This week’s newsletter is out!
In this week’s edition:
Focus on tech this week, trying to take my mind off of anything related to terminal breaths, which is very much a thing and very scary. The world keeps on turning.
Issue details:
EOF
Today’s links:
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Death’s Door (Issue #151) markjgsmith.com #
A 2024 Wishlist for Node's Test Runner - Colin J. Ihrig shares a list of things he'd like to see added the Node's new built-in test runner. I'd like to try out the test runner on a new project at some point so these are aticles are always interesting. cjihrig.com #
British inventor seeks to take $18bn bite out of Apple in bitter patent war - I don't have an opinion on this but I'd like to hear more about it and the outcome. The case has been going for more than 20 years. www.theguardian.com #
Yellow tshirt bloke - I just got approached by the yellow tshirt bloke from several days ago. Last time he was wearing a yellow tshirt, I was right in the middle of a multi day yellow goading campaign, he was super aggressive came right up in my face as he walked / marched by. This time he offered me some cigarettes. I indicated I was just about to brush my teeth, because that's exactly what I was doing. He checked a mental calling me a liar and no doubt all sorts of other nasties. I literally had the toothbrush in my hand already loaded up with toothpaste. He walked off still hurling abuse at me.
I'm writing this down because the offering cigarettes thing is some sort of pattern. I'm not sure exactly when it occurs. Feels like its often near starvatiom periods. It's like they are trying to train you to hurt yourself, and you get punished if you don't.
So that's what happened this morning.
Update: Not sure if this is related but last night I got gifted some rice. It was odd because it was literally just rice with some sort of sauce. I though maybe there would be other things mixed in, but there weren't. It was wrapped in celophane so it was shaped like a small sphere. It's a pretty odd gift. Often nearby events end up being linked, so I'm mentioning it. #
Cement brick thrown directly in face - I was physically assaulted again by the motorbike gang stalkers. This time they drove past and lobbed a cement brick at me, which hit me square in the face. Back home I'm pretty sure such a thing would be considered attempted murder. I didn't see them coming, by the time I got up to look around, they were long gone. I was left with a very fat and bloody mouth, and the brick. I took some pictures, which I posted to Twitter along with a small writeup.
Right before the attack someone drove past shouting 'you learn', something that happens so frequencly, it's become almost meaningless. Weirdly I had just written a note about the young's use of the term 'you learn' earlier that day, and it got published on the daily schedule.
There's not a lot I can do about it.
This isn't the first time I've had bricks or rocks thrown at me. That's happenned many times before. I've documented each occurrence previously. I estimate it's happened 10 times at this point. I've also been assaulted with a bat several times.
I've decided to carry the brick around with me for the next few days everywhere I go, along with the bloody facemask I was wearing, so regular people can hopefully figure out what happened.
The only person that reacted particularly badly to it was the baker, who went and chucked a mental at me, telling me loudly to leave, after purposely getting my order wrong, while also chuckling to himself in between outbursts.
There are so many more details and bizare synchronicities to what happened, but listing them all here would just get things more convoluted.
At a high level, that's what happened. #
Return of the softly softly murmurers - I've written about them before. They usually make an appearence at some point during an anger goading escallation. Perhaps they do the start? Anyway, they are back, impossible to do anything that requires concentration or focus. #
I published a link earlier about Brexit and free movement for UK citizens, so I've got Europe on the brain. I spent a lot of time growing up in Belgium. For the most part it was fine, good in a lot of ways. Not the best, not the worst, I liked that about the place. It was cool.
Belgium is made up of provinces, and the provinces are made up of communes. Communes are like councils in the UK. The smallest administrative unit of the state. Communes are geographic, as in the extend over a certain area, but each one also has an administrative office. Every once in a while you'd have to go there to do some adminstrative stuff. I went to the commune probably a handful of times during the entire time I was living in Belgium.
I didn't end up learning that much about Belgium history because I changed from a french speaking primary school to an english secondary school. There was zero history in primary school as far as I remember. What I learnt was just from actually being there, every day life, and there were a few meuseums with stuff about battles with blokes with hats on horses hundreds and hundreds of yesrs in the past. A tremendous bore in my opinion. I did learn how to speak french rather well so that was good. I can pick a good belgian beer. Not so useful these days now that I no longer drink alcohol.
But anyway, it occurred to me a few months ago isn't it odd that their smallest unit is the commune? What possible economic system would result in such a structure? I mean maybe it's a total co-incidence, but based just on the words alone, wouldn't you expect commune based societies to be created by communism?
I'm amazed that I never saw this connection before, but on the other hand I was a science and maths major. I was never interested in politics, economics, history or all that stuff. That's been a more recent thing. I guess it's just some sort of weird coincidence because the entire time I was there, no one mentioned it. Not in the schools, not in the bars, not in the sports camps, or churches. I lived there for 10 years. So others musn't have been thinking about it either. Communes were just communes, you grow up with that around you, end of story.
Next time I'm online, I'll need to look this up. It's super weird. I don't think they use communes in France by the way.
Update: Couldn't find anything via the regular web, so tried Google Bard. Turns out the term predates the creation of the state of Belgium. Usage started in 17th century, standardized across the region after the french revolution in 1789. Belgium was created in 1830.
Btw, this is the first time I've used a ChatGPT. I hope it's accurate. Sounds like it is. :)
Bard doesn't work with the internet archive so I've copied the full text of the answer:
Question: When did Belgium start using the term commune
The term "commune" has been used to refer to local administrative units in Belgium since the 17th century. However, it was not until the French Revolution of 1789 that the term was officially adopted and standardized across the country. In 1795, the French revolutionary government created the communes as the basic unit of local government in Belgium. This was part of a broader effort to centralize power and eliminate the old feudal system.
The communes were initially very small and fragmented, with many of them having only a few hundred inhabitants. However, over time they gradually merged and grew larger. Today, there are 581 communes in Belgium, ranging in size from the city of Antwerp with over 500,000 inhabitants to the rural commune of Vloesberg with only 70 inhabitants.
The communes are responsible for a wide range of local services, including:
The communes are governed by elected councils and mayors. The councils are responsible for making decisions about local affairs, while the mayors are responsible for implementing those decisions.
The term "commune" is also used in a more informal sense to refer to the local community or people who live in a particular commune. For example, someone might say "I'm from the commune of Leuven" to indicate that they are from the city of Leuven.
Here is a timeline of the use of the term "commune" in Belgium:
Note: The only fact relevant to the origin date that Bard was able to verify via matching google search results and listed in the "Checks Completed - Understand the Results" section, was the standardization following the french revolution. That was from this wikipedia page. I've bolded the relevant section above.
EOF
Just a test - Feels like every single note I've written today, as soon as I've started writing it, someone has turned up, started incessantly chatting either on a phone or with a partner, then the exact moment I finish writing the note, literally the exact moment, they leave.
Well no one turned up, but 5 seconds after starting writing the note, some sort of commotion started downstairs. Now there's some kid saying 'yah' every few seconds. I wouldn't say this was a conclusive test, but it is at least a bit illustrative.
Some days the world interrupts and barges in on every darn thing I do with stupid precision. Those days suck.
