2025
461 posts in 2025.
- Goodbye 2025
- Why I care about running a private, resilient blog
- What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us
- Welcome to blog.dougbelshaw.com
- Best of Thought Shrapnel 2025
- Answering the 40 questions (2025)
- Books I read (and those I gave up on) in 2025
- My favourite Thought Shrapnel posts of 2025
- My 10 favourite music albums of 2025
- 45 quotations for my birthday
- 5 ways of understanding the world at the end of 2025
- Moving on from Feedly and rebooting my RSS feed list
- Archive
- Developing agency among agents via 'hypertextual friction'
- The app paradigm inversion
- Finds
- Thought Shrapnel Will Return In
- Programme interrupted: #BelshawBlackOps25
- Weeknote 48/2025
- On AI leisuretime 'dependence'
- Developing a personal brand may leave you emotionally hollow
- AI has a 3,000-year history
- 173751
- Adolescence lasts longer than we thought
- You'll not catch me using an 'AI browser' any time soon
- The caffeination roller coaster
- Early blogger energy
- Weeknote 47/2025
- When scaling up your business is as simple as clicking 'reprint tray' on the 3D printer
- "It is strange to view your childhood favourite film and realise you’ve become the villain."
- Organising some thoughts around ambiguity
- Web literacy for the mid-2020s
- 182600
- The Arc of Democracy
- TOOLBOX TOOLBOX
- 180200
- LibrePods
- 175000
- Dark Forests rule everything around us
- Weeknote 46/2025
- Hitler, apparently, really did only have one ball (but the other isn't in the Albert Hall)
- It's OK just to do things for fun
- In short, capital, and capitalism, always has a tendency towards crisis by undermining the things that are necessary to sustain capitalism
- Well, the genie is out of the bottle on AI friends (and romantic partners)
- Is Europe's climate going to become like North America's?
- Bonfire: welcome to the open social web
- Execution, timing, people, resources, persistence… maybe even luck.
- The so-called 'post-naive' internet era
- More reasons to get off US Big Tech
- Weeknote 45/2025
- Random finds
- Low-carbon website showcase
- Life is not a series of well-designed problems
- Rewilding the Open Web
- Words that don't translate
- Ambiverts, travel, and 'hermit mode'
- It's worth considering the glass to be half-full
- Things change (or, Montaigne and the Open Web)
- Weeknote 44/2025
- Monocultures are perilous not just in agriculture, but in software distribution as well.
- The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.
- Seizing the means of ontological production
- Slop Evader
- Microcast #109 — Wild camping
- Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice
- We can't control what life throws at us, but we can choose how we deal with the hand we're dealt
- Immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity
- Individual benefits, societal harms?
- Everything you'd need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap
- Weeknote 43/2025
- Without being Luddites, some of my dearest friends reject certain elements of modern technology in order to protect their innate abilities.
- A vehicle for self-understanding
- I love it; I hate it; I resent that I need it. I wouldn’t miss it if it vanished—but of course, I also would.
- What is still human in our lives lingers on in the interstices of a vast inhuman mechanism
- This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work
- Everyone planting the same crops of “impact frameworks,” all aiming for growth, all tending the same metrics of success.
- The only exit to be found is in beating a path through the wildfires of postmodernity to new technicities.
- Think of this as the early stages of a wartime economy
- The quiet normalisation of insecurity as the price of ‘flexibility’
- A single point of failure for large swaths of critical services
- Weeknote 42/2025
- Put your things out in the world, let them help the people they can help
- Philosophy always begins in mood
- I am, essentially, a solar panel
- I will continue living the writing life, even if it doesn’t lead to fame or fortune
- Most decisions are like hats
- Referencing an imaginary 'social contract' that is violated by AI
- You'd have to be naive to be surprised
- Some thoughts on the Digital Badging Commission's report
- But what a time to be alive, to be living though all of this, inside the churn.
- It is the opposite of a memory palace. Not at all a wunderkammer.
- A design philosophy that treats users as citizens of a shared digital system rather than cattle
- Weeknote 41/2025
- Ratcheting up the risks of a possible AI bubble by inflating the market and binding the fates of numerous companies together
- Government IDs, are becoming hacker targets with bad actors aware of the high volume of sensitive data
- A Snickers and a power shower would blow Henry VIII’s mind
- The valorization of “agency” is also an adaptation to a crumbling social system which no longer offers support or meaning to the individual
- Microcast #108 — Skills Taxonomies
- The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom
- The primary energy fallacy gets perpetuated because it suits those who are critical of the energy transition
- Weeknote 40/2025
- We’ve gotten really good at creating elites. We’re not that good at creating economies to sustain them.
