markjgsmith

2024/07/26 #

• Why people aren’t into politics

  With all the politics happening all around the world I’ve spent much more time recently thinking about some of the core ideas that underpin it all. One thing that’s very confusing is the difference between left and right, and all the other things you can be, such as liberal, conservative, progressive, authoritarian etc.

  In the UK it’s Labour vs Conservative, which sort of implies that Labour is the liberal party. But it’s odd because the 3rd party is the Liberal Democrats, so I guess THEY are the liberals. But isn’t it interesting that they are the liberal DEMOCRATS. That sort of implies that either Labour or the Conservatives, or both, are not into democracy.

  Which brings us to the US, that only have two parties, who famously use the red and blue colors, them being the Republican and Democratic parties. Of course the same applies here, the very existence of a the Democratic party implies that the Republicans are not into democracy. And that of course leads you back to the UK because the two major parties also use red and blue, except it’s reversed with the Conservatives being blue and Labour being red.

  Then there’s communist vs populist. Communist is about the group so it makes sense they would be on the left, and though populist is it’s opposite so should be on the right, it’s a bit confusing that the word populist has a base of ‘people’ or ‘populace’, which sounds like it’s about the group as well. But I guess populist describes a single person that is popular and leads not in a for-the-people kind of way?

  I don’t know maybe I’m the only person that finds this stuff confusing. It’s like some sort of weird game snakes and ladders that you have to play while drunk. It’s almost like the nomenclature is chosen specifically to BE confusing. Is it any wonder people aren’t into politics?

  It seems pretty likely that a lot of folks are talking cross purposes much of the time. If this was a legacy software application, any sane programmer asked to work on such a code base, would totally refuse until things were renamed to more sensible things. I’m amazed it works as well as it does.

  Also isn’t it a bit odd that there aren’t any parties with the word 'capitalist' in their name?

• I was physically assaulted again last night by what appears to have been a drive-by attack from the motorbike gang stalkers. I didn’t see exactly what happened, but at some point in the early hours when I wasn’t looking I recieved what felt very much like lots of small stones hitting my face. It felt like there was some type of impact. It was painful, I shouted in pain, and I instinctively held both hands up to my face to protect myself.

  After a moment when I realised I was okay, I looked around and the very strange thing, is that there was no debris or rocks or any sort of projectiles around me. I still haven’t completely figured out how it could have happened, but I have a few ideas. In any case a few monents later several motorbike drive-by harrassment attacks occurred, in quick succession. At least one of them was someone shouting 'you learn' directly at me while reving their engine. These appear all to have been by young adults in their late teens / early twenties.

  I was quite shaken up by the whole episode, but I’m okay. This appears once again to have been part of a bigger planned escallation that has been happening over the past few days. I might write more about that later, it’s very weird, including elements sexual in nature, starvation, anger goading, but much darker than most previous incidents. I just wanted to have at least something writen about the attack here regardless.

  This happened the day after a westerner tried to help me, trying to give me some options to improve my situation, and imo is just another example of me being blocked any time I try to fix my situation being stuck here. The message is pretty clear: you try to leave, we will hurt you. #

• Solving poverty even cooler than rocket science

  I’m going to pull together ideas from 3 places today, to try and convince you that solving world hunger not only is likely possible, but is as cool and awesome as putting rockets into space, and if taken on at scale might even be profitable, because it certainly would improve world wide productivity. Put aside for a second everything you know about this topic, all the politics, all the stuff you've read, watched abd heard, just for the length of this post and try to put these 3 ideas together.

  First there’s Joe Rogan from his conversation with fellow comedian Bridget Phetasy, where they are discussing the importance being open to ideas from both sides of the political devide [11:31]:

  And the only people that make any sense are the ones that aren’t on either team. [...] There’s a bunch of things that you probably believe but don’t put yourself in a fucking group, because there is probably a bunch of stuff that the left agrees with that you would probably agree with too. And you can’t be resistent to those ideas simply because they are attached to people that you have decided are the enemy, because they might be right.

  That’s an important point. A lot of these topics are maximumly politicised, but they don’t all need to be. Some are just obvious no matter which side of the political divide you stand.

  He goes on:

  They might be right about wellfare, they might be right...hey maybe kids shouldn’t ever be fucking starving. As a group, as a group of humans that live together on this one patch of dirt called America, maybe we should agree that since we have this gigantic amount of money, that NO kids should be hungry. How about that? And since we got that done, how about regular people? How about no people should FUCKING starve?

  Reguardless of whether or not you think that people are lazy or this and that, how much could we solve if noone could possibly starve? We set up free restaurants or free kitchens, massive ones, like for real. Food should be free...for a lot of people. If we are this rich as a country?

  So let’s have no babies starve, no babies malnurished, nobody starve to death, health care, yeah. But you would need to revamp the whole thing. The real nitty gritty. Why are you prescribing this? Who’s making money off of this? How did this happen? How many adds did you guys run? What did the add say? What are the studies? Not just the ones you submitted, but ALL fhe studies? What’s the actual data instead of just the data that’s reviewed by the pharmaceutical companies and THEN given to the scientists, in the report when they do their peer review?

  When I heard that, I was like you guys are making too much money, you are getting crazy, this is what it is. You went above and beyond the rules, you have too much power and influence. But also you do great stuff.

  I think it’s great that Joe is talkng about this stuff. Sure it’s two comedians talking about serious stuff, but actually sometimes, and especially for the difficult subjects, comedians do a great job of pulling apart the topic, saying the things folks are afraid to say, really getting into some of the crevaces.

  That brings me to my second idea source, from a blog post writen by me last year about money, liquidity and hunger:

  We have the technology to make food on an enormous scale, there’s more than enough for everyone, but money isn’t making it to lots and lots of people, and so neither is food. Many people are starving and thirsty, and that’s unacceptable.

  So what we need to do if we want to fix this is first estimate what’s possible:

  Just price out 3 healthy microwave meals per person per day. You just want to have the minimum worst case. Is that amount, larger or smaller than current total money liquidity? Is it even possible? Remember to multiply by the total population of earth, I guess that's currently around 7 billion.

  It should then be obvious how much people and institutions can hoard before starvation shortages occur.

  Then the problem becomes tractable:

  When you know the answers to these questions, then it should be easier to figure out how to get that money into the hands of people, whether it’s jobs, UBI or something else, first figure out what’s possible, set targets and make a solution that fits.

  My thesis is that a healthy society would be orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to run.

  When hunger is solved, many of the world’s problems start to disappear as they are often self inflicted, because hunger is used as a weapon of control, but really it’s a massive escalating humanity foot gun that will at some point affect us all.

  Yes it would require big changes to society. Lots of patterns of behaviour and incentive structures would need to be updated, but the key point is to figure out first if it’s even possible mathematically.

  Which brings us to the 3rd and final idea, taken from a recent Daily Show episode, where John Stuart chats with Reverand Doctor William Barber about poverty in America. The very well spoken and knowledgeable reverend is endearingly religious, polite and pretty funny too.

  The numbers speak for themselves, 41% of Americans are poor and low wage people, that’s 135 million people, shockingly over 50% of children. It’s not even a race thing, 60% are white. These numbers are at least double what I had assumed was the case.

  The reverand goes into some detail [4:19]:

  295000 people a year are dying from poverty and low wages. That’s 800 people a day, are DYING, from poverty. Poverty is the 4th leading cause of death in the country. Higher than respiratory disease, higher than gun violence.

  It’s unbelievably shocking that this is happening in the richest country on the planet. It’s a great interview that will let you see how bad the situation really is. It’s a bit strange to hear all this on a comedy channel, but it’s no joke. I think the humour helps us hear and see the size of the problem without our brains shutting it out.

  IMO this isn’t a partisan issue, both sides should make this a priority. Trump showed us that he spoke to regular folks that are getting screwed by the system, and the Democrats have historically been the party that championed and stood behind the poor.

  The reality is poverty will only get worse if it isn’t addressed, and that ultimately affects everyone. The sad thing is that there is technically plenty for everyone. Put aside your political views for a few minutes and listen to this short episode. It will be worth it.

  As Stuart points out in his interview, we need to reframe the whole thing [12:45]:

  And doesn’t it weaken the system as s whole? You could almost make the case that if the system is requiring a permanent entrenched underclass then it makes itself ripe for instability. And I’m wondering is there a way to change the mindset. Because the mindset in America is there is a moocher class. "These poor people are moochers and they are taking resources from me, I work hard, poor people get health care, they get food, they get whatever they need, I don’t get it". Is there a way to change the mentality, to view them not as entitlements but as investments?

  I like his idea to reframe how we think about poverty. There no question that the way people generally view poverty is a massive impediment. But I think the reframing needs to be much more ambitious. The very act of fixing poverty, this huge endeavour, needs to be as cool as building rockets and sending people into space. We need the next generation of people like Elon Musk to take up the challenge.

  It might seem like a very difficult reframing, but when you stop to think how beneficial it would be for our societies to be built on much more solid foundations, you start to realise that maybe solving poverty might in fact be necessary to truely be in a strong position as a civilisation to go out and explore the solar system and beyond. Remember the internet will lead to a 10X renaissance, it’s already happening. That’s a huge wave we will be able to ride. We should think big. Think very big.

  Solving hunger is a choice, and would put out societies on much stronger foundations. That’s something we are going to need if we want to become a multiplanetary species.

Today’s links:

• New Post: Why people aren’t into politics markjgsmith.com #

• Facing American Poverty and Global Supply Chain Issues (The Daily Show Podcast) - John Stuart chats with Rev Doc William Barber about poverty in America. The very well spoken and knowledgeable reverend is endearingly religious, polite and pretty funny too. The numbers speak for themselves: 41% of Americans are poor and low wage people, that’s 135 million people, shockingly over 50% of children. It’s not even a race thing, 60% are white. These numbers are at least double what I had assumed was the case. 295000 people die each year from poverty, that’s 800 people a day. It’s the 4th leading cause of death in the country. Higher than respiratory disease, higher than gun violence. It’s unbelievably shocking that this is happening in the richest country on the planet. It’s a great interview that will let you see how bad the situation really is. It’s a bit strange to hear all this on a comedy channel, but it’s no joke. I think the humour helps us hear and see the size of the problem without our brains shutting it out. IMO this isn’t a partisan issue, both sides should make this a priority. Trump showed us that he spoke to regular folks that are getting screwed by the system, and the Democrats have historically been the party that championed and stood behind the poor. The reality is poverty will only get worse if it isn’t addressed, and that ultimately affects everyone. The sad thing is that there is technically plenty for everyone. Put aside your political views for a few minutes and listen to this short episode. It will be worth it. podcastindex.org #

• Bridget Phetasy (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - Great episode that takes a somewhat winding path covering all sorts of social issues of the day, a bunch of conspiracy theories, all with loads of humour and curiosity. Topics including solving starvation, reproduction & pro-choice, menstrual cycle synchronisation, creepy government and commercial tracking, 40 year old in a fake Biden suit, the entertainment business and AI, seeing behind the curtain of the fakers that run the world, trans craziness and puberty blockers, and the strange outdated sex laws that still exist in some US states. There’s a lot in there, but it’s a good mix of the latest current zeitgeist, the stuff you won’t hear on main stream media, what people are likely talking about in the interesting conversations down the pub. podcastindex.org #

• New Post: Solving poverty even cooler than rocket science markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/25 #

• I managed to get the bulk of the refactoring needed to move to reusable workflows for all the builds. The world was of course trying to trip me up the entire way. The new favorite thing is to have someone give me an order early morning then make that thing they ordered me to do impossible. It’s just more examples of their 3 step manouver: create problem, block solution, escallate & blame.

  For example, day before yesterday, in the shop where I get hot water for noodles, another apparent customer in the queue after me told me to 'work!' as I was arranging my bag, then in the cafe seating area of a place I go to to listen to podcasts, write blog posts and code, the entire day there was what can only be described as a relay race of eggregious blocking that ensued. One after the other, from gangs of youths playing group video games making a racket, to loud angry women on the telephone, to solo gamers loudly getting angry at their video game and continuously tutting, to women telling off small children, and much more people not working. It just never ended. Blocked again and again by the opposite of the thing they are telling me to do. Literally one would leave and another would arrive within 60 seconds. The entire day. Then of course they blame me for everything and mutilate me.

  It was the same yesterday except the order was 'happy', followed by literally tsunami after tsunami of extremely unhappy people, doing much the same. Always back to their 3 step manouver.

  So so so bleak.

  Someone bought me a sandwich yesterday evening, that was nice. But the world was right back to it’s bullying with sleep depravation from women on motorbikes all through the night, and white tissue anger goading this morning. Oh and of course they are back to starving me again, while doing drive-bys shouting 'Money!' at me. #

• Since hearing that some americans think MI6 is behind the failed Trump assassination, I've been trying to figure out a scenario where that would even make sense. My lived experience in the UK is that aside from the occasional joke, the vaste vaste vaste majority of people just don’t spend any time at all thinking about the US being independant. In fact we all think it’s awesome.

  The MI6 conspiracy just makes no sense to me at all. The only reason I can think for MI6 to do something that extreme is that they believe the US, or an entity controlling the US, is doing something even more extreme.

  Likely my experience here in Vietnam over the last few years is affecting my thinking on this, but I’ve become a bit sceptical about infiniti. In fini tea. What are the chances?

  Can’t we all just chill out, go to the pub, and all get along?

  Btw, probably compleately unrelated, but MI in Vietnam means noodles, but bizarely is also used in the word for sandwich which is Banh Mi. I always thought was quite odd.

  Update: Bang means cake according to Google translate #

Today’s links:

• InteractiVenn - Web tool to create Venn diagrams interactivenn.net #

• Google's Exclusive Reddit Access - Only Google can now scrape Reddit content, they are blocking most other crawlers. They have a multi million dollar deal with Google, and don't want bulk access without setting up a deal in order to protect reddit users from having their content used to train other people’s AIs. www.404media.co #

• Tom Tugendhat enters race for Conservative party leadership - In addition to looking very much like a bond movie villain, he says he would be prepared to take the UK out of the European convention on human rights in order to restore full control of the countries borders. Seems kind of hardcore, is there something up ahead they can see that we can’t? www.theguardian.com #

• Germany challenges Turkey’s protected status claim for the doner kebab - Kind of a bold move by Turkey. Is the US going to do the same thing with the hamburger? www.theguardian.com #

2024/07/24 #

• I did eventually get the code for the reusable workflows feature I mentioned yesterday writen, but oh gosh was there push back from an angry world definitely on the war path pretending quite unsuccessfully to not be on the war path. I also managed a blog post, and that too was a slog to get through. Just so much hate and anger, disguished as 'you learn' and 'pay' harrassment incidents. Getting blamed quite literally for the things being done to me. That’s the thieves little trick, they steal from you while blaming you for stealing. It’s not always obvious because the thing they steal often isn’t a physical thing, but it equates to one because ultimately in one way or another you end up paying for it with time or money.

