5 June 26
On Green AI
Contrary to the normal progression of things, the computer that I built a year ago in May has increased in value by about $1150. This is because of the extraordinary demand being placed on supplies of memory and storage components of all sorts by the buildout of AI data centers — most spectacularly in my case, the 64 GB of DDR5 RAM which I purchased in May of 2025 for $165 is now priced at $915. With my workstation, I am continuing to play around with local AI models. The quality of these local models has increased dramatically over the past year, which is leading many developers to explore how they can be used in preference to the huge models from providers in the cloud such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
One could make the argument that running AI models locally is more sustainable than invoking the resources of huge server farms every time one calls upon AI. But are there other threads that might constitute “green AI”? Sharon Stein has a good piece about this topic on resilience.org. She identifies three visions for green AI. The first of these technical greening. This means running AI with fewer resources, for instance by using smaller models that demand less energy and materials. The second of these is ecological intervention. This refers to developing AI applications that help us understand and ameliorate environmental change, for instance by optimizing agricultural resource use. The third vision is relational reorientation. This focuses on questioning the assumptions around nature, intelligence, and relationships that are built into contemporary AI. A lot of this vision comes from Indigenous perspectives: one interesting research program in this vein is called Abundant Intelligences (also see an open access paper titled Abundant intelligences: placing AI within Indigenous knowledge frameworks).
On a more amusing note, here is a literally hand-cranked solution to the cost and energy use of contemporary AI systems.
26 May 26
Disarming AI
Today I read through the entirety of Pope Leo XIV’s newly issued encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, subtitled On Safeguarding The Human Person In The Time Of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a very rich document which anyone who is concerned with the ethical and moral issues around AI should add to their reading list. Pope Leo’s namesake predecessor Pope Leo XIII in 1891 wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum about the condition of the working class. In its first two chapters Magnifica Humanitas traces the history of Catholic social teachings from the time of Rerum Novarum to the present. These themes of human dignity and working towards the common good structure the discussion of AI beginning in chapter three.
Whether through direct study or not Pope Leo XIV has absorbed a lot from the discipline of science and technology studies. For instance there is no such thing as morally neutral AI:
In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. (Section 104).
Discussions of digital colonialism are readily found among academic critics of information technology but it is much weightier to hear this topic coming from the leader of the Catholic church:
Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. Entire regions, especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information…Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form. (Section 178).
Pope Leo XIV is fond of the expression “to disarm” and this phrase is at the heart of his critique of AI:
To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible. (Section 110).
It is easy to find blanket rejections of AI in many quarters but I am heartened that there is a lot more nuance in this encyclical. Technical innovation is part of the divine act of creation but going along with that comes a responsibility towards affected communities and cultivation of the common good.
1 April 26
Awaiting A Moon Launch
The world is in even much more of a train wreck than when I first reported on this at the end of January, but there might be a launch to the moon tomorrow! At the moment we have 16 hours before launch of the Artemis 2 space rocket that will send four astronauts on a loop around the moon. It’s quite possible the launch will be scrubbed tomorrow due to a mechanical difficulty or weather (there’s a 20% chance of the latter), but the launch window for this month extends a few more day so they’d be able to try again the following day.
I will be following this actively tomorrow afternoon. Trump is scheduled to make some pronouncement about the Iran war in the evening — nobody knows what direction he’ll go on this — and is usurping all broadcasting for that; I will not be watching that. Ugh.
29 March 26
Wikipedia At Home
Both Pica and I had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home when we grew up, always at hand to dig into some topic of interest. Nowadays Wikipedia plays that role, the jewel of the Internet, a master reference only one bit of typing away. But what if…something happen to the Internet? A tech enclosure movement or collapse of the root level domain name system or rampant cyberwarfare?
It turns out one can download all of Wikipedia pretty easily. Since 2007 there has been a project called Kiwix that has created a system for taking extremely large knowledge stores and compressing them into single files that are easily viewed with special software offline.
This software is not difficult to run and is available for all major platforms. Their catalog lists 3458 different works that have been compiled into this file format in many different languages. I’ve had a go and have downloaded the complete English Wikipedia, Wikispecies, and resources from iFixit. The Wikipedia file is 115 GB in size and took several hours to download.
