Group of investors represented by YouTuber Perifractic buys Commodore
amiga-news.de
amiga-news.de
As I said in the previous post about this, I support their efforts and applaud their enthusiasm. But they are making some very risky moves with their premature messaging. This could easily fall through and is just begging other parties with less sincere interest in the brand's legacy to take notice.
I'm quite frankly expecting a crash and burn with a lot of grasping-at-finances to try to keep whatever this becomes afloat, and/or another Atari-esque cash-grab-flailing-venture situation.
* Commodore B.V. only owns the Commodore trademark and logo. They do not own any of the Commodore source code, patents, designs, etc. They do not own the Amiga trademarks, logos, source code, ROMs, etc.
* The exact terms and status of the transaction are unclear, however it appears to be a letter of intent and contingent on raising sufficient funds, which has not yet been done.
Doesn’t take long for directions to change.
Strikes me the main real opportunity was to bring the original C64 back to life, not to go to war with social media, which is so unrelated to retro computing and commodore that I shook my head and turned off the announcement video.
(They do have Jeri Ellsworth and some OGs from Commodore signed up to be part of the team though, and seem to genuine love the brand and have nostalgia for the C64, so I have cautious optimism!)
YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand
Terrible messaging around a beloved brand.
My 64yo "non digital" graphic artist aunt holds a very high level of resentment to the digital ones, while most of her old friends and ex-colleagues who embraced digital way back when are stil active in the space and happy one way or another, she is not.
But she is happy she can now get near-real-time two-way translation to/from languages she doesn't speak and is also happy to bury her head in the sand when I point out that's thanks to the same tech that will have an impact on the people who do simultaneous translations as a job.
This comes from a person for which the internet and computers are the love of life and everything. I'm excited about these times and the future. But every day that goes by I feel like this technology thing is going backwards, thanks to irresponsible, rich and careless people, and should be stopped right now. It will not stop, this is only the beginning.
I don't like this train of thought. I do like that there are the menonites and the amish in this world, but, for myself, I prefer a more intimate relationship with technology, for the lack of a better word. I like to think of technology as an extension of people: what the technology is and how we use it is then a reflection of our minds in their current stage of continuous evolution. If we have problems regulating dopamine, then we'll gravitate to technologies that allow us to experience those problems: not the other way around. Basically, I don't think of technology as external to society, rather to me it's a reflection.
And yet, for all the glory and benefit that we were promised modern technology would bring, the average person only enjoys a small sliver of it, while the rest is enjoyed by the 1% of humans in control, or corrupted by those who seek becoming part of the 1%.
We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it. We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited. We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams. We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy. We have self-driving cars and high-tech gadgets to entertain ourselves, which is great until the companies start exploiting us. And so on. The latest wave of AI tech is another step in this same direction, ramped up to levels we have never seen before.
I challenge anyone to steel man the argument that technology has been a net positive for humanity on a global scale, or that it will ever get better. I sure can't.
Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
Most of those trends were in motion well before widespread computer use, e.g. [1]. I'm sure that computers were a factor in improving the rate of literacy, education, perhaps even poverty, but they played a much smaller role in improving hunger, disease, child mortality, life expectancy, let alone homicide rates(!). Most of those are attributable to improvements in economic programs, sociopolitical stability, etc. I.e. the global progress humanity has experienced for centuries. Which, unfortunately, has been slowing down or regressing in the past few decades precisely _because_ of technology.
You can see this in literacy, for example[2]. Yes, the rate increases post-1950, but it had been increasing for many decades before. There is a large uptick between 1950 and 1980, well before computers were in widespread use. So, sure, we can say that computers played a role, but the world was already improving without them.
> Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
Extraordinary claim? Everything I said can be verified by a cursory web search (assuming you can navigate around disinformation), or by personal experience, since I'm sure most of us have directly experienced some form of it. I don't think it's interesting to rehash verifiable claims, but I am interested in discussing the positive effects of technology. You mentioned some, but when factoring in everything else I mentioned in my previous post, I still don't see how these make technology a net positive.
To be clear: technology in general has revolutionized many fields, such as agriculture and medicine, which has greatly contributed to improving the well-being of billions of people. But that's not the kind of technology I'm talking about here. I'm specifically referring to modern computing since roughly the 1970s. The kind of technology within the context of companies like Commodore.
> We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it.
We have more sources and can check. Any new medium needs time for people to learn to deal with it. No one doubts that printing has been a net positive, but it was used to spread misinformation - one of the first really influential printed works was Malleus Maleficarum.
> We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited.
Well, they have metadata, but a lot of chat is E2E. Email can be E2E encrypted too but people do not know about it and big companies do not want to support it.
> We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams
I think that also reflects the way the wider economy has developed (concentration of production power in big businesses) and culture (people do longer feel a duty to do a good job for customers).
> We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy
The poor have far better access to drugs too. Almost all drugs are available to people in developed countries, and even in poor countries availability has improved a lot.
Their points reek of “anything less than perfection may as well have not even existed” - which is a huge fallacy (often used in political ad campaigns to mislead the public).
Their points reek of “anything less than perfection may as well have not even existed” - which is a huge fallacy (often used in political ad campaigns to mislead the public).
But it's not like they somehow created a demand in people to compare their lives with others', present themselves as happier/more successful/better than they really are etc; it just gives them the tools to use it.
Computers, and the scale they enable, are dystopian enablers of late-stage capitalism, fascism, and other exploitation.
Computers are the difference. While you could in theory pay a bunch of people to watch a bunch of cameras and listen to a bunch of microphones it was so expensive that no one outside of East Germany or Moscow ever had to seriously worry about the threat. Computers changed that. While in theory someone could look up a ton of information about you and precisely target ads to influence your behavior precisely, that wasn't a serious threat until computers. Neither were metrics and social dopamine triggers designed to keep you literally addicted to screens, voting campaign manipulation by hypertargeted disinformation campaigns, your job being replaced by a machine that illegally grabbed a bunch of art and can now spit out exact copies, or any of a thousand things computers are doing today.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago, but now I think computers make central control (and therefore control of the flow of information) a lot easier.
Exploitation? Slavery was (relative to population; and likely more so if you adjust for the changing definition) more numerous before modern technology, and it remains primarily in underdeveloped countries.
I get being unhappy about the world and what not, and it's fine to feel skeptical towards technology, but we shouldn't let it confuse our perception of reality.
His methods were insane, but his words prophetic.
If I had money and social media clout then I would buy SGI (Silicon Graphics) and get kids to learn the MIPS instruction set on refrigerator sized machines that needed their own power station. But no, got to let it go.
Yes, but it's too early for Commodore. Commodore is fondly remembered by Gen X, and Gen X is still alive and has the means to indulge its nostalgia.
Or we could repurpose the SGI acronym to be Silicon Graphics and Intelligence to catch the AI wave.
And, of course, publish OpenIRIX under GPLv3. Including the screensavers.
"Teaching kids today the wonders of that useless language called BASIC on 8 bit micros from the eighties amounts to cruel and unusual punishment."
I beg to differ. BASIC is a great introductory language for teaching kids the fundamentals of programming.
I like retro computers as much as the next person but selling dead technology and brands just doesn’t make sense.