Comment by fullstop

2 days ago

My kids were exposed to many operating systems at a young age, and you couldn't be more right regarding the mobile ecosystem. There's a lot of highschool aged kids who don't understand directories on a file system. They're used to tapping "open" and being presented with a list of files sandboxed in that environment.

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fullstop

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xnyan  2 days ago

The situation you describing is the norm for everyone, including you, for most subjects. Expertise gives you greater understanding and allows for more meaningful engagement with the subject, but most people are experts very few things.

When I "dance" (sway to the beat) at a wedding, I am doing the equivalent of tapping open on the file, whereas my parter with their lifetime of dance experience can move with a level of skill that is much more meaningful and nuanced. My best friend is a chef, his daughter has a vasty deeper awareness of flavor and technique vs most kids (including mine) who are just consuming without much thought. The same goes for my colleague who is also a musician and DJ - their kids can hear a song and instantly understand all the layers of production and instrumentation, whereas most children and adults are just nodding along to the beat.

If I consider most of the things I do in my life, I am interacting with them at very shallow and superficial level versus an expert, and I would assume the same is true for you.

  • fullstop  2 days ago

    I totally agree about expertise in a given domain. With that being said, I would consider navigating a directory tree below the level of swaying to the beat.

    I'm not expecting them to get into the nitty gritty about page alignment and DMA transfers. A directory tree is more on level with toe tapping.

    • Imustaskforhelp  20 hours ago

      Personally I always loved computers more than smartphones and really loved the freedom even windows could provide over something like android (in the sense of its interface etc.)

      I feel that a lot of people my age spend a lot more time on their phones as compared to computers and maybe even using the computer just for gaming or discord or something else (just click open, the games are there in steam, play run, it runs)

      I feel like it is partially tech's fault as well. Tech really wants us to not interact with things or to create a superapp to abstract everything to get a bigger portion of the cake

      I personally wouldn't be surprised if with things like AI browsers, we might be coming to the point where they genuinely just convert the whole internet into just a chatbot and would interact with the computer and everything on your behalf in the same interface (most likely)

      I am pretty sure that if this interface or something similar comes true then most people might not even know about things like www. or internet links in general, and we might be shocked in the same way we are right now to them not knowing what files are.