Re:The digital natives are not who you think they are
by II2II on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @06:03PM
(#27135702)
I suspect a better measure of technical proficiency is the ability to shape the technology to reflect your own needs. That could happen at a much lower level on the Commodore 64 since it was a much simpler machine, yet that should not invalidate the proficiency of a JavaScript programmer simply because they work at a much higher level.
Put in other terms, even those who absorbed the Commodore 64 programmer's guide didn't truly understand the machine. They may have known how to write software for it and even how to exploit the various chips, but that manual only provided surface level details about the electronics.
Re:The digital natives are not who you think they are
by the_only_law on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @05:40PM
(#27135477)
> Understanding a modern phone is a huge job.
I’ve tried (well maybe not phones, but other things). There’s a lot of stuff and large chunks of it are either undocumented, do not provide documentation unless you are in a contract with the company or are very superficially documented. On top I usually ended up finding I could not fully comprehend how A worked without comprehending B which required C which required D, etc.
Re:The digital natives are not who you think they are
by infoseek12 on Thursday May 13, 2021 @12:14PM
(#27143862)
Is there anyone alive who completely understands a latest generation iPhone down to the bit level? It would be impossible for someone outside of Apple to have the access necessary. But even if everything was completely open source would it be within the realm of human ability to understand something so vast and complex in the way that it was possible to understand a Commodore 64?
With a modest amount of effort, you could totally understand an AMPS phone, the last generation of analog cellular. It was a two-way FM radio controlled by a tiny CPU, no more complex than a Commodore 64.
Understanding a modern phone is a huge job. Even at a general level. There's a 90s data center worth of compute power in there. About four radios. A GPU. A 6-axis inertial guidance system. Several cameras. A rather excessive amount of software. A web browser, which is itself overly complex. Voice codecs. Voice recognition. Quite possibly a machine learning system.
That's a lot to understand. It is also not useful to the end user to understand it.