And again, generation X completely forgotten about.
We’re already at that end of the alphabet again?
I know enough Millennials who don’t know shit. “My email address is www…”
Same. My older brother got scammed by the “hello this is paypal. Your account got hacked.” Eventhough i told him to hang up and that it is a scam
Anyone can get scammed, they just have to get you with your guard down.
Yeah i got scammed because they called while i was talking to a mechanic about my breakes. So i was rather distracted
Where did Gen X go?
I am happy to pretend not to know anything so as not have to fix everyone’s computer.
Even to the point that when someone is expected to fact check at a dinner table - I look at the young’ns as if I am hopeless so that they can do the lookup.
Am i a rare GenZ or do i just hang around with unicorns because we are all active in IT. Me programming nog hardware but still
You are rare and these stereotypes are mostly false. Most people in every generation can’t fix a computer. Maybe the only slight echo of truth is that during the millennial childhood and youth, at least in terms of raw numbers, home computers peaked as the main “tech” children were exposed to, so there might be a little more people who are not professionals, but have some extra comfort with them. Still, that’s a stretch.
There are some parts of Gen Z that can actually tear stuff apart and actually fix systems, but those are the nerds (which also includes me) that care enough to actually learn stuff. The majority is quite tech illiterate
Millenial here, its actually the same for us. Most millenials dont actually know how to fix a computer, either.
Just ask an AI to fix it.
YOUR COMPUTER NEEDS AN RTX 5090 SUPER RUNNING THE SKYNET CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICE TO WORK PROPERLY.
Easy
There are people out there who would happily give AI all the power in the world to turn their skulls into a highway or a scammer access to their entire bank account just so they don’t have to read out an error and google it for themselves out of fear of technology or even speaking to anyone about technology.
Sort of like those people who would rather drive their car off of a cliff rather than ever hear words from a mechanic or check their own oil.
And when it arrives it turns out you need a new computer as well. Also it’s lacking some features you need, and it has some new features nobody asked for. Also fixing it became much harder and doing so can get you to jail.
Not all of Gen Z are tech illiterate. Some of us used computers before iPads and smartphones. I used Windows XP and 7 long before I ever got a smartphone.
Same here, but I’m a border generation (born in the late 90s)
So am I! I guess we are more relatable to millennials. 10 years ago, people would call me one so whatever.
Well I don’t know… I worked with boomers who first built out the internet in my country. Now they mostly retired, but the Gen-Xers who remain are also incredible.
My dad who’s also a boomer and an anesthesiologist got admin rights at the hospital he worked at because he helped everyone around with their computer troubles and the tech support trusted him and were happy he reduced their ticket load.
Maybe you guys just know the wrong people.
But I’m Generation Z and I have to update my mom’s Linux Mint laptop because she can’t pay attention when I show her.
I wrote a shell script my mom just has to click on to run the updates and she still can’t figure it out. The filename is literally “ClickHereToRunUpdatesMom.sh”
I’m also Gen Z
Good damn it they forgot about us again. This is exactly why they call us Generation X!
Shh, we get to be anonymous, tech literate and be able to buy our own houses.
Shhh - let the Millennials do it, they need the validation, and most of us need a nap.
Ok but what about Gen X?
Napping. Wake me up when September ends.
We could fix it too, but we don’t wanna.
We’re burned out. It’s time to pass the soldering iron.
I tried to get into the whole Arduino thing as a Gen Xer. I couldn’t believe the complexity and back story you need to know before getting started. Totally baffled by the whole thing. Just give me a processor, some memory and a serial port. Why do I need an IDE, drivers, a bootloader, fifteen different kinds of whatevers I don’t understand, yes, I am burned out, where are the Doritos?
You can just install and invoke the compiler directly, and you only need a driver if you’re on windows and using the bootloader to program it, and you don’t need a bootloader if you have an ISP (programmer) so you can flash it directly, and you don’t need anything else though one of the main reason people use Arduino is for the libraries
I just wanted to generate a simple pulse from a switch press. Needless to say since I needed a breadboard anyway, I just popped in a 74LS123 with a resistor and a capacitor. I couldn’t even begin to understand what I needed to get that pulse from an Arduino. And I used to program PICs bare metal. It’s like the complexity traded places. On the PIC, the tools and process are dead simple. But writing the code for the little monsters required understanding every opcode and peripheral and how they interact. It looks like on the Arduino, I can just type sleep(5000) but to set up the whole thing to get there is where the complexity lies.
They’re too tired for that too. They’re more of a “blow in the hole and jiggle it” people.
To my fellow Gen X’ers…
Shhh!
Let someone else deal with the inept on the other end of the phone. Be happy we’re being ignored again.
I was going to complain, but you’re damned right.
Silence is golden.
And duct tape is silver
Millenial here:
This is good advice, sage even.
…
EDIT:
I didn’t forget the couple of extremely cool and also very knowledgable Gen X mentors/bosses I had, hahah!