  I listenned to a pretty wild episode of Gold Goats ’n Guns podcast, talking all about the Trump assassination attempt. It meanders on for quite a while but it sure does finish on a whopper of a conspiracy theory. I had no idea people in the US thought like this. Kind of want to hear more about these wild ideas.

  Seems like I’m on the brink of another starvation cycle from the gang stalker thiefs who just want to control every single concievable aspect of my life. Makes the pro-choice issue in the US seem a bit quaint. Broadly I would describe it as pro-infiniti-slavery. It’s so extreme that people simply don’t believe it’s a real thing. Finding it hilarious like some kind of joke. Meanwhile it’s totally happening.

  I have a few podcasts to review, and need to go through yesterday’s code I wrote. Let’s see how far I get, hard to do on an empty stomach.

  Another day... #

• Ashley Esqueda on TWIT [10:42]: "There is an interesting device though, with younger people, particularly GenZ and younger, there’s this permeating feeling of, and I’ve seen this several times with multiple research and data that’s been published, they really feel like the most important news will make it to me. They feel that they don’t need to go looking for it because the most important news is going to find me. Like the thing that is the most relevant to me…they really trust the algorithm, which is slightly terrifying, but also it’s an interesting change, an interesting shift. The first group of people that have grown up entirely in algorithms, are people that really trust them to bring them the news that they need to know, as opposed to a even younger millennial who remembers a time when there wasn’t an algorithm to contend with." #

Today’s links:

• Spot Ethereum ETFs get final sign off to begin trading Tuesday - Good news for crypto in general, my guess is that many folks will re-allocate some of their Bitcoin to Eth, so not necessarily lots of new inflows. Longer term though there might be especially is Options and staked Eth become a reality. TradFi people are really into yield generating assets. www.theblock.co #

• Apple Reportedly Working on Foldable iPhone With Similar Design as Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip - Rumours sparked by leaks from production partners, looks like they are figuring out supply chain, parts and that sort of stuff. I always though foldables were a cool idea. They will have arrived properly if Apple release one. Code name is apparently V68. Could be a couple of years until they are in stores though. www.macrumors.com #

• So you think you know box shadows? - This is about as far away from the type of code I write as a web developer. It’s true that I mostly do backend but still I find it pretty crazy that web development is so broad. Interesting in any case just to get a vague idea of what’s possible. dgerrells.com #

• DeFi Giant dYdX Says Its v3 Platform Is Compromised – Just as It's Reportedly Up for Sale - Very scary compromise where the hacker got control of the entire domain and put up a fake site looking entirely like the old site. Users were then asked to approve a transaction that stole their funds. www.coindesk.com #

• Open Source AI Is the Path Forward - Leaving aside for a second this crazy world we now live in where everything imaginable is tracked and monetized which Zuck helped create, I think most of his thinking about AI that he writes about in this post seems well thought out, and generally in the right direction. I still though would like to read critiques from other industry leaders. He seems to be mostly talking about inference. What about training? about.fb.com #

• Spotify CEO confirms a ‘deluxe’ version with hi-fi audio is coming soon - A deluxe product for music would of course be awesome. I’m also interested in their plans for product offerings in the podcast space. I listened to several podcasts about a year ago where CEO Daniel Ek was talking about all sorts of cool new podcast features. There’s no mention of that in this article though. www.theverge.com #

2024/07/23 #

• Balaji on civil wars, nations and the state

  Raoul Pal put out an old episode, first published August 2022, it’s an interview with Balaji Srinivasan all about Network States. The whole thing is super interesting, a mix of history, politics, technology and futurism.

  One part that stood out to me was his description of the difference between a nation and the state. They take the scenic route, first looking at how the internet enabled the separation between political ideology and abscense of centralisation, but then Balaji zooms out to show the bigger arc of history. It was something that had been happening already for hundreds of years, and might even be the same fight happening again and again:

  It was accelerating even before the internet. It was happening but the internet accelerated it. Because cable news preceded the internet, the repeal of the fairness doctrine, what happened by 1950 was peak centralisation, where it was like this massive centralising force over decades and centuries, mass media, mass production, telegraph, telephone, rail road. That level of centralisation, we sort of sometimes think of history as beginning in 1945, because the current era did, and people, if you ask them for the history of what happened before, they actually get pretty hazy.

  They are like "Aaah Great Depression...Prohibition, then the Civil War...1776, okay" and then go back to like Christianity. They basically just don’t have any memory of that. But there are some really interesting incidents, for example in the 1600s, a really important one, the Puritans, or the ancestors of what we now call the Puritans, the Roundheads, lost a battle in what is today the United Kingdom, and they went out to the North East of America and settled there in like the early 1600s.

  And in the mid 1600s, the Roundheads, and their allies beat the Cavaliers, and the Cavaliers came out to the Virginia area in 1640ish, if I remember correctly. And so what happened was two different sides in a civil war migrated out to the US, setup colonies, and 200 years later those same two groups got into another civil war.

  That gives a completely different lens on like the Civil War. People say "oh it’s state trieds (?) or it’s slavery", no maybe it’s Roundheads vs Cavalier. That’s like this insane thing where this group, these cultural...these like mind virus’ or what have you, are just things that are just powerful things that just, we don’t understand them yet. It’s like we don’t fully understand human biology, we don’t fully understand human sociology. We are still at the flodgestone (?) theory there. Like the mind virus’ that mass move large groups of people, okay. And these two groups are again kind of fighting now, 150 something years later.

  Interesting stuff. I’m guessing you could probably trace it back even further. From what I understand, many of the people of the UK originated from places in today’s Germany, hence they are called the Anglo-saxons. In any case Balaji then goes on to explain the difference between the nation and the state:

  The nation is the people, and the state is government, and the land is a 3rd thing we can come back to. Nation has the same root as natality. Common birth. Common descent. The Japanese nation is the Japanese people and culture and language and so on and so forth as distinct from the Japanese state which is a creamy layer of administrators above them. Which could be the Japanese empire, and then in 1945-46 actually the American state above them. The state was not the people. The Japanese nation was different to the people. And then eventually they got the democratic Japan installed there.

  And like somebody that lived in East Germany actually like lived under 4 different states. They were under Weinmar, then the Nazis, the the East Germans, and if they lived long enough they got to German Re-unification. [...] So when you understand the difference between the nation and the state, you can actually start decoding certain amazing things.

  Like for example, the United Nations, is actually best not thought of as the United Nations. It’s actually best thought of as the Selected States. Why? Because there are 193 countries in the United Nations, but [...] if all the stateless nations, Catalonians, Basques, Kurds, Armenians, and so on and so forth, if all of them got their own states, there would be 600 or 700 countries in the United Nations.

  He goes on to talk about old city states, how they have reminence of the old world in the present day, and the history of India and all sorts of interesting things. I found all this history kind of fascinating, especially as context for discussions about how we might start to organise our societies in the future. Definitely worth spending the time to listen to the entire episode.

  I’m certainly intrigued by the idea of network states, but I can’t help but wonder whether it’s over complicating things. Is the Network State sort of equivalent to assembly language though? Surely most people won’t want to be bothered with it and will want to spend most of their time actually having fun or writing cool tunes or something? Won’t the existing state and government be good enough for 99% of people?

  And I just have more questions...

  • Is there a time when we will be forced into a networked state architecture in order to support the collective computation required for us to live?
  • What is societies’ capacity now?
  • What is it in a networked state architecture?

  I will leave you with this story, which is most probably fictional:

  A long long time ago there was a gang of cells in a bigger gang of cells that decided they were the God Cells Gang. They were constantly going on, at length, about something they kept refering to as the Body State. And they were determied to build it. They had the cell equivalent of a website, where they distributed what we would call pdfs. They even had infographics. Some believe we have actually found traces of the Gang of God Cells in our DNA. What were the God Cells like? They mostly just hung around waiting for nutrients. At least that’s what we think. Some people believe the God Cells are still out there somewhere in a secret place still sending us messages, and still twiddling their cytoplasm waiting for nutrients. Apparently they are hilarious.

  Recently some researchers announced that they might have been able to contact them, communicating via a very complicated nutrient based protocol that they invented. To the researchers suprise, not only did the protocol work, buy they recieved a response which decoded to an actual HTTP url and the phrase "We have cytoplasm twiddles you can’t even imagine yet".

  Oh yeah there was also included a gif of, what looked like, some weird pulsating cells, and if you looked at it for a little while, it just sort of looked like they were all having an awesome time. And if you looked at it for a bit longer the following words emerged from the chaos: "Rock on at the after party".

• Crappy day full of fucking bullying from the dirty fucking thieves, non stop both aggressive and passive aggressive bullying. Managed a blog post, but it was a nightmare to write, and now once again I have a runny nose. Fucking thieves. Stop stealing from me thieves. #

Today’s links:

• After years of uncertainty, Google says it won’t be ‘deprecating third-party cookies’ in Chrome - I still don’t really understand what’s going on after reading this article. I can see why advertisers might be annoyed. As a developer I’m now wondering if it affects anything I might need to do. digiday.com #

• Node.js 20.6.0: Say Goodbye to 'dotenv' - Tutorial on how to use the new --env-file nodejs flag to set environment vatiables from a file. Something the article doesn’t mention which could be useful in unixy environments, the 'export' keyword is ignored when prepended to a variable, which means you can use the env file from a shell script as well as via node command line argument. Might be useful in development or in places where you need to use the settings in other non-nodejs places. See nodejs docs for details. dev.to #

• Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean - "About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean" - That’s mental. The article describes they have found oxygen being produced without light, therefore without photosynthesis. Apparently mining companies want to extract various metals from these sites, but scientists warn it could kill local life. I would have thought a bigger concern would be that it could kill humans since so much of the oxygen we breath comes from the sea, but that doesn’t appear to be a concern. www.bbc.com #

• New Post: Balaji on civil wars, nations and the state markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/22 #

• Lots of low grade escallations this morning from motorbike drivebys. Yesterday there was a massive, IMO clearly co-ordinated, escallation that lasted the entire day. Literally every location I went to, and at key points I passed as I walked between places, there were folks waiting to shout harrassment at me. These were clearly manufactured incidents in each location. The general theme was you-do-what-we-say, you-belong-to-us. Yah’ing basically everywhere. I calmly responded in each case by calling the perpetraitors theifs and said for them to stop stealing from me. Ultimately, when all is said and done that’s what’s going on here. They might not like to hear it but that’s what it is.

  I’m not here by choice. I’m got stuck here and continue to be stuck here because of decisions other people made. I did all the right things I was asked and supposed to do at every step, and now I’m having my life stolen from me, by people who believe they literally own me. That’s theft of the worst kind. Stealing someone’s life is literally equivalent to murder. Calling them thieves is extremely generous, in reality they are murderers. Slow murdering me. Every. single. day.

  I took some notes about the escallations yesterday so maybe I’ll write them up into a blog post today.

  Trying to blog as much as I am able to but the conditions are very confrontational, adversarial and bleak everywhere. #

• I see this morning that president Biden has dropped out of the race. I have to admit part of me is a bit disapointed there won’t be a Rocky Balboa coming back from the brink moment in this story. That would have been a very american thing to happen, at least based on all the Hollywood movies I’ve watched in my lifetime, and the situation sure does feel like some sort of movie a lot of the time. Anyway, it will be interesting to see where this takes us. It’s not a Rocky movie.

  I wonder what kind of movie fits the current moment. What movies did GenZers grow up watching?

  Also video games, I don’t know anything about those though.

  Also what movies are scheduled to be released in the next 12 months. I’ve found in the past that somewhat bizarely movies can be quite an accurate bell weather of things to come. #

• It feels like societies are reaching some kind of maximum. Peak fakeness. Peak everything.

  It’s is happening so much quicker than in the past. Films have much more complicated plots than in years gone by, same for television series, video games, and it’s the same for other literature based art. We’ve been ramping up the complexity in many different dimensions for decades at this point.

  I wonder whether the pendulum will start to swing in another direction at some point, because in a similar way to Moor's law, perhaps we are running out of space. We are bursting at the seams. Is there a maximum complexity that these city based systems we live in can feasibly process?

  As a reaction to all the crazy fast paced infiniti everything, maybe there will be a shift towards more ambient and ephemeral ways of existing, maybe we need some time in the Chill Out room. More Brian Eno. Less Gaba. #

• I just can't bring myself to writing up the latest escallation I mentioned in this morning's note. Everything is just too dam bleak. Not much interesting to blog about today :( #

• Lots of people dressed in black today, many fake sneezing, and I’m sneezing now with runny nose, and wouldn’t you know it, the people all dressed in black are saying 'you learn'. I guess that signals the end of the current escallation cycle, me once again mutilated.

  Everything is clearly too difficult now that they’ve escallated everything in every dimension and the only solution is to mutilate me and blame everything on me for the millionth time. Lazy fucking thieves. #

Today’s links:

• Selects: The Duality of Caffeine (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) - Very useful episode, especially since I started drinking coffee again this week. Just another what are the chances. Turns out there are quite a few health benefits to caffeine, but also downsides. I’ve been finding it definitely improves my ability to write blog posts, especially in adversarial environments. The science behind how caffeine works is kind of fascinating. If you drink coffee definitely worth listening to this episode. podcastindex.org #

• What do small businesses think about the new worker’s rights? Ep#77 (The Rest is Money Podcast) - Robert and Steph have on Dragon’s Den dragon Deborah Meaden. A load of interesting discussion around the change in government and what it means for small businesses. Why the need for employment rights, pros/cons of zero hour contracts, weening employers off of their reliance on immigration to keep wages lower, and betting on the green economy future. They then have a more personal chat with Deborah about her entrepreneurial journey, touching all sorts of topics including running your own business, franchising if you don’t have money, investing in other entrepreneurs, scaling up, British risk aversion vs US risk appetite, dealing with business failures, time value vs impact value, technical vs instinct when making investing decisions, crowd sourced investment, looking beyond the pitch deck, meeting founders and other investors, and the importance of shared values. Great episode with a good mix of the current business zeitgeist and more general long term advice for entrepreneurs. podcastindex.org #

• The all-seeing AI webcam (Vergecast Podcast) - Will Poor piece that looks at Dries Depoorter, who not only includes Will’s family name in his family name, but also creates weird absurdist internet based AI / surveillance themed art and installations. He’s flemish belgian so has a cool accent and a downtempo kind of vibe. His projects tend to turn the tables on power, highlight important aspects of modern society that we aren’t considering, and create tools that use the latest AI models to create delightfully odd tools that make you think. podcastindex.org #

• ROLLUP: Trump Pump | ETH ETF Next Week | Mt. Gox & Germany | Crypto Wars 2.0 (Bankless Podcast) - They are all about crypto but I feel that the Bankless guys are often a bell weather for what’s going on in the wider world. Their takes are often sensible yet also they regulary appear to notice important trends before others do. This Rollup episode has all sorts of interesting titbits from commentary on the Trump assassination and it’s aftermath, but also prediction markets becoming more mainstream, top bitcoin holding countries worldwide, ETF and Larry Fink fully orange pilled and maybe opening the door for etherium, bullish miners, uniswap browser wallet improvements, legal cases changing the playing field and tracking the growing crypto lobby. www.bankless.com #

• Joe Biden withdraws from presidential race following debate debacle - Not much to say about this. Can’t say I’m all that enthusiastic about it. I was never really into Biden, but still it feels like when they replace the lead singer in a band. Or a lead actor in a film or TV series. It rarely works. Can I really be arsed to invest time learning about a whole new cast of characters right now? Nope not really is how I feel about it today. I bet many feel similar to me. www.theguardian.com #

2024/07/21 #

• Some thoughts about theft and stealing brought about by the past few days. I’m just thinking out loud.

