jeromie

Let's be real. Developers and investors know what the community objections will be before they propose a project. They could overcome those objections by making strong contractual guarantees up front, particularly around building closed-loop cooling systems, strong ambient noise controls and performance thereof (managed well outside the human range of hearing to minimize effects on wildlife), self-generation capacities that exclusively ban Grok-style temporary gas turbines and other fossil-fuel sources at the facility, and or other formal contractual guarantees that costs to energy suppliers will be directly absorbed by the facility and not the backs of consumers in the local energy market.

Supply-side constraints aside, none of this is actually hard, it just eats into profit margins. Any argument that prioritizes time to market concerns over irreparable harm to ecosystems and communities doesn't, umm... hold water.

When these ventures ultimately go bankrupt (that time to market argument predicates a few winners and many losers) and leaves abandoned mega-structures behind, who cleans those up? The tiny rural communities where many of these facilities are proposed to be sited? The federal government? Licensure should include an escrow account with funds sufficient to restore the site to a leave-no-trace state. If it's good enough for my campground, it's good enough for a datacenter.

You know, when the alternatives are to put money in the pockets of a sociopathic compulsive liar, ketamine fiend and nazi, put money in the pockets of a sociopathic compulsive liar, or give money to Dario, I'll pick Dario.

My dad took me here a couple times as a kid, it's such a lovely place. Highly recommend checking it out, it's well worth the drive.

The ability of Texas to adhere so intensely to the idea of radical individualism while also being wholly committed to fascism at a policy level has always confused me.

When I studied Texas history in University, the textbook opened with a sentence along the lines of "Texas Government has always been characterized by incompetence and nepotism", and through that lens, I filed many of the absurdities (e.g. Greg Abbott's entire career and the "free speech area" on my university campus) under that bucket.

A couple decades haves since passed and my view has changed to see the openly racist institutions, targeted policing and zero-sum "satesmanship" at both local and state levels that forego core democratic values for "winning" (or at least lining the pockets of your donors) as something more jaded and sociopathic.

There are a lot of truly good, smart people in Texas, yet it's been an fairly openly fascist state for decades. Coming from the Bay Area and having lived in a lot of places, I've never felt like I lived in a police state more than in the DFW metroplex, although when visiting family in Northern CA, CAMP operations in Mendocino County come as a close second in terms of authoritarian vibes.

I was so confused with how many people from the valley openly aligned and invested in such a deeply corrupt state in the 2000s. Elon was unsurprising given his fashy incel leanings, but Apple's choice to build the Austin campus floored me. An office in a state where your female employees don't have reproductive rights? How do you endorse that?

You can't just look past the political rot that has defined Texas for generations with the excuse that you can buy a "Keep Austin Weird" sticker at H.E.B. The people in Austin and across the state advocating for a better future and an accountable government deserve a shoutout, but man, if you wanted to see the writing on the wall for American Democracy, all you needed to do was look at Texas anytime between 1996 and now.

It's sad because it really is beautiful country full of decent people, but it's blatantly and unjustifiably corrupt, and diametrically opposed to the core American values that it attaches to it's lifted, 9-tom, 1/2"-longer-than-the-same-model-sold-in-every-other-state pick 'em up truck, and it's gamed so hard that the people in the state will never undo it.

Texas was the test case.

I had to go take a two-hour walk to calm down after my boss sent me a project proposal that was just ChatGPT gobbledygook.

Gasoline degrades more quickly than propane.

When I looked at options for keeping a couple days worth of fuel around (with no gas-powered yard tools to necessitate fuel turnover), propane seemed like the more attractive option.

I was also storing said fuel in an outbuilding with venting and pretty far back on my property.

If you're regularly buying and storing gas, your math might math differently.

The irony

>Kurt Cobain ended up dying by suicide as a result of complications from his use of the drug.

Oof... you skipped right over the Heroin part of that equation.

I went down the music track around that age, and it was the gateway into daily routine, meditation, delayed gratification and a community similar to software (at least back in the day) that understands and embraces neurodivergence. It's now this life-long cornerstone that brings me deep joy and stability when things are too hard. It was probably one of the first places where I really felt seen by adults and found peers that got me.

This. The replies, and then the rest of the logged-out feed almost exclusively filled with Elon being unhinged just reminded me of why I deleted Twitter. Good riddance.

Yay, more useless hot takes from Twitter. So glad they're on my HN feed.

The team at ruffle.rs has done a really good clean-room implementation of Flash. The hard part with Flash (beyond having two virtual machines, a JIT compiler, pixel shader support, etc) was that it was also bug-for-bug backwards compatible, such that new player updates would not break existing content compiled for older versions. Good luck reverse-engineering that (or porting it with a fully copy of the ~2.5M line codebase).

It's also the case that a lot of games were dependent on specific timing, and changes to internals that were completely unrelated would elicit super weird behaviors in various games.

When Flash in the US was EOLed, the folks at Newgrounds used Ruffle to keep their large body of Flash content running. It's been a couple years since I've checked in on it, but what they had was pretty impressive compared to other FOSS attempts that had been made over the years.