5 ms·

I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially

by fipar 6y ago

I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.

HDMI_Cable 6y ago
That’s basically everyone. Confirmation Bias is one hell of a drug.
munk-a 6y ago
I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up in might be the most tech literate but I think that's a false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye opening. My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it. I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
- ksm1717 6y ago
  This is how I feel when using visual studio.
- toomanyducks 6y ago
  > the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'. > we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways. also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
- cacarr 6y ago
  I think people conflate a high degree of modern GUI proficiency with general technical literacy. I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are really more generally technically literate on average than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
  - asdff 6y ago
    This was me in my old research lab. I had to teach an undergrad how to copy and paste text into notepad and save the file on the shared drive. The kid grew up on iPads and had no idea how to work a desktop, nor had a great understanding of what a file or directory structure is. Things I took for granted. It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to jailbreak the phone in order to gain access). Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal app, and the files app actually showed you the directory structure of the device. They could be scripting on these machines and learning about how they function same as we did growing up. Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands and should learn Swift and other low code efforts instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.
fastball 6y ago
Yeah, I actually think the group that is least susceptible to this is millennials, who group around the anonymity of IRC / early 4chan / etc, but before people were even pretending to use real identities on the internet.
- munk-a 6y ago
  The difference is that we got to make mistakes when we were young. Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where you said very controversial things or vented angst in a manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed where it will be with you forever. It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone had access to those messages it would be harder to definitively tie it back to someone since user fingerprinting was so non-existent. That all said, I was in the middle of University when folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to see it start to emerge as a concern.

by fipar 6y ago

HDMI_Cable 6y ago

That’s basically everyone. Confirmation Bias is one hell of a drug.

munk-a 6y ago

I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up in might be the most tech literate but I think that's a false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye opening. My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it. I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.

ksm1717 6y ago
This is how I feel when using visual studio.
toomanyducks 6y ago
> the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'. > we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways. also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
cacarr 6y ago
I think people conflate a high degree of modern GUI proficiency with general technical literacy. I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are really more generally technically literate on average than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
- asdff 6y ago
  This was me in my old research lab. I had to teach an undergrad how to copy and paste text into notepad and save the file on the shared drive. The kid grew up on iPads and had no idea how to work a desktop, nor had a great understanding of what a file or directory structure is. Things I took for granted. It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to jailbreak the phone in order to gain access). Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal app, and the files app actually showed you the directory structure of the device. They could be scripting on these machines and learning about how they function same as we did growing up. Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands and should learn Swift and other low code efforts instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.

fastball 6y ago

Yeah, I actually think the group that is least susceptible to this is millennials, who group around the anonymity of IRC / early 4chan / etc, but before people were even pretending to use real identities on the internet.

munk-a 6y ago
The difference is that we got to make mistakes when we were young. Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where you said very controversial things or vented angst in a manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed where it will be with you forever. It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone had access to those messages it would be harder to definitively tie it back to someone since user fingerprinting was so non-existent. That all said, I was in the middle of University when folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to see it start to emerge as a concern.