theres a generation of kids who donât understand basic directories because of the mobile market and never actually used a pc in a regular usecase.
put in perspective, there are those who are more proficient on a touchscreen keyboard more than an actual keyboard.
Iâve also found (Iâm a teacher) this generation is far less proficient at search. They (generalisation) type a whole question into Google, and read the Google created text box to get their answer, taking it as gospel - regardless of if Google has completely gone off the mark.
Contrast this to a generation that grew up with needing to refine search terms with key words, who can find far more relevant info quicker.
Itâs hard to get them out of the rut and teach them to be more critical of sources. Theyâre so used to having what they need served straight up for them. LLMs (AI) are feeding into this more - they struggle to believe that AI hallucinations exist until I show them.
Again all this is generalisation - when I say âtheyâ I donât mean âallâ.
Ask it esoteric questions on something you are intimately familiar with. Heck it doesnât even need to be esoteric. I asked Bing who won the 2023 World Series and it confidently told me that it was Astros vs the Phillies that the Astros won in 5 games.
I generally get ask it to provide sources for its work, and then show the students that most of the time those sources donât actually exist.
Like itâll have a real author, and a real journal, but a fake article name that the author supposedly wrote.
Or a real website that 404âs - once is fair enough, websites change, but when ten of the sourced websites are all 404s thatâs not right. You also try to search for the article thatâs meant to be on the website, but even the website doesnât think it exists.
Iâve even been in an argument with Bing where it was adamant that an article existed on a university website, and it shut down the conversation with me when I kept pointing out I couldnât find it.
Couple of years back I used to help this kid with computer related stuff, and it really baffled me how he was nearly computer illiterate. He had no idea what make his laptop was, no idea what OS he was on, or any of the specs.
He called it a gaming laptop because he played games on it, but it was a pretty decent school/work thing without a dedicated GPU.
Iâd always envisioned the younger generations getting better and better with tech, but it makes sense that wonât be the case as tech moves to be easier to use, more reliable, and less intrusive.
Modern iPads are nothing like the BS DOS/98 I grew up with.
Similar thing happened with cars. My grandpa would take them apart and reassemble them. my dad (somewhat generalizing to generations a bit) were really into cars and engines and would do some basic diy. I know nothing about them and donât care to learn much.
I think computers are doing a similar thing. Millennials sit in the middle of the adoption and saw it emerge from more of a technology wild Wild West to being central to modern society. We could take the time to delve into details (since they mattered), but now itâs more taken for granted and things are there.
I guess, Iâm just thinking itâs some sort of technology adoption thing that naturally plays out in a âvictim if itâs own successâ way.
Fr I think this is my problem with the new âadvancementsâ and why I find myself more drawn to Linux as time passes. The âfoolproofâ of modern tech is also troubleshoot resistant and difficult as hell to do anything with.
I often say I am lucky that I grew up in the narrow window between when computers became a household commonality and when running and repairing them was affordable, because in that narrow window it was learn or buy. Learn to fix it or shell out for a new one, and they werenât stable enough for buy to be an option for most households for what was basically a toy. So fam being broke, I learned. Iâm not in IT or anything (donât have the credentials to get hired and entirely unwilling to get them when I already know how to do all the things, Iâd rather be unemployed than spend more on worthless credentials⌠see? Millennial.) but I love running my own hosting and stuff, which means constant learning how to maintain. If I didnât grow up at that exact time, would I bother, considering this isnât a job for me and never will be? Probably not, honestly.
I hated the iMac lockdown (and deleted the hard drive registries from every iMac I came across while it was an option to do so, essentially bricking every device I came across, because thatâs just piss poor management to allow a group user to brick the entire device⌠đ ) I hate the windows forced-maintenance (11 doesnât give a fuck what my active hours are, because I have them set to everything but a 6 hour span of morning when I actually wonât be using it. Still does updates mid afternoon, breaking everything I host on it until Iâm home to confirm login even with all security disabled and resume settings enabledâŚ)
I just hate everything except DIY, and I grew up with that. It so difficult to get it to do what -you-want it to do without bowing to the overlords who dictate how it can be used and Iâm so over it.
(The swap off Linux was of necessity 2x, the Beast died due to mobo failure and I bought an off the shelf win tower to replace it, but also needed to run the VM for work and Linux couldnât manage the niche client they went with⌠but now Iâm not employed, buh bye windows! Nevah again.)
Unfortunately this generation google is getting less proficient at search as well. Itâs like it treats the search term as a vague idea and any syntax as a non binding suggestion.
This has actually been studied. Turns out, zoomers are so reliant on smart technology like tablets and phones, they never actually learned anything about normal PC file systems or extensions. They literally donât understand what a folder is because theyâve never been exposed to PC or Mac environments.
Iâve seen people comment about needing to teach folder and file hierarchies to young people in CS classes because they grew up with cloud services and auto-save. Dunno how widespread that might be.
Iâve had to teach folders, file types and extensions to lots of ~18 yo. When I ask them where they saved a files they get confused and generally respond with something like âon the computerâ.
I am a sophomore computer science student and when I entered freshman year I was very surprised as well. Just last week, I was helping some kid with his intro C++ final and the entire semester, the guy has been saving everything to /downloads. He was wondering why every new program he made in Visual Studio failed to work. It kept messing up because he was in the same directory all the time messing about with the other 5 or so programs he made beforehand.
Yeah, but you can also just upload everything into one giant file orgy. Iâd wager most people take that approach.
And there are lots who donât understand what the shift key is for. They use capslock to shiftâŚ
There was a tech reviewer that scorched Chromebooks for taking away the CapLocks because⌠he couldnât type capitals anymore!
