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2024/08/31 #

  • The pervert gang stalkers are definitely doing their perverted gang stalker kind of pedo shit again. So I’ll start there, but there’s been tons of other harrassment aswell. I’m exhauated from not much sleep and there’s just so much of all this crap it’s really difficult keep it all in your head to write about it, even with notes. Anyway, as I mentioned I think yesterday, they cut off my washing water and power again. Lots and lots of 'you learns' literally everywhere I go. Also the internet connection has been really dodgy the past 2-3 days.

    So yesterday evening it was raining pretty badly, kind of a down pour. Lots of motorbikes on the busy road I was sitting next to on a bench. A woman motorbike gang stalker, driving in the wrong direction pulled up right on front of me. She kept smiling and nodding. For a second I thought she was about to gift me something because she had the vibe of someone that was purposely stopping in front of me. Anyway while nodding and looking at me over and over she takes out a rain poncho, and starts putting it on, but she’s really really clumsy about it. She eventually gets it on and the front of it placed over the front of the motorbike handle bars, as one does in such weather conditions, but she wasn’t half going arse about foot at it, as they say.

    Before ridding off she apeared to be waiting for me to notice the text on the front of the poncho, which said in big letters 'Vietbaby', next to some sort of generic logo. Well isn’t that a coincidence, just last week during the weird pedo pervert apocalypse I was gifted a large bag full of only sugar based snacks and breads and an industrial sized soft box of baby wipes. How strange that this should happen, with profuse nodding, at the same time as my washing water has been cut off, and at the same time as I’m getting constantly sexually harrassed by pervert woman in shop cafes that have grafiti erect penises on the walls next to the pevert women who are either doing never ending influencer style selfie photo shoots, or purposely hiding your charging devices behind their bags. Gee, I wonder what they are up to?

    Btw a short while after she left, which was actually very indicative of somebody up to no good if you ask me because she had tremendous issues getting the bike going, keys issues, issues with the gears, kept trying to raise the foot stand 5-6 times even though it was already raised, but anyway I digress, a short while after she left, a male-female couple arrived and sat near me, both mid to late twenties, girl in another tiny miniskirt. The bloke was holding a bag from the shop which at a glance appeared to have roughly the same items as the baby wipes incident. Large water bottles, breads of some variety, other bits and bobs. He kept dropping out of, presumably, vietnanese to say the word 'Canada'. It was pretty clear they were devoting a large portion of their attention to me. I’ve lived in Canada as it happens.

    Seems pretty clear they are refering to the baby wipes, and they are insinuating that I should wash with the baby wipes. And then of course they will try to frame me as some sort of pervert. I know this might seem a bit far fetched, especially to those that haven’t experienced this sort of thing, but it absolutely happens. Are there people sitting in secret closed rooms conspiring against me? Probably not. But is there some combination of emergence, pranksterism, various gangs gossiping about me, ... and maybe a bit of secret planning behind closed doors, yes undoubtably. And as I’ve been trying to illustrate over the past few weeks and months, it’s something that evolves over time, day by day. It’s incredibly pernichous, a slow constantly encroaching evil that nibbles at your heals every single day, happens in boom and bust cycles, with huge crescendos. And those that have never seen or experienced it before are completely hoodwinked by the instigators who say it’s the targetted individual that has mental issues, or has some screws lose. Did I mention that in one of the cafe shop’s I go to, over the past week or so a small collection of actual metal screws has been accumulating right near where I sit. Gee what are the chances? That’s in the penis grafiti place so also some weird pervert shit going on with that.

    So anyway, I’m past caring about all this. If you don’t believe me, I don’t care, if it makes me look like I’ve got a screw lose, I don’t care. Let me tell you, if this shit was happening to you, I bet you’d be in a much worse state than me. I’m actually mostly used to it at this stage. Duck off a water’s back as I have occasionally mis-spoken under times of elevated stress and sleep depravation.

    So here are yesterday's harrassnent and escallation notes:

    • Moody bloke at the internet place being moody again
    • Lots of podcast downloads still failing
    • Old pervert loan shark lady from the canal approached me again aggressively, totally unprovoked ‘No!’, haven’t seen her in about a month, but she always appears when they starve me and I go down to the canal
    • Extreme exaggerated fast walker bloke with the big ring who normally passes in both directions many times, passed once in one direction, then in the opposite direction was walking very slowly. Very unusual.
    • Lots of young women wearing green, including skinny girl in the green dress, and the screaming banshee down at the canal
    • People taking selfies for ages and ages and ages in places where crazy angry banshee girl in green usually sits, while the crazy girl in green walks past, what are the chances? Right after which I was asked if I would be okay having my photo taken. I politely declined.
    • Couples where the bloke is wearing all green being coupley directly in front of me
    • Yesterday girl staff member was upset I didn’t go to her till while she was counting a massive wad of green 100000 bills
    • The world is upset that I don’t like parsley in my sandwiches. I just don’t like the flavour, it overpowers the other flavours. So I ask for no parsley, and the world thinks how dare you not take our parsley, because the world ultimately wants slaves at an instinctive level
    • ‘Aahh’ food goading by gangs of women walking past, finding it all very hilarious that they are starving me

    All this is but a small sample. There were also lots of 'our', 'our lie' and a bunch of other you-belong-to-us related harrassment, so much so I’ve just started calmly responding 'No slaves' and if asked, I say 'god says so', and shrug shoulders, which in a sense is actually true. I wonder where the path will lead to this time? Same place it always does.

    Me getting mutilated, and everything being blamed on me.

    At least the newsletter is already written though :)

    PS They are doing that food and anger goading thing again where they give you food that looks half eaten like it might have been reconstituted from a bin. Then the next day they will give you expensive chocolates or croissants. Everything is malicious, everything is some form of perversion, some way of controlling you.

    No slaves world! And also stop being perverts, and as you like to say to me, easy peasy! #

  • It feels like we’re going to get to a place where you either survive by being a slave, or you survive by fighting against being a slave. Either way you are essentially a slave. How would this be in any way a good thing. There must be a better way. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/30 #

  • Lots and lots of harrassment yesterday. I’m too exhausted to write it all up so here are my notes:

    • Red tsunami - small bit of red tape on curb this morning, followed by big red bus with small red car parked behind it on way to internet place, followed by motorbike gang stalkers shouting No!
    • Porche with side panels with text "catchup"
    • Dodgy internet connection today, podcasts keep failing
    • Another female influencer doing a seemingly never ending masturbatory photo shoot right up in my face, right next to the graffiti penis
    • Another female repeatedly audibly flicking her bra trap directly on front of me, both over and under her T-shirt, in a pink text "piece of cake number 24" T-shirt
    • Bra strap girl had turned into another influencer photoshooter
    • Both girls were doing that thing where they want to look at you but do not want you to look at them, and then are annoyed that you didn’t look at them
    • Empty red topped milk cartons being thrown out of windows
    • Girls in miniskirts hiding your charging device plug with their bags, but are then upset that you place your device behind their bag where they are not able to see it

    Along with all the female pervert shit noted above, there were threats to completely cut off washing water, and threats by police and the security guard mafia of framing me for some kind of theft that I had absolutely nothing to do with. Also in the middle of the night some weird pedo pervert shit where I was woken up to find on the other side of the road a western man with long heavy metal style hair standing next to motorbike taxi, talking to him. Some evil laughter, then metal bloke says extremely loudly 'I’m just trying to give you a hard time', emphasis on hard, the bloke motortaxi then grabs the metal bloke in a hug around his torso, but because he’s sitting on the bike he’s much lower and it ends up looking very much like a kid hugging a much taller adult. That’s very unusual. It felt very manufactured.

    Anyway, what with all the harrassment and weird goings on, I didn’t get any testing done on the reusable workflows feature. I think I found the bug that caused the daily build to not get run yesterday. It appears the repository_dispatch on directive in the workflow yml got deleted while fixing the reusable workflow secret limit bug. I’ll get that merged back in this morning.

    Looks like it’s another starvation day, will need to start conserving power again, and that’s been cut off. At least the newsletter is done, though it’s a bit piecemeal because I’ve had to prepare it in stages again, but I was able to add 5 blog posts and something like 9 podcasts, so overall it’s still got quite a lot in there, and they are all pretty awesome shows.

    Another day. #

  • One thing that just doesn’t square for me in the current politics is the left - right paradigm. I listen to a lot of podcasts, many of them are Bitcoin shows, and there are a lot of republicans. But I also listen to quite a lot of democrats. Now obviously there’s a lot of differences in how they view the world.

    Here’s the thing that just doesn’t add up for me. I listen to Rory Stewart on the Rest is Politics podcast, and he claims to be conservative, and was in the UK government for many years and travels all around the world doing foreign policy and what not, so you’ve got to think he knows a thing or two about politics. Well he claims that the UK Conservatives, which are a so called right wing party, he says they are basically the equivalent of the US Democrats. That just makes no sense.

    It puts the Republicans way way out on the right of the spectrum, much further to the right than even the UK Reform party. In the UK, right of Reform is always portraid as a hop skip and a jump away from fascism. However just based on what I hear day in day out on all these podcasts, the difference between these parties just isn’t that extreme.

    It just occurred to me how detached from reality somehow all this is in one way or another. It just doesn’t square with what I hear.

    The only thing the UK conservatives, at least the ones I’ve been listening to, and the Democrats really seem to have in common is their hate for Donald Trump, which leads me to believe all the politics is just smoke and mirrors to hide the real thing that’s going on, which is some form of class / rich poor warfare. And it must run extremely deep if you’d be willing to do a complete flip of the orientation of an entire political party, just to express that sentiment.

    I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well. Something doesn’t add up. The pieces somehow don’t fit together to form the overall picture. The reality distortion is too big to make sense. #

  • Yet another crazy synchronicity. I wrote the previous note about how the left - right political spectrum mid way through listenning to the latest Rogan podcast with ex-CIA bloke Mike Baker. I paused it to write the note. Well about 15-20 minutes later and that’s exactly what they are talking about, the 'topsy turvy' left right politics that’s all upside down and makes no sense. This sort of thing happens way too often. That doesn’t add up either imho.

    Btw, Mike Baker sounds a lot more like a comedian than an ex-CIA bloke. #

  • The starvation cycle is in full swing with associated weird harrassment. World pretending not to be on the warpath while being very much on the warpath, If past experience is any guidance, the pervert maybe pedo westerner bloke will make an appearance sometime soon to stir things up. #

  • Britain’s Ukraine aid situation

    Really interesting discussion on the Goats, Guns and Gold podcast, a discussion with Alex Rainer about how so much of finance leads back to London. Particularly interesting if you are from the UK.

    Yeah I know the name of the podcast is a little bit off putting to those from the left. But put that aside for a second there’s actually a lot of interesting analysis, mostly I would say factual as opposed to political propaganda. Now there is a right wing slant for sure, but just ignore it if that’s not your thing, just get in there for the data, the facts.

    Broadly speaking it’s about the aid that the UK is being forced into giving to the Ukraine to fund their war efforts.

    Some facts:

    • They have given $10 billion in military aim, and $6.5 billion in financial aid. That’s what’s in official documents on the government website.
    • Britain also guarantied multiple tranches of World Bank loans to Ukraine. So even though the money was supposedly given by the World Bank, they are on the hook for that too.
    • Who knows how many Ukraine bonds were forced onto UK pension funds.
    • On 22 September 2022 Liz Truss appointed Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He presents mini budget and markets go bazirk, Guilts and pound sell off sharply.
    • The pension funds get hit with margin calls, because the pension funds, it turns out, were leveraged. They had leveraged exposure to the Guilts. A margin call is when the loan issuer demands you increase your collateral because conditions have become much riskier.
    • To meet margin calls they all started selling off their Guilts, so as to have the cash to make the margin calls. On 27th of September there were no more buyers of long dated Guilts to sell to. The pension funds were trying to sell the Guilts, but nobody wanted them.
    • The Bank of England had to step in and buy $40 billion of bonds in order to avoid the price falling off of a cliff. They stepped in at last minute and narrowly avoided complete collapse.
    • Each citizen is on the hook for about $2000, but since only 1/4 are working in the private sector, realistically it’s $10000 for each privately working person.
    • Btw 45% of people work or are supported by the government, ie have them as a major client.

    So that’s the backdrop. I’ll follow that up with an extended quote from Alex Krainer [40:40].

    If the Bank of England looses any money on these assets that it holds...So they buy British government bonds, and the British government bonds collapse and the Bank of England loses money on those bonds, well his majesty’s treasury has to reimburse the Bank of England for those loses. They have to make the bank whole. Which means that the British tax payer has to reimburse the bank...

    This is like piracy, high street banditry on an industrial scale. So the Bank of England and the owners of the Bank of England, hold the collective British population to ransom, for a system that was foisted on them, which is fraudulent, which is immiserating them systematically, and which they themselves have to pay. It’s like if the slave owner makes a loss on the business that he uses the slaves to run, then the slaves have to reimburse him. That’s ultimately what this is.

    Some followup notes:

    • On 22 July Ukrainians announce the deal with bond holders, the one where the holders get a 37% haircut.
    • The government are now expanding what they accept for collateral, maybe even Ukraine bonds.
    • But with reverse repo they will get 100 cents on the dollar, no losses, so the whole system will pay for those losses. They will rob the whole population of the UK.
    • Likely the Guilt market will go to zero eventually, that’s how the system is designed, collapse is a mathematical certainty, it’s happenned at least twice before.
    • And remember Gordon Brown sold all gold reserves at the bottom of the market a few years back.
    • With all this in mind, it brings new perspective on why maybe we’ve seen an massive increase in CCTV everywhere in the UK, and why generally people are being hemmed in. They are going to have to work harder to pay off the debts, and maybe they are pre-emptively getting ready for the unrest that will occur.

    So that‘s some of the interesting facts but there’s more in the episode. I think it’s valuable to listen to no matter which side of the political ailse you are on. At the end of the day it’s just maths. It might be somewhat innacurate, putting this sort of thing together is difficult, but I think it’s at least directionally correct.

    The british people are being turned into slaves, and this is no good! It is no bueno!

    In a sense the US is in a similar situation but they have much stronger possibilities for growth and are not as reliant on foreign energy sources, i.e. Russia.

    I suspect this is but a tip of a bigger ice berg too.

    No slaves!

Today’s links:

2024/08/29 #

  • Rare is the day I get to start a morning note with some good news. Today is one of those days. I got the main website building and deploying with all the reusable workflows! As they say during football matches, get in! I've been trying to get the reusable workflows working on the main site for close to 3 weeks now, but been slowed down by non-stop warpath world. That combined with an impossible bug. I’m not sure if that’s an existing class of bugs, but it should be.

    Every now and then you get a bug that is so devious, so utterly impossible to find, reproduce and fix that you basically completely run out of debugging options. I knew the file that the bug was in, but no matter what I did could not find the bug. It was a yml syntax error apparently, at least according to Github. The way I solved it was to create a minimal reusable workflow, both caller workflow and callee workflow, using the required amount of inputs and secrets. Github had been telling me that as soon as I got to the number of secrets I needed, that there was a syntax error and was refusing to run the workflow. Remove one secret and it worked again.

    Once I got the minimal workflows working, I updated the callee workflow to have the same secret names as the production reusable workflow, then updated the production caller workflow to trigger the minimal reusable callee workflow. Once that was working I slowly, and laboriously I might add, rebuilt the callee reusable workflow, piece by piece, each time testing that it was still working. The fact that I only have internet access while standing up at the minute made this incredibly tedious. Something that would normally take a few hours, literally took 3 weeks. But it’s frigging working now. Yesterday evening once it was all working, I renamed the mininal reusable callee workflow, which was now no longer minimal but essentially the second incarnation of the original workflow minus the bug, to be the production reusable workflow and deleted the old one.

    So what was the bug? I have no idea. If I find time I might be able to do a diff between the working reusable and the previous non-working one. That’s a bit tricky because of how difficult internet access is, and because of all the harrassment. My priority is to get the feature complete, but maybe I’ll circle back around to it, world willing.

    I now have most of the plugins and the main website operational, all building and deploying using the reusable workflows. The feeds plugin still needs to be updated because, just like the main website, uses an npm module cache, but now the website is on the new workflows, the feeds plugin will be very similar. I’ve already made the updates, just need to test.

    Then there are a few plugins that don’t have the right 3rd party vendor keys so small pieces aren’t working. Last I checked Amazon only allows two public/private key pairs. It’s likely I’ll actually have to update the AWS credentials for all the workflows, which is actually going to be quite tedious. So more laborious tedium, but I’ll eventually get it complete, and all the repos will build and deploy using the same reusable workflow.

    Changing the foundations really takes a long time, especially when you are having to do it under duress. But it will be worth the effort.

    As for harrassment, there’s been loads if it, and they are back to their old sex perverted tricks again. Lots of white tsunanis, red anger goading, sex goading with young women wearing unbelievably tiny mini skirts. Soon as I run out of food again they are bound to start the food goading again.

    But whatever world, today’s update isn’t about that. #

  • Oh lordi lord is the world on the warpath this morning while pretending not to be on the warpath. Just listenned to the lastest Rest is Politics, so many bizare synchronicities, from getting on with opposition, people with father issues, bears, worms, MI6 agents called steak knife, and grit in the oyster. And I only started jotting down notes after I was already half way through.

    Anyway, even if they are warpathers, it’s still a good podcast worth listening to. And probably they aren’t so either way, worth listening to.

    The Rest is Warpaths? #

  • The beautiful improbabilties of a world on the warpath: a seemingly endless stream of bizarely appropriate, somewhat unsettling, and always mostly entertaining podcasts.

    Take for example this one I literally just listenned to:

    The beautiful paradoxes of a multi-cultural identity by Farhad Modhit

    Truely wonderful, as I try my best not to be a dirty foreign bastard or a slave or both. The world of course is literally trying to do the exact opposite. Mindboggling.

    No doubt hate me even more world! #

  • The previously very timely podcast was followed literally immediately by another. I’m not going to say much about it for fear of unbalancing the universe again, need to be more equaniminous.

    It’s a wonderful conversation though, the Trussell - Nichtern ones always are, all sorts of interesting buddhism stuff translated into regular people talk. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/28 #

  • Lots of gang stalker harrassment yesterday and through the night. There was actually quite a bit the day before but I was too tired to write about it. I’m still tired now but here are the notes I jotted down:

    • Yesterday (i.e day before yesterday) - whole series of one thing after another situations, sweat bread vendor hiding, sandwich bloke getting literally everything wrong with my sandwich while butch woman front run me having to correct him, then lots of anger goading in shop cafe, including staff violently upset at me asking for a slightly bigger plastic bag, then shouting No when I said wow to their violent behaviour, then girl upstairs randomly saying No at me for no reason whatsoever, then red coke bottle top being left outside the toilet door, and just lots of that sort of thing
    • Video game tutter bloke continuously doing his huffing and puffing and tutting in the shop cafe today. His moody warpathing girlfriend has already made an appearance. They’ve been showing off their new gold wedding rings, and generally lording it over everyone. Such brats.
    • Shop staff injecting ambiguous messages as they go to the toilet / go to empty the bin again. This time they were on the phone, ending conversation with ‘buy’. Seems that ‘hilarious’ joke is still active.
    • The world is doing that thing where it waits until just before you are about to start doing something you had planned to do and then yah’ing you.

    Yesterday evening the sandwich shop bloke that sometimes get very moody, who has been rather chill the past few weeks, was once again quite moody. Banging things around aggressively, then doing that thing
    with the plastic bag where they hold the handle open so you can slide your hand into it, but I never do because it’s clearly a power move when the person doing it isn’t totally clueless, which is clearly the case here. He also double bagged the customer before me's 2 sandwiches, which is unnusual.

    The rest of the evening was full of escallations, and I won’t get into them here but it got to the point where literally anything I did that involved 2 things, so for example, hanging out 2 sox to dry since they got wet in the rain, or just crossing both my feet or basically anything was interpreted as some kind of rebellion, and escallated. Even sitting still was met with more warpathing, including anger and food goading.

    Interestingly I was up 4 times during the night to go to the bathroom, and I didn’t eat or drink anything much different to usual, so makes me wonder if moody sandwich bloke put something in my food.

    It all coincides with the start of what looks likely to be another starvation cycle which will no doubt involve the typical water and power being cut off.

    This morning already some gang stalker harrassment from one of the exercise cyclists: 'We ahh'.

    Managed to write several notes and blog posts yesterday, but it was really just me catching up with things following the last couple of weeks intense harrassment. It doesn’t feel like progress, just me being stuck and being forced to spin my wheels so to speak.

