Decentralized Twitter rival Damus will be removed from the App Store over Bitcoin tipping - That does seem like a bit of an over-reaction. Surely they aren't the first iOS app to add a tipping feature on a social media app? appleinsider.com #

Freefaces - Open source typefaces gallery - There are some pretty neat looking fonts in this collection. freefaces.gallery #

Let's welcome Meta, not block them - The author Manton Reece, founder of micro.blog, writes about the movement to pre-emptively block Meta before it has even released it's product, mentioning Open APIs, data privacy, getting your own house in order, and monocultures. Micro.blog by the way supports posting to ActivityPub, Nostr and Bluesky. Pretty cool. manton.org #

Hugging Face CEO tells US House open-source AI is ‘extremely aligned’ with American interests - I'm still amazed at how easy and cool it is that anyone in the world can watch these type of government hearings. It wasn't always like this. Isn't the world wide web awesome? Btw Hugging Face is like Github but for AI and large language models (LLMs). Open Source AI is a very interesting topic that we are only starting to grapple with. We are still in the new-ideas-permeating-everything phase which is quite confusing, but some academics trained in thinking at a macro level are starting to ask very detailed & specific questions which are highlighting the magnitude of the sea change that is ahead. venturebeat.com #

Architecture of an early stage SAAS - This is a great writeup. It’s a somewhat more modern version of the nodejs architecure I used for my SaaS. The author also covers the frontend setup abd code organisation. It relies on Fly.io but you do get a lot of nice features out of the box. It is quite involved, but building and running a SaaS is complicated and difficult. feelback.dev #

🚀 New Post: Building digital asset economies - Distinguishing between the different digital asset classes that DeFi is making available, and looking at some specific examples that demonstrate the new reality that is fast approaching. We are entering a world where new digital asset economies are being forged. markjgsmith.com #

The top six rivals competing with OpenAI - Looks like quite a decent list of some of the big players in the wider AI space: OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Cohere, Stability A.I., EleutherAI, Hugging Face aisupremacy.substack.com #

Six more companies competing with OpenAI - Adept AI, Inflection AI, Runway, Alph Alpha, AI21 Labs, BAAI - The magic film visual effects tools company sounds very cool, uses generative AI to add all sorts of effects from text prompts. There also appears to be a trend in training models in non-english languages, which of course makes sense. I'd also like to try out the AI gramerly tool. Which one of these companies is going to be the next google, microsoft, apple or meta? aisupremacy.substack.com #

🚀 New Post: Revisiting Instapaper for offline reading - A continuation of the exploration of Read Later apps that I did earlier in the week. This time I decided to try Instapaper again. The aim here is to have a way to read web development content offline. So far the results from using Safari Reading Lists and Pocket have been very variable. How about Instapaper, is it as bad as I remember? markjgsmith.com #

The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook - I started out reading this article thinking I wasn't that interested in the topic, but as I read, memories of jobs past, and various digital collaboration environment infras I helped setup, flooded my thoughts. Turns out I actually have quite a lot to say about high end mac hardware. Most of the VFX shops I worked for used Windows and Linux, because of upgradeability/modularity but also because it was easier to integrate them into the workflows. The folks running macs tended to be one offs, on their own island so to speak, with their own custom setup. From a sysadmin perspective, those systems were harder to maintain. At one place all the engineers actually got Mac Pros because then we could have any OS we wanted by running Parallels, which made sense given we were supporting artists running all 3 OSs. I loved my silver tower, it was freaking awesome! But probably way more power than I actually needed at the time. Oh how things change. Dear lord how I wish I had enough power to not have to wait 5 minutes switching feature branches or pushing to remote. Life is waiting for progress bar atm. theverge.com #

🚀 New Post: Ideal offline reading app for web development content - Reading web development content offline has some specific requirements over and above what is generally needed to read other types of content. I detail the ideal required basic and advanced feature set. markjgsmith.com #

Amazon to start using bodegas and small businesses to deliver packages - I have seen something similar where I am in Vietnam. Some shops have a large metal cabinet into which staff place small packages customers give them. It appears to be for sending rather than receiving. Anyhow, such partnerships with small businesses could prove to be very valuable in a future where physical increasingly integrates with digital. Amazon famously has highstreet stores called Amazon Go, that automatically tally up the food you put in your trolley as you shop and charges you as you walk out. The new packages delivery program has a cool name too, Amazon Hub. Wouldn't it be interesting if Amazon opened a major crypto exchange and turned high street shop partners into crypto exchanges? That was an idea I put forward in my recent ultimately very pro-bitcoin article that in retrospect was sort of maskerading as a hit piece. It's strange how creativity works sometimes. axios.com #

FTC sues Amazon over deceptive signup and cancelation process - I don't know that much about the flow to have an opinion. Ben Thompson has a piece that goes into a lot more details with screenshots. Seems like there might be too many steps. Reguardless though I'm happy that government insitutions are putting dark pattern usage on the agenda. I think it's something we really need to be aware of, especially with the rise of AI, it might get more difficult to detect. It's an area in which we probably want to avoid an arms race, that would likely be very bad for everyone. cnbc.com #

