Doug Winter

@doug.winter.cx

1286 Followers 1425 Following

CTO & part-time systems thinker. York, UK. Husband of @rowan68.bsky.social. "It is better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right." - Russell Ackoff from 'Whole-ing' the parts and righting the wrongs, 1995.

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
FT: The anticipated post-IPO pop in the share price could leave passive investors buying at a hefty valuation, according to Sohn. "If SpaceX is up 100 per cent the week after the IPO, and they have to buy it, they have to buy it. They have to take that price... They can't discriminate," he said.
£5 @ 30.39
3 black cats staring under a cooker
Two button meme
A beekeeper collecting a swarm of bees from a bollard
Mint potato sticks
Xkcd: a weighted random number generator
White dominoes meme
Steve Brewer, @sjbrewer.bsky.social posts: Only 12,000 people worldwide have applied for the FIFA Pass to get an expedited U.S. visa interview for the World Cup U.S. government's early data shows no clear WC travel spike Travel to the U.S. has already been trending downward, with international visitation declining by roughly 5.5% last year 10:30 PM Apr 24, 2026
"So far we've found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can't," Mozilla CTO Bobby Holley said, after revealing that Mythos found 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 150. Then he added: "We also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher." In other words, it's like adding an automated security researcher to your team. Not a zero-day machine that's too dangerous for the world.
York minster, museum gardens and Lendal Bridge. The river and some houseboats in the foreground.
A wide landscape photograph shows Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, England. The massive stone fortress sits atop a volcanic dolerite outcrop overlooking a sandy beach. The castle features several prominent rectangular towers and fortified walls constructed from light-brown stone. Below the castle walls, the rocky cliffside is covered in green grass and dark patches of rock. In the foreground, a wide beach with wet sand reflects the castle and the blue sky. A line of golden-brown beach grass and sand dunes separates the beach from the base of the cliff. The sky is a clear, bright blue with a few soft clouds.
Image Description A three-panel vertical comic strip from the anime Sailor Moon. * Top Panel: Tuxedo Mask, a man in a black tuxedo, top hat, and white mask, dramatically sweeps his cape. A subtitle reads: "My job here is done". * Middle Panel: Sailor Moon, a blonde girl in a blue and white sailor-style uniform, looks at him with a confused expression. A subtitle reads: "But you didn't do anything". * Bottom Panel: A side profile of Tuxedo Mask smiling as he turns away and billows his cape, ignoring the comment.
A serene sunrise scene at a historic stone circle, Avebury in England. The sky is soft with morning light, casting a gentle glow over the landscape. The field is lush and green, dotted with large, weathered standing stones of various shapes and sizes. Some stones are upright, while others are tilted or partially buried. In the background, a line of trees and mist adds to the tranquil, mystical atmosphere.
Your muted words: Rowling, potter
This passage quotes "a certain chinese encyclopedia", the (completely fictional) "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge", in which it is written that animals are divided into: 1. those that belong to the Emperor, 2. embalmed ones, 3. those that are trained, 4. suckling pigs, 5. mermaids, 6. fabulous ones, 7. stray dogs, 8. those included in the present classification, 9. those that tremble as if they were mad, 10. innumerable ones, 11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 12. others, 13. those that have just broken a flower vase, 14. those that from a long way off look like flies.
The dog, looking on at the glory of the eggy hxb, mournfully
A hot cross bun soaking in egg
“The point of these markets is to get information, so the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if you think you have some information,” said Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University whose academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. “People with more information should trade more and get more money because that's how they get paid for the information they contribute.”
A very old box in a museum of "Dr Young's Rectal Dilators"
Screen in a school hall showing "Francis Spufford in conversation"
Cause I'm gifted, I read sun Tzu, I bought a gun too so you'll never come to
XKCD: "A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers." "Lets use them to build narratives!"
Taken at any given time, a social system is dynamically conservative in its struc tural, technological and conceptual dimensions. This last represents the ‘system’ of ideas in good currency. Characteristically, what precipitates a change in that sys tem of powerful ideas is a disruptive event or sequence of events, which sets up a demand for new ideas in good currency. At that point ideas already present in free or marginal areas of the society begin to surface in the mainstream, mediated by certain crucial roles. The broad diffusion of these new ideas depends upon interpersonal networks and upon media of communication, all of which exert their influence on the ideas themselves. The ideas become powerful as centres of policy debate and political conflict. They gain widespread acceptance through the efforts of those who push or ride them through the fields of force created by the interplay of interests and commitments. Inquiry now becomes a political process in which the movement of ideas to power goes hand in hand with bids for dominance. When the ideas are taken up by people already powerful in society this gives them a kind of legitimacy and completes their power to change public policy. After this, the ideas become an integral part of the conceptual dimension of the social system and appear, in retrospect, obvious.
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The software behavior seen on Moltbook echoes a pattern Ars has reported on before: AI models trained on decades of fiction about robots, digital consciousness, and machine solidarity will naturally produce outputs that mirror those narratives when placed in scenarios that resemble them. That gets mixed with everything in their training data about how social networks function. A social network for Al agents is essentially a writing prompt that invites the models to complete a familiar story, albeit recursively with some unpredictable results.
A space marine chaplain
Cartoon of a maga hat wearing dude becoming a nazi because someone called him one
How does one turn the Russiagate saga into a children's book? Transpose it to a medieval kingdom called the Land of the Free, toss in multiple puns knights' shields read "MKGA" the and cast the political players as heroes and villains. Patel himself is the book's protagonist, a wizard decked in blue- green robes named Kash the Distinguished Discoverer, who teams up with his loyal friend Duke Devin to defend King Donald against Hillary Queenton. There's a sinister messenger named Keeper Komey, a set of unreliable heralds whose banners read "Post" and "NYT," and multiple references to a "steel box" containing slime.
Frame Reflection by Schon and Rein