Buried the lede - they have not yet actually paid for it and are still raising money.
As I said in the previous post about this, I support their efforts and applaud their enthusiasm. But they are making some very risky moves with their premature messaging. This could easily fall through and is just begging other parties with less sincere interest in the brand's legacy to take notice.
And it's "only" a "low seven-figure sum" involved here.
I'm quite frankly expecting a crash and burn with a lot of grasping-at-finances to try to keep whatever this becomes afloat, and/or another Atari-esque cash-grab-flailing-venture situation.
AFAICT from the article the takeover deal is agreed and in process, so assuming they end up able to pay on time and meet any other requirements I don't see how other interest matters?
I don’t know what the agreement is, but if either party is allowed to pull out at a 10% cost, and this fund raising goes crazy viral it might make financial sense for the seller to pull out, and make a new offer.
Sure bad things could happen depending what terms they could negotiate. The counter proposal seems to be to not have made the deal probably not being able to raise enough money to do so in secrecy (or not maintaining secrecy and making more spicy gossip about an opportunity.) The old owner is probably happier to be done with owning the brand and getting more than they could have with no free advertising.
* Commodore B.V. only owns the Commodore trademark and logo. They do not own any of the Commodore source code, patents, designs, etc. They do not own the Amiga trademarks, logos, source code, ROMs, etc.
* The exact terms and status of the transaction are unclear, however it appears to be a letter of intent and contingent on raising sufficient funds, which has not yet been done.
I advise the new CEO to immediately sell the brand again, take the "low seven-figure sum", and invest it in actual technology for a new company which can be called Rear Admiral.
Can someone briefly explain what the actual product will be? Not interested in going down a rabbit hole with a series of videos. I just want a straight to the point explanation.
(They do have Jeri Ellsworth and some OGs from Commodore signed up to be part of the team though, and seem to genuine love the brand and have nostalgia for the C64, so I have cautious optimism!)
I like the enthusiasm for Retrofuturism, that if you didn't get the future that you were once promised 20-30 years ago you just create it anyway. I think that's a more humane alternative "to move fast and break things". I'm so sick of the latter and its negative effects on societies.
It’s very odd that the first product announced is not a retro computer but some sort of anti social media product.
Doesn’t take long for directions to change.
Strikes me the main real opportunity was to bring the original C64 back to life, not to go to war with social media, which is so unrelated to retro computing and commodore that I shook my head and turned off the announcement video.
You are just wrong. Look at the last few years and see how computer technology is being worshiped in the most destructive way. Instagram is literally bringing diseases to children.
This comes from a person for which the internet and computers are the love of life and everything. I'm excited about these times and the future. But every day that goes by I feel like this technology thing is going backwards, thanks to irresponsible, rich and careless people, and should be stopped right now. It will not stop, this is only the beginning.
This opinion will inevitably be seen as pessimistic tech doomerism, especially on forums like this.
And yet, for all the glory and benefit that we were promised modern technology would bring, the average person only enjoys a small sliver of it, while the rest is enjoyed by the 1% of humans in control, or corrupted by those who seek becoming part of the 1%.
We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it. We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited. We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams. We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy. We have self-driving cars and high-tech gadgets to entertain ourselves, which is great until the companies start exploiting us. And so on. The latest wave of AI tech is another step in this same direction, ramped up to levels we have never seen before.
I challenge anyone to steel man the argument that technology has been a net positive for humanity on a global scale, or that it will ever get better. I sure can't.
As someone in a country with a functional healthcare system, I can assure you those miraculous drugs are available to all here. There are many countries like this. I suspect you’re more interested in shaking your fist at clouds than you are in making properly thought through points, however. Your comment isn’t “pessimistic tech doomerism”, it’s simpler than that, it’s self aggrandising statements based on feelings rather than facts.
Globally, since the advent of widespread computer use, human life has improved by orders of magnitude along every metric we have: poverty, hunger, disease, literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, homicide rates, etc., etc., etc.: https://ourworldindata.org
Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
> Globally, since the advent of widespread computer use, human life has improved by orders of magnitude along every metric we have: poverty, hunger, disease, literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, homicide rates, etc.
