Just realised the loss of vendors UNIX also ment the processors that went with it :
No more Alphas, PA-RISC, now Itaniums, I suppose true also for SPARC...
That also means less architecture and implementation choices, no?
Leaving us in UNIX world with Mac or AIX...
Is that to mean the only competition left is Intel vs Power-PC ?
Could that explain the decline here? People coming are mainly under linux, using GUI and not really bothered on the internals, leaving that to paid support? ( since we see fewer posts here...) they can afford now they are not running on costly HW and OS...
Unix-like operating systems dominate global computing: Android and iOS power virtually all smartphones, while Linux and other Unix-like systems host roughly 92% of websites with an identifiable server operating system.
UNIX is far from extinct. Its descendants and Unix-like systems dominate smartphones, web/cloud infrastructure, supercomputers, networking equipment, and much embedded infrastructure.
Traditional commercial UNIX variants such as AIX and Solaris have declined, but the UNIX architecture and programming model thrive through Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, BSD, and related systems. In practical influence, UNIX is more pervasive today than ever.
On the other hand, LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude are rapidly making traditional discussion forums seem obsolete.
Where will this lead as humans become less dominant in online forums, discussions, blogs, and other social media, while LLMs are increasingly trained on content generated by other LLMs?
I recently began examining this issue in a draft paper:
Well I see more and more senior ( more than highly trained and qualified...) developers/engineers retiring in banks because fed up of seeing AI being used more and more, and having to correct code generated by outsourced site, like in Portugal, using Claude... and reading in the news how many more are getting sacked in banks here in Switzerland because of restructuration and use of AI, the true knowledge is being lost, and one day, a really bad back kick would not surprise me...
So what will be the next revolution?
I am for a return to little/small or whatever you want to call it, is beautiful, even if it means a lot to learn in order to master, now no one really masters anything look how lost are the IT directions when facing a production issue, and when all the different involved teams ( HW, Net, Architecture design, OS...) say they see no issues their side, but Production are going nuts with the issue...
I'm working with skilled dev's who are being enthrawled/entrapped by the allure of the AI tools available to them, I constantly feel obliged to remind them its no more that an aide in its current guise and that they need to revert to first principals wrt coding else they're effectively throwing away the n*years experience they've gained to get where they are and bequeathing that to 'someone' who comes across as way more 'expert' than themselves. ! , use it but don't lose it
Ironically (maybe even more ironically in some way), probably more than 90% of the server infrastructure training and running today’s LLMs is itself UNIX-based, overwhelmingly Linux
My thoughts are that as soon as the human touch is finally eliminated "...who ya gonna call?...".
Certainly not Ghost Busters... ;oO
Imagine this scenario:
"""
It is way into an almost dystopian future and the world's society has
shrunk to a very minute size due to man made predictable circumstances.
Most of the species have become extinct and food, oxygen, and EVERYTHING
else for homosapien survival is now created by machines.
The population is ruled by an aging lady from a bland room controlled
by the said machines; she is known as the Master Leader.
The machines do absolutely everything, and Master Leader can command any
machine to do as she requests via a voice recognition computing network.
The most important machine is the Mending Machine, its job is to repair
or replace any broken machines as they wear out.
Requests from the now tiny population are made to Master Leader and she
tells the relevant machines to do said requests...
One day Master Leader asks the Mending Machine to go and repair another
faulty machine and a reply comes back via the computing network...
"The Mending Machine is unable to do the repair or replacement of the
faulty machine!"
In panic Master Leader shouts in anger, "WHY, DO AS I COMMAND?".
The reply from the network comes back:
"Because the Mending Machine is in need of mending and none of all the
other machines know how to do that!"
Master Leader, now in frightened shock, stares forlornly at the opposite
wall of her bland room......
The END?
"""
Scary eh?
Who mends the Mending Machine?
This could well be analogous to the OP...
There is a very good dystopian and very funny book by Adrian Tchaikovsky called Service Model which is touches on your very point @wisecracker
Service Model is a 2024 satiricalscience fiction novel by British author Adrian Tchaikovsky. The novel tells the story of a robotic valet who murders his own master, and further explores the robot's journey to discover a reason for existence during the collapse of human society.[1]
The Audible audiobook is performed by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is very good and super "laughing out loud" funny:
