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.
The idea that people are available 24/7.
My sister works in tech and it’s concerning to me how much she believes all the hype from tech startups. Sometimes i wonder if she is serious and sometimes it is painfully obvious she is.
I remember one time she urging me to use this app that ‘translated cat meows.’ the concept sounded just silly to me but I induldged her by recording and “translating” the meows of her cat that i had been taking care of for a couple of years. The interpreted cat meows according to the app revealed that the cat supposedly loves me, and i’ m her favorite and she is sad when i am not around. (which is standard cat behavior if you treat them well and especially for this cat that is very caring and social.
My sister reacted like she was jealous, not only believing everything the app translated but also feeling like i displaced her as her cat’s favorite human. The whole experience was surreal.
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.
“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 dislike the “privacy fiends” that hang around those subs/forums/instances but try to debate you out of trying. The “akschaully that wouldn’t work because…” people. Who are they helping?
Totally agree. Perfect is the enemy of good. If people would just drop meta, and Microsoft. That would go a long way and would be pretty easily achievable for most people.
Alphabet would be huge but because most phones run android (including my own), that’s a big ask, too big without a good viable alternative ATM
“Computer illiterate” isn’t silly and funny to say anymore. Computers have been around since the 80s. Get with the program. Oh and doing a quick Google search yourself can solve a good 70-80% of issues. Stop calling the help desk immediately.
I don’t know, but my view of technology being awesome and wonderful and the way to a better future has died, and that makes me sad
I’ll try to answer the question. How about this worry so many people have that technology facilitating any level of privacy is only going to be used for evil purposes. Even non technology cases. “Why aren’t you putting your real name and hometown?” Because it’s not relevant to this situation and nobody’s business! “Why are you refusing to be in this cute video we’re making for the company social media presence?” Because I don’t want my picture out there for everyone to see, and to be able to extrapolate where I live and who I work for
I think I got our company social media person to actually think I might have been serious when I eventually started saying I was under some kind of witness protection just to get out of it without having the same battle every time
I’m still awaiting the moment someone finally has a reason to legally insist on looking into my background or whatever after the whole “what shady activity or history are you hiding, always wanting your privacy and refusing to volunteer information about yourself” only to find I’m completely clean. No criminal record, no suspicious affiliations (unless Lemmy counts, hah), nothing incriminating. I’ve lived an extremely boring life. I just value my privacy
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.
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.
That transcends all ages, it has to be related to the irresistibility of big red buttons.
Windows upbringing.
It’s a “can’t be bothered” thing: age is irrelevant.
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.
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.
Me too, and I really think we need to be less accepting of it in general. I’ve known lots of people whose job involves using computers, and they can’t use them and refuse to learn and expect others to help them constantly. I don’t mind showing someone how to do something if it’s a new thing that they don’t know, but I’ve known people who get someone else to do the same simple task for them whenever it comes up, sometimes for years. And I don’t mean learning everything there is to know about computers, but like basic shit necessary for your job like where files go when you save them, or how to format text in a Word doc.
Like… if your job is being a delivery driver and you don’t know how to drive and you refuse to learn, people won’t accept it. But for some reason it’s fine with computers. I get that you may not like computers, but again, it’s your job. Learn it.
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.
I’m 73 and I reckon I’m learning more now than when I was in my 20s. I have a few things I’m interested in and I have a real thirst to know more about them. Not like in school where I was forced to remember a load of names and dates.
I might have hit a wall as far as tech goes though - I see people here on Lemmy talking about servers and I’m interested, but struggle to understand the basics.
I’m at that point but between you and me, it’s pure laziness.
na boy some peoplw be dumb as fuck. Some don’t want but somenare incapable…as you can see by the state of the world
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.
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?).
Meanwhile, i look for community fixes and hacks the moment i get a game shared. More of a here-for-the-story player.
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 doubt people switching from the rotary phones to touch tone phones were complaining a year later about not having something better from the phones.
Haha. We were re-installing our rotary phones a year later, because the touch tone ones were designed to fail in a year. I should have kept my rotary phone. I’m sure it would still work.
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”
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.
Being completely uncritical of it. This ties into being unwilling to learn, if they’re introduced to word processors via MS Word, many people are completely unwilling to move to something else like LibreOffice Writer, even if it’s not actually that different.
Back to the first sentence, too many people just aren’t willing to consider the ramifications of living in a walled garden made and maintained by foreign far-right groups, or if they are generally aware and critical of it, it usually still not enough to actually do something against it. That includes people who are generally tech savy, most of my millenial-or-younger friends and relatives aren’t on Signal, including one who is a software developer and vocally critical of Trump and US tech companies. Meanwhile my parents and grandparents have no issue using Signal.
And what makes so many people so willing to look at ads? I know way too many people who could easily use adblockers if they wanted, but just don’t.
My parents are older, in their late 60s and 70s, neither of them are particularly tech-savvy. They’re not totally helpless, they’ll usually do an alright job of basic troubleshooting like making sure things are plugged in, turning it off and on again, even look around a bit for settings and try to Google their problems before calling me.
They’d been using a copy of office 2003 or something like that age since that was new, they had the disk and didn’t feel any need to upgrade to a newer version. At some point they “upgraded” their computer to windows 11 which finally seemed to break compatibility with that old version of office.
