markjgsmith

Busy day today, not much blogging probably. #

I do find all the LLMs stuff interesting, and I've noticed the latest Anthropic release for Claude seems to be reverberating with folks, especially for its better coding ability. The developer in me was immediately curious about this Simon Willison deep dive into the system prompts. Though there was definitely some interesting stuff in there I found myself skimming through it, because like all things LLM, it's all so wordy, and you also end up feeling like some sort of computer psycologist. I wonder whether my web developer trained brain will ever get as into this as Simon appears to be.

At the minute, to me it feels a bit too close to horoscopes than I am comfortable with, no offense to any psychics and mediums that might be reading this post. I find myself craving for the unambiguity of if statements, for loops, variables and of course async/await. #

Jason Calacanis (17:20): "Employees are going to get to certain points in their day and they are going to say can I get some more work to do? Humans are going to be begging for work". #

Jason Calacanis: "I have heard stories from founders, that people will get…they don't have the shares, they will say hey do you want to buy some Andril, I dont have the shares, would you pay this, then they setup an SPV or something, they collect your money, then they go find the shares, they have charged you over…I don't know if any of that is true but that's the back channel, is that there are people claiming they have access to shares, maybe they are buying shares in another SPV, and the markups, and the circular nature of this, is unregulated […] it's kind of another boiler room." #

The Ives - Altman collaboration announcement is interesting. There's something very funny about the whole thing, but also it's like hey maybe it's sort of serious, or they are partly aware of the ridiculousness. Perhaps this is the frontier of reality comedy hybrid. They have certainly got everyone talking about them. #

Since moving to Android I've been using QR codes a lot more. I noticed that several products I've bought recently have QR codes that encode a url. It's kind of neat. Well it just occurred to me that the ability to share a url with someone nearby you could be very useful. Turns out you can do this in Chrome. It's just another option in the share menu. You don't need an internet connection, you don't need to exchange contact details or login info, the url is encoded into the weird looking pixelated image. The person nearby that you are sharing the link with just has to scan the image with their phone's 'scan qr code' feature, which most modern phones have.

BTW, I'm seeing QR codes everywhere here in Europe. I think you can even pay bills using them, but I haven't figured out how people are doing that yet. Stablecoins perhaps? #

Lots of insightful stuff in the latest Vergecast podcast, especially around AI and the future of the web. Great episode, worth listening to. A few snippets that stood out:

Nilay Patel (1:11:31): "The web is the place where the information is, is quickly getting abstracted away to the web is the database that the new AI Google search synthesises for you."

Nilay Patel (1:16:05): "The web is a miracle. Straightforwardly, the web is a miracle. We have, in the world, a giant interconnected interdependent mostly open application platform. That's weird."

David Pierce (1:19:18) asks “Do we still need websites?” And after a bunch of interesting discussion including a quote from Sundar Pichai saying “What is the web but a series of databases” and eventually lands on this thought:

"The fundamental question here is what happens when display adds don't work anymore? What is the business of the web for the people that have traditionally relied on display ads? [...] but if the web is a series of un-rendered databases, the whole business of the web is suddenly immediately gone."

Alex Heath: Are websites just going to become like driving a vintage car? It's going to be this thing you do because it's a luxury, it feels good, it's a bespoke unique experience, it's not as efficient, but you do it and you spend more money. I kind of feel like that's the direction websites are going to go. #

In recent weeks, a lot of public companies are starting to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, doing the Saylor playbook. There are some websites poping up tracking these bitcoin treasury companies. It's interesing to see the distribution, they are all over the world. Could be the start of some sort of Bitcoin mania. #

CZ, Binance CEO (28:53): "There's a lot of data that we don't store, and now we are going to be smarter about how we store our data. They should be stored in a permissioned way, that we only allow access when we want to, and we should be able to monetise out of it. So your health data, you can be annonymised and used to train different AIs. Every interaction you have, every thought you have etc, if you want to you should be able to digitize that, blockchain tokennize it, and then be able to monetize it." #

CZ, Binance CEO (33:18): "What we are short on is not ideas. The same ideas, the same people have. What we lack on is strong founders that have very strong conviction, founders who are mission driven. Founders who are money driven...in this industry, in the crypto industry though, it's quite easy to raise 10, 50, 100, even more millions of dollars. People who are money driven, once they raise 100 million they think they have made it and the drive they kind of lose it. People who are mission driven, they continue to go. And also people who are mission driven, when there is some adversity, they plough through it. From our perspective what we lack most is strong founders in the space. We have a lot of strong founders, but we need way more, we need 10 X more. Strong founders with conviction, with ability to execute. If you have all 3, there is so much money to be made. You don't even have to think about money, the money will just come." #

Quite a crazy few days for me, hopefully things have settled at least for a short while. The world keeps on turning :) #

5 Dimensional Beings

They must look at us humans and laugh, and also cry.

