Oracle is giving customers more choice and flexibility with the launch of its first Arm-based cloud compute offering on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. From a report: The new offering, called OCI Ampere A1 Compute, is designed to power both general-purpose and cloud-native workloads that demand high performance at more manageable costs, Oracle said today. It's based on the Ampere Altra architecture built by Ampere Computing. Today's announcement comes as Oracle makes a big investment into the Arm ecosystem more generally, with the availability of more resources and tools, including a new development environment for developers that's intended to support Arm-based application development.

Arm's central processing units are known for their extremely efficient, flexible and scalable architecture. They're most prominently used in smaller devices such as smartphones, but in more recent years they have come to power everything from personal computers and "internet of things" devices to computer servers and even supercomputers. Oracle said its new Arm compute instances come in a range of options and sizes to fit just about any workload, with choices including what it says are the industry's first Arm-based flexible virtual machine shapes that can be right-sized for different jobs. There are also more powerful bare metal server options.

A tweet from Oracle Executive VP Ken Glueck goading his followers into harassing a female reporter was found to violate Twitter's policies, the company told Gizmodo on Wednesday. From the report: Glueck, who's previously made headlines as one of the top lobbyists under Oracle, was forced to take down the tweet and have his account suspended in a read-only mode for the next 12 hours, a Twitter spokesperson said. "The Tweet you referenced was in violation of the Twitter Rules. The account owner will be required to delete the violative Tweet and spend 12 hours with their account in read-only mode," a Twitter spokesperson said in an email. The tweet we reference was, of course, Glueck's. That tweet was the latest attack on the Intercept's Mara Hvistendahl, who last week published an expose detailing how reseller networks in China reportedly funnel Oracle's tech into the hands of the country's government. In response, Glueck published roughly 2,700 words worth of rebuttal on the official Oracle blog, helmed by a request for readers to send "any information about Mara or her reporting" to his personal Protonmail email address.

In 2018 Oracle's Larry Ellison bought the historic Cal Neva Lodge on the scenic north shore of California's Lake Tahoe for $36 million. Then in 2019 Mark Zuckerberg bought a $59 million compound on Lake Tahoe's west shore.

But now a wave of techies are moving in, reports Outside magazine, "freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes. They migrated, laptops in tow, to mountain towns all over the West, transforming them into modern-day boomtowns: 'Zoom-towns.'" "It's the wildest time," says realtor Katey Brandenburg, who works on Tahoe's Nevada side. For her and other realtors around the lake, the autumn of 2020 felt like winning the lottery. "I paid off a lifetime of debt — 28 years of loans, college, credit cards, and cars — in three months."

All told, 2020 saw more than 2,350 homes sold across the Tahoe Basin, for a boggling $3.28 billion, up from $1.76 billion in 2019, according to data analyzed by Sierra Sotheby's. That $3 billion stat is on a par with 2020 home-sales revenues in Aspen, Colorado (albeit there, the latest average home-sale price came in at $11 million). The trend is in line with real estate records being shattered from Sun Valley, Idaho, to Stowe, Vermont. And according to a just-released market update, it hasn't stopped: in the first quarter of 2021, median prices for single-family homes increased by an astronomical 70 percent year over year in Truckee, 72 percent in South Lake, and 81 percent in Incline Village...

"A disproportionate number of people who purchased homes in Tahoe in 2020 are employees of some of the largest tech companies in the Bay Area," says Deniz Kahramaner, founder of Atlasa, a real estate brokerage firm that specializes in data analytics. Of the 2,280 new-home buyers Atlasa identified throughout the Tahoe region in 2020, roughly 30 percent worked at software companies. The top three employers were Google (54 buyers), Apple (46), and Facebook (34)...

There is, however, one glaring issue with all this rapid, high-priced growth: the people who actually make a mountain town run — the ski instructors and patrollers, lift operators and shuttle drivers, housekeepers and snowcat mechanics, cooks and servers — can no longer afford to live there.
The article does note higher property taxes going toward public services (along with "more money eventually pumping into bars and restaurants.") And it also acknowledges affordable housing has for decades been an issue in tourist towns.

