Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Carl Rigney

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 8h

His immediate dawning understanding of just exactly how much he could fuck things up made him go "That's a GREAT analogy," heh

sarahquaint @sarahquaint.bsky.social · 17h

While providing tech support for my FIL:

FIL: What's that screen?

ME: The terminal. You should never use it.

FIL: Never?

ME: So you know how I'm allowed to watch you open the electrical panel and swap out breakers, but I'm not allowed to ever open up it myself?

FIL: Ah! I understand, thank you.

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Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social · 6h

"A great way to get censored in this country is investigate Epstein and Maxwell and to research the origins of the Maxwell family and Robert Maxwell's ties to organized crime."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtTW...

Sarah Kendzior: The Fiction of Antifa, Plus, Answering the Epstein “Files” Question

YouTube video by The Mark Thompson Show

www.youtube.com

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Carl Rigney @carlrigney.bsky.social · 6h

@sporadicerratic.bsky.social Hydration check! Have you had tea today? Mmmm, tea.

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Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 16h

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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gentlystream.bsky.social @gentlystream.bsky.social · 19h

From the latest Q&A by the ever-wise and frank @sarahkendzior.bsky.social (via her free Substack).

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Criterion Channel @criterionchannl.bsky.social · 18h

Evening viewing recommendation? Watch A BETTER TOMORROW (1986) on our Hong Kong Action Classics collection! The box-office sensation that established director John Woo as the king of 1980s Hong Kong action cinema and set the standard for the heroic bloodshed genre.

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Jim Daley @jimdaleywrites.bsky.social · 1d

Pass it on: If you FILE A COMPLAINT about police activity, it flags the body-worn camera video so reporters can obtain it later via FOIA requests.

City: www.chicagocopa.org/complaints/i...
County: apps.cookcountyil.gov/oiig/
State: oeig.illinois.gov/complaints/o...

The People's Fabric @peoplesfabric.com · 1d

State troopers just dragged three people out of the crowd.

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Aaron Fritschner @fritschner.bsky.social · 1d

A few minutes ago in the House:

- Speaker Mike Johnson officially cancels votes next week, extending the House recess through a fourth week

- House Republicans block Democrats from passing a bill to pay the troops during the shutdown, ensuring they will miss paychecks next week

House Press Gallery: During today's pro forma session, the Clerk read a message from the Speaker designating Tuesday, October 14 through Sunday, October 19 as a district work period.

Punchbowl's Briana Reilly: House gaveled in and out of its pro forma just now w/o recognizing Rep Elfreth, who was seeking to UC a mil pay bill from Rep Sykes.

Elfreth told reporters after that House Dems stand “ready and willing to take” up standalone legislation to pay troops.

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Michael Belfiore @michaelbelfiore.bsky.social · 1d

Worth the subscription. @katmabu.bsky.social is bringing the fight that the incumbents don't have in them. We need more like her.

"She's betting that voters, above all else, want a brawler."

Yes.

www.wired.com/story/kat-ab...

She Fought the Far Right Online for Years. Now She Wants to Do It in Congress

Kat Abughazaleh, 26, made her name swatting down right-wing talking points on social media. Now she’s hoping internet fame can propel her to Congress.

www.wired.com

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sam “over and under” sorensen @samsorensen.bsky.social · 1d

on Tuesday, October 14th, as a part of Mothership Month 25, I'm going to launch another real-time play-by-post wargame, open to the public, called OVER/UNDER. the server will open to players on Monday the 13th, but in the meantime you can read about it here: samsorensen.blot.im/mothership-m...

Mothership Month 2025 Wargame: OVER/UNDER - Sam Sorensen

Starting on October 14th, as a part of Mothership Month 2025—the annual group-crowdfunding campaign and general season of celebration for

samsorensen.blot.im

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TX FReadom Fighters @freadomfighters.bsky.social · 1d

We can see from losses in recent school board elections around Texas and the number of local groups fighting censorship documented by @penamerica.bsky.social that Americans are tired of library censorship battles and are pushing back.

What can you do? Join @uabookbans.bsky.social to start!

