Obey Giant partnered with Unite in Advance on Art for Freedom, a multi-piece art series interpreting three First Amendment freedoms, speech, press, and assembly, and their role in upholding our democracy.
As America recognizes its 250th anniversary, the series uses bold imagery and public participation to give people a moment to connect these freedoms to their own experience, and spark conversation and civic engagement around the freedoms that allow communities to exercise their rights. The art is now available to download at artforfreedom.org and we invite you to join us in posting from June 22 through July 20.
These three original works each honor a First Amendment freedom. Download a poster, share across your channels, and add your voice.
Created in recognition of America’s 250th anniversary, this series examines the enduring significance of the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly in a democratic society, drawing on both national symbols and contemporary civic themes to highlight the people who exercise these rights every day, and at a moment when many Americans feel divided from one another and disconnected from public institutions, the series uses art as a unifying force, inviting audiences to consider how these freedoms connect us, how they shape our shared future, and why each generation has a responsibility to uphold them.
PM’s demise after landslide victory two years ago points to an increasingly volatile and impatient electorate
Historians will puzzle over this one. Of the six prime ministers that have led Britain over the last decade, with a seventh now on the way, it will be the fall of Keir Starmer that will most perplex the political analysts of the future.
They will ponder a man who won a landslide victory in July 2024 only to be pushed out less than two years later, having started no illegal wars, having triggered no grave economic crises, having been accused of no scandalous act of corruption.
DE BILT (ANP) - Vanaf woensdag 12.00 uur geldt in het midden en zuiden van Nederland de waarschuwing code oranje vanwege extreme hitte, meldt het KNMI. De waarschuwing geldt voorlopig voor meerdere dagen. In die periode worden dagelijks temperaturen boven de 34 graden verwacht.
Het is de twaalfde keer dit jaar dat het KNMI waarschuwing code oranje heeft afgegeven. Dat is een record. In 2010 werd elf keer code oranje afgegeven.
Google Cloud Summit came to London last week, and we took the opportunity to sit down with database execs Sailesh Krishnamurthy (VP engineering) and Yasmeen Ahmad (product executive Agentic Data Cloud). The event was wall-to-wall agentic AI, and true to the theme, Ahmad told us that "we're putting agents at the center ... with the goal that humans are not going to be using data platforms in the next three to five years. It’s going to be humans orchestrating agents, and agents actually doing the work." One of the key AI-driven changes, Krishnamurthy said, is that when retrieving data "it’s not so much about getting the exact results, but getting the best results." For developers skilled in crafting SQL queries that get precise results in the most efficient way, the notion of inexact queries that go through some sort of non-deterministic and compute-expensive parsing may seem like a step backwards. "If you have exact questions, you need to be able to provide exact answers," Krishnamurthy told us. "But I think inexact questions are what people are also going to expect. When you think about agentic workloads and operational databases, you want to be able to ask more flexible questions." An example might be a natural language query that takes into account context, such as previous interactions. Krishnamurthy described "AI native infrastructure," including vector indexing, text indexing, and graph technology where "you combine structured and unstructured data, you have to be operating in terms of inexact results and data quality." The company is also investing in the "knowledge catalog," formerly called Dataplex, which is enterprise search now also treated as context for LLMs (large language models). Knowledge catalog aggregates organization data across multiple sources including structured and unstructured sources. Krishnamurthy said that exact SQL queries are not going away, and that sometimes a "fuzzy question in natural language" might generate an SQL query with exact results. How do you verify that AI-generated SQL is producing the results you want? “The answer is the same, not just about SQL, but about many AI-related things," said Krishnamurthy. “The answer is a set of evals you have to maintain ... you might start with something where some results work well and some don’t. And then you have to keep iterating on your blueprints and other pieces of context until your eval set is 100 percent working well." By eval set, Krishnamurthy means "a set of questions that are representative tests that users may have, and what is the right query that is generated associated with it, and then a determination of is this query, is this answer correct or not?" Google SQL as used in its distributed Spanner database, PostgreSQL-compatible AlloyDB, and in the BigQuery data warehouse engine now has AI functions such as AI.IF, which evaluates a condition described in natural language and returns true or false. The prompt value is evaluated using a Gemini LLM; and could return an error or null if the model fails such as when unavailable or out of quota. The inefficiency of functions like AI.IF is a problem, but there are possible