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2024/10/17 #

  • It’s been malicious help after malicious help the past 24 hours. When this happens you know they have already decided the outcome of everything. It literally doesn’t matter what you do they will continue to escallate even more, each time becoming more and more righteous. Each time blaming you for the thing they are doing to you. The only thing left is peace: ☮️✌️🕊 #

  • Progressive enhancement underrated

    cat << EOF

    I think progressive enhancement is such a cool idea and feature of the web. Though different people’s approach vary a lot, the basic principle of getting something minimally functional first is a tried and tested approach to engineering that will keep you from getting stuck in unnecessary weeds.

    That’s why the uk.gov progressive enhancement service manual is worth reading. It might not be exactly how you should approach it for your particular situation, but they likely will have some aspects that would be applicable. A lot can be learnt from organisations that have explored such topics at a deep level, and the UK government’s approach to progressive enhancement and the web in general certainly is that.

    Progressive enhancement does seem a bit burdensome at first, creating unnecessary obstacles, but after a lot of years building websites, I’ve seen so many frameworks and cool new things fall by the wayside, and seen time and time again that at the very least having a progressive enhancement mindset will help you avoid nasty unnexpected issues.

    Make sure the site at least works minimally without styling and javascript. I'm not a religious absolutist about it but I find that it actually helps you focus on core functionality, then when the foundations are strong, the enhancement phase is much easier, and fun. In some ways it’s a bit like having quality test suites to run your backend code through. It inspires a certain confidence in your ability to make changes to the code base.

    I wish more people wrote about their experiences with progressive enhancement in web development. I feel like it’s a somewhat undiscovered area of exploration.

    EOF

  • I haven’t been writing any escallation notes the past few days. That’s mostly because the food poisoning stomach thing totally obliterated me. That’s not to say there hasn’t been any escallations, in fact quite the opposite, it’s been almost constant escallations. It feels like pieces are being slyly moved into some sort of mega attack. If past experience id anything to go by that will manifest in water being cut off, power being cut of, food being cut off, and mutilation. And everything being blamed on me.

    Even this morning for instance was a long series of situations where no matter what I did, I was in some way put into the line of fute for some blame. Even finding the optimum solution resulted in being blamed. This happened over and over and over, for hours, literally anything I did just resulted in another even more improbable contradiction reality inversion situation.

    It’s very difficult to desccribe, but just wanted to write a note about it to at least say that it’s happening. #

  • I just got what I would call borderline assaulted.

    It’s borderline because technically they didn’t make physical contact with me but several gang stalker gangs harassed me in such a way that I had diminished attention of my surroundings and since it was twilight, visibility was poor and the path was very precarious and slipery. I stood on an uneven bit of ground, lost my balance and because one of my bags is very heavy I wasn’t able to stabilise myself and went flying into the floor. There was another gang waiting for me a bit further up the street ready to harass me even more. At a minimum it’s extremly dangerous.

    Btw, there literally were gangs waiting at every corner along the way, harassing me as I walked past.

    Earlier in the shop cafe there were gangs of school kids playing cards, and throwing cards at considerable velocity at my head, one card missed my head by about an inch. My sinuses then got completely blocked for some reason. For some reason this happens a lot in this particular place, that I hadn’t been to in a while. This no doubt also had an affect on my sense of balance.

    It’s just more escallations. Like I keep saying, it always always results in me getting mutilated. It happens every damn time in one way or another.

    Also on the path to the internet place, there were several pink tsunamis. This is likely in response to some malicious help last night were I was left some food in a pink Tupperware. I didn't have space in my bag for the Tupperware but I took the food. The food was very nice, but now that’s being blamed on me. Literally blaming and punishing me for the things they are doing to me.

    So many other escallations today, too many to mention. #

Today’s links:

2024/10/16 #

  • I thought I was over the stomach troubles yesterday morning. I was feeling relatively alright, so had some breakfast, just usual stuff. There was some weirdness at both the sandwich shop and the egg & hot water shop. They are both in a mood with me once again just for existing. All I can do is peace signs now. When all is said and done, ultimately that’s what you are left with. When they remove your ability to choose your boiled egg, nevermind that they were still boiling them when you got there and you had to calmy wait, then punish you for nevertheless trying to choose your boiled egg, ultimately you are left with peace signs.

    And then 10 minutes after eating said breakfast I became completely bloated. I felt like a baloon. It was really horrible, couldn’t hardly move. Spent the entire day being harassed by anonymous bullies, it was literally non-stop. I ended up just locking both my hands into peace signs and just sitting / lying motionless.

    I slept really badly last night. I expect it will be more of the same non-stop harassnent as the world repeatedly counter acts everything I do, no matter that I’m ill, worldo doesn’t care one little bit, in fact me being ill is like some sort of bully extra special treat.

    No development possible as have no build minutes left. Still able to publish to the website for now. #

  • The blocking has already started at the internet place this morning. A woman on a motorbike was waiting for me, as soon as I got there she rolled her bike into position, blocking me from the wall that I can lean against to aleviate some of the pain from having to stand. Complete with infiniti righteousness. #

Today’s links:

2024/10/15 #

  • I’m still feeling really lousy from yesterday’s food / drink poisoning by the gang stalkers. I spent much of yesterday evening in and out of the public toilet, which for whatever reason they decided to not keep clean. It was just a mess. Several sgnd that it was related to the poisoning. It had to be said that 85% of the intigators of the entire thing were women, righteously on some sort of we are thd bosses of everything high horses abd can make you ill and you can’t do nothing, and it‘s all your fault. Well they got some peace signs.

    I might try to merge the latest redirect to title heredoc feature this morning. It looks good in the plugins, and I have a feature branch with all the modifications on the main website. I will take 3 builds minimum. I to update the npm module cache, 1 to test using feature branches, and one to build the final merged main branch. If it all works without a problem then I think there’s enough minutes to run the daily build until the reset.

    Anyway, I hope the world has gotten all it’s warpathing done, though that seems unlikely. This morning over the tannoy in the nearby school as a male voice was testing it before the kids arrived: 'More war!'. Seriously, that actually happened.

    I don’t have the energy for all this. The only thing left is peace.

    ☮️✌️🕊 #

  • Definitely not enough build minutes left to try and merge the redirect to title heredocs feature. It’ll have to wait until the reset. I’ll likley also run out of build minutes even for publishing new content too. I’ve got 12 build left for 14 days, and that doesn’t take into account that Github rounds up to the nearest minute. I guess I’ll run out several days before the reset. #

2024/10/14 #

  • I'm running up towards more build minute issues. I’ve got enough to run about 2-3 builds per day until the end of the month when the minutes reset. It’s a bit frustrating, it’s what was happening all the time before I introduced the npm module cache and the reusable workflows. I was running out of minutes every month. On the other hand it’s a sign I've gotten quite a lot done this month. It doesn’t feel that way though because all the work this month has involved jumping between many repos, which means running many builds, and using up lots of minutes. If I had a laptop and was able to run builds locally, not only would I be able to get 10x more development done, but I’d use up way way less build minutes.

    Anyhow, there’s little point complaining about it. I have made a few changes to the heredoc style post delimiters that I think will look a bit better, more compact and kind of nerd cool. I’m calling the feature redirect to title heredocs. If you know anything about Linux and Bash and Heredocs, you might have an idea of what it will look like. And if you know anything about HTML and CSS you’ll know that it’s not completely trivial to implement, because you have to get heading text and regular body text to exist on the same line, which isn’t how things work by default. I think I have a solution though.

    I’ll try to merge that later, hopefully there won’t be any bugs and I can get it deployed, otherwise it will have to wait till the end of the month.

    I’ve was gifted a few nice meals the past couple of days, it feels so nice to have had food and to have some energy. #

  • I managed to get the new redirect to title heredocs feature working in all the plugins. It looks pretty cool. I still need to get all the latest plugins working in the main site build, but I’m going to wait at least until tomorrow for that. I need to ensure I still have enough build minutes to post content to the website until the build minutes reset.

    Really awesome that it’s working, disapointed I’m back to build minutes issues, and once again been punished pretty hard all this morning by an angry world. I’ve got quite bad sneezing and runny nose again, people everywhere trying to make me ill / enflame alergies.

    But the feature fucking works. #

  • Well I was planning to go and buy the flip flops that I desperately need. I mentioned this lat week. The current ones are so worn down I’m starting to slip when it rains, and that gets very dangerous especially when you are carrying heavy bags as I always am. I saved enough money, that took a while and was quite difficult in itself, but anyway got nearby to the shop, had a coffee and a sweet bread breakfast, and a while later started getting stomach cramps. All sorts of manufactured situations all morning, it’s very clear to me it was a planned poisoning of some sort. People around me definitely knew it was happening. It’s the second time this has happened in the last month. The last time was the day after my birthday.

    So I had to skip buying the flip flops and get to a public toilet, and wouldn’t you know it, very camp men harassing me in the toilets. This only happens when they are doing some form of poo based harassment. It’s anger goading. Also bits of red tape left at the internet place where I stand to get online.

