8 bit kid here, I played with my uncle’s Atari VCS, the original one with six silver switches on the front, and my first computer was a C64.

It is definitely true that the only real difference between games released in the last ten years and games released in the 90s is prettier graphics. We still play platformers.

We don’t need all this to have fun. Trust me.

Also it will implode and all of this will be available at fire sale prices.

Don Tchak never! The dude is completely corrupt, and I hear he has some very nasty sexual proclivities.

My bad, I was a kid during his Oilers days and I mean, look at him…

Removed by mod

I also didn’t know what it was when I discovered their forum, which is a combination of kool-aid addled VCbrains and tech geeks having normal, informed conversations about tech stuff. I was hanging out there for a while, until I realized.

He’s gonna go full Buggin Out

He’s from Alberta, he didn’t turn, just stopped hiding it.

It’s worse for GenX, we watched Fat Albert and learned about things like drugs and prejudice from it. The Cosby Show happened during my cynical, anti-wholesomeness teen years so I didn’t watch that so much.

I started reading for the same reason, except it was he Narnia books and my gramma 🫡

There are many people who want to go out and do stuff; you haven’t met them. I am in my 50s and I spent a couple decades trying to convince the friends I had to be more interested in doing, and I never succeeded. It is clear to me now that I should have been out finding my people who enjoyed the stuff I enjoy, and spending my time with them instead.

Don’t be me.

Agree. I live in Winnipeg, Canada, and I have visited local datacentres - anything built in the last twenty years would be very hard to physically penetrate with stealth alone.

There are older ones which might be a bit less sophisticated, but that’s not the norm.

Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.

Those old computers you speak of: They worked. There is no comparison to be made here.

They were built in order to give us an edge on the battlefield. More accurate artillery and the like. They did math which humans could do, but which would take humans weeks or months, and the answers were required within timeframes more like 12 hours, because war.

They were so useful, so valuable, that they were worth the treasure spent. They conferred a kind of superintelligence to their users. Those with brains to understand could see this, and so yes, hobbyists found their way to building their own machines, once small CPUs became available, however janky. Anyone who had to do math, who had to do math, went into debt if they had to, and learned to use these janky beasts because the advantage was weeks or months of time they didn’t have to grind on paper.

There is nothing about AI that resembles any of that.

Keep lecturing, yank. You made this, it’s on you to stop it. And if you rethink some of the astoundingly stupid things your culture believes, that could not hurt. But this is not a moment when any of us owe you a shred of understanding. You’re fucking up the world right now, and instead of blocking traffic you’re on here begging us to understand.

We understand just fine. It is you people who have never understood your own country.

I read that as “I refuse to imagine anything but this, sorry about causing WWIII but we have forgotten the 1930s and you are all going to have to save us because we have become Eloi.”

This statement fills me with real and bitter contempt.

Radical interoperability. If I want to subscribe to this board via Gopher, or via Dialup modem, there should be an implemented way to do that.

(GreenKnight23’s Internet goes out) (Lambo stalls and blonde turns into Steve Ballmer screaming DEVELOPERS)

I’m curious what the word “capitalism” means to you.

Leaving Marx aside completely for a moment, I see it as “the use of capital” at the most grossly simplified tip of the iceberg. Which broadly means that capitalism refers to people with a lot of money already, using that money as a means of getting more money, without doing any sort of productive work themselves.

And that is exactly the problem at hand, and what MBech meant by the word.

I think you use it to broadly mean “our Western, non-communist system,” which is quite a lot to cram into a word.

I ended up with adult “friends” who were putting up just as big a front as me, probably also autistic in many cases really, but very far from any sort of acceptance of that. But I believed that everyone was like this, others were just better at it than me, so I never questioned a lot of things.

Once I reached paragraph 2 and began to act on that, well, they have scattered to the winds. Though to be fair, I did move an hour away from everyone I have known, though for me it’s just pragmatic; I want to avoid the food riots (or possible Troubles, if the Usians go ahead and invade us; it will go as well for them as it did for the British in Ireland).

edit: actually this does not refer to who you were referring to. He seems more like your typical Usian liberal.

If I had to place a bet, I would replace “Americans” with “Russian Trolls”. You look at this guy’s account, all he does is stir up shit. I honestly have trouble believing that anyone in the USA has the time to sit and troll all day. That requires a wage, such as they exist in St. Petersburg.