  A bunch of malicious help last night. It’s unbelievable how 1 lot of malicious help leads to another, which leads to another. It’s like theft being used to fix a theft, which is being used to fix a theft. Each time they created the problem in the first place, yet blamed it on you.

  Theft just doesn’t work as a core of society, eventually you run out of people to steal from. Then you are stuck at this stupid self imposed maximum, an equilibrium between thieves and victims. If there is no stealing, there is no maximum, everyone can grow together and help each other without worrying.

  If you are stealing from somebody to teach them I think it’s likely that at best you are teaching them to steal. If you are stealing to teach you aren’t teaching, you’re stealing. #

• I wrote yesterday about Rogan’s advice to create successful and cool businesses. If the US is so incredibly divided politically, I mean everyone is saying the divide is the worst ever, that there is this insane level of hate, then how is it that people from both camps can go to the same comedy places and laugh at the same jokes?

  Wouldn’t you expect that eventually there would be Republican comedy places and Democrat comedy places and never the two shall meet? Or is that perhaps a thing that might still happen? Should we be taking measures to make sure this doesn’t happen?

  Is there a weird world possible where one side just decides to ditch comedy all together, and the other side then creates fake people to make it look like both sides are still laughing together when in fact they aren’t. The infiniti comedy division is a pretty dark thought. #

• An architecture for art

  I was very taken by a recent Keen On podcast episode featuring writer Andrew O'Hagan where they discuss his recent novel Caledonian Road. It made it into this week’s newsletter, being quite a major influence on the theme.

  I've been wondering what makes these sorts of rather grandiose works of art possible. Here are some of the questions I’ve been wondering about:

  • What architectures are needed in society to study and create these types of books / collections of stories?
  • Are some societies more well organised or pre-disposed to being documented or novelised into fictional stories?
  • Is there an observation problem where the observer affects the story they are documenting?
  • Are some societies purposely setup to make them difficult to novelise?

  Also extrapolating somewhat on yesterday’s post about Rogan’s secret to making cool businesses, I wonder if some of these ideas are something you can apply at a city level. I suppose people do think about such things, though I'm not sure how comfortable I am with life being engineered at this level.

  How do you even do that without seeming like senator Palpatine from Star Wars?

  Maybe these sorts of questions are things we should be thinking about given that so many things these days appear fake. Catcher in the Rye seems a bit quaint these days.

  I think it’s worth noting that for whatever reason, there was a distinct surge of "spiritual push back" from the world around me, in the form of apparently random No! harrasment and apparently accidental chair bumping, as I put the finishing touches to this blog post, from the mostly university students folks that surround me where I am writing this post.

  Oh, and some 'you dog' calls from people walking by too!

  Proving once again, that for the perpetraitors, harrassment is similar to the tag line of a certain brand of crisps that will remain unmentioned here to avoid any repercussions that might occur:

  "Once you pop you can’t stop".

  Writing that last paragraph was 10X harder than the rest of the article for some bizare reason. Anyway, nothing to see here, please move along...I am but an unfunny tennis ball.

Today’s links:

• The Academics That Think ChatGPT is BS (Better Offline Podcast) - I didn’t take detailed notes on this one, and probably should have, because it was packed with very insightful and well thought out hypothesis’ about how LLMs work but also about how we should view them, whether they are actually thinking, how they differ to human learning, and how they are impacting academia. These researchers highlight some of the most important things to consider, such as lying vs bullshitying vs hallucinating, and the danger of anthropomorphising them. It vears into philosophy and psychology, but grounded in computer science and mathematics. You'd think these boffins would have the whole thing figured out, but even these guys occasionally run into difficulty describing what’s going on. LLMs seem to be teaching us humans about our own cognition and consciousness. It’s the sort of episode that should be required listening when using these tools, they are powerful but could be detrimental to your abilities if used in the wrong way long term. IMO, use them as a booster rather than a crutch, imagine they could be taken away at anytime, you still need to be able to function at a high level without them. podcastindex.org #

• Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy - Steven Levy looks into the recent trend of Silicon Valey big wig VCs like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz changing their allegiance from the Democrats & Biden to the Republicans & Trump. It appears to centre around Biden’s idea to impose 25% capital gains tax on unrealised assets for folks earning more than $100 million per year. They are trying to close a loop hole where the very rich never pay taxes by never realising their assets but monetize them by borrowing against them. They argue that it’s a slipery slope that starts with the very rich, but eventually canibalises wealth from all wealthy households. The argument is that it destroys philantropy and ultimately Silicon Valley itself. Interesting article, no less because Levy appears to be a staunch Democrat. Big changes in the tectonic plates of the tech industry. www.wired.com #

• J. Malcolm Garcia on the humanity of San Fransisco's homeless community (Keen On Podcast) - Homelessness is a difficult subject to talk about and I think Andrew and Malcolm manage to have an interesting conversation, while being respectful to the people they are talking about. Many have experienced significant trauma, there is mental illness, sometimes drugs or alcohol, but they are real people with both happy and sad stories, and they can be very interesting and even fun to talk to. It can be awkward at first to strike up a conversation, and it can be risky as you might end up liking them, and feel a responsibility, but the truth is regular folks "need some skin in the game". It’s worth breaking down the barriers, they are within the community even if they aren’t a part of it. Waiting for the government to fix things in many places might be unrealistic. I think it’s worth remembering the world they live in is very different to the one lived by the housed, so they will likely be in a very different mindset to you. They spend most of their time thinking about things you probably never even have to consider. Things you take for granted that take minutes can take days to accomplish for them. Their timelines are very different. They might not trust you initially, they have likely had many bad experiences talking to housed people in the past so they might be cautious, not wanting their situation to get any worse than it already is - Malcom ends by reminding us that "they are great people". podcastindex.org #

• A guide to reading and writing Node.js streams - Great tutorial by Matteo Collina that looks at how to use Streams in NodeJS. The article focusses on readable and writable streams, backpressure, handling errors, and advanced techniques like async iterators. The render pipelines concept I introduced to my static site generator is only partly realised, I only introduced the minimum needed to get the job done. I have partially implemented a more complete version of the feature and it’s crazy how similar in shape it is to the streams examples here, but it just uses the fs module. It would be very cool to explore using streams in the render core, certainly would be a good way to reduce memory consumption, and maybe even give a speed boost. Streams also support HTTP as well as files on the filesystem. Maybe one day ... :) blog.platformatic.dev #

• How to Build a JavaScript UI Component-First DevTool Startup in 2024 - Well writen article, and the modularity of their final solution is pretty cool, and understandable given current state of things. However it all feels so complicated. Why can’t the next cohort of Facebook type startups take up the mantle for building the next React ontop of Web Components? Why can’t Lit, which looks very cool btw, be worked on to get it to be comparable in features to Vue and React? www.corbado.com #

• Promises From The Ground Up - Josh Comeau summarises pretty succinctly how javascript promises work, with just the right amount of detail, without getting caught up in the weeds. This enables you to get to grips with async / await, which the article finishes with. I’ve found async / await to be one of the more useful primitives for simplifying my code. It did take a little while to get to grips with though. Reading existing code bases for popular libraries that use it helped too. I don’t miss callbacks in my NodeJS code at all. www.joshwcomeau.com #

• New Post: An architecture for art markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/20 #

• The new thing, since the evening before yesterday evening, is people dressed in black. Mostly head to toe black, occasionally just a black tshirt. They have been appearing everytime some sort of manufactured anger goading is in progress. They will often appear to be having a normal conversation, but then they drop in a word that was used in a key moment during the previous anger goading situation, which was usually in a totally different location. It sticks out like a soar thumb in amongst the apparent vietnamese they are speaking.

  There was quite a bit of sleep depravation by roudy groups that kept showing up one after the other yesterday evening like some sort of relay race. It was clear I was being blamed for something. There were several seruptitious 'you learn' shouting in amongst the frollicking cleary aimed directly at me.

  I’m still calling out people stealing from me. That’s going down about as you would expect. Usually resulting in even more stealing. Sandwich shops suddenly run out of ingredients, cafe shop seating areas suddenly get mysteriously sealed off with cardboard box tape, shop staff counters closing as you get to the front of the queue, getting redirected to another queue, only for that queue to also get mysteriously closed. Even self depracating jokes about being a tennis ball, go down like a ton of bricks. Only they are aloud to be funny, you can never be funny, even if you are taking the piss out of yourself.

  The hypocracy reaches the end of the universe and pokes a whole through to the next universe, while simultaneously springing a leak into 12 different dimensions you never even knew existed.

  Got issue #173 of the newsletter writen and published though. That felt pretty good.

  And I’m right back at it listening to podcasts, taking notes, writing blog posts and posting links. #

• Fiction, Art, Music, Aliens & Evolutionary Biology (Issue #173)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-07-20)

  In this week’s edition:

  Monetary policy, intelligence agencies, AI vs crypto, aliens, Bitcoin treasuries, everyday novelists, evolutionary biology vs modernity, Solana fundamentals, quantum computers, EU politics, EDM duos

  Issue details:

  • Title: Fiction, Art, Music, Aliens & Evolutionary Biology
  • Issue: 173
  • Page: issue webpage

• Likely no blog posts today. I’ve gone through all the low hanging fruit from my daily notes, the ones remaining require a bit more thought and attention and space to think. The world has been yah’ing me for days now. Of course there is only so much of that I can withstand, eventually it turns into an infiniti block. I’m going to try and chill for the rest of the day. I've got the newsletter out, published a bunch of links, and done most of my backlog pruning, ready for next week.

  This past week had been a productive one, yet I need to find a balance where I can write code as well. Writing code and 3 blog posts a day, isn’t realistic. Certainly not on the puny hardware I'm currently stuck with. #

• Rogan’s secret to building cool businesses

  I think this piece from the latest Rogan podcast where he has on Sam Morril was kind of relevant to the theme of my latest newsletter issue #173, all about the Fiction, Art and Music that the technologies we build make possible. He’s managed over the last few years to create a comedy club that’s now become some sort of legendary comedy hub, and it’s not even in LA or New York. It’s in Texas.

  They are talking about comedy clubs and after a great Rodney Dangerfield detour, Rogan highlights why he thinks the business has really started firing on all cylinders [01:12:54]:

  The thing is there is a separation between the people that do it and the business. That’s where all the friction comes from. In my club there is no separation between the people that do it and the business, cause the people that do it, own it, and it’s all of ours. The way I refer to it, I don’t refer to it as my club. This club is setup for comedians, it was never setup to make any money.

  The whole concept was that I just want to make something where I don’t lose money. I just want to break even, if I break even, I’ll be super happy. It’s not a money making venture at all.

  So the money structure is different, the comedians get most of the money, and there is plenty of money for the bar and plenty of money for the wait staff. There is plenty of money for everybody. It’s just you can’t be greedy.

  In most environments the club makes most of the money and the comedians don’t.

  He then goes on to perhaps the take away observation [01:14:18]:

  But it’s funny that the best way to make a business, is to make a business where you just do it the best way to express the art form, and then the business thrives.

  It’s worth listening to the whole bit. I wonder if this is a re-occuring theme in the arts, or even in businesses in general. Some of the coolest places I've worked in my lifetime have had some elements of what he describes here. Presumably he’s able to fund the whole venture because of his other ventures. There’s something about the freedom he is able to provide that’s actually great for business.

  I wonder how much time and effort he spends making sure it’s sustainable.

• There’s something really egregious about people that are openly generous but then passive aggressively discourage you from accepting their generocity. It’s really a very pernicious form of stealing, and the worst kind because it’s essentially stealing from everyone, it’s stealing from society. And it often comes from folks that say they are all for working together, for the common good. Double egregious. #

Today’s links:

• Quantum computers aren’t what you think...they’re cooler | Hartmut Neven (TED Talks Daily Podcast) - A look into the weird science behind quantum computing where huge computations can be carried out using parallel universes. It’s very early days for this technology, but we will soon be able to use quantum computers to solve problems in medicine, AI, neuroscience and more. All sorts of interesting examples of what we might be able to do in the future. We might even be able to discover the dynamics of consciousness, and perhaps even ways to expand it. www.ted.com #

• Caitlin Long and the Conundrums of Europe Ep#183 (Goats Gold 'n Guns Podcast) - Caitlin Long who runs Custodia Bank is on the show to discuss the recent elections in the UK and France, and how they have been affecting the markets. She also goes into her difficult experiences trying to setup a crypto focused full reserve bank, Trump and crypto, Tether & US treasuries, and the unconstitutional structure of the FED. podcastindex.org #

• Bicep Ep#522 (Resident Advisor Podcast) - Interview with Irish duo Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar. Setting up a label, their background in graphic design and advertising, tech gear, the writing process, live shows vs writing albums, mixing seminar at Abbey Road, upping their game and working with tech wizards, working as a duo, Belfast vs London, people’s differing views on emotions, writhing with purpose, being maximal with minimal, negative spaces, giving your brain space, taking the essence out and striping it back, teasing the audience, harnessing energy, 1 word song titles, the Brit awards, creativity during the pandemic, fear & worry in the community, signing with Ninja Tune, performing live vs DJing, being on the road, Glastonbury, first Essential Mix, first Beats in Space mix, first show in Japan, rave energy and clubs in general, blogging their sets, artistic kinship, making tunes and getting them out as quick as possible, collaborating, and shooting video for visuals. ra.co #

• Cafes to work from in Chiang Mai - I miss Chiang Mai, it’s been so many years since I was last there. James Clark has re-written one of his oldest cafe review pieces. I'm linking to it because in a freakish bit of synchronicity, I started drinking coffee again this week and it’s resulted in me writing loads of blog posts. Some of these new places sound awesome. www.nomadicnotes.com #

• Nvidia and Mistral’s new model ‘Mistral-NeMo’ brings enterprise-grade AI to desktop computers - This feels like it could be one of those low key announcements that goes mostly unnoticed but then ends up being quite important. The model is not anywhere near as powerful as the latest OpenAI models but it’s open source, and runs on your own personal hardware, rather than on a data centre monster GPU. Turns out there are many applications that don’t require the bestest model, but do require much more privacy, because small busineses want to be in control of their data. venturebeat.com #

• Bicep - Bicep 2017 - A Pitchfork review of their self titled debut album. I couldn’t find anything in podcast form that I could download, but this review popped up. I love reading electronic music reviews, they are often pieces of art in their own right, capturing the vibe in textual form, of something that attempts to capture the vibe of something in audio form. There’s something very magical happening when it works. It’s funny because I imagine they probably read like total gibberish to folks that are not familiar with the genres. I assure you though, there really is an undiscovered parallel dimension, or several, to all this modern electronic stuff. pitchfork.com #

• Zelenskiy to attend UK cabinet meeting in effort to disrupt Russian oil sales - He attended the European Political Community summit and will address the new government caninet. It’s intetesting to see Zelenskiy in the UK but also how the UK will operate on european matters while outside the EU. www.theguardian.com #

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Fiction, Art, Music, Aliens & Evolutionary Biology (Issue #173) markjgsmith.com #

• Working with Pasted Content in JavaScript - Nothing earth shatering but useful to know. Depending on what you add to the clipboard, say HTML text or files for example, you get different data in the event object, which you then need to handle in some way. www.raymondcamden.com #

• A Developer's Review of a Snapdragon X Laptop (Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x) - Interesting to see a price and spec comparison with MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Looks like, as I suspected, 16GB RAM is pretty much the minimum these days for a development machine. Makes sense, even my now defunct MacBook Pro from 2013 had 16GB of RAM, and these days they need to run AI coding copilot tools. Any less RAM just isn’t viable. www.wezm.net #

• SqLite for NodeJS - They are adding Sqlite to nodejs core, so you’ll be able to write database driven apps right out of the box. Very cool! github.com #

• New Post: Rogan’s secret to building cool businesses markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/19 #

• I’ve been able to write quite a few blog posts the past few days. One thing I changed in my routine is I started drinking a hot cup of coffee in the morning, and occasionally one in the afternoon. It definitely helps with getting focussed and into gear as far as writting goes, at least it has done for the past few days. The downside is that I’m not too into how it makes you feel afterwards when the coffee wears off. It’s not terrible, but I find I’m perhaps somewhat more irritable.

