Doug Belshaw

👋 Hi! I'm Doug. This is an updated #introduction post. I've been on Bluesky since the early days, after deleting my Twitter account in 2019. I'm more active on the #Fediverse than here: social.coop/@dajb You find out more about me at my (minimalist) personal website: dougbelshaw.com

I’m starting Viable, a monthly newsletter for people working in mission-driven orgs like charities, funders, NGOs, universities & public bodies. Issue #0 is going out soon (test run). Sign up and help me check it works. It'll be monthly from Jan 2027. news.dynamicskillset.com/subscription...

Had this idea in lockdown, half-built it, forgot about it, remembered it again, though might as well finish it.

This is a brilliant tool - aimed at getting folks to contribute to Wikipedia - why not check out your own postcode ( what is missing ?) In a past life I'd be getting my communications students to fill in the blanks #openscot www.neil-scott.com/walkipedia/

Agreed. And this is exactly the opposite of what hand-wringers do on Bluesky: "look at what they've done now!" Unless you're organising against the far-right, don't help spread their messages.

Parkinson’s Law of AI: AI will expand the work so as to exhaust the entire token budget available and to fill all the time available, regardless of task simplicity.

Is anyone seeing an uptick of plausible-sounding bots asking questions in reply to posts (especially if mentioning AI)?

To be fair, even Spotify is at it (which is one of the reasons I've cancelled my subscription after 17 years) bigthink.com/the-present/...

The latest News Canary: Africa launches its own credit rating agency, and Meta tests charging Pages to share links. Paying to point at the open web tells you where platforms are heading. substrate.dougbelshaw.com/news-canary-...

Scaffolding still up Storm Boelo overnight Sleep somewhat disturbed

"a distinctively British approach to artificial intelligence"

My homemade 1TB iPod now runs Rockbox, so I don't have to convert 290GB of music into formats it understands. None of the themes looked enough like stock, so I got Claude to build me one. substrate.dougbelshaw.com/a-stock-look...

'Digital sovereignty' is turning into a flag-waving exercise. A British tech company can still lock its customers in. The real question is sovereignty for whom, over what, and what for? New post, with a short Adam Curtis-style film: substrate.dougbelshaw.com/what-even-is...

More of this please.

I've rebuilt my consultancy website. It now says plainly what I do (strategy and systems thinking for charities, NGOs and public bodies) and what it costs, with prices on the page. The fox hug remains 🦊 dynamicskillset.com

In 2011 I put my doctoral thesis in the public domain. A new paper on opening up the doctorate got me thinking about “scenius” and the usual fear that someone will steal "your" ideas. substrate.dougbelshaw.com/the-scenius-...

Current status: reminding Claude that I'm an Oxford comma maximalist.

Look, I hate to tell you this but you, who have *not* got to grips with AI, and haven't a flying fucking clue how it works, are not best placed to teach others how to "make good use of it". #SubSkeeting

Pure Moods volume 3: Puritan Moods

Thanks to frontier AI models being so good at decompiling games, I'm delighted to be playing a reimagined version of SimCity 2000 that offering visuals, multiplayer, and modern tools, all built on OpenSC2K. substrate.dougbelshaw.com/reticulating...

I've used Gravatar since the start of my career. Having just updated my profile image, it's interesting to see how much I have and haven't changed over the years... gravatar.com/dajbelshaw

Add "piss" to a band name Kings of Piss Convenience

Weekstarter 43: still recovering, but well enough to clear moss off the roof before solar panels and a Powerwall go on today. Plus MozFest next week, and nearly throwing my ereader across the room. substrate.dougbelshaw.com/weekstarter-...

Go to your camera roll and search “boat” and then post a photograph of a boat you like Faro, Feb 2024

Last night's screening of The National Emergency Broadcast left me thinking awareness isn't the bottleneck. Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse' says the societies that survived were willing to reconsider core values. Solar panels & EVs aren't enough. substrate.dougbelshaw.com/national-eme...

Not going to link to Instagram, but photographer Brendan Larsen from NZ captured an estimated 14,000 satellite trails in around two hours. Pretty photo of devices providing potentially-useful services, but at what cost? Their website: www.blarsenphoto.com

New profile pic of me taken at the CoTech event last month

Add "for Tax Purposes" to a movie: No Country For Old Men for Tax Purposes

Open is the new closed substrate.dougbelshaw.com/open-is-the-...

An Open Letter To The People Writing Lengthy Posts About 'Why I'm Going Back to Twitter' dansinker.com/posts/2026-1...

/via www.are.na/block/51257726

Vibe-coding alternatives to fascist software projects substrate.dougbelshaw.com/vibe-coding-...

Weekstarter 42/2026 substrate.dougbelshaw.com/weekstarter-...

This is set up for laughs, but it’s actually one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how being capable of producing convincing sounding language and understanding meaning are two completely different things. A chatbot does not understand you, it just has automated responses based on your words.

👀

Had such a great time in Toronto last week at the #MozAlums gathering! I've put on about two stone and look better in black and white anyway, so I edited them slightly.

We're at "remove heat pump subsidies to fund defence spending" levels of civilizational suicide, I see.

🧵🧵🧵 I was going to write a simple sentence about the madness of the moment, but I got distracted by the U.S. president’s complaint that he was screwed out of the Nobel Peace Prize after bombing multiple countries, and then he bolstered his case with a plan to execute a guy in a wheelchair and ...

Does thinking have inherent value? substrate.dougbelshaw.com/does-thinkin...

A lifeboat on which you find yourself substrate.dougbelshaw.com/a-lifeboat-o...

The sheer volume of untapped knowledge sitting in public archives is staggering substrate.dougbelshaw.com/the-sheer-vo...

AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer, because they are simulation machines. substrate.dougbelshaw.com/ais-are-not-...

Who uses banknotes? I haven't even *seen* one for a couple of years