The reviews on my paper "Modelling Scenarios for Carbon-aware Geographic Load Shifting of Compute Workloads" came back and the verdict is major revision (four reviews: Major/Minor/New/Minor).

"Please rate the manuscript. Excellent/Good/Fair/Good"

I feel this is going to be a long struggle; meanwhile, please read the preprint as nothing materially will change.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07043

https://scholar.social/@wim_v12e/115179142615575786

#frugalComputing

The article https://huggingface.co/blog/sasha/ai-energy-score-v2 about the huge increase in energy consumption of genAI tools because of "reasoning" is interesting:

I estimated (https://limited.systems/articles/google-search-vs-chatgpt-emissions/) that the energy cost per query for GPT-3 (a 220B-parameter model) was between 2,000 and 5,000 Wh/1000 queries. The new GPT-OSS, with 120B parameters, consumes between 5,000 and 8,500 Wh/1000 queries.

So even though it has only half as many parameters, if consumes more than twice the energy of GPT-3.

#FrugalComputing

I wrote an article about upgrading software on obsolete phones.

"Resisting software driven hardware obsolescence"

Considering the sheer volume of mobile phones, and the high greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their manufacture, it is imperative to extend their useful life by several decades. What would it take?

https://limited.systems/articles/resisting-hardware-obsolescence/

#frugalComputing

I have written some notes to a thing I’m working on which, for the learning of others in the team, includes:

“This website does *not* deploy Google Analytics. This is because if it did, similar to YouTube embeds, it would result in ~500 KB of panopticon spyware.”

#webDev #frugalComputing

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I made a tally of the total planned AI data centre capacity in Scotland and I am a bit shocked: it amounts to 7.3 GW, which is as much as the entire energy consumption of Scotland, electricity + gas in 2023.

To spend as much energy on "AI" as the entire need of a country is madness. And I have no doubt that this picture would scale if I did it for the entire UK etc.

#FrugalComputing #AI