Status:
Bit of an odd day. I think I might have made a decision. It’s probably a good one but I need to digest it a bit before writing about it.
Reading:
- UK households free to install plug-in balcony solar panels from end of August — Hooray! It’s happening! I’ll probably hang on til the spring to see how the prices and options settle out but this is very exciting.
- Autistic meltdowns & shutdowns — A good explanation of the various forms they can take and how to go about managing them. I’ve never knowingly had the stereotypical meltdown but I’ve definitely had flavours over the decades. And my Long Covid / CFS definitely matches the Autistic Burnout description (which has been fun, jumping between those to models). Anyway, this might be useful to folks figuring this stuff out.
- A sobering account of how TheNumbers.com was taken down by AI scraping and AI-enabled hacking — The traffic numbers for AI companies hoovering up data from the open web are horrific. "Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers." These companies are criminal in every way they operate.
- Let’s make it harder to buy government — One political party in charge is bad. Two is better but still open to abuse.
- How the hosepipe ban got caught up in the culture wars — The culture war stuff aside (it’s basically the latest “middle class people who pay taxes are being asked to do something they don’t want to do which some other people, who may not pay taxes, are exempt from” wedge issue) this is a pretty comprehensive survey of how we got here and how we might fix it.
- Who is Miatta Fahnbulleh, the radical-thinking new UK energy secretary? — She seems great. I have cautious hopes.
- Interview with Nicolas Winding Refn — On the release of his new film Her Private Hell which looks to be in the vein of The Neon Demon, which I really liked.
- Listening to Cassandra: Misogyny, classical and modern — Excellent (as ever) piece from Rebecca Solnit using the Odyssey to talk about violence against women from the dawn of literature to the present day.