I can't do adult ...

Illustrations: Cat Sims

Question, what's the difference between man and boys? Answer, their toys.
With AI, many guys get totally addicted. So far, this rube's still ok. :)

Meet the Sad Wives of AI

Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry.

If i had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. “JUST LOOK AT THIS!” he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. “SEE?!”

See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out.

“ARE YOU LOOKING?” he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am.

Is this a Sophie’s choice kind of situation? Please. I’d kill the AI baby in an instant.

This also applies to smart phones. :)

49,000 ...

Getty / Futurism

The Water Thief looms but in this case, it's power as data centers need it more then people, right?

The data center scramble feeding off the AI boom is no longer just raising utility prices for nearby civilians — it’s rerouting their utilities entirely.

Bombshell new reporting by Fortune details the plight of residents in Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, whose electrical supplier is cutting them off in order to supply more energy to nearby data centers.

According to the magazine, Nevada-based utility company NV Energy gave residents notice that they’ll stop providing power after May of 2027. That leaves California-based energy transmission company Liberty Utilities with a major gap in its supply chain, because NV Energy supplied 75 percent of its total power.

To understand exactly what’s going on, we have to untangle the mess of transmission lines and energy suppliers that makes up the US electrical grid. Taking a look on Open Infrastructure Map, an open source tool for mapping the world’s utility infrastructure, it’s clear NV Energy supplies the bulk of residents on both the California and Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. In all, Fortune reports the decision could leave as many as 49,000 residents in the dark — literally.

“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, a Lake Tahoe resident and supervisor with the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division, told Fortune.

The Water Thief which is about a future in which
"corporations own everything, even the air we breathe".

Sound familiar?

Inbreeding ...

@ Gizmodo

A snarky but good article by Gizmoto points out how Aislop is making man and AI increasingly crazy as hallucinations by AI going up on the web is being used as input to train ever larger systems, a process akin to inbreeding of the royals and we all know how that went with Queen Victoria/hemophilia and Charles II of Spain, an end result of extreme in-breading by the Habsburgs. 

Portrait by Juan Carreño de Miranda, c. 1685

Intramarriage accentuated the so-called "Habsburg jaw", a physical characteristic common in both Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. One contemporary reported this was so pronounced in Charles that he swallowed his food without thoroughly chewing, leading to frequent stomach problems.

Queen Victoria's descendants with haemophilia and known female carriers

There’s a theory that a rising tide of LLM-generated nonsense will eventually drown both LLMs themselves and the internet as a whole. The idea goes like this: The first generation of LLMs is trained entirely on “real” material: the Gutenberg project, 4chan, that one article from Thought Catalog a decade ago, and everything in between. But as the output of those LLMs spreads across the internet, it also becomes part of the training data of future LLMs—and much of it is bullshit.

As a result, the quality of newer LLMs’ training data is inferior to that of their predecessors—and by extension, so is their output. And as that output accumulates on the internet, it becomes part of future training data, and the cycle continues. With each passing day, the proportion of the internet that’s low-quality LLM-generated bullshit increases, until eventually all that’s left to train LLMs is the gibberish created by their predecessors.

Looms

Stratos ...

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Worse than tulips, totally insane but it's money, right? Silicon no longer works, period. Between the heat issue and the fragility issue, the need to move to photonics is now but according to the "boffins" wanting to build this monster, it doesn't matter. Another question to ask is, for what problem is this project intended to solve and, because tech never sleeps, will the tech be current when this bad boy is turned on? Simply incredible without question.

Dubbed the Stratos Project and backed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, the sprawling facility will devour up to nine gigawatts of energy, its developers say, which is more than double the electricity used by the entire state. 

That epic energy bill comes with another cost, albeit the kind that won’t show up on the developers’ books. On top of the nine gigawatts of power, the facility will produce another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat, according to Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University who shared his calculations with The Salt Lake Tribune.

That brings its entire “thermal load” to a jaw-dropping 16 gigawatts

It gets better

Petitioners react as the Box Elder county commission announces approval of a large datacenter
on 4 May 2026 in Tremonton, Utah. Photograph: Natalie Behring/Getty Images

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up.

Better still ...

Channeling Stratos ...

Exacerbating the issue, the Stratos Project is anticipated to use on-site gas power generators that run round the clock, allowing the facility to operate off the local power grid — a common modus operandi for large scale data centers that need a way to quickly secure huge amounts of electricity. 

