I thought it collapsed years ago. Had no idea it was still alive

I think many people have never experienced and don't realize how mind-bending a clear night sky in the winter without light pollution is. You need to get pretty far from civilization but when you do you will see so many stars, colors and effects you had no idea were visible without a telescope. The first time I experienced it I couldn't believe my eyes and it redefined my perception of space.

My memories of the 68k to PPC transition are mostly watching the new machines reboot, reboot, & reboot some more.

> and a big reason why I gave up on smartphones entirely

This is not necessary: my Librem 5 doesn't rely on blobs in kernel and runs FSF-endorsed GNU/Linux, PureOS.

I remember each of the architecture transitions (M68k->PPC, PPC->x86, x86->ARM), and perhaps the most vivid recollection I have of each one is that it made perfect sense at the time. In other words, it wasn't a surprise move by Apple, and I remember widespread speculation for years beforehand in the broader community (Apple users and otherwise).

PPC offered tremendous promise in the early 1990s at the same time Motorola's evolution of M68k was lackluster at best - so it made perfect sense that Apple would need to migrate away from M68k, and PPC was the optimal choice so as not to compete directly with hardware used by the PC market.

And when Intel/AMD were innovating tremendously in the early 2000s while IBM was lagging with bringing out aggressive updates to their PPC line, the switch to Intel seemed inevitable.

Even the idea that Apple should heavily develop their ARM mobile chips for future Apple products was discussed heavily in my circles since about 2016 (around the same time Intel started to stagnate their offerings). The earliest I remember was this blog from 2011: https://www.mattrichman.net/apple-and-arm-sitting-in-a-tree/.

Amazing willingness on Apple's part to switch architectures significantly 4 times and leave behind so much code. I know Apple has done some clever stuff with translation and emulation, but this is so different than the Microsoft Windows approach to backward compatibility where you can upgrade from Windows 1.0 all the way to Windows 11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4rk3gFOxM

I need to find a CRT and recreate one of those nights. Always wanted a 17" Viewsonic.

at the bare minimum, we have graveyards all over the place with our language, names, number system, religious symbology, etc etc carved into stone

Outside of archeology we basically know nothing about pre-Roman Britain. We hardly know anything about Roman Britain too and we barely know what happened after the Romans left.

Barring some world ending apocalypse I find it hard to imagine that, even if let's say 1000 times less written material survived the next 2000 years compared to the 2000 that preceded us our descendants would still have several magnitudes more information about our times than we do about 0 BC (especially if we're talking about Britain or pretty much any people in Europe who did not speak Latin or Greek).