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Comment by teaearlgraycold | Hacker News Reader

The author of the article says the 8-Bit Guy is controversial. Why is that?

Gun nut on the side, he had a rather ill-informed (at best) video on AI a while ago (before the current LLM craze), and has once done a pretty reckless attempt at repairing a unique IBM machine – as in, opening the PSU with a dremel tool and then then bridging a circuit with a paperclip.

Yeah, that paperclip episode was where I stopped watching.

Same. Realized this guy is a total hack.

For reference, here is the video with the timestamp when he shorts the power supply with the paperclip: https://youtu.be/Wh2OCBZpzZ8?t=273

Instead of deleting the video and owning up to his mistake, he just deactivated the comments...

I think it’s an embarrassing mistake that I probably would have entirely edited out if I were him. But I don’t watch his hardware restoration videos because he’s a source of electrical knowledge. They’re pure entertainment.

Maybe it's because he's a bit of a gun nut on the side? He did some computer videos casually carrying a rifle of some kind slung over his shoulder.

I still enjoy his videos.

A lot of vintage restorers don't like him and people like him because he goes Wow! Look at This! and then suddenly a bunch of middle aged men with beards have that exact thing on their shelf. And those of us doing preservation and restoration suddenly are priced out of the hobby we've been in for decades.

Also, his technical "work" is not great. In fact, it's really bad. Even his successful fixes show a lack of attention to detail.

It's worth noting that he started his career as a computer scrapper.

Yeah, I've seen some fixes that gave me the wrong kind of goosebumps.

I like his history videos, though, for instance the ones that talk about graphics modes for a given computer.

Also, your bio says you don't shave. Sure you're not one of those bearded, middle-aged men?

I also live in my mom's basement and write currency libraries.

>currency libraries

Are there some hidden depths to formatting/converting that I'm missing? And yes. I know not to use floats

Currency conversions is a fantastically more complicated task than most people realize. Also, performing transforms.

The attention thing he can't be blamed for, and it's in any case a mixed blessing (more popularity of a specific retro computer can also have upsides for the existing enthusiasts).

He's definitively not the best hardware restorer. But his historical videos, his games and his X16 project are pretty nice.

Most of his restoration work on videos limited to just being cosmetic at best with his expertise just being retrobriting.

When there was an issue on the motherboard, he almost always outsourced to his more tech-savy friends to fix it for him.

Gun nut is fine. One can be a gun nut without supporting the awful ideas/people within that domain. It's the support of awful ideas/people in that domain them that make him "controversial" (a.k.a. anti-social asshole, that insist being an anti-social asshole is simply a personality trait, immune to criticism)

Nah these days you pick a team and cancel the other.

Yeah, the teams are "The Assholes", and "Everyone Else". The problem with assholes is they don't "cancel" the other team, they forcefully insist on being part of the other teams lives.

I find it funny that being Texan == gun nut. But I'm from Oregon, lots of OreGUNians around here.

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