The kids aren’t alright.
Seriously.
Richard Stallman literally started the Free Software Foundation over his frustrations with a printer
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there’s somebody there to fix them.
Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can […] tell the users who are waiting for printouts go fix the printer.
But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary.
And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software. So I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, “Hi, I’m from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer source code?” And he said “No, I promised not to give you a copy.” He had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Now, this was my first, direct encounter with a non-disclosure agreement, and it taught me an important lesson – […] non-disclosure agreements have victims. They’re not innocent. […]
(he goes on for a bit, but ultimately describes never accepting any software that requires signing an NDA ever, and then goes on to write his own unix)
PC LOAD LETTER.
The paper cartridge (PC) needs to be loaded with letter sized paper.
It’s a command to get the paper cartridge and load letter sized paper in it.
C’mon people.
When I was around 8, we had a printer that never seemed to work. One day, I somehow cast a spell that allowed it to print out a couple of colouring book sheets, but I had no idea how.
I couldn’t get it to work again, but my one-time success led my mum to believe that I understood the magicks that power printers, and she became frustrated at me for this. Fun fun fun
I’ve used computers recreationally for 35 years, professionally for 30.
I’ve never owned a printer.
I refuse to support equipment I don’t use.
Just think, once we all die off, no more printers.
The 3d printers are so cool though.
Sorry, no printers.
The responsibility of knowing how to use a printer skips a generation, much like male pattern baldness.
So, I’m reading two false claims, and I’ve got a long line of highly proficient bald family members to prove it
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Hopefully finally only one.single.protocol to simply move pdf to printer?
That’s been invented in the eighties, it’s called PostScript, which is a precursor to PDF. You sent a PostScript file to the printer, and the printer evaluated PostScript and printed the result. Except, with the spread of home printers, processing was moved into the drivers to eliminate costly electronics from printers.
But postscript is the document description, not the transport. And pdf now, because base pdf is simpler & more secure than postscript.
There are about a dotzen transport protocols in a printers settings.
I don’t have any kids. I’m free!!
We are complaining about printers now? Outstanding! I can help! I never miss the opportunity to say double-fuck Hewlett Packard/Compaq and anything they’ve ever thought about producing with the heat of a thousand suns. Two shitty orgs that geometrically devolved into quintessential, archetypal enshittification enshrined, the unequalled horrors that are HP printers and drivers.
We are complaining about printers now?
Sadly, no. We’re complaining about age cohorts.
In the future, kindly refrain from introducing reason to my painstakingly constructed anti-HP tirades. It throws me off stride.
Are we having stereotypical talk shop about printers?
I though it was an urban legend, but I did buy a used brother and I’m def delighted. Spent less on it than a round of inkjet for my crappy Canon. Guess what, 6 months later and I’m still using the toner that came in it. I’d be in the 2nd round of dried inkjet.
Why, yes. Yes, we are.
My experience mirrors yours; 6 years later, still no issues. Moreover, old used laser Brother’s seem to love shittynonametoner.com cartridges as well.
And I can’t even tell if it’s because printers have gotten worse or millennials are just the IT department forever.
It’s 100 % because you no longer need to understand how information technology works in order to use it.
So our parents didn’t know because the tech didn’t exist (or came late in their life), and our kids because they never needed to learn.
I work in an industry where we use computers all day and this is painfully clear. I grew up with a mouse in my hand, shortcuts are hardwired into my brain. Watching someone right click them slowly move the cursor to copy, then right click and slowly move to paste, then slowly navigate to formulas then click refresh is brutal. It literally takes them 3-4x as long as it takes me to do the same task.
On the bright side, I only work about 20 hours a week and still outperform them, so thanks I guess?
I was hella unemployed for a while, and the job centre asked me if I was good with computers. I replied “not really. I cab do a little HTML, and can sort of read JS and C++/C# but can’t really write anything with them” so they sent me on a course so I could brush up on my computer skills to improve my prospects of getting a job.
I spent my first lesson teaching everyone else what the difference between left click and right click was, and how the little arrow moves when you wiggle the mouse.
Gen X here and I memorized only 3 shortcuts: cut, copy, and paste
I’ve gotta have my Ctrl+T and Ctrl+N and of course my Ctrl+W. And you KNOW I’ve got my Ctrl+Shift versions of everything, naturally. Oh man, and my Windows+Tab, how could I forget you?