Most of those trends were in motion well before widespread computer use, e.g. [1]. I'm sure that computers were a factor in improving the rate of literacy, education, perhaps even poverty, but they played a much smaller role in improving hunger, disease, child mortality, life expectancy, let alone homicide rates(!). Most of those are attributable to improvements in economic programs, sociopolitical stability, etc. I.e. the global progress humanity has experienced for centuries. Which, unfortunately, has been slowing down or regressing in the past few decades precisely _because_ of technology.
You can see this in literacy, for example[2]. Yes, the rate increases post-1950, but it had been increasing for many decades before. There is a large uptick between 1950 and 1980, well before computers were in widespread use. So, sure, we can say that computers played a role, but the world was already improving without them.
> Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
Extraordinary claim? Everything I said can be verified by a cursory web search (assuming you can navigate around disinformation), or by personal experience, since I'm sure most of us have directly experienced some form of it. I don't think it's interesting to rehash verifiable claims, but I am interested in discussing the positive effects of technology. You mentioned some, but when factoring in everything else I mentioned in my previous post, I still don't see how these make technology a net positive.
To be clear: technology in general has revolutionized many fields, such as agriculture and medicine, which has greatly contributed to improving the well-being of billions of people. But that's not the kind of technology I'm talking about here. I'm specifically referring to modern computing since roughly the 1970s. The kind of technology within the context of companies like Commodore.
As someone in a country with a functional healthcare system, I can assure you those miraculous drugs are available to all here. There are many countries like this.
I think advances in IT were a strong net positive for a long time. Certainly until into this century. The way much of it has developed in the last decade or so has been net negative (social media, surveillance, etc.).
> We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it.
We have more sources and can check. Any new medium needs time for people to learn to deal with it. No one doubts that printing has been a net positive, but it was used to spread misinformation - one of the first really influential printed works was Malleus Maleficarum.
> We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited.
Well, they have metadata, but a lot of chat is E2E. Email can be E2E encrypted too but people do not know about it and big companies do not want to support it.
> We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams
I think that also reflects the way the wider economy has developed (concentration of production power in big businesses) and culture (people do longer feel a duty to do a good job for customers).
> We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy
The poor have far better access to drugs too. Almost all drugs are available to people in developed countries, and even in poor countries availability has improved a lot.
Yeah I don’t think the guy you’re talking to is really arguing in good faith or has thought through their opinion beyond wanting to shake their fist at clouds. Any one of those things, even if true, is still a huge effect. Take the “drugs only accessible to the wealthy” - they say that like that makes them basically pointless. Sure, it’s bad that the poorest communities can have difficulty getting access to the latest drugs, but the idea that hundreds of millions of people around the world who do have access to these drugs wouldn’t still be a pretty cool achievement?
Their points reek of “anything less than perfection may as well have not even existed” - which is a huge fallacy (often used in political ad campaigns to mislead the public).
Yeah I don’t think the guy you’re talking to is really arguing in good faith or has thought through their opinion beyond wanting to shake their fist at clouds. Any one of those things, even if true, is still a huge effect. Take the “drugs only accessible to the wealthy” - they say that like that makes them basically pointless. Sure, it’s bad that the poorest communities can have difficulty getting access to the latest drugs, but the idea that hundreds of millions of people around the world who do have access to these drugs would still be a pretty cool achievement?
Their points reek of “anything less than perfection may as well have not even existed” - which is a huge fallacy (often used in political ad campaigns to mislead the public).
By that logic, all technology that is misused is "a scourge". Metal and plastic technologies build weapons, computer technology controls bombs, pharmaceutical technologies make addictive drugs, food technologies contribute to diabetes epidemics.
I don't like this train of thought. I do like that there are the menonites and the amish in this world, but, for myself, I prefer a more intimate relationship with technology, for the lack of a better word. I like to think of technology as an extension of people: what the technology is and how we use it is then a reflection of our minds in their current stage of continuous evolution. If we have problems regulating dopamine, then we'll gravitate to technologies that allow us to experience those problems: not the other way around. Basically, I don't think of technology as external to society, rather to me it's a reflection.
Is instagram really primarily "computer technology", or is it primarily a social phenomenon? Yes, the technology broadly enables that social phenomenon, but it doesn't drive it. I don't think instagram was engineered to be what it was today, users used it that way and Facebook happily picked that up and optimized.
But it's not like they somehow created a demand in people to compare their lives with others', present themselves as happier/more successful/better than they really are etc; it just gives them the tools to use it.
Computers, and the scale they enable, are dystopian enablers of late-stage capitalism, fascism, and other exploitation.
