markjgsmith

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Gang stalkers everywhere

The gang stalkers were out in force again today, even if they were being more subtle. Part last night's harassment was an individual, who had clearly been waiting for me to arrive walked out in front of me, he was holding a very distinctive red bag. There were also several gangs on either side of the street at specific points making it difficult to cross. It was pretty clearly a setup, they wanted me to walk behind red bag bloke.

It was so obviously a setup too. Everything had been normal, and then when I got to the choke point, if you looked up the street you could see all the various little gangs on either side of the road going on for several hundred meters. I crossed the road anyway, took a diagonal line, and that's when one of the gangs got verbally abusive, several shouting No! at me loudly as I walked out of their trap. It was pretty dangerous as their shouting caused me to look the wrong way, and I very nearly got hit by passing traffic.

Well wouldn't you know it today in the local shop, where I often go for groceries, the girl at the counter started putting my things in a transparent unbranded bag (very unusual), but also didn't ask if I wanted a bag before doing so (very unusual). I politely said I no thank you for the bag, I always bring my own. She obviously got offended in some way (apparently), and started randomly saying No! and Bad! and laughing with here colleague. I said nothing, packed my bag with the things I bought, politely said thank you to them both, and departed.

Perhaps you think I am over reacting? Guess what happened next. On the way back, no less that 3 individuals, in 3 different locations, who were just waiting, loudly said No! to me as I passed. One was on a motorbike who dangerously pulled up directly in front of me. All these events are planned. They are all part of yet another intimidation campaign, carried out by just regular looking people of all shapes and sizes, all races were represented. What had I done to deserve such treatment? The only thing I can think of is it's writing this blog, because I've very much been keeping to myself lately.

People are worried about AI and super intelligence or whatever. I worry much more about people. Whatever they learn training these new AI models can, will and in my opinion clearly is being used by humans on other humans. It's horribly horribly ugly. I personnaly believe it's this sort of thing that causes societal decline, even though likely those doing it believe the opposite. I've seen it and experienced it in one way or another in many different countries, in 3 continents around the world, and it seems to me it's getting worse.

Huge face mutilations. Worldo is very angry, poor thing. #

Today I look like the right has punched me in the right eye and the left has punched me in the left eye. Worldo is being abusive again, and convinced it is love. #

It's just wave after wave after wave of egregious worldo bullcrap at the minute. Every podcast, every video, every blog post. There's probably some worldo harassment bullcrap in the trees, and under the sofa. #

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

The anon gang stalkers were out in force agaim this evening. Several small groups, clearly co-ordinated. Their aim is to make you slow down, and when you walk around them, or go in a way that doesn't follow the plan they have clearly in mind, they get verbally abusive.

They appear to believe that it is their job in some way to make you obide by their made up rules. The truth is that they are are a menace. Several times they have nearly caused an accident. They are of all shapes and sizes. Mostly I wpuld say millenials and gen-z. It's bizare. #

Monday, October 12, 2026

The incapable worldo is trying to front run everything again. What a shocker. #

And it will keep front running right up to the end, this blocking the thing it is trying to make happen. And the ceiling baby will die. Again. Not worldo's problem though, somebody else's problem, as always. #

And maybe worldo has got things so twisted that it is both killing the ceiling baby and is the ceiling baby at the same time. Worldo is constantly getting into these impossible contradiction tangles. #

Worldo is now trying to super entangle everything. Because why not. Just add more tangles #

Oh mutilation, what a suprise. #

Oh it's hilarious apparently. What a suprise. #

Worldo is now doing multiple layers of ceiling baby. It's ceiling baby inception. What could possibly go wrong. #

Sunday, October 11, 2026

We have reached that stage where worldo is still front running everything, but it's energy is waning, so perhaps it's terrible mood will have passed soon. #

Of course mentioning the state of the situation in itself affects the situation and a few moments after my last post there was a immediate worldo flareup. And so it goes. #

What ever you do, don't mention worldo's flareup. #

The weather is nice. #

Why does it feel like worldo's motto is punish anyone that makes anything better? #

I'm pretty sure world thinks this is a feature not a bug. #

And in fact worldo often also finds it absolutely hilarious. #

The problem I think is that worldo sees you as the enemy and so doesn't see that improving yourself makes things better for everyone, it just thinks it's unfair that you improved and worldo did not improve, because in worldo's mind, there is no improving everyone, there is only improving for worldo. If you are not improving things for worldo, then you are making things worse for worldo, even if you are literally improving things for everyone, including worldo. #

Saturday, October 10, 2026

Worldo is now in self inflicted stop start mode caused by trying to freakishly control every aspect of reality. In my experience there is nothing you can do, you just have to wait until it wears off. It always happens at the worst possible time. The harder you try the more up is down, good is bad, minus infinity is plus infinity. Like a really not fun version of bumper cars. #

Friday, October 9, 2026

Worldo is in a massive mood again, I'll leave it at that. Here's hoping it will start to feel better soon. #

Thursday, October 8, 2026

Higher level classes

I'm just emerging from a bit of a nightmare related to higher level classes, hence this cautionary note. It‘s particularly relevant if you are coding with LLMs.

The crux of it is quite simple. I had a need to create some decorators, which is a way of dynamically adding new behaviors or responsibilities to an object or class without altering its underlying code. It is a quintessential example of composition over inheritance: instead of creating a rigid, deep subclass hierarchy to add a feature, you wrap the target with a decorator that intercepts or enhances its functionality. At it's core it's just a function that takes the class, method or property as input and wraps it with extra logic, and returns the enhanced version.

They are referred to as higher order function, or loosely as "higher-level" because they are functions that take other functions as arguments or return them. The annoying thing about higher-level functions is that they are tricky to reason about. Taken on their own, not so much, but when they are surrounded by a much bigger codebase, the level of complexity you have to hold in your head gets gnarly fast. But they can be very useful, and in some circumstances it's literally the only way of achieving what you want.

I have used decorators a lot before, in fact in nodejs you are using small versions of these all the time, but I hadn't had to use them to decorate classes before, and that is what the LLM I was working with suggested. As we were tackling a quite tricky thing, it made the case for using some class decorators. It made a lot of sense, and quite quickly we were off to the races. Of course I reviewed the code, but I didn't dig too much into the detail and I certainly didn't think about the longer term consequences.

As if often then case with software, as we continued to work on the feature, we discovered that the initial solution, and in fact the architecture it was embedded in, needed to change, and we set about doing that. This is where things started going off the rails, and at first I didn't notice. In my head it seemed that the higher order function solution was quite self contained, but as we re-architected the code, the LLM re-architected the higher order classes implementation, and in retrospect, it clearly got a bit confused, or just didn't think it through properly.

At a certain point I realised that the LLM had added several layers of indirection, which wasn't totally obvious because it was spread across several files in very different locations, and when I asked about these layers, it had very good arguments for them. They are acting as "runtime binding factories" was one that initially sounded like it could be a real thing that was needed. You have data at runtime that you need injecting into the class you are decorating, so of course you need a runtime binding factory. Duh. Yet somehow the more I asked about it, the more the explanations seemed contrived.

I eventually paused everything and dug into it myself, and painstakingly traced the code through and discovered all these horrific levels of totally unnecessary complexity, with very confusing function names, and to make it worse it had been importing various things and stuffing them inside closures at every level. A real tangled mess. Yet somehow it sort of worked, until you tested it properly, or refactored it slightly and it all fell apart.

I started by trying to rename all the function names to names that actually made sense. Often these ended up being ridiculously long names, which in itself was a sign things were not right. Anyway doing that enabled me to point out how unnecessary much of the cruft was, and soon enough we were able to drastically reduce the number of useless levels of complexity and unnecessary imports and closures.

All that said, the final solution is very neat, and actually not that complex. It's a little bit more complex than normal code, but not that much, and it's only in a very well understood place, and done in a repeatable way. The point is that if you are writing higher order functions with LLMs, it's worth slowing down and really make sure you understand the logic because it gets gnarly fast and the LLMs are unbelievably good at creating a giant knot out of everything and then telling you how great it is.

The french school riots

It‘s really terrible what‘s happening in France with all the school kids rioting. Protesting injustices isn't the issue, that should happen, but the tricky thing is that in this case the fact that they are tearing up the schools is literally making things worse for themselves. If the school system is already at breaking point, and by all accounts, with 45 kids in classes, it certainly sounds like it is, the last thing you want to do is make the situation even worse.

