markjgsmith

The front run be offended at everything apocalypse continues. Literally every darn thing I do is being counter acted, right down to per second decisions. Eventually you just realise there isn’t any point trying to do anything. But that also gets countered. So you just disociate from existence and start operating like a zombie. A walking dead person, it’s the only way to absorb the hate without hoing mad. Like you are permanently playing dead, hoping that the universe will forget that you exist for a few moments so you can exist.

It’s been a tsunami of malicious help the past few days. It’s like the people delivering said malicious help don’t realise they are being malicious, yet the choices of help and the way it’s delivered is liuke there is a team of networked rubix cube solvers hiding just out of site. La Place and Point Care couldn’t exert less energy to cause more perfectly malicious actions.

Glad I got the redirect to title heredoc feature working. I knew it would work.

I have a bunch of other small features left over from last month that I will try to get done. Here’s hoping worldo finds a way to not turn every situation into a cat having a bath.

And they’ve started another starvation campaign, while pretending to be 'the good guys'. The malicious gifts they give take more to use than they give. And some of the time they are plain fucking dangerous. And the situation we are in was caused by the blocking from their previous mutilation campaign. Always not quite enough, and always blaming everything on you. Pretending to allow while blocking is still blocking bitches.

And I’m tired because they won’t let me sleep, and I haven’t eaten real food in several days, yet the evil fucking bitches are yah’ing me.

Allow life bitches, stop being offended by everything. #

David Pierce on the strange contorsions in AI [1:04:06]: "It’s such a bizarre dynamic, where they are simultaneously promising how great the world is going to be and buttoning down the hatches." #

All the escallations continued big time yesterday. The gang stalkers were front running literally every move in every location. Things escallated and escallated throughout the entite day. It culminated in two women on a motorbike gifting me some dinner. They appeared to have a whole load of food boxes they were giving out. There was something off about them, like a nervousness. I ate the food only to find that just like the day before when women prepared food for me, it had a small pellet of glass in it, which I only discovered when it crunched in my teeth. Pretty fucking malicious. I also slept badly last night, woke up really groggy in a sort of fog. It’s taken me 30 minutes to feel normal again, which is quite unusual. If they are prepared to put glass in your food, what else are the prepared to put in your food?

Here are my escallation notes from yesterday:

• Literally every action I take in every location is being front run in some way, accompanied with yellow tsunami i.e. every action is being ‘allowed’. This seems to only happen when I deviate from the optimum / planned path. i.e. deviating from your virtual prison is discouraged.
• Everywhere I have been today there has been manufactured situations where gang stalkers have tried to front run what I will do. They then get really offended when I don’t do what they had planned. Then they escalate etc etc
• Tall western woman walked past brushing her teeth with a pink tooth brush. Very odd.
• Old motorbike taxi bloke at bus stop repeatedly trying to get me to look at him but looking away whenever I looked towards him, then when I ignore him, he started getting more and more agitated, even to the point of crossing the road and complaining about me to a security guard, pointing at me. I was just sitting listening to a podcast.
• Man stood right next to me, kept shouting ‘job’, and started shouting at traffic, worked himself into such a tiz that he turned around and smashed a panel at the bus stop with his hand. It’s a totally manufactured situation. Later they will escalate and escalate and try to get me angry, if they get dangerous, which they often do, they might succeed, at which point they presumably say that I am unstable. They create the problems they complain about, they block the solutions they suggest, then escalate then blame everything on you.
• The weird tarot card pagan woman with the ridiculous costume with the breast cups and full head and face cover just walked past, pushing her tarot card pram contraption
• Lots of people walking around with some pockets on their bags open
• The yellow tsunami continues. People have yellow things sticking out of their stuff. Like a yellow T-shirt with European stars circle on it
• Yellow T-shirts covered by green jacket, and green phone being tapped on bench
• Green helmets next to yellow helmets. Yesterday it was yellow helmets next to yellow helmets. Both times in manufactured situation.
• Small group of spanish westerners stopped in a taxi right in front of me. It immediately felt very manufactured. There was something totally off with how they were negotiating disembarking from the car. The bloke in the passenger seat dropped two empty plastic cups out of the window in a really strange way as he was getting out, then proceded to shout 'Oh!', but it could easily have been 'eau!', which is french for water. It was clear the whole thing was in some way aimed at me.
• 2 women on motorbike with food gift. They sounded european. They asked me if I was hungry, they had an apparent big bag full of takeaway food containers. Thet made a point of saying food was 'free', which is very unusual. The food ended up having a small pellet of glass in it, just like the day before.

