I‘m putting the finishing touches to the re-architecting of the blog. It was all looking great but the realities of managing a stock implementation alongside the customized version for the site were clearly going to be an issue. So I implemented a light weight theming feature.

It‘s just internal for the minute, only one theme which is he blog, but can theoretically be expanded into a full feature later. Sometimes you have to do just enough to get going without boiling the ocean.

Got it working late last night, going to try and see if I can get a live version deployed today.

It‘s been really great to watch on YouTube people from all over the world discover the USA in their travels for the World Cup over the past few weeks. Pretty much everyone is totally in love with what they are finding.

I‘ve travelled quite a bit in the states, having done an east coast to west coast road trip several years ago, so I experienced first hand much of what folks are seeing. The USA really is an amazing place, and the people are super cool too. It‘s very different to what much of the main stream media would have you believe.

And so what a fantastically beautiful thing that it‘s the 250th birthday of the formation of the USA today.

Happy birthday and best wishes to all for the next 250 :)

It‘s really quite mind boggling how many small things there are to fix when you are deploying something for the first time. It feels like it will never end. So many niggly little fixes and things you didn‘t anticipate. It‘s very exhausting.

The good news is that as of a few minutes ago I successfully deployed the new site, fully built using my new rendering tool. I still have a few things to migrate over and I have to rebuild the data to make sure I have the latest, so it‘s not quite ready to show, but the crucial thing is it worked.

Like a lot of people I have only really started paying attention to how money really works the past few years. There is so much content online these days. But it‘s worth remembering this is a very new state of affairs. Two quotes from recent podcast illustrate the point.

First we have Richard Werner, who apparently invented Quantitive Easing. He was on the Liz Truss podcast [9:22]:

And of course the money creation is driven by bank credit, bank credit creation, that’s the more detail, the more precise way of looking at it. Of course that’s not by accident, they are not entirely uninformed at the Bank of England. For example when I published...well I was about to publish my first proof that banks create money out of nothing when they give a loan, each individual bank will create new money. Until then it was controversial. It was debated for a whole century its been debated. Is this true, is this not true.

Well let’s do an empirical test, that’s the scientific thing to do. So I did an empirical test, and it was found out that I was about to publish this, so the bank of England rushed out, to beat me to it, of course they vastly control their own publications, and in March 2014 they put out their own report saying, “oh we just discovered banks create money!”, and they did a video on it, which they had never done, they got all the publicity and that was their goal, and my paper came out later that year, called “Can banks individually create money out of nothing?”. It’s open access so one can google it [...] and so of course they knew this before.

It would be nice to get more info on what exactly his "empirical test" consisted of, but let‘s assume for a second it‘s genuine. Isn‘t it mind boggling that it was only in 2014 that we discovered that banks create money? I still can‘t quite get my head around this fact.

The second one is from Matt Dines on the What Bitcoin Did Podcast [1:04:03]:

I was just an analyst starting out, we were still talking about replacing LIBOR and moving to something else. We knew LIBOR had to go away, and SOFR was already on the table [...] as early as those days, and most of us at the not executive level, we didn‘t understand what the heck was going on.

Like coming through university, I did a masters in finance, it was quantitative focussed, we didn‘t go through any of this, like how the dollar structure worked, this was just not there. You are learning quantitative formulas, number crunching, pricing exotic derivatives. How the system actually works isn't taught to you. It‘s not the focus, maybe that's changing. Actually it‘s the podcast circuit, now that it‘s talked about people can find this and that‘s made all the difference.

It‘s really the explosion of content online by independent media and content creators that has created the situation where we are all learning how these previously very opaque systems are actually organised. Including for the people who work in the finance industry!

This recent surge in interest in the finance industry in general is a quiet revolution. I think it‘s also been happening because so many folks are into crypto and Bitcoin and so are having to figure things out from first principles, and it‘s all been made possible by independent podcasting.

