... I don't think it would hurt if school children learned that there are actually working search engines out there.

Yeah, but even those things have been solved decades ago. For example if using HTML the browser will take care that it's accessible to people who cannot see or hear, and that it looks "good" regardless of what device you have. After all HTML does not specify how something looks like, only what structure it has.

And please don't get me started at "Enterprise Grade" software. We can do better than that. We can take the user into account, we can actually _fix_ bugs instead of creating an industry of software companies and consultants to sell workarounds.

After all "every 1000 lines" there is a bug, and every bug can be a security issue. Now while the number of 1000 if of course heavily disputed, a software project of a billion lines of code will have more bugs than one that has just a few thousands of lines.

Currently we often layer complexity on top of complexity, since it seems free. You can get some complex library to do something you don't actually need, since it's just an "import" statement away, and your build system downloads it automatically... and you can even package it into a Docker image so nobody will see it. Your trivial application uses Billions of lines of code, because you use a browser as a GUI toolkit and use some framework to be able to manage it, etc.

Some surprising thing I've noticed when trying to use AI to write software is that you can sidestep the problem. You can just tell the AI to write minimalist code and not use any unusual libraries... and it works. The programs are as short as you'd expect from a competent programmer. It's an interesting observation.

Maybe this could lead to less shitty software.

Signed code is not necessarily trustworthy. There is signed malware out there. Look at the mobile world, where everything is signed, but nothing is secure. (in the sense that it protects user data)
It's solving the wrong problem.

However there's a dark side to it. We have governments and companies trying to pass laws on how computers can be used. Having enforced signatures makes it easy to enforce such things.

... is a popular past time. Many people do this, often for fun.
It's so popular, there's even a Wiki for it
https://wiki.osdev.org/Expande...

There's insane AI datacenter spending, so they can tap that money. If they are smart, they'll sell those turbines up front and gather some money with it.

I mean it's no worse than their main business model, trying to sell some supersonic jets to billionaires.

"New Space" start-ups claim to be able to make orbital launches extremely cheap.

If you have any kind of start-up, it is vital that people believe that you can achieve your goal, regardless of how mundane of fantastical it is. If people stop believing that what you do is possible, you have lost. You need to keep up the "Legend" of your company, particularly if you have a long way to go. You cannot go to the moon or write yet another "to-do list app" if you don't believe in it.

So "New Space" startups have a very high interest in such demonstrations. And the demonstration is not that you can put a 1kW satellite into orbit, that's the trivial part of it, but that a company like Google, which has some credence, believes enough in it, that they do this little experimental project. Essentially it's an endorsement form Google, that they think "New Space" companies will eventually make orbital launches so cheap a data center in space makes sense. Of course since Google is probably invested in at least some of those companies, it only makes send in participating in such a project. After all that's funny money for them.

I mean Cisco is not exactly known for high quality software.It can't get that much worse. For example, IOS famously left the TCP part of TCP/IP to be implemented by the process using it... and had no memory protection for quite some time.

I mean the "good old days" on the web were, when people just made websites. Every ISP came with some webspace, and you had simple to use HTML editors, often WYSIWIG. Even Word had a (terrible) HTML export.

There simply was no need for Facebook or Twitter, you just posted something on your website. You had actual E-Mail... without HTML it was completely harmless to open an e-mail.

a) Foldable screen are very hard to get working reliably, and AFAIK nobody has yet managed to do so.
b) Apple is known for making fairly unreliable and hard to repair products. So much so that they actually drag down the market with them, lowering what is acceptable on the market.

Outside of Windows, 64 Bit is the norm for way over a decade now... and so is IPv6.

I haven't tried it myself, but apparently you can now get IPv6 stacks for some versions of Windows, but networking always seems to have been an afterthought there.

I mean even small models are Gigabytes in size, while big IoT devices have perhaps a single Gigabyte of storage and most systems are measured in Megabytes.

And that's even unrelated to the question of why a system with no agency would do it?

It's all pumping up hype with almost no connection to reality.

...the password was hard-coded to today's date, and some "smart" people put it directly onto the Internet (or via port forwarding).

To an outside person, this was virtually indistinguishable from an web-site, in fact from the screen-shots circulating on Fedi, it even looks well designed compared to many web-sites out there.

I means Google clearly doesn't think it's likely they'll need that level of power in the near future... but they cannot tell their investors that, since that would sound like they are quitting out of the AI race.

So the obvious solution is to make contracts with a company that will, most likely, never provide a service economically. Nobody has ever operated a nuclear power plant without heavy subsidies, and using old equipment that's long out of its desired life-span doesn't make it more economical. On the other side there are now a lot cheaper and simpler alternatives like solar, wind and battery storage. Look at the prices for solar panels, look at the prices for batteries. Nuclear will most likely never be able to come close to the economics of renewables. That ship has sailed in the last decade or so.

So in a few years, when the hype has died down, and we need much less data centers, Google will just be able to quietly back out, since Constellation Energy will most likely, not have delivered on their promise. Everyone is happy then, and the amount of money wasted is minimal.

Memory now is expensive now, and fewer people shell out for the gigabytes of memory a typical Linux system needs. So people will likely just stick to Windows and DOS games as those run fine on 64 Megabytes of RAM.

I mean, as the numbers show, few people played games on workstation class machines anyhow. Why waste hundreds of dollars or euros on a Linux workstation, when you can rescue a Windows box from scrap.