Reading

Catching the bus to work today, as I like to do sometimes. As I would do most of the time if it were cheaper. The return has gone up from £7.60 to £8.50. It costs me about £2.50 by car.
I'm willing to pay a bit more for public transport, but this is crazy, and largely down to how the Scottish government reimburses bus companies for free travel.

I have a colleague who was previously of the "only public transport!" persuasion, but this price rise has broken him and he's looking for a car. Ultimately the majority of people on the bus now are those who get free travel, and those with no choice. And tourists.

We - as a society - can say as much as we like about net zero and about active travel, but if we price people off public transport then we're heading in the wrong direction.

I spent this morning achieving nothing while WFH, with no motivation and no focus for anything.
I went to the office to see if that would make any difference. It didn't. I had a big task I had to do, and I couldn't do it, and I also couldn't do anything else.

Then I got the big task started with some GenAI help[1], and it became easier - if not easy - to finish it. And having done that seemed to unlock things, and I've been ticking off minor stuff for the rest of the day.

Brains are weird.

[1] Yes, I used some GenAI. Don't hate me. I fed it a failed research proposal of mine and asked it to turn it into an advert for a PhD studentship for the same project, and it did a half-decent job at a first draft to improve upon.
I still have enormous ethical problems with LLMs, and I still feel like their energy use is undoing everything I work for. And they've broken university learning and assessment in a way that we haven't figured out how to handle. But also, I recognise that complaining about that isn't going to stop it, at least until the bubble pops. And my university is all-in on "use it use it use it use it". This is the first time that I've actually found it useful.

Catching the bus.

Brains are weird.