I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of
Not just that, I remember when app stores were new and people clamoured to be on them AND those app makers would often move to ONLY being on the app store, with anything downloaded off-store being a scam
So a lot of people grew up to use these devices at a time where downloading something off the web was more likely than not to be malware, giving them the ick on the idea as a whole
Fuck, I’m from the time a bit before all of that and even I have a goddamn hard time downloading shit that’s available off-store on someone’s website out of pure paranoia from those days
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
this may still be true, we just tend to have more RAM nowadays
ah makes sense. i also have a pretty big swap file so i think that helps a bit when im doing other ram intensive stuff
It’s not true currently. Firefox and Chrome trade blows on which is more performance and which uses more/less RAM these days. It varies, but they’re quite close.
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you’ll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
I think it’s more a generational gap in basic computer skills.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux. We understand computers (mostly) and the (various) paradigms they use.
Gen Z is what I refer to as the iPad generation (give or take a few years). Everything’s dumbed down and they never had to learn what a folder is or why you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search. (i.e. throw everything in a junk drawer and rummage through it as needed).
As with millennials who can’t balance a checkbook or do basic household tasks, I don’t blame Gen Z for not learning; I blame those who didn’t teach them. In this case, tech companies who keep dumbing everything down.
Edit: “Balance a checkbook” doesn’t have to mean a physical transaction log for old school checks. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You’d be surprised how many people my age can’t manage that.
you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.
nobody look at my downloads folder. It’s fine. I promise.
Organizing my downloads has been on my to do list for… Four, I think? Yeah, four… phones…
Zettelkasten users:
I’ve been interested in Zettelkasten for a few years, since I discovered Obsidian, but I’ve never been able to quite get the hang of it enough to make it stick
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux
Only the oldest millenials did. When the youngest were born, the internet and Windows 95 were readily available and they were in middle school when the iPhone came out.
Trouble is that there are enough millennials who also have absolutely no clue about computers. Between dude-bros who won’t touch that nerd shit and girls who got told by their nerd boyfriend’s that the computer will start to burn if they click anything besides their allowed icons a vast majority of people are glad if they know how to turn on the computer and print out their document.
Yes, there are probably a lot more computer literate millennials than in other generations. But even there it pretty much depends on family and friends. And in a pirate community on Lemmy most of the people will belong to the tech savvy bubble.
In our friend group even the most computer illiterate kid knew how to set up a LAN without a DHCP server. Their younger siblings had no idea a LAN was even a thing.
My wife’s ex always told her that she couldn’t understand how to work with a computer. Her older brother who works in IT wouldn’t explain anything to her either. They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
Anyone can learn any skill if they actually invest the time.
And regarding the older brother, you learn pretty quickly working help desk that users generally don’t care what the problem is or why it happened. They just want to get back to work and not have it happen again. After a while you get conditioned to just be friendly and solve the issue without explaining what you’re doing or why.
I don’t know how many time I answered the same thing to the exact same argument but here goes:
In short, it’s most likely not true. You’re implying the the millennials were generally more competent but it’s very likely wrong, the vast majority of people in that gen had absolutely no clue what they were doing on a computer most of the time they just knew how to do a few limited things with them.
The apps didn’t make the masses tech illiterate, the app adjusted to the existing ones and removed the stuff they couldn’t never understand, like where to save a file to be able to find it later. (I’ve worked in a support call center and I can tell you with 98.5% accuracy that the lost file is in system32).
The gen-z has quite a lot of smart, curious tech savvy people, and a vast majority of tech-illiterate people, so did the millenial, and the X, and the boomers.
This whole generational superiority argument is just as baseless as it was when my gen was blaming yours for being lazy, not able to learn anything due to a short attention span and an obsession for brunch and avocado toast.
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. Relying on edge cases in either generation is pointless. Millenials had zero tech support to help them for everything you need to do on computers.
How to load a program: Nowadays - touch the icon on the screen. Millenials - Load"$“,8 LIST LOAD"LEISURESUIT*”,8,1 (wait 10 min.) RUN
How to install a game: Nowadays - Click BUY on game store and choose INSTALL. Millenials - Learn MSDOS basics, Type a series of 5 commands without typos
How to configure game settings: Nowadays - Play with volume sliders, Graphics preferences, and game difficulty. Millenials - Edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to ensure device drivers are loaded, load game, assign proper IRQ, DMA variables to get your SOUNDBLASTER card to play sound, select game difficulty
How to setup a printer: Nowadays - go to manufacturers website and download drivers, run setup.exe, plug in printer to USB port. Millenials - Check Device manager in Windows to determine COM port and other relevant variables. Set values in word processing software. Employ Minor in mechanical engineering to align or correct bad ink ribbon with perforated track runners. Repeat fixes every 5 pages ad nauseum.
