Hell, I know a couple of guys, a boomer alcoholic and a zoomer that ages backwards, that work at a VCR repair shop, one of the three remaining in the United States. Although I don’t know how good are they at actually fixing VCRs, all I see is them scamming some elderly person off of his life savings while all he wants is to watch a Night Court video cassette.
Some of us VCR clock-setters are on Lemmy already due to the combination of us loving playing with tech and the attitude of “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”. I’ve seen the fall of the original BBSs, Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, Geocities, MySpace, Yahoo, Digg, Facebook, and here I sit watching Reddit’s behavior with a bag of popcorn. If they don’t backpedal, they’ll get their IPO, Spez will get his money, and the shell of what Reddit was will continue to exist like MySpace and Facebook. It will strive to stay relevant while slowly becoming more and more irrelevant over time as the newcomer gains steam. Will Lemmy be that newcomer taking over? I’m not sure but it sure is fun to watch the world burn sometimes.
It really is just Gen Z. Millenials were programming shit and bashing everything together with hardware and software adaptors as kids. Gen Z grew up in the world of the slick interface that just works.
During the age wars (because that is somehow a thing…) this comes up all the time.
The reality is that most millenials also have absolutely zero understanding of problem solving. They want "a script I can follow’ just as much as boomers and genx and all the other fairly arbitrary demarcations.
Zoomers benefit from having very intuitive interfaces. We aren’t going to go backwards on that. Hell, we can already start to see the shift between “I intuitively know to swipe these menus” becoming “I just ask the voice assistant which connects to an LLM to interpret what I want it to do”. And that is a good thing.
The Internet likes to pretend millenials are all tech gods. As someone who has supported, worked with, and managed millenial, boomer, and increasingly zoomer people in even “computer science” levels of “tech”: We very much aren’t. Some people (self included) had a passion for it growing up and continue to learn how to do new stuff. Other people are basically Jen from the IT Crowd who understand enough to sound competent to complete idiots. And other people will stop work for a month if you move one of their shortcuts or get rid of python in favor of python3.
And we can very much see this with the shift to fediverse apps. Plenty of folk STILL insist that Mastodon is too complicated because… it is basically email levels of domains after your username. And those are the same people who are bragging about how they love their steam deck because they can install so many plugins and change so many settings.
This misconception comes from the fact that gen X were basically the first crowd to be the bulk of the Internets at the dawn of it, and all of them were technically proficient enough to do it, so there is a bias: you had to know something about computers to be on the internet. Nowadays you don’t need to know anything, the barrier is virtually non-existent and basically anyone can do internets with their phone and some “app” without knowing anything at all about how it works or how to setup a connection or even type an address.
Most of us were and are pretty dumb when it comes to technology or even problem solving, nothing changed in that regard.
Yeah. Gen X is weird since people just forget them in the “boomer/millenial” nonsense. But some older GenX’ers were having fun on BBSes just like some older millenials (yo) did.
But largely, by the time all the tech savvy millenials got involved? We were already in Windows 95/98 and were basically just using web browsers and double clicking everything.
And the main point for why zoomers clearly don’t understand anything is… zoomers don’t care about folder structure. Which… is arguably a better approach to file systems and is similar to the logic of redis/nosql versus sql/relational databases.
Like, whichever Windows got rid of the start menu (8?) largely made me realize that I was barely using my start menu anyway and mostly would click it, go to programs, and then type the name of what I wanted.
There are definitely harder jumps to go from “I use computers” to “I am a computer scientist/engineer/whatever” but… that is the point of school. And we already saw t with a lot of millenials not having shop class equivalents. We tend to not “build” things because… repairing your TV is more effort than it is worth. Same with cars where the vast majority of maintenance is either less needed (because of better tolerances on hoses and the like) or is just swapping out parts rather than hammering your radiator pump until it fits.
Heck, genXers are the only generation who can set the clock on a VCR. A skill now lost to time and technology.
