Es passiert. Daft Punk has entered the LEGO universe. So wie es aussieht nicht als die vor zwei Jahren bei LEGO Ideas eingereichte Idee der ikonischen Pyramid Stage, aber man hat sich auf eine Kooperation geeinigt. Wie auch immer die am Ende aussehen wird.

(Direktlink)

People across America rejected data centers during last night’s midterm election. Proposals related to data centers were explicitly on the ballot in more than 40 races across 13 states. People voted against data centers in 38 of them and counting. Six cities voted to ban data centers outright and 12 put limits on the amount of megawatts such buildings could draw. In addition to specific ballot measures, candidates who supported data centers lost across the country.

One of the most striking repudiations of pro data center politicians was in Texas, where Gregg Abbott lost a bid for a fourth term as governor. Abbott had made Texas a data center friendly place. The state has more than 300 working data centers and there are plans to double that number. “Texas is the epicenter of AI development,” Abbott said in 2025 at a press conference with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.” He went on to accept more than $9 million from data center-related donors.

When public sentiment turned against data centers, Abbott attempted to ride shifting political winds by issuing a “pause” on new projects. The pause wasn’t real. Texas regulators continued to approve data center projects after Abbott’s announcement and only shut down the state’s permitting web portal when 404 Media reported it.

Gina Hinojosa, Texas’s Democratic governor-elect, made Abbott’s stance on data centers a central part of her campaign. Abbott’s words about making Texas a data center-friendly AI state played on TVs and the internet over and over again. He lost by more than 700,000 votes.

Anti-data center candidates overwhelmingly won statewide races across the country. In Burgin, Kansas, mayoral candidate George Hensley lost his bid after voting to approve a hyperscale project—to a write-in candidate. Hensley was the only name on the ballot, and he lost to Joe MonroeTK, who ran an anti-data center write-in campaign. Emporia, Kansas — where police arrested a school teacher for clapping during a data center related city meeting — passed a ban on high impact data centers. In Yukon, Oklahoma the mayor lost a recall election after he supported a hyperscale data center project.

"These midterms sent a clear message — people don't want to see data centers in their backyards,” Michael Whitesides, the deputy communications director for Local Progress, told 404 Media. “Across the country, people do not see the promised benefit of these data centers, and the AI they power, playing out in their daily lives. They're seeing basic goods and services get more expensive while these billionaire backed monstrosities take up space in their community, poison their air, and drive up their utility bills.”

Local Progress is a network of local elected officials. Over the past year, its members have become increasingly focused on data centers as a top political issue. “Last night, we saw local, state, and federal officials who backed data center deals lose their seats,” Whitesides said. He noted that Kim Rooney in Asheville, North Carolina and Amanda Rodrigues in San Marcos, Texas (both members of Local Progress) were elected mayors in their cities after running anti-data center campaigns.

“Big Tech will continue its typical playbook of trying to buy and bully local officials into complying with their demands for more data center development, but our hope is that last night's results are a clear signal to local leaders that they can resist and their community will back them up,” Whitesides said.

American voters in the communities where they’re being built hate data centers. They run up power bills, burn through water, and power Silicon Valley’s  AI apparatus. America rejected data centers last night as both symbols of the big tech oligarchy and a physical manifestation of the future it wants to build. It’s a future Americans seem willing to fight.

Elon Musk, one of the night’s big losers, took a break from a weeks-long posting spree on X as the election results rolled in. Musk spent half a billion dollars on the midterms, $224 of it in Texas, the state where he lives and does a lot of business. The world’s richest man wanted to cover the state in data centers. Those plans aren’t looking good now that Abbott is out and Hinojoa is in.

Musk broke his election day posting silence a little after 1 am. “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” he said on X. Chased off the land by its people, the billionaire looks to the sky.

Das Internet kann immer auch noch ein großartiger Ort für ominöse Ideen und sich daraus ergebenen Projekten sein. So wie das The Restroom Archive, das 3-Scans von öffentlich zugänglichen Toiletten aus aller Welt zeigt, die man so ja nie alle betreten würde. Als Bonus gibt es zu jedem der gezeigten Objekte ein kurze Erläuterung. Toll! Wie auch immer man darauf kommen mag; danke. Da geht er dahin, der Tag.

The Restroom Archive is an ongoing repository of publicly accessible restrooms. Designed and built by Jake Welch, this archive aims to document the diverse qualities of these unique spaces. Everyone uses restrooms, yet as spaces, they are considered taboo and are rarely considered. There is perhaps no space in society that better captures the creativity and impertinence of humans when they know that nobody else is watching.

