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I meet kids today who haven’t heard of Microsoft, who regularly play GTA and hand in assignments made in Powerpoint. 20 years ago I discovered that a friend didn’t know Xbox and Word were both from Microsoft. It’s really hard to understand what is common knowledge in different parts of society.


Indeed. You'd be shocked how few people on Hacker News even know the difference between cross stitch and blackwork.


https://xkcd.com/2501/


Those are just products who cares?

I think the GP is alluding to understanding the fundamental way a thing works.


Kids today don’t even know where the files are stored or anything about partitions, drives, directory structure or even how much disk space is available.

They have some files, synced to OneDrive and do everything else fully online (Canva, etc.)

Most of them have never seen a computer with a drive other than C:


Kids today don't even know the most basic x86 assembly instructions! A whole class of third graders, and not one of them could tell me the difference between MOV and LEA!!!! Can you believe it?!?!


Apt username.


My son has never seen a C: drive before. Heck, we got him a Macbook Neo a few weeks ago and I don’t think he has left more than a few coding apps since then. Thankfully he isn’t using AI yet.


Kids in college 20 years ago didn’t know that either. Some of them didn’t understand that they had a school email address.




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