markjgsmith

Full text RSS feed - The build minutes for this month finally reset so I can build and deploy again. One of the features I've been waiting to test was full text RSS feeds. Previously the blog feed only contained the description of each item and you had to click through to the website to read the full article.

It's working for the blog, and when I tested it earlier in Feedly each item contained the full text of the article, so no need to click through anymore. Code blocks appear to be correctly formatted, though without the syntax highlighting. Glad they are at least legible. That was the reason I didn't do full text earlier, I didn't think the code blocks would display at all.

I might start writing more blog posts now and do less notes, because I don't need to write descriptions anymore. I guess we'll see over the next few weeks if and how it affects my writing. #

Happy New Year - Best wishes to all of you out there for 2024! I hope it's a good year for everyone :) #

Communism - The problem with communism is communism itself, for the very same thing that saves you from oblivion, the commune, also blocks you from succeeding at anything. The commune cuts both ways. Ultimately you are constantly taking two steps forward, then two steps backwards.

The people with the power, keep the power, and the people without the power, stay without any power. Everyone is stuck, and literally every single thing is a fight.

And with AI it will be even worse. Even more stuck, even more of a fight for everything. #

Build minutes - Bit of a quiet day posting wise today. I've been waiting for my build minutes to get reset. I was just able to publish the notes and links that were supposed to go out this morning. #

Harassment - The harassment I've been subjected to the past few days has been off the charts. Tsunami after tsunami after tsunami. I've tried not to mention it much because it's Christmas, no one wants to read about harrassment over the holidays. Anyway just wanted to mention it because there have been several of these harassment incidents, which appear to be linked, that could definitely be classified as being sexual in nature.

Very strange and uncomfortable situations too. This sort of thing has happened before, about a year ago, I think I wrote about it last time it happened too. It's my belief that it's intimidation, manufactured situations, trying to get me angry. I don't want to get into specifics, but I just want to say it's definitely not ok. #

Banking neutrality - I'm starting to wonder whether payment networks should be completely neutral. That's a weird thing to say in this age where payment networks are regularly used to cancel people and groups. I'm certainly not for people doing criminal things, but the fact is that governments change over time, so there really isn't a way to ensure you won't at some point be canceled yourself. Perhaps if governments were not allowed to weaponise payment networks then they would be forced to reckon with the reasons why some people are forced to engage in illegal activities in the first place.

The problem with having a dual use network is that it runs the risk of eventually turning into something other than a payment network.

We have the idea of net neutrality for the world wide web. Should there be something like transaction neutrality for banking? #

Internet cutoff - The internet connection got cutoff pretty much as soon as I pushed the previous banking neutrality note. There's been rather a lot of blatant bullying and harrassment by the gang stalkers today everywhere I've been.

Just after writing the previous paragraph, the wifi connectiom re-connected except either (1) the network was renamed, or (2) an old network that I was previously connected to re-appeared. I can't tell which. I just know the network name is diferent than it was earlier. It looks familiar though. In any case though I can connect to the wifi, there is no internet connection. I've tried reconnecting several times.

I tried changing the DNS server and the network suddenly disapeared, and the old network re-appeared! But when I connect it shows a strange iOS connection screen that says 'Oops... Connection lost', and a bunch of text in vietnamese. So now I can't even connect to the Wifi.

I rebooted the device and when it turned back on the old network was once again gone, and the renamed network was back. This time it reconnected and internet appears to be working. #

Good enough for now - I wrote a few days ago about the possibility of creating an RSS render pipeline. I've had some time to review the codebase and though long term it definitely looks like the way to go, it's more non-trivial than I initially thought. It will require a re-write of the core rendering engine. As it turns out I've already written the v1 of this re-write. I did it a few months back, but got blocked by one thing or several, and wasn't able to get it fully working.

I'm going to keep the current RSS components for now. I've made some modifications that should enable full text feeds, and should be enough to get things working for the interleaved everything re-design. Longer term though, I hope I'll get a chance to get the re-write operational. It would open up many new possibilities for code reuse and packaging.

Sometimes you have to take some steps backwards. But you got to keep moving forwards. Things don't always go smoothly or in a straight line. That's how the world is a lot of the time. #

Musk vs Bezos - I haven't heard or read much in the way of comparisons between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It's an interesting comparison because they have both ran very successful internet businesses (Paypal, Amazon) and are now the two biggest players in the space race (SpaceX, Blue Origin). Some in depth coverage of Musk's background was done in the recent We Study Billionaires Podcast reviewing a recent biography. Also recently, Jeff was on the Lex Fridman Podcast, where he spoke quite a bit about his childhood, spending much time growing up on ranches.

Both episodes are really worth listening to in order to get a better feel for both men. They are building the infrastructure of humanities future.

I might have this very wrong, but my impression is that Elon's upbringing was a lot more chaotic than Jeff's. Of course it's possible to thrive in chaotic environments, Elon clearly has, but I wonder how much of his success is despite the chaos rather than because of it. Is it possible that in a less chaotic environment, Elon could have been 10X more performant than he already is?

It's an important question because if it is the case that chaos hinders progress, how can we ensure to pull out performers from chaotic environments? Or is there something about the modern world that requires choas in order to make progress. These might be increasingly worth considering in a world ever more mediated and organised by AI. #

Christmas - Happy Christmas to all. Thanks for reading my writtings. Wishing you and all your loved ones the best over the holidays :) #

Notes on the Beatles - I recently finished listening to the latest 500 Songs podcast on the Beatles. It's great, if you like music, give it a listen, you will probably like it. I took some notes, a few bits that stood out for whatever reason. Had I listenned to the episode another time perhaps totally different bits would have been focussed. There are so many great bits.

