markjgsmith

2024/06/17 #

• Unbelievably bad day of being constantly warpathed, starved and thirsted yesterday. I think I've traced it back to an incident at a food vendor around 2 days ago. Not a street stand, but a vendor operating out of the front of a actual house. I've been there many times before, they have always seemed nice. As I arrived and stood waiting to say what I wanted, the older chap that works there walked out front to attend to some food that was cooking.

  Before I had even said anything at all, he belched out at me 'Pay' with a strange smirk on his face. I had no idea what he was on about, perhaps he was having a bad day, I thought to myself. A few moments later the other slightly younger bloke asked if I wanted the take away dish I usually get, and I said yes and thank you. The other bloke then held up the coffee he was drinking and said 'coffee'. Then pointed at a coffee stand about 20 meters down the street, and uttered a somewhat malevolent and malicious sounding chuckle. I said that I don't drink coffee, which I don't. I then got the food and paid for it.

  I walked off down the street past the coffee stand, and shortly afterwards someone random started barking orders at me. 'Up!'. I was heading to a shop / caffee that I usually go to. The seating area is upstairs. Well basically ever since then that's when the tsunani of hate and ordering and general harrassment from the past few days started. And it's been rather epic, and not in a good way.

  Another manufactured situation to justify blamming me for everything again and again. Seems like it to me, especially since several of the harrassments since an athen, in totally different locations have involved people shouting 'Pay!' at me for absolutely no good reason that I could determine, even in places that had no shop or any commercial thing nearby.

  The food place btw is on the same street as the sandwich place that often creates problem situations that I've previously written about. There's something about that street, or perhaps it's just that here, every place eventually turns nasty. #

• There was an interesting discussion around AI & LLMs in the latest All-in podcast. Turns out many researchers that work on various media related projects routinely use LLMs to gather information. That is a new development, but the interesting thing is that they often have multiple LLMs open and run the query through all of them, then cross reference results in order to spot mistakes and hallucinations. #

• My thoughts on Brexit

  It occurred to me a while back that I hadn't written anything, apart from a few links on the linkblog, about how I view and think about Brexit. It's such a big subject, and for me it crosses very close to my roots since, although I am from the UK, I grew up mostly in europe outside the UK. I feel like I should have very well formed thoughts about the whole debacle at this stage, but the truth is that I don't. I'm still confused by it.

  I'm also in a permanent situation where it's almost impossible to have enough piece and quiet to gather my thoughts on this complex topic, and write something meaningful. So bare that in mind. What follows is just a few notes I wrote down in between tsunamis, spiritual storms, and general crazy world shit that surrounds me 24/7 at the minute. Maybe I'll refine it over time. Even as I write this I'm being dogged by a couple of softly softly murmurers. It never ends.

  I’ve always been pro-Europe. It would be difficult for me not to be. I grew up mostly in Europe. I went to a European School for heck's sake. So I’m kind of biased. Europe is a great place. I really liked living there. Having said that, the way you see things as a kid and the way things are in reality can be quite different. At some point after university, which was in the UK, I became aware that many UK people weren't so into the hole EU project.

  I knew this before, of course, through watching the news, but there's something very different about being in a place, immersed among it's people that's very different from absorbing information through the tele. You get a much more real sense for the general zietgiest. I became aware that much of the politics and government in the EU was organised in a very beurocratic and possibly non-democratic way. Certainly in a way that was at odds with how things are done in the UK. I started to understand why many in the UK didn’t like being part of the EU.

  I was abroad when the vote happened. I think I was in Thailand at the time. I watched some of the build up, and the results, but I didn't vote. I think probably if I were back home, I’d have voted to remain, but I decided before the vote happened, that I'd be okay with whatever result was reached, as long as the election was a true representation of the view from the people of the UK.

  I’m ultimately British and would stand behind whatever the nation wanted. If there are big reasons to not be in the EU, and many have these views, I trust that the people have good vision and know at an instinctive level what is right for the country. They might very well be able to see something that I simply couldn't. There's no sense trying to smash a square peg into a round hole, these differing views ultimately have to be resolved in some way, and maybe leaving would be the best way to do that. That was basically my high level thought process when the vote hapenned.

  Perhaps we will rejoin some day or maybe we won’t. Things change, people change, nations change, the european project will change, let’s see where this goes. I'm not going to turn my back on either side, even if it feels like the world does that sometimes, even if it often feels like it's the world's favorite thing. As a side note, it is kind of cool to know that leaving is possible. That in itself might be the greatest take away for everyone.

  I think ultimately whatever happens both the EU and the UK will be better off for it.

  Hopefully I'll have more time in the future to write something less clumsy about this, when I'm not being pressured by a world on the warpath. I just wanted to get something out there, with the EU elections that just happened, and with the UK elections on the horizon, I've been much more interested in both than I'd expected, so now felt like a good time.

Today’s links:

• Apple’s Slow Rollout of Intelligence Features Will Stretch Into 2025 - A bunch of interesting Apple related info in this multi-part article, the most noteworthy probably being more details about Apple Intelligence and a whole load of VisionOS improvements. www.bloomberg.com #

• The Light Phone - "The Light Phone III adds a metal frame, USB-C, fingerprint ID, a flashlight, 5G, an NFC chip, and a clickable wheel." - The idea behind this phone is kind of interesting. It's a phone but with a lot of the smartphone features stripped back. It only does the basics that a feature phone does but with a few extras like podcasts. The point is to try and create a device that is purely functional, that doesn't distract you from the real world around you. There is no web browser, no social media for example. The promo video does a good job of explaining things. Interested to see if this takes off. www.thelightphone.com #

• No One Is Talking About Brexit - I've heard this mentioned in a few places and I've noticed it too. I can understand it though, it is a bit of a distraction. I'm curious about the ongoing relationship with the EU, but I think we need to give the new outside the EU thing a chance to develop. Lots of opportunity to learn about ourselves as a nation imho. politicalwire.com #

• New Post: My thoughts on Brexit markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/16 #

• Absolutely horrid night last night, with rain from around midnight, and at least an hour of which was quite a down pour It got pretty darn cold too. It only partially deterred the motorbike gang stalkers, with quite a lot of driveby harrassment still going on. Very cold hands this morning. #

• Unmistakable yellow tsunami the past 3 days. It occurred to me as I walked to the internet place this morning that it was worth noting. Seems like that's being turned into a bit of a red tsunani given the configuration of things and people this morning. Just some more warpaths. I stand in the only way left to me, with my back to them. This morning's pleasant reminiscing of times gone by is over now, replaced by starvation and bullying. The glee in the air from some is palpable. #

Today’s links:

• Why the pope has the ears of G7 leaders on the ethics of AI - This is likely more important than it appears, the pope has a very big influence on over a billion people worldwide. It's also interesting because like Biden, only the second Catholic US president, he's very old, yet still influencial, but also because what I get from the article is that what he speaks about AI actually seems somewhat well thought out. Perhaps his position enables him and his entourage to think deeply about these matters. Other names that might be worth remembering, Paolo Benanti an influencial fransiscan friar who advises the pope on AI, and Georgia Meloni, Italy's PM who’s the first to invite the pope to a G7 meeting. The other thing that's interesting is that not only is he at the G7 but he has been meeting with large groups of comedians recently. That's perhaps another sign of the times. It's hard to tell because there are so many levels of traditional media involved here, but maybe, just maybe it's not all garbage that this old fellow is leaving in his trail, which I'm afraid to say is more than can be said for some old people, at least in my vecinity this morning as I typed this paragraph. www.theguardian.com #

• Blur: To the End review – sentimental journey for four likely lads on their way to Wembley - I saw them live in Ghent sometime around ’93 when they were just starting to get really big. Then at several festivals over the years, one particularly memorable. In a way, they sort of openned up the english music scene to me when I moved back from abroad to the UK to go to university. I got quite into them, even though it wasn't really the sort of music I listenned to at the time, which was much more dark and metally. Coincidentally the first post on the linkblog was to an article about Damon's shape shifting career. It's nice to see and read about them again after all these years, even if the review of the documentary isn't all that great. www.theguardian.com #

• More than mere camembert: why France leads the world in cheesemaking - I guess the Guardian must synchronize some of their articles, I saved this without thinking it had anything to do with the previous Blur link, but surely it can't be a coincidence given Alex James’ passion for cheesemaking. You could make the argument that there's even a comedic cosmic link to the one before that too. In any case, I saved it because it occurred to me that I quite missed all the nice cheeses I used to eat when I was living in Belgium. The cheese here in Vietnam is very strange. It's this dry stringy stuff, a bit like shredded chicken. www.theguardian.com #

2024/06/15 #

• Big Changes At Every Layer (Issue #168)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-06-15)

  In this week’s edition:

  Linux desktop movement gets a big boost, the dollar and petrodollar are dying, being a VC is changing, the surprisingly interesting history of men’s suits, EU elections and Microsoft & AI

  Issue details:

  • Title: Big Changes At Every Layer
  • Issue: 168
  • Page: issue webpage

• Elon’s insane pay package

  On first read about Elon’s USD$50 billion pay package, it does seem utterly ridiculous. And in a way, the amount is so huge, that it kind of is ridiculous. But when I read about it, something made me instinctively side with Elon, I couldn't figure out why. A few days ago I remembered why.

  Something similar happened to me a little over a decade ago. I was working for a US startup that was expanding it's presence into the EU. The first 3 years were incredibly difficult, but through huge effort, working crazy hours every week, flying in and out of countries all around the EU, Middle East and Africa, we grew our region's revenue from basically zero to 1/2 of the entire company’s revenue. We had sold, installed and customised our software into most of the biggest media companies across the continent. It was quite an accomplishment.

  The entire time the variable compensation part of my pay package was pretty darn huge, but just out of reach. Nevertheless we continued, working and traveling almost all the hours that existed. The whole time, the others on the EU team would tell me these amazing stories of previous startups they had worked for where they hit their targets and got paid massive amounts of money in bonuses. The promise of big bonuses was a heck of a motivator.

  Then in the third year, we really started to hit our stride. We started meeting the impossible targets. The bonuses started trickling in, things were on the up. It was awesome, especially after so much hard work. What hapenned next was quite a shock to me.

  The US management sent me a new contract to sign. They didn't mention they had re-structured the variable compensation part of the package. I only discovered it when I read through the small print. It wasn't a few minor changes, it was for all intents abd purposes, a totally different pay package. I white boarded the two packages to compare them in detail, and it was night and day. Completely different, like by an order of magnitude. I brought this up with them and they said they had made a mistake, and the original package was way more than they had planned to give me.

  After much back and forth, I managed to claw some of it back, but it wasn't anything like the package that had motivated me to give up 3 years of my life. 3 years that established the company as a force to be reconned with in the industry. Being just a Solutions Architect, unlike Elon I unfortunately didn't have a way to do a shareholder vote. I had to accept the new package. I got burnt by that experience pretty bad, and it’s stuck with me. Companies will promise you everything, and they won’t hesitate to rug pull you. It doesn't matter that it's a small company and your friendly with everyone.