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 1d

Higher Ed in 2025 is opening your mailbox to see that your institution has sent you:

1. A Center for Teaching and Learning call to integrate AI into your classroom; and

2. An Office of Academic Integrity email encouraging you to crack down on students who use AI to cheat.

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Reuters @reuters.com · 1d

'When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,' the Norwegian Nobel Committee said as it announced Maria Corina Machado as the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 1d

Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.

She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

(Published June)

Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations

A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirem...

www.propublica.org

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 1d

Premium: The AI Bubble's promises are impossible. NVIDIA's customers are running out of money, GPUs die in 3-5 years, most 1GW data centers will never get built, and OpenAI's Abilene data center doesn't won't have the power it needs before 2028 - if it ever does.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbl...

The AI Bubble's Impossible Promises

Readers: I’ve done a very generous “free” portion of this newsletter, but I do recommend paying for premium to get the in-depth analysis underpinning the intro. That being said, I want as many people ...

www.wheresyoured.at

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Carl Rigney @carlrigney.bsky.social · 1d

@sporadicerratic.bsky.social Hydration check! Have you had tea today?

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Kieron Gillen @kierongillen.bsky.social · 1d

Expect to see me banging the Die-drum a bunch across the next week. You need to get your orders in a week on Monday. It doesn't even need to be formal - talk about the books you like to the retailer, and it effects their orders. Now back to making marketing material.

Kieron Gillen @kierongillen.bsky.social · Aug 8

DIE: Loaded has just been announced, where @stephaniehans.bsky.social and myself are back at @imagecomics.com and doing our goth jumanji thing to its fullest effect.

Out November 12th.

Lots more info over at Rascal: www.rascal.news/exclusive-di...

The basic advert for DIE: Loaded - a big ol' bear witha. woman crawling out of its mouth, with a fox at her feet.

Out November 12th.

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 1d

Every single AI data center is a toxic investment, with most of its value tied up in GPUs that will be multiple generations behind by the time these things turn on - and then die in 3-5 years.

All to build for AI demand that doesn't exist.
edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Actually, wait - how long do GPUs last, exactly? Four years for training? Three years? The A100 GPU started shipping in May 2020, and the H100 (and the Hopper GPU generation) entered full production in September 2022, meaning that we’re hurtling at speed toward the time in which we’re going to start seeing a remarkable amount of chips start wearing down, which should be a concern for companies like Microsoft, who bought 150,000 Hopper GPUs in 2023 and 485,000 of them in 2024.
Alright, let me just be blunt: the entire economy of debt around GPUs is insane.
Assuming these things don’t die within five years (their warranties generally end in three), their value absolutely will, as NVIDIA has committed to releasing a new AI chip every single year, likely with significant increases to power and power efficiency. At the end of the five year period, the Special Purpose Vehicle will be the proud owner of five-year-old chips that nobody is going to want to rent at the price that Elon Musk has been paying for the last five years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the rental prices for H100 GPUs that went from $8-an-hour in 2023 to $2-an-hour in 2024, or the Silicon Data Indexes (aggregated realtime indexes of hourly prices) that show H100 rentals at around $2.14-an-hour and A100 rentals at a dollar-an-hour, with Vast.AI offering them at as little as $0.67 an hour.
This is, by the way, a problem that faces literally every data center being built in the world, and I feel insane talking about it. It feels like nobody is talking about how impossible and ridiculous all of this is - it’s one thing that OpenAI has promised one trillion dollars to people - it’s another that large swaths of that will be spent on hardware that will, by the end of these agreements, be half-obsolete and generating less revenue than ever.
Think about it - let’s assume we live in a fantasy land where OpenAI is somehow able to pay Oracle $300 billion over 5 years. Said money is paying for access to Blackwell…

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 1d

Tomorrow: The AI Bubble is built on impossible promises. GPUs die in 5 years, nobody has built a 1GW data center, and they have the power to do so. Stargate Abilene won't have enough power before 2028.

