TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “nom nom”. This blog post is not for you.
Well played Blogger. Well played.
To me, it just came across as petulant. Ironically, the “conclusion” was basically a TLDR for anyone interested.
Way before “tldr” became something on the internet, research papers had an abstract and news articles had a lead that tells you what the article is about.
I think this article is very good but replacing the abstract/lead by a snug paragraph is not a good idea.
Fun fact, the top part of a news article is actually called a “lede”. This originated not because it’s actually a different word from “lead”, but because in written form the latter could be confused with the metal “lead”. It’s described as “a deliberate misspelling of lead”.
Wow, what a bitter man, he wrote it as spitefully as he could. I wonder what is he so bitter about
Tech support calls that amount to wiping someone’s ass for them. I was helping someone setup their new computer and they managed to install spyware while I was using the restroom. Another time, ransomware got onto to someone’s computer and I instructed them to unplug the computer while I made my way over. They plugged in their only backup of office files into the infected computer and all that data also got encrypted.
I remember this article. It’s the reason why I now have a laptop prepared and ready to give my son for his fifth birthday.
My wife and I were just talking about this the other day.
I’m not in IT but I work as an industrial maintenance electrician, and knowing how computers work solves more problems than people realize!It’s so frustrating when people are like “Well I don’t need to know how computers work.”
Every aspect of our lives is governed by computers in one way or another. I can’t imagine not being curious to know how they work.
People feel the same way about cars, electricity, food preservation. People’s lives are interdependent on massively specialized technical disciplines and most of them couldn’t care less. I understand that the amount of specialization that goes into some topics means you can’t be an expert on all of these subjects, but some people just could not give a single shit how any of it works, and do not have any understanding of the ways in which it might stop working.
I’ve come to greatly resent any sort of technology or design being dismissed as “magic”, because I’ve met too many people who mean it literally.
Absolutely. I’ll be the first to admit my knowledge of cars is lacking, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in learning about it. It’s fine to not know things, but it’s weird to not want to know things.
Yeah, and I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a gap between “my car is a machine that occasionally requires service by someone who knows how” and “my car is a metal horse that should go as long as I put gas in it”. I don’t expect people to be the mechanic, but the second group of people is very much real.
my car is a metal horse that should go as long as I put gas in it
This one is fun because horses require so much more effort and upkeep than cars. Your horse can suck because you made it sad.
I like to think I have the general gist of how cars work and go together, even if I couldn’t literally get in one and replace some arbitrary part (other than tires/batteries/fluids) without a lot of guides.
Yeah, I feel like I know all the very specific stuff from watching videos about how 4-stroke engines and such work, but the moment I open my actual-for-real hood I’m mostly clueless outside of very basic maintenance.
Unscrew things in the right order and swear at how everything is completely rusted in place.
There, easy.
Hello iphone buyers
I’m pushing 50 and when people ask me how I know so much about computers, my first comment is that I had to program my first computer for it to do anything.
My second is that I actively sought to learn, and you can too.
Later in life Linux played a huge role in understanding how these contraptions work. Ironically, I’m a human factors engineer, so I’m also guilty of creating part of the problem. User interfaces that “just work”… Until they don’t.
I had to program my first computer for it to do anything.
Sadly, most people have no grasp what that even means. I’ve had adults think that means I “downloaded something into the computer” and then it worked.
It was around that time I just stopped talking to anyone outside of my geek circle about anything technical. Best to play dumb.
Yeah, I realized I started to sound snarky when I said “I work on computers” when people ask me what I do. Didn’t mean it to sound dumb, it was just honestly the level of understanding about computers a lot strangers had when they asked.
Saying I did networking or worked with servers didn’t mean much, but sometimes people would ask me to work on their WiFi…
I was right in the edge of Gen Z and Millennial and grew up being the family’s tech kid. It still astounds me now that my younger sisters don’t know how to even look for solutions. They just get me. Having moved out I get texts and calls sometimes. I’ve had to explain that using a computer is a skill that is learnable. I didn’t learn by going to someone else. I had to learn how to learn. That’s the skill we should be teaching kids. Not how to solve the problems, but how to FIND the solution to problems.