  Of course Elon's situation is somewhat different for sure. I understand the people against him on it are saying that he was too close to those constructing the pay package, so it was a bit like he had carte blanche. But when you look at the numbers and read about the crazy targets they were having to hit month after month after month, it's a different picture entirely. I listenned to a podcast a while back with an interview with a bloke that wrote an Elon autobiography, and you really get a sense for the magnitude of the effort and results they pulled off. It's nothing short if incredible.

  Given my similar experience I was happy to see Elon eventually got the support of the shareholders. True it’s an insane amount of money, but the targets that he hit in his performance based package were equally insane. And he hit those targets and the value of the company has also increased an insane amount. That was the deal.

• Politics campaigns vs Agile development manifesto. This is perhaps a case of every nail looking like a hammer, but it occurred to me earlier, isn’t politics just a very high level feature backlog?

  Doesn’t it just end up being devs vs testing trying to get features done, the devs government vs shadow testers, if you will.

  Why not just run the government like a software company? #

Today’s links:

• ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack - The massively refactored ChromeOS will be based on the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, and will enable improved security, faster development of new AI features and better interop of different devices like phones with Chromebooks. Sounds awesome, especially the interop. That in my experience has always been where Android has performed very poorly. It will take a while to get there, but they will provide seemless transition when it's ready. blog.chromium.org #

• Apple paying OpenAI with exposure, not money - Interesting collaboration, I wonder how long the honeymoon will last. Looks like Apple is already eyeing up other AI companies, planning to offer a variety of functionality to their customers. It's also interesting that OpenAI made a statement about privacy, how Apple customers won't be tracked. Do they treat other customers differently? Will they be audited around privacy? appleinsider.com #

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Big Changes At Every Layer (Issue #168) markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Elon’s insane pay package markjgsmith.com #

• No magic wand for growing the economy, says Starmer - Could be because I've just written a blog post about his pay package, but this article makes Keir Stalmer sound like an Elon Musk type character. That really would be pretty interesting.www.bbc.com #

• Vladimir Putin issues fresh demands to Ukraine to end war - It really feels like we are heading towards WW3 with all these wars going on. A tin foil hat wearer could be forgiven for thinking that such a thing would align with a world where AI tech puts millions of people out of work. Maybe time to invest in nuclear energy companies. Pains me to say it but that’s realistically the only thing that will loosen Russia‘s grip on the west. www.theguardian.com #

• French leftwing parties form ‘Popular Front’ to contest snap election - I have to say the name of the combined party had me thinking of the classic Popular Front sketch from Monty Python's Life of Brian. In any case French politics is definitely heating up. Might be quite interesting. www.theguardian.com #

2024/06/14 #

• Looks like I was right about my prediction of starvation and thirst. Lots of food goading and bullying from the gang stalkers. Everything is my fault again. They are digging up old graves, basically anything from the recent past where they feel they have been hard done by in some way. Nevermind that even in all those cases, the incidents they reference were situations they in some way caused in the previous bullying cycle.

  There is just no way to react that doesn't cause more bullying. That's why I say they are on the warpath because really what they are after is more war. Being on the warpath isn't necessarily a violent thing, often it's passive aggressive. There's nothing you as a victim can do. I imagine it's similar in that way to being gang raped. You just have to wait until it subsides, and hope you are still alive.

  They of course don't view it like that. For them they see it as essential learning that I must do and that they must administer. #

• Exactly as I finished writing the previous note, a man on a motorbike, roughly late twenties / early thirties, drove up on a motorbike. He looked like a totally normal and respectable bloke. Appeared completely sober. He quietly tried to talk to me, and repeatedly pointed at my private parts. After an awkward conversation where I just said I didn't understand what he wanted, he got off the bike, crouched on front of me, putting his hand in my leg. I moved sideways so he was no longer in front of my private parts region, and calmly picked up his arm from my leg and moved it aside. He got on his bike and drove off.

  Now you might think this is just what happens sometimes, but I can tell you, it's not. This is very unusual, especially at this time in the morning. Most people are going to work. Also in the park yesterday mid-morning, a group of people using the public exercise equipment said loudly 'lonely' as I walked past. Also a couple of nights ago, a similar thing happened. That time it was most likely a lady boy that stopped on their motorbike with similar intentions.

  These incidents are all linked in some way. These type if things trend for a few days then usually subside. They are often accompanied by copious amounts of anger goading, and white tissues seem to be everywhere you go. It involves both men and women. Personally I see it as sexual harrassment being inflicted on me. No doubt these gang stalkers have a different read of the situation, likely it's all in some way my fault.

  They try to make you angry, then if you show pretty much any sign of reacting, they imply you need sexual relief, but it's them that are the sexual aggressors. And they do this as a group. It's all co-ordinared, and happens over many days. It's a well known pattern I've seen many times before.

  Worth noting that these sexual harrassment incidents almost always occur during periods where they are starving and thirsting me, as is the case this time. It's happened so many times before, though not recently. It's almost as if it's a new set of gang stalkers and they are going through their standard playbook. #

• I hate writing about all this stuff, but that's what I'm experiencing at the minute. It sucks. I'd much rather be writing about tech and webdev.

  Perhaps the bullies are banking on the fact they think I won't talk about it, out of fear of embarrassment. But this sort of stuff doesn't embarass me at all. If I feel I'm being harrassed, I'm going to say so. And I definutely feel like I'm being harrassed.

  I wouldn't be suprised if these MFs actually want me to write about it, because in a weird way it's free advertising for them. Because this sort if harrassment doesn't happen if it isn't encouraged, and I've seen many signs it's encouraged by some westerners. This sort of stuff is so well organised, so second nature, there is for sure more going on behind the scenes. It's a very well trodden path. #

• I've long been a listener of the Rest is History Podcast. The RIH guys consistently put out really great episodes, this week's newsletter features their recent piece covering the history of men's suits, which has a much more interesting history than you would expect. Anyhow they sometimes mention, and I've heard many others also mention, the Rest is Politics Podcast. Given that I found the recent EU elections quite interesting, this morning I figured I'd take the RIP Podcast for a spin.

  I'm not so into their unfortunate 3 letter acronym, especially seing as I'm currently being starved and thirsted for something somebody else did to me, and the gang stalkers have been jokingly (probably) harrassing me about my actual death. Anyway just listenned to the Labour vs Conservatives episode, as well as a recent Nigel Farage episode. I like it. The hosts, Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, having been previously in politics themselves, are very knowledgeable, yet they don't necessarily have the same views as me. That's actually a good thing. It's interesting to hear different angles, different points of view.

  Btw it's not just UK politics, though that is somewhat of a focus, they had interesting stuff on US and South African politics on the episodes I listenned to.

  Looking forward to hearing more from this dynamic, pot buying duo. :) #

Today’s links:

• PDF to podcast - I haven't tried this but it was on HN yesterday. You upload a PDF and get back a podcast episode. I guess it could be useful if you read a lot of PDFs. Kind of niche. pdf-to-podcast.com #

2024/06/13 #

• Static site generator archives plugin update

  I got the latest archives plugin, which now supports the everything page, fully working in staging yesterday. It was pretty difficult not only because of string headwinds from a very warpathy world, but also because it was technically quite a challenge. The everything page is built from a dataset created by merging multiple datasets. What this means is that it's no longer so trivial to build the correct urls on each page because the data could be in many different locations depending on which item it is.

  One cool thing I was able to improve on the original implementation is to use the regular data source primitive, but modify it so that's where the data merging occurs. I had tried this initially but, for whatever reason, I had hit a wall. Perhaps there was another bug blocking at the time, who knows. In any case I ended up implementing the data merge in another part of the render process. It worked but was a bit clunky. I guess some of the housekeeping and refactoring from the past few weeks must have cleared the path, because when I tried to create a merged data source it all worked wonderfully.

  It's nice when that happens. It's a sort of validation that the system's primitives, the basic building blocks that you combine together, are the right shape. It makes things much more clear to understand, rather than have these special cases that get around the fact that the primitives don't provide the needed functionality.

  There was still quite a bit of tedious work after that, both removing the special casing, and updating the code to use the merged data. Of course I ran into build minute issues again and, though I was able to really improve the module caching logic, in the end it wasn't enough, and yesterday evening I basically ran out of build minutes again. I think I've still got a few to publish the odd post on the website, but basically actually merging and deploying the new archives plugin will now have to wait until next month when my build minutes reset.

  It's so frustrating, you pull out all the stops, physically put your body through lots of pain, battle through tsunami after tsunami from a world constantly on the warpath, only to find you haven't quite got enough resources. And it's made worse by bizare bugs in Github Actions that cause jobs to occasionally get stuck when you aren't looking, wasting precious build minutes.

  Anyway, roll on July, looks like it will be a 4th of July release for the completed everything page including archive pages.

• The world appears to still be on the warpath from yet another manufactured incident that happened at a sandwich store. Same one that did it several times before. It seems I'm heading into more starvation and thirst punishment for the things that were done to me, so I'll likely have to prepare the newsletter early as these periods which happen all too often are often accompanied by access to running water and electricity being cut off. Food and water goading from the gang stalkers has already begun. There are also signs they are going to force me down an unsafe path that I don't want to go down. How strange that this sort of thing always happens during starvation and thirst episodes. What are the chances? #

• Leo Laporte on AI

  In a recent This Week in Tech episode Leo Laporte really nails some of the major issues with the AI gold rush. (0:15:22)

  We have problems on both sides. One is garbage content generated by these AIs, because they can’t distinguish between a joke and a genuine suggestion. The other is they are disintermediating the original source of all this content so that users don’t have to click through, they can just read the generated page. And by the way these AI companies are burning money because the creation of these LLMs is so hideously expensive, they can’t possibly generate enough revenue to pay for it. So the whole thing is a house of cards.

  He then goes on

  It feels like we’ve replaced a system that could never work, the internet, with an even more chaotic system that requires an interlocking payment system, with money out but no money in. It feels like it’s not making it better, it could make it worse.

  And finally

  It does feel like it’s almost a Ponzi scheme, where they're just going to keep shifting the responsibility for payment, and nothing ever really gets fixed. It’s like Uber. Eventually it feels like it’s going to collapse in on itself.

  The full discussion is really insightfull. There are a lot of issues people are ignoring. Real fundamental things like how the making of the content actually gets paid for.

• I'm really curious about the podcasting 2.0 movement. It's a progression of the podcasting scene with revenue payment tools that use Bitcoin to give podcasters a new way to interact with their listeners. With the new tech, listeners can stream sats, which are small subdivisions of a Bitcoin, directly to the show podcasters. They can also send one off 'boosts'. It works really well for shows that have quite a lot of audience interaction.

  My current two favorites that use it are Citadel Dispatch Podcast and the Linux Unplugged Podcast. The Linux Unplugged guys have gotten especially into it, creating sound effects for different donation amounts. The sound effects are short film and TV clips. It creates a more intimate vibe with show insider jokes.

