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enaaem

American zoning is weird. You can't walk to a grocery store, but you can walk to a data center.

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You cant walk to a data center either

Literally in the article is a proposed development that is (easily) walkable from residential houses.

Who the hell wants to walk to data centers? From residential houses or whatever.

One of the key skills of a software developer is inference and you guys need to go get some more coffee and come back and try reading this thread again.

For code only, even then only sometimes or even rarely. The HN comments section is like a gold mine of the Dunning Kruger effect for social awareness/intelligence. It's not even worth pointing out because you'll just get 5 paragraphs in response of "no, you're wrong because I'm smart and so I'm right". It's exhausting.

Some days you show up to work and start by deleting everything you wrote for the last 3 hours the day before. They aren't all good days.

So you can avoid paying for remote hands when something goes wrong with a server.

A singular example. Thanks for the "gotcha", very redditor behavior.

It seems more like you’re exhibiting “redditor behavior”. Ostensibly, the comment you replied to was about TFA, and you replied flippantly with a statement of fact “you can’t walk to a data center” when the discussion is about an article related to a data center in a residential area. They didn’t pull a “gotcha”, you got got by your own ignorance of the topic at hand.

You obviously have never been to Ashburn, Virginia. Look up Lord Fairfax Pl. in Ashburn, VA on Google Maps and note the data center just outside that neighborhood.

And just up the road in Arlington you can walk to a grocery store

The zoning for that lot would allow a grocery store. Not being able to walk to the grocery store isn’t a zoning issue in this case.

Mwah, that depends on what you consider walking distance. I remember walking back from a Rite-Aid in SF when attending an IETF conference, entering the conference hotel and being asked by other attendees 'where the hell I managed to find a Rite-Aid here'? Well, it may have been a 1.5 km walk but it was there, sure enough. I did not look it up beforehand, just started walking out of the centre and found one. Sure, if you only look in the local block you won't find one but then again if I walk 1.5 km from where I live I only find more trees so everything is relative.

I mean to be fair if you add that 3km onto the walking you're already doing for the conference, that's a lot for most of us. Zigzagging a conference floor all day is a LOT of steps.

Not sure if this is sarcastic? It's like 20 minutes each way if you're not walking that quickly?

I used to walk from the main library to the metreon every sunday (made a day of visiting library and seeing a movie). It's not a long walk to most americans. It's easy, in that its a flat walk. Less easy (at least then) as it wasn't always the most pleasant area to walk through depending which way one went (detours et al). Staying on market was fine, walking up minna (sp?) less so.

What? This depends entirely on where you are. And for far more people, I would expect they can far more easily walk to a grocery store than they can any sort of industrial thing.

I have two grocery stores within 5 miles of me. Both paths to the grocery store take me by an Amazon warehouse before I arrive at the grocery

I have no doubt such locations exist. I would not at all present this as a common outcome in the US. Certainly not due to zoning.

You may be surprised. Many cities have urban sprawl and a desperate need for housing meaning subdivisions are being built in previously zoned industrial areas. That's certainly what's happened in my city.

Fair that I can be surprised/wrong.

As a new zealander walking to a grocery store sounds weird. I've lived in 7 houses some rural some urban and in none of them could I walk to a grocery store, so it's very weird to hear it exalted as some "standard" that America always fails in.

New Zealand, along with Australia, shares a lot of its urbanism with the US and Canada. In the rest of the (urbanised) world, I'd say it's expected to be able to walk to stores, especially in cities.

It's interesting to ponder if it's just the low density (caused by "having too much land" to expand on) or other factors that deprioritise walking like this.

Whats really frustrating is how silicon valley fights tooth and nail to stop housing from being built in their community only to force these data centers onto everybody else's communities.

Just makes you wonder how many of the SV types are wanting to use AI as the final solution for the poor.

Many of them, like Thiel and Ellison, are basically all but saying that sort of thing already. I'd give it under a year before one of them lets it slip.

Sam Altman already tried to counter the accusation that AI uses too much energy by complaining that raising children who can't contribute to the economy for the first 18 years of their life is more wasteful than building data centers.

I wish that there could be a normal world where people who want to cooperate don't have to deal with sociopaths and all the sociopaths could go live in another world to have fun and rape each other instead of raping normal people, it's a pity that humanity never evolved to handle globalism and it's a pity that life itself is selfishness codified

edit: all humans are psychopaths, sociopaths are merely the extreme end of the psychopathy scale

I walk to the grocery store, and can't walk to a data center.

It all makes sense once you realise the purpose is to maximise the amount of car storage. You're allowed to build car storage in every zone. Many zones even have a minimum amount of car storage required to accompany anything else you want to build.

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