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.

Yeah, but you could just put everything you'd put into a satellite into a small shed and plop that somewhere. There's extemely little to be gained by going into space for such things, particularly considering the effort.

The promise of "new space" startups like SpaceX is, that they will somehow be able to reduce the costs of bringing up something into space by multiple orders of magnitude. That's what they promise, if people stop believing that they can do that eventually, they will just implode.

Bringing electronics into space has it's problems, but it's essentially proven technology. We have had space stations converting many kilowatts for decades now. We can do that, we know how to do that. We know where to get the energy from (storage and batteries) we know how to cool that. We know how to do high-speed data links. A Terabit to a LEO satellite is just a regular engineering problem.

So why don't we just put data centers in orbit? The answer is that putting anything into orbit is prohibitively expensive. We can have most of the advantages of the technology also without putting stuff into space. You can run data centers by solar and wind, heck it's hard to find a hosting company in Germany, for example, that does not do that.

Claiming that data centers in space have a future is claiming that "new space" companies are likely to achieve their goal. I don't know how much investment Google has in "new space", but if it's a billion, spending some pocket money on such an experiment seems like a sensible investment to strengthen that investment.

The market for fashion-statement laptops is already crowded. You can buy hundreds of different "to thin to be useful" laptops, that barely work under real life conditions.

There would be a market for easy to maintain laptops that are thick enough to not only provide essential ports (Framework failed on this), but also provide the ability to have battery packs of meaningful size. (e.g. >100Wh)

Don't have to be a profit^w prophet to see that coming.

IQ measurements keep going up.
Autism diagnoses keep going up.
The price of food keeps going up.
People get a year older every year.

Something fishy is going on.

Are they going to chip you, or control your brain by more direct means?

Yes, but think how great the fire sale is going to be for everyone else.

Well, some people think AI will extinctify us within four years, whereas if the IRGC gets nukes they'll figure out like everyone else that they can't actually use them except in self defense without getting erased, so the only difference will be that we won't be able to try crush them anymore.

Yes, tell us how easy the current effort is turning out to be. Someone grabbed a tiger by the tail and can neither subdue it nor let go. The IRGC is probably laughing its ass off.

Said every Native American ever.

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

I prefer the Martian bear.

Why do programming languages keep repeating the same mistake of side-stepping established ways to provide libraries (e.g. the OS distribution systems) and run some self-service systems where anybody can just upload their malware with nobody looking over it?

It's one of those ideas that immediately sound like a bad idea. We have made so much progress in memory safety with languages like Rust and Go, only for those security advanced to be eliminated by a system that downloads dependencies from a random server. Dependencies that often would be better suited for the standard library.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

Yes, Don-boy, I called you a fuckup. Tell the FCC to ban the internet.