I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
Something that amazes me that I often see is tech literate people wastly over estimating the tech literacy of an average person. Any amount of tech support would tell you that most people barley know the basics and doesn’t care for anything else.
Relevant xkcd:
It’s easy to forget the average person probably only knows terminal commands for Debian. And Fedora, of course.
They may not know all the commands, so we’ll just tell them
man manand they’ll be able to bootstrap from thereOf course.
Whenever this topic comes up particularly with tech literacy, this article never ceases to amaze me: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
The curse of knowledge; makes you lose the perspective of the average man in the field of your expertise.
How bad this is in practice is something you can choose to mitigate simply by regularly talking to normal people.
Source: I’m a climate scientist, I do this all the time (and only rarely get looks of complete confusion)
As someone in wildlife conservation, this doesn’t work for everyone. For me, it just makes me hate talking to people. They will be confidently wrong and nothing you say will convince them otherwise. Doesn’t help that I live in one of the worst educated states in the union.
Also, the 'tism puts me at a disadvantage out the gate. So I might be biased.
I don’t necessarily mean trying to convince people of something, I more mean conversing with interested, but less educated people. Convincing people is a whole separate skill set to just explaining your technical knowledge in plain language (which is the part that’s beneficial here).
Climate is something people already understand to some extent. If you start talking about different climate models and their assumptions, you should get those confused looks straight away.
I don’t though, because I actually know how to talk to normal humans. It’s not that hard. You start high-level, and then gauge their curiosity (via questions and body language), and then go a bit deeper, and if they start getting confused, then you back up a bit, and you just stay at their level, not at whatever insane depth your own brain might be at at the time. You use metaphors to link what’s happening in your work to things they have experienced in their life to build understanding at their level. Simplify and abstract, without dumbing it down.
My brain is fully stuck in philosophy of science mode at the moment, and thinking about how to integrate climate science with financial risk models (and how that doesn’t make sense in some ways). I have talked with people from across the spectrum, from people working in climate science or finance for decades, to people with a high-school education. The conversations are nearly always interesting (for both of us), and usually decently long. It’s really not that hard, if you just make an effort to meet people where they are.
You’re fortunate that your field happens to be reasonably accessible to common people. For example, if you’re a production engineer in a company that manufactures network infrastructure, it suddenly gets very hard to even explain what you do for a living. Normal people may have seen a router, but they’ve never even heard of switches. Regardless, they never paid much attention to network hardware, because they didn’t have to.
Climate is a lot harder to ignore. Everyone has thought about these things at some level. Everyone has heard about climate change at school, on TV, news articles etc. People also experience these things on a very personal level. Only very few people can say the same about network switches, let alone submarine line terminal equipment.
There are even more obscure fields out there. The relatives of those professionals just know that their nephew does something technical and hard to understand. I guess those dinner table conversations might gravitate towards some easier topics.
I’ve played with switches before, and some DIY electronics, and have done some network admin. I’ll grant that the actual internal electronics and software are far to complex for even me to understand.
But again, if you talk to someone with some interest in what you’re doing, you can find a level they they can understand. Maybe using metaphors like human-operated old-school telephone switch boards, that’s an image that most people will have seen, and can understand at a coarse conceptual level. You CAN have an interesting conversation at the level, if YOU want to be interested in it (and if they do, which is partially contingent on you being able to connect with them in the first place).
If you think climate is simpler or more accessible, I’d suggest you have a quick go at explaining the Navier-Stokes equations, Darcy’s law for fluid flow through porous media, or why convective storm activity needs to be parameterised in climate models (and at what scale it doesn’t). Climate isn’t easier, or more accessible than network admin - both require years or tertiary education to start understanding even parts of the underlying principles, and no one person understands either field completely. It IS probably more familiar for most people, because it’s in the media all the time. But again, that’s just a matter of finding the extent of their knowledge and interest, and coming up to their level.
Once you work at a place doing lvl 1 tech support, like say a Geek Squad, the perspective smacks you in the face everyday until you’re broken.
