The core skills of bat signalling are Posting and Hosting. When you Post and Host, you stop using the world in View Mode and start using it in Edit Mode.

This applies personally and professionally. The people who have a meaningful job and likeminded close friends have typically not fallen into their life by accident. They have continuously edited the world around them until they architected their life.

Developing a signal

Searching for work and friends is difficult when you can only go outbound. You can only see the options that you’re aware of, and each shot requires new effort. Hosting and Posting adds a much richer stream of opportunity for work and friendship, from people that you’d never have otherwise discovered.

I think this dynamic will only be sharpened by AI. The future value of most existing skills could be significantly eroded, but the charisma and experiences of the people behind them will become proportionally more important.

By “visibility”, I don’t mean treating yourself as a corporate branding exercise to sell more consulting opportunities. Rather, you should be yourself, but more loudly than you were.

Hosting

Hosting is a way of planting the flag. It communicates the type of activities you value.

Hosting events is especially valuable for introverts, who are often prone to leaving large parts of their personality underexpressed. Getting 15% better at group interactions is not going to fix your introverted woes. You have to blow off the front doors and host the type of hangouts you stand for.

My personal opinion is that you should try to host events with a premise. I have nothing against grabbing food or drinks, but the rewards of meeting up to create something together are extremely outsized.

There are three reasons for this.

#1 - Friendships are formed under new experiences

You are not going to become close friends with someone by getting coffee every 4 months; you have to share new experiences. Going through something together (a trip abroad, a class, an experience at work) is the shared base that friendships are built on. By default, they come along rarely, but you can greatly expand your base of shared experiences at any time by hosting unique events or trips.

Friendships also need new shared experiences to sustain them - there is a limited amount of time that you can reminisce about the old days. The friendships that survive the long term continue to expand their base of shared experiences as time goes on.

#2 Format compensates for awkwardness

A strong premise (“we’re here to X”) allows you to invite people that you don’t know very well, and also makes it easier to mix groups of people that you might not otherwise introduce. This applies to intellectual/creative clubs with a serious goal of self-improvement, as well as to social meetups purely for fun.

As a general rule: the more unique you make the premise, the more that people will be jolted from their normal social formalities, and the more they will rally behind it. On the whackier end, I have (co-)hosted a dessert invention contest, penguin-installation party, solar data center build in California, and 20th anniversary black tie screening of Pixar’s Cars. All felt ridiculous at the time of sending the invite, but helped me internalise that the more you go out on a limb, the more that people will pitch in to bring your idea to life.

#3 People like conviction

Would you prefer to receive “Where shall we go for brunch this weekend?”, or “We’re doing a history reading marathon at the British Library on Saturday. Do you want to join?”.

I think that short form video has actually helped prime the social fabric for events with a premise. There are countless reels/tiktoks of peoples’ “sublime” gatherings - adventures, candlelit dinners, hidden concerts, and absurd challenges. People are bombarded with others’ peak social experiences and they are dying to be invited to one themselves.

Hosting regularly also gives you a handy mechanism for befriending new people you’d like to hang more with. If you meet someone and hit it off, you can invite them to your next event instead of never speaking again.

Posting

Much has been written about the benefits of publishing on the internet, and I will not recap it all here. If you have not read Henrik Karlsson’s essay (”A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox), then you should go and read that instead.

All I will say is that if you are interested in finding your people, or finding your life’s work, posting on the internet is probably the best tool available to you.

It is difficult to convey how outsized the rewards are - whilst I think the professional benefits of online writing are more well understood, the personal benefits are also immense. If you post online with voice about topics that excite you, you will find it extraordinarily difficult not to meet a growing and richly interesting group of humans.

This is true for blogging and for technical writing (which Abhi calls out above), but it’s also true for “posting” in the widest sense - any form of publishing your ideas and creative work online.

Part of this is the magic of the internet. Everyone (your future friends, your future collaborators, the most powerful people in the world) glue their eyes to a glass panel for most of their waking hours, on which you can appear for free, simply by typing into a box.

But part of it is simply that few people create public work. Long before the internet existed, the most influential ideas were created by those who published their writing...

