Let’s be fair though. Adobe changes the Acrobat interface every two weeks for no reason. PDF has always been an absolute shitshow, super slow, walled garden format. After like 30 years it’s still a 30 step process to add a note box with an arrow that looks half decent

Converting a PDF to Excel repeatedly on Adobe by clearing the browsing history each time, saves you hundreds a year.

> be me
> zoomer
> use linux
> i use linux
> i don’t know how to use windows, or macos
> i dont know how to use the most popular operating systems
> wait
> i am the joke now

How did we fail so hard? Where did we go wrong?

Yea surprise some people are good at using computers some are bad, has nothing to do with whatever generation someone is apart of, generation labels are so dumb. Literally every “milleinal” I’ve known comes to me for their computer problems.

Not true

Millennials think it’s them , because they learned how. Gen X knows, because they wrote it.

It only relatively recently occurred to me that the vast majority of people use the Internet either solely or mostly with a mobile phone. It blew my mind since I grew up with PCs and modems and the Internet is so much better on a large screen that’s not half full of ads.

OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.

With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn’t already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.

I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.

I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.

However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.

So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It… Just… Isn’t… Important…

They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise “magic box does things when I perform this ritual” is enough for them to function in their world, the same as “Car starts when I turn this key” is enough for me to function in mine.

Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?

So, the key takeaway is everyone has a different experience, and that is okay.

I remember a game wouldn’t work until i adjusted the screen resolution in like 98

The number of people in this thread stumped by the “rotate a PDF” comment, even what it means at all, while a smartphone has been 95-100% of their “computer” usage in their lives.

We grew up in an analog childhood, but digital adulthood.

We’ve been at the cusp of all the changes, we probably had to boot into Ms DOS and navigate to the A:// drive to play whatever was on the floppy disk with a whopping 1.44mb.

Now you download almost instantly to your phone/tablet. The internet as we knew it is mostly dead, everywhere is a walled garden of shit.

The more I think about it PDFs are our fax machine and that shit just needs to go away.

As a boomer, reading this thread/discussion has been so amusing in many ways while enjoying my cuppa tea this morning. A classic “the younger generations are stupid.”

The older generations looking down the ones that follow. And the following generations looking down on those that precede them. And no one understanding ain’t none of us are all that bright.

Ever has it been, and so ever shall it be.

this is less a problem of ‘people are stupid’ and more ‘educational institutions have been dismantled over the last several decades and large numbers of people are pushed through school despite being functionally illiterate, if they graduate at all’