"It's just suddenly on steroids..."

Austin, Texas is America's fastest-growing major metro area, reports Bloomberg Businessweek, growing 30% from 2010 to 2019. But today a minimum wage worker hoping to afford a one-bedroom rental "would now need to work a 125-hour week."

And meanwhile, homeowner Matthew Congrove says he's now getting a half-dozen all-cash offers on his house every week. "In the boldest attempt, a stranger simply showed up at his home unannounced and asked to buy it..." Even Congrove — a software engineer who moved from Florida seven years ago — is most concerned about how the new wave of tech workers is affecting his adopted city's culture. Lately, he's seen more T-shirts bearing startup logos than band names. New condos have sprouted up where quirky bungalows once stood. And the commute time to his downtown office has tripled. "They just keep coming," Congrove says. "The fleece vests, the tech bros — that's definitely imported from California."

During the pandemic, Austin has welcomed more new residents from the Bay Area than from any other region outside Texas, according to records provided to Bloomberg by the U.S. Postal Service... Oracle late last year said it was moving its headquarters to Austin, and a stream of tech elites including prominent investor Jim Breyer and the chief executive officers of Dropbox and Splunk made plans to relocate. Elon Musk, the second-richest man in the world, is now a resident of Texas — though he hasn't said where — and Tesla Inc. is building a factory in Austin's outskirts, where Musk has said the company will need 10,000 people by 2022. He's also expanding the Austin area operations for Boring Co. and SpaceX, and has moved his personal foundation to the city's downtown.

For all his boosterism, even Musk recognizes the potential hazards of the influx he's helping spark. In a tweet on April 4, he called out the "urgent need to build more housing in greater Austin area!"

The region is facing the same boomtown dynamics that have plagued San Francisco for decades.... "There is a fairly broad-based concern that some of the things that aren't working in other areas are going to be brought here," says Dax Williamson, a managing director for Silicon Valley Bank who leads its technology banking practice for Central Texas. "If we price out the musicians we're going to find ourselves in a bad place." In a sign that may already be happening, Tesla recently selected a warehouse in southern Austin that served as music rehearsal space, with plans to transform it into a $2.5 million Tesla showroom this summer.

Hating California is a tradition in Texas, but Austin's growing pains aren't all California's fault. According to the Austin Chamber, more than half of newcomers from 2014 to 2018 came from other parts of the state, followed by just 8% from California and 3% from New York... Still, out-of-state arrivals from affluent cities tend to be richer than average existing residents and, as a consequence, have a greater impact on the local economy. "Probably 5 out of 10 of my clients are Californians, and others could say the same thing," says Susan Horton, president of the Austin Board of Realtors. "The majority are all tech people, and the last wave were all coming to work at Tesla."

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alphabet's Google didn't commit copyright infringement when it used Oracle's programming code in the Android operating system, sparing Google from what could have been a multibillion-dollar award. From a report: The 6-2 ruling, which overturns a victory for Oracle, marks a climax to a decade-old case that divided Silicon Valley and promised to reshape the rules for the software industry. Oracle was seeking as much as $9 billion. The court said Google engaged in legitimate "fair use" when it put key aspects of Oracle's Java programming language in the Android operating system. Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said Google used "only what was needed to allow users to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program." Each side contended the other's position would undercut innovation. Oracle said that without strong copyright protection, companies would have less incentive to invest the large sums needed to create groundbreaking products. Google said Oracle's approach would discourage the development of new software that builds on legacy products.

phalse phace writes: Twitter boss Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT for just over $2.9 million on Monday. The tweet -- "just setting up my twttr" -- was Dorsey's first tweet, made on March 21, 2006. The NFT was sold via auction on a platform called Valuables, which is owned by the U.S.-based company Cent. It was bought using the cryptocurrency Ether, for 1630.5825601 ETH, which was worth $2,915,835.47 at the time of sale, Cameron Hejazi, the CEO and co-founder of Cent confirmed. Cent confirmed the buyer is Sina Estavi. Estavi's Twitter profile, @sinaEstavi, says he is based in Malaysia and is CEO of the blockchain company Bridge Oracle. Estavi told Reuters he was "thankful" when asked for comment about the purchase.

