Sunday, May 17, 2026

Data center discovered to be draining city's water supply through unauthorized hookups (AI roundup)

“officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.”

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— Madhusudan 🦉 Katti (@leafwarbler.myatproto.social) May 9, 2026 at 3:47 PM






NEW: xAI appears to have added more than 500 MW (!) of unpermitted gas turbines to its Colossus 2 campus in a matter of weeks, according to internal emails between the company and regulators

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— molly taft (@mollytaft.com) May 12, 2026 at 5:11 PM
(Because the state considers them “mobile” turbines — they’re attached to flatbed trailers — MDEQ allows xAI to run the generators without an air permit for up to a year)

btw, regulators confirmed to us this morning that the 19 new turbines (and the 27 already on site) are not part of an air permit granted in March, meaning xAI has more than 1 GW of unpermitted gas power at Colossus 2 right now

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— molly taft (@mollytaft.com) May 13, 2026 at 7:45 AM








NEW FROM ME: I wrote about how chatbots are surfacing real phone numbers, these PII exposures are likely to increase, and (maybe the worst news) how hard it is to actually prevent this from happening. www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/13/1... #AI #Privacy

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— Eileen Guo (@eileenguo.bsky.social) May 13, 2026 at 1:58 PM








Exclusive: Every adult with a YouTube account will now be able to enroll in the platform's AI deepfake detection (and removal) program. The feature constantly monitors YouTube for lookalikes, and allows users to request takedowns. www.theverge.com/news/931884/...

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— Mia Sato (@miasato.bsky.social) May 15, 2026 at 3:26 PM








Google finds evidence a criminal hackers attempted a widespread campaign that relied on a 0day built by artificial intelligence. “It’s a taste of what’s to come,” @hultquist.bsky.social says. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/u...

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— Dustin Volz (@dustinvolz.bsky.social) May 11, 2026 at 7:52 AM
("The tech giant did not say precisely when the thwarted attack happened, whom it was targeting or which A.I. platform the hackers used, but the company added that it did not believe it was its own Gemini chatbot")







Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

— Caitlin G. DeAngelis (@caitlindeangelis.bsky.social) May 13, 2026 at 4:46 PM








right... your local session piloted by a massive datacenter has to octopus your whole OS, so it can constantly keep making your vapor startup that accumulates spaghetti tech debt 100x faster than users. so your laptop is ALWAYS OPEN cool cool cool cool cool. www.businessinsider.com/coders-keep-...

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— Naomi Clark (@metasynthie) 暗悪直美 (@halfrobot.com) May 12, 2026 at 6:42 PM
("There are ways to keep a laptop running while closed")























NEW: Mayo Clinic, the massive U.S. hospital network, is using what it describes as “Ambient Listening” to record patient interactions with nurses, including in emergency rooms, then using AI to process that collected data.

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— 404 Media (@404media.co) May 15, 2026 at 6:22 AM








NEW: ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work. www.404media.co/new-arxiv-ru...

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— 404 Media (@404media.co) May 15, 2026 at 9:11 AM








Process: the speech or lesson you think you're gonna give Energeia: what the room is ready for, discoverable only in the moment; the flow Good rhetoric: knowing when to go with the flow

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— Sargoth (diegetic epideictic eidolon) (@longersky.com) May 10, 2026 at 7:30 PM

Roll the tape. Read the story now: www.404media.co/ucf-ai-comme...

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— 404 Media (@404media.co) May 11, 2026 at 6:46 AM
















personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.

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— Michelle Cyca (@michellecyca.com) May 8, 2026 at 9:28 AM
Original article and correction



NEW: The NYT sent a firm email to freelancers today warning that "contributors must not submit any material for publication that contains content generated, modified or enhanced" by generative AI. The "reminder" notably follows a string of AI incidents at the paper: futurism.com/artificial-i...

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— Maggie Harrison Dupré (@mharrisondupre.bsky.social) May 12, 2026 at 10:38 AM








Warning for board game folks: this site has a list of industry people that uses AI slop for images and bios. I’m trying to figure out how to reach out to them to ask to have the entry on me removed. Wanted to spread awareness on the slop. www.4pillargames.com/about/

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— David Thompson (@djackthompson.bsky.social) May 9, 2026 at 5:58 PM








The Titans did a super low-tech schedule release video and people loved it The Cardinals used AI and they’re getting crushed Seems telling!

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— Mina Kimes (@minakimes.bsky.social) May 14, 2026 at 9:05 PM


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