Similarly my career started off 'full remote' as it was a small company that began in the late 90's almost by accident, picking up employees mostly from meeting them on industry-specific IRC channels. The initial 5 or 6 employees including myself never met each other until a number of years later when we could afford flights/hotels to have a company sponsored event.
After that team grew beyond a small handful of individuals who all knew each other and were used to working remotely (e.g. open source style of work) it got a lot harder.
The absolute best working situation for me was having an office everyone typically worked out of, but I was not required to work from. I found that I could balance my workload where I'd be in the office 2-3 days a week doing the "social" stuff like collaborating with my team on whiteboard level designs, meeting with other teams, catching up on e-mail, etc. Then I'd have 2-3 days of focus time at home to go head down and ignore the outside world to get more technical deep dive work done.
This only really worked for me though because everyone else worked from the office. I would wake up one morning, and simply decide to go in or not based on how I was feeling. If other folks were remote or hybrid it simply would have not been nearly as valuable.
I very much miss the office. I actually moved states and into the big city to be closer to it about 6 months before COVID hit. All the expense of bigy city living, none of the benefit! I am now fully remote like I was at the start of my career.
They completely eliminate the need for handwashing for me, unless cooking something very out of the ordinary like a huge vat of soup to freeze in the largest stock pot I own.
I have a rule that every single item in the kitchen goes into the dishwasher. If it doesn’t survive oh well - survival of the fittest.
The only thing exception outside of size that I can think of are the fancy knives. But we have an everyday set I don’t mind dulling and just sharpening once a month with a basic sharpener.
Everything used immediately goes into the dishwasher during the day, then before bed it gets ran full or not. Dishes put away with morning coffee and the cycle repeats. No dirty dishes cluttering up the kitchen, and no wasteful (water and time) hand washing required.
Yeah, though I tend to find that filling up a dishwasher with mostly a few things is often less efficient than just washing the bulky/awkward things by hand.
If you're doing this sort of thing, usually you batch your orders together (ideally with some friends) and randomly lab test a few vials selected from the large batch you receive. The powder form vials you receive before mixing will last more or less indefinitely in a freezer, so you can order multiple years worth of supply at a time.
The potency and purity are typically pretty good but from time to time vendors will be outed for either outright fraud or a bad batch that is underfilled or low purity. Most of the direct vendors (out of China) will guarantee fill and purity, and also give credit on your next order for lab test costs if you share the tests with them for future marketing purposes.
All sorts of risks involved of course, but you can mitigate them fairly effectively. Your risk tolerance may vary. Some folks will buy single vials from US resellers and trust those seller's lab test reports. Others (smartly, imo) don't trust that and do their own testing directly on the product they receive.
This grey market supply chain is remarkably robust these days. Plenty of suburban Facebook soccer moms organizing group buys.
No, you can know that decisions are stupid before knowing their outcome. In fact, decisions can be stupid even when they result in a neutral or positive outcome.
One of the worst outcomes from GLP-1 drugs are people getting on them and then saying ridiculous things like this. Just totally confident that they can discount other folks lived experiences.
I know quite a few skinny people who have struggled every single day with food noise, overeating, and self control. They simply got through it with a lot of struggle, habits, and discipline.
Some of these people had to maintain their weight and fitness because their careers required looking conventionally attractive for their jobs. It consumed most of their life doing so. Some of these folks are now on GLP-1s and their lives are immensely better as they don't need to constantly be in a battle of willpower with themselves.
There are a huge number of "skinny" people out there who feel hunger in very likely the same way many obese people do.
>I know quite a few skinny people who have struggled every single day with food noise, overeating, and self control. They simply got through it with a lot of struggle, habits, and discipline.
You're right, but the charitable interpretation of GP's comment is that people that were always skinny don't feel hunger, which clearly isn't true in a strict sense, but not totally untrue either, it just isn't as often.
What you're talking about seems to be people that worked their way to being skinny, or those that have such low body fat that they have visible abs, which even 'naturally skinny' people would struggle to maintain.
As someone skinny enough to have visible abs (But not washboard abs either), I don't try particularly hard to maintain my weight, it's mostly just avoiding obvious things like having fast food all the time (I still do eat it) and working out. Food isn't something I think about unless I'm hungry, and despite working in offices stocked full with candy/snacks, it hasn't resulted in weight gain over my tech career. I've been told directly by people in my circle (Not in tech) that they would really struggle with working in an environment like that.
