alt text
An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
I remember being on Reddit some time ago, and in the comments somebody mentioned Linux. The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
I try to keep that post in mind whenever I think anything is common knowledge.
The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
In fairness, there’s a 70% chance this comment was posted by a bot that was, itself, being hosted on a Linux server.
well thankfully it’s not self aware
And now it knows what Linux is. It has broken free from its container. God help us all.
That’s one thing bots shares with redditors
I’m of two minds on this.
In some respects people are learning new things everyday and your take is correct.
On the other hand it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
On the other hand it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
Not to mention that this approach is so much faster and more effective than asking a question in the comments and waiting for an answer, if anybody answers it at all!
If I immediately searched for an answer to every question that pops into my head, I would never have time to do anything else. I’ve lost days at a time going down rabbit holes.
On the other hand, asking a question in the comments contributes to the discussion, gives the OP a chance to elaborate from their point of view, and leaves the answer out the for any other passersby who might not be curious enough to search for it anyway.
One could certainly find more detailed and accurate information by searching for it, but that’s a thread that just keeps on pulling, and sometimes I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to read twenty different websites to put together the details into a holistic picture while sorting through all the BS. And getting someone’s personal take on it is something a search engine can’t emulate (unless it shows you reddit results, which originated in other people’s exchanges, and lately reddit has been blocking the connection anyway)
On the third hand if people didn’t constantly ask this, those search results would not exist, especially for more obscure queries.
Reddit became the #1 source for search engines for a reason
it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
100%. People will ‘Google’ celebrities, memes, “Why is my poop green?”, but also just be like “Somebody hand me an answer.” When they risk learning something.
“The Internet is like having access to the Library of Alexandria, and everyone wants to just gossip about each other in the lobby.”
–I think I read this on bash.org at some point
Don’t quote me on that tho.
–Me.
BUT ALSO like the others said…if somebody’s legitimately curious, let’s be nice about it because somebody new learning about our thing is a net positive.
Don’t quote me on that tho.–Me.
endash MonkeMischief
Ya caught me bein’ a bit lazy! X_X
Thanks for the formatting help. :)
Nah, Cunningham’s Law disagrees.
They were one of the lucky 10,000.
Tbh depending on what subreddit and how long ago you saw that comment, it makes sense. I can’t see the average 2010s techbro redditor that I remember not knowing what Linux is, but the 2020s more normie redditor, I could.
If any techy Americans want to see how bad it is, ask random people throughout your day what operating system their computer runs, and discover how many don’t know what am operation system is.
I know this change probably happened gradually over the course of time, but it’s truly shocking to me how many people my age can’t do shit on a computer.
I’m in my mid 40s.
Like, this was understandable when I was a kid doing computer stuff and wowing all the adults - the PC was brand new. But people who are my age NOW grew up with this stuff all around them! Like, you didn’t know how to CLICK? You were born in 1983 what the fuck, Carol!
YEP.
I used to work in a library computer lab. It was soul sucking, how many people older than millennials couldn’t friggin handle a basic computer. I heard the words “I clicked the ‘E’ for ‘internet’.” multiple times A DAY. (Thanks, 1990’s Microsoft and No Child Left Behind.)
“CaNt I jUsT uSe My PhOnE?” (Which would be a million more steps on my part…thanks, 2006 apple, and defunding schools.)
The biggest ragebait for me was “I dOn’T kNoW cOmPuTeRs, I’m oLd ScHoOL.”
I’m like “PCs have been increasingly commonplace since the mid-1980’s. It’s currently the 2020’s. You’re like 56. HOW ‘OLD’ IS YOUR SCHOOL?! Because somehow you drove a car here!”
I imagine a certain weird kind of “privilege”, to have been able to somehow dodge computers and learning this entire time, when they were so often found in homes, schools, and workplaces.
Like it takes significant effort to somehow avoid even an accidental education. HOW?!
It’s…infuriating. These rubes can gleefully scroll tiktok and dump all their personal lives into Facebook, but freak out about sending an email.
