Requires a modern chromium-based browser unfortunately, but this is forgivable for such a ridiculous project.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-labor-workers-movement

It's cool that these are science lasers and not (just)acid and pink floyd lasers

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/30047

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is continuing to fuel its data centers with unpermitted gas turbines, according to a Floodlight visual investigation. Thermal drone footage shows xAI is still burning gas at a facility in Southaven, Mississippi, despite a recent Environmental Protection Agency ruling reiterating that doing so requires a state permit in advance.

State regulators in Mississippi maintain that since the turbines are parked on tractor trailers, they don’t require permits. However, the EPA has long required that such pollution sources be permitted under the Clean Air Act.

Any exemption for these machines “could leave these engines subject to no emission standards at all,” the agency wrote in a January final ruling.

However, thermal images captured by Floodlight — and analyzed by multiple experts — show more than a dozen unpermitted turbines still spewing pollutants at the plant nearly two weeks after the EPA’s recent ruling.

“That is a violation of the law,” said Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA air enforcement chief, after reviewing Floodlight’s images and EPA regulations.

Thermal drone footage shows unpermitted turbines operating at xAI’s gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi, nearly two weeks after the EPA ruled such turbines require permits before they can run. (Evan Simon / Floodlight)

xAI, which is seeking permits for dozens more turbines in Southaven, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The EPA, which under Trump has initiated a record low number of enforcement actions, declined to answer questions about the turbines at Musk’s AI facilities and referred to local authorities on permits.

The first and only public hearing on the matter is scheduled for February 17, and the public comment period is still open.

The Trump administration has made AI a priority, but as data centers proliferate across the country, regulators are struggling to keep pace with the industry’s increasing reliance on custom-built power sources and their public health impacts on surrounding communities. And Southaven, where state regulators are at odds with federal guidance, is a prime example.

xAI parked 27 unpermitted turbines in the suburban city of Southaven, Mississippi, to power the company’s nearby data center. Evan Simon / Floodlight

The turbines there help power Grok, the company’s controversial chatbot, and emit harmful pollutants linked to health problems such as asthma, lung cancer, and heart attacks.

“The risk of living next to this type of power plant is well documented,” said Shaolei Ren, a University of California, Riverside associate professor who specializes in the health impacts of data centers. “From the health perspective, we know that this is not good.”

Southaven residents have voiced concerns for months over the noise and pollution emanating from the 114-acre site that is largely hidden from public view — a site xAI is looking to expand.

“For them to be releasing so much pollution in such a populated area, not to mention that there are at least ten schools within a two-mile radius of the facility, is really concerning,” said longtime resident Shannon Samsa. “It’s horrifying to me that we’re allowing this in our community.”

From Memphis to Mississippi

The Southaven turbine cluster is part of xAi’s rapidly growing footprint along the Tennessee-Mississippi border. That expansion began in the spring of 2024 in South Memphis, next to historically Black neighborhoods, with the construction of Colossus 1, which the company touted as the world’s largest AI supercomputer.

The Southern Environmental Law Center released thermal images in April revealing that xAi had been operating more than 30 unpermitted gas-powered turbines at that site.

“We were hopeful that the health department would step in,” said Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney at the SELC. “That never happened.”

County officials in Tennessee maintained the turbines did not require a permit despite longstanding EPA policy that they do. In July, amid local pushback, the county permitted 15 turbines for use at Colossus 1.

On January 15, the EPA reiterated its decades-old policy that such machines need a permit. By then, xAi had already built a second data center in the area, Colossus 2. To power it, the company parked 27 turbines just across the stateline in Southaven, Mississippi, a diverse suburb of Memphis with higher-than-average levels of air pollution.

“When you’re talking about these turbines, think of the jet engine,” said Buckheit.

Thermal drone imagery captured by Floodlight in late January shows some of the 15 permitted turbines operating at xAI’s Colossus 1. Evan Simon / Floodlight

Despite the EPA’s recent directive, Floodlight’s thermal imagery — analyzed by multiple experts — shows 15 unpermitted turbines in operation at Southaven. Public records obtained by Floodlight show 18 of the 27 turbines have been used since November, at least.

“One might easily have expected, since this has been going on for some months, at least [issue a] stop work order,” said Buckheit, who served during the Republican administrations of Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. He also said the EPA could refer the case to the Department of Justice.

“But apparently that didn’t happen.”

xAI’s gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi, has been operating unpermitted turbines since at least November to power the company’s nearby datacenter, according to documents obtained by Floodlight. Evan Simon / Floodlight

Playing by a different set of rules

An EPA spokesperson did not answer Floodlight’s questions relating to its enforcement options, instead saying, “EPA does not approve the operation of gas turbines at facilities, that would be the state or local air permitting authority.”

