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.

Children are exposed to the capitalist system whenever you allow them to handle currency and buy food, candy, toys...

There are three big reasons most countries restrict child labor:
- Prevent exploitation of minors by employers, since they are not in a position to understand or negotiate terms of employment - or to resist authority figures (e.g. parents) pressuring them into involuntary contract.
- Prevent parents from interrupting child education for short-term economic incentives - which is a concern for the State long-term economic strategy
- Prevent employers from leveraging minors as cheap labor to depress wages - which is a big enough concern for Labor to exercise political pressure on the State to restrict that

I've never heard "exposing immature minds to the capitalist system" used as a reason, and this includes countries injecting "anti-imperialist" rhetoric on everything. For that matter, the few governments that could use that argument with a straight face seem to have a history with exploiting unpaid child labor (e.g. North Korea)

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.

"Woke" simply means you're not ignoring reality. And nothing more. If you're a geek who is ignoring reality, then I want your geek card.

If Professor Penrose is correct about the nature of consciousness, then Many Worlds cannot be correct.

If quantum uncertainty in position applies to spacetime and not just space, then Many Worlds would require that particles can experience interactions that don't actually occur in the timeline of the observer.

Many Worlds is mandatory if (a) information must be conserved, (b) superposition is information and not just potential information, and (c) the universe along any given path is an open system. But if it is an open system, with the sum of all paths being a closed system, we must consider the other conservation laws from that standpoint.

So there might be possible openings.