  To participste as a listener you need to listen using playback software that supports the new tech. One example I hear mentioned a lot is Fountain. Another I've heard mention is Podverse.

  I think these are great tools for audience participation / Q&A style show segments. Interested to hear about any other podcasts that are experimenting with this stuff. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: Static site generator archives plugin update markjgsmith.com #

• Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models - Looks like a ptetty strong AI product offering. Will be very interesting to see how folks use it. machinelearning.apple.com #

• Omakub - "An Omakase Developer Setup for Ubuntu 24.04 by DHH" - Sort of like oh-my-zsh but for an entire Ubuntu install and setup. Aiming to create the perfect OS optimised for software developers. DHH discusses it in a recent Rework podcast episode, I also blogged about it. Cool project. omakub.org #

• New Post: Leo Laporte on AI markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/12 #

• What a day yesterday. So much headwind from the world. I decided to back off from merging the latest archives plugin everything page support, because I noticed some strange things on the website. After spending quite a bit of time looking into it, I'm glad I held off, despite massive pressures from the world around me to hurry up. It's difficult to put into words, and I know it sounds bizare, but there are times when the world smells blood, it suddenly knows you are in a precarious position, and situations will materialise around you that make you just want to get whatever you are doing done. That's shen mistakes are easily made, and you find yourself merging before everything is properly tested, and of course big problems often ensue.

  But choosing to wait and figure out what's going on properly also has a cost. The entire rest of yesterday I was punished again and again and again, everywherw I went. It made it hugely difficult to get to the core of the issue, but I think I managed to, and made some fixes. I tested it all in staging in the evening, it all looked good. And of course the same exact pattern from the previous night repeated. The world was pushing for me to continue and finish the work, to merge even though I was really tired from standing for many hours. Once again I decided to hold off until the morning, and once again that was followed by an angry world on the warpath.

  I've hardly had any sleep last night, motorbike gang stalkers and several strange situations through the night. What a coincidence that there would be a night of sleep depravation. If you walk into the trap, you get punished, if you avoid the trap, you get punished.

  Are you going to allow today world? Or are you yet again on the warpath? #

• My ankles are massively swollen again. I guess it's all the standing I've been having to do to get the archives fixed. I only have internet when I'm standing up unfortunately. Plus, pins and needles in my legs last night because of the new restricted sleeping situation. Just so horrid. When are you going to give me a break world? #

• By the way, forgot to mention, there was another clearly manufactured incident at one of the sandwich shops yesterday morning. They did the old one person that always gets my order right, remembers the garnishes I don't like, taking my order, then the other bloke, who always purposely gets the order wrong and sometimes turns into a total sandwich nazi, actually making the sandwich. It was quite clearly a planned switcharoo, and of course he got my order wrong, and I had to open the sandwich up in front of him and take out the disgusting stuff. Anyway, that was no doubt grounds for the bullying that ensued the entire rest of the day. And guess what, when I left the sandwich shop, crossed the road, and on the otherside there was a street vendor parked right there, seemed very intent on looking at me, as I passed him he said his line that he'd obviously been waiting to utter: "my dog". How uterly vietnanese charming and on brand for this place. #

• The Lib Dems pro-EU pro-cannabis ticket

  The UK Lib Dems have announced their policies going into the elections. It's a pro-EU pro-cannabis platform, which given the history might be quite a good combination. In all seriousness though, I think having cannabis decriminalised would eventually lead to much lower overall crime. It would just be a normal thing, no reason to get involved with crime. The bigger issue I think is to simultaneously try to tackle the binge culture that is quite common in the UK.

  I think most adults would like to have the option to try cannabis every now and then. That's the responsible way to enjoy such a priveledge. The problem is that people often drift into a daily habitual relashionship with such substances. It's the same with alcohol. Both these substances can be fun, and even therapeutic, but when it's too habitual they make you forget how great life is sober. That's something I've really become familiar with the past few years. Being sober is awesome. Waking up early with a clear head is awesome. Feeling healthy is awesome. But it's a subtle feeling in comparison to alcohol or cannabis, so people miss how good it is.

  It should be 95% sober, and just occasional stroll into mind altering substances territory. That's how I'd like society to be, where people were responsible enough to balance themselves. The focus wouldn't even be on these substances, they would just be peripheral, the focus would be on living life and contributing to society in a meaningfully way, where you could feel that your talent and efforts really made a difference.

• Linux desktop for developers movement

  The main discussion in the Chefs Choice Ubuntu episode Ep#566 on the latest Linux Unplugged podcast, is super interesting, especially given my recent article about what digital collaboration looks like in the VFX industries. Such synchronicity. It was all brought about by the recent announcement over at 37signals that they are moving to Linux as the standard workstation for developers. DHH is somewhat of a major OG internet pioneer, so folks really listen to what he had to say when it comes to developing online businesses.

  His thesis is that although Apple does have some nice hardware and software, it's been apparent for some time that their interests are not as well aligned with developer interests as they once were. So he decided to take the plunge and move all his developers to Linux which he feels is more spiritually aligned with his interests. It's somewhat of a bold move in an industry where most, or at least many, developers use Apple hardware and software. The cool thing is he's decided to channel his enthusiasm of the transition into a project, called Omakub, to help rapidly configure Ubuntu into a generalised workstation for software developers. Of course the project is open source and aims to help other small businesses and solo devs make a similar move towards Linux.

  The Linux Unplugged guys, who themselves are extremely experienced running and maintaining Linux systems in a variety of contexts, go deep on the whole idea, and it makes for a tremendous episode. It's a subject I'm really interested in, and have been since my time working in VFX, where the default OS for engineers and artists was often Linux, in my case it was Fedora Linux. It was awesome, but it did take quite a bit of customisation to get things looking good and being functionally optimum. I was part of the engineering team that systematized that, but many folks don't have the luxury of an in-house engineering team, hence the need for the project.

  Some of the key take aways:

  • DHH’s project is a collection of setup scripts that configure Ubuntu Linux to be both aesthetically pleasing to the average developer, but also aims to install and configure many standard tools and software such as databases and text editors
  • The scripts add lots of PPA’s so the latest and greatest versions of much used packaged can be installed
  • They use a custom version of Gnome
  • They opted for simplicity and familiarity, just curl and bash scripts organised in a folder structure, easily customisable, easily understood, just delete what you don't want
  • They plan for 37signals to support the project and use it directly in their own work

  Some of the additional topics discussed:

  • It will be interesting to see how it’s maintained, how it evolves, similar projects have emerged in the past, the difficulty is often long term maintenance as priorities change, as 3rd party projects fall by the wayside and new ones come on the scene
  • Mint, cosmic desktop, matte, are all essentially attacking this same problem from different angles
  • The aesthetic tweaks are nice, it's suprising how close you can get to a setup that rivals MacOS in terms of looks, but it takes quite a lot of research and decision making, having a baseline like this could really speed up similar transitions to Linux for many
  • It doesn’t separate out applications, user data, and the OS very well, ironically MacOS has recently gotten quite good at this
  • What are the possibilities of running the scripts on a different base OS than Ubuntu?
  • How and why one might want to do a project like this using Nix rather than bash scripts and curl, many portability, customisation and packaging benefits
  • Using such a project to create little dev vms that you use in development
  • Adding nix as a default tool in the tool chain

  It's great to see such a project take flight, especially since it stands a pretty good chance of being around for a while as they are using it in their day to day business activities. Could be an awesome combo with one of those modular Framework laptops. In fact I believe I read somewhere that DHH is equiping many of the 37Signal devs with such devices. This has all the hallmarks of the maker / hacker movement. Really hope this project succeeds, I've seen something similar with my own eyes in VFX, so I know it's possible, and I'm almost certain something similar could be created for developer environments across the wider economy. Digital collaboration on Linux might be the next big thing.

Today’s links:

• The Endgame for Stablecoins - I haven't had a chance to read this yet, but looks super interesting. I'm trying to understand stablecoins a lot better, they are clearly a bug deal in the crypto world. multicoin.capital #

• Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models - Apple enters the AI software race, with a focus on privacy and high quality training data. They appear to have spent a lot of time thinking their product offering through. machinelearning.apple.com #

• Ed Davey vows to fight for UK to rejoin EU single market and eventually overturn Brexit - I quite like the understated simplicity of their 'fair deal' pitch. Yeah most people just want to be sure they have the basics covered so they can then try to meaningfully contribute to society. I guess their cannabis shops thing will be popular with younger voters, on balance I think it's probably a good idea, with the criminality aspect removed it would eventually stop being such a draw for risk takers, it would just be a normal thing, so less likelihood of leading to other crime. The pro-EU stance also interesting. I'd like to know their what their approach would be within the EU should a rejoin occur. Seems like they could do quite well with these policies. www.independent.co.uk #

• New Posts: The Lib Dems pro-EU pro-cannabis ticket markjgsmith.com #

• Robinhood to Buy Crypto Exchange Bitstamp in Effort to Expand Outside the U.S. - Pretty interesting article. Robinhood has clearly hit upon a massive intetest in investing for regular folks, makes total sense for them to get into crypto. www.coindesk.com #

• New Posts: Linux desktop for developers movement markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/11 #

• I've got the everything page archives working in staging yesterday. All pages appear to be correctly generated and the links on the pages all point to the right places. The everything page archives are genetated from a merged data source so individual items are in various locations. That makes it more complicated the get the urls right. But I found a way to do it, and it appears to work.

  I decided to wait until today to merge the new code because I was already very tired from standing for so many hours. I still only have internet while standing up at the minute. My ankles are quite swollen today, that's likely because of all the work on the archives over the past few days, but it could be related to the much more difficult sleeping arrangement the world forced me into last week. It's difficult to tell.

  In any case, hoping to have the archives all working and deployed later today. They will probably need a bit of re-arranging of things on the main website, but I'll get to that once it's all deployed. #

• Well the plan to merge and deploy the latest archives plugin has been derailed. As I set off for the internet place, I could sense a warpath brewing in the air. I got to the corner where the soup stand is and sure enough as I crossed the road from the ether emerged a random voice shouting 'more ah!'. That's typucally not a good sign. I calmly notes that it sounded like a warpath and continued on my way.

  At the internet place, there were much nore people than usual at this early time, it was about 6am. Started getting ready to do the merge. Noticed that yesterday's posts hadn't been deployed, even though the midnight build has successfully conpleted. I've been debugging that for the past 40 minutes.

  Looks like the build completed but the deploy got stuck wasting 25 build minutes, and eventually completing without error, though the logs show that the deploy did in fact error, and did not deploy the latest build.

  It's not a good omen. I can almost sense a disturbence in all around me. It’s like I’m being pressured into starting the meege, but I'm already tired now.

  Feeks like the world is going to keep escallating no matter what I do.

  Someone literally as I type this note, just flicked a cigarette butt in my direction. Landed a meter from my feet.

