But what contaminated the water collected from taps and wells isn’t immediately evident, the lab run by a group that helps communities struggling with post-Cold War pollution says

During an exchange of war stories, a colleague of mine told one from back in the days when Windows included a processor emulator for x86-32 on systems that natively ran some other processor. (This has happened many times. And no, I don’t know which processor this particular story applied to.)

This particular emulator employed binary translation, generating native code to perform the equivalent operations of the original x86-32 code. This offered a significant performance improvement over emulation via interpreter. You can imagine that x86-32 is just a bytecode, and the emulator is a JIT compiler.

Anyway, my colleague found that there was one program that needed to allocate around 64KB of memory on the stack and initialize it. The standard way of doing this is to perform a stack probe to ensure that 64KB of memory is available, then subtracting 65536 from the stack pointer, and then initializing the memory in a small, tight loop.

But using a loop to initialize the memory was too mundane for whatever compiler was used to compile this code. Instead of generating a loop to initialize each byte of the buffer, the compiler “optimized” the code by unrolling the loop into 65,536 individual “write byte to memory” instructions, each 4 bytes long.

All in all, it took this program 256 kilobytes of code to initialize 64 kilobytes of data.

This offended the team so much that they added special code to the translator to detect this horrible function and replace it with the equivalent tight loop.

The post The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad that they fixed it during emulation appeared first on The Old New Thing.

It's clear that communities now have an effective playbook to block data center construction. This week, researchers flagged the first quarter of 2026 as producing the "most blocked and delayed data center projects on record," NBC News reported.

Data Center Watch, a project from AI intelligence firm 10a Labs that tracks data center fights around the US, reported that protestors "blocked or delayed at least 75 projects nationwide worth about $130 billion from January through March," NBC News reported.

That's "the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023," and it shouldn't be parsed as "a cyclical spike," the researchers said. Instead, there's been a "structural shift," as "communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states," researchers said.

The political momentum behind data center protests is expected to influence the upcoming midterm elections, with both parties increasingly sympathizing with resistance as opposition intensifies.

Sociologist's unique take on data center opposition

Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has been spending time with organizers in North Carolina to better understand the playbook that's fueling this momentum. In an op-ed for the New York Times encouraging Democrats to make data centers a key campaign issue, she noted that she "wasn’t sold on data center resistance as a political possibility," but "time on the ground changed my mind."

Not only are people crossing political divides to oppose local construction projects, but also people "are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use, and thermodynamics," McMillan Cottom wrote. As she explained, people aren't just educating themselves to keep noisy factories from driving up utility costs, threatening public health, or wasting local resources; some people are, for the first time, experiencing what it's like to work with their neighbors to overcome adversity through political will:

"I have been watching this new groundswell of dissent firsthand in community meetings, organizing sessions and civic trainings here in North Carolina. The resistance has lifelong joiners, alumni from environmental and housing movements and young organizers. There are also a lot of people who have never dreamed of being disagreeable in public, much less considered joining a raucous social movement. The imminent risk of living next to a data center may be why they show up for a meeting, but they’re committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political corruption and corporate malfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who override them and in some cases beating the opposition is giving them something few politicians are offering—a taste of political power."

Although it may be hard for Democrats to craft a national message that capitalizes on anti-data-center sentiment, McMillan Cottom suggested that, if they could, it would be the "greatest untapped opportunity" to win more elections.

Data Center Watch noted that the record of $130 billion data centers blocked or delayed in early 2026 was close to matching the value of the total number they recorded for all of 2025, about $156 billion. The researchers suggested that the back half of 2025 marked a "turning point, as data center opposition emerged as a national-level narrative" that showed the AI industry can no longer see the fights as individual zoning disputes. It "is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide," Data Center Watch reported last year.

For officials hoping to quickly build data centers to propel America's AI ambitions, facing the mounting opposition as the playbook has come together has been tough, NBC News reported. Where before, officials were criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents, now they're encountering backlash before any deal is in the books, Data Center Watch found.

