Kinda shooting for the feel of like an old school Lenovo laptop keyboard

If you’re specifically set on that, there used to be a USB-attached version of those. Dunno if they still make them. Wasn’t really interested myself, since I don’t like low-key-travel keyboards if I can avoid them, but I distinctly remember seeing them.

searches

Apparently it was called the “Ultranav”. I don’t see new ones on Amazon (other than someone trying to sell one at an exorbitant $400), but there are used ones:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=ultranav

EDIT: Well, some of those say that they’re new. shrugs

If one has it set to default-deny Javascript, a lot of websites don’t work, because many web developers don’t develop websites that work without Javascript today.

Historically, websites did a better job of falling back.

Apparently they’re Simulium vittatum.

https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/huge-surge-in-tiny-eye-biting-flies-plagues-california-they-re-like-little-demons/ar-AA1ZyMaR

Residents in the San Gabriel Valley (SGV), to the east of Los Angeles, are battling unusually high numbers of black flies, also known as Simulium vittatum.

https://www.glamosquito.org/black-flies

Control Agents Used to Combat Black Flies

Black fly management is accomplished by applying a natural soil bacteria called Bti to water sources where black flies breed. Bti stands for Bacillus thuringiensis israeliensis. Bti is a special formulation of common soil bacteria that is highly effective in controlling black flies and mosquitoes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis_israelensis

Bacillus thuringiensis serotype israelensis (Bti) is a group of bacteria used as biological control agents for larvae stages of certain dipterans. Bti, along with other B. thuringiensis products, produces toxins lethal to various species of mosquitoes, fungus gnats, and blackflies but which have negligible effects on other organisms.

“I typed man sex and was not presented with a blonde girl.”

Yeah, but the flip side is that it also comes with controversy, and I could imagine that it’s more hassle for OpenAI than it’s worth.

Plus, there are some scaling issues. There is a varying collection of social norms around the world that vary when it comes to sexuality. Some people are going to get really upset if there’s a chatbot that violates their social norms. Some of those social norms change (e.g. the UK just put out that restriction on choking pornography).

And then you’ve got privacy issues. My own suspicion is that erotica might be a driver for LLMs-on-local-hardware.

Given how much money OpenAI is burning, I’d guess that they really have to get agentic stuff, more-advanced stuff working. And I don’t know how much overlap there is on making general-knowledge AI and erotica generation stuff. Like, one point I recall someone making on /r/LocalLLama was that MoEs haven’t worked incredibly well with creative writing…but it might be that MoEs are a better approach for problem solving.

Like, I agree that there’s demand. And I’m pretty sure that there’s gonna be an industry filling that (maybe after hardware prices have come down). But I’m not sure that it’s the best bet for OpenAI.

Nuclear terrorism might be a thing, but I seriously doubt that the easiest way to do it is nuclear suicide vests. Miniaturizing nuclear warheads is a pain. If you were going to do something like that, you’d be better off doing something akin to a truck bomb.

Yeah, I didn’t give a complete list, just the ones I’ve used. The gptel page lists some of the other emacs LLM clients: chatgpt-shell, org-ai, superchat, claude-code-ide, claude-code.el, agent-shell, aidermacs, aider.el, copilot.el, minuet.

So, for me, a substantial amount of the benefit of using emacs software packages is that I’ve spent a lot of time learning emacs functionality, and so if I use software in emacs, then I get to continue using all of that functionality. Like, I can set bookmarks, reconfigure colors, bounce around by paragraphs or searching for text, have elaborate completion functionality, macros, stuff like that.

Emacs also has support for LLM chatbots and code stuff.

https://github.com/s-kostyaev/ellama

Ellama is a tool for interacting with large language models from Emacs. It allows you to ask questions and receive responses from the LLMs. Ellama can perform various tasks such as translation, code review, summarization, enhancing grammar/spelling or wording and more through the Emacs interface. Ellama natively supports streaming output, making it effortless to use with your preferred text editor.

https://github.com/karthink/gptel

gptel is a simple Large Language Model chat client for Emacs, with support for multiple models and backends. It works in the spirit of Emacs, available at any time and uniformly in any buffer.