All that BS and more required hours of research to learn how to do in an era where guidance was buried in some sketchy newsgroup where ‘Rick Rolling’ was seeing if you’d notice “Deltree c:” in the instructions, and not just a simple 20 second video on TikTok.
I work with children using Ipads and that one kid who doesn’t get lost if the relevant icon is missing in the UI is the one I know is going to be trouble. They say average IQ increases by 3 every generation and this is the first one I don’t think that trend will hold for because they aren’t required to think at all ever.
Millenials - Load"$“,8 LIST LOAD"LEISURESUIT*”,8,1 (wait 10 min.) RUN
Even the oldest millennials were just toddlers when the C64 was relevant, so this is not a typical millennial experience at all. It’s really a GenX thing… so once again we are forgotten.
I would say millennials’ computer experience starts in the late DOS/Win3.11 era at the very earliest, but more typically in the Windows 9x and early XP era. So even IRQ/DMA/config.sys/autoexec.bat fuckery is not that typical.
Generational wars doesn’t do anyone any favors.
Yeah and let’s not pretend that everyone back in 2002 was eMuling or torrenting and cracking videos games. I knew so many people who failed at ripping a CD to MP3 or copying it with a CD burner.
Acknowledging differences is not “war”.
as a high schooler with a special interest in computers, it’s genuinely surprising how poor most of my peers computers skills are. most of my peers don’t even know the very basics of folder structures.
also unrelated, let’s all love lain
special interest
poor skill of peers
(I’m totally with you though)
I blame google for the demise of well-organized folders. Their approach to email was “chuck it all in one big folder named Archive, and you can search for it using keywords that you will definitely remember when you need to find it again!”
It’s a useful tool, but paved the way for the current state of affairs where people get overwhelmed by their email because they have 150,000 unread emails in their inbox and as a result, don’t read an email until you tell them the entire contents of their email via the inferior messaging platform known as texting.
Twenty years ago when I was 13, I started doing web stuff. This was back when everything was super simple, so everything to get a webserver up was super manual. I’ll mention port forwarding at my current job and there’s this slice of people that are 28-40 years old that know what I’m talking about.
I’m slightly younger than that even, currently finishing up my master’s but have been working as a backend dev for a couple of years.
I’ve learned an order of magnitude more about networking from just being in the vicinity of my girlfriend (who is a network technician) than from uni, and it’s definitely already paying off.
I think the gap stems from need. Most people only learn what they absolutely need to. My sister and I are just 3 years apart in age. Yet I am pretty familiar with tech, while she knows next to nothing. I was always there to fix whatever broke. Even now she knows that if she needs to watch something, she can just ask me to add it to my Jellyfin server. I often have to remote into her system to fix stuff.
The Gen Z we’re talking about here mostly grew up using phones, and phone OSes do their best to hide any complexity away from the user. So they never learnt anything. I’m also technically Gen Z (very early), but growing up in rural India, I had to teach myself how to pirate since streaming wasn’t a thing yet (our internet was too slow for that anyway), and the local theater didn’t play anything except local mainstream cinema.
Jellyseerr is your friend. She can request whatever and you can get alerts to add it. Even if your stuff isn’t automated
I know about Jellyseerr, but I find it not worth it since there are very few people that send me requests. Messaging apps are enough for that.
Whatever works for you, simple is always better
Teaching college students, I agree that phones and ‘need’ are largely the culprit.
Loss of typing skill, trouble shooting skill, and file directory skill.
Better at cameras generally
I also teach college students lol. People can’t even figure out how to upload assignments from their phone. Had a student tell me that she broke her laptop, so can’t submit an assignment even though it was already written. She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas. I tried to explain that she can do it on the mobile app for Canvas instead. I eventually had to give up and asked her to drop it at my office. It literally felt like explaining stuff to my ma.
I seen teens without being able to make a folder in windows because they only use phones, so.
It’s like cars. Almost everyone has one and can drive it but don’t know how it works. Computers have become that. There are some who know or have an idea of how it works and others who can use it but have no idea.
Yeah but cars have become increasingly more complex over the last 20 years. You basically need an EEPROM arduino kit these days just to get the fucking diagnostics out of the car, because someone decided that analog circuits were just too much bulk
