as a high schooler with a special interest in computers, it’s genuinely surprising how poor most of my peers computers skills are. most of my peers don’t even know the very basics of folder structures.
also unrelated, let’s all love lain
special interest
poor skill of peers
(I’m totally with you though)
I blame google for the demise of well-organized folders. Their approach to email was “chuck it all in one big folder named Archive, and you can search for it using keywords that you will definitely remember when you need to find it again!”
It’s a useful tool, but paved the way for the current state of affairs where people get overwhelmed by their email because they have 150,000 unread emails in their inbox and as a result, don’t read an email until you tell them the entire contents of their email via the inferior messaging platform known as texting.
Idk. I blame Apple, and Android hasn’t done much to really bolster the need for file folders (not a bad thing, just lack of opportunity for learning).
But Apple actively prohibits its user base from engaging with folders, and has been for well over a decade - plenty long enough for my (millennial) generation to phase it out and for the generations after to never need them in the first place. Plus, emails aren’t dependent on file paths, whereas systems file paths are completely necessary.
Without seeds, torrents become almost useless, and many pirate sites offer rare and hard-to-find movies/animes whose torrent versions never download because their seeds are practically extinct forever. So I don’t think this is a weak complaint. If torrents didn’t have this weakness I would always choose to use them but…
It’s like cars. Almost everyone has one and can drive it but don’t know how it works. Computers have become that. There are some who know or have an idea of how it works and others who can use it but have no idea.
Yeah but cars have become increasingly more complex over the last 20 years. You basically need an EEPROM arduino kit these days just to get the fucking diagnostics out of the car, because someone decided that analog circuits were just too much bulk
I think their metaphor is referring to ease of use and the knowledge required for use. I have a few personal anecdotes as examples.
I’m an eighties kid. My first PC was a Commodore 64 and my first car was a 1966 VW Bug. Neither was reliable nor easy to use. I had to learn to utilize interfaces that were more finicky and complex than modern equivalents, and I spent a great deal of time learning how to make them work when they glitched out or were broken. The alternative was not having them at all. It was hard to get BBS advice when your PC took a dump and no one else you knew had one you could use, and then where would you get car advice? Certainly not from my dad!
A kid growing up with an Apple anything and driving a 20 year old car doesn’t face the same kinds of difficulties. Many things just work more reliably and aren’t as difficult to use. One can easily buy gaming systems now where we often had to build our own to get what we wanted. My buddy’s 23 year old daughter had never even heard of CLI. That’s all I had!
It doesn’t make one generation better than the other - younger people today are skilled in ways I could have only dreamed of. We just have different opportunities for excellence.
If you had real shitty internet back in the day (read 56k modem) and you liked to play russian roulette you would dump satellite traffic with a skystar2 DVB-S card. You never knew what you’d get realistically, found some true gems underneath mountains of coal in the day of (still) unfiltered internet.
That’s wild. Did you need a special program to parse stuff out of the data stream? I guess it would mostly come in as http reaponses, so it wouldn’t be too hard, but still an interesting problem.
Yep, used Skygrabber, you could filter out files depending on extensions, filenames etc and could narrow out what you wanted. Still had no real way of knowing what you’d end up with as you were effectively just passively listening on the satellite traffic. It was wild as you could fill out a 40 gig drive overnight without issues in the era where people were downloading a MP3 album for hours.
I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did because I am not sure if the statutes of limitations have run.
Vaguely, it involved ftp and file repositories hosted unwittingly by large companies plus restricted IRC channels to discuss the locations of such places.
Unless you killed somebody, the statutes of limitations have run.
I still remember the “dumb” tech was AOL warez chatrooms where you interacted with a chat bot to get an email with lists of scene games, movies and other stuff in the traditional multi-RAR parts, and you’d individually request them a few at a time to be emailed. Then you’d move to IRC when you found out could be done faster, or BBSes.
I’ve probably forgotten most of how things worked.
I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did
They watched tv and traded tapes.
I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then “accidentally” disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.
I miss my college days, Terabytes upon terabytes of “Linux ISOs” accessible via the blazing fast internal university network. And the IRC channel, where I learned what trolling was, but never learned to not feed the trolls.
Yo Gundam Wing was sick, sweet music
the only people who know how to torrent are the ones that want to learn. the learning curve is gentler than a walk-in shower. I’ve shown people of all ages and all tech backgrounds, though recommending VPN connections and getting that going does throw a few.
anyway, it’s so easy, it’s crazy compared to the old days of usenet, ZIP disks, ftp sites, .is files, and sequenced RAR files. this is the golden age of piracy and I love it.
The tools were annoying but the process wasn’t very hard. Unprotected FTPs were pretty common early on and IRC download bots were around before torrenting. Sharing applications like Kazaa, Scour, Limewire, and Napster were super simple. There were fewer roadblocks. I wouldn’t want to explain to someone how to get a private invite, understand the trackers rules, and ensure they do not get VPN leaks.