After three decades in Silicon Valley, billionaire Jim Breyer chose Austin for the next era of his venture capital/venture philanthropy work, and cites "early, but compelling, signals that Austin is emerging as the next great tech hub."

While Silicon Valley's critics "make some fair points about rising living costs and government overreach," he argues that Austin's advantages are being overlooked — and they go beyond just the University of Texas:

Austin, more than any other city in the country, encourages a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Because the city has catered to so many types of professionals, and not just technologists, the depth of talent here is unique. Artists, entrepreneurs, doctors and professors, all at the top of their trade, frequently choose to build things together. By breaking down silos and embracing novel approaches to company-building, Austin's diverse entrepreneurs will usher in a new era of growth for the city, state and country... Austin has every type of entrepreneur that a great company needs...

Austin has attracted and will continue to attract young, brilliant talent because of its comparative affordability, outdoor culture and professional development opportunities. This vast pool of expertise is contributing to a remarkably robust climate of innovation. With Tesla, Facebook, Apple, Google, Oracle and other leading companies moving to or expanding in Austin, the entrepreneurial ecosystem will be bolstered when talent from these companies breaks away to start new ventures. Some of my best investments have been in entrepreneurs who gained valuable experience at an outstanding established company before starting their own. Five years from now, Austin will benefit from many tech company alums eager to leverage their expertise to tackle some of the world's most pressing problems...

Lastly, Austin entrepreneurs are among the most impact-driven in the world. The city, in a push to "Keep Austin Weird," emphasizes thinking outside the box. It encourages a frontier spirit where founders take big problems into their own hands — I have seen more impact investing pitches in Austin than any other geography... [T]he majority of people at startups here are determined to make the world a better place...

I think Austin founders will offer indisputable proof that companies can simultaneously earn money for shareholders and improve society.
"The things that made Silicon Valley special are not going anywhere," Breyer adds. "The Bay Area will continue to be a global hub of innovation that attracts courageous entrepreneurs, benefits from world-class institutions and nurtures talent from leading tech companies." But he's ultimately predicting a bright future for both cities, while arguing that Austin "offers a remarkable new frontier of opportunity."

MojoKid writes: AMD announced new additions to its EPYC server processor lineup today, codenamed Milan. The company's EPYC 7003 series brings with it significantly improved IPC and per-core performance, better multi-core scaling, and more flexible memory configuration options, in a package that's socket compatible with its previous-gen CPUs. Like the current AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors, new EPYC 7003 CPUs leverage AMD's new Zen 3 microarchitecture. Unlike its desktop parts, however, EPYC 7003 server processors use much larger packaging and feature up to CPU nine chiplets (up to eight 7nm CPU dies and a 12nm IO die), with up to 64 physical cores and 128 threads per socket. As things stand today, Intel doesn't currently have any Xeon processors that can match AMD in terms of single-socket core density. As such, AMD's EPYC 7003 series should consistently offer better performance in many workloads. Pricing for these new big iron processors ranges from $913 or the 16-core 7313P, and up to $7,890 for the powerful EPYC 7763, which AMD is calling "the world's highest-performing server processor." Though nearly $8K is not cheap, AMD appears to be continuing its aggressive price strategy with the EPYC 7003 series, relative to Intel's Xeon Scalable processors. The company also announced a who's who of data center and cloud service OEMs supporting the new platform, including AWS, Azure, Dell Technologies, HPE, Cisco, Google Cloud, Oracle and others.

"The Border Gateway Protocol was first described in 1989...," according to Wikipedia, "and has been in use on the Internet since 1994."

