While golf courses exist in the desert, building a bunch of new golf courses in the desert would be controversial. One could imagine data center companies buying Phoenix golf-courses and replacing them with xeriscaped data center campuses, but that is not what's happening.
Who's Who of AI
Jed Brown
Prof developing fast algorithms, reliable software, and healthy communities for computational science. Opinions my own. https://hachyderm.io/@jedbrown
https://PhyPID.org | aspiring killjoy | refuse epistemicide | he/they
What they're sharing
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land theguardian.com
ft.com
- YouTube youtube.com
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Contra Literacy-Laundering: Mechanistic Critical AI Literacy | Zenodo doi.org
Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf themaybe.org
The AI fight brewing inside The New York Times theverge.com
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Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot arstechnica.com
KPMG report on AI found riddled with AI hallucinations cityam.com
Nvidia shows off Rubin Ultra with 600,000-Watt Kyber racks and infrastructure, coming in 2027 tomshardware.com
Next Generation AI Programs - CIFAR cifar.ca
Colorado's AI Anti-Discrimination Law Is Dead Before It Ever Took Effect: Replaced With Notice-Only Framework techtimes.com
Articles & links
It's notable that the report has been out for 8 months and this was only detected because an "AI" vendor (GPTZero) had an adversarial interest. So much for the discernment capabilities of business/finance/executives. www.ft.com/content/b382...
Jed Brown reposted
the whole episode is out today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5twr...
Jed Brown reposted
> “when men use AI, we question their effort; when women use AI, we question their integrity” [...] (Pringle, 2026). What is framed as a literacy deficit is [actually] a form of rational refusal [&] within that frame, the only direction of travel is toward more adoption. doi.o…
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Ishani Ray and Olivia Guest argue LLM critique has split between the stochastic parrot dismissal and pragmatic accommodation, and that both misdiagnose the problem.
- The Zenodo preprint reframes the question as not whether LLMs work but what kind of working is happening and at whose cost.
- The authors propose a mechanistic critical AI literacy along cognitive, pedagogical, and political dimensions grounded in the epistemology of those most harmed.
Read full analysis →
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An excellent interview with @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social on safety engineering (in contrast to the clown show of "AI safety"). This discussed abdication of standards and safety revisionism is paralleled in computational science & engineering with abandonment of verification and va…
Jed Brown reposted
OUR FIGHT: We have taken legal action against The Times for using AI programs to surveil and monitor our members. Read The Verge article here: www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
And the chatbot was taken offline after that ruling. This is much like terms of service for "AI" products that say things like "for entertainment purposes only". The "value" requires laundering of liability.
This KPMG report contributed to the inevitability and workforce-development narratives that have been used to pressure academia. This is what businesses need, workforce development, etc. University administrators and business school faculty are exceptionally gullible marks.
To put this 100 kW in context, prototype and near-future generation "AI" datacenter racks range up to 1 MW each. For example, the prototype on the right (NVL576 Rubin Ultra) is a 600 kW rack. You'd need six of the reactors on the left to power that one rack. www.tomshardware.c…
Note the dogmatic technosolutionist frame in the CIFAR educational materials, funded by big tech and oil. cifar.ca/ai/next-gene...
Righteous 🔥 and correctly blames Polis. @briannatitone.bsky.social "who sponsored the original 2024 bill and voted for the replacement, acknowledged that workers and consumer rights groups faced an insurmountable obstacle: Governor Polis would not sign a bill without the tech …
Their network
In Jed Brown's orbit
Center = Jed Brown. Left = members they follow (green edges). Right = members who follow them (blue edges). Top = mutual follows (orange edges, slightly larger). Drag any node to reposition; click to open that profile.