    Once again blocked by an angry world, likely a retaliation for my peace signs that I’ve been calmly giving people. Quite a lot of 'you learns' as I was walking to the public loos. #

Today’s links:

2024/10/13 #

  • Going to try and do an even shorter morning note than yesterday because I have some code I wrote last night to merge. Last night I added a way to differentiate between different post types using delimiters. I opted for a geeky bash heredoc style delimiter, and I think it looks quite cool. I updated the code to generalise it so you can add any style of delimiters, and I also had a go at making it work across the blog, newsletter and podcast, all with 1 configuration. It will be cool if it works.

    Lots of strange things yesterday, some nice things too like the tshirts gift. Time to get going with the code testing and merging. #

2024/10/12 #

  • Short note this morning. The world went all yah yah yah everything yesterday. It was crazy. Literally a bloke in the shop cafe for 30 minutes on the telephone the only word he said was 'yah'. I was trying to write a blog post, got most of the way through it but eventually it was just too distracting so saved what I had and started quietly listening to podcasts. That caused the world to go even more yah in various ways, and eventually sparrow people sparrow attacking me. I placed my hand on my bag in the shape of a peace sign and just sat still, waiting for the storm to pass.

    But it didn’t pass. It juat git worse and worse and worse. I realised this had been happening in one way or another for days but was just peaking. I started moving really really slowly, since there is nothing else I could do. I’m not a sparrow or a sparrow person, so eventually going along with that flow just gets dangerous.

    I realised that the one thing I needed to do was the newsletter. I’d been sort of getting blocked doing that for days at this point, but just decided to write a 1 paragraph issue. Weird thing was that as soon as I started, all the sparrow attacks and blocking and what have you completely stopped.

    It’s ridiculus. They constantly block me from doing the thing, to force you into doing the minimal thing, then they are infinitely upset that there is only a minimal thing.

    Then suprise suprise in the evening when I went to publish the issue, for whatever reason everything on my device was taking ages and ages to load. It took more than twice as long as usual. I got it done eventually, so it’s all scheduled and waiting to be sent out. Kept calm. I think the keeping calm really gets up the world’s nose, because it doesn’t fit in with the warpathing.

    The world is yah blocking everything yet again. Then blaming it all on me. #

  • They’ve started turning the internet on and off, while telling me 'pain', and they have ensured the puppy has pee'd in the place where I can lean against the wall at the internet place, thus ensuring I will be in pain if I am online.

    Peace vietnam peace ✌️☮️🕊 #

  • Grand slams

    cat << EOF

    This clip of Francisco Lindor’s grand slam in the eastern conference playoffs made it’s way to me via the ether. I don’t play or watch baseball anymore, but I sure used to. I’m not at all up to speed with the current baseball season, or indeed any season for the past 30 years, but at one point I totally was.

    I knew loads of player stats, would go around to friends houses to watch games on elaborate old school enormous satellite systems to watch games. I collected baseball cards. Tops, Fleer, other brands I can’t remember now. I would endlessly play 80s and early 90s baseball video games. Hiting a grand slam was THE thing you were always trying, and usually failing, to do. Over and over and over.

    I also played all through my teenage years. I must have done 10 seasons. Practiced multiple times per week, year in year out, played competition games every weekend, award ceremonies, trophies, 6ft bubble gum, giant pizzas, bbq hot dogs and hamburgers, american sodas, the whole thing. I was very into it. In later years I made it onto some all star teams. I spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours out on the field, in blistering hot, freezing cold, wet and miserable weather. And in the duggout waiting to get an at bat.

    The sound of a baseball bat connecting with a baseball is lodged so deep in my consciousness and attached in some way to all those memories, that when I hear and see a grand slam, even if I haven’t been following the season or any games for 30 freeking years, it all instantly comes flooding back, my eye brows raise, and some form of pure elation, happiness, and togetherness shines through me. I’m transported back in time, jumping up from my seat along with every god darn person in the stadium, arms raised, fists in the air, roars of joy.

    It’s fucking insane how the things you do when you are young stay with you for the rest of your life. It’s sort of similar for other sports, I watched a lot of football, i.e. soccer, at university, in the pub, so that’s in some way similar for me, even if these days I don’t really watch any sports at all.

    If you've never been into sports, perhaps for you it was something else like music. I have a similarish feeling when I hear incredible loud electric guitars.

    Those moments are some of the best things about being alive. Let’s remember to keep those moments in our future techno world.

    I don’t get so many grand slams these days, but my hope is that at least some of you out there reading this will remember that grand slams exist. That in itself will be a gram slam.

    EOF

  • Simply Refreshing (Issue #185)

    cat << EOF

    This week’s newsletter is out!

    In this week’s edition:

    Freedom tech, future of etherium, AI friends, even bigger tech, mental health, Wordpress drama, Cuban & Musk, BTC mining, OpenAI, Islam, social media, Uk politics

    Issue details:

    EOF

  • Funny old world

    cat << EOF

    I just got gifted 3 black T-Shirts, from a vietnamese gentlemen that lives here.

    I see him quite regularly going for walks along the canal. So many strange things happen to me here in Vietnam, especially the past several months, that when something genuine happens, an act of kindness, a part of me automatically assumes it’s some sort of trick.

    Of course I try to not let on that I’m deep in fight or flight mode, and it adds to the already quite big language barier awkwardness. Funny old world sometimes, as the saying goes.

    I really did need some T-Shirts. They have a logo on the back but it looks quite cool, nothing garish. It doesn’t appear to have some strange double meaning. They are actually really quite good quality.

    It appears to be ok, for the moment at least I’m thankful for the gift :)

    EOF

  • Well that didn’t take long. Barely an hour since I got gifted the 3 t-shirts and already the vultures of the gang stalker hive mind have decended and are twisting and contorting reality into alternative false realities. Rather predictably the false narrative that appears to be being spun is that I didn’t pay for the tshirts, with random passers by shouting 'money!' in my direction as they pass by as I make my way back towards the internet place to post another blog post I wrote for the world.

    For what it’s worth I’m absolutely certain the bloke that gifted me the tshirts wasn’t asking for money. He approached me while I was sitting listening to a podcast. Asked me if I wanted a tshirt. Kept pointing to the wet tshirt I was drying. Said he had 3 tshirts. He asked me several times if I would be here if he went to get them. I told him I would be there for at least an hour.

    I must have said to him I had no money to spend on tshirts 5 or 6 times. I even made the international sign for money rubbing fingers together while saying 'no money', and he definitely gestured that it wasn’t a problem. He went to get the tshirts, came back with them, never asked for money, I said thank you several times, he left smiling.

    But the whispers that travel along the social layer morph and invert very quickly.

    And on the way back up to the internet place, a man apparently talking on a mobile phone, saying 'no-one no-one' followed by an evil laugh, as I walked past. A hundred meters further up the road, some sort of red tshirt moving crew moving boxes. Right after them, a poor scrawney dog limps past in what looked like an aweful lot of pain. The dog had one testicle, it was enormous, the size of a gratefruit, hanging down between it’s legs. Extreme intimidation much?

    And now food goading and angry foot stomping by locals that have a history of spining there false naratives, anger goading and all the usual bullcrap.

    Why do you invert everything vietnam? Why do you turn everything into darkness?

    ✌️☮️🕊 #

  • It was a bit difficult to see the end of a blog post and the beginning of the next post. To remedy this I’ve added delimiters in the style of a Bash Heredoc. I think this fits in quite well with my ethos. I’m a programmer who has mostly worked developing and maintaining systems on Linux. The closing tag links to an article describing heredocs so for the curious they can figure out the reason for the extra text.

    For example you should be able to see the delimiters on:

    • The everything page - All days will have delimiters at the start and end of blog post text]
    • All blog post pages - All individual blog post pages will have the delimiters at the start and end of that blog post’s text

Today’s links:

2024/10/11 #

  • Tried to get back into some blogging yesterday, but it’s not the sort of thing you can just pick back up. It takes a while to load your brain back up with all the current zeitgeist and think about it, and write some notes etc. That’s the biggest problem with all this boom bust cycles that are constantly happening to me, it just cripples your ability to do anything. Ideally I’d be doing a bit of writing and a bit of coding and some podcast listening everyday, and the flow would be more constant.

    Unfortunately the world is not allowing that, too much harassment and blocking and all the rest of it like the horrendous weather. So the past few days I did get quite a lot of coding done, considering all the set backs, but it meant I had to drop everything else. That’s why yesterday was a bit frustrating, made worse by the extreme passive aggressive sparrow people.

    I still got a bit of writing done but I wasn’t particularly happy about it.

    I think I’ve gotten loaded up with some good ideas after listening to several podcasts, so perhaps today will be a bit better blogging-wise. I also have a few odds and ends I need to deal with related to the past few days coding. I made all the updates last night, need to test and merge them this morning.

