I won’t argue that AI won’t solve the housing problem. And I agree that we can build a bunch of housing. But it won’t be where people want to live, or it won’t be affordable. I’ve got people in my town screaming for affordable housing. Even with subsidies its hard to get things going when the local municipality is practically bending over backwards. Why? Because it has to be on a bus line. It has to be within walking distance of X services. And all the land that fits those criteria is millions of dollars an acre. Even if you could find them, the contractors can’t find enough qualified, reliable workers at premium rates to service their million dollar home builds. I’m in the industry and I don’t care how much “will power” you have; short of taking land through eminent domain and using it for free, you won’t have anyplace that meets any kind of criteria for livability. Hell, I could go buy 1000 acres just an hour down the road for $1M and put up 10,000 houses that only cost $50k each to build. Thing is, nobody is going to buy them. There is literally no demand, even for cheap housing, that takes an hour drive to get anywhere useful - and if you get closer in, you won’t find land that’s affordable. Heck, by the time I extended infrastructure to them or built it out, it would be 3-4 years before the first resident could move in, and that’s with zero delay on any governmental paperwork.
AI does have little to do with it, but we can’t do housing the way people want housing. The land does not exist in sufficient quantity, in the desired areas, without other strings attached (such as private ownership). And it would still take a decade to build it all because there aren’t enough tradespeople in the places where you want the housing built.
Severability is standard boilerplate. As is waiving of all liability (essentially in perpetuity, even if not stated as such), incidental and consequential damage, and indemnification of the writing party against any and all claims. This is a mole hill on the landscape of click-through licensing fuckery.
Yeah, it’s high on my list. Along with a half dozen other AAAs from the last decade. I think Cyberpunk is next on my list, though there’s a Fallout languishing on my Deck I keep meaning to go back to.
lol- yup. It’s free in the same way that building your own house is free. Which is true if you already have the skills and free time. And even if you’re light on skills there’s tons of YouTube videos and forums where you can get any technical data you need. Right?
the whole network could be run with a cleverly configured raspberry pi
Which would defeat the entire purpose of a distributed blockchain. I’m ribbing you, of course, on that ;-) Bitcoin was not built for efficiency and the very basis of distributed proof of work trades efficiency for security. The more “successful” it gets, the larger the incentive to waste power in a fight to win each block reward becomes - by design.
Again, it would take a substantial change to the code or reality. The options are to change the block size (more transactions per block), alter the difficulty curve (which is intended to limit growth in the limited bitcoin supply), alter the way blocks are solved (massive theoretical mathematical breakthrough or, possibly, a move from asic to quantum computing), or switch away from proof of work. The first increases the storage of the blockchain (substantially for a substantial reduction), rewrite - and get approval - to change the difficulty steps which had been a hallmark of the system, the third is magical thinking, and the fourth completely undermines the egalitarian ethos of the coin.
I’ve heard of no substantive move on any front to alter the plan because, for now, it working. And the true believers are generally libertarians who have faith that market forces will correct any shortcomings organically. This usually results in everything working perfectly right up until it doesn’t, at which point the wheels come off and the bus slams into the class of kindergarteners crossing the road.
You can’t have a transaction without mining. Mining is the work done to solve a batch of transactions, so the exact cost of a transaction is easy to determine provided that you don’t include the cost of plant (buildings and IT to run the miners, though this is usually very minor compared to the actual calculation consumption). Each block contains (typically) between 3000 and 4000 transactions and is solved every 10 minutes. As of today, it takes 2.6GWh to solve a block, given the current number of miners (137TWh/yr per digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), which is 744kWh per transaction at 3500 transactions per block.
