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Pinkie promise gains 200-plus new participants and precisely zero enforcement

President Trump has expanded his Ratepayer Protection Pledge to include power companies, datacenter developers, cooperatives, and state governments, saying the move will shield consumers from rising energy costs driven by the datacenter boom.

In a speech at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) HQ in Washington, Trump said the pledge will now extend across the full chain of parties whose decisions determine household bills. This includes the utilities that supply power, the developers that build the facilities, and the state authorities that regulate energy rates and infrastructure.

“We’re here today to continue the incredible progress we’re making in communities nationwide to ensure that as new datacenters go up, and they’re going up all over, electricity bills for American families will actually come down,” he declared.

The Ratepayer Protection Pledge was created earlier this year, partly as a response to growing anti-datacenter sentiment among ordinary Americans, especially those who were seeing their utility bills jump.

Much of the concern stems from the need for energy firms to invest heavily in new generation capacity and grid upgrades to serve the facilities being built, many for the AI market.

The original signatories of the pledge – the “Munificent 7” of Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI – agreed to cover the full cost of any extra resources required to satisfy their energy demands.

But as was pointed out at the time, these hyperscalers do not set the rates ultimately paid by consumers; utilities and state regulators play crucial roles there. The expanded pledge now brings those parties into the tent.

According to the White House, more than 200 additional utilities, datacenter developers, cooperatives, and states have now joined the pledge. The White House claims the pledge covers roughly 80 percent of the power delivered to American homes and businesses, supposedly protecting 263 million people when a datacenter is built nearby.

Trump went on to say that many datacenter developers will have to generate their own power on site, effectively turning themselves into utilities.

“It’s hard to believe, but you need double the electricity that we have right now, maybe even more than that, to really fulfill what you want to do,” Trump said.

“We’re leading China [in AI] by a lot, and using our old grid would not have worked. And I came up with the idea that you build your own plant. This way nobody can complain,” he added.

The Reg believes many datacenter operators were already generating their own on-site power before Trump claimed responsibility for the idea. 

“We’re insisting that AI datacenters and big tech companies pay their own way. And that’s what they’re doing, and they’re happy to do it, because this way, they’re going to be able to function, and function brilliantly. They’re going to have a lot of electricity left over and they’ll put that into the grid, so we’ll actually end up with more electricity,” Trump claimed.

But as The Register pointed out previously, the text of the Ratepayer Protection Pledge makes no mention of enforcement. There are no apparent penalties should any of the signatories fail to prevent consumer bills rising because of demand from AI datacenters, so this appears to be very much a voluntary agreement.

We asked the White House and the EPA what actions might be taken if signatories to the pledge were found to be failing in their commitments, and will update if we get a response.

The measure seems likely to be put to the test, as the latest data from Synergy Research estimates the total capacity of US datacenters will double over the next three years, driven by an aggressive build-out by hyperscale operators.

The pipeline of future large facilities known to the research biz currently stands at almost 1,500 worldwide, with almost half of those in America. That represents around 45 gigawatts of extra IT capacity set to be added over the next few years.

Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale says that availability of power and rising local concerns over server farms are crimping many new plans for facilities.

“But it is also clear that datacenter developers will continue to find ways around those issues and that booming demand will continue to drive aggressive capacity growth. Over the next five years, the US will continue to account for well over half of the world’s operational datacenter capacity.” ®

With heaps of praise from practically everyone about the redesigned form factor of the new Galaxy Z Fold 8, why has Samsung decided to keep on with the boxier design in the form of the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra? The answer, in Samsung’s eyes at least, is productivity. 

The firm claims that the boxy 1:1 aspect ratio of the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra’s 8-inch foldable screen is designed to run two regular 6.5-inch smartphone apps side-by-side, while the 4:3 aspect ratio of the regular Z Fold 8’s 7.8-inch inner panel is better suited to social media, watching movies and playing games.

However, after using the regular Galaxy Z Fold 8 for the past few days, I’d argue that the opposite is true; it can be just as productive as its Ultra sibling, if not more so. It just depends on what you’re up to.

Split-screen works just as well on the Fold 8

Samsung’s Ultra productivity angle makes a lot of sense on paper. The ability to use what is essentially two smartphone-sized apps at once does make the Ultra a great option for productivity – but that doesn’t mean the Fold 8 isn’t.

