salt-thrower

The resource consumption is huge and it provides relatively little to the surrounding community compared to its intake. For most residents who live near one it’s a net loss. Qualify of life decreases and utility bills go up so that a Silicon Valley exec can get a nice bonus for closing the deal.

A nuclear plant creates energy and a decent amount of jobs, while a data center’s value is dubious to the average human and the data center barely brings in any jobs.

The interesting difference here is that other hedonic activities do bring people back even after the first time they build up a tolerance and get bored. But many of these AI "creative" apps seem like a one-and-done thing. Once the novelty wears off there isn't anything more deeply rewarding to bring people back.

This resonates with me. I used to live in a medium-sized US city which prided itself on its public transit. The buses were SO slow, and it's because they would sometimes literally stop every two blocks on a major through street. (This particular city has the smallest "block size" in the US, so it was extra ridiculous). It was infuriating. I would gladly walk twice as far to find the first stop if it meant the bus stopped half as much once I'm on it.

Bringing up accessibility concerns for people who can't walk as far is well-meant, but seems contrived. There's no guarantee that accessible housing is available near the existing stops anyway, and with the cost savings from having fewer stops (and windfall from increased ridership due to the bus becoming a faster option), bus lines could even be expanded, allowing more people to live near a bus line in general. Perhaps it would balance out?

Many transit services also offer smaller shuttles that can go directly to the homes of people with disabilities, so putting that responsibility on buses alone seems ineffective. I think the author is on to something here.

They shouldn’t be, especially with the recent lessons of Iraq and especially Afghanistan. It will be a catastrophe.

Another example: the complete surrender of the Xbox platform. They spent the last 10 years buying up game studios and then closing them, failing to develop any good exclusive titles, and letting Sony eat their lunch. Now they are officially giving up and will just let Sony own the console space altogether.

Xbox was THE gaming console 20 years ago. Playstation was always a contender but Xbox Live was synonymous with the online console gaming experience. Halo was an untouchable juggernaut of a series for the first 3 titles.

It's mind boggling that Microsoft just let all that die without a fight. Worse, they seem to have actively shot themselves in the foot and then given up.

Nope, that wasn't me. I have the Node, React, Typescript etc. buzzwords in droves (that's been the bulk of my career experience).

Maybe emphasizing AI more would help like you mentioned, or maybe I need to be looking in different markets.

At my current workplace, we do have a roadmap for the business, but the actual backlog of tickets to implement work is all waiting on other siloed teams to make decisions that we are downstream of. This ranges from our infrastructure model to simple things like “which CSS components are we allowed to use.”

We are also explicitly NOT allowed to make any code changes that aren’t part of a story that our product owner has approved and prioritized.

The result is that we scrape together some stories to work on every sprint, but if we finish it early, we quickly run into red tape and circular conversations with other “decision makers” who need to tell us what we’re allowed to do before we actually do anything.

It’s fairly maddening. The whole org is hamstrung by a few workaholic individuals who control decision making for several teams and are chronically unavailable as a result.

I’ve seen this sort of thing happen at other big enterprises too but my current situation is perhaps an extreme example of dysfunction. Point being, when an org gets tangled up like this, LLMs aren’t gonna save it :)

At every company I’ve ever worked for, the bottleneck is not “how fast can we spit out more code?” It’s always: “how fast can the business actually decide what they want and create a good backlog?”

Maybe startup development will significantly accelerate with AI churning out all the boilerplate to get your app started.

But enterprise development, where the app is already there and you’re building new features on top of a labyrinthian foundation, is a different beast. The hard part is sitting through planning meetings or untangling weird system dependencies, not churning out net new code. My two cents anyway.

Dropbox and Google Drive work for Obsidian on the desktop version, but the iOS version does not seem to support them.

The trouble is: broadly speaking, no one uses those.

Your argument is so out of touch I can only assume it’s being made in bad faith.

Many of the pro-Palestinian protesters are also Jewish. Equating all Jewish people with Israel and Zionism is insidious and misleading.

Well luckily for them, I’d imagine they don’t think too hard about it.

Love this. I’ve had the same thought for years and I’m glad to hear there’s a name for it.

Going out on a limb here: nope.

Do I wish otherwise? Of course. Will anything of the sort happen? Nope.

What?

A “gaming headset” with a built-in microphone. The sound quality was fine but the build quality was terrible. It broke apart while I was wearing it, after owning it for less than a year.

Now I just use a pair of Sennheiser studio headphones and a usb desktop microphone, and they’ve lasted for years with no issues.

Beautifully written and fun to read. Blog posts like this give me a boost of mental strength to keep going during my worst episodes of burnout.

Are you aware of any software developer unions? I’ve never encountered any in my 9 year career so far

Non-sycophant employees are shut down and ignored once the whole corporate culture has bought in to the hype du jour. If you are the sole dissenter, it can even make you look like a “bad” employee for not recognizing the “opportunity” that the new hyped thing will supposedly bring.

Fair point that a lot of Reddit is already astroturfed, but this is definitely the final nail in the coffin. Now SEO is coming for the forums, too. Wonderful.

Not just rocks and dirt. Mining waste is often toxic - heavy metals, acid, that sort of thing.

Sad. I had no idea “dump it in the water” was still a waste disposal practice in any developed nations. As per the article, only three countries on earth still grant licenses for this: Turkey, Papua New Guinea, and Norway.

Love this site. I’ve been reading it periodically since high school. Glad it’s still around.

.

Please elaborate.

As someone else already mentioned, this is especially ironic to bring up in the case of Libya because Libya gave up their nukes to appease Western powers. Then were invaded and toppled by those same powers later on.

Plenty of internally stable nations have been toppled by imperialism. It's not really a good metric for how well you can "prevent external forces."

Not that odd of a take. It's difficult to have internal stability when you face externally-sourced "reorganizations" every generation or so.

I would guess that the average person has higher expectations for Google. Bing has been a bit of a punchline for years, so I don't think most people care as much.

Forgive me for wondering whether an account created 27 minutes ago is arguing in good faith on a topic that frequently gets brigaded by FUD trolling. An actual lawyer will have to weigh in on whether this fits the damages awarded in similar cases.