This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-09-30)
In this week’s edition:
Money, bitcoin, free speech, AI assistants, static site generators, roman history, kiosks are cool, physics is barmy, Cockney rhyming slang and I’m loosing my mind again.
Issue details:
EOF
RSS feed oblivion - I have neglected to maintain my RSS feed collection over the nearly 20 years I've been using feed readers. I have so many feeds that were at some stage interesting but have either disapeared or become uninteresting. I find that I rarely open my RSS reader these days. I miss how it used to be.
I'm thinking of deleting virtually all the feeds and start fresh. What I'd like is a manageable amount of news sources, both old media and new media publications, as well as a collection of feeds from bloggers that are doing interesting things and publish at least several times per week. I want to be connected to folks that are doing cool things, and writting about it, in the areas that I am interested in.
But deleting everything is very scary indeed. #
Banality of local intimidation - People driving past on motorbikes while talking on their mobile phone that just so happen to say "you learn" as they pass me are currently trending. It follows quite an anger goading heavy day, so not much of a suprise. Alk the same, rather unpleasant. #
Today’s links:
Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight - Writeup from James Vaughan of how to still have fun when your airplane wifi connection is lacking internet connectivity. Fun article though some code snippets would have been useful, especially around how he did the graphs. jamesbvaughan.com #
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bitcoin Butterfly (Issue #134) markjgsmith.com #
Today’s links:
Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians? - Bandcamp was the spiritual successor to MySpace as far as usage by bands. It's not an absolutely huge web property like say Instagram, but it sort of ticks along in the background doing it's thing. It has a huge variety of artists, it's cool. All that to say that what happens to it is massively important to the music scene. Let's hope it goes well, though I wouldn't be suprised if we see moves by artists to start preparing life boats in case the new owners turn out to be too hands on. rocknerd.co.uk #
Announcing Deno Queues - This is really cool, I've been waiting for some of the more modern web hosting providers to start offering queues. They are a must have for pretty much any SaaS you might want to build because they enable you to decouple the backend job processing from frontend web page rendering. Their implementation is interesting, with ability to run locally using SQLite, and a way to combine with Deno KV atomic transactions. Great for background tasks like scheduling email notifications and handling webhooks. Would be cool if there was an admin dashboard. deno.com #
Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions - This could be quite cool but I would like to see the numbers on the plants waste. There isn't much sense in making clean energy if it creates a different hazardous sutuation instead. www.theverge.com #
When tech says ‘no’ - When the public says no to regulation policy makers are proposing, it usually is either because it's annoying, it has serious concequences for them, or it simply isn't technically possible. Bennedict goes into each, citing recent examples in the current batch of government regulations that are passing through the tech industry. www.ben-evans.com #
Twitter is starting to feel like X. Day to day I still think of it as Twitter, but over the last week or so I've noticed that the amount of people on podcasts using the name X, without going through some kind of explanation, has reached a new level. I wouldn't say it is totally there yet, but it's slowly starting to feel like folks are more comfortable with the new name. #
Today’s links:
earthly/earthly - 🌍 "Earthly is a build automation tool for the container era. It allows you to execute all your builds in containers. This makes them self-contained, repeatable, portable and parallel. You can use Earthly to create Docker images and artifacts (e.g., binaries, packages, arbitrary files)." - "It can run on top of popular CI systems like Jenkins, Circle, GitHub Actions." github.com #
Running jobs in a container - It's good to know it's possible to run custom containers. I have wanted to do that in order to speed up workfkow runs. It's still not totally clear to me from these examples where the workflow steps are defined though. What's the point in specifying a container if you don't also specify workflow steps? Maybe these aren't a complete example? Confusing. docs.github.com #
nektos/act - Gives you the ability to run your workflows locally. Runs off of the workflows defined in .github/workflows and uses docker images. Sounds cool though I've read some reports on HN that it doesn't always work very well. It does seem a bit complex. Sometimes it ain't worth all the extra effort. Linking to it here for completeness, as I've seen it mentioned many times. github.com #
Being code blocked is strange. It's the 3rd month in a row that I've run out of build minutes on Github. It means I can't deploy or test any code I write, and I have to change almost everything I do. It happens often that I get a great idea and I have to sit on my hands.
I really miss not being able to code. Everything seems a little less interesting, the articles I'm reading, the podcasts I'm listening to, and I'm more distracted than when I'm able to code. I'm still publishing links and notes via github. I'll be able to sync them up at the start of the month. But everything feels off, like I've lost my rythm somehow. #
Offline could be awesome. I have to do a lot of things offline these days because of my internet access situation. I get Wifi a few times a day, in various locations, but mostly I'm offline. It occurred to me today that I actually like that setup quite a lot because it stops you from doom scrolling and you can actually get quite a lot done.
If apps had better offline features, I think it might be my prefered way of operating. What I really want is for all websites to work properly in read later tools, better audio podcasting tools like show attachments, and importantly the return of video podcasting. That would be awesome. I just want to select a bunch of stuff every morning, load up, then disconnect knowing that I've got a bunch of stuff to read, listen to and watch.
Working offline could be loads better. Browsers could cache linked pages so you could read links people add to their content, and perhaps you could create an offline list for things you didn't cache that would automatically sync next time you were online. There are so many things that could be made better. Unfortunately no one is going to focus on such an experience unless there was a device that had offline as it's primary use case. #
Today’s links:
Michael Saylor's microstrategy buys 5,445 more bitcoin for $147.3 million - He's been pretty accurate with his bitcoin predictions to date, so this is likely quite a bullish sign. Interesting choice of header graphic. bitcoinmagazine.com #
Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024 with listeners migrated to YouTube Music - Very disapointing. Many podcasters don't have their own websites so Google podcasts has been my go to place for getting show urls that I include in the newsletter. The interface is minimalist and contains all relevant info. I wonder what will happen to the urls. Will they let them rot or be a good web citizen and keep them alive? If they disapear they will atlantis a massive part of the web which was built during a perhaps unrepeatable period of human intelectual enlightenment. techcrunch.com #
The Booking.com Decision Shows the True Scope of the EU’s Big Tech Crackdown - It's a bit of a suprising decision because to date regulators have focussed on american and chinese companies. But their reasoning seems well thought out, trying to avoid monopolies forming that would ultimately impact users across the eurozone. I'd like to know more about the regulators long term plans to ecourage genuine diversity in the ecosystem. www.wired.co.uk #
Jony Ive is reportedly developing an AI gadget with OpenAI’s Sam Altman - I've always thought it would be cool to have some linux based hardware designed by Jony Ive. Perhaps it will be a GNU humanoid robot, or maybe a super intelligent roomba. Actually what I'd really love would be a podcast audio and video player, with cool new podcasting features like being able view show attachments like images, slide decks and even small html5 apps. www.theverge.com #
Today’s links:
Every Programmer Should Know #1: Idempotency - Yes idempotency is an important concept and this article is pretty good at illustrating how it applies in HTTP requests. Personally I have found it to be even more useful in the context of shell scripts. I've previously linked to some articles when I was setting up the backend automation for linkblog.io. Since I've recently added a sitemap, let's find out if these links are findable by a google search. www.berkansasmaz.com #
30 years of the web down under - Stories about the early internet are kind of fun. The commercial internet started picking up steam around 1994. I was around at the time but didn’t do much apart from email and occasional searches to get extra information for the university coursework essays and disertations I was writting. We actually still used real physical libraries quite a bit back then. Anyway, it's quite a trip to think that was 30 years ago. Time flies, but it also takes ages :) theconversation.com #
FX is where all the missing money is - Peter MacCormack asked on a recent podcast, and unfortunately I can't find exactly where as I write this, he asked where is all the money that regular people have lost on the stock markets in recent years? Good question. Today's Eurodollar University, perhaps not uncoincidentally covers FX, Jeff Snider highlights what this shadowy part of the money system does. It's a vital part of the system, even if it is very opaque. McCormack did an interview with Nik Bhatia covering FX just this week.
This note birthed the blog post: Where is all the missing money?. #
G7 strange but true: There is a popular cab company here in Vietnam called G7. On it's own this little oddity doesn't seem particulary important, but the more time you spend here the more of these wierdnesses you notice. Eventually you start to realise none of them are coincidences. I'm not at all saying it's nefarious, but it's certainly noteworthy. #
Do you believe in free range humans? It might be that much of the worlds problems and disagreements boil down to a difference in opinion on this fundamental question. The reason it is such a challenge is because the extremes on either side of the answer are likely not possible solutions. Yet we live in a world with maximalists on both sides, locked in an eternal war. Which makes you wonder how the majority manage to not be held hostage by this unlikely and bizare partnership. #
Peter MacCormack asked on a recent podcast, and unfortunately I can't find exactly where as I write this, he asked where is all the money that regular people have lost on the stock markets in recent years? Good question. Today's Eurodollar University episode, perhaps not uncoincidentally covers FX, Jeff Snider highlights what this shadowy part of the money system does. It's a vital part of the system, even if it is very opaque. McCormack did an interview with Nik Bhatia covering FX just this week.
Up to 4 trillion dollars traded per day. Around 80-100 trillion dollars in contracts outstanding. That's a lot! For perspective total physical cash worldwide is 9 trillion dollars. Total debt in the entire world is somewhere in the region of 30-40 trillion dollars last I heard, though a quick search puts this number into question. This trade happens between money market dealers. Essentially it’s currency swaps but can be better thought of as collateralised loans. They function as a way to match people that need dollars with those that have dollars. They are redistributing currency and money and resources throughout the world system.
They keep everything functional, making sure there is the minimum money circulation necessary for the system to function. But because they are highly constrained, they do this off balance sheet, because they don’t have the capacity. The fact that it is off balance sheet means that it is very difficult to see what is actually going on. Interesting stuff.
Jeff points out that FX tells us something about the system from the perspective of the system, in a way that can't really be faked. In a normal world I'd be nodding my head, but in the current world I find myself in, that's the sort of statement that either is hidding fakery or will lead to fakery. It's almost a challenge. Anyway just wanted to note that.
I find it kind of mindboggling that the system is so inneficient that it basically relies on these dealers just to ensure a basic flow througout the system. Isn't it a little like saying the global food system relies on drug dealers to ensure people get fed regularly? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole concept. I also get the sense that this might not be the most unbelievable thing about all this.
EOF
Today’s links:
🚀 New Post: Where is all the missing money? - Ever wondered where all the money that regular people lost in the stock markets actually went? There’s a part of the money system which is essentially hidden called FX, with enormous amounts of money flowing through it, and unbelievably, it keeps the entire system functional. markjgsmith.com #
🚀 What can web developers learn from the industrialisation of farming? (2022) markjgsmith.com #
This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-08-23)
In this week’s edition:
Everyone has been going on about circles and circular economies recently. I’m not so convinced. Circles can be vicious, mindblowing is the new super easy peasy. Lots of great podcasts this week.
