Does not work. First, native seeds are already there. No need for additional seeding. Second, it takes not decades, but centuries for a native forest to form. If you really want an oak-beech forest in natural equilibrium forming just by seeding, we are talking more than 1000 years, because you have to wait until the first generation of oaks and beeches have died and withered away and given space to the next generation. Until then, you have a forest with trees of nearly the same age, and the English oak (Quercus robur, in Germany known as German oak) lives for about 500-1000 years, Fagus sylvatica (Common Beech) for 300 years.

Instead, you have to actively manage the conversion from a monoculture spruce forest into a Mixed conifer forest by replacing single trees of spruce either because it died or it was harvested for wood, with young trees between 10 and 15 years old, so they have enough mycellium around their roots to keep healthy in a new environment. This is a slow, ongoing process, and it will still take decades, but much shorter than just throwing some seeds and waiting,

PS: My wife is a biologist, and one of the research topics at her university was a forest in Scandinavia which burned down in the 1950ies. At this place, no one was actively regrowing the forest, but researchers instead documented the natural regrowing. After 40 years, new plants barely covered the ground, and naked rock, where the topsoil was washed off, was still visible everywhere. And new trees (mainly pine and birch) were small, like larger shrubs, not forming a closed forest.

Yeah, the prices are initially surprising. I guess all the spying, ads, and preloaded crapware/shovelware have massively increased the margins on Smart TVs, so that competitive pressures brought the price to way below benevolent TVs. That should give us all an idea how many dollars worth of fuckery a Smart TV inflicts.

This is not a product endorsement; I have no familiarity with the product and all I did was search Amazon and pick the first result (which was also sponsored). That said: Amazon claims to sell this.

(This is not a store endorsement, either, but it looks like Amazon will let you put it in your shopping cart (and presumably buy it) without asking who is going to use it for what. I only mention this because someone else posted that some vendor refuses to sell monitors to individuals.)

What we call "Dumb TVs," the industry calls "monitors." Use that search term and you'll find plenty.

I don't know. You seem to make a good point, but what would you say if the 4 year old explained that you're mounting your 60-inch TV wrong?

Think 2016 (when the Republicrat era ended) and later.

If you're trying to avoid it, then that's just a software problem, not a hardware one. It's only a hardware problem if you're trying to get more of it.

I remember when floating point was the luxuriously optional silicon. I try to be welcoming to new things even if I don't know how/if I'll use them, because I think they don't really inflate the cost of the processors much. (Am I right? I don't actually know.)

Long-term, I think there's widespread consensus that integrated floating point was a good idea. Even less controversial, integrated MMUs are a critically necessary part of our modern world. (It's hard to imagine that separate chips like the 68851 used to exist.) The vector stuff? Some code uses it. The cryptographic instructions? Oh hell yes! Maybe I'll get reamed for this, but I think the processor industry has a pretty good track record of making silicon that we eventually truly do light up.

This time, it's a little harder. The applications for LLMs seem so niche. Part of me thinks they're doing this several years too soon. But that said:

0. Neural networks have more applications than LLMs. However worthless you think LLMs are: if your computer is good at LLMs, what else might it be good at?

1. I strongly disagree with everyone who says the hypothetical applications for this should run "in the cloud" instead of on the user's own hardware. All my experience tells me that's definitely wrong. IF this "AI" stuff really isn't a bubble (I think it probably is), then getting coprocessors widely deployed for it out there, is a very good thing. "AI" is no different from non-"AI" logic, in that whatever you're doing, from the user's point of view it should be as local as possible, and with as few external dependencies as possible. You don't need to teach me that lesson again for the 100th time, dammit. Maybe a lot of laypeople will get stuck with OpenAI's (or whoever's) services, but we will want to run it on our machines.

2. Maybe the reason there are so few existing applications that use neural nets, is that the cheap hardware to make it practical isn't out there yet! Get the silicon out there and then developers will find uses for it. Back when I was stealing my employer's electricity (and coffee) at night, I ray-traced on a network of 80386s and 80486s, and the 486's floating point performance made me a lot more excited to work on my ray-tracer. Had it ran slower, I would have moved on to the next amateur time-waster sooner.

But I can see why consumers wouldn't care a bit, right now. By the time you have real use for this hardware, I think you'll have already retired the new machine that you're buying today. But wasn't that sort of the case with vector and crypto instructions too? Different people will check it out at a different pace. It's always been like that.

Beware, I heard the project to port GrapheneOS to the Samsung Galaxy SmartToupee has run into a lot of driver problems.

The government should clearly define what this is.

One of the things that makes these such Interesting Times is that while your statement would normally make perfect sense, these days the government has a financial conflict of interest in this situation, so I think they should be completely disqualified from defining anything!

Trump is doing this for the purpose of personally profiting from it, and might possibly might even be one of the bettors. He (and everyone who works for him, since they necessarily lack independence) should not have any say at all in this bet's adjudication, other than as a biased advocate for whatever position best maximizes their own interests.

If you and I have a conflict, then neither you nor I are fit to be a neutral judge in that conflict.

Io is heavily influenced by Jupiter's electromagnetic field. Basically, it gets inductive heating from Jupiter, hence the volcanic activity. Europe is too far removed from Jupiter for electromagnetic heating to have a sizable effect. It's just a frozen snowball.

I don't bother with romance novels (they're usually about abusers being rewarded for being abusers, and not really my cup of tea even when they aren't), but AI is not great at translation, is terrible at metaphor, and is horrific at writing.

If they're going to use AI for auto-translation, then I think the best thing they can do is pay for the first 30 sessions of therapy needed afterwards.

European car brands for most of its time had only a single brand in the market, and if they have different brands then because they bought another company and did not want to lose the customers. For most of its time, you only got BMW from BMW (o.k., in the early days, you could not buy a BMW from BMW, because they sold their cars under the Dixi name until World War II). You only got Mercedes-Benz from Mercedes-Benz, until they bought Smart back in the 1990ies. Volkswagen until the mid-1970ies only sold Volkswagen, when they bought Auto Union, and from the bunch of brands Auto Union had, they only kept Audi. Ford of Europe only sells Ford. Renault only sells Renault. When Volvo bought DAF, they phased out the DAF brand as soon as possible.

Volkswagen in the last decades tried to Americanize and set up an U.S. style scheme of brands, but we have to wait and see if it works out. Stellantis only formed recently and is still in the process of sorting through their brands, which they got from the likes of Fiat, Chrysler, PSA and Opel/Vauxhall.

Hoarding resources: It's hardwired into our "core-rope" memory and it was essential for our survival until very recently.

Ah, yes, the 2020 toilet paper shortage. I was so high and mighty after my early March Costco trip. It's good to be the king.

The future was promised to be that robots do the manual labor, and humans make art and sing merry songs.

Don't forget the part about getting to have sex with Orion dancers! Once you've gone green, you never go back.