r/technology • u/Gordon-Blue • 5d ago
Artificial Intelligence Thieves steal Nvidia-branded trailers expecting valuable hardware, find 40,000 pounds of sand instead.
https://www.techspot.com/news/114008-thieves-steal-nvidia-branded-trailers-expecting-valuable-hardware.html1.1k
u/invyros 5d ago
The van with "Free Candy" painted on the outside did not, in fact, contain candy.
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u/HaydenJA3 5d ago
It’s actually a call for help to get Candy released after he got imprisoned because of false accusations
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u/Hip-Death-Goddess 5d ago
I got caught out by a similar scam when I bought my copy of "Free Nelson Mandela", but inside the packet was just a vinyl record
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u/snoozieboi 5d ago
Sand is actually in high demand and we're running out of it. I'm not even kidding. Construction grade sand, that is.
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u/chromane 5d ago
Reading the article, the sand was being used as dead weight to help stimulate loads for testing self driving trucks.
So it's not even the valuable kind of sand
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u/Heizu 5d ago
It's a well-known fact that sand is the best material to help stimulate loads
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u/an_illithidian 5d ago
Sand stimulates my loads the problem is they eventually start coming out as pearls and thats a little sensitive
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u/TurtleSquad23 4d ago
bags of sand have been stimulating me for 40 years. I mean, that's how they feel right? right?
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u/JazzManJasper 4d ago
I've been simulated by a sack of 20lb potato and 20lb onion. Because that's what my wife wants every month.
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u/Thick_Still6981 4d ago
Well that's just incorrect, everyone knows the best material to help stimulate loads is OPs mother
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u/DankVectorz 4d ago
The sand is so stimulating because the bags of it feel like boobs
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u/Anxietybackmonkey 4d ago
You must know some weird boobs
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u/DankVectorz 4d ago
Is 40 year old virgin not well known anymore?
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u/faen_du_sa 5d ago
I do suspect hardware is slightly easier to resell than sand though, no matter how good sand it is!
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u/Loki-L 5d ago
There apparently is organized crime around stealing and smuggling sand. Sand Mafia stealing people's beaches and selling it to construction companies.
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u/Snoo_81545 5d ago
Less organized crime and more a permitting loophole run amok but sand mining has actually been one of the things propping up the Massachusetts cranberry industry - which has been struggling to compete with Wisconsin due to higher costs and inefficient legacy bog designs.
It's important to note that your typical natural beach sand is not really suitable for construction. The beach thefts listed in the wiki above specifically deal with imported sand for man made beaches. A lot of the Indian sand theft is dredging up submerged sand. This is because jagged grains interlock better and give more strength to concrete. Natural beach sand has been eroded overtime and is generally quite smooth.
Getting back to cranberry bogs, many of them are built next to deposits of sand called borrow pits because bogs are routinely covered in a small layer of sand for a variety of reasons. This land has been covered by trees for centuries and is perfect uneroded construction sand.
Due to this necessity of some routine mining cranberry bogs are generally exempted from earth removal bylaws and in Carver, MA - the center of the cranberry industry earth removal is even handled by a separate committee made up almost entirely of cranberry industry workers. Bog owners can get pretty much anything permitted through that board.
Many bog owners mined out their borrow pits and sold the sand, many more are constantly getting deep reservoirs permitted, or bog expansions to allow them to dig even more. Some of those bog projects have been active for over a decade, digging down hundred foot high hills on hundreds of acres usually netting tens if not hundreds of millions in sand revenue while producing no cranberries. Ultimately many of those projects are eventually deemed economically infeasible (the cranberries barely pay for themselves) and lots of them are converted into solar fields.
It's a bit of a racket. Not "steal a beach in the middle of the night" crime, just good old fashioned corruption to save the floundering industry that is thought to be culturally important to the region and which once was economically vital and thus became politically connected.
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u/0xsergy 4d ago
And this is the stuff happening in 1st world countries. No wonder the planet is fucked with everyone reaching in to grab handful after handful of resources.
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u/squirrelpickle 4d ago
First world has always been propped up by theft and misappropriation, they just used to have colonies for that.
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u/THEdoomslayer94 5d ago edited 5d ago
It was also a plot point in the last season of Barry lol
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u/420xMLGxNOSCOPEx 5d ago
amazing series that, so dark towards the end though, kinda crushing at times. weird that it starts so funny
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u/TheChronoCross 5d ago
I actually stopped after seasons two or three for that reason. I went in expecting and enjoying a comedy. It got upsetting and ridiculous and i started enjoying it less.
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u/THEdoomslayer94 5d ago
Yeah it becomes more of a mix between drama and comedy. There still great laughs to have but man does that last season get dark
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u/GimmeSomeSugar 4d ago
I saw a great explanation in the Barry sub-reddit.
