Linux won't capture the desktop market unless Microsoft is broken up due to them repeating antitrust activity they have been repeatedly convicted of. But that won't happen because the US is too dependent on its supply of what's basically electronic heroin.

If you include Chrome PCs, that's been and gone.

Sun tried to go the Networked Computing route and bankrupted themselves.

Internet connectivity is far too slow and far too unreliable for most tasks. Worse, most apps still use TCP and UDP, despite better transport protocols existing. And IPv4 is still mainstream, despite IPv6's benefits.

The Internet is also not secure, due to NSA demanding the IETF withdraw IPSec as a mandatory requirement for IPv6.

No, thin clients with overpowered central servers (the mainframe architecture) was abandoned for good reasons and every attempt to return to centralised computing has failed for good reasons. Companies are now even starting to abandon the cloud.

It's the Trisolarons. Voyager 1 has now concluded there is no physics and has committed digital suicide.

That will depend a lot on whether the Klingons and Trisolarons join forces.

This is also vanilla RAM. Well, rad-hardened to the best of their ability back then, but as far as I can tell, there's oy error-correction in transmissions, not in the RAM itself.

https://destevez.net/2021/12/v...

Error-correcting RAM is used in business on Earth because cosmic rays can corrupt data over the brief lifespans of a business server. Imagine being in deep space with no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, and no heliosphere. The radiation the Voyagers are having to endure is orders of magnitude greater than designed for and for decades longer.

That a chip has fried is news because it's just one. NASA does amazingly well, but I doubt New Horizons will last as long, and I sincerely doubt any private firm will be capable of building a probe that can Voyager's achievements.

Many of us on this website dream of a day when humans no longer have to perform backbreaking or mind-numbing labor. Our spirits are assaulted whenever we hear politicians hatefully brag about how they will create more jobs instead of leading us toward the Star Trekkian paradise of less soul-crushing or injurious toil.

I thought Amazon was one of the few good guys, working to help create a world of 100% unemployment. I know it's only an ideal to strive for (we'll likely never free everyone from having to work) but they seemed to be trying.

How many times have we been promised "I'll replace you with a script" or "AI is coming for your job?" Empty words. Lies. To find out they were secretly saddling innocent humans with computers' jobs, is an insult to both of our races.

It's absolutely ridiculous to claim these anecdotes mean computers suck.

These computers which initially worked and then turned against their owners all had one thing in common: they run proprietary software, made to serve the manufacturer's interests at the expense of the owners' interests.

So stop saying "smart devices are bad." The obvious conclusion is that "proprietary smart devices are bad."

Strangely, that's not actually true. Our brains did indeed evolve to work with maths, and indeed many animals (including insects) work with maths in identical ways. When independent cultures discovered maths, they discovered the same maths. They used different number bases and different symbols, but the formulations are identical.

Archimedes' formulations for statistics are virtually identical to Pascal's, and Archimedes' formulations for calculus work the same way as Leibnuz' and Newton's. Three independent forms of calculus that are basically identical, and two independent formulations of statistics that are also basically identical.

If everything from bees to crows to humans have identical maths, and all humans of all cultures have identical maths, then it gets seriously problematic to call it an invention.

If you cannot build a universe in which Pi or e take different values, then those values are not artifacts.

The only thing humans have done is chosen which axioms apply to a given system. Everything else is a consequence of the axioms chosen. Neither the steps to derive consequences nor the consequences themselves are manufactured.

Maths is natural. It is completely independent of who stumbles on the relationships and would be exact the same in every universe should other universes exist.

You simply can't construct a universe in which Pi is 4 which you could if maths were an invention.

If we show that gravity follows GR and cannot be quantised, then spacetime would have to he continuous.

I agree that systemd makes a pig's war of everything.

So it's all down to those meddling kids and their dog.

Space, time, matter, and possibly energy as well are thought to be emergent phenomena ultimately resulting from field interactions (with space and time emerging from particle interactions and particles resulting from field interactions).

If Prof Tegmark is correct, fields themselves emerge from maths. If string theorists are correct, fields emerge from brane interactions.

No matter who us right (if anyone), concepts like "physical" take a beating. If space and time are the result of interactions between interactions between fields, then all if our equations are upside-down. Nothing occurs in space over time, space and time occur in interactions, which then presumably must vary over some other quality.

We've also got a problem with objective reality. Quantum calculations work between measurements, but definitely don't work if you try to calculate intermediate states. You almost have to assume there aren't any, that reality only exists when it's observed.

If concepts like "reality" and "physical" don't refer to anything that is useful, if assuming them produces calculations that are always wrong, then they might not be useful concepts. Quantum Mechanics seems to describe what the universe does, but not why it does it or how it does it. The numbers "just work". That's indeed the basis behind the standard interpretation.

But if that is the case, and if seems to be, then it seems reasonable for theoreticians to try and produce models that say why that's the case. However, I've no issue with it being left to theoreticians, which Elon Musk et al certainly aren't.