But now long-time Slashdot reader jovius reports that a startup named Syntropy "aims to replace BGP as the default routing method of the internet, by using nodes around the world to constantly gather data of the inefficiencies of the current network." The intelligence is then used to route data via the most efficient routes. Actual tests with hundreds of servers have proved that latencies can be reduced by tens to hundreds of milliseconds. The connections are by default encrypted, and jitter is also reduced.

Eventually, the company-run servers are augmented with tens of thousands of nodes run by users/smart devices, who are rewarded for their work.

The team was recently joined by former SVP at Verizon Shawn Hakl and former Chief Product Officer at AT&T Roman Pacewicz. One of the founders of Syntropy is the co-founder of Equinix and NANOG Bill Norton. Syntropy is an Oracle and Microsoft partner, and transforming into a foundation and DAO to govern the protocol work.
Decentralised autonomous routing protocol (or DARP) has just been opened for community testing, and the system is live on https://darp.syntropystack.com/.

The U.S., which once had a dominant head start in artificial intelligence, now has just a few years' lead on China and risks being overtaken unless government steps in, according to a new report to Congress and the White House. From a report: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who chaired the committee that issued the report, tells Axios that the U.S. risks dire consequences if it fails to both invest in key technologies and fully integrate AI into the military. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence approved its 750-page report on Monday, following a 2-year effort. Schmidt chaired the 15-member commission, which also included Oracle's Safra Catz, Microsoft's Eric Horvitz and Amazon's Andy Jassy.

On both the economic and military fronts, the biggest risk comes from China. "China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world's leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change," the report states. And It's not just AI technology that the U.S. needs to maintain a lead in. The report mentions a number of key technologies, including quantum computing, robotics, 3D printing and 5G. "We don't have to go to war with China," Schmidt said. "We don't have to have a cold war. We do need to be competitive."

In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it's been marketing its own software for their surveillance work. From a report: Police in China's Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department's disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations. So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company's California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle's website, begin with a "case outline" listing four Oracle "product[s] used" by Liaoning police to "do criminal analysis and prediction." One slide shows Oracle software enabling Liaoning police to create network graphs based on hotel registrations and track down anyone who might be linked to a given suspect.

Another shows the software being used to build a police dashboard and create "security case heat map[s]." Apparent pictures of the software interface show a blurred face and various Chinese names. The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been "incomprehensible," more easily "trace the key people/objects/events" and "identify potential suspect[s]" -- which in China often means dissidents. Oracle representatives have marketed the company's data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website. In at least two cases, the documents imply that provincial departments used the software in their operations. One is the slideshow story about Liaoning province. The other is an Oracle document describing police in Shanxi province as a "client" in need of an intelligence platform. Oracle also boasted that its data security services were used by other Chinese police entities, according to the documents -- including police in Xinjiang, the site of a genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. In marketing materials, Oracle said that its software could help police leverage information from online comments, investigation records, hotel registrations, license plate information, DNA databases, and images for facial recognition. Oracle presentations even suggested that police could use its products to combine social media activity with dedicated Chinese government databases tracking drug users and people in the entertainment industry, a group that includes sex workers. Oracle employees also promoted company technology for China's "Police Cloud," a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.

Microsoft approached Pinterest in recent months about a potential deal to acquire the $51bn social media company popular with hobbyists posting home decor, food and wedding collages, Financial Times reported Thursday [alternative source], citing people briefed on the matter. From the report: The talks were currently not active, said one of the people briefed. Microsoft has been pursuing an acquisition strategy aimed at amassing a portfolio of active online communities that could run on top of its cloud computing platform. Pinterest, whose market value has increased more than 600 per cent during the coronavirus pandemic, has signalled in the past that it desired to remain an independent company. Its soaring stock price would present a hurdle to Microsoft, whose shares have risen nearly 80 per cent from a pandemic low, though Pinterest's market value is only about 3 per cent of Microsoft's $1.83tn.