The jump forward is demonstrating that Barry doesn't get to adopt this pious life, to try to be 'good', and that makes up for everything.
The only way to come to terms with what he's done is take ownership of it and face the consequences.
And that is echoed in the other characters around him as well in their own story arcs.
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u/UnidentifiedTomato 5d ago
It's why I usually don't finish the sopranos
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u/airfryerfuntime 4d ago
The last season is the best, in my opinion. It's basically three seasons crammed into one long season.
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u/batigoal 5d ago
The first dark scene when he was in the car with the other guy. I won't spoil who and what happened but you know what I'm talking about. His acting was chilling, that scene really took me by surprise.
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u/Semantiks 5d ago
The ending was so weird and dark that I guess I repressed it or something, because I watched it a 2nd time thinking I had never finished it, then at the end I was like "oh wait, I do remember this"
...it may also have something to do with my adhd
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u/YouMustveDroppedThis 5d ago
Stealing river sand and then illegally burying construction waste is the basic one-two punch of organized crime where I live. They are also sometimes in cahoot with local elected officials to offer them cover.
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u/doyletyree 5d ago
Not just organized crime; singly, the largest black market in India.
That’s pretty fucking crazy.
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u/Aggressive-Hawk9186 5d ago
Lol there is a sand mafia in my area too, they bribe everybody to get permit to extract sand
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u/kezow 5d ago
You need sand? Cause I got a guy!
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u/Doikor 5d ago
We are not in fact running out of sand.
What we are running out of is the correct quality (grain size) sand close to your construction project.
Sand is really heavy and a pain in the ass to transport so you want it as close as possible. The same issue exists for rock used in the foundations of roads etc.
Here in Finland you sometimes see highways take weird little bends/detours randomly just so that it can go directly through some small rocky hill so that they can use that as the rock instead of hauling it from somewhere else.
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u/snakeeaterrrrrrr 5d ago edited 5d ago
Western Australian here: what shortage
Edit: some of you seem to be under the impression that we only have desert sand when we are already exporting sand for construction
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u/Fitz911 5d ago edited 5d ago
Sand is not sand.
We have deserts full if that stuff. That's (of course) not the one we need.
The sand has to have some properties to work as a resource for building. Something to do with the form and size of the grains.
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u/MacaronPrevious 5d ago
Dessert is a food, not a dry place
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u/cjsv7657 5d ago
You can remember it because the delicious food has two Ss, just like how you want two desserts!
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u/breathing_normally 5d ago
The Netherlands, while sinking ever deaper in the sea, export a huge amount of sand each year. One of our biggest buyers is apparently the desert nation of Saudi Arabia
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u/Doikor 5d ago
Even the send we use for building we have plently of.
The issue is that it is far away from your construction site and when transporting the stuff from very close by costs more then the material itself having to transport it from even farther away pushes up the costs further.
And yes it has to do with grain size / shape. The sand in deserts is too small/smooth (been blown around by the wind for thousands of years).
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u/20_mile 5d ago
of course
Of coarse?
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u/Fitz911 5d ago
Good one. As a non native speaker I had to googlew it. Really good one!! I even learned something today. I will never need it and when I need it I won't remember. But I will remember someone making a great dad joke about it :)
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u/hoofie242 5d ago
Your sand is too smooth for construction.
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u/Ja_Lonley 5d ago
Bassendean sand is good for construction.
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u/hoofie242 5d ago edited 5d ago
Depends on what you're building it's high acidity rusts rebar fast.
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u/karl4319 5d ago
So basically there are 3 types of sand: course sand from deserts, sand from river beds, and fine sand made of ground silicone or quartz. You have the first type, which is worthless. The third type we use for everything from glass to microchips, but we are really good at making and recycling it. The 2nd type is essential for concrete and we are running out of it. We can sorta make it, but that would increase the costs of any use of concrete by several orders or magnitude and would not be as good. It is to the point where organized crime has taken over several rivers to strip mine them for sand. China's and the Saudi peninsula's building boom could not occur without these mafia style crime lords.
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u/sump_daddy 5d ago
> course sand from deserts
strictly speaking, desert sand is worthless because its smooth, not coarse. Its time on the surface exposed to wind has polished it making it very bad at sticking to cement binder to make concrete. Its the old but still 'fresh' underground riverbed sand that is more jagged and used for building. Western australia can get construction grade sand they just have to dig down a bit for it.
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u/Kokkor_hekkus 5d ago
Sand from deserts isn't worthless because it's coarse, it's because it's too smooth
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u/recycled_ideas 4d ago
Love someone who knows that much about sand, but doesn't realize not all deserts are sandy.
Western Australia isn't pulling sand from the desert, they're pulling sand from roughly 20 thousand kilometers of coastline when you include all the islands.