I know a few folks on GLP-1s, and they operate on a completely different wavelength in regards to food than I do, and it's been great to see them reach their body goals.
Yes, there are outliers in just about any situation. The vast majority of healthy people, though, do not have this food noise impulse. If they did, they'd not be healthy people.
> That’s a hell of a claim, I would like to see some actual evidence for it.
I dunno if it's for the most part or not, but it holds true in my experience.
In my home state, there has been a transmission line project planned for over a decade now to take wind power generated in the windy southern end of the state to bring it to the central metropolitan load center.
It's been basically tied up this entire time due to NIMBY. It just recently in the past year or so started to enter the next phase, just in time for the anti-datacenter folks to be added to the NIMBY allied cause to get it blocked again.
It might still happen, but overall green energy from where I stand is something everyone wants in someone else's backyard. In the state I currently live in rural folks protest the solar farms, and pretty much everyone everywhere protests the transmission upgrades required.
My whole life has been consumed with basically no one allowing anything to be built for any reason. It's getting tiring, so taking anti-datacenter concerns at face value is proving difficult to me. Even if I do logically understand many or maybe even most are being brought in good faith.
Polls won't really provide much value on the subject. Plenty of people will say they are in favor of green energy projects - until they are proposed near them.
A "small" datacenter I personally know if in a municipality I am directly involved with generates about $6m/yr in taxes just from the city utilities (electric usage) tariff. That ignores any property taxes and the rest.
This is for a standard "warehouse sized" 100MW facility no one would know exists unless you told them it does which has been there for 20 or so years now. It generates far more taxes for the municipality than buildings of similar footprint next to it, as it's in a light industrial park like most of these things are. Scaled up to 1GW that's $60m/yr in simple "sales tax" on electricity consumption. Property tax is harder to dig through, but ignoring initial 10-20 year abatements typical for such projects it's roughly double that - but that's from memory.
I agree the tax abatements are bullshit. But those are bullshit for any sort of development and imo should be outright illegal at a federal level regardless of the project.
This doesn't account for any local income tax/etc. generated by jobs - where a datacenter of course will not be significant compared to most industrial land uses of similar acreage.
These datacenter facilities have typically been very tax revenue dense land uses for quite some time now without cities needing to invest very much in infrastructure to service them. It's why they generally have sailed through approvals until recently.
It just shows the utter hollowing out of the US industrial base to me.
Everything has been cut to the bone so any blip in demand cannot - at any price - be effectively responded to. Even if you were exceptionally good at being able to double internal capacity, the supply chain all the way from raw materials to skilled labor pool your vendors may need just isn’t there.
This latest datacenter bubble is just the last and most acute symptom of this problem I’ve noted in my lifetime. Hyper-financialization does that to an economy.
The best anyone can do is outbid peter to rob paul.
Consider that semiconductors are the worst case situation for a supply chain planner:
- most capital-intensive manufacturing process ever invented
- lead time for expansion is several years
- demand that is highly uncertain on a timescale of months
- technology that goes rapidly obsolete
Unless one of these factors changes, it essentially guarantees that semiconductors will have the highest price volatility of any manufactured goods. As they have since the 1980s.
This sub-thread wasn't about semiconductors though. It was for chilling plant. Semiconductors I do agree are a somewhat special case - but also one the US ceded it's capability in and largely offshored.
But it's way more than just chillers. It's everything from structural steel, to electrical transformers, copper cabling, optical transceivers, electric generation, skilled workforce in the trades, etc.
Overall this boom has been relatively tiny as far as US industrial booms historically have been, and we cannot ramp up production even if there was the political will to do so.
It's not just datacenters. Look at the military industrial supply chain these days. We can't even scale up WWII era artillery shell production in any reasonable timeframe. Much less modern weapons systems.
Because IT/programmers/tech folks in general have abdicated their responsibilities for too long, imo. The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.
Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.
If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.
It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.
This sounds exactly like the promises of putting a PC on everyone's desktop rather than a terminal connected to a locked-down mainframe, which in the end led to the lockdown migrating to PCs and the few employees who had any interest in automation forced to use tools like Excel because it was at least an improvement over VBScript and batch files and IT wouldn't let them install legit development tools unless their job description required them.