  The world of course gas noticed my slight change in routine, and has been doing it’s best to royally f it all up. Manufactured situations where people in cafes / shops are setting themselves up to sleep for the entire day, yet if I so much as put my feet up on a chair I get in trouble with the shop staff. It’s basically impossible to change anything without it causing enormous problems, as the malicious types try to find all the holes in the new configuration. It’s absolutely madenning.

  I call it what it is which is theft. Theft of your life is the worst kind of theft. It’s basically slow murder IMO.

  I've continued trying to do the podcast reviews as I listen to podcasts, creating links on the linkblog. When it works it feels good, but the world constantly getting in the way so it feels like a struggle. Somehow it’s easier to do that all in one go, rather than after each episode. I wish that wasn’t the case. It would be great to have all the reviews done when I start writing each issue.

  I'm a few reviews behind, so I’ll hopefully get those done today, world willing. Overall I kind if like this new way of doing it, but I’m not sure it’s very practical given my circumstances. Unfortunately.

  Anytime I start typing for more than a few minutes, it‘s like I trigger some sort of immune response from the hive mind, and the world starts yah’ing me, trying to hurry me up, and of course that has the opposite effect. Oh well, one must persevere regardless as they say. #

• GenZ vs evolutionary biology

  Really interesting interview with writer Jonathan Haidt on the All-in podcast. It’s a very well structured and interesting discussion, that looks at how humans have evolved to be how we are, and how we are adapting to the modern world. They put forward the thesis that there is a crisis with Gen Z onwards because society is still getting to grips with the introduction of digital technologies.

  The discussion around the evolutionary biology topics is fantastic and a must listen for all. Same goes for the recent developments in social media and how this is intersecting with our core biology. I’m not fully convinced by their thesis though. I think there’s a fair amount of our generation did it betterism that creeps in, though I don’t think it’s malicious, it’s just that the world is changing so much it’s difficult to ground oneself.

  If you are GenZ definitely worth listening, get the data, learn about your body etc but you decide on your direction. You’re the first generation to be fully digital so many things will be possible that us olds will find difficult to imagine.

  Having said that there is much wisdom hidden away within the path that humanity has taken to get where we are today. I’m finding as I get older that the philosophical and political thought from eras past, is more relevant than I previously realised. It’s not always obvious how to translate it into a modern context though, and takes quite a lot of time to fully appreciate it’s lessons. Often you can only see the lessons once you’ve lived through challenges and successes yourself.

  There’s a lot of stuff that could help you avoid long periods of stagnation and spinning your wheels as you try to get to a better future. Be informed by the past but wary about being controlled by it.

• I wonder if in the distant future governments will eventually just consist of AI brain trainer specialists. In this world a change of government, would essentually be a national brain transplant. The turn up with the new brain, plug it in, then everything just gets put through the new brain. #

Today’s links:

• Andrew O'Hagan goes up the Caledonian Road in search of Truth, Justice & a Man in Blue Ep#2027 (Keen On Podcast) - I really enjoyed this interview, on many levels. The fact it’s about a novel written about a place in London I’d spent some time in, the fact that the novel is a rich tapestry, weaving together stories and characters from different walks of life, and class, together with contemporary topics, and even the diverse real life cast of the podcast interview itself. It’s like some sort of giant living jigsaw puzzle, where the interesting pieces find each other and intertwine like a patch of garden in a bigger patch of a larger garden. Fascinating waters in which to go for a swim, with so many different cultural topics intersecting, the novel really gives a sense, a multi-dimensional snapshot of a place in time. Local pubs, politics, austerity, Brexit, migrants, fake news, fake life, global vs local, renters vs home owners, big city, urban vs country side, art, perspective, concreteness, optical illusions, capitalism, englishness, the working class, unions, working men’s clubs, the miners strikes, russian oligarchs, aristocrats, crypto utopianism, landlords, paying your taxes, beaurocracy, gangsters, Balzacian & Kafkan nightmares, Britain, the similarity of father & sons relationships across classes, all with the backdrop glow from a distant US culture. The complexity of modern life in all it’s imperfect glory. Seems like a really wonderful example of the art and stories the technologies we build everyday now make possible. podcastindex.org #

• The Jonathan Haidt Interview (All-in Podcast) - New interview format for the All-in pod. They interview writer and evolutionary biology and psychology specialist Jonathan Haidt. All sorts of interesting topics covered, including the origins of sociology, a somewhat dubious social media drugs analogy but kind of interesting comparison nonetheless, how the human brain and mind evolved, the dopamine reward system, hacking evolutionary biology, Boomers vs GenX vs Millennials vs GenZ, Buddhism, the alleged perils of desire and dualistic thinking, influencer culture, collective action traps, oppressor / oppressed mindset, the 3 great untruths, how the political left has changed since the 70s, traditional liberalism and conservatism, boredom & creativity, and some things to be aware about video games. Very much recommended if you spend a lot of time thinking about the future. podcastindex.org #

• New Post: GenZ vs evolutionary biology markjgsmith.com #

• Resisting a Surveillance Technocracy with NVK (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Great discussion with always in a good jovial mood NVK, all about the future of society with AI, language models, cryptography, and bitcoin, focusing on how it will affect government surveillance. Topics including talking with AI, natural language translation, non carbon based alien intelligences, open source models, creating business AIs using your own data with really good privacy, how AIs "think" using vector maps, AI in government and politics, pattern matching and pre-crime, anyone being able to fake anything, digital signatures, Nostr and private keys, data sharing between agencies, and chain analysis using AI. Worth the listen to get a reslistic idea of where we are heading, while trying to not get too depressed about it all. www.whatbitcoindid.com #

• Is SOL Undervalued? 83% discount to ETH? | Michael Nadeau (Bankless Podcast) - Solana is generally considered to be the 3rd most popular blockchain after Bitcoin and Etherium. Micheal comes from a TradFi background but has been into crypto for a number of years. He’s identified some interesting things about Solana by doing a classic TradFi analysis of core fundamentals. He presents his findings. He looks at things like total value locked, number of active users, number of transactions, number of developers, fees, to where investment capital is flowing, DEX trading volumes and more. It would seem to still be somewhat undervalued. He makes some predictions for the future. Good solid episode. www.bankless.com #

2024/07/18 #

• Here’s a infiniti No! total reality inversion classic example that happened to me yesterday afternoon:

  It’s raining and wet everywhere. It‘s been raining for about 5 minutes. I'm walking to a sandwich shop, carrying all 3 of my bags, which are all quite full and heavy. As I walk / clamber around a tricky part in the pavement where there's a lamp post, a man on a motorbike pulls up close to me, veering towards me unexpectedly, asking me ‘where you go?’ motioning to get on his motorbike. It's bysy heavy traffic everywhere.

  That’s already quite unusual though not unheard of, but as I look at him I realise he is western. That really is VERY unusual. He repeats himself, he had a French accent. I politely decline, but it’s very awkward because the curb is very high where I am walking, and remember it’s raining, and I’ve got these heavy bags, and I’m now having to deal with this surprise offer. I stumble, my foot slips on the enormous curb, I go flying directly into some parked motorbikes, with enormous momentum because of the heavy bags.

  I’ve fallen over previously a few times with these bags and it’s really really dangerous, your legs literally buckle under you, so when it happens this time I get flash backs of previous times it happened. Miraculously I don’t fall to the ground, I stabilise myself with the parked motorbike, that I imagine are scratched by my bags after crashing into them.

  I instinctively say out loud "careful mate", because well, his manoeuvre was frankly bloody dangerous given the conditions. He looks very annoyed at me and shouts ‘No!’, then drives off. No sorry, no ‘are you ok’, no help getting back stable on my feet. Just a loud somewhat angry 'No!'. Like the entire thing is my fault. He then drives off.

  I finally get to the shop, buy what I went there for, and just before I walk off the girl working there, who historically is very often on a warpath, shouts ‘liar’. I call her a thief, she immediately says thank you in Vietnamese, like she was expecting me to say that, I’m completely exhausted and spent after continuous bullying all morning in every location and walk away, a few meters down the road I gather my thoughts and tell the world to stop stealing from me.

  I notice that on the top shelf of the items I was buying, that come in various sizes, the top shelf now has a size that’s 1/2 as big as the previous smallest size. Note there has been both 1/2 size food portion anger goading, as well as large butch women suddenly turning up and running all the sandwich shops along side the previous, often very moody, non-butch sandwich shop staff.

  This is what it has come to. The level of pettiness is such that people would quite happily consume an entire universe of resources just to win an argument on why a neutrino was out of place by a distance of one neutrino.

  The odd thing is that the girl and bloke from this sandwich shop always give off a sort of french vibe, in the way they behave, the things they say, perhaps they used to live there or something, but I always got a French vibe from them. What are the chances? #

• Competition for criminals

  As we all know by now, not only is the technology industry right in the middle of an AI revolution, but the repercussions are starting to be felt in the rest of the industry as the jobs market is impacted by companies able to do much more with significantly less staff. The AI revolution stands to put many people out of a job.

  It occurred to me yesterday while reading about the new powerful generative AI tools now available on all consumer smart phones, that the displacement will affect criminals in much the same way. Whereas previously creating fake photographs was the exclusive of a select few well trained operators, incredibly realistic fakes can now be done by literally anyone. That means criminals who would previously been able to pay photoshop artists to create fakes, and who enjoyed a relatively uncrowded market, will potentially be faced with a tidal wave of wanabe crime kiddies, who can probably create better fakes than they ever even imagined.

  While we get out the smallest violins in the universe, it’s worth considering that this coukd actually change existing power structures and the unseen part of the econony significantly. Those photo editing tools are pretty darn amazing. Imagine what kind of crazy alternate realities people will create to infiniti pawn each other.

• Bitcoinifying arguments

  Bitcoin is famous for being a distributed system. That's one of the properties that make it censorship resistant. When you look at it‘s underlying architecture it turns out that it’s a market of markets. The reason it’s done this way is to setup an incentive structure that is fair to all participants. I wonder if other things could be architected in this way.

  What about for example, a similar architecture for decision exploration and decision making? This might be a way to ensure that all sides of an argument are covered. People would be free to take up any side of an argument, and highlight all the important aspects. It wouldn’t necessarily mean that that person held thise views, but would ensure that much bigger possibilities spaces were explored for products, or government policies or new ideologies.

  A sort of mechanical turk for idea workshoping, where anyone could participate, all run on the blockchain, not owned by anyone.

  Would that even be a usefull, non-dangerous thing to do?

• The real vs digital assets equilibrium

  I wrote at the weekend about the future of crypto and high end NFTs. Some market analysts are predicting based on passed trends, that the coming bull markets in the crypto space will necessarily increase the marketcap by approximately $8tn by 2030. That’s a large amount of value that will accrue.

  The thesis by people like Raoul Pal is that, as with previous generations, the winners in these spaces will want to invest the money they make into property and art. Historically speaking, these have been the assets that the rich have bought to preserve their wealth in the face of currencies that get debased. He believes that they will want to invest in the digital equivalents of property & art, namely Bitcoin & high end NFTs.

  I think he’s identified something very interesting, but I’m not completely convinced by his conclusions. It’s true that norms in this generation of money managers are different, they will certainly be more into crypto & NFTs, but why wouldn’t they just buy hard assets just like their predecessors? Why didn’t their predecessors buy their own financial instruments?

  Well I bet they did buy quite a lot of their own financial instruments, as well as real physical assets. It would be very interesting to see the numbers on this dynamic, because perhaps there is already a sort of equilibrium between how nuch the winners put back into the system and how much they take out into hard assets. Isn’t it likely that the very same equilibrium is passed down into the next generation of the financial system?

  What’s more, isn’t it the case that if a country finds itself flip floping from hard left to hard right governments, that this equilibrium is seriously miss balanced?

Today’s links:

• Samsung’s new image-generating AI tool is a little too good - These new tools are indeed very impressive. The democratisation of imagination and even art creation is going to be a massive shift. It won't be revered as much. What will that do to the value of real high end artworks I wonder? www.theverge.com #

• New Post: Competition for criminals markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Bitcoinifying arguments markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: The real vs digital assets equilibrium markjgsmith.com #

• Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto" - Vitalik outlines many reasons why you shouln’t just vote based on whether a candidate is pro-crypto. As with many things in life, it’s a lot more nuanced, and pro-crypto candidates might turn out to be very much the opposite in the long term. vitalik.eth.limo #

2024/07/17 #

• The new thing is once again harrassment of a sexual nature, combined with starvation and food goading. A few days ago I was gifted a fancy croisant from an expensive bakery, by a woman on a motorbike. Now every evening a well dressed tall bloke turns up, sits nearby. He is always holding a large bag from the expensive bakery, full of nice pastries. He looks to be waiting for someone in the building across the road.

  While he waits the security guard in the building opposite, sits directly facing me, and repeatedly makes up and down motion with his right hand, very quickly. It looks very much like he’s pretend masterbate. He eventually stops, and fancy pastries bloke crosses the road and walks off with the person he was waiting for. About 30 mins before this a young woman offered me 1/2 a bagel, because she apparently "was full" and couldn’t eat it. I politely declined. The half food portions has been a thing for several days now, which I have written about.