Computers are the difference. While you could in theory pay a bunch of people to watch a bunch of cameras and listen to a bunch of microphones it was so expensive that no one outside of East Germany or Moscow ever had to seriously worry about the threat. Computers changed that. While in theory someone could look up a ton of information about you and precisely target ads to influence your behavior precisely, that wasn't a serious threat until computers. Neither were metrics and social dopamine triggers designed to keep you literally addicted to screens, voting campaign manipulation by hypertargeted disinformation campaigns, your job being replaced by a machine that illegally grabbed a bunch of art and can now spit out exact copies, or any of a thousand things computers are doing today.
I think that Adolf disagrees: if anything, computers make fascism not possible. Long gone are the days he was elected and long gone are the days Germans built and operated extermination camps in silence, unknown to the world. That cannot happen again with computers as they are the opposite of silence.
Computers and associated technologies are getting increasingly centrally controlled. Almost all mobile phones are controlled by two American companies, social media is controlled by a handful of companies, email by a handful of providers, so is streaming media. China and a few other countries have demonstrated that they can control what their citizens here. Multiple democratic countries are pushing on-device scanning.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago, but now I think computers make central control (and therefore control of the flow of information) a lot easier.
There has been more fascism before there were modern computers than after, so I'm not sure how they "enable" fascism.
Exploitation? Slavery was (relative to population; and likely more so if you adjust for the changing definition) more numerous before modern technology, and it remains primarily in underdeveloped countries.
I get being unhappy about the world and what not, and it's fine to feel skeptical towards technology, but we shouldn't let it confuse our perception of reality.
Most profesional digital graphic artists and writers do hold some level of resentment to the latest technological advancements, and other professions will soon undoubtedly join that sentiment as AI tech evolves into more job fields.
as usual it's a matter of bubbles: most of those you know might hold such resentment, most of those I know are in fact in love with the possibilities and are trying their hardest to leverage the new tools.
My 64yo "non digital" graphic artist aunt holds a very high level of resentment to the digital ones, while most of her old friends and ex-colleagues who embraced digital way back when are stil active in the space and happy one way or another, she is not.
But she is happy she can now get near-real-time two-way translation to/from languages she doesn't speak and is also happy to bury her head in the sand when I point out that's thanks to the same tech that will have an impact on the people who do simultaneous translations as a job.
Sometimes you have got to let things go. Clinging onto the past doesn't make sense in tech. Teaching kids today the wonders of that useless language called BASIC on 8 bit micros from the eighties amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. What next, slide rules?
If I had money and social media clout then I would buy SGI (Silicon Graphics) and get kids to learn the MIPS instruction set on refrigerator sized machines that needed their own power station. But no, got to let it go.
I think BASIC is not that bad. It is not so bad to learn a slide rule either, even if you do not use it very often and do not need it very often. Even if you use newer stuff, the older stuff is not worthless and sometimes avoids some of the disadvantages of newer stuff, so it is worth to learn many things.
I can easily see a new generation of Silicon Graphics machines powered by something like a MI300R (R because the amd64 cores would be replaced by RISC-V ones, which are the natural heirs to MIPS).
Or we could repurpose the SGI acronym to be Silicon Graphics and Intelligence to catch the AI wave.
And, of course, publish OpenIRIX under GPLv3. Including the screensavers.
In a world where quality content or products disappear at an ever quicker pace, replaced with generic slop with no emotional attachment, functioning as just a way to extract something from you, the consumer, nostalgia becomes ever more valuable. Maybe not let everything go? Maybe letting things go is why we're at the current state of toxic consumerism that nobody likes.
Buried the lede - they have not yet actually paid for it and are still raising money.
As I said in the previous post about this, I support their efforts and applaud their enthusiasm. But they are making some very risky moves with their premature messaging. This could easily fall through and is just begging other parties with less sincere interest in the brand's legacy to take notice.
And it's "only" a "low seven-figure sum" involved here.
I'm quite frankly expecting a crash and burn with a lot of grasping-at-finances to try to keep whatever this becomes afloat, and/or another Atari-esque cash-grab-flailing-venture situation.
AFAICT from the article the takeover deal is agreed and in process, so assuming they end up able to pay on time and meet any other requirements I don't see how other interest matters?
I don’t know what the agreement is, but if either party is allowed to pull out at a 10% cost, and this fund raising goes crazy viral it might make financial sense for the seller to pull out, and make a new offer.
