My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
That any website outside of corpo net is the Evil Dark Web. I can’t stand my tech illiterate friends that refuse to use the fediverse or any non tracking YouTube links. If a site is HTML only they shit their pants.
When did people get so dumb about computers ? Man.
That every generation of device is going to be the next greatest thing and they should all have huge leaps like in the early 2000’s.
I doubt people switching from the rotary phones to touch tone phones were complaining a year later about not having something better from the phones.
I’m old and tech-y, and my contemporaries still use the “I’m too old to learn” line on me - and then ask me to sort out their issue. Deeply annoying.
I’m legit scared of that. Im only in my 30s and my capacity for learning has diminished greatly since I was a child. What if that trajectory continues?
I dont wanna be “too old to learn these newfangled thingamabobs” when we get the next big thing.
this post reads like an entitled youth complaining about old people.
you know that video of the kids that can’t figure out how to use a rotary dial telephone? yeah, that’s exactly what happens to old folks who can’t figure out how to use a smart phone, or computer, or a smart TV, or a, or a, or a…
technological context is important. you can’t just pick up a piece of technology and immediately understand how to use it. you have to understand not just how it works, but why it works the way it does. knowing the why takes a history of the whole feature.
it’d be like if I posted a meme you have zero context about and I make fun of you for not understanding it and call you an old dumb fuck for not grasping on the basic understandings of why it’s funny.
The issue as I have presented isn’t one of “Old People Dumb”, but one of the idea that older people shouldn’t refuse to learn about something because they are “too old”. Or enabling that line of thinking. I recently had a customer buy a new computer for me and paid for a setup. I needed account details, and he had no idea what his accounts were, his passwords, just that he wanted his computer setup. When I asked for any passwords to get the setup done, he didn’t know because his kids set all that up. If the kids took a moment to show him what was going on, how things worked, maybe he would have had an idea when he needed it.
to riff off your example, what’s an account? is there a bank involved or should I get in contact with my financial advisor? Did I get mail about the accounts? perhaps some kind of ID card came for me in the mail?
what’s an account?
my point still remains. not only were you asking him to understand what an account is, but also the nuances between different accounts and what they do. like knowing what the difference is between a Facebook and email account is.
you take your historical knowledge of technology for granted. one day, sooner than you think, you’re going to be that old man ranting about how nothing works and technology sucks.
“XYZ company already has all my data so I don’t care that they’re spying on me and selling my data to advertisers”
Fucking makes my blood boil. These people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, or self respect
blood boil
I’m the same, but I try to explain the errors of their ways in the most relaxed manner.
Most times it doesn’t make a difference but once in a while someone is receptive and makes a change. and it’s really rewarding.It has been theorized once 25% of the population accepts an opinion the rest tends to follow, so I try to be optimistic and take it one step at a time. Lately I’ve had the impression I’m seeing progress.
The thing is though, that most people don’t know why that’s a problem, and privacy advocates seem to think that ‘you’ve got a door on your bathroom’ is a gotcha.
If someone is giving Google their home address and work address, and planning the route to get traffic data, they’re not going to be concerned when Google Maps suggests their work address as a destination through the week. Same for their shopping data. ‘Of course Amazon knows what I like, I do my shopping there!’
We need better ways to explain it to people who don’t understand it, and who are not interested in it or the tech behind it. We have a big problem on Lemmy where we tend to assume that everyone understands the same issues as us, just not as well.
If someone is giving Google their home address and work address, and planning the route to get traffic data, they’re not going to be concerned when Google Maps suggests their work address as a destination through the week.
It isn’t that they aren’t concerned, that is actually something many people see as a benefit. Yes, I still use google maps because it remembers destinations and has traffic density alerts and a bunch of other stuff that require tracking but those are a separate thing from google selling that tracking data to third parties. The former is a benefit and the latter is a problem.
That’s part of my point. For most people, giving Google their data means things like their travel info. The majority of people don’t understand that tracking data is different, or what it means. When you tell them not to give their data to big corporations, they think you mean any data, and don’t know that they can get data that you might not want shared
I fucking hate that word ‘Innovation’. It is spammed by corporatebros who think their shit doesn’t smell.
