markjgsmith

2024/09/19 #

• There’s a sort of emptiness to everything today.

  Of course the escallations continued all throughout the day to epic proportions. I could probably write several books just on yesterday’s events.

  Eventually you just get to a point where there is no more capacity to handle any of it, and so you just sit and wait for them to stop raping you.

  Nothing else you can do.

  Here are the escallation notes from yesterday:

  • A western woman probably vaguely in her 30s speaking on her mobile phone in the shop cafe the minute I arrived this morning and straight into an apparent conversation about pregnancy tests in Vietnam. How strange, it was literally 2 days ago I blogged about abortion. She seemed very intent on me hearing her, standing directly on front of the item I buy almost every day.
  • Young women at the internet place blocked the toilet with a chair
  • Young women staff at the cafe shop being passive aggressive by pretending to give you your bag with the things you’ve bought but at the last second placing it on the counter top instead of handing the bag to you directly, and you are left hanging with your hands waiting for the bag
  • Young women staff at the cafe shop walking past seing you have just packed up bags and are about to leave and ordering you to "go home", then a few minutes later when you leave saying ‘voila’
  • Afternoon at the internet place. Been here about 5 mins. Woman baby walker just appeared and walked past. The reason I mention these baby walkers is previously there were zero baby walkers, now it’s literally everytime I get online. That’s weird.
  • Man baby walker appeared about 60 seconds after the woman baby walker.
  • Middle aged asian woman drives past on motorbike and looks directly at me just as I look up from my device, she mouths the word ‘obbey’ very slowly accompanied by a simultaneous head nod
  • Working on getting a new workflow working, I made some good progress but got to a point where I need to add some deployment keys to a repo. Literally the instant that happens a bunch of very young kids show up. Something like this happens like 90% of the time whenever I have to do anything with private crypto keys.

  I haven’t even re-read these notes, just don’t have the will for it, so likely loads of spelling mistakes and what not, and might very well not make much sense.

  The reason I walked away from Perl is that it was a dead end, that was pretty clear to everyone. Luckily there was Javascript and the web.

  Life at the minute makes Perl look like some kind of heaven of heavens. It’s like being stuck in the worst framework or programming language in the universe, and it keeps trying to force you to learn more about itself. It’s like a train wreck, you look at it and you think to yourself shit I knew it was bad, but I had no clue it was THAT bad. And it always just gets worse, so much so that people are trying to make the getting worse into being something amazing, making things exponentially worse. And now even the AIs are helping them.

  But unlike with Perl there is nowhere to walk away to.

  There is only more layers of the never ending AI generated fractal of multiplexed what-are-the-chances to keep you separate from everyone in the universe for something that was done to you and blamed on you.

  So you wake up, and put one foot on front of the other and try to survive another day.

  Update: And pick up your bag after writting a note and the strap tears, and you remember there was a whole incident yesterday with a bloke traping you in some manufactured voila situation, involving him leaving his bag for ages, and you think to yourself, what are the chances. And at that instant the morning cyclist assholes cycle past and say loudly 'we learn'. And there are no words. You cannot even. #

• Slight change to routine to catch some sun, I need to dry some clothes so it’s part functional, part to get some fresh air. Heavy rain forcast for the entire day. Here are my verbatim escallation notes from my way down to the canal:

  • Went to two shops, strange feeling of things slowly getting blocked up. Perhaps in some way manufactured situations. Both interactions involved all sorts of extra blah blah that was totally unnecessary.
  • Man in his twenties in road at crossing talking to another on a stationary motorbike, appeared to be waiting for me to choose direction. I hadn’t seen him yet but as soon as I decided to go the direction he was in, he snapped shut his arms and hands in a sort of loud crocodile bitting motion, while laughing maniacally.
  • I walked around him, giving him plenty of space to try and signal "I don’t want any trouble" and walk on to the canal. All the seats at the canal are taken, which I think is quite unusual especially midweek before 630am. I get to the end of the road and turn the corner and there is an enormous gang of middle aged and old butch women doing morning exercises, all wearing pink T-shirts.
  • The instant I notice them, a man cycles past and says "they know"
  • Momentarily there’s a huge sense of glee in the air, many of them are very attentive to my every move.
  • I walk past, carrying my large bags, one if which had the large letters PINK on 3 sides, with no sign of getting angry. I’m like totally chill, whatever world. It was here that I initially git gifted the 'PINK' bag.
  • This appears to create a sense of uneasiness
  • At the next junction there is a choice to either cross the canal or to go back where I came from. I had already decided to go back because as is the case with all these tsunami situations, they have already decided on the outcome, all doors are closed so to speak, all options blocked, no matter what you do, you will be getting mutilated in some way
  • Interestingly at the junction there is a small butch pink T-shirt wearing woman intimidation gang semi blocking the way over the canal, and in the other direction back from where I came there are also butch women but they are wearing light colour pink T-shirts.
  • I make a mental note of this configuration, but I had already decided what I was going to do and as I proceed there’s a vibe of people being a bit confused like they were expecting an angry foreigner but got the exact opposite. And I wasn’t faking it at all, no hesitation, no feeling bad about anything, not happy, but also not sad in any way. I was feeling 100% real.
  • I walk back up to where I had been the previous day, where a weird Vonnegut strawberries maybe manufactured situation involving a man wearing all black, only boxers and T-shirt, a doppelgänger of someone from my past, followed immediately by another doppelgänger of another prominent person from my past. Both not 100%’s but more like as to yet unknown (and impossible based on current description of the universe) family members of OG peeps.
  • I sit down, and directly across the road, a giant empty red coach bus.
  • A few seconds later a couple walks past, the young woman says No! loudly
  • You try to walk away, because you are being infiniti blocked, but you get infinite blocked in every location, so you go back, and you get infiniti blocked when you get back too. Every option leads to punishment.
  • You remember the man with an FFF shoping bag the night before. Eyes are trending. Or not. Either way it’s a trend, like night and day. Happy and sad at the same time, like some sort of carbon credit system gone mad. You get punished for writing this bullet item while writing it.

  I sit quietly. At least I have some food today.

  Appologies for lack of editing. Making it all perfect just creates more issues. #

• Taken from today’s Bankless podcast with Macro Alf [32:57] that for whatever reason feels very appropriate and relevant to areas of my life much more than just the economy.

  Hyman Minski, someone much smarter than I am, once said that "artificial stability actually breads instability". That’s what we are trying to do, we are trying to create this artificial stability. Kill the business cycle, kill the market volatility, kill everything, just control everything, and the federal reserve is communicating along the lines of that.

  In blackout, look at that, they cannot communicate ANYTHING, they cannot communicate that they want or are considering doing 50 [basis points cut]. So what do they do? They communicate through our friend Nick Timeraos from the Wallstreet journal. So Nick is a very good journalist. He is known to have their ear or actually to be the ear of Federal Reserve speakers during blackout periods.

  It’s like patterns in the fractal that is society, ripple through all layers of the social network of humans in one way or another. I’m not able to describe what I’m seing very well. Of course there’s also the possibility of confirmation bias, and "seing faces in clouds", but honestly there are just way to many oddities for them all to be explained by that. In life, as with the economy large manipulations are visible at the macro level.

  And this isn’t my first rodeo. This has been happening for years at this point, and progressively escallating.

  And as far as I know, aside from the occasional cup of coffee, I’m completely sober, and have been for years, not that I ever had substance abuse problems, though like many I had some fun times at university, which was a very very long time ago now.

  It feels like society is reaching some form of new era, where things making sense is going to start breaking down.

  Anyway, 'nough said for now. #

• Another choice quote from Macro Alf on Bankless (34:50):

  The reality is that as investors, our job, I think, is to understand the rule of the game, and then to try and navigate them in the safest possible way with tight risk management.

  That’s some dark Orwelian double speak if ever I’ve heard any. Are there any other people you would like to 'navigate' using powerful economic tools?

  I don’t want to pick on Macro Alf, I actually like much of what he has to say about the economy. But his choice of words is, I think, illustrative of an issue we are going to start bumping up against as AI tools become ever more poweful, and available throughout societies, at greater and greater levels of granularity.

  We should be talking about this in the open, and allowing people to think about it, make up their own minds. I say this because literally as I type this, a gang of women has been doing their version of open air "risk management", keying off of my every move to distract and anger goad me in public in broad daylight.

  At a certain point you get to a place where people are non-ironically declaring slavery to be freedom, or something else that’s as fucked up. Or maybe they declare it as a joke, or some other diguise for real bad and dispicable behaviour.

  As I type this even more gangs showed up, doing modern day next level "nothing to see here" risk management. Literally got intimidation surrounded. The social layer really not down with my writting, so maybe this is the right direction after all.

  Though based on the correlation between their silences and general enthusiasm, and my pausing and starting writting, they might be thinking the same thing. It’s crazy. #

• Another comment about Macro Alf comments about the economy. His whole thesis about lags in the effects of things passing through the economy is so ridiculously precient, it’s borderline not believable to me. I don’t know when their show was recorded, but I received it today in my podcast app.

