markjgsmith

2024/10/06 #

• I've made the changes to the plugins required to make the day title and article title elements configurable. That will make it possible to change the heading sizes. The current headings on the website are too small. When I started out I just decided to keep it super simple and make everything the same small size, but now that most of the pieces are in place, it’s a good time to make it configurable.

  There’s still a bug that I’m looking into, didn’t manage to find it last night. Once that’s fixed, the day titles will be h3 elements and the blog post titles will be h4 elements. I’m currently just using whatever sizes are the defaults for headings. That on it’s own should make things much more readable, but I have another, possibly even more exciting feature. It’s time to try some new fonts!

  I’ve been looking at the various web safe fonts, the ones that should normally work without issues across all browsers, and there are a few I want to try out. A little touch of flare, to make things look a bit friendlier but also to draw attention to the blog posts, so it’s obvious they are separate and distinct from the notes. I’m also going to try the grid idea and the left margin border idea, but wanted to get as far as possible with just heading sized and fonts.

  Even if I don’t decide to go with the colored left margin idea, I plan to do something similar with quoted text blocks. These currently look a bit weak, indented but the white space on the left just looks empty. I see many websites have a colored left margin on block quotes and I think it makes the quotes stand out.

  It’s all quite fun and exciting, making these small changes that have a big effect on readability. I’ve been wanting to make these changes for so long now.

  Escallation wise, all that is still going on, I’m still being blamed for everything, literally everything I do is in some way wrong apparently. Food is in short supply, there were some food gifts for a few days that were nice, but that might have been turned into something malicious again. I’m having to ration pretty hard. Since my birthday 2 weeks ago, I’ve only had 1 day with 3 full meals, and many with no meals at all.

  The newsletter went out yesterday as scheduled. I’m glad something went out but I’m not happy at all with how haphazard it all is, having to prep things in adcance, and add bits and bobs when that’s possible. I just hope things get a bit more stable. #

Today’s links:

• Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ - Really seems like a full on war, which is quite unWordpress-like. Matt usually seems like a relatively calm and quiet fellow, which is somewhat at odds with the situation. Suprised to hear WP Engine are making billions of dollars. www.theverge.com #

• Keanu Reeves spins out at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in pro racing debut - I didn’t realise he was a race car driver. Pretty awesome way to promote his new graphic novel. Also great to see someone doing a debut at 60. www.theguardian.com #

• UK ‘resolutely committed’ to its overseas territories, says foreign minister - It’s interesting how many foreign territories the UK still has, very long term strategic in an uncertain world. www.theguardian.com #

2024/10/05 #

• Hoping to continue making some small cosmetic changes to the look and feel of the website. I’ve gotten rid of the bullets for posts and blog posts, but not for daily links. I think it looks pretty good. I’m going to try out the grid and left border ideas, and update heading sizes and possibly fonts. It should hopefully be a bit of a fresh look, and be easier to read.

  It’s quite cold this morning. Brrr. #

• Punished For Being Born (Issue #184)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-10-05)

  In this week’s edition:

  Fixing capitalism, Labour & the Middle East, Chamath solo, Vivek, Smartglasses, nuclear war risk, OpenAI makeover, boomers get with it, Europe vs Trump, AI Twitter, happiness, the AI supercycle

  Issue details:

  • Title: Punished For Being Born
  • Issue: 184
  • Page: issue webpage

• Straws have been trending for several days now. Or straw rapers to be precise. They have been appearing literally everywhere I’ve been.

  And there seems to be some sort of universe ending level argument happening, that will turn out to be proof that the existing design already solves the problem that’s being blamed on me.

  And all the blaming has been the very thing causing the problem in the first place. #

Today’s links:

• The Why of Crazy Stupid Tech - Om Malik was one of the first tech bloggers I started reading when I first seriously got online. I guess that was around 2003ish. He’s starting a newsletter, partnering with ex-Wired reporter Fred Vogelstein. The focus is interesting: the tech that powers the foundational layers of the stack, from materials science to sythetic biology and how they might change the future. Sounds awesome, can’t wait, subscribed :) crazystupidtech.com #

• 159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO's fight with WP Engine escalates - Matt Mullenweg founder of Wordpress and CEO of Automattic has been in a rather public fight with WP Engine for a few weeks. The whole saga is bringing to the surface some core issues with open source and specifically Wordpress, one of the most popular open source projects. Many are worried they aren’t as safe from despotic centralised control as they once thought, since Wordpress is using some of the very tactics it was setup to avoid, namely removing things from people. Many open source projects have been runing into philosophical brick walls recently. This case could have a big impact in the space. techcrunch.com #

• Boris Johnson calls for referendum on leaving ECHR - That’s the European Convention on Human Rights. The problem is that though it might appear to make sense from the perspective of fixing immigration, it would ultimately decrease valuable protections for all citizens across huge swath of completely unrelated areas. Not being part of a human rights treaty sounds very dangerous to me. www.theguardian.com #

• liriliri/eruda: Console for mobile browsers - This basically does what it says on the tin, ads devtools to mobile browsers. You include a library in the page, and then can open up a devtools style webapp in the page to look at HTML, network requests etc. Very awesome. I wish there was an app that was a dev webserver that automatically added this to your pages, so you could do local frontend development on your mobile device. github.com #

• @parischap/pretty-print - This looks awesome. All sorts of additional customisable features to JSON.stringify and util.inspect. colorisation and treeifying for example. I could see this really improving the debugging experience, printing to console is still one of the most popular ways to debug, because it works in most environments, might as well make it better. www.npmjs.com #

• Get ready to meet your AI best friend (Vergecast Podcast) - Lots of awesome tech reporting in this episode, and not just about AI. OpenAI mega funding, the Wordpress community values meltdown, progressive web apps, and a mindboggling description of the Dish/Direct TV timeline over the past few decades, which bizarely sounds to me like a simulacrum of a single week of my life right now here in Vietnam. podcastindex.org #

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Punished For Being Born (Issue #184) markjgsmith.com #

2024/10/04 #

• Removing the bullets on all posts on the website worked pretty well. The text has a lot more space now. As suspected though it’s a bit difficult to tell the difference between notes posts and blog posts. I’ve made a quick start on both possible CSS based solutions I mentioned, namely putting all posts inside a sort of grid, and adding a colored left border to notes posts. It’s been a bit tricky making sure all the right CSS classes are in place so the CSS rules work their magic. I might have something to see today.

  I’m thinking to add the bullets back for the 'Today’s Links' in each day because I quite like having that section look visually distinct to make them easier to find on the page when you are scrolling. I need to mess around with the underlying CSS classes so it’s easier to style those sections independantly from the other items on the page.

  That’s the development plan. hopefully I’ll make some progress, but I’m already getting harrassed.

  The old woman that stop starts her motorbike and keeps alternately talking quiet then loud and saying 'president' over and over is right on front of me as I type this paragraph doing her anger goading thing.

  Earlier this morning 'hey, go home' bloke passed by on his motorbike. He seems to be a new re-occuring harrassment character. He zooms past and shouts in an overly jolly manner 'hey, go home!'. It’s just more anger goading but will likely turn into something else more involved.

  As soon as I put my headphones in and started listenning to music stop start weirdo lady drove off, annoyed that she could no longer annoy me.

  There were some red noodle packages left on the ground this morning, so likely some noodle based anger goading and harrassment at some point. #

• Notes on the question of the meaning of life

  A few nights ago I was approached by a young man who was perhaps in his 20s. He sat near me, seemed very agitated. He started asking me questions about why I was here in Vietnam. We chatted for a while, though I left him to do most of the talking because that seemed like the most prudent thing to do.

  He had spent time in northern Europe, and spoke pretty good english. He seemed to be perhaps having some issues with friends or family. He said he had previously had anxiety issues. I've been through that age and it sure can be confusing at times. I listenned and suggested a few things, I can’t say I gave the best of advice over and above 'live your life'.

  Towards the end of the conversation he asked me what I thought was the meaning of life. Quite a big question, one of the biggest. I didn’t have a very good answer. The context in which he asked it was a little strange. After hearing about my situation, how I’d gotten stuck here during COVID, he had asked me if I needed any help. I said yes, but the how is the less obvious thing, I’m open to ideas but I’ve found it’s rare that people are actually able to help.

  Anyway, he said his question was his gift to me. I’m really not sure how exactly his gift was supposed to help me. Seems like it would just distract me even more than I already am by this crazy world, taking up even more of my time which I can never get back. But it is an interesting question that I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about properly. So I did spend a short while pondering it, and made a few notes. I’m publishing them here, because though it’s not something I want to spend a lot of time on right now, perhaps in the future I will, and I’ll have this post to return to. And who knows maybe it will spark some ideas in others.

  • Last night’s what is meaning of life bloke
    • What does ‘meaning of’ mean? Is it more than just the dictionary definition of a word?
    • Are we saying meaning of a specific life or life in general?
    • Isn’t it a strange question to ask? You don’t ask what the meaning of a table is do you?
    • His answer: pussy, because dick and pussy make life
    • So does ‘meaning of’ mean ‘leads to’
    • Lenses to interpret the question
      • Philosophical - the purpose of life, how do you know what anything means. When a particular set of events happen we often say, such and such happened, and this other thing, so that means this other situation is likely going to happen. Eg predicting the direction of the tech scene. How big can these collections of events get. Could they be increased in size to an entire human life? Can a human life have a theme / a purpose? Would it be different for everyone? Would there be a common higher level quality that all lives share in this respect?
      • Scientific - What is the purpose of life from the perspective of the universe? cells, RNA, DNA all arguably examples of life who’s purpose seems to be to create higher and higher complexity life systems. Is human life the final stage, or does there exist an even higher life form that human life is creating, or on the way to create. Are we trying to figure that out? Maybe that is our purpose right now?
      • Comic - dick and pussy

  His answer was that the meaning of life is pussy, because dicks and pussys create life. Presumably the meaning of life for a woman, in this paradigm would be dick. I think he’d gotten this from someone in his entourage. I suggested to him that perhaps they were joking.

  I’m not totally convinced by his argument, but there is a certain simplicity to it that is quite refreshing. For me the whole question of the meaning of life has always seemed like something much more grandiose, and I’ve tried to jot down some of the thoughts that occurred to me. I like that there is this simple paradigm, but also that there could be much more to it.

  To be honest it was kind of a weird situation, but I feel like it merited at least a short blog post. Might be something worth thinking about if I ever get unstuck from this terrible situation I am in. Having to figure it out right now is a big ask.

  As for the young man in question, I wish him all the best on his journey.

  Take it easy everyone :)

• I don’t want to go into too much detail but following this morning’s strange harrassment incident by the stop / start motorbike woman, where I eventually started listening to music on my headphones, and she left, my headphones mysteriously have started malfunctioning. As far as I am aware I didn’t drop them or damage them in any way, and I don’t think I left them unnatended anywhere.

  There was an incident earlier where cafe shop staff seemed to be parodying an incident that happened to me when somebody asked me the meaning of life. While they were doing this, one of them was repeatedly setting off the flash on the phone camera. Well as it happened, the start / stop woman ended up being in a selfie I took that morning. The shole situation feels like some form of intimidation, especially since the regular camera on my phone stopped working in similarly strange circumstances.

  This evening, back at the location of the harrassment, there was a whole cascade of 'yellow' based harrassment situations, some of which felt very manufactured.

  I certainly hope the selfie camera doesn’t end up mysteriously breaking. It’s really bizare that the headphones have, the day I used them to politely and non-violently push back on what seemed like pretty clear harrassment, something which the stop / start woman has done several times before.

  It’s worth mentioning that I have had several headphones stop working like this as part of escallations. They have all been regular old school phono plug in-ear headphones. #

• The meaning of life bloke just passed by again. He seems to have gotten it in his head that the thing to do is to ask me questions and drive off. This time it was less grandiose: What is Tam?

  I’m missing an accent on one of the letters. I don’t know what tam is, it’s usually used alongside the word 'com'. As in 'com tam', and it means something like 'rice dish'. You can have different variations of it, pork, chicken etc.

  Anyway, I don’t know for sure what it means, it’s a bit like Banh, when you think about all the things it is used for, it kind of doesn’t make sense. But I just don’t worry about it, and get on with my day.

  I expect this is all part of a bigger story arc because I’ve been gifted in the past couple of days both com tam and a banh mi (sandwich), which likely means it might get turned into an anger goading, where I’ll just be gifted plain rice or something. That’s the sort of thing that usually happens. #

Today’s links:

• OpenAI gets $4 billion revolving credit line, giving it more than $10 billion in liquidity - It’s one of the biggest VC fund raises of all time. The company’s value is now $157bn. www.cnbc.com #

• Spotify adds a new, automatically updating playlist for offline listening - Really great to see some big players support offline features. Offline is massively underprovided for, but massively important for resilience and independance. You don’t realise you need it until it’s too late. Interesting to learn that Youtube music already has a similar feature. techcrunch.com #

• Biggest solar flare since 2017 erupts from sun and Earth is in the firing line (video) - The video of this is quite mesmerising, especially when they turn off the ultra violet filter and you see what is the biggest object for several light years distance, and it’s so completely on fire, like a burning Hades. Earth is expected to be impacted over the next few days. www.space.com #

• UK hands sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - It’s clear immediately from the map hiw strategic the location is, it’s to the east of Aftica and south of India. There is a joint UK-US military based on one of the islands that will remain there. Many of the islanders now live in Crawley of all places. Britain still has quite a long list of around 17 overseas territories. www.bbc.com #

• New Post: Notes on the question of the meaning of life markjgsmith.com #

2024/10/03 #

• I actually made some progress yesterday on both removing the list bullets and improving the article navigation. I deployed a new version of the site that has no list bullets, which looked okay in staging. I’ll find out how it really looks this morning when the daily build gets done using the live data.

  There should be lots more space for the text on the page, which will be noticeable on mobile screens. I’m a little worried that without the bullets it will be difficult to see the difference between notes and blog posts. That the boundaries between notes posts won’t be obvious enough. If that happens, I have two possible solutions, one using a colored border in the left margin, the other adding a grid around all posts. I’m curious to try both.

  Quite excited about how things will look.

  I’ll try deploying the updated article navigation links this morning. That should make it much easier to get a permanent url to articles, and to get back to the day a particular post is from, from the individual article page. I’ll use links to the month archives version of posts, that way you’ll be able to see the context around a post rather than just the post. It’s a bit fiddly because I need to use hashlinks and only days have hash ids currently.

  I suppose the best thing would be to have hash ids on all posts on the page so you can link directly to anything on the page. That might take some extra work though, cause I’ll need to generate the hash ids, and unlike with dates, there isn’t an obvious id. I guess maybe the timestamp will be unique enough. That will work for notes, but what about blog posts? I’ll have to think about that, might be better to just omit them for blog posts, the canonical blog post page is likely a better url for blog posts. It’s really just the notes you want to see in context, because they look a bit weird on their own.

  Development progress feels good even if it’s just a small cosmetic thing. It’s been so long since I was able to add a visual feature. #

Today’s links:

• Croissant debuts a cross-posting app for Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon - I don’t know if it supports posting from an RSS feed. That would be cool. Interesting that it supports threaded posts. I want something that I pass a post to via an RSS feed or an API and it just figures out all the details of making it compatible with each platform. Like a jQuery for social media posting. techcrunch.com #

2024/10/02 #

• Looks like I’ll be able to eat again today, so that’s a bit of a relief, but I’m reluctant to get carried away because the starvations seem to be getting longer. It’s a catch22, because without energy I can’t really function, think and write. And I’m still knackered from the previous starvation cycle, and now with a cold, still sneezing and coughing flem. It feels like I’ll just about recover and be dunked right back into another starvation cycle.

  The hot season is starting, there is still rain quite often but when it’s hot around midday it’s getting unbearably hot. So hot you really don’t want to be outside kind of hot.

  I need to look at static site generator and website features, figure out what I want to do next. The most obvious is that I’m kind of tired of the bullets on each item on the main blog page. It would be cleaner without bullets, more space for the text. The other thing is to add some navigation links. I want to be able to more easily navigate between individual items back up to the day that contains the item. And be able to get to the archives version of a day from the front page. Both small cosmetic changes but would dramatically improve readability.