We just can't seem to not do the things that cause us issues, like blocking the things we instruct people to do, then getting angry and blaming them. It happens again and again and again, at different scales. You see it all over the news media if you pay attention, and all throughout your own life, no doubt. It's hilarious, but it's also not hilarious a lot of the time. Things are so messed up that situations become perverse, with total reality inversions.

With folks being so worried about immigration, eventually won't they reach the ridiculous conclusion that hey, if they are getting in and we can't stop them, then we better make sure that we literally ARE them. Which makes no sense until you realise the enormity of that possibility, and then see evidence that it might actually be happening. And you know, maybe they have a point, and actually it seems like nobody really gets out of this all happy because guess what, we are all living on the same big space rock.

We are all in the most bizarre modern art museum of all time. All looking at this utterly mind boggling work of art. The rich, the poor, the in between, and the rest and we are all rubbing our chins in perplexity, staring, gawking. What is it? And we are sharing our points of view that are hopelessly impossible to integrate because we've been doing this for so long we have forgotten we are in a museum. We can't even explain it to our children or friends, let alone folks from other jurisdictions. Jurisdictions which don't even make sense anymore.

The piece of art we are all looking at, all trying to make sense of, this beautiful monstrosity, is us.

Regardless, the earth keeps on turning. Revolving around the hot star in the sky.

And the giant 11 dimensional snake we are all living on, keeps eating its tail, and we all have to periodically get out and run along carrying all our things, just to make sure we don't get gobbled up. How long can it go on? Surely not forever?

And occasionally you get a glimpse of this weird structure. Like a shadow. A projection of the higher dimensional structure, into our puny 3+1 dimensions. But it is only a slice.

I don't have much advice, especially if you haven't been through any very turbulent times. The strange thing about life is there are these periods where things are relatively calm, things kind of make sense, mostly, sort of. But then there is a disturbance, things feel out of place all of a sudden, and the cascade starts. What I can say is that once you've been through a lot of these, you get a sense of ‘oh gosh, here we go again’. And it really is like a roller coaster sometimes. And sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it really isn't.

The only thing I think is important is to have some empathy, and kindness and compassion for others, because they are likely going through something similar, but also different. It might even be completely opposite, which is a mind trip, and then you realise that it might even be in eleven dimensions too. Oh gosh, time for an ice tea.

It's frustratingly nebulous. Just got to get to the next oasis of calm.

La vie est belle? Says a random man in a shop. Seems to be the thing people say in this small, very beautiful town.

The day continues to unfold into one of those days where the world wants you to speed up, but then it doesn't like you sped up and then wants you to slow down. The day continues in this oscillating pattern, you are always either a couple of steps behind or a couple of steps ahead, but rarely just right, or when you find you do actually fall into the groove, everyone is unhappy about that too like your some kind of know it all.

How dare he be “in the groove”. And you think to yourself, yep it's definitely that thing again. Oh well, I'll just mind my own business, smile eversoslightly, and continue along. #

Not the most productive day, quite strange in places, but there were quite a few nice bits too. A very pleasant stroll along a big river, and some very tastey food. Everyone enjoying the sunny weather as best they could. #

Lots of crazy stuff happening seemingly everywhere at the minute. Feels like it's important to stay upbeat about things. #

I've never been to Syria but I've seen first hand people living in very difficult conditions in other parts of the world so I can imagine how this might feel for the Syrians. All we in the west have heard for so many years is all these terrible things happening in Syria, so I'm just so happy there's some hope for them finally. Best wishes for all. #

It's interesting to see that the US and the Saudis are getting on. This article made me smile a bit. It wasn't all that long ago, probably a decade ago, that I got pulled over into secondary at the US - Canadian border. I was going for a weekend snowboarding in Vermont. What was the issue? I had UAE stamp in my passport, because I had been to Abu Dhabi a few years before. Why had I been there? I was doing solutions architect work there for a US company! They were building a new television broadcast center there and I was integrating our software into their internal workflows and systems.