Yoko Ono's background - I had no idea she was from such an elustrious background. I knew she wasn't poor but she's stratospheric in terms of ancestry. Her father was nouveaux upper class, wanted to be a musician, but her mother was from basically a royal family, the end of a long line of samurai. Even though he wasn't too shabby in terms of social status, it doesn't even compare to the mother's status, and the mother's family didn't approve of his musical ambitions. So a compromise was reached where he would become a company man, giving up his music career. That's quite an interesting set of circumstances. Being torn between two very different groups is not easy, I bet it had a big impact on her music and art, which ended up being very experimental in nature.

Recording studio sounds - At university I was involved in the student radio station. The radio station had a couple of different studios. The main one was for radio shows, but there were two another less well known ones that were used for recording band sessions. I got to spend a fair amount of time in all of them. A lot of the clips in the podcast totally reminded me of various equipment we would play around with, turn tables, tape loops, mini disks, samplers etc. Talking into microphones between the mixing desk and the recording room that were separated by glass. Everyone wearing headphones. Very familiar sounds. Omg the scary you-are-live-on-air red light. Lots of fun memories.

I didn't really know about what the UK politics scene was like at the height of their fame. In 1968 there was a very left wing liberal government. They passed several very progressive laws:

• Legalising gay sex
• Abolition of death penalty for murder
• Legalising abortion

This will probably sound strange. It never occurred to me that you don’t get the death penalty for murder. It’s odd isn’t it? I guess there are all sorts of edge cases where it makes sense, but when you hear that it actually had to be enshrined into law, the first thing that occurred to me was what an obvious potential arbitrage, though clearly very dark. It’s wierd that you can kill someone and get a less severe punishment isn’t it?

I guess maybe in practice, it does work because the punishment is nevertheless very severe so practically speaking no one will ever knowingly make that trade off. Maybe it also is somewhat of a deterent to not be a total arsehole all the time, because someone theoretically could murder you. It is a bit weird though.

The Nina Simone tribute / reply track to Lennon's very famous song Revolution is awesome. Not only is the track brilliant, a sort of parody done in the style of Simone, but Lennon's reaction is super cool. It's the sort of thing that goes on in social media every day now, but I wonder if this is one of the first examples of this sort of thing happening in popular culture. Based on Lennon's pleasant suprise, seems like it might have been.

The band breakup story is kind of classic, the low key nature of it makes it even better considering the band's status. It’s like an episode of a popular sitcom or something, but you could see how it could be true. I won't spoil it for you, but it's quite funny, even if I guess for those involved at the time it probably wasn't. I think if they were all alive today, they would likely see the funny side of it.

It’s cool to hear all the complicated background history about what was happening around the world when these songs were written. "Back in the USSR" is a good example, what a phenominal song btw, it really was going very against main stream culture of the time. This isn't at all a commentary on the current situation in the region, but I really love that song.

It’s cool to hear how all the bands of the time intersected, and influenced each other, like an enormous ever changing configuration of planets and stars all sling-shotting around each other.

The Beatles were awesome! :) #

Non freedom memory leak - It occurred to me a couple of days ago that perhaps non-freedom is like a memory leak. It grows and grows until the capacity of the entire system is affected. #

RSS curse strikes again - Following on from yesterday's difficult coding session working on RSS code, I found a quiet place and tried again. The universe granted me about 10 minutes and guess what, it happened again. A strange man appeared, bizarely made some baby crying noises, and is now sitting next to me. He's doing some sort of exercise, rocking from side to side, then extending his arms up and stretching them. Then rocking backwords and forwards. Very odd behaviour in my opinion. #

Fractal of do / don't do - The universe's favorite thing today is to aggressively tell me to do something, again and again and again, with a multitude of yah's, then when I do it, immediately block me. It's just happened 3 times in a row within the space of an hour at at least 3 different abstraction levels. I then got mutilated. I hate to say it but it's what always happens. This time it literally was caused in part by dominoes...an actual dominoe's pizza employee.

The universe currently is finding this all very amusing, but I know ultimately the universe will be unhappy, because that's what happens every time! #

RSS generation refactor - I've refactored the RSS generation plugin for my static site generator at least once previously. After the last refactor the feeds generated were a lot better because I was able to swap out a library that did things in a weird way, with one that was a lot more standard. The weird one ended up loosing me loads of time. At the time it looked very well used, according to stats anyway, but I digress.

I've been working for a while on creating an interleaved main page with all posts types displayed together. Along with that I've put in a bunch of work to create an accompanying everything RSS feed. Before even starting either of these bits of work, a long time before, around when I had to migrate the site off of Heroku, an item still remaining from that nightmare, was restructuring the podcast data. I'm still waiting to deploy the refactored data.

For whatever reason the universe just keeps deciding that the feed generation has to change in some way, but then something blocks the necessary change. Each time I go into the code, and it's happened again today, circumstances around me get super wierd. Strange synchronicities, huge distractions, really obnoxious people materialise. It's the most bizare thing. It keeps happening.

It's almost as if there is some evil force monitoring my every move, and when I do RSS coding, they release the hounds do to speak. Seriously, it's really fucking weird, and at times actually very dark.

Anyhow, because of all the head winds, there are a few places where the code gets a bit narly and convoluted. I was able refactor away some of the cruft today, still need to test and debug it, but it's nice to untangle it somewhat. The reason I was doing the refactor in the first place was that a couple of days ago I had an epiphany. The current implementation is done in a serverside component. It works quite well but it always felt a bit out of place. I couldn't figure out exactly what is was.

