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The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other s…
this is just a rant and not constructive.
An observation doesn't need to be constructive. I needs to be relevant and novel. This is a relevant and novel observation. The people seemingly feeling hurt by this - you do realize you're outliers, right?
The number of folks who genuinely understand computers has been rising at unprecedented rates. Just look at the number of employed programmers.
Does that mean most children understand it? Of course not, just like most adults don't. When Grandma is amazed that her grandkids manage to make Netflix work, I don't think there's any real expectation that they will become software engineers.
This is like bitching that kids from the 1920s don't know how combustion engines work. It's not productive.
They don't know what their car's choke would have been, or what a dwell tach is. So? They can still drive. Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I write assembly code that runs in supervisory mode. My kid couldn't write assembly code to save his life, but just taught me a new algorithm I'd never seen before. And he could learn assembly if he wanted.
I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200.
There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably younger) could manage to milk a cow.
The FFA has 700,000 members [2], and I'd bet that at least half of them could manage to milk a cow, so that's closer to 1 in 200.
This isn't quite a fair comparison since the article above was referring only to "teens", not "children", and the FFA numbers include members up to age 21 and includes members in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands).
[1] https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population...
The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other s…
I'd rather be like my kid and worry about making sure his Fortnite is updated than playing the HIMEM.sys jigsaw puzzle that I had to.
The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather be like my kid and worry about making sure his Fortnite is updated than playing the HIMEM.sys jigsaw puzzle that I had to.
I've only got 16MB of ram, Warcraft needs at least 8MB of Extended ram but Quake needs at least 12 MB of Expanded ram. Damn I'm gonna need a boot floppy for one of them.
They don't know what their car's choke would have been, or what a dwell tach is. So? They can still drive. Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I write assembly code that runs in supervisory mode. My kid couldn't write assembly code to save his life, but just taught me a new algorithm I'd never seen before. And he could learn assembly if he wanted.
Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200. There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably youn…
I originally had typed "1 in 10,000" but that seemed too many kids....and it turns out I was utterly wrong!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The abstraction layers they are (typically) comfortable with have shifted 1 or 2 levels up.
Those level ups are pretty bad though. They take you from owning your data and devices to third parties having complete control.
So teenagers do what teenagers have always done? I agree with the others - kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way.