"oh, you know so much! howd you do that?"
"grandma, i literally only typed dir."
y'all motherfuckers need Bash
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Give someone bash, and they'll shell for a day. Teach them fish and they'll shell for the rest of their lives.
teach them batch, theyll ask for an ibm pc and a floppy
teach them basic, theyll ask for a c64 instead. and a cassette, apart from the floppy
As someone living in more rural demographic, replace grandma with every person with a cpu driven device. To quote my dad regarding his cellular trailcams "Wtf is updatefirmware? Stop making up words."
The whole "old people are bad at tech" thing is a bit long in the tooth now. Many people who grew up with computers are now old, and many young people are just as baffled by the command line as any grandmother.
There really was a magic learning window 1990-2010, I think. Some people who were there are still bad at technology, and a select few from before are good at it and maybe even helped build those systems, but the prevalence is night and day.
Yes but I'd say it started 10 years before that, growing in numbers through the first few years of the 1980s.
That could be, it was a rough period. I wasn't around for the beginning, and even the end is approximate as locked down mobile OSs and similarly user-opaque systems gradually came to dominate.
Kids today can still learn computers, but they have to explicitly try. I think something analogous happened with early cars. The first guys had to be able to personally maintain and repair the whole thing, and then over time it gradually became an area for experts and the odd enthusiast only.
i didnt say any grandma, i said specifically mine, who follows that trope. idk how yours is but mine is like that
Reminds me of the Hollywood trope of a character saying “In English please” after any reference to something on a computer.
I hate it so much when they do it. The writers should just say it the way an IT admin would and move on. Pretending that the character is speaking another language is just anti intellectual bullshit.
Have you ever seen A Touch Of Cloth? It's a superb send-up of police procedurals. There's a scene where the main character, Cloth, is explaining some not-very-complex idea like you said and one of his lackeys replies, "Can you explain it like I'm some kind of viewer, guv?".
in my case replacing my grandma with "everyone at my school" also works, i chose my grandma just to vary a bit
Jokes on you, my Oma worked in Dos until her retirement.
She was an absolute master at it.
Jokes on you, my Oma worked in Dos until her retirement.
I bet one of her previous titles was literally "computer"
thats one of the nicknames the school jocks came up with about me
and i just accepted it bc i actually found it fitting so they had to think of another one lol
mine doesnt even know how to add a custom ringtone to her phone
Mine was convinced that cell phones and landlines were two different networks. Like you couldn't call a landline from a cell and vice versa. This went on for decades, even after we infront of her proved it worked.
wat
Do you?
Do be fair that took me longer than installing the operating system too.
It same when i was called by friend who worked at police HQ, updating linux with showing terminal at full screen because i want to know if udate successful or not while i reinstal windows at some computer in that room.
all police that station almost killed me because they tough i hacked police database just because they saw terminal with some progress bar installing linux update.
Thanks, Hollywood!
yay
My wife calls it “the app with lots of text”. She’s very beautiful.
yes thats what my music teacher calls trackers too
At least she even comments. Mine just waves her hand in disgust. She knows it enables her whole technological life, but couldn't give a shit.
That's because the default color scheme is white on black. Just change it and Poof! Blue magic, red magic, yellow magic... so many possibilities!
is the blue magic another name for the bsod
man that was the command that first got me into the terminal lol
it was also how i made a christmas tree when there was none: launch cmd, change the colors to a christmas-y palette (spefifically red on green) and run tree. bam. christmas tree. look heres a screenshot
Batch is a very cursed shell/scripting language though
I like typing arcane runes.
Nah, that's APL.
or uiua
Just wait until she hears about the Linux shell.
pacman -S neovim
-"Are you trying to play pacman?"
yes my favorite game is the arch package manager
yum
Wait until you type top
as a bottom i refuse
as a middle i refuse too
One of my favorite comparisons is computing to magic. They say that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
A lot of people have a hard time drawing that comparison, but if you tell them that there are very special, rare ~~silica~~ rocks that you can only find in specific places on earth, and that if you inscribe one of these rocks with billions of tiny ~~transistors~~ runes and then ~~power~~ infuse the rock with ~~electricity~~ lightning you can actually ~~make~~ trick the rock into ~~a processor~~ thinking, and that this now let's you create ~~software~~ incantations which explain to the ~~processor~~ thinking rock how to ~~execute a program~~ do specific things for you, then they begin to see why.
"I'm gonna pop out and get some lunch because this is going to take a while and definitely isn't just an SSH into an Ubuntu box running apt update/upgrade in a loop."