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Just like the Fold 8 Ultra, you can run two apps side-by-side in a split-screen view, with space to run a third resizable floating app on top on the Z Fold 8. Yes, with a squatter, wider screen than the Ultra’s boxy aspect ratio, you don’t see quite as much of both apps at once, but it’s still more than usable. 

I’ve opened up Google Docs and Chrome side-by-side to tweak an article on-the-fly before posting, I’ve dragged-and-dropped large video files from the Google Files app to my NAS drive, and I’ve had recorder and notes running simultaneously for a recent briefing – and I’ve not really had any major complaints.

Yes, the Fold 8 Ultra remains the better option if you do a lot of split-screen multitasking, but for more occasional use, the Fold 8 remains a solid option.

Editing videos on a wider screen is way better

In fact, I’d argue that the opposite is true; the wider 4:3 aspect ratio of the regular Z Fold 8 actually lends itself better to specific tasks like video editing than the 1:1 Fold 8 Ultra. 

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I’ve been testing out the Insta360 Luna Ultra for the past few days (what a bit of kit – but that’s a story for another day) and decided to lean into social media content creation to see what it could do. Once I shot a few clips on the Luna Ultra, I imported them to the Z Fold 8 using the Insta360 app.

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At this point, I’d usually transfer everything to my PC and edit on my big 34-inch ultrawide monitor – but I instead set myself the challenge of editing a TikTok video entirely on the Z Fold 8. And, honestly, it went way better than I expected.

I first booted up the regular CapCut mobile app, but the app informed me that the Fold 8’s screen was big enough to qualify for the more advanced CapCut Pad app – so I downloaded that instead. And it was a joy to use on the inner foldable screen.

There’s plenty more available at your fingertips than the CapCut mobile app designed for small screens, making it much easier to create quick cuts, adjust video and audio properties, throw in transitions, edit audio and generate captions. And the wider screen means you get to see more of your editing timeline than you would on the boxy 8 Ultra, meaning less time swiping across your timeline to find your edit. 

From start to finish, I had a quick 30-second video fully edited and exported in just under 30 minutes, ready to post on TikTok. That’s a real edge for content creators right there.  

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What does this mean for the Ultra form factor?

So if the regular Z Fold 8 falls into the ‘pretty good’ category for split-screen multitasking and arguably the ‘better’ category for things like video editing, what does this mean for the ‘productivity-focused’ Fold 8 Ultra design?

It’s hard to say for now. Samsung isn’t going to just drop the foldable design it has insisted on for the past eight generations because that’d be an admission that it got it wrong.

Instead, I think it’ll depend more on sales figures for the Fold 8. If, as I’m suspecting, it outsells the pricier Fold 8 Ultra, we could indeed see a shift from Samsung with next year’s Fold 9 collection. We’ve already seen Samsung quickly cancel projects based on poor sales figures – I’m looking at you, Galaxy S25 Edge – and it could well be the case for the Fold 8 Ultra.

We’ll just have to wait and see for now, I suppose. But one thing is for sure; the Z Fold 8 isn’t just the content-focused foldable Samsung claims it is. 

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Most cameras ignore a wide stretch of near-infrared light that plants reflect and certain materials absorb in unexpected ways. One maker spent three months turning three ordinary USB webcams into a single system that records that invisible band as full color video. Project 326 started with the same $15 modules many people already own. Each sensor already responds to near-infrared once the factory IR-cut filter is gone.

That filter is placed between the lens and the sensor to prevent typical photographs from becoming foggy. Taking it out is a simple process: open the camera housing, remove the tiny red or green glass or plastic piece, and your sensor will become far more sensitive to anything above 700 nanometers. The catch is that even with a full-spectrum camera, while that infrared-pass filter is in place, you’ll still receive monochrome images since colour requires three different cameras, each locked to a narrow slice of the infrared spectrum.

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Dichroic bandpass filters effectively resolved the isolation issue. You only need to put a filter on each camera that is centered around 750 nanometers, another around 850 nanometers, and a third around 940 nanometers; they will pass only a little window of wavelengths while rejecting everything else, including normal visible light. After a few tests with handheld infrared flashlights, you can observe that each one only hits one camera: a 745-nanometer lamp would light up the first camera, an 850-nanometer lamp the second, and a 940-nanometer lamp the third, with no overlap.