A lot of the biggies were hosting and posting

There seems to be something about the combo of defining your own in-person environment, coupled with distributing your thoughts to a wider audience, that is common to many influential historical figures.

• Benjamin Franklin set up his famous Junto club, and regularly printed his ideas in the local papers.

• John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf played a central part in assembling the Bloomsbury Group of London intellectuals, and published prolifically

• Andy Warhol ran the Factory as an open studio for New York’s artists and hangers-on, then founded Interview magazine and printed their ideas.

• Oprah Winfrey hosted a daily show for 25 years, started the world’s biggest book club, and wrote a monthly column

• Morris Chang hosted night classes on semiconductors for his coworkers, and wrote extensively on corporate strategy and the future of Taiwan.

(See also: Paul Graham, Martin Luther King, Marie Curie, Brian Eno, Adam Smith, Seneca)

For a lot of these people, the Hosting x Posting combo became a flywheel. Ideas that they developed in small groups were published more broadly, and their published works drew more people into groups.

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Whether your aims are lofty or ridiculous, it is useful to identify the specific activities that turn your surroundings into something you chose. For me, the stretches of my life when I was hosting or posting are the ones where I felt most active in aligning my life to who I am. Becoming yourself is a long project, but hosting and posting are the parts I can check I'm actually doing.

Clawd and the case are aluminium, CNCd & anodised.

Inside, there’s a solenoid and microcontroller. The solenoid drives Clawd through a stainless steel pin in a little bronze bushing.

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Minifax

I made myself a mini fax machine. It has a dedicated phone number, and instantly prints anything that you text it.

I love fax, because sending physical notes to your friends is timeless (it is why this newsletter is called Ben by Fax!).

A receipt printer is £30 on eBay and an old iPhone is £20. Add a Raspberry Pi and Claude Code does the rest.

I also wired it up to a contact form at the bottom of my website, although I regretted this pretty quick.

If we know each other, DM me for the fax number :)

It is cliché to say, but there is something reassuring about making physical things in the age of AI. When all information becomes pulp, the unambiguity of the physical world feels especially comforting.

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Anyone could invent a new dessert and bring it to compete.

Jordan had written a blog post asking what The Next Tiramisu is, so I suggested that we run a competition to find out.

We threw up a quick website (dessert.quest), and put up posters around London. The posters got some traction on instagram and we also ended up on a billboard.

Postering had surprisingly good reach and selection. Most entrants were strangers and very vibes-aligned!

The judging panel included an internationally renowned pastry chef and an Executive Head Chef for Heston Blumenthal. They both came along purely for the love of the game. We were also lucky to have Mo representing the People’s Palette.

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Each participant pitched their dessert to the room, whilst the judges tasted and scored.

Pitches included ancient legends, mood boards, and more than one chant.

It was heartwarming to see the care and imagination that people poured into their entries. Society contains a vast amount of under-expressed creativity that takes only a small nudge to activate.

The winning desserts were:

• Best overall: Luana’s Cocotapi [recipe]

• Most novel: H’s Hazelspud Bao [recipe as a beautiful website]

• Best presented dish: Rodica’s Cherry Blossom box cake [recipe]

• Best pitch: Joe’s Proustjacks [recipe]

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• Made a live 3D map of the London Underground. The BBC and Time Out wrote about it.

• Built a prototype solar data center in California.

  

• Made an interactive solar data center cost calculator, with Scale Microgrids and Stripe.

• Installed 75 replicas of Feathers McGraw around London. The BBC also covered this and a lot of people sent in selfies.

  

• Wrote my first non-technical post, on my pet theory of life. This became my most read blog on substack, which was unexpected for a post about a 2x2 matrix.

• Dissolved my oyster card in acetone and used the chip to make a bigger one

  

• Built out my breakdown of UK electricity prices, and released a 2030 price forecast. This really took off beyond my expectations, and popped up in various places including The Economist/FT/Times. Grateful to be supported by Emergent Ventures in this work.

  • I continue to believe that the single most important objective for UK decarbonisation is making electricity cheap. 10% of UK emissions come from electricity, but we will not reduce the remaining 90% — which are primarily heating and transport — without cheap electricity.

• Converted an old typewriter into a Claude terminal. When you type in a question, Claude will type back a response.

