What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?

Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint… The reason we often think that ChatGPT is an energy guzzler is because of the initial statement: it uses 10 times more energy than a Google search. Even if this is accurate, what’s missing is the context that a Google search uses a really tiny amount of energy. Even 10 times a really tiny number is still tiny.

“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning A.I."

Sadly this only explains part of the user experience.

University of Zürich researchers undertake an ethically shady experiment on a subreddit involving the use of A.I.-generated comments. Astonishingly this was approved the University of Zürich’s Institutional Ethics Review Board.

Welcome to the semantic apocalypse

A post about A.I., “Studio Ghibli” style and the draining of meaning.

What’s the bet they’re going to try to rent it as-is?

A house with huge amounts of overgrowth around a window and on the ceiling. The path to the door appears to have been cleared recently.

Has anyone written an oral history of the Whirlpoool forums yet?

More than 2,200 jobs being cut across Australian universities.

It was only a few years ago more that 17,000 were lost during COVID.

Table showing that more than 2,000 job losses have been announced across Australian universities.

“Maashorst council says [Andy Warhol’s] print of Queen Beatrix from 1985 series Reigning Queens probably taken with the rubbish” - The Guardian

U.S. National Institutes of Health guts its first and largest study centered on women - Science.org

Beautiful work by Julian Fell and Simon Elvery with this visual storytelling:

Over five decades, here’s how voters have shifted away from the major parties - ABC

Fascinating Bandcanp Daily post on the pioneers of computer music via Bruce Sterling

Happy Easter to those who partake

The morning sun shining through a stand of trees

Which Australian members of parliament consistently voted for compulsory income management for welfare recipients?

Interesting list.

A tree lined path with rays of sunlight falling on the lens. It’s a calm, sunny scene.

Turmoil has engulfed the Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying nations is in dispute.

We argue instead that populism must be understood as a specific political discourse, a way to articulate all kinds of policies – liberal or protectionist, left-wing or right-wing – as a clash between the virtuous, downtrodden “people” and an unresponsive corrupt “elite”. In this way, one can identify a consistent populist logic in how trade policies are presented regardless of the content of actual policies followed. In our analysis we show that, despite their very opposing trade preferences, the discourses of both protectionist Trump and strongly pro-free trade Conservative Brexiteers in the second half of the 2010s followed very similar articulatory modes flowing from their populism.

The populist logic behind Trump’s tariffs - LSE Blogs

“The problem is, these code suggestions often include hallucinated package names that sound real but don’t exist. I’ve seen this firsthand. You paste it into your terminal and the install fails – or worse, it doesn’t fail, because someone has slop-squatted that exact package name."

The stunning autumn days will continue until morale improves.

A panoramic photo of a park with trees and deep blue skies. I rotunda is in the foreground.

How people (on reddit) are using A.I. in 2025

I’m always surprised, given its influence, that HBR remains an evidence-free zone. For example this article makes expansive pronouncements about how A.I. Is being used in 2025. The methodology:

I looked at online forums (Reddit, Quora), as well as articles that included explicit, specific applications of the technology. Perhaps owing to its inherent pseudonymity, Reddit again yielded the richest insights. I read through them myself, and added each relevant post to the tally for that category. Several days later, I emerged with the count and the quotes for each of the new 100 use cases.

The 2025 Top-100 Gen AI Use Case Report lists the top 100 applications now, in 2025, rated according to perceived usefulness and scale of impact (assessed qualitatively by expert review), and includes a quote or several for each.

Seriously?

How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025

An interest​ing discussion about the pitfalls Big Tech geopolitics and alternate futures that might be possible

Looking ahead, the AI Iron Curtain appears likely to extend into space. For instance, China’s Chang’e 6 Lunar Exploration Mission returned first-ever samples from the far side of the moon in June 2024, but US research scientists cannot view the samples because of the restrictive 2011 Wolf Amendment, which forbids NASA from collaborating directly with China without security approval. Although China invited international scientists to study the samples, the US has erected a self-imposed barrier, stifling beneficial cooperation and hindering progress in this and other critical areas of common interests.

Moving Towards Local and People-Centered Artificial Intelligence - Bot Populi

“Their ambulances were crushed and partly buried. Nearby were their bodies – also buried, en masse, in the sand. Our dead colleagues were still wearing their Red Crescent vests. In life, those uniforms signalled their status as humanitarian workers; they should have protected them. Instead, in death, those red vests became their shrouds."