The thing with building software is that different parts evolve at different speeds, and at different times. For example, since the initial feed component was written, the entire rendering engine went through a massive refactor. It's now possible to create render pipelines, where you can easily reuse plugins, configuring them so the output of one plugin is passed as input to the next pipeline plugin. Well guess what, I think it should be possible to move the code from the feed component into a render pipeline. That will mean all the other pipeline plugins become available to use along side the RSS feed generation.

It's one of those things that looks quite obvious in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time was totally not obvious at all.

Guess what, as I was writting this note, really obnoxious, and very friggin strange people turned up, and just kept sticking their nose in my business. So if it's unusually difficult to read, that was definitely a big contributing factor.

Update: The instant I finished writting the note they disapeared. Literally. WTF?

Update 2: Started typing again and they were back wearing exoskeletons and shouting loudly into megaphones. Metaphorically.

Update 3: Stopped typing and they disapeared again! #

Multi protocol fediverse - David Pierce has a good piece about the current state of social media as 2024 approaches. He's not super into the term fediverse and is sure that we should have only 1 protocol.

Personally I'm totally fine with the term fediverse, though I suppose some central bankers might get a bit confused, but you gotta think a central banker would know the difference between real and virtual by the time they are running a central bank, no? Anyhow, I like that it has the vibe of something vaste, like a virtual universe.

I know that there is a popular saying in software development that 1 protocol is better than many, and I can understand the reasoning, but for some reason my gut feeling in this case is I'm OK with several. I've read through the ActivityPub, Bluesky and Nostr protocols, and I think they are all pretty cool. I think as long as it's clear to all that there are multiple protocols then having many isn't an issue. Shouldn't it be a free market for protocols?

The ones people like will get popular. Though you probably don't want too many. Could be time consuming to learn them all. I imagine they will end up getting progressively more complicated as technology evolves.

It would be cool if they all supported RSS so we can have a mininum of easily implementable interop between them all. It feels like it could be like how there are many flavours of Linux, but they all support reading and writing to files, "everything is a file". Maybe all social networks have file based feeds.

Note: More weird people arrived as I was writting this note. They literally only talk when I'm typing. And in the last hour they were having very bizare conversations indeed. #

Social space hackers go home - These people cause so many problems imho. Maybe one day we will all see what's been going on all these years. #

Tired and drained - I haven't been feeling much like posting the past few days. It's been close to a week of continuous harrassment and I'm both exhausted and not very enthusiastic about anything. The place where I get internet has an apparrent funeral reception happening since yesterday. A bit strange since I asked in last week's newsletter whether we should all wear black after reading the Verge's Twitter is dead piece.

Just another bizaro coincidence, they only happen multiple times per day after all. #

Early music history - I've been listening to the latest 500 songs episode all about the Beattles. It's been so many years since I've heard any of their music. I still remember it perfectly, every chord change, drum beat and weird sample. Lots of interesting stories about what was happening back in the times that led up to the music scenes that I grew up in. #

New Podcasts and Media Publications - I've alluded to this previously, though I really love all the podcasts and media publications I read, I think we could have many more. I find myself going back to the same handfull and I just think there could be more variety.

Are there such things in other languages that could be transkated by AI? I really want a few new points of view, new ways of looking at the world. That I think is one of my biggest wishes for 2024. #

Moving on ActivityPub - What with all the movement in ActivityPub this week, with Threads announcing they are actively implementing and testing their integration, the programmer in me thought of an extreme but I think vital test case that must pass. Without this, I don't think there is freedom.

It's the case where every person on the network follows an individual, and that individual decides to move fediverse instances. It might seem like an extreme use case but it's actually quite an important one. We live in a very strange world. The strangest things happen.

Interestingly, given it's size, Threads is probably the best entity to test this use case.

It would be really cool if they open sourced their integration, but also gave visibility into the automated tests. That way you could easily check what their integration really supported. #

Bitcoin practical sovereignty - I wrote a few days ago about the big lie that bitcoiners tell themselves about self sovereignty. In theory it's possible, but practically speaking it will very soon be impossible. It's good to see some more discussion on this topic happening.

Without self-sovereignty, aren't we essentially just re-creating the current monetary system? #

Gang stalker tsunamis - The past few days I've been dealing with the backlash from compleating the latest feature on my static site generator. As I've mentioned before these tsunamis happen regularly, usually from motorbike gang stalkers, but eventually it spreads everywhere, to random passers by, people in shops, for all intents and purposes it ultimately propagates to every location I go to.

Once again it’s water shortage and starvation intimidation. And once again I'm not sure I'll be able to send out the newsletter. It's a cycle, it happens over and over. #

Talking to people strongly discouraged - Whenever I speak to fellow foreigners, a short while later, something weird happens, often making my situation worse.

Case in point. A few days ago, a rather large chap from central europe stopped to have a chat. We had a nice conversation, it was good to actually have a real life conversation with someone for once. It doesn't happen very often. But it was difficult, because I've learnt over the years here that anytime I talk about something specific, anytime I divulge personal information, it always in some way comes back to bite me. So I end up seeming somewhat evassive, but it's for good reason.

In this case I was able to communicate that to the bloke. As we chatted he said that things couldn't get much worse and I should just accept any help. I mentioned that if there is one thing I've learnt, it's that things can always get worse. When you are in a bad situation, something that is super easy to fix in a few minutes for regular folks, can end up being a multi-day or week gargantuan project. It's a totally different universe. The example I gave was a broken zip on a bag. That can really f you up.

Anyhow the next day he gifted me some clothes. Just basic stuff but good quaility and it made a big difference. All items were black. Things I really needed. I've been wearing the stuff. It's great. Well yesterday, after a day of pink tsunamis, something that happens relatively regularly, I noticed that, suprise suprise, the zip on my main back pack, the new one that I was gifted by another fellow european about a month ago, was partly broken.

