My generation uses and understands tech. This gen just uses it. Or should I say, is used by it.
Wanna see how tech-savvy this gen is? Go up to one randomly and ask them how to "find" text on web page page.
Greentexts, memes, everything 4chan.
My generation uses and understands tech. This gen just uses it. Or should I say, is used by it.
Wanna see how tech-savvy this gen is? Go up to one randomly and ask them how to "find" text on web page page.
the same way you find text in nearly every fucking document, browsers aren't special
You're missing my point. They won't know that and they won't know how.
Yup, using an actual keyboard is going to become a niche skill
Pip install Claude
Zoomers are starting to remind me of the Eloi in the original movie version of The Time Machine. It's like nothing is possible to do unless it's provided as a clickable menu item.
This is me now, except the clouds are aws, azure, and gcloud.
They told me I'm at an age where people have to ask their kids how to rotate a PDF.
I told them if none of the tools I would use for that were available, I could just write my own. In a number of different programming languages.
When did Millennials get Boomer Brain anyway? If you took Boomers at their word thirty years ago, nobody under the age of 70 would know how to fix a car today .
Now these "Young people don't understand technology" memes are spreading like a nasty STD. Just endless posts of the most heinous ignorant horseshit.
Meanwhile, I've got kids flying homemade drones down at the park. I've got to fight through gaggles of teenagers on the way to robotics competitions and hack a thons when I'm downtown for lunch. My local Microprose is stuffed full of people under 30. All the active Linux geeks are practically in diapers, while millennials cling to Microsoft and fucking Apple.
But nobody is using the shitty VR that Zuckerberg is shilling, so Zoomers can't code? FFS, it's GenX that's forcing AI down all our throats.
Don't give me that "young people can't use computers" shit.
Oh, they can use them alright, limited to the ways they've seen. That's short version, here is a longer one:
Well, I don't have kids flying homemade drones at the park, and highly doubt that, say, devs behind Lutris are in diapers. But what I do have is this: https://lemmy.world/comment/17328375 (browse down to @Lightor comment). That goes along with continuously degrading UI (hello, the marginal user tyranny https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user), the fact that Microsoft and Apple are still not sued to the ground with all the bullshit they pull off. These wildly unrelated points all fall in line with my personal feeling and general sentiment that percentage of people who know some very basic things about computers is going down. Don't give me that "I don't see it in my surroundings, so that's not happening" shit
Us millenials are going to become the next boomers. The other generations around us like genX, zoomers and genA are comparatively smaller than the millenial generation, substantially so in the UK where I live.
Can't wait until my peers and I capture the legislators and start redirecting all of society's resources into our interests.
Edit: Already drafting comments to leave on the comments section of major newspaper articles about how genA need to pull themselves up by their bootraps, stop enjoying avocados, and cultivate some "stick-tuitiveness" (sub in other made-up phrase here).
Can’t wait until my peers and I capture the legislators
You're a billionaire?
I was thinking of doing it how the boomers have done. Old people make up a majority of the voters, especially if their generation makes up a plurality of the society's demographics. So basically boomers were able to demand all the assistance in terms of acquiring assets (including low taxes) and now they've got them they are demanding all the social security goes their way despite it being less than they paid in initially.
Millenials need to make up for lost time though. Maybe we can tell the politicians we'll only vote for parties that exempt over 60s from any form of taxation and demand that the state retirement payments triple. Just for a start... then we can live another 20-40 years and gradually claw more each year.
Edit: Another idea, we could start building affordable housing again but earmark them as only being for millenials. This is going to be sweet!
Old people make up a majority of the voters
But they're not aligned on policy. They go whichever way local news and the regional cultural touchstones tell them to go.
Boomers up in Portland and Seattle have very different politics than the retirees out in Savannah and Boco Raton.
I mean if you work in the industry you would absolutely see a rise, a significant one, in people generally inept at the technical requirements of their jobs that’s factual not “ignorant horseshit” - it’s not that young people can’t learn this stuff it’s that young people grew up in, and are still in, an environment that doesn’t foster learning of these skills or independence at a more personal level so those learning through traditional education are being failed by the system while simultaneously being given tools to make self sabotage easier than ever before and the values that tell people to seek out and do things on your own are quickly going extinct. If someone can’t do something, especially at a wide scale not like one individual who didn’t pick up a skill or something, this is a system problem and yes there are significant systemic problems young people are being faced with in their personal and professional/student lives acting like “that’s ignorant horseshit” is just denying something is wrong, it’s advocating for the status quo, something is wrong, young people are being failed and unless we acknowledge this problem we can’t address it
The divide is that zoomers don't NEED to understand technology. They instead default to learning the fluffy user interfaces. Older users were required to know the basics of file systems, and even touch on command line operations just to get by.
Modern kids aren't required to learn that. They are perfectly able to, but no longer required to. We currently have a lot of newer "mechanics" that are perfectly good at driving, but didn't really notice there as an engine thing up front to look at.
It creates a binomial split. Many don't notice the youngsters quietly getting good. They do notice the increase in idiots out of their depth due to overconfidence.
Actually, that has always been true.
Yes the UI has become fluffier. But users have always just used first and most convenient way to do something.
The subset of tech savvy users may be slightly bigger, but the majority never learned how computers worked beyond clicking around. That is in every generation. Our vision is just skewed because we grew up in a tech heavy environment.
But if you ever worked in IT support, you'd know that not knowing how computers work is the default in every generation.
I work with college students all day. They are computer illiterate. It’s like working with the old. Generalizations are sometimes kinda true.
Cool, I ALSO work with college age kids all day and they navigate/troubleshoot our software fine.
I guess our two completely useless anecdotes will now cancel out into irrelevance.
And on top of that I have enough millennial colleagues who don't know shit about anything in regards to tech.
Maybe people just reinforce their cliques in their 40s and just think everyone in their age group is like them.
And especially nerdy autists like to gravitate towards technology and ignore all the other people around them.
They really are terrible. They grew up in the age of apps and don't know how to actually use or maintain tech.
What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can't wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.
I mean... entirely seriously:
A large percentage of them are also functionally illiterate.
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-parents-children-reading-literacy-crisis-2081875
The % of kids that 'read for fun everyday' has dropped from 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2023.
Functionally illiterate reading levels of the whole US population?
19% in 2017.
28% in 2023.
Again, for emphasis: 28% of all Americans are functionally illiterate.
They can't read beyond a 'Hop on Pop' level.
Nearly a third of the US population is at a 2nd grade reading level.
And that near 10% increase in 6 years... thats 6 years of Zoomers graduating high school and becoming adults.
... Only gonna be worse for Gen Alpha.
Yeah, the only zoomers who really understand computers beyond the surface are gamers, especially ones who played stuff like modded minecraft before there were dedicated launchers for it
How does he know? Because he's that 35 yo pedophile NEET that lives in his mom's basement