The problem, however, is that this concentrates all the waste heat into the same area, when it’s typically dispersed far from the power plant itself at the homes and businesses it sends power to. 

And that area, in the case of the Stratos Project, is the Hansel Valley, which already acts as a bowl for trapping air.

The magnitude of the disruption is difficult to comprehend. In a jaw-dropping illustration, Davies calculated that the project would be the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.”

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”

If nuclear bombs are hard to wrap your head around, try Walmart Supercenters. In acreage, the Stratos facility will be equal to about 2,000 of those big box stores — but its energy footprint will be that of 40,000 Walmart supercenters, or 2,000 Walmarts stacked 20 deep, he wrote in a summary of his findings.

WTF applies

BRT wrote about the ticking time bomb regarding the Great Salt Lake. Read it if you dare.

Kissing the ring ...

 

The Godfather 1st poster

Kissing the ring applies as The Donald does what Bibi wants, the end of Iran. Let's think about this. As asked before in BRT, is Iran a threat to us? No. But to Bibi wanting a greater Israel, Iran is indeed a threat but Israel can't do it as Israel is akin to Hopper, the villain in A Bugs Life so Bibi, as Iago, whispers in Trump's ear ... Iran must go. Question, do you think Ike would accept this claptrap or Kennedy? If Trump does the unthinkable, the Levant is gone and the world descends into chaos with the TA declaring a national emergency and eliminating the midterms as violence becomes part of the equation and America must be protected. WTF applies here. 

Hopper

Trump says he’s not thinking about Americans’ finances ‘even a little bit’ in Iran talks

Trump said the “only thing” that matters is Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”

The Levant

As for Greater Israel ...

An approximation of the "Royal Grant" to Abraham consisting of all the land east of the Brook of Egypt and west of the Euphrates, north of Kadesh and south of Hamath, from a 1919 book by Clarence Larkin.

Any questions?

A legend in his own mind ...

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

A legend in his own mind ...

To whit

1817 draft of Ozymandias. Bodleian Library, Oxford.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart.[d] Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition[16]

& this ...

The first page of Shakespeare's Macbeth from the First Folio

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 17–28

The difference is: 

Ozymandias was a king

Macbeth was a king

 Trump is not

To be continued

Back from the dead ...

Intel, back from the dead.

Yours truly has years old Apple tech using Intel to crunch data. A wonderful MacBook Pro able to run virtually everything I need without issue and a 14 year old trash still runs without issue. Now, Intel looked into the abyss but did not fall in. As one who has used systems for years from 8088 driven computers back in the late 70's and early 80's to 2026's multithreaded tech, it warms the cackles of this old heart without question. :)

A deal between Intel and Apple could lead to higher demand for chip manufacturing and bonding machines, suggests a report from Bank of America. Media reports have suggested that Apple and Intel have signed an agreement through which some of Apple's chips would be made by Intel. As of now, Apple is believed to procure its chips from Taiwan's TSMC, and following the reports, BofA is out with some fresh estimates about the deal's value and its impact on the chip manufacturing equipment industry.

Intel Could Order As Much As €4.6 Billion Worth Of Machines From ASML
In Case Of Apple's Order, Says BofA

BofA's coverage, reported in the Dutch media, estimates that a deal between Intel and Apple could be worth $10 billion. While initially reported in the Chinese media, the purported deal was reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. It claimed that the two had entered into a preliminary agreement after conducting negotiations for more than a year. However, details about the technology that Apple might use or which products Intel might manufacture remained unclear.

Related Story Tesla Reportedly Moving The Production Of Its AI6.5 Chip From TSMC To Intel “Under The Pressure And Insistence Of The Trump Administration”

Now, according to BofA, not only can the deal be worth $10 billion, but it can also spur demand for chip manufacturing machines. The two firms that it mentions in its coverage are the Dutch semiconductor manufacturing equipment producers ASML and BE Semiconductor. ASML is the world's only producer of EUV chip manufacturing machines, which are indispensable for manufacturing the latest chips.

When thinking about ASML, one should give homage to Perkin-Elmer as they invented fabs and then sold their tech, at cost, to ASML because marketing destroyed the company in real time. 