I’m also between gen Z and millennial and was the family’s tech kid and still get calls. Are you me? :D
Just yesterday I got a call asking how to select all images in a directory… And then another call about how to get those images to Google Drive, which is literally just drag and drop… And one of the people involved was my gen Z younger sister.
the family’s tech kid and still get calls
I don’t know how you all get calls. I have literally never been called to fix a computer. People prefer to pay some random guy at Walmart who will scam them, instead of calling me and getting free help. And I’m not a troll, not an asshole, or an incel, I’m a regular guy, I’m friendly, but people don’t seem to care, they prefer paying for useless help.
Of course my family members call me. It’s the only way they get the tech support I used to offer in-house. :D
As someone also near the border between Gen Z and Millennial, I relate a lot to this comment. I was also the family tech kid, and since like middle school I’ve always told people “I’m not good with computers, I just know how to use a search engine”
My “computer literacy” is literally just basic research skills; knowing how to formulate a web search and how to identify bad sources.
On this subject, my personal definition for millennial is someone in the age bracket where they had to teach themselves how to use windows as a kid
But if you are good at using search engine, you are good with computers
It’s the issue that is the most baffling to me. Learning how to search properly can be done in 10 minutes but no one does it.
If I want a recipe for a burger with onions, I’ll search for “recipe burger with onions.” When people around me search for the same recipe, they would type “I’m hungry and I’d like stuff with onions and shit” and instead of getting one of the billion web sites with recipes, they would stumble upon a weird blog about an anorexic girl who is obsessed with onions, and think that the internet contain no recipes at all.
Right! This is why I say it has more to do with being stubborn than being smart. If you’re determined to find a solution and you’re half decent at research and following instructions, you can figure a lot out, but people treat it like you invented the thing with some magical knowledge that they could never possess.
You’ve just articulated a feeling I’ve had most of my life, but couldn’t have described better.
Solving trivial problems for people they could easily do themselves if they just muddled through the work of it. Then act like I’m a genius, when it’s really just ‘stubbornness’ and refusing to admit i can’t figure it out.
Thanks for that.
I think we can blame the education system. At some point it became solely about passing some arbitrary threshold of students with high exam scores rather than about teaching students how to get by in life.
End result was an education system that simply teaches kids how to pass exams rather than basic life skills like critical thinking.
I also blame the education system, the fact that my computer teacher thought that opening R, trying to reconnect to WiFi, and opening the cmd prompt were all attempts at “hacking” is sad. The fact our robotics class shut down when the exchange student left, because he was the only who knew how to program was sadder.
Part of the problem is the people making the standards don’t even know how ignorant they are themselves. Like I at least recognize I have a lot learning to go, and lean heavily on people more experienced than me in fields I’m not the expert.
The late 90s Gen Z/Millennial DMZ is a painful place to exist. Constant and mandatory tech support.
The ones that is blamed for the ills of society by both the baby boomers and younger gen zs
Yep. I was born 1998. To Millennials, I’m a tiny baby Gen Z, to Gen Zs, I may as well be a boomer. It’s odd.
Growing up poor confuses things even more, because I have more in common with people born late 80s/early 90s than with people born only a few years after me. My first game console was a SNES and we had a VCR until we got a PS2, and kept using it well after.
Hah, are we the same person? My family was poor too. I’m a bit younger (born 2000) but I grew up using a VCR, and my first console was a GBA where I played a lot of SNES ports. The internet has existed my entire life, but I still remember before smartphones were a thing. It’s a really weird place to be socially. I don’t connect with Gen Z culture in almost any way, but I’m also distinctly not a millennial.
Interestingly my older sister (1998) who has zero interest in anything tech is actually pretty tech savvy for how little she cares about it. I think she crossed that threshold of learning how to learn, where even when she comes across something she doesn’t understand she knows how to approach the problem.
