Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“This is not the computer for you”

samhenri.gold

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 390 posts

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#301

Post by s3p »

astafrig wrote: post #109
lukestevens wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is AI! Or, at least, it's been run through it. (Staccato sentences; Not X. Not Y. Z...) It's a shame for a personal reflection. It's hard to imagine what the (I'm guessing) Claude-isms add that improve what would otherwise have been a nice unmolested personal essay.

What else is a shame is claiming that some single language feature supports a foregone conclusion that the writing's been 'molested'. It's hard to imagine what a constructive comment this could've been with the minimum of effort to know that the author has written this way consistently since at least 2021, before the first public release of ChatGPT.

It's also hard to imagine how difficult you must enjoy being, when you could have offered a kind clarification but instead dove into some obituary style takedown.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#302

Post by leshenka »

jon-wood wrote: post #203
raincole wrote: post #133

What's so special about this machine? Is there no comparable $599 Windows or Linux laptop for kids to buy?

There are absolutely $599 laptops available from companies that aren't Apple but they've all made major compromises to get to that price in ways that people will notice. The cooling will be terrible so that every 30 seconds the fans kick in at full speed, thermal throttling takes hold, and then it decides all is fine 30 seconds after that so you're working on a machine that's constantly cycling fan noise. The trackpa…

> compromises the average user buying a $599 laptop isn't going to notice everyday

Oh my god yes. I've read way too much discussions that completely overlook this aspect.

So many people get so fixated on meaningless labels such as "smartphone CPU" (meaning it's bad) and things to pick on like "ew no HDMI or Ethernet" as if it was a life-saving thought terminator that preserves the world view in which absolutely nothing under the Apple brand can be in any way good.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#303

Post by torgoguys »

andai wrote: post #110

Main machine is a $50 Thinkpad. I haven't used a computer more recent than 2016. As far as I can tell, the only thing I'm missing is AAA gaming (RTX looks cool), and local LLMs. I did a bunch of game jams on it. Even won one! (Of course, even 2010s hardware is overkill for 2d games :) I also did some basic video editing on it but it was a bit slow to render. I won't say I'm not missing out — I'm certainly looking for…

Yes, exactly this. I'm using a 10 year old elitebook folio g1. It's about 2 pounds and does what I need it to do. Available with a 4k screen if that's your thing. Does not feel sluggish. Given that I'm not gaming, video editing, or doing local LLMs (and I think there is a big chunk of the population in that camp), I feel like I am missing out on nearly zero.

(And I'm not trying to say anything is special about the laptop I'm using. I adore using trackpoint (so much that I brought my own trackpoint keyboard in to work to use there) so would gladly trade for an old thinkpad if what I had didn't already do what I need it to do).

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#304

Post by monkaiju »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #296

> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take scree…

I mean i did this sort of thing a ton and am not on the spectrum. Idk when being "quirky" meant you are autistic, seems like it was within the last 7-10 years though.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#305

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

Interesting read! I love to see this spirit. I grew up with a different - but similar experience. Only, as an 80s and 90s kid, computers were nothing but limitations. Even when my dad built a machine with a 133MHz Cyrix chip, already a year later, it was outdated by computers with literally double the computing power.

That Cyrix machine was already miles ahead of the 386 that was handed down to me to play text based games on and learn dos through hard knocks. I remember leafing through old hard drives that had 10mb of capacity and realizing they had no value despite not being that old.

Later in college, I had the confidence to build my own first desktop with parts cobbled together from sketchy resellers. Athlon A1 single core 1ghz. Man that thing could fly.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#306

Post by carlosjobim »

orbital-decay wrote: post #197

>Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do. Anywhere in the world, the kind of kid that does all this…

That's very true, and it's a great tragedy. Kids get skilled in troubleshooting awful computers instead of getting skilled in creative things which actually have future value.

As for piracy, it's just as easy on a Mac, and MacOS has more quality software than any other platform - unless you're talking about software used in factories and such.

But how many kids actually "save up" for a computer vs being given one by their parents or getting a hand-me-down from relatives? I would suspect that many parents would be more than happy to buy a Macbook for their kid if they showed that kind of interest.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#307

Post by dijit »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #297
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #296

> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take scree…

And before I’m lynched, I was that kid too and I agree with the author. It was just funnily written.

I was that kid too, and I probably have Autism

(yes, I know we're all on the spectrum somewhere, but a diagnosis is defined as it impacting your life severely, and I think many people would say that I have many autistic traits that are negative).

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#308

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #296

> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take scree…

This is also the sort of obsession that follows ADHD. Source: me

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#309

Post by teiferer »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #296

> He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take scree…

Autism is a quite strong diagnosis at the end of a spectrum. Not every tech-loving introvert is autistic. That's the kind of arrogant attitude that marginalizes nerds and on a forum like HN people really ought to know better.

As somebody who identified a lot with what's in that article I can say that I haven't just made peace with having been "different" but I love it and wouldn't want it any different comparing my life today with that of the arrogant non-nerds who made fun of us back in school.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#310

Post by kmoser »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #206
tombert wrote: post #63

When I was sixteen I got one of the earlier digital HD cameras (Canon VIXIA HF100) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio for my birthday. It was a neat camera and I liked Vegas, and I was grateful that my parents got them for me, but an issue that I had with it was that my computer wasn't nearly powerful enough to edit the video. Even setting the preview to the lowest quality settings, I was lucky to get 2fps with the 1080i vi…

I learned to code on my school's BBC Micro. [0] 8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours. I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing. By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested…

> Working within constraints teaches you something, I think.

It absolutely does. But every system has constraints; even when provided with massive resources, humans tend to try things that exceed those resources, as evidenced by Parkinson's Law of data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Post reply on HN