    There was a slightly older than me gentleman sitting on a chair near the place I bought breakfast yesterday morning. He was popping bubbles on a massive sheet of bubble wrap. The woman who put the takeaway breakfast together was pleasant right up until I left at which point she got aggressive for no reason. She’s done that several times before. I just kept calm and said 'thank you warpather'.

    I made a bit of progess on the reusable workflow. The empty test reusable with the correct number of secrets works, with all the same secret names and optional secrets etc. So now I need to test triggering the test reusable from the real workflow. Once that works I can start to rebuild the reusable piece by piece. This probably doesn’t make much sense, but basically it’s the last resort when nothing works and debugging doesn’t work, you have to essentially start to rebuild the file from scratch checking each time that it’s still working. It’s a total pain.

    Another day. Not looking forward to the starvation and bullying that will no doubt increase today. Then I’ll be catching up again for a few days, then it will all start over. It’s a miracle I get anything done at all. #

  • Two somewhat weird synchronicities that occurred to me vis-a-vis the Telegram Pavel Durov situation.

    First is that two days before he was arrested, two women likely in their 40s, stopped to talk with me, in our conversation they were trying to find out if I was belgian and if I was russian. Seemed odd to me since I don’t, as far as I am aware, sound or look to be from either of those places. Durov is of course from Russia and has french citizenship. Bit of a strange coincidence.

    Also I read in one of the articles that he changed his name in France to Du Rov. It does make his name sound very french, but I think it’s a bit of a strange coincidence that Rov is probably best associated with the famous US Roe v Wade legal case, which is all about the right to have an abortion. Given that the charges against the Telegram CEO involve platforming pedophiles, I find that a strange coincidence. The literal translation of the french version of his name then would be something like "From the Right to Abortion", or maybe even just "From the Abortion".

    Yes slightly far fetched, but I think could be significant. We live in a very strange world. #

  • Chris Coyier on LLMs using your data

    Chris Coyier went on a bit of a friendly rant about LLMs using your data [53:29]. I think it’s super interesting to hear his perspective because he’s not a big media or tech company, he just runs some small businesses, Code Pen & CSS Tricks, and they happen over the years to have published a lot of great web development content and code. A lot of the web is from sources like that, narrow niches where hard working folks spent years creating and currating content, often labours of love, and it’s all just being hoovered up so a very small amount of people, often already part of very large a profitable businesses, can make out like bandits.

    Here’s what Chris has to say about it:

    To me it still boils down to the like ‘Yeah but you like took my stuff’. And nobody wants to tell you that that’s true or false. There are a lot of LLMs now. It’s not just Llama, ChatGPT4, whatever the names of these models are. There are a ton of models. There are so many [...] It’s not like there is a list, like this LLM is trained on this list of sources. I’ve never seen that ever. So what’s the deal? Were you? Were you trained on my stuff? Did you read my book? Did you scrape Codepen? Did you learn about CSS from CSS-Tricks? Did you do that, or not? Cause you didn’t ask me. I’ve never gotten an email from any model ever ever in my inbox. I get lots of email, and I’ve never gotten one that says ‘do you mind if we train it on your stuff’.

    Then you’ll hear a news article like "Matt Mullenweg awarded 20 billion for allowing Wordpress to be used in language models". Why didn’t they just scrape him too? Are they more scared of his lawyers than mine? Cause I don’t have one and he does. Or Reddit allowed to be a source. Or Stack Overflow allowed to be a source.

    So if you are big enough they will ask you or they will pen a deal with you, but most content surely they just scrapped up and gave nothing to. It almost makes it hurt more. Oh like I see, you got to be rich to make money, that’s the trick.

    I think it’s great that he’s speaking out, others in his position should do the same. If we don’t have the conversation now, we'll all be pushed into offers we can’t refuse, or worse. We are all in this together.

  • I’ve heard in podcasts this morning that Macron actually uses Telegram to send info to journalists, he has a public Telegram channel. The fact that he prefered to use a foreign product perhaps says something. Ultimately who do you want evesdroping on your conversations? The president has to make the same decision as all of us.

    Also isn’t it weird that this whole debacle should happen in France, a country famous for it’s revolutions. How would they organise a revolution in 2024? Or have revolutions been eradicated? #

  • Politics ambidextrous

    I guess this idea makes the most immediate sense in the context of US politics, but maybe also the UK, and other places where there are two main political parties. Does this exist? Is it a thing?

    A politics ambidextrous person would be able to see from both vantage points with the fluidity as a bilingual person can interpret 2 languages. In a sense it’s really just the same thing, all be it at a higher level of abstraction. Importantly though, it’s not just about comprehension, that’s part of it, but such a person would also be able to perform and be successful in both environments.

    It’s only relatively recently that I have started to move my attention towards politics. One thing that has suprised me is the level of polarisation between say, in the US, Democrats and Republicans, but there’s a similar thing going on between Labour and Conservatives in the UK. The thing that’s somewhat amusing is that even if you take just one political party, the same pattern, or at least similar repeats itself again, except other categorisations are used such as progressives, or libertarians.

    There’s always an us and them that develops. Anyway that’s not super important right now just worth noting.

    One thing that was quite a suprise to me was how ingrained some of these beliefs are. It makes sense because we are raised from birth to absorb these ideas without really noticing. There are areas of our lives where the programing runs deep. At times it’s easy to spot in others, but difficult to see in yourself. That’s where the ambidextrous idea arose from. I wonder if it’s even possible.

    I would imagine that it could be quite a skill to have. Obviously for say an actor, you would immediately double the space of possible work opportunities. But the same should hold for other professions too. You are a lot more likely to fit in if you can see the world through the two major political lenses.

    On the other hand, I imagine that such thinking might be considered heracy by those who were staunchly one side or the other, which is probably why nobody ever mentions this idea. I’m obviously quite stupid.

    So anyway, if they do exist, the other thing I wonder, is if they could perhaps help us all get along a bit better?

  • Peter McCormack [41:16]: "How do I crystallise this in a way that people go ‘Pete I’ve watched you for seven years make this podcast and travel around the world and do Bitcoin, and somehow your life seems okay and my life is going to shit. I can’t seem to translate it, but I’m trying so hard. It’s like I can’t crystallise it."

    The world sequences things in the most unnexpected ways sometimes. ☮️✌️🕊 #

  • Fake Doctors Real Friends: "Former high-level CIA operatives John Sipher and Jerry O'Shea walk Zach and Donald through how they would craft fake conspiracies to help solve real crimes. Learn what kind of person the CIA is looking for and how you could become a member."

    Zach and Donald are CIA stooges? Nooooooooooo. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/27 #

  • The world is doing it’s yes yes yes yes yes yes no thing again today. It’s very disorientating for your body, and quite annoying, and occasionally dangerous. But what can you do? Not much apart from wait till it blows over and turns into the new new thing. Yesterday the world was so on the warpath all day it was uterly ridiculus. I managed to ignore it all, which seemed to make it worse. The world just pretended even more to not be on the warpath while being even more on the warpath.

    Anyway, today maybe I’ll be able to rebuild the reusable deploy workflow so as to fix the mystery syntax error.

    Nough said. #

  • Are people constantly escalating everywhere because we are living in an actual exponentially escalating technology fractal?

    We humans are all so dumb sometimes. We think we’re like really smart but we’re just not that far from our monkey see, monkey do past. All the instances of being dumb get conveniently forgotten about. But we always find another, possibly even dumber, way to be dumb. It just so happens that we are also getting smarter so it all sort of cancels out. But we are so dumb.

    I bet the furries think we are fucking hilarious.

    There will of course be a contingent that righteously believe the escallations are causing the exponentially escalating technology fractal in the first place, and are thus a good thing.

    The escallationists think they themselves are both hilarious and indispensibly important, but they hate pandas for some unknown reason.

    Oh noes.

    I’m not even smart enough to make this note all perfect and lovely. #

  • Wouldn’t it be strange if now, or some time in the future, it turned out that racism doesn’t actually exist, that it’s a ghost in the machine so to speak, a misunderstanding. That the people accused of being racist were actually reacting to being trapped in some way, and the perhaps unwitting trappers interpreted this as racism. And I wonder if, bizarrely, should such a situation occur, whether it could lead to actual racism since the person being trapped sees it happen so often that they just front run these events and ‘act like a racist’ even before such an event occurs. Yeah I know it’s weirdly circular, very chicken and egg, but sometimes the world gets into a right old twist. #

  • Just going through old notes from the past couple of weeks to catchup with things. Thought this was worth publishing. Even if it’s not a completely finished perfect thought, I think it highlights some frustration with the levels of hypocracy in politics at the minute. I had titled it Fuck politics.

    Democrats will literally tell you that they want you to have control over your body when it comes to abortion, while simultaneously trying to control every other aspect of your life including your body!

    Republicans will literally tell you they want you to have freedom while simultaneously infiniti belittling you so you can never get ahead in life!

    It’s bullcrap infiniti on both sides.

    FuCk PiLitacS indeed. #

  • Another one from my notes cleanup. This one stems from all the weird pedo pervert apocalypse that happened last week. At one of the locations, right in the middle of all that stuff, one of the regular locals shouted at a mechanic up the road just before leaving on a motorbike:

    "They go bear"

    That was accompanied by some rather evil sounding laughter. The context around this is that at another location I go to nearby, some gang stalkers have grafiti’d the words 'Beor Loose' just were I sit. So often that’s thrown at me as part of the harrassment, often during starvation periods they put me through.

    The individual in question in this case is always around young children, and I think the double meaning here is quite obvious. I don’t know why it happened, it feels like some form of intimidation, that’s why I write about it now.

    Another thing that happened, either right before, or shortly afterwards, I forget exactly the sequence of events as there was so many things happening, was this individual clearly saying 'you learn' to me while they were buying something from a nearby vendor.

    I have nothing else to say about it apart from it’s very f-ing weird. #

  • Liberalism should be about liberty not beer

    I’m trying to catchup with things, going through notes I’ve written over the past couple of weeks.

    This one feels like it was worthy of a blog post. It’s not a fully formed idea, and no doubt highlights more about my misunderstanding of political concepts than being some valuable critique. But if I’m finding some of these concepts confusing then I bet others are too, so maybe some knowledgeable politicos out there might jump in to clarify.

    Btw the title references the very well known at this stage, pillar of the free software movement, that tries to explain that when we talk about free software, we mean free as in liberty not free as in free beer. Though the two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

    I hope I’ve remembered that right, I don’t currently have internet access to verify I’ve well worded that. This is the sort of thing where wording actually matters quite a lot, so perhaps look it up on Wikipedia or the FSF website.

    Whether the use of the not free as in beer analogy is appropriate here, I don’t entirely know, but it should give you, dear reader, an idea of where I’m coming from on this topic.

    Anyway, here were the notes I jotted down:

    • Conservatives should be able to be liberals too, because you can be conservative in your approach to life but also want liberty
    • Maybe the opposite of conservatives is progressives
    • Liberals will tend to spend more, they want more space for the individual
    • Perhaps there should be an ism for the opposite of liberalism, something like slaveism, or supremacism. Perhaps the reason there isn’t such a thing is to ensure it can’t happen?
    • But it still happens whether there’s a name for it or not. The downside of not having a name for it is it’s very difficult to talk about, and that’s very bad for liberals that find themselves in a dangerous slavism situation, how do you even think about something that doesn’t officially exist?

  • The game in a game problem

    Another one from my big daily notes cleanup. Again this feels like something that has undoubtably been thought about to death in philosophy circles, and there’s probably loads of famous sheet wearing ancient greeks that have been there done that got the tshirt so to speak. But anyway perhaps it’s interesting to consider in a modern AI + crypto + the world wide web context.

    • Surely eventually AI tools will be so powerful that people will use them to control societies, taking people’s entire lives and turning them into a sort of game.
    • And they will get very annoyed if said person decides to become a developer because in their eyes, they will think they have to create whatever the developer wants to build before the developer tries to build it.
    • And as soon as the developer decides to build in a way that the super developer didn’t anticipate they will blame the regular developer.
    • And isn’t society a sort of game, so what does that tell us about how we should design our societies?

    Perhaps some philo geeks can jump in to set me straight, even though my reasoning is clearly flawless.

Today’s links:

2024/08/26 #

  • Relatively okay day yesterday. There was some small amount of harrassment here and there but I was able to ignore it. The girl staff in the shop cafe that always seems to be doing a C3PO from Srar Wars impression was a bit weird. I noticed that her thing is to always be slightly ahead of you in whatever interaction you have with her, so she's always in some way waiting for you. So she will move very quickly, then slow down, move very quickly, then slow down. But the whole charade stops as soon as she’s done interacting with customers, she’s completely normal with other staffers. Naturally I did the same thing to her while buying a second coffee and some biscuits. Evidently this was not appreciated, because right after finishing the coffee she materialised from downstairs on her way to the toilet, casually making a fake sneeze 'choo' sound as she passed.

    The only other thing was that, quite predictably, the penis grafiti has spread so now there is also a sticker of a cartoon fast car on the wall next to the bathroom. Someone’s obviously tried to scratch it off but it’s too well on the wall to be easily removed. What a shame the walls had been nice and white for so long, now it’s being over run with vandalism. Before long the whole place will no doubt become unusable and be shutdown for a renovation or something.

    Forgot to mention a couple of days ago that a lot of the time when sketchy lady with the fancy hat turns up, a bit later towards the end of whatever money dealings she’s up to, a sort of twin of her shows up, hangs around, usually sitting on the other side of me. She also had a fancy hat, but more importantly is dressed in a very similar style as OG woman with fancy hat. She’s the same exact height. She’s basically a twin. Weird.

    I made some progress on the reusable workflow. As suspected the minimal example with 17 secrets works totally fine. Even tried a variant with the same number of required and optional secrets. Also works. So who knows where the bug is. The only thing left to do is laboriously rebuild the production workflow piece by piece, testing each time if it’s still working. Eventually, hopefully it will work and I can do a diff to see what was different.

    Not much blog post inspiration at the minute. #

  • Some interesting subtleties about Telegram’s encryption implementation. Firstly the UX is a bit weird: although they advertise as being a fully encrypted product, they only offer end-2-end encryption on 2 person chats, not group chats, and it’s not the default, and to enable it you have to hunt through deeply burried settings, and even then it only works if the other person in the chat is online when you setup the chat.

    Also their encryption implementation is a little bit "non standard". The author of the article linked above suggests that combining all these subtleties, it would be understandable if some people formed the view that their implementation was in some way malicious, i.e. user hostile. IMO there are a huge amount of right up to the line and no further situations in this story.

    Like a weird honey pot inside a honey pot inside a honey pot. A honey pot fractal? Is that even a thing? Why did Pavel get fired for trying to unresign? There’s definitely something uncanny about this whole thing.

    Has this entire story been written by an AI? #

  • I’m finding this whole Mike Lynch british entrepreneur super yacht sinking story very weird. Especially the latest bit about him being interested in this bizare and very dark Letby case.

    It’s weird to me that Letby has been given 15 life sentences, and 2 days ago I wrote about a RL conversation I had with a person I said apparently works 15 simultaneous jobs or something. What an odd coincidence. And especially, given the details of the case, right after the pedo pervert apocalypse.

    Also since numerology is clearly trending, what’s up with all the sevens in this article? I feel like all this is going to be fed into a powerful AI and turned into the next Iron Maiden album cover art or something.

    Did I mention that yesterday morning a street food vendor ordered me to 'buy', as I stood there, after I communicated to his female collegue what dish I wanted and she was preparing it, and I was quite clearly waiting already holding the money in my hand to pay. This was, judging on the smile and chuckles they made, very funny to them.

    Come on world, you are clearly warpathing at extreme levels. #

  • The mind bending realities of the universe’s scale and deep time

    Today’s quote piece is a long one but well worth it. Everything this week seems to be about exponentials so it fits in very well. It’s from the most recent Rogan podcast episode where he talks with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFOs.

    There’s a ton of wild stuff in their conversation, which is super interesting because it gives a view into how these things are thought about from inside the establishment. Quite pragmatically actually. In any case Luis is very science and engineering focussed and I thought his view of time and the universe was both mind bending and incredibly well articulated. Enjoy.

    [1:19:13] Luis:

    Homosapien sapien as a modern species has been around for roughly between 100000 and 200000 years. It was only the Greeks 2000 years ago that introduced the idea that there are only 2 types of life forms on this planet, you are either (a) a plant or (b) you’re an animal. And it was only in the last 300 years, if you look at a 24 hour clock, roughly the last 5 minutes in the 24 hours towards midnight, we discovered another form of life that is neither plant nor animal, that’s been here with us on this planet. And that is the world of fungus: during the renaissance and the days of Newton, we discovered that there was this other life form that we had been sharing the planet with all along.

    So we patted ourselves on the shoulder, and it wasn’t until the last 120 years, think about it, the last 10 seconds of our existence on this planet, so to speak, on a 24 hour clock as a modern species, we actually discovered the true dominant life form on this planet. And infact if you take all the biomass of every plant, and the biomass of every animal, and the biomass of every fungus and add it all up together, it’s still not equal to the biomass of this hidden kingdom of life, that’s actually the dominant life form of this planet. And that wasn’t until we were able to curve glass and look through a little steel tube and famously shout "little beasties, little beasties", did we discover the world of micro-organisms, that yes, live inside of you, and yes, live on the skin of the ISS space station, and live miles underneath the artic ice. That is the true dominant life form on this planet, and always had been. In the last 120 years we discovered that.

    So is it possible that there is something else that is just as normal to this world? Is it possible? Well the answer is a resounding yes of course it’s possible, cause we are always discovering new new new new ways life can exist.

    When I was growing up as a kid, I was told absolutely as a matter of fact all life form is derived from photosynthesis, ultimately when you go all the way down. It turns out that that’s not true. It wasn’t until we discovered in the deepest depths of our oceans, were these things called black smokers. We discovered there are these creatures that thrive with no light, and they thrive off of something called kinosynthesis, a completely different way to metabolise energy to sustain life. Everytime we put Mother Nature in a little box, she always finds a way to wiggle her way out. And so think that’s important when having this conversation because if there’s one thing we know as human beings, it’s that we are usually wrong, at first.

    [1:21:46] Rogan:

    Well we exist and we do send things to other planets and we do send things into space. It only makes sense that something far more intelligent than us that would be doing that, and if they did, they would probably watch an emerging civilisation, which is essentially what we are. Like you said 200000 years which is nothing, the existence of homosapiens have gone from things that use stones, and flintmap to things that can fly things through the air. If you look at Orvel Wright and Wilbur Wright when they flew the first airplane. You go from that to the first Apollo 11 launch, that’s only like 50 years. That’s nuts.

    And you just take that, and everything moved exponentially, and you imagine a civilisation that’s been around 10000 years longer than us, 100000 years longer than us, a million years longer than us.

    [1:22:44] Luis:

    How about 100 years? We have evolved more in the last 150 years than we have in the last 150000 years. And then you have the other side of it. For me, I find, when people say space is so huge, and is it possible that things are coming from outer space? My response has always been the same. Look I don’t know where they are from, I just know they are here. Could they be from outer space? Sure. They could be from outer space or inner space or even the space in between. And I say that because the universe is far more complex than we give it credit for. Everytime...there was a time we had Newtonian physics, we thought that was the solution, then Einstein came along, and we realised that wait, space and time are actually connected and everything is relative. And then all of a sudden you have Quantum Mechanics, which is this spooky action at a distance, where the whole universe is behaving in a way that it shouldn’t, yet that looks like the real way the universe actually works.

    I often tell people that as humans we only have 5 fundamental senses that we can base our reality upon. If you can’t touch it, taste it, hear it, smell it, etc we can’t interact with it. And so where I live in Wyoming we have these beautiful night skies, 300 days of un-occluded night skies per year, and as beautiful as those night skies are, if you were to look at that same portion of the night sky through a radio telescope, you would see a whole different reality around you. You would see nebula and you would see things in different spectra that we can’t pickup. You pick an ultra violet, an infra red, so you would see a whole new reality, just like our cell phones. You would see in cell phone vision, you would see in WiFi, 5G and GPS. You would interact with your environment completely differently. We can only interact with a very small sliver of the reality we can perceive because we are humans. But most of reality is actually beyond that.

    And then of course you have scalability issues. The universe is immensely huge. And what scientists are now saying, if you look in any direction, you can see roughly within the visible horizon, which is roughly 13.9 billion light years. So that means I can see 13.9 billion light years with the right equipment. What’s a light year? Well it’s the fastest light can travel in a year. Well light travels pretty fast. In fact it travels at 186000 miles per second. That’s 7.5 times around the planet in a second. So imagine how far you can go in a year. Now multiply that by 13.9 billion. And that is by scientists estimation. So the universe end-to-end, we are stuck in the middle, is roughly 27 billion light years. Scientists are now saying possibly that’s only 10% of the known universe, because the universe is so big, and so vast, and so far, that light will never have time to reach earth. That’s at a minimum 100 billion light years. And we are this little speck in the middle.

