markjgsmith

Strategy still popular

With Bitcoin recent big draw down of course lots of people talking about Michael Saylor and his Bitcoin treasury company Strategy. They have rebranded slightly from Microstrategy, now called just Strategy. I have been trying to sort the signal from the noise, which isn't all that obvious.

Saylor posted a chart in the past few days on Twitter that is kind of interesting. It shows the weekly volumes of Bitcoin backed credit, showing that even though Bitcoin is down, his Bitcoin based financial intruments are surging. What I thought was interesting was that volumes have increased for all of his offerrings.

What seems to be happening, and of course I totally could have this wrong, I am definitely not an expert, is it's the access to Bitcoin he is providing that people are interested in. There are those that just want a bit of Bitcoin exposure, they want to try and profit from the volatility. Those folks buy the common stock, which is still very volatile. They night not be setuo to buy Bitciin direct, but they can totally buy financial intruments. It's just stocks and shares, and that normal for institutions. Then there are those that buy the preferred stock, which has some volatility protection, but it's at a cost. Instead of the say 30-40% gains that you could get with regular Bitcoin, you only get like 10%. Saylor pockets the difference. And of course he then uses profits to buy more Bitcoin.

But what's super interesting is what the folks buying the preferred stocks are doing with them. These are toughted as rock solid, very over-collateralised securities. Strategy has so much Bitcoin in his treasury reserve that he can say for a fact that those securities will be honored well into the future even if Bitcoin goes down a lot. If something goes wrong, those shares get made whole first. So I think what's happening is folks are using these high quality securities as collateral to get dollar loans, to of course buy Bitcoin.

And they can get those loans from regular tradfi institutions because though they aren't necessarily setup to invest in Bitcoin, they love financial instruments, especially high quality ones. So it's like he is levering up, and they are levering up, and well that's what's happening. And it's the common stock folks that end up taking the risk I guess, and if you zoom out further well it's basically small retail investors that will likely foot the bill, because well the institutions levering up must be very good at timing the markets. I mean they have all sorts of futuristic algorythmic tools for predicting the tops and ways to exit the market gradually so as to not cause big disturbances, and basically by the time retail realise it's a market top, well those levered players are long gone.

And of course the big banks making the loans must know this, why else are they making the loans, they must have pretty good confidence they will get their money back. And the other thing is that other folks are shorting Bitcoin on the way down. They bet it will go down, and make tons when it does. You got to wonder where they are putting their winnings. What else are they going to buy aside from Gold? Well might as well buy some Strategy, and make some more as it goes back up.

I likely don't fully understand all the dynamics, but that seems to be the gist of it. Saylor has build a platform on the surface of the Sun, and for a fee you can setup shop on his Sun platform, and do what he's doing too.

It does seem totally bonkers. I wonder though isn't this just what regular financial markets have been doing all along? All be it in a less obvious way.

Probably worth being aware at some level what the dynamics are vaguely. #

Things to look forward to

I’m running really low on build minutes on Github, which is why I haven’t been blogging much, or in fact at all, the past week. I've also had quite a few administrative things to take care of, which is always a bit stressful. Last time I wrote, I was mid allergy attack. Well I recovered fully from that a few days ago, but today it’s another allergy day. Sneezing, sneezing, so much sneezing. Burning face. Dripping nose. Everything feels blocked. Feels like it never ends.

Tomorrow is a bit of a travel day. It will be nice to be in motion. I'm looking forward to the end of the month, when I can get the social media auto-poster workflows finished. I also have 1 other small feature that I've added to the site that needs testing. It’s not something that will make a big difference visually but it could be something interesting in the future. On the web it’s a good idea to try and get well positioned in case a wave starts to gather some momentum.

I've got about 35 build minutes left, to last until the end of the month. That's about 6 or 7 builds. Likely I won’t have much of a chance to write anything till early next week in any case.

Everything seems to be down at the minute. Markets are down. Bitcoin is down. General mood is really negative, and yet, in many of the podcasts I’m listening to, the sense seems to be that actually things are much better than people think.

