Last I checked, I think with nextjs, if you want to build once and deploy with different base paths (without having to rebuild), this is impossible, since the base path is hardcoded all over the build. This makes some forms of deployment of nextjs sites much more difficult than with other frameworks.
- we, as tech workers, are losing out immensely due to a lack of collective bargaining
I look at the recent SAG-AFTRA strike as a reference: these are jobs with similarly privileged work conditions. However, there being a union meant they could inflict significant pain on industry players until their demands around AI training were met.
Meanwhile, we’re all just keeping our heads down hoping the market improves at the same time the biggest players are using our inputs to train even better models.
Just because our work conditions are better than other professions doesn’t negate the notion that we are being actively exploited to our own detriment.
This is true, but it's also true that any 12 year old kid with an ancient laptop on a random island in Indonesia will be proficient enough at writing code 4 years from now to take my job. There's no job security in big tech because it's a global marketplace. And it always will be.
Front-end engineering is incredibly driven by the “fashion” of the moment. The only framework that seems to have maybe overcome fashion is React.
Though React is plagued with its own churn around trends. Perhaps this is aging me a bit but I still can’t get my head around why we threw away class-based components with clear lifecycle methods.
I use hooks regularly now but it just feels so much less elegant than the perfectly fine solution that came before it.
For context, US agriculture subsidies come principally in the form of Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC). These programs pay subsidies to farmers based on price or revenue losses for covered commodities like corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. Farmers choose between PLC, which pays based on national average prices, and ARC, which pays based on county or individual farm revenue.
ARC and PLC are projected to cost approximately $1.6 billion in 2025, which is more than triple their 2024 levels, but The American Relief Act of 2025 allocated $31 billion in ad hoc disaster aid to farmers. So maybe I was wrong about ARC/PLC being the principal method of subsidy?
> Under current law, USDA’s total outlays for 2025 are estimated at $231 billion. Outlays for
mandatory programs are $189.6 billion, 82.1 percent of total outlays.[0]
We passed legislation authorizing spending a few billion ($7.5B, 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act), and have deployed a portion of it. Most of the authorized $$$ has not yet been spent; it unlocks over the decade from 2021-2030. One fault of the bill is it depends on states actually doing the work to build these stations; the feds aren't doing it directly. If states drag their feet, stations don't get built.
The timeline is even longer (and with such good cause). It also took till March 2023 to specify federal requirements for a charger! That's not a bad thing, it's not unreasonable at all. We didn't have any open systems for charging until then! There were no federal standards for what to build or how to stay or fall out of compliance! Before you start paying people to build chargers, you have to have some direction for what to build, have to make it better than the free for all of unreliable chargers that had hindered confidence & adoption so badly!
Folks act so salty about this all, such snark. But in my view so much was smartly done. There's so many layers of problems that needed to be tackled for consumers to actually get success, and it felt like these were gone through slowly carefully over time to make something useful and helpful.
For example, the charging standards require a certain amount of availability. Otherwise, folks might build some crappy chargers, not maintain them, and still claim money.
Folks have had all kinds of issues with chargers being not in service. Or fully used! One of the big requirements that took a while to hammer out was that chargers neede to live report their status: how many chargers are there, at what power outputs, at this location, and which are in use & what capacity is remaining? So you can get to the charger you are aiming for and have some real hope of charging up!
It's been just under two years since the standards got made. They're good, important standards, that insure this money was going to be for public benefit, that it really would tackle the problem. It is unsurprising as hell to me that there's not a ton of deployments yet!
For a "hacker news" site, I would expect a more reasonable set of expectations about product development lifecycle. Simply manufacturing compatible chargers is gonna take at least a year, in all probability. Site planning can somewhat happen in parallel, but going through the state to get the fed money is going to be a bit complex, especially at first. This stuff just takes time! The pool of money was mostly unspent, and I expect over time, as roll outs ramped up, the difficulty & costs would have been going down.
The political appetite & cycle is so contrary to the actual pace of the world some time. Sometimes we have to be willing to let good things take time to happen. It all felt so with-cause to me.
Ok, but taking two years to come up with a big document of standards while Tesla was able to just do all that by themselves and then build more chargers for less is kind of the issue. I appreciate that it's not easy, but the not-easiness is the problem.
Tesla took over a decade before they open-sourced their supercharger standards.