  She had a very shifty attitute. Every morning, and I’m sure today will be no different, the sexual harrassment weird old lady puts used tissues in my path in the gutter. Yesterday evening whenever she appeared, right afterwards somebody appeared gorging on food. All these things are linked. It’s all harrassment, it’s all some form of stealing from me. Stop stealing my life world. #

• Just ignore them virtually impossible

  Each time in my life I’ve got a little bit interested in politics, and tried to explore the left hand side of the spectrum, a total asshat of a leftist has materialised that is so extreme in everything they do, that I’ve just felt sick to my stomach. They minus infiniti plus infiniti literally everything in every dimension. Urgh.

  It’s happened with such precision that it really feels like some sort of conspiracy. I wouldn’t even be suprised if these people were secret rightists put there to ensure I never form an accurate picture of the left.

  Just pay no attention to them I hear you say. Well it turns out that in each case the world has configured itself in such a way that it’s very hard, verging on the impossible, to "just ignore them".

• Eric Semler on Bitcoin company treasuries: "Bitcoin is the cheapest way to buy the future because it’s the only currency that doesn’t get debased." #

• Kings and Queens and politics

  There’s an interesting bit on the latest Rest is Politics podcast where they compare a subtle yet important difference between how the UK and US are organised [28:05]:

  Rory Stewart: The King is the head of state, and the prime minister Keir Stalmer is the head of government, and of course Keir Stalmer has 99% of the power in the country, but I wonder whether one of the reasons why, in America, they are finding it very difficult to move president Biden, is that countries like the US and France, they have these sort of presidents that are heads of state, and the most powerful people in the country, they take on some of the kind of aura of a kind of mini King. Whereas in Britain one of the reasons we were able to get rid of Boris Johnson, and Luz Truss very very quickly, I think is we have a more pragmatic relationship to our prime minister. And I think maybe the presence of the King maybe sort of psychologically helps that a bit.

  Alistair Campbell: [...] I was always conscious of this whenever I saw the Queen with the prime ministers, be that the prime minister of the day, or I remember the time when she was with all her living former prime ministers and Tony Blair at one of the Jubilees, you were always conscious of the fact that the prime minister, routinely described as the most powerful person in the country, sort of felt very…second fiddle. She was the most important person in the room. And I think you are right, that does mean there is a clear separation between executive power and formal constitutional leadership power, which is what the King has.

  Rory Stewart: Yeah, and I think it can be quite healthy, I mean I know we often disagree on this, but when you see France and America getting very obsessed with their presidents, and almost turning them into these semi-regal figures, I sometimes think it’s quite useful that some of the symbolic weight is lifted off the prime minister’s shoulders and it makes them kind of get on with it in a more pragmatic way.

  When you grow up as a Brit you are sort of always aware of these small subtleties that having a monarchy entails, but I don’t hear them mentioned outright all that often. I’m not saying one is better than the other just that these types of things make quite a bit of difference to how things are more generally in society.

  I think it’s worth highlighting while passing, though not so important to dwell on it for too long. I found it interesting.

  It reminded me of an interaction between the late Queen and Boris Johnson that I saw on YouTube a while back. They were in what looked like a very palacial and ornate room. I guess someone from the government had been involved in a scandal of some kind and had likely been fired. Boris entered the room, his body language was very interesting, sort of deferential to her, he kind of lowered his head as he spoke to her, with his feet positioned one sort of infront of the other. Anyway, she asked him about the departed fellow and Boris said simply, "He was full of beans mam", and she replied something like, "Oh right, I see".

  Funny world sometimes states and governments.

• I’m a couple of days into the newsletter prep experiment, and I have to say, it feels way more laborious. Doing each review right after listening to each podcast really creates a lot of friction to the listening experience. Feels a lot less free flowing than just listening to them all, taking notes, then boshing out all the reviews in one sitting. I’ll soldier on for the rest of the week.

  I think it’s partly made worse by the dire state of the hardware I’m using. Adding links to the git repo takes aaaaaggges. It’s disapointing because I had high hopes I could have added some cool automation to create the newsletter later down the line.

  Anyway, maybe I’ll feel different about it by the end of the week. #

• The offline video cache web browser

  I wish this product would exist.

  It’s a web browser just like Firefox or Chrome, but has a built in core feature that downloads and caches videos for offline viewing. The way it would work:

  • You would be able to select and mark videos on a page for offline viewing
  • These would then download in the background into a local cache
  • The page would also be saved in a local cache
  • Later you could open the page while offline
  • The page would load, and the videos marked for offline viewing would be watchable even though there is no internet connection
  • There would be a download manager for each page so you could easily see which videos were still downloading
  • A nice to have would be functional comments that would sync up later when you get back online

  Offline is still terrible. I wrote about this last year in a piece that explored the state of the offline reading experience, and put together a feature list for an ideal offline reader app.

  I want to be able to watch online videos again!

• I’ve been using the podcast queue feature in my podcast app quite a bit recently. It’s a cool feature. Here’s how I use it:

  • Add to it the most interesting looking episodes after downloading every morning
  • Listen throughout the day
  • Add mostly new stuff, also maybe a few old ones you missed
  • You have to clear it every few days
  • More than 10 items starts to get a bit unmanageable

  The nice thing is that you do all the choosing agead of time, so you are never in a position to have to choose when the world is on the warpath with you. #

• The butch women army appears to be on the warpath with me again. All this morning, when I was trying to buy food they were joking / not joking about food access, and turning up on motorbikes surrounding me, very intimidating. What did I do? I’ve been calling out people as thieves when they quite clearly are steeling my life from me. Since people are constantly steeling my life from me in one way or another, seems to have ruffled some feathers. People want to be able to infiniti block you, but you can’t even call it out. When they do it, it’s a hilarious joke, when you so much as think about it, you are an infiniti Adolf Hitler. #

Today’s links:

• Why Facebook doesn’t use Git - I’m rather heavily invested in git. I use it to write all the software I write, but also for all my blogging. So this was a super interesting article. It’s a great writeup and very interesting software story. Turns out FB use Mercurial which apparently is written in Python, and is very extensible. At the time they chose it, it was way better at handling very large monorepos with many files. Thinking about it, there isn’t any reason I can think of that would stop you from using alternative version control tools with my static site generator, at least not clientside. If I ever do get some form of product off the ground, I might consider adding support for other DVCS’ than git. graphite.dev #

• Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI - How long until this training theft sweeps into the wider society? It’s going to have a much bigger impact than we are currently aware, as many realise they are being exploited by thieving infiniti liars. And the infiniti liars could very well be the most exploited of all. This is going to make Gaza - Isreal seem like a walk in the park. It will be like mini Gaza - Isreals literally everywhere, like fucking Gremlins. That was quite a fun film though. Not so sure it would be fun in real life though. www.proofnews.org #

• Thoughts on Node.js, Deno, and Bun - Some pretty solid advice about writting code that’s portable between javascript runtimes. ckarchive.com #

• New Post: Just ignore them virtually impossible markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Kings and Queens and politics markjgsmith.com #

• Stocks Up & Crypto Flat...Why? (Bankless Podcast) - There’s a whole lot of interesting and very practical stuff discussed in this episode, including how crypto must outperform AI, that 7 companies account for most of the equity markets, the internet bubble vs the AI bubble, money market funds, the disappointment of ETFs, what stablecoins bring to the table, the often forgotten yet very compelling TradFi promise. www.bankless.com #

• My search for proof aliens exist (Ted Talks Daily Podcast) - Astrophysicist Avi Loeb talks about the possibilities of alien civilisations existing in other places in the universe, and describes an expedition he led to find reminents of the first detected interstellar asteroid that crashed into the ocean in the last few years. It’s quite a humorous talk, scientists can be quite funny too :), definitely worth the listen. www.ted.com #

• Why a Bitcoin Treasury is the Winning Strategy with Eric Semler (TFTC Podcast) - I listenned to this earlier under pretty extreme conditions so it was very difficult to concentrate. The part I found very interesting was around why holding Bitcoin in a company treasury can be very beneficial in some circumstances, especially for high margin businesses that tend to hold a lot of cash on their books. It’s an interesting discussion, I wish there were more examples of businesses integrating crypto and Bitcoin into their operations and talking about it. www.tftc.io #

• New Post: The offline video cache web browser markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/16 #

• Right in the middle of another gang stalker escallation cycle. When all is said and done it’s theft. Theft plain and simple. So I’m calling what it is, everytime it happens, which is a lot because each time they try to fix the situation with another theft, each time disguised as something else. Before you know it it’s malicious help after malicious help after malicious help. Each time making the situation even worse while pretending to be the saviours. Until maximum perversion, at which point the entire social system starts to break down. And eventually I get blamed and often mutilated.

  Another starvation cycle is just about to start. The malicious help from last night involved two girls in their twenties on a motorbike ostensibly giving out meals, except they made a point of giving the weird old lady, who now is permanently camped outside the shop, a meal too. I could sense there was something up the second they artived. Anyway, opened the meal to find it was half sized. Thiefs.

  The other very weird thing that happened earlier in the evening, was that during the rain storm the weird old lady came over to where I was sheltering and started acting very bizarely, what can only be described as sexual advances. She eventually went away. During the night a meal was left in the place she had been sitting. All this stuff is harassment, it’s of a sexual nature. It’s combined with starvation, and constant anger goading. It is frankly disgusting.

  It’s all ultimately theft. Stop stealing from me world. Stealing someone’s life is murder.

  There have been at least 4 police walk bys this morning, so it’s clear it’s going to escallate in some way and everything will once again get blamed on me. #

• I’m going to try to write the podcast reviews as I listen to them this week, rather than wait until the end of the week. Hopefully it will improve both the reviews and the newsletter intro. It remains to be seen how the world will react to this new way of doing things. Let’s hope for the best.

  Update: Almost immediate push back from a world on the warpath yet again. Even a wiff if possible change sends the wirkd into perversion mode, where everything gets perverted and escallated and warpathed. One must persevere. #

• The newsletter preparation experiment

  I'm going to try something a bit different this week as far as the newsletter goes. I usually just listen to podcasts throughout the week, sometimes taking notes, and wait until the end of the week to put it all together into an issue. This week I’m going to try, as much as possible, to write the podcast reviews as soon as I listen to an episode that I star, and create a link on the linkblog. That way at the end of the week I’ll only have to write the newsletter intro, and just gather up all the reviews, which will already be written.

  I suppose it could be a bit of a spoiler if you already read the blog and linkblog and look forward to the newsletter. On the other hand perhaps it’s a nice way to encourage newsletter readers to read the website more regularly. The newsletter intro will of course always be original content written at the end of the week. The new way might even improve that part because I won’t be as burdonned by the weight of writting the reviews, and the reviews might be better because they will have been written while the episode is fresh in my mind.

  Let’s see how it goes.

• Following on from yesterday evening’s bizare sexual harrassment from the weird old lady, there was more of it this morning. Her new thing is to dump enormous amounts of tissues in your path, right in the gutter. Avid readers will remember that there was an incident in last week’s escallations involving condoms left in the gutter on front of the internet place. And you will also remember that ice lollys have started to feature everytime the weird old lady gets on a warpath.

  Well wouldn’t you know it, this morning at the shop / cafe, ice scream lolly wrapers left exactly where I charge my devices. Add to that all sorts of anger goading involving not flushing the toilet, sugar free coke bottles, and a bunch of other weird shit I won’t get into right now. It’s intimidation escallation, masquerading as perhaps humour, but really it’s harrassment.

  Ultimately it’s theft, using up even more of my time that’s alteady being fully stolen by the gang stalker pervert thieves. #

• I partly really like the expression / turn of phrase "And so on and so forth". It means roughly speaking something like "etc etc" but slightly cleverer because it demands of the listener to extrapolate based on what you just said and imagine similar examples.

  It’s good because it can save time when you are talking about something quite complex, time you can use to build up important ideas rather than laboriously be going over examples. When it’s used well, it is saying to the other person, "I know you know what I mean, you are a smart person, I'm not going to bother you with unnecessary explanations". If it’s used sparingly and respectfully it can be very effective at keeping the conversation moving forward.

  Having said that, there is the danger of over-use, of using it as a crutch, a way to be lazy, asking the listener to do your job for you. These are not respectful ways to use this expression.

  Anyway, I'm writting about it here so that I remember to use it sometimes. My impression is that I rarely use it. I think if used correctly it can make you sound quite smart. #

• Having been more focussed on UK and US politics than I usually am for the past few months, one thing that I think many brits are suprised about in the US is the level of hatred between various groups. Of course in the UK we have all sorts of disagreements too, but my impression is that the level of underlying hatred is much less pronounced.

  I could be wrong about this in some places, but on average, I think people tend to get along better most of the time.

  I wonder what people in the US think about the levels of hatred in the UK? #

• Do you even memecoin?

  I wish there was more information out there about people trying to use memecoins / altcoins for serious projects. There’s lots of talk about memecoins, about celebrities starting their own memecoins, most seem to eventually fail. I haven’t read about many folks actually seriously trying to put these new technologies to good use over and above just glorified pump and dump schemes.

  I was looking at pump.fun earlier in the week, but it really just looks like a scam site. I thought the description as the 4chan for memecoins was kind of interesting. I think I'd be looking for something a bit more like the reddit for memecoins or the hacker news for memecoins. All this is very vague because I have hardly any idea how this would manifest, or what it would look like.

  It’s not clear to me how folks are using these coins with their projects. Is it purely for investment, or are they being used for governance too? If it is for investment, how do the launchers of the coin get value from it?

  But there are people trying out interesting modern digital ways to fund projects. I’ve read about decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), sounds great but it’s almost all theoretical. How do you actually set one of these things up?

  What do you actually need to start a memecoin? Can you do it just from your mobile phone?

• Just heard that brain - machine interface companies are collectively now referred to as Neurotech. I guess it makes sense, even if it feels a bit icky that there are folks building companies around our neurons. #

• Rudimentary backup of our civilization

  The chances are still unfortunately very high that our civilisation is going to destroy itself in some way. We need a rudimentary backup.

  Recently I’ve been hearing multiple people mention the Tesla Roadster than Elon put up into space a while back. It’s in some crazy orbit near Mars or something. I wonder whether we shouldn’t try to expand on this idea, and put the equivalent of a space pyramid up there in orbit. Something that would be there for several billions of years.

  That way any future civilisation that rises from the ashes of ours, that reached the same level of technology as us now, would at least know life existed previously on Earth / in the solar system a long time ago, even if there is still no sign of life anywhere else. That would be very useful to know.

  Of course it would need to be much bigger than a car, probably something more like a football field, in order for it to be easily findable by telescopes.

  I would guess that the fact that there is no such thing in our solar system, suggests strongly that we are the most advanced civilisation that has ever existed orbiting this star. That in itself is an interesting thought. It’s quite a responsability.