  The next big feature might be taking back up the work I’ve previously done on the API. It’s 80% written. At first it would just be for posting. But it might make sense to first get a minimal working example of several blogs hosted somewhere. So I could get somebody else setup with a similar writing experience. It might turn out to be not a lot of work, but pretty sure there would be all sorts of unnexpected things to deal with.

  So that’s where I’m at with development, and hard life, woe me. #

• Tom Luongo on seing people from all sides

  I find myself liking or at least interested in many of Tom Luongo’s takes on global finance, and geopolitics.

  He appears to be quite anti-british, so some of the things he says definitely make me wince somewhat, but on listening to his points, many times they do have at least some things that are worth considering, angles that I would never have considered. The brit in me is often wondering what an equivalent, a british Tom Luongo, if you will, would say. I think sometimes he’s a little too forgiving of indiscressions made by people his side of the pond. But hey, that’s normal, we all instincively defend our own team.

  Aside from the anti-brit stuff, which like I said, is actually quite well thought out even if it’s a little bit bonkers, there‘s great takes on how central bank mono rates like the FED funds rate or the ECB’s interest rate, re-enforce established powers, transfering wealth from peripheral entities, and a possible move away from Davos globalism back to more regional banking models, as well as the unrealised export of the US economic model, and a bunch more.

  So although he does definitely vear into slighlty crazy town sometimes, he often lays out some kind of wise ways of looking at things, no matter what political or geographic persuasion you are. His closing words on the importance of seing people from all sides is definitely one of those:

  There are so many competing incentives that you have to...just be careful, the way I’m going to put it is this: No one is any one thing at any one time. People in pivotal positions, can be simultaneously, to quote Tom Soper, consecutively and concurrently, hero, victim and villain. The 3 sides of all character.

  When you look at a figure like Jerome Powell for example, or Janet Yelling or whoever, you have to see them from all sides. And I hate to do that for Yelling because I think she’s the villain.

  Look at a guy like Powell who is a very pivotal figure in history, look at a guy like Trump, look at these people that are confounding. They are the fulcra on which all of this will turn, and they are going to have competing roles that they are going to want to be cast in. And we have to be willing to view them from different positions, from those 3 perspectives, even though we know in the grand scheme of things, in our philosophical hearts, they are one thing, they are the villain or hero or the victim. But a guy like Powel is all 3 all the time. You can’t be FED chair and not be all 3 of those things.

  So that’s what I would argue for people to do a little bit more of, and if we do that, I think all of our commentary gets a lot better. [...]

  It usually yields the best insights. Let’s freeze frame that person for a second and think about it from their perspective. Now what. Oh that’s interesting...

  This is such a true statement, I’ve rarely heard it expressed so well. He is of course talking about things in the world of global finance, but I think it’s actually a point you can make about many areas of life. I think I’d heard something like this mentioned in the past and thought to myself, oh yeah, that makes sense, I get it. But then as you get experience in the world there comes a point when you really see what people were talking about, and it’s unbelievably disorientating. It’s like your brain needs a certain amount of data to even get to the point of being able to see this point of view.

  And it’s even weirder because sometimes you have complete flips. People you really thought were horrible, you actually start to see them in a different light, understanding their behaviour better because you have additional context that you were missing. And the other way too, folks you thought were awesome, becoming in your mind pretty aweful. And other times when it’s a mixture of both things happening. And actually it’s even weirder than that because some people are even exploiting this phenominon etc etc. But you can’t get bogged down in all of this stuff too much. This might actually be the most profound thing that has happened for me in my late 30s and 40s.

  It happens so gradually, you don’t notice it at first, and of course you yourself are changing as a person as well, so it’s not an obvious thing. You are sort of left with these updated models in your head for people that are imperfect, with holes in them, and you have to be okay with that, but other parts where you are like, oh yeah this part of them was the part I really liked, or hated or whatever. When it happens it shows you quite a lot about yourself, what your instinctive views are, and you have to accept that at some point in the past you were unknowingly ignoring somethings or unknowingly shutting out other aspects.

  It’s the strangest thing to realise, and come to terms with.

Today’s links:

• Spending cuts needed to tackle France’s colossal debt, Michel Barnier tells MPs - Michel Barnier is now the prime minister of France, having been recently appointed by president Macron. He is right leaning and so doesn’t have much support in parliament since the left co-alition’s big win. He’s trying to reign in excessive spending. Interesting situation, big lefty dreams meets reality. Since taxes are already so high in France he wants the rich to step up, and lots of efficiency projects. Europe seems week, Russia is getting stronger, the EU is busy squabling with partners like Britain over old graves, the middle east is turning into a major war, the US is tired of being the world’s police force. www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Tom Luongo on seing people from all sides - markjgsmith.com #

• Irish finance minister calls €14bn tax windfall from Apple ‘transformational’ - Kind of an interesting time for a country all the way on the west of Europe to be having a windfall as the countries all the way in the east to be having issues with the local hedgemon. www.theguardian.com #

2024/10/01 #

• What a nutso day yesterday. I continued giving the peace sign in return to any harrassment the entire day. There was a lot if it. Each time saying 'peace vietnam peace'. At the end of the day I got gifted a takeaway rice meal, from the same bloke who had given me food the previous day and the morning. He eventually gave me the equivalent of 40 cents USD when I told him I had not had bottle of drinking water in 2 days. So basically all day from 4am until 9pm peace signing, and it kept going after that, and all I got was a meal and enough to buy a small bottle of water. That’s slavery in every juristriction on the planet, plain and simple.

  A few minutes later, a woman and man probably in their 30s who had previously seen me giving peace signs and responded, with the woman sitting on the back of their motorbike peace signing too and smiling, stopped by to gift me a fruit. When I said about the water situation, she turned to the man and helped convince him to buy me some water. They drove off and returned a while later gifting me 2 large bottles of water. Without the water I’m not sure I would have been able to eat the food.

  This morning I actually have a relatively bad chesty cough starting, coughing up a ton of flem when I woke up earlier, so looks as if the food was in some way poisonned too.

  Washing water and electricity have been cut off for days now. Hoping I’ll be able to find reprive on that today.

  Everything is so fucking dire, it’s like the end of the universe.

  Update: The strange older lady on the motorbike that keeps stop / starting and mumbling, stopped by again this morning. She kept whittering on about a 'president' over and over but same as before I couldn’t hear what she was on about, as everything else she was saying, as she kept stopping and starting her motorbike, revving the engine up and down, was just gibberish. #

• This morning at the internet place while I’m standing browsing online...

  Fat school girl on the back of a motorbike passes by saying loudly 'blog!' then small amount of slightly understated maniacle evil laughter from both her and the adult driving the motorbike.

  A few moments later the normal / evil bloke from the opposite house appears with a woman and child. She keeps saying 'lie', and 'liar' and 'the liar'. #

• All relatively quiet this afternoon at the shop cafe. I did have a major allergy / sneeze attack earlier. Happened after I’d already been here for 2 hours, right at the same time 2 rowdy boy young teenagers turned up, who were very nosey about me being at the shop cafe, kept saying ‘hello’ in their conversation to each other, seemed to be waiting to see my reaction. Felt very manufactured, very high level of righteousness.

  Then the place filled up with loads of young women in their twenties, all being very very quiet. Bit of a weird vibe, and when one left saying 'good' for no reason as she left and passed me, I responded with a 'peace vietnam peace' which set off several of the other women who had until then been very quiet. All sorts of foreign chatter interspered with orders in english. They were saying stuff to each other like 'he will learn'. That always seems to happen when I get these mysterious sneezing attacks that often turn into a cold.

  This one in particular coincides with last night’s flem cough, so likely linked to that. That looks to have been something in the food I got gifted, or the water, or the fruit. I didn’t ingest anything else.

  Once again looks like I got mutilated. Mutilated for turning darkness into light. Doesn’t matter what I do, whether I am peaceful or angry, either way I get mutilated. Either way, blamed for everything, even though I’m already being starved and thirsted.

  It’s like I’m caught between good and evil groups, each wants the opposite of the other, so either way I lose. And neither group acknowledges the existence of the other, or they collude, whether by arrangement or just easiest path.

  Update: The two rowdy teenage boys left a small ziplock baggie on the chairs they were sitting on. Just looked to contain some orange crystal sweets, the sort that are hideously sour and crackle in your mouth. Nothing like drugs, but still what are the chances there are suddenly lots of baggie related incidents the past few days? #

• I’m back at the internet place to post today's links and blogging. Pretty much immediately women are passing by making 'you learn' based comments as they pass me. Presumably linked to my now developing cold. Just more women based mutilation and bullying. Nothing to see here, please move along, as they say.

  Well I say...

  Peace world, peace ☮️🕊✌️ Peace vietnam, peace ☮️🕊✌️ Peace women, peace ☮️🕊✌️ #

• Just another quick note about the types of harrassments this evening since it’s a sneeze day. Lots of random people saying 'Gay!', both men and women. Also lots of people just saying 'No!', especially shortly after I sneeze. And then there was all the 'you learns' earlier. #

• Looking back at my notes I can see that I’ve been getting these sneezy colds now with crazy regularity for at least 7 months now. I happens about every 3-4 weeks. There was a time during the early part of COVID where it was happening every 10 days. I really don’t get what it is. It just seems like somebody has figured out something that I’m massively alergic to and keeps killing me with it. It’s do horrid, makes concentrating on anything practically impossible. Could be that my body just hates me. #

Today’s links:

• Catholic Belgian university ‘deplores’ comments by Pope Francis moments after speech - Women were upset he has traditional views on women’s role in society, and they spoke out to him about women being subjugated in the past by the church. I thought his comments about victims of church pedophilia were a bit odd: "There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims, so that we can help them feel our closeness". I find the use of the term 'mercy' strange here. Doesn’t it imply the victims did something wrong? And that the church needs to be mercifull towards them? WTF is that about? But also doesn’t it sound a bit pedo? 'Feel our closeness'? What are you saying mate? And lastly, I happen to know there is an american parish in Brussels called 'Our Lady of Mercy'. Bit of a coincidence. I note that last week there was news the woman president of the European Commision unilaterally re-organised all lead roles, flipping from 60/40 male-female to 40/60 male-female. Just 'because'. This whole thing seems weird. www.theguardian.com #

• Top Russia diplomat warns west not to fight ‘nuclear power’ in UN speech - Russia’s "we can invade any small nation and you can't do nothing" policy is fucking demented. www.theguardian.com #

• European ministers call for immediate ceasefire in Lebanon - This ground invasion thing is strange. I feel like it’s a rather extreme thing to do unless there is some sort of existing teritorial dispute. Ground invasions don’t tend to happen unless there’s a fight over said ground. I wonder if there are some facts thag are being omitted. www.theguardian.com #

• UK universities urge government to restart flow of EU students after Brexit - I think that for university places, it’s a free market and there should be a corresponding number of good quality high standard places made available in the EU. Both sides should need to convince the students their courses are valuable. As long as fees are being paid based on demand for places there shouldn’t be much of an issue. Seems like they could figure out something. I think likely the bigger thing is the work placements side of things which is complicated, and Starmer is right to hold off on that. Using british youth as a bargaining chip doesn’t seem like such a great idea. www.theguardian.com #

• China, South Korea, Taiwan to spend most on chip equipment 2025-2027, industry body says - It’s all about chips at the minute, at least until the current AI wave runs out of forward motion. www.reuters.com #

• Keir Starmer calls for the 'return of the sausages' in Labour conference speech - Amusing gaff. Strange that it happened just a few days after my sausage pastry incident in the park, which was also the day I innadvertently Keith’d Keir. I think the return of the sausages would be magnificent right now, I've hardly eaten anything today. m.youtube.com #

2024/09/30 #

• Two noticeable things following yesterday’s small meal gift. I had hardly eaten anything in the previous 7 days.

  Firstly terrible night sweats. Your body normally heats up a bit after eating but cools down relatively quickly. This lasted almost the entire night, definitely until 3am. There was some chilli oil which I covered the rice with, so it could be that. But it still feels very extreme, I eat this sort of dish quite regularly, and rarely get night sweats like that, certainly not in recent memory.

  Second was some really, and I mean really insane dreams. It was like being in a completely photorealistic demented video game. Like a car chase that felt not only more like being on a rollercoaster ride, but all the elements in the environment were also doing a rollercoaster ride thing. It was really fucking horrible.

  I’m going to cut this note short because I’m already being water goaded by some strange bloke that is pretending to have a conversation with a woman sitting nearby, but who is saying hello at me, over and over while trying to get me to notice his coke bottle that is full of water. It’s very odd. I had some other thing to say about the dreams, maybe I’ll remember later. #

• The bloke that gifted me the meal last night just dropped by again and gifted me a mince pork ban boa bun. It’s unbelievable how great food tastes.

  So anyway a few things about the dreams:

  • It happened twice around 4-5am, two distinct dreams.
  • Both times I was really glad to wake up.
  • I’m not sure it was related to the food as I had a similar dream a few days ago.
  • Somebody had left a small ziplock transparent baggie on the floor near where I sit. Whenever small ziplock baggies appear, historically speaking there usually ends up being drug related harrassment in one form or another. It’s a form of anger goading. In previous bullying cycles, used seringes have started apearing in many of the places I go, followed by people directly and indirectly accusing me of taking drugs, which is totally false.
  • It’s worth noting here that when you are starved for 7 days, esoecially when you aren’t able to drink hardly any water, you look pretty terrible, not completely unlike somebody taking drugs, who is often starving their body from food as well as inputing harmful things. It’s no suprise that the gang stalkers use starvation, and anger goading in combination with false news about you being a drug user.
  • Yesterday I walked past a bar that was playing Metallica ridiculously loudly with two old guys outside sort of playing along on imaginary drum sets. Super weird because they didn’t look like metal heads at all, and the bar wasn’t a metal bar, just a regular coffee shop / bar place.
  • The Metallica music could quite easily have been the sound track to both dreams.
  • I was really glad I didn’t have to listen to Metallica all day yesterday, I specifically remember thinking that after walking past.
  • The dreams had this sort of feeling like when you have had way too many cups of coffee, like you are on a runnaway train, and there is no way to get off it
  • When I woke up, from the first crazy dream, I woke up into another dream, which felt like real life, I could hear people talking nearby, but couldn’t move my arm hardly at all. I eventually forced myself to move my incredibly heavy arm, and as I did this I woke up into propper reality. At least I hope it is, so far so good.
  • Yesterday evening some time around the food, a man in his twenties walked past, looked drunk or perhaps disabled. When he walked, his arms hung down by his side and flopped about like heavy arms.

  I’m very low on drinking water. If there’s one thing that’s even worse than starvation, it’s thirst. Washing is also blocked as is charging my devices, so likely I’ll have to turn them all off to conserve power till the weekend. No blogging without power. #

• To those of you out there collecting for good causes, for each time someone 'saves your ass', do actually at some point donate some of those cookies from your incredible stash. The people you rely on every single day might very well be starving. #

• A reminder to those that like to come up with, or simply appreciate minimal apps for debugging purposes, especially in the somewhat higher level space of politics minimal apps.

  Those that scam and steel your work, repurposing it for their nefarious aims, often aren’t very good at figuring out the minimal app themselves because they spend all their time figuring out all the scams. BUT, they absolutely love themselves a minimal app. In a way, their monstrous work doesn’t even start until they get hold of your minimal app.

  I just think it’s important to be aware of that.

  Once you start seing that sort of thing happen, you see it happen again and again, and you realise it’s been happening right under your nose your entire life.

  And remember to support those that do good work, those that build faithfully towards the better future you envision. When things are going well for you it’s all too easy to forget about the people you rely on, who are often in very harsh situations. #

• I hesitated to call it, though I suspected it would happen. The light green harrassment from the Mary Popins impersonator type has of course developed into a full blown light green tsunami, complete with manufactured situations.

  Large gangs of dancing women entirely dressed in light green in the park, starting up mere moments after my arrival. Blokes slinging light green cloths to wipe the sweat from their brow walking past, right afterwards. I’m sure that won’t be the end if it.