Also days where you get hit in the face by a brick suck. #
Today’s links:
Sadiq Khan: ‘Free young people from Brexit work and travel ban’ - I'm glad there is at least some people that are trying to mitigate some of the negative effects of Brexit for the next generation of UK citizens. I bet things feel very tight at the minute for them. I grew up in mainland europe, so I was always going to be pro europe. I decided early on during Brexit that I'd be ok with either decision, even if I'd prefer to remain. You have to support your country. I could see there were many things wrong with how europe was being run, and if there was a mojority that wanted to leave, then we should trust that. I never saw leaving as the end. I think people both sides have had a lot of time to think through importamt things. I also think many in Europe miss the UK being a member country. Who knows what will happen in the future, so many possibilities, but start by opening things up for the next generation, maybe they will find a way to build something better. They have the energy and vitality, they have more powerful tools, more well defined problem spaces. We did what was possible at the time. www.theguardian.com #
Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs - Somewhat missleading title, it's likely they want to create chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging facilities. I guess the details are still not yet known. It is interesting though, especially as much of the money would be coming from Abu-dabi or Japan. How much of our future freedoms would he be giving away to secure the deal? The answer should be none, but it's not always very obvious, so it's worth asking the question. Has he even thought about that? www.theregister.com #
BrigJS/brig: User Interface Toolkits for Node.js - Interesting because it's based on QT. Back in my days working in the VFX industry, several of the facilities I worked at used QT for their custom tools. I don't remember it being the best by any stretch, but for basic robust UIs that work well, it was pretty great. Would be cool to have something similar for node. github.com #
New Post: Belgium and communes - Remembering some aspects of what it was like to growup in Belgium. It's really strange the seemingly obvious things you missed, and wonder later how it was that you never noticed. Some things just weren't relevant, but they become more relevant as you get older. markjgsmith.com #
This week’s newsletter is out!
In this week’s edition:
Sort of a quiet week but still a few interesting and important topics: Bitcoin scaling, HTMX, regulation in the EU and open source AI.
Issue details:
EOF
Flem update - Yum yum. I know, it's really gross. So it's definitely better than before, coughing up much less during the day, though it has gotten worse during the night the past few days. Right side of body is still very painful at times, but if I sit in certain positions I don't notice it that much. But I'm pretty worried about it. It feels like how you would expect it to feel if you'd gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson, which to my knowledge, I have not. Maybe it's just the side of the lung that is flemming? So gross. #
Worse version of sorry - The way people here, especially the young, use the term 'you learn', which for many appears to be their favorite thing in the entire universe, is like a non-submissive version of sorry, if you were using sorry maliciously, as some people unfortunately do. As long as they say that then the malicious thing they just did to you is totally fine, because well, they helped you learn a thing you didn't know about. It's a totally acceptable thing to say at anytime to foreigners, anywhere. Oddly they even say it to each other a lot, which I find strange. Wouldn't you expect that they would say it in vietnanese? This happens with a lot of english words btw. It's really strange.
You learnt about a vulnerability you weren't aware of, and so actually they're brilliant! The fact that in an infinite universe you can never know everything, so there will always be something you'll need to learn, that's not relevant at all. Shut up foreigner, 'you learn'.
We aren't talking about small things either, some of these 'learning campaigns' which they no doubt use to refer to them, can take days or even weeks to pan out. It's like some sort of secret citizen military operation or something. Mindboggling. Such infinite proudness. #
Today’s links:
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Quite Quiet (Issue #150) markjgsmith.com #
Astronomers spotted something perplexing near the beginning of time - They have found galaxies where according to current understanding of the laws of physics, there shouldn't be any. It's very interesting but I obviously have a lack of knowledge about how these measurements are being made. I find it quite confusing. When light hits the telescope, how do they determine how far the light has travelled? How can they differentiate between light from very far away and light from the very ancient universe? How do they know they aren't seing light that originated from a distance twice the length of the observable universe, created twice as long ago as the current estimate for the age of the universe? These are probably dumb questions, but I feel like I don't currently have good answers to them. There are likely a lot more if I spent some time to write them down. www.vox.com #
Super drained - Really really drained today. The right side of my torso still really painfull. Still coughing up enormous amounts of yellow flem.
I noticed that the gang stalkers are doing something a bit weird. Wherever I go suddenly cigarette smokers appear. An awful lot of them don't appear to be inhaling their cigarettes. Of course there are smokers, that's somewhat normal, but the amount of them feels much more than is normal. How strange that this would happen exactly when I've had an unshakeable raspy cough for over 2 weeks now.
The cough really reminds me what it was like when I was a smoker. I smoked for many years, but gave up about 5 years ago.
Anyway something feels off about it. Just putting it out there. #
Today’s links:
AfD plans to turn Germany into authoritarian state, vice-chancellor warns - Something to be aware of. This would of course be terrible. It's good that people are speaking out about it, and that liberal democrats are publically showing solidarity. Germany's energy prices have been hit hard by russian actions over the past few months. They really need more energy independence. www.theguardian.com #
Why is it so cold in the UK right now – and how long will Arctic chill last? - The explanation gymnastics in this article is quite amuzing. They basically use the exact same argument the so called 'climate deniers' use, that it's just normal weather. Anyhow whatever looks like it's currently mighty chilly in the UK! www.theguardian.com #
Sleep depravation gang stalkers are back - Kept me awake much of the night. All in all I would say it was in the hundreds of motorbike drive-by incidents. At one point the apparent gang of construction workers appeared across the street to do their usual totally bullshit, digg a whole and fill it back in again, making the most noise possible. Wacking empty tubaware, and drilling into the ground.
The color once again is yellow. This is very typical in a starvation and thirsting. They will taunt with 'allow', trying to blame everything on you, nevermind that it's them that are creating the situation in the first place. There's literally nothing you can do, as they print even more infiniti pride, that everyone will at some stage have to deal with. It's the last thing folks need. And ultimately I end up getting blamed and punished for everything, just for simply existing.
Many of the gang stalkers have started doing that thing again where the slowly drive up behind you, just out of site. They are trying to trigger a panic response, by simulating the conditions that lead up to a bat or rock attack. They have done this many times before. It's pure intimidation and they know it.
They have also been doing a huge amount of water and food goading. 'You learn' is trending big time, from old, young, men and women. It's like some sort of infinit pride appocalypse.
The taxi mafia and the security guard mafia all appear to have their fingers in this color and garbage fueled intimidation campaign.
Suspected food poisoning - They have been starving and thirsting me for about 3 days. I was able to finally buy a meal from a place run by butch women. All seemed Ok, they had a whole stack of pork chops. That is until the lady that takes the money and gives you the food shouted out 'liar' twice as she put the food in a bag. Seemed at first like she was chastising the other butch woman preparing the food, but eventually it was obvious she had some sort of issue with me. I literally had said nothing, just pointed at the food I wanted.
Well a bit further up the road another thuggish butch woman walked up to me holding her gut. That's very unusual. Anyway it's several hours after eating the food now and I have all sorts of stitch type pain all down my right side. Very painful. Seems likely that it was another planned attack. I literally did nothing. They are attacking me just because they've attacked me before.
It's not just the women either, there was a gang waiting for me at the public rest room, that were clearly there to chastise me. It never ends. It's literally every single location I go to. In the shop earlier, another incident, all be it much smaller in nature, and again right now in the park, a gang of older males, intent in telling me to 'learn' and 'allow'. Hell on earth.
