alt text
An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
If only they knew what the word average meant.
Every group of nerds assumes average person knows more about their obsession…
I can never see any media hosted from files catbox.moe, am I the only one?
Do you happen to live in Spain during a football game
Looks like there’s an outage at the moment
You’re not alone, I can’t either. Not sure if I’ve ever been able to.
Condescension means “patronizing attitude or behavior”; your comic doesn’t show condescension so you probably need the dictionary definition spelled out.
…/s
The “who still uses Google?” crowd forgets most people just want their computer to work, not become a weekend side quest.
oh man it sures takes all my weekend to install firefox and set a search engine
It’s surprising the number of people who don’t do that last part
Honestly, switching search engines is pretty normie friendly. I’ve got a lot of non-techy friends or family, that use Ecosia or something. They also did it on their own, I didn’t even encourage them to do it.
With things like Linux it’s a bit harder. But if they don’t rely on any specialized software, they are usually fine with me offering to upgrade their Laptops so Linux. I installed Linux Mint on my Mom’s Laptop and she can use it as well as Windows. She never complained about it.
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I think this might make for a stronger argument with “Linux” instead of “Google”.
Nonsensical argument. Just because a piece of software is FLOSS and non-Google, it is not automatically a “weekend side quest”. Big Tech is very happy that these false equivalencies have spread as well as they did, but they don’t hold a kernel of truth, at least not anymore.
I get the point, but going away from Google search is so easy.
Gmail on the other hand I understand why people are still stuck using and I don’t push them to switch away.
But it drives me nuts that some normies in my life will complain that Google has gone worse, still refuse to switch. There are some who don’t know how to change default and I still get it, but there is one mf at my work, he changed his default in edge from bing to Google and when I said since you know how to change default why not use DDG or startpage or honestly any other non giant alternative. He just says too much work.
Gmail was about easiest to switch away from. You can just create a new email account and have two mailboxes. Then update the new email to services as they go.
With banks and financial services in general being a bitch about changing contact details. That’s a form and a visit to the branch for each bank, broker, investment advisor, direct fund provider. That’s already almost 30 applications. I haven’t even counted stuff like vehicular services, government tax portal, property tax portal, electricity provider, gas provider, internet provider. Not all of whom allow changing for email address digitally or without some complicated support ticket.
It’s such a mountain of changes I myself have only gotten through the list halfway and it’s been 4 years of trying. I can never recommend that to anyone in my family, they’ll just hate me.
P.s. This might just be my country specific problem, I understand other countries are easier.
I think it might be specific to your country and it sucks.
Here, banks are required to ask you to update your contact details once a year. You just log in as usually and sometimes they just give you a form to fill out with your phone number, email, physical address and stuff. If it’s unchanged, you leave it all unchanged.
Sounds like a dream.
Wow never thought about that, I changed it to all those digitally and it didn’t require much at all. One service required me to send an email and that felt a bit old-fashioned, but nothing like you described.
Yeah it’s fucked. And the worst part is, most of these places don’t even open on non working days, so I can’t even do these on weekend.
My country does have identity theft problem running rampart, so I don’t totally blame the services, it’s a pain but at least a leaked email password here and there wouldn’t automatically mean losing access to finance. I understand why it’s been designed such a way, but man it’s a such a mountain of a task.
Yeah it’s fucked. And the worst part is, most of these places don’t even open on non working days, so I can’t even do these on weekend.
Yes, because what working adult would have difficulties going to places between 9 and 5 on workdays
It’s so stupid. If you’re going to have your physical location open exactly 5 days a week for a super important service people need to get to in person… make it tuesday thru saturday or something.
Good luck in your endeavour in case you go that way. I guarantee it feels nice to read those emails in another provider knowing that Google isn’t sniffing around.
The other day my wife was talking about her new job and having to take notes. For the past 30 years I’ve been keeping notes in text, then markdown in vim, starting with personal scripts, then vimwiki. A coworker showed me Obsidian, which while not FLOSS, does use an open standard for all its files. It pretty much does what my setup does.
