the fan might pull more electricity than a modern one

It draws 35W on full power, which isn’t that bad - and I mostly run it on the low power setting. Even modern fans use the same motor type (shaded-pole motors), they just got a bit smaller over the last 80 years.

A modern comparison would be the PHILIPS Mercury 1000 desk fans, they also draw 35 watts.

Yes, that thing is basically just a CPU, a few capacitors and a screen. Unless the CPU just dies for no reason it can run forever. Capacitors can be replaced.

The fan is grounded. I have replaced the motor wiring and used heatshrink to properly put it into the case. Even though I love my old devices, I don’t take any chances with brittle mains wiring.

The lamp does not have a ground wire, but the plug is at the top and the bulb is surrounded by non-conductive material so I’m not worried about it.

It definitely hurts, but hasn’t penetrated the skin of my fingers (yet).

Whenever some device breaks, I try to get a replacement from ancient times so I’ll never have to buy another shitty one again.

When my desk lamp broke, I got a medical lamp from the 1930s. It’s made out of steel and aluminum and will never fail.

When my fan broke, I got a desk fan from the 50’s - it needed just a few drops of oil and has been running continuously for a week during the European heatwave. Everything down to the gears that make it turn from left to right is made out of solid metal.

The next thing will be an analog scale. I have an electronic one from amazon that partly melted when it was sitting a little bit next to my stove (it didn’t even get that hot). And I secretly hope my toaster will break soon, because ancient toasters look fucking awesome and I want one.

I also have an eBook reader from 2008, when Sony went crazy for a bit and actually produced models with a metal shell. All of these things will definitely last longer than me, as it should be.

The only thing I cannot replace are my fridge and my washing machine. :( You just cannot get those old ones - and even if you do, sellers will not ship them and without a car or driving license, I simply can’t get them. But I do what I can to minimize having to spend a shit ton of money every few years to replace my failing devices.

Pay for new teeth, up my Patreon subscription for my favorite artist by factor 5 and then back some great projects made by human artists on Kickstarter.

Updates are painful on modern Windows, to me it feels like they haven’t overhauled the updating system since the Windows 7 days.

It’s ridiculous that you have to restart just to update .NET and they take way too long. The major update from the last patchday took 20 minutes on my Ryzen 7 with 64GB RAM and gigabit internet - from downloading to installing and then doing three reboots.

Fedora on the other hand recently had 153 updates for me and the whole process was done in 3 minutes, with only one reboot.

There are still a few that do, antiX for example.

but there’s been one place where it’s been lacking: the Linux community

Don’t see a single amount of lack here, although that word means varnish in German and that’s probably what OpenAI was drinking when they built this.

My dual Pentium 3 board will probably benefit from this. Nice!

Coders will abandon AI

I secretly wish for it, but that will probably never happen. But the ridiculous excesses - like running hundreds of LLM agents in a loop to write your software - will go away. They’ll be way too expensive to run for most companies after the subsidies run out.

Came here just for this comment

Most of the project was written with the help of AI.

Noping right outta here.

deleted by creator

They’ll come crawling back to us once the bubble pops and I hope gamers will remember.

Hack the Planet!

Finding web info like google used to in 2010 before ad based content over swept all the searches

LLMs are only useful because Google has deliberately made their search engine worse. Since I pay for Kagi, I don’t need to consult a chatbot anymore, I can just search again like I did before the AI hype.

So we technically don’t need LLMs for search. But we are nudged extremely hard into that direction.

To be fair, eBooks have just gotten that big in recent years because the publishers are lazy and cram uncompressed embedded fonts into them.

I always strip out embedded fonts from my eBooks with calibre and I have seen books being reduced from 20MB to 400KB. 🤣

This won’t make this a good device due to a myriad of other reasons, though.

The specs are an absolute joke. Even my Sony PRS from 2008 comes with 64MB RAM and physical buttons.

This thing will choke on epubs with embedded fonts, if it doesn’t just plainly ignore them (which it seems like it will, since they’re talking so much about their own custom font).

Neat idea, but I fear it’s destined to fail. I also think it’s too small. The PRS-505 is six inches and I wouldn’t go any smaller than that for comfortable reading.

I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That’s why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it’s been like that for a decade.

They’re just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.