markjgsmith

Weather alright last night, no storms, doesn't feel too cold this morning. Custer-f of a day synchronicity-wise. The hive mind is really going for me in a big way. It's been bad before but this is next level stuff. At times it's second by second, person after person, and it creates a huge traffic jam of race conditions, where everyone, or a lot of people, are speeding up then slowing things down with yah's and woah's, and all it's variants. I've never seen it this bad before. I've been calmly saying 'infiniti no' to it all, which does seem to aggrevate things but I am able to remain mostly very calm.

There were a few cases yesterday where some groups clearly tried to escallate to physical violence, and wanted me to know they did. As I left the internet place to get some breakfast, someone shouted out 'ow!' loudly, this was repeated in the park as I walked through it. When I got to the sweat breads stand something felt off, there was a small gang of blokes standing right before him that were talking but their attention was on me. Just as I got to the street vendor a motorbike passing by drove way way to close to me, right into one of my bags, and wouldn't you know it, he was heading right to the small gang who were all at this stage hidding laughter. The bloke driving the mororbike included. At the next food vendor where I bought a take away meal the bloke that I paid to receive the food clearly said 'ow!' at some point. He was the bloke that manufactured a 'Pay!' incident cascade last week all around a coffee that he was drinking that I had absolutely nothing to do with, yet was turned into a series of escallations over the next few days. That eventually calmed down but actually now that I think about it, the day before yesterday there was another one of those, seemingly unsuccesful because I 'infiniti no'’d it, and that hasn’t spread through to everyone.

I wrote up a few of these bullying cascades yesterday, maybe I'll publish something later today, they are quite illustrative. I'm still being mostly starved and thirsted though I was gifted a chicken and rice meal last night.

The big theme this morning is people yah'ing like it's going out of fashion, from joggers running past, to security guards, to people on mororbikes. Total cluster fuck. This sort of behaviour is really counter productive IMO, because even if you target one person, which clearly happens, all the random people around still hear it, so there is a blast radius, and some of those people will think they are being targeted, or just that it’s today's thing or whatever, and soon enough you get a chain reaction and it‘s a total cluster fuck everywhere. It's happening constantly at a low level, and while it does fuck things up, people absorb it reasonably well, even if it’s a complete waste of resources. But today and yesterday it’s reached new levels and it’s just chaos and dysfunction everywhere. #

The new everything page archives is fully written and tested, and has been ready for deploy for over two weeks now. I haven't made any code changes. I fully expect the deploy to go relatively smoothly. However this insane level of anarchy and dysfunction in the world around me is not instilling any confidence. It's doing the exact opposite because while in normal regular world times I would fully expect to easily handle any issues with the deploynent, in this insane everything is f-d environment, even small hickups would likely be very dufficult to deal with, and could cause a massive derail, and you run the risk of ending up in a worse place.

The frustrating thing is that in between all these tsunamis, I can see that the world is mostly calm, things are just carrying on as normal. But for instance where I'm sitting, a group of 2 or 3 young blokes sat down a few minutes ago and are exageratedly swinging their feet, have been quietly saying yah over and over, slapping their foot down repeatedly like you do to signal impatience. All this yah-woah is likely manyfactured, but even if it’s fake, for all intents and purposes the effects are very real if you are at the center if it, and since it’s a cloud that follows you everywhere, you are always at the center if it.

Oh and did I mention I am being starved. And that's another thing that happens in these situations, people spitting as they pass you, not necessarily aggresively, though that happens too, but to show you they are being thirsted and have no spit left. And people that look very thin start appearing, like they are hungry. Is that all fake too though? Why would me deploying my feature to my inconsequential tiny little unknown static site generator which isn't even open source yet, be in any way linked to any of this mega hurry up'ing. It makes no friggin sense.

It's like I'm a bus and a huge group of people I don't know keep throwing themselves under me, then getting very annoyed, angry and even occasionally violent at me, when I don't do whatever is in their heads. It often feels like it's just to derail me, but there might actually be real life people suffering from hunger and thirst, but then again maybe they are fake. There is no way to know.

But the reality, even if it's a manufactured one, even if there are real people starving and thirsting, is that the situation is highly likely to get worse if I do actually speed up and rush things.

And did I mention that I'm actually for reals being starved and thirsted?

That last paragraph was going to be the last paragraph, but the instant I finished it, a man arrived shouting, chased by a woman trying to sell him scratch card lottery tickets. This sort of end of task yah is happening constantly. Oh and another man just arrived in this incredible rush to sit down, and I had to move my bags, which I don't mind doing of course, but he was in such a rush he nearly sat in the wrong place, ontop of my bags or dividing my bags up, seperating me from one of them. Very unusual. I had to say to him to wait, to chill out while I move the bag to give him space. I wouldn't be suprised if that will lead to me being punished in some way later. Oh guess what, I just got punished while writting this sentence. The yah loiterers uttered a 'think' right as I finished the sentence which caused me to lose my train of thought, which caused me to look like I had paused to think, which made the yah loiterers strangely happy. So I calmly infiniti-no'd them. I wouldn't be suprised if this entire situation was manufactured. This is how bad it is here sometimes.

Anyway, and so it goes, I'm going to delay the deploy for a bit.

Update: I stopped typing, started listening quietly to a podcast, and a few moments later the two yah-loiterers got up and left.

Update: As I type this two new people have showed up behind me just out of view and are second guessing my typing. Stop, start, stop, start... #

On the way to the internet place. Just passed the place where the last 2-3 days there was a funeral event happening. That's finished and been put away, but opposite it where the walk path gets narrow, a dead rat had been placed to block the path, I had to step over it. I guess there is minuscule chance it died of natural causes in that exact spot.

Infiniti no. #

So I'm in the park near the internet place waiting for the bullying storm tsunami to calm down, but of course it gets worse, with people on loudspeakers and people with paporazi level cameras. Yesterday some kids were messing around so close to the road where I was crossing that they very nearly diverted me into oncoming traffic. It was very dangerous, especially because with the heavy bags it's difficult to change direction.

It was clearly on purpose they were waiting for me and only sprung into action as I got there. I said be careful and called them paperazzi kids, because that's the type of dangerous paperazi behaviour that got Diana killed. Well guess what the only seat left in the park today was next to a bloke with a paperazi camera. What are the chances?

This is the level of total disreguard for society the kids have here. No matter what they do, even if they nearly kill you, it's actually your fault and grounds for more bullying. #

Saw an interesting thing happen in the park while I was being paperizi death bullied by the local youth. Two youths stopped a westerner bloke that was jogging. I couldn't hear what was said but whatever they said, the runner bloke oblidged by taking an A4 piece of card from them that had some words written on it, held it up below his chin, and smiled while they took a few pictures of him. They thanked him and he ran off continuing in his jogging. They walked past me looking at their photo and said 'learn' just as they passed.

Obviously I replied with the only sane thing remaining in this shitty world we live in that is over-run with fakes created by youths that want to kill you because it's funny:

'Infiniti no to you too'

Just in case you don't know, the way Reddit does validation of the people it features on it's AMAs is using a photo of a person holding a paper that has their username written on it. #

Had to change seat because of the sun. The paperazzi kids had put half drunk coffees on all the benches that are in the shade. They are doing this because they are ordering me back to the internet place that's next to the coffee place. It's the same reason they shout Up! at me, because they know that I can only use the internet while standing up. Pretty frigging cruel, but it's not just the kids, many of the adults do it too. They think it's rather hilarious to torture and mutilate foreigners.

I guess the foreigners that enable their cruel never ending bullying get treated better than me. I think many of the foreigners don't realise what they are doing, but some do and are only too happy to join in on the bullying. Who knows what story they've been told, but I doubt they mention that they created the issues in the first place, and it always results in me getting mutilated. #

cat << EOF > France turn your dysfunction into the central powerhouse of Europe

It occurred to me that Macron's Renaissance party in politically much troubled France is perhaps aiming for a second renaissance? It would make sense given the party's name. But they never mention that. I find that a bit strange, I mean why on earth do they call themselves that in the first place?

It would also makes sense given that, reading the tea leaves of history, just like the printing press gave rise to a renaissance, we are likely due an even bigger renaissance because of the internet. We think the internet revolution already happened, but what if that was just the very beginning? It's an order of magnitude bigger than the printing press renaissance. That's going to be a really crazy ride when it takes off.

The 10X renaissance is happening whether we like it or not. The printing press added millions of new minds to the social discourse. The internet has added billions of new minds. It's already happened. Now we need to get ready for the aftermath. But it doesn't have to be painful. Remember we have done this before. It could actually be pretty cool this time, maybe even fun, but we have to let it be fun. It could also be painful if we resist and restrict ourselves. Do we want it to be painful or do we want it to be fun?

I think that if you convince the nation you can lead that transition, they will stand with you. And then Europe will stand with you too, they want a strong France. But you have to think big. Like Elon Musk level big. In a 10X renaissance, the immigrants AND the people are all part of the solution. They just all want something great to do together. In a 10X renaissance all the things you are arguing about now are tiny details. The party that can get France on this marvelous voyage should be the ones in charge. Anything else is just shooting yourselves in the foot.

I think it’s possible.

The weather wasn't too bad last night, not much rain, not feeling too cold this morning, but my gosh are people upset with me saying 'infiniti no' to everything. That has really stired up the hornets nest. It's almost like their entire system is somehow built on the idea of 'No!', except when anybody apart from themselves uses it, then everything breaks down. Like they are constantly creating all these imaginary contracts throughout everyday life, that they hold you to, even if you have no idea it's happening. That's why they are so intent on having some people be designated as dogs, because their whole system relies on people not understanding what's going on. When you start not accepting everything, then it all breaks down.

I don't know, I'm not explaining this very well. It's fucking hell though, and wouldn't you know it, it just happens to coincide with my Github build minutes being reset, which will enable me to finish the everything page archives pages. Only problem is they've basically cut off my electricity and water again.

And there are westerners involved too, quite clearly, with intimidation and referencing of previous situations, but I'm not convinced they have any clue what or why they are doing what they are doing. Like they are paid actors or something. And they aren't necessarily being paid in money, could be food, or documents or whatever. There was a situation where a westener did a subtle, but obvious to me, something only I would know about, intimidation reference thing, then the next day, it was repeated by an apparent local that I've seen here for years. It's like they are claiming to be in control of the foreigners, but also that the foreigners might be secretly behind the entire situation. And there's just no way to tell the difference. And that is perhaps the point. This ambiguity pattern happens again and again, from small events all the way up to mega taunamis.

The last 24 hours have been an absolute synchronicity tsunami cluster fuck. They are digging up old graves, they are blaming me for all sorts of things I absolutely didn't do, trying to trap me in various manufactured situations. It's like every possible way to fuck me is being raised up, yet they are righteously making out like they are the ones being wronged.

They are infiniti no-ing me in every conceivable dimension while claiming not to be on the warpath, and if I so much as mention 'infiniti-no' they totally lose they're collective shit, and they escallate everything even more.

As I write this, I have no idea how I'm going to be able to wash my clothes or charge my devices. #

cat << EOF > Liberalism, Free Speech, and Even More Politics (Issue #170)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

AR & VR, memecoins, macro, digital media publications, liberalism, national debt, history of elections, free speech, state dysfunction, resolving disputes, UK politics, authoritarianism, sad tech

Issue details:

• Title: Liberalism, Free Speech, and Even More Politics
• Issue: 170
• Page: issue webpage

It rained very heavily around 8-10pm then drizzled quite a lot after that. A bit chilly, my feet are cold this morning. Sleep depravation on and off for much of the night. Looks like that was planned in some way as one of the locals was repeatedly taunting me with super exagerated yawns during the rain storm. He was basically saying, we are going to keep you awake and you can't do nothing about it. Sleeping has been depracated again, both during the night and during the day. Oh and of course they are currently starving me, so the levels of glee are quite high amoungst the infiniti-nos, who are absolutely certain they aren't infiniti-no-ing while maximumly infinity-no-ing me in every possible dimension.

It sounds proposterous, and then one day it happens to you, and it no longer sounds proposterous, and you say 'I understand now', but it’s too late. #

Monkeys are trending, one wonders if it has anything to do with Assange being released.

I think it's kind of gross when people use animals to get at other humans. It's not the sort of behaviour you would expect from the so called apex animal of the planet.

Especially given that we are smart enough to know how rare a life rich planet like Earth is in the universe. We shouldn't be using the other life forms like that IMO.

I do it too sometimes without realising it, it's unfortunately very normalised behaviour. #

cat << EOF > The printing press vs the world wide web

I've read a lot recently comparing the introduction of the printing press and the internet / world wide web. The main gist of it is that following the introduction of the printing press there was all sorts of craziness that ensued in societies across the world. But on the other hand it still led to the enlightenment period which is universally seen as a good thing for humanity.

Looking at it from a purely numbers perspective, the printing press introduced millions of new minds to the general social discourse. That creates problems because dynamics that had been in place for hundreds of years suddenly started to shift. With the internet / world wide web, there's no reason to think sonethibg similar isn't currently occuring. The difference is that instead of millions of new minds, we have introduced billions of new minds to the general social discourse. What's more we've done it much faster, for all intents and purposes in comparison to the printing press, it's happenned almost instantaneously.

So we should expect there to be a very turbulent period, where dynamics recallibrate. It's complicated because this time it really is global in nature, but we have very different cultures and ideologies across all these places. I expect there are big fault lines across it all for things like economic status and gender. I think it's going to be rather rough because the dynamics that have been in place for so long are rooted all the way down to the language, customs and ritual layer of our societies. Things that we grew up with and didn't question are being questioned.

I think that's why we are seing such polarisation in politics across the globe. It's an important moment. Those in power will be trying to keep that power while the less powerful are speaking out about their difficult lives. It's worth remembering that the printing press resulted in a better world, and the same will be true for the internet / world wide web, we need to collectively find ways to channel the change, without blocking or supression, even if it's uncomfortable.

We should encourage kindness, humility, understanding, a willingness to try and see things through the eyes of others, without predjudice, the courage to speak out when things aren't right, and equally the courage to listen to views that we might not be used to hearing. Infiniti no will only ever be met with infiniti no, so we have to find better ways of sailing through these waters.

Ice lolly's are definitely the new stick I'm being hit with. More sleep depravation last night led by a young couple both eating ice lolly's even though it was clearly raining. It might seem like a small innocuous thing but I know from experience that these events that all involve ice lollies in rapid succession, day after day, are all linked. All a form of anger goading. The people actually eating the ice lolly's might not all be aware of the situation, but some clearly are.

Also couples. The last two days there has been an uptick in the number of male - female couples that are gang stalking. That's not a coincidence in my opinion, because several of the recent tsunami escallations have been seemingly have seemed like an infiniti war between these two groups, extending into infiniti like an tit for tat asymptote, where every move, no matter how minuscule, must be countered and offset.

Also several very very aggressive motorbike drivebys last night. Literally threatening me with some sort of violence, while shouting at me with extreme maliciousness. I was just sitting quietly.

I'm tired. I'm hungry.

Difficult to be upbeat about anything when I know I'm going to be tsunami'd by a world clearly on the warpath, absolutely convinced that I'm to blame for everything, even while it infiniti No!‘s me in every dimension, while claiming to be a gang if angels, many of whom actually believe their multi-universe sized bullshit. #

The past two days the cranky old lady that walks past every morning and sits at the other end of the bench for a few moments, then continues on her way, has been joined by a man, not quite ad old, brandishing a small coke cola bottle. I say joined but they appear not to know each other but the pattern is so regular, it makes you wonder.

First she walks past with her walking stick, sits down. Then he appears seperately, sits on the bench. They both sit quietly. They appear to be very attentive to what I'm doing, like they are waiting for me to say something. She then gets up and leaves. A few moments later he gets up and leaves in the opposite direction. Yesterday his bottle had coke in it, today it has water in it.

I mention it because it's weird. It's too well balanced for it not to be some form of anger goading.

Btw, the cranky old women is the one that previously wasn't so quiet, shouting at me for no reason, and eating ice lolly's, or at least appearing to. I saw her eat one, then everytime I walk past her there are either ice lolly wrappers or used tissues thrown around her. She also exposed herself to me which was again weird. It's all very very strange.

