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I Believe in one God, and It's Not a Computer

Mother Jones

How the data center boom plunged one small Pennsylvania town into chaos. Valley View Estates is set to be surrounded by data centers. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. "I don't like to see anyone upset," said Nick Farris of Provident Real Estate Advisors. He was sitting in the front of a crowd of roughly 150 inside Valley View High School's auditorium in Archbald, a town of about 7,500, huddled between two mountain ranges in Pennsylvania's Lackawanna Valley. Farris was there to represent the developer for Project Scott, one of many data center campuses coming to town. "I think that this is the best data center site in this area of the country, by far." The audience had been fairly quiet, bundled in thick coats against the late January cold. But as Farris spoke about data centers as a boon for communities, they began to laugh, drawing a rebuke from town officials. "What about the children?" someone shouted from the crowd. The children were watching from the walls; long banners of Valley View Performing Arts students hanging around the auditorium like championship pennants. Project Scott and four other data facilities will sit just a few thousand feet from the middle and high schools. He was referring to Lockheed Martin's 350,000-square-foot Missiles and Fire Control facility directly next to the high school, parts of which are highly contaminated . "That sucks too!" another attendee yelled back.


L.A. teachers union widely expected to announce strike date at massive Wednesday rally

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. L.A. teachers union widely expected to announce strike date at massive Wednesday rally Members of the largest unions representing teachers and nonteachers participate in joint rally at Grand Park in March 2023. The scene will be repeated on Wednesday, with union members once again on the verge of a strike. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .


Two Literal Crypto Bros Built a Real Estate Empire. Then the Homes Started to Fall Apart

WIRED

Two Literal Crypto Bros Built a Real Estate Empire. In 2019, two Canadian brothers blew into Detroit with an irresistible pitch: For $50, almost anyone could become a property owner. When houses decayed and the city intervened, the blame games began. A fire broke out at 10410 Cadieux in March 2025, burning a hole in the roof. The smell hit me first: damp brick, stagnant water, mold, and bleach. I was partway down a flight of wooden stairs that led to the basement of a 1920s duplex in east Detroit, Michigan. Leading the way was Cornell Dorris, a tenant in the building for nearly a decade. Dorris is in his early forties, has two daughters who visit on weekends, and makes a living smoking meat and cooking for events. As my eyes adjusted, I made out rodent droppings and a black puddle that spread across the basement floor. "Anytime it rains, the water comes down," Dorris said. The air was unnaturally heavy, and I felt a nagging urge to leave. Dorris doesn't have a typical landlord. Almost four years ago, his building was acquired by a startup called RealToken, or RealT.


Canadian snowbirds are still unhappy with Trump. And Palm Springs is feeling the chill

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Canadian snowbirds are still unhappy with Trump. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Palm Springs relies heavily on Canadian tourists, who are declining to travel to the U.S. or shortening their stays because of Trump. The number of Canadian visitors to California plummeted more than 18% in 2025 compared with the year prior.




AI risk is dominating conference calls as investors dump stocks

The Japan Times

In what's turning out to be a great quarter for corporate earnings growth, company executives and investors alike are focused on something else entirely: the threat from artificial intelligence. Mentions of AI disruption on management calls almost doubled compared to the previous quarter, an analysis of transcripts shows. While the technology hasn't yet noticeably reduced earnings estimates, investors aren't waiting around and instead are selling any company perceived to be at risk. Last week, commercial real estate company CBRE Group published better-than-expected earnings. In a call with analysts following the results, its chief executive officer said it's possible AI will reduce demand for office space in the long term. The comments sparked a 20% selloff in the stock over two days.


Zillow Has Gone Wild--for AI

WIRED

As the housing market stalls, Zillow's CEO sees AI as "an ingredient rather than a threat" that can both help the company protect its turf and reinvent how people search for homes. This will not be a banner year for the real estate app Zillow. "We describe the home market as bouncing along the bottom," CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in our conversation this week. Last year was dismal for the real estate market, and he expects things to improve only marginally in 2026. "The way to think about it is that there were 4.1 million existing homes sold last year--a normal market is 5.5 to 6 million," Wacksman says.


Share values of property services firms tumble over fears of AI disruption

The Guardian

The share declines were sparked by AI firms such as Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, releasing new tools. The share declines were sparked by AI firms such as Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, releasing new tools. But, after second day of Wall Street falls, analysts say sell-off'may overstate AI's immediate risk to complex deal-making' Shares in commercial property services companies have tumbled, in the latest sell-off driven by fears over disruption from artificial intelligence. After steep declines on Wall Street, European stocks in the sector were hit on Thursday. The estate agent Savills' shares fell 7.5% in London, while the serviced office provider International Workplace Group, which owns the Regus brand, lost 9%.


PuzzleFusion: Unleashing the Power of Diffusion Models for Spatial Puzzle Solving

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper presents an end-to-end neural architecture based on Diffusion Models for spatial puzzle solving, particularly jigsaw puzzle and room arrangement tasks. In the latter task, for instance, the proposed system takes a set of room layouts as polygonal curves in the top-down view and aligns the room layout pieces by estimating their 2D translations and rotations, akin to solving the jigsaw puzzle of room layouts. A surprising discovery of the paper is that the simple use of a Diffusion Model effectively solves these challenging spatial puzzle tasks as a conditional generation process. To enable learning of an end-to-end neural system, the paper introduces new datasets with ground-truth arrangements: 1) 2D V oronoi jigsaw dataset, a synthetic one where pieces are generated by V oronoi diagram of 2D pointset; and 2) MagicPlan dataset, a real one offered by MagicPlan from its production pipeline, where pieces are room layouts constructed by augmented reality App by real-estate consumers. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms the competing methods by significant margins in all the tasks. We have provided code and data here .