You may want to support development. So that it, you know, does not go away. Obviously, that idea is altruistic and not everybody understands that concept.

I never had any real problems with floppy disks. But I always bought quality brands, both for disks and for drives. There was a lot of bad quality disks and drives around back then.

One of the characteristics of shoddy / cheap manufacturing is that the products have large variations, sometimes with long rhythms. It is entirely possible that some factory produced "good" zip drives for a day or even several regularly and you got lucky. The thing is, good products have consistent quality. Bad ones do not.

The difference is the Ukrainian version does its job well ...

The whole thing probably needs a few more decades to work well. I guess somebody "important" had to blow up their ego and could not wait. Also reminds me of certain other projects, like some tunnels, for example.

Alcohol is a flawed comparison. The only positive use alcohol has is as entertainment and even that is problematic. With a "screen", you may be reading a book, learning some things or doom-scrolling.

The main problem is IMO that some content is designed to be addictive. Most social media is trying to be. LLMs are dramatically so. But other stuff is not.

What you do when in front of a screen may be though.

Exactly. And with the uncertainty LLMs now bring to the table, your software must be secure by construction to have a good chance of survival. This includes architecture, design and implementation and requires real insight and experience. Testing can only do so much. Review only really works if it looks at the construction principles used. If you "vibe code", you can basically throw the result away directly after finishing it.

Agreed. And I also have moved to SSDs in external cases and some quasi-SSD memory sticks (they have SMART). But I miss the "store and forget" thing I could do with MODs.

Unless they have an actor of comparable skills driving things, this will remain flat and boring. All generative AI can do is imitation and averages. For some things that is enough, but it will never be good.

LLM-type AI has some uses, but it is not the "God machine" many people seem to believe, after ample prompting by the LLM pushers. It is just a tool. It can do some things somewhat well but unreliably and needs a lot of manual oversight by actual experts. "Vibe coding" is somewhat suitable for mock-ups (which is useful), but cannot create production stable / secure / maintainable code and thereby fails basically all fundamental requirements for production code.

In the end, we will see what we saw with all other AI hypes: Productivity increases in the 1..10% range for some very specific things, productivity decreases in many others things that got pushed. Not a surprise. Only because of unfettered greed and customer stupidity did things get scaled to a completely irrational level and hence there will be a real crash this time, with real damage. The last AI hypes basically fizzled out quietly. Let's hope the sure-to-come next AI winter is bad enough that it makes it amply clear for at least a few decades that computers are not magic and cannot be magic and people should stop believing that.

Not reliable and not durable. Initially, it worked great, but then it started to have trouble. I had the SCSI version. I eventually got an MOD drive as replacement that never caused any issues. But sadly consumers do not want reliable storage, so MOD was not developed further.

IMO, the Zip drive was just another badly made piece of technology that claimed to be something it was not. Quite like QIC-80, at least the consumer versions. Essentially just a money-grab.

AI would have caught it if it was told it was there or at least to go look exactly there for it! Oh, wait...

Many will still be doing software, but with an actual engineering education to help them. But Data Science? I think that stuff may be within reach of AI eventually. It is mostly statistics and data conditioning, both things AI can do. Of course, really good data scientists will still be in demand, but the mid-range ones? They may be screwed.

You are quite likely correct.