phil21

I guess it depends on how you look at the numbers.

My current place would sell for say $1.4M or so.

The lot itself is worth around $600-700k if it was empty.

A similarly sized home would cost well over $1m to construct to similar quality levels - normalizing a bit for modern construction techniques and all that.

So about $2.4m to build new, or $1.4m to buy a fairly similar 25 year old home next door. New construction here costs more than the older structures on the land in most cases. This ignores permitting and financing costs which throws a light wrench into those calculations, likely making it a bit more expensive on the build side.

That is using numbers I would pay a custom builder for, but even if you add in 20-30% profit for the builder the math isn't super great for the new build end of things.

It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it

Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.

Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.

I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.

That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.

This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.

Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.

Well you shifted the goal posts. Storing everything in EST vs UTC isn’t great, but isn’t some business ending level problem. It annoys engineers and causes inefficiency. Unlikely to even show up on a quarterly report if someone chose to write a mandate to fix it.

Once you get to the point of bolting on random systems that need to talk in whatever time zones is when you bite the bullet and change it. Yes, that is expensive.

The point I’m making is that if you spend a week dicking around with two junior devs while in your startup phase arguing about EST vs UTC you lose by default. Would much rather have my imaginary employee just choose EST in 14 seconds and move on at that stage. And I have dealt with systems that have done exactly this.

When it becomes a problem I can afford to fix it. Talking about it for more than 5 minutes at the bootstrap company stage is the definition of bike shedding to me. If those are discussions you are having in your weekly dev meetings you have already lost.

This will obviously depend on exactly what you are developing. Payment systems? Probably way more important to get this right vs. some social media app.

The ironic part to me is that this comment thread is basically bike shedding itself! Timestamps are an age old nerd snipe.

Because I have been monitoring this as a weird interest of mine now for 20 years or more. To the point of absurdity.

I would be very surprised to hear of a location in the US that is experiencing grid instability due to recent increases in industrial scale electric usage.

I 100% refute your claim that grid instability is the primary reason folks in the US are installing solar. You will be still seen as a crazy prepper type if you call a company and tell them you don’t care about the financials penciling out, and only want it for potential blackouts. Assuming you are not in California of course - which I assume not since none of those instability problems have to do with industry so it’s not relevant to this discussion.

Generally speaking - if you want to live in a place with a stable grid, you will seek out a spot that has heavy industry in the region. These energy consumers stabilize the grid for residential folks. Especially datacenters since those tend to come with emergency backup and are the first to fall off the grid on a voluntary basis during peak usage events.

I’m sure somewhere in the US exists where this is true since basically everything is true at a micro scale. I just do not see it as a wide scale issue.

The only reason Loudon county became datacenter alley is due to where the transatlantic cables landed. And Washington DC being next door.

It’s basically the OG networking effect. You put equipment there because everyone else had equipment there.

The rest just grew with it. It had nothing to do with power infrastructure. If anything, datacenters created the power infrastructure in the area.

Agreed on the tax abatement stuff. Those should be outright illegal regardless of industry.

These sorts of things done remotely close to residential areas are very rare in the grand scheme. And I agree these specific projects are a major problem.

It’s just not representative of the bigger picture when there are a dozen horrible projects against say 1000 total.

The hyperbole is what gets my mom terrified of moving to a city that might allow a datacenter to be built 8 miles away from the place she was looking at.

The fact there is not the social media and political outrage there is on stuff that is literally 10-1000x the water usage is what outs folks as being unserious on the topic. Collectively speaking, people do not give a shit about water usage at all for any reason.

It’s like private jets. If you talk about PJ use in the first 10 minutes about your diatribe about climate change I already know you give zero care about co2 production and only want to either hate rich folks for valid but unrelated reasons, or are an entirely unserious person.

Both are focusing on a mathematically immaterial number when it comes to the supposed problem they say they care about. It they actually cared, they would be talking about things that matter and can move the needle if they “win”.

