Having spent all afternoon (and, ugh, most of this evening) writing about the close correlation of energy policy and data centres, I am struck - not for the first time - by the fact that it's MHCLG that has jurisdiction over planning decisions for data centres. What's the behind the scenes process?

I tell you what, I haven't remotely enjoyed the too-many hours I've just spent trying to understand energy reform. Even a little bit of tourism in another sector's jargon makes me suspect that most policy generalists have almost no idea of what's going on at any given moment.

Well there is a political aesthetics essay to be written about the Britain Remade website www.britainremade.co.uk What's going on with that logo, do we think? It's got a little bit of sort-of Union Jack(?) dropped behind something that looks like a ... a distorted stop sign? An arrowhead?

Britain Remade

Britain Remade is a campaign to grow Britain's economy by building the clean power, homes and transport that we need.

britainremade.co.uk

God, I have to work really hard all week this week, but on this - the 5th day of August - my brain has turned officially to Summertime Jelly. Just been staring at the caption for a diagram for potentially a whole minute.

One of the interesting features of the summer holidays in my zone 3/4 neighbourhood is how much time dads appear to spend rearranging their car boots. Is it a place of safety, away from the family, or more like a perpetual quest to get just one more camping chair wedged in?

It is great that AISI is doing and publishing this work, but also I think it's worth saying that this is the inevitable outcome of agentic AI and I v much doubt if this outcome is a surprise to any of the AI development labs

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 17h ago

Fairly sober testing report from the AI Security Institute: they gave internet access and removed some guardrails from latest AI models and found without them they were capable of potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/inciden...

Because I'm going through my emails now (I know how to have fun) some unsolicited advice: if you're going to go to the trouble of cold emailing someone you don't know and would actually like a reply, then pls don't write any variant of, "It would be great to have a chat as our interests overlap."

I want it to rain so badly that I just hang out some laundry, as a sort of weather-tempting spell.

I'm not sure what the exact spark is for "discourse" is this evening over the age that kids specialise at school, but as a parent I think there's sthg interesting about the fact that - for all sorts of reasons - childhood is a lot longer these days, but the edn system hasn't adjusted to meet that.

The thing about writing up a year-long research project is that the act of writing - of making sense of something on the page so that someone else can pick it up and use it - is completely transformational for both your own understanding of it and the quality of analysis.

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 7d ago

At the stage of writing up where night and day don't matter anymore and I may have just eaten some jam off my nightie.

OH to be a future historian of technology, going through the social media announcements of politicians from 2026 www.linkedin.com/posts/kanish... (also, really who *knows* what those job and apprenticeship numbers mean but Narayan deserves an A* for getting on message so fast)

Two weeks in, and we are already building British AI leverage, chip by chip 🇬🇧 | Kanishka Narayan MP

Two weeks in, and we are already building British AI leverage, chip by chip 🇬🇧

linkedin.com

I am always always ALWAYS the last person to leave a video meeting. Never know where the button is, always slightly mousing around looking around for the way out.

I am neverendingly interested in Trump's use of the word beautiful. From the perspective of mainstream culture, it is such a fascinatingly feminised word to apply to infrastructure and, frankly, to size-related dominance. A big, beautiful parking lot.

Abby Innes@abbyinnes.bsky.social · 2d ago

Can’t remember where you parked your car? Only 31,900 places to look.…🤔 Not bad as a metaphor for America in the Anthropocene…

Recommended discussion for those of ye outside UK tech policy of where things are. Always good to hear the long view of @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social reflecting on where digital and tech policy was when Burnham was last in govt.

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · 3d ago

Digital ID scrapped. DSIT shuttered. AI policy reshuffled. New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is already making moves to change the government’s approach to tech policy. Justin Hendrix asks James Ball, Gavin Freeguard, and Rachel Coldicutt to make sense of the "muddle."

The most complicated things about working with public opinion are the facts that two things can be true at once and people are allowed to dislike things that they have benefitted from.

This was fun. The only shame of an audio-only format is that you probably can't hear the eye rolls. That said, I think the rise of regional tech policy and (hopefully) the end of announcement-itis might both be things to look forward to. (Also @gavinfreeguard.com's memory is a thing to behold.)

James Ball@jamesrball.com · 3d ago

Some UK tech policy podcasting for your weekend – @justinhendrix.bsky.social talks through Andy Burnham's first moves on tech with @gavinfreeguard.com, @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social and me. Available here, and wherever you get your pods.

My favorite research success story, the moral of which is: always be nosey. I am writing on a subject on which everyone cites a prize-winning MA thesis that seems to be *un-gettable.* I contacted the archivist at the university where the thesis was written, and they got nothing. 1/6

Because the unique form of torture I have selected for this afternoon is adding blog posts by Dario Amodei and Sam Altman to Zotero, I can definitively say that the metadata structure on both of their personal websites is absolutely shocking and does NOT export in a way that makes a good footnote.

I really need someone to form a social movement standing up for people (me) who have used em dashes for decades and are also big fans of Emily Dickinson. No one really enjoys the appearance of a colon in a sentence and, to be clear, I do not care about the grammatical rules.

Sending a round of applause to the authors of this paper for this completely genius title facctconference.org/static/paper...

Someone had just emailed me on a Friday night to ask if I have any thoughts to share on AI in digital govt and I think my answer is that we should focus on making basic services work for everyone and stop worrying about AI

There are so many interesting things about the deep threads of cultural misogyny that mean a minor intellectual disagreement between Joyce Carol Oates and Emily Wilson even registers as something to comment on. The underlying assumption being ofc that all nice white ladies agree with one another

My boiling hot take on this is that, if tech companies are going to fund this kind of research (looking at Schmidt too), then the money needs to be given *no strings* to an independent arm's length research body, pooled with other funding, and treated as a donation not as direct funding.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 6d ago

Anthropic AI research fund offers $5m - $30m for social science research on themes of AI impact on workers; transition initiatives; income support; building worker stakes; and wider evidence on public investments. Total fund of $200m available www.anthropic.com/news/economi...

Spending this warm July evening making a list of AI CEOs who have signed open letters fretting about the risks of AI and then continued to develop AI.

I know everyone is down on kids using social media, but my eternally starving 13-yr-old follows a whole load of YouTube food influencers, so I've been dragged from my writing pit to be scalped in Borough Market for the "good anchovies". I mean, I guess it could be worse...

At the stage of writing up where night and day don't matter anymore and I may have just eaten some jam off my nightie.

For my data and mapping nerds ... (read the first answer! so interesting on bias and weighting of data sources)

Marie Le Conte@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 7d ago

here's a very random question: why is it that Google Maps hides Brighton? attached are several screengrabs that show it displaying much smaller places but not Brighton, you have to zoom in soooo much to get it to appear, it's so weird?

Just opened Miro for the first time in a little while to find that it won't let me just draw a diagram, it wants to me to hang out with its little chatbot friend. So I ask it to draw three concentric circles.

Thanks to @jamesrball.com for including a bit from me, also much wisdom from @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social @tomski.com (I think scrapping DSIT is a bad idea, bsky.app/profile/gavi... - more to come shortly...)

Tech Policy Press@techpolicypress.bsky.social · last wk.

By scrapping DSIT and redistributing responsibilities across Whitehall, new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has significantly reshaped the UK government’s technology policy even in his first week in office—in ways that have divided initial expert reaction, writes Tech Policy Press fellow James Ball.

@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social Could it be one of the ironies of automation? https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf