“This is not the computer for you” • Hacker News Board

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#271

Post by ghoulishly » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

holliplex wrote: post #228

It's an interesting slip, given the premise of the article, that this hypothetical child is assumed to be a boy.

I actually gave a de-gendered draft of the essay to some friends a few days ago and heard that it landed with a thud — the essay is largely written about myself, in the third person, retrospectively, so removing the pronoun made the autobiographical thread harder to follow. I switched it to "he" to make that clearer.

I think if I used "she" it would've made the "That kid was me" transition harder — it would either involve some gymnastics to make it make sense or it would introduce a reading I didn't intend.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#272

Post by ghoulishly » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

lukestevens wrote: post #120

astafrig wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? In that case I retract the statement and will ponder what AI has done to my ability to assess this kind of writing!

Author here, it’s all me. I ran it through Claude before publishing to spot check me on grammar/typos and it caught a few syntax things, but this is just my writing style.

Here’s a satire piece I wrote in the summer of 2021. Tonally very different but you can pick up on my voice between it and my essay yesterday: https://samhenri.gold/blog/20210803-localhost/

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#273

Post by xyzzy_plugh » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #261

xattt wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $200 Chromebook chrooted into Debian Are there even any x86 Chromebooks left at that price point? They are only one that are still capable of chrooting into Linux. ARM Chromebooks remain locked up.

There were a bunch of intel atom ones IIRC. I got my degree with a used EEEpc with one of those.

As did I. The most unbelievable part is that we used that tiny keyboard.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#274

Post by jrochkind1 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

John Gruber used it for a day and found it was actually totally adequate, or better, for his actual daily work.

> But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/the_macbook_neo

I think people are assuming it's going to be a worse experience than it actually is. I don't know how it does it with 8GB of RAM either, but apparently it does; i suppose my guess would be SSD and bus are fast enough that swapping on app change is no longer so disruptive? (I don't know if improvements in virtual memory swap logic could also be a thing that matters or not, this is not my area).

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#275

Post by nindalf » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #238

nindalf wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I flag uninteresting comments, such as yours.

For that we have downvotes, not flags.

True. But this comment broke guidelines as well. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#276

Post by elfly » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

Dunno about Xcode, but if you put a go compiler in there, I doubt it will compile or run slowly. Some dependencies may require C, but you could avoid that mostly.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#277

Post by holliplex » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

ghoulishly wrote: post #271

holliplex wrote: post #228

It's an interesting slip, given the premise of the article, that this hypothetical child is assumed to be a boy.

I actually gave a de-gendered draft of the essay to some friends a few days ago and heard that it landed with a thud — the essay is largely written about myself, in the third person, retrospectively, so removing the pronoun made the autobiographical thread harder to follow. I switched it to "he" to make that clearer. I think if I used "she" it would've made the "That kid was me" transition harder — it would either in…

Yes, I thought that was probably the case, but it stuck out to me. Sorry, I didn't mean to come across as chiding you; I think the basic point about who is and isn't "allowed" to think of themselves as a computer-person is a really interesting one, and also that you can't address this topic properly without addressing gender (and race).

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#278

Post by gjm11 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

It was worse than you remember. You could have 640x256 in monochrome, or 320x256 with 4 colours, or 160x256 with 16 colours (which IIRC was actually 8 distinct colours plus 8 flashing versions of them).

The game Elite did something extremely evil and clever: it was actually able to switch between modes partway through each frame, so that it could display higher-resolution wireframe graphics in the upper part of the screen and lower-resolution more-colourful stuff for the radar/status display further down.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#279

Post by acuozzo » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

forinti wrote: post #243

Apple has turned computers into luxury items. They are not simply computers, there is some status and image projection involved. As a hacker and tinkerer I could never justify the cost of purchasing one of their machines, but I see people around me trying to sell their old Apple machines and phones at absurd prices (I do live in a peripheral economy and Apple stuff is even more expensive here). So it makes sense for…

> most analyses have very little to do with the car's technical attributes and there's a lot of gibberish about design and lifestyle

Which is what makes a used Lexus so compelling. Toyota engineering under the hood, "Luxury" design on top.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#280

Post by officeplant » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to.

As someone who lived on a chromebook for fun because it was a cheap way to get a browser machine that also had Linux access. I don't really get this. You can run blender on a chromebook as soon as you turn on the linux container. It will run even better if you install linux on it after a quick firmware flash.

If it's locked down by a school that's not really the chromebooks fault, schools are gonna lock down Macbook Neos via management policy the exact same way.