What a mess. This is the damage done by social media lies and disinformation - aided by a government that subsidises and cossets the platforms that spread it. news.sky.com/story/uk-los...

That's not to say LLMs are useless for legal research. You've just got to treat them like a brilliant and extremely fast trainee who is also a psychopath and pathological liar.

And now a more personal blog on what I was driving at in this growth piece, through five years' of frustrated commentary. freethinkecon.wordpress.com/2026/01/28/g...

Sometimes you see a graph and your like - damn thats a nice graph.... .... ... just me?

Vertical rows are the agrivoltaic winner! “The vertical panels produce slightly less electricity—but with higher value, as generation peaks coincide with morning and late afternoon demand…The crops don't seem to mind the presence of solar panels and they like the wind protection they provide.”

NEW: Expensive gas still biggest driver of high UK electricity bills, says UKERC "Volatile, gas-linked market prices – not green policies, as some misleading claims have suggested – dominate the real-terms increase in bills since 2021." www.carbonbrief.org/expensive-ga...

Agreed. It has to start with solar panels Installed them a few years ago and it changes your behaviour. Got a house battery, changed when we run stuff, eventually got a2a heat pumps. Gradual changes that evolved naturally from the availability of free power when the sun shines

New paper argues that we should not harm economic growth with climate policies because this growth helps with both adaptation and mitigation. osf.io/preprints/so... It leaves me agreeing and exasperated at the same time because... the best climate policies ALSO HELP economic growth. Let me explain

Please spread this far and wide, as stories don't get much bigger than this. When the government blocks even the intelligence services from telling us we're heading for environmental catastrophe, you know we have a problem. A very big problem. Thank you. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Pretty sure he’s trying to hide the scar he got trying to steal a medallion off a woman in a bar fire in Nepal in the 1930s.

I understand Labour faces a largely hostile media environment, but its inability to make a big splash with genuinely positive news remains unfathomable. Like the Warm Homes Plan last week, this will make a big difference to the finances and lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Joe Marler rightly destroyed any use of horse metaphors in serious discourse youtu.be/C8VRk2ViiOw?...

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

This is an interesting proposition. We have a highly centralised state in the UK. Do we attempt to increase its competence (& caring) or break it up into more localised chunks with more direct accountability? (From a technologist's perspective, the latter approach is more modern/resilient.)

Shoddy work even by the Institute for Economic Affairs' standards. And by the outlets which wrote it up without question. Via Private Eye

I visited Khavda recently, where India is building the world's largest renewable energy park, using an arid land 5 times the size of Paris for a combination of solar and wind energy. Once operational the park would produce 30GW of energy. But that wasn't the biggest takeaway for me.

The Shingles vaccine has outperformed all expectations. Why? erictopol.substack.com/p/spotlight-...

China has the largest: - Installed capacity of wind power (absolute) - Output of wind farms (absolute) - Annual additions of wind capacity + the same %'age share of wind as the US, NZ, Norway, Italy despite being.....extremely large Wind generated 18% more than solar did in China, in 2024

Great speech, fortresses of nations trying to build their own energy, food and supply chains are not the answer and variable geometry with different coalitions for different issues is. I would suggest a coalition for net zero and nature positive economies would be sure fire way to resilience

Traditional Chinese translation just arrived in the post! @saraemilybergman.bsky.social

Fucking *hell*, I had not realised this

KRUGMAN: “.. How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world’s longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man’s dementia?” @pkrugman.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

"I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace"

This chart by @nathanielbullard.com is one reason data centers are driving up our electricity prices. Tech companies usually build data centers close to cities, where accommodating their GW-scale power demand entails costly reinforcement of wires or transformers. Utilities pass those costs on to us.

Unfortunately, this is the world we now seem to be living in. If folk want noise and action, one thing you can do is click on and read positive change climate articles We talk a lot about right wing press but remember the news we see is the news that generates clicks

'Traitors'; 'globalists'. We see you and we know what Reform UK are.

