Let's be real. Developers and investors know what the community objections will be before they propose a project. They could overcome those objections by making strong contractual guarantees up front, particularly around building closed-loop cooling systems, strong ambient noise controls and performance thereof (managed well outside the human range of hearing to minimize effects on wildlife), self-generation capacities that exclusively ban Grok-style temporary gas turbines and other fossil-fuel sources at the facility, and or other formal contractual guarantees that costs to energy suppliers will be directly absorbed by the facility and not the backs of consumers in the local energy market.
Supply-side constraints aside, none of this is actually hard, it just eats into profit margins. Any argument that prioritizes time to market concerns over irreparable harm to ecosystems and communities doesn't, umm... hold water.
When these ventures ultimately go bankrupt (that time to market argument predicates a few winners and many losers) and leaves abandoned mega-structures behind, who cleans those up? The tiny rural communities where many of these facilities are proposed to be sited? The federal government? Licensure should include an escrow account with funds sufficient to restore the site to a leave-no-trace state. If it's good enough for my campground, it's good enough for a datacenter.
You know, when the alternatives are to put money in the pockets of a sociopathic compulsive liar, ketamine fiend and nazi, put money in the pockets of a sociopathic compulsive liar, or give money to Dario, I'll pick Dario.
The ability of Texas to adhere so intensely to the idea of radical individualism while also being wholly committed to fascism at a policy level has always confused me.
When I studied Texas history in University, the textbook opened with a sentence along the lines of "Texas Government has always been characterized by incompetence and nepotism", and through that lens, I filed many of the absurdities (e.g. Greg Abbott's entire career and the "free speech area" on my university campus) under that bucket.
A couple decades haves since passed and my view has changed to see the openly racist institutions, targeted policing and zero-sum "satesmanship" at both local and state levels that forego core democratic values for "winning" (or at least lining the pockets of your donors) as something more jaded and sociopathic.
There are a lot of truly good, smart people in Texas, yet it's been an fairly openly fascist state for decades. Coming from the Bay Area and having lived in a lot of places, I've never felt like I lived in a police state more than in the DFW metroplex, although when visiting family in Northern CA, CAMP operations in Mendocino County come as a close second in terms of authoritarian vibes.
I was so confused with how many people from the valley openly aligned and invested in such a deeply corrupt state in the 2000s. Elon was unsurprising given his fashy incel leanings, but Apple's choice to build the Austin campus floored me. An office in a state where your female employees don't have reproductive rights? How do you endorse that?
You can't just look past the political rot that has defined Texas for generations with the excuse that you can buy a "Keep Austin Weird" sticker at H.E.B. The people in Austin and across the state advocating for a better future and an accountable government deserve a shoutout, but man, if you wanted to see the writing on the wall for American Democracy, all you needed to do was look at Texas anytime between 1996 and now.
It's sad because it really is beautiful country full of decent people, but it's blatantly and unjustifiably corrupt, and diametrically opposed to the core American values that it attaches to it's lifted, 9-tom, 1/2"-longer-than-the-same-model-sold-in-every-other-state pick 'em up truck, and it's gamed so hard that the people in the state will never undo it.
When I looked at options for keeping a couple days worth of fuel around (with no gas-powered yard tools to necessitate fuel turnover), propane seemed like the more attractive option.
I was also storing said fuel in an outbuilding with venting and pretty far back on my property.
If you're regularly buying and storing gas, your math might math differently.
Just the usual caution that Melatonin can be effective, but it's also really easy to overdose a kid. Consult your doctor first if you decide to go that route.
I went down the music track around that age, and it was the gateway into daily routine, meditation, delayed gratification and a community similar to software (at least back in the day) that understands and embraces neurodivergence. It's now this life-long cornerstone that brings me deep joy and stability when things are too hard. It was probably one of the first places where I really felt seen by adults and found peers that got me.
I can't recommend this video enough. I wish this research and understanding was available when I was a kid.
I figured out systems and tools to succeed in school and work (I was largely a C student testing in the top 0.1% of CA school kids on the standardized tests -- found that tidbit cleaning out my mom's things).
It was the rejection I experienced in peer friendships that scarred me deeply, and as someone who has been unmedicated into my 40s, still impacts my adult friendships and professional relationships.
