For Linux (Debian in particular), it's more like encourage and assist. You can use whatever version you want, if you know what you're doing.

No one said wolves lived there. They said the forest supported life that meant wolves went there to hunt. As for how much life is supported in an area like that? The answer is a shitload, just go ask a hunter.

No it's a natural forest. None of those trees are evenly spaced and they aren't identically sized beyond your own inability to understand what you see: Hint: Trees in a forest are competitive for light, hence most forests where a single large plant dominates result in trees growing to similar uniform heights. This is especially true of pine forests. But if you look beyond the tree trips you'll find plenty of biodiversity further down.

False, and in any case it's also irrelevant. Even plantations support diverse wildlife and are frequently used as hunting grounds too (not just for furry creatures, but for idiots with guns too)

Google destroyed the top soil, not only against commercial resource management, but to the point where the subsidiary building the datacentre is about to be issued a fine. They did so without an environmental impact assessment which is the *MINIMUM* requirement to cut down trees under the forestry act.

Oh an you know who thinks that Google fucked up and did the wrong thing? ... Google. The company which has formally and publicly apologised for doing precisely this thing.

Brownnosing a megacorporation is lame at the best of times, but it's far worse when even said megacorporation disagrees with your view. If you want to be a simp then toe the company line and admit Google fucked up, just like Google admitted.

You clearly have no idea how this works. A permit to build a project allows you to start projects in stages. It's not a single stamp that gives you carte-blanche authority to do what the fuck you want.

Projects are executed in phases, certain activities run in parallel. When you have an initial permission for construction you can start getting contracts ready while you apply for additional permits. Things such as performing impact assessments of the construction, obtaining land clearing permits, emissions permits for temporary generators, water discharge permits for construction water, etc. These are all separate from having approval to build a datacentre.

Google didn't get a land clearing permit. They chopped down trees illegally. Having the go ahead to build a datacentre is not the final step, it's the first step.

Also yes, Google is evil. In fact they even apologised for being evil and admitted it was their fault.

By the way, this applies to you wanting to build your own house as well. It's not only clear you don't know how construction of mega projects work, it's clear you've never built anything requiring permits at all.

There's 3 things at play here:
1) Datacentre equipment is heavy. Having a second floor is far more expensive than having just one floor, and the foundations need to be engineered in a very different way. Also the second floor means the first floor needs load bearing supports which take space and cost money, etc. etc.
2) Construction sites are larger than what they are constructing. This is highly complicated in inner city constructions, but in the bush where you can just clear a bit of extra land, quite often you make a significantly bigger plot clear so you can stage construction equipment, temporary housing, canteens, parking lots for hundreds of workers, etc. The datacentre isn't going to be 2 sqmi, but the construction site may well be.
3) Believe it or not, companies like to hide things like this. A single story datacentre may not clear visible tree line from a nearby road and thus (ironically in this case) preserve the natural looking landscape.

If everyone professionally turns into a code reviewer and no one writes code of their own, are we losing the art? Software engineering is one of those cases where the best people to review something are those with deep enough understanding to do it themselves. If we lose the skill of the fundamentals because no one does that work anymore, how are we going to review and fix things?

Even that somewhat inflated sum is pocket change for just one of the many major corporations which rely on PHP.

I challenge you (well obviously this is impossible but you get the rhetorical point) to find one corporation in the entire world valued at over a billion that doesn't, say, use openssh. The OpenBSD foundation struggles to raise CAD 400,000 a year.

Sure they are legally allowed to be freeloaders. The point of the license is anyone can use it. It's really stupid however to contribute absolutely nothing when it's critical infrastructure you rely on day to day and you could easily afford a sponsorship. But it's the tragedy of the commons.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago.

No, I disagree, and now that I'm thinking about it more, quite strongly. I think frontier models passed the mediocre programmers of all seniority levels some time ago. I've worked with so many arrogant pillocks who are convinced they are the shit and will not listen to someone with domain expertise and then get pissy when they turn out to be wrong. Or worse, get political and push through an objectively broken thing.

Good juniors can drive AI really well and do good stuff. I had a summer intern the summer just gone. 2 month placement in the middle of an engineering degree. Basically gave him a problem I didn't have time to work on: you know "here's the current solution, here's what I know, this is the problem, go nuts" kind of deal. Obviously there were regular feedback sessions, but he did all the work, and used AI heavily but not religiously. And that's now part of the product. He was obviously very very junior, but I've had seniors who were less capable and flexible.

The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites,

I've also found the mediocre are very much monkey-see-monkey do kind of programmers who write tests because those are Bet Practices and they are the Best. But they also as I say convinced they are the shit and don't appear to actually believe their code need testing really. CI is there to put the halt on all the fools they are surrounded with, not them of course, but they know they need to model Best Practices for the unwashed.

