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  #26  
Old 05-31-2018, 08:43 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Oh ho ho ho.

So that one little dingleberry who has been using my email address for all kinds of garbage for about a decade has had a recent spate mostly of updated privacy policies. But he's clearly still using my email address, even after I tracked him down and told him to stop it. So today, I did a quick search on him and found what I'm 99% sure is his Twitter, where he is complaining that 'old people' accidentally tag him in their tweets.
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  #27  
Old 06-01-2018, 09:31 AM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

STOP SPYING ON ME ON TWITTER, OLD WOMAN!
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  #28  
Old 06-02-2018, 03:47 AM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

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STOP SPYING ON ME ON TWITTER, OLD WOMAN!
MAN!

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  #29  
Old 10-25-2019, 04:52 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Oh ho ho. (I saw this yesterday, and I'm pretty sure the description was something about confused old people, which is reflected in the comments.)


Granted, the rest of the questions are pretty weird and bad, but the very first one, despite the plodding clown music, is legitimate. The only possible misunderstanding there is that the number of data points will vary from person to person. They're generally just marketing demographics that could be applied, so not every one is applied to every person unless you think of each one as a toggle or something.

Zuckerberg is just pretending not to know what data categories she's talking about in order to evade the question, but apparently, that's effective, because CNN and a bunch of YouTube commenters think that data modeling is some product of some feeble old person's misunderstanding of technology, and we are fucking DOOMED.

How do people even think that these things work? It's not even that they don't know. That's fine and understandable. It's that they're super-confident that just because they haven't heard of it, it's crazy and wrong.
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  #30  
Old 10-25-2019, 05:38 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Sweet Moses "data modeling" is as old as supermarkets themselves at least. What do they think all those savings cards are?
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  #31  
Old 10-25-2019, 09:41 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

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Originally Posted by BrotherMan View Post
What do they think all those savings cards are?
Socialism?
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  #32  
Old 10-26-2019, 12:11 AM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

I showed my great nephew an old PS2 mouse - the sort with a ball inside. He couldn't understand how we ever managed to survive using such ancient technology.

And I explained to him how an optical mouse works - essentially using a tiny camera to watch how the surface underneath it "moves" - but he doesn't believe that. "It works on a white sheet of paper.", he said, "How could it possibly tell the difference between one part of the paper and another?"

He seems quite content with his own explanation that the mouse operates using some sort of technology he doesn't know about - but rejects my explanation as "ridiculous."

I think he may have a great future in sales, management, the law, banking, or advertising.
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  #33  
Old 10-26-2019, 10:58 AM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Or politics.
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  #34  
Old 01-16-2020, 09:09 AM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

I'm confused that my laptop did not boot from the boot disk I made,i checked the boot options and it was correct, but I still failed.
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  #35  
Old 01-16-2020, 06:24 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Hi Lois! :wave: Welcome to :ff:

Feel free to tell us about yourself!

Or, indeed, about the laptop and the boot disk you've mentioned.
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  #36  
Old 01-16-2020, 08:16 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Specifically the BIOS, and what you see on your screen.

Did you change the boot order? Are you sure the disk is bootable? Do you have a USB port you could maybe try instead?
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  #37  
Old 02-20-2020, 08:20 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

This is good, and it touches on a big part of the reason that people are actually getting less competent with technology despite being more dependent on it:

Thread by @gravislizard: "almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F […]"

People like to talk about how amazing it is that people are carrying around massively powerful computers in their pockets, and it's kind of true. But the people carrying them don't control them. They don't know how to, and they're discouraged or outright prevented from venturing outside the walled garden in multiple different ways.

You can't get to a command line. You can't perform a simple query or execute a script you wrote. Hell, it's not even easy to list active processes or see your filestructure. You're only allowed to do a limited number of very specific things that the systems are designed for, all written into different glitchy, bloated one-off apps that offer a tiny, prescribed subset of options you can control, and a massive number of behind the scenes processes that perform functions you didn't ask for and probably wouldn't want.