Getting the mechanical alignment correct was far more difficult than the optical filters. He tried utilizing a beam-splitting prism and a single shared lens to ensure that all three sensors saw the same scene, but 3D-printed mounts couldn’t keep the optics stable enough, so the idea was abandoned. In the end, he decided on three different lenses side by side. He removed the sensors from their original boards and remounted them on new printed circuit boards, ensuring that each chip sits squarely and at the same distance from the lens. The new housings maintain everything nice and rigid, as we’re talking a baseline of roughly 17 millimeters between cameras, which is small enough that parallax only interferes with the image at close range.

He had to switch the footage to a Raspberry Pi because Windows wouldn’t let him utilize three identical USB cameras at the same time. Python programs are currently pulling simultaneous monochromatic streams and writing them out as independent MKV files; but, because these webcams use free-running RC oscillators, their frame rates are drifting by one or two frames per minute.

To address this, he set up a post-processing system that also handles the minor geometric offsets. He uses DaVinci Resolve to manually align the first frames of each stream, including translation, scale, and rotation, and then a script applies those fixes to the rest of the sequence. Once he had three grayscale videos layered on top of one another, he simply assigned each to a red, green, or blue channel. There are six different mappings, and selecting the appropriate one can significantly alter the final appearance of elements such as flora, sky, and skin.

Its first usable color footage resulted from testing conducted outside under the scorching tropical sun. Leaves that appear to be one solid green to our eyes begin to break apart into distinct tones as you use the near-infrared light that reflects off them to add depth to the footage. Atmospheric haze behaves differently when picked up in the three various color bands, giving distant objects a layered appearance that draws the observer in. Now, the system still needs some fine-tuning to get the focus right, and a steady hand is required, since one of the early recording sessions was ruined because the silly lens cap remained on throughout. The Python scripts used to capture the footage, as well as the 3D printed objects, are available on GitHub for anyone interested in following in his footsteps.
[Source]

Other Models We Tested

Photograph: Martin Cizmar

TCL Q-Series Air Conditioner (10,000 BTU) for $369: Chinese electronics company TCL has been making air conditioners for only five years, but it is tackling the category the way it did for TVs—that is, by quickly conquering turf with excellent value. I tested the 10,000-BTU version of the Q Series window AC in an 120-square-foot upstairs bedroom that gets very little flow from my home’s central AC. It took three hours to drop the temperature by 10 degrees from a sweltering 78, but as it operated at a fairly quiet 60 decibels, I didn’t mind it. Installation was a breeze thanks to the included frame. The TCL has Matter connectivity, but I was not able to get it to connect to my Apple Home app, apparently a common issue. There is a remote that has all the controls from the unit itself. The thermostat is accurate within one degree, and the unit reliably turns itself on and off to keep the room temperature on its mark. The CEER rating ranks an impressive 15.0, equaling WIRED’s top-pick Midea, and the TCL costs $100 less at the same power output. But while quiet compared well with many other models, this TCL is still louder than the Midea and doesn’t offer the U-shaped device’s superior insulation. Easy install may be a selling point over the U-Shaped model. —Martin Cizmar

Dreo Portable Air Conditioner 740S (10,000 BTU) for $700: Look, I’m loving the new generation of portable air conditioners but not because they’re portable. Fact is, wheels aside, they’re pretty big and heavy, and the thick hoses make them bulky in a room. But they’re easy to install without lifting into a window frame, a real boon for solo residents. And because the only thing that needs mounting in a window is a bracket for the hoses, these ACs can be used on pretty much any window shape—a boon especially for those in older buildings. The Dreo has all these virtues, plus a respectable 12 CEER rating, courtesy of dual hoses and a smart inverter. (In general, avoid portable units without dual hoses, as this can cause a depressurization effect that lowers efficiency.) I’ve been using this portable in the difficult-to-access window in my 150-square-foot office, and its effects are basically instant. The evaporative cooling tech also means I don’t have to drain water. But our top-pick Zafro offers a lower price, and a slightly better CEER efficiency rating at a similar operating noise level of around 60 to 65 decibels on high fan speeds. Still, this is an excellent portable AC unit. If you see a deal, snap it up.

GE AWAS05BBA Window Air Conditioner Unit (5,000 BTU) for $231: This 5,000 BTU unit is less powerful than our favorite budget window air conditioner pick from GE. There’s no app and no remote, and airflow options are limited: You can’t direct air up and down, only left and right. But it’s the cheapest model we recommend, relatively easy to install, and much quieter than you’d expect for the price. It’ll cool a small 150-square-foot space quickly and mostly frictionlessly. But we haven’t tested it as long as for our top budget pick.

