Many Usenet groups have been abandoned, or are haunted only by a few cranks, but a few still have worthwhile discussion. A couple of years ago there was a tidal wave of spam, but that mostly stopped after Google Groups disconnected. So the infrastructure is still there, still free of adverts and manipulative algorithms, just waiting for more people to use it.
The list of talks for this year's Tcl and OpenACS conference has just been published: https://openacs.km.at/ . It's all happening in Vienna, Austria, on 16 & 17 July. Registration officially closes tomorrow, but late applications are quite likely to be accepted.
As another post pointed out, AI as a field of research started about the time I was born (LLMs are another matter of course). So everything I've created has been since that time. Some of my software tools are listed at https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Colin+Macleod - no form of AI was involved in any of them.
This will run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Tcl's starkit/starpack system makes it easy to generate a single executable file for each OS that can just be copied over and run without any installation needed.
"there are no native GUI frameworks for simple tools that are easy, fast, and simple to develop in at the same time" - Tcl/Tk does all that just fine for me.
As I said, the user interface is awkward. You need to select the "Content" checkbox when searching for Posts. E.g. to search for "deadlock" within comp.lang.tcl, start with https://usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=deadlock%20ingroup:co...
then select "Content", unselect "Author" and "Subject" and click "Search".
In the early days Usenet propagation was slow and haphazard because the communication links available were very limited. Nowadays I can post a message on one Usenet server and it appears on other servers in a few seconds. So coherent real-time conversations are no problem.
On the other hand, with a long-running discussion, HN, Reddit, etc. still have no way to see what messages are new since you last looked at a thread, something which Usenet clients have always done and still do now.
I had tried this site a year or two ago and found it unusable then, but it seems greatly improved now. I found posts as old as 1982, but recent coverage seems to stop around April 2022. Crucially, it supports full-text search on posts within a specific group - something which my own site https://newsgrouper.org cannot do. I find the user interface a little awkward, but it does now appear to be a really useful resource.
I have a Tcl Improvement Proposal (TIP 676) currently being voted on which introduces an alternative compact form of calculation. The implementation uses a Pratt parser: https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/file?ci=cgm-equals-command&nam... which directly generates bytecode rather than creating a parse tree.
You might be interested in https://newsgrouper.org - my web interface to Usenet, text-only. The site is implemented in Tcl, but only needs a web browser for a client. Some Android users find it preferable to the available native clients.
Here's mine: https://cmacleod.me.uk/ - I'm a retired programmer, my site has links to various projects, mostly in Tcl, some Javascript or C, also old blog, etc.
Note: when posting a link to an article on Newsgrouper it's best to use the "Permalink" at the bottom of the article. People clicking that will get straight to the article without needing to login as a guest. The permalink for this article is: https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]...
The one thing that really annoys me about HN is that when you return to a discussion that you read the day before, there is no way to easily find the comments which are new since your previous visit. This is basic functionality which Usenet always had (and still does).
Many Usenet groups have been abandoned, or are haunted only by a few cranks, but a few still have worthwhile discussion. A couple of years ago there was a tidal wave of spam, but that mostly stopped after Google Groups disconnected. So the infrastructure is still there, still free of adverts and manipulative algorithms, just waiting for more people to use it.