Yesterday's issue loading images on my blog post about the state of offline reading for web development content appears to have been resolved, so I'm linking to the article again, it will make much more sense now with the images. I tried reading Chris' CSS article again last night, noticed that many of the images only load as you scroll down the page. I wonder if that might be what's preventing them from making it into the saved offline version. Anyway, good morning everyone, time for coffee :) markjgsmith.com #

Leveraged Bitcoin Futures ETF to Start Trading Tuesday - Good news though a few things stand out, no idea how relevant. It's a futures based ETF rather that a spot ETF, which the Blackrock application was for. Rather than say it was explicitly approved, says only that it wasn't blocked. coindesk.com #

IMF says banning crypto assets may not be effective long-term - The institution which is likely one of the most important financial institution in the world, appears to be softening their stance on crypto after being a long time critic. This made me smile a bit, comes just 3 days after my blog post about crypto not being enough. Ain't that always the way [rolls eyes]. theblock.co #

JPMorgan Starts Euro Blockchain Payments for Corporates - Corporate use of crypto is a big theme currently, so it's noteworthy when one of the world's biggest banks introduces crypto rails, making it possible for large corporates to transfer large amounts dollars or euros outside of business hours. Crypto runs 24/7/365. It will be interesting to follow the popularity, currently it's used for $300 billion out of total possible $10 trillion of payments. So called "digital asset" projects appear to be the new black. Michael Saylor refers to this as the transition from physical to digital property. bloomberg.com #

‘ZK embodies integrity, privacy and magic’: Matter Labs - I've so far mostly concentrated on bitcoin when it comes to learning about crypto and DeFi. It's interesting to hear alt coin folks exploring internet fundamentals, being open to hard lessons learnt by previous generations of tech innovators, especially around soveraignty and gate-keepers. It reminds me a bit of the explosion of open source and creative commons licensing during web2.0. Diversity is great, but it gets kind of confusing. I hope things settle down to the point where we have a handful of well understood contenders, the equivalent of MIT, GPL, Apache etc. blockworks.co #

AI Getting Started - A Javascript AI getting started stack for weekend projects, including image/text models, vector stores, auth, and deployment configs - Self hosted platform released by a16z that integrates with a bunch of online APIs so you can easily create apps that do image and text AI stuff. The setup looks quite straight forward, not much info on the operation side of things, like what it looks like to use once you have things setup github.com #

🚀 New Post: The state of offline reading for web development content - Reading web content offline is very convenient, and occasionally essential. I have found however that it’s a terrible experience for reading web development content. I describe what I have observed in the hope that others will notice the importance of this topic. It’s one of those things you don't realise that you need until you do, and if it does't work, well then it’s too late and you are now stuck. markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Issues with CDN for images? - I've been having very strange behaviour from the Netlify CDN all morning. Images that are definitely in the repo and deployed, are showing up in some browsers, but not others, then disapearing. Here's a support forum post I created about it. Appologies to all that are trying to read my latest blog post about problems reading articles offline, because the images aren't loading. Oh the irony, and frustration, a post about issues seeing images offline is not readable because images of the issue are not loading online. It's some sort of bizare support case inception fractal. answers.netlify.com #

More on Preemptively Blocking Facebook’s Imminent ActivityPub Entry - More relatively wise words from John Gruber, along with some very worthy and relevant quotes from around the web concerning Meta being blocked before they have even started on ActivityPub. daringfireball.net #

Arctic Monkeys at Glastonbury review – breaking rock’s rules at their own strange pace - I love reading about Glasto every year, I have such fond memories from the 3 or 4 times I attended around the turn of the millenium. It's a long time ago now. Back then my music tastes were squarely in alternative rock but they were starting to broaden into breakbeat, drum 'n bass and electronic. These days Glasto is almost unrecognizable based just on the lineups. There are some really main stream acts that play, but my sensibilities have relaxed as I get older. It would be awesome to see Elton for instance. Sometimes the juxtaposition of old and new and main stream and alternative is what makes the magic of Glasto. I think I might have seen the Artic Monkeys at a festival when they were a small indie band. My favorite festival sets off the top of my head would have to be Bjork, David Bowie and the unforgetable sunny Sunday afternoon Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. Anyway all this to say, I miss music festivals and especially Glastonbury. It really is the closest experience I have had to being in a magical city. theguardian.com #

How This All Happened - Author Morgan Housel writes a very readable piece, both visually and content-wise, about the history that happened to the US economy since the end of World War II. From the uncertainty in the GIs returning, to the boom that followed because of low interest rates and cheap credit, raising most out of poverty and creating a somewhat equal society, through a crash, then another boom where this time there was a big divergence between rich and the rest. Crucially though, the 'mostly equal' expectation persisted for a long time, causing many to take on too much debt. Then another worse crash, and now the expectation has finaly shifted to many folks generally thinking society is no longer working for them. There's lots more detail, and graphs and period magazine covers, and it's just basically a very informative piece that doesn't get too bogged down. IMO worth the read. collabfund.com #

Thoughts from "Meet Safari for Spatial Computing" - Nothing earth shattering but gives a bit of an idea what to expect in visionOS as a web developer. Best to use resolution-agnostic units like rem. Hover states are ignored but visionOS Webkit will automatically add it's own version of :hover when a user looks at elements on a page. Generally speaking keep using progressive enhancement, well written accessible HTML and other web standards such as responsive images, media queries, and vector graphics and your website will still look good. blog.jim-nielsen.com #

