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Computer literacy is weird because it feels like millennials were born into it and had to learn how to use the tools available… Then said tools were made a lot simpler with a lot less control over them, and Gen Z was born into apps and saas and did not have the chance to properly learn
We generally only taught a single generation to master our tech, I think it’s scary, but also I trust the Zoomers to figure it out, they’re creative
I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).
I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.
Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.
I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.
(to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days)
The problem is if you don’t know basic concepts of computers you cannot transfer your knowledge from one program to the next. Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people and if they see one in program A, then they won’t understand that in program B it works the same way.
I have never had any issues learning any new software from scratch, but I see people my age not figuring out where to click next or where something they are looking for might be hidden in the options. Then an update comes that changes things and they are back to square 1 and helpless.
I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.
He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.
So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.
This could be a very formative memory even if he get disinterested from computers, getting this kind of perspective on things can go a long way !
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
I have memories of some random afternoons at the consulting firm my mom worked at, where everyone’s just poking at spreadsheets. I can’t imagine how cool the memory of going into the server farm and doing some hardware work there would be
Good on you. You can teach your son some valuable perspective, while getting in some quality time as well. Please let us know how it goes, if you don’t mind. I feel invested now.
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
Remind me in two months, and I’ll tell you what’s happening.
!remind 2 months
do we have something like this on lemmy?
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
@RemindMe@programming.dev exists, but im not sure if it is whitelisted
2 months
Best I can do is “[voice assistant] remind me about that post in two months”
Drat, gotta open the reminder and paste in the comment URL too. Do wonder if that bot mentioned is whitelisted or not. More social, beyond just being native. And hopefully it has “send me a PM to reduce spam”
I just had a baby and I’m already planning how to get her to help me run my home lab as a way to get her to figure all this stuff out, maybe run some game servers or do a little local blog. Then I think about how I can teach her to solder a hand wired keyboard or maybe build a little fpv drone with me and then I start to remember that kids sometimes just don’t like what you do so you never know what you could get them interested in or not or if you will each have the time when they’re older
I posted the result of the trip in CasualConversation: https://feddit.nl/post/19675883
Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people
When learning about this I learned that in the analog days folks would actually put physical folders inside of physical folders and it both makes tons of sense and is mind blowing at the same time. -Late Millennial born to IT parents
You make some good points there. I remember LAN parties in high school where we would spend hours troubleshooting network problems and calling older brothers for advice. I learned a lot from those experiences, because I was forced to. I think a big part of the changes we are seeing in computer literacy is what I would call the Apple philosophy: if a toddler can’t use it, we need to simplify. Basically, as you said, things are getting simpler with less granular control. Of course, Apple is far from the only company doing this stuff, but they seem to be industry leaders in the sense of ‘dumbing down’ tech.
I recently had a friend say that privacy is a luxury these days. My first thought was that there is nothing luxurious about it. It takes hard work, inconvenience and savvy. And I’m not even close to Stallman levels of privacy paranoia. I know just enough to acknowledge that I know nothing. I feel similarly about tech in general. I have been using Linux for ten years, I use VPNs, I have played around with DNS settings, et cetera. But I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and available to those willing to spend the time and get it done.
Anyway, I’ll shut up now. Thanks for replying thoughtfully, and thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Remember that story about Gen Z students not understanding file systems?
I’m Gen Z and I still know all this stuff because that’s just what I’m interested in. I don’t think it’s a huge issue that those things were made simpler for the average person and that they don’t know how it works. It’s not like you can or need to know everything.
In my country, this generational divide doesn’t make much sense. But comparing those born in the 90s and early 2000s with those born from the late 2000s onwards, there is a fundamental difference: there was, even in the public education system, a variety of computer courses available to many people. With the arrival and hegemony of the app model, which is designed with the idea that it is intuitive and does not require anyone to be taught how to use it, computer courses have been disappearing. As a result, millions of young people use computers daily and have no knowledge of simple concepts such as shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, let alone advanced features of Office suites, not to mention that they have no idea what LATEX and Markdown are.
