The CSO has released data on metered electricity consumption for 2025. The extraordinary headline figures: - Electricity consumption from data centres grew by nearly 10% last year, and now accounts for 23% of Ireland's electricity demand.

61% of all political donations in the last quarter came from just 14 people Reform took in £9.3m from a handful of super rich donors British democracy is being bought. We urgently need action to take the money out of our politics

Steve Goodrich@stevejgoodrich.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Some quick thoughts on Q1 2026 donations data from @electoralcommission.org.uk 🧵 HEADLINE STATS Total: £20.7m (excl. public funds) Biggest recipient: Reform £9.3m Biggest donor: Ben Delo £4m to Reform Donors giving £1m+: £9.2m (44%) from 3 donors Donors giving £250k+: £12.7m (61%) from 14 donors

For clarity, this government has so far: - cancelled HS2 north of Birmingham (previous government hadn't actually done that formally) - cancelled electrification of the Midland Main Line - cancelled West Yorkshire mass transit - cancelled the trans-Pennine high speed line

Remember when HS2 to Leeds was cancelled by the NIC's shitty maths and fundamental lack of expertise, and Leeds was thrown the bone of "you'll get trams" and I said those would never be delivered? Yeah, as I was saying...

It's so weird to me that one of the biggest kitchen/home appliance brands is called "SharkNinja", it has such teenage xbox gamertag vibes. Who's in the market for a fridge freezer from *~420#killer#69~*

In 2014, Hackney Council sold a property under Right to Buy for £95,050 In 2021, they bought it back off the ex-tenant for £365k In ~6 yrs, the council lost £269,950 on a single property It's not an isolated example. @bigissue.com has uncovered 100+ 'Yo-yo Homes' www.bigissue.com/news/housing...

How ex-council tenants make over £200k selling homes back to councils

Big Issue investigates the Right To Buy properties sold back to councils for massive profits, just years after being bought at a discount.

bigissue.com

in case you're not sure who dhh is, he's a danish counterstrike player and race car owner who writes essays like "i am smarter than you" and "foreigners bad" rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast

"one in six private tenants in England now rents a former local authority home" - money that could have been helping councils fund services and build more affordable homes. Right to buy was a policy disaster *if* you were aiming to have more affordable, quality homes for working people.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · last yr.

Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’

"People are doing real work to bring Vöråcore to the masses, and they’re doing it for free, out of the love in their hearts for some guys from Finland." @chiltonm.bsky.social explains what makes Finland-Swedish comedy group KAJ refreshing in her media: unwinnable.com/2025/07/31/w...

Solving "UK Passport Application" with Haskell: jameshaydon.github.io/passport/

📢 Thanks to the generosity of local company @hiveit.co.uk and a few lovely individuals we are now able to offer a small number of diversity tickets for this year’s Front End North conference in Sheffield on 10th July. See frontendnorth.com/blog/2025/06... for full details.

Apply for a diversity ticket for Front End North | Front End North Conference

Front End North is pleased to offer a small number of diversity tickets for this year’s conference

frontendnorth.com

Inspired by @fabinou.bsky.social's great Wolfenstein 3D game engine book I decided to give a simple raycasting renderer a go. Using plain C and Raylib for the draw calls, it is pretty rough, but was really satisfying to see the results as someone that never does any graphics programming.

Incase you missed the news, we have announced our full lineup of speakers! Tickets are £75 and include access to our evening social at the National Videogame Museum 🎟️ frontendnorth.com

The mere suggestion that the United States could order its cloud firms to shut off foreign clients the Trump administration is feuding with is yet another reason to accelerate the creation of sovereign public cloud facilities. Governments can’t give more contracts to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.

Microsoft would push back against Trump order to suspend European cloud operations

Company to change contracts amid concerns that services will get tangled in US-EU fight.

politico.eu

I'm late to the new oklab/oklch colour syntax in CSS, but found this post by @ericportis.com to be a great explainer. With some interesting history of colour spaces too. Even if you only occasionally touch CSS, I'd strongly recommend giving it a read. ericportis.com/posts/2024/o...

I gave a talk at Handmade Seattle last year about why I think software gets complicated (spoiler: it's not laziness). www.youtube.com/watch?v=czzA... This is something I've thought about for years and observed up close both in commercial and research contexts, so I hope you enjoy.

Why Can't We Make Simple Software? - Peter van Hardenberg

YouTube video by Handmade Cities

youtube.com