How did it happen? Well there were a couple of opportunities it could have happened. It's in the exact same place as happened on another bag about 2 years ago. That bag had been fine for 8 years. There was a strange incident where a stranger took the bag and insisted on moving it totally unnecessairly. About 20 minutes later I noticed the zip was broken. There was also another incident during the COVID lockdown where the main strap on a bag was cut with a sharp tool. I had only left it unattended for a few seconds. Getting that fixed was a massive massive ordeal.

Well guess what, this time about a minute after discovering the broken zip, two incredibly tall westerners, male and female, dressed entirely head to toe in black clothes walked past. It's very unusual. You just don't see a lot of goths, the weather isn't very conducive for it. It's way too hot for goths here. This type of thing happens everytime I talk with anyone. #

Words of wisdom - I wish I had some wise words today. I’ve been sitting here thinking about the past few days. Truth is though, I don’t have any. I finished the feature I’d been working on for many days, it was unbelievably tough going, the world pushing back against me in almost every conceivable dimension, every step of the way. Since then, as predicted, it’s been tsunami after tsunami after tsunami. Each one bigger than the last.

And I don’t have any wise words about it. I just know that it happens. It happens over and over again. Any time that I gain something, I am immediately blocked bigly. Then I get the blame in some way, and the process starts again, but a little more intense. It’s like those that help can’t see those that block. And everyone gets frustrated. The folks that help are angry because nothing they do makes a difference. The folks that block are angry because that’s how they always are. So net net everyone is angry, all the time.

I just know that everyone is angry and I’m to blame for everything by everyone. Literally everything I do is wrong. Everything. Even being wrong is wrong. So I’m even more wrong, which is wrong, so again, more wrong.

The weather is quite mild, a little warm but not too bad. #

Fact vs fiction - I finished listening to the last episode in the Rest is History Podcast series on the JFK assassination. Overall I think it's a great series, really enjoyed it, you should definitely consider listenibg to it. However listening to the last episode I was struck by how much Tom and Dominic meld historical fact and totally subjective, basically arm chair psychology, without any clear demarcation.

I'm currently in Vietnam, a communist country. I've been here for about 3 years. So I have a literal different perspective than if I were in the UK. I suppose I'm more sensitive to the whole story. Especially the fact that Oswald had done a somewhat crazy trip to Russia when he was younger. I had no idea about that. Was it really that crazy? People from the UK have been doing crazy trips all around that part of the world and much further for hundreds of years.

Anyhow I'm not saying Oswald didn't do it, the evidence definitely makes it look like he probably did do it. But it was really apparent to me that Tom and Dominic seemlessly add in bucket loads of stuff that they are essentially just making up, that sounds very plausible. And with their very propper british accents, it's just so convincing. They are also quite dismissive of some theories. I found their attitude to be a bit assumptive and arrogant at times - all those other theories are rubbish, our theory is clearly what really happened, and it happened like that because, look at that evil moustache we just quite obviously painted on his face.

One thing I've learnt here is that really really weird things do happen. They aren't necessarily sinister, but they happen all the friggin time, every bloody day actually. You don't notice it when you are in your familiar home. Life is very strange, it's more noticeable in unfamiliar places. The picture they paint is very incomplete and misleading in that reguard. At least in my opinion it is.

It's a good reminder that historians and especially authors will be historians and authors. They need to create a great story, that's their game after all. I don't fault them for it, I still like the show and both Tom and Dominic, that's why I listen to it. It's easy to get carried away and stop thinking critically, and you have to be very mindful of that. Even people that we like have their own agendas, and that's OK. Just be aware of it. #

Modernity - One thing that sort of irks me these days is that there are a ton of people that insist on teaching everyone to sail, and the most important thing is to be able to sail into the wind, which is super fucking difficult, so obviously you have to practice basically constantly. It's bullshit! We have friggin motorboats these days, for frig's sake. Just use a motorboat. Use the extra time you gain to do something wonderful. #

Permalinks and indentation - I wrote yesterday about the latest sprint to redesign the archives on my website. I was able to get both the indentation and permalinks working today too. Here are today's links.

Notice how all the other days from December are right there, so you can easily scroll to them. And they are linkable via the hash # link next to each day date. It might not seem like much, but this is a huge feature for writing on the web. It's all about the links. #

Redesigned archives - The last few days I've been heads down working through bugs in my latest archives plugin for the static site generator. Consequently I haven't been posting to the website as much as usual. Sometimes life is just too hectic. You have to focus entirely on the most important issue and get it done. The archives plugin was the most important issue because I'm not currently able to effectively link to the linkblog or notes from the newsletter, and also because it's a pre-requisit for the next feature, which is a homepage that interleaves all the post types as they occur.

Previously I could only link to the newest links on the linkblog at the top level. That's not so useful, especially if linking from the newsletter, because depending on when the person reads it, the link will most likely not make that much sense since all the linkblog links will have changed. Compare that to the re-designed archives, where you can easily browse via a date to the correct location. And the links at the other end won't ever change. For example, here are the links for December.

I still need to adjust the indentation, and most importantly I also need to add permalinks to each day. With permalinks I'll be able to link to a specific day, and it will display with all the other days around it. That way I can have a link that points at the previous Saturday in the newsletter. Anyone that clicks on it can quickly scroll through all the other posts in the intervening days.