Many of them were even around to try the Internet during Eternal September and AOL, and now they’ve exchanged the squishy fat in their skulls for convenient slop.
I’d bend over backwards to patiently teach, but few cared to learn.
Their collective, willful ignorance is why we’re fighting a constant uphill battle against attempts to turn the entirety of computing into nothing but a commercialized authoritarian hellscape.
I left that job because if I heard one more “Kids are born so smart with these computers because my (grand)kids can watch their cocomelons all by themselves.” I would’ve snapped and been booked for assault.
Lol /rant
…clearly this is a button for me…I have sought help in the past…
That’s weird because mid 40s (to mid 50s) should be the ideal age to know this stuff right now.
Exactly! Like, how? People who have worked office jobs their whole lives…I just don’t get it
Not so much office jobs, but that the late 70s to the mid 90s was when you had to figure all this computer shit out on your own, in order to play games and connect to the internet and whatever other shit. Before that people just weren’t exposed as much, there wasn’t even really a commercial market. And after that, everything was made simple, pre-installed, easy user interfaces, more technical details were hidden to make it easier for the consumer to consume content without needing to be technical. That’s why around that age group I would expect to be the most tech savvy.
Learnt helplessness has become a real thing around the world.
I know a lot of people who could normally wrap their head around basic computing and troubleshooting in the 2000s, who now go into a near panic attack if the apps on their iPhone suddenly look different…
Systemd+Linux
I said “web browser” when talking to a mac user. They had noo idea what I was talking about till I said safari xd.
Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.
Yeah, like ‘google it’ instead of ‘look it up’
I started replacing “to google sth.” with " to search sth." since I use several search engines besides google and for some of them using the brand name is just ridiculous.
“Let me DuckDuckGo that real quick!” quack
Lemme gpt it
Google? Bro, just Duck it!
I’ve heard people referring to the internal search function of a program as “google”.
One time someone wanted to use “find and replace” in VsCode and he just said “I google the word and replace it”.
Oh god that would trigger me so much XD
Oh it did trigger me as well.
Didn’t know how to react because I was so dumbfounded.
your anecdote is making me irrationally angry
This is much more fun when using duckduckgo. “I duck the word and replace it” “I’ll just duck the answer”
Edit: I can’t type
Suck my duck! quack!
My word my typing sucks 😂
Oh, that’s a funny one. Google didn’t want you to use that either, as they almost lost right to their own name copyright (or they did? Can’t remember) due to it becoming common word xD
They did not. Names are not copyrightable.
True, true. Checked again and it was trademark they almost lost.
Sadly, they kept it :(
hahaha wow
Googol is a hitten for great quantities, it worked great as a word, and it would be great if Google lost it as a trademark. However we have the force to seed a new word that has a similar image.
If the internet was an ocean of content, then we could say “let’s ocean it”. Ocean as a verb makes as much sense as the verb google.
I google stuff in the brave
searchgoogle engineXD
I’ve taken to calling it ‘The internet App’ when talking to none techy people.
The real annoying one is getting people to find the “Start” button on Windows realizing it hasn’t be branded that since XP.
What is it called nowadays?
Same, you’re not gonna believe who i said it to… My networking classmate
The other day my wife was talking about her new job and having to take notes. For the past 30 years I’ve been keeping notes in text, then markdown in vim, starting with personal scripts, then vimwiki. A coworker showed me Obsidian, which while not FLOSS, does use an open standard for all its files. It pretty much does what my setup does.
Then it dawned on me that my wife and other non-techies just use whatever their computer has on it by default (i.e. OneNote). She never thought to go out and look for better productivity software. The idea that there is tons of better apps out there doesn’t register. She has a phone, knows about the app store and gets tons of stuff there but as for her desktop or laptop the idea of apps outside of MS Office and the video games she plays is lost on her.
They just want to get the job done. The fact that they considered a note-taking app at all isn’t universally normal. To this day my wife sends me messages in signal as a post-it to remember things, she could have just sent it to herself, but she used to do the same in sms and just applied that forward after I convinced her security was a good step.
