- cross-posted to:
- lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Memes@europe.pub
- memes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Memes@europe.pub
- memes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27501866
source: @n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca
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As a dev, the divide between apps users and computer software users is fascinating. My mom can do things in instagram or whatsapp that I didn’t even know possible… but put her in front of a modern computer with a simple application and she’s completely lost! I try to explain that it’s exactly the same as her phone its just a larger screen/physical keybaord with different apps, doesn’t seem to help.
Just helped build my 12 year old cousin his first computer and was forced into putting Windows on it. Now, I get that it’s important that he at least understand what the “normal OS” is, but I did want to put at least Mint or something on there. Zoomers and Alpha really don’t know how to navigate even the basics, though, and this kid was no exception.
Well, technically I wanted to put something based on Arch but even I know that’s a bad idea for a sink or swim computer moment.
Yeah, schools do not have tech literacy classes and it’s devastating, this is why
I dunno how old you guys are but just in case… Schools never had good computing classes. When I was in school in the UK in the 90s we had MS Office lessons and that was about it.
Actually the UK took steps a few years ago to fixing that. Apparently they have actually computing classes now, but I don’t have kids of the appropriate age in school yet so I don’t know if it’s really as good as we’d hope.
Estonia used to have solid school classes since 2000s and now offers programming pretty early, but overall tech literacy is at an all time low.
Is it really though? I’d need to see evidence of that before I believe it.
I have some teacher friends who get the broad avarage. Entire lessons get brought to a standstill since the avarage student can’t even handle logging in.
I mean… that’s how it was in the 90s too.
What do you consider “the basics”? I regards to getting a 12 yr old started on Linux
The only reason we have to rotate the PDFs is because they can’t figure out how to use the sheet-feed scanner. Theres a picture embossed in the thing! And a sign that we put next to the button!
You need a full SOP with step by step directions and big pictures
They won’t fucking read it though, “I’m just not a computer person! tee-hee!”
For me, that’s been the major differentiator. The Boomers that don’t know basic shit in 2025 are proud of it; the Zoomers that don’t know have at least been willing to be shown. The Boomers that ASK to be shown though, ::chefs kiss::, now there is a passion to learn
Unlike with boomers, this shit was your fault. Y’all refused to kill off iPhone and macbooks and chromebooks and Windows and now this is the world we live in.
Guess me and my partner are exceptional zoomers? Them having a diploma in computer science and i am a software developer
Don’t worry, the vast majority of every generation are shit with computers. Tech-ies just think their generation is better because their friends (also in tech) are better than the people they randomly run into from other generations. It’s just selection bias. Most millennials I know don’t even know the keyboard shortcut to save in word.
I thought they would be wiz kids…
Me too. They were born with phones in their hands, right? Understanding technology should be like breathing to them! But it turns out they started using it after corporations had locked it down and simplified it, so they only know how to use apps, not how any of it actually works.
Though even Sysadmin is going to be managing a SaaS cloud service or a self managed docker container on an automatically provisioned hyperconverged SAN, so its going to be obsolete in a decade. Chromebooks are where we are headed, and Google also saw the future a decade ago.
Yeah, but these kids spend the majority of their time on phones and tablets, not PCs, and many of ’em don’t even really know what a “file” or “folder” is. Everything just does its cloud save thing.
Yes, the future is here and it fucking sucks.
Asked a user to log into a computer at work. She would have been around 25 or so about 6-7 years ago.
I was stunned watching her turn on caps lock each time she had to type a character in uppercase. I didn’t understand it at all until my mom pointed out she probably always used a phone or a tablet and never learned what the shift key was for.
Still blows my mind because by that point in that user’s education she had probably written hundreds if not thousands of papers to get where she was. I can’t imagine her doing that without using the shift key.
My son types with his pointers… he turns 14 this month, and has already learned how to type in school. 🤦🏼♂️ Types exactly like my dad, only minus the thick glasses.
Uh, if he’s your son, you might be able to teach him? Like, without my parents encouraging it, I don’t think I’d have learned half as much about computers as I did in my childhood/teens.
Have you met a 13 year old? What I say must always, and I can not stress this enough, ALWAYS be wrong.
Yeah, OK, I was thinking of my sister, also around that age, but I guess I have a bit of a “cool older brother” bonus, that her mother might not necessarily have.
Did manage to get her into Linux, though, so I see that as a win.
I’ve long said that I believe Millennials, as a generational cohort, are the best at typing that ever has been and ever will be. We were the first generation where adults really recognized that we’d be using computers our entire lives and took steps to teach typing. But, so much more importantly than that, we socialized through typing. I had typing classes in school, sure, but I learned to type quickly on AIM and in chat rooms.
Earlier generations only really typed for business or school. Later generations socialize over phones, so they, too, only use a physical keyboard for school and business.
I guess I should amend this theory to include all tech literacy in general.
There wasn’t voice Chat in early games and you had to type fast to communicate and not die.
that’s how I learned to touch type without “learning” It intentionally. never bothered using home keys but I can type at 100-ish WPM and 95% accuracy
Exactly this
Early Starcraft got me from ~10 wpm to near 100. You had to type those messages fast before your base was invaded and you died. If I had been born either 5 years earlier or later I don’t think I’d be nearly as fast a typer as I am today.
I didn’t teach my older zoomer kid to type. He learned on his own out of the necessity of chatting with friends in online games, played on his computer. He uses the first two fingers of both hands, and he’s faster than me, who learned in school and has been a touch-typist for 40 years.
I think we’re moving away from keyboard and mouse, anyway. It will be AR headsets with voice, eye tracking, and hand gestures for most use, and keyboards will be used only when direct input is needed.