Today’s links:

• New Post: The newsletter preparation experiment markjgsmith.com #

• Bank of England Economist: Interest rates must be cut (The Rest is Money Podcast) - Robert and Steph have economist and external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Swati Dhingra on the show. There’s much interesting and intelligent discussion all very relevant to the government changeover in this episode. While listening to this I was struck by how special it is that these 3, with such different backgrounds, are all living in the same country, all call it their home, and all earnestly working together at a very high level to make it a better place for everyone. Even just the variety in accents is something that is incredible. There are very few other places in the world that have this. It’s amazing. podcastindex.org #

• New Post: Do you even memecoin? markjgsmith.com #

• Shares in Trump’s media group leap by a third after assassination attempt - Around $2bn has been added to the valuation of Trump Media and Technology Group, which uses his initials DJT as its ticker. The company is 60% owned by thr former president, so his personal stake had risen by $1bn.www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Rudimentary backup of our civilization markjgsmith.com #

• Whitney Webb & Mark Goodwin on How Intelligence Agencies Capture Everything (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Whitney Webb has this unbelievable ability to paint enormous, completely self consistent pictures, based on limited available data. It’s really quite something. What it amounts to is one possible version of reality, of "the truth", that’s incredibly convincing. Mark Goodwin is pretty darn good at it too. I think it’s worth remembering that before embarking on a podcast journey with them. Worth remembering also, especially if you are a builder of things, that there are other, as self consistent realities possible. It’s still nevertheless a fascinating ride. In this part 1 of 2 they discuss among other topics, why stablecoins are keeping the dollar afloat, the dwindleing petro dollar system, the emerging bitcoin dollar system, banks becoming information brokers, Arpanet’s (the precursor to the internet) history with intelligence agencies, and some of the dangers of public private partnerships. Kind of heavy in places, but so much to think about. Really looking forward to part 2 :)www.whatbitcoindid.com #

2024/07/15 #

• Shoplifting bloke appears to have disapeared the past 2 days, but he’s been replaced by another bloke who basically does the same charade. This bloke has a mobile phone and a backpack, looks much more normal. He stands there for ages looking at his mobile phone, looking confused. Then over to the shop, looking confused. He’s holding a plastic bag with something in it. Then eventually disapears.

  There’s also been this other older bloke on a motorbike that’s stopped two days in a row, yesterday evening with some food gift. He's very grumpy.

  The police did several walk-bys early this morning. That’s unusual. I mention all these things because I know from experience that they will all coalesce into some sort of thing where I get blamed for everything. They always do.

  Even as I write this note, two motorbike gang stalkers drove past and shouted No! at me. And so it goes, everything will be my fault now for the rest of the day. #

• I’ve listenned to several politics podcasts discussing the Trump assassination attempt and though there was much mention of the fist in the air, no one has mentioned the bizare nazi salute thing as he was evacuated from the stage. Was the video I watched a fake?

  Apparently he was shouting 'fight' rather than the f-word, which is what I thought at first. A bit weird but I can see how in the heat of the moment that could happen. But a nazi solute? WTF is that about?

  If it turns out I did watch the official real video, it’s really strange that everyone is just pretending the nazi solute didn’t happen.

  As part of today’s escallations from locals, there has been another photographer (there was one yesterday too), some sexual harrassment and a walk-by past me as I sat in the park earlier loudly saying 'fight fight'. Oh and another police walk-by in the shop / cafe I’m in now. What are the chances? #

• Parodying yourself

  I've heard two examples of this recently. I’m starting to wonder if it’s a thing people do.

  First there was Louis Theroux, on a recent episode where he sits down for a catchup with fellow podcaster and childhood friend Adam Buxton. From what I remember from the show, Adam was doing an impression of Louis, and Louis then tries to mimic the impression, very effectively I might add, so he’s basically parodying himself. It’s very funny.

  At the time I remember thinking I wouldn’t even know how to parody myself. I can hardly even recognise myself in the mirror most days.

  Anyway I didn’t think much of it until I started listening to Ed Zitron. His recent episode with some of the Vergecast folks is pretty good for example. He’s got a very east end of London kind of accent. What occurred to me was that at times he really lays the accent on thick, it’s like a total piss take. The interesting thing is that you momentarily wonder if his accent is real or not. It feels uncomfortable. Then he returns to the normal version, and you are comfortable again. Few. It occurred to me this might be a very effective way to get people to unknowingly trust you. If you do it enough that is. Btw whether it’s a put on thing or not, Ed’s reporting and analysis is top notch.

  The reason this popped into my consciousness today, is because I’d made a note to write about it a while back, but also because yesterday someone tried to assasinate Trump and he did a fight fist followed by what looked like a nazi salute as he was evacuated off stage, and everyone is ignoring it, and I thought wouldn’t it be the ultimate extreme self parody if it turned out he was taking the piss? Is he an actor or a comedian, or both? Or indeed neither?

  Another extreme self parody that springs to mind is Stevo from Jackass who had an enormous tatoo of himself done on his back.

  Anyway just thinking about self parody today, wondering if it’s a thing people do on purpose, or whether perhaps it’s some weird Carl Yung shit people do unknowingly. Or perhaps both.

• I hope I've reached peak blog post weirdness.

  They seem to be getting a bit weirder everyday.

  Must keep reminding myself we are living in the best days.

  Pretty sure there’s a Beatles song about all this :) #

• There was an interesting interaction between lawyers on a recent Vergecast episode all about music copyright in the age of AI [20:10]:

  Nilay Patel: Professor, let’s say you didn’t have Jonny B Good in the training data, but then you had the entire architecture of Rock ‘n Roll, that is built on Jonny B Good. Could you back your way into Jonny B Good?

  David Pierce: Monkeys and type writers and Shakespeare right? Is that the theory here?

  Nilay Patel: Do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of Rock ‘n Roll?

  Professor Charlie of NYU: That’s a really good question because if you look at this entire era of music where RnB, Rock ‘n Roll, Rockabilly, are all kind of one entity, the music is drawing on 12 bar blues, a very standard song structure, they are often in the same keys that play well on guitar, they are using the same guitar licks, they are mostly using pentatonic scales, they are using the same language, and you might think yeah you could sort of back into that. But the precise rhythms, the exact words? Let’s be clear, the copy is worse, it does not sound nearly as good as the real Jonny B Good.

  He goes on to say anyone defending the AI would lose. But it brings up an important question. Could you train an AI, remember it’s an infinite training regression, that would guarantie a specific output? What if you actually could?

  This is likely bigger than just copyright. It’s much more akin to fate. #

• Isn’t it a bit strange that the EU appears to hate vertically integrated companies like Apple, throwing all sorts of antitrust cases at them, but they also hate crypto, which is basically the opposite of a vertically integrated company? #

• Enough will never be enough

  The folks at TWIT have an interesting discussion about AI destroying the web [53:35]:

  Paris Martineau: The question I always have about these Large Language Models and generative output machines is what is the end game? Assuming something like Perplexity becomes successful, let’s say in their wildest dreams everything works, everybody uses Perplexity instead of Google search. They are looking for answers instead of combing through all these links. In 5 - 10 years what is going to happen? If you have a world where all of it is you have users coming to your site to look at your content and not going away to where the content is coming from, no one is going to be creating content to feed into that machine. It seems just incredibly short sited. And as of right now this is not a business model…like they are not making any money.

  Leo Laporte: No you are right they are not making money, that’s why they are trying to raise money, but you are right, in the long run if you cannibalise all your sources, there won’t be any sources left. And then what do you do?

  Since you have to eat or you will die, it only works if all the AI companies club together and enslave the content creators in a giant communist prison gulag. They give you food and you give the world content. But they will never be happy because they want to be free and you requiring food will make them think you are enslaving them, even though it is they that have enslaved you. You will be blamed for everything always, and made to pay for the horrible things they do to you, with your life, and it still won’t be enough.

Today’s links:

• ‘Britain is back’: Keir Starmer promises UK will be at the heart of Europe - With both Germany and France in disarray politically, thd UK is stepping up efforts to strengthen relations with Europe around defense. Seems like a good strategy that could lead to other deals. www.theguardian.com #

• ‘A galvanising sense of unity’: a football team that is multiracial and distinctively English - As I write this the match will have finished a few hours ago. I need to get to the internet place so I can see the result. What a way to start a new government for England it would be. I find this whole thing about englishness fascinating. I wonder how it will trickle into other non-football parts of society. www.theguardian.com #

• Spain beat England 2:1 in Euro 2024 - Oh crap. And the bloody world is defo on the warpath again with me too. Just another day in passive aggressive escallation hell. #

• The return of crypto venture capital - Investments from VCs rose from $2.5bn in Q1 to $3.2bn in Q2, median deal size rose from $3mn to $3.2mn. www.ft.com #

• Webvm - A serverless vitual linux OS running in your browser using HTML5 and Web Assembly. Pretty darn cool. It’s entirely running in your webvm.io #

• New Post: Parodying yourself markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Enough will never be enough markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/14 #

• The world has gotten itself into another muddle, and it’s blaming me for everything again, going through the by now very familar escallation cycles, that eventually stop making any kind of sense, and you get mutilated. Several malicious help incidents yesterday evening, and motorbike gang stalker intimidation for much of the night and into the morning. Lots of yah’ing already today and it’s hardly even daylight. Looks like another day of spiritual traffic jams is upon us.

  I re-read my elections turnout blog post from yesterday, which at the time of writing felt a bit confused, but it’s not that bad. I think it expresses vaguely what I was trying to say.

  Worth noting, now that I’m up and writing, all the gang stalking has completely stopped. No more drive-bys from loud clunky motorbikes loaded up with scummy kids shouting abuse and driving around like hooligans, no more drive-bys by gravely voiced old men, or from mid twenties normies also on motorbikes. When the gang stalking and intimidation starts, it’s from all walks of life. But it can cease as quick as it started, and then it’s as if it never happened.

  Hopefully the world will somehow find a way off the warpath it’s gotten itself snagged onto. #

• Raoul Pal: "These are all decentralised businesses that sell blockspace, and they have different qualities to their blockspace, or a different narrative on what makes their blockspace effective"

  Reminds me of when Amazon S3 was introduced all those years ago. Maybe we’ll start to think about crypto as the blockspace internet. #

• The future of crypto and high end NFTs

  Raoul Pal makes the case in his latest podcast Surfing the crypto wave, that now is the time for investing in crypto and high end NFTs. It’s an interesting conversation with Chris Burniske and worth listening to if you are wondering what the future of the digital assets industry will look like.

  First, Raoul considers the size of the opportunity:

  So when I look at it, I just look at the growth of the space, and it grows at a hundred and something percent a year, which is twice the speed of the internet, because obviously it’s built on internet rails, so it should go quickly. And I just extrapolate that trend out and I look at it and it's like it’s a $2.5 trillion dollar space today, if we carry on, by 2032 it’s $100 trillion. That’s the largest accumulation of wealth in all of human history in the shortest period of time. Even if I’m wrong by 50% because I’m a total moron, it’s the same as 100 years of value acrual of the S&P500 in 8 years. It’s banannas. [00:38:32]

  So there’s potentially a lot of money on the table. That’s clear, but what is all this tokenisation all about in the first place?

  How do you get capital into the hands of people that don’t have it, and then help them grow it?

  This is why I’m really passionate about the future of social tokens, digital network states and tokenised smaller economies, because they create community and capital. In the past they tended to be different, but it’s the same thing. And so I’m seeing this blending of community and capital everywhere, whether it’s GameStop in the last cycle or even a bit this cycle or whether it’s crypto overall.

  But I do think that social tokens in whatever format they end up being, we are still testing them, between NFTs and memes and all this stuff, it’s all around the same idea. That somehow we are going to tokenise small economies better, that you can participate in, and now you’ve got capital in them. Before you just couldn’t do that. [01:20:35]

  Seems like it’s a new, more efficient, more flexible way of allocating capital to projects. Even if you forget about the financial upside altogether, there is something very fascinating about all this, a way to coordinate activity around particular topics and communities, a way to enable people to build cool things together.

  The money is a big part of it though. In the past, that has typically ended up in the same places:

  If you’re going to generate a lot of wealth, I've seen this before, because a lot of my ex-collegues were hedge fund managers who owned big hedge fund businesses, they became obscenely rich. What did they buy? Property and art. All of them. Many of them have multi-billion dollar art collections.

  Then I remember the russians coming in after the Berlin wall came down. They started getting really rich in early 2000. They bought everything in the art market, and everything property market. Then we saw it with the chinese, with the indians, we saw it with the silicon valley guys. They’ve all done the same trade, and we are going to do that all over again.

  What’s so interesting is humans like to take a snapshot of culture from when the magic was happening. And we all know that the magic is happening now. It has been for a few of years. [...]

  So anyone that makes a lot of money is likely to celebrate this with high end NFTs, particularly the culturally relevant ones. [01:27:37]

  It certainly is a pretty good sales pitch.

  This new generation, with their new norms around digital assets, if they made their money in digital assets, they are going to be much more comfortable investing in that space too. In a lot of ways digital assets are much more convenient than real physical assets anyway.

  So the logic is I suppose, invest now in digital assets at low prices, and reap the benefits when the winners innevitably need to park their hard won cash, and the prices of those digital assets, which you bought on the cheap, go up.

  Of course, it’s risky, after all why wouldn’t the winners of this generation of entrepreneurs just buy real property and real art?

  If I’m honest, that’s where I’m stuck on all this. Probably the winners will buy both real and digital assets. They won’t want to see what they’ve built crumble to the ground, so they will have to re-invest a certain amount back in, but it seems to me that they are going to try and maximise their physical asset purchases.

  Overall I’m not completely convinced by Raoul’s thesis, though I do think there’s something interesting happening here. What that is exactly will get more obvious over time.

  We want to spend our time building cool things, but we also want to make money doing it. How that plays out is still very much undecided, so I’m paying attention to the space, but I think you have to be somewhat cautious.

Today’s links:

• Eno review – exhilarating Brian Eno documentary that’s different at every screening - I’ve always liked and been very curious about Brian Eno. His is a very unique way of looking at the world. I really liked his auto generated music, had one of the albums that came out of that, and found it very relaxing. I also like his vision around ambient music and sound. This documentary sounds awesome, but as the reviewer points out, and somewhat amuzingly, posses a certain amount of difficulty to review. It would be fun to watch this documentary every year, I wonder what it would do to your memory. www.theguardian.com #

• ‘This is biblical’: England fans blag lifts, camp and get ready for Euro 2024 final - I’m of course incredibly happy they’ve gotten to the finals and hope they win. Though I don’t recognize many of the names, because it’s been years since I really followed any sports, I really hope they win. All the best everyone, would be great to have something to tease those tapas eating spaniards with, even though I am very fond of both tapas and spaniards :) www.theguardian.com #

• ‘Amazing’ new technology set to transform the search for alien life - We are about to be in a position of being able to capture way more data than at any time previously, with several new telescopes abd radio arrays about to come online. Add to that powerful AI to analyse the data. We'll be in a position to detect not only intensionally directed communication but unintensional too, such as emisions from alien airport radar, or powerful TV transmitters. www.theguardian.com #

• Donald Trump rushed off stage at rally after sound of gunshots ring out – live updates - The footage I saw on Twitter was kind of weird. I didn’t have audio, but he appeared to be repeatedly saying the f-word, which is compleately understandable if you've just been shot at. But the very weird thing is that as the security staff huddled him off, he seemed to do a nazi salute. Bizare. In any case, hope he’s doing okay. www.theguardian.com #

• Solana-Based Pump.fun Emerges As The Go-To Platform For Memecoin Creation, Report - I’ve been wondering how easy it would be to setup a memecoin for some of my development projects. I wonder if it’s a feasible way to raise money or attention for serious projects. Anyway, based on this site it seems it probably isn’t, as it just looks like a glitchy mega scam site. Is there anything like this but for semi-serious projects? bitcoinist.com #

• New Post: The future of crypto and high end NFTs markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/13 #

• I got this week’s newsletter issue writen and scheduled. That’s always a relief. There’s something odd that it does to time, which can upset your rythm a bit. I can’t quite put my finger on the specifics, but the process of writing the newsletter is some sort of huge compression of the entire week. I find it often leaves you in a strange state where you feel like you're having to catchup with everything.

