Re-Thinking the Desktop OS

Related to this is the phenomenon of turning everything into service. Why would you own things and accept responsibility for maintaining them, if you could just throw money at the service provider and have the thing be present when it's needed? Of course the thing will be extremely limited in what you can do with it, subject to Terms&Conditions, but why would you want to do anything non-standard with stuff? There's always another service you can throw money at to solve the same problem.

What's the end-game here? That we specialize into sub-species of humans, forever stuck in one role, with zero autonomy? No longer building wealth, we'll only be allocating the flow of money - from what Society gives us in reward for our work, straight to Services of said Society? Will we become specialized cells of the meta-multicellular organism Society becomes?

I can see how we're on the path towards that reality, and I absolutely hate it.

Not necessarily creating something. The OP really did shoot themself in the foot by using the word "coding", where what they most likely meant was doing simple alterations to computing systems that require understanding some basic control flow structures - conditionals and loops. Things like, "I seem to be doing the same repetitive sequence of steps 100x a day, let me automate this somewhat". Think Tasker and bash, not JavaScript and C++.

> this piling up of expectations just lead people to give up and pay for services rather than learn all that

A small bit of knowledge can save you a lot of money in services. I can get why wealthy wouldn't care, but most people aren't wealthy. Also, I feel there's more pressure from the sales&marketing departments of services than from modern society's demands on free time.

I started wit KDE Neon, but it failed to install drivers for my Nvidia card and proceeded to sabotage my sound drivers in the process (they were working fine before).

I then switched to ElementaryOS which did fine with my Nvidia but every time it played a sound it would send a loud crack in my speakers.

Back on Windows which I feel a prisoner of. The thing is sending data all over the internet, I can't even write a diary because I feel like I live in the USSR where I have to pay attention to everything I say or the KGB will get me (to be clear it's just a metaphor, I understand I can write whatever I want on my PC without consequences but I don't like the feeling that my inner thoughts would end up on a server somewhere).

You may notice that there's barely any English in this specification, or even examples. But that's not the main problem. The main problem for me is that this VM lacks support for arithmetic operations. Well that's not quite true. It has all the necessary components to support arithmetic operations: it has comparison and increment. Congratulations, now go build your own Peano from scratch.

The author claims that this is not a problem! The VM will optimize your increments in the loop to subtraction, and it will optimize those nested loops to multiplication and division. But now you have an even worse problem! How the hell are you going to detect that a loop is a subtraction?! It's a halting problem hard task. So instead what you end up having is a VM with an informal specification, and if you stray away too much from it, your program is going to run hundreds of loops just to subtract two values, which means the program may boil up the oceans until it finishes.

And if you're being so smarty-pants about increment and equality being sufficient for arithmetics, why not use Church numerals? That's an even simpler foundation that the Nock VM!

https://tromp.github.io/cl/Binary_lambda_calculus.html