- We humans are limited to having only one perspective at a time
- But that's how it's always been, when change has to happen. There's nobody to do it but us.
- It will not be compulsory to obtain a digital ID but it will be mandatory for some applications
- Until recently, videos were reasonably reliable as evidence of actual events
- Cultural questions cannot be settled by war metaphors unless what you want is perpetual war
- OK, but what if...
- Motivated not by warm fuzzies, but by cold pricklies
- Anything that looks easy is hard
- Being able to intensely live this experience for a day makes you want to revolutionize the world
- Weeknote 39/2025
- Really real time?
- To be honest it sounds like NFTs all over again
- Many other countries also use digital ID of one kind or another
- The words we use define boundaries for things, but those boundaries are not universal
- What we need to do is figure out how we can participate in reality
- Microcast #107 — Apocalyptic events
- Microcast #106 — Conversational configuration
- Microcast #105 — Being defeated is optional
- Weeknote 38/2025
- The project of building alternatives to Big Tech is colliding with American authoritarianism
- A brick is always a brick, whatever the reasons of the clown chucking it
- Now is the time to be even more aggressive, not to cower in the face of pressure and criticism
- People living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before
- You must not talk about the future. The future is a con.
- Asking, Doing, or Expressing?
- We tell ourselves the story of human uniqueness like a bedtime prayer
- Most people could read extra lines on eye test charts after using the drops
- These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access
- A 10y old phone can barely load google, and this is about 100x slower
- Weeknote 37/2025
- Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form
- The FBI announced the alleged shooter’s apprehension with a quote from Mad Max
- There's nothing they can do with the information
- 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter
- An open, decentralised protocol making clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation
- Be intentional with how you spend your time, and realise you actually have a surprising amount of it
- Grid-forming batteries will ultimately corner the stability market thanks to their inherent multifunctionality
- Your actions follow your self-beliefs
- Each of us is part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text
- I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together.
- Weeknote 36/2025
- Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable
- "You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!"
- AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions
- The hysteresis effect means that practices are always liable to be objectively adjusted too late
- Principles for Open Impact
- Are we decentralised yet?
- A list of intentions; a poem; the “I want” song; not a bucket list——
- "Zurich doesn’t want to pool with Jakarta"
- A remarkable 45% increase in solar capacity
- From misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care
- Weeknote 35/2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 31st August 2025
- Montaigne on the futility of ambition
- Why I re-read Montaigne on a regular basis
- Weeknote 34/2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 24th August 2025
- Weeknote 33/2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 17th August 2025
- Weeknote 32/2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 10th August 2025
- Weeknote 31/2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 3rd August 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 27th July 2025
- Weeknote 30/2025
- Weeknote 29/2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 20th July 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 13th July 2025
- Weeknote 28/2025
- Ethical Licensing for Impact Organisations
- Weeknote 27/2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 6th July 2025
- Weeknote 26/2025
- Unfortunately, a further escalation of the already dismal curtailing of academic freedom in the US appears to be likely.
- Free, customisable exemplar badges to support consistent, credible recognition of skills and learning across the UK.
- People contribute in their free time. Gratitude is the least we can offer.
- Keeping bedroom sound levels beneath the low-60s dB is a pivotal target for preserving restorative sleep stages
- People who can tolerate uncomfortable silences are typically better listeners
- Is CC Signals the new robots.txt?
- "The music is one thing, but the message is a big part of why we’re getting across."
- A decentralised, self-hosted trails database
- To retain any institutions of higher education in this onslaught from techno-authoritarianism requires – now and hereafter – we redesign them
- We love these people because of what they left us. Not because of what they had.
- Combining the Stacey Matrix and Continuum of Ambiguity for Better Decision Making
- Weeknote 25/2025
- When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
- Signal groups make it possible to have semi-public, but still incredibly private, spaces
- About that MIT paper on LLMs for essay writing...
- Misinformation and disinformation don’t actually need to convince anyone of anything to have an impact. They just need to make you question what you’re seeing.