    It’s Friday so the other thing is the newsletter. I opted to not do this edition in advance, though I have been compiling the list of podcasts as the week progressed. I like the knowledge that something will definitely get sent out when you prepare it in advance, there’s a sort of relief to doing it that way, but I hate how the newsletter ends up being this update frenzy, all disjointed. Anyway this week I’m back to just writing it, probably in a mad rush tomorrow morning, which will feel crap, then I’ll be lucky if I am able to eat a sandwich and drink a coffee for the entire day. #

  • Escallations started early, I’ll add them to this note:

    • Early morning, a "recycler" leaving the garbage bin open
    • The workmen that caused an issue yesterday morning were back again, this time closing the bin for no apparent reason, I guess "doing me a favour" but they likely were responsible for opening it in the first place. See once a garbage theme starts it continues everywhere. Then sitting next to me, wanting to watch me get ready, which is basically blocking as far as I’m concerned. They left eventually on their motorbikes shouting ‘we god’ as they departed.
    • Motorbike gang stalker drives past making a loud noise sounding like someone who has reached the end of their tether, maximum frustration if you will. Something like Ooouuwooo-ooo. Hard to put into words. Peace world piece.
    • Woman who sits quietly nearby watching videos as I get ready turns up exactly after I have gotten ready. I predicted this would happen and tokd the troublemaker workmen. They are filling up every gap possible. It’s really just more passive aggressive anger goading, eventually everything in every dimension will be full up and the mutliverse will implode, and I will be blamed for it all.
    • As predicted yesterday, the school girl standing at the corner where the old lady does her weird humping exercise has been turned into some weird pedo pervert shit. Today as I passed the corner in question was a white minivan, and as I passed the white minivan an old bloke wearing all white cycled past precariously really looking at me like he was waiting for a reaction. On the perpendicular street, a man walking was waiting and sprung into action as soon as I arrived into view, he too was wearing all white. I walked the rest of the way completely quietly to the internet place with both hands in peace signs.
    • Moody bloke at the internet place that sometimes tries to murder you by forcing you into on-coming traffic is clearing his throat and coughing exactly as he passes me. Soon he’ll be spitting.
    • Woman that runs one of the cafe next to the internet place just started a 'Pay!' harassment cycle. That never ends well.
    • Now people have started 'yah’ing' and laughing, and then the cafe woman is responding with exasperated 'lie!', even though she started it.
    • Having spent the last hour at the internet place handling all the escallation notes etc I finally got to merge the first bit of code I wrote last night. About 2 seconds after clicking the merge button, a motorbike drives past me on the small alley way where I’m standing. The motorbike had a young girl in the back, she can’t be more than 6-7 years old. As they pass, she very happilly shouts 'Aaaaaahhh'. It’s like she’s been told to do it as part of a game or something. A moment later a woman from one of the cafes shouts 'data!'. Remember I told you yesterday the 'data' incident would lead to pedo pervert shit didn’t I. Then another short moment later a man from the other cafe shouts 'see?'. I do what any sane person would do in respobse to all this strangeness, and do a peace sign, then s double peace sign. Then alternating evil / good bloke emerges from hid house and says 'you dog'. I then loudly say peace vietnam peace. This is a classic example of a shirt escallation cycle, which quite clearly included pedo pervert shit. And as I was typing uo the writeup, quite clearly they tried to pin it on me.
    • Lots of people at internet cafe saying 'gay' and one clearly saying 'I am gay lord'
    • On the way to the sandwich shop, I crossed the road from the internet shop, and who should be right there, the overly camp bloke that often appears at the public toilets when I happen to go there. And guess what he’s got a small pussy cat on his shoulder, as he sweeps the floor. It’s very clear to me that this is all a big planned pedo pervert anger goading escallation just as I go back to the sandwich shop where they keep anger goading me.
    • Sandwich shop bloke corrected my near perfect pronounciation of the name of the sandwich, which he doesn’t normally do, then made the sandwich but got his collegue to give it to me, all while making a really sad face.
    • Got to the shop cafe and there was waiting there a hugely tall asian bloke with a woman, apparently just about to pay. He must have been close to 7ft tall. This is the shop cafe with the grafiti penis in the wall. It’s more manufactured escallation pedo pervert shit as far as I’m concerned. One or two of these situations could randonly happen but it’s literally continuous, multiple events at every location I go to. By the way tall asian bloke threw a straw wrapper on the ground in front of me, remember straws have been trending all week, and the woman he was with repeatedly kept saying the word 'come' in amoungst her presumably vietnamese. Sure that’s not a manufactured situation. Anyway, they got multiple peace signs from me. I hope they have a nice day.
    • The music playing in the shop cafe as I wrote the previous escallation item was some non descript asian boy band (sorry) and the final 2 minutes of the song was just someone saying 'tchew' over and over like they were sneezing. As I write this note item bloke shop staff is saying 'wanker' over and over, and 'okay' over and over. Followed by 'he’s learning'.
    • Video game tutter bloke waited exactly until I started eating my sandwich abd is now on a loud speaker phone call on some sort of tirade. One of the cafe shop bloke staff is in the back room also on phone in some sort of 'okay', 'lie' and 'liar' tirade. A minute after I started drinking my hot coffee back room bloke started making overly elaborate yawning / extreme tiredness sounds.
    • It’s lunch time now, and a massive school kids tsunami, blocking all the seats and tables with their bags. 80% girls. But also a few folks in their 20s. Again 80% women. I get the sense there is some pent up harassment, trying to surface, several metaphorical shives, but I’m not reacting to anything. So of course lots of 'well dones' which is a shiv in itself. Totally unnecessary in a public space IMO.

  • Ed Dowd [23:23]: "They don’t believe in god, they believe they are the gods."

    This is a quote from a podcast I listened to yesterday, and guess what, that’s literally what troublemaker workmen shouted at me this morning. #

  • Tom Tugendhat on the british system of government

    cat << EOF

    I really enjoyed the latest episode of the Conversations With Tyler podcast, a discussion with UK member of parliament Tom Tugendhat. He is in the running for the Conservative Party leadership.

    One bit that stood out was his instinctive and deep understanding of the government machine as it were, how the pieces fit together, and how they are intended to work, their mechanics, to create particular features. Here’s a quote:

    Tyler Cowan: Can the british system of government in it’s current parliamentary form, how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?

    Tom Tugendhat: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truely liberal foundations are maintained. I mean not in the american sense, but in the old liberal tradition that emerges in the UK in the 17-18 hundreds, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property and all those principles that then became embeded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own.

    It does very well at doing it because our system forces you into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in parliament over the next 4-5 years, and there are 4 of us currently going for leadership of the Conservative party. And there is one reason why, despite the fact that we are competing, almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we are all going to have to work together over the next 4 years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other 3, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true.

    There's only 121 of us Conservative MPs in parliament, and what this system forces on us, is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with someone as if you have to deal with them tomorrow. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the british political system has endured, because it forces you to remember there is a long term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short term one.

    On a related note Tyler then goes on to ask about the House of Lords:

    Tyler Cowan: Should the House of Lords be phased out?

    Tom Tugendhat: No it shouldn’t. The extraordinary thing about the House of Lords is that it’s not something that anybody would invent, but it works! Well you might, you are the kind of economist that might :). The weird thing about hereditory peers is that there are plenty of changes you can make to hereditory peers, but the weird thing about it is that it’s a system of randomness, that injects lottery into government. I can certainly see an argument for turning that from a family lotery into a jury system, where it’s a temporary lotery.

    But the other thing that the House of Lords does, which is very very difficult in a democracy, is to force you to think longer over time. And what the House of Lords used to do, through it’s hereditory principle, was force you to think not only long term over time for yourself, so 20-30 years, but actually think generationally.

    If you want to guard the stability of your country, so that your children or your grand children inherit your wealth, then you need to be thinking over 50 or 100 years. And one of the problems that democracies have is short term thinking, and balancing long term and short term thinking is something every democracy should be trying to do [...] the fact that they introduce long term thinking, that they don’t actually have the ability to block anything, and that they force, effectively, a power base beyond the day to day will of the prime minister, I think is a benefit, and I think it has been good to have as a revising chamber. I don’t think it should ever have pre-eminance, and I think that the elected chamber should always have the ability to over-rule it, which we do, but I think having that long term thinking is really important.

    I thought this was a really great interview. Tyler asks some fantastic questions. I was impressed with Tom’s clarity of thought when it comes to the engine of british government. Based on this interview, it’s the first time I’ve heard him speak about anything, I’d say he would be a good leader. He instills a certain amount of confidence, you get the sense he’d be rather good at keeping things running.

    I do wonder whether he has any big ideas, things ge wants to change. I’ve only heard he’s not too keen on being in the European convention of human rights. That I find kind of worrying. That doesn’t sound like something we should be throwing away too quickly. In any case, even if he doesn’t have any big ideas he wants to implement, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes just being in maintenance mode for a while is what’s needed.

    But if he does, and he has the right team around him, I feel like he’s likely in a good position to judge as to what changes might be achievable.

    Just a few thoughts I had after listening.

    I thought it was also quite interesting in juxtaposition with the latest Rogan podcast with Michael Shellenburger where they get into some of the design philosophies behind the US government, as well as problems institutions are facing. Interesting contrast. Conservatism built into the system vs implemented by the political party, at runtime so to speak.

    I don’t really have an opinion on which is better, but it’s certainly useful information, to understand what sort of environments each would be suited for, and something to keep in mind as we try to continue to further a mutually productive relationship with the US.

    EOF

  • Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenburger on the current problems in science and society

    cat << EOF

    I thought this was a particularly insightful back and forth following a discussion about science and specifically the efficacy of vaccines [0:37:05]:

    Shellenburger: It’s very authoritarian. [...] What Fouchey and Peter Hotez and Bill Neigh call "science" is not actually science, because science is a process. The way they talk about it, is more like a doctrine, or a dictatorship. In a dictatorship science is done by scientists. Well actually science can be done by anybody. It’s like journalism. You don’t need a PHD to do science. Science is something that you do, and it’s also not the same, sometimes you do experiments in labs, but science in the world of ecological biology is just going out there and counting the number or gorillas or whales. So when they say "science" they really mean "obey me". That’s what they mean.

