Computers have become generally good enough to be used without much knowledge. Same happened with cars. 30 years ago it was very beneficial to know how your car works. These days you can own and a car without knowing much about it and you will most likely be ok.
> These days you can own and a car without knowing much about it and you will most likely be ok.
It's a pretty expensive way to own a car, though: having to take it to a mechanic in order to maintain or fix things. But you're absolutely right that it's an option today that wasn't really an option 30+ years ago.
Except this breeds a learned helplessness, and makes every layman beholden to some wizard who knows the Old Wisdom, the right incantations to make the devices we rely on every day even function. It must feel awful to have to go through life at the mercy of tech crap that just doesn't work half the time, and little to no ability to reasonably deal with it.
Besides, so many problems now aren't even fixable by end users. Why? Because all of our computation happens somewhere in the bowels of us-east-1. If your budgeting program breaks on your computer, you might be able to fix it, especially if you have the source. But GET /budgets/123 returning a 500 is the equivalent of saying "pound sand", and you have zero hope of actually fixing the issue. You're at the mercy of some faceless on-call person halfway across the globe, and they're overworked and on their third bourbon of the evening.
while i agree that we might be moving too fast with our “progress” regarding tech, my guess is we’ll get it smoother before we fully move on.
however, don’t confuse helplessness with having better things to do with your time.
for example, we’re not helpless when we turn on a faucet to get water. we’re totally capable of hauling heavy buckets down the hill to the river and hauling heavy pales of water back home, then boiling the water to cook with and then again to take a bath. we just decided it’s a waste of time for every single person to do that for hours every single day. now we just turn a faucet and boom, that’s it. that’s not helpless.
we’re not incapable of hunting and gathering for hours every single day either. we just found a better way. now i can just go to the store grab a bag of chips without needing to grow potatoes for months first.
we’re not helpless, we just decided to be more efficient.
good news is, those who like growing a potato to make their own chips can still absolutely do it. if you’re someone who likes hauling 50 gallons of water by foot everyday from the local river, set up that fire and boil that water to your hearts content.
you may not have been implying it, but a lot of people lately seem to often confuse having different priorities with “helplessness.”
I don't want my acknowledgment to be confused with approval, if you depend on something you should have a reasonable understanding of it
As the family wizard, I expect people to know their passwords, keep track of their mails / services and such (And will refuse to save them / store them, within reason)
But even with tech literate people, sometimes they prefer to defer some stuff to me since they trust I'll know what to do
I do the same with stuff they are competent in, we are (mostly) better for it
As a millenial, I don't think it's either of our generations. IMO, the issue is just due to the general culture shift from generalized computers being used in the average person's daily life to smartphones becoming sufficient for most people's computing/socializing/shopping needs.
Well, also Chromebooks, which basically take away the opportunity to learn how to really use a computer in favor of only teaching you how to use a laptop to open Chrome.
When everything just works, you don't sit around half a day troubleshooting and having to do so feels exceptionally bad when you didn't spend half your childhood doing it to get your brand new game/graphics card/weird controller to work.
Most of my computer skills were self taught because I wanted to figure out how to do stuff with my computer as a kid without spending money, or how to upgrade my PC while spending as little as possible.
Ive encountered a shocking amount of 30yr olds that don't own a computer or know how to properly type. I'd say GenZ and Alpha have plenty of computer literacy as laptops were better integrated into education by time they got or will get to high school.
Outside of some AP classes that had their own computer labs most kids in my age group (early 30s) took one computer class in their entire secondary education. I knew one other person in my entire high school that coded.
They're all issued Chromebooks and live in a glorified browser and GSuite. There's something of an epidemic of students landing in college CS programs and not knowing how to manage files outside of Google Drive.
Millennials got to use real computers growing up. Gens Z and Alpha got locked down Google appliances tightly monitored by schools.
My kid still cannot really grasp the concept of "things being stored locally on the computer or on the phone vs. things being on the Internet". She doesn't understand why some apps require Internet and others don't. No concept of the boundary between local and network. "What do you mean 'it's stored on the phone'? YouTube is stored on the phone, right?"
I think a lot of this is developers intentionally blurring the line between local and cloud storage. If you were a layman iPhone user, would you be able to confidently tell me which of your photos are stored in iCloud and which are stored on your device? Apple is deliberately obfuscating it.
And not even in a "hey, the network is also a filesystem!" sorta transparent way, either. It's an obscure patchwork of half-baked ideas (especially iCloud. To this day, I'm just trusting that I'll be able to do a phone restore, if need be).
It doesn't help that network-transparent storage is _hard_. Before, if you wrote something to storage, there was a preeeeetty good chance it was going to wind up on disk. Yes, yes, disk IO is a dark art that's still probably full of subtle bugs, and there is no God, but generally: file -> disk was, and is, solid.
Now, you have file -> several HTTP round trips -> ope, fiber cut -> hung. And that's just to turn on your living room lights! I've seen networking code that is supposed to provide the same guarantees that the people writing filesystems and disk drivers do, and I can't say it usually succeeds. And people wonder why everything feels more and more broken.
> I think a lot of this is developers intentionally blurring the line between local and cloud storage. If you were a layman iPhone user, would you be able to confidently tell me which of your photos are stored in iCloud and which are stored on your device? Apple is deliberately obfuscating it.
It is exactly this. I'd like to think it is less developers and more marketing/product manager/bizdev types trying to keep their customers ignorant as a form of lock-in.
When I say "developers" I usually mean the entire development apparatus, including designers, product, and, yes, programmers. They all have agency, all work together to produce the product, and should share the honor and/or blame for their product.
I fully believe this, but that is just bonkerstown to me. I mean, okay, I guess the Plan 9 folks eventually won, I just didn't expect "the computer" to be "Google.com".
Of course, university IS meant to be an introduction to whatever your field is, but those of us with in-depth computer knowledge, even basic knowledge of something like Java, had a much easier time of it.
I think it's a little of: generations being more disconnected than before, cars and other items being more complicated and less easily repairable (remember you used to pop out a battery on your phone), a culture of buying cheap and replacing instead of taking the time, energy, and learning to fix.
I think looking at the prevalance of something like DoorDash delivering fast food to people shows you how strange culture has gotten.