Ralph Lawson hat einen bisher unveröffentlichten Daft Punk-Mix aus dem Jahr 1997 geteilt, den er restauriert hat, nachdem er ihn auf einem „verschimmelten“ DAT-Tape in einem Lagerraum entdeckt hatte. „Das Band war kaputt und es hat so lange gedauert, bis ich das in Ordnung gebracht habe“, erklärt er und fügt hinzu, dass es „verschimmelt und zerrissen“ gewesen sei, bevor eine Firma aus Bristol bei der Restaurierung geholfen hat. Und weiter: „Ich war so nervös deswegen, weil ich sichergehen wollte, dass es nicht ihr [BBC Radio 1] Essential Mix war, der im März ’97 herauskam“, fährt er fort, bevor er das Band im Video abspielt und einen Freudenschrei ausstößt, als er erkennt, dass es sich tatsächlich um eine Originalaufnahme handelt. Schönes Relikt der 1990er mit dazu noch toller Geschichte.

World of Warcraft: Forever, a re-imaginging of the legendary MMO, comes out Wednesday. The idea is to recapture the feeling of discovery and wonder players had when adventuring across its world for the first time back in 2004.

But 2026 is a very different time. Subreddits dedicated to the game are already overrun with AI-generated addons that rip off longtime developers’ work, and a company that helps players track their damage output tells me it is making changes to its API because of the inundation of AI slop addons.

Warcraft Logs is a long-running site made by Archon.gg that lets players track and share their logs of particular in-game fights so they can analyze them for ways to get better. This works by players downloading Archon’s software which records the data of their fights and uploads them to the site. Warcraft Logs makes its API available for free to other developers. It used to be mostly hobby developers, the CEO of Archon.gg and Warcraft Logs, who goes by Sildri Silentcrest, told me. Now, it’s increasingly commercial projects, which are supposed to ask for permission in order to head off projects that would break Warcraft Logs’ terms of service or wouldn’t be able to scale. 

“There’s been [an] explosion of development,” Silentcrest said. “Now, we’re averaging a[t] least one commercial ask per day. And I’m sure there are more that are commercializing without our approval. One new World of Warcraft analysis company every day! It's hard to keep up.”

At the root of many of these is the explosion of vibe-coded sites and addons. Addons are custom pieces of software a World of Warcraft player loads into their game for a specific benefit. Maybe they want a guide on the most optimal questing path to take, so an addon shows them the way on their minimap; or they want to make big changes to the UI. Some developers make real money from these, either by running Patreons or receiving ad revenue from Curseforge, the main repository for World of Warcraft addons.

If you scrolled any of the World of Warcraft subreddits in the past few weeks, you likely came across someone posting about the new addon they ‘created’. Sometimes the poster discloses they used AI, other times they add an update later after being called out. There’s even a tool for players to use Claude or Codex while they’re in World of Warcraft, so they can keep making addons in the game.

And with the flood, Warcraft Logs is changing its own API. “We're changing our API to better align with the applications we want to enable. We like things that help our community to dive deeper into their data, like tools that give you a deep dive on why you died to a boss or how you can improve on your next attempt. We don’t like things that effectively scrape lots of the data from our site to show surface-level info on their own site. Unfortunately, the ‘scrape and show basic statistics’ type has become much more prevalent,” Silentcrest said. They said Warcraft Logs is also introducing a paid commercial key “so that developers with commercial ambitions can support the foundation for the projects.”

Addons have been a crucial and thriving part of World of Warcraft for essentially the game’s entire life. Developers have spent many, many hours crafting those over the years. Now, AI is ripping those off too.

“People are making rip-offs of my work and copying my ideas,” plusmouse, a well-known addon creator, told me. Plusmouse gave one example: a particular design for nameplates in the game, which are the bars that appear above an enemy’s head. 

“Prior to that releasing I hadn’t seen any addons adopt that style of design, and now, it feels like every AI addon ends up using that idea,” they said. Plusmouse has found in some cases the code is so similar in the AI-generated versions, that they submit copyright complaints to Curseforge. “Sometimes the code is so similar the complaint results in a takedown, other times it’s just different enough to get away with it, despite feeling like my solution. Borrowing ideas is normal in addon development, but doing it on the scale that AI permits isn’t,” they said. Plusmouse said they made some of their GitHub repositories private, which they believe has stopped LLMs from using their code.

Another key part of World of Warcraft: Forever is that the game is letting players engage with it in their own, preferred way.

“If I can be hopeful, the ubiquity of services under development will allow people to pick their own experience,” Silvercrest added. “If they want to take their time and explore in a relaxed manner, then they can. If they have limited time and want to get to endgame content quickly, they can do that too. On the flip side, my worry is that there will be lots of abandonware that will frustrate users with out-of-date information, buggy software, and vulnerabilities.”