Iâve observed this personally but I didnât know it was studied. Can you provide a link to a study about it?
By study, I donât mean in a lab setting, but more so the data has been collected by employers reporting that their Gen Z staff is technologically stunted.
https://futurism.com/gen-z-baffled-basic-technology
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
https://www.digitaldisrupting.com/gen-z-kids-apparently-dont-understand-how-file-systems-work/
I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isnât) and shows you the files.
If this zoomer wanted to open it theyâd obviously double click.
So calm down boomers, this is fiction.
If itâs an executeable with dependencies in the archive it might not run without being unpacked.
The greentext says âhe asks for some filesâ, that doesnât sound like an executable, which usually gets blocked by the mail system anyway (even in a zip, if thereâs no password on it).
But yeah, that is one way to have it broken, besides Windows refusing to run a random .exe
They may have emailed it to the zoomer, and the zoomer attempted to open it on their iphone or something that doesnât have native zip compatibility.
Maybe they downloaded the zip and then immediately tried to open it in a specific program through the open dialog giving them an error. I see similar mistakes with my parents - they have no concept of where files are, itâs just âon the computerâ because they rely so heavily on âsmartâ file picker dialogs that show you everything recent or by a file type no matter where itâs actually located.
Not super tech literare⌠Is there even a reason to unzip the files if you just want to grab one of them? I kust assumed windows is unzipping it into some weird temporary memory anyway to show me them, so a file is a file?
I mean the file is zipped, as in compressed. So it might just look like a file, but if you open it inside the zip (with file explorer) Windows does have to decompress the file in the background to show it to you.
Which is obviously slightly slower than if you unzip the file and put it somewhere and then open it, but you wonât really notice the difference except weâre talking about massive files.
And of course if you make changes to the file you canât save it (except to a new file) as it gets opened up as read only.
If you just want to store the file and view it every now and then I donât see a reason to unzip it. And you can always do that later anyway.
I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isnât) and shows you the files.
Just the other day I had to tell someone to unzip first before they could patch the rom (they were going to play some romhack on an emulator); I donât know how old they were but clearly there can be scenarios where someone has a zip file and donât know what to do with it or use it.
I donât even know what the rom was or which emulator they were using, because I just told them if they google Rom Patcher JS thatâs going to work for whatever file type it is, because according to them the problem was that the patcher they had didnât workâŚ
But as it turns out they were trying to use the .zip archive as the patch file, so I then had to explain to them that they need to extract it first.
And afterwards the patcher they had did work so I donât think they even used Rom Patcher JS in the end.
Thatâs also more of a Windows issue than a user issue. I absolutely hate that file types are hidden by default in file explorer, makes the whole thing feel unusable. First option I change whenever I touch a Windows PC.
So besides the icon you canât see at first glance as a casual user that itâs a zip file. And a ROM most likely had an icon the user wasnât used to, so they didnât notice something was wrong :-/
Administrators can disable this, so I think the larger point is: if a tech literate person receives a zip file, they understand that it is in fact a compressed archive that can contain one or more files and directories, and that you need an archive tool to extract the contents, whereas a tech illiterate person doesnât understand this and expects it to just be handled magically when they double click on it and are stumped when that doesnât work.
Double clicking works for 99% of file types. So if I send you a pair of Excel files in a zip and you double click it under Windows 10 or 11, it will just show you the Excel files and you can even open them. Not sure what your point is here.
Double clicking works for 99% of file types
Youâre completely missing the point.
Not sure what your point is here
The point is that when the double click magic doesnât work for one reason or another, for example because the administrator disabled this feature with a group policy or because the file associations got messed up, the tech illiterate person does not know what to do because they donât grasp the underlying concept.
Itâs Chromebooks, phones, and tablets that you donât ever have exposure to actual files. Chromebooks especially now that theyâre so common in schools because theyâre cheap.
I so wish Linux phones were actually a usable thing so that we could have functional pocket computers.
The attempts made so far werenât very convincing.
I still have one of these bad boys
Those were pretty great. I would have expected them to live in as a niche product, but no such luck.
Honestly we probably can just somehow shove Linux components like flatpak and other stuff like the terminal into android, make them apks somehow so they can work whenever
Of course this would be hard AF to do but I just want to run tik tok in a sealed off VM using flatseal goddamnit (I donât trust it with my phone but I want to access the videos on it)
You can run a full Linux distro with termux https://termux.dev/en/ and proot-distro https://github.com/termux/proot-distro
You can do many Linuxy-terminaly things with Termux. I use it quite often. Write shell scripts in vim, run Python scripts, SSH, use ADB tools to manage other android devices, install and update things with pkg/apt, traverse your phones filesystem as you would in Linux, if you have root on your phone you can even do root stuff! Heck, you can even run neofetch! All that and more on your tiny little phone screen!
There is this
But Iâm not sure itâs up-to-snuff. Never touched it myself.
Unfortunately itâs not
Phones also have the added benefit of needing the OS tweaked for every device
Sample size of 1 person
ZOOMERS
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/385/
Millenials are just passing on the abuse they got from the boomers for enjoying avocado toast 10 years ago.
At least making fun of someoneâs tech skills is rather harmless compared to questioning the basic desire to eat something other than ramen every now and then.
I have seen multiple âzoomersâ struggle with zip files. Probably because they dont know those from their smartphones.
How is it possible to struggle with them, pretty much all desktop OSes have built-in support for those and Windows even lets you treat them like folders.
I think itâs because Windows treats them like folders. They donât understand why things donât work like normal but windows explorer displays them like normal folders.
They have no concept of what a compressed archive is.
Interestingly enough, the youngest zoomer is now 11. Iâve never seen an 11 year old struggle with a zip