Saturday, July 20, 2024

The new thing, since the evening before yesterday evening, is people dressed in black. Mostly head to toe black, occasionally just a black tshirt. They have been appearing everytime some sort of manufactured anger goading is in progress. They will often appear to be having a normal conversation, but then they drop in a word that was used in a key moment during the previous anger goading situation, which was usually in a totally different location. It sticks out like a soar thumb in amongst the apparent vietnamese they are speaking.

There was quite a bit of sleep depravation by roudy groups that kept showing up one after the other yesterday evening like some sort of relay race. It was clear I was being blamed for something. There were several seruptitious 'you learn' shouting in amongst the frollicking cleary aimed directly at me.

I’m still calling out people stealing from me. That’s going down about as you would expect. Usually resulting in even more stealing. Sandwich shops suddenly run out of ingredients, cafe shop seating areas suddenly get mysteriously sealed off with cardboard box tape, shop staff counters closing as you get to the front of the queue, getting redirected to another queue, only for that queue to also get mysteriously closed. Even self depracating jokes about being a tennis ball, go down like a ton of bricks. Only they are aloud to be funny, you can never be funny, even if you are taking the piss out of yourself.

The hypocracy reaches the end of the universe and pokes a whole through to the next universe, while simultaneously springing a leak into 12 different dimensions you never even knew existed.

Got issue #173 of the newsletter writen and published though. That felt pretty good.

And I’m right back at it listening to podcasts, taking notes, writing blog posts and posting links. #

Likely no blog posts today. I’ve gone through all the low hanging fruit from my daily notes, the ones remaining require a bit more thought and attention and space to think. The world has been yah’ing me for days now. Of course there is only so much of that I can withstand, eventually it turns into an infiniti block. I’m going to try and chill for the rest of the day. I've got the newsletter out, published a bunch of links, and done most of my backlog pruning, ready for next week.

This past week had been a productive one, yet I need to find a balance where I can write code as well. Writing code and 3 blog posts a day, isn’t realistic. Certainly not on the puny hardware I'm currently stuck with. #

There’s something really egregious about people that are openly generous but then passive aggressively discourage you from accepting their generocity. It’s really a very pernicious form of stealing, and the worst kind because it’s essentially stealing from everyone, it’s stealing from society. And it often comes from folks that say they are all for working together, for the common good. Double egregious. #

Rogan’s secret to building cool businesses

I think this piece from the latest Rogan podcast where he has on Sam Morril was kind of relevant to the theme of my latest newsletter issue #173, all about the Fiction, Art and Music that the technologies we build make possible. He’s managed over the last few years to create a comedy club that’s now become some sort of legendary comedy hub, and it’s not even in LA or New York. It’s in Texas.

They are talking about comedy clubs and after a great Rodney Dangerfield detour, Rogan highlights why he thinks the business has really started firing on all cylinders [01:12:54]:

The thing is there is a separation between the people that do it and the business. That’s where all the friction comes from. In my club there is no separation between the people that do it and the business, cause the people that do it, own it, and it’s all of ours. The way I refer to it, I don’t refer to it as my club. This club is setup for comedians, it was never setup to make any money.

The whole concept was that I just want to make something where I don’t lose money. I just want to break even, if I break even, I’ll be super happy. It’s not a money making venture at all.

So the money structure is different, the comedians get most of the money, and there is plenty of money for the bar and plenty of money for the wait staff. There is plenty of money for everybody. It’s just you can’t be greedy.

In most environments the club makes most of the money and the comedians don’t.

He then goes on to perhaps the take away observation [01:14:18]:

But it’s funny that the best way to make a business, is to make a business where you just do it the best way to express the art form, and then the business thrives.

It’s worth listening to the whole bit. I wonder if this is a re-occuring theme in the arts, or even in businesses in general. Some of the coolest places I've worked in my lifetime have had some elements of what he describes here. Presumably he’s able to fund the whole venture because of his other ventures. There’s something about the freedom he is able to provide that’s actually great for business.