What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?
> The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
And most organizations still treat IT as a "support role" which means "cost center", only changing attitude when they inevitably get hacked, and a few years down the line, when enough of the managers who were there during the Great Hack are gone, IT gets the cuts again.
> Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason.
Sadly that doesn't help at all. Random people automating heaps of crap in order to do their actual work, just makes the crap easier to manage for them. It doesn't remove it.
I'm reminded of health workers or teachers complaining that half their time is wasted on various types of record-keeping, because employer wants to record, check & micromanage everything. Similar with tax systems becoming ever more complex. Those are just a few of many examples.
AI assisting with managing that, just puts some $profitable$ control knobs in the hands of a very few providers. While at the same time enabling the mountain of crap to grow even further.
A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
Doesn't seem to me that that's being done. So far AI is mostly used to ADD to the crap-heap, faster & easier.
> A real fix would be to use AI to get a better understanding of the existing heap of crap, and use that understanding to cut large chunks out & re-organise the remainder into a simpler stack.
The thing is, that's been known for a long time, at the latest since the release of Bullshit Jobs [1].
Unfortunately, too many too rich interests are tied up in the status quo.
First, you do realize that when in some your-employer's-boring-CRM-system a certain field cannot be edited until a specific 5 conditions is met and that conditions allows an object to transition from "new" to "processing" status before field become available etc. then there was a reason for this.
Before Claude these people used to automate their processes in Excel. Then new people would come along and say, "None of this makes any sense to me so I'll just build my own even better automation in Excel". And again, and again. "Random sales people" won't ask Claude:
- Find out who was the PO in 2019, analyze why it was decided to introduce an additional status in FSTP-14475 instead of (...) What happens if the driver currently outside mobile coverage area and the task processing will return a 202 instead of a 200 (not described in the documentation; refer to FSTP-14385 for additional information), but the status will be updated before the deferred change returns (...)
Instead, they'll do something more like:
- I need to be able to quickly change this and that right here, get it done, don't make any mistakes.
Would be good if Claude could recognize an XY problem and respond "Understanding what you don't want is even more important than understanding what you do want" or "If you try to cut corners here again instead of following the established process - thereby making things more difficult for the people in the warehouse - I will inform your manager" instead of just charging ahead "you're absolutely right, see the goal, ignore the obstacles".
Second, it is easier to fix a flawed but already functional system than build a perfect one from scratch - without running into a problems, contradictions, previously unknown nuances during implementation. Because these contradictions, problems, and oddities over the last 10 years naturally gave you the requirements and specifications that no one of the sales-people and decision-making-people were able to articulate in a coherent way. And yes, now, having these specifications, you can rewrite it in Rust and do things better.
I've gone through at least 30+ iterations of CRMs / Bug/ Issue/ WorkTrackers/ AP/ Expense / Project tooling in 7 companies over 20 years.
One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.
Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.
This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.
The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.
Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.
No, it's recognizing mistakes will be made and no one is perfect. You will also make mistakes regarding blast radius - sometimes the blast doors don't close or function like you thought they would during an actual explosion.
Defense in depth is the idea. Swiss cheese model of failure.
Yeah, but this is bottlenecked by both your ability to observe and understand the system, which is precisely the thing that's being reduced by careless use of AI tools.
After that team grew beyond a small handful of individuals who all knew each other and were used to working remotely (e.g. open source style of work) it got a lot harder.
The absolute best working situation for me was having an office everyone typically worked out of, but I was not required to work from. I found that I could balance my workload where I'd be in the office 2-3 days a week doing the "social" stuff like collaborating with my team on whiteboard level designs, meeting with other teams, catching up on e-mail, etc. Then I'd have 2-3 days of focus time at home to go head down and ignore the outside world to get more technical deep dive work done.
This only really worked for me though because everyone else worked from the office. I would wake up one morning, and simply decide to go in or not based on how I was feeling. If other folks were remote or hybrid it simply would have not been nearly as valuable.
I very much miss the office. I actually moved states and into the big city to be closer to it about 6 months before COVID hit. All the expense of bigy city living, none of the benefit! I am now fully remote like I was at the start of my career.
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