Lew Riley

View Alistair Alexander’s graphic link Alistair AlexanderAlistair Alexander • 1stPremium • 1st Ecologies of Technology - research, writing, engagement, workshops, project and proposal developmentEcologies of Technology - research, writing, engagement, workshops, project and proposal development 1d • Edited • 1 day ago • Edited • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn I recently posted that creating one 10-second AI video on OpenAI’s Sora app takes 1 kilowatt hour - 10% of the daily energy of a German household. Someone asked: What about Netflix and online gaming - surely they use a lot of energy too? It’s a good question, and it comes up a lot whenever AI energy is discussed - and answering it helps to put AI’s energy demand in perspective. Let's start with Netflix - a credible estimate from The Carbon Trust in 2021 said that 1 hour’s streaming took around .18 kilowatt hours. So in that case, making one 10 second Sora Video takes the same as watching 5 and a half of hours of Netflix. And in case you’re wondering, watching HD or 4K makes virtually no difference. Most of that energy by far is from your own device, so a large TV takes a lot more than a smartphone. In the Sora estimate, a device is not included. Online gaming is far harder to estimate, there are no clear numbers, but I found some clues. One analysis looks at hosting Destiny 2, a popular online game, on an AWS “ng4b.16xlarge” instance. (you can find out more how I've calculated in the link below). By my estimates that will come to around 15 watts per player per hour. But again your home device is doing most of the work - nearly 20 times more. Add a Playstion or PC, that could be 250 watts, so that’s .265 Kwh for every hour of gaming. So making 1 Sora Video takes 4 hours of gaming. And it will be dozens of hours more if you use a smartphone. But with AI’s energy use, we should take a systemic view; after all, an AI model is a massive industrial system with a truly global impact. We don’t have p…

An estimate of the energy cost of producing one single 10 second Sora video: one kilowatt hour.

- Deplete and then recharge your iphone 17 68 times
- 10% of daily German household use
- 5.5 hours of Netflix
- ~4hrs of gaming

This is probably a huge underestimate

www.linkedin.com/posts/alista...

This paper contains some good arguments about an issue that concerns me a lot when I hear my colleagues talking about LLM use in developing their research:

Whose ideas are you presenting as your own?

(Though the fatalist argument the authors make at the end of paper is disappointing/bizarre.)

This post (+ the one after it, but starting with this one because context is important) has gotten surprising amounts of attention from folks who think that students are necessarily lazy and malicious.

>>

* students need structure (followed by implied or direct claims of ableism)

Black women like @angryblacklady.bsky.social and @chanda.bsky.social are speaking very clearly and objectively about why registering for a protest isn't a great idea, and white people are fighting them down.

It's always "listen to Black women*" with the asterisk meaning "after the fact"

Monarez: "Kennedy demanded 2 things of me that were were inconsistent w/ my oath of office. He directed me to commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation regardless of the scientific evidence. He also directed me to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause"

For years, I've tried to tell y'all what cops know, and what criminal justice reformers know, about how murders really get solved.

Look at how massive the manhunt for both Luigi Mangioni and Tyler Robinson were. Then look at how they were actually caught. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Two phone calls.

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years.

Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

OpenAI claims new GPT-5 model boosts ChatGPT to ‘PhD level’ GPT-5's release comes as tech firms continue to compete in an effort to claim the world's most advanced AI.

Obviously a lie, since the definition of PhD-level expertise, standard across universities worldwide, is that you can produce original knowledge.

I remember once astonishing a colleague’s husband when he naively asked why we (historians) couldn’t just look something up on the internet and we had to explain that WE are the ones who find the stuff and add it to the internet

A lot of conversations I have with software developers reveal a fundamental causal reasoning fallacy around access. Their stance is frequently: "I had interest, and I succeeded, so interest is the driver of success."

The real comparison is how many people had interest and didn't succeed anyway

“Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk opens up about her 45 days in a South Louisiana processing facility—and the generous and compassionate women she met.

Rümeysa Öztürk was unlawfully detained by ICE for over six weeks in retaliation for writing an op-ed.

For the first time since her release, Rümeysa opens up about her experiences and advocates for dignity and justice for those still trapped in ICE detention.

What's up with Justice Jackson? She started making her mark and speaking out early, and some of her dissents are so pointed Kagan and Sotomayor don’t even join them. The far right is out for her, and even Republican justices are getting snarky.

So what's up? Here’s my take 🧵

Added alt text to the reposted image.

I can get behind this. The episodes are painfully short. I wait a whole week, and then it's all over so quickly?

Not fair! I am being treated very unfairly!

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

#NoKings protest in Philadelphia

Carole Cadwalladr - Broligarchs, AI, and a Techno-Authoritarian Surveillance State | The Daily Show YouTube video by The Daily Show

Jon Stewart is a legend & the way this show is trying to explain to a mainstream audience the gravity what is happening in the US is amazing. It was both thrilling & terrifying to be part of it. Thank you @TheDailyShow 👏

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG7C...

More US scientists must speak out - Nature Human Behaviour The Trump administration has launched an extraordinary and dangerous attack on US science. Climate and water scientist Peter Gleick calls on scientists who are able and willing to do so to speak out p...

"History tells us that there are times when the dangers of inaction become sufficiently threatening to individuals or the planet that scientists who are able and willing to do so will have to enter the public arena ... This is such a time." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

There's nothing holy about writing discrimination into the law.

Utah study on trans youth care extremely inconvenient for politicians who ordered it The state's ban on gender-affirming pediatric care "cannot be justified" by science, a two-year review concluded.

Repeat after me: Treatment for trans-youth saves lives.

"The consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body
changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric [gender dysphoria] patients."

You do NOT have to accept this! Post on the public comments to pressure them to NOT do this! www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD...

Please use this image as the reply post to all dems who're trying to compromise right now. You have my blessing.

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they'll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they'd tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead. No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

One of many moments in Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” that will stop you in your tracks.

📌

Hundreds more NSF grants terminated after agency director resigns Sethuraman Panchanathan abruptly leaves helm of US funding agency after Elon Musk’s DOGE arrives.

The scientific news from America is grim. The Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) has resigned and hundreds of existing grants are ending. NSF grant money isn't paid out in a chunk at the start - you invoice as you need it, so gov can just stop paying.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

The Roads Both Taken

Quantum Frost
xkcd.com/3076/

NSF has awarded almost 50% fewer grants since Trump took office The reasons aren’t clear—and the agency’s director claims the president’s policies haven’t slowed grant awards

NEW: The number of new grants handed out by the National Science Foundation since President Donald Trump took office has fallen by nearly 50% compared with the same 2-month period 1 year ago. | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Hey, yall thought I was harsh when I said this over the years. I said what I said.

Do you still think it's harsh now?

Some of y'all think you are somewhat safe but you are not, because you are surrounded by unreliable people.

It's better to have a smaller group that will not cash you in.