Weeknote 13/2026

Outside is cloudy, but I like that better
Behind the wheel, but still ain't on my way
Some people say they want to live forever
That's way too long, I'll just get through today

Without any complications
Does it always gotta, does it always gotta
Gotta be so complicated?
Well, I'm way too young to be gettin' old

– Mac Miller, Complicated

I have felt old and tired this week. To be fair, this is exactly what I thought being in my mid-forties would feel like – not that it makes it any less frustrating.

Anyway, the world is 🔥 outside it's 💨 and my body clock is off as we've entered daylight saving time. 🕰️

Writing

Here, I published:

Blog posts in the Stream, that is what we are

A velocity-based RSS reader. Articles arrive, linger, and fade. You are not behind.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Secure your place in the TechFreedom pilot cohort!

Only 10 spots available. The price will increase significantly for the next cohort.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

You can now support Open Thinkering

I’ve been publishing this blog for two decades now. It’s always been free to read, and it’s going to stay that way. But if you see value in what I write and would like to support it financially, I’ve enabled that to happen.

Open ThinkeringDoug Belshaw

Over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:

If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes

I agree with this clear-eyed metaphor from Greg Wilson, riffing off Steve Jobs’ famous quotation that computers are “bicycles for the mind”. It’s certainly been my experience that LLMs have enabled me to do things that I otherwise wouldn’t have done! Check out the ‘Tools’ section of my Dynamic Skillset website, for example. And that doesn’t even list everything… [I]f a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes.

Thought Shrapnel

Your future needs you. Your past doesn’t.

A useful reminder — especially for me. Source: Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

The hard work of building a thing now isn’t writing the code

Last week, after seeing yet another person wax lyrical about Current (on this occasion without even using it!) I decided that I needed to do something about it. Most RSS readers ask you to “mark as read.” Think about what that language implies. You’re granting the article a status change, like an administrator processing paperwork. Read. Filed. Handled. Current asks you to release. You can release from anywhere. In the river, a long swipe left on a card sends it flying off the screen.

Thought Shrapnel

Thought Shrapnel’s 50 most-referenced sources (2008-2016)

I’ve been travelling to and from Huddersfield today (2.5 hours each way) for my daughter’s JPL football match. My wife and I shared the driving, so I took the opportunity to do some reading and also… get Claude to do some analysis of Thought Shrapnel (2018-2026) For those interested, the chart at the top shows my 50 most-referenced sources, from a total of 2117 total sources. The top 50 are links below; no massive surprises!

Thought Shrapnel

I must trouble the reader to correct the errata... For I am quite tired.

Well, indeed. My little robot friend says the origin is as follows: That line is from the 1704 pamphlet “A Defence of a Book intituled The Snake in the Grass. In reply to several Answers put out to it by George Whitehead, Joseph Wyeth, &c.” by the Anglican controversialist Charles Leslie. Source: Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

Each came down with spectacular clarity, each a wingless fuselage, quietly descending to the depths of the ocean floor.

This is an incredible read, and I’d encourage you to set aside the time to do so. I’m old so I literally printed it out to give it the attention it deserves. Cade Diehm, founder of New Design Congress, explains where we’re at. It’s a long essay, so this post is going to be longer than your average Thought Shrapnel post. Diehm argues that last year, there were a couple of long-standing trends which combined.

Thought Shrapnel

Clippy sez: Just Do It

Wow, rude. Source: Are.na

Thought Shrapnel

2026 is about ‘Aspirational Humanity’ – amongst other things

The key themes in this slide deck are interesting, especially as I like to be able to name things that I’m seeing/sensing: Aspirational Humanity – “As artificial intelligence hyper-flattens mass culture, anything denoting evidence of humanity becomes exceptionally desirable.” Sensorial Potency – “The drive to over-optimize everything has left us in a sensory void.” Subversive Sincerity – “The performance of ironic detachment is growing tired, and the fantasy of regressive nostalgia is no longer meeting expectations.

