And who does that?

I think you don’t really get my point. I’m not arguing that there are no ways to archive data. I’m arguing that there are no technologies available for average Joe.

It is hardly a good strategy to basically set up half a datacenter at home.

Thin concrete slabs are extremely brittle.

Is it? It’s rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?

You’d have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That’s not really low complexity.

But what actually is “archival”?

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.

and I could make a death ray out of my home wifi box and a wok.

I mean, you could. Do you happen to have a small nuclear reactor and about 400l of liquid helium?

It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.

Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.

Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.

Well, obviously, you just have to put a sticker with a geometric pattern on it to turn the bad radiation into good radiation!

(I wish that was a joke, but you can actually buy those)

He’s still on YouTube, in case you didn’t know.

What really bothers me is that rpi seems to have “lost its way”.

I’d argue, there are essentially two camps here. The close-to-x86 camp, who want powerful, but efficient small machines, and the tinker-board camp, who want cheap machines with barely any power needs, basically a microcontroller on steroids, that you can buy an entire school class worth of for a few bucks.

Rpis started in the latter camp. 35€ for reasonable performance, great software for kids to tinker with, hardly any requirements, everyone has a usb mouse/keyboard.

But nowadays pis are in the no man’s land between. They’re priced above cheap N100 PCs, but are not as powerful, and simultaneously way too expensive and involved for throwing them at children - like it was initially intended.

I’m not sure, how that’s supposed to be sustainable.

I have to say, I’m always skeptical of proposals that seem too active.

Agriculture is mostly passive. Of course plants need care, but most of the time, they’re doing their thing alone. If you need constant monitoring, maintenance, resource cycling, etc, etc, it’ll drive costs up very quickly and will need to be detached from nature quite a bit.

This is, at best, a niche solution for rich countries. It won’t feed the masses.

Not even one generation, the entire runtime is not even 10 years, and you’d have to be in a rather small age bracket to get the full brunt of the “cultural” impact. My parents’ generation watched it, but it wasn’t really all that different from everything else for them.

It’s actually super interesting to see the fall of GoT. It fell into oblivion almost immediately after the last season finished.

Look at crowdstrike. A tiny error disabled millions of computers for hours. Think about what would have happened, if this wouldn’t have been an error, but an actual attack.

Look at the supply chains of medical supplies. One major outbreak of some bacterial disease in India or China will lead to them stopping exports and since so many pills are produced there, a huge drop in global supply.

Look at the undersea cables. There are not that many and capable malicious actor could easily destroy a lot of them.

Look at the power grid. I don’t know about other parts of the world, but the European grid, spanning pretty much all countries in Europe plus turkey, has no plan for a cold start. If it breaks down, there’s gonna be blackouts for weeks.

Of course, none of that will end society, but that’s not how collapses work anyway. One event triggers another, and the combination leads to the collapse itself.

As a software engineer, this is exactly how software works.

Everything is just a huge mess bolted and duct taped together, sometimes over decades. And it’s all way too complex to understand and crap like crowdstrike happens.

You can’t rely on anything anymore and I’m pretty sure, our highly interdependent world will come very close to collapse if anything major happens. Covid was a warning shot, but nobody heard it.

That’s the nature of capitalism.

Look at healthcare, software, construction. Unless there’s a very clear incentive to produce high quality (laws or enforceable contracts) things will go lower and lower in quality.

And unfortunately, a lot of consumers don’t care all that much about quality. They want crap that looks fancy.

For a lot of Asian countries the “asian dream” is still somewhat realistic.

Just look at China or Korea. Many of the older folks there grew up in abject poverty, but the countries managed to develop themselves through hard labor into modern, wealthy nations. The promise of “my kids will have it better” was actually true for them. And that promise still drives a lot of the work culture. In China the first cracks already appear, since for the first time in 50 years or so, the current youth has no way up anymore.

It’s not about capabilities, it’s about cost.

If you can exploit your workers, pay shit wages for long hours, you’ll get a cheaper product. You can get the same output by applying higher standards, but that would mean hiring more people.

Aren’t those already available in some (online) stores?

Why the question marks, the answer is always yes.

Microcontrollers aren’t “the whole board”, following that definition, an SoC wouldn’t have a CPU either.

MCs require support components. Clocks, power converters, level shifters, modem, etc. You’ll hardly wire a barrel plug and a servo directly to a DIP (though that would be pretty cool).

Those are still CPUs. Microcontrollers have CPUs, and those are the smallest units that can actually run code in a meaningful way.

However, Linux needs an MMU as far as I know, so you won’t see Ubuntu boot on an esp32, even though it does have a CPU.