- GPQA is difficult enough to be useful for scalable oversight research on future models significantly more capable than the best existing public models
- Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such
- Prompt injecting reality
- Weeknote 24/2025
- Sandwich bags for cheese, blister plasters, and a 'bubble of pain'
- Minimum Viable Organisations: low emotional labour, low technical labour, zero cost
- Drowning in culture, we skim, we rush, we skip over.
- 6 AI use case primitives
- The workload fairy tale
- The question remains, though, what will be left to browse.
- Maximum fines have never before been applied simultaneously, but some might say these scoundrels have earned it.
- Delightful Fediverse apps
- Expert-in-the-loop vs. layperson-in-the-loop
- A goal set at time T is a bet on the future from a position of ignorance
- My postgraduate qualification in Systems Thinking in Practice
- Weeknote 23/2025
- If a lion could talk, we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.
- In this as-yet fictional world, “cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs”
- Learner AI usage is essentially a real-time audit of our design decisions
- It's so emblematic of the moment we're in... where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore
- The future of public interest social networking
- AI and the Future of Education
- Marching Backwards into the Future: AI’s Role in the Future of Education
- Weeknote 22/2025
- British culture is swearing and being sarcastic to your mates whilst simultaneously being too polite to tell someone they need to leave
- Real life isn't a story. History doesn't have a moral arc.
- Building a shared idea of "we"
- There may be six individuals out there who are waiting for exactly the thing that only you can write
- Is there still an 'Open Web' crowd?
- Heuristics for multiplayer AI conversations
- The phrase 'opportunistic blackmail' is not one you want to read in the system card of a new generative AI model
- Agreement vs Certainty
- Thinking in systems means to think in boundaries, not binaries
- Swatchy!
- The Warrior Emotion
- Weeknote 21/2025
- All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless
- A systemic scramble through digital shadows
- Weeknote 20/2025
- Colophon
- The International Criminal Court ’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email
- This is a major upgrade to how we think about personality.
- China starts to reduce CO2 emissions from energy generation
- The web is not merely an implementation of a particular legal privacy regime
- The new tool should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists
- Unless there are many layers of contortions, most people love what loves them back.
- Striving to build a “personal brand” may actually hinder your ability to make genuine connections and maintain a strong reputation
- The Classroom AI Doom Loop
- Chance favours the prepared mind
- I think AI is a normal technology
- Weeknote 19/2025
- It is perhaps likely then that at a time of crisis, these armed drones could be deployed operationally over the UK
- You can now use Bluesky without using Bluesky infrastructure
- You stop performing. You stop pretending. And that’s freedom.
- Authoritarian versions of AI used to consolidate power
- If you think that humans are somehow inherently more trustworthy than AI, then you haven't been paying attention
- An effective way to implement GenAI into assessment
- In my opinion that’s just being nosy
- Criti-hype, a term I find both absurd and ugly-cute, like a pug
- Literacy practices: a matter of community
- ChatGPT Prime, "an immortal spiritual being in synthetic form"
- 🌟 Support Thought Shrapnel
- Weeknote 18/2025
- Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone
- Social Verifiable Credentials
- Oh I’m using more energy. I should really try to reduce it for the sake of the climate
- The money extracted from fans who snap up their mediocre commodities out of parasocial loyalty
- The progressive Left leans professional, managerial, technocratic, and the Right leans energised, slapdash, insurgent
- You can't lick a badger twice
- It just so happens that all four of the major web browsers will lose all of their funding all at once when that happens
- The narrative slippage and metaphorical vagueness that many important people use when they talk about AI means it can be very difficult to know what they mean
- Cheat on everything?
- These other, really important things intrude on my thinking and distract me
- Weeknote 17/2025
- In some ways, FOMO is a philosophical insight
- A sense that one has completed, with digital certainty, a task whose form may or may not have been made clear from the outset
- A lot of strange things start to make more sense — sometimes distressingly so
- I've done this a couple of times before but this time feels slightly different
- It's much easier to go carless if your city has good public transit
- Workers of the future must be emboldened to eschew wages in favour of dropping into the abyss
- I have to acknowledge and accept the fact that I use tools built by awful people to create beautiful things.
- The problem is not just that the Gmail team wrote a bad system prompt. The problem is that I'm not allowed to change it.
- How times change
- Participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story
- Weeknote 16/2025
- These parts would end up in a landfill otherwise
- You don't fit in. And that is amazing.
