Reads, Takes and Links

Reads, takes and links. Posted here, before I forget them.

  • 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…

  • Does the EU AI Act really call for tracking inference as well as training in AI models?

    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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • What makes the web different from the internet?

    I’m not talking about specifics of protoocols like HTTP, but more the idea of who they should work for. Let’s look at the W3C Web Platform Design Principles They start with a short preamble about principles. I think this is a good summary what many web developers who love the web appreciate about it. Principles…

  • Being in the Green Driving Foundation

    I wrote this early one morning to partly as a way to help figure out what bothered me about many of the conversations around Green IT, and Digital Sustainability. I’ve phrased it in a way that I hope helps less technical people understand some of the dynamics in the industry, that are an open secret…

  • What I want from a mobile provider in 2024

    I’m dashing this post as a follow up to this thread on Mastodon, when I was asking for pointers for new providers, after getting sick of Vodafone’s poor broadband service. It’s an outline of my circumstances as I hunt around for an alternative provider of mobile connectivity for someone who lives in Berlin. Here are…

  • If you want greener energy, what’s the best way to get it?

    If you want greener energy, what’s the best way to get it?

    I saw an interesting chart fly by recently from a tweet by Juliaen Jomaux, taken from the recent IEA Renewables report (page 57), What does this chart tell us? The key thing that attracted my attention was how in China, the use of fixed-tariffs / premiums, where anyone building a renewables project gets a fixed…

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