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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Programmer Humor
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The next generation of script kiddies is going to be iPad babies. It’ll be interesting to see, since the majority can’t use anything in tech unless it’s an app.
We built computer labs in schools, to teach kids how to use computers. Then we decided computers are ubiquitous enough that we didn’t need computer labs anymore. And now we have an entire generation that doesn’t know how to use computers, because they use their phones and tablets for everything instead.
I saw a tweet that said something like "It's amazing that somehow we were only able to produce a single generation that knows how to properly use computers" and now it lives rent-free in my head.
Meh, maybe 10% of a single generation at most know how to use computers. Technically savvy millenials vastly overestimate how technically savvy other millenials are.
Even if it's just 10% of millennials, that still feels higher than both the older and younger generations. I'm in my 30s and a lot of people I went to school with can at least do basic things on the computer, since we had computer classes in primary (elementary) school and high school.
I think there was a golden 20 year era for learning basic computing. If you were a kid somewhere between 1985 and 2005 you had to figure out some slightly more technical things to use a computer. I'm late Gen X and so was exposed early on to the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS, but kids working with Windows 3, 95 and 98 would have developed similar skills.
The iMac was the herald of the end.
Genuinely curious: what made you think that? The iMac itself doesn't really strike me as a "simplified" computer, but I might be missing something.
Meh, lots of Dino gaming, not a lot of computer tinkering as I recollect.
fr, whenever i open the terminal on my school pc everyone immediately thinks im 'hacking'
sir that is just how i update my programs
Eegh, even in high school (thirty-something Millennial here) I got that. "Woooaaahh, is that code there?!?" "Uhh... it's an article? It's in plain English. You know, your own native language? There's even a class at this school called that. I know you know this because you were in that class last period. What I'm saying is, I don't understand how the same language you just read out loud an hour ago suddenly looks like arcana on a computer screen."
... It's extra weird because no one ever just happened to go shoulder-surfing when I was actually programming. 🤷
I'm a millenial who does tech support in a school and I see this every day. Older people and young kids generally are pretty clueless about doing anything in a computer.
I always thought the generations after the millennials would use a computer as second nature as they would be born when computers were already everywhere. Instead, they are just as useless as boomers.
But millenials always manage the basics. And learn stuff quick when they have too. I doesn't matter if it's a teacher or a janitor. It's a different mindset.
I am my companies best employee, and am now a manager for the sole reason i know how to concatenate and use find and replace in excel.
I don't think the percentage for gen X is much lower. But those people simply engaged with a kind of computer technology in their youth that is irrelevant today, and had to keep up with a lot of new things since then.
Whenever one of my closest friends (early 30s) needs help it's like helping my grandparents.
Every millennial I know, knows how to use a computer.
I graduated high school class of 2005 in a random rural high school in North Carolina. Everyone in my graduating class knows how to navigate a file system, ie knows how to find homework.txt in My Documents/Homework, can type an essay in MS Word and could do a simple invoice or something in Excel. I don't think they even offered programming classes, and I don't think I met anyone who took CAD drafting or whatever, not until college.
How else did you get music?
If you mean "point and click" level of proficiency, sure.
I have no idea what level of proficiency you had in mind.
It doesn’t kinda feel that way, doesn’t it?
I also blame Apple and their walled garden approach to software
A lot of schools have Chromebooks too. You're not doing any serious business, CAD, Photoshop, or programming there.
ChromeOS has a full Linux VM. Maybe schools disable it though.
I have a feeling that the OS in question here is Windows. Not as bad as Apple's walled garden, but similar results.
I grew up with windows and it's sloppy implementation of a lot of things is a big reason why I got into computers because it let me fuck around with things under the hood easily. I remember messing around with the registry to do things that you couldn't edit in the settings guis.
Have you tried Linux or the BSDs? Having spent a lot of time on Linux and Windows, the former feels like a well oiled machine with many fine tuning screws, while the latter feels like a rusted old trunk that needs a crowbar to get anything done.
Of course, Windows being so janky for power user stuff made Linux a lot easier for me to pick up in comparison
I don't want to hear that Apple was right. "What's a computer?" What isn't these days?
