Local people know where they are because once upon a time a D8 drove through pulling a big orange spool of fiber conduit and passers by chatted about how another fiber was going in. Also around here the contractors seeded the disturbed ground with a wildflower mix (presumably to discourage weeds) so you can also look for straps of wildflowers.
And of course there are marker posts that say "buried fiber optic cable do not dig".
Once you get out farther from civilization these signs become less common and there are more situations where they can get removed.
Most cheap hired labor doesn't realize you shouldn't dig up the market posts and throw them in the dumpster on construction sites. Add a little bit of rain and suddenly the contractor showing up with an excavator that was told everything was properly marked, and can see markings in other places but not where they are digging, and disaster occurs.
Also soils aren't static, I've been on sites where the midpoint of a buried telecommunications cable had drifted over 8 feet from where the markers were a few hundred yards apart. Just looking at the markers and assuming a straight line isn't a safe bet. Looking at the fence rows to the left and right of the cable and you could see a matching bow in the fence rows.
I see you've never dug into a cable way out of range where the utility thought it was. You've definitely never been on a project where the utility was there with you wondering how the wire they marked many many feet away out of the hand dig area was actually where you're digging.
I was on such a project once back when PRI was still a hot ticket. Part of the project evolved to mean that we needed to construct a small radio tower, and a part of that meant finding a spot where we wouldn't dig up anything important.
Reps from the local telco showed up to one of the meetings to tell everyone that they didn't know where their copper lines were buried and that they were unsuccessful at locating them outside at all. They knew where both ends were but the middle was a mystery to them.
This statement made the architect's face contort into strange shapes. I joked that they call 811; some people thought that was rather hilarious, others much less so.
Anyway, the building wasn't in service yet and the telco said they'd fix it if we managed to naff them up, so away we dug. No telco cabling was damaged in this process. (We did dig up some plastic drainage tile but that was a simple farm store fix.)
You and several other people here are making unsubstantiated claims about how you're super sure this is real in a way that makes it seem less real. You guys seem to know this Dave character and are doing him a solid, right?
Dave Plummer's a well known YouTuber. He pops up in a couple of DEC groups that I'm in on Facebook. However I'm not a fan. He seems to take a lot and contribute only self-promotional videos.
The photo on this page looks very AI heavy. I'm not an expert but I really don't think those light panels are real (if they're real they're not contemporary to the machines they're in).
(Edit: I should qualify that I don't mean the panel with the octet switches, that looks roughly right - I mean the one under the 8" disks and the one on the vaguely Vax-pedestal looking thing)
He isn't, but nearly everything he puts out there is AI produced. His video thumbnails look awful, and that task manager he built for macOS is fully AI coded. Not saying it's a bad thing, but I dunno it's kinda all ugly looking to me.
Every pixel is where I put it, so that's all that matters to me. If it's ugly, it's intentionally so. AI had no input into designing the visuals or UX.
I think you might be confusing "what people should be doing" from "what some people think they can make money from". imho the whole "agent sandboxing" thing is vastly premature and un-thought-out.
You also get to learn another culture which to some extent prevents you from becoming an a.hole. Lack of foreign language instruction in k-12 education in the USA might be a little correlated with this...
I've found it useful to think in terms of how such structures might have evolved. The beginning state is always something very simple: the first nerve. It must go from A to B. Perhaps from a food sensing area to a muscle. Sense food, stop moving, something like that. Organisms could evolve multiple copies of that structure: N nerves going from A(n) to B(n). At some point the next invention arises: some logic gate type thing that branches and/or combines nerves. So now sensing food can make movement stop and also digestion begin. Or food response can be attenuated during the day time. And so on. There's no reason why you'd have exactly one of these "nerve processor" nodes. There's also no reason why several different kinds of them and different instances might evolve. They're useful. Then at some point the next discovery is made: by combining several nerve processor nodes in close proximity, with their own inter-node connections, you can perform more complex processing. You've now got a proto-brain. But again there's nothing to say you have exactly one of these things, or that they're exact replicas of each other.
As implemented they also lack conceptual integrity: you get them somehow (where are they?), and somehow you can use them (how, exactly?) but you can't enumerate them anywhere, see them, see where they came from and what they can do for you.
The worst offender for me is the Costco mobile app. It's handy because it allows you to enter the store by scanning the QR code it displays on start up. However it also nags you to create a passkey. You can dismiss this by saying that you want to keep using a password. But then it nags you again next time. This behavior is problematic because the delay between opening the app and the "create a passkey" splash dialog (which hides the QR code) is exactly the time it takes to pull the phone out, open the app and present the screen under the reader at the door. Every single time I need to look back at the phone screen to see why it didn't scan, dismiss the passkey nag, bring up the QR code again, scan.
And of course there are marker posts that say "buried fiber optic cable do not dig".
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