you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.

Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux

Only the oldest millenials did. When the youngest were born, the internet and Windows 95 were readily available and they were in middle school when the iPhone came out.

I appreciate this measured take. Whenever generational differences get brought up, they oftentimes seemed framed as if generations are biologically different creatures or willfully choosing to be stupid in some sector. In all, or at least must cases, it's what you suggest: people responding and developing based on what the environment has presented them.

Trouble is that there are enough millennials who also have absolutely no clue about computers. Between dude-bros who won't touch that nerd shit and girls who got told by their nerd boyfriend's that the computer will start to burn if they click anything besides their allowed icons a vast majority of people are glad if they know how to turn on the computer and print out their document.

Yes, there are probably a lot more computer literate millennials than in other generations. But even there it pretty much depends on family and friends. And in a pirate community on Lemmy most of the people will belong to the tech savvy bubble.

In our friend group even the most computer illiterate kid knew how to set up a LAN without a DHCP server. Their younger siblings had no idea a LAN was even a thing.

My wife's ex always told her that she couldn't understand how to work with a computer. Her older brother who works in IT wouldn't explain anything to her either. They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.

Exactly. Basically nobody in their 30s can, say, drive a manual car without a synchro, unless they specifically practiced it, because there is zero need to learn that skill. And basically nobody under 20 can set port forwarding on a router because there is basically zero need for that skill.

When I wanted sound on Arkanoid, I HAD to learn IRQ settings, so I did. But now that stuff just works.

I don't know how many time I answered the same thing to the exact same argument but here goes:

In short, it's most likely not true. You're implying the the millennials were generally more competent but it's very likely wrong, the vast majority of people in that gen had absolutely no clue what they were doing on a computer most of the time they just knew how to do a few limited things with them.

The apps didn't make the masses tech illiterate, the app adjusted to the existing ones and removed the stuff they couldn't never understand, like where to save a file to be able to find it later. (I've worked in a support call center and I can tell you with 98.5% accuracy that the lost file is in system32).

The gen-z has quite a lot of smart, curious tech savvy people, and a vast majority of tech-illiterate people, so did the millenial, and the X, and the boomers.

This whole generational superiority argument is just as baseless as it was when my gen was blaming yours for being lazy, not able to learn anything due to a short attention span and an obsession for brunch and avocado toast.

Yeah and let's not pretend that everyone back in 2002 was eMuling or torrenting and cracking videos games. I knew so many people who failed at ripping a CD to MP3 or copying it with a CD burner.

special interest

poor skill of peers

(I'm totally with you though)

I blame google for the demise of well-organized folders. Their approach to email was "chuck it all in one big folder named Archive, and you can search for it using keywords that you will definitely remember when you need to find it again!"

It's a useful tool, but paved the way for the current state of affairs where people get overwhelmed by their email because they have 150,000 unread emails in their inbox and as a result, don't read an email until you tell them the entire contents of their email via the inferior messaging platform known as texting.

Twenty years ago when I was 13, I started doing web stuff. This was back when everything was super simple, so everything to get a webserver up was super manual. I'll mention port forwarding at my current job and there's this slice of people that are 28-40 years old that know what I'm talking about.

People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.

I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. "Walled Garden"

They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.

I don't interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can't do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn't their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don't control.

Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It's already showing signs of enshittification. We don't have a viable third option.

It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.

I remember installing a keylogger on the school library computers, then "accidentally" disconnecting the dialup internet and asking the teacher to type the login credentials again. I bet the ISP was confused when they saw so many concurrent logins after hours, all playing Quake and downloading huge files.

I truly hate that phones don't readily have file browsers and folders, and when you do add them, they aren't effective. Mostly that would be useful when moving files between phone and computer. It's not simple even to get the computer to mount the phone's drive, probably because everyone is fine with having all their files "in the cloud."

The usenet has many treasures

How else are you going to get your hands on the latest build of Hannah Montana Linux?

Hats off for our poor German friends. It's definitely not easy over there, but if you do the private torrent tracker + VPN combo, you can be relatively safe.

Rightsholders have seeders sitting in public torrents to grab IPs to sue about. Private trackers are essentially a "club" that only invites known users, (friends of friends) and as such, fewer (not zero) rightsholders are able to join, and as such, fewer instances of being referred to a lawfirm simply because there isn't anyone in the swarm who is a rightsholder who only wants your IP... because they don't invite those kind of people most of the time.

Rightsholders like how hanging fruit like public torrents. Private trackers help take a lot of the stress away.

However, I don't know how it works in Germany so maybe rightsholders over there are more zealous.

Elder Gen-X: "I spent all weekend making this mix tape off of songs on the radio. I even got London Calling without the DJ!"