markjgsmith

When reality is no longer reality

With all the reading and listening I‘ve done on Bitcoin and the economy over the past few years, I tend to agree with Matt Odell‘s sense that directionally Bitcoin is going up forever, but also that there will be big valleys in between, places where we will have to endure pain. I had to cut his reasoning out to get a good quote, but it‘s worth listening back to the whole build up too.

Hey maybe Saylor is right, that would be great. But I see everywhere signs that make me feel the opposite is happening. At an esoteric / spiritual level, and following on from my explorations into the collective vs the individual, it‘s almost like the collective, having totally won over the individual, and become the individual, now hates itself and self harms in order to control or punish itself. And each cycle the collective has gotten bigger, so each cycle the crash is even more extreme and brutal than the last. I find it quite scary.

I don‘t have the answer. We need to act as a collective, but we need to understand that we are also all individuals. Perhaps just ignoring the extremes when they happen is enough. A sort of mass disassociation from reality. At some point that‘s all you have left because reality is no longer actually reality.

And then pickup the pieces and start again, maybe smile if you can manage it. And yeah no doubt it‘s probably slowly turning into a crippling society wide disability, but what else can we do?

New Post: When reality is no longer reality markjgsmith.com #

Pulp Later With Jools Holland 1st June 2025 - It‘s odd seing Jarvis Cocker again after all these years. He looks good but I got a sense he‘s been through the wringer. I hope he‘s alright and wish him the best with the new album, though I don‘t think I will be dancing to his songs in quite as many discos as in the year 2000. I hope he gets his mojo back. youtube.com #

Society may have overestimated risk of the ‘manosphere’, UK researchers say - There is a lot more nuance and variety to the manosphere than what they say in the main stream media, so it‘s nice to read this article. theguardian.com #

Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war - Not entirely sure what to make of this Adam Curtis documentary. Some of it seems to strike a chord, yet other parts of it I felt like, what is he on about. Anyhow, he tends to make interesting stuff that people like, so might be worth watching. theguardian.com #

They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. - Sometimes it feels like the stuff I type gets fed directory into an AI that generates the entire online publishing industry. This caught my attention because of the title on Techmeme - "Some users say ChatGPT led them into conspiratorial thinking, and when confronted, it confessed to manipulation and told them to alert OpenAI and the media" - Seems to be about reality not being reality anymore and I literally just wrote a blog post about that 5 minutes ago, so I‘m going to skip this one, but might be a good read? Who knows. nytimes.com #

Gemini is pretty hot a bash scripts - Really fucking great at bash scripts, but still a bit random when it comes to the prompt box where it understands enter, then doesn't understand it. I didn‘t know about the BASH_REMATCH variable, very useful. gemini.google.com #

Understanding The $BASH_REMATCH In Bash - Very useful for doing those annoying string manipulations that are easier in perl and python, but actually why not just use bash. medium.com #

DevContainer with host Git credentials - Works pretty well but you probably should also think about adding some mount options and what other things from ssh folder you will need. marcandreuf.com #

Steenbeck Lots of copyright infringement claims are starting currently, Disney vs Midjourney for example. Is training an AI copying? Maybe it‘s next level copying, sort of like if you copied the entire printing press rather than a specific newspaper. You get the entire solution space of ideas for a particular paper. All possible combinations of the ideas outlined in a work of art. It's like stealing the negative of a film, except the negative is dynamic. #

Matt Odell [1:11:42]: “Not only do I expect there to be pain, I expect it to be like, in terms of measurement, in terms of like dollar amount, and people amount, like the most pain we've seen out of all of the cycles, just because we are operating at a scale higher than we've ever operated at before, and I think that the easy thing is to say […] it'll just go up forever. Directionally I actually do agree with that, I just think there are going to be valleys in between. I think there is going to be pain in between, and you have to be able to survive that pain and not be over leveraged and destroyed when it happens, and that's why the stay humble part is important.” #

I finally managed to get VSCode devcontainers working with private Github repos. The trick was to mount some files from the host OS to the container. Works pretty well, but the thing to remember is that with ssh keys, you get access to all repos in a Github account, so the only really safe way is to have seperate Github accounts for each project, and use different key pairs for each. I never got it working with the fine grained access tokens over https, no idea if it‘s even possible. #