Unfortunately, the state of non-Apple hardware makes your parent’s comment a defensible position. Btw, using Linux in general means having “some unpaid volunteer do it for you”
Where does the assertion that most of this is fraud come from? The City Journal investigation claims IHSS loses roughly $6 - 12 billion a year (out of a nearly $30 billion program). That’s 20 - 40% of dollars not employment. And that data is contested. I think the real problem here is that there isn’t enough oversight so we don’t have the data, which allows stories like this to fester.
What I’m reading into what you are saying: this is the most uncertain time to be alive. And I think that is true. Societal change at this pace is a relatively new thing for humans, and it’s speeding up. Simultaneously, we are losing many anchors and touchstones at once. In the past, even in times of great uncertainty, there were always constants that humans could lean on. From family, to country, to religion, to occupation, even to art and media. That is less and less the case. Everything is uncertain, everywhere, all at once.
This is something, but it is not enough. I live in Virginia. Virginia has been increasingly importing more and more electricity from West Virginia (coal) and Pennsylvania (natural gas) to power new data centers. Between 2019 and 2023, imports grew 61% [1]. Even though Virginia has been building out solar and offshore wind, between 2023 and 2025 low carbon electricity (renewables + nuclear) actually decreased as a % of the energy mix (28% to 26%) [2]. Virginia won’t commit to building the clean energy generation needed to power the data centers and it won’t build fossil fuel powered generation (which is on paper something I agree with). So it imports the electricity that is both dirty and expensive, and we pay for it. It’s the coward’s way out.
So true. A legislator in Virginia finally pitched ending the tax credit that brought all the data centers to VA in the first place, and I hope it passes (I know it won’t). But seeing the upcoming rate increases already on the books and the number of data centers they are planning to build is pushing me to consider solar again. The payback time is getting shorter and shorter :)
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
Putting aside the fact that no company should have direct access to anyone's brain, how cool would it be to be building toward VISOR (from TNG) instead of this. If we could translate sensor signals to the neural circuitry of the brain directly, we wouldn't even need an LLM in the mix. But to have it as an overlay, as supplementary data! With the ability to turn it off of course. (Would a person even be able to turn it off? In the same sense as whether someone can "turn off" social media?) If only we had meaningful human rights and institutions that really protected them... I still can't fully give up the techno-optimism that made me love tech in the first place (and TNG for that matter).
And if you look very closely, you can see just the tiniest bit of backbone growing in the backs of the Democratic congresspeople. If they continue to nurture this growth, they may even be able to sit up straight. That would be a marked improvement over their current situation of lying on the floor and letting the GOP walk all over them.
I switched from caffeine (coffee) to theacrine (pills) and I like it so much more. I feel alert and focused without added anxiety. It doesn’t seem to affect my sleep at all. I really didn’t like how hard it was to quit coffee.
I don’t like that it’s a pill. I tried making my own theacrine drinks, but theacrine is so bitter that I never found one that I liked. I am still haunted by the chicory + theacrine drink I made…
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, there are definitely ongoing jobs, but in this area they are mostly filled with H1B workers. The real money is in development
I agree with you. People are far too optimistic. On a practical level, though, how much of these increasing issues can be temporarily ameliorated by better ventilated houses, schools, offices, etc.? In other words, does reducing the average exposure of CO2 help or is it really about the outdoor level? I could see the average mattering, but I could also see how spending time in an environment that is <400ppm CO2 (basically never happens now) could cause our bodies to rapidly expel CO2 and "reset" our internal levels.
His acting is laughably, painfully bad and then suddenly incredibly poignant and for some reason for the whole time it's bad I'm subconsciously like "oh this part doesn't count". It's so easy to root for him
It's unlikely that anyone will see this but I tried using Zed again after not using it for a while and the power draw is significantly lower! So I don't think it is related to those issues after all. I don't see much of a difference between Zed and VSCode in the amount of energy they use, but Zed is noticeably snappier (and not owned by MSFT)
I would love to switch but the battery draw on my mac is just too much! I like to move around to different places in my home as I work so being able to be on battery for a while is a must for me (not to mention that I do travel occasionally)
I have a pet theory that I like to contemplate which is that consciousness is a field that brings the universe into being sort of like how the Higgs field brings mass into being
I’ve gone from thinking people are oblivious to thinking that people are willing to sacrifice a lot (democracy, individual liberties, food safety, etc.) out of fear, selfishness, and greed. It is surprising with the HN crowd though given how much less innovation and entrepreneurship there is under fascism.
I am considering dotnet Maui for a project. On the one hand, I am worried about committing to the Microsoft ecosystem where projects like Maui have been killed in the past and Microsoft has a lot of control. Also XML… On the other hand, I’ve been seeing so many impressive technical things about dotnet itself. Has anyone here used Maui and wants to comment on their experience?
Whether they were forced out or whether they just had a victim complex (I really don't know enough about history to know and it may be a little of both), I think it is well documented that they weren't wanted there by many. I believe England outlawed whatever religion the Pilgrims were practicing there.
It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day