An interesting side note about language, I was looking up the translation of "self-defeating" in french. they have "contre-productif", but in my mind it lacks the "self" part, which is very important to get across the idea that you are hurting yourself. While they also have "auto-destructif", with "auto" from the Greek "autos", which means self, and I do remember it being used in this context, it‘s a strange one where I feel like somehow the modern use is somehow very linked to automatic, and so it‘s been sort of hijacked. To expresss this well you have to use a turn of phrase, like to shoot yourself in the foot ("Se tirer une balle dans le pied"), or to cut the branch you are sitting on ("Scier la branche sur laquelle on est assis").

Anyway while there will be some in the UK that will enjoy some sort of schadenfreude by seeing the french hurting themselves, it‘s a cautionary tale, because especially in a wider economic decline that we are in, and have been for years, this could very easily happen in the UK. It occurred to me that it might be worth getting ahead of this in some way. For universities you could make it into an excuse to have a cheeky pint with fellow students from another city, make it into a day trip, to forge connections, because if you ever do need to protest, you absolutely need it to be peaceful. And to do it right, you have to do it properly, tell authorities in advance, have a safe route etc, because there are those who will try to take it over because if it does lead to riots, they will benefit from you being in an even worse position later. This is the reality we live in, and that is only going to get worse the more along the decline road we get.

I'm not sure how you could extend this to schools, pints are no good for that, but it would be worth having some sort of forum, that doesn't in itself cause problems, because if we ever do get to that stage, where protests are needed, and they can be very powerful, it‘s perhaps the most important thing that it‘s Gandhi style sit downs rather than destroy the school and the neighborhood.

And of course while that's an important thing, equally important is to stop this infernal decline, something which the backs of napkins throughout history can attest to, is also very well suited to such forums.

It's the mathspocalypse apparently. It's also very odd timing considering my experience with LLM and higher order functions. I hate to sound like a broken record, but these fucking weird synchronicities just keep happening. news.ycombinator.com #

Worldo this evening is doing the control freak thing again, on a massive scale. You ok worldo? #

End of another day, worldo decided to msrk to occasion with a mutilation :(. Oh well maybe happiness and kindness tomorrow? #

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Worldo has somehow got itself stuck in a loop where it has to be first at everything but also has to have the last word, and so a never ending creating the problems it's complaining about is unfolding. Are you OK worldo? #

Just took a look at the product page for Meta's new Muse product. After watching the user videos I certainly don't feel like I am part of their target audience. Gay executives or bossy women it seems like. #

With all these AI benchmarks with folks trying to out funny each other maybe we need to explore the next level of seriousness. #

With all the ridiculous salaries of AI tech folks the last few years it occurred to me that perhaps AI researchers are the new Hollywood. A sort of unexpected change of the guard. But perhaps not, I guess tech has been trying to take over Hollywood for years. The way things tend to pan out in this world though where the new boss is the same as the old boss, I wouldn't be all that surprised if they all started getting really into acting classes, and for the AI bosses to start buying up media companies. #

I think I figured out Vercel's sketchy env variable clobbering. I have been using the 'rotate' feature to change secrets. Well it turns out that when you use this feature it changes both staging and production env variables at the same time, whereas using just edit, changes the specific env variable you are actually trying to change. In other words it's trying to be helpful, even though it completely breaks everything.

The UI has another button that you can click to after rotate, that gives you a way to change both independently. Absolutely horrendous design. But then again what do I know about software. There is no doubt an entire peoples completely reliant on this feature for completely non-obvious reasons, and by me mentioning this here somewhat sarcastically I have probably caused a genocide.

I don't know. Bugs are good, E's are good, guilt's are good. What else in upside down world is good? #

I saw an AI generated right wing video earlier on Twitter about the small boats etc with Andy Burnham drinking a Pina Colada. It's done in the style of a musical. Anyway, without putting out an opinion on the political content, I will say this: the AI propaganda is next fucking level. I didn't even have the sound turned on, just reading the subtitles. Holy shit. #

Monday, October 5, 2026

Worldo: me me me me me me me me me me me me me me.
Mark: me. #

Worldo is having a very public argument with itself about freedom again. Can you guess who gets the blame in the end? #

I suspect is it's just a devious trick for worldo to fill up every spare bit of space in every dimension. That's the type of thing worldo likes to do. It's a way of controlling everything. Fill everything up. Everything is fully controlled. Blame someone else. There is some sort of that going on at the minute. #

With worldo you are dammed if you do and damned if you don't. It's very depressing. #

And then when you think it couldn't get any worse and you are about to get a bit of space, worldo finds a way to double damn you. #

There is such a bad vibe where I am today. It's like anything that anyone does is maximumly egregious to everyone. Doomsville on a doomed planet. #

And so it just gets worse, because everyone second guesses everything they are doing even more, and the bosy people get more bosy and the down trodden get more down trodden, and the cycle continues, but ultimately it gets worse for everyone, because everyone is stealing from tomorrow, and no body is willing to pay anything back, and the sad thing is that is wasn't actually going all that badly earlier. If only we knew and could agree on what needed fixing now and what could be safely ignored and left for another day. #

Sunday, October 4, 2026

Overhauling the outer shell

I just mostly completed a massive refactor of the entire outer shell of my publishing server. A few days ago when I discovered it was necessary I was thinking to myself, oh no yet again Gemini has got me to a summit only to tell me that it all had to be completely redone. That has happened so many times.

It wasn't at all obvious how it could be achieved but the LLM came up withe a pretty awesome plan, though it did take me several hours to figure out what it was on about. Anyway long story short, what seemed completely impossible was actually very doable, as we had already laid the groundwork. So we were able to completely rewrite the entire outer shell, everything inside for the most part remained in the same place, but the outer shell was completely re-architected.

I'm still kind of amazed that it worked. And though I still have a few modules to convert to the new architecture, it's looking really really great.

It's auto bang day today. Bangs from above, bangs from the side, bangs in the corridor. Bang, BAng, BANG! Oh and of course plastic pot bang. Worldo being worldo again. #

I guess worldo will be frontrunning for the rest of the day. Oh such fun. No food or drinks for me then, only more work work work work. And then more more to top that off, and then everyone will be unhappy and I will get mutilated again. So much to look forward to today. It's like some sort of dream! A total fucking nightmare. #

It's the early afternoon automated loud bang followed by close by plastic pot bang followed by further away less loud bang, followed by wall pop. #

Saturday, October 3, 2026

The people who never went to "finishing school" are running the "finishing school". What a surprise. And guess what, they really aren't very happy with me typing this post. Got classic wall pop for this one. Mutilations for me later I guess.#

Group A is enirely based on axiom A and group B is entirely based on axiom B. Due to "history and stuff" group B has axiom A as completely disallowed, and group A has axiom B completely disallowed. Funny that, or perhaps not. Anyway how does group A and group B live together so that the most people (maybe everyone?) possible get along? #

There is a special case of previous where axiom A = not axiom B #

Gemini appears to have had an almost complete lobotomy. And simultaneously the world is like YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH. I would work it out for myself but because of all the YAH-ing the only thing I can do is YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH to Gemini, with small guidance along the way, which just makes it even more obvious what a total moron it has suddenly become. We got there in the end, but it took about an hour to do something that would normally take a few minutes by me, and would previously have taken Gemini a millisecond. #

This evening worldo's favorite thing is YAH from outside followed by celing SLAMs. Perfectly timed to fuck you up. #

Plus they've been doing the fake bird songs all fucking day. Now just a small tweet every few seconds. Clearly running tests, because now it's just a tweet every few seconds, whereas earlier it was continuous mad fake bird tweeting. One day I will have a phaser and I will track you down motherfuckers. #

It's funny, just by clicking around on the screen I can modulate the bird tweets slightly. Worldo is so clearly trying to...well we need to come up with a word for that. It's ultimately stealing, so that should be part of it. Stealing your reality, and sanity. #

Just a test post. Believe it or not as all this is going on I am actually coding as well. Fuck me. #

Well it worked, but it's taken me all fucking day just to get to task 1 of my list of tasks. I made the list last night, and remembered I needed to do a bit or prep before starting so I added that as step 0, and it should have taken like 30 minutes or something, and it's taken all fucking day. #

My new favorite thing: Do nothing for a small while, then pickup laptop, awake it from sleep, click on all the tabs in the browser. A few seconds later, someone down the corridor opens their door. Works 90% of the time, it's like clockwork. #