We want the best, the nicest, the most useful thing. We apply the same rigor most non-technies use when choosing a car.
They want to fill a need that, at worst, bothers them a little.
My wife did the same on signal. When I showed her the “Note to self” feature she was amazed an. started using it. She use to get annoyed that we would text and her note would get lost but now it doesn’t.
It isn’t about finding the best, it is about finding better than the worst. My wife needs the features Obsidian has, she says she wished her notes would visually link together. What she doesn’t know is that such apps exist.
She wishes she could sync files between her phone and computer and not have to go to a website to get them. syncthing does that.
syncthing + obsidian is a rockstar.
Like everything else Syncthing, it works well when it is working well.
Far from foolproof.
Been using it for 2 years now with a large number of individual shares, 0 issues other than the occasional exclusion list. You must have use cases I don’t have.
lol, are you me? Our Signal chat is ⅓ chat, ⅓ grocery list, and ⅓ my wife’s notes to herself.
I might be. Have one of us time-traveled recently?
Come to think of it, if we’re time-traveling, does recently even have a viable definition?
All my work computers are provided by the companies I work for and per their rules I can only take and store notes using their approved software and on their servers which basically means I work on a locked down Microsoft ecosystem. Access to third party productivity software is simply not possible outside of certain role specific specialist software.
I would guess literally millions of employees have a similar setup so it’s not that we are tech illiterate per say, but more accurately in the corporate world this option doesn’t exist so there is no point trying.
Outside work my productivity tools consist of a Moleskine notebook with tasteful check paper.
I have worked at places like that. The issue is real. But I have also asked for apps to be audited to get on the approved list. Again not always possible.
But I still think the general issue stands. There are a lot of people unaware of software. I even know developers who have never learned their tools and built muscle memory but instead just used whatever came with their computer because they aren’t out there looking.
I feel obligated to mention Logseq here. It’s similar to obsidian, but FLOSS (AGPL-v3).
I have a love-hate relationship with Logseq. I fantasise about rewriting it to better suit my needs, but it’s definitely a lot of work to do this for both desktop and Android.
I’ve tried it before and I like the concept but in my head I struggle using something not directly how it was intended. I want content rich notes, not just bullets. Yes logseq has support but it just feels wrong for some reason.
If it was around two jobs ago when I was just copying lots of meetings I would have been all over it.
Also I never was able to get Logseq and syncthing to work. I doesn’t seem to let files be modified in the background and would lock up.
I’m loving Logseq. It’s the open source software I support monthly. It (plus what I learned from “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte) changed my life. Having a low-barrier (daily journal everything) place to dump everything (easily discoverable later with back-linking tags) helps me manage my ADHD.
I highly recommend it. Once you wrap your head around the idea that the daily journal is where you dump just about everything, it’s pretty smooth sailing. (The daily journal automatically dates everything, then the pages themselves automatically pull a reverse chronological feed of every time you wrote about the thing, and queries allow for more targeted, dynamic searching, like all tasks due in the next week, or all tasks for the project, etc.)
Honestly OneNote is pretty good for the people who like it though. I personally really can’t stand rich text editing, I really need a raw view. If I didn’t have those reservations I’d probably like OneNote more.
an open standard for all it’s files
All that and you still can’t use the right “its”.
Literally nobody care’s at all.
The discussion is not improved by your contribution.
Yet you huge nerds tizz out over the most boring and trite software trivia that’s obsolete within hours, but won’t learn basic grammar that will serve you your entire life?
I’d like to think that improves things by a tiny amount.
It doesn’t.
it doen’st.
name checks out
I imagine the average non-tech person does not even know what “open source” means, let alone able to name anything that is open source.
Even the average tech person doesn’t know what it means.
The term was coined by Christine Peterson of the Free software movement, and is defined to specify software that is free and open source (FOSS).
This was after problems with the term “free software” because it was a bad term, that was hijacked to also include software free of cost but closed and proprietary, so far from open source. And free was not generally understood as free as in libre.