solutions. One is the idea of proxy models, which Krishnamurthy described as "a tiny model in the database." A proxy model is trained on the fly, based on a small sample of the data. The query engine evaluates the results from the proxy model, and if good enough, uses it for inference in place of a call to the LLM. According to a paper on the subject proxy models "consume about 400x less tokens, and the latency goes down by 30x-100x." We asked Ahmad why she believes humans will soon not interact directly with Google’s data platform. The answer, she said, is based on the idea of intent-driven engineering. "Three years ago everyone was doing prompt training classes. Really, these models were co-pilots or assistants. Now these models are doing multi-step execution, parallel execution, handling complexity. So you can define an intent, a goal, an outcome, and the model will figure out the steps to get there." According to Ahmad, humans will act as orchestrators, thinking about business outcomes, and models will do "the hard graft of figuring out the low-level data wrangling." She said that today’s staff need to be skilled not so much in prompt engineering, but rather using AI for spec-driven development. "The focus for the human is getting to the right plan and iterating with the model on what is the right way to think about the problem." In business intelligence, she said, companies will move away from dashboards because they only "serve the first layer of predictable questions." In their place will be "conversational analytics for business users." She believes that unwelcome aspects of generative AI, such as hallucinations and prompt injections, are mitigated by improved context, such as from Knowledge Catalog. "I have customers who have got 90 percent plus accuracy with conversational analytics, but that was not the case 18 months ago when the models would get one out of every two questions wrong because they would not have that context." A problem here is that even over 90 percent accuracy is not good enough if you are, for example, a customer of a company with heavy AI adoption confronted with a blocked transaction or other rejection because of an inaccurate response. Another issue is that injecting AI into every interaction means paying for tokens on top of the base compute and storage resources traditionally consumed by cloud database platforms. Higher productivity and reduced staff costs may more than compensate, but this cannot be taken for granted, particularly as reducing the skill barrier with features like conversational analytics also tends to increase usage. Giant cloud providers like Google though have plenty to gain. AI, Krishamurthy told us, is driving growth in data storage as well as token usage. He described "a huge overall growth in the business because everyone needs data … Anthropic, for example, rely on BigTable to store all their prompt information. They have other workloads too which are not public." Two metrics he is permitted to talk to us about, he said, are that Spanner "now runs 7 ½ billion queries per second at the peak … a year back Spanner might have been 5 billion queries per second." Spanner, he said, "has about 23 exabytes of data. It’s the same with BigTable, roughly 7 billion queries per second and double-digit exabytes." Models make more queries, he said. "Instead of taking the user request and just sending one query, one pattern I’ve seen is a model will send five different queries … it’s hard to say exactly what is happening because the models are trying different things."®
Wij kennen minister Boekholt-O'Sullivan (D66) van Volkshuisvesting hier inmiddels van het verzinnen van een raar verhaal over douchemuntjes, erover liegen dat ze het ooit gehad heeft over die douchemuntjes, en van op camera HELEMAAL NIKS zeggen als haar een normale vraag wordt gesteld. Maar klokkenluider Victor van Wulfen, die kent minister Boekholt-O'Sullivan al veeeeeel langer. Zij was namelijk de baas op vliegbasis Eindhoven toen Van Wulfen met nep-psychologische rapporten werd weggepest omdat hij te kritisch was. In bananenrepubliek Nederland werd Boekholt-O'Sullivan vervolgend opgevolgd door Harold Boekholt, wat niet haar broer is maar haar echtgenoot. Van Wulfen strijdt nog steeds voor eerherstel en wil onder meer inzicht in de 1700 (!) mails die Boekholt over hem verzameld zou hebben. Vandaag vraagt DNA-Kamerlid Tamara ten Hove aan minister Yesilgöz om antwoord op allemaal hele logische vragen (zie video hierboven), maar zij kan die allemaal niet geven, naar eigen zeggen omdat de zaak onder de rechter ligt (zie video hieronder). JA MAAR WIE ZIJN SCHULD IS DAT YESILGÖZ, VRAAG DAT EENS AAN JE COLLEGA OP VOLKSHUISVESTING.
Board members of a small township in Michigan agreed to “fight to our very last breath” against an AI data center planned in their community. America’s nuclear scientists and the University of Michigan want to build a massive data center in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan. If built, the data center will, among other things, run simulations to help America build nuclear weapons.
The residents of Ypsilanti Township overwhelmingly oppose the construction of the data center and voiced their opposition to the computer warehouse during a public board meeting on June 16. In a show of support that’s often rare from local leaders in communities with data centers, Ypsilanti Township’s board vowed to fight UofM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is partnering with the university, with everything they had.
