It's kind of funny how far back this whinging about kids not being able to use computers goes, especially how condescending this blog is. Most people will only learn as much about computers to do their work and nothing more, because isn't it normal to only learn the bare minimum about something you don't care about?
The kids these days don‘t know how to use their cars. They go to mechanics to do something basic like change the oil or replace the brake pads when they could spend a few hours doing it themselves in a half-assed way.
Yeah, on most cars, changing the oil consists of: loosen/remove one bolt, drain oil, unscrew oil filter, put new filter on and bolt back, fill with amount and type of oil specified in manual. (Some also have a little plastic shield you have to remove first.) And yeah, you’re likely to care a whole lot more about your car than some average lube tech. (This is why I change my oil now: I found out how little they care when the lube techs at two different places reattached the plastic shield wrong causing it to fall and drag on the road. Saving money was just a bonus.)
I’ve notice people seriously overestimate how complicated really simple maintenance/mechanical tasks are generally.
I remember hearing an NPR story about a plumber shortage where the person being interviewed had just paid some thousand dollars to have their PVC drain line repaired. I was shocked. They could have done it themselves with a shovel, a hacksaw, and $5 worth of PVC and glue in maybe 10-25 minutes, well within almost anyone’s capabilities if they had thought to look into it before calling someone.
We really are very rich that we can not think about these things.
I expect most people don't fancy crawling under their car nor do they have a lift. It's also surprisingly hard to do DIY stuff if you aren't used to or equipped for it; you can waste hours fiddling with something that you haven't built the wisdom to do in the right/quick/easy way, like unscrewing something in an awkward place or angle.
You can find out how to do this with a hundred different detailed youtube videos.
I will outline the procedure on my car how I do it so you can see how simple it actually is. No you don't need a lift. Yes you lay down but keep in mind 65 year old mechanics can lay down and its not a big ask for most people in good health to lay down under their car.
> unscrew oil cap at the top of the engine
> get plastic pan to collect oil and slide it under the oil pan
> get 14mm socket wrench and slightly loosen the drain plug
> loosen it the rest of the way by hand, then carefully remove the plug to not drop it into the collection pan (not a big deal if it happens)
> go have lunch
> come back and pour a little new oil down
> go and clean up lunch
> come back and screw the drain plug back on with a new copper washer
> unscrew the filter which i do by hand because i do this myself and don't overtorque like the lube tech
> pour a little oil into new replacement filter and screw back on
> fill with oil
> cap the fill lid
> done
as you can see you screw and unscrew three things. this should fit within the mental model of most people quite easily barring intellectual disability.
You don't need a lift, you just need some ramps or to use the jack that probably comes with your car with some jack stands. I can't imagine almost any DIYer uses a lift, unless they're moved into the Very Serious Car Person With Project Cars stage of DIY.
You didn't include jack stands, crawling under the car, nor needing an appropriate place to work in your original description making it sound so easy. I do a lot of DIY including car stuff, but for oil it's a toss up of whether I actually want that hassle or whether I'll just outsource it to a still-competitive market for a low price.
(I did get burned on a cross country road trip by some dipshit stripping my oil pan drain hole. I don't know if they just didn't like the far-off plates, or aluminum was an exotic material to them, or what. But that's much less of a worry when you go to the same local place)
Depends on your car but you don't need to jack it up for oil. I do it whereever its parked. I've done it on the side of the road when I had to park it there before.
I think you underestimate the level of complexity. The actual oil change is simple enough but getting the car lifted requires ramps. Then there is the disposal problem individually each step is simple but when you add them up and trade them against paying 50$ for the oil change it’s not always a great trade.
As for plumbing you definitely underestimate how much of a pain in the a it is to dig a 4-6’ deep hole to do your own pipes. It can be done in a day or 2 outside of most peoples comfort zone.
And they are going to let you do this for free instead of invoicing you for changing your oil. Very nice guys. Most of all because they have to pay to dispose of _your_ oil afterward.
Maybe car shops are philanthropic where you live, not so much where I live…
Have you ever actually tried this stuff instead of supposing things and writing about it as a fact online? I just take it to autozone and they don't ask questions or need to file anything, or even really ask me anything about the oil I brought in. Some people don't even go that far and just leave a used jug outside the autozone (bad practice as it could spill and is rude to the workers).
I have literally never seen anyplace geared towards selling parts / oil, charge for oil disposal. I can think of 6+ places within 30 minutes that offer it for free.
Like the sibling commenter, I have never heard of an auto parts store charging for this. Walmart accepts it as well. Maybe it's just in the US that things are this way, and you're in another country?
I assume part of the reason they offer this service is to incentivize you to buy parts and oil from them, but I imagine there are also regulatory reasons.
I do live in another country and you started to make me doubt, so I checked.
So car shops generally won’t take you old oil where I live (although allegedly some do, which I somehow have never heard of), but it appears that most of the gas stations do.
So, my mistake, it appears it’s not so much a pain as I thought, I’ll look into this.
