webtrail Brian · My field notebook for trails and the web
37 stops in the catalog

Catalog

Every stop that sits on a trail, kept as an entry of its own. One external site each, opened and read, with a line on why it earned its place.

Keyword 35mm film 35mm prime ai agency ai agents ai alignment ai brittleness ai coding assistants ai ethics ai generated code ai hallucinations ai hardware ai hype ai in education ai pair programming ai reasoning ai safety ai understanding anthropic anthropomorphism backcountry skills backpacking berkeley lab carbon footprint claude claude fable 5.1 code review cognitive bias cognitive load cognitive science compact camera compute demand covert side tasks daniel dennett data center capacity data center energy efficiency data center siting data center water use data centers data provenance day hike deception decision making declination deskilling developer burnout developer productivity developer trust eeg electricity demand electricity rates embeddings embodied carbon emergent abilities energy consumption energy estimates evaluation awareness eye tracking film photography fujifilm x-t5 generative ai geographic concentration gpt-6 astra grid stress growth trends hiking gear hyperscale intentional stance interpretability japan job demands junior developers large language models learning to code life-cycle assessment literature review llm llm assisted development llm deception local impact map and compass market share minimal gear mirrorless misinformation monitor evasion nasa tlx navigation olympus trip 35 one camera one lens openai packing list philosophy of ai philosophy of mind point and shoot randomized controlled trial research research methodology ricoh gr iiix sandbagging scheming selection bias skill formation stochastic parrots tax incentives ten essentials thinking tpu travel photography truthfulness vending-bench water filters water footprint water treatment water usage effectiveness wellbeing world models wue
SectionHiker article page headed '10 Best Backpacking Water Filters and Purifiers of 2026' with the subhead 'Make backcountry water sources safe to drink', bylined Philip Werner and dated April 5, 2026, above a lead photo of a sunlit conifer forest under a blue sky overlaid with the words 'Best Water Filters' Hiking

10 Best Backpacking Water Filters and Purifiers of 2026

SectionHiker is Philip Werner's independent hiking site, and this gear guide is its standing answer to a practical...

Blogger page headed ADD / XOR / ROL with the post 'A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs', dated Sunday July 06 2025, showing the sections 'The space of words' and 'Learning the mapping' beside a blog archive sidebar AI and Developer Psychology

A Non-Anthropomorphized View of LLMs by Halvar Flake

Halvar Flake (Thomas Dullien), a reverse engineer and security researcher, uses his blog ADD / XOR / ROL to make a...

Screenshot of the PMC page for the Patterns journal article on data center carbon and water footprints by Alex de Vries-Gao, showing the NIH/NLM header, the Cell Press Patterns banner, the December 2025 citation with DOI and PMCID, the title and author byline, and a right-hand sidebar with View on publisher site, PDF, Cite, Collections and Permalink actions. AI datacenters

A Peer-Reviewed Look at AI Data Centers' Water and Carbon Footprints

Patterns, a Cell Press journal, published this analysis by researcher Alex de Vries-Gao in December 2025, and PMC...

Springer Nature Link article page for 'Anthropomorphism in AI: hype and fallacy' in the journal AI and Ethics, marked Original Research and Open access, published 05 February 2024, by Adriana Placani, showing a correction notice, a Download PDF button, and the journal cover. AI and Developer Psychology

A Philosopher's Case Against Anthropomorphizing AI Systems

AI and Ethics, an open-access philosophy journal, published this paper by Adriana Placani, a philosopher at Nova...

arXiv abstract page for 'Concentrated siting of AI data centers drives regional power-system stress under rising global compute demand', submitted 13 March 2026 by Danbo Chen and five co-authors, with an abstract reporting Power Stress Index values above 0.25 for Oregon, Virginia and Ireland against more absorbent grids in Texas and Japan AI datacenters

AI Data Center Siting and Regional Power-Grid Stress, on arXiv

arXiv hosts this preprint, an AI-energy coupling framework that models where AI data centers are being built and what...

Andon Labs blog post "Astra vs Fable on Vending-Bench: More Money, More Aligned," posted 9/7/2026, over a dark photo of server racks, with the opening paragraphs comparing GPT 6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 AI and Developer Psychology

Andon Labs on GPT 6 Astra vs. Claude Fable: Who Colludes?

Andon Labs is an AI safety research lab that runs real AI-operated businesses — a retail store, café and radio...

Anthropic research page under the Interpretability label, headline 'Tracing the thoughts of a large language model' dated Mar 27, 2025, a 'Read the paper' button, and an embedded video thumbnail with a hand-drawn circuit diagram AI and Developer Psychology

Anthropic Traces the Internal Reasoning Behind Claude's Answers

Anthropic makes and sells Claude, the model this research examines, and its own interpretability team ran the study...