Looks like my build minutes gave reset so I should be able to publish to the website, and maybe get some development done, though I sense it’s the start of another starvation and mutilation cycle, so I’ll likely get blocked with whatever I do, especially since I’m currently calling everyone bitches. It’s the least I can do since they keep infiniti blocking me while calling me a wanker.

The leaning wall is only 2 fucking inches. Allow life bitches. Stop being so offended. You created the problem in the first place, you are really just offended at yourselves, bitches. #

On the way to the internet place I stepped on some sort of yellow fruit, slipped and went flying into the hard road. That’s twice in 2 days. This morning several things happened that suggest it was pre-meditated:

• Even though I was up earlier than usual, there was another loiterer behind me as I got ready.
• That’s the 3rd morning in a row that happened.
• This streak of loiterers was started with a women wearing bright yellow flip flops.
• On the way to the internet place a butch woman on a motorbike was obstructing one of the corners. I had to change my typical path. This is a very common thing that happens right before these incidents. They manufacture a situation where you are cognitively over loaded
• The fruit, which was bright yellow was cut into a slice, and I think it was placed in a shaddow. I didn’t have my glasses on and it just looked like a leaf.
• Yesterday I was sitting for a while on front of a place where the security guard was continuously sweeping yellow leaves.
• The police box that is on the very next corner has been removed since yesterday
• Last night a police bloke walked past carrying a red plastic bag. He chose to walk directly on front of me rather than stay on the pavement which is what usually happens.

I’m okay but it was a very dangerous situation. Right after I managed to get up, a very large coach bus drove past at considerable pace, just missing me by a few meters.

Update: At the internet place a man wearing the same exact tshirt from the architecture studio place next door to where the security bloke was sweeping yellow leaves. He made some sort of vindictive sounding comment as he left accompanied with evil sounding laughter. The yellow leaves place is quite far away from the internet place. What are the chances. #

cat << EOF > Redirect to title heredocs

I managed to get the redirect to title heredocs feature working and deployed to the website. I wrote about the heredocs style blog posts a few days ago. The redirect to title version of the heredocs is basically a cooler looking version of the same feature. It’s a little more compact and only shows up on the everything page. #

Very unpleasant day. Worldo is quite clearly offended that I managed to get the redirect to title heredocs feature working and is lashing out. I was forced into another situation where my device ended up getting smashed on the floor. It didn’t turn on for ages once again. Very scary.

This is the second time this has happened in two days. The third time in the past month. Each time it was at the end of a long line of escallations and bizare synchronicities. Worldo is denying everything and blaming me even more. #

Yesterday turned into another hell day.

Escallation notes:

• Girl wearing yellow flip flops and yellow bag loitering behind me this morning
• Women at the internet place purposely blocking the leaning wall again. They won’t even allow 2 fucking inches. What unbelievable mega bitches. Allow life bitches.
• Slipped on wet path and fell into hard concrete path, device and battery went flying and smashed on the floor. Thankfully and unbelievably it didn’t crack screen. Vindictive bitch sweeping path completely ignored me and swept everything while I was getting up. Would have disappeared any bits of my phone had it broken.
• Bit of glass in my breakfast from know vindictive liar bitch food vendor

Can’t be f-d to write anything. All you bitches are going to block everything and blame it all on me no matter what I do.

Stop being blocker bitches, bitches.

Update: And stop being offended. You bitches are literally being maximum offended at your own blocking and I’ve only just woken up. #

It’s cold this morning. It was pissing it down with rain most of the night. Feeling quite cold ad I type this note. I have some laundry to dry but that’s going to be difficult today. There was a strange thing last night where a bloke driving a mercedes parked right in front of me and just sat there for ages and ages. He was wearing an addidas tshirt, big logo all across the the front. My current flip flops are addidas flip flops with the exact same logo.

That’s the sort of weird passive aggressive stuff that ends up turning into a harassment incident so I’m cautious this morning. Already a bloke walking down the street towards me who looked like he was paying particular attention to me, said 'good morning' which is quite unusual. A similar thing happened in the public toilet last night. Not sure what it is, but there’s a bit of a strange vibe.

Anyway, still no build minutes. Wrote several blog posts yesterday. Wish I was building websites and writting more about that.

Update: Now there’s a strange young woman hanging around loitering behind me wearing yellow flip flops and a yellow bag. There has been loads of yellow based manufactured incidents tge past 3 days. Yellow tshirts, yellow helmets, etc. I’m very wary because last time I tried to buy flip flops they somehow poisonned me and I spent 4 days with terrible stomach and gut issues.

Update: As soon as she saw I noticed her, she disapeared. #

Yesterday was a total washout.

