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The tension around AI data centers is escalating well beyond zoning disputes. In Marshall, Michigan, a city council passed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction, and within ten days, council members received credible death threats tied to the decision. In the three-hundred-person town of Salix, Iowa, officials postponed a similar vote after threatening posts circulated on Facebook. More than five hundred towns across the country have now moved to restrict these builds, and what began as a land-use conversation has turned into something far more alarming for local democracy.
Shifting to something considerably less grim, a hardware enthusiast known as TrashBench has been taking a grinder to old Nvidia graphics cards and bolting on full-sized CPU coolers with RGB fans. The results are genuinely impressive — temperatures on the GTX ten-eighty Ti dropped by up to thirty-two degrees Celsius, power draw fell by thirty watts, and frame rates climbed roughly nine percent. It is the kind of obsessive, impractical tinkering that reminds you why people fell in love with PC hardware in the first place.
And finally, Maxell is reviving its classic nineteen-seventies ferric cassette tape formula in a collaboration with Japanese retailer Disk Union. The new UD-sixty-U tapes are aimed squarely at nostalgic collectors, with the press release noting that exchanging cassette tapes was once how hobbyists connected before the digital age made everything frictionless. Sometimes the old ways just feel worth preserving.
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