Weeknote 37/2025

I got up at just before 6am this morning, having heard my son, Ben, come back from a night out at 4am and finally get to bed at 4.30am. I’m a light sleeper and hear almost everything that goes on in our house, despite wearing sleep buds. They’re mainly to help me get back to sleep and stop middle-of-the-night ruminating though, rather than to block out noise.

Ben’s off to university next week, living ‘away’ in student accommodation in Gateshead, which is ~15 miles from where we live in Morpeth. On Friday, we accompanied him as he picked up his digital key and ‘checked in’ to his new flat, which seems a lot nicer than the accommodation my wife and I had 26 years ago. Pool tables, ping-pong, a café, a gym — lots of things that I’m sure will give him a nice introduction to independent living. One of his flatmates has already moved in, so he already knows someone.

My daughter, Grace, is now playing for Boro Rangers, and yesterday they battered Halifax Town Academy 10-0 in the U15 Junior Premier League Cup qualifying rounds. The opposition managed one shot on target towards the end of the game and otherwise, much as last week’s opposition, parked the bus. I’ve been maintaining a spreadsheet of her games, which I’ve now vibe-coded into a dashboard.

Talking of vibe coding, I had a chat with Tom Watson this week, and we’re going to run at least one in-person meet-up in Newcastle for those interested in learning more (or sharing their knowledge). The first one is likely to be on Wednesday 15th or Friday 17th October, so if you’re reading this in the next few days, are interested in the topic, and live within striking distance of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, fill in this poll.

Lots of things have happened this week, from accelerationist-inspired political assassinations to tens of thousands of people marching on the capital on the orders of a far right leader. Instead, though, I’m going to focus on things that affect me personally. So let’s take things one at a time.

Let’s start with my health. Last week, I learned that the latest test had come back normal, and on Monday I had a chat with my GP about next steps. As I assumed, they’ve referred me for a tilt table test to rule out POTS, even though as a 44 year-old male, the statistical chances of having that are ~0.1%. That’s not to say it couldn’t be some kind of other autonomic system issue (dysautonomia) but it’s all quite mysterious.

It’s all making me feel very old, if I’m honest. Walking is fine, I guess, but not doing proper cardio is extremely frustrating. After not drinking for a few months, I also seem to have zero tolerance for alcohol. So I’m now a grey-haired teetotal vegetarian; the Doug of 2015 would barely recognise the Doug of 2025.

I’ve been working on three things this week:

• SEBI-L: on Tuesday I had a glorious drive up to Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where SEBI-Livestock is based. I picked up Aaron on the way, as he lives in the Scottish Borders, and we had a great time facilitating a Theory of Change workshop for the team, to help inform their 10-year strategy. We received some lovely feedback — e.g. when asked what well, one survey respondent said “Just about everything I can think of. Your approach was very open and inclusive, great explanations, and firmness when required. Very well balanced and capable facilitation in my opinion.”
• AIUK: Laura and I continue to be massively ahead of schedule with WAO‘s work on a new community platform for Amnesty International UK. There’s always a tension between putting into place things for a pilot that you know can’t be too set in stone, as you might need to pivot based on user feedback — and setting things up to scale, if and (hopefully) when the pilot is successful.
• SDS: I’m helping run a workshop on Monday for Skills Development Scotland around Open Badges and Verifiable Credentials, so I’ve been putting together a slide deck for my 10-15 minute slot. The audience is staff from related Scottish organisations such as Education Scotland, the SQA, SCQF, etc. There’s an in-person workshop up in Glasgow at the end of the month that I’ll be facilitating, followed by writing up a report for next steps. This is all based on a proposal I put together at the request of SDS last year for integrating Verifiable Credentials into the My World of Work platform.

I’m back to publishing 10 things on Thought Shrapnel, although I didn’t space out my writing very well this week and ended up writing nine posts yesterday afternoon!

• I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together
• Each of us is part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text
• Your actions follow your self-beliefs
• Grid-forming batteries will ultimately corner the stability market thanks to their inherent multifunctionality
• Be intentional with how you spend your time, and realise you actually have a surprising amount of it
• An open, decentralised protocol making clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation
• 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter
• There’s nothing they can do with the information
• The FBI announced the alleged shooter’s apprehension with a quote from Mad Max
• Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form

This morning I’m taking Grace to referee a couple of U10 matches, before going for a walk and watching some football on TV.

Next week, I’m running the aforementioned workshop on Monday, and then I’ll be working on AIUK stuff, planning the SDS workshop, and then getting a blood test done. On Friday or Saturday (I don’t think he’s fully decided) we’ll be taking Ben to move into his student accommodation and driving down to Bradford for another one of Grace’s matches.

Photos taken by me during the SEBI-L workshop. It was a unique location to run a strategy session!