Sure bad things could happen depending what terms they could negotiate. The counter proposal seems to be to not have made the deal probably not being able to raise enough money to do so in secrecy (or not maintaining secrecy and making more spicy gossip about an opportunity.) The old owner is probably happier to be done with owning the brand and getting more than they could have with no free advertising.
It's important to understand that:
* Commodore B.V. only owns the Commodore trademark and logo. They do not own any of the Commodore source code, patents, designs, etc. They do not own the Amiga trademarks, logos, source code, ROMs, etc.
* The exact terms and status of the transaction are unclear, however it appears to be a letter of intent and contingent on raising sufficient funds, which has not yet been done.
The logo and name wouldnt be a lot for a “low seven figure” payment.
I advise the new CEO to immediately sell the brand again, take the "low seven-figure sum", and invest it in actual technology for a new company which can be called Rear Admiral.
That's great! But not Amiga, which Gateway 2000 owns. Too bad it seems to be mired in the retrocomputing morass.
How sad.
Can someone briefly explain what the actual product will be? Not interested in going down a rabbit hole with a series of videos. I just want a straight to the point explanation.
That'll be revealed in episode 3.
(They do have Jeri Ellsworth and some OGs from Commodore signed up to be part of the team though, and seem to genuine love the brand and have nostalgia for the C64, so I have cautious optimism!)
I’m sure multiple video parts is supposed to raise hype but it has the opposite effect on me.
I like the enthusiasm for Retrofuturism, that if you didn't get the future that you were once promised 20-30 years ago you just create it anyway. I think that's a more humane alternative "to move fast and break things". I'm so sick of the latter and its negative effects on societies.
It’s very odd that the first product announced is not a retro computer but some sort of anti social media product.
Doesn’t take long for directions to change.
Strikes me the main real opportunity was to bring the original C64 back to life, not to go to war with social media, which is so unrelated to retro computing and commodore that I shook my head and turned off the announcement video.
Related previously:
YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44215117
Computer technology is not "the scourge of mankind".
Terrible messaging around a beloved brand.
You are just wrong. Look at the last few years and see how computer technology is being worshiped in the most destructive way. Instagram is literally bringing diseases to children.
This comes from a person for which the internet and computers are the love of life and everything. I'm excited about these times and the future. But every day that goes by I feel like this technology thing is going backwards, thanks to irresponsible, rich and careless people, and should be stopped right now. It will not stop, this is only the beginning.
This opinion will inevitably be seen as pessimistic tech doomerism, especially on forums like this.
And yet, for all the glory and benefit that we were promised modern technology would bring, the average person only enjoys a small sliver of it, while the rest is enjoyed by the 1% of humans in control, or corrupted by those who seek becoming part of the 1%.
We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it. We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited. We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams. We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy. We have self-driving cars and high-tech gadgets to entertain ourselves, which is great until the companies start exploiting us. And so on. The latest wave of AI tech is another step in this same direction, ramped up to levels we have never seen before.
I challenge anyone to steel man the argument that technology has been a net positive for humanity on a global scale, or that it will ever get better. I sure can't.
As someone in a country with a functional healthcare system, I can assure you those miraculous drugs are available to all here. There are many countries like this. I suspect you’re more interested in shaking your fist at clouds than you are in making properly thought through points, however. Your comment isn’t “pessimistic tech doomerism”, it’s simpler than that, it’s self aggrandising statements based on feelings rather than facts.
Globally, since the advent of widespread computer use, human life has improved by orders of magnitude along every metric we have: poverty, hunger, disease, literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, homicide rates, etc., etc., etc.: https://ourworldindata.org
Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
I’d love to see a chain of cause and effect that links any of those outcomes to widespread computer use and advancements in computing.
Go nuts. I am not making this claim.
> Globally, since the advent of widespread computer use, human life has improved by orders of magnitude along every metric we have: poverty, hunger, disease, literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, homicide rates, etc.
Most of those trends were in motion well before widespread computer use, e.g. [1]. I'm sure that computers were a factor in improving the rate of literacy, education, perhaps even poverty, but they played a much smaller role in improving hunger, disease, child mortality, life expectancy, let alone homicide rates(!). Most of those are attributable to improvements in economic programs, sociopolitical stability, etc. I.e. the global progress humanity has experienced for centuries. Which, unfortunately, has been slowing down or regressing in the past few decades precisely _because_ of technology.