While I was writting this note, a man on a motorbike slowed down, pretended to get on the phone, then said 'Aaaaah' quite loudly drove off. That was immediately followed by some loud kids on bycicles. All these fakes have one thing in common, they all are trying to catch my attention or are paying way more attention to me than anyone else around. They stick out like a sore thumb, and they almost always apear one after the other in quick succession. #

I've taken to saying 'Infiniti no' whenever something feels off or strange. That happens to be quite a lot sometimes. I just say it calmly.

The thinking behind it is that (1) saying No is definitely allowed because their popular drinking chant is 1-2-3 No! (2) it's increasingly looking like people are making up invented agreements in their head, like a sort of bitcoin covenant, then later punishing you for not respecting the thing they invented in their head. So I need to be clear I'm not agreeing to anything, at every step, because I get punished for literally everything.

It's similar to how John Gruber described Apple's reaction to the EU's DMA fines.

I know it sounds bonkers, but since I've started doing it, several gang stalker groups of fake customers that have been appearing in cafes, have started to lose their shit. It's like I've thrown a spanner in whatever they were doing. It's the strangest thing.

The world is infiniti No-ing me constantly in every conceivable dimension, and a few that aren't conceivable, the only thing I have left is to calmly return the favour.

I feel like I've tried everything, it's the only remaining sensible option. I just hope I don't turn into Alan Partridge, or starve to death. #

I'm sitting quietly in the park, quietly starving, just reading stuff on my iOS device. Two seemingly random walkers pass by, they are chatting loudly, much louder than all the other walkers going around the circular walking circuit. As they pass me, one of them shouts out in my direction 'Die!', followed by maniacle laughter from both of them.

I calmly reply, 'infiniti no'. Not much else I can do.

I remember that this morning on the way to the internet place, after the first corner there was an early funeral ceremony / sombre celebration happening. Funerals have this strange tendency to materialise at the end of bullying cyckes, just when they are about to start starving you. #

Little bit of rain last night, not too cold, this morning not too cold. Quite quiet too. As can be seen from all yesterday's notes, it was a very tsunami heavy day yesterday. Blogging about tech stuff was next to impossible, but did manage a few links.

The new thing in the evening seems to be slight sleep depravation campaign until around 11pm/12pm, led by a woman wearing the same tshirt as many of the woman that clean (and perhaps manage) the public toilets. Then in the cafes / shops the next day people wearing red tshirts sitting in front of me, with head on table ostensibly trying to sleep. That's what Gestapo kid did after interogating me and accusing me of lying. Two days in a row now. I mention this because there was that strange incident at the shop / cafe toilet the other day. These sort of incidents have a tendency to be linked in some way.

I wonder what today has in store for me. Hopefully this quiet isn’t the calm before a storm. Probably should think about preparing the newsletter early this week as starvation seems likely by the end of the day. #

Gestapo kid showed up at the cafe / shop again today. There weren't any interogations this time but he was with an entire gang of youths brandishing badmington rackets. They blocked access to the power outlets near where I was sitting, and ice lolly wrapers appeared directly on front of me (very unusual). But before leaving they got really very roudy, tables moved around, chairs thrown about, they made a heck of a lot of noise for about 20 minutes.

Felt somewhat planned, I think they expected me to calm them down, but I just sat quietly listening to music. Also felt somewhat like something bordering on intimidation.

I hope there isn't another unprovoked attack on the horizon, I'm still shaken from the previous attack and the afternath of that. #

I'm in another shop / cafe, the staff passed through quietly and removed my charging portable battery when I wasn't looking and hid it behind the counter downstairs. This isn't a normal occurence, first time it has happened to me in 5 years of being here and going to huge amount of shop / cafes.

What an unbelievable coincidence that this would happen the same day that Gestapo kid and his mob of youths blocked the power outlet in the previous shop / cafe. #

It was a bit of a cold night, and it's still a litte bit chilly this morning, but at least it didn't rain. I got gifted a pork bun at some point, so that food gave me a some extra body heat to make it through. It followed a day of escallations that once again appear to have been triggered by an unprovoked incident at a food vendor stand. This time they simply called me a dog as I bought the food. I took it on the chin and in a hey-now friendly way made it clear to the vendor that wasn't okay, but I didn't blame her, the world is crazy sometimes, I understand. By the end of our interaction we both thanked each other, it appeared we had settled our differences. Btw, she had insulted me a previous time I went there for no apparent reason unnexpectedly fu-ing me right at the point of giving me the food when you both say thank you. And so it goes.

But then immediately afterwards, a group of men at corner having coffee made a comment as I walked past, 'Good one' then lots of laughter. The situation was finished but they decided fir whatever reason to digg up old graves, and thus began an entire day of escallations. No chance of stoping it, from that point onwards everything you do is some sort of war, even if you ignore it and just go about your day, everything you do is interpreted as an attack, but anything they do is some sort of funny joke.

There literally is no way to even communicate anything.

So considering all that, the day went alright. I wrote two blog posts, a bunch of notes and links. Quite a lot of editing, the words were not flowing particularly well, perhaps because of all the turbulance. Listenned to a few podcasts, the mist interesting was probably the Keen On interview episode about liberalism. It's a concept that somehow is deceptively difficult to understand even though I feel it shouldn't be.

Another day... #

It's hard to describe this, but I'll try anyway. I appear once again to be stuck in between the forces of good and evil. The place where I'm sitting a man and a woman have sat next to me. They could have sat at nearby chairs and table, much more confortable, but decided for whatever reason to sit next to me intead. The man has a pork bun box. I was gifted a pork bun during the night.

They appear to be waiting to see what I do. A similar thing happened yesterday evening before I went to sleep. Given the whole days events, I stayed awake until they left, which took quite a while.

I know from experience that nothing I do at this point can be right. No matter what I do, it will be percieved in a bad way by one of these seemingly random people. If I stay, I will be yah!'d, if I go I will be told I'm going too quickly. That pattern started yesterday evening at the shop.

It's a sort of RL race condition. Very difficult to deal with, because it ends up messing with your timing. Everything just seems out of step afterwards. And then you get blamed for that too.

I'm just writting about it because I don't know what else to do. Incidentally they all just got up, they had turned into 3 people as another bloke had joined them, and left. One of the blokes, turned to me and said 'woah, thank you' as they walked off. I never said a word to them, I've never seen them before. #

Ed Zitron on digital media: "What is possible is giving great people enough of a chance to build a real audience and a great product. A better world is possible for digital media, it just has to be built by and for the writers themselves." #

Ben Collins on information scarecity [50:47]:

There is a massive pollution of the internet happening to obfuscate good information [...].

The more narrow it is to get good information on the internet, the only people that benefit from that are rich people. If the only people that have access to good information are rich people, the only people that benefit from that are rich people, and those rich people get richer from the good information.

Once there is information scarcity, the people who will hoard it are the rich. They have no problem paying for a Bloomberg terminal, they don’t care. They’ll pay for the information [...].

They will do that when everyone else is searching around for scraps on Google and Reddit.

A followup from the earlier writeup. Rough notes very lightly edited because it's really tough writting about this stuff.

First there was the man this morning thanking me for no reason. A short while later, another food vendor fake customer incident, imo linked to the 'yah woah' surge from last 24 hours. As I arrived at the food stand he shouted out 'liar' in my direction. I calmy replied after a few moments something to the effect of 'it’s the world that is the liar, it speeds people up just to slow them down again' and smiled. Intended as a light hearted comment about the human experience.

The fake customer then tried to pretend offer to pay for my food. He very clearly said 'I pay' and pointed at my food, which incidentally I never ordered, the vendor had pre-pared it without asking me. I always get the same thing so she knew what I wanted. Still though she never asked me. Now I've had this trick played on me several times the past few weeks. I've written about it many times. I asked him why he was lying, why he was trying to create a problem for me, why he was pretending to pay for my food. He suddenly had nothing to say. I said 'you’re the biggest liar in the world'. The food vendor also had a very sheepish look on her face. I calmly told her she was lying too, calmly paid and calmly walked away.

A bit further down the street I said out load 'stop trying to trick people everybody', to which there was an immediate reply from an anonymous female voice in the crowd 'Thank you'. Gee what are the chances. I guess now I'm the bad guy for something else.

That was followed by another fake customer situation at the next food vendor. The male food vendor this time, took issue with me, repeatedly loudly saying Lie! Lie! Lie! Lie! as he prepared my food. I calmly said, he was the one lying after he gave me the wrong sauce. The sauce was warm btw, that’s unusual and is likely another warpath.

There's been several subsequent incidents at the shop / cafe I am sitting at writting this note. All from apparent customers, who incesently are calling each other liars, or telling each other they are lying, but really it's obvious it's aimed at me, and of course it's all hilarious as far as they are concerned.

I've kept my cool through it all. And each time I said nope 'I'm not lying, you are', they have been getting extremely adgitated.

Also a young person, who seemed nice enough, asking me lots of personal questions, which is quite unusual. I tried to answer his questions as best I could, but very conscious that whatever I say will be turned against me by some. Having public conversations with personal information like this doesn't usually end particularly well in my experience.

And guess what, after being polite and answering his questions, he walked off back to his friends saying 'he’s such a good liar'. I guess my hesitation and awkwardness didn't meet his Gestapo-like high standards. I had to once again say into the void that they were the liars not me. And remind them that if I answer the questions they fuck me, and if I don't answer the questions they fuck me. Either way I end up getting mutilated.

Just another tsunami of escallations. Doesn't matter what you do, eventually you get mutilated. #

Attempted to listen to a few really interesting podcasts today, but unfortunately the world had started infiniti No!-ing everything so it's been next to impossible to actually fully meaningfully absorb the content properly. Even as I type this I'm being infiniti No!'d. These were the podcasts:

• The Dysfunctional State with Michael Malice (What Bitcoin Did Podcast)
• Why we should fight for freedom of speech | Greg Lukianoff (Bankless Podcast)

As you might have noticed reading the show titles that we might have reached yet another irony maximum. I'm half expecting a delinquant gang of paperclips to run past into the sunset laughing maniacly, chased by the rubix cube solver robot, chased by a rubix cube solver paperclip, chased by a comedy death fractal laughing and crying at the same time.

What a shame, maybe I'll get a chance to listen to them again when the world isn't infiniti No-ing. :( #

No sooner has one bullying cycle finished, or at least appears to have finished, the binary / halves cascades, than another one has started. This one is in a minus infiniti - plus infiniti form, and my experience is they start off relatively innocently but rapidly turn into a huge tsunami.

A cute girl for example might gift you a (whole) sandwich and bottle of water, that happened a few hours ago, but in parrallel to this at around the same time an old woman, who constantly eats ice lollys, is exposing herself to you. At around the same time in other places, there are more examples of it, you are compared to young children, then almost immediately afterwards, in the same cafe / shop, a strange incident at the toilet where a strange old cranky woman arrives, loudly pushing her weight around, uses the bathroom, then afterwards, just before leaving, the person with her stands behind you and very loudly, for no apparent reason, starts making sex pleasure noises. Very strange indeed.

You wonder when you'll get another cold drink, since that got deprecated when you tried to save money by eating instant noodles but the money getting to you decreased by the same amount you saved, so now you are stuck eating noodles just to stay hydrated.

These types of things start happening everywhere, and they escallate and escallate, and eventually something bad happens, usually involving you getting mutilated.

That's basically the current situation. Oh and the drugs / steeling meme is always just waiting to make a resurgeance. #

You say No! a single time, and immediately afterwards, the hive mind tries to correct you simply for making an awkward movement as a bloke who regularly intimidates you walks past, by having him shout No! at you. He's No!-ing your No!

Literally just for moving your body in a way that for whatever reason he found disagreeable. Nevermind that the entire world has been tsunami No!-ing you repeatedly for the past 2 days and you have been quietly saying nothing.

It's one set of rules for you and a totally different set of rules for everyone else. Even thinking that there is a minus-infiniti plus-infiniti pattern occuring is grounds for anothoer tsunami. And of course any suggestion that this is not a normal situation is met with genuine righteous indignation of the highest order.

No's for we but not for thee

Mind boggled for the 1 millionth time. #

cat << EOF > The magic of Glastonbury music festival

In a classic Glastonbury move, the festival has all the old timers up in arms about how the festival is moving too far away from it's roots. This year South Korean K-pop boy band Seventeen is playing the Pyramid stage, the Friday afteroon spot.

I say this as a former cranky old timer that was complaining about how the festival was moving away from it's roots, only to discover that, actually, I hadn't truely understood what Glastonbury was all about. Yes sure it's about big rock bands, and you can enjoy it at that level, but the really cool thing about Glastonbury, the thing it's mind bendingly good at, is taking these bands that seem completely different, that would appear to be almost completely at odds with each other, and juxtaposing them in such an unnexpected way, that somehow it magically just works.

It's really difficult to explain in words. The festival is so enormous, with so many stages, so many genres and ambiences, that it quite literally feels magical, like walking across a simulacrum of the multiverse composed of the most incredible colidascope of colours, energies and people. You are constantly finding yourself in places you would never normally have gone to in your non-glasto RL, often with a glass of authentic west country pear cider in your hand, and absolutely friggin loving it.

Even the so called uncool bands seem to popup just at the right time, when you're recovering from some other concert, and you see and feel the energy of the festival flow through them, and you think to yourself, holy crap Glastonbury is amazing.

The magic of the ancient druids, mystical rituals from across the ages permeates everything like the cosmic background radiation, you see it eminating through the musicians, and you recognise it, because it's eminating through you too. You feel at one with yourself, the bands, your friends, all the people around you, as well as with the earth and entire universe.

And then it's 4am and you are deep in the magic forest, at some totally underground unannounced jungle rave thing, and the band you thought were uncool are there raving their tits off, with an assortment of people so crazily diverse you start to literally believe you are in a dream. But it's just Glasto.

Not even rain and mud can dampen the spirit, the rave continues with wellies and rain jackets, or in your tent.

I don't know much about Reform, aside from everyone constantly shouting about how horrible they are, so I was fully prepared for some really hard hitting stuff in this candidates in their own words article. But apart from the bloke saying Diane Abbott should be deported, the rest aren't really all that bad.

There's a real allergy to the mere mention of conspiracy theories, with massive flare ups, which are about as unhelpful as spending all your time talking about conspiracy theories. Imo, we need a better balance that is in sync with today's reality. Conspiracy theories are often bonkers but they reflect real world worries that people have. Making them taboo and off limits just makes them more disruptive than they need be. #

My read on the political situation in France, based on what I've read, and there's a big chance I have this wrong cause I know even less about French politics than English politics. The left coalition is a sort of a motley crue of folks from across the left spectrum, whereas the right party really is mostly quite far right, and the center party is sort of innefective and a bit wimpy. Oddly the left might have the most diversity in opinion and thus pro-democracy, but that might not be what you think is needed depending on where you live.

I wonder whether many would like to vote for pro-democracy lets-hold-hands-around-the-camp-fire left coalition, but given their situation, where so many tensions and so many things need sorting out, feel they have to vote right to even get to a world where such a thing like a left coalition even makes sense.

Potentially quite a dangerous slippery slope situation. #

cat << EOF > The great british seaside holiday

The trick to enjoying a british style beach holiday is first to realise they are an altogether different affair than such a thing in warmer climates. I really enjoyed that Guardian article, very readable and great photos. Definitely worth the time to read. I wonder if these places will start to get more popular in the future. There's something uniquely authentic about them.

The water is cold, many of the beaches are pebbles instead of sand and the weather has a mind of it’s own. But for every downside, there is an upside, evolved over hundreds of years, you just have to see it through a different mindset. For instance, the unpredictability of said weather creates a sort of unspoken comeraderie between people, and there's often a special coziness to many of the places you'll find to eat hearty food as the winds and rain swirl outside.

There's a sort of minimun bravery that you have to have to start enjoying it, a sense of humour about when things go wrong. But once you do, you might just realise why some of these places are the best kept secret of many poets and writers from around the world. And when it's finally sunny and warm, the tougher parts of the holiday cause it to truely feel that much more glorious.