• Moved office twice at Axle, as the team has more than doubled this year. We racked up a lot of industry firsts, and added some extraordinary people. I have learned more about being an effective human from this group than any other. Axle is hiring.

• Spent more time making music with friends. Figured out that you don’t need a reason to get together and jam.

• Fell off my bike and fractured my jaw. First general anaesthetic. Woke up feeling very grateful and ate the best yoghurt of my life. I’m back to normal now.

• Moved to Bethnal Green in London. Most mornings you can find me by the lake in Victoria Park.

  

A few good things to read

• OpenAI burns the boats - banger on the inference market

• Moxie Marlinspike’s Hat Band

• Henrik Karlsson on unfolding. (I think this applies more to creatives than others, but still thought provoking.)

• The email response times of the best founders

• Richard Feynman’s love letter to his wife

• There’s no speed limit (corny but mandatory re-read every year)

Asks

• Email me if we should be friends, penpals, co-conspirators, or dating: ben@benjames.io.

• I’m searching for drummers and guitarists in London.

• My pet rat Bogdan travels around the world with friends. If you are travelling to an outlandish place in 2026, he would love to tag along, once he returns from Antarctica in Q1.

Have a peaceful 2026!

Warmly,

Ben

When you type in a question, Claude will type back a response.

This was primarily a hardware hack. To allow Claude to type, I had to electronically simulate phantom keypresses. This meant fully intercepting the keyboard signals and re-routing them to be processed by an Arduino.

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Like all keyboards, the typewriter keys were wired in a matrix. When a key is pressed, it connects a row to a column. By intercepting all of the 8x rows and 8x columns, I could scan the keyboard for keypresses and send back “phantom typing” at will.

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This was slightly fiddly with 32 pins to tap and no space inside the enclosure. I added the electronics onto the back, including a Raspberry Pi Zero as the brains.

It’s also a full linux terminal, since the intercepted keypresses feed directly into the Raspberry Pi over serial.1 This is pretty fun to play with.

For some reason, seeing an LLM physically manifested is quite compelling. Watching something intelligent whir and clunk into life - answering anything you throw at it - felt like rediscovering LLMs for the first time.

If you’re in London and would like to have a go, drop me a note :)

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In quadrant four you are rolling with the gang. It’s Ocean’s Eleven. There is an aliveness and a thrill that can’t be found anywhere else. Quadrant four is where the greatest memories are made.

Quadrant four is not the default

Quadrant four requires taking social risk. It is uncomfortable to initiate and easy to avoid.

By default, I will spend my time in quadrant three (Creating Alone). Many people that I know default to quadrant two (Consuming Together).

This framework is useful to me because it highlights that I must actively push myself into quadrant four. This is hard! Initiating not-chill activities requires effort, planning and social courage.

It is easy to go months, years or lifetimes without touching quadrant four, purely by avoiding discomfort.

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Society is built in quadrant four

The world is strung together by those who initiate quadrant four activities. The people that we celebrate and chronicle - entrepreneurs, community leaders, directors/producers, founders of institutions - are those who invited other people to create something together.

Religion is also in quadrant four - the act of creating prayer together and singing worship. Gathering every day/week to co-create a ritual remains the most potently spiritual activity that humans have yet discovered.

In many ways, the thin-ness of life in 2025 can be explained by our drift away from quadrant four.

Quadrant four is under-supplied

You might have noticed that social media and AI have turned everyone into a helpless baby who can’t do anything and is incapable of love1. The kids are scrolling and anxious and brainrotted and lonely. We live in The Great Slopification: the internet floods with AI slurry, AI companions proliferate, and our perception of the world detaches from the world itself.

In this context, there is huge demand for reality. People are wild for:

• The Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest

• The dude who publicly folded a fitted sheet in Edinburgh

• San Francisco’s Pursuit treasure hunt

• Stoop coffee SF

• The march to put googly eyes on Boston’s trains

• Moxie Marlinspike’s Hat Band

• Toronto picnic in the park

Quadrant four activities are society’s immune response to growing social detachment. You cannot beat the desire for reality out of humans! We stand at the foot of an era that will only drive us crazier for it. If there was an index fund for touching grass, I would buy it.