  I guess the world is in fact on another warpath. What a suprise, guess I'll be having to yet again handle another tsunami of hate, as everything gets blamed on me for the millionth time. #

• Definitely need to pause the merge. Just noticed the everything page is broken in both staging and production. It's only displaying notes, no blog posts, no links. It's not clear to me why this happened, especially not in production. Production should normally be using a cached version of all the modules, so any changes in staging should absolutely not affect production, and I haven't refreshed the cache in production. #

Today’s links:

• UK unemployment rising at fastest pace of OECD countries, analysis shows - Of all member states, only Costa Rica suffered a similar rise. Managers are blamibg the economy, risibng costs but also interestingly a sizeable oroportion are also pointing to increased automation. No mention if that's related to AI but seems likely since that's the biggest tech trend at the minute. www.theguardian.com #

2024/06/10 #

• I've made some progress yesterday on getting the archives working for the everything page, though I had to do a lot of housekeeping of the code initially.

  The test data wasn't created with merged data sources in mind, so it wasn't really a good data set for testing the everything page since the different post type examples were on different days. There was also a bunch of EJS syntax in them which was just confusing things. So I spent quite a bit of time updating the data to something that shows the everything page in action.

  The npm module cache started doing strange things again. I was able to prove it wasn't getting updated correctly. Ultimately it was blocking me from using new code in plugins. I refactored the cache refresh logic so it's easier to clear the cache, but in the end the only thing that fixed it was tediously deleting all cache items by hand one by one in the Github web UI. That's not normal. The cache is keyed off of a hash of the package-lock.json. If that changes, and it should everytime something changes in the npm modules, then a new cache should be created. It's either the cache, or npm isn't updating lock files correctly.

  Anyway, hoping to be able to test the latest archives plugin code today, which should hopefully create a merged data source and correctly handle adding the right urls to the page, so individual items from different sources are correctly referenced. Let's hope the cache doesn't cause any more issues, I've used up a little over half of this month's build minutes so far.

  Update: The midnight build for whatever reason got stuck deploying to the hosting provider. The job completed without erroring, but in the logs there was a single error line outputed. The newly built site didn't get deployed either.

  TimeoutError: Timeout while waiting for deploy

  I'm adding this update to trigger a build to deploy the site. Another totally unnecessary waste of 25 build minutes when I'm already almost run out. #

Today’s links:

• EU elections: populist right makes gains but pro-European centre holds - Pretty good round up of the elections. I'm finding all these parties with similar sounding names, and parties within parties, and the trans-national nature of the whole thing very confusing. Quite an exiting event this time around. I feel someone should make something like a Ven diagram of all the parties. www.theguardian.com #

• EU elections: Macron to dissolve French parliament after crushing loss to far right - France seems to be somewhat at the centre of much of the election drama. It's kind of shocking that Le Penn has done so well, getting twice the support as Macron did. In what has been described as a poker move Macron has called a snap national election in response. Exciting stuff. Interesting that it will happen only a few days after the UK's snap election, which was called last week by Sunak. So much happening in Europe at the minute. Plus it's the first time 16+ year olds have gotten the vote in several countries. www.theguardian.com #

• Hundreds of millions head to polls on final day of European elections - Great sunmary piece, this one has just the right amount of detail and breadth across the entire region. Seems like the final results will be known by the end of today. I'm interested to see the participation rates in the various countries. www.theguardian.com #

• Centre-right on course to strengthen majority in EU election, as far-right makes gains - Some coverage from the Beeb, several bite sized summaries from various reporters across the continent, focusing in on hard facts rather than over analyse, quite successfully I think cutting through much of the confusing system of coalitions. I'm still kind of confused, but maybe I'll at least recognise some of the names over the next few years. www.bbc.com #

• India outpacing Asian rivals in data center capacity, report says - In non EU election news, turns out data centre growth is a pretty intetesting metric, a proxy for economic growth? India has been doing relatively well recently as a country. asia.nikkei.com #

• Solana saw nearly half a million tokens launched last month - It's become the most popular chain for launching new tokens recently, very popular especially with memecoins. Are there any open source software projects that have launched coins? I wonder if I could create a coin and attach it in some way to the development of my static site generator. I'd have next to no clue how one would actually run a coin. Probably a far too outlandish an idea. On the other hand might be kind of fun. www.theblock.co #

2024/06/09 #

• Sadly the world is on the war path yet again. As far as I can tell it started at a soup stand yesterday morning. They were being weird as I ordered the soup and paid, then as I left there someone loudly said 'pay'. I had already paid and they knew very well that I'd already paid. I continued on my way. The entire rest of the day, escallation after escallation after escallation, and things getting blocked, literally everywhere I went. All through the night gang stalkers have been waking me up by shouting 'lie'. One of their favorite things, you can almost see the glee oozing out of their pores as they do it.

  The lady doth protest a bit too much, me thinks.

  Once again, they create the problem they complain about, they block the solution they suggest, and eventually they just blame everything on you. This will continue until everyone is unhappy about everything, then they will blame the unhappiness on me too. Instructing me to be happy.

  But it doesn't matter what you do, happy or sad, standing up or sitting down, saying something or not saying anything, it doesn't matter, you'll get the blame, and very likely you'll get mutilated in some way, and someone will shout 'learn' at you. Either way that's what happens.

  Blaming me for blaming me. Literally blaming me for the thing they are doing to me. #

• I think I might have made some progress with the everything page archives. I changed where I merge the data sources, essentially it's just another data source like all the others. Previously I had special cased it because I hadn't been able to create the merged data source in the standard way, but I gave it another try and got the promises to resolve correctly.

  I'll be testing the archives using this combined data source later today. I'm expecting it to render the pages correctly but with incorrect urls in the pages in some places. Very conscious of not wasting build minutes. That's easy enough when I'm testing it in just the archives plugin, but as soon as I attempt to test it on the main website, which has the npm module cache, things tend to get very confusing, and each mistake eats up massive amounts of build minutes. And sometimes the cache appears to just not clear properly. Anyway, here we go again. #

• Mark Russinovich CTO of Azure:

  By the way, I’ve been using AI a ton for programming, for these AI projects, and I can tell you, we’re not at risk any time soon of loosing our jobs. I mean I’ve spent so much time debugging AI buggy code. And then trying to "you did it wrong, you introduced a variable and there is no declaration for it"…"oh I’m sorry"…"you still didn’t do it". (31:00)

• Surely the problem with re-enforcement learning, is that at some point, instead of learning the problem being taught, the AI will go meta and start learning the re-enforcement learning, because that's the most obvious re-occurring pattern. Then it's just two entities teaching each other to teach while pretending to be doing something else. And presumably the AI will eventually win that war since it can do much cleverer, and devious re-enforcements than the human. Then civilisational collapse ensues. #

• Vietnam: Warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath

  Me: Are you on the warpath again?

  Vietnam: Warpath lie #

• Me: Are you still on the warpath?

  Vietnam: Warpath #

Today’s links:

• Who are the political supergroups in the European parliament? - It's good to see the main parties listed. I can't help but wonder how many regular folks turn off to the whole thing when they realise there are essentially parties inside parties, and none of the names really describe what they are very well. Politics is complicated already even when it's just 1 level of parties. How on earth are regular people supposed to compare and contrast and figure out what's going on with all this indirection? www.theguardian.com #

• European elections: Dutch exit polls show progressive alliance just ahead of far right - What with all these coalitions, I wonder how many of the politicians actually remember their official policies. And even worse, how many remember the official policy positions of the opposing parties? The level of winging it has got to be through the roof. Perhaps they have a model checker embeded in their cravates. www.theguardian.com #

2024/06/08 #

• Collaborating on a Rocky Road (Issue #167)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-06-08)

  In this week’s edition:

  Crypto going mainstream, belgians on bitcoin, the etherium vs solana debate, another open source rug pull, superintelligence and digital collaboration in VFX

  Issue details:

  • Title: Collaborating on a Rocky Road
  • Issue: 167
  • Page: issue webpage

Today’s links:

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Collaborating on a Rocky Road (Issue #167) markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/07 #

• I've started work on getting the archives rendering for the everything page. Though the everything page is looking great, when you click through to individual days, since there are no archives, you get a 404. It's a little bit tricky with the everything page because the page gets created by merging all the individual data sources. What this means is that the location of the canonical page for a particular post item are in different places. So you have to have a way to figure out the URL.

  Anyway, I'm going to be working on that for the next few days. I have to be careful with build minutes, I've already used up half of this months minutes. The other thing I could work on is reusabke wirkflows which could make the build minutes issue easier to deal with. But if I do that then the everything page will likely not have archives until next month. It's tough balancing all this stuff. #

• When you build big important things you generally start with a small prototype first. With that in mind, why don't we create super intelligent, fir example, squirels before super intelligent humans? How many people would even be happy with the idea of super intelligent squirels? I'm not sure I'm okay with it. If we aren't happy with superintelligent squirels, why are we happy with superintelligent AIs? #

• It's Friday and looking at the list of podcasts I've starred this week, and I've only started 2 items. I have listened to quite a few. Not sure what I'll do for the newsletter tomorrow. #

• In this age of AI, how long until 'learn' becomes the new C-word? #

Today’s links:

• Tinypool - the node.js worker pool 🧵 - Projects like this interest me because the could potentially be integrated into my static site generator. Good to keep the footprint small. github.com #

• sanack/node-jq - Node.js wrapper for jq - a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. Could be useful.github.com #

• In Praise Of The Basics - With web development it's important go understand the basics, whether you are an advanced developer or a user who wants to make some modifications to their Squarespace hosted website. This article list some free resources to get people up to speed, could be a good piece to keep handy in case you need something to send to friends, family or clients.www.smashingmagazine.com #

2024/06/06 #

• How digital collaboration works at VFX shops

  I spent many years working in the feature film visual effects (VFX) industry. There's a huge variety of companies that supply services to film projects both big and small, and that specialise in different parts of the post production process. I've worked for both small and big companies, but also for companies specialising in different parts of the development process. The VFX industry was one of the first to go fully digital, and at scale. Just stay in your seat at the cinema and watch a vfx heavy film's end credits to get an idea of that scale. It's mindboggling. Simply put, they have a lot of experience in digital workflows and collaboration. I thought this might be an interesting topic to cover for others involved in digital transformation across the wider economy.

  The smaller companies tend not to have lots of infrastructure and custom workflow above and beyond some large networked storage and high end work stations for artists to work on the high resolution images. Larger companies tend to have much more mature workflow systems that enable them to work on many simultaneous projects, to rapidly hire large numbers of artists, to on-board them quickly, and have them collaborate together on the same visual effects shots.

  The typical situation is that there are many artists using different UIs / editing software, all operating on the same data. The data tends to amount to huge volumes. Earlier in the post production process, artists are working on individual shots, churning out many diffetent versions, that get reviewed daily. Later in the film process when the shots have been assembled into the full feature, artists work on reels, of which films tend to have 4-6 reels. Their job is to integrate, color grade and edit the shots into a cohesive hole, to give the film a specific look and style. Reels used to get printed back onto actual reels of films, although increasingly cinemas are fully digital these days, so another final part of the process is to create d-cinema specific digital formats.