People with no technical background insisting that “AI” is taking over and is sentient, even when I try to explain how it actually works. They refuse to believe that maybe all of those breathless “news” articles are clickbait hype-mongering.
“You just don’t like it because it’s gonna take your job!” Keep believing that, imbeciles.
I hear a lot of people worrying about this being the case in the future but I don’t remember hearing anyone claiming that about our current LLMs.
If you’re entering or exiting the tram, heads the fuck up.
Linux nerds screeching about how Linux desktop works perfectly out of the box and with less time and effort then Windows/OsX.
It’s entirely counterproductive to adoption.
Yeah, I tell people Linux is like driving a custom built car. You can make it do anything you want and have absolute control and freedom, and often do things other cars can’t, faster and more efficiently and cheaply. But sometimes it’s going to break and you need to get in there and wrench. If you don’t enjoy learning, or work 80 hour weeks and have no time to tinker, don’t use Linux desktop.
I got my SO to change because they like to customize, and I’m there if if breaks.
It works out of the box - if you do nothing at all to it and just browse.
But to do anything like getting all of your favorite programs, that’s going to take effort.
With older hardware sure. I largely have a flawless experience with anything 10 years old or older. And as long as it’s simple anything 5 years old works perfectly too.
But somehow my 5 year old network card is basically unusable on Linux unless I disable 6ghz WiFi.
Not even. I need custom scripts for audio, can’t turn my display off and on I need to pull the HDMI cable, and Bluetooth is basically unusable.
Bluetooth Linux sucks ass. No one can solve my Bluetooth issue and I’m using a good tp link dongle and updated kernel and keep getting skipping randomly over Bluetooth. So bad.
“I got my 107 year-old great grandmother running Arch from the command line in 20 minutes! Now she browses with Lynx and hosts a Matrix server.”
People need to learn innovation is not always progress, and that some paths forward are dead ends.
“Innovation” under late stage crony capitalism is just newspeak for “further surveillance for poors and enrichment for billionaires”
Something I absolutely hate is when people say shit like “do you sell an apple charger?” The complete ignorance of what port your device uses or even what it’s called is infuriating. Look, you either have a usb-c or lightning port, and you only have a lightning port if your phone is from like a decade ago or something. You should know by now to look for usb-c cables. It’s especially frustrating when they get angry at me when they don’t understand what I’m talking about.
I’m a sales supervisor in an office supply store, and I get this ALL THE TIME! I once had someone argue with me over the name of the cable connectors and wondered why I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then they said, and I quote, “Well, to me that’s what I call them, so I’m going to just keep calling them that.”
Not exploring the Settings menu of a new device. That should be the first thing you do when you first power on a new device. Most people just go with whatever the default settings are. Hell, some have never even seen their settings menu beyond the wifi connection.
I think we are just tinkerers, learners. I have been taking shit apart since I was 5, because I wanted to know how it worked and how to fix it.
Many (majority of humans?) people have zero desire to learn or do anything new/different. I thought everyone was like me early on, boy was I wrong.
I’m weird with this. Usually when I get a new phone, laptop or whatever, I like to use it exactly as is for at least a day or so. I like knowing what the “default” user experience is without me having to change or “fix” things first. Like playing a game without mods for a playthrough before adding big tiddie dragons.
Meanwhile, i look for community fixes and hacks the moment i get a game shared.
I get that! Or maybe default settings are perfect. That’s rare though especially nowadays.
Its like using your moms phone (or PC) with chrome, no adblock, 6789764 windows open, and brightness all the way up (what’s dark mode?).
Clicking OK without reading the box.
It won’t work, I get an error.
What’s the error say?
Let me try again. Ok it says enter a time.
Did you enter a time?
No.
Except that there are about 100 questions on the page and there is no prompt to go to the question you missed.
Many sites are just poorly designed.
dear god, if people actually read the screen, most Helpdesk jobs would be gone. read the damn screen, put that into your favourite search engine. bam. profit.
And an actual search engine… Not an LLM prompt. A plain regular search engine!
Put the error wording in quotes. Scroll past the AI LLM response they force at the top. That first result under there almost certainly gives you the answer.
Or someone on Reddit with the ever-useless, “That never happens to me”.
You’ve met my mother in law, I see. And my dad. Why do they do that? It must be an age thing.
