thepryz

What's sad is that most people in the U.S. still believe the narrative that China is heavily reliant on diesel and coal and polluting more than any other country when the reality is that they've seemingly been executing on a more long term plan that will give them way more energy independence and environmentally responsible economy while the U.S. is stuck in the past, content with the lie of American Exceptionalism.

I shouldn’t dignify that with a response, but you may want to learn more about illusory truth. Everyone is susceptible to manipulation.

You may find some of the work done by Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project to be interesting.

https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/reports/challenging-tru...

When you work a particular field, and have acquired a certain level of knowledge and expertise, it’s a lot easier to see who has taken time to try and understand something and who is just repeating headlines or media rage bait because it confirms their own bias.

When someone favors what they saw on YouTube over multiple research studies or industry reports or even government reports, I think it’s fair to say they lack intellectual curiosity and are not serious enough to discuss or debate in good faith.

There’s a difference between fact and opinion and there are a lot of confidently incorrect people.

Agreed. One of the reasons I'm seeing myself becoming more of a luddite looking forward to retiring offline with minimal technology is precisley because online discourse is largely comprised of unserious people confidently incorrect and technology companies have largely stopped trying to make peoples' lives better and are more focused on quarterly earnings.

I'm skeptical that the misinformation campaigns are run by China, et al. but I do believe there are a number of competing interests directly manipulating public perception.

Americans, as a whole, lack intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and are easily manipulated by the media. The amount of misinformation on both sides of the AI and data center debate is staggering but stirring up fear drives engagement and revenue so here we are.

Be honest. There aren’t a lot of companies with a moral compass these days. If you want a job, and you’re not working for yourself,’the odds are likely you’re working for an evil company.

While not a Kindle, there are a number of E ink tablets running android with high refresh rates. Boox is one example.

Disappointing to see the removed Qi wireless charging in favor of pogo pins in the Signature.

This. I can't tell you how many times I've been contacted by a recruiter looking to fill a job that I myself am the hiring manager for or is within my reporting line. When recruiters can't even be bothered to look at the job, company and potentially hiring manager before contacting someone, the system is broken.

You'll often find a lot of engineers, and in my experience, a lot of former navy nuke personnel, overseeing the power and facilities at large data centers. There also tend to be a number of others with engineering backgrounds working in data center operations even if a lot of their work may not be what would commonly fall under "engineering". Technicians who perform some of the break/fix and routine maintenance do tend to be lower skilled but, again, it's not uncommon to find advanced degrees. I knew someone with a Phd in Chemistry working as an entry level data center technician because they were simply looking for something different outside of academia and it was a career that had rapid advancement potential.

Agreed. While Andrew's done an okay job stepping into some big shoes, I too miss the reviews John Siracusa used to do for Ars. Same could be said for a lot of the old internet when you had people like Siracusa, Anand Lal Shimpi at AnandTech among others, providing very detailed deep dives on the latest technology.

Sorry, but a lot of cars, even if they run Android Automotive, maintain a separate TCU/DCM with its own cellular connection that can collect vehicle information independently of Android Automotive.

The corners in the duo seem comparable to those on the standard iPhone. Presumably, the squatter dimensions may just call more attention to them. I don’t see the duo as appearing cartoonish though.

Seems a better question is who do you believe is actually innovating today?

Apple has rarely been about providing bleeding edge technology to early adopters. They've always been more concerned with evaluating technology, often building things behind closed doors to explore and iterate, and then only releasing something once they felt it was ready and able to address a defined purpose or need. It's not first to market, but often first to get it right.

Their AI strategy is actually pretty smart when you consider how they're focusing on small, local models with a clear security model. Others are spending billions to make incremental progress on models while Apple can sit back, build integrations that allow users to leverage the best models, and then once a certain level of maturity is reached, Apple can either license models or train their own using the lessons learned by everyone else.

Flock records more that just license plates. It’s my understanding they’re also scanning wireless spectrum and tracking Bluetooth and WiFi MAC addresses, among other things.

More to the point, there’s a difference between someone writing down license plate numbers on a sheet of paper and and putting that information into a database that can then be mines to identify patterns of behavior, associations between people, etc. Context, use, and scale all matter significantly

Would love to see this applied to VR so that users consuming content in a Meta Quest, Vision Pro, etc. can navigate the video store to browse, and then once they find what they want to watch, walking out the door takes them into a virtual theatre or living rom environment.

