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I’m going to go a bit further and say that kids today are not worse than in the past. It’s been 20 years since I taught computers but the doom and gloom here could have easily been posted in 2002 with only minor rewording.
GUIs got good with the launch of the Mac in 1984, and by the launch of XP & Mac OS X in ‘01 good GUIs were cheap. This brought computers into way more homes and exposed them both to kids who liked them for their own sake and to kids who saw them primarily as a tool.
I think people like this handwringing about kids not understanding computers on a deep enough level for their taste are just being obtuse.
I write software now instead of teaching and I write the kind of software that people should be able to just use as a tool.
We’ve had 20 years where the vast majority of computer users understand latin better than they understand their computers. It’s fine. It’ll continue to be fine.
Every one learns something for the first time. Expert to noob all start in the same state of knowing nothing.
she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with
Reeks of “incel” attitude.
The entire thing reads like an edge-lord self aggrandizing. If they were an english lit nerd instead of a computer nerd I’d bet they’d write fan fiction about themselves being a god.
I love how everyone is acting like this is a new thing. People have never been able to use computers.
This article looks like it is seriously a decade or older at this point. The writer goes on about how phones can’t be upgraded or repaired and go obsolete in two years but also buys a macbook pro.
Much of the article is some boomer going on about how they had no computers and they know computers better than people who do have computers. But I bet you this guy doesn’t know how to make laundry detergent but they rely on it all the time. Bet you need manufactur-dad to the fucking rescue for you eh?
I’m seeing this with my oldest niece and nephew. They’re okay with navigating their android tablets; but if you ask either them of troubleshoot a problem on the PC, they both just end up coming to me. Neither of them know how to research solutions either. Ugh.
Website: coding2learn
http site only
Lmao
Well, your comment just shows your tech illiteracy. https is useless when you don’t need to deal with sensitive data.
It’s definitely not the case that it’s useless. A MITM can embed malware into the page it returns if you aren’t being served over HTTPS. It’s not just about snooping on sensitive data going one or both ways, it’s about being sure that what you’re receiving is from who you actually think you’re receiving it from.
(Edit to add:) I actually went to look at some of the rest of the site and it confirms what I suspected: not using HTTPS here puts the reader at risk. Because this website provides code snippets and command line snippets that the user is to run, by not presenting it over HTTPS, it becomes susceptible to malicious MITM editing of the content.
For example, this line on the site:
- Install Homebrew (ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)”)
Could be intercepted, since it’s not being served HTTPS, and be replaced with utf-8 lookalike characters that really downloads and runs a malicious ruby script! Even easier, perhaps, they could just insert an item into the bulleted list that has the user run a malicious command.
HTTPS is not just for security of personal or private information. It is also for verifiable authenticity and security in contexts like this.
Yeah, it’s also easy enough to set up that a coding website not doing it is almost embarrassing.
Indeed. See my edit on the parent comment–I noticed that the website provides commands to the user to run, which makes it ripe for MITM attacks: if the user is copying-and-pasting commands to run into their shell, those need to be served over HTTPS.
Computers, math, cooking, cleaning, exercise, eating properly.
It’s just another in a long list of things that some grown-ass adults act like is somehow beyond them because that’s easier than trying.
Definitely not unique to any generation.
It sure is getting worse, though.
lol it’s really not, at all. every generation tells themselves this and it’s always bullshit.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
- Attributed to Socrates, ~400 BC
There are objective metrics one can use, rather than basing your opinion on your personal observation window.
There are, sure. And you are going to cherry-pick the ones that allow you to feel a smug and very much unearned sense of superiority.
I’m old and educated, so sorry.
No need to apologize to me, I’m not the one making a fool out of myself.
Educated indeed. Lmao.
I am 28 and i have always thought that the as long as you know how to operate a search engine you can find out what you need. The reason computer people know computers better than you do is because computer people can use a search engine better than you
I learned how to use computer since i was 5 years old, mostly through video games, then by playing with the Microsoft office, i’m 25 now going computer engineering, and i’m teaching my dad how to use a computer lol
Good thing search engines are optimized for advertising instead of utility!
I use searx and DNS level adblocking. Online ads are almost a completely foreign concept for me as 99.9% of the time they just never even load.
I remember when Google used to be perfectly functional as long as you knew the right search tools. Now it thinks it knows what I’m searching for better than I do, and that almost always means pointing me towards something someone paid for lol
Is advanced searching any better? I wouldn’t know now because searx but when I used it before it helped to keep the results focused.
It’s better, but sometimes google will decide you didn’t really mean to type the string inside the quotation marks. Advanced search tools used to be rock solid!
🤓🤓
- Dump on
tl;drs - Subject your readers to a minimally-edited 4000 word rant
You get to pick one.
- Dump on
This is some “I am very smart and sexy” cringe.
I’m pushing 50 and when people ask me how I know so much about computers, my first comment is that I had to program my first computer for it to do anything.
My second is that I actively sought to learn, and you can too.
Later in life Linux played a huge role in understanding how these contraptions work. Ironically, I’m a human factors engineer, so I’m also guilty of creating part of the problem. User interfaces that “just work”… Until they don’t.
My wife and I were just talking about this the other day.
I’m not in IT but I work as an industrial maintenance electrician, and knowing how computers work solves more problems than people realize!It’s so frustrating when people are like “Well I don’t need to know how computers work.”
Every aspect of our lives is governed by computers in one way or another. I can’t imagine not being curious to know how they work.
People feel the same way about cars, electricity, food preservation. People’s lives are interdependent on massively specialized technical disciplines and most of them couldn’t care less. I understand that the amount of specialization that goes into some topics means you can’t be an expert on all of these subjects, but some people just could not give a single shit how any of it works, and do not have any understanding of the ways in which it might stop working.
I’ve come to greatly resent any sort of technology or design being dismissed as “magic”, because I’ve met too many people who mean it literally.
Absolutely. I’ll be the first to admit my knowledge of cars is lacking, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in learning about it. It’s fine to not know things, but it’s weird to not want to know things.
Yeah, and I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a gap between “my car is a machine that occasionally requires service by someone who knows how” and “my car is a metal horse that should go as long as I put gas in it”. I don’t expect people to be the mechanic, but the second group of people is very much real.
my car is a metal horse that should go as long as I put gas in it
This one is fun because horses require so much more effort and upkeep than cars. Your horse can suck because you made it sad.
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “nom nom”. This blog post is not for you.
Well played Blogger. Well played.
To me, it just came across as petulant. Ironically, the “conclusion” was basically a TLDR for anyone interested.
Way before “tldr” became something on the internet, research papers had an abstract and news articles had a lead that tells you what the article is about.
I think this article is very good but replacing the abstract/lead by a snug paragraph is not a good idea.
Im a 6th semester software engineer student, back in first semester I had classmates that didn’t even know how to zip a folder
He was there to learn, right? Is a first semester student expected to know specific programs without explanation?
Zipping a folder is on of the most basic features of any os. It’s weird that he was so unfamiliar with computers and decided to get into compsci
Zipping a folder has 0 to do with compsci in the first place. Unless it’s a course on compression.
I was showing an intern how to install a software the intern needed. The computer setup was a laptop with two external monitors. After we installed the software from one of the external monitors, the intern asked “so will this install the software in the other screen?” I was flabbergasted.
I mean… Technically it would.