  Anyway today is going to be about listening to some podcasts, trying not to stress too much, eating some food, maybe a blog post. Doing my best not to get all caught up in the weird newsletter compression thing. #

• This is Funworld (Issue #172)

  This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-07-13)

  In this week’s edition:

  Far out science, Diggnation reunion, comedy & Carl Yung, crazy politics, Bitcoin crashes, video games & philosophy, atemporality of music, the USD afterparty, europe, and frankencompanies

  Issue details:

  • Title: This is Funworld
  • Issue: 172
  • Page: issue webpage

• Some half baked thoughts about election turnout numbers

  I'm having trouble thinking this through and articulating it, so bear with me. Hopefully this will turn into something a bit more cohesive over time. That’s part of the magic of blogging, it doesn’t a always have to be perfect, it’s a journey, it’s a work in progress.

  It seems only 50% of the population voted in the recent UK elections. My initial reaction to this was that it’s a rather terrible statistic. I think the thinking is that you really want the number to be high so you can have greater confidence that the government that gets voted in is well aligned with most of the population. That seems to make some logical sense.

  For comparison, I read a figure that the French election turnout was 67%. On the surface that seems like a much "better" number. But is it really though? The more I think about it, the more I’m starting to think there’s a lot more nuance involved.

  Perhaps a low turnout is a sign people don’t feel engaged in society, and that might be a sign of bad things to come. On the other hand I’d also be worried if the turnout was very high but everyone was super partisan. For example, it‘s clear that things are in pretty bad shape in France politically. Sure we had a low turnout in the UK, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. What is the turnout number even telling us?

  I feel like we are looking at this number like it‘s a speedometer when it’s actually measuring something slightly ridiculous like the number of birds that fly by per minute, which tells you precisely not much at all.

  I'd like to be better informed on exactly what this number tells us, and what it doesn’t.

• I totally did get caught up in the newsletter compression thing. I don’t know if I’m describing this very well. Anyway this is me sort of getting out of that, having published a blog post, some links and a few notes. Gosh it sure was very confusing getting this all sorted though.

  Sometimes the world just wants to fight you on absolutely everything. It punishes you for punishing you then forces you to pay for your own punishment, then is righteously offended by you just for existing.

  Still managed a newsletter issue, a blog post, a few links, some notes, and listened to a few cool pods. Oh and I ate some really nice food.

  Peace world, your friend Mark. x #

Today’s links:

• 🚀 Latest Newsletter: This is Funworld (Issue #172) markjgsmith.com #

• Lowest turnout in UK general election since universal suffrage, report shows - Only about 50% of people voted. Another interesting way of thinking about it - "if non-voting was a party, it would have the largest share of support by far". www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Some half baked thoughts about election turnout numbers markjgsmith.com #

2024/07/12 #

• Today I'm going to try to tentatively take a look at the re-organisation of deploy workflows I had been working on last month when I got blocked by a build minutes shortage. The scope has decreased somewhat in the interim because I've improved the npm module caching in the existing main website deploy workflow, so I likely no longer need to separate out the cache refresh code. The plan is to move to reusable Github Action workflows, so that all the repos, including the plugins all use the eact same build and deploy workflow which are all in a special shared repository.

  This is one of those bits of work that makes you feel much better with the code base because something which is vital and often used, which currently has quite a lot of duplicated code, suddenly becomes 1 cohesive and consuatent well tested bit of code. All sorts of silly mistakes that can easily get introduced by copy paste mistakes that lead to almost the same code diverging, just totally disapear. It’s the sort ot thing that feels a bit like when you do a very thorough spring cleaning of your house, but where you've additionally built some shelves and put together some neat looking Ikea cupboards. Everything feels more robust and useful.

  I’m going to ease into it, and continue with the main focus on blogging. I don’t want to get into any issues with the build minutes this month. From what I recall I had a minimum viable version working, and it was just a question of moving over the more complicated workflow into 3 seperate workflows that are each reusable. One for build, one for deploy and one for backup. Quietly optimistic and excited about it. #

Today’s links:

• TryGhost/ActivityPub - A multitenant ActivityPub server for Ghost, built with Fedify. github.com #

• h4l/json.bash - "json.bash is a command-line tool and bash library that creates JSON" - I could see this being a very useful tools to have on your toolbelt. Syntax looks really easy to understand. github.com #

• Waiter, there's a whale in my bucket! - It’s possible to use S3 buckets to hist your container files, and though you can't docker push, docker pull not only works fine but is much faster than hosting using a container registry, since yhe image layers download in patallel using regular HTTP requests. Could be useful in some dev and testing situations. ochagavia.nl #

2024/07/11 #

• Rough few days, especially after last week where I only ate a meal 3 out of 7 days. After each bought of starvation my body takes a couple of days to recover, only to be plunged right back into another starvation. A westerner that occasionally stops for a chat passed by earlier this evening, gifted me a meal and a bottle of coke. The food was wonderful, my body was craving some nutrients, and it was also really great to have an actual conversation with another human lasting more than two words long. About 20 minutes later someone stopped on a motorbike and gifted me some chicken and rice. After days of bullying and starvation it’s nice just for my existence to be acknowledged.

  Pretty sure I'll realise later that there’s some meliciousness mixed in somewhere that I just haven’t noticed yet. I know from experience there always tends to be, it’s like clockwork. The dark side of things is always hiding between the cracks somewhere. In any case, for now it feels good. #

2024/07/10 #

• Rained quite a lot last night. Weird shoplifter bloke still hanging around. He appears to be pretending he was actually bringing gifts to the weird old lady that now hangs out outside the shop almost 24/7. Of course he would do that wouldn’t he if he was shoplifting, because he doesn’t want her to rat him out. I'm still calling him little boy to try and put him off so that I don’t get blamed for his criminality. There's not much else I can do. I certainly don’t want any violence. And the reality is he’s actually steeling from me. I saw him walk past the internet place yesterday, so no doubt something is going to happen there soon related to all this.

  I fixed the website's everything RSS feed, which was quite the challenge because the world literally always starts starving me any time I do any work on the RSS feeds. I pretty much only have to look at the feed code and starvation gets initiated, along with enormous infiniti total reality inversion bullying from every direction. It’s like a mass delusion pavlovian response or something. Anyway the urls in the by date everything feed had an undefined variable, breaking the urls.

  I had to add a way to seperate the webRoot and the itemsWebRoot in the template where you define a feed. That fixes the urls for feeds that are based on mixed data sources. I also updated both the Twitter and Mastodon autoposter tools, so there should only be a single auto posted link each day to the latest everything page post, rather than seperate auto posts for notes and links. I decided to keep an auto poster for individual blog posts. I want these to stand out a bit, since they are the most valuable content. Over the next few days it will hopefully be more obvious if the balance is right.

  Okay pat yourselves on the back 10x everyone, time to do some work. #

• In what-are-the-chances-world news, a new hot social media app called No Place is in the headlines, barely a week after the infiniti No! saga. #

• Cobbling together companies is trending

  The Vergecast Podcast did an episode all about cobbling together companies from the existing parts of existing companies, literally 2 days after I wrote about cobbling together a company from existing parts. My spelling mistakes and terrible wording hadn't even dried yet. Another candidate for what-are-the-chances-world news, but I digress.

  It’s actually quite a good episode, and I think probably a sign that in the future, actual real companies that do complicated and important shit are going to have to create ridiculously elaborate fake products and companies just to distract the children of the mega rich, to avoid being highjacked by morons, and to ensure we don’t inadvertently flush the entire human race down the toilet. And that will eventually backfire as we’ll need to create a deep state just to break back out into base reality, and then we’ll need to somehow destroy the deep state, and to do that we put comedians in charge.

  Eventually the Labour and Conservative political parties are replaced by Comedians vs Actors, which will probably be called the More Ha Ha party and the Sshh They Don't Know party. Which one created which will be hotly debated inside the Communist party which will likely take over as it makes the Sshh They Don't Know party pretend they don't exist, while literally murdering the More Ha Ha party by convincing them that the self-disapeared Sshh They Don't Know party, is the funniest joke in the entire universe.

  The Howard - Weinstein appearance on Joe Rogan is likely a sign this has already happened and we are living in a fractal of nested simulations. And that your mommy and daddy likely [aren’t / weren’t] who they [say / said] they [are / were]. Sorry.

• Jeff Snider from the Eurodollar University podcast asks why isn’t Bitcoin dominating the commercial landscape?

  It‘s an interesting episode, a recording of a recent conference presentation he made. He looks back at the fascinating history and evolution of ledger based money. He notes that each time there had been a massive step change in the technology, the adoption has happened rapidly within less than 15 years. Bitcoin had been around for that amoung of time, and it’s getting very popular, but the adoption just isn’t comparable.

  One problem he identifies is that in order to use your Bitcoin you have to convert it to Eurodollars, the current best version of ledger money that we use. He argues that that’s not a payment system. Jeff believes Bitcoin took a wrong turn by overly focusing on store of value, when the market wants a dynamic highly useable money. A better way of exchanging value.

  It’s not to say it’s store of value isn’t really useful, but it does make you wonder whether Bitcoin will become the next evolutionary step in ledger based money. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: Cobbling together companies is trending markjgsmith.com #

• The Right Kind of Stubborn - Makes the case that there are two types of stubborn people, namely persistent and obstinate. And that the later is bad. It’s well written just like all PG's writting and very thoughtful. Interesting observations, important to be aware that there is a difference, but also remember life can sometimes throw you into very extreme situations. IMO, these can be choices rather than something built into a person’s character. paulgraham.com #

• Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring - These look pretty cool. Definitely want to try one out. It's a $200 dollar smartphone, a $69 smartwatch and $59 wireless ear buds. The smartphone looks kind of cool, runs Android and has relatively good spec with 8GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, 5G support, dual-SIM, an under-display optical fingerprint sensor, 5,000-mAh battery cell with 33-watt fast-charging, 50-megapixel main camera, sensor to capture depth for portrait mode, 16-MP selfie shooter, and expandable storage up to 2 terabytes via microSD. Unfortunately only in bright orange which is gastly. Hopefully they will try some less intense colors at some stage. www.wired.com #

• US Disrupts Russian Bots Spreading Propaganda on Twitter - The big thing in this story is the involvement of RT, which I guess is the quite popular in some places Russia Today media company. They alledgedly participated in the development of the bot farm software called Meliorator, which enables people to manage hundreds of fake social media accounts to distribute pro-russian Ukraine war propaganda. www.pcmag.com #

• This $1.5 Billion AI Company Is Building A ‘General Purpose Brain’ For Robots - Reminder that we are kind of close to T2 Judgement Day type scenarios. Are they really going to open source robotics specific models like the one mentioned here? So many catch-22s everywhere, we want freedom but with control, but who will end up having the control? The game theory on this stuff is insane, in a way, it makes nuclear deterents feel a bit quaint. www.forbes.com #

• YouTube Embeds are Bananas Heavy and it’s Fixable - Apparently not only do they add entire mega bytes to the page, but if you add multiple embeds then multiple mega bytes get added. I’m kind of suprised to hear that because I remember videobloggers over 10 years ago with many youtube embeds on their pages and the pages didn’t take that long to load. Anyhow worth knowing about if you are working with video and having unnexpectedly large pages. frontendmasters.com #

• Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships - I wish there were more real world examples of data structures used in large RL projects. While I do use things like classes to keep data and functionality together in my static generator for example, and I put a lot of thought into the best way to store and combine these, I’m not sure that that qualifies as data structures. I tend to use simple objects and arrays to store class instances. I've tried a few times to write, for example, a generalised queue data structure and got into trouble. The code was way simpler just using an array. Not to say I wouldn't consider this though. It very well might be easier now that the main app structure is much better defined and might allow for more advanced features. read.engineerscodex.com #

2024/07/09 #

• Weird shoplifter bloke has been making more and more appearences. He just sits at the other end of the bench and tries to see when the nearby shop staff go into the back room so he can swipe stuff. At the same time to this, not unco-incidentally police have been turning up in other places that I go to. Yesterday one, who was enormous and a bit fat, sat directly on front of me next to a small young woman that had been sitting there for a while. He proceeded to continuously pat her on the back and side, just like how you would pat a dog. He then was basically necking with her interspersed with patting for most of lunch time.

  Once again perhaps not uncoincidentally previous to this at the internet place there were used condom packets in the street in the gutter.

  And once again previous to that, an old women dressed entirely in red was ostensibly doing early morning exercises in the exact spot where last week the gang stalkers had left a dead rat. Her exercise was very strange. She was facing the wall, both hands on it, then girating her torso backwards and forwards, so she was basically being the man in some bizare doggy style position.

  Don’t try to tell me none of this stuff is linked. That’s fucking bullshit. All these events are totally linked. It's anger goading, it’s intimidation, and it’s a total time suck for me, and that’s equivalent to murder. Get your feets off my neck world.

  Whenever shoplifter bloke shows up, I’ve started loudly saying 'go to bed little boy'. I have to deter him peacefully, because I’m going to end up being blamed for his shoplifting. Not to mention that people don’t stop to help when he’s loitering there, so he‘s literally starving me. He's now showing up early morning and all through the evening.

  Rowdy scummy gang stalker kids on motorbikes are driving by shouting 'Lie!' loudly right after shoplifter bloke leaves now. These are the same type that a few weeks ago physicslly assaulted me. They have attacked me with rocks many times before. Once they threw a huge stone brick at me that hit me directly in the face. These events always have huge aftermaths that last for days.

  Just another impossible situation. I’ll be the one who ends up being mutilated, and blamed for everything, then starved even more than they are already starving me.

  I wish I had more positive things to write about, because it’s not doing much for my employability, but this is life for me at the minute. And since I'm a blogger, I write about life, so it would be disengenuous for me to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  Everything is a catch-22 these days. #

• What the world says: Commons for everyone!

  What the world really means: No safe commons for you, and if you try not to use the commons, we'll punish you too! #

• John Gruber on iPadOS [01:53:34]:

  It’s like they’ve painted themselves into a corner and blindfolded themselves so they can’t see that they are painted in a corner. […]

  There is no easy solution. […]

  I feel like collectively Apple is just pretending it’s not a problem. […]

  General rule of thumb, you should eliminate modes, cause modes just aren’t intuitive, and they aren’t how people think. But the iPad is all about modes.

