When energy geopolitics hits your laptop
Energy shocks from Russia’s diesel export ban and the Strait of Hormuz crisis won’t just lift petrol prices - they’re already reshaping global computing.
Kate Carruthers
When Space, Strategy and Commercial Tech Converge
Leaked Russia-China plans to counter Starlink show how military strategy, geopolitics and commercial tech are converging, as states adapt to dual‑use infrastructure and the strategic role of privately owned satellite constellations.
DeepSeek’s AI chip is a wake‑up call: the arms race has only just started
DeepSeek’s push to design its own AI inference chip is a clear sign that the real AI arms race is shifting from flashy models to control of the hardware stack.
War, Politics and Compute Power
War is politics by other means - and today, supercomputers, AI and platforms are the new “means” in US-China tech rivalry, compute sovereignty and AI governance.
The Two-Layer AI Stack: Cost Discipline Meets Strategic Leverage
AI shouldn’t be one big expensive model doing everything. Build a two-layer stack: a cheap, open-weight “engine” for execution, with frontier models as “steering” for judgment and edge cases. Own your costs, avoid lock-in, and let quality go up as prices go down.
Some changes with this site
This site has been running in one form or another since 2002. It started out in the early days as a kind of personal live journal (no pun intended for those who remember Live Journal back in the day). But to put the timeline in perspective: when I started this
Claude Science: a practical AI workbench for real scientific workflows
Claude Science is Anthropic’s new AI workbench for scientists, built around real lab workflows, reproducibility and auditable AI, not just another chatbot. Here is what it means for day‑to‑day research and engineering.