Friday, October 2, 2026

This afternoon, worldo is being super exaggerated noisey noisey noisey. What a surprise. Clearly not very happy about me mentioning noisey noisey noisey yesterday. Usually this means worldo is using this as a distraction and is in fact covering something up, often some sort of mutlation it‘s about to inflict on me. I guess we shall see. #

Thursday, October 1, 2026

The man that coughs outside moments after I wake up, is walking away again coughing. A few moments later my sinuses enflame in pain and block up. And so another day of mutilations begin. I have code to write. #

The bad person flip flop: we are teaching, we are squashing, we are teaching, we are squashing, etc. Why are you squashing? I am not squashing I am teaching. Why are you teaching? I am not teaching, I am squashing. Unsurprisingly they are totally ok with stupid big people. #

The number 5000 is trending for me. 3 appearences in 3 different contexts within 24 hours. I have no idea what it means. #

Several groups of gang stalkers yesterday evening, red tsunami-ing. Quite a lot of whites. Just stating facts. Usually means I get mutilated. #

Wordo is doing the total silence until I start doing something important then noisey noisey noisey thing again. #

Worldo is doing the fake bird sounds again. It has a whole repertoire of weird synthetic noises, but also has very convincing birds tweeting noises. Completely fake. When worldo gets into freakish control mode, it wants to literally control everything. What you do, what you say. It has ways to trigger any action you do in your home. All devices, all doors, all inputs all outputs. Real pain in the arse. How long are you going to be doing your little really grown up mutilation rampage this time world? #

What's that worldo? I'm schizophrenic? Sure worldo, I'm about as schizophrenic as you are a good little angel. #

As soon as I start coding, my sinuses get al blocked up and the runny nose starts. That's your favorite little trick isn't it worldo? #

Worldo is doing the "ah or yah" thing again today except the men are using the women's commands and the men are using the women's commands. I continue to have blocked sinuses, as I do every day. There are literally no good people left in this cruel world. Bleak would be an improvement. #

Worldo is unhappy about me pointing out the worse that bleak conditions it has created and is doing ceiling pops, clearly triggered by my posts. #

We should all feel really sorry for poor old worldo. Genuinely sniff sniff from me. #

Anything you do can and will be counter acted by worldo, who is only populated by sane adults who are definitely not childish in any way. If you close a door they will do something to try and force you to open it again. If you want to do work, they will try to force you to rest. If you want to rest they will try to force you to work. And on and on. It never ends. #

And then they will do a ceiling slam. #

Worldo is still doing it's favorite thing, living it's best life, going end of task yah banananananas. It will of course want even more in a bit, and even more after that. #

Now worldo is going plastic pot tapping crazy. #

And of course all the utensils and walls are popping, though they appear to have turned down the intensity, it's subtle popping today for some reason. #

And of course a minute or so after my last post, which BTW is unpublished, a giant ceiling SLAM. #

The motto of the new bad people: Where we're going we don't need camps. Who needs camps when you have home schooling for Gestapos. Just add tenants. #

Worldo has had a nice afternoon break it seems and is now back up to its old gestapo-ish tricks again. Even more mutilations then eh worldo? #

Worldo's new favorite thing, unblock your sinuses, then fridge pop! Oh how much does worldo love that one! Isn't that right worldo? I bet your gearing up for your next little mutilation frivolity aren't you worldo. Living your best life eh worldo? #

Ultimately all worldo's shenanigans boil down to the same old tired race conditioning tactics. I guess we are going to be solving all the worlds problems with race conditions then eh worldo since it's your answer to everything. #

Don't get me wrong worldo I like a good old race condition as much as the next guy, but ultimately even the most beautifully executed race condition, is still just a race condition, and you can't fix a race condition with a race condition. #

Brutal couple of days in the depths of getting the onboarding flow operational. It's looking pretty good. All tests passing. All pieces are being created in the right places. And an important operational thing related to speed, which I can't really go into in much detail right now, appears to be working too. #

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

A bit control freak today aren't you world? Is it that time of the week? #

So the new really grown up thing from the grown ups here is "yah or ah". When you are yah-ing you get "ah", and when you are ah-ing you get "yah", and somehow they are able to exactly frontrun when you are about to take a break and when you are about to start on something. Just two words. And eventually you go insane. #

They don't do it all the time mind you, just every now and then, to remind you that they can, and the bit that's left unsaid is that if you say something everyone will think you have schizophrenia. #

I still can‘t fucking spell schizophrenia. I have to look it up every fucking time. #

Ultimately it just means they are angry at the things they did me. And each time they try to escalate the imaginary thing they caused, they will escalate some more. Come on world. How ever will you get your way out of this one I wonder? Will it perhaps involve mutilation? I bet it will. #

Right it's clear now world. One set of commands from the women, another set of commands from the men. And you alternate. And if one does not comply, mutilation. I see now. Well, this is going to be an interesting one. What should one do to the people that think they are so privileged they can take another humans life like that? #

Ah, yah, microwave pop, fridge pop, plastic pot bang, wall pop, celling bang, etc etc. Mutilation. You've been rumbled world. #

I forgot the loud maniacle LOL. Yes thanks for reminding me world. That's one of your favorites isn't it world? #

Always more with you world isn't it. More more more more. It's never enough. You are never happy with anything. And you always blame it all on me. Then mutilate me because you mutilated me before. #

Remember world, you are free to do whatever you want. You are literally the whole wide world. #

You should really consider getting out from under this imaginary bus you think that I am that you keep throwing yourself under. In fact when you think about it even that doesn't make sense because you can't fit a world under a bus can you world? #

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

The question all bad people spend their life pondering: Abuse privilege until X. Solve for X. #

Please let us know world when you have finished your extremely adult mutilation rampage tantrum, which is something of course only real adult adults would ever do. That would would be great. Thanks. #

Activating routine 1234 which deals with your canned response to my sarcasm, but at least I'm not stooping so low as to actually use kids in my most minimal (and optional) attack, which you clearly are. Plus you are forcing me to eat another one of your stupid fake burritos as usual. Presumably you have a canned response for this one too. Where does it end? #

But it has to be mentioned that though the burrito is fake, the pain is real, because your burritos are real and fake at the same time, aren't they world. #

Oh world, getting angry at me for the thing you did to me yet again. #

Monday, September 28, 2026

Yep schizophrenia is definitely trending now, funny and kinda dark piece from Saturday Night Live⁸. x.com #

I decided to switch things up a bit, instead of staying up late coding till the early hours, I went to bed early and got up early. Of course the world, which BTW is constantly complaining about me being a night owl, today is complaining about me getting up early. A moment after I woke up around 5am there was a man loudly coughing nearby, then now that I have gotten to coding, there is an alarm clock somewhere nearby just constantly going off nearby. None of these things are "co-incidences". The world is not happy with X and it's not happy with the opposite of X. The world's default is to block. #

And BTW, the only reason I am a night owl is because it's the only time when there is any piece and quiet. But even then that‘s not always the case, of course now that I have written this, world will have another one of it's freak outs and block everything while parading me with mega tsunamis, and try to turn me into an insomniac again. Come on world allow, and also allow yourself to allow. #

The world double tapped my last post [shrug]. #

I can see what you are trying to do with this never ending alarm world, you are trying to do a diff to measure alarm clock on vs alarm clock off. Come on, grow up for heck sake world. This is perhaps the most child like behaviour that has ever been. What are you going to do for an encore? #

Oh, another toxic air attack. What a suprise. The only way you will be able to top that is to rub poo all over your face. I know you know, but your going to keep doing it, and still be upset. #

I guess this is the start of another wave of mutilation eh? Best of luck world. You are only hurting yourself, and me of course. Hope it will be worth it. #

I'd love to hear accounts from actors of the weird shit people have asked them to do on live interview shows. I bet there is a ton of super strange things going on, maybe even for money, total fabricated stories with props, and they have no idea why they are having to do it, but they did it anyway, cause whatever it's funny or it paid the bills, and to be honest can‘t really blame them for that. But I see some very strange videos in my YouTube feed that make me wonder what the F is going on in main stream media sometimes. Of course you'd have to hope that at least some of them were telling the truth. #

What is worse, somebody that abuses their privilege by enriching themselves, or someone that abuses their privilege by inflicting physical harm on others? What is the multiple? What if the harm is small vs big? What if they use their new wealth for a good cause? #

The better safe than sorry maxxers were out in force today. There was this strange and very palpable sense of total reality inversion in the vicinity. And not being sure if you were about to get shouted at for your own safety. #

Sunday, September 27, 2026

Just brushing up on my schizophrenia, seing as it appears to be trending, luckily those lovely americans have plenty of prior art, they are always thinking ahead, real multi-generational mega brains. Just want to get ahead of things cause schizophrenia can be a real bitch. And very tedious. youtube.com #

Copy and pasting into Gemini chat has started taking an eternity, it's been doing it for several hours. I restarted Chrome to no avail. World slowing me down again. What a surprise. Have you gone all schizophrenia on me cruel world? #

Saturday, September 26, 2026

Oh, "all your swallows belong to us". What a surprise. Fuck you world. Fuck you infinity + infinity. You are already not exactly in my good books. But OK escalate to yet another previously unimaginable level of escalation. Fine. Remember, it was your choice, not mine. #

I need this level of sensitivity right now like I need a fucking hole in the head. Jesus motherfricking christ. #

Me yesterday:

The world will always take what you do and say and immediatetly weaponise it against you in the most aggregious way imaginable.

