• Jenpocalypse@lemmy.world
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    6 minutes ago

    I teach high school and it’s amazing to me how much these kids don’t know how to use a computer. They can click a button and get to tik-tok. They read the first answer the AI gives them. That’s it.

    I keep telling them they should be better at computers than an old lady like me.

  • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
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    16 minutes ago

    Youth bad, hate youth

    Haha funny

    This is the same rhetoric the Boomers used to keep us down.

    Every generation is smarter than the last, us millennials need to learn to cope without ageist propaganda.

    • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.eeOPM
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      13 minutes ago

      I’m not a millenial, I’m a part of gen z.

      A high amount of this generation is hopeless when it comes to tech. There is outliers and exceptions, but as a whole, tech literacy has gone down.

      • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
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        6 minutes ago

        I’m a millennial computer scientist

        This is literally propaganda

        This is the exact same as boomers thinking they are superior to millennials for knowing how to drive stick shift or write cursive.

      • HalfSalesman@lemm.ee
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        5 minutes ago

        At the very least, your generation has the ability to eventually learn tech usage. Its not too late like it is for boomers.

  • vvilld@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    I’ve long said that I believe Millennials, as a generational cohort, are the best at typing that ever has been and ever will be. We were the first generation where adults really recognized that we’d be using computers our entire lives and took steps to teach typing. But, so much more importantly than that, we socialized through typing. I had typing classes in school, sure, but I learned to type quickly on AIM and in chat rooms.

    Earlier generations only really typed for business or school. Later generations socialize over phones, so they, too, only use a physical keyboard for school and business.

    I guess I should amend this theory to include all tech literacy in general.

    • Taleya@aussie.zone
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      1 hour ago

      Typing was taught to boomers and genx first dude. In fact, as a liminal i’d readily say i’ve had an arseload more typing “teaching” than you have - both keyboard and typewriter- and i’ll wager my mother in the age of typewriters had even more.

      • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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        51 minutes ago

        The typewriter generation are probably faster overall because they don’t make mistakes.

        Being able to delete any error makes you far less careful.

        Sure, modern programs will autocorrect for you, but autocorrect to what?

        • ebc@lemmy.ca
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          30 minutes ago

          Yeah, it was funny teaching my grandmother to use a computer… She couldn’t use a mouse, but she typed really fast!

      • walktheplank@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        I took typing class in high school. On a typewriter. Gen X. My mom was a trained stenographer in her younger years.

        • Taleya@aussie.zone
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          1 hour ago

          X here as well. But 78. So i got to take advantage of the digital age without having my teen stupidity immortalised on it. Truly the sweetest of spots.

          • walktheplank@lemmy.world
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            52 minutes ago

            I am a bit older but similar. My dad was an early adopter of computers even though he had zero idea how to use one.

    • kylo@programming.dev
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      2 hours ago

      As a Zoomer, I also had typing classes, but I learned how to type because I wanted to be able to quickly send messages in Minecraft when I was like 7 years old 🙃

      • Kissaki@programming.dev
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        1 hour ago

        I write a lot on my keyboard, and have been for a long time. But my left hand is not on SDF but on AWD because that’s the default hand position for gaming/shooters. 😬

        Doesn’t stop me from typing fast or blind though. Otherwise I would have done something about it.

    • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      I didn’t teach my older zoomer kid to type. He learned on his own out of the necessity of chatting with friends in online games, played on his computer. He uses the first two fingers of both hands, and he’s faster than me, who learned in school and has been a touch-typist for 40 years.

      I think we’re moving away from keyboard and mouse, anyway. It will be AR headsets with voice, eye tracking, and hand gestures for most use, and keyboards will be used only when direct input is needed.

  • moopet@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    There’s one generation between boomers and zoomers? I’m pretty confident I know who it is you’re forgetting.

  • Evotech@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    I was pretty worthless with computers at 16 too.

    Now I’m almost 40 and I’m working In the industry and slowly getting worse again

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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    6 hours ago

    Is this some Acrobat functionality or something?

    Off the top of my head, there’s pdfjam, pdftk and imagemagick (don’t forget the --dpi switch) who could probably do that, after reading the man pages. Or ghostscript’ gs, if you want to go in-depth.

