Dopamine Responsibly
I love how simple and effective this 2x2 grid is. All it's doing is showing that there are many things we can do to satisfy our brain's need for dopamine, some of which are sustainable and cheap, and others that... aren't.
…Substrate
A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
Despite all our accomplishments we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains
Debería tomar más fotos
I take far fewer photos than I used to, which is ironic because the cameras on the phone in my pocket are the best I've ever had. Maybe something like this could help?
Note: the competition mentioned happened five years ago, and yes, the title of this post is a play on the name of Bad Bunny's excellent 2025 album)
…Fully Offline is a privilege
There’s a sad irony when someone jettisons from social media, they’re gone from our Online worlds but I’m so happy for them. And I mourn what we don’t get to hear from them. We don’t get to hear about how wonderful they feel, how beautiful their skin is now, and how they restored their mental health. We don’t know if they make more money or less money. We don’t get further inspiration from them to leave the Online. But being able to observe the Offline from the Online might ruin the magic and mystery hidden there. It’s a door hidden in an old wardrobe that you have to pass through to fully understand.
…
Big Tech & AI: "Guilty until proven wealthy"
It's very US-centric, but then much of AI discourse is. What I like about this piece from Matt Stoller is that it gets to the heart of what's going on here: corruption.
We no longer live in a land where people are “innocent until proven guilty,” the actual rule of law as practiced is “guilty until proven wealthy.” The Supreme Court even gave Wall Street an exemption from the Constitution in securing bankers their own independent regulator, even though no one else gets a regulator free from Presidential demands. Oh, and let’s not even talk about laws that purport to constrain illegal wars or war crimes.
…
What happens when AI fades into the background (like gigabit fibre)?
In 1997 nobody could explain why you would want a gigabit connection, because the honest pitch was that your email would arrive faster, and that wasn’t worth the money. Everything that eventually made the bandwidth worth having hadn’t been built yet. There was no bandwidth to build it for.
…
The Legibility of Live Rewind
As I'm sure most people with even a passing interest will have heard by now, the new Apple Watch has a feature called "Live Rewind". Before we get into this properly, let's just see how Apple describes the feature:
…INTERNET OPERATOR: metonymy, icons, and idolatory
This is going to be a long-ish note, primarily because I'm going to be quoting at length from Jay Springett's excellent INTERNET OPERATOR zine. As you can see from the gif above, I've given it the highlighter treatment, pulling out things which resonate with me.
…The true measure of success
Source: Are.na