Issue details:
EOF
AI activity boosters - I wonder how long until it will be until all entrepreneurs will have AI assistants. Building a business is such a complicated activity, and AIs have such strong pattern matching capabilities, you've got to imagine they would be very good at matching company building activities and personal outside work activities so that one boosts the other. Finding activities that have the same general shape, or complimentary. It wouldn't be without dangers though, tech like that could really get in the way if it wasn't done right. #
Niche down on action style workflows - There have been quite a lot of companies the past few years doing database SaaS products similar to Salesforce but focussed on a very specific niche. Airtable is a good example. I'm a big user of Github Actions, and I wonder whether there's potential to do something similar. Basically to bring file repository based automated workflows to very specific niche areas. The underlying mechanics would be very similar and familiar to developers, but the UI users interacted with during workflow execution would be very different. #
I wish there was a Markdown editor that was also an outliner, to have the power of an outliner but when you are editing markdown files. You would be able to output markdown files, but you could also output OPML files. It would make it easy to work with both formats side by side. It would support yaml frontmatter and have a plugin system so you could add support for different flavors of markdown. It would have an easy to use mobile app. #
Today’s links:
GitHub Actions could be so much better - The linked article is quite good, but the HN discussion is great. Lots of useful tips and practical examples for writting better Github Actions, mixed in with a healthy amount of complaints and positivity. Reminds you that there are other programmers out there struggling with the very same issues you are day in day out. news.ycombinator.com #
Get All That Network Activity Under Control with Priority Hints - Browsers have a lot of functionality these days. Some pretty straight forward improvements to your site's pageload times possible using these techniques, but I'd be careful trying to use them on everything because I could see debugging priority issues could be a challenge. Always have a base you can fall back to in case it doesn't function as you expected. www.macarthur.me #
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Beware Of Circularity (Issue #133)markjgsmith.com #
Swup - "Versatile and extensible page transition library for server-rendered websites. It manages the complete page load lifecycle and smoothly animates between the current and next page." swup.js.org #
WebKit Features in Safari 17.0 - Lots of new HTML, CSS, javascript and developer tool improvements. webkit.org #
The world will help you but you have to climb into one of it's traps. If you refuse to climb into a trap, then one (or more) will be constructed around you. That's been my experience. This has happened again and again and again. It happened again over the past few days. It must have been the end of some sort of mega configuration, with several story lines that had been running in parallel intersecting. Huge amounts of circularity. The level of planning that must have gone into all this is mind boggling. Just a quick note about it now, so I have something to point to later if I need to. It's going to take a while to fully process. Not exactly improving my situation, which is most likely the point. #
The dark irony of these trap building cruscendoes is that they are a sort of denouement. You finally see all the pieces slot into place, all the oddities you thought were a bit off at the time, suddenly make sense. You finally see their purpose. The lies that were invisibly and insidiously tieing your hands together, are revealed, your hands untied, even as the walls close in on you. #
Mindboggling is the new super easy peasy. #
It's that time of year where I get to flip another year on the old calendar. I've actually lost count at this stage and have to use a calculator to figure out the exact number. I always seem to be out by a year or two. Anyway, this is what mid forties looks like. I hope you are all doing well.
My backup power cable stopped working today, but I did have tart. That was quite nice. #
Today’s links:
How to make your code faster using JavaScript Sets - I rarely use Sets at the minute. I still intinctively use arrays or objects. I'm looking at the performance characteristics of Sets now though, because when you are handling tens of thousands of files then performance can quickly become an issue. bretcameron.medium.com #
In bitcoin circles they speak of "orange pilling" people. It's suppsedly a reference to the red pill / blue pill scene from the matrix. The idea being that you need to convince regular non bitcoiners to try bitcoin. The problem is that the expression comes with a lot of baguage. Matt Odell cover this in some detail on the latest Ep#111 of Citadel Dispatch, it's a very interesting conversation. No one in bitcoin has ever questioned that expression before. I always felt it was a little odd. They absolutely get to the heart of the issue.
Interestingly in the early days of RSS we all had orange xml buttons that link to our feeds. I've always wondered if there was a connection. The sort of irony in all this is that, whatever you think about the bitcoin orange pilling, that is in effect orange pilling people into podcasting. #
This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-09-16)
In this week’s edition:
Everyone’s having weird conversations and it’s great! AI religions to Harry Potter to prime numbers, through to debasing everything, the internet sucking, philanthropy, and good/bad Typescript.
Issue details:
EOF
Today’s links:
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Wonderfull and Strange Nerdy Discussions (Issue #132) markjgsmith.com #
Typescript makes community programming mire difficult - Rich Harris makes an interesting point about how Typescript has changed how we interact with the libraries we use in our code. Since there's a compilation step required, people are much less likely to explore the libraries they use, adding console.log statements and such. That's a big net loss to the ecosystem when it comes to community open source programing. He makes the case for why it would be better for library authors to use Typescript via JSDOC comments. Great point.
One aspect that I think Typescript devs are very hypocritical about is the extra cognitive load and tooling complexity Typescript adds. It's like now that they have mastered JS and Typescript, they are pulling up the ladders so to speak, making it significantly harder to learn the language. I'm not saying Typescript is bad, but you should not require people building sheds to have to use skyscraper building tools. There's clearly a huge conflict of interest that they fail to disclose. Typescript is really an elitist extension that is only for people with space and time to learn, who are not immersed in chaos. By imposing Typescript early you are effectively shutting out a huge swoth of humans who's lives are not as afluent.