I welcome high water use stuff in my back yard because my region has plenty of water, plus I firmly believe in the fact that a society cannot have wealth without industry. Datacenters, steel production, whatever. Bring it on.

Are there specific bad projects that should not happen due to local water concerns? Absolutely! But that is not the discussion anyone is having. Datacenter water usage as an industry is a total non issue and is an increasingly immediate tell that someone has no clue what they speak of.

I would say that speaks more to apathy than activism

And I would say that speaks more to your disconnect with most of US society. Very few folks actually trust activists for good reason.

Trump is like the most mild form of what is to come. The fact he got elected when he did is remarkable to me.

It only gets worse from here if things don’t change. At some point someone like him who is actually serious will be elected and then it’s basically game over.

Trump 2016 was a warning shot most folks in the chosen classes chose to ignore. Trump 2024 is something you ignore at your own peril at this point. I would be thanking the gods at the relative apathy so far if I believed that narrative.

If Trump was remotely competent we would be having entirely different conversations. There would be no option of “weathering the storm” to wait him out if so.

What instability has been attributed towards datacenter - or even any - large 24x7 predictable load industrial consumers of electricity in your area?

The exact opposite is typically true, so this is surprising to me!

Literally have lived within 1500 feet of a datacenter. Zero of my my non techie friends ever knew.

It’s a non-issue. It’s like complaining about a vacant but well maintained warehouse next door.

If you mean living next door to a power plant? Absolutely. But that is a different topic.

Why? If you want this policy make it for the entire grid, not some random consumer.

Electricity should function as a common carrier like any other utility. If you want to pay for the watts you get the watts regardless of who you happen to be.

What about fan noise is low pitched?

I generally agree that I would not like to live across the street from a datacenter. Having worked inside of dozens of them, I could not care less if I lived half a mile from one. Most people who live within such a distance currently do not have a clue. At that point I would not even worry about the noise from the backup generators.

As I get older I realize how the news works.

You are talking about a single incident that has been reported 500 times by different organizations.

And that single instance still hasn’t actually been traced back to the datacenter in question. Could have come upstream of that for all we know now.

Water usage in this context is a rounding error on a rounding error on top of a rounding error when it comes to corn production for ethanol.

Anyone bringing it up does not actually care about the water usage. It’s just a politically easy topic to get traction with. If anyone starts off their anti-datacenter screed with this, it instantly outs them as someone you can ignore as unserious person on the topic.

Plenty of other legitimate reasons to be anti-datacenter but this isn’t one of them.

All… three of them if you really try hard? Really only two qualify as disasters to me. Three Mile Island wasn’t great, but certainly not a disaster on any level I can figure.

Manias are required for humans to develop a new technology. It’s just part of the human condition.

Tilting at windmills over the stupidity of it is just something I’m trying to get over and not care about at a personal level. Nothing I can do about it either way!

I sort of agree. But I kind of think it misses the point.

Bike shedding means no decision is made. That is the worst possible outcome as it provides absolutely zero value. Even a wrong decision provides at least some value even if it fails horribly. Maybe we paint the shed black and it burns down due to excessive heat, but it’s a bike shed so who actually cares if we need to rebuild the entire thing and paint it white this time.

And when it comes to bike shedding, getting it “wrong” is by definition already low stakes. It just doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Even the timezone example isn’t really that material IMO. Sure, it’s an extra annoyance to normalize timestamps to locale in every app/debugging query. But in the end it’s just not that big of a deal.

Worse would have been that early team arguing about it for 6mo without implementing anything. Then no one would be employed currently to curse those early developers to begin with.

Often times the only wrong decision is not making a decision. Very rarely are there decisions to be made that are not overtly obvious which are actually material. These exceedingly rare situations are where the winners from losers get sorted out - but that sort of decision in my experience so far happen a handful of times during an entire career.

As I moved up the ladder in my life I’ve often found my job is to basically flip a coin when a decision choice is presented to me. Very rarely is the topic worth me spending any material amount of mental energy on.

In such environments everyone is constantly missing things and not replying until they get followed up with.