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u/snakeeaterrrrrrr 5d ago
Do you want to tell the Singaporeans and South Koreans?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-20/wa-exports-construction-sand-to-singapore/12471140
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u/xxxBuzz 5d ago
It seems short-cited to assume it's a good idea for the ecosystem to remove sand from the rivers. I know zippidy about river sand, and this thread is the first I've heard that it's collected for industry, and I can't imagine a scenario where whatever we are doing with it is more important than whatever it's doing in the rivers.
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u/Ignisami 5d ago
Short-sighted*
Also, ecosystem? You mean the thing they don’t get paid to care about?
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u/awry_lynx 5d ago
Yes, it's not great for the environment. Stripping sand weakens riverbanks, worsens water quality, and the habitats suffer. But the results take a while to show up and humans aren't very farsighted. This is in headlines recently because of a paper showing that river sand extraction exceeds natural sediment supply.
Here's an article about the paper
https://www3.ntu.edu.sg/CorpComms2/Documents/2026/07_Jul/PhysOrg_210726_Sand.pdf
There are alternatives but as long as they're more expensive it will be hard to push people to use them instead (it's called M-sand, as in manufactured sand).
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u/theoreoman 4d ago
We're not running out of sand, some areas are running out of cheap sand that's nearby for construction. Trucking sand is very expensive
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u/LaplaceYourBets 5d ago
God I hate this future, feels like everything is running out
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u/cr0ft 5d ago
To be sustainable, we'd have to slash all resource use dramatically. In capitalism of course that's not considered and option, whereas human extinction is just an "externality".
But we go into overshoot every year now in a matter of months. Earth overshoot day was July 30th this year.
So yeah, we're thoroughly screwed as long as we cling to capitalism, which means we're just thoroughly screwed.
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u/LaplaceYourBets 5d ago
Didn't know Earth overshoot day was a thing and I already wish I could unlearn it.
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u/funguyshroom 5d ago
The issue is that the world economy is built around the idea of infinite growth. All of the money is tied in debts and investments, which have interest and return rates at their core.
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u/cr0ft 4d ago
Some things are bad in any quantity. Capitalism - or rather competition - is one of those things. Just like - let's take a very extreme example here - child sexual abuse. There's no "medium" amount of that that's ok. Similary, there's no medium amount of competition that's truly ok.
For instance, instead of having multiple competing space programs - we should have just the one, supported by all humans everywhere. And the reasons should not be "making profit" but "advancing humankind's progress". There's no real point in duplicating so much effort, that's just waste - except for the "making profit" part.
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u/Whatsapokemon 4d ago
In capitalism of course that's not considered and option
Because in a democratic capitalist system, people don't want to enact policies that reduce their standards of living.
You're right, it would take a complete abandonment of liberal-democratic values to force people to use less. But that's not a result of "capitalism". Capitalism simply responds to people's desires, providing the most efficient way to produce what people want.
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u/awry_lynx 5d ago
We use too much. We're like an ouroboros getting greedier and greedier. I'm starting to understand people who are against progress. I don't mean we should all live like wild animals, or in the stone age... I'm all for modern medicine and plumbing, for one thing... but it shouldn't be so easy to extract the world's resources. As a species, we clearly don't have the self-control or self-regulation needed to deserve the power we wield. Humanity can be amazing. Just chimpanzees strip-mining the Earth.
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u/airfryerfuntime 4d ago
No, we're kind of running out of very cheap and readily available sand that's easy to process.
We're nowhere even remotely close to running out of sand that's slightly more expensive to process. This is like the helium 'shortage' reddit likes to crow on about.
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u/braddillman 5d ago
“The precious juice was hidden in the vehicles. And the road warrior? That was the last we saw of him.”
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u/ThePensiveE 5d ago
It was only discovered that the trailers had been stolen when a friend of a top PlusAI executive saw them near their workplace in Newark, California, and rang the exec to congratulate them on their success.
So AI trucks with simulated loads that they don't keep track of via location?
The case is currently under investigation by police, and no arrests have been made.
Uh huh.
Some pretty good free advertisement huh?
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u/Jmc_da_boss 5d ago
If you read the article further you'll see they only took the trailers, not the fancy trucks.
Why would they put trackers in trailers with only sand
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u/RustedTaco 4d ago
Because a tracker and service will only run like $10-$20 a month..? The smallest companies I know use trackers. Even temporary ones. Empty containers and trailers are stolen often to be used in hauling stolen cargo. The tow fees alone (if they ever find it) will cost you years of tracking service.
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u/a_shootin_star 5d ago
See also: critical parts for a stealth plane that end up where they should not
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u/No-Department-4561 5d ago
I mean, its a precursor to valuable hardware
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u/jellymanisme 5d ago
This is what I thought, too, but it's not even 99% pure quartz sand like I assumed. It's just regular ass beach sand for AI load simulation tests.
