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silverquiet

2,378 karma · joined September 22, 2022

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silverquiet··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
I assume HN runs on machines in a datacenter. The servers that serve my business also reside in a datacenter. I see lots of upsides to datacenters, and they've been around long before they were controversial.
silverquiet··on U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal
As a young man, can I opt into Medicare since I'm opted in to paying for it?
silverquiet··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
I ran it by Gemini, and it says that the top 10% earn more than $78,800 annually.

I believe your experience is with the top end of the distribution.

silverquiet··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
How much do they make?
silverquiet··on Rent collections are down in New York
This sounds like private equity, except they'd also demand that the goose increase egg production by 10% per quarter.
silverquiet··on Waymo Premier
> Waymo is nicer

Just wait till Google spins it off to private equity; it'll be barley running bits of vehicles patched together by the cheapest mechanics they can find.

Enjoy it while you can; I'd love to give it a go myself, but even though I live in a city where they are supposedly in commercial operation, I can't get one to either of the two houses on either side of town that I currently split my time between. I have a buddy who lives a few blocks from one of their zones who walked over just so he could try it out. As of now, our sub-standard, minimally-invested-in-this-century bus system is actually much better suited to my needs.

silverquiet··on Americans don't know how to fight AI so they're fighting data centers
> rural red states where they welcome the construction

The state legislatures might be all for it, but I can say as someone who lives in South Texas, the actual communities are up in arms against datacenters. Of course there's lots of irony in that one of the reasons the datacenters like the area is that there is a gas pipeline that the locals welcomed that can be used to run turbines.

silverquiet··on Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
How do you plan that? Particularly for an age 45 retirement?
silverquiet··on Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
> you can retire at 45

Kinda hard to do that when you've locked all your money up in a retirement vehicle that doesn't let you withdraw until age 59.5.

silverquiet··on Louisiana Advances One of the Country's 'Cruelest' Anti-Homeless Bills
arbeit macht frei
silverquiet··on We automated everything except knowing what's going on
Anything in production is legacy; I'm pretty sure it happens as soon as the code is shipped regardless of who wrote it.
silverquiet··on Google Public CA is down
If multiple services are affected, it's probably some underlying infrastructure issue.
silverquiet··on New Athens: The first great American city for families
I'm quite capable of snark and I wouldn't say that I was being particularly so, but maybe something adjacent to it. Mostly I think this is amusingly naive. America has a history of attempts to create utopian communities, but I'm unaware of any that have persisted for terribly long. I think the one I'm most fond of are the Shakers, whose biggest legacy is their carpentry skills which is a hobby of mine.

I didn't really get an explicit yes or no out of the above, but I take it to mean no? That's the interesting question to me - who would be allowed to join such a community, and if someone was discovered to be undesirable for one reason or another, what would be done with them?

silverquiet··on New Athens: The first great American city for families
Will you allow illegal aliens in your new city?
silverquiet··on Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"
Does it recommend taking a break? Mostly I've seen it ask if I'm still watching. I've always assumed this is not for user benefit, but in order to not spend bandwidth on a screen that is not being looked at.

The only site I'm familiar with that has somewhat decent self-limiting functions built in is HN's no procrastination settings. But that's of course because HN isn't run to make money, but as a hobby.

silverquiet··on Electric Macan outsold gas in 2025, but Porsche commits to gas for some reason
> For the same reason I don't keep a giant gas tank in my garage

Do you keep a car in your garage?

silverquiet··on What twenty years of DevOps has failed to do
I think my favorite interaction with a dev around this was when I was explaining how his java program looked like a big juicy target for the OOM killer and it had killed it in order to keep the system working. His response was, "I don't care about the system, I care about my program!" And he understood the irony of that, but it was a good reminder that we have somewhat different views and priorities.
silverquiet··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
> JP Doherty did not want to sign the email. But he knew he didn’t have a choice. His son, Rhys, was scheduled to have strabismus surgery in January, correcting an eye issue that made it difficult for him to walk on his own. The procedure cost $10,000 out of pocket. Doherty discussed the decision with his wife, and while she wanted him to be able to quit, they both knew the kids needed his health insurance. [0]

Regarding Musk's "hardcore" ultimatum at Twitter.