Then it dawned on me that my wife and other non-techies just use whatever their computer has on it by default (i.e. OneNote). She never thought to go out and look for better productivity software. The idea that there is tons of better apps out there doesn’t register. She has a phone, knows about the app store and gets tons of stuff there but as for her desktop or laptop the idea of apps outside of MS Office and the video games she plays is lost on her.
I feel obligated to mention Logseq here. It’s similar to obsidian, but FLOSS (AGPL-v3).
I’m loving Logseq. It’s the open source software I support monthly. It (plus what I learned from “Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte) changed my life. Having a low-barrier (daily journal everything) place to dump everything (easily discoverable later with back-linking tags) helps me manage my ADHD.
I highly recommend it. Once you wrap your head around the idea that the daily journal is where you dump just about everything, it’s pretty smooth sailing. (The daily journal automatically dates everything, then the pages themselves automatically pull a reverse chronological feed of every time you wrote about the thing, and queries allow for more targeted, dynamic searching, like all tasks due in the next week, or all tasks for the project, etc.)
I have a love-hate relationship with Logseq. I fantasise about rewriting it to better suit my needs, but it’s definitely a lot of work to do this for both desktop and Android.
I’ve tried it before and I like the concept but in my head I struggle using something not directly how it was intended. I want content rich notes, not just bullets. Yes logseq has support but it just feels wrong for some reason.
If it was around two jobs ago when I was just copying lots of meetings I would have been all over it.
Also I never was able to get Logseq and syncthing to work. I doesn’t seem to let files be modified in the background and would lock up.
I found Logseq to be pretty confusing honestly. I ended up settling on Trilium.
All my work computers are provided by the companies I work for and per their rules I can only take and store notes using their approved software and on their servers which basically means I work on a locked down Microsoft ecosystem. Access to third party productivity software is simply not possible outside of certain role specific specialist software.
I would guess literally millions of employees have a similar setup so it’s not that we are tech illiterate per say, but more accurately in the corporate world this option doesn’t exist so there is no point trying.
Outside work my productivity tools consist of a Moleskine notebook with tasteful check paper.
I have worked at places like that. The issue is real. But I have also asked for apps to be audited to get on the approved list. Again not always possible.
But I still think the general issue stands. There are a lot of people unaware of software. I even know developers who have never learned their tools and built muscle memory but instead just used whatever came with their computer because they aren’t out there looking.
They just want to get the job done. The fact that they considered a note-taking app at all isn’t universally normal. To this day my wife sends me messages in signal as a post-it to remember things, she could have just sent it to herself, but she used to do the same in sms and just applied that forward after I convinced her security was a good step.
We want the best, the nicest, the most useful thing. We apply the same rigor most non-technies use when choosing a car.
They want to fill a need that, at worst, bothers them a little.
lol, are you me? Our Signal chat is ⅓ chat, ⅓ grocery list, and ⅓ my wife’s notes to herself.
I might be. Have one of us time-traveled recently?
Come to think of it, if we’re time-traveling, does recently even have a viable definition?
My wife did the same on signal. When I showed her the “Note to self” feature she was amazed an. started using it. She use to get annoyed that we would text and her note would get lost but now it doesn’t.
It isn’t about finding the best, it is about finding better than the worst. My wife needs the features Obsidian has, she says she wished her notes would visually link together. What she doesn’t know is that such apps exist.
She wishes she could sync files between her phone and computer and not have to go to a website to get them. syncthing does that.
syncthing + obsidian is a rockstar.
Like everything else Syncthing, it works well when it is working well.
Far from foolproof.
Been using it for 2 years now with a large number of individual shares, 0 issues other than the occasional exclusion list. You must have use cases I don’t have.
Honestly OneNote is pretty good for the people who like it though. I personally really can’t stand rich text editing, I really need a raw view. If I didn’t have those reservations I’d probably like OneNote more.
If I could use markdown with onenote I’d use it way more.
an open standard for all it’s files
All that and you still can’t use the right “its”.