Even easier, if you're willing to spend a little up front. Just get a vacuum pump extractor, purpose built for changing oil. You shove the hose down the dipstick hole, pump it a few times, and watch as your oil is removed from the car. No need to jack up the car or crawl under. When the thing starts to make bathtub drain noises, wiggle the hose around to make sure it was seated, pull it up out, and pour a new bottle of oil in. No mess no fuss
i found those vaccuum pump never suck all of the oil completely. You can test it yourself, after sucking the oil, remove the drain plug and there is oil still dripping out
That's how I do it on my vehicle, no lift no ramps. I just slide under on my back and everything is very accessible. Toyota still doing something right I guess.
Many oil filters these days are accessible from the top of the engine, and IME it’s possible to get under many SUVs/CUVs/trucks far enough to remove the filter/bung without lifting anyway.
A set of drive-on ramps makes it kind of a non issue either way
You don’t need a lift, Walmart sells cheap ramps and many cars are high enough now you don’t even need those. Of course you can also use a jack and jack stands too, and almost every car comes now with a jack.
Used oil can be disposed of at almost any of the super abundant auto parts stores. You take it in, walk to the back, and dump it in the giant tank.
Yes. Space is an expensive luxury where I live. Doesn't matter _how cheap_ the ramp(s) and jack(s) and stand(s) are. I'm going to use them ~5 times a year and the rest of the time they're going to be taking up space that more utilized tools/materials/stuff can occupy.
The few $ i spend every ~ 4k miles on oil changes is worth it. Mechanic does it faster than I could because they have power lift and it's second nature to them. While they're under there, they call anything else that's worth it to my attention, too.
My next car will not need oil and then those cheap ramps will _really_ be a waste of space.
I can't say for everyone, but my current Mazda 3 (and I suspect my previous tenth-gen Civic) lifts to only one side at a time. There is no jack point (in the manual at least) at the front allowing you to jack the vehicle (with the single included jack) and put in jack stands for both sides.
Suggests the jack is included only to change a tire at the side of the road, not for maintenance. You were right earlier though, inexpensive ramps for work would be fine.
> There is no jack point (in the manual at least) at the front allowing you to jack the vehicle (with the single included jack) and put in jack stands for both sides.
That is not how you put the front up on stands with one jack and the manual's indicated tire change jack points. You jack up one side, using the "jack point" for changing that front tire on that side, insert one jack stand on that side, then you switch to the other side, jack up the other side using its approved "jack point", and insert the other jack stand on the other side.
Maybe they have money. The kids who don’t have money and are somewhat more intelligent that the average learn that doing it themselves saves them some money they can spend on other things. There’s a cultural aspect of it that changes over time but that’s possibly influenced by changes in technology. When I was a a teenager you could comprehend how a car worked and have modest success debugging and fixing a car. I doubt that’s easy to do these days.
I started going to the oil change places when I owned a car that I couldn't get at the oil filter. If I crawled under it, I could just barely touch it with my finger, but at the price of pulling a shoulder muscle. I still can't figure out how you're supposed to change the thing, but after one attempt, I was content to let someone else do it.
Yeah, I know, not very "hacker spirit" of me. But I've got a finite amount of that, and there are other places I want to spend it.
While true, the computer as a general purpose machine has become a bloated incomprehensive, somewhat hostile affair to the user and that pushes newcomers away. There was a time when more newcomers stayed.
I once asked a 20 something kid "do you know why computers are a big deal", and he said, "because it is a communication device"?
Computers are so good at being programmable that now a days people don't see it as a programmable device, but only as the thing that it is programmed to be. Today there are computers everywhere, but people see a workstatinon, a web server, a gaming rig, a tv, a phone etc, but never the computer is behind all those things.
A few years ago I was doing some tutoring at a school and a student mentioned "Computer Science" class. I was impressed that fifth graders at this school with generally low performing students had access to Computer Science classes at that age.
Then I discovered they were learning how to use Word. The students really thought they were taking a "Computer Science" course. I would have liked to meet the teacher - I suspect they wouldn't know how to write a binary search in the language of their choice to save their life, let alone discuss if a problem was NP Complete.
This sort of thing used to be called "Computer Literacy", which was a much better name. The equivalent of (and I suppose including) what was called "typing class" in the 80s.
So I stopped at the bit about the proxies because seriously, I’ve had to care about proxies almost never in the last 11 years. If your network is set up to require some special proxy setting, it shouldn’t be a network that people sign into with some random device and I would expect the IT staff to manage the proxy settings when setting up the devices that are meant to go on that network. As for being able to join a wifi network, yes, the kids know exactly how to do that and they do just fine. Maybe a handful of people who take a learned helplessness approach to anything technical might be flummoxed but the kids can do it.
And spare me the recollections of the old days when your computer booted up into a BASIC prompt. I was there, Charlie, it wasn’t all wine and roses. You had a computer you could program, but that most people didn’t have much use for and frankly right now the ability to program your computers is way better than it‘s been at any time in my 50+ years since you’ve got world class compilers, interpreters and development tools available for free along with all the documentation you can eat on the internet as opposed to having to have your uncle visit half a dozen computer stores looking for the book that describes the undocumented entry points into the ROM that let you do cool stuff.