With the rise of version control systems (VCS) like Github, Pull Requests, often called PRs for short, have become very popular with programmers. They are basically a place to gather together all the bits and pieces for a particular thing you are working on before you merge in the new changes from your feature branch into the main branch of your repo. It's useful as a way to mentally separate out changes, and gives you a high level view of what been going on in the project historically without having to see every tiny little change in each file.

As useful as it is for individual programmers, it's even more useful when you are collaborating with other programmers to complete the feature, because it gives you a place to discuss the changes, refactor the changes, review and approve the changes, and even launch automated processes such as linters which ensure the code follows certain conventions, or various flavour of automated tests to ensure that broken core doesn't make it into production.

One of the goals of my new publishing system is to leverage some of these features for content creation. Once you are in a world where everything is a file then all sorts of interesting things become possible. That isn't to say that database powered systems are bad, on the contrary, there can be great synergies, but the point is to use each system where it shines.

In the modern era where AI agents are starting to have a huge effect on things, the collaboration won't just be with other humans, it will be with the agents too. That's why I'm super pumped about my new setup, because all the content I now write passes through PRs. Each new item, whether it's a link, a note or a blog post get's it's own individual PR. It's already really useful, but I think in the future a lot more cool things are going to be possible by hooking up AI agents into the mix, and the tools I've built make it really easy to spin up new ways to publish content.

When I started using the new blog publishing system for all writing on the blog, I only setup blog posts and links. It occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I‘m finding it a bit difficult to get back into a good blogging rhythm was because I never setup notes.

Notes are another type of writing unit, not quite as big as a blog post, but more than a link. They are great for small thoughts, things you are pondering, but haven‘t really thought through. Maybe they will eventually turn into a blog post, but also maybe they won‘t. No pressure. Also no title, which is crucial. Sometimes when you have a thought that you want to write about, the hurdle of having to come up with a great title the perfectly describes your thought, is enough to for your initial enthusiasm to disappear into the ether.

That was the idea behind the blogging virtuous circle. Let‘s see if I can get that setup again.

I've been trying to get back into a better blogging rhythm. I can't remember a time where there's just so much doom and gloom everywhere. Whether I open up my RSS reader, or check out what podcasts have dropped, or whether I decide to brave it in the dystopian hall of mirrors that youtube seems to have become, it's 90% people freaking out about something, and often everything.

It's really not making the blogging any easier.

On the other hand, at least I managed to write this post.

Like many I‘ve been watching this latest trend to ban social media sites for under 16s. The first I saw of it was the ban in Australia, but it seems the same will be happening in the UK. Keir Starmer wants to give kids their childhood back, which is a catchy slogan I suppose, but feels a little bit hollow to me.

Yeah perhaps for some that live out in the countryside, you can imagine they will be able to get back to horse riding and hiking or whatever, but for most inner city kids, it‘s not like there are loads of things to do. I read an interview with a teenager that lives in London and when asked what he‘d do when the ban came into force, he paused and said 'I‘ll probably just stare at the wall'. Kind of bleak.

I‘m not totally against the ban though. I can see it could have a positive impact, but you have to pair it with some other programs for the youth if you really are serious about changing things for the better.

If it‘s just the big social media sites, perhaps this will be a boost for the indieweb? The web was in many ways a lot more fun before the social media sites terraformed our digital lives. There was a lot more variety back then. Maybe this is an opportunity for the next generation to build a better digital future for themselves. All you need is an text editor and a bit of knowledge about HTML.

I was just looking at some stock charts way zoomed out to see as much historical context as possible, and wondered what it looked like for some prominent companies that were around for the dotcom era of the web, both for hardware and software.

You can really see the similarity in the massive uptick around the year 2000, and then the current moment. Microsoft was famously not that hot on the internet back then, and so there isn‘t much of a bump, but the hardware companies definitely were, and that‘s very clear for Cisco, who made much of the networking equipment back then.

It sort of makes you go yikes, but it doesn‘t mean necessarily it‘s going to crash anytime soon, in fact I think it‘s unlikely to go that way until there are some more IPOs, but it‘s worth keeping these graphs in mind.