    Rogan: And it’s people that are connected to institutions. All of them.

    Shellenburger: Very powerful ones.

    Rogan: So you are connected to educational institutions, you are connected to these pharmaceutical industries, various institutions that are funding media. So they have enormous influence and power over narratives. And then you have people like Bill Niegh who’s not even a scientist.

    Shellenburger: I know, he’s an engineer.

    Rogan: Which is really wild. A guy that’s not a scientist, is "the science guy". [...] There’s a scientific method, and that’s what science is. Science is applying the scientific method and data and trying to find out the truth, based on what we know. It’s not "trust the experts". Especially when the experts are severely compromised.

    Shellenburger: Science comes out of Christianity. It comes out of the desire to understand god’s creation. Then over time the church gives more and more freedom to these scientists to study things, that end up being quite inconvenient. The earth revolves around the sun or there’s evolution, there’s all these things that scientists discover. It’s the opposite of doctrine. They are discovering things that are content doctrinaire [...] Science tries to tell you how things are, not what you should do.

    It’s worth going back a bit and listening to the path they took, the I think pretty well thought out criticism they make, to get to their summation. They go on to talk about some of the issues current day institutions are running into. And also what will be likely seen as a rather controvercial chat about drug legalisation / decriminalisation, but I think they make some very good observations.

    Really interesting discussion.

    EOF

  • Joe Rogan [0:53:49]: "The crazy thing is it seems to be an emergent behaviour pattern. When people get into power, when people have power, they always go in this very particular direction of control. And this is what the founding fathers of the constitution, the people that founded this country, when they were laying it out, they were trying to prevent that from taking place, and they had this very elaborate plan to sort of subvert notmal human behaviour, to stop it from taking root in this country, and make this a better experiment in self government than what they had experienced under dictatorships. And people always want to get it back to where they are comfortable, which is being a dictator." #

Today’s links:

2024/10/10 #

  • Well the escallation cycle is certainly in full swing. The manufactured situation at the sandwich shop a couple if days ago where they purposely got my order wrong while simultaneously front running literally everything I was doing, as predicted has balooned into some sort of 10 headed hydra of bullying. Everywhere I go people are digging up the graves of bullying cycles past, righteously blaming me for everything bad in the entire multiverse.

    The current thing is that they are doing the tired old 'Pay' manufactured lie, where they pretend you are a criminal to everyone. Pretty quickly everyone and their pets are all too happy to pile in on a poor foreigner who’s already being gang raped by the world. Justice and truth be damned. If you complain, it’s a joke, 'why are you so up tight foreigner? Have you got something to hide?'. If you don’t say anything, then you get bullied even more.

    I’m having to ration massively. I haven’t had a full meal in days. I had to buy some new headphones to replace the ones that started malfunctioning under dubious circumstances. The new cheap ones have a distinct crackle in both ears. Not a good sign. I have to buy a new pair of flip flops soon, so I’m saving for those, it could take weeks. You simply can’t walk anywhere in bare feet when it’s hot. But now I’m being framed and accused of steeling, and of doing drugs. No matter what you do they will find a way to fuck you, while claiming to be angels.

    It’s all a big lie, and those that perpetuate the hate know exactly the situation, and what they are doing.

    At least I got the headers and title fonts updated on the website. Happy about that even though it took 10 times as long as it should have done, because of all their blocking and harassment.

    Stop lying Vietnam. Peace vietnam piece.

    Update: Just as I finished writing this note, a butch women did a driveby on a motorbike, in quite a dangerous way I might add, and aggressively shouted 'Tam' at me. Once again they are blocking 'Tam', which I assume refers to 'Com Tam', pork and rice, because I need to buy flip flops, and using it as an excuse to boss me around. But if I do what they are ordering me to do, to buy food even though I can’t afford it, when I run out and then am stuck, they blame me for that too. It’s warpathing on every level, and they do it righteously while claiming to be a peace dove innocently perched on a tree branch. Nevermind they are actually perched on a motorbike doing unprovoked driveby harassments. #

  • The new thing, the response to my double peace signs, which are likely seen as the latest heinous foreigner aggression, is to goad me with unprovoked 'no!' harassment. Then if I do the double peace signs, or a single peace sign, or even if I just say 'peace', is to 'good boy' me.

    Wow Vietnam you’ve beaten peace. Such a winner winner. The winners of all winners.

    I can see the headline now:

    "Vietnam defeats peace! 🕊☠️🔥" #

  • Rather annoyingly, somewhere along the way, code syntax highlighting has gotten broken. You can see it in the latest test post, where the CSS snippet has no syntax highlighting and has had newlines removed. That’s partly why I wrote the post, it’s been so long since I was able to publish anything related to code.

    This same bug has happened before, I can’t remember exactly what it was, could be a render setting. I thought it was something I had fixed in a way that was relatively permanent, so I’m a bit suprised.

    Geez regressions suck.

    Anyhow, I’ll have to find time somewhere to debug it and fix. #

  • Started getting sneezy a few minutes ago, here at the internet place. Noticed the same happened to several others at the sane time. It was accompanied by one of the butch women from the cafes doing lots of 'Aaah' noises, but with a certain confidence like she knew sonething was about to go down. Then a bit later the bloke who alternates between good abd evil characters emerged from his house saying 'you learn'. This was the same house that 2 dats ago a butch woman was sitting outside looking ill. The next day, something I didn’t mention, they said loudly 'doctor' at one point.

    Something likely related. Early this morning, much much earlier than schools are open, on the way to the internet place there was a young school girl standing waiting at the corner where the weird old lady sometimes does her strange humping exercise. As I passed by, two men passed on a motorbike, one saying 'Dataa!' for no apoarent reason. Based on past experience this will be developed and escallated by the gang stalkers into pedo pervert harassment of some sort. It’s happened many many times before at this stage, I recognise the signs almost immediately.

    All is not well in paradise. #

  • It‘s been an entire day of passive aggressive people. Impossible to do get anything done, especially the last few hours with some really extreme passive aggressive sparrow people.

    Maybe tomorrow will be a better day. #

  • Scarebundance

    cat << EOF

    In a world of the future (?) where 1/2 the people have been raised to just spend money on what they need and expect to magically get given what they need, and the other 1/2 have been raised to only spend when they have enough in advance, dysfunction permeates everything, neither side even acknowledges the other even exists...

    One man finds himself homeless and caught between the two groups. Each one absolutely righteously believing their worldview. Our hero ends up infiniti punished by both sides, as no matter what he does he is wrong.

    Will he ever be accepted? Will he need to change the entire world just to survive?

    EOF

  • Escallation notes for today:

    • Sandwich shop, blamed for problem they created. He had given me a bigger sandwich today, but of course I didn’t see that until later. I assume it was a sort of sorry, but that’s not how it cane across because he said 'lie' as he gave it to me. As far as I’m concerned that’s blaming me for something he created in the first place. I responded with peace vietnam peace, which of course set him off on another escallation. He’s kind if missing the whole point of sorry in my opinion, confusing it with 'shut up', which is quite different isn’t it.
    • Beard tsunami from very moody looking western men, surprise surprise I happen to need a shave
    • Woman steeling my receipt, trying to frame me as a thief, that’s the 3rd time this week they have used that intimidation
    • White tsunami at shop cafe, women in white lab coats saying wanker over and over, white wash cloth next to plug outlet, white bags, steeling of white receipt.
    • No garbage bag in the bin at the shop cafe so it was a mess, I got ordered to put garbage into bag, which was what I was going to do anyway. This morning butch women woke me up by loudly smashing the garbage lid on purpose. So there’s a garbage theme going on yet again.
    • The video game tutter bloke that tuts not only at his video games but at people sniffling, followed by a sniff of his own. They create the sniffling then they tell you to not sniff. Or they follow sniffling with a passive aggressive ‘no!’, which causes another round of tutting, which leads to the white lab coat woman who tried to steel my receipt, going on a passive aggressive phone call rampage accusing everyone of lying and being a wanker. Which leads to a phone call by tutter bloke, escalating with another bloke, it’s all on speaker phone. Conversation ends with da da da!
    • School kids gang trying to tell me I dirtied the table, which I absolutely did not, and saying I should clean it up, while telling me I am a liar. Clearly manufactured incident.
    • Lots of people saying ‘gay’ this evening, both walkers and motorbike gang stalkers
    • Several walkers and drivebys saying ‘no money’

Today’s links:

2024/10/09 #

  • It was a very eventful day yesterday as far as development goes. I got the customizable headers feature working, following quite a big push to get it over the line. It all looked awesome yesterday evening. If the daily build has gone well during the night then there will be another test blog post in amidst yesterday’s writings.

    I suppose it might seem like an inconsequential feature, but it’s actually quite profound. Like the beginning of a new phase. The phase where many interesting things become possibilities. The foundations are nearing a place where they are ready to support some bigger feature sets.

    As a small step I’m going to try and update the day and blog post header fonts to something a little unnusual, at least by the standards of the website so far.

    My hope is that I’m in a place where redesigns are possible. It would be awesome if redesigns were easy, something you could do every year say. The tricky part, the bit I’d like to get right, is I want a setup where redesigns only affect the pages going forward. So whenever you visit a page on the blog, you see it with the style it was originally published with. Like a time capsule.

