Buried the lede - they have not yet actually paid for it and are still raising money.
As I said in the previous post about this, I support their efforts and applaud their enthusiasm. But they are making some very risky moves with their premature messaging. This could easily fall through and is just begging other parties with less sincere interest in the brand's legacy to take notice.
I advise the new CEO to immediately sell the brand again, take the "low seven-figure sum", and invest it in actual technology for a new company which can be called Rear Admiral.
That's great! But not Amiga, which Gateway 2000 owns. Too bad it seems to be mired in the retrocomputing morass.
How sad.
Computer technology is not "the scourge of mankind".
Terrible messaging around a beloved brand.
You are just wrong. Look at the last few years and see how computer technology is being worshiped in the most destructive way. Instagram is literally bringing diseases to children.
This comes from a person for which the internet and computers are the love of life and everything. I'm excited about these times and the future. But every day that goes by I feel like this technology thing is going backwards, thanks to irresponsible, rich and careless people, and should be stopped right now. It will not stop, this is only the beginning.
By that logic, all technology that is misused is "a scourge". Metal and plastic technologies build weapons, computer technology controls bombs, pharmaceutical technologies make addictive drugs, food technologies contribute to diabetes epidemics.
I don't like this train of thought. I do like that there are the menonites and the amish in this world, but, for myself, I prefer a more intimate relationship with technology, for the lack of a better word. I like to think of technology as an extension of people: what the technology is and how we use it is then a reflection of our minds in their current stage of continuous evolution. If we have problems regulating dopamine, then we'll gravitate to technologies that allow us to experience those problems: not the other way around. Basically, I don't think of technology as external to society, rather to me it's a reflection.
This opinion will inevitably be seen as pessimistic tech doomerism, especially on forums like this.
And yet, for all the glory and benefit that we were promised modern technology would bring, the average person only enjoys a small sliver of it, while the rest is enjoyed by the 1% of humans in control, or corrupted by those who seek becoming part of the 1%.
We can access a world of information, but most of it is corrupted by (m|d)isinformation. In fact, most mainstream media is corrupted by it. We can communicate with family and loved ones around the world, at the expense of our data being exploited. We can buy and consume easier than ever before, but have to navigate a sea of poor quality products and scams. We have miraculous drugs, most of which are only accessible to the wealthy. We have self-driving cars and high-tech gadgets to entertain ourselves, which is great until the companies start exploiting us. And so on. The latest wave of AI tech is another step in this same direction, ramped up to levels we have never seen before.
I challenge anyone to steel man the argument that technology has been a net positive for humanity on a global scale, or that it will ever get better. I sure can't.
Globally, since the advent of widespread computer use, human life has improved by orders of magnitude along every metric we have: poverty, hunger, disease, literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, homicide rates, etc., etc., etc.: https://ourworldindata.org
Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
I’d love to see a chain of cause and effect that links any of those outcomes to widespread computer use and advancements in computing.
> Globally, since the advent of widespread computer use, human life has improved by orders of magnitude along every metric we have: poverty, hunger, disease, literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, homicide rates, etc.
Most of those trends were in motion well before widespread computer use, e.g. [1]. I'm sure that computers were a factor in improving the rate of literacy, education, perhaps even poverty, but they played a much smaller role in improving hunger, disease, child mortality, life expectancy, let alone homicide rates(!). Most of those are attributable to improvements in economic programs, sociopolitical stability, etc. I.e. the global progress humanity has experienced for centuries. Which, unfortunately, has been slowing down or regressing in the past few decades precisely _because_ of technology.
You can see this in literacy, for example[2]. Yes, the rate increases post-1950, but it had been increasing for many decades before. There is a large uptick between 1950 and 1980, well before computers were in widespread use. So, sure, we can say that computers played a role, but the world was already improving without them.
> Respectfully, you are the one making an extraordinary claim in need of evidentiary support.
