Where's the concern about robots and AI?

[Winehole23]

The pricing pressures of these and other components have been most evident at the producer level. The Producer Price Index chart semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing industry looks like a hockey stick.


As of June, that category’s wholesale prices were up 26% from a year ago – a stark shift from June 2025 when prices were falling 0.8% on an annual basis, PPI data shows.


“Why this matters for the end consumer is, at the end of the day, our laptops, computers, iPhones, iPads all have some sort of memory chip embedded in that hardware, and those chips have become quite expensive,” she said.

[Winehole23]

Late last month, Apple hiked the prices for some of its most popular products by roughly 20%. In a statement, the company noted that AI data centers created an “extraordinary surge” in demand for memory and storage.


Sony upped the price of its PlayStation console earlier this year, and Microsoft last month raised the price of its Xbox consoles by about 25% for similar reasons.


“The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles,” Microsoft wrote in a statement.

[Winehole23]

Data centers also are impacting the supply of other key construction inputs such as copper and electrical wiring, as well as workers.

“If you’re looking for data that was conclusive (about AI’s effect on the economy and inflation), albeit a bit more subtle, you would look and see whether wages in construction were going up more than wages in the rest of the economy,” said Thierry Wizman, Global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie Group.

“Because if in fact there is upward pressure, straining resources of the economy because of the AI data center buildout, you would see it in wages as well – specifically in the wages of labor that would be working these projects,” he added.

So far, the available national-level wage data is showing a “robust divergence” between the construction sector and the aggregate, he noted.

Regional data could prove even more telling, he said, noting the importance of tracking construction wages in areas with a high concentration of data centers. (That will take more patience, however, as that more localized data is lagged due to collection and modeling needs).

“We’re having a problem with housing in the country these days; people talk about it as being unaffordable,” Wizman said. “It could be the case that the fact wages in construction have been rising a lot is putting upward pressure on houses as well.”

[Winehole23]

just curious, what's the archival durability of AI compared to paper?

Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/o...587a0348538ce9

[Winehole23]

Beginning in early 2024, the AI lab quietly launched an industrial-scale book-buying program, partnering with used-book wholesalers to acquire millions of paper books by the pallet for what internal do ents — which became public last year during the copyright lawsuit — described as “destructive scanning”, where books’ spines are cut apart so the pages can be scanned and then discarded.

Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.

Court do ents detailed how the AI lab used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to “neatly cut” millions of books before scanning the pages “on high speed, high quality, production level scanners”.

[Winehole23]

who's dumber, ChatGPT or the US State Dept?

View image in fullscreen

The map presented in Brazil on Sunday showed a landlocked Nigeria in the Sahara and placed Mozambique in the Horn of Africa. Photograph: Picture obtained by Reuters/Reuters

A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a ⁠global conference in Brazil ⁠this week, ​causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.


Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in ⁠Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.



A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included ⁠in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did ​not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ican-countries

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

who's dumber, ChatGPT or the US State Dept?

[COLOR=#121212][FONT=&quot]


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ican-countries

also, the shapes of the countries make no sense

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

not easy to come up with a non-malicious use-case for this

Google pulled a new AI image-editing feature from Google Earth less than 24 hours after launch.
The company launched the function on Thursday, allowing Gemini's Nano Banana 2 image model to access Google Earth and transform locations with text prompts.
The function, however, quickly got out of hand. AI researcher Henk van Ess, for example, created extremely realistic deepfakes, including fake refugee camps along the US-Mexico border and a nuclear plant in Iran.

"We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies," a Google spokesperson said in a statement posted on X. "So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails."


Google added that the AI-generated images were watermarked and never appeared in the public Google Earth experience.

https://www.businessinsider.com/goog...unction-2026-7

[Winehole23]

hahahhahaha

*US DRAFTING BAN ON CHINA DATA CENTER COMPONENTS: REUTERS

[Winehole23]

vibes very bad

Someone brought a guillotine to a city council meeting in Salem, Oregon on July 27, 2026. Not a sign shaped like one. Not a drawing. According to community accounts and social media posts, an actual guillotine structure appeared at the protest outside Loucks Auditorium, where hundreds of residents had gathered to oppose a proposed multi-billion-dollar AI data center. Company representatives reportedly assessed the scene and left, citing safety concerns — though that detail hasn’t appeared in formal news coverage or official minutes.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/salem-b...feeling-unsafe

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

#1 in Texas, #1 in the USA

As part of a planned data center in Pecos County, Texas, Amazon is investing in an on-site power plant that could become the largest source of climate pollution in the United States, according to The New York Times.

The NYT says the plant would burn natural gas and is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — more than any other power plant in the U.S.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/08/pl...er-in-the-u-s/

[Winehole23]

AI PEOPLE: "AI gonna your up, AI gonna your up"

NORMIES: "hey, let's AI's up"

AI PEOPLE:

[Winehole23]

SLOK: “.. the AI capex boom is so far only showing up in the sellers' margins, not the buyers'.

.. This is important because the longer it takes the S&P 493 to generate ROI, the bigger the downside risks to an economy and a market this concentrated in the AI trade.”

https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insigh...for-the-payoff

[Winehole23]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/o...smine-sun.html

[Winehole23]

is this good?

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

Other things AI stans don't care about: LLMs teaching depressed teenagers step by step instructions on how to commit suicide and hide it from their parents. Helping perverted stepdads make gigs of CSAM of their stepdaughters. Dead Iranian schoolchildren "accidentally" targeted by Claude

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

worldwide GitHub outage

Microsoft's GitHub source shack is reporting a 50 percent error rate on repository content downloads. GitHub Copilot is also "experiencing degraded availability."

The problems began at 1340 UTC, when the company's status page reported "impacted performance for some GitHub services." This rapidly escalated to degraded performance across numerous services, including Issues – which was, appropriately enough, experiencing an issue of its own.

GitHub is investigating and has promised an update, but today's incident is only the latest in a string of disruptions that have left developer nerves frayed.

Earlier in August, GitHub's Actions automation platform and Pages hosting service experienced problems. In its May 2026 availability report, the company acknowledged that AI-assisted coding and agentic workflows were adding to the strain.

GitHub parent Microsoft boasted last year that AI was writing as much as 30 percent of the code in some of its repositories, subject to human review, according to CEO Satya Nadella.

Addressing GitHub's repeated outages in June, software engineering SVP Jakub Oleksy said structural changes were afoot to "permanently remove failure modes."

"We acknowledge that we have work to do, but we're committed to getting it done and making GitHub reliable when and where you need it."

Brave words, but today's disruption demonstrates that there is still plenty of work to do – and each recurrence further tests developer confidence in the service.

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-m...r-rate/5288543

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

Anthropic doin alright tho, before the IPO

[ChumpDumper]

lol annualized

Short that right after it goes public. Seems like a lock.