A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
The great thing about LLMs is that I can point them at blog posts like this one explaining how to jailbreak an old Kindle and turn it into a 'literary clock', then tell them to crack on. With a bit of guidance and troubleshooting they can do stuff that either I would never get round to, or I'd get frustrated by.
…I realised that there were a couple of things missing in TaskDial that affect my productivity:
So I've added them! So in addition to being able to see your tasks and calendar on one clock face, you can also get some help in planning those tasks by being more aware of your energy levels and the weather at your location.
…First of all, as a man of a certain age, can I just say how much I love the Teletext vibe of this site? It's comparing different AI models versus straight FIFA rankings, versus the perspective of a single human, in terms of predicting the outcome of World Cup 2026 football matches.
…"We all know the elephant in the room' — the topic that everyone knows is there, but no one talks about. But what about the mosquitoes in the room, the tiny things we sense but ignore?"
— Mariana Alessandri, 'The fourth wall' (New Philosopher, #49)
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There is a certain type of person who fetishises human creativity, which I see as a lowkey version of the great man theory of history. It's almost as if they've a) never heard of Brian Eno's idea of scenius, nor b) understood that "we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us".
…I'm not sure my responses to this series of 29 questions warrant the tag 'true believer' but I haven't looked into the methodology of this 'AI Compass'.
Essentially my position is that AI is more consequential and useful than things like Blockchain, that it should be better regulated, and that it allows most people to do things they weren't able to do before.
…I almost didn't post this due to one of the words being misspelled, but I think that's part of the charm.
More people need to spend some time learning about Pragmatism which, by way of analogy, is to 'pragmatism' the way that being Stoic is to being 'stoic'.
…Just a quick note to say that while all of the tokenmaxxing techbros are talking about 'agentic loops' normal folk like you and me can achieve fantastic results building stuff with LLMs by using these 5 approaches:
…I know it's summer, but this is awesome. Our solar panels should be installed in the next 4-6 weeks and, as even more people do what we do (solar, heat pump, EV) we'll even more rapidly decarbonise the world.
Britain is currently running on an electricity generation mix that is over 90% renewables. The amount generated is in fact 112% of demand and the rest is being exported. That means that, were it not for the need to currently keep gas running to provide frequency and voltage stability, the country could technically be running on wind, solar and a bit of hydro.
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