Here's a link for $10 off premium.

edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

Everybody is very casual with how they talk about Sam Altman’s theoretical promises of trillions of dollars of data center infrastructure, and I'm not sure anybody realizes how difficult even the very basics of this plan will be.
Nevertheless, everybody is happily publishing stories about how “Stargate Abilene Texas - OpenAI’s massive data center with Oracle - is open,” by which they mean two buildings, and I’m not even confident both of them are providing compute to OpenAI yet. There are six more of them that need to get built for this thing to start rocking at 1.2GW - even though it’s only 1.1GW according to my sources in Abilene.
But, hey, sorry - one minute - while we’re on that subject, did anybody visiting Abilene in the last week or so ever ask whether they’ll have enough power there?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to look - I’m sure you were just about to, and had simply been busy! - but I did the hard work for you and read up on it, and it turns out that Stargate Abilene only has 200 megawatts of power - a 200 megawatt substation that, according to my sources, has only been built within the last couple of months, with 350 Megawatt of gas turbine generators that connect to a natural gas power plant that might get built by the end of the year in the event that one of the multiple construction firms involved . Said turbine is extremely expensive, featuring volatile pricing (for context, volatility fell in Q2 2025…to 69% annualized, meaning that if you had these prices across the entirety of a year you’d see swings of 69% up or down) and even more volatile environmental consequences, and is, while permitted for it (this will download the PDF of the permit), impractical and expensive to use long-term.
Analyst James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research recently said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that these are “not the really good natural gas turbines” because the really good ones would take seven years to deliver due to a natural gas turbine shortage.
But th…

$Stargate Abilene does not have sufficient power to run at even half of its supposed IT load of 1.2GW, and at its present capacity - assuming that the gas turbines function at full power - can only hope to run 370MW to 460MW of IT load. I’ve seen article after article about the gas turbines and their use of fracked gas - a disgusting and wasteful act typical of OpenAI - but nobody appears to have asked “how much power does a 1.2GW data center require?” and then chased it with “how much power does Stargate Abilene have?” The answer is not enough, and the significance of said “not enough” is remarkable. Today, I’m going to tell you, at length, how impossible the future of generative AI is. Gigawatt data centers are a ridiculous pipe dream, one that runs face-first into the walls of reality. The world’s governments and media have been far too cavalier with the term “gigawatt,” casually breezing by the fact that Altman’s plans require 17 or more nuclear reactors’ worth of power, as if building power is quick and easy and cheap and just happens. I believe that many of you think that this is an issue of permitting - of simply throwing enough money at the problem - when we are in the midst of a shortage in the electrical grade steel and transformers required to expand America (and the world’s) power grid. I realize it’s easy to get blinded by the constant drumbeat of “gargoyle-like tycoon cabal builds 1 gigawatt data center” and feel that they will simply overwhelm the problem with money, but no, I’m afraid that isn’t the case at all, and all of this is so silly, so ridiculous, so cartoonishly bad that it threatens even the seemingly-infinite wealth of Elon Musk, with xAI burning over a billion dollars a month and planning to spend tens of billions of dollars building the Colossus 2 data center, dragging two billion dollars from SpaceX in his desperate quest to burn as much money as possible for no reason. This is the age of hubris - a time in which we are going to watc…$

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spookygorski @cpgorski.bsky.social · 1d

*applause*

Pack it up... We have a winner for today, y'all

John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.s... • 1h
ME: Now Mom, just remember, there's a lot of disinformation and Al in your social feed and your friends' Facebook.
MOM: I know! My friend sent me this crazy post where someone used Al to make an image of a giant frog fighting Army troops!
ME: ... okay, no, that one's ... goddamit, Portland.

MotherofCorgs @motherofcar... • 22m
It's only fighting if that was a dance off.
And you know those feds can't dance.

Goo-orge W Horrors @bullcityfats.bsky.social
And if they can't dance they're...no feds of mine

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Brian Flaherty @brianflaherty.bsky.social · 2d

If you’re not reading The Power Fantasy by @kierongillen.bsky.social then you’re really missing out.

Issue 12 is the start of a new arc and is probably my favorite issue of the series so far.

You can even read the first issue online for free!

imagecomics.com/read/the-pow...