  Often larger VFX shops will have various collaboration tooling such as review and approve, version control of assets, and lots of custom scripting for working with large amounts of digital sequences of image files. Like for example quickly listing, renaming, creating different resolution test versions. Many of the artist software have both comercial plugins as well as in-house made plugins for modifying and adding effects.

  In the places that have extensive collaboration infrastructure, though there are the occasional Windows and Mac workstations, open source Linux OSs tend to be the most popular, because it's easier to build custom workflow tools using scripting languages like Python and Perl, and lots of shell scripting, connecting up to central shot tracking databases. The automation makes it easy for artists to switch between shots, submit sequences to the render farm, and have various resolution outputed to different locations, some ready for review in small theatres with high-end projectors or screens, some for review on web browsers. The tools are seemlessly integrated into the OSs using environment variables, which can be managed with shell environment management tools. Tools are both UI and CLI based.

  There are also lots of system tools that automatically backup ongoing work, run machine healthchecks, automate repeatable environment setup, and integrate with production and finance databases.

  Though some artists do also write code, especially the 3D artists, most of the bigger VFX shops have tools teams. These are groups of software developers that specialise in different aspects of the development process. They write custom system and workflow tools, as well as effects plugins for the various software tools used by the artists. There are also the occasional web developer for the database collab tools, but most of the GUI tools are written using native OS UI toolkits like QT.

  A lot of thought goes into integrating all these pieces of software, so huge teams can be brought together very quickly to work on massive amounts of data, all co-ordinated by producers. I had the chance to see into much of this process when I was tasked with putting together a training program for new artists. It was an enlightening process, and we were subsequently able to scale the teams in a much more flexible way.

  At a high level, that's pretty much how they do it in VFX.

  Since working in feature film VFX, I've also worked in broadcast TV and software development. I think there are likely a lot of common patterns that can be re-used in many other industries. Digital transformation is the hot buzzword for the process of the digitization of everything. It's a real thing, where companies are mapping out their processes, how they've always done things, and then try to create new and better ways of doing it using digital tools, and it takes a long time, often decades.

• The world has re-configured itself again while I wasn't looking. Without getting into details, sleeping just got a whole lot more difficult. Really not what you want in the middle of rainy season. I wouldn't be suprised if the bullies where measuring out my coffin as I type this.

  I hate writing about this stuff, but that's reality for me at the minute. If I didn't write about it that would be disingenuous. Of course, I imagine it doesn't help much with trying to find a job, to get out of the nightmare caused by COVID. Such are the contradictions at times in life. #

• Just another inconsequential data point.

  I'm standing browsing the internet at the internet place. People are having breakfast coffees at the next door cafes. Chitter chatter is ongoing. At the very instant I'm about to finish up, a man in one of the cafes loudly and repeatedly says the exact name of the noodles I got gifted from a food vendor yesterday. It's very odd, not only because of the timing, but also because these cafes don't have food. There are no food places nearby. Is it intimidation? Is it some sort of strange help? Is it both?

  This type of thing is happening constantly here. Literally everywhere I go, random people seem to know my business, with uncanny precision. Is it harrassment? Pretty sure it would be considered some form of it back in europe.

  It's so impossible to describe the strange things that happen here. Figured I'd write this one up into a note. #

• Just to add to the previous note, because since finishing writing it, mildly thretening passive aggresive behaviour from one of the locals as he walks up and down the lane past me. Historically it's a pattern of behaviour I've been on the receiving end from him many times before. This morning it included a clear reference to last night's sleep depravation re-configuratiom which I mentioned earlier. This sort of escallation is happening constantly. #

• One of the greatest things about long form podcasting is that you get these magic little moments that pop up out of the ether.

  In his latest episode talking with Tony Hinchcliffe, Rogan makes a somewhat unexpected comparison.

  Sure in the run up to the election, Trump was talking about locking Hilary up because of her emails, but he never actually went after the opposition legally. Yet the democrats have done exactly that while claiming that Trump is the crazy one, the loose cannon.

  They are all crazy, that’s what they don’t want you to know. It’s like sluts that are always talking bad about other girls that are sluts." [01:13:00]

  The thing that really makes this one pop is Rogan’s reaction to himself, realising in real-time that he just totally nailed it. Instant classic IMO. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: How digital collaboration works at VFX shops markjgsmith.com #

• Nvidia passes Apple in market cap as second-most valuable public U.S. company - They passed $3 trillion market cap. The top most valuable are now Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple, with Apple dealing with a lot of head winds. www.cnbc.com #

2024/06/05 #

• Dear iOS,

  Please stop auto-correcting 'some' to 'sone', which isn’t even a word, and it’s most definitely much less common than 'some'. You do it constantly.

  Thank you & kind regards, Mark #

• According to Anatoly Yakovenko, the goal for the Solana L1 is to be able to support the entire world. 10M transactions per second: 100 transactions per person, per second, per day. That's a lot of transactions. #

• There's an interesting developer related segment on the latest Rabbit Hole recap Podcast. Matt and Marty comment on Peter MacCormack's recent Michael Saylor interview, and they go on to talk about being bitcoin conservative, open source development & funding, protocol changes, maintenance, the need for an ethical path for devs, and the scary prospect of shitcoiners funding bitcoin development (~00:50:00). Worth a listen if you are interested in Bitcoin tech and development. #

• It's election season in the EU, and I've noticed lots of articles in the main stream media. Perhaps I'm just reading the Guardian too much, but it seems to have peaked an interest in the UK.

  After all the Brexit stuff, and especially with a large majority of young folks being quite annoyed about the whole debacle, is the Uk getting interested in EU elections? That would be quite an ironic turn of events. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

  Could also be because the EU elections are IMO actually turning out to be genuinely interesting this time around.

  I'd love to know how to get a representative read of the situation. #

• I thought this was an interesting quote from the recent article about Bilderberg:

  Time magazine has dubbed Ukraine "an AI war lab", and the Economist agrees, describing it as "a testing ground for companies like Anduril and Palantir" – the heads of both of these defense tech companies are here in Madrid.

  That hadn't occurred to me before, because the scale of war is just so big. But of course, some things you just can't test in staging, and that's even more the case for something like war. The point is that it's worth remembering that lots of people actually want the war in Ukraine to continue. It's very convenient for some.

  And it's likely a general thing, that if a horrible situatiom persists for far longer than seems normal, there's often an incentive disalignment. It might not be immediately obvious, but likely that some people are benefitting from the misery of others. #

• EU elections AI analyst bot

  I've been getting mildly interested in the run up to the EU elections over the past few days. It's not something I've ever paid any real attention to before, but this year, there's so much going on. It feels genuinely a bit exciting. Like the entire region is approaching some sort of important crossroad.

  It's also an opportunity to do some arm chair tourism. Learn about some of the different cultural subtleties that exist across the continent. A time when it's possible to suss out genuine differences in the flavours of society, but also the things that hold us together, and maybe even more importantly, a way to envision how we could be better in ourselves and better integrated together in the future. Respecting and even appreciating our differences, and genuinely looking forward to building a great future that we can feel part of and valued.

  For me the western EU differences are quite well understood. I've spent time in many places in those countries. It's still interesting to catchup and remember how things were, how they might have changed in recent years. But I'm also really interested in the central and eastern countries. Those I have much less first hand experience with. Mostly just through watching alternative small budget films and talking to immigrants back home. There's a certain romanticism to it, they seem somewhat exotic, but in a cold sort of way.

  It's one of the reasons I like listening to the Crypto Voices Podcast. Matthew Mezinskis is a US expat in the region, living I think in Poland. His crypto coverage is the main attraction, he is somewhat famously good at numerical and scientific analysis of the monetary base system, and he's really excellent at explaining things. But he often drifts into a bit of local central european politics at the end of the episodes. It's a boots on the ground view of what's happening in the region. And that's tended to be quite a lot recently, given the war in Ukraine.

  Most of what I'm reading newswise is from the Guardian and BBC news websites. It's great writing but I'm always wondering what their biases are. I really wish I could read similar articles but from the different countries local media. Unfortunately because of language differences, but also because of shear volume, that's pretty difficult.

  It occurred to me so, that wouldn't it be great, in this age of LLMs and ChatGPT, to have an AI bot that on the daily, consumed all the election news, in all the various languages, creating not only a summary in your native language, because translation is so good these days, but also did some genuine analysis to discover biases, discrepencies, conflicts of interest, in short produced some high level pieces that gave you a way to check the pulse across the entire region.

  You could also imagine that, if the AI bot knew your interests and background, it could unearth things that might be of particular interest to you.

  Would love to know if such a thing exists, and if it doesn't, why not?

• I was thinking about which online communities I spend most of my time with. In no particular order, I'd say these broadly are the following: Linux, Webdev, Tech, Bitcoin, Music, Out There Stuff.

  I have to say, it's mostly reading at this stage. I don't actively participate in chats, forums, discord groups etc. That's mostly down to lack of time. But I would like to be a bit more connected into these in the future.

  In the past, many of my attempts to connect have been rebuffed. Maybe that will change in the future, really wish that could happen in some way. I guess I'm not very good at it.

  I've been online for 25 years at this point, still no real friends though. You would think that it would be a possibility. #

• Static site vs dynamic web server

  It's true that dynamic web servers are super cheap these days. So why not use one instead of rendering your website as static files?

  Here are a few reasons off the top of my head:

  • Easily move your site around, avoid lock in and price gouging, just pick up all your files and leave, everywhere supports static sites
  • Long term stability, no npm installs that fail after years of not installing your site, no libraries out of date, no upgrades needed, your website is just files (see note below)
  • Security, virtually no way to hack your site because there literally isn't any code that gets executed
  • Automation and collaboration, Github powered workflows, since it's all just files, it's super easy to collaborate around a github repository, setup workflows using many available pre-built ones or create your own, your website isn't stuck inside a database, also great for automating pulling content from various sources and generating your website using static site generators
  • Publish and work offline, if you manage your site using a version control system like Git, then you can always create new content, even if/when your internet connection gets cut off / goes down, just sync up when you are next online
  • You can still integrate with dynamic servers if you need to for some things, use serverless function for example, or entire custom web servers, just put them on a subdomain, essentially you can mix and match

  These would be the first things that spring to mind for me.

  Full disclosure, I develop a static site generator, so I'm biased :)

  Note: Ok yes if you use a static site generator it's possible that you could run into npm install / up upgrade issues. On the other hand, in an emergency, you literally can just pickup all your files, leave, and get them up online at a different host without any difficulty. So keeping your existing site online is much easier. You don't need to mess about with a database. Then you have time to fix any problems with the static site generator.

• Some people just want to watch you starve

  Sadly another textbook example of the bullies creating the problem they complain about, blocking the solution they suggest, and eventually blaming it all on me. This one is going to be a bit depressing. Life is like that sometimes.