95 here. Started with the original GameBoy and an old Macintosh in the basement. My first computer was a POS gateway with the cow logo and 128MB of RAM. Finished up high school with the Xbox 360 and an iPhone. I’m a retrogrouch to Gen Z and some kind of hacker to most Millenials. My GF (same age) and I jokingly call ourselves “MillenialZ” (with an obnoxious accentuated zzzzzz at the end) because we don’t quite fit in with either generation.
I love it. I think that should be the official title for our mini generation.
Growing up poor confuses things even more
Yeah this is why generations aren’t actually a good metric. I might as well be from another planet lol
Same boat here, though a couple years later. It feels really weird to be so out of the loop with my “fellow” Gen Z siblings who were born in the late 00s.
Teach a child to fish, basically.
If we keep making it easy for them… Ask and I’ll give you all the answers… They’ll never learn.
My first response these days is, “What have you tried so far?” And, “What are you searching for in ‘Google’?”
I also ask “what have you tried so far” mostly because too many times I get into troubleshooting and then discover that they’ve created a new problem while doing their own troubleshooting. (Like one time they plugged in a second cable between two switches - good god was that hard to troubleshoot remotely)
Man, I didn’t realize that article was written in 2013, it could’ve been written today, and it still would’ve been true. I think one of the biggest contributions to the tech illiteracy of people is, 1. Schools don’t really teach you about that kind of stuff (in my experience, or unless you take a special course) and 2. Everything is basically done for you now, its incredibly easy to do anything basic on computers.
I still remember getting in trouble at my public school with the IT admin because my friends and I discovered how to write BAT files, and had the brilliant idea to create a bunch of fork bombs that self-replicated until they froze their host computer.
Unfortunately I think kids today don’t even get enough leeway to figure that sort of shit out. But kids are awfully good at finding cracks in systems, so maybe they’ve just figured out how to get up to similar hijinks with GUIs and cloud storage.
Teaching direct tech through schools is problematic too because by the time they update the cirriculum the reality had changed. Concepts and diagnositcs would be a lot more useful, then let the kids have the tools to find the issues from there
So when the author says it’s the 30-50 year olds that know how to use computers, today it’s the 40-60 year olds. I’d say it goes older than that.
One thing that used to bug me on reddit was youngsters going on about how over-50s wouldn’t know how to use a computer. That hasn’t been the case for decades now.
Hear hear! We 40-50+ year old geeks were learning the Internet as it rolled out. Before that we were upgrading our PCs and modems as funds permitted, joining & running BBS’s on DOS. OS/2 seemed futuristic and I ran it for a while, but Linux won my heart. As a teenager, I had my favourite kernel hackers, tested their patches, chatted with them on IRC. Before that, we had our C64s, Amiga 500s and similar. We had the greatest opportunity to learn, and we loved it.
Over the last 10 years I’ve really had to dumb down my interview questions, covering a wider range of topics until I (hopefully) find a spark of passion and beyond-user-level knowledge about anything (even unrelated to the position)… it used to be easier.
I feel like getting into opensource software is easier than it ever was at least, the biggest Barrie’s I see are people thinking they can’t and advertising making people defensive about sticking to proprietary options.
It’s actually the 8-80 year olds that don’t know how to use computers.
Most people don’t know. They just know how to use a handful of programs. But the vast majority of them don’t understand the basic concepts behind them. Things like files and directories are nebulous at best.
Does it matter? A little, because so much stuff revolves around computers nowadays. Which means that they don’t really understand the world they’re navigating daily. OTOH, they live perfectly well as they are, so it clearly doesn’t matter to them.
We’re going to end up like that society in Star Trek that worships a computer.
But… The Computer is our friend!
It’s like understanding how a car works. Some people know what every sound is. Some people can’t even grasp what oil is.
At my job I have to explain to fully grown adults where the Start menu is on a regular basis.
To be fair it doesn’t help that Microsoft keeps moving the damn thing.
We’re still 100% Windows 10 so it hasn’t moved (yet).
Lucky you! Windows 11 sucks.
Computers, math, cooking, cleaning, exercise, eating properly.
It’s just another in a long list of things that some grown-ass adults act like is somehow beyond them because that’s easier than trying.
Definitely not unique to any generation.