  I think they do it because they are just so bored of red goading, so they manufacture a non-red goading situation. Always be foreigner goading, I suppose the saying likely goes. #

• There are a lot of people coughing, sneezing and spitting today. Way more than usual. There appears to be something 'in the air'. I’m noticing it too.

  As a side node, I read all about the con / chem trails phenominon, and it’s debuncking, and re-bunking and what not. Who the heck knows. What I can tell you for sure is what I’ve seen with my own eyes. Last time I was in Chiang Mai, about 5-6 years ago, I was walking right outside the main old city centre quad which is where most of the tourists hang out, and I saw with my own eyes a small airoplane decend really low right over the main quad and dump an enormous amount of liquid and pull up and fly off into the distance.

  The entire floor of the airplane openned and whatever it was full of, which looked like clear liquid, went right into the atmosphere right where all the tourists spend their days. I dunno, it sure looked strange. The things that authorities consider 'normal' in places around asia, are at times very different to back in the west. #

• Since entering the park several water goading incidents. People appear to be aware that I’m very low on drinking water, and are harrassing me about it. For example a very jolly butch woman just walked past talking to a friend, holding and swinging an empty water bottle in a transparent bag like she was a school girl, saying loudly 'hellow', an analgam of hello and allow. It’s their favorite reality inversion, telling you to do the thing they are blocking. Absolute righteousness, like she’s doing me a favour by participating in the gang rape thirsting they are doing to me. #

• Just got harrassed by security guards for daring to stand on the edge of the grass. The only reason I’m having to do that is because they have recently moved all the seats so they are permanently out of the shade. Once again creating the problems they complain about. Note that it’s happening on the light green tsunami day. They usually don’t care. Not that I’m in the habit of doing it. Also remember the ziplock baggie? I told you didn’t I?

  No grass for you, or water.

  And wouldn’t you know ut tgey are constantly watering the grass, but you likely wouldnt want to drink that.

  The walls are closing in again. Hellow reality inversion traffic jam, how have you been? It’s been at least a couple of days... #

Today’s links:

• Raised by the internet - I thought it was noteworthy that the first time I’ve been subjected to a 7 day starvation, that the day after I finally got some food this article popped up on Hacker News. Interesting also no dates on the other blog articles on the site. It highlights the dilema of a captured truthful person. If you extrapolate, at some point it stops being feasible. Would the articles keep popping up with ever more impossible scenarios? The only way to find out would be to lie, but then you would be pointed out as a liar. If you don’t then eventually maybe you’ll actually get murdered by the world. This kind of thing is happening constantly to me, and not just on HN. Pretty much everywhere. jimmyhmiller.github.io #

2024/09/29 #

• Yesterday’s prediction about everything being blocked was 110% spot on. Understatement of the month. It was more like 1010%. And today it continues. The level righteousness is un-fucking-believable.

  Yesterday evening I eventually just started making peace signs with both hands in response to each harrassnent event, saying peace vietnam, peace. My voice had completely cracked, I could hardly speak. It went on for hours. This morning voice is still really broken, but it’s so strange because I’m not ill really in any way aside from a very slight morning cough.

  Got gifted an ice tea and a small rice / tuna based snack around 3am. That was nice, pretty much the only thing I’ve eaten in the past 7 days.

  I expect the level of righteousness will continue for the rest of the day.

  The latest thing from mororbike gang stalkers: "him a lawyer". Who knows who they are talking about. Me, somebody else? Hard to know.

  I asked the ether why I needed a lawyer, noting that this was hardly fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and if they really wanted to all be kangaroos given that in Australia they shoot kangaroos like vermin, and that sent the security guards outside the office on the other side of the street into some form of frenzy.

  Another day. I don’t suppose I’ll get much done as I’ll need to turn off devices to ensure I’ll last till next weekend’s newsletter. Washing water and electricity have been cut off again. Shrug. #

• When I look back at my blogging output for this year, I’m really happy about the quantity, because it’s like 5x or 10x previous years. That’s incredible. The blogging virtuous circle really is working for shear quantity. There’s absolutely no question about that.

  But the topics I’m writing about, aren’t ultimately what I want to be writing about. I haven’t written about web development for months. Everything is politics, and end of the world AI apocalypse topics, and though I think I’m doing okay at it given the circumstances, it just isn’t the focus I want. The problem is that the writings are really just a reflection of how fucked my current life situation is is right now. Writing keeps me somewhat sane. But I’m spending all this time thinking about stuff that is just getting in the way of my goals. It’s 95% other people’s crap.

  Frankly I’m very depressed about it. It’s like getting to the summit of a terribly huge mountain, spending years doing it, and then seing that everything is poop for as far as the eye can see. My laptop that I used to use to write has turned to poop. My SaaS turned to poop. The dingy I am in, one of the few non poop things, is constantly filling up with poop. Everything is poop.

  It’s cool that I can these days just write a short note about this without the pressure of an entire blog post.

  Nope, I fucking hate the poop emoji. #

• The bloke that lives across the alleyway of the internet place, just emerged from his house, a butch woman wearing an outfit that was covered in bright red pattern also emerged. The butch woman stands to my left, a few meters away. As he emerges and starts locking the sliding gate on front of the house front door, he makes an order 'Blog!'. Kind of weird. It’s clear to me they are on the warpath about something.

  Incidentally from the moment I set off this morning many people have been on the warpath, including a man on a motorbike wearing a red tshirt with large black letters 'TRUE' on his back, so you can see it clearly as he drives past.

  Anyway, I turn away from them, lean on the wall. They are behind me. I don’t want any trouble. He says loudly in english 'you are lying'. I literally have no idea what he means, I had said absolutely nothing to him. He is not addressing her, she doesn’t speak english. The rest of their conversation certainly isn’t in english.

  I simply calmly say, 'you are on the warpath', and I say no more.

  He walks off with the butch woman, which is unusual as he always drives a motorbike. The butch woman has in her hand 3 large food boxes. Clear food goading, and anger goading, and total reality inversion.

  I rest my case, as it were.

  Update: This is the same bloke that alternates between being normal, and being 'evil', with evil laughs and last week with the small boy that walked like he had leg braces, except he has no leg braces. I note that yesterday a small boy on a small bycicle with stabilizers was cycling around me over and over, and when he finally stopped two walkers passed and announced I had 'won' whatever that means. At the internet place for the rest of the day, right next to where I stand at the internet place, was a small girl version of the bycicle. You are not going to be able to convince me there is nothing strange going on here. At least some of these events are linked, maybe all of them. It’s clear intimidation, anger goading, food goading and complete reality inversion.

  Update: As I finish writing this note, the young woman staff from the cafe arrives on her red motorbike right on front of me, and says 'him learn' to the other woman staffer. After which she appears to be waiting, listening for me to say something. I wait until she has gathered all her things and enters the cafe, and I calmly say, 'her on the warpath'.

  Whatever weird strange bizare ambiguous doublespeak is going on here. It’s clear things are very far away from Okay imho. Everyone is teetering on a warpath, just waiting for an opportunity to pin it all on me.

  Note: They are still starving and thirsting me. And btw, the butch woman that cleans up the puppy’s poop earlier started calling the puppy using the same word the bloke that gifted me the rice this morning: 'Hey'. That has been a term of harrassment for a few weeks now since one of the sandwich vendor women addressed me by saying 'hey dog'. All these things seem small, but I’m telling you, whatever network they use, whether it’s encrypted chats or word of mouth, is absolutely optimised for passing around exactly this type of info. This sort of subtle corruption of the social layer of public society is happening constantly. #

• I’ve burned through so much battery dealing with everyone’s bull crap this morning, I doubt I’ll get anything done the entire week now. Washing water and power still cut off, I’m still a pariah, though I’ve done nothing wrong.

  Even saying peace via words or hand gesture, or saying I don’t want any trouble, is considered some sort of war move, and escallated against.

  Everything is the worst form of poo, utterly hopeless poo. #

• Well 'ya’s' are definitely trending.

  Gosh 'Ya’s' trending in shitville, never seen that before.

  Oh 'our' is trending too. what a suprise. #

• Finally some food. I got gifted a small rice and small pork chop takeaway box. Starvation, especially when you just don’t know if you’ll ever eat again, is the fucking worst thing. No idea why but the last two weeks basically no one is gifting me anything, only harrassment.

  In the last 7 days only 1 day of food. Just unbearable, especially with all the harrassment.

  There is now a gang of recycling butch women that have a loud speaker with an automated announcement attached to their pedal powered vehicle. It sounds like gibberish at first until you realise it’s saying 'Ya! bear die' over and over. One of the main places I go, for quite a while now has grafiti’d the word BEOR right where I sit, and many people shout it at me as they pass.

  I’m now doing double peace sign, one with each hand to the world after every harrassment. I just don’t want to be angry, it feels so horrible.

  Turn darkness into light.

  You get a lot more gifts when you get angry. At least currently. I hope things improve because I can’t survive on 1 day of food per week.

  Update: The new thing seems to be to shout 'Blog!' at me. Right after I finished eating the small meal I got gifted, a butch woman stopped opposite me on a motorbike. She paused to adjust something on the todler chair, and right before speeding off, said 'Blog!' loudly. WTF world? First of all, no food, no blog, brains literally don’t work without food, just like motorbike’s and petrol, second of all why in the fuck are random butch women, with kids no less, stopping to order me to blog? This is some seriously f-ed up twisted shit.

  Peace vietnam, peace ☮️🕊✌️ Peace world, peace ☮️🕊✌️ #

Today’s links:

• Starmer visit to Brussels could lead to overhaul of Brexit deal - This really sadens me. I want the youths, in britain and europe, to have mobility for sure, but the reality, the thing that no one is saying out loud is that europeans want this because they want free native level english language exposure and immersion. It’s not really about becoming friends. Be honest europe. So I think Starmer is right to hold back on that for the moment. The other thing that really sadens me is this notion that 'britain quit'. WTF is that? Were we employees of europe? No. European leaders you need to re-evaluate your morals, and grow up. Britain democratically chose to leave, and no country has ever done that before, and so it’s been incredibly difficult for everyone involved, but both europe and britain will be better in the long run, as long as you can manage to get past your mummy and daddy issues, and stop projecting them all on britain. This is a great opportunity for all involved, especially because there are many wars developing around europe’s edges. Stop procrastinating, start thinking creatively, leave your exploitative thinking behind you, lets build something better for the next generations. www.theguardian.com #

2024/09/28 #

• I’m only just awake and it’s clear that the world is going to be doing it’s best to block my every move. Quiet so called goody goody two shoe angels maliciously and righteously blocking all while claiming everything in the universe is my fault. What’s the point in doing anything, on days like these, all doors have been closed, all possibilities accounted for, everything already determined, I know it sounds defeatist and strange, but these days really do exist. Nothing I will do will make the world happy today. And I’ll get blamed for everything, oh and guess what I was already being starved and thirsted, so it’s a double whammey.

  On the plus side, I got reusable workflows deployed on all repos, even the ones that just required part of the full workflow. That’s a big step forward. Finally got to close out that feature in the backlog. What a difficult one that was. That’s probably why worldo has gone all passive aggressive warpatho.

  Literally just as I finished writting the previous paragraph it started 'Ya Ma!' -ing me via motorbike gang stalkers for no reason, nevermind it’s blocking me in all dimensions. Creating the problems they complain about...etc etc, here I go again. #

• Merdeism

  Another political minimal app.

  Perhaps we are all waiting for those that are in the shit to get out of the shit. Perhaps it’s gotten to the stage where we’re really hoping that they get out of the shit because it’s starting to affect us who are not in the shit.

  The problem is though that some of them really love being in the shit. They think it’s the best thing ever. And some others of them pretend to love being in the shit, but are actually secretly in Champagne.

  They’ve turned being in the shit into an entire ideology. Merdeism if you will.

  IANAL, and remember even min apps have edge cases.

  Yes, I know IANAL is amusing in this context. But is it really, or are you just being a merdeist?

  Note: Merde is french for shit.

• The instant I committed my latest blog post about merdeism, a small well todo gang of morning walkers in the park walked past and 'No?' harrassed me. Literally 1 second after the commit completed. This sort of thing is happening constantly.

  Interesting that it was question based rather than the usual order based.

  Anyhow just wanted the full context of writting this post to be out there.

  Btw, I’m not even kiding about any of this, in some ways I really wish I was.

  Update: Committing this note was followed almost immediately by an aggressive 'No Ah' harrassment. No doubt this update will be countered too, so I’ll say no more on the matter today. The last sentence just got extreme passive aggressive silent countered. #

• Vampires Vampire Attacking Vampires (Issue #183)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-09-28)

  In this week’s edition:

  Genes need a future, Russia is mental, specialists vs generalists, VC tough years, inflation demystified, rewilding the Earth at scale, deep fakes future, and Uk politics

  Issue details:

  • Title: Vampires Vampire Attacking Vampires
  • Issue: 183
  • Page: issue webpage

• Altman’s reality distortion field

  OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman certainly seems to have some sort of a reality distortion field. First there was all the commotion and strangeness about getting fired then re-hired, then there was changing from a non-profit to a for profit company and the bad blood with Elon Musk over the $50 million dollars he put into the company, and recently a long line of important OpenAI employees leaving the company.

  Altman has also testified on front of Congress famously saying that he didn’t get paid and just did it because he loved what he was doing. And now he’s been spotted driving a $4 million dollar car. Rogan has done a very hilarious segment on one of his shows that appears to have gone somewhat viral. The All-In podcast had an entire spoof funeral / death themed intro on this week’s show all about the employees leaving. Lots of hilarity. There sure is a lot of smoke even if there isn’t any fire. Yet somehow he’s 'getting away with it' for some reason.

  Isn’t it super interesting that all this crazy and extreme reality distortiom should occur with the first big AI company leader? I wonder though, could it be fake news?

  As a counter example from where I am. There’s a security guard of a nearby business that I see most days doing the day shift. Just a regular security guard. I doubt he makes much money. Yet a few weeks ago I saw him drive past in a vintage custom Ford Mustang. He looked pretty happy, it’s a pretty fly car. But I doubt it’s his car. He’s probably just taking it for a test drive. I’ve done that before. Probably one of the coolest things I’ve done. It was awesome. Isn’t it possible that that’s what was happening.

  I dunno, maybe with Sam Altman he really is just all concerned with money, and is secretly just a greedy capitalist expert liar. I guess it’s possible. But again isn’t it strange it should all be happening with the first famous AI company leader?

  I wonder, especially with powerful AIs mediating and organising our futures, won't this in fact be likely to just become another pattern that could be repeated at will. Like a photoshop fill tool. Unbelievable complete reality inversion...no problem..."Hey AIs, make it so".

  I know I see these types of reality inversions in my own life all the friggin’ time. There might be dislocations, similar to in crystallography, in the fractal of reality. A place where the pattern flips. It wouldn’t suprise me if this sort of thing was a common thing in general. What will we do in the future when there will be no way to know what the reality really is. If the person you were infiniti mocking was in fact in extreme poverty? That would be much less funny, wouldn’t it?

  Freedom advocates will say, we want free speech, we should be able to parody and make jokes etc, and I agree. But if you can deploy a reality inversions at the click of a button, then follow it up with cascades of internet mocking, doesn’t that mean rising from poverty will basically become impossible?

  I see some version of that every day here. You are either a crushed quiet poor person or if you get angry and say something, you are derided as liar / actor. Literally. And often you get rewarded for getting angry, then punished. It’s mental, I don’t think I’m able to describe it very well.

  In recent years many in the west have discovered the dark patterns of the World Bank and IMF. Exploitative deals that trap third world countries into debt. It’s horrendous. But maybe these types of practices have been going on for years everywhere, at much smaller scales, in many of these places. Maybe we couldn’t see it before because we didn’t know it was happening on smaller scales too. I see money exploitation happening every day here in Vietnam. All be it on a much smaller scale, but really predatory, very well practiced, exploitative practices.

  At the big World Bank / IMF scales, it just doesn’t seem plausible. That’s why people don’t believe it at first. But think about it for a second, slavery / exploitative thinking has been with humanity for much longer than the more modern liberal way of framing things. Being against slavery and exploitation is actually quite a new way of thinking in the overall scheme of humanity. Is it really that much of a suprise that some of these horrid practices got scalled up and deployed?

