Considering that the internet was invented and built from scratch by the US military, US universities, and US companies, why are you surprised? And who do you suggest could or should manage much of the internet backbone, if not them?

Wow, lovely cartography and lovely works of art! And so many cities to choose from!

The (only) people who pay for Windows are corporate managers. Therefore, the main purpose of Windows is to make corporate managers happy. Corporate managers want updates to install promptly, so they can tick their ISO compliance box saying "no insecure software running here". They couldn't care less about an annoying experience or slightly reduced productivity for their underlings. Therefore, Windows succeeds at its main purpose.

That's how it was in the good ol Usenet days! Eg alt.tv.simpsons. Not sure how URLs ended up being the other way round.

I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.

Yes! Exactly that - basics of unix - was one of the first-semester courses in my comp sci degree. It has served me well ever since.

You don't pay for RDS because you care about IOPS. You pay for it because you want backups and replication to be somebody else's problem. And because you (by which I mean probably the MBA management above you, rather than you yourself) care about it being an opex rather than capex cost, a lot more than you care about how much the cost is. And because ISO audit boxes get ticked.

If you want your own hardware to be OPEX, just do leasing. Every enterprise hardware seller will make you an offer for that.

I wouldn't say it's closing to completion - it looks like it's in the very early stages development according to their repo. I don't see any evidence they've gotten as far as even running a single query through it.

Even when it's done, it's going to be a lot of work to run. sure, it's not guaranteed to be hard, but if it's not your core business and you're making money, having someone else do it gives you time to focus on what matters.

Agreed. But I'd also be willing to bet big, that the cycle of "new AI breakthrough is made, AI bubble ensues and hypesters claim AGI is just around the corner for several years, bubble bursts, all quiet on the AI front for a decade or two" continues beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now.

True. We have our gods, same as every other tribe throughout history.

We've "succeeded" at space flight about as much as we've "succeeded" at AI. Yay, man on the moon! Over half a century later, and it turns out that the "next small step" - man on Mars - isn't so small and still hasn't been achieved. Anything remotely resembling sci-fi-style ubiquitous space travel remains exactly that - sci-fi!

Flying a plane and intercontinental flight are different levels of the same remarkable achievement.

A man on the moon, or the SpaceX rockets that land and can rapidly relaunch, both feel like hard problems that have been solved, although it’s not the next hard step of intergalactic space travel.