Tag: politics

Bookmarks for April 13, 2026

  • Training AI models doesn’t emit that much – Andy Masley
    A comparison of the carbon cost of training AI models compared to many many others things. I have long wondered about this, and now I have a decent answer, and yes, it’s pretty much a red herring, unless you are already complete consumer goods renunciate. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but AIs are not especially unethical within the eco frame, and painting them as if they are is not an especially helpful argument.
    Tags: ai
  • Hungarian opposition ousts Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power | Hungary | The Guardian
    A little sliver of good news – I await seeing if the infrasctructure he built can be dismanlted fast enough to prevent someone else just as bad filling his shoes at the next election, but I’ll take the fact that there’s even hope they might as as good sign for now.
    Tags: politics

Bookmarks for May 20, 2025

  • EU reset deal puts Britain back on the world stage, says Keir Starmer | Brexit | The Guardian
    As a pal put it – in the last couple of months Labour have: coped as well as could be asked with Trump's tariff madness, secured a trade deal with India, and now, made genuine progress on rectifying (some of) the damage of Brexit.

    This does absolutely nothing to offset the damage of the transphobic shit going on, the anti-migrant rhetoric, and all the other things they're doing that I loathe, and I still don't know if I can vote for them at the next election, but I just wanted to take a moment to feel something that isn't total despair about my governement.

    Tags: politics, uk
  • An Instagram Reel of 'Chad the Bird' talking about Star Wars fonts
    A sweary bird puppet talks about the typography of Star Wars. Either that sounds like fun to you, or you may be dead inside.
    Tags: typography, funny, starwars
  • I'm a nanny on £150k – parents don't treat me like a human being
    Interesting/terrifying (tiny, carefully chosen for sensationalism) glimpse into the world of the ultra-weathly. There's a line from a Gibson's Count Zero that it reminds me of "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

    I just cannot fathom raising one's kids like that. I can understand having a nanny to take the pressure off, and to enable the work-oriented lifestyle that made the family rich. But surely the point is then to also have the kids raised *right*?

    Tags: children, wealth

Bookmarks for April 13, 2025

Bookmarks for April 12, 2025

  • Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
    This is a solid bit of writing from a few years back that explains a lot about the stages of growth of the internet and how we've arrived at the current moment. I think that four years later, his conclusion that we're headed back to a more open and decentralised internet is optimistic – but thinking about Bluesky, and the idea that independent writing plaforms (or, as we used to call them, blogs) are having a resurgence in response to everything, maybe not totaly unfounded.
    Tags: politics, business, technology
  • LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything • The Register
    Fascinating new exploit wrinkle, and a very strong argument for not using LLMs to generate entire applications – it'll literally decide to try and pull in dependencies that don't exist, and if the app runner doesn't notice, then a bad actor can simply occupy that space with whatever they're like, and completely co-opt the AI-generated app.
    Tags: lmm, exploit