My favorite:
“Where did you save the file?”
“I saved it in Excel”
just want to add, it’s not the zoomer’s fault. they were intentionally raised in ignorance because its apparently profitable
fuck the corporations who’ve deliberately turned our living computers into soulless commercial brainwashing surveillance machines
It’s their parents fault for not using GNU/Linux
Also schools that thought just seeing the tech used would give you innate knowledge on how to use a computer.
Don’t blame the people, they often cant get a mobile and tablet and computer… blame the awful corporations who made everything an app and pushed locked down mobile and tablets environments
Then get a laptop and a phone. No one needs a tablet.
Then they get a chromium based laptop because those were the most affordable ones they can get.
Appification was generalized and its not ppls fault for growing up in that environment, especially if their parents were not big into computers and couldn’t tell the difference.
Messing around with your old WinXP/95 computer and then fixing that mess before your parents come home and scold you does wonders to one’s troubleshooting skills. People of this generation never got to hear that scary XP error sound, and it shows.
Fun fact: Windows XP had cool day 0 loophole that saved my my ass. Once I decided to explore new options and I stumbled upon new and cool feature: setting a password. The only issue with it was that I’ve forgotten it half an hour later. I already knew ‘admin’ word so I used it in hackerman style and I logged in and I was able to reverse old password. This loophole was patched with first service pack but I still giggle when I remind myself of that.
Damn! This is some real hackerman shit.
Windows XP’s error sound wasn’t scary. Windows 95 and 98’s were. That natural alarming chime, combined with the angry faces when our parents find out the non-functioning operating system…
Turns out the one I was thinking of was the critical stop sound and the error sound was less threatening. Learnt something new…
The key concept they’re missing a lot of the time is that software sits within the file system and not the other way around.
This is largely because apps hide this and data is generally stored in one place on your phone (the downloads folder).
Best way to fix it - have 1–2 lessons entirely devoted to finding shit on their computer. My favourite activity is “ok, save your word file, close word, you now have 10 mins to find that file without opening word”.
I’d at least start them with something simple like Paint or Notepad. Once they have that down, then you can throw the disaster that is the MS Office file save dialog at them.
We are all working class.
The working class should hold the bulk of the wealth.
“Should” is doing all the work in that sentence
More work than the 1% will ever do.
Gen Z here, in college.
Some of these people are braindead when it comes to tech.
Like, I get if you’re not used to technology because you’re poor/had a lack of access to it, as many people might not have a home computer. So there were kids who were absolutely hopeless when it came to using windows at my tech school because they were broke, and the school only gives out Chromebooks (cause they’re shitty and cheap).
But outside of not knowing a UI and different file formats, you should absolutely know how to use anything on the web, unless you literally lived in an area with absolutely no internet and electricity.
Some people at my college STILL don’t know how to share Google documents correctly, and it’s the most insane and frustrating thing to me. Literally any device with an Internet connection can use it. Windows, apple, Chromebook, Linux, you name it. HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO WORK GOOGLE DRIVE?!?!?!
Like many comments have said, devs have dumbed down a lot of shit in the name of protecting users, and people expect stuff to just work without any issues/effort, which I get, but damn, you’ve never simply done a 5 mins search on Google or YouTube for a quick fix?
My hand-me-down phone journey started with a Samsung G Note 4 as a kid, then a old iPhone (don’t remember which), moved to a Moto G Play 7 (I adore that thing today), moved to iPhone X, and now I’m at a Pixel 8a cause I put GrapheneOS on it. My mom got me it as a grad gift cause I hated my iPhone so much for all the shit I couldn’t do while I was on it. I’ve always just liked Android and Windows more for the freedom to fuck up (which I never did), instead of Apple’s shitty walled garden. And now I’m on Fedora, because I know I don’t have to subject myself to a shit user experience on Windows just for simplicity.
But other people my gen who aren’t willing to be adventurous for a bit and even try will never do that. Hell, you get shamed in school for not loving the Apple overlords and wanting Apple deciding everything in your life (green bubble shaming is real, I hated middle and early high school…). We want quick and easy, and we got it, but at what cost?
Google drive is absolutely horrible to use for any real purpose. Organizing things is awful, search sucks, sharing permissions are dumb in terms of their specific behaviors. Its not particularly hard to use for basic things where you’ve got like 10 files in there, but it’s a terrible example of usable software. Like… SharePoint is better, and I didn’t think it was possible to be worse than SharePoint.
I’ve used both for work and I’m having a hard time understanding what you could possibly find better about SharePoint. It’s consistently the most frustrating sharing and navigation experience I’ve ever had to endure.
Yep, have used both Google Drive and SharePoint for work. SharePoint is an abomination
Mate just my 2 cents ignore overlords and enjoy using other stuff and getting a more global knowledge. Didn’t know the situation was getting this bad, let me guess: they know every single thing that has been posted on tiktok, but nothing else?
That’s no different from boomers and millenials really. Boomers only know the 6 o’clock news and either the front or back page of the paper. Millennial only know 90s cartoons and how to complain; I should know as i am one.
Some people at my college STILL don’t know how to share Google documents correctl
They emulate a “files” menu (like any native office software has), where you can download/export it to a standardized format. Right?
Well, for the download/export stuff, yeah, you just go to the “File” tab and click the download drop down tab, and you can save it to the computer or Google Drive. Which some people still didn’t know about somehow but… (Some people never touch the tabs I guess)
But when I mean file sharing, I’m talking like sharing stuff to another person’s drive, or simply just letting them have access to it by clicking a link. To be fair, sometimes the sharing is wonky or really dumb, but it’s basically, give access to specific emails/accounts, give access to anyone within your organization with the link, or give access to anyone who has the link. You can specify if this access link should be viewer, commenter, or editor.
The amount of people who have shared a document with incorrect access rights where teachers can’t see their work and have to ask them to resubmit, or trying to do group projects with people who claim that it’s not working, is fucking insane. I get some of them are just being lazy and probably lying about it not working to get more time to procrastinate, but dead serious, some people just have no idea how to share files correctly. My public speaking class was full of these blunders, especially when sharing a presentation done with Canva, and we’d always have to waste like 3 minutes waiting for them to fix it…
The paradigm has changed. The rift between PC and smart phone. Is it really a surprise? My 18yr step kid can at least type on a keyboard with proficiency. Beyond that and installing games in steam, he’s lost outside of that. Both I and his mom work in IT. We try to shore up the gaps, but it seems the ‘kid’ actively refuses to learn.
One friend of mine told that he read once that kids these days doesn’t even know how to create a folder (or directory), is that true?
This is the only one of these that I simply do not believe I am genz and admittedly more into computers than average but I have never met anyone who couldn’t figure out to right click to make a new folder unless they mean that they didn’t know how to use the terminal to do it.
I mean… My Mac M1 doesn’t allow right-click create a new file. 😮💨 ! Also, if I recall correctly, there is a similar thing that made me go crazy on Gnome DE.
Nowadays, people hate to get everything neatly separated in a nice and well ordered directory structure. They throw everything in the same directory and use the find/search function, for what it’s worth.
I dislike gnome to an unreasonable extent. I tried using it when I first tried linux and it did not vibe.
Gnome had right click --> new folder, but only if you can select the white space, or you can right click the small empty square in the upper right below the top but above the scroll bar.
Haha, some kind of dead DE pixel ? 😅
Area 51
Do you know how to create a directory on your phone? Lots of kids have never used a desktop/laptop, just phones and tablets.
Yes.
I mean, so do I, but it’s not something I ever needed to do on a phone.
I do.
Yes, files, and hamburger menu at top right, new folder
You mean you don’t open the terminal and use mkdir?
Too many letters. md for me 🤪
That can change depending on your file manager, and many OSs do not present the file manager app anywhere but the app list by default, if they even have one.
So our IT guy sent a training memo for a task. Step 1, 2, 3, etc. The one step was go to folder /User, then go to folder yourusername. A young guy emailed back " there is no folder called yourusername".
