I‘m putting the finishing touches to the re-architecting of the blog. It was all looking great but the realities of managing a stock implementation alongside the customized version for the site were clearly going to be an issue. So I implemented a light weight theming feature.

It‘s just internal for the minute, only one theme which is he blog, but can theoretically be expanded into a full feature later. Sometimes you have to do just enough to get going without boiling the ocean.

Got it working late last night, going to try and see if I can get a live version deployed today.

It‘s been really great to watch on YouTube people from all over the world discover the USA in their travels for the World Cup over the past few weeks. Pretty much everyone is totally in love with what they are finding.

I‘ve travelled quite a bit in the states, having done an east coast to west coast road trip several years ago, so I experienced first hand much of what folks are seeing. The USA really is an amazing place, and the people are super cool too. It‘s very different to what much of the main stream media would have you believe.

And so what a fantastically beautiful thing that it‘s the 250th birthday of the formation of the USA today.

Happy birthday and best wishes to all for the next 250 :)

It‘s really quite mind boggling how many small things there are to fix when you are deploying something for the first time. It feels like it will never end. So many niggly little fixes and things you didn‘t anticipate. It‘s very exhausting.

The good news is that as of a few minutes ago I successfully deployed the new site, fully built using my new rendering tool. I still have a few things to migrate over and I have to rebuild the data to make sure I have the latest, so it‘s not quite ready to show, but the crucial thing is it worked.

Like a lot of people I have only really started paying attention to how money really works the past few years. There is so much content online these days. But it‘s worth remembering this is a very new state of affairs. Two quotes from recent podcast illustrate the point.

First we have Richard Werner, who apparently invented Quantitive Easing. He was on the Liz Truss podcast [9:22]:

And of course the money creation is driven by bank credit, bank credit creation, that’s the more detail, the more precise way of looking at it. Of course that’s not by accident, they are not entirely uninformed at the Bank of England. For example when I published...well I was about to publish my first proof that banks create money out of nothing when they give a loan, each individual bank will create new money. Until then it was controversial. It was debated for a whole century its been debated. Is this true, is this not true.

Well let’s do an empirical test, that’s the scientific thing to do. So I did an empirical test, and it was found out that I was about to publish this, so the bank of England rushed out, to beat me to it, of course they vastly control their own publications, and in March 2014 they put out their own report saying, “oh we just discovered banks create money!”, and they did a video on it, which they had never done, they got all the publicity and that was their goal, and my paper came out later that year, called “Can banks individually create money out of nothing?”. It’s open access so one can google it [...] and so of course they knew this before.

It would be nice to get more info on what exactly his "empirical test" consisted of, but let‘s assume for a second it‘s genuine. Isn‘t it mind boggling that it was only in 2014 that we discovered that banks create money? I still can‘t quite get my head around this fact.

The second one is from Matt Dines on the What Bitcoin Did Podcast [1:04:03]:

I was just an analyst starting out, we were still talking about replacing LIBOR and moving to something else. We knew LIBOR had to go away, and SOFR was already on the table [...] as early as those days, and most of us at the not executive level, we didn‘t understand what the heck was going on.

Like coming through university, I did a masters in finance, it was quantitative focussed, we didn‘t go through any of this, like how the dollar structure worked, this was just not there. You are learning quantitative formulas, number crunching, pricing exotic derivatives. How the system actually works isn't taught to you. It‘s not the focus, maybe that's changing. Actually it‘s the podcast circuit, now that it‘s talked about people can find this and that‘s made all the difference.

It‘s really the explosion of content online by independent media and content creators that has created the situation where we are all learning how these previously very opaque systems are actually organised. Including for the people who work in the finance industry!

This recent surge in interest in the finance industry in general is a quiet revolution. I think it‘s also been happening because so many folks are into crypto and Bitcoin and so are having to figure things out from first principles, and it‘s all been made possible by independent podcasting.

With the rise of version control systems (VCS) like Github, Pull Requests, often called PRs for short, have become very popular with programmers. They are basically a place to gather together all the bits and pieces for a particular thing you are working on before you merge in the new changes from your feature branch into the main branch of your repo. It's useful as a way to mentally separate out changes, and gives you a high level view of what been going on in the project historically without having to see every tiny little change in each file.

