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the most irritating website has been found

www.agile451.com Hold and Modify: Fine-Tuning AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an essential part of many industries, including personalized recommendations on streaming platforms and forecasting in industrial settings. Although AI can optimize and automate a broad variety of processes, each use case is different, and it is frequently req...

Hold and Modify: Fine-Tuning AI

I found this searching for information on how to program for the old Commodore Amiga’s HAM (Hold And Modify) video mode and you gotta touch and feel this one to sneer at it, cause I haven’t seen a website this aggressively shitty since Flash died. the content isn’t even worth quoting as it’s just LLM-generated bullshit meant to SEO this shit site into the top result for an existing term (which worked), but just clicking around and scrolling on this site will expose you to an incredible density of laggy, broken full screen animations that take way too long to complete and block reading content until they’re done, alongside a long list of other good design sense violations (find your favorites!)

bonus sneer arguably I’m finally taking up Amiga programming as an escape from all this AI bullshit. well fuck me I guess cause here’s one of the vultures in the retrocomputing space selling an enshittified (and very ugly) version of AmigaOS with a ChatGPT app and an AI art generator, cause not even operating on a 30 year old computer will spare me this bullshit:

like fuck man, all I want to do is trick a video chipset from 1985 into making pretty colors. am I seriously gonna have to barge screaming into another German demoscene IRC channel?

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  • Whats the appeal of Amigas? I really regret being too young to appreciate things like it and BeOS.

    • it definitely varies based on the person but roughly:

      • it’s hardware and software you can fuck with. the schematic of an Amiga is so simple that it can fit in your head, but its custom video chips are so flexible that folks are still finding new techniques to get beautiful results out of them (I’ll come back to this post when I have time and link something relatively recent from the Amiga demoscene that shows this). in short, it’s a system designed from the ground up to render beautiful graphics on an old school CRT
      • likewise, the OS is extremely modular and easy to modify, though it’s not open source (it really should be — the vultures in the retro space you’ve heard me complain about ensure it isn’t). all of the data structures and APIs the OS exposes are very visible due to its architecture and lack of memory protection. not having memory protection sounds shitty, but the Amiga does its best to turn that into a strength; there’s a bunch of support in the OS for fucking around, finding out, and recovering afterwards, and there’s also a wonderful feature parity between the Amiga’s GUI, CLI (AmigaDOS, a mix of someone’s memories of Unix and CP/M that’s actually surprisingly pleasant to use), and scripting languages
      • the platform has a lot of support for banging on the hardware directly without the OS running if you want maximum efficiency, and there’s even a modern framework (WHDLoad) that’ll paravirtualize your OS so you can run a game that takes over the hardware then exit back to your running OS afterwards
      • it’s a very easy retro platform to modernize. my Amiga has an inexpensive accelerator card that uses a Raspberry Pi to emulate an impossibly fast 68k CPU, hard drives, 720p graphics card (which the OS uses, but games still use the authentic graphics hardware), networking, and a shitload (128MB) of RAM. it turns out you can do even more tricks on the 1985 graphics hardware in the Amiga if you give it an impossibly fast CPU and hard drive and a shitload of RAM
      • it’s a good gaming platform, though try it in an emulator if you only want that
      • “nostalgia!” is the common reason you hear from the shitheads in the retro scene trying to charge you way too much for old hardware. I didn’t grow up with these computers so that’s bullshit, I just think they’re cool as fuck
      • new shit is still coming out for this platform? other than 68k accelerator tech only getting better (now that PowerPC is finally dead), AmigaOS 3.2.2 only came out this year and has a bunch of improvements. it’s the sequel to AmigaOS 3.9 and AmigaOS 4 (yes there’s a story behind this)

      this concludes the prepared Amiga rant you have fallen victim to

      • youtube must’ve heard me cause this compilation of Amiga demos from the Revision 2023 demoparty a few months ago was in my recommendations (flashing lights warning for those unfamiliar — this is basically the live visuals and music for a very nerdy type of rave). I timed it to skip the first demo, Blood Sugar Rising, cause I felt like it wasn’t as impressive as the rest. note the lower right corner of the screen when each demo starts — OCS demos run on the Amiga’s original 1985 chipset, and AGA demos target the 1992 revision of that hardware. traditionally, demos usually target unaccelerated Amigas, so they’ll usually run on machines with ordinary CPUs and mild RAM upgrades

        when you watch these, note how many impossible things seem to be happening: none of these effects are built into the Amiga, it definitely shouldn’t be able to support complex 3D, and it should have a very constrained color palette to work with; these and many other visual effects in these demos are enabled by tricks the demoscene has mastered. even the audio shouldn’t be possible — the amiga’s audio hardware was considered to be too primitive to play back samples at high fidelity or handle complex effects

        a lot of the tricks the demoscene discovered have made their way back into Amiga development — there are now AmigaOS apps that use the 1985 chipset to do previously impossible things like better-than-VHS video playback and MP3 playback while multitasking

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