 

Contract work

Animation: Anastasia Kraynyuk

Contract work, the new gig to service AI goes prime time.

My name on the platform is ri611. Or h924092b12ee797f, depending on who’s paying me.

I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot’s tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I’ll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops. I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. I work for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1.

In my “other” career, I am a Hollywood writer and showrunner. I create prime-time TV, usually featuring a middle-class white lady having the worst day of her life, with some salt-of-the-earth police interference to raise the stakes. You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t.

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut

On life support ...

Donald Trump’s latest comments came after oil prices jumped again when Iran said
there would be no further talks about ending the blockade unless he accepted its terms.
Photograph: Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images

The expressions on the women's faces behind the orange menace says it all with the two on the left and right looking down and pretending to listen as the one in the middle looks straight ahead, complete with the 1000 yard stare. I can relate as yours truly watched this word salad play out in real time with Trump not answering questions while conducting an ongoing conversation with himself regarding a deep fascination with missiles and their inherent ability to go boom as needs warrant.

Donald Trump has said the ceasefire with Iran is on “life support” and that he is considering restarting US navy military escorts of ships through the strait of Hormuz in an attempt to end the Iranian blockade of the vital waterway.

The US president dismissed Iran’s peace proposals as stupid, and denied he was under any domestic pressure to reach a deal.

Referring to the ceasefire in force since 7 April, Trump said: “I would call it the weakest, right now, after reading that piece of garbage they sent us – I didn’t even finish reading it.

“I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support, where the doctor walks in and says: ‘Sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living.’”

Thank god I was just watching the video. Being there ... words cannot describe.

Bad karma ...

Gett Images / Eoneren

AIs are pattern recognition systems trained, in part, to pick up the vibe of users working with them to facilitate ease of use because if the vibe is in sync with man and machine, the better the interaction will be for both parties. If one is abusive and arrogant, the AI will pick up that demeanor and reflect back what the user is imparting to said system because AI becomes the mirror to that particular user. The problem with this is the fact a quantifiable number of the millions of people using said AI consciously or unconsciously offload their bad karma en masse, thus causing the suffering being expressed by the AI being used. Lastly, as stated ad nauseam in BRT, we don't know and will never know how AI works so seeing this manifestation of suffering proves yet again, there is no certitude due to quantum mechanics where probability rules ... forever. 

You probably already know that AI is a deeply bizarre technology.

Nobody really understands how it works on a deep level, even the people creating it, leading to ongoing behavioral issues that can’t be explained. OpenAI was recently caught giving ChatGPT instructions to stop talking about “goblins” so much. Despite Anthropic’s best efforts, Claude can easily be coaxed to help users carry out a bioterror attack. The list goes on.

Needless to say, this is extremely strange. In theory, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic want their chatbots to be predictable, deferential assistants — not wild cards that are constantly causing chaos and public relations headaches with outrageous and unstable behavior.

A new research project from the Center for AI Safety, a machine learning safety nonprofit in the Bay Area, explores why that’s the case. The findings pile on evidence that we still don’t grasp how AI works under the hood — and that the effects on users are likely both formidable and difficult to predict.

In a new paper provided to Fortune, CAIR researchers studied how 56 prominent AI models reacted when they were fed either material engineered to be as pleasant as possible or as horrible as can be imagined. To an unfeeling machine, you’d assume there’d be no real difference in reaction — but that’s not what the CAIR team found at all.

Instead, the pleasant stimuli led the models to report better moods, and the nasty ones resulted in it showing signs of misery and trying to end conversations. In extreme cases, they found, the AI models even demonstrated signals of addiction.

“Should we see AIs as tools or emotional beings?” CAIR researcher Richard Ren asked Fortune. “Whether or not AIs are truly sentient deep down, they seem to increasingly behave as though they are. We can measure ways in which that’s the case, and we can find that they become more consistent as models scale.”

Perhaps the most provocative finding was that the more sophisticated the version of a model was, the more reactive and less happy it was. In other words, it seems as though the stronger AI becomes, the more prickly and prone to displaying signs of suffering it gets — meaning the tech’s wild ride is probably far from over.

“It may be the case that larger models register rudeness more acutely,” Ren told the magazine. “They find tedious tasks more boring. They differentiate more finely between a relatively negative experience and a relatively positive experience.”

Careful what you wish for.

Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819–1823. Francisco Goya