As useful as it is for individual programmers, it's even more useful when you are collaborating with other programmers to complete the feature, because it gives you a place to discuss the changes, refactor the changes, review and approve the changes, and even launch automated processes such as linters which ensure the code follows certain conventions, or various flavour of automated tests to ensure that broken core doesn't make it into production.

One of the goals of my new publishing system is to leverage some of these features for content creation. Once you are in a world where everything is a file then all sorts of interesting things become possible. That isn't to say that database powered systems are bad, on the contrary, there can be great synergies, but the point is to use each system where it shines.

In the modern era where AI agents are starting to have a huge effect on things, the collaboration won't just be with other humans, it will be with the agents too. That's why I'm super pumped about my new setup, because all the content I now write passes through PRs. Each new item, whether it's a link, a note or a blog post get's it's own individual PR. It's already really useful, but I think in the future a lot more cool things are going to be possible by hooking up AI agents into the mix, and the tools I've built make it really easy to spin up new ways to publish content.

When I started using the new blog publishing system for all writing on the blog, I only setup blog posts and links. It occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I‘m finding it a bit difficult to get back into a good blogging rhythm was because I never setup notes.

Notes are another type of writing unit, not quite as big as a blog post, but more than a link. They are great for small thoughts, things you are pondering, but haven‘t really thought through. Maybe they will eventually turn into a blog post, but also maybe they won‘t. No pressure. Also no title, which is crucial. Sometimes when you have a thought that you want to write about, the hurdle of having to come up with a great title the perfectly describes your thought, is enough to for your initial enthusiasm to disappear into the ether.

That was the idea behind the blogging virtuous circle. Let‘s see if I can get that setup again.

I've been trying to get back into a better blogging rhythm. I can't remember a time where there's just so much doom and gloom everywhere. Whether I open up my RSS reader, or check out what podcasts have dropped, or whether I decide to brave it in the dystopian hall of mirrors that youtube seems to have become, it's 90% people freaking out about something, and often everything.

It's really not making the blogging any easier.

On the other hand, at least I managed to write this post.

Like many I‘ve been watching this latest trend to ban social media sites for under 16s. The first I saw of it was the ban in Australia, but it seems the same will be happening in the UK. Keir Starmer wants to give kids their childhood back, which is a catchy slogan I suppose, but feels a little bit hollow to me.

Yeah perhaps for some that live out in the countryside, you can imagine they will be able to get back to horse riding and hiking or whatever, but for most inner city kids, it‘s not like there are loads of things to do. I read an interview with a teenager that lives in London and when asked what he‘d do when the ban came into force, he paused and said 'I‘ll probably just stare at the wall'. Kind of bleak.

I‘m not totally against the ban though. I can see it could have a positive impact, but you have to pair it with some other programs for the youth if you really are serious about changing things for the better.

If it‘s just the big social media sites, perhaps this will be a boost for the indieweb? The web was in many ways a lot more fun before the social media sites terraformed our digital lives. There was a lot more variety back then. Maybe this is an opportunity for the next generation to build a better digital future for themselves. All you need is an text editor and a bit of knowledge about HTML.

I was just looking at some stock charts way zoomed out to see as much historical context as possible, and wondered what it looked like for some prominent companies that were around for the dotcom era of the web, both for hardware and software.

You can really see the similarity in the massive uptick around the year 2000, and then the current moment. Microsoft was famously not that hot on the internet back then, and so there isn‘t much of a bump, but the hardware companies definitely were, and that‘s very clear for Cisco, who made much of the networking equipment back then.

It sort of makes you go yikes, but it doesn‘t mean necessarily it‘s going to crash anytime soon, in fact I think it‘s unlikely to go that way until there are some more IPOs, but it‘s worth keeping these graphs in mind.

How best to set yourself up for the long road ahead is the big question that nobody knows the answer to.

Marc Andreesen was on the Latent Space Podcast recently. He‘s best known for being co-author of Mosaic, the first web browser to display inline images, and for being the founder of Netscape. There‘s a great bit midway through where he talks about his roots in unix programming and the Unix Mindset.

I started out working on unix systems back in university in the early 2000s, and in my first tech job managing a linux render farm in a visual effects company. Up until that point I‘d only used Windows systems, but having hands on experience it was clear to me very quickly how great these systems were for building and hacking on software.

What‘s cool about this clip is Marc takes all the unix concepts, everything being a file, the shell and being able to easily connect programs together, and he brings all these notions into the modern agentic era, explaining how they underpin all the developments we are now seeing AI.