I've pretty much burned through all my build minutes for this month getting it working. There was a very difficult to spot bug deep within some nested for loops, which caused all the build times to 20x. That of course seriously compounded an already very tricky and stressful situation. I got it done, and am now anticipating the usual backlash from the world which innevitably ensues. There were already a few hints of something earlier, almost within seconds of completing the feature. And a domino effect of one thing after another triping me up on my journey to where I am now writing this post. That's just how it is. It's like clockwork, rather unpleasant.

Anyhow, the next phase will likely have to wait until next month now. #

Bitcoin self-sovereignty a big lie - Turns out the capacity of the network is so poor that though technically it's possible to hold your own keys and transact on the base layer, once adoption increases, fees will skyrocket, so practically speaking it just won't be possible to be self-sovereign.

That's very disapointing. More details in the latest What Bitcoin Did Podcast, interview with Bob Burnett, Chairman and CEO of Barefoot Mining. #

Changelog news links - I really like Changelog News Podcast. Of course it's produced with the usual very high quality standards with which they make all of their shows, great story selections, commentary, and context audio clips. The accompanying newsletter is really great too. But if there would be one thing that would make it even better imho that would be including a list of story links in the show notes. I often listen to the show offline, so getting to the newsletter which has the links isn't always possible. Having the links with the podcast would be super useful. #

River regeneration project - I wrote a few days ago about some bridge building in the local communities here where I am in Vietnam. I created a Twitter thread with pictures. Rather serendipitously this article about the very same river / canal flowed through my feeds yestrday. Lots of interesting history about the area and the wider projects to revitalise the waterway.

It's really tough going here in many places, and these projects drag on for decades, it's very chaotic, funding issues, it's never ending. But there is progress even though on the surface it might not look like it at times. #

Catching up on coding - I've been out of build minutes the past 5-6 days. The counter reset yesterday, so today I've been trying to get back into the coding mindset. I wrote quite a bit of code this past week but didn't have a way to test or deploy it. Now that I'm getting setup to test it all, it's become obvious that I need to refactor some of the plugins to have more tests, to lighten the burden on the website main project.

The thing I'm trying to avoid is running out of build minutes again. The website's npm module cache is great for normal time operation, it saves loads of build minutes, but when the plugins are changing, I effectively have to turn off the cache to get the updates into the website. It's a real hassle, error prone, and wastes loads of build minutes.

So I'm moving what tests I can from the main website repo into the plugin repos. I'm hoping that will make things easier to manage, and save on build minutes, because the plugins have less dependencies. I won't know for sure until it's done, but my huntch is that it will, and it will be better organised in any case.

Of course as I'm doing that I've found that the various plugins were all using their own test fixtures data. I had setup a seperate repo with test data but was only using it in the main website project. As part of the refactor then, I'm going to make sure all the repos use the test data from the same repo, rather than each having their own, possibily inconsistent data.

It takes a bit longer than you expected, which can be frustrating at times, especially when you've been waiting eagerly for what feels like ages to test your latest code. But I'm mostly used to it, and I can see that the setup will be way more robust once this little update is done.

It's the way things often happen with software. #

Black rock in food aftermath - I went back to the food place that sold rice & pork & rock to me a few days ago. I could sense things weren't going to go well as I arrived.

All the women working there were suddenly different, apart from 1 of them. That was the first warning sign. As soon as I arrived, before I'd said anything, the 1 remaining women non chalantly called me a dog, while attempting to tell me what I should eat.

I smiled and ordered the "chicken with no rocks this time, thank you". Within what couldn't have been more than 1/2 a millisecond she called me a wanker. She then got a propper grump on, packaging the food and throwing it down on the table for her new collegue to handle.

She called me a wanker several more times. Several butch women appeared out of nowhere, like they had been anticipating some sort of situation. I said "I definitely don't recommend putting rocks in the food", and as I walked away "I hope you lot aren't planning on putting rocks in people's food, everybody definitely doesn't like that". I was very pleasant about it.

Impossible to know exactly what happened, the woman that actually gave me the rock food wasn't there. But they knew something.

You get rocks in your food, then called a dog, when you speak up for yourself, telling the literal truth, you're the wanker.

I hate writting about this stuff, but I feel I have to at this point.

Earlier this morning around breakfast time, two individuals, one older and one younger, that were in my opinion waiting for me, started re-ennacting a knife stabbing as I passed them. Intimidation much?

If I end up getting stabbed, at least you know vaguely what happened.

These multi-day bullying campaigns are the worst.

Fix the AB problem. #

Black rock in food - I was just having some lunch, some rice and pork. Tastey until I heard and felt a crunch. After carefully bysecting the contents in my mouth, I pulled out a small very hard black rock. Thankfully this time no teeth broken. This comes just two days after a gang stalker attack that has left my right hand very swollen. What are the chances?

There was a weirdness when buying the food. They tried to tell me to have a specific dish, I opted for a different dish. Then more random passers by shouting 'learn' at me today. Go figure.

Just a thought, fix the AB problem. #

Why not regulate the technology? - Scott Babwah: "What is it that we care about? At the end of the day, we care about the harm that happens. We care more about voter supression than if that voter supression was done through an AI model than if it was done through a hand drawn leaflet, or through photoshop."

Worth remembering. Focusing on the tech is lazy. Figuring out the root problem is much harder. Once you have the root problem, you can then focus on detecting when it's occurring. That too is very hard.

Ultimately the tech shouldn't really matter. #

Everyone is far right these days - There's a pretty clear narrative being pushed that the far right is surging everywhere around the world.

Milei won in Argentina, Wilders in Holland, LePenn keeps doing well in France, far right riots in Ireland. I'm not saying that all these things aren't happening, just to be aware that there is a narative element to linking these events. Dig a bit below the surface and you find things are a lot more nuanced and complicated.

