Had to teach our seniors to use alt+tab, Had to teach our interns to use alt+tab
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Oh, a Boomer needs tech support, of any kind, family, friend, otherwise?
$100/h.
Stop subsidizing their utter incompetence, time for ‘tough love’.
A kid?
Like an actual kid?
Free.
How would they know any better?
But, let em know the first fix is free, on the house, next one will be $5, then $10… or, they can spend no money if they want to spend an hour getting tutored on the basics maybe once a week.
Generate fishermen, not fish.
Show them that they are capable, can learn, can solve problems… if they’re patient and humble enough to try and learn.
I mean, it depends on the family dynamic I guess?
My older generation family members have a lot of skills and experience I also lack, and the minute I pick up the phone to ask for help they’re giving me their time for free too.
I’d rather live in a kind world where we help our little communities only because it’s the right thing to do, as long as it’s not gone to the point of being taken advantage of.
The kids aren’t alright.
Seriously.
On the one hand I know exactly what you mean and I agree to an extent. On the other I see hope in the youth. They value different things in a good way. For instance, in talking to my niece and nephews I’ve learned that being smart is considered cool now, which was most definitely the opposite when I was young.
Tbf printers are the most unnecessarily complicated pieces of shit ever
We are complaining about printers now? Outstanding! I can help! I never miss the opportunity to say double-fuck Hewlett Packard/Compaq and anything they’ve ever thought about producing with the heat of a thousand suns. Two shitty orgs that geometrically devolved into quintessential, archetypal enshittification enshrined, the unequalled horrors that are HP printers and drivers.
Back in the day I inherited a Compaq laptop that had Windows 95 on it. I “upgraded” it to Windows 98, all was well for a year or so and then it started throwing BIOS errors. I couldn’t work it out so eventually I ended up having to contact Compaq support. I explained what was going on and they said it was because I installed 98 and that one’s only supposed to run 95.
I said I didn’t think that was it, because it ran 98 perfectly well for like a year before this happened and also it was a BIOS error, which presumably occurs before Windows even loads. They told me it was 98 and that machine was only meant to run 95. I tried a few more approaches and they just said the same thing over and over like a robot. Eventually I just gave up and was like never mind, I’ll work it out myself.
Turns out that on that laptop, the BIOS memory is stored on a watch battery like a fucking Nintendo Cartridge. New $1 battery, no more error. Also the last HP/Compaq thing I owned just because support was so shitty at me lol.
We are complaining about printers now?
Sadly, no. We’re complaining about age cohorts.
In the future, kindly refrain from introducing reason to my painstakingly constructed anti-HP tirades. It throws me off stride.
Are we having stereotypical talk shop about printers?
I though it was an urban legend, but I did buy a used brother and I’m def delighted. Spent less on it than a round of inkjet for my crappy Canon. Guess what, 6 months later and I’m still using the toner that came in it. I’d be in the 2nd round of dried inkjet.
Why, yes. Yes, we are.
My experience mirrors yours; 6 years later, still no issues. Moreover, old used laser Brother’s seem to love shittynonametoner.com cartridges as well.
shitty no-names - they work fine. functional, and if I’d started with them, I doubt I’d ever perecieve a diff, but… for color laser - I find the og brother toner carts are much more vibrant and colors overlay (and therefore mix better). I almost wish I had two brother printers, one with OG expensive brother toner and another for all the print jobs I might want color for but don’t care about fidelity.
I have a toolbox dedicated to repairing all electrical devices and the hammer is for HP Printers.
Canon Printers are at least somewhat useable by comparison, brother inkjets seem to be the most recommended, but HP? Nope, worthless scrap.
Most HP products are worthless scrap now.
When I was around 8, we had a printer that never seemed to work. One day, I somehow cast a spell that allowed it to print out a couple of colouring book sheets, but I had no idea how.
I couldn’t get it to work again, but my one-time success led my mum to believe that I understood the magicks that power printers, and she became frustrated at me for this. Fun fun fun
Like when you 'fix ’ a family members computer and Everytime it malfunctions after that it is your fault.
When I was a kid, one day our service provider had connectivity problems… Guess who my parents accused to be the culprit first. Well, I guess being the only one making use of that modern it seemed to be a logical conclusion for them somehow, not knowing anything about the internet. At least from then on they knew a bit more about what can go wrong.