    As crazy as that is to even try to conceive, if you compare 1 atom, 1 Hydrogen atom, Avogadro’s number, 1 x 10 to the minus 26, it is roughly the same level of scale as we are to the universe. Meaning that atom’s size is to a human, as we humans are in size to the universe. So we as humans can only interact, plus or minus, with one order of magnitude up or down. Otherwise the universe is either too big or too small. Most of the universe and reality lies in those scales. We live in this little tiny tiny sliver.

    [1:26:26] Rogan:

    [Exhales deeply] You are hurting my head.

    [1:26:27] Luis:

    Ha ha ha

    [1:26:28] Rogan:

    Yeah we live in a tiny sliver. And I think the idea we are alone is preposterous, I really do.

  • Joe Rogan and Luis Elizondo discuss the possibility that non-human higher intelligences live among us:

    Luis: To this day in China, we have the Panda bear exhibits. What do we do? We don’t disrupt the pandas, we wear panda suits. It sounds silly but you can actually get online and see zoo keepers wearing panda suits because they want to interfere as least as possible with the natural flora and fauna there inside the exhibit.

    Rogan: Do you think there are non-human intelligences that look like us, moving around with us, living amongst us?

    Luis: Do I think it’s possible? Well we are doing it already with the panda bears.

    OMG, politicians are going to turn into furries. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/25 #

  • The big thing yesterday was nodding. Literally everywhere I went people would nod their heads at me. People of all ages and all walks of life, all nodding. It must have happened 20-30 times during the day. Like someone sent them all a memo to nod at everyone, or certainly at me. It started while I was writting yesterday’s morning note, and at about the same exact time I started getting a blocked nose and sneezing. That continued for much of the day. Seems to have subsided now.

    It was a slow day yesterday, hardly anything in the way of food, though I had an instant coffee left from the Nescafe marketing people so had that with cold water early morning, listenned to quite a few podcasts before getting tired. Got gifted a small sandwich, which tasted pretty good, even though it was processed meats. It’s amazing how food tastes when you’re starving.

    There was a lot of harrassment yesterday evening. There was clearly something organised. I spent much of the day down by the canal. Weather was mediocre but nice to be in the open space there. On the way to the internet place that evening to send out the newsletter promo and schedule next week’s issue, all along the route there were people waiting to shout harrassment at me. From security guards aggresively shouting 'gay', to customers sitting out from of cafes shouting various rude stuff, to just randoms scaterred everywhere doing the same, it was just vile hate being thrown at me the entire way.

    I was listening to music as I was walking, something I don’t like doing because it puts my device and earphones at risk, but it drowns out the harrassment, so it’s just about possible to ignore it. But of course I end up having to put myself in danger. Ultimately that’s the worst thing about the harrassment, it’s fucking dangerous a lot of the time.

    Today I’m hoping to get the minimal repo I created to reproduce the reusable workfkow secrets bug. Looks like I’ll be able to buy some food and hot water. But I’m playing catchup again, laundry, washing etc, so not expecting to get a huge amount done. By the time I’ll be caught up it will be the end of the day.

    It’s all just so hopeless, things that take a few hours or even minutes when your life is all functional can literally take weeks. The reusable workflow is a great example. It’s literally been 3 weeks now that I’ve been trying to finish that, but the world just keeps blocking me in one way of another. It’s like I’m in a different universe. Then regular folks just don’t believe you are so stuck, and start testing you to check if you are lying or not, which makes everything even more exponentially harder. I’m spending 90% of my time just dealing with warpath world.

    Already a lot of loud warpathing this morning from the gang stalkers. That was started by early morning bycicle singing lady. She hasn’t been past in a while. That’s been followed by several high jinks loud shouting motorbike gang stalkers. That sort of stuff usually stops around 3am so it’s odd that it’s still happening now. #

Today’s links:

  • Telegram app founder Pavel Durov reportedly arrested at French airport - Arrested aboard his private jet, there was a warrant for his arrest. He’s been living in Dubai since he refused to comply with russian government demands to shut down opposition groups on a social media app he used to own. It’s unclear why there was a french warrant out for his arrest. His fortune estimated to be $15.5bn. Telegram has 900 million users. www.theguardian.com #

  • How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing - Lidl is similar in a way to Aldi, it’s sort of a budget supermarket chain, but it’s got quite a unique vibe, stocking lots of lesser known brands, so there’s lots of choice and you often find products you would never normally try. Super interesting they are getting into cloud computing. I wonder if this is a new trend, where large local businesses start running their own clouds and offering services to smaller local businesses. I think it makes a lot of sense. Interesting they ended up buying a security company co-founded by a former boss of Israel’s secret service Mossad. That ticks the security box for sure. Clients include SAP and Bayern Munich football club. Their main offering is experience keeping competitively sensitive data very confidential. www.ft.com #

  • ‘No thanks, I’ll pass on the service charge’: Why UK diners are opting out of tipping - Really not a good sign. It’s crazy to think that waiting staff have to pick up the slack when the economy goes down the tubes. Huge numbers of people are opting out of discretional service charges. Time for those with money to start overtiping, because if these places go out of business, it will be really tough to get them back up and running again. Tipping works great in good times, gives businesses flexibility, not so great in hard times though. www.independent.co.uk #

  • Apple will let developers use the iPhone's NFC chip - Lots of cool examples of how the new chips could be used. I wonder what the privacy implications are for this new technology. Since it will likely become pervassive tech used everywhere, I’d like to know which services are worth the trade off and which it makes sense to just opt out of using. www.indiehackers.com #

2024/08/24 #

  • Yesterday was kind of a washout productivity-wise, the world is doing it’s thing again where it pretends to be helping but literally every bit of help has a malicious component. Here are my notes from yesterday morning:

    • The bloke in hot water shop yesterday kept on saying the word sim over and over
    • There’s a bycicle vendor that passes the internet place all the time, his loud speaker always has a message that says "your sim lie"
    • This morning the white bag gifted to me during the night had a packet of noodles
    • No hot water but yesterday the lady that gave me an expensive pizza from bakery gave me a large bottle of water
    • Btw I had stomach issues during the night because of the pizza
    • At the internet place this morning it started to rain, it got kind of cold
    • I went to the park to eat the food, would have been nice to have hot water I thought to myself since it’s cold, but can’t get any since no money and clearly police are watching my every move
    • Put blanket around my shoulders to keep warm, had shelter from rain under some trees, sort of a light drizzle rain rather than downpour
    • Prepared the noodles with cold water
    • Openned the noodles to find oddly that there were 2 oil packets. Normally only 1. I decided to throw both away. No way to clean the bowl in any case, oil would just make things more difficult
    • It occurred to me how silly this is as it could be interpreted as a sort of protest
    • 2 minutes later a park sweeper lady passed and swept my potentially-a-protest away, under the carpet so to speak
    • A moment later somebody nearby said ‘we know’
    • There are no words, just when you think your imagination had gone too far, nope it was spot on, they really are that insane about controlling everything
    • Oh and guess what Joe Rogan pod just dropped an episode interview with philosopher Jack Symes about beating the evil god problem. What are the chances?

    So that was the morning. I tried to listen to podcasts but that was very difficult as the world kept setting up warpath situations all around me. From a very "hot" young woman wearing unbelievably white tight jeans on even more unbelievably long legs, standing right in front of me recording some sort of influencer youtube video no doubt. It was like some sort of beauty product shoot, with her long hair being tossed in all directions. There was just no way to concentrate on evil god philosophy. What are the chances?

    And to accompany the white jeans Miss Influencer, directly to my right was a bloke with loads of tastey food stuffing his face. Made my bag of sweet snacks and cold water noodles seem a bit underwhelming. So in both possible sitting orientations on the bench I was sitting at, I was forced to watch some sort of anger goading performance. In the end Miss Influencer got in a big huff about her camera or something and stormed off. Eventually I decided there wasn’t any point trying to fight the warpathing world that was oppositing literally everything I was doing in some way. I was also getting sleepy because not much sleep last night.

    I went back to the internet place, updated this week’s newsletter with some additional podcasts and blog posts I managed to get through during the week. It looked like it was about to rain anyway. At another location a bit later there was a gang of Nescafe marketing people giving out free coffee samples. That was nice however would have been useful when I was falling alseep a bit earlier, and they also didn’t have any hot water. So I had an instant coffee made with cold water. Nearly choked on it as initially the coffee hadn’t disolved.

    Still the coffee was quite nice nevertheless. But the moment didn’t last long before the small middle aged well dressed but super sketchy lady that used to sell cigarettes next to the nearby primary school showed up. Recently she’s ditched the cigarettes and now appears to be some sort of loan shark. She always wears a sort of fancy hat, like she’s of to the vietnamese horse racing or something. It’s hard to tell exactly what she’s doing but people keep showing up, sit next to her, she taps away on her feature phone, taps away on a calculator, they sometimes give her some small amount of money, then she gives them more money in return. Mostly small amounts like 1-40 USD, but in local currency. It’s bizare. She always sits right near me, so I have to move, because I don’t want to be associated with whatever it is she’s doing. Remember the police from earlier that was saying 'money' over and over, well they were positioned exactly where loan shark with fancy hat woman sits. She has her own fold out chair, and a small stool for her, I guess, customers, who 90% of the time are the same exact people.

    Later I got visited by maybe a pedo soap opera westerner bloke. The guy that featured in the recent weird pedo pervert bullying escallations. He bought me a large Coke and a bottle of water, while only getting himself a small no sugar coke, gave me a lecture about how sugar makes you fat. Btw he chose what he bought for me. He was banging on about his job, which seems to change every few days, he apparently works 15 simultaneous jobs or something, and is literally always in trouble with his boss. It was all cash in hand not quite legal, but somehow the story has evolved and now it’s salaried, but not enough, and there is some issues with Visas or something. He has previously tried to get me to work in something he would organise. "Just let me know and I’ll make a call, I know people. Oh and you’ll work" he said while slowly nodding and raising his eyebrows. "You’ll work...every...single...day". Always super sketchy about how it’s organised. He also previously told me that near where he lived the people are kind of hardcore. Said he was speaking to a young boy of about 5 years old out in the street. Apparently the boy later got in trouble with his father, and the father threw him out of the window, the boy fell to his death splaterred on the sidewalk. He said it was horrible. He has a lot of these strange sorts of stories.

    We chatted for a bit, weird conversation, his wife had been away for two weeks, and his place was in a mess, he needed to clean it up before she got back. I wished him best of luck with his last minute cleanup operation as he left. We talked about health and processed foods being unhealthy.

    Later got gifted a bag full of sweet foods and breads and a ginormous industrial size packet of baby wipes. That’s really unusual. What are the chances that should happen right after the pedo apocalypse bullying cycle?

    I ended up not drinking most of the large coke because it turned out that it wasn’t regular coke, it had lime in it, so it just tasted like rum and coke, pretty gross. When I mentioned it to pedo westerner bloke he said 'oh my bad' in the most deadpan I’m not sorry at all infact I most likely did it on purpose you’ve ever seen. Still there’s a tiny minuscule chance he 'got confused' I suppose.

    The garbage bin was surrounded by construction workers, so I placed the 2/3 undrunk bottle in the curb along with all the wrappers from all the sweet snacks, which was called 'food' as it was given to me, all neatly packed so they didn’t fly off in the wind. Later the garbage sweeper bloke had a pop at me for daring to leave garbage in the curb, nevermind that that’s literally what everyone does here. Certainly the construction workers and weird old laddies do. I guess it’s different rules for me though isn’t it.

    I was just thinking that I’d had way too much sugar that day, having had a bag full of mostly sugar stuff in the morning, a large bottle of gross lime coke and another bag full of sugar stuff, and wouldn’t it be nice to eat some real food, when a motorbike bloke stopped and gave me a takeaway food styrofoam box. I gestured thank you, he drove off, I openned the box to find a single fat slab of heavily processed meat, on a bed of something I’ve never seen before. A bit like rice but it’s combined with small bits of sweet gelatiney type stuff, all a yellow color. Was it a sweet dish, was it a savory dish, impossible to tell. It certainly wasn’t the most appealing food in the world. You win yet again world, while yet again pretending that I’m the winner.

    So that was yesterday. Didn’t get much done.

    Today already some harassment, anger goading type stuff, with people wearing head to toe red outfits pacing up and down the road like an angry bull. Also motorbike driveby gang stalkers, but I’ve mostly been ignoring it.

    At least I’ve already written and scheduled today’s newsletter.

    I’ve been sneezing all morning, and had a blocked nose earlier, but that seems to have disapeared. Just me getting mutilated again, nothing to see here, please move along.

    Someone has also been accumulating rocks nearby where I sit, where I’ve previously been assaulted several times already, including rocks and bricks to the body and face. There’s a small pile of them now. Intimidation much?

    No doubt I’ll be blamed for being on the warpath, even though quite clearly it’s the other way around.

    Probably going to be another one of those days. #

Today’s links:

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Supercuts, Urban Art, Bitcoin, AI & Aliens (Issue #178) markjgsmith.com #

  • Balaji’s Network State Becomes a Reality in Singapore - I like almost every aspect of this project. I think there's a huge potential to build something truely ground breaking. But I don’t like the idea of focusing on 'Dark Talent' because it makes it sound like some sort of clandestine thing, especially since he explicitly says that legacy institution people aren’t suitable. I don’t like this exclusionary vibe, seems kind of elitist. The main thing that worries me about the network state movement is that it could very easily be used for bad purposes. Imagine a world where secret criminal network states exist, run by mafias, alongside the existing nation states. That seems scary to me. But if it’s all done in the open it could be brilliant. thedefiant.io #

2024/08/23 #

  • It’s not even daylight yet and I’m neck deep in harrassment, intimidation, lies, bullying, people creating problems, complaining about those, problems, escallating and escallating, and ultimately being blamed. Is it any wonder that I’m completely stuck world? Get your foot off my neck. And now I’m literally being yah’d by the motorbike gang stalkers, very aggressively I might add. That’s literal slavery.

    Let’s back up. A couple of days ago, I was involved in a clearly manufactured situation that got very dangerous, I was nearly killed by on-coming traffic. This was following some weird pedophile based harrassment culminating in a yellow tsunami from tourist motorbike taxis, some of whom knew about the attempted murder of me earlier that day. They were referencing it and finding it hilarious.

    The morning after the attempted murder, there was all sorts of weird sex goading and general harrassment everywhere I went. One thing I didn’t mention was that among this, when I got to the internet place, I think it was yesterday morning, which was the day after the attempted murder, there were some traffic police waiting just up the road from the internet place, parked sort of hiding behind a blue bus. I spotted them ahead of time. It’s very unusual for them to be in that place. What are the chances they would be there the day after I got essentially pushed into oncoming traffic?

    I thought it was a bit odd at the time, well wouldn’t you know it this morning I got woken up by a traffic police motorbike apparently stoping a male motorbike driver and his female passenger. Right on front of me, and in the exact place where the 3 yellow motorbike taxis had shouted 'care care care!' referencing the murder attempt the day before. As the police gave the driver and passenger a hard time for whatever they had done to merrit being stopped, he kept saying the english word 'money' over and over, in amongst what was presumably vietnamese. He also quite clearly and loudly said the word 'yellow'. Eventually he drove off, on his police bike with the all in black military police bloke that was with him. The whole incident took quite a long time, it sort of felt like they were waiting for something.

    At that point, I noticed that somebody had left a white plastic bag with various snack foods. That’d great because I have nothing to eat today. As soon as I picked up the bag, the male and female that had been stopped by the police, said something in english, I can‘t remember exactly what, but it was clear they were waiting for me to find the bag. So the whole situation, which involved actual real police, on an actual real police motorbike, was a staged manufactured incident.

    A short while later as I was gathering myself for the day ahead, a motorbike gang stalker drove past shouting 'go home'. Then shortly after, the very aggressive one passed shouting 'yah!'.

    How is it even possible to get ahead in life, to not get caught up in crime, to just live, when literally everyone, including the fucking police are in on the grift, which involves enslaving you, constantly harrassing you, and possibly murdering you? And what about if the fucking journalists are in some way in on it too? Who are you going to call?

    Answer me that world, because I’m all out of ideas. All the doors are closed. Every god dam thing is a contradiction, and I’m being blamed for everything, blamed for being blamed, blamed just for existing. Infiniti AI nightmare trap much?

    This is the sort of collective action that is not one bit good. It maskerades as help, but really is the mob collaborating to keep you down in the gutter. It’s literally happening to me.

    So maybe I’ll be able to test the minimal repo I created yesterday, in between harrassments, to test the strange 18 secret limit bug I have experiencing on reusable workflows this past week.

    It’s literslly 95% dealing with the world’s extreme bullcrap at the minute, 5% on getting myself out of the trap I’m stuck in. How is this fair in any way world? #

Today’s links:

2024/08/22 #

  • There was much sex related bullying and goading for the rest of the day yesterday with women food vendors calling 'com suon' which is rice pork, 'come soon' instead, then later as I was eating the food I'd bought, 2 girls sitting in front of me continuously repeating 'com suon'. And the bloke shop staff saying 'I love you' to the customer ahead of me as they departed. And just constant small things like that. But at least I was able to buy some food and eat something. It felt like people were trying to make me sneeze the whole day, but I didn’t catch a runny nose or sneezing fits thankfully.

    The soup vendor that occasionally offers me free soup did that again, and a variation on that old pattern emerged where he was saying it was free and the big gruff bloke also working the food stand was saying pay. I confirmed it was free with the bloke that had initially approached me. He speaks quite good english so I confirmed it was indeed free. No major repurcussions until now.

    I listenned to some pretty good podcasts on politics and solo development. Made a lot of notes. Had a few ideas for some blog posts. Perhaps today I’ll find time between the harrassments to write a few. No progress on the reusable workflows yet, hopefully that will happen too. Charged all my devices and caught up with laundry. Hopefully today will be a bit more productive now that I’ve caught up with things. It’s a bit disheartening to know that by tomorrow another starvation cycle will have started, and it will all start over and I’ll be catching up for days only to get maybe 1/2 a day of productivity before it starts over again. #

  • Something else worth mentioning that I forgot about. The weird western bloke with the bald head that walks slowly showed up twice. First I passed him when I went to a place along the canal I haven’t been to in a while 2 days ago. Later that evening, he passed by in a totally different location. He used to apear all the time during COVID. He’s kind of creepy, has this strange vibe like he’s at an invisible funeral, walking slowly, head hanging down. He was wearing a purple tshirt. I mention it because it’s bound to turn into some sort of warpath. #

  • Rory and Alistair on the treatment of palestinian prisoners

    It was interesting to hear Rory Stewart on a recent Rest is Politics podcast episode [35:18] discussing Isreal’s horrendous treatment of palestinian soldiers:

    The situation in Isreali prisons is very very disturbing. There are currently 10000 palestinians detained in isreali prisons approximately. Of those, 4781 have been detained without trial, no charges, without the ability to defend themselves. It could be that they are young men of a certain age, who might be considered by the isreali defence forces as potential allies of terrorist groups. Some of them appear to be in purely for posting stuff on Facebook that seems to be critical of the isreali government.

    And B'Tselem which is an isreali human rights organisation founded by progressive isrealis who are critical of the isreali government, have conducted interviews with 57 of these Palestinian prisoners and have recorded what they believe to be an absolutely systematic policy of physical torture, mental torture, depravation of food, depravation of water, depravation of sleep, striping of personal processions, 12 people being crammed into a prison cell designed for 6, some of them obviously sleeping on the floor, with no beds, no mattresses, no blankets. And this appears to be in line with the fact that the security minister, Itimar Ben Givere, who is on the right of the Isreali cabinet, has made it absolutely clear that he intends to make conditions in prisons worse for prisoners.

    I was struck with how similar the language used to describe the conditions is to many of my descriptions of the situations that I've been put through here in Vietnam. Also for any numerologists out there, I can tell you that in this context, the number 57 is significant.

    Rory continues:

    He’s trying to hit the absolute legal minimum of provision for Palestinian prisoners, which is leading to this systematic abuse and torture. Related to this, 5 isreali soldiers are still currently charged for sodomising a prisoner in a desert camp. The associated press, in case people think this is just B'Tselem making this up, has also been conducting interviews with released prisoners, revealing people who are being allowed into daylight for 15 minutes in a periods of a few days. One of them hadn’t been outside for 87 days. So this is very very very disturbing.

    Whatever one thinks, heinous attacks by Hamas on October, horrifying terrorist atrocities, but the response from the isreali government is being challenged and should be challenged and is being challenged by isreali human rights groups quite correctly, cause this is horrifying stuff.