Silvercrest said staff at Warcraft Logs “feel pressure to do more,” and the site has used some AI itself for research and some code review. “We have a small team. People are using our API to vibecode features that are on our own to do list. Should we take those features off our list? Or should we bite the bullet and lean into AI tools ourselves?”  

They added, “Two years ago, say we had 200 developers using our API and two or three or four were being abusive. Today, 10,000 developers are using our API and 1,000 are being abusive. The ratio has changed, and that really feels bad. It used [to] be developers respecting other developers’ hard work. I'm not sure what’s changed. Is it that Claude doesn’t read the ToS? Or is it that the new developers don’t care as much as the old? We seriously love some of the tools that this coding accessibility has enabled, but policing API use has become a struggle.”

A vibe-coded site that scraped Archive of Our Own (AO3) fanfiction works, reuploaded them and charged for audiobook versions is down now after the creator said they received over 2,000 takedown requests from authors in the single day it was up.

ao3.life, a website that sprung up following last week’s announced weeks-long outage of fanfiction repository AO3, scraped the internet for works to populate the site using “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines were scraping the internet for all drives, scrapes, and sources,” the site’s creator, named Ganesh, wrote on a page apologizing for the entire project. AO3.life went down on Monday evening following widespread backlash from readers and authors on social media. 

Before it went down, the ao3.life homepage said, “AO3, saved before it slips away. Search every fandom, ship and trope. Read it here, keep the EPUB, or let it read to you when your eyes get tired.” 

AO3 went down on Thursday following a security incident, according to the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which owns the repository. The site is expected to be down for as long as four weeks. OTW says no data has been lost. Readers and authors are generally distraught, unable to access the site at all for potentially a month. AO3 hosts nearly 18.5 million works.

ao3.life offered works as EPUBs for reading on e-readers, and as AI-generated audiobooks that Ganesh charged for after the first three minutes. They claimed on a page titled “Authors get paid here” that authors would get 91% of the profits, with AO3.life getting 9% to cover “narration and processing” costs. “Your earnings wait for you. You don't need an account here to earn. We hold your share indefinitely until you collect it, however long that takes,” the site said. 

On AO3, authors can “archive lock” their works, making them visible only to logged-in users, which keeps AI bots like this one from scraping them and also gives better control over how far a work spreads or whether it breaks the containment of the repository’s intended audience. Of course, authors couldn’t access AO3 while it was down to lock their works if they were publicly available before the outage.

But some authors reported the archive lock not mattering. “I had everything archive locked on ao3 and it's still all here and I as the author have 0 control over any of my fics on there,” one AO3 author posted on Bluesky.

ao3.life said at the bottom of the homepage that authors could request their works be removed from the site: ”Every work belongs to its author; if one is yours and you want it gone, email legal@ao3.life and it goes.” Proving that you’re the author of the work to ao3.life required authors “leave a note on your AO3 profile so we can confirm it's you,” the site said. But how authors could do that while AO3 was — and still is — completely down is a mystery. 

A lot of authors clearly used the legal complaints email. “In the time this site has been up, I’ve facilitated over 2,000 takedown requests. It was never my intention to hurt so many authors - and I’m truly sorry to you all. There’s no way to show my sorry [sic] better than taking this site down,” Ganesh wrote. “Why did I charge for AI Slop audiobooks? I doubt anyone knows how expensive it is to run a server like this, especially with the amount of usage this site got. It had 126,592 unique users within 24 hours of going up, and had terabytes of bandwidth in usage. In an attempt to keep the site up, I thought audiobooks were a good option. I sold like 11 audiobooks, if it’s any consolation.”

Fanfiction has become a target of AI scraping, repackaging and reselling in recent years. In 2024, I reported on how Etsy sellers turn free fanfiction into printed and bound physical books, then list them for sale for as much as $100 a book.  

With AO3 down and fans scrambling to find ways to keep consuming the works they miss, some people have started sharing links to Google Drives on Reddit and Discord of works they’d downloaded from the site previously, even if they aren’t the original authors of those works. This has alarmed and angered a lot of writers; whether authors have the right to profit from their works depends on the content and their use of existing intellectual property. Fanfic is typically considered fair use — I can write a VeggieTales Bob and Larry fic without getting sued by Universal Pictures if it’s sufficiently transformative, for example — but selling it could draw the ire of their lawyers, and a potential lawsuit even if I happened to ultimately win it. Authors on AO3 are prohibited by the platform from monetizing their works or linking to payment platforms. 

“It was never and is not my intention to hurt authors, and I hope every subequent [sic] action I’ve taken is representative of that,” Ganesh said. “From an attempt at revenue sharing, to responding to takedown requests as fast as I could, to taking down the site as a whole.” They signed the note: “Yours truly, a 17 year old from India that thought they were doing something good.”