There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Or iPhones?

I have not seen AI code that is *more* efficient than human code, yet. I have seen AI write efficient, compact code when pressed, very, very hard to do so, but only then. Otherwise, in my hands, and those of my developer colleagues, AI produces mostly correct, but inefficient, verbose code.

Could that change? Sure, I suppose. But right now it is not the case, and the value system that is driving auto-generated code (i.e., the training set of extant code), does not put a premium on efficiency.

Web browsers are absolute hogs, and, in part, that's because web sites are absolute hogs. Web sites are now full-blown applications that were written without regard to memory footprint or efficiency. I blame the developers who write their code on lovely, large, powerful machines (because devs should get good tools, I get that), but then don't suffer the pain of running them on perfectly good 8 GB laptops that *were* top-of-the line 10 years ago, but are now on eBay for $100. MS Teams is a perfect example of this. What a steaming pile of crap. My favored laptop is said machine, favored because of the combination of ultra-light weight and eminently portable size, and zoom works just fine on it, but teams is unusable. Slack is OK, if that's nearly the only web site you're visiting. Eight frelling GB to run a glorified chat room.

The thing that gets my goat, however, is that the laptop I used in the late 1990s was about the same form factor as this one, had 64 MB (yes, MB) of main memory, and booted up Linux back then just about as fast. If memory serves, the system took about 2 MB, once up. The CPU clock on that machine was in the 100 MHz range. Even not counting for the massive architectural improvements, my 2010s-era laptop should boot an order of magnitude faster. It does not.

Why? Because a long time ago, it became OK to include vast numbers of libraries because programmers were too lazy to implement something on their own, so you got 4, 5, 6 or more layers of abstraction, as each library recursively calls packages only slightly lower-level to achieve its goals. I fear that with AI coding, it will only get worse.

And don't get me started on the massive performance regression that so-called modern languages represent, even when compiled. Hell in a handbasket? Yes. Because CPU cycles are stupidly cheap now, and we don't have to work hard to eke out every bit of performance, so we don't bother.

Remember kids, spaceflight is hard. Nature does not like us being in space, at all. She puts up serious, difficult barriers that we need to overcome. Just look how hard it was for a new program like Space X to start from scratch even with all of the existing knowledge developed by NASA, ESA, etc.. How many rapid unscheduled disassembly events did they suffer? I lost count. Even the Russians, who arguably have as much or more LEO experience than the US, continue to face challenges. Heck, so do we, as the current generation of engineers no longer has the direct experience from Gemini and Apollo to guide them. Space is deeply unforgiving of mistakes.

To the GP, if you think that your 5-second considered opinion is better than a fleet of talented folks, I'll wager that if you more time, did some research, you'd change your opinion. I hope you do.

I've been expecting that eventual outcome since the early 2000s when we (as in someone in an academic lab) grew a 3rd kidney in a mouse by grafting stem cells from a donor.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"

The perchlorates are a serious sticking issue. While I continue to be amazed at human ingenuity, the remediation problem for Martian soil seems to be very difficult. Not only that, but the perchlorates are *everywhere*, which means the entire environment is fundamentally poisonous to humans. That doesn't make it impossible, but it raises the bar another notch where we are already potentially dealing with low atmospheric pressure, extremely high CO2 concentration, very low O2 concentration, serious cold, etc. Again, not impossible, but Mars is almost as inhospitable as the Moon.

Yeah, their assumption that a sterile planetary body will not spontaneously develop this chemistry is not a really solid null hypothesis, especially given the number of demonstrations that amino acids fall out of proto-Earth conditions.

You don't read the news, do you?