2026
228 posts in 2026.
- Intermission
- Intermission
- The mistake of believing you are the bigger thing
- The Art of Money Getting
- As per my last email
- Always more mountains
- Use it or lose it
- The house that eats its foundations
- We are mature in one realm, childish in another
- AI's energy problem is a systems problem
- New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways
- Drug testing on brains hovering between life and death
- New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways that did not have technological pathways before
- Reprogramming the athlete's visual system to function at peak efficiency
- Archiving my writing
- What my archetypes taught me about how I work
- Weeknote 20/2026
- Why do people procrastinate?
- Field Notes on Productive Friction
- Arbitrary structures and accidental hierarchies
- I Have Led A Toothless Life He Thought
- Digital legacy
- The impact of volcanoes on the Black Death
- Don't write in the passive voice
- A brief guide to self-hosting websites and apps using Cloudflare Tunnel
- Believe in your own excellence
- There are always people who fall outside the bounds of what a service can handle
- My kidnappers returning me back
- Cognitive Wallpaper #001: Field Notes on Productive Friction
- What comes after web literacy?
- Weeknote 19/2026
- The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in
- Oof
- We live in an economy that has systematically destroyed the conditions for trust, and then charges us for the workarounds
- My goal is to encourage people to take action and look at the alternatives that are on the table
- The patient as transcription layer
- Wisdom from the Tao Te Ching
- Beyond Elegant Consumption (Again)
- On the gendered nature of (types of) hobbies
- Digital literacies involve layers of abstraction
- How power structures and relationships really work
- Time as an instrument?
- On originality
- Literacy-slop
- April 2026: frameworks, friction, and federation
- Weeknote 18/2026
- Quite the week
- The end of an era
- My tech disclaimer
- Claude Code used to be the obvious choice
- Weeknote 17/2026
- The concentration of power in AI labs is now one of the defining political questions of the decade
- Grand ambitions vs reality
- Renewable energy: 98% of days in Britain are either windy, sunny, or both
- Having a system built on context puts the power in the people's hands
- THE FUTURE IS OFFLINE
- How a little “productive friction” protects human agency
- Choosing partnership over "certainty theatre"
- Turning polygonal badges into contours of practice
- Why I adore the night
- Life advice
- The AI Adoption Spiral
- The "U-shaped curve" of cognitive offloading to AI tools
- "We have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one is working"
- The Journey Home
- 'Folk software' - not 'vibe coding'
- Our communication currently often takes place via platforms over which we have no control
- Note to self
- Scamming tourists in Nepal
- The system can generate options. It cannot supply ownership.
- 'Google Docs' for Markdown?
- Ideas are not products, as much as corporations would like them to be
- Games from Hacker News "Show HN" threads
- Violently boiling water in some monstrous kettle
- You made this?
- Lemme finish this sentence...
- Earthrise, Take 2
- Commonplace
- 🐣 Happy Easter!
- A Victorian-era LLM
- 2026 is about 'Aspirational Humanity' – amongst other things
- Clippy sez: Just Do It
- Each came down with spectacular clarity, each a wingless fuselage, quietly descending to the depths of the ocean floor.
- I must trouble the reader to correct the errata... For I am quite tired.
- Thought Shrapnel's 50 most-referenced sources (2018-2026)
- The hard work of building a thing now isn’t writing the code
- Your future needs you. Your past doesn't.
- If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes
- LLMs are "in the game, even if they’re not strictly playing it."
- Creating the conditions to make things possible
- Institute of Pragmatic Solutions
- Maybe the loose end isn't a failure of facilitation
- Why it's all kicking off (again)
- A useful reminder
- Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak
- Disgust is a complicated emotion
- Recursive logical fallacies
- Claude Cowork vs Claude Code
- ROOTS: Return Old Online Things to your own Site
- How long before run-on sentences are preferred to em-dashes?
- How to stop thinking
- The Fifth Horseman
- How to Create a Freelancer Dashboard
- US Big Tech infrastructure as "legitimate targets"
- Ending an archaic and undemocratic principle
- Tree Hug
- DOUG.md
- News Canary next steps
- They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.
