My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
I fucking hate that word ‘Innovation’. It is spammed by corporatebros who think their shit doesn’t smell.
“XYZ company already has all my data so I don’t care that they’re spying on me and selling my data to advertisers”
Fucking makes my blood boil. These people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, or self respect
blood boil
I’m the same, but I try to explain the errors of their ways in the most relaxed manner.
Most times it doesn’t make a difference but once in a while someone is receptive and makes a change. and it’s really rewarding.It has been theorized once 25% of the population accepts an opinion the rest tends to follow, so I try to be optimistic and take it one step at a time. Lately I’ve had the impression I’m seeing progress.
The thing is though, that most people don’t know why that’s a problem, and privacy advocates seem to think that ‘you’ve got a door on your bathroom’ is a gotcha.
If someone is giving Google their home address and work address, and planning the route to get traffic data, they’re not going to be concerned when Google Maps suggests their work address as a destination through the week. Same for their shopping data. ‘Of course Amazon knows what I like, I do my shopping there!’
We need better ways to explain it to people who don’t understand it, and who are not interested in it or the tech behind it. We have a big problem on Lemmy where we tend to assume that everyone understands the same issues as us, just not as well.
If someone is giving Google their home address and work address, and planning the route to get traffic data, they’re not going to be concerned when Google Maps suggests their work address as a destination through the week.
It isn’t that they aren’t concerned, that is actually something many people see as a benefit. Yes, I still use google maps because it remembers destinations and has traffic density alerts and a bunch of other stuff that require tracking but those are a separate thing from google selling that tracking data to third parties. The former is a benefit and the latter is a problem.
If you’re entering or exiting the tram, heads the fuck up.
People with no technical background insisting that “AI” is taking over and is sentient, even when I try to explain how it actually works. They refuse to believe that maybe all of those breathless “news” articles are clickbait hype-mongering.
“You just don’t like it because it’s gonna take your job!” Keep believing that, imbeciles.
I hear a lot of people worrying about this being the case in the future but I don’t remember hearing anyone claiming that about our current LLMs.
Linux nerds screeching about how Linux desktop works perfectly out of the box and with less time and effort then Windows/OsX.
It’s entirely counterproductive to adoption.
It works out of the box - if you do nothing at all to it and just browse.
But to do anything like getting all of your favorite programs, that’s going to take effort.
Not even. I need custom scripts for audio, can’t turn my display off and on I need to pull the HDMI cable, and Bluetooth is basically unusable.
“I got my 107 year-old great grandmother running Arch from the command line in 20 minutes! Now she browses with Lynx and hosts a Matrix server.”
Something I absolutely hate is when people say shit like “do you sell an apple charger?” The complete ignorance of what port your device uses or even what it’s called is infuriating. Look, you either have a usb-c or lightning port, and you only have a lightning port if your phone is from like a decade ago or something. You should know by now to look for usb-c cables. It’s especially frustrating when they get angry at me when they don’t understand what I’m talking about.
I’m a sales supervisor in an office supply store, and I get this ALL THE TIME! I once had someone argue with me over the name of the cable connectors and wondered why I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then they said, and I quote, “Well, to me that’s what I call them, so I’m going to just keep calling them that.”
People need to learn innovation is not always progress, and that some paths forward are dead ends.
Not exploring the Settings menu of a new device. That should be the first thing you do when you first power on a new device. Most people just go with whatever the default settings are. Hell, some have never even seen their settings menu beyond the wifi connection.
I would love to see a majority of people stop considering ‘new tech’ as the magical wand/solution to all their problems, and see them stop considering ‘new tech’ as a necessity in their lives. Whatever their age.
My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
Beware of that kind of shortcuts, they often can be very wrong.
Also, do you think old people not wanting to use whatever new app or service is more of an issue than younger people not be willing to not use same app or service?
Working in a store with a self-service printing center, I can tell you it’s a lack of wanting to learn, or even read. Instructions are spelled out on the copiers, but many of my customers will demand someone to help them before even looking at the device because they claim they are too old and not tech-minded enough to do it themselves. Actual excuses to not even trying.
