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Trump says data center opponents will end up 'backwards and poor,' claims China benefits from backlash

President Trump posted on Truth Social criticizing the growing local opposition to AI data center construction across the U.S., arguing that communities rejecting these projects are choosing poverty and stagnation over prosperity. He also claimed that China benefits from the anti-data-center sentiment spreading through American towns and cities.

Verizon Launches $45 Simplicity Plan, Undercutting myPlan on 5G Access

Verizon has introduced a new unlimited plan called Simplicity, priced at $45 a month with autopay, or $30 for customers who switch their number to Verizon. The plan includes unlimited data, 10GB of hotspot data, Canada and Mexico roaming, satellite texting, and unrestricted access to 5G Ultra Wideband speeds, with optional add-on bundles for streaming and other perks sold separately.

KIT and Tsukuba researchers build heat-driven solid-state cooler with no electric motor

Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Tsukuba built a solid-state cooling prototype that uses a shape-memory titanium-nickel film to convert heat directly into the mechanical motion needed to drive elastocaloric cooling, replacing the usual electric actuator. In tests, heating the actuator film to 86°C produced a 4.0 K temperature difference across the cooling device, and swapping in an external 130°C heat source still yielded a 2.2 K span, showing waste heat alone can power the cycle.

YC-backed Hebbian Robotics launches open-source HFlow SDK for robotics data pipelines

Hebbian Robotics, part of YC's Summer 2026 batch, has released HFlow, an open source SDK designed to manage large-scale multimodal data pipelines for robotics and physical AI. The tool automates orchestration, versioning, quality checks, and provenance tracking for datasets combining video, sensor state, and action data, using MCAP as its standard input/output format. The project is currently pre-v1 but functional end-to-end for local use.

Blog post questions how platforms like Netflix misread simple 'thumbs up' feedback

Writer Eric Bailey proposed that streaming and rating systems need richer feedback options beyond binary likes, since a single 'thumbs up' can't capture reactions like guilty pleasure viewing or accidental clicks. The piece argues this reductive feedback gets treated as objective data by companies making product decisions, even though users know firsthand how misleading such signals are about their own experience.

Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 adds data logging viewer for Private Compute Core

Google's Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 introduces a new 'Data logging' section inside Privacy Dashboard that lets users monitor data leaving the Private Compute Core, the isolated sandbox behind features like Live Caption and Smart Reply. Users can toggle logging on or off, choose between a limited three-day/100MB mode and a more exhaustive 12-hour/100MB detailed mode, and download or delete the resulting log files.

Sam Altman Admits Public Backlash Against Data Centers Is Rattling AI Industry

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in a Time interview that public sentiment has turned sharply against AI and the data centers powering it. Communities nationwide are protesting roughly $130 billion in data center construction, citing strained water supplies, rising living costs and pollution, forming a bipartisan opposition movement. Altman also revealed he's faced personal threats, including a molotov cocktail thrown at his home and a shooting, linked to anti-AI safety activism.

SlideOps ties auto-generated slide decks to source code, flags drift

SlideOps is a new pair of Agent Skills for Claude Code and compatible coding assistants that generates presentation slides directly from a codebase, then tracks the source each slide came from. When the underlying code changes, it detects which slides no longer match reality and rebuilds only those, rather than the whole deck. It installs via a two-line Claude Code marketplace command or a git clone plus install script for Codex, Copilot CLI, and OpenCode.

12TB Steam2 server dump exposes unreleased Valve and third-party game data

A 12-terabyte archive of data from Valve's old Steam2 content servers, used between 2003 and 2013, has surfaced via BitTorrent in an incident dubbed the 'Teraleak.' The trove reportedly contains unreleased builds and prototypes from Valve and other developers, including early Portal 2 prototypes and a Sonic the Hedgehog 4 build, and appears to have been assembled from publicly accessible endpoints rather than a hack.

File servers remain widely used; experts outline security best practices for managing them

Despite years of predicted cloud dominance, many organizations still run on-premises file servers alongside SaaS tools, citing cost control, data ownership and regulatory concerns. To keep these hybrid environments secure, administrators are advised to follow strict access governance rules, starting with never granting permissions directly to individual user accounts.

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