- Groundwork
- Et Merda
- Finger-based checkout
- Living off the moral and intellectual capital of a pre-AI world
- How to avoid your white collar turning blue: brilliance, influence, and relationships
- The world you were raised to survive in no longer exists
- Customised pixel graphics from classic games
- The spectacle produces hypernormalisation
- Building a news canary
- Enough is enough
- Super Mario World Map
- WAO is closing
- Agentic commerce is a catastrophe for every business whose moat is made of friction
- Who am I, and what does someone like me do with their time?
- Units of attention
- Reimagining everyday urban details on a micro scale
- A Reminder That Ive Been
- Weeknote 07/2026
- TechFreedom
- Like a stone
- A range of authentic selves?
- To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one
- Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist
- Thinking is hard
- Like it or not, it is a basic fact of human cognition that we think and act politically as members of social groups.
- Your data might be in Europe but your risks are not
- Digital sovereignty, French-style
- How to Be Less Wrong in a Polycrisis
- Hands, spoon, shovel
- New ebook: How to Be Less Wrong in a Polycrisis
- Why some organisations learn to be less wrong (and others don't)
- Weeknote 06/2026
- A rough attempt at laying out what in philosophy is most relevant for AI.
- The heart is ancient and hasn't had any updates
- The winners will be headless
- Octopus people
- Choo choo!
- Building a 'thinking system' to help you be less wrong
- Source Arena
- A Complex System Contrary To
- How to be less wrong in a polycrisis
- Building your sense of agency by granting yourself permission to do the things you are already allowed to do
- Ambiguity, legibility, and working in the open (ambiguiti.es)
- Ambiguity, legibility, and working in the open
- Weeknote 05/2026
- We are, effectively, being fracked to death.
- Sometimes the work is rest
- A bit more than a to-do list
- Because I learned a second thing at the end of my two days of vertigo: That my idea was terrible.
- January 2026: systems, software, and self
- Words/phrases used more in AI-generated text
- Makes you think
- Claude's Constitution and the trap of corporate AI ethics
- Extending Proton Calendar beyond its limits
- I'm so glad I can still talk to my AI chatbot friends
- The purpose of your website is what it does
- Weeknote 04/2026
- National security assessment on global ecosystems
- About
- Psychological Defence and Information Influence
- Weapon of the enemy
- What do we mean when we talk about pollution and toxicity in online spaces?
- Living with your incapacity
- My Are.na channels are now more organised
- Are they ever tricked by a voice that is false when they expected it to be a real, live human?
- It makes a lot more sense
- Privacy by design means what it says on the tin
- Why your organisation needs someone “unemployable”
- The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards
- SOLVEM PROBLER
- Why your worst decision probably came from your best analysis
- They have no idea what’s happening now.
- How and why I've migrated from from Google to Proton
- Weeknote 03/2026
- What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other
- Time appears in this 3D sort of calendar pattern
- Somewhere I'd like to spend some time
- Postal Arbitrage
- The Cost of American Exceptionalism
- Writing always interrupts being
- LinkedIf
- We will no longer have the conspiracy nonsense about state control
- We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips
- If execution is no longer the differentiator, what is?
- Cognitive Autonomous Zones: against “framework fundamentalism”
- You are here: mental models for 2026
- You can ask AI to write the code, but the hard part is... everything after that
- Weeknote 02/2026
- Bottom-up (systems) thinking
- A deliberate willingness to be helped
- What content are you really trying to provide and how do you get to it?
- Celebrating the lesser-known at the Internet Archive
- Why books are now luxury goods
- The Questions
- Avoiding 'hacklore'
- Open Infrastructure map
- Digital colonialism is where jurisdiction matters more than geography
- Post-digital authenticity
- Humans exhibit analogues of LLM pathologies
- AGI isn't “coming” – it's already reshaping how young people think
- Cash Value: Katherine Ryan, William James, and... getting on with it
- For Me How About You
- The uncomfortable truth about getting people off US tech
- Understanding yourself isn't enough
- Helping strangers access the internet
- A university degree is now more like a 'visa' than a guaranteed route to professional success
- An attack on sovereignty itself
- The strange magic of the third week
- Toward an Open Source contribution standard
- Boing!
- The Woodblock Prints of Utugawa Hiroshige
- The rise of entrepreneurial heroism
- Your mental models are out of date
- For every snarky comment, there are 10x as many people admiring your work
- The same tools that are keeping some people connected to reality are blurring the lines of what is real for others
- The world is rarely as neat as any scenario
- Choose your own inspirational adventure
- And Were Back A Quick
- 2026: Can't complain