  About a month ago, my portable coffee mug went missing. I used to use it for instant noodles too, so it was quite a big loss. It disapeared under very strange circumstances. I wrote about it at the time. In any case I had been mostly avoiding instant noodles because in one of the places where they have hot water heaters in the public areas, a strange old lady was making it look like she was pouring small recepticles of clear liquid into the water heaters. I don't know for sure whether she was actually doing it or not, but I did end up with several sore throats.

  Following that, the incidents of people gifting me large numbers of instant noodles packets increased significantly. Sometimes big bags full of them. Since I had no way to cook them I had no choice but to refuse them or throw them away. And guess what, I got blamed, 'what an ungrateful foreigner'. Nevermind that I was often starving.

  In parrallel to this, the water supply in the taps at one of the public toilets slowly, bit by bit, week by week, systematically got reduced and eventually cut off. That was an entire ordeal in itself, but in any case now there is a red bucket outside the toilet that people are supposed to use to clean their hands. I don't use it because not only is it likely a new popular bath location, for the bird fauna in the neighbouring park, but I've seen the toilet staff use the same red bucket to clean the toilets. Fucking gross.

  Well in the interim over the past few weeks I decided to start eating noodles again since the previous noodles drama seemed long ago. So I've been enjoying the occasional instant noodles. That helps a lot when there is no food, and also a way to keep hydrated. Instead of the coffee mug I've been reusing an instant noodles recepticle. If you pay a bit more you get a recepticle, the noodles on their own are 1/2 the price. But the recepticle was made of cardboard on the outside so it wears out quite quickly.

  Well the recepticle I was reusing was getting quite knackered. This morning though I got gifted some noodles from a food vendor, which was very nice, though it seemed like it could very well have been part of some sort of grift, where they make it seem like it's a gift, then when you don't pay, they look very disapointed and sad, even though they have been asking you all about the difficulties you've been having stuck in Vietnam since COVID. Even though they walked up to you and said they would give you some noodles. Anyway, that's a whole other story I won't get into. Their noodles were very nice, and what was great they came in a compleately plastic bowl, one I can safely reuse. Brilliant, a problem solved!

  Well guess what, eventually everything good gets broken. It happens every time. I had the gifted noodles sitting in a cafe / shop for breakfast. I also had an instant noodles to test out the new plastic bowl. Worked great. A few hours later, lunch time swings around and literally just as I was about to get another instant noodles packet, one of the shop cafe staff walks up the stairs with, you guessed it, a red bucket, identical to the public toilet bucket, full of water, which he then uses to fill up the water heater with. At this point I notice I have a bit of a sore throat and a massive case of dry mounth, which hasn't been happening all the other times I've had instant noodles the past week.

  It's likely not the exact same bucket, but it is literally a bucket you could use to mop the floor. And guess how the place was configured the day before? I arrived to find all the stools upside down on the tables, evidently they had been moping the floor. It's hard to impart how strange this configuration is. I've been going there every day for months and months now, and that was literally the first time I've seen all the stools upside down on the tables like that. What are the chances?

  So one problem fixed, but then another one immediately created, blocked once again, no more noodles for me, and in an even worse situation than before. Whenever they help you, they also mutilate you.

  This is happening constantly with literally every fucking thing, every fucking day. And what's more there are people that are fully aware of the situation, egging you on, pushing you to have the noodles, pushing you to walk into thier evil and malicious trap, and then finding it absolutely hilarious when you do. And they will also find it the most hilarious thing in the universe when you are starving and can only afford an instant noodles. They just want to watch you starve.

Today’s links:

• Thousands of homeless people removed from Paris in pre-Olympics ‘social cleaning’ - This should be a national embarrassment. It's clearly not a money issue, the Olympics will bring huge amounts of money. These people have been forced into horrible conditions by a system that is clearly against them, and now the state is trying to disapear them. Just horrendous. Sadly this type of thing happens in so many places, it's the modern day gas chambers. www.theguardian.com #

• Shein set to file for £50bn London listing - Interesting to see how local big clothes companies like Zara and H&M will react, apparently Shein skirts import taxes since many of the third-party suppliers, as well as contract manufacturers (i.e. small factories) ship direct to customers rather than import large shiping containers. www.bbc.com #

• Open Collective - "Open Collective is a legal and financial toolbox for grassroots groups. It’s a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community." - It's awesome that there are now tools to help these grassroots movements be transparent. That enables them to carry out the great work they do with much less likelyhood they will fall victim to corruption. opencollective.com #

• OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance - Interesting to see they are engageing Lawrence Lessig, well known for his work creating the Creative Commons, the copy left movement, and experiments in elections reform. I find the excessive secrecy in these AI companies worrying, these groups should be operating with much more transparency. www.nytimes.com #

• New Post: EU elections AI analyst bot markjgsmith.com #

• Open Timestamps - "A timestamping proof standard, OpenTimestamps aims to be a standard format for blockchain timestamping." - Use the bitcoin blockchain to create timestamps so you can verify that a particular bit of content existed at a particular moment in time. I'd like to integrate something like this into my static site generator at some point. The website isn't loading the CSS, so not sure if it's still maintained. Sounds like a cool project though. opentimestamps.org #

• New Post: Static site vs dynamic web server markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Some people just want to watch you starve markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/04 #

• Utopias in the age of AI & crypto

  I'm not so suprised many of the experiments mentioned in Rohit Krishnan Wither Utopia thought piece failed. They are all tiny projects compared to a full blown utopian society. It’s not to say that they weren’t useful in some way. Perhaps they were useful learning experiences.

  The internet and world wide web have been a success, and these really are society scale inventions. I don’t know the history completely but I do know there were all sorts of failed projects and protocols. There were many failed starts. One of the core ideas of the web is that it’s simple. Anyone could write a bit of HTML, CSS and Javascript and get a site up and running pretty easily. Heck you could do it with just HTML.

  In the early days of the web there were all sorts of complicated visions about two way linking and being semantic and what not. But in the end what worked was something simple that anyone could do. I think we should continue striving for Utopian goals but it’s more like growing a garden than designing a perfect building. I wonder what patterns promote utopian outcomes. That might be something AI could help us with.

• Cory Doctorow used to work in VFX. I had no idea. The company in question was Alias Wavefront. Skim through the Wikipedia page and you will see they created the Maya software, which is the standard for 3D modeling throughout the VFX industries. Pretty cool. #

Today’s links:

• The future of financial analysis: How GPT-4 is disrupting the industry, according to new research - At some point the prediction capabilities are going to approach perfection. Won't that break the econony? Why would anyone invest? I guess when predicting company perfornance and economies has been solved those analysts will need to move on to analysing more complex systems? venturebeat.com #

• UK within British empire is like last person left at a party, says David Olusoga - Quite the analogy. I'm not sure it's so accurate, it feels like we've been hungover for years at this point. www.theguardian.com #

• The Guardian view on social media harms: the tech giants must be more open - I'm not so sure this is such a good idea. Yes there are occasionally some horrible cases that occur, but you have to realise the other side of the coin. There are also horrible cases of abuse by parents. I wonder what Britney Spears would think about social media companies allowing parents to snoop on their children. www.theguardian.com #

• Whither Utopia? - This article by Rohit Krishnan has been getting some attention. I thought it started out as a sort of book list maskerading as a thought piece. But it does get more interesting from about half way through. It's a topic I'm curious about, especially in this new age of AI and crypto where everything can be predicted and everything can be turned into a transaction. www.strangeloopcanon.com #

• New Post: Utopias in the age of AI & crypto markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/03 #

• As tech gets better as we head into infinity, how do we educate people to the fact that they can be tricked, and bigly? And keep doing it generation after generation? When people only really learn these things by experience. #

• With AI we are modelling the way the brain works. But the brain is essentially analogue, neurons aren’t either on or off, they can be a little bit on. How will digital models ever really recreate an analogue process? Maybe that will, in the end be the difference between human and artificial intelligence. #

• Lex Fridman on human memory

  The human brain and mind is something we are intimately aware of yet we take it for granted since they mediate our every action in the world. It's important to be aware of thought dynamics that arise, but without getting too caught up in it. It's especially relevant when you make a living primarily using your brain.

  I previously wrote about some memory and perception issues I had while reading. That was a kind of difficult piece to write about, but it helped me understand more fully how my mind works. It's possible that it improved the situation somewhat, but to be honest it's not something I've thought about much since writing the piece.

  With that in mind, I really enjoyed Lex Fridman's recent podcast interview with memory researcher and expert Charan Ranganath. There's so much to learn from their discussion to help demistify the grey matter in between your ears, in that skull we all carry around everywhere.

  Memory weirdnesses are just part of being human, even if they can be a bit embarrassing and confusing. The way we think about the brain and mind has changed dramatically, even since I was young. These are no longer taboo topics. I think that's great, and this progress has been possible in part by people freely sharing their experiences.

  I thought these two stories from Lex were particulatly interesting and fun. I have similar things that have happened to me.

  The first is all about how our brains remember things in very strange ways sometimes. It's not like a button you press, like with electronics or a computer, it's more like our brains have a mind of their own, and actually, they do!

  I remember, a good friend of mine Joe Rogan. I was on his podcast, we were randomly talking about soccer…football…somebody I grew up watching, Diego Armando Maradona, one of the greatest soccer players of all time, and we were talking about him and his career and so on, and Joe asked me if he was still around, and I said ‘yeah’. I don’t know why I thought yeah.

  That was a perfect example of memories. He passed away, I tweeted about it, how heart broken I was, all this kind of stuff, like a year before. I know this, but in my mind, I went back to the thing I’ve done many times in my head, visualising some of the epic runs he had on goal, and so on, so for me he’s alive. And also, part of the conversation when you are talking with Joe, there’s stress, and the focus is allocated, the attention is allocated in a particular way. But when I walked away, I was like, "in which world was Diego Maradona still alive?

  Because I was sure, in my head that he was still alive. It’s a moment that sticks with me. I’ve had a few like that in my life. Obvious things…like, disappear from mind. And it’s cool. It shows the power of the mind in a positive sense, to erase memories you want erased, maybe. But I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s a good explanation for that. (01:01:44)

  The second story is a reminder that our life situation, and that of others has a big impact on how our brains work. That's to be expected, we are shaped by the things we do day in day out:

  There’s a good percentage of time I personally live in the imagined world. I do thought experiments a lot […] sometimes it’s rigorous thought experiments, sometimes it’s fun ones. I imagine that has an effect on how I remember things. And I suppose I have to be a little bit careful to make sure stuff happened vs stuff that I just imagined happened.

  And also, some of my best friends are characters inside books, that never even existed. There’s some degree to which they actually exist in my mind. (01:09:37)

  Both these stories cheered me up a bit, so I figured I'd share them here. It's a great conversation, worth spending the time to listen to the whole episode.

• Another fascinating factoid from Lex's podcast with memory researcher and expert Charan Ranganath:

  The act of recalling memories can strengthen or distort the memory depending on environment conditions at the time, but also can have an effect on memories that you didn’t even recall! Memory is more like an ecosystem.

