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Amazon is drawing scrutiny tonight over how it broke ground on a data center in Gilroy, California, without a public comment period. The company quietly leveraged forty-five-year-old zoning rules to sidestep community review, leaving residents with no formal window to weigh in. It's a reminder that the infrastructure race for AI capacity is increasingly running ahead of civic process.
On the subject of AI, a new fluency study of eighteen hundred professionals reveals a striking gap in self-awareness. The least skilled users overestimated their abilities by forty points, while the most skilled underestimated theirs by twenty-seven — a sixty-seven point Dunning-Kruger spread. Perhaps more surprising, product managers outscored engineers, suggesting applied judgment matters as much as technical knowledge.
And in a story that captures the unintended consequences of the AI boom, Gentoo's bug tracking system was forced offline after AI scraper bots overwhelmed its servers. A volunteer-maintained open source project, essentially crushed under the weight of automated data harvesting. The irony is sharp — tools built to learn from the web quietly breaking the communities that built it.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
