Gentle recommendation to have a hobby that you can 1) do on your own time 2) are not doing for livelihood or career 3) can grow your skill in over time, and 4) can focus on for chunks of time where you can tune other things out. I spent a couple hours last night developing film and it was excellent
Screenshot of dougbelshaw.com/work
DID YOU KNOW?
I'm unexpectedly rather more available than expected right now, so if you see something Doug-shaped, please do let me know (boosts appreciated!)
dougbelshaw.com/work/
This is whirling round my head at the moment. What *should* I be working on?
thoughtshrapnel.com/2025/01/02/h...
The clearest photo of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun | NASA
Perfection.
Extremely detailed photo of Martian soil from the Curiosity rover 🔍
You have to soak in the data & struggle with it — the part that has the most ambiguity, which is uncomfortable!
But the discomfort is a necessary signal toward finding your way to insight & clarity.
I think many practitioners (&/or bosses) assume the discomfort is bad, so avoiding it must be good.
So I was a guest at a meetup last week. One of the participants used an AI notes and summary tool.
The thing that struck me when looking at the summary afterwards is that what got talked about most was actually the least important part of the conversation, but the tool had no way of knowing that.
`chmod 777 **/lib` to own the libs
James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared view of the Pillars of Creation
Interesting snippet in here for Dashboard Government Nerds
Did you know that by substituting your morning coffee with green tea, you can eliminate up to 93% of what little joy you have left?
At work one of the things we do (@carefultrouble.bsky.social) is help different kinds of orgs with their AI strategy and ethical evaluations. Some random trends:
- techno-optimistic senior managers who want to sprinkle AI on something but aren't sure what are almost always men in their 40s
Chart showing poor financial resilience among a high proportion of Londoners - key stats in main post.
Sobering finding from Centre for London commissioned polling, contradicting the image too many have that London's streets are paved with gold. 1 in 7 Londoners could not cope with an unexpected £20 bill, rising to 1 in 4 if they're hit with an unplanned £50 cost. #LDNConf24
#UncoolTwo50
Day 42. Computer Love - Kraftwerk (1981)
One way to make your sci-fi text timeless: pick something futuristic, find its limitations, then write about being disappointed by those limits. Using this method, Kraftwerk wrote the most accurate song about online dating three decades early.
Can you wait while I count from 0 to 20,000?
Introduce yourself with some jobs you have done apart from what you do now:
Primary school teacher
Restaurant cook
Nightclub DJ
Think tanker
Polling and opinion surveys contribute to harm year round, not just at election time. In large part because running surveys is a lucrative business that crowds out actually understanding people's lived experience.
The reporting on surveys as bad as bad science journalism.
Most survey results reported as facts about the world are not in fact facts about the world. I trust what comes out of Pew, but that's about it.
Anything out of an industry group or a study funded by a specific company, nah.
I mean, unless it supports my priors.
If you have a shy young person in your life who is not a massive joiner-inner can I recommend getting into Warhammer? If you're not a team sports person or don't thrill to putting on a show, there's not much out there for kids these days and few positive male role models
So much of modern childhood - from doing PowerPoint presentations from KS1 to being expected to be a high achiever in group contexts - assumes everyone is an extrovert, but there are all sorts of people with all kinds of skills out there and they all need some space to thrive
I grew up on these streets
@maggieappleton.com thanks, great talk! Really thought provoking.
London Bridge train platform with the shard in the background.
Up early and off to UX Brighton.
Honestly, speed reading boring and impenetrable books is a skill that needs to be passed on from generation to generation
I’d been given The Road by Cormac McCarthy as a gift but it was sat on my bedside table. I thought I’d have an early night and read a little and picked it up. Finished it at 3am. Not an easy read but incredibly compelling. Reading in one sitting by I felt like I’d lived it.
“Heat pumps are superior in efficiency to condensing boilers, even if the heat pumps are powered by electricity from a power station burning natural gas.”
Not me saying that but the late Prof Sir David MacKay.
More in my Carbon Brief article 👇
www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-18...
Thinking of you at this difficult time (i.e. Monday)
3 slightly wrong hedgehogs against a psychedelic background. There are also two chests and a lion. I mean, idk, it's a bit weird
Some very incorrect pictures of birds
Yeah sorry you can't rearrange your sofa delivery date because you have not correctly identified these hedgehogs
Frame 1: (Sender) AI expands a bullet point to a long email Frame 2: (Recipient) AI makes a bullet point out of long this email
Pretty much this.
