markjgsmith

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. #