    What kind of legal minimum equates to systematic abuse and torture including physical torture, mental torture, depravation of food, depravation of water, depravation of sleep, striping of personal processions? That’s the most insane legal minimum I’ve ever heard about.

    Alistair Campbell responds:

    I guess the thinking behind Charlotte’s question is that, is it really being challenged? Here we are in Chicago and the biggest demonstration that’s going on, there’s quite a few demonstrations around the place, the biggest demonstration is about the american administration and position on Gaza, and there’s pretty steadfast support for Isreal. And the other thing in this context that was, I thought, quite newsworthy and interesting this week, was this letter of resignation by a civil servant at the foreign and commonwealth and development office, Mark Smith, who essentially had said I’ve been trying to raise alarm about our system for selling arms to isreal, and what they have been used for, I get nowhere, therefore I am resigning, and it didn’t make that much of a splash. And I think this is the point that we’ve been making repeatedly is that this stuff has just become very very normalised. And as it happens, I think David Lammy, he is reviewing this position about Britain’s arms relationship with Isreal. I don’t know when that’s coming, I don’t know what the decision will be, but I wonder whether Mark Smith’s was a deliberate move trying to push in that direction. I’m sure you’ve spoken to people in the foreign office who are pretty alarmed about this?

    Well obviously that’s going to catch my attention. How bizare, another Mark Smith trying to raise awareness about people being miss-treated. I don’t think I’ve ever met another Mark Smith in person. He sounds pretty cool.

    And a final back and forth on the matter:

    Rory: Yes but there is of course a consensus between the main political parties in Britain, and pretty much a consensus between the political parties in the US as well, and pretty much a consensus between the main political parties in Germany, which remain pretty stead fastly pro-Isreal, and again I am very aware that in quoting this report, and criticising the treatment of prisoners, I can see the flood of emails about to come in, saying at least we investigate, at least we have human rights groups, at least we have imprisoned our soldiers for sodomising people. But I don’t think you can get around the fact that the security minister has made it entirely clear that this is a policy. Nor can you get around the fact that 5000 people are detained without trial.

    Alistair: Or the fact that 40000 people are dead, and they’re not all Hamas.

    Rory: And this is where in Chicago we need a very clear sense from Kamala Harris on what she’s actually doing, what is her strategy, because clearly Biden’s strategy hasn’t worked. And I assume the way to do this, if she wants to hold the two parts of her party together, is to say to Isreal your strategy is not working. This is not the way to win a war and you are going to have to stop doing this. Meanwhile let’s not forget about Lebanon, let’s not forget about the possibility of a war with Iran.

    Strange old world sometimes isn’t it fellow internet cousins?

    Here’s to hoping a resolution to the situation will be found. A lot of people suffering unnecessarily.

  • Steph and Grace on how education affects collective organising & action

    I enjoyed listening to the latest The Rest is Money Podcast episode where Steph talks to economics author Grace Blakeley. One part that stood out to me was when they were talking about education and how it has a big impact on the values the people that end up in leadership positions have.

    Grace outlines her education journey:

    I went through various private schools, and then through to Oxford and especially at Oxford I found that the economics and the politics we were studying were pretty irrelevant to the way that the world actually works, but also you are constantly fed this idea, never explicitly, always implicitly in terms of the activities that you are encouraged to signup for, and the way politics and political societies work, you are fed this idea that there is this hierarchy, there’s this natural hierarchy, where the powerful, the successful, the inginuitive, the intelligent, naturally rise to the top, and the only good way to run a society is to make sure that those people do have all the power and get to tell everyone else what to do. And I think that this subtly figures in a lot of the politics that we have today and the way that politicians understand the way society should work. [...]

    There’s this inherent suspicion, amongst people who have been trained to believe that there’s this natural hierarchy in society, of any forms of collective organising because, they are like, those people are just a mob, they can’t be trusted with power cause they will abuse it [...] it’s based on this elitism that certain people are in charge and some people should obbey. And I just don’t think that’s how a functioning society works.

    Steph then compares with her quite different experience:

    I am someone that grew up in the North East. I went to state school in a very deprived area. Kind of defied the odds to do what I’m doing now. What’s interesting on what you’re saying is, for me collective action should be in education. It shouldn’t be when you are in your job. As much as you were taught you can rise to the top and everything, but for me in state education in a deprived area, half the time was spent just trying to teach us how to survive as much as anything else, so there wasn’t time for all this leadership and how to speak publicly and how to do all these amazing things, it was about how do we not end up in crime.

    How we collectively organise and take action is changing, and we need to realise that there is quite a lot of variety in how we’ve all been brought up and educated. That can be a good thing. We need to understand each other so we can integrate and all meaningfully contribute and feel part of society.

    Personally I love the idea of collective organising and action, but there are a lot of situations where it effectively does turn into a mob that bullies individuals not part of that specific mob. And with technology and AI if we are not careful, that could lead us into a situation where we are all in some way bullied by the mob.

    The whole episode is worth listening to but I thought this was a particularly endearing and eye opening back and forth.

Today’s links:

2024/08/21 #

  • There was a bunch of aftermath escallations following yesterday’s attempt attempt on my life, but also a continuation of the kids in yellow thing, which morphed into a more generalised gangs with a yellow person thing, and yesterday turned into a full blown yellow tsunami. In the evening yesterday, a huge gathering of motorbikes, probably around 30-40 bikes, installed themselves on the opposite side of the road, directly in front of me.

    They do this occasionally, have been doing it for several months now. It’s ostensibly some kind of city tour for groups that stay in the nearby hotel. The thing is all the drivers wear bright yellow tshirts. And the other thing is they always seem to appear at the end of a bullying cycle. I call this thing a yellow tsunami, because the whole color tsunami thing happens quite often, usually with red, white and yellow. Something will happen, some sort of manufactured incident, and a color is anchored to that incident, escallations follow, culminating in a tsunami, where a sea of that color materialises. Sounds weird, but it definutely happens.

    Are all the participants in a tsunami aware they are tsunamying? Probably not, but some definitely are. Take yesterday’s yellow tsunami for example, about 5 minutes after they arrived, 3 of the yellow tshirted drivers went to the shop behind me. They returned, each with a large bottle of cold water. As they crossed the road right in front of me to get back to their bikes, all three shouted in unison "care, care, care!", followed I might add by gaffows of laughter. Well guess what, it sounded familiar, and sure enough I remembered a few moments later what had happened earlier that day. When I essentially got forced into on-comming traffic, extremely dangerously, the thing I shouted very loudly to get the bikes that were heading directly at me to slow down was "Carefull!", repeatedly. So it’s pretty obvious that least some of them knew about that, which happened in a totally different location. This isn’t a small town either, this is a massive city.

    There was a bunch of other stuff, mostly drive by motorbike stalker harrassment stuff. One thing worth mentioning is that it’s pretty clear the gang stalkers organise set pieces, with several of them passing in succession, each shouting or doing something related. For example a bloke walked by with a tshirt with only the large letters on the front 'RUN'. Moments later an older bloke on a bicycle passed by, he passes quite often, very often cranky with a gargoyle type voice, very tanned and shriveled face. He was doing a mean face and pointing directly at me. That was followed a few minutes later by another bloke on a bycicle, who was basically a younger better looking version of the old cranky bloke. He looked at me as he passed and as soon as eye contact was made he looked away very quickly as if he was scared. Given all the weird pedo and pervert shit from the past few days, this seems very much like a set piece to me.

    This morning a motorbike gang stalker did a driveby shouting 'allow'. That’s another one of their favorites during a yellow tsunami. It’s because the words sound so similar. It’s mind control at best but often also anger goading. Today it happened moments before morning yellow lady passed by. She passes by every morning, about the time I get up, crosses the road directly in front of me. She always wears a yellow tshirt. They are 'allowing' me to get up and leave. This sort of thing happens everywhere. They want total control of you at all times.

    Okay enough chatter, the plan for today is the write a few blog posts and maybe create a minimal example of the reusable workflow secrets limit issue if I have time. Looks like I’ll be able to get some food today, and they allowed me eat something last night so I have some energy today.

    Hopefully the harrassment won’t be too intense today. #

  • Just got to the internet place. Clearly another bullying cycle has started. First, earlier while I was writting the previous note, a motorbike gang stalker drove past, the bloke driving had a really horse voice, sounds like he has some vocal chord issues, perhaps a polip, something I have had btw, so I know what it sounds like. Well guess what, in one of the shop cafes I often go to, every afternoon a bloke shows up that has literally the same voice. Anyhow he drives past blah blahing about something or other, and the long legged girl sitting on the back says loudly 'I love'.

    A short while later I make my way to the internet place, on route I first have to walk around a small mound of used white tissues that have been left scattered. This had stopped happening, but I guess they are back to their old tricks again. I continue to the corner where the dead rat was previously left and also a brick on a separate a occasion. It’s been a while since the weird old lady that does her pretend humping exercise was there, but she’s there again this morning, both hands holding the fence, legs spread, doing her weird pretend humping thing.

    I am reminded at this point that yesterday in the park, right after I had nearly been murdered, so I was quite shell shocked, sitting resting, some badmington players, a bloke and young woman about the same age were having a conversation. The girl kept using the english word 'money' over and over. When I looked directly opposite me about 30 yards away, suddenly an old lady who had been standing there waiting, sprung into action, opened a wallet and looked through it for a few moments, then put it away, put her two hands on the bench near her and started doing the pretend humping thing. Same as the weird old lady from the dead rat / brick corner. I said something, I can’t remember what, it wasn’t rude or overly loud, just enough for her to hear me, she scurried away very quickly. There were loads more strange incidents that I won’t go into now.

    I continue to the next corner where there is a middle aged slightly large lady wearing head to toe the brightest white outfit ever, very keen to try to make eye contact with me as I pass. Is this the start of the white tsunami that I predicted? I guess we shall see. The thing that makes me think I’m entering a white tsunani is that the shop cafe where the polup horse voice guy shows up, is the place where recently on the very white walls a small erect penis + balls with a forward slash / above it, was grafiti’d on the wall, just to the right and a few meters on front of where I sit, so it’s always in some way in my periferal vision.

    I did write recently that I like urban art, but let’s be honest, this isn’t quite Banksy caliber art we’re talking about here. It’s juvenile crap being used by pervert gang stalkers to sexually harrass people.

    Another thing that happened as I walked to the internet place, a motorbike taxi, wearing yellow tshirt, stopped to ask if I wanted a ride. That’s extremely unusual at this time in the morning. I can only remember one other time a moto taxi stoped during this walk at this hour. This time he simply said 'Be the one, motorbike?'. That was about 50 yards before encountering the all in white woman at the corner. And guess what, I followed Keanu Reeves yesterday on Threads. What are the chances?

    Btw, murderer bloke from yesterday is once again in a mood and pretending to blow his nose everytime he passes me as he moodily walks up and down the path preparing the sandwich stand. #

Today’s links:

  • Sicilians are brought up to hate our island – but those of us who flee are seen as the enemy - Lots of stuff in the news the past few says about Sicily. It’s interesting to learn some of the details about their expat culture and how it’s connected to long histories of invasions, and is kind of toxic in places. Every country handles expats slightly differently, but there are commonalities for sure. Some of the things she describes ring true to me too. I find it all very complicated. I’m a sort of double expat, having grown up outside the UK, then returned for university and early career then moved away a second time. Being an expat is definitely weird. I wonder whether I’ll ever have english friends again sometimes or if they just think of me as a foriegner too. www.theguardian.com #

2024/08/20 #

  • I managed to finish listening to several podcasts I had started listening to yesterday. Very low on energy atm though because I’ve hardly been able to eat anything. Hardly any food and lots of bullying. The bags are so much heavier when you haven’t eaten in a few days.

    I went to an old spot I hadn’t been to in a while yesterday near the canal. They have taken away some of the benches I would previously sit on. On the opposite side of the canal all the benches have been replaced with concrete seats that don’t have backrests, a bit like the seats you get at bus stops. I guess they no longer want people to spend too much time outside. Without back support it’s a lot harder to sit for long periids of time.

    The only benches remaining were the ones whose legs had been entombed in the pathway’s cement. It’s almost as if this has happened before and the previous lot took measures to ensure they would always have some benches with back rests.

    Didn’t get any coding done yesterday. The secrets bug is still blocking everything. I’m going to have to write another energency newsletter early while I’ve still got power, then turn everything off until I can charge the devices up again. I’m so sick of these mini boom bust cycles.

    Another thing, anytime I start doing anything with my device, a group of people appear and just sort of start loutering nearby, lightly chatting, but it’s like fake chatting or something. Their actions feel in some way connected to what you are doing. It becomes really impossible to do anything, because they are incredibly distracting. The closer you get to whatever it us you are figuring out, the worse it gets. Happened yesterday in the park, along the canal, and this morning outsite the shop.

    There appears to be another one of those regime changes. It’s like I’m being forced into so called bad behavior, because I have to stand up to the bullying, abd ind group rewards me for it while another does the opposite. I also appear to get rewarded when I get mutilated, especially if I accidentaly do it to myself.

    The sunburn from a few days ago is quite painful today. Feels like it’s going to be another struggle today. Not so nice and quiet this morning, lots of loud people shouting as they drive past, like there’s something in the air.

    Feels like the world is about to be unhappy with everything again.

    Almost forgot, there was another camicaze earth worm yesterday. It was trying to cross the road. No earth worms doing basically anything for 5 years, then suddenly in the space of a few weeks it’s like some sort of earthworm apocalypse. They keep appearing in places I go to or routes I walk along. Perhaps there’s an earthworm health thing going on. The one yesterday got run over by a motorbike a few seconds after I noticed it. The poor thing recoiled in pain, flopped around for a bit and eventually sort of disapeared into a small shrivelled mound of earthworm skin. Much like how a witch disolves into bubbling putrid green stuff when it dies. Kind of gross. Poor little guy. This aggression against earth worms has to stop I tell you!

    If it turns out that god is in fact a very evolved giant earthworm in the sky, let’s please all remember I stood up for the earthworms. Thank you. #

  • Well I haven’t as predicted had a brick thrown in my face, or fallen out of a window, or starved to death (yet), but earlier was involved in a very dangerous manufactured incident where I ended up inadvertantly walking out into head on traffic. It’s the second time that something like this has happened in around a month.

    Last time there was a gang of teenagers taking photos that appeared to be waiting for me, as I arrived to cross the road to get to the place I can get internet, they suddenly changed direction, walking straight at me. With my heavy bags I was unnable to stop and was forced down the high curb right into on coming traffic. It’s a very busy road, luckily I was able to manouvre between the motorbikes and cars.

    This time the situation occurred pretty much in the exact same spot but on the other side of the road. The only difference is there is no curb on that side. I had been using the internet in between the two cafes there. I have to stand to use the internet there. One of the locals that helps run a mobile sandwich stand that’s there most weekday mornings, had been warpathing me all morning. It started with him spitting behind me as he walked past, which was followed by several loud noises each time he passed near me.

    I’d been standing for over an hour when I decided to leave as I was getting very tired. I collected my heavy bags and somewhat abscent mindedly and tired, as I haven’t eaten much the past few days as they are starving me again, walked to the side of the road to cross. There was a ton of on coming traffic, and as I reached the side of the road, the local bloke suddenly jumped up from the seat next to the food stand moving very fast in my direction. I took my eyes off the road to look behind me to see what was heading towards me. He then pretended to be blowing his nose onto the floor, holding one nostril, but really he was trying to suprise and scare me. And it worked because with the momentum of the bags, by the time I’d turned my head back to the traffic I was already fully in the road. With no way to stop the only thing possible was to continue crossing which was fine until mid way across the road. At that point there were no gaps in the traffic and a tight group of motorbikes headed directly at me, one after the other. I only made it across the road by shouting 'careful' extremely loudly repeatedly which had the effect of speeding up the breaking of the motorbikes. It was unbelievably dangerous. With these bags, had a bike hit me I would most likely have ended up on the floor, and run over by many cars and bikes. There were hundreds of them as it was the morning rush hour. I could easily have been killed.

    It’s 100% clear to me that he planned it, did it on purpose, and was attempting to get me to walk out into the on coming traffic. I have zero doubt about that. He has been around for a few months now, is very often in a foul mood and about as often harrasses me in one way or another, always trying to provoke me.

    Interestingly when I entered the park across the road there was a group of old people in their 80s sitting on a bench, and as I walked past, one of them shouted 'you learn' at me. Seems this had been planned by many. Absolutely attrocious behaviour. It’s no wonder this place is such a shit hole. If the older generation are taking part in organised community murders and passing it off as some sort of learning experience, you can start to understand why so many have head injuries, huge scars, and missing limbs. And why things in this place just appear to get worse.

    What are the chances that this should happen today, the day after I link to an article about the mafia, and the same day british entrepreneurs and their accountants are turning up dead in Sicilian boat accidents and murdered in strange pedestrian vs car incidents in the UK. Also Banksy, he’s probably got something to do with it too. Why not?

    Also also, you might find these two articles I wrote about organised crime interesting. The first one is about how AI might affect criminals, and the second is about in the future whether crime will even be possible.

    Might as well try to get something out of this rotten day. Always be promoting. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/19 #

  • The yellow tshirt thing that I confirmed yesterday morning most definitely became a thing yesterday. It spread and morphed into something slightly different. Gangs of stalkers were waiting for me in every location I went to. Each gang had one member that was wearing a yellow tshirt or a yellow rain jacket they clearly had just put on over their clothes in a rush. What’s more it appeared seats had been organised in such a way to make it much more likely I would sit in a specific location, or at least to ensure there would be some form of confrontation wherever I sat.

    For example, on the way down to the water canal, which I hadn’t been to for quite a while, the skinny girl in the green dress passed me in the opposite direction. She’s been around for years, probably in her twenties, always wearing the same dress, always looking like she should eat something. She always appears when they are doing weird sex goading shit, but also when they are starving me. This time I guess it was a bit of both because the was multi-tasking, walking while eating out of one of the polystyrene takeaway containers. It’s very unusual to see her eating something, let alone eating while walking.

    Also when I got to the canal and was looking for a seat, a large butch women with a mobile street stand was sitting on the curb right behind one of the seats I often sit. Based on past experience as soon as I would have sit there she would likely get on the phone and start yapping away with a piercing vicious gargoil witch type voice. She was wearing tight green leggings, just like the pervert butch women from the internet place the previous morning.

    So I gave that seat a miss, but at the next one along just as I arrived I noticed a small 2 bike motorbike gang there waiting for me. One passenger was wearing a yellow rain jacket which looked like it had just been put on in a bit of a rush. As soon as I got there, they sprung into action, and started having some form of argument. I eventually called them out as a motorbike gang stalker gang. Asked them to stop following me, and to stop being perverts, to stop perverting everything. They eventually stopped and both women had quite big grins on their faces as they drove off. The two blokes with them looked kind of clueless.

    I was there for a few hours. There weren’t that many people passing, the morning rush had passed and the sun was out. Then there were gang after gang of yellow tshirted children that started to materialise. It was one after the other on both sides of the canal. One of the groups had 4 kids in yellow and an adult also in yellow. A gang of teens with one yellow tshirt wearer passed twice, the first time shouting 'you learn'. On the return leg the yellow tshirt wearer hid his head under the yellow shirt. Perhaps they were refering to the sun that was beaming down, or perhaps they were saying I should learn to not speak up and hide myself. Impossible to know exactly.

    Anyway the point here is to see that once these escallations start, they spread, and take on different forms, and there’s basically nothing you can do. If you say something they often escallate, and if you say nothing they also often escallate because they think you are a soft touch and it’s an opportunity to bully you without fear of repurcussions.

    I was able to get some food later that afternoon and thankfully it was quiet in the shop cafe I went to. That evening there was almost a total drop off of the harrassment, for basically the entire evening. Like night and day, like all the harrassers had gone home to bed ot something. The mood was very quiet everywhere. I was able to write a couple of rather up beat blog posts. One about urban art and the other about the interesting phenominon of using supercuts to expose media manipulation, which I was able to link back to some of things I’ve been experiencing here in the social layer.

    So it was kind of a pleasant end to the day, though I was quite tired physically and mentally by the end of it all.

    Today, the plan is to finish listening to some of the podcasts I started yesterday, and I need to figure out how I’m going to deal with the odd secrets limit that’s appeared in the reusable workflows. Based on my research it shouldn’t be blocking like this. There isn’t a limit to the number of secrets, certainly nowhere near 18 secrets. I might create a minimal example to try and reproduce the error. Not sure how much that will help though as I suspect the bug won’t showup, but perhaps I’ll be able to copy and paste a known good secrets definition with 18 secrets. Some software bugs are just so puzzling.

