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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • jj4211@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skillsEnglish
    4·
    7 days ago

    Note that to some extent, this might have been a necessary step in the relative popularity of computing.

    Folks remembering how flexible and open ended things were in the 90s were a tiny sliver of the population. At the time about 1% of the world were participating in the internet, now the majority of the population participates on the internet.

    I would have loved for the industry to keep up the trends of the 90s (AOL/Prodigy lost out to a federated internet, centralized computing yielded to personal computing) instead of going backwards (enduser devices becoming tethered to internet hosted software, relatively few internet domains and home hosted sites being considered suspicious rather than normal), but this might have just been what it took for the wider population to be able to cope.

  • jj4211@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skillsEnglish
    13·
    7 days ago

    Gen X and older witnessed a young generation born into kind of working, but kind of janky technology. They saw kids figure out obscure VCR programming interfaces that let the kids record something they wanted, but only by navigating very obtuse interface rendered exclusively with 7 segment displays with a few extra static indicators. A teenager playing that new DOS game, but first they had to struggle with getting the conventional memory, upper memory, EMS/XMS and just the right set of TSRs running, involving mucking about with menu driven config.sys/autoexec.bat tailored for their use cases. Consumer electronics and computers of the time demanded a steep learning curve, but they could still do magic, leading to the trope in the 80s and 90s media of tech wonder kids doing awesome stuff way better than the adults. Even if you have a super advanced submarine and very smart people, you needed your teenager computer kid to outclass everyone.

    By now, we’ve made high res touch screens that can be embedded in everything for cheap, and embedded systems that would be the envy of a pretty high end desktop from the year 2000, which was capable of running more friendly operating environments. The rather open ended internet has largely baked in how the participants get to play. The most common devices lock down what the user can do, because the user can’t be trusted not to break themselves with malware.

    The end result is that we may have the same proportion of people with the deep technical skills, but a lot of people are now unimpressed. In the mid 90s, less than 1 percent of the population had direct internet experience, and by 2008, 25% had that experience. So even if you still have 1% of really tech savvy people, there’s over 24x as many non savvy people that don’t need to marvel at those savvy people because they are getting about what they want out of it.

  • jj4211@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•America's Smartest Man Finds Something Interesting
    8·
    13 days ago

    I’d say it’s more people who are repeatedly told they are smart can be very stupid.

    Many of then might even be “smart”, but the important part is having unwarranted confidence.

    Complicating things is that society rewards confidence way more than it rewards competence. If I’m honest about a lack of competence in a certain area but someone else lies during the interview, good chance they are going to get the job over me.

    The reality is that everyone can be very very stupid, and so long as each and every one of us is willing to accept and recognize our weakness we aren’t as likely to be assholes.

  • jj4211@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way?
    7·
    21 days ago

    It’s not a matter of knowledge, it’s a matter of what they want.

    One may desire to be advantaged/superior to some others, and particularly nice and easy if race or gender is a convenient shorthand for knowing who is ‘in’ and ‘out’, as long as you are in the ‘in’ group of course.

    So life is just plain easier if women are just supposed to sit there and please them. If the ‘natural order’ justifies that convenience, then one may be attracted to that thought. To the extent fairness and equality makes their life harder, they are inclined to be upset at that obstackle. It’s convenient if the legal and labor world gives their race preferential treatment, and other groups are left desperate enough to do whatever they need done but don’t want to do, and scared enough of the government to not get “uppity”.

    Sometimes overt evil, sometimes more subconscious manifesting as being very receptive to narratives that correlate with those feelings.