Windows+V
Also win+space to switch from English to Japanese and back! And inside that, shift+caps to switch between kana and kanji, and romaji!
(I’m on Mint, but I changed the shortcuts to be Windows default because that’s what I’m used to. Still works great, sometimes I hamfist the wrong kanji in the sentence because I’m just not looking too closely, but I’ve seen native English speakers abuse the shit out of “your” and “there”.)
I definitely have a lot more I use, I just had an I Think You Should Leave sketch in my head and tried to do a shitty riff on it. 🤣
Oh, I guess there is a fourth one I’ve memorized. Win + L to lock the computer at work.
I have no idea what ctrl+ T, N, or W do.
I can’t count the times Ctrl+Shift+T has saved my browsers sessions. Or when I close a tab and 5 seconds later think, wait I needed that one.
Also je youtube player controls. J, K, L, etc. Got so annoyed by the video player not responding to spacebar because the video wasn’t focused that I just stopped using the spacebar.
Youtube’s controls are stupid. Left and right skip 5 seconds forward and backward respectively, and up and down adjust the volume.
However, if you’ve recently adjusted the volume slider with the mouse, then left and right ALSO adjust volume, and can’t be used to skip forward/backward anymore until you unfocus the volume bar.
Yeah, those annoying people who need accessibility and navigate web pages via keyboard focus, they ruined YouTube controls for the rest of us.
Good ol’
C-w,M-w, andC-yYou sound like someone who frequently accidentally brings up the emoji keyboard when you’re trying to go to the end of the line here on Lemmy.
Alt-E, select copy, Alt-E, select paste.
It’s partially that. It’s also because printers do suck more now. Had an HP 5p in the 90s that was a workhorse, reliable as hell, and would simply print whatever you sent. period.
I feel like there was definitely a golden age for printers, because when I was a kid we had an Epson Stylus Color 800 that was literally Satan crammed into a shitty beige box, but my HP LaserJet from like 2012 is still going strong.
Fair enough, printers suck! Laser printers seem to be less of a racket than inkjets, but still…
I tried older HP PSC 1315 on Windows 11.
Windows 11: Cannot find drivers, use manufacturer’s website.
HP: Windows will automatically download drivers, no downloads are provided.Uuuh… thanks?
Soooooo… archive.org.
I have a great rule to promote self reliance. I’ll gladly help you, but if the answer is in the first 20 results on Google, it costs you 50 euro.
I only had one relative get angry, asking how he was supposed to know if it was. I told him to check, and he angrily said “well then I might as well do it myself”.
Exactly.
Those first 20 results in 2025:
- 1-4: AI slop
- 5: Reddit thread (no comments)
- 6: Reddit thread (comment including the solution has been deleted)
- 7-9: AI slop
- 10: Microsoft support forum (two pages of generic advice from support workers located in India who get paid a starvation wage)
- 11-12: stack exchange (both with poorly written questions followed by angry comments)
- 13: quora (nonsense mixed with stuff that somehow actually makes things worse???)
- 14: Wikipedia
- 15-17: AI slop
- 18: Reddit thread (only one comment “nvm figured it out”)
- 19: Arch Linux forum (links to Arch Wiki)
- 20: the actual solut… no wait, it’s also AI slop
18: Reddit thread (only one comment “nvm figured it out”)
“Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?!”
You vastly overestimate the level of these questions. Think “how do I send photos on Whatsapp”.
Most of the stuff is accurately answered by the shitty AI most of the time.
20??? I’m pretty sure if you scroll down past 5 results you’re already in the top 1% of users doing so.
I thought this was about Gen X, rooky Gen X mistake, sorry, forgot we forgotten.
They don’t forget us when they are struggling with their computer…
Same
Today I had to teach two people from different generations, the difference between right and left click.
Did you mention the center wheel click? No? Probably for the best.
💀
Not just millennials… I’ve been family IT support since the late 80s. And not just printers. TVs, cable, VCRs, DVD players, BlueRay, stereos, home theater, networking, WiFi, smart appliances, laptops, tablets, phones, etc.
Not just millennials… I’ve been family IT support since the late 80s.
I mean, as a millennial I only missed that by a couple of years. I was already the most computer-literate person in the house when I was 7, in the early '90s.
