markjgsmith

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 #