As Andy Massick explains well, if you are making a few requests per day to a simple non-reasoning text based AI model the carbon impact is, to use a technical term, bugger all 1. I probably ask ChatGPT and Claude around 8 questions a day on average. Over the course of a year of using them, this uses up the same energy as running a single space heater in my room for 2 hours in total. Not 2 hours per day, just a one-off use of a single space heater for 2 hours […] By being vegan, I have as much climate impact as not prompting ChatGPT 400,000 times each year ...

Finally a week with more than two links! Beatrice de Graaf is a Professor at Utrecht University. Her talk at Stanford on The Quest for a Third Rome describes using text mining techniques to analyse Putin’s speeches since 1999. The paper, written with her student Neils Drost, is open access: Putin and the Third Rome:: Imperial-Eschatological Motives as a Usable Past “In this corpus, we ask how Putin used the combination of history and Russian Orthodox theological, biblical tropes as a usable past, to create his powerbase, to understand how he built up to defending and legitimizing the invasion in Ukraine” A similar area was covered by Teitelbaum in his book War for Eternity about the influence of Alexsandr Dugin and mysticism on both Putin and Steve Bannon in the US. Does Putin believe it? Maybe. Is he using mysticism and religion for his own ends? For sure. ...

Some AI development resources this week… How to Build an AI Code Agent Thorsten Ball has published how to build your own AI code agent. He creates a toy example in Rust that’s <400 lines but still includes tool use. Geoffrey Huntley does the same. It’s worth reading both Claude Code Best Practices Anthropic has released a detailed guide on Claude Code best practices. Of note: Claude can (and should!) use the architect/plan then code model that Aider makes explicit. Telling Claude to read code/docs, then plan, then code, then commit gives better results than just telling it to write code Ask Claude to review things (e.g. the CLAUDE.md hint files) and suggest improvements. Repeat. (As an aside, the Anthropic workbench can improve general prompts) Telling Claude to ’think’, ’think harder’ etc results in more thinking tokens being used Clear context frequently (/clear) - usable context window is smaller than the advertised max The model of asking Claude to review and improve its work (or human starting points) repeatedly was not obvious to me ...

Two links this week… AI Logos Are All Buttholes In what might be the most important visual design analysis of 2025, Velvet Shark has compiled a gallery of AI company logos that look like buttholes. From Claude’s spiral to Midjourney’s abstract void, it seems AI branding has converged on a rather unfortunate design pattern. If It’s Crypto, It’s Not Money Laundering Money laundering is legal now, as long as it’s crypto. JP Koning summaries the Trump administration’s latest legal changes: If it’s crypto, it’s not money laundering. ...

I’m trying not to be perfectionist about this blogging thing, and concentrate on getting stuff out so in that spirit so this week there’s just a few links, all on AI. First up - how to use AI. I see so many people type some random question into ChatGPT/Claude, get a mediocre answer back and move on. But how to get good results from these systems is not at all obvious. For a complex example, see my post on Experimenting with Deep Research or an even more extensive example of using one model to generate a prompt for another ...

Today’s fun is setting up the new Zapier MCP integration. This creates a MCP server that allows Claude Desktop or Cursor or anything else that supports MCP to call any Zaps Setting Up Zapier MCP Step 1: Install mcp-remote First, install the mcp-remote package using npm: npm install mcp-remote Step 2: Configure MCP Endpoint in Claude Desktop In Claude Desktop, you’ll need to add the Zapier MCP endpoint to your settings. Add the following configuration to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json ...

Trying something new, with a weekly-ish list of links 1) OAPs are radicalised too When Grandpa Turns Extremist: Digital Immigrants, Radicalisation and the German Reich Citizens Movement the radicalisation of middle-aged and elderly people remains largely overlooked despite their active involvement in nearly all extremist movements. This Insight advocates for a more nuanced understanding of extremism and ageing, emphasising the need for radicalisation prevention strategies geared towards those born as Digital Immigrants, such as Baby Boomers and Generation X. These generations did not grow up in a digitised world, and their education largely did not include critical media studies. Among others, this factor makes them prone to misinformation consumption online. [This article looks..] at the example of the German Reich Citizens Movement, which has a very specific age structure and is characterised by the relatively late radicalisation of its adherents. The movement, which predates the digital age, now primarily relies on the internet for communication, spreading its ideology, and mobilising action against the state and governmental authorities ...

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized approach for structuring context information when working with Large Language Models (LLMs). It was introduced by Anthropic but is standardised and an open protocol. Yeah, great. But what does that even mean? The problem that MCP is trying to solve is one of getting access to local/specialist information. When using Claude or ChatGPT etc, the model has access to its built in knowledge from training, but this only contains public information and will have a cut off date when the model was trained. To get around this, some tools have integrated web search that can add extra knowledge and/or the ability to import documents. But what if you want to talk to a database? Or files on disk? Or a knowledge base? Or … ...

Now Deep Research is available to ChatGPT users on the £20/mth tier, I’ve had a chance to experiment. The tl;dr is that it’s really very good, and the level of progress in just 6 months is mind-blowing. I picked something I know about - financial pressures facing UK Universities. First, I asked ChatGPT to generate the prompt for Deep Research, using this template I found via a mailing list (and I can’t remember which one). ...