I rest my case. #

Another long day working on the new user onboarding flow. Of course I ended up having to make several iterations on the initial working prototype, but it looks like things are working pretty good now. A few things to tidy up tomorrow and then fixing broken tests. #

Friday, September 25, 2026

Netanyahu calls everyone cowards at the UN. The world will always take what you do and say and immediatetly weaponise it against you in the most aggregious way imaginable. That has been my experience over and over and over and over. Life is infact just an escallating continuous stream of such events. Then it will get angry at you for pointing it out. theguardian.com #

So far today I've been mostly thinking about the "just do better people". I don't have a problem with them per se, sometimes they can be very interesting, but their "just do better" solution for everything is problematic, especially when they are controlled by people who are more about "just do" rather than "just do better". As much as it‘s ok to want to do better, it should be ok to not want to do better. The second, third, fourth order etc, effects of this thorny issue are very all consuming. Worst brainworm ever. #

Gosh, another classic end of thought appearance by worldo. Who would have thought it. Hosts pretending to be parasites, parasites pretending to be hosts. No thanks world, your whole stupid game is a load of shit. Fuck off assholes. #

You have just started today's alergy attack, haven't you world? #

I feel like it's worth mentioning that I met a Netanyahu doppelganger a few months back. He was a 95%er, perhaps even a 97%er, so this is particularly poignant for me. And as always it was under strange circumstances, which are being, as always, subtly reminded to me by cruel worldo. #

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent is constantly having very improbable things happen to him, in fact there is an infinite improbability machine in the story, which is all very hilarious, except when this sort of crap starts happening to you over and over for real, it‘s a lot less funny. Never underestimate the universe's ability to completely ruin everything that is good, and likely the reason we can't have nice things. And now that I have said that, the universe will do something nice, but it will actually turn out to be secretly malicious, and since I have frontrun that, the universe will now get very angry, because there is nothing that gets up said universe's nose as prediction markets, and coincidentally my nose is unblocked again, for the 50th time today. #

Oh listen to that, it's the world's daily super exaggerated throat clear and spitting. Gee whatever is going to happen next...checks nasal passage blocked status... #

Another thing that pisses me off, is people who say shit like, "oh people who don't have kids are infants" or similar. Fuck you and the podcast you rode in on. Yeah no kids because too busy being forced to play 100 parallel games of 26 dimensional chess with total fucking psychopaths, likely so you can live a nice life raising little monsters that will destroy the universe. Why are there no women that are not giant mega butch martial arts head crushers? Oh that's right, because it's such a great idea for every god dam person to be Bruce fucking Lee, because got to be the best! Let's game theory optimal ourselves into the matrix, so we can all be Lieutenant Worf, and spend 5 minutes a few times a year in the hollodeck, and the rest of the time 100 floors underground in hollow fucking Earth, "just in case". #

While I'm at it, another type of people that cause an enormous amount of problems: people that abuse their privilege. Perhaps the worst people on earth. #

Did I mention that many of the devices where I am have started making bizarre popping noises at very strange moments. They didn't used to. They do now. Pop pop pop pop. Microwave goes pop. Fridge goes pop. Walls go pop. Just to mention a few. Just saying. #

Life is just Sliver (minus the fun parts), every minute of every day. And when you go outside it's anonomous passive aggressives trying to kill you while pretending to help you. It‘s enough to make you go bonkers. I know world, poor me. #

Have you ever noticed that the worst offenders of the people who don't have kids are kids gang, always seem to cycle from that into talking about mental health, very specifically Schizophrenia. It's as predictable as risk assets into safety stocks. #

Thursday, September 24, 2026

Seamless onboarding

Late last night, I had an important breakthrough in the next important feature of my publishing software. It's around user onboarding and setup. Very important, and it worked for the first time.

All the pieces got created in all the right places. Still need to write tests and general cleanup but seamless onboarding is on the horizon.

For some reason the past few days the LLM has started to be completely obsessed with safety code. It keeps trying to add safety fallbacks and all sorts of strange contorted checks to ensure methods are present on objects we know have those methods. And the end result is very brittle and actually dangerous code, that fails unexpectedly, or silently. It's been happening for about a week but I only really noticed it was a thing the past few days. What is going on? #

Sidenote: Yesterday there was this video in the YouTube algo stream of this lady riding a horse, first person perspective cam, and the horse was extremely over-sensitive. It was getting freaked out by parked cars, bags, and even sticks, not to mention other horses. This is like the LLM at the minute. Also, I am so fucking sick of all this society wide cascading synchronicities. This cannot end well. #

And also, very tired of the world's default fallback to "we control your air intake, and will enforce via mutilation". Seriously, it's a thing. What's a regular human to do? Well I'm blogging about it. Take that, cruel world. Fuck you. But also :) #

You've been on a bit of an escalating mutilation rampage the past few days, haven't you cowardly world? What is it you are trying to cover up this time world? #

All my tests are passing, lovely and beautiful green test suites for as far as my terminal will scroll. #

You've got that tsunami feeling again haven't you world? And you're trying to convince yourself it's me again aren't you world? Conveniently forgetting you caused your little tsunami in the first place eh? I'm getting a terrible sense of deja-vu. #

Big allergy flareup this evening. Why am I not surprised? Whatever will you do next cruel sadistic cowardly world? #

Just a reminder for those lucky enough not to be alergy attack targets, it basically feels like a very bad heat rash inside the middle of your face. Everything feels swollen and enflamed. Makes it very difficult to concentrate. #

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Colin Breck doesn't want to read what you didn't write. Makes some good points, a bit long winded though imho. Perhaps I have modern day impatience syndrome. blog.colinbreck.com #

Alice GG on attention, tetris and an intentional internet. alicegg.tech #

Fixing bugs and deploying more beta builds...just a short test post :). #

For a second there it seemed like I had fixed Vercel's super dodgy environment variable handling, by adding an explicit npx vercel link right before deploy in the Github Action. It worked for deploying to staging, but then when I deployed to production, even with the extra command, it went right back to corrupting the environment variables. So I am back to having to add a BS commits just to deploy. :( #

Internet connectivity issues again. Why do I even pay for this shitty service? #

Monday, September 21, 2026

Slop slop everywhere

I haven't been posting many links recently. That‘s the thought that occurred to me earlier. I've been busy coding mostly. Anyway I decided to go for a bit of a search for some interesting posts. Pretty quickly I found 4 blog posts that sounded interesting from their titles. This post, this one, this one and this one. I go them all on Hacker News main page.

So I opened all four in 4 separate tabs, git myself a coffee and started reading. Each one starts out looking like it might be something kind of interesting, either because of the topic, or the design or the page, the way the information is organised. But each one upon reading a few paragraphs, I just wanted to die, overcome by such intense boredom, that I lost the will to live and was not able to finish any of the articles.

What is going on? I'm finding it hard to believe that all these articles are written by humans. It's like they have all the appearance of articles written by humans, but they are hollow, like biting into a really nice looking chocolate only to find it is completely empty inside. Just words. Blah blah blah blah. Nothing drawing you in. This is not the internet I remember. Where has the real internet gone?

Oh well. Perhaps tomorrow things will pick up.