To be fair, the overwhelming majority of people regardless of age don’t know what LaTeX or markdown are. Not the best examples. I’m a millennial with a 4 year STEM degree and I maybe used LaTeX once because it was required, and before Discord became a thing, I’d never heard of markdown. Most people who use Discord probably don’t even know it supports markdown.
I agree that is a extreme example. That’s precisely why I started with keyboard shortcuts. I don’t think anyone is required to know LaTeX and Markdown, but it seems to me that fewer and fewer younger people know them. If there are fewer people who know the basics, there are proportionally fewer people who know the advanced ones.
That’s super interesting, I do remember being taught as a kid how to use Google Image search (circa 2005), Gimp for photo manipulation around the age of 12 in 2008, we had technology classes with electronics, technical drawing, even some plastic bending machine, and light programming (made a robot figurine execute recorded moves in sequence)
I do wonder if it’s still the case in my own country
Gen-z here - I know how to torrent lol. It’s insane how tech illiterate a lot of my friends are, even in my IT classes don’t know what HTTPS is or what an ethernet cable is so… yeah
Feels weird being known as “the guy who’s an expert at computers” despite being a noob
bro you’re on lemmy, you’re already outside of the curve for most gen-z
I’m probably the only person in my entire school who knows what lemmy is lol
I wonder if anybody at my uni uses lemmy
Edit: Anybody from cal poly pomona feel free to comment below
I wonder if anybody in my town uses Lemmy lol.
yea we’re fucked
torrenting is a little bit more complicated than turning a light switch on
I think the core of the problem is that back in the bad old days, things needed to be tuned up a bit before they would work right and there was a marked lack of standardization. Now, not only do our devices work right out of the box, bit they also have little quality of life stuff as well. I haven’t bought a battery-powered device in years that wasn’t partially charged when I got it, and most devices come preinstalled with all the basic utility apps.
I’m an older Gen Z, but same here. I really don’t know that much but can torrent, so people see me as some sort of tech god lol.
My younger sister on the other hand, also Gen z, is so tech illiterate that her downloads folder is a mess and thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program.
thinks deleting installers will delete the installed program
Now I get why Windows XP had an alert that said you weren’t going to uninstall the program when you tried deleting a link to a program
It’s absolutely amazing how we went from the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer in the beginning of computers to everyone knowing how to do at least the bare minimum on a computer in the 2000s to now circling back to the majority of people not knowing how to use a computer because pretty much everything they do can and probably is done on a phone. It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
It’s also real scary to think since I’d assume most of us Gen Z-ers aren’t properly able to object to privacy eroding tech bills because we’re too tech illiterate to understand the impacts.
Millennial here, putting my tinfoil hat on for a minute:
This is exactly what the big tech corpos wanted all along. They’ve been curving the arc of history towards people at large being digitally dependent but incapable of self-service. They want addicts, not citizens. Serfs, not an educated populace.
In the 70s, 80s, 90s, and into the early 00s there was this “hacker culture” which was centered on the idea that as long as we keep our wits about us we could use computers as a great equalizer. The common person was empowered. Any and all software would be distributed for free so anyone who couldn’t afford it could get it. Bill Gates was painted as a villain because he was overtly capitalistic. The corpos were kept in check by a diverse, rapidly evolving market and a ton of savvy users who knew what they wanted.
Giant corporations pretty much caught on that they needed there to be fewer tech savvy people who could get one over on them. When politicians needed to ask experts what to include in school curriculums, guess who had lobbyists ready to go? Microsoft and Apple. Eventually Google too.
And now that there are fewer tech savvy people? Everything got shittier. Shinier, faster, dumber, more locked down and shittier. And the enshittification is just going to accelerate until people straight up reject it, then it’ll pause for 6 months to a year and start up again.
That’s a theory I can actually agree with. Sounds plausible enough to be true, given what we know about large corpos.
Gen-z too, finding can be somewhat hard but the mega threads help. Torrenting itself is easy of course. Just get transmission or any other FOSS client, put on a proper VPN and good to go.
qbittorrent search makes it stupid easy too
I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.
I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.
There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.
I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.
I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.
I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.
Get a certification?
What, like the CCNA? Which I achieved and it expired last year, and got me nowhere?
Yeah.