It‘s all files, and everything is swappable.

Quick update on the Github Actions storage issue I ran into last month. To summarize Github blocked me because it claimed I went over my Actions storage quota. I contacted their support and they were not able to answer my very basic and polite questions, instead sending me pre-written articles that didn‘t fit my situation very well imho. They then stopped replying to me. Eventually the quota got reset with the new billing cycle.

We are 1/3 of the way through the current month‘s billing cycle. I have written four days worth of posts so far this month. Last month in total I had written 13 days of posts when I went over my quota, leading to the suspension. So you would expect that since my publishing workflow uses up the exact same amount of storage every day, that I would be 1/3 of the way through my quota, right?

Well I just checked on the billing page, and I have used up 0 GB of the 0.5 GB included free Actions storage this month. I haven‘t made any changes to how the site builds. It‘s the exact same actions that build the site. Haven‘t changed them for many many months.

Github I tried really hard to figure out your complicated Actions storage quota system. It makes no sense to me.

The deployment of the refactor I mentioned yesterday went very smoothly. The test post and bunch of links I had gathered yesterday, all got picked up by the automated publishing tool, got turned into individual PRs, got put through a batch review process and got released in the early hours this morning.Seems like everything is running as expected.

Today I decided to overhaul the way the system is processing incoming webhooks. The way it was doing things was working but the big refactor exposed some cruft in that part of the code, so I figured out a better way to do things that fits in well with the new architecture, and got it all working, and tested. Just pushed that out earlier, all tests are passing and smoke testing in staging went fine, so no reason to think there will be any issues.

I want to make sure everything is still working as I‘ve just deployed the latest refactor of my publishing software. I previously wrote about the rendering tool, but this is the publishing side of things, it‘s the software that manages the content through a neat publishing workflow once you‘ve pushed it to Github.

As far as refactors go, this was kind of a big one. There had been a apparent misunderstanding between me and the LLM for quite a while. I thought we were on the same page about the architecture, so did the LLM, but we kept running into strange dislocations in the code. It‘s not always obvious immediately that this is happening, because sometimes the LLMs do come up with some really novel ways of architecting things, they have access to basically all of programming through all of time after all. Anyway the same sort of thing kept happening, but in different ways.

I eventually got to the bottom of it, and when I pointed out the ridiculousness of two entities that were clearly supposed to be different things, in the mind of the AI they were the same thing. Anyhow perhaps a story for another blog post.

For now just hoping this makes it onto the blog later tonight. Should know by morning if it worked.

Barely 24 hours after I wrote about Apple and Gemini and that I had been using Gemini a lot recently and now Gemini has had a makeover and looks great but is requireming me to click 10 times for each query :(

Strange.

Interesting to hear the latest from this years Apple developer conference. Apple‘s AI future for now will be with Gemini models. I‘ve been working a lot with Gemini the past few months, and it‘s very good a lot of the time, including for coding, which is what I mostly use it for.

I am struck, especially today actually, by how much Gemini likes to refactor code. In this world where all code is apparently one shotted, it‘s really quite odd how much refactoring one has to do to get anything worth having. I suspect one shotting is the new refactoring.

So Apple and Google...perhaps it is fitting. Always one more one-shottings away from the perfect software that will definitely be the most perfect software ever. This time is different.

The Github Action I added to my blog to run at the start of every month worked. I added it because I got blocked again by Github last month, this time apparently for using hundreds of GB-hours (whatever that is) of storage even though I am using literally the smallest amount of storage possible.

One of the cool things about running a static site website, is I can continue to write offline and sync it back up when I get online again. I realized though that because I was only building the site when I push new content to Github, that once the new billing cycle came around that all the content I had written while offline wouldn‘t automatically get rendered into the site, because all the build triggers had been missed, and the new content would only make it to the site if I added some more content, which would trigger the site to rebuild.

With this extra little monthly workflow, I can be sure that any content I add while offline will definitely make it onto the site even without me writing something new at the beginning of the month. It worked last night, and all the content I added since I got blocked was rendered into the site.

The Github support team, who initially answered my support query, still haven‘t answered my question about what settings I need to use to not go over the storage quota limit. In the past Github support could take several days to reply to a support case but they wouldn't ever just go dark like that. That‘s quite disappointing, especially given how much time I have been spending developing on their platform the past few months.