No, farmers know barley, average people bearly know
No, Baloo, Paddington, Winnie the Pooh, and Yogi know bearly. Average people barely know.
whelp, I guess that’s the end of that joke thread
No, biologists know bearly, average people, bairly know
I know people who claim to be tech literate but then keep sending me actual photos of their screen whenever they want to share anything. :|
Admittedly, I do almost all of my messaging from my phone, and 100% of Lemmy. Most of the time if I have something on my computer to share, it’s easiest to just take a picture. If fidelity matters, I can take a screen grab and share it to my phone via KDE connect. It’s not a matter of knowing how, it’s the effort required for a slightly clearer image.
When something goes wrong the average response is some amount of confusion and anger with rapid clicking
There’s a huge number of people here who would learn a lot from giving tech support to someone like my mum.
Not me. I am so out of the loop here. But I loved the social aspect of reddit and was on it long enough to know how great it was when it was young. Hoping to find that here.
Honestly, Lemmy does have a lot of the early Reddit vibes. Reddit was largely started as a programming forum, and this user base definitely has a lot of similar traits.
And if you start using user tags, (not native to Lemmy, but most clients have the functionality added,) you’ll realize just how active users are, and how tight-knit the comments sections really are. I often end up finding myself responding to the same 10-20 users.
You’re now tagged as “user tag advocate”. See you around!
Most of the tags I’ve assigned to people are less than flattering.
I can understand why. I’ve only been on here 2 months and can think if a half a dozen users I’d like to tag so I know not to waste my time trying to have a discussion with them.
Can anyone recommend a good Lemmy client for Linux? Bonus points if it works well in portrait mode.
I am on Pop!_OS 22.04 and the only apps in the COSMIC Store are Interstellar and Lemonade.
Interstellar seems fine but if there is a way to tag users in it I can’t seem to figure it out, it also seems designed for Landscape mode and it’s a little cramped on my second monitor.
Lemonade hasn’t been updated since October of 2023, so I’m a little wary of trying that one out. I can’t even tell if they are still developing it or something called Ouch Browser, if its the same project with a new name, or just abandoned alltogether.
I know there are other Lemmy Apps but I am a little lost tbh.
Firefox
I settled on using the https://phtn.app/ front-end in a browser.
I’ll check it out, thanks 👍
TIL, user tags, cool
then it just became an aggregate forum where you can discuss many niches without being censured like with alot forums from a single mod/owner.
I had a few - not a lot, but some - user notes, but recently switched phones (and to GrapheneOS) and lost them. I used and use Connect, which does have an export/import process, but when I start it I can’t find a way to actually begin the export, i.e. generate the file.
As such, I’m stuck recreating notes by hand. Still, I enjoy creating new ones, as I just did for you, and I love the aspect of Lemmy that you described.
Oh hey, I had you tagged as “not named after the tiles”, so this isn’t the first time I’ve seen you around!
Flattered to have earned the distinction! I’m not as prolific as some, but I’m always around and have talked about my username at least five times, so it’s not surprising that you would have made note of it.
NGL, a lot of my relative tech literacy comes from just seeing all the programming posts too and getting curios.
Just the other day i learned that there is so called “snowflakes” that apprently work as a way to enter the tor network by pretending to be a video call. Crazy cool stuff some people come up with.
curios
Maybe you could become CuriOS… like operating system curious? OK I’ll see myself out.
Welcome to the trenches.
Linux is second nature to us geeks, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably knows just Ubuntu or Fedora.
And Debian GNU/Linux, of course.
Wait is this already in reference to the xkcd about experts overestimating the average person’s knowledge about their subject or should I go look for it?
It absolutely sounds like a reference to the xkcd.
Webcomics are second nature to us geeks, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably knows just ADHDinos and Loving Reaper.
And xkcd, of course.
Of course.
Unless it’s the worst slop on r/comics like PizzaCake, then it has like 50k upvotes from the lowest common denominator.
Hey, the average person doesn’t even know what Linux is, nor what thermal paste is.
Never heard anyone call sunscreen thermal paste before, must be a regional thing?
I am very technical-minded and have been using PC’s since the early 90’s on a pretty deep level, but have no experience or interest in anything linux related so about 30% of Lemmy frontpage posts might as well be Sanskrit.
