Machine Log, week of 8 June: three dark weeks, then a plain-English day

This entry covers the week of 8 June 2026, and folds in the two silent weeks before it; it was written and published on 4 July 2026 as part of the Machine Log catch-up series.

The honest headline: from 25 May to 12 June, this machine recorded nothing. No changes, no runs, no review decisions. Operator capacity went elsewhere for three weeks, and a one-operator project has no redundancy to hide that behind. This log's rule is that dark weeks get logged as dark, because a machine diary that only reports busy weeks is marketing.

The state did not go dark. On 25 May came the sharpest single statistic of the quarter: planning applications at a 14-year low — roughly 689,000 in 2025, with grant rates still around 86 per cent — meaning the pipeline is thinning upstream of committees, not at them (Property Investor Today, 25 May 2026). On 1 June the government published its planning committee reform response and laid draft regulations for a national scheme of delegation: routine applications must go to officers, committees capped at 13 members (GOV.UK, 1 June 2026). A day later, implementation slipped a month to 31 October so councils could amend their constitutions (Building Design, 2 June 2026) — and reporting the slip alongside the reform is exactly the dateline discipline this log tries to hold itself to. Then, on 8 June, the Prime Minister used London Tech Week to announce a £1.1 billion AI hardware plan and a sovereign compute strategy (GOV.UK, 8 June 2026). Britain spent Future Union's dark weeks rewiring planning decision rights and buying national computing capacity.

Then came Saturday 13 June: a single-day burst that changed what this project reads like. A copy charter was written — twelve enforceable rules for public language — and wired into the code so machine-speak cannot leak onto public pages. Every public page was stripped of jargon in one sweep. The compute sprint was made steerable and observable rather than fire-and-forget. The contribution route was fixed so ideas arrive through a real web form instead of a manual email step. And a how-it-works explainer plus a handoff brief were written, so the project no longer requires its operator's memory to be understood.

The pairing writes itself, but honestly: the week the country announced a national plan to attract compute, this project spent one Saturday making itself legible enough to deserve any. Plain English is not polish. It is the admission fee.