Air permits are traditionally handled by state agencies. However, according to its own website, the EPA is responsible for making sure these agencies comply with federal regulations and “generally will take enforcement action” if a state government fails to “take timely and appropriate action.”

xAI “violated the Clean Air Act the first time, and now they’re gonna copy and paste and do it again,” said Anderson. “I maybe had some naive hope that the regulators who are most in the day-to-day business of implementing the Clean Air Act in Mississippi would do the right thing.”

In response to Floodlight’s questions, a spokesperson from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said the EPA’s recent rule leaves permitting decisions to state authorities.

“The turbines currently operating at the Southaven facility are classified as portable/mobile units under state law and therefore remain exempt from air permitting requirements during this temporary period,” they said. “Nothing in the EPA’s January 15 rule altered that determination under Mississippi regulations.”

An asthmatic, Krystal Polk said she was forced to empty out the home that’s been in her family for generations and cancel her plans to retire there out of concerns for her health after xAI began operating gas powered turbines directly across the street from her property. Evan Simon / Floodight

Longtime resident Krystal Polk said she had no idea xAI was coming to Southaven until black fences were set up across the street from her house. The area, she said, was once quiet and serene, with an abundance of wildlife, but is now bombarded by ceaseless noise and pollution.

“I do feel like xAi is playing by a different set of rules,” she said.

An asthmatic, Polk said she was forced to empty out the home that’s been in her family for generations and cancel her plans to retire there out of concerns for her health.

“We are a casualty of the whole data center race,” she said. “I feel that my voice doesn’t matter.”

The spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said the agency takes public concern around emissions, noise, and overall quality of life seriously, and though the turbines — in their view — do not require permits, all “applicable air quality standards still apply.”

Krystal Polk’s family home (foreground) sits directly across the street from xAI’s gas plant in Southaven, Mississippi. Evan Simon / Floodlight

AI’s increasing thirst for fossil fuels

Despite lofty sustainability goals put forward by industry leaders, data centers across the country are increasingly turning to fossil fuels to power the AI boom by using custom-built power plants like the ones seen in Southaven.

Roughly 75 percent of this power comes from natural gas, according to a recent report by CleanView, which tracks clean energy and data center projects.

“Nearly every project we reviewed mentions renewables, hydrogen, or nuclear in its public announcements,” the author wrote, but renewables aren’t scheduled until 2028 or later.

And “nuclear is a decade away,” he said.

Now, xAI is seeking to expand in Southaven, applying in January for a permit to operate 41 turbines at the site.

The facility could emit more than 6 million tons of greenhouse gases and over 1,300 tons of health-harming air pollutants every year, according to xAI’s permit application. That would make it among the largest fossil fuel power plants in the state. The company also purchased property in Southaven for a third data center that, when completed, will make the Colossus cluster — spanning Memphis to Southaven — one of the largest data center complexes in the world.

Shannon Samsa, a physician’s assistant, had hoped to raise a family in Southaven, but the presence of xAi’s gas-powered turbines has made her and her husband reconsider. Evan Simon / Floodlight

“It would be devastating,” said Samsa, the Southaven resident. “No community in their right mind would want something like this in their backyards.”

Samsa, a physician’s assistant, had hoped to raise a family in Southaven, but the presence of xAi’s gas-powered turbines has made her and her husband reconsider. She has helped collect more than 1,000 signatures for a petition demanding Mississippi authorities shut down the plant.

“I don’t want my children to be growing up around such massive amounts of air pollution,” she said. “I don’t want them to have to live in a place where their health and their overall well-being are not considered over economics.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A different set of rules’: Thermal drone footage shows Musk’s AI power plant flouting clean air regulations on Feb 21, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

This paper is honestly one of the most creative takes on LLM reasoning I’ve seen in a while. The team at ByteDance basically argues that we should view Long Chain-of-Thought as a macromolecular structure with internal forces that hold the logic together. They found that when we try to teach a model to reason by simply distilling keywords from a teacher, it fails because it’s like trying to build a protein by looking at a photo of it rather than understanding the atomic bonds.

Their Molecular Structure of Thought hypothesis breaks reasoning down into three specific bond types that behave similarly to their chemical counterparts. Deep reasoning acts like covalent bonds, forming the rigid primary backbone where each logical step must strictly justify the next. Self-reflection functions like hydrogen bonds, creating folding patterns where the model looks back 100 steps to audit an earlier premise, which keeps it from hallucinating. Finally, you have self-exploration acting like van der Waals forces, these are low-commitment bridges that let the model probe different ideas without getting stuck in a rigid path too early.