Dominic Frisby has an interesting and to the point podcast episode on the matter: the innexorable rise of the far right.

Sometimes countries really do need to try different approaches, and sometimes that might seem radical.

As a software engineer I tend to look at these situations a bit like giant software projects. I'm always wondering if there is a backup, how would you get out of the plan if it went bad. But you have to be pragmatic. If you treat everything like it's the end of the world, then you are probably causing more problems than you are solving.

Winning everything, in every dimension, for infiniti, is not very pragmatic, and believe it or not there are people that non-ironically believe this to be a completely acceptable position. You can't let that cripple you though. You have to make decisions, you have do something, and course correct as you go.

It's worth noting that all these far right leaders have somewhat ridiculous haircuts. I have no idea if that's relevant. Maybe it's some sort of cheat code that they've figured out. Extrapolating to infiniti, perhaps in 10 years time, we'll have a world leader with a mowhawk. If that happens it's probably safe to assume that the hair dressing industrial complex has gotten a bit too powerful. #

Hand mutilation - day 2 - It's the next day after the hand mutilation attack. My right hand still hurts, movement is reduced, my little finger doesn't bend as normal since areas around both joints are swollen. The mark where whatever the foreign object pierced the skin is on the inside of the smaller, extremity join, but for whatever reason the bigger lower joint closer to the hand appears also to be swollen. It sort of vaguely reminds me of the sensation you get when you are waiting for an injection to wear off at the dentist. Though it's now about 12 hours after the incident.

Of course now I'm wondering whether it was an insect bite or something else. Especially since at the time I didn't find any sharp object or insect near where I was sitting. I've disinfected the wound loads. Currently it looks fine, but all this is bringing back horrible memories of when unbelievably painful wounds spread across both my legs about a year ago. That all started after a weird incident where a female security guard purposely rolled a motorbike over my foot.

Oddly enough a few days ago I was reminded of that event as the only seat available was across the canal directly opposite the location where that happened. A few minutes after sitting down a white westerner man walked past with an asian man. The western bloke had a tatoo on the back of his calf, it was a cartoonish picture of a dog next to the word 'Toto'. What are the chances?

Also worth remembering that 2 weeks ago a girl working in a cafe threatenned to call the police after I stopped her from rolling her motorbike over my foot.

None of these things are coincidences.

I only mention the highlights, at a guess it's about 10% of what's going on. These sorts of things are happening all the time. A constant tit for tat of grievances being avenged, for the smallest of things. A word mis-spoken, a gesture mistimed, simply existing sometimes is enough to set the multiverse destruction escallation algorithm off.

It's the insidious nature of how things are here. Slowly evolving over days / months / years. Hatred slowly being ratcheted up, until all the world is blind. #

Chanting season - Seems like chanting season has started. This isn't an official thing, but I've noticed that at certain times of the year there is loads of chanting happening almost everyday. Some of it can sound quite nice but other times it just sounds like a bloke singing really badly in the shower, especially if it's in the distance. Which is kind of funny, but it goes on for hours. #

Code blocks in RSS feeds - I've been wanting to have full text RSS feeds on the blog for a whike now. Currently I'm only including a description of the post because I wasn't sure how readers will handle code blocks with syntsx highlighting. on the website I have to include a javascript & css library, but there's no way to do that in a feed.

When I implemented the feed generation it was just easier to go the description route. I had so many other things to implement. But now I'm thinking about it again because the new notes feature has made such a difference to how I write inline. I'm writting notes everyday, but I hardly ever write blog posts. It's clearly somewhat ridiculous because most of the notes basically have a title. I nearly always bold the first few word ms which are a title. The only other difference is that blog posts have a filename that's more complicated to create than notes. It's amazing that these seemingly tiny little difference create such a barier to posting, but they clearly do.

As for the code syntax highlighting, I guess I should just try it and see what it looks like. Maybe it will display ok in readers even if it's not colorised. If I can get away from having to write post descriptions, then that will be another little barier to writting online removed. #

Safe zero based budgeting - I've written rather negatively about zero based budgeting recently. Calling it extremist and potentially oppressive. I still broadly believe that to be the case.

That's not to say that there might not be situations necessitating drastic measures. However when you embark on an extremist approach, something that is totally on one end of the spectrum, as zero based budgeting clearly is, you better be damn sure you can get out of it later if you need to, lest it become the new normal.

The econony certainly is in dire straights at the minute. What worries me about zero based budgeting is that the proponents don't seem to be aware, or are willfully ignoring the dangers. How will they determine when to pull the rip chord? Or are they just expecting everyone to carry the weight of the sky for evermore?

It would be wiser to have some scaffolding and a backup in place to ensure you can get back vaguely to where you are now, in case the plan back fires in some way.

Keep in mind that those asking for zero based budgetting now, could very well be back later asking for zero based approaches to other important areas of interest. How would you feel for example about zero based personal freedoms? Or zero based education? Zero based approaches are by definition extreme, and should be used with enormous care. #

Stories of tech intrigue - It's been a week full of stories of tech entrepreneurial intrigue. First there was the recent saga at OpenAI, then I listenned to the Rest is History series on the Aztecs, and finally Techmeme published an old Internet History Podcast episode about the story of Gary Kildall, the man that wrote the first commercially successful operating system, and the man who could have been Bill Gates. What a story.

Real life is full of twists and turns. All of these are examples of why we are so mesmerised by tech. For some reason things in tech often get weird. It's very entertaining, unless of course you are caught up in it yourself. #

Gang stalker mutilation attack - I just got done listenning to the latest PTID episode, some good tracks and gig banter, including a story about getting biten by a spider in the night, while staying at a place called the Ho Chi Minh hotel. Imagine my suprise when 5 minutes after finishing the podcast, an overly smiley man wearing a terrible pink and blue track suit top and a women on a motorbike arrive, with a gift. I take the gift, they drive off, and a few seconds later a shooting pain in my right hand. What are the chances?

