I shudder to think how much I spent on UDXLII tapes.

Adding page-turn buttons to the cover sounds clever.

Yeah, I ran to find the product page - only to find that it "Fits 2026 Releases Only". Agh!

Also it only fits the Signature Editions and will only be available in March (in the UK, at least).

I'm still mourning the Oasis :(

This finally got me to replace (preorder) my Oasis with a new Kindle. The physical buttons are a must for me.

> AI-themed images for the opener

Yes, this is the exact kind of AI image usage that discourages me (and presumably this post's author) from reading the rest of it.

I think you should learn from the reaction of most people in this thread and avoid it (if your audience is mostly technical people) for the following reason.

A. If it's unrelated, it doesn't add anything to the post except aesthetics. B. On the aesthetics dimension: I don't think people are very impressed by the AI aesthetic, and tend to be annoyed by it. C. It seems that most people now assume that AI-generated image == AI-generated text.

I personally do not care about AI images or not, but it seems that a portion of people do.

Alternatively, consider that the people who are so against this are posting here with great conviction, and everyone else who isn't against it just reading the blogs rather than writing on Hacker News.

that is exactly the kind of thing that makes me close the tab.

like why?

to me it just means "I'm an author that likes/makes AI slop and this article is probably half if not complete AI slop or not worth reading"

I don't see how that would add any value or boost page visits

I find it entertaining. I'm doing it for me, not to boost any metric.

I am my target audience.

I was starting as a software developer when the Amiga first came out. We used Lattice C at work on MS-DOS. I bought it for my A2000. Being able to write code on a proper multitasking OS made it easier for me to learn C. I kept updating the compiler through the SAS/C days.

I was registered in Commodore's developer program and was porting one of our statistical apps when Commodore imploded. I had a nice A3000, running pre-release versions of Amiga DOS 3.1. It was a cool platform and I enjoyed it.

I had an A3000 as my last Amiga. It was my favorite machine growing up as a teen and I still regret selling it.

I wrote a book on localization for Xamarin many years ago. I get about one email a week "inviting" me to join a book club. The well-crafted ones tend to impersonate an actual person on Goodreads.

At this point, I would happily give away my book, but Apress has the publishing rights. And since the sales are about a century away from being profitable for Apress, I don't see them letting me give away the book any time soon.

There were multiple reasons.

Simons' BASIC was still interpreted. If you wanted graphics and performance, you used Assembler.

Many/most people were using a disk speed-up cartridge like Epyx's Fast Load. You could only use one cartridge at a time. If they placed Simons' BASIC in the C64 ROM, that could have made it less compatible with existing software.

They didn't want to pay the licensing cost for an application that only a minority of C64 owners would have wanted.

I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll a few years ago, and it's anything but an over-engineered system. I used WordPress for years, and it was overkill for a personal blog.

I used to use em-dashes and en-dashes in my work emails and other writings, but stopped using them when they became AI markers.

Back in the VIC-20 days, I had the VIC Forth (https://ia800304.us.archive.org/34/items/VIC_Forth_1982_HES/... and https://photobubba.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/an-intervi...) cartridge and the book Starting Forth (https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/). It was my second programming language, after BASIC.

Like everything else, it was easy do simple things, much harder to do anything else. My brain also rejected doing stuff with postfix notation.

It always fun trying to explain Forth to developers used to higher level languages. It always came down to "a word is like a function, but not really"

Word is an internal call, it's a function, but the key is that the parameters and local variables are on the data stack and are separate from the return stack. I can call many levels without touching the data stack! Impossible in other languages. However, this does require practice and a change of mindset. At runtime, the dictionary doesn't exist, and under certain conditions and with the correct compiler, the stack doesn't either; it's converted into registers.

I was using this before 2018. I used to write TSR applets for data collection. Knowing what interrupts were being was critical. It could mean the difference between your code working and it dying somewhere in expanded memory space.