Were you the only one who knew how to press the input button on the remote to switch devices?
Trick question: back then, we changed to channel 3 and turned on the device hooked up to the RF adapter.
Also, my parents struggle with changing inputs on the remote now. I’m not sure if they regressed in their old age or never knew to begin with, but either is plausible.
I feel like being competent in electronics can be so aggravating depending on how people treat you. I don’t even want to think about those giant tv/dvd/multi-disc changer set-ups with sound systems people had. Rip.
I have set up so many home theater systems over the years. And before things like HDMI-ARC or even toslink so it was always a pain to get everything plugged in and working. 14 remotes and a multifaceted spell you had to cast to get sound working. Man what a pain…
Oh yeah…I forgot about the basket of remotes.
Literally helped my parents with this last night.
Also, fuck windows for defaulting a setting I’d never seen before: “let windows manage my default printer”
That’s why it wasn’t printing. What a fucking stupid idea.
Ah, I see mom’s PC updated and it’s trying to print with the fucking “OneNote XPS” virtual printer again.
Also I see the “OneNote XPS” printer I manually remove every month is back again.
Gearing up for this tomorrow, every time I turn off automatic updates and uninstall a bunch of bullshit…every time it’s right back there.
I manually remove every month
People don’t learn about cron and scripting anymore, smh my damn head.
Are they running win 11? 'Cos the queue in that doesn’t work.
Literally, it’s gonna print the first job then just error everything queued behind it.
Not a terrible idea if there’s one printer plugged in. The idea isn’t bad, it’s Windows that’s bad.
Before things like the XPS printer showed up, if there was only one printer anyway, it was the default. Pointless.
To be fair I can make a 3D printer work more easily and for longer without any maintenance than a regular ass printer. I get that inkjets are actually super complex but bro there are now cases where it is literally easier to make a thing than to print out a picture of that thing.
That’s because you can actually access everything
ever seen one of those $200k stratasys “polyjet” resin 3d printers for medlabs? i bet you they’re like inkjets cubed to service, minimum. if that tech ever makes it to consumers we’ll be doomed.
What do they use it for?
if you’ve gotten a mouth guard made by a dentist recently where they just scan your teeth, that’s a 3d printed part. the ones that look the most spectacular are the anatomical models for surgery, where they can take something like an mri of a problem area and print it out with a mix of materials and colours that makes them realistic enough to practice on.
content warning: 3d printed hand and foot parts with visible veins
as far as i understand it they can do full CMYK as well as mixing material to requested hardness and consistency on the fly.
Now that’s fascinating.
Blame tablet culture. Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness. Kids can just download an app from the appstore and point at what they want it to do. People don’t even know anymore how the filesystem on their computer works. If the dow load pup-up in chrome disappears, they think the download has dissapeared and they need to download it again.
TBF, Android and iOS do not make it clear where files are going when you save them like desktop OSes do. It’s almost as if they are intentionally trying to hide their file structure, especially Apple, which is beyond frustrating.
They are intentionally trying to hide it.
The default file browsers don’t access the entire file structure, what exists and what you can see and edit, without root.
You can, or at least could, sideload a FOSS filebrowser, much more straightforward UI, doesnt shit itself if you arent logged into it.
What they instead do is make it really, really easy to upload all your personal files to their cloud, which is either going to cost you time, money, or your privacy.
Its why Microsoft genuinely doesnt understand why everyone hates OneDrive, why they genuinely don’t see a problem with Windows becoming an AI prompt/API with ads.
Because its basically the same as the mobile UI paradigm.
It’s been known since probably the seventies that normies have trouble with hierarchical file systems. UI researchers kept testing the assumptions about file systems, and the results in the majority of populace have always been abysmal. Which is why people have the desktop piled with every file they ever created or downloaded, and why UI designers are trying to move away from shoving file systems into users’ faces.
I know where mine usually go, but sometimes they go somewhere else. Why did it do that? Where did it go? Sometimes I run a search and still can’t find it. Wtf? So, I have re-downloaded when I was in a pinch.
Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness.
Feels like the opposite to me. Modern mobile style interfaces feel extremely hostile, designed to minimise the amount of information the user can extract from the application (and maximise the amount that can be extracted from the user and sold to the highest bidder) and our control over it.
