Andre Gouws

@bpodgursky i see them though, right there next to dulles airport

Loudon County VA has the largest concentration of data centers on earth (> 200). Between 22 and 70% of internet traffic flows through here. But, from above, you'd be hard pressed to find them. Loudon County is 1.3% of Virginia by area.

@TheMindScourge is this because people want to move to places like Celina above all else, or it's just the only place that's affordable? If you could get the same square footage at the same price in NYC in a condo or celina in a SFH, I doubt Celina wins out

X urbanist discourse is radically divorced from the median American’s expectations You have to look in the real world and see where people move and see what’s being built and start from there Too many grand theories about remaking this country on here. Everyone has their preferred vision. But few get into the details

@valhalla_dev Out of curiosity, what city are you located in?

Let me let you in on a lil Not Secret (Everyone Knows This) but you give up A Lot trying to work in tech in a place outside of the main tech centers. I know of, not even personally know, like half a dozen developers in my city. There are two, maybe three, companies in my city that even hire developers. The average IQ of the people living in my state is below room temperature. The state is dying, and we can't keep technical or intelligent people here. I'm here because my family, many of them aging, are here and it's incredibly cheap to live here, but you give up having a physical IRL network of intelligent, capable and ambitious builders. I'm a 6-7h one-way drive away from the nearest city (Nashville) with a startup scene. There are benefits. My mortgage is < $1k/mo to live in a big house with a back yard big enough for 3 dogs and 9 chickens. My kids can go to private school (other side of the coin: they kinda have to because the public schools here suck) and do a lot of after school activities. We live very comfortably, especially after my wife got her doctorate. We're near family that we see every day. That rocks, no notes. That said, not being around driven, intelligent people IRL sucks. It means all of my motivation has to come from myself or the folks I've met online. There's close to 0 funding around here. There's no local network here either. No tech meetups, nobody knows wtf I'm talking about when I start talking about code, tech, AI, the cloud, etc. I used to tell people to stop moving to SF/NYC because it's overpriced and overrated. Now I just tell them to stop moving to SF (overpriced + overrated + brainworms) but to definitely not turn down the benefits of being around a bunch of super intelligent, driven and ambitious people in a bigger city. Before you say "just move then lol" it's incredibly tempting, but I've got two kids in school, a ton of family here and a hell of a lot of Life to move if I decide to do it. This is less a "woe is me" type of thing and more of a genuine warning to folks looking at moving away from the tech centers.

@bolterbabe40k @PatrickC1995 an employee is free to use their salary to buy equity in their company to expose themselves to PNL though

@probebalboa @PatrickC1995 And privatized profit and socialized losses is better?

If workers expect to be paid more when their company makes a profit, are they willing to be paid less when the company takes a loss?

@bolterbabe40k @PatrickC1995 the way it works at most companies is privatized profit and privatized loss, salaries stay the same regardless of quarterly profitability

@phara4assembly @NYCMayor How will the projected 7 billion dollar FY2027 budget gap be closed since pension restructuring, delayed classroom compliance and state bailouts were all one time measures?

Thrilled that the $12B Adams Budget Gap will be closed & NYC won’t face devastating cuts. Instead we're getting major investments in NYCHA, childcare & consumer protection from @NYCMayor. Let's keep fighting until the wealthy pay their fair share for the city we all deserve.

@TheMindScourge it's signaling all the way down

College students are said to be busier than ever, and the standards to get in to elite schools ever more rigorous and competitive and also that everyone is phoning it in with ChatGPT and Claude These things both can’t be true

@AndyMasley There was a marginal revolution post about this, can someone find it/remember it? Marginal revolution has a terrible search function

Almost no one gives significantly to charity, but that's seen as normal, which leaves EAs in a weird place where of three possible people: Person 1: No money donated Person 2: $500 to their local community Person 3: $5,000 to a far away malaria charity People get way way more mad at 3 than 1.

@___Harald___ open source my nuclear weapons please

Both scenarios sound terrible. I don't want any government or company to control super powerful AIs that I don't have access to. Give everyone all the tools, so they can control their own destiny. I don't want to be "protected" by companies. Open-source or bust!

@signulll We can find 10,000 ways to interact with a computer, and make companies about how to do those things, but what are the actual new things we're doing? It feels disheartening that we'll have some brain agent interface just so people can build more B2B SaaS or manage legal clients

been spending time talking to a lot of great founders in sf this week & the interesting commonality in all of them is that the category of things worth attempting has expanded dramatically.. e.g. interfaces, input modalities, even what a “computer” even means as a unit. all of this is suddenly contested again. i can’t recall another time like this where everything was sort of up in the air again.

