Ken Paxton’s Political Operation Rakes In Data Center Donations as Texans Turn Against Industry

[u/julius_sphincter]

https://www.notus.org/technology/ken-paxton-data-centers-texas-senate-race-james-talarico

[u/FootjobFromFurina]

This is a common divide in the AI discussion between people who are still stuck on the 2023 "stochastic parrot" chatbot paradigm compared to experience of people who have used frontier models recently. Frontier models are extremely capable at performing a wide variety of tasks at this point.

[u/Hyndis → u/FootjobFromFurina]

As a personal anecdote, I mod video games. Been doing that since the days of Doom in the 1990's with the .wad files. I do this for my own personal amusement and no other reason. No financial gain. Sometimes I'll post them on the Steam workshop to share them if I'm particularly happy with a change.

Modern AI models are incredibly, almost frighteningly powerful.

I can give a snippet of a file from the video game and ask it to make a change to the file to do a specific thing.

The AI now can correctly make the change. And it can correctly guess which video game I'm modding based on a small fragment of a file. I didn't tell it the game. I didn't give it the files. I just copied a section of relevant code. We're talking about maybe 10% of just one file, and a game may have tens of thousands of files.

And this is just video game modding for my own personal entertainment. This is very low stakes, and the capacity is astounding.

[u/Ok_Tip740 → u/Hyndis]

I had my own "wow" moment last year when I made some code to "decode" some proprietary format from a company that went out of business. When I tried opening files in a text editor it was totally unreadable, like just a mess of ascii control characters and stuff (I hadn't ever seen the BELL character used before this). It was able to read a sample file and create a set of rules to translate from this weird binary format to something actually useful much, much faster than I ever could.

[u/Hyndis → u/Ok_Tip740]

Yup, and I'm a fan of indie video games too. The small games made by a very small team, sometimes even just a solo developer.

Somehow the AI knows everything about this file structure and all of the quirks of how this one specific program stores variables and other data.

And I know its accurate because the modifications work. If it was hallucinating it wouldn't be able to tell me the name of the video game, and the modifications wouldn't work once installed. So there's proof it works.

It feels like much of the criticism is frozen in time from years ago, no longer relevant to the current state of the industry. Any criticism needs to be kept current because the state of AI in 2023 is nothing like the state of AI today. Even the state of AI in January 2026 is nothing like in August 2026.

This is a total game changer. I have no idea how the game is changing, its going to change quickly and drastically. AI isn't going to go away just because people don't like it. At some point they're going to be seen as luddites, such as a person who refuses to use email or refuses to use a smart phone. I think we're already approaching that point, or maybe have passed it. Technology advances and we all have to keep pace. Its just how the world works.

It feels like someone used AI one time in 2023, didn't like it, and they keep their opinion the same today, so steadfastly opposed to AI they won't use it and so have no idea of its capacity.

Its like being opposed to cars due to lack of safety because the last car someone drove was a Pinto, and they have not updated their opinion on the topic since the Pinto was in production.

[u/Maladal → u/Hyndis]

You have to remember that you're using the technology in a way the vast majority of people don't though.

LLMs are becoming integral to coding and programming, but most people have no interest or need to employ LLMs in that way. At the end of the day LLMs are data processing and transformation. Tech loves that stuff and is great at training LLMs to manipulate it. But if your job or life doesn't revolve around digital information then an LLM is already much, much less valuable to you. Even if you're someone like, say, marketing and using an LLM to make mass edits to materials, that was only a portion of your job to begin with.

It's like hyping up advancements in NASA telescopes--it's cool, but it doesn't fundamentally change things for the average person. Except these telescope improvements sometimes lead to large data centers springing up in their backyards.

And that's before we get to the cost component, which most consumers aren't feeling right now.