Does it give you tools to change what you can change, though?

I’ll be reading “Meditations” soon enough, but emphasis on the means to accept things you are helpless about, and not the opposite, can lead to learned helplessness.

If young people take up on these ideas, they just can’t know better at their stage in life, one where they can be, for the most part, helpless.

These architectures were for were high end machines at the time, universities and government agencies would indeed been the only ones buying these, and they probably migrated to commodity hardware long ago; if migrating to a PC-compatible architecture had been off the table for them, so had been keeping these things running after their EOL.

(In my second-tier university at my developing country, the Sun workstation hadn’t been turned on in years by the late 2000s, and the the minicomputer they bought in the 1980s was furniture at the school)

Edit: As for big businesses, they have support plans from IBM or HP for their mainframes, nothing relevant to Debian.

All I find searching for “embedded m68k Linux distro” is people looking for, or coming up with, alternatives, as Debian was already “too big” fifteen years ago.

I don’t get the fuzz around the “retro computing” verbiage. I doubt anyone is actually running Debian on these devices out of necessity, someone who plays baroque music in reconstructed period instruments won’t balk at being called an “early music” enthusiast.

Aren’t m68k computers only a few models from the 1990s and 1980s, and some more recent hobby projects? That’s squarely in the retro computing enthusiasts category.

I’m not in the Debian world, but those do seem to me like the types of systems that could use their own specialized distros rather than being a burden to the mass market ones. It’s not as if you could run a stock configuration of any desktop environment on them anyway.

The machine god would still need resources provided by humans on their terms to run; the AI wouldn’t sweat having to run, for instance, 5 years straight of its immortality just to figure out a 10 years plan to eventually run at 5% less power than now, but humans may not be willing to foot the bill for this.

There’s no guarantee that the singularity makes economic sense for humans.