Oh to be beside the great british seaside, you feel connected to the land, the history and the people in a way you never could have imagined before. And the moderarely good fish and chips you eat while sitting on the peer looking out to sea, will be the best you've ever tasted.

Update: When I re-read the first draft of this post, it had this poorly written travel brochure sort of vibe, and that wasn't at all my intention, so I re-wrote it twice, but each time it ended up being even more travel brochurey. It's very odd, there’s something in the universe that’s causing this to happen, like some sort of giant magnet, I don't appear to have any control over it. Rather than fight it, I'm just adding this note. Somehow it feels like the british seaside thing to do.

Great Rest is Money podcast episode out today - Does debt really matter?. There's a segment on national debt, very clear explanation on how that works and why governments can't just keep safely printing money. There's also another excellent segment on the UK - EU relationship, how after much pain inflicted by the EU as punishment for leaving, perhaps the UK is finally in a position of bargening power with the EU, with interesting things to offer related to security and defence. They also promise a special AI episode, looking forward to that. #

What if mandated software backdoors had to themselves be backdoored? So for example users could always see when they were being observed via the backdoor. #

The new thing seems to be halves. Leaving half drunk bottles of water, half drunk cups of water, gifting me half eaten boxes of chocolates. Yes/No cascades. It's all about binaries. Halves. That's the current stick that's being used to hit me. It's happened before of course. That time there was a flurry of half eaten sandwiches.

Reading the description here, it seems a little far fetched, but it's not, when it's happening to you, event after event after event all follow the same basic pattern. It's like clockwork. It's the strangest thing. #

cat << EOF > Jews and Arabs of Jaffa

There is so much horrible stuff happening in Isreal and Gaza at the minute it's important to highlight some of the inspiring things that are happening too. This is from This Week in Startups podcast recent episode - Startup Nation Deep Dive - Dan Senor Ep#1970.

First a bit of background, here are a lot of people in the west mouthing off without really understanding the history and the subtleties of the situation.

For example people claiming the jews haven't been in the region that long, that they should go home, when in fact there have been jews living in the region since the time of King David ~1000 BC. That's over a thousand years before Islam was even created.

Also many people don’t know there are many arabs that actually live in Israel, around 2 million in total. And they are full citizens. They can hold office in government, be on the supreme court etc. Some areas are extremely diverse. There are tensions now and then of course, but the bigger story, the one that gets missed is that jews and arabs have lived together for literally thousands of years. The current situation of conflict and hate is an anomaly. In the longer arc of time, it has not been the norm.

With that in mind, the story of how the people of Jaffa reacted to the October 7th attacks is quite something. Both communities essentially got together after the attack and created a task force to ensure peace in the region.

From the podcast (0:46:00):

Since October 7th, the Israeli Arab community has so locked arms with the Jewish community against Hamas, in ways that are, I will say, quite inspiring.

In a Jaffa, which is one of the most intermingled Jewish Arab towns, just outside of Tel Aviv, after October 7th the Arab community and the Jewish community were so concerned, because of the Gaza war, that there could be a flare up of tensions again between Jews and Isreali Arabs, that they created, on their own, a citizens bottom up community task force to work on security within Jaffa with each other. So literally days after October 7th, they formed this community, hundreds of them, and they basically said, "we need to stay closely connected. If there is a flare up in Jaffa in either community that threatens either community, we agree that we will work together to prevent that flareup.

And they then formed this task force, reached the mayor...THEY reached out to the major, it wasn’t top down, they setup like this Zoom call or WhatsApp call or something, they had like thousands of people from both communities.

The cohesion of both communities still persists to this day. It’s one of the most moving and inspiring stories coming out of Isreal.

More subtle / not subtle intimidation at the internet place this morning. As I stand browsing the web, a man walks up next to me prominently brandishing a 500000 VND note, which is the biggest note. He spits about a meter away from my feet. Ostensibly he's buying a drink at the cafe, but he's not. He literally could have spat anywhere, its not busy at all at this time in the morning.

Btw, there was a weird incident that reaked of planned and manufactured yesterday in a shop involving the person just ahead of me paying with a 500000 VND note. While people do obviously occasionally pay with the biggest note, it doesn't happen all that often. Two days in a row like this is unusual at the best of times, but with all the extra stuff it's almost definitely some sort of planned thing.

Btw 2, the 1/2 eaten box of chocolates, the chocolates are quite fancy, the chocolate is high quality, I guess probably quite expensive, however the centre of the chocolates is jelly sweets, kind of cheap and nasty. Anyhow it's another example of the halves pattern, but also the expensive pattern also manifested in the 500000 VND notes.

While this is happening, 2-3 blokes are having a somewhat lively discussion, but it's aggressive in nature, they keep inserting english words designed to anger goad. I say quite loudly 'Spitting at my feet while holding a 500 note, what are you doing mate, you could have spat literally anywhere'. Lots of laughter from the small gang of blokes.

They continue their anger goading, finishing with a 'you learn'.

I wait a few moments and calmly answer the thing they were really saying:

'No, fuck you'.

Within a few minutes they have all disapeared.

And they claim to not be on a warpath. Warpathing is all they do. Literally every damn thing they do is a warpath, but they dress it up as funny, or help, or whatever. And when you calmly point it out to them, and everyone else, they get upset. #

As I leave the internet place with my heavy bags several people including security guards loudly shout 'yah!' at me. #

The problem with eating expensive chocolate gifted to you when you are being starved from normal food, is that a short while after eating the chocolate you become even more accutely aware of your hunger for real food.

How strange that the week there is a drugs theme to the bullying, with small plastic zip lock baggies appearing everywhere, and people making comments related to drug use, that my food is being so blatantly manipulated causing more cravings for food. Oh and lets not forget the increased anger goading. Gee what are the chances? #

cat << EOF > Does my Bitcoin have a covenant attached to it?

This was a question raised in a recent What Bitcoin Did podcast episode with niftynei. The rest of their discussion around covenants is super interesting too, worth giving it a listen. The question is a variation of what I first thought of when I skimmed through the covenants proposal. I said so at the time on Twitter several months ago.

The basic idea of covenants is that you would have a way to attach conditions to bitcoins. It's an interesting primitive for sure, likely could lead to many useful application features. However it reaks of danger. You have a permissionless decentralised self sovereign digital money that works really well, why on earth would you risk adding permissions to it on the base layer? Surely you would run the risk of not being able to spend your bitcoin some time in the future?

In the podcast they bring up the example of attaching a time lock to some bitcoin, and the question then came up, how would you know if the Bitcoin you just received had conditions attached? Their answer is what I suspected. Essentially you wouldn't know unless your wallet had a feature to show you the covenant. So it's conceivable that you could keep bitcoin literally for years and only discover the covenant when you tried to spend the bitcoin.

They propose to create some sort of standards body for wallets, but as they discuss the idea it rapidly becomes a re-inventing-the-government problem because how do you create such an entity that is decentralised? It would be near impossible.

This is tangential to another problem I previously highlighted, namely that Bitcoin is way too obscure at a technical level. Crypto coins aren't easily explorable like HTTP and HTML. That's a big deal.

Anyway, it's an interesting episode, I'm glad they are at least talking about it, however it's clear there are elite and peasant classes forming in Bitcoin. That's a real shame, but it's also dangerous, no matter who you are.

Just read through the notes section on this website to discover first hand examples that the world is absolutely full of people that want nothing more than to block you from one thing or another.

You might be an elite today, but can you be so sure you'll be an elite next week, next year, in 20 or 100 years? Permissions are dangerous.

Another somewhat rainy night last night, not quite as cold though. More sleep depravation from the gang stalkers. They finished their onslaught this time with a driveby 'we learn'. Well why an I always having to pay for their learning? I can't even afford food and water much of the time. Something doesn't add up.

But instead I get blamed. The current bad thing that they are incinuating seems to be that I'm doing drugs. Totally false. Small zip lock baggies are appearing everywhere I go. There was another strange incident at a food stand yesterday. Once again a woman was just standing there waiting, supposedly a customer, but her and the food vendor behaved very strangely. They seemed to be overly focussed on what I was doing, like they were waiting for me to do something. It felt very much like all the incidents the past two weeks where people were offering to pay for my food, which I wrote about.

They only got on with getting my food order when I stepped back away from the food stand. And guess what the sauce for the food was in? A small plastic zip lock baggie. Oh and another guess what, a huge uptick in police walkbys yesterday morning. There must have been about 10 walkbyes within just a few hours. Very unusual.

This has happened before several times. They are just cycling through their playbook at this stage. I always end up getting mutilated in some way, like the unprovoked assault a few days ago. One wonders whether my blog post about the Lib Dem's policy on cannabis might have triggered this new wave of blame. Yet it might also have been a conversation I had with a westerner a few days ago where the topic came up in conversation, it was around weed shops in the US.

Last week it was about stealing food. This week it's drugs. Next week it will be something else. They are always looking for something to blame me with. They only help when they can blame. Nevermind that they caused me to get stuck here in the first place. #

cat << EOF > Politics, Bitcoin and UFOs (Issue #169)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

UK & France election politics, Bitcoins future with inscriptions and runes, St George & the history of dragons, Trump on All-in pod, science & UFOs

Issue details:

• Title: Politics, Bitcoin and UFOs
• Issue: 169
• Page: issue webpage

Now I'm not an expert in this but I would have though that with the UK going left politically while most of the EU goes right, surely that would lead to some interesting possibilities for arbitrage?

I have no real clue how to identify such possibilities other than stay abreast of the political and business news in both places, and read up on what these different effects these of governments usually have on the populace. The arbitrage might be financial but could also take other forms. #

There was a segment on a recent Techmeme Ride Home (06/18) podcast about how AI avatars of us will eventually do all our social media activity for us. I checked out the company mentioned which was called Butterfly. The examples in their app marketing are all lotr style avatars, elves and what not, which just seems far too far fetched. But the general idea isn't too out there in my opinion.

The AIs know everything anout us, so it makes sense that they could interact and explore possible synergies. The question is though, how exactly would us as individuals want to interact with these avatars, and eventually how would the avatars arrange for the RL people to start interacting. You could really imagine some out there ideas for this type of tech. #

Earlier this morning, as I was getting breakfast there was another warpath cascade. Figured I'd describe it here since there are links to previous incidents.

I left the internet place, around 7am, having scheduled the newsletter. I had a vague route in mind, and as I walked I decided to avoid yesterday's place with the baggied sauce. The food was pretty good but the sauce tasted a bit strange. As I walked towards the cross roads ahead, I thus would need to need to carry on straight instead of turning right.

As I made this decision I noticed up ahead a security guard loitering outside a shop, he was clearly waiting for me, I noticed it instantly. His focus was on me, even though he was interacting with another person. Sure enough at the monent I walked past him, he belted out extremely loudly 'No!'. He had obviysly been waiting to shout his prepared line at me.

I said nothing, continued on, got to the cross roads and walked straight across, the lights turned green for pedestrians crossing at the exact moment I got there. I continued up the road about a hubdred meters and a bloke sitting on his motirbike taxi started trying to catch my attention. He'd clearly been sitting there for a while. He shouted 'Yo Yo Yo No!'. Notice the final No there. Quite a strange coincidence.

I ignored the mototaxi bloke, and continued up to the street I was heading towards that has several food stands during the morning hours. The first one appeared to be out of what I was looking for, I continued to the next place. When I got there, there was another one of these strange situations where there is already a customer there ostensibly getting served but the interavtion is strange. They are doing the food purchase thing, but they are concentrated on me, waiting to see what I do, so their interaction seems odd, like they areb't quite sure what they are doing. I kept my distance and just waited.

Eventually they finish, and the vendor turned towards me, looks somewhat suprised, even though I'm quite sure she clearly already knew I was standing there. I say what I want, the starts gathering the various bits and pieces, oddly looking for confirmation from me went stacking the rice. She did this last time too. There's no reason for her to do this as her stand is a rice and pork stand.

She turns to add the pork and also puts an egg on the dish. I say 'no egg', she doesn't hear me, or is ignoring me. I say it once again louder. She definitely heard me the second time. She continues none the less, wraps it all up and bags it. Motions the price with her fingers. I give her the money I was already holding in my hand. So I ended up with an extra egg, for the normal regular price.

I know from experience this will be turned into some sort of way of blaming me for something, but I don't really have a choice, I take the food and pay, and walk off. I walk to down the road towards a sandwich shop I know is there that I've been to a few times. The vague plan was to get a sandwich that I can have later for lunch.

As I get towards the shop I see ahead of time there is already a customer standing there. It's another of thise weird situations, it doesn't feel right, the body movements are all wrong, they have been standing there waiting for ages, the flow isn't right. I decide instantly to skip the sandwich, and sure enough as I walk past, the apparent customer shouts 'No!'.

I ignore it and continue down the road. There's another street vendor near there that I go to sometimes. The vendor isn't there, but as I pass their spot, several people nearby shout 'No!'. I ignore it and continue. I get to the corner and guess what the food vendor just happens to be turning around the corner with her stuff, but it looked like she had been standing waiting there, only setting herself in motion as I arrived. I ignore it, decide to give that a muss too.

I head to the sweet breads food vendor that I've mentioned before, deciding just to get one since I don't have much money. As I turn the corner into the road where he usually is, a security guard type bloke shouts 'No! No!' as I pass. I ignore him, walk to the vendor and buy 1 sweet bread. I head to the shop that gave me a free boiled egg gift the day I got assaulted. I buy some instant noodles. This time he isn't so friendly, he looks disaprovingly at me, and says okay after I've paid in a way that makes you think you he doesn't trust you. I ask him if he knows why everyone is behaving strangely this morning. He is suprised at me addressing him, he suddenly becomes very sheepish, and says nothing.

What a strange coincidence.

I continue to the cafe shop with a seating area, there are a few more 'No!' incidents. I'm still ignoring them all. In the cafe shop, several customers show up and sit nearby, clearly trying to provoke me. I ignore them all, they seem disapointed and deflated, run out of things to say to each other and leave.

Just another day.

As I write this paragraph, Bjork is singing 'Save Up' over and over, in the RA mix #940) I'm listening to. The irony is, and I've mentioned it before in the newsletters, they have deprecated saving. They block you from saving, they make it basically impossible, they always know exactly what you have. If you manage to save anything at all, even a few pennies, they treat you like a thief or drug addict. There is no way to escape.

Just another distopian synchronicity. #

Cold and rainy night last night. I'm still feeling very cold this morning. Not much to add. I can't code or blog properly because no build minutes, I have hardly any energy because no food, body noticeably thin, still got to carry these damn bags though.

Most of the podcasts I've listened to this week haven't really peeked ny attention. I've only started 4-5 so far this week, and most of them aren't even tech related. It will probably be a weird newsletter this week. Very difficult to stay motivated when almost everything is cut off. Even just walking to the internet place feels like it's too much effort.

The bullying trend from the hive mind at the minute is to 'yah!' me. Young people, middle aged people, old people, male abd female, they just 'yah!', but my tank is empty and they know it. #

The polls suggest not only is Labour going to win the elections, but that they will demolish the Conservatives. My worry with an ultra strong Labour government is that it's potentially very dangerous as it coincides with the hypergrowth of AI.

Big majority sure, might even be good, we have many things to change in the nation, but ultra majority, I'm not so sure. You might be on the right side today, but what about in 20 years time? The nation will look very different indeed then. I think this is a non partisan issue. #

The computer chips sector is going through big changes at the minute. The US, Germany and Japan all have big government subsidized projects, whether via tax breaks or loans, to build domestic chip manufacturing plants. Given how important access to chip manufacturing is going to be going forward, and that the UK has a general election next month, I'd like to know what each political party's plan is for chips going forward. #

cat << EOF > My main worry with an ultra strong labour government

This recent poll in the Telegraph is even worse than the last one I read about which was predicting only 100 seats, the worst defeat in 100 years. Here the prediction is they'll only get 50 seats. If that happens the Lib Dems might even have a shot at becoming the opposition. The colored map is almost entirely red.