Next step, modify your resume to say you did networking at previous positions. Don’t lie, just focus on the network stuff. I’m assuming you did that too.
Well, I’m probably going to try to get my ccnp for kicks. I’ll re-do my CCNA, then do my ccnp. By the time I go for my NA cert I’ll pretty much be ready to go for the np cert.
I’ll build a new resume emphasizing my network stuff, though my resume is already fairly heavily focused on networking as is, and try again.
I’m pretty happy with my job in almost every way, I know most of the things I would need to know to be successful, despite it being a more generalist position, and my co-workers are cool. Management is better than most, and the pay is more than the last two generalist positions I’ve worked, plus it’s work from home, so I’m pretty comfortable where I am for now. The pay, despite being higher than I’ve gotten previously, is a pretty far cry from what I probably deserve, just way too low, under $55k USD (I’m not in the US, but the conversion puts me under 55). From what I’ve seen online, median salary for a systems admin, which is basically what my job mostly entails, is around $73k USD… So I’m around $20k/yr shy.
I know network admins are similar, depending on the complexity/importance of the network they administrate. I’m aware of people in networking that are making more than 100k USD a year; and right now I consider that to be where things start to cap off for networking. I’d be pretty happy with $73k USD.
I feel like if you know how to look up the answer and can follow a guide to apply 5 steps, you are probably more capable than 80% of the people on this planet.
That applies for most things tbh
Fellow Zer here, my elective IT class had grading done depending on how well you could use the computer:
‘A’ if you could do everything perfectly well, ‘B’ if you needed some help from the instructor, ‘C’ if you needed a lot of help, ‘D’ if you couldn’t even get past the login screen on the windows machine.
We had a lot of people who got a pity ‘C-’
With the amount of password resets I have to do at work, I can’t say I’m shocked
Dude I was born in 2000 and I get so mad when I realize how true this is. Apps/“smart” phones might be regarded as the biggest double edged sword in the history of technology.
It literally feels like we are at a moment in history where we are evolving backwards by force. This will only worsen as the ipad babies grow older.
You will own nothing and be happy. You will also know nothing and be happy.
People thought the same thing about written language, that it would ruin everyone’s memory cause they could just write things down and wouldn’t have to go through the honorable effort of rembering everything
Although, to be fair, they didn’t have capitalism then so our similar worries might be more well founded lol
We are actively being held back by companies catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator.
You will also know nothing and be happy.
Ignorance is bliss after all
Might be a bit dramatic. All sectors of industry are using more and more tech, we have more people in the workforce now that are tech literate than we did decades ago.
These are random numbers to explain my point. Look at it this way, in the 90s maybe 20 percent of people knew how to use computers but 12 percent of those were truly tech savvy and knew the ins and out of using a pc.
Now a days 90 percent of people know how to use a pc (regardless of the form it presents itself, be it pc, phone, tablet, etc) but only like 30 percent of them might be truly tech savvy.
It’s still a step up from back then, and because of the nature of tech in industry there’s always gonna be plenty of people who know how to use pcs well and if there aren’t then that’s just more money for us who do know.
This might be true, but it’s rapidly changing due to a collaborative effort from big gaming companies, streaming services and hollywood. People are relearning the art of torrenting.
Torrenting is getting worse and worse these days, I’m learning the ancient art of Usenet.
Usenet is getting worse and worse these days, I’m learning the ancient art of Sneakernet.
Unless this is a joke that went right trough my head, what part of torrenting is getting worse?
Nothing. It’s fine. I can’t fathom why people are out here paying for their piracy. Seems like it defeats the purpose. I still find everything I ever want on the same sites I’ve always gone to.
I’ve got a server I’m mass downloading anything I or my wife can think of and quite a few obscure movies and shows aren’t on the major sites in any form that has enough seeders to actually finish
So, Usenet it is, at least until I’m mostly done.
If I was huntig for it all by hand I’d probably not bother but I’m using the Arr stack for automation so
I heard that some employers are having to teach new ‘gen z’ employees how to download email attachments…
Gen Z struggles with file systems in general, because the vast majority of their technical experience is on mobile OS’s. However, Gen Z compsci students are somehow far beyond the skill set that millennials had at their age. Or at least that has been my experience with interns over the past 12 years.