The cost of a Visa transaction is more difficult because there are people involved and other plant costs (buildings to house the people who work for Visa). The actual cost to process a Visa transaction, in direct transactional power usage, is trivial because a Raspberry Pi can “process” hundreds of thousands of transactions a second locally - it’s literally a couple hundred bytes of login/query/reply data, and adding or subtracting from a ledger which is mirrored to distributed servers. Distributed across a server with enough transactions to keep it busy it’s probably a few hundred milliseconds on 1/8 of a 50W processor - call it 0.001Wh at the server, which is the equivalent of the 700kWh per bitcoin transaction. If we say that there are 10 machines all doing the same virtual transaction on each physical transaction (incl. POS, backup, billing, etc) and we figure a 5:1 cost of total power (a/c, losses, memory, storage) then we’re all the way up to 0.00005kWh (0.05 Wh, or 180 watt-seconds) per transaction. That means that the overall cost for visa to process your charge is 1.5kWh/0.00005kWh for the computers or 30,000:1 due to humans being involved in the process.
Here’s the thing, though: Bitcoin gets harder (more compute intensive) as time goes on, and the rate of increase is faster than the ability to solve, on a Wh basis. IE - Bitcoin transactions will get more expensive over time unless bitcoin changes their code - and there is always resistance to that because there is a financial disincentive to reduce the work in Proof of Work systems. This is mitigated on other blockchains by using Proof of Stake, but that has other implications. Visa, otoh, is taking advantage of AI and drops in processor and storage costs to lower their per-transaction cost because there is a financial incentive to reduce processing costs as the fees charged are fixed (nominally 3% of the transaction cost) and anything left over is profit.
After a while (a few months to a few years) the workplace politics becomes unbearable, or culture becomes too toxic, or managers straight up ignore our feedback.
In all likelihood, these are not time-variable conditions. When you first start you don’t know about the politics - who’s going behind your back to sabotage you, who’s a climber, who is getting preferential treatment from management or HR. Ignorance is bliss. As you learn what terrible people you work with you find their existence to make the workplace “toxic.” And it doesn’t matter where you work - there will be terrible people, just different grades and distributions. Finally, the managers were ignoring your feedback from day one - they just pretended that you mattered so that you would settle in and become part of the machine. It’s basic onboarding.
This isn’t going to help you, but I quit and started my own business. It was…challenging. Prior to that, I found routines and resets in my daily work which let me (mostly) ignore the noise. Most were mental, setting timers to focus on tasks; learning to be a non-joiner with tact; roll with the sameness and view the work as “just a job”. Some were physical, like eating lunch quickly and spending the rest of my half hour lying down in my car.
I should say that I still get burnout, even though I’m a one-person consulting company. I recognize that my focus comes and goes and I when I get a manic period I try to push though work to “get ahead” (or at least catch up). More importantly, I try to recognize when my energy is flagging and not try to push through it. I let myself have the afternoon off. Two years ago I started taking an “admin” week every quarter. I put a message on my phone that I’m in training or in meetings (so people think I’m “working”) but I mostly just clean up the office, get personal project done around the house, and generally reset my focus. Sometimes I even do a little online training. Specifically - I don’t go away on vacation. Vacation doesn’t reset me like removing the life clutter that builds up when I’m busy at work and can’t get to (or are too tired to) do the peripheral things. I fully recognize that this is not really a valuable strategy for a most jobs, but if you have a certain amount of autonomy and you’re getting your deadlines met otherwise, scheduling some “training” time might be good. Just make it as regular as possible - put it in your year’s calendar on Jan 1. For me, it’s my reward for getting things done, and if I don’t make it a hard commitment, I’ll just move it - and it will never happen.
The kids still have exposure, but the total load is reduced allowing the body to see and react to the infectious elements without being overwhelmed. All of the “but it’s nature” fanatics should remember that the million years of evolution we have survived with exposure was done without enclosed, poorly ventilated boxes. And within the historical record, the some of the greatest failures of our “natural” immune system prior to vaccines and antibiotics have generally occurred when we enclosed people into poorly ventilated, densely packed communities. (though many failures come from drinking our own poo…usually due to densely packed populations with unregulated water standards/supplies)
Fair enough, though the app is stand-alone. AFAIK there’s no sync function (I’m iOS/Windows). The files are local and export is to whatever filesystem is on the device (iOS allows any connected cloud service).