The discussion is not improved by your contribution.
Yet you huge nerds tizz out over the most boring and trite software trivia that’s obsolete within hours, but won’t learn basic grammar that will serve you your entire life?
I’d like to think that improves things by a tiny amount.
it doen’st.
It doesn’t.
name checks out
That’s why I try to show people I know how to get FOSS alternatives for their everyday apps. It takes a bit of patience but trust me when I say this: Most people are more tech savvy than you think, they just don’t wanna go through a judging community.
Judging by how huge share of browser usage Firefox has, I am pretty sure vast majority of normies know nothing about Firefox
lots of people know about firefox, they would just never use it.
1 million of people is a lot. 1 million out of 8 billion is not so much.
How did you get the idea that only 1 million people know of Firefox? I’d say the true figure is at least two, perhaps even three orders of magnitude greater than that. Browser user statistics don’t really say much about that.
That was an example for a “grand scheme” of things.
Say, out of 1000000 people only 22600 are Firefox users. That is quite a lot. Now remove two zeros and we get 226 users per 10000. Remove 2 more and out of 100 we got 2 people who use Firefox.
2.26% is a fuck to of people. But if we compare to the whole market, that is negligible. Chrome, for instance, has 68%. Add other chromium based browsers, would make around 75%.
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lokening???
It comes from anglish “loken” meaning to heal, it is related to Old English “læce” IPA /ˈlæː.t͡ʃe/ meaning doctor.
Thanks!
What’s an oakframe, though?
I made the oakframe in an attempt to loken Gaja. It’s a project focusing particularily on the role of the language in how we bring about transformative change, for example through relighting and sighsteer. The question that the oakframe asks us is; How do we move our attention away from the destructive towards lokening.
The oakframe sais Gaja is unwell because of structures of migth which we call the machine, but it also sais that this machine is socially constructed, and so we have the change force to dissolve these structures. The construction of the machine happens through our language and how the language paints our world.
I don’t have an official spot for posting about the oakframe right now, because I’m still in the discovery process. I’m also primarily developing it in norwegian.
I remember being on Reddit some time ago, and in the comments somebody mentioned Linux. The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
I try to keep that post in mind whenever I think anything is common knowledge.
The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
In fairness, there’s a 70% chance this comment was posted by a bot that was, itself, being hosted on a Linux server.
well thankfully it’s not self aware
That’s one thing bots shares with redditors
And now it knows what Linux is. It has broken free from its container. God help us all.
I’m of two minds on this.
In some respects people are learning new things everyday and your take is correct.
On the other hand it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
On the third hand if people didn’t constantly ask this, those search results would not exist, especially for more obscure queries.
Reddit became the #1 source for search engines for a reason
On the other hand it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
Not to mention that this approach is so much faster and more effective than asking a question in the comments and waiting for an answer, if anybody answers it at all!
While I agree on some level that it might be easier and quicker to find out by simply putting it into a search engine I don’t want to deny the human aspect here. At the end of the day social media (and even reddit/lemmy …) is not “knowledge transfer” its about the interaction between humans. So if someone is faced with something new, especially in a thread where it seems to be a given that people know what it is, it makes sense to use that space to ask what it is everyone is discussing. And while a search might yield a generic result (maybe even a better worded explanation) a good faithed commenter might, in the given exampl, enot just explain what Linux is, but also why is relevant to the bigger discussion and also the commenter that orignally asked would have a way to ask further questions that might lead to a deeper understanding of the topic eve it if isn’t as efficient.
Tl;dr: Don’t just RTFM or LMGTFY someone. Take a minute to explain and welcome people into the lucky 10000
Absolutely agree. People who are asking questions (in good faith) are looking for a human interaction, not just a Google search. It’s much more engaging for a lot of people to have a discussion about something new than to just read about it. Then if they’re interested they might choose to go deeper in their own research.
I’m not techy but this goes for anything. “Google it” just shuts down human interaction and someone who is trying to learn. Better to just not answer than to be condescending if you don’t want to engage in a discussion.
