vel0city

> The whole attitude of "I landed a job with job security, so I am not doing a thing more than I have to" is what drives germany into the ground

I'm not in Germany, but I definitely see this attitude in lots of positions in what I see as jobs with excessive job security.

> Policemen are notorious for abuses of powers with no repercussions

So wouldn't it be good if they potentially had less job security so they'd actually face some real repercussions for their bad actions? Instead they often have some of the strongest job protections out there. They can sometimes even murder people and still collect a full paycheck while cooling off for a few weeks.

> Teachers get the short end of the stick, and the best ones are seldom recognised

I agree. And once again, lots of job security programs ensure the ones continuing to scrape by get promoted and kept while those actually trying just face burn out. I definitely think teachers in general should be paid more and should have good incentive systems (of which there are lots of bad incentive systems, it's a tricky thing to do well in this space).

> in general we should care about people’s well-being instead of trying to “advance” and being afraid of “being left behind” all the time.

I truly do agree we should try and have a good balance of work/life, and I do agree tons of people in places like the US are way too overly focused on the work side of that. I'm just pointing out when you focus too much on the other side, all your industries are no longer competitive on the global marketplace and you'll find yourself a lot worse off. Having people who aren't effectively incentivized to improve (for whatever improve means in context) is not a good thing, I think we can both agree on that.

FWIW, that kind of near total job security leading to not caring about improving isn't inherently a government job kind of thing. I've known lots of people in private industry be effectively the same. The real connection is places with extreme bureaucracy. And I'm definitely not trying to bash all government employees, many truly are hard workers who care.

> You went to university to become a better employee?!

Not the sole reason, no. But it's not like that wasn't a reason, it was certainly a big one. And that's an incredibly common reason to go. And no, I didn't even get a degree in the field I'm working in currently, but the things I learned getting the degree have definitely helped me be far more effective at work.

> Aren’t you yourself proof that that is not true?

No, because I'm not a government employee with near total job certainty. If I'm not keeping up, I'm falling behind, and will likely find myself replaced in short order. There are millions of people in the world who can do what I do, and what I do can be done anywhere there's a data signal.

> nothing indicates those people aren’t getting better, they’re just not doing the specific thing the other person suggested as a means to that end. That’s not at all the same thing.

Sure. Believe what you will. I've worked with countless people who have this mentality. Giving these people more job security guarantees they'll care even less about their job performance and growth. Having the job is 100% about getting a check on the pay period, not about actually doing anything useful.

If someone doesn't think €20 and a few hours spread over a month isn't worth it to be better at their job, I can't imagine they're really working hard at improving any other ways.

> If you think most doctors out there are continually improving

I don't think that. I agree many stagnate. And I usually choose to avoid those which seem to be stagnating.

I used an immense amount of personal time and money to make me a better employee, it was called getting a degree from a university.

I still sometimes spend a bit of personal money and time to tinker with technology, sometimes on the basis that it'll probably be good to know some of this stuff. It's like being surprised a chef likes to experiment a bit in their kitchen at home.

Their point is with total job security there's no real drive to actually be good at your job and little incentive to improve. Just be good enough to not be labeled entirely incompetent and truly unfit for the job, not any better. Would you go to a doctor who hasn't bothered learning anything new about medicine for decades and still practices like it's the 1950s, or one which continually evolved their practice to stick with modern times?

> many of those features were available over 433MHz radio well before cars were connected to the internet.

And as I've said before here many times, it usually had really shitty range making those features nearly useless. It's not the same.

> This new phone app solution requires you to pull out the phone instead of the car key

Well, I don't normally carry a car key as I just usey phone for that these days...so...about that...

> turn on gps, wait for a fix (imagine that in an underground parking!)

Have you never used a device with AGPS or a modern smartphone generally? I can't remember having to seriously wait for a GPS fix, and it can find location from things like cellular and WiFi networks.

Probably this home right here:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4611-Esper-Ln-324-Austin-...

I'm somewhat familiar with the area as I like to go to events at Circuit of the Americas often.

It's out there. There's really not much close nearby other than more houses. It's not like there's a lot of outdoorsy stuff, almost all the land around there is owned by private entities, almost no public park lands so it doesn't even have the "but at least there's nature!" aspect to it.

You're probably going to drive a private toll road everywhere you need to go. You'll have a hell of a commute to work anywhere but the Tesla factory.

If you're one to pretty much never leave a 1,300sqft home with next to no lot and get everything delivered it's probably not bad. Outside of that I wouldn't want to live there, at least not for another decade of development or something. Which it's not even like you've got some amazing investment in the land, you have a tiny lot with a builder spec cheap structure on it.

Key word there is had, while the comment you're replying to is speaking as to today minus ten years roughly.