Extraordinary claim? Everything I said can be verified by a cursory web search (assuming you can navigate around disinformation), or by personal experience, since I'm sure most of us have directly experienced some form of it. I don't think it's interesting to rehash verifiable claims, but I am interested in discussing the positive effects of technology. You mentioned some, but when factoring in everything else I mentioned in my previous post, I still don't see how these make technology a net positive.
To be clear: technology in general has revolutionized many fields, such as agriculture and medicine, which has greatly contributed to improving the well-being of billions of people. But that's not the kind of technology I'm talking about here. I'm specifically referring to modern computing since roughly the 1970s. The kind of technology within the context of companies like Commodore.
Is instagram really primarily "computer technology", or is it primarily a social phenomenon? Yes, the technology broadly enables that social phenomenon, but it doesn't drive it. I don't think instagram was engineered to be what it was today, users used it that way and Facebook happily picked that up and optimized.
But it's not like they somehow created a demand in people to compare their lives with others', present themselves as happier/more successful/better than they really are etc; it just gives them the tools to use it.
It's a computer technology.
Computers, and the scale they enable, are dystopian enablers of late-stage capitalism, fascism, and other exploitation.
Computers are the difference. While you could in theory pay a bunch of people to watch a bunch of cameras and listen to a bunch of microphones it was so expensive that no one outside of East Germany or Moscow ever had to seriously worry about the threat. Computers changed that. While in theory someone could look up a ton of information about you and precisely target ads to influence your behavior precisely, that wasn't a serious threat until computers. Neither were metrics and social dopamine triggers designed to keep you literally addicted to screens, voting campaign manipulation by hypertargeted disinformation campaigns, your job being replaced by a machine that illegally grabbed a bunch of art and can now spit out exact copies, or any of a thousand things computers are doing today.
I think that Adolf disagrees: if anything, computers make fascism not possible. Long gone are the days he was elected and long gone are the days Germans built and operated extermination camps in silence, unknown to the world. That cannot happen again with computers as they are the opposite of silence.
Peter Thiel, is that you?
/S ?
Hopefully
Most profesional digital graphic artists and writers do hold some level of resentment to the latest technological advancements, and other professions will soon undoubtedly join that sentiment as AI tech evolves into more job fields.
as usual it's a matter of bubbles: most of those you know might hold such resentment, most of those I know are in fact in love with the possibilities and are trying their hardest to leverage the new tools.
My 64yo "non digital" graphic artist aunt holds a very high level of resentment to the digital ones, while most of her old friends and ex-colleagues who embraced digital way back when are stil active in the space and happy one way or another, she is not.
But she is happy she can now get near-real-time two-way translation to/from languages she doesn't speak and is also happy to bury her head in the sand when I point out that's thanks to the same tech that will have an impact on the people who do simultaneous translations as a job.
This comment will age like milk
Sometimes you have got to let things go. Clinging onto the past doesn't make sense in tech. Teaching kids today the wonders of that useless language called BASIC on 8 bit micros from the eighties amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. What next, slide rules?
If I had money and social media clout then I would buy SGI (Silicon Graphics) and get kids to learn the MIPS instruction set on refrigerator sized machines that needed their own power station. But no, got to let it go.
I can easily see a new generation of Silicon Graphics machines powered by something like a MI300R (R because the amd64 cores would be replaced by RISC-V ones, which are the natural heirs to MIPS).
Or we could repurpose the SGI acronym to be Silicon Graphics and Intelligence to catch the AI wave.
And, of course, publish OpenIRIX under GPLv3. Including the screensavers.
> Sometimes you have got to let things go.
Yes, but it's too early for Commodore. Commodore is fondly remembered by Gen X, and Gen X is still alive and has the means to indulge its nostalgia.
In a world where quality content or products disappear at an ever quicker pace, replaced with generic slop with no emotional attachment, functioning as just a way to extract something from you, the consumer, nostalgia becomes ever more valuable. Maybe not let everything go? Maybe letting things go is why we're at the current state of toxic consumerism that nobody likes.
Related previously:
YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand