Friday links for June 12th 2026
The “worse than I thought” edition.
1. The UN report on AI vs Climate
It’s not great. 80 to 90% of energy consumption is in day-to-day use, not training. When CO2 consumption goes down, water and land can increase. Generating images is 1450 times worse than text, video is worse than that.
2. Generative AI is fixated on Elias Thorne
Elias Thorne does not exist but, when you ask a large language models to tell you a story, there’s a high chance he’ll be the hero. The reason? Model collapse: feeding generated text back into a text generator.
If you ever wondered how ad networks seem to track you all over the net, this iPhone app reveals all the fingerprinting data they can access about your phone without even asking. Despite knowing about this, I was still surprised at how much is up for grabs.
A very well made site demonstrating the issues with dark patterns in online shopping and the overconsumption that results from it in the world of fashion.
On rotation
This week’s soundtrack is Big Mama by Flying Lotus
Until Monday…
Colin