So instead of one maybe moderately steep learning curve where you learn how to operate a computer, you get a thousand shallower, ungeneralizable learning curves where you learn how to navigate the GUIs for each individual app. And even those change all the time at the whims of the developers.

I'd be really curious to see how much of a smartphone's resources are used for doing what the user wants for vs. how much is used to for the benefit manufacturers and developers.

In conclusion, this is the primary reason that young people are confused by technology.
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  #38  
Old 02-20-2020, 08:34 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

From the tweet:

Quote:


When computers used interfaces like these they were lightning fast, universally. I've used a lot of them.

The library computers, the homebrew POS at my first job, even the machines at Fry's Electronics use an interface like this.

If you ever go to Fry's, watch the employees use this style of UI. Blinding speed. They ricochet around like pros, even the new people.
Wow. Haven't thought about this in a long time.

When I worked at this studio rental place, we had displays like this (except they were the extra-retro light-green-text-on-dark-green-screen style*). There sometimes was a lot of lag between keystroke and visible result of that keystroke, but it didn't matter because it queued up the keystrokes and handled them properly and in order. If your muscle memory was good enough, you could type in half the order, tabbing between fields, before the network or whatever caught up with you. But when it did, the screen would be properly filled in with everything you had typed. Can't do that so easily with a mousey-type interface.

* When I worked at Blockbuster, our display looked more like the one in the image. My computery friend at the time who is still my computery friend today said "SVGA for text? What a waste!" and I don't disagree.
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  #39  
Old 02-20-2020, 08:55 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

I was just talking about this and the ipad with a sane-prepper friend. There are little design issues that are clear from even a few weeks using the thing. Like accidental clicks while scrolling. There’s no scroll bar, so the whole hot click zone is also your scroll zone, you just have to hope the system understands you’re scrolling and not clicking and it seems like it would be obvious to designate the sides ‘scroll first, click second’ or some other simple fix.

He then pointed out that this was all on purpose. A quick sleek interface that does exactly what you want is contrary to consumption model, which is a cluttered and slow interface you’ve gotten used to only half working so that you see more ads and end up in more places in which you can consume their media/products.

Modern systems aren’t being made as things that do things for you, but that you consume things on, and a system so fast that it reduces the impact of consumerist messages isn’t profit forward thinking.
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  #40  
Old 02-20-2020, 08:58 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Oh, hell yeah. That type of interface was pretty common for BBSes and for other networked services like that. Even into the 2000s, there were a fair number of internal tools at companies like AT&T that used UIs like that. Because they're the best way to get things done.

(Oh, and I have many fond memories of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) system. Back pre-web and pre-everything easily accessible on the open internet, I could go to the library and just research stuff, sometimes for little or no good reason. It was like a precursor to spending the day going down internet rabbitholes, and there were a lot of other regulars there doing the same thing.)
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  #41  
Old 02-20-2020, 10:12 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea View Post
You can't get to a command line. You can't perform a simple query or execute a script you wrote. Hell, it's not even easy to list active processes or see your filestructure.
:eek:

* JoeP gets to command line on Android ... from laptop

ssh root@192.168.0.4 -p 9999

OK, it's busybox not a full shell but I can ls and cd and ps (very limited view of processes, tbf).

Now returning you to your entirely justified rants.
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  #42  
Old 02-21-2020, 12:19 AM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

That doesn't count!

OK, I should have said 'natively' or something, I guess, but I forgot about nitpickers.
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  #43  
Old 02-21-2020, 12:28 AM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

My computery friend can ssh into his iPhone. I won't say why but a hint is he's not breaking any terms of service. Anyway, it's bullshit, cuz he can modify his activity data and win any step challenge.
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  #44  
Old 02-21-2020, 12:31 AM
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That doesn't count!