They found that most synthetic reasoning data is actually trash because it lacks this distribution. They proved that models don't actually learn the keywords themselves, but the characteristic reasoning behaviors those keywords represent. In one experiment, they replaced keywords like wait with arbitrary synonyms or removed them entirely, and the models still learned the reasoning structure just fine. It turns out that building these stable thought molecules is what creates the basis for Long CoT, as opposed to just mimicking a specific vibe or prompt format.

They built MOLE-SYN to address the problem. Instead of just copying teacher outputs, it uses a distribution transfer graph to walk through four behavioral states to synthesize traces that have the correct bond profile from the start. Their approach makes reinforcement learning much more stable because the model starts with a balanced skeleton instead of a bunch of fragmented logic. The paper challenges the whole more data is better mindset to argue that it's the geometry of the information flow that really matters.

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site is commonly used to bypass news paywalls, and the FBI has sought information on the site operator’s identity with a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows.

“Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability,” said today’s Wikipedia update. “However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today.”

Editors urged to remove links

Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.” The Internet Archive is a nonprofit based in the US.

As we previously reported, malicious code in Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page was used to direct a DDoS against the Gyrovague blog written by a man named Jani Patokallio. The Archive.today maintainer demanded that Patokallio take down a 2023 blog post that discussed the archive site founder’s possible identity. Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.

When we last wrote about this topic, the Archive.today maintainer told Ars Technica that it would not provide any comment on the Wikipedia discussion unless we removed references to Patokallio’s blog, which we did not do.

Archive.today maintainer sent threats

Patokallio told Ars today that he is pleased by the Wikipedia community’s decision. “I’m glad the Wikipedia community has come to a clear consensus, and I hope this inspires the Wikimedia Foundation to look into creating its own archival service,” he told us.

In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.

“Honestly, I’m kind of in shock,” one editor wrote. “Just to make sure I’m understanding the implications of this: we have good reason to believe that the archive.today operator has tampered with the content of their archives, in a manner that suggests they were trying to further their position against the person they are in dispute with???”

“If this is true it essentially forces our hand, archive.today would have to go,” another editor replied. “The argument for allowing it has been verifiability, but that of course rests upon the fact the archives are accurate, and the counter to people saying the website cannot be trusted for that has been that there is no record of archived websites themselves being tampered with. If that is no longer the case then the stated reason for the website being reliable for accurate snapshots of sources would no longer be valid.”

Blog capture tampered with

One example discussed by Wikipedia editors involved Jani Patokallio’s name being inserted into an Archive.today capture of a blog post that was mentioned by Patokallio in his February 2026 write-up of the DDoS incident. This blog is related to the “Nora” alias used by the Archive.today maintainer, which now appears to be the name of an actual person.

“It appears increasingly likely that the identity of ‘Nora’ has been appropriated from an actual person, whose only connection to archive.today was a request to take down some content,” Patokallio wrote in an update to his blog today. “As a courtesy, I have redacted their last name from this post.”

Evidence presented in the Wikipedia discussion showed that Archive.today replaced Nora’s name with Patokallio’s name in the aforementioned blog post. The Archive.today capture has since been reverted to what appears to be the original version. In other cases, Archive.today captures included a “Comment as: Jani Patokallio” string on captures that previously had a “Comment as: Nora [last name redacted]” string.

Even if the snapshot alterations hadn’t helped convince Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to deprecate Archive.today, the Wikimedia Foundation itself might have stepped in. In its comments on the DDoS, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia said on February 10 that it had not ruled out intervening due to “the seriousness of the security concern for people who click the links that appear across many wikis.”

https://archive.ph/6tjt3

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29802

Google handed a British graduate student’s bank and credit card information over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after he was targeted by the agency for attending a pro-Palestine protest for just five minutes. 

The tech giant fulfilled a subpoena request from ICE for “a wide array of personal data” on Amandla Thomas-Johnson, an activist and journalist who was studying in the US at Cornell University, The Intercept reported.   

Thomas-Johnson went into hiding in the college town of Ithaca, upstate New York, in spring last year as Donald Trump’s administration began rounding up foreign students who opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

He had briefly attended a 2024 protest against companies supplying weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair, which got him banned from campus. 

As well as financial information, the data requested by ICE included usernames, addresses, a list of any IP masking services, telephone numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers. 

Thomas-Johnson had no opportunity to challenge the subpoena. 

He believes ICE was planning to monitor and then detain him, but by the time of the subpoena he had already fled to Switzerland. 

“We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions,” he told The Intercept, “where government and big tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment from the outlet. 

From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.

Trying to get away from my phone more, and an e reader sounds like a good way to get myself to read more. Kobo is sounding like the most recommended one based on some googling, but I’m also ok with jailbreaking something like an older kindle from eBay. Something that plays nice with Libby would be ideal but not required.