@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-12-15 06:11:06
Filing: Oracle signed ~$150B of data center leases in the three months ending November 30, raising its total data center and cloud capacity commitments to $248B (Martin Peers/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/o
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-11-14 21:05:53
So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/
@castarco@hachyderm.io2025-11-16 12:05:17
I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
@AimeeMaroux@mastodon.social2025-11-16 10:09:51
It's the #DayOfHelios / Sol's Day / #Sunday! ☀️
"Hastened by the golden-haired Horai Sol (the Sun) puts on his diadem of myriad rays [. . .] Then above the earth and above the horns of the eastern mount he shone forth, and drew a train of light over the sparkling waves."
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-09-16 18:05:39
You know, I’m sorry, I really appreciate that at least Spain and a few other countries are doing something now but if you’re a fucking whole-ass country, your “threat” in the face of genocide being committed as we speak if you want to stop said genocide being committed isn’t to pull out of a fucking song contest. It’s to send your damn army – ideally along with a few others – as a peacekeeping force to stop the sons of bitches who are committing genocide.
But hey, pulling out of a song…
@arXiv_condmatmeshall_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-10-15 08:38:42
Influence of Platinum Thin Films on the Photophysical and Quantum Properties of Near-Surface NV Centers
Joachim P. Leibold (Department of Chemistry, School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany), Lina M. Todenhagen (Walter Schottky Institute, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany), Matthias Althammer (Walther-Mei{\ss}ner-Institute, Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Garching, Germany), Nikhita Khera (Department of Physics and Resea…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-15 06:20:54
SEC filing: Jeff Bezos discloses that he now owns 9% of Amazon's shares, down from 10.1% a year ago, after selling 100M shares over the course of the past year (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business
@arXiv_csSI_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-10-15 08:09:21
Evolution of wartime discourse on Telegram: A comparative study of Ukrainian and Russian policymakers' communication before and after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine
Mykola Makhortykh, Aytalina Kulichkina, Kateryna Maikovska
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11746
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-16 06:36:00