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2024/07/21 #

Some thoughts about theft and stealing brought about by the past few days. I’m just thinking out loud.

A bunch of malicious help last night. It’s unbelievable how 1 lot of malicious help leads to another, which leads to another. It’s like theft being used to fix a theft, which is being used to fix a theft. Each time they created the problem in the first place, yet blamed it on you.

Theft just doesn’t work as a core of society, eventually you run out of people to steal from. Then you are stuck at this stupid self imposed maximum, an equilibrium between thieves and victims. If there is no stealing, there is no maximum, everyone can grow together and help each other without worrying.

If you are stealing from somebody to teach them I think it’s likely that at best you are teaching them to steal. If you are stealing to teach you aren’t teaching, you’re stealing. #

I wrote yesterday about Rogan’s advice to create successful and cool businesses. If the US is so incredibly divided politically, I mean everyone is saying the divide is the worst ever, that there is this insane level of hate, then how is it that people from both camps can go to the same comedy places and laugh at the same jokes?

Wouldn’t you expect that eventually there would be Republican comedy places and Democrat comedy places and never the two shall meet? Or is that perhaps a thing that might still happen? Should we be taking measures to make sure this doesn’t happen?

Is there a weird world possible where one side just decides to ditch comedy all together, and the other side then creates fake people to make it look like both sides are still laughing together when in fact they aren’t. The infiniti comedy division is a pretty dark thought. #

An architecture for art

I was very taken by a recent Keen On podcast episode featuring writer Andrew O'Hagan where they discuss his recent novel Caledonian Road. It made it into this week’s newsletter, being quite a major influence on the theme.

I've been wondering what makes these sorts of rather grandiose works of art possible. Here are some of the questions I’ve been wondering about:

  • What architectures are needed in society to study and create these types of books / collections of stories?
  • Are some societies more well organised or pre-disposed to being documented or novelised into fictional stories?
  • Is there an observation problem where the observer affects the story they are documenting?
  • Are some societies purposely setup to make them difficult to novelise?

Also extrapolating somewhat on yesterday’s post about Rogan’s secret to making cool businesses, I wonder if some of these ideas are something you can apply at a city level. I suppose people do think about such things, though I'm not sure how comfortable I am with life being engineered at this level.

How do you even do that without seeming like senator Palpatine from Star Wars?

Maybe these sorts of questions are things we should be thinking about given that so many things these days appear fake. Catcher in the Rye seems a bit quaint these days.

I think it’s worth noting that for whatever reason, there was a distinct surge of "spiritual push back" from the world around me, in the form of apparently random No! harrasment and apparently accidental chair bumping, as I put the finishing touches to this blog post, from the mostly university students folks that surround me where I am writing this post.

Oh, and some 'you dog' calls from people walking by too!

Proving once again, that for the perpetraitors, harrassment is similar to the tag line of a certain brand of crisps that will remain unmentioned here to avoid any repercussions that might occur:

"Once you pop you can’t stop".

Writing that last paragraph was 10X harder than the rest of the article for some bizare reason. Anyway, nothing to see here, please move along...I am but an unfunny tennis ball. #

Today’s links:

  • The Academics That Think ChatGPT is BS (Better Offline Podcast) - I didn’t take detailed notes on this one, and probably should have, because it was packed with very insightful and well thought out hypothesis’ about how LLMs work but also about how we should view them, whether they are actually thinking, how they differ to human learning, and how they are impacting academia. These researchers highlight some of the most important things to consider, such as lying vs bullshitying vs hallucinating, and the danger of anthropomorphising them. It vears into philosophy and psychology, but grounded in computer science and mathematics. You'd think these boffins would have the whole thing figured out, but even these guys occasionally run into difficulty describing what’s going on. LLMs seem to be teaching us humans about our own cognition and consciousness. It’s the sort of episode that should be required listening when using these tools, they are powerful but could be detrimental to your abilities if used in the wrong way long term. IMO, use them as a booster rather than a crutch, imagine they could be taken away at anytime, you still need to be able to function at a high level without them. podcastindex.org #

  • Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy - Steven Levy looks into the recent trend of Silicon Valey big wig VCs like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz changing their allegiance from the Democrats & Biden to the Republicans & Trump. It appears to centre around Biden’s idea to impose 25% capital gains tax on unrealised assets for folks earning more than $100 million per year. They are trying to close a loop hole where the very rich never pay taxes by never realising their assets but monetize them by borrowing against them. They argue that it’s a slipery slope that starts with the very rich, but eventually canibalises wealth from all wealthy households. The argument is that it destroys philantropy and ultimately Silicon Valley itself. Interesting article, no less because Levy appears to be a staunch Democrat. Big changes in the tectonic plates of the tech industry. www.wired.com #

  • J. Malcolm Garcia on the humanity of San Fransisco's homeless community (Keen On Podcast) - Homelessness is a difficult subject to talk about and I think Andrew and Malcolm manage to have an interesting conversation, while being respectful to the people they are talking about. Many have experienced significant trauma, there is mental illness, sometimes drugs or alcohol, but they are real people with both happy and sad stories, and they can be very interesting and even fun to talk to. It can be awkward at first to strike up a conversation, and it can be risky as you might end up liking them, and feel a responsibility, but the truth is regular folks "need some skin in the game". It’s worth breaking down the barriers, they are within the community even if they aren’t a part of it. Waiting for the government to fix things in many places might be unrealistic. I think it’s worth remembering the world they live in is very different to the one lived by the housed, so they will likely be in a very different mindset to you. They spend most of their time thinking about things you probably never even have to consider. Things you take for granted that take minutes can take days to accomplish for them. Their timelines are very different. They might not trust you initially, they have likely had many bad experiences talking to housed people in the past so they might be cautious, not wanting their situation to get any worse than it already is - Malcom ends by reminding us that "they are great people". podcastindex.org #

  • A guide to reading and writing Node.js streams - Great tutorial by Matteo Collina that looks at how to use Streams in NodeJS. The article focusses on readable and writable streams, backpressure, handling errors, and advanced techniques like async iterators. The render pipelines concept I introduced to my static site generator is only partly realised, I only introduced the minimum needed to get the job done. I have partially implemented a more complete version of the feature and it’s crazy how similar in shape it is to the streams examples here, but it just uses the fs module. It would be very cool to explore using streams in the render core, certainly would be a good way to reduce memory consumption, and maybe even give a speed boost. Streams also support HTTP as well as files on the filesystem. Maybe one day ... :) blog.platformatic.dev #

  • How to Build a JavaScript UI Component-First DevTool Startup in 2024 - Well writen article, and the modularity of their final solution is pretty cool, and understandable given current state of things. However it all feels so complicated. Why can’t the next cohort of Facebook type startups take up the mantle for building the next React ontop of Web Components? Why can’t Lit, which looks very cool btw, be worked on to get it to be comparable in features to Vue and React? www.corbado.com #

  • Promises From The Ground Up - Josh Comeau summarises pretty succinctly how javascript promises work, with just the right amount of detail, without getting caught up in the weeds. This enables you to get to grips with async / await, which the article finishes with. I’ve found async / await to be one of the more useful primitives for simplifying my code. It did take a little while to get to grips with though. Reading existing code bases for popular libraries that use it helped too. I don’t miss callbacks in my NodeJS code at all. www.joshwcomeau.com #

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