The Vergecast Podcast is going daily. David Pierce interviewed Casey Neistat to get some advice. Casey is know for having run a daily vlog for years. I used to watch it.

I checked out Ze Frank, another one of the daily vloggers from the mid 2000s that got very popular. He‘s now doing nature related videos narrating in his style. His latest is about bees and wasps and ants.

I wonder what happened to Andrew Baron from Rocketboom. Another one of my favorite dailies from the mid 2000s, when video was just starting on the web. They used to do all sorts of things both indoors and outdoors.

Oh yeah there was also Mike Rugnetta and The Idea Channel. Actually not sure if this was a daily, but somehow in my mind it falls into a similar bucket.

As far as I know the Vergecast isn't video, but I‘m interested to see where they take it with an audio only daily pod. Potentially lot‘s of things to explore.

I found myself needing some good music to code to the other day and after a bit of searching found an LTJ Bukem album I hadn't heard before:

• LTJ Bukem - Cosmic Twilight Vol.2 @ Tipper & Friends, Spirit Of Suwannee Music Park // 03.04.22

Seems like it was released in 2022. I haven't really been following the drum and bass scene for many years now, so it makes sense that I wouldn't have seen it. It's a great album. Really reminded me of the times I got into drum and bass around 1996. I feel like back then drum and bass was much lighter, things were very chill. Bukem uses the "Amen Break" a lot in his tracks. I thought he came up with it, but turns out folks had been using that sample for years.

Anyhow he's got several of his albums on youtube, Logical Progression being his most famous, and probably the best place to start:

• LTJ Bukem presents Logical Progression (CD-B mixed set, original 1996 version) Intelligent DnB

This live album is pretty great too:

• LTJ Bukem studio set '95 - Love Of Life "Master Mix" soulful dnb Cut 4 YT

I‘m still trying to figure out exactly why the storage in my Github Actions has gone through it‘s monthly quota. Github support did get back in touch with me, but that got delayed because replying to the emails for some reason didn‘t add the message to the support case thread. I didn‘t realise initially so that wasted a few days. When I copied those messages into the thread, they replied with what looked like a pre-prepared reply with some links but not really answering my question.

I am genuinely confused by their storage quota. I have been using it for several years in the same exact way. Every day an action runs and builds the website if there was new content added, and during that build I create an artifact of the built website in order to pass it between two Github Action jobs. It‘s a pretty standard thing to do as far as I am aware. The artifact is around 100MB, and I set a retention policy of 1 day, which is the minimum amount. I don‘t even need the artifact to last a day, as soon as the build is finished it can be deleted as far as I am concerned.

Well Github have changed their billing system relatively recently, within the past few months, so I suspect it‘s got something to do with that, because I am literally using the least amount of actions storage as possible. The way it's always worked is as long as I was under the 500MB limit every day, and I always am because of the 1 day retention setting, then the quote is not exceeded.

But now when I look in the billing section they are talking about GB-hrs, and it lists 100s of GB-hrs. I have no idea what this means, but it just seems utterly ridiculous to me because I am as far as I am aware using the least amount of storage possible. I politely pointed this out to the support person, and they have gone dark on me. It's been several more days now and no reply. Anyway the billing cycle resets in 4 days.

I‘ve added a scheduled start to the build so that as well as building on push to main, it now builds once at the start of each month. That will hopefully ensure that any content I push during these weird periods were Github is blocking me for whatever reason they have decided to block me for this time, always makes it onto the website.

According to the Github account usage page I have used up all my Actions storage quota of 500MB, so it is blocking all my builds that use artifacts.The website's build uses artifacts to pass the built website between jobs, which is the Github recommended way to do things. Thus all builds of the website and thus all publishing to the website is completely blocked. I haven't even been publishing much the past few weeks!

This isn't the first time Github has blocked me completely but it is the first time it has done it on the basis of storage. In the past it has always been because of running out of free build minutes. The thing that is very strange about the storage quota is that as far as storage goes I am very conservative, setting a retention of 1 day on all artifacts I generate, and I only run 1 build per day, so it's very odd that I am over the quota suddenly. I have been publishing without storage problems in this, the recommended way, literally for years.