You can see this in literacy, for example[2]. Yes, the rate increases post-1950, but it had been increasing for many decades before. There is a large uptick between 1950 and 1980, well before computers were in widespread use. So, sure, we can say that computers played a role, but the world was already improving without them.
> Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
Extraordinary claim? Everything I said can be verified by a cursory web search (assuming you can navigate around disinformation), or by personal experience, since I'm sure most of us have directly experienced some form of it. I don't think it's interesting to rehash verifiable claims, but I am interested in discussing the positive effects of technology. You mentioned some, but when factoring in everything else I mentioned in my previous post, I still don't see how these make technology a net positive.
To be clear: technology in general has revolutionized many fields, such as agriculture and medicine, which has greatly contributed to improving the well-being of billions of people. But that's not the kind of technology I'm talking about here. I'm specifically referring to modern computing since roughly the 1970s. The kind of technology within the context of companies like Commodore.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm
[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/literacy
As someone in a country with a functional healthcare system, I can assure you those miraculous drugs are available to all here. There are many countries like this.
I think advances in IT were a strong net positive for a long time. Certainly until into this century. The way much of it has developed in the last decade or so has been net negative (social media, surveillance, etc.).
> We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it.
We have more sources and can check. Any new medium needs time for people to learn to deal with it. No one doubts that printing has been a net positive, but it was used to spread misinformation - one of the first really influential printed works was Malleus Maleficarum.
> We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited.
Well, they have metadata, but a lot of chat is E2E. Email can be E2E encrypted too but people do not know about it and big companies do not want to support it.
> We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams
I think that also reflects the way the wider economy has developed (concentration of production power in big businesses) and culture (people do longer feel a duty to do a good job for customers).
> We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy
The poor have far better access to drugs too. Almost all drugs are available to people in developed countries, and even in poor countries availability has improved a lot.
Yeah I don’t think the guy you’re talking to is really arguing in good faith or has thought through their opinion beyond wanting to shake their fist at clouds. Any one of those things, even if true, is still a huge effect. Take the “drugs only accessible to the wealthy” - they say that like that makes them basically pointless. Sure, it’s bad that the poorest communities can have difficulty getting access to the latest drugs, but the idea that hundreds of millions of people around the world who do have access to these drugs wouldn’t still be a pretty cool achievement?
Their points reek of “anything less than perfection may as well have not even existed” - which is a huge fallacy (often used in political ad campaigns to mislead the public).
Yeah I don’t think the guy you’re talking to is really arguing in good faith or has thought through their opinion beyond wanting to shake their fist at clouds. Any one of those things, even if true, is still a huge effect. Take the “drugs only accessible to the wealthy” - they say that like that makes them basically pointless. Sure, it’s bad that the poorest communities can have difficulty getting access to the latest drugs, but the idea that hundreds of millions of people around the world who do have access to these drugs would still be a pretty cool achievement?
Their points reek of “anything less than perfection may as well have not even existed” - which is a huge fallacy (often used in political ad campaigns to mislead the public).
By that logic, all technology that is misused is "a scourge". Metal and plastic technologies build weapons, computer technology controls bombs, pharmaceutical technologies make addictive drugs, food technologies contribute to diabetes epidemics.
I don't like this train of thought. I do like that there are the menonites and the amish in this world, but, for myself, I prefer a more intimate relationship with technology, for the lack of a better word. I like to think of technology as an extension of people: what the technology is and how we use it is then a reflection of our minds in their current stage of continuous evolution. If we have problems regulating dopamine, then we'll gravitate to technologies that allow us to experience those problems: not the other way around. Basically, I don't think of technology as external to society, rather to me it's a reflection.
Is instagram really primarily "computer technology", or is it primarily a social phenomenon? Yes, the technology broadly enables that social phenomenon, but it doesn't drive it. I don't think instagram was engineered to be what it was today, users used it that way and Facebook happily picked that up and optimized.
But it's not like they somehow created a demand in people to compare their lives with others', present themselves as happier/more successful/better than they really are etc; it just gives them the tools to use it.
It's a computer technology.
Computers, and the scale they enable, are dystopian enablers of late-stage capitalism, fascism, and other exploitation.