Thought Shrapnel

A Victorian-era LLM

If you scratch away the surface, I’m still a History teacher underneath, so I love this idea of training an LLM on Victorian-era texts! It’s pretty slow, but fun. Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. He is not a modern AI putting on an accent — his vocabulary, ideas, and worldview are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.

Thought Shrapnel

Reading, Listening, and Watching

It's inexplicable that I'm still re-reading The Castle by Franz Kafka and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But there we are.

I enjoyed watching this short video:

One of the latest episodes of The Adventure Podcast featuring Simon Jeffries on mindset was pretty good, too.

Working

Laura and I continued to sprint on the INASP project which focuses on their Rising Scholars website. We've done plenty of work on it this week, including user research interviews with staff and the community.

The other WAO project I'm working on, the Amnesty International UK community platform pilot, is now in the “get the evaluation written” phase. WAO itself is, of course, closing in just over a month, so we had former member Bryan Mathers create some imagery for us. I'm sure he won't mind me sneaking in a sketch we ended up not taking forward. It references our inaugural planning meeting, a decade ago.

I kept things ticking over with Nate for the Digital Badges Proof of Concept project through Dynamic Skillset. We've submitted our first deliverable (technical architecture) and you see the kanban board to see what we're up to.

Tom Watson and I now have a couple of people signed up for the TechFreedom pilot cohort, which kicks off towards the end of April. Another person has said they're going to join us. We ideally want 10 people, but will go ahead if we get 6. We spent some time noodling on the workshop sessions this week and also talked about making a SimCity 2000-style game.

More on that tomorrow 😉

I also had chats with:

• Stephen Lockyer who is an enthusiastic early adopter of TaskDial (let me know if you want an invite code!)
• Laura Kirsop who is currently CTPO at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and who I've known for years. She put me in touch with Justin Spooner from Unthinkable Digital, with whom I also had an enjoyable conversation.
• The “AI group” which has met irregularly ever since we worked on a UNESCO thing together. This time around, Bryan Alexander, Laura Hilliger, Ian O'Byrne, and Karen Smith came along. Helen Beetham couldn't make it, unfortunately.
• Tim Riches, CEO of Navigatr. We talked about my polygonal badges post, among other things.
• John Fitzgerald, Digital Evolution Manager at SCVO (with Tom)
• Steve Hawkes from The Developer Society about WAO closing, and so on.
• Will Heinemann from Torchbox who showed me their new Possibility Mapping workshop, which is not unrelated to my Sightlines tool.

In terms of apps, I've made tweaks to TaskDial as a result of the chat with Stephen Lockyer, have made huge strides with Stream, and have also started to reinvent MoodleNet on top of Bonfire. Don't get too excited, but perhaps more soon...

Personal

My son, Ben, and I went to see Project Hail Mary at the cinema. He fell asleep, and I didn't get what all the fuss was about. He had quite the week, talking to his university tutor about potentially changing courses from Sport to Geography, and also wild camping with his mates halfway up Helvellyn in gale-force winds.

My wife and I spent most of yesterday travelling to and from Huddersfield with our daughter for her football match. The wind spoiled it, really – that, and the fact that two of her team mates ended up in hospital with injuries, one with a fractured wrist! Along with someone being sidelined with a hamstring strain, and only taking a squad of 12, they were down to 9 players at one point. They still only lost 2-1!

I've done some exercise this week, but not a lot. I'm trying to lean into the rest that I've been prescribed. Did I mention that I was diagnosed with Phase 3 (“parasympathetic”) overtraining syndrome? Oh right, yes, I did. 😅

Next week

I was going to be taking two weeks off work, including next week. But given the co-op is closing and we've got stuff to do, that didn't feel right. So, given that it's a four-day week due to Good Friday, I'm going to work this coming week.

Hopefully I'll sleep better this week. The change of seasons, coupled with changing my exercise regime and medication, means my routine is all out of whack.