This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-08-26)
In this week’s edition:
This week is all about building the future while being informed, but not imprisoned, by the past.
Issue details:
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I was listening to the US politics discussion on the latest All-in Podcast earlier, it's very good you should give it a listen, and I was struck with how much more grandiose US politics is than UK politics. It makes sense because they are the world super power so everything they do is in that context.
The slightly odd thing about UK politics is that because we used to be the world super power, all the places where politics happen still have the grandiose vibe, yet the politics isn't in comparison. It's sort of commical in a way. All these politicians acting out their careers on this incredible stage, yet the plays they perform are children's plays. I wonder how that affects their ability to govern. Are they out of touch with the people?
And yet perhaps it is still important to be on a big stage. When we were participating in the European Parliament, would we have been able to have a big impact had the politicians not been trained on the world class british political stage? At the EU level, politics is a much bigger game so to speak. I'm not sure how to square the circle, or indeed what I'm trying to say. I worry british politics is the wrong shape, bigger on the inside than on the outside.
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UK politics cognitive disonance - I was listening to the US politics discussion on the latest All-in Podcast earlier, it's very good you should give it a listen, and I was struck with how much more grandiose US politics is than UK politics. It makes sense because they are the world super power so everything they do is in that context.
This note birthed the blog post: UK politics cognitive disonance. #
Today’s links:
Create A CI/CD Pipeline For Front End Projects - Good article to read if you are looking to get a high level overview of continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD). Lists the major tools used and some example configuration files cli commands and scripts to get a sense how all the pieces fit together. Falls short of presenting a fully working repo though, you'll need to do that yourself, but it's a good article to get situated. blog.openreplay.com #
France to spend €200m destroying wine as demand falls - Interesting data point. The wine industry appears to have been particularly badly wrong footed by the COVID supply shock. Consumption has fallen in double digit % while production rose by 4%. The emergency measures are to ensure there isn't a collapse in prices. www.bbc.com #
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bingeing the Past and Building the Future (Issue #129) markjgsmith.com #
Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee - There have been a lot of web scraping court cases over the years, and the courts don't seem to have a firm handle on the situation. Add to that the recent surge in companies looking for data to train their AI models. It's a hot topic that looks likely to see some controversy as companies take contradictory and hypocritical stances when it comes to web scraping. blog.ericgoldman.org #
New York Times, CNN and ABC block OpenAI’s GPTBot web crawler from accessing content - They have all been updating their robots.txt recently. Me too! I added a sitemap to the website a few weeks ago. What a coincidence. I wonder what the general sentiment is amoung bloggers about GPTBot. www.theguardian.com #
All hail the new EU law that lets social media users quiet quit the algorithm - It's interesting to see these new regulations have already caused Meta to add a chronological feed back. I like the idea of being able to compare the algorythmic feed against chronological, also the AI off switch seems like it might be a good idea. One day surely we'll be able to BYOA? techcrunch.com #
The EU's war on behavioral advertising - Lots more detail about the new regulations in this article. Maybe they just averted a future apocalypse. The at infiniti situation with all this behavioural advertising is pretty scary in my opinion. At some point it ceses to be advertising. What does it become? Probably unpleasant and very confusing causality bugs in spacetime. I'm only half joking. I'm not sure it's a good idea to find out. thisisunpacked.substack.com #
🚀 New Post: UK politics cognitive disonance - Some observations about UK politics. We have such a rich history, but is that causing our politicians to be out of touch with the current reality of the people? markjgsmith.com #
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