Not that I recall, no.

My first one was a 65MB (or was it 85MB?) 3.5’’ parallel ATA one, and while the enclosure might have been shaped around the platter(s?) (could have been a later one, though) I don’t recall the motor being distinguishable.

Whole machine (my first PC proper) was a 286, 16MHz with turbo on, possibly 1024KB of RAM (I recall setting up autoexec.bat to ask me if I needed extended or expanded memory on boot, but could’ve been in a later machine; pretty certain the memory was on socketed DIPs on the mainboard, not SIMMs, in any case, so it can’t have been much, and 640KB was supposed to be enough, anyway), CGA, 5.25’’ and possibly 3.5’’ floppy drive, DOS… 4.something, I believe.

Good times.

Nero burning ROM.

Meh, burning CDs… ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

(To be fair, neither did I, probably; my earliest hard drive was already IDE, I believe, and those seem to have already had autopark, but the old lore was that you parked your hard drives before moving them, or the heads would scratch the surface, so park them we did.)

If you held them by a side and shaked them, they were definitely floppy.

It’s dead, Jim.

They’ll never be able to learn, though.

A LLM is merely a statistical model of its training material. Very well indexed but extremely lossy compression.

It will always be outdated. It can never become familiar with your codebase and coding practices. And it’ll always be extremely unreliable, because it’s just a text generator without any semblance of comprehension about what the texts it generates actually mean.

All it’ll ever be able to do is reproduce the standards as they were when its training model was captured.

If we are to compare it to a junior developer, it’d be someone who suffered a traumatic brain injury just after leaving college, which prevents them from ever learning anything new, makes them unaware that they can’t learn, and incapable of realising when they don’t know something, makes them unable to reason or comprehend what they are saying, and causes them to suffer from verbal diarrhoea and excessive sycophancy.

Now, such a tragically brain damaged individual might look like the ideal worker to the average CEO, but I definitely wouldn’t want them anywhere near my code.

My favorite use is actually just to help me name stuff.

Reverse dictionary lookup, more or less.

Now, that is something LLMs should be actually good at, unlike practically any other thing they’re being sold as being good at.

The junior developer can (hopefully) learn and improve.

Yeah, maybe it’s because I learned git from the graph, but I find it really helpful when figuring out why a certain piece of code ended up looking like it does (the ability to see the changes made in every commit and open versions of the files at any point in history without checking out the commit is also very useful).

And yeah, if you need or want the command line it always lets you open a git prompt for you to do whatever you want, which is nice.

Also, again maybe because it’s what I’ve gotten used to, but I find the way it handles merge or rebase conflicts more useable (or rather less unusable) than any other I’ve tried…

Git Extensions.

It’s what they used at my job when I started, it does the job, and I’ve gotten used to it. 🤷‍♂️

I want to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.