markjgsmith

2024/07/17 #

• The new thing is once again harrassment of a sexual nature, combined with starvation and food goading. A few days ago I was gifted a fancy croisant from an expensive bakery, by a woman on a motorbike. Now every evening a well dressed tall bloke turns up, sits nearby. He is always holding a large bag from the expensive bakery, full of nice pastries. He looks to be waiting for someone in the building across the road.

  While he waits the security guard in the building opposite, sits directly facing me, and repeatedly makes up and down motion with his right hand, very quickly. It looks very much like he’s pretend masterbate. He eventually stops, and fancy pastries bloke crosses the road and walks off with the person he was waiting for. About 30 mins before this a young woman offered me 1/2 a bagel, because she apparently "was full" and couldn’t eat it. I politely declined. The half food portions has been a thing for several days now, which I have written about.

  She had a very shifty attitute. Every morning, and I’m sure today will be no different, the sexual harrassment weird old lady puts used tissues in my path in the gutter. Yesterday evening whenever she appeared, right afterwards somebody appeared gorging on food. All these things are linked. It’s all harrassment, it’s all some form of stealing from me. Stop stealing my life world. #

• cat << EOF > Just ignore them virtually impossible

  Each time in my life I’ve got a little bit interested in politics, and tried to explore the left hand side of the spectrum, a total asshat of a leftist has materialised that is so extreme in everything they do, that I’ve just felt sick to my stomach. They minus infiniti plus infiniti literally everything in every dimension. Urgh.

  It’s happened with such precision that it really feels like some sort of conspiracy. I wouldn’t even be suprised if these people were secret rightists put there to ensure I never form an accurate picture of the left.

  Just pay no attention to them I hear you say. Well it turns out that in each case the world has configured itself in such a way that it’s very hard, verging on the impossible, to "just ignore them".

  EOF

• Eric Semler on Bitcoin company treasuries: "Bitcoin is the cheapest way to buy the future because it’s the only currency that doesn’t get debased." #

• cat << EOF > Kings and Queens and politics

  There’s an interesting bit on the latest Rest is Politics podcast where they compare a subtle yet important difference between how the UK and US are organised [28:05]:

  Rory Stewart: The King is the head of state, and the prime minister Keir Stalmer is the head of government, and of course Keir Stalmer has 99% of the power in the country, but I wonder whether one of the reasons why, in America, they are finding it very difficult to move president Biden, is that countries like the US and France, they have these sort of presidents that are heads of state, and the most powerful people in the country, they take on some of the kind of aura of a kind of mini King. Whereas in Britain one of the reasons we were able to get rid of Boris Johnson, and Luz Truss very very quickly, I think is we have a more pragmatic relationship to our prime minister. And I think maybe the presence of the King maybe sort of psychologically helps that a bit.

  Alistair Campbell: [...] I was always conscious of this whenever I saw the Queen with the prime ministers, be that the prime minister of the day, or I remember the time when she was with all her living former prime ministers and Tony Blair at one of the Jubilees, you were always conscious of the fact that the prime minister, routinely described as the most powerful person in the country, sort of felt very…second fiddle. She was the most important person in the room. And I think you are right, that does mean there is a clear separation between executive power and formal constitutional leadership power, which is what the King has.

  Rory Stewart: Yeah, and I think it can be quite healthy, I mean I know we often disagree on this, but when you see France and America getting very obsessed with their presidents, and almost turning them into these semi-regal figures, I sometimes think it’s quite useful that some of the symbolic weight is lifted off the prime minister’s shoulders and it makes them kind of get on with it in a more pragmatic way.

  When you grow up as a Brit you are sort of always aware of these small subtleties that having a monarchy entails, but I don’t hear them mentioned outright all that often. I’m not saying one is better than the other just that these types of things make quite a bit of difference to how things are more generally in society.

  I think it’s worth highlighting while passing, though not so important to dwell on it for too long. I found it interesting.

  It reminded me of an interaction between the late Queen and Boris Johnson that I saw on YouTube a while back. They were in what looked like a very palacial and ornate room. I guess someone from the government had been involved in a scandal of some kind and had likely been fired. Boris entered the room, his body language was very interesting, sort of deferential to her, he kind of lowered his head as he spoke to her, with his feet positioned one sort of infront of the other. Anyway, she asked him about the departed fellow and Boris said simply, "He was full of beans mam", and she replied something like, "Oh right, I see".

  Funny world sometimes states and governments.

  EOF

• I’m a couple of days into the newsletter prep experiment, and I have to say, it feels way more laborious. Doing each review right after listening to each podcast really creates a lot of friction to the listening experience. Feels a lot less free flowing than just listening to them all, taking notes, then boshing out all the reviews in one sitting. I’ll soldier on for the rest of the week.