    Btw, though there was several motorbike harrassment incidents earlier this morning when I got up. I completely ignored them and the entire time I’ve been writting this note the whole world, though mediumly busy, has been quite quiet. Literally as I wrote that last sentence a gang of 10 youths all wearing black and white outfits just turned up where I am. And so it goes.

    Update: Forgot to mention, I took my tshirt off yesterday just before lunch, it was really hot, I was in the shade the whole time as far as I could tell, under some trees, but it obviously wasn’t enough shade. Ended up getting a slight sunburn all over my chest and shoulders. Not sure how that works. Surely shade is shade. Anyway, just to note, I ended up getting mutilated again! Told you, this always happens. Now there will be escalations where the world won’t believe I didn’t do it on purpose, and will keep setting up situations that are just outside my consciousness window of perception. Again and again I’ll get blamed.

    It’s strange, almost as if either the world mutilates me or my body mutilates itself. It’s like neither believes the other. Something to think about. There’s definitely something that keeps happening. Not sure if the end-of-task-yah is related. That happens more often than not too. #

Today’s links:

  • Digital euro faces skepticism in Germany over privacy concerns - They say "The main motivation for the digital euro is to decrease Europe’s reliance on non-European payment services". Seems like a worthy goal but many countries still prefer cash, worried that a CBDC would enable government surveillence. Apparently their CBDC has an offline mode. I wonder sometimes how good the privacy is with cash since all notes have serial numbers, technically you could trace usage if you really wanted to, though might be difficult at scale. It will probably be a moot point eventually once they track our thoughts with the brain implants. cryptobriefing.com #

2024/08/18 #

  • All the strange pedophile / pervert shit from the past few days has me very shaken. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. And it didn’t stop yesterday after my last note on the matter. It continued throughout the day and into the evening yesterday. Culminating in a bizare conversation with a western bloke that stops to chat every now and then, who sometimes gifts me some food, water and soft drinks from the nearby shop, or sandwich shop. This individual has a propensity imo for some very tall tales, so it’s always very difficult to know where the truth lies. Also the sort of person that is more concerned about being an alpha male in control, and I think wouldn’t think twice on bending the truth if it meant he had the upper hand in some way. Yet in his own way he has been kind and generous.

    Anyway, in our conversation there were several instances which I would classify as blatant double speak. And it felt prepared, like he’d either been thinking about saying what he said for a while or could be a well trodden path, some turns of phrase he has used in the past. It happenned right at the start of the conversation. I don’t remember the exact wording, but I think it was pretty clear references to pedophile activities. Something along the lines of seing certain things that you can’t unsee. It was said using facial expressions that initially communicated it could be some form of dark joke, but turned into something along the lines of having been forced or coersed into these sorts of situations. Something unpleasant.

    It’s really odd, and hard to describe. This person has previously talked about being involved with people that are into bad things i.e. criminals, but it’s always felt like someone flexing in order to get the upper hand, a form of distorting and perverting reality with lies. When he goes off piste into one of these rants he takes on a sort of soap opera type character, where everything is overly dramatic, you can almost feel the cemeras slowly zooming in on the long pauses like it’s an episode of the Bold and the Beautiful or something.

    I mention this for context because even though what he said was really friggin’ weird I’m not convinced on balance that he was actually involved in the things he was implying. But he might be, that’s the troubling thing. You never really know. I wanted to write about it here because I said I would, and also if there is weird shit going on, whether you are a local or a foreigner, western or eastern, whatever the colour of your skin, male of female, old medium aged or young, that doesn’t matter to me, I will write about it. I don’t seek to get anyone in trouble, but I’m also not going to be easily intimidated.

    The other reason is that this all comes at the end of another bullying cycle, and this individual has a tendency to pop up when things in my environment are very intense. Whether that’s his doing I don’t know, but it definitely happens. With all this it’s very difficult to write about because with all the strange things that happen, it often feels like I’m dealing with people that are also caught up in some weird shit. The final thing I want to say about this is that this individual has a striking resemblance to somebody from my past. I’ve seen a lot of doppelgangers of people from my past while I’ve been here. I used to mention it in my writtings a lot but I’ve mostly stopped. I just got kind of bored of doing it. But it still happens, though somewhat less frequently. It’s either doppelgangers of celebrities, or people from my past. Like you are meeting a relative of theirs, but it often doesn’t make sense because in your earlier life they didn’t have such relatives, at least as far as you were aware.

    So all this to say, things are very fucked up at the minute. I hardly know how to think about it let alone talk or write about. It’s just so pervasive, and happens in some shape or form everywhere I go. Many many things seem to be connected and it could be bad shit is happening, but there’s also a lot of signs that whatever the actual reality is, it’s very complicated for everyone involved.

    The two biggest themes that crop up again and again in these incidents similar to what I've described here are pedophilia and slavery. It happens constantly.

    That’s all I’m going to say about it right now. Hopefully I won’t get another brick in the face, fall out of a window or starve to death. No doubt the bullying will continue, in fact while I was writting this note there have been several drive-by harrassments and a couple of local blokes also tried to get a reaction out of me by anger goading me. And so it goes. #

  • Forgot to mention that children wearing all in yellow outfits or bright yellow tshirts is definitely trending. It must have happened at least 5 times yesterday. Just wanted to mention that because I'll often mention something that might seem like it could just be random, but it later is confirmed to be 'a thing'. I‘ve gotten very good at recognizing when something like that is happening, so I can spot it very early in the cycle. So just a follow up to say that the yellow thing is happening and spreading through the various groups. #

  • The culture jamming qualities of urban art

    I had totally forgotten about how much I like street art until I read this article about UK street artists earlier today. It’s funny how seing pictures of some of these murals brings back all sorts of memories of places I’ve lived in, or visited or just past by often. All those pieces of art are ever present but they sort of disapear into the scenery, into the background. They become part of the city, part of your everyday life, like an old friend you bump into every now and then.

    What I love about street art is how it channels culture jaming in really positive ways. In that for a moment as you go about your daily routines, it pierces through the invisible bariers that innevitably rise in between us and wakes you up out of the automatisms of life. For a small moment you pause and appreciate life in it’s purest form, and then life goes on. It’s some sort of combination of magic and love encoded directly into the environment.

    And people take photos, and send them to their friends, the love and ambience spreads. Yes I guess it’s strickly speaking illegal but it can have such a net benefit, when done right and used sparingly, for the ambience of a place. It breathes life right into the often cold and mundane realities of urban life. There are lots of examples all over the world, but my favorite, and I am of course very biased, is the street art in the UK.

    There is something so personal and unique about UK street art, the artists must spend so much time thinking about their projects because I find that more often than in other places they seem to seemlessly blend in to the location almost as if they had somehow grown out of the walls, bridges and nooks and crannies where they appear. Getting this type of art right I imagine is very difficult, a sort of synthesis of a melange of cultures and vibes and historical events, boiling it all down to an essence, but it’s also a sort of curration, one that breaks right out of the frame and into the place where it resides.

    Also I think one of the unique aspects of this art form is that it references the culture, becomes the culture and shapes the direction of the culture. And as an observer of it, you somehow feel part of it, like you are participating, because it’s about your city, and you are living inside that city, and when you look at the art there’s a part of you - the part that in some way contributed to that city by being there everyday just doing normal everyday things - that is inside the art itself. I’m not sure if others feel that way, but that’s how I feel about it.

  • Supercuts show you the manipulation

    Supercuts have been around for years at this point. They are a sort of megamix of clips on a specific topic where all the clips are stuck together back to back. I guess they arose out of actual megamixes which were more music based, where a whole load of tunes from a specific artist were mixed together. For example here’s an 80s megamix - 1980s Greatest hits mixed nonstop. Oh the 80s were such fun.

    I remember listening to megamixes in my youth, so the concept has been around for decades. When consumer audio and video editing tools became more widespread, along with online video sharing websites like YouTube became popular, supercuts of classic bits from various actors back catalogues of films started popping up everywhere. A famous example is Nicholas Cage loosing his temper. They are pretty fun, often a sort of homage to the person that’s being supercuted.

    I never really used to pay much attention to elections, but the past few months have been filled with pretty exciting election cycles in the UK, France, the US and the EU, with some small interesting appearances from places like South Africa and Iran. World politics is actually kind of interesting these days.

    What I’ve noticed recently is how supercuts are now being used during election campaigns to illustrate how much the main stream media is manipulated. The best example of this is in the recent US elections, where vice president Harris is now standing against Trump in the upcoming elections. Some politics observers have started putting together supercuts with pieces taken from main stream news channels where they are all using not just similar language, but absolutely identical language week in, week out.

    It’s really odd to hear this because it totally breaks the facade they portray as trusted professional journalists. It turns out they all just parrot the political party weekly talking points. It’s easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it, but the supercuts expose the lie. It’s so blatant to be truely comedic. Take for example this supercut of news anchors talking about the Republicans as being 'weird'.

    The irony is that the supercut exposes were the real weirdness lies, in the fact that a huge part of the main stream media are just puppet mouthpieces for the Democrats. I think it’s probably the most original use of digital media I’ve seen in years. I fully expect these supercuts to get more popular in the near future.

    Another thing that I think supercuts show you goes far beyond politics. It’s really just an example of how the social layer of society can be hacked. And it can be done pretty easily. I mention this because it’s the sort of thing that can happen outside of television and radio, it can happen in just regular real life. Anywhere there are networks of connected humans, which these days is made all the more easy with social media and encrypted group messaging apps but could easily be implemented by just word of mouth.

    I write a lot about my experiences living here in Vietnam, and there is no doubt in my mind that a version of this occurs here. Events happen, often manufactured, and the word on the street spreads really quickly through the various groups of people like the food vendors, the security guards, the park gardeners, the motorbike taxi drivers, and eventually to the regular population of adults, children, office workers and even older folks. You can often see things spreading over several days. It tends to escallate, and to be honest it can be quite scary. Sometimes it’s totally organic, other times it feels very orchestrated.

    I write about it now, for example in this blog post about a recent bullying cycle, and another very strange and quite dark one that happened just in the past few days. I’m making the link to these supercuts so you can get a sense for the type of thing that can occur. When targeted individuals try to explain what’s happening they can often seem a bit unhinged. That’s because this type of thing really is quite disturbing to your senses. I think the supercuts can give you a glimpse of the type of harrassment and bullying that happens in societies, which often goes unnoticed, but is very real. It’s a good thing to be aware of in case it happens to you but also so you can empathise when you see it happen to others.

    Modern life is weird, and it’s likely going to get weirder, but ultimately we are all in this together.

Today’s links:

2024/08/17 #

  • Difficult to know even where to start today. The pervert everything motorbike gang stalkers were doing their sleep depravation basically the entire night. It doesn’t feel like I got any sleep. As soon as I would start to fall asleep, one would drive by and shout unbelievably witty like 'lie', or if they were being particularly extra witty 'lie' 'lie'. This sort of thing kept happening from late last night until daylight this morning. There was also a gang of twenty somethings outside the shop that would occasionally get involved to gaffaws of laughter. I’m really very exhausted now.

    There was also some weird sex shit to go along with the starvation and thirsting they are putting me through again. This time the sex shit was really really weird. Earlier in the evening a bloke wearing a black tshirt with the letters 'BAD' in giant white text had been trying to get into the school that’s across and a bit up the road. Then there was a motorbike taxi droping off a bloke nearbye who said really loudly 'yellow' to the passenger, nothing else.

    Then I remembered that that morning there had been a weird incident with an adult and 2 children walking past in the opposite direction. I remember thinking at the time that it really seemed like a manufactured incident, anyway both children were wearing bright yellow tshirts.

    Well back to yesterday evening’s escallations, a western couple walked past both wearing head to toe white outfits. Then there was a motorbike gang stalker where the adult passenger was waving in my direction exactly like a young child waves. Basically pretending to be a child waving. Then another motorbike gang stalker making a noise which I can’t really figure out how to turn into text, but it’s the sound of a sobbing young boy as his bottom lip qwivers. I know that sounds weird but there is literally a sound that is exactly that, and the motorbike gang stalker was making it.

    Then motorbike gang stalkers started driving by making sex noises and shouting 'come!'. Then loads or white cars suddenly everywhere. Then more motorbike gang stalkers shouting something like 'babies' and lots of lol'ing. I can’t remember exact details but it got really fucking weird. I eventually just said something along the lines of 'I don’t know what you are up to but none of this is funny, it’s all just fucking perverted and strange, stop being perverts', which of course made them become even more perverted and weird.

    It went on for hours. Gangs of men would walk past and shout things like 'yeah yeah yeah' as in 'whatever'. All I could do was call them perverts, and asked them to consider stoping their bizare perverted pedo escallations. They of course continued. Eventually I just said 'look I don’t know why today of all days you’ve decided to let your strange perverted fantasies out of the closet, you are obviously going to continue doing this no matter what I say, you do you, let’s all learn about your strange perverted pedo shit together'. It kept on happening for literally hours. At one point, I think it was right after the 'yeah yeah yeah' from the gang of men, even an apparent police officer drove past on a non-descript motorbike, driving really slowly giving me the stink eye. Several months ago there was what I think was a manufactured incident where an apparent police officer arrested a bloke and the police officer was saying much the same thing as he arrested him and the bloke was trying to explain his situation. Anyway that was again followed by more weird motorbike gang stalker perverted f-d up shit.

    I was getting really tired at this point, but they really wouldn’t let me go to sleep, it really intensified. The gang outside the shop was finding everything hilarious. I mentioned that I wasn’t trying to be funny, that I’d much prefer to not have to be funny, but what choice did I have. If I said nothing, I would later get bullied even more or worse. Either way it looks like I’ll get bullied in some way. Ultimately it’s all just intimidation and warpathing, blaming the victim for their strange perversions, creating the problem they complain about, blocking the solutions they suggest, and escallating and escallating until they have thoroughly painted themselves into a corner at which point they just blame everything on me.

    I’ve been typing this out as best I can remember it. I’m not going to be intimidated by this kind of stuff. I’m going to write about it. If you perverts think it’s funny then go ahead and make a 'Allo allo' / Dad’s Army style comedy program, but with starvation and thirsting and infiniti bullying, the weird pedo pervert shit and all the rest of it. Maybe you are right, who knows, there are a lot of perverts out there, maybe you’ll find a niche for your strange and bizare pedo based comedy. At least then the rest of us will know exactly how to avoid you. I don’t think even Andy Kaufman or Borat would find your weird ass shit funny, but I might be wrong. You do you, perverts.

    Thankfully I prepared the newsletter early this week, so I don’t have to do that today. I’m quite shell shocked from all this. I haven’t been able to write any podcast reviews though, which I’m quite disapointed about. I really just want to get back to some form of normality. The pervert appocalypse is shit.

    Just remembered the title to this week’s newsletter is very relevant to all this stuff. That’s all scheduled and waiting to be published. It isn't the first time things I haven’t published yet in Substack, Github or even the iOS Notes app have seemingly made their way into RL before they get published in a publically visible way. It happens quite a lot actually.

    As I typed that last sentence a motorbike gang stalker driving by shouted 'stop'. It was literally going to be my last sentence.

    When normality world? When food and water?

    As I typed that last sentence another saying 'wow'.

    It never ends. #

  • The weird shit has continued for much of the day. At the internet place when I turned up early this morning to finalise newsletter #177, almost immediately a large butch woman wearing green leggings materialised parading a child who couldn’t have been more than 4 years old up and down in front of where I was standing. One of the many strange things she said as they walked back and forth was 'we alone', apparently into a phone conversation she was having, but it was strange, she kept breaking into english words just as she passed me. She wasn’t in fact alone as it happens there was a man with her who got a bit bad tempered at once point right before they all left, he was saying something about 'the white man'. It was unclear if he was talking about me specifically or just about white men generally. I called them perverts and said 'well this white man doesn’t want anything to do with you perverts'. They then left.

    Later in the park, a park attendant security bloke, started getting agro with me, I had started falling asleep. Had the perverts not kept me awake all night, I probably wouldn’t have been falling asleep. I called him a pervert as he touched my leg, he then started to get aggressive, he made what looked to me to be quite an obscene gesture with two of his fingers. I asked him what he was doing with his two fingers. He started to try and take some photos of me. I calked him a pervert and asked why hd was trying to take photos of me. He scurried away rather quickly after that.

    Now back at the internet place the butch women are trying to assert their authority. One is walking a small labrador puppy up and down the way. Totally harmless puppy that has been here for a few weeks now. For some reason today the butch woman is brandishing a long stick to hit the puppy. What are the chances. These are the kind of escallations that occur. It’s clear warpathing in my opinion, they are just looking for a fight, anger goading and all the rest of it. It’s absolutely attrocious behaviour.

    As I’ve been quietly writting this note at least two groups of people, including a group of teenagers have shouted 'liar' at me casually as they walk past me to the park. They escallate and escallate and escallate.

    It wouldn’t suprise me if there was some form of violence this evening. In the past that has been bricks to the face or a bat to the body. This is what happens when the social layer in society is completely fucked.

    I write about it here because that’s all I can do since they have trapped me here. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/16 #

  • Feeling exhausted this morning. Lots of sleep depravation from the motorbike gang stalkers last night. That follows several days of starvation and intense harrassment literally everywhere I’ve been. It looks like I’ll be able to buy some food today, but catching up with the newsletter seems unlikely. First off, my body will take time to recover from the starvation, same with mind. I’ve also now got to catch up with laundry and charge all my devices. There will of course be even more harrassment to deal with because the perverts are still perverting everything like a plague of addicts that just don’t know when to or aren’t able to stop. And of course they blame everythibg they are doing to me on me.

    I managed to get the reusable build workflow mostly working for the main website yesterday but I appear to have hit a limitation on the number of secrets you can pass to the reusabke workflow. It was unbelievably tedious to figure out. Eventually after so much pain and aggrevation I laboriously removed all the secrets and added them back one by one, while standing to use the internet, while being harrassed constantly, and wouldn’t you know it on the very last one, that’s when the workflow suddenly becomes corrupt. Works with 17, everything corrupted and doesn’t even run with 18. Gee world what are the chances?

    The quickest safest way around the issue would be to jetison one of the plugins. The other way is to use the 'inherit' secrets keyword. That passes all the secrets in the top level workflow into the reusable. That seems like a rather big security risk IMO. The build workflow doesn’t need to have access to all the 3rd party services that happen in later reusable workflows.

    Anyway, I might take the gas off coding for a few days, since I’m feeling so battered by the abusive world.

    Are you going to let me recover from your extreme abuse world? #

Today’s links:

  • Kim Dotcom’s Extradition to the U.S. Given Green Light By New Zealand - Weird coincidence / synchronicity, one of the blokes that works in a cafe shop I go to, I realised today, after reading this article, is a total Kim Dotcom doppelganger. Seriously could totally be his brother or cousin or something. Strange world sometimes. Anyhow I hope Kim is okay, he’s one of the early internet heavy weights, both physically but also from an entrepreneurial perspective. Did a lot of crazy stuff. I like his views on free speech and trying to break down old world barriers. From what I’ve read, it appeared he had been somewhat harshly treated, though I don’t know the specifics. Hoping he doesn’t get memory holed. Let’s remember to watch out for updates on this story. torrentfreak.com #

  • Zelenskiy: Ukraine’s troops now in full control of Russian town of Sudzha - I know the war is serious business and I don’t mean any disrespect to either side but I have to say this made me smile a bit. It has a certain comedic sense to it. It reminded me of the opening sequence to Dad’s Army a bit. It’s definitely unnexpected. I heard that the Ukrainian moral was very low, because soldiers had basically lost hope of ever returning home, they had resigned themselves that they would likely remain at the frontline for the rest of their lives. So perhaps this will make things somewhat more interesting for them. Who knows maybe it could unlock a whole new dimension to resolving the conflict peacefully. As I understand it Zelenski used to be a comedian after all. Strange, and sometimes good strange things can happen during wars. Here’s to hoping this is one of those times. Also sorry no disrespect to germans either. I have no idea what they think of Dad’s Army. I grew up watching it, so I’m quite fond of it. Easy for me to say, I suppose, since we were on the winning side. I’d love to see any german satire / comedy from that era if any exists. Is that still a sore point? I really don’t know. Update: Was listening to Duncan Trussel’s latest Jamar Neighbors episode while writing this, and there’s a really really bizarely hilariously synchronous relevant bit 1/3 into it. Weird but kind of funny. www.theguardian.com #

2024/08/15 #

  • The current thirsting and starvation cycle continues, with weird perverted sex shit, anger goading, and food goading. They know full well that I have hardly any drinking water yet people are only gifting me cans of soft drinks and packets of milk. Then folks materialise with obscene amounts of huge water bottles, parading them onfront of you, often with huge gleeful ways about them, while clearly trying to stoke a reaction. Men late at night drive up and gift you a bunch of bananas, again with milk, then pat you on the shoulder, then start squeezing your shoulder in a very strange and uncomfortable way. people constantly shouting 'gay' at you as they pass.