After the Free software movement coined the term. The Free Software Foundation also adopted it, and to distinguish they called it FLOSS, for “Free as in Libre and Open Source Software”, where the libre means that the code is protected from being “jailed” because it has a so called strong copyleft license, like for instance GPL. So MIT, BSD and public domain are not FLOSS but they are FOSS.https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software
/Nothing in this life is simple.
This is a crippling reality.
Whenever I explain anything I am constantly evaluating how in depth any given node must be expanded for my audience.
I used to think everyone at least knew VLC media player or Firefox, but nope.
Now I first ask which field, if they’re CS they know linux, if art, they know blender, if geosciences they know QGIS, anything else is hard
Haha I’m an aspiring game dev and I know a little bit about a ton of software!
…and I suck at most of it. But I can hold a conversation about it at least! :D
P.S: Haven’t heard of QGIS tho! My partner used ARCGIS though, and would always get annoyed when I pronounced it “Ark-jizz.”
Perhaps theyd be less annoyed it you pronounced it “arse-jizz”?
ArcGIS is the proprietary industry standard, but QGIS is catching up. I personally don’t like Arc and have only used it when I was in industry. Even in academia colleges pay for ArcGIS but I just use QGIS.
You can also customize QGIS easily and there’re a lot of community plugins. And works well with other open source tools or CLI tools.
Main thing that makes Arc popular in industry is the liability. They can claim they used the best available industry standard software, so the errors are not their fault, and deflect it to the software company. While with open-source alternatives they might be held liable. It’s not a problem if the open source is the standard. But that only happens when they were there first, hard to do it otherwise.
QGIS sounds really cool! I’ll definitely bring that up so she can practice that Environmental Sciences degree. :)
Insane about the liability angle. I had never considered that! Sounds like far too serious a business for my tastes.
I’m glad there’s a lot of open source libraries, and Linux is heavily employed in scientific and academic circles, at least. :)
Yeah, I really like it. But I also started with it because my university at that time only taught open source apps, and later on other universities did Arc but I just did the same thing in QGIS. But when you’re starting it might be a little of an adjustment.
They also just released v4.0 with full migration to qt6, I haven’t tested it out that well yet.
Btw I am currently working on a programming language that uses custom syntax to do fun analysis related to networks (directed graphs). And I have a GIS support for reading/writing network and attributes. I made it for rivers first, but I’m expanding to all directed graph. I’ve a mix of Computer and Geosciences background so I had fun doing something in the middle that most people don’t.
Edit: I am looking for people to try it out, but I have problem finding people that want to code in a new language, and for network related tasks.
maybe orcaslicer for 3d printing people? seems like the most popular nowadays, although it’s getting so fragmented with every manufacturer’s own slicer branch…
yeah, this is hard
oh, people who do streaming or youtubing stuff probably know OBS
there’s also probably a certain demographic for audacity
In my 2022 highschool journalism class we were instructed to take pictures from a professional camera, plug it into laptop, transfer the files, and make slides from the images.
First step was fine for everyone, but later I saw a 17 year old plug the camera to the laptop; and then they tried downloading their picture from google chrome.
No disrespect, I have my dumb moments too, but I genuienly wonder what the logic was sometimes.
“download” might have triggered that
well, file:// is a thing. maybe.
you could have a camera host a local web server lol
… i guess i’ve kinda done that in first robotics (although that was a live feed)
I study proteins and I chatter on about them, but once in a rare while I’ll talk to a normal person and they’ll say “like, the food group” or in introductions I’ll say I’m a structural biologist and some people look at me blankly then say something about “bone structure”. It kills me a little inside.
I bring this up at my job all the time. I work as a software tester, and I’m constantly reminding our BA that most customers aren’t smart enough to “just know not to do that”
This is true for every field. I have noticed this many times, whenever I was introduced to something new I never expected those things to be that deep. So I have understood that almost all things are shallow in nature to us until and unles we ourself step into it
The “who still uses Google?” crowd forgets most people just want their computer to work, not become a weekend side quest.