And yeah, as a millennial I know lots of people who had a shared desktop at home, probably had a laptop in college, used a work laptop, and hasn't had a personal computing device outside an iPad and iPhone for a decade or more.

I've known two people in my life who went by some version of Trey as a nickname, as in some slight change if tres, three.

It takes someone to store some of this data somewhere. I'd prefer more choices on how this data is handled, no doubt. See the last sentence of my previous comment.

But yes, generally speaking and replying to your original question of "requires telemetry to remotely access certain features on their car", yes it takes telemetry to access telemetry data. The whole feature is access to telemetry data in the end, presented in useful ways. Whether Ford uses some kund of homomorphic encryption to handle that data or sets up end to end encryption between your phone and the data receiver from the car or allows you to configure third party telemetry retrieval services is a whole different question to ask.

Remote starters generally had really poor range. I know, I've owned a few of them over the years. Often you need direct line of sight and have to be somewhat close, usually only slightly better range than the regular fob assuming you installed it right.

It was a terrible experience compared to being able to issue the command from anywhere.

When that feature is remote telemetry, yeah it is correct.

Its nice knowing the doors are actually locked when you issue a remote unlock and then lock command when a friend is trying to grab something and you didn't want to handle the logistics of them getting to you to get the keys to get to the car and then back to you. Or making sure you really did lock it when you walked away.

It's nice knowing the state of charge while the car is on the charger and get that data somewhat live while it's charging and you're in a restaurant or whatever.

It's nice having the last known location on a map when you're trying to find the car in a maze of a parking lot and it turns out it wasn't parked in lot H row 72 like you thought you remembered.

It's nice starting the AC or heat well before you get to the car and are far out of range of the key remote.

There's a lot of telemetry that's kind of nice to have, assuming you can have control over it and who it's shared with. It's not nice having it shared without your consent and potentially used against you.

Plus with the magic of ranked choice voting those few "confused" voters would likely still end up voting for their intended candidate in the end, assuming they ranked both people with similar names over everyone else.

Sure seems like this ranked choice voting solves a lot of problems over the first past the post style we mostly do.

The APIs are essentially standardized. You just need to look up how to add another provider to whatever harness you're using. It's a similar thing when you want to try and use local models.

Look up YellowKey. Specifically crafted NTFS transaction logs would unlock any Bitlocker drive with transparent encryption. Some people believe it was an intentional backdoor, kind of a debated topic.

I'm not 100% certain either way.

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.

It's not even just how much money they have, which is an insane amount in and of itself. It's also how much money they're able to raise with debt.

These hyperscalers are issuing so much debt and investors are certain enough of returns they're upending global bond markets. Tons of large countries are having to mess with interest rates because the groups who used to buy their debt are already tossing their money at AI datacenters at a massive scale.

> JPMorgan Chase estimated in June that $4.1 trillion in AI-related debt will be issued through 2030, as data center companies and others tied to the AI boom race to build up capacity.

And once again that's just the debt. They're also all making many billions of dollars every quarter in revenue already, they're planning on that increasing rapidly, and dumping that cash into building as fast as they can.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/27/debt-hungry-data-center-comp...

So yeah, your napkin math of them spending trillions on datacenter builds you used to try and illustrated how impossible that could be...yeah...that's been the plan for a while. It's an insane number, but that's the number.

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.

I do agree, it's an absurd number. But that's the number.

https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2026/07/29/ERCOT-Senate-Jul...

And yeah, supposedly it's over $1T in computer capacity allegedly planned to be built.

> just on our exported Natural Gas alone before we really need to start expanding LNG supply.

That's natural gas which already has a buyer though. We're now adding a buyer who isn't batting an eye at spending over a trillion dollars. What price of natural gas do they stop buying at? What price will the people of Texas, surrounding states, and our international customers pay for gas until we can't afford it and freeze?

So yeah, if we do build out anything close to this I hope we manage to increase energy capacity similarly. Because I doubt I can spend as much to heat my home as these hyperscalers can spend to power their chips.

That's kind of the whole point of my "sucks the natural gas pipes dry". I'm not saying the gas pressure of the line going to my house is literally going to zero, but if it's so expensive I can't afford for it to flow it might as well be.

Also, your number of 72 GPUs per rack is a dated figure. They're targeting >500 per rack these days. That's also assuming GPUs. What's the same math on TPUs?

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.

What happens when he sucks the natural gas pipes dry in the peak cold of a Texas winter and thousands of people die to keep xAI burning?

Looking more into this, it looks like you're correct. It was a single action which resulted in that ~1,600 pardons, not 1,600 individual documents. My bad.

He supposedly signed individual pardons for 1,600 people in one day.

That would give me quite a cramp and I'm not 80.