It occurs to me looking at this that my main worry with a Labour government that is so strong, with the economy so horrid, is we'll end up in another war. That's what happened last time. But the war this time might look very different, might be non-obvious, and especially with the exponential AI revolution happening, be much worse long term. Such a huge majority right now feels like it could be very dangerous. WW3 would be unimagineably bad, but what if it was an order of magnitude worse than even that?

What's more, although it might not look like it, I think this is likely a non-partisan issue. It feels like a dangerous time for extremes. Big majority, sure, might even be needed, we have a lot of things to change in the nation, but an ultra majority as predicted here, that worries me.

I think I'd maybe almost prefer it if the Lib Dems got 100 seats. How is Stalmer going to ensure we don't end up, in some way, at war again or worse?

A few minutes ago I was physically assaulted by some vietnamese youths. It was a completely unprovoked attack. They snuck up behind me and I then recieved a very large blow to the side of my head. When I looked up they were running away into the distance.

This follows days of escallations from a manufactured situation. Like I've said many times before, it always results in me getting mutilated. #

cat << EOF > I got assaulted again

Following several manufactured incidents and wave after wave of escalations over the past few days, I was attacked this evening. What follows is my writeup, it's not very well edited, I just wanted to get something written and published. I'll likely add context links to previous relevant articles I've written over the next few days. I'm still kind of shaken by the whole thing.

A gang of youths snuck up behind me and I received a very strong blow to the side of my head. I’m not entirely sure if it was a punch or with some sort of device. Previous similar incidents have been with projectiles such as rocks, stones or bricks. This time though, I found no nearby debris afterwards.

About 10 minutes after the incident, two respectable looking but quite weedy young people drove past on a motorbike, slowed down ostensibly to put some garbage in a nearby bin. As they drive off, the youth on the back made several downwards hitting motions with their hand, like they were hitting something with a bat. They also quite clearly had an enormous smirk on their face. Something was very hilarious to them about throwing their garbage away. Seems rather unlikely it was a coincidence.

This all happened after several days of escalations and multiple manufactured incidents. And zooming out even further, it appears to be part of a longer multi-week arc. It’s difficult to describe these events, because they happen bit by bit. Something happens one day, that causes an escalation the next few days. It’s always made clear in some way by the perpetrators that they are linked. That enables you to trace it back but it’s convoluted.

These events seem totally haphazard at first, like they aren’t organised, like they are just incremental situations created in a reactionary way as situations unfold. However it often becomes apparent that they somehow fall into a much more co-ordinated whole. It’s like it’s a combination of organised higher level situations and free form smaller situations that fall within the boundaries created by the organised element.

For example, taken as an isolated event, this evening’s attack could be seen as the cruscendo of an escalation following a manufactured ‘Pay!’ incident at a food place a few days ago.

Yet you can trace it further back still, because earlier in the evening right next to the location that the attack happened, a man darted into the middle of the street to pick up a twenty thousand VND note. That’s about the equivalent of 1 USD, slightly less. The note perhaps had been dropped by a passing motorbike or maybe the bloke dropped it crossing the road, I didn’t see the lead up.

You might think it’s innocuous enough. Well in that precise location several situations have occurred quite recently that each involved a twenty thousand VND note. There were a couple of other times a note was blowing past like tumbleweed, and a situation where a local lady that hangs about here everyday at the same time, tried to trick me. She was holding a twenty thousand in her hand, quite obviously trying to make me notice it, while motioning me towards a passing bicycle food vendor that she was buying something from. She was making it look like she was going to buy me something, but not quite. Something felt off about it. I just said and motioned that I had no money to buy food, which was true. The situation passed.

It’s a weird situation to occur. It basically never happens that someone just randomly tells you to buy some food from a food vendor, certainly not from someone not working as a food vendor. That’s never happened in 5 years of me being here. And from someone that definitely knows I've been stuck here in Vietnam in a difficult situation for a long time. Hence why it seemed much more likely they were offering to buy me something. But like I said something felt off. She made no effort to further explain the situation.

The very next morning, I got some soup at a nearby food vendor. When I tried to pay they motioned that I didn’t need to pay, it was free. I said thank you, and walked off. Neither of the food vendors, who are not shy of coming forward, regularly barking out orders at their customers, said anything as I left. If there had been a miscommunication, surely they would have said something as I walked off. I wrote a blog post about this incident.

The next day I went back to the same soup place, the soup was good, and I was grateful for the freebie, nice gesture. Not many foreigners eat at the street soup places. Maybe this could be a regular place to eat. As I tried to pay, holding the money visibly in my hand, another apparent female customer who had been standing there waiting, motioned to me that she would pay for the food. Again I said thank you, ate the soup, and left. No drama.

What’s important to understand here is the wider context. In that two week period, this sort of thing happened at least 3-4 times at different locations. Just as I was about to pay, someone who was just standing there suddenly stepped in to pay. The first time this happened, the food vendors helper quite clearly said to me when I asked how much the food was, "For you, free". I’ve been back to that place since and bought food from that vendor, no major issues.

The point here is that the whole freebie’s at food vendors suddenly started happening everywhere I went. And it was very clearly a freebie, but as the events continued to happen, that slowly changed, and it became more ambiguous what was happening. None of the vendors shouted out at me as I walked away.

So anyway I went back to the soup place a week or so later and finally they allowed me to pay for the food. I 100% paid the soup lady directly as she gave me the food. That time, as I walked away after eating the soup, a man’s voice said ‘Pay’. Strange thing is that the food stand is run by two women. I had paid, so I legitimately walked away having paid. Ever since then there’s been weird incidents where people shout ‘Pay’ at me.

One thing that seems like it could be happening is that the food vendor helpers are saying one thing, and telling the food vendor something totally different, to try and make it look like I tried to get food without paying. By the way that’s definitely never happened. I would never do that.

But there are even more strangenesses that happened around the same time. Like the incident that seemed a bit weird at the time. A street sweet bread vendor, had added a few extra things into the bag he gave me. Seemed like it was some tasters, a few freebie’s, I go there a lot. That’s the sort of thing vendors do sometimes. The odd thing was when it happened a lady on a motorbike was just sitting waiting there, she had already bought her sweet breads but was just sitting there next to the vendor doing nothing. Remember this was all happening during a period where as I tried to buy something, suddenly someone would pop up and pay. In the sweet bread case since I was distracted I accudentally gave him money for 1 sweet bread instead if two, he reminded me, I appologised and paid the right amount. So the extras were definitely free samplers.

There were just a lot of situations where a person was standing next to the vendor for no good reason. It was noticeably different to how things are normally. This happened multiple times over a couple of weeks. It hadn’t happened previous to this, and for whatever reason, it has now completely stopped. But for about 2 weeks it was happening all the time.

There was also another situation with some soup where another food vendor helper had approached me up the road from his food stand and said he would offer me some soup. I wrote a blog post about it at the time. He was very aware of my situation being stuck here in Vietnam and kept asking me lots of questions. Said he'd seen me many times and wanted to help. But was that what he said to the food vendor he was apparently working for?

My impression is that the food vendors were perfectly aware of what was going on, but those situations are clearly being used as a way to spread untruths about me. And guess what, I’m being attacked and mutilated. In my opinion there is some element of co-ordination going on here. I’m not saying everyone is involved, but I think many are. It appears to be a standard trick in their tool belt of anti-foreigner tricks, of which there are an infinite amount.

Even with all this that you have read here, there are lots of things I’ve had to leave out. There were many other incidents that were involved, especially around the twenty thousand VND, there was a whole week of strange price manipulation at various sandwich shops, all centering around twenty thousand VND, all trying to create situations where I was in some way in the wrong. But since then it’s transpired that I was actually in the right and they had been lying to me about the price. Anyway, this is really just a sample. This stuff is happening day in day out. Each small high street has it’s little organised tricks they play on foreigners, though I suspect they likely do it to themselves too. And the high street gangs are loosely linked in some way. The manufactured situations are constantly making reference to each other.

It even involves several, I believe to be, fake motorbike accidents. Motorbike accidents have a tendency to happen right on front of me for some bizarre reason. One happened a couple of days ago. The aftermath was very strange with a bloke helping the injured guy but he was really just bossing him about. And the injured guy kept holding the side of his face. The same side that they hit me on in the unprovoked attack earlier.

I’ve seen lots of other fake stuff. One particularly memorable time, a bloke on a parked motorbike lost his shit right before I walked past, threw a massive hissy fit, and went over to a large woman on the side of the street and walloped her across the front of her body with his arm like he was playing a game of human tennis, she was sent flying through the air onto the ground. The thing is it was exactly like it would be in the movies. It just wasn’t real. It was like a performance by some stunt actors.

I'm going to lightly edit all these bullet points and create a blog post. I imagine this wasn't the best of reads, I'm still quite shook up by the whole thing. I just want to get in with the day, even though, since I'm also currently being starved and thirsted, it's not likely going to be much fun.

It just occurred to me, as I'm editing this post, that my blog post from a couple of days ago about westerners never really being accepted in asia now seems earily precient.

I've been at the internet place for about 30 minutes preparing the blog post detailing being assaulted last night. People in both nearby caffees are strangely much quieter than usual. It's almost as if quite a few of then know something bad happened last night. #

cat << EOF > Assault aftermath 1

I wrote earlier about the assault that happened to me yesterday evening. So far this morning people at the cafes next to the internet place were noticeably quiet compared to normal.

On the way to the cafe / shop I'm sitting in, I passed by a nearby shop that has much safer hit water than here. I bought an instant nooddles and filled up my flasks with safe hot water. In the place I'm sitting in now, they use the mop buckets to fill up the hot water device. I previously wrote about that.

Anyway as I was filling up my flasks one of the staff walked up to me and offered me a large plastic bag. I said thanks, even though it was a bit odd. He was being really overly polite, so much so it felt like it was some sort of trap. I actually needed a large bag because the one I use to wrap my flask was very old, full of holes. I said thanks, took the bag.

After I paid for the noodles, the other shop staff bloke offered me a free boiled egg. "A gift for you", he said and put it in the bag with the noodles. i said thanks abd walked off towards the cafe / shop I that had the seating area upstairs.

Seems like a normal interaction, except that I've literally been going to these Circle K shops on a daily basis for 5 years at this stage, and not a single time have they given me any sort of freebie like this. Also the staff in this shop have recently been a bit rude the last few times I've been there. Also thr two blokes staffing it this morning I've never seen there before.

What are the chances that this extreme politeness and freebie would happen just a few hours after being physically assaulted?

I had the boiled egg with the noodles, tasted pretty good.

cat << EOF > Assault aftermath 2

I wrote earlier about the assault that happened to me yesterday evening. This post describes an incident that happened earlier in a cafe / shop I was in over lunch. Similar to the assault post, I'm going to do very minimal editing. I just want to get on with life. What follows are just some notes I took.

While being starved and thirsted, sitting in cafe / shop, 3 staff from another cafe turn up with 4 large takeaway food boxes. They sit at the high stool bar at the window directly on front of me. All start eating gratuitously on front of me, the 4th food box is placed all the way to the right. For some reason they keep looking back at me.

The 3rd person at the end of the table stands up, walks past me and says ‘lie’ as she walks away, she acts like she’s saying it to the 2 remaining people, but visibly angles herself so I can hear her. She was really saying it to me.

She returns a few minutes later with a 4th person. It’s clear to me that they know. This group of four never eat here. I’m here everyday, and pretty much none of the regulars are here. Many are younger than this lot. About the same age as last night's attackers. Wonder if that has anything to do with it. Word travels fast in this place. Often, literally unbelievably fast.

As they all get stuck into their meals, another group that just showed up, start laughing maniacally. This is a very typical dynamic, though it manifests in many ways. Westerners will never?really be welcome.

A short while later the eaters finish and leave, they are immediately followed by the maniacle laughers who until now were different groups. One of the maniacles says loudly ‘No I’ / ‘No eye’ as they all walk down the stairs.

A little while later all remaining people in the cafe / shop got up and left at the same time. The penultimate person kicked my chair as she walked past. The only remaining item in the room is a plastic glass of ice water left directly on front of me on the windiw bar table. All the empty food boxes, and all the garbage for all other roughly 10 people that weee in the room, were cleaned up by those people, all apart from the ice water plastic cup. What a strangely coincidental way for that to play out. Here's why:

Since I started eating instant noodles again a few weeks ago, I haven’t been able to afford drinking water, so am hydrating almost exclusively with the hot water that comes with the instant noodles. Strangely the money that makes it to me, has decreased by an amount exactly equal to the cost of drinking water. By trying to save money by eating noodles, I got squeezed even more than I was already being squeezed. The reason I was trying to save money is because I already never have enough to eat food and drink water every day. I'm already being starved and thirsted, yet they want to starve and thirst me even more.

I think the people that were just in this room knew all this perfectly well.

cat << EOF > Assault aftermath 3

I wrote earlier about the assault that happened to me yesterday evening. This post describes an incident that happened earlier in a cafe / shop I was in over lunch.

Right after writting the previous 2 blog posts, while trying to commit the to the repo, there was a weird error in the text editor. I was blocked from commiting the files. Restarting the app didn't fix the issue, so I had to restart the device. During the reboot the screen went all strange, all black but with vertical lines of color, as if something was wrong with the power supply. The device was plugged into a battery at the time, and the cable had been giving me error messages the past few days. The only other times I have seen this behaviour on Apple devices it's ended up being something pretty bad so this has me very worried now. It's my only device. When all this happened I was listening to a somewhat obscure podcast.

The device is back on now and appears to be working ok, apart from the power cable which is intermittently causing errors still.

When it rains...

I forget which podcast I heard this on, likely a recent What Bitcoin Did episode, the idea that the best way to structure the economy might be a mixture of right and left depending on the situation. Some things, the thinking goes, are best run in a more collective socialist way, like health care and telephone / internet networks, whereas the startup scene is perhaps better suited to an approach that would be considered more right wing, with less government. I thought that was an interesting idea. #

The bullies are at it again. Several more unprovoked 'Pay!' harrassment incidents. Also the police seem to be making a point of passing by where I am. At least 4 or 5 walkby and drivebys in the past 24 hours. That's very unusual. It's intimidation plain and simple. I'm tired of constantly going over every damn interaction to try and figure out what if anything went wrong. It's never ending. It's the last damn thing in the world I need right now. If anyone is stealing from anyone, it's most definitely the world stealing from me. Constantly.

Here‘s a typical chain of events that happens. It's not a perfect description, each time it's slightly different, but this should give you a relatively good idea what sort of thing happens each time.

• They manufacture situations, to make it look like you did something bad, when you in fact did nothing of the sort
• When you protest, they say 'we learn'
• If you don't protest they escallate and escallate
• And actually even when they say 'we learn', they end up escallating anyway
• Then they say you have to learn
• And eventually it's such a cauldron of hate in every direction they just blame you for everything
• Then you get mutilated, actual physical mutilation of your body
• Then it starts all over again

It's like every situation is in some way ambiguous, but it's done like that on purpose. The various sets of folks react differently. You've got those that are blaming you for doing something bad, then those that appologise, then those that are saying the entire thing was some sort of learning thing, then the blammers turn back up and they are blaming you even more, and then a bunch of people are saying it's just a big joke, but is it really, yes it is, no it isn't, and 'yah!', and 'lie!', and things get dangerous, and innevitably you get mutilated.

And all the while they are starving and thirsting you on and off, anger goading you, food and water goading you. It's just a full on assault from all directions everywhere you go. But maybe it's nothing, and remember, be happy.

And that’s not even saying anything about the weird as fuck synchronicities that are constantly happening whenever you do anything like listening to podcasts, browse the internet or even write code. The entire freaking world seems like a malicious dystopian panopticon AI algorithm orchestrated version of the Truman show, probably running on fucking Etherium. Plot twist, it's actually running on Bitcoin, and it’s even fucking worse. #

cat << EOF > The UK, the EU, podcasting and AI

It's the year of elections, with the EU having just had their big election event, the UK about to have theirs in July, France at around the same time, and there's also the US. Elections are happening everywhere it seems. I'm usually not that interested in elections, but for some reason this year I have been. I think that's because the dynamics are genuinely quite exciting at the minute, with big shifts in opinion, economic conditions and ongoing wars causing geo-political forces to be very strained.

