markjgsmith

2024/04/23 #

• The act of blogging is useful in and of itself. If other people read it and like it, that's an added bonus. #

• cat << EOF > The utility of running a blog

  The idea that blogging is dead, that people won't start blogging again, is imho somewhat misguided. The thought is that people only want to post on social medias because that's where other people are. On your blog it's just you.

  The people that blog consistently mostly do it for themselves. It's a great way to think through difficult problems, to have a record of a particular moment in time. They would likely blog whether there are people there or not. The act of blogging is useful in and of itself. If other people read it and like it, that's an added bonus.

  Often folks that only post on social media don't lead lives where blogging is useful. No worries, keep posting on social media. But there likely are also people that just haven't discovered yet the utility of running a blog.

  EOF

• cat << EOF > Max Hillebrand economics book recommendations

  These books were recommended by Max Hillebrand on the Economics of Bitcoin panel @ Cheatcode 2024 conference.

  Fundamentals on theory of economics, how to think like an economist:

  • Theory and History by Ludwig Von Mises
  • Economic Science and the Austrian Method by Hans Hermann Hoppe

  End result of thinking like an economist:

  • Man, Economy and State by Mary Rothbard

  Thinking like an economist about money and what it actually means:

  • The Ethics of Money Production by Yurk Hultzman

  Most insanely accurate and logically consistent book about the economics of Bitcoin:

  • Crypto Economics On the Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin by Eric Voscule

  I thought the panel discussion was really enlightening so I'm listing the books here. Hopefully at some stage I'll have the chance to het hold of these and read them.

  EOF

• NY Times: "Roughly 170 million Americans use TikTok. That’s half the population of the United States."

  I knew the app was very popular, but I hadn't appreciated just how popular. Half the entire population. Wow. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: The utility of running a blog markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Max Hillebrand economics book recommendations markjgsmith.com #

• Ideas for my dream blogging CMS - Matthew Haughey describes his ideal modern blogging CMS. It's a well thought out piece that takes into account interacting with the modern social media world, with the ability to write in one place, then publish to any target location or platform, connectivity to protocols like ActuvityPub, first class support for micro-content, a kick ass writer editor experience, lots of themes, import/export, syndication, support for things like linkblogs in the sidebar. Lots of interesting ideas in this post. Matthew was in the most recent Shop Talk Show where they discuss his post in detail. a.wholelottanothing.org #

• $200 infra to serve your startup till 100k monthly users in 15 minutes. Self-hosted Postgres, caddyserver and docker-compose - I'm always interested to read latest tutorials on how to setup a self hosted infrastructure for small companies. I too have found that in many cases serverless can endbup being very expensive. In fact you can get pretty far with a boring linux box. This article was pretty good, though a little complex imo. grski.pl #

• Robust NodeJS Deployment Architecture - I created this writeup that pulled together what I'd learnt building and deploying my linkblig SaaS. I still think it's a pretty solid self hosted solution. It runs on any standard VPS, can manually scale, fault tolerant, and is easy to maintain. Features a load balancer, application servers and a datastore. markjgsmith.com #

• How a Jack Dorsey-backed bitcoin miner uses a volcano in Kenya to turn on the lights in rural homes - Jack has backed Gridless a company that has deployed several containers that house portable bitcoin mining farms, to Kenya, Malawi and Zambia. They work with local renewable energy companies making them cost effective since they soak up extra energy that would otherwise go to waste. It's a nice synergy that is having a big impact on local communities, many of which didn't previously have electricity. www.cnbc.com #