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. #

More build minute issues - I spent much of the begining of the month laying some foundations for the interleaved everything feature of my static site generator. It's a re-imagining of the website's homepage. The current latest page format doesn't work particularly well at showing what's going on because each section moves at it's own speed. I think a unified page where all post types just appear interleaved as they are posted will be a lot better.

Once the foundational changes were done, I decided it was a good time to harmonise all the build and deploy scripts into a single repo. Mostly that has worked really well. I did find yesterday that the archives plugin was still using the old deploy workflow. I'm sure I had written the code, it was one of the first plugins I converted. I think what must have happened was I deleted the feature branch before I merged it. It was a very chaotic environment at the time, and it was super difficult to keep track of so many repos that needed to be updated. Anyhow it wasn't that difficult to redo the changes, and now that's all merged and working.

But all these foundational changes required a lot of building and deploying, and now that they're done, I've discovered that I'm 80% through this cycle's build minutes. It's really frustrating because I've written the interleaved everything code, along with an interleaved everything RSS feed but if I start testing it now, I'll definitely run out of minutes, and we're only half way through the month!

In the interest of still being able to post links, notes, newsletters etc, I'm having to pause all dev work :(

Hey World, why is it that I always seem to have not quite enough? It's a pattern in my life that re-occurs constantly. Every single time, circumstances occur that result in me arriving just short of the target. One would have thought, that at least some times things would work out in my favour, but that basically never happens. And each time at that exact moment, an opportunity arises that is no longer possible because of the lack of resources. But if I don't press forward with my projects, and save resources, those opportunities never arise!

Come on world, enough rubbing people's noses in it, when you do the exact same thing. Sort it out! #

The softly softly murmurers - It's another early afternoon with the softly softly murmurers. They are like timid cats, that sit behind you and murmer, except they are humans! Not quite loud enough so you can hear what they are saying. It goes on for hours. I'm pretty sure it's just gibberish, it seems to be highly correlated to my movements, like they are keying off me.

Not much you can do about it.

Based on the morning I've had, it's a sign they are angry, but projecting their anger onto me, to try and make me angry, so they can say 'look he's the angry one!'. Not this time though. I'm not at all angry. Sure I'm caught up in it all like everyone else, inflation affects us all, not just monetary, there's also karma inflation. They create the problem they later complain about, then they escallate and escallate, until everything in the whole universe is psychic mess, then they blame it all on me. #