It's also been the first real EU election that didn't include the UK. Ironically enough, I think that's also caused many in the UK to become more intetested in the politics happening across the waters and througout the continent. I've learnt really quite a lot about central and eastern europe just reading round ups of what's been going on in each country. It's rather fascinating, no less because the EU is so big these days.

But the other big thing that's changed in recent years is that podcasting has become very popular, almost mainstream. People are able to have access to a much broader set of media sources, much of it created by non government groups or independants. I've been listening to politcs discussions all throughout the Bitcoin scene on podcasts like What Bitcoin Did, Crypto Voices and Bankless, the Peter St Onge Podcast and of course great discussions and interviews on the All-in podcast. But also, more recently on podcasts like the Rest is Politics and the Rest is Money. It feels like a genuinely different environment than back when Brexit happened.

The other big change is clearly the AI and LLM revolution that's happenned over the past couple of years. If the rise of podcasting has significantly changed the environment, and in my opinion it has, then how different will things be after a few more years of exponential advances in AI tech?

In the Uk, some pundits are predicting that the Conservative party will have their biggest election loss in over 100 years. That's pretty massive, but it's even more massive considering that the rest of the EU has been going in the total opposite direction, with the political right and extreme right gaining huge ground.

What a strange time for this to be happening. It occurred to me earlier that such a big election defeat, at the very moment powerful AI tools are being democratized, could be a lethal blow to the Conservatives. What if they never recover?

Just started getting the dreaded "This device may not be supported" error message when I try to charge my iOS device from my backup battery. Come on world, seriously?

I guess you've started another mutilation cycle then. Back on the warpath again world are you?

Update: As I sat here finishing typing this note, the old lady that leaves garbage in her trail, and has been hanging around like a bad omen the past few weeks, and constantly warpathing, walked / hobbled past with her walking stick, and said simply 'Up!'. World is back on the warpath big time.

I hope you find your way off the warpath you are on world. #

World continues to be on the warpath. It's new favorite thing is pepering small groups of 2-3 people along any route I am walking, who appear to be just having a normal conversation. Then as I pass them, one of the gang says 'Pay!' loudly.

I say they appear to be having a normal conversation, but that's not entirely true. Everytime something seems off about them. They somehow stick out like a sore thumb. I think it's because unlike a regular group of people having a chat, they're attention is actually focussed on me approaching. That makes their interaction seem off in some way that you instinctively notice.

This sort of anger goading will continue and escallate for the rest of the day. They have already decided that I'm to blame for something, they just have to find what that is. #

It's abundantly clear that everything I do is tracked here. It's not clear exactly by who, same as the gang stalkers, you never really know who is doing it. Just some amorphous anonomous gang of folks. A lot of the constant bullying they do is subtle in nature, passive aggressive if you will. One thing they definitely do is play with smells.

At the internet place where I get online, I find that whenever I discover a new food dish, then the very next day, the smell of exactly that same food suddenly appears at the internet place. This has hapenned many many times at this stage. Most recently it's been with:

• The red sauce spicey chicken balzack from GS25 store
• Rogan spicey noodles
• Yogurt and sweet fruit desert street food

But it's happened with so many more things that I've lost count. Each time I discover something new, or change my pattern and start eating something that I hadn't had for a while, almost immediately that smell appears at the internet place. It's like clockwork.

The people near the internet place are always barking orders at me, in ever more sly and devious ways. Using smells is just another example of the same thing. I imagine they likely have a saying they say to themselves, something like "Always be ordering". Ultimately it's just another example of warpathing. #

It was a very strange day yesterday, not without it's problems. At the end of it all I got plunged into a lot of very intense thinking, which made a lot of sense, but was very abstract. Anyway towards the end of it all I wrote the following:

Oppositely asymmetric in both directions, where the symmetry manifests in different dimensional sets of properties, that are not easily visible to the opposing side, you might end up with a minus infiniti plus infiniti divergence. In those situations maybe the rule of thumb is to stay away from the edges, or at least approach them in a mutually balanced way.

I don't know if that's useful to anyone, I'm writing it here because frankly I don't want to think about it anymore right now. I just want to get on with the day and not be bullied.

The world just won't stop pushing me down all these crazy paths, then blames me the instant a neutrino is out of place. shrug emoji #

Pretty sure I'm going to run out of build minutes entirely today or tomorrow, which will mean no way to publish to the website for the rest of the month. I'll still be able to blog locally and sync it up later but it's difficult to stay enthusiastic when that happens because it feels like all the effort put in to write blog posts, links and what not, will get even more missed by everyone.

I'll probably spend some time refactoring code, but again you don't want to get too far ahead of yourself without being able to test anything, because that leads to problems when you finally can run builds again.

I wish I had a way to render the site locally. Currently I only have the markdown files and searching through them is really lousy. Too slow and doesn't hardly ever find what you want. At least if I had a copy of the website, blogging locally for a couple of weeks would still be useful to me in the current moment. The only way I can think to do it would be to run node usibg WebAssembly in the browser, but that's way too complicated at the minute. #

cat << EOF > On being accepted in asia

When I arrived in asia, I guess it's somewhere close to 10 years ago now (how time flies), many fellow non-asians that I met on my travels said to me that you'll never really be accepted in asia. You might end up living here etc, but you will never really be integrated. You will always be a foreigner. At the time I didn't think much of it.

The thing is, now that I've been here for a long time, I totally see what they were saying. These were folks that had been here for years, and I heard it from people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and maybe more places. There really is underneath it all an us and them vibe that permeates everything. It varies from place to place, it's pretty bad here in Vietnam IMO, a bit less so in Thailand for instance, but still pretty bad.

I've been thinking about back home the past few days, because of the EU and UK elections. It occurred to me earlier how utterly alien this whole idea, that you will never really be accepted by a place, was to me. The entire time I grew up in the EU, it was the complete opposite. There really was a sense that you could eventually fit in, feel at home and integrated. My impression was that both the people arriving and the natives actually wanted this, and it was almost a matter of pride that it was something that was possible, something to strive for.

That's not how it is here at all. There are likely a lot of reasons for this, like the fact that many places in asia are such huge tourist destinations, and it's totally possible that I was simply not exposed to some of the darker aspects of immigration back home. I saw some racism and hostile behaviour here and there back home, but it's on a completely different scale and level here. You don't see it until you stay for longer. They are of course very nice to all the tourists, and to a certain extent the expats too, but many wear two faces, it's almost ridiculous and certainly shocking at times. And once again it's not everyone, but generally speaking it is the norm. It sort of feels like it's a group thing, that doesn't manifest so much on a 1 to 1 basis, like it is in some way structural, it's possible many are not aware of it.

Maybe things will change, I hope so, it can be a great place, but it's definitely not plain sailing most of the time.

Unbelievably bad day of being constantly warpathed, starved and thirsted yesterday. I think I've traced it back to an incident at a food vendor around 2 days ago. Not a street stand, but a vendor operating out of the front of a actual house. I've been there many times before, they have always seemed nice. As I arrived and stood waiting to say what I wanted, the older chap that works there walked out front to attend to some food that was cooking.

Before I had even said anything at all, he belched out at me 'Pay' with a strange smirk on his face. I had no idea what he was on about, perhaps he was having a bad day, I thought to myself. A few moments later the other slightly younger bloke asked if I wanted the take away dish I usually get, and I said yes and thank you. The other bloke then held up the coffee he was drinking and said 'coffee'. Then pointed at a coffee stand about 20 meters down the street, and uttered a somewhat malevolent and malicious sounding chuckle. I said that I don't drink coffee, which I don't. I then got the food and paid for it.

I walked off down the street past the coffee stand, and shortly afterwards someone random started barking orders at me. 'Up!'. I was heading to a shop / caffee that I usually go to. The seating area is upstairs. Well basically ever since then that's when the tsunani of hate and ordering and general harrassment from the past few days started. And it's been rather epic, and not in a good way.

Another manufactured situation to justify blamming me for everything again and again. Seems like it to me, especially since several of the harrassments since then, in totally different locations have involved people shouting 'Pay!' at me for absolutely no good reason that I could determine, even in places that had no shop or any commercial thing nearby.

The food place btw is on the same street as the sandwich place that often creates problem situations that I've previously written about. There's something about that street, or perhaps it's just that here, every place eventually turns nasty. #

There was an interesting discussion around AI & LLMs in the latest All-in podcast. Turns out many researchers that work on various media related projects routinely use LLMs to gather information. That is a new development, but the interesting thing is that they often have multiple LLMs open and run the query through all of them, then cross reference results in order to spot mistakes and hallucinations. #

cat << EOF > My thoughts on Brexit

It occurred to me a while back that I hadn't written anything, apart from a few links on the linkblog, about how I view and think about Brexit. It's such a big subject, and for me it crosses very close to my roots since, although I am from the UK, I grew up mostly in europe outside the UK. I feel like I should have very well formed thoughts about the whole debacle at this stage, but the truth is that I don't. I'm still confused by it.

I'm also in a permanent situation where it's almost impossible to have enough piece and quiet to gather my thoughts on this complex topic, and write something meaningful. So bare that in mind. What follows is just a few notes I wrote down in between tsunamis, spiritual storms, and general crazy world shit that surrounds me 24/7 at the minute. Maybe I'll refine it over time. Even as I write this I'm being dogged by a couple of softly softly murmurers. It never ends.

I’ve always been pro-Europe. It would be difficult for me not to be. I grew up mostly in Europe. I went to a European School for heck's sake. So I’m kind of biased. Europe is a great place. I really liked living there. Having said that, the way you see things as a kid and the way things are in reality can be quite different. At some point after university, which was in the UK, I became aware that many UK people weren't so into the hole EU project.

I knew this before, of course, through watching the news, but there's something very different about being in a place, immersed among it's people that's very different from absorbing information through the tele. You get a much more real sense for the general zietgiest. I became aware that much of the politics and government in the EU was organised in a very beurocratic and possibly non-democratic way. Certainly in a way that was at odds with how things are done in the UK. I started to understand why many in the UK didn’t like being part of the EU.

I was abroad when the vote happened. I think I was in Thailand at the time. I watched some of the build up, and the results, but I didn't vote. I think probably if I were back home, I’d have voted to remain, but I decided before the vote happened, that I'd be okay with whatever result was reached, as long as the election was a true representation of the view from the people of the UK.

I’m ultimately British and would stand behind whatever the nation wanted. If there are big reasons to not be in the EU, and many have these views, I trust that the people have good vision and know at an instinctive level what is right for the country. They might very well be able to see something that I simply couldn't. There's no sense trying to smash a square peg into a round hole, these differing views ultimately have to be resolved in some way, and maybe leaving would be the best way to do that. That was basically my high level thought process when the vote hapenned.

Perhaps we will rejoin some day or maybe we won’t. Things change, people change, nations change, the european project will change, let’s see where this goes. I'm not going to turn my back on either side, even if it feels like the world does that sometimes, even if it often feels like it's the world's favorite thing. As a side note, it is kind of cool to know that leaving is possible. That in itself might be the greatest take away for everyone.

I think ultimately whatever happens both the EU and the UK will be better off for it.

Hopefully I'll have more time in the future to write something less clumsy about this, when I'm not being pressured by a world on the warpath. I just wanted to get something out there, with the EU elections that just happened, and with the UK elections on the horizon, I've been much more interested in both than I'd expected, so now felt like a good time.

A lot of expats and long term travellers I've met over the past 10 years here in asia, told me that as a westerner you will never really be accepted here in asia. You will always remain a foreigner. Now that I've been here for many years, I totally see what they meant. It occured to me earlier how uterly alien to me this idea of not being accepted by a place was to me. In the places I grew up in the EU it was the complete opposite, it was a matter ov pride for both the natives and those arriving from abroad, that being accepted was possible, that you could really eventually feel good calling it your home. #

Absolutely horrid night last night, with rain from around midnight, and at least an hour of which was quite a down pour It got pretty darn cold too. It only partially deterred the motorbike gang stalkers, with quite a lot of driveby harrassment still going on. Very cold hands this morning. #

Unmistakable yellow tsunami the past 3 days. It occurred to me as I walked to the internet place this morning that it was worth noting. Seems like that's being turned into a bit of a red tsunani given the configuration of things and people this morning. Just some more warpaths. I stand in the only way left to me, with my back to them. This morning's pleasant reminiscing of times gone by is over now, replaced by starvation and bullying. The glee in the air from some is palpable. #

cat << EOF > Big Changes At Every Layer (Issue #168)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Linux desktop movement gets a big boost, the dollar and petrodollar are dying, being a VC is changing, the surprisingly interesting history of men’s suits, EU elections and Microsoft & AI

Issue details:

• Title: Big Changes At Every Layer
• Issue: 168
• Page: issue webpage

cat << EOF > Elon’s insane pay package

On first read about Elon’s USD$50 billion pay package, it does seem utterly ridiculous. And in a way, the amount is so huge, that it kind of is ridiculous. But when I read about it, something made me instinctively side with Elon, I couldn't figure out why. A few days ago I remembered why.

Something similar happened to me a little over a decade ago. I was working for a US startup that was expanding it's presence into the EU. The first 3 years were incredibly difficult, but through huge effort, working crazy hours every week, flying in and out of countries all around the EU, Middle East and Africa, we grew our region's revenue from basically zero to 1/2 of the entire company’s revenue. We had sold, installed and customised our software into most of the biggest media companies across the continent. It was quite an accomplishment.

The entire time the variable compensation part of my pay package was pretty darn huge, but just out of reach. Nevertheless we continued, working and traveling almost all the hours that existed. The whole time, the others on the EU team would tell me these amazing stories of previous startups they had worked for where they hit their targets and got paid massive amounts of money in bonuses. The promise of big bonuses was a heck of a motivator.

Then in the third year, we really started to hit our stride. We started meeting the impossible targets. The bonuses started trickling in, things were on the up. It was awesome, especially after so much hard work. What hapenned next was quite a shock to me.

The US management sent me a new contract to sign. They didn't mention they had re-structured the variable compensation part of the package. I only discovered it when I read through the small print. It wasn't a few minor changes, it was for all intents abd purposes, a totally different pay package. I white boarded the two packages to compare them in detail, and it was night and day. Completely different, like by an order of magnitude. I brought this up with them and they said they had made a mistake, and the original package was way more than they had planned to give me.

After much back and forth, I managed to claw some of it back, but it wasn't anything like the package that had motivated me to give up 3 years of my life. 3 years that established the company as a force to be reconned with in the industry. Being just a Solutions Architect, unlike Elon I unfortunately didn't have a way to do a shareholder vote. I had to accept the new package. I got burnt by that experience pretty bad, and it’s stuck with me. Companies will promise you everything, and they won’t hesitate to rug pull you. It doesn't matter that it's a small company and your friendly with everyone.

Of course Elon's situation is somewhat different for sure. I understand the people against him on it are saying that he was too close to those constructing the pay package, so it was a bit like he had carte blanche. But when you look at the numbers and read about the crazy targets they were having to hit month after month after month, it's a different picture entirely. I listenned to a podcast a while back with an interview with a bloke that wrote an Elon autobiography, and you really get a sense for the magnitude of the effort and results they pulled off. It's nothing short if incredible.

Given my similar experience I was happy to see Elon eventually got the support of the shareholders. True it’s an insane amount of money, but the targets that he hit in his performance based package were equally insane. And he hit those targets and the value of the company has also increased an insane amount. That was the deal.

Politics campaigns vs Agile development manifesto. This is perhaps a case of every nail looking like a hammer, but it occurred to me earlier, isn’t politics just a very high level feature backlog?

Doesn’t it just end up being devs vs testing trying to get features done, the devs government vs shadow testers, if you will.

Why not just run the government like a software company? #

Looks like I was right about my prediction of starvation and thirst. Lots of food goading and bullying from the gang stalkers. Everything is my fault again. They are digging up old graves, basically anything from the recent past where they feel they have been hard done by in some way. Nevermind that even in all those cases, the incidents they reference were situations they in some way caused in the previous bullying cycle.

