#hardware

The word behind every restart describes something that cannot be done: lifting yourself off the ground by your own straps. Engineers in the 1950s chose the idiom precisely because it names a real paradox at the bottom of every machine, and the paradox is still there.

When a program dies badly, the file it leaves behind is named after hardware that has been extinct for fifty years: little ferrite rings threaded by hand onto wire grids, by the millions, mostly by women whose work your crash reports still commemorate.

The industry is spending 2.59 trillion dollars a year to etch gen-AI into physical silicon, on the bet that this paradigm is the durable one. The paying base is about 50 million people, the productivity that would pay for it isn't measurable, and no software paradigm has ever been the forever thing.