markjgsmith

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. #

• cat << EOF > 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.

  EOF

• 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? #

• cat << EOF > 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?

  EOF

• 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:

• New Post: Chris Coyier on LLMs using your data markjgsmith.com #

• Macron on Telegram CEO’s arrest: French government was not involved - "This is in no way a political decision" - That’s a very strange way to deflect. Surely the judges are part of the government, no? What a strange game of hot potato. www.politico.eu #

• New Post: Politics ambidextrous markjgsmith.com #