How best to set yourself up for the long road ahead is the big question that nobody knows the answer to.

Marc Andreesen was on the Latent Space Podcast recently. He‘s best known for being co-author of Mosaic, the first web browser to display inline images, and for being the founder of Netscape. There‘s a great bit midway through where he talks about his roots in unix programming and the Unix Mindset.

I started out working on unix systems back in university in the early 2000s, and in my first tech job managing a linux render farm in a visual effects company. Up until that point I‘d only used Windows systems, but having hands on experience it was clear to me very quickly how great these systems were for building and hacking on software.

What‘s cool about this clip is Marc takes all the unix concepts, everything being a file, the shell and being able to easily connect programs together, and he brings all these notions into the modern agentic era, explaining how they underpin all the developments we are now seeing AI.

It‘s all files, and everything is swappable.

Quick update on the Github Actions storage issue I ran into last month. To summarize Github blocked me because it claimed I went over my Actions storage quota. I contacted their support and they were not able to answer my very basic and polite questions, instead sending me pre-written articles that didn‘t fit my situation very well imho. They then stopped replying to me. Eventually the quota got reset with the new billing cycle.

We are 1/3 of the way through the current month‘s billing cycle. I have written four days worth of posts so far this month. Last month in total I had written 13 days of posts when I went over my quota, leading to the suspension. So you would expect that since my publishing workflow uses up the exact same amount of storage every day, that I would be 1/3 of the way through my quota, right?

Well I just checked on the billing page, and I have used up 0 GB of the 0.5 GB included free Actions storage this month. I haven‘t made any changes to how the site builds. It‘s the exact same actions that build the site. Haven‘t changed them for many many months.

Github I tried really hard to figure out your complicated Actions storage quota system. It makes no sense to me.

The deployment of the refactor I mentioned yesterday went very smoothly. The test post and bunch of links I had gathered yesterday, all got picked up by the automated publishing tool, got turned into individual PRs, got put through a batch review process and got released in the early hours this morning.Seems like everything is running as expected.

Today I decided to overhaul the way the system is processing incoming webhooks. The way it was doing things was working but the big refactor exposed some cruft in that part of the code, so I figured out a better way to do things that fits in well with the new architecture, and got it all working, and tested. Just pushed that out earlier, all tests are passing and smoke testing in staging went fine, so no reason to think there will be any issues.

I want to make sure everything is still working as I‘ve just deployed the latest refactor of my publishing software. I previously wrote about the rendering tool, but this is the publishing side of things, it‘s the software that manages the content through a neat publishing workflow once you‘ve pushed it to Github.

As far as refactors go, this was kind of a big one. There had been a apparent misunderstanding between me and the LLM for quite a while. I thought we were on the same page about the architecture, so did the LLM, but we kept running into strange dislocations in the code. It‘s not always obvious immediately that this is happening, because sometimes the LLMs do come up with some really novel ways of architecting things, they have access to basically all of programming through all of time after all. Anyway the same sort of thing kept happening, but in different ways.

I eventually got to the bottom of it, and when I pointed out the ridiculousness of two entities that were clearly supposed to be different things, in the mind of the AI they were the same thing. Anyhow perhaps a story for another blog post.

For now just hoping this makes it onto the blog later tonight. Should know by morning if it worked.

Barely 24 hours after I wrote about Apple and Gemini and that I had been using Gemini a lot recently and now Gemini has had a makeover and looks great but is requireming me to click 10 times for each query :(

Strange.

Interesting to hear the latest from this years Apple developer conference. Apple‘s AI future for now will be with Gemini models. I‘ve been working a lot with Gemini the past few months, and it‘s very good a lot of the time, including for coding, which is what I mostly use it for.

I am struck, especially today actually, by how much Gemini likes to refactor code. In this world where all code is apparently one shotted, it‘s really quite odd how much refactoring one has to do to get anything worth having. I suspect one shotting is the new refactoring.

So Apple and Google...perhaps it is fitting. Always one more one-shottings away from the perfect software that will definitely be the most perfect software ever. This time is different.