There is just no way to react that doesn't cause more bullying. That's why I say they are on the warpath because really what they are after is more war. Being on the warpath isn't necessarily a violent thing, often it's passive aggressive. There's nothing you as a victim can do. I imagine it's similar in that way to being gang raped. You just have to wait until it subsides, and hope you are still alive.

They of course don't view it like that. For them they see it as essential learning that I must do and that they must administer. #

Exactly as I finished writing the previous note, a man on a motorbike, roughly late twenties / early thirties, drove up on a motorbike. He looked like a totally normal and respectable bloke. Appeared completely sober. He quietly tried to talk to me, and repeatedly pointed at my private parts. After an awkward conversation where I just said I didn't understand what he wanted, he got off the bike, crouched on front of me, putting his hand in my leg. I moved sideways so he was no longer in front of my private parts region, and calmly picked up his arm from my leg and moved it aside. He got on his bike and drove off.

Now you might think this is just what happens sometimes, but I can tell you, it's not. This is very unusual, especially at this time in the morning. Most people are going to work. Also in the park yesterday mid-morning, a group of people using the public exercise equipment said loudly 'lonely' as I walked past. Also a couple of nights ago, a similar thing happened. That time it was most likely a lady boy that stopped on their motorbike with similar intentions.

These incidents are all linked in some way. These type if things trend for a few days then usually subside. They are often accompanied by copious amounts of anger goading, and white tissues seem to be everywhere you go. It involves both men and women. Personally I see it as sexual harrassment being inflicted on me. No doubt these gang stalkers have a different read of the situation, likely it's all in some way my fault.

They try to make you angry, then if you show pretty much any sign of reacting, they imply you need sexual relief, but it's them that are the sexual aggressors. And they do this as a group. It's all co-ordinared, and happens over many days. It's a well known pattern I've seen many times before.

Worth noting that these sexual harrassment incidents almost always occur during periods where they are starving and thirsting me, as is the case this time. It's happened so many times before, though not recently. It's almost as if it's a new set of gang stalkers and they are going through their standard playbook. #

I hate writing about all this stuff, but that's what I'm experiencing at the minute. It sucks. I'd much rather be writing about tech and webdev.

Perhaps the bullies are banking on the fact they think I won't talk about it, out of fear of embarrassment. But this sort of stuff doesn't embarass me at all. If I feel I'm being harrassed, I'm going to say so. And I definutely feel like I'm being harrassed.

I wouldn't be suprised if these MFs actually want me to write about it, because in a weird way it's free advertising for them. Because this sort if harrassment doesn't happen if it isn't encouraged, and I've seen many signs it's encouraged by some westerners. This sort of stuff is so well organised, so second nature, there is for sure more going on behind the scenes. It's a very well trodden path. #

I've long been a listener of the Rest is History Podcast. The RIH guys consistently put out really great episodes, this week's newsletter features their recent piece covering the history of men's suits, which has a much more interesting history than you would expect. Anyhow they sometimes mention, and I've heard many others also mention, the Rest is Politics Podcast. Given that I found the recent EU elections quite interesting, this morning I figured I'd take the RIP Podcast for a spin.

I'm not so into their unfortunate 3 letter acronym, especially seing as I'm currently being starved and thirsted for something somebody else did to me, and the gang stalkers have been jokingly (probably) harrassing me about my actual death. Anyway just listenned to the Labour vs Conservatives episode, as well as a recent Nigel Farage episode. I like it. The hosts, Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, having been previously in politics themselves, are very knowledgeable, yet they don't necessarily have the same views as me. That's actually a good thing. It's interesting to hear different angles, different points of view.

Btw it's not just UK politics, though that is somewhat of a focus, they had interesting stuff on US and South African politics on the episodes I listenned to.

Looking forward to hearing more from this dynamic, pot buying duo. :) #

cat << EOF > Static site generator archives plugin update

I got the latest archives plugin, which now supports the everything page, fully working in staging yesterday. It was pretty difficult not only because of string headwinds from a very warpathy world, but also because it was technically quite a challenge. The everything page is built from a dataset created by merging multiple datasets. What this means is that it's no longer so trivial to build the correct urls on each page because the data could be in many different locations depending on which item it is.

One cool thing I was able to improve on the original implementation is to use the regular data source primitive, but modify it so that's where the data merging occurs. I had tried this initially but, for whatever reason, I had hit a wall. Perhaps there was another bug blocking at the time, who knows. In any case I ended up implementing the data merge in another part of the render process. It worked but was a bit clunky. I guess some of the housekeeping and refactoring from the past few weeks must have cleared the path, because when I tried to create a merged data source it all worked wonderfully.

It's nice when that happens. It's a sort of validation that the system's primitives, the basic building blocks that you combine together, are the right shape. It makes things much more clear to understand, rather than have these special cases that get around the fact that the primitives don't provide the needed functionality.

There was still quite a bit of tedious work after that, both removing the special casing, and updating the code to use the merged data. Of course I ran into build minute issues again and, though I was able to really improve the module caching logic, in the end it wasn't enough, and yesterday evening I basically ran out of build minutes again. I think I've still got a few to publish the odd post on the website, but basically actually merging and deploying the new archives plugin will now have to wait until next month when my build minutes reset.

It's so frustrating, you pull out all the stops, physically put your body through lots of pain, battle through tsunami after tsunami from a world constantly on the warpath, only to find you haven't quite got enough resources. And it's made worse by bizare bugs in Github Actions that cause jobs to occasionally get stuck when you aren't looking, wasting precious build minutes.

Anyway, roll on July, looks like it will be a 4th of July release for the completed everything page including archive pages.

The world appears to still be on the warpath from yet another manufactured incident that happened at a sandwich store. Same one that did it several times before. It seems I'm heading into more starvation and thirst punishment for the things that were done to me, so I'll likely have to prepare the newsletter early as these periods which happen all too often are often accompanied by access to running water and electricity being cut off. Food and water goading from the gang stalkers has already begun. There are also signs they are going to force me down an unsafe path that I don't want to go down. How strange that this sort of thing always happens during starvation and thirst episodes. What are the chances? #

cat << EOF > Leo Laporte on AI

In a recent This Week in Tech episode Leo Laporte really nails some of the major issues with the AI gold rush. (0:15:22)

We have problems on both sides. One is garbage content generated by these AIs, because they can’t distinguish between a joke and a genuine suggestion. The other is they are disintermediating the original source of all this content so that users don’t have to click through, they can just read the generated page. And by the way these AI companies are burning money because the creation of these LLMs is so hideously expensive, they can’t possibly generate enough revenue to pay for it. So the whole thing is a house of cards.

He then goes on

It feels like we’ve replaced a system that could never work, the internet, with an even more chaotic system that requires an interlocking payment system, with money out but no money in. It feels like it’s not making it better, it could make it worse.

And finally

It does feel like it’s almost a Ponzi scheme, where they're just going to keep shifting the responsibility for payment, and nothing ever really gets fixed. It’s like Uber. Eventually it feels like it’s going to collapse in on itself.

The full discussion is really insightfull. There are a lot of issues people are ignoring. Real fundamental things like how the making of the content actually gets paid for.

I'm really curious about the podcasting 2.0 movement. It's a progression of the podcasting scene with revenue payment tools that use Bitcoin to give podcasters a new way to interact with their listeners. With the new tech, listeners can stream sats, which are small subdivisions of a Bitcoin, directly to the show podcasters. They can also send one off 'boosts'. It works really well for shows that have quite a lot of audience interaction.

My current two favorites that use it are Citadel Dispatch Podcast and the Linux Unplugged Podcast. The Linux Unplugged guys have gotten especially into it, creating sound effects for different donation amounts. The sound effects are short film and TV clips. It creates a more intimate vibe with show insider jokes.

To participste as a listener you need to listen using playback software that supports the new tech. One example I hear mentioned a lot is Fountain. Another I've heard mention is Podverse.

I think these are great tools for audience participation / Q&A style show segments. Interested to hear about any other podcasts that are experimenting with this stuff. #

What a day yesterday. So much headwind from the world. I decided to back off from merging the latest archives plugin everything page support, because I noticed some strange things on the website. After spending quite a bit of time looking into it, I'm glad I held off, despite massive pressures from the world around me to hurry up. It's difficult to put into words, and I know it sounds bizare, but there are times when the world smells blood, it suddenly knows you are in a precarious position, and situations will materialise around you that make you just want to get whatever you are doing done. That's shen mistakes are easily made, and you find yourself merging before everything is properly tested, and of course big problems often ensue.

But choosing to wait and figure out what's going on properly also has a cost. The entire rest of yesterday I was punished again and again and again, everywherw I went. It made it hugely difficult to get to the core of the issue, but I think I managed to, and made some fixes. I tested it all in staging in the evening, it all looked good. And of course the same exact pattern from the previous night repeated. The world was pushing for me to continue and finish the work, to merge even though I was really tired from standing for many hours. Once again I decided to hold off until the morning, and once again that was followed by an angry world on the warpath.

I've hardly had any sleep last night, motorbike gang stalkers and several strange situations through the night. What a coincidence that there would be a night of sleep depravation. If you walk into the trap, you get punished, if you avoid the trap, you get punished.

Are you going to allow today world? Or are you yet again on the warpath? #

My ankles are massively swollen again. I guess it's all the standing I've been having to do to get the archives fixed. I only have internet when I'm standing up unfortunately. Plus, pins and needles in my legs last night because of the new restricted sleeping situation. Just so horrid. When are you going to give me a break world? #

By the way, forgot to mention, there was another clearly manufactured incident at one of the sandwich shops yesterday morning. They did the old one person that always gets my order right, remembers the garnishes I don't like, taking my order, then the other bloke, who always purposely gets the order wrong and sometimes turns into a total sandwich nazi, actually making the sandwich. It was quite clearly a planned switcharoo, and of course he got my order wrong, and I had to open the sandwich up in front of him and take out the disgusting stuff. Anyway, that was no doubt grounds for the bullying that ensued the entire rest of the day. And guess what, when I left the sandwich shop, crossed the road, and on the otherside there was a street vendor parked right there, seemed very intent on looking at me, as I passed him he said his line that he'd obviously been waiting to utter: "my dog". How uterly vietnanese charming and on brand for this place. #

cat << EOF > The Lib Dems pro-EU pro-cannabis ticket

The UK Lib Dems have announced their policies going into the elections. It's a pro-EU pro-cannabis platform, which given the history might be quite a good combination. In all seriousness though, I think having cannabis decriminalised would eventually lead to much lower overall crime. It would just be a normal thing, no reason to get involved with crime. The bigger issue I think is to simultaneously try to tackle the binge culture that is quite common in the UK.

I think most adults would like to have the option to try cannabis every now and then. That's the responsible way to enjoy such a priveledge. The problem is that people often drift into a daily habitual relashionship with such substances. It's the same with alcohol. Both these substances can be fun, and even therapeutic, but when it's too habitual they make you forget how great life is sober. That's something I've really become familiar with the past few years. Being sober is awesome. Waking up early with a clear head is awesome. Feeling healthy is awesome. But it's a subtle feeling in comparison to alcohol or cannabis, so people miss how good it is.

It should be 95% sober, and just occasional stroll into mind altering substances territory. That's how I'd like society to be, where people were responsible enough to balance themselves. The focus wouldn't even be on these substances, they would just be peripheral, the focus would be on living life and contributing to society in a meaningfully way, where you could feel that your talent and efforts really made a difference.

cat << EOF > Linux desktop for developers movement

The main discussion in the Chefs Choice Ubuntu episode Ep#566 on the latest Linux Unplugged podcast, is super interesting, especially given my recent article about what digital collaboration looks like in the VFX industries. Such synchronicity. It was all brought about by the recent announcement over at 37signals that they are moving to Linux as the standard workstation for developers. DHH is somewhat of a major OG internet pioneer, so folks really listen to what he had to say when it comes to developing online businesses.

His thesis is that although Apple does have some nice hardware and software, it's been apparent for some time that their interests are not as well aligned with developer interests as they once were. So he decided to take the plunge and move all his developers to Linux which he feels is more spiritually aligned with his interests. It's somewhat of a bold move in an industry where most, or at least many, developers use Apple hardware and software. The cool thing is he's decided to channel his enthusiasm of the transition into a project, called Omakub, to help rapidly configure Ubuntu into a generalised workstation for software developers. Of course the project is open source and aims to help other small businesses and solo devs make a similar move towards Linux.

The Linux Unplugged guys, who themselves are extremely experienced running and maintaining Linux systems in a variety of contexts, go deep on the whole idea, and it makes for a tremendous episode. It's a subject I'm really interested in, and have been since my time working in VFX, where the default OS for engineers and artists was often Linux, in my case it was Fedora Linux. It was awesome, but it did take quite a bit of customisation to get things looking good and being functionally optimum. I was part of the engineering team that systematized that, but many folks don't have the luxury of an in-house engineering team, hence the need for the project.

Some of the key take aways:

• DHH’s project is a collection of setup scripts that configure Ubuntu Linux to be both aesthetically pleasing to the average developer, but also aims to install and configure many standard tools and software such as databases and text editors
• The scripts add lots of PPA’s so the latest and greatest versions of much used packaged can be installed
• They use a custom version of Gnome
• They opted for simplicity and familiarity, just curl and bash scripts organised in a folder structure, easily customisable, easily understood, just delete what you don't want
• They plan for 37signals to support the project and use it directly in their own work

Some of the additional topics discussed:

• It will be interesting to see how it’s maintained, how it evolves, similar projects have emerged in the past, the difficulty is often long term maintenance as priorities change, as 3rd party projects fall by the wayside and new ones come on the scene
• Mint, cosmic desktop, matte, are all essentially attacking this same problem from different angles
• The aesthetic tweaks are nice, it's suprising how close you can get to a setup that rivals MacOS in terms of looks, but it takes quite a lot of research and decision making, having a baseline like this could really speed up similar transitions to Linux for many
• It doesn’t separate out applications, user data, and the OS very well, ironically MacOS has recently gotten quite good at this
• What are the possibilities of running the scripts on a different base OS than Ubuntu?
• How and why one might want to do a project like this using Nix rather than bash scripts and curl, many portability, customisation and packaging benefits
• Using such a project to create little dev vms that you use in development
• Adding nix as a default tool in the tool chain

It's great to see such a project take flight, especially since it stands a pretty good chance of being around for a while as they are using it in their day to day business activities. Could be an awesome combo with one of those modular Framework laptops. In fact I believe I read somewhere that DHH is equiping many of the 37Signal devs with such devices. This has all the hallmarks of the maker / hacker movement. Really hope this project succeeds, I've seen something similar with my own eyes in VFX, so I know it's possible, and I'm almost certain something similar could be created for developer environments across the wider economy. Digital collaboration on Linux might be the next big thing.

I've got the everything page archives working in staging yesterday. All pages appear to be correctly generated and the links on the pages all point to the right places. The everything page archives are genetated from a merged data source so individual items are in various locations. That makes it more complicated the get the urls right. But I found a way to do it, and it appears to work.

I decided to wait until today to merge the new code because I was already very tired from standing for so many hours. I still only have internet while standing up at the minute. My ankles are quite swollen today, that's likely because of all the work on the archives over the past few days, but it could be related to the much more difficult sleeping arrangement the world forced me into last week. It's difficult to tell.

In any case, hoping to have the archives all working and deployed later today. They will probably need a bit of re-arranging of things on the main website, but I'll get to that once it's all deployed. #

Well the plan to merge and deploy the latest archives plugin has been derailed. As I set off for the internet place, I could sense a warpath brewing in the air. I got to the corner where the soup stand is and sure enough as I crossed the road from the ether emerged a random voice shouting 'more ah!'. That's typucally not a good sign. I calmly notes that it sounded like a warpath and continued on my way.

At the internet place, there were much nore people than usual at this early time, it was about 6am. Started getting ready to do the merge. Noticed that yesterday's posts hadn't been deployed, even though the midnight build has successfully conpleted. I've been debugging that for the past 40 minutes.

Looks like the build completed but the deploy got stuck wasting 25 build minutes, and eventually completing without error, though the logs show that the deploy did in fact error, and did not deploy the latest build.