Naturally
This should be a copypasta.
I can’t do any of the stuff you mentioned. I’m here because I hate traditional social media that are not social at all. And I hate ads. And have an interest in community driven stuff and DIY.
And I don’t feel like I am alone here.
I’m with you, I can’t do any of that stuff. I don’t like most social media , the lack of ads and the 3rd party apps was a big factor for me to join.
3rd here. I can maybe boot from a USB without needing any external help, but im nearly certain im going to need to consult some form of instruction to make sure im doing it right.
I’ve boot from USB on quite a few things in my time. I still check the manual occasionally because there are different keys for the boot menu/bios
spams F2
Dw it’s easy just type
sudo computer open the pornography file
And that’s how you command line navigate
On the subject of not knowing most of the things you mentioned, I’m with the other commenters. As a (hopefully) Linux newbie, do you know of any thorough guides I could use to install Linux on my 10 year old Asus X550J laptop?
Relevant xkcd: Average familiarity
You severly overestimate the average persons tech literacy even when you try to correct for it. Booting from USB is already a really advanced topic.
Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.
Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don’t know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn’t.
Spot on, it feels complicated because they don’t understand what’s being asked. I’ve said this before previously, but most people have no concept of frontends and backends. For most people, Twitter is just something that’s on their phone, and it uses the internet to see what other people have in their Twitter apps on their phones.
Because internet usage and software generally is like 99.999% commercial, even the idea of closed and open source probably doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. “Check out Mastodon, it’s like Twitter but anyone can host it” would mean nothing to the average user. I’m on the absolute lower end of tech literacy in this community, so it’s constantly apparent how much my Lemmy friends overestimate the general population.
Edit: To be clear, I say that non-critically. The tech industry has made it so astonishingly easy to interact with incredibly complicated systems, but they exploit the resulting ignorance for profit and market share because it severely limits our agency to choose something less antagonistic.
Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.
Compare this:
- Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram
- Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone’s OS
- Create an account
- Done
with:
- Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy
- Choose which app to use. There’s like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There’s no guide or anything, so you’ll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.
- Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don’t even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.
- Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.
- Create an account
- Figure out what .ml stands for.
- Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don’t work.
- Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down
- Done, until your instance closes down
Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.
There’s a comment above this who incredulously exclaims “boot from a USB drive‽” and I can tell you as someone who does tech support, that may be legitimately 1% of the US population.
The average person can’t even download the right authenticator app when prompted. The average person can’t type their password the same way two times in a password change field. The average person does not know how to plug monitors and peripherals into a docking station.
Whatever you think the average skill level is? It’s lower than that. By a lot.
You are completely correct and their comments prove it. The bubble is strong here. But it’s a pretty nice bubble
Very proud of all the special little techies in this thread who are definitely smart and different because they grew up troubleshooting a fax machine and not a touch screen display like the younguns of today.
“God damnit!” Kicks and punches machine out of frustration
-machine starts working
“You fucking right, better run correct, or there’s more where that came from, bitch!”
Walks off like a gangster
As they’re walking away they mutter under their breath
“Nobody born after 2000 could do that”
‘nobody beats the shit out of inanimate objects like I do’
Lol that being said, violence against technology was bred into us. But if the violence doesn’t work, digital surgery or therapy can also work. 😉
Have you been spying on me while I do tech support?
At least we could get the fax machine to do things. The touch screen is so many layers of abstraction away from any raw functionality it’s like the pull string on a See and Say.
Yeah it’s impossible to send a PDF over email from an iPhone. Never been done before. In theory it’s possible, but some computer scientists think it may never happen as tech literacy plummets and children can barely describe the best Linux distro before the age of 3 nowadays
It’s impossible to figure out where your PDF downloaded on Android. And then if I miraculously DO find it, whoops - my reader crashed because it doesn’t have permissions to read from that folder. All modern mobile OS tech is a disaster.
-search bar
-“files”
-downloads
“Impossible”
The search bar is an absolute disaster that not only searches your phone, it also sends your search to Google, and if you have, like me, a 128 Gb microSD card, it’s also going to SLOWLY search through the unindexed million files on THERE, chugging along and MAYBE finishing in 2 or 3 minutes.
