“oh, you know so much! howd you do that?”

“grandma, i literally only typed dir.”

  • golden_zealot@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    One of my favorite comparisons is computing to magic. They say that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

    A lot of people have a hard time drawing that comparison, but if you tell them that there are very special, rare silica rocks that you can only find in specific places on earth, and that if you inscribe one of these rocks with billions of tiny transistors runes and then power infuse the rock with electricity lightning you can actually make trick the rock into a processor thinking, and that this now let’s you create software incantations which explain to the processor thinking rock how to execute a program do specific things for you, then they begin to see why.

    • bombadil@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      Give someone bash, and they’ll shell for a day. Teach them fish and they’ll shell for the rest of their lives.

      • dosuser123456@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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        16 hours ago

        teach them batch, theyll ask for an ibm pc and a floppy

        teach them basic, theyll ask for a c64 instead. and a cassette, apart from the floppy

  • rmuk@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    “I’m gonna pop out and get some lunch because this is going to take a while and definitely isn’t just an SSH into an Ubuntu box running apt update/upgrade in a loop.”

  • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    As someone living in more rural demographic, replace grandma with every person with a cpu driven device. To quote my dad regarding his cellular trailcams “Wtf is updatefirmware? Stop making up words.”

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      2 days ago

      The whole “old people are bad at tech” thing is a bit long in the tooth now. Many people who grew up with computers are now old, and many young people are just as baffled by the command line as any grandmother.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 days ago

        There really was a magic learning window 1990-2010, I think. Some people who were there are still bad at technology, and a select few from before are good at it and maybe even helped build those systems, but the prevalence is night and day.

        • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          Yes but I’d say it started 10 years before that, growing in numbers through the first few years of the 1980s.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            2 days ago

            That could be, it was a rough period. I wasn’t around for the beginning, and even the end is approximate as locked down mobile OSs and similarly user-opaque systems gradually came to dominate.

            Kids today can still learn computers, but they have to explicitly try. I think something analogous happened with early cars. The first guys had to be able to personally maintain and repair the whole thing, and then over time it gradually became an area for experts and the odd enthusiast only.

    • SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Reminds me of the Hollywood trope of a character saying “In English please” after any reference to something on a computer.

      I hate it so much when they do it. The writers should just say it the way an IT admin would and move on. Pretending that the character is speaking another language is just anti intellectual bullshit.

      • rmuk@feddit.uk
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        1 day ago

        Have you ever seen A Touch Of Cloth? It’s a superb send-up of police procedurals. There’s a scene where the main character, Cloth, is explaining some not-very-complex idea like you said and one of his lackeys replies, “Can you explain it like I’m some kind of viewer, guv?”.

  • devilish666@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It same when i was called by friend who worked at police HQ, updating linux with showing terminal at full screen because i want to know if udate successful or not while i reinstal windows at some computer in that room.
    all police that station almost killed me because they tough i hacked police database just because they saw terminal with some progress bar installing linux update.

  • lemmyng@piefed.ca
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    2 days ago

    That’s because the default color scheme is white on black. Just change it and Poof! Blue magic, red magic, yellow magic… so many possibilities!