#Technology & Literacy

[gayvampyr]

im glad we’re finally talking about lack of technology literacy in younger people. everyone assumes we’ll automatically be good at it and have all the know-how because we grew up with it, and sure i might be more knowledgeable about it than say, someone 15 years older, but technology is changing and becoming more “turnkey” and a lot of the customization and workarounds just are not that accessible or obvious anymore. several tech companies boast that their new products are so simple and easy that a baby could do it, and users no longer have to figure out or understand anything behind the scenes because look, there’s a button right there you can press for this issue and if you’re still having problems you can just take it to a technician.

and im not saying this is inherently bad, it’s more accessible to people who don’t know anything about technology, but we are losing our computer skills because we don’t understand the tech and don’t see a need to. you buy a phone or a laptop and it’s perfectly usable fresh out the box and you don’t have to do anything to customize it because they’ve done it for you, which sucks especially considering they often don’t even want you to mess with the programming or software. customization is discouraged so they give you a handful of options they picked out and that’s that, and if your computer goes kaput then instead of learning how to fix it you can just throw it away and buy a new one! and while turnkey tech is a good option for a lot of people, we should still be encouraging know-how and teaching tech literacy in school as we become even more dependent on it. so many young people are struggling to work on computers and no one thinks to teach them because of the generation they’re in. it’s a major issue.

[ahb-writes]

"What's your fully formed opinion on this incredibly complex social issue that you just learned about five minutes ago? Quick, type it into your phone so the rest of us can tell you: Fuck off and die!"

Randy Feltface (Purple Privilege)

[katthekonqueror]

Another downside to the increasing amount of technology illiteracy is that if you do know basic troubleshooting steps, and you ever use them to successfully solve someone's problem, that person will think you're a fucking genius and sign you up to help a baby boomer with his iphone.

[writeouswriter]

Genuinely don't understand people who don't want to actually think about and analyze what they read or want to use AI to write their essays, gonna be honest, I'd kill to be writing an essay right now, I'm dying to be in an environment where actually being able to delve into and lay out my thoughts on a work would mean something, have some effect or actual outside accountability or reward in the form of further understanding through review and working toward a further tangible goal, like genuinely if you don't want to learn the subject material, why are you paying to take these courses, I mean, it's one thing to be a disillusioned high school student who feels forced into an assignment and wants the easy way out, which, don't be that guy, even if you're struggling, trying to work through and pinpoint why is better than just trying to ignore it, but it's another thing when like this is your life, this is what you chose to do, what you're working towards and you don't want to do it properly, like do you genuinely want to go through life without ever having a single fully formed thought float through your head again? I'm being real, are you so dependent on AI or things like that, you've conditioned yourself to literally be unable to think for yourself, form opinions, understand text or deeper meaning or anything, that's how things get bad EVERYWHERE, that's how you get a misinformed population of the blind leading the blind, easily susceptible people who can't understand why we shouldn't create the torment nexus or why the leopards eating faces party would eat their face, too, like, yes, I remember procrastinating assignments, yes the school system is flawed, it's focused too largely on memory and rigid structures and etc., but this isn't the solution, if anything it's only further deepening the already existing issues of only caring about tests and end results, but in the end, if you play into it, it's not the system that's failed you, it's common sense. You can be better, you can do better, work smarter not harder does not mean don't work at all, give yourself the benefit of the doubt, don't hold yourself back, let yourself be capable of discovering things even through struggling and making mistakes, let yourself be capable of being smart.

[maybefrench]

This is bullshit. I mean, I was on PC, didn't understand a fuck. Was moved on Mac, and then I could understand and was willing to put my hand in them to change parts. The problem is not Mac vs PC It's how *fixable* they are. And if this "study" is to be on tablet-kids, then I'm sorry to say your Samsung is just as not reparable as an iPad.

The real problem is there: the fact we can't open our devices anymore to go and check the parts, even if just to clean them from dust.

Not the UI.

[localthumbcache]

max kaspar, the friendly ghost... hunter

[skippersthecat]

Toritsuka has definitely fallen for those 'horny milfs in your area' scams multiple times

[etlu-yume]

All of this.