It's not a good omen. I can almost sense a disturbence in all around me. It’s like I’m being pressured into starting the meege, but I'm already tired now.

Feeks like the world is going to keep escallating no matter what I do.

Someone literally as I type this note, just flicked a cigarette butt in my direction. Landed a meter from my feet.

I guess the world is in fact on another warpath. What a suprise, guess I'll be having to yet again handle another tsunami of hate, as everything gets blamed on me for the millionth time. #

Definitely need to pause the merge. Just noticed the everything page is broken in both staging and production. It's only displaying notes, no blog posts, no links. It's not clear to me why this happened, especially not in production. Production should normally be using a cached version of all the modules, so any changes in staging should absolutely not affect production, and I haven't refreshed the cache in production. #

I've made some progress yesterday on getting the archives working for the everything page, though I had to do a lot of housekeeping of the code initially.

The test data wasn't created with merged data sources in mind, so it wasn't really a good data set for testing the everything page since the different post type examples were on different days. There was also a bunch of EJS syntax in them which was just confusing things. So I spent quite a bit of time updating the data to something that shows the everything page in action.

The npm module cache started doing strange things again. I was able to prove it wasn't getting updated correctly. Ultimately it was blocking me from using new code in plugins. I refactored the cache refresh logic so it's easier to clear the cache, but in the end the only thing that fixed it was tediously deleting all cache items by hand one by one in the Github web UI. That's not normal. The cache is keyed off of a hash of the package-lock.json. If that changes, and it should everytime something changes in the npm modules, then a new cache should be created. It's either the cache, or npm isn't updating lock files correctly.

Anyway, hoping to be able to test the latest archives plugin code today, which should hopefully create a merged data source and correctly handle adding the right urls to the page, so individual items from different sources are correctly referenced. Let's hope the cache doesn't cause any more issues, I've used up a little over half of this month's build minutes so far.

Update: The midnight build for whatever reason got stuck deploying to the hosting provider. The job completed without erroring, but in the logs there was a single error line outputed. The newly built site didn't get deployed either.

TimeoutError: Timeout while waiting for deploy

I'm adding this update to trigger a build to deploy the site. Another totally unnecessary waste of 25 build minutes when I'm already almost run out. #

Sadly the world is on the war path yet again. As far as I can tell it started at a soup stand yesterday morning. They were being weird as I ordered the soup and paid, then as I left there someone loudly said 'pay'. I had already paid and they knew very well that I'd already paid. I continued on my way. The entire rest of the day, escallation after escallation after escallation, and things getting blocked, literally everywhere I went. All through the night gang stalkers have been waking me up by shouting 'lie'. One of their favorite things, you can almost see the glee oozing out of their pores as they do it.

The lady doth protest a bit too much, me thinks.

Once again, they create the problem they complain about, they block the solution they suggest, and eventually they just blame everything on you. This will continue until everyone is unhappy about everything, then they will blame the unhappiness on me too. Instructing me to be happy.

But it doesn't matter what you do, happy or sad, standing up or sitting down, saying something or not saying anything, it doesn't matter, you'll get the blame, and very likely you'll get mutilated in some way, and someone will shout 'learn' at you. Either way that's what happens.

Blaming me for blaming me. Literally blaming me for the thing they are doing to me. #

I think I might have made some progress with the everything page archives. I changed where I merge the data sources, essentially it's just another data source like all the others. Previously I had special cased it because I hadn't been able to create the merged data source in the standard way, but I gave it another try and got the promises to resolve correctly.

I'll be testing the archives using this combined data source later today. I'm expecting it to render the pages correctly but with incorrect urls in the pages in some places. Very conscious of not wasting build minutes. That's easy enough when I'm testing it in just the archives plugin, but as soon as I attempt to test it on the main website, which has the npm module cache, things tend to get very confusing, and each mistake eats up massive amounts of build minutes. And sometimes the cache appears to just not clear properly. Anyway, here we go again. #

Mark Russinovich CTO of Azure:

By the way, I’ve been using AI a ton for programming, for these AI projects, and I can tell you, we’re not at risk any time soon of loosing our jobs. I mean I’ve spent so much time debugging AI buggy code. And then trying to "you did it wrong, you introduced a variable and there is no declaration for it"…"oh I’m sorry"…"you still didn’t do it". (31:00)

Surely the problem with re-enforcement learning, is that at some point, instead of learning the problem being taught, the AI will go meta and start learning the re-enforcement learning, because that's the most obvious re-occurring pattern. Then it's just two entities teaching each other to teach while pretending to be doing something else. And presumably the AI will eventually win that war since it can do much cleverer, and devious re-enforcements than the human. Then civilisational collapse ensues. #

Vietnam: Warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath warpath

Me: Are you on the warpath again?

Vietnam: Warpath lie #

Me: Are you still on the warpath?

Vietnam: Warpath #

cat << EOF > Collaborating on a Rocky Road (Issue #167)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Crypto going mainstream, belgians on bitcoin, the etherium vs solana debate, another open source rug pull, superintelligence and digital collaboration in VFX

Issue details:

• Title: Collaborating on a Rocky Road
• Issue: 167
• Page: issue webpage

I've started work on getting the archives rendering for the everything page. Though the everything page is looking great, when you click through to individual days, since there are no archives, you get a 404. It's a little bit tricky with the everything page because the page gets created by merging all the individual data sources. What this means is that the location of the canonical page for a particular post item are in different places. So you have to have a way to figure out the URL.

Anyway, I'm going to be working on that for the next few days. I have to be careful with build minutes, I've already used up half of this months minutes. The other thing I could work on is reusabke wirkflows which could make the build minutes issue easier to deal with. But if I do that then the everything page will likely not have archives until next month. It's tough balancing all this stuff. #

When you build big important things you generally start with a small prototype first. With that in mind, why don't we create super intelligent, fir example, squirels before super intelligent humans? How many people would even be happy with the idea of super intelligent squirels? I'm not sure I'm okay with it. If we aren't happy with superintelligent squirels, why are we happy with superintelligent AIs? #

It's Friday and looking at the list of podcasts I've starred this week, and I've only started 2 items. I have listened to quite a few. Not sure what I'll do for the newsletter tomorrow. #

In this age of AI, how long until 'learn' becomes the new C-word? #

cat << EOF > How digital collaboration works at VFX shops

I spent many years working in the feature film visual effects (VFX) industry. There's a huge variety of companies that supply services to film projects both big and small, and that specialise in different parts of the post production process. I've worked for both small and big companies, but also for companies specialising in different parts of the development process. The VFX industry was one of the first to go fully digital, and at scale. Just stay in your seat at the cinema and watch a vfx heavy film's end credits to get an idea of that scale. It's mindboggling. Simply put, they have a lot of experience in digital workflows and collaboration. I thought this might be an interesting topic to cover for others involved in digital transformation across the wider economy.

The smaller companies tend not to have lots of infrastructure and custom workflow above and beyond some large networked storage and high end work stations for artists to work on the high resolution images. Larger companies tend to have much more mature workflow systems that enable them to work on many simultaneous projects, to rapidly hire large numbers of artists, to on-board them quickly, and have them collaborate together on the same visual effects shots.

The typical situation is that there are many artists using different UIs / editing software, all operating on the same data. The data tends to amount to huge volumes. Earlier in the post production process, artists are working on individual shots, churning out many diffetent versions, that get reviewed daily. Later in the film process when the shots have been assembled into the full feature, artists work on reels, of which films tend to have 4-6 reels. Their job is to integrate, color grade and edit the shots into a cohesive hole, to give the film a specific look and style. Reels used to get printed back onto actual reels of films, although increasingly cinemas are fully digital these days, so another final part of the process is to create d-cinema specific digital formats.

Often larger VFX shops will have various collaboration tooling such as review and approve, version control of assets, and lots of custom scripting for working with large amounts of digital sequences of image files. Like for example quickly listing, renaming, creating different resolution test versions. Many of the artist software have both comercial plugins as well as in-house made plugins for modifying and adding effects.

In the places that have extensive collaboration infrastructure, though there are the occasional Windows and Mac workstations, open source Linux OSs tend to be the most popular, because it's easier to build custom workflow tools using scripting languages like Python and Perl, and lots of shell scripting, connecting up to central shot tracking databases. The automation makes it easy for artists to switch between shots, submit sequences to the render farm, and have various resolution outputed to different locations, some ready for review in small theatres with high-end projectors or screens, some for review on web browsers. The tools are seemlessly integrated into the OSs using environment variables, which can be managed with shell environment management tools. Tools are both UI and CLI based.

There are also lots of system tools that automatically backup ongoing work, run machine healthchecks, automate repeatable environment setup, and integrate with production and finance databases.

Though some artists do also write code, especially the 3D artists, most of the bigger VFX shops have tools teams. These are groups of software developers that specialise in different aspects of the development process. They write custom system and workflow tools, as well as effects plugins for the various software tools used by the artists. There are also the occasional web developer for the database collab tools, but most of the GUI tools are written using native OS UI toolkits like QT.

A lot of thought goes into integrating all these pieces of software, so huge teams can be brought together very quickly to work on massive amounts of data, all co-ordinated by producers. I had the chance to see into much of this process when I was tasked with putting together a training program for new artists. It was an enlightening process, and we were subsequently able to scale the teams in a much more flexible way.

At a high level, that's pretty much how they do it in VFX.

Since working in feature film VFX, I've also worked in broadcast TV and software development. I think there are likely a lot of common patterns that can be re-used in many other industries. Digital transformation is the hot buzzword for the process of the digitization of everything. It's a real thing, where companies are mapping out their processes, how they've always done things, and then try to create new and better ways of doing it using digital tools, and it takes a long time, often decades.

The world has re-configured itself again while I wasn't looking. Without getting into details, sleeping just got a whole lot more difficult. Really not what you want in the middle of rainy season. I wouldn't be suprised if the bullies where measuring out my coffin as I type this.

I hate writing about this stuff, but that's reality for me at the minute. If I didn't write about it that would be disingenuous. Of course, I imagine it doesn't help much with trying to find a job, to get out of the nightmare caused by COVID. Such are the contradictions at times in life. #

Just another inconsequential data point.

I'm standing browsing the internet at the internet place. People are having breakfast coffees at the next door cafes. Chitter chatter is ongoing. At the very instant I'm about to finish up, a man in one of the cafes loudly and repeatedly says the exact name of the noodles I got gifted from a food vendor yesterday. It's very odd, not only because of the timing, but also because these cafes don't have food. There are no food places nearby. Is it intimidation? Is it some sort of strange help? Is it both?

This type of thing is happening constantly here. Literally everywhere I go, random people seem to know my business, with uncanny precision. Is it harrassment? Pretty sure it would be considered some form of it back in europe.

It's so impossible to describe the strange things that happen here. Figured I'd write this one up into a note. #

Just to add to the previous note, because since finishing writing it, mildly thretening passive aggresive behaviour from one of the locals as he walks up and down the lane past me. Historically it's a pattern of behaviour I've been on the receiving end from him many times before. This morning it included a clear reference to last night's sleep depravation re-configuratiom which I mentioned earlier. This sort of escallation is happening constantly. #

One of the greatest things about long form podcasting is that you get these magic little moments that pop up out of the ether.

In his latest episode talking with Tony Hinchcliffe, Rogan makes a somewhat unexpected comparison.

Sure in the run up to the election, Trump was talking about locking Hilary up because of her emails, but he never actually went after the opposition legally. Yet the democrats have done exactly that while claiming that Trump is the crazy one, the loose cannon.

They are all crazy, that’s what they don’t want you to know. It’s like sluts that are always talking bad about other girls that are sluts." [01:13:00]

The thing that really makes this one pop is Rogan’s reaction to himself, realising in real-time that he just totally nailed it. Instant classic IMO. #

Dear iOS,

Please stop auto-correcting 'some' to 'sone', which isn’t even a word, and it’s most definitely much less common than 'some'. You do it constantly.

Thank you & kind regards, Mark #

According to Anatoly Yakovenko, the goal for the Solana L1 is to be able to support the entire world. 10M transactions per second: 100 transactions per person, per second, per day. That's a lot of transactions. #

There's an interesting developer related segment on the latest Rabbit Hole recap Podcast. Matt and Marty comment on Peter MacCormack's recent Michael Saylor interview, and they go on to talk about being bitcoin conservative, open source development & funding, protocol changes, maintenance, the need for an ethical path for devs, and the scary prospect of shitcoiners funding bitcoin development (~00:50:00). Worth a listen if you are interested in Bitcoin tech and development. #

It's election season in the EU, and I've noticed lots of articles in the main stream media. Perhaps I'm just reading the Guardian too much, but it seems to have peaked an interest in the UK.

After all the Brexit stuff, and especially with a large majority of young folks being quite annoyed about the whole debacle, is the Uk getting interested in EU elections? That would be quite an ironic turn of events. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Could also be because the EU elections are IMO actually turning out to be genuinely interesting this time around.

I'd love to know how to get a representative read of the situation. #

I thought this was an interesting quote from the recent article about Bilderberg:

Time magazine has dubbed Ukraine "an AI war lab", and the Economist agrees, describing it as "a testing ground for companies like Anduril and Palantir" – the heads of both of these defense tech companies are here in Madrid.

That hadn't occurred to me before, because the scale of war is just so big. But of course, some things you just can't test in staging, and that's even more the case for something like war. The point is that it's worth remembering that lots of people actually want the war in Ukraine to continue. It's very convenient for some.

And it's likely a general thing, that if a horrible situatiom persists for far longer than seems normal, there's often an incentive disalignment. It might not be immediately obvious, but likely that some people are benefitting from the misery of others. #

cat << EOF > EU elections AI analyst bot

I've been getting mildly interested in the run up to the EU elections over the past few days. It's not something I've ever paid any real attention to before, but this year, there's so much going on. It feels genuinely a bit exciting. Like the entire region is approaching some sort of important crossroad.

It's also an opportunity to do some arm chair tourism. Learn about some of the different cultural subtleties that exist across the continent. A time when it's possible to suss out genuine differences in the flavours of society, but also the things that hold us together, and maybe even more importantly, a way to envision how we could be better in ourselves and better integrated together in the future. Respecting and even appreciating our differences, and genuinely looking forward to building a great future that we can feel part of and valued.

For me the western EU differences are quite well understood. I've spent time in many places in those countries. It's still interesting to catchup and remember how things were, how they might have changed in recent years. But I'm also really interested in the central and eastern countries. Those I have much less first hand experience with. Mostly just through watching alternative small budget films and talking to immigrants back home. There's a certain romanticism to it, they seem somewhat exotic, but in a cold sort of way.

It's one of the reasons I like listening to the Crypto Voices Podcast. Matthew Mezinskis is a US expat in the region, living I think in Poland. His crypto coverage is the main attraction, he is somewhat famously good at numerical and scientific analysis of the monetary base system, and he's really excellent at explaining things. But he often drifts into a bit of local central european politics at the end of the episodes. It's a boots on the ground view of what's happening in the region. And that's tended to be quite a lot recently, given the war in Ukraine.

Most of what I'm reading newswise is from the Guardian and BBC news websites. It's great writing but I'm always wondering what their biases are. I really wish I could read similar articles but from the different countries local media. Unfortunately because of language differences, but also because of shear volume, that's pretty difficult.

It occurred to me so, that wouldn't it be great, in this age of LLMs and ChatGPT, to have an AI bot that on the daily, consumed all the election news, in all the various languages, creating not only a summary in your native language, because translation is so good these days, but also did some genuine analysis to discover biases, discrepencies, conflicts of interest, in short produced some high level pieces that gave you a way to check the pulse across the entire region.

You could also imagine that, if the AI bot knew your interests and background, it could unearth things that might be of particular interest to you.

Would love to know if such a thing exists, and if it doesn't, why not?

I was thinking about which online communities I spend most of my time with. In no particular order, I'd say these broadly are the following: Linux, Webdev, Tech, Bitcoin, Music, Out There Stuff.