Classic desktop interfaces (and no, the stupid office ribbons are not included in that), even when poorly designed, are many orders of magnitude easier to use and navigate, and provide a lot more tools and information.
I agree, but we have two have different meanings of user friendly here.
You: The thing makes it easy to do what I want, to understand what it can do.
Them: The thing makes it easy to do what the designer wants, makes it easy to understand what the designer wants me to do with it.
I thought the younger folk would be faster on computers than me but I had to show a junior new hire IT tech what a zip file was and how to open it. Something that I assumed would be second nature to them, they hadn’t seen. Growing up with analog and moving to digital as society progressed, I assumed the next generation would smoke me in tech but it’s been surprising that because tech has “Just worked” for many of them they haven’t had to learn how it works. A blessing and a curse I suppose.
The next gen grew up on tablets and iphones and walled gardens that make everything a mystery to them. Corporate infantilisation
Honestly sometimes having learned the analog counterpart is really useful. It’s a different field but the first time I mixed live audio was on an old analog mixer. It wasn’t really all that difficult to use once explained. Shortly after we replaced it with a digital mixer (behringer x32), and I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to use the old analog one because so many concepts would appear, at least to me, difficult to grasp if you’re starting out on the digital one.
File compression is for poor people.
People never knew how filesystems work. It’s been tested time and again, people aside from nerds have trouble with hierarchical filesystems. They had trouble in the eighties, they had trouble in the nineties, had trouble in the two-thousandths and obviously still have trouble today. Saving every single file on the desktop didn’t start with tablets.
Nerds just have no idea how the majority of the population fare with computers, and don’t know that UI designers in fact test their UIs and continually check their assumptions. But nerds are cocksure in blaming UI designers and ‘tablet culture’, which culture made computing accessible to everyone from toddlers to decrepit geriatrics.
Also I’ve noticed a total lack of curiosity or willingness to learn how to use these products. It takes a little brain power sometimes.
And a lot of Lemmy could be accused of having the same attitude towards sports, fashion or pop culture. People aren’t obligated to be interested in tech, for most people it’s a tool, not a hobby.
The things you’ve mentioned are hobbies, not tools you need to use
Honestly I don’t blame them, I fall into the not giving a shit about sports or fashion camp too. My inner boomer comes out when I’m forced to use microsoft products so I’m definitely a hypocrite but at least I’ll put a little effort into trying to get a surface level of understanding.
Literacy and numeracy scores in the US in general peaked in 2012.
If you graduated high school / college around then, statistically, everyone +/-5 of greater your age is generally less literate, less mathematically literate, less knowledgeable than you, ceteris paribus.
Back in my day we had to walk up hill both ways.
You really don’t have to if you just make your kids use the computer instead of the phone
Here’s my obligatory Fuck You to ink jet printers and cartridges.
A few months ago I finally got a Brother b/w multi function laser printer and not having to refill Magenta or Black regularly is no longer, and my mind is at peace.
Mine just had a cartridge explode all over it and my counter. I took the hint and threw it out with no replacement.
My mom hates it since she can’t just drop by and have me print something, I’ve never felt more free.
I realized a while back that I print so rarely that I’m better off just using a print shop for the rare occasions when I do need to print something. They are priced for massive orders, so printing a few pages can cost under a dollar (though tbf, I haven’t needed to print anything since inflation got crazy, so not sure if that still applies). Then they can deal with DRM ink and all that BS.
We’ll see how things go when my daughter gets to essay age, though.
Hopefully all digital!
Yeah, fingers crossed. Though schools can be incredibly inconsistent with how they move forward with tech.
Won’t regret it, had one for 10 years changed the black twice. Also the powder doesn’t have a shelf life like liquid ink, so I bought the two drums when I first got it.
Oh, a Boomer needs tech support, of any kind, family, friend, otherwise?
$100/h.
Stop subsidizing their utter incompetence, time for ‘tough love’.
A kid?
Like an actual kid?
Free.
How would they know any better?
But, let em know the first fix is free, on the house, next one will be $5, then $10… or, they can spend no money if they want to spend an hour getting tutored on the basics maybe once a week.
Generate fishermen, not fish.
Show them that they are capable, can learn, can solve problems… if they’re patient and humble enough to try and learn.
