Notices by HP van Braam (hp@mastodon.tmm.cx)

Nobody wants these old-fashioned mice, and yes, please tell me EVERY TIME I BOOT MY COMPUTER.

I might forget how much fun my new touchpad is!

#retrocomputing

On Matthew Garrett's post: "LLMs: (enable that)
Free software people: Oh no not like that"

No, people RENTING their empowerment to use computers in freedom is, in fact, exactly the "not like that" we have been talking about forever.

Paying apple $99/year to put your own software on your own phone is also "not like that"

Paying a company to let you use their computer how they want you is exactly what we didn't want.

EMPOWERMENT ISN'T BILLED MONTHLY GEEZ

@atax1a @dieweltist I'm only addressing the point that free software people, like myself, are being hypocritical about LLMs.

Telling everyone who wants to write software to a) pay monthly to access proprietary software
b) download and install non-free software locally to work with the SaaS software

Is pretty much exactly the opposite of what we ever wanted computing to be.

@thomasfuchs I think in most people's hands LLMs are not at all doing well.

There are people who when using an LLM can generate good code. But it's a little bit like a guitar, and I don't think that the skill required to use a guitar well to play music well, and the skill required to use an LLM to write code well are that dissimilar.

The only thing that saves LLMs is that most people weren't very good programmers to begin with and don't recognize that most of the generated code is crap.

@thomasfuchs an LLM is "good" in someone's eye when they can generate code of a level above their ability to evaluate it.

Again, it's not all bad, but the way that they have been getting better at is hasn't been qualitative really.

They are still very much making exactly the same KIND of mistakes they were 3 years ago, but now it's harder to find.

RE: https://mastodon.tmm.cx/@hp/116403718145053275

I suppose the takeaway from this is that people would rather spend less on a device that's slower!

Not the outcome I had expected!

#retrocomputing

Another sweet #RolandMT32 tune! #sierra's #silpheed.

The setup:
- Celeron 300A
- Roland MPU-401AT
- Roland MT-32
- Soundblaster 64

Direct capture from VGA and Audio! The "snow" at the start is also visible on my monitor. Maybe an incompatibility with my VGA?

(I promise this isn't a MT32 account now. I was testing my new capture setup and it came out beautifully. I hope you'll all enjoy!)

#retrocomputing #retrogaming

I was today years old when I learned that #IRC is 5 years older than #SMS

#retrocomputing

Remember that time when you could <EMBED SRC="all_i_want_for_christmas.mid" hidden=true autostart=true loop=1>

And everyone just had to... Deal with it?

#retrocomputing #web

@wolf480pl I felt that given that the target platform is Windows 3 it paid to be specific... 😄

Not to brag, but if anthropic had paid me $20,000 and given me a month I'd also have been able to write them a very shitty C compiler.

@thomasfuchs what about MO?! 😱

(Magneto optical)

@thomasfuchs what happens when you take a platter out of a harddisk...

Is that a disk or a disc?

@thomasfuchs @foone hoard the librettos, the most collectible of Laptops.

I bought a #compaq Armada m700 at the thrift store yesterday! It's a really nice pentium III laptop (1999 thin and light)

HOWEVER there's one terrible OCD triggering design compromise on this thing.

Why did it have to be this way Compaq... WHY?!

#retrocomputing #unsatisfying

@thomasfuchs It's a weird ebb and flow. It seems every ~10 years or so we go back and forth.

1 Mainframes
2 PCs
3 Terminal servers
4 Back to PCs
5 VDI (as in individual desktop VMs on central hardware)
6 BYOD. Everyone buys their own laptop (PCs again)
7 Pay-as-you-go AI from OpenAI/Antropic

There's some more home pc stuff stages as well, like the "gaming in the cloud" thing.

Corporations just really want us to rent computers. But they always, eventually, become too cheap to rent out.

@whitequark just less infrastructure, get closer to nature.

(Nature being the internet around 1993)

@whitequark I wish more people would copy this commitment.

Be the change you want to see in the world!

@TechTangents I'm in the same boat with various bits and pieces of Sun kit.

Some people just think that because EVERYONE is asking $500 for something it's worth $500, not realizing that if they are listed it means they aren't selling...

I keep making offers, pretty sure I'm the only one too. It doesn't say "active offers" or "in shopping carts" and stuff.

Some people really don't understand how this is supposed to work. 😄