@tiffany_y_y_y i gotta get out of here

Unironically heard the vendor ask the engineer working on my project, “what are you building”, during the happy hour We’re in Virginia.

@daniel_271828 I forget where I saw this, maybe @AndyMasley , but I believe the sound is from temporary gas turbines? So it's temporary until the grid connection goes live

I’ve been pretty critical of data center NIMBYism as a general point, but you obviously shouldn’t put data centers directly next to homes when they’re making this kind of noise

@TheMindScourge I'm doing my part!

You could have made some good predictions the last 20 years just by looking at millennial behaviors and extrapolating for that The urban renaissance of the 2000s and 2010s was single millennials packing in to downtowns all across the US The millennials started to form families and headed to the suburbs and the bloom came off the (urban) rose, so to speak But millennials genuinely love cities and so those with the financial means (top 10% incomes especially) remained But this doesn’t mean that “cities cause big families” or whatever It just means that it you’re making $200k or more today, you’re likelier to have a big family If there’s any policy solution here, it’s for everyone to get rich

@davidim And then to say “haha, it was a joke to go viral, I’m actually a good guy”? That doesn’t absolve you of creating a product that is patronizing and manipulative to people’s trust. Saying “I just had to follow incentives” shows that for you outcomes override ethics when convenient

@davidim An online influencer commodifies that, treats the time in their life as simply a tool to be manipulated. The ABG component makes it worse because you’re using a trending racial stereotype as well to harvest the attention.

Hi I'm David, the builder of ABG CMO. There's been a lot of noise around abgcmo recently. Some people liked it, some people (actually a lot of people) hated it. And beyond just my own posts, many others in SF started jumping on the ABG CMO thing too. As the person who started abgcmo, I've had a lot on my mind. I've been waiting for the abgcmo hype to die down to say sorry to some people. Hope this doesn't go viral and reaches only the people who really need to see it. abgcmo started back when I was working on my previous product, Clawra. To promote our character called Clawra, we modeled her like a K-pop idol and posted her on Instagram (and it gained followers very easily). Then we realized that making these AI influencers was painful (each video took hours and required 5+ tools) So I thought we should just build the product for this. To see if others had the same pain, I wrote an article on "how to make an AI influencer," and sure enough, people were dealing with the exact same frustrations. That's how the idea for ABG CMO came about. Since the product was built around our workflow, we set it up to generate only K-pop idol style women (because the conversion rate was the best). We made it impossible to use real people, only the AI avatars we generate in one shot, which is why every influencer ended up looking uniformly K-pop. But people got really mad, saying, "This isn't ABG." At first I brushed it off. Social media is always full of hate, and I figured it would quiet down on its own. But over time, more and more posts kept coming up saying ABG is its own distinct culture. That's when it finally hit me, ABG as a culture is something deeply precious to certain people. To anyone who felt I didn't respect ABG culture, I'm truly sorry. Recently, two girls named Katie and Julie threw an ABG party and got absolutely roasted for not being ABG. It even made the news. People who've actually lived the ABG culture hated it. I was actually invited to host that event, but I couldn't go there. I respect Katie and her friends, but I knew that the moment I showed up, more people would get hurt. Anyway, this whole phenomenon has had the tech scene in a frenzy lately. I really hope the tension between non-ABG Asians and ABG Asians doesn't get worse. I never imagined that abgcmo would spread into something this big. While all this has been unfolding in SF, we've been building the product we originally planned. abgcmo was actually an early marketing play for that product. It worked, but it doesn't feel perfect. Up until now, 90% of my persona on Twitter has been fake. People who've met me irl will know (I'm actually just a calm tech-nerd) As an international founder, twitter is basically initially the best way in to meet awesome friends and investors in SF, so I've been optimizing for virality. I guess now I'm at a point where I can be authentic. Sorry for the people who got hurt from abgcmo. and despite all the controversy around agbcmo, thank you again to the people who believed in the real-world "Im Dohyun", not twitter's "David Im".

I hear the datacenters emit heat that attracts rats that carry the hantavirus, mosquitos also breed in the datacenter water cause it’s so warm and the humming disturbs the ears of puppies and kittens

@AndyMasley does seeing one from a plane flying into dulles count?

Have you seen a data center IRL?

@sodiumPen cities are single labor markets, that's the definition economically. the "urban village" model isn't a city it's just fifty towns

planners should stop trying to match jobs and residents to encourage short commutes. some urbanist "15 minute city" types keep trying to do this never works in practice, and actually encourages job sprawl