Ho una lista di cose da fare che si ritrae e si espande come una fisarmonica: tiro un sospiro di sollievo e poi mannaggio, tiro un sospiro di sollievo e poi mannaggio, e così via, ad infinitum

#mannaggia

I love how stuff like this (!) is dealt with.

Everyday operations in orbit: toilet maintenance.

#ESA #ISS #Adenot #Toilet !

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2026/04/Everyday_operations_in_orbit_toilet_maintenance#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=2f51b4c6-88f8-4d9f-982b-ae16eb910000

Ahead of a Tokyo exhibition to celebrate the 360th year of the Ohi ware school of ceramics, the 11th head of the acclaimed family of artisans describes how continuing his legacy means adapting to a new generation. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2026/05/12/style-design/ceramics-ohi-chozaemon-xi-japanese-crafts-360th-anniversary/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #life #styledesign #japanesecrafts #pottery #exhibitions #japaneseart #ohiware #ohichozaemonxi

@Roland @raph @petitevieille
Oui : le racisme est décomplexé. Oui : le RN fait des gros scores. Oui : tout le paysage politique s'est droitisé. Non : la progression du RN n'est pas inéluctable. Non : Bardella sera pas forcément au 2e tour. Oui : Mélenchon sera élu en 2027. Le meilleur ami de l'extrême droite est la résignation à porter un projet de rupture avec la république bourgeoise

Support UR by donating to our Legal Fund.

We're still attempting to recoup the $50,000+ we spent on our legal team vs Energy Transfer who wanted source materials.

We fought for press freedoms and won at the MN Supreme Court, thank you so much for helping us dig out of the hole.

https://donorbox.org/unicorn-riot-nodapl-legal-defense

Malaysia rescues 23 migrants after boat capsizes, 14 still missing
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/12/malaysia-rescues-23-migrants-after-boat-capsizes-14-still-missing?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Asia Pacific News @asia-pacific-news-AlJazeera

I'm glad we got all of that crazy security stuff out of the way yesterday so we can have a nice chilled Tuesday with no significant supply chain incidents...

@albert yeah I don’t really want to build my own it would be a lot more expensive than getting a 2nd hand one. I guess nobody really does the open hw thing as a whole unit.

new preprint on the spread of hallucinated citations in the scientific literature:

- origin primarily from small and early-career author teams

- hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars

- 𝟴𝟱.𝟯% of hallucinations in preprints persist into the published version

- hallucinations appear across the range of journals, including high impact ones

- fake citations are becoming listed in search engines like Google scholar

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

@ricci

Why are we building housing for computers and not for people?

Come cavolo fate a sopravvivere ai vostri sogni? Solitamente mi sveglio sereno, dimentico di tutto quello che è successo durante la notte e pronto a essere preso a schiaffi dalla giornata in divenire. Ma oggi, perdio, l'inconscio mi ha regalato una traccia lunghissima e dettagliata di tutta la mia attività onirica notturna, lasciandomi stanco, nonostante il lungo sonno, e impanicato per quello che ho trovato dentro di me. Il mio cervello, il posto più inospitale della terra.

Redditors have caught Google secretly updating its Chrome terms of service to remove a line that guaranteed that local AI models won't send data to Google servers.

That's now gone, meaning your local AI sends data to Google, so it's not that local.

https://old.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1t5qayz/chrome_removes_claim_of_ondevice_al_not_sending/

RT: @KieraDiss Celebrations for the Green Party as they take the win for a LAMBETH Council seat in BRIXTON Rush Common.

Zvikomborero Chinoro is the new face of politics in London.

@tante 🫠🫠
But on the upside they are recognising that 7 layers of management is too much management 🙈 🙊

@Sascha
+ Mastodon ist (nur) ein Teil des Fediverse
+ Friendica nutzen viele, wie auch meine @reparierecke
+ Alt-Texte sind wichtige Hilfen für blinde Menschen und auch, wenn Bilder nicht angezeigt werden können.
+ das Fediverse hat eine treffsicherere Reichweite als alle anderen sozialen Netzwerke, da hier kein Algorithmus Reichweite vorgaukelt. Wobei es aber nicht hauptsächlich die Reichweite ist, die hier wichtig ist.

#neuhier #Fediverse #Mastodon #friendica #reichweite #alttext #alttag

Ink Shortage Means Black-and-White Bags of Potato Chips in Japan
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-12/ink-shortage-means-black-and-white-bags-of-potato-chips-in-japan?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Bloomberg Asia @bloomberg-asia-bloomberg

The reason I went on this little tour was to put in perspective the proposed Stratos datacenter project in Box Elder County, UT.

Stratos is supposedly designed to eventually reach a size of 9 GW. That is more than double the 4 GW that the entire state of Utah currently uses. The entire campus is supposed to be big enough that, for comparison, it would fill over 10% of the Salt Lake Valley, as shown in this image (which I didn't make).