I don’t disagree with you. I’m just amused that your example is printers and copiers, the tech that has been notoriously devilish to get working correctly from like the very beginning. New tech has certainly NOT made printing any easier or more convenient. Sometimes they simply require arcane incantations and a blood sacrifice. I still think people should at least try, but I totally understand why their threshold for “I’m over this shit and I want someone else (e.g. a pro like you) to fix it for me.” is so low specifically when it comes to printers and copiers.
Working in a store with a self-service printing center, I can tell you it’s a lack of wanting to learn, or even read. Instructions are spelled out on the copiers, but many of my customers will demand someone to help them before even looking at the device because they claim they are too old and not tech-minded enough to do it themselves. Actual excuses to not even trying.
Well, I do believe and hopefully you will believe me too when I tell you I regularly meet young people that can’t be bothered to learn much either. Does that mean all young people are lazy as fuck and unwilling to learn shit? Certainly not.
Laziness (like stubbornness, like all vices and like all qualities) is not an age thing. It’s a choice and a way of life.
It’s the way some persons chose to relate to the world around them in a mostly (self-)destructive manner. Real sad I will agree with you, but there is nothing new and it certainly not age-related.
Those ‘old people’ you regularly stumble upon at your workplace were young people themselves a few years ago, maybe even your age, and I’m willing to bet a whole penny that they were as lazy when they were young. Exactly like those young people I regularly meet nowadays will still be lazy once they get old.
Those persons we talk about, some of your older customers and those of my young people, are (probably) lazy but that should not mean all person their age are the same. And that makes a huge difference.
BTW, you did not answer my previous question: do you think old people not wanting to use whatever new app or service is more of an issue than younger people not be willing to not use same app or service?
Edit: there is one thing that I think I need to add: getting old (you most likely are still young) you get slower and things become harder to do, your body gets tired quicker and even your brains start to feel… somewhat less agile. It slows and one can fight against it (nearing my 60s I started learning Russian this year, and plan on brushing up on my Latin too… probably need to relearn it from scratch to be honest as I have not used it for decades), but this aging is happening and, well, it’s impossible to completely avoid it and to magically stay young. You will experience that too yourself, hopefully not in a self-destructive way.
Totally. There’s old duffers at work that struggle to open a word doc, but are strangely adept at Navigating Facebook…
And then there’s my girlfriend, wanting help with some arcane bullshit on Facebook because I’m ‘good with computers’ … but I’ve never used Facebook before, never even seen the page she’s messing with, and I only half understand what she’s trying to accomplish.
To be fair, what being “good with computers” actually means is being adept at figuring out a new thing you haven’t seen before.
Computer literacy is about synthesis, not rote memorization. I like citing this interview, talking about software as “building blocks with which you can create things,” as a great example of what knowing how to use a computer properly is really like. (Note that the point isn’t the specific detail of the UNIX CLI, but the principle that he can imagine a novel workflow and make it happen.)
Speaking of which, that’s my “something about how people view or use technology that needs to die:” the notion that you can be “computer literate” without understanding how to program, at least a little bit. The entire difference between a computer and any of the technologies that came before it is that a computer doesn’t have a fixed function, and you can make it do whatever you want it to do as long as you have the imagination and skill to figure out how to describe it.
WAY too many people don’t realize “AI” is just marketing bullshit, and genuinely think that LLMs and shit are literal intelligence in a computer.
For one, it’s driving every company under the sun to shove it into every product under the sun; and two, if we ever do create a true AI (what we’re calling “AGI” now, at least until marketing drives that one to meaninglessness too and we have to move the goal posts again), it’s going to be humanity changer in par with shit like discovering fire… and people will be confused as all hell becuase “wE’ve hAd tHAt foR yEArS!” cuz they’ll think its the same spell-checker-that’s-wrong-occaisionally-and-generates-nudes that we have today.