Another example of infiniti pride. These women print infiniti pride at will and expect everyone else to pick up the pieces. #
Raspy cough update - This started a couple of weeks ago just after new year. I got quite a lot better, but then got worse again. I'm still coughing up lots of yellow flem everyday.
This moring there was a staged incident involving a man walking with a bright yellow bike, wearing a yellow top and yellow biking gloves. In the opposite direction there was a man in another yellow tshirt walking next to a large butch women wearing all black. As they crossed paths, directly on front of me, there was this really strange awkward moment where the man with the bike held up his hand making a STOP signal. All he seemed to say was hello, and he sort of stopped but then didn't. It was very strange.
They gave been yellow tsunami-ing me for days now, so I expect it's a continuation of that. Butch women wearing fluresent yellow nail polish, all sorts of yellow garbage everywhere I go. Too many other things to mention. I have absolutely nothing against nail polish, but why not just wear nail polish without bullying people?
Anyway my whole right side of my body is in a lot of pain now. Feeling very ill and low energy, following 2 weeks of righteous infiniti pride bullying. Even the bloke testing out the tannoy system in the park I'm in is insecently shouting, 'you lie', 'your lie' and 'you learn'. Some people literally want to control every single thing and movement you do, where you go, what you say, and even what you think. That's infiniti pride. #
Slow walking women intimidation - The latest trend is slow walking middle aged women. They are clearly going for the prison guard look. It's been happening at the canal, it's been happening in the park. To be honest I don't actually have a problem with that per see. If you want to walk around looking like a prison guard, by all means go ahead. What I do have issues with is when it's very clearly used for intimidation and anger goading purposes.
Case in point, I'm in the park, having a bit of a snack, it's been literally days since I've been able to eat some food. They are right in the middle of a righteous starvation and thirst campaign, for a situation that they manufactured. I'm being punished for daring to walk out of yet another trap that they layed for me. How dare I.
So what just happened was tweedle di and tweedle dum slow walked directly on front of me, one brandishing quite a large almost industrial pair of scissors. Edwina scissor hands says very clearly and audibly as she passed on front of me:
"You're gay"
This is quite clearly a reference to an incident a few days ago when the food lady took exception to me asking her not to cut the pork chop into strips. The pork chop laddies from earlier today cut up the chop, I wasn't particularly fussed, I rarely go to their food place anyway. In any case the park laddies walked up the way a bit, ostensibly to prune some tiny plants, that really didn't need pruning. The park gardeners do a great job here.
It's also a reference to my PINK bag, which by the way they gifted to me. Another example of creating the problems they complain about. Such is the nature of infiniti proudness, it very often has uterly perverse chains of events and objects. It's classic bullying tactics, because the contradictions break people's brains. That's why I call it infiniti proudness. It's one of their main techniques, they think people don't notice.
They slow walked back past me again, I looked edwina in the eyes, she seemed quite annoyed about that. I calmy waited until they were 10 meters away and said relatively loudly:
"Lady, your declaration of war is gay"
I followed that up about a minute later saying loudly to all:
"Whether I say something or don't say something, either way I'm going to get mutilated. At least if I say something there's a chance some good natured folks might see and figure out what's going on."
This kind of silent bullying goes on all the time. I sincerly hope it doesn't escallate again. #
More anger goading walking out of the park. A lot of folks seem to be aware of my gut issues. How can that be? The WIFI at the internet place nearby wasn't showing up initially. A motorbike was parked with it's front wheel where I usually stand. That only happens during anger goading campaigns. I started writting this note and eventually the WIFI returned, to huge amusement by the cafe locals: "Good Good" followed by evil lols. No situations is out of bounds for their infiniti pride. They will always kick you when you are down. Over and over and over. #
Purple tsunami - Very low energy yesterday and today. That's what happens when they starve and thirst you. As is customary in these parts, fueled by the belief that gasoline fixes all fires, I find myself in a literal purple tsunami.
Pretty much everyone is wearing purple. Such inifini proudness has celdom been whitnessed. Not much I can to except calmy add it to the list. #
Malicious gifts - Yesterday's digging up of the grave of the NYE assaults now becomes clear. Since then I've been gifted 3 items of food, from people driving by on motorbikes. Seems nice enough, until you examine the food. In each case the food item had something weird with it. Old looking bags, stained food packaging, discolored food. in each case the gifter uttered some sort of snark or mean comment. One quite large lady bowed while saying 'No!' right after giving me the gift. I was left sitting there quite confused.
Since the NYE attacks were precipitated by youths throwing garbage everywhere, my guess is that the current theme is 'food that looks like it comes from the garbage'.
As per usual the reason for this particular escallation has been long forgitten, but the bullying abd escallations continue. For the record it was the probably staged incident at the food place where I got blammed for their disorganisation.
I'll add this incident to the ever growing list if 2024. #
Haha psyche! incidents are trending - If you haven't experienced these before, or you haven't noticed them before they can be a bit difficult to spot. Once you have, they are so unbelievably obvious. Basically it's people approaching you with all the movement of someone that is about to talk to you, perhaps to gift you something, but at the very last moment they course correct and walk off like it was never that at all. They often are dressed similar to someone that you previously interacted with.
Often several of these, all slightly different in nature, happen in rapid succession. The big tell sign is that if you are absolutely rigorous in directing your main focus somewhere else, something feels very off because they are paying attention to you. They are trying to see you react. Their timing is all off, and that's what you notice, that's why the situation feels strange. They will often slow down as they pass you, the mote you nove yiur attention away, the nore you can see them modifying their behaviour to see your reaction. Once you see it a few times, you wonder how it wasn't totally obvious the whole time.
This is usually part of an anger goading campaign which typically runs over mabye days. Always seems coincides with periods of starvation and thirst.
I've had this happen in a somewhat different context too. I kept noticing that the number of incidents of nearly walking into women suddenly sky rocketed. At one point I just decided that when it was about to happen, to just stop dead in place. All these women would literally walk straight into me, with force. That's what they were purposely doing, with the expectation that I would move out of the way.
Anyway, when things feel off, it's often because they are off, your peripheral vision abd pattern matching will recognise this. #
All-in bell weather - To the extent that the All-in podcast is a bell weather for tech and the wider world, the latest episode left me feeling quite flat.
I'm not saying that it was a bad episode exactly, it wasn't, there were quite a few good bits, but somehow a generalised malaise permeates. I could very well be projecting my situation, but that's the case every week. For whatever reason I don't feel better about the world. A bit more informed sure, but I don't often feel low energy after listening.
I sincerly hope this isn't a bad signal about the period we are heading into, whatever that might be. #
Interleaved Redesign - The more I write blog posts now that the everything feed is operational, the more it's becoming obvious how important the interleaved redesign is going to be. I highlighted previously some of the annoyances from the perspective of writing. It's really apparent to me now.
It's somewhat difficult to estimate the complexity of the move. It seems like it could be considerable, on the other hand if I were starting from scratch, I'd be quite confident because the static site generator is very flexible at this point.