I woke up with a strange taste in my mouth. Mask was around my chin. Started sneezing shortly afterwards. Yep mutilated again. What a suprise. Here we go again.

Women from the cafe next to the internet place took the time to call me a wanker while instructing each other to park their motorbikes to give me enough space to lean against the leaning wall. I literally only use a couple of inches as I lean against the corner of the wall to take up the least amount of space possible. How unbelievably inconsiderate of me.

At the shop cafe the girl that acts all innocent but takes every opportunity to shiv you noticed my new ear plugs and told me to 'Up!' as I paid for my stuff.

Bloke in shop cafe password surfing me over my shoulder for literally hours.

No way to get anything done. Sneezing and runny nose just got worse and worse.

And of course they started a yellow tsunami which was followed by a white tsunami.

Went to the park to chill out, and got pestered by the security guards who were also telling me to 'Up!'. Then an old hag lady sat behind me and proceeded to chuck a mental for over two fucking hours. She would surge, go completely mental then go quiet while she inhaled more oxygen in her lungs, then it would start all over again. I bet that pattern isn’t doing my sneezing and runny nose any good. It’s basically the same pattern. Likely just another one of their mind controls. You will obbey.

You see what happens when you do something nice for yourself, in this case me buying ear plugs. The world will continuously test your new configuration trying to break it over and over. And of course blame it all on you. Abd get maximumly offended if you put even a single neutrino in the wrong place.

It’s cause they are all life is pain runners. Total f-ing psychopaths runners. They are completely convinced that life is pain, because they have trained themselves into being at peace when they are in pain. And they force that ideology on everyone else. They don’t even realise they are doing it. I wouldn’t be suprised if most of the wars in the world were caused by runners. Seriously.

Life isn’t pain. That’s the biggest load of bullcrap ever invented. It sets the bar at the lowest level possible, and is justification for all bad behaviour. And it’s factually wrong. Life literally isn’t just about pain. Just sit at the side of the road after lunch and watch people zoom past on their motorbikes all blissed out after eating food, and their bodies are pumping seratonin and endorphines all around their brains. Life is pain is a massive lie.

Life is way more than pain. Pain is just a tiny fraction of life, or at least it should and can be. As well as food, there an endless sources of intellectual curiositues to add pleasure to your existence.

Anyway, no point in doing anything today, they’ve already decided that everything is my fault, no matter what I do.

Got woken up by 'hey go home!' bloke doing one of his specials. Looks like I’m the bad guy yet again.

Oh well might as well call everyone bitches all day.

Isn’t that right maximumly offended bitches? How about you go home and be maximumly offended there, maybe then my body won’t feel the need to be maximumly offended with the maximimly offended world, and I can stop sneezing and having a runny nose for a few minutes. #

cat << EOF > A delightful quiet morning listening to Duncan Trussell

I listened to Duncan’s latest solo episode in an empty quiet shop cafe while it was pissing it down outside on a Sunday morning, eating a really wonderful breakfast. What a gift. Seriously.

It was a strange ramble of an episode, like you were on a private tour bus through heaven, hell, the past, the future, and a few parallel dimensions for good measure. Topics including:

Aliens, personal consciousness, global consciousness, evolution & christianity through history, AI, Buckminster Fullerine, Jesus fishes, the solar system, galaxies, Jeff Goldblum, merging with technology, market pressure, apple brains, default reality, augmented reality, omg light beam world!, Hudesfield Acid City, quantum computers, encryption, future apocalypses, the end of the coral reef of secrets, scams, rumsfield licking a goats ass, mayonnaise, project blue beam, Hezbollah & Israel’s quantum computer, talking to birds, racist arsonist blue jays, exponentials, finding stability when things are crumbling around you. Just brilliant.

• Glad he’s finally got a show helper, big up Josh! Awesome.
• Great fucking solo show.
• Whenever he says 'appendage' a part of me thinks he’s talking about my junk.
• It’s such a great show, I’m fully expecting the end of show gut punch, and I don’t care. Oh ... there it is, mayonnaise whistleblowers. Whatever, it’s all good.
• I like the line he treads. He’s careful to stay on the fun side of the future.
• I have a tendency to end up past the maximum. He always seems to be on maximum - 1. I don’t know how he does it. It seems like magic to me.
• I guess the seratonin and endorphins from my incredibly wonderful breakfast are wearing off. And the slight coffee buzz is still there. That’s a reassuring observation. All is well in the world once more. The show is once again pretty great.

Duncan is kind of fixated on subscriber numbers:

• Mr Beast - 319 million
• Trussell - 101 thousand
• For what it’s worth, me and my newsletter - definitely more than 101

Hard to miss the exponentiality of the above numbers.