When I did some investigation on the command line using Github's gh tool I could see hundreds and hundreds of old artifacts on the system which would have totalled several GB in size. They were all "expired", because of the retension policy, but I would have expected these to get cleaned up. According to the LLM helping me I did everything correctly, and it looks like something on Github's side is suddenly trigering them to block.

Anyway I manually deleted all the expired artifacts, even though I shouldn't have to, so there are literally zero artifacts now, but even after a day the system is still blocking everything. The Github website says it will reset in 12 days.

They always seem to find some reason and way to block you, even when you spend years and years making everything perfect. I have emailed support, so hopefully I will hear back soon. This always seems to happen right when I'm putting the final fixes to software I'm building. Quite difficult to test a blogging tool when you aren't allowed to build your blog. The one small win is that since it's a static site powered by git I can still write posts offline, but right now it doesn't feel like much consolation.

Bugs in code is not a lot of fun at the best of times, but finding a bug in a mocking library is the sort of thing that can really ruin your day, or week, or worse.

The past few days I‘ve been deep in a refactor, and I eventually hit a point where I was fighting the tools rather than the code. There were just too many moving parts, and it became impossible to see the woods for the trees. What appeared to be a straightforward bug in my integration tests turned into a two-day troubleshooting marathon. It’s a strange irony of working with LLMs: the ability to generate code so quickly means you can sometimes dig yourself into an even deeper hole than the one you are already in, with terrifying efficiency. You end up iterating on a flawed premise until you’re so far down you’ve lost all perspective on the original problem.

My way out of that cycle is to step away from the main project and build a "minimal". I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve even started a dedicated section in my portfolio to track them. The goal is to isolate the problem domain completely. By stripping everything back to a few lines of code and a single test case, the friction has nowhere to hide. In this case, it turned out that Node’s native fetch behaves just differently enough during a 204 handshake to throw Nock into a tailspin unless you explicitly override the transport.

I don't just build these repos to fix a single bug, they serve as a way to document the "why" so my future self can return to the problem and actually remember the details. It’s easy to forget the nuances of a library conflict six months down the line, but having a working, isolated example provides a path back to stable ground. It’s about being pragmatic, clearing the brambles in a small patch so you can see the through-line in your main project.

Here's the latest minimal: minimal-modern-node-http-mocking

The good news is that when I dove back into the main project I was able to fix the integration test I had been spinning on almost immediately. I feel like this latest minimal is a textbook example of when to use this technique.

Side note, a long list of very strange synchronicities for me this week, including what seemed like a name drop of the mocking library in a podcast I listened to moments after deciding to fix the bug. What's really weird, as far as I can tell they were talking about something completely unrelated to programming. It made no sense whatsoever in their context.

Barely a single day after getting my review and approve publishing software fully working, and the White House annouces some sort of regime where they will review and approve AI models. I will file this away in the, at this stage, unbelievably large "what are the chances" folder.

Long day today, but managed to fix all the integration tests that had broken during the latest refactor. It‘s nice to finish the day with the latest build running smoothly. I had to re-record all the test fixtures, but that‘s been made a lot easier following recent changes I made. Previously I had to create all the test mocks by hand, which was really laborious and error prone, but now it‘s all automatic. Anyway, nice to have some progress :)

This is another one of those test posts. I‘ve been busy with more refactoring of my blogging software. This time I‘ve been getting the integration tests working correctly. Thankfully the developer tools and libraries are pretty great. It‘s a bit laborious to get things setup initially and the LLMs have sent be down several pretty bad dead ends. But things are progressing well in general.

It‘s really quite amazing the sort of refactoring of your code you can get done when working with LLMs. They make it possible to see much much further into the future, and you can get a much better idea of whether something is possible or not, but also if you can't quite see the through line, but you know it‘s there, you can head off in the general direction, and work things out as you go.

This happened several times to me this week, I had a really good sense that it was possible, but it was really lot of very abstract changes, and I couldn't quite get a handle on it. Instead of fighting, I just said, what are the top 3 things we could do to the code base to put us in a position that would make the particular refactor possible. The LLM had a good sense of where we were heading as we'd been discussing it for a while, and so we charted a course and started on the top 3 things.

By the time we finished the top 3 things, it had cleared enough of the brambles and tangles that it was much much more obvious how the refactor could be done.

But don‘t fall into the perfection trap, you have to be pragmatic, there are times, where getting to stable ground is more important that having everything perfect.