  I’m aware that my thoughts on this reality distortion stuff is all quite a mess at the minute. Life is insanely aggressively evil for me right now. Just want to get these thoughts out there while I still can. I really wish I was more articulate on the matter.

• Pretty sure I’ve been mutilated again. It follows me going to a store where they always say 'It’s Okay' as you enter, which when you think about it is kind of offensive, not to mention borderline racist. But anyway the real passive aggressive onslaught doesn’t start until you yourself say 'It’s Okay'. If you dare to do that even if it’s in a totally normal situation where that’s exactly what you would say, you then get 'No!’d', and if you dare to signal you mean no harm via a peace sign, you get double 'No!’d'. Oh yeah and I ordered by an 'Up!' just before I was about to go up to the seating area. I really had been perfectly polite.

  Makes you wonder if things were really Okay in the first place or not when you enterred.

  Anyway, I continued the rest of the day, not too many harrassments, until this evening a woman walked past the dark green bin and tapped it for no reason. Then a while later a young woman in a light green dress, who was being really excessively prim and propper like she was Mary Popins or something, did some elaborate thing where she was droping tissues, then using baby wipes, then radomly swinging her legs. Anyway it all had a sketchy air to it and wouldn’t you know it my nose had started to get blocked, and my voice appears to have gone walkabouts. No pain at all in my throat, and I haven’t been shouting.

  The theme from harrassers this evening seems to be financial, lots of things like 'money' and 'pay', but also 'actor', 'young', and one very loud and determined deep voiced 'good liar'.

  So yeah looks like I got mutilation punished yet again, a side dish to the starvation and thirst they are already inflicting on me.

  Update: Noticed this earlier but I didn’t see the connection to today’s events until now. They’ve cordonned off the pavement in a really bizare way that is totally innefective. Just another block to add to all the blocking. It’d been mostly fine this afternoon but they were in blocking over drive in the park this morning. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: Merdeism markjgsmith.com #

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Vampires Vampire Attacking Vampires (Issue #183) markjgsmith.com #

• Boris Johnson: we considered ‘aquatic raid’ on Netherlands to seize Covid vaccine - On one level this whole invade Holland for vacines thing is obviously quite amuzing, but when you combine it with the no birthday cake story, no matter how you feel about Boris, how pathetic is it that the primeminister couldn’t even have a birthday cake on his birthday. Even if he’s lying about it, it’s so ridiculously pathetic my brain is having difficulty comprehending. What is going on? www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Altman’s reality distortion field markjgsmith.com #

2024/09/27 #

• Another day.

  One weird thing that happened yesterday was pervert maybe pedo westerner bloke started calling me 'son'. He’s not british by the way. That's pretty f-ing strange. Can’t imagine that’s going anywhere good.

  I’ll hopefully get a few more of the remaining reusable workflows deployed on the remaining few repos that only use some of the full workflow. Got it working for 2 of them yesterday, there are about 3-4 other ones to update.

  Then it looks like it’s more starvation and all the other crap, cut off water and electrcity etc that goes with that. I had 2/3 of a day of food yesterday. They have already started food goading and the day only just begun. #

• Looks like they are training the puppy to pee where I stand to get online at the internet place. Anger goading much?

  I guess I’ll get those other workflows working another time. Blocked.

  Here they go again. #

• Now the locals are harrassing me for not standing in the dog pee. pretending they can’t get past me despite the fact there is literally the most room possible.

  It’s anger goading. They create the problem they complain about, they escallate, they block, they blame, they mutilate. #

• People in the park blocking all the seats in some way, then huge gangs of like 30 or 40 people with a person amongst them confidently and loudly calling me 'god' as they walk past. It’s just another maximum anger goad that justifies further bullying. #

• Slightly aggressive park attendant approached me in the park to give me an earfull. Absolutely no idea what he was on about. I had been sewing, doing a small repair on a T-shirt.

  Previous to this, the park attendents were also escallating the event that happened earlier. That was when a local at the internet place was pretending I was in the way even though (1) there was plenty of room (2) the reason I was where I was, was because of something they did. I had said 'chill out' as they were getting slightly aggressive. Well the security guards and people with them, walked past me saying 'out out out out'. Weirdly at the very same moment, the podcast I was listening to had a bit about the recent Isreali exploding pagers, and they were also saying 'out' many times. Weirdo worldo.

  Just as I finished the previous paragraph a female baby walker walked past. I'm at the internet place again having returned from the park. There is a small girl’s bycicle right next to where I stand to use the internet.

  World’s on the warpath again. Shrug. #

• Techmeme (09/26) on facial computing:

  Zuck has shown us the finish line

  Update: Kind of an instance of front running the big bang, no?

  Strange. This keeps happening. #

• Nilay Patel on Talk Show podcast relaying Samsung’s views on AI photography [~1:38:00]:

  There is no such thing as a picture.

  If you squint a bit this is kind of an instance of next week’s newsletter which is already written and scheduled.

  Subscribe in advance!

  Update: Just a few minutes later and he said the title’s keyword! It’s a mad algorithms desease future. #

• Having a minimal app is really important, crucial in fact, when debugging a problem. But it’s not enough. In life and politics, probably even more so than in programming there can be some pretty wild edge cases. People wear multiple hats, an entity you thought was just one person turns out to be a factory, there are unions! Snakes and ladders! And fractals! Omg fractals. The publisher of the min app might be corrupt! And now AI! Even the simplest of things can be ridiculously perverted. #

2024/09/26 #

• I’m up incredibly early, it’s 330am, hoping to get some coding done before the plague of horrible people wake. But elas just as I was about the start the motorbike gang stalkers are already doing their 'shut up slave' 'Up!' harrassnent. They are such fucking psycho paperclip maximizing bossy bootses that they end up blocking things that are working perfectly fine. It’s like they are addicted to shooting themselves in the foot, and have convinced themselves that shooting themselves in the foot is literally the only thing that fixes the world, when in fact it does the opposite. And they are supremely righteous about it all.

  They are literally making themselves poorer while the rich get richer, and anyone that even thinks about actual real improvements is devil incarnate. And everything is full in all dimensions, and they think that’s normality, because filling everything up is the way they control things, and they must control everything. It’s like a bunch of maniac suicide cultists. And long term I don’t even think it works out particularly well for the elites. They will get dragged into hell just like everyone else did.

  So anyway, hoping to have some instances of the reusable workflows working for repos that don’t run a build. There are a bunch of small workflows that only need to run portions of the workflow. They currently still have their own custom workflow but I think there is a way to get them on the new reusable workflow standard too. That will be awesome. The reusable workflows have so far been a massive success uncovering some until now undetectable problems within build environments.

  Also now that I’ve been using them for a few weeks, I can see lots of places where the reusable build and deploy workflows could be improved. The current implementation is a first try, a pretty good one all things considered, but there are many ways to improve things further. The great thing is that any improvements immediately become available to all existing workflows.

  Even amongst all the bleakness, there is some hope, a tiny glimmer of hope shining through all of worldo’s bullcrap. #

• Just got vampire attacked by the older woman that stop / starts everything. As soon as you say anything she backs off and becomes quiet. Same with movements. Stop starting her motorbike over and over. It’s all ultimately malicious anger goading, with blatant hunger goading too this time. Any conversation is impossible, and that’s the point, it’s just a time suck

  Pretending to be soft and nice, but actually just as evil as the loud ones. They have more types of malisciousness than you can even imagine. The only way to deal with it is to not respond. #

• I managed to get the reusable workflow I mentioned earlier working. Quite happy about that.

  It took much longer than it should have done because of all the constant harrassment, but I got it working nonetheless. There are a handfull of workflows that need this slimed diwn version, and once they are all running correctly then that will be the end of the initial version of the reusable workflows feature. #

• Pretty sure somebody just moved a neutrino in the universe so it’s out of place and will blame it on me and try to make everything in the universe my fault again and everything will be turned to Defcon 1 again. Here I ago yet again. The everything is your fault event just occurred again. #

• Joe Rogan’s vision on immigration sounds cool

  Joe Rogan vision on immigration, from his chat with Chamath Palihapitiya [1:09:40]:

  This is my one bright spot that I think about with AI as well. Everyone is terrified of the open borders situation, and criminals coming across the border. Wouln’t the solution be, not have a place like a desparate 3rd world country where people are trying to escape on foot with their families.

  If we were living next door to another United States, and you could just travel freely back and forth between the two them, because it really didn’t matter. Both of them are equally safe, both of them have equal economic prosperity, both of them are equally democratically governed, no problem, just go over there, go over here.

  It kind of used to be like that with Canada. With Canada you used yo go over there with a driver’s license. You used to be able to go back and forth between the United States...I mean I think the first time I went to Canada I did not have a passport, I had a driver’s licence. It was kind of the same sort of deal. It was just accepted, "Oah that place is cool, we’re cool, we’re next to each other". If the whole world was like that...

  CP: It would be incredible.

  JR: Right, it would be incredible, and I think AI makes that possible, but we are going to have to deal with some very uncomfortable factors.

  I thought that was a particulary standout and interesting way to think about it. I too remember that the world used to be much more chilled about borders, and not just in the US. It felt great. We should not forget that. The pendulum can swing back to a place that is cool like it was in the past.

  I’m not so convinced about the assertiom that AI makes it all possible. I think there are really big reasons why AI tech might make that vision more difficult to achieve, that it could get in the way, but I concede that it could also help in some way. My instinct is saying, yes that vision sounds really great but woah careful with the over reliance on AI. AI doesn’t magically solve everything. Thinking that it does brings a bunch of it’s own of dangers.

• More totally unprovoked 'Up!' harrassment from shop staff as I leave the shop cafe I’ve been at all morning to go to the internet place. This happens so often wherever I am, when I’m heading to the internet place. It’s like some sort of compulsion. I don’t think they are able to not say some sort of harrassment, like some strange form f collective OCD.

  Perhaps not uncoincidentally this mornings motorbike driveby uppers were of the same rough age as the shop staff.

  And now in the park I’m being 'Bear!' harrassed for no reason, as I’m sitting quietly typing on my device. #

• Even more 'Up!' harrassment on my way between the internet place and another shop cafe, which, you guessed it, has it’s seating area upstairs. It’s literally every portion of any journey has some form of harrassment. I reckon there’s a 70% chance the staff at the shop cafe also do some 'Up!' harrassment after I buy my drink, right before I make my way upstairs.

  Update: The shop staff didn’t harrass, though some customers, including a young women ordering me to "home", just as I returned from the bathroom and was about to gather my things to head back to the internet place. She also seemed particularly proud of her bossiness, appearing to parody success kid meme.

  Update: Just as I got back to the internet place a group of blokes sitting at the nearby cafe did an opposite harrassment, all simulteneously shouting 'down!'.

  Update: Followed immediately by a woman baby walker.

  Update: There was however more poo based harrassment at the shop cafe, which was the same place were my tummy suddenly went all melt down a few days ago. It envolved apparent customers 'accidentally' leaving bits of toilet paper right on front of me. I wasn’t entirely sure that it was that, but now back at the internet place, there has been some more poo based harrassment involving the puppy, who this morning appeared to also have a bit of a tummy bug. It was just now chased down by a butch women who tried to hit the poor thing with a stick for no reason right in front of me while clearly 'No!' harrassing me. They always try to create plausible deniability through ambiguity but when you see these things happen as often ad I do, it’s very obvious they are linked events, and that it’s anger goading. Incidentally at the shop cafe in question, they just happened to remove the soap dispenser from toilets the day before I got gut poisonned. What are the chances.

  Update: Just as I finished writting the previous update, a man walked past saying loudly 'they lie', when I looked up, there was a younh woman wearing head to toe brown outfit, who paused momentarily and then left.

  Update: Now there is a distinct smell of chocolate in the air. I guess the poo based harrassment is set to continue.

  And so it goes. #

• Really enjoyed listenning to Chamath Palihapitiya on Rogan earlier. Lots of great topics discussed. I wrote a quick quote blog post earlier.

  One thing I just wanted to comment on was his idea to setup ghost kitchen + uber delivery infrastructure to make cheap healthy food available at scale. I love this idea, however as with many parts of government, the infra innevitably get taken over by deep state / malicious gangs and used to target individuals. That’s basically the sort of thing that’s been happening to me here. Specifically this week, there’s been a whole load of poo based harrassment.

  I’m not casting judgement, in fact I suspect these folks think they are doing the right thing. They have some way they justify this behaviour to themselves, it keeps happening.

  So great idea, but I think it would be doomed to fail, or at least fail for some. #

Today’s links:

• UK must stop being naive over resetting relations with EU, thinktank says - There something that this article captures but I’m not convinced that the important thing is that the EU is all offended that a country should dare to leave. Looking at the macro happening with elections everywhere europe is looking more and more like it could be a sinking ship long term. To be sure that would be undesirable for everyone. There’s likely naiveté on both sides, but using that as a thing to hit the other over the head with is unproductive and childish. Better would be to move as quickly as possible to mend some core elements and stop procrastinating. Both sides stand to benefit in these uncertain times.www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Joe Rogan’s vision on immigration sounds cool markjgsmith.com #

2024/09/25 #

• What a day full of horrible people, claiming to be angels while blatantly & maliciously harrassing and starving me. Yesterday was much the same. How strange that things should escallate to such a degree right after I uncovered and fixed a very likely divergeance between Github actions environments. A divergeance which would cause some repositories to not get any access keys causing everything they do to fail. #

• More blah blah blahs. I told you they were trending :)

  I haven’t listenned to this one yet but theur stuff is always the best. #

2024/09/23 #

• All escallation notes from yesterday already posted. Hoping to make a bit of progress on coding now that I fixed the strange heredoc permissions bug. Probably not going to be able to make much progress as another starvation cycle looks to have started.

  So far in today’s escallations:

  • Got woken up by some driveby bloke excedingly jolly shouting. Oddly I think he shouted 'Navalny' at me, but can’t be sure. I was listening to a McCormack episode last night that mentions him a lot.
  • Early morning bicycle lady that sings her head off just drove past, singing her head off, it’s around 510am, I think last time she passed by was about a week ago

  Onwards... #

• One major issue is no matter what you do, whether it took you 5 secs or 5 life times, they will just immediately do an Isreal on you and order you to 'more', while claiming to be Gaza.

  They literally just did it to me now following two days of non stop escallations f-ing everything up for me.

  I can never even get to coding any of my own stuff.

  If you are god then why do you clearly have an infiniti amount of horns growing out of your head? #

• I haven’t been able to get any coding done this morning, despite being continuously handling crap from everyone for hours. Maybe later I guess, though the weather forcast is rain, and I haven’t eaten, and they have cut off water and electricity again. So I guess I have to prepare next weeks newsletter again now. Here I go again.

  Are you sized? #

• Could everyone please stop being vampires do that I can just get 1 thing done? Thank you.

  Note: Being a "kind" vampire is still being a vampire. #

• I cannot even. #

• I just did my best to listen to the latest Search Engine podcast all about Inflation:

  • Is everyone pretending to understand inflation (or just me)?

  It’s a great epidode but I kept getting interupted, do feel like I didn’t fully understand all of it. I did get gifted a tiny sausage pastry breakfast from a very camp man though.

  There are a lot more components to inflation than is generally portraid in the media.

  Ultimately still hungry, still not 100% on inflation, people are still angry at me :(

  Literally just got called a 'liar' by a middle aged woman in the park as I wrote the previous paragraph.

  Update: Still being vampire attacked over and over in broad daylight by people much better fed than me. They are now telling me 'you won'. #

• I thought this podcast about rewilding the earth on a massive scale was great, even if it’s ghe world blatantly taking an opportunity to try and contradict me.

  • A bold plan to rewild the earth at a massive scale | Kristine McDivitt (TED Talks Daily Podcast)

  It’s especially timely given my post yesterday our impending Labour government journey. What a wonderful example of a large vision to make the world a better place.

  Btw, I could do with a bit of rewildibg too. #

• Figured out why my poor old brain confused Keir with Keith. Likely has something to do with the fact that I’ve also been posting about Keith Tear the past few days.

