Blake Patterson has a beautiful tribute to No Man's Sky[1] done on an Amiga 1000 if anyone wants to see one in action. I really love his more recent Amiga retrospective[2] and he has a great Amiga 1000 photo album[3] too.
It doesn't matter what you do, if it experiences some success, no matter how fleeting someone somewhere will get really upset about it. I believe that part of this is connected to the inversion of small-scale private conversations into large-scale text-driven public ones without us really being fully aware of the difference.
Without the context of non-verbal communication or the closeness towards people we've never met we react differently online to offline. I think it's important not to lose sight of the idea that people can blow up online, call you every name under the sun and still be perfectly good people.
I found Innuendo Studios' Why Are You So Angry[1] and SSC's varieties of Argumentative Experience[2] really helpful in coming to terms with my own online behaviour. There's also a pg essay[3] that's fairly relevant. I particularly enjoyed Rationality.org's double-cruxing approach[4].
Right now I'm focusing on avoiding continuing discussions at the point they stop adding overall. Nobody's perfect but it's definitely keeping my internal Angry Jack at bay.
> Was it Uriel that committed that section? I could kind of understand not wanting to remove it if it was. If that's the case then context in the FQA might be helpful for people who stumble across it.
That's hardly demanding names, unless you're referring to somewhere else in the convo. In that case please feel free to point it out.
There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.
The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.
> There's also this: https://mastodon.social/@stevelord/105510025405203167 which I interpreted as some kind of invitation to disavow the project and name 'the real villains' or something, which would of course be the same deal.
Sure, I can see that and thanks for raising that. It wasn't intended that way but I can see how it came across. Some mediums are just poor for discussion and text is always poor for expressing context.
> The whole vibe just felt like it was more about who did what than what any of it was supposed to mean, which isn't really how we operate in general.
I got that sense from you at the time. I get that you've all been attacked heavily at different points. I don't think there's any way you couldn't have felt that vibe. I've seen people call you guys out to me since on a scale that I've not seen elsewhere.
The bit I didn't know is the how you operate in general. As an outsider that's just not info I have.
I genuinely had links and samples for Appendix L's C section - if you look at the post you'll see the drawing screenshot and references to building blocks. Not knowing how you guys worked, I perhaps wrongly assumed that this might've been welcome, but wasn't comfortable putting it in with that image there. I genuinely wasn't trying to gotcha you.
I'm sure you can imagine how I received that: "we don't care what you actually believe, we only care about appendix L of the documentation."
People have been calling us Nazis since day one -- we have several German developers so we make VW and BMW jokes about 'German engineering' and of course all the early-cold-war German rocket scientists. It's the reason we've got the photo of Bowie at Victoria Station -- photographed while waving to the crowd, he had to repeatedly deny being a Nazi afterward, because it sure looked like a Nazi salute in the photo.
Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil, and that's okay -- rejecting hate is the easy part. Defending ourselves against the people we agree with is much harder.
Yeah I can see that now. Thanks. I guess once you process the first bit that way the rest drops off.
By the no nazis bit not meaning anything what I meant there was that with everything else it can be hard to tell what's intentional on the site and what isn't.
I honestly don't care who calls you guys nazis or not. Even if I wanted to (which I don't, I gain nothing by doing so) I wouldn't need to. There are plenty of people doing that already. The harder thing to do is to try to understand without pre-judging. Thanks for clearing a lot of this up.
EDIT: I noticed this in another subthread:
> I do think the image should be provided with context.
I'm editing here because I don't want to add to the pile-on in the other thread. You mentioned this above:
> Once the actual Nazis started showing up we had to get more explicit in our condemnation of their evil
If you want to keep the picture, what would your thoughts be on a log of that condemnation linked from somewhere in the FQA? Not necessarily Appendix L. No skin off my nose either way but I thought I'd mention it in case nobody had thought of it.
We've been discussing it; we'll probably remove the image but add the context. Next time you find something that makes you like this, would you please send a patch (or at least report a bug)? It's sheer chance that I ran across your original Mastodon post at all.
Yes, the person who committed it was a high school teenager at the time. Maturity and good taste isn't generally associated with high schoolers. It was tasteless. And it was reverted.
My family is full of holocaust survivors. My grandmother passed through Auschwitz. 10 of her 12 siblings did not.
I am fairly heavily involved in 9front. I have never had any issues with anyone in that project -- certainly none to do with antisemitism.
I regularly use the Web most days on an Amiga 4000, built in 1992. It's not perfect for everything, but I can use things like search engines, visit web sites over HTTPS etc. I mostly visit Amiga-specific sites that tend to have lower overheads. I've also visited sites like like Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. in the past.
It should be possible to use older machines to browse the web but it stops being about the machine and starts being more about availability of TLS libraries and rendering engines. In theory an Amiga 1000 (1985) should be able to connect to the Internet and may be able to run AmiSSL and IBrowse with the right upgrades. It might need custom hardware though. I think there's some jiggery pokery that'll allow older Macs dating back to 85 or maybe 84 (I'd be surprised to see an original 128kb Mac but the late 84 512kb model should work) to browse the web without modern TLS.
Is the 68k port of Netsurf still kept up to date? I assume it would be slow, but Netsurf itself is quite usable, though I wouldn't say it's a modern Internet experience.
Not really. I'm not sure where I got it from but I have several Netsurf versions on my Amiga, including a crash-prone 3.10 build. The last official release is 3.6 I think.
Even so the 3.10 build I have isn't built against current AmiSSL so TLS sites fail. It is slower than say, Voyager Browser and much slower than IBrowse. Netsurf 3.6 is usable if you're patient on an 060/50. Performance is around what I'd expect from a Pentium 75-100 maybe?
I use it because I used them throughout the 90s and just find them really nice machines to use for a lot of things. Almost everything's offline first, but it's functional enough to get things done. Some things are more fiddly, but that's to be expected.
Most of what I do is creative, a mix of Art, music, programming, writing. I've done things like covid data analysis, I've written the odd letter on there, some of my newsletter gets written on there. I also use it for things like Usenet, IRC, Telegram etc. There's also a lot of really good games for it. I've heard classic 68k Mac owners have similar experiences. Of course, some say the Amiga is also the fastest classic Mac[1].
This really isn't a good space for most of the people here on HN. SSB is very much a work in progress. When I first started trying to use the Patchwork client, lots of SSB Pubs were down. It took 3 days to get to a point where I could see people.
While censorship isn't directly possible, it's not really in the kind of state suitable for lots of people currently departing existing social networks and looking for something new.
I'm not saying there isn't potential. Even for the average HN user it's possibly ready to try but not yet ready for mainstream use.
> I wonder if you could build a working IBM PC clone today.
Yes you can! There's the NuXT[1] which is a full system, or you could use PC-104 designs to build something approximating an IBM PC-type system from a later generation.
[1] - https://bytecellar.com/2018/03/14/a-planetary-anachronism-no...
[2] - https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a...
[3] - https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/7215762159627...