Something appeared to have embeded into my little finger. Without my glasses I couldn't see what it was, but I managed to pull whatever it was out. It felt very much like a bee sting. I got my glasses but couldn't find anything. The pain eventually subsided after a few minutes. I have no idea what it was, but it sure was very painful. There's a red mark on my finger and the area is sore to touch.

Just another example of some typical gang stalker intimidation. I wonder what it is I'm supposed to have done this time? Quietly sitting listening to a punk rock podcast apparently. Just wanted to write it up as a note while it's fresh in my mind.

Just a thought, fix the AB problem. #

OpenAI vs Cortez - I'm almost finished listening to the Rest is History Podcast mega 8 part series on the Aztecs. It's way more interesting than I thought it would be, and how timeley because the story is as crazy as last week's OpenAI saga, except it's old school, utter carnage. How times have changed. We in tech are all but amateurs compared to this lot. All the same I'm quite glad we aren't as hardcore.

A story of adventure, courage, confusion, culture clashes, riches, hopelessness, impossible decisions, misinformation, bizare aliances, death, carnage, legacy, and so much more.

The start of the series is episode 1: The Fall of the Aztecs: The Adventure Begins. #

Spirit of computing - Programmer James Sumers' piece A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft from last week laments how quickly the world of computing is changing, and he wonders what computing skills he should try to teach his children. He concludes that skills will most certainly be out of date very quickly, so perhaps the thing to teach is spirit. I like the idea, and it got me thinking wouldn't it be great to have a list of things that coallesce together form the hacker spirit?

What sort of things would be on that list? The first things I though of were things like everything is a file from Unix, but that's probably too specific. I guess we are talking more about philosophy, so like the tenants of open source software. But there are likely a bunch of web specific things. What would be on the list? #

Wasm browser cli - I've been trying to figure out how to run wasm apps in the browser. There are many apps being ported to run on web assembly, and it would be really cool to be able to run these in the browser, because you always have a browser. On the command line it's quite obvious, but in the browser you don't really have a cli. There is the javascript console, but that's not really a cli, and in any case it's not accessible on many (most?) mobile devices.

There are apps like ffmpeg which can be used to manipulate video, but there is also recently many LLMs that run on wasm. I want my static site generator to run in the browser, maybe wasm is the way?

According to MDN's Loading and running WebAssembly code, you have to write some javascript code to fetch and then execute the wasm module. It would be cool if it was easier to run wasm modules in the browser. Perhaps we need a special wasm cli that you can easily load in the main browser window? #

Gruber and Rivera - Just listenned to the latest Talk Show episode, John talks with Gave Rivera who built and runs Techmeme, which has been probably the most influential tech news aggregator site for the past 15 years. In this age of AI wizardry maybe social media seems a bit dull and boring, but I found the conversation to be very interesting. There's a lot of movement in social media and online news at the minute, and Techmeme has been at the centre of it all for over a decade.

Loads of interesting topics including the story of Techmeme, early web, technorati, advertising, how the web has changed, RSS and Google Reader, HTML and web crawling, the rise of paywalls and hostile sites, the decline of blogs, the rise of Twitter, reducing friction in UIs, linkblogging / linkposting, Twitter killing blog comments, Threads/Mastodon/Bluesky, selling out vs being an indie publisher, Twitter’s character constraint, social media variety and fragmentation fatigue, federation and ActivityPub, Threads and APIs, Elon Musk breaking Twitter, the rename to X, and our AI future. #

Your own personal AI of yourself - Looks like creating an LLM AI of yourself is going to become a trend. I'm seing tech influencers everywhere experimenting with it. The turnkey solution by OpenAI looks to work pretty well, they are running a sort of App Store for LLMs. However I think many won't want to upload all their personal data to a 3rd party, so self hosted setups are likely going to be popular. Many are suprised at how good these AIs are, often they are better at answering questions than the person who's data they were trained on, because they essentially have perfect recall.

The latest Bitcoin Fundamentals has an interesting discussion between Preston and Jeff Booth. All about Personal AI models and Bitcoin.

It's a good time to start your own blog. The more content you have the better your AI will be. #

Fix the AB problem - At it's core it's a circular dependency bug, but I'm calling it the AB problem because that's the closest to the mathematical formal proof / definition, which is this:

A requires B, B requires A, you require A and/or B.

The problem is that requiring A gets blocked by it's dependency on B, and requiring B get's blocked by it's dependency on A. Literally the only way to solve the problem, is to find an A that doesn't require B, and/or a B that doesn't require A.

The AB problem manifests throughout the world in many different forms. My guess is that many of the worlds biggest problems at their very centre have some version of this.

It's likely that some people setup AB problems for their own benefit, but it's short termist behavior because ultimately it escallates and escallates until it affects us all, including those that created the problem in the first place.

It's also likely that as the system thrashes and thrashes trying to solve the problem, that it propagates basically everywhere, until everything and everyone is stuck in an AB problem fractal.

AB problems all the way up, and all the way down. In fact it would be more accurate the say that there would be AB problems in every direction. #

The AI elephant gets bigger - Looks like some big steps in LLM based AI self awareness are being made. My comment from a few days ago feels ever more precient. Compute via training is going to force us to reckon with old demons. We are digging up old graves for short term profit. #

The end of police and thieves - I recently wrote briefly about crime and tech, and how I've wondered for ages how, as we get further into a world without privacy, and bots everywhere and super intelligent AI everythings everywhere, how is that going to affect crime?

