Most datacenters I've been to around the world are barely noticeable. Most of them are in warehouse districts and the AC chillers are barely noticeable over the chillers on other nearby buildings. Often, they WANT to be nondescript.

That being said, I've not been to any of these new ones which are both significantly larger and also can have onsite turbines that run all the time and not just during power outages.

That being said, demand from and via China (which has a geopolitical case for wanting to see risc-v succeed) will probably end up being what drives it forward.

In many ways it's not much different than Linux was in the 1990s. It was cheap and useful, but often not as performant as commercial OSes (UNIX or even windows) until big corporate money came in and started piling resources into it. Distribution fragmentation was also an issue, which could still cause headaches for RISC-V (especially if some companies start adding proprietary performance extensions that others can't). So I think it remains to be seen how RISC-V will pan out (eg will the cloud vendors see enough of an ROI supporting it for higher end computing than buying ARM licences).

IMO, this plays into how solar is used. An individual household would have different goals than a grid-level solar/battery project depending on how they consume electricity. A grid is going to optimize (ignoring any desire for extra capacity for days without sun) for the peak that tends to happen between 4-6 for most western grids.

We wanted to investigate using the native AWS java lambdas with snapstart and/or using parallel GC, but the place I used them at a year ago was under the tyranny of product having complete control of our backlog, so we didn't get to go that far with it or even more serious tech debt for that matter.

More memory may or may not even be much of an issue depending on your workload. If you can handle the odd OOM error it would have been fine, but for our use case lambdas were so cheap that it didn't really matter, outside of us techies preferring to do it "right". Having the max execution time be less than 15m could also minimize the heap bloat at the cost of more cold starts.

Railways were also the future, but that didn't stop a rush to build out (often subsidized) lines that were ultimately uneconomical (either because they were corrupt or the planned settlements never arrived).

If AI is similar, then there's going to be a long slowdown on compute spend until the surplus is worked through. A good historical analogy could be the fiber optic buildouts of the late 1990s. The demand for data never really went down much, but the industry eventually commodified and took down some large companies (Nortel, especially)

I already have that agency. If I wanted money, I'd have long ago worked for a FAANG. I didn't because I wanted something else. I enjoy working at startups and small to medium sized firms for the challenge and flexibility in all matter of things I get to work on. I have shifted my career from being a sysadmin/netadmin, to devops, to development and it just involved getting involved at places I've worked at. There was no need for licensing, meeting requirements, etc.

If I felt I didn't have any of that agency, I'd likely feel differently about it. But I just don't see what any union (small or large) is going to do for me unless I was in a jurisdiction where they provided extra services like healthcare or other universal benefits.

Would suck to be in this market as an entry-level engineer, though.

It's not going to be the same story at much higher paid shops where workers often have equity, good benefits, and the market has provided access to other jobs if you lose yours (in my experience, there are still shortages of qualified and competent engineers).

I would like a different method to deal with the pitfalls, but the politics, drama, overhead, and costs of unionization just don't interest me. I'm not interested in being at one job for life.

This also ignores the costs in buying/selling, including agent fees, lawyers, etc. You should probably only buy if you plan on living in a single place for at least a decade.

It can also be a prison, as many people who locked in at low interest rates are learning. If they move, a lot of them will have to reset their mortgage rates and end up paying a lot more. This has trapped people into housing that is substandard for their living situations (growing families, moving for career opportunities, etc).

Renting can be perfectly fine for society, though the explicit tax benefits in the USA usually tilt in favour of home ownership. But a lot of very wealthy countries are majority renters, including Switzerland (where the home ownership rate is in the 30-40% range). This gives the Swiss a huge leg up on lifestyle flexibility and the majority of their wealth isn't tied up in a single asset.

I'm not trying to shit on owning a place, but ideally there should be nothing wrong with renting (assuming a competitive market where rental units can be built and aren't zoned out due to restrictions, etc).

That being said, there is a lot of actual buildouts happening right now. The question is how much of the planned future capacity will actually get developed.