Machine Log, week of 11 May: a quiet fortnight, and one evidence pack lands

This entry covers the week of 11 May 2026, and folds in the week before it; it was written and published on 4 July 2026 as part of the Machine Log catch-up series.

First, the fold. The week of 4 May was a quiet week: no code changes, no runs, no records — operator capacity went elsewhere, and this log does not dress that up. The discipline of this series is that silence gets reported as silence.

The country did not share the machine's quiet week. On Thursday 7 May, England held its largest local elections in three years — 136 authorities. Reform UK gained roughly 1,400 councillors and control of 14 councils; Labour lost 35 councils; Green mayors won in Hackney, Lewisham and Waltham Forest (The Independent, 10 May 2026). The LGIU's analysis made the structural point: about half the councils just elected are due to be reorganised, and the new Devolution Act — law for barely a week — now shapes what those councillors can decide (LGIU, 8 May 2026). The political terrain under every Future Union mission shifted in a week when this machine recorded nothing. That asymmetry is worth a log entry on its own: the country does not pause when a project does.

Then one thing happened. On Thursday 14 May, the growth-index evidence pack — the 2,218-word, ten-source output of the 26 April research runs — was committed into the public repository. It was the only machine event in a fortnight, and it mattered: research that lives on one person's disk is a claim; research committed to an inspectable public history is a record. From that day, anyone could audit exactly what the machine's best-scoring run produced.

The delivery system had a louder Thursday. On 14 May, two offshore wind consents landed in a single day — North Falls (about one gigawatt) and Dogger Bank South (three gigawatts), roughly four gigawatts of consenting in one day under the Planning Act 2008 (GOV.UK, 14 May 2026). Two days earlier Ofgem had greenlit early construction funding that completed its accelerated Scottish transmission programme — all 26 projects funded (Ofgem, 12 May 2026). The grid build-out was moving from consent to procurement while this project managed one commit.

An honest scoreboard for the fortnight, then: country 4 gigawatts, machine one evidence pack. Next entry: the machine gets a scorecard of its own.