vel0city

One of my classes in college had an alternate question on a final exam to write a short program in MIPS R2000 binary. Lines and lines of 32 1's and 0's.

It was an easy program. We were allowed an 8.5x11 cheat sheet, I had managed to put a lot of the binary formats for common instructions on it. Easy peasy, got to skip like 1/4 of the other questions.

Kind of true.

There are certainly things where you need to have an officially licensed engineer actually stamp the plans. That doesn't mean everything about the plans was done by someone who holds that stamp, just that they were reviewed and signed off by the person holding the license. Lots of people may work on those plans. They're still doing engineering work. And that's just for the kinds of things which actually require a licensed "engineer".

There's still tons of jobs which is often still called "engineering" which often don't involve anyone who has a stamp. Few electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, or lots of others actually have any kind of engineering license. They still get degrees in things like "Bachelor of Science of Electrical Engineering" or "Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering". Their job roles usually have "engineer" in it. And yet it seems like the job people only really criticize as "you're not an engineer, engineers are licensed" is SWE.

It's still a radically different thing. It wasn't nearly as algorithmic. The interface and engagement was different. And the number of people consuming it all the time is totally different.

If they were really the same, why was there so much uproar over how annoying Shorts was when it was originally added?

How can you honestly think YouTube in 2016 was practically the same as Tik Tok? Why would these other social media companies spend so much trying to change to copy their same strategy if they were all already the same?

Short form content is radically different today than what it was in 2016. It's produced differently. It's presented differently. It's consumed differently. The audience is different. It's pervasiveness in society is different.

Eh. I get what it's going for. The Multi-Window application concept and what not.

In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.

Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.

I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.

The backup would live someplace other than on the broken machine. It would be encrypted some other way (or maybe not at all, depending on threat profile).

No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.

Regular YouTube isn't the same as YouTube shorts. It's a vastly different product.

Yeah I mean it's yet to be seen how much of that really gets built. I imagine some of it will never get built. Who knows how much though.

All I'm certain of is all this new demand willing to pay any price means things will be more expensive just to try and not melt or freeze in the Texas weather.

FWIW I'm far from an AI detractor. But we need to make sure we're putting these costs where they belong, and some of these plans do seem insane.

That comment was at least 75% snark, I agree.

I do agree and understand we flare a lot of natural gas, waste because there's just not the economics to transfer it elsewhere. I definitely agree, it would be nice for that to be put to some economic use if we're pulling it out of the ground.

> Texas produces nearly twice as much natural gas as it consumes domestically.

And it exports that other half it doesn't consume domestically. It's not like half of what is produced just sits around forever. We've massively scaled up LNG exports. We export to surrounding states. But hey just act like we've got billions of cubic feet lying around doing nothing ready to go for datacenters.

> approximately 80.7 GW of continuous electrical generation.

Ooh wow. There's 420.8 GW of demand sitting in the ERCOT connection queue specifically for data centers today. All that "extra" and we'll cover like 20%. A good gas power plant will do better than 50%, but that's still not enough. And I imagine there will be even more datacenter demand coming soon. And that's just at the grid connection levels, not behind-the-meter generation like what we're talking about.

I've also lived through continued cost increases of natural gas in Texas. What does adding an additional 420GW of demand for just datacenters do to our rates? How much more am I going to spend to heat my home this winter? How much more will I spend on my electric bill next summer?

I've also lived through the collapse of natural gas supplies in 2021. I wonder if these datacenters will turn off their turbines or let people freeze it something similar happened again?

Seems like you make a big point about doing the math but only doing half of it. Keep going, see where it takes you.

Instagram Stories were radically different in 2016 than the reels of today. They were far more personalized (less algorithmic public content), slideshow-like updates. Ten second max video clips, with most being just images. Ephemeral as well, where they'd get removed in 24 hours.

It's not the same at all.

Many kids were, sometimes. Also, Vine was still pretty different from modern short form content, being capped at only a few seconds of length. Now most people consume tons of short form content, with many being 30s or more. It's pretty radically different in terms of what most people consume.

Practically nobody consumed short form TikTok-like media in 2016. Now it's a highly dominant type of media.

I still remember when Vista had just come out and I installed it on my computer. I was getting such annoying hangups and blue screens constantly.

Turns out it was my sound card, or at least it's drivers. It was some super cheap Crystal-based one. It would have some glitch during the permissions swap of the UAC environment, and when it went to play that ding it would break the system and require a hard power off. If I muted the computer before the UAC, it was fine.

Pulled the sound card and it ran fine.