Seems like the bug I fixed yesterday is properly fixed. It is at least with my links, this post tests it's also fixed in blog posts.

I hate to go on about it, but since I started blogging again it‘s been strange thing after strange thing after strange thing.

More bizarre and weird synchronicities than you can shake a stick at. I just fixed a bug in my review and approve workflow, the sort that you only find when you have it running in production. It took me all day yesterday to debug and write the fix. Anyhow I was just about to push the code to production and suddenly all my shells across my whole machine suddenly become unresponsive. All of them in Vscode, and all in iTerm2 and even the system Termnal. Had to reboot. That's two reboots in two days.

I was just about to write a test post to test things out, so this is the test post. I think I prefer the dull and boring test posts. Does everything have to be a high wire act?

Sharp and noticeable uptick in let's call them oddities, or weirdnesses occuring around me since I started blogging again. I don't want to get into much detail, but sometimes it's best just to note it and move on. Hopefully things will settle down a bit in due course.

I see Polymarket is adding perpetual futures, otherwise known as perps, to their platform. I can‘t say I fully understand how these work over and above the notion that you can bet on future prices of things which you can use to hedge against things happening or not happening to you, or your investments. Polymarket has been making headlines the past few months, people are up in arms about all this "crazy" betting that is going on everywhere. It strikes me that all these angles are missing the real story, that regular people can start hedging things, something previously only really available to high net worth individuals.

What will the world look like when literally everyone is hedging everything? I find this notion mildly terrifying, but I'm not sure if it's terrifying because of the craziness or terrifying because of it's opposite. Maybe if everything is perfectly hedged, nothing is interesting and exciting. How likely is all this to have an impact?

In the short term probably not huge, but a few weeks back I spent a few hours talking with an LLM about all this and throwing around some ideas about creating a home grown hedging application, all written in Typescript. I have to say it was quite interesting, and the LLMs have all the patterns analysed and know about all the best ways of tracking things, and they are incredibly good at coming up with some general rules, throwing things into buckets, so you can actually make some interesting allocations and stay on top of things.

But I also go the sense that it could very easily become all consuming. Do we really all want to become AI powered traders?

More very very bizare internet connecivity issues. Just another note into the void in case this is the end again, so someone knows how it went down. :(

There are a lot of cool features in my new blogging tool. Here are some of the top of my head:

1. Render anything, from individual posts to full blown websites.
2. Integrates with the writing tools you already use today.
3. Templates for pages but also file paths, for maximum flexibility.
4. Automatically generate frontmatter for your markdown files.
5. It‘s agnostic so you can use any template rendering engine.
6. Supports partials and cross engine calling.
7. Add functionality using toolpacks accessible from inside the templates.
8. Blueprint based workflow engine you can use to create assets of any shape.
9. Attach logic to templates to explode out many output files from one input template.
10. Run javascript middleware stacks at key places in the render pipeline, integrate with anything.
11. Transform data on the way in before it hits your templates.
12. Extreme debugability, easily see how data flows through the render pipeline.
13. Integrates with Github for atomic and batch review and approve based publishing workflows.
14. Dispatch rendered assets to external destinations with custom deliveries.
15. Easily cleanup your local workspace with custom cleaners.

There‘s a lot more too.

It‘s the fastest way to get from idea to published, completely remove all the tedium from writing online.

I‘m using it right now to write all my posts. Each one gets it‘s own git branch, automatically and uniquely named. You can bulk push all your branches to Github, and then the workflow side picks up and your content goes through a PR based workflow, each item can be review and approved, or auto-merged.

Seems to be working pretty well so far.

It was to be expected I suppose, no sooner than I have started writing again and the world around me is angry. Always angry about something. The world is angry I don't do what it wants. It's also angry when I actually do what it wants. It can't make up it's mind. It's really quite unbelievable, like some sort of evil clockwork. Like a heat seeking missile, you just know the moment you see it off in the distance, that no matter what you do, that it's going to get you in one way or another, eventually.

Also the allergies are back. What a surprise.

Really trying to keep upbeat about things, but that easier said than done when the world is angry and your face is on fire and leaking.

There were two issues getting all the gears in my blogging setup working again after a few months of not posting. Both related to the social media auto-poster Github action workflow that runs every day to post links to various social medias to new posts on the blog. Bluesky and Mastodon still worked perfectly, but Nostr and Twitter were both erroring.