Keep javascript something anyone can learn. Then if you want to go on to build sky scrappers with it, have the tooling available to make that possible. Just my two cents. #
Make javascript easy again - It occurs to me that calling Typescript elitist is perhaps an over-simplification of a more complicated dynamic. It's entirely possible that those insisting on Typescript are from under-priveledged backgrounds. Perhaps their difficult path is the thing that causes the hypocracy in the first place. It might very well be that the very afluent don't behave this way.
That would make sense since their path would have been comparatively easier, and so they would not see the need to make it more difficult for the competition. Of course that might just be elitist apologist tosh. Maybe elites really are all evil. Ultimately there's no way to know.
But it's not really that important. What's important is having a language that is easy to learn and experiment with.
If anything, we need to make it easier to learn, not harder. #
I've fixed the notes ordering issue and day pages now look much nicer. It only affects the notes and links pages. It just means that when you click through to a particular day, the way the content is displayed remains the same.
Previously the day pages had no date link at the top of the page, so it was a bit jarring. Small change, but huge effort. Readability is important on text based websites. #
Today’s links:
Arm climbs 25% in Nasdaq debut after pricing IPO at $51 a share - "About half the company's royalty revenue, which totaled $1.68 billion in 2022, comes from products released between 1990 and 2012". Arm is valued at around the same price-to-earnings ratio as Nvidia, but without the 170% growth forcast. www.cnbc.com #
What if the debasement of money that has gotten much much worse recently was just the beginning. What's to stop other things getting debased? What's to stop AIs monitoring anything that you show interest in, and debasing it as soon as you ascribe some value to it? #
Today’s links:
Amazon debuts generative AI tools that helps sellers write product descriptions - At some point isn't it just going to be AIs selling to AIs? techcrunch.com #
Arm prices IPO at high end of range, raising $4.87 billion - That's pretty incredible when you consider that they don't actually make anything physical. They are entirely a knowledge product. It's the biggest US IPOs this year. www.marketwatch.com #
Some notes on Local-First Development - Interesting article discussing the local first movement where web applications are designed to run locally. They tend to use technologies like CRDT-based sync engines, to replicate data structures or database tables between client abd server, but could also use replication protocols. The focus is on realtime, multiplayer and offline. The movement aims to have a positive impact on privacy, decentralization, data control. I like the general idea though I can't help but think we are trying to run before we can walk. These fancy technologies are great, but what I want, what I think we need first, are regular content based websites that by default can be viewed offline. I want to be able to browse the web, find a bunch of sites to read, then be able to seemlessly read them later offline, including all the links in the content. It needs to work with images, and code snippets. Currently even that experience is very poor, forget about complicated javascript apps. bricolage.io #
Eventually there will be AI that will be so powerful they will be able to decide who will be the winner in a death match between 2 humans. They will be able to do it with accuracy and precision comparable to chess players playing chess.
Except they will be able to basically see infiniti number of moves into the future, in infinite dimensions. And people simply won’t interact with those that the AI tells them that they can’t beat. It could very well be something that we don't consciously choose.
Last man standing tech will be a very big sector indeed.
I make no judgement here as to whether I believe this to be a good or bad thing, only that it's a possible scenario we need to consider.
This post was originally published as a note, but I decided to put it out as a blog post. Notes tend to be off the cuff, less well thought out.
EOF
When I was young we simply never spoke about mental health. There were normal people, and there were a very small amount of people that had mental disorders, and those people usually got locked away in mental asylums. That’s just how it was pretty much. It’s horrible to think that it was like that, but it was. In some places it might still be like this.
We’ve progressed a long way from those days. People realise that mental health is something that can affect everyone. Folks that used to bully others, calling them crazies and mental, are now understanding that the way they treated people before wasn’t very nice. They have seen friends or family members be affected by these issues, or indeed have experienced something similar themselves.
In part this is because the modern world is ever more complicated and this is reflected in the stress experienced by the average person. In the modern world people have more mental health issues.
We are due another step forward in how we view such conditions, and it’s around the realisation that the notion of mental health issues is still very antiquated way of looking at it. The problem is that it is implicit in the term that the fault is the person with the mental health issues. That somehow they have brought this condition on themselves by the way they lived their life. That’s the unspoken piece, the unspoken belief that’s never said. It’s something ‘they’ have.
If you spend a little bit of time thinking about it, this notion is absurd. There are a very very small amount of people that perhaps have a physical abnormality in the brain, but the vaste majority do not, yet there are many many people with mental health issues.
The fact is that by definition these people that have no physical disability and have mental health issues, have these issues because of the people they interact with. It must be the case that these interactions are causing the so called mental health issues. In short we must realise that mental health issues are really issues of the group bullying individuals. The environment creates the mental health issues not the individual.
Even if they have substance abuse problems, why do they have these problems in the first place?
Mental health issues is really a failure of the group.
It’s likely that it’s a system level problem where to the total information processing capacity of the system is being reached, and for whatever reason these folks always find themselves as the pressure cooker release valve. It’s not a coincidence. One day we will look back at our primitive understanding of group dynamics and realise that groups can turn into a mob and they might not even realise they are doing it, though they also might. Ultimately it doesn’t matter though. What matters is noticing it is happening and course correcting collectively in a way that de-escalates and moves the unhealthy dynamics to a safer configuration.
In the present day, "mental health issues" is a euphemism for someone that the group systematically and relentlessly bullies. We need to evolve this understanding into a more truthful and effective model.