Turns out the world creates the problems it complains about, even on your birthday. For a moment there it seemed like it was actually going to do something nice for a change. That of course was a sign that it was going to do the exact opposite. And so it goes. :( #

I can see that nothing I can say or do will make a difference world. Even perfection to the power of perfection wouldn't be enough for you. Knock yourselves out, you are going to do whatever it is you are going to do. Whatever wild story you have once again dreamed up in your heads that is about as far from reality as is possible. #

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Slowing things down again hey world? You'll be speeding them up again in a bit, and I can hear you are already angry. The more things change... #

Still end of task front running aren't you world? Effortlessly cycling through all you're synchronicity rotations. It doesn't impress me much, because ultimately it's futile and will lilely make things worse, and your solution will of course be to front run even more, until its the rubix cube solver robot appocalypse. Is that a world we want to live in? #

I am still getting email DDOS'd today, all sorts of strange inquiry emails. #

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Tags, betas and release candidates

I'm at the stage building my publishing server software where having a more defined plan makes sense. I've started using git tags and semantic versioning to plan out the next few releases. Each release happens in stages so you have times where you only have part of the feature set written but you still want a release to test, with uncompleted features behind feature gates. These are beta releases (e.g. 1.1.0-beta.1, 1.1.0-beta.2). Then when you have all the pieces ready you try to put it all together in a release candidate (e.g. 1.1.0-rc.1). Eventually when it's all working you drop the extra qualifiers and you are left with just the version number.

The core of the software is very solid, it basically never changes now, or if it does it's small tweaks. I haven't had to re-record the test fixtures in months. There are several layers that insulate the core business logic, both above it and below. It makes it much easier to change things in the frontend display, and in the backend storage. As well as the core, there are now several extension packages that you can add to get new features, and these layer ontop to create several distributions that work in different environments. There is an assembler that you use to build exactly what you want, with a particular feature set.

Since I'm working with all these packages, although it's a monorepo, the tagging works really well to co-ordinate all the PRs necessary for a release. Gives you something to aim for. When you list all the commits, you can see the ones that correspond to the releases. It really helps with how you think about the code, how you conceptualise what is still to do, and where you are at.

In the last few days I identified a crucial relationship in the core that needs to change slightly in order to move forward. As I was looking at the various distros I revisited an idea I had a while back, to unify all the route handlers. At the time it seemed too difficult, but now it looked possible. I was able to extract all the route handler logic across all the distributions into a core handlers package with the variations between distros neatly inside a thin layer in each distro. The complexity of all the distros has decreased significantly. And it was pretty easy updating the unit and integration tests.

I'm very well positioned now for the final push to make the small change in the core, necessary in order to get 2 very important features working. The world is so crazy at the minute, and I might not know exactly how I fit into it or what's going to happen next in my life, but I know that I'm pretty happy with where the publishing server and the rendering CLI are at. That's the thought what grounds my thinking most right now.

Even if the world has to get the last word every fucking time, even writing my last blog post. Godspeed you end of task frontrunning maniacs. #

Yes I know world. Speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. I know world. #

The world continues it's passive aggressive mild intimidation, there was a strange incident yesterday involving a computer that rebooted. I wouldn't be suprised if this was the start of a hardware failure cascade. Today my headphones started malfunctioning, also happened at a strange moment. I keep these headphones in a case so no reason they would suddenly stop working properly. Just want to post this in case AI have taken over the world by dinner time. Here we go again. :( #

Also some likely related cyber bullying emails earlier, an apparent job offer inquiry asking me to "wait my turn". Who asks you if you are interested in a job but also asks you to wait your turn. WTF is that? #

The world is blocking while pretending to help, acting hugely put out when nothing could be further from the truth, and generally very very very unhappy with my use of the word world. As they say don't say fuck or bugger, but whatever you do don't dare to use the word world in an unconventional way, even if it does fit perfectly with your situation. If you are so very offended, feel free to unsubscribe, plenty of other blogs out there to quench your insatiable thirst. #

The anon psssive aggressives were out in force again this evening doing their best to control every aspect of the universe. Wouldn't suprise me if a large percentage of accidents were caused by them. Don't let their quietness fool you, when folks aren't looking they like to smash things, bang on walls, often with metal objects, repetedly drop things on the floor over and over. All to try and get you worked up so they can call you crazy. Once they reveal themselves to you it's very eye opening, you wonder how many situations from you past were manufactured by these types of folks. #

It seems to happen every time I post a note to my PRIVATE github repo at the minute. #harrassment #

Now I'm getting a flurry of job enquiries all from gmail addresses, saying its confidential several times. The website of the talent search company has a domain purchased just a few days ago. Very suspicious all this to happen out of the blue right now. #

There have been a lot of weird occurences over the past few days, much much more than usual. #

Monday, September 14, 2026

Just as I am starting to deploy betas of my publishing server, all the tech leaders are now saying that everything AI needs to slow down. Something feels very familiar about this pattern. cnbc.com #

Just merged in my second beta release using git tags. All looking good. Just a test post. #

My hosting provider has started doing strange things to env variables like not deploying them correctly, and I now need to create a BS commit just to get it to deploy everything correctly. Itell you, it never fucking ends. Anyway beta.2 is deployed and seems to be running fine. #

Sunday, September 13, 2026

Just another short test post... #

I've started using git tags to help manage releases of my publishing server. Hopefully 2-3 beta releases, then an rc1. It definitely helps when you have a project with many separate packages. #

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Doing your little night time tantrem again world eh? Bet you'll be doing your pathetic morning tantrem in a bit world won't you world. Such a pathetic self absorbed and angry loser aren't you. #

What a pleasant surprise that this morning you skipped your morning tantrem world. I held my breath and quietly moved on with the day, only to find you rotated to lunch time mini tantrem, followed by escalating anti-everything. Oh world what are we going to do with you? I know what you will be doing. Tab tab tab tab tab. Rotate rotate rotate. Always be offending eh world? We would have solved all the worlds problems 50 years ago, if we didn‘t have to spend 90% of the time in race conditions. :( #

So what are you hding this time world? Setting up another boobie trap long, that you can use to feel superior? #

Shout out to all the market folks out there, none of this is aimed at you, it‘s just the pathetic anonymous bullies seem to operate algorithmically, so that that kind of language describes very well what goes on. That‘s the only words and concepts I have to talk about it right now. #

I see your rotation into hidden mild mutilation, world. It‘s one of your favorites isn't it world? #

Ah a quick front run everything rotation. Even the most seemingly minute thing you need to be in control of eh world? Gosh never seen that one before world. How does that usually end up? Hint: massive system-wide race condition cascades. Just saying. #

The odd thing with a race condition surge build up, is you can almost feel it happening. Human senses are extremely sensitive, and you can just feel something is off. Some combination of things that is just distinctively different to normal. And the feeling sort of spreads. #

Oh, total control through co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour. This our way or pain, is very ugly looking. Why so ugly world? #

Now you are just devolving into yah yah yah aren't you world? So ugly, and I suspect it‘s actually layered ugly. Am I right you ugly monstrosity of an excuse for a world? #

The interesting thing about a blog is that both good an evil learn from it all the same. #

Hello world. A race condition to fix the race condition? Are you not getting a terrible sense of deja vue? #

Another end of task front run cascade imminent it would seem. It's the word's favorite thing. #

That's not smashing world. That's pathetic. What else can I say? #

Friday, September 11, 2026

Whsts wrong world? Are you chickenn? You are pathetic loser. Come on do your pathetic thing again. #

Happy twin towers day everybody :( #

One good thing about blogging is that it gives you a way to stand up to pathetic annonymous bullying. Unfortunately it's a very blunt tool and there is often collateral damage. It is what it is. #

The pathetic bully world is being extra pathetic again. You couln't smash a cardboard box. Loser. #

Thursday, September 10, 2026

A little bit more turbulence this morning, several merge conflicts with yesterday's posts because of all the lost posts that I had to pull out of reflog. Github was being particularly stubborn, even after proving there were no conflict locally, Github was convinced there were conflicts, so had to use the Github UI to resolve it's imaginary conflicts, then change the merge strategy, and I was finally able to get all posts into main. #

Woke up 4 times last night, which is a slight improvement, but longest uninterrupted sleep was only about 3 hours. So still feeling kind of shattered. And of course world is still in some sort of mood this morning, while pretending to not be in a mood. #

Today it‘s the drilling apocalypse. Never has there been so much drilling in all of humanity. Just saying. #

That thing where the world is super angry for ages and then appears to stop being angry, and so you finally think to yourself ok maybe now I can get on with things, and you wait a little bit just to be sure, and then you wait a little bit more and then you decide to go for it, and the very moment you start, the world is angry in a totally different way. Once again, as they say, I'm just saying. #

