Handwritten Magazine Without Generative AI | Hacker News Reader

Handwritten Magazine Without Generative AI

flyingcarcomputer.com

35 pointszkirill13 comments

He's building his own computer (starting from an OS that he sells via SD cards). Very cool. I wish there was a video showing the OS/talks about everything more in depth.

I mean this in the kindest way, but what on earth even is this?

It's described as

> No generative AI.

> No cloud.

> No distractions.

> Just your thoughts.

But that doesn't even vaguely tell me what the concept is and how it's different to just a regular machine without additional services.

The faq goes into detail about what chips might be used, and says they don't like current computers.

There must be a middle ground here explaining just briefly what this is?

True. Whats the USP

It tries to push a lack of AI as its USP but that's with the assumption that the majority of stuff is with AI right now, which isn't true.

My local bakery also doesn’t use AI…

Yes, and the paper can still use genAI, it would just need to be handwritten instead of copy and pasted.

AI can be used to brainstorm ideas, do literature review / background search, criticize the article, reflow language or write it directly. We can never know what degree of AI usage is in a piece of text.

My preferred way is to chat about a topic, make my case, and demand an article at the end.

Yeah, it's really striking how hard it is to decipher what the product is here. Presumably there's a community somewhere that's been following the development of whatever OS or piece of single function hardware it is.

I can see the value of creating coolness through authenticity, anti-marketing and 'low-fi' design - but if you literally can't find an explanation as to whats on sale it's probably gone too far.

Scrolling back to the first entry on the blog, it appears to be a small form board running BSD on ARM. Not sure how that qualifies as a new kind of computer...

https://flyingcarcomputer.com/posts/a-new-personal-computer/

You could use AI to...Find what it is :-)

> Given that this will initially be a niche product, the price will be quite high

It really becomes self defeating when this is your target market. If I can't tell what it is, why would I earmark money for it in the future?

I've also got something like that: CPU Snapdragon 680, 8x1.8-2.4 GHz Cortex-A73&A53. 4G RAM. GPU Qualcomm Adreno 610.

A non-distracting 10.3 inch 4:3 grayscale e-ink display, touchscreen & pen handwriting recognition! I use handwriting as much as possible.

It has 1 USB-c connection (power or data). Optionally, I can use bluetooth keyboard, wifi or run Lllama-3.2-3B on device! With inform7 or ink i can write interactive fiction, with Vassal I can play solo board games. With Termux, I can run a rust toolchain, zig, python scripts, good old C as well. Days of battery life, decades of books to read.

Perhaps I can use it to figure out a life without computers, perhaps an analogue computer or calculator. Smart use of pen and paper (BulletJournal, journaling, pen and paper games). An oracle with stones, dice or cards to 'chat' with, use of the mind and imagination to deal with life.

Oh wait, we have vajrayana meditation, mantra, visualisation and pen and paper already! Just train to be a mentat.

Unique and authentic approach, especially in a digital age. Hope this approach helps you

I felt like reading Lorem Ipsum.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com