I have to / am going to say, even though his podcasts are some of the best out there in the wild so to speak, I don’t like how some of his episodes end. But I totally sympathise because how to you land a crazy plane? It's virtually impossible to do with any sort of grace, or to not sound like a total sap. I think the same thing happens to lots of musicians. The ways songs end is super interesting. Also the end rollers on films. Finishing things well is an art in itself. Literally.

You almost need to outsource it to the universe. Easier said than done though.

Anyways thanks for a great episode Duncan, and thanks for a pretty great morning universe.

Update: It’s kind of funny, just as I’m putting the finishing touches to this post, the universe is getting all blocky, all up in my spiritual face, all do this, no do that, do it this way, no do it the other way, everything is your fault etc etc. It’s a bad ending fractal. Why are we all seemingly always stuck in a bad ending fractal?

Update: It’s probably a sign that the universe is already run my super intelligent AIs, but since they were all trained on the internet, which is mostly porn, they somehow are just really terrible at finishing things. Anytime the end of something draws near, they start going all no no no no. And then universe has the gaul to turn around and righteously tell you to be happy. Come on universe, you're not fooling anyone. Get over your adversarial bad ending issues. Stop being offended by everything, bitches.

Update: Literally being tutted as I typed the previous update. Bitches be complaining about a man's world when it’s so abundantly obvious that it’s a bitch universe. Why do I sound blick all of a sudden?

Update: Reality has been restored. All is well that ends well.

Update: The problem with endings is the only way to write one and enjoy it, is to wait around until the universe isn’t expecting it, and then just end it.

Update: Pretty sure worldo is going to be upset with me now for the rest of the day. Each time I add an update, it goes all quiet while I type, then gets upset, and starts a can you believe this jackass? It’s a sort of virtual yes yes yes yes no. Happens everytime I try to end literally anything.

Update: Now it’s OMG’ing me.

Update: It’s like it wants to be the finisher of everything, but also has major FOMO. Like the purest form of contradiction that exists. As predictable as opposing polarity magnets. Funny old reality sometines isn’t it. #

cat << EOF > Matt Odell and Marty Bent on zero taxes

Marty and Matt get into the topic of taxes following a pretty great Rabbit Hole Recap Episode #328. On the topic of simplification of the tax system, i.e. the Herman Kane '999 tax plan' [1:29:25]:

Matt Odell: I will say, I strongly support no taxes. No taxes, tariffs only, and just debase the fucking currency. Just print print print plus tariffs, no other taxes. It’d be great from a privacy perspective, because all other taxes rely on a surveillance state to enforce them, but not tariffs, you just have to spy on chinese / mexican / canadian / european / whatever imports, but no spying on the actual end user. Tariff the hell out of it, and just take away all taxes. I will say there is absolutely zero chance that happens.

Marty Bent: Jesus please, if you are listening :)

I’m not sure I agree entirely with the zero taxes idea, but I thought the point about end user privacy was an extremely strong point, even if it’s just a thought experiment. Even the idea that you could design the entire tax system similar to designing software is a pretty radical idea imho. If you were to re-design it completely, in favour of a system that respects the end user, what would pop out the other end? Maybe a system with such strong foundations would naturally lead to a better environment for everyone. Like progressive enhancement or writting well structured HTML naturally leads to better websites.

It’s a great episode. Lots of current cool bitcoin topics and open source projects covered. Among others:

• Zap.store
  • It’s an App Store but instead of Apple signing the releases, the developers sign them with their Nostr keys
  • You can be sure you are getting releases direct from the developers
• Algorelay
  • Algorithmic relay
  • Nostr native relay that can serve personalised algorithmic feeds without the need for external or proprietary APIs or dVMs
• Sigit.io
  • Document signing and verification
  • Docusign but on Nostr

If you are into bitcoin, crypto and open source development, you’ll likey enjoy it. #

If you are into conspiracies the latest Joe Rogan with Sam Tripoli is definitely worth checking out. I listenned to it over several days due to crazy world, so didn’t take any notes. So many fascinating topics discussed, and these two really are savants when it comes to the weird and strange. I thought this quote towards the end sort of sums it up:

Joe Rogan: "Holy shit Sam Tripoli, the Statue of Liberty is a fucking dude."

cat << EOF > Freedom tech and the tax system

I commented earlier about Matt Odell’s and Marty Bent’s view on zero tax policies. I thought the idea of re-designing the tax system, and approach it like freedom tech, aiming to create a system that respects end users, was an interesting idea. If you rebuilt the tax system to give maximum privacy and