LLMs are AI - always have been. The term “artificial intelligence” has always been broad in computer science: it covers anything that performs a cognitive task normally requiring human intelligence. A chess engine from 1999 is AI. A spam filter is AI. An LLM is AI. Narrow AI, sure, but still AI.
The confusion comes from people equating “AI” with sci-fi AGI (human-level general intelligence, HAL/JARVIS/Skynet/etc.). That’s a specific subset, not the whole category. When companies say “AI-powered” they’re not claiming AGI - they’re saying the product uses machine learning or pattern recognition in some way. Marketing inflates the language, yes, but the underlying tech is real and fits the definition.
If/when we reach actual AGI, it will be a civilization-level shift - far beyond today’s spell-checker-that-sometimes-hallucinates. People will look back and say “we had AI for years,” but they’ll mean narrow tools, not the thing that can invent new science or run a company autonomously. The goalposts aren’t moving; the hype is just using the broad term loosely.
LLMs are AI - always have been. The term “artificial intelligence” has always been broad in computer science: it covers anything that performs a cognitive task normally requiring human intelligence.
On the contrary, it’s not “AI” unless it’s a fuckton of hand-programmed
ifstatements. I dunno what this newfangled “neural network” shit is, but it’s way too brain-like to be AI! \s
Generative algorithms, and the people intent on replacing artists with them.
Also everyone labeling and/or peddling these things as “Artificial Intelligence”.
Also all of the corporations trying to shoehorn them into every product and service and ram them down user’s throats.
Also every user that patronizes these things voluntarily.
Paying for everything, especially things you can be getting for free.
The idea that if you’re not paying for something then you’re the product is rhetoric for suckers so they don’t recognize how they’re being fleeced.
Some stuff is indeed free, although, some other stuff seems free because you’re paying with something else that is not money.
Troll. Smiling and sunshine is free, all other things require some sort of payment in this world.
Useful idiots always get mad when someone points out their naivete.
I think we’re coming to the end of a 50 year cycle of rapid technological improvement that’s been a parasitic host for capitalistic predilections. Shareholders ride tech companies hard and put them away wet, fucking over workers and squeezing consumers in the process. Innovative and awesome companies end up getting subsumed into a shit whirlpool where the product gets worse, more expensive, and steals your data. So I guess the people in my example are the tech investors and MBAs feeding them, and their abuse of tech is what needs to die.
A lot of tech evolves and changes quickly, and a whole lot of people just dont like change, especially as they get older. It is also harder to learn new things as you get older. While it doesn’t apply across the board, the “can’t teach an old dog” addage generally holds true. This is not something that will go away. If you dont want to become that person, continue to exercise your brain as you age, and learning new tricks will be easier.
As someone in the “older” crowd, I can learn just about anything, I’m just sick and fucking tired of lazy ass devs who can’t be bothered to write proper fucking docs.
Note: I’ve been writing docs for going on 40 years as part of my job. It’s fucking tedious to do it well, to verify what you wrote actually works.
No, it’s not that it’s harder to learn (it may be) it’s that I have other shit to do too, and some dumbass has made using whatever tool way fucking more obtuse than it needs to be and hasn’t bothered to even explain their approach, their paradigm, in the all but non-existent docs.
Github’s website is an example - it leads with changes, the intro is halfway down the page, even then most descriptions are terse. Tech writers the world around are having strokes every time they have to look at it.
My dwindling interest in the the new hotness for tech is due to diminishing returns and how frequently it is change for the sake of change with zero additional benefit. I still learn new stuff, but only after it has been out long enough to find out if there is an actual benefit involved.
Seriously, the amount of things that are just repackaged stuff that already existed but now it is cheaply produced and unreliable is overwhelming. Brands don’t even stick to their purpose for a decade before selling out and letting quality slip.
The problem is that you often can’t learn because the app’s instructions are a year behind.
Or, for my pet hate with FOSS, the instructions assume that you understand the underlying technology.
‘Hey, we’ve made this fantastic new program for Linux newbs, it’s so easy that even your grandma can use it! To install it, clone the repo and pipe the results of awk through sed using grep. You can add flags in the usual way!’
