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Comment on Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?

JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

and they from teens geeking around with computers, and oops - teens are not geeking around with computers, they are watching reels and scrolling recommendations and doing other bullshit.

“Youth bad.” Lazy take. As if everyone in the gray beard generation was tinkering around with computers? Plenty of youths still tinker. Posting condescending shit like this is just going to turn them off from pursuing/contributing.

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AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s not youth bad. It’s that in the 80s and 90s, computers were fun and required a lot of tinkering. Nowadays they mostly work. They’re boring.

People who tinkered learned stuff. Users just know how to use a couple applications.

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UNY0N@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I don’t see anything that could be considered a “Youth bad” statement in that comment. It’s a complex issue, influenced by a myriad of factors.

For example, I could dissasemle and reassemble my first PC without any prior knowledge. I had to learn to use DOS to navigate the OS and get things done. I got a book from the library about it, and spent hours upon hours just learning about how the file structure, commands, programs, external media, etc. worked before I could do anything remotely useful.

Today a PC/tablet/phone is a black box, you have to actively WANT to tinker in order to learn such about how they work. And most big tech companies try to punish you for so much as trying to replace a battery yourself.

I suspect you are projecting some personal feelings onto a stranger’s comment.

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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I’m really confused by your reasoning here. You’re describing how it was extremely difficult to you and you had to go to great lengths to learn technology. Not everyone did this back then not does everyone do it now.
  
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  - entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That was the stuff you needed to do to do things like: play video games on your computer, get online and chat with people, hell even use your PC to write an essay. You didn’t necessarily have to go as far as they described to do that stuff, but you had to do some of it.
    
    Nowadays there’s no equivalent. You don’t have to at least kinda understand the filesystem to play minecraft on your iPad.
    
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Viri4thus@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Gen Z/Alpha are the new boomers. I teach hundreds of so called intellectual cream of the crop per year. It was bad before the pandemic, it’s seriously concerning now. The youth has largely divorced from reasoning and are used to reason in simple inputs to simple output. I am genuinely scared.

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FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
No, it’s recognizing that tinkering means different things now.

In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn’t in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.

That just isn’t the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.

For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don’t need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.

There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.

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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I get that, I’m not saying differently, I’m just saying that it’s not like the only reason people were learning lower level things was only to play games. Some people were just curious about it. Plenty of people are still learning those things because they’re curious. The barrier to entry being lower doesn’t mean there are less people who are curious about learning! If anything, it means that people who are curious but thought the barrier to entry was higher in the past have an easier time getting into the hobby now.
  
  Do you think that the Arduino project has been a net negative for people curious about learning low level microcontroller stuff? It was created out of frustration by people learning it wanting it to be easier to begin to learn. spectrum.ieee.org/the-making-of-arduino
  
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- barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  config.sys generation represent.
  
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  - FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    We got extended memory now! Bill gates doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
    
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