Regression with the C64

I agree, with this, and the general sentiments in this blog post.

Yet I am one of those "Experts" out there who knows nodejs et al, and builds things with it. I recognise it's deep flaws, evade them as much as I am able and am always trying to find better ways of doing things - but this is the domain I work in, and using these tools and building blocks to some degree is quite difficult to completely avoid (and I say this as someone who has gone to quite some extremes in my attempts to do so).

My point is, even though the issue is a cultural one, not everyone caught up in a particular manifestation of these issues is blind to them - Please remember this the next time you judge a web dev, or foo dev, or someone from whatever area you perceive to be hopelessly flawed.

Of course this is a neat exercise to do on a C64, but in no way does this give any reason to think we're doing something wrong by using more powerful computers to study vastly more data (using more complex algorithms - we are not just doing "the same thing" as in this demo). The gap between showing that you can fit a line to two points on old hardware and concluding that modern data science is one big heap of inefficiency is just too large.

Is anything actually stopping you writing it in baremetal x86 assembly if you wanted?

Disclosure: Maintainer of emlearn project.

Reminds me of when everyone in the SV bubble was all excited about "graph theory" because Facebook was using it. But it's something that was being done in 16K BASIC back in the 1970's.

And it's just as stupid.

That said, going back to less powerful hardware is the right thing to do because we get longer lasting batteries:

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/picosystem

Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM, this is the equivalent to a modern C64 and it consumes 0.1W instead of 20W.

That said again, I'm targeting the Raspberry 4 for my upcoming 3D action MMO and that is 5W when maxxing the GPU and one CPU core.

It's a good way to keep your expectations in check as electricity prices rise indefinitely.

The only thing I'm 100% sure of is that people will soon not be able to afford to play on 200+W machines.

A friend of mine calls 8 bit computers "glorified calculators" and he's right. You could have tons of fun though.

You don't have to use Windows 10, there are better options. You have to waste tons of RAM for an IDE to keep fast useful indexes in-memory. You don't have to use Spring Boot, there are better options.