  A strange addition to this is that earlier today in the park a "kind vampire" approached me and kept asking me via the translation app on her phone about 'onions'. What are the chances?

  And since then all sorts of harrassment, people calling me a liar, and making other references to this typo, actual gangs of youths laughing at me and following me into side alleys to verbally harrass me, and it turns out it was the world shitting the bed yet again, and trying to blame me for it.

  The world is non stop constantly Keithing me, and because of that I end up Keithing someone once, and the world goes all defcon1. The mind boggles. Abd of course now I have to appologise to Keith too. Sorry mate.

  Anyway, it’s okay world. #

• Peter McCormack and Allen Farrington on the process of socialising losses [1:43:55]:

  PM: When you socialise the losses, you are in turn socialising gains for the richest in society, because the process of socialising the losses is leading to inflation, which is increasing the price of the assets of the richest people

  AF: Yes

  PM: It’s SO fucked isn’t it?

  AF: It’s pretty bad. I don’t like it.

  It would be interesting to see a comparison with other causes of inflation, so we can see which bad processes are worse.

  Really great episode, so many interesting topics, particularly the bit about folks that think they are making things better but are actually doing the opposite. #

2024/09/22 #

• Yesterday was basically rain the whole day. Huge down pours for hours at a time. I was inside a shop cafe for most of it, and I had some food and hot coffee so that was pretty good I guess. There was a load of strange bizare weird stuff as usual. I didn’t take that many notes as it was my birthday, but anyway here they are:

  • Middle aged aggressive women (with young kids in tow), obsessed with saying the word ‘come’ whenever near me. On one street this morning it happened at least 3 times. Com means rice, but the double meaning is well known. The purpose is anger goading. Often accompanied with other anger goading like ‘Gay’.
  • This morning people at every junction I needed to take this morning on my route pointing in the direction I needed to go in.
  • Placed next to the penis graffiti this morning: a large empty plastic cup of a red colored soft drink. As I typed the last sentence 2 blokes sitting behind me say "Man City". What are the chances of that? It’s an opposite / not dynamic again.
  • Non stop sparrow people, young women and young men doing over / under goading and general distraction harassment.
  • A manufactured situation involving a little girl, her female guardian / parent and a trip to the bathroom. This has previously happened with other combinations: female guardian and little boy etc. All in Vietnamese but key words in English like "sorry". I would classify it as pedo pervert stuff but the entire situation appeared to be led by the child. Very strange. Poo related.
  • Two delicate young women enter the cafe shop, never seen them before, I’m sitting completely quietly listening to podcasts, they turn to me and say ‘liar’ then go sit down. I say nothing. They stay for a few minutes, then get up and walk out. As they pass me they say quietly ‘No’ in angelic voice.
  • Back at the internet place to send out newsletter promo. Somebody in one of the cafes is saying Dig over and over. That’s odd, the Diggnation episode was a last minute addition to the newsletter.
  • In the late afternoon I got a sandwich and went to another shop cafe near the university. Lots of harrassment there too with shop staff ordering me to Up!, thats where the seating area is, then upstairs lots of people saying things like 'our' and 'our lie'. Ignored most of it, but 20 minutes after eating the sandwich and a hot instant noodles, stomach started feeling not so good. Left the place, and en-route back to the internet place to post a few more things, major gut issues, had to do an emergy classy #2 in a side street. Given all the poo related harrassment, seems likely to me that it was planned.
  • Went to another shop cafe, there a couple on front of me did a few 'you learn’s' at me
  • Later in the evening somewhere else, a tall western man walks past holding his lips, looking like he wanted me to see.
  • Noticed that I have two huge zits on my face. Painful and swollen. It occurred to me that there was a segment on the latest Diggnation about this new treatment where they rub your own treated blood stuff on your face to reduce aging and wrinkles. It’s kind of weird that the same day I added their episode to the newsletter that later that night I got assaulted with a red soft drink to the face. And even stranger that I ended up with two big painful zits despite cleaning all the sticky soft drink gew from my face.

  So on the whole it was a birthday with some good bits and some bad bits, and then it rained all night, and it’s been raining all morning. The rain appears to have cleared up, but it’s still quite cold.

  Am I happy? I dunno, I try but the world has other plans, literally mutilating me on the inside and on the outside.

  The worst part about all this is who do you trust, and the unfortunate thing is you can’t really trust anyone. You have to keep buying and eating food from people that might be making you ill, and listening to podcasts from people that might be causing you harm.

  You just can’t ever know.

  Update: The rain has started again. #

• A quick update on the bizare strange weird heredoc permissions error I uncovered a few days ago. First of all I fixed the error. I added a chmod of the file after it gets created in the bash script, and after running several tests, the file now gets created with the correct permissions. Also I check that the update didn’t break the main site build. Technically the problem is fixed.

  It does bring up some interesting things though:

  • The environments used to run the code sometimes differ. That’s unusual. I would have expected that if the heredoc got created with specific permissions, then it should always get created in the same way across all the environments since they all use the same linux image as far as I can tell. I’m certainly not changing the configuration in any way between environments. Typically the OS has a specific umask set that it uses to create file in a consistent way.
  • Having all the workflows all using the same reusable workflows definitely made it easier to see what was happening and fix the problem, even if it’s still a mystery why the file got created with the incorrect permissions. It strongly suggests an issue with the underlying platform rather than be anything to do with my code.
  • Strangely bizarely weirdly, as I pushed out the fix and tested it this morning at the internet place it had been pretty quiet all morning. The instant I decided to deploy a pretty large flareup between customers in one of the neighboring cafes occurred between a butch woman and several men. It continued all through deploy and testing until literally I started to write this bullet item. I was at it’s most intense right when I discovered the fix had worked. There appeared to be a 'moment of proof and certainty' by participants in the argument. Weird. Smaller versions of this happen constantly, but this one felt very 'canonical', for some reason.

  As I finished writing the previous item, one of the quieter older men from the flareup quietly said 'voila'.

  Btw they can see me standing next to the cafe typing away on my device but to my knowledge that’s all they can see.

  Anyway enough said. Just another weird coding and RL interaction.

  Update: Just as I was getting ready to leave, having already committed this note, putting my stuff together and packing my bag, one of the men involved in the flareup, loudly said 'you know, ower' as he got on his motorbike and left. It wasn’t clear to me who he was saying it to, but it’s certainly an interesting thing to say given the issue in my code was a permissions issue.

  Update: As I finished writting the previous update, several people from both cafes all said 'wow' one after the other.

  Update: As I wrote the previous update someone said 'you know, pay'. #

• Marty Bent and Matt Odell on Trump family World Liberty Be Defined

  I thought this was an interesting exchange on multiple levels. Marty Bent and Matt Odell on the Trump family World Liberty Be Defined crypto project on Rabbit Hole Recap podcast [1:19:20]:

  MO: What are your thoughts on the World Liberty Be Defined shitcoin thing he has?

  MB: It’s complete bullshit. What are you doing Trump family? People are like you’re doing all these scammy business deals, you’re gonna launch a shitcoin 2 months before the election?

  MO: So many people hate him on the left, if he looses, they are going to come after us harder because of all this bullshit. You realise that right?

  MB: Yes.

  MO: Like they group us in with the crypto bullshit. They are not going to be like, oh the Bitcoiners were against World Liberty Coin.

  MB: Yeah terrible timing. Terrible look. You are associating with people that run a network called Rug Radio? An overt insinuation that they are going to dump on retail? [laughs]

  MO: Pretty bad.

  MB: It’s very bad. These crypto scammers they know how to wiggle their way in. The fact that he did a spaces with his...I’m not sure if you listened to any of it?

  MO: I didn’t. I know it existed.

  MB: Not impressive people.

  MO: Blah blah blah politics blah blah [...] stay humble and stack sats.

  This exchange is a great example of why I really like their podcast. They really are in it for furthering Bitcoin, for making the protocol better. They might be on the right of the political spectrum but they will still call out weird shit even if it’s from their preferred candidate.

• The crazy future of RL deep fakes

  It occurred to be after writing about Marty Bent and Matt Odell’s recent interaction on Trumps sketchy looking crypto venture, that what if they themselves are scammers?

  I think this type of thing is going to become ever more frequent. Noone is going to be able to trust anyone. I’m not alone in thinking this. Andrew Keen and Keith Tear get into that, along with a bunch of other interesting topics in the latest Keen On episode.

  As for Marty and Matt, it certainly doesn’t sound like they are scammers, but I’ve heard some serious meta meta meta shit this week. It’s worrying that with AI deep fakes, in the future, you literally won’t be able to tell. In fact ironically it will be just as difficult for the scammers to convince you they are real as it will be for the real folks to convince you they aren’t fake.

  Asymptote prison for everyone.

  There are bound to be some very strange 2nd and 3rd order effects. The most obvious I can think of is real fakes, where people will be put up against each other by puppet masters, but without the full data set, so they will be fake but they might have many real qualities. A sort of modern RL version of Team America.

  Fuck yeah!....Fuck Yeah?

• Our Keir Starmer Journey

  I like the Andrew Rawnsley, and Toby Helm’s roundup of Starmer’s first 11 weeks in office.

  There’s a bit of controversy around gifts and staff salaries, but on closer look he seems to be mostly being very practical. He’s not afraid to point out where the other side left a mess, but I like that he’s also not afraid of accepting responsibility. This conscientious approach ties in rather well with this house redecoration metaphor he’s been going for. It all feels very sensible. At the minute he sounds like a tremendously good house renovation expert. And that’s great. It feels safe.

  Nevertheless there’s this yearning to get a feel for his wider ambitions for the country because I think people realise that a country is in fact more complicated than a house. Having a small glimpse of his vision, even if it’s just a description of the house he sees, would give us an idea of what he thinks might be possible. And that’s important because it’s not just about him, it’s about the team around him, the institutions around him, and all the rest of it, and he’s the one with the best visibility of that right now.

  I think people want to understand what he feels is possible. Maybe it’s a complete refurb of everything, or maybe it’s just a few key rooms in the house, or maybe it’s just to be in maintenance mode for a while only changing the furniture. People will likely be fine with most of the possibilities as long as it’s feasible, as long as it’s achievable.

  In this article they mention the "house redecoration" metaphor, cleaning up cracks and mold, but I seem to remember reading or hearing elseshere about "house renovation" as the metaphor with suggestion of more foundational changes. The country is a much more multi-dimensional and realtime changing complexity thing than a house. It’s more like a giant living organism. That's why a description of his vision is so important, or even just an honest description of his approach to finding the right vision fit for the nation if it hasn’t been compleately figured out yet.

  I wonder whether Starmer has some Elon Musk qualities in him. Perhaps even dare I say it a better, more british version of Elon Musk. I hesitate to mention Musk as I know he’s a bit of an enfant terrible at the minute, especially among UK elites, but wouldn’t it be cool if Starmer got the country firing on all cylinders in a way comparable to how Musk is helping to push US tech forward.

  I keep thinking back to the unbelievable Danny Boyle London Olympics opening ceremony. That really was something wasn’t it? I want this Labour journey to be the next chapter in that story, but even better, less painful, more fun, and even more incredible and amazing. Are we just taking on a new scene in that story, or a whole new section, or is it all just foundational stuff to even make that a possibility? It’s all good.

  Where are we at Keir mate, what do you reckon?

  PS - In the original version of this article I confused Keir with Keith. Totally unintentional. That’s the sort of thing that happens in hectic environments. I did know Keir was Keir, but for some reason, I suppose because it’s not a name my brain is familiar with, Keir became Keith, and I just realised it now. Sorry mate, I’ve updated the article and url.

• Escallation notes for today, covers morning and afternoon:

  • Sandwich vendor lady as I got to her stand: ‘bed’, there was a bit of weirdness when another customer right before me smiled and said 'you won' for no reason just as lady put chillis in his sandwich. Then when she made my sandwich, she got a bit strange when I asked for chilli sauce, saying 'lie' a bit grumpily, but maybe she was saying it to the customer after me. Reminded me that there had been some sort of weirdness the day before around chillis from another sandwich vendor right before tummy thing.
  • On entering hot water shop both female staff both said ‘bed’. As I was paying the female staffer taking payments said ‘door’
  • On paying at the shop cafe, female staffer taking payments said in a weird put on voice quite quietly ‘up up up up up!’. When she handed me my change from the purchase she did that thing where she seems really intent on putting the money into my hand but then keeps on moving her hand forward so normally most people would end up backing up and moving their hand in reverse, except I half expected something strange to happen so when I extended my hand to take the money, I purposely didn’t move it. She ended up having to back track and pull her hand back. She immediately turned towards the other staff member and said something that looked like she was describing what had just happened, so it looked like the other staff was in on the thing she was doing. But I’m not convinced she was. The fact that the previous shop staff said 'door' is actually significant. In apartments I’ve staid in here, several times the apartment caretaker has done basically the same thing as with the money, but with their entire body, sort of assuming you will let them in and try to pass by you expecting you will move aside. And of course when you don’t move the same situation occurs. It’s a bit awkward, they stop and back off and leave, usually somewhat upset. So what are the chances these two interactions are somehow linked? Pretty high I reckon. And also the one previous to that too. It’s another social layer multi step attack day. Wouldn’t surprise me if these staffers aren’t real staff, though they were wearing uniforms.
  • It’s been all quiet for 15 mins, the instant I finished writing the previous item, there was a flareup between staff downstairs
  • Another likely manufactured situation with shop staff filling up the hot water dispenser, trying to make it clear to me that they just filled it up

  Bit of a weird vibe this afternoon, I’m back at the place I was at right before I ended up with dodgy tummy yesterday. It seems to have mostly passed and I didn’t get ill again, even though I used the same hot water fountain as yesterday. #

• A little bit of what feels like intimidation from butch middle aged woman this evening, including one who had quite a wild young teen in toe on the back of her motorbike. That was followed by motorbike driveby gang stalker 'Ow!' harrassment. Previous to that there were two blokes who appeared to be waiting for me outside of a sandwich shop I sometimes go to who were really intent on me looking at them as I passed them, and one of them did an up down throwing motion with his right arm. At this sandwich shop, there was quite a strange incident last week, where the bloke that works there started shouting across the road right before I ordered my sandwich. It felt like a very manufactured situation. A few moments later, just as we exchanged sandwich for cash, a young boy suddenly appeared. And the sandwich shop bloke shouted 'wanker!' extremely loudly. I said nothing and just went on my way. It was very strange.

  I might just be being a bit overly worried given the assault yesterday, where somebody threw a drink in my face with considerable force, but I wonder whether it’s a sign of another imminent attack. I sure hope it isn’t.

  While I was writting this note, another motorbike driveby gang stalker drove by looking at me, and non-chalantly did the same arm throwing motion as they passed.

  Update: A couple of minutes after writing this note there was an 'okay' harrassment from moto gang stalker.

  Update: Followed immediately by 'money, they' harrassment from two teenage boys. #

• Well blah blah blah’s are trending.

  Always nice when you end up ahead of the game, which incidentally is also trending.

  Sure wish money donations would start trending.

  Update: Assaults, not so much.

  Update: I seem to be surrounded by wigglers who are trying to convince everyone that I'm a wiggler. But that just cannot be the case, unless of course you are f-ing with the permissions.

  Update: As soon as I added the previous update they tried to redefine wigglers in a way that would turn me evil. What a suprise. #

• The woman bin person that always has 2 teenage kids accompanying and helping her with the bins, just passed by. She appeared to describe me as 'the liar' to them.

  That doesn’t seem like a great sign as far as reducing assaults goes. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: Marty Bent and Matt Odell on Trump family World Liberty Be Defined markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: The crazy future of RL deep fakes markjgsmith.com #

• We have done more in 11 weeks than the Tories did in 11 years’: Keir Starmer defends his record - I thought this was a pretty good roundup of the story do far. It’s very high level, but I kind of like the general vibe. www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Our Keir Starmer Journey markjgsmith.com #

2024/09/21 #

• I was just assaulted in what appears to be a compleately unprovoked motorbike driveby attack. The projectile was a plastic cup full of red sticky soft drink. It hit me directly in the face with considerable force.