    I’ll have to put more thought into that, there are a lot of edge cases, for instance it makes sense for date based writings like blogging and notes but does it make sense for one off info pages? Probably not. It might not even make sense for the linkblog.

    It was a cold night last night. Feeling very cold this morning. Not having any dinner last night didn’t help much, but unfortunatly I’m having to ration massively at the minute. Even one propper meal a day isn’t possible. There are signs things are being setup to blame me for something again.

    A butch woman was sitting on a chair near the internet place looking like she was ill yesterday. And then later in the public toilets, a man was apparently passed out in one of the cubicles with a foot sticking out under the door. He had a bag you could see under the door that looked similar to mine. It wouldn’t suprise me one bit if it was part of some plot to convince people I was doing drugs. Similar things have happened many times before.

    Whether it’s a full on attempt to do that or just anger goading, there’s definitely something in the works. Straws are still being left in every location I go to. #

  • Enormous man in shop cafe eating with what can only be described as impressively slob like aplomb informed me with absolute certainty that 'we won'. Having never to my knowledge met or seen this ginormous gentleman before, I feel like the world deserves to know, hence this short post. I wouldn’t want to be the only person alive to be aware of the state of things, whatever things are in this case, I certainly have no idea what he was on about, but it seemed very important to him that I knew. #

  • Keen & Teare on innovation in Europe

    cat << EOF

    Another pretty great tech industry discussion between Andrew Keen and Keith Teare in a recent podcast. Lots of topics covered but this one about innovation in Europe stood out. Here’s a quote [23:33]:

    AK: It’s bad news for Europe. They are doubly now in jeopardy. They couldn’t keep up with Google and Apple, they’re certainly not going to be able to keep up with OpenAI.

    Keith Tear: Yeah it tells you a little bit why regulation is such a big topic there. They are trying to slow it all down.

    Another interesting fact, innovation spend per head per year in venture:

    • Europe $55
    • Uk $320
    • US $500

    Worse still, of the $55, 60% comes from government, whereas for US 100% comes from the private sector.

    EOF

  • New heading fonts :)

    cat << EOF

    Following on from the customizable header elements feature that I got working over the past few days, I decided to go ahead and try out some new fonts. These might very well change in the future, but just wanted to at least try something different.

    Here’s the CSS if you are curious what they are:

    h3 { font-family: Impact, Charcoal, Helvetica Inserat, Bitstream Vera Sans Bold, Arial Black, sans serif; } h4 { font-family: bradley hand, cursive; font-size: 1.17em; }

    They are both web safe fonts so should work in all browsers. This stack overflow post about default browser sizes was also useful.

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/10/08 #

  • I’m very close to having the customizable headers feature working. Here’s the test blog post about that. I had hoped to get all the code merged and the test post pushed to the remote yesterday evening but the world had other plans, defying the weather forcast’s mild evening prediction and opting for all night rain which was started off with torrential downpours. It was fucking horid. And it’s still wet and cold now.

    I’m up early, gang stalker harassment has already started, I'm already being 'Up!' harassed, which roughly translates to 'Shut up slave, go and write code, ha ha ha'. Any excitement I might have had from the idea that I was about to complete a cool feature, has disapeared now. What a bunch of fucking a-holes. They leave you with barely enough to be on life support, then they take what spiritual fullfillment you had cultivated for yourself too.

    Hoping to get the code merged and I’ll manually add the test post to last night’s auto build. Better a bit late than never.

    How many more lifetimes of this shit eh world? #

  • I did a 430am to 930am stint at the stand up internet earlier. Nearly broke my f-ing back. They’ve put dog poop in the spot where I can get a small bit of respite by leaning against the wall. Even the tiniest bit of luxury can and will be taken away by the bullies, and they will try to convince you, and presumably everybody else, they are doing you a favour.

    Anyway got all the new plugin code merged and tested. But ran into a really narly situation where the npm install on the main website stopped working. Npm was telling me it was trying and failing to install a feature branch. I’d checked all the plugins to make sure I’d updated them back to using main branches since all the code was merged. It made no sense. I backed up the site folder and used git to try to at least get back to a known good state. But that didn’t work either, even blowing away the past 4 days of work. Pretty scary since at this point all the plugins have already been updated.

    I went back and checked the plugins again, and sure enough there was one, the archives plugin, that still had a feature branch in it’s package.json. Once I fixed that the npm install started working again. I got the main branch back into a working state, so at least builds are working, but they are only working because of the npm cache which has a copy of all the old plugins.

    The main website’s feature branch is now npm installing correctly, but there’s still some bugs. I’ll hopefully get them fixed later.

    So pretty scary. But the good thing is that I was able to navigate through it all with relative ease. That’s a sign the foundations are much stronger with the reusable workflows. I suppose one could make the case that I should have paused development earlier in the day. Perhaps. The problem I have at the minute is I’m up against rainy season downpours which makes most late afternoons a literal washout. And with all the harassment sometimes you just want to power through. Yes it’s more risky at times, but the reality is that progress would be far too slow if you just waited for everything to be perfect.

    The key thing is always to be able to get back to a known good state, and be very aware what changes you might loose. Sometimes redoing a few small things isn’t too bad.

    I’ll hopefully get it all fixed and working later today. #

  • Everyone in the shop cafe this morning started having runny noses all at the same time, about an hour after I arrived. It’s odd, I think this was how it went down last bullyyng cycle too. Last time the big cycle ended by me getting a cold which turned into a chest cough. I recovered from that but then got another cold a few days later. Feels like something very similar has happened again. #

  • Just to prove a bit of a point here, it’s exactly as predicted, mid afternoon and absolutely pissing it down with rain, and thunder and lightning too. It would be completely impossible to be on the internet debugging the header sizes feature now. Glad I powered through and got to a safe place, but also made a lot of progress. Just need to wait for the storm to pass and I’m all setup to get back into debugging whatever bug is causing the feature branch to error during the render.

    Update: And guess what, writting this short note was punished by harassment, which caysed my nose to start running again. Had been fine for the past 1.5 hours. Yet again, either way I get punished, I’ll probably be right said Fred’d for adding this update. #

  • Another configurable headers test post

    cat << EOF

    It took a little longer than expected to get the latest configurable headers feature working on the website, so this is a short post just to ensure tomorrow’s daily build has a blog post included. The weather has been constant rain this afternoon, and since I have to stand outside currently to use the internet, the delay couldn’t be avoided.

    It would have been nice to get it right first time, but all things considered, given the complexity, I’m pretty happy about it, especially since there was no down time.

    The blog titles should stand out more so it’s easier to differentiate the blog posts from notes posts. The day dates are also slightly larger. Hopefully it makes the page more readable.

    Here is the original post describing the feature.

    EOF

Today’s links:

  • Ireland is a ‘playground’ for Russian intelligence, says former army chief - This is very interesting, especially the planned russian embassy expansion that would have includes 10 subteranian power plant rooms. That’s insane. Also which countries in the east are western countries doing the same to? It’s bound to be happening in both directions, and likely via proxies too. I bet it’s a nice little money maker for many. But what happens when it spans generations? How are we ever going to untangle all this mess? www.theguardian.com #

  • Does China now have a permanent military base in Cambodia? - I don’t know anything about the military bases, but I suppose to a certain extent it’s to be expected. One thing I do note on my extensive travels around south east asia is how embeded the chinese community is basically everywhere. In many places there are streets where almost every house had some form of chinese decoration. It seems odd, but accepted. Imagine if there were streets all throughout France and Spain with Union Jack flag's everywhere, it would be a bit odd wouldn’t it? Somehow the chinese have managed exactlyish that. Imho, the european and US expats in comparison tend to blend in a bit better, though I guess I might be a bit biased. www.bbc.com #

  • W Hot Drama Week (Wordpress, WP Engine, and Web Components - Oh My!) Ep#636 (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - I’m not going to get into how good this episode is right now, as the moment I started writing this paragraph I started getting harassed by the world. If you are in any way involved in the web or curious about the web, and / or open source for that matter, then do yourself a favour and listen to this episode. Might even change your world view. What version of the simulation are Chris and Dave in that they can have such a nuanced and clear view of things? IMO, it’s a sign that a lot of important things are getting figured out at a very high level at the minute, hopefully for the better. It’s like we’ve reached some sort of tipping point where the number of minimal apps / mental models is approaching a big shift. shoptalkshow.com #

2024/10/07 #

  • Well the escallations usually take a few days to get going at the start of an escallation cycle, but then lots of things that appeared to be unrelated and seperate all start coalescing together. That’s where we are at now. Here are my escallation notes from yesterday:

    • Gangs of women harassing at every location today, with manufactured impossible situations where whatever you do you are wrong and painted in the worst possible light with outright lies, anger goading, food goading, baby walkers, all the usual bullshit by the gang stalkers
    • Departure 'okays' in every location, which is when whenever you decide to get up and leave someone or group of people that have been waiting for you to leave, usually they have been doing some form of harassment the whole time, tell you 'okay' as in 'I give you permission to leave'. This literally happened in at least 4 locations in a row.

