Reads, takes and links. Posted here, before I forget them.
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TIL: Searching shell history in Atuin
I’ve been using Atuin recently to manage shell history. I really like it though it does take a bit of getting used to when it takes over the up arrow key in a terminal by default. Fortunately you can switch the default to make the up arrow filter commands to ones run in the current…
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Revisiting H2-powered datacentres
This is a follow-on post from an earlier post I dashed out – Hydrogen datacentres – is this legit? – where a podcast interview caught my attention about one approach being sold to address demands on the grid caused by new datacentres. This post will make more sense if you have read it. Basically ECL…
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Is the UK using loads of gas on the grid or not?
This was a thing that had me scratching my head when prepping a few stories for a newsletter this weekend, and I figured it might be of use to others too. In the UK, if you follow the decarbonisation of the grid, you’ll likely have noticed that the UK succeeded in getting coal off the…
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Why talk about monopoly in the context of climate change?
This came up in a recent conversation about sustainability in the digital sector, because the answer isn’t immediately obvious. To understand it, I think you need to understand why we have antitrust or competition laws in the first place. When they were first brought about bout in the first half of the 20th century, there…
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Fixing a stricken iPad mini 6th gen
This post is here to make it easier to get help fixing an iPad I bought from Backmarket a couple of years ago. Last week I left it in a bag with a water bottle that leaked, and I’m hoping that being able to share pictures and links should help me find someone to fix…
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Does the EU AI Act really call for tracking inference as well as training in AI models?
I’m sharing this post as it I think it helped me realise something I hadn’t appreciated til today. I don’t build AI models, and to be honest, while I make sparing use of Github Co-pilot and Perplexity, I’m definitely not a power user. My interest in them is more linked to my day job, and…
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TIL: training small models can be more energy intensive than training large models
As I end up reading more around AI, I came across this snippet from a recent post by Sayah Kapor, which initially felt really counter intuitive: Paradoxically, smaller models require more training to reach the same level of performance. So the downward pressure on model size is putting upward pressure on training compute. In effect,…
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Emily Atkins on the vilfying the fossil fuel industry
This extended snippet is from the Heated Newsletter: For readers who are new to this newsletter, I think it’s important to note that I am not a climate activist. I’m a journalist who went went to college for journalism and have only held journalism jobs. I’ve worked at news outlets with both liberal and conservative…
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How do I track the direct environmental impact of my own inference and training when working with AI?
I can’t be the only person who is in a situation like this: These feel like things you ought to know before you start a project, to help decide if you even should go ahead, but that for many folks, that ship has sailed. So, I’ll try unpacking these points, and share some context that…
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Making sense of the energy reporting deadlines for datacentres in Europe
In the last 12 months, we’ve had a few laws passed in Europe that are likely to lead to us having access to new data about the energy demands of datacenters. Which laws specifically is a bit more complicated, and this post is an attempt to explain the mechanism to others, as well make sense…
Got any book recommendations?