all the parallel comments flagged as offtopic lol

anyone remember how Assange and his Russian handlers tried to file a criminal complaint against the Nobel Foundation for their lack of prescience regarding Trump’s attacks on Venezuala?

The complaint was dismissed 2 days later.

Writeup in Swedish here by yours truly:

https://gerikson.com/m/2026/01/index.html#d21p01_wed

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.

JWZ: The Dilbert Hole

It’s darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didn’t predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration that’s sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god they’re conjuring up? “Agent-4” will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.

in retrospect I regret starting this hare

The impulse was a HN sub where the CDCCPS was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad

becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis. [See above, this was CPS, not CDC, so I doubly misread. Further association follows] In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up

HN submission (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567696

Previous discussion on HN from 9 years ago, no-one mentions Fremskrittspartiet are heirs to Nazis, nor that the linked submission explicitely calls out the legislation as anti-semitic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291906

I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds

People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?

I found out about the rightwing / misogynist strain of FOSS mostly via the furore over RMS defending Minsky from Epstein allegations.

Glyph has weighed in here

https://lobste.rs/c/mhal5b

Apparently someone edited in the numeral in the title when submitting to lobste.rs. Another entry on the watchlist.

Sorry for you and your cat.

cue this lobste.rs shitshow where someone states “88 is a known Nazi dogwhistle”, and multiple people come out of the woodwork saying even if it is, it’s not so bad actually, get over it

https://lobste.rs/s/rvgvgj/best_line_length_is_88

Submitted blog post could without loss of generality be titled “Black’s default of 88 for line length is not necessarily the best”, yet author decided to go with the title they have now… edit author seems to be a good egg generally https://mastodon.social/@glyph

Man, that’s rough. I know it’s not much but I’m sending you positive energy from where I am.

I’d wager an ounce of gold that the general attitude towards sustainability and the environment is 100% aligned among the rulers of both states.

Dubai famously doesn’t have a sewage pipe system, human waste is loaded onto tanker trucks that spend hours waiting to offload it in the only sewage treatment plant available.

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

LOL @ promptfondlers in comments

Nice time - here’s a Swedish dude who constructed a 8m parabolic dish to do EME by hand

News item in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/byggde-atta-meter-parabol-for-att-prata-via-manen

Earth-Moon-Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth–Moon–Earth_communication (bonus illustration obviously taken from a primary school science project) Edit malus for long passage in second section second para obviously originally written by a Nazi

this made my day, thx

whole country is swole, good mirror of the maga mind

yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.