The New CSS - What I got from this article is that around about 2020 there was a significant sea change in CSS. With features such as :has(), container queries, custom properties, CSS grid, new color spaces, and auto scaling fluid typography, you can create designs that flexibly adapt to different contexts and different types of content. So much so that, if you usually only dabble enough to get the job done, it's probably worth doing another pass at learning CSS using the latest reading material because the way people are thinking about the landscape is fundamentally different now. There is a sense by many that all these new features are coalescing together into a 'Modern CSS'. matthiasott.com #

Understand Units in CSS: A Comprehensive Guide - These all make sense, but yikes there are so many. I didn't know that you can use resolution units to activate different CSS across devices with differing resolutions. So for example high resolution devices could get higher resolution background images. Assuming only the appropriate image is downloaded, then that's pretty cool. hongkiat.com #

🚀 New Post: Unfortunately bitcoin alone doesn‘t fix the fundamental problem markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: The Economics of Catching the AI Wave (Issue #120) markjgsmith.com #

How "Exit Traps" Can Make Your Bash Scripts Way More Robust And Reliable - Like a finally in a javascript try/catch but for your entire bash script. Several very useful examples that I wouldn't have thought of. redsymbol.net #

AI Is a Lot of Work - Quite a long article, somewhat ironically a bit of a slog to read, but it's well written and certainly eye opening. The AI Annotation Industrial Complex that is highlighted is the iceberg behind the recent AI models like ChatGPT. There are elements that really remind me of the VFX industry, such as project based work that moves around the globe quickly based on demand, and workers clubbing together to help each other out. But it also feels like there could be some exploitative practices going on. The numbers are bordering on mindboggling, with current estimates in the millions, but projected to move into potentially billions of people. That's right, some predict double digit percentages of the entire human population of earth employed training robots, though it would likely be somewhat temporary until base models are trained. The article ends on a bit of a strange snake eating it's tail thing which left me worried about how structuraly sound this house of cards actually might be. theverge.com #

Islamic State: Woman jailed in Germany for keeping Yazidi woman as slave - Reminder that people's views on slavery still vary enormously around the world. Something to keep in mind both at home and abroad. bbc.com #

Sitemaps XML format - The way to tell search crawlers about the structure of your site. Yet another thing I'll need to implement. You literally have to have an entry for every single page, but you can build index sitemaps that point to other (nested) sitemaps. Without sitemaps I'm guessing your site isn't going to showup very often in search results. And you need a robots.txt file too. sitemaps.org #

AI meets the other AI - With talk recently of the House Oversight Committee having a hearing about UFOs, and with the present moment being so dominated by AI, it's dawning on people that not only could we use AI to detect UFOs, but that learning about AI will make us much better at preparing for a future encounter with alien intelligences. politico.com #

Not That Kind of ‘Open’ - John Gruber gets to the core if why those trying to block Facebook's new ActivityPub powered Twitter app are essentially participating in something akin to pre-crime at best. And also however you feel about Facebook/Meta, there are a lot of people that use the service, so really all you are doing is blocking the open web from growing. It seems that might be exactly what some people would prefer, open for we but not for thee. daringfireball.net #

Style your RSS feed - Describes how to style your RSS feed using XSLT and CSS. I'm not sure exactly where I fall on styling your RSS feed. It's true that feeds look a bit intimidating to new users, especially for non-programmers, but is a styled feed really necessary since most blogs & podcasts have an HTML page that lists all the posts/episodes anyway. For example my blog and podcast, and the seperate page that lists all the feeds. At least when you see the weird looking XML you know you've found the feed to copy/paste. Aren't you just confusing things even more by styling the feed? Also when you actually want to see the XML of a feed, something that I find myself needing to do quite a lot, there isn't an easy way to remove the styling. darekkay.com #

Sitemaps XML format - The way to tell search crawlers about the structure of your site. Yet another thing I'll need to implement. You literally have to have an entry for every single page, but you can build index sitemaps that point to other (nested) sitemaps. Without sitemaps I'm guessing your site isn't going to showup very often in search results. And you need a robots.txt file too. sitemaps.org #

Bitcoin Breaks $28K for the First Time Since May - A flurry of activity in the crypto space has raised the price above $28k, up from 22k in just a few days. It appears to be in response to the world's largest asset management firm Blackrock's announcement of the first Bitcoin ETF, which would open up the possibility of investing to many that previously would not have been able to. Previous to this, it had been a slow and steady decline in price, which appeared to be following the general sentiment that the economy is heading into a deflationary period. This comes at the same time as US regulators have been charging big crypto exchanges for handling unregistered securities, and prominent TradFi figure John Stark has been straightup advising folks to 'get out of crypto' because of the storm brewing and major podcasters in the space are predicting big regulatory headwinds. Nevertheless at least for now, it's the return of number go up. news.yahoo.com #

Binance starts whipping up Bitcoin Lightning Network nodes - In other crypto news Binance, one of the biggest crypto exchanges, has massively expanded their ability to handle the layer 2 Lightening protocol, setting up their own instances. They plan to use the Lightning network for users to receive and export funds. If I am understanding correctly, this should significantly speed up transactions, taking the load off of the base layer. theblock.co #

