My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
My favorite is when someone tells me that they are too old to learn about new technology, or that they can’t use a device because they aren’t very tech-y. No, you just refuse to learn.
A lot of tech evolves and changes quickly, and a whole lot of people just dont like change, especially as they get older. It is also harder to learn new things as you get older. While it doesn’t apply across the board, the “can’t teach an old dog” addage generally holds true. This is not something that will go away. If you dont want to become that person, continue to exercise your brain as you age, and learning new tricks will be easier.
As someone in the “older” crowd, I can learn just about anything, I’m just sick and fucking tired of lazy ass devs who can’t be bothered to write proper fucking docs.
Note: I’ve been writing docs for going on 40 years as part of my job. It’s fucking tedious to do it well, to verify what you wrote actually works.
No, it’s not that it’s harder to learn (it may be) it’s that I have other shit to do too, and some dumbass has made using whatever tool way fucking more obtuse than it needs to be and hasn’t bothered to even explain their approach, their paradigm, in the all but non-existent docs.
Github’s website is an example - it leads with changes, the intro is halfway down the page, even then most descriptions are terse. Tech writers the world around are having strokes every time they have to look at it.
My dwindling interest in the the new hotness for tech is due to diminishing returns and how frequently it is change for the sake of change with zero additional benefit. I still learn new stuff, but only after it has been out long enough to find out if there is an actual benefit involved.
Seriously, the amount of things that are just repackaged stuff that already existed but now it is cheaply produced and unreliable is overwhelming. Brands don’t even stick to their purpose for a decade before selling out and letting quality slip.
Somehow, most changes I’ve seen in the last ~10 years seem to be enshittification …
It’s hard to motivate yourself to make an effort when the hot new tech is stuff like LLMs.
I agree. Just yesterday I was talking with my wife about this regarding the switch to ms teams our employers have made. Ever since, everything that could be done with one action now takes at least two. So I showed her the link where you can add shortcuts from teams to your onedrive, so you can at least work with explorer like a decent caveman.
The problem is that you often can’t learn because the app’s instructions are a year behind.
Or, for my pet hate with FOSS, the instructions assume that you understand the underlying technology.
‘Hey, we’ve made this fantastic new program for Linux newbs, it’s so easy that even your grandma can use it! To install it, clone the repo and pipe the results of awk through sed using grep. You can add flags in the usual way!’