- 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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2 generations. Gen X and Millennials are both of the right age to properly understand computers.
To put a finer point on it, it specifically the younger Gen Xers and older Millennials. That’s the “one” generation this post describes.
I’m on the older end of Gen Xers and at least the nerdier half of us not only know how to use computers, but we’ve seen the whole evolution of home computing since the Altair. We know in a way you never can why goto is considered harmful.
And on the other end of that, my niece and nephew are just on the cusp between millennial and gen z and they grew up playing games on Windows 95, 98, and XP. I think both Gen X and Millennials in their entirety fit the bill.
I’m on the younger end of X, and definitely agree about witnessing (most) of the evolution of personal computing.
It’s not just younger Gen X. I’m oldish Gen X and loads of us were programming computers for fun from the late 1970s on. By the early 1990s you couldn’t really avoid computers, and you couldn’t use them without at least a basic level of understanding. By that time many of us had been using them for a decade or more. It’s those who grew up without computers (before they became common) and those who grew up with iPhones that have a problem with tech.
That would be the xennials.
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I know younger millennials and older gen Z and they both can use computers just fine. The oldest Gen Z are nearly 30 now.
Trying to explain to a GenXer what Cobol is and to a Millennial what a Ring Light is and its practically impossible.
This meme is just ForwardsFromGeandma minus the 😂🤣😂🤣 emojis. If GenX/Millennials properly understood technology, they wouldn’t all be on Windows.
Millennial what a Ring Light is
Ain’t nobody don’t know what a fuckin’ ring light is.
The Xbox would give red ones of death. 😤
😂
If GenX/Millennials properly understood technology, they wouldn’t all be on Windows.
By that metric the only generations that properly understand technology are gen alpha and boomers, since they’re the most likely to just own a phone and/or tablet and no windows desktop or laptop.
I’m in the middle of Gen X.
I had a class in college that was centered on COBOL.
I certainly wouldn’t need anyone to explain to what it is.
Pretty sure the only Cobol programmers left at this point are Gen X and older.
People are still on Windows because of massive industry momentum, and as the developers shift from being mostly Gen X and older millennials, to younger millennials and Gen z, things are getting progressively shittier. And it’s not only due to c-suite driven enshitification.
Pretty sure the only Cobol programmers left at this point are Gen X and older.
The funny thing is that we’ve got a ton of legacy hardware that still runs it, mostly in the public sector. But since GenX/Millennials avoided public jobs like the plague, what we’re seeing now are Boomers left to teach it to the incoming ranks of GenZs who can’t get a job in the dying Silicon Valley sector.
And just like that, Gen X disappeared from existence
Maybe it’s just me but I feel like PDFs are significantly a less common part of life nowadays. Especially when it comes to having to edit one
I’m curious. What other format you have to send and receive documents?
LaTeX
If you want me to read it, you better put effort into writing it.I tried to write my master dissertation in LaTeX. Emphasis on “tried”.
Uncompressed .BMP files from Windows 3.11 MS Paint
Tiktocks
Ah. You’re likely in the wrong job for it then. They are incredibly popular in any sort of digital paperwork job.
Can confirm, we’re using PDF for any sort of pretty formatted documents/reports we’re sending to clients.
Just about every financial institution will use PDFs. Now editing PDFs, that’s slightly different (but only so slightly). Used to be you had to use a certain tech giant’s monolithic and expensive software to create/edit PDFs, but these days it’s second nature; maybe to the point that you’ve stopped noticing?
It’s just you.
God I WISH that were true because I personally fucking hate them.
Beat me to it
Everybody always forgets about Gen X
I’m sure they’re used to it and therefore are all like “meh, whatever”.
Yeah honestly we forget about ourselves just as often
I’ve trained a lot of 18-22 y/os in the last 10 years and they are fine. Let’s not become the boomers please…
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The issue is they click the biggest and flashiest button and quit once they discover it does not lead them where they want to go.
Anyone that ever pirated anything learns real quick that those are the buttons you avoid like the plague
I hope anyone who uses Google without an adblocker learns that very quick too.
Bait ads is the biggest attack vector to bring users to install malware.
“30 yr old boomer” …not without a time machine.
Yeah, being dumb is hardware-agnostic. As some guy put it, “being stupid isn’t a big deal anymore; some of my best friends are stupid”.
It just stunlocks me a little bit as younger people have been around tech their whole life, unlike boomers, who were born before computers.“been around tech their whole life” more like they have a locked down phone, locked down game console and MAYBE a desktop computer. It’s too rounded out and consumer friendly now, you never have to peek under the hood.
Idk, most likely its region/class dependant because I had dumb phones, some very early androids, and an Athlon 64 3000+ pc and I’d call myself a zoomer
edit: before that I had some ancient family pc but it’s only relevance is getting me entertained, didn’t tinker with it or anything. Also my old phone’s 4.4 android was my favorite because it was polished enough while still letting you do dumb shit with it
I was born in 04, I work in tech so it’s definitely dependant on a lot of factors, I think the biggest being siblings/parents that are into tech. My oldest brother was into tech so he taught me a lot of piracy stuff from a young age.