I wonder how much time and effort he spends making sure it’s sustainable.

tech society

Quantum computers aren’t what you think...they’re cooler | Hartmut Neven (TED Talks Daily Podcast) - A look into the weird science behind quantum computing where huge computations can be carried out using parallel universes. It’s very early days for this technology, but we will soon be able to use quantum computers to solve problems in medicine, AI, neuroscience and more. All sorts of interesting examples of what we might be able to do in the future. We might even be able to discover the dynamics of consciousness, and perhaps even ways to expand it. ted.com #

Caitlin Long and the Conundrums of Europe Ep#183 (Goats Gold 'n Guns Podcast) - Caitlin Long who runs Custodia Bank is on the show to discuss the recent elections in the UK and France, and how they have been affecting the markets. She also goes into her difficult experiences trying to setup a crypto focused full reserve bank, Trump and crypto, Tether & US treasuries, and the unconstitutional structure of the FED. podcastindex.org #

Bicep Ep#722 (Resident Advisor Podcast) - Interview with Irish duo Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar. Setting up a label, their background in graphic design and advertising, tech gear, the writing process, live shows vs writing albums, mixing seminar at Abbey Road, upping their game and working with tech wizards, working as a duo, Belfast vs London, people’s differing views on emotions, writhing with purpose, being maximal with minimal, negative spaces, giving your brain space, taking the essence out and striping it back, teasing the audience, harnessing energy, 1 word song titles, the Brit awards, creativity during the pandemic, fear & worry in the community, signing with Ninja Tune, performing live vs DJing, being on the road, Glastonbury, first Essential Mix, first Beats in Space mix, first show in Japan, rave energy and clubs in general, blogging their sets, artistic kinship, making tunes and getting them out as quick as possible, collaborating, and shooting video for visuals. ra.co #

Cafes to work from in Chiang Mai - I miss Chiang Mai, it’s been so many years since I was last there. James Clark has re-written one of his oldest cafe review pieces. I'm linking to it because in a freakish bit of synchronicity, I started drinking coffee again this week and it’s resulted in me writing loads of blog posts. Some of these new places sound awesome. nomadicnotes.com #

Nvidia and Mistral’s new model ‘Mistral-NeMo’ brings enterprise-grade AI to desktop computers - This feels like it could be one of those low key announcements that goes mostly unnoticed but then ends up being quite important. The model is not anywhere near as powerful as the latest OpenAI models but it’s open source, and runs on your own personal hardware, rather than on a data centre monster GPU. Turns out there are many applications that don’t require the bestest model, but do require much more privacy, because small busineses want to be in control of their data. venturebeat.com #

Bicep - Bicep 2017 - A Pitchfork review of their self titled debut album. I couldn’t find anything in podcast form that I could download, but this review popped up. I love reading electronic music reviews, they are often pieces of art in their own right, capturing the vibe in textual form, of something that attempts to capture the vibe of something in audio form. There’s something very magical happening when it works. It’s funny because I imagine they probably read like total gibberish to folks that are not familiar with the genres. I assure you though, there really is an undiscovered parallel dimension, or several, to all this modern electronic stuff. pitchfork.com #

Zelenskiy to attend UK cabinet meeting in effort to disrupt Russian oil sales - He attended the European Political Community summit and will address the new government caninet. It’s intetesting to see Zelenskiy in the UK but also how the UK will operate on european matters while outside the EU. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Fiction, Art, Music, Aliens & Evolutionary Biology (Issue #173) markjgsmith.com #

Working with Pasted Content in JavaScript - Nothing earth shatering but useful to know. Depending on what you add to the clipboard, say HTML text or files for example, you get different data in the event object, which you then need to handle in some way. raymondcamden.com #

A Developer's Review of a Snapdragon X Laptop (Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x) - Interesting to see a price and spec comparison with MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Looks like, as I suspected, 16GB RAM is pretty much the minimum these days for a development machine. Makes sense, even my now defunct MacBook Pro from 2013 had 16GB of RAM, and these days they need to run AI coding copilot tools. Any less RAM just isn’t viable. wezm.net #

SqLite for NodeJS - They are adding Sqlite to nodejs core, so you’ll be able to write database driven apps right out of the box. Very cool! github.com #

New Post: Rogan’s secret to building cool businesses markjgsmith.com #