Throughout most of the three hour board meeting, a photograph from a data center groundbreaking in nearby Saline Township was projected onto a wall behind the board. The photo showed a grinning Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer standing in line with Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk. It was taken at the June 1 groundbreaking of an Oracle and OpenAI data center in nearby Saline Township, one of several Stargate projects. Saline Township is a community of only 2,300 people and the fight against the data center was so contentious that the Township treasurer resigned in tears during a public meeting in May.
During the groundbreaking, a videographer caught Whitmer talking with Magouyrk. In the video Whitmer appeared to tell the billionaire, “We’re used to people saying no, and doing it anyway.” Whitmer’s office has officially denied she said that, but many of the residents of Michigan—including the people of Ypsilanti Township—believe she did.
Governor Whitmer had a hot mic moment at the Saline Data Center groundbreaking, where she tells Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk, “We’re used to people saying f*ck no, and doing it anyway.” I’m old enough to remember when she doxxed Marshall constituents who opposed her BlueOval project. pic.twitter.com/PRFnjGY5l9
Cilla Cresswell shot the video of Whitmer and was present at the Ypsilanti Township board meeting on Tuesday. “On June 1 I was standing just to the left, right there,” Creswell said, referring to the photo that loomed behind the board during the meeting. “I was there. I recorded that clip [… ] I was right there. And they want to say it’s fake, but I just want to let you guys know it’s real. You can play it on my camera.”
Members of the board and the community referenced the photograph often during the meeting. “You have people in that photograph worth billions of dollars. Not just millions, we’re talking trillions. Soon to be trillionaires. Yet this state, in its zeal to become the data capital of the country, has extended unprecedented tax credits to the richest corporations in the world,” Douglas Winters, a lawyer representing Ypsilanti Township, said in the meeting.
“Having to stare at this picture during this meeting has my blood boiling,” said Ypsi resident Laura Witowski. “I did not realize how emotional I would be. The waste of space. The complete lack of regard for humans and animals and for what?”
During the hours of community comments, residents stepped forward to voice complaints that have now become common about data centers in America. The people of Ypsilanti Township worried about the rising cost of electricity, how much water the building will use, and how noisy the data center would be once finished.
They also called on the Township board to do everything in their power to stop it from even being built. “Put yourselves on the line. Those people will listen to you better than they will listen to us. Please put yourselves, your jobs, and your comfort on the line to stop this for us,” Ypsi resident Jane Wolf said. “Get creative. Tear up the road. Block the road. Break the law. Do whatever you need to do for us. You will be remembered better in history for the job that you did if you can get creative and really put yourselves out there.”
Jill Warren, the wife of a Methodist pastor, suggested residents brush up on the OSS’ Simple Sabotage Field Manual. “Simply slow things down bureaucratically," she said. “Make sure we block where we can. Use very slow agendas and response times and do, within your power, the work that you are entitled to do. For those who aren’t familiar with it, please look up the Simple Sabotage Field Manual and use it in your own lives of action as well [...] they may not care about us, but we care about us and we’re here and we’ll continue to be here and support the work that you’re doing on our behalf.”
Alyssa, an Ypsilanti resident, cited long passages from John Hershey’s Hiroshima—a 1946 book that focused on the victims of the first atomic bombing. “We don’t need simulations to know what a nuclear strike looks like,” she said. “We have pictures, videos, and audio of what happens. We know what it does to bodies. We know what it does to children and what it does to life.”
Board supervisor Brend Stumbo vowed to fight. “This is going to harm our community in our future. We will fight to our very last breath, but we need help. And we need it from the people who have the power to stop things,” she said.
Stumbo explained that, early on, she and other members of the board were ignorant about data centers and that she was grateful to the Township’s residents for informing her. “Now we know and we’re thankful for the residents and non-residents that came to our meetings early and told us, ‘don’t trust UofM,’” she said. “We do not love nor do we appreciate what the board or regents is doing to our community. It needs to stop. And everyone that showed up here today, we greatly appreciate it and we will keep going, like everyone has said, by doing it together […] I will stand with you. I will fight with you. And I know this entire board and our Township attorney will as well. So let’s keep doing it together.”
The Township has, so far, made good on its word and it’s been creative in its opposition. In April, the board voted to institute a 365 day moratorium on supplying water to data centers so it could conduct a scientific study into how hyper scale data centers might affect the community water supply. In response, UofM threatened to sue and claimed that withholding water from an AI data center meant to power nuclear weapons research was unlawful discrimination.
