sloshpuppie
@sloshpuppie

It honestly blows my mind how poor general tech literacy has become.
Not like “can use a smartphone / apps etc.” but like… core understanding of how things work?

So I’m in discords for things like rom hacks, console mods and the like
And holy fuck some of the questions people ask make me question my sanity
“Can I use [thing] from some completely unrelated game and have it work on this one?”
Or wondering why a file won’t run and they haven’t unzipped it
@ the devs to ask how to unzip a fucking file
I worry

Not to “back in my day”
But back in my day I needed to use hex or assembler or jsons or ftp servers or learn to fuckin solder in order to do mods
Nowadays it’s literally drag and drop and somehow folks seem to have the worst fucking luck with even that

imo if you have very limited understanding of how to do things like this
Why the fuck are you in a server for beta testing the thing


fwankie
@fwankie

I think most of this is just that it takes less & less technical knowledge to make a computer do something useful like connect to the internet and download a chat client as the whole "everyone owns a computer" idea develops, and a lot of people don't really care about computers just the thing it can do for them, so you end up with a bunch of people with very little knowledge who stick to the tools they're familiar with (@ing you on discord to get free videogames)


fwankie
@fwankie

like speaking as someone who's this way about cars, I am forced to know things about cars against my will because there's no other way for me to do certain things, so every time it breaks I have to go ask people wtf is wrong with it, is that important, can I fix it or do I need a new one, it's just paint why's it so expensive, these things literally come off an assembly line how can there be a parts shortage, etc


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in reply to @sloshpuppie's post:

i was in the godot discord a while ago trying to get the answer to a question that i just could not find an answer to elsewhere. someone helped me and we worked it out (there were probably better ways to do stuff but it did work!)

but while i was there - there was someone who copy pasted code from chatgpt and figured the issue with it was "made for godot 3 not 4". the thing they sent was not even code, it was like bad pseudo code, with no indents. i tried to be helpful (as they were given endless shit) and say hey, copying from a chatbot does not work, go do the tutorial here's a link.

they got stuck because they did not know what an indented block was. or what a tab key did. their solution was to ask for a 'better' video tutorial on how to do it. someone said "youtube" and they left the chat, satisfied with the answer.

something has ingrained the idea that 'you do not have to learn anything to do stuff' despite it being very not true

also 40% of people can't use a computer

in reply to @fwankie's post:

I know where you’re coming from but there’s also an extent with car ownership that you’re expected to know how to do basic maintenance tasks as part of getting the license
I feel like some of the stuff I see is much more akin to “I put the diesel fuel in my petrol car why doesn’t it work”

"it says 'very low fuel refill as soon as possible' and now the satnav will only take me to fuel stations? this is really annoying, i was going on a cross country road trip tomorrow (ive already packed a 600ml bottle of water and a box of crackers) does anyone know how to get the satnav working?"