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Strangest is that the DJ will often talk about lesser-known songs/artists and will play a few second snippet of the music, but then go right back to the regular rotation. If the audience is already thought to be interested in the story/snippet about a song, you'd think they'd want to hear the whole thing, but apparently not.

One time I tuned into college radio and not long after came on a song from my own band. The only recording of our music was from a jam session that we put on CD that we handed out to a few friends and we hadn't played together in many years by that point so it was quite a shock to hear it.

30 minutes out of town isn't nearby anymore. The highways are surprisingly efficient. And consider that it is more like a 1-1.5 hour drive for someone living on the opposing end of the city — possibly more if it is a large city. Advertising a job 1.5 hours away as if it is local doesn't tend to win you any admiration from job seekers. Maybe AI companies are prominent enough that they can piss off workers and still hire them in the end, but that doesn't fly for most businesses.

But, again, why take the risk when you can just as easily put the work right beside the workers?

While most people wouldn't hesitate to travel 30 minutes out of town, the generally don't ever think to see if jobs exist 30 minutes out of town, and thus won't find the work there. When looking for work they search within the city they live in, not the next town over with a name they might not even know. This is a real problem for a lot of businesses that exist 30 minutes out of town.

In fairness, the companies behind these data centres are well known and have endless marketing budgets, so they can likely find a way to close that gap where the typical rural-based business cannot, but at the same time why take the risk when you can just as easily build the datacenter right beside the person you want to hire?

“Move to Nowhere, USA, and get cheap, new housing and a good-paying job”

These types of opportunities already exist but are rarely taken up upon. More of them means more jobs unfilled.

When those mining towns were the way of the world people moved around a lot more. It was no big deal to pack your bags and move there. While census data only started being collected from the 1950s onward, it is estimated that ~40% of the population would move in a given year at the hight of the mining booms. Even in the 1950s, when we started collecting concrete data, around 30% of the population would move in a given year. Now only around 8% of the population will move in a given year.

Nowadays there is an expectation that you can stay put. For example, if you watch housing affordability discussions closely you'll notice the theme is always "I cannot afford a house where I am currently located", not "I cannot afford a house anywhere in the world". Attitudes about living arrangements have changed as compared to the past and the AI companies are not about to change it back any time soon. They have to work with people they want to hire, and that means putting the work where the people are already found.

We could in a vacuum, but they require human labor and human labor isn't found in the boonies.

It's the age old problem. The people in the cities cry that there are no jobs and the rural businesses cry that they can't find anyone to hire, with no great resolution as the businesses cannot afford to move into the city and the people don't want to travel to the boonies.

However, in this case, these data centers are so well capitalized that they can afford to move them into the cities right beside where the workers are located.

Which is why we do buy less of them nowadays. We're buying slightly more of them than we did during the Great Depression, but we are on the low side as compared to the historical norm. If we bought more of them we wouldn't be talking about it in the first place.

It does address what you said: Nobody is talking about giant houses. In context, "large" houses are still quite small. It remains that very few people want a 100 sq ft home even if it is technically cheaper to own and easier to take care of. If you won't give your comments any thought before posting them I'll happy keep making fun of them.

I don't think anyone is talking about giant houses. Last time I priced a new 1,500 sq ft home they wanted over $800,000. That was an instant nope from me. Another commenter pointed out that their 650 sq ft home would be $400,000 to build new. These are already beyond most people's affordability even before considering the cost of the land.

So when we talk about small and affordable we're talking more like 100 sq ft. Large compared to that is what most would call a modest home.

The local business producing single-wides seems to be doing fairly well and has been in business for over 60 years, so I am not sure it is accurate to say that there is no profit. The market is small, though. If you can afford a small new house you can also afford a large used house and most people are going to choose the larger house every time. In aggregate, there isn't a whole lot of incentive for someone to build a small house.

Houses depreciate. Markets can do funny things (remember the COVID days when a used car could sell for more than the same new car?), but generally the remaining value of a standing structure is going to be a fair bit less than the cost to build the same thing new. It is likely that the parent also sees >50% land value on the current property now that the house has been lived in and is showing some wear and tear, but key here is that to rebuild the building from scratch it would cost as much as the land plus current building is worth just to build the same structure again.

