- 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.
- 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.
Bookmarks for April 9, 2026
- Dream-pop at its most divine: Cocteau Twins’ 20 greatest songs – ranked! | Pop and rock | The Guardian
Clearly, I needed to spend the afternoon listening to the Cocteau Twins. It's been quite a while, and the remain absolutely perfection.
Bookmarks for April 2, 2026
- World’s oldest tortoise caught in viral crypto death scam | St Helena | The Guardian
There is no part of that headline that isn't magnificent.
Bookmarks for April 1, 2026
- axios Compromised on npm – Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan – StepSecurity
To quote the article: "This is among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm package". A very scary hack, if you're a developer. (For non developers: I would not like to guess how many websites will have axios in their Javascript – these days, there's a fair chance the answer is "most".). In practical terms, it's nothing for non-devs to worry about directly – the attack is focused on the servers that hold the javascript, rather than the users of the websites – but indirectly, the number of computers that might have been compromised is terrifying.
Bookmarks for March 30, 2026
- I Decompiled the White House's New App
I really hope that the fact that this has been publically shared will get someone to make some massive and rapid changes to this app, because wow, this is bad on so many levels.
- Scientists uncovered the nutrients bees were missing — Colonies surged 15-fold | ScienceDaily
It's easy to feel like everything's doomed, so I've been trying to keep an eye out for good news stories, and this is absolutely superb news. Bees are vital, and if we can reverse the damage we've done fairly easily, that's great.
Bookmarks for March 28, 2026
- Can it Resolve DOOM? Game Engine in 2,000 DNS Records – blog.rice.is
I think "Can it run DOOM?" may have reached it's apotheosis.
Bookmarks for March 23, 2026
- March, 19-21: God is a comedian – by No1
This is an absolutely wild account of geopolitics over the last few days/weeks. Nothing untrue, just a reasonable accounting of the ongoing stupidity, in a way that for all it's just shatteringly depressing, does at least make me laugh.
- MuPDF: The ultimate library for managing PDF documents
How in god's name have I not run across this before? Irrelevant to most people, but I suspect it's going to change my working life.
Bookmarks for March 21, 2026
- Better, Faster, and (Even) More – Rands in Repose
The opening two sentence of this really resonated with me. "I’ve never built more interesting, random, and useless scripts, tools, and services than I have in the last six months. The cost to go from “Random Thought” to “Working Something” has never been lower thanks to Claude Code."
Bookmarked to take a proper look at his tools later – but having made this note, I have to note that the gap between "quick tools I'm building for myself" and "working public software" is massive, and I still don't believe that non-professional engineers should be using these tools to make public software.
Bookmarks for March 19, 2026
- The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham
God, yes, this all of this. I hate that even my personaly website, which I've kept as lightweight as my blogging tools will allow me to, still loads about 0.5MB of data in order to render 7KB of actual text. That's mad to me. But it's not close to as mad as news websites.
Bookmarks for March 18, 2026
- When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”
This is fascinating. I am pretty candid about making steady use of AI during my work day, but I don't generally try and multi-task with it. I could, in theory, juggle multiple work streams, pinging between agents on different projects as they report in. But that intuitively seems like madness to me – if I'm constantly context switching, I'm not going to be doing the required thinking (and there's still more than enough of it) well enough. I can use AI to make the task I'm doing faster, but I don't want to try and use it to do two tasks at once.
- Flexibility boosts productivity, not office mandates
I am completely unsurprised by this news. Working from home full time (I go into the office maybe once or twice a quarter) is a *huge* benefit to me, and I am disposed to a) stay with my employer and b) work hard to ensure my employer succeeds so I don't have to find a job that will make me go into the office even part-time. I know there are some people for whom it's not true, and some jobs where it helps to be in person, but I honestly don't get why employers can't just trust people to figure out their own best practice and let them get on.