I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
The average person is becoming MORE technologically illiterate, not less. The era of growing up with a home computer that required fiddling and dial up, etc is over. People grow up with phones and iPads and kids come to school not knowing how to use a mouse.
And for that reason alone I built a Linux PC for my 11 year old and told him to go to town figuring things out. (I supervise everything of course). Dude has been doing fantastic so far.
If he doesn’t solve problems with chmod 777 then he’s already more competent than the ops teams at my fortune 500 company
Oh, but you gotta drop a chmod nuke at least once to feel the terror having done something irreversible. As a bonus, you’ll also gain a brand new appreciation for snapshots.
sudo chmod 000 /for security
Who’s going to win?
SELinux+Seccomp+Containers…
Or the sysadmin with sudo and chmod.Neither! It’s whichever script kiddie gets lucky first.
Cool. I’m old enough that in middle school I begged my Mom to take to the mall to buy Linux. I got a Red Hat Linux CD-ROM pack from a store called Babbage’s. I couldn’t download the ISO on our modem and I don’t remember if we even had a burner at that point.
So a friend of mine went to a convention to show off his gaming project. The kids there were trying to touch the monitors to play the game. They didn’t grab the keyboard and mouse. They didn’t touch the controller. They touched the monitor. People’s framework of what a computer is and what it’s made of is completely different than what it use to be
Reminds me of my senior teaching days 15 years ago. Solitaire, same.exe and saddam.exe and whack.exe soon had those oldies clicking, double clicking and dragging.
Didn’t think then that the situation could reverse.
Same still exists on Android and is still a brain twister.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kubilayerdogan.samegamel
Even when I was like 4, I would’ve gone for the controller. I knew how to use it from Lego Star Wars. I knew how to use a keyboard, but I didn’t play on pc, so I’d have had to have been told the controls.
Hate to say it, but that technical literacy from having to operate computers the difficult way was a small blip in history. So things are just kind of going back to “normal.”
Now, the only real natural entry into “computing” is gaming. Pretty much everything else has to come through formal education, which is largely myopic and boring.
Don’t think I’ve even worked with a gen Z engineer yet. I assume they exist.
I have worked with a few gen z interns/fresh grads, and some younger millennials (I am a 1990 kid) and its interesting… Some of them have been very successful at passing the tests but have no mechanical aptitude at all. Some have been technically literate on first glance, then proven to be just confidently incorrect. In general though, it seems they just didn’t grow up being interested in how things worked like I did. It could be isolated to my small sample size or it could be a general trend. They also don’t seem to make connections across disciplines as easily either but again, that could just be a time in service thing at this point and not a generational trait.
I have not been super impressed with the new ones we get when we get them, some of them have been quick learners though and have impressed me with their adaptability. I am a huge proponent of proper mentorships or rotational programs and that is something that seems to get overlooked with younger grads in my experience.
One thing that really annoys me though, is that when prompted with something they don’t know, they will spit out some randome bullshit rather than say they don’t know. Saying I don’t know is a completly acceptable answer as long as it is followed up with “but I will find out” or “can you help/explain it”. Falling back to a first principle approach and talking through it is also valid but just making up some shit doesnt fly with me.
is that when prompted with something they don’t know, they will spit out some randome bullshit rather than say they don’t know
This is just the majority of people, not specific to any generation. Our minds are predisposed to use inductive reasoning to explain the world around us. We see something new and our brain immediately begins to make inferences based on prior information we believe we know (I say it this way cause our memories are incredibly faulty) that we think is relevant or comparable.
It’s essentially the Dunning Kruger effect: we think we know more than we do and, because of this, believe we can simply assume correctly about other things we know nothing about.
It’s an incredibly bad habit that is supposed to be trained out of us through our education systems but we all know how incredibly faulty those systems are.
The education system as I lived through it in Texas was actively hostile to saying you didn’t know, it was treated as being worse than being wrong or guessing. You can tell by the results allllllll around us.
Hadn’t realized what a gem “I don’t know” is until waaaaay too late. Saying “I don’t know” still often feels like a personal, albeit public, moral failure. Which is so dumb. But feels like it makes so much sense.
I grew up starting my computer use having to navigate DOS just before windows 3.11 was released. I work in tech today and I feel like just knowing about a lot of the automated things we take for granted today has given me a little bit of an edge.
I had to walk to school in the snow ten miles, both ways uphill!
The average person is becoming MORE technologically illiterate, not less.
There’s simply no evidence of this
What’s more, the prevalence of cheap, accessible technologies is having a host of knock-on effects. Case in point:
People grow up with phones and iPads and kids come to school not knowing how to use a mouse.
Feels like I’m listening to the Boomer complaining about kids today not knowing how to use a manual transmission.
Feels like I’m listening to the Boomer complaining about kids today not knowing how to use a manual transmission.
There have been some articles regarding beginning CS classes bring required to include teaching concepts like folder structures because a sizeable part of class was list on this concept.
To use your transmission analogy, it would be like truck driving schools now need to how to drive a manual transmission vehicle, which adds to the length of the class. Or all the company vehicles are manual and now the company has to deal with hiring new drivers who don’t know how to drive stick but will say they know how to drive.
new drivers who don’t know how to drive stick but will say they know how to drive.
That’s how my great-grandpa got his first job, truck driving; might’ve been the first time he drove in general, automatic or stick.
Something that amazes me that I often see is tech literate people wastly over estimating the tech literacy of an average person. Any amount of tech support would tell you that most people barley know the basics and doesn’t care for anything else.
Relevant xkcd:
deleted by creator
I know people who claim to be tech literate but then keep sending me actual photos of their screen whenever they want to share anything. :|
Admittedly, I do almost all of my messaging from my phone, and 100% of Lemmy. Most of the time if I have something on my computer to share, it’s easiest to just take a picture. If fidelity matters, I can take a screen grab and share it to my phone via KDE connect. It’s not a matter of knowing how, it’s the effort required for a slightly clearer image.
When something goes wrong the average response is some amount of confusion and anger with rapid clicking
I just don’t understand how it’s more “techy” than Reddit. I just want our user count to keep going up.
I think we should focus less on hyping federation/decentralization and more on how there are no ads and the content is really coming from actual users (and maybe a leftist bias).
I got a few friends on here by explaining that choosing a server is no different from choosing an email provider. Everyone understands email, that you can communicate with most other email users no matter what their provider is.
The Leftist bias is a selling point? That’s literally all social media except Twitter
Linux is second nature to us geeks, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably knows just Ubuntu or Fedora.
And Debian GNU/Linux, of course.
Webcomics are second nature to us geeks, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably knows just ADHDinos and Loving Reaper.
And xkcd, of course.
Unless it’s the worst slop on r/comics like PizzaCake, then it has like 50k upvotes from the lowest common denominator.
The average person can’t even download the right authenticator app when prompted. The average person can’t type their password the same way two times in a password change field. The average person does not know how to plug monitors and peripherals into a docking station.
Whatever you think the average skill level is? It’s lower than that. By a lot.
I work electronics in walmart and you would be shocked at the questions I get on things like laptops from collage age kids. A very frequent one is ‘if it isn’t touchscreen then how do you work it’. One of my favorite ever was a girl who went down the line asking can you type on them because i need to be able to type. Every time I told her you can type on all laptops but she just kept asking.
I know a huge part of it is some kind of ‘location bias’ because the kids who know something about computers are shopping online or at microcenter or something.
Once upon a time I worked for a company where I would be called with requests like “I can’t work because my computer is broken”. I would go and ask “Where is your computer” and the employee would point to her monitor. I would then press the power button on the monitor and they looked at me like I was a magician. I would point to the actually PC under the desk and say “btw THIS is your computer” and they would stare with confusion and disbelief.
Ha! That’s funny because I have a department here with some real… Non thinkers who do the same stuff. They’ll come in, one monitor doesn’t come on. Normal computer stuff. Especially with docking stations. I power cycle the monitor and it comes right on. They swear they did that and that I must just have the magic touch. I even ask them before I walk over whether theyve done that and they are adamant that they did.
I just dont get it. Surely my value in this world is not limited to making sure people get the right authenticator app and pressing monitor power buttons. Smdh.
Relevant xkcd: Average familiarity
You severly overestimate the average persons tech literacy even when you try to correct for it. Booting from USB is already a really advanced topic.
Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.
People are lazier than ever now. Thats one reason I dont like the tech illiterate normies. Its SO EASY so learn how to use the tools you interact with 24/7. But they are lazy.
There’s a comment above this who incredulously exclaims “boot from a USB drive‽” and I can tell you as someone who does tech support, that may be legitimately 1% of the US population.
Does it count if I have to google which key to hold down to enter the boot menu or bios every time? There are 12 function keys and esc.
That still counts. I have 25 years in IT and I’m still surprised by every new machine. F2? Why?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could do it, but I would need to look up the steps. Already knowing how to do tech stuff is one thing, but below that are people like me that are comfortable following guides. It seems a lot of people aren’t.
This is where i sit. I don’t know shit on my own, but i know how to look it up. I managed to do the transfer from Windows to Linux Mint and have been able to navigate the bumps in the process via Google and trying to get a halfway decent idea about some very basic concepts. Now i am moving on and am trying to get rid of all Tech Companies that bend their knee to fascism. And that works as well, without being a tech savvy person.
I would argue that being willing to learn qualifies you as a tech savvy person, even if not as much as people that are really accomplished at it.
Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.
Compare this:
- Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram
- Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone’s OS
- Create an account
- Done
with:
- Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy
- Choose which app to use. There’s like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There’s no guide or anything, so you’ll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.
- Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don’t even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.
- Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.
- Create an account
- Figure out what .ml stands for.
- Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don’t work.
- Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down
- Done, until your instance closes down
Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.
Hyperbole? Not really. You described my lemmy experience perfectly. However, not having big data sift through my digital feces to find the peanut, makes it worth the effort.
Tbh, not even that is guaranteed. Lemmy (or the fediverse in general) are really not that privacy-focussed at all.
While the people running your instance might not be sifting through your data, nothing would stop anyone from doing so. Everything you post on Lemmy is public, and even if all major instances would somehow block scraping (which they don’t), a scraper would only need to create their own instance and ActivityPub would just deliver all of the data in a nice and easy to process way.
The big advantage of Lemmy is that it is not controlled by one large corporation (and instead by a bunch of faceless, unknown randos on the internet), not that posting stuff publically visible on the internet is somehow more private.
Ah, yes. I confused privacy with anonymity. Related and equally important to liberty. Big data is free to mine my posts. Thanks for the reply.
Check out https://amiunique.org/
You are literally never anonymous on the internet.
Anonymity and the general public do not mix. Barrier to entry is all we have left.
