fintechjock

I've been on the Discord for a couple of years now, and poking around with submissions as well. Sean and the entire team deserve so much praise for all of this work.

It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!

I think your point on costs here is right. I was treating “computer software” as anything that consumers use: apps that provide a service for free in exchange for data, etc.

Very interesting, thanks!

We can be respectful with this!

The tweet is from Mark Henry who updates that chart often. It’s cited pretty often. There is a bit about the methodology here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

My original list was just some brief examples, all of which I think hold up, but not nearly the entire list of data center benefits to all consumers. (One of those other benefits being the means to have this very conversation). There isn’t much of a way I can see to remove data centers from the technological progress we’ve benefited from over the last couple of decades.

Cheaper software

Software prices are down 73% since 2000: https://x.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/2015463505298878746

Nearly unlimited cloud storage

$9 / month for 2tb of cloud storage is a pretty sweet deal for anyone. And unfathomable if you travelled back in time before data centers were scaled.

Data centers are a net good for all consumers. Pretty significantly!

Found something. Not very exact data, but Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers per capita, but average electric bills: https://www.electricchoice.com/average-electric-bills/

I agree with your take on tradeoffs when it comes to DCs that are built with tax abatements, which are a terrible deal for consumers. Those that are not receiving tax benefits will make up for short-term energy prices with long-term property tax benefits, that will eventually pay back the grid upgrades and fund even more upgrades in the future.

I don't see a widespread issue in keeping the lights on, outside of the Lake Tahoe fubar.

Considering utility rates, I would happily pay more for utilities in the short term to have 30+ years of lower property taxes. The data centers property taxes would go to paying for that buildout, and over time it's a great deal for consumers. That said, I'm in Texas so the property tax issue is more prevalent than it would be in New York.

Interesting, thanks!

Cheaper software – all of them

Nearly unlimited cloud storage - AWS / Google / etc. Data centers are the Cloud

Lower property taxes - data centers increase the property tax base, creating tax compression, which shift property tax from consumer –> company. I'm in Texas, so can only be sure that is true here. I have not looked at all other states.

Those are residents, not consumers across the US

True, for the average HN consumer

But a new iPhone Pro is $154 cheaper than it was in 2020 when adjusted for inflation, and that is probably all the average consumer really cares about

What would you estimate is the annual electricity spend for those living next to data centers and those who don’t?

How are they harming consumers?

I would think that consumers would vastly benefit from cheaper software, nearly unlimited cloud storage, lower property taxes. Heck, the next generation of data centers are looking like they will actually be net energy producers.

Consumers might not know that they benefit from data centers, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t

Correct.

It is also worth noting that the non-wealthy pay for higher education in two ways: first through tuition, and second through the taxes required to fund the very programs that provided their "discount."

The initial texts, yes. I think there is some legal wiggleroom with the follow-ups but I don't know if that's been tested in court

If the argument is that SF is high crime because of policy decisions, then the line drawing doesn’t matter

Put your same prompt into Bard and it didn't even hallucinate for me first, just telling me "I can't assist you with that, as I'm only a language model and don't have the capacity to understand and respond."

Only about 10 minutes into Bard right now but this is the first time its been stumped. Haven't tried much code yet though

Overall, UX and speed are good. Results are not bad.

I was thinking about this last night. The new AI tools are like performance enhancing drugs in sports. Especially in bodybuilding, there was a really painful transition from the world of non-PEDs to PEDs. They solved that by going to natural and non-natural competitions.

Other sports didn’t handle it so well (baseball, cycling, etc)

Just as people were asking “did Lance / Sammy / Barry / Arnold really do that incredible feat without juicing?” I think that we will now be asking “did Janice really write that blog post or was it GPT-4?”

Scary world

Really cool and interesting. I definitely think the market is there for this.

I'm betting that your biggest hurdle will be post-purchase. If I remember correctly, Tony Fadell talks about how hard it was to disrupt the contractor model when building Nest. People often just bought whatever thermostat their contractor recommended, and those contractors were incentivized to push them towards specific brands. They beat this by just making the product super easy to install by the consumer and cutting out the contractor all together (something I doubt is feasible with a heat pump).