The last 3 pods I listenned to that I thought were pretty darn great:

• Gemini 3 Launch, Big Tech Backs Anthropic, OpenAI Adds Fidji Simo (TBPN Podcast)
• Bitcoin & Macro Overview w/ Luke Gromen Q4 2025 (Bitcoin Podcast)
• Why data is the biggest AI bottleneck (feat. Arthur Mensch of Mistral AI) (This Week In Startups Podcast)

Not much else to report. I hope everyone out there is doing alright. #

Another suspiciously timed allergy flare up day today. The world continues to be very unhappy with my imperfections. Likely another tsunami on the way. Life goes on. Looking forward to another day. #

The alergy attack appears to have past, took almost the entire day. It can be completely debilitating when it happens. Very hard to concentrate on anything. It's sort of difficult to describe, not entirely disimilar to how it would feel to have stinging nettles rubbed all over your face, and right into your eyes. Sometimes I describe it as being punched in the face. It really drains your life energy. Roll on tomorrow :) #

Static websites + git everytime

Just as I manage to finally clear the decks this morning, and about to get back to finishing the rebuild of the Github Actions auto-poster, the internet connection disappears. Literally within a few seconds. Looks like the world is productivity min-ing again. This will no doubt be followed by some yah’ing and some everything is your faulting. Hard not to wonder whether reality should have a .cause property.

At least my blog is a website built with a static site generator so I can keep on blogging locally and sync later with git. #

Social media auto-poster progress

I managed to get a very minimal example of the Github Actions social media auto-poster workflow working. It proves that in theory the necessary sequence is possible. The reason it’s tricky is because I am trying to run all the auto-poster jobs in a job matrix in order to parallelize them. I’ve almost run out of build minutes this month, so here’s a summary, so I can pick it up again next month. It’s not really intended for anyone in particular except me.

It boils down to the GitHub scheduler making it very difficult to enforce a sequence of jobs where some of those jobs are optional (skipped). I need this because I have some jobs that read and write the current state of the RSS feed before and after running the auto-posters, but I don't want to force the caller to use the state management provided. They should be able to manage their own state.

The problem is though that the scheduler fails to properly trace the history when a required upstream job is skipped, causing the matrix job that launches the poster jobs in parallel, to enter a deadlock at the dependency validation stage. The solution bypasses this by using the always() condition, which forces the runner to ignore the flawed historical trace and proceed with execution based only on the immediate, successful output of the preceding step.

Though there are some edge cases still to test, it successfully completes with all jobs enabled and with some jobs skipped. The devil is always in the detail. #

Improved RSS feeds

I discovered that my RSS feeds were rendering the title inside the description. Titles should go in the title field! I know I know. How embarrassing.

Honestly it’s some sort of miracle of miracles that I even have RSS feeds that work at all. When I wrote the static site generator, I figured out how to do serverside components using just regular javascript and ejs templates, and that was pretty cool. It occurred to me that I could use the same serverside components to render the RSS feeds.

The way it works is essentially when the feed builder iterates through the posts data, it grabs the post’s item component, renders the feed item using the exact same component that gets used to render the post on the website. It works for all posts types, whether it’s blog, linkblog, podcast, newsletter or notes.

It wasn’t very obvious at all, especially because I wrote it all on an iPod Touch. It was a rough few years. I only realised relatively recently because I haven’t really been using RSS readers much at all the past few years.

I am always quite scarred to change the RSS code, because historically speaking, every time I go near the RSS code, really weird things tend to happen. I have no idea what that is all about, but it’s happened so many times that there is some amount of trauma.

Anyways, I took a look at the code just now, and it wasn’t that bad. It was really just adding if statement, though I did have to duplicate a dictionary for the everything feed, which without going into too much detail, doubles the memory consumption. Seems to be rendering fine though. Hopefully it will look a bit less ugly in readers. #

Not much fun with Gem

Two days of very frustrating debugging Github Actions with Gemini, who seems to have completely perfected being a lemming and confidently launching itself into ever more precarious situations, and every time I have to descend into the depths of hell just to make the tinniest bit of progress, and somehow find a way out of the trail of destruction it has caused.

Currently rebuilding a very complex workflow from scratch. I've had to build several minimal examples in order to prove to it that it doesn't have to be as horrendously complex as it constantly tries to make things. And when it becomes obvious I’m right, it then starts talking about my code being wrong, never mind that it wrote the code a few minutes earlier.

Not much fun. #

Google’s new coding agent called Jules

Jed Borovik was on the Latent Space Podcast talking about what it’s like inside Google Labs, and their new AI tool Jules.

