Interests:
- Energy/Climate Tech (especially decarbonizing the built environment, electricity, transportation).
- Applications of emerging tech to solve problems in areas that are often affected by the same emerging technologies, including climate change, education, electrification and electric grid stability, all with a focus on closing the currently expanding gap in quality of life.
- Linguistics (especially historical, but also computational and social).
The best way to get in touch is to triangulate me on the Internet (shouldn't be hard from my comment history) and reach out over LinkedIn.
- danansAMD drivers alone do not make a computer that "just works".
- Junior vs senior is the wrong framing. It's "can use LLMs effectively" vs "can't use LLMs effectively".
It's like expecting someone to know how to use source control (which at some point wasn't table stakes like it is today).
- > Are these highly qualified people or do you just need to install some parts?
They're not software engineers or data scientists if that's what you mean by "highly qualified".
Datacenters techs do the physical parts of the job we once called "system administrator". That definitely requires skill and attention to detail, not just the ability to "install some parts".
When the tech industry transitioned from on site systems to datacenters and big compute / big data, "system administrator" got split into "site reliability engineer" and "datacenter technician" as they scaled independently, with datacenter tech being focused on manufacturing and physical troubleshooting.
They have always been the "blue collar" workers of tech, both in terms of pay and prestige. Like tech support, the job is considered more of a stepping stone into the operations (not R&D) side of big data companies.
That all said, the qualifications of applicants for a job depend a lot on the labor market, in particular, the desperation of applicants. During the dotcom bust, a lot of CS grads (including me) were applying for technician jobs.
- Most people who need a job won't have that job at that data center.
- > Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.
There will be few jobs created after construction is complete, and the ones created won't pay anything like typical tech comp.
- > Great if everything that one wants from their GNU/Linux experience is a command line and TUI.
Regular GUI apps work fine on ChromeOS. There's a flag to enable the GPU in the VM and with it, 3D accelerated GUI apps also mostly work. It's not optimized for gaming if that's what you are referring to though.
- > ChromeOS commonality is the Linux kernel, not userspace.
ChromeOS has a Linux userspace fully integrated via it's Crostini VM.
- I still think that if they'd released an electric Ford Maverick sized pickup instead of the monstrosity that is the Lightning, they would have done much better, but everyone had to run after the story Elon was spinning with the Cybertruck, and unsurprisingly, they are similarly unsuccessful.
- > Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars ...
I wish the same could be said of car UX these days but clearly that has regressed away from optimal.
- Probably a jellyfish. You're seeing the tentacles
- Sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
- I'm mostly struck by how incremental and unimaginative those articles are.
- Dell has been a publicly traded company again since 2018.
- In the 18th and 19th centuries, slavery and sharecropping were primary forms of agricultural labor.
Those are far closer to medieval feudal peasantry than 20th century industrial labor, regardless of the lack of an official hereditary aristocracy in the US.
- > It is really still quite a mess at the moment.
Integration, testing, and support are all expensive. Right or wrong, that's a reason why if a laptop "just works" (like a Mac, Windows Thinkpad, or a Chromebook), it probably has proprietary binaries.
Also, if you aren't paying for the OS (via the hardware it's coupled with), you can't expect the OS to have the benefits of tight hardware integration.
Even Framework laptops use proprietary boot firmware, and they've been pretty clear that they only provide support for Ubuntu and Fedora, not the alphabet soup of other Linux desktop distros.
- > Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines.
This sounds like a semantic disagreement.
I think you are using the word "farmer" to mean "large agricultural landlord". Today, those terms may have a lot of overlap, because most of us don't work in agriculture like we did then, but in the past, it wasn't so much the case.
Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master".
"Farmers" were mostly people who worked as tenants on their land. The confusion in US history started early as the local feudal lords of the time (the founding fathers) rebranded themselves as farmers in opposition to their British rulers, but the economic structure of the societies was scarcely different.
- > Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.
If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
- > Do you run ChromeOS Flex on some thinkpads or do you work on a Chromebook?
Chromebook.
> What are the pros/cons vs running a debian if you can elaborate?
I like minimalist desktop environments. I like full screen window tiling using keyboard shortcuts, power management, fingerprint readers, accelerated displays, phone tethering, touch screen, passkey support for auth, and verified boot, and preferences synced across devices.
And I like all that to work out of the box with no fiddling,
- > So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted?
> I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry.
Yes, perhaps, but many industries are built on a little bit of technology and a lot of stories.
I think of it as us all being caught in one giant infomercial.
Meanwhile as long as investors buy the hype it's a great story to use for triming payrolls.
- > Things that are too big to fail can end up being nationalized when they do fail.
And if that happens, will the taxpayer be on the hook to make investors whole? We shouldn't. If it is nationalized, it needs to be done at a small fraction of the private investment.