markjgsmith

The world has been teetering on a red tsunami for 2 days now. It’s like it knows it caused the problem it’s complaining about and so is reluctant to go full tsunami, but it just keeps reseting itself to the initial stages of a red tsunami. It’s strange to describe.

Some malicious help last night, a gift but also accompanied by considerable pocking in the body, so much so it actually hurt. I felt it right to the bone. Borderline violent behaviour. And this morning a woman dressed in red doing exercises right in front of me and blocking me getting up and ready.

I have the newsletter written, it turned out better than I expected, although it’s still very hodge podge because of the difficult situation. It’s the best I could do.

There was a bit more progress with the reusable workflows, though I ran into what appears to be a bug in my git client where it won’t let me reset a branch by 3 commits. No matter what I do the 3 commits disapear, then reapear. Hopefully I’ll get some useful feedback and suggestions from the support team. Currently the repo containing the reusable workflow is not updateable.

What are the chances right when I’ve gotten all the key repos using the reusable workflow that it should suddenly be blocked from updates? #

cat << EOF > Unified Narratives (Issue #180)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Bitcoin end is the beginning, second brains, theories of everything, media manipulations and market distortions, LLM video game characters, 20 years of podcasting!

Issue details:

• Title: Unified Narratives
• Issue: 180
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

A couple of questions about stablecoins:

1. Aren’t stablecoins just new eurodollars, but operated by a single company?
2. Are stablecoins a blockchain interop solution?

USDC for example now supports around 14 blockchains. Doesn’t that mean stablecoins are a bit like file formats such as .doc or .pdf?

For context I was listening to a recent This Week in Startups podcast interview with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire all about stablecoins. #

cat << EOF > Extremely evil, duh

It’s the other side that is extremely evil, obviously, duh

• Democrats think Trump is a fascist and will put them all in a concentration camp. He is thus extremely scary.
• Republicans think Harris is a Marxist and will put them all in a Gulag. She is thus extremely scary.

And somehow neither side can see the other side’s perspective. Infinite righteousness meets infinite righteousness. It’s a population scale cry baby war.

Don’t be suprised if eventually they start literally playing back recordings of crying babies at each other. In fact not doing so will be seen as deeply suspicious.

After that who knows what will happen. I suppose the worst case might be we have to wait until the heat death of the universe.

Or maybe they merge the parties into 1 and create a gulag concentration camp.

Then we’ll get bored of that and so we’ll turn it into a multi-colored rainbow, because actually life was a spectrum all along rather than reduceable to half a binary.

Isn’t it kind of funny that rainbows are giant sad faces? It’s almost like the universe has seen this all before. Rainbows and the moon are both signs we are in a simulation. I mean seriously, what are the chances. #

cat << EOF > Could we build a decentralised podcast index?

The original podcast index is the one managed by Apple. In the initial days of podcasting, as far as I remember, it was the only one. If you wanted podcasts you openned up iTunes, browsed their podcast index, and subscribed to podcasts from their index. After you subscribed, your iTunes would download your podcast subscriptions automatically.

That’s a bit of a simplistic reduction of the history, I think there were non-Apple indexes, but since Apple was the dominant place people went to for podcasts, the vast majority of people never even knew what a podcast index was, let alone use an alternative. I think that’s mostly still the case.

That changed for me when I started a weekly newsletter that contains links to podcast episodes. You see one of the problems with podcasting is that people can choose where they host their podcasts, and hosting providers implement their services in varying ways. Ironically that’s also one of podcasting’s greatest strengths, since it makes podcasting distributed, and thus hard to shutdown.

The reason it matters is that since many podcasters don’t have their own websites, it means there isn’t a consistent way to get a web link to a show episode page. Some hosting providers, have show pages, others don’t even bother, the ones that do often don’t include a playback tool in the page to listen to the episode in your browser. It’s a bit of a mess. And if you are sharing podcast links in the content you are publishing, that turns into quite an issue.

For the past few years I had been using the podcast index maintained by Google Podcasts. It had by far the cleanest UI, no ads, a really great in page player to listen to the episode, search that worked pretty well most of the time. But recently Google Podcasts was shutdown. I guess it wasn’t a money maker in the same way as it is for Apple since they don’t really have hardware products in the same way as Apple do.

Anyway, since Google shut their index down, I have been using podcastindex.org. It’s pretty good, with links for each episode, search that works well, and based on the blurb on the website, they appear to be in it for the good of the community. Yet I’m still not completely comfortable using their site for linking to podcast episodes. There are a few reasons.

First off there are no individual episode pages. Instead there are multiple episodes on each page. Episode links are possible using a url hash fragment, but it worries me that the show episode url contains an id generated by their database. Maybe it’s not a big deal but for some reason this makes me uneasy.

The other thing, and probably more important is what happens if they go offline. The web being the web, that’s virtually a certainty to happen at some point. And when it does, all those links I shared will 404, and whatever I wrote about the podcasts will become worthless. Isn’t there a better way?

Podcasting has become such a big part of our lives, it’s gotten big enough I feel like we need some authoritative source similar to Wikipedia that will last for the forseable future. Isn’t there some way to use blockchains and something like IPFS to ensure the data is all stored publically in a distributed way?

I'm not an expert in this area, but perhaps some sort of a standard / protocol would be good enough. If we knew all podcast indexes used the same URL structure, which used hashes of a standard episode metadata file, then maybe it wouldn’t matter so much. You could just swap out one podcast index domain name for another, and the links would still work.

Just thinking out loud. I think it’s a really important topic, especially as governments try to attack podcasting which is bound to happen more frequently in the future. #