| ▲ | tptacek an hour ago | ||||||||||||||||
Yeah, I did that too. That's what you did with these machines. Deeply unsatisfying! Like: a real lesson in how gnarly real computers actually were. This is my point. You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything, but it turns out "anything" took on values ranging from "hours to many hours of typing in BASIC listings and then working through inscrutable errors until something showed up on the screen but then crashed". Computers sucked ass! Until like a year ago. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | thaumaturgy 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Different strokes, I guess. FWIW, I also started at 8 -- with a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Vic-20, both connected to a television -- and I found the process of trail-and-error learning my way through BASIC to be absolutely awesome. I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that. | |||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | qsera 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything.. Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really? For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are... In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers... May be your falling the same way for LLMs now.. | |||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | musicale 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Figuring out inscrutable errors seems highly educational. I guess I don't have enough data to determine whether your bad experience was more or less common (probably less common on HN though). I imagine some (like yourself at 8) found computers frustrating and bad, while others (some peer posters on HN, who might also have been a bit older when they started) found them frustrating and good! | |||||||||||||||||
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