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2024/03/31 #

  • Happy Easter - Best wishes to all for the Easter weekend :) #

  • Eat chocolate - I heard on the latest All-In podcast that the price of the commodity cocoa has gone through the roof recently because some of the main supplier countries have had a particularly bad harvest this year. Analysts are saying this will affect the price of chocolate starting in a few weeks, and / or the size of chocolate products. Could be a good time to either stock up the freezer and eat as many chocolate easter eggs as possible. #

Today’s links:

  • Google Podcasts service shuts down in the US next week - I use google podcast links a lot in the newsletter. It's unbelievable how many podcasters don't have their own website, so Google Podcasts is the best place to get a clean and tidy page for their show. I hope they don't 404 all the old pages. We need a good replacement. I can't inagibe YouTube Music will be adequate. www.bleepingcomputer.com #

  • How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU - Currently we are maxing out at about 150 billion, and we are reaching the end of Moore's law, however this is causing chip makers to figure out new ways to incresse transistor count, and there is a sort of chips renaissance quietly happening in every layer. Innovative advances are being made in materials science, 3D stacking, integrated chiplets, lithography, and even the software and description languages used by chip designers. They will have a trillion transistors within a decade, which will fuel the AI revolution. spectrum.ieee.org #

2024/03/30 #

  • cat << EOF > Eating Glass (Issue #157)

    This week’s newsletter is out!

    In this week’s edition:

    Bitcoin scaling, social media federation, Bitcoin on feature phones, Microstrategy strategy, the slaughtering of good media outlets, fascinating Bitcoin mining dynamics

    Issue details:

    EOF

  • Interleaved main page take 2 - Since I was blocked on the plugins tidy up on my static site generator development, I took another look at the previous feature I was working on. That feature is the interleaved main page, which would display all post types, blog, notes, links etc interleaved by day. This would take the place of the current latest page. I think it will be awesome.

    I think I've found a much simpler way of implementing the feature. One of the reasons for the tidy up was to try and simplify things. So anyway I've made a start at getting it implemented and it's going quite well, no major show stoppers so far. Hoping to have something operational this week. #

Today’s links:

2024/03/29 #

  • Illness update - Still feeling mostly okay. No coughing, no flem, though slight strange taste in my mouth. So that's encouraging. However, ankles are still swollen despite two days of applying anti-inflamatory cream.

    The other weird thing is that earlier as I got back to were I am now, about 30 metres down the road, there was a pile of seemingly random business papers thrown about the place. A4 sheets of paper, folders etc. As I passed I noticed that there was a big pile of xrays. Actual medical xrays. All the xrays were of pairs of lungs.

    What the fuck is that about? Intimidation much?

    This was after a day full of escallations everywhere I went, including being blocked from drying clothes and sleeping blanket.

    Had I not found a way around that blockage, I quite literally would have had to sleep in wet clothes and under an actual wet blancket. This while I'm trying to recover from actual suspected pneumonia. Once again, the world is not only blocking me from getting well, but actively trying to make me ill again.

    And guess what, I was later punished for getting around the blockage. Punished for saving my own life. #

Today’s links:

2024/03/28 #

  • Big tech blocks smaller companies - One of the things that is very different during the AI revolution we are in is that the big companies are being as nimble as historically the smaller upstarts have been.

    This means for the first time ever, it's not obvious that the ecosystem will turn over. Smaller companies might never again become bigger players, and the big players will always be at the top. Much of the innovation is coming frlm the big players. That's a new dynamic and quite clearly could have terrible concequences for diversity throughout society.

    Do we need to redesign how all these institutions interact so the ecosystem remains healthy?

    If bitcoin was designed as the business system is stuctured, 4-5 people would do all the transactions in the entire world. #

  • cat << EOF > Feature phone interfaces

    Really interesting episode of Citadel Dispatch with KG about his custodial Bitcoin solution Machankura, deployed in a many countries across Africa. The cool thing is that their solution works with old school feature phones. And it's suprisingly advanced in terms of functionality. In a way, it's simplicity is it's strength. If users can add credit to their phone, then they send/receive/store bitcoin.

    They even have a way to pay for groceries directly in stores via lightning, and a way to buy bitcoin annonomously using cash via gift cards or directly over the counter in participating stores. It's really very impressive.

    I wonder if he could open up his solution to other developers via an HTTP API?

    I'm also wondering how easy it would be to add a feature phone interface to an existing web2/3 app. What is the min app for a feature phone interface app?

    Personally I quite like the idea of using a simple device to do bitcoin transactions because it minimises your attack surface. Of course you would also have a smart phone for surfing the web, but keeping these devices seperate might be a good idea. Also should you loose all your belongings, it's a lot cheaper to buy a feature phone than the latest iPhone with 10 cameras and AI photo editing.

    EOF

  • Swollen ankles - The strange thing about my ankles swelling again is that after the initial round of antibiotics that I did, they didn't swell up after I stopped taking the medication. After this round of antibiotics, they started to swell up the day after finishing the course. I find that strange. #

Today’s links:

2024/03/27 #

  • cat << EOF > Regulators as secret crypto shills

    Another half baked mid-week observation for you. Maybe it will spark some ideas even if it isn't articulted in the most elegant way.

    The way things are built in the crypto space is sort of interesting, even if it's a bit worrying, because it can lead to all sorts of scamy behaviour. Contenders for new layer 1s start out as personality or meme coins. This is to get some traction and money flowing through the network. The developers then attempt to add much needed core features like security and decentralisation amoung others. If they don't succeed they can always turn the project into a layer 2.

    The point is the process is very difficult, fraught with difficulties, but can result in robust software. That software tends to be relatively well suited to building protocols, which can be used by many.

    This is in contrast to how software is typically build for more traditional web companies. These tend to favour centralisation and don't tend to be conducive to creating open protocols.

    It occurred to me that in a way the US and EU regulators that are trying to impose laws to curb tech giants are basically imposing a specific development philosophy onto companies. Their focus is on curbing monopolistic behaviour, rather than say decentralisation, or censorship resistance.

    I wonder if it's the case that eventually they will be imposing crypto style architectures and protocols. The certainly don't seem to be down with traditional web businesses at the minute.

    How ironic that they don't allow crypto then, when in a way, these are perhaps the companies that are trying hardest to be the most fair to participants. At least that's the case for the layer 1s.

    EOF

  • What would bitcoiners do? - With all the regulatory issues Apple is up against about it's software it's worth considering what development methodologies we want people to use. Is it still ok to build software that's good enough, or does everything have to be solved from first principles now?

    What would an app store built by bitcoiners look like? What would it's layer 0 look like? #

  • Illness update - I'm still feeling relatively okay this evening. This morning I did wake up early and coughed up a small bit of flem, but the rest of the day no couging or flem, lungs feel mostly normal.

    So that's all great, almost 3 days since I finished the antibiotics and I can't feel any symptoms returning. Or at least direct symptoms. One thing I have noticed since I stopped the antibiotics both my ankles have swollen up slighlty.

    That's worrying because when I was ill, the ankles got very swollen, to the point where it was difficult to walk. I had a theory it was due to liquid from the lungs accumulating in the ankles, but my lungs don't feel like they are full of anything. Like I said, they feel okay.

    Maybe it's a side effect of the antibiotics and it will pass. Or perhaps it's just related to activity. I did quite a lot of walking today.

    Anyway that's the update. Feeling alright but worried I'm not out of the woods yet. #

  • Masks are dumb - I imagine this will be unpopular but anyway needs to be said. There's nothing like a lung infection, and 3 months of flem vomming, to make you paranoid about air quality. So I bought one of these specialist disposable masks that everyone is wearing. One of the tight fit ones. Until now I had a cloth mask that I washed.

    Well one thing that was immediately obvious was how innefective the mask actually is. It only really works if you press it down at the top of your nose. Otherwise when you inhale, 90% of the air just comes in around the side of the mask. So you end up inhaling the anbient air anyway. It's dumb.

    I don't get it. Why is everyone wearing these stupid masks if they don't filter the air? #

Today’s links:

2024/03/26 #

  • cat << EOF > David Pierce summarises the complaints about Apple

    David Pierce repeats the complaints from makers about Apple in a recent Vergecast episode.

    It’s is actually worse than it was before. You’ve made our lives harder in the name of pretending to make our lives easier

    He also summarizes the situation quite succinctly:

    Apple keeps claiming it’s trying to make things easier for its users, and all it does is make things worse for everybody

    Apple is now embroiled in several very high profile litigations. It's going to be interesting to see how it unfolds, the results affect us all.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > The AI layered tech stack

    David Sachs outlined how he thinks about the bigger picture of the AI tech stack on the most recent All-In Podcast (48:43). I think it's a very useful mental model so I have reproduced it here so I have something to link to from other articles I write.

    1. Chips, silicone, Nvidia
    2. Foundation models, open AI, open source models etc
    3. Infrastructure, developer tools, vector databases
    4. Applications

    Talking about layers is pretty popular at the minute.

    EOF

  • Apple has been facing off against EU regulators recently. One of their complaints was about how Apple treats super apps. If you take the idea of mobile super apps to the extreme, don't super apps eventually become app stores?

    At what point then does the OG app store require the app to actually become an app store? #

  • Glassy food and bad water - I finished the second lot of antibiotics for my lung infection Monday morning. I'm feeling mostly quite good today, not much coughing, hardly any flem. Hopefully it will last this time and I'll be well again.

    The world continues to make things difficult. Found small glass pieces in my breakfast this morning. Examined the pieces using a magnifying glass, and managed to crack the small piece into two but I had to use a metal cup. It was definitely glass. This evening a large bottle of water I bought in a shop, which was sealed and looked totally new, contained water that tasted very strange.

    It's been attempted escallations everywhere I've gone today too. Everyone is on the war path. I've managed to walk around all these without reacting, giving them a wide birth and plenty of space.

    Hey world, come on, allow me to get well. #

Today’s links:

2024/03/25 #

  • cat << EOF > The bitcoin and crypto rollercoaster

    I've found my learnings in the Bitcoin and crypto space a bit of a rollercoaster recently. I ended up writing a somewhat frustrated blog post and followup note, so I've been trying to piece together my recent somewhat turbulent learnings. Life is complicated and confusing sometimes, so many things happening at once. Writing about it helps figure it out, even if it's a bit inelegant at times.

    Anyhow I thought it would be easier to vaguely re-create my journey with a list of podcasts. You too can experience the rollercoaster :)

    This one will make you comfortable that Bitcoin can send/receive/store:

    These two will freak you out about the wider world of crypto, and make you confused about the current state of Bitcoin development:

    This one will calm you down and be at ease and comfortable that Bitcoin actually has a robust layered architecture and sensible bigger picture:

    This one will make you curious about layer 1 and layer 2 infrastructure architectures:

    This one will make you much more comfortable about layer 2s in a Bitcoin context, and excited about the possibilities of programmable money which will likely compliment and enhance send/receive/store.

    Update: I just listened to the David Seroy Bankless episode which is a perfect compliment to his WBD episode. The future of Bitcoin with bitvm and zk rollups sounds very cool indeed.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > The bitcoin layered stack

    On a recent What Bitcoin Did Podcast, Dhruv Bansal outlined a big picture view of the Bitcoin blockchain, how it is designed to be extended and built upon in layers. Fundamentally it's all about auctions.

    Dhruv's main idea:

    "Bitcoin is layers of markets. Each layer relies on functionality of the layer below"

    The Bitcoin stack

    • Layer 0 - Creating / releasing bitcoin, deeply connected to time and energy
      • The network is putting out a bid for computation with a set reward, the first to solve wins, the order book is trivial, single asking price, first order that comes through settles that order
    • Layer 1 - Transfer bitcoin to each other, deeply connected to blockspace and mining pools
      • Settlement of orders is chosen when an individual miner (actually now we have mining pools), the order book of layer 1 is non trivial, it consists of all pending transactions in the mempool, which is much bigger than 1 standing asking price. More complex than layer 0, there are more degrees of freedom
    • Layer 2 - Allows much larger amount of people to transact, about small payments, deeply connected to routing (onion network lives inside the lightning network)
      • Something like the Lightning network, this is now a market for fast settlement that doesn’t go directly on the blockchain, the scarecity we see in this market is liquidity or the availability of bitcoin, number of orders in order book is vastly bigger than in layer 2, it’s not just every transaction we are trying to get into a block, it’s all the lightning payments that could potentially ever be made between all the people trying to buy coffee or whatever it is we use the Lightning network for
    • Layer 3 - Something about the internet, about routing and the transmission of information digitally online

    He goes on:

    Each layer increases the reach and scope of Bitcoin, and allows it to do more interesting things. We have to create new markets that allow Bitcoin’s reach to grow.

    I thought it was a really valuable way of looking at Bitcoin architecture so I've extracted the essence of what he was saying here, so that I have something to link to from other articles I write. Feel free to do the same from your articles.

    It's still worth listening to the full episode to get additional context. They talk about layers about 30 mins into the episode.

    EOF

  • There are efforts to get Linux running on Apple silicon chips. They seem to be successful. I wonder if there are any efforts to get Android running on iPhones? #

Today’s links:

2024/03/24 #

Today’s links:

2024/03/23 #

  • cat << EOF > Backlash (Issue #156)

    This week’s newsletter is out!

    In this week’s edition:

    TikTok ban, volcanos & the Pixies, Bitcoin basics from 2022, podcasters talking to podcasters, crypto narratives for 2024, AI models vs reality, EU regulation, tech innovation droubt, Apple antitrust

    Issue details:

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/03/22 #

  • Medical info wikipedia - One thing that's become apparent to me while being ill, is that getting medical information online, especially relating to medication, is a total shitshow at the minute. Try and search for a specific medication and you enter a dark world of popups, preditory advertising, and blatant misinformation. Even if you try to read scientific papers, you end up down a never ending rabbit hole. It's the last thing you are able to deal with when you actually are ill.

    We need a common resource for humanity, non-profit, for medical info. You should be able to easily find illness symptons, medication descriptions. It should be easy to compare different medications. The current leave it to the open market, quite clearly does not work. #

  • Nvidia's modern platform play - Nvidia is everywhere at the minute. Not only are they killing it in hardware, they have released a load of cloud based software. Each one very unique, tailored to future tech like AI and also spacial computing. Their spacial computing offering even includes a world wide streaming delivery network that will enable companies to stream 3D content directly to Vision Pro devices.

    Their example is a digital twin car configurator. Pretty cool, but one wonders how many other 3D applications currently rendered to 2D screens will want to move to spacial computing environments.

    As I wrote about last year, a lot of science and engineering companies might be interested. #

Today’s links:

2024/03/21 #

  • Illness is back - I've mentioned this on Twitter already, but not here yet. The illness that I had since the beginning of the year. It had looked like the antibiotics I took had cleared it up, but that only lasted 2 weeks or so. I am most definitely ill again, coughing up loads of flem, pain in my right lung, flem vomming too. It's so horrible.

    I got some more antibiotics. They are supposedly better than the previous antibiotics. Different brand, based on different chemistry, suppsedly is able to kill more types of bacteria, which is what we suspect has infected my lung. These ones are 10x more expensive. I took the first one last night, this morning it doesn't appear to have had any effect. In fact if anything, it's gotten worse.

    Please world, work with me on this, so that I can get well again. #

2024/03/20 #

Today’s links:

2024/03/17 #

  • cat << EOF > Consent forms suck

    I've written about this many times before. The web is now a wasteland almost totally covered in consent forms. It's a disgrace. Users don't want to wade through this crap, and who can blame them.

    Consent forms are handing the entire web, the thing many of us have spent decades contributing to, directly to AI companies on a silver platter.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > LLMs in the browser

    I've been thinking about browser diversity the past few days. Looks like the EU is going to force Apple to allow alternative browser rendering engines on iOS. I think this is likely great for users.

    Anyway browsers are made up of various pieces, including the rendering engine. Firefox, Chrome and Safari have different variants. Meta has open sourced it's LLM Llama, Elon is apparently also open sourcing his Grok LLM. I wonder how long it will take until someone tries to integrate one of these directly into a web browser. Could be interesting to surf the web with a browser super powered by AI.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > Low level git

    Software is strange. You build it using your current knowledge, but things change and you realise that your software would have been better, or easier to understand had it been built another way. So people retrofit new interfaces to the old software, to modernise it. And it sort of works for many of the use cases.

    But if you try to do something complicated, or you run into trouble, accidentally going down a path you didn't mean to, the new interface often gets in the way. Git, amazing as it is, sufers from this problem.

    I've been reading Git from the bottom up recentally. It's been very enlightening. Git is so much simpler underneath than I thought. I'm finding it difficult though to hold both interfaces in my head.

    I keep wondering whether it would have been better to learn git using the low level primitives right from the start.

    Computer software doesn't always intersect well with human cultures.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > Crypto WTF

    So I've been listening to loads of podcasts mentioning Tether and Tron recently. They say these are super popular in places where people just want to do smaller transactions. Very popular in developing countries because fees are low. It's aimed at the unbanked, people that have never had bank accounts.

    But what's going on from a technical perspective? First of all it's totally unclear to me how these unbanked people use it because surely at some stage they need to turn these cryptos into a fiat currency in order to actually buy something. Also how do they get crypto in the first place? Don't you need a bank account to make use of crypto eventually?

    Are these all just literal seperate apps for your phone? Which are the blockchain, which are the coins? How do you exchange them? Or are you just stuck in the coin that you choose, along with all the other confused souls that somehow ended up with X coin on Y chain with Z wallet...

    Here's a tiny fraction of what I was presented with:

    • Tron
    • Tether
    • Etherium
    • Bitcoin
    • Aqua
    • Fedimint
    • Lghtning
    • Liquid
    • Optimism

    But wait there's more. There are combinations too. Tether Tron, Liquid Tether, and so many other combinations. You quickly start to wonder whether even those you are listening to talking about this stuff know what they are talking about. It's enfuriating.

    It's so unbelievably complicated. Once you do some research you will quickly be lost in a sea of technologies, protocols, stable coins, chains, side chains, rollups etc. How can sending, receiving and storing money be so fucking complicated? It's literally 3 fucking features y'all. WTF crypto?

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > What will the Space Age be like?

    I've become totally fascinated with the gilded age after listening to the latest Rest is History podcast series all about the Titanic. Building huge luxury ships that would sail across the Atlantic ocean was what entrepreuneurs did back then. Of course there were also huge industries in building massive road and rail networks, and many other large scale physical goods productions. I wonder if we will see a return to a similar age with the space race unfolding?

    Elon just managed to put the largest craft ever into orbit. Such a ship could transport many many people. Exciting times.

    I'm going to work on my facial hair just in case we do have to go all Edwardian Steam Punk in the next few years.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > Trump has become a standup comic

    Rogan made this observation on one of his latest episodes. It was either the Black Keys or James Lindsay episodes, I can't quite remember which. He's had nearly a decade now of going around doing speeches and TV interviews constantly. And he clearly loves it, he's totally in his element, and because of his stream of consciousness style of speaking, he's basically at this stage a standup comic.

    I feel validated because I've been thinking the exact same thing for months. I make no commentary on whether this is good or bad for the United States, but to be honest, often he's pretty fucking hilarious.

    EOF

  • VMs for mobile - With all this worry about Tik Tok and what access apps have on mobile devices, doesn't it make sense to develop some form of VM for mobiles? That way you can have trusted apps on the base phone OS, and put all those 'dangerous' but fun social networking apps on a VM that you can switch to. This would be a feature I think many business executives and high net worth individuals would be very interested in.

    At the very least there should be much better logging. You should be able to see exactly what data is being accessed and sent over the network. #

  • Computer nerd humour - "Ligging". Darn it, not again, stupid auto-correct. #

  • From an earlier blog post: "How can sending, receiving and storing money be so fucking complicated? It's literally 3 fucking features y'all. WTF crypto?"

    I also mentioned in this week's newsletter that Bitcoin development reminded me of a collection of hodge podge ActivityPub protocols, that no longer fit the use case. Ironically email, I think we can all agree, has pretty much mastered send/receive/store.

    In case you aren't aware ActivityPub uses an email style paradigm, with an inbox and outbox. I'm not sure what this all means apart from perhaps my analogy was a bit off I guess.

