Brandon Adams

@theistinthought @ChristianDadMC Having faith groups at work where I could see that some pretty accomplished people held genuine faith helped dispel the misguided notion that the Church wasn’t something for serious scientists and engineers.

@ChristianDadMC Have you seen these workplace conversions happen? Will you work 70 weeks to put legs to this?

Heard a sermon today about being a Christian at work. Pastor said if you work really hard for your non-Christian boss, eventually your boss might ask, “You always work so hard for me, why do you do it?” And then you can tell your boss about Jesus. No offense, but this is so out of touch with reality it’s insane.

In economics there’s the concept of marginality: the guy who’s right at the tipping point of buying a thing, switching jobs, eating a snack, and so forth. If you discount that cheeseburger by just a penny, he buys it. Most people aren’t yet at the tipping point for Christ, they’re on one side or the other. And most people includes bosses. Yet some are at that tipping point. For many converts like me it feels like God aligned a whole mess of things in my life to draw me toward his truth. “Put someone in your life whom you respect and who is Christian” can be one of those things.

@MapleChaos000 @Fat_Electrician @DefiniteBear That’s a gas turbine.

@adamsb6 @Fat_Electrician @DefiniteBear Cooling can be noisy too. youtube.com/shorts/dvOuZmm…

I’ve looked into this very minimally, so I’m genuinely asking. Why are people opposing data centers so hard? My gut feeling is it’s hippies opposing nuclear power 2.0, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

@2BOutonalimb @Fat_Electrician @DefiniteBear Here’s Meta in Prineville, Oregon, you can count the spots in the parking lot: maps.app.goo.gl/qtrL8esq55Ptog… A lot of the work is technicians swapping out failed parts. Those are mostly going to be contractors and not employees.

@adamsb6 @Fat_Electrician @DefiniteBear So the cooling system is quieter than Teslas. Got it. Honestly how many employees are there actually going to be?

The only noise you'd be able to hear offsite would be from onsite power generation. That's only going to be active for tests and power outages, except for the rare sites where utilities can't provide enough power and they've setup onsite gas turbines. Otherwise employee cars in the parking lots are going to be noisier than the datacenter itself.

@DefiniteBear Genuinely asking how loud are they? Like how far away can you hear them?

On the other hand, a lot of anti-H1B discourse smacks of blank slatism. Software engineers are high variance and the companies willing to pay top dollar have wrung about all they can out of the top tier of American talent. Many have tried to seek out untrained Americans with latent talent and train them up. Check out Facebook’s old Rotational Engineer program.

@kylem_org @LayoffAI Same.Also who even knows the visa status of so many people? And how does one know if they "barely survive" the layoff? Managers aren't going to tell you that you were just above the cut line.

@LayoffAI Absolutely bullshit. I know a few on visa who were let go

META EMPLOYEE TAKES TO REDDIT TO EXPLAIN ZERO OF THOSE LAID OFF WERE VISA WORKERS A Meta employee posted on Reddit that they barely survived yesterday's layoffs. Their direct manager had 40-50 reports across two combined teams. Both managers are American citizens. About 40% of the team was on visa. Yesterday they lost about 15 people combined from both teams. Guess how many of those 15 were on visa vs American? 0 on visa. All 15 were American citizens and green card holders. Here is the reality: H-1B workers are captive. Their visa is tied to the employer. They can't job hop, can't negotiate, can't push back. Deportation is the alternative. From a cold management perspective, they are the "safer" employees to keep. Americans have leverage. They can quit, sue, leave for competitors. That makes them the first to go. There is no law requiring companies to retain Americans first during layoffs. None. That is the loophole. No company will ever publish visa status breakdowns of their layoff lists. So this will stay in anecdote territory forever. By design.

@growing_daniel you guys got spidermans?

too many weird climby freaks in SF rn

@ToryAmerican @L0m3z @curtis_yarvin @grok The irony of Grok not recognizing its great grandpa

@L0m3z @curtis_yarvin @grok who is this

Nazi scientists: putting a man on the moon Communist scientists: splitting the mighty atom Conservative scientists: [help me out here]

@daniel_mac8 @tszzl

@tszzl what’s it the early stage of then?

it does seem that this time, unlike others, it is fair to characterize it all as ‘late stage capitalism’

@RJWidhalm Number of data centers isn't a very good metric, there's a lot of variance in datacenter size. Gigawatts is a better though still imperfect metric. The U.S. has about twice the capacity of China by this metric.

