Are AI Datacenters Increasing Electric Bills for American Households? This is an important analysis to read, especially for our state leaders. This article is based on the grid in Texas (ERCOT) and the East Coast (PJM) but the reasoning still applies to us. The conclusion: Datacenters are not the primary cause of rising electricity bills — poor market design is. "The fault is government policy, not AI."
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In PJM, we think poor market design is the main culprit. Most of the 15% increase in household electricity bills in PJM is driven by a widely misunderstood and somewhat obscure mechanism: the BRA capacity auction.
Now look at Texas. The state is witnessing an equivalent AI buildout, with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic all building massive facilities. Yet power futures in Texas have moved only a few percent in the past year. No 9x spike, no crisis, very different market design.
Datacenters do contribute to incremental load growth and modestly higher energy prices in both regions (forward energy prices rose 11–20% in both PJM and ERCOT). But the dramatic bill increases hitting PJM consumers — the 9.3x capacity price spike translating to roughly $25–30/month more per household — are primarily the product of PJM's centrally planned capacity auction design amplifying uncertain forecasts, not of datacenters physically consuming too much power. The same datacenter growth in Texas, under a different market structure, has produced no comparable price shock for consumers.
This is apparently AOC's former climate activist, and it's a sight to behold as she finally understands that climate activism was all bullshit. The clues have always been there. She just needed to see.
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This is why I don't get excited about a lot of things in the news these days. You read this – it's basically a confession. So there was rampant election fraud. Yet, what's going to happen? Will we get reform and integrity? I'm not holding my breath. Why even report stuff like this anymore?
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Anthropic built a connector between Claude and the ClinicalTrials.gov website. This could be very helpful for those seeking information about clinical trials. I remember there was a startup that arose during the dotcom heyday that aspired to connect people to clinical trials. It was funded by some wealthy woman, but the data entry was going to be done by hand and that proved too onerous. The effort shut down, sadly. Now there is AI to automate things. This is also helpful because sometimes drug companies will post results in Clinicaltrials.gov when they don't want to publish negative results, such as the influenza mRNA vaccine being no better than standard quadrivalent vaccine in those >65 years. This is the only way you'd find out, because in the NEJM paper, they only published data for the younger age group (≤64 years) and declared the mRNA vaccine to be superior to the standard vax.
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Spy Satellite simulator looks at what happened in Iran. This is really cool, and he makes that project available on his GitHub page.
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Teenager wants to cure cancer in his homemade lab, but the FBI found out. It's not safe to be a "boy genius" anymore.
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Why was this even necessary? The U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to allowing government-run schools to keep secretly transitioning children without the parents' knowledge. What kind of an insane world do we live in that this has to be a law? Sick.
Well Oregon wants to pass a bill that would allow this. "prevents officials from cooperating with investigations " Oregon is a really sick state, basically protecting pedophiles.
The U.S. Supreme Court also declared that AI-generated art is not copyrightable. Seems reasonable to me. If you want to be that kind of artist, come up with your own vision model and put in your own weights that no one else can copy.
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Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash. The old Streisand effect strikes again. The best way to counter this is to stop making slop. Start impressing people with your excellence, instead of telling folks what insults they must not use.
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Attempting to detect smart glasses nearby and warn you. It picks up Bluetooth signatures. I don't think I'm going to need this now, but in the future, who knows?
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Anonymous credentials: an illustrated primer. For life in a dystopian society. And then there's this article from Proton.me: How to protect your privacy at protests. The best way is not to go, of course, and get themselves into trouble.
But in one of the rare instances where Oregon did the right thing is the passage of the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act.
I was reading this about a language snafu in the Metro Council. It seems a figure of speech was taken seriously, and the council member even furthered the confusion by issuing an apology in Spanish. People thought that diversity would bring about a Federation of Planets type of society, but instead we have this. So some guy came up with an Accent Converter for video meetings. I have mixed feelings about this. It's better to let people see how you really are, but if getting people to understand difficult accents really helps move things along, then I guess it's better than the alternative.
AI apps designed for the legal profession aren't as good as plain old ChatGPT. That's quite the opposite of what we see in the medical profession, where ChatGPT is inferior to apps trained on medical datasets. So legal AI startups can't get off the ground. But the legal profession should be one area where AI excels. My guess is that the models are not well trained or the architecture needs improvement.
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ChatGPT gets your prompt before you hit send! Be careful when you type in that text input box. Even though you don't hit send, ChatGPT knows what you are thinking. So you might benefit from Privacy Shield, which anonymizes all the protected identifiable information you enter.
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A small company's Gemini API key was stolen and the thief racked up a huge bill with it. Now they might go bankrupt. This is a great reason to not use plaintext .env files to store your secrets. But it also appears that Google changed the rules about API keys, so you'd REALLY better keep them secret.
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Have you ever felt that it was later or earlier in the day than it actually was? I've had that feeling many times. Here's a map that shows the discrepancy between mean solar time and standard time. It seems most of the world is quite off. But the United States is fine the way it is, and we should just stay on Standard Time indefinitely.