"In some cases," researchers reported, "opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed, the mere rumor of a data center was enough to trigger organized resistance."

AI industry struggles to counter narrative

AI firms and data center developers, as well as officials who hope to benefit from striking deals, are beginning to counter the data center hate as best they can.

Most recently, OpenAI released a report claiming that China was trying to influence the US data center debate by using ChatGPT. OpenAI quickly banned the bad actors, they reported, who were creating comics and memes to post on X, as well as generating social media comments, supposedly in the hopes of swaying US sentiment.

There has also been a push to paint public dissent as "naïve," McMillan Cottom noted, "or, worse, un-American."

Proponents of data centers argue that debates over electricity price hikes or water resources are misinformed. In a recent Atlantic piece claiming "the data-center panic is overblown," it's emphasized that only drought-stricken locations or areas with strained grids need to worry about those concerns. And economists suggested that communities risk overlooking little-discussed long-term benefits, like employment gains that "are likely to grow as new data centers attract businesses that use AI."

In Loudon County, Virginia, The Atlantic noted, 53 million square feet of data centers have been constructed over the past 20 years. Although data centers account for only about 3 percent of the county’s land area, they generate "almost half of its property-tax revenue—a projected $1.3 billion in 2026," The Atlantic reported. Although some data center projects were removed from residential zones due to noise complaints, communities have largely benefited from letting data centers in, with lower tax rates and more affordable housing.

This week, Meta claimed a similar data center PR win in Louisiana. One of the tech giant's data center projects more than doubled Richland Parish's sales and use tax, leading some teachers to get $50,000 bonuses, due to an ordinance that "lets the school board collect a 1 percent sales tax to fund teacher bonuses," The Wall Street Journal reported. Scott Franklin, a director of the parish’s chamber of commerce and a farmer who sold the land to Meta for the data center, told WSJ that "anybody that complains about teachers getting a $50,000 check, they just instantly lose all credibility with me."

But The Atlantic story seems to gloss over one of the biggest complaints that locals have about data centers: a lack of comprehensive environmental reviews. Mostly, communities simply don't want local officials to take the kind of shortcuts to expedite data center approvals that Donald Trump and other Republicans have called for.

In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker is pushing lawmakers to develop a legislative framework for responsible data center development in the state with proper environmental reviews at its center. And other cities, counties, and states are pivoting to get residents more information as deals are increasingly obstructed by residents loudly vocalizing opposition. Most recently, a data center developer in Utah vowed to handle all communications himself to make his construction project more transparent, after backlash reduced the total approved land area for the site by 50 percent.

Dems slow to embrace data center resistance

McMillan Cottom suggested that no public officials on the right or the left have perfected their messaging to align with anti-data center sentiments. It may be money standing in the Democrats' way of fully embracing the data center resistance, she suggested, as many AI firms are donating hundreds of millions to campaigns to sway elections.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's plans to tax AI firms to force more transparency are "wonky," she said. And Sen. Bernie Sanders' call for Americans to profit off AI—which Trump, to some degree, agrees on—depends on creating a wealth fund that at least one critic warned "would enshrine the tech sector’s as-yet-unproven claims of its importance."

Perhaps Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come closest to plugging into the nationwide rage. After joining Sanders in calling for a nationwide data center moratorium in March, she used jars she claimed were filled with dirty data center water to press the Environmental Protection Agency over its alleged failures to investigate a Meta project in Georgia.

Meta has denied that its Georgia data center is polluting waters. But analysts think that Ocasio-Cortez's instinct to use the jars to symbolize data center opposition seems more likely to strike a nerve and drum up support than even the most genuine pushes to regulate or tax data centers, so long as the long-term harms of construction remain unknown and the risks of AI remain abstract.

The Atlantic's piece concluded that the "reasons for resisting data centers may ultimately have less to do with the tangible costs than the symbolic ones."