Anyhow the trip went well, I found the emeratis to be very friendly. It was kind of wild as the plane was landing in the early evening, looking down across the vastness of the desert, to see in the distance tiny pickup trucks and people riding camels battling the sand storms.

How times change. I hear and see lots of tech entrepreneurs visiting the region the last couple of years. #

I just rewatched the very cool Harold White space warp drive explanation that was featured on the latest Rogan. It's at 25:42 if you want to skip straight to it. The thing that I keep wondering is that if you are traveling at say warp 5, how do you ensure you don't smash into anything? The stoping distance at WARP5 has got to be spectacularly long, and I would have thought that across such large distances the chances of hiting something that is vaguely space ship sized must increase. #

Netlify support did finally get around to updating their cli github action, so all my deploys are working again. Thanks to those that took the time to post their similar experiences in the thread. #

Hey Netlify, are you okay?

This is day 2 of Netlify blocking all my deploys that are coming from inside Github Actions workflows. I have no idea what's going on because they appear to be ignoring my posts on their support forum. I'm fairly certain the issue is on their side because I reset the code to the exact version that created the current live website, a known good version since that made it out without any issues, and that is now getting blocked too.

So far I can still deploy by building the site locally and deploying direct, but that's really sub-optimal because the workflows in the Github actions do all sorts of extra things. And who knows how long this will last. Hey Netlify, are you okay? #

All sorts of strange issues today. As well as all the deploy problems, I had some really quite bizare interactions with GPTs today. I have previously had some good experiences working on CSS with AIs, but today was with javascript, and it was really quite terrible. I was trying to do something very simple, and the AI was repeatedly failing, and adding complexity while doing so. So I asked it to remove the styling that it had added without asking me, and it said yep removed it. And it hadn't. This went on for at least 30 mins. Over and over it would say that it had removed it, but then it still hadn't, and it would even check itself and say, oh yes I didn't remove it, then still fail to remove it.

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before, and I can't believe I hadn't thought if this, and I also can't believe I haven't heard anyone talking about this yet. How do we know that the GPT companies aren't just barely training their models, then releasing them to billions of users half baked, so that the users train them for free without knowing it. Surely this is bound to happen as VC money dries up. #

Having some errors with the deploy to Netlify this morning. This is just a test post. Bit of a mystery since the status page doesn't show any relevant errors or incidents. #

There's definitely some type of issue on Netlify this morning as far as I can tell. I've openned a support case. The good news is that since I run a static site all powered by git, I can continue writing posts locally and they will sync up later, the bad news is that nothing new is currently being added to the live site. #

Well I am able to deploy directly to Netlify, hence you can read this post, but deploys via Github Actions appear to be completely blocked for me. I haven't seen that before in all the years I've had my sites on Netlify. It's a bit strange. No reply yet on the support forum site, almost 7 hours after reporting it. Not great. Especially since deploys to all my sites are currently affected. #

What with the Trump tarrifs, new US trade deals being struck, and the new pope, it feels like a lot of big things are sliding into place. I wonder whether this could be the beginning of a nice bit of momentum for everyone. #

This whole transition to using AI tools is going to be very complex. Of course that's nothing new to hear, but I get a sense that some are starting to get a feel for the size of the issue at hand. Reality is very very complicated and it took humanity literally millions of years in a shared reality to build the current non-AI "solution". I feel like we need to be careful, but also not too careful, sometimes you have to press on reguardless. But also, empathy, kindness. #

Running my static generator in the VSCode debugger

I configured the VSCode debugger to run my static site generator. It's been a while since I've been debugging like this. It's awesome to finally see the code running with all the debug tools. Makes it so much easier to get back into code that I wrote years ago. I wanted to make a quick note of it here, it's one of those things that you configure then don't think about for ages. Now I can refresh my brain with this blog post.

Crucially VSCode supports debugging programs launched via npm. Since I use npm scripts to run my code locally and in Github actions, I wanted to use the same method in the debugger.