What I'm considering at the minute is whether it might be worth collapsing all the seperate calendar structures into a single day based calendar structure. It's really appealing to have all of a day's content in the same folder. The big downside is not being able to easily find stuff. I won't at a glance of the filesystem be able for example to see all the blog post markdown files.
But maybe there is a way. I have ish installed so perhaps with some basic shell aliases I can get the view back that I'd lose, or something similar.
It's no longer clear cut whether to write a blog post or a note. Each has serious downsides, so you end up not being able to write anything. The current status qui just promotes stuckness.
One thing is clear, the quicker I can move away from the latest page format the better. #
Today’s links:
Taiwan elects William Lai president in historic election - Probably an important thing to be aware of, likely will have geopolitical implications. www.bbc.com #
Incident followups - Of course there were followups to yesterdays incidents. There always are.
I walked past the food place where the woman didn't like not cutting my pork into strips. Checked in to see if they had some food. Wouldn't you know it they only had 1 pork chop left. 1 lonely looking pork chop. What are the chances? I decided to pass. I was there later than usual so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. And even though she was a bit shouty yesterday, mostly she's okay, so perhaps she was just having a bad day.
Next I walked past the headphones place which was just up the road. As I walked past, a cigarette butt emerged flying through the air, landing right at my feet. Gee what are the chances? I don't give so much benefit of doubt to people that flick lit cigarettes at you, especially if they were previously purpusely and maliciously coughing all over the item you were trying to buy.
At the corner shop a bit further down the road I got some instant noodles. The motorbikes were parked in a strange way as I entered. In a way that forced you to enter in one of two ways. Inside, I had to rinse my noodle recepticle, so filled it with hot water from the dispensor and went back outsite. Emptied the contents after a good shake onto the street, on front of the strangely parked motorbike. Went back in to buy the noodles. On the way out guess what was placed a few centimeters next to where I emptied the hot water? Yep that's right, a still smoking cigarette butt. Gosh what are the chances? Word travels faster than the wind in this place. And you are always wrong.
The rest of the morning has been litered with similar incidents. The two big themes are stop / start / stop / start. Just when you start to do something, you get blocked. Then it's hurry up, then blocked again. It's a recurring pattern. It's usually followed by people wearing red clothes. Classic anger goading. The stop start shenanigans can literally go on for hours sometimes. The other theme is water goading. I wrote previously about my water sources being virtually cut off. Well they went even further this morning. Right after using it, the renaining water source trickle stopped. Now neither water sources work. I literally don't know what I'll do. Anyhow there's been a lot of water related goading this morning. #
This week’s newsletter is out!
In this week’s edition:
Bitcoin ETFs, Bitcoin history, generative AI legal discussion, webdev juniors vs AI, and my website’s new incredibly sexy everything RSS feed. Lol worst issue desc ever. Brain full.
Issue details:
EOF
Punished for haggling 50 cents - As is always the case in a bullying escallation, everything you do will be used against you in some way. For me right now that appears to be the incident that occurred yesterday when buying headphones. At the time I haggled a wopping 50 cents (USD) discount. Well now manufactured incidents involving 50 cents amounts are occuring followed immediately by motorbike gang stalkers, quite clearly waiting for me, shouting 'No!' as I pass them.
They say haggling customery all across Asia. Well it is until the gang stalkers take offense, and when they do literally anything will set them off. A single neutrino out of place is enough to trigger total destruction of the multiverse, and as they pulverise everything they will remind you that it is you that is over-reacting, by simply existing.
I wish I wasn't absolutely serious. #
Digging up old graves - Another pattern that re-occurs as part of anger goading is they attempt to re-surface previously settled disputes from previous bullying campaigns.
Case in point, right now in a shop cafe, I am reminded of the New Year's Eve assault by a quite aggitated chap drinking a purple soft drink, who then abruptly leaves disguarding all his garbage. Youths disguarding their garbage was what precipitated the NYE attacks. The girl who attacked me that night threw an unnopened can of drink directly at me. The can was purple.
These incidents happen so often, I detect them almost immediately. I think the idea is to trigger your fight or flight response. There will likely be more of these throughout the afternoon. Unfortunitely once they pop on the anger goading, they can't stop, eventually anything you do is interpreted as war. #
Grave digging confirmed infinit % - I can't go into details right now, but my earlier suspicion that the NYE assault was being dug up was 100% correct. If past experience is anything to go by, this will result in another or many mutilation attempts on me, which if they are not successful will be blamed on me.
I'm aware that I sometimes sound a bit unhinged on these matters, but I strongly believe, if you dear reader, walked even a few miles in my shoes you would see things in a very similar way. #
Today’s links:
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Everything Bitcoin (Issue #149) markjgsmith.com #
The website's new everything RSS has been live for a couple of days now. I've noticed that it doesn't display all that well in some feed readers. The reason is that many readers don't currently do a great job at displaying posts without titles. Since the everything feed includes everything, that means it has both posts where titles make sense like the blog, podcast and newsletter, but it also includes posts that have no titles, like the links and notes posts.
In the earlier days of the web, when most feed readers were created, pretty much all posts had titles. But then Twitter showed up and proved without a shaddow of a doubt that not only did posts not need titles, but people absolutely loved writting posts without titles. The RSS specification doesn't actually require a title. As long as you specify either a title or a description or both, it's technically a valid feed. Feed readers haven't adapted all that well to the new paradigm. It's somewhat understandable because to be fair it's a bit of a design challenge.
With that said here's how I handled it in Feedly. The feed was initially showing up with a load of posts that said 'No title'. I checked out the display settings and updated the 'density' settings from 'compact' to 'comfortable'. With that setting change, the title still displays as 'No title' but an abbreviated version of the description shows up below, so you can at least see what the post contains.
Other feed readers will likely have similar display settings. It's worth trying some of them to see if there's a view that works better with a mixed post type feed like the everything feed.
EOF
As I attempt to write more blog posts I'm aware of various annoyances that get in the way. Here they are listed, hopefully I'll find a way to streamline.
Moving between folders - There's currently a seperate folder for each post type: blog, linkblog, podcast, newsletter and notes. That's partly historical. In the early days there was only the linkblog folder, then I added the blog, then podcast etc. It is a bit annoying having to jump between folders, especially on a small screen. I might make more sense in an interleaved world to have all the posts under the same calendar structure. The downside is it would likely becomes more difficult to find some posts. Currently blog posts are in year based calendar structure whereas links are in s day based calendar structure. In a combined world all the blog posts would be in a day calendar, so viewing all blog posts from 2024 for example would no longer be possible via the filesystem. That's actually very annoying, especially if you can't render a local copy of the website.
Linkblog links for blog posts - Each time I create a blog post I currently have to create both a blog item markdown file and an accompanying linkblog link markdown file. That's mostly because the latest page is set out in sections. If I don't add a linkblog link then folks are unlikely to see there was a blog post, since they are all the way at the bottom of the latest page. Creating the linkblog file is tedious because of the previously mentioned jumping between folders problem. A combined folder structure would make this easier, but also linkblog links might not be necessary in an interleaved everything main page paradigm.
