sombragris

A big letdown for me is the lack of a headphone jack.

I guess this is not exactly "cost", but also lifetime spans. A nuclear reactor can sustain a ship for about 20+ years, and that lifetime is too long for many ships, who would be headed out to the scrap yard in less time than that.

I'm 55, about to turn 56, and I did hobby programming back in the 80s, mainly in a C64 and C128, so I fit the bill, although I'm no developer and right now all my programming is reduced to some shell scripts aimed to automate repetitive or tedious tasks.

And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.

This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.

Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.

So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.

I'm an user; I have zero or near zero development and programming knowledge, so this take of mine might be complete nonsense.

But I think this is perhaps one of the first AI developments I actually like. Transitioning an app from React Native or any web technology to native code has the distinct advantage that the native version should be much more economical in its use of resources.

I'm tired of hearing about RAM and other components hiking their prices while at the same time RAM sizes of ~8 GB are considered too small because things like Electron apps are wasteful in their consumption of resources. Now, with more native apps, we might get full circle: leaner apps thanks to agentic development. Maybe someday 8 GB of RAM could be considered enough once again. Truly interesting.

Right. I should have said "comply with copyleft licenses".

The convenience (?) of not having to comply with GPL terms. Some people really hate copyleft.

The link is paywalled and the site requires me a subscription to keep reading TFA. This happens even after using the link with the Wayback Machine.

TL;DR version so I can save you the mental expense of sifting through several paragraph of AI slop:

If LA repairs a whole street, they also need to add wheelchair ramps because of ADA. This is expensive for them and they don't want to do that, so they do not do any repair or circumvent it.

I have both CDE and NsCDE installed on my system (Slackware64-current). Both run well and, surprisingly, good ol' CDE behaves better in some respects.

You can download the original CDE here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Reading from the activity, it still seems to receive some fixes and updates although, as the SlackBuild author said, it would not be advisable to use it in an internet-facing desktop for security reasons.

NsCDE also behaves very well.

Otherwise, you can use Xfce which was heavily inspired by CDE; and now, even Plasma 6 have a very good CDE-like (or Motif) theme.

A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.

The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.

For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.

You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.

Yeah, I thought that. Too bad, you just hit one of the (very few) disadvantages of immutable systems.

or perhaps, some Plasma bug was fixed in Plasma 6.7x. Who knows...

EDIT: Now I see you installed it via flatpak. That is also a source of endless inconsistencies and instabilities. So you should maybe try the native fedora rpm.

There are some very important wars missing. For example, I see nothing about Spain's Civil War (1936-1939)

No issues here on Linux, using Firefox 140.12.0esr under Slackware and Plasma 6.7.2 / Wayland

Still today, the posts below the title are all gibberish.

Slackware-current upgraded xsnow to the latest version in June 20th but applied a patch from ALT Linux that removed the protestware bits just because of this reason. I support this.

Nice to see Knoppix featured here. This is basically the distro that pioneered the "Live CD" Linux where you can play with the full system without the need to commit to a full install. This was huge at a time where it was quite difficult for a non-technical user to install Linux. In addition, it was based on Debian, which at the time still was much more difficult to install than now, so for many people Knoppix was a way to use Debian without having to use that old installer. To top that, it used KDE.

Since then, a lot of Live Linux distros emerged, with various features offered; Debian got a much better installer; and then Knoppix dropped KDE Plasma as their desktop environment. All of that made me to move over to better "Live Linux" distros.

That was not the question. The point is, elvis is still around. This is relevant because is a required, essential part (not at all optional) for an actively developed Linux distribution, which coincidentally is the oldest Linux distribution still actively maintained and developed.

The package you mention (SCCS) might be offered as a FreeBSD port, maybe, but I'm certain it's not a required part of the system.

> I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.

Interesting. This reminds me of COBOL and FORTRAN "code sheets" that were used back in the day...