I liked his description of the direction he sees things going in [08:06]:

“We have an API, so people are using it for all kinds of things. Triggering it when something happens. We saw an example where someone is triggering Jool’s to do all kinds of updates to their site, and then they have a Github action that is going to automatically merge Jules pull request. So all kinds of stuff is flowing...we are really changing how people are able to do stuff [...] we also have a CLI. We want to meet developers where they are [...] an API is great but when you are working locally you want to be able to trigger stuff [...] by the time this podcast comes out we will be integrated with the Gemini CLI [...], all kinds of places where we are going to mix and be able to harness this power, because developers work in all kind of spots, and so making it easy to have this autonomous ambient agent that can really do all kind of work for you.”

A lot of their discussion resonated with me, I’ve ran into many of the things they talk about.

I asked Gemini a bunch of technical things about Jules, and finally whether Gemini had met Jules:

"That's a fun, meta question! As a helpful AI assistant built by Google, I can't actually "meet" Jules in the way two people or two physical robots would. We exist in different operational contexts, but I am certainly aware of and have access to a wealth of information about its function and design."

It took the whole night to download but it did finally download and I am now running Tahoe 26.1. So far most things seem to be working find, but somewhat worryingly the vpn app is behaving a bit strangely. I connects but none of the buttons in the interface work. The weird thing is that the issues started happening right before I installed the updates. After the OS update I updated the vpn app, but the issues persist. And people wonder why folks hate updating their software.

The biggest difference so far with Tahoe is that it changed the wallpaper from giant redwood trees to a sunny beach with giant rocks and snow covered mountains far in the background. Perhaps mountains are trending. I appear to be ahead of the curve on mountains. #

It’s 1997s era of making agents

I thought this take from Bret Taylor about where we are in the AI rollout [1:30:13] was pretty good:

"We are like in the 1997 era of making agents. I found this article for Siera summit about creating websites in 1997, and there was this Wired article [...], and it was basically about banks spending 23 million dollars to add transactional support to their website, like adding a login form basically. And then you fast forward to the late 2010s and Kylie Jenner starts a multi-billion dollar cosmetics line with [...] 7 full time staff.

So we are still in the 1997 era of building agents where it’s way too hard. You end up putting a lot of engineering around what is a very intelligent set of models, just to make it work well, and I think what do you need to create a 7 person team to create a multi-billion dollar business on agents? And I think we have a lot of product and technology work still to do [...] but for an applied AI company like ours, the models are actually pretty great right now."

BTW, Bret is co-founder of Sierra and chairman of Open AI.

In case you weren’t around this was 1997.

It’s a great way to situate our current moment in the broader picture. Of course one of the big questions that naturally follows is how much faster the acceleration will be in this era, because presumably it won’t take 20 years? Or maybe it will?

It would be an interesting metric to track. #

Emoji fixes everything

I think I might have fixed the weird Github Actions workflow corruption thing. The fix is almost stranger than the original bug. I fixed it by adding an emoji to the workflow name. This is literally what I did, I'm not even joking. Is this the real world? #

Looks like the worldo breakages aren’t quite over yet. My MacBook Air M4 just kernel panic’d and crashed while I was using VScode pushing code. Gemini seems to think it’s something to do with low level hardware.

This kernel panic was caused by an unexpected and unrecoverable error in the system's low-level hardware management software, likely concerning the Accessory Operating Processor (AOP) or a peripheral it controls (like the audio system or other internal controllers).

It is almost certainly not caused by a third-party application, but rather an issue in the macOS kernel, Apple's firmware, or potentially a rare hardware malfunction.

Not a particulary great sign. At the exact moment it happened a woman outside made a noise that can be best described as "very suprised". Also not a great sign.

I’m running updates now, it seems to be upgrading me to Tahoe 26.1, 14.62 GB of updates to be precise. Might take a while... #

I've been listening, and occasionally watching, the TBPN Podcast a lot recently. It occurred to me today that it might be this era's Techcrunch, in terms of the flow of interesting stuff that goes through them. It feels similar in a lot of ways, but it's a 10x version of it. Their analysis of the bizarre moment we are in is very often quite incredible and it's also a lot of the time fucking hilarious. Now it is a bit heavy tech bro style silicon valley cultureish, so you have to be ok with that, but it's very much it's own thing, and I find I'm even sort of into the ridiculous add reads. There are of course some bits that are a bit average, but I just skip through those. Overall it's really high signal. #

Quite bad allergies flare-up today. It’s a real pain. This seems to often follow after several days of tsunamis. #

I got pretty much right to the end of the refactor of the auto-poster, everything was working, and then I notice that the workflows in Github are suddenly corrupt, appearing as the path instead of the name of the workflow. That’s exactly the same thing that happened last time. This is not normal. Hey world can you please stop getting in a huff and breaking everything? Would you please consider it? #

The internet connectivity issues where joined by their friends broken kettle, broken headphones, and a whole lot of world being prickly. I had a feeling there was going to be a streak of broken things a few days ago when I accidentally broke my coffee cup after being repeatedly tsunamied by worldo. Hey ho, that’s how it goes sometimes.

