That's like saying that all a new pharmacist needs to learn to get started in dispensing is one book: The PDR. The information on the medications is in there, the knowledge to comprehend it is not. If you had an infinite amount of time, and one of the really well-documented versions of Unix, what you say is true, for an educated and/or talented user. But not all man pages are very good, and some are missing entirely and it's not obvious where to find the documentation.

Some things are also only documented in the pages for programmers, but I've never seen a Unix system come with the kind of documentation you'd reasonably need to start learning C, or in most cases even shell scripting (although the modern bash man page is pretty good!)

If you read what I wrote, you didn't understand it.

Feel free to ask for clarification, or simply to point out any parts of what I wrote that you find unclear. I'm looking for ways to better explain this.

Yeah, it's going to be hard to establish a plausible positive ROI for interstellar travel. I think even public funding for probes will be problematic, since it will take years just to get flyby photos. Probably the first flyby will be funded by some rich guy.

General public believes whoever has the most money deserves it.

Then someone new has the most money, what happened to the old guy? Fell out of God's favor? Never mind all that, we're looking at the new shiny shiny, we've got no time for any other kind of reflection.

Prosperity theology is the dominant belief system. To the winner go the spoils.

When you say that someone's argument is bad because they are allegedly unsophisticated, that is ad hominem. When you say that someone is clearly unsophisticated because of their foolish argument, that is not ad hominem. This is probably the most widely misunderstood logical fallacy, if only because it's the most familiar — if not well-known, in that it is not well-understood. It means argument from a person, and if you are not arguing that someone's argument is bad because of some thing about them which doesn't affect the argument true or not then it's not an ad hominem.

For example, pointing out that someone's argument is potentially biased because they are relevantly economically involved is a valid response to someone claiming they have no reason to make deceptive statements, but it's still not a valid argument for or against a position because it doesn't make specific testable claims. It's just window dressing intended to engender an emotional response. Even though it's not an insult, if you're depending on it to prove something did or didn't happen or to distract from a lack of proof, it's still the same logical fallacy.

If you think someone is being needlessly insulting, you can just say that. There's no need to invoke ad hominem to point out that someone is being a bell end.

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

That's literally the premise of this thread.

It's not that it's sacred, that's a dumb take. It's not just a job like any other, that's an ignorant take.

Perhaps it should be, but it's the private sector that should change, to provide more accountability.

DMV jobs are complicated because the law is complicated.

IRS jobs, potentially the same. It depends on the level of the person you're talking to.

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

Microsoft needs OEMs to buy licenses, even at a deeply discounted rate this is important (and importantly, has been dependable) revenue. They only do that when they are selling PCs. Microsoft had to help those OEMs sell PCs to capture that revenue.

Microsoft knows that source is drying up. Companies will be able to move away from Windows. This is why they have been shifting their focus towards the cloud. Like IBM, they have become a services company as they became staid and unable to execute on delivering exciting products, or in fact products people want. Instead, the best they can do is products they're forced to use. The money is all the same color no matter what the feelings behind it are...

The methodologies of these surveys are often mysterious and when we find out how they work they are usually bad, so you shouldn't take any particular major change seriously unless you know specifically why it happened. If you read statcounter's FAQ, they basically say they publish data as they get it, and then say they make some modifications, and then say that's basically publishing data as they get it, pinky swear! So you probably shouldn't take it seriously ever.

I started using Linux at a time when it was still pretty common for people using Unixlikes on PC to not use graphics, though I did put in a 1 MB VGA card and start using X right away. Still, maybe that kind of perspective is why I consider more things to be "using Linux" than some people do. Even Android is recognizably Linux underneath, when you consider it from the shell. You can put a full userland on it and have hundreds of users logged into your phone playing rogue and using icb, if people still did that.

Lots of things including changes in methodology or changes in default browser fingerprints could have caused this.

OK, but Apple is still going to need high speed memory for all of their products after this too. They would still gain the benefits of additional vertical integration. They themselves represent sufficient demand to keep many facilities busy without any other customers, so it seems like there's no drawbacks here.

Because self-supposed leftists who are really just too lazy to vote stay home.

The basis of expectation of failure comes from experience that others have had with maintaining AI-generated code. Maybe you're right and the tech will progress, some new discovery even more profound than transformers will be found and you actually will be able to maintain that code. Good luck!