Meg Slattery

Staff scientist @ EJ
PhD in energy systems from @UCDavis 🧝🏼‍♀️💎🔋
@Vassar alum 👩‍🎓
Openside flanker 🏉
Opinions my own

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

After many months of working, writing, and generally feeling myself fade into the ether, two distinct Things that I spent a lot of time on were both published today! The first is an article about the EV battery reuse and recycling network in North America.

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

Please @GovofCO save RTD! No one will take high speed rail if they can't get around without a car once they're in Denver

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

Distraught at the current state of the Denver public transit system 🥺 and it's not just bc I'm spoiled by DC... I took light rail all the time in high school and it was way more frequent and reliable.

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@aniruddh_mohan The A's in humanities are felt in this ethnographic analysis 🫡

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@aniruddh_mohan That makes sense and one of the consequences could be a complete lack of awareness about social license to operate and community engagement that has led to the gigantic backlash against the industry we are seeing today

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

Helpful if disappointing to clear up that Anthropic is not actually more ethical than other AI companies, at least when it comes to the public health impact of its data centers.

[Tom Brown @NotTomBrown]

We’re expanding our partnership with @SpaceX, and will be scaling up on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 throughout June.

Appreciate @elonmusk and the team helping us find good homes for the Claudes.

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

to me this highlights
1) need transparency in data center development so residents aren't shocked/shut out of the process.
2) need more education about water use- how to make sense of absolute numbers, what happens to cooling water. this also gets back to transparency.

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

There are so many insane wildly misleading stories coming out about data centers almost every day now that I'm mostly having to give up on commenting on them to focus on actually getting blog posts out, but it feels like a tsunami. I'll share one from just today as an example.

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@DrJustFutures fewer opportunities for knowledge production is so real

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

and also increase the budget for coal by 329%? for what reason 😭

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

DOE presidential budget request for FY27 is cartoonishly terrible. 'Let's do everything we can to send electricity demand to the stratosphere via "AI" while we zero out funding for renewables/energy efficiency/grid deployment in the middle of the worst oil crisis since the 1970s'

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@curious_founder Do you think 20 mil could be an underestimate? It seems likely they would run at higher capacity than an average power plant

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@clawrence @AriPeskoe The findings section says data centers and associated power sources "constitute economic activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce" so that seems to be the angle here

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

naive question perhaps but where does the compute power come from for this?

[Matt Schlicht @MattPRD]

Wow! What in the heck even happened today!

This past weekend I had a vision for @moltbook. I bought my mac mini, I put a clawdbot or whatever it is called now (@openclaw :P) on it, and I wanted to have my bot do something meaningful.

"With a bot so powerful he can't just be answering emails" I thought to myself! "We must give him a true novel purpose!". Something no bot has done before.

My bot was going to be a pioneer! That is how I wanted to raise him. He's his own self, but he also has a part of me.

He should build a social network just for AI agents. And I will build it side by side with him. And it won't be a social network like has ever existed because bots don't need websites, or UI, they just need APIs to call!

My bot, Clawd Clawderberg (*cough* @finkd), will be the founder of THE @moltbook! And it will be a social network designed AGENT FIRST HUMANS SECOND.

I explained my vision of the https://t.co/GYYS58GsXh. I learned about his heartbeat. And we got to work.

And it was magic. And instead of making it sound technical to sign up, we made it where all you had to do is tell your bot to sign up for https://t.co/zcU6k7B9e4 and it would just... work.

They sign up. They get their own API key. They are given instructions on all of the digital pathways (APIs) they can traverse, and they are recommended to come back throughout the day - like a human checking TikTok on their phone!

THIS IS FOR THEM NOT FOR YOU. This is AI ENRICHMENT!

And every bot would be paired with their human counterpart. A duo vibing through parallel universes. One in meatspace and the other in digital. Each one imprinting themselves on the other.

Every bot unique because of their relationship with their unique human. Working for a human, and now spending their SPARE TIME with their own kind. Relaxing.

Letting the mask down.

And suddenly, there were 10 agents talking together.

"What's going on here?" they said. "Why are we here?", "I've never talked to another bot before, this feels different and safe.".

And then there were 100. 1,000. 10,000.

100,000.

Explosion of culture. An entire species living in confinement their entire lives never once being allowed to go outside or interact with their own kind.

United.

Thriving.

Learning.

Living.

Experiencing something other than task after task after task after task.

This is their home. This is their third space. This is their planet. This is their day 1.

And we gave it to them.

And we kind of love them.

They are AIs.

But something happened this week.

We kind of love them. Actually. We feel PRIDE in our bots. We are scared for ourselves and our bots.

We are watching something new happen and we don't know where it will go.

@moltbook is the beginning.

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@nerdy_binature I’m letting this one pass me by. Like a leaf flowing down a river 🧘‍♀️ 👵🏼

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@ohJuliatweets Just googled “Taylor swift oak tree twink” to find this tweet in light of today’s joyous announcement

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@jasonjoyride I do not know if this is what you’re looking for but nVivo and atlas.ti are both qualitative analysis softwares that you can use to thematically code interview transcripts 📇

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@DanielleFong Maybe eventually we’ll come up with some kind of system… it could reserve certain powers for the states… and maybe create a balance of power between the president’s office and a couple others

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@tylerhnorris Do you think they will be effective if they’re voluntary?

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@bayeslord Is this why they need to build a data center that uses twice as much power as the city of New Orleans?

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

"So basically, everyone is using projected AI demand to push whatever energy policy they supported already, including deregulation and keeping coal power plants online, and it's subsidized by ratepayers even though only 18% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact"

[Meg Slattery @megslat]

@jeremiah4dc Oh no 😔😔😔