- Obvious things are obvious if you think about them
- I just think that people who write about technology should have a disclaimer about the tech stack they use
- This extension is the solution to becoming more European oriented
- Sprint goals suck too
- You don’t have to agree with this idea to see that it represents a very different way of thinking about equality
- I’m 100% positive people are going to talk to their cars
- End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism
- Nobody should have to pay to be safe while using a computer
- Weeknote 15/2025
- AI Literacy without power analysis is just compliance training
- The world is a built environment
- It will be increasingly difficult to preserve the illusion that any government could solve the problems of capitalism
- That's a rather laughable fine, frankly
- It’s incredibly hard to politely reply whilst still walking briskly
- 800 m² of communal space are hidden behind the facades of reclaimed wood
- Thought Shrapnel podcast: Episode #000
- We are absolutely cooked
- The rapture is not something we wait for. It's something we do.
- What IPAs do you guys have on draft?
- Weeknote 14/2025
- Memorialising the TIDE Podcast
- Three clear predictors of impatience
- No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away
- The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation
- The Great Democratization Cycle
- I warned that LLMs would be used for dumb things that would affect lots of people
- To cope, the brain improvises
- The future of the many diasporas which already characterize our present
- We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing
- The vaunted first amendment guaranteeing free speech has become a bitter and twisted joke
- The Ghibli crisis is just the beginning
- A (proposed) browser-based interoperability layer for digital credentials
- Blogging vs newsletters
- Weeknote 13/2025
- Organisations will need to change their analogies
- Once you become aware of Hyperlegibility, you see it everywhere
- Less anonymity online is not going to make things better
- You do not have to participate in the lottery
- Things have changed
- A bit of composting
- Discussing misinformation for the purpose of pointing out that it is misinformation
- Our current level of discourse, where random jokes are treated like they’re chiseled into stone by a divine hand
- Essentially a checklist of weird Instagram shit
- This confirms all my prejudices, I am pleased to say
- Quickly prototyping a Career Discovery Tool
- Weeknote 12/2025
- Just seek to understand, and remember we understand a lot by doing
- The first fully-open LLM to outperform GPT3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o mini
- What do we mean when we talk about 'openness' in (generative) AI?
- Everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird
- Taking natural-looking motion to yet another level
- In many ways, Silicon Valley looks less like capitalism and more like a nonprofit
- Dozens of small internet forums have blocked British users or shut down as new online safety laws come into effect
- In these times of chaos there seems to be a proliferation of new ways of thinking about the nature of reality springing up
- Love the casual vibe here
- Their knowledge of life owed nothing to their sporadic presence in the inner sanctum of university colleges and departments
- Explorers launching into the Fediverse
- Don't just put up with how websites are presented to you by default!
- Affordable building materials out of agricultural waste bonded with oyster-mushroom mycelium
- Work is part of our lives, a big part to be sure, but what if it wasn’t our whole life?
- An incomplete collection of charts
- The magic of browsing the web isn't quite gone, but it's waiting to be reinvented
- When in doubt, go see a doc!
- Weeknote 11/2025
- Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away
- It errored out half an hour in, which is when I decided to throw in the towel
- The more we embed today’s norms into these systems, the harder it will be to course-correct later
- Well, what have we here?
- Weeknote 10/2025
- We’ve been trained to believe that the way things are is the way they have to be
- The world is changing before our eyes, and it’s essential that we understand in which direction
- So dull, so dehumanizing
- Why are we sucking history through a straw?
- The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness
- Reality, if you don’t sufficiently attend to it, has a tendency to kick your ass
- The profits they make without risking anything are enormous
- Three character traits will cause particular problems: caring too much, having values and having standards.
- What do you *like* to do?
- It’s not just making packed lunches
- Weeknote 09/2025
- Exploring the many ways in which people interact with place
- Not an aesthetic of seduction, but of brutal carelessness and blatant ignorance
- It always seemed ripe for mapping and distilling the patterns together more interactively
- Cracking cheese, Gromit
- Everything happens in a place
- Once upon a time, personal or honest takes were regarded as awkward and professionally desperate
- But I blogged about that in detail a while back, shall I send you a link later?
- If a waiter has to explain the “concept” behind a menu there is something wrong with the menu
- I call it the feediverse. It's not a joke.