[0]https://www.vanityfair.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-ultimatum

silverquiet··on Pentagon moves to punish Democratic senator over 'seditious video'
Aren't they required to obey chain-of-command? And doesn't their pay and their family's healthcare depend on them remaining employed?
silverquiet··on A middle-class family's only option: A $43,000 health insurance premium
The hip seems like such a bad example to me. First of all, who do you think needs hip replacements? It's not young people; surgeons don't even like to do them on young people (and to a joint replacement surgeon, "young" is under 60) since there's a good chance they'll outlive the joint itself. And it's a one-time cost for a surgery that increases an old person's independence vs an ongoing cost of palliative care (whatever that means) and having to provide more care for someone who has a potentially treatable disability. Hip replacement is considered "the surgery of the century" - the 20th century that is, because it is one of the most successful in terms of function and satisfaction provided to patients.
silverquiet··on $27,000 a Year for Health Insurance. How Can We Afford That?
I gained insurance overnight because of the ACA after not being able to afford it.
silverquiet··on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
I got a junk Precision workstation last year as a "polite" home server (it's quiet and doesn't look like industrial equipment, but still has some server-like qualities, particularly the use of ECC RAM). I liked it so much that it ended up becoming my main desktop.
silverquiet··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
> Hence, the "on average". For any 10 couples, they should have 21 children. If some have fewer, the rest have to have more.

This would seem to agree with "not everyone has to have children" - mathematically speaking you can quite simply put a couple zeros into the equation and still arrive at 2.1

> Sounds like a "you" problem.

I have no problem with the situation at all as I have never in my life had an interest in having children. I'm not sure I even see the changes in birthrate as a problem; people can adapt to demographic changes. But if it is a problem, then it must be some sort of systemic one and I doubt the answer is to try and apply pressure to individuals to have children by telling them to think of the economy or that it is some sort of societal obligation.

silverquiet··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
The math has a few problems then, because it seems rather difficult for me to have .1 child. Actually, it's impossible for me to have any children because I am a single man and it is not biologically possible.
silverquiet··on Thiel and Zuckerberg on Facebook, Millennials, and predictions for 2030 (2019)
> They really are just that up their own asses.

I remember perhaps a decade ago, a coworker and I were watching a clip of Zuckerberg walking up to a group of employees and they started clapping for him. I mentioned how odd it was to see, and he thought it was perfectly natural to applaud the CEO of your company. We never applauded when our boss showed up, and I've never really been sure where the line is for which authority I'm supposed to cheer for merely from being in their presence. I haven't thought about it too much since then, but obviously it's stuck with me.

As a society, we've all had our lips pretty firmly pressed onto the asses of the oligarchs for quite awhile, so it seems pretty natural that they think it's the natural order of things.

silverquiet··on $50 Oil Could Crush American Shale Growth
Eventually human civilization breaks down to the point where we can no longer sustain the industry to extract the fossil fuels.
silverquiet··on Moderna has unraveled
Given that the plan to accelerate covid vaccine development, "Operation Warp Speed", was a Trump administration program, this seems quite ironic.
silverquiet··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
I don't see where the GP changed their mind. They may not be ok with this particular action while still preferring the current administration to any alternative.
silverquiet··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
I've got a (probably former at this point) buddy who makes less than $15K/year. He seems to have lots of time to listen to right wing propaganda podcasts and likes telling "jokes" about how minorities are problematic. He was never really interested in politics when we were growing up and I suspect never voted before 2024. Poor people have interests and opinions too.
silverquiet··on Americans can't afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried
How much cheaper is a boring 3-year old Toyota versus a boring brand new Toyota? Why would the person who buys a boring new Toyota unload it for a significant loss after just 3 years of ownership?
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