    In the park, western men sit right next to you doing strange yoga posses where their butts are pointing directly at your face, in some sort of gross cat like erotic way. Western men btw. western people in the park inform you that 'you are free' as they pass you. The list of bizare, strange, and weird events often bordering on sexual harrassment keeps being added to. Each incident is followed by another. For instance bunch of banannas guy was immediately followed by a girl and boy all in black, sitting right next to me eating huge amounts of expensive tastey takeaway food. They would have you believe it’s all just coincidence. But it’s not. There are clear patterns. All aimed to make you angry so they can they blame you for being a crazy foreigner. This is a very well trodden path.

    And now of course with all the riots in the UK and the crack down on social media, I wonder how long until I’m accused of inciting violence simply for describing what’s happening to me.

    And so another day of starvation, thirsting, and infiniti bullying begins.

    I found a bit of time yesterday to fix some of the reusable deploy workflows for the plugins. The whole time there were two troublemakers that were essentially narrating everything I was doing. Trying to put me off what I was doing. Of course this made an already very difficult situation where I have to stand to get an internet connection, even more difficult. All while perverts in the cafe next door kept saying 'come!', which apparently was hilarious based on their laughing hyenas follow up.

    There was a very weird bug in the main website reusable workflow. I pass in a load more private keys (than for the plugin workflows) to the reusable workflow so it can access all the plugins, which are in private repos. For some reason this created a strange non descript syntax bug, which didn’t tell you anything apart from your workflow is f-ed. I spent literally hours trying to find the syntax error in the yaml. There was no syntax error, at least visible. Eventually I rewrote git history to get back to how things were before I added the extra workflow secrets, and it all worked. I then added one secret at a time instead of all at once, and it worked fine. That’s where I left it. I was too tired to stand up any longer and the harrassment had gotten rather strange, with a young man sprinting up and down right next to where I was standing, arounnd a corner. Similar to the people sprinting in opposite direction to the direction you are walking, which was happening last bullying cycle.

    The bug was most likely some weird copy paste error where a hidden character has been introduced that f's the yml, or perhaps there’s a maximum number of secrets you can pass to a reusable workflow. I looked at the docs yesterday and couldn’t find anything to that effect, but could be it’s burried in there somewhere.

    Needless to say, all of this is made 100x more difficult by having to stand to use the internet, the starvation, the thirsting, and the constant bullying.

    Fuck you world. Fuck you very much. [Extents both middle fingers at everyone]. How about happy for a little bit world? Could you get off your warpath just for a few minutes? #

2024/08/14 #

  • Whatever the new regime was from yesterday didn’t last long. As predicted it just ended up being turned into more warpathing. Change all the rules so you can blame the victim while pretending to help, then just as the victim is getting used to the new rules, change them back again, and once again don’t waste the opportunity to blame the victim on the return leg. Make maximum equal minimum, and start the whole escallation process off again. That’s pretty much what happened over the past few days.

    I managed to listen to several podcasts and found a bit of time to fix a few bugs in the reusable workflows feature, but there was no way to write any podcast reviews because extra time I had was consumed figuring out their latest regime, and fielding their blame and harrassment and all the bullcrap that comes with that.

    Looks like it’s back to the beginning of another starvation cycle today, and all the resource restriction shit that that entails. I’ll likely have to start conserving and rationing everything soon, so I’ll effectively be blocked again.

    Going to try to make a bit of progress on the reusable workflow feature this morning. #

  • The thing today is grumpy men spitting as they pass on front of me, that’s happened several times as I’ve been standing here, trying to debug the reusable workflows feature. By regular offenders but also some that I’ve never seen before. Also somewhat more worryingly throwing lit cigarettes at me. That’s what prompted me to write this note.

    World definitely on the warpath again, all from grumpy men at the minute, and wouldn’t you know it, coincides with the start of another starvation cycle. What are the chances?

    When I said something after the cigarette projectile, someone shouted 'Come!'. Pretty sure the anger goading and starvation will be followed up with some weird ass sex goading shit. That’s what usually happens. #

Today’s links:

  • Google’s $1,799 Pixel 9 Pro Fold arrives with 8-inch inner display and Gemini - I’m very intrigued by these new foldable phones from Google. They have almost comparable specs to laptop! 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage. The screen unfolded is small compared to a laptop, but 8inch is huge for a phone. And it appears each pane can operate independently, so you could have an editir in one and a browser in the other. Since it’s Android and thus Linux does that mean you can get a bash shell? A small foldout keyboard and perhaps you could do dev work on it? And the AI features look very snazy in the promo video. Seems pricey though, same price as the MacBook Air! techcrunch.com #

  • Sunil Bharti Mittal: who is the Indian tycoon now BT’s largest shareholder? - I’m not saying this is bad per se, but it is a bit suprising that a nation state would allow it’s communications network to be mostly owned by foreign interests. It’s certainly a lot of trust to put in someone. On the other hand, if the trust is merited, having run the main comms network in a country as large as India might be great in terms of experience in getting high performance and value for money. It would be interesting to hear what the sentiment is from current BT staff members. www.theguardian.com #

  • How Spotify started -- and killed -- Latin America’s podcast boom - I find the whole Spotify approach to podcasting very puzzling. CEO Daniel Ek has seemed to be in interviews I've listenned to, a complete audio nerd, with tons and tons of great ideas for podcasting, yet his approach has seemed very anti-podcasting, more of a take over of the entire medium, than helping to build the whole ecosystem up. I don’t get it, why isn’t he putting effort into the whole podcasting 2.0 movement? Seems like an opportunity missed for everyone. It will be interesting to see how the podcasting scene in Latin America develops. restofworld.org #

2024/08/13 #

  • There’s some sort of new regime that’s started. It’s hard to describe. I haven’t quite figured it out. People are helping but only if they can simultaneously block something else. So you end up in all these impossible decisions, and innevitably you get blamed for everything. Pretty sure it will ultimately boil down to another them creating the problem they complain about, blocking the solution they suggest, escallating again and again, and eventually blaming it all on me. That’s what always happens, all the variations boil down to the same basic pattern.

    It seems to be mainly women that are really miffed at the minute for some reason. Being all bossy, being hot and bothered about the tiniest thing. It’s quite literally like walking on egg shells.

    I had my spare battery charging for most of the day yesterday, yet it only got half charged. That’s weird. I had to use a different power outlet because people kept sitting in front of the one I use, hiding my device from me, which is essentially blocking, because if I leave it hidden it ends up getting vandalised, something that has happened before. Also there was a passive aggressive threat of vandalism to my spare battery device. A young woman started using my battery to prop up her phone, but she wasn’t doing it for any purpose aside from just anger goading, and forcing me to unplug from charging the battery until they left.

    It’s all just more of the same total corruption of the social layer. They have a million ways to f-up your day. And there's nothing you can do about it, apart from waste all your energy and mind thinking about it. Which of course is the point of it all, to slow you down so you make no progress on anything.

    Going to try to make some progress on the reusable workflows feature this morning. #

  • Carry trades, far right riots, and upside down flags

    The Yen Carry Trade situation is pretty dire. Each account I read or listenned to explores it in ever more detail. The blast radius just keeps widening. I'm no longer able to follow all the logic, but I can see it’s making people realise how messed up things are.

    Especially for the US, which is essentially being reset back to emerging market status. Luke Gromen has described it as "US with Argentine Characteristics". Witty fortune cookie pun very much intended, I presume.

    I mentioned recently that France might be in trouble having raised the Olympic flag upside down at the Olympics openning ceremony. It occured to me that Japan wouldn’t even be able to do that given that their flag is the same in every orientation.

    I find it really really weird that the far right riots in the UK occurred the same exact time as the Yen Carry Trade fell apart. That carry trade by the way had been going on for just over a decade, which by the way was around the same time the UK’s previous riots occurred. I was in the UK during those riots and it was kind of scary.

    Correlation is not causation, but it’s so unbelieably strange seeing all these events appear to be so correlated, like a slow moving train crash. And it wouldn’t suprise me at all if these events turn out to be much more closely linked than we previously realised. The world after all is to a large extent driven by money.

    Anyway, this Peruvian Bull bit from his appearance on the most recent TFTC podcast [42:35] sums up the Japan situation pretty well and how it affects the US:

    They have finally walked themselves into a situation where it’s a catch-22. It’s a situation of damned if they do, damned if they don’t. If they keep rates at this level or hike further they exacerbate the US debt problem both at the private and public level, and then if they lower rates they cause an unwind of the carry trade but then also will re-stimulate lending growth and increase debt in the private sector as well, and eventually lead to inflation, because usually with a rate cutting cycle comes QE, and comes monetary accommodation.

    And with fiscal deficits at 7% of deficit to GDP, and debt to GDP at 132% and rising every single year. We are seeing this acceleration of the debt problem to the point that we are having $1tn of debt every 100 days. And last year we passed $1tn of gross interest expense within 9 months of the year for the first time in US history. And if we keep rates at this level that will just continue to accelerate. That financial gravity will start pulling in public sector debt, private sector debt, and everything will just start to get repriced higher and higher and higher.

    And no-one can swallow that amount of debt issuance other than ultimately the central bank. And so what I’ve been writing about is this monetary dilemma that the FED faces, and there really isn’t any good options. They are in their own version of the Bank of Japan’s black hole. Luckily we are not as far and as deep into it as they are, but we are getting there, we will be there eventually.

    The crazy thing is that the US is considering creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Some have said it could amount to up to 4 million Bitcoin, or approximately 1/5 of all Bitcoin in existence. That would potentially be a way for the US to get out of the debt problem. But as I’ve been trying to illustrate in this post, everything is so globally connected these days, would that even work? What would happen to the bigger Japan black hole?

    It’s like two completely insane people jumped out of a plane with no parachutes. They discover as they fall that they are attached. They continue falling, hurtling towards the ground, and one of them, the smaller of the two, comes up with a crazy plan to make a parachute. They figure it all out, it can be done but they need the bigger of the two to also create a parachute.

    You would think that, the situation being as bad as it clearly already is globally, that now would be a good time for anyone and everyone to start making a parachute, to start creating a strategic bitcoin reserve, just in case.

    If Japan can destabilise the entire global economy by changing their interest rate by 0.25%, including the economy of the country who’s currency is the global reserve currency, doesn’t that mean they control the board right now?

    At this point, I think the most crazy thing that could happen would be for some of Satoshi’s OG coins to suddenly move. What if Japan already had a strategic bitcoin reserve? What if they already knew mathematically they would never need to hoist their flag upside up down?

    Update: Since writing this blog post a few hours ago I listenned to the latest WBD episode with American HODL and Erik Cason. There’s so much in there that’s relevant. Rather than try and find some clever way to integrate it here, I’m just going to add a quote. My head is already spining too much from the insanity of all the bizare sinchronicities.

    Here’s the quote 1:30:31:

    American HODL: Well like this is embarrassing though right? This is our fucking country. We are like talking about the future of our children and none of us can predict what we can leave to our children because of how much the political establishment has actually fucked up every single economic and monetary standard that there is.

    We literally have put our life savings into magic internet money from a man that we don’t even fucking know, because our governments have failed us so miserably. And like 10 years ago, I was like, you know what, magic internet money man that I don't even know, he’s got a better idea than these dumb motherfuckers, so I’m just going all in on this, and if it doesn’t work out it’s fucking better than participating in the war economy.

    Erik Cason: It’s so fucking true. It’s so true. I had the exact same feeling you had 10 years ago. Okay random japanese guy, let’s do this thing!

    Go listen to the full episode, it’s awesome.

    One thing I do take issue with is their view, that they express earlier in the episode, that people without kids are themselves still kids. That’s fucking bullshit. Motherfuckers, at least you have fucking kids. Priveledged much? Don’t be telling me how hard things are for you and your family while simultaneously infiniti belittleing me, when because of all this bullshit I can't even get onto the fucking track to start the fucking race. I don’t think I’ve even made it into the god damn stadium yet. You’re fucking welcome assholes.

    If I ever do get going, will I too have to belittle those that arrive after me, who if we extrapolate, will likely be older, even more shriveled and even more broken than me? I can tell you, right now this doesn’t feel like magic internet money to me. More like infinite slavery tokens.

    I’m too broken and tired to even figure out if all the metaphores and logic I’ve used here even check out. Please dear reader just imagine that this post was brilliant. Thank you.

    God darn it world, what is this craziness you have us all in?

Today’s links:

2024/08/12 #

  • Some motorbike gang stalker harrassnent through the night. Also got 'Ahhh yah’d' by the taxi car mafia in the very small hours of the night, that was followed by more sleep depravation by loud talkers that were clearly just doing it to stop me sleeping. Not much you can do in the sort of situation. They are essentially on the warpath, no matter what you do they’ll do the opposite even if it means destroying the entire multiverse.

    Seems likely that will continue for much of the day. It’s just a big old waste of resources for everyone. Like breaking something just to fix it, or digging a hole just to fill it back in again. Even though right now it’s sort of quiet, there are already signs they are waiting in the shaddows to jump right back on that tastey tastey warpath. At least it is for them anyway. Maybe I’ll get a few small things done in between all the bullcrap that’s no doubt coming my way.

    Several quite difficult and not immediately obvious bugs to fix with the reusable workflows feature. It appears only to be working for about 1/2 the plugins so far. I keep trying to look into each issue but get interrupted, and since there are so many repos it gets very confusing, easy to get lost, at which point the world gets all gleeful and warpathey. It’s like I’m getting blamed for not writing perfect code first time, but the world ain’t perfect! Yet it expects you to be perfect!

    Life goes on reguardless, the world keeps on spinning. #

Today’s links:

  • Celsius targets Tether, Badger DAO, Compound, and Netanyahu's niece and nephew in lawsuits - It’s been a while since there was some newsworthy excitenent in crypto markets. That’s why these litigation stories stood out a bit. They involve a company well known to have had a big downfall in the previous cycle and several interesting counter parties including the biggest stablecoin issuer, a company run by family members of a very famous politician, and a service provider that got hacked. Likely lots of interesting facts will transpire, interesting things to learn, and will probably have an impact on the current sideways leaning bull market. www.theblock.co #

  • The Ticking Yen Time Bomb - James Lavish’s explanations of major market incidents are always top notch, and this look at the recent falling apart of the now infamous Yen Carry trade is no exception. Another cracker of an article that perfectly illustrates the dynamics at play, but also packed full of nuance that I didn’t see in any of the other roundups I read. www.jameslavish.com #

  • Imagining a Personal Data Pipeline - Looks at what components you might think of including in an extract, load, transform (ELT) data pipeline for all your personal data. It’s a follow on post expanding on the author’s journey into life logging and quantified self. I found it pretty interesting especially in the context of my static site generator which has some very similar features, but also could interface really easily with something like this. I’ve heard a lot about ELT data pipelines in an enteprise setting, but not much for personal use. Seems very synergistic with my Github powered workflows for content creators idea. www.joshcanhelp.com #

2024/08/11 #

  • Writeup of epic vietnamese bullying mutilation cycle

    Another mutilation attempt last night, one which referenced the mutilation from yesterday morning, where some small pieces of ground glass had been put in my food. This time I got gifted some food, rice and tofu, which was fine but there were two small packets of what looked like dried vegetables. I openned one of them and it was some dried slices of tomato. They looked pretty wierd, checked the sell by date which was January 2024. That’s almost a year out of date. Perhaps you are thinkng this could have been an honest mistake?

    Well, as it happens the vendor where the previous mutilation attempt occurred had created another manufactured incident. Here’s how it happened. I arrived and waited at their food stand, as far as I can tell they only sell one dish, rice with pork. There is a woman and a man that work the food stand. The bloke filled a takeaway box with rice, he appears to put extra rice, which I didn’t ask for, but he looks at me for confirmation, I nod. He also puts in two chilly oil sauces. I previously asked for two of these since their chilly oil packages are tiny compared to other food vendors. They are 1/2 size and don’t even cover all the rice. They were always totally okay with that, always smiling.

    He passes the box to the woman, she adds the pork, and some cucumber slices garnish. They usually also add, wait for it...TOMATO slices garnish, but they must have been out of tomato because there was no tomato in the box, and the woman looks at me holding a small piece of a sort of quiche / flan type thing, asking me if I want it. I simply say thank you. I do this because in another similar food vendor across town, they previously did the trick of asking me if I wanted tomato, then charging me extra, even though there’s no mention anywhere about having to pay for garnish, and it’s clearly free, certainly is for locals.

    I’d been to this place several times before and both the cucumber and tomato garnish have always been included in the price. It’s the same with a similar food vendor just up the same road. Anyway, after I say thank you the bloke vendor says loudly 'Free'. He looks a bit annoyed. As far as I was concerned it was pretty clear she was asking if I wanted the small quiche / flan slice instead of the tomato. I pay the usual price and continue on with the morning, but mentally noted it was a weird situation.

    Well later I was to discover small crunchy bits of glass in my food.

    Also worth noting that the other food vendor across town also started putting small bits of glass in my food. Now these folks aren’t stupid, they of course have a sort of alibi. Both their food trucks are located on the site of a motorbike repair shop, where clearly there must be lots of small bits of glass, so one could imagine it’s all some sort of honest mistake, except it only happens when they are in a bullying cycle, when they are 'teaching you a lesson', when random folks are appearing saying 'learn' and 'obey'. But they are always teaching you a lesson! Because foreigners are always wrong. You eventually get blamed for everything, no matter what you do.

    Oh and guess what, afterwards as I walked past the other pork and rice vendor down the street, who by the way also tried a similar trick but with a fried egg previously, she was clearly very much aware that 'something was going down', making it very obvious by causing a bit of a scene as I walked past, doing her upmost to get my attention.

    Oh and another guess what, later that day in the afternoon, at the internet place, where there is also a mechanics, but no food vendor, one of the mechanics there loudly shouted 'Aaaaah yah' at me right after I arrived. What are the chances?

    These situations are all connected. It’s absolutely not an isolated incident, this sort of thing is happening constantly. These are routines they run on people. Well rehersed. They can deploy a million variations at any time.

    This is what it looks like when the social layer is completely corrupt. Continuous escallations from anonymous bullies, aided and abetted by people in shops that have perfect alibis for everything. You aren’t ever going to fix this.

    Oh and the icing on the cake, at least for them I’m sure, is that when I turned up to the quiche / flan pork rice food vendor initially, right behind the food stand there was a motorbike police man having a chat with the mechanics place. Just in case you thought you could go to the police to report any of this, forget about it, they are all in on it too. That’s the message.

    Incredibly this isn’t even the end of it. The weird old lady that’s been hanging out outside the store for the past month, the one that gas been sexually harrassing me, including expossing herself to me, which I’ve previously written about, suddenly decided this morning to start disposing of her garbage using the nearby bin, rather than chucking it into the street where I have to step over her mountains of used tissues when I walk to the internet place. And guess what was left for me two days ago during the night, 2 small cartons of milk, no bag, just loose cartons of milk. Sane shape as the 2 massively out of date dried tomato packets. I wonder who put them there. It’s pretty obvious who they want me to think put them there.

    Oh and did I mention that this past week they have been doing the forced marriage routine again. I also wrote about that.

    Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any weirder, wouldn’t you know it, Rogan of all people has had on 2 guests this week with the word mari in their names. Who the fuck knows how that happened. Quite the coincidence though, don’t you think?

    All these situations are linked, and planned, it’s passive aggressive intimidation that’s meant to make you angry so they can then point at you and tell everyone you are a crazy foreigner, and they’ll also push totally false and completely malicious rumours that you are doing drugs, and worse.

    They pervert everything, they steal your life and blame you for it. Murders, perverts, thiefs and liars.

    Just as I finish writting this note, the security guard mafia have started taking photos of themselves around me, maniacly laughing, they think the hole situation is fucking hilarious. It’s clear intimidation.

    Hey Vietnam, slavery, theft, lying and murder is not one bit funny.

    Update: I write this knowing that it’s likely they are really liking my writeup, because in a strange way I’m helping them perfect their evil ways. I just hope that at least it’s possible that this writeup could help those caught in a similar situation as me, or indeed those looking to dismantle these horrible industrial scale harrassment and bullying networks.

  • Pretty clear that another starvation cycle has begun. I guess I’m going to have to prepare next week’s newsletter early again.

    No matter what I do, everything eventually gets blocked and frontrun and exploited, and turned against me.

