A little while ago when I had a free weekend. I decided I would pre-compute some musings of an LLM trapped in a computer, I had a raspberry pi 1 (or maybe b) lieing around that I had a framebuffer screen for. I think it was a non-standard TFT_ILI9325 from Aliexpress.

The idea is it would display some helplessness comment on the screen like "Help I'm trapped in a computer" etc etc.

Eventually I got the thing booted with it's original OS image and it was running a custom kernel and had the hardware still attached and worked, but it was very outdated so I decided backup and update it, more of a technical challenge than something practical.

I gave it a few tries but eventually the screen would stop working, not helped by the thing being quite slow. Updating in place was probably harder than a brand new OS. Eventually I determined that I'd need to build a custom kernel image using a newer version, something I've never done before and for me it was quite difficult and a little before AI had agents and such to help you along.

I managed to build a custom kernel but the driver for it had been patched out and moved to an optional thing that I had to enable, I was able to build the custom kernel but for some reason the screen wouldn't display anything like it did on the original OS.

I spent a further few weekends on it working really hard to get this thing to work. Eventually I calmly picked up the screen and intentionally pushed down hard with my thumb breaking the screen irreparably.

It was destructive yes but the joy I feel even now being free of this frustration is immense.

I said I would order a newer screen but have yet to do so.