This post was originally published as a note, but I decided to put it out as a blog post. Notes tend to be more off the cuff, perhaps less well thought out.
Personal note: I wasn't particularly happy with the title. Specifically I feel like the word 'deception' might not convey the right message. I'm not saying there's some big conspiracy, it's more like a sort of emergent group deception. Anyway rather than get too hung up on writting the perfect piece, I just want to get it out there, it's the general idea of the piece that's important.
EOF
It occurs to me that many people that behave with hypocracy, not only don't see their own hypocracy but believe it to be something good, like that's just how one does business effectively. We need more examples of doing business effectively that don't require hypocracy. Even better would be examples where non hypocracy is demonstrably better. #
I previously wrote about the real opportunity for the Vision Pro. From that piece:
Perhaps the opportunity with the Vision Pro isn't with consumer apps, but with industrial apps. Sectors like construction, interior design, synthetic biology, materials science, big pharma, supply chain management and many others, have money to spend and a need to process large amounts of data in new ways. I see the Vision Pro less as a way to watch movies and more like a welding mask, a speciality device that you use in specific parts of your workflow to accomplish previously impossible data analysis and manipulation tasks.
I had been thinking something along these lines from the moment I read the descriptions of the device. I spent my undergrad amidst science and engineering departments. I myself studied Materials Science but when you are at a science and engineering university you are immersed in the culture of all the various disciplines, from biology to aerospace, from civil to mechnical engineering to chemistry and all the rest. So I have a pretty intuitive understanding how such a device could make a big impact in these areas.
The Bankless Nation podcast had a really fascinating episode talking to among others Drew Endy, the father of modern synthetic biology. I've transcribed some of what he was saying here, as it really crystalises why the Vision Pro could make a huge difference in science. He is asked What is synthetic biology? to which he replies:
I think of it as wetware. There’s hardware, there’s software, there’s wetware. A cell is a cell, let’s just let a cell be a cell (no metaphors required).
Let’s say I took a bacterium that’s microscopic, 1 millionth of a meter long, a micron. And I’m just going to have a magic wand and make it 100 million times bigger. So now it’s 100 meters long, and I’m not adding more atoms, I’m just magically making everything bigger. So we can see it, it’s like the size of a building.
Now we can say, what does it look like? Let’s say I have a protein, a green fluorescent protein that makes a green light. That protein is the size of a basketball. And the ribosome, which is a collection of molecules that makes proteins, is 2 meters tall. And then the genome, the DNA, it’s going back and forth in this building 1600 times.
It’s a really thin thread and so it’s cross sectional area is like 4 square meters. And there are many other molecules in this building, all about basketball size, and they fill 30% of the space of the building. We call that volume fraction, it’s 30% packed with molecules.
Now we are just building this instantaneous mental image of what a cell is, and of course it’s alive. And what that means is that it’s self mixing. Brownian energy is causing all the molecules to jostle around through collisions with water, so that soccer ball, that green fluorescent protein, is moving…this is where it gets crazy…
It’s moving with an average velocity of 500 meters per second. It’s just instantaneous velocity is faster probably. What that means is that the molecular - molecular collision time is a nanosecond.
So I’ve got this self mixing milieu that’s 30% solid, 70% water, with a gigahertz collision rate, and what it’s doing is being encoded by the genome, instantiated as a physical mixture, it’s receiving energy from the environment.
Within the period of 10-20 minutes it could make a physical copy of itself. That’s wetware.
Doesn't that sound awesome? Doesn't it sound like the sort of thing that could be revolutionised by the Vision Pro?
And guess what, the whole of science and engineering disciplines are full of these types of visualisation problems.
EOF
Today’s links:
Nasa says distant exoplanet could have rare water ocean and possible hint of life - The planet is 9 times the size of earth, might have oceans, and they have detected some hints of molecules that on Earth are emmitted by phytoplankton. The discovery was made by the James Webb telescope, which was able to capture light from the planet's star that had passed through it's atmosphere. And that all happened 120 light years away. Mindblowing. Some other cool examples of JWT detections listed at the end of the article. www.theguardian.com #
From zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds - This caught my eye because I had the opportunity many years ago to be driven on the back of a very fast motorbike. I think it was 0-100 in around 3 seconds and it totally freaked me out. I just can't imagine there could be anything 3 times faster than that. Anyhow interesting story, the cigar shaped car was built by students and has a vacuum suction device to keep it on the ground before it's aerodynamics kick in. ethz.ch #
🚀 New Post: Last Man Standing Tech - It seems like powerful AI could become a bigger part in mediating how we interact with each other. What might this look like? markjgsmith.com #
🚀 New Post: The Mental Health Deception - How we view mental health issues has changed a lot in my lifetime. We didn't really even have non-derogatory ways of talking about it. It's a lot better these days but I think we still need to evolve our understanding of the topic. markjgsmith.com #
Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition - Scientists have been able to not only entangle constellations of many particles simultaneously, but by measuring their state in a clever way, stochastically, use the measuring as a way to have some control over the entanglement, since measurement causes entanglement collapse. And by doing that they were able to explore the entire entanglement space. Similar to how many materials go through phase transitions, say from liquid water to solid ice, there appears to be phase transitions in the quantum world. The weird thing is that it's not a material per se it's literally a phase transition in information, where the information shared between two things undergoes an abrupt change. As well as cool science, it's a tale of multiple reasearch groups discovering each other and combining forces. The story mixes in quantum computers, entanglement entropy and even time crystals in what is defo one of the best science writeups I've read this year. www.quantamagazine.org #
🚀 New Post: Where might the Vision Pro make a big impact? - I make the case for why the really exciting opportunities for the Vision Pro might not be as a consumer media watching device but as an information welding mask for those working in science and engineering. markjgsmith.com #
Last Man Standing Tech - Eventually there will be AI that will be so powerful they will be able to decide who will be the winner in a death match between 2 humans. They will be able to do it with accuracy and precision comparable to chess players playing chess.
