this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
24 points (80.0% liked)
Casual Conversation
2354 readers
231 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES (updated 01/22/25)
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling. To be concise, disrespect is defined by escalation.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible. You won't be punished for trying.
- Avoid controversial topics (politics or societal debates come to mind, though we are not saying not to talk about anything that resembles these). There's a guide in the protocol book offered as a mod model that can be used for that; it's vague until you realize it was made for things like the rule in question. At least four purple answers must apply to a "controversial" message for it to be allowed.
- Keep it clean and SFW: No illegal content or anything gross and inappropriate. A rule of thumb is if a recording of a conversation put on another platform would get someone a COPPA violation response, that exact exchange should be avoided when possible.
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc. The chart redirected to above applies to spam material as well, which is one of the reasons its wording is vague, as it applies to a few things. Again, a "spammy" message must be applicable to four purple answers before it's allowed.
- Respect privacy as well as truth: Don’t ask for or share any personal information or slander anyone. A rule of thumb is if something is enough info to go by that it "would be a copyright violation if the info was art" as another group put it, or that it alone can be used to narrow someone down to 150 physical humans (Dunbar's Number) or less, it's considered an excess breach of privacy. Slander is defined by intentional utilitarian misguidance at the expense (positive or negative) of a sentient entity. This often links back to or mixes with rule one, which implies, for example, that even something that is true can still amount to what slander is trying to achieve, and that will be looked down upon.
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
- !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
- !askmenover30@lemm.ee
- !dads@feddit.uk
- !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk
- !movies@lemm.ee
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.
Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.
And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you're right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the "right" computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.
(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it's still pretty great.)
Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don't know if that's just physics being a pain or if it's straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.
Anyway I'll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.
Yeah, the tech we have is nicer, slicker, and faster. Most just works until it doesn't, then buy another. But I keep feeling like I SHOULD be excited, but I'm not.
I legit and thinking of dialing it all back, going old school and just fucking around w an old computer that can hardly do anything cool.
I mean, that excitement almost came back with raspberry pi, but not it's pretty commercial. AI sort had that thrill, but now it's so good and so fast, the newness wore off.
I recently retired (early retirement), and thought what all my free time I was gonna do and learn all the latest tech. Um, no. Now I want to do old tech as the hobby. lmao
I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.
I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.
Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There's also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.
It's not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it's still reasonable if you have an era you're after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don't, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.
....stop looking at me like that.
There's also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that's a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian's Digital Basement, Necroware)
Yeah, I can definitely see myself going down the same path as you. lol
Silver lining: it makes personal computers a lot less-expensive. Your system isn't running at a quarter the speed of current systems and in need of replacement three years after it came out of the factory.
On the video cards...parallel processing is actually still improving at a fair clip -- like, the GPUs aren't improving quite as fast as the CPUs were back then, but they are improving. I think that a major factor is that today, a big chunk of marketshare shifted from desktops to laptops and then laptops to smartphones. That means that while, yes, you can go out and get a tower that can crunch a lot of data in parallel, most software out there isn't going to use it, because a lot of people are using systems that are under power-usage constraints.