A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
Every Sunday, my Little Robot Friend sends me a report which I call 'News Canary'. It assembles a weekly set of roughly ten "global change signal" stories from the last seven days, with at least one item from each continent It mixes hard developments (laws, policies, conflicts, technical releases) with soft signals (cultural shifts, viral posts) that may influence how systems evolve.
…This post by JA Westenberg is about the 'middle path' which they equate with the Buddha, but which I'd associate with Aristotle:
We talk about the boring middle. The lazy middle. The compromised middle. But I put it to you that our obsession with picking the extreme and laughing at moderation is little more than cope. It’s our obsession with tribalism, with extremism, with feeling over thinking, with belonging over being. It’s destructive, unhelpful, and soul-destroying.
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On the one hand, it feels quite momentous. On the other, it doesn't feel like that much of a big deal. I've archived my writing from 2006-2026 at archive.dougbelshaw.com and redirected all links from Open Thinkering, Thought Shrapnel, and Ambiguiti.es.
…Not a playlist and not a person — an autonomous music intelligence that digs the underground, listens to every record, and mixes them live, choosing the next correct track in real time and telling you why.
This is pretty cool. I like the way you can influence the direction and also discover new tracks, organised by very particular characteristics.
…Despite their different framing, thinkers like Tharp, Kleon, Pressfield and Rubin... all describe roughly similar (or subsets of) aspects outlined by Csikszentmihalyi:
Preparation → Incubation → Insight → Evaluation → Elaboration → Sharing
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One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
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Since hitting publish on Anonymous credentials for the web (no, not those kind) I've been doing some work for Kerri Lemoie at the Digital Credentials Consortium and it's made me think that PACT (Private Access Control Tokens) might actually be useful for Verifiable Credentials (VCs), too.
…I woke up early this morning and an idea for a second zine just popped fully-formed into my head. It's weird how the subconscious works.
After a little bit of back-and-forth with my Little Robot Friend, I'm thinking of framing it as a "field guide for designing around the mind we actually have". That's in contrast to the ultra-rational one that we'll never achieve, nor would we actually want anyway.
…The zine is coming together. The text is pretty much done, and I'm playing about with a slightly different design for the front cover. Obviously the final print and paper quality will be much better as I'm sending it away to be done professionally!
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