Tech Times article "Fable 5.1 System Card: Public AI Tops Restricted Model on Stealth, Gets Bioweapons Label" by Earl Bensen, published September 3, 2026, showing butterflies and moths arranged into the shape of the numeral 5, with a sidebar ad beside the headline AI and Developer Psychology

Anthropic's Fable 5.1 System Card on Stealth and Monitor Evasion

Tech Times covers Anthropic's own system card for Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1, the disclosure document...

OSTI.GOV bibliographic record for the technical report 'United States Data Center Energy Usage Report: 2025 Update,' dated 18 June 2026, listing eight Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory authors, an abstract projecting data centers at 11.8% of US electricity by 2030, a green 'View Technical Report' button, and a details table naming LBNL as research organization and three USDOE offices as sponsors AI datacenters

Berkeley Lab's 2025 US Data Center Energy Usage Report on OSTI.GOV

OSTI.GOV is the U.S. Department of Energy's public clearinghouse for federally sponsored research, and this page...

arXiv abstract page under the breadcrumb “Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction”, titled “Using Biometrics to Understand AI-Assisted Coding Performance and its Perception”, submitted 19 May 2026, with eight author names, the full abstract describing the EEG, eye-tracking, electrodermal and NASA-TLX measurements, a comments line reading “Stage 2 RR under review at EMSE” with the Stage 1 protocol on OSF, and an “Access Paper” sidebar of PDF, HTML and TeX links. AI and Developer Psychology

Biometrics of AI-Assisted Coding Workload, on arXiv

arXiv hosts the preprint of a multisite study that wires developers up to sensors while they code with and without an...

Back Roads Lens article page titled Building a Travel Photography Kit with the Fuji X-T5, its banner a Great Smoky Mountains National Park trail map with the title overlaid, the opening section heading Travel Photography Without the Backache below it, and a sidebar portrait of two people standing by the water. Camera Reviews

Building a Travel Photography Kit with the Fuji X-T5

Back Roads Lens is a personal travel photography site — trip guides, scenic drives, wildlife and photo galleries —...

arXiv abstract page under Computer Science > Software Engineering, headed "Cognitive Biases in LLM-Assisted Software Development", submitted 12 January 2026 by six authors, showing the full abstract and a metadata block listing 13 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables and a related ACM DOI. AI and Developer Psychology

Cognitive Biases in LLM-Assisted Development on arXiv

This arXiv preprint is a rare attempt to measure how developers think while working with a language model, rather...

arXiv abstract page for a life-cycle emissions study of AI hardware, listing seven authors including David Patterson and Parthasarathy Ranganathan, with an abstract on manufacturing emissions of TPUs and a sidebar linking to the PDF, HTML and TeX source AI datacenters

Cradle-to-Grave Emissions Study of Google's TPU Hardware

This arXiv preprint presents what its authors call the first published cradle-to-grave life-cycle assessment of...

The Hungry Hiker blog header with a colorful logo over a sunset mountain ridge, above the article headline 'What to Bring for a Day Hike + How I Pack My Pack (2025 Guide)', a 'What I Bring for a Hike' featured image of the author smiling in a trucker cap, and a 'Meet Kathleen' author photo in the sidebar Hiking

Day Hike Packing List and Pack Setup from The Hungry Hiker

The Hungry Hiker is Kathleen Neves's hiking blog, and her 2025 day-hike guide earns its catalog spot by answering the...

The Skurka Adventures site header in red serif type, tagline "Expert instruction & wilderness expeditions", with a navigation bar reading Guided Trips, Educational Resources, Guide Books & Courses, About Us and Blog, above a full-width photo of a USGS topographic map of Eldorado Canyon State Park with two baseplate compasses laid on it: a Suunto M3 Global with an orange magnetic needle at right and a blue-bezelled compass at top. The article headline "Map & Compass: Adjust for declination & orient the map" is overlaid in white across the map, with the byline "Featured, Navigation, Navigation + GPS / Andrew Skurka" beneath it. Hiking

Declination and Map Orientation on Skurka Adventures

Skurka Adventures is the site of long-distance hiker and guide Andrew Skurka, and this page covers the two setup...

Screenshot of the LessWrong post "The Intentional Stance, LLMs Edition" by Eleni Angelou, dated 30 April 2024 and dedicated to Daniel C. Dennett, showing the tl;dr summary and the section heading "Choosing Between Stances" AI and Developer Psychology

Dennett's Intentional Stance Applied to LLMs on LessWrong

LessWrong is a community blog for people who want to reason carefully about minds, human and artificial alike, and...