    I'm wondering now if ActivityPub could be built on top of the AT protocol. Maybe email done right is actually quite involved. #

2024/03/16 #

Today’s links:

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Compositing the Sistine Chapel (Issue #155) markjgsmith.com #

  • China’s economic bright spots provide a warning - Chinese manufacturing has unnexpectedly picked up slightly with increased exports to the US. An interesting point made is that family run factories are now able to send products direct to consumers, which they are experimenting with via companies like Shein and Temu. I heard via Bennedict Evans on his podcast that large clothes stores like Zara and H&M are complaining they still have to pay lots of import tax on their container shipments, something the direct to customer shipers manage to avoid in many cases. www.economist.com #

2024/03/14 #

Today’s links:

  • voici.js - A Node.js library for pretty printing your data on the terminal🎨 - I can imagine this could be very useful if you are writing CLI tools that retrieve data from an API. github.com #

  • Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog - Manton Reece introduces a blogroll feature on micro.blog, and suddenly the world feels a tiny little bit more like 2005. His implementation allows you to create several different named blogrolls, then insert them into your site's pages via a plugin. Cool feature. www.manton.org #

  • Welcome to AirSpace (2016) - Kyle Chayka piece about his noticing the international airbnb easthetic that was developing worldwide in apartments, cafes and restaurants. There's a lot of nuance to how culture is being spread in the age of globally hyperconnected people. When you connect people across large distances, it can have a big impact on the spaces we live in. Lots of interesting observations. www.theverge.com #

2024/03/13 #

  • Navigating around blockages - I've been having a terrible time doing a much needed consolidation of all my static site generator's plugins. There's some sort of bug in the Github Action library that I wanted to use to figure out if files have been modified in a specific repository folder. Necessary so I can trigger a build and deploy a plugin when I change something.

    Well I think I've found another way to do the same thing. Hoping to get something working this week. It will be great to have things tidy. Sometimes it's worth slowing down so you can go faster later. #

Today’s links:

2024/03/12 #

Today’s links:

  • Cartesi - I'm certainly not an expert in this area, but this seems like it could be quite interesting. It's an etherium smart contract VM that runs a full Linux instance. Cool! www.cartesi.io #

2024/03/11 #

  • Micropayments for humans - I wrote a few days ago about an easy way to make a crypto wallet discoverable on personal websites. The use case I had in mind was AI visitors to a website. AI tools that browse and synthesize information from websites is becoming insanely popular recently. They are great but they break the web. Content creators essentially get cut completly out of the loop, so they no longer have any incentive to create content. Eventually thus there will be no human content creators online. Auto-discoverable cryptp wallets for websites could be part of a solution.

    Auto-discoverable wallets could also be used for human website visitors. For example a human visitor might consume some content they like while visiting a website, and if their browser had a built in crypto wallet, theoretically they could then send a micro payment to the website in a single click. No setup required, even if they had never visited that particular website before.

    There's already a protocol for it, though it doesn't appear to be very well used. I think something light-weight like this would ve very useful, both for AI and human website visitors. #

Today’s links:

2024/03/09 #

  • cat << EOF > Breathing Difficult (Issue #154)

    This week’s newsletter is out!

    In this week’s edition:

    Social media vs personal websites, AI and deep fakes, future of money and crypto, history of Ukraine, history of curry, building the next era of the internet, social media traps

    Issue details:

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/03/07 #

  • Git based blogging - One of the cool things about basing your blogging platform on git is that you can blog even when offline. I'm still battling illness, my ankles are still intermitently swelling up, which means I can't walk anywhere, including to the place where I get an internet connection, and I'm still coughing up lots of flem. But I can continue to write posts.

    I create a feature branch for each day, and I add posts, notes, links etc throughout the day. In normal times the branch would automatically get merged into the main branch and the site would get rebuilt at midnight. But if I'm not able to get online for whatever reason, then I just create the next day's feature branch, merge the previous day's content on my local device. The next time I do manage to get online, all the content I wrote while offline will get published.

    Okay sure it's a little jaring that a load of content appears on the site all at once in those situations, but it's still all dated correctly, with the date and time I wrote it. The point is that I can continue blogging pretty much as normal, even when I'm not able to get online.

    Git is an awesome tool. Yes there's a bit of a learning curve, but for writing you only really need to learn a few features, and the workflow ends up being quite simple once you have done it a few times. And you then get the benefits of everything being version controlled. #

  • Big infra build out done when? - We are in a very rare period of core internet infrastructure build out. The huge surge in Nvidia profits is part of this, as service providers are rushing to build out the compute necessary for the boom in AI / machine learning applications that have become runnaway successes everywhere.