Microservices are the right solution for certain problems

Just one problem, actually: Conway's law.

When your organization needs to operate like the macro economy, where independent groups provide services for each other, then you are going to see the same structure found in the macro economy mirrored in the microcosm of that single organization. Hence the name microservices. Same as services, except not across business lines.

At Google scale you have no choice but to have an internal economy, but trying to build an entire economy inside a small business with less activity than a personal blog is crazy.

[dead] 2 days ago

So it skips the root cause analysis you requested.

Stands to reason. Root cause analysis is a process, not a result. With no expectations on what the result should be, the LLM is free to do whatever it wants. What you really need is to ask it to produce failing test case(s). That forces it to do root cause analysis and provide a written explanation of what went wrong, while also providing the feedback mechanism necessary to show that the problem is fixed once you do ask it to proceed with implementation which helps satisfy its "software engineer" predisposition.

LLMs aren't humans that can understand contextual intent like humans can, just fancy compilers that can handle informal languages. You still need to program them like the computers they are.

When you called attention to Rust you clearly understood the point of picking nits. Why pretend you have no idea what we are talking about now?

malloc/free, not being a language feature, cannot be reasoned about. Since the larger discussion is about Go, consider using malloc/free in Go. Of course you can do it. There is nothing stopping you. Since it is not part of a language it can be bolted on to any language, not just C. But if you do, it should be obvious you can no longer reason about the program in terms of how memory is used. If there was a way to reason about it, C would already have all the same memory guarantees that Rust does.

There is nothing in the language spec. It leaves it up to the implementation to decide how to optimize. Whether or not your implementation has an extension to perform the same will ultimately depend on the implementation you are using, although you are unlikely to find it in any of the popular implementations.

Are you telling me that today, there's a Go compiler that's best suited for web servers, and a different Go compiler best suited for micro-controllers?

No, I would have no reason to tell you that because, given what we're talking about, you would already know that. You couldn't possibly partipcate in good faith if weren't familiar with the Go ecosystem. This is such a strange comment.

It seems like you’re conflating dynamic

Perhaps I should have said heap memory to be more clear, but the intent was to recognize that C does have memory management (the stack), but it manages it automatically. However, I don't think the intent was actually lost as you specifically called out malloc, which was directionally correct. So I guess there was no need to be more clear as the message was delivered just fine.

C definitely has manual memory management via malloc

No. malloc isn't part of the C language, it is a library function and one that isn't guaranteed to be available at that.

It can be reasoned about, but doing so correctly is very difficult

To the best of our knowledge it is impossible. That is why Rust's claim to fame is adding a model necessary to make reasoning about memory possible.

C has dynamic memory (again, malloc and free)

Again, malloc and free are not language features. They are bolted on top. You can bolt malloc and free onto every language under the sun. You can even bolt malloc and free onto Rust, but you will then break the ability to reason about its memory if you use it.

I don't think gambling is at all like paying a set price for a ticket and having a pretty good idea of how long the entertainment will last.

Generally you can gain a pretty good understanding of how long the entertainment will last. Maybe not down to the millisecond, but you know a spin on the one arm bandit won't take hours. It will give on the order of seconds. Your willingness to give up x is contingent on the perceived entertainment value of those seconds. If you choose to play again, that is an independent event — like deciding to watch a second movie while you are already at the theatre.

while secretly hoping that they'll actually leave with more than they came with.

Yes, this may be the undefined variable. The dopamine hit of believing you can come home better than you started, with little tastes of the possibility, coupled with loss aversion when it isn't being realized. This is what earlier comments seem to be speaking about, so perhaps, despite your insistence, a consensus was already reached.

That seems like an incomplete explanation.

Logically, gambling is like going to the movies. You expect to pay x currency for y value of entertainment. If y falls short of expectations you might feel like you wasted your money, but who becomes addicted to going to the movies to try to get even? There is probably someone who has, but I’ve never heard of it and it doesn’t seem to be common; not like gambling addictions. For all intents and purposes it doesn’t happen.

But gambling addictions do happen, fairly regularly. Perhaps it is loss aversion coupled with the aforementioned dopamine hit associated with gambling that makes it so prevalent?

Machine learning used to be considered a subset of AI. AI encompassed any algorithms that exhibited "intelligence" (e.g. a chess engine), while machine learning was scoped to algorithms that required training (e.g. a neural network).

without harming others.

