The year is 2030.
Computers boot directly into the browser. IDEs are just a web app now, running in the GPU. No one knows why. Or how.
All programs run in 4 nested containers on top of a hypervisor abstracting over the 5 major computational clouds. The last time a branch was predicted correctly, in any CPU anywhere, was 4 years ago.
Cloud costs are withdrawn directly from your retirement fund.
Ext7 just came out, it's written in Javascript and uses AI to guess what the file may contain.
@chrisg
>The last time a branch was predicted correctly, in any CPU anywhere, was 4 years ago.
LMAO
#DavidFincher's fourth feature lobbed a stylistic dirty bomb of mischief into the arena of millennium anxiety — #FIGHTCLUB, starring #BradPitt and #EdwardNor...
i know its wrong to ask ChatGPT for a prospect but so did I and it even gave me some smiles 😁
The Year 2040:
Computing and Society:
1. The Hyper-Browser OS: By 2040, the browser is the computer. Layers of abstraction have reached absurd heights, where every interaction is mediated through predictive AI models embedded within the browser's neural framework. Offline computing is virtually extinct. "Kernel" now refers to the latest browser patch.
2. AI Drives Everything: IDEs, operating systems, games—everything is a predictive machine-learning black box. Programmers are more "prompt architects" than coders, working in layers of probabilistic inference where "bugs" are just emergent features.
3. Energy Collapse: The computational demand of multi-cloud, containerized infrastructure now consumes a measurable percentage of planetary resources. Renewable energies are monopolized by computation. Rolling brownouts are considered acceptable trade-offs for the privilege of using Excel 2040.
4. Financial Systems: Retirement funds are depleted in real-time to cover computational overheads. A market for "offline years" has emerged, where users sell their digital presence to spend time disconnected.
Technology:
1. Ext9 & ExtX: Filesystems are now interpreted as "suggestions." Ext9 doesn't store data at all—it merely indexes AI's best guess of what your files "should" contain. Users live in perpetual Schrödingerian doubt of their data integrity.
2. CPU Branch Prediction Paradox: By 2040, CPU design abandons traditional logic altogether. Computing is probabilistic at its core, with hardware optimized for running Monte Carlo simulations instead of sequential logic. Quantum computing promises salvation but remains locked in academic experimentation.
Cultural Backlash:
1. Neo-Luddite Revival: The FORTH-based internet of 2035 evolves into a full-fledged movement. These "Neo-Mechanists" build systems using only direct machine instructions and low-level network protocols like X.25. They shun anything predictive or abstracted, viewing JavaScript as the downfall of civilization.
2. Digital Feudalism: The breakaway Neo-Mechanists form isolated communities with strict rules: no cloud, no JavaScript, no containers. In these havens, simple, efficient devices run single-tasking FORTH-based OSes on 1980s CPUs. Their philosophy spreads underground, infiltrating corporate systems through "Trojan simplicity."
The Paradoxical Web:
1. Two Internets: The traditional internet continues as a bloated, cloud-driven monstrosity, accessible only via hyper-browser. Meanwhile, the WML-inspired "Othernet" flourishes quietly, powered by ad-hoc networks of long-abandoned devices. These separate realities rarely intersect.
2. Tech Collapse Warning: By 2040, mainstream systems are so complex and fragile that minor bugs cascade into global outages. Calls to "reboot the stack" grow louder, as the weight of abstraction becomes unsustainable.
Final Notes: In 2040, humanity stands on the precipice: either to simplify and reclaim control over technology, or to dive deeper into the abyss of predictive computation and abstraction.
@rysiek @chrisg Siemens was hiring Windows 3.11 Admins last year. 3.11 will be definitely around, too.
https://www.heise.de/news/Deutsche-Bahn-sucht-Admin-fuer-Windows-3-11-for-Workgroups-9611543.html
Copilot has replaced all programmers by 2028 and keeps spitting out ext implementations. No one can stop it.
@Reiddragon Yeah, this post is doing numbers and I'm not sure if that's because people think it's funny or because it's true.
Probably both?
I mean, it'll probably be called something different than ext7 - openAI will put their marketing team on it.
@neia That's ok, they are basically the same thing.
Or, if that's too hot a take, they share common causes.
@neia Completely agree, and (shameless plug) I wrote as much in my small dbms manifesto
https://radiki.dev/posts/a-small-dbms/
TL;DR I hate the cloud and what it represents. I just want us to stop wasting all that energy, creativity and resources just to sell ads.
@chrisg @neia Great post, thanks! A question, though. In my MediaWiki world "scaling" means that our wikis have millions of articles nobody cares about, but a few that get hit millions of times. Per second. And you don't know which.
I think this is similar in many software systems. Shops for example have a few bestsellers, or people buying the same stuff all at the same time. You don't want the system to crash exactly when you can make the most sales. Isn't this what scaling is about?
I agree that this can be one definition of scale. In my post, I talk about database scaling as processing large amounts of data. Not as the ability of a system to manage a large number of requests. That is a different challenge, that spans a larger part of the software stack. Databases are part of it, but doing that and managing petabytes of user data are different problems with different solutions and different implications.
@chrisg Funny thing: I was working on a filesystem using AI* to guess where to put file on a heterogenic disk matrix in most efficient way for long term storage cost.
[as always - AI was a simple model that could be just a bunch of ifs and elifs instead, but wouldn't sound so fancy].
@chrisg Hello world webpages requires a 7 node, 160 CPU cluster running Kubernetes and a pile of 67kB of IASC yaml. The webpage weighs 1.2MB.
(IASC stands for Intrastructure as Shitty Code, everyone does this now)
It's funny because it's really too far, it won't happen, right? 
@chrisg developers have to pay $1,000 a month to have their apps approved to run on "their" cloud computers
sideloading is a thing of the past, jailbreaking is a violation of ToS. every last processor instruction must be signed or it will be taken off the scheduler
@chrisg Correction: The year is 214. Last year was 214. Next year will be 214. Questioning this state of affairs gets you reassigned to reactor shielding duty.
("Repairing the reactor shielding? Doesn't sound so bad.")
@chrisg > Cloud costs are withdrawn directly from your retirement fund.
😂
It should be funny but it's too real. :(
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