markjgsmith

2024/06/18 #

• 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.

  EOF

Today’s links:

• New Post: On being accepted in asia markjgsmith.com #

• The Myth of the Tin Foil Hat - Fun article about the humble tin foil hat, maybe not the best invention ever, but I think it became one of the most useful turns of phrase in our lifetime. gizmodo.com #

• AI in finance is like ‘moving from typewriters to word processors’ - Nothing ground breaking in this relatively short article but it's good to read about how management consultants and business schools are approaching the AI revolution. Let's please make sure AI tech also makes it into the hands of artists. www.ft.com #

• YouTube is experimenting with Notes, a crowdsourced feature that lets users add context to videos - Seems like I was somewhat ahead of the curve with the whole Notes thing. I know my notes aren't exactly the same as what's described here, but short public messages are the generalised feature, what you do with them depends on the context. The big discovery in my opinion, and it might sound like it's not something that's all that meaningfull, is that they stand independantly from blog posts. And turns out, imo anyway, that it is actually quite meaningfull. techcrunch.com #

• The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup - Great tech stack writeup by Anthony Simons covering the personal tech stack he uses for all his projects. Loads of great stuff in this post. It's very focussed on Kubernetes, which is somewhat complex, but once you have it configured it's very easy to deploy all the components of your infrastructure. If you are looking for something a bit more old school, check out my writeup of a robust setup for nodejs apps. If you are just starting out probably best to follow Anthony's advice to use a hosted service, at least initially. These sorts of self-hosted configurations are awesome, but a lot of up front effort. anthonynsimon.com #