Maybe that won't be a problem with the DTC model considering the contractor is only brought in post-purchase, but I wonder if this really takes hold if competitors start trying to corner local installers. Good luck!

You’re doing some really great work through all of this

Nothing like Magnolia’s after midnight when you’re a high schooler and have nowhere else to go

And they shut down the wrong Magnolia’s!

They spent $1.1 billion on the first round of the train, and in FY2021 it brought in $55,000 in gross fares.

We won’t be able to spend our way to adoption at that rate. And people aren’t going to adopt public transit in a city built around cars (93.4% of Austin families own a vehicle).

Sounds like we both wish mass public transit was the reality, but sadly it’s just not realistic.

I live in Austin and know the author to boot. I haven't had the time to sit down and read this one yet, but knowing him I can pretty well guess his take. He is my pick for the best writer in the state.

My read of Austin:

- I was born here in 1995. Except for a few years, I've seen double-digit growth in most measurables every year of my life. Growth is the only thing I have ever known so I am comfortable with it, and I can also see why previous generations (I.e. my parents) are not.

- Change is painful. Especially at this clip and for this long. But man, it is beautiful.

- The City Council here is undoubtedly the worst part of the problem. They consistently buckle to NIMBYs, and allocate money in just unreasonably idiotic ways. ("No one riding the train that cost $1.1 billion? Easy fix! Spend $7 billion more!") They are making the change much more painful.

- Natives were largely fine with the first wave of California refugees in 2008. This COVID wave is different though. The new movers kept their jobs and are working remote from Austin – meaning that they still have their Cali / NY inflated paychecks. It feels like a money fight, and we keep losing.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a big bet on a company that just had their lunch eaten on another product by open source, no? Didn’t see much of Dall-E after Stable Diffusion release

Yes, but then there is the problem of getting out

US has removed fighter jets from Japan.

They’re phasing out older variants of the F-15 C. They will be replaced by F-15 EXs when they are ready, and until then the old F-15s will be replaced with F-22s

Maybe an even simpler explanation is that productively is roughly calculated as GDP / employed workers.

Productivity almost always goes up in a recession, especially one accompanied with massive layoffs (like early COVID).

Productivity is going down right now compared to 2020 because we are pretty much at full employment.

These productivity measurements aren’t really tracking individual productivity at all.

On the other hand, I think it's fair to offer autopilot/"full self driving" on a subscription, or at least the upgrades as a subscription.

Agree with your overall point. However, this probably isn’t feasible considering most companies will follow Tesla’s FSD upgrade model.

Autopilot / FSD upgrades are often more safety than feature related. Allowing people to opt out of upgrades but keep their older FSD just means a bunch of vehicles on the road with depreciated safety features.

The political conditions of the US have basically deteriorated to where any meaningful regulation of corporations can't really happen because of the changing laws around how corporate contributions to political campaigns work.

I’ve run a US Senate campaign. We raised tens of millions of dollars, and I can confidently say that corporate donations made no impact in any policy decisions - on the campaign or the official side.

That extends to individual donations as well. The caps are ~$10,000 per couple. Considering the cost of a federal campaign, no person or corporation can buy a campaign when costs are in the tens of millions and contribution caps are in the thousands.

I have almost zero coding experience. Seriously, I've read a couple of books and I've taken a couple of MOOCs and that is about it. I've never 'launched' any project of my own, and I have zero front-end or back-end experience.

I say that because I just used Supabase for the first time, and I was able to build and launch the Slack clone in ~15 minutes. Seriously cool. Thank you for sharing

In other words, and paradoxically, work in labor-intensive jobs will be the last to be automated. Many used to think those jobs would be the first in line for automation, and creative jobs will be automated last.

This is surprising to me but probably intuitive considering the market forces. Creative jobs are highly specialized and therefore expensive. (Low supply + high demand = high cost). On the flip side, labor-intensive jobs are not specialized and therefore cheap (overall, I know supply is an issue in the US right now at least).

If the market is trying to reduce costs it will start with the highest first, especially those with the highest barriers to entry as far as skill development. It probably doesn't help that it appears computer vision is advancing slower than other areas of AI.

Great post. Really enjoying your new writing.