Except they will be able to basically see infiniti number of moves into the future, in infinite dimensions. And people simply won’t interact with those that the AI tells them that they can’t beat.
Last man standing tech will be a very big sector indeed.
At least this is a possible scenario we need to consider. #
The Mental Health Deception - When I was young we simply never spoke about mental health. There were normal people, and there were a very small amount of people that had mental disorders, and those people usually got locked away in mental asylums. That’s just how it was pretty much. It’s horrible to think that it was like that, but it was. In some places it might still be like this.
We’ve progressed a long way from those days. People realise that mental health is something that can affect everyone. Folks that used to bully others, calling them crazies and mental, are now understanding that the way they treated people before wasn’t very nice. They have seen friends or family members be affected by these issues, or indeed have experienced something similar themselves.
In part this is because the modern world is ever more complicated and this is reflected in the stress experienced by the average person. In the modern world people have more mental health issues.
We are due another step forward in how we view such conditions, and it’s around the realisation that the notion of mental health issues is still very antiquated way of looking at it. The problem is that it is implicit in the term that the fault is the person with the mental health issues. That somehow they have brought this condition on themselves by the way they lived their life. That’s the unspoken piece, the unspoken belief that’s never said. It’s something ‘they’ have.
If you spend a little bit of time thinking about it, this notion is absurd. There are a very very small amount of people that perhaps have a physical abnormality in the brain, but the vaste majority do not, yet there are many many people with mental health issues.
The fact is that by definition these people that have no physical disability and have mental health issues, have these issues because of the people they interact with. It must be the case that these interactions are causing the so called mental health issues. In short we must realise that mental health issues are really issues of the group bullying individuals. The environment creates the mental health issues not the individual.
Even if they have substance abuse problems, why do they have these problems in the first place?
Mental health issues is really a failure of the group.
It’s likely that it’s a system level problem where to the total information processing capacity of the system is being reached, and for whatever reason these folks always find themselves as the pressure cooker release valve. It’s not a coincidence. One day we will look back at our primitive understanding of group dynamics and realise that groups can turn into a mob and they might not even realise they are doing it, though they also might. Ultimately it doesn’t matter though. What matters is noticing it is happening and course correcting collectively in a way that de-escalates and moves the unhealthy dynamics to a safer configuration.
In the present day, "mental health issues" is a euphemism for someone that the group systematically and relentlessly bullies. We need to evolve this understanding into a more truthful and effective model. #
Two nights of gang stalker sleep depravation in a row so I'm quite exhausted today. Possibly made worse by endless softly softly murmurers today :( #
Today’s links:
Dear Duolingo: Are any words the same in all languages? - Absolutely fascinating post about culture and history and language and travel. I've never used Duolingo myself but I've heard lots of good things about their app. You know a company is really into their core mission when they write a blog post like this. Just brilliant. I wonder if they have a podcast? blog.duolingo.com #
ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm - "ffmpeg.wasm is a pure Webassembly / Javascript port of FFmpeg. It enables video & audio record, convert and stream right inside browsers." - That could come in handy. Would be awesome if somebody created a frontend in the form of a PWA. It's not clear to me how a user would start using some of these wasm based tools in their workflow. github.com #
This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-09-09)
In this week’s edition:
Exploring both the good and bad sides of tech. How do we progress when there is clearly two sides to the coin? Some incredibly awesome futuristic stuff but also some somewhat darker things too.
Issue details:
EOF
Today’s links:
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Circles or Squiggles? (Issue #131) markjgsmith.com #
Peter Levels: "Is the MacBook Air 15" w/ M2 a good replacement for MacBook Pro 16"?" #
It's possible to easily run MacOS VMs on Mac using something like Vimy. What's the current state of affairs running MacOS VMs when you are on Windows or Linux?
Important question if you are a web developer. It used to be that it simply wasn't possible. I wonder if that is still the case. #
Framework have been on a tear recently with lots of product annoucements, and it seem's their new modular laptops are quietly becoming very popular. I love the philosophy behind these devices. What I want to know is to what degree the modularity gives you freedom. In practice is it possible to buy and use comodity hardware or do you end up having to buy everything from them? #
Just because they aren't being violent doesn't mean they aren't forcing you. #
Today’s links:
What OpenAI Really Wants - Stephen Levy profile piece about Sam Altman and OpenAI. Starts out comparing the attention he's getting to the Beattles when they first got popular. Seems a bit of a stretch, but in the piece he follows Altman and his small PR team around London as they hop between presidents, prime ministers, university lecture theatres, and more, and you do get a sense that something quite unusual is unfolding. Some interesting insight into the nascent AI / LLM scene. www.wired.com #
How Apple inspired creators to take a risk on its $3,500 Vision Pro - I'm still very intrigued by the Vision Pro, but I think people might be missing the real opportunity. In any case it's a good idea to keep the Vision Pro on your radar. There's going to be a lot of nuances to deal with and it could dramatically change the landscape for developers. I keep asking myself how best to position myself for the new paradigm. www.digitaltrends.com #
The End of Airbnb in New York - NYC officials brought into effect Local Law 18 which aims to put in place limits on short term rentals which some believe are having a variety of adverse effects on local residents. It's not just NYC, many other large cities are passing similar regulations. Some in NYC are calling it a defacto ban on airbnbs. www.wired.com #
If You’ve Got a New Car, It’s a Data Privacy Nightmare - Honestly this is quite shocking. Cars used to be the last space people felt they had privacy, often used as a place to call your doctor or just a temporary shelter from a crazy world. Turns out car manufacturers are now harvesting a plethora of user information, everything from driving habbits to sexual activity and health info to genetic data. They use a variety of sensors and recording devices built right into the cars. gizmodo.com #
Back when I started linkblogging about 10 years ago, one of the benefits I noticed was that it frees you up from the tyranny of choice that comes with the web. The web is so overwhelmingly vaste and full of interesting things that there is a tendency to get pulled in too many directions. I discovered that by posting links to the things I found noteworthy during the day, I was able to move on with the day much more easily. If something really was important then I could circle back around to it later. As it happens most stuff isn't, so there's just no point worrying about it. On the other hand, very often you end up finding synergies between linked items that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed.
