VMS has a versioning filesystems, which is a useful thing to have. It's also pretty secure (once you disable scripts in mail subject headers).

I'd contend it has a role in server systems, but really it's a struggle to think where else it would fit.

I don't know if I'm affected, really. But my property isn't on served by a public water utility; nor are half of the people in this county. Perhaps that's what you mean.

They also aren't cheap even if the knowledge problem is solved. Something like a roomba lives in a special case where being more or less a toy RC car is enough robotics to actually attack a real-world cleaning problem(on reasonably uncluttered flat floors).

If you want "look for missing items, get things out of the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor, clean the toilets, and vacuum" you are suddenly talking about a *lot* more robot. Not necessarily 'call Boston Dynamics for their most humanoid biped', you might be able to get away with some sort of wheeled platform with robot arms since the arms count for more than the legs(as long as you can reach things that are a meter plus away from the floor); but you are definitely talking a much more involved piece of hardware with considerably more fiddly moving parts; especially if you don't want to overhaul your entire house.

Pawn to Deep Space Nine. Check.

Those sneaky bggrs are forever altering memory to avoid consequences.

It's not what it lacks. It's because it uses newer components. As you make the transistors smaller and reduce the voltages, you increase the damage a cosmic ray strike will do. Yes, the chips are rad-hardened, but anything that gets through will have greater impact and have a greater risk of frying a component versus flipping the bit. The rad hardening will also have improved, but the risks will have increased faster than the protections.

However, there will undoubtedly be better error-correction in NH at circuit level, Voyager only error corrected the communications not the processor or memory. So I fully expect bit flips to be fixed silently, so I expect data to be of greater robustness. So in terms of quality of output, I expect NH to beat Voyager by a long way.

(I'm ignoring the efforts by the anti-science lobby to shut down NASA and the Deep Space Network. If they succeed, all communication will be permanently lost. But that won't be a technological fault, that will be a massive social fault on a scale comparable with Crusaders destroying the Imperial Library in Constantinople.)

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.

True! But "science" and "climate fact" are welcomed in the same sentence, cutie.

Self-driving software recognizes (classifies) and understands the significance of objects such as people, animals, road signs, traffic lights, stationary and moving vehicles of various sizes, lamp posts, trees, curbs, speedbumps, buildings, walls, traffic cones etc. It models predicted behaviours of those of those object types that move of their own accord. It then makes real-time driving plans accordingly.

Large language models have trained so much on the relationships of words to each other in a large chunk of all of human discourse that their internal neural-net representations of these symbols can be said to be modelling the situations that phrases and sentences and paragraphs of these words describe.

The models are then able to generate novel language (novel descriptions of implicit or imagined plausible sub-situations) to answer questions. The situations described by the answers were sometimes only implicit in the trained-on situations, not explicit. The system "understands" that type of situation in general (the general types of relationships and evolutions of relationships that occur in those type of situations....). So it gives you a plausible but sometimes creative answer.

Oh I don't know about that.

If something gathers, organizes associatively, and has quick access to all kinds of pertinent relationships between a type of thing (an object in the world) it has individuated and classified from its sensor field, and other types of things in the world that help define the situations and roles and likely behaviours if any of that object, I would say it knows a thing or two about what the thing is and what is important about it.

That's pretty much all we do ourselves.

More precisely, it is a stance that there is an implicit agreement among users of a system that the code (and data state) of the system is the arbiter that is used to determine outcomes in the system, including value distribution outcomes.

That is the entire essential premise of cryptocurrency systems and smart-contract systems.

If you don't understand and agree to this premise, you wouldn't, as a reasonable person, make any use of such systems.

Therefore all reasonable users of such systems should be deemed to be in agreement with this premise about value distribution outcome determination.

That principle of implicit agreement (i.e. contract with the developers and operators of the system and with counterparties exchanged with within the system) should be used in making legal determinations about the validity and legality of outcomes of operations/transactions of/in the system.

That's the spelling out of what is meant by it that you clearly need.

âoeDonâ(TM)t just read the slide deckâ is more or less rule #1 of not completely ruining a presentation. Is there any room for optimism about the results of a tool that generates video of you reading the slide deck? Even if itâ(TM)s a goddamn miracle on a technical level it seems like a fundamentally mal-suited tool for the job. If anything, the better it works the worse it will likely be, since it will just be doing the wrong thing more attractively and easily.