I explained to IT, some of these people have never navigated a folder structure and don’t realize Yourfoldername is meant to be replaced with their own name.
I have this at work with technical people. It’s ever so frustrating.
I was showing a co-op how to do something last year and told them to navigate through our department drive into whatever folder we were looking at.
They couldn’t do it. They had somehow managed to get to the department drive in file explorer, but then completely fell apart when I narrated the names of the folders to go down into. Like I’d say “Go into ‘desks and tables’” or whatever and I’d watch them drag their cursor past the Ds, past the Es, and then just click on something completely different. Like their brain just stopped working. It took us like 2 minutes to get less than 10 folders deep.
It is true, and I’ve seen it myself. At first I refused to believe, but sadly we’re already at that state.
I’m an older zoomer but still a zoomer. Its a crazy dynamic seeing people my age and younger just not getting IT stuff. There’s a high ratio of older to younger people where I’ve worked in IT too.
The challenges thst existed to use technology no longer exist, so there is no longer a reason to look under the hood for most people. It’s like how a lot of generations after boomers don’t know about how to change a tyre or spark plugs etc, cars got more reliable and industries created services to stop you needing to worry about that stuff.
As a kid I remember WANTING to play games with a friend on PC, he knew we needed a null modem cable and we went to pc shop 2 towns over got one and tried to figure out how to play together using it. Then when the Internet came out and we had to fight against Internet connection sharing so one computer could share Internet with friends pc. Trying to use no-cd patches just so we didn’t need to keep grabbing cds to play games etc.
There were so many things you learnt back then but it was because we had no alternative, I get why tech knowledge has vanished and I don’t blame them, they have had no need to solve the same problems and haven’t grown with technology, it’s been already established and they have had no need to concern themselves with it.
Problem is the working world still heavily needs PC skills and basic analytical ability so there needs to be more focus on those old “computer driving license” style courses so people can certify they know how to find a file and end task when something hangs.
pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endright output output.pdfconvert -rotate 90 in.pdf out.pdfDoesn’t convert rasterize the pdf? (I don’t remember)
Yea, but the entire rotation of pdf is from scanned pdfs that are rasterized anyway
if you’re manipulating pdfs exported via a computer program I doubt you’d ever need to rotate them, but in that case qpdf etc are better
Yep I’ve noticed that too. I get questions like “what is the difference between downloading and installing” from people that are over 18 years old and under 30.
Farts unhappily
I’m not a kid (see my other replies in this thread lol), but I’ve never had to use PDFs for much at all. The closest I’ve ever been to editing one is clicking a box to draw a signature or check a checkbox.
So I’ve gotta ask. Why would one need to rotate a PDF? They would be made on a computer, and naturally default to the correct orientation, no? I can’t imagine why one would ever be sideways.
Pdfs are not always made on computers. In most office environments you are going to run into scanned documents. Scanners like to do funny things and people dont always put all the pages in the correct orientation.
Scanners like to do funny things
I know it’s not very relevant, but that reminds me of a talk held during a CCC (Chaos Computer Club) convention.
It’s in German, but I’ll try to summarize it: Someone noticed the numbers on a scanned page didn’t match the original, so they hired an expert to find out what happened. Turns out that the printer they were using had a feature that would detect symbols that looked the same and basically copypasted ome cutout of the symbol onto the other to save space on the final PDF. Due to the print/copy quality, this substitution sometimes malfunctioned, substituting similar looking symbols, such as 8 and 0.
I see. I didn’t think I ever heard about that. I’m only familiar with them as in a digital version of paperwork, not a digital copy of a document.
I understand exactly how that happens then.
You can scan a document to PDF, sometimes the default orientation isn’t correct.
I learned that from the other reply
I see. I didn’t think I ever heard about that. I’m only familiar with them as in a digital version of paperwork, not a digital copy of a document.
I understand exactly how that happens then.
Well speaking for this week: doing my taxes, reviewing documentation at work.
