A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
After experimenting (again) with Obsidian I came across Forestry.md which describes itself as "Open Source Digital Garden Hosting". I thought it was cool, but then realised that it would be yet another system where I have to fit into its workflow, rather than vice-versa
…I can dismiss a lot of pronouncements by Big Tech companies as simply press releases trying to invent the future. But attempting to ascribe consciousness to AI models pisses me off, particularly as the untold riches being poured into AI development could be used to lessen the suffering of real people and animals that we know for sure experience it.
…I missed this when Dorian Taylor published it a year ago, but it's relevant not only to TechFreedom, but to my current situation this weekend.
After discussing some standard business risks when dealing with SaaS vendors, he says:
…I really value this point by Joe Burns because it's counter-intuitive and controversial:
Thinking has no inherent value.
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Bad news for strategists, because we bloody love thinking.
Strategists like thinking about things. Then thinking about why we thought those things. Then putting the thoughts into a framework or an infographic type of thing so other people can think about them too.
But the point of thinking should be getting somewhere. Sometimes thinking moves you forward. You’re grappling with something.
Sometimes it just creates more thinking. You’re in the tangle.
Where you want to be, and where the best stuff happens is where you’re making progress but you’re barely thinking at all. That’s flow.
In this magical state, residual thinking is compressed into instinct.
You just sort of know what to do. You have ‘The Knack’.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot of thinking to create that flow state. That’s why the best type of thinking is to think about how you can think less.
"You are what you eat" was the phrase when I was growing up. And it's true, isn't it?
But the same goes for everything we do:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
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– Annie Dillard
For my MA in Modern History back in 2002-2003 I spent a long time in the Tyne & Wear archives working towards my dissertation: 'The Origin and Application of Educational Ideas in Mid to Late Victorian England'. None of what I was looking at was digitised, but if it were, imagine how quickly I could have found things using AI.
…Most organisations I work with know something isn't quite right. The same problems keep coming back, people in different parts of the organisation describe it in ways that don't match, and nobody has the time, budget or appetite for a consultant to come in and tell them what they already half know.
…The first two OrgLens notes (1, 2) asked whether AI could turn what people say about an organisation into a useful health check.
The results made me cautiously optimistic: OrgLens could produce a structured description of an organisation and a plain-language report. It did, however, need software checks to verify quotations, catch contradictions, and stop important issues disappearing during editing.
…As I mentioned last week, and as you can guess from the above photo, I've been in Toronto for the past few days. I'm on my way home, overnight, via Dublin.
It's a long way to come for a couple of days of unconferencing and a bit of sightseeing either side, but it's been worth it. There's nothing quite like the Mozilla community, and the #MozAlums crew are fantastic.
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