Advanced social analysis

I will lastly support my theory with some extremely rigorous analysis of instagram reels.

In the name of research I went through my 600 saved reels and checked which were the most viewed. The top two:

• Number one (110M views) is of some people digging a big hole in the beach and sitting in it.

• Number two (33M views) consists of some French men racing their sandals along a river.

This is probably just an embarrassing reflection on my taste. But it is striking that out of the entirety of audiovisual options available to perceive on instagram, people are drawn to watching people creating something together.

The best creators use a format that guarantees quadrant four moments. You’ve probably seen the guy who walks around NYC making beats for strangers to rap on. It is impossible for him to release a video that doesn’t go viral, because watching humans create together is a guaranteed slam dunk.

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Meaning is created, not discovered

It is hard to consume your way to meaning.

To build a life that fits like a glove, it is necessary to hunt down your own quadrant four. Sometimes it is found in existing groups (a dance crew, startup, theatre company, community garden, makerspace, etc). More often, you must assemble your own - particularly if you are in a city or environment that under-expresses parts of your personality.

Either way, time spent in each quadrant is a decision - one that unfolds every day.

Thanks Gyri, Ed, Danielle

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1

Numb at the Lodge

Against truth

I try not to get too meta in this space. Aside from my end-of-year posts, I don’t like to talk all that much about the general project of Numb at the Lodge, what it is I’m doing here and why; in general I think my work does fine just expressing itself without having a load of explanation slathered on top. Anyway, too much talking about the talking start…

Read more

a year ago · Sam Kriss

It is internet connected and runs 24/7, but is completely off grid.

There are no wires connecting it to the outside world, thanks to batteries and Starlink.

How it started

In February I put out a tweet asking if anyone wanted to build a proof-of-concept solar data center.

Luckily, the internet is a reality printer. You input an idea, and it outputs talented people and real life stuff.

An insane group of people responded. This project is the collective work of Guthrie, Bjorn, Ami, Ivy, Andy, Luke, Nick, Harrison, Parker, Graham, Nate and many others.

Accruing parts

A week before the build, we joined a video call and figured out how to build this. We were lucky to have Bjorn and Luke who spent years at Tesla building battery & solar systems!

We then borrowed a lot of things and drove them to a field. We inherited 20 excess solar panels from a commercial installation, borrowed two GPUs & workstations, three battery systems, Starlink, and the rest.

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Compute tent

We filled a grow-tent with battery storage, a server, a box fan, industrial blower, air filtration, and a lot of silica gel. This was enough to dissipate 700W of heat.

Side note: I work in energy and I am still shocked by how powerful a solar panel is. I look at the panels on the ground and they look so silly. They are so innocuous, just sitting there, la la la la. Nothing is moving. Then I look over at the inverter and they are delivering many kilowatts of power. Most of time we only needed six panels.

Use our compute!

This week we have an RTX4090 fitted. We are hosting:

• A notebook server so that anyone can use it like Collab

• Llama & Deepseek

• Docker job submission

We are currently setting up some protein synthesis work. Let me know if you have jobs that need compute before the end of June!

Lastly

Why did we do this? Solar+batteries+gas backup is a quick, clean and cheap solution for powering data centers. You can build power fast without waiting to connect to the power grid. If you are interested in the economics of off-grid solar datacenters, check out the interactive cost calculator that I made with the offgridai.us team.

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Sourcing parts for this relied on immense generosity from many people. Particular thanks to Guthrie (conjuror extraordinaire), Grant, Kaylee, Nick and Harrison (PV panels), Andy and Mit (GPU), Harrison and Graham (batteries).

I built this just for fun, but it ended up getting some traction online.

This post is about how I made it. 80% of the code was written by AI. I wouldn’t have started or completed this project without it.

Data

The London Underground has a live arrivals API. It basically lifts the predictions from the arrival boards at station platforms.

My job was to turn these predictions into a travel agenda per train. I set up a live pipeline to continuously pull updates from TfL, transform them into schedules, and expose them in a real-time API.

Setting this up and debugging it was the hardest part. Different lines spell the same station in different ways. Sometimes you’ll get Kings Cross, sometimes King’s Cross, and sometimes Kings Cross St. Pancras.