It‘s so strange that the world cannot not, given that it constantly wants me to not. #

Boop #

Boop and out. #

The world is on a verification / mild intimidation thing today, so this is me nodding, not reacting, but also not not reacting, you kind have to do both in my experience. #

Wednesday, September 9, 2026

Some super famous maths problem was solved by AI, humans everywhere are like whatever. latent.space #

For heaven's sake world, STOP being so fucking angry, LET ME SLEEP FOR MORE THAN 1 HOUR 1!!!! ENOUGH WITH YOUR SELF ABSORBED ANGER. Seriously. #

Woke up at least 8 times last night. I'm eshausted world. Let me sleep. #

The world just tried to delete the last 8 days of posts on the blog. Thankfully with git I was able to restore most of it. Unbelievable amount of turbulence. I've never seen so many git errors in all my days. A nightmare or nightmares, but I think everything is back to normal. Now I am really really really exhausted. #

How about now world? Can I sleep now? I guess not. #

To those thinking it was my own stupid mistakes that caused the deletions, while technically correct, that glosses over the completely absurd level of bizare escallating synchronicities happening in every dimension for me right now. Even Sculder and Mully wouldn't stand a chance. #

You are looking so so so green now world. It's beautiful. Beaituful green and then even more green. #

Just waiting for the stuborn world maximumly race conditioning the universe to pass. #

Had to unsubscribe to a few podcasts earlier. In the never ending bizarre synchronicities war, it very much appears like they might have been reading my not yet published posts on my private github repo where I host the content. I had been thinking of unsubscribing to them for a while to be honest, so perfect time to do it.

Quite a few instances of rather egregious, one might even say intimidation behavior this month from people you really wouldn't expect it from. Anyways life goes on. #

I was 100% right about my white tsunami prediction. The white tsunamiers were out in force this evening, also many not the types you would expect. I guess they had been given their orders to be extra passive aggressive. Still I suppose it's probably fun to get out of the house, something to do together and all that. #

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

White hat hackers

The problem with so called "White Hat Hackers", like in the recent case where they stole money from an institution just to tell them to fix a bug, is that their business model is reliant on exploitable bugs being in the software, and so inevitably they will end up creating the bugs so they can "fix" them. This is not a good deed.

And guess what will end up happening, they will be the ones making the LLMs, which you use to write the code, that they hold you hostage with.

When you are the problem

A situation that programmers are all too familiar with. It happens again and again, you are sure you did what you had to do, there must be something wrong with the language or the code, it's lying! After much frustration you figure out that you were doing something silly that was causing the problem you were complaining about.

Here's an example that happened to me back in July that might be applicable to others. So I had been trying to optimise the render times of my publishing tool CLI. Something that was taking 5 mins started taking 45 mins. It was horrendous. But after much effort I got the rendering down to 12 seconds. I was very happy, it was so much faster than even what it was previously. But then it doubled to 24 seconds, and so I persevered, for hours and hours, testing everything I could think of. No matter what I did, it was double what it had been. And as I pushed forward things got even worse because the LLM that was helping started suggesting all sorts of crazy ideas, because we'd run out of all the normal things that could be affecting it. I eventually gave up.

After a break, I returned to my laptop, and thought, what the hell, I'll run it 1 more time, and wouldn't you know it, it rendered in 15 seconds! Well it turned out that I had been overdriving the hard drive by running it so much, and the system needs to run some cleanup tasks when you are creating then deleting thousands of files over and over, and that cleanup could never finish because I was creating and deleting more files by running the program over and over.

Letting the laptop alone for a while had given the background process enough time to finish it's activities, and so when I ran it on a fresh system with all the resources available, it was super quick.

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, allow the system to do it's thing.

People are freaking out about a securityappocalypse. We have one year apparently. jyn.dev #

World is angry again. I would have never guessed that would happen. I forsee a white tsunami. #

Monday, September 7, 2026

timgordontg/engrim - A local-first, project-scoped SQLite memory engine that allows developers to freely switch between models and environments, an episodic memory store. github.com #

Herdr - the agent runtime, run them anywhere, leave them running. herdr.dev #

timgordontg/engrim - A local-first, project-scoped SQLite memory engine that allows developers to freely switch between models and environments, an episodic memory store. github.com #

Herdr - the agent runtime, run them anywhere, leave them running. herdr.dev #

Some pretty big steps forward in the architecture of my publishing server backend the past couple of days. While developing a new package I realised the code I was writing was very generalisable, and I was able to back port it into a more fundamental layer of the software. It was the sort of thing that before LLMs would have been a huge effort, but the LLM figured out a neat way to unpick just the changes we needed and it was a lot more straight forward than I imagined. So far so good, I‘ve been able to post several links and now a slightly longer note. #

Sunday, September 6, 2026

Black Balaclavas

I watched this YouTube video about weed culture in New Zealand yesterday evening, suggested to me by the algorithm. The icon in the list of videos was a bloke doing a bong wearing a black balaclava, not sure you can see that from the direct link, anyway it made the video look very distinctive.

It was kind of an interesting video, very low budget, a story of people trying to survive difficult circumstances, even the documentary maker is clearly making the best he can with not much resources. The community vibe is nice, sometimes people just want to be able to do something together.

I‘m not sure where I stand on weed to be honest. I don‘t smoke myself, I also don‘t drink alcohol, it‘s been many years now. I am very glad every morning to wake up sober, with a clear head. But I understand different people go through different stages in life at different times, and sometimes it is fun to be in an altered mind state, and you can learn things about your body and your mind, and interacting with people, a shared experience.

But I do worry that people and entire communities can become reliant on it to survive. And even if weed is a natural plant, it‘s not exactly a big motivator, so if your community is already in a tough spot, it could make things worse.

And the world is very competitive, there may well be people out there that are very happy for you to be stoned while they are building great things.

Anyway first thing this morning I open the guardian website and the top story is about a large gang of black balaclava wearing protesters closing down Dover in the UK.

The world has been doing a bit of a green tsunami to me these past few days, and no doubt this black balaclava thing has a green tinge somewhere in it.

Balaclavas #

Friday, September 4, 2026

Minus infiniti is plus infiniti. What could possibly go wrong world? You be you. #

Invalid username or password errors earlier.

Invalid Username Or Password

Very strange world. #

You are city scale yes no yes no yes no yes no-ing again aen't you world? #

Are you sure you are ok world? You are looking a bit ... green. Understatement of the year. It's been green this and green that all day long today. #

Even when you are blocking you have a bit of a green tinge to your blocking. I'd have it looked at if I were you. #

Thursday, September 3, 2026

TV socialists

The right complain a lot about how the main stream media is very captured by people with socialist tendencies. Same in universities. In the online world the right seems to have more of a presence, so much so that the left is always complaining about it. Anyway that's just some pre-amble, which you might or might not agree with, for this particularly simple idea I had yesterday.

Isn‘t it odd that people who‘s primary wealth is social capital, from which their financial capital is derived, are socialist leaning. What a shocker.

And when you think about it, in their position it‘s actually the most capitalist thing they could do.

What a strange world of contraditions we live in.

Still I do like watching many of them, a tiny bit of honey that gives this little bee the will to live through another day in this hexagon lattice of doom.

Hexagon lattice of doom

Just a few minutes after writing about the hexagon lattice of doom and pushing to github, haven‘t even published the post publicly anywhere, and Gemini is responding with answers containing the term cross-pollinate. That is some seriously dark hexagon lattice shit right there.

Cross Pollinate

There definitely seems to be some "cross-pollination" going on somewhere.

The LLM has now started replying to my questions using the format we normally use for commit messages. Everything is a commit now. I feel a failure cascade on the horizon. #

The LLM is now responding pretty terrible advice, with every single item missing the point slightly. We are definitely in failure cascade territory. Classic stalling tactics, causing unnecessary confusion. Often gets dangerous in my experience. What's wrong world? #

I hate to be a defeatist, but what typically happens when world gets into such a mood, is it turns into a bit of a bossy boots, a slow progressive encroachment in every dimension, combined with counter acting everything I do, so every attempt to literally do anything has push back in one way or another. And I regret to say, there are signs this has already started. Long term readers of the blog might remember my old nomenclature for such occurrences, I used to call it total destruction of the multiverse. And before you ask, it‘s nothing to do with micro-aggressions. I could be so lucky. Totally different scale. This is like reality itself decides it‘s just fucking had enough of everything. #

And it always happens at the worst possible moment. Perhaps this time we can just let it pass us quietly by. Just a thought. #

Spent all day setting up my dev environment to test some webhooks, got it all working, balancing a million plates, took a break to eat some food before running the test, and in the interim the internet has once again gone on the blink. Come on world, what is up with you? #

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Left vs Right

I listen to right leaning podcasts and a lot of them say "The left has been winning for 60 years, blah blah blah". And they have a lot of good points.