  A few minutes afterwards there was some intimidation by western looking men, I have no idea if the two situations were linked in some way. They then proceeded to laugh uncontrolably in what seemed like fake very loud laughter to me.

  Happy birthday to you too world.

  Update: Police have made an appearance, apparently stoping a driver right near me. There was at some stage a mention of the word 'dog'.

  Update: Now female motorbike gang stalkers are shouting 'No!' #

• Not the best start to a birthday.

  So I guess this is my actual morning note this morning, as technically the previous one was in middle of the god darn night.

  There’s all sorts of fractal and cascades and just a lot of unpleasant good vs evil stuff and mirroring at all scales, so I’ll keep this one short.

  At least I can eat today. Happy birthday me. #

• Human body threat detection tech

  My first thoughts after skimming through the latest microplastics research was about the recent increase smell issues many folks have been having. Turns out it’s potentially worse than that though as it’s the first time breaching of the bloob brain boundry by environmental plastics has been detected. Clearly that’s an issue since if it affects overall brain function, it could affect our ability to fix any resulting problems. I wonder if emergency precautions should be enacted.

  In the worst case you could imagine having to have some backup humans raised in environments known to be totally uncontaminated by microplastics And the way the world is going at the minute in terms of conflicts and escallations, one wonders how long until such a phenominon could be weaponized. On the other hand raising some people in a completely seperate environment could be a very inhumane thing to do to somebody.

  I bet in the near future, companies will popup that offer, by today's standards, rather extreme body modification tech to prevent or at least detect cellular level attacks on the human body. Maybe a new era where we’ll have to defend out bodies in the sand way we secure networked computers.

  We should also collectively be realistic about things. Just based on my involvement in the tech industry over the past 20 years, finding long lasting, trust worthy, open source, solutions that promote freedom takes a lot of time to get right. I’ve been following social media for 20 years and though there’s been huge steps forward and periods of big evolution, it’s still a mess. And that’s something relatively speaking, much less complex.

  We are going to have to admit collectively that we are going to be passing through an extended difficult period, and agree to not metaphorically or physically DDOS each other for every tiny disagreement, or we risk not making it to a safe place. Getting on well with each other without tech is the most important things at the minute. We need to be kind to each other. That’s the reality I see.

  Even as I type this I’m being 'yah’d', so I’ll stop here.

  I don’t think we can fix things if we can’t think, talk or communicate about them. The world is imperfect, it keeps on turning reguardless.

• Front Running the Big Bang (Issue #182)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-09-21)

  In this week’s edition:

  Alien life in the universe, Google anti-trust deep dive, the history of beards, and lots lots more...

  Issue details:

  • Title: Front Running the Big Bang
  • Issue: 182
  • Page: issue webpage

• Richard Dawkins: I think it’s a remarkable fact that Darwinian evolution...Darwinian natural selection was not discovered until the middle of 19th century, and then it was not discovered by sophisticated mathematicians or philosophers. It was discovered by 2 traveling naturalists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, both of whom were collectors in tropical jungles, and I’m actually genuinely puzzled as to why it took that kind of skill, that kind of experience, to tumble to this really remarkably simple idea, it’s a terribly simple idea when you think about it, natural selection. And it evaded really really clever people down the centuries, until 2 traveling naturalists in the 19th century, so yes I think scientists of the future would benefit from field trips as well. #

• Trumps visited Pubkey, a Bitcoin themed bar in New York. He was able to pay with Bitcoin. Here’s the tech stack:

  • Trump used Strike app to pay the invoice.
  • Pubkey was using Zaprite to receive the payment.
  • Zaprite connected to their own LND instance powered by Voltage, an LND service provider.

  It takes a while to build the pieces the right way, but it’s a great example of loosely coupled, open source freedom orientated tech being used to build a better future. #

• Reminder that Oracle is still holding Javascript hostage, as they technically own the trademark. There is a movement to free Javascript, sign the petition!

  Javascript is most popular programming language in the world, the one most extensively used to build the open web we all use every single day. #

Today’s links:

• Microplastics in the Olfactory Bulb of the Human Brain - It’s a very detailed study, the intro section is quite skimable, but it doesn’t have the level of detail I was looking for. Still gives a vague idea of the potential dangers. jamanetwork.com #

• New Post: Human body threat detection tech markjgsmith.com #

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Front Running the Big Bang (Issue #182) markjgsmith.com #

• Why Generalists Own the Future - First of all nobody 'owns the future'. I’m not saying there aren’t some interesting ideas in this article, there are definitely things worth thinking about. But I hate most of the framing. The notion that it’s even useful, let alone a safe thing, to reduce the entire universe to a binary is stupid. 2/3 of the Romans were slaves, avoiding such vampire dynamics is probably a much more important task than getting overly worried about pigeon holing people. every.to #

2024/09/20 #

• I did a lot of writing yesterday! The good news is all the escallation notes are already published so there isn’t much to write about this morning. That feels pretty great. Unburdenned by yesterday’s escallations. :)

  The bad news is that in order to ensure I have something to eat on my birthday which is tomorrow, I have to do a starvation day today :(

  I have a bunch of typos and wording fixes to add to yesterday’s writings. And I have a bunch of podcasts and some blog posts to add to this week’s newsletter that goes out tomorrow.

  I don’t expect I’ll get much coding done aside from one or two configuratiom changes that I need to do.

  I hope today isn’t as full on as yesterday, that felt very full on. #

• Escallation notes from early morning and at the internet place:

  • As soon as I woke up a man wearing special leg braces on both legs appeared. There’s a kid down at the canal that wears the very same leg braces, so that seems like it could somehow turn into an escalation of some sort. I think maybe they are legs braces for polio victims, I’m really not sure about that. They are white plastic and they encase the lower part of the leg and foot and it’s evidently difficult to walk with them.
  • I knew the earlier man with leg braces would turn into an escalation. Right opposite where I stand for internet a boy in a yellow T-shirt appeared walking like the man and the boy down the canal that wear the leg braces, except he wasn’t wearing any leg braces. He gets on the motorbike waiting for him driven by the man that lives in that house. As he gets on the bike, the man makes an evil laugh.
  • In parralel to this clearly manufactured incident, the moody bloke that sometimes spits and generally is rather unpleasant to me, today for some reason has changed where he sits. He is now sitting several meters behind me, rather than where he usually sits which is in front of me. That would have enabled him to see my reaction to seeing the kid with no leg braces walking like a kid with leg braces. As far as I know I didn’t react much, I just kept typing whatever I was typing.
  • Moody bloke, in his new place, is "chatting" with some other bloke. That basically involves looking at me and keying the "conversation" on my every move. Well that’s clearly going to cause issues isn’t it. Even more feedback for the infiniti feedback loop.
  • A red motorbike just parked right next to me and the bloke pretends to talk to cafe staff but says to me "be the bear". I move away to signal I don’t want any trouble. The motorbike man and shop staff look very disappointed. A few minutes later they then try to anger goad more by filling in the space with another motorbike from a yellow hard hat construction worker, and girl staff find it all very hilarious. This is the young woman staff from the coffee shop’s favorite move. You might call it her signature move. Whenever she is on the warpath she f’s with my ability to stand and get internet. I keep calm and take a few photos. This will no doubt lead to a photo war later.
  • Interestingly, moody bloke and friend were well positioned to see it all happen.
  • As I try to leave a construction worker driving a small truck in a yellow hard hat has a pop at me for no reason.
  • I hold my back in pain from all the extra standing I’m having to do and moody bloke says loudly but not confidently 'liar'. As I wrote the last sentence someone shouts 'okay'.
  • An apparent smoker on the phone appears and stands behind me. As I type this people in the opposite cafe all start laughing their heads off as it’s completely obvious what’s happening, that it’s all bullshit by bullshiters faking situations to try and make me angry. As I finish this note smoker man slowly walks away.
  • Now customers from cafe are saying 'block' at me as they drive away. More laughing.
  • Now customers in opposite cafe are saying "Die hard", which is probably some pedo pervert shit, but also a few days ago when I bought some food from a food vendor she finished by saying 'Die!' instead of thank you, smiling like an angel, but since I said nothing as I expected her to do something odd, since she almost always does, she suddenly went all quiet.

  The stupid thing in all this is that if they hadn’t been anger goading me, I would have been gone ages ago and there wouldn’t be this ridiculous traffic jam. And now everyone has gone ridiculously quiet.

  As I write the last sentence a man shouted 'allow'.

  And on it goes.

  Update 1: A woman is now doing a continuous fake maniacle witch laugh. It seems like maybe she’s trying to get people to laugh with her. An old man is laughing a bit. It’s a really really weird vibe.

  Update 2: Two blokes in dark turquoise tshirts just showed up on a motorbike they had been driving very quickly. My nose just started running for no reason. Now there is some sort of argument with a passer by. They just called him 'dog' and said 'yah yah'. They are trying to talk with the man with the kid without the leg braces that walks like he has leg braces. Now everyone is just standing around confused. Now they just drove off. One of them had a thick white plastic bag similar to one that was gifted to me last week with some food.

  Update: If you think tailgaters are bad, and they are, imagine a fleet of anonymous tailgaters all tailgating you constantly, everywhere you go, in your car, out of your car, even on the blogs you read. That’s what life is like for me at the minute. Anonymous tailgaters everywhere snaping snaping snaping non stop. #

• Punish yourself so you can be nice to yourself

  I've writen previously about how the world appears to punish me whenever I try to be nice to myself. It’s one of those things that keeps happening in a million different ways. Well here’s another example of it. Perhaps the textbook canonical example of it infact.

  It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’m kind of old these days, somewhere between 44 and 50. I don’t know exactly, which sounds strange, but it’s just that it’s been so long since I’ve had a normal birthday, I just can’t remember exactly how old I am. Yes of course I could figure it out, but why should I? Can’t imagine it’s going to make my day any better is it.

  Anyway I only have enough money to buy 1 day of food, barely. So the only way I can ensure or at least make it very likely that I don’t starve on my birthday is to starve myself today.

  I literally have to punish myself in order to be nice to myself.

  And I bet the world will still be upset, certainly if all the bizare shit that’s happened all morning is anything to go by.

  While I wrote the previous paragraph a man somewhere behind me in this park shouted 'Go home!'.

  Now as I get ready to commit and publish, a woman 20 meters away just randonly shouted 'yah'. Now as I type this paragraph she is quietly saying 'lie'.

• All the stuff happening in the Middle East is of course horrible for everyone involved and for many watching internationally. There are a few things that personally I find really really odd that appear in some way linked to my life.

  First off, the attack was all based around mobile devices, but strangely it happened literally the day after I had a scary incident with my mobile device. It was on the surface carelessness on my part, however there was a load of bizare things that happened leading up to the event that look very much like some serious weight being added to the scale shall we say. It seems to me that not only was this situation expected, known that it was going to happen, but that there were forces external to me that were actively trying to cause the incident.

  The second thing is that all the Middle East stuff happened the day after another doppelganger incident, of someone from my past. The name of the original person was mentioned several times in different locations. They are connected to the middle east in some way.

  And interestingly, though I won’t go into details, I just realised was yet another example of me being punished for trying to be nice to myself.

  I don’t know where this all leads, probably everyone being infinitely offended at everyone else just for everyone blinking. #

• I was hoping to update the newsletter with new content, I have a load of awesome podcast episodes from some of yhe best podcasts in the universe, and a few strange blog posts by me. But looks like the world isn’t willing as the internet place, that was being very warpathy this morning, appears to have cut off the internet. I can’t get online as the network currently doesn’t exist.

  I’ll try again tomorrow. :(

  Update: The instant I committed the above note, the internet was restored. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: Punish yourself so you can be nice to yourself markjgsmith.com #

• Israel bombards southern Lebanon after Hezbollah chief vows ‘punishment’ - This is aweful but the details are actually very interesting. It’s not just Gaza, it’s Lebanon involved now too. There’s a thing called the 'Axis of Resistance' setup by Iran as a counter organisation and narrative to the 'Axis of Evil' thing which I guess dates back to the Iraq war. The details of the supply chain attack are all interesting too, various companies in different countries. But the final thing mentioned is that Isreal submitted a ceasefire proposal to the US. Basically they are saying, 'we got you back for the attacks at the Isreali music festival, now the war ends'. It will be interesting to see how the international community reacts. www.theguardian.com #

2024/09/19 #

• There’s a sort of emptiness to everything today.

  Of course the escallations continued all throughout the day to epic proportions. I could probably write several books just on yesterday’s events.

  Eventually you just get to a point where there is no more capacity to handle any of it, and so you just sit and wait for them to stop raping you.

  Nothing else you can do.

  Here are the escallation notes from yesterday:

  • A western woman probably vaguely in her 30s speaking on her mobile phone in the shop cafe the minute I arrived this morning and straight into an apparent conversation about pregnancy tests in Vietnam. How strange, it was literally 2 days ago I blogged about abortion. She seemed very intent on me hearing her, standing directly on front of the item I buy almost every day.
  • Young women at the internet place blocked the toilet with a chair
  • Young women staff at the cafe shop being passive aggressive by pretending to give you your bag with the things you’ve bought but at the last second placing it on the counter top instead of handing the bag to you directly, and you are left hanging with your hands waiting for the bag
  • Young women staff at the cafe shop walking past seing you have just packed up bags and are about to leave and ordering you to "go home", then a few minutes later when you leave saying ‘voila’
  • Afternoon at the internet place. Been here about 5 mins. Woman baby walker just appeared and walked past. The reason I mention these baby walkers is previously there were zero baby walkers, now it’s literally everytime I get online. That’s weird.
  • Man baby walker appeared about 60 seconds after the woman baby walker.
  • Middle aged asian woman drives past on motorbike and looks directly at me just as I look up from my device, she mouths the word ‘obbey’ very slowly accompanied by a simultaneous head nod
  • Working on getting a new workflow working, I made some good progress but got to a point where I need to add some deployment keys to a repo. Literally the instant that happens a bunch of very young kids show up. Something like this happens like 90% of the time whenever I have to do anything with private crypto keys.

  I haven’t even re-read these notes, just don’t have the will for it, so likely loads of spelling mistakes and what not, and might very well not make much sense.

  The reason I walked away from Perl is that it was a dead end, that was pretty clear to everyone. Luckily there was Javascript and the web.

  Life at the minute makes Perl look like some kind of heaven of heavens. It’s like being stuck in the worst framework or programming language in the universe, and it keeps trying to force you to learn more about itself. It’s like a train wreck, you look at it and you think to yourself shit I knew it was bad, but I had no clue it was THAT bad. And it always just gets worse, so much so that people are trying to make the getting worse into being something amazing, making things exponentially worse. And now even the AIs are helping them.

  But unlike with Perl there is nowhere to walk away to.

  There is only more layers of the never ending AI generated fractal of multiplexed what-are-the-chances to keep you separate from everyone in the universe for something that was done to you and blamed on you.

  So you wake up, and put one foot on front of the other and try to survive another day.