Creating files with frontmatter - Creating the markdown files is really tedious at the minute. Both the filename which had quite a long format containing the date and time. Blog posts also have the title converted to snake case and used in the filename. What makes it annoying is you often don't know the title when you start writting the post, so you have to go back and update the file name afterwards. Also creating the frontmatter is annoying because you have to ensure you have the right date and time which also has to be in the filename. I would be great to have a way to make this easier. Long term it should probably be a custom UI, but it would be useful to have the bare bones method of creating files by hand streamlined as much as possible. You always want to be able to fall back easily to just creating a file in a text editor.
These are the main annoyances at the minute. I'll add more below if I think of / discover any more.
EOF
I’m having to write this post without internet connection because the world has decided that everything is my fault again. Let me explain.
Yesterday a confusion happened at a food place I went to. Seemingly, I got blamed for, at best the disorganisation of the staff. Though it looked very much like an entirely manufactured situation. They apparently couldn’t coordinate between preparation staff and payment staff and somehow it all became my fault even though I was very polite and calm, saying thank you, giving them plenty of money. Almost exactly the same situation happened previously at the same place a month or so ago. I wrote about it then too. That time they tried to short change me. It was the same staff.
This morning another confusion at another food place. I asked the women there not to cut the pork into strips, others there had it that way so it shouldn’t be an issue. Another staff member, a man, at the same exact moment walked past and said ‘good’. When she gave me the food, she shouted ‘Lie!’ very loudly in a very aggressive voice. I had literally no idea what she was on about, which I calmly said to her. I walked off confused by there entire situation. It’s good, yet it’s also all my fault. Clear as mud.
Anyway later today, I had to buy some new cheap headphones. At the small kiosk shop I went to, the woman there, who was covered in tatoos, tried to take my device off me when I asked if I could test the headphones. I wasn’t comfortable with that so I clumsily put the device in my pocket. A short while later after I had tested them, because she eventually handed them over so I could while purposely coughing all over them which unfortuntely is standard malicious behaviour here, I figured I’d haggle a bit. I opened my device, brought up the Notes app to type the amount I was suggesting. At some point I must have fat fingered the screen because the word ‘No’ was on the empty screen. I deleted it and typed the amount I wanted to pay, asked if she would sell the headphones for that amount. She said yes, I said thanks. And then as I prepared to pay she said I was lying and told me to ‘learn’. She still sold me the headphones.
Now several hours later my internet connection stopped working, and a woman on a motorbike just drove past and said ‘No’. To me. Everything in the universe is my fault again! Never mind that I probably wouldn’t have fat fingered the screen had the other lady not been so insistent on taking my device off me.
And of course as is customary here, everything will escalate until total destruction of the multiverse. At which point everyone will go into an unhappy funk and guess what, I’ll get blamed for that too, and eventually I will get mutilated.
Literally every single interaction is like this. It’s the same at other food places, at the bakery, at the internet places, the shops, the cafes. Every darn place I go to. Whatever happens in one place is followed up with punishments in the next places. And honestly imho 9/10 they cause the issues in the first place.
EOF
Today’s links:
The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn't Exist - Jake Lazaroff believes the website vs web app destinction doesn't do a good job of describing what's actually being built these days. He outlines a slightly different yet related way to break down the current web development landscape: informational, transactional, realtime and local websites. I think it describes what's out there quite well. Read this post to get a reassuring sense of where you are in amidst all the chaos. jakelazaroff.com #
Scholz urges unity against far right after mass deportation ‘masterplan’ revealed - They speak out against the secret plans for both forced re-migration, including of german citizens, and forced assimilation, whatever that means, it certainly sounds very barbaric. www.theguardian.com #
New Post: Viewing the everything feed - Describing some things you can do if the new everything RSS feed doesn’t display all that well in your feed reader. markjgsmith.com #
New Post: Writing annoyances - Listing of the current writing annoyances that get in the way of writing blog posts. markjgsmith.com #
CSS Media Query for Scripting Support - Gives you the ability to style content based on whether javascript is available, a little bit like <noscript> but for styling elements. blog.stephaniestimac.com #
FrigadeHQ/remote-storage - "remoteStorage is a simple library that combines the localStorage API with a remote server to persist data across browsers and devices." - I thought this looks pretty interesting for it's simplicity, could be great for some simple local first apps. github.com #
What’s the Value of 3 Million LPs in a Digital World? - We had a massive record collection at the student radio station I was part of back at university. Walls and walls of records. There was something very calming about being in that room surrounded by thousands of records. The ritual of queueing tracks up on the 2 Technics decks in the studio was very memorable too. And of course we would try to scratch like the pros, but we were terrible. We once had DJ Hurricane in to do a guest mix set. He was the DJ from the Beastie Boys. He was awesome. That was fun afternoon. Anyway yes records are amazing whatever the music genre. Keep vinyl alive! www.wired.co.uk #
New Post: Causing the problems they complain about - I had some more starter incidents happen to me at some food places and a shop. These type of incidents always get escallated to infiniti. It literally happens every time. So I‘m detailing them here so I have something to link to. It‘s also to try and paint an accurate picture of what it’s like here. markjgsmith.com #
In the past few days I've completed a refactoring of all the website's RSS feeds, and I've also added an everything feed. It's part of the bigger redesign of the main page, which currently shows the latest posts from the linkblog, blog, podcast, newsletter and notes. The idea behind the redesign is to move away from each post type in it's own section because it feels disjointed, given that each post type has a different frequency. The redesigned main page will have all the posts interleaved as they occur.
I've been mostly writing notes and links lately and blog posts seem to have fallen by the wayside. Having everything interleaved will hopefully restore some balance. This post is the start of that. Many of the recent notes posts could really have been blog posts. They are quite long and almost all of them have titles. The reason they are ending up as notes is that creating notes is slightly easier, but I think it might also be because the latest page doesn't give you a very good at-a-glance idea of what's being posted. And that is I suppose a bit ironic given that it's called the latest page.
First was to fix how the posts are displayed. Hopefully if the posts are interleaved then the balance of post types is on display so I'll be more conscious of what I'm publishing, and naturally tend to publish a more balanced collection of posts. I started with the RSS feeds, but I'm also working on an interleaved website main page.
Second is to make it easier to post blog posts. The biggest hurdle was that previously the RSS feeds were not full text. Instead they only included the description. That was because I didn't think code snippets would be formatted correctly, so I figured it was best to require readers to click through to the website. Turns out that code snippet formatting is fine, though syntax hightlighting is lost, which is a bit annoying. So the blog post descriptions are no longer necessary. That's already a bit easier.
Ideally I'd like to find a way to create new blog post files from a template. I haven't found a way to do that yet. I looked into some iOS apps that give you ways to create text blocks from snippet templates but the ones I found either didn't do it in a way that I could integrate into my workflow, or they required too many security grants, akin to installing a key logger, which I'm not comfortable with. I need to be able to create a markdown file with frontmatter, both the file contents and filename should be templateable. If you have any good suggestions, please get in touch.
Anyhow that about wraps it up for this blog post. Hopefully there will be more of these going forward.
EOF
BBC News broken - In the past few weeks many of the BBC News' websites pages have stopped being readable in offline reading apps. In Pocket for example instead of the article you save, you end up with some sort of copyright notice. This has been working for years. What changed? #
Taking someone's life === murder - I've been saying this for a while now. I know I sound crazy when I say stuff like that but I've thought about it a lot, and it's the sort of thing that though you don't have to contemplate it a lot, it absolutely can become very important. Anyway I felt a bit validated yesterday after listening to Robert Breedlove on the Bankless Podcast.
