Meta is building several gigawatt-sized data centers to power AI, as reported by Bloomberg. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company will spend "hundreds of billions of dollars" to accomplish this feat, with an aim of creating "superintelligence." The term typically refers to artificial general intelligence (AGI), which describes AI systems that boast human-level intelligence across multiple domains. This is something of a holy grail for Silicon Valley tech types.

The first center is called Prometheus and it comes online next year. It's being built in Ohio. Next up, there's a data center called Hyperion that's almost the size of Manhattan. This one should "be able to scale up to 5GW over several years." Some of these campuses will be among the largest in the world, as most data centers can only generate hundreds of megawatts of capacity.

Meta has also been staffing up its Superintelligence Labs team, recruiting folks from OpenAI, Google's DeepMind and others. Scale AI's co-founder Alexandr Wang is heading up this effort.

However, these giant data centers do not exist in a vacuum. The complexes typically brush up against local communities. The centers are not only power hogs, but also water hogs. The New York Times just published a report on how Meta data centers impact local water supplies.

There's a data center east of Atlanta that has damaged local wells and caused municipal water prices to soar, which could lead to a shortage and rationing by 2030. The price of water in the region is set to increase by 33 percent in the next two years.

Typical data centers guzzle around 500,000 gallons of water each day, but these forthcoming AI-centric complexes will likely be even thirstier. The new centers could require millions of gallons per day, according to water permit applications reviewed by The New York Times. Mike Hopkins, the executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority, says that applications are coming in with requests for up to six millions of water per day, which is more than the county's entire daily usage.

“What the data centers don’t understand is that they’re taking up the community wealth,” he said. “We just don’t have the water.”

This same worrying story is playing out across the country. Data center hot spots in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and Colorado are also taxing local water reserves. For instance, some Phoenix homebuilders have been forced to pause new constructions due to droughts exacerbated by these data centers.

Found this while I was cleaning up my room.

The LAPD:

Gruesome Newsom and other Cali Dems, probably: Instead let us do the legwork for you by pumping up the budgets of our police forces so they can be militarized locally

I thought Milchick's character development was one of, if not the most, compelling parts of season 2. I had been wanting to do a little post/commentary on it, but Afrodizjha does a much better job of putting it together than I could ever hope.

Best part is:

The New Orleans Police Department said in a statement that “law enforcement is working to determine applicable charges in this incident.”

They arrested him before determining what he could be charged with.

Death to America

UPDATE: No charges. Still imagine probably spent the night locked up for caring about people being genocided. And I'm guessing the NFL won't be reversing their ban on him from all events.

In a rare youtube algoritim W, I got recommended the trailer for the series from Chinese studio Flint Sugar, which is releasing in 2025, based on this short film. Kinda gives some FLCL vibes, at least in so far as the style.

Trailer for the series: youtu.be/watch?v=YOqMmz0gDZ8

Guess Brian Thompson didn't bring his moral vest to his visit to NYC. Oh wait, that's right. He never had one because his job is to be immoral for the sake of chasing the fantastical ever growing profit margin.

Rest in power, Comrade Castro

I'll allow myself to get hyped just this once. Funny thing is I've recently been thinking of rewatching season 1.

Ritchie Torres can only dream of being a fraction of the person for his constituents as Sinwar was for his people.

“It dawned on me today … The bad guys won in WWII,” reads the old X post from Royce White, a former NBA player now running against Democratic incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota. “There were no ‘good guys’ in that war. The controlling interests had a jump ball. If you look closely, you see the link between liberalism and communism in the Allied forces.”

Ah yes, this is exactly why the Cold War happened right after the war ended

Asked for clarification, White said that "neither the Allied forces nor the Axis powers won or lost the war" and that "there was a group of people who benefited from all the institutions that sprang out and sprang up after World War II."

He said the people he's referring to were "globalists" and "the post-World War II democratic order."

Tesla's Germany factory is going to have a train service that will transport its workers for free, which cool, train good. But a number of the usual suspects (Teslarati and other Tesla/Elon loving media) are claiming that Tesla are launching the train as if it had built the train. In some cases adding its "mind-blowing" capacity (its the same as a regular train).

Here's the kicker: Tesla only slapped its name on a train built by Seimens, using batteries manufactured by Toshiba