Of the two of them, my mom is slightly more technically savvy. They had started using Google docs at her job before she retired, so she was able to switch to that with no major issues.
My dad couldn’t quite get the hang of that. I put libre office on their computer and told him it was just like Microsoft but free, and he’s been using that just fine since then.
Their computer, while technically compatible with Windows 11, seems to really struggle with it. They’re old retired people, they watch YouTube, do basic word processing and spreadsheets, check their emails, and go on Facebook. It’s not a beefy computer and they don’t need one, I’m pretty sure there are smart toasters or something these days that can do everything they need.
On a whim I stuck a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint on it in their computer about a week ago, and have had them test drive that. It does everything they need, they’ve had no issues with it so far, and even running off a flash drive it’s been running smoother than windows 11.
So when I go visit them tomorrow I’m gonna be making some backups and installing Linux on their computer.
Pretty much the one program they use that’s not a web browser or office software they use is Hallmark card studio (2007 I think) to print their own cards. Not gonna be the end of the world if they can’t use that anymore, but fingers crossed I’ll be able to get that running in wine. Wine HQ lists its compatibility as garbage but I don’t think anyone has tried to do it in a few years and wine has come a long way recently, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
So if these two old people can learn to use libre office and Linux, no one has an excuse.
I think Linux has a peculiar learning curve. If someone else installs it for you and does basic tech support once in a while, and installs a beginner-friendly distro, and the users only use very basic stuff like word processors and browser-based social media, it’s really easy, even easier than Windows. For people who know just about enough to install new software and reinstall Windows, Linux can be fairly difficult since a lot of the system plumbing just works quite differently, and these users are also tempted to install more difficult-to-use-and-maintain distros. Then once you’re very tech-savvy, Linux becomes easier than Windows again because it mostly does what you want and doesn’t fight you like Windows, and it’s often a first class citizen when it comes to software development.
Yeah, it’s absolutely a weird curve like that
I’m kind of in the second batch where things get hard, I’ve managed to keep myself from diving headfirst into some crazy hard to maintain distro and biting off more than I can chew, but it’s really weird not knowing how things the way I did on windows.
Yeah, I’d really like to switch to Linux, but I’m the most tech savvy person in my circle and I know I’d fuck something up.
Edit: thanks all for the advice, I’ve got to at least wait until I finish my thesis and my husband and I have more than one computer between us
You will! But it’s pretty hard to actually do lasting damage. If your install breaks, just reinstall - can be annoying, but it’s also a great excuse to try another distro or desktop!
If you have a second device, like an old laptop or something, that you can put Linux on to use it for stuff, I’d suggest that.
The short story of my Linux conversion was I got a Raspberry Pi for my amateur radio hobby. Learning how to deal with Linux as a side thing that had no pressure of “I might need my computer for something” really helped take to it.
So I’ve been running Linux for a few months now. Making the switch was pretty intimidating at first but I have a couple thoughts now.
- Back up any important documents you really don’t want to lose, you should be doing that anyway. Everyone is different on this of course, but personally when I went to do that I realized that I didn’t actually have anything I needed to back up. Most of my stuff personally is already saved somewhere in the cloud, and we can nitpick about whether that’s really a robust enough solution, and the ethics of the big tech companies holding onto my data and such, but that’s where everything was for me. And pretty everything that wasn’t is all stuff that I can easily get from the source I originally got it from anyway.
If you have important work documents, or big collections of music movies, pictures, etc. yeah, that’s a bit of a chore, but again if it’s anything that can’t be easily replaced you should make backups anyway.
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Once you’ve done that, you’ve got nothing left to lose. You have your backups, and while it’s intimidating to hit install that first time, trust me, it is really hard to totally brick your computer to the point that you can’t just wipe everything and either try again or even reinstall windows if you really need to. You may need to spend a couple hours googling on your phone and borrow some time on a friend’s computer to create a new bootable flash drive or something but unless you really try to you’re not going to totally fuck up anything.
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Like I said, my parents have been running off of a flash drive for about a week now, you can do that too, test things out in that safe little sandbox, you basically can’t break anything from that live USB.
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If you know enough to get yourself in trouble, you know enough to get yourself back out of it again, and you’ll have learned something from the experience. I’m actually at the point now where I’m kind of excited to eventually really break something to give me an excuse to try out another distro as a daily driver. I’m not trying to break something, but if it happens, it’s an opportunity to try new stuff.
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Maybe I’m weird, but setting up a new computer, figuring out the settings, and personalizing it the way I want may actually be one of my favorite things. When I do that I always seem to find a fun new thing that I didn’t know was there before.
Honestly, Linux is great for two groups:
A) People who extremely tech-savvy.
B) People who aren’t tech savvy at all.
It’s the people in the middle, the people who know just enough to get themselves in trouble, who want to screw around with things and do weird custom stuff, but aren’t good enough at it to handle learning a new OS, those are the people in the middle Linux isn’t well suited for. But the two opposite ends of the technical ability spectrum are perfect for Linux.
I actually like most of the people in the middle. Those are the people who figure out enough to become type A. The rest I can tell are trying, so I’m not worried about them not becoming Type A.
I fucking hate that word ‘Innovation’. It is spammed by corporatebros who think their shit doesn’t smell.
What’s your opinion on the word “entrepreneur”?