Hell, I know a couple of guys, a boomer alcoholic and a zoomer that ages backwards, that work at a VCR repair shop, one of the three remaining in the United States. Although I don’t know how good are they at actually fixing VCRs, all I see is them scamming some elderly person off of his life savings while all he wants is to watch a Night Court video cassette.
Hey now! They’re probably also watching Alf
Some of us VCR clock-setters are on Lemmy already due to the combination of us loving playing with tech and the attitude of “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me”. I’ve seen the fall of the original BBSs, Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, Geocities, MySpace, Yahoo, Digg, Facebook, and here I sit watching Reddit’s behavior with a bag of popcorn. If they don’t backpedal, they’ll get their IPO, Spez will get his money, and the shell of what Reddit was will continue to exist like MySpace and Facebook. It will strive to stay relevant while slowly becoming more and more irrelevant over time as the newcomer gains steam. Will Lemmy be that newcomer taking over? I’m not sure but it sure is fun to watch the world burn sometimes.
It really is just Gen Z. Millenials were programming shit and bashing everything together with hardware and software adaptors as kids. Gen Z grew up in the world of the slick interface that just works.
During the age wars (because that is somehow a thing…) this comes up all the time.
The reality is that most millenials also have absolutely zero understanding of problem solving. They want "a script I can follow’ just as much as boomers and genx and all the other fairly arbitrary demarcations.
Zoomers benefit from having very intuitive interfaces. We aren’t going to go backwards on that. Hell, we can already start to see the shift between “I intuitively know to swipe these menus” becoming “I just ask the voice assistant which connects to an LLM to interpret what I want it to do”. And that is a good thing.
The Internet likes to pretend millenials are all tech gods. As someone who has supported, worked with, and managed millenial, boomer, and increasingly zoomer people in even “computer science” levels of “tech”: We very much aren’t. Some people (self included) had a passion for it growing up and continue to learn how to do new stuff. Other people are basically Jen from the IT Crowd who understand enough to sound competent to complete idiots. And other people will stop work for a month if you move one of their shortcuts or get rid of
pythonin favor ofpython3.And we can very much see this with the shift to fediverse apps. Plenty of folk STILL insist that Mastodon is too complicated because… it is basically email levels of domains after your username. And those are the same people who are bragging about how they love their steam deck because they can install so many plugins and change so many settings.
This misconception comes from the fact that gen X were basically the first crowd to be the bulk of the Internets at the dawn of it, and all of them were technically proficient enough to do it, so there is a bias: you had to know something about computers to be on the internet. Nowadays you don’t need to know anything, the barrier is virtually non-existent and basically anyone can do internets with their phone and some “app” without knowing anything at all about how it works or how to setup a connection or even type an address.
Most of us were and are pretty dumb when it comes to technology or even problem solving, nothing changed in that regard.
Yeah. Gen X is weird since people just forget them in the “boomer/millenial” nonsense. But some older GenX’ers were having fun on BBSes just like some older millenials (yo) did.
But largely, by the time all the tech savvy millenials got involved? We were already in Windows 95/98 and were basically just using web browsers and double clicking everything.
And the main point for why zoomers clearly don’t understand anything is… zoomers don’t care about folder structure. Which… is arguably a better approach to file systems and is similar to the logic of redis/nosql versus sql/relational databases.
Like, whichever Windows got rid of the start menu (8?) largely made me realize that I was barely using my start menu anyway and mostly would click it, go to programs, and then type the name of what I wanted.
There are definitely harder jumps to go from “I use computers” to “I am a computer scientist/engineer/whatever” but… that is the point of school. And we already saw t with a lot of millenials not having shop class equivalents. We tend to not “build” things because… repairing your TV is more effort than it is worth. Same with cars where the vast majority of maintenance is either less needed (because of better tolerances on hoses and the like) or is just swapping out parts rather than hammering your radiator pump until it fits.
No, we grew up on Vista and 8.