So that sort of thing is already normalized. An LLM is unlikely to be worse than a human. There is no accountability either way since everyone is failing at the task, it really doesn’t matter much if your or your bot misses a few percentage points of high priority items. You will probably be vastly outperforming your peers who are doing it manually.

As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.

And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle.

I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choice of burying my head in the sand or deciding to take a look.

They are going to change society on a scale far beyond smart phones. In ways many will not see as positives, but change never goes the way one may expect.

For a lot of folks summarizing a few days of work email and especially slack chats is way more than 5 minutes. Some work environments do not have great communication hygiene so it can be overwhelming to try to keep up with 500 emails a day and 38 Slack channels.

For the folks I talk to who use a LLM for this that seems to be the case. Takes a huge cognitive load off every morning and saves them an hour or two.

More or less a very expensive band aid over a bad work environment.

I kinda use it the same way in a sense. I have a little skill I run against our (horrible) task management system to summarize things and give me a punchlist to work through sorted by priority. This saves me thousands of clicks to do the same thing in the horrible web UI. A proper system in the first place would be a lot better!

At some point I’ll probably just take that to the next logical step and have the LLM write my own web interface to abstract and replace the horrible one entirely for me.

This has been a long running "heads we win tails you lose" with the older generations toying with the future dating back ~50+ years

Yep. I call it the old eating their young. Society cannot exist in such a condition for very long. They will collect full benefits while paying in relatively less, and die before it becomes their problem.

And while Social Security is the big one everyone talks about, there are a whole lot of state and municipal level public pensions that are exceedingly underfunded. These come due at pretty much the same time. The problem was the same with those - workers at the time did not want to pay more taxes but wanted to enjoy the benefits that those current pensioners provided them. They borrowed from the future generations to do it.

I struggle to find any national policy implemented in the last few decades that has truly disrupted the kind of upper middle class voter that has a lot of money in a 401k.

Capping SALT deductions was a big one. For upper middle class folks in HCOL cities this is tens of thousands of dollars of additional taxes being paid.

If you tax 401ks higher than long term capital gains tax then higher earners just won’t use 401ks/IRAs.

How does that help those who funded a 401k/IRA during their working career? Sure, new earners won't use them but that doesn't help you very much if you're retired. I also don't think it would be more than long term capital gains, it would first start as a very small "reasonable" tax on the top "rich folks" accounts and slide upwards from there like nearly all taxes do.

Totally agree on points 3 and 5, but I absolutely expect my tax advantaged retirement accounts to become less advantaged than they are today by the time I'm drawing on them. You have to collect revenue from where the money is, and with all the talk about "wealth taxes" I predict will eventually hit 401k/IRA accounts as well. I bet it will be politically very popular to add a 5% tax on withdrawals from "millionaire" retirement accounts. Most folks have very little concern over the upper middle classes $3m brokerage account being taxed regardless of account type.

The date was always in the 2030-2040 range since I started reading about it in the 90's. At my first job I planned my retirement around the trust fund running out by the time I retired, and benefits being cut passively via cost of living not matching inflation.

This is largely due to congress actually taking action in the early 80's, which pushed this date back to the current 2030ish estimate. As the date draws nearer, it gets more refined. If they had not taken action, those previous articles would have been correct.

If congress had done their jobs and done another round of reformation 20 years later in around 2003 we would not be having this discussion now. The date would have either been pushed back or eliminated. It was exceedingly clear what was going to happen back then if no action was taken, and those workers simply did not vote for folks who were going to raise taxes (or reduce benefits) for them. Collectively speaking they would rather have their children pay instead.

From my standpoint the reporting has been very consistent on the subject. It's pretty easy math to report on.

As we saw with the whole DOGE fiasco, a substantial portion of the population would love to tear down current entitlement programs.

Social Security is (or was?) unique in that it was politically untouchable by either side of the aisle. No one was telling anyone they were running for office to cut social security benefits. Plenty run to say they will cut welfare spending.

