<story><title>The digital natives are not who you think they are</title><url>https://blog.torh.net/2021/05/12/the-digital-natives-are-not-who-you-think-it-is/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Smithalicious</author><text>Another instance of &amp;quot;middle-aged tech nerd makes fun of kids these days&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I get it, you&amp;#x27;re not too old to be good at computers, but I don&amp;#x27;t see the need to put down the younger generation and act like their tech knowledge doesn&amp;#x27;t extend beyond &amp;quot;video streaming&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Acting like kids are computer wizards is an exaggeration, but acting like young people know &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; about computing than this older generation is simply wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>teachingassist</author><text>I have taught kids for 20 years.&lt;p&gt;Young people (on average) know &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; about computing than they did.&lt;p&gt;The author of this article says &amp;quot;floppy disks, or &amp;#x27;the save icon&amp;#x27; as the young kids would recognize it&amp;quot; - except that they often wouldn&amp;#x27;t. Kids don&amp;#x27;t have any experience of saving and loading files.</text></comment>
<story><title>The digital natives are not who you think they are</title><url>https://blog.torh.net/2021/05/12/the-digital-natives-are-not-who-you-think-it-is/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Smithalicious</author><text>Another instance of &amp;quot;middle-aged tech nerd makes fun of kids these days&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I get it, you&amp;#x27;re not too old to be good at computers, but I don&amp;#x27;t see the need to put down the younger generation and act like their tech knowledge doesn&amp;#x27;t extend beyond &amp;quot;video streaming&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Acting like kids are computer wizards is an exaggeration, but acting like young people know &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; about computing than this older generation is simply wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>The complexity today is so great that understanding the entire system requires a vast amount of knowledge. The Commodore 64 was notable for being totally described down to the hardware and bit level in a 1 inch thick book. People who grew up with that could fully understand that little device.&lt;p&gt;With a modest amount of effort, you could totally understand an AMPS phone, the last generation of analog cellular. It was a two-way FM radio controlled by a tiny CPU, no more complex than a Commodore 64.&lt;p&gt;Understanding a modern phone is a huge job. Even at a general level. There&amp;#x27;s a 90s data center worth of compute power in there. About four radios. A GPU. A 6-axis inertial guidance system. Several cameras. A rather excessive amount of software. A web browser, which is itself overly complex. Voice codecs. Voice recognition. Quite possibly a machine learning system.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a lot to understand. It is also not useful to the end user to understand it.</text></comment>