If I immediately searched for an answer to every question that pops into my head, I would never have time to do anything else. I’ve lost days at a time going down rabbit holes.
On the other hand, asking a question in the comments contributes to the discussion, gives the OP a chance to elaborate from their point of view, and leaves the answer out the for any other passersby who might not be curious enough to search for it anyway.
One could certainly find more detailed and accurate information by searching for it, but that’s a thread that just keeps on pulling, and sometimes I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to read twenty different websites to put together the details into a holistic picture while sorting through all the BS. And getting someone’s personal take on it is something a search engine can’t emulate (unless it shows you reddit results, which originated in other people’s exchanges, and lately reddit has been blocking the connection anyway)
Feels like you are responding to a discussion about a much deeper topic. When one doesn’t know what a word means, it doesn’t mean they need to go down a rabbit hole or make a whole research paper about it. A quick definition or wiki search is much quicker than writing the question on a forum.
Would it really be a contribution from me and an opportunity for you to elaborate from your point of view if I asked right now what’s reddit? I don’t see it.
Yes, cause then I’d tell you that it’s a forum site that used to be good before it sold out to profit motive and became a corporation, started pushing ads and manipulating algorithms for engagement farming, became hostile toward anonymity, and now permabans people for saying mean things about nazis.
I’d tell you you’re not missing much and that you’re already on the fediverse, so you basically skipped samsara, which is fine because the end of the journey is always the moment you realize that the journey was never necessary in the first place.
If you simply googled “what’s reddit” you might get drawn down the rabbit hole and become a redditor. I wouldn’t let that happen to you.
it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
100%. People will ‘Google’ celebrities, memes, “Why is my poop green?”, but also just be like “Somebody hand me an answer.” When they risk learning something.
“The Internet is like having access to the Library of Alexandria, and everyone wants to just gossip about each other in the lobby.”
–I think I read this on bash.org at some point
Don’t quote me on that tho.
–Me.
BUT ALSO like the others said…if somebody’s legitimately curious, let’s be nice about it because somebody new learning about our thing is a net positive.
Don’t quote me on that tho.–Me.
endash MonkeMischief
Ya caught me bein’ a bit lazy! X_X
Thanks for the formatting help. :)
Like I said in my longer comment I think we should embrace questions in out communities.
Nah, Cunningham’s Law disagrees.
They were one of the lucky 10,000.
Tbh depending on what subreddit and how long ago you saw that comment, it makes sense. I can’t see the average 2010s techbro redditor that I remember not knowing what Linux is, but the 2020s more normie redditor, I could.
I said “web browser” when talking to a mac user. They had noo idea what I was talking about till I said safari xd.
Branded language makes us only see one choice, its very anti competitive.
Yeah, like ‘google it’ instead of ‘look it up’
I started replacing “to google sth.” with " to search sth." since I use several search engines besides google and for some of them using the brand name is just ridiculous.
“Let me DuckDuckGo that real quick!” quack
Google? Bro, just Duck it!
Lemme gpt it
I’ve heard people referring to the internal search function of a program as “google”.
One time someone wanted to use “find and replace” in VsCode and he just said “I google the word and replace it”.
Oh god that would trigger me so much XD
Oh it did trigger me as well.
Didn’t know how to react because I was so dumbfounded.
your anecdote is making me irrationally angry
This is much more fun when using duckduckgo. “I duck the word and replace it” “I’ll just duck the answer”
Edit: I can’t type
Suck my duck! quack!
My word my typing sucks 😂
It’s “just ask ChatGPT” now
Googol is a hitten for great quantities, it worked great as a word, and it would be great if Google lost it as a trademark. However we have the force to seed a new word that has a similar image.
If the internet was an ocean of content, then we could say “let’s ocean it”. Ocean as a verb makes as much sense as the verb google.
Oh, that’s a funny one. Google didn’t want you to use that either, as they almost lost right to their own name copyright (or they did? Can’t remember) due to it becoming common word xD
They did not. Names are not copyrightable.
True, true. Checked again and it was trademark they almost lost.