Along similar lines, McMillan Cottom suggested that "the voters showing up to fight data centers demonstrate that a lot of us want something different." And what many politicians and AI fans see as a sea of unsubstantiated backlash is actually "the righteous rage driving millions of Americans to look up from their enemy and finally see, instead, a neighbor and future worth fighting for," she wrote.

Read full article

Comments

If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you've probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers' insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies.

In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew "about 2.5 billion gallons" globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It's also useful to compare Amazon's number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.

Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.

All told, a 2021 Nature study estimates that all US data centers combined consumed about 163 billion gallons of water that year, a number that includes "indirect" consumption from non-renewable power sources. That number has doubtlessly increased in the AI-driven years since that study was published—one analysis estimates that Texas data centers alone used 25 to 49 billion gallons in 2024, and could grow to withdraw 399 billion gallons in 2030. But even annual data center water usage measured in the trillions would represent a figurative (and kind of literal) drop in the bucket compared to national and worldwide water usage statistics.

Think globally, worry locally

While there's no risk of big tech companies literally draining the oceans to power the data centers behind their LLMs, even moderately sized data centers can have an outsized effect on nearby water resources. A single Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia, for instance, now uses about 10 percent of the entire county's water supply, according to a New York Times report from last year. And the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin recently estimated that data centers account for 8 percent of total water consumption in the region, a rate that could climb to 29 percent by 2050 if the large concentration of data centers in northern Virginia continues apace.

That kind of concentrated water use can put severe strain on local infrastructure and water supplies, and has led to at least one situation where a data center siphoned millions of gallons from local sources without initially paying. The local impacts can be especially severe in areas that are already water-stressed; a 2025 Business Insider report found that 40 percent of planned and existing data centers in the US are in areas with "high" or "extremely high" water scarcity, as measured by the World Resources Institute.

In light of these concerns, the biggest tech companies are eager to project an image of efficiency and responsible stewardship regarding water supplies. Amazon says it has been letting data centers run hotter to use less water for cooling, helping it to use less water per kilowatt-hour than other major data center providers. Amazon also says it's funding "50 water projects expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons of water annually for use by local communities," and Google has laid out 165 water stewardship projects that it says "are expected to replenish more than 19 billion gallons of water annually by 2030."

If all the memes and worries about data center water consumption are helping to drive this kind of environmental responsibility among PR-focused big tech companies, that's all for the better. But if your concerned friend starts worrying about AI data centers literally causing a worldwide water catastrophe, the actual numbers involved should hopefully put those worries to rest.

Read full article

Comments

You may recall that on Tuesday The Autopian became the first publication to get photos of a prototype Ford Universal EV pickup truck — a highly anticipated, $30,000-ish electruck from The Blue Oval. A reader noticed that the camouflage wrapped around the truck contained a QR code. I wonder where that goes? Let’s find out!

Shoutout to reader Matt, who noticed the QR codes slathered along the body — QR codes that are quite small and drowned out by fun dogs and soccer balls and sailboats and hearts and painters trays and anvils.

Here are a few photos that show the camo up close:

It’s kind of amazing for all of the work we did to start at that camo that we never noticed. Anyway, I figured I’d tell you all where these little QR codes actually go, and it’s right here. Here’s the URL, by the way; it contains the word “camo” and”spot[ted]” twice: https://www.ford.com/spotted/?fcid=qrc-camo-lifestyle&qrcid=qrc=camo-lifestyle-fv-spot

Hot dog! We have new footage of the prototype EV ute testing on the track! Before we get to that, let’s click that video at the top. The clip is a little intro from Alan Clarke, Vice President, Advanced Development Projects. He runs Ford’s Long Beach EVDC (Electric Vehicle Development Center):

“Welcome, chances are you saw something on the road that piqued your interest and you’re here because you’re curious,” Clarke begins. “You’re just like us — really interested in new technology, innovation, and something pretty unique and interesting you saw on the road.”

Clarke continues:

“This website will be your exclusive window into our progress — a place where we show you how we’re doing things differently as our team develops an electric vehicle that’s accessible and exciting, one innovation at a time. So come on back sometime soon and take a look at the different things that this team across the world is doing to make sure that this product is ready for market in 2027.”

