sophacles

I met Mr Draper once. I was staying at the SFO hyatt, or maybe the Mariott, and had a couple hours to kill after breakfast and noticed there was some sort of conference going on, so I crashed it. I walked into a talk room and sat in the front row and introduced myself to my neighbors. On one side was Steven Levy (author of many books in the industry) and the other was Bill Draper. I don't really remember the conversation, nor even the topic of the conference - it was a brief conversation in the 5 or 10 minutes before the talk started. At the time I didn't really know who he was but I was a little star-struck by Mr Levy, and it was Levy who told me I should be more impressed by being next to Draper. Mr Draper thought that was funny and the three of us chatted a bit more about whatever. I found it interesting that Mr. Draper was a surprisingly relatable guy (particularly given what I know about him know) and that he was very insightful of technology for someone who was in his 70 or 80s at the time.

RIP Mr. Draper. I didn't know it when we talked, but you helped make my career possible - thanks!

The floor of most houses for most of history was made of dirt.

If I hear "they" are foreign" I'm capable of any or all of the following as situationally relevant:

* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on the antecedent.

* deciding if singular or plural is relevant based on other context.

* deciding if the singular or plural actually meaninfully changes the meaning of the statement within it's context and not worrying about if it doesn't.

* in the vanishingly rare cases where it's meaningful, contextually unclear, and I am still unsure, I can ask.

I may be an imbecile, but fortunately it takes only a minuscule amount of mental power to handle all this. English has a lot of redundancies and deducing from context is built into the language.

So when hear a simple snippet "they are foreign" I assume either it will become clear from further context, or it doesn't matter how many people "they" refers to since someone is having a tantrum about pronoun usage.

Perhaps what's really bothering you isn't that I pointed out the historicity of a common, centuries-old pattern in the English language, but rather that someone missed naptime and is grumpy.

People have been using "they" as a gender neutral singular pronoun for 600 years. I doubt you're old enough to find this confusing.

I'm sober, both in the immediate sense and in the sense that I haven't had a drink in 23 years. I know that drinking is not a good thing for me, for many reasons.

If you want to go home and have a beer or whatever - have a good time. If you want to go to the bar later and have a drink - maybe I'll go with you and sip a fancy mocktail or something, we can take turns buying rounds. If you want to get wasted and party all night - have fun, I had a lot of fun nights that way (please don't drive though).

I'm not opposed to anyone else's drinking. I just know I can't.

Teetotal implies an opposition to all alcohol use. A teetotaler is against you drinking. I'm not opposed to that at all, I just choose for myself to be sober, for a myriad of personal reasons.

> You linked to a data center that was a bitcoin mining operation and ...

> I don’t think you understand how people operate.

Hahaha you think people care what the datacenters do.... and you accuse me of not understanding how people operate.

I don't know specifically, I'm not the person who posted about that database. But it happens all the time, even in 2026 at good tech companies.

It tends to come from a couple of common places...

* efficiency - triggers, stored procedures and constraints can often speed up throughput in terms of transactions per second by reducing the number of round trips from the application to the db. I know above i mentioned its not about qps necessarily, but a telephone billing db probably includes records of calls and txts and so on, which across millions of people adds up.

* Older architecture patterns didn't put a single service in front of a database for that service. Instead theres a single database for the company, or for a function within the company, and many programs and services interacted with that database. In such an architecture, stored procedures and triggers are really useful for some business logic, to ensure consistency between various systems... Need to update tax rules for one state? Just donit in the db instead of the sales pos system at the stores and the billing system and the phone operator sales system and the website and the gateway for 3rd party sellers, etc. there's a certain logic to it too... This data is fundamental to the business and has lots of rules associated with it, those make sense to place together - the rules change independently of the systems accessing those rules, and over the life of the company those rules tied to laws and accounting may last far far longer than any given pos system or website rewrite.

They literally are. Look up the markley datacenter in lowell Massachusetts. Here's a video out of dowagiac michigan where you can see and hear the datacenter across the street: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2026/0...

