What's sad is even if you retreat to retro computing/gaming or only listen to old music, you'll likely still run into people online or at meet-ups vibe coding, making ai remixes of songs or generating music videos. Not even the old stuff is safe unless you do it offline by yourself. So you go out and try to find like-minded individuals and these spaces are still infiltrated and tainted. It reminds me a bit of radiation, how everything was just tainted decades ago, they have to salvage low background steel from sunken ships to make Geiger counters because everything else is irradiated.
I still use IRC on the daily, but someone mentions Discord at least once a month on there, and sometimes tries to whisk people away to that side. There are also people hooking up LLMs to IRC bots and joining them to channels without permission, then when you complain or kick/ban their bot you're somehow treated as the rude one. It's very hard to entirely get away from all the crap anymore.
If your CRT had Component or SCART (not sure this was a brand thing so much as model to model, like imagine your parents bought a Sony TV with no HDMI port in the current year and then insisted you told them Sony was good in their defense) you often just needed one official cable and you were good to go. SNES and newer should be simple, NES needed modding but I wouldn't call that the norm.
I used to have a ViewSonic PC CRT that went up to 2048x1536. Sadly my family didn't realize the worth and tossed it out along with a bunch of other CRTs many years ago. In hindsight we should've tested them all and kept the nicest ones.
Same thought here, GBA was the peak of mainstream 2D graphics for me. I look at games from that era and often times they have aged well, they still look ideal to me.
The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
Tax filing in the US being so deeply intertwined with proprietary software is extremely unfortunate. I actually emailed Richard Stallman the first time I had to file to see what he does. He basically recommended grabbing the forms as PDFs, using xournalpp to edit/sign them, then print and mail them the old-fashioned way. I did do this but I found the process clunky and upsetting. I would kill to have some official government thing that's free software and covers all the common cases, or to have it automated like in other countries. I simply should not have to do this myself, it's ridiculous. I don't care about a tax refund either, just don't make me do this at all. Maybe leave the process optional for those who want to try to game the system and get some money back.
I don't see AI as a solution here as it's all rather murky and proprietary.
It's not proprietary, they (tax companies) just want you to think that. It is very murky though, but you can fill out and file the proper forms yourself if you know what you're doing. Apparently, even the models last filing season did a great job. My uncle has been an accountant and done a lot of the family's taxes for decades. He did a parallel comparison and the llm did it perfectly. The models have improved since then as well.
Of course, if you're (imo rightly) concerned with your data, you'll have to run them locally.
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