Nonsensical argument. Just because a piece of software is FLOSS and non-Google, it is not automatically a “weekend side quest”. Big Tech is very happy that these false equivalencies have spread as well as they did, but they don’t hold a kernel of truth, at least not anymore.
I get the point, but going away from Google search is so easy.
Gmail on the other hand I understand why people are still stuck using and I don’t push them to switch away.
But it drives me nuts that some normies in my life will complain that Google has gone worse, still refuse to switch. There are some who don’t know how to change default and I still get it, but there is one mf at my work, he changed his default in edge from bing to Google and when I said since you know how to change default why not use DDG or startpage or honestly any other non giant alternative. He just says too much work.
Gmail was about easiest to switch away from. You can just create a new email account and have two mailboxes. Then update the new email to services as they go.
With banks and financial services in general being a bitch about changing contact details. That’s a form and a visit to the branch for each bank, broker, investment advisor, direct fund provider. That’s already almost 30 applications. I haven’t even counted stuff like vehicular services, government tax portal, property tax portal, electricity provider, gas provider, internet provider. Not all of whom allow changing for email address digitally or without some complicated support ticket.
It’s such a mountain of changes I myself have only gotten through the list halfway and it’s been 4 years of trying. I can never recommend that to anyone in my family, they’ll just hate me.
P.s. This might just be my country specific problem, I understand other countries are easier.
I think it might be specific to your country and it sucks.
Here, banks are required to ask you to update your contact details once a year. You just log in as usually and sometimes they just give you a form to fill out with your phone number, email, physical address and stuff. If it’s unchanged, you leave it all unchanged.
Sounds like a dream.
Wow never thought about that, I changed it to all those digitally and it didn’t require much at all. One service required me to send an email and that felt a bit old-fashioned, but nothing like you described.
Yeah it’s fucked. And the worst part is, most of these places don’t even open on non working days, so I can’t even do these on weekend.
My country does have identity theft problem running rampart, so I don’t totally blame the services, it’s a pain but at least a leaked email password here and there wouldn’t automatically mean losing access to finance. I understand why it’s been designed such a way, but man it’s a such a mountain of a task.
Good luck in your endeavour in case you go that way. I guarantee it feels nice to read those emails in another provider knowing that Google isn’t sniffing around.
Yeah it’s fucked. And the worst part is, most of these places don’t even open on non working days, so I can’t even do these on weekend.
Yes, because what working adult would have difficulties going to places between 9 and 5 on workdays
It’s so stupid. If you’re going to have your physical location open exactly 5 days a week for a super important service people need to get to in person… make it tuesday thru saturday or something.
oh man it sures takes all my weekend to install firefox and set a search engine
It’s surprising the number of people who don’t do that last part
Honestly, switching search engines is pretty normie friendly. I’ve got a lot of non-techy friends or family, that use Ecosia or something. They also did it on their own, I didn’t even encourage them to do it.
With things like Linux it’s a bit harder. But if they don’t rely on any specialized software, they are usually fine with me offering to upgrade their Laptops so Linux. I installed Linux Mint on my Mom’s Laptop and she can use it as well as Windows. She never complained about it.
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I think this might make for a stronger argument with “Linux” instead of “Google”.
I think they’ll know about VLC, Audacity and Blender also
All FOSS nerds that joined after 2020 only know OBS, charge they phone, distro hop, eat hot chip, and GUI.
libreoffice is getting there too
every pc i’ve used has had libreoffice, even at my job even though they have licenses for almost everything from microsoft
Happens all the time. Also, nerds tend to overestimate the amount of resources, like time or money, someone would put on something they care about.
Right here in Lemmy I had this interaction where someone argued that if one were to lose their photos because Google had an oopsie, it’s kind of their fault because they didn’t have a backup plan.
The most intelligent people aren’t those with the greatest amount of knowledge but rather they’re the people that are capable of patiently breaking down concepts for their fellow human beings to understand.