Someone really ought to make a printer that doesn’t suck and is simple to use.
My 3d printer works pretty great.
It really is weird that a paper jam can be harder to fix than a clogged nozzle or jammed feeder.
I’m lucky that the people in my life do try some basics before asking me and tell me what they tried. Sometimes things just seem to start working when I arrive, so I just play along with it and say the printer was intimidated into working by my mere presence.
The panic my coworkers get in their eyes when they pull me from a task just to show me something that suddenly works for them is always funny.
“This was totally not working for 10 minutes straight.”
I’m lucky that the people in my life do try some basics before asking me and tell me what they tried.
If not, you raise them to do that.
Oh, you have that aura too? I like it in that it helps me avoid spending time on fixes, but it’s annoying too because deep in my mind I wonder what really went wrong.
I’ve had users who had equipment that worked when I came in to help them with the problem. I think what actually happens is that the user, possibly unconsciously, realizes that they have to pay attention to the UI, because I will, and does the action to make the equipment work the way it’s supposed to work.
I think this is correct. People tend to read the dialog boxes when I’m there to help because they don’t want to feel stupid I guess. Now if I could just get my youngest nephew to stop using his full first and last name as his username on fucking everything.
The printers are playing the long game.
I do that with my SO too even though they’re not a tech person at all lol. I’m just like “can you come over for a second and watch this error because it’ll work if I show someone else.” And that genuinely does the trick maybe 30% of the time. One of the mysteries of the universe
Same. What do you mean your device was suddenly incapable of performing one of its most basic functions for an hour and it magically got better just before you handed it to me? I don’t have panacea NFC tags embedded in my skin.
I don’t have panacea NFC tags embedded in my skin.
Right. 😉
I don’t have panacea NFC tags embedded in my skin.
you’re sure about that?
Blame tablet culture. Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness. Kids can just download an app from the appstore and point at what they want it to do. People don’t even know anymore how the filesystem on their computer works. If the dow load pup-up in chrome disappears, they think the download has dissapeared and they need to download it again.
Also I’ve noticed a total lack of curiosity or willingness to learn how to use these products. It takes a little brain power sometimes.
Brain power, you say?
Here’s a test of Zoomer brain power:
Ask them to name their favorite Zoomer band.
Not artist.
Band.
Band comprised of Zoomers.
Back in my day we had to walk up hill both ways.
People never knew how filesystems work. It’s been tested time and again, people aside from nerds have trouble with hierarchical filesystems. They had trouble in the eighties, they had trouble in the nineties, had trouble in the two-thousandths and obviously still have trouble today. Saving every single file on the desktop didn’t start with tablets.
Nerds just have no idea how the majority of the population fare with computers, and don’t know that UI designers in fact test their UIs and continually check their assumptions. But nerds are cocksure in blaming UI designers and ‘tablet culture’, which culture made computing accessible to everyone from toddlers to decrepit geriatrics.
So, since it’s unusable for people who are unwilling to learn, the solution is to make it unusable for everybody?
Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness.
Feels like the opposite to me. Modern mobile style interfaces feel extremely hostile, designed to minimise the amount of information the user can extract from the application (and maximise the amount that can be extracted from the user and sold to the highest bidder) and our control over it.
Classic desktop interfaces (and no, the stupid office ribbons are not included in that), even when poorly designed, are many orders of magnitude easier to use and navigate, and provide a lot more tools and information.
Agree with you on all of it, but the office ribbon I think is actually not bad design. Especially if you use alt shortcuts, you can get pretty quick at accessing a bunch of options via the keyboard.
The little stupid arrow to show more options notwithstanding.
Here’s a very entertaining video on how bad ribbons can be: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI
They waste three or four times more space (in the direction in which screens have the least!) than menus, while having much less space, and they are almost always much more poorly organised (and are often contextual, which makes it even harder to learn where everything is; if I want something contextual I’ll fucking right click).
Even ALT shortcuts are much easier with menus: press ALT, keep pressing the underlined letters until you’re where you want to be, or use the arrow keys. With ribbons you have to try to find the key amongst a mess of randomly thrown together icons, labels, and occasionally dropdown boxes. Utter madness.
Thanks for the video, I’m currently on the bus going to work and I don’t have headphones, but I’ll make a note to watch it once I get home.