    How long I wonder until I’m accused of being 'mentally ill'. I’m probably one of the most sane people you’ll ever meet. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/10 #

  • I’ve hardly even woken up and everything is already all my fault. People are yah'ing me, then blocking me, but also telling to slow down, and eventually everything just gets blocked and nobody knows what to do. I’ve already done done done the newsletter so it’s obvious. The world had already frontrun the frontrun, there’s nowhere else left for it to go. And so I get blamed for the thing that’s being done to me. It’s so unbelievably obvious that it’s almost comical. But it’s not actually very funny. Having your life stolen from you really isn’t funny. It’s slavery at best and ultimately it’s slow murder, and slow murder is still murder. There are no more words to explain it at this point.

    I haven’t been able to finish the reusable deploy workflow feature on the main website. The world keeps blocking me everytime I attempt to make any progress. It’s strange to explain, but that’s what happens. In between gangs of harrassers turning up just as I get started, and the daily rainy season rain, there’s just hardly any way to make progress.

    It just feels like it’s going to be another day of stoped starts, blocked progress, escallations, peace turned into war, giving turned into stealing, and ultimately I’ll get mutilated in some way. No one will be happy with anything, then I’ll get blamed for the unhappiness too.

    Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, a crack on the head for asking, a crack on the head for not asking. Oh look we’re in the neverending fractal of doom again. Learn, learn, learn, obey, obey, obey. Hey world how about you take some of your own medicine? Be happy with something! Anything! #

  • There’s obviously more to this short writeup, but just wanted to get this out now. I got mutilated again. This time it was once again small crunchy bits of glass put in my food. That’s at least the 3rd serious mutilation in as many days. #

  • Maximum Frontrun (Issue #176)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-08-10)

    In this week’s edition:

    US Election buildup, Middle East turmoil & geopolitics, boots on the ground with homelessness, future of liberalism & conservatism, Saylor on surfing the Bitcoin bull market, and Germans on drugs!

    Issue details:

Today’s links:

  • Apple Is America’s Semiconductor Problem - There’s definitely some anti-Apple sentiment brewing at the minute. Buffet has been getting out of his Apple position recently. Regulators in the US and EU are going after them for monopoly practices. Add to that they aren’t really innovating products very effectively. This looks at the scale of their market position and influence. www.semiconductor-digest.com #

  • Online Safety Act to be reviewed after Sadiq Khan criticism, says minister - I don’t know specifically about Khan’s criticism, but I’ve read and heard about many crack downs that sound very authoritarian. Regular folks being arrested just for sharing links on social media. It’s made me wonder about whether anything I post could be misinterprated in such a way. For years western countries have been pointing out censorship of repressive regimes abroad. Why is it happening in the west now? Strange times. www.theguardian.com #

  • King Charles sends ‘heartfelt thanks’ to police for restoring order after riots - What worries me about all this is that those that might want to create a widespread chilling effect on online speech, now have a way to do that. The vaste majority of people don’t do all this violence stuff, why should we be paying the price by having our freedoms curtailed? I myself am now worried about what I post, and I in no way consider myself to me part of any extremist groups. Ironically by cracking down on the bullies, you might just be helping them get their way, a repressive society that is inflexible, and can’t handle any sort of disagreement. The internet existed during previous riots, why were there no crack downs on online speech then? Perhaps that was the better approach. Having said all that I like that King Charles is thanking the police, they do in many cases do a very good job under difficult circumstances. www.theguardian.com #

2024/08/09 #

  • Quite a lot of harrassment from motorbike gang stalkers last night. They woke me up every couple of hours. Feeling quite tired today. Just got gifted a bananna from a somewhat strange man riding a bycicle. He was dressed like an office worker, kept saying he was 'SSI'. I have no idea what that means. Shortly after he left discovered somebody had once again left an earthworm for me. This time I managed to save the worm before it died. Pretty sure this is the start of another bullying cycle. No doubt it will likely be sexual harrassment in one form or another. It almost always is when banannas are involved. It never ends.

    I'm close to getting all the simple plugins working with the new reusable workflow. There are several annoying bugs still to fix. Once it works with those I’ll move on to the plugins that use an npm module cache. Then finally I’ll move on to the main website repo. It’s tedious because there is a lot of jumping between repos, and lots of hard to spot bugs. It will be worth the effort though.

    One thing that occurred to me yesterday is that there is potentially a downside to all the repos using the same workflow. If something goes wrong with that workflow in an unnexpected way, then deployments of all the repos could be blocked all at once. That could be problematic in high pressure situations. It will be important to be extra careful when modifying the workflow and thoroughly test before pushing out any changes. #

  • Since eating the bananna I was gifted earlier, I have gotten a runny nose and am sneezing lots. Just another mutilation. No doubt this is more of their world famous foreigner hospitality.

    Also got yah’d for no reason walking to the internet place earlier. The roads were completely empty, the yaher was waiting for me to pass by.

    Going to have to take it easy now to try to ensure the alergies don’t get worse. I was hoping to make some progress on the reusable workflows feature but I guess the world has other plans.

    Respect our slow down bubble wrap and earthworm intimidation dirty foreigner! And also hurry up, stop being lazy! #

  • As predicted, the sexual harrassment has started, in the form of people turning up on motorbikes and making sex noises. 'Aaaaaaah'. This sort of thing will continue for the rest of the day everywhere I go. It makes the sneezing worse, which is the intent. #

  • Trying my best to listen to podcasts but it’s virtually impossible now that the runny nose and sneezing has turned into watery eyes, snott everywhere, unbelievably sensitive and itchy nose and sinuses, constant sneezing. All morning it’s been 'you learn' and even an 'obey' from random people on the street and in shops, young and old, male and female. Cowardly wimpy thugs, the lot of them.

    You in the west think violent riots is bad, and it is, but the correlary of total crack down and pushing this behaviour underground is that it just transforms into something arguably even more vile that you will no longer have a way to see, let alone fix. Once the social layer is corrupt, there is very little you can do. We are all in this together ultimately. #

  • It happened again. After taking a bit of a quiet break, 20 mins or so, I picked up my device and started listening to a podcast and taking notes. Approx 30 seconds later several small groups of people arrived. The first of which said loudly 'No!' as they passed me. Now the groups are back to their passive aggressive onslaught.

    Earlier before the break I had been battling the same thing for at least an hour. The instant I shifted to listening to music, and I mean literally the same instant, all their harrassing behaviour ceased, complete quiet. They eventually left. Literally everytime I try to do any work a sabotage gang materialises and does it’s best to block anything I am doing. #

  • Brian Merchant [39:15]: "You’d see the lines drawn, industrialisation was very literally almost a civil war, and the state’s making the case against the Luddites, and the propaganda, you can call it that, it’s propaganda of the time, it’s proclamations and it’s declarations, it’s casting the Luddites as backwards looking, as deluded, as malcontent, under the, you know, they’re smashing the thing that’s part of their job. This form of criticism is already there so when the Luddites do lose, when they are hung, on mass, that language is used in the trial against them. And we can see why. Because the state needs to have this enemy. They have to be able to paint this portrait of anybody that is against the shape that technological development is taking, anyone who’s criticising any element of that, there are too many losers or winers…no shut up, you are a Luddite, stand down, or we will hang you." #

Today’s links:

  • Putin signs law on legalizing cryptocurrency mining in Russia - This sounds pretty cool, perhaps nation states really are getting into crypto currencies. How long until they start mining operations themselves I wonder. It’s interesting that the Bank of Russia is involved though somewhat unclear what this means: "the Bank of Russia will have the right to ban the placement of individual issues". tass.com #

  • Meta is closing a beloved first-party Quest studio - I don’t know much about the VR side of the tech industry, but it’s an interesting data point. It’s kind of cool that the way the sector appears to be structured is lots of smaller studios rather than one super large mega company. I wonder why most of the tech industry doesn’t take this form. www.androidcentral.com #

  • What lies beneath: the growing threat to the hidden network of cables that power the internet - Most interesting fact from the article: an underwater cable is cut on average every 3 days. The vaste majority is accidental rather than planed attacks. Small islands need to get multiple cables to hedge against these types of events since it can take weeks to repair a severed cable. New Zealand for example has 7 different cables, whereas Tonga only has one. I guess many likely also use the new satellite constellations. www.theguardian.com #

2024/08/08 #

  • I feel like I got quite a lot of coding done yesterday. The harrassment levels weren’t too bad, though not altogether non existent. I was able to mostly ignore it all, listen to music and code, intersperced with podcasts. I‘d done most of the difficult coding already so that made it easier. Still not a whole lot in the way of blogging ideas.

    I got gifted some sweet breakfasty type stuff earlier so at least I have something to get me through some of the day. There are some bice people still left in the world :)

    I managed to get the reusable build and deploy workflows fully working with 2 different plugins. That’s a pretty big step because it means that the concept works, that it’s totally possible to reuse the same workflows across many different repos. I’ve updated all the plugins and will need to test all that. The next step is to get it working on repos that use an npm module cache. I should be able to use the very same workfkow because the module cache is just a feature of the workflow that you can enable/disable by setting a variable. The way I’ve written it, the workflow is very modular, almost all the major steps can be enabled/disabled. #

  • It’s been a relatively quiet early morning without harrassment, though I’m at the internet place now and in the location where I stand to get internet has been left some bubble wrap. That’s historically been used multiple times before starvation periods. They are saying 'don’t do anything, just pop bubbles in the bubble wrap'. Usually it’s one of the butch women that walks past in the middle of the road on front of me clutching a handfull of bubble wrap. It only ever occurs just as starvation is about to begin.

    The thing is though, there’s another contingent that want the exact opposite, and will start yah'ing me. It will escallate and escallate, and no matter what I do, I’ll get blamed, eventually all ills in the universe will be blamed on me, simply for existing. I hate to sound so defeatest, but this sort of thing has happened literally hundreds of times at this point.

    Seems the world is back on the warpath after an entire afternoon and evening of relative peace and quiet. #

  • The last hour has been nice an quiet, was able to listen to the latest Odell - Saylor podcast that droped earlier. After listening to it, I switched over to my editor to write the review, and literally at the same moment a person that had been quietly sitting behind me for a while, suddenly starts watching some sort of stream of obnoxious short form videos on his phone, speaker on maximum volume. It’s unbelievable to me how often this happens. As soon as I start to do anything for myself, writing code or blogging, something gets activated in the universe to block or make very difficult. It’s like clockwork. It happens so often that I now get anxiety everytime I’m about to start working on something. That can’t possibly be good for motivation and productivity. Forced procrastination much? Later, no doubt, I’ll be bullied for being 'lazy'. #

  • Just wanted to mention this for the sake of completeness. There was more bubble wrap left at key locations I walked down, places where I would have had to decide on one way or another, had I not already decided. Quite clearly planned, definitely a thing. #

Today’s links:

  • Michael Saylor X Odell Bitcoin Park Fireside (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - Odell interviews Saylor live at Bitcoin Park. It’s a relatively short interview compared to some of the Saylor interviews I’ve listened to over the years, but it’s interesting because it feels like there’s been a noticeable shift in the overall narrative. This conversation to me felt like it was grounded in actually very practical and immediate topics, rather than a lot of the interesting but sometimes long winded bitcoin philosophy. It seems to coincide with the big recent increase in bitcoin interest from companies and institutions. You get a sense there is a wave coming and people are positioning their businesses for some bitcoin action. It’s not just businesses, countries too. All sorts of useful things talked about including operating companies vs investment trusts, hurdles to companies holding bitcoin treasuries, bitcoin as medium of exchange, stable coin + bitcoin as the perfect combination, building nation State FOMO?, and Bitcoin strategies the US Treasury could take. Great interview. podcastindex.org #

  • Edmund Fawsett compares the future of liberalism and conservatism Ep#2151 (Keen On Podcast) - Edmund’s last name makes me think we are in the fractal version of the simulation currently. Regardless it’s an interesting conversation exploring a topic that I’ve always found quite confusing. Deciding if you are liberal or conservative has always seemed to me to be like deciding to be a fast or slow car driver. Surely, it depends? Needless to say Edmund has a much more complete understanding than my overly simplistic take on things. History, ideas, traditions, and how it all relates back to the current day political environment we find ourself in. It’s all very interesting and I feel like I need to listen to this one again because the world ironically was trying to be both at the same time as I was listening to this yesterday, so it was a bit tricky to focus. This feels like a fundamental topic any person operating in the business world today should better understand, and I think this episode lays out the somewhat amorphous problem space pretty well. podcastindex.org #

2024/08/07 #

  • I ended up getting mutilated again. I’m not exactly sure how it hapenned, that’s always how these things go down. It’s happened so many times before. There’s a long escallation, over many days, and it eventually crescendos with all sorts of weird synchronicities, and you realise you’ve been mutilated. In this case it’s some sort of alergic skin reaction on my arm. It’s all swollen. I was preceded by random people shouting 'you learn' at me. Then afterwards a big soap opera-esce scene. The whole evening it was one thing after another, like the entire world had been turned into some sort of giant swiss clock.

    Btw, I’ve also developed some sort of similar sensation on my left hand little finger and ring finger. It’s badly itching. I mention it because people are constantly trying to pressure you into extremely dubious mariages here, so the fact that I’ve developed this skin irritation thing is extremely suspect to me.

    On the bright side, I got gifted some food and it looks like I’ll be able to get electricity and food for a few days. But any of the help I get these days always seems to have a nasty malicious component attached to it. In fact I wouldn’t be suprised if the malicious part continues for a while. It’s a wonder I get anything done at all on my static site generator or blogging for that matter.

    It looks like I’m quite close to having the deploy workflows working using the new reusable workflow. I’ve almost got it working for one of the plugins. Yesterday evening the build appeared to have completed. There are a few small tweaks needed to environment variables still to be made. Once it’s fully working I’ll be able to update all the repos to use the new workflow. It’ll be awesome to have just one workflow to maintain as opposed to one in each repo.

    Also hoping to write a few blog posts, though all this week’s bullying, starvation and resources restriction has left me a bit shell shocked, but also I haven’t been able to generate many new post ideas, because I’ve had to conserve power.

    It would be wonderfull if you could get off the warpath and stop blocking everything I do world. Thanks, your exhausted friend, Mark. #

  • Well I was right about the maliciousness continuing. Two incidents one after the other this morning. First at the sandwich shop, the sandwich shop bloke getting all upset with me for no reason "Okay okay" as I asked for my sandwich, even though it was early with hardly any customers. I jokingly responded with an "okay okay okay okay", which got a bit of a laugh from sandwich bloke, somewhat suprising as that’s the first time that’s happened. Anyway the moment didn’t last long as I was immediately accused of lying by the other large sandwich woman working alongside sandwich bloke.

    At the next shop, a few meters down the road, there was a largish woman already in there having a dubious chat with the shop staff. I immediately sensed something was off as soon as I entered the shop. On entering the shop bloke called either me or the woman a dog, a convenient ambiguity for him. I responded 'not at all' and entered the store. As I approached the register to pay for my item, the woman turned and held out her hand towards me, in a very bizare way I might add. She was very intent on me taking her hand. What are the chances of such an ambush literally an hour after discovering a skin reaction on my left hand ring finger?

    It was a very awkward situation, eventually diffused after I smiled and politely informed the demoisel that it was far too early for a dance. She was very persistent but eventually departed. I went back to the water fountain to fill up a container with hot water. As I did so I joked that perhaps I had just had a narrow escape. On hearing the word 'escape' shop bloke’s face visibly flintched, which was weird. Made me wonder if both situations had been manufactured traps.

    And in true what-are-you-doing-to-me-world, I see in today’s news now that Harris has announced that her running mate will be Tim Walz. Perhaps they will make an appearance on stricktly come dancing? Waltz also looks strangely familiar, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole today. I feel like I’ve already reached some sort of maximum synchronicity level for one morning.

    How much time am I spending processing all these weird synchronicities? Way way way too much. Literally my life is being stolen from me. And what’s more, I don’t get blocked doing that, no the blocking only starts when I try to spend time on my static site generator or writing blog posts. #

  • Quick update on my previous note about being mutilated on my left hand ring finger, the tail end of a bullying campaign against me. As I left the cafe I spent this morning reading, writting and listening to podcasts, about 30 meters up the road someone had very liberally sprinkled what looked very much like a bag of rice all over the ground, which I had to walk over. Geez what are the chances.

    I add this for completeness, knowing that it’s likely those involved actually want me to write about it, perhaps because any publicity is good publicity? I don’t know for sure, I only know that these types of things keep happening. But it’s complicated because I’ve also met some non locals here that weren’t exactly the type you would want to introduce to the family. It’s understandable that communities protect themselves, but at the same time it’s really horrible when you get caught up in this sort of thing. I absolutely just don’t want annything to do with any of it. #

Today’s links:

  • Elon Musk calls PM ‘two-tier Keir’ over police response to UK riots - I’m not sure how I feel about the Elon vs The Police situation. I wish people would just get along. One thing though is I’m glad Elon, a person developing both powerful AI tools and powerful brain implants, is very much against the concept of a two tier society. In the overall scheme of things I don’t think it matters that much that he’s defending so called far right folks, or that he’s insulting the new prime minister. In fact it might be the most free speech thing possible. If the government really is against a 2 tier society then perhaps this is an opportunity to explore that idea in public in full transparency, because that IMO is the thing we are all worried about. Show us that you really do have all of our backs long term, even after all the riots have passed. www.theguardian.com #

2024/08/06 #

  • I’m having to go into starvation mode, I did get gifted some food but they are doing the half portions thing again, also no drinking water, they are doing the milk thing again. Must conserve what I have and keep devices off until they allow electricity, drinking water and real food. Will likely have to stop posting from today onwards. Lots and lots of bullying atm btw. #

Today’s links:

  • Worst far-right violence should be treated as terrorism, says ex-police chief - I’m definitely not a defender of thugery and violence, but at the same time it’s clear that there are many communities that for whatever reason are not able to process the level of change they are being subjected to. The crack down is a short term solution, and of course you have to make sure people are safe, but I hope accompanying this they announce some programs that explore long term how to bring communities that are divided closer together, and ways to stop the festering of resentment. The violence is terrible, but at least you can see where the difficulties are. If all this gets pushed further underground, it might end up being worse long term, for everyone involved. www.theguardian.com #

  • No 10 criticises Elon Musk for ‘civil war is inevitable’ post on England riots - Very interesting that Elon is getting involved here. It’s obviously a difficult situation and police are no doubt doing the best they can, but I think it might be short sighted to rebuf this attention. We’ve had riots in the UK several times before, the difference here is I think the wider context and environment is unparalleled. I’m betting that the AI revolution we are in is freaking people out. They don’t want to be left behind, or find themselves at the bottom of an impossible heap to climb just to live a normal life. Yes the tools create the problems or at least give them a way to surface, but they can also be part of the solution. It’s time to be creative about how we respond. www.theguardian.com #

  • The debauched rise of New York’s wildest bar - The story of one of New York’s most infamous bars where people from Warhol to Lennon went to hang out. I wonder what the equivalent is these days. My sense is that things these days aren’t as drug fueled as they used to be, which is definitely a good thing. Rogan’s got his comedy club which seems to be attaining legendary status. There are quite a lot of Bitcoin related hangout places being setup. What other cultural institutions are springing up these days? www.theguardian.com #

2024/08/05 #

  • Not a huge amount to write this morning. I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the last bullying cycle. When everything everywhere in every dimension gets turned into an infiniti no and blamed on you, it can take days to clear. But life goes on.

    I appears water and electricity are about to be cut off again. I’ll likely writeup the newsletter early again this week. I get the sense that the world is already front running that, but there isn’t anywhere else to go, because any further back and your back into the previous cycle, so the world is literally blocking itself, and blaming me of course.

    I managed amongst all the yes nos yesterday to fix a few small bits of code on the reusable workflow feature, so maybe I’ll get a chance to test that later.

    Life goes on. #

  • Well I got next week’s issue #176 written and scheduled without any major problems, but guess what as soon as I tried to do the tiniest of the tiniest amount of work on my static site generator reusable workflow feature, the world was right back at it doing it’s infiniti yes no thing again. What a suprise. #

  • Max Richter on infusing context into your work

    The folks at Resident Advisor have put out a recent interview with Max Richter, the esteemed neoclassical composer. It’s an interesting conversation that goes into his clasdical background, his love of architecture, how he discovered synthesizors through hearing Kraftwerk on the tele, his creative process, and all sorts of otget intetesting things.

    The bit that stood out to me was how he’s been trying to infuse some of the context of his life environment into his music. There are a lot of similarities with how I view blogging. Context was one of the main ideas behind linkblog.io. The ability to share not only links, but the context of other stuff that was going on at the time you posted link. In fact one of the taglines was "Context is everything".