A purchase of Pinterest, which would have amounted to the largest deal ever for Microsoft, would also have tested the Biden administration's appetite for allowing powerful technology companies to strike deals. However, Microsoft, which mainly sells to businesses and governments rather than consumers, has avoided most of the political backlash that has made it more difficult for Facebook and Google to make big acquisitions. Microsoft first revealed its interest in acquiring a prominent social media company last year when it tried to buy the US operations of TikTok, a popular Chinese video app that was under pressure to divest its US business over the Trump administration's national security concerns. The bid for TikTok failed after rival Oracle gatecrashed the talks.

TikTok's forced sale to Walmart and Oracle has been shelved indefinitely as the Biden administration takes on a broad review of national security risks posed by Chinese technology companies initiated under his predecessor, according to the Wall Street Journal. From a report: Former U.S. President Donald Trump had ordered the popular video app, which is owned by China's ByteDance, be sold to an American company last year, citing national security concerns about users' data falling into the hands of Chinese authorities. But multiple legal challenges held up a deal. The most recent ruling on Dec. 7 said Trump's executive order likely overstepped his authority. Discussions have continued between ByteDance and U.S. security officials at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., the Journal reported citing people familiar with the talks. One of the people said possible solutions include use of a trusted third party to manage TikTok's data, which wouldn't require an outright sale. But no decision on how to resolve the issues is imminent as the Biden administration undertakes its own assessment of the risks of Chinese technology companies and data collection.

Google's cloud business reported operating loss of $5.61 billion in 2020. It brought in $13.06 billion in revenue for the year. It's the first time the company revealed the operating income metric for its cloud business. CNBC reports: Alphabet's latest push to show it's serious about its cloud unit comes as it tries to diversify revenue, which primarily comes from advertising, a business that showed vulnerability in 2020 -- particularly in the second quarter. Google Cloud includes infrastructure and data analytics platforms, collaboration tools, and "other services for enterprise customers."

The company's past attempts to bolster its cloud unit under CEO Diane Greene, who left in 2018, failed to capture much market share. But, since former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian came to Google to lead its cloud efforts in 2019, the company has gone on hiring and acquisition sprees.

The Bay Area Newsgroup reports: Despite high salaries and world-class amenities, San Jose is the least affordable place for tech workers to buy a home. [Alternate URL here] A new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found the typical tech worker and his or her partner — with two incomes totaling $200,000 — can afford just 12 percent of the homes for sale in the San Jose metro area.

The picture in San Francisco and the East Bay is nearly as bad, with just 21 percent of homes for sale fitting in the budget of an average tech couple. The high-hurdles to home ownership are fueling a Bay Area exodus that has contributed to the state's sluggish population growth in recent years, researchers say. Study author Ed Pinto, director of the AEI Housing Center, said tech workers can afford their pick of homes in almost every other U.S. city. "But in those places like San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles," he said, "that is not the case."

The analysis gives another explanation for the Bay Area exodus. And it's not only workers who are leaving. Tech heavyweights HPE and Oracle have announced moves of their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas. Pinto believes the spread of remote work will only accelerate migration from the Bay Area. With new workplace flexibilities, tech workers have a choice between high-cost regions near their offices and low-cost regions with bigger houses and remote work. "Work from home is winning," he said.

This week Digital Reality data center services announced it was also relocating its headquarters from the San Francisco Bay Area to Texas, citing factors like a low cost of living and "supportive business climate". (Though it will still maintain a "significant" presence in the Bay Area.)

And Align Technology (makers of the Invisalign orthodontic dental aligners) also announced it had relocated its global corporate headquarters from San Jose, California to Tempe, Arizona, citing a "favorable corporate operating environment, low cost of living and overall quality of life."

NBC News writes that "while Silicon Valley is by no means ceasing to be the center of the technology industry," there's still an "undeniable migration" that's happening: Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, bought a house in Miami Beach in 2018. In late 2020, Jonathan Oringer, who founded Shutterstock and became an investor, moved to Miami, as did other notable venture capitalists, including Keith Rabois and David Blumberg. It's not just Miami experiencing this migration. Last month, Oracle, the tech giant, announced it is moving its corporate headquarters from Redwood City, California, to Austin, Texas. Other such moves include Palantir, which decamped for Denver, while Elon Musk said last month he had moved himself to Austin. Hewlett Packard Enterprise also announced last month it was moving its headquarters from San Jose, California, in favor of a Houston suburb...

