creato

This ignores capital and opportunity cost. Building a GPU data center or chemical plant costs a lot. If you only use it 20% of the time, you're effectively paying 5x more for that capital equipment.

In the 80s, the US was 80% white, and upper management is going to be people from the 1930s-40s, when the US was 90% white.

Have you seen what the president of the US posts about renewable energy?

I don't know if they do this, but those conventions could be enforced by a tool.

Maybe he just likes building things that others find useful.

When I was younger I rented furniture from a company called CORT. I happened to notice on the contract or receipt or something, that it was a Berkshire company (I didn't know that before then).

If I were Warren Buffet, I would have been happy to know that someone was a satisfied customer of one of his companies. I got some decent furniture for a few months at a reasonable price.

Just like I'm happy when someone is a satisfied user of my software.

That number seems very unlikely to be accurate. It's more than 2x larger than all local, state, and federal government spending in 2025 combined.

Does that setting actually matter? When I lived in the area that had these, I always forgot to set it when the number of passengers in my car changed. I never saw any difference. The charge is the same.

The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.

Past innovation did though.

The fatal mistake I see people repeatedly making is that it isn't about the system or checks and balances or whatever. It's about the people. The US had a deep bench of mostly reasonable leaders that mostly respected ideas like checks and balances or conflicts of interest.

Those people are mostly gone now. Our society used to elevate people like that, but it just doesn't now.

You're right, the thing I linked to do does exactly that. I should have read it more closely.

The projects that I've worked on, unconditionally define it as a thing that crashes (e.g. `std::abort` with a message). They don't actually use that C/C++ thing (because C23 is too new), and apparently it would be wrong to do so.

This is actually C and C++ has not done something similar AFAIK.

The "standard" (typically defined in projects I'm familiar with, and as of C23, an actual standard) is "unreachable": https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/program/unreachable.html

This isn't necessarily a problem if you don't consider the output to be "source" code. Assembly is also garbage spaghetti code but that doesn't stop you from using a compiler does it?

This might be a reasonable summary of the situation but I suspect it's vastly oversimplified. The trajectory of these businesses depends on more than who's name is at the top of the org chart. TI pivoting away from semiconductors and towards other goods may seem like a stupid move in hindsight, but even in hindsight it's not clearly the case. TI's move is basically them trying to be Apple or NVIDIA instead of Intel or TSMC. Because they failed at that, doesn't necessarily mean that attempting it was wrong.

And none of this necessarily has anything to do with Morris Chang personally. Many factors need to align for a company like TSMC to be successful. Morris Chang may be one of them, but there are other factors that may or may not have existed at TI. The claim that they didn't exist at TI because TI didn't like Morris Chang is not something we'll ever know for sure.

> Populist rent control is an excellent motivator to get counter-parties to the table to discuss productive alternatives in a market where no outside pressure currently exists.

This makes no sense, the battle is ultimately between renters and owners of low density housing. Those owners don't care about rent control, they only care about zoning disallowing construction of new rentals. If anything, they're probably happy to see rent control if it means the pressure on cities to upzone is removed.

The scarcity in Europe (at least the two countries I'm familiar with) comes from a standardized test. If you don't do well on the test, you don't go to college.

> One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.

Did you read the issue at hand?

This is not average people making "mistakes". This is severe incompetence at every layer of decision making, and a complete lack of care for quality work. If you want to be mad at someone for being unfair, be mad at the manager of these people for putting them in a position they are grossly unprepared for.

Yeah, calling the authors of this code losers and monkeys is being kind. There is zero excuse for ever writing code like this, the incompetence is staggering.

> How can you possibly know who's good and who's not? Think of the information they have at hand - what the chain of command tells them. What if the chain of command itself is the problem? Think about how you yourself could protect a bad employee if you were a manager. You could! How can they possibly find the truth?

Senior managers should look at what people are actually doing. It doesn't take that much time. If tickets and PRs/MRs/changes are searchable by author, reviewer, and the files they touch (if they aren't, that's your problem right there) then it takes a few minutes to figure out who did the critical work, and who doesn't do much of anything.

In big tech, I've had senior managers (1-3 levels up) that do this, and ones that don't. The ones that do it are great managers. Under this type of manager, people are usually focused on making things actually work and making projects successful. The ones that don't do it can be good managers, but usually aren't. Under these types is where politics festers and dominates, because why wouldn't it? If you don't let the actual work guide your understanding, you're left with presentations and opinions of others.

When I do this (a few times a year), it takes 10 minutes for the easy cases, 1 hour for the hard cases, and once you do a few of these kinds of investigations in the same work area, you start to understand what the collaborators are doing before even looking at them specifically. So you're talking a few weeks of work for 100s of people. A few weeks a few times a year is not too much to ask someone to spend on their primary responsibility as a senior manager.

Past some point in scale, this does become impractical, I don't expect the CEO of a 10k person company to be doing this. But at that scale, the metrics are different anyways.

That's baked in to the cost of the hardware though.

> All of the ones I've remained friends with over that time are either deeply concerned about their career future, or have already jumped ship and become nurses, carpenters, teachers, caregivers, and even priests and drug dealers...

Aside from the last one, that kinda sounds like a win for society.

I literally just got my first Mac computer a few months ago. I tried to set it up as a local account with no online account. I could not.

Maybe it is possible and I just missed it. But either they don't allow it, or they have enough dark pattern bullshit to trick me, either way, it's the same as windows to me.

MacOS is just as aggressive about turning on icloud as windows is with it's crap.

Most people think they can just use WiFi, and most of them are probably right.

> Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.

It's not impossible to beat them consistently, but if you do, they'll limit how much you can bet or just ban you.

Escrow doesn't magically solve the problem, a way to mediate disputes would be required. That probably will fail in very similar ways to the way the systems we have today fail.

"People" you are referring to want a level playing field. If the Chinese government is tilting the field, there aren't a lot of good options. You can either watch the Chinese subsidize draining most productive capacity from the rest of the world, erect trade barriers (my preference, but it would require cooperation with other countries, which... ain't gonna happen for a while now), or try to tilt back.

I'm ambivalent about whether their design can work but if they were confident in their design and have the necessary funding, a paper and a nobel prize are going to be very far down their priority list.

> Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7.

If you're talking about just not running your data center when the sun isn't out, that effectively triples the cost of the building+ hardware. It would require a hell of a carbon tax to make the economics of this make sense.