I have to say, it's mostly reading at this stage. I don't actively participate in chats, forums, discord groups etc. That's mostly down to lack of time. But I would like to be a bit more connected into these in the future.

In the past, many of my attempts to connect have been rebuffed. Maybe that will change in the future, really wish that could happen in some way. I guess I'm not very good at it.

I've been online for 25 years at this point, still no real friends though. You would think that it would be a possibility. #

cat << EOF > Static site vs dynamic web server

It's true that dynamic web servers are super cheap these days. So why not use one instead of rendering your website as static files?

Here are a few reasons off the top of my head:

• Easily move your site around, avoid lock in and price gouging, just pick up all your files and leave, everywhere supports static sites
• Long term stability, no npm installs that fail after years of not installing your site, no libraries out of date, no upgrades needed, your website is just files (see note below)
• Security, virtually no way to hack your site because there literally isn't any code that gets executed
• Automation and collaboration, Github powered workflows, since it's all just files, it's super easy to collaborate around a github repository, setup workflows using many available pre-built ones or create your own, your website isn't stuck inside a database, also great for automating pulling content from various sources and generating your website using static site generators
• Publish and work offline, if you manage your site using a version control system like Git, then you can always create new content, even if/when your internet connection gets cut off / goes down, just sync up when you are next online
• You can still integrate with dynamic servers if you need to for some things, use serverless function for example, or entire custom web servers, just put them on a subdomain, essentially you can mix and match

These would be the first things that spring to mind for me.

Full disclosure, I develop a static site generator, so I'm biased :)

Note: Ok yes if you use a static site generator it's possible that you could run into npm install / up upgrade issues. On the other hand, in an emergency, you literally can just pickup all your files, leave, and get them up online at a different host without any difficulty. So keeping your existing site online is much easier. You don't need to mess about with a database. Then you have time to fix any problems with the static site generator.

cat << EOF > Some people just want to watch you starve

Sadly another textbook example of the bullies creating the problem they complain about, blocking the solution they suggest, and eventually blaming it all on me. This one is going to be a bit depressing. Life is like that sometimes.

About a month ago, my portable coffee mug went missing. I used to use it for instant noodles too, so it was quite a big loss. It disapeared under very strange circumstances. I wrote about it at the time. In any case I had been mostly avoiding instant noodles because in one of the places where they have hot water heaters in the public areas, a strange old lady was making it look like she was pouring small recepticles of clear liquid into the water heaters. I don't know for sure whether she was actually doing it or not, but I did end up with several sore throats.

Following that, the incidents of people gifting me large numbers of instant noodles packets increased significantly. Sometimes big bags full of them. Since I had no way to cook them I had no choice but to refuse them or throw them away. And guess what, I got blamed, 'what an ungrateful foreigner'. Nevermind that I was often starving.

In parrallel to this, the water supply in the taps at one of the public toilets slowly, bit by bit, week by week, systematically got reduced and eventually cut off. That was an entire ordeal in itself, but in any case now there is a red bucket outside the toilet that people are supposed to use to clean their hands. I don't use it because not only is it likely a new popular bath location, for the bird fauna in the neighbouring park, but I've seen the toilet staff use the same red bucket to clean the toilets. Fucking gross.

Well in the interim over the past few weeks I decided to start eating noodles again since the previous noodles drama seemed long ago. So I've been enjoying the occasional instant noodles. That helps a lot when there is no food, and also a way to keep hydrated. Instead of the coffee mug I've been reusing an instant noodles recepticle. If you pay a bit more you get a recepticle, the noodles on their own are 1/2 the price. But the recepticle was made of cardboard on the outside so it wears out quite quickly.

Well the recepticle I was reusing was getting quite knackered. This morning though I got gifted some noodles from a food vendor, which was very nice, though it seemed like it could very well have been part of some sort of grift, where they make it seem like it's a gift, then when you don't pay, they look very disapointed and sad, even though they have been asking you all about the difficulties you've been having stuck in Vietnam since COVID. Even though they walked up to you and said they would give you some noodles. Anyway, that's a whole other story I won't get into. Their noodles were very nice, and what was great they came in a compleately plastic bowl, one I can safely reuse. Brilliant, a problem solved!

Well guess what, eventually everything good gets broken. It happens every time. I had the gifted noodles sitting in a cafe / shop for breakfast. I also had an instant noodles to test out the new plastic bowl. Worked great. A few hours later, lunch time swings around and literally just as I was about to get another instant noodles packet, one of the shop cafe staff walks up the stairs with, you guessed it, a red bucket, identical to the public toilet bucket, full of water, which he then uses to fill up the water heater with. At this point I notice I have a bit of a sore throat and a massive case of dry mounth, which hasn't been happening all the other times I've had instant noodles the past week.

It's likely not the exact same bucket, but it is literally a bucket you could use to mop the floor. And guess how the place was configured the day before? I arrived to find all the stools upside down on the tables, evidently they had been moping the floor. It's hard to impart how strange this configuration is. I've been going there every day for months and months now, and that was literally the first time I've seen all the stools upside down on the tables like that. What are the chances?

So one problem fixed, but then another one immediately created, blocked once again, no more noodles for me, and in an even worse situation than before. Whenever they help you, they also mutilate you.

This is happening constantly with literally every fucking thing, every fucking day. And what's more there are people that are fully aware of the situation, egging you on, pushing you to have the noodles, pushing you to walk into thier evil and malicious trap, and then finding it absolutely hilarious when you do. And they will also find it the most hilarious thing in the universe when you are starving and can only afford an instant noodles. They just want to watch you starve.

cat << EOF > Utopias in the age of AI & crypto

I'm not so suprised many of the experiments mentioned in Rohit Krishnan Wither Utopia thought piece failed. They are all tiny projects compared to a full blown utopian society. It’s not to say that they weren’t useful in some way. Perhaps they were useful learning experiences.

The internet and world wide web have been a success, and these really are society scale inventions. I don’t know the history completely but I do know there were all sorts of failed projects and protocols. There were many failed starts. One of the core ideas of the web is that it’s simple. Anyone could write a bit of HTML, CSS and Javascript and get a site up and running pretty easily. Heck you could do it with just HTML.

In the early days of the web there were all sorts of complicated visions about two way linking and being semantic and what not. But in the end what worked was something simple that anyone could do. I think we should continue striving for Utopian goals but it’s more like growing a garden than designing a perfect building. I wonder what patterns promote utopian outcomes. That might be something AI could help us with.

Cory Doctorow used to work in VFX. I had no idea. The company in question was Alias Wavefront. Skim through the Wikipedia page and you will see they created the Maya software, which is the standard for 3D modeling throughout the VFX industries. Pretty cool. #

As tech gets better as we head into infinity, how do we educate people to the fact that they can be tricked, and bigly? And keep doing it generation after generation? When people only really learn these things by experience. #

With AI we are modelling the way the brain works. But the brain is essentially analogue, neurons aren’t either on or off, they can be a little bit on. How will digital models ever really recreate an analogue process? Maybe that will, in the end be the difference between human and artificial intelligence. #

cat << EOF > Lex Fridman on human memory

The human brain and mind is something we are intimately aware of yet we take it for granted since they mediate our every action in the world. It's important to be aware of thought dynamics that arise, but without getting too caught up in it. It's especially relevant when you make a living primarily using your brain.

I previously wrote about some memory and perception issues I had while reading. That was a kind of difficult piece to write about, but it helped me understand more fully how my mind works. It's possible that it improved the situation somewhat, but to be honest it's not something I've thought about much since writing the piece.

With that in mind, I really enjoyed Lex Fridman's recent podcast interview with memory researcher and expert Charan Ranganath. There's so much to learn from their discussion to help demistify the grey matter in between your ears, in that skull we all carry around everywhere.

Memory weirdnesses are just part of being human, even if they can be a bit embarrassing and confusing. The way we think about the brain and mind has changed dramatically, even since I was young. These are no longer taboo topics. I think that's great, and this progress has been possible in part by people freely sharing their experiences.

I thought these two stories from Lex were particulatly interesting and fun. I have similar things that have happened to me.

The first is all about how our brains remember things in very strange ways sometimes. It's not like a button you press, like with electronics or a computer, it's more like our brains have a mind of their own, and actually, they do!

I remember, a good friend of mine Joe Rogan. I was on his podcast, we were randomly talking about soccer…football…somebody I grew up watching, Diego Armando Maradona, one of the greatest soccer players of all time, and we were talking about him and his career and so on, and Joe asked me if he was still around, and I said ‘yeah’. I don’t know why I thought yeah.

That was a perfect example of memories. He passed away, I tweeted about it, how heart broken I was, all this kind of stuff, like a year before. I know this, but in my mind, I went back to the thing I’ve done many times in my head, visualising some of the epic runs he had on goal, and so on, so for me he’s alive. And also, part of the conversation when you are talking with Joe, there’s stress, and the focus is allocated, the attention is allocated in a particular way. But when I walked away, I was like, "in which world was Diego Maradona still alive?

Because I was sure, in my head that he was still alive. It’s a moment that sticks with me. I’ve had a few like that in my life. Obvious things…like, disappear from mind. And it’s cool. It shows the power of the mind in a positive sense, to erase memories you want erased, maybe. But I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s a good explanation for that. (01:01:44)

The second story is a reminder that our life situation, and that of others has a big impact on how our brains work. That's to be expected, we are shaped by the things we do day in day out:

There’s a good percentage of time I personally live in the imagined world. I do thought experiments a lot […] sometimes it’s rigorous thought experiments, sometimes it’s fun ones. I imagine that has an effect on how I remember things. And I suppose I have to be a little bit careful to make sure stuff happened vs stuff that I just imagined happened.

And also, some of my best friends are characters inside books, that never even existed. There’s some degree to which they actually exist in my mind. (01:09:37)

Both these stories cheered me up a bit, so I figured I'd share them here. It's a great conversation, worth spending the time to listen to the whole episode.

Another fascinating factoid from Lex's podcast with memory researcher and expert Charan Ranganath:

The act of recalling memories can strengthen or distort the memory depending on environment conditions at the time, but also can have an effect on memories that you didn’t even recall! Memory is more like an ecosystem.

That's so frigging strange. How did we ever get this far with such a weird thinking apparatus! #

Lots of harrassment the past 24 hours. I've been ignoring it completely, without saying a thing. I'm just so sick of having to react to every gif darn mood swing the big cry babies have. But predictably, it slowly gets worse when you do that. The escallations are literally worse than if you reply in some way. Catch 22, because then you get blamed for that. Literally any opportunity to blame you for something is created, cultuvated and exploited. #

I got the daily links section in articles working yesterday in the blog plugin, which is pretty cool. It looks good, though I win't know for sure until I try it with production data. I tried deploying it in staging on the main website, but there's something blocking.

It looks like the new code isn't being picked up for some reason. Tried reseting the cache several times. No dice. Also tried turning off the cache completely. Still no dice. Really strange because with no cache and fresh install of all modules, the latest version of all plugins should be picked up. #

cat << EOF > Everything page version 2

It's been close to 3 weeks since I released the initial version of the everything page. That was quite a lot of effort that initially felt like great progress, with strides forward re-writing some important foundational code, and also massively reducing build times, but ultimately ended in disapointment and frustration as I ran out of Github build minutes while there were still way to many bugs.

Well I spent the rest of the month finding bugs, re-writing portions of affected code, getting ready for this month's build minutes reset. I also wrote an interesting new feature called incremental progressive rendering, which still needs to be tested, merged and deployed. I wrote a lot of blog posts offline, all stored in git because I had no build minutes so couldn't publish them. Such are the difficulties when you are self hosting, building your own platform, and very low on resources. I did write a blog series about my static site generator and a post exploring the strategic long term vision for the project. Pretty happy with both of those.

So the build minutes reset a couple of days ago, and I was ready to hit the ground running. It's been quite a stressful few days, first getting all the content I wrote offline the past 3 weeks published. Then finishing the testing, debugging, merging and deploying the everything page fixes to the main website.

The basic structure is essentially complete, and the page looks pretty good even with minimal styling. The plan is to progressively enhance the styling. The key thing is that all post types are interleaved in reverse chronological order by day. But the links for each day are in a separate section so you can skim through them easier, and to draw focus to the blog posts and notes. All that said, there were a couple of really tricky things that came up.

First the npm module cache in the build and deploy github action started misbehaving badly. There's some weird stuff happening where the cache doesn’t always clear, sometimes you have to completely turn it off. So many build minutes lost f-ing around getting it working. Like almost 1/2 of this months minutes.

Second, there was this really strange fractal rendering bug, EJS inside code snippets were mistakenly being rendered. Really difficult to figure out what was going on. Not helped by the fact that the bug in a very strange way was mirroring some difficult things happening to me in RL. Another build minutes suck.

I ended up starting to use semantic versioning for all plugins, so I can quickly see which are getting loaded at runtime. This helped with the cache problems. Still an awkward manual process, but I can automate that at some point. I also have a feature in the backlog to implement reusable deploy workflows. That should harmonize workflows and help with the build minutes thing.

Things I'm looking to style:

• Easier to read, remove the bullets on notes and blog posts
• Visually distinguish between post types, maybe something simple at first like different colour boxes that surround posts
• Distinguish between self links so it’s obvious that it’s a link to a blog / newsletter / podcast post
• Better use of space, the left margin looks a bit weird
• Update post header fonts, and font sizes

Probably other things I haven't noticed yet. Happy to have v2 it done. Quite the effort. Feeling drained, hungry and thirsty.

Not much good sleep last night. A group of construction workers showed up in the other side of the street and proceeded to drill the ground all through the night. I'm not saying they are totally fake, but this exact thing happened a few months back. They would showup everytime harrassment was peaking and drill the same tiny spot in the ground. It was always the same lot. Eventually they disapeared for good when I pointed this out to them. Seems like they are back using the same old playbook. Likely they aren't all aware of it, but some of them are.

Also the new thing is to throw or leave 1/2 eaten food at or near me. Also half eat a tastey looking sandwich right in front of me, then throw the rest of it in the garbage. It's the worste most cruel food goading you can do. I bet they even think they are somehow doing me a favour. It always seems as though they have justified their poor behavior somehow to themselves.

Just another day. More starvation appears immonent. They gave been doing the whole cigarettes thing the past 24 hours. Empty packets left in places I go, people suddenly offering cigs. Last night someone even wedged a no smoking sign on a bench I sit. I haven't smoked for years. Just the world trying to blame me once again for the things it's doing to me.

Have to write the newsletter now. #

On a more positive note, I think I'm pretty close to getting the links on the everything page into their own little footer section on each article. I spent all day yesterday trying to find a bug in an EJS template. Absolute nightmare to track down because the stack trace gives no details of where the error occurs.

A bit of googling revealed it was likely related to missing EJS closing tags. I spent all day adjusting indentation of the template, splitting the template into multiple templates, bisecting the template, striping it down to a shell, then painstakingly adding blocks back one at a time, in order to find the bug.

Turns out I was looking for slightly the wrong thing. It wasn't a tag closing problem, it was a for loop problem. I had introduced 2 new for loops but somehow mistakenly typed the opening curly as a semi-colon.

for(var i = 0; i < blah; i++);

instead of

for(var i = 0; i < blah; i++) {

Note: in the real code both statements are wrapped in EJS opening and closing tags. I can't add those in this post because then the EJS renderer will mistakenly try to render the EJS in the example snippet, and error. Not sure how to escape that at this point, so just not including it. You'll have to use your imagination.

So anyway, visually very difficult to see the bug, especially because I was looking for problems with closing EJS tags, which is right next to it. The advice from the internet was quite literally hiding the actual problem. Somehow the bug was resulting in the same error as a missing closing tag. So that's fixed.

I've added a bunch of debug logging too, so hopefully at some point today I'll have the links displaying correctly. #

cat << EOF > Vibes, the Economy, Blogging and Freedom (Issue #166)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

BTC for the oppressed, AI security & dystopia, iPadOS vs MacOS, fake gov phone companies, Saylor, webdevs & the economy, Indian prosperity, human memory, Argentina inflation, science societal issues

Issue details:

• Title: Vibes, the Economy, Blogging and Freedom
• Issue: 166
• Page: issue webpage