Do you like charts? Oh yes you do. I've just published hundreds of them, as I do every year. www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

This is huge: For the first time since the early 1970s, coal power generation has fallen in both China & India. It undercuts claims that decarbonisation is pointless while they expand coal. Renewables are no longer just adding capacity — they’re displacing coal. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Swearing apparently boosts physical power by ~10% (maybe more) www.bps.org.uk/research-dig... Interesting.

Yes. One of my favourite energy efficiency stats is that 25% of UK economic growth between 1971-2013 was due to energy efficiency: ukerc.ac.uk/news/energy-... @jrbarrett.bsky.social

Reassuringly, it is also cheaper than thought.. prices were 19% below the ceiling price💪

Woohoo! 💪

China is now the leading clean energy powerhouse with the West falling behind. The transition is inevitable; the key question is where and how fast it happens. I look forward to discussing this in Davos next week at the World Economic Forum, facilitating a live-streamed session on electrostates.

How likely is ‘likely’? Does ‘likely’ have a higher probability than ‘probable’? I put together a quick quiz so you can see how you interpret probability phrases, then see how you compare with others: probability.kucharski.io

There we go. That there’s a headline.

"many places experience higher regional sea-level rise than the global average, while places close to the ice sheet can even see sea levels drop. The main reason has to do with gravity." theconversation.com/sea-level-do...

This chart documents one of humanity’s greatest achievements, in my view. We just lived through the fastest population growth in human history. It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace — but on every continent, they grew even faster than the population.

NEW RECORD: Africa imports 2GW of solar panels for the first time in a month. And this is happening EVERYWHERE in Africa...

My friends in Austria sent this and I can't stop watching...wait for the end. 🤗💜

If he carries on like this it's going to make the FIFA Peace Prize look ridiculous

This is an interesting discussion about whether we should display this stuff for moral reasons but there is another objection. Does it _reduce_ our understanding? In The Golden Bough, James Frazer's point was rituals are often steeped in/a codification of vital, practical context...

Here's my enormous round-up of everything we learned about LLMs in 2025 - the third in my annual series of reviews of the past twelve months https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/ This year it's divided into 26 sections! This is the table of contents

Good morning with good news: Science names Renewable Energy Surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year! 2025 saw Renewable Energy pass coal as World's Top electricity source. Solar & wind global growth exceeds electricity demand growth from Jan-June 2025. #energysky www.science.org/content/arti...

In my Utopia Five novel (now available under CC or on Amazon) www.annecurrie.com/book-downloads Lee and Nemo's very first surveillance product was called The Eye of Sauron as a joke/commentary on their somewhat naive view of the world. Just sayin'

US bet: Ai, China bet: Green “In 2024, the country invested an estimated $940bn in clean-energy capex, broadly defined as renewables, electricity grids and energy storage (batteries), dwarfing its AI investments” ft.com/content/1258... Presented basically this argmnt last wk @basakkus.bsky.social

Uh, wow www.latimes.com/california/s...

Caveats apply, as this data is only through November, but so far, this year, 92% of the new power plants built in the U.S. have been solar/batteries/wind. 92%! In the year Trump tried to destroy clean energy! More in this week's chart for @canarymedia.com: www.canarymedia.com/articles/cle...

I was in London this week and it was very quiet (for London) which is sad but does make it the time to go! No crowds, plenty of seats inside and outside restaurants and cafes. Great lights. Head in this weekend. We had a splendid time.

Someone fed our BRICS essay to grok which has good critique! The US has tech innovation capacity esp in AI, chips, Space, biotech etc, and it that can finance a boom in areas of monopoly. But read this in Nature: "US losing ground as China’s lead expands rapidly" www.nature.com/nature-index...

“For the first time in two centuries, the West is no longer the leader in future technology, but the follower" NEW: @katemac.bsky.social and I @phenomenalworld.bsky.social write about what China's tech acceleration means for the world. Subscribe & read here: www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/bri...