i am constantly baffled by the lack of curiosity demonstrated by retro hardware enthusiasts who use llms to make their stuff. it's like... i thought we were here to understand how computers work from a historical and material perspective, in order to build a future for computation that empowers communities over corporate interests, and to redeem the knowledge bottled up in retro hardware design to enrich the commons. but no i guess you're here for the frisson of "lookie old thing does new thing"
i mean i get the appeal of that frisson, and nostalgia's appeal—who doesn't want to sit down in front of an altair or a tandy or a 386DX or a playstation or a windows ce netbook in footie pajamas and relive the world before it got so dang gosh complicated. and i get that there's clout and vpn sponsorship money to be had (for the youtubers). but the bar for contributing something to the world with this hobby—or at least not actively making it worse—is so so low
from a practical level, what i'm saying is, the two scenarios are: (a) i had an idea for a thing, and turns out the idea was very ambitious, so i didn't finish the project all the way, but i did learn this thing that i didn't know before, and now i'm sharing that knowledge with you from my perspective, so we can both get closer to making the thing next time; or (b) i had an idea for a thing, i used Clob Clorb to make something shaped like the idea, and i don't know how or even whether it works
@aparrish dad a comment earlier where somebody said "converting something C++ into an archaic, low-level language feels like The Kind Of Shit that LLMs *should* be used for" and I'm just a bit gobsmacked. That's a compiler! You want a compiler
@rumblesan @aparrish the eagerness with which people desire to use a tool of nonreproducible, statistical outputs for deterministic tasks is incredibly flabbergasting.
until you consider the angle that the tools present as a subservient person to heed their users’ every beck and call.