    I'm really curious how the infrastructure companies are estimating how much compute they will need. It's a complicated problem in normal times, but this is the age of generative AI and deep fakes. They have to lay down the infrastructure for companies that will be able to build the smartest bullshit machines ever invented.

    We will probably avoid the pitfalls of the dot com crash this time, but the pitfalls in this build out seem like they could be very difficult to detect, especially when you are in the thick of it. #

  • Website crypto wallet auto-discovery - For RSS you can add a special meta tag in the head of your web page's HTML. That can then be used by applications that read your page to auto discover the RSS feed for the page. I wonder if there is a similar standard way to define a crypto wallet associated with a website?

    Such a standard could enable automatic micro payments, which in this age of AI that consume everything without a care for the creators, might be very useful. Imagine a world where, not only are creators of content rewarded for the content they are creating, but the AI could give the wallet an exact breakdown of the user query and weighted payments for all sites that were used to contruct the final answer.

    There is the possibility for almost perfect transparency. #

Today’s links:

  • The Open Wallet protocol - Seems like somebody already proposed a way to add crypto wallets to web pages. It's simple, very easy to add to a website. It doesn't seem to be very popular though. There are no tutorials etc, just this lonely website. What's wrong with the proposal? I guess you need some app that uses it for it to become popular. Worth being aware of, especially since the big AI companies like Google will likely try to create some crazy complicated way of doing the same thing. Would be very cool if Google decided to go the simple root, and use this existing protocol. openwalletprotocol.org #

2024/03/06 #

  • Swollen ankles - My ankles are still somewhat randomly swelling up. It can get pretty bad if I don't notice it, they can appear almost double normal size. When that happens putting on socks can get very difficult, if not impossible. I don't yet have a handle on what's causing it. It's really frustrating because it has a huge impact on my mobility. When they are swollen, I can't walk anywhere.

    They definitely swell up when I walk somewhere. That much I do know. That in itself is odd, but I've also had on at least one occasion, where I didn't walk anywhere, and the next day they were swollen. It might be something simple like sitting in a position where I unknowingly put them under strain.

    Whatever it is, it wasn't happening before I got ill in early January. Swollen ankles is not something I have ever had to contend with previously. I'm hoping that when the coughing / microbial infection in my respiratory system clears up, the ankles thing will disapear too.

    When they do swell up, as they have done today, the only thing I can do is apply the anti-inflamation gel, put my feet up and rest. #

  • Antibiotics - I've completed the course of antibiotics. It was 1 week. Things have cleared up considerably, but they definitely haven't cleared completely. I'm still coughing a lot, and coughing up quite a lot of flem. So I'm continuing to take the antibiotics for a few more days. Apparently taking them for more days is supposed to be fine. #

2024/03/05 #

  • Resurfacing - The last few days I've finally started feeling well enough to contemplate posting again. I've basically been completely incapacitated all of February, though I was ill most of January too. I just couldn't even think about writing or posting. Anyway, let's see how things go.

    I'm still not able to get online everyday, so these posts might appear somewhat unnexpectedly, though I'm writing them at the publish time in the frontmatter.

    My ankles are still periodically swelling up. I have no idea why. When that happens I have to stop walking anywhere. I'm also still coughing up flem, but much less since I started taking the antibiotics. I occasionally still feel queezy too. Keeping food down has been a challenge too, but that's improved too.

    Still dealing with the pre-illness problems, having to use the internet standing up, my water access is still a trickle, other stuff I can't think of now. But I'm alive, and I'm still posting again.

    Thank you to those who have helped and been kind these past few weeks. Hoping things continue to improve :) #

  • Participating - I don't currently have the opportunity to watch films or TV series. It's been like that for a while now. I really miss it. I find myself listening to people on podcasts talking about the stuff they are watching as a sort of proxy. Instead of watching films, I listen to people talk about watching films.

    It occurred to me yesterday that my experience of social media is much the same. Since I can only get online while standing up at the minute, participating in social media is very difficult. I do post but getting into conversations is next to impossible. The current thing has always passed me by the time I circle back around to read my replies and messages.

    I find that I spend much of my time listening to people on podcasts talking about using social media. This isn't the internet I imagined when I first got excited about being online.

    Anyway, I'm not complaining exactly, just describing how it is at the minute. I'm super happy that at least through podcasting, I can experience things even if it's often second hand. #

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