  That's so frigging strange. How did we ever get this far with such a weird thinking apparatus! #

Today’s links:

• Napster Sparked a File-Sharing Revolution 25 Years Ago - That era of the internet really was kind of wild. I don't remember being into Napster specifically but Bit torrent and NZBs were really awesome. Great post download automation features. I miss those days, you could really vicerally sense how the web was going to change literally everything. torrentfreak.com #

• War, AI and more war: the 2024 Bilderberg agenda is sure to set off alarm bells - Haven't herd this lot mentioned in quite a few years. It was Bilderberg this and illuminatti that about a decade ago. Interesting they are trying to re-inventing themselves. Perhaps they should try being more 'open' and less secretive, have the attendees do some blogging. I'm struck today about the 'builder' root in the name that I hadn't noticed before. This year it's a who's who of heads Big AI tech apparently, oh and Big pharma, and Big warfare. So nothing to be worried about then. Probably just like Davos. www.theguardian.com #

• U.S tech giants are building dozens of huge data centers in Chile. Locals are fighting back - These data centers are massive and use huge amounts of water extracted from the ground to cool their servers. That's a big problem in areas that already have droubts since many years. I like that these environmental organisations are springing up to both highlight the issue but also to facilitate projects where the very rich Big Tech companies can offset their environmental footprint. I just hope there is transparency, I could imagine such efforts could easily fall victim to corruption. restofworld.org #

• Computer makers unveil Nvidia Blackwell systems for AI rollouts - Two big new things in this article. First, 25-30X improvements in power comsumption, and second, the idea of "AI factories" that produce a new type of commodity: artificial intelligence. AI ETF anyone? venturebeat.com #

• Young French leader's rise and Belgium's future existence: What to watch in EU elections - Pretty good article that briefly samples the pulse in various countries accross the EU. I didn't realise that Belgium was in danger of disapearing, I suspect it's a bit of an alarmist view. Lots of focus on the rise of far right groups. It would be good to find a few similar articles by different news orgs to compare and contrast. Certainly interesting times politically in the EU at the minute. www.bbc.com #

• I’m a brown, Muslim European. For people like me, these EU elections are terrifying - Shada Islam piece about how the EU elections affect people like her. Every country has it's own slightly different flavour of disfunction when it comes to immigration, racism etc. I think also each place has it's own particulars where it's working well and producing net benefits for those involved. I wish we could spend some time unearthing those stories too. Interesting article nonetheless, both positive and negative aspects need to be written about and shared. www.theguardian.com #

• ‘I cannot take it lightly’: young voters urged to take part in EU elections - The view from young voters, also very interesting, they face quite different pressures and influences. And across the EU this group is massive. Some varied beliefs in ex-autocratic and russian states. Lots of concern for environmental issues. www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Lex Fridman on human memory markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/02 #

• Lots of harrassment the past 24 hours. I've been ignoring it completely, without saying a thing. I'm just so sick of having to react to every gif darn mood swing the big cry babies have. But predictably, it slowly gets worse when you do that. The escallations are literally worse than if you reply in some way. Catch 22, because then you get blamed for that. Literally any opportunity to blame you for something is created, cultuvated and exploited. #

• I got the daily links section in articles working yesterday in the blog plugin, which is pretty cool. It looks good, though I win't know for sure until I try it with production data. I tried deploying it in staging on the main website, but there's something blocking.

  It looks like the new code isn't being picked up for some reason. Tried reseting the cache several times. No dice. Also tried turning off the cache completely. Still no dice. Really strange because with no cache and fresh install of all modules, the latest version of all plugins should be picked up. #

• Everything page version 2

  It's been close to 3 weeks since I released the initial version of the everything page. That was quite a lot of effort that initially felt like great progress, with strides forward re-writing some important foundational code, and also massively reducing build times, but ultimately ended in disapointment and frustration as I ran out of Github build minutes while there were still way to many bugs.

  Well I spent the rest of the month finding bugs, re-writing portions of affected code, getting ready for this month's build minutes reset. I also wrote an interesting new feature called incremental progressive rendering, which still needs to be tested, merged and deployed. I wrote a lot of blog posts offline, all stored in git because I had no build minutes so couldn't publish them. Such are the difficulties when you are self hosting, building your own platform, and very low on resources. I did write a blog series about my static site generator and a post exploring the strategic long term vision for the project. Pretty happy with both of those.

  So the build minutes reset a couple of days ago, and I was ready to hit the ground running. It's been quite a stressful few days, first getting all the content I wrote offline the past 3 weeks published. Then finishing the testing, debugging, merging and deploying the everything page fixes to the main website.

  The basic structure is essentially complete, and the page looks pretty good even with minimal styling. The plan is to progressively enhance the styling. The key thing is that all post types are interleaved in reverse chronological order by day. But the links for each day are in a separate section so you can skim through them easier, and to draw focus to the blog posts and notes. All that said, there were a couple of really tricky things that came up.

  First the npm module cache in the build and deploy github action started misbehaving badly. There's some weird stuff happening where the cache doesn’t always clear, sometimes you have to completely turn it off. So many build minutes lost f-ing around getting it working. Like almost 1/2 of this months minutes.

  Second, there was this really strange fractal rendering bug, EJS inside code snippets were mistakenly being rendered. Really difficult to figure out what was going on. Not helped by the fact that the bug in a very strange way was mirroring some difficult things happening to me in RL. Another build minutes suck.

  I ended up starting to use semantic versioning for all plugins, so I can quickly see which are getting loaded at runtime. This helped with the cache problems. Still an awkward manual process, but I can automate that at some point. I also have a feature in the backlog to implement reusable deploy workflows. That should harmonize workflows and help with the build minutes thing.

  Things I'm looking to style:

  • Easier to read, remove the bullets on notes and blog posts
  • Visually distinguish between post types, maybe something simple at first like different colour boxes that surround posts
  • Distinguish between self links so it’s obvious that it’s a link to a blog / newsletter / podcast post
  • Better use of space, the left margin looks a bit weird
  • Update post header fonts, and font sizes

  Probably other things I haven't noticed yet. Happy to have v2 it done. Quite the effort. Feeling drained, hungry and thirsty.

Today’s links:

• Belgian police search EU parliament office over Russian interference - Looks like the EU is getting serious about russians behaving badly. The scale and sophistication of these co-ordinated attacks is quite worrying. At what stage though does it become censorship, because that could be used on anyone. Many believe russians are trying to break up the EU. www.theguardian.com #

• Indexing all of Wikipedia, on a laptop - Out of all the talk of using publically available data for AI training and copyright etc, suprisingly this is the first time I've heard mention using Wikipedia. Most of this is over my head, it's just interesting it can be done on a personal laptop. You need Linux, lots of storage space (~190GB) and lots of ram (~28GB). foojay.io #

• New Post: Everything page version 2 markjgsmith.com #

2024/06/01 #

• Not much good sleep last night. A group of construction workers showed up in the other side of the street and proceeded to drill the ground all through the night. I'm not saying they are totally fake, but this exact thing happened a few months back. They would showup everytime harrassment was peaking and drill the same tiny spot in the ground. It was always the same lot. Eventually they disapeared for good when I pointed this out to them. Seems like they are back using the same old playbook. Likely they aren't all aware of it, but some of them are.

  Also the new thing is to throw or leave 1/2 eaten food at or near me. Also half eat a tastey looking sandwich right in front of me, then throw the rest of it in the garbage. It's the worste most cruel food goading you can do. I bet they even think they are somehow doing me a favour. It always seems as though they have justified their poor behavior somehow to themselves.

  Just another day. More starvation appears immonent. They gave been doing the whole cigarettes thing the past 24 hours. Empty packets left in places I go, people suddenly offering cigs. Last night someone even wedged a no smoking sign on a bench I sit. I haven't smoked for years. Just the world trying to blame me once again for the things it's doing to me.

  Have to write the newsletter now. #

• On a more positive note, I think I'm pretty close to getting the links on the everything page into their own little footer section on each article. I spent all day yesterday trying to find a bug in an EJS template. Absolute nightmare to track down because the stack trace gives no details of where the error occurs.

  A bit of googling revealed it was likely related to missing EJS closing tags. I spent all day adjusting indentation of the template, splitting the template into multiple templates, bisecting the template, striping it down to a shell, then painstakingly adding blocks back one at a time, in order to find the bug.

  Turns out I was looking for slightly the wrong thing. It wasn't a tag closing problem, it was a for loop problem. I had introduced 2 new for loops but somehow mistakenly typed the opening curly as a semi-colon.

  for(var i = 0; i < blah; i++);

  instead of

  for(var i = 0; i < blah; i++) {

  Note: in the real code both statements are wrapped in EJS opening and closing tags. I can't add those in this post because then the EJS renderer will mistakenly try to render the EJS in the example snippet, and error. Not sure how to escape that at this point, so just not including it. You'll have to use your imagination.

  So anyway, visually very difficult to see the bug, especially because I was looking for problems with closing EJS tags, which is right next to it. The advice from the internet was quite literally hiding the actual problem. Somehow the bug was resulting in the same error as a missing closing tag. So that's fixed.

  I've added a bunch of debug logging too, so hopefully at some point today I'll have the links displaying correctly. #

• Vibes, the Economy, Blogging and Freedom (Issue #166)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-06-01)

  In this week’s edition:

  BTC for the oppressed, AI security & dystopia, iPadOS vs MacOS, fake gov phone companies, Saylor, webdevs & the economy, Indian prosperity, human memory, Argentina inflation, science societal issues

  Issue details:

  • Title: Vibes, the Economy, Blogging and Freedom
  • Issue: 166
  • Page: issue webpage

Today’s links:

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Vibes, the Economy, Blogging and Freedom (Issue #166) markjgsmith.com #

2024/05/31 #

• One thing that's a pattern is when I'm being starved and thirsted, I'm also being harrassed. Then I get gifted something and the harrassnent quiets down for a bit. That's been the past 24 hours. It's like night and day difference.

  This morning though, the low key harrassment has started back up again. It's like one thing after another. Like lots of pieces are being setup for future incidents or something. I'm being hurried up, then slowed down. Then punished for being wrong, even though I've done nothing. They are creating problems to complain about, I'm then getting blamed and blocked.

  Anyhow, this morning I'm going to be testing the second version of my fix to separate the links on the everything page into their own area of the post.

  I think I found the bug with my initial version. It looks like a copy / paste mistake, there was an extra closing tag in a block of EJS. Really difficult to spot. I didn't see it until I refactored the code a bit and painstakingly went through it line by line. #

2024/05/30 #

• The future of iPadOS vs MacOS

  There's some interesting discussion, on the latest Talk Show podcast episode, between John Gruber and M.G. Siegler all about the future of iPadOS vs MacOS. It's a re-occuring theme on his show, and broadly speaking has been following the evolution of these different but related operating systems, and all the many subtle nuances that come with that. Subtle nuance is something Gruber is expert at.

  Initially when iPadOS was released, OSX users were really worried it would end up replacing MacOS. The main worry being that iPadOS isn't really for power users. It's for people that just want to use a few apps and browse the web. It's not for developer types that want to get right into all levels of the operating system, something possible with MacOS, but not with iPadOS. Over the years though it's become clear that Apple isn't planning on deprecating MacOS, so that worry has dicipated.

