I'm doing it wrong. I wouldn't buy at those prices, and I've never had an auction bid up to those prices. Maybe some people with the cojones to list at Buy It Now of that price get some non-collector who wants it NOW to pay it... I guess.

Several hundred dollars? Let me know where you're seeing people paying several hundred dollars for a bare, working C64. If you pay $100 for such an article, you are overpaying (This comment won't age well due to market volatility but it is true today in June 2026 in the United States). Putting together a minimal real C64 system for the purpose of playing games/demos/SIDfiles and/or tinkering with BASIC should set you back about $75 for the computer itself, about $60 (shipped) for either a Kung Fu Flash 2 card or a combo SD2IEC/fastloader cartridge, about $10 for a joystick and about $15 for a composite to HDMI adapter. Unless you are archiving unique disks from a personal collection, there is truly no real reason to buy a disk drive these days. Plus a third party PSU, the gold standard being Keelog, but cheaper options exist - allow $70 for this. Or you can get essentially the same experience by purchasing a Raspberry Pi 3B and associated case, etc, for around $100 total, some assembly required.

The C64 Ultimate isn't a terrible product, but it is only a minor aspect of this fiasco. The deplorable part is the influencer pollution. Who knew enshittification could encompass a brand as well as a product.

The equivalency stems from the fact that it is shanzai junk shilled to a target audience of "people who define themselves in terms of the social media they consume".

I was actually being sarcastic there by stating that the group of people without a real connection to Commodore is insignificantly small - not that it's super important. People who are really Commodore enthusiasts like me loathe the tosser who owns the Commodore paperwork ("Commodore" per se ceased to exist long ago), and the zombie influencer Temu entity into which it is being fashioned. People who are too young to be Commodore natives are consuming the fast-fashion aspect of it the way they'd buy an iPhone case styled like a Walkman.

Many things that are foisted on the market are not necessary. Google "did people, like, actually live in the 17th century?"

Yeah, but this isn't a stupid business decision, it's just an influencer grift like Logan Paul-branded energy drinks. Sooner they run out of money and sell the indicia to someone who actually has an investment in the historical value of the brand, the better (but I don't think this will happen; it's going to go the way of Magnavox and RCA and Polaroid and (...) and just be a zombie brand on random shanzai junk.

This is the retrocomputing equivalent of the Trump T1 phone, and I'm far from the only person saying this. Fundamentally, there are two groups of people in this world: People who think having a YouTube influencer buy a venerable brand to "reboot" it is a good idea, and people who recognize this for the quintessential grift it is. Oh, and then there are people who don't have any emotional investment in Commodore - but based on a sampling of the people I communicate with regularly, there are very few of those. The kindest thing that can be said about Perifractic is that he started out running a reasonably interesting retrocomputing channel, but he slid through a one-way sphincter straight down the colon of SEO and YouTube monetization, never to return. (Pointlessly long intros and stretched content to maximize ad impressions and keep the "suspense" coming to meet minimum view time quotas, careful scrubbing of language, clickbait thumbnails and video titles - everything bad you can think of is there).

What is being done with the Commodore indicia now is a deplorable embarrassment to the community of Commodore collectors, historians and aficionados, on par with the ludicrous "PET phone" that was created by some bootleg company in Italy a few years ago.

I've owned more than one inexpensive Windows laptop that I only discovered to be a touchscreen by accident - like most sane people I see only ergonomic downsides in a touchscreen computer. In fact one of the reasons I prefer to use a computer with a keyboard and mouse is precisely to avoid sliding my finger around a touchscreen. With that said, it appears to add little to the cost, so I guess I am happy to continue completely ignoring it on Macs as well as PCs.

I remember the Rainbow Warrior thing well - that was the French, preventing the RW from trying to stop nuclear bomb testing. The 80s is the decade I remember best, I think :)

I am "implying" that when your ship gets sunk by an enemy mine, you don't really stop to ask where it was assembled or which flag was flying on the vehicle that planted it.

Vault-Tec is a corporate angel compared to some of the real corporate entities in today's world...

Darwin was bombed by the Japanese in WW2, so that takes Australia off your list. Canada was also hit by Japanese balloon attacks, so Canada comes off too. NZ didn't get bombed, but it did have an Axis-laid mine sink an Allied ship in its coastal waters, so borderline.

All that means (and my cynicism continues to run strong) is that the legislation is either competitively advantageous to Anthropic and OpenAI over Google and Apple, or it simply doesn't have big enough loopholes to suit Google and Apple. Big corporations - and Anthropic and OpenAI definitely qualify - don't generally have a masochistic streak; if they are eager to don handcuffs it is because those handcuffs are fur-lined and/or the big corporation has a handcuff key under its tongue.

Both the extremes you mention, and the middle ground between, are merely different flavors of chaos. I've written a bunch of substack articles on related topics (example https://larwe.substack.com/p/w... ), and after all the neuron activity I've performed on this, I'm pretty convinced that "AI" cannot be controlled in the manner that legislators would like. It will always be vulnerable to attack chain type behavior. Look no further than Multivac (also https://larwe.substack.com/p/m... :) ) and "All the Troubles of the World" Asimov short story.

The thing about analysis by CNN is that you can't easily predict what noise is going to interfere with recognition. The CNN maintainers likely have more resources than people trying to shield themselves, and they also are the only people who are in a position to run a bunch of experiments. If this technique truly does allow surveillance of some meaningful kind, it would be invisible to the end-user - so how could the end-user tell if their countermeasures are working?