I’ve spent the last decade training Millennials just for that task.
I’ll be over here screwing with the K8S cluster if you need me.
You seniors and your K8s I tell you whut
The meh generation
so middle of the road that they are left out of every discussion about generations. Boomers may suck, but at least they’re memorable lol
I for one am happy to be left out of the ‘generation war’. It’s stupid. In my day blah blah blah- no one cares gramps. Live in the now.
Back in my day we had weed. We still do, but we did back then too.
In my day you would either get trash weed with seeds all in it, or pay out the ass for ‘kind buds’. You can get whole Ounces in Michigan right now for what we had to pay for a quarter in the 90s… damn it, you got me doing it! ;)
I used to get my weed in a big trash bag behind the high school from a guy on a yamaha scooter. It was mostly seeds and stems and you had to smoke a lot to even get high but it was great because it gave you something fun to do with friends. I can’t handle the weed people smoke nowadays, one toke sends me straight to the nether realm.
Nah, they’re the last “boomer” generation. Fed a diet of TV and no internet growing up, but just in time to secure the last slice of normal with owning a home and having a family on a decent income.
You’re using that word again. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Boomer is a mindset not a timespan.
the last “boomer” generation. Fed a diet of TV and no internet growing up
Boomer is a mindset not a timespan
Lol.
Yeah?
You don’t have to be born from '46 to '64 to be a boomer, you have to act like a boomer to be a boomer. Being fed a boomer media/social diet growing up tends to make people grow up into boomers.
You’re conflating and confusing a term that has existed since the 60’s to describe a time span, with complex societal, economical effects on peoples mindset today.
Your inability to describe and explain the things you want to argue is the issue. Repeating the word again and again is not helping.
You’re completely wrong, but if you want to confuse the word even more, go ahead.
Let’s be fair, we millennial know how to fix stuff because stuff still can be fixed. We can glance back one generation away and learn about how stuff work back then, and also learn how to fix those stuff. Nowadays stuff aren’t meant to be fixed, (late) gen z doesn’t have thing to start tearing apart and learn about the inner working of stuff, because it’s all glued/snapped together, with the culture being once broke just toss.
Computers themselves are still pretty fixable.
At this point I’m happy to let someone else do it. Being everybody’s tech support sucks. I can just tinker with and enjoy my own setups in peace.
The generation that couldn’t be bothered.
“Meh”
Whatchu got going for you, pal? Crippling anxiety? Unable to socialize? Helplessly uninspired? The creativity of a mushroom?
Meh.
A denial.
A denial.
A denial.
A denial.
A denial.
Edgy.
Gen X - who, let’s face it, wrote most of this stuff - gets forgotten again.
Fine with me. Leave us the hell alone.
Oh it’s a printer? I, uh, yeah, no I don’t know anything about printers sorry.
That’s cool. We’re used to being forgotten and this way nobody will ask us to fix their computer.
Gen X is the Aslan lion meme: “Do not cite the deep computer repair magic to me, Millennial. I was there when it was written.”
Asian lion?
They mean Aslan, aka big kitty Jesus, from the Narnia books.
I read big kitty Jesus as big titty Jesus and was confused
You’re thinking of Gandalf Big Naturals. Easy mistake to make.
Better than Wither Big Naturals
Damn autocorrect.
As one of those Gen-X that actually helped create the dumpster fire we call the modern Internet, I have come to realize that we fall into two camps. You either look young enough to be classified as a Millennial (my wife) or you look old enough to immediately be thrown in the Boomer bucket (me)…which is really unfair because no other generation has hated and fought the fucking Boomers longer than us.
I’d love to show some GenZ photos of Matt Damon, Bem Affleck, Cillian Murphy, etc. and ask them what generation they think they are.
The struggle is, we all live long enough to be the next boomers. Maybe in 10 years it is: “OK, Gen-X”
I think what’s happening is Millenials are starting to get the “OK Boomer”.
Yep it’s just a phrase now and people don’t know what boomer was.
Before I deleted Facebook entirely, I briefly flirted with a Facebook group of Aussie gen xers for a bit of nostalgia, and I had to quit after only a few weeks because the ‘back in my day’ crowd became too insufferable. It’s already happened.
And while gen X definitely were instrumental in creating much of modern tech, most of them are still pretty hopeless at it. Watching some of my similarly aged colleagues trying to use a computer is an exercise in frustration.
By that logic, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak were Boomers so Boomers all know how to fix computers.
Let’s face it, “generational” assumptions are all too coarse to be valuable - and are probably just another way to separate and divide us all so we stop thinking about how to take down the ruling classes.
My dad is close to 80. He’s been PC savvy since the super early 1980s and he still is, although he is stuck in Windows because he’s a monster in the astrophotography world and most of his software isn’t supported in Linux etc. I dated a girl in college whose dad was one of the founding creators of the internet. Unlike Al Gore lol.
