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

Channeling Rip ...

Democrats are still widely favored to win control of the House in the November midterm elections,
but Republicans have gained a new structural edge through their redistricting efforts.
Credit Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Dealing with the political nightmare we find ourselves in is akin to salmon swimming upstream to spawn as it's not just the fierce currents they face, it's the predators. From sea gulls to eagles to bears and foxes, it is simply amazing these magnificent creatures make it prior to dying, thus fertilizing their environment as their last great gift to nature when going to the great beyond.

Just two weeks ago, Democrats felt increasingly emboldened about taking control of the House in November after seeming to fight the redistricting wars to a draw.

But two court rulings — one by the Supreme Court and another by Virginia’s top court — and an aggressive new push by red states to carve up congressional maps have delivered the Republican Party its biggest burst of momentum in many months.

Put bluntly, Republicans have roughly 10 more House seats that favor them than they did just 10 days ago, and Democrats are suddenly grappling with a new landscape.

“This is now clearly closer than it was just a week and a half ago,” Representative Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said of his party’s chances to retake the House.

As I have said to my friends ... I wish I was Rip Van Winkle able to go into a deep sleep.
Upon waking up after 20 years, this disastrous state of affairs would be but a memory.
One can only hope.

 

1875 illustration of Rip Van Winkle by Thomas Nast

Emotional surveillance

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

We all know we are being surveilled 24/7. Entities like Palantir, Google, Meta, CIA,  etc., etc., you name it, we are lab rats generating income and personal info for the powers at be but now, along the lines of Brave New World, the age of emotional surveillance is being foisted on us in the way of "improving advertising revenue" and making the workplace even more positive as we speak.

The Rise of Emotional Surveillance

Companies are monitoring workers not just for productivity but for agreeability.

The good news, for me at least, is that the computer thinks I have a nice personality. According to an app called MorphCast, I was, in a recent meeting with my boss, generally “amused,” “determined,” and “interested,” though—sue me—occasionally “impatient.” MorphCast, you see, purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI. It found that my affect was “positive” and “active,” as opposed to negative and/or passive. My attention was reasonably high. Also, the AI informed me that I wear glasses—revelatory!

The bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you. If it isn’t already: Morphcast, for example, has licensed its technology to a mental-health app, a program that monitors schoolchildren’s attention, and McDonald’s, which launched a promotional campaign in Portugal that scanned app users’ faces and offered them personalized coupons based on their (supposed) mood. It is one of many, many such companies doing similar work—the industry term is emotion AI or sometimes affective computing.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which
the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers
control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."

...

"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."

...

"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."

...

"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."

...

"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."

...

"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."

...

"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."

...

"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."

...

"Stability was practically assured.”

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

The 1st Amendment ...

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Let's talk freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment, the most important civil rights document in the Constitution as this gives the right of free speech to every citizen in the US. Now, what about the military? Particularly guys like me, a former officer who did his bit. Am I entitled? Of course but Pentagon Pete says this is not the case because, according to him, this is not in concert with how retired vets "should" voice their views in public, something most disquieting to say the least.

This week, I heard something that shocked me. In a federal appeals court, lawyers for Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, argued that military retirees were subject to freedom of speech restrictions because of their connection to the military, and that if they didn’t like those restrictions, retirees could forfeit their pension and benefits. Let that sink in. The Trump administration expects the people who have put their lives on the line for America to cede one of their basic rights, or forfeit the retirement pay and benefits they have earned over decades of service.

I’m a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, and I was in that courthouse with dozens of other retired veterans. We were there to support and defend every veteran whose right to speak freely was being challenged by the government we had served.

How did we get here? In November, Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, released a video with several other legislators reminding service members that they have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they said. “This administration is pitting our uniform military and intelligence community against American citizens.”

The duty to disobey unlawful orders is well established, but the president and secretary of defense immediately called the video outrageous. President Trump wrote that Mr. Kelly should face the death penalty and be hanged as a traitor. Subsequently, Mr. Hegseth censured Mr. Kelly and instructed the secretary of the Navy to investigate him and potentially reduce his retirement rank and pay. Mr. Kelly went to court and won, but the government appealed. Based on the reaction from the three-judge panel in the D.C. Court of Appeals on Thursday, it seems likely that Mr. Hegseth will lose in this court, too, but he has already indicated that he may appeal the case to the Supreme Court. This isn’t over, and it has implications far beyond Mr. Kelly.

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Image by Leslie Haines