Computers are the difference. While you could in theory pay a bunch of people to watch a bunch of cameras and listen to a bunch of microphones it was so expensive that no one outside of East Germany or Moscow ever had to seriously worry about the threat. Computers changed that. While in theory someone could look up a ton of information about you and precisely target ads to influence your behavior precisely, that wasn't a serious threat until computers. Neither were metrics and social dopamine triggers designed to keep you literally addicted to screens, voting campaign manipulation by hypertargeted disinformation campaigns, your job being replaced by a machine that illegally grabbed a bunch of art and can now spit out exact copies, or any of a thousand things computers are doing today.
I think that Adolf disagrees: if anything, computers make fascism not possible. Long gone are the days he was elected and long gone are the days Germans built and operated extermination camps in silence, unknown to the world. That cannot happen again with computers as they are the opposite of silence.
Computers and associated technologies are getting increasingly centrally controlled. Almost all mobile phones are controlled by two American companies, social media is controlled by a handful of companies, email by a handful of providers, so is streaming media. China and a few other countries have demonstrated that they can control what their citizens here. Multiple democratic countries are pushing on-device scanning.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago, but now I think computers make central control (and therefore control of the flow of information) a lot easier.
Peter Thiel, is that you?
/S ?
Hopefully
There has been more fascism before there were modern computers than after, so I'm not sure how they "enable" fascism.
Exploitation? Slavery was (relative to population; and likely more so if you adjust for the changing definition) more numerous before modern technology, and it remains primarily in underdeveloped countries.
I get being unhappy about the world and what not, and it's fine to feel skeptical towards technology, but we shouldn't let it confuse our perception of reality.
It seems so surreal that the unibomber's manifesto was 100% correct.
His methods were insane, but his words prophetic.
Most profesional digital graphic artists and writers do hold some level of resentment to the latest technological advancements, and other professions will soon undoubtedly join that sentiment as AI tech evolves into more job fields.
as usual it's a matter of bubbles: most of those you know might hold such resentment, most of those I know are in fact in love with the possibilities and are trying their hardest to leverage the new tools.
My 64yo "non digital" graphic artist aunt holds a very high level of resentment to the digital ones, while most of her old friends and ex-colleagues who embraced digital way back when are stil active in the space and happy one way or another, she is not.
But she is happy she can now get near-real-time two-way translation to/from languages she doesn't speak and is also happy to bury her head in the sand when I point out that's thanks to the same tech that will have an impact on the people who do simultaneous translations as a job.
This comment will age like milk
Sometimes you have got to let things go. Clinging onto the past doesn't make sense in tech. Teaching kids today the wonders of that useless language called BASIC on 8 bit micros from the eighties amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. What next, slide rules?
If I had money and social media clout then I would buy SGI (Silicon Graphics) and get kids to learn the MIPS instruction set on refrigerator sized machines that needed their own power station. But no, got to let it go.
> Sometimes you have got to let things go.
Yes, but it's too early for Commodore. Commodore is fondly remembered by Gen X, and Gen X is still alive and has the means to indulge its nostalgia.
I think BASIC is not that bad. It is not so bad to learn a slide rule either, even if you do not use it very often and do not need it very often. Even if you use newer stuff, the older stuff is not worthless and sometimes avoids some of the disadvantages of newer stuff, so it is worth to learn many things.
Blasé comment. This isn't clinging onto "the past" like proverbial nostalgia. It's history and culture.
"Teaching kids today the wonders of that useless language called BASIC on 8 bit micros from the eighties amounts to cruel and unusual punishment."
I beg to differ. BASIC is a great introductory language for teaching kids the fundamentals of programming.
I can easily see a new generation of Silicon Graphics machines powered by something like a MI300R (R because the amd64 cores would be replaced by RISC-V ones, which are the natural heirs to MIPS).
Or we could repurpose the SGI acronym to be Silicon Graphics and Intelligence to catch the AI wave.
And, of course, publish OpenIRIX under GPLv3. Including the screensavers.
For those interested by the Irix desktop, Maxx Intercative is a free autorized clone https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
It's pretty good. I tried it some time ago and got strong O2 vibes.
In a world where quality content or products disappear at an ever quicker pace, replaced with generic slop with no emotional attachment, functioning as just a way to extract something from you, the consumer, nostalgia becomes ever more valuable. Maybe not let everything go? Maybe letting things go is why we're at the current state of toxic consumerism that nobody likes.
Well said.
I like retro computers as much as the next person but selling dead technology and brands just doesn’t make sense.