I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"One day, shortly before Christmas, an insect becomes jammed in a teleprinter, which misprints a copy of an arrest warrant it was receiving. This leads to the arrest and death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle instead of suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle. ..."

Data center use of power is very high, but water is often being overestimated. See https://theconversation.com/ai-has-a-hidden-water-cost-heres-how-to-calculate-yours-263252 for a good basic discussion of the issues involved.

I've been a participant here for what 30 years now? Lately very little participation, but I do regularly read these posts. I have also been in the computing industry for the past 40+ years. I've used Linux for the past 20 or so, and I own and operate a computer repair shop. I have for the past 20 years.

I started using Ai when it came out believing that it could help resolve tech issues. Technology changes virtually every day, and with every release, which seems to be ever so frequent. It is hard for sole individual to get up to speed and to stay up with technology (Linux, Mac, Windows).

My opinion is that Ai is only good for ideas. It is unqualified to actually suss out the cause of an issue and give precise responses, that is without the user knowing so much about the issue up front as to make the use of Ai pointless for that endeavor. It is good for ideas and to gain some clarity on how to proceed.

Some new users to Linux fail to understand that Linux is free, as in beer, and it is up to them to try; to give it their best go. The expectations that I have seen over the years from new users, as Linux has gained popularity, is that Linux is "Windows" in this regard; that the software community owes them the answer. Ai is just good enough that it can give them some clues about how to approach a problem that they have never experienced before. Clearly that's a benefit. Ai is not a replacement for new users to put in the work up front, nor is it tech support.

By David Goodstein, then vice-provost of Caltech in 1994, pointing to a long need for systemic change: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever.
        I think we have our work cut out for us."

That said, I am all for lots more funding of science and technological research (especially small-scale projects)!

Also on how this continues to play out, by Philip Greenspun:
https://philip.greenspun.com/c...
        "Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:
        "A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?"
        Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
* young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
* men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
        Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. ...
        It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.
        What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory. ..."

Frankly, as a science&technology-inspired once-upon-a-time mathnerd (i.e. similar to many here on Slashdot), who thinks our global society desperately needs better technology appropriate to small-scale locally-controlled sustainable living (while also needing better social sciences to support better ways of collaborating productively), this state of affairs saddens me. Bbut I can't deny the truth of a lot of what David Goostein and Philip Greenspun wrote.

Yes there is some demand for trained people in industry with PhDs. But technical workers in big corporations is not what the academic system historically is set up to produce. And the results are a lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction all around.

Another piece of the unhappiness puzzle:
"Disciplined Minds"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
        In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
        The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
        Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

But the whole work system in general is broken and full of needless suffering: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
        I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

Examples of sci-fi stories envisioning something better include The Skills of Xanadu, Voyage form Yesteryear, and Manna.

Still trying to extort money from IBM after all this time. Nothing like a business model made up entirely of rent seeking.

Also a separate reply to note a specific detail: > 12 and 21 You mean 15 and 21. There's no way Shor's algorithm would factor 12. It only factors odd numbers.

What evidence? The only evidence you've provided was a vague wave about Shor's algorithm, which we're in agreement with. You haven't attempted to give anything else remotely resembling evidence, like a link, a citation, a source, anything here. And then after all the insults here and in the other thread where you and I discussed these issues you think the problem is me being an asshole? How hard is it rather than insult people to just give evidence that I and everyone else in this thread can actually look at, or for you to go back to the prior thread where we were having a conversation and continue that?

People are really quick to accuse things of being AI. I've lost track of how many times on Reddit I've written two or three paragraphs with citations and someone responds accusing it of being AI. Apparently the bar is very low, and seems even lower if one is arguing for something they disagree with. But I've also had this happen with short stories. I had someone claim a short story I wrote was AI generated when the story was from 2019 and thus predated any AI that could write more than a few sentences.

I'm not sure why you think that. It wouldn't be surprising if Israel has access to Signal App chats, and other things. But you don't need quantum computers for that. The vast majority of penetrations of secure systems involve finding implementation bugs, or infecting machines thought to be secure, or social engineering, or given how the beeper operation went, possibly just compromising phones at their source before they even get to the targets. And we have good evidence that the governments have not yet built quantum computers on a scale that can decrypt anything substantial. There are two major lines of evidence.

First, while we've seen some government investment in quantum computing, we're seeing scientists and engineers there publish in the open. When they get really close, some of that will start getting classified. That's happened with a bunch of techs before. Georgy Flerov was able to detect that the US was working on an atomic bomb because all of the apparent public nuclear research stopped. Similarly, a sign in the 1970s to the US that the Soviets were *not* working on stealth aircraft was that the work on related ideas such as the work by Ufimstev and related work had not been classified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ufimtsev.

Second, the US and its allies have built giant data storage facilities and are still expanding those. The Utah Data Center is the obvious big example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center but other governments have built similar smaller facilities. This doesn't make much sense if one has quantum computers. But it makes a lot of sense if one is expecting to get quantum computers a few years from now since it lets one do the strategy of storing massive numbers of messages now for later decryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later.

There is however one argument in your favor. If one looks at the history of declassified material from the NSA, material from GCHQ (the British analog of the NSA), and looks also at declassified Soviet material, anthe pattern seems to be that the classified version is generally 10 to 20 years ahead of the unclassified work on a bunch of things. (For the Soviet end, this stops being the case in the 1980s it seems, but I don't know how much of that is that the USSR is just falling apart and how much of this them failing to archive things well, or make their archives available, or failure to declassify things. Also, the Soviets were never quite as good at a lot of cryptography things. For example, while both NSA and GCHQ came up with a lot of ideas about public key cryptography before it was public, I'm not aware of any evidence the Soviets did.) So by that logic, if one thinks that quantum computers will be practically able to do some decryption within 15 years or so, then that's an argument that it should be plausible that the NSA can do it now.

Local models aren't very good for many purposes. For example, for doing math reasoning, they are poor enough to be completely useless. There's a version of your proposal that would be much more workable though: require that new data centers are built with solar power and batteries that offsets much of their power consumption. Even if you only have them offset 20% or 30%, that would go a long way. And then if the current boom does go under, the worst situation is you have a big set of solar panels that can feed back into the grid.

This is exactly the sort of response that isn't helpful. You haven't provided any evidence. You haven't grappled with anything I said. You've just repeated yourself. I don't know if QCs are going to become practical soon or not, but I suspect they will be in the next decade. But I'm very aware that people who have thought about it much more than I have disagree on the timeline here. Gil Kalai, for example, thinks humans will *never* have quantum computers based on fundamental physical issues. But I'm able to disagree with Kalai on this while not having the arrogance to label him as deluded or lying. It is true that there are some people who claim that QCs are going to happen real soon now who are probably lying, but that happens whenever you have some large-scale investment. You'll get some people, a certain investment type, who has so little connection to the truth that understanding whether they are lying is genuinely difficult to determine. But you get that in all sorts of industries, and the probable success should be judged on the underlying mechanisms and trends, not on the presence of some hucksters.