Windows upbringing.
It’s a “can’t be bothered” thing: age is irrelevant.
That transcends all ages, it has to be related to the irresistibility of big red buttons.
Totally. There’s old duffers at work that struggle to open a word doc, but are strangely adept at Navigating Facebook…
And then there’s my girlfriend, wanting help with some arcane bullshit on Facebook because I’m ‘good with computers’ … but I’ve never used Facebook before, never even seen the page she’s messing with, and I only half understand what she’s trying to accomplish.
To be fair, what being “good with computers” actually means is being adept at figuring out a new thing you haven’t seen before.
Computer literacy is about synthesis, not rote memorization. I like citing this interview, talking about software as “building blocks with which you can create things,” as a great example of what knowing how to use a computer properly is really like. (Note that the point isn’t the specific detail of the UNIX CLI, but the principle that he can imagine a novel workflow and make it happen.)
Speaking of which, that’s my “something about how people view or use technology that needs to die:” the notion that you can be “computer literate” without understanding how to program, at least a little bit. The entire difference between a computer and any of the technologies that came before it is that a computer doesn’t have a fixed function, and you can make it do whatever you want it to do as long as you have the imagination and skill to figure out how to describe it.
I would love to see a majority of people stop considering ‘new tech’ as the magical wand/solution to all their problems, and see them stop considering ‘new tech’ as a necessity in their lives. Whatever their age.
My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
Beware of that kind of shortcuts, they often can be very wrong.
Also, do you think old people not wanting to use whatever new app or service is more of an issue than younger people not be willing to not use same app or service?
Working in a store with a self-service printing center, I can tell you it’s a lack of wanting to learn, or even read. Instructions are spelled out on the copiers, but many of my customers will demand someone to help them before even looking at the device because they claim they are too old and not tech-minded enough to do it themselves. Actual excuses to not even trying.
I don’t disagree with you. I’m just amused that your example is printers and copiers, the tech that has been notoriously devilish to get working correctly from like the very beginning. New tech has certainly NOT made printing any easier or more convenient. Sometimes they simply require arcane incantations and a blood sacrifice. I still think people should at least try, but I totally understand why their threshold for “I’m over this shit and I want someone else (e.g. a pro like you) to fix it for me.” is so low specifically when it comes to printers and copiers.
Working in a store with a self-service printing center, I can tell you it’s a lack of wanting to learn, or even read. Instructions are spelled out on the copiers, but many of my customers will demand someone to help them before even looking at the device because they claim they are too old and not tech-minded enough to do it themselves. Actual excuses to not even trying.
Well, I do believe and hopefully you will believe me too when I tell you I regularly meet young people that can’t be bothered to learn much either. Does that mean all young people are lazy as fuck and unwilling to learn shit? Certainly not.
Laziness (like stubbornness, like all vices and like all qualities) is not an age thing. It’s a choice and a way of life.
It’s the way some persons chose to relate to the world around them in a mostly (self-)destructive manner. Real sad I will agree with you, but there is nothing new and it certainly not age-related.
Those ‘old people’ you regularly stumble upon at your workplace were young people themselves a few years ago, maybe even your age, and I’m willing to bet a whole penny that they were as lazy when they were young. Exactly like those young people I regularly meet nowadays will still be lazy once they get old.
Those persons we talk about, some of your older customers and those of my young people, are (probably) lazy but that should not mean all person their age are the same. And that makes a huge difference.
BTW, you did not answer my previous question: do you think old people not wanting to use whatever new app or service is more of an issue than younger people not be willing to not use same app or service?
Edit: there is one thing that I think I need to add: getting old (you most likely are still young) you get slower and things become harder to do, your body gets tired quicker and even your brains start to feel… somewhat less agile. It slows and one can fight against it (nearing my 60s I started learning Russian this year, and plan on brushing up on my Latin too… probably need to relearn it from scratch to be honest as I have not used it for decades), but this aging is happening and, well, it’s impossible to completely avoid it and to magically stay young. You will experience that too yourself, hopefully not in a self-destructive way.
I’ve meet younger folks like this, but they are usually acting too entitled to do things for themselves. When it’s someone from an older generation, they actually start asking for help, and when we guide them through the process their remarks are usually about how simple it was.