I'm noticing something similar with writing notes using my new notes feature. It happens a lot that while I'm listening to a podcast, or reading an article, that my brain suddenly gets interested in some related aspect. It just won't let it go, and eventually it starts to affect the consumption of said bit of media. It's related to my surroundings, if I'm feeling stressed, or hungry, or in some other way imbalanced. It can be very frustrating.
With the notes feature, when I notice that happening, that I've had to pause and rewind a podcast a few times or re-read a part of an article only to be interrupted again by the thought which is suddenly the most important thing in the universe, I just switch over to notes, write down the main thing of the thought, and I can move on. It seems to be important that it's very non-formal. A blog post is too much effort because I have to think of a title, and write a description and a bunch of stuff. A note isn't much more effort than a tweet. However notes tend to be less well thought out, and probably have more spelling mistakes. #
Given yesterday's close encounter with what amounted to a time traveling family member doppelganger, this article linked to on hacker news today stood out.
Human Embryo Models Grown from Stem Cells: Scientists have created what amounts to a fake 14 day old human embryo. No fertilized eggs or a womb required. Just lab cultured and human skin stemcells.
"When the scientists applied secretions from these cells to a commercial pregnancy test, it came out positive."
We will soon have the ability to synthetically create intelligences and biologies. That's going to be quite a big change. Things are going to get very weird. #
AI pain strategy - Sam Altman's OpenAI has provisions in company founding documents for if AGI is created.
Steven Levy: "Somewhere in the restructuring documents is a clause to the effect that, if the company does manage to create AGI, all financial arrangements will be reconsidered. After all, it will be a new world from that point on."
Sandhini Agarwal: "Look back at the industrial revolution -- everyone agrees it was great for the world… but the first 50 years were really painful… We’re trying to think how we can make the period before adaptation of AGI as painless as possible." #
Today’s links:
Human Embryo Models Grown from Stem Cells - Scientists have created what amounts to a fake 14 day old human embryo. No fertilized eggs or a womb required. Just lab cultured and human skin stemcells - "When the scientists applied secretions from these cells to a commercial pregnancy test, it came out positive." - Synthetic intelligences and biologies on the horizon. Mindblowing. Also where is the .il domain based out of? (Update: Answer - Isreal) wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il #
Wikimedia DNS - Wikimedia have launched a public DNS service, currently a small-scale beta project. Supports both DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT). It's not served on the wikipedia.org domain. meta.wikimedia.org #
Chris Coyier [~31:57] on the present state of syndication: "We are in a rough spot".
That pretty much sums it up. We've spent the last 10 years happily enjoying the convenience of Twitter, and we've left many of the open alternatives wither by the wayside. Many of us are realising now that it's actually harder to syndicate content into several networks than it used to be back in the era of ubiquitous APIs.
I have things I post flowing in some way through Twitter, Mastodon and LinkedIn, but it's not ideal because I don't currently have a way to have full posts in my RSS feeds. I can't figure out how to add code syntax highlighting into the feeds, so at the minute I only include the description and a link to avoid a broken reading experience.
I like the new fancy federated protocols but I'd feel better if I had a robust setup for RSS reading, newsgroups/IRC and forums. #
My RSS reading experience is quite bad at the minute. Organising all my feeds feels like a gargantuan task. With 15 or so years of feeds that have accumulated, many of which are defunct, there is just so much to wade through. There is also no clear way to categorize any of them in a useful way.
I wish there was more automation. For instance for any site that I link to on the linkblog, I'd like to automatically subscribe to their RSS feed if one exists. Then after a week or so let me review the ones I want to keep subscribed to. I also want more feed readers to support OPML reading lists, so it's easy to move between readers, and I can manage my subscriptions in a similar way that I manage blog and linkblog posts.