    But generally, just rotate the source material you’ve got the pdf from. That’s how it is intended.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      4 hours ago

      I’ve used ghostscript a few times to reduce the quality of images within a pdf, so they wouldn’t be freezing my phone while reading. From ~80mb to 25mb

      The folks at Corvus Belli could learn a thing or two about that when making the pdfs for their Warcrow game (the core rules pdf is 118MB for 60 pages)

  • VampirePenguin@midwest.social
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    3 hours ago

    There are tech savvy people in every generation and some dumbos. IMO the low bar for being tech savvy has nothing to do with PDFs, it’s whether or not you can install a functioning operating system on a device. Anyone who can do that can figure out any of that other stuff.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
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      22 minutes ago

      I’m conflicted on this. Back in the day, I would normally say: building your own computer was the bar (which includes the OS to me).

      Times have changed and all of a sudden (or so it feels) it seems that navigating UIs seems to be making people tech savvy? Quite a lot of kids can navigate things faster than I can, but don’t really get what an OS is at all. That makes sense because iPads, Android Phones, Macs and most machines don’t require any building or OS installation.

    • Rancor_Tangerine@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      That’s a terrible bar for who is tech savy. I can guarantee Zoomers, on average, are far less competent with technology. It’s not their fault they grew up with apps and iPhones.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      3 hours ago

      That’s not the bar it used to be. You don’t even need to worry about device drivers anymore.

      Even the most difficult Linux installs now aren’t that much more complicated than XP was.

      Anything from Home Assistant / Sonarr / Radarr / ntfy / MQTT / LoRa would make my current basic savvy list.

  • hydroxycotton@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    I’ve trained a lot of 18-22 y/os in the last 10 years and they are fine. Let’s not become the boomers please…

    • endeavor@sopuli.xyz
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      8 hours ago

      I am a 30 yr old boomer in uni with 18 year olds and they are mostly fine. We are learning programming so the base qualification is to not dumb with computers. BUT My teacher friends are supporting OPs screencap where children do not understand computers at all. Theres plenty of tales of students being asked to log into a 15 minute online test and entire lesson is spent teaching them how to log in one by one. The issue is they click the biggest and flashiest button and quit once they discover it does not lead them where they want to go.

      There is plenty more evidence that the next generation is unable to handle anything more complex than most popular apps on phone. Is it really surprising when everything has been designed to just work and be streamlined so you don’t have to troubleshoot anymore.

      • Taleya@aussie.zone
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        1 hour ago

        I legit have an acquaintance 15 years my junior regularly begging me for the the best torrent sites. And they’re pretty savvy for their generation

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        4 hours ago

        The issue is they click the biggest and flashiest button and quit once they discover it does not lead them where they want to go.

        Anyone that ever pirated anything learns real quick that those are the buttons you avoid like the plague

        • Kissaki@programming.dev
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          1 hour ago

          I hope anyone who uses Google without an adblocker learns that very quick too.

          Bait ads is the biggest attack vector to bring users to install malware.

          • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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            30 minutes ago

            They don’t learn, despite phone ads using the X button (the one supposed to close the ad) to open the fucking play store page

    • real_squids@sopuli.xyz
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      12 hours ago

      Yeah, being dumb is hardware-agnostic. As some guy put it, “being stupid isn’t a big deal anymore; some of my best friends are stupid”.
      It just stunlocks me a little bit as younger people have been around tech their whole life, unlike boomers, who were born before computers.

      • Taleya@aussie.zone
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        1 hour ago

        Younger millennials down have had their exposure be primarily gardenwalled, locked down equipment. Tablets and smartphones and apps, oh my! The sort of thing that discourages casual exploration and experimentation.

        They are fuckin’ skin masters though.

      • ilovepiracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 hours ago

        “been around tech their whole life” more like they have a locked down phone, locked down game console and MAYBE a desktop computer. It’s too rounded out and consumer friendly now, you never have to peek under the hood.

      • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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        10 hours ago

        Boomers have been seeing changes in communications, culture, and technology as revolutionary as anything in the last 20 years, for their entire lives. Things didn’t start getting wild just recently. It has been a romp for the last 200 years.

  • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works
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    13 minutes ago

    Eh PDFs are just annoying to deal with. I could do this stuff the adobe acrobat when I had the paid version in school but I’m cheap and no longer have it. If I’m feeling desperate I’ll find the ghostscript command that does it otherwise I just do something horrible (for example scanning to jpeg rather than PDF creating an HTML page with both images and printing that to PDF)

    From writing a limited amount of code to generate PDFs from scratch the standard is just cursed. It was using 7 bit ASCII until fairly recently resulting in an eighth of the document being wasted space. Also when they switched to PDFs being an open standard the specs went from something freely available on adobe’s web site to a challege of how to send 98 swiss francs to ISO to get access.

    • LwL@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      PDF24 has been my savior for anything pdf related. I learned about it and suddenly I no longer hate pdfs.

  • BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    Smarmy pride in knowing how to rotate a PDF is sounding a lot like “kids don’t know how to change a spark plug these days”. Tech keeps moving forward. Zoomers are way faster with their phones than you’ll ever be, and they know all the AI boosted efficiency features inside and out.

    • Rancor_Tangerine@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      I have a lot of empathy for Zoomers and do not think they’re universally bad at “things”, but they are bad with technology as a cohort. That’s not up for debate. They grew up with apps they didn’t have to open the hood for. Anyone using AI without a foundational understanding of this stuff is a recipe for disaster.

    • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.eeOPM
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      5 hours ago

      I am a part of gen z, and while they may be fast with some specific functions of their phone, they are useless when it comes to anything on a desktop. So many people don’t understand filesystems.

      And the Ai boosted stuff is usually shite.

      • BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        And the Ai boosted stuff is usually shite.

        It is trash but it is going to be very important trash to know how to navigate.

        • Rancor_Tangerine@lemmy.world
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          1 hour ago

          It’s not, man. If you know how to use google, you know how to get the majority of the benefit from AI tools. At higher levels there’s some light additional usage, but the technology is still struggling there.

    • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 hours ago

      Zoomers are not, in fact, way faster with phones than I’ll ever be. I clumsily use my swipe keyboard faster than they type (and they look at it like it’s black magic even though I’ve been using that shit for 10 years now).

      Also I know what a file system is. Have you tried to get a non-tech oriented zoomer who’s been using phones and tablets all their life to wrap their head around that concept ? Yet my boomer mom can use it competently, and she’s quite bad with tech.

      The younger generation does some things better and more instinctively, true, but just like I never became a genius at electronics by only using them at a surface level all my life, and way more than my elders (and despite having some interest in it), the fact that they’ve been spoon fed tech doesn’t automatically turn them into technological übermensch or some shit.

      • Comment105@lemm.ee
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        5 hours ago

        I write so many wrong words due to swype it’s ridiculous, but it’s so nice to write with otherwise. Maybe I’ve been too slack with it and ruined the prediction algorithm or whatever. Maybe I’m just inaccurate. If I actually care, I’ll make sure to proofread, but often I barely glance.

        • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 hours ago

          Yeah it gets finicky especially if you write in several languages, but I think I’ve trained mine pretty well by trying to never let a wrong word through. Still has a hard time with repeating letters, or with words containing a succession of several letters that are close to each other on the keyboard though

          • Comment105@lemm.ee
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            3 hours ago

            Yeah, I’ve been swyping interchangeably between Norwegian and English on the same keyboard for years, and mixed in some Mandarin for good measure. That was on it’s own pinyin thing though, might not have affected the NB EN keyboard.

        • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 hours ago

          I’m not pretending that is some amazing achievement though ? Imo that is a basic requirement if you’re gonna use a computer

          • JandroDelSol@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            most zoomers just use phones and tablets, and mayyyybe a laptop for school. they’re using closed systems and never have to look at the files or anything. older zoomers may have experience if they gamed, especially things like early modded minecraft, but younger zoomers and gen alpha only use systems that do all the work for them

            • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              38 minutes ago

              Exactly. I know some brilliant zoomers who are absolutely helpless with that kind of stuff. And I know some who are huge computer nerds and are just as good if not better than me with them (and I’m a professional programmer) but that’s definitely not the general trend.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      5 hours ago

      No they don’t. They know ticktock better then I do, but you ask them to get into app data and you’ll get a blank look