A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
I use Signal every day and recommend it to others. But, as this post reminds us, for all its state of the art encryption, at the end of the day it's a US-owned, centralised service. What we need is choice built on standards. (In this case, the author suggests, XMPP.)
…The burnout of our age, Han writes, doesn’t come from external repression but from internal overproduction. We are not crushed by the lash; we are fried by the light, the constant buzz of notifications, the tyranny of being reachable, and the invisible expectation to always be on.
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– Miski Omar, The Guardian
I'm delighted to say that I've sold all available copies of CW-PUB-001: Field Notes on Productive Friction. It was a limited edition, physical copy-only run of 50. There won't be any reprints. I've now updated the Cognitive Wallpaper website hinting at further zines, although I haven't decided what they'll be yet.
…Tom is currently on holiday, but I'm still sending him stuff like the above diagram as we build FIELD STATION in an intentional way. So I should say, right off the bat, that this is my view of what we're doing.
I've been collecting writing about using AI with the Viable System Model (VSM) in this Are.na collection, and published an essay entitled Governance Is Not a Dashboard. This note is an attempt to work in the open, thinking about how to apply the VSM to build a sustainable business where the "requisite variety" can, in part, be met by AI agents.
…I love stuff like this that can mean different things to different people, and various things to one individual person, depending on the day / their state of mind.
Source: Are.na block · Vibes channel
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.
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