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Saturday’s Forum
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13 responses to “Saturday’s Forum”
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Netflix has a new product: fast turnaround documentaries called Instadocs. Just watched two last night: The Prediction Games (came out end of July), about Polymarket and Kalshi and AI Gone WIld (Oct 12), about OpenAI rogue agents and Hugging Face.
They were short (30 mins), informative and well done and perhaps, most importantly, very timely.
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Curious, were they AI or at least massaged AI? AI produced mini-docs have proliferated in the last few months on YouTube. I watched one on a subject that I’m familiar with and the history was generally accurate, but the supposition that the producer was attempting to prove, was so unsupported that it was comical.
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I watched a 35-minute Youtube video because the subject was a place of local interest. But as the video dragged on, repeated some of its themes, and included at least a couple completely irrelevant photos, I was reminded of Tom Skerritt’s character in A River Runs Through It. As the father and instructor of two sons, he marked up a paper his son has submitted, returned it the son and said “half as long,” then later marked up the revised paper and said “again, half as long.”
Whether it was AI, lazy production, or a mix of the two, the 35-minute video could have been done in about 12 minutes.
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My harebrained thought of the morning.
Somewhat inspired by a purported Ukrainian attack on Russian data centers/bot farms.
Data Center and AI development is a huge political discussion right now across the country, particularly in rural areas.
What about a law that required radical transparency about these data centers? Each data center has to publicly publish exactly what data is being stored there, who owns that data, what that data is being used for, what program (social networks, AI, crypto currency, etc.) is supported. And so forth.
The harebrained idea is to enforce good behavior by the threat of uuplugging or destruction.
With great power comes great responsibility.
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I get the motive behind this but i just don’t think it’s practical. Most companies nowadays have their infrastructure in the cloud. If you use Microsoft Teams or Office 365, your information is in a data center. Heck, I’m in the process of implementing a service authorization system for a new product and it will be hosted on a data center somewhere. Where? Even the host company (a division of IBM) doesn’t know precisely, as we are paying extra for failover protection so if something goes wrong at one server farm (i.e. data center) it will instantly instantiate on another. My point is that the data centers are not specific to AI, they just rent capacity. Nowadays the vast majority of work done on a computer goes through these data centers, and the centers themselves don’t know what is hosted, and the people who buy the hosting don’t know where their stuff is physically located (and don’t care, except for some specific circumstances).
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I said it was harebrained. Also based on idle thinking about data. Example. Cryptocurrency. Where is that information stored? Is it duplicated, backed up somewhere? Does it just disappear if blown up? There is a worldwide dependency on computers, data transmission lines and so forth that I am totally ignorant on and that ignorance makes me uncomfortable.
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As you point out, there are various types of data centers, many of which have been around for decades. Operational AI data centers are relatively few so far, although enormous in size. Pennsylvania, for example, has scores of operating data centers, but at the time of Gov Shapiro’s executive order placing rules on data center development and operation in August 2026 (months after the Governor’s office had published proposed data center rules but the republican-controlled state Senate failed to pass the state House bill codifying those rules), there were no operational AI data centers in the state.
There are groups who have collected publicly available information and posted lists and maps of data centers with information including owner, type of data center, and power consumption in MW (or GW!).
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Oh, Pres. Obama, how I miss you!
“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory”
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Good to hear Carville slip up and say how he really feels.
“I’d rather have the Republicans win by 5 than the Democrats win by 5 because if the Democrats win then Jeffries has to pay attention to the DSA.”
Yes, Carville admitted on recorded media that he wants to lose.. because he’s not interested in achieving tangible benefits for his constituents.It’s almost like the entire pro-corporate wing of the Democratic party are just pre-Reagan Republicans. You know – not Democrats at all, only there to stab actual progressives in the back.
It’s fun to note that Carville did this because he thought he was “among friends” – on the Bulwark, talking to one of the OG neocons Bill Kristol. And both Kristol and the other Bulwark guy immediately started the pathetic “he didn’t really mean that!” lies. Um, yes, he did, because soft-peddling that Do-Republican-policies-but-as-a-Democrat nonsense is the entire raison d’etre of the Bulwark’s very existence.
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