Those are two I know off the top of my head. There are others.

Why would you lie about something so easily dispoven?

There's likely an awful lot of tricky logic in the queries, stored procedures, etc. Dealing with taxes (very location and situation depending), details of any given customer's plan, equipment charges, etc etc for lines going back for decades... this stuff is hard to migrate correctly. It's not necessarily about qps.

If you don't like it there, trade with someone who is in a town with a datacenter and is unhappy that the datacenter is there! Or maybe convince more YIMBY types to move into your city and get the datacenter back.

I understand you're disappointed that people had the ability to choose things in their lives and didn't choose the thing you wanted. You can still do plenty to get the datacenters right across the street from you - sometimes in this world you have to work for the outcomes you want. IDK if it's fair or not, but it is how it seems to work out.

> Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?

Wow, you're really triggered by the idea that people should get a say about what happens in their lives.

You'll note I didn't oppose the datacenters - I offered a solution to getting the datacenters built. If you trade houses with the people who don't want a data center in the neighborhood you're getting the datacenter! It's just that you're so upset about someone else having the ability to affect their own lives that you aren't seeing that you have the same power, and can work towards your own perfect world with power plants and datacenters and sewage treatment plants and subway stops just down the street!

I think the problem with that plan is what I pointed out - you want other people to have all the downsides of those things in their neighborhood while you get the benefit. It's pretty sick to think that them not wanting the downsides is a problem, but you not wanting the downsides also means they have a problem. Fortunately there's a solution! Go form a YIMBY community that allows all the projects that have representatives promising benefits, and prove that the NIMBYs are all wrong. I'm 100% certain it will make you way happier.

> What's your plan to solve income inequality?

Well part of it starts by not giving giant companies with lots of money even more money in the form of tax breaks, extra access to government, and the ability to use eminent domain for their profit. All these thing grow income inequality.

You know, here's what i don't understand...

Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?

You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.

I wouldn't. I was responding to the GP comment talking about how utterly awful and wasteful this design is because you need some extra wire instead of just making "miles long chains" of solar panels. My 1/4 mile example was just to point out that a tiny fraction of those miles is itself insane.

Research pilot programs are always much more expensive than the comercialized version will be. The money is used to work out kinks, do a bunch of engineering, discover and account for unexpected issues, and so on. A lot of the work done on there is reusable to make the scaled version cheaper. Further, once the design is settled, economies of scale factor in and you get a much cheaper unit price.

And so ultimately, despite my details being wrong about currents, the notion of stringing miles of panels together is probably not a good basis for rejecting the panels over the canals.

I get that. I'm pretty skeptical that 120 KW going through the last panel doesn't cause damage, and in the "multiple miles chained together" (to quote op) many MW going through the panel at the end of the chain doesn't run into some sort of issue in the real world. Even small percentage losses turn into a lot of heat or other issues at that scale.

If it doesn't why not just make the whole 100 mile stretch of canals discussed a single very long daisy chain of panels, and still address the concern of the OP in terms of extra material for conductors?

A solar panel is 4 feet or so on the long side. Theres 250+ of them in a string 1/4 mile long.... at 48 V/panel, you get to 12KV. even if it's topped out at 10A thats still 120KW... you need a hefty cable to carry that panel to panel. Which is the core of the point I was making.

According to my searches, steel production is something like 6-8 MWh/ton to extract, refine, and shape. A solar panel lasts 25 years at up to 80% effiency. This thing produces 1.7MW at peak. so call it 3 MWh/day average to account for a lot of adverse conditions over the lifetime. Thats 27000 MWh... so unless we are looking at more than 3000 tons of steel (we aren't) the steel production is accounted for. A panel takes something like 1.9 MWh equivalent in energy.... and again we aren't looking at 13K solar panels in this pilot.

So yes, in fact this does generate far more energy than goes into its production.

I'm pretty sure those are called tunnels

Power lines are made of aluminum and steel.