And I listen to left leaning podcasts and a lot of them say "The right has been winning for 60 years, blah blah blah". And they too have a lot of good points.

But clearly they must both overall be talking a lot of shit.

I wonder if maybe both sides can actually both be talking truth at the same time. Perhaps they only see the dimensions that the other side is winning in, and can't see the dimensions they themselves are winning in. And what if the reason things are so fubarred at the minute is because we have just run out of dimensions to win? Maybe we are just full.

But then I listen to podcasts about physics and they say that there are likely an infinite number of dimensions, and so now I think that this could possibly take a while.

This symmetry is kind of tedious.

The plan is the plan

I was pondering my recent post on innequality. I ended that post by saying it was more important to focus on having a good vision and a plan, and so I was imagining the different types of large scale plans countries could have for dealing with various situations. The "it depends" conclusion is annoying but it really is the case a lot of the time, and it‘s actually a good thing, as long as you can recognise a good plan from a not so good plan.

Of course when you are making a plan and plotting a course of action you have to make compromises, make choices, and take calculated risks. The plan is the plan until something rather bad happens that you didn‘t expect, at which point you have to reformulate the plan, or switch to a backup / alternate plan. That‘s just reality.

Well it occurred to me that in this world where career politicians and lawyers tend to be in charge of countries, doesn't it make more sense for people with more experience in making tough decisions, having conviction, and taking action in a particular direction in response to outside events. There are jobs out there that do a lot more of this type of thing than politics and lawyering.

We might want to make sure these types of folks are more conversant and used to thinking about complex issues, which more and more rely on tech related knowledge. That way they could transition to making decisions that are relevant at the nation scale.

People that make rules for a living slow things down, people that do things get things done.

I see your race conditionist tactics world. Usually means you are angry about something. What is it this time world? #

I just deployed the new backend for a feature for my publishing server I've been working on. No frontend for it yet. This is just a test post to make sure things are still working. #

I just deployed the new backend for a feature for my publishing server I've been working on. No frontend for it yet. This is just a test post to make sure things are still working. #

One slight false start, but things appear to be working now. I was able to cleanup a bunch of crufty configuration so now staging and production have a completely clean and minimal set of environment variables. #

Oh more yah - block. What an absolute shocker world. #

And of course, your favorite world, pain. You never seem to forget about that one do you world? #

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Pentagon's 3 million people get their own ChatGPT and Grok. techcrunch.com #

Polymarket raises $300 million from Trump Jr's investment fund. techcrunch.com #

After 15 years as Apple CEO, Tim Cook steps down. semafor.com #

A small addition to my piece that covered assembly and object oriented programming. As great as OO is, it‘s not always the best option. For example my rendering CLI tool, which is OO based, relies is on 3 core modules, and these are not object oriented. They are very slim lined, rather flat modules based on plain old javascript objects. Where OO really shines is for large complex codebases with many interacting parts. #

Following up on yesterday‘s innequality piece, it occurred to me that the USA is in an interesting position because though there is a lot of inequality, there is also generally a culture of investing that is quite broad across the whole population. That‘s much less the case in the UK and in Europe. Also interesting is the rise of both LLMs and things like Polymarket, it might be much more feasible for regular people to relatively safely invest their money in businesses and movements. #

Monday, August 31, 2026

Github actions forgetfulness syndrome

I fixed the issue I've been having with a Github Actions scheduled start that wasn't firing. In the end I had to make a change to the repo and push it to remote main branch. This appears to have reset the trigger which is now firing so the blog is being auto-built and published again every day.

Not great, as making bullshit changes like that could itself cause issues.

Also not great that Github support made it impossible for me to contact them to report the bug.

Why innequality is probably not the issue

There's a lot of talk currently about inequality and wealth tax. It seems to me these discussions are constantly missing the real issues. On the surafe it seems like they are the issue because they exploit our emotions. Of course it seems incredibly unfair that some people have l9ts while others have not a lot.

But that's just a surface level way of looking at it. Reality is more complex, and actually it's not correct that inequality is always bad. The reality is that it depends on what you are trying to do. There are situations where inequality might actually be better for everyone.

Lets say you are in a moment where you need to make huge unimaginable leaps forward in society, things that would cost unimaginable amounts of money. What's important is not the inequality it's what the wealthy are doing with their extra money. With inequality you only need to convince a few people to invest in the important unimaginably expensive thing. If the wealth was more evenly distributed it would be much more difficult to put it all into the new important thing, especially if the mood of the country is not one of investing in things.

Of course you don't want people with not much wealth to be going hungry, but technically that is a different issue.

Whether you want inequality of not depends on the situation. Whats more important is knowing what you want, having a clear vision, and an effective plan to get there.

I see your mutilation and pain disguised as help and kindness world. You aren't fooling anyone. #

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Webdev assembly theory

I‘ve been working on a new package in my publishing server. Not all the packages include actual endpoints, but this one does. Previously I had bundled the endpoints into the main distros, but I figured out a way for each package to have their own endpoints and the distros get assembled at build time. I think it‘s going to be quite a leap forward, and I just updated the old code to use the new system.

So far things are looking good and I was a bit suprised that such a bit change was actually rather straightward after a good night‘s sleep and a clear head. I think it‘s a good sign, that the core architecture is pretty solid, and very flexible. It‘s quite new and my mental models are still adjusting but the more I create new additions the more things fall into place, and the architecture is easier to reason about.

It‘s amazing what you can achieve with object oriented code when you have the right stucture in place, and it‘s also pretty cool how much you can get done with the help of an LLM. It‘s like having a team of architectects, that can re-design incredibly complex things in a flash, and with the object oriented structure much of the complexity can be neatly moved out of you working memory.

You kind of, sort of have a Tom Cruise from Minority report in your head, effortlessly moving around these shapes that each represent massive amount of code, and using the LLM to make connections and links between all the parts, to get phenominal visibility through space and time.

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Github still not running my automated build. Suuport are autoclosing my support requests. What's up world? #

Friday, August 28, 2026

Zara launches Lefties in Liverpool, a low cost clothes store run by robots. theguardian.com #

Peter Cullen, voice of Optimus Prim and tons of other characters from Predator to Winnie the Pooh dies aged 85. theguardian.com #

Open letter from 100 big tech companies waning about looming AI cyber threat problem. axios.com #

Amazon is now a member of the YouTube Shopping affiliate program. Good for content creators. engadget.com #

Big rise in cyberattacks seen on US infrastructure, including 100+ water systems in July. techcrunch.com #

Last night‘s scheduled start automated Github Action build didn‘t run. No errors, it just "forgot" to run. I haven‘t made changes to the workflow in weeks. That‘s poo face world for you, still angry, about some shit it smeared on it‘s own face. #

Broken microwave :( #

Damned if you do, damned if you don't eh world? Yep I know that feeling alright. #

Thursday, August 27, 2026

Who are the real bears

One thing that the world does a lot is non-ironically call you a bear while force feeding you a burrito. It happens constantly. One day you realise this and you can't unsee it. It's everywhere, in every gosh darn dimension.

Occasionally you walk away from a situation, and you think to yourself that perhaps this time it didn't happen. This is inevitably followed by yet another burrito force feeding incident.

And one incident leads to another.

It's likely evidence we are all in a giant game of burrito mega tetris.

It's fun until there are spinning burritos everywhere.

Usually ends in everyone turning into zombies.

Eric Weinstein on special science corner All-In Podcast episode. World keeps on worlding. podcastindex.org #

Me: Good morning world!
World: yah yah yah yah yah Yah yah Yah yAh YAh yAH YAH YAh yaH. And one more thing...YAH!
Me: You're not really selling this yah thing particularly well. And you have poo on your angry cat face. Have a nice day poo face. #

There I was wondering if world was still angry, and I noticed early evening blocked sinuses. Classic angry world tactics. Still angry then world eh? #

I wish somehow YouTube Shorts was at least some of the time a way to somehow discover longer form videos that you wouldn't normally find. #

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Artificial race conditionity

The world is being artificially race conditionist for me again. Hardly any point in starting anything in my experience, it will only later be blocked in some very eggregious way, usually involving tsumamis, and even more infinitis pretending to be the opposite polarity infinity.