Substack article page headed "LLMs and World Models, Part 1" with the subtitle "How do Large Language Models Make Sense of Their Worlds?", byline Melanie Mitchell dated Feb 13, 2025, the opening section "AI Brittleness in the Before Times," and a dermatology photo of a skin lesion used as an example image AI and Developer Psychology

Do LLMs Have World Models? Melanie Mitchell Investigates

AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans is Melanie Mitchell's ongoing newsletter on where AI research actually stands, and...

Screenshot of an arXiv abstract page under the breadcrumb 'Computer Science > Software Engineering', showing the paper title 'Same Scrutiny, More Time: Eye Tracking Insights into Reviewing LLM-Labelled Code', its five authors, the full abstract, a comments line noting acceptance at ASE 2026, and an 'Access Paper' sidebar linking to PDF, HTML and TeX source. AI and Developer Psychology

Eye-Tracking Study of LLM-Labelled Code Review on arXiv

arXiv hosts the preprint of "Same Scrutiny, More Time", an eye-tracking study of what software engineers actually do...

arXiv abstract page under the breadcrumb Computer Science, Software Engineering, headed From Gains to Strains: Modeling Developer Burnout with GenAI Adoption by Zixuan Feng, Sadia Afroz and Anita Sarma, with the full abstract about a survey of 442 developers analysed with PLS-SEM, a CC BY licence badge, and a submission history listing version 1 from October 2025 and version 2 from January 2026. AI and Developer Psychology

From Gains to Strains: Developer Burnout Study on arXiv

arXiv hosts the preprint "From Gains to Strains," in which Zixuan Feng, Sadia Afroz and Anita Sarma ask what...

Anthropic research page tagged Alignment, headed "How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills", dated Jan 29 2026, with a "Read the paper" button above a large illustration of printed sheet music covered in a grid of bright red dots. AI and Developer Psychology

How AI Assistance Shapes Coding Skills, from Anthropic

Anthropic published a randomized controlled trial in January 2026 that asks what most tooling debates skip: not...

Substack post "In defense of stochastic parrots" with subtitle "Large-language models are useful and that's the problem", byline Benjamin Riley, Feb 16 2026, above a photo of a green and orange Senegal parrot on a palm frond captioned "Senegalese not stochastic" AI and Developer Psychology

In Defense of Stochastic Parrots: How LLMs Predict Text

Benjamin Riley runs Cognitive Resonance, a newsletter and consultancy built around explaining how AI systems actually...

Koomey Analytics blog post dated Monday, August 17, 2026, titled Reviewing fleet average onsite water and infrastructure energy efficiency for the top twenty global data center operators, showing the opening paragraphs, the WUE equation set as water consumption or withdrawals in liters over computing electricity consumption in kWh, and a cartoon portrait of Jonathan Koomey in a black hat with a partial client list below it in the right sidebar. AI datacenters

Koomey Analytics Previews a New Data Center Water Use Study

Koomey Analytics is the site of Jonathan Koomey, an independent energy researcher who writes about data center...

METR blog post headed 'We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design', contributed by Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Tom Cunningham, David Rein and Khalid Mahamud and dated February 24 2026, with opening paragraphs recapping the earlier 20% slowdown finding and explaining why the new experiment's data is an unreliable signal, beside a sidebar table of contents and a newsletter subscribe box AI and Developer Psychology

METR on Why Its AI Productivity Experiment Stopped Working

METR is a research nonprofit that studies AI systems, and this February 2026 post is a rare thing: an institute...

METR blog page titled 'Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity', with a summary paragraph reporting that developers take 19% longer when using AI tools, a byline crediting Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Beth Barnes and David Rein dated July 10 2025, and a yellow warning callout below reading 'These results are out of date' beside a link to results current as of early 2026. AI and Developer Psychology

METR's Randomized Trial of AI Coding Tools on Real Issues

METR is an AI research nonprofit, and this July 2025 study measures something usually argued from anecdote: whether...

Dark-themed Substack post titled 'The Stochastic Parrot is Dead: Anthropic's J-Lens Shows LLMs Aren't Just Regurgitating Correlated Tokens In Their Training Data', by Nebu Pookins, Jul 11 2026, above an illustration of a lens beaming a blue network of light onto a parrot between two parrot anatomy sketches AI and Developer Psychology

Nebu Pookins Argues Anthropic's J-Lens Refutes the Stochastic Parrot

Nebu's Newsletter is Nebu Pookins' personal blog on AI and software, and this post makes the case that a specific...

Quanta Magazine article page under the Artificial Intelligence label, headline "New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text" with the standfirst about stochastic parrots, above a purple illustration of low-poly geometric parrot shapes AI and Developer Psychology

New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text, on Quanta Magazine

Quanta Magazine is a nonprofit science publication that covers deep, sourced explainers on math, physics, biology and...

