You wouldn’t download a C drive.
If that crowd represents chatGPT, then this represents gen alpha perfectly.
Anyone who dismisses an entire generation as lazy or stupid is, ironically, revealing their own ignorance. Even Socrates complained about the youth of his time, yet civilization kept moving forward. If every new generation were truly worse than the last, we’d have collapsed long ago. So no, you can’t generalize an entire generation as foolish—doing so only highlights your own lack of perspective.
Right here you can see capitalism collapsing in on itself. This is the result of a society that glorifies consumption and makes work undesirable to do.
Calm down they’re like 16yrs old
I know a bunch of people who got into webdesign cuz of MySpace.
Don’t know no C, only /dev/sda1.
I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.
My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.
But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…
Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.
It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.
I’ve worked in IT for most of my career. I’ve seen some shit. I’m on the older side of “millennial”. Not old enough to be on the cusp, but almost immediate after. I have had computers as a part of my life since I was young enough to remember, starting with a 286/386 that my dad used at home.
One thing I’ve noticed is that most companies shit doesn’t stink. What I mean by that is that all of them, to some extent, hide, cover up, or otherwise deny that their product has any issues whatsoever. I did a lot of VMware training back in the day, there were good reasons for that, but I won’t get into it … anyways, all of their training was about how it’s supposed to work. There’s zero material about what to do when it doesn’t work like it is supposed to… Even “troubleshooting” courses are designed to help you fix the configuration of the system using only methods sanctioned by the company, because any fault or flaw in their product must be because you aren’t using it right, or you simply don’t know how.
I’ve known so many millennials, especially in the tech space, that had to fix their own problems because the product, and the company that made it, believes that their shit doesn’t stink. There’s nothing wrong with their product, you either don’t know how to use it, or you aren’t using it correctly,
Meanwhile, here in reality, all their shit sucks to all fuck, and their product is little more than hour garbage.
Yay?
What’s a computer?
It’s like an iPad, but has to be plugged into the wall all the time. Rarely has a touch screen, so the only way to make it do stuff is with an external mouse and keyboard. Super useless.
Why would you use a rodent to control an iPad? Wtf?
What’s an iPad?
Imagine a raspberry pi hooked to a cheap LCD for a 100x mark up
Touchscreen computer sold by Apple commonly used for multimedia consumption. The only input device is the touchscreen: no keyboard, mouse, everything is done with the touchscreen. It is commonly associated with Gen Alpha due to its ubiquitousness, cost, ease of use, portability and the ability to shut a kid’s mouth up in five seconds attracting Millennial parents who don’t want to have to give their Gen alpha kid their phone for brainless entertainment. Commonly seen with children under five in restaurants/aeroplanes/whatever in a bulky rubber case.
A laptop that lacks the bottom part. Really useless most of the time.
This. The fundamentals of things computers do is so heavily abstracted now days, all kids know how to do is work with those abstractions.
Let’s not make the inevitable mistake of assuming what was an essential skill for one generation is going to matter fuck all for most of the next generation.
Old people still think it’s outageous if you can write a check, read an analog clock, read/write cursive… All things that most millennials might “need” to do less than once a year.
My ssd is sda (with a sda1 boot partition and an encrypted root partition). I may be in Gen Z but I also have Autism, granted I didnt grow up with a lot of technology but I always squeezed every ounce out of them. When I was 13 I installed Linux, by 16 I already knew how to use a terminal (and manage the entire system with it), today I would say im relatively good at basic IT and basic network management (although im struggling greatly at installing coreboot).
Conclusion: Gen Z/Alpha probrally wont be great at computers but there will probrally be many individuals who will be significantly more advanced at computers. I was watching YouTube and a found a video of a 15 year old installing Arch manually in less than 10 minutes on a Chromebook. So tbh I wouldn’t be worried tbh (at least about this specifically).
They didn’t have to learn what irq is the hard way and I am so thankful for the ability to read and edit bootloaders and ini files with no guardrails and error diode manual pages for giving me barely enough clues to learn from the ground up
I run a Makerspace and teach technology to kids. I don’t think they are getting worse, but the difference between the lowest and highest skilled is bigger than ever before.
Those who are interested, learn so fucking fast and so thoroughly, because they have things like YouTube tutorials and Discord chat groups with like-minded nerds to teach themselves. BUT at the same time, it’s easier to just remain a consumer, and never gain any deeper knowledge.
I think curiosity and attention are quickly becoming the most important skills by far.