LG Window Air Conditioner Unit (12,000 BTU) for $379: The LG 12,000 BTU Smart Window Air Conditioner offers efficient large-room cooling at a surprisingly low price. It weighs 90 pounds and requires professional installation with a bracket. Its 60-decibel operation places it squarely in the middle of the pack on noise. This said, WIRED reviewer Lisa Wood Shapiro found it blends into a room well with its white-on-white design, and that the filter replacement indicator light is useful. The app was laggy and difficult to use during Wood Shapiro’s testing, but there is a remote.

Friedrich Kuhl Air Conditioner for $1,228: This unit from Friedrich is among the most expensive we’ve tested, and one of the heaviest—in part because of a metal chassis designed to provide easy maintenance access and deter first-floor break-ins. This model allows adding a custom Friedrich FreshAire MERV 13 filter to clean the air as it cools. The screen is easy to read, and the device comes with a remote. An app lets you schedule the unit’s use over the course of the week, but note that connection with the smart app was a little janky, and it paired only with 2.4 GHz signals.

EcoFlow Wave 2 for $1,299 (but usually on sale for much less): Wood Shapiro tested the newest model, but previous models of the EcoFlow are often available at steep discounts. After happily testing the EcoFlow Wave 1 for more than a year in his wife’s office, WIRED senior editor Julian Chokkattu far preferred the EcoFlow Wave 2 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) because it’s both lighter and more cost-friendly, with a higher 5,100 BTU rating (up from 4,000). A heating mode rated at 6,100 BTU means you can keep using it in the winter to warm up. The company says it’s best for rooms up to 107 square feet. You do need to place it near a window to have one of the included ducts connected to the vent to take hot exhaust from the back of the unit out of the room. What makes this unit versatile is its alternate power sources. You can use a standard AC outlet, but you can also buy an add-on battery to keep it working when you don’t have access to electricity, or hook it up to solar panels.

Zero Breeze Mark II for $999: With its 2,300 BTU, the Zero Breeze (7/10, WIRED Review) won’t have the same cooling power as the EcoFlow Wave, but it’s much lighter at 17 pounds. This bundle includes a battery that makes the whole thing weigh about 30 pounds, but you’ll get four hours of use without needing to be near a wall outlet. Like the EcoFlow, you get a few vent pipes to direct exhaust away and direct cool air to a specific area, but unlike the EcoFlow, you can’t charge the battery and use the AC at the same time.

Zero Breeze Mark III for $1,399: As WIRED reviewer Chris Null notes, the Mark III (7/10, WIRED Review) is both larger than the Mark II and quite a bit heavier, now at 22 pounds. Add on the 1,022-Wh battery pack and you’ll pack on another 14 pounds, though that frees you from having to be near a power outlet. New for the Mark III is the fact that batteries can now be stacked and charged in sequence, each daisy-chained to the next (though at $600+ per battery, this can get pricey fast). Each Mark III battery also has extra outputs that can be used for other devices—one USB-C port, one USB-A port, and a 12-volt DC socket. However, the Mark II battery had all of the above plus a second USB-A port. No word on why this was removed. However, the new version is a bigger, punchier unit by most standards and a worthwhile buy for outdoors enthusiasts

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting that’s too important to ignore. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Subscribe today.

A company spokesperson said that it’s “still exploring all our options for the best approach.”

DreamScapes A/V didn’t arrive at Southwest Audio Fest 2026 with a soundbar, a folding table and a bowl of mints. They showcased a 32,000-watt, 11.8.6 home theater featuring Alcons Audio CRMSQ Series with eight infrasonic subwoofers, Trinnov audio processing, Kaleidescape movie playback, Lumagen video processing, Christie 4MK15 projector and 150-inch Stewart Filmscreen G3 2:05:1 screen. The system is one of two immersive theaters and five two channel hi-fi systems being demonstrated by DreamScapes during the three day show.

That 32,000-watt figure comes from DreamScapes and has not been independently measured by eCoustics. Even so, eight infrasonic subwoofers should provide sufficient evidence that someone checked the hotel’s insurance policy.

