emh68

I've been thinking about running a "mystery retro LAN party". Dig into a big cardboard box and pull out an old gaming laptop. You get what you get. Then go try to get top frag!

The first computer I bought with my own money was an Athlon XP. Probably got the motherboard and CPU from Comp USA or Office Max or something. I bought it specifically to play The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind! It felt like it was obsolete in a week, the way Moore's Law was rocking at that time.

And yeah, when I opened the box and saw that the CPU had a fragile ceramic/glass top like that, I had a mini panic attack.

These days, of course I have a few in my retro collection, but I'll never remove the heatsinks. The CPU and motherboards might as well be one unit, never to be separated again.

I have this graph I like to show with "risk to company posed by changes" and "benefit to company posed by changes" on the y axis and "company entrenchment" on the x axis. The "benefit" graph starts out nearly vertical but quickly levels off. The "risk" is the inverse, starts off horizontal but quickly ramps up to infinity.

So I think that ZIRP has little effect on the "just say no" phenomenon, that's more about company size.

Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took.

For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created by the spinning platter) came in and blew all other technology away.

And, likewise, we had liquid crystal technology since the 70s, and probably could have invented it sooner, but no need, because Cathode Ray Tube technology appeared (a mini particle accelerator in your home! Plus the advanced materials science to bore the precision electron beam holes in the screen grid, the phosphor coating, the unusual deflection coil winding topology, and leaded glass to reduce x-ray expose for the viewers) and made all other forms of display unattractive by comparison.

It's amazing how far CRT technology got, given its disconnect from other technologies. The sophistication of the factories that created late-model "flat-screen" CRTs is truly impressive.

The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").

Someday, maybe given advances in robotics and automation, I hope to start a retro CRT manufacturing company. The problems, such as the unavailability of the entire supply chain (can't even buy an electron gun, it would have to be made from scratch) and environmental restrictions (lead glass probably makes the EPA perk up and notice).

> defense of the rich against the poor

Taking this a step further, it's logical to conclude that society itself is a constant war between rich people, who use their wealth (influence/power) to enlist the poor in their attacks on one another. Taking it another level, we could say that "society" itself is merely a side-effect of this war, in fact it is the current state-of-the-art weapon in this struggle. If something better than capitalistic society comes about (such as, most obviously, human-level AIs and robotics), the rich will not hesitate to abandon the society strategy.

1. Build a house for each homeless person

2. Remove them from the homeless count, because they now have a house.

3. Reach zero homelessness!

4. There are still people living on the streets... But we don't call them homeless!

Wow! It really works. The missing bean "pops" out at you. The hardest part is getting your brain to focus on the cross-eyed virtual center image.

How are other companies handling this?

Ask an LLM to output precise instructions to control a 1 meter 3 axis triple- articulated robot arm to pet a cat, and you'll see the answer is "no".

Much like Facebook and Twitter spy on American citizens for the Federal government.

My introduction to Pascal and Assembly Language were after finding one of those huge paperbacks on the shelves of a Salvation Army in North Huntington, Pennsylvania. This was long after the book had lost all relevance. But before that I was stuck thinking about programming in terms of Java and C++ OOP. Small things that changed the course of my programming career.

Laravel is never going to be competitive with Django/Rails simply because PHP as a language is just not as easy to master as Python/Ruby. There, I said it. Lots of PHP fans write these articles about how PHP is catching up in terms of usability, but nobody is choosing PHP in 2024 (other than truly uninformed people who are just picking their project language at random).

The one area where PHP is useful in 2024 is for prototyping a website quickly. As a one-person team, PHP without a framework (and without OOP) is the fastest way to build a fully-functioning complex site. I built a massively complicated site this way, in very little time. This is great because if it ever becomes popular, I can simply hire developers to rewrite it in the latest framework du jour (probably Next/Nuxt/whatever)