As a Zoomer, I also had typing classes, but I learned how to type because I wanted to be able to quickly send messages in Minecraft when I was like 7 years old 🙃
I write a lot on my keyboard, and have been for a long time. But my left hand is not on SDF but on AWD because that’s the default hand position for gaming/shooters. 😬
Doesn’t stop me from typing fast or blind though. Otherwise I would have done something about it.
Typing was taught to boomers and genx first dude. In fact, as a liminal i’d readily say i’ve had an arseload more typing “teaching” than you have - both keyboard and typewriter- and i’ll wager my mother in the age of typewriters had even more.
The typewriter generation are probably faster overall because they don’t make mistakes.
Being able to delete any error makes you far less careful.
Sure, modern programs will autocorrect for you, but autocorrect to what?
Yeah, it was funny teaching my grandmother to use a computer… She couldn’t use a mouse, but she typed really fast!
Microsoft word fixing tiny mistakes like reversed i and e or other very common errors has made me an absurdly lazy typist.
I think you’re missing my point. I’m not saying nobody ever was taught to type in earlier generations. I’m saying that millennials were the first where there was a widespread recognition that typing was a valuable skill EVERYONE needed to learn, regardless of your future life path. Of course there were people getting trained to type ever since the first keyboards were invented. I mean, there were people as long ago as the 1870s learning to type on the earliest mass-produced typewriters.
I’m talking about a generational cohort as a whole, not individual select cases.
And I’m also talking about the difference between typing being a skill you learn for school/work vs something you use for socialization.
I took typing class in high school. On a typewriter. Gen X. My mom was a trained stenographer in her younger years.
X here as well. But 78. So i got to take advantage of the digital age without having my teen stupidity immortalised on it. Truly the sweetest of spots.
What’s up Oregon Trail Generation bros!? We really did have a unique environment for growing up.
Childhood with no social media and basically no internet, wandering or biking around the neighborhood, finding porn in the woods… then computers and video games kept becoming more of a thing as we grew, and for many of us starting college meant the jump from connecting to the internet with a modem at kilobit speeds to connecting straight to Ethernet at megabit speeds.
And even though internet communication was fairly popular in our early adulthood, we mostly made it out of college, and maybe even dating if we were lucky, before social media took hold.
And now in middle age we still somehow get to be the “computer people” even though all these bright young minds came after us. But at least those of us with gigabit internet and OLED screens can really appreciate them.
Meeeeeemorieeees
The only generation that had to learn how to record on VHS and burn a DVD. Madness.
I am a bit older but similar. My dad was an early adopter of computers even though he had zero idea how to use one.
“Am I out of touch? No! It’s everyone else who is wrong” - millennials
I have never rotated a PDF
And I can’t actually imagine why you’d need to?
But I can imagine it’s pretty simple, like “print” then “print to pdf” and landscape? Or something?
Usually when people scan documents, they will need rotating, croping, deskewing, etc. Another case can be when someone made a muti page document for printing with mixed 90° rotation pages. You don’t ever intend to print it and don’t want the mixed rotation.
This would explain why I get so many attachments that are not right side up.
I’ve has to rotate them after print-to-pdf turned a collection of images into a landscape pdf.
I felt like an idiot the other day. Customer sent in a pdf with confidential information. I needed to upload the document without the confidential information but only have the free Adobe. I normally redact the information in paint but paint wouldn’t accept the file format.
I ended up asking a gen x teammate and she instantly told me to use the snipping tool which solved my problem. Thank you Gen X coworkers
Gen X checking in here. I’m actually happy to be left out of the memes. Carry on.
I always feel like Gen X should be labeled as the “forgotten generation”.
I mean that’s what “Generation X” means. We were forgotten from the beginning, forced into the long shadow of the Baby Boomers.
Boomers: analogue phones and rolodexes. The nerdy ones knew Morse Code, though.
Gen X: grew up with picture books on assembly language programming
Millennials: know how to use Microsoft Word and Photoshop. Perhaps can unfuck Windows Registry keys if needed.
GenZ: “What’s a file?”
The nerdy boomers built computers as we know them.
As we knew them, not as we know them.
You know what I mean.
But you don’t know what I mean. Computers as most people know them now are tablets and cell phones. I blame X and the elder millennials for that.
Computers filled rooms back when the boomers (and earlier gens) were creating them, so even a desktop isn’t how they were known then. But it laid the groundwork.
Was Franklin laying the groundwork for computers as we know them when he discovered electricity? You have to cut things off somewhere for a statement like that.
It could be said so, but it’s a much, much more distant connection than working on things that are literally called “computers.”
Well, at a low level they are still basically the same. x86 still starts in 16-bit real mode. Mice still use USB 1 from the 90s.
Mostly it’s just a lot faster and covered with more layers of abstraction.
Computers as most people know them now are tablets and cell phones.
That’s like saying that nerdy millenials invented mRNA vaccines. A very small percentage of the population worked on them while the rest weren’t even aware they existed for most of that time.
Regardless of how few, it was still people from that gen and computers wouldn’t exist today if they hadn’t laid the groundwork.
Really depends early GenZ was born in the late 90s/early 00s, and I can Attest that there’s quite a few who’re pretty good with computers. Mostly depends on what you got in touch with at home.
Now, Gen Alpha, I’d say, is on average proper fucked regarding computer knowledge.
Or, more to the point, the generational blocks don’t really matter much for this, but there’s certainly a declining aclemation with basic OS concepts.
I thought that late 90s was still millenial? Probably wrong.
I think the cut off between Z and millennial I see most often is 97. I was born in 98 and I feel like I’m in both generations at the same time
Saved that link. I’m about to end high school and i wanna do CS at uni next.
Just think about gen alpha
Correction: there are 10 generations that know technology inside and out. IYKYK.
I just aged 20 years reading that joke.