I were on the hunt for a software forge with public hosting and I was worried about policies changing down the line, I’d probably take a look at GNU Savannah. That’s not especially blingy and it’s restricted to GPL-compatible stuff, but I have a pretty solid level of trust for the FSF.

Thanks for the opt-out link.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forbidden_fruit_is_the_sweetest

Proverb

forbidden fruit is the sweetest

1. Forbidden things seem more appealing; people desire things more if (or, in some way, because) they can’t have them.

When I got whatever it was that I got new…I think an Asus device…that I used, I think that I had to order it online, and it sounds like OP was shopping brick-and-mortar. I dunno if he’d be able to find it brick-and-mortar.

Many open source operating systems exist that can turn a computer with multiple NIC’s into a router

Minor nitpick, but if you’re planning on sticking a NIC into a machine to make it a router, it’s probably more cost-effective to get a single NIC with multiple Ethernet ports than multiple NICs.

Yup, and with the evdev devices present.

Now I just have to figure out whether I want to get another external soundcard for my gaming rig or if I can live with switching the USB cable back and forth between the two PCs or if I can get used to control the volume with software. I really like hardware knobs though

I don’t know what you’re doing, but if your headphones are using a 1/4 inch jack or 1/8 inch jack and your devices have some form of audio output already, you can just use a plain ol’ analog mixer. That’ll give you knobs and let you hook multiple devices up.

I keep my headphones plugged into one. I rarely actually use the other devices, but sometimes I’ll want to be listening to a radio scanner or a shortwave radio or some other things, and it lets me just pipe whatever into the headphones.

searches Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/LiNKFOR-Channel-Separate-Controls-6-35mm/dp/B0DDKBJFWY

That’s $11 and looks like it’ll do 4 1/4 inch inputs. Looks like they also have RCA and 1/8 inch input versions (though those cost more, and there there might be more-inexpensive mixers).

Power supplies are largely fine as long as they’re not really old.

Oh, I didn’t think about PSUs in my comment. Good thought.

There was a period where a lot of bad capacitors went into PSUs and there was a rash of PSU and motherboard failures sometime around 2000. I remember some failed caps causing devices to die — I think I had a video card, a motherboard, and a PSU go. At the time, I thought that capacitors just must not last very long, didn’t find out about the fact that it was a specific issue with some capacitors until years later. But, yeah, today, that’d be pretty ancient, and I haven’t seen that for some time.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors between 1999 and 2007, especially those from some Taiwanese manufacturers,[1][2] due to faulty electrolyte composition that caused corrosion accompanied by gas generation; this often resulted in rupturing of the case of the capacitor from the build-up of pressure.

High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and were particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers.

A 2003 article in The Independent claimed that the cause of the faulty capacitors was due to a mis-copied formula. In 2001, a scientist working in the Rubycon Corporation in Japan stole a mis-copied formula for capacitors’ electrolytes. He then took the faulty formula to the Luminous Town Electric company in China, where he had previously been employed. In the same year, the scientist’s staff left China, stealing again the mis-copied formula and moving to Taiwan, where they created their own company, producing capacitors and propagating even more of this faulty formula of capacitor electrolytes.[3]

I do think that one issue with PSUs is that power demands of high-end CPUs and GPUs have also increased. If the PSU is rated for your system, then no problem, but I’d want to make sure.

Also, PSUs have fans, and while I don’t think I’ve ever had a PSU fan go, thinking back…fans do have moving parts and are IME one of the more-prone-to-see-failures components. I have definitely had CPU fans and case fans die — start making noise and ultimately seize up, as the bearings wear out.

Cases basically can’t fail unless you destroy it on purpose.

True, though I’ve also had cases come with a lot of parts, especially if you have toolless mounting or something. That’s one where I personally have always thrown out my old ATX cases, though it’s not as if they’re nonfunctional or anything. I even have the leftover parts, but they’re in some box somewhere.

But I’ll concede that that’s probably just me. I mean, if someone wanted to, they could probably do fine with an old case.

Air coolers don’t go bad.

The aluminum/copper/etc heatsink itself will last forever, but for about the past 30 years, most will have had a fan on them. Now, granted, it’s also almost certainly replaceable, and it’s not hard to get new fans, but the fan can die.

Liquid coolers will eventually need maintenance, but as long as they’re not really old should be fine.