Also I'm wondering when AI powered tools will make their way into our feed readers. #
Today’s links:
Building a wide news commons - Ben Werdmuller writes a piece about local news. How things were, how they have changed with social media, and how he hopes it plays out. Lots of interesting ideas and cool examples. Caffs not Cafes sounds cool, covering London caffs. I'll have to check it out later when I'm online again. Glad to come across this article via my RSS reader. It had been a while since I openned it. I think Ben is part of the HN bloggers feeds collection. werd.io #
The Fed, The Treasury, The White House…Who's Really in Charge of the Economy? - James Lavish takes a look at each of these entities in turn, asking what makes them tick, in order to attempt to figure out who's in charge. It's an unbelievably enlightening piece, which will leave you with your mouth wide open in astonishment at the insanity of it all. jameslavish.substack.com #
From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars? - I'm struck by how WASM seems to be following javascript's path. Get it working clientside, then move it to the server and start adding APIs for available hardware interfaces. Personally though I'm more interested in the possibilities for running developer tools in the browser, be able to build for the browser entirely from the browser. I want to be able to build my static website locally from a browser. www.theregister.com #
CSS Grid Systems with CSS Grid - Why aren't there more frameworks that make good use of CSS Grid? Andrew Walpole believes the answer is quite simple and might suprise you. andrewwalpole.com #
I've setup a nip5 on my Nostr account. It's the way they verify accounts. Once you get past the ambiguities in the instructions, it basically boils down to putting a file containing some json formatted text on a server accessible at a known path and add it to a domain name that you control. The difficult part is that it's not very obvious what text exactly you have to put in the file. You have to add your 'name', but your Nostr profile has 3 fields that look like names.
Here is my nip5 config.
This note birthed the blog post: I’ve setup a nip5 on my Nostr account. #
Nip5 is the way you verify your Nostr account. I think the idea is that once configured, you can give people your nip5 instead of your public key, which is ridiculously long, so they can find you. If you self host your nip5 configuration it also proves who you are i.e. that your account was created by the person that controls your domain name. That's the theory. In practice I've found it to be quite confusing to setup.
My nostr nip5 should be: [email protected]
Confusingly it looks like an email address, but it's not an email address.
Once you get past the ambiguities in the instructions, it basically boils down to putting a file containing some json formatted text on a server accessible at a known path and add it to a domain name that you control. The difficult part is that it's not very obvious what text exactly you have to put in the file. You have to add your 'name', but your Nostr profile has 3 fields that look like names.
Here is my nip5 config. As far as I can tell it's in the right place, has my domain name configured, is accessible to all clients, and has the correct mime type.
Also once you have it all configured, it's not obvious how to check that you have it correctly configured. I'm using a Nostr client called Damus and when I open it, my username has a tick next to it, but I seem to remember that tick was always there. I don't see my domain name anywhere, so it's not clear whether it's setup correctly.
According to nostr.band my nip5 isn't showing up in searches. I guess that means it's not configured correctly.
So much faffing about. I've literally spent around 8 hours at this point. That's ridiculous. How do they ever expect regular non techie people to get onto Nostr?
Update: Discovered that I hadn't merged the feature branch into main so the config was there but only on the staging server. It should be in production shortly.
EOF
Today’s links:
🚀 New Post: I’ve setup a nip5 on my Nostr account - Writeup of my experience configuring a nip5 on my Nostr account. Kind of complicated, and I’m still not sure it’s correctly setup. markjgsmith.com #
Why I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency - Nela Dunato describes her reasons for prefering to remain working solo as a design freelancer. She's pretty candid about her reasons, clearly she's had some bad experiences in agencies, and of course she has adapted accordingly. Each person's situation and trajectory is different, no doubt there will be folks that have very valid reasons for doing the exact opposite. I think we can have a world where both models can work side by side, you never know when your life circumstances might change and having the optionality to switch models is a net win for everyone. I wish more people felt as confident to share their reasoning without fearing repurcussions. It's really helpful reading articles like this. I'd love to read something similar from the pro-agency perspective. neladunato.com #
This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-09-02)
In this week’s edition:
We are entering into an era of very long timescales. This week we go on a bit of a journey in space and time to try and get handle on what this might mean exactly.
Issue details:
EOF
Today’s links:
🚀 Latest Newsletter: A Bit of a Trip (Issue #130) - We are entering into an era of very long timescales. This week we go on a bit of a journey in space and time to try and get handle on what this might mean exactly. markjgsmith.com #
USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix - The central governing authority was reconvened in 2020 after 10 years of dormancy. There has been a bit of a resurgence of late. Turns out many of the usenet servers have been quietly ticking along all these years and much of the network is still functional. Might be an idea to have usenet access setup as a sort of backup plan in case modern social media further implodes. The article lists some interesting looking groups active for science fiction and computer history. www.theregister.com #
A lot of stuff is just fine - Chris Coyier, commenting on a Robin Rendle post, points out that as web developers we should be pretty embarrassed that most websites aren't 'just fine'. In contrast to most things in the real world which might not be amazing but are at least mostly alright, websites are full of popups and ads and tracking and too much javascript. It's a very good observation. It should be easier to get the basics right. All websites should render offline, be accessible, and be progressively enhanced with fancier stuff.chriscoyier.net #
Strange exchange between David Sacks and Jason Calacanis in this week's All-in podcast, centering around a disagreement while talking about geo-politics and BRICS nations. Jason repeatedly miss-hears Sacks, quite clearly purposely trying to put words in his mouth. Saying his opinion was disgusting, when in fact he had been describing the opinion of others (~58:00), not his own. Very weird interaction in an otherwise enjoyable and informative show.
It had a sort of joking-not-joking kind of vibe to it, though Sacks wasn't overly eager to correct the mis-understanding, which makes me think there could be more to it. I think Jason came away from it looking like a power hungry moderator doing a flex. But he also changes his tact right at the end trying to get Sach's opinion on the subject. Seems like a very underhand way to get someone to reveal their cards. Why is he picking a fight, why is he playing a bad guy here? #
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