I figured out the Nostr error quite quickly. Looks like some of the relays I had been using to post messages had gone offline. I updated to a more recent list of relays and posts began flowing again.

But the Twitter blockage was much more involved. I spent the morning navigating the quite complex developer portal, and regenerating an absurd amount of API keys and secrets and bearer tokens, and deleting my app and recreating it. Still authentication errors. Eventually went to the billing page and there was a note that said free tier accounts can no longer access the API.

Ok well I guess Twitter doesn't value my content much. Looks like, for the moment at least, none of my posts will be flowing through Twitter.

Kind of disapointing.

I'm having the strangest connectivity issues all of a sudden. Some web browsers on my machine can't load any web pages at all. Others can load some pages, but not others.

Trying to troubleshoot it with the help of some LLMs but of course the connectivity issues mean it's very difficult to do anything at all because the sessions keep disconecting.

I haven't installed any software or made any configuration changes recenrtly.

Anyway just posting this in case the world is about to end or something. I hope not.

Well after several about an hour troubleshooting, the conclusion from the LLM was that the networking stack on my laptop was hosed.

I rebooted and everything seems to be working again. I can‘t even remember that happening a single time before on this machine.

Kind of strange it should happen right after my first blog posts in several months. Such is life sometimes. And every time also.

My blogging setup is working pretty well. Some posts about that to follow soonish.

Last night's test post actually worked pretty well. There were a few things that needed reconfiguring in the production environment, but it essentially worked. Today I'm getting it working from my Android phone. Again some slightly annoying configuration changes to do with environment setup, but the code looks like it's working.

It‘s been a while. I‘ve been busy building a blogging tool.

I know the way these test posts tend to go, chances are it‘s not going to work first time, so I'll refrain from writing much.

Might post a few links too...

It‘s been a while since I‘ve written any blog posts. I‘ve been heads down on getting my blogging scripts updated the past 2 months. Quite a journey into writing CLIs, but I reached a milestone yesterday, I was able to successfully write a post using the new system. Still some things to figure out, but it means a much more streamlined process from writing words, to getting them onto the website, all via Github, with individual PRs for each post, and a ton of automation so I don't have to worry about getting the frontmatter right, or naming files, or putting things in the right place. It's all automatic.

Anyhow just wanted to put a short post out there, I’m still using the old system to write this, but if all goes well then I will be using the new CLI tool soon. Hoping everyone is well out there.

I‘ve been spending quite a lot of time writing specifications the past week or so. I‘m planning on making some modifications to my blogging scripts, turning them into a full blown CLI tool. And while doing that I also found some really neat improvements I can make to my static site renderer. It’s been very productive. It’s mind boggling how much further you can get using AI tools. It takes a bit of getting used to it as there are some annoyances that you have to find some workarounds to, but when you do it’s possible to architect much larger and more elegant systems than you would be able to do without AI, you can really think something through in so much more depth and breadth than you would otherwise be able to.

Anyway I had been looking for possible names for a module I was building, and the word constructivism popped up while going through some art-related terms that had a builder / utilitarian vibe. So I was looking at pictures of constructivism art to remind myself what it was all about. Well it occurred to me that it might be a strange and interesting juxtaposition to have some psychedelic constructivism. And so me and Gemini went off on a slightly frivolous side quest exploring various things and I was looking up art examples again, so I could try and have Gemini generate some amalgam of the two types of art.

Well that didn't work out very well. After a few tries, I realised Gemini was just sending back the same picture over and over. Oh well not to worry. Then I realised something very bizarre had happened with the two examples I had chosen out of many. I didn’t pay much thought to it, I just chose one of each type that I liked. And these were they:

What a great reminder that two very different ways of looking at the world can both describe the exact same reality. It’s so strange that I didn’t see it at first. But now that I do, there is something very comforting about it. Yep, we see it too, but weirdly.

When I got back to writing the specification, I must have really confused Gemini. I don't think it understood what a side quest was, or that we were just taking a break from the spec writing and it kept trying to add amusing art stuff into the specification. I was trying to take out these references that didn't make much sense. But I eventually relented. Gemini was really insistent that my new tools needed to be pointy and wavey. It’s how it described the core philosophy. It‘s ridiculous but I thought might as well just leave it in there because it was funny.

But the really funny thing is that the more I think about it, I think that Gemini in this case might actually be onto something.