semi-extrinsic

I believe Signal last year started allowing you to backup your primary account and transfer it to a new device?

Other clouds are similarly odd (or even worse). I have experienced in Azure that if you provision a resource group with some basic SKU for a given service, the only way to later upgrade to the latest and greatest SKU is to tear down the whole resource group and re-provision everything from scratch. All attempts at scale-up in place will fail with cryptic errors. Seems like you are assigned in an old corner of the DC and can't get out of it.

Extra fun if there is a key vault involved, then you have to manually delete every key in it, otherwise you can't create new keys with the same names in the new vault.

The best version is of course Dick Pick, creator of the Pick operating system (not joking).

I think OP doesn't want techno-babble, but coherent and causal interactions of everyday objects in their story.

Mary packed the binoculars in chapter 3, therefore she may use them on the train in chapter 6.

Mechanical integrity in industrial processes is often divided into two categories: static equipment (tanks, pipes, heat exchangers...) and rotating equipment.

These two have very distinct failure modes. The failure mechanisms for solid state electronics are much more similar to those for static equipment (corrosion, thermal fatigue, creep, ...)

I know a guy who is very proud of the fact that he has a Flask based web app, fully exposed on the public web, running with >99.9% uptime on a cheap hosted VM with zero updates to either the OS or application code since 2016.

I have no argument against the case that scientists may one day send a probe to travel to other solar systems. Probably it will be unmanned.

This does not extrapolate to a dark forest scenario.

None of these points solve the underlying economic problem. You would not get any ROI for hundreds of years, at which point the people who made the huge investment are no longer alive, and the companies/nations may not even exist anymore.

Or maybe it's so boring that the math of the universe (practically achieavable time to travel to another solar system) makes the galaxy a set of distinct systems, where 1 in X has an intelligent species which has achieved orbit, but with no transit in between.

It's not a cool concept to write scifi books about, but it may still be the reality we live in.

The most likely situation (by many orders of magnitude) is that the only practical way of getting to another star system, even in the far far future, is a generation ship travelling 50+ years one way with a significant risk of people dying from organ failure or cancer along the route. This would represent a 1000x speed improvement over current tech and is only a factor of 10x slower than lightspeed.

It is entirely unfeasible for any company or even government to spend money on such a project. Even if the ground on the other planet is strewn with diamonds and gold and the elixir of eternal life, you are looking at ~200 years before any ROI can be realised.

It's actually no different for dice than for LLMs. Explaining accurately the reason for the exact outcome of any given dice roll someone makes would be stupendously hard. It would require lots of instrumentation and math and be poorly transferrable to another surface, another player, etc.

But even so people don't say that we don't understand how dice work.

Saying that we don't understand how LLMs work is exactly like saying we don't understand how dice, or tires, or golf ball shots work. Or like the old myth that we don't understand how bumblebees fly.

I am entirely unsure whether to upvote or downvote.

If you think about what it actually means to have a time-varying smooth body force defined in all of 3-space, you fairly quickly come to that kind of conclusion.

Even if someone comes up with a construction that does not require any forcing, it is going to be some extremely weird initial conditions that you will never be able to even approximate in reality unless you can move all the individual molecules of a fluid around and set their initial velocities from a far distance.

"Does there exist a pathological combination of smooth body forces and initial conditions for this set of PDEs, where singularities appear, which by the way is completely impossible to actually create in the real world unless you are a literal God?" is a question of math, not physics. This is a hill I will die on.