    That was during the day, but the night was very eventful too. Lots of sleep depravation and linked events:

    • Woken up by official garbage men, who gave me a gift
    • Perhaps not uncoincidentally the past few nights, a group of recyclers have been showing up across the road late evening with 2 trailers, then they spend literally the whole night smashing wood from cabinets and other household items and stacking them on their trailers. They make an absolute racket doing it. It’s blatant sleep depravation in retaliation to my 'peace signs', which they are forcing me to do, because if I don’t respond with something then they get upset about that.
    • Garbage was left open again this morning. A clear sign there’s a whole garbage thing going on.
    • 'Hey go home!' bloke drove by again. He’s been doing this everyday for at least 10 days at this point. He sounds like he might have spent time in a french speaking country.
    • Apparrent french tourists in the early morning shouting 'milou!'.
    • Early morning workmen on motorbikes shouting ‘gay’ and ‘you learn’ at me as they pass going the wrong way on the wrong side of the road.
    • Early morning woman who sits quietly playing videos on her phone
    • Lots of 'up!' harassment
    • Lots of 'our!' harassment

    I note also that the bloke who has been stoping by pretty much every evening and gifting me some food has started to get weird. I believe I predicted this would happen, it always does. Yesterday evening he gifted me a sandwich but before giving it to me shouted 'liar' loudly after he’d stopped his motorbike on front of me. I literally had done nothing, was just sitting quietly listening to a podcast.

    I’ve also noticed that whenever I buy a sandwich during the day, he gives me a sandwich, when I have a soup during the day, he doesn’t showup, but someone else gifts me a vegetable mushroom soup in the middle of the night, and when I ate nothing during the day he gifted me a pork and rice dish. It’s like some sort of bizare buy ond get one free thing going on. And coincidentally the buy one get one free banana guy from one of the shop cafe’s has been a bit strange the past week or so. Keeps saying things like 'you will learn', apparently to people sitting in the stairwell drinking coffe but it’s pretty clear he’s saying it to me.

    Also the first few sandwiches appeared to be from a shop with propper shop packaging but yesterday it was just wrapped in what looked like a child’s math homework. And yesterday evening the woman that has been appearing every few days with two little girls carrying grocery bags for the past few weeks, one of the girls was waving what looked like some art project homework. Might be a coincidence or more of the bizare pedo pervert shit that seems to eventually appear everywhere in Vietnam.

    Anyway, there’s other bullcrap going on too, but that’s where we are at. Likely things will escallate and I’ll get blamed for something and everything.

    I have been making quite a lot of progress on the header sizing and fonts feature. Hoping to test something today, though that’s seeming more and more unlikely as the escallations and blocking increase seemingly by the hour. #

  • Tom Luongo [37:37] on why the legal frameworks for confiscation of property rights, securities and cash were put in place in the US, Europe (4 years later) then a Japan (6 years after that) in the 70s:

    We have always known that at some point we were going to reach that moment where the cartel was going to start feeding on each other because there was [...] a lack of actual physical assets, and now they are scrambling for physical assets. It’s always about collateral, and they can’t secure the sources of collateral in the same ways that they always have in the past. I’ll put on my evil hat for a second and be them [...].

    "Let’s have a fallback plan. The plan is of course we are going to destroy Russia, we are going to split up the Middle East, we are going to take all of their oil and gas and everything else, but if we fail we are going to need a fallback position which is that we are going to have to take all the assets of the people and protect ourselves that way".

    They are hedging their risk as well. They are not dumb.

  • Configurable day and article headers

    cat << EOF

    This is really just a test post for a new feature on the website.

    I explained it in more detail in a note yesterday. It boils down to the ability to set the header HTML element that is used to wrap the day dates, and also the blog post titles. Peviously these were both hardcoded to be <p> elements. That worked pretty well for getting everything setup and working, minimal distractions during development. But with the initial build now close to being done, and with thr new everything page that interleaves all the post types, it was visually a but difficult to distinguish at a glance between them.

    It will make the most difference for distinguishing notes, which have no title, and blog posts which do have titles. It will also make it easier to see newsletter and podcast posts. I’m going to set day headers to be <h3> elements and blog titles to be <h4>. The blog post should stand out a bit in the flow of posts on the page. That’s the hope anyway.

    If this works as expected, I’m going to try and update the header fonts too. Initially they won’t be configurable, but perhaps I could look at that later down the line.

    EOF

Today’s links:

  • The Medieval Masterpiece the Book of Kells is Now Digitized and Available Online - Trinity College Dublin has published a high resolution digital version. This is awesome. Hopefully whatever revolutionary tech is the hot new thing in 1000 years time will port the entire internet / world wide web onto itself, so that folks then can read this note about the hot new tech from 1000 years ago getting ported onto the internet / world wide web. If my static site generator is open source and still around perhaps they would consider making a generous donation. Also please ensure the maintainers aren’t hungry, and still living outside in the rain as I am. Rainy season is kind of brutal. And that the world isn’t still enslaving developers to write it’s open source code. Thank you. www.openculture.com #

  • I stayed. - Jeffrey Zeldman writes a piece about why he decided to stay at Automattic even though they offered all staff a severence package following the WP Engine controversy. zeldman.com #

2024/10/06 #

  • I've made the changes to the plugins required to make the day title and article title elements configurable. That will make it possible to change the heading sizes. The current headings on the website are too small. When I started out I just decided to keep it super simple and make everything the same small size, but now that most of the pieces are in place, it’s a good time to make it configurable.

    There’s still a bug that I’m looking into, didn’t manage to find it last night. Once that’s fixed, the day titles will be h3 elements and the blog post titles will be h4 elements. I’m currently just using whatever sizes are the defaults for headings. That on it’s own should make things much more readable, but I have another, possibly even more exciting feature. It’s time to try some new fonts!

    I’ve been looking at the various web safe fonts, the ones that should normally work without issues across all browsers, and there are a few I want to try out. A little touch of flare, to make things look a bit friendlier but also to draw attention to the blog posts, so it’s obvious they are separate and distinct from the notes. I’m also going to try the grid idea and the left margin border idea, but wanted to get as far as possible with just heading sized and fonts.

    Even if I don’t decide to go with the colored left margin idea, I plan to do something similar with quoted text blocks. These currently look a bit weak, indented but the white space on the left just looks empty. I see many websites have a colored left margin on block quotes and I think it makes the quotes stand out.

    It’s all quite fun and exciting, making these small changes that have a big effect on readability. I’ve been wanting to make these changes for so long now.

    Escallation wise, all that is still going on, I’m still being blamed for everything, literally everything I do is in some way wrong apparently. Food is in short supply, there were some food gifts for a few days that were nice, but that might have been turned into something malicious again. I’m having to ration pretty hard. Since my birthday 2 weeks ago, I’ve only had 1 day with 3 full meals, and many with no meals at all.

    The newsletter went out yesterday as scheduled. I’m glad something went out but I’m not happy at all with how haphazard it all is, having to prep things in adcance, and add bits and bobs when that’s possible. I just hope things get a bit more stable. #

Today’s links:

2024/10/05 #

  • Hoping to continue making some small cosmetic changes to the look and feel of the website. I’ve gotten rid of the bullets for posts and blog posts, but not for daily links. I think it looks pretty good. I’m going to try out the grid and left border ideas, and update heading sizes and possibly fonts. It should hopefully be a bit of a fresh look, and be easier to read.

    It’s quite cold this morning. Brrr. #

  • Punished For Being Born (Issue #184)

    cat << EOF

    This week’s newsletter is out!

    In this week’s edition:

    Fixing capitalism, Labour & the Middle East, Chamath solo, Vivek, Smartglasses, nuclear war risk, OpenAI makeover, boomers get with it, Europe vs Trump, AI Twitter, happiness, the AI supercycle

    Issue details:

    EOF

  • Straws have been trending for several days now. Or straw rapers to be precise. They have been appearing literally everywhere I’ve been.

    And there seems to be some sort of universe ending level argument happening, that will turn out to be proof that the existing design already solves the problem that’s being blamed on me.

    And all the blaming has been the very thing causing the problem in the first place. #

Today’s links:

  • The Why of Crazy Stupid Tech - Om Malik was one of the first tech bloggers I started reading when I first seriously got online. I guess that was around 2003ish. He’s starting a newsletter, partnering with ex-Wired reporter Fred Vogelstein. The focus is interesting: the tech that powers the foundational layers of the stack, from materials science to sythetic biology and how they might change the future. Sounds awesome, can’t wait, subscribed :) crazystupidtech.com #

  • 159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO's fight with WP Engine escalates - Matt Mullenweg founder of Wordpress and CEO of Automattic has been in a rather public fight with WP Engine for a few weeks. The whole saga is bringing to the surface some core issues with open source and specifically Wordpress, one of the most popular open source projects. Many are worried they aren’t as safe from despotic centralised control as they once thought, since Wordpress is using some of the very tactics it was setup to avoid, namely removing things from people. Many open source projects have been runing into philosophical brick walls recently. This case could have a big impact in the space. techcrunch.com #

  • Boris Johnson calls for referendum on leaving ECHR - That’s the European Convention on Human Rights. The problem is that though it might appear to make sense from the perspective of fixing immigration, it would ultimately decrease valuable protections for all citizens across huge swath of completely unrelated areas. Not being part of a human rights treaty sounds very dangerous to me. www.theguardian.com #

  • liriliri/eruda: Console for mobile browsers - This basically does what it says on the tin, ads devtools to mobile browsers. You include a library in the page, and then can open up a devtools style webapp in the page to look at HTML, network requests etc. Very awesome. I wish there was an app that was a dev webserver that automatically added this to your pages, so you could do local frontend development on your mobile device. github.com #

  • @parischap/pretty-print - This looks awesome. All sorts of additional customisable features to JSON.stringify and util.inspect. colorisation and treeifying for example. I could see this really improving the debugging experience, printing to console is still one of the most popular ways to debug, because it works in most environments, might as well make it better. www.npmjs.com #

  • Get ready to meet your AI best friend (Vergecast Podcast) - Lots of awesome tech reporting in this episode, and not just about AI. OpenAI mega funding, the Wordpress community values meltdown, progressive web apps, and a mindboggling description of the Dish/Direct TV timeline over the past few decades, which bizarely sounds to me like a simulacrum of a single week of my life right now here in Vietnam. podcastindex.org #

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Punished For Being Born (Issue #184) markjgsmith.com #

2024/10/04 #

  • Removing the bullets on all posts on the website worked pretty well. The text has a lot more space now. As suspected though it’s a bit difficult to tell the difference between notes posts and blog posts. I’ve made a quick start on both possible CSS based solutions I mentioned, namely putting all posts inside a sort of grid, and adding a colored left border to notes posts. It’s been a bit tricky making sure all the right CSS classes are in place so the CSS rules work their magic. I might have something to see today.