OK, I should have said 'natively' or something, I guess, but I forgot about WHERE I WAS.
:fixed:

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cd /
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It's an app that I had to install - so not built-in but still working natively. And admittedly still half crippled.
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  #45  
Old 09-23-2021, 04:58 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever - The Verge

LOL.

I mean, I sort of get how the desktop metaphor is weird. It always has been. It's never really made sense entirely, and while it can feel intuitive to people who are used to it, it really isn't at all.

Ultimately, there probably isn't a real intuitive metaphor that will work. Metaphors are for contextualizing novel concepts and don't really work well beyond that.

You just have to learn how your computer works at a basic, superficial level; and that includes understanding file structures. Search engines are fine when it's just random stuff for personal use, but once you're working on a big project of some sort with different pieces and iterations, you really need to be able to keep track without relying on a bunch of different user interfaces, all with their own little glitches.

If people would let go of this myth that kids understand computing by osmosis or something, we could address these things in K-12 so that random college professors don't end up having to teach remedial computer skills.
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  #46  
Old 09-23-2021, 05:54 PM
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Originally Posted by lisarea View Post
I mean, I sort of get how the desktop metaphor is weird. It always has been. It's never really made sense entirely, and while it can feel intuitive to people who are used to it, it really isn't at all.
Dude, that article. I can't even. Maybe I am being extremely uncharitable, but it reads to me like grown up people think there's an actual nano-scale filing cabinet in their computer's memory, and kids these days don't understand that that's how computers work. Back in our day, we had to physically open the tiny file drawers with our little tweezers, and insert the ones and zeros in it by hand.
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  #47  
Old 09-23-2021, 07:29 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Haha, my first thought was “wait till these adults learn about fragmentation!” What do you mean these words are stored in different areas on the ‘disk’ they’re right next to each other in my text file!

Not addressed at all is that this is partly deliberate. Apple and google don’t want users to know they even have files outsides of their specific interfaces. The entire idea that a item exists outside of the app your using is the antithesis of the modern walled garden, curated experience. Music exists in the music app, photos in the photos app, etc. Of course the kids only know how the device works based on what apple or google want them to know.

It is an interesting answer to things like music piracy.
what do you mean download a song? That’s the same as pressing play in the streaming app, right?
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  #48  
Old 09-23-2021, 07:52 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

When you're minding an elder, the walls of the garden can't be made high enough.

A solution a friend (An IT security director at a university) did with his family is take all their computers away and hand out iPads.

I can't get an old man to allow for that so he keeps following directions handed out by that nice man on the phone who wants to give him money. :sadcheer:
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  #49  
Old 09-23-2021, 08:23 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Kamilah - tell me about it. My mother has used desktop computers her whole life and refuses to learn anything else. It took me three tries to Facetime with my mother to figure out what was wrong with her computer, only to discover the computer was off. I was also surprised I was able to help her with her other problems while only looking at the lower right corner of her screen.

The kids these days - have no excuse. Just because they haven't been introduced to the concept of a file, they still need to organize their stuff. Some things, like photo streams and music, have built in sorting (by date, location, etc), but you still need to organize the rest. I have trouble believing searching fixes a lack of organization.

In the 90s, people who didn't care would just dump everything in a single directory. Having an unorganized pile of stuff is fine when you are the only person using it, and you have some recollection of what you put in it. Better searching only bandaids the bigger problem.
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  #50  
Old 09-23-2021, 11:45 PM
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Default Re: Young people confused by technology

Quote:
Originally Posted by the article
“Students have had these computers in my lab; they’ll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized,” he told The Verge, somewhat incredulously.
This ... is not new? I saw Windows desktops in the 1990s with hundreds of files all on the desktop (it would have been thousands but screen sizes were smaller then).

This is a dumb article saying little more than one person has articulated one issue that some people have with some aspects of using computers. It isn't even well-written, so many obvious points unanswered ...
Quote:
He likens finding files to giving driving directions.
Worst possible example. Driving directions are something none of us needs any more.
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