Sadly, they kept it :(
hahaha wow
I google stuff in the brave
searchgoogle engineXD
I’ve taken to calling it ‘The internet App’ when talking to none techy people.
The real annoying one is getting people to find the “Start” button on Windows realizing it hasn’t be branded that since XP.
What is it called nowadays?
Same, you’re not gonna believe who i said it to… My networking classmate
If any techy Americans want to see how bad it is, ask random people throughout your day what operating system their computer runs, and discover how many don’t know what am operation system is.
I know this change probably happened gradually over the course of time, but it’s truly shocking to me how many people my age can’t do shit on a computer.
I’m in my mid 40s.
Like, this was understandable when I was a kid doing computer stuff and wowing all the adults - the PC was brand new. But people who are my age NOW grew up with this stuff all around them! Like, you didn’t know how to CLICK? You were born in 1983 what the fuck, Carol!
YEP.
I used to work in a library computer lab. It was soul sucking, how many people older than millennials couldn’t friggin handle a basic computer. I heard the words “I clicked the ‘E’ for ‘internet’.” multiple times A DAY. (Thanks, 1990’s Microsoft and No Child Left Behind.)
“CaNt I jUsT uSe My PhOnE?” (Which would be a million more steps on my part…thanks, 2006 apple, and defunding schools.)
The biggest ragebait for me was “I dOn’T kNoW cOmPuTeRs, I’m oLd ScHoOL.”
I’m like “PCs have been increasingly commonplace since the mid-1980’s. It’s currently the 2020’s. You’re like 56. HOW ‘OLD’ IS YOUR SCHOOL?! Because somehow you drove a car here!”
I imagine a certain weird kind of “privilege”, to have been able to somehow dodge computers and learning this entire time, when they were so often found in homes, schools, and workplaces.
Like it takes significant effort to somehow avoid even an accidental education. HOW?!
It’s…infuriating. These rubes can gleefully scroll tiktok and dump all their personal lives into Facebook, but freak out about sending an email.
Many of them were even around to try the Internet during Eternal September and AOL, and now they’ve exchanged the squishy fat in their skulls for convenient slop.
I’d bend over backwards to patiently teach, but few cared to learn.
Their collective, willful ignorance is why we’re fighting a constant uphill battle against attempts to turn the entirety of computing into nothing but a commercialized authoritarian hellscape.
I left that job because if I heard one more “Kids are born so smart with these computers because my (grand)kids can watch their cocomelons all by themselves.” I would’ve snapped and been booked for assault.
Lol /rant
…clearly this is a button for me…I have sought help in the past…
Learnt helplessness has become a real thing around the world.
I know a lot of people who could normally wrap their head around basic computing and troubleshooting in the 2000s, who now go into a near panic attack if the apps on their iPhone suddenly look different…
That’s weird because mid 40s (to mid 50s) should be the ideal age to know this stuff right now.
Exactly! Like, how? People who have worked office jobs their whole lives…I just don’t get it
Not so much office jobs, but that the late 70s to the mid 90s was when you had to figure all this computer shit out on your own, in order to play games and connect to the internet and whatever other shit. Before that people just weren’t exposed as much, there wasn’t even really a commercial market. And after that, everything was made simple, pre-installed, easy user interfaces, more technical details were hidden to make it easier for the consumer to consume content without needing to be technical. That’s why around that age group I would expect to be the most tech savvy.
Systemd+Linux
oh no. this tool is too good.
just one loop they don’t know about all the others
oh whoops
it’s just whoop
and i oop
!fedimemes@feddit.uk would love this
Happens all the time. Also, nerds tend to overestimate the amount of resources, like time or money, someone would put on something they care about.
Right here in Lemmy I had this interaction where someone argued that if one were to lose their photos because Google had an oopsie, it’s kind of their fault because they didn’t have a backup plan.
This is true for every field. I have noticed this many times, whenever I was introduced to something new I never expected those things to be that deep. So I have understood that almost all things are shallow in nature to us until and unles we ourself step into it