Social Security will not run out. It simply won't be taxing current workers enough to pay current retirees. This demographic problem was easily foreseen which is why there is a trust fund to "run out" to begin with. For quite some time social security operated in a surplus since there were many workers per retiree collecting benefits. Now we are around 3:1 workers:retirees and expected to drop to something like 2.2:1.

Where this gets confusing is that most folks seem to have the mental model that Social Security is a pension or some weird retirement account. It is not.

Social Security is simply a pay as you go means tested welfare program. It just means tests in a strange way. If you ended social security taxes today, the trust would run out in a few months and there would be $0 to pay retirees. It's current workers paying for current retirees. Social Security is simply an income tax like any other, but it's separated and marketed the way it is to purposefully make people think it's "their money" and make repealing it politically impossible.

It's just a means tested entitlement program funded by current tax receipts dressed up in fancy marketing. It functions much more similarly to SNAP (food aid) than it does a pension.

Why paint the sides of the rails? Well you can paint the tops, but it tends to gum up the wheels and get worn off.

Tops of rails are already pretty shiny for any mainline track seeing a couple dozen trains a day. I'd bet they are more reflective than white paint could be. And the paint would be gone after the first train passes through anyways.

They rust pretty quick, but with regular use it doesn't build up much since it's constantly being worn off from the wheel friction.

It means that there will not be this level of memory demand for much longer. I tend to agree. Right now there is far more demand than supply, so they are cashing in while they can. It will be resolved one way or another eventually, current margins are not sustainable for the long term and will be resolved either via demand destruction or an increase of supply. Likely a combination of both.

Summarising emails that then misses the crucial information is not saving any time.

Ironically due to an overloaded inbox these days, I've been using a LLM as the world's most inefficient e-mail filter.

It does a decent job at this, and gives at least a nice starting point in the morning for a prioritized hitlist to power through. Gets most things pretty accurate, but I only use it to sense "importance" and not much else.

Certainly not life changing, just a nice to have.

I've had far more real gains with home IT projects. Tons of home automation integrations and "silly" projects I've been wanting to get done for a decade but never really had the energy to want to deal with. These sorts of things also allowed me some time/excuse to play around with agents to see what the fuss was about.

I now have the world's most complex garden irrigation/sensor setup complete with automated watering and grafana panels! I could have tied everything from the hardware through software together myself, but I just was not interested in installing the 856th Ubuntu VM in my life, configuring InfluxDB from scratch, etc.

I can see the future potential due to the above, but I also see how it went off the rails easily and also produced some laughably inefficient/unmaintable stuff like Flux queries which toss what should be variables as statics directly into the grafana panels, etc. Add a single new sensor to a group and you'll be re-writing the panel queries. Just horrible ground level design only maintainable via brute force. But when you just tell it to add the thing and it does... I can see why many feel it's a superpower.

That's also likely to be a small pool of people relative to the number of people interacting with AI

Perhaps small now. But overall this seems to be what most have done in my small social circle. Small uses of AI here and there, sometimes surprising gains/wins they find out and share if asked, otherwise really it's just another tool to learn and make use of.

Most everyone thinks it's overhyped and wedged into stupid places it doesn't make much sense, especially in consumer products. But they also can recognize that behind the scenes and in closed doors there are perhaps some exciting things happening in certain industries and use-cases.

Most are still very much in the "haven't played with it much yet, it's moving too fast and I'm too old and busy with my life" or "still evaluating as time allows" stage. This is mid-career folks in various professional roles, skewing towards tech. Some sense of "this tech is getting good fast, and I will be left behind if I do not learn it at some point in the future".

I will say most have barely ventured past the "copy/paste from ChatGPT" stage of AI use. It usually elicits comment when someone moves past that and finds out they are far more capable than they realized. Then usually some more comments a couple weeks later mentioning newfound limitations.

Yep. This is how I view the world these days too. All systems will inevitable devolve into corruption and centralized power. The best system I suppose is the one that starts with the most distributed means of power possible, and then that gives the most quality of life years out of anything before it's time for a horrific reset again.