It's significant enough that while the San Francisco Bay Area continues to gain tech workers, the rate of increase is down by over 35 percent — the single largest drop of any tracked metropolitan area — according to self-reported data tracked by LinkedIn. Experts following this migration predict these numbers may grow. "There's a mini-exodus of tech companies leaving the Valley, and I think that's going to accelerate in 2021," said Dan Ives, a financial analyst with Wedbush Securities. But the reasons many businesses are moving are more complex than people may think. Tax experts say companies aren't moving their corporate headquarters necessarily for business tax incentives. Instead, it may be a long-term play to help them pay workers relatively less where the cost of living is lower... "You're going to always have the vast majority of tech companies coming out of the Valley, and you can't create that anywhere else," Ives said. "But when you look at an Austin: It's creating a mini Silicon Valley at half the cost for an average employee..."

Tax experts suspect Oracle and its peers may over time phase out higher-paid employees in California in favor of lower-paid employees in Texas. These companies can also ease off giving employees raises because they are living somewhere with a lower cost of living. "Even though a lot of companies are saying they can let people work from anywhere, most are saying we're not going to cut salary, but we're going to slow the rate of increase of salary," said Brian Kropp, an analyst with the IT service management company Gartner. Kropp said he spoke with high-level representatives from several "Fortune 200 type companies" who are exploring moving their corporate headquarters. In short, shifting employees from California to Texas could represent long-term corporate cost savings, which means larger payouts for these companies' top executives.

"The compounding effect translates to a 3 or 5 percent margin that moves straight to profit," Kropp said...
Kropp says some companies are also worried about the increase in state laws targeting businesses and executives. But there could be another culprit, argues Darien Shanske, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who NBC identiies as an expert on state and local taxation.

"California has blown it, but not because of tax policy — its decades-long problem of not producing enough housing," he said. "It's probably cheaper and easier to build that in Austin."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A coalition of health and technology organizations are working to develop a digital COVID-19 vaccination passport to allow businesses, airlines and countries to check if people have received the vaccine. The Vaccination Credential Initiative, announced on Thursday, is formulating technology to confirm vaccinations in the likelihood that some governments will mandate people provide proof of their shots in order to enter the nation. The organization hopes the technology will allow people to "demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy."

The initiative, which includes members like Microsoft, Oracle and U.S. nonprofit Mayo Clinic, is using the work from member Commons Project's international digital document that verifies a person has tested negative for COVID-19, the Financial Times reported. The Commons Project's technology, created in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, is being utilized by three major airline alliances. The coalition is reportedly in discussions with several governments to create a program requiring either negative tests or proof of vaccination to enter, Paul Meyer, the chief executive of The Commons Project, told the Times. The technology will need to allow patients to keep their data secure while being available in a digital wallet or a physical QR code for them to regulate who sees the information.

Long-time programmer/researcher/former MIT research fellow Jonathan Edwards writes a blog called "Alarming Development: Dispatches from the User Liberation Front."

He began the new year by arguing that software "is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996." Slashdot reader tonique summarizes Edwards' argument: In 1996 there were "LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, Oracle, Smalltalk, Windows, C++, LabView, HyperCard, Mathematica, Haskell, WWW, Python, Mosaic, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Flash, Postgress [sic]". After that we're supposed to have achieved "IntelliJ, Eclipse, ASP, Spring, Rails, Scala, AWS, Clojure, Heroku, V8, Go, React, Docker, Kubernetes, Wasm".

Edwards's main thesis is that the Internet boom around 1996 caused this slowdown because programmers could get rich quick. Then smart and ambitious people moved into Silicon Valley, and founded startups. But you can't do research at a startup due to time and money constraints. Today only "megacorps" like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are supposedly able to do relevant research because of their vast resources.