Some key tidbits to sell you (and your nephew's parents) on spending the full two hours with this:
"... it also helps families to understand some of the other life course risks 50 to 70% of ADHD children are utterly rejected by close friendships by second grade it is in fact one of the more devastating consequences of this disorder is this inability to make and keep close sustained friendships with others their children and it is heartbreaking for parents to see this happening that their child is not as liked as other children that the sleepovers the going to the movies and the other social events in which other children celebrate their peer relationships are shut off for this child why is it there the single best predictor of peer rejection is that symptom the emotional impulsiveness friends forgive you your distractability your forgetfulness your working memory problems and even your restlessness they will not forgive your anger your hostility the quickness with which you emote to other people because it is offensive it is socially costly so now we can begin to understand the numerous social problems that ADHD children are prone to because it arises from this aspect of the inhibitory deficit"
"explains the road rage during driving the job dismissals which are not the result of inattentiveness but of being too quick to anger too quick to express raw emotion in the workplace of which employers are not tolerant especially if it occurs with a customer and it also explains to us the marital difficulties and the parenting difficulties these children may be prone to because the single best predictor of marital problems in the adult with ADHD is not distractability it is emotion so we can begin to paint a better picture of understanding ADHD and its life course risks by understanding the nature of the inhibitory problem..."
This. The replies, and then the rest of the logged-out feed almost exclusively filled with Elon being unhinged just reminded me of why I deleted Twitter. Good riddance.
The team at ruffle.rs has done a really good clean-room implementation of Flash. The hard part with Flash (beyond having two virtual machines, a JIT compiler, pixel shader support, etc) was that it was also bug-for-bug backwards compatible, such that new player updates would not break existing content compiled for older versions. Good luck reverse-engineering that (or porting it with a fully copy of the ~2.5M line codebase).
It's also the case that a lot of games were dependent on specific timing, and changes to internals that were completely unrelated would elicit super weird behaviors in various games.
When Flash in the US was EOLed, the folks at Newgrounds used Ruffle to keep their large body of Flash content running. It's been a couple years since I've checked in on it, but what they had was pretty impressive compared to other FOSS attempts that had been made over the years.
If you wanted to piss off the legal team at my large multinational employer and create strong headwinds for any future renewal conversations or more broad adoption for the rest of time, slapping our logo on your front page without asking was a guaranteed way to do it. Our lawyers did not forgive or forget.
As the interviewee, you can pretty much ask anything you want. You may also talk yourself out of the job in the process.
I haven't seen companies offer to pay off loans before (there's no geography here, YMMV), but hiring bonuses and equity compensation are pretty standard depending on your seniority and skillset. (e.g. We'll give you $X in restricted stock over 4 years, with 25% coming at the end of year 1 and then in quarterly drops.)
At the end of the day, you're a budget line-item for the company and they care about what you cost, not what you spend the money on.
Very similar career trajectory and move -- just approaching the 1-year mark.
In hindsight, I wish I would have:
- Listened more and Talked less in general
- Consistently started with "Why does this happen this way" vs. "This isn't the way that the industry does it, and we should aim for that"
+ The end states I defined were generally correct, but historical context matters and informed the route in ways that I would have benefitted from knowing about.
- Spent more time helping people realize my perspective on their own, vs. just communicating the necessary end-state and the justification.
+ Even if I'm right in what we need to do, people want to solve their own problems and feel ownership for the outcome when they've joined the cause on their own
- Really dug into it when contributors failed to meet their commitments to me to understand if there was a prioritization problem or an alignment problem (or if there's a skill or commitment gap in play).
- Remembered that it's just a job, and nobody there is going to be at my funeral. It's a transactional relationship that's less important than my mental health.
In terms of things I feel I did well with and/or found engergizing:
- Lots of new, really smart and talented people in my orbit
- Tons of information and perspective sharing, new reading, new insight
- Taking the time to meet people (this was hard over COVID), but bi-weekly 1:1s are key. People will generally tell you the (or at least their) truth in 1:1 conversations in a way that rarely happens in large meetings.
+ Chatting with my lunch crew on the daily is where I have historically gotten most of the valuable intel and feedback, and hashed out long-term strategies for the group or organization. It's also where people in my orbit communicate their vision and build coalitions around common pain points. I feel kneecapped by this and haven't found a good substitute.
+ There's really no substitute for sharing a meal with people. It's human and important.
I also came away with a deep appreciation for how good many of the "invisible" functions at my last job were, and what excellent leadership qualities were on display.
As an aside, I stumbled across these guys earlier today. They seem like they're trying to make global HR practices more accessible to smaller companies.
Supply-side constraints aside, none of this is actually hard, it just eats into profit margins. Any argument that prioritizes time to market concerns over irreparable harm to ecosystems and communities doesn't, umm... hold water.
When these ventures ultimately go bankrupt (that time to market argument predicates a few winners and many losers) and leaves abandoned mega-structures behind, who cleans those up? The tiny rural communities where many of these facilities are proposed to be sited? The federal government? Licensure should include an escrow account with funds sufficient to restore the site to a leave-no-trace state. If it's good enough for my campground, it's good enough for a datacenter.