The trick to getting it working was to use the npm launch configuration, and to also add a new 'debug' npm script, which was a copy of the existing 'build' npm script but with the additional '--inspect' node arg. Then when you run the debugger in VSCode, and after you have set a breakpoint somewhere near the top of your code, the command line window opens, and VSCode runs the program, halting at your breakpoint and you can step through the code, examining variables, callstacks and use all sorts of other cool tools. #

Nothing huge or major today, but I did fix a long standing bug on the linkblog that had been causing a display issue on some links. Basically if you used a file editor that adds a newline at the end of files when saving them, then that caused the linkblog link created from said file to not have space between the link text and link domain, which looked kind of bad. I was having to use an annoying workaround using the linux truncate command to remove the newline after each save. Anyhow that's fixed now. #

Figured I'd try for one more feature for the redesign. Here's a bunch of text. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. And if I've done this right, there should be a picture in the top right of this note. #

Long overdue site redesign

Just a quick post about the recent site redesign. I have been wanting to do a bit of an overhaul of the site design for a long time at this point. That wasn't possible until now because I was coding everything on a very small screen. Now that I have a laptop, the redesign became possible, and also somewhat more urgent because (1) I could see how bad the site looked on desktop browsers and (2) I'm looking for a job. The fact that it was quite a painless redesign is confirmation that my static site generator is working well, and perhaps my long term vision might be possible.

Here's a couple of screenshots that show the before and after for prostherity:

The biggest annoyance with the old design was that the text was too wide on desktop browsers. Though it looked okay on mobile, it spanned the entire screen on desktop. Second to that was the top of the page looked very empty and bare, and the menu items were confusing, but also far too minimalist. That's the best I could do without being able to open up devtools.

The new design takes a traditional blog layout approach, with a sidebar on desktop that contains the menu items. That frees up the header section considerably, cleaning it up, making it look neat and tidy. The main content now has text that doesn't span the entire page, making it much easier to read. I also added some borders around the different posts so it's completely clear where each one starts and finishes, even when the page displays posts of different types.

Along with the visual redesign I re-organised all the pages, updating the breadcrumbs making it less confusing when browsing the archives. It's often a good idea to cleanup things both visually but also logically. Hopefully the site is a lot easier to read on desktop now.

I've added some javascript and CSS to create a hamburger menu button that appears in the top right of the screen on small screens. That way there is no need for a wasteful sidebar taking up valuable screen space on those devices. Clicking / taping the hamburger menu opens a centered list of menu items. Clicking / taping it a second time closes the menu. Load the page on a mobile device or resize your browser window to test it out.

That's it really, it's still quite minimalist but is a good foundation to build on. At some point in the future I plan to make some more frontend changes to give it a more styled look. I just need to decide what direction to take it in design wise. For now it's good enough.

Thanks to Gemini for helping with some of the trickier CSS and javascript. It was actually very fun pair programming with an AI. #

Just discovered a small bit of collateral damage from the site redesign. A lot of the site links on the about and portfolio pages were 404ing. I've updated them, so they now point to the correct place. Sorry, the links should work again now. #

Just had a strange but interesting conversation with ChatGPT about Belgium politics and belgians. I learnt a lot. Wish I could have asked it to draw a few more pictures. I felt a good representation necessitates much more creativity. Then again perhaps my questions could be better too.

It asked me to try again tomorrow. Anyways, check out the conversation. #

Following yesterday's redesign, I've been re-organising the menu items and pages on the blog this morning so they make more sense. It's not exactly right just yet, but it's better than it was. The problem is that "blog" is what we call the entire site, and the main page of that site is a page that display the blog posts, notes items and links all interleaved. But the menu items give you a way to view these individually as well. However since /blog is the site main page, then where do you put the page that shows just the blog posts? Bit of a connundrum. Well I've opted for /posts. As in 'only the blog posts'.

The whole things is compounded slightly by the idea of archives. Basically this is just a way to find posts by navigating a date folder structure. I won't go into it here, but you'll see the problem if you click around a bit. Integrating individual posts with the ability to have archives isn't trivial. I've noticed others are having similar issues on their blogs. Anyways, things are getting better slowly, bit by bit. #

I ended up figuring out the archives issue I mentioned earlier. I was able to change just the breadcrumbs at the top of each page which show the current location. It wasn't as complicatd as I had thought, but just difficult to see. It wasn't actually all that difficult to change, which is a really good sign that my static generator is very flexible. Of course there are some simplifications that could be made, but on the whole, it's working rather well. I think it likely won't be too much effort to get it to a state where I can release it as open source. #

My new favorate thing: Writing CSS code with Gemini. CSS is actually kind of fun again. And now the blog looks half decent both in a web browser and on mobile. More changes to come no doubt. Technically I guess this is vibe coding. #