It’s a comfort having Wikipedia on my own hard drive. You never know.
26 March 26
The Ghost Airport of Aragón
There was an good piece yesterday about the epistemic collapse of the Iran war: nobody has any idea of what the facts are on the ground, and the information bubbles we all (separately) occupy are not communicating across to each other. Some interesting stories are emerging though, sometimes on the periphery of it all.
One of these stories concerns the airport of Teruel – Caudé in Aragón. This is not an airport for passengers. Rather, it’s a facility for aircraft maintenance and storage. When the war broke out, it began to receive big jetliners from the fleets of the Gulf States airlines to take refuge from the war. Planes from Qatar Airways, whose home base is Doha, are especially represented as part of the new arrivals, with about 20 of their widebody jets having come in by last Saturday.
9 March 26
For Fun Or For Beauty?
Thanks to a link on MetaFilter, recently I watched a masterful long-form video by jazz bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely entitled “Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future”. Suno is the technology company that has become the biggest powerhouse in AI music. A usual workflow with Suno is to give it some text prompts describing the characteristics of the music you want and perhaps some lyrics and then Suno will take that and generate a fully instrumented song for you.
Needless to say, Neely is not a fan.
Commercial generative AI is bad in ways which are different from other disruptive music technologies of the past, like MIDI sequencing and samplers, because there is a sociopolitical agenda behind its adoption. This agenda will be bad for musicians, it will be bad for music lovers, and it will leave us feeling more alienated and alone…Like any culture war, it’s a distraction from the real war, the class war. You see, there is a class of techno-capitalists who are currently using generative AI as a means of wealth extraction. They do this by circumventing intellectual property laws…
Fifty-nine minutes into the video, Neely links AI music to technofuturist movements past and present. He discusses the Italian futurists, in particular Filippo Marinetti who in 1909 pens The Futurist Manifesto. Nine years later he goes on to write the original Fascist Manifesto. Today’s technocapitalists such as Marc Andreessen view Marinetti as a patron saint. Theirs is the same worldview that produces abominations such as Reflect Orbital’s plan.
Suno describes their core values as being “Music, Impatience, Aesthetics, and Fun”. Neely would replace these values with Service, Patience, Craft, and Beauty.
Neely believes generative AI will cause music to split into two different art forms, just as theatre and cinema are different but related art forms. These will be live and recorded music, and he has a lot of hope for the future of live music.
5 March 26
Delusions From Middle-Earth
Today I submitted a public comment to the Federal Communications Commission on the proposal from SpaceX to launch up to a million satellites for orbital data centers, which I blogged about last Friday. I am now working on the public comment for the Reflect Orbital proposal to put giant mirrors into space to light up the night particularly for use by solar farms. I retrieved the Reflect Orbital proposal documents from the FCC portal and was disenchanted to find that the name of their initial test satellite with an 18-meter mirror is EARENDIL-1.
This is a name that comes from Tolkien: Eärendil was a half-elf in The Silmarillion who bore on his brow a jewel — a Silmaril — that shone like a bright star. This leads to the question: why are so many tech bros obsessed with Tolkien?
A lot of people have commented on this trait lately. A writer named Samuel Arbesman compiled a list of all the tech companies he could find that have names from Tolkien (there are 22). In an essay entitled Mythic Capital, Lee Konstantinou discusses how Tolkien teaches a lot about capital and politics and the technoutopian vision of breaking free of all limits. In the New York Times Michiko Kakutani writes about how the traditionalism running through Tolkien appeals to the tech bros and that they are drawn to the themes of kingly and magical power rather than the gentle settled life of the hobbits.
It is interesting that when Tolkien first got popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was pulling in people mostly from the hippie counterculture. Times have changed.
But Pratchett doesn’t seem to appeal to the tech bros — I don’t see too many companies celebrating the cabbages of the Sto Plains for some reason.
27 February 26
The Destruction of the Night Sky
There are two proposals before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission right now that would do horrifying things to the night sky. Both are currently open to public comment through March 6 and 9, and I’m gearing up to submit a couple of comments. The FCC is the federal agency that regulates satellite launches in the United States, and they are now in the practice of rubber stamping an awful lot of these.
