• 38 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026English
    8·
    21 hours ago

    Heatmap: Amid Rising Local Pushback, U.S. Data Center Cancellations Surged in 2025

    regwalled, here are quotes

    President Trump has staked his administration’s success on America’s ongoing artificial intelligence boom. More than $500 billion may be spent this year to dot the landscape with new data centers, power plants, and other grid equipment needed to sustain the explosively growing sector, according to Goldman Sachs.

    There’s just one problem: Many Americans seem to be turning against the buildout. Across the country, scores of communities — including some of the same rural and exurban areas that have rebelled against new wind and solar farms — are blocking proposed data centers from getting built or banning them outright.

    At least 25 data center projects were canceled last year following local opposition in the United States, according to a review of press accounts, public records, and project announcements conducted by Heatmap Pro. Those canceled projects accounted for at least 4.7 gigawatts of electricity demand — a meaningful share of the overall data center capacity projected to come online in the coming years.

    Those cancellations reflect a sharp increase over recent years, when local backlash rarely played a role in project cancellations, according to Heatmap’s review.

    The surge reflects the public’s growing awareness — and increasing skepticism — of the large-scale fixed investment that must be kept up to power the AI economy. It also shows the challenge faced by utilities and grid planners as they try to forecast how the fast-growing sector will shape power demand.

    via WaPo, ole orange cankles is promising socialism:

    In a bid to tamp down growing unrest in communities over tech giants’ expansion of power-hungry data centers, President Donald Trump said his administration would push Silicon Valley companies to ensure their massive computer farms do not drive up people’s electricity bills, seizing on a promise Microsoft made public Tuesday to be a better neighbor.

    The Trump administration has gone all in on artificial intelligence, pushing aside concerns within the MAGA movement and seeking to sweep away regulations that it says hamper innovation. But neighbors of the vast warehouses of computer chips that form the technology’s backbone — many of them in areas otherwise supportive of the president — have grown increasingly concerned about how the facilities sap power from the grid, guzzle water to stay cool and secure tax breaks from local governments. And Trump now appears to be recalibrating his approach.

  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026English
    16·
    16 days ago

    A rival gang of “AI” “researchers” dare to make fun of Big Yud’s latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy

    Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)

    When we say Y&S’s arguments are theological, we don’t just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using “theological” to simply mean “wrong”. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. That’s because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).

    What we mean is that Y&S’s methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.

    Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, there’s no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the “before” and “after”: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.

    LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP

    Update an LessWrong attempts to debunk the piece with inline comments here

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6sBAT4SPCJnBPKPJ/mechanize-work-s-essay-on-unfalsifiable-doom

    Leading to such hilarious howlers as

    Then solving alignment could be no easier than preventing the Germans from endorsing the Nazi ideology and commiting genocide.

    Ummm pretty sure engaging in a new world war and getting their country bombed to pieces was not on most German’s agenda. A small group of ideologues managed to sieze complete control of the state, and did their very best to prevent widespread knowledge of the Holocaust from getting out. At the same time they used the power of the state to ruthlessly supress any opposition.

    rejecting Yudkowsky-Soares’ arguments would require that ultrapowerful beings are either theoretically impossible (which is highly unlikely)

    ohai begging the question