Younger millennials down have had their exposure be primarily gardenwalled, locked down equipment. Tablets and smartphones and apps, oh my! The sort of thing that discourages casual exploration and experimentation.
They are fuckin’ skin masters though.
Boomers have been seeing changes in communications, culture, and technology as revolutionary as anything in the last 20 years, for their entire lives. Things didn’t start getting wild just recently. It has been a romp for the last 200 years.
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.
To be fair, PDFs suck and the only software that handles them well is paid and proprietary
Libreoffice is pretty decent with PDFs imo
From my experience, not very much, at least for editing PDFs without fucking up the fonts
I guess
Do Adobe PDF things handle all Google fonts?
I don’t know. I just know that Acrobat works well, while Libreoffice barely works when editing (and in general the software was buggy)
Yeah, I’ve only used it a little bit so I don’t really know
Unfortunately in LibreOffice all the pages in a PDF need to render with the same orientation and size :/ It adds whitespace to pages to make them all the same size, and this whitespace remains even when exporting as PDF.
There’s been a formal request made to change that, but it’s been years with no movement.
PDF gear is free (for now) and excellent
Proprietary :-/ but might still be interesting nevertheless
Thanks for sharing
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
The thing is most of us cant even rotate a pdf, but we do know how to learn it.
Load up Adobe Acrobat, like the button that looks like it will rotate the document.
I assume that’s the process. Never needed to do it but I have no doubt I’d be able to work it out
“like the button” - not sure if typo or using “like” to mean “click”.
Like that button. Love the button. Gently caress the button.
like that smash button
Please, no, have mercy. Anything but the ad invested bloated Adobe Acrobat.
YES! being able to google (or read) goes a long way.
it depends on the person. some zoomers are great with tech, hardware and software. others aren’t. same goes for every generation. this reeks of the “haha let’s shit on the younger generations” millennials have been mad about for years
Yeah I suspect what’s happening is that plenty of boomers were actually just bad at tech but they got to use the excuse that they didn’t grow up with it. Any gen z people that are bad at tech don’t have that excuse so it seems like they’re stupid, when in reality there have always been stupid people or people who just aren’t interested.
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And I’ve worked with some boomers who could use filezilla and other higher level than typical tech. There are some that are talented, but the average is noticeably lower.
Sorry, but its different this time. A much smaller chunk of gen z is good with tech, and most of them struggle with basic concepts (like filesystems). Saying this as a gen z person.
It’s always “different this time.” Every generation.
Spoken as another gen Z person, I know exactly one other gen Z person who’s bad with tech. The rest are great with it. It’s entirely Dependant on who you surround yourself with.The older parts are typically better.
I disagree. I work IT for a living. I fix a lot of devices for gen z but don’t often have to educate them on software. the amount of people 30+ who don’t realize I as a random IT worker can’t magically reset their yahoo password is insane.
older gen z, can confirm! gamers and nerds are generally pretty good, but others not so much
And I’ve worked with some boomers who could use filezilla and other higher level than typical tech. There are some that are talented, but the average is noticeably lower.
Just think about gen alpha
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.
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.
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.
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.
Correction: there are 10 generations that know technology inside and out. IYKYK.
What is this referencing?
The original joke as I heard it was:
There are 10 types of people:
- Those who know binary
- Those who don’t
Binary is Base-2 math, meaning that the highest number in any place is 1. So 10 means 2 in Base-10 math.
I just aged 20 years reading that joke.
I think you mean you aged 00010100 years
I just copied from my phone and pasted to my steam deck. I still got it.
Classic Lemmy Linux users forgetting that access to a PC and the knowledge to use it is a privilege not afforded to most unlike budget smartphones which cost less than the keyboard you own and are becoming more and more of a necessity than a trivial toy as it was when we first had them.
Lamenting generational failures is a pastime reserved for the old to soothe their egos. If you actually care, understand the systemic reasons why young people are less tech literate and take the steps to reach them.
I understand the reasons, but so many people I’ve had to deal with don’t seem to want to learn.
Bingo. I have noticed a huge downfall in curiosity and engagement with not only technology, but pretty much everything in the world. People just want to be spoon-fed and will fight you throw a hissy fit rather than just… learn or make an effort to figure things out on their own.
I used to be a part of a DIY repair space for tech and mechanics and left because around 2022 it went from fun to just… a bunch of lazy people showing up and whining that other people were not doing the work for them. And you’d explain it was a DIY space for people to self-learn and they would just give you this vague look and get angry and then complain that ‘I thought you were suppose to do it for me.’
I don’t know what it is, social media or phone addiction or what. It seems to be just as bad will millennials now as any other gen. People just… don’t want to try anymore at anything. And trying is the only way you properly learn anything.
Also, people don’t seem interesting in figuring tech stuff out, its so easy to just google an error message, and read what it says.
You say that yet we all know Google has gone to shit the last 2 years. Not to mention all the good forums are either shuttering or putting up motes so they can’t be scraped, which means they can’t be found. Discord has been a disaster for tech solution searching online.
Sure, but google an error message + one or two tiny details still will 70% of the time return something useful.
Its gotten worse, but not that bad yet.
Yet!
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air for $60 a year ago to take with me on a backpacking trip.
It is running the very latest release of EndeavourOS and runs it well. It can do video calls. Honestly, there is little it cannot do.
You can use it to learn to program C, C++, Rust, Python, Go, Java, C#, and F#. It runs Distrobox and Docker so you can learn about containers. I guess after using QEMU/KVM to learn about VMs. You can use it to run K3S. You can run Postman, RestAssured, and Selenium to learn about Web APIs and testing. It runs WASM. You can orchestrate AWS or Azure from it as it runs both Terraform and OpenTofu great. It can run a host of cybersecurity tools including BurpSuite. You can run both SQL and Document databases. You can use it to package your own software and contribute to Linux distro development. You can emulate older machines and even run digital design tools and PCB layout. Obviously it runs all the major modern web browsers and a couple different Office suites. It can even do basic video editing and run smaller LLMs. It can run Steam if you are happy with older games. I know it can do all these things because I have.
Without going on and on, I think you could use it to rotate a PDF.
It comes with keyboard, trackpad, screen, and networking built in. It takes up hardly any space. And it is considerably less expensive than most phones and tablets. Of course, there are many less expensive computers that would also do the trick if you cannot afford $60 and just want to learn.
I don’t think you can argue that basic computer skills are elitist. We are not talking F1 racing here.
access to a PC and the knowledge to use it is a privilege not afforded to most
Yes and no. Computers have never been cheaper, but back in the 90’s and 2000’s there was only The Computer :TM:. Now a computer is in your pocket, on a tablet, a laptop, or a desktop. You can get a PC for cheaper than a smartphone (beelink anyone?)
I don’t blame zoomers for not knowing proper desktop/laptop computer usage. You can do basically everything without them these days. But it is an objective fact that the consequence is lower computer literacy. Whether that’s a big deal or more like not knowing how to write in script is up to you and largely depends on what job they plan on holding one day. This may comes as a shock to Lemmy users but in the 2020’s you can completely function without ever touching a mouse and keyboard.
So no, access is not necessarily a privilege unless we are talking about populations that already can’t access smart phones and tablets, in which case that’s a decades-old problem and not relevant. That’s just basic access to any computer device writ large, not a discussion about PC’s.
computers have never been cheaper
while that might be true for the e-waste teirs of pcs, that idea is laughable for anything actually usable. just take a look at nvidia’s pricing, and I don’t mean msrp I mean the actual price you actually pay at checkout.
Are we seriously going to get elitist about what PC kids are using to learn the basics?
My $120 beelink runs my server on elementary OS and can encode/stream 3x 4K streams without any issue. It’s plenty capable for teaching kids how to use computers.
Meant to respond before you deleted, then forgot. Wasn’t trying to be elitist, just pissed off at the state of the industry. I do not disagree with what you said tho.
Most people carry a smartphone more expensive than my all organs combined to be fair, at least in US.
Linux and technology in general is not that hard as long as you aren’t scared of clicking everything and messing around. And I say this as someone who didn’t have internet access until 2020.
Well yeah I didn’t learn at all about computers even in high school, when students did use a computer it was a cheap Chromebook. I bearly grew up with computers and thats the same for most people, the difference is I have autism so I hyprfocus on computers :3
Yes you are a monolith block when born in a certain age group.
Nothing wrong with that statement apparently.
Divide and conquer.I work with some guys much younger than me. They’re great at programming and stuff like that but none of them have ever built a computer. They seem to think it’ll be really hard.
It is really hard, with al the soldering and print etching and what more.
I’m more of a wire wrap traditionalist.
When I did my technician course, it was still using the old program and we had a wirewrap course (I did my course from 2007 to 2009)
We had this big bread board that we could connect to an ISA slot in an old PC. A guy connected a capacitor wrong by mistake. When he plugged the ISA card in, the capacitor caught fire like it would in a cartoon.
He was dumbfounded and it was funny as hell.
Never let the magic smoke escape!
none of them have ever built a computer. They seem to think it’ll be really hard.
Depends on what you’re starting with. If you mean assembling a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, storage, video adapters, etc., the only difficult part of that is deciding you can do it.
If you’re talking about assembling components on a breadboard, that’s going to be more challenging.
I’ve done both. The breadboard computer was for an electronics class in college. It was both more fun and more pain.
The part I find challenging about building a PC is shopping for components. Making sure the RAM is compatible with the motherboard and all that shit. Assembling the thing is like really expensive legos that take a disconcerting amount of force to click together.
This is the fix for that:
Edit:
I had about 13 years between my current PC built in December of 2024 and my previous machine. Back when I built the previous PCs, I would rely on books to research what to get. It’s gotten a lot easier with pcpartpicker.com.
The sad part about that is building a PC is easier than ever. I hadn’t built one in over a decade and was shocked to find out that everything is toolless and just snaps right into place! The only part that’s maybe intimidating for newbies is putting the thermal paste down without making a mess but even then, you just go slow and take your time and you’ll be fine.
