A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
I was having a chat with someone the other day where I casually mentioned that my wife and I used to use a shared task management tool called Astrid. Although we tried a couple of forks after it was open-sourced following the Yahoo! acquisition and closure in 2013, nothing stuck.
…Exciting! The final version of my first ever zine has arrived.
It's looking great and the tweaks that I've made after the test print have turned out perfectly.
I'm anticipating getting these into people's hands in early September. There'll only ever be 50 physical copies (no digital version) and there are currently 12* remaining.
…We've published another essay over at FIELD STATION entitled Governance Is Not a Dashboard. This post is a TL;DR of it, explaining how applying the Viable System Model (VSM) is even more achievable in a world of AI agents.
…1. Finishing off my zine on Productive Friction. It's currently at the printers, so will be ready to ship soon!
2. Recovering from tearing my calf muscle caused by an ill-advised race in the back garden with my daughter.
…“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”
— Oscar Wilde
Sometimes you read things that explain eloquently something you've felt but not been able to articulate. For example, this from Sam Kahn:
There was a point when the middle class... was more culturally aspirational. The heyday of this probably was Mortimer Adler’s great books program and the ubiquity of Encyclopedias Britannica and Great Books boxsets in middle class homes. It’s still discernible in, say, old Woody Allen movies where a major part of Allen’s neuroses is that he’s not measuring up to what he takes to be a European cosmopolitan ideal.
…
Substack is a shitty place to publish blog posts, but (for me, at least) Substack Notes has a pretty high signal/noise ratio. Because it's very much a writer-focused place, you get wonderful things like this happening:
…So, I was "the reader" in question which prompted this post from my good friend Laura:
A reader pointed out that in my second assignment, I sort of waved off the question of “What does validation look like?” My protagonist was, to be fair, quite snarky in telling the professor what validation would look like. Thus, I am submitting this brief reflection for extra credit (or for full credit since I lost credit points by being dismissive of the question).
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