• From my blog post The Future of iPados vs Macos [30/05/2024]:

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

• John Gruber on The EU and DMA [02:19:16]:

  I really can’t help but think though that there are a lot of DMA proponents who really think it’s just about busting up the App Store, when it’s way more far reaching than that, and really does open up Apple non-compliance fines for anything that they do that is vertically integrated within their own products and services. […]

  I think henceforth, every future thing Apple does is going to come late and possibly limited to the EU. If Apple Watch were brand new, it would definitely be delayed, because it only works with iPhones. I think that’s illegal under the DMA, or it could be. They would need them to rule, and they don’t want to rule in advance, and Apple doesn’t want to tell them in advance. That’s not the Apple way of doing things.

  "Hey we’re thinking about unveiling these new smart glasses next year. What do you guys think in the EU?" - They’re not going to do that.

• Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart on the french mind [30:06]:

  Alistair: And she said, I'll translate as I go, she said "it's not the least of the paradoxes, that on the evening..."

  Rory: I love the fact that when you translate french you have to go, "it is not the least of the paradoxes". If you were editing this into english prose, would you start with "it is not the least of the paradoxes"? [laughing]

  Alistair: "Ce n’est pas le moindre des paradoxes"..."that on the eve of the most important european elections in history, the most european of french presidents, took the least european of decisions to shake up Europe."

  Rory: Wait wait wait...before we go on, what a beautiful expression of the french mind. Not the least of paradoxes, the most european of presidents, on the eve of the european elections, took the least european of decisions...

  Alistair: It’s brilliant, exactly exactly, exactly

  I absolutely love this interaction. You really have to listen to it to get the full picture. The thing is, both Rory and Alistair speak very good french, as do I, and the unspoken bit, is that when you read the french press, it really is absolutely packed with this kind of unbelievably flowery language.

  It’s such a wonderful insight into french culture. But it’s great because it’s two politics nerds and admirers of France stumbling upon something that is so very very french.

  They are both taking the piss somewhat, but also being affectionate, at the same time. I can confirm it really is a very french turn of phrase.

  And it probably says something about the UK and even Europe in general as well. Btw, the english press has it’s own quirks when it comes to turns of phrase.

  Imagine all the shit we’ve had to go through that have resulted in these ridiculus yet beautiful ways of speaking. It boggles my mind. #

Today’s links:

• Rachel Reeves plans urgent assessment of spending inheritance - Is it just me or is that a strange way of phrasing this topic. Using the word inherit sure, but inheritance? Hasn’t that got a very high probability of triggering people with assets? It wreeks of we are coming for your money subtext. Perhaps that's their point, sort your shit out. www.theguardian.com #

• Mapped: the vast network of security deals spanning the Pacific, and what it means - Seems like there's an opportunity to create a canihas style info website for this sort of information. I bet there would be a lot of traffic. www.theguardian.com #

2024/07/08 #

• I listenned to quite a few great podcasts today. Brain, mind and body apear to be getting back into the swing of things following the past few days difficulties.

  Listening to music everywhere seems to be helping somewhat with averting escallations. I used to do that but the world didn‘t like it much, and also the headphones have a tendency to break much quicker. Anyhow maybe I won't need to do it once the world has calmed down a bit.

  The next few days are about trying to get back into more regular blogging. Just need to clear some of the digital clutter. #

• The revival of Linkblog.io

  I've been thinking the past few days about how much effort it would take to get a commercial site up and running again. I previously successfully built a linkblogging SaaS called Linkblog.io, it had a ton of great features, worked really well, was low cost to run and very scalable. But I ran out of runway and had to shut it down. Since then I've continued building, mostly just my own stuff. I moved my personal linkblog to a static site and bit by bit added various new features. My static site is now a blog, linkblog, notes blog, newsletter and podcast.

  As part of this I built my own static site generator. It's a nodejs CLI tool. It runs very quickly. It's really customisable. I recently wrote a more detailed description of it's features, and had a bit of a think about possible plans for the future. I don't currently have the resources to start again from scratch, but I've been wondering if I have enough pieces to cobble together something that I could open up as a product.

  In an ideal world with lots of money and resources I would most likely do a re-write, because what I've been working towards all these years is this thing I call the blogging virtuous circle. I have basically managed to achieve a first version of that in my own personal static site. It's really cool, and actually kind of works, though it's a bit rough around the edges. Posting links on the daily, writing short notes and longer blog posts, is a really great way to consistently create great content.

  The thing that fills me with confidence is that it's built around git. That means it is a very robust setup. Even if you get knocked offline, you can still blog, and sync up later when you are back online. This happened to me recently several times, and I was able to blog through it even though I was offline for several weeks. I plan to build better higher level UIs for posting, but I want it to always be possible to fallback to just using git and markdown files. I know for sure that's possible now.

  So the question is, can I get something up and running, and over time move towards my long term vision? I have a working first version of my long term vision, I have a SaaS of one core component of that vision, and a static site generator that would enable users to build their own sites should they choose to migrate from the SaaS. The great thing about the SaaS is that it has the billing system all done and fully working. I could theoretically have some paying customers for the linkblogging SaaS, that would enable me to fund development towards the full vision. Who knows maybe once something is up and running, perhaps I could raise some money via a kick starter campaign. The plan is to open source the static site generator. Users would always be able to easily move to their own site.

  That's what I've been thinking about the past few days since I finished the everything page amidst a somewhat difficult deployment. I know all this might seem uterly futile and hopeless in a world dominated by Big Tech giants, and everyone is building fancy AI stuff and maybe publishing is boring, but I still believe we can build a better future, and I think writing your own content, and having control of it is the way we get there.

  Figured I'd write a short blog post about it, put the ideas out into the universe and see what, if anything, comes back.

• Rogan on living in the best days

  Rogan has comedian Jimmy Dore on the show, and they are reminiscing about times gone by.

  Rogan gets into the magnitude of the incredible cultural change that occured in the 60s, and some of the darker aspects that went along with it, the supression by the government:

  The psychadelic act of 1970 was passed to go after the Black Panthers, and to go after the anti-war movement, cause those people were all taking drugs.

  They were eating mushrooms and trying to come to some sort of an understanding of our place in the universe, and they said okay we are going to take all these psychadelic compounds, they are literally creating a cultural revolution.

  You go from the 1950s, you get...I always say that music is the best representation of that, and comedy as well, but really music. If you look at like Buddy Holy, great music, great stuff...and Jimmy Hendrix is 10 years later. What the fuck is that?! That's like a revolution. Like out of nowhere.

  Something is insanely different, like it's not even from this earth. That’s all psychadelics.

  And it‘s true and certainly worth noting. The change in music around that period was profound. It's really worth listening to music from that period, really getting into it. When I went down that rabbit hole a number of years ago, I found it incredible to learn about all the influences of the musicians of my generation. The history is literally embeded in the music. You get a real sense of where we've come from culturally.

  But the thing that really stood out for me is his next bit, a few minutes later, where he outlines why he thinks we live in the best times now.

  These are the best days. These days right now, these are the best days. By far. By far for everybody, because we get all the other stuff, from those other eras, we still can listen that too. We still can watch that too.

  But we have a bizarre time where the world is waking up, where people are so much more aware of the corruption, and just the way the world works, it’s more highlighted than it’s ever been before, and I think it’s more fun.

  It’s like some of the things that are stupid, are SO stupid. Like when you see Biden "We beat Medicare", and they go "Thank you mister president", and they smash cut, like how the fuck is that real? How the fuck is that real? The guy locks up like Windows 95, stammers for 15 seconds, and then he says "We beat Medicare".

  I think he's right, and it’s important to remember it because it’s too easy to get caught up in the trap of believing that stuff was way better before. Stuff is really great now, and there will be awesome things that will emerge out of this era that will totally blow our minds too, probably even more than before. It’s just that because we are in it right now, it’s difficult to see it. If course it’s easy to see the great stuff looking backwards, but the really great thing is to find it as it’s happening, and take part in it.

  The whole episode is really great, Jimmy goes into this excellent description of some of Carl Jung’s philosophical thoughts. How people project their secret inner selves onto others without realising it, creating love but also hate, this strange state where conscious and unconscious parts of our mind encounter each other in a real physical way. I found that quite profound.

  Also a bunch of pretty intense conspiracy stuff.

  Great episode.

• Mt Gox is finally giving back their customers money that they stole. But they are only paying back 15% of funds. That's an outrage, and it's even more outrageous to claim they were doing their customers a favour putting them through years of hell. It's disgusting victim blaming, something I’m unfortunately all too familiar with.

  How unbelievable that this should happen the exact same week I finished the everything page, after months of delays, and mentioned I would be retiring the current mountain homepage.

  It's just another example of total reality inversion that I experience daily, in this case it’s especially bad because the ordeal the Mt Gox customers have gone through feels earily similar to what I'm still going through here in Vietnam.

  What are you doing to me world?

  Update: While I was writing this note and associated linkblog link, a couple in their twenties had been sitting behind me relatively queitly. Just as I was putting the finishing touches to my wording, the bloke said audibly 'sorry' in my direction. They both then got up and left a few moments later. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: The revival of Linkblog.io markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Rogan on living in the best days markjgsmith.com #

• Labour to seek joint declaration with EU on wide-ranging security pact - It will be interesting to see the policy shifts that Labour will start to announce. This was one of the first articles I've seen. Makes sense to get the ball rolling on foreign policy pretty quickly. www.theguardian.com #

• Exit poll shows surprise win for left-wing alliance in French election - High turnout at about 67%, far right in 3rd and Macron's centrist party in 2nd place. Tactical voting, with smaller party candidates withdrawing and asking their followers to vote for the left coalition, appears to have stopped the far right from forming a government. I wonder if Macron's snap election call will now be heralded as a successful yet risky bet. www.theguardian.com #

• ElevenLabs launches free AI voice isolator to take on Adobe - I keep hearing about Eleven Labs, they look to be a pretty interesting AI audio tools company. This product could be very useful for podcasters. venturebeat.com #

• After a 10 Year Wait, Mt. Gox Bitcoin Is Finally Being Returned - It‘s horendous what they put their customers through, and it’s not good enough they are only returning 15% of funds, even if the Bitcoin price has increased a lot. They gave been put through hell, at considerable risk, and now only getting back a fraction of what they would have had they invested it elsewhere. Total nonsense to claim that locking them in limbo was good for them. www.wired.com #

• Viktor Orbán’s rightwing group hits quota for recognition by EU parliament - Just as France's newly formed left wing coalition pushes back the far right in their elections, Orban is creating a far right coalition at the EU level called "Patriots for Europe". All the far right parties across the block apear to be joining. More evidence that everything in life is a fractal. www.theguardian.com #

• A Git story: Not so fun this time - I’ve been trying to read this for several days now, finally found time. It’s a little on the long side but really is a great roundup of the happenings that finally led to the version control tool almost all of us use today. I had no idea it was the Ruby community that was so instrumental in git's adoption around 2008. Glad I know the background, since git is so central to all my programming, and now blogging. Git is one of the best open source projects ever. Houray to all those that helped make it such a success, and indeed those that continue to do so, we are all very lucky to have such a great bit of software available, that we can all freely use to build the things we build. blog.brachiosoft.com #

2024/07/07 #

• Yesterday everything felt incredibly rushed. For a start there was an insane amount of yah-blocking from seemingly everyone, everywhere. You get yah’d for absolutely no good reason, only to be immediately blocked in what you are doing. It can be infuriating if you don’t know it’s happening, and it very much appears to be the point by many. Personally I think it’s counter productive, as it spreads and just causes traffic jams real and imaginary, and generally seems to put everyone in a bad mood.

  I was already having to play catchup, having just been allowed to eat again after about a week of starvation. So I had many days of clothes to wash and just try to get back into the swing of things. Not so obvious, everything felt rushed, brain constantly doing that thing where it feels like it‘s having buffering issues, and just constantly wants to multi-task. All the yah-ing just makes it worse. Still I caught up with most of the physical stuff I needed to do. Still quite a bit of digital things to catch up on.

  I spent much of the day listening to music, and smiling each time a yah-block occurred. Ok world, you are doing another one of your innefective counter productive yah-blocks, I would think to myself. Knowing full well people would ultimately be more unhappy later. Then just slow down and try to keep a constant pace to get through it.

  I listenned to several podcasts, but had to pause and move on to another several times. Today has been a bit better. Your body and brain really get very affected by starvation and bullying, and it takes a while to recover.

  The music helps to ignore it and all the people calling you 'dog', which also happens all the friggin time. It's very brutal. Once it starts it spreads everywhere like the plague.

  I notice after each time they put me through these starvation days, that my hunger gets worse. I'm constantly thinking and feeling I should eat something, even if I've recently eaten plenty to get by to the next meal. I've never had trouble with weight, but I wouldn’t be suprised if that becomes an issue at some point. But maybe that‘s part of their plan, one other thing they shout at me is 'bear'. #

Today’s links:

• Biden vows to stay in race and beat Trump in defiant speech - He apparently was massively jet lagged and nearly fell asleep on stage. With all the democrats constantly talking about Trump's lying, I found it interesting to learn yesterday that Biden was renouned for being very economical with the truth early in his career. He was known for big time plagiarising and quite lot of anti-left policies. www.bbc.com #

• The French republic is under threat. We are 1,000 historians and we cannot remain silent - The historians speak out. A very IMO well worded message that articulates their concerns. For what it's worth I wrote about France's future in the exponential age of AI last week. www.theguardian.com #

• Iran reformist Masoud Pezeshkian extends lead in presidential election count - I’m no expert in middle east concerns, but I feel like it could be a good time for the west to improve it’s relations with Iran, so maybe this is a rare bit of light appearing in an environment that has been very somber in recent years. I've heard Iran is a really wonderful place. I watched a great skateboarding documentary that was shot there a number of years ago. www.theguardian.com #

• Keir Starmer to hold first Labour cabinet meeting as Tory leadership jostling begins - The times they are a changing. It’s times like these where culture can get very interesting. Lots of new dynamics to lift and inspire, lots of fresh energy and perspective. Also something I had totally forgotten about, highlighted and explored here, is that the conservatives will need to appoint a new leader. There‘s even some talk it could be Farage, though I gather that’s very unlikely. Still lots of activity happening. Britain will look and feel very different within a few weeks. www.theguardian.com #

• Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows - Assuming they have discounted the possibility that this is some sort of ant on ant hate crime, that the patient really did need an amputation, it's pretty darned amazing. Cool video, ant arms flayling around everywhere. www.theguardian.com #

• What heppened to Perl 7? - I've done quite a lot of Perl programming over the years, though not recently. Interesting to hear progress. Both the new governance structure and the new RFC process definitely sound like a great ideas. I also like the addition of feature flags. I'm not so sure about feature bundles, feels weird hardcoding the version number in the script. I wonder if this will lead to some form Perl renaissance. blogs.perl.org #

• Npub.pro: Nostr-based Websites for Creators - "Npub.pro let's users create personal websites from their Nostr content. It's free for anyone getting started, it's open source and self-hostable. Built by Nostr.Band team." - They use Ghost themes and pull content from your Nostr account. There's a pro version where you can attach a custom domain. Useful to have nice shareable personalised links for your content. www.nobsbitcoin.com #