markjgsmith

This graph of inflation cycles since the 1970s from @lawrencelepard caught my eye. The obvious question is what is similar about the present moment and back then? We should really figure this out before all the folks around back then are RIP. Also wouldn't it be wild if the same pattern repeated itself further back into the past? #

I've switched back to working on my publishing software‘s cli after spending a while working on the server-side. It‘s amazing how quickly you can get your head back into code you have forgotten about with the help of LLMs. They can see through lines in the code instantly, and can summarise exactly how things work. It‘s really quite incredible. Hopefully will have some interesting progress to share soon regarding how the blog is rendered. #

Since I was previously posting about trillionaires, here's an angle from David Sachs that describes what wealth actually looks like practically speaking because it's not just a big pile of money.

We need better ways to more easily get a feel for what is normal and what is excessive in this realm. #

Yesterday's notes got rendered in to the site without issues :) #

PRs for content in the agentic era

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. #

Great new episode from Peter McCormack, talking with Fernando Nikolic about how they've both been building cool stuff with AI.

It's interesting seing how AI tools are empowering people to build their own custom software. People who wouldn't have previously interacted with Github repositories, environment variables or deployed code to hosting providers are starting to become software engineers.

I think content creation using these tools is well aligned with this trend. And you only need to understand a small subset of the commands to go from md file to published. #

Adding notes back to the blog

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. #

Just added a blueprint to the config and a template in the template folder and now let‘s see if this works... #

Appears to have worked, a PR was created, the real proof it‘s operational will be if it gets rendered in tonight‘s build. #

So much doom and gloom everywhere.

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. #

Social media ban vs the indieweb

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. #

DotCom vs DotAI

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. #

All parts swappable

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. #

Github storage usage update

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. #

Yesterday‘s refactor worked

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. #

The latest big refactor

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. #

Gemini pretty down

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. #

Apple and Google in an AI

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. #

My blocked man switch worked

The Github Action I added to my blog to run at the start of every month worked. I added it because I got blocked again by Github last month, this time apparently for using hundreds of GB-hours (whatever that is) of storage even though I am using literally the smallest amount of storage possible.

One of the cool things about running a static site website, is I can continue to write offline and sync it back up when I get online again. I realized though that because I was only building the site when I push new content to Github, that once the new billing cycle came around that all the content I had written while offline wouldn‘t automatically get rendered into the site, because all the build triggers had been missed, and the new content would only make it to the site if I added some more content, which would trigger the site to rebuild.

With this extra little monthly workflow, I can be sure that any content I add while offline will definitely make it onto the site even without me writing something new at the beginning of the month. It worked last night, and all the content I added since I got blocked was rendered into the site.

The Github support team, who initially answered my support query, still haven‘t answered my question about what settings I need to use to not go over the storage quota limit. In the past Github support could take several days to reply to a support case but they wouldn't ever just go dark like that. That‘s quite disappointing, especially given how much time I have been spending developing on their platform the past few months. #

Vergecast going daily

The Vergecast Podcast is going daily. David Pierce interviewed Casey Neistat to get some advice. Casey is know for having run a daily vlog for years. I used to watch it.

I checked out Ze Frank, another one of the daily vloggers from the mid 2000s that got very popular. He‘s now doing nature related videos narrating in his style. His latest is about bees and wasps and ants.

I wonder what happened to Andrew Baron from Rocketboom. Another one of my favorite dailies from the mid 2000s, when video was just starting on the web. They used to do all sorts of things both indoors and outdoors.

Oh yeah there was also Mike Rugnetta and The Idea Channel. Actually not sure if this was a daily, but somehow in my mind it falls into a similar bucket.