🚀 New Post: The return of number go up markjgsmith.com #

AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years - Makes the case that we have entered the third major UI paradigm in computing. First it was batch processing (punch cards), then command based interaction (cli's and later guis), and finally it's intent based outcome specification (tell the computer what you want rather than how to do it). Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. We need something a bit like WYSIWYG but for AI interfaces. nngroup.com #

Eight days later: Kbin, Lemmy, the landed gentry, and the rise of the "threadiverse" - Current state of the open source decentralised Reddit alternative space, content moderation and defederation as a temporary protective measure. I think the idea of using the term 'landed gentry' to describe certain online groups is very clever and in many cases quite appropriate. privacy.thenexus.today #

Phishing frenzy: School kids are stealing millions of dollars of NFTs — to buy Roblox skins - Is this article for real? Kids making millions of dollars and then spending it in Roblox? Surely not. theblock.co #

AI shakes up way we work in three key industries - Looks at Legal Professional Services, Filmmaking and Coding. In filmmaking I thought it was kind of interesting that actors are negotiating deals that include their AI double do they can be recording an advert using their AI at the same time as shooting a film and get paid for both. And in coding aparently AIs are better at making frontend code. I'd like to see more data on that. Though many folks across industries project potentially more work, it seems people are really worried that wages will be erroded over time. ft.com #

Celebrities Use AI to Take Control of Their Own Images - Another article that looks at the possibilities and challenges of AI body double technology, in particular for acting, fashion and sports. I wonder if 3D photobooths will start poping up in public spaces so normies can get in on this AI body double craze. wsj.com #

The Staggering Frontiers of CSS - The author runs through some of his favorite new features including View Transitions for making multi-page apps more slick, Anchor Positioning, Dynamic Viewport units and Subgrid. He finishes up by expressing a sentiment I've been feeling recently about the web platform in general, I call it webdev vertigo, that things have gotten too complex to fully understand by one person. "It feels like we’ve entered this new phase in the life of CSS where just keeping up with what’s shipping each year is too much for any one person to keep track of, let alone take advantage of". I just hope it all doesn't turn to grey gew. buttondown.email #

Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout - One of the big winners from the Reddit civil war has been Lemmy. It's a decentralised open source Reddit alternative. Their monthly active user count has balooned from 1000 to 27000, and is now one of the largest Fediverse projects. It's an interesting project, lots of neat sounding features. Seems incredibly futuristic compared to my humble linkblog. It makes me wonder if there are any easy ways I could integrate my setup into the Fediverse. join-lemmy.org #

GitHub Actions Trigger Via Webhooks - I've been looking for options to automate site rebuilds on creating new content. There is reusable workflows, which is quite neat because the called workflow runs and literally appears as part of the caller workflow. Another optiom is to use webhooks, which, if I'm understanding the docs correctly, results in the called workflow running outside of the caller workflow, so you get essentially 2 workflows running, in 2 seperate repos. It's a somewhat subtle difference but operationally it's a very different way of doing things. I'm currently exploring using a combination of the two techniques to effectively share workflows across many repositories, which should make setting up new projects much less error prone and far easier to maintain. mainawycliffe.dev #

Unify and modernize your web architecture with Netlify Connect - There are a couple of things that tend to be true which you learn over many years of being in tech and being a developer. Eventually every enterprise sized company releases a product called 'Connect'. The other thing is that one-api-to-rule-them-all solutions are usually not the safest thing for the end user long term, because though it might be convenient, switching becomes very difficult, and so eventually over time the platform treats the user worse and worse because the incentive structure promotes that behaviour. I love Netlify, they have been a great platform, so maybe they will find a way to avoid this dynamic. The only way I can think that might aleviate it would be making their fancy API open source, so people aren't locked-in to their solution. But building a healthy ecosystem has it's own challenges, case in point the on-going total destruction of the Reddit multiverse situation. We don't seem to have figured out the recipe for creating successful, healthy and sustainbable communities. Seems like that might be a multi-generational endeavor. netlify.com #

Netlify presents: Edge Functions general availability - The idea of edge functions is awesome. Practically speaking though it means handing over full control of the DNS of your entire domain, and currently at least, building against a propriety API. Having more open standards in this area implemented by multiple companies is a real urgency. netlify.com #

JavaScript’s Backtick Strings are Likely the Wrong Tool for Your Job - Short and useful post that highlights some of the pitfalls to think about when using string literalls, and makes the case for using URLSearchParams when constructing urls. spin.atomicobject.com #

Why you should pin your GitHub Actions by commit-hash - Basically you can avoid supply chain attacks by specifying the full commit hash of every community built action you use, for example the 'checkout' action, instead of specifying the module version. Yes that avoids the attack in the immediate term but how do you maintain your repo now? You are now tied down to the ground like Guliver. They mention using dependabot which supports version numbers in comments, but how does dependabot know the version it's promoting hasn't been compromised? And now your workflow files are full of illegible commit hashes. Supply chain tragedy. blog.rafaelgss.dev #

Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development - For all of you out there getting into the latest perfect rust idioms or what have you, spare a thought for those of us that had to trawl through entire UML books, diligently studying them to pass masters degree exams, only to find it was basically all a total waste of time. Apart from sequence diagrams that is. I have to agree with the author of this blog post, sequence diagrams are indeed very useful. They are the computer science equivalent to electrical engineering circuit diagrams. If you are going to learn 1 type of computer science diagraming, learn sequence diagrams. They make it possible to visually and accurately communicate very complex flows of information. There are times during implementation where groking the big picture is vital because hings can get confusing quickly. You will need a map with just the right anoubt if detail of what's actually going on. That map is often a sequence diagram. mermaidchart.com #

My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things your modern iPhone still can't do! - The author of this article is very very nerdy but I totally agree with his main argument. You should be able to program a device from the device itself. That's not the case with most modern mobile devices, but it doesn't have to be that way. That's what I was alluding to when I imagined the HTML5 Phone. That's what computing used to be all about. I think with a bit of thought we could have both nice looking devices, and user programable devices. raymii.org #

Everything Must Be Paid for Twice - Makes the interesting observation that people often forget about the cost that will be incurred after making a purchase, corresponding to the time and effort required to fully see the utility of the purchase. Quite a timely piece for me. Doubling seems to be trending at the minute. raptitude.com #

Architecting a high throughout digital effects facility - Following on from yesterday's Fragments of Capital FX blog post, having re-read all the various fragments I found, I think this article has the best description of the facility we built, from a technical infrastructure perspective. If you are technically inclined and spend time thinking about tools and environments for creators, this is definitely worth reading. markets.businessinsider.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Don’t Missout on Magic (Issue #119) markjgsmith.com #

Spotify pivots from being HBO for podcasts to YouTube for podcasts - Previous acquisitions Gimlet Media and Parcast are losing their branding, joining the umbrella Spotify Studios. It has also been organising high profile events on the french riviera in Cannes, where companies can court advertising agencies. It's incredible how similar this sounds to what I lived through when a VFX house I worked for called Capital FX got bought out by Deluxe. It was simultaneously exciting, wonderfull and a very difficult process, where the old guard got slowly transitioned out while the new upstarts were brought in. A sort of multi-year game of musical chairs, that you only realise you were playing in retrospect, executed like a perfect no down time infra migration, where you never expect to be phased out, until you too are phased out because, while you were extremly-busy-doing-important-things, without realising it, you turned into the old-guard-next-generation. bloomberg.com #

Meta AI researchers unveil I-JEPA, a computer vision model that learns more like humans do - I'm not by any means very well versed in all things AI, but this sounds like a big step forward. These new models create an internal model of the world and compare abstract representations of the data instead of the actual data. That sounds more similar to how humans learn to me. Apparently it results in models that are less likely to get caught up in irrelevant detail and minutea. siliconangle.com #

🚀 New Post: Fragments of Capital FX markjgsmith.com #

The culture war for your face - Some push back against the future that could be created by the Vision Pro. It's an important conversation to be having as we move forward. Honestly even though I'm optimistic and enthusiastic about the future and the possibilities of spatial computing, I worry a lot about distopian scenarios. Historically speaking humans haven't exactly treated each other very well over the years, slavery is a big part of our past. It's also possible that we could innadvertantly create something horrible. Or, and this is perhaps the most likely and scary, some bizare combination of the two. Having said that, we must move forward, discovering and avoiding bad patterns along the way by listening and having empathy to/for each other. politico.com #

Scientists Discover Phosphorus On Enceladus - Pretty big news in astrobiology, phosphorous is a fundamental component of DNA and energy-carrying molecules. It now looks like Enceladus has many of the elements and compounds that were necessary for life here on earth. tlpnetwork.com #

Naked JSX: Use JSX without React - NakedJSX is a command-line tool for generating HTML files from JSX - I'm still trying to wrap my head around this, it seems so unbelievably simple that I'm thinking I must be missing something. It's a replacement for whatever templating language you use. For me that's EJS. So instead of EJX template files, I guess I would have javascript files that build the page using components created in JSX. It also has some clientside features. Very interesting indeed. nakedjsx.org #

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens - So governments are slowly turning into tech giants? Maybe eventually it will be so obvious they'll have to give us all free storage. Of course the other thing that might happen is that the tech giants turn into the government. Or I suppose a bit of both. This modern world we live in is very very strange. wired.com #

A Developer's View of Vision Pro - Thoughts from a developer that was there from the start for the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. He was at the launch event and was left speechless by the quality of the experience. High on his list of reasons to get in early is to build up his "platform intuition". Nice article though a bit light on actual ideas about what sort of things will be possible. david-smith.org #

Basic authentication with custom HTTP headers - Some perhaps good news in my side quest to organise my RSS feeds. If I'm parsing this netlify doc correctly, looks like I can add basic auth to static pages by setting an HTTP header, which solves one of the issues I listed. I also might have found a solution for an RSS reader that supports subscribing to dynamic OPML files. Ideally though I need a client that runs on iOS with good offline features. docs.netlify.com #

Awesome HTML5 - So many incredible features in this web platform we have built. It will be interesting to see how the Vision Pro and visionOS changes the focus. It's a good time to get a broad view of what's currently possible because there will be a lot of possibilities for integrating the two platforms. github.com #

🎙Apple's Web Apps, Meta Quest and Vision Pro, and Missing Sticky Headers Ep#569 (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - Lots of interesting webdev bits and pieces but the highlight is clearly Chris and Dave getting into some proper web developer Vision Pro dev talk. We are at the very beginning of the roller coaster. That's when folks are slowly realising how awesome and cool this might turn out to be. I love this bit of the journey. shoptalkshow.com #