That's the problem. It isn't always clear to all people exactly what causes harm to others. For example, it is generally agreed upon that exposing your "nether region" is harmful to others even though all you are really doing is giving something for others to look at. Maybe some of the other weird things they see could be equally harmful? If your weird behaviour is commonly weird then you might have some precedent to look upon, but there is no way to tell what is and isn't harmful to others until it has already happened when you are being uniquely weird.

Have what backwards? Capitalism and markets are clearly different concepts. Consider the single company town. The capital is privately owned but the economy is centrally planned. There is no competition lowering prices, but there is capitalism. The capital is most definitely not communally owned.

There is another concept, market capitalism, which describes where markets and capitalism come together. That may be what you are thinking of, but that isn't what we are talking about in the discussion. The original comment clearly wrote "capitalism" and not "market capitalism". What was said about markets in that comment holds true even without capitalism, so we have logical confirmation that it wasn't a case of accidentally leaving out "market" in front of "capitalism".

I mean implementations, but we can conflate the two in most cases

Perhaps there is something to be said about that within the space of all programming languages, but why would you conflate them in our discussion about Go given that having multiple implementations was established as a language design requirement? For many years the core Go team maintained two different Go compilers themselves to ensure that requirement was met, although these days it has turned its focus to one, relying on the community of other compilers to fulfill the other implementation requirements. It is impossible to have that conflation because there isn't just one implementation in which to conflate it with.

In practice, if you were going use Go on a microcontroller you would not use the same compiler as you would use if you writing a web server. There are different tradeoffs for different computing environments and so different compilers can focus on different machines. As we already discussed, one such tradeoff is in GC implementations. While it is fair to say that dynamic memory allocation is not ideal on microcontrollers to begin with, if you chose to go down that road and accepted GC to go with it you'd want a GC designed for microcontrollers, not a GC designed for handling web requests. Those needs are very different. Conflating languages and implementations straight up doesn't make any sense in the context of this particular discussion.

I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools.

Why's that? Around here the parochial schools are fuller than ever. Not because people have taken a greater interest in the religion — the local data shows the same decline in god-based religious observance that you spoke of — but because they are the schools which have gained a reputation for providing a better education, which strikes a chord with those fearing the fiery hell of the McDonald's grill.

Heck, even if we assume for the sake of discussion that the original claim is the truth and that parents must turn to private schools, why does that preclude parochial schools? On the premise given, if that's where the "desirables" are found that is where the students needs to go, even if one doesn't buy into the religious foundation of the school.

the could support two parts of his narrative

If it had said that parents want to turn to private schools then you'd have a point, but it says they must. "I cannot afford it" doesn't fly for things you must do. Since it is something they have no choice in now, that they didn't do decades ago, where is it showing up in the data? Another comment indicated that charter school growth is where the data suggests there is a clear growing trend. We could accept the premise that parents actually see those features in charter schools instead, but then that same comment pointed out that charter schools are often the most diverse, which contradicts the original premise.

given the decrease in religiosity in the US over that time period?

Has religiosity actually decreased? Christianity certainly has, maybe even all god-based religions, but the religion of formal education seems to have fully picked up the slack. There are a shocking number of people who believe that you will be stricken to the hell of flipping burgers at McDonalds if you don't praise the institution and attend college worship. And it seems likely that anyone who buys into that religion is prone to want to send their kids to private schools given the prevailing ideas about what private school offers.

And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.

It is, indeed. There is a huge chasm between wants and musts. It would require an entirely different discussion to turn us towards wants. Although it is not clear what purpose that discussion would serve? What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?

What I can’t understand is why you all seem so fucking gleeful about it.

Many asked the same question when loom operators were on the way out. But in hindsight would you have rather seen it play out the other way and now have loom operating being the thing that you do? Freeing one from operating a loom allowed us to move into software development. I, for one, am thankful I don't have to operate a loom.

What you may have missed is that many software developers are actually engineers. Engineers don't care about software, they care about solving problems. Even if LLMs can somehow solve all problems that can be solved with software, there will still be an endless list of more problems to solve that cannot be solved with software. Software is just a tool in the toolbox, not one's identity. So what if one of those tools is no longer needed?