I wonder: is there any reason beyond sheer curiosity* to learn Fortran in 2025? Not being snarky, genuinely curious about what Fortran brings to the table.
Yes; I am seriously thinking of getting the "Modern Fortran Explained" book (https://academic.oup.com/book/56095). Modern Fortran has everything (Procedural, OO, Functional, Multithreading, Parallel etc. features) that all modern languages have. I would say it is no longer "just" for numerical computing. Excellent libraries/ecosystem, a well supported and stable language, fantastic optimization right out of the box etc. makes it a great general purpose language.
I suspect that nearly all of the Fortran code that will exist ten years from now already exists today, so knowing the language is a skill that is more likely to be useful to you for performance testing and code porting than for new development.
The trickiest part of really learning Fortran today is that it is hard to define what the language is, apart from the practical definition imposed by what its seven or so surviving compilers accept and how they interpret it. There are near-universally portable features that are not part of the ISO standard; there are standard features that are not at all portable, or not available at all anywhere. So what one should know as “Fortran” is its reasonably portable intersection of features across multiple compilers, and there isn’t a good practical book that will teach you that.
Fortran is still the best way to write scientific computing codes for HPC environments. And not just because of legacy code. You know how all those language benchmarks have C as the reference class (and fastest)? Fortran is faster still, by a significant margin.
They bought unfinished components and have no ability to finish them. They're now waste just sitting on shelves and by the time we could do this and get them into production lines, they'll be obsoletd by DDR6.
Yeah, that is my main worry - that whatever they ordered is actually unusable for normal people once they go bankrupt, so there is not only nothing to auction of to the creditors, but also nothing to alleviate the shortage in the short term.
As with all Ponzi schemes OpenAI will eventually go bankrupt, yet it continues to receive money from the unwary. I wonder how the research division at Disney feels about what their bosses have done...
But it should happen earlier due what is happening with the RAM, as it sounds quite illegal, like anticompetitive hoarding, cornering the market, raising rivals' costs, consumer welfare harm, and so on.
> besides the risk that an OS update will break this app
Tangential, but what a sad state of affairs is that an OS update can break your app. I'm not a windows user (not voluntarily, at least), but I always appreciated the stability and retrocompatibilità that allowed old apps to run unmodified on modern systems. I heard they dropped the ball on this as well, though.
> This drives up the "real" price of these purchases because of the time constraint.
I'd say you answered your own question.
> telco's tend to be oligopolies and tend to also do some form of price collusion among themselves, it was generally accepted as "just how things were"
So are LLM companies, at this stage
> Am I missing something?
Not really
> Is this really how things should be?
No, this is how thing are. I'm more than interested in ways to change the status quo, though.
How you consume social media is not what everyone does.
For example my SO spends hours on end on Facebook. Depending on whether you consider it social media I sometimes sink a lot of time (think hours) on YouTube. And that's time we're not spending on reading.
In light of this the question doesn't seem as twisted.
So what next? Wheelchair ramps? Seats for the elderly and the pregnant? Accessibility features don't displace or even inconvenience the majority in any manner. They only make facilities accessible to an additional crowd, who should be getting them as a matter of right in the first place. What's the end game here?
The endgame is to normalize punishing groups/individuals for any reason on a whim of the ones in charge. Start with minorities and people who can’t defend themselves, then later you can do easier to anyone who gets inconvenient. Despotism 101.
They can be if a font is chosen due to it being easier to read for some people and then it's reverted so that those people will then struggle to read. It's akin to removing ramps from shops to make it awkward for those in wheelchairs.
The president of the US struggles to stay awake in his brief detours from the golf course. It’s a perfect metaphor for the country. All seriousness has left the building.
This reads like a mish-mash of various science fiction sources I can't quite pinpoint (except WALL-E in the end, maybe).
Anyway, that's probably how it would go, but I'd like to think of the better vision for the future where such a machine would instead result in a post-scarcity world where one of the few actual jobs is designing the stuff the machine creates (of course excluding all the jobs that can actually be automated once the economy changes so drastically).
So it's possible to get better sound quality with better quality tapes and players, but I'm pretty sure the player that's using that description falls neatly into the shitty equipment category.
reply