End result, a lot of programmers are shockingly bad at writing tests and basically test useless things that are easy to test and unlikely to break but don't do what's actually hard but important. This appears to be what Claude has been trained on: basically the average, on average and it tends to write long batteries of more or less meaningless tests.

Naturally good juniors aren't very good at tests initially. They're juniors, but I find it's the attitude that matter. It's not hard to convince them they might be wrong and that there's a need for testing. Or "prove to me Claude hasn't messed it up", kind of thing. I'd much rather work with an enthusiastic junior who wants to prove me, Claude or themselves wrong than a senior programmer who I have to beg to consider the notion that their code might not be perfect.

TL;DR I broadly agree, but I think Claude makes the competent/incompetent split starker, not the junior/senior split.

Currently, based on objective data comparing similar fully completed development tasks like for like, I still outperform agentic workflows using frontier models by about 25-50% on average, and I don't have to pay anyone extra fees to do that, and subjectively I also find it more engaging to work that way. So I don't really buy the hype about AIs making us all orders of magnitude more productive unless you're happy to YOLO everything forever and take the much-discussed risks that comes with.

Yes, though as you say quite a lot of stuff can be YOLO'd.

It's amazingly good at some stuff and not at others.

It can bash out a CRUD app with a web based UI in basically no time, and really well. Think some boring internal tool like inventory management or something. Would cost a fortune to buy and also suck massively. It would from a project perspective count as long and complex, but from a pure software point of view, it's not complicated stuff. It's well documented. It's also a horrible tech stack.

It's also very good at indexing an unseen codebase and figuring out entry points for things. I've known people, or rather a person, that good, but I ain't.

But I've also seen it make a complete shitshow of threading in a small, contained task. It's also so-so if that at optimization. I set it on making thing go faster. I had the dataset, and specified tests. It found the hotspot and made it faster, which is frankly more than a lot of programmers can do. Most of them will smugly tell you everyone knows e.g. std::unordered_map is slow (and you're implicitly a moron for using it), change everything to their own implementation on a Friday night then bugger off. So yeah better than that, but I let it churn for ages with its agents and it didn't get much further. So I put some easy wins in by hand.

It is quite often wrong and i definitely worse in areas requiring domain expertise. But then again that's the case with your average programmer. It's also a bit weirdly pissy at time, but much less so that many programmers, so that's a net win. It won't flounce off if you tell it to delete a bunch of code it just wrote.

So...

Yeah I use it and quite a lot.

I mean if you don't know your history you may laugh and look like a lunatic, but you do you. I'll give you one more change to learn something. Google Sony TA-N77ES. It was a member of the Elevated Series of audio stack. The amp alone cost $3000 back in the 80s, and having a full ES stack in your living room would easily have set you back over $10k. Oh and that amp still fetches that price in second hand audiophile circles today. But I don't expect you to know that because you heard the name Sony and turned off your brain.

This isn't wrong. One of my devs is on a bit of a side quest to see how far he an get with Qwen locally (5070Ti) compared to Claude. He was basically trying to answer the GP's question. Resort so far: it's not as good as the latest frontier model feels like 4.6 instead which is pretty solid. Main thing is it's got a pretty small context, but that's due to the 16GB size of the GPU not the model per-se.

That is extremely unlikely, but if it happens, people will switch to other AI engines.

I use Cursor for coding, which SpaceX now owns.

SpaceX (which may merge with Tesla soon) has deep pockets and an in-house need for AI, so it is even less likely to "close shop".

Even if Anthropic and OpenAI get in deep financial doo-doo, they won't close entirely. They might stop updating their models, but the existing models in static mode would be fine for coding. More likely, they would be acquired in a consolidation.

There are currently dozens of AI companies. I predict there will be fewer than five in a few years.

TFS says Google took the topsoil too. Not helpful if you plan to grow anything else on the site.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

Yeah that's sort of where we're at. I'm heavily into photography so my TV spends most of its time displaying some photos I took.

I agree their firmware is rubbish though. They actually killed a useful feature of mine (they killed gaming). The Frame used to ship with Steam Link, which worked amazingly well. Paired a bluetooth controller to the TV and I would sit on the couch playing games from a stream up in the study. Then they released a firmware update that mapped volume up to left anologue stick Y without the option of disabling it effectively making the TV unusable for any gaming. Fuck them.

But fuck LG more, and fuck Sony equally as much and what are you gonna do, buy a crappy TCL? And that's how we ended up with a second Frame.

Requires != seeks out even if you don't set it up. We have evidence of TVs establishing network connections despite not being logged in. Your neighbour has an open wifi hotspot? Congrats, your TV may have a network connection regardless of what you want it to have.