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Comment by jpindar | Hacker News Reader

We could start right here on HN by calling out those who use "grandma" to mean "person who can hardly even use a computer".

People who are now old enough to be grandparents INVENTED computers and the internet.

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I'm reminded of my dad, bought some surplus home security cams. They were surplus because they were discontinued on account of the firmware being shitty + spyware. Basic shlocked together embedded linux crap.

Found someone that had developed fixed firmware. Re-flashed them with that. Figured out how to get them to send a notification to his phone when the motion sensor goes off so he knows when the deer are eating his wife's plants.

My dad is 83.

One of the early Foscam pan-tilt-zoom IR cameras? Your dad did better than I did. I liked the hardware, for the price point, and wasn't aware of alternative firmware. I ended up putting it on its own LAN with an old OpenWrt router, and kludging simple motion detection with a little program that ran on the router. (Script pulled frames from the camera with some HTTP interface using wget or curl, and used ImageMagick for the hard part.)

Foscam sounds familiar. My dad just mentioned it in passing.

My dad is also retired. And the only thing he doesn't seem to be able to do is nothing.

I wish my dad was still that clever and he's almost two decades younger. Your dad is awesome.

My dad's in his 60s. Runs marathons once a year. Works on backend stuff in a ML startup.

I am not sure I can make 10 km these days...

We do a lot of digitisation in the public sector of Denmark, in fact we’re world leaders in it along side Estonia.

Being an old social democracy we tend to build solutions to be inclusive. This means you can opt out of a range of our digitised options, and it also means we do extensive service design and benchmarking to make sure meaningful software gets to the citizens and that they know how to use it.

Almost every elderly citizen in my municipality is a digitally competent citizen. The ones who aren’t, often suffer from sicknesses like dementia or mental disabilities.

By contrast we have twenty year olds who don’t know how to install a program that isn’t part of “the App Store” or don’t know double clicking with a mouse is a thing.

In the tech part of it, we have old developers who’ve been through decades of soa vs microservices and a billion frameworks who can build solutions that require minimal maintenance. While some of our freshly educated engineers build things that can’t even last a year without needing major updates or refactoring because their hipster packages broke. We also have extremely talented youngsters and old engineers that can’t write a for loop, but in general, age is extremely valuable if you want to actually operate the software after you build it.

Ageism is simply put silly, unfortunately it isn’t just a thing in tech l. I see it in several areas, even in the public sector of a Scandinavian country. I’m not sure what we can do about it, but we need to do something.

Fact. As someone who runs a startup that targets grandparents, they know the internet well. I’ve even had a customer say “why do young people think we don’t know how to use the web? We invented the fucking thing!”

Heheh. My grandmother literally was a programmer. Not a computer scientist by a mile but she wrote software as a Sr Analyst in the oil industry— I believe her lingua franca were FORTRAN and COBOL. She retired in the late 80s and was hired back for a few years in the 90s because even then they didn’t have enough people working in the language to draw from.

She passed away a few years ago now.

My grandpa once fetched cigarettes for Von Neumann.

Which is to say, he basically invented the computer.

When I operated mainframes, the raised floor area (where all the computers, drives, and major printers reside) was the only place one couldn't smoke.

Part of this is boomer performative incompetency at computers, which they do as a status/power move to demand humans serve them at various levels.

This sounds more like the behavior of a narcissist than a generational thing (and there are plenty in that generation).

This is important to echo, I think. In service industries (I'm most familiar with property management) there's a very real tendency for folks in today's "Grandma" range to just flap their hands and yell when asked to email instead of call, even when they get a receptionist who can take the problem down and email it in for them. But it's unreasonable to admit that they just want a person to bow and arrow and treat them specially, so it becomes an "I can't [so you have to]". And now a lot of this performative incompetency has now seeped into the general reference pool.

I remember I was sitting at a coffee shop and a lady sat in front of me and we started chatting.

She would have been in her late 40s or early 50s. I thought she worked in banking or sales as many do around here. Turned out she was at IBM building early Unix systems. I was so impressed by our chat. She had left the industry at the time.

Now I know plenty of competent and masterful tech pioneers but they are sort of the exception that proves the rule - it generally is or was their career or at least a hobby and it isn't expected for them to know it.

A young person from the first world who wasn't say a mennonite not knowing how to send an email attachment is seen as incompetent. An older person who doesn't is seen as not adapting to a changing world.

While stereotyping is grossly unfair on an individual level judging the group based on the right end of the bell curve isn't a good representation. It would be like judging the intellectual capabilities of all children by 12 year old college graduates. Sure they prove capability and not to dismiss them out of hand but certainly not universality - moving all elementary school students to high school wouldn't be too effective for most.

Let me start by saying that I absolutely agree with you - it's a dumb insult now and always has been.

That said, anecdotally, my grandmother recently passed away having never used a computer in her life. Never sent an email, googled anything, or had a Facebook account. She was in her 90s and simply never had to use one. I often wondered what that life was like in 2019, but she had nothing to compare it to and thus couldn't really share. All that is to say, there really are both ends of the spectrum out there.

I bet there are more 20 year olds that have never driven than grandmas who have never used a computer.

Soon its meaning will be replaced with "person who knows how to type"

This usage of "grandma" is sexist as well -- it's much more common than "grandpa".

Grandma testing refers to one's own grandmother, not a random person.

People can say whatever they want about their own grandma, but I've seen many comments that were clearly referring to grandmothers in general.

I think, by and large, "calling out" is something we ought to be doing much less of.

When I said "calling out", I meant responding to a post here, not doxing someone or stalking them on other platforms.

If people started posting blatantly racist things here, should we not say anything?

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