I think one thing that might happen is that crime just gets too difficult to do. At the singularity, crime just won't be possible any longer. The problem is that transitioning to that future is going to get really weird, especially because it's kind of a taboo subject. How do you even talk about it without risking incriminating yourself? There won't be an easy way for everything to re-organize.

As folks that rely on crime get pushed further and further to the edges at some point it won't be worth it any longer, but by then it will be too late. Remember this is a multi-generational thing happening. There might be some really strange outcomes.

One possibility is that the world becomes divided into 2 groups. The non-criminals and the people pretending to be criminals. Since pretending to be a criminal isn't a crime, isn't that the last likely outcome, however odd it sounds? That will be the last option available. The pretenders won't want the non-criminals to know, because they will be forced to make their living off of them in some way.

And it's not just criminals that would be in for a tough time. For instance, what happens to lawyers? Their game would essentially be up. Such a world would also be very confusing to grow up in. And what would happen if we all got caught in this bizare future? A sort of purgatory for everyone. Indeed how do we know we aren't already in such a future? #

Localism vs centralism vs globalism - I hear a lot of people these days complain about government. They say things like, "it's all decided centrally, far away from where we are", and "they don't know what's right for us". On the surface this seems like a valid criticism. The reality is that the people that say this, are themselves doing the very thing they complain about to others at the local level.

An example was on a recent What Bitcoin Did Podcast interview with Robert Breedlove. Much of the podcast is great, lots of interesting ideas, but the localism-is-better-than-everything position is just assumed to be correct. There isn't even a second thought about why it might not be.

Not everyone is accepted into the local community. Just think how many shops there are on the high street, it's a tiny number compared to the total local population. The reality of "doing things local" is that it works fantastic for a few, but for many it's actually preferable to have things, or a significant number of things determined centrally. If you aren't accepted locally, the only other option is centrally, and of course the end of that path is globalism.

Deciding things locally sounds great, but it invariably ends up creating a toxic soup of in-fighting, office politicsism, fiefdoms, mafias and family feuds that turn everything into a hellscape. Arguably people are more free when things are decided centrally, or at least at a somewhat higher level than the highstreet where everyone lives.

Perhaps it's a balance. But the reason some want 100% local and others 100% central is because of acceptance. #

Zero-based budgeting oppression - Another thing I hear people talk about all the time these days is zero-based budgeting. Again on the surface it seems like a fantastic idea. Who wouldn't want to not waste money? No one is saying that saving money is bad, and yes there are areas where large amounts of money get wasted, and we should work towards making that better. Remember though we are in different age now, the age of AI, where your ability to do anything will be determined by how well you can compute it.

However it seems rather obvious to me that taking the very extreme position of zero-based budgeting puts all the power into the hands of the current elites, and invariably they will use zero-based budgeting not as a way to save money, but as a way to shut people out, to ensure people always have not quite enough. With zero-based budgeting, and especially if it's taken to extremes, there is by definition literally no margin for error. Without an error margin, only the most affluent will have the capacity to determine exactly what they need ahead of time. Everyone else will be left in the gutter. #

All-In Dirty Sanchez - The latest All-in Podcast episode where they have a discussion with presidential candidate Dean Phillips, is another great episode. They've really perfected the 4 successfull entrepreuneurs joking around but also having serious discussions format. It got me thinking, why don't we have a comparable podcast coming out of the UK? #

Automattic Combinator? - Automattic has been in the news recently for restructuring Tumblr. Apparently it's loosing money. It's cool that they were able to move most of the employees to other projects within their other conpanies. Matt Mullenweg has done several question and answer sessions about the whole thing. It feels like they are doing the right thing.

I look in from the outside at Automattic and I see a very interesting company. It doesn't quite have the finess and polish of other large web companies. I've previously described the collection of companies under the Automattic umbrella as hodge podge, but I don't mean it disparagingly. In fact, in many ways it's very web-like, very opensourceish. They have some of the web's core values embeded deep in their DNA, and it shines through. It would be great if we could ensure that way of thinking, that way of building things got passed on.

Why doesn't Automattic setup a YCombinator type entity? To help create the next wave of the web, the next chapter of the ecosystem, ensure web values get passed on to the next generation, give them some guidance from all their years experience. I think that would be awesome. #

Better than physics - Friedberg has a closing segment on the latest All-in pod about the latest LLMs that are being used in various specialised areas. The AIs can consume vaste amounts of data and make predictions based on what they see. The mind bending thing they are realising is that some of the models are literally better at predicting the future than current models used in physics. Yes that's right, actual physics, as in the discipline.

I imagine this could result in an explosion of new science discoveries, as scientists start to use LLMs to hone in on new theories, and discredit or improve existing theories.

On the other hand, could it innadvertantly lead us into a world of halucinations? Some mathematics is mind bending enough already. I mean we are still arguing over the number 0. #

Destructuring for the win - Just saw this in a nodejs tutorial:

const { API_KEY, API_SECRET_KEY, SCOPES, SHOP, HOST, HOST_SCHEME } = process.env;

Genius idea to use destructuring for getting environment variables. Can't believe I didn't think to do this before. #

Veloceraptors - The worste thing about the world that they don't tell you is that absolutely everyone turns out to be a veloceraptor. Occasionally you meet a koala or a giraffe, but every bloody time it's a veloceraptor in a koala or giraffe costume.

And they fucking hate being told they are veloceraptors. What do you mean? I can't believe you just called me a veloceraptor. How dare you? You are literally the worste person in the universe.

And then they draw a middle finger on the window with their breath, open the door, and run off into the jungle leaving enormous foot prints everywhere. #