I had the same thought, how can you continue working for Meta if the leader happily undermines democracy for profit and enjoys schmoozing with the current administration who have no scruples of dismantling our democratic institutions and world order.
I get not everyone can leave a company if their life depends on it and they have to support a family, especially in this market.
But this guy is probably a millionaire already. He's got the luxury of working for more world positive companies or projects.
But him choosing to continue to work for Zuck sends a clear signal what his values are.
It's all just self embellishment and rationalisation with these guys for the horrible stuff they did. Even if they think its genuine, this Philip K Dick quote fits exactly "Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools".
> Will local folks get those jobs to build the data center?
Yes. At some point the demand will be so high that imported workers won't suffice and local population will need to be trained and hired.
> And if so, what happens to those builders once the data center is built?
They are going to be moved to a new place where the datacenters will need to be built next. Mobility if the workforce was often cited as one of the greatest strengths of US economy.
So local people in town 1 who are getting these jobs to build the data center will then have to move to town 2 to build a data center there? What happens to the local people in town 2 who are also looking for construction jobs?
Local people in town 2 share the same fate that people in town 1 alread had. If there's not enough imported workers, from town 1 or elsewere people from town 2 will need to be trained and employed.
More and more data centers (and power sources) are going to be built at the same time so more and more workers will be needed. This is going to be THE job. I think there are going to be many similarities with the age when railroads were being developed. Hopefully with less worker deaths this time.
That sounds unimaginably tough, and I admire the strength and mindset both of you share as a couple.
Wishing you and your wife (and your boys) a better 2026 and beyond.
And hopefully the NHS will continue to exist, I read about its struggle and the call for it to be privatized and end up like the system in here the US.
Huge respect to healthcare workers and wish they'd be compensated better.
I've actually done a fair bit of ML work in Elixir, in practice I found:
1) It's generally harder to interface with existing libraries and models (example: whisperX [0] is a library that combines generic whisper speech recognition models with some additional tools like discrete-time-warping to create a transcription with more accurate time stamp alignment - something that was very helpful when generating subtitles. But because most of this logic just lives in the python library, using this in Elixir requires writing a lot more tooling around the existing bumblebee whisper implementation [1]).
but,
2) It's way easier to ship models I built and trained entirely with Elixir's ML ecosystem - EXLA, NX, Bumblebee. I trained a few models doing basic visual recognition tasks (detecting scene transitions, credits, title cards, etc), using the existing CLIP model as a visual frontend and then training a small classifier on the output of CLIP. It was pretty straightforward to do with Elixir, and I love that I can run the same exact code on my laptop and server without dealing with lots of dependencies and environment issues.
Livebook is also incredibly nice, my typical workflow has become prototyping things in Livebook with some custom visualization tools that I made and then just connecting to a livebook instance running on EC2 to do the actual training run. From there shipping and using the model is seamless, and I just publish the wrapping module as a library on our corporate github, which lets anyone else import it straight into livebook and use it.
And you let local QWEN write the code for you? Is the output any good or comparable to frontier models?
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