I think most people are quickly coming to the conclusion that maybe the wealthy aren't as critical to a community as they would like everyone to believe.

The big argument around NYC's pied-à-terre tax among other policy changes was that it would force the wealthy to relocate outside of NYC to more favorable locations. That hasn't happened, and for a place like NYC, very unlikely to happen because people are attracted to the city for what it provides. Worst case, they leave, the property values decline and the city becomes more affordable with any gaps in businesses likely filled by those living and invested in the community.

One of my greatest criticisms of higher education, or at least the academic institutions (having spent almost 20 years working for one), is that they approach education as a means to an end. Students are viewed as a resource to extract money from and little more. It’s no wonder people are questioning the value and ROI of higher education given the cost.

What educational institutions and the community should be doing is reframing the student-teacher or student-institution relationship and working to build a system that provides better support for lifelong learning via low cost classes people can drop in rather than limiting or overly emphasizing degree programs.

Do we really take away from the artist? In what way?

The obvious answer is that you take away a purchase the person to give the gift would have made. One could argue that there is also value in propagating someone’s art and potentially increasing the artists customer/patron base. Think of it as advertising or to put it in the context of a drug deal, the first hit’s free. The gift recipient may then go on to buy another work from that artist and even pass on the one they were given to someone else, continuing the cycle.

I’d also argue that there isn’t widespread agreement on reasonable compensation for artists. Personally, I don’t consider artists to be special enough in the context of people that make and produce goods, that they should get unique treatment. Why does a family deserve the financial benefits of trademarks and copyrights decades after the artists death. That’s just one example, but in a time when many’s artists view their livelihoods to be at risk because of AI, it’s not popular to engage in any debate that undermines the artist in any way.

Data centers surely provide jobs to the local community. Construction can bring in thousands, but even the operation of a modern data center employs a lot more people than the common narrative would lead you to believe. What obscures that operational employment is that it’s not uncommon for a large percentage to be contingent workers or third party vendors

This is the issue. There are big differences in how individual companies build and operate data centers. The average hyperscale data center from a major player is vastly different than some of the crypto mining, small time data center builds I’ve seen.

An AI-focused center from AWS, Google, or Meta tends to be large, but also relatively quiet and they make a lot of effort to ensure they’re not overloading the local infrastructure because it poses operational and strategic risks. They also don’t want to alienate the community because they need to get their workforce from the community and they they require a lot more people in site than what most believe.

At the same time, I’ve seen “data centers” built from shipping containers that you can hear cooling fans whining from a mile away.

At the end of the day, the blame really should fall on the local governments to enact and enforce regulations and any anger really should be directed at them.

The common man is grossly uninformed and highly susceptible to misinformation of which there’s a lot of around data centers.

This highlights what I think is missing within a lot of tech companies today. I don’t know too many people who are so passionate about what they’re doing that they would sneak into their former employer’s office buildings and then find employees willing to work together with them to finish a project that simply had to get done. That alone makes me a bit sad.

I would disagree. Theres enough information readily available to be able to see what relative home values are, where the good school districts are, etc.

The only reason I’ve ever used a realtor is because I don’t have the time to deal with the contract/legal side of everything. Most would be better served by hiring an attorney and title company if your state allows.

I view self help books in a similar light as management books. They're usually not going to teach me anything new. What they will do is present something I already know, in potentially new ways and new contexts that allow me to contemplate them and keep them more front of mind. I tend to think of it almost like right thought right action. It's also worth noting that sometimes you just need to be at the right moment in time for a lesson to resonate and stick so reading such books can provide more opportunity for that to happen.

I do, however, try to limit who and what I read though because there is a lot of derivative garbage out there.

Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.

I don’t disagree that there are many evil companies and one should try to be selective in who they work for. But life, in my experience, exists in shades of gray and it’s foolish to judge others without understanding their circumstances and the path that lead them to where they are today.

Sorry, but your rant comes from a place of naive privilege when you assume meta engineers all had options.

I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.

Representative Beatty serves her own interests and her involvement Kennedy Center naming was just more of the same performative politics she routinely engages in. She's on the verge of being an octogenarian and missed a number of key votes, like the bill that cut funding to NPR, PBS, and other govt. programs. Kudos to her for working to remove Trump's name from the Kennedy Center but she needs to go.

I agree with the post, though I have to admit I was tempted for a split second to send them an email offering to buy them a coffee.