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.
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.
YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand
Terrible messaging around a beloved brand.
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.
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.
> 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.
Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
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.
His methods were insane, but his words prophetic.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.