Additionally, trains often drop in and out of the API data.

AI was terrible at identifying these bugs, but fantastic at writing powerful debug tools.

Cursor wrote a 1D debug dashboard that allowed me to visually travel through time to track how train actions changed between API requests. This saved days.

In another case, I had to manually review and tweak the position of each tube station. In a few prompts, I got a custom webapp with keyboard shortcuts to blitz through them.

The end result shows decently accurate locations of trains. It does a good enough job at tracking positions when everything’s running smoothly, but it’s a lot less accurate when there are delays.

Dealing with volume

Spending a morning on hacker news drove quite a lot of traffic to the site. Within 24 hours, I had sent ~4 million map tile requests to Maptiler, which quickly started to get pricey.

I asked in a tweet if anyone would like to sponsor the site, and 15 minutes later, a hero stepped up :) Later on, Maptiler saw the site and jumped in to sponsor my future credits. They were really kind in helping me deal with the traffic.

Takeaways

• The bar to expressing creativity through technology is historically low, and virtually nobody has yet re-calibrated to what’s possible (myself included).

• But don’t let AI choose your stack :)) Cursor started by overlaying three.js with a separate mapping layer - syncing the 3D viewports was horrible and cost me several weeks. After I did 15 mins of research, I found that using deckGL would make everything 10x easier.

  

• People like trains way more than I realised.

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Feathers McGraw

Feathers McGraw is the UK’s favourite villain. He originated in Wallace and Gromit, and now people get tattoos of him.

Step 1: Making Feathers

Our version of Feathers fits around a lamppost. He carries a swag bag and a pistol.

This required around two months of full-time 3D printing.

[EDIT: for everyone asking for 3D print files, you can find them here. Send me a picture if you print one.]

On installation day, 20 people spent the afternoon sewing up 75 mini swag bags, taping beaks, and attaching eyes.

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Step 2: Deploying Feathers

We kitted up and split into teams. Over the course of an evening, feathers hit Soho, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, and Mayfair. If you exit The Ritz or The Savoy this weekend, you will see him.

Passers-by were highly engaged.

Step 3: feathers.today

All installations have a link to feathers.today, where Londoners are uploading their selfies with Feathers. We’ll keep it updated.

Seeing pictures roll in is pretty delightful.

Thanks to everyone who came to make and install ❤️.

Special thanks to MK and AM for living with my full-time 3D printing for 2 months, and SJ for 🧠💡.

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253 million Hiroshima bombs of heat accumulated in the ocean between 2023 and 2024.1 Roughly equivalent to 8 billion people each putting 6 toasters in the ocean for a year.

Because of... shipping fuel

Some of this spike was caused by removing sulfur from shipping fuel.

When sulfur is released into the atmosphere, it reflects sunlight and cools the earth. Ship fuel contains more sulfur than other liquid fuels, so it has a net cooling effect when burned. The cooling effect from sulfur is much greater than the warming effect from CO2.

It is good for the climate that we have a emitted a lot of sulfur into the atmosphere, because it is masking a lot of warming. Without sulfur, we’d already be near 2°C.

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But in 2020, we decided to take the sulfur out of shipping fuel.

This has quickly unmasked a lot of warming, because sulfur does not stick around for very long in the atmosphere (between a week and a year, depending on altitude).

By my calculations, the 2020 low sulfur fuel standard has caused roughly the same amount of warming as all the historical CO2 emissions of France.

From May 1st, it gets worse

Here is the Mediterranean Sea - it carries one-third of the world’s merchant shipping2.

On May 1st, ships in the Mediterranean will be subject to a new Emissions Control Area. It will limit sulfur content in fuels by an additional 80% (reducing the current 0.5% limit down to 0.1%).

This will increase warming in Europe!

Europe has warmed faster than the global average since 1980, and Europe’s rapidly declining sulfur emissions are part of the reason. Warming in Europe is consistently underestimated by climate simulations that do not take aerosols (like sulfur) into effect3.

(By the way, “aerosols” is the science name for small particles in the atmosphere)

This is very avoidable

Of course, we are not reducing sulfur emissions for no reason. Sulfur causes acid rain, and very nasty health effects when breathed in by humans. Port workers and coastal towns should not have to experience sulfur pollution in 2025.