>right now the ability to program your computers is way better than it‘s been at any time in my 50+ years since you’ve got world class compilers, interpreters and development tools available for free along with all the documentation you can eat on the internet...
Sure, but all that is useless if motivation is missing. A BASIC prompt, or even a terminal into which type commands, is infinitly more motivating w.r.t programming than a desktop filled with "Apps".
That’s not me just being glib. We have almost a million percent more engineers these days, and that number is very nearly not an exaggeration.
I’ll take that over your BASIC prompt plus “intrinsic motivation”, whatever that is. By every possible measure, more of the people you think probably “should” be software engineers are today.
I don't think more people should become software engineers. But I think more people, even non-professional programmers should be able to program computers for their own needs.
So basically I think programming should be something that a lay person do, like learning to drive a car.
More people than ever are capable of this today by a wide margin than at any point in history.
Computers being insanely useful out of the box is what has driven their adoption, and that widespread access has done more to enable people to explore programming than dropping hapless novices into a BASIC prompt at startup.
This reminds me of "in my childhood we could only ate car tires for breakfast, then walked 10km to school barefoot, chased by a bear" posts. You most definitely did not need to write your own DOS games, they were abundant.
Not everyone cares about computers or is destined to spend their lives tinkering with them. Most people are content with simply thinking of computers as a magic box that does things and going on with their lives. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everything needs to be bent to your will.
In very old days kids would have had to build their own toys instead of going to a toy store. Is there some lesson there?
I remember being so excited when I found out I could get computer game books at the library. I would take one out, and spend the next hour typing out several pages of "Tour de France" in BASIC, then another hour figuring out where my typos were, so that I could spend the rest of the evening playing a primitive text based game. It was a simpler time.
The old family laptop's Windows 10 license is about to expire soon so I took the chance to install Linux Mint on it for my younger sibling. From what they tell me, it's perfectly usable, though I don't know to what extent they're using it. If it's just logging on and going straight to Firefox, there's not much difference from Windows kn terms of what they're learning. I've been thinking about what I can do to get them to engage more constructively with the computer, but no concrete ideas yet. Any suggestions from those of you who've done something similar for your siblings or kids?
Windows won’t stop functioning, it just stops receiving updates. Win10 machines will still work, and you can reinstall win10 if you like.
In practice, what usually seems to happen is Microsoft will begrudgingly extend security updates for a few years after official EOS, because most people won’t switch over that quickly and having all those machines with unpatched vulnerabilities would be a bigger pain that potentially more expensive than just keeping on for a few more years.
I have a windows machine (windows 10) that I will never upgrade to windows 11, that’s the end of the line for me as far as Windows goes. I also have an old laptop that still runs windows XP, I turn on once in a while but I do keep it offline.
At work windows reigns. Im not looking forward to but soon they’ll install windows 11 on our dev machines. I’m really not looking forward to that at all.
The first computer I remember having as a kid was an old DOS machine that was gifted to us.
I remember it had a command prompt and you had to type pop or something to launch prince of Persia. It was mind blowing, but led to trying to figure out what else you could input into this mysterious C:\ prompt.
add a chat gpt to the terminal with a prompt. "I want to dowload pictures of cats and opening them in an image program." and it downloads cats and installs and open gimp. linux can be very star trek nowadays.
That's 12 years old. You're not supposed to understand how computers work any more.
On some machines, you can't re-install Windows any more. You're pretty much a slave to the cloud with Office 360 or Google. Chromebooks are total slaves.
Phones get more locked down each year.
Even on Linux, you're often now slaved to some remote system which keeps installing new stuff.
Yes, kids should come into school a month early, form self selected groups to, unsupervised, build their own desktops and re-cable the entire school network following instructions on the internet, on their phones.
The end of school term, they carefully disassemble everything.
Meh. My 16 year old writes shaders for her own games, writes for her VR headset, programs her graphing calculator, etc etc. The next generation will have plenty of self-taught SWEs, just like ours. Most kids couldn’t use computers in the 80s or now, and it wasn’t a disaster either time.
The issue is it probably won’t be your daughter who creates and passes the legislation that dictates how she and the rest of us get to use our computers (net neutrality, encryption, etc). In a democracy, the majority of the population needs to be computer literate enough to vote for candidates who will support these things.
Amazing poster child for HN comments having nothing to due with original post.
Almost everything in here at the moment is about changing oil in a car 8-)
Which avoids the obvious issue that modern tech users are just another new exploited consumer class.
And if anyone points out the obvious: "Maybe you're just dumb as a rock?", of course they're just being condescending. I mean you're an expert in "Call of Doo Doo, The Final Genocide 18"... Or, you know how to type really smart things into an LLM prompt...
p.s.: It should be pointed out that "dumb" is almost never a physical disability, it's almost always a willful lack of mental discipline.
I definitely like to use folders and know how to use a printer, copier, or fax machine but rejected ad nauseam for jobs. I guess I should put it in my “skills” section. Being in “stride” appears to be most important part, i.e., straight from college with the experience of maybe working at the cafeteria/book store/whatever to that prestigious job lol
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