markjgsmith

2023/10/11 #

• Keith Teare on AI - I've been enjoying the Keen On podcast new video format. It reminds me of the short period before Youtube took over video. The videoblogging / vlog years, circa 2005. It's awesome to have the video files downloaded. Brilliant for offline. File sizes are a bit of an issue. Takes ages to download and that's problematic for me atm.

  Anyway was suprised to realise who Keith Teare actually is. I hadn't recognized him on audio only. He's one of the guys that used to appear occasionally on the Gilmore Gang. I drifted away when they stopped publishing via RSS, since the files no longer made it to my device, though I believe the show is still going. It was always interesting to hear his british angle in amongst all the US voices.

  Note: for some reason none of the sites I usually get show urls are rendering correctly so I was only able to find this audio only link. I'll try to update the link later. Very weird that even google podcasts seem to be selectively blocking the show page listings. #

• Parasocial relationships - The SYSK guys have an episode all about weird onesided relationships, focussing on how modern forms of media have normalised this phenominon somewhat. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I've listenned since the very early days of podcasting. I've also met a few of the podcasters I listen to. To be honest that has been quite strange on occasion, especially in the early days of podcasting.

  Back then it literally wasn't even a thing to meet online people IRL, so your brain's only prior art was your real life friends, and so when you met a podcaster the imbalances were super strange and sort of unnexpected. These days I'm totally ok with not meeting or becoming friends with any of the podcasters I listen to. I'm much more interested in just meeting regular people that have similar interests to me, if they are podcasters great, if they aren't also great. I don't spend anytime thinking about it.

  I'm not sure the term parasocial relationship really describes the way I feel about the podcasters I listen to very well these days. Maybe at some point many years ago it did. But I'm glad we have a term to describe the phenominon because it's definitely something that didn't previously exist, and it definitely sends your brain for a bit of a trip sometimes. It's a bit like being somewhat annibriated but the people each side of the ear phones are drinking drinks that have different but related effects. Except of course you are sober, and it's still weird, which is itself quite weird.

  Anyhow I thought this was a great episode. #

Today’s links:

• The Hidden Performance Cost of NodeJS and GraphQL - Performance is such a critical issue sometimes, as I recently found out with a nasty 6X build time regression. This is the sort of problem that's quite fun to work on when you have time on your side, but it's absolute hell when you are up against it. Some useful tips on how to see if your code is getting clogged up with promises in this article. www.softwareatscale.dev #

• Deploy and Test AWS Step Functions with Node.js - This is awesome functionality to have in your serverless tool box, but I find AWS to be too complicated for everyday programming. Getting the permissions right is always a nightmare, and the UI is very bad in places. I wish Netlify offered something similar but executed with their eye for simplifying the developer experience. blog.appsignal.com #

• A history of Ireland in 100 goodbyes - A metamorphosis style IDE code editor, ireland theme. Whether it's ireland theme or darkside theme, or another, these modern IDEs can get quite emotional in places. www.irishtimes.com #