In short, the complexity acted as a filter. It was a barrier to entry, which meant you had to be a bit of a nerd to get online. Back in the ‘90’s, people made fun of you for being an online nerd. But it also meant that the people who got online tended to be smarter. More educated.

The internet of the ‘90’s had a very nerdy culture. The worst debates were about Star Wars vs Star Trek. We disagreed on some things, but on the whole it was ‘us nerds’ online.

Now that we made it this easy, there’s no longer a filter: you can find anyone and everyone online. Including some folks who can’t really handle this much freedom without being assholes with it. The web also gravitated towards bigger platforms which, ironically, have much less of a community feel than the old web. In the 90’s, I knew everyone on a forum by name. But on a subreddit with a million people, there’s no real ‘community’.

The web these days is also overrun with politics, which simply wasn’t a thing back in say, 1995.

When technology was too hard for the tech-illiterate to use, your grandma wasn’t sharing stories about Haitians eating cats and dogs, and your deadbeat cousin didn’t waste his life savings on Trump’s cryptocurrency

/dev/nvme1?

I have the Microsoft safety shit on, and I made every site they can go to a web app. My router blocks nsfw/nonkid traffic. My phone gets notifications when they do anything at all.

And I have extensions blocking all nsfw sites just in case. And I’ve nuked the entry for any web browser on their start menu and task bars. Can’t even scroll to find it. If you open it, it requires my admin PW, which is 14char #$@-123-ABC so good luck turds.

Steam is locked down in kid mode - also they just play Roblox or cool math games anyways lol. Steam has browser disabled.

Only things they have access to is Bing.com with their signed in kid account. And coolmathgames.com.

It took about a week on and off to setup and I just did the two laptops in tandem. Windows 11.

The family thing can be a pain, Microsoft has a lot of half baked ideas https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/how-to-set-up-parental-controls-on-a-windows-11-pc

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought of a 92 YO on Lemmy.

Most parents done feel like raising theirs either. They just stuff them on a tablet and do their thing.

Raising them right. I have a 28 year old college grad sys admin that I work with…I had to show him where windows updates were.

He uses windows search to open settings…bachelors degree in IT.

Ive heard about qwant and ecosia too

I agree but bing.com is really what they are using because it has the parental controls that coincide with their signed in account.

When they get older and are more “free” on the Internet I’ll migrate them to Linux, I’ll let them choose the DE and then they can do what ever they want.

Old dusty balls still knockin around by my knees but you better be god damn sure I’m fuckin.

Not really. It takes a lot of experience to sort the legit from the not legit.

“Having problem X? Download the system32.dll fix here!”

I’m starting to get to a point in my career where I have to turn down helping my family.

I strongly encourage the elderly to “just get an iPad” if they have an iPhone and just drop x86 devices all together. It’s way less headache.

Luckily my mom’s still young and proficient enough with computers and phones.

You assumed absolutely wayyy to much based on a single sentence and virtue signal your superiority based on your own fantasy of what’s going on with inconclusive data. Move along.

It’s because Windows has to save its keyboard combinations for the important things, like opening a new LinkedIn tab.

“an enthusiastic emacs user” Well, there’s your problem! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the poke)

To be serious, Windows and that mouse are just tools-- same as any Linux distro is. A means to an end. Nothing more. There is nothing to be miffed about when you need to use that tool. Be proficient with all your tools. And when you need to use a tool, don’t be concerned about comparing it to the other tools. It diminishes you skills with that tool and and offers no gain to the solution.

I use Arch (btw) because it’s easy, simple, and beginner friendly

Absolutely lost in Windows, nothing ever works, and the documentation isn’t laid out well. Support is just sfc /scannow

This is why windows is here for a few games and Linux is for everything else.

I think that’s being a bit unfair to Windows. Some of its keyboard shortcuts are stupid, but it does have them. When it doesn’t, the problem is the application.

Some of the legacy keyboard shortcuts still survive to this day.

I live by Windows+R for the run dialogue.

If you populate %userprofile% with shortcuts named after keywords to your commonly used apps (eg fire.lnk for Firefox) then you can just slap Windows+R, type fire, Enter.

Generally, you’re totally on point, but I just wanted to drill into that mention about hotkeys for switching windows. You mean something other than alt+tab, ctrl+tab, and in some applications shift+brackets?

Going to be? We already are, along with older millenials.

Only the 10% or so that paid attention to “nerd stuff”.

All the rest are, at best boomer level, at worst smug about being at boomer level.

Based on how often I have to explain very obvious error messages to ostensibly qualified system admins: Yes.