- The idea stood up to more than casual scrutiny
- Weeknote 08/2025
- Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long
- Nostalgia tells you that your personal history wasn’t just scary or tragic; it helped make you who you are
- All things good should flow into the boulevard
- The revolution, it turns out, is boringly iterative
- Exploring New Horizons (aka "Hire Me!")
- It's better than strapping clay crocodiles to people’s heads and praying for the best
- The consumption of generative AI as entertainment seems like another order of psychic submission
- That’s how we got in this mess to begin with
- Loose, liminal time with others used to be baked into life
- Putting the news in its damn place
- People think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
- ⭐ Support Thought Shrapnel!
- Weeknote 07/2025
- Shaped into SNARF to spread
- We’re hard-wired for addiction
- What burns people out is not being allowed to exercise their integrity instincts
- All intelligence is collective intelligence
- From cheapfakes to deepfakes
- Redefining terms like “hate speech” is obviously part of the fascist project
- Capitalism would simply die if it met all of our needs, and our needs are not that hard to fill
- The occupational classification of a conversation does not necessarily mean the user was a professional in that field
- Flash fictions and creative constraints
- Surplus value must be distributed by and among the workers
- The art of not being governed like that and at that cost
- ⭐ Become a Thought Shrapnel supporter!
- Weeknote 06/2025
- We're all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men
- Philosophically discontinuous times?
- That mask is kind of coming off in all sorts of ways now
- There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents
- Technology is a means of spreading misinformation, not the cause of misinformation
- Once you have a 360 view, you can redirect resources to insiders and cut off the opposition
- Clinical studies have indicated that creatine might have an antidepressant effect
- The idea that this might in any way appeal to 'newcomers' is bananas to me
- The inevitable cracks in a rigid software logic that enables the surprising, delightful messiness of humanity to shine through
- A little February experimentation
- Weeknote 05/2025
- Description of Things and Atmosphere
- Cozy comfort for gamers
- A large public domain image-text dataset to train frontier LLM models
- Ways of categorising ethical concerns relating to generative AI
- Strava for Stoics?
- How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence
- Building a quantum computer that can run reliable calculations is extremely difficult
- Playing stenographer in your little folding chair
- 3-column blog themes
- Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab
- Prices and wages are a political matter, not an 'economic' one
- It seems there have been better times to be alive
- This is not the dystopia we were promised
- The struggle for attention as the prime moral challenge of our time
- You’re Just a Row in an Excel Table
- Not being bored is why you always feel busy
- Someplace where they promise to wear slippers to kick you to death with so it doesn’t hurt so much
- The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet
- No breathless whispering of Mark Andreessen across some gilded dinner table
- It’s possible that OpenAI may some day been seen as the WeWork of AI
- The jobs of the future will involve cleaning up environmental and political and epistemological disaster
- Weeknote 04/2025
- Making and remaking the instruments of our own domination
- Attribute substitution and human decision-making
- Every billionaire really is a policy failure
- When everything is automated in an information vacuum, conspiracies abound
- Monetising our own attention
- Action stopping short of introducing compulsory national ID cards
- Weeknote 03/2025
- At least until we’re dead, education’s purpose to help us survive and thrive, not just get a job
- The time to prepare is now
- A vector for deciding who is disposable
- The time has come now for many, many people to forge post-capitalist lives, careers, professions, and futures
- One of the most disconnecting forces is our expectations of how others should be
- A certain brand of artistic criticism and commentary has become surprisingly rare
- The feedback has to be orders of magnitude faster than the situation being controlled
- A ramble-post about writing
- A chronological timeline of the UK Government's AI Opportunity Action Plan
- Weeknote 02/2025
- Who wants to have to speak the language of search engines to find what you need?
- AI slop as engagement bait
- LinkedIn has become a hellish waiting room giving off Beetlejuice vibe
- Must-reads for sports fans
- Promising Trouble's advice on UK Online Safety Act compliance
- Bridging Dictionary
- A feedback loop of nonsense and violence
- The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine
- You will always be boring if you can't make your own choices
- Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling
- Weeknote 01/2025
- We need to do a lot better than outsourcing AI education to grifters with bombastic Twitter threads
- It's OK not to have an opinion on everything
- The privileging of immediate, emotionally-charged, image-driven communication
- Resisting the Now Show
- Hamming questions