EDIT: That was indeed entertaining, in an infuriating and depressing kind of way. Thanks!
I agree, but we have two have different meanings of user friendly here.
You: The thing makes it easy to do what I want, to understand what it can do.
Them: The thing makes it easy to do what the designer wants, makes it easy to understand what the designer wants me to do with it.
Yeah maybe, but try popping out of an app for five seconds to copy something and then come back to paste it, and tell me how user friendly and optimised that is.
I thought the younger folk would be faster on computers than me but I had to show a junior new hire IT tech what a zip file was and how to open it. Something that I assumed would be second nature to them, they hadn’t seen. Growing up with analog and moving to digital as society progressed, I assumed the next generation would smoke me in tech but it’s been surprising that because tech has “Just worked” for many of them they haven’t had to learn how it works. A blessing and a curse I suppose.
Honestly sometimes having learned the analog counterpart is really useful. It’s a different field but the first time I mixed live audio was on an old analog mixer. It wasn’t really all that difficult to use once explained. Shortly after we replaced it with a digital mixer (behringer x32), and I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to use the old analog one because so many concepts would appear, at least to me, difficult to grasp if you’re starting out on the digital one.
The next gen grew up on tablets and iphones and walled gardens that make everything a mystery to them. Corporate infantilisation
File compression is for poor people.
I have bad news for you if you happen to play maybe Skyrim or Cyberpunk 2077 or any Source game… or damn near any game, ever, or ever download literally any game from Steam…
they all use compressed file archive formats with their own decompression / streaming methods to fit more shit in less space on your hard drive / game disc. when you download a game, Steam auto encapsulates it in a compressed format, sends you those files, and then decompresses on your machine it once its all downloaded.
Yeah, I wasn’t being serious. You don’t have to convince me file compression is ubiquitous, but I appreciate your dedication to educating people. :)
Well, ok, but then… how is ‘compression is for poor people’ a joke?
It’s absurdist. Like I said, file compression is ubiquitous and the reason for that is because of its undeniable utility. Thinking you can avoid file compression by being rich (by buying more storage space or network throughput) has likely NEVER occurred to anyone. I posted this joke on a comment about someone not understanding file compression at a basic level i.e. not even knowing how to use basic tools to get uncompressed files from compressed ones. The joke is taking this one step further from the perspective of someone so out of touch with the tech, that they’d rather not learn and choose the absolute worst attitude possible.
TBF, Android and iOS do not make it clear where files are going when you save them like desktop OSes do. It’s almost as if they are intentionally trying to hide their file structure, especially Apple, which is beyond frustrating.
It’s been known since probably the seventies that normies have trouble with hierarchical file systems. UI researchers kept testing the assumptions about file systems, and the results in the majority of populace have always been abysmal. Which is why people have the desktop piled with every file they ever created or downloaded, and why UI designers are trying to move away from shoving file systems into users’ faces.
We all started as “normies”.
This is solved through education and tutorials, not by making everything unusable by reducing it to the lowest common denominator.
No we didn’t, Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Neurodivergence is something you’re born with. One can learn to act like a normie, but that’s not the same as being born as a normie.
This is a conversation about computer interfaces, not about whatever unrelated issue you’re attempting to shove in.
It’s been known since probably the seventies that normies have trouble with hyerarchical file systems.
I was evidently using the term (in quotes, if that wasn’t clear enough) the comment I was replying to used for… frankly, I don’t know what; people who aren’t born knowing about hierarchical file systems, I suppose? (in any case, if you have issues with that term it’s not me you should be preaching to), and pointing out that we all start not knowing about them, and that they’re not that esoteric or arcane a thing to learn through usage, or education.
Because here’s the thing: much like you seem unwilling to read or incapable of reading the thread you’re replying to before replying to it with a non sequitur, 99% of the supposed “trouble” people have with computer interfaces and concepts stems from their irrational refusal to read the fucking screen, think for a second about what it’s saying, and fucking learn what it’s telling them.
That’s the only issue with what the comment I was replying to referred as “normies” and as I said it’s easily fixable through education, and removing the information from the screen so that not even the people willing to read it can evidently won’t solve anything and will only make the problem worse.
Computer interfaces and neurodivergence go hand-in-hand, you know.