WhatsApp Channels turns on broadcasts for creators and organizations - It's such a popular app that this is likely a big deal. Feels like every app eventually turns into a Twitter clone. theverge.com #

How to Use The HTML5 Sectioning Elements - The past few days, I've been trying to ensure that pages from the website look good on social media sites, as well as in read later apps. Sometimes you have to re-read the basics just to make sure you understand important details. blog.teamtreehouse.com #

Archive.today is a time capsule for web pages! - Similar to the Internet Archive save feature, this service enables you to take a snapshot of any url at a particular point in time. That's useful because sites go offline, but they also change. Looks to use something called the Momento protocol. I wish there were more services like this, and that the technology was more pervasive and robust. It doesn't feel like there is an accepted standard. How do I create a url backup on my own hardware for instance? archive.today #

Kong Yiji: The memes that lay bare China's youth disillusionment - I think what this article describes isn't particular to China. When you zoom out, there are many many people worldwide that spend literally multiple decades of their lives in isolation. The unwritten promise from society has been that it will lead to a better life. But that promise is being broken in a big way. Folks that didn't choose that route find themselves with money, and now with AI, it turns out they didn't need to study anyway. The discontent from the skinny educated is bound to become something that will need to be reparationed. bbc.com #

Tools for thought: the first 300,000 years - A super high level summary of some of the big technological innovations that humans have made which have resulted in our modern world. It's funny to me because I've been preparing something similar in my spare time recently. I was focusing on science whereas this focusses on actual inventions. Two sides of the same coin in a way. Anyhow worth reading if you are at all interested in history and culture and perhaps the future. subconscious.substack.com #

Coding a deep learning model using TensorFlow.js (2020) - Following on from yesterday's tutorial for getting a pre-trained model up and running, here's the next tutorial in the series. It shows how to create and train a model from scratch. I haven't managed to get completely through it yet due too lack of internet connectivity and Safari reading lists not working for this site for some reason. The impression I get is that it's considerably more complex an endeavour. Hoping to circle back to this at some stage, or perhaps find a more recent example. developer.ibm.com #

Why AI Will Save the World - Mark Andreessen makes the techno-optimist case for AI. I'm on board. Honestly though the past few days I've been feeling a bit of tech vertigo. Even just the web stack is mind boggling, and that's just a tiny part of it all. I need a hoverboard because the escalator is going so fast there will be a point in the not too distant future where there will be no way to keep up with any of it in a meaningfull way. a16z.com #

US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles - I keep an eye out for UAP articles as a sort of curiosity. This one actually looks sort of credible because it's from a well reputed intelligence official who has gone before Congress. theguardian.com #

Someone Should Write a Screenplay - Hugh Macleod piece about how technology and the internet is affecting the creative trades. Touches on the current Hollywood writer's strike, AI and the parallels in the wider economy. Gets to the core of the issue. gapingvoid.com #

How First Principles Thinking Fails - A short exploration into situations where first principles thinking doesn't lead to the right result, something I've been wondering about myself for a while. The danger when it happens is that it's often completely unnexpected, and so runs the risk of being catastrophic. It's a good idea to keep an open mind to other ways of approaching a problem. commoncog.com #

🎙We Studied Thousands of Heads (Accidental Tech Podcast) - The guys review the entire WWDC conference, which is pretty standard. Vision Pro coverage starts ~2 hours into the episode. Quite technical discussion from the experienced Mac user / developer angle, covering topics including field of view, social stigma, latency, not being presented as a gaming device at all, capturing 3D video, no killer app yet, currently lots of 2D screens in 3D, new area of the AR/VR market focussing on work applications, spacial audio, potentially cool dev environment setups, not really priced for consumers atm, power cable disconnect shuts everything off, and possible apps in shopping, interior design, meditation and fitness spaces. atp.fm #

Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion - People are inventing some quite innovative ways of using Stable Diffusiom AIs that take existing QR codes and moddify them into art while keeping the encoded QR data intact. arstechnica.com #

An introduction to AI in Node.js - Reading through this tutorial, it's not actually that difficult to get a pre-trained model up and running. I find the way that these AI systems are architected to be a bit strange, perhaps unintuitive, or maybe it's just the way the interfaces are described. I'm not able to parse them as quickly as say web APIs. Anyway the cool thing is it's possible to do it all from Node.js using Tensorflow.js. developer.ibm.com #

Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro - It will be super interesting to see how this all unfolds. It's actually good that there is diversity in approach right from the start. It's an ecosystem, lots of room for everyone. Hopefully we will remember some of the lessons learnt from the past, like interop and open protocols. Healthy competition. I think there's a path where all the companies and people in the space are helping each other, building the future together. That's when the tech industry is at it's best. theverge.com #

News from WWDC23: WebKit Features in Safari 17 beta - Based on WWDC reviews on various podcasts, it's clear this year's WWDC was kind of mega. Of course there's the Vision Pro, that's what everyone's talking about, but there was a ton of other hardware and software announcements. Reading through the Webkit release notes I'm blown away by how many features have been released across HTML/CSS/JS, it's truely mind boggling. I'm also getting a sensation that I think can best be described as a sort of general vertigo, about how unfathomly complex the entire web platform is. Just wanted to mention that now, because the complexity is about to increase significantly. The 3D stuff has my mind racing about how Vision Pro is going to change webdev. Awesome but also a bit scary. webkit.org #

Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta - MacOS joins iPad/iOS in supporting web apps, this is a detailed writeup, complete with lots of screenshots. Works with any site, no need for a manifest file, and appear as a regular app in the Dock. I'm imagining all sorts of cool things I could add to my website that would enable it work offline as a web app. Wouldn't it be awesome if the whole site worked offline? blog.tomayac.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Apple’s Vision Pro, Crypto vs SEC markjgsmith.com #

Royal Navy Says Quantum Navigation Test a Success - Seems like this could be quite important because it eliminates the need for GPS and hence satellites which can be jammed. Theoretically should work for subs too. Happy to learn the technology was developed at Imperial College, that's where I did my Materials Science undergrad. thequantuminsider.com #

Automattic launches an AI writing assistant for WordPress - What happens to content on the web when the most popular open source publishing platform adds generative AI features? Many are concerned about spam but the people that really want to make great things are still out there, so it's possible that quality might increase, with ever more intricate and detailed stories that were previously unnimaginable. techcrunch.com #

Apple Vision review from Stratechery - Ben found the experience to be "extraordinary", his piece covers the real-time OS, it’s mirrorless and mixed reality nature, the eye tracking powered user interface, the opportunities in the productivity space, replacing the iPad as the ultimate consumption device, and Meta being totally out-classed on hardware but perhaps not on human connectedness stratechery.com #

🎙Apple Vision (Another Podcast Podcast) - The two experts in all things brainstorming return to review the latest WWDC announcement, covering amoung other things, why the Vision Pro is the dream device from 5 years in the future but now, hardware description, spatial computing, AR vs VR, Apple’s insistence to not compromise on quality, the Apple vs Meta approach, whether mass adoption will occur, how demoing for spatial computing is different, and the you-look-through-it metaphor podcasts.google.com #

🚀 New Recommendation: Chris Reichhelm, founder & CEO at Deep Tech Leaders and Deep Tech Jobs markjgsmith.com #

Culture Design Strategist - Given my lifelong fascination with the notion of culture, this job advert from Hugh MacCleod turned my head. He's always light years ahead of everyone, and occupies a different realm in terms of how he sees the world. The idea that you can engineer culture had occurred to me, but I had no idea it was turning into an entire discipline. I once had a fun lunch with Hugh at one of his meetups in London, we all went to an art gallery afterwards as I recall. I think I'd like to be a web developer culture design strategist. gapingvoid.com #

Github Actions - trigger another action after one action is completed - I'm trying to streamline some of my publishing workflows, looks like reusable workflows is what I'll need to implement so that the site gets automatically re-built when I close a PR on the content repo. Currently it's a two step manual process. stackoverflow.com #

GGML - AI at the edge- Implementing one of these AI models still feels a little mysterious to me. This project looks quite interesting, works on commodity hardware. It would be cool to setup a minimal example of a setup where you could train a very basic AI classifier and deploy it to the cloud. I guess most of these LLMs are more for generating text, but would work well in concert with a classifier. ggml.ai #

Why did Usenet fail? - It's articles like this that make blogging such a wonderful medium. Well written with nice pacing whithin a story arc that flows, some useful links and good comments. Really like the site design too. And totally relatable content, I too tried usenet a bit back in the day and eventually moved to centralised websites for basically the same reasons. shkspr.mobi #

Vision Pro: Apple's new augmented reality headset unveiled - They sure do look like snowboard goggles, and quite the price tag at $3499. I'm curious how they will do zoom-like conferences, could be very cool, but won't it be strange to look at several other people also wearing goggles? Or will they GPT generate fake faces? bbc.com #

Introducing Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer - The official press release from Apple, worth reading to get a sense of how they envison this new world of spatial computing. There's a new operating system called visionOS, with a new interface, lots of AR features, and they appear to have seriously thought on data privacy and security. Overall it's very intriguing and compelling. It's their first new hardware product line in a decade, so quite a big moment. apple.com #

The Open Graph protocol - I'm trying to add the right meta tags to the site <head> so that pages appear nicely on various social media platforms. There are a lot of possibilities but it's not so obvious how to engineer a way to add more than just the basics. The only two ways I can think of are hard code into the site templates or by using markdown frontmatter, or a combinatiom of both. ogp.me #

The Culture Map: How to Navigate Foreign Cultures in Business - Gives a concise breakdown of some of the major cultural dimensions to consider when interacting across cultures. Written for business but much of it is useful in other scenarios too. ahalbert.com #

Iceland: the emerging tech-ecosystem of the Nordics - I've never been to Iceland, sounds pretty cool, I hadn't considered timezone-wise how convenient it is when working with US east coast and western EU. erikdestefanis.substack.com #

Photography's new bag if tricks (1984) - Interesting in the age of AI enhanced and generated photography to see how people viewed regular photo editing technologies when they were introduced nytimes.com #

JavaScript Macros in Bun - Cool feature that sort of turns your code files into render templates. You import functions specifying an attribute, and use those functions in your code. They are executed during bundling, with returned values added into the final outputted code. The functions can be async like running a fetch. bun.sh #