It’s just another in a long list of things that some grown-ass adults act like is somehow beyond them because that’s easier than trying.
That’s the funny part. It’s not really easier. They have to go through life depending on others to do trivial things for them.
Imagine taking your car to a mechanic for low tire pressure rather than learning how to use the pumps at a gas station.
easier than trying
I’m sure there are plenty of cases of this, but I feel the need to point out that a lot of times there can be mental illness at the root. Which is definitely not easier than trying.
It sure is getting worse, though.
lol it’s really not, at all. every generation tells themselves this and it’s always bullshit.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
- Attributed to Socrates, ~400 BC
There are objective metrics one can use, rather than basing your opinion on your personal observation window.
There are, sure. And you are going to cherry-pick the ones that allow you to feel a smug and very much unearned sense of superiority.
I’m old and educated, so sorry.
No need to apologize to me, I’m not the one making a fool out of myself.
Educated indeed. Lmao.
…and the blog owner can’t use Let’s Encrypt.
Ask them what https means and why it is important
Ironic
Looks like they haven’t really posted to the site since 2014 (there was a post in 2017, but they were no other posts between then and 2014.) LetsEncrypt wasn’t nearly as prolific back then.
And he thinks TL;DRs are for kids with ADHD. Totally egotistic. I’m sure his whole point can be heavily TL;DR’d.
Twitter brain rot is a problem that effects all ages, but then you grow up with it, it’s worst.
I think sometimes people just want others to go straight to the point. I don’t want to hear the personal stories of this guy, just rambling about his past and his skills.
Maybe he could say the premise and a conclusion. Then explain why he reached that conclusion. But no, he chose to torture you with personal anecdotes to get to a point he could have summarized in a few words.
While the asinine attitude has no place in something like this, it’s sad to see how bad reading comprehension is these days. You don’t need a TL;DR, just scroll down to the conclusion where everything is summed up already.
And after that he goes directly into a tedious story that does more to make me dislike him than actually build up the point he’s trying to make. I agree with the basic premise of the article, but the endless passive aggressive anecdotes really don’t help.
The whole attitude just ruined it for me. He went full “get ready to hear this 2h long story about my times and how awful current generations are. And no, you’re not allowed to go to the bathroom while I talk” grandpa style.
This is some “I am very smart and sexy” cringe.
Can be generalized to “nobody understands science and technology anymore”. I can understand those who went offline and are not looking back.
I’m seeing this with my oldest niece and nephew. They’re okay with navigating their android tablets; but if you ask either them of troubleshoot a problem on the PC, they both just end up coming to me. Neither of them know how to research solutions either. Ugh.
- Dump on
tl;drs - Subject your readers to a minimally-edited 4000 word rant
You get to pick one.
The people who are them problem aren’t the intended audience. The intended audience are people who are in positions to direct youth education programs.
The tldr is usually called “the lead” in newspaper articles and it tells you roughly what’s it’s about so you know if you want to read the damn thing or not.
It’s spelled “lede” I think.
Both are acceptable.
- Dump on
was teaching my 3yo mouse and keyboard this week, and he had some difficulty because he is already accustomed to touchscreen. to be fair, toddlers touch everything, its intuitive. regardless, he was pointing and clicking like a pro after afer minutes.
now, when to introduce the cli…?Start with the sl command, and you can do it now 😁
I’d wait until the “yank the key from keyboard and eat it” bug is fixed.
3.5!
No kids myself, but I saw something really interesting at a restaurant the other day. Kid, maybe 3, was watching something on an iPad. When it was time to go, the parents asked “it’s time to go, can you pause your movie?”
Kid taps the screen to bring up the menu, and taps pause. No problem.
I found it really interesting that that UI paradigm is maybe 10-15 years old, and it really isn’t super intuitive, but it’s universal, and this little kid knew how to do it. And it looked like his parents taught him how to do it and encouraged him to do it.
So it isn’t all hopeless, it’s just a matter of parents teaching kids how to use computers. Just like they teach them to eat, brush their teeth, and dress themselves.
Time to hand over a rusty ThinkPad and USB with Ubuntu on it. By 5, he will teach you Arch!
