I guess this is not exactly "cost", but also lifetime spans. A nuclear reactor can sustain a ship for about 20+ years, and that lifetime is too long for many ships, who would be headed out to the scrap yard in less time than that.
I'm 55, about to turn 56, and I did hobby programming back in the 80s, mainly in a C64 and C128, so I fit the bill, although I'm no developer and right now all my programming is reduced to some shell scripts aimed to automate repetitive or tedious tasks.
And no, I'm not "overwhelmingly" pro-AI. Especially since many of us know that the AI concept is storied and goes a long time even before our generation, and this LLM-based AI isn't really AI in a proper sense.
This "AI" has some good uses, granted, but the cost-benefit ratio is stupidly bad. For all the benefits that I can see with AI, if this means that I have to put up with scrapers aggressively ruining the Web, data centers gobsmacking available resources, and getting GPU and memory prices gouged to death on me, I'd rather pass. It's not an attractive proposition, simply stated.
Worse yet, I teach; and AI-enabled cheating is making my work much harder.
So, pardon me if I'm a little unenthusiastic about this newfangled artificial intelligence that isn't.
I'm an user; I have zero or near zero development and programming knowledge, so this take of mine might be complete nonsense.
But I think this is perhaps one of the first AI developments I actually like. Transitioning an app from React Native or any web technology to native code has the distinct advantage that the native version should be much more economical in its use of resources.
I'm tired of hearing about RAM and other components hiking their prices while at the same time RAM sizes of ~8 GB are considered too small because things like Electron apps are wasteful in their consumption of resources. Now, with more native apps, we might get full circle: leaner apps thanks to agentic development. Maybe someday 8 GB of RAM could be considered enough once again. Truly interesting.
TL;DR version so I can save you the mental expense of sifting through several paragraph of AI slop:
If LA repairs a whole street, they also need to add wheelchair ramps because of ADA. This is expensive for them and they don't want to do that, so they do not do any repair or circumvent it.
Reading from the activity, it still seems to receive some fixes and updates although, as the SlackBuild author said, it would not be advisable to use it in an internet-facing desktop for security reasons.
NsCDE also behaves very well.
Otherwise, you can use Xfce which was heavily inspired by CDE; and now, even Plasma 6 have a very good CDE-like (or Motif) theme.
A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible.
The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sense that you could have similar, "serious" peripherals such as good dot-matrix printers or floppy drives, than your father's "serious" CP/M or MS-DOS business computers; quite a difference from other home computers' idea of peripherals which were substandard or crippled equipment. That is, from peripherals alone, you could make a case of using C-64 even in serious business cases. And I know, I saw various cases where it was used with vertical or custom-made software packages in my country.
For hackers, the architecture was well understood, the memory map open and re-programmable, and the assembly was 6502 (I know the CPU was the slightly different 6510 but the opcodes were basically the same), which was fairly approachable for assembly programming.
You could get some or all of that, but, as the ad referenced by the TFA, you had to pay a lot more dollars for that.
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