Beijing's comedy crackdown is hitting its music scene - This obviously sucks if it's true, music is so important for society. The other thing that sucks though is that all evidence presented are contained in other BBC published articles. How about linking to some external sites to back up claims? bbc.com #

Oil production to drop after Opec+ nations meet - It's sort of weird when you think about it. If your main export is oil, it's totally fine for you to print / burn, but if your main export is money itself, and everything that makes the money possible, then print / burn is bad bbc.com #

OpenAI is pursuing a new way to fight A.I. 'hallucinations' - Their technique called 'process supervision' rewards based on each individual correct step in a multi-step reasoned problem rather than only the final outcome. Interesting approach but sounds a bit like mind control. Who decides on the steps in the first place? Isn't the whole point of AI that it would be able to generate steps that humans would never be able to envisage? cnbc.com #

Telly dual-screen TV first look: it’s free and may be the future - This new product seems comically silly and dumb at first, but the more I read about it, the more I'm cuious about what's going to happen when it arrives in stores. Pretty sure it's going to ruffle a few feathers at the very least. There's a chance it's a stroke of pure genius, which doesn't happen very often. Also as a brit clearly I like the name, it literally is 'the telly'. theverge.com #

Sanda Dia: Belgium reckons with verdict over black student's hazing death - I really dislike these hazing rituals where foreigners are systematically abused and harrassed. I didn't growup in my home countries and I've always felt like a bit of a foreigner everywhere I've been, including at 'home'. IMO it's an outdated part of our collective cultures. Great to see the students standing together against these horrid incidents. bbc.com #

Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn’t Apply To AI Training - Very topical with the writers strike in Hollywood, and also really important for all, there's a new arms race beginning, we need to ensure we don't inadvertently destroy entire culture ecosystems technomancers.ai #

Zeal is an offline documentation browser for software developers - This looks cool, it's similar to devdocs.io, but better because the data isn't stored in ephemeral browser storage. Wish there was an iOS app. zealdocs.org #

Steak, coffee and cheese locked up as shoplifting rises - Not a very good omen bbc.com #

WebRTC support being added to FFmpeg - Simple HTTP-based protocol that will allow WebRTC-based ingestion of content into streaming services and/or CDNs, which would make it much easier to for example setup YouTube, Telegram or Facebook livestreams news.ycombinator.com #

The new Motorola Razr Plus looks kind of amazing. It's foldable with a pretty big outside screen that you can use with most apps, and it opens from clam shell to a massive screen. Great tech specs, and has the vibe of the old Razr flip phone but modern. theverge.com #

Elon Musk: Twitter boss reclaims title of world's richest person - At $192 billion net worth, it's mind boggling to me that Elon could buy 128 million Macbook Airs. What is this world we are living in? bbc.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Quite A Lot Of History markjgsmith.com #

These tiny, medical robots could one day travel through your body colorado.edu #

Advanced Fastify: Hooks, Middleware, and Decorators - It's been a while since I've looked at the fastify project, really liking the plugin and hooks systems, not to mention express compatibility blog.appsignal.com #

Node.js built-ins on Deno Deploy - This is awesome. The deno team are on a phenominally good run of consistent and impressive releases. I really want to try out their platform for some apps. deno.com #

Vanilla With Candy Sprinkles - A heck of an impressive demo app, so many options and global too. Would be cool to try out the fly.io platform too. I especially like how easy it is to spin up databases. fly.io #

tj/node-migrate - Abstract migration framework for node - Database migrations can be tricky, but if you have the right tools, it's much easier. This library is database agnostic, which is awesome, and has a very express middleware vibe to it, also awesome. Of course it does, it's from tj. github.com #

Leaders have signed the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade in Washington which aims to strengthen economic ties. China has denounced the move, and has previously described such negotitations as 'extremely dangerous'. bbc.com #

🚀 New Post: Organising my RSS feeds markjgsmith.com #

CSS Blend Modes - At first these don't look that impressive but as you go through the examples you eventually realise the examples look pretty darn cool, and you realise they could have called this feature CSS Andy Warhol, or CSS Cartoon Strips garden.bradwoods.io #

LangChainJS the popular AutoGPT library is announcing support for multiple JS environments including browsers, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel/Next.js, Deno, Supabase Edge Functions, alongside existing support for Node.js ESM and CJS blog.langchain.dev #

Going Beyond Chatbots: How to Make GPT-4 Output Structured Data Using LangChain blog.langchain.dev #

Libuv devs have added io_uring support for several asynchronous file operations, including read, write, fsync, fdatasync, stat, fstat and lstat. Works on newer linux kernel versions and gives an 8x performance boost. Falls back to the thread pool for older kernel versions. I'm wondering if that means my ssg is going to run that much quicker. Sounds kind of amazing. github.com #

WPP one of the world’s largest advertising groups, is teaming up with Nvidia to use AI to create in minutes campaigns that would have previously taken weeks. The system will be able to generate fully photorealistic images using 3D software which can then be used in AI generated video or 2D, eliminating the need for filming or green screens. 10000 variations of a car advert can be generated in a couple of minutes, varying all elements. ft.com #

🚀 New Post: When will AI start to affect macro? markjgsmith.com #