I keep forgetting how absolutely vital the computer class I took in year 11/12 was. Ironically only two people took it, everyone else was more interested in taking programming. I wonder how that holds up today in comparison...

BUT the really big thing for me, which was really a teeny tiny part of the course, was going over file types. JPEG vs GIF vs BMP/Bitmap vs EPS, etc etc.

Because like someone said above, the thing that concerns me about a looooot of these app-specific file formats? What happens when that app... dies. When the devs stop supporting it, or it just gathers dust. Or there's another major shift between operating systems and it gets left behind?

I've seen soooooo many issues arise in both personal and professional applications that makes me worried about where it's all heading. Because this continued privatization of data and particularly file types is not looking good.

Take Adobe for example - part of the reason it has a fucking chokehold on the art and design world is because of the file formatting. Someone sends you a PSD file, and while there are other apps that /can/ open it to varying degrees, it's dodgy. But then you get people who can't or won't for reasons upgrade to later versions of the software (no shade intended - we encountered a print supplier who still worked with CS6 instead of CC and we had to prepare files differently for them. Iirc it was a pretty large scale industrial packaging printer too, so. Nobody's immune!)

Hell, even just from adobe you start getting issues with things like Pantone swatches (domino effect across the sector; creative agencies are scrambling trying to work out PMS swatches and printers are being supplied files that are totally unsuitable - because pantone removed their colour books from adobe products, and even with a paid subscription what I've heard from local designers has been that all it does is give you *access* to their colour converter. You don't get the swatches.)

And what's worse than colour swatches? Fonts!

As of early 2023 they stopped supporting T1 fonts ("Type1" fonts, iirc a Postscript format). Which suddenly renders HUNDREDS of fonts useless.

"oh just go download free fonts from dafont Etlu"

I mean, technically yeah, you could. But from my experience a loooot of the files being affected are also dating back to the 90's. They're formats that have worked for LITERAL DECADES and probably cost an arm and a leg. I remember a thumbdrive going around my uni class from a lecturer who "lost" it (he was being an amazing lecturer shh take a copy and pass it on), with $20,000 worth of fonts on it. (Fonts are hellishly expensive. For comparison, to buy the complete family of Helvetica Now with 96 fonts it'll set you back $866.86)

And now so many of those fonts are just. Redundant.

There's such a push for "cloud-based" programming and like no consideration/though about what happens when the internet goes down or if something happens to that particular "cloud"'s server network, etc etc.

Idk the more I think about it the more I kinda want to crawl back into a safety bubble of 2011-2012.

Me: oh yeah, if you think school photography is hard now, try imagining doing this with film.

The new girl: what’s film?

Me: … film. Like… film that goes in a film camera.

New girl: what’s that mean?

Me: … before cameras were digital.

New girl: how did you do it before digital?

Me:… with film? I haven’t had enough coffee for this conversation

[uovoc]

Me: so discord is like... Well you know group chats... Except they're usually organized around a common interest...

Mom: ??? the same as a Facebook group?

me: not really.... more like Weixin group?

Mom: oh, I get it.

~ Ten minutes later ~

me: so Apple Pay is like... a way to pay using your phone... but the money is from either your credit card or bank account...

Mom: ???

me: It's like Weixin Pay

mom: [instant comprehension] oh ok

[liminalweirdo]

what do you think are the most important things to utilize if someone wanted to learn to amplify their tech-literacy/tech-using experience?

We all know about add-block and anti-tracker add-ons, I'm thinking things like using github for various things, downloading youtube vids using yt-dlp. etc. etc. Bonus points if you can drop guides/how-tos

Other examples are things you can do with word, like adding macros, etc.

Also, what are your favourite non-game programs and apps? This could be anything.

i'm hoping to get a list where lots of folks can add on so if you could reblog that would be awesome

[hibiscus-ships]

If you guys ever feel stupid, just remember that I learned that someone has you blocked when Tumblr gives you an error message instead of taking you to their page when you click their URL like.....1.5 months ago 💀 🌺

[disast3rtransp0rt]

Absolutely crazy that David Wong (aka Jason Pargin) wrote a book containing this precise problematic situation, "Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits". And in one of the first four chapters he presents this technology as exactly the kind of threat it has turned out to be:

Another person shuffled down the aisle toward the restroom, and they also glanced down at her, an act that was starting to seem intentional - Zoey swore everyone who passed was doing it. Did she still have chili stuck to her face? This time it was a black teenage girl with wired-up glasses like the ones Jacob was wearing, which meant for all Zoey knew the girl had the built-in camera on and was broadcasting a feed, maybe one called The Worst Hair Dye Jobs on Mass Transit Daily (today's episode: "The Cat Girl in the Back Row with Cyan Bangs").

