Aaron Linson

One thing I learned today. On the Mac with Voiceover turned on and with the path setting enabled. You can interact with your path and find the last folder, pressing VO plus shift pbblus m will bring up the seconary menu. Within that secondary menu there is an option to open the terminal. Pressing enter opens the terminal and sets your root folder as the default directory for that session. An easy way to then type claude and off you go. It's the small useful things that the Mac does. We'll see what Golden Gate brings, I'm excited and nervous at the same time.

AI's environmental numbers, and why everyone's are different
Per-prompt water estimates for AI range from 0.26 mL to about 519 mL. That's a factor of 2,000. Neither is wrong — they're measuring different things.
Google's 0.26 mL figure covers on-site cooling water for a median Gemini text prompt, including idle chips and data centre overhead. It excludes water consumed generating the electricity. The UC Riverside team's 519 mL figure is for a 100-word email and includes that indirect water. Google's own narrow, chip-only version of its methodology gives 0.12 mL. Sam Altman has cited ~0.39 mL for ChatGPT.
So before repeating any per-query number, check what's inside the boundary.
The aggregate picture
Data centres used about 415 TWh in 2024 — roughly 1.5% of global electricity. AI-specific facilities used about 155 TWh in 2025, or about 0.5% of world electricity. That's the total-stock view.
The growth view looks different. In 2025 data centre demand grew 17%, AI-focused facilities grew 50%, and global electricity demand grew 3%. Work that against global generation and AI accounted for something like 5–6% of all new electricity demand last year. (That last figure is my arithmetic from the IEA's growth rates and Ember's generation total, not a number the IEA publishes.)
Same year. Same data. Roughly a tenfold difference depending on which denominator you pick.
Water
Berkeley Lab estimated US data centres consumed 17.4 billion gallons directly in 2023, plus about 211 billion gallons indirectly through electricity generation. Together that's under 1% of US water consumption.
Two caveats. The indirect figure is contested — deriving it from USGS thermoelectric factors instead gives roughly half, partly because Berkeley Lab counts evaporation from hydroelectric reservoirs. And water doesn't move between basins, so a national percentage tells you very little about any specific place. Google's data centres use roughly a third of the municipal water in The Dalles, Oregon.
Concentration and efficiency both matter
Data centres are about 21% of Ireland's electricity and around 26% of Virginia's. Roughly two-thirds of data centres built since 2022 sit in water-stressed regions.
At the same time, the IEA finds energy per AI task falling by at least an order of magnitude annually. Google reports a 33× energy drop and 44× carbon drop per median prompt over twelve months. Predictions that AI would hit 20% of world energy by 2025 missed by a factor of about 40.
What nobody has
No company publishes query volumes, so per-prompt figures can't be multiplied up to totals. Best estimates put all text queries at about 2% of AI data centre electricity — the other 98% isn't publicly broken down anywhere.
Small share of the total. Large share of the growth. Very concentrated locally. Improving fast per unit of work. All four are true at once, and which one you lead with is a choice, not a fact.
Sources are all public. Go argue with the primary documents rather than with me.
Google methodology: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measuring-the-environmental-impact-of-ai-inference
Li et al., Communications of the ACM 68:54–63 (2025): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-questions-on-energy-and-ai/executive-summary
Berkeley Lab, 2024 US Data Center Energy Usage Report: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1
Our World in Data summary: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use
#AI #Energy #DataCenters #Sustainability #ClimateData

Today with the assistance of Ai I did something that I never thought I could ever do again. For 29 years I had 20/200 vision in my right eye. I used magnifiers and everything from a visual perspective. 8 years ago that all changed for me. Today, I increased browser zoom by 200 percent and asked Be My Eyes if text and images overlapped, if so, describe in detail where those elements were located. To my amazement it described all of this to me in great detail. This was after using the screenshot feature from the windows desktop app. I tried the same thing at 400 percent and got different results. This test confirmed to me that the site had reflow, and resize text issues along with some color contrast issues thanks to another tool. How AI can help blind accessibility professionals is amazing me every day. Something I never thought possible is possible to me. I'd still verify with a human tester however, not bad results I think.

Did you know that skip to links / buttons can save time for users with disabilities? Imagine you only have the use of your left hand or are 6 months into using a screen reader. You come across a site with no skip controls at all. THUS forcing you to tab through 30 items to get into the main content. You see where you need to go but are forced to tab through every interactive element or, you just want to get into the nain content and can't. This is a major reality for people with disabilities every day. Skip to controls or links are essential for people with disabilities useful to all users as well. #WCAG #UX #DigitalAccessibility #AccessibilityChampion ABetterWebForAll

#WeekendWraup Wife's Airpods got replaced as she dropped them and decided it was a good idea to clean them with soap and water, she now knows bertter. Working on getting her home office workable for her when she has the ability to work from home. We found out that shopping at whole foods isn't as expensive as going to the grocery store. Other than that, nothing really to exciting, a nice relaxing weekend was had.