markjgsmith

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. #