I never said those were the only countries. You are trying to justify bad practices and nonsense arguments by screaming xenophobia where there is no xenophobia.

You are really reaching here. I live in the UK but I am pretty sure the EU have regulations just as harsh and certainly harsher than the USA. Where I am in academia we have machines that are 6-8 years old that we are only allowed to use in development and testing environments. They can’t be used in production because our IT team won’t allow it.

There is no good reason to put Windows XP on an internet connected network in a production environment. It’s acceptable only on air gapped machines. If you have servers that are too new for modern Windows then use Linux. Failing that buy a new machine.

Yes I am well aware that modern mainframes exist, I am actually planning to get certified on them at some point. They are however a very niche solution, which you clearly should know, and often tasked to run software made decades ago. A mainframe from 1999 is not exactly modern.

If you legit are running Windows XP or Server 2003 then you are way out of government regulations and compliance and your whole team should be sacked immediately including you. Don’t come on a public forum and brag about the incompetence of your whole organisation for fuck’s sake. You just painted a target on your back. You clearly have no understanding of either cyber security or operational security doing things like that.

Talking about a single mainframe lasting 20+ years is disingenuous given mainframes are not normal servers and inherently have a longer lifespan. Even then 20+ years is an exceptionally long operation for one of these, not because of hardware limitations, but because it normally does not make financial sense. Mainframes typically run legacy systems so they are the one place these kinds of financial rules don’t apply.

The average operational lifespan of a server is still 5-6 years as it’s always been. Some businesses are replaced every 3 years. A quick Google search would tell you that. That’s not a limit inherent to the hardware, but simply how long they are warranted and deployed for in most instances. As I explained before it doesn’t make sense to keep servers around for that long when more modern options are available. Saying they “would still work perfectly fine” doesn’t really mean anything outside of the hobbyist and used server market.

LLMs haven’t reached a pause in performance and they are only a category of AI models. If you actually kept track of advancements instead of sitting here whining about it you would have seen more has been happening in even just the last year then just throwing data and compute at the problem. I find your intentional ignorance to be morally insulting.

Well yes but it’s not like this is the first time very expensive hardware was entirely expendable or even the first time it makes sense to do so. Look at the Saturn V. It cost something like a billion per rocket in today’s money and each one could only be used once. You had to build a whole new rocket every time you wanted to go to the moon. That’s just how things were with the technology available at the time. The funny thing is it was actually cheaper per launch than the Space Shuttle in the end despite the space shuttle being mostly reused/refurbished between launches.

Data center hardware has always had a limited lifespan due to new technology making it obsolete. Improvements in efficiency and performance make it cheaper to buy new servers than keep running old ones. I am pretty sure 5 or 6 years was already roughly the lifespan of these things to begin with. AI hasn’t really changed that, only the scale has changed.

Actually open weights models have gotten better and better to the point they actually can compete meaningfully with ChatGPT and Claude Sonnet. Nvidia are actually one of the ones spearheading this with Nemotron. The issue is more that most of the really competent models need lots of VRAM to run. Small models lag quite far behind. Although with Nemotron Nano they are getting better.

I think this is more like percussive maintenance

It’s not possible to bundle everything as an extension. Some things do not work that way.