  I think it’s partly made worse by the dire state of the hardware I’m using. Adding links to the git repo takes aaaaaggges. It’s disapointing because I had high hopes I could have added some cool automation to create the newsletter later down the line.

  Anyway, maybe I’ll feel different about it by the end of the week. #

• cat << EOF > The offline video cache web browser

  I wish this product would exist.

  It’s a web browser just like Firefox or Chrome, but has a built in core feature that downloads and caches videos for offline viewing. The way it would work:

  • You would be able to select and mark videos on a page for offline viewing
  • These would then download in the background into a local cache
  • The page would also be saved in a local cache
  • Later you could open the page while offline
  • The page would load, and the videos marked for offline viewing would be watchable even though there is no internet connection
  • There would be a download manager for each page so you could easily see which videos were still downloading
  • A nice to have would be functional comments that would sync up later when you get back online

  Offline is still terrible. I wrote about this last year in a piece that explored the state of the offline reading experience, and put together a feature list for an ideal offline reader app.

  I want to be able to watch online videos again!

  EOF

• I’ve been using the podcast queue feature in my podcast app quite a bit recently. It’s a cool feature. Here’s how I use it:

  • Add to it the most interesting looking episodes after downloading every morning
  • Listen throughout the day
  • Add mostly new stuff, also maybe a few old ones you missed
  • You have to clear it every few days
  • More than 10 items starts to get a bit unmanageable

  The nice thing is that you do all the choosing agead of time, so you are never in a position to have to choose when the world is on the warpath with you. #

• The butch women army appears to be on the warpath with me again. All this morning, when I was trying to buy food they were joking / not joking about food access, and turning up on motorbikes surrounding me, very intimidating. What did I do? I’ve been calling out people as thieves when they quite clearly are steeling my life from me. Since people are constantly steeling my life from me in one way or another, seems to have ruffled some feathers. People want to be able to infiniti block you, but you can’t even call it out. When they do it, it’s a hilarious joke, when you so much as think about it, you are an infiniti Adolf Hitler. #

Today’s links:

• Why Facebook doesn’t use Git - I’m rather heavily invested in git. I use it to write all the software I write, but also for all my blogging. So this was a super interesting article. It’s a great writeup and very interesting software story. Turns out FB use Mercurial which apparently is written in Python, and is very extensible. At the time they chose it, it was way better at handling very large monorepos with many files. Thinking about it, there isn’t any reason I can think of that would stop you from using alternative version control tools with my static site generator, at least not clientside. If I ever do get some form of product off the ground, I might consider adding support for other DVCS’ than git. graphite.dev #

• Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI - How long until this training theft sweeps into the wider society? It’s going to have a much bigger impact than we are currently aware, as many realise they are being exploited by thieving infiniti liars. And the infiniti liars could very well be the most exploited of all. This is going to make Gaza - Isreal seem like a walk in the park. It will be like mini Gaza - Isreals literally everywhere, like fucking Gremlins. That was quite a fun film though. Not so sure it would be fun in real life though. www.proofnews.org #

• Thoughts on Node.js, Deno, and Bun - Some pretty solid advice about writting code that’s portable between javascript runtimes. ckarchive.com #

• New Post: Just ignore them virtually impossible markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Kings and Queens and politics markjgsmith.com #

• Stocks Up & Crypto Flat...Why? (Bankless Podcast) - There’s a whole lot of interesting and very practical stuff discussed in this episode, including how crypto must outperform AI, that 7 companies account for most of the equity markets, the internet bubble vs the AI bubble, money market funds, the disappointment of ETFs, what stablecoins bring to the table, the often forgotten yet very compelling TradFi promise. www.bankless.com #

• My search for proof aliens exist (Ted Talks Daily Podcast) - Astrophysicist Avi Loeb talks about the possibilities of alien civilisations existing in other places in the universe, and describes an expedition he led to find reminents of the first detected interstellar asteroid that crashed into the ocean in the last few years. It’s quite a humorous talk, scientists can be quite funny too :), definitely worth the listen. www.ted.com #

• Why a Bitcoin Treasury is the Winning Strategy with Eric Semler (TFTC Podcast) - I listenned to this earlier under pretty extreme conditions so it was very difficult to concentrate. The part I found very interesting was around why holding Bitcoin in a company treasury can be very beneficial in some circumstances, especially for high margin businesses that tend to hold a lot of cash on their books. It’s an interesting discussion, I wish there were more examples of businesses integrating crypto and Bitcoin into their operations and talking about it. www.tftc.io #

• New Post: The offline video cache web browser markjgsmith.com #