For example: Many family members of mine inherently don‘t understand E-Mail or messaging like WhatsApp. They think their Mail or texting app on the phone receives a text and don‘t understand the client/server model and how packages are getting send through the internet.
I have two things they don't: abstractions, and problem solving.
My abstractions range from algorithmic and mathematical, to organizational[networking, hardware], to taxonomic and ontological. I have dozens if not hundreds of abstractions that I can draw from. This allows me to frame problems correctly. Sometimes we all chose the wrong abstraction, but 99% of the time we avoid that and it's a shortcut to weeding out all of the unnecessary details of a problem. Ever helped a newbie with a problem and they either misidentify what's important or overlook an obvious/crucial piece of information? I'm operating with 10 times the number of abstractions that they have and likely drew the right one whereas they are operating in a pre-theoretic world.
The second thing I have is problem solving. I can craft information-rich hypotheses and test them much more quickly(or at all) than non-tech friends. That means when I look for something, I'm much faster at finding the root cause and being able to tell whether something is a root cause or if I need to keep digging.
Having these two things mean I don't need encyclopedic knowledge of technology. In fact, I probably rely on Stack Overflow much much more than they would think. Can this be taught? Yes, but it isn't teaching someone _what_ to think more than it's teaching them _how_ to think. That takes a certain amount of deliberate sustained effort.
This deserves to be seen by more people.
My wife is proudly non-technical but has internalized this to the extent that she can self-identify the source of most availability problems. "Is it my program, the internet, or the site itself that's down?" is basic question that any user should be able to troubleshoot.
I'm in the process of learning my 4 year old nephew what a day, a month and a year are. And then I also tell him that a week is just something that people invented for convenience.
In the dominant Gregorian calendar and its predecessors. There are others where this is not true. [1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_calendar#List_of_lunar_c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunisolar_calendar#List_of_lun...
There’s magical stuff in tech but the best implementation just fades into the background. Proper abstraction lets people concentrate on more important things.
And I agree, I do not need to know how the USPS works internally, how FedEx or DHL do what they do exactly. Same with email.
But the approximation is no longer true. The approximation would now be that the USPS stores all mail at the post office and if I want to read it I have to go to the post office and when I do I only take a copy of the mail back home to read. The post office keeps the original. Oh and the post office also reads all my mail and checks if they can show me relevant ads based on the content.
... wait, do the uploaders?
If it froze after pressing a button, don't continuously press the button, at best it does nothing and at worst it ruins everything (looking at you "transaction processing don't hit refresh" messages in 2022).
"I deleted photos from my phone, panic, instantly mash sync to cloud!" - and now they're gone from the cloud too because its a 2 way sync
"The internet doesn't work, should I factory reset my phone?" - no, not as step number one.
Mostly, non-technical people don't know or care about why something is happening, or even really what is happening, and that's not a bad thing. But at least knowing if whats happening is "Good" or "Bad" can go a long way, though its getting harder now that OSs in general will signal less and less that you've gotten into a bad state.
Our computers, tablets, phones etc have become such general purpose devices it’s next to impossible for a layperson to even understand how to use them effectively, let alone how they work. So much of our society is now mediated by technology, and it pushes people who struggle with it to the fringes (and imposes a decent cost keeping tech up to date). My grandparents (pushing 90 now) can’t use any modern tech because it all does too much. They can’t remember what direction swiping reveals the hidden controls, or returns them home, or whatever it happens to be.
I hope that as HNers we can remember ordinary people when we’re working on our apps or hardware or whatever. One day it might be you struggling to make a payment because you can’t work the computer.
I explain that the IP addresses belong to third parties, that proxies can be used to access the email accounts and so on. They are really lost on the whole address metaphor, and assume that all the properties of an official residence apply to them.
What does it matter if they don’t understand this?
I barely understand this and as far as I’m concerned the mail app on my phone does receive messages even if I “get” the concept of a server somewhere doing something.
Like „self driving cars“ and how they are marketed by especially one company: Tesla
Even if you record every road with cameras in the world, a computer will make mistakes without radar or lidar, because he can not understand certain things without depth data.
> Even if you record every road with cameras in the world, a computer will make mistakes without radar or lidar, because he can not understand certain things without depth data.
2 cameras or more gives the same amount of depth information that the human brain gets. It's the brain that's doing the depth processing, this is an unsolved computer vision problem (but much progress has been made).
How can we be sure that you're not? Do you own a possessed violin, by any chance?
If I could summon Satan all over somebody's hard drive I doubt Uncle Sam would let me remain in the private sector.
> Do you own a possessed violin, by any chance?
No, but this sword here at my side don't act the way it should. It keeps calling me its master when I feel like it's slave. It's hauling me, faster and faster, to an early, early grave.
Random recommendation: If you enjoy that style of writing, I highly recommend the podcast The Magnus Archives.
It follows the story of Jonathan Sims, the newly appointed Head Archivist of the fictional Magnus Institute—an institution based in London centered on research into the paranormal.
The podcast is a horror anthology series that starts with a small scope, but gradually the meta-narrative develops into a massive world that's interconnected. Top notch worldbuilding and narration!
Not affiliated with the pod in any way—just saw the mention of the Laundry Files and figured I'd mention the series since there's a lot of overlap in style between the two.
And that Google is hiring all their employees to do this manual work.
Its much harder than I thought
I started off explaining binary and how groups of wires can be used to represent numbers
Lost them somewhere around explaining gates/adders
I think its so difficult because there are so many layers of abstraction and you really need some basic electronics knowledge
I think you really should go "top down" not "bottom up" for something like this.
If you get stuck around gates then you've taught people nothing. If you start at the top and get stuck after "network packets" then hopefully people at least understand the internet better.
These were tech-savy people and some people couldn't change paper role in the printer.
I'm astonished, but people are still gatekeeping in my area.
I work in IT, but troubleshooting printers scares me. I like to keep my distance from them.
(Didi! Don't touch that button!)
When I was teaching my mother to use a mouse she waved it around in the air and asked why nothing was happening on the screen. When I showed her a picture of water, she kept poking the LCD screen making it distort and laughing that it looked like real water, until I firmly told her to stop before she damaged it.
But even much younger people seem to have no clue. Some think their desktop is their browser, or their browser is the Internet. Some call their monitor (or UPS) their "computer". No understanding of hierarchical file organization. No understanding the difference between memory and storage. No understanding of "context".
My wife complains that Thunderbird is slow. I point out she has tens of thousands of unread emails in her inbox.
A neverending shitshow.
- Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud.
- You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails.
- Cheap tablets and phones try exceedingly fucking hard to confuse you intentionally for this bullshit to sell you "32GB MEMORY" (shit storage, 1GB ram), etc. Every non-flagship will lie to your face about this in all advertising you ever see, at least in the US.
- Cloud storage is the same. See first point about Chromebooks, for all practical purposes you save nothing locally. iPhones save your local storage by auto-migrating items to iCloud if not used.