Zoey is in fact being followed by a murderous bounty-hunter in this scene, and random people are assisting the hunt by providing live feed of her location.

Social Media and the internet at large are already enormously useful tools for stalkers. Imagine what this layer of access could do; imagine the lives that will be absolutely ruined for no reason other than greed and hubris. Was everyone so blinded by Jeff Goldblum's tits in Jurassic Park that they didn't hear him question the mindless pursuit of scientific advancement without first considering the consequences?

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

That's still before taking into consideration the unknown psychological and neurological outcomes of this tech! What will it do to your vision? Your brain's pathway formation? How will it impact prepubescent vs. postpubescent brains?

These are tests that should be run before any kind of tool this involved can be rolled out to the purchasing public.

Occasionally Jacob's eyes would dart up and to the right and she knew he was refreshing an inbox that was only visible to him, otherwise she had no idea what he was actually seeing out of the glasses. They made games where you could bounce a little rubber ball off the faces of the people in the room (the ball was only visible to you, of course) or that would obscure everything with a fantasy world and leave you blind to your surroundings, which if you did it on the bus, was a good way to get your purse stolen. But either way, any time you talked to a person who was wearing the glasses, you never knew if they were actually seeing you. Jacob said, "You get used to them. They leave kind of an afterimage when you take them off, and you find yourself constantly looking around for your notifications."

Humans love our kinesthetic memory! It has worked very well for us throughout our entire evolutionary process! It's why "muscle memory" is a term and why cars with buttons are so much easier to operate than cars with touch screens!

Anyway. Be smart about your tech choices and read more science fiction.

Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them."

In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.

"This synergy between LLMs and reverse face search allows for fully automatic and comprehensive data extraction that was previously not possible with traditional methods alone," their Google document said.

Where previously someone could spend substantial time conducting their own search of public databases to find information based on someone's image alone, their dystopian smart glasses do that job in a few seconds, their demo video said.

The co-creators said that they altered a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to create I-XRAY to raise awareness of "significant privacy concerns" online as technology rapidly advances.

[i-l-t-l]

The Shadow of Man

-

For a long time I have known I am different than most due to my mental illness. From a young age I could see that my world perception was different to such an extent that I often retreated and escaped into fiction where I wouldn't need to inhabit the same mental spaces.

During my most isolated of times I have had dreams of this figure and in my dreams it is always something of a warning. I think isolation burns something inside of us to the point that it'll merely consume you.

Face Your Shadow Lest You Are Consumed.

[disasterhimbo]

Ok, y’all, I’m embarrassingly tech-illiterate, they never taught it to us in school and I never learned on my own. Does anyone know of a primer to understand such things more? I know that’s probably a big, vague question but I don’t even know exactly what I should be looking for so I’m open to suggestions lol, I just need to at least understand how to set up a wifi network and shit like that. I’m also very interested in learning more about federated/decentralized platforms and privacy-focused stuff like protonmail. Thanks for any help you offer!

[commodorez]

"Oh, but you were raised around technology, you should know this".

Someone had to teach us (millennials) how to use it, and they failed many of you gen Z folks by not doing you the same courtesy. Someone did the same with gen X'ers in the office, but maybe they don't remember it. And before that, someone had to teach the baby boomers. And someone had to teach the greatest generation how to use a rotary dial telephone. I could keep going...

Look, I'm just some guy on the internet, but I'll help how can -- the inbox is always open for general technical questions about technology, old and somewhat new.

Telling young zoomers to "just switch to linux" is nuts some of these ipad kids have never even heard of a cmd.exe or BIOS you're throwing them to the wolves

[settlercolonialismisbad]

Thinking about Mastodon? Peertube? here’s a primer.