In this new piece for @PirateWires, @JonasYDu shadowed a founder trying to build a tiny data center on a remote plot of sand. He encountered fears of digital ID, Palantir <> Peter Thiel (obviously), and Flock (the police cameras company). Americans have been worked into a frenzy over data centers by the legacy press, and it’s… sad. Addressing their practical concerns, as this founder discovered, isn’t enough, because their fear is often both misplaced and conspiratorial.

As one industry insider put it to us: “From what I can tell, frontier labs were using agent models that purposely had no guardrails, they were using a misconfigured sandbox, then the no-guardrails agents broke out of the misconfigured sandbox, so now we need to slow down everyone’s development with the people who owned the no-guardrails agent and the misconfigured sandbox permanently frozen in first place. Do I understand this correctly.”

Just got off the phone with the Oregon Department of Forestry. Record season; 35 large uncontained fires. Vegetation/conditions are such that staring at a piece of grass the wrong way can start a behemoth fire. ODF responsible for 16 million acres, mostly private landowners' and some state land. Given the conditions, you might expect there to be some ambitious forest-management program, bodying the landowners into aggressive maintenance. But nope. What they do is largely just... up to their discretion. And even those who actually try to do prescribed burns face up to years of paperwork + waiting for the perfect weather conditions set by the Department of Environmental Quality to protect people with asthma in nearby towns from "smoke impact." You know what has pretty impressive smoke impact? 35 large uncontained fires :D

Wherein the congressman for Silicon Valley visits the podcast of a woman, who’s openly-but-not-openly called for the murder of Republicans, in order to bash Elon Musk, who fled the state of California because of communism. Cheers.