I seriously doubt that you can chain even 1/4 mile of panels together without destroying things. Thats already puting thousands of volts and hundreds or thousands of amps through the silicon. If you are making it all parallel you still need wiring between panels that can handle that. The cabling doesn't go away, it just moves.

Wouldn't there still be supports in a feild of solar panels? Are you sure that those supports + the supports for the shade material are going to be less material than the supports for this?

Most shade material wears out pretty quickly. Will their replacement result in more expense, more waste, etc than just putting the solar panels?

Shade material is generally pretty heavy, is it really going to need significantly less robust support? Weight aside, how much of the load those supports are rated for is due to the actual weight of the panels, and how much is for forces from things like wind?

To analogize coding to sculpting - you're in the "toddler with playdough" phase. At some point you might want to make something other people will find pleasing and maybe even worth putting on display, the rules of composition, the details of materials, and the techniques for not wasting expensive materials suddenly become important.

If you're just writing code to fuck around or automate a small part of your life, whatever. But if you're making a big system or wanting other people to use your product, these things about how to make good software become more relevant.

By your logic 'ls' is a file manager, 'grep' is a search engine, and 'echo $X >> /proc/sys/$Y' is a settings manager.

It makes sense though. It's the same logic that allows you to say promting an AI with "do a simple thing for me" makes you a programmer, and prompting an AI with "what is an api" allows makes you knowledgable about computers.

No, its not a strawman. Cutting tiny things from the budget to save money when there are big obvious wastes right out in front is fucking stupid. Complaining about how hard it is to cut tiny things from the budget when there are giant obvious wastes out in front is equally as stupid.

If you want to seriously affect the budget, go for the things that burn large piles of money first.

Nonsense, curl is a tool for executing a single http request.

Many apis require several requests to get things done. (one to auth, one or more to fecth resource ids, one or more to modify resources, etc).

That would be a series of curl calls with logic applied to the output of each call to curl. An api client just does those things in a single function call. The steps are the same, but in one case the AI has to figure out each curl call and implement the logic, rather than just call the function.

Or we could look at the utterly stupid things, like maybe stop having a failed war in Iran, and just not pay for those? Thats a very big chunk of budget. As a bonus it would bring gas prices down, reduce future spending in VA and other combat veteran costs, and just possible help make the case for reducing the size and expense of our military (while still maintaining the 2 largest air forces in the world).

What is "implementing".... I'd define it as "figuring out the workflow, and storing it in a way that allows reuse". This could be a program written in assembly, or rust, or even python. Or it could be a shell script that calls curl. Or it could just be a set of tokens in the current session. Outside of the computer it could even be a set of processes people do, or a mechanical device.

If it's just a set of tokens in the current session, well then next session it has to figure out the workflow, and then store it in a way to use in the next session.

Seems like maybe you should take your own advice.

Instead of doing that boring thing the unthinking do - I challenge you to ask why 15M seems like a lot.

Is it a lot in comparrison to the costs to the taxpayers for all the emergency crews responding to animal caused accidents over the lifetime of the crossing, not to mention dealing with carcasses of animals, etc?

How much of any single person's tax money went into it? How long until those few cents get paid off in terms of saved time and gas by not dealing with the traffic backup from those accidents? How much do those few cents amortize to your savings in reduced insurance since thats less potential accident you have to bet against... how much savings does that reduction confer on your expected direct costs in cas you had been in a the accident?

Does 15M still seem like a lot?

Maybe you think it could be built cheaper - how? Show your work.

All these things sure are an interesting conversation to have. Much more interesting than "hur dur, 15M is a big number" anyway.

There are people who turn off their computer?

I hold myself to all sorts of standards that are not enforced by anyone outside of me. There are plenty of things I choose not do do despite a complete lack of consequence if I do them.

It's a called integrity and morality. Clearly another thing cops and their sycophants don't have.

What latency gets added? Presumably on cache miss they already need to look up "whats the origin for www.example.com" and get info about it. This is just a handful of bytes in that record.