Editor of Trans Britain. #Author of Pressing Matters. Lifetime Achievement Award PrideOfManchester 2021. Drove an 8 year old #EV called Peggy and now drives Olga who is one year old.
Posts about #climate mitigation, #trans moral panic, #books. Was #retired. Checked out but unable to leave. She/Her.
So interesting to see leaders from a completely different walk of life discussing how out of control the British press has become, the damaging effects of a constant barrage of negative stories and how they can work to push back. Who’s trying to kill the electric car? And why?
Trying to come up with a test for genuine intelligence for AIs feels awfully like trying to come up with a definition for woman which perfectly and perpetually excludes trans women.
@Garwboy I was at school in 1968 and I remember sports teachers all over Kent being ordered to explain to pupils that if you tried it with a sandpit-equipped high jump you’d most likely end up paralysed for life.
The high winds curling around Britain mean we start today with over 70% renewables and just 11.2% fossil fuels. The carbon intensity is just 54g/kWh averaged overall and the wholesale price of this power is 1.2 pence per kWh. https://grid.iamkate.com
It’s very interesting to study the electricity generation projects that are under construction at the moment. With this interactive map you can also look at those that are approved but awaiting construction. There appear to be some omissions (such as Hinkley Point C) but it’s interesting to note a broadly north-south divide in technologies. Notice the tidal barrage pilots. A sad lack of onshore wind in England.
In tangential news I discovered this morning that Tesco are currently building a 1 megawatt solar farm on the roof of their Altrincham ‘Extra’ store. Now in that case you have to net off the enormous power drain of their freezer and air conditioning plant (the largest part of superstore energy consumption) but, even so, it will take that load off the local grid and be a nice cost saver for the company so they’ll hopefully do it on all their vast flat roofs.
Just sold almost my entire vinyl album collection — much dating to the period 1970-1990 — to a local secondhand music shop. This follows the project to give my CD and DVD collection, plus a ton of hardback books to the local Oxfam. Next up: Old clothes that no longer fit and I’ll never wear again. Yet STILL I don’t feel like I’ve made a noticeable dent in the clutter.
The owner was very pleased with how I’d looked after my vinyl. There were only a couple of scratches on heavily played albums. Back then I was obsessive about cleaning albums and never let anyone else lower the stylus or get boisterous near the turntable, so it seems my care paid off. Those worst damage was on a copy of Let It Be that I’d left in the prefects room at school, so don’t take your music to school 😀
As at 5.20pm, 95.2% of our electricity demand in Britain was being met by the combination of renewables and nuclear. Other forms of generation mean that supply exceeds demand (partly to provide inertial stability from spinning thermal generators) but the excess is being exported to surrounding countries. https://grid.iamkate.com
I have a nagging worry over AI that has been bouncing around in my head ever since I first heard of ChatGPT and the whole idea of LLMs. These things are trained by sucking in the internet and social media from recent time. So they’re trained on a diet that includes utterly unhinged lies about trans people. That’s baked into them. And their outputs are going to contribute to what’s out there when the next version is trained. And the next. And the next… long after people have forgotten why.
The accompaniment for this morning’s two mile walk has been the second part of an interview with former Prime Minister John Major, carried out by @campbellclaret and @rorystewartuk. You may have differing views about JM (and see my big reservation below) but this was a genuinely interesting and mostly very candid interview and will be of great interest to anyone interested in modern British political history. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leading/id1665265193?i=1000617468407
Safari/Webkit - not just foundational to Apple but was the foundation of Google's Chrome (and via Chrome, Microsoft's Edge) browser - led by @lisamelton. Congratulations.
I'm sure there are many other trans people central to tech that I'm simply unaware of, we need them all.
@kevin@lisamelton@cydonian@pelegri Was? Still is? She’s still going strong. This is her giving an address to the Royal Society in Edinburgh in 2015, where they conferred on her the James Clerk Maxwell medal.
I’m no expert but I’d be inclined to measure Prigozhin’s life expectancy now in meals and cups of tea. He also needs to avoid windows, except the ground floor.
