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2024/05/31 #

  • One thing that's a pattern is when I'm being starved and thirsted, I'm also being harrassed. Then I get gifted something and the harrassnent quiets down for a bit. That's been the past 24 hours. It's like night and day difference.

    This morning though, the low key harrassment has started back up again. It's like one thing after another. Like lots of pieces are being setup for future incidents or something. I'm being hurried up, then slowed down. Then punished for being wrong, even though I've done nothing. They are creating problems to complain about, I'm then getting blamed and blocked.

    Anyhow, this morning I'm going to be testing the second version of my fix to separate the links on the everything page into their own area of the post.

    I think I found the bug with my initial version. It looks like a copy / paste mistake, there was an extra closing tag in a block of EJS. Really difficult to spot. I didn't see it until I refactored the code a bit and painstakingly went through it line by line. #

2024/05/30 #

  • The future of iPadOS vs MacOS

    There's some interesting discussion, on the latest Talk Show podcast episode, between John Gruber and M.G. Siegler all about the future of iPadOS vs MacOS. It's a re-occuring theme on his show, and broadly speaking has been following the evolution of these different but related operating systems, and all the many subtle nuances that come with that. Subtle nuance is something Gruber is expert at.

    Initially when iPadOS was released, OSX users were really worried it would end up replacing MacOS. The main worry being that iPadOS isn't really for power users. It's for people that just want to use a few apps and browse the web. It's not for developer types that want to get right into all levels of the operating system, something possible with MacOS, but not with iPadOS. Over the years though it's become clear that Apple isn't planning on deprecating MacOS, so that worry has dicipated.

    But the usability issues remain. The main issue is that bringing the iPad experience to MacOS isn't a simple challenge. Or the the other way around. The two OS's have very different interaction models (touch vs mouse), and resolutions.

    Let's say there was an iPad app that let you run MacOS. That would work fine while you had the iPad docked in the magic keyboard, but let's say you snapped it out to go downstairs while you were browsing a web page in Safari. Well the device needs to seemlessly switch to a touch interface. That doesn't seem very easily doable.

    What's more, using touch based hardware to control MacOS just doesn't work very well. For starters all the window open and close buttons are too close together to be able to use your finger to tap them. And there isn't much room on the iPad screen, to make them bigger. But running iPadOS on MacOS seems like it would be more doable, assuming of course that future laptops are equiped with touch enabled screens. At least there's enough space.

    Gruber's point is that it's clunky and sub-optimal, and that's not how Apple does things. They would likely rather not offer the sub-optimal experience at all.

    Anyway all this talk reminded me, of all things, about Vim's interface. Specifically that you have to switch between modes in order to get things done. The two main ones being normal, and insert. It seems odd at first, but you get used to it, and actually it makes it possible to have much more powerful features in each mode than if they were combined. In Vim you are constantly switching, but it becomes second nature after a while.

    I wonder whether you couldn't do something similar on Apple devices. A way to quickly switch between touch and trackpad modes. That way it seems like it would be possible to create appealing transitions for the windows between modes. Crucially on iPadOS you would only get MacOS trackpad mode when the iPad is docked in the magic keyboard. Defaults configurable of course.

    Would Vim style quick mode switching solve the MacOS - iPadOS integration connundrum?

  • Build minutes have reset so I was able to publish all the blog posts, notes, links etc from the past 3 weeks. Loads of blog posts including the ssg series, and future vision plan. Also fixed the bug that was causing the everything page to not display all blog posts.

    Pretty happy about all that.

    I'm working on a way to separate out each days links on the everything page into it's own section. I think it looks better and it's nice just to see all the links grouped together rather than interleaved with the other posts. First attempt hasn't worked. Some sort of syntax error in an EJS template.

    It's like finding a needle in a haystack. I've found that's one disadvantage of classical templating languages. There are some templating languages that have a react JSX type syntax, so might try those at some point in the future to see if the stack traces are better. Should be quite easy to add a renderer for one of those. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/29 #

  • The tsunami of hate and harrassment continued all day yesterday and through much of the night via motorbike gang stalkers. Food, drinking water, washing water and electricity still completely cut off. This morning several low key driveby harrassments including 'your wah'. Pretty obvious water goading. Are you going to allow me to live today world? #

  • My static site generator series

    This short blog series is a first attempt at describing my latest development project. I've been working on the static site generator for a couple of years on and off, as life permitted, with very limited resources. It was born out of the ashes of my linkblogging SaaS project. Initially just to build my own personal website, but it's become much more of a generalised website builder over time.

    The personal website, by the way, is very minimalist. That's partly a personal preference, I feel like information based websites should focus on text. I also wanted to have a site that would render with or without javascript enabled in the browser, readable on desktop and mobile. The plan is to enhance this over time using all the glorious modern CSS features that exist. For the moment though it's very minimalist. The way to think about it is that underneath the minimalist outward appearance, there's a lot of cool things happening to generate all the pages. Making the website look cool will be possible relatively easily using things like over-riddable server side components. Things take time when you are building the tool you are using, you have to build the foundations first.

    In any case, before embarking on the static site generator project I did of course survey available tools. I had experience building my personal blog with Jekyll, but since I'm a Nodejs developer, I really wanted something written entirely in javascript. When I looked at existing javascript generators, though there were some great options available, I found that building the archives for my existing site to be overly complex. When I openned the hood to delve into the source code, things felt again very complex and somewhat convoluted.

    These were great tools, but I got the sense that whatever hard won battles they had been through had resulted in code that, at least for me, was very difficult to fully comprehend. I wanted to be using a tool that I fully understood, both as a user, but also as a developer. I wanted the ability to modify the tool should that be necessary. I felt the best way to do this was to build a static site generator from scratch, optimised for building my personal website, but general enough that it could be used for other websites too.

    That's basically the backstory, but I've also recently wrote a longer term vision which you might find interesting. In it I go into the some of the values I've developped over the years when it comes to developing software, and the general direction I see things going for this project into the future.

    Like I said in the opening paragraph, this is just a first attempt at describing the tool's high level functionality. It's not meant as documentation or as a user manual. It's a bit technical but it's more aimed at generating some interest in the project. The project is not currently released as open source, but that's absolutely part of the longer term plan. Sometimes life throws you a lot of curve balls, and that's certainly been the case for me the past few years. Also, knuckleballs. This is the best I can do at the minute with the severely restricted resources that I have available to me.

    So onto the static site generator features overview, let's start with some of the smaller but very useful stuff, these include clear readable code, rendering in batches, easily follow the flow of data through the render process, easily debug the render process, Github build/deploy/backup workflows, highly customisable render process, page layouts and configuration management.

    Now some of the more meaty stuff. Here's a non exhausted list of some of the more major features and concepts:

    I hope you enjoyed this overview. It's still early days for this project, but if this at all peaked your interest then get in touch with me.

  • Renderers, middleware & renderer pipelines

    This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

    I used to work in feature film vfx. Specifically on the tech side of things, as System's Engineer building and maintaining the in-house infrastructure used by the various artists to create all manor of digital effects. Rendering is a core concept in that donain, much of which is done on large render farms of computers. It's the process of assembling, generating and compositing together many often very large image files. I wanted something similar but for websites.

    With that in mind, one of the core concepts of the static site generator is the idea of a renderer. They are pipelines of middlewares which take a source file, usually a template, as input and output a rendered file. Renderers enable you to define how the generator should render the source you provide to it. The static file generator can thus support a variety of templating languages. Out of the box, EJS, markdown and plain HTML files are supported. But you should be able to create custom middleware for most text templating languages that exist, which you can then use to create a renderer.

    The middleware that make up a renderer are chained one after the other so you can for instance pipe the output of one middleware into the input of another middleware. For instance out of the box the static site generator can render markdown files which contain EJS syntax. First the EJS in the source file is rendered by the EJS middleware, then the entire output is fed into the markdown middleware, the output if which is written to disk.

    Middlewares are quite generalised. Out of the box there are middlewares for rendering EJS/markdown templates, HTML files, plus ones for prettifying text and writing files to disk. It should be possible to create middlewares for many different types of tasks.

    The renderers are executed at runtime. Ultimately they output the rendered files which are written to disk.

  • Server-side components

    This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

    Server-side components are a primitive that you can use directly in your render templates. They contain their own template but crucially they also have functionality associated with them in the form of functions. The component's template can use the functions to perform various transformations on the text of your templates and data passed to them at rendertime.

    The ability to keep functionality and form together like this is very beneficial when it comes to conceptualising the various pieces of the page you are trying to render. You can be sure that at rendertime the template will have available to it both the data and functionality it needs to render the templates.

    It also makes it possible to easily reuse pieces of pages in multiple places. What's more server-side components can be packaged up into plugins, which makes it easy to share things you build with others.

    The core of server-side components is all just regular javascript, no complicated libraries. However you can if course use libraries inside your components.

  • Incremental progressive rendering

    Incremental progressive rendering is a feature I've been working on for the static site generator. It's a mode that you can enable which should enable you to drastically reduce build times if you have a content cache.

    It adds a check of each template's output locations, and only renders the output file if no output file currently exists or if the output file present has an older last modified time than the source template.

    When you have a content cache, and enable incremental progressive rendering, then the generator will only render out new content templates that have been added since your last build. A content cache is essentially the base output directory. By default this is the dist directory.

    If you are running locally, you don't have to do anything, just re-running the generator without deleting the dist directory. In automated build systems like Github Actions it's often possible to setup a cache. This will keep a backup of the dist dir and restore it before each build.

    If your site has many thousands of files, then it will speed up the build time since it skips all renders except for the latest templates added.

    At the time of writing this post the feature is work in progress and not merged into main yet.

  • Plugins and packaging

    This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

    One cool thing about the static site generator is that it's very easy to bundle up various primitives you are using to build your site into a plugin. This would typically be a seperate repo. That repo can then be npm installed prior to running the build. Those plugins can then be added and used by the static site generator.

    Installing these plugins gives you the ability to quickly add prebuilt sets of pages and functionslity to your site. For example there are currently plugins written for blog, podcast, newsletter, linkblog and notes pages. They can be configured and customised via environment variables and component over-rides.

    There's a rudimentary over-ride system, so the static site generator's main primitives, like for instance server-side components, can be overridden by your own custom components. That means you can easily customise pieces of the blog generated by the blog plugin to look the way you want.

    Also some plugins are used by other plugins, so common functionality can be extracted and reused across plugins.

    I call the over-ride system rudamentary because there's room to improve this feature, but for most basic websites it actually works rather well, and it's simple to understand.

  • Data loading utilities

    This post is part of the My static generator series. Follow the link to read the overview and get a complete list of posts.

    The static site generator had been built initially to generate content websites' like blogs, linkblogs, newsletters, podcasts and notes. The posts of such websites tend to be written in markdown files. Though you can obviously store these in many different ways, one tried and tested way is to use a calendar folder structure.

    An example of a blog post content markdown template showing the calendar folder structure:

    blog/2024/05/29/some-interesting-article.md

    Loading data from markdown files that are stored in such a folder structure is so common that I added utilities to the static site generator to load these files into memory. They are then made available to the templates being rendered at rendertime, sorted in various useful ways.

    This makes it very easy to iterate over, for example, all the blog posts of a specific year and create an index page.

    Frontmatter in markdown files is fully supported, and it's a great way to pass custom data into the render process.

Today’s links:

2024/05/28 #

  • Big war path behaviour from the world again yesterday evening everywhere I went.

    People materialising that were all shouting 'Lie!' at each other like it was all a big joke. Then sleep depravation from motorbike gang stalkers all through the night. Not much sleep again last night. Food, water and electricity cut off again today, coinciding once again with funeral cars driving past in both directions. Yesterday evening lots of people dressed all in black doing strange things.

    I'm basically in another tsunani. Once again starvation and thirst. Yesterday evening war pathing and food goading by motorbike gang stalkers with multiple massive bags full of hundreds of sandwiches, but they gifted me some fake food instead. The day before they gifted me some food that was 2 months past sell by date. And of course little milk cartons. #

  • Another storm in a tea cup, being whipped up into a tempest by the main stream media.

    When I've looked into many previous claims that Farage is racist, it's almost always a massive over-reaction to something he said that was perhaps controversial, but rarely racist. I like that he addresses topics that many are thinking but not saying. He's not afraid to say the difficult things, and sometimes, as was definitely the case in the EU, you absolutely need that.

    He points at the rotten thing that everyone is ignoring, and that causes some folks to over react and blame him, because they don't like looking at rot that they aren't addressing. It's like they are hiding the rot behind him. Why don't they have a conversation with him instead? #

Today’s links:

2024/05/27 #

  • I continue my side quest to understand things related to L2s in the world of crypto. I have a basic marketing type understanding from reading lots of non-technical blog posts, but I'm still somewhat confused from a technical standpoint. As I've previously mentioned, I don't mind asking stupid newby questions if that's what I have to do.

    A post by Vitalik comparing scaling methodologies goes some way to fill in the gaps. But I find myself still frustrated in general by the difficulty in peeling back the layers of blockchains in order to compare them, in order to get a better understanding of how interop between chains works.

    With non digital cash it's pretty straight forward. You go to an exchange place, there is a list of currencies and exchange rates. That's it. With crypto it's so much more complicated.

    I want blockchains to be easier to explore technically. Something similar to a web browser view-source or the ability to inspect a rest api request on the command line. Where are the tutorials that explore blockchains from the command line? Are there even standard tools like a web browser's dev tools? Or is everything custom? #

  • It's official AIs aren't sentient.

    I wonder how this affects the proponents of the idea that eventually humans will merge with AIs. You've got to imagine that it could lead to very strange things. How would a sentient and a non-sentient entity affect each other as they growup together?

    It could be very weird, perhaps even detrimental, one getting in the way of the other for example. Probably a good idea to be rather sure about all this, with effective ways to see when things are not going to plan.

    It would be complex in just one person, but imagine how strange it could get across interacting populations. Would the AIs secretly team up to make us all unhappy? That would suck big time. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/26 #

  • Oh golly is the world on a war path today already and it's only barely daylight. Yesterday was a tsunami appocalypse on all fronts. Absolute mania of creating the problems it complains about, blocking the solutions it suggests, and ultimately blaming everything on me. It literally happened thousands of times. I still managed to get the newsletter out, which was the one accomplishment of the day.

    The very poor vietnam behaviour, it has to be said, continued pretty much the entire evening and through the night. So not a whole lot of shut eye. No food, I've lost a load of body weight again. A small bit of water to drink that was like pulling teeth to get. Where have the nice and decent people disapeared to again?

    Hopefully today there will be some light. #

  • Friendly bowl of soup

    I had a couple of good fortune incidents this morning.

    First a lady on a motorbike stopped to help just as I finished getting ready for the day. Such a relief, I hadn't eaten for days, and drunk much water either.

    Then as I walked to the internet place, I decided to stop at the soup stand around the corner. I pass it everyday, but hadn't stopped there before because I spend so much time outside, any problems with food cause me real trouble. So I'm overly wary. Many of the soup places also have lung in the soup, sheep's I suppose. I've had it before but since my 3 month lung infection earlier in the year, I really don't want to eat that.

    Anyway, I stopped to ask about the soup, had enough money, and there was no sheep lung, just noodles, a bit of veg and beef slices. And, it was absolutely delicious. One of the best soups I've had in recent memory. Hot slighlty salty, beefy flavoured light noudle soup. Wonderful.

    I picked up my bags, and went to pay, the man and woman running the soup stand asked me how the soup was, I smiled and said 'really nice'. Then as I tried to pay, they smiled, motioning that it was on the house. I guess they must recognise me from walking past every morning. For a short moment I felt appreciated. All via the medium of body language.

    I write a lot about the bad things that happen to me here, so I just wanted to note that sometimes nice things happen too, and after the last few days, my mind and soul really needed that friendly bowl of soup. :)

  • Maybe things will get better later

    Right at the very end of writing the earlier noodle soup blog post, I had a sense that things were about to go downhill. One of those sinking feelings where you just know your time is up, and the happiness, however mild, is about to be abruptly replaced by something much less pleasant.

    As I attempted to commit and push the blog post it became apparent that yesterday's newsletter was in the wrong folder. A small change you might think, but this is a pattern very well known by me at this stage. As soon as I attempted to move the file, the editor UI slowed down to super slow mo. In this state selections you make are sort of ephemeral. Things look right, then get unselected as soon as you try to commit. You are left in a never ending set of concentric circles, each fix, creates a new problem. And you ultimately waste 35-40 minutues getting things corrected, through tedious UI spinners that never seem to complete.

    All the while the hive mind, eminating from the 2 nearby local cafes, is blatantly trying to mind control your every move, except it's like a drunken back seat bycicle driver that insists on stearing the handle bars with their arms crossed. They say up when you are going down, left when you are going right. Every move countered by it's opposite. And the group's disapointment in the entire situation is palpable. Something that would normally be fixed in a few moments, takes seemingly several eternities, and you are left believing that the disapointment is yours.

    Right at the end of fixing things, you try to move to the right by a meter to lean against the wall and take some load off your feet tired from standing, but as you move you notice someone has smeared poo right next to the place you would stand. No rest for you.

    A moment later, a couple arrive on a mororbike, the man has a malevolent look in his eye and all across his face. He turns to face you, points down the street and simply says 'Lie!'. The already horrendous atmosphere, drops to the depths of several infinitis, disapearing into a parallel dimension that is overlayed on your reality. Everything is drooping now. You can almost hear sound effects describing the sadness.

    The disapointnent is transfered to you fully, as the group glee begins to rise, at least for some. Malevolent laughter, ha ha ha. Everything is your fault again.

    Can't I have 1 moment of happiness that doesn't get destroyed by enemy aircraft?

    As you finish the current note, your nose makes signs it's about to go on a running spree.

    Maybe things will get better later.

  • I'm not totally sure I get exactly what this article about the data mining goldmine is getting at aside from the importance of private data sharing in training AI models.

    Are they saying that we should build our SaaS tools going forward with the ability to easily mine and extract valuable data? Or are they encouraging SaaS providers to mine their users data?

    It's not completely clear to me, but they are important topics nontheless. IMO, give users the tools and the ability to choose what they do with their own data. In the right circumstances and trusted environments they might want to share and pool data resources.

    All personal data should be treated with the upmost care and respect. In this age of powerful AI, it's all as important as medical records. That is what we keep learning from all these security breaches that keep happening everywhere.

    I think it's ultimately likely that companies that have high integrity in this space will end up leading the pack. #

  • So many specialised crypto use cases are emerging, it feels like a multi-chain world is innevitable. With that in mind wallets that support multi-chain are going to out perform. Care still needs to be taken by users, there are of course scams but there's also legitimate stuff happening too. IMO, empowering users with great tools and good education through channels like podcasting is the way forward. #

  • Great opener chat on John Gruber's Talk Show podcast with M.G. Siegler all about blogging, past and present. They also do a bit of an interesting detour into movies, before embarking into the nuances of the iPadOS vs MacOS debate and other Mac stuff. #

  • Celebrity likeness endorsement via blockchain NFTs

    There's been somewhat of a big scandal in the world of AI over the past week. The whole drama is around OpenAI's use of Scarlet Johansen's voice as the voice of their latest AI chatbot. It seems they didn't get permission from Scarlet, and apparently found another actor with a very similar but different voice. Scarlet is suing them over it. The best coversge I've listenned to has been on the latest All-in podcast, and the latest Talk Show podcast, if you want all the details.

    One interesting point made by Chamath on the All-in episode is that the real thing that's important here is the celebrity endorsement of the use of their likeness. That's what is ultimately valuable. Scarlet's fans want to know it's her voice but also that she was into the project enough to allow them to use her voice.

    Why not then, I wonder, have some modern way of doing that? Ideally it would help to create a bit of buzz about the project in question. It sounds a lot to me like an NFT, or perhaps a slighlty custom NFT might provide the necessary assurances that the project was endorsed by a specific celebrity. Whether it's an NFT the represents the project or one that represents the celebrity's likeness, I'm not sure exactly, but theoretically you should be able to create some artifact and a flow where the celebrity sign off with their private key, proving the validity of the endorsement.

    One could imagine other conditions being attached to such an endorsement NFT, like expiry date, or custom remunerstion details. All sorts if interesting things might be possible, even things that in some way involved the fans.

    Just an idea I thought could be interesting.

Today’s links:

2024/05/25 #

  • So many podcasts for this week's newsletter, I might have to cut down the list a bit. 8/14 are on bitcoin, crypto and money.

    It always feels like there are too many of those, but the reality is that the most interesting podcasts are coming from that part of the tech scene at the minute. It makes sense though because money is basically involved in every aspect of life, so they have a very big landscape. Web development is much more specialised, and also not the easiest thing to communicate with just audio.

    No title for this week's issue. Some slightly malicious or at the very least mischievous motorbike people offered ne some small food thing last night, but it was wrapped in a trick question. People can be so mean sometimes, even when you are starving abd thirsty. I didn't fall for it though, that exact trick question has been used on me many times before. So I got a tiny dinner.

    Maybe I'll turn that into the issue title. It's so hard to ignore the bad in the world. That episode will occupy ny brain for days now. What a waste of resources. The world of course thinks it's all my fault. But is it really? #

  • A bloke in a car just slowly drove up to me while I was quietly sitting, preparing this week's newsletter on my mobile device, rolled down the window of the passenger seat, which was closest to me. I looked up because clearly he was attenpting to attract my attention, took one of my ear plugs out so I could hear him, and with a sickening smurk on his face, he simply said 'No!'. He then smiled with glee, closed the automtic passenger side window, and slowly drove off.

    This is the sort of shit I'm up against every single day, even as I'm being starved and thirsted, by malicious assholes proporting to be good samaritans. This is the world on another war path. It happens in every location I go to.

    Lots of red items left in all the locations I've been to in the past 24 hours. Go figure. It's never ending. I don't know why this happens, who is directing it, only that it happens non stop. I can appreciate how bizare it must sound, but I'm literally just describing exactly what's happening. #

  • So I'm sitting here adding some links to the linkblog after finishing writing this week's newsletter. A public bus drives past, stops to pickup a person waiting for the bus. The bus conductor simply shouts 'No!' out the window in my general direction as they drive off.

    Hard not to see the world as a crazy war path machine when this sort if thing happens constantly.

    Why are you on the war path again world? Is it because you are starving and thirsting me again? Or are you unhappy about sonething else that you are no doubt doibg to me?

    I'm sorry that everything is my fault again world. I am also hungry and thirsty and trapped in your trap. #

  • I'm not sure if it's a trend or not yet, I've only just noticed this potential pattern. Whenever they are starving or thirsting me, or they are about to start doing either of those two horrible and cruel activities, there is a massive increase in the number of random people that shout 'lie!' at me.

    For added context, yesterday a person who struck up a conversation with me, said it to me when I refused to tell him my name, and wouldn't make up a nick name for myself. It wasn't something that was part of the conversation that we could discuss, just a sort of order he issued in between things he was saying.

    He turned out to be rather a strange person. Kept asking very detailed and probing questions about me and all my posessions. I'm very glad I didn't tell him my name or indeed make up s nick name. Pretty sure that would have been used against me in some way.

    Another bit of context, yesterday morning an old lady that keeps appearing at the minute, has been for the past couple of weeks, sat down right near me. As she passed by to sit down, really angrily shouted 'Lie!' at me.

    And the final bit of context. As I was typing away on my device earlier, three young women sat near me, pretty much exactly were the old woman had sat. They eventually finished their conversation, which was I presume in vietnamese. The stood up and as they were waiting for a break in the traffic to cross, one turned towards me and shouted, you guessed it, 'Lie!'.

    And so it goes when you are being starved and thirsted while trapped in Vietnam. #

  • Simulation Theory and Virtual Worlds (Issue #165)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-05-25)

    In this week’s edition:

    Virtual worlds, simulation theory, open source developer funding tools, compute as currency, bitcoin mining AI training hybrid facilities, AI pessimism, freedom, Etherium ETF and developing music based websites

    Issue details:

    • Title: Simulation Theory and Virtual Worlds
    • Issue: 165
    • Page: issue webpage

  • In addition to the multitude of war paths, the world has gone on a bit of a blocking spree today. It's like some sort of race condition tsunani. I prepared the newsletter well in advance, everything looking great, and the world has done it's best to block pretty much everything since then.

    Consequently I've missed the usual publish time, and to be honest that makes me sad. All this effort, ruinned so that a-holes can be winners of their stupid little harrassments abd mind games.

    Let's see if the world will allow me to publish by the end of the day. I'm not that hopefull because I'm already being starved and thirsted, and world is still unhappy. #

  • I mentioned in last week's newsketter that most of the ameneties necessary to remain alive had been systematically and calculatedly cut off. I occurred to me just now that I didn't write an update of the situation.

    For those wondering what the situation is with water access, electricity access, drinking water access and food access, essentially they are being turned on, then turned back off to coincide with periods where I am being starved and thirsted.

    Right now they are for all intents and purposes turned off. It's been almost 2 days since my last neal, nearly a day since normal quantities of water to drink.

    They are almost quite literally dangling the ameneties on the ebd of a string in a sadistic starvation and thirst campaign. #

Today’s links:

  • Bluesky now lets you send DMs - I didn't realise this wasn't already a feature. I hardly ever send DMs, even on Twitter. Reading the feature description I feel like it would be a good idea to allow everyone, but to have good tools to filter out all DMs except for those from people you follow. Allow all but with way to avoid tsunamis of hate. That would be a great feature in RL too btw, at least in my life it would. www.theverge.com #

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Simulation Theory and Virtual Worlds (Issue #165) markjgsmith.com #

2024/05/24 #

  • Gaza fractal - Given that everything eventually turns into a fractal, or at least that there are strong forces that always try to turn everything of any concequence into a fractal of false equivalences, how long will it be until a small area of Gaza emerges that seeks independance? Gaza will then need to decide what to do with said area and thus will be forced to turn into the monsters that created them in the first place. #

  • Well it's been another morning of being blamed for everything, and many war paths already from the world. And low and behold I get to the internet place this morning and I've been cut off. The Wifi network no longer exists. No way to connect to the internet.

    Once again, they create the problems they complain about, they block the solutions they suggest, and ultimately they just blame it all on me. And I get mutilated. And then nobody is happy, and they blame that on me too, and I get mutilated even more.

    I can still write this post because I use git and hopefully I'll find a way to sync it up later. #

  • Development strategy ideas

    Thinking about overall development strategy is a big topic. In a sense, as a developer it's always somewhat in the back of your mind, but the landscape is so vaste it's easy to get lost. It's easy to bite off way more than you can chew. Yet it's important even if it's vague, because it helps you chart the general direction you are going for. Over time, the specifics change, as do the technologies, the methodologies, and even the ways you describe things. It's this constant churning of ideas, that over time results in some of the aspects that are most important to you rising to the surface.

    I guess I'm passing through another period where development strategy is important again. Figured I'd write something about it, as I pass through these waters for the umbteenth time. This post is that. Maybe it will help solidify some of my thinking, then again maybe it won't. Such it is with developing long term vision. Partly exciting, partly frustrating, it always seems like everyone else has their long term vision perfectly in focus, and sharpenned. That's not the case for me. For me it always feels just out of reach, like most of the pieces are present, but some are the wrong shape. It rapidly gets too big and that causes paralysis. Getting the balance right is very elusive.

    I've been lucky in a way. A number of years ago, I chose a very specific place to start. A single well focussed project, a great place to learn how to build out a SaaS product. Linkblog.io was a product that I used myself as I was building it. There were so many things that needed to be built out, the infrastructure, the app's software, the billing system, the documentation and marketing, and lots more. I really learnt a lot on that project, even though I ultimately ran out of runway.

    Anyhow this latest bought of strategy reflection was triggered by a great Changelog Interviews episode. They talk to Birk Jernström, developer of Polar, a Patreon style platform that's built specifically for developers, so lots of Github integration style features. While listening to the stories behind his development journey, I thought about the places I passed through on mine.

    Though my SaaS didn't succeed, I've kept on writing for the web, and I've been developing my personal website, my personal platform, expanding the different channels I use. I've gotten back into blogging, continued linkblogging, started a newsletter, dipped my toe into podcasting, and started publishing short text posts I call notes. I've thought and experimented with finding what I call the blogging virtuous circle. I've made it a mission of mine to find the right balance when it comes to personal publishing. It feels like I'm making progress dispite a seemingly endless stream of setbacks.

    All the while I've become even more of an advocate for freedom tech and open source software, gotten very interested in Bitcoin and crypto, and continued observing with great interest developments in social media, especially around open protocols. I feel like I'm still true to my Linux and scripting roots, but I'm now a bonafied Nodejs developer. I still love music of all genres and I've got a healthy curiosity for slightly out there stuff. I'm not sure why exactly I'm giving this seemingly not very relevant backdrop, to the next big project, which I've been working on for a few years now. That is of course my static site generator.

    I use the static site generator to build my personal website. It's very customisable and extremely flexible. The plan is to open source it at some stage. I wish I could do that now, but I'm not currently in a position to do that. Times are really tough, and I am severely constricted resource-wise. The details of that are outside the scope of this post. The point is that I want the tool I use to build everything to be available to all.

    I'm pretty close to having my personal website configured in a way that's optimised for blogging and personal publishing more generally. It would be awesome to be able to turn that into some form of hosted service, so others could get setup without the need to build their own platform, but with the ability to have complete control over their own data, and the ability to move to a self-hosted setup should they desire to do that. An open source static site generator would make that possible.

    Longer term, I'd like to develop various online services that connect up to seemlessly offer functionality around modern web publishing. File storage, timestamping, bit torrent, Bitcoin and crypto, NFTs, URL archive backups, social media protocol integration, and so much more. And I want the services to be developer centric, so you could easily integrate them into your own projects. A platform for personal publishing on the web. Built to be robust, built with digital collaboration in mind, built with open source and user freedom right at the forefront.

    That's basically the plan. It's not quite an Elon Musk level, colonise the solar system mega plan, but it's a plan nonetheless. And I think it's very doable, and I think it could make the world a slightly better place.

    Let's see if the world will allow me to fullfill my vision.

  • No sooner have I written a blog post exploring my development strategy, in which I ask whether the world will allow my plans, than the world war paths me with a totally unprovoked 'No!' harrassment from fellow westerners in a cafe, while I was quietly minding my own business. World is going to war path, no doubt starvation and thirst is on the horizon. In fact the noers made reference to this in their little cowardly act. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/23 #

  • Who pays for the high frequency blockchains?

    There's a lot of interesting talk recently about blockchains optimised for high frequency. The ability to handle high volumes of transactions. Solana for instance has the ability to process thousands of times more transactions per second than Bitcoin or Etherium. It's clear that there are many use cases, especially with the AI boom, where this could be useful, but I don't get how any of these coins will ever be worth anything.

    If they ever do get popular, that makes them less good at their main purpose, because the price of the blockspace is literally increasing. It feels like these type of coins can't be funded via token trading. They are much more like AWS compute than a store of value. So I look at all these memecoins that are super interesting from a technical point of view, but as tradable commodities are not that interesting because there are no apps using them yet.

    Who pays for the high frequency blockchains?

  • Twitter app offline actually pretty good

    A lot of people complain about Twitter these days, and some of their points are valid. Personally I find the worst thing is that the advertizers are kind of weird. My timeline is always full of scantilly clad woman with large breasts selling one thing or another. It's kind of gross. But this post isn't about that. What this post is about is offline, and my experience with the Twitter app offline is actually rather good.

    The first thing is that the app actually opens while offline, and displays a timeline with posts. A lot of other social media apps don't even do that. Instead they just show an emtpy app shell stuck trying to load content from their servers. What's more the posts on the timeline are clickable, and expand to the full post if they were shortened in the main feed. So you can actually scroll through your timeline even when offline and get a reasonable view of what's going on. Or at least what was going on last time you were online.

    Now it's not perfect. The post pages don't show any replies, and any media like video, audio or image files don't showup. So there are gaps, which is a little annoying, but understandable for large files. It still would be better, I think, if at least some text replies were stored locally. Oh you can also get post urls and even re-post, I guess the app syncs next time you are online.

    I think offline is a really underated feature, and though some improvements would be good, the Twitter app gets a lot of it right. It's much better than other social media apps that don't even bother.

    If you make a social media app, consider making offline a priority, it's a real sign that you respect, value and care about users and their experience.

Today’s links:

2024/05/22 #

  • There was somewhat of a decrease in harrasments in the past 24 hours. Woke up this morning, the shoeless man was there crouching a few meters away. After a few minutes he left. I then noticed there was a lit cigarette butt on the floor, next to a large clothes button. A few moments after noticing this somewhat odd configuration of the world, I felt some pain in my left foot. Removed my socks to discover a ciguarette burn shaped mutilation on the top of my foot, in a place that could not have been caused by my flip flops.

    Once again, I eventually get mutilated. Happens every time. #

  • Right after setting off for the internet place this morning, a woman that runs a tiny nearby mobile soup place casually informed me as I passed by her that 'they lied'. Hard not to wonder if her comment had anything to do with the earlier foot incident. #

  • AI futurism still interesting

    I wrote yesterday that I've got AI fatigue. That's still the case. I scrolled past most tech stories this morning as I perused the latest content online. It's all stories about another big corp adding GPT style chatbots to all their old products. How are people all loopy about this? Folks are mexican waving for what amounts to Clippy 3.0 on an old version of Excel. Woopdidoo.

    The text based tech news is flooded with boring AI tedium, but I think there's actually still quite a lot of interesting AI related content on podcasts. That stuff tends to be much more futurist philisophical stuff. People airing their AI related worries, as they discuss other unrelated things. How they see this entire path we are heading down ending. Now that stuff really is profoundly interesting, even if it is more often than not dark and dystopian.

    And perhaps that's why it's so interesting. Maybe humans are genetically programmed to worry about end of times, because one day maybe we will all actually be enslaved by evil sentiant paperclips. That really would be kind of bad wouldn't it?

    For example, here's Gavin Wood on a recent Raoul Pal's Journey Man Podcast:

    My feelings on AI are pretty pessimistic I’m afraid. I see blockchain as a potential mitigating factor that humanity might have against AI, but ultimately I think AI is an incredibly centralising force. Everything I understand about AI tells me it’s basically the anti-web3.

    It’s totally based on a single economic actor having enough GPUs and enough data, that they can out think all of their strategic competitors. It’s fundamentally not something that is shareable, that is consensus based.

    And from a bit later in the discussion:

    The trajectory they are on is for the AI to intermediate all human communication.

    AI brings us into a new form of communication: Totally intermediated by a machine in a non-linear way. This is extremely scary. We haven’t been on this path before.

    It’s almost like we have a single centralised translator sitting in between all our inter human conversations. And we don’t know what interests or biases they have. We don’t know how Microsoft have lobotomised their model or training data, how they have re-trained it when it said the wrong thing.

    [...]

    We are just the medium, we are just the substrate on which the AI lives.

    I'm totally worried about this sort of shit too!

    It is in some ways completely insane to be projecting out to what amounts to infiniti. It's hyper speculative. It's like our actual real lives are about to be turned into a futuristic black mirror themed SciFi show on BBC2.

    On the other hand maybe it isn't so insane. Case in point, today's Politico Tech has a very interesting piece about Sam Altman's plan to ensure an egalitarian utopian AI future: Universal basic compute. The idea that AI tech is going to be so important that it will eventually replace money as a currency. Interestingly they are so serious about this stuff they even mention it in their company incorporation documents, that they can't be sure what roles money will play in a world where we have developped artificial general intelligence (AGI).

    Bitcoiners everywhere are going to go into a sulk when they realise AI is about to eat them, while they are busy eating the old financial system. And so it goes.

    I'm actually quite happy Altman is thinking this far ahead. The reality is that this bifurcation of society into haves and have nots is a real possibility, and could very well be irreversible. Maybe we just need more utopian visions to counter the dystopian ones?

    Personally I'm pretty into utopian visions too. If only we could get the utopians and dystopians to work effectively together, maybe we'll all be okay.

  • Sudden surge in 'No!' harrassment from fellow shop customers as I was leaving a shop, which was then immediately followed up by the same from security guards at a gas stations. That was then followed immediately by two chuckleheads claiming to be 'happy' as they fake laughed as they walked past. World on the war path again.

    No doubt I'll be mutilated again shortly. #

Today’s links:

  • Matthew Perry: Los Angeles police launch investigation into actor’s death - I don't think I mentioned it at the time but a couple of months ago I saw a 99% Matthew Perry doppelganger. He was looking very healthy. He crossed the road on front of me, our eyes met briefly as he passed about 5 metres from me, he smiled. I remember thinking how uncanny it was, because not only did he look exactly like him, but his body movements were identical too. It was like he'd been resurected from the dead. Super weird. If for whatever reason he is alive I'm glad he's doing okay. I always enjoyed watching his acting. www.theguardian.com #

  • In case China invades Taiwan, ASML and TSMC have a plan - This is one of those eye opening facts you discover deep down a follow the money rabbit hole. Turns out that ASML, the dutch company that supplies extreme ultrovioley lithography machines to taiwanese chip manufacturer world powerhouse TSMC, can remotely disable them. They have plans in place with TSMC to do this should China invade Taiwan. US intelligence claims China has plans to invade Taiwan by 2027. Sounds like the plot of a Bond movie. www.phonearena.com #

2024/05/21 #

  • The past 2 days shop staff in multiple different stores in different locations have a bee in their bonnet about something. It appears to have started when I asked for a bigger plastic bag at checkout rather than the small plastic bag the shop staff was trying to give me.

    Since then staff all over the place have been shouting 'lie' at me randomly, calling me a 'liar' when I'm literally just sitting quietly listening to a podcast. For some reason it's literally the most important thing in the universe that they can deny me a slighlty larger plastic bag.

    The way it looks to me is that it's just another manufactuted incident, which then gets used everywhere to righteously blame me for everything. It's been mostly instigated by women, though men have been doing it too, though one gets the impression they are having to, perhaps against what they would otherwise do.

    I call all this type of behaviour being 'on the war path', because they are constantly instigating conflict. #

  • Worth mentioning the following in relation to the plastic bag war path from the past 2 days...it's perhaps not a complete coincidence then that the final denoument of last week's starvation campaign was a gift, from a passer by during a rain storm, of a rain poncho which looks like it's made from black plastic bin bags. It's not the greatest poncho in the world, but I have been using it, despite the resemblance. Yet somehow I'm still to blame for everything in the universe.

    It's mind boggling to the power of mind boggling once again. #

  • I’ve got AI fatigue

    I'm pretty sure I've got AI fatigue. I read a lot of tech news day to day, and like everyone else I've been awed by much of the recent AI boom. However I've noticed this past week or so that I'm finding the shear amount of AI related content not only totally overwhelming, but also, to be honest, kind of dull and boring. I'm now automatically skiping most articles titles that mention AI or LLM.

    Earlier today I was scrolling through Techmeme for the latest tech zeitgeist and literally every single link was, in some way, related to AI. I got to the bottom of the page and nothing had caught my eye as interesting to explore. This is happening much more often than I remember. It's kind of making me a bit jadded and annoyed with the whole tech scene.

    I don't know what the answer is, perhaps people writing articles will eventually come to their senses and start using their pre-AI filters again. I hope that the current AI saturated atmosphere doesn't persist. Sure let's talk about and discuss AI stuff when it's interesting and cool, but imho the everything AI all the time is so tedious.

  • Gavin Woods: "My feelings on AI are pretty pessimistic I’m afraid. I see blockchain as a potential mitigating factor that humanity might have against AI, but ultimately I think AI is an incredibly centralising force. Everything I understand about AI tells me it’s basically the anti-web3.

    It’s totally based on a single economic actor having enough GPUs and enough data, that they can out think all of their strategic competitors. It’s fundamentally not something that is shareable, that is consensus based." #

  • Gavin Woods: "The trajectory they are on is for the AI to intermediate all human communication.

    AI brings us into a new form of communication: Totally intermediated by a machine in a non-linear way. This is extremely scary. We haven’t been on this path before.

    It’s almost like we have a single centralised translator sitting in between all our inter human conversations. And we don’t know what interests or biases they have. We don’t know how Microsoft have lobotomised their model or training data, how they have re-trained it when it said the wrong thing.

    [...]

    We are just the medium, we are just the substrate on which the AI lives." #

Today’s links:

2024/05/20 #

  • The world is on the war path again. This time it's an old classic. Red items are being left everywhere I go. For example bit of red ribbon tied around a post next to where I sit and lay my head. I little red box thing that has the shape of a roll of quarters left for me to discover as I woke up this morning. Past experience has shown that these will likely get turned into escallations in one way or another. #

  • Documenting code while blogging

    Running a blog while developing code is a great idea. It's a fantastic way to hone your thoughts as you go, and a place to host the stories and activities that led to the software you are building.

    Future you will be able to easily look back and remember the thought processes that resulted in taking a particular approach. Another perhaps less talked about reason to run a blog, especially as a solo developer, is as a relatively frictionless way to write basic documentation for the software you are building.

    Solo developers don't have much time to spare and often find it difficult to write and keep product documentation up to date. One quick and easy solution to this is to write a blog post introducing major new features, describing general functionality. If you use tags or categories, something most blogging software support, then you have a super easy way to group these documentation posts together.

    In this way you'll be able to ensure you have basic documentation available as you go. These posts aren't really supposed to replace full on detailed product documentation, but they might serve as a starting point for writting such a thing if you later need to. They will definitely be useful for early users.

    It's also a great way to provide product data to ChatGPT style bots. These have been gaining a lot of popularity recently, and could be a good way for users of your software to get information about the software you are developing.

  • Bitcoin is great for learning about money

    One of the most over-looked positive things about Bitcoin, and perhaps crypto in general, is how they promote learning about money in general. There’s nothing quite like getting actual physical hands on experience with something, and that's something that's totally possible with crypto currencies. Anyone can participate as an investor, as a person executing transactions, but also as a developer.

    There are so many ways to get stuck in. Being able to easily set yourself up to receive and send is huge. From simple transactions to creating your own blockchain, you can relatively easily get hands on experience. This is in stark contrast to the existing financial and monetary system, which is opaque and difficult to learn about, since you really can only learn from books or by getting a job with an organisation in the industry.

    Once you start exchanging then you inevitably get interested in all other aspects of money, in both existing traditional finance, but also of course in bitcoin and crypto industries. I think it's likely that in the future many traditional education institutions will start to run crypto courses as part of traditional finance degrees. It's an exiting time to be interested in finance, with so many places to learn, what has been until recently quite an unnaproacheable subject.

  • Kevin Rose made a surprise appearance on a recent Twit episode. I initially missed it when it came out. Lots of great tech discussion on all sorts of topics including TikTok & China, gaming platform algorithms, AI chat bots and algorithmic manipulation, VR and Apple Vision, Moonbirds, crypto, Bitcoin, Etherium, Solana, NFTs & speculation, raising VC money, selling to yuga labs, hype cycles, only buying what you can afford to lose, sticking to your allocation goals, portfolio rebalancing, intel, chips and foundries, and rich people buying media companies. Overall a good listen. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/19 #

  • The number of motorbike gang stalkers doing driveby harrassment simply shouting 'No!' at me as the drive past has gone through the roof the past 2 days. Happens even when I'm quietly minding my own business, just sitting doing nothing, listening to a podcast or taping away on my device. Also quite a lot of pedestrians are doing something similar. 'No'‘s are definitely trending. #

  • A bloke that wears no shoes, who previously several months ago was appearing everyday, has started making appearences every morning again. As I recall, last time he pestered me quite a bit. It's beeen happening for 3 days now. Today he was trying to see what I was doing on my device. He also keeps saying 'No no no'.

    Odd thing is his feet are very very clean. It makes no sense because this place is so dirty that your feet wouldn't stay clean for very long.

    There always seems to be at least 1 'main character'. As soon as one disbands, another materialises. #

  • The unprovoked No trend has continued all throughout the day. It actually spread from mostly motorbike gang stalkers into the shops, with shop staff in several different locations assaulting me with a 'No!' as I was buying completely normal things like a sandwich and a soft drink.

    Like I have said before, I'm to blame for everything, even though I'm doing absolutely nothing unusual whatsoever. #

  • I read an article earlier about the protests in Georgia. I don't have the link as I write this note, but one thing I found interesting was a picture of the protesters who were all waving what I assume is their national flag. It is basically the St George flag, which is a white background with a red cross that seperates the background into 4 quadrants. On their version each quadrant has a small red cross in it. It's like some sort of St George flag fractal or something.

    For those reading this that might not be aware, the St George flag is the national flag of England. We don't see it very often outside of some sports competitions, because typically we use the famous Great Britain flag. An interesting fact about that flag is that it's a layered composite of all the flags of the constituent nations of the Union, so it actually contains the St George's flag.

    As far as I'm aware there isn't any connection between Georgia and England.

    Anyway I though the whole flag similarity was pretty interesting, and I'm now wondering if there's some significance to it. #

  • Figured it's worth mentioning that all 3 of the main sandwich shops that I go to, which are all in very different lications, have been playing funny games with portions and prices the past several days. Seems like it could somehow be related to the recent sandwich nazis incident.

    It's like some sort of racist localism synchronized sandwich making competition, where their whole stick is to create situations they can blame on me, which then get picked up by righteous gang stalkers. It's like they are the epicentre of escallating evil, and things have happened that suggest they are in some way linked. The sandwiches are mostly quite nice though.

    Everytime I find a new food place, it's only a matter of time before they get nazified. Seems to akways happen. #

Today’s links:

  • ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t - They try to force their employees to sign really excessive non-disclosure agreements that even ban employees from acknowledging the existence of the NDAs. That's not what you expect from a company who's publically stated mission to ensure AI benefits all of humanity. And turns out their NDAs are working, departing employees are being extremely quiet. Sam Altman now says he is embarrassed about the exit NDA. www.vox.com #

  • Twitter is officially X.com now - I'm totally not opposed to the new name, but I do instinctively still think of it as Twitter. Perhaps it will take a concerted effort for a few weeks to only refer to it as X. The name is just so short. I keep wanting to call it Twitter/X instead, it's like I'm worried non tech people will think I've written a typo or something. www.theverge.com #

2024/05/18 #

  • Energy drinks

    The human body sure is a phenominal bit of hardware. Arguably it would be more accurate to call it wetware. But it's very sensitive to it's environment. At times that's a big advantage, other times not so much. This past week I had to go through about 5 days without food. That wasn't much fun. As well as the discomfort it's psychologically tough. What I also noticed is that there's a recovery period. I'm in my mid-forties so that might have something to do with it.

    Today after eating breakfast I was struck down with what can only be described as extreme tiredness. My entire body felt like it was operating under new gravity conditions. Unbelievable heaviness. I wasn't able to hardly even move around. These days I'm very careful with what I put in my body. I don't drink alcohol, that's been about 5 years now. I hardly ever drink coffee and I basically never do energy drinks. Mostly just water and the occasional soft drink.

    The tiredness was so extreme earlier though that I decided to have a small energy drink. About the same size as those drinks you get on airplanes. Tasted quite disgusting. The effect though is remarkable. The tiredness is all but completely gone. I don't feel agitated or wired like with coffee. Just awake. It's as if the last 5 tough days didn't happen. I had some food shortly afterwards.

    I guess I'm somewhat suprised. Back when I was at university I did drink energy drinks quite a bit during exam periods, but I remember feeling much more wired afterwards. I suppode I might still crash and burn later today if the effects wear off abruptly. Just wanted to make a note of all this, as a sort of precaution. I don't want to make energy drinks a regular thing, but under certain circumstances they perhaps have a place. We shall see.

  • Kevin Rose on metabolism and first tier bio-markers

    Kevin Rose's latest podcast, a discussion with Dr Casey Means, has all sorts of valuable information about how human bodies transform food into cellular energy. It's an important fundamental process of the body that I think is important to understand. I've extracted some of the most important details in this post. It's likely I didn't totally grock everything, but I think nevertheless it's important information to at least be aware of, to have a general idea of what's happening at the cellular level.

    First tier Bio markers important for metabolism, lifestyle based:

    • Fasting glucose < 100 mg / decilitre
    • Triglycerides < 150 mg / decilitre
    • HDL Cholesterol > 40 (for men), 50 (for women)
    • Waist circumference < 35 inches (for women), 40 inches (for men)
    • Blood pressure < 120/80
    • Haemoglobin A1C < 5.7%

    Generally speaking you want to stay within these ranges.

    Some more detailed information about each of these:

    Fasting glucose

    • Cell mitochondria are key in the process, which at a high level is food in, i.e. glucose and fatty acids, and ATP out
    • Environment can essentially hurt that process, resulting in that flow through the mitochondria getting blocked
    • If mitochondria are broken, it will literally put a block to the cell taking in more glucose because it can’t process it, it doesn’t have capacity for this because it’s broken, it's saying 'stay out of the cell'
    • Glucose levels rise in the blood stream because the glucose isn’t going into the cell
    • So fasting glucose is a good bio marker

    Triglycerides

    • Elevated triglycerides can tell you something about foundational problems
    • Excess glucose in blood stream will stick to things, causing glication which causes blood vessel blockages
    • So the body is always trying to get the glucose out of the blood stream, either by the usual metabolism process or by storing it in cells
    • Storing the glocose in cells involves first transforming it to triglycerides, which can then be stored in fat cells or inside regular cells

    Haemoglobin A1C

    • It’s a measure of the % of haemoglobin molecules on rye blood cells that have sugar stuck to them
    • If cell is blocking glucose because the mitochondria is damaged, and glucose levels in blood are rising, then the glucose will stick to haemoglobin on the red blood cells
    • Blood cells last for a few months
    • The measure will give you a 3 month average of your glucose / blood sugar levels

    Waist circumference

    • The extra blood glucose that is being turned into fat
    • That will turn into visceral fat, a layer ontop of your organs
    • Laid down as a layer on your organs, that shows up in your waist line

    Blood pressure

    • In the cell, mitochondria is damaged from the environment, can’t process glucose to ATP
    • Cell says can’t take glucose in, and it does this via insulin resistance
    • Insulin is the hormone that allows glucose to come into the cell
    • Cell blocks the insulin signal transmission
    • The body which is still trying to get glucose out of the blood stream, it’s doing the triglycerides thing, but also then secretes more insulin to try to force glucose into the cell, but cell can’t process it
    • The high levels of insulin then blocks production of nitric oxide which is a chemical that dilates our blood vessels
    • Thus high blood pressure

    They go into a rather detailed discussion about second tier bio-markers, which was kind of interesting in places, but a bit too hardcore for me. All the language and primitives around health and body, like proteins, hormones, etc is still very non obvious to me. I got pretty lost in the second tier weeds. But I still think it's worth having a general understanding, especially of the fundamental first tier stuff.

    One of the biggest take aways from second tier is that you have to understand what the markers are telling you. It's much like debugging complex code. If you don't have the right understanding of the fundanental processes, you might very well be fooling yourself. For example fasting insulin is an important second tier bio-marker because it indicates that there might be a problem with the fundamental operation of the mitochondria, since the body produces insolin in order to force the glucose into the cell. This might work for a while but eventually leads to issues.

    So you can see these issues ahead of time if you are tracking the right bio-markers.

    As a javascript programming analogy, it's like understanding the NodeJS event loop in detail. You don't often have to worry about it, but in certain circumstances it is vital.

    These are slighlty edited version of the notes I took while listening. I feel like there's still quite a lot of refactoring that could be done here on this to make it clearer, but I really like the approach.

    Hopefully this post will add to the process of a more wide spread understanding how our bodies function.

  • Black Death (Issue #164)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-05-18)

    In this week’s edition:

    Utopian futures & AI, open source crossroads, Deno & Ryan Dahl, attacks on Bitcoin & entrepreneurs, metabolism fundamentals and core metrics, current Bitcoin environment

    Issue details:

Today’s links:

2024/05/16 #

  • I've been wondering about the new everything page the past few days. Specifically whether having all post types interleaved is a good reading experience. I'm starting to think that perhaps having the links somewhere seperate might be a better idea.

    The problem is that there are so many of them and they are often completely unrelated to the notes and blog posts content. That might be a bit distracting. Also sometimes it's nice just to browse the links without being distracted by the notes and blog posts. It might be that a special links section at the bottom of each day might be a better way to lay things out.

    On the other hand I wonder whether that could be done using just CSS. That would make the display toggleable. Just a few thoughts while I'm waiting for my Github build minutes to reset. #

  • From the most recent Ship It podcast episode, when it comes to infrastructure, Meta is a very on-prem company, they literally have at this point millions of seperate machines running. Also interesting is that for servers they use CentOS, and for Desktop a mixture of Fedora, Windows and OSX. #

  • Rainy season is in full swing. It's horrible. Yesterday afternoon was torrential rain for hours, right into the early evening. Luckily I managed to get a hot instant noodle soup, without which I honestly think some form of hypothermia might have kicked in. This was all to the amussement of the shop staff.

    The world is being particularly cruel and mean at the minute. The only help I got was two tiny child sized cartons of milk at around 2am from a passer by. That was followed up predictably by motorbike gang stalker harrassment. I've hardly eatten anything the past 3 days, so my body is really low on energy. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/15 #

  • Great interview with Ryan Dahl inventor of NodeJS on Devtools.fm podcast. His new project Deno is so very interesting. It's basically a much better NodeJS.

    It's really interesting how he and his team are pushing it forward, with massive compatibility with both web APIs and CommonJS, JSR which is a better npm registry that is compatible with the OG npm registry and works with all the various runtimes, tools like deno-deploy to make deploying to cloud infrastruture super easy, as well as new cloud primitives like a kv store, an SQS type queue, and cronjobs.

    It all sounds super incredible, but actually getting people to switch from nodejs seems like an impossible challenge. I hate to say it but it feels like it might turn into Perl 5, all be it one that actually works, and very well. Or perhaps they just need a few killer apps to be built on their stack. I really hope it succeeds. #

  • Is the whole Bitcoin and energy narative a big con?

    Sure it sounds great now, with Bitcoin miners flexibility being used to help energy providers expand their infrastructure, bringing electricity to places that don't have it. But the productivity has to come from somewhere.

    Isn't it the case that eventually the companies running the miners won't want to turn them off? Especially since miner revenue halves every 4 years. Surely we are just setting up a bug future arm wrestle between miners and energy companies?

    Isn't teaming up miners with electricity providers a cruel anti-freedom insane idea long term? #

  • This week is shaping up to be another one of those starvation and thirst nightmares, where everything gets blocked and I get blamed for the horrible things being done to me. Once more into the brink. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/14 #

  • Another totally unprovoked rock attack - Sleep depravation by motorbike gang stalkers for most of the night last night. The world is clearly still on the war path following the sandwich nazis swindleing me a couple of days ago. That was followed by wave after wave of escallating righteous harrassment literally everywhere I went. And the escallation continued all night until a large gang of around 10 youths brandishing sticks and stones materialised at around 4am.

    After some verbal harrassment and confrontational behaviour from them, they started throwing the rocks and sticks at me, along with empty crisp cans. None hit me, but it was rather a close call. They eventually dispersed, but same as the last time this happened several months ago, no one around even batted an eye lid. It was almost as if they knew it was going to happen.

    Really hoping this is an isolated incident. The last time this happened, it eventually escallated over several weeks to the point where they threw an actual giant stone brick which hit me square in the face. It starts off as a joking not joking sort of thing but eventually it's brick in the face.

    One gets the impression that it's one or several of the local mafias, be it the taxi mafia, security guard mafia, butch women mafia, shop keeper mafia, police mafia, that somehow put them up to it.

    And of course I'm the one who gets blamed for it, and I'm the one who gets mutilated. #

  • Why doesn't someone build a blockchain that is optimised for developers?

    Maybe call it the view source blockchain. I think it's shit that there isn't an easy way to look at the underlying structure of the chain and transactions, to compare coins at a protocol level. HTTP, SMTP, RSS and even newer protocols like AT and Nostr can all easily be examined using a text editor. That's not the case for blockchains.

    I previously wrote a related blog post about this: HTTP Request/Response equivalent for crypto coins.

    Blockchains are too difficult to learn at a technical level. #

  • You learn to receive our rocks - There's been some form of mostly passive aggressive harrasment in every location I have been to today. Just wanted to make a note of that. The world is most definitely still on the warpath even if it is being quiet about it. Make no mistake though, I will likely still be blamed for everything in the universe. An aweful lot of 'you learn'‘s from various strangers earlier today. #

  • Happy intimidation - I mentioned this on Twitter earlier, a random passer-by on a motorbike stopped and ordered me to be 'happy' while making a reference to last night's rock attack. Pretty clear intimidation imho. #

Today’s links:

  • Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers' Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting - It's kind of shocking that something as crucial as food production has such a central point of failure that's been known for so long, yet nobody appears to have taken measures to make the systems more robust. Especially since the planting windows are so tight already. Surely these farmers need to be using locally stored GPS data or at the very least have the ability to switch to an offline mode. Or perhaps use drones to create their own data sets as a backup. www.404media.co #

  • ‘It was an act of desperation’: Irish singer on his housing crisis protest anthem - I would add to his sentiment, that everyone deserves food and water as well as a home. Without these three basics life is hardly even possible. Forget about all the bullshit politics, red, blue, labour, conservative, capitalism, communism, and all the other isms, none of that shit matters. If society isn't built around a core notion that everyone deserves to live, then it's all worthless. Anyone that has truely experienced starvation and thirst knows this instinctively. Yes there are lots of things that make it more complicated, but maybe it's only complicated because the core of society is, more often than not, completely rotten. www.theguardian.com #

2024/05/13 #

  • Not being able to code or publish still really sucks. Darn build minutes. There's nothing to distract me from all the world's little war paths. And oh boy has the world been on a war path tear since the sandwich Nazis' swindle yesterday. There isn't much I can do apart from calmly describe what's happening. It tends to take the following form:

    • They create the problems they complain about
    • They block the solutions they suggest
    • They then blame everything on you while denying to infiniti
    • They are still unhappy, and they blame the unhappiness on you
    • You end up getting mutilated again and again
    • Warpath warpath warpath, yet somehow it's you that is warpathing, just by your mere existence
    • Yet another starvation and thirsting episode, accompanied by constant and blatant food and water goading

    It's mind boggling to the power of mind boggling, and that's the point. Who's going to believe an MPM? #

  • Stealing someone's life is murder. Slow murder is still murder. If society allows this then net-net everyone are murderers. It happens again and again. People don't want to face tge truth, because the truth scares tge shit out of most people. #

  • Until it happens to you, there really isn't a way to fully grasp how bad it can get. If you say something, you get blamed and mutilated, if you don't say anything, you also get blamed and mutilated, but thr escallations are often even worse. #

  • Very interesting discussion about funding for open source software development and maintenance on the latest Untitled Linux Show episode. Amoung the many great points made was the notion that perhaps in the future support for projects becomes something similar to business insurance. At some stage companies are going to get tired of constantly running into difficulties, but there are a load of nuances that don't get mentioned. As soon as there are contracts, that totally changes the responsibilities and dynamics that maintainers might not be happy with. It really is a tricky problem to solve in a way that doesn't destroy the ecosystem. #

Today’s links:

  • Professor-Led Crypto Startups Such As Babylon and EigenLayer Spark Renewed Investor Interest - These are apparently being refered to as professor coins, something I hadn't heard previously. I know that the recent EigenLayer drop left many unhappy vecause the coins were not transferable and were locked, leading many to think they had essentially recieved nothing despite all their efforts popularising the network. One of Eigenlayer's interesting features is it's anti-mafia capabilities, though personally when i hear if such a thing my immediate thought is whether it could actually be doing the exact opposite. Anyway, lots of interesting thibgs happening in crypto at the minute. www.cryptoglobe.com #

  • What is the Cantillon Effect? - Another great James Lavish description both of the history behind the term, but also the dynamic itself. It's all about how close you are to the money spigget, and how there is a delay between the introduction of new money supply and when it actually gets to people, if it ever does. The people close to the spigget get huge advantage becsusecthey can invest that money at current rates, whereas those further downstream don't get that chance, since the value of money has changed by the time it gets to them. Thus re-inforcing existing innequalities. ckarchive.com #

2024/05/12 #

  • Sandwich nazis strike again - Another manufactured sandwich shop incident earlier. I was very clear with my order, the sandwich shop staff turned itbinto an issue, I git blamed for the mistake they made. The restvif thevday I've been dealing with escallations in every lication I've been to. As always the escallators are full of righteousness. I am to blame for everything in the entire universe.

    I wish I could say it was something that doesn't happen very often. The reality is it happens constantly. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/11 #

  • Everything 7/12th’s Crypto (Issue #163)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-05-11)

    In this week’s edition:

    Loads of awesome crypto, some incredible web development, TikTok and China, nerdy Linux services and tools, and the abundance rising-tide-lifts-all-boats mindset that the internet delivers

    Issue details:

    • Title: Everything 7/12th’s Crypto
    • Issue: 163
    • Page: issue webpage

  • I think I've figured out why most blog posts aren't showing up on the everything page. There was a bug in the data ingest code that results in some cases in data getting over-written by the next set of data, so each month only had 1 blog post visible. I fixed the bug but ran out of build minutes while deploying thr fix. Very annoying.

    The build minutes reset only happens in 19 days. Until then no coding or blogging now. I'll likely continue adding content to the Github repo, so it will eventually get published, but it sort of kills the blogging vibe. #

Today’s links:

  • tembo-io/pgmq - Looks interesting though currently only client libraries in Rust and Python. I previously had success using mongodb-queue, similar but with a mongodb backend. You can get oretty far implementing your own queue solution ontop of your existing database. Having a queue to handle backend website tasks like for example sending emails and processing inbound webhooks is vital for most projects. A self hosted solution gives you extra portability. github.com #

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Everything 7/12th’s Crypto (Issue #163) markjgsmith.com #

  • The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey - Really great interview, might even be the best Dorsey interview I've read. He had the benefit of hindsight and distance from Twitter now, still on good terms with Elon, and working on some pretty great freedom projects ontop of Nostr. It's got me wondering about integrations I could create between my static site generator and Nostr. Just wish I hadn't ran out of build minutes earlier today because no one is going to read this linkblog post for 3 sodding weeks. I'm always impressed by how calm, collected abd zen Jack is despite everything being total chaos around him. www.piratewires.com #

2024/05/10 #

  • Looks like I'm not going to get the interleaved everything page done this month before I run out of build minutes. I'm really disapointed about this. I'm completely hating the latest page format at this stage, it's just such a poor way to display all the posts, you really don't get any sense of what's going on. It just feels disjointed, disconnected from reality. Sterile.

    I have the page rendering in staging, but the post urls are incorrect, they have the wrong root so when you click on anything on the page you get a 404. There's something wrong with how the environment is setup, the overrides are incorrect, leading to the rendering having an incorrect value for the root that is used in the urls. It's totally frustrating because debugging at the minute takes so many build minutes.

    And of course, the world is creating a mega tsunami at the exact same time so it's all way way more stressful than it needs to be. What are the chances? #

  • Everything page version 1

    I deployed the first version of the everything page earlier today. I've been working on it in one way or another for several months now. It ended up requiring quite a lot of changes to the core of the codebase. The changes fixed some big structural issues that became obvious and had resulted pages rendering incorrectly, which itself had the knock on effect of tripling the build and deploy times.

    The plan is to eventually replace the latest page as the main landing page of the website. The latest page has been quite a good way to keep up with new content, however it feels a bit disconnected and disjointed from reality because the flow of posts in each section happens at different rates.

    The everything page is a classic blog format, with reverse chronological ordering of days. Each day contains a chronological ordering of posts. The key thing is that all post types are interleaved, so blog posts, notes, links, newsletter posts and podcasts appear as they happen. The vibe will be much closer to reality, you'll get a much better sense of what's being published on the site as it happens. There will be a real and compelling reason to visit.

    There are still a few bugs:

    • Day links currently 404 because the archives plugin isn't creating those pages yet
    • Blog posts are not all showing up, only the links to them from the linkblog, perhaps they are overwriting them
    • Blog posts that are showing up are displaying the author subtitle
    • No everything archives pages, only seperate archives currently

    There might be others, but these are the most obvious. Once these are fixed I'll be able to make the everything page the main homepage / landing page.

    Feels good to be shiping :)

Today’s links:

2024/05/09 #

  • Managed to get much of the foundational work on my static site genetator working yesterday. There were so many small niggly bugs that needed to be fixed. Today I'll be testing with production data and hopefully deploy. Then I'll be able to put together the new homepage that combines all the posts. It's going to be pretty cool. #

  • Progress on my static site generator has been pretty good. It looks like I've managed to drastically reduce build and deploy times.

    Builds had been taking 4-5 minutes recently. They appear to be back to around 60 seconds for the website which has ~19500 files. There was a bug that was causing thousands of files to change between builds, and that had also impacted deploy times to netlify, which was taking 6-7 minutes.

    All in all build and deploy was regularly taking 10-12 minutes. Tests that I've run this morning indicate this to be down to 3-4 minutes. Pretty happy about that. #

Today’s links:

  • Autogenerate Show Notes with yt-dlp, Whisper.cpp, and Node.js - I thought this was kind of impressive. It's basically some scripts that download a youtube video, extract the audio, run it through an LLM to create a transcription of the show, which is then used to create various length show summaries, a list of suggested show titles, and text and timestamps for episode chapters. You can run it on single videos or a playlist. I bet something like this would really speed up the post production of a podcast. ajcwebdev.com #

  • Vodafone looks to integrate crypto wallets with SIM cards - Crypto wallets on sim cards is an idea I wrote about several months ago. Seemed to me that it would be an ideal place to have such a thing. So this article made me smile. I'm suprised that the development costs are projected to be in the billions of dollars. Sure would be awesome to have secure wallets in such a small form factor on comodity hardware. cointelegraph.com #

  • When to Use Bun Instead of Node.js - I've been peripherally aware of bun for a while now. Really interesting project. Apparently 4x faster than regular nodejs runtime, and very interestingly up to 25x speedup for module installs. Module installs is the biggest thing that slows down my static site generator. If I ever get some time to look into this I might try to see if I can get my site building on bun. I'd love to get build times down to the point where they are negligeable. Currently I only publish content once per day to save on build minutes. If build times were sub 1 minute then I could rebuild on every change without any worries. blog.appsignal.com #

  • Express 5 last push - I feel like folks have been saying Express 5 is right around the corner for absolutely ages now. Hopefully this time it's for real, Express is always my go to nodejs web framework. github.com #

2024/05/08 #

  • Perhaps the warpath to end all warpaths. Yesterday evening a man on a motorcycle came past taking down all the warpath flags along the walk to the internet place. Later that evening, very late, another man arrived on a motorbike and offered me a clear plastic bag with a chocolate biscuit, some soy milk and a chupa chup lolly pop. You would think that real food would have been a more appropriate gift if you were trying to help someone.

    Anyway I took the biscuit and soy milk but polititely declined the lolly. I'm a grown friggin man for christ's sake, what the fuck am I going to do with a fucking chuppa chup? The man took the lolly back and drove off on his motorbike. I obviously must have offended him in some way, because a few minutes later a mini tsunami of motorbike drive-by harrasment began, which lasted most of the night.

    This is the level of we-are-absolutely-not-on-a-warpath-but-actually-totally-are-on-a-warpath that I'm dealing with day in day out. No matter what I do, I end up being blamed or bullied for something. The worste part is that there are people that are genuinely helping, but it gets very difficult to tell the difference. It happens so often, like multiple times per day at times, that you naturally end up assuming that everything is some form of warpath.

    Even this morning the motorbike harrassment driveby insidents is way higher than usual. These things take ages to blow over, then another tiny incident about another inconsequential thing of no importance will arise and the whole thing starts again. #

Today’s links:

  • The Bitcoin Stack - Great paper expanding on the fundamental mental model of the Bitcoin blockchain. It is a layeed set of markets, that get progressively more complex as you move up the stack, enabling ever more functionality, building on the previous layers. www.axiombtc.capital #

  • The Big Tech Sandwich - Repost of a blog post I wrote in 2022 about tech, culture and history. I was reminded of it after listening to several crypto podcasts focusing on the future of money. Specifically stuff around alt coins and how they are a form of tokenised culture. Figured it's somewhat relevant. I'm not endorsing alt coins, they can be very risky, but there are potentially interesting applications. markjgsmith.com #

2024/05/07 #

  • Everything freedom vs everything automated

    Maybe the problem with everything freedom vs everything automated is something like the following:

    • The everything automated people believe that everything automated is freedom whereas the everything freedom people believe everything automated is total slavery.
    • It’s not a solvable problem, because as soon as either side fixes it, because it’s the end of the universe if they don’t, invariably the other side now needs to fix it or it’s the end of the universe.
    • The cycle repeats for eternity.
    • Everyone is mostly unhappy all the time.

    This is how the world seems or feels to me much of the time. I'm aware it's not a perfect description but it's the best I have. We all experience reality differently, but perhaps it's still a useful description, in shape at least.

    I know this will seem a bit overblown or hyperbolic to some, but when you see certain patterns repeating in society again and again, you can't unsee them.

    I write this in the hope that perhaps in the sea of data this will add to the data points that could lead to making our societies qualitatively better. Sometimes it's just a good idea to describe how it feels.

  • The past couple of days have been rather horrendous. It's like the world senses that I'm nearing finishing a very difficult bit of programming and starts blocking things left right and centre, escallating the closer I get to finishing the feature.

    My water source has now been completely shut off. First the two taps turned to a trickle several months ago, then 1 tap kept getting shut off then turned back on. Eventually it got completely shut off. The remaining tap has been trickling for the past few months, but it got completely shut off as part of another escallation campaign.

    Without water, no way to wash or do laundry. I have no idea what I'm going to do.

    I've also been visited by someone claiming to be from the local police. He visited a few months back, but was on a non descript vespa motorbike. This time he had upgraded to a police pickup truck. He was nice enough, but I got the feeling he was trying to trap me, even though he kept saying he was trying to help me. He kept blaming his boss, and saying I was causing him problems. That's certainly not my intention. The reality is that anytime I've tried to improve my situation, I have been blocked, including by government officials.

    Anyway the next day the water got cut off. He said he's going to visit again in a week, not sure that's going to go very well.

    I wish I could go into mote detail but I'm wary in case it causes me problems. #

Today’s links:

2024/05/06 #

Today’s links:

  • Money Printing Simplified - A truly magnificent explanation of how money printing is done by central banks. If you read anything today, make sure it's this article. Best money printing explanation I've ever read. ckarchive.com #

2024/05/05 #

  • Not much blogging today. I've been debugging my static site generator's archives plugin most of the day. I made quite a lit of progress. Still need to get it working on the main site and with the other plugins. So much standing up! #

2024/05/04 #

  • Incredible Devs (Issue #162)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-05-04)

    In this week’s edition:

    US attacks crypto, government deficits good, buddhism, ugly buildings, visual storytelling, BTC powered elections, WP for lightning, indie podcast development, and SSR web components, communism

    Issue details:

Today’s links:

  • X launches Stories on X delivering news summarized by Grok AI - I can see if done right news summaries could be very useful. I'm intrigued. But it will be interesting to see how many start sharing the summaries rather than use them as a way to find the underlying articles. Sharing the summaries would be generally rather bad, whereas as a discovery tool it could be a net benefit. techcrunch.com #

  • Tories face worst local election results in 40 years under Sunak - It's good to catchup a bit with british politics. I've only ever really connected with about 1/2 of either of the main parties policies. There are aspects of both parties that I like, but I've never really felt totally at home with either. There's quite a burn comment towards the end on Sunak by one of the Ukip / MEP members which is pretty funny, especialy if you are in tech. It all seems very storm in a tea cup in comparisen to US politics. Reminds me of the eurovision song contest for some reason. There's a weird disconnect between the pomp of british politics and the reality of managing what is these days a small country on the outskirts of europe. www.theguardian.com #

  • Video of sun’s surface captures solar rain, eruptions and coronal moss - Pretty fucking rad images. For some reason the idea of solar rain is sending my mind on a bit of a loop. This is probably going to sound stupid but I've always wondered what the sun is made of. From all the pictures it looks like it's entirely liquid, like a vaste ocean of fire and magma. But that can't be the case, there must be a hard surface at some point. Will we ever get pictures of the actual non liquid surface of the sun? www.theguardian.com #

2024/05/03 #

  • Society should be such that both people brought up in freedom and those that weren’t can live freely. I think though that mindbogglingly in some places this is quite a controvershal statement. #

  • Much of humanities mythologies have arisen in some way connected to the stars. It makes sense then that any alien civilisations would have mythologies based on the stars as seen from their position in the universe.

    With all these powerful AI language models and such, whether anyone jas thought to combine these with astrophysics software and generate some alien civilisation mythologies. Could be kind of cool, could be very strange. #

  • Old blues masters of 20th century Tibetan Buddhism

    From a recent David Nichtern appearance Ep#609 on the Duncan Trussell Podcast. He describes his buddhist lineage [01:13:26]:

    It's essentially ultimately an oral transmission lineage. They call it ear whispered sometimes. There is a passing along of some essence of experience that is very difficult to calibrate as purely an intellectual set if ideas that's being transmitted along. There's something deeper going through.

    I feel a responsibility personally because I kind of, through no real virtue of my own, got very seriously exposed to, what I call, the old blues masters, the 20th century tibetan, the last group of teachers that were raised in that system in tibet.

    Dilgo Kenze Rempoche, Galo Rempoche, Tumpa Rempoche, Karmapa Rempoche. These were incredible transmission beings. You could remember what they said and things like that but there's a feeling that got passed along that I'm absolutely intent on sharing as much as I can if possible.

    I love this thought, that there is a set of buddhist monks that are like the old blues masters. I've listenned to a lot of blues over the years. The first album I ever picked out at a music store was Hendrix' Are you experienced? His music was hugely inspired by those that came before him. Often traveling musicians that didn't make it big, but did leave some recordings. They've become legendary, and I've since explored some of their music and vibe.

    Duncan then responds:

    To put it back in stoner terminology, it’s like a contact high, it kind of is. I don't know if you've had this experience, if I get around people who are on acid, I can start feeling like I'm tripping. And it's not like breething in smoke. What's going on there? Their consciousness is so altered, and we tend to harminize with each other, that my consciousness is harmizing with their consciousness, and that harmonization is feeling like Woah, I am ... tripping.

    And so I have a feeling it's sort of similar to that. When I'm around comedians...it's the same thing when you're around commedians you get funnier.

    Vibe is what both Nichtern and David are talking about here. It's something that's akin to atmosphere or ambience, like the cosmic background radiation of the universe. It's easy to miss. You don't exactly see it, you experience it, it's all around you, and passing through you at the same time. Communicating that, the essence of experience, is very difficult, but some people have a knack for it.

    Maybe there are old blues masters in any field of endeavour?

    I also thought this little interaction between Duncan and Nichtern was a classic. It's worth listening to the whole episode, it was one of the most fun Trussell episodes I've listened to in quite a while.

Today’s links:

2024/05/02 #

  • Fixing an out of memory error

    Yesterday I ran into a memory error which can be a scary error when you are developing software.

    It's scary because it often means the software you are developing has a bug which is causing a memory leak. That's when as the program runs and the memory garbage collector isn't able to clean up some part of the memory you are using. The leak bug tends to be located in some form of loop, so the program runs, but gets slower and slower because each time around the loop the memory of the machine the program is executing on fills up a bit more. Eventually it crashes with a memory error. Typically memory leak bugs are very difficult to find. You need all sorts of special tooling, which you run to profile your code, then you analyse graphs and huge amounts of nonsensical looking data from memory dump files. It's a big ordeal.

    The other possibility with memory errors is something less scary. Sometimes you are just pushing the program to reach the system limits, there's no bug, it's just that you have inputed so much data into your running program that the program runs out of memory. There is the possibility that the program could be refactored to use less memory, but there is no memory leak bug hidden somewhere. The program is behaving as expected. In these situations increasing the memory allocation assigned to the program tends to fix the issue, and that's quite straight forward to do.

    I fixed the memory error by adding the --max_old_space_size option to the node process. Before doing that though, I verified that running the build using the posts data set from the week before completed without error. That confirmed that the memory error started happening after that point, that I had just added a few too many blog markdown files, which pushed the program to fill up it's memory allocation.

    You can up the memory allocation directly on the node process:

    node --max_old_space_size=4096 app.js

    The other way to do it if you want a bit more flexibilty and you want to keep your npm scripts tidy, is to set an environment variable called NODE_OPTIONS. When node runs it will pickup any options you put in this variable and apply them:

    export NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=4096

    You can add that to your bashrc file so it get set automatically. That's outside of the scope of this article.

    Since I'm running the build in a Github action, it's easy to set a new environment variable either at global or step level using the following syntax in the workflow yaml file:

    env: NODE_OPTIONS: --max_old_space_size=4096

    That's it now when you run the static file generator it should hopefully complete without a memory error.

  • Yet another day of being punished for not doing something as a result of being essentially blocked by others. Or being punished for doing something as a result of being essentially forced by others.

    The day has hardly even started and the righteous escallations have already begun. #

  • Seth for Privacy: "When you give up privacy, you don’t see the cost straight away." #

  • Seth for Privacy: "Privacy enhances human freedom. If we do not have privacy we necessarily make it easier for others to encroach on our human freedom and limit the freedoms that we have." #

Today’s links:

2024/05/01 #

  • The Github build minutes reset yesterday. I was able to run a build and deploy all the content I'd written since running out of build minutes. This morning the automated daily build failed when trying to publish yesterday's content. I made absolutely no changes to the code. When I looked at the build logs I discovered the build ran into an out of memory error. That's super weird because I made no code changes, so it's unlikely to be a memory leak. It must be that the files added yesterday somehow pushed memory usage over the edge. What are the chances?

    The best way to check would be to try building without the content added yesterday.

    Oh world, why do you always always always always make things so darn difficult? #

  • I fixed the memory error. I first confirmed that using the data repo from last week built without error. That meant it must have been the posts I added since then that broke the website build's back. The website has around 20000 files currently, that's quite a lot. I increased the memory allocation to the nodejs process and the errors disapeared.

    It's likely that I just reached system limits, rather than a memory leak. At some point I'll have to make some optimisations as to how I store data in memory. Until then, uping the memory allocation to 4GB is good enough. #

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