My current place would sell for say $1.4M or so.

The lot itself is worth around $600-700k if it was empty.

A similarly sized home would cost well over $1m to construct to similar quality levels - normalizing a bit for modern construction techniques and all that.

So about $2.4m to build new, or $1.4m to buy a fairly similar 25 year old home next door. New construction here costs more than the older structures on the land in most cases. This ignores permitting and financing costs which throws a light wrench into those calculations, likely making it a bit more expensive on the build side.

That is using numbers I would pay a custom builder for, but even if you add in 20-30% profit for the builder the math isn't super great for the new build end of things.

Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.

Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.

I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.

> That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.

This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.

Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.

Once you get to the point of bolting on random systems that need to talk in whatever time zones is when you bite the bullet and change it. Yes, that is expensive.

The point I’m making is that if you spend a week dicking around with two junior devs while in your startup phase arguing about EST vs UTC you lose by default. Would much rather have my imaginary employee just choose EST in 14 seconds and move on at that stage. And I have dealt with systems that have done exactly this.

When it becomes a problem I can afford to fix it. Talking about it for more than 5 minutes at the bootstrap company stage is the definition of bike shedding to me. If those are discussions you are having in your weekly dev meetings you have already lost.

This will obviously depend on exactly what you are developing. Payment systems? Probably way more important to get this right vs. some social media app.

The ironic part to me is that this comment thread is basically bike shedding itself! Timestamps are an age old nerd snipe.

I would be very surprised to hear of a location in the US that is experiencing grid instability due to recent increases in industrial scale electric usage.

I 100% refute your claim that grid instability is the primary reason folks in the US are installing solar. You will be still seen as a crazy prepper type if you call a company and tell them you don’t care about the financials penciling out, and only want it for potential blackouts. Assuming you are not in California of course - which I assume not since none of those instability problems have to do with industry so it’s not relevant to this discussion.

Generally speaking - if you want to live in a place with a stable grid, you will seek out a spot that has heavy industry in the region. These energy consumers stabilize the grid for residential folks. Especially datacenters since those tend to come with emergency backup and are the first to fall off the grid on a voluntary basis during peak usage events.

I’m sure somewhere in the US exists where this is true since basically everything is true at a micro scale. I just do not see it as a wide scale issue.

It’s basically the OG networking effect. You put equipment there because everyone else had equipment there.

The rest just grew with it. It had nothing to do with power infrastructure. If anything, datacenters created the power infrastructure in the area.

Agreed on the tax abatement stuff. Those should be outright illegal regardless of industry.

It’s just not representative of the bigger picture when there are a dozen horrible projects against say 1000 total.

The hyperbole is what gets my mom terrified of moving to a city that might allow a datacenter to be built 8 miles away from the place she was looking at.

It’s like private jets. If you talk about PJ use in the first 10 minutes about your diatribe about climate change I already know you give zero care about co2 production and only want to either hate rich folks for valid but unrelated reasons, or are an entirely unserious person.

Both are focusing on a mathematically immaterial number when it comes to the supposed problem they say they care about. It they actually cared, they would be talking about things that matter and can move the needle if they “win”.

I welcome high water use stuff in my back yard because my region has plenty of water, plus I firmly believe in the fact that a society cannot have wealth without industry. Datacenters, steel production, whatever. Bring it on.

Are there specific bad projects that should not happen due to local water concerns? Absolutely! But that is not the discussion anyone is having. Datacenter water usage as an industry is a total non issue and is an increasingly immediate tell that someone has no clue what they speak of.

And I would say that speaks more to your disconnect with most of US society. Very few folks actually trust activists for good reason.

Trump is like the most mild form of what is to come. The fact he got elected when he did is remarkable to me.

It only gets worse from here if things don’t change. At some point someone like him who is actually serious will be elected and then it’s basically game over.

Trump 2016 was a warning shot most folks in the chosen classes chose to ignore. Trump 2024 is something you ignore at your own peril at this point. I would be thanking the gods at the relative apathy so far if I believed that narrative.

If Trump was remotely competent we would be having entirely different conversations. There would be no option of “weathering the storm” to wait him out if so.

The exact opposite is typically true, so this is surprising to me!

It’s a non-issue. It’s like complaining about a vacant but well maintained warehouse next door.

If you mean living next door to a power plant? Absolutely. But that is a different topic.

Electricity should function as a common carrier like any other utility. If you want to pay for the watts you get the watts regardless of who you happen to be.

I generally agree that I would not like to live across the street from a datacenter. Having worked inside of dozens of them, I could not care less if I lived half a mile from one. Most people who live within such a distance currently do not have a clue. At that point I would not even worry about the noise from the backup generators.

You are talking about a single incident that has been reported 500 times by different organizations.

And that single instance still hasn’t actually been traced back to the datacenter in question. Could have come upstream of that for all we know now.

Anyone bringing it up does not actually care about the water usage. It’s just a politically easy topic to get traction with. If anyone starts off their anti-datacenter screed with this, it instantly outs them as someone you can ignore as unserious person on the topic.

Plenty of other legitimate reasons to be anti-datacenter but this isn’t one of them.

Tilting at windmills over the stupidity of it is just something I’m trying to get over and not care about at a personal level. Nothing I can do about it either way!

Bike shedding means no decision is made. That is the worst possible outcome as it provides absolutely zero value. Even a wrong decision provides at least some value even if it fails horribly. Maybe we paint the shed black and it burns down due to excessive heat, but it’s a bike shed so who actually cares if we need to rebuild the entire thing and paint it white this time.

And when it comes to bike shedding, getting it “wrong” is by definition already low stakes. It just doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Even the timezone example isn’t really that material IMO. Sure, it’s an extra annoyance to normalize timestamps to locale in every app/debugging query. But in the end it’s just not that big of a deal.

Worse would have been that early team arguing about it for 6mo without implementing anything. Then no one would be employed currently to curse those early developers to begin with.

Often times the only wrong decision is not making a decision. Very rarely are there decisions to be made that are not overtly obvious which are actually material. These exceedingly rare situations are where the winners from losers get sorted out - but that sort of decision in my experience so far happen a handful of times during an entire career.

As I moved up the ladder in my life I’ve often found my job is to basically flip a coin when a decision choice is presented to me. Very rarely is the topic worth me spending any material amount of mental energy on.

So that sort of thing is already normalized. An LLM is unlikely to be worse than a human. There is no accountability either way since everyone is failing at the task, it really doesn’t matter much if your or your bot misses a few percentage points of high priority items. You will probably be vastly outperforming your peers who are doing it manually.

And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle.

I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choice of burying my head in the sand or deciding to take a look.

They are going to change society on a scale far beyond smart phones. In ways many will not see as positives, but change never goes the way one may expect.

For the folks I talk to who use a LLM for this that seems to be the case. Takes a huge cognitive load off every morning and saves them an hour or two.

More or less a very expensive band aid over a bad work environment.

I kinda use it the same way in a sense. I have a little skill I run against our (horrible) task management system to summarize things and give me a punchlist to work through sorted by priority. This saves me thousands of clicks to do the same thing in the horrible web UI. A proper system in the first place would be a lot better!

At some point I’ll probably just take that to the next logical step and have the LLM write my own web interface to abstract and replace the horrible one entirely for me.