You make some good points there. I remember LAN parties in high school where we would spend hours troubleshooting network problems and calling older brothers for advice. I learned a lot from those experiences, because I was forced to. I think a big part of the changes we are seeing in computer literacy is what I would call the Apple philosophy: if a toddler can’t use it, we need to simplify. Basically, as you said, things are getting simpler with less granular control. Of course, Apple is far from the only company doing this stuff, but they seem to be industry leaders in the sense of ‘dumbing down’ tech.

I recently had a friend say that privacy is a luxury these days. My first thought was that there is nothing luxurious about it. It takes hard work, inconvenience and savvy. And I’m not even close to Stallman levels of privacy paranoia. I know just enough to acknowledge that I know nothing. I feel similarly about tech in general. I have been using Linux for ten years, I use VPNs, I have played around with DNS settings, et cetera. But I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and available to those willing to spend the time and get it done.

Anyway, I’ll shut up now. Thanks for replying thoughtfully, and thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

In my country, this generational divide doesn’t make much sense. But comparing those born in the 90s and early 2000s with those born from the late 2000s onwards, there is a fundamental difference: there was, even in the public education system, a variety of computer courses available to many people. With the arrival and hegemony of the app model, which is designed with the idea that it is intuitive and does not require anyone to be taught how to use it, computer courses have been disappearing. As a result, millions of young people use computers daily and have no knowledge of simple concepts such as shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, let alone advanced features of Office suites, not to mention that they have no idea what LATEX and Markdown are.

It’s really not a generational thing. Every generation has their nerds and they always are just a tiny minority.

The late Gen X/early millennials may have been an outlier because they were forced to learn to get anything working but also from those years most don’t care about tech.

This is quite a few years old now, but I think the main points are still valid. As you said, everything is so polished, kids don’t need to figure out how it works.

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

Im surprised that a lot of people that are my age, even if they are using computers a lot, dont know how to search the solution for a problem or follow some instructions on how to do something

Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them

Which needs to be reversed if we’re to remain free in Western democracies. Access to and control of computing - general purpose computing in particular - is practically a civil liberty now. I look at legislators in my own country, and I’d wager 50% of them don’t understand this, 40% kind of grasp the problems but are apathetic, and 10% are on the enemies’ payrolls.

I’m Gen Z and I still know all this stuff because that’s just what I’m interested in. I don’t think it’s a huge issue that those things were made simpler for the average person and that they don’t know how it works. It’s not like you can or need to know everything.

The weird thing is I know a lot of millennials that could use a dos computer just fine but struggle with anything modern

Remember that story about Gen Z students not understanding file systems?

bro you’re on lemmy, you’re already outside of the curve for most gen-z

I feel like if you know how to look up the answer and can follow a guide to apply 5 steps, you are probably more capable than 80% of the people on this planet.

I’m an older Gen Z, but same here. I really don’t know that much but can torrent, so people see me as some sort of tech god lol.

My younger sister on the other hand, also Gen z, is so tech illiterate that her downloads folder is a mess and thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program.

20yrs ago I had to help my comp sci housemate build a website for his module. I was not a CS student.

Some things never change.

Gen-z too, finding can be somewhat hard but the mega threads help. Torrenting itself is easy of course. Just get transmission or any other FOSS client, put on a proper VPN and good to go.

I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.

I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.

There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.

I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.

I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.

I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.

Fellow Zer here, my elective IT class had grading done depending on how well you could use the computer:

‘A’ if you could do everything perfectly well, ‘B’ if you needed some help from the instructor, ‘C’ if you needed a lot of help, ‘D’ if you couldn’t even get past the login screen on the windows machine.

We had a lot of people who got a pity ‘C-’

I’m in the same boat. I’m a comp sci student but the amount of tech illiterate comp sci students I meet every day is astounding and concerning

You will also know nothing and be happy.

Ignorance is bliss after all

We are actively being held back by companies catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator.

Might be a bit dramatic. All sectors of industry are using more and more tech, we have more people in the workforce now that are tech literate than we did decades ago.

These are random numbers to explain my point. Look at it this way, in the 90s maybe 20 percent of people knew how to use computers but 12 percent of those were truly tech savvy and knew the ins and out of using a pc.

Now a days 90 percent of people know how to use a pc (regardless of the form it presents itself, be it pc, phone, tablet, etc) but only like 30 percent of them might be truly tech savvy.

It’s still a step up from back then, and because of the nature of tech in industry there’s always gonna be plenty of people who know how to use pcs well and if there aren’t then that’s just more money for us who do know.

Torrenting is getting worse and worse these days, I’m learning the ancient art of Usenet.

Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?

I think they’re using this style: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-does-eat-hot-chip-and-lie-mean-the-viral-copypasta-and-meme-explained

I mean it’s true here.

This is the first time I see the word halcyon being used irl

Gen Z struggles with file systems in general, because the vast majority of their technical experience is on mobile OS’s. However, Gen Z compsci students are somehow far beyond the skill set that millennials had at their age. Or at least that has been my experience with interns over the past 12 years.

My dad pronounced it war-easy. Some time later I played Morrowind and, well… “Khajit has warez if you have coin”

I don’t think either answer is wrong.

My native language isn’t English, so for me as a teen back then it was definitely the second option.

Ha I was actually just thinking that we need to teach them as I was reading this. We had to go through a shit ton of trial and error. God forbid if he started with something like LimeWire. Viruses… Viruses everywhere

Teach us then 😭

I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.

I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.

Based alert

Besides 1337 who is good?

Literally any private tracker is a million times better

Depends on what you’re looking for, really. I’m unsure about the rules regarding sharing specific sites, but if you DM me, I can throw a few recommendations your way.

1337 is fine for most stuff, I think. Private trackers start to make sense when you want to automate downloading shows and movies but if you just wanna pirate some game, you’ll probably find it on 1337 with a ton of seeders anyways.

linking_park_numb.mp3.exe