  But the usability issues remain. The main issue is that bringing the iPad experience to MacOS isn't a simple challenge. Or the the other way around. The two OS's have very different interaction models (touch vs mouse), and resolutions.

  Let's say there was an iPad app that let you run MacOS. That would work fine while you had the iPad docked in the magic keyboard, but let's say you snapped it out to go downstairs while you were browsing a web page in Safari. Well the device needs to seemlessly switch to a touch interface. That doesn't seem very easily doable.

  What's more, using touch based hardware to control MacOS just doesn't work very well. For starters all the window open and close buttons are too close together to be able to use your finger to tap them. And there isn't much room on the iPad screen, to make them bigger. But running iPadOS on MacOS seems like it would be more doable, assuming of course that future laptops are equiped with touch enabled screens. At least there's enough space.

  Gruber's point is that it's clunky and sub-optimal, and that's not how Apple does things. They would likely rather not offer the sub-optimal experience at all.

  Anyway all this talk reminded me, of all things, about Vim's interface. Specifically that you have to switch between modes in order to get things done. The two main ones being normal, and insert. It seems odd at first, but you get used to it, and actually it makes it possible to have much more powerful features in each mode than if they were combined. In Vim you are constantly switching, but it becomes second nature after a while.

  I wonder whether you couldn't do something similar on Apple devices. A way to quickly switch between touch and trackpad modes. That way it seems like it would be possible to create appealing transitions for the windows between modes. Crucially on iPadOS you would only get MacOS trackpad mode when the iPad is docked in the magic keyboard. Defaults configurable of course.

  Would Vim style quick mode switching solve the MacOS - iPadOS integration connundrum?

• Build minutes have reset so I was able to publish all the blog posts, notes, links etc from the past 3 weeks. Loads of blog posts including the ssg series, and future vision plan. Also fixed the bug that was causing the everything page to not display all blog posts.

  Pretty happy about all that.

  I'm working on a way to separate out each days links on the everything page into it's own section. I think it looks better and it's nice just to see all the links grouped together rather than interleaved with the other posts. First attempt hasn't worked. Some sort of syntax error in an EJS template.

  It's like finding a needle in a haystack. I've found that's one disadvantage of classical templating languages. There are some templating languages that have a react JSX type syntax, so might try those at some point in the future to see if the stack traces are better. Should be quite easy to add a renderer for one of those. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: The future of iPadOS vs MacOS markjgsmith.com #

2024/05/29 #

• The tsunami of hate and harrassment continued all day yesterday and through much of the night via motorbike gang stalkers. Food, drinking water, washing water and electricity still completely cut off. This morning several low key driveby harrassments including 'your wah'. Pretty obvious water goading. Are you going to allow me to live today world? #

• My static site generator series

  This short blog series is a first attempt at describing my latest development project. I've been working on the static site generator for a couple of years on and off, as life permitted, with very limited resources. It was born out of the ashes of my linkblogging SaaS project. Initially just to build my own personal website, but it's become much more of a generalised website builder over time.

  The personal website, by the way, is very minimalist. That's partly a personal preference, I feel like information based websites should focus on text. I also wanted to have a site that would render with or without javascript enabled in the browser, readable on desktop and mobile. The plan is to enhance this over time using all the glorious modern CSS features that exist. For the moment though it's very minimalist. The way to think about it is that underneath the minimalist outward appearance, there's a lot of cool things happening to generate all the pages. Making the website look cool will be possible relatively easily using things like over-riddable server side components. Things take time when you are building the tool you are using, you have to build the foundations first.

  In any case, before embarking on the static site generator project I did of course survey available tools. I had experience building my personal blog with Jekyll, but since I'm a Nodejs developer, I really wanted something written entirely in javascript. When I looked at existing javascript generators, though there were some great options available, I found that building the archives for my existing site to be overly complex. When I openned the hood to delve into the source code, things felt again very complex and somewhat convoluted.

  These were great tools, but I got the sense that whatever hard won battles they had been through had resulted in code that, at least for me, was very difficult to fully comprehend. I wanted to be using a tool that I fully understood, both as a user, but also as a developer. I wanted the ability to modify the tool should that be necessary. I felt the best way to do this was to build a static site generator from scratch, optimised for building my personal website, but general enough that it could be used for other websites too.

  That's basically the backstory, but I've also recently wrote a longer term vision which you might find interesting. In it I go into the some of the values I've developped over the years when it comes to developing software, and the general direction I see things going for this project into the future.

  Like I said in the opening paragraph, this is just a first attempt at describing the tool's high level functionality. It's not meant as documentation or as a user manual. It's a bit technical but it's more aimed at generating some interest in the project. The project is not currently released as open source, but that's absolutely part of the longer term plan. Sometimes life throws you a lot of curve balls, and that's certainly been the case for me the past few years. Also, knuckleballs. This is the best I can do at the minute with the severely restricted resources that I have available to me.

  So onto the static site generator features overview, let's start with some of the smaller but very useful stuff, these include clear readable code, rendering in batches, easily follow the flow of data through the render process, easily debug the render process, Github build/deploy/backup workflows, highly customisable render process, page layouts and configuration management.

  Now some of the more meaty stuff. Here's a non exhausted list of some of the more major features and concepts:

  • Renderers, middleware & renderer pipelines
  • Server side components
  • Incremental progressive rendering
  • Plugins and packaging
  • Data loading utilities

  I hope you enjoyed this overview. It's still early days for this project, but if this at all peaked your interest then get in touch with me.

• Renderers, middleware & renderer pipelines

  This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

  I used to work in feature film vfx. Specifically on the tech side of things, as System's Engineer building and maintaining the in-house infrastructure used by the various artists to create all manor of digital effects. Rendering is a core concept in that donain, much of which is done on large render farms of computers. It's the process of assembling, generating and compositing together many often very large image files. I wanted something similar but for websites.

  With that in mind, one of the core concepts of the static site generator is the idea of a renderer. They are pipelines of middlewares which take a source file, usually a template, as input and output a rendered file. Renderers enable you to define how the generator should render the source you provide to it. The static file generator can thus support a variety of templating languages. Out of the box, EJS, markdown and plain HTML files are supported. But you should be able to create custom middleware for most text templating languages that exist, which you can then use to create a renderer.

  The middleware that make up a renderer are chained one after the other so you can for instance pipe the output of one middleware into the input of another middleware. For instance out of the box the static site generator can render markdown files which contain EJS syntax. First the EJS in the source file is rendered by the EJS middleware, then the entire output is fed into the markdown middleware, the output if which is written to disk.

  Middlewares are quite generalised. Out of the box there are middlewares for rendering EJS/markdown templates, HTML files, plus ones for prettifying text and writing files to disk. It should be possible to create middlewares for many different types of tasks.

  The renderers are executed at runtime. Ultimately they output the rendered files which are written to disk.

• Server-side components

  This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

  Server-side components are a primitive that you can use directly in your render templates. They contain their own template but crucially they also have functionality associated with them in the form of functions. The component's template can use the functions to perform various transformations on the text of your templates and data passed to them at rendertime.

  The ability to keep functionality and form together like this is very beneficial when it comes to conceptualising the various pieces of the page you are trying to render. You can be sure that at rendertime the template will have available to it both the data and functionality it needs to render the templates.

  It also makes it possible to easily reuse pieces of pages in multiple places. What's more server-side components can be packaged up into plugins, which makes it easy to share things you build with others.

  The core of server-side components is all just regular javascript, no complicated libraries. However you can if course use libraries inside your components.

• Incremental progressive rendering

  Incremental progressive rendering is a feature I've been working on for the static site generator. It's a mode that you can enable which should enable you to drastically reduce build times if you have a content cache.

  It adds a check of each template's output locations, and only renders the output file if no output file currently exists or if the output file present has an older last modified time than the source template.

  When you have a content cache, and enable incremental progressive rendering, then the generator will only render out new content templates that have been added since your last build. A content cache is essentially the base output directory. By default this is the dist directory.

  If you are running locally, you don't have to do anything, just re-running the generator without deleting the dist directory. In automated build systems like Github Actions it's often possible to setup a cache. This will keep a backup of the dist dir and restore it before each build.

  If your site has many thousands of files, then it will speed up the build time since it skips all renders except for the latest templates added.

  At the time of writing this post the feature is work in progress and not merged into main yet.

• Plugins and packaging

  This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

  One cool thing about the static site generator is that it's very easy to bundle up various primitives you are using to build your site into a plugin. This would typically be a seperate repo. That repo can then be npm installed prior to running the build. Those plugins can then be added and used by the static site generator.

  Installing these plugins gives you the ability to quickly add prebuilt sets of pages and functionslity to your site. For example there are currently plugins written for blog, podcast, newsletter, linkblog and notes pages. They can be configured and customised via environment variables and component over-rides.

  There's a rudimentary over-ride system, so the static site generator's main primitives, like for instance server-side components, can be overridden by your own custom components. That means you can easily customise pieces of the blog generated by the blog plugin to look the way you want.

  Also some plugins are used by other plugins, so common functionality can be extracted and reused across plugins.

  I call the over-ride system rudamentary because there's room to improve this feature, but for most basic websites it actually works rather well, and it's simple to understand.

• Data loading utilities

  This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

  The static site generator had been built initially to generate content websites' like blogs, linkblogs, newsletters, podcasts and notes. The posts of such websites tend to be written in markdown files. Though you can obviously store these in many different ways, one tried and tested way is to use a calendar folder structure.

  An example of a blog post content markdown template showing the calendar folder structure:

  blog/2024/05/29/some-interesting-article.md

  Loading data from markdown files that are stored in such a folder structure is so common that I added utilities to the static site generator to load these files into memory. They are then made available to the templates being rendered at rendertime, sorted in various useful ways.

  This makes it very easy to iterate over, for example, all the blog posts of a specific year and create an index page.

  Frontmatter in markdown files is fully supported, and it's a great way to pass custom data into the render process.

Today’s links:

• New Post: My static site generator series markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Renderers, middleware & renderer pipelines markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Server-side components markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Incremental progressive rendering markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Plugins and packaging markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Data loading utilities markjgsmith.com #

• The reasoning behind publishers' desire to federate their sites is clear - The author talks to the Verge's Nilay Patel and 404Media's Jason Koebler to find out what federation has to offer smaller independant publishers, and what their plans are for this Fediverse centric future list23.com #

• Inside Bluesky’s Engineering Culture - Pretty interesting piece, at least the first half, that looks at what it’s like working at Bluesky as part of the engineering team. Also great description of the tech stack. Annoyingly the second half of the article is behind a paywall. newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com #

• Essays on programming I think about a lot - Great selection of programming essays that focus on specific aspects of the craft. For each item the author has extracted a poiniant quote from the essay, and written a short summary of the key ideas. I hope to find time to read some of these :) www.benkuhn.net #