"If I take your life, that’s equivalent to murdering you, that’s to take your future freedom" - Robert Breedlove on life, liberty, and property
It's a great interview exploring the history of money, in order to lay out the critical design choices that were made when designing Bitcoin. There's an absolute ton of incredible background info about everything related to the monetary system in this episode. #
I've been listening to various podcasts recently that cover the goings on in the publishing industry vis-a-vis how they are handling the new dynamics that have been introduced by large language models (LLMs). Publishers aren't too happy that their content is being used to train AI models, and the models are then steeling their customers.
The New York Times is sueing OpenAI for copyright infringement. It's an interesting case. Here's OpenAI's public response to the accusations. I've been reading it every few days, there was something about it that seemed very familiar. It's been really bugging me. Well it took listening to somebody else reading it out to figure out what my brain was matching.
It's weird but the way they describe the tactics used by the NYT to get the model to do unnexpected things, well that's what it feels like living in Vietnam as a foreigner. People here are constantly trying to hack you, constantly. I can't emphasize this enough, it's literally every interaction, everywhere I go, all the time. The same groups of people show up at the same places each time, and they seem to try out new tricks / hacks they have created or learnt. It gets very involved, happens across multiple locations. It's mind bending, enough to send you barmy.
You do sort of get used to it after a while but it pretty much destroys your mood, makes it super hard to concentrate, causes confusion, often ends up escallating. Anyway, just wanted to put that out there, the NYT's described behaviour really reminds me of many of the people I meet or pass by here in Vietnam.
Is this what the whole world is turning into? I hope not, it's rarely very fun, and often unpleasant. It feels a lot like bullying, and unfortuntely relatively often results in violence or injury or both.
EOF
Today’s links:
New Post: Everything feed operational - Some notes after completing the website’s new everything RSS feed. markjgsmith.com #
Austrian heiress Marlene Engelhorn announces plan for €25m giveaway - Austria abolished inheritance tax a number of years ago. Marlene is putting together a team of 50 austrians, whom she will pay for their time, from across the social sphere who will decide how to spend the money. She's very literally doing her own taxation. An odd story but somewhat relevant given how unclear the future will be with pervassive autonomous AI, crypto currencies, as well as things like UBI and token based governance. I'm really curious to see how her project goes. Marlene if you need a web developer please get in touch with me :) www.bbc.com #
New Post: NYT vs OpenAI oddity - Something about the recent rebutal kept reminding me of something, I couldn't figure out what it was. Then of course I did figure it out. markjgsmith.com #
Water halvening - I've written about the recent bullying campaign previously, that ultimately resulted in me getting mutilated via the medium of sickness. A horrible raspy cough to be precise. Well the bullying doesn't stop there. No no no, the end is the beginning.
What always follows a sickness mutilation, and this has happened many many times before, after you have been coughing up flem for several days, at least initially, is some small yellow goading incidents. People wearing yellow appear everywhere you go, some of them tend to be quite aggressive. The yellow goading incidents escallate until it's a full on yellow tsunami. Yellow busses, cars, delivery vehicles, large groups of people wearing all yellow outfits, bizare incidents that involve yellow colored soft drink bottles, which happen across locations. They've already been infiniti winning you for days, well they want to be even more infiniti winners.
And so your raspy cough shows signs of clearing. No doubt the bullies take some sort of credit for this, since it must obviously be their clever yellow tsunami that is fixing things. Never mind that they caused the raspy cough in the first place or that it's you that fixed it not their attrocious malicious behaviour. But I digress. So you are feeling a bit better.
But wait, you still have to be blamed for being blamed! And the very next day, your water supply which was already a trickle, has been cut in half. For it was a trickle from two sources, but now it's a trickle from one source. Your back is already in aggony from having to stand to use the internet, and for washing using the trickles, and for sleeping, that is when the sleep depravation gangs aren't active, in a position that will eventually cripple you. Well now it's even worse.
But wait there's more, in some of the key locations you go to have been poop bombed. Human feces. Multiple human feces. All these incidents are linked. It's obvious. They want to make it obvious, but you know, without it being obvious to everyone. So a woman wearing unbelievably pungeant purfume was giving you the stink eye as you left the public rest rooms earlier, which, wouldn't you know, smelt really bad today, which is actually quite unusual.
And the two butch women that always happen to walk past when you are at a particular location, have just walked past again, saying 'No!' even though you are minding your own business typing on your mobile device. One of them casually brandishing a metal rod. Is that perhaps an intimidation tactic referencing the recent bat assaults that were done to you? Seems likely.
There are many other things that happened today but that gives you a pretty accurare idea of the situation. They have already been infiniti winners for infiniti and they want / must absolutely be even more infiniti winners, even if it results in the total destruction of the multiverse, which is always what happens by the way, and then you get blamed for everything again.
I am left with the only thing I can do. Calmly and quietly say:
Shame on you Vietnam. #
Injured sparrow - A small sparrow just made an appearance. I noticed as it was jumping around nearby that it was looking particularly dishevelled, dirty and even had an injury on it's neck. I felt bad for the little fellow as he was desperately trying to eat everything. I tried to lay out some water in some nearby pavement cracks, but ended up scaring him / her off. What is up with you today world? Seriously. #
Today’s links:
Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse - When it rains it pours, although in my case it would seem it's much more like the entire multiverse is repeatedly destroyed over and over for eternity. I don't even want to be funny about it. That's basically what's happening and nobody can or is doing anything about it. The weather isn't too bad today, a bit hot around lunch time. Even trying to sound normal has an annoying funniness to it atm. www.vice.com #
New RSS feeds deployed - I got the new RSS feeds working and deployed on the live website. I announced it on Twitter. You can find the latest feeds on the feeds page.
There are now per item feeds for the blog, linkblog, podcast, newsletter and notes. They are all full text feeds so include the full post. There is also the by date feeds that were there previously for the links and notes since they have a much more frequent cadence, so a summary feed still makes sense.
The cool thing is that I found a way to create an everything feed. The everything feed includes all the post types.
Over the next few weeks I'll hopefully be able to redesign the homepage to display all the posts types interleaved. I think it will be better than the latest page which often feels a bit disjointed.
Progress feels good :) #
Everything is trending - I finished and deployed the everything RSS feed for the website yesterday. I had been working on the feature in one way or another, amidst all sorts of blockages and bizare synchronicities for at least 28 weeks. At least that's how many weeks the task has been active in my feature tracking system. So imagine my suprise when today on the Changelog News podcast there was a story about a recent npm incident where someone created an everything package, hilarity ensued. But seriously world what are the chances that I would hear of this less than 24 hours after deploying my long running totally unrelated everything feed feature? Gosh aren't we all so darn clever. #
Today’s links:
IT Employment Grew by Just 700 Jobs in 2023, Down From 267,000 in 2022 - Seems like the IT sector has been hit particularly badly compared to other areas of the economy. www.wsj.com #
The Apple Vision Pro will launch in February - When the initial annoucement happened back in June 2024 seemed so far off, but now it feels like that happened a month ago or something. So many things have happened to keep us busy. Prescription lenses will be $149. Base model will have 256GB storage. I would have thought that folks will need much more storage for the 3D spacial videos they record. www.theverge.com #
I kept a diary of how I use my phone. The results were depressing - I can't say this mirrors my experience, I clearly don't use social media anywhere near as much as the author, yet there are some aspects of what he describes that ring true. www.theguardian.com #
Kate doesn’t want Prince George to go to Eton – and for once I agree with her - I often wonder if the people that incesantly bully me here aren't boarding school victims. Pretty sure regularly schooled folks wouldn't behave so attrociously. I went to mixed schools myself and liked it. Seems like no matter what you do the bullies eventually get you. www.theguardian.com #
Tired - I've been mostly posting on Twitter the past few days. I've developped a raspy cough which is really bad at night time but mostly fine during the day. That's a bit strange. I'm not sleeping particularly well because of it, and so I'm feeling very tired. All the men at food places I go to have started bowing their head to me, which is odd. Multiple places, started the exact same time. All the woman are constantly calling me dog, and coughing all over my food clearly on purpose.
Both seem to be doing the thing where they hold the plastic bag so you slide you hand into the handles. I don't particularly care for that way of handing over food. It had this trap sort of vibe to it, so I always take the food with two hands. Anyway that really annoys some folks, particilarly the women.
Anyhow no matter what I do there is retaliation. Eventually everything escallates to some form of mutilation to me. #
RSS feeds - On the plus side I've almost got the RSS feeds rendering using the same server side components I use on the website. It will mean per item feeds for each of the blog, linkblog, podcast, newsletter and notes. I'll also hsve a summary feed for the linkblog and notes sibce these have a more frequent cadence.
I think I've also managed to create an everything feed. I used a feature where I can associate custom metadata to data imports. The RSSFeed component can use that data to select the right server side component at render time. It appears to work.
There will likely be issues to figure out though. Even if I an feeling drained, the development progress is keeping me somewhat positive. #
Today’s links:
Hundreds block off Westminster Bridge in call for Gaza ceasefire - They should release those that were arrested, especially if they were non-violent. www.theguardian.com #
This week’s newsletter is out!
In this week’s edition:
Here we go again :)
Issue details:
EOF
Today’s links:
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Another year! (Issue #148) markjgsmith.com #
Remembering artists - I wrote yesterday about my lost mini disc collection. Today I remembered another one of the artists of the down tempo / remix genre that I listenned to loads: Kruder and Dorfmeister. They were awesome.
I wish I had the chronology. It would be really interesting to trace which bands I got into when.
There was of course Cold Cut's incredible album Journeys by DJ. I listenned to that the first time on a long train journey. I guess it was probably on the Eurostar. Amazing. Some albums are meant to be listenned to when you are traveling somewhere new, especially if the scenery is nice. #
The lost mini disc collection - I've been listenning to the latest RA mix pretty much on repeat. I went through an important part of my life listening to this type of music. Before that I had only really listenned to band music, mostly heavy metal and alternative rock. I absolutely despised electronic music. Anyhow at some point I found a bridge, on the other side of that bridge was a strange but very interesting world. The journey began.
The first few years were all about down tempo, very chill music, lots of remixes, samples and what not. I had bought a mini disc player and had a load of mini discs. This was a big step up from cassette tapes. Mini discs were awesome, kind of like CDs so you could skip between tracks, and create your own copies easily. It was still the era of listening to the same 10 or 20 albums over and over. We forget that today, because we have music abundance. You became very familiar with entire albums.
Anyhow I had a load of stuff from all these artists, I forget many of the names now. Too Many DJs, Thievery Corporation, Massive Attack. There were loads more. At some point between apartments and moving to CDs then to mp3s, I lost the entire mini disc collection. I also started getting into other electronic music genres.
I wish I hadn't lost that collection. Who knows maybe my life trajectory would have been very different. Listening to the RA mix reminded me how much it was a part of my life. The ambience of it is still very much a core part of who I am, even if I've been on a lot of adventures since then. #
Today’s links:
FreshRSS - "A free, self-hostable feed aggregator". Open source, had been in development fir 10 years, has extensions system, runs fast for up to 50k feeds. www.freshrss.org #
You have one life. What do you want to spend it paying attention to – your phone? - Important to be aware of, even if you don't immediately change your usage. I for one would love to ditch the mobile device and just have a laptop. But that isn't possible at the minute. www.theguardian.com #
A restless Gen Z is reshaping the Chinese Dream - I hope the jobs situation for the youth in China improves. It's an interesting article if only to get a window into a very different world. Anecdotally I'm less convinced by the developing world / developed world distinction these days, at least the way it's popularly understood. The more I have traveled, especially around asia, the more I realise how innadequate these comparisons are. Yes in some senses poverty and hardship is more visible in some places, but on the other hand while places like the US have giant shops with every concievable grocery, with abundance of products and colors everywhere, in asia you have entire streets that are a vaste sea of variety and beautiful colors, filled with exotic delights. I wonder what the UK equivalent would be of student girl they interview for the article with her thick brown sugarcane filled hotcakes, spicy Sichuan sausage, mooncakes, chestnuts and dried mango. Fish & chips, a savoloy and some mushy peas? Perhaps the metric we measure by should be something else. We have very different societies optimised in very different ways. www.bbc.com #
Sexual harrassment then sleep depravation - The extreme bullying continues. Last night was visited by 2 creepy males. The first on a motorbike, stopped and said he would 'take me' while chuckling. A short while later another man on foot, wearing a black backpack stood a meter away, with his back to me, apparently having a Dom Jolly style conversation on his mobile phone, where the only phrase that was said was 'I am gay'. That was followed by the usual assortment of drive-by harrassment from motorbike gang stalkers.
This morning at the exact same time I was physically assaulted yesterday the security guards across the road turned on their radio at airoplane level loudness. That was immediately followed by several motorbike gang stalker drive-byes where they shouted 'I lied'.
The only person that lied is you Vietnam. You layed a trap for me, and when I didn't walk into it, you lashed out and assaulted me by throwing an unnopenned can of drink at me in plain sight of everyone around. You then followed that up with a drive-by assault with a bat. And you followed that up with sexual harrassment and sleep depravation from your security guard mafia.
Shame on you Vietnam. #
Problems with eternity - I was listening to this SYSK podcast episode while waiting for a particularly bad spiritual storm to pass. The universe is especially confrontational this morning, with lots of cerbal harrassment, more red clothes goading which is a continuation of [yesterday's harrassment campaign], all with a backdrop of a sustained pink tsunami in every location I have been to this morning.
The red goading I expected because I am in the location I was gifted the red shirt a few days ago, that I previously mentioned. That was the start of the most recent harrassment campaign that escallated to multiple physical assaults on me. But the amounts of bizare synchronicities are off the fucking charts.
Anyway, all this to say to 'yall, that none of this is okay.
Enough.
Update 1: I noticed yesterday evening that I have quite a bad mutilation on my right hand middle knuckle. It's very itchy and swollen. Feels like some sort of insect bite. However isn't it very odd that it should happen right after one of the security guard mafia gave me the middle finger.
Update 2: As I was writting this note, a butch western woman walked past slowly examining her right hand. About 2 minutes later, 3 more westerners walked past, as they past me, one said very loudly: "you need to struggle". It's been one thing after another all morning. #
Elon vs Disney - I know a lot of people really hate Musk right now. There have definitely been some of his decisions that I've though were very dubious, but I've often found myself thinking the mob is doing that thing when it over reacts bigly with enormous rightiousness, then later back tracks.
Anyhow on the Disney thing, I thought Musk's approach was awesome. He felt they were black mailing him, and he said so strongly, in public, dispite the fact they are a huge source of revenue and historically have been an american darling. You can't get much more free speech than that.
I'm puzzled by all the haters, are they on Disney's payroll? Yeah it sucks that the company is currently worth a lot less, 70% is brutal, but if he can rebuild it back up it will be much better for it long term without customers that feel they can push him around whenever it suits them. Ultimately it's better for users, even if it's a difficult period. #
Today’s links:
X Is Worth 71.5% Less Than When Elon Musk Bought It - Ouch 70% is brutal, but I think long term Elon's approach to stand up to customer bullies is good for the users of Twitter/X. me.pcmag.com #
Generative AI and intellectual property - Nice thought piece from Bennedict Evans that touches on many of the important aspects of intellectual property rights that ChatGPT is making us rethink. It's a real puzzler, do we all have to become mechanical turks for AI tech to work? www.ben-evans.com #
Physicaly assaulted again - I was physically assaulted again a few minutes ago. One of the motorbike gang stalkers drove up behind me and wacked me with a bat as they drove past. This is following several harrassnent incidents yesterday where I didn't react more than accepting the blame.
They blame me for something, bully me, and even if I accept the bullying, they are still not happy, and blame me for being blamed.
Shame on you vietnam. 2024 is definitely turning into the vietnamese year of shame. One year can turn into many. #
I miss conversations - One of the things that really lacked for me in 2023 was conversations. I only had about a handfull of actual conversations during the entire year. In pretty much each case there were concequences, things I said got turned around and used against me within days. Talking to fellow foreigners is very much discouraged. I miss talking to people. #
Vision Pro Pro's - Casey Liss and John Gruber discuss amoung other things Apple's soon to be released Vision Pro on the latest Talk Show episode. They mention two aspects of the device that I hadn't considered before.
Some people wonder whether the price tag is too high. It's a high price for sure, but one group of people that will fork out the cash is business travellers. These folks spend extended amounts of time on planes and trains. If the device does turn out to offer a very immersive experience similar to being at the cinema, then why wouldn't they invest in improving those long travel days?
The other aspect I hadn't considered is privacy. If the work that you do is sensitive and needs to be kept secret, then the Vision Pro is maybe the best device available because it totally cuts out the possibility of opportunistic shoulder surfers since the device is literally attached to your face. #
Today’s links:
Vinyl is back for good and that’s exciting. Don’t let the greed of big labels ruin it - Recently people have been noticing the resurgence of vinyl records. John Harris' article goes into a bit more depth, looking at some of the dynamics at play between mainstream and independent labels, and the manufacturing realities in supply chains that seem currently to be predominently based in eastern european countries. I feel like a lot more could be written about this interesting topic. I would definitely read it. www.theguardian.com #
Britain is stuck in a doom loop: the system is rigged against growth. That needs to change - Will Hutton paints quite a bleak picture of the UK's coorporate sector. Chronic under funding of companies, money going abroad and UK companies increasingly being bought by foreign investors at an alarming rate. It's a doom loop that results in lower pensions, which are normally aggregated and invested in business. Overall it results in even less investment in home grown ventures, which results in even less pensions, and the cycle continues. He makes the case that the state needs to intervene. www.theguardian.com #
Transplanted to the US as a child, two accents seemed like a great idea. Until my first playdate - I too had a bit of a variable accent growing up between cultures. I'm suprised by how well the author remembers her experience. I for one do not remember hardly any of the details, to the extent my accent did change, it certainly wasn't something I was consciously doing. Of course you are going to change the words you use, otherwise people don't understand what you are saying. But it's not like you are staying up late studying and plotting coping strategies. Maybe I'm just thick. Strange article which rings true, but also feels very different to how it was, at least for me. www.theguardian.com #
RA 917 - Purelink - “90-plus minutes of intricately textured downtempo, dub techno and even UK garage, all cut through with a floaty, almost drowsy quality, with plenty of exclusives and unreleased cuts”. I’m really into this mix. It’s about atmospheric, about ambience. Reminds me of some of the stuff I was listening to in the early oughts. Reminds me of being in Belgium. It takes a while to get going but once it does it’s very good and very chill. Also liked this description - “a bridger of worlds, sounds and tempos”. ra.co #
Eye mutilation - I wish the first note of the year could be more positive. I've been subjected to lots of harrassment this past week, and it somewhat subsided yesterday. But the last few incidents involved people shouting 'no!' and 'learn' at me. Well wouldn't you know it, a few hours later, I've developed an eye infection. So far it's not too bad, but it feels weird and definitely a bit painful. It's a bit swollen and puffy. I just hope it doesn't get any worse.
This sort of thing happens at the end of almost every harrassment campaign. I've written about it many times before. Eventually in one way or another I always end up getting mutilated.
Not exactly how I'd hoped to usher in the new year. #
Assaulted with projectile - In addition to the eye infection, at around 10pm last night, a small gang of late teens youths, sat nearby me, started eating food and throwing garbage all about the place. I said to not throw garbage everywhere. A short while later, they came back and tried to start an argument. A girl from the gang threatenned to call the police, I said fine call them.
A bit later the police showed up, I explained what had happened, eventually they drove off. Right after they drove off the girl threw an unnopened can of drink at me very hard from about 3 meters away. The can hit me full force on the inside of my arm. I expect it will leave some bruising as the impact was very severe.
I believe the events were pre-meditated, and part of the intimidation campaign that's been waged against me all week from anonymous gang stalkers. #
More projectiles - The assaults continued through the night. At around 3am a motorbike drove past throwing both what appeared to be an empty glass bottle and a large paper cup filled with some form of soft drink. I got covered with the soft drink on my head and torso. Thankfully the glass bottle didn't hit me but it must have smashed right next to me, there was broken glass everywhere.
Five minutes later what appeared to be a police man drove past on a non-descript moped and shouted some abuse at me.
Not the best new year's I've had.
Quite a shameful way to start 2024 from vietnam in my humble opinion.
If past experience is anything to go by, this will set in motion a new harrassment campaign as I am repeatedly blamed for everything in the universe, then blamed again for being blamed. #
2024: Vietnamese year of shame - Quite a lot of verbal harrassment from the new year's day early morning runners. Given yesterday evening's harrassment and assaults done to me, I'm calling 2024 the vietnamese year of shame. Don't feel like you need to participate in this, it's not like I'm planning some form of counter offensive, it's entirely meant to be symbolic.
I sincerely hope it does not escallate, though given that many of this morning's runners were wearing red tshirts with the vietnam yellow star on the front, and the number 42 on the back, I think it's fair to say that looks likely. Thankfully murdering life the universe and everything in the near future, is probably a bit optimistic on their part. #
Ownership of everything - It occurs to me this morning that if one wanted at some stage to redesign the vietnamese flag for any reason, then perhaps a fitting thing to do with the old ones would be to send them all up in a space rocket and fly them into our star the sun. #
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