The first proposal is from a company called Reflect Solar that wants to put giant mirrors in space for the purpose of turning night into day for selected localities, in particular solar farms. They plan to start with an test satellite in 2026 with an 18 meter mirror, and then by 2030 have 4000 satellites in orbit at an altitude of 625 km. Eventually they imagine orbiting 250,000 satellites. The math for the amount of solar energy one can obtain this way absolutely does not work out, but even the 4000-satellite plan would be catastrophic for both professional and amateur astronomy. Visual astronomy would become an extremely risky activity, since accidentally glimpsing the reflected light in a telescope or binoculars could cause permanent eye damage.
Not to be outdone, everybody’s favorite archvillain Elon Musk is wanting to orbit up to 1,000,000 satellites for spaceborne AI data centers. There are presently 14,000 active satellites in space and low earth orbit is already getting crowded. One risk is Kessler syndrome — that is, collisions from space debris causing the generation of more debris in a chain reaction, rendering the entire orbital zone unusable. Another is impacts on atmospheric chemistry as tens of thousands of satellites burning up when they reenter may contribute to ozone depletion and climate change. Advocates of space data centers also tend to neglect the laws of physics. It is a lot harder to cool down a data center in space than on Earth, since due to the vacuum of space the only mechanism for heat transfer is radiation, not conduction or convection. (This is why vacuum thermoses keep their contents hot or cold.)
Both these proposals are now getting mainstream media coverage, such as in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The organization DarkSky International has a web page on how to comment on the proposals.
26 January 26
Back To The Moon
This upcoming journey doesn’t seem to be getting much attention now given the train wreck of current world events, but the United States is on the verge of launching four astronauts on a trip around the moon. This is the Artemis II space mission, which will start no earlier than February 6th. The launch vehicle arrived at its launch pad last week. There are monthly launch windows, so if the initial attempt has to be scrubbed, they will postpone to the next or subsequent months. The mission profile is similar to that of Apollo 8 in December 1968, although unlike in Apollo 8, the spacecraft will be sent on a “free return” trajectory to the moon (the spacecraft will not have to fire its engines to get back to Earth).
I am excited and nervous and will be following closely. 1968 wasn’t exactly a year of peace and harmony either, so there’s that.
7 December 25
The Memory Keeper
I’m continuing down my genealogical rabbithole and while reading up on WikiTree I came across a reference to an obscure but quite intriguing piece of software called The Memory Keeper. This is genealogical and historical research that is built on something called TiddlyWiki.
TiddlyWiki is personal wiki software that extremely cleverly functions entirely inside of a single HTML page. The individual wiki pages are units called “tiddlers” and the code in the HTML page sets up forms to edit and save the tiddlers. I have been using TiddlyWiki since 2017 to keep a research log for work. There is a substantial community around TiddlyWiki who have built many extensions and plugins for the system.
Memory Keeper consists of a set of these plugins and templates that have been organized around genealogical and historical research. It is not meant as a replacement for traditional genealogy software but rather to help in the research process. The trouble with most genealogy software is that the software typically is good at organizing the results of the research (individuals, their relationships in families, events, places, and sources and citations) but the software isn’t really a place to record one’s working notes. Nowadays there are many software systems for taking non-linear notes (in addition to TiddlyWiki, systems like Zettlr, Obsidian, and Scrivener come to mind). What Memory Keeper does is marry the two types of software, providing fields for genealogical data while allowing for non-linear wiki entry linking.
I’ve been testing Memory Keeper out these past couple of days and I think it will be very useful. I’m using Hosea Curtice as my test case. Here is an illustration. There is a note in the published genealogy for the Curtice family that he served in the French and Indian Wars and that lists the captain commanding his company. I easily look up what company this was, but this leads into researching the campaigns of this company and its regiment. Traditional genealogy software will not have fields to store that information, but this is ideal for a wiki-based system.
My previous work with TiddlyWiki was not very sophisticated, but I see lots of potential for Memory Keeper, particularly around keeping track of geographies in personal historical research.