markjgsmith

2024/07/10 #

• Rained quite a lot last night. Weird shoplifter bloke still hanging around. He appears to be pretending he was actually bringing gifts to the weird old lady that now hangs out outside the shop almost 24/7. Of course he would do that wouldn’t he if he was shoplifting, because he doesn’t want her to rat him out. I'm still calling him little boy to try and put him off so that I don’t get blamed for his criminality. There's not much else I can do. I certainly don’t want any violence. And the reality is he’s actually steeling from me. I saw him walk past the internet place yesterday, so no doubt something is going to happen there soon related to all this.

  I fixed the website's everything RSS feed, which was quite the challenge because the world literally always starts starving me any time I do any work on the RSS feeds. I pretty much only have to look at the feed code and starvation gets initiated, along with enormous infiniti total reality inversion bullying from every direction. It’s like a mass delusion pavlovian response or something. Anyway the urls in the by date everything feed had an undefined variable, breaking the urls.

  I had to add a way to seperate the webRoot and the itemsWebRoot in the template where you define a feed. That fixes the urls for feeds that are based on mixed data sources. I also updated both the Twitter and Mastodon autoposter tools, so there should only be a single auto posted link each day to the latest everything page post, rather than seperate auto posts for notes and links. I decided to keep an auto poster for individual blog posts. I want these to stand out a bit, since they are the most valuable content. Over the next few days it will hopefully be more obvious if the balance is right.

  Okay pat yourselves on the back 10x everyone, time to do some work. #

• In what-are-the-chances-world news, a new hot social media app called No Place is in the headlines, barely a week after the infiniti No! saga. #

• cat << EOF > Cobbling together companies is trending

  The Vergecast Podcast did an episode all about cobbling together companies from the existing parts of existing companies, literally 2 days after I wrote about cobbling together a company from existing parts. My spelling mistakes and terrible wording hadn't even dried yet. Another candidate for what-are-the-chances-world news, but I digress.

  It’s actually quite a good episode, and I think probably a sign that in the future, actual real companies that do complicated and important shit are going to have to create ridiculously elaborate fake products and companies just to distract the children of the mega rich, to avoid being highjacked by morons, and to ensure we don’t inadvertently flush the entire human race down the toilet. And that will eventually backfire as we’ll need to create a deep state just to break back out into base reality, and then we’ll need to somehow destroy the deep state, and to do that we put comedians in charge.

  Eventually the Labour and Conservative political parties are replaced by Comedians vs Actors, which will probably be called the More Ha Ha party and the Sshh They Don't Know party. Which one created which will be hotly debated inside the Communist party which will likely take over as it makes the Sshh They Don't Know party pretend they don't exist, while literally murdering the More Ha Ha party by convincing them that the self-disapeared Sshh They Don't Know party, is the funniest joke in the entire universe.

  The Howard - Weinstein appearance on Joe Rogan is likely a sign this has already happened and we are living in a fractal of nested simulations. And that your mommy and daddy likely [aren’t / weren’t] who they [say / said] they [are / were]. Sorry.

  EOF

• Jeff Snider from the Eurodollar University podcast asks why isn’t Bitcoin dominating the commercial landscape?

  It‘s an interesting episode, a recording of a recent conference presentation he made. He looks back at the fascinating history and evolution of ledger based money. He notes that each time there had been a massive step change in the technology, the adoption has happened rapidly within less than 15 years. Bitcoin had been around for that amoung of time, and it’s getting very popular, but the adoption just isn’t comparable.

  One problem he identifies is that in order to use your Bitcoin you have to convert it to Eurodollars, the current best version of ledger money that we use. He argues that that’s not a payment system. Jeff believes Bitcoin took a wrong turn by overly focusing on store of value, when the market wants a dynamic highly useable money. A better way of exchanging value.

  It’s not to say it’s store of value isn’t really useful, but it does make you wonder whether Bitcoin will become the next evolutionary step in ledger based money. #

Today’s links:

• New Post: Cobbling together companies is trending markjgsmith.com #

• The Right Kind of Stubborn - Makes the case that there are two types of stubborn people, namely persistent and obstinate. And that the later is bad. It’s well written just like all PG's writting and very thoughtful. Interesting observations, important to be aware that there is a difference, but also remember life can sometimes throw you into very extreme situations. IMO, these can be choices rather than something built into a person’s character. paulgraham.com #

• Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring - These look pretty cool. Definitely want to try one out. It's a $200 dollar smartphone, a $69 smartwatch and $59 wireless ear buds. The smartphone looks kind of cool, runs Android and has relatively good spec with 8GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, 5G support, dual-SIM, an under-display optical fingerprint sensor, 5,000-mAh battery cell with 33-watt fast-charging, 50-megapixel main camera, sensor to capture depth for portrait mode, 16-MP selfie shooter, and expandable storage up to 2 terabytes via microSD. Unfortunately only in bright orange which is gastly. Hopefully they will try some less intense colors at some stage. www.wired.com #

• US Disrupts Russian Bots Spreading Propaganda on Twitter - The big thing in this story is the involvement of RT, which I guess is the quite popular in some places Russia Today media company. They alledgedly participated in the development of the bot farm software called Meliorator, which enables people to manage hundreds of fake social media accounts to distribute pro-russian Ukraine war propaganda. www.pcmag.com #

• This $1.5 Billion AI Company Is Building A ‘General Purpose Brain’ For Robots - Reminder that we are kind of close to T2 Judgement Day type scenarios. Are they really going to open source robotics specific models like the one mentioned here? So many catch-22s everywhere, we want freedom but with control, but who will end up having the control? The game theory on this stuff is insane, in a way, it makes nuclear deterents feel a bit quaint. www.forbes.com #

• YouTube Embeds are Bananas Heavy and it’s Fixable - Apparently not only do they add entire mega bytes to the page, but if you add multiple embeds then multiple mega bytes get added. I’m kind of suprised to hear that because I remember videobloggers over 10 years ago with many youtube embeds on their pages and the pages didn’t take that long to load. Anyhow worth knowing about if you are working with video and having unnexpectedly large pages. frontendmasters.com #

• Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships - I wish there were more real world examples of data structures used in large RL projects. While I do use things like classes to keep data and functionality together in my static generator for example, and I put a lot of thought into the best way to store and combine these, I’m not sure that that qualifies as data structures. I tend to use simple objects and arrays to store class instances. I've tried a few times to write, for example, a generalised queue data structure and got into trouble. The code was way simpler just using an array. Not to say I wouldn't consider this though. It very well might be easier now that the main app structure is much better defined and might allow for more advanced features. read.engineerscodex.com #