Notices by Kate Morley (kate@fosstodon.org)

I have far too many blogs bookmarked, so perhaps it’s time I finally downloaded an RSS reader. What would people here recommend I use on a MacBook?

In 2024, the carbon intensity of electricity in Britain fell to a record low of 125g CO2 per kilowatt-hour, a drop of 75% since 2012, as our last coal-fired power station closed and wind became our largest single power source. See the live data at https://grid.iamkate.com

In 2024, wind overtook gas to become Britain’s largest single source of electricity, in the same year that our last coal-fired power station closed. See the live data at https://grid.iamkate.com

@leaverou The issue is that people are using LLMs not as an idle conversation partner but as an authority. A human teacher, librarian, doctor, or news reader who was so often wrong certainly wouldn’t be worth listening to.

What’s going on with YouTube recently with excessively long unskippable adverts? I’ve just started playing a 3.5 hour video and it’s first showing me a 19 minute unskippable advert for Microsoft Azure. I’ve muted that tab and set myself a timer to come back when it’s done.

Accidentally writing social commentary in today’s #AdventOfCode:

British wind turbines averaged a record 22.41GW of power generation between 7:00pm and 7:30pm last night.

Additionally, energy exports exceeded gas-fired power generation between 1:30am and 6:00am.

Live data can be seen on my site at https://grid.iamkate.com.

I’m tempted to create a Mastodon-compatible ActivityPub implementation optimised for single-user instances and call it Solenodon

I often see people here discussing the importance of forgiving our past selves for taking so long to realise who we really are. But forgiveness implies blame — that there’s something to forgive.

I believe gratitude is more powerful, and more cathartic, than forgiveness. I say to my past self:

Thank you for all you endured for so many years to keep me safe. Thank you for sacrificing yourself so that I could exist. I’ll make it worth it. I’ll make you proud.

Yes, I hyphenate “e-mail”, and I will continue to do so until the day I die

Updated my e-mail signature for the generative AI era:

British wind turbines averaged a record 22.02GW of power generation between 10:00pm and 10:30pm last night. Live data can be seen on my site at https://grid.iamkate.com.

It gets worse:

“In her autobiography, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy, Whitney describes an incident in which she was sexually assaulted by an executive of the Star Trek production team, whom she never identified by name, and she drew a link between this incident and her dismissal a few days later”

People tend to defend things like this as products of their time, so I’d also like to highlight that someone much more recently writing the Memory Alpha article on the episode chose the belittling phrasing that Rand “walks away in a huff” in response to Spock’s remark.

Unsurprisingly, behaviour on set was just as problematic as that depicted in the show:

“Grace Lee Whitney once recounted that, while shooting the scene when a distraught, tearful Janice Rand accuses Captain Kirk of trying to rape her, William Shatner slapped her across the face to get her to register the proper emotion.”

So I thought I’d finally watch Star Trek: The Original Series. I expected it to be dated, but I didn’t expect the horrific levels of sexual harassment depicted. In one episode, Yeoman Rand is sexually assaulted by an evil version of Kirk, is then interrogated about the incident by Kirk and Spock, and apologises for getting Kirk in trouble (at this point no-one knows there’s a separate evil Kirk). The episode ends with Spock remarking to her that evil Kirk had some “interesting qualities”.

Between 2:00am and 7:00am this morning, electricity exports and storage exceeded fossil fuel power generation — in other words, Britain could (in theory) have been powered entirely without fossil fuels for these five hours. See the live data at https://grid.iamkate.com

In spite of everything, there’s still beauty to be found in this world, so I’ve started added some of my photos to a new ‘art’ section on my website: https://iamkate.com/art/

CSS advice required:

It’s easy to create a grid that contains the maximum number of columns subject to a minimum width:

grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(400px, 1fr));

But how do you achieve the opposite: a grid that contains the minimum number of columns subject to a maximum width? This is invalid CSS:

grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(1fr, 400px));

The use case is a gallery of images, where I want them as big as possible without exceeding a specific maximum.

Having recently been introduced to the tabletop role-playing game Deadlands, I’ve analysed its unique mechanic of exploding dice: https://iamkate.com/data/exploding-dice/

(This was the first time I’ve calculated expected values of random variables or the sum of a geometric series since I finished my A-level exams 23 years ago.)