(Though I insist I’m the oldest millennial and not Gen x)

More like Millennials. Gen X may have been around for the duration of the silicon boom, but it was largely niche “nerd shit” when they were kids, and only became widely accessible/acceptable to them with the same changes that have left Gen A lacking basic computer skills. Millennials, though, grew up through the full development of PCs and the Internet and had to learn how to navigate them at their early stages, as well as keep up with the rapid changes. It of course still isn’t universal knowledge there, either, but anyone that used a computer regularly through the early 2000s is going to be levels above most people getting into it now.

Yes.

Gen X is gonna be the tech equivalent of my grandma who knows everything there is to know about sewing and cooking

“Going to be …”?

I feel like I’ve been that graybeard for at least 10 lifetimes. No beginning. No end. Only servitude.

humanities?

You spelt Math incorrectly.

humanities?

You spelt Math incorrectly.

Same as it ever was. The only thing that has changed is accessibility. All these discussions seem to miss that. Most people have not, do not, and will not ever care.

I guess I’m one of the fractions of a fraction. I remember back in the late 90s when that catastrophe of an OS called Windows ME was plaguing our society. Having to manually change registry keys just to make the damn thing recognize a sound card.

It makes me sound old but, kids these days have no idea the kind of hell we went through. If/when I have kids I’m going to start them off with DOS 6 and gradually move them up to current OSes. They need to know the pain we went through.

People don’t need to know how to write a program from scratch to have useful tech knowledge. Knowing basic keyboard shortcuts puts a person above the vast majority of other people in terms of tech literacy.

NYC = new york city

This is a translation provided for free by me because this user has defualted to american defaultism

To the person I’m replying to, THIS IS THE INTERNET, NOT america

I’m 2-3 hours from NYC depending on traffic, so… kinda? But I’m pretty happy with my job honestly. I support a niche cloud product that my organization is almost entirely dependent on. Its a union position with good pay and benefits. It can be stressful sometimes and my boss can sometimes be… overbearing, but on the whole it feels like I’ve found a unicorn.

Out of curiosity though, do you have a job posting you’re willing to share? I like to keep my ear to the ground.

I’m pretty sure the people who do interviews are not the ones who have to train them. Also, if you use chat gpt for writing your cover letter, structuring your CV, running interview prep etc etc. You don’t even really need to be literate to come across as pretty put together.

Interviewers look for excess confidence, not skill

I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.

But I don’t want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that’s what the scanner does automatically.

But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.

But my company computer won’t let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.

But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don’t want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose “Print to PDF” and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.

I have a great custom workflow. I’m the most computer literate person in my office.

It’s shocking how few people know things I consider using a PC like organizing, customizing, automating tasks etc.

I always have to hold myself back and think I am not going to tell you how exactly to do this.

And expecting a list they can work off instead of thinking? Infuriating! These people are not old, it’s a mentality.

I wish this were the case, and in a world where software was perfectly documented and there was clearly one (or maybe 3) ways to accomplish a task I could see this being the case. Unfortunately there really is an intuition that needs to be built up over years of the underlying logic of how the most prominent software packages work and how to efficiently accomplish some basic workflows. There is no chance that someone with zero prior knowledge of excel is going to reach the same level of competency on their own as someone with 5 years of supervised experience.

I hate that Microsoft products are the de-facto standard in every workplace, but what I hate more is that they have shaped how we expect software to operate: the underlying logic (or lack thereof), where to look for tools, what keystrokes/operations result in what actions, etc. In this way they’ve also monopolised software design in a way that prevents innovation, since we all already understand how to use Microsoft’s products (at least to some extent) it makes breaking that mould a really dangerous proposition for competitors. It also means that someone with a really deep knowledge of the M$ suite is going to be far more valuable to most businesses than someone with less experience but a better grasp of how to acquire knowledge.

I think knowing something like office software helps since that novel problem. Knowing how to do a pivot table can get you an outcome you need in a fraction of the time if you don’t know how to do one. You need to know how to use the tools to create a solution.

Granted, but the inability to learn what isn’t “intuitive” is staggering.

With the search Powertoys can help, it is really good. Plus the other features it has is just amazing, windows without it is pure trash.

On iOS for example it’s also hard. Every app has its own silo of files and then there’s a shared file system. The file manager app is far less capable than Finder on macOS.

Fuck Microsoft. I’m out on my build coming up.

Nah fam, post with your real name, your real face, all your personal details, and then write your racist opinions next to them.

I’m sure nothing will go wrong with that.

Its a watered down and minimalist scary place. at least the Design language and UI of the conspiracy theorist websites are clean and sanitized today.

In the 90s and much of the 2000s, That Web 1.0 style of webpages, even Granny’s Knitting website looked terrifying.

… And I loved web 1.0

I can read docs and would be interested in an internship… Paid ideally, but would love to have a mentor to learn devops. I also know multiple programming languages and am comfortable in a terminal

Cut your losses and get a new intern, it’s gonna take ten times longer to teach this kid to read than if you just do the project solo.