may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.
I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.
Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.
Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.
Some strikingly high percentage can’t complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).
Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind
Nice! I switched my desktop from win11 to popos this weekend. So far so good, but all I’ve done is play some games (guild wars 2, binding of Isaac) and some quick tests (camera, HDMI to the TV, music)
I think a lot of people are kind of bad at written communication. It’s not an easy skill.
Often at work folks will write twice as many words and clauses as needed. The Hemingway editor ( https://hemingwayapp.com/ ) isn’t perfect, but I recommend they take a look at it.
My favorite, though more of a UI blunder than a bug, and I think fixed now: If you right clicked on a user name and hit “Add Note”, a box would pop up for you to type in. Like for writing your note in. But that box was in fact the “send them a direct message” box.
So if you hypothetically wanted to write “Asshole” as a note, and didn’t pay attention to what text box had focus, well, that was a bad time.
Making a discord channel is instant and free
This is because discord is close to the top of the enshittification funnel.
Some people are really bad at empathy. They don’t actually, like, imagine the pain and confusion in the other person if they did unwittingly damage their computer. They’re thoughtless. That’s a lot of words to say “They’re kind of stupid.”
And some people do imagine the pain of the victim, and do it anyway. Those people should probably be on a watch list before they start killing small animals or shooting up a school.
I mean, sure, it’s not good if they did sketchy stuff to bootstrap their network. I hadn’t heard there before but I wouldn’t be surprised.
But I don’t think it’s really the same as Yelp. Or at least not how I use it. Trust isn’t really a factor. I don’t use LinkedIn to review a company. I don’t look at their soulless posts about how great their team is. I use it to see “do I know anyone who works at this place that has an opening I want?” Then when I see my old friend is a manager there, I shoot him a message (possibly not even via LinkedIn if it’s someone I know well) and ask if it’s someplace I would want to work at. There’s not really a lot of room for fake in that process.
Also sometimes recruiters just message me. Some of them suck but that’s not really particular to LinkedIn.
You’re not thinking of Glassdoor, are you? Because that’s more like yelp and I don’t especially trust the positive reviews on there.
I don’t really want to go to bat for Microsoft though. I’d be happier if there was a better professional network out there. But, you know, capitalist hellscape.
LinkedIn is very useful for job searching and networking. I don’t post on there, but it was key to getting several job offers.
I’m not aware of any other professional social networks.
Semantic versioning. If I have 1.0.0 and you release 1.1.0 I can be pretty confident it’s safe to update. If you release 2.0.0 I need to read the release notes and see what broke.
If I have version July2023 and you release August2023 I have no information about if it’s safe to update. That’s terrible. That’s really bad.
This is for dependency management and maybe apis more than OSs, but in general semantic versioning is a very good system. It should be used often.
Maybe the average user is so ignorant and bad at computers they don’t understand this. They don’t know what a browser is. They don’t know what a website is. They don’t know what a program is. It’s all just stuff.
Personally, I’d rather spend billions on education than AI slop and other patches on “people are kind of dull”