> Now, a comparable energy budget we used to use "deciding what to build" (because labour was scarce) is now energy we can divert toward "unbuilding stuff that was a mistake"
The hard part is that you very quickly become Salesforce or Jira or <insert large confusing product>.
You have thousands of users who love your product and pay lots of money and find the features absolutely essential to their workflow. Everyone says your product is bloated and has too many useless features, if only you could delete a bunch of crap they don’t use your software would be perfect.
They all use a different 20%. Delete a feature, lose a fifth of your users.
Great point. It's probably obvious from my take that I build a lot of bespoke software, and have blind spots about the pitfalls of building at scale :)
> Ever considered fan noise while shopping for laptops? If so, then you don't want to live within a mile of a datacenter.
Or we could regulate that data centers be sound proof.
These are things we can solve. They just cost a little money so businesses will fight tooth and nail against it. But hey look we also used to dump slaughterhouse refuse and factory runoff straight into the river in the middle of cities. We don’t do that anymore because at some point it became illegal.
Easy peasy. Just make the things you don’t want businesses to do illegal and they’ll stop doing them.
We could even regulate that all data centers have a large public park and green space on its roof! Or be covered in solar panels to make its own power. Or a huge parking lot. Whatever we need or wish for, the billion+ dollar investment into the data center can provide.
Don't forget the fan controllers to try to make it silent and the neon lights. I still have that machine at my parents house, used it a couple of years ago to rip all my teenage CDs to digital formats.
distcc-pump
And, I forget what the toolchain setup is called, but on gentoo its literally just `emerge -1av <toolchain-thing> distcc` on machine with beef and just `emerge -1 distcc` on athlon...
I found out how to do it consistently in 2010 and its like black magic knowing how to target a real OS at BS hardware.
I was doing this in 2003 and my computer was also the internet/network router for our house. When that thing was down, you had no access to external information that you didn’t pre-save somewhere.
One time I forgot to install network drivers and had to download them through my flip phone via GPRS and then awkwardly load onto the computer via a clunky USB connection. Fun times.
Also my English wasn’t this good yet. I’m sure it would’ve been a lot easier had I actually understood all the tutorials and documentation fully.
Some of my least favourite nights and most cherished childhood memories involve troubleshooting broken or missing network drivers the only functional Linux box I had working. Never had to use a flip phone, but sure came close a few times.
Nothing I’d ever willingly re-live if given the chance, but always fun to look back on and grin.
> You can use it to make the entire phone greyscale, which entirely defeats a huge range of techniques that apps and feeds use to draw your attention
As a counter-anecdata: I've had my phone in greyscale for a few years now. At first it worked amazingly, made me hate my phone and pickups dropped significantly. But over time I realized "Oh wait, 90% of my phone use is text and this is actually super nice for reading".
Now I use my phone just as much as before, except in greyscale.
There are several different definitions of that word, some of which would reasonably apply to hn. I am glad it doesn't have infinite scroll but it also (front page) changes fairly slowly so I do not develop an urge to check it every few minutes.
> Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable, state of improvement or stagnation, these takes will continue to be pointless and most likely completely wrong.
Little thing to keep in mind about AI: a technology is only called AI while it doesn’t work yet. Once it works reliable, we give it a proper name and something else becomes AI.
> 'build a lot of homes at once'. That creates the suburbs which
What a silly American way of thinking. Build a lot of homes at once creates high rise neighborhoods. We've had these in Europe since the 60's, they are great. Asia has taken it to the extreme in recent decades.
A couple high rises give you a few hundred residential units in a completely walkable neighborhood.
What a silly dismissal. Of course you can build apartment buildings and increased density options in some cities and not take too big of a step. I'm a fan of that in the right sized cities. Go for it, if the city can handle it as a small step. Some cities however that one project would take up the next couple years of anticipated growth and would therefor likely be too big of a step. The point is the step size relative to the city, not an arbitrary count. I am advocating for cities encouraging many smaller steps, compared to their size, instead of trying to build all the housing in one big development all at once. But to get to your point about high-rises, those can also be city killers and emphasize my point. Many cities have 'redeveloped' poor neighborhoods into high-rises to 'make enough low income housing available' all at once. This type of development was bad because it often achieved its goal, all low income housing needed was created at once in one place leading to massive problems. So, yeah, high-rises can be great, or terrible. It depends on the city and the way they are implemented.
> The point of notifications is the convenience of not having to constantly check your phone for every single app you have (amazon delivery? just eats delivery? uber booking? claude finished its task?).
My phone has been on DoNoDisturb since 2010 or so. Here's the reality: I don't check for any of those things. Delivery drivers can ring the door bell. If I'm very hungry I'll keep the app open and check where they are. I literally do not care to be notified about any of the things that apps want to notify me off.
Anyone who cares to reach me knows to ring the phone twice in case of emergency to get through DnD. Anyone else? The best time to call is text me. Or schedule a time.
As for Claude, the point of clankers is that they work in the background. The robot can wait, their infinite patience is a feature.
I guess you probably have no dependents and never been oncall then if you are on no disturb. For many people, having to poll the state of multiple ongoing tasks is time consuming itself or/and focus breaking enough that some apps are deserving of having notifications.
Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.
> Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.
I both agree and disagree with you. I disabled notifications for everything and found myself refreshing email too often. But if I have the notifications, I can get disturbed too often which also takes mental bandwidth.
For me I found the best tactic was to selectively enable notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete (not silence) everything else - I don't have email on my phone now - the temptation to check it is more than the need to have it. As for things like PagerDuty, I have it send an SMS and phone me instead.
Oh I’m on essentially permanent 2nd tier oncall and occasionally 1st tier. Pagerduty has an exception configured. If you message me on slack it shows up on my home screen and I will probably notice in the next 15 minutes or so.
I find polling less disruptive because my phone or watch are almost always nearby. Being in control of when to get interrupted feels better than having stuff constantly pop up while you’re doing something.
Just holding my partner’s phone spikes my cortizol. You try to type 2 sentences and get 5 notifications for random other apps and messages popping up on screen in the meantime. Literally one notification every 10 seconds on average. It’s horrible
You know it is not a binary option, right? You can select what apps you want notifications from and most apps have at least two types of notifications you can toggle.
I’m eastern-ish european, is it even racist to say that tech talent in the region is through the roof but for various accidents of history, the best opportunities available to talented people are in cybercrime (both sides)?
Not everyone has a hundred tech unicorns in their back yard. I think my country (Slovenia) produced one in its entire history so far and even that was mostly in the US
It’s really hard to get people excited about not having jobs when you design a whole society around the idea of having a job and make life exceedingly miserable for anyone who doesn’t
You can’t push both “If you dont work, you dont eat” and “Nobody needs to work anymore” propaganda at the same time. Gotta choose
The hard part is that you very quickly become Salesforce or Jira or <insert large confusing product>.
You have thousands of users who love your product and pay lots of money and find the features absolutely essential to their workflow. Everyone says your product is bloated and has too many useless features, if only you could delete a bunch of crap they don’t use your software would be perfect.
They all use a different 20%. Delete a feature, lose a fifth of your users.
reply