It's just ordinary slang.

Trump is doing all in his power to fight for the little guy including stopping foreign H1B1 Visa holders.

The democrats care about the foreignors. Not us!

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

One phone call to Bezos, or Pichai or any of the others, and even the most sensitive EU data will be in the hands of the US government within hours. (Surely nobody can think these leashed pets will say no.) There's zero respect for security, privacy, national sovereignty, or the conequences.

The same thing is happening in Canada, and it will happen elsewhere. The Cloud Act plus the descent of the US into a fascist oligarchy has made this inevitable, and all of these countries have realized that they need to plan tech, and defense, and energy, and everything else to work with zero reliance on the US.

The US response to this be threats and tariffs, of course. They won't work: they'll only convince the EU to move faster.

I've spent most of the past decade working (for free) on an archiving project for a nonprofit organization. This is a labor of love for me: it's a chance to use a lifetime of technical skills to help preserve the past for the future. I've put in every spare minute that I can, and have given up most other things in my life to do so. I have to: there isn't anyone else with the requisite skill set to do this work for free, and the organization certainly can't afford to pay anybody.

The AI companies have created two massive problems for us. The first is their web scraping, which is way beyond abusive: it's an attack. Yes, YES, I know about all the techniques to block it and I've deployed a bunch of them, but every minute spent doing that is a minute not spent doing actual archiving work. And even if I managed to blunt most of these attacks, at least one will get through, and they'll steal everything we've posted (for free) and use it (for profit), against our terms of service and against the express wishes of the people who donated materials to us...which is making it vastly harder to convince donors to help us.

The second is the topic of this discussion: disk drives. We don't need the biggest and the fastest, but we need a lot of them because we're maintaining replicas of the archive in geographically distributed locations. And like everyone else, we either can't find them or we can't afford them. I've been using eBay and Craigslist and I've even been going to estate states to try to pick up used external USB/firewire drives and old desktop PCs so that I can pull the disks and hope they test okay. Again: every minute spent doing that is a minute not doing actual archiving work. (Also: because some of these disks have a lot of hours on them, I have to consider probable remaining lifetimes and account for that.)

This is maddening and heartbreaking at the same time. And the thing is: I've spent a lot of time interacting with other people in this space: GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums). Everybody has this problem. All of these people, who definitely aren't doing their jobs because of the lavish pay and spectacular benefits but because they appreciate and love the cultural area(s) they're in, are all struggling. And none of these institutions have the money to truly address the situation: they're all underfunded because they've always been underfunded.

TL;DR: this is cultural vandalism conducted by billionaires who are willing to burn the entire world down for money and power.

As a matter of fact, yes. Specifically, to the Greenland region.

Although a golden bridge of grossly outsized proportions and festooned with tacky ornamentation would be much preferred.

1. A few decades ago, universities/colleges ran their own IT infrastructure: email, web, applications, etc. But grossly-overpaid administrators decided that competent, experienced IT staff making far less were expendable and they began outsourcing everything they possibly could -- because, of course, reducing the number of administrators and their compensation was never an option.

The consequences of that are now here. What were 8,000 targets are now: 1. And this isn't the only such application -- for example, much the same thing is true of email. And thus attackers now have luxury of focusing their efforts on a single target andl leveraging that into extortion against 8,000. None of the clueless, selfish, ignorant administrators responsible for this debacle will admit any responsibility -- ever. They're too busy enjoying their mansions while graduate students struggle to afford ramen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and junior faculty are forced to moonlight in order to make ends meet.

2. Instructure is following the standard playbook here: lie, lie, lie. They're doing that because they know they can and because no will ever hold them accountable. It's clear from what we already know that this was a very thorough hack, Instructure knows it was a very thorough hack, and they're doing everything they can to hide that fact. And as a result of that, they're deliberately making it impossible for everyone at those 8,000 institutions to understand what really happened and to take appropriate defensive measures (if any, if possible). Instructure isn't in the least bit concerned about the damage done to all the students and faculty; Instructure only cares about itself.

Exactly so. And exacerbating the situation is that distribution losses mean that running 1000 minicenters will use MORE power than 1 center with 1000 times the capacity.

Then, as you noted, there's the cooling problem, which also doesn't scale. Neither does the noise problem: people live in quiet places because, well, quiet. A thousand little data centers running 24 hours a day isn't going to mesh well with that.

This entire concept is insanely stupid -- but no doubt some VCs will throw money at these morons and they'll profit handsomely.

Democracy is for retards.

Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.

This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.

Like you.

Apparently, its current purpose is a demo for their "Copilot" AI technology.

All of the chargers that I've stopped at in BC (in between cities) have been in big open areas or parks where you can walk your dog. The OnRoute stops also have green areas.

I greatly suspect that the thing you're asking for is actually not any sort of problem at all, you just haven't looked into it so you don't know. I'm not gonna do your homework for you (more than I already have) but you can actually just search for this stuff. Or, frankly, you can just set out and not worry about it, because a) your car isn't going to take 30 minutes to charge; and b) you're likely to end up near some green space anyway. Just pick up after your dog. That's what people walking their dogs in the city do when the dog doesn't wait for a park or a lawn.