What’s there to learn? You just simply download a client, go into thepiratebay (if it still exists, dunno, havent torrented a thing for like 10 years), click download and wait.
thepiratebay still exists but is regarded as untrustworthy and infested with malware. I’d say knowing you’re getting something from a trustworthy source is harder than it used to be.
And these days magnet links are everywhere, making it even a little simpler
It is more difficult than a few years ago, especially if you don’t want to get sued or get a threatening letter from your ISP.
I would only torrent with a VPN and a private tracker. It’s certainly not difficult to learn, but absolutely requires some small amount of information to acquire.
Not exactly, first of all, this is pretty divisive which I dislike, a lot of late Gen z can and has torrented and used ddl sites. It’s early Gen z and Gen alpha that is hopeless.
lol, you point out how this is divisive and then proceed to divide Gen Z into late and early cohorts.
Oh wait
No most millennials are also too lazy because they stopped giving a shit about computers when it stopped being a requirement to use the internet like 10-15 years ago because smartphones.
Most who did haven’t in at least a decade, and wouldn’t unless you put a gun to their head.
For some reason the vast majority of people seem to just want to ignore the machines that literally run our society, and its fucking maddening.
FFS the amount of people who I work with in IT and even then don’t really give a shit about they’re daily computing is absolutely fucking baffling.
Its really just a smattering of people from all ages who actually know how to use a computer because they’re actually interested in doing so.
I like to think I know how to use a computer, but I mostly use my phone for private stuff. I have a few things running on my PC, but they’re all online now in my local network and they have a mobile website through which I interact with them. Even my TV runs a frontend for things on my computer. Computer stuff has become an even broader spectrum of devices and skills than it used to be 20 years ago.
I’m in this comment, and I don’t like it. I still fix “computers” for a living, but when I get home, most days, the last tech I want to interact with is anything more complex than my phone.
Which is actually extremely complex…
Edit: the phone not the interaction
Unless they’re interacting with a landline.
Which, to be fair, is still pretty complex.
I remember having a torrent client set up was a great way to become popular back in 2010
I think the gap stems from need. Most people only learn what they absolutely need to. My sister and I are just 3 years apart in age. Yet I am pretty familiar with tech, while she knows next to nothing. I was always there to fix whatever broke. Even now she knows that if she needs to watch something, she can just ask me to add it to my Jellyfin server. I often have to remote into her system to fix stuff.
The Gen Z we’re talking about here mostly grew up using phones, and phone OSes do their best to hide any complexity away from the user. So they never learnt anything. I’m also technically Gen Z (very early), but growing up in rural India, I had to teach myself how to pirate since streaming wasn’t a thing yet (our internet was too slow for that anyway), and the local theater didn’t play anything except local mainstream cinema.
Jellyseerr is your friend. She can request whatever and you can get alerts to add it. Even if your stuff isn’t automated
I know about Jellyseerr, but I find it not worth it since there are very few people that send me requests. Messaging apps are enough for that.
Whatever works for you, simple is always better
Teaching college students, I agree that phones and ‘need’ are largely the culprit.
Loss of typing skill, trouble shooting skill, and file directory skill.
Better at cameras generally
Congrats on making me want to pull my youngest from public school for a year or so, so I can teach her typing, scripting, the command line, etc … (also, phonics) … Blows my mind that TYPING as a late-elementary-school glass is basically gone in our school district, nor is it a class that’s even available in middle or high-school.
also, phonics
Giving up on phonics was a horrible idea. I’m not sure whose to blame for that but it clearly was a disaster.
I agree with Chapo. Maybe you can teach these things in addition to what your kid learns at school? Might be a fun way to spend time together anyway.
Its definitely not all students and, in reality, I believe every generation has been deskilled to diff degrees. So, while these skills are noticeably worse with Gen z than it is with millennials, many young people I meet come to college with some or all of these skills.
So I think you could go with a less extreme intervention lol
I also teach college students lol. People can’t even figure out how to upload assignments from their phone. Had a student tell me that she broke her laptop, so can’t submit an assignment even though it was already written. She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas. I tried to explain that she can do it on the mobile app for Canvas instead. I eventually had to give up and asked her to drop it at my office. It literally felt like explaining stuff to my ma.
She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas.
When you know how to use the entire toolbox, but only if you can use the entire toolbox…in order.
We know how to torrent mate we aren’t dumb
does the rest of gen z not know how to torrent? i thought everyone did
I’m gen z born in the early 200xs and I torrent (legal Linux ISOs ofc)
How else are you going to get your hands on the latest build of Hannah Montana Linux?
All of 4 gen-x usenet users pictured
I’m in this picture and I appreciate it.
Need more disks…
