Oooh - here's a nuanced take: I'm tentatively a data centre advocate. At least the data centre of the sort in the article's pictures. That's a NextDC data centre. Those are different to all the AI ones being spawned recently.

The way NextDC works is they take all server racks that used to live in business' server rooms and put them together in two locations (Most cities have two for redundancy). Such data centres have been around for decades. We had a data centre in Perth in the mid-90's, though it was tiny/basic by today's standards - today that organisation is called IIA and has data centres in every Australian city.

For the first 20 years of my career, every place I worked had a server room. Even tiny businesses had a token server somewhere in the building handling shared files and maybe company email. Today, that stuff is all hosted in data centres. All the Cloud buzzwords you've been hearing about for the last 15 years or so? Data centres.

The reason I advocate for these is they are more efficient. By sharing the infrastructure like power and water in one location, they use less overall than they used to when spread all over town. Because business pay a lot for every single rack they rent, they reduce their footprints as much as possible. That goes for the amount of power they draw, and how many racks they can get away with. When you own your own server room, you think nothing of having 15 racks of servers. When each rack costs tens of thousands per month to be located in a data centre, you get super efficient about using as few as possible.

This very site runs on data centres. Multiple vendors: Cloudflare, Amazon, couple of others. Though for all I know some of them are in the same physical data centre.

The headline however is about AI data centres, and yeah - I'm no advocate there. There's a gold rush at present to build immense infrastructure so that some businesses will be ready for demand that simply is not coming. Some AI will stay, but they are building orders of magnitude more infrastructure than is needful right now.

Edit: I just saw on the NextDC site that ChatGPT is going to host their Australian servers with NextDC. Sooooo I dunno what I think about that. At least they aren't building more data centres in Australia?

I'm glad it was noticed. 🙂

Intelligence has never been a requirement to be in politics. And I mostly give the dumber things politicians say something of a pass. But, ministerial roles are meant to meet a minimal threshold of smart. This isn't some random nutjob who found herself representing a seat, she is the bloody NT minister for trade and business.

For a minister to be coming out with stupidity like this, makes the entire government look bad. You are supposed to give cabinet positions to the better representatives. If this is the best person for that job, it makes me sad for NT.

Okay then, Senator Hanson: Give us the context. Please explain to us how in context we are supposed to take what you said regarding Domestic Violence. Because when I read things like "If these women are getting abused by men out there, then don't put up with it", I struggle to find any context that could be anything except abhorrent.

How can you defend/explain these quotes to mean something the electorate is meant to get behind? Because honestly, the only quote of yours I'm in agreement with is "I'm growing less tolerant of many journalists within the [mainstream media] and so too are the public," - but my growing mistrust is more to do with the fact that we have been suddenly talking about you in the past three months after decades of you screaming into the wind.

I don't know why you are relevant outside your fringe circles all of a sudden, and I have growing suspicions that there is intent behind this change bringing you to the wider political discourse.

Anecdotal, I realise - but my niece and all her classmates were on Instagram last year. When that was cut off from them, it wasn't replaced (the cohort didn't move to some other social media). So in her case, the ban has been a success. She'll be 16 in Feb anyway.

My son on the other hand hasn't been affected. He is on YouTube and Discord and hasn't noticed the ban at all. He hasn't seen any age verification stuff. So in his case, the ban has been a total fizzle.

It was an example, but what you do in this situation is update the alert deployment process to cater to the failed devices (and it wouldn't likely be as simple as 'these iphones', rather a combination of factors). Focus testing on the specific scenarios/devices that were previously incompatible. There's a point where you're talking about 0.4% of devices, and you'd note that on some risk registry somewhere.

I don't know the acceptable thresholds, but I would expect that if 99% of the population receive the emergency alert, they can give the other 1% a heads-up. Then again, those acceptable thresholds might be 99.9% for all I know.

Either way, sample testing the assortment of phones you have in the lab will only take you so far. At some point you want to trial a full alert to find anything you may have missed.

I don't think "hectare" is the measure that people struggle with. It's how many hectares a given area takes up. For example, if you put 24,103 hectares into one big square, that square would be smaller than 16km x 16km. People would assume this should a much bigger square. 241 square km (24,103 hectares) is 241 km x 1 km.

These links are 1. The State government press release that the article is referencing and 2. Some more useful that should bloody well be interpreted, summarised, referenced and included in the damn article. The fact that this information is out there further highlights how lazy the article is.

As an infrastructure dude, I would definitely want to know about edge cases where what I think of as "TELL EVERYONE" does not in fact, tell everyone.

"There's a tsunami coming. Alert every phone tower within 2 km of shore!"
[Emergency alert sent]
"Hey, it turns out that iOS 18 and earlier devices aren't compatible with alerts in this format."

So, 12% of iPhone users in the critical zone miss out on the tsunami alert.

Everyone knows how far 100m is. It's an insult to your fellow Aussies to suggest they don't know that a hectare is 100m x 100m. We all learned about hectares in primary school.

I live on the other side of the country, so don't know the gravity of the topic as you put it, and after reading this article, I still have no idea of the gravity.

We aren't told how much woody land NSW has. We aren't told whether this reducing figure is even a problem. All we are given is a number and that the chief executive of Nature Conservation Council of NSW finds that number disappointing. That's the whole core of the article.

No suggestion of what that number should be. No proposed policy that would be preferred. They don't even tell us whether that land is being cleared for construction and development or for pulping woodchips to make toilet paper.

It's a lazy article that is lacking in all the relevant info and hangs everything off 'clearing land bad. Rage bait engagement good'. And look, here we are discussing it. So, from their perspective, it's a great article.

I'm not hostile to land conservation by any means. And if the land is being cleared in an unsustainable way, I will be critical of that. But that's the issue as well - this article doesn't actually address that topic. For all I know, 0.03% of NSW per year in cleared land is perfectly sustainable.

Why not say "66 hectares"? What is this nonsense of measuring things in "football fields"? Particularly in the same week as the World Cup final? Football has so many meanings especially in NSW. Football as in soccer? NRL? AFL? The article provides the actual amount of woody land cleared:

In 2024, 24,103 hectares of woody vegetation was cleared, a decline on the previous year – when clearing skyrocketed to 32,837 hectares – and 19% below the 2018-2024 average of 29,800 hectares.

But even that was eight paragraphs into the article after initially giving the fact "Clearing of vegetation across the state increased by 16% in 2024, reaching 81,293 hectares". Is that bigger number actually relevant? Are we talking about clearing bushland? Or suburban areas for housing? They don't say. They also skimmed over the fact that land clearing was below the average annual amount. So is land clearing declining after all? Or were there other reasons in play for the lower number?

The article also doesn't say how many trees were re-planted - that'd be a super relevant statistic to provide in context.

I'm upset by this article for all the wrong reasons. They're trying to rustle my jimmies about land clearing, but they're rustling them for cherry-picking some facts to highlight while skimming over relevant information to provide a full picture of the issue. I think it's important to call out shitty journalism like this, because of we don't, we'll end up with 'Fox News for the left' side of politics. I don't want that.

Mum smoked a pack (of 25s) per day in the 80's. That habit would cost over $100/wk these days. I presume some of the drop is simply that smoking is too expensive these days.

The West Australian font page article today was all "they had a strike but it was a complete failure, BHP claims victory". They claimed that fewer than 50 staff walked off the site. I don't know how true that is, though.

Funny world we live in where we can't trust a supposedly prestigious newspaper to be 100% truthful.