  Update: And pick up your bag after writting a note and the strap tears, and you remember there was a whole incident yesterday with a bloke traping you in some manufactured voila situation, involving him leaving his bag for ages, and you think to yourself, what are the chances. And at that instant the morning cyclist assholes cycle past and say loudly 'we learn'. And there are no words. You cannot even. #

• Slight change to routine to catch some sun, I need to dry some clothes so it’s part functional, part to get some fresh air. Heavy rain forcast for the entire day. Here are my verbatim escallation notes from my way down to the canal:

  • Went to two shops, strange feeling of things slowly getting blocked up. Perhaps in some way manufactured situations. Both interactions involved all sorts of extra blah blah that was totally unnecessary.
  • Man in his twenties in road at crossing talking to another on a stationary motorbike, appeared to be waiting for me to choose direction. I hadn’t seen him yet but as soon as I decided to go the direction he was in, he snapped shut his arms and hands in a sort of loud crocodile bitting motion, while laughing maniacally.
  • I walked around him, giving him plenty of space to try and signal "I don’t want any trouble" and walk on to the canal. All the seats at the canal are taken, which I think is quite unusual especially midweek before 630am. I get to the end of the road and turn the corner and there is an enormous gang of middle aged and old butch women doing morning exercises, all wearing pink T-shirts.
  • The instant I notice them, a man cycles past and says "they know"
  • Momentarily there’s a huge sense of glee in the air, many of them are very attentive to my every move.
  • I walk past, carrying my large bags, one if which had the large letters PINK on 3 sides, with no sign of getting angry. I’m like totally chill, whatever world. It was here that I initially git gifted the 'PINK' bag.
  • This appears to create a sense of uneasiness
  • At the next junction there is a choice to either cross the canal or to go back where I came from. I had already decided to go back because as is the case with all these tsunami situations, they have already decided on the outcome, all doors are closed so to speak, all options blocked, no matter what you do, you will be getting mutilated in some way
  • Interestingly at the junction there is a small butch pink T-shirt wearing woman intimidation gang semi blocking the way over the canal, and in the other direction back from where I came there are also butch women but they are wearing light colour pink T-shirts.
  • I make a mental note of this configuration, but I had already decided what I was going to do and as I proceed there’s a vibe of people being a bit confused like they were expecting an angry foreigner but got the exact opposite. And I wasn’t faking it at all, no hesitation, no feeling bad about anything, not happy, but also not sad in any way. I was feeling 100% real.
  • I walk back up to where I had been the previous day, where a weird Vonnegut strawberries maybe manufactured situation involving a man wearing all black, only boxers and T-shirt, a doppelgänger of someone from my past, followed immediately by another doppelgänger of another prominent person from my past. Both not 100%’s but more like as to yet unknown (and impossible based on current description of the universe) family members of OG peeps.
  • I sit down, and directly across the road, a giant empty red coach bus.
  • A few seconds later a couple walks past, the young woman says No! loudly
  • You try to walk away, because you are being infiniti blocked, but you get infinite blocked in every location, so you go back, and you get infiniti blocked when you get back too. Every option leads to punishment.
  • You remember the man with an FFF shoping bag the night before. Eyes are trending. Or not. Either way it’s a trend, like night and day. Happy and sad at the same time, like some sort of carbon credit system gone mad. You get punished for writing this bullet item while writing it.

  I sit quietly. At least I have some food today.

  Appologies for lack of editing. Making it all perfect just creates more issues. #

• Taken from today’s Bankless podcast with Macro Alf [32:57] that for whatever reason feels very appropriate and relevant to areas of my life much more than just the economy.

  Hyman Minski, someone much smarter than I am, once said that "artificial stability actually breads instability". That’s what we are trying to do, we are trying to create this artificial stability. Kill the business cycle, kill the market volatility, kill everything, just control everything, and the federal reserve is communicating along the lines of that.

  In blackout, look at that, they cannot communicate ANYTHING, they cannot communicate that they want or are considering doing 50 [basis points cut]. So what do they do? They communicate through our friend Nick Timeraos from the Wallstreet journal. So Nick is a very good journalist. He is known to have their ear or actually to be the ear of Federal Reserve speakers during blackout periods.

  It’s like patterns in the fractal that is society, ripple through all layers of the social network of humans in one way or another. I’m not able to describe what I’m seing very well. Of course there’s also the possibility of confirmation bias, and "seing faces in clouds", but honestly there are just way to many oddities for them all to be explained by that. In life, as with the economy large manipulations are visible at the macro level.

  And this isn’t my first rodeo. This has been happening for years at this point, and progressively escallating.

  And as far as I know, aside from the occasional cup of coffee, I’m completely sober, and have been for years, not that I ever had substance abuse problems, though like many I had some fun times at university, which was a very very long time ago now.

  It feels like society is reaching some form of new era, where things making sense is going to start breaking down.

  Anyway, 'nough said for now. #

• Another choice quote from Macro Alf on Bankless (34:50):

  The reality is that as investors, our job, I think, is to understand the rule of the game, and then to try and navigate them in the safest possible way with tight risk management.

  That’s some dark Orwelian double speak if ever I’ve heard any. Are there any other people you would like to 'navigate' using powerful economic tools?

  I don’t want to pick on Macro Alf, I actually like much of what he has to say about the economy. But his choice of words is, I think, illustrative of an issue we are going to start bumping up against as AI tools become ever more poweful, and available throughout societies, at greater and greater levels of granularity.

  We should be talking about this in the open, and allowing people to think about it, make up their own minds. I say this because literally as I type this, a gang of women has been doing their version of open air "risk management", keying off of my every move to distract and anger goad me in public in broad daylight.

  At a certain point you get to a place where people are non-ironically declaring slavery to be freedom, or something else that’s as fucked up. Or maybe they declare it as a joke, or some other diguise for real bad and dispicable behaviour.

  As I type this even more gangs showed up, doing modern day next level "nothing to see here" risk management. Literally got intimidation surrounded. The social layer really not down with my writting, so maybe this is the right direction after all.

  Though based on the correlation between their silences and general enthusiasm, and my pausing and starting writting, they might be thinking the same thing. It’s crazy. #

• Another comment about Macro Alf comments about the economy. His whole thesis about lags in the effects of things passing through the economy is so ridiculously precient, it’s borderline not believable to me. I don’t know when their show was recorded, but I received it today in my podcast app.

  Remember I already prepared next week’s newsletter, last week. You aren’t gonna believe the issue title, but the timestamps are all verifiable via git commits. I sort of expected something like this to happen based on past bullying cycles. And it’s happening again. The world’s manipulations are being laid out bare.

  The question is how large is the blast radius? Where are the edges to this thing we are in? I think that’s what I’m starting to see. How about you all, what do you see? #

• I have a Github action step that creates a file via bash heredoc. It’s been working totally fine for all my workflows for ages. Well yesterday the step started doing something odd on one of the repos.

  Suddenly there was a file permision error. You see the file created is a bash script that gets run. For some reason, in this case, the file is created but doesn’t have any execution permissions set, so attempting to run the script fails with a permission error.

  This would normally cause all sorts of crazy confusion trying to debug, but now that all the repos use the exact same build workflow, I know something strange is going on. There is literally no reason the file should get created with different permissions.

  I’m still trying to figure out what happened, but just wanted to write a note about it because there are all sorts of very bizare situations happening in RL, and I often find, as strange as this might sound, that the universe starts mirroring situations in my code back at me.

  Strange, that is, if you have never experienced passive aggressive industrial scale gang stalkers, and the anger goading that almost always accompanies them. Right now for instance a young woman is standing right next to me in a bright white shirt looking clueless. Clueless apparently that yesterday the manufactured situation that occurred in this very same spot involved people dressed entirely in all black clothes. So there’s an opposite dynamic that’s hapening, but also blocking, because these types of things keep happening just as I’m about to leave.

  There’s other weird stuff happening too but I don’t want to get into it for fear that things get even worse. #

• Rep. Jay Obernolte on Politico Tech Podcast:

  AI like few topics in policy has been misinformed by 50 years of science fiction and pop culture now. So if you ask what the average american what they view as the largest risk of AI, you’ll get something out of the Terminator. An evil army of robots rising up to take over the world with red laser eyes.

  I told you eyes were trending. Just another what are the chances. #

• Escalation notes down to the other side of the canal:

  • Red anger goading pretty much all the way to the other side of the canal, especially once across to the other side.
  • Also people purposely blocking the path and pretending you don’t exist, then annoyed when your bag touches them as you pass even though they quite clearly saw me approaching
  • On entering the shop cafe, young woman staff shouts "free", then on paying calls me wanker under her breath, then annoyed that I asked for the receipt which she forgot to give me. Update: a bloke shouted free as I finally left several hours later
  • Very large butch woman wearing bright red top sitting right next to the power outlet, very intent on making eye contact, talking aggressively on phone.
  • Somebody in shop opposite taking photos or video of me or someone near me, then laughing when I subtly raise my hand to cover my face. Then somebody in the room where I am saying "he knows".
  • Strange issues with the power outlets, followed by staff saying "you won"
  • Anytime shop staff go near the hot water fountain they say ‘lie’ or ‘liar’.
  • Every time I come to this place somebody starts counting huge wads of cash. It happened again.
  • It’s pretty clear the staff here are cycling through several pre-prepared situations, like american football plays

  Update: It’s several hours later since I wrote this note. I’ve been listening podcasts, it’s been quite quiet in my surroundings. I decided to re-read and fix typos and wording. Within about 10 seconds of starting to make edits, typing on my phone, an extreme camp bloke has piped up, gotten on the phone and is anger goading my every move. He keeps saying the word 'Gay' for instance. Anyway just wanted to make an update to the note. When I speak about blocking, this is often the sort of thing I am talking about. #

• Sparrow people

  Some people mostly women but also some men are like sparrows, it’s like if there was an algorithm that controls sparrows, that algorithm has been connected up to them. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. They spiritually are always like right up in your face fluttering their wings, pecking at you like you are a small mound of sesame seeds.

  Depending on how you look at it, it can seem like different things, but to be honest often it’s phasers-on-its-okay extreme. And even suggesting that is met with, metaphorically speaking, the entire world nuclear arsenal aimed directly at you, while casually laughing like it’s a light hearted joke. It’s almost as if they weaponise their anxiety and yours, and, in a way, it’s ingenious, even if it is manipulation infiniti.

  For the record I think sparrows are amazing. No problem at all with sparrows, but I do at times find sparrow people quite challenging.

  Update: Please world don’t psycho bully me with dead sparrows, thank you.

• Matt Walsh on racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers

  Really enjoyed listening to the Rogan - Matt Walsh episode. Lots of interesting topics including racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers.

  Also literally the best moon landings are fake discussion I’ve listenned to. I wish conversations between two people with opposite views were always this respectful.

  Here’s a great quote from Matt about social media:

  If you’re a human being on Twitter saying something, that’s real life, it’s not fake, it’s not happening in some kind of dream world. But then people think that well okay if I just say this on Twitter, I put a YouTube comment section, and this heinous awful thing, it doesn’t count, it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person because it’s not real life. That’s like writing on loose leaf paper, calling someone a piece of shit, and handing it to them, and then they get mad at you, and you say ‘hey man, it’s the paper, it’s not real life, it just happened on the paper’. It’s a method for communicating [...] it turns people into sociopaths after a while I think.

  I find this sort of behavior is seeping into real life too. Not sure how I feel about that. Sometmes it can be funny, but other times not at all.

• Slavery, the bible, and the changeability of institutions

  I listenned to several very interesting podcasts this week. One of the themes that came up several times is slavery. It's an on-going conversation that our societies are having now, and have been in one way or another for a very long time.

  Historian Gregory Aldrete, who specialises in the Roman period, was on the Lex Fridman podcast. Elon Musk recommended the conversation on Twitter, and I think he was right, it’s not normally a period in history I’m particularly interested in, but there were a lot of very interesting takes.

  For example the Christians were the first to say everyone is created equal in the eyes of God. That’s pretty cool! Apparently it really got up the Romans noses though. It’s now the basis of many democracies around the world! [2:35:51].

  Noah Harare was on both the Bankless podcast talking about AI and democracy and the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast talking about AI Fears. He tells a fascinating yet somewhat different story, namely that the Bible’s 10th commandment appears to endorse or at least allow slavery. So that seems like a bit of a contradiction. How can you have everyone is created equal but also slavery? Hold that thought.

  The other very interesting thing Noah talks about is institutions in general and how their changeability, their updatability varies enormously. And this is a good thing. Newer institutions tend to be easier to update. Older ones not so much.

  The US constitution is difficult but not impossible to update. There are quite a few amendments that have been made to the original document. The bible on the other hand is pretty much impossible to update, but also it’s context is some rather crazy stories so it’s kind of clear much of it is not meant to be taken literally. But it’s written to last thousands of years, and has lasted that long, no easy feat, through civilisation collapses and renaisances too.

  Anyway I‘d been thinking about the apparent contradiction all week and one thing that had occurred to me, is similar to a point I’d made recently about the importance of giving things a name so you can actually talk about them. The fact that slavery is mentioned at all is significant, and the specifics might not actually be all that important. Remember 2000 years ago things were very very different.

  Matt Walsh on Rogan [14:05] makes some really interesting points about the realities of how our societies view racism and slavery:

  Of course the issue is that everybody who lived on earth prior to about...certainly prior to about 100 years ago, was racist by our standards today. Every single one. There was no one on earth that lived 100 years ago who we would not consider racist. Of any race.

  If you go back 200 years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back 500 years, and there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally. They might have had issues with how slaves were treated in some contexts. But it took like 1000s of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on Earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing [...]

  Why is that? It’s so obvious to us, but some of the greatest minds of history, they never thought of it. But we can’t talk about that, we have to talk about slavery and racism as if they are an exclusively white western phenomena.

  It’s mindboggling that it took 1000s of years to make this discovery. And it is a discovery, an enormous one. It’s humanity as a whole discovering about itself. That’s the pace of the big questions in humanity. It’s imperfect, but we are making progress. The insututions are layered ontop of each other. Yes sometimes there are contradictions, but seen in context as a massive living document of all of our societies this patch work is pretty amazing.

  I’ll leave you with those 3 thoughts, because the world has become very blocky, prickley with red anger goading, as I wrote most of those last few paragraphs.

  Perhaps I’ll write more about this at a later stage.

  I’m finding it’s so unbelievably difficult to think and write about anything of substance these days. It’s like two opposing forces are constantly at odds with each other in the literal world that surrounds me, and I’m always caught in the cross fire.

Today’s links:

• Explosions linked to walkie-talkies kill at least 20 in fresh Lebanon attack - This story is so f-ed up. I sure hope this isn’t the future for all of us, but the way the world has been going it doesn’t seem that far fetched to imagine that it could be. How many of us even have any idea how many degrees of separation we are from potential targets. The further we go down this road, the closer such a reality becomes. Next year’s, actually fuck it, this year’s most popular Christmas prezzy: bomb proof phone cases. www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Sparrow people markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Matt Walsh on racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Slavery, the bible, and the changeability of institutions markjgsmith.com #

2024/09/18 #

• So many weird fucking things yesterday. I stopped taking notes because it was just too much. You eventually get the the stage where you are like 'whatever' world. One thing I’ll add here was that after I left the internet place where they’d blocked where I stand with a white motorbike, I went back to the park where there were now two white tsunamis. One very large group of people wearing all white doing exercises near the children’s play sandbox area. Another huge group of people all wearing white T-shirts and white hats doing some sort of dance routine. One of them was wearing a yellow hat and yellow shorts. Just in case you thought I was over doing things with the white motorbikes, nope that happens all the time and I recognise it early in the cycle.

  Since then it’s been basically more of the same but on an industrial scale. There’s just no way to note take on it all. It culminated with another visit from the group of utility workers that lasted much of the night, so pretty blatant sleep depravation and wierd pedo pervert sex goading too with what looked like a flashing blue elephant child toy that they kept playing with while doing some sort of cleanup of the drains with huge pipes. Of course they finished it all with some 'you learn’s'. Didn’t get much sleep, that’s for sure.

  And already this morning a motorbike driveby by an aggressive gargole sounding man shouting 'Now!' very loudly as he drove past. He appears to be a new regular, has made an appearance the last few cycles.

  Anyhow, like I was saying just so many oddities and anger goading and the rest of it. I’m hoping to finally close out the reusable workflows feature today and perhaps look at some of the features that got created as part of that. There might be some that are worth looking at.

  But it’s one of those catchup days, following 2 days of starvation and power and water being cut off. What generally happens is the world smells something is up and starts rushing me, and even less gets done than what would have gotten done without the rushing. I can already feel the anxiety starting, and it usually ends up with a spiritual traffic jam in some form, and stop start race conditions and getting blamed and/or framed for things I didn’t do.

  I expect little will get done today. #

Today’s links:

• 11ty is joining Font Awesome - Well that's an interesting development. Font awesome is well...awesome, so really interested to hear more about how and why this team up happened :) www.11ty.dev #

• Inbox ten - Ingesting information around you, not blocking other teams, and other interesting thoughts and tips about being successful in a digital world. boz.com #

2024/09/17 #

• Bit of a scare this morning. I was up early as usual, and after getting ready for the day, I was just sitting down to write my morning note. Having just washed my hands with soap, my hands were a little waxy. I needed to plug in my device to charge on the battery pack so I went to place my device on the bench I was sitting on but it didn’t slide off my hand smoothly, on account of the waxyness, instead it slipped straight in between the benche’s slats and hurtled 1/2 a meter to the ground, with a moderately loud clank. It had fallen face down directly onto the hard pavement below.