Down below the video are two others, one showing the prototype being assembled by an employee named Mark Gentry who, in Ford’s New Model Program Development Center, marvels at just how easy it is to put this new EV truck together. In the screenshots below you can see the cast aluminum instrument panel being married (via adhesive and threaded fasteners) to the stamped steel chassis:

The third video you see when you follow the camo prototype’s QR code shows Ford test engineer Chris Kirkland snow-drifting the EV truck in Michigan’s upper peninsula. The footage actually shows some interesting details not obvious on the prototype The Autopian photographed on Tuesday in Long Beach. One such detail is the wheels, which are exposed here:

Another detail is the nose, which on the prototype I saw on Tuesday was covered in some kind of bulky black mass. Here, the nose looks more like the aerodynamic shape you’d expect this truck to have based on the aerodynamic imagery Ford has shown (like the one below):

Check out that tapered hood (and also look at the truck drift with its front wheels at opposite-lock and its rears kicking up snow; looks fun!):

By contrast, here’s what I saw on Tuesday:

Anyway, I just thought I’d show you all what’s on the test mule’s QR code hidden in the camo. Looks like Ford will be updating that site regularly as the EV pickup/ute gets closer to its 2027 launch.

All screenshots Ford unless otherwise stated

 

The post The $30,000 Ford EV Pickup We Photographed Was Hiding A QR Code On Its Camouflage. Here’s Where It Takes You appeared first on The Autopian.

For the first time, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) has released its own recommendations for maternal vaccination, providing formal guidance that diverges from that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention amid unprecedented policy changes and meddling from anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

ACOG President Camille Clare blamed "changing national recommendations coupled with rampant vaccine misinformation" for the confusion among patients and health care professionals about vaccines during pregnancy.

"It is incredibly important for the public to have access to reliable, evidence-based information on maternal immunizations from a trusted source. ACOG is proud to be that source," Clare said in a statement.

ACOG's 2026 Maternal Immunization Schedule differs most significantly from the CDC's current schedule by including recommendations for COVID-19 and seasonal influenza vaccines. Those vaccines have been dropped from the CDC's recommendations under Kennedy, in conflict with scientific evidence and amid strong opposition from medical organizations.

Currently, the CDC recommends only two immunizations during pregnancy: Tdap (against tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) and RSV (against respiratory syncytial virus). ACOG's new guidance recommends influenza, COVID-19, RSV, and Tdap vaccines. It also provides clear recommendations for additional vaccines for certain populations, as well as vaccinations recommended during postpartum and while breastfeeding.

Medical organizations revolt

"Immunizations are an essential part of prepregnancy, prenatal, and postpartum care," said ACOG Chief of Clinical Practice Christopher Zahn in a statement. "As OB-GYNs, we have the power to combat vaccine misinformation on our own platforms, help our patients make educated decisions, and increase confidence in vaccination overall."

Thirteen other medical organizations have already endorsed ACOG's new vaccine recommendations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Family Physicians, the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health, and the American College of Nurse-Midwives.

AAP President Andrew Racine highlighted the need for such guidance, citing the vulnerability of babies. "Their immune systems are still developing, and in those first months of life, they rely on us—the adults around them—to help keep them safe. Maternal vaccines are one of the most effective ways to protect not only the mother but her newborn as well."

Like ACOG, AAP has also released its own childhood vaccine schedule, which conflicts with the CDC's schedule under Kennedy. And like AAP's, its recommendations have been endorsed by a dozen other medical organizations, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The AAP has led the charge against Kennedy's anti-vaccine agenda, spearheading a lawsuit against changes that Kennedy has made to federal vaccine recommendations and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an influential panel of advisors the CDC relies on to set policy. That litigation, which is ongoing, led to a temporary injunction in March that reversed many changes to CDC's vaccine schedule and blocked most of Kennedy's hand-selected ACIP members.

Read full article

Comments