  Remember I already prepared next week’s newsletter, last week. You aren’t gonna believe the issue title, but the timestamps are all verifiable via git commits. I sort of expected something like this to happen based on past bullying cycles. And it’s happening again. The world’s manipulations are being laid out bare.

  The question is how large is the blast radius? Where are the edges to this thing we are in? I think that’s what I’m starting to see. How about you all, what do you see? #

• I have a Github action step that creates a file via bash heredoc. It’s been working totally fine for all my workflows for ages. Well yesterday the step started doing something odd on one of the repos.

  Suddenly there was a file permision error. You see the file created is a bash script that gets run. For some reason, in this case, the file is created but doesn’t have any execution permissions set, so attempting to run the script fails with a permission error.

  This would normally cause all sorts of crazy confusion trying to debug, but now that all the repos use the exact same build workflow, I know something strange is going on. There is literally no reason the file should get created with different permissions.

  I’m still trying to figure out what happened, but just wanted to write a note about it because there are all sorts of very bizare situations happening in RL, and I often find, as strange as this might sound, that the universe starts mirroring situations in my code back at me.

  Strange, that is, if you have never experienced passive aggressive industrial scale gang stalkers, and the anger goading that almost always accompanies them. Right now for instance a young woman is standing right next to me in a bright white shirt looking clueless. Clueless apparently that yesterday the manufactured situation that occurred in this very same spot involved people dressed entirely in all black clothes. So there’s an opposite dynamic that’s hapening, but also blocking, because these types of things keep happening just as I’m about to leave.

  There’s other weird stuff happening too but I don’t want to get into it for fear that things get even worse. #

• Rep. Jay Obernolte on Politico Tech Podcast:

  AI like few topics in policy has been misinformed by 50 years of science fiction and pop culture now. So if you ask what the average american what they view as the largest risk of AI, you’ll get something out of the Terminator. An evil army of robots rising up to take over the world with red laser eyes.

  I told you eyes were trending. Just another what are the chances. #

• Escalation notes down to the other side of the canal:

  • Red anger goading pretty much all the way to the other side of the canal, especially once across to the other side.
  • Also people purposely blocking the path and pretending you don’t exist, then annoyed when your bag touches them as you pass even though they quite clearly saw me approaching
  • On entering the shop cafe, young woman staff shouts "free", then on paying calls me wanker under her breath, then annoyed that I asked for the receipt which she forgot to give me. Update: a bloke shouted free as I finally left several hours later
  • Very large butch woman wearing bright red top sitting right next to the power outlet, very intent on making eye contact, talking aggressively on phone.
  • Somebody in shop opposite taking photos or video of me or someone near me, then laughing when I subtly raise my hand to cover my face. Then somebody in the room where I am saying "he knows".
  • Strange issues with the power outlets, followed by staff saying "you won"
  • Anytime shop staff go near the hot water fountain they say ‘lie’ or ‘liar’.
  • Every time I come to this place somebody starts counting huge wads of cash. It happened again.
  • It’s pretty clear the staff here are cycling through several pre-prepared situations, like american football plays

  Update: It’s several hours later since I wrote this note. I’ve been listening podcasts, it’s been quite quiet in my surroundings. I decided to re-read and fix typos and wording. Within about 10 seconds of starting to make edits, typing on my phone, an extreme camp bloke has piped up, gotten on the phone and is anger goading my every move. He keeps saying the word 'Gay' for instance. Anyway just wanted to make an update to the note. When I speak about blocking, this is often the sort of thing I am talking about. #

• Sparrow people

  Some people mostly women but also some men are like sparrows, it’s like if there was an algorithm that controls sparrows, that algorithm has been connected up to them. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. They spiritually are always like right up in your face fluttering their wings, pecking at you like you are a small mound of sesame seeds.

  Depending on how you look at it, it can seem like different things, but to be honest often it’s phasers-on-its-okay extreme. And even suggesting that is met with, metaphorically speaking, the entire world nuclear arsenal aimed directly at you, while casually laughing like it’s a light hearted joke. It’s almost as if they weaponise their anxiety and yours, and, in a way, it’s ingenious, even if it is manipulation infiniti.

  For the record I think sparrows are amazing. No problem at all with sparrows, but I do at times find sparrow people quite challenging.

  Update: Please world don’t psycho bully me with dead sparrows, thank you.

• Matt Walsh on racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers

  Really enjoyed listening to the Rogan - Matt Walsh episode. Lots of interesting topics including racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers.

  Also literally the best moon landings are fake discussion I’ve listenned to. I wish conversations between two people with opposite views were always this respectful.

