Ask Lemmy

What's the scale? I'm proposing:

1 - able to turn on the device (not necessarily turn it off)
9 - can train and run own LLM (from scratch, not from an existing model)
10 - knows how to reliably set up a printer

how the fuck do you "bug" the internal speakers while attempting to pirate a game? that's like saying you broke the sink while trying to change a light bulb.

9.9/10

If I'm not interested then you can get 5/10 advice for free just to be polite.

Skill is not knowledge, it's the ability and hardheadedness to acquire knowledge kicking and screaming to make the world bend to your will so that the printer will actually print.

obligatory-xkcd-tech-support

https://xkcd.com/627/

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Whatever score you give to youself, will be a demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

There is not one single technology to be good or bad at. You can be an Android development ace, a Windows gamer and a Linux user all at the same time, and naturally you will struggle if you switch to Windows dev and Linux gamer.

Being tech savy really just means that you know and recognize tons of patterns that pop up everywhere (e.g. drag-n-drop, config files in certain places with overrides in other places etc.)

8/10 maybe more, maybe less. Software developer, don't really have issues with tech, but put me in front of a quantum computer and I sure as shit would be lost, but fine with consumer products.

Are we rating ourselves against the general population? I'm an easy 9 if not 10/10.

Against people working in IT, or skilled enthusiasts? I've really slipped, maybe a 4 or 5 at best.

Between 0.4 and 0.6 but the best humans score between 1.2 and 1.8; we are all pretty shit at technology.

If you don’t believe me, ask technical lithography questions to software programmers and economic questions to plumbers.

We are swimming in a sea of technologies and don’t even know how deep the water around us is.

Fuck the technological complexity in a single screw is massive.

Please give references for the scale

Also Richard Stallman -- the man who wrote the original Emacs and GCC -- has never installed a GNU+Linux distro, and he has no idea/interest in it.

Depends on if I care of not.

Phone: 3/10. I don't really care other than googling "how to turn off annoying feature".

Writing Software: 7/10. It's not beautiful, but it does one thing reasonably well and I finished it in an afternoon. Just don't ask me to write a GUI.

Writing Software for industrial machinery: I've done it for a living for more than a decade. Still rather skip the GUI part.

Decimal or binary? I'd say a two.

A solid 4, I think. Sure, I can build a PC and install an OS but both of those have been pretty much plug and play for decades at this point.

Don't ask me about your smartphone, your smart home devices or your Windows 10/11 problems, I don't have a clue about any of that. If you visited my home you'd be forgiven for thinking it was abandoned 20 years ago.

I can usually figure out basic tech I've never used before, but I'd prefer to have the manual, help or hindrance though that may be.

9.5; I worked on machine learning starting in 2016 and lead teams working on new cryptography. That being said, I've met tons of people wayyyy more skilled/"good" than I am. But if we are comparing to the general public, at least a 9.5

I mean im in IT and it really depends. Everythings a learning curve so things you have figured out usually goes well but since every tech has pretty much unlimited use cases you still can hit roadblocks. For things you have never done it takes time to learn how to do the common uses and then you can expand out to things that require more finesse (ideally, if the boss wants Z you make it do Z even if you never got it to do X)

I am an IT technician, I would say that I am about a 7.

Most of my job deals with psychology.

I think it is hard to give an objective rating on this since even extremely skilled individuals (probably half of Lemmy by societal standards) tend to skew their ratings toward the middle. Basically what Dunning-Krueger actually found from their research

That said... I'd rate myself as a 6/10. Maybe I actually know more than that

If you blindly run commands without thinking, you're gonna have a bad time in Linux.

SteamOS is also not hard to use, especially if you use it as intended, but if you start going outside the box on things, you can definitely break stuff. Nintendo switch would have the same problems if they let you touch the knobs that valve does with SteamOS

Compared to people who work on cryptography and AI magic? Like 2/10. Compared to Boomers? 9/10.

I used to be really good. In the last 15 years or so the industry has insisted on making the interface would be worse and worse. NowI’m damn near helpless. I google more stuff than you can imagine. It’s fucking stupid. I don’t even enjoy most technology anymore.

Probably around 4-6. I know the basics and can do a few other things after using resources from Google/YouTube, but there's times where I stare at a problem and feel like I became my parents who can't figure out how to make a window take up the whole screen.

Operating stuff with GUI? Maybe 5/10, just ok.

Operating stuff using command? 0/10 i suck.

Scale is always a problem with questions like this. If these are percentiles of the general population, then I'm easily 10 and even trying to dig deep enough into Linux to break a Steam Deck puts you near the upper end of the scale.

If on the other hand, 0 is an otherwise intelligent adult who refuses to have anything to do with anything having a screen and 10 is Lovelace, Turing, von Neumann, etc... then I might be a 7 or 8.

11 - I avoid it as much as I can ;)

More seriously, I will often be the one people around ask for help but it doesn't change that I also learned to absolutely distrust tech.

All tech, be it corporate-owned as well as free/Libre... I'm using Linux and have no issue (I like it) but I'm also terrified by the many 'social code of conducts' that have been popping out in many communities. Not necessarily because I disagree with their core values, that would not even matter much, but because it's stating a precedent to allow a group to remove any user they don't like/disagree with the right to use a tech... and that power will be used even when not 'the good guys' will be in charge.

Hence me slowly falling back to analog as much as possible...

Edit: typos, clarifications

It all depends on the day lol.

Maybe 7.75? I've soldered internals, setup computer networks, built computers, do websites/graphics/videos/3D modeling/music. A little of everything.

5?

I’ve installed custom ROMs on Android when I used Android. I have a hacked 3DS, PSP, Vita. I have a PiHole, and a little Pi server. I use windows for my games, I’ve built maybe seven machines for myself, my partner, and friends. I know very little Linux, but a little. I use an iPhone now, for as long as I can remember, because I don’t wanna have to fuck around with my phone, but I don’t touch Google anymore. I’m heavy into private trackers, but those seems so easy now. I think a solid five is where I’m at.

I’ve studied a bit of solid state physics and I’ve worked in different tech industries for a while. Dabbled with a bunch of stuff professionally: optics, microcontrollers, motors, fluidics, web, LLMs.

So.. 5/10?

Hmm... Well... Let's see about all the things I can do:

• I can pirate on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh. I don't consider it difficult.
• I can install an operating on various mediums, and used to carry a Linux OS (forgot which distro) on a thumb drive with all my stuff on it to use on library computers (used to be poor and homeless. This is how I practiced Blender3D).
• I have built my own PC, and built PCs for a lot of my friends and family.
• I know how to bypass admin security on Windows XP.
• I have and still do mod games, even ones without easy modding support. I do this on Linux.
• I troubleshoot and fix my own problems, should I run into any. This included opening up hardware.
• I'm currently in the process of learning coding for the creation of games in Godot.

All of this and I feel like I've only scratched the surface of technology. So in consideration of the skill that exists with tech, the the 10-scale being used, I'd say my skill in tech is:

2 out of 10.

3/10 too.

Linux IS hard to use, especially when you try to do something you never can on Windows.

I spent this morning trying to fix the WiFi driver on my laptop and ended up using USB-LAN adapter.

Also, I tried to run Ente Photos on Coolify on said laptop and I couldn't. Luckily there was a preset for immich so I used it instead.

Linux is hard. Computer is hard and it should be.

What's a 10?