That last datacenter campus? At ~160 MW, those three buildings put together are designed for a load about 1/55th the size of Stratos. That 300 MW natural gas power station we saw in the background? Stratos is supposed to generate its own power on-site, so it will need 30 of those things. (Or maybe more - remember PUE?)

In terms of carbon output, this thing is designed to be an absolute monster.

There's not much getting around that. They have handwaved about including solar and/or wind, but without anything concrete, we should assume this is a whole lot of carbon.

How about water?

Well, that's harder to tell, given all the vagaries and "if"s in the public information so far.

Remember, a datacenter has to get rid of a lot of heat. A datacenter that is generating its own energy on-site has to get rid of *far* more heat.

In the desert West, the most *energy* efficient way of getting rid of heat in the hot summer months is evaporative cooling: you boil water. This has, historically, been a major way of cooling both natural gas plants and datacenters, as well as homes, etc.

The same reason why this works well in the west is the same reason why it's problematic: we have very dry air, so evaporative cooling is very effective, but having dry air is connected to the fact that we don't have much water to begin with.

There *are* ways to air-cool natural gas turbines, and there *are* ways to cool datacenters that are not evaporative cooling. They are more *water* efficient. But they are less *power* efficient, which means, in this context, burning even more natural gas.

The backers of Stratos claim that they are trying to get some very new, high-tech gas turbines that operate without water cooling, or at least with very little. That does assuage some water concerns. But their language is very hedge-y - they're trying, they hope to jump in line for the limited supply of them, etc.

They also claim they will use "closed loop" water systems for cooling the datacenter. There are several things this *could* mean, and we need to know more in order to actually understand it. Most cooling systems for datacenters and even large buildings have a closed loop of water (or another coolant) for moving heat around. That's because we cannot *make* cold, we can only *move* heat. In some datacenters, this cold loop comes into the room, where it's used to cool air, which is blown across the servers. In higher-power-density datacenters, the coolant loop comes all the way to the individual rack in order to cool the air right before it enters the servers. In the most high-tech datacenters (which Stratos would likely be), it comes all the way *inside* the server, directly exchanging heat with the hot bits like CPUs and GPUs.

Coolant in these kinds of systems circulates, it's closed, you can generally consider the coolant loop to consume very little to no water after it's been filled.

But: you still have to make the heat go away somehow. This is where Stratos *might* use evaporative cooling. Or they might opt for one of the more expensive, less energy efficient dry systems. Saying "we have a closed loop" only tells us *part* of the story!

Here's what we know: the Stratos people have secured 13,000 acre-feet of water rights. In numbers that mean more to most of us, that's about 4 billion gallons per year.

They *claim* that's far more water than they need, and they won't use most of it.

But: if they don't manage to get their air-cooled gas turbines (which, in addition to being less efficient, also cost more), or decide to go with some evaporative cooling for the datacenter (because it's cheaper and uses less power), they could very easily use that much water. We are very much in a "trust me" situation, and it's not clear that we *should* trust what developers say when they are trying to get permits. We need to get independent studies and binding contracts.

For those who aren't locals, you might not be aware, but: the Great Salt Lake is shrinking. People are trying (not hard enough, probably) to save it. Not just because hey, what would we call our city without it, but also because the lakebed is full of chemicals we'd rather not be breathing in, thanks.

Stratos would not literally pull water out of the lake (which it is quite close to). But: the water rights they have obtained are in the watershed of the lake. So: if they use the water rights they have obtained, they might well contribute to the drying up of the lake.

The point here is that: they are hoarding water rights that they claim they will not use - the more reasonable bet is to assume they will use them; we need a study by actual hydrologists to understand whether using the water would accelerate the lake's demise.

And, you will notice that I have not even touched on a ton of *other* issues, such as:

1) Is there actually demand for all of these computers?
2) Would it be a good idea to fill this demand even if it does exist?
3) Can we build enough computers to fill this thing in a reasonable time anyway?
4) How far will this project get before the AI bubble pops, and will it leave anyone other than the investors holding the bag?
5) If it does get fully built, what other resources (like more water rights) might they go after?
6) Is it a wise idea to provide huge tax breaks to companies that expect to be highly profitable?
7) This is being done though the Military Installation Development Authority - what's the actual military connection here?
8) Regardless of whether it's wet or dry, is dumping this much heat into one valley a good idea?
9) There's no way that burning that much natural gas doesn't raise gas and electricity prices.
10) Can we trust the developers' numbers for how many jobs this will create locally?

Just to name a few.

RT: @KieraDiss Celebrations for the Green Party as they take the win for a LAMBETH Council seat in BRIXTON Rush Common.

Zvikomborero Chinoro is the new face of politics in London.