From Tesla's own website: "NACS was originally developed by Tesla, deployed in 2012 with the first Supercharger and Model S vehicle and eventually published by Tesla in 2022 with the goal of industry-wide adoption."
Tesla though has had to pair partner by partner with every other car maker who wants to use their network. Deals have to be cut to figure out how payments are gonna work with each manufacturer's car/app.
Tesla also has been operating on chargers for years! They took their own sweet time we just don't think about the first years!
Tesla never built standards. They just made something that sort of worked for them. That sort of somewhat helped some specific consumers find chargers, albeit with not enough status available to know what to expect when you got there.
None of that is at all good enough for actual infrastructure the world needs to be able to depend on. "Works for my car" isn't how gasoline works, and it's not how ev charging is gonna ever succeed.
>It takes a while to get all the surveys and permits.
Yes, that's exactly the problem, an over regulated permitting regime. If we are in a climate emergency then we should treat it as such, which means that if the Federal government can't overrule local permitting restrictions, they should prioritize funding to states that are willing to relax permitting requirements and get shovels in the ground.
The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program have made significant progress in expanding electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across the United States.
As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.
It's irritating to see Joe Rogan's moronic talking points repeated uncritically in these hallowed halls. Truly, as Brandolini[0] observed, public discourse is flooded with misinformation faster than we can bail it out.
>As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
That's not good for a law that was ratified in November of 2021. It might be about par for the course for the federal government, but that's the problem.
> Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.
The trick being played here is counting all charging stations in the US and pretending they're part of the IRA's funding.
in accounting rules, it's spent money. the notes say that 61 ports have been built from that allocated money.
like I said, I would love to see the cost breakdown. is all that allocated money spent? are some projects still being constructed? three years seems like a long time to get 61 ports when you allocated $2B.
I'll be honest and tell you I didn't look into the specifics of this project.
My guess would be that the money is also allocated for an X amount of sites / charging ports still in progress. Or do they only allocate the money after the site is fully operational?
If that's the case, I think saying '2B spent for 61 ports' is disingenuous at best.
You don't think a (probably significant) portion of that money is allocated to sites that were 'in progress' on July 2024?
From what I can tell from the newsletter I get from a big European charging infrastructure provider the lead time of a new charging location tends to be 1 - 2 years depending on the specific location.
While I do agree these numbers are disingenuous, looking at politics I definitely see the next administration counting the chargers that will come up past January 2025 to their win list. Oh well, I guess that's politics.
Oil would be pretty much the same. Ag would be a chaotic disaster. The subsidies for ag were written in blood based on the need to smooth the natural forces of extreme cyclic market fluctuations that affect all inelastic commodities.
But a society cannot afford those cycles to play out for their food supply. Prices need to be stable and we need a slight oversupply of staples to be robust rather than perfectly efficient.
I’m not saying the subsidies are perfectly dialed in and that there’s no waste or pork. But some are very very necessary.
the big division we need to kill is ethanol in fuel. it's 30% less efficient than gas, much more expensive, produces more CO2 and gums up and destroys engines if you let it sit for a few weeks.
Thanks for sharing man. I think quite a few of us are fed up with the status quo in tech.
I was also at Microsoft until fairly recently, and although I didn’t feel like my immediate work was “unethical”, I’ve felt for quite some time that leadership is completely out of touch with workers. The copilot push in 2022, coinciding with firing the AI ethics team, is a prime example of actions that felt reckless.
I wonder what it’s going to take for tech workers like us to collectively say “enough is enough” to the grotesque avarice we see from tech leadership. I’m not holding my breath, and have essentially no desire to find another role in the industry.
No, if there are multiple people who in principle are not directly coordinated to make that happen. They can always point the finger at others and say they're not responsible for that bad outcome.
Perhaps being a PM for several years has helped, I’ve had great success speeding up my programming workflows by prompting Claude with very specific, well defined tasks.
Like many others are saying, you need to be in the drivers seat and in control. The LLM is not going to fully complete your objectives for you, but it will speed you up when provided with enough context, especially on mundane boilerplate tasks.
I think the key to LLMs being useful is knowing how to prompt with enough context to get a useful output, and knowing what context is not important so the output doesn’t lead you in the wrong direction.
I’ve been using Next deployed to a container for years without issue — what are the major challenges here?
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