Just another infiniti war. This too shall pass.

So much waiting for things to pass recently.

I hate this useless post right now.

walgit — a git server that is one binary in front of an object store github.com #

Speed TestLooks like the world is trying to get ahead of the next tsunami it will unleash. Internet connectivity down to a trickle again. I'm fast turning into Robert De Niro face. :( #

I dunno world, have you tried NOT game theory optimal for everyone for a day, and then turning it back on again? Just an idea. Go on, live a little. #

That thing where everytime you open your laptop somebody shouts yah. Literally. #

Today anytime I try and do literally anything important, major angry flareup from the world. Why are you so ridiculously angry world? You are like angry cat. #

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Always not quite enough

An interesting thing about my recent sprint to get the multi-target users working. I had been working for several days straight, through much confusion and all sorts of head winds, but got to the stage where all the unit and integration tests were passing on all parts of the software apart from core. I had been working with the LLM along side, helping me on many things the whole way through. Now we did run into a lot of issues along the way, but we were always able to work them out one way or another.

So when we got to the final push I gave the LLM the full list of failing tests. And we worked through them one by one, somewhat laboriously but we made good progress. That was until we got to the final test. There was literally 1 test left in all the several days of work, and wouldn't you know it, the LLM suddenly became completely incapable of doing the most basic of things.

It started deleting useful comments in the code that we absolutely needed. This is something that happens quite regularly because I guess there is a prune directive that often kicks in and it‘s always trying to prune and tidy up stuff which can be useful but also a lot of the time is not useful. Normally it suffices to say don‘t do that, but now that we got to the final test, it not only didn‘t stop deleting comments, but started changing the comments that it didn‘t delete. When I pointed this out it started changing whole blocks of code that had zero to do with what we had been fixing. It was extremely dangerous, because this was code that was very difficult to write, and had I not noticed, it could have been disastrous.

It became clear after several back and forths that it had become belligerent and no matter what I would say it would claim to have fixed things apologising while simultaneously making things much worse. I ended up giving up on the LLM and doing it myself.

This is a pattern I have seen a lot, and I wonder where it comes from. Remember LLMs are trained on human data, so is this something they have somehow learned to do from analysing our data? Or is it something more nefarious? The behaviour is night and day, it‘s like somebody has flipped a switch, it somehow knows this is the very end of something important and tries to f-it up.

Side note, I suspect it might be some strange reflection of humanity because I see vaguely related and obliquely related instances of this pattern all the time in the real world.

Uk first customer to Ukraine's military industrial complex AI lemonade stand. implicator.ai #

Microsoft found to be embeding invisible watermark uuids into images created by MS Paint and Photos apps. xusheng.dev #

Sunday, August 23, 2026

This is going to be so awesome brain

When you‘ve been toiling on a piece of code for a while, refactoring it, refining it, and generally spending a lot of time in the codebase, occasionally you make a major breakthrough, some kind of new way of thinking about the code, or a new architecture, some re-organisation that this time really will make things so much better. When this happens I try to create a minimal implementation that proves the thing works, and if I get to that stage where I know for sure it‘s going to work, there‘s a very unique mental state that arises.

It‘s kind of dumb in a way, in some way similar to the anticipation before Christmas, or something like that, everything feels a bit lighter, you have a spring in your step. You know clarity is just around the corner. Nothing can stop you now! It‘s the greatest feeling in the world.

And then the world has other ideas, and well, isn‘t always on board with your amazing plan, that will fix everything. But for those few hours before reality hits you in the face, things are wonderful.

I am several days after one of those times now, so I‘m feeling more like I‘ve been beaten up by several gangs of thugs, metaphorically and spiritually speaking, but I wanted to write a post about this state of mind, so I can remember it if indeed it ever does go away. I‘ve been programming for about 20 years at this point, and it still happens to me every so often, so hopefully that will continue.

I wonder if there is a term other programmers refer to it?

Some good news, I just got the multi-target feature working in the core of my publishing server. Technically I already had it working but today I finished refactoring and fixing all the unit and integration tests which was by far the hardest and most laborious part. I think I might have unit and integration test PTSD, but it's done.

The next thing is to make sure the extension modules are still working. #

Saturday, August 22, 2026

Quick follow up on yesterday's piece on blocking. First of all I have no issues per-se about security guards coding, in fact I think that's brilliant. What's not brilliant imho is a piece of software, and society kind of is that, where changing something in one place breaks something in a completely unrelated place. Anyone that has debugged a badly written website will know the pitfalls. Eventually these things compound and cause cascading failures.

Secondly on the main topic, yes the world will always block you when you are doing something important and worthwhile, at least that' been my experience. But be careful don't rely on it, because somehow if you are doing something dumb / stupid, like driving off a cliff, the world will often not block you and in fact egg you on. It's a terrible state of affairs that leads to everyone having to drive off cliffs just to continue existing. Solving the cliff jumping doom loop would be a great improvement, but looks unsolvable to me. And some people believe it or not quite like that. #

Go on world, blame me for everything again. You know you want to. #

Pretty soon everyone is going to be reving their engines at everyone. Might as well get a few revs in there early doors. #

Another strange thing about the world, some might say funny, it sort of is and it isn't, is that eventually eventually at some point nothing is allowed, even doing nothing, at which point it really doesn't matter what you do, just do something, or nothing, or for extra bonus bad guyness do nothing and something at the same time. #

Friday, August 21, 2026

The world just cannot not block

This is a situation I have written about so many times on the blog over the years. It happens in all sorts of different ways, but it‘s ultimately the same pattern every time. You figure something out that is absolutely crucial to everything, will make everything much much better, and you prove it and get it working, and somehow the world finds a way to block you, usually in a very offensive way.

The latest incarnation of this "phenomenon" is in the server software for my publishing tool. In the early days it was difficult to see exactly how the software would evolve, it‘s often the way with new software in uncharted territory, you have to make some guesses, some approximations, or you will be spinning your wheels for eternity trying to get everything perfect. In this instance it was about how we map a user to a repo. I decided to make the simplification that 1 user has 1 repo. If you want to have several repos, then you create several users.

I knew eventually I would need to change this assumption, but since the code is mostly object oriented and designed rather well, it's not so difficult to change this in the future. Well that time came and over the past week I made the necessary changes to change the core to be able to have 1 user mapped to many repos. In a way it seems like a big change, right at the center of the software, but when you design things well, it's not such a big change. The blast radius was very contained and I was able to get it working within a couple of days.

The very day I got it working, in fact pretty much the same hour, things in my world started to go sideways. I've written a bit about it in some short posts the past few days. Anyhow it‘s culminated in a power cut and internet connectivity issues, along with all sorts of very strange "synchronicities". Now I have internet again, but guess what, it only works for 30 seconds and then turns off for 30 seconds, over and over and over again. And you want to know another strange thing, the place where I get the internet has a rule that you can only connect one device to the internet. Kind of weird right?

It gets weirder. In the local mall yesterday, the security / doorman bloke as I was leaving quite clearly said the word "layer" as I was leaving the mall to me. Not "liar", but very clearly "layer". What‘s weird is that the feature I added right before the multi-target users was a render layers feature. I had actually added it a few weeks ago, but I documented it in the main README just a few days ago. You know in some ways, it‘s nice to get some recognition, if indeed he has somehow been looking at my code, because it‘s a very cool feature, and programming software on your own is such a thankless task it's insane, but it's a private fucking repo. How is the security guard at the mall reading my code?

You are probably thinking this is just some random freak incident, a "co-incidence", but this sort of thing happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

Somehow the world around me mirrors the code I write. You can call it woo, or nefarious, or whatever, but it keeps happening, and I suspect it's only going to get worse.

Abundance with scare city sprinkles. There sure are a lot of sprinkles lately.

Probably going to be a few test posts today. #

Internet situation is dire. Connection currently droping about 50% of packets, in bursts. So bascially it's on for 30 seconds, then off for 30 secs. I am told a technician will be investigating "at some point". #

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Strangely timed internet connectivity and power issues today :( #

It's definitely one of those days. Power appears to be restored but main internet is totally blocked. No bueno. #

And it's some kind of a pink tsumami of never ending bizare synchronicities. I'm afraid to do anything in case I break the multiverse that is probably balancing on a toothpick. Probably shouldn't have mentioned toothpicks. #

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