I forgot how much I hated that commercial. And I hate even more that it was ahead of its time.
I forgot that ad and had to look it up. It's pretentious and annoying as hell.
I wonder who is going to write the apps in the future.
Chatgpt, of course..
Ugh. You’re probably right. Finally all those idiots who come up to me going “I’ve got a great idea for an app” will actually be able to release their great idea :)
I used to be able to say “ideas are easy, work is hard”. Now we won’t be.
I'm yet to hear anyone saying that chatGPT can navigate the complex series of design decisions needed to create a cohesive app (unless of course, it was trained on something exactly the same). Many people report spending an inordinate amount of time rectifying the mistakes these LLMs make. It sounds like a glorified autofill (I haven't used them yet). I shudder to think about the future of the software ecosystem if an entire generation is trained to rely entirely on them to create code.
LLM is great for writing code in small snippets. I’ve used it for quickly writing batch files, for instance. I couldn’t be bothered to look up how to format something obscure. So I use an LLM like ChatGPT to do the bulk work, then I just double check what it gave me.
I wouldn’t use it for anything over ~100 lines at a time. Just like with long conversations, it will have a tendency to “lose the plot” and start forgetting things that it said early on. Because as things get added to the conversation it has to parse more and more data. So it’ll start to drift off topic as conversations get longer.
It can also be handy for debugging sections of code. Because programming is just a form of language with strict grammar/diction/spelling rules. And a LLM will be really really good at spotting stupid grammar mistakes. It’ll instantly notice your missing semicolon and point it out to you, which can save you a ton of frustration.
Just like with any tool, how well it works is entirely up to the user. It will likely progress to the point of being able to manage longer code eventually. But right now it’s still incredibly useful as long as you accept its limitations and work within them.
I think you’re right at the minute. Whether you’ll be right in the future I’m less certain.
and they're going to be precisely as nonsensical as those AI articles are
sure, you can get good output from LLMs, but companies are absolutely not going to bother putting in the effort to do so, as not putting in effort is the entire point.
it's at least nice to know that corporations will enshittify themselves out of existence, while one guy living in a basement will silently release something they poured their soul into and it sells 5 billion copies in the hour
AI for the heavy lifting, some poor overworked freelancer overseas fixes issues and refines, and then maybe, mayyyybe a domestic review team of senior coders for pen/security testing.
!remindme 2030
"AI"
People wrote software before there's was computers for them to grow up with. They'll be able to develop these skills in university's, colleges, coding courses or online.
I grew up prior to the app world. My exposure to computing during highschool was word, excel, access and once we used PowerPoint. Nothings changed, people are only taught what the teachers know.
I started from a similar background in school. Learning from books in the library and coding on a sheet of paper. Opportunities to get that in a real computer was hard to come by. Some teachers helped by pitching in to get me a few hours in the school lab. Those who like it start learning well before the resources become available. You don't need to wait till UG to gain those skills.
That said, how often do you see kids these days using a real general purpose computer suitable for coding? Like a desktop or laptop? Not phones, Chromebooks or tablets. In fact, it's bewildering these days to see programming tutorials start with a statement saying that you need such a device. It was a given, back in the day. And the other stories here don't paint a good picture.
It's probably the same amount as before. More phones and tablets haven't had a big effect on the amount of general purpose computers. There's devices today like raspberry pi and Arduino that fill the same niche as older general-purpose computers.
Your assume things are different and must be worse. This is a take old as time. Socrates complained about the youth no longer taking the studies as serious as his generation did. The world would have fallen into complete chaos if it were ever true. It's the conservative myth that things were better and can only get worse.
These kids accessing websites that tell you that a general purpose computer is needed, would have to rely on textbooks and magazines to get the same information in the past. A much bigger barrier, even identifying which ones you need.
To be fair, there has been a lot of complicated stuff to know/fiddle/find out to compile even a hello world, especially on windows (I guess?).
Skillsets skillsets, when the darn thing needs jre older than the one you have installed or tiger.dll is missing, what do you do ... ?
It's always easy until it isn't, and todays youth is probably more tech savy than what my peers was back in the nineties.
where's waldo.dll when you need them?