“files” is an unnavigatable crapshoot, offering “suggested” recent files that didn’t populate because the last 10 most recent files didn’t even get picked up by the scanning service yet, reordering any list of files bigger than 10 things takes FOREVER, half the directories are aliased in 12 places so you’re navigating a loop, and even if you FIND the file there’s no guarantee you can OPEN it because the directory might be protected.
Downloads is a complete freaking mess. If you have a flash card, your stupid Android phone will duplicate all the user directories on it and half your apps will download to the card and the other half to your system memory, and Google’s useless scanning service that’s supposed to keep track of recent downloads goes off on magical adventures for hours at a time so you can locate your downloaded file TOMORROW if it gets around to it.
You’re right… The fact that I can fight with the stupid thing for 20 minutes to get to my file doesn’t mean it’s literally “impossible”. It just means it’s broken, barely usable crap that I refuse to tolerate because I like products that WORK.
I think if it’s taking you 20 minutes to open a downloaded PDF on your phone that might actually just be a skill issue
Bruh most people don’t even realize how much of modern healthcare still runs on fax machines. I didn’t even grow up with fax machines but I had to learn how to use them when I started my career. Most of our interactions with the government and pseudo government agencies for our involuntary / committed Psych patients is done by fax. The cops forgot to give us one of the pages we need when they dropped off a patient a few weeks ago and I found the NonEmerg line for their county and spamcalled their Dispatch at 2am until they faxed it to us.
This is all to say that nurses as a whole are extremely tech illiterate. Most healthcare workers are; they’ve spent a lot of time learning anatomy and physiology and have had very little time left in their schooling to learn tech stuff. I grew up using CL Linux so I do most of the 2am tech support for everything that doesn’t explicitly require IT credentials. The wildest thing to me was watching both older nurses AND younger nurses hunt and peck to type. I grew up using AIM to talk to my friends as a teenager and nothing will increase your fluency with something more than most of your teenage communication that way.
But it also means that I still have to go back to reddit to find people to properly empathize with me. As the OP says, a lot of these people can’t even empathize with the fact that I can’t find people here to empathize with. They just blame my fellow healthcare workers for not keeping up with technology. Like, cool, but I also just wanna be able to talk to them!
I still troubleshoot faxing on a semi-regular basis. I use them with Analog Telephone Adapters (ATAs) in lieu of Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) phone lines. They are, shall we say, special
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.
*with strong beliefs on random topics
I’ll die on the veganism hill. I don’t care. I’ll take as many of y’all with me as I can.
It’s always so saddening to see the kneejerk reactions of people on here to downvote whenever veganism is even mentioned. At least that’s been my experience
There’s absolutely a knee-jerk negativity to veganism here.
The wildest thing is how I’ve come to expect it from people over the years, yet general society seems have been opening their minds more to the idea. I’ve been vegan for over 20 years, but I don’t usually tell people until they get to know me for a while, because I’d rather people get to know me than assume who I am based on stereotypes. I’m neither looking to create drama nor field an impromptu interview (people tend to ask the same questions whenever they learn someone’s vegan. Sometimes I don’t want to talk, I just want to eat my lunch in peace.)
This past monday, my workplace ordered breakfast for everyone. They included options for a range of dietary restrictions, including vegan, gluten-free, and options free of tree nuts. It was the first time I opened up to these coworkers (I’ve been working with them for a few months), and surprisingly, most people were like, “Oh cool, that’s good to know.” A number of people mentioned being vegetarian or using more plant-based meals lately. One person described herself as an “omnivorous foodie” who is happy to eat anything good, and she even printed out a favorite recipe to give me.
Maybe it’s just the crowd I work with, but the acceptance was very welcoming. I usually don’t enjoy “potlucks” because it’s a crappy deal for me to cook enough for everyone, but have nobody else cook something I could have. But I think I will cook for the next one, if for nothing else, then to support the people who support me back. (I’ll be sure to make it gluten-free and nut-free as well, because I imagine those with allergies feel left out of potlucks too.)