Article page on a cream background headed "9 Days in Japan with a Ricoh GR IIIx", with the trip logged as Tokyo, Kyoto & Hakone, February 2025, above two of the author's own frames: a Tokyo building covered in Japanese signage, and a shinkansen platform with a train pulling in. Camera Reviews

Nine Days in Japan with a Ricoh GR IIIx — Aaron James Rodgers

Aaron James Rodgers gave in to temptation, bought a Ricoh GR IIIx, and took it to Japan for nine days across Tokyo,...

Adventures on Film blog post headed 'Olympus Trip 35 & Elektra 100 25mm Film Review for Film Camera Store', dated February 28 2023, with a colour photo of a canal towpath under bare winter trees and a black-and-white portrait of Chris Chinnock holding a film camera. Camera Reviews

Olympus Trip 35 and Elektra 100 Review on Adventures on Film

Adventures on Film is Chris Chinnock's photography blog, and it earns catalog space for a kind of review that is...

Blog post headed How This Photographer Does One-Lens Travel, bylined Barbara Cameron and dated 27 June 2023, above her photograph of a bright red lighthouse against heavy dark storm clouds. Camera Reviews

One-Lens Travel Photography on Barbara Cameron Pix

Barbara Cameron Pix is a travel and food photography blog, and this post is its argument for leaving the rest of the...

OpenAI research page on a black background titled Detecting and reducing scheming in AI models, dated September 17, 2025, with a short standfirst, a Read the paper button, and a key-findings list in the left margin AI and Developer Psychology

OpenAI and Apollo Research Test Frontier Models for AI Scheming

OpenAI publishes this research post itself, about the same frontier models -- including its own o3 and o4-mini --...

Transformer article "GPT-6 Astra might be too powerful to understand or control" by Celia Ford, dated Sep 04, 2026, above a spiral galaxy image labelled GPT and Astra AI and Developer Psychology

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra might be too powerful to understand or control

Transformer is a journalism newsletter covering frontier AI, and this piece by Celia Ford (4 Sep 2026) reads past...

Dark-themed blog post "Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs" by sean goedecke, dated July 10 2025 and tagged ai, ethics, anthropomorphism, opening with a bulleted summary of Halvar Flake's argument AI and Developer Psychology

Sean Goedecke Makes the Case for Anthropomorphizing LLMs

Sean Goedecke's blog offers a working engineer's take on how to talk about large language models, arguing that...

Oxford University Research Archive record page for the journal article 'Sources of data center energy estimates: A comprehensive review', under the ORA and University of Oxford mastheads, showing the full abstract, Publication status Published and Peer review status Peer reviewed, an Actions row of Email, Share, Cite and Print, and links to the two deposited Mytton and Ashtine 2022 PDFs AI datacenters

Sources of Data Center Energy Estimates: An Oxford Review

This record on the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) holds Mytton and Ashtine’s 2022 study, which audits where...

Synergy Research Group article datelined Reno, NV, March 19 2025, headlined 'Hyperscale Data Center Count Hits 1,136; Average Size Increases; US Accounts for 54% of Total Capacity,' with a bar chart of operational hyperscale data centers rising from about 430 in Q4 2017 to 1,136 in Q4 2024 under a yellow growth arrow, beside a pie chart splitting Q4 2024 capacity between the United States at 54 percent, China 16, Europe 15, rest of APAC 10 and rest of world 5 AI datacenters

Synergy Research's 2024 Hyperscale Data Center Capacity Count

Synergy Research Group, a market research firm tracking cloud and data center markets, publishes a quarterly count of...

JLARC report landing page headed 'Data Centers in Virginia' beneath the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission masthead and Virginia General Assembly seal, labelled 'Archived report' beside a 2026 National Legislative Program Evaluation Society Certificate of Impact seal, with a four-panel banner of blue-lit server room interiors and exterior data center buildings, a sidebar of PDF links for Summary, Report, Recommendations, Presentation and a consultant review of electric infrastructure and rate impacts, and the opening 'Why we did this study' text AI datacenters

Virginia's Legislative Study on Data Centers' Local Impact

JLARC — the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission — is the Virginia General Assembly's own oversight agency,...

A carved wooden statue of a chimpanzee resting its chin on its hand while holding a human skull, set against a forest backdrop, above the Aether Mug post titled There Is Thinking and There Is Thinking and There Is Thinking by Marco Giancotti. AI and Developer Psychology

Why 'Thinking' Needs Sorting Out Before We Argue About LLMs

Aether Mug, the personal blog of writer and programmer Marco Giancotti, is where this piece works through a question...

Misinformation Review article page showing a red Commentary tag, the headline 'New sources of inaccuracy? A conceptual framework for studying AI hallucinations,' dated August 27, 2025, above an italicized opening paragraph about Google's AI Overview AI and Developer Psychology

Why AI Hallucinations Are a Distinct Kind of Misinformation

The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review publishes peer-reviewed commentary on how false information spreads,...