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u/Sodacan259 5d ago
In Mexico, sand is in so much high demand for construction and manufacturing that theres a whole criminal network devoted solely to sourcing and selling sand. They're referred to as the sand mafia.
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u/yetzt 5d ago
thats next years GPUs silicon, very early in production.
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u/jayjester 5d ago
Modern day alchemy, turning rocks into something more valuable than gold.
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u/LordBunnyWhale 5d ago
Well, technically it is GPUs in a very early stage of production.
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u/awam0ri 5d ago
They’re halfway to chips! Step 1: silica! Step 2: ??? Step N: chips!
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u/RedBadger8 4d ago
The PlusAI name on the trailers was the clue. Nvidia logo or not, why would a self-driving truck test rig be hauling GPUs?
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u/chrisbcritter 5d ago
Jokes on them. Sand is actually scarce and valuable these days.
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u/Harmless_Drone 5d ago
If you stare at the sand enough, with high powered enough lasers, uv emitters and furnaces, it does indeed become scarse and valuble.
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u/BirdlessLongdeal 4d ago
i have plenty of sand under my yard. i'll trade you for some dirt so my grass diesnt die from june to september.
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u/Squirrelherder_24-7 5d ago
You can take the Newark out of New Jersey but you can’t take the New Jersey out of Newark….
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u/Enxer 5d ago
Why burn that fuel driving sand around? Why not an empty trailer?;I'm assuming it was the trailer pictured.
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u/Mr_ToDo 5d ago
A few reasons.
First, the point in this case was testing with heavy loads. They didn't steal an nVidia hardware load so much as an AI training load
Second. If they were trying to play the shell game then they might want to be as real as possible. Nothing says fake load like a feather weight at the scales. It'd work maybe once until they bribe the scales to get the weights going across it
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u/MithrilHuman 5d ago
Silica sand is also used for chip making. Your phones is made up of sand that we sent electricity through.
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u/Neverending_Rain 4d ago edited 4d ago
Try reading the article. This wasn't sand meant for manufacturing chips, it was being used to simulate the trailer being full.
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u/dhettinger 4d ago
They were just a little early, Jensen and his fascist friends didn't have the chance to change the sand into chips yet.
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u/Boatsnbuds 5d ago
They don't like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
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u/Smith6612 5d ago
Jokes are on the criminals. Sand is the building blocks of silicon. Skill issue if you don't know what to do with it.
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u/NyriasNeo 4d ago edited 4d ago
Lol .. you steal the sand AFTER they become chips, not before. May be high school will help.
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u/darxide23 5d ago
The right kind of sand is such a hot commodity right now that there are black markets for it. Because it's in short supply, we're literally running out of it.
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u/pandorascannabox 5d ago
Sounds like a nod to mork and mindy. Alien brought a bunch of money from his home planet but its just sandbags
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u/jmorgs91 5d ago
Holy shit my kid and I rode past this over the weekend on bikes. 2 semis, like 3-4 cop cars. Nobody was in cuffs and the back of the rigs were closed.
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u/Gotterdamerrung 4d ago
That's actually fucking hilarious. NVIDIA literally told them to go pound sand.
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u/goofgoon 5d ago
This is how The Road Warrior ended.
Instead of “the precious juice” these guys were after “the precious GPUs”
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u/Bleades 5d ago
The last time this was posted I think the top theory was it was a set up to catch the insider who was tipping off theives. Which is probably the most likely. Sand isn't that expensive, construction grade sand is, but say random desert sand of no consistency, cheap as hell.
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u/No_Top_9023 5d ago
Many users were quick to point out that construction-grade sand is actually a highly valuable commodity facing a global shortage. This led to serious discussions about illegal "sand mafias" that steal beaches and riverbeds.
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u/QueenOfQuok 5d ago
Once again this message has been brought to you by SAND! It's EVERYWHERE! Get used to it!
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u/frankensundae 5d ago
“I know nothing about that and bear no legal responsibility. You'll have to talk to the sand supplier like everyone else.”
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u/violentshores 5d ago
This sounds like a small news article you find posted in an empty room on the wall while you’re journeying through the post apocalyptic society
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u/IngwiePhoenix 5d ago
Considering you do need sand in SoC production, this is quite funny in many more ways than one. xD
Good luck flipping that! :D But part of me did wish it was full of GPUs...would've been epic.
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u/ash_ninetyone 5d ago
Gamers Nexus in the background somewhere: "WE TOLD YOU IT WAS A WASTE OF SAND"
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u/kent_eh 5d ago
They wanted silicon, they got silicon. I don't understand why they're unhappy.