To understand how significant this is, the minimum solar roof installation is usually 3-4 kWh. Plug and play solar panels usually start around 250w, but typically you might install 400-8000w across a few panels to cover background household energy use with no battery. What a time of change.

German discount supermarket Lidl is offering a 2.24 kWh plug-in battery for just €299 in Spain.

Fantastically hopeful start to the day - from @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social - bringing much needed optimistim and a call to activism and collective action. Let’s all join. Let’s all do it now. societyforhopefultechnologists.org/ #CampDigital

When we jump from 100,000 new eBooks per month to 300,000, we know that about two out of every three new eBooks are AI slop. May I introduce a new literary category of “pre AI classics”? This includes every single book published before November 2022 when ChatGPT was released 😉📚

Using the rules of linear perspective to combat ai slop can I get a hell yeah

Plus, electrifying those lagging sectors — buildings (heat pumps!), industry and transport (EVs!) — will radically reduce energy demand rather than simply replacing units of oil and gas with equivalent kWh of electricity.

Back by popular demand: puffin cam returns. The Farne Islands' seabirds are back on camera, more than 250,000 people tuned in last year to watch the Northumberland colony, home to 40,000 breeding puffin pairs. 🐦 www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt3M...

I can‘t figure out why, but I have never seen news stories about how oil rigs hurt whales. Only wind farms do that. And only solar panels have a recycling problem. Gas stations are fine.

2 year research postdoc at UCL @laws.ucl.ac.uk on data and democracy, public law focus — could focus on surveillance and/or AI issues www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

This is great. Fun, whimsical and hopeful: www.wired.com/story/cyberd...

The deeper point is that integrating agentic AI doesn’t absolve the need for security and IT safety fundamentals. Any tech with insufficient controls is ripe for errors, let alone abuse or misuse.

Good thread.

For the avoidance of doubt, £5m is approximately the same as the amount the Green Party has received in donations in 15 years. Just... Think about that

My latest. America is giving dying mall vibes. open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

If this is legit then all the energy modelling, scenarios and projections you have seen are wrong. electrek.co/2026/04/27/c...

My biggest conspiracy theory is that telling working class people that engagement in the arts is a middle / upper class thing and to do so makes you a class traitor is a psyop to make them disengaged with themselves and the world and the beauty of being human, so that they accept worse treatment.

A good explanation of why both proportionality + tactical voting are complicated in the Welsh election

Apparently, journals, universities and publishers cannot do it but the Oscars can

Post your warning sign: this farmer doesn’t want you to walk along this public footpath edition.

Post your warning sign, evergreen edition.

We hear NHS England’s mid-level managment are having a panic about AI and naturally dash to secrecy. If the NHS walking away from transparency and open source would somehow inconvenience you, you may wish to send an email to [email protected] bsky.app/profile/marc...

Hansard’s complete record of parliamentary proceedings is now available online 📚 Browse the official report ➡️ hansard.parliament.uk/commons

So as someone very much aware of this - I’m no @archive.org, but if you know of a theatre production archive that’s going to disappear, do get in touch. I have better credentials than national governments, billion dollar tech companies, and well funded projects that didn’t budget for”after”

I can't remember who predicted a few years ago that it would be the Conservatives rather than Labour who would come out for PR first, but they were right.

BREAKING: Reporters Without Borders released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index. The United States fell seven spots to 64th out of 180 countries and regions surveyed, a historical low for the second straight year; its political indicator tumbled 21 spots from 41st to 62nd worldwide.

The new data.gov.uk team need folks to join its user research panel, so they can ask you about stuff portal.participantkit.com/74e3e483-044...

Great news. But now, imagine how much more money the fossil fuel interests will be pouring into the far right at the next presidential election to try to sink this. We need to counter that, too.

Yeah it is if you are offering a service that you cannot offer long-term, with the explicit intention of hiding the costs of the service you *can* afford to run long-term. There was never a point where this was going to get cheaper. It never happened, and has never been happening

So many problems with this statement. I read it as irresponsible marketing rather than technical advice. “If a washing machine did not consume $2,500 worth of washing detergent I will be deeply alarmed.”

