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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always been really loved the bicycles for the mind metaphor and for a while I was cataloging different ways the metaphor works for me. Not sure what I did with that list, but compiling it was fun and made me think about how I chose to use technology.

It feels like the era of the personal computer ended around the turn of the century though.

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As a person who has finally arrived at a programming setup which allows him to finally do what he has dreamed about since first trying to sketch things up on a Koala Pad attached to a Commodore 64, I would like to gainsay that the personal computer revolution has come to an end.

When OpenSCAD was first released, I finally had a 3D modeling environment which made sense to me.

When the Shapeoko was first announced on Kickstarter (which made use of the opensource projects Arduino, Grbl, and Makerslide, and was iself initially opensource) I finally had a robotic shop assistant which allowed me to make pretty much anything I wanted w/o the need to make myriad fixtures and jigs or to limit myself to traditional joinery techniques.

When Python was added to OpenSCAD as: https://pythonscad.org/ I finally had a programming environment which allowed not just 3D modeling but also mutable variables _and_ the ability to write out files so as to make DXFs or G-code.

So, I am working on:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

and have been using it for my personal projects for a while now --- hopefully I will have a suitably intricate project ready to function as a showcase for its capabilities in a month or so.

That looks really cool and I like that it isn’t a website. There’s a Whitfield Diffie quote I’ve mentioned a few times on HN. It’s from Ellen Ullman’s book Life in Code[1]:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! [Diffie] said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

Applications like yours claw back a little of that power. Very nice.

[1]:https://archive.org/details/life-in-code-a-personal-history-...

Thanks!

Yeah, I've never understood how folks who managed to escape from the schackles of mainframe central computing are willing to ease into the padded cell afforded by cloud computing.

Because lots of things go in cycles and the other end of the cycle has many problems as well.

Just to pick a turning point of sorts, it ended when you needed to password protect your "account". In short, the internet killed the "personal" computer.

I think LLMs will bring it back. This is one part of the future I'm hopeful about.

On the other hand I was thinking something similar with smartphones and look how that ended up.

Before those came along I was perfectly content using a computer with 4 or 8 GB of RAM or less and thought that ought to be more enough for anything I wanted to do with computers for the rest of my life. Now I find myself wondering how much more RAM and what new GPU I am going to need to run a model with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. A few years ago I might have agreed with those who say the personal computer revolution has long been over. Indeed there was a long period with few new milestones or innovation. But now I see that that sentiment was mostly a failure of my (and their) imagination.

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