Comment on Anon updates GNU/linux
Aggravationstation@feddit.uk 10 months ago
Oh please Christ tell me that kids these days aren’t that dumb when it comes to computers.
Kids? I regularly interact with PhD students that don’t know how to open a fucking ZIP archive. I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive. I’ve had one that couldn’t grasp the idea of 2FA. I’ve had one that only had a single copy of his dissertation and lost all of it when Bitlocker ate the disk.
Organic intelligence is going extinct, I swear.
I’m a middle- aged millennial going through an undergraduate university course, in my first year I had to teach some of my group work partners how to move files from one folder to another in windows.
And these are students who have chosen modules in electrical engineering, so they have more technical/ computer education than most at that age…
My bestie in my phd program had all of her data and everything on a single shitty USB. She does some coding in R so she’s not tech illiterate. I slapped that shit out her hands so fast and bought her a durable external. Lmao
I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM
Well, could it be considered random access memory? I couldn’t really find a clear answer, mostly opinions.
A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks and magnetic tape), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement.
So maybe?
Although that’s basically the other end of “SSD is RAM”.
You could also install the OS to a RAMdisk.
Gigabyte even made some physical ones in the past.
The i-RAM was a PCI card-mounted, battery-backed RAM disk that behaved and was marketed as a solid-state storage device. It was produced by Gigabyte and released in June 2005, at a time when genuine solid-state storage solutions were generally still less affordable than an i-RAM product with superficially similar capabilities. The i-RAM utilised DRAM, a type of volatile memory, and was equipped with a lithium-ion battery to provide backup power.
Well, could it be considered random access memory?
Not really, a bit further down in the Wiki article it says:
RAM is normally associated with volatile types of memory where stored information is lost if power is removed.
Which is not really the case for SSDs (except for cached data that hasn’t been written yet). That said, yes you can use a SSD as RAM through pagefiles, swap partitions, or whatever, but the same is true for a HDD. So in the context of where to install an OS it’s a rather irrelevant detail. SSDs are power cycle persistent storage.
entire SSD as Linux swap maybe?
I had a computer class that was fairly self guided, do projects and tell the facilitator how it's good for community or whatever.
All I would do when she walked by is go to hackertyper and tell her I was coding.
So yes.
Oh, they def are. Most people under ~20 only use touch screen devices. In school, they have apps for building documents and power points, so they can just do those in their phone or a tablet.
I’m watching it in my high school aged niece: she barely knows how to type on a real keyboard, let alone how to access a command line, and even less so what can be accomplished through it.
Developers are that dumb when it comes to computers. Actual fucking developers.
Fucking backend developers who can’t even git commit without their fucking IDE handling it for them.
It’s so much easier to see diffs/merges with gui tools. 90% of the operations can be handled easily in the UI.
I only need to use the command line and use the docs when I do something complicated (I still screwed something up).
Because most of the time, the complicated stuff is just a few simple commands chained together.
99.9% of the time, git is easy. You don’t need to do everything on the command line, especially when dealing with diffs and merge conflicts. But in my experience most devs who flat out refuse to use it don’t understand most of the basic concepts because it’s all hidden behind a layer of abstraction. That’s why when I teach the basic concepts, it’s command line only. At least you know what that big Squash&Merge button does and why you should never click on the big Rebase button on main/master.
in our area was some kind of job orientation school (or more the advertisement to spend 3 years in the main part).
one of the people (probably 18-15) that wanted to look at programming or system integration (its combined) said that the teacher had a magic finger because that finger managed to turn on the pc
the teacher had a magic finger because that finger managed to turn on the pc
That might have been a joke that made sense if you haven’t seen the PC. When I was in high school, someone ripped out the power button which also used to have power LED in it, so there were just 4 mystery wires sticking out.
Yes. They are.
Everything is magic to them the way it was to the boomers. Open the box, plug it in, it works, hope nothing unusual happens along the way.
Of course there are plenty who know more, but I’ve got kids and helped them build their own PCs. They still know relatively little, but their friends don’t even understand that cellphones are computers and reject the idea altogether.
They are way worse than 20 years ago. High school kids now grew up with Roblox on the iPad.
I think you misunderstand how good with computers anyone ever was. Back then if you didn’t care to learn, you just didn’t have one.
Now you either are interested and learn it, or you just use an iPad/iPhone. I know many, many people who never used anything more complicated than an iPad.
There was a certain period where a lot of people really had a PC, and they learned because the PC had what they wanted. Nowadays there’s relatively little incentive.
Yea that’s something that I thought about when I rewatched Serial Experiments Lain recently. It was made in 1998 and they correctly predicted that in the future the internet was going to become mainstream, but because the only way to access it then was with PCs they also assumed that would mean that everyone would become super interested in computers too and most of the characters have rigs that would put mine to shame. Fascinating how one didn’t require the other, which I think would have seemed unbelievable at the time.
I used to tell a story about how my boss had to call me into his office to show him how to maximize a window after he accidentally changed its size. I had to do similarly basic instructions for several young news hires lately, and most don't seem to be picking it up very well.
It's less that kids are dumb with computers - since everyone's dumb with computers when they're inexperienced - and more that they're as unwilling to learn as my grandma; I'll show them how to do something, and they'll completely forget how by the next day.
I saw computers as an exciting new thing, but the next generation seems to think of them as outdated tech.
I’ve met young adults that don’t know how to type with ten fingers, that have never touched a desktop pc and can’t properly explain the differences between an OS, a browser and a search engine
can’t properly explain the differences between an OS, a browser and a search engine
Which, of course, was the goal of manufacturers all along. First computer you used a lot was a Chromebook? Google is all of those things. Was it a Windows 8 or later system? They damn near are the same thanks to web search integration with the start menu that only nerds like me care about disabling.
As a young person:
They really are. They get used to fancy GUIs and don’t understand anything about computers.
There are still a few that are good with computers, but that number is going down.
They are wayyy worse
I’m sorry to inform you that when I was in high school I had classmates ask me if I was hacking when opening up the command line. We don’t have snitches though and the people here have the ability to listen to explanations.
KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Computer literacy is definitely down in gen z and alpha.
stingpie@lemmy.world 10 months ago
IMO around 2006 is when you see the decline. It’s the delineation between kids who started with computers, and kids that started with phones or tablets.
curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
This is why my kids get to use the PC in the living room. Wireless keyboard and mouse, gcompris from boot until they are a bit older.
Though I am thinking of moving it all onto the htpc so its JF, emulators, gcompris, etc, but I haven’t decided how I want to do that yet. I was thinking of doing NFC for login, but my youngest is creative and would figure out he could grab mom’s phone to get game access.
TBD. And a huge digression.
Therefore@aussie.zone 10 months ago
kde neon and pam time for my kids. my 7 yr old is the only kid who knows how to use a computer in class, when friends visit for minecraft they try to touch the screen… computer literacy is something I intend to pass on.
Matriks404@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Gen Alpha are like 5 years old, so why would they?
ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
The oldest members of Gen Alpha would be 14, turning 15 this year…