Computer science wouldn't help, either, because "most of our software technology was built in companies" and because computer science "strongly disincentivizes risky long-range research". Further, according to Edwards, the aversion to risk and "hyper-professionalization of Computer Science" is part of a larger and worrisome trend throughout the whole field and all of western civilisation.
Edwards' blog post argues that since 1996 "almost everything has been cleverly repackaging and re-engineering prior inventions. Or adding leaky layers to partially paper over problems below. Nothing is obsoleted, and the teetering stack grows ever higher..."

"[M]aybe I'm imagining things. Maybe the reason progress stopped in 1996 is that we invented everything. Maybe there are no more radical breakthroughs possible, and all that's left is to tinker around the edges. This is as good as it gets: a 50 year old OS, 30 year old text editors, and 25 year old languages.

"Bullshit. No technology has ever been permanent. We've just lost the will to improve."

Bloomberg Editorial Board: Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for Austin. Palantir, Charles Schwab and McKesson are all bound for greener pastures. No less an information-age avatar than Elon Musk has had enough. He thinks regulators have grown "complacent" and "entitled" about the state's world-class tech companies. No doubt, he has a point. Silicon Valley's high-tech cluster has been the envy of the world for decades, but there's nothing inevitable about its success. As many cities have found in recent years, building such agglomerations is exceedingly hard, as much art as science. Low taxes, modest regulation, sound infrastructure and good education systems all help, but aren't always sufficient. Once squandered, moreover, such dynamism can't easily be revived. With competition rising across the U.S., the area's policy makers need to recognize the dangers ahead.

In recent years, San Francisco has seemed to be begging for companies to leave. In addition to familiar failures of governance -- widespread homelessness, inadequate transit, soaring property crime -- it has also imposed more idiosyncratic hindrances. Far from welcoming experimentation, it has sought to undermine or stamp out home-rental services, food-delivery apps, ride-hailing firms, electric-scooter companies, facial-recognition technology, delivery robots and more, even as the pioneers in each of those fields attempted to set up shop in the city. It tried to ban corporate cafeterias -- a major tech-industry perk -- on the not-so-sound theory that this would protect local restaurants. It created an "Office of Emerging Technology" that will only grant permission to test new products if they're deemed, in a city bureaucrat's view, to provide a "net common good." Whatever the merits of such meddling, it's hardly a formula for unbounded inventiveness.

These two traits -- poor governance and animosity toward business -- have collided calamitously with respect to the city's housing market. Even as officials offered tax breaks for tech companies to headquarter themselves downtown, they mostly refused to lift residential height limits, modify zoning rules or allow significant new construction to accommodate the influx of new workers. They then expressed shock that rents and home prices were soaring -- and blamed the tech companies. California's legislature has only made matters worse. A bill it enacted in 2019, ostensibly intended to protect gig workers, threatened to undo the business models of some of the state's biggest tech companies until voters granted them a reprieve in a November referendum. A new privacy law has imposed immense compliance burdens -- amounting to as much as 1.8% of state output in 2018 -- while conferring almost no consumer benefits. An 8.8% state corporate tax rate and 13.3% top income-tax rate (the nation's highest) haven't helped.

Electrek reports that 2021 will bring one of Tesla's fast-charging Supercharger to a state that's never had one before: Lanai Island, a former pineapple plantation that was almost entirely (98%) purchased by Oracle founder and Tesla board member Larry Ellison for $300 million in 2012, is the first in Hawaii to see a Supercharger permit filed by Tesla...

The 145-square-mile island doesn't have any traffic lights, only 30ish miles of paved roads and the 3,400 person population lives almost exclusively in the small Lana'i City. This would seem to indicate that the chargers would be of the Urban Supercharger variety and in likely service of Larry Ellison's Four Seasons Hotels, which rely on Model X vehicles to shuttle guests to and from the airport and around the island's luxury amenities.

Ellison plans to convert the island's power from diesel to solar/battery, and obviously Tesla's expertise here is likely to be tapped... Hawaii in general has been massively moving from its diesel generating past to solar power and plans to be 100% renewable before 2040.