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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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I feel obligated to mention Logseq here. It’s similar to obsidian, but FLOSS (AGPL-v3).
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’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’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.
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”.
Literally nobody care’s at all.
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 doesn’t.
it doen’st.
name checks out
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’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 😂
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
Lemme gpt it
Google? Bro, just Duck it!
It’s “just ask ChatGPT” now
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
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.
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
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
[email protected] would love this
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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The “who still uses Google?” crowd forgets most people just want their computer to work, not become a weekend side quest.
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.
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
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.
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”.
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
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
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.
I think they’ll know about VLC, Audacity and Blender also
VLC and Blender are not really alternatives tho, rather industry standard
When did that change occur?
Since their inception
Blender most certainly has not been the industry standard since it was created.
All FOSS nerds that joined after 2020 only know OBS, charge they phone, distro hop, eat hot chip, and GUI.
libreoffice is getting there too
every pc i’ve used has had libreoffice, even at my job even though they have licenses for almost everything from microsoft
The most intelligent people aren’t those with the greatest amount of knowledge but rather they’re the people that are capable of patiently breaking down concepts for their fellow human beings to understand.
Experience has taught me that Intelligence and Wisdom are very different things, and whilst the former can help get the latter faster, having lots of the former in no way form or shape guarantees any of the latter or even that one will get any of it.
I would even say that there’s a level of high intelligence but not high enough (I mentally call them “Entry Level Geniouses”) that leads people who think they’re so much better than everybody else whilst not being intelligent enough to figure out the limits in capability and breath of use of intelligence alone, so they never figure out the whole “All I know is that I know nothing” and don’t really start walking down the path to Wisdom. Elon Musk is probably a good example.
In my 2022 highschool journalism class we were instructed to take pictures from a professional camera, plug it into laptop, transfer the files, and make slides from the images.
First step was fine for everyone, but later I saw a 17 year old plug the camera to the laptop; and then they tried downloading their picture from google chrome.
No disrespect, I have my dumb moments too, but I genuienly wonder what the logic was sometimes.
“download” might have triggered that
well, file:// is a thing. maybe.
you could have a camera host a local web server lol
… i guess i’ve kinda done that in first robotics (although that was a live feed)
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.
Every group of nerds assumes average person knows more about their obsession…
I study proteins and I chatter on about them, but once in a rare while I’ll talk to a normal person and they’ll say “like, the food group” or in introductions I’ll say I’m a structural biologist and some people look at me blankly then say something about “bone structure”. It kills me a little inside.