But this does not mean that we need to reduce sulfur emissions at sea. We can turn on exhaust scrubbers in port, and turn them off at sea. We can store different fuel blends in different tanks, and switch over mid-voyage - this is already common in big ships.

Somehow, the climate policy machine continues to look the other way, despite the fact that declining aerosols might drive us towards climate tipping points faster than any other factor.

Here is what the mitigation group of the IPCC’s most recent Assessment Report had to say:

As other regions consider sulfur limits for shipping and aviation, I am surprised to see no targeted advocacy on behalf of the world’s temperature.

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Thanks for reading - I am not a climate scientist and would love to know where I’m wrong :)

Shoutout to Leon Simons for all his work and distillation of the facts in this area.

I’ll explain (1) what the calculator can do, and (2) what the numbers show.

#1: About the calculator

The calculator is an extension of the model developed by the offgridai.us team in their recent whitepaper: How off-grid solar microgrids can power the AI race.

Visit the calculator

The calculator pulls weather data from any location, simulates solar & battery power flow for 20 years, then runs a financial model to determine the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE).

The code is open-source, and you can run simulation sweeps for different locations and generation mixes.

#2: The takeaway: data centers will use a lot of sun and gas.

1. AI needs power today. Developers cannot wait 5+ years for new grid connections, so off-grid data centers will supply a lot of future compute.

2. AI data centers want to juice their GPUs 24 hours a day. Power supply needs to be continuous at 100%.

3. Running a 100% renewable data center from solar and batteries is prohibitively expensive. You need too many batteries to guarantee reliability.

4. Adding full gas backup (capable of supplying 100% of demand) makes this workable.

In other words, you start by building a 100% gas powered data center, then add solar & batteries to reduce costs. The resulting cost vs renewables graph looks like this (for west Texas):

A 100% gas-powered data center is more expensive than a 40% to 90% renewable one. Good news!

Data center developers have been slow to internalise this fact; grid connections are appealing for reliability, and the off-grid paradigm is new. But grid connection queues have never been longer, and demand for quick-compute has never been higher.

The speed and economics are now being clearly born out by future projects. Stargate — the $100 billion megaproject by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank — is being built in Abilene, Texas, and will sport vast arrays of solar, as well as ten open-cycle gas turbines. The fact that the turbines are not combined-cycle gives a good indication that they expect to run at low load-factor. Meanwhile, Google is bankrolling 900MW (!!) of solar in Milam County, Texas, for its nearby data centers.

Take a look.

Visit the calculator

Enjoy the calculator, and let me know what you think. Thanks to Duncan and the rest of the offgridai.us team for developing the underlying model for this project, and helping me get this calculator live.

If you haven’t read the original whitepaper, you should - it has awesome analysis. For example, after filtering private US land for solar potential, distance from natural gas pipelines, and ease of construction, almost all the best land for datacenters is in West Texas.

Thanks for reading!

Ben

For the past 18 months, I’ve written about energy and climate on my personal website. But today I’m moving to a new blog on Substack, called Ben by Fax.

I’m doing this because (1) I love Substack, and (2) I want to write about more than just energy.

Beyond energy

I will still write about energy, but I’ll blog more broadly too. Upcoming drafts are on datacenters, central banks, uranium, and my approach to writing.

I’ll also be sharing more personal updates! Projects I’m working on, pranks, and misc reflections. A public notes app.

Why now?

In 2020-2023 I felt as though it was possible to understand my place in the world by understanding energy and climate tech. Today, that feels insufficient.

We are at the end of predictable progress, and the world is being unsteadily remade. We await superintelligence in hundreds of days. Science is accelerating again. Solar costs plummet, and solar tariffs soar. The returns to labour are shrinking, and the returns to capital are exploding.

I don’t know exactly what direction this blog will take, but I know that restricting my writing to energy-only feels limiting. Writing is an important way that I process the world at large, and there is a lot to process!

How will emails work?

Future emails will come from this Substack. You can still read all of my energy posts on climate.benjames.io. I am not moving to Substack to paywall my writing :)

—

Thanks for reading, I am excited to be in touch!

Warmly,

Ben