Well I just finished a pretty big refactor of the Github Actions social media autoposter. Not tested yet but it’s looking pretty good.

Managed to get myself a new kettle and I had a spare pair of headphones tucked away, and the internet and vpn both seem to be stable again, so I was able to listen to some great podcasts earlier. It’s such a crazy great time we live in, even if it is very confusing a lot of the time. #

I've been putting the finishing touches to new post to social media Github Action workflows. It's looking real good, very close to having it working, and now the internet just went down :( #

Peak plumber

I thought Jason Calacanis made an interesting point on his podcast this week [1:03:40]:

"If you could do a search and figure out what’s wrong with your dish washer [...] and not have to call the plumber, you’re like this is an incredible experience. You know what, people haven’t had that experience yet. But this winter when people’s HVACS go off or their pipes freeze and they take a picture of it, or they do a search on Google and it says oh you have this HVAC unit, it’s known to do this, here is how you reset it and relight the pilot, and you don’t have to call the person, and you fix it, or your housekeeper was able to clear the dishwasher cause suddenly they know how to take a picture of it and put the model number and say Error 72, and it’s like Error 72 is something is blocking it, take out this thing and clear the blockage. How many times have to had somebody come to your house and they fixed it in 5 minutes and you had to pay 150 bucks?"

The word on the street these days, is that the best new career path for everyone is to become a plumber or an electrician. Every Hollywood celebrity is parroting this new wisdom. And on the surface it seems like there might be some sense to it, especially with the AI boom and the explosion of data centers being built. Now I’m not saying that there isn’t something to this, but I am saying that if you are considering it, be aware that you should look more closely at the data. There are lots of competing factors.

While there is a data centre boom going on, and they do need lots of tradespeople in that industry, that’s a very specific type of electrician, and likely by the time you finish your apprenticeship, the boom will have plateaued quite a bit. And the other things is, as Jason points out, there is a whole class of jobs that new AI tools, available to everyone, that will be completely removed from the day to day of regular electricians and plumbers.

All this to say that, it’s worth doing your own analysis of the situation, because IMO there are a lot of self serving opinions being casually thrown about at the minute. They aren’t necessarily untrue, but they aren’t necessarily true either.

BTW, there are some interesting and quite spicy opinions about OpenAI in this episode too, especially if you are a developer using or thinking of using their API. Worth a listen. #

Platform generated AI slop at scale

There is an interesting piece on the latest Vergecast episode [34:15] with David Pierce and Nilay Patel about the immanent death of the creator economy. There is lots of good discussion, but the real catch is a quote they pulled from a recent Meta earnings call in which Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that we are entering the 3rd era of social media.

According to Zuck the 1st era was all about sharing content generated by family and friends, the second era was when they added the creator content, and the third era is AI generated content that will be added "ontop" of the first two kinds. It sure is an interesting choice of words.

Nilay has this to say about it:

"There is only so many people in the world Mark. And they only have so much time in the day. Supply and demand dictates that if you add much more content to the feeds, the attention will be taken from something else. I know where the attention will be taken from, cause you are not paying friends, family and the elementary school parents group, you are paying the creators. You are going to take the money away from the creators with your universe, your corpus of AI content."

It’s one of those extremely obvious points that is worth saying out loud, especially because the creator economy hasn’t exactly been having the best of times recently. But Meta aren’t the only ones. OpenAI is heading in this direction at a shocking pace, they have gone from non-profit, to possibly the biggest profit maximizers in all of human existence, entering into any market that has even a hint of action.

Platforms competing with their users isn’t exactly a new thing, it’s unfortunately a re-occurring theme in tech. It seems we are about to enter into another era of the platforms eating their users. #

Elon Musk on All-In Podcast [51:06]: “Try using any of the recent so called Open AI open source models, they don't work. They basically open sourced a broken, non-working, version of their models, as a fig leaf.”

Great interview, especially the bits at the end about solar energy. Ultimately all energy production leads to solar. I hadn’t heard this perspective before. It’s completely obvious if you are thinking about it from the right scale. But of course few of use are. #