I taught my younger brother how to program in basic and pascal in the 80s. He’s now a super successful programmer. I’m pretty poor but I like to build fix and upgrade people’s computers as a hobby. I am gen x.
I dated a girl in college whose dad was one of the founding creators of the internet. Unlike Al Gore lol.
Bullshit. If her dad was one of the founders of the Internet, you’d know that the Al Gore meme was a Republican smear campaign.
I worked for Vint Cerf in the early 90’s. This is what he wrote to defend Al Gore against the Republican smear campaign:
Al Gore didn’t need a smear campaign for his nonsense. I was there too, we were laughing our asses off at the shit he said.
“We don’t think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he “invented” the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.”
- Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
He was a hell of a lot more of a founder than Al Gore was. Gore was a marketer at best.
Edit: you all are downvoting without even knowing who he was. Drink piss assholes.
Al Gore never claimed to have been the founder of the Internet. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn both defended Al Gore against idiots like you.
Rush Limbaugh was on the radio daily in the early 90’s calling Al Gore’s information superhighway a Democratic Boondoggle. Republicans were fighting to kill the Internet. Al Gore was fighting since the 80’s to fund it so it could grow into something bigger than a research network.
If Eisenhower can get credit for the US Interstate Highway system despite not pouring a drop of concrete, then Al Gore gets credit for the Internet.
You really love that piece of shit don’t you?
I worked for Vint Cerf. I later started my own ISP. I know the history of the Internet because I lived it.
I quoted Vint Cerf. What do you have to support your claim?
Here’s a 40 second video of Vint Cerf saying Al Gore did help create the internet:
I am Gen X
This sounds like a commercial (fellow GenX here), haha
And this is how we prefer it.
Whatever
I don’t know about you, but I quit doing that soul crushing work as soon as I could something I really loved.
no, they’re just choosing to not fuck with this shit because they’ve had enough
Hey, Millennial here. Just a friendly reminder to drink your metamucil today
They said boomers so same dif.
Ahhh I see. So what you’re saying is that Gen X is actually the root of our problems? Boomers were just another symptom that needed a GUI.
Eh. Genx understood how to work a VCR and deal with the rat’s nest of cables behind the TV
Computers are millennials
Older Millenial here. It was definitely GenX that paved the way for the computer world I learned, and it was mostly GenX who wrote the books and taught the lessons (often informal) that brought us what knowledge we have, at least in the beginning. Plus a small selection of exceptional individuals from older generations, including, dare I say it,… the baby boomers.
There is a big difference between having the people who invented something and being the people who families (and companies…) depend on to keep them running. This being about the latter.
Or, at least, in my family, we tended to not tell the engineers at Ampex to get their butts downstairs because dad didn’t understand why the color was off on the football game he recorded last night
Older millennial here, too. This is absolutely correct. (Btw we are called xenials 1981–86)
Utter BS. I’m on the old end of Gen X and I’m still building PCs for people and troubleshooting their shit when it breaks. I have yet to meet a much younger person who can do it as well.
Gen X seem to be either computer people or totally unaware. Millennials seem to be generally much less knowledgeable than the former and much more knowledgeable than the latter. Obviously there are millennials who are computer people, but my conception of them is more people who got computer science degrees than the person who lives in a shack in the woods and builds his own robots. Boomer computer people are even more formidable.
I’m not saying that’s true, but it’s the stereotype I have in my head.
Well put.
Your also on Lemmy so you’re the exception not the rule.
We were the first (of non-computer types) to adopt the web. We rode the AOL Instant Messenger train. What are you talking about.
AOL instant messenger was late to the party. ICQ started the instant messaging fad… that little “uh oh” notification sound is permanently burned into my brain.
Fuck that sound.
presses Ctrl+G to foghorn
I was on ICQ as well, but most people weren’t. I was generalizing to the contemporary audience.
Most millenials I deal with don’t know how anything works. They know apps and swiping screens. They are computer competent, knowing how to use them. Like knowing how to drive a car doesn’t mean you are a mechanic. They frequently know how do basic fixes like rebooting or reinstalling but less frequently have any true troubleshooting understanding. I don’t claim all millenials are like that, but broad stroke its not uncommon. I’d never say the generation as a whole is THE technical one though. I know more Gen Z that are technical by far, but that seems more matching Gen X to me. They either know technology or don’t. Nothing in between.
People can be exceptions to the norm. Most GenX we all interact with are as hopeless as the boomers.
Younger GenX are basically Millenials (but cooler and less uptight), and older GenX are basically Boomers (but nastier and louder).
No we’re not!!
Its almost like the “generations” are mostly arbitrary with a lot of overlap
When I joined the company maintaining Unix, I was one of the younger ones. It’s older X who knows how it’s all built; because they did it.
I had home computers 10 years before the internet really hit.
Very late Gen X or early millenial no. We came through VCR DVD it was a wonderful change. Also Torvalds would be Gen X.