As far as I know the Vergecast isn't video, but I‘m interested to see where they take it with an audio only daily pod. Potentially lot‘s of things to explore. #

Some great LTJ Bukem albums

I found myself needing some good music to code to the other day and after a bit of searching found an LTJ Bukem album I hadn't heard before:

• LTJ Bukem - Cosmic Twilight Vol.2 @ Tipper & Friends, Spirit Of Suwannee Music Park // 03.04.22

Seems like it was released in 2022. I haven't really been following the drum and bass scene for many years now, so it makes sense that I wouldn't have seen it. It's a great album. Really reminded me of the times I got into drum and bass around 1996. I feel like back then drum and bass was much lighter, things were very chill. Bukem uses the "Amen Break" a lot in his tracks. I thought he came up with it, but turns out folks had been using that sample for years.

Anyhow he's got several of his albums on youtube, Logical Progression being his most famous, and probably the best place to start:

• LTJ Bukem presents Logical Progression (CD-B mixed set, original 1996 version) Intelligent DnB

This live album is pretty great too:

• LTJ Bukem studio set '95 - Love Of Life "Master Mix" soulful dnb Cut 4 YT

Monthly catchup action

I‘m still trying to figure out exactly why the storage in my Github Actions has gone through it‘s monthly quota. Github support did get back in touch with me, but that got delayed because replying to the emails for some reason didn‘t add the message to the support case thread. I didn‘t realise initially so that wasted a few days. When I copied those messages into the thread, they replied with what looked like a pre-prepared reply with some links but not really answering my question.

I am genuinely confused by their storage quota. I have been using it for several years in the same exact way. Every day an action runs and builds the website if there was new content added, and during that build I create an artifact of the built website in order to pass it between two Github Action jobs. It‘s a pretty standard thing to do as far as I am aware. The artifact is around 100MB, and I set a retention policy of 1 day, which is the minimum amount. I don‘t even need the artifact to last a day, as soon as the build is finished it can be deleted as far as I am concerned.

Well Github have changed their billing system relatively recently, within the past few months, so I suspect it‘s got something to do with that, because I am literally using the least amount of actions storage as possible. The way it's always worked is as long as I was under the 500MB limit every day, and I always am because of the 1 day retention setting, then the quote is not exceeded.

But now when I look in the billing section they are talking about GB-hrs, and it lists 100s of GB-hrs. I have no idea what this means, but it just seems utterly ridiculous to me because I am as far as I am aware using the least amount of storage possible. I politely pointed this out to the support person, and they have gone dark on me. It's been several more days now and no reply. Anyway the billing cycle resets in 4 days.

I‘ve added a scheduled start to the build so that as well as building on push to main, it now builds once at the start of each month. That will hopefully ensure that any content I push during these weird periods were Github is blocking me for whatever reason they have decided to block me for this time, always makes it onto the website. #

Blocked by Github yet again

According to the Github account usage page I have used up all my Actions storage quota of 500MB, so it is blocking all my builds that use artifacts.The website's build uses artifacts to pass the built website between jobs, which is the Github recommended way to do things. Thus all builds of the website and thus all publishing to the website is completely blocked. I haven't even been publishing much the past few weeks!

This isn't the first time Github has blocked me completely but it is the first time it has done it on the basis of storage. In the past it has always been because of running out of free build minutes. The thing that is very strange about the storage quota is that as far as storage goes I am very conservative, setting a retention of 1 day on all artifacts I generate, and I only run 1 build per day, so it's very odd that I am over the quota suddenly. I have been publishing without storage problems in this, the recommended way, literally for years.

When I did some investigation on the command line using Github's gh tool I could see hundreds and hundreds of old artifacts on the system which would have totalled several GB in size. They were all "expired", because of the retension policy, but I would have expected these to get cleaned up. According to the LLM helping me I did everything correctly, and it looks like something on Github's side is suddenly trigering them to block.

Anyway I manually deleted all the expired artifacts, even though I shouldn't have to, so there are literally zero artifacts now, but even after a day the system is still blocking everything. The Github website says it will reset in 12 days.

They always seem to find some reason and way to block you, even when you spend years and years making everything perfect. I have emailed support, so hopefully I will hear back soon. This always seems to happen right when I'm putting the final fixes to software I'm building. Quite difficult to test a blogging tool when you aren't allowed to build your blog. The one small win is that since it's a static site powered by git I can still write posts offline, but right now it doesn't feel like much consolation. #