A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
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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I follow all kind of weird and wonderful subreddits, including /r/bloomin8 which is a community for a particular brand of colour e-ink canvas. I don't (yet) own one of their products. What's great about this example is that one of their users has thoughtfully added another, smaller, monochrome e-ink displays to mimic a museum display.
…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.
…It's a bit of a coincidence that the main protagonist in both the last book I read and the current book I'm reading are both the same age as me. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene was absolutely fantastic, and I'm enjoying the modern James Bond novel Solo by William Boyd so far.
…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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One of the advantages and drawbacks of having studied Philosophy, History, Education, and Systems Thinking while having a background in technology is that you realise that everything... is just made up. Not just in a Steve Jobs "everything around you around was made by someone no smarter than you" kind of way, but in a William James "blooming, buzzing confusion" kind of way.
…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