I was born in 1970. My teenage years were in the 1980s, in coincidence with the emergence of the home computer. I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000, then a C64, then a C128. One of my main forces that drove myself to learn computers was (besides games) the ability to produce text that was clearly written and readable, thanks to word processors and printers, because my handwriting was abysmal, and I got tired very quickly while writing by hand. In the computer, instead, I got to type exactly what I wanted, I could edit and correct my spelling and grammar mistakes, and then produce very readable and clean output. A win in my book.

Now, I require of students to submit written assignments done by hand. That way, I can at least be certain that there's some learning involved, even if they resort to AI to produce the relevant written part, because evidence points out that writing by hand reinforces learning.

I read that other professors resorted to requiring manual typewriters, which I also hate with a passion.

That is, AI is negating decades of enablement achieved by technology.

Honestly, between these circumstances and the fact that we are "enjoying" (?) brave new prices for RAM and SSDs, I'm finding AI increasingly harder to like.

Thank you, AI. /s

> you can only install it via the AUR or nixpkgs on linux

I just said that it comes already installed (because is a required, essential part of the system) in Slackware.

Slackware is a Linux distribution, just as Arch or NixOS.

So, install Slackware, and elvis comes bundled and installed in your Linux.

Is still around, at least for some values of "around".

Elvis, at its latest release (2.2.0) is a required part of Slackware, part of the A (essential system) package series. I have it installed on my system, alongside Plasma 6.7 and kernel 7.1.

More than the Blackberry... I'd say, the N900 form factor, complete with camera lens lid.

No, no and no.

Last year I paid money to upgrade my laptop's RAM from 16 to 32 GB. I didn't pay it so apps could just be more bloated without offering any significant benefit.

Developers should respect and be efficient using hardware resources. There are no excuses for that.

An IBM 1130 system was installed in my country (Paraguay), at the National Computing Center (CNC) of the National University of Asunción (UNA), around 1969-1970. At the time it was, if not the very first, one of the first computers ever installed in my country.

It was used by reservation; that is, someone requested a time slot and got access to the computer for that time (paying the required fee, of course). IIRC, it even ran overnight.

I saw the system while I was a pre-teen, in 1982. At the time, it was still in operation even after more capable systems were installed and microcomputers were making their inroads. At that time its usage was reduced, but CNC folks told me it still was used by some civil engineers who did structural calculations with it.

> I never bought into the recent vinyl hype.

This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.

But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.

Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.

To be honest, I'm not "anti-AI", that is, anti-LLM/agents, etc., at all. LLMs and their ilk are just a tool. You can use it, or not. And you can use it well, or not. That's it. The tool has its good uses and some benefits are genuine. I should know since I'm no developer, and I should be the prime target for vibe coding uses.

But I really hate with my guts how AI capabilities are shoved down our throats on every instance of consumer-facing software, and I hate how it's carelessly used, sometimes with devastating consequences. The latest case where some accounts were hacked by abusing Meta's AI is an example.

And also, as a teacher, I hate how AI has upended higher education. I'm still adjusting my workflow to work around student's AI-enabled cheating and abuse.

So, while it's just a tool, it's been a tool that has seen some very crappy uses, and companies are quite happy to empower and enhance humanity's worst tendencies with it.

My perspective is that of an user, not a developer. I use Deno since yt-dlp required a JS engine and recommended it. So while I don't use it for development, I have to build it for my system.

This software is a beast to build and package. On first compilation, it spent like ~5-6 hours just pulling Rust crates. This time thankfully was significantly reduced once the relevant packages were in cargo caché; only the changed/added ones were picked up.

But the second problem is even more annoying. Building Deno happily consumes about ~16-20 GB of precious disk space on space-constrained SSDs. This is too much.

I think we should go back to more efficient software, both in object code formats (the product) as well as in the build process. Why would a single JS runtime need 20 GB storage to be built? This is wasteful.

That's if you need to customize headings. I usually can keep using the standard ones, so that's not my case, and I suspect this also applies to a lot of people.