Nobody here was arguing that they don’t. It’s just that computing as a hobby is far more niche than it used to be. Literally everyone who used a computer used to have to be able to troubleshoot issues on their own with nothing but a manual and the machine itself. If they didn’t figure it out, they’d ask a friend who would teach them how to fix it in the future and they just had to remember or they were SOL. You don’t have to do that anymore, so those kinds of skills are less common than they were for prior generations.

I’m not saying young people with those skills don’t exist anymore. I know they do. I’m a senior software engineer and have mentored some of them. I’m trying to talk about the rate at which fundamental computer knowledge and troubleshooting skills are being acquired, not if they are at all.

Please, don’t put words in my mouth.

Edit: alright, since you’ve changed your argument with a stealth edit I’m going to quote the latest revision so my edit doesn’t look irrelevant:

But plenty of people still do learn the deeper stuff. Just because you can write a game without code doesn’t mean everyone who makes games is doing it without code. Arguing otherwise just feels like bemoaning some sort of lost golden days when that’s not the case. It’s because everyone who used to be into these hobbies knew the ins and outs. Now more people are into it so proportionally less know the ins and outs, but I see no reason to believe the absolute number of people who really want to learn the deeper stuff has gone down.

I have several college professor friends who teach in STEM. In the last few years, lessons have needed to be added to teach the fundamentals of computer use, even to classes meant for comp-sci majors. I’m talking about things like managing where files are in the filesystem, how to make a folder, how to rename a file, the extreme basics. These used to be a given. They used to be taught in elementary school because they were necessary life skills at the time. Now they aren’t.

There are people who know that stuff. There’s a high school kid on YouTube who recently built his own laptop, PCBs and all. But this kind of hacking has become the exception. You have to be exceptional to try popping the hood and ask questions and risk breaking things when everything just works. Computers used to break way more often, so people who knew how to fix them were way more common.

I’m not bemoaning the glory of days long gone. Just observing the trends as I see them. I’m quite happy things have gone this way, personally. I was one of the kids who grew up fixing their friends’ parents’ PCs for them in exchange for pizza. Now I get to play video games or do deep dives in other hobbies instead of playing tech support for everyone who knows me well enough to ask for help. The one or two calls I still get per year feel like a refreshing change of pace instead of the burden they once were.

I really think it has led to a reduction in the rate at which otherwise average people wind up in tech because they like it, as opposed to for money.

In other words, the computing hobby has declined from its heyday in the 80’s-early 00s. Most people who build their own PC now can do so with about 10 minutes of help from YouTube and tools like PCPartsPicker, which helps a lot with accessibility, but the trade off is that the people who get into computers now don’t need to spend as much time on them to get into them. They don’t need to build up as much foundational knowledge, so now that knowledge has become rarer, even within e.g. the indie PC gaming hobby.

You can literally make an entire video game without writing any code. This is phenomenal if you want to make games easily, but it also gives coding a level of inaccessibility even in the minds of people getting into making video games that didn’t use to exist because they came as a package deal.

I think you missed my point, which is that everyone who used a computer back then (less of the overall population) had to at least dip their toes in learning how they worked back then. This meant that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten interested in computers found out that they really liked them and started going down the rabbit hole on their own from there.

People would get a computer for school, buy a game for it, and have to learn how to fix the computer when the game didn’t work. Hell, in the 80s (as a 90’s kid I missed the boat on this one) there were magazines that included games where you had to type the code for the game (in BASIC) into the computer yourself for the game to run. Many of those magazine games had bugs so if you wanted to fix it you had to learn some basic coding skills to spot the bug/typo in the magazine.

Nowadays such entryways into the computing hobby are far less ubiquitous, you have to seek them out. I’m not saying people now are less capable or less curious or that the hardcore nerds won’t still get into the hobby, I’m saying it used to be required for playing PC games or social interactions online. There used to be incentives for people who otherwise wouldn’t have tried to figure out how computers worked, and as a result a lot of people who didn’t necessarily think of themselves as would-be computer people ended up getting into computers.

That was the stuff you needed to do to do things like: play video games on your computer, get online and chat with people, hell even use your PC to write an essay and print it out (or even setup your printer to begin with). You didn’t necessarily have to go as far as they described to do that stuff, but you had to do some of it.

Nowadays there’s no equivalent. You don’t have to at least kinda understand the filesystem to play minecraft on your iPad.

Welcome!

I was worried this meant it could program and/or train a copy of itself from scratch, but this is just the basic “copy/paste your own files” case.