alt Hacker NewsWhere's the utility? If it's a fun hobby to optimise old hardware that's fine. But there's nothing noble about using AI and expensive modern GPUs to get 5% more juice out of old hardware.
Where's the utility? If it's a fun hobby to optimise old hardware that's fine. But there's nothing noble about using AI and expensive modern GPUs to get 5% more juice out of old hardware.
In my collection I have an Oric Atmos which was used for 40 years as a membership and fuel-tracking terminal for a motorcycle club. It was in this capacity, extremely useful to 250 members of the club, who would ride their motorbikes out into the countryside, unlock the clubhouse, type in their name, their fuel use, their mileage in a few simple keystrokes, turn it off, lock up the clubhouse again, and go on their merry way. They did this for 40 years before someone suggested they replace it with an Android tablet, with a web page, and all the latest bells and whistles.
It was donated to my collection after the tablet was integrated .. but of course, the membership and fuel-tracking capabilities of the club are now radically degraded, nobody can get the web page working any more, no data is being recorded by the club, and the whole thing was a fiasco.
That Atmos is still quite useful for that function. It still works, just as reliably as it has, for 40 years. The only reason it was taken out of service was because the consumer-/consumption- culture was applied to it - it was not 'new', it was 'old', it therefore needed to be replaced with 'something modern'. Indeed, if the utility question was asked properly - as you have done - the machine would still be there, functioning just as well as it had for decades.
Its not a hobby. Its a bet that, in the future, 'old computers' will find new uses. Every single one of the systems in my collection can find new users. The users just have to discard the consumer-/consumption neurosis which afflicts everyone ruled by the "new bar of soap" conundrum.
>But there's nothing noble about using AI and expensive modern GPUs to get 5% more juice out of old hardware.
I disagree with you completely, but then I focus on the user, not the use. There's a distinct difference. It is entirely noble to use a computing system for which there is absolutely no possibility that it be subverted for displaying ads or piping the data through an unknown third-party entity, for example, to maintain a private membership database and associated data logging ..