  I picked up the device, and discovered the screen to be in a very sorry state indeed. Only the bottom half of the screen was rendering, the top half completely black. The screen then got very bright, with lines from top to bottom and it got brighter and brighter until the entire screen was lit up, very similar to when you use the flash light app. I tried turning the device off for about 20 mins, all possible combinations of button presses. Nothing worked. Tried pluging it into power. Didn’t work. Eventually tried the on/off button in combination with the down volume button, an extended press of both buttons simultaneously, and the device finally turned off.

  When it started backup, which happened automatically, the Apple logo was there for the OS loading but the screen still looked strange. It was flickering, like a strobe light does. When the OS loaded I was able get into the OS, and the home screen was there with all the apps, but it was still flickering like mad. I checked the podcast app and that was working. So at least I could still listen to podcasts, even if using any other apps was impossible. I decided to just finish listening to one of the podcasts I’d been listening to the day before, and chill out and not worry about it.

  As I listenned, an old man across the street walked past. He walks past most mornings, always seems to be wearing just boxer shorts and a tshirt. Oddly as he walked past he did the exact motion I had done to lay the phone on the bench, using his other hand as a stand in for the bench. That really is very odd isn’t it? I don’t think he was there a few minutes earlier when the device got dropped.

  Anyway, I continued listening, and a bunch of road worker blokes and a big truck turned up. I remembered the day before a lone road worker bloke had apeared in the evening just as I had finished cleaning up the reusable workflows feature, deleting all the old workflows in all the repos. These workers started making a racket, and there was no way to listen to the podcast, so I decided to head on to the internet place, especially since I noticed the screen had returned almost to normal.

  My departure seemed to anger the workmen, and it’s been much the same from everyone everywhere I’ve been since. I’m now in the park, where people have ran past shouting angrily, women have suspiciously positioned themselves almost directly opposite me to exercise, while continuously checking if I'm looking at them, which I haven’t been. The whole world is super warpathy. People checking if others are warpathy by being warpathy themselves and waiting for a reaction. It’s like a ginormous never ending traffic jam made of quick sand.

  Also interestingly, more people doing the violent downwards arm hand motion, like throwing something to the ground. Many people were doing that yesterday, at least 4-5 different people. And as I write this people are sitting behind me saying 'allow' while simultaneously trying to distract me from what I’m writting.

  See, when the world doesn’t allow and is on the warpath, it just escallates and escallates and blames you for the thing it’s doing to you. It doesn’t stop until it mutilates you, and even then it will probably keep escallating.

  It’s just non stop this morning. I’m getting battered from all sides. A large man just walked past looking at his phone and shouted 'Mao!'.

  Time to finish this note and wait for the world to calm down, it appears to have fix it derangement syndrome, anytime I try to fix something in my life, it goes on a breaking rampage. Even if I fix something literally while the world is fixing something, I get punished. It all just feels like a doom fractal, all roads lead to everything being my fault every time.

  Btw, while writing this an old lady shouted 'Ga!', just like what happened with the workers the evening before last. It’s like a replay attack or something.

  As it happens I am very hungry, but everyone is more concerned about their warpathing. I guess maybe I'll eat tomorrow. #

• As I left the park to go to the internet place, a gang of old laddies that historically are pretty much always harrassing me, shouted 'No!' at me. These were the same old laddies that said 'you learn' after the moody internet place bloke caused me to walk out into on comming traffic and very nearly get killed. That was about 2 or 3 weeks ago now. I think one of their ring leaders lives near the internet place.

  Anyway, I got to the internet place and where I always stand has been blocked by a large white motorbike. There was a blocking incident with a white motorbike the two previous evenings. It’s 100% planned anger goading. Just part of their escallations. This will continue now for the rest of the day. I doesn’t matter what I do. They want to blame everything in me yet again. #

• Escallation notes from the internet place this morning:

  • Blocked by white motorbike
  • Man left cafe saying ’wow’ then ‘young boy!’, seems like they are starting their pedo pervert shit again
  • As I finished writing the previous note, the male baby walker appeared
  • Man wearing yellow motorbike helmet from nearby book store shouting ‘No!’
  • Moody internet bloke is doing some mega-whistling as he walks past me, what a psycho, I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries another one of his "go play in the traffic" specials
  • Woman baby walker appears just as I’m leaving
  • Lots of 'mother' harrassment
  • The latest RA mix I’m listening to finishes with a sexy women voice saying "Be with me". Wouldn’t that be a weird and fucked up anger goady thing for a mother to say to a child? And even weirder for a warpathy world to bully said child with.

  Is this the real world? Whatever it is, IMO it’s very very fucked up. #

• One strange thing about this morning’s device screen scare was that around 1-weeks ago, on the very same bench there was a lady sitting at one end that appeared to have the same issue with her phone. It was flickering like crazy as she was using it and the screen was really really bright. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. What are the chances that I would have the same thing happen to me within days.

  The other thing that’s a bit odd is that my device didn’t fall from that high up, and not with much force, and it does have a device protection thing that I keep it inside. It didn’t feel like it would be broken in the way it fell. #

• It’s also extremly odd that the device screen scare incident should happen literally the day after I posted about wanting iOS Notes to support markdown files in case I needed to switch platform. #

Today’s links:

• France picks Sejourne as nominee for EU Commission after Breton clash - Looks like France and Germany might be having a bit of a power struggle in europe. www.theguardian.com #

• Singer Tito Jackson dead at 70 - There’s a Tito Jackson doppelganger that I see out and about quite often here, except strangely he’s white. Aside from the skin color the resemblance is uncanny. www.bbc.com #

2024/09/16 #

• All the weird pervert sex goading continued for the rest of the day, I’m to tired and frankly completwly unenthusiastic to document any of it. I’ll just post one of the items from the escallation notes from yesterday evening.

  • Another string of escalations as I walk from the internet place to the sandwich shop early evening. I stay calm throughout and say nothing.
  • It starts when a woman in restaurant shouts ‘you are lying’ as I walk past, followed shortly by ‘liar’ from another, then a little bit further down the same road ‘you won’ by security guards.
  • I arrive at the sandwich shop and there is a motorbike with man and woman ostensibly waiting for a sandwich but he’s very focussed on me for some reason. Feels like they have been waiting for me, or just gotten there in a rush based on the hurried angle of the motorbike. Right after I pay the sandwich shop girl the man is suddenly on the phone. The only thing he says is ‘you are a liar’. It seems like he is saying it at me rather than the phone.
  • I then walk to where I am now, another shop cafe. The girl at the till says ‘No!’ and something else I don’t hear, while I’m paying, then when I don’t react, she angrily stomps her foot on the ground.
  • Shortly after I sit down a man in a really bright yellow T-shirt eating a yellow pot noodle sits directly on front of me. I note that the day started out with some yellow related incidents didn’t it. Gee I wonder what’s happening here, sex pervert shit again perhaps?
  • Almost immediately after a man then walks past window and does a slap down with his arm and hand while laughing to his friend and looking through window at me.
  • Woman sitting to my left is no’ing with her foot continuously from side to side, she stops the foot thing and a short while later says ‘we know’.
  • Yellow T-shirt man goes off to get a tissue and cleans up where he was sitting which wasn’t even dirty at all.
  • 1 minute later shop staff bloke shouts ‘lie’. Shortly after a young woman enters the room and suddenly sprints to the other side of room, starts doing a little dance, she is wearing a backpack that has a teddy bear on it.
  • Shortly after a western man wearing pink T-shirt walks past with a woman his age they both look directly at me as they walk past.
  • Finally as I left shop staff shouted a ‘good’ at me.

  It all just seems like more weird sex pervert shit to me at the minute.

  I’ve been thinking quite a lot about abortion and immigration the past day or so. Historically I’ve always been a pro choice type person, I'd like people to have control over their own bodies. But given my circumstances, that argument is no longer particularly convincing to me now that I feel day in day out that I have very little control over my own body. The more I think about it the more I feel sort of indifferent about the hole thing. Also there are a lot of very agressive bully women in my life at the minute. At a very practical level, if those women had the power to be god, there is zero question in my mind that that power would go to their heads making my situation worse. I want the world to have equality and all that progressive stuff but from where I’m sitting the world is massively unequal and often not in the way that’s portraid in the media.

  It’s all very depressing.

  There was an incident earlier this morning, two motorbikes loaded up with hooligan youths, both boys and girls. They drove past revving their incredibly loud engines, just generally being hooligans and shouting. They shouted 'Your lie' then 'Our' before driving off. It’s intimidation. It’s not exactly making me want to give anybody god powers.

  I managed to get tests running and passing on all the repos which are now all using the reusable workflows. I spent a bit of time thinking about improvements I could make. There are some steps that could be simplified, and it might make sense to create a new reusable workflow just for running tests. They are currently just tacked on after the build, but that’s a step that’s important enough to merit it’s own workflow which would run as a seperate job.

  I haven’t made any changes yet, I’ll likely not do anything in that area in the near term, but the cool thing is that I only have to update it in one place, and the new features will be available to all repos. That feels pretty cool, and was the whole point of the overhaul in the first place.

  I haven’t been very inspired with much blogging, just way too bogged down in life crap. Not feeling very happy about that. #

• Already lots of escallations this morning:

  • Two young men early twenties arrived almost as soon as I woke up today. They just sat there. Just before I set off to the internet place one of them shouted ‘up!’. He obviously been waiting to say it. Since I have to stand to use the internet, this is one of their favourite ways of anger goading me. It’s basically a ‘go work slave’.
  • At the internet place young woman that works in cafe arrives on her motorbike, she has a purposeful air about her. Loudly shouts ‘Ah!’ then walks off impersonating a moody child. Earlier this morning a girl approached me, gifted me a sweat bread and bottle of water, she said ‘fine’ as she gave it to me. It’s just more perverted shit from the perverts. Yet again trying to blame me for the thing they are doing to me, then anger goading.

  There’s not much point trying to get anything done. They have already decided that everything is my fault and won’t stop until I get mutilated. #

• Wouldn’t it be awesome if iOS Notes supported markdown files? I think it would be great. I worry how useful the Rich Text files wiuld be should I need to move platform. Being able to save my notes as markdown files would solve that. If course ideally I‘d want a way to convert existing notes to markdown files. #

• The escallations continued throughout the day. Here are my escallation notes from the cafe shop:

  • On the way to the cafe shop, gang of butch women in the park inciting violence while holding a packet of tissues and blocking me from passing them
  • Most yellow man ever head to toe yellow even yellow hair. Literally everything yellow. Shoes, socks, shorts, tshirt, and as I just said, even hair. Feels like they are going do their favourite thing which is to block everything while telling me to allow.
  • Girl shop staff in hot water shop pretending to be a child while I’m paying, she also uses the word cool several times. That's very unusual.
  • Girl shop staff in shop cafe: ‘you won’. All I did was quietly buy a noodles and a package of instant coffee.
  • Woman and child sitting behind me and another sitting on front of me. The small boy on front is wearing a yellow jacket.
  • I start listening to the Peter Kafka podcast I was listening to yesterday, within a minute they are saying cool this and cool that, as I eat my hot noodle soup and an egg. What are the chances?
  • The world is clearly trying to trap me again, another ‘lesson’, today’s theme appears to be shoplifting. Ultimately I get blamed no matter what I do, it’s like 1/2 of people are helping and 1/2 of people are being malicious, and they both have to win. But also I have to win too! One thing looks certain though, lunch is going to be rather light, and tea might not even have any hot water, let alone tea leaves. I wish I could abide, but abiding has been deprecated.
  • Police have just made an appearance outside the shop cafe
  • Just a few minutes since last item, and the JS Party podcast that auto played is an interview with a bloke last name ‘Shank’. Gee what are the chances.
  • The infiniti liars are complaining that a neutrino in the universe is out of place again, with, surprise surprise, infiniti righteousness. Oh gosh, here we go again.
  • The world continues on its rampage, with young men being creepy, waiting until I close my eyes then approaching me. I changed seat. Creepy bloke left a few moments later. As I wrote the last sentence shop staff say loudly ‘No!’.
  • Impossible to concentrate on anything with shop staff in the background saying "see"
  • The only thing I see is that my podcast app has a podcast downloaded today with title "How to sleep well". Oh the irony. Is there even such a thing that still exists that can be described as ‘sleeping well’?
  • The reason why it’s impossible to listen to the JS Party podcast, which was very interesting m, is that it’s all about web app interactions and how they can go wrong, and the universe is, yet again, doing that thing where it mirrors whatever I’m doing and so now it’s throwing all sorts of bad interactions my way. Had to change podcast. See universe, told you doing anything today would be impossible.
  • Moved back to where I was previously sitting, got okay’d by a kid sitting behind me, who should clearly be in school rather than loitering here in this shop cafe. Once again it’s one rule set for them, totally different rule set for me apparently. Almost immediately police drive past outside again. Podcast I’m listening to says 'let’s go' at the same exact time as Notes app UI I’m typing in majorly freezes up
  • Just got okay’d to go to bathroom by the kids that are okaying everything I do as I do it. Okaying everything appears to be the new thing.
  • It’s unbelievable, anytime I attempt to make any code changes, world gets all sensitive and angry about something. All I’m doing is deleting the old deploy workflow that is now unused. It’s suddenly like walking on egg shells. Any action appears to trigger worry and distrust. Like giving a cat or dog a bath, though I’ve never done that, but I imagine it’s much like that.
  • One workflow, which I don’t even use, hadn’t been merged yet. The instant I opened the repo, the entire world went all defcon1 on me. It’s literally not even a plugin that is used or even finished, it was just a test plugin I created months ago to test an idea. Now everyone is shouting ‘liar’. This is nuts.
  • Another police driveby
  • ‘Okay’ really seems to be the word of the day, like being used in practically every sentence by people in this cafe shop for some reasons
  • Yet another situation where woman are trying to trap me in a ‘your garbage’ situation, they retaliate and punish when I don’t get into the trap.
  • Yet another man doing a wank motion right after a child says No! for no good reason. Man left as soon as I wrote this note about it. The podcast I’m listening to mentioned perverts as I was writing the previous sentence.
  • The previous harassment was followed by a tsunami of up! harassment by a group of young wonen that just arrived, then that was followed immediately by ‘your lie’ harassment. They appear to just be replaying all the harassment from earlier, with a ‘you win’ for example. Also ‘You learn’, ‘No you learn’, ‘you know’, ‘wanka’, ‘you are’, ‘your money’, ‘we lie’, ‘you learn’, ‘lie’, ‘we learn hahahaha’, then they leave - just jotted down their key phrases
  • 2 new girls in their twenties, again Up! harassment, ‘see’, arm gestures like throwing darts then said ‘safe’, then went to bathroom and back, then said ‘safe’ again, then ‘good lie’ right after, then back over to bathroom, they awkwardly grab all their bags and leave saying ‘okay’ and giggling
  • Girl kicks my chair as she walks past and leaves, right after another says ‘learn’
  • Man doing angry downward motion with his arm and hand when I change seat to charge my device
  • A couple in their twenties, sit in front of the penis graffiti. Bloke: ‘you are’, ‘he’s a liar’, ‘pain’, ‘wow’, then leave
  • 2 women in their twenties leave, 1 says ‘gay’ as she leaves
  • Lunchtime over much quieter now
  • Started to make a few code edits, within 30 seconds a bloke that turned up a few minutes ago sneezes violently, it was like a dog barking rather than a sneeze

  I decided to just post all notes verbatim. Sorry if they don’t make total sense. It at least gives an idea of what’s going on. It’s not an exageration to say that almost everyone, like 60-70% of the people that turned up were being malicious in some way.

  Crazy day.

  Update: As I was posting this at the internet place, a male baby walker appeared within minutes of me getting there. He seemed sort of intent on me noticing him too. #