Huh. Well, that sounds good. I’ve been curious to see how these do. I’m on the first system I’ve used with an AIO liquid cooler. So far, it’s been remarkably quiet, had a lot of cooling capacity, and not had a huge amount of mass hanging off the motherboard — I’m glad that I got it, even if it cost more — I but I have wondered about pump longevity.

Used liquid coolers might be interesting, as long as one can get the appropriate mounting bits, haven’t been thrown out. I remember that mine came with a bunch of brackets and such for various sockets. Do need to deal with cleaning off old thermal paste, though.

I’m looking at a Trixie system right now, and /dev/input/js0 appears just as expected. Is it possible that you modified your Debian installation way back then, to disable your js devices? Maybe you (or some package you installed) applied a udev rule to block them?

Nope. Vanilla /etc/udev (well, okay, there are some unrelated changes for snapd and one to keep an JBOD enclosure form spinnign down drives). The joydev module isn’t even loaded.

A great many games rely on a library for joystick input.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean that they’re using the js API at the kernel level.

SDL, for example, which will use js devices depending on the circumstance.

Your own link points out that even SDL 1 — very old now — doesn’t use the js interface unless forced to do so.

I’m running Debian trixie. IIRC in the past, for a while when the evdev interface showed up, a problem was that games that could talk to both interfaces would sometimes get double input, because a number would aggregate all input from all joysticks, and so if one had both the js and evdev interfaces visible, they’d see it as two joysticks both; a fix was to not expose them via the js API, rather than leaving them exposed via both. I don’t know how that’s evolved over time, but it may have been a factor encouraging not exposing them by default. I’ve certainly seen the “double input” behavior myself, maybe ten, fifteen years back.

What - if anything - do you insist on buying new and what do you buy second hand and why?

• I would get a used PC as a whole, if I needed one for some secondary role. I did that once for a media PC, where I had no need for new hardware and just needed to throw a TV-out card into it. Often available cheap, because someone just wants to unload it.

• I’ve never purchased used DIMMs, but as long as I was okay with the speed, I wouldn’t worry much about it. Aging shouldn’t really be an issue. Maybe you could possibly get damaged stuff somehow, but…shrugs

• I personally would not buy used rotational hard drives. Those all eventually die. If someone wants to badly enough deal with it, they can set up redundant storage and try to get a little more value out of drives that haven’t died yet, just keep swapping drives and hope that they don’t have multiple concurrent failures. In my book, it’s just not worth the trouble. That being said, maybe someone has tighter financial constraints and less data concerns or needs to store a lot more data than me.

• CPUs…I dunno. Wouldn’t be my first choice to deal with secondhand. CPUs haven’t seen lots of single-threaded speed increases for a while, so for many workloads, older CPUs are fine. But you can get bent pins on them, and people might have overclocked them and had various forms of damage. And I don’t really want to deal with whatever thermal paste is left on them or so forth. I would avoid 13th or 14th gen Intel desktop CPUs, the ones that gradually destroyed themselves internally over time. You don’t know if any given CPU might have suffered damage.

• Motherboard. Not my first choice, since they tend to come with various spacers and screws and other things.

• Sound cards. Sure. I’ve used ancient sound cards. Technology hasn’t changed much there. I think that external, USB sound interfaces have kind of taken over here, though (as you illustrate). I do run Linux on stuff, and once support is in the kernel, it tends to just kinda stay there.

• Network interface cards: Sure.

• GPU: Sure, depending upon the workload. GPUs have seen significant performance improvements, so if you want the latest-and-greatest, I don’t think that an old GPU is a great buy. But if you just want video output on a server or something, then sure, anything will work.

• Keyboards: Not unless I was dead set on some vintage thing. These can last a long time, but keyboards are relatively cheap.

• Mice: No. I find that these things wear out. The buttons get a lot of clicks and eventually wear out. I’ve also generally had the little slidey feet detach over time.

• Webcams: Not unless I had some special use for them where I cared very little about image quality. Image quality has improved substantially.

• Monitors: Probably fine to do secondhand. Early OLEDs might have burn-in as a risk. If you specifically want high refresh rates or something, then maybe you want something newer, but for plenty of uses, older monitors are just fine. They’ll probably be dimmer at max brightness than when they were new.