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It's more simple than you think it is. It's more complicated than you think it is. (Didi! Don't touch that button!) When I was teaching my mother to use a mou

It's more simple than you think it is. It's more complicated than you think it is. (Didi! Don't touch that button!) When I was teaching my mother to use a mouse she waved it around in the air and asked why nothing was happening on the screen. When I showed her a picture of water, she kept poking the LCD screen making it distort and laughing that it looked like real water, until I firmly told her to stop before she damaged it. But even much younger people seem to have no clue. Some think their desktop is their browser, or their browser is the Internet. Some call their monitor (or UPS) their "computer". No understanding of hierarchical file organization. No understanding the difference between memory and storage. No understanding of "context". My wife complains that Thunderbird is slow. I point out she has tens of thousands of unread emails in her inbox. A neverending shitshow.

ev1 4y ago
I'm at the older point of gen z and I can explain a few of the things: - Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud. - You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails. - Cheap tablets and phones try exceedingly fucking hard to confuse you intentionally for this bullshit to sell you "32GB MEMORY" (shit storage, 1GB ram), etc. Every non-flagship will lie to your face about this in all advertising you ever see, at least in the US. - Cloud storage is the same. See first point about Chromebooks, for all practical purposes you save nothing locally. iPhones save your local storage by auto-migrating items to iCloud if not used.

ev1 4y ago

I'm at the older point of gen z and I can explain a few of the things: - Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud. - You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails. - Cheap tablets and phones try exceedingly fucking hard to confuse you intentionally for this bullshit to sell you "32GB MEMORY" (shit storage, 1GB ram), etc. Every non-flagship will lie to your face about this in all advertising you ever see, at least in the US. - Cloud storage is the same. See first point about Chromebooks, for all practical purposes you save nothing locally. iPhones save your local storage by auto-migrating items to iCloud if not used.