not sure how most do anything. echo? most need a button says 'click here'. can drag a horse to water...

Don't worry, my fair tech-literate maiden. I, a tech-dyslexic, am here to bring down the collective IQ and make the chamber echo less. You can thank me later, for adding some much needed intellectual diversity to the mix.

The store I work at mostly hires immigrants. While I would say that the language barrier is squing things a little, my coworkers generally have never handled technology before, even if they were previously in a role that had a high level of education.

Take one of my coworkers for example. When she asked me what I was reading, my fumbled attempt to explain fanfiction might as well have been pure gibrish. She didn't even have a concept of a book that isn't educational, never mind not knowing the translation of "fiction". After explaining the concept, she said "Oh, like the Bible?"

I think I might have done a mental bluescreen at that one.

Even just this last week, she seemed to be genuenly confuzed when I explained that I was writing a book. She kept asking "oh, are you in school then?" as if the only reason to ever write stuff was for school.

Anyways, my point is; the average everyday person has likely never so much as owned a smartphone, never mind knows how to boot off a usb drive. It's not just an immigrant thing either, my familly is almost utterly unable to have conversations with me because they don't even recognize 3/4ths of the words I need to use to describe the concept I need to explain to explain why I was laughing at a meme.

or at least navigate a directory through the command line

Why, obviously. I mean who hasn't read through the ls(1) man page at least once?

It totally is. That's why I'm here. Depending on the server, you also get a side of non-authoritarianism and strong privacy beliefs.

About the time they get a list of services to pick for sign up, they lose interest or freeze, exhibiting decision paralysis. That one time they installed ImagineDragns.exe and the computer had to be taken to be cleaned, set them down a path of I don't know what this is, I won't touch it that keep us employed.

I’ve been saying it’s an echo chamber for a while now and it makes me spend less time here.

I am a software developer so yes on the coding.

I lived in a tech echo chamber until I was in my 30s. This is because my dad is a baby boomer computer engineer who was working with computers since the 70s and we always had a computer at home (no consoles, just computers). First was a c64, we even briefly had a c128 (that didn't work) and then we got a 386 followed by pentium machines and we first hooked up to the internet in the 90s... and before the internet we went on dial up BBSes run by ultra nerds.

My dad still keeps up with tech and is probably better with computers than many recent CS graduates. It wasn't until I worked in tech support that I realized... Holy shit! There are people who have no idea their computers have directories! As in, if the shortcut isn't on their desktop, then their program might as well not exist.

Also one thing I learned that if you tell someone to go to a site and you spell the URL to them, then 99.9% of the time they will Google it, because they don't know what an address bar is.

I used to think those 'how to use a computer' courses in college were a giant waste of time (and an easy A for people like us) but I realize that these people could absolutely benefit from something like that.

And that is when I was working with people who had laptops mostly. When I worked in mobile tech support... fuck me! Do you realize that for a sizable chunk of the population the only computer they have is their smart phone? Those people are far, far worse. When I worked in mobility we were not allowed to hang up on clients for any reason (it was grounds for immediate termination) but at least a few times a week I had to deal with a client who did not know how to hang up their phone! No joke. They were accustomed to the other person hanging up and they didn't know how to do it!

This is doubly frustrating when those people are using flip phones rhat have a clear hang up button on them.

So yeah, acknowledging we are in a bubble is a good thing. But it isn't a bad thing to hang out with fellow tech nerds either.

I discovered the USB boot by accident and thought my laptop bricked for no reason!

This used to be what people said about digg and then about reddit

Definitely very echoey in here.

Hello?

^Hello?^

When I first read this I thought the title was "tech illiterate" which I thought was a bit rude, but anecdotally true.

Sure we've got healthy linux and programmers communities, but I think most people are just regular degular folx.

This is true but I ultimately don't care.

Is there any social media site that isn't an echo chamber? They're designed that way on purpose in most cases.

There are enough forums catering to idiots. I appreciate the better moderation, tech savviness, and lack of tolerance for right wing BS on Lemmy.

100%. Thats why I like it here hahaha

I don't understand any of that shit. Nerd

I do read hardcopys of 2600 though

I am not a programmer, not a geek, but just the ability to recognize problems and then find and implement the solution gives me the aura of an omniscient wizard. Simple things like: We have an automatic drying machine for work clothes here, but we haven't been able to use it for YEARS! A Google search, manual found. We now have the third coffee machine. They always break because of the chalky water. When we descale, the display still lights up: If I really go through the instructions in the manual step by step, it suddenly works. And that's before we get to any multiple screens or Excel problems with the sum function.

If you can interpret your car's manual, you're a hero. If you can also get hold of the vehicle's repair manual, then you're a wizard. And if you understand the sum function in Excel, then you are a danger to your supervisor.

I mean creating an account is no different than creating any other online account so I have to think the average netizen can do that. navigating the command line is much more rare of a thing and coding more so although it does not take much command line before you might want to modify some home directory files and that leads to scripting. Booting from a usb setup already to do it I think is not toooo uncommon but setting up a usb drive to boot an iso you put on it is a different story. Your right though that given what the federation is Im guessing it likely has a tech ratio similar to slashdot I reckon.

As someone who is way too tech literate I would argue tech should be made more accessible. I wholeheartedly disagree with the walled garden approach, but the fact that I just had a conversation with my friends with the result of "but I won't use a password manager, because it's too complicated" is very eye opening.

Here's my setup for instance: Bitwarden, I log into my own server (which it self is kind of a hidden setting), then go into Settings > Autofill, check everything, grant a dozen obscure permissions (most people won't know what they are) and then sometimes it just doesn't work. Yet again sometimes it randomly loses said permissions and I have to grant them again, meaning I couldn't even help someone while setting it up, because eventually it might break.

People should be able to download a password manager of their choosing and then grant a "this is a password manager" option, which shouldn't be easily exploitable. Instead apps and websites should clearly declare login forms, but they don't really so these apps need a fuckton of permissions, over which we should obviously have granular control, so fucking password managers of all things become a powertool.

And these kinds of things happen ridiculously often, over way too much different tech stuff.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.