It’s endlessly frustrating to see the value of art in society. How it’s used, how so many companies profit from it, meanwhile the people who actually make art can barely survive. Artists deserve better. EVERYONE deserves better.

As someone who runs an organisation that is in the unpleasant situation of applying for Horizon grants without university-level capital, this is not just bad for the system, it’s particularly bad for the social science and innovation parts of the system.

Countries with more smart meters sell more heat pumps. There are many other factors. Correlation does not mean causation. But smart meters matter for heat pumps: time-of-use tariffs make running heat pump cheaper if run smartly. From paper with @jaapburger.eu www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is excellent and well worth a read/listen.

Good worked example of how substack’s roach motel works in practice, and why I don’t begrudge people who won’t move their businesses but do advise people against building new ones on the platform

This left hand, right hand lack of AI data centre policy co-ordination was bizarre from the start last year. Particularly when changes in planning laws were hurried in so that small nuclear reactors could potentially take the slack. Amazed the differences aren’t resolved. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Lining this up to read and listen to later.

I’ve been reading deletion discussions in Wikimedia Commons: hundreds of uploaded photos nominated by volunteers for deletion every day, and AI-generated / AI-“enhanced” pics are a significant proportion. Who knows how many fake photos are sneaking through and polluting the historical record.

Remember a few years ago when we could assume that photos and video on the Internet were probably real? Now that well has been poisoned by generative AI and thousands of sociopaths uploading fakes. It’s probably never going back and that’s sad.

The UK Information Commissioner has "voluntarily stepped aside … while an independent investigation into HR matters is undertaken" www.politico.eu/article/head... People had recently started to ask questions about Edwards's absence e.g. www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/foi_... #FOI #dataprotection

The post-AI-bubble regulation should start by making it illegal to do circular deals - money invested cannot be used to pay for services, money invested cannot be used for buying hardware, etc, etc. Hell, I'm game for making it illegal to invest in customers at all.

Conversely, 60% of the fuel burnt by passenger flights in Europe is due to flights over 2000km, which account for just 16% of flights and 23% of seats 47% of fuel burnt is due to the 6% flights (12% of seats) over 4000km!

I’ve written a reaction to @transportenvironment.org‘s report on ticketing problems for iPaper inews.co.uk/inews-lifest... We know the scale of the problem now. The ball is in the Commission‘s court to fix it now! #CrossBorderRail #ticketing #sdbtr

Update: @jonworth.eu has written a piece for the iPaper on the report, explaining what’s wrong and how it needs to change. inews.co.uk/inews-lifest...

Good to see this report, but not a surprise especially to those following @jonworth.eu 's work. "Across Europe, the report found incumbent operators do not sell competitors’ tickets on 86% of routes where competition exists, while on 59% of the routes, the alternative is not even displayed."

Exclusive: Microsoft is reducing rate limits on GitHub Copilot, removing Opus from $10-a-month subscriptions, and plans to move users to token/API-based billing some time later in 2026 in a sign that it's looking for way to cut costs for its AI services. www.wheresyoured.at/news-microso...

THREAD: The IEA global energy review 2026 * CO2 record high, but growth nearly ground to halt * Clean energy shaved 3bn tonnes off CO2 * Fossil-fuel power pushed into reverse * Age of Electricity "confirmed" * "Extraordinary" solar growth * Batteries up 40% * EVs up 20% 1/10

This is an excellent but very troubling article looking at the impact of Hormuz on world-wide food production, dependence on hydrocarbons for fertiliser and just how embedded the Gulf states are in the global food system.

"In retrospect, basing the entire global food system on fossil fuels may have been a poor idea." -- @benehrenreich.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/3634...

EV sales surged everywhere apart from the US, rising more than 20% globally in 2025 * EVs were half of Chinese sales and electric truck sales in China tripled * EV sales outside CN/Eu/US grew 80% (!) 10/10

Sigh The technical achievement here isn't the speed, it's the motion. Mechanical running is hard