• SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    Same with Wi-Fi being used to refer to Internet access in general. I basically lived on the phone with our ISP’s tech support for two days and one tech person even told me they needed to “reset our modem so they could get the WiFi flowing to our house again”. I died a little inside.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Would’ve been real hard for me to not hang up the phone. And I’m not as tech literate as half the nerds on Lemmy, but I know enough to know when they’re giving me wrong answers. Shit is frustrating.

      • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
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        24 hours ago

        I guess they could have been trying to dumb it down to make it easier for the customer to understand.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Well it’s not like Big They made it particularly clear with the naming scheme.

        “Wi-Fi” is an entirely non-descriptive name, it’s supposed to be “like Hi-Fi, but with a W for Wireless.” It doesn’t indicate what it does at all. The typical unwashed mass just wants to know what button to push in iOS to make it get on Instagram. Wi-Fi is synonymous with internet access in their minds; iPhones and iPads don’t have Ethernet sockets, and they’ve got no use for local traffic because their Apple products are thousand dollar Tiktok appliances.

        So yeah, “Wi-Fi” means “internet access” to more people than it means “IEEE 802.11”

        • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          technical terms mean what they mean rather than being defined by the average usage like average terms because without this we can’t have useful discussions

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Last time they said something like this to me, I pointed out that I had WiFi disabled other piece of crap router.

      I knew what he meant but had no problem being literal. Tech stuff s definitely an area where details matter