    Here’s how Max describes it [8:43]:

    Interviewer: So the album contains many snapshots of what of what I assume to be your daily life. So there are field recordings, and found sounds, electronics, I think more than I’ve found in your past work. We are surrounded by electronics in your studio now. Can you tell me more about the role that those little snapshots play?

    Max Richter: Yeah, so I’ve called those life studies. They are almost like diaristic little fragments. I wanted to try to bring context that the album came out of into the album itself. So it’s like the landscape that gave rise to the record, the stuff, you know, the world I was inhabiting at the time, is also in the record. So yeah there is a lot of kind of found sounds from here, and other places, travels and bits and bobs of touring and stuff. Stuff from cooking and all kinds of domestic, ordinary life. I’m very interested in that actually. How creativity and the rest of life fit together and how they influence one another, and how creative work is really rooted in our ordinary life.

    Needless to say I was kind of fascinated by how a musical artist views this process. It’s much the same, a process of collecting bits and pieces of life as it happens and stitching these into a larger work. Personally I feel like I’ve only explored the surface, that there are tons of interesting and creative ways to explore context. Really enjoyed listening, it gave me several new and different ways to think about this ephemeral and mysterious thing we call context.

  • I’ve heard and read mixed reviews of the Olympic Opening Ceremony. I didn’t watch any of it myself but I did hear that they raised the Olympic flag upside down at the ceremony. That’s a bit strange, isn’t it a sign of distress. Seriously, isn’t that what you do when you are in distress out at sea?

    Let’s all remember to keep an eye out for those in distress, at all levels, from individuals all the way up to countries. The world is going through difficult times. We are ultimately all in this together.

    I know I’ve written recently about France, and perhaps that could be misinterpreted. I do really hope all is well in France. Best wishes for the rest of the event. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/04 #

  • It certainly was another one of those days yesterday. Big time. One of the big themes was people sprinting in the opposite direction to whichever way you are walking in. Often right before I’d get both a 'you learn' followed by a 'yah'. It must have happened at least 4 times. Then when you get to where you are going you get blocked in some way. The thing you want is out of stock, and so is the backup thing. Or only two items of the thing you want are left, same with backup item. Or a combibation of these.

    No matter what you do you are wrong in some way. Even if you get one of each of the main thing and the backup thing, that would cause another infiniti no! I ended up just saying 'yes no' to everything. You have to say something, and since you get blamed no matter what you do, including doing nothing, then 'yes no' seems like the least untruthful thing you can say. The problem of course is that things just get worse, I think because the hive mind is waiting on a decision from you but doesn’t get it, and so eventually everything becomes blocked in every dimension. But that was going to happen anyway, and at least this way it’s possible to not get yourself overloaded, so you can keep your cool and not get angry.

    I bet none of this makes any sense. Anyway needless to say I didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday. Whenever I tried to actually do anything like write or listen to a podcast or whatever, that would get immediately blocked too. Like clockwork someone or some group of people would arrive and start being very aggregious, and no matter what you do, they are unhappy. Unhappy if you stay, unhappy if you go, unhappy if you write, unhappy if you talk, unhappy if you stay quiet. Sometimes they would earnestly say 'sorry', and just continue on their infiniti no! campaign.

    This morning as I started writting this note a morning exercise cyclist in a group said 'lie' to me followed by a small laugh, like just joking. And it would be funny but I know if I find it funny then I’ll get yah'd, so my only possible response is 'yes no'.

    According to Elon, heard in his latest interview with Lex Friedman, training robots at scale is a bit like conducting a very big orchestra. I think that’s likely not a bad description for humans at scale too. Some days everything is a total escallating stop start race condition mess. #

  • On the way to the internet place this morning, weird old humper lady was at the corner doing her humping thing. That was immediately preceded by the people that run the nearby cafe shouting 'mother' as I walked past them. Yesterday they were shouting 'learn'. There’s usually something they are warpathing. My reply to everything is still 'yes no'. That will eventually turned against me too. That’s life. #

  • Trump assassination counter factuals

    It’s interesting to consider, as they call it in history circles, the counter factuals of the recent Trump assassination attempt. The assassination itself had a lot of very weird things from the young shooter, to the secret service handling of the situation. Imagine if Trump had actually been killed. These were the things that would have occurred in rapid succession afterwards:

    • The CrowdStrike cyber attack which affected millions of small and medium sized businesses would have scared the heck out of a nation still recovering from the murder of a former president
    • A nation in total disarray from a murder and an attack at the core of millions of businesses would still have to decide on how to deal with the Biden situation, making that decision even more difficult
    • In addition to the war in Ukraine, and the one in Gaza, they would have to deal with the assassination of Hamas leader by Mossad in Iran, an assassination which had been in motion for months already, perhaps destabilizing the whole region
    • The rise of the far right across Europe, in elections but also some riots
    • Trump would not have appeared at the Bitcoin 2024 conference, giving the crypto industry what is being widely reguarded as the most crypto bullish bit of legitimisation to ever have happened to some of the smartest people on the planet, many of whom could literally become the richest humans alive over the next few years

    As it happened the attempt was unsuccessful, and though it caused a bit of a flareup, it’s been mostly absorbed and the news cycle has moved on. Had it succeeded the world situation might have been very different. I’ve only mentioned a few items here, there are more. One wonders if it might have been part of a larger plan to destabilise the global balance of power.

  • Got a reasonable amount done today. There was a bunch of harrassment after I left the internet place this morning, including 'Pay' harrassnent. Just noting it here because that has a tendency to spread and turn into a tsunami even if it’s totally false. I of course payed for everything that I got in the shops nearby the harrassment.

    Interestingly, in the shop the bloke behind the counter kept calling the receipt the bill. I politely corrected him and said it was a receipt not a bill. The shop bloke seemed very suprised, saying wow. I added that I didn’t owe him anything. It’s the second time in 2 days that I’ve had the receipt being called the bill. I guess this receipt bill false equivalence is probably being used as a pretext for more escallations. Happens quite a lot, I always assumed it was just a foreign language thing, but I’m starting to question that as it always seems to be from trickster types. #

Today’s links:

  • Norman Ohler (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - I thought this was a pretty fascinating look into a side of german cultural history that has been completely missed. It’s about the drugs that germans were taking around the time of the second world war. The attrocities of the war were of course happening but in parallel, psychadellic drugs were literally being discovered by scientists, and they were having hippie like experiences, hoping to spread love and togetherness to the world. These were the origins of the psychadelic movement in the US. It was also a time where mild stimulants like coffee didn’t exist yet, so people took meth instead! Norman’s research adventure took him deep into the archives of companies working on drug programs, and he discovered a treasure trove of information that paints a much more complete picture of what was actually going on around that time. It’s almost as if the seeds of destruction and it’s solution where somehow being created at the same time. And the story of how Norman got to the information, in it’s own way, is as interesting as the stories he eventually found. Really worth listening to this one. podcastindex.org #

  • Why CSV is still king - I’ve really only used CSV a few times personally, but I can imagine that many businesses do use it all the time. The simplest data exchange formats tend to get widest adoption. These days it’s actually quite rare that I need to export and re-import data between applications, which might be a sign that we are far too silo'd. konbert.com #

  • Government warns that rioters ‘will pay the price’ as wave of violence sweeps UK - Riots across many cities in the UK. It will be interesting to see how the new government handles the situation. Riots as bad as they are, perhaps are a bit like error logging in an application. You obviously don’t want them to happen but they at least do communicate that there are serious issues that need addressing. If you crack down too hard on them, you are really just turning off error logging without addressing the problem. So the resentment still builds but you won’t even know about it next time. In hell there are no flareups, but everything is resentment, but noone can be sure. www.theguardian.com #

2024/08/03 #

  • All sorts of weird sex related bullying and harrassment the past 2 days. I’ve taken a few notes so maybe I’ll find some time to write it up. I’m aware that the Democrats have been doing the whole everything Republican is 'weird' thing, and I’m certainly not part of that, I just can’t think of another way to describe it right now. It’s all just very weird, and very little if it is cool weird, just weird weird. If I get a chance to write something, I think you’ll see what I mean.

    Already some very aggressive motorbike gang stalker harrassment this morning. First a 'you learn', then a short while later a motorbike gang stalker carrying a small plastic table, aggressively shouting at me as he drove past. Yesterday morning the food vendor where I bought something kept trying to get me to sit down at a small table even after I made it clear that I wanted take away. So it might be related to that. How dare me for politely declining an asking for a takeaway!

    The newsletter is already written, I just have to add a few additional podcast reviews I did since I wrote it. The world is on the warpath again, so I'll have to take it easy, then of course I'll get blamed and yah'd. They create the problems they complain about, they block the solutions they suggest, they escallate, and blame it all on me. Pretty sure it’s going to be another one of those days. #

  • Oh world, what are you doing to me?

    It’s like there are two teams of gang stalkers. One team is constantly telling me to speed up, to go quicker, hurry up for fuck’s sake, yah. The other team is doing the exact opposite, slow the fuck down, woah, calm down, lie. So no matter what I do, everyone literally gets infinitely annoyed.

    It escallates and escallates until I’m being blamed for everything. I’m not even really speaking metaphorically. Actual real life physical humans just constantly harrass me wherever I go. There are small gangs of them waiting for me all along the routes I walk. If you think it sounds crazy, let me tell you, it’s even crazier when it’s really actually happening to you. #

  • Fractional Reserve Bullying (Issue #175)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-08-03)

    In this week’s edition:

    Useful info about UBI, China vs US in power, fun politics, the stablecoins & treasuries end game, macro analysis, well balanced double acts, a side order of techno and of course aliens

    Issue details:

    • Title: Fractional Reserve Bullying
    • Issue: 175
    • Page: issue webpage

Today’s links:

  • Kamala Surges, Trump at NABJ, recession fears, Middle East escallations, Ackman postpones IPO (All-in Podcast) - They featured in last week’s newsletter issue, and this latest episode was once again a cracker. The Harris - Trump election build up discussion was great, with some very insightful observations and analysis. That was later followed up with an even better discussion of the Isreal/Mossad/Hamas/Iran assassination situation. The All-In guys are at their best when they are handling geopolitics and relating it back to global macro and Tech. There are some other smaller topics peppered in amongst those. Jason is pulling a Biden this week having caught COVID, but the show was still top notch, though there were signs of a few small resentments festering, which were kind of funny but will no doubt need some fielding from the best moderator in the universe. I bet it’s a tough job keeping the train on the tracks when your team is made up of an alternating current of Sith Lords and Rebel Aliance Jedi knights. Likely that’s why he took the week off in the first place, to see how well balanced everyone is performing. podcastindex.org #

  • Alan Graham (The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - Interesting exploration of the homeless and poverty situation in the US by talking to someone that has 25 years boots on the ground experience with his Mobile Loaves and the Fishes organisation, has been organising food trucks and programs to promote hope, meaning and purpose for the chronically homeless. They talk about his background, his religious thinking and how he integrates that with the difficulties and contradictions of modern life. Interesting discussion around some of the core drivers in city regeneration, problems with the education system that have all contributed to the homeless situation that has been getting worse since the 70s. Overall will give you a different way to think about some of these highly politicised problems, which underneath are about real people doing the best they can given the circumstances. podcastindex.org #

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Fractional Reserve Bullying (Issue #175) markjgsmith.com #

2024/08/02 #

  • I’m slowly making some progress with the reusable deploy workflow feature for my static site generator. I’ve also managed to listen to a few podcasts. Got gifted some food yesterday evening, which was nice, but these events often come with strings attached, in the form of strange incidents that take up all your time. A fellow with some travel bags showed up immediately afterwards and said he was stuck like me.

    I didn’t have much I could help him with, I’m also in a bad situation. I gave him a few things I could spare and a way to avoid getting lost which is all too easy once you get into places where nobody speaks any language you speak. He eventually moved on, making his own way, I wished him bestvof luck as he departed. I can’t say I fully believed his story, which I won’t share details of here, but there were several strange synchronicities with things that have happened to me in recent days.

    This morning there was a police officer sitting nearby, got the feeling he was sending me a we-are-watching-you kind of message. Right afterwards, a woman who was having some kind of vague low level argument / situation a few meters away from me suddenly broke into english saying 'you won'. A lot of people have been saying that to me the past few days, followed by some form of harrassment.

    I hope that doesn’t happen again today. Gonna try to get the reusable workflows feature operational, and as usual podcasts, links, blog posts. I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff about stablecoins, so I might write sonething about that as I try to wrap my head around that. I’m still confused by it. #

  • The weird old lady that does imaginary humping as an exercise was doing it again this morning. Just next to the brick that was left a few days ago. She’s different from the weird old lady that hangs out outside the shop. She assumes a position similar to when you are getting patted down by police, then slowly humps. It happens to be across the road from police box thing that usually has an officer inside. Along the way to the internet place lots of used tissues, and tons of empty drugs wrappers, probably from pain killer meds. Got to the internet place and some folks here were making strange sex noises as part of their apparent conversation. In parallel to this there’s been anger goading and motorbike drivebys telling me to eat noodles - ‘mi after’. Btw, remember I wrote a blog post that mentioned a fictional after party just a few days ago. Then same color bags I keep my soup bowl in were left where I stand at the internet place. So sex goading, drugs goading, food goading, and it’s not even 7am.

    Hello warpath, it’s been, oh at least a day or two since the last warpath! #

  • Stablecoins vs Treasuries vs CBDCs

    There has been much talk recently of stablecoins, with Tether making record profits and US presidential candidates making them key in their new promises to those in the crypto industries. I’ve been listening to quite a few related podcasts, most recently Luke Gromen and Preston Pysh on the What Bitcoin Did podcast.

    I think I'm starting to vaguely understand things, but I still have many questions. This post is a roundup of where I’m at with it. I likely still don’t properly understand things, so don’t take any of this as gospel, do your own research and fact checking.

    Aren’t stablecoins just crap treasuries? You give up dollars and get a crypto token, you can later exchange that token back to dollars. It’s as safe as the dollar because the price is guarantied to be 1:1 with the dollar. The stablecoin issuer takes your dollars and buys short duration government Treasury bonds, and they get the interest on the bonds. The crap thing is you get no interest, but the UI is great, you have an app and you can trade the stablecoins with other people.

    Aren’t treasuries just incredible stablecoins, but with a terrible UI? You give up dollars and get a token called a treasury, you can later get back your dollars by giving back the token, plus you get interest. The treasury issuer spends your money to grow the economy, so the value of the dollar increases, it’s like interest, that’s how they can pay you back the money with extra interest. If the economy doesn’t grow the issuer is on the hook for paying the interest out of their own pocket somehow. The UI is crap though, there is no way to trade them with other people, so you can’t easily use them for anything except getting the interest. They are the safest since they are issued by a government, who in most cases is the least likely to default.

    All this got me thinking yesterday evening that theoretically you could create a treasury based on bitcoin alone. You give up dollars, the issuer buys bitcoin, gives you a crypto token. You can later exchange that token back for dollars with interest. It would be up to the issuer to ensure that they bought and sold bitcoin in such a way as to make money. Depending on where in the cycle we were they would issue different duration bitcoin treasuries, potentially with different interest. They would typically pay the interest to you from the earnings they get from the bitcoin price increasing. If they fucked it up and sold bitcoin after a crash, they would be on the hook for paying you the interest using their savings. I wonder if there isn’t potentially lots of money to be made, very much like a stablecoin.

    It seems there are some moves to create exotic financial instruments that mix in crypto. I listened to Marty Bent today describe on the latest Rabbit Hole Recap podcast speaking about people that are looking to create dual collateralised treasuries, collateralised with dollars and bitcoin, possibly with a variable split, and payout in dollars.

    Also something else, I wrote about yesterday:

    I totally might be not understanding this correctly but aren’t CBDCs basically stablecoins run by the government instead of a foreign company? If that’s the case then another way of saying that is that stablecoins are CBDCs run by a foreign company. That doesn’t sound like a good idea.

    I just wanted to add to that, if CBDCs are essentially stablecoins issues by a government, aren’t they therefore essentially treasuries?

    Anyway, like I said, I probably have most of this incorrect, but that’s where I’m at.

  • Bitcoin strategic reserves are totally going to become the cool thing you need whether you are an individual, a family, an organisation, an institution, or a country. I thought it sounded cool when Trump mentioned it in his Bitcoin conference keynote, but it was Marty and Matt on Rabbit Hole Recap podcast that predicted it’s going to become a thing. I think it might too. #

Today’s links:

2024/08/01 #

  • I totally might be not understanding this correctly but aren’t CBDCs basically stablecoins run by the government instead of a foreign company? If that’s the case then another way of saying that is that stablecoins are CBDCs run by a foreign company. That doesn’t sound like a good idea. #

  • Bitcoin strategic sovereign reserves

    There’s been a big shift in the sentiment towards Bitcoin and crypto in recent weeks. The US presidential candidates have realised that there are now quite a lot of people into crypto. So many in fact that they represent an amount of people large enough to have an impact in elections. That has led to several candidates announcing that they are now pro-crypto. Trump in particular has been particularly vocal, having spoken at a big Bitcoin conference a few days ago, where he promised to turn the US into the Crypto capital of the planet. Here’s the full keynote speech in video.

    The video from the conference is pretty interesting. I’ve seen a bunch of soundbite clips which are short and informative but in the full video you can tell he is of course reading off of the tele-prompter, and though he obviously knows a bunch about Bitcoin and crypto, he’s clearly still got some learning to do. There are several bits where you can tell he doesn’t fully understand what he’s reading and saying, and there are some other bits where he’s genuinely suprised by the crowds huge reaction. But anyway the point is he’s talking about it, and he’s learning as he goes along. He’s a busy guy.

    The US already has quite a big stockpile of Bitcoin, mostly from seizures from criminal activities, but there is much talk of the US creating a strategic reserve consisting entirely of Bitcoin. Though Trump didn’t go into specifics, others have done. Robert Kennedy for instance says he would setup a program of steady daily Bitcoin purchases, 550 Bitcoins per day until the US had around 4 million coins. That’s around 1/5 of all Bitcoin in existence.

    What I found interesting was this idea of a country steadily buying up Bitcoin. Countries are such big entities that they could have a big impact on the Bitcoin markets. But what would happen if all countries banded together and bought Bitcoin at a sustained pace together?

    I don’t know the answer to this, but I would have thought they could theoretically usher in a very smooth transition from fiat currencies to Bitcoin if they worked together. This is happening already, and everything in the world is being repriced accordingly, but it’s been somewhat chaotic. Though it’s chaotic, there are re-occuring patterns, with high valatility, but it has been happening in a 4 year cycle, that seems to follow the fiat money system’s liquidity refinancing cycle.

    I’d like to know what would happen if countries band together and start buying Bitcoin in lockstep, slowly but synchronised? Would that be a good thing in general, what about for current Bitcoin holders?

Today’s links:

  • The US government needs Bitcoin with Luke Gromen & Preston Pysh (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - I wasn’t able to follow everything in this episode, it rapidly gets pretty complicated, but IMO there’s some very important information in there. It’s basically a macro discussion around how Bitcoin is intersecting with the old school financial system, how the interplay between stablecoins and treasuries is shaping up, and how this might affect and be affected by geo-politics. It gets very abstract in places, but they always bring the discussion back to grounded truths and examples. I think even if you don’t fully understand everything, seeing things through a Bitcoin lense gives you the ability to see where things are moving at least directionally. I’m wondering if there are stablecoins backed by chinese treasuries, that’s were the biggest productivity gains from recent years are currently. Somewhat sad to hear that it’s one of the last WBD episodes, it appears they are moving onto other ventures still to be announced. www.whatbitcoindid.com #

  • RA.947 Lydo (Resident Advisor Podcast) - I listenned to this mix by vietnamese - america electronic music artist last night. It’s pretty great, hard techno, gets pretty dark, especially at the end, I could totally imagine listening to this in a club with an incredible sound system. Probably quite good music to code to also. ra.co #

  • Michael Malice (Joe Rogan Podcast) - I think Malice was previously on Rogan, and I think I really enjoyed their conversation. They are very well balanced together, I feel like they bring out the best in each other. It’s a very conspiracy heavy episode, so if you’re into that, you’ll enjoy this episode. All sorts of topics including the Biden body double, deep fakes & cheap fakes, sceptical being the new norm, Elon and free speech, Harris wine mom, Google memory holing, Trump shooter weirdnesses, Silk Road Ross Ulbricht, Prince Charles’ sausage fingers, aristocrats being perverts, prince Andrew loosing ability to sweat, 1000 space monkeys writing the Art of the Deal, and a whole lot more. If you have a few hours to chill, worth listening to. podcastindex.org #

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