A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
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'.
…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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We're not making a big splash about it yet, but yesterday Tom and I met up to discuss FIELD STATION. Today we submitted documents to Companies House to incorporate.
In fact, yesterday was a strange day in that we finalised details for FIELD STATION, I had a bunch of admin to do for Dynamic Skillset, and I met up with Laura and John for the second-to-last WAO close-down meeting.
…I came across a simpler version of this that not only attributes this to Gandhi himself, but misspelled his name. So I created a version using Gemini.
The original list via Wikipedia:
Seven Social Sins is a list by Frederic Donaldson that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi published in his weekly newspaper Young India on 22 October 1925. Later he gave this same list written on a piece of paper to his grandson, Arun Gandhi, on their final day together shortly before his assassination.
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Sometimes, two images you save go so well together it would be crime not post them one above the other:
Source: Are.na block · Vibes channel
I've always been interested in the idea of an 'untakedownable' blog. In 2017 I attempted to create one giving some of the reasons why in this post.
My old blog used to be available via Tor and this project, OnionPress, aims to take that a step further.
…I like this from Russell Davies, telling the story of visiting Microsoft's campus in the 1990s when Bill Gates was still around.
Gates was notoriously socially awkward, so he just asked everything the same question, "What are you working on?". People ensured they had an answer that made it sound like they were working on something:
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