I guess because the Gen Z comp sci students are the people who are truly fluent in computers. We were immersed in the internet and digital technology from a young age, but also had the curiosity to go beneath the surface of them, and get a real understanding of how things work. Most people just use the technology superficially, even if they have grown up with the internet and computers.
needing a paid vpn to torrent without getting spooky ISP notices is a pretty big barrier for me tbh :|
Use a p2p block list in your torrent client. Once I started using that the emails stopped.
I use: https://github.com/Naunter/BT_BlockLists/
But there are probably others
A decade ago we figured out blacklists were ineffective. What’s changed?
Better blocklists? They’re working fine for me.
Blocklists are ineffective by design. Each and every member of the swarm can collect all the data necessary to flag you to your ISP. Obviously any professional collecting this kind of data can avoid a blocklist. There is no such thing as a better blocklist.
Get into a Private tracker. Or You could rent a vps in a country that doesn’t care, torrent to that server and stream or sync it locally. You would never be torrenting on your local connection.
I don’t understand how private trackers are supposed to be secure. They cannot guarantee that they keep out all bad actors and that means they’re basically the same as public trackers, just more exclusive and with a slightly lower risk because of the barrier of entry. I used MyAnonamouse in the past and back then they weren’t big fans of VPNs. But I will never use any tracker without a VPN.
My guess would be that companies will probably go after the 99.9% of people that torrent on public trackers, while ignoring private ones since it’s not worth it to go to all that trouble just to track the last 0.1%
Never had any issues with the private tracker I’m in or got any letter from my ISP. I definitely don’t pay for a vpn. I could always use my rented vps(seedbox) as a vpn if i absolutely needed or wanted to.
Anonymous torrents on I2P FTW 🏴☠️ Best way to safely find stuff unavailable on streaming sites.
“be bisexual” ???
When you’re a pirate, you can’t be picky on which booty to plunder
You know what they say, something is better than nothing
I can torrent, I just suck at it.
Besides 1337 who is good?
Besides 1337 who is good?
Literally any private tracker is a million times better
Are those the trackers which demand you have accounts with other private trackers before you join or the ones which demand everyone have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition, so everyone either gets huge seedboxes, cheats the ratio or has to download niche but big files from other sites and switch out the tracker to artificially up the ratio?
I’m sure there are actually good private trackers, but I’ve found there are open/effectively open (sign up only with no verification/requirements) trackers with better communities than any restricted one I’ve found
have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition
They give you a bit of leniency after you first sign up. All that share ratio means is that you leave your computer seeding for a while after your download finishes, and when your torrent client has uploaded the file you got from them to e.g. 5 other people you can stop seeding it. They’re asking you to give back, is all. If you download a 3GB file from other people in the swarm and then immediately close the torrent before anybody can download it from you, after enough repeat times of you doing that, they’ll stop letting you download new files.
Trackers cannot read, and are not interested in, the number at the bottom of your torrent client, or your history with other trackers. They just care that you seed their torrents after you’ve finished downloading them so other people can download them too.
I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it’s infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don’t want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I’ll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)
I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that’d be fine, but from my experience most “entry level” private ones don’t, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it’s hard to build up a ratio.
The system isn’t closed though. More people join the tracker all the time, and that’s to say nothing of the people who already have access to the tracker downloading a new file.
I don’t think you understand how it works… An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that’s because ratios are nonlinear - I can’t recall the mean type but it’s the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn’t matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That’s what I meant by a closed system.
An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.
Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?
Teach us then 😭
Ha I was actually just thinking that we need to teach them as I was reading this. We had to go through a shit ton of trial and error. God forbid if he started with something like LimeWire. Viruses… Viruses everywhere
I remember when the go-to search term was “warez.”
I still don’t know if that was supposed to be pronounced like “wares” or “war-ehz.” 🤔
I don’t think either answer is wrong.
I always thought it was warez as in “wears”. My understanding is it was short for “softwares” or something. Take the end, add a dash of 1337sp34k and you get warez.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Except that softwares and hardwares probably came out of the word “wares”.
My native language isn’t English, so for me as a teen back then it was definitely the second option.