    I’m thinking to add the bullets back for the 'Today’s Links' in each day because I quite like having that section look visually distinct to make them easier to find on the page when you are scrolling. I need to mess around with the underlying CSS classes so it’s easier to style those sections independantly from the other items on the page.

    That’s the development plan. hopefully I’ll make some progress, but I’m already getting harassed.

    The old woman that stop starts her motorbike and keeps alternately talking quiet then loud and saying 'president' over and over is right on front of me as I type this paragraph doing her anger goading thing.

    Earlier this morning 'hey, go home' bloke passed by on his motorbike. He seems to be a new re-occuring harassment character. He zooms past and shouts in an overly jolly manner 'hey, go home!'. It’s just more anger goading but will likely turn into something else more involved.

    As soon as I put my headphones in and started listenning to music stop start weirdo lady drove off, annoyed that she could no longer annoy me.

    There were some red noodle packages left on the ground this morning, so likely some noodle based anger goading and harassment at some point. #

  • Notes on the question of the meaning of life

    cat << EOF

    A few nights ago I was approached by a young man who was perhaps in his 20s. He sat near me, seemed very agitated. He started asking me questions about why I was here in Vietnam. We chatted for a while, though I left him to do most of the talking because that seemed like the most prudent thing to do.

    He had spent time in northern Europe, and spoke pretty good english. He seemed to be perhaps having some issues with friends or family. He said he had previously had anxiety issues. I've been through that age and it sure can be confusing at times. I listenned and suggested a few things, I can’t say I gave the best of advice over and above 'live your life'.

    Towards the end of the conversation he asked me what I thought was the meaning of life. Quite a big question, one of the biggest. I didn’t have a very good answer. The context in which he asked it was a little strange. After hearing about my situation, how I’d gotten stuck here during COVID, he had asked me if I needed any help. I said yes, but the how is the less obvious thing, I’m open to ideas but I’ve found it’s rare that people are actually able to help.

    Anyway, he said his question was his gift to me. I’m really not sure how exactly his gift was supposed to help me. Seems like it would just distract me even more than I already am by this crazy world, taking up even more of my time which I can never get back. But it is an interesting question that I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about properly. So I did spend a short while pondering it, and made a few notes. I’m publishing them here, because though it’s not something I want to spend a lot of time on right now, perhaps in the future I will, and I’ll have this post to return to. And who knows maybe it will spark some ideas in others.

    • Last night’s what is meaning of life bloke
      • What does ‘meaning of’ mean? Is it more than just the dictionary definition of a word?
      • Are we saying meaning of a specific life or life in general?
      • Isn’t it a strange question to ask? You don’t ask what the meaning of a table is do you?
      • His answer: pussy, because dick and pussy make life
      • So does ‘meaning of’ mean ‘leads to’
      • Lenses to interpret the question
        • Philosophical - the purpose of life, how do you know what anything means. When a particular set of events happen we often say, such and such happened, and this other thing, so that means this other situation is likely going to happen. Eg predicting the direction of the tech scene. How big can these collections of events get. Could they be increased in size to an entire human life? Can a human life have a theme / a purpose? Would it be different for everyone? Would there be a common higher level quality that all lives share in this respect?
        • Scientific - What is the purpose of life from the perspective of the universe? cells, RNA, DNA all arguably examples of life who’s purpose seems to be to create higher and higher complexity life systems. Is human life the final stage, or does there exist an even higher life form that human life is creating, or on the way to create. Are we trying to figure that out? Maybe that is our purpose right now?
        • Comic - dick and pussy

    His answer was that the meaning of life is pussy, because dicks and pussys create life. Presumably the meaning of life for a woman, in this paradigm would be dick. I think he’d gotten this from someone in his entourage. I suggested to him that perhaps they were joking.

    I’m not totally convinced by his argument, but there is a certain simplicity to it that is quite refreshing. For me the whole question of the meaning of life has always seemed like something much more grandiose, and I’ve tried to jot down some of the thoughts that occurred to me. I like that there is this simple paradigm, but also that there could be much more to it.

    To be honest it was kind of a weird situation, but I feel like it merited at least a short blog post. Might be something worth thinking about if I ever get unstuck from this terrible situation I am in. Having to figure it out right now is a big ask.

    As for the young man in question, I wish him all the best on his journey.

    Take it easy everyone :)

    EOF

  • I don’t want to go into too much detail but following this morning’s strange harrassment incident by the stop / start motorbike woman, where I eventually started listening to music on my headphones, and she left, my headphones mysteriously have started malfunctioning. As far as I am aware I didn’t drop them or damage them in any way, and I don’t think I left them unnatended anywhere.

    There was an incident earlier where cafe shop staff seemed to be parodying an incident that happened to me when somebody asked me the meaning of life. While they were doing this, one of them was repeatedly setting off the flash on the phone camera. Well as it happened, the start / stop woman ended up being in a selfie I took that morning. The shole situation feels like some form of intimidation, especially since the regular camera on my phone stopped working in similarly strange circumstances.

    This evening, back at the location of the harassment, there was a whole cascade of 'yellow' based harassment situations, some of which felt very manufactured.

    I certainly hope the selfie camera doesn’t end up mysteriously breaking. It’s really bizare that the headphones have, the day I used them to politely and non-violently push back on what seemed like pretty clear harassment, something which the stop / start woman has done several times before.

    It’s worth mentioning that I have had several headphones stop working like this as part of escallations. They have all been regular old school phono plug in-ear headphones. #

  • The meaning of life bloke just passed by again. He seems to have gotten it in his head that the thing to do is to ask me questions and drive off. This time it was less grandiose: What is Tam?

    I’m missing an accent on one of the letters. I don’t know what tam is, it’s usually used alongside the word 'com'. As in 'com tam', and it means something like 'rice dish'. You can have different variations of it, pork, chicken etc.

    Anyway, I don’t know for sure what it means, it’s a bit like Banh, when you think about all the things it is used for, it kind of doesn’t make sense. But I just don’t worry about it, and get on with my day.

    I expect this is all part of a bigger story arc because I’ve been gifted in the past couple of days both com tam and a banh mi (sandwich), which likely means it might get turned into an anger goading, where I’ll just be gifted plain rice or something. That’s the sort of thing that usually happens. #

Today’s links:

2024/10/03 #

  • I actually made some progress yesterday on both removing the list bullets and improving the article navigation. I deployed a new version of the site that has no list bullets, which looked okay in staging. I’ll find out how it really looks this morning when the daily build gets done using the live data.

    There should be lots more space for the text on the page, which will be noticeable on mobile screens. I’m a little worried that without the bullets it will be difficult to see the difference between notes and blog posts. That the boundaries between notes posts won’t be obvious enough. If that happens, I have two possible solutions, one using a colored border in the left margin, the other adding a grid around all posts. I’m curious to try both.

    Quite excited about how things will look.

    I’ll try deploying the updated article navigation links this morning. That should make it much easier to get a permanent url to articles, and to get back to the day a particular post is from, from the individual article page. I’ll use links to the month archives version of posts, that way you’ll be able to see the context around a post rather than just the post. It’s a bit fiddly because I need to use hashlinks and only days have hash ids currently.

    I suppose the best thing would be to have hash ids on all posts on the page so you can link directly to anything on the page. That might take some extra work though, cause I’ll need to generate the hash ids, and unlike with dates, there isn’t an obvious id. I guess maybe the timestamp will be unique enough. That will work for notes, but what about blog posts? I’ll have to think about that, might be better to just omit them for blog posts, the canonical blog post page is likely a better url for blog posts. It’s really just the notes you want to see in context, because they look a bit weird on their own.

    Development progress feels good even if it’s just a small cosmetic thing. It’s been so long since I was able to add a visual feature. #

Today’s links:

2024/10/02 #

  • Looks like I’ll be able to eat again today, so that’s a bit of a relief, but I’m reluctant to get carried away because the starvations seem to be getting longer. It’s a catch22, because without energy I can’t really function, think and write. And I’m still knackered from the previous starvation cycle, and now with a cold, still sneezing and coughing flem. It feels like I’ll just about recover and be dunked right back into another starvation cycle.

