It's definitely not black and white though, and I hate having to second-guess projects I see - 'is this person actually passionate about this subject or did they just throw $200 at Claude over the weekend without any deeper understanding' and similar thoughts suck, especially in the retrotech space

Code is fairly often seen as a 'means to an end' more than 'meaningful expression', and consumers of AI-generated code are divorced from the way in which the code was produced more than other forms of art, so people don't really even seem to care as long as the program works most of the time.

I think there is something 'human' when it comes to taking ownership of code - being able to understand and mentally model what you've coded, and having a greater understanding of the context/needs of the program and why certain approaches were taken over the 'most probable' LLM-derived ones.

Interesting, the capacitors on the circuit board for the railroad bell are labeled with 'NASA' - but I can't find much information about what that actually means (space/military-grade?)

The last few times I was there I actually do remember them saying something like this, I think they have a list of silly things to say at some locations

Can't say I've seen CRTs advertised in units of square inches before, I guess the diagonal (or diameter/radius for circular CRTs) wasn't quite an impressive-sounding number yet

...do protogens have irises and pupils..? Eh, who cares about the rules when you've got a screen for a face!

Image of a Compaq Portable with a green monochrome CRT displaying an ANSI art rendition of a protogen face looking directly at the viewer.

Working on some ANSI art drawing software for CGA/MDA, thought it would be appropriate to give the computer I've nicknamed 'Protogen' a #protogen face!

You've been permanently banned in CMake by Valve Anti-Cheat.

cmake in my steam library

i fucking hate windows dev

I wonder if the XT version just uses more memory in comparison to the PC-compatible version.

So many mods add fancy new ways to mine things but nothing will ever beat the nostalgia of setting up a max size quarry!

Burger derg
The derg with the burger

Printed circuit dragon

This fish finder is actually a full Z80 computer with ram and rom and a crt character generator

Noodle dragon but with phone cables instead of noodles

Ran the benchmark on a Compaq Portable and a DTK XT clone, both 8088s running MS-DOS 3.22 with GW Basic. Compaq Portable came in around 290s, XT clone came in at 293s, 174s with 8mhz turbo

I love how silly the floppy disk would look out of the context of being included with the hardware. "Ah yes, my copy of Software."

'Best viewed in Netscape Navigator' type message

I had no clue PLA filament was available in standardized colors like this! Definitely a bit on the pricey side but this seems useful! Thanks!

Ooh a Twiggy Macintosh, I've always wanted to see one in person! The keyboard on it also looks a bit different from the final one!

Oh yeah these switches are definitely quite difficult to print - the SE one seems especially difficult because of how thin the button is. Have you tried printing using a more flexible material like PETG?

Still looks quite salvageable for something that also looks like it was half buried underground for a while! Surprised there's not more rust/corrosion on it

Image of a Macintosh Plus with a 3D printed 'programmer's key' inserted into the side. The Macintosh Plus is beige, the keyboard is a more modern platinum color, and the switch is somewhere in-between the two colors.

Finally 3D printed a programmer's key for my Macintosh Plus.. I'm a real programmer now, supposedly! A third shade of beige for my mismatched Plus - platinum keyboard, beige chassis, and now a bone white PLA switch... #MARCHintosh

Image of the Macintosh Plus logic board, showing a FOX-branded crystal oscillator.

There's a fox trapped inside my Macintosh Plus!

Image of one of the eject gears for the Macintosh Plus floppy drive being modeled in FreeCAD

Image of the eject mechanism for the Macintosh Plus floppy drive

FreeCAD to the rescue! Now my 800k drive eject mechanism is half 3D printed parts... but hey, no more paperclip ejection! #MARCHintosh #retrocomputing

Has anyone made 3D models of *all* of the gears in the Macintosh floppy disk eject mechanism? I have a 3D printed replacement for the one that *usually* breaks, but not the one that I've removed here... which is the one that broke in another 800k drive I have! #retrocomputing

The issue it was encountering wasn't actually a fatal one (but it could become one given enough time) - the arm of the drive was getting stuck on the sticky rubber bumper, producing a rather worrisome noise as it attempts to unstick itself. It would often take 5 minutes or so to get it to boot.

Image of a Compaq Portable with the top of the case off, having run 'chkdsk' and reporting the size of the hard drive (20mb).

It lives! This is my first time successfully performing hard drive surgery.