China has 369 data centers. The U.S. has over 5,400 data centers. We don't need more data centers.

The text says one connection was installed "without the utility's knowledge." So was this a dastardly meter-dodging splice into the main, or an unlocked meter on the company's property? If the former, I think the article would say so. And if the latter, is there an expectation to ask first before using unlocked meters? Or is it being unlocked accepted as the signal that it's available for use? Did someone ask and there was confusion about which meter had already been blessed? I think the writer may want you to imagine the dastardly version and not the benign one.

@adamsb6 @AndyMasley The story specifically says one of the hookups had not been authorized.

There are so many insane wildly misleading stories coming out about data centers almost every day now that I'm mostly having to give up on commenting on them to focus on actually getting blog posts out, but it feels like a tsunami. I'll share one from just today as an example.

@obrien @AndyMasley From the available information it sounds like the water was metered but not billed. How else could the utility determine the amount to bill later? And what do you expect of the customer? To perform their own meter readings and alert the utility that the bill is wrong?

@adamsb6 @AndyMasley Without a doubt, it's a bad headline. But also, the breakdown of the story is just as misleading. "That's all that happened." LOL. A data center hooked up to a utility and was using water unauthorized when the community was rationing. That's theft. Period. Locals caught them...

@obrien @AndyMasley A writer can be careful to say “A, then B” without actually saying A caused B. But whether they intend it or not, they can write such that readers will get the impression that A caused B.

@AndyMasley It probably doesn't help that you are entirely misrepresenting the situation. No one is blaming that data center for the low pressure, that was just the motivation for people to start looking for a cause...

@AndyStumpf77 @LucasBotkin I have an idea

@LucasBotkin Why are people so spun up about this? TTP’s vary between units and organizations. Do what works for you.

Utilizing a safety on your rifle is the lowest skill requirement when it comes to shooting. After the first couple weeks of handling a rifle, it should be subconscious. When eyes leave optic - safety comes on. It’s that simple. The safety only slows you down if you suck.

@Austen The Hunger Games but the favorite topic of citizens of the Capitol is how much they hate the Capitol

Look if I’m ever invited to a dinner where everyone dresses up in one-of-a-kind designer outfits and tickets cost $100k each I promise I will make a fashion statement that decries the wealthy

@DJSnM @johncrickett They’re clearly in space though

@johncrickett Voyager spacecraft code was written in assembly.

NASA ran Forth on Voyager. Not because it was trendy. Because it fit in a few kilobytes and gave engineers runtime flexibility. No variables. No classes. No syntax. Just a stack, raw operations, and control flow. The part that fascinated me: you build the language as you use it. You define new words that feel like primitives. The boundary between language and program doesn't exist. It's the one of best ways I've found to understand how interpreters actually work. Want to try Forth yourself? Start with Easy Forth: skilldrick.github.io/easyforth/ Grab Gforth (gforth.org) or SwiftForth (forth.com/swiftforth/). Or do what I did and build your own Forth interpreter: codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/cha… Learning Forth won't make you more productive. It will make you a better engineer.

@levie @harshilmathur Music used to sound very different depending on the user’s MIDI card. We might be headed that direction, see the Taalas demo with Llama etched on a chip producing single digit millisecond inference.

@harshilmathur Probably unlikely. It would mean that every app will behave differently depending on the user’s setup which will make building good products impossible.

Hot take: in a few years, apps will assume you have a local LLM with memory just like they assume always-on internet today. Every app becomes personal, intelligent and a little different for everyone. And software as we know it completely changes.

@jessesingal If you’re on the central coast it behooves you to go to Hearst castle.

When I was growing up (before wokeness), we were allowed to harass any juvenile sea otters we wanted -- and for any reason This used to be a free country. RIP America

@tszzl even kernel panics are more fun, you can just ask the computer to introspect itself and tell you what happened

automating the computer has made the computer radically more fun and its even harder to go outside now