  Here’s a great quote from Matt about social media:

  If you’re a human being on Twitter saying something, that’s real life, it’s not fake, it’s not happening in some kind of dream world. But then people think that well okay if I just say this on Twitter, I put a YouTube comment section, and this heinous awful thing, it doesn’t count, it doesn’t mean I’m a bad person because it’s not real life. That’s like writing on loose leaf paper, calling someone a piece of shit, and handing it to them, and then they get mad at you, and you say ‘hey man, it’s the paper, it’s not real life, it just happened on the paper’. It’s a method for communicating [...] it turns people into sociopaths after a while I think.

  I find this sort of behavior is seeping into real life too. Not sure how I feel about that. Sometmes it can be funny, but other times not at all.

• Slavery, the bible, and the changeability of institutions

  I listenned to several very interesting podcasts this week. One of the themes that came up several times is slavery. It's an on-going conversation that our societies are having now, and have been in one way or another for a very long time.

  Historian Gregory Aldrete, who specialises in the Roman period, was on the Lex Fridman podcast. Elon Musk recommended the conversation on Twitter, and I think he was right, it’s not normally a period in history I’m particularly interested in, but there were a lot of very interesting takes.

  For example the Christians were the first to say everyone is created equal in the eyes of God. That’s pretty cool! Apparently it really got up the Romans noses though. It’s now the basis of many democracies around the world! [2:35:51].

  Noah Harare was on both the Bankless podcast talking about AI and democracy and the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast talking about AI Fears. He tells a fascinating yet somewhat different story, namely that the Bible’s 10th commandment appears to endorse or at least allow slavery. So that seems like a bit of a contradiction. How can you have everyone is created equal but also slavery? Hold that thought.

  The other very interesting thing Noah talks about is institutions in general and how their changeability, their updatability varies enormously. And this is a good thing. Newer institutions tend to be easier to update. Older ones not so much.

  The US constitution is difficult but not impossible to update. There are quite a few amendments that have been made to the original document. The bible on the other hand is pretty much impossible to update, but also it’s context is some rather crazy stories so it’s kind of clear much of it is not meant to be taken literally. But it’s written to last thousands of years, and has lasted that long, no easy feat, through civilisation collapses and renaisances too.

  Anyway I‘d been thinking about the apparent contradiction all week and one thing that had occurred to me, is similar to a point I’d made recently about the importance of giving things a name so you can actually talk about them. The fact that slavery is mentioned at all is significant, and the specifics might not actually be all that important. Remember 2000 years ago things were very very different.

  Matt Walsh on Rogan [14:05] makes some really interesting points about the realities of how our societies view racism and slavery:

  Of course the issue is that everybody who lived on earth prior to about...certainly prior to about 100 years ago, was racist by our standards today. Every single one. There was no one on earth that lived 100 years ago who we would not consider racist. Of any race.

  If you go back 200 years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back 500 years, and there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally. They might have had issues with how slaves were treated in some contexts. But it took like 1000s of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on Earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing [...]

  Why is that? It’s so obvious to us, but some of the greatest minds of history, they never thought of it. But we can’t talk about that, we have to talk about slavery and racism as if they are an exclusively white western phenomena.

  It’s mindboggling that it took 1000s of years to make this discovery. And it is a discovery, an enormous one. It’s humanity as a whole discovering about itself. That’s the pace of the big questions in humanity. It’s imperfect, but we are making progress. The insututions are layered ontop of each other. Yes sometimes there are contradictions, but seen in context as a massive living document of all of our societies this patch work is pretty amazing.

  I’ll leave you with those 3 thoughts, because the world has become very blocky, prickley with red anger goading, as I wrote most of those last few paragraphs.

  Perhaps I’ll write more about this at a later stage.

  I’m finding it’s so unbelievably difficult to think and write about anything of substance these days. It’s like two opposing forces are constantly at odds with each other in the literal world that surrounds me, and I’m always caught in the cross fire.

Today’s links:

• Explosions linked to walkie-talkies kill at least 20 in fresh Lebanon attack - This story is so f-ed up. I sure hope this isn’t the future for all of us, but the way the world has been going it doesn’t seem that far fetched to imagine that it could be. How many of us even have any idea how many degrees of separation we are from potential targets. The further we go down this road, the closer such a reality becomes. Next year’s, actually fuck it, this year’s most popular Christmas prezzy: bomb proof phone cases. www.theguardian.com #

• New Post: Sparrow people markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Matt Walsh on racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: Slavery, the bible, and the changeability of institutions markjgsmith.com #