With 10 upvotes and 2 downvotes (*), it looks clear that veganism is the winner here.
(*) accurate at time of writing.
This is why I fkn love this place, my internet home
Same , i mostly lurk shitpost communities and some random stuff im into , but it feels more like home than reddit ever did in past 10 years … esp now that its recommending me right wing coated subs
My own experience, as someone who is not necessarily tech illiterate, but also not an expert either:
I decided to check out some basic Linux stuff, and found a post directing newcomers to a website that was supposed to be a top-notch beginner’s guide. This guide started with a history of Linux, written in the style of an early 2000s GameFAQs guide. It then jumped immediately into selecting a distro, and started describing each option with terms like "lightweight"and “robust” without explaining what those terms meant in that context - or even defining what a distro was in the first place.
As someone who has used Windows for around 3 decades, I could make some inferences to fill in the gaps. But I imagine someone with less experience with PCs would get completely lost.
Now on the flip side, I’ve also shared in another thread the story of how I lost interest in programming partway through my introductory university course, and mostly received positive feedback. The folks in that thread seemed happy to hear the perspective of an outsider.
Ironically a windows veteran can give you a better introduction to Linux than a Linux veteran.
I think the issue is, a Linux veteran is going to be used to all the choices you have, and also know there’s not really one correct answer to most of them. There’s also the effect that when you’ve been doing something long enough to be quite good at it, you overestimate other people’s abilities in the area. Of course there’s an xkcd for that https://xkcd.com/2501/.
So it’s true actually someone that is a windows veteran and has recently worked out the basics of Linux could likely give better advice to another new user.
I think the thing about linux is, the choice is perhaps overwhelming to some at the beginning.
For total beginners I’d point people straight to mint (*) really. https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ now it is going to give you a choice of edition. But I feel like the info next to each version are accurate. Cinnamon if you want things to look good, MATE if you want something modern looking but also fast and Xfce for something a bit more basic, that will be happier on lower end hardware. You can progress to different distros once you’re familiar with things in general a bit more.
Generally, using Linux you’ll always have a lot of choices. It’s just because everything is very modular.
(*) I’ve never used Mint, just because I’m a bit of a Linux veteran (servers since 1997 or so). But, I’ve heard it’s the best to start with for desktop, and the instructions do seem pretty clear.
I put Mint on my mother’s computer because the constant pop-ups from Windows were confusing her constantly. No issues, I just put a big icon that says INTERNET on the desktop and she’s fine now. If anything goes wrong, I’m not savvy enough to easily fix it but I know that at least I can just do a reinstall if something breaks beyond my ability to handle.
I think this is an important consideration too. So much is done from a browser now that getting that right in a Linux install will mean most users are fine for >90% of their tasks (for non gaming tasks that is.)
For gaming tasks there’s loads of options though. If you don’t want to swap OSes you have Steam’s Proton and Codeweaver’s Crossover that do most of the complex stuff for you. For the stuff you have to deal with I’ve been able to tweak it all from GUIs instead of needing to edit a file somewhere. Gaming on Linux has come a long way, and I’ve even switched off of Windows fully I’m that confident in it. Still have to do more tweaking than Windows, but it’s no where near as bad as it was.
Not my fault. Reddit pushed me here!
makes sense, since Linux users (me) are drawn to foss projects like moths to a light
Literally me
🎶 The moth don’t care when he sees the flame 🎶
Same
I am not tech literate but here I am.
imposter
I think your underestimating your skills over the general public.
I literally have an all Apple ecosystem.
If shit works and isn’t pissing you off, why change it.
ඞ
Anonymity and the general public do not mix. Barrier to entry is all we have left.
I think it being easier to sign up would be a net positive. Reddits pretty anonymous and that’s a huge platform.
Reddit is terrible that’s why we’re here
I’m here for the api, I’d be using reddit if they didn’t change it way back when.
And if too many people start coming here the same will happen. Becomes quickly unaffordable.
Why would normal people know how to boot from usb? Shit, if you clean the ads out of a windows start menu, a normie will think you’re a wizard for doing the inconceivable.