Related Reviews:

Alcons Audio Goes Big in Dallas

The main DreamScapes theater took over the Press Club, adjacent to event registration. DreamScapes says the installation improved upon the theater it created with Keith Yates Design at Capital Audiofest 2025, adding a larger room, more loudspeaker channels and further software updates.

A Separate Alcons System for Music

DreamScapes also demonstrated Alcons MR12 monitors with MB12 bass units for two channel listening to reveal how proprietary Pro Ribbon transducers from the company’s cinema and professional monitoring products could sound in your home. The complete system only included two more components. The Grimm Audio MU2 for streaming, digital conversion, and preamplifier duties, which fed the external Alcons ALC amplified loudspeaker controller that power and actively crossover the MR12 monitors and MB12 bass modules.

Theory Audio Design Gets Its Own Theater

The second DreamScapes theater featured a less expensive Theory Audio Design 9.2.4 system in Room 1043. It combined Theory loudspeakers, subwoofers and controllers with Kaleidescape Strato V playback, Trinnov AltitudeCI processing, Lumagen video processing, Epson QL7000 projector and a 135-inch Stewart Filmscreen Harmony G3 acoustically transparent screen.

Having installed and reviewed a Theory Audio Design system, I know the company’s loudspeakers can deliver considerable output, dialogue intelligibility and dynamic impact without becoming aggressive. Theory’s new DLC and PLC loudspeaker controllers also add Dante and AES67 networking, DSP and substantially greater channel capacity.

More Hardware Upstairs

The 10th Floor Presidential Suite featured five additional two channel systems, including Aretai loudspeakers, Benchmark Electronics, A-Definition tube electronics, Kronos analog components, the Mola Mola Lupe phono stage and active loudspeakers from Norway’s Sigberg Audio.

The Sigberg Audio Manta, Saranna and 10D are covered separately because their active architecture and controlled directivity deserve more than a brief mention beneath 32,000 watts of home theater mayhem.

The Bottom Line

Southwest Audio Fest is primarily associated with two channel audio, but the DreamScapes rooms demonstrate why properly designed home theater belongs at events like this.

The Alcons installation combines a large channel count, eight infrasonic subwoofers, sophisticated audio and video processing and professional cinema technology inside a hotel demonstration room. The separate Theory Audio Design theater provides a second look at what an integrated immersive system can achieve without requiring a commercial auditorium.

Will either system fit inside the average living room? Probably not.

That is hardly the point. The best audio show systems should demonstrate what is possible when engineering, installation expertise and budget are permitted to operate without much adult supervision.

Pricing & Availability

All components are currently available from DreamScapes A/V, but we haven’t been able to verify all pricing. Once provided, this article will be updated.

For more information: dreamscapesav.com

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A lot has been made about the increase of automated traffic on the Internet, with the past years LLM-related crawlers having quite literally swarmed the picture here. Not only does this drive up traffic, it also increases load on web servers, whose owners find themselves faced with increased hosting costs. This recently led to The-Numbers.com going offline for a while as automated traffic was quite literally destroying their bottom line.

This saga is covered by [Stephen Follows], who had a chance to talk with the founder and CEO of the site, [Bruce Nash], after the site went basically offline for a few months. Since the website both licenses data for commercial purposes as well as offering the free access on its website, there were accusations of this being a ‘rug pull’.

The site was started in 1997, as a static HTML site on Geocities where [Bruce] provided box office analyses for investment purposes. Since that beginning traffic was generally polite, with human visitors and usually well-behaved search engine crawlers. Then around 2024 the first wave of scraper bots arrived, followed by a larger wave around December of 2025.

Despite implementing a few mitigations, such as LLM-targeted text, the increased traffic and the resulting load on a site architecture that was never designed for this ultimately led to a collapse. One of the major sources of traffic turned out to be from so-called ‘prediction markets’, like Polymarket, whose bots absolutely hammered the site.

Fortunately for [Bruce] and his team they do not rely on the free website for income, but they have had to massively rework the site’s architecture to bring back a semblance of the original features. As noted in the article, the amount of crawling traffic by these LLMs and ‘agentic AI’ tools is logarithmically more than that for search engines, which makes this a major challenge.

Issues like these is why services such as Cloudflare are offering blocking features for such automated traffic. After all, unless such traffic is of use to you, you may as well treat it like a DDoS attack and cut it off at the root.

Thanks to [Ben] for the tip.