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The thing is the new generations don't have to work as much to make things work in their day to day lives. Most use ios devices which are dead simple and straig

The thing is the new generations don't have to work as much to make things work in their day to day lives. Most use ios devices which are dead simple and straight up don't allow anything complicated things (it just works) and windows came a long way. Not so long ago things were breaking apart almost daily, you had to dig into things to make them work, and as you did that you were learning how to fix things, how to research about issues, &c. I remember struggling with torrent clients, cracked games, dodgy drivers, unrecognised CDs, building my own pc &c. then in uni I was toying with linux distros, I probably spent more time hacking around to make them work than actually studying but it taught me a lot of things, things that were useless on the spot but are helpful in the long run It's a bit like car drivers, they all know more or less how to drive a car, but they have absolutely no idea of the internals even the most basic stuff. Or bicycles: https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw-bicycle-from-memory-and-renders-results/ https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw... familiarity != knowledge/understanding

dividedbyzero 4y ago
> I remember struggling with torrent clients, cracked games, dodgy drivers, unrecognised CDs, building my own pc &c. then in uni I was toying with linux distros, I probably spent more time hacking around to make them work than actually studying but it taught me a lot of things, things that were useless on the spot but are helpful in the long run You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? Not if you grew up in some post-communist/eastern european country in the '90s to '00s and wanted to play pirated games on the family PC. Except the linux part, no kids really cared about it. All that tinkering to obtain and make pirated games work made a lot of kids proficient in PCs and Windows internals. Almost every 15 year old back then new at least something about .RARs, ISOs, .DLLs, .cfg and .ini files, IPs, network settings, registry settings, direct connect, CD burning, anti-viruses, binary patches, driver installs, etc. I remember some article about 15 years ago that the SW industry and computer usage proficiency in eastern Europe blew up so quickly despite being impoverished VS the richer west because kids there had to fight witch complex systems to play videogames VS the kids in richer countries who would just plug in a cartridge or disc in the console and hit PLAY. Not every kid back then was into tinkering and hacking, we only wanted to play games, but those of us who were went into tech as adults and the childhood experiences around PC problem solving definitely helped.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? A good third of my totally average school class was doing it, any kid into PC games basically
  - karmelapple 4y ago
    By school class, do you mean the hundreds of young people graduating in your grade? I can think of no more than 5% of my class doing it, and I graduated in the first half of the ‘00s in the USA.
jhbadger 4y ago
I think part of it is that current technology is mostly interacted with via software rather than worrying about how it is actually implemented. The article mentions not knowing that a paper to be copied needs to be upside down so it faces the copier glass. It's fun to laugh at that, but younger people aren't making that mistake "because they are stupid" but because they see that as just a weird user-interface fail. If you think how a copier works internally, obviously the copier can only copy things facing the glass, but if you are not used to thinking about the hardware, that just seems user-hostile.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And, in fact, it depends. I have a scanner at home that is a camera with an LED light that basically takes a picture--and in this case, it obviously print side up. Obvious? Well, sort of but you need some mental model of how things work.

dividedbyzero 4y ago

> I remember struggling with torrent clients, cracked games, dodgy drivers, unrecognised CDs, building my own pc &c. then in uni I was toying with linux distros, I probably spent more time hacking around to make them work than actually studying but it taught me a lot of things, things that were useless on the spot but are helpful in the long run You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? Not if you grew up in some post-communist/eastern european country in the '90s to '00s and wanted to play pirated games on the family PC. Except the linux part, no kids really cared about it. All that tinkering to obtain and make pirated games work made a lot of kids proficient in PCs and Windows internals. Almost every 15 year old back then new at least something about .RARs, ISOs, .DLLs, .cfg and .ini files, IPs, network settings, registry settings, direct connect, CD burning, anti-viruses, binary patches, driver installs, etc. I remember some article about 15 years ago that the SW industry and computer usage proficiency in eastern Europe blew up so quickly despite being impoverished VS the richer west because kids there had to fight witch complex systems to play videogames VS the kids in richer countries who would just plug in a cartridge or disc in the console and hit PLAY. Not every kid back then was into tinkering and hacking, we only wanted to play games, but those of us who were went into tech as adults and the childhood experiences around PC problem solving definitely helped.
lm28469 4y ago
> You do realize only a tiny tiny subset of kids were like that back in the day, right? A good third of my totally average school class was doing it, any kid into PC games basically
- karmelapple 4y ago
  By school class, do you mean the hundreds of young people graduating in your grade? I can think of no more than 5% of my class doing it, and I graduated in the first half of the ‘00s in the USA.

jhbadger 4y ago

I think part of it is that current technology is mostly interacted with via software rather than worrying about how it is actually implemented. The article mentions not knowing that a paper to be copied needs to be upside down so it faces the copier glass. It's fun to laugh at that, but younger people aren't making that mistake "because they are stupid" but because they see that as just a weird user-interface fail. If you think how a copier works internally, obviously the copier can only copy things facing the glass, but if you are not used to thinking about the hardware, that just seems user-hostile.

ghaff 4y ago
And, in fact, it depends. I have a scanner at home that is a camera with an LED light that basically takes a picture--and in this case, it obviously print side up. Obvious? Well, sort of but you need some mental model of how things work.