I recently got my first refusal, which was to patch a license check for very old 3D software I had that was compiled with Visual C++ 6.0 directly in the .exe (my product key / box was missing but I had found the disc)
I got around this by starting a new session, having it run Ghidra, then look for the string directly in the window code, then asking it to block any popup windows of that function, then it obliged.
I think it highly depends on what field you're in. Personal projects that I find useful in my everyday life? Churning them out like crazy. Enterprise software? It has slowed our productivity down to a halt--part of this is due to people not knowing how to use these tools, and the other part of it is the collective AI psychosis of our leadership (I work at a Fortune 500 software company).
Do you think its enterprise software? or the team? I work on a product ( https://www.mywildeye.com/ ) but we do a lot of back end enterprisey type stuff to manage our logistics / manufacturing as well. We are a small dev team with a lot of latitude to make decisions. For us, AI allows a dev to deal with a lot more things. We also churn out internal tools like crazy. Our Hardware, Firmware, Accounts, and Support people are all creating tools. Our CEO (former developer) is also getting back to making things, we recently released a free ios app https://epicfields.app/ so farmers can monitor water demand using free satellite data.
Very Large Enterprise is very hard to change, or rewrite, especially old systems. Our company mostly sells contracts to large corporations / government institutions (1500+ employees), with an insane amount of transactions, functionality, etc. Even with the latest models you cannot automate everything, the world is far too complex, and there is quite a bit of pushback when anything changes.
In order to keep some of these extremely large contracts (using Samsung as an example here) for example, we had to revert certain changes that were global but now we have a "Samsung version" because we want to maintain a large presence in Asia and Samsung leaving would be a huge blow.
At this scale, code isn't even the bottleneck, it's customer wants, politics, etc.
I have one of these Machinist boards sitting in my closet, which I haven’t set up mostly out of laziness. What I really want is a PCI-E card that can take DDR3 RAM to be used as a RAM disk for containers that do a heavy amount of heavy I/O.
One or two DDR3 ramdisk cards were produced but they’re basically non-existent today. There are DDR4/5 ones (CXL), but they they’re restricted to specific enterprise motherboards.
I played the Half Life Uplink demo on a Pentium II 450Mhz Gateway (with no 3D acceleration) and remember seeing Half-Life for the first time on the Voodoo 3 after it, thinking it looked "worse". There was something about the colors of the software rendering that were different and felt "warmer". That being said, the framerate of the Voodoo 3 did blow me away.
Voodoo 1-3 couldn’t render 32-bit color, so maybe you were noticing the lower bit depth?
3dfx did design some tricks into the video pipeline on Voodoo 2 and 3 cards that allowed for what they called 22-but color, and it definitely looked better than other 3D accelerator cards’ 16-bit modes - but it was still not as clean looking as true 32-bit color. (Interestingly, the filtering they did was applied after the framebuffer, so screen captures would only ever show the lower quality original.)
I desperately wanted a voodoo card (I was late to the pc party). I'd been playing lots of Goldeneye on the n64 and the gaming press had me convinced that real FPS shooters were on the pc not consoles. What a load of shite, I bought a voodoo 3 for my dad's pc, got quake 2 and was bitterly disappointed. Gameplay wise it was so limited compared to Goldeneye. The world was no were near as interactive. Recently I've seen gabe Newell talking about half life and the crowd bar hitting walls was their way of showing the player real world feedback. He's right, but that's nothing compared to the bullet holes in Goldeneye. To be fair, quake 3, unreal tournament 99 and Deus ex alone justified the voodoo card purchase, but it still felt like a let down.
IIRC the expected lifespan of a brand new drive in cold storage that has been written to once is 10-15 years. The platters were technically fine after that, it was the lubricants and the screws rusting that caused them to fail. The latter of course is heavily dependant on where they are stored.
Also this single bit of "anecdata": I was once told that in long storage attraction between the electron orbitals of head and platter could gradually drive out the air gap, leaving them bonded too tightly for the drive motor to overcome.
If one were to actually build and design a SoC, ARM $60 game “console” that plugs into your TV in 2026 and sell it at a decent volume, what would the equivalent game console be potential-wise?
I’ve been doing 3D game development for retro consoles for fun and it’s actually quite impressive what you can actually achieve with little hardware.
The Switch is essentially that. Obviously not $60 but it's a several generations old Nvidia Tegra SoC. The AppleTV wasn't far off either before its massive price hikes.
Not $60, but a bit close. I'd do something based on the RK3588 SoC. It's pretty beefy. GPU isn't stellar but it does have good video codec, a proper PCIe bus including support for e.g. m.2 slot nVME on many boards, and decent amounts of RAM, and good a multicore basis.
And there's some amount of kernel upstreaming that makes it a bit friendlier than some.
I use AI all the time for coding, but a tool that non-deterministically reaches potentially a different output than I would have produced myself is not analogous to typewriters.
It’s not exactly determinism, it’s authenticity. If we rewind time, of course the words would be different. It’s not relevant to my argument.
There’s a reason why the top comments of HN blog posts whine about articles that are clearly written by AI. I use AI constantly as a coding agent, but I care deeply about the authenticity of the words I write intended for other human beings to be my own.
> It’s not exactly determinism, it’s authenticity.
I hope you understand, by so glibly switching from "determinism" to "authenticity" you've just provided more evidence that this is just the latest excuse to hate.
But that aside - what happens in a couple years, when LLMs inevitably improve, and their writing is objectively superior to human writing? And people who just want to read well-written material won't care about the authenticity?
I suspect there will be another glib switch. Because the reality here is just that AI is hated. Full stop.
I’m not against piracy but the initial pitch made it seem like it’s more purely for trying to cast streams embedded in websites that you already are visiting and/or have access to, of which do not “allow” you to cast, or for whatever reason only work on a laptop and not on something like AirPlay. But the LLM-slop description of “random websites” in addition to the option for a TVDB API key confuse me as to what the actual focus is here.
I got around this by starting a new session, having it run Ghidra, then look for the string directly in the window code, then asking it to block any popup windows of that function, then it obliged.