A Reddit user's ant-infested PC has destroyed my hopes for a real life Discworld computer

rockpapershotgun.com:

People who read my articles have exceptionally good taste, which is why I will assume you are already intimately familiar with Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. For those who are not and somehow got here by mistake, it will save me a lot of time if you go away and read them all. Oh fine, I will explain Hex. And also, if I have time, a real life man with ants in his computer.

The Discworld series is one of slightly metafictional adult fantasy. Inhabitants of the Disc operate sort of parallel to our own existence, and there is frequent leakage between the two. Some of the earlier books imagine Hollywood, shopping centres or rock and roll ("music with rocks in") as sort of magical parasites or "wild ideas" in the wrong place and time (and universe). As the series stacked up, the metafictional aspects stopped taking up entire books and became references, some of which slowly accreted meaning and ideas. Some of them, and how the Discworld's science in particular relates to our own world, are discussed in two volumes of The Science Of Discworld.

One of the best of these is Hex, a computer at the wizard university developed by, essentially, the wizard equivalent of IT nerds. Hex is a load of ants in blown glass tubes and, on its first appearance, is able to do simple calculations by wizards putting in cards with holes in specific places, to allow the ants to go into specific tubes. A reference to the earliest kind of punchcard data processing, you see?

Hex pops up in successive books and becomes smarter, and accrues more references. It has a sticker on the side saying "Anthill Inside", has secure external memory in the form of a beehive in the room next door, and a mouse builds a nest inside Hex. The doesn't do anything, but if the mouse is removed then Hex stops working. When Hex is processing a lot of data, an hourglass on a spring drops down in front of the user. Hex becomes self-aware, which worries one of the wizards, who calms himself with the idea that Hex only th