I constantly remind myself of the George Carlin(I think) quote:
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.”
Also important to remember Douglas Adams (when underestimating stupid people):
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Have gotten to post that one twice this week!
I always think about the effort to create a bear proof trash can in Yosemite that gave us the phrase “there is significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist”.
It’s easy enough to design and even build a bear proof garbage can. So long as you are OK with locking out 90% of the users.
gotta add the babbage classic :
On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
those are modern techbros now
That sounds like my ex colleague. He could not comprehend people typing non numbers into his input boxes on his little application and I had to break thing à down for him. He actually got upset over it. “It asks for a positive, integer value. What’s unclear about that? Why would you type text in?”
sighuses the word “integer” in a communication with the user
Oh honey…
Right? The guy was a 40yo engineer. A real nerd’s nerd. This might explain that :,D
Computer scientists don’t understand this. This is systems.
Seriously, I have met computer scientists who admit they don’t know how the computer works, but simply is processional math.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking.
Computer science doesn’t mean you know how to a use a computer; astronomers and microbiologists don’t know much about telescopes and microscopes.
And CS students have the dumbest “smart” questions.
One dude just got his phD in computer science and admitted to me he cannot even use his phone. Wish I was joking
I mean, computer science is basically the mathematics of computation. It’s not like the people working on knot theory or topology are great with 3d art or knitting
I would be surprised if the average person knows even one operating system, including the ones they use
My parents know one and it’s windows. One time my dad messaged me at work to ask if his laptop had windows xp, vista, 7, 8, 10 or 11, so he doesn’t even know the version differences :p
My mom may also say “samsung” as an operating system if you prod enough, but she also knows their laptop has windows 11, so she knows more than my dad
So that’s what the average non-tech person thinks about OSes
Yeah. A typical non-tech person is just as likely to say their PC is running on Microsoft or Google. Maybe they’ll say Edge if they are really knowledgeable.
Most of them are unaware of what an OS is even.
For real! I’m still unable to explain what an OS is to my 14-yo daughter. I tried several analogies but I always have the impression she says she gets it just to shut me up so she can carry on watching Tiktok videos.
starting from stratch is a good way to learn. Basic circuits, what electricity is, etc. Then you move onto diodes and transistors. Then memory and binary systems. Then assembly, c, etc.
Also, have you tried convincing them to move from stuff like tiktok to foss apps like loops?
Don’t forget Temple OS
uhhhh temple os
bask in its glory
I’ve literally had to explain the existence of other operating systems than Windows to people. They had never heard of Linux.
Have you ever heard something like saying “His Windows is Linux”?
An upgrade to having never heard of Linux but also a downgrade somehow
A long time ago (I cannot find it anymore, may have been deleted) I read a “tale from tech support” where a user called tech support and complained “my operating system is missing”. Retelling from memory:
Tech support person tried to walk the user through various steps until the user said “ok, let me just close these documents…”
“Wait, you have open documents? Your operating system is not missing.”
“What? No, it is.”
“If your operating system were missing, you wouldn’t be able to do anything with your computer, you wouldn’t have open documents. If you can do that, you definitely have some operating system. What version of Windows is the computer running?”
“Windows 7.”
“There you have it, that’s your operating system.”
“That’s Windows, not operating system.”
Am in tech. Surrounded by tech people. Front devs, back devs, data engineers, data scientists and analysts, IT techs…
They know windows. They know macOS as an “easier alternative for normies”. Some of them even prefer it because it’s “easy”. A few of them even know there’s a terminal somewhere, but wouldn’t
git commitfrom the command line even if their life depended on it.A lot of them have heard of Linux, in a distant and nebulous way. Most of them still believe that Linux is confined to the server space or a weird dev environment inside WSL because you’re developing for servers, that you can’t daily drive Linux as a desktop, or that you can’t game on Linux. None of them would consider switching even if they spend their day complaining about how shitty windows is.
This is true for about 95% of the tech people I interact with btw. Big tech psyop is real.
It’s first in the last few years we’ve begun seeing somewhat stable gaming distros for Linux, which doesn’t require a ton of fiddling for every single game.
Yet kernel level anti cheat is still an issue, so if you want to play some of the big PvP games. There’s a lot of inconvenience to get them rolling
Working as a dev, I have the same experience. The few times I’ve tried to bring Linux up as a viable option to the OS we’re all forced to use at work, and most of us hate using (Win11), there’s little to no interest. There’s a few Mac users on my team, but that’s about it. I think it’s that the majority of folks, even if they’re working in tech, simply don’t have enough of a reason to try something unfamiliar, which might cause them new and unknown problems, or require them to rethink how they use computes, on their own machines. Even though I’m pretty sure that most would prefer it, given some time.
That’s kind of an astounding anecdotal batch of experience, you sure more of those folks don’t know Linux better?
