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?

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.

That is wildly optimistic IME. Frontier models do a great job of sounding authoritative on any given subject. This is not the same as actually having expert-level knowledge and understanding, and the choices the models make when you ask them to implement something can and often do reflect that. There are several domains I've worked in over the past few years where AIs lack even basic knowledge an expert practitioner would have, probably because these fields are too specialised to have a lot of books available or papers published, so presumably there hasn't been much subject-specific content to train the models on.

I don't think it's usually about what AI "did really badly on" at this point. It's more about whether the overheads of adding all the guard rails and then reviewing and correcting all the output end up costing at least a similar amount to just writing the code yourself.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago. Today's LLMs routinely write code at the level of a competent junior-mid but with the advantage of an inhumanly broad knowledge base.

For a good senior, I'm much less convinced. The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites, which matters a lot when they rely on tests so heavily to reach acceptable quality. IME, they are still mostly miss when it comes to the business insight that seniors will take into account and design/architecture decisions that keep the code manageable as it evolves. While they have become much better at recognising existing patterns in the code, and I would say they follow them reasonably well the majority of the time now, there are still bizarre anomalies that creep in, and they aren't very good at extending those patterns when necessary.

I think AI advocates also tend to underestimate just how much time it takes to properly review what they are doing. Take a half-day Claude session to implement some new feature. It might take half an hour to give it the initial brief and then review its plan. Make a few edits and it'll propose a new plan that is also long and detailed and has no edit markings to show what it changed so you have to review the whole thing, carefully and in detail, again to pick up the minor changes it also made for no obvious reason. Then you let it start doing its thing. You can't really leave it unattended for long because it'll stop to ask questions. Some of those questions might be whether it can run a screenful of ad-hoc Bash script to make some edits to your source files, because for some reason it decided not to show the actual edits as it usually would, so now you have to figure out what all the sed incantations are actually going to do while looking at those files in another editor or just trust it and then review all the changes properly later anyway. Sometimes it decides to change its plan mid-flight, but not always in a good way, and if you interrupt it to apply corrections or redirect, you break the neat plan flow it was in. Then you get to the end and you can finally see how everything it has done fits together, and you still need to review everything with the same care as you would with a junior developer's code and probably apply a few fixes where it's come up with weird names or not quite followed a pattern or imagined some instructions that were never there and made other changes in other parts of the system that should be out of scope.

If you read to the end of that last paragraph, you know how I typically feel at the end of a half day working with an agentic UI. And the thing is, I do those sessions as experiments fairly often to keep up with progress, but a lot of what I do is still written by hand, which gives me simple, objective data to compare the two ways of working and see whether the AI tools are really making me more productive once you take everything into account.

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.

Personally, I think the optimum use of LLMs right now is probably not to use them for the whole coding workflow like that or rely on agentic tools, but to use them for tasks like answering quick questions about the existing code, doing research like a fancy search engine, writing a first draft of some boilerplate, and writing quick and dirty throwaway code for experiments, one-shot tools and the like, where you don't really care about the quality as long as it gets the job done and you will see immediately if it has in fact got the job done. For these things, the LLM can read and type faster than me, and that's useful.

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.

LOL no sorry you haven't figured out shit. "LCD driver boards" does not a TV make and the result would be absolutely trash compared to a high end modern OLED which relies on many things to not only decode incoming video, but to perform advanced tricks such as local dimming control, 4 colour display, automatic continuous self calibration, external light adjustment, etc that precisely zero of these boards have and if they had it, wouldn't work with the proprietary interface.

If you were just trying to display an image, stop fucking around with hacking and buy a digital sign board. That will net you better quality than what you're hacking together, and will still be far shy of a modern TV.

There are precisely zero dumb TVs on the market with the format support and visual quality of a high end TV from the majors. That you don't even know that shows you're not a serious customer of TVs and are just parroting whatever AI spat out at you from a quick Google search.

No you can't. That doesn't guarantee that your TV doesn't seek out a network connection. We have evidence of that, actual evidence of network traffic despite the user "skipping" the network setup. That you don't even know this shows you're not serious about security or have any idea about what is going on in the TV world at all.

How about we stop accepting sub optimal solutions made of bodged together diverse components like some cyberpunk dystopia and actually demand better products that work the way we want?

You shouldn't need to "not connect your TV to the internet". It should work the way you want.

He's asking you to demonstrate your credentials. You claim you modified proprietary OSes, bypasses secure bootloaders with blown e-fuses, unpotted CPUs to access debug connections, bypassed subscription requirements on services, and hacked mandatory network connections to work offline? Demonstrate it. That's the kind of thing that people who are capable of post all over the internet proudly with evidence of how it was done.

Got a link for us?

Option? I bought a Samsung TV (Frame, a small model, not intended for good viewing, but for being out of the way on the wall) for the attic only 9 months ago and ... it did that by default out of the box...

The manufacturers really don't care if 5 of their customers modify their TV. Consumer ambivalence will mean manufacturers won't change, largely because sheeple have come to accept the current experience as the norm.

99.9% of normal customers wouldn't make it past the first 4 words of this Slashdot headline without scrolling on to the next article.