    The hot season is starting, there is still rain quite often but when it’s hot around midday it’s getting unbearably hot. So hot you really don’t want to be outside kind of hot.

    I need to look at static site generator and website features, figure out what I want to do next. The most obvious is that I’m kind of tired of the bullets on each item on the main blog page. It would be cleaner without bullets, more space for the text. The other thing is to add some navigation links. I want to be able to more easily navigate between individual items back up to the day that contains the item. And be able to get to the archives version of a day from the front page. Both small cosmetic changes but would dramatically improve readability.

    The next big feature might be taking back up the work I’ve previously done on the API. It’s 80% written. At first it would just be for posting. But it might make sense to first get a minimal working example of several blogs hosted somewhere. So I could get somebody else setup with a similar writing experience. It might turn out to be not a lot of work, but pretty sure there would be all sorts of unnexpected things to deal with.

    So that’s where I’m at with development, and hard life, woe me. #

  • Tom Luongo on seing people from all sides

    cat << EOF

    I find myself liking or at least interested in many of Tom Luongo’s takes on global finance, and geopolitics.

    He appears to be quite anti-british, so some of the things he says definitely make me wince somewhat, but on listening to his points, many times they do have at least some things that are worth considering, angles that I would never have considered. The brit in me is often wondering what an equivalent, a british Tom Luongo, if you will, would say. I think sometimes he’s a little too forgiving of indiscressions made by people his side of the pond. But hey, that’s normal, we all instincively defend our own team.

    Aside from the anti-brit stuff, which like I said, is actually quite well thought out even if it’s a little bit bonkers, there‘s great takes on how central bank mono rates like the FED funds rate or the ECB’s interest rate, re-enforce established powers, transfering wealth from peripheral entities, and a possible move away from Davos globalism back to more regional banking models, as well as the unrealised export of the US economic model, and a bunch more.

    So although he does definitely vear into slighlty crazy town sometimes, he often lays out some kind of wise ways of looking at things, no matter what political or geographic persuasion you are. His closing words on the importance of seing people from all sides is definitely one of those:

    There are so many competing incentives that you have to...just be careful, the way I’m going to put it is this: No one is any one thing at any one time. People in pivotal positions, can be simultaneously, to quote Tom Soper, consecutively and concurrently, hero, victim and villain. The 3 sides of all character.

    When you look at a figure like Jerome Powell for example, or Janet Yelling or whoever, you have to see them from all sides. And I hate to do that for Yelling because I think she’s the villain.

    Look at a guy like Powell who is a very pivotal figure in history, look at a guy like Trump, look at these people that are confounding. They are the fulcra on which all of this will turn, and they are going to have competing roles that they are going to want to be cast in. And we have to be willing to view them from different positions, from those 3 perspectives, even though we know in the grand scheme of things, in our philosophical hearts, they are one thing, they are the villain or hero or the victim. But a guy like Powel is all 3 all the time. You can’t be FED chair and not be all 3 of those things.

    So that’s what I would argue for people to do a little bit more of, and if we do that, I think all of our commentary gets a lot better. [...]

    It usually yields the best insights. Let’s freeze frame that person for a second and think about it from their perspective. Now what. Oh that’s interesting...

    This is such a true statement, I’ve rarely heard it expressed so well. He is of course talking about things in the world of global finance, but I think it’s actually a point you can make about many areas of life. I think I’d heard something like this mentioned in the past and thought to myself, oh yeah, that makes sense, I get it. But then as you get experience in the world there comes a point when you really see what people were talking about, and it’s unbelievably disorientating. It’s like your brain needs a certain amount of data to even get to the point of being able to see this point of view.

    And it’s even weirder because sometimes you have complete flips. People you really thought were horrible, you actually start to see them in a different light, understanding their behaviour better because you have additional context that you were missing. And the other way too, folks you thought were awesome, becoming in your mind pretty aweful. And other times when it’s a mixture of both things happening. And actually it’s even weirder than that because some people are even exploiting this phenominon etc etc. But you can’t get bogged down in all of this stuff too much. This might actually be the most profound thing that has happened for me in my late 30s and 40s.

    It happens so gradually, you don’t notice it at first, and of course you yourself are changing as a person as well, so it’s not an obvious thing. You are sort of left with these updated models in your head for people that are imperfect, with holes in them, and you have to be okay with that, but other parts where you are like, oh yeah this part of them was the part I really liked, or hated or whatever. When it happens it shows you quite a lot about yourself, what your instinctive views are, and you have to accept that at some point in the past you were unknowingly ignoring somethings or unknowingly shutting out other aspects.

    It’s the strangest thing to realise, and come to terms with.

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/10/01 #

  • What a nutso day yesterday. I continued giving the peace sign in return to any harrassment the entire day. There was a lot if it. Each time saying 'peace vietnam peace'. At the end of the day I got gifted a takeaway rice meal, from the same bloke who had given me food the previous day and the morning. He eventually gave me the equivalent of 40 cents USD when I told him I had not had bottle of drinking water in 2 days. So basically all day from 4am until 9pm peace signing, and it kept going after that, and all I got was a meal and enough to buy a small bottle of water. That’s slavery in every juristriction on the planet, plain and simple.

    A few minutes later, a woman and man probably in their 30s who had previously seen me giving peace signs and responded, with the woman sitting on the back of their motorbike peace signing too and smiling, stopped by to gift me a fruit. When I said about the water situation, she turned to the man and helped convince him to buy me some water. They drove off and returned a while later gifting me 2 large bottles of water. Without the water I’m not sure I would have been able to eat the food.

    This morning I actually have a relatively bad chesty cough starting, coughing up a ton of flem when I woke up earlier, so looks as if the food was in some way poisonned too.

    Washing water and electricity have been cut off for days now. Hoping I’ll be able to find reprive on that today.

    Everything is so fucking dire, it’s like the end of the universe.

    Update: The strange older lady on the motorbike that keeps stop / starting and mumbling, stopped by again this morning. She kept whittering on about a 'president' over and over but same as before I couldn’t hear what she was on about, as everything else she was saying, as she kept stopping and starting her motorbike, revving the engine up and down, was just gibberish. #

  • This morning at the internet place while I’m standing browsing online...

    Fat school girl on the back of a motorbike passes by saying loudly 'blog!' then small amount of slightly understated maniacle evil laughter from both her and the adult driving the motorbike.

    A few moments later the normal / evil bloke from the opposite house appears with a woman and child. She keeps saying 'lie', and 'liar' and 'the liar'. #

  • All relatively quiet this afternoon at the shop cafe. I did have a major allergy / sneeze attack earlier. Happened after I’d already been here for 2 hours, right at the same time 2 rowdy boy young teenagers turned up, who were very nosey about me being at the shop cafe, kept saying ‘hello’ in their conversation to each other, seemed to be waiting to see my reaction. Felt very manufactured, very high level of righteousness.

    Then the place filled up with loads of young women in their twenties, all being very very quiet. Bit of a weird vibe, and when one left saying 'good' for no reason as she left and passed me, I responded with a 'peace vietnam peace' which set off several of the other women who had until then been very quiet. All sorts of foreign chatter interspered with orders in english. They were saying stuff to each other like 'he will learn'. That always seems to happen when I get these mysterious sneezing attacks that often turn into a cold.

    This one in particular coincides with last night’s flem cough, so likely linked to that. That looks to have been something in the food I got gifted, or the water, or the fruit. I didn’t ingest anything else.

    Once again looks like I got mutilated. Mutilated for turning darkness into light. Doesn’t matter what I do, whether I am peaceful or angry, either way I get mutilated. Either way, blamed for everything, even though I’m already being starved and thirsted.

    It’s like I’m caught between good and evil groups, each wants the opposite of the other, so either way I lose. And neither group acknowledges the existence of the other, or they collude, whether by arrangement or just easiest path.

    Update: The two rowdy teenage boys left a small ziplock baggie on the chairs they were sitting on. Just looked to contain some orange crystal sweets, the sort that are hideously sour and crackle in your mouth. Nothing like drugs, but still what are the chances there are suddenly lots of baggie related incidents the past few days? #

  • I’m back at the internet place to post today's links and blogging. Pretty much immediately women are passing by making 'you learn' based comments as they pass me. Presumably linked to my now developing cold. Just more women based mutilation and bullying. Nothing to see here, please move along, as they say.

    Well I say...

    Peace world, peace ☮️🕊✌️ Peace vietnam, peace ☮️🕊✌️ Peace women, peace ☮️🕊✌️ #

  • Just another quick note about the types of harrassments this evening since it’s a sneeze day. Lots of random people saying 'Gay!', both men and women. Also lots of people just saying 'No!', especially shortly after I sneeze. And then there was all the 'you learns' earlier. #

  • Looking back at my notes I can see that I’ve been getting these sneezy colds now with crazy regularity for at least 7 months now. I happens about every 3-4 weeks. There was a time during the early part of COVID where it was happening every 10 days. I really don’t get what it is. It just seems like somebody has figured out something that I’m massively alergic to and keeps killing me with it. It’s do horrid, makes concentrating on anything practically impossible. Could be that my body just hates me. #

Today’s links:

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