*doesn’t read the rest of your comment*
They are intentionally trying to hide it.
The default file browsers don’t access the entire file structure, what exists and what you can see and edit, without root.
You can, or at least could, sideload a FOSS filebrowser, much more straightforward UI, doesnt shit itself if you arent logged into it.
What they instead do is make it really, really easy to upload all your personal files to their cloud, which is either going to cost you time, money, or your privacy.
Its why Microsoft genuinely doesnt understand why everyone hates OneDrive, why they genuinely don’t see a problem with Windows becoming an AI prompt/API with ads.
Because its basically the same as the mobile UI paradigm.
Its why Microsoft genuinely doesnt
understandcareFTFY. Microsoft doesn’t deserve the Hanlon’s Razor benefit of doubt.
I mean, I feel you, but I also used to work for Microsoft.
Their management is largely literally delusional.
The groupthink / corpo culture is so strong that its basically like talking to an ET alien, on many topics.
So yes, clearly they do not care, but also, they’re very much deluded into thinking that everything they do is just obviously the way you would do something.
Its very culty, to be frank, its one part of why I don’t work there any more, the other main one being their blatent reproduction of India’s caste system within MSFT itself.
Multiple times I saw H1B visa junior employees getting viciously verbally absued by more senior employees from India, from a higher caste or social status, shit that I would have gotten instantly fired if I did.
I went to HR and they told me that actually I was being culturally insensitive because that’s just normal in their culture.
Absolute fucking horseshit.
And this was all a decade-ish ago. I am certain it is much worse now, just look at everyone who got fired for objecting to Microsoft aiding and abetting and facilitating Israel’s genocide.
… I’m gonna need a fucking cigarette, god damnit.
I know where mine usually go, but sometimes they go somewhere else. Why did it do that? Where did it go? Sometimes I run a search and still can’t find it. Wtf? So, I have re-downloaded when I was in a pinch.
Literacy and numeracy scores in the US in general peaked in 2012.
If you graduated high school / college around then, statistically, everyone +/-5 or greater your age is generally less literate, less mathematically literate, less knowledgeable than you, ceteris paribus.
Do you have any data on that? Maybe it’s my personal bias but it seems to me, having graduated high school in 2002, that people ten years younger than me tend to be less literate. That’s charitable language. They certainly struggle much more with tech.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
They unfortunately rework the metrics by which they measure this stuff, and have many different ways of trying to measure roughly the same thing… but hey, thats true of NBER and the BLS and FRED over this same time period too, way before Elon/Trump basically fired everyone.
So yeah, its hard to pinpoint exactly, without… doing my own meta analysis of all their data, but basically around ~2012 were the peak of totally averaged literacy and numeracy scores.
Before that, it was climbing, then peaked, and has since been falling, quite rapidly the closer you get to present day.
Your anecdotal observed deviation is indeed biased, you probably do not spend your time around a purely statistically average set of people, how/why exactly that is the case would require me to get some PID from you to attempt to explain though, lol.
Most likely explanation would probably be regional / location variance.
US education systems vary wildly in quality by Zipcode, the average net worth of families in the zipcode you grew up in is still the most statistically significant way to accurately predict overall life outcomes.
Very interesting. Especially the first link showing how different life circumstances appear to influence performance. I’m fairly certain this is also tied to income inequality.
The practice of funding schools based on local property taxes is incredibly harmful.
Yes, thats like, the whole main problem with American society.
It is statistically true that working hard, staying out of jail, and getting an education is absolutely not a guarantee that you will achieve what the Boomers call ‘middle class lifestyle’, or better.
It might help you at least tread water, in terms of generational advancement, maybe?
But if you don’t have a stable home, family situation, food situation… shouldn’t be surprising that you tend not to do well in school.
A huge part of that problem is indeed tying together local property taxes and school systems.
People have been saying this and proving it with numbers since at least the 90s.
But, we never changed it in a way that would fix anything, instead, the Republicans have spent my entire lifespan on this planet deliberately destroying public education, because they want to give taxpayer money to privately run religious schools (Christian, of course), and then make everyone pay for basic, K-12 education, via some kind of voucher/marketplace of schools system.
They know dumb people are easier to lie to, and most of our own Founders knew that a functional democracy is impossible without a foundation of an educated and well informed populace.
So, of course, blow all that up, revert to Theocracy, thats the plan, its basically mostly Reagan’s fault for setting all this in motion.
Agreed on almost everything. My only difference is I’d say it started with the Nixon administration and was made far worse by the Reagan admin.
Well, I am just a silly youngin’, what would I know =P
Less snarkily, could you tell me what Nixon did in relation to the US education system?
I’m fairly decent with my US History, but I could be forgetting something, or have not heard of it before.
My brother taught himself to the point where he shows me how to do the techy stuff.
Thank god I started using computers before smartphones were as ubiquitous as they are now. If I had waited til I was a teenager I would have no idea how to use a computer.
You really don’t have to if you just make your kids use the computer instead of the phone
To be fair I can make a 3D printer work more easily and for longer without any maintenance than a regular ass printer. I get that inkjets are actually super complex but bro there are now cases where it is literally easier to make a thing than to print out a picture of that thing.
Guess it’s time for someone to start 3D printing documents with 1 layer high text
Time to start submitting documents as 3D-printed stone slabs.
Time is a flat circle.
You can attach a pen to the print head to build a plotter quite easily.
That’s because you can actually access everything
ever seen one of those $200k stratasys “polyjet” resin 3d printers for medlabs? i bet you they’re like inkjets cubed to service, minimum. if that tech ever makes it to consumers we’ll be doomed.
What do they use it for?
if you’ve gotten a mouth guard made by a dentist recently where they just scan your teeth, that’s a 3d printed part. the ones that look the most spectacular are the anatomical models for surgery, where they can take something like an mri of a problem area and print it out with a mix of materials and colours that makes them realistic enough to practice on.
content warning: 3d printed hand and foot parts with visible veins
as far as i understand it they can do full CMYK as well as mixing material to requested hardness and consistency on the fly.
Now that’s fascinating.
Wow that’s really really cool
I haven’t had a printer in years. Best decision I’ve made. When you don’t have one, your need for printing things seems to decrease. We just order prints at the library the 2 times a year we need to print something for like 25 cents a page
We have young kids. So, we are printing things for them all the time. Doctor’s notes, coloring sheets, copies of forms for school (reading logs, etc.), on and on.
Plus, my wife is a musician and prints out music, we print our insurance cards, baby business cards, holiday card mailing labels, etc.
We don’t print every day, but enough that it’s worth it. It also scans and copies, which is helpful.
When it comes to school, I’ve been able to get by with signing forms on my iPad and then emailing them to the school. Doctor’s notes also go by email nowadays for me. Only one that needed to be physical in the last two years was a form for self administration of a medication. If I had remembered to ask for it at the doctor’s office when we had our appointment, doctor’s office would have gladly printed it. It can be slightly inconvenient at times, but I’ve really reduced my paper usage.
Choosing to print your own insurance cards, business cards, and return labels definitely is one of those things that you find another way to do if you didn’t have a printer. My personal opinion is that having a printer makes you need to print more and that’s what I’m still hearing from your comment.
Tho I will make the caveat that printing music as a musician is pretty much a business need. But business needs are outside the scope of my advice that getting rid of a printer is extremely doable and will reduce your printing needs.
We didn’t have a working printer for a few years. We spent more having stuff printed than we do printing ourselves. It’s a laser printer. So, the on-going cost for us is pretty minimal. Yes, we can (and do) buy coloring books, but if the kids want to color something specific (e.g., Lego people), we can print them and the kids can color right then and there. No driving to the store, no waiting for it to be delivered. Could I get by without one, absolutely, but it is way more convenient to have one for us, and less expensive. Printing services local and online are fairly expensive these days, and the local shop is a pain to get to. They’re right near the university and their parking is shit.
So in summary, you use paper in part because you have a printer and in part because public services and offices are behind the times.
Sure, and not having one would be inconvenient.
I have an ancient Brother laser printer that is magical. It runs on Linux, the toner cartridges last for about a decade and if you leave it unplugged for like a year and then turn it back on to print one document it doesn’t mind at all. I’m never getting rid of that thing.
Start needing legal assistance and see your printing needs skyrocket. Gathering evidence takes a lot of paper.
Legal is when you start needed the cursed tech that is fax as well. My condolences
At least faxing apparently can go directly to and from the computer. (Never dealt with faxing myself, so can’t guarantee it.)
