Kids often don’t know the difference between “wifi” and the Internet. It’s not an age thing these days.
Comment on Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine
ZeroCool@feddit.ch 9 months ago
The judge in question is 51 years old. He’s not quite old enough to be this clueless about basics like the difference between a search engine and a web browser.
sping@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
Elderos@lemmings.world 9 months ago
Since smartphone became a thing it has always been my theory that millenials, and up to a point GenX, would be the only two generations to be forced into being tech-savy. Boomers and GenZ have been overwhelmingly tablet and phone users. Whoever still logging on a PC nowadays will have a vastly different experience than what it used to be.
It is a different world really. I am a huge geek and I have been in tech for a long time now, but I still get confused look at family gathering when I tell them I have no idea how to fix someone’s Ipad or what app/settings/touch gesture to do whatever.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Kids often aren’t explained the difference and if they have been they just don’t care.
A 51 year old Judge has a vastly different brain and should be able to retain the difference when explained.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 9 months ago
You’d think they’d notice they can use the internet from their phones when there’s no wifi.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If it’s not connected to a cord, it’s wifi. Now try and explaining those nuances to them that there’s more than one-type of wireless signal.
Wifi is easier and simpler. Sometime I find myself making the mistake…
In construction there’s a similar issue (with grown men even). A circular saw is the tool, but everyone calls it a skilsaw, which is a brand name. You can correct them, they just don’t care, that’s what the tool is called, a skilsaw.
clgoh@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Pretty sure they call cellular data “wifi”.
jaybone@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Or you’d think it would also be very easy to demonstrate you can be on wifi and not on the internet.
DeadlineX@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Lawmakers and judges should not be allowed to make decisions on something they know nothing about. This is a huge problem with people not even wanting to educate themselves, and then deciding how the rest of us get to interact with the internet.
That being said, Firefox is only popular with tech folk. They have just over a 3% market share. I’m a developer and I don’t know anyone but myself that uses it. My mother would think I was talking about a cartoon if I brought it up. A lot of lemmings use it, but o would not call it a popular example.
Elderos@lemmings.world 9 months ago
Experts are supposed to break it down to them. But yeah, this is a flawed system but I fear the honnest take is that most humans know nothing about most things (even if we’re tempted to believe otherwise), so you’d be running out of avalaible judges real quick.
DeadlineX@lemm.ee 9 months ago
That’s a fair point. This case is even more complicated, as either the author of the article doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or a word was missing. The article says the judge wasn’t sure if mozilla was a browser or search engine, and Mozilla is neither.
I still hate the confidently incorrect assertions people in charge are making to negatively impact the way the largest and most complete telecommunications and information system works. Just look at facebooks trial where zuck had to explain how the internet works to the people who were deciding if his company was doing something wrong.
PickTheStick@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That just…seems so wrong. My mentally declining grandmother used firefox back in the 00s era (though now that I think about it, my uncle is a developer, so maybe he set up the computer). How have we backslid since then to where so few people know/use firefox?
DeadlineX@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Actually yes. Around 2010 Firefox still had like 60% market share. Now, chrome dominates the market and Firefox is in single digits. Chrome gives you so many conveniences, and only a small amount of people care about what you give up for those conveniences. “My data isn’t important. Who cares about what I do?” Is a common response to data mining and sharing.
Most people don’t want to put the time and effort into researching these things. Most people just don’t have the energy.
But again if you don’t know anything about a topic you are asked to make a decision on, you should recuse yourself. It’s unfortunate that most people making decisions about tech know very little about it.
Ryumast3r@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Another thing not being considered by all the “judge doesn’t know anything” crowd is that they’re failing to consider that this case isn’t really about search engines or Alphabet as a company.
It’s about monopoly laws. In this case, pertaining to Google and Mozilla, but monopolies nonetheless.
Hanabie@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Only a few years older than me. Absolutely not yet old enough to be a boomer.
Fuzzy_Dunlop@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Yet? How would one turn into a boomer?
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Use your favorite search engine (mine is called firefox) to browse the google and connect with your friends on a facebook
ZeroCool@feddit.ch 9 months ago
We don’t have Facebook is AltaVista okay?
TheGiantKorean@lemmy.world 9 months ago
When you start posting searches in your Facebook status.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“Mysterious purple spot on butt cheek”
coffeebiscuit@lemmy.world 9 months ago
By being born between 1940 and 1955. Now it’s mostly a generalization of “people that are older than me”.
unreachable@lemmy.world 9 months ago
you need to declare it yourself, like possession
INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 9 months ago
OK boomer (someone had to say it)
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m 46 and I know the difference.
INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Yeah but your on lemmy so your a write off (and so am I)
AbyssalChord@feddit.de 9 months ago
Hey there! Don’t want to nitpick, but it is spelled „you‘re“ in your case. „Your“ is used when you‘re talking about possessive attribution. „Your car“ vs „you‘re (you are) driving a car“.
wmassingham@lemmy.world 9 months ago
As long as we’re nitpicking, in English, we only use the upper quotation marks, e.g. “you’re”.
INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 9 months ago
That’s interesting!
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 9 months ago
Lots of people of my gen were utterly clueless about computers growing up-- it was arcane nerd shit.
You didn’t have to know how to use a computer until much later in life in a number of careers.
Hell, my university still had rentable typewriters in the library, which still had a physical card catalog (alongside the new computerized one), and we still wrote tests by hand (essay or otherwise). Laptops weren’t a thing. And not everyone had a PC/Mac. The Internet was something most students were oblivious to. The web was only just in its infancy and only the nerds knew about it as a curious novelty. Hell, there wasn’t even DNS back then. Everyone downloaded a “hosts” file.
Even so, I’m still struggling to imagine how a person still doesn’t know the difference between a search engine and a browser, though.
Then again, I suppose some people are just really awful at analytical thinking – understanding how to decompose complex things. Understanding how the parts and pieces work. The people who were really bad at that kind of thing probably would have steered clear of computers as much as possible.
So, ok, maybe if a person avoids computers in undergrad and law school in the 90s then becomes a lawyer, they can just actively avoid computers in their job. That’s one career where maybe that’s possible because, by the time computers become truly ubiquitous, your assistants that can do the computer stuff for you.
clif@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I teach a programming class to young adults (18-25, usually) and was flabbergasted last semester when I realized that a couple of them didn’t know what a directory hierarchy/file system was.
My suspicion is that the ease of use angle of “just tell me what you want and I’ll find it” led to this. Not saying ease of use is bad, but I expected more from people wanting to learn programming.
And I’m over here meticulously organizing my music library into folders by band, album, year, etc…o the humanity.
dustyData@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There’s a subgroup of the millennial and gen X that grew up with a sweet spot of computers such that you actually need to know how it works in order to use one effectively. Ease enough to do a lot of fun stuff, hard enough that it encourages learning the technical minutiae. The rise of smart phones and net/chrome books means there is a huge chunk of population that has a superficial and passing relationship with tech. It’s big buttons or else it doesn’t register with them. It’s not their fault, the pursue of usability and fool proofing without actually giving tools to dig deep when necessary means they have less exposure to the underlying tech. Thus are less familiar with how things work. It’s an universal phenomenon, I would bet most people have no clue how to raise, grow and process food, but still we don’t starve, we go to the grocery and buy what’s there already cleaned, processed and packaged. There are huge advantages to understanding the chain of production of food, but I’d guess most people would struggle in an agronomy class about what’s a compost bin.
clif@lemmy.world 9 months ago
100% agree. Great description that dives into particulars of what I hand waved at.
Soundhole@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Imo it’s because most of them used cap-ass Chromebooks in school since the US school system is underfunded and allowed Uncle Googs to foot the bill and teach an entire generation the shitty Chrome “OS” is how computers work.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No. It’s phones. Phones hide their file directories.
Engineer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
iPhones do, I can get to them on android
Soundhole@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I know this thread is old as dirt, but I just have to respond.
While phones are computers, I feel like they’ve always been computers focused on consuming only. People use it to consume videos, social networks, games, music, you get the idea. Actual desktop and laptop computers have always been more focused on doing lots of different things. So consumption is definitely part of it, but also video editing, programming, scientific work, complex math, engineering, etc etc. Real heavy work type stuff.
I guess, to me, when schools started using Chromebooks, it sort of taught kids that actual laptops are just another device for consumption. Sure they can do work online through Goog Docs or whatever, but all that other really crunchy stuff is impossible since the “OS” is really just a web browser.
I’m obviously painting with a broad brush. Some phone users are total hackers, plenty of computer users only consume on their powerful computers, and Chrome “OS” does have some (extremely limited) functionality, and tablets probably blur the line to some extent, but I think the broader idea holds.
Anyways, I’ve been thinking about your comment for a couple days, because it’s a valid point, and I really felt the need to address for some reason. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.
Bread@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
As one of those people who didn’t understand what file systems and directories were at 18, it isn’t taught in early school so you don’t notice it is a thing that exists until you stumble upon it yourself. I distinctly remember the day it clicked and it felt like I had had an epiphany.
Once you break that basic barrier then you rely on your interests to take you further. I went from not understanding that to being a Linux guru in years time, so I fully believe if the desire to learn is there, it will happen. It is just not mandatory to learn anymore. So most people don’t.
TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee 9 months ago
www.coding2learn.org/…/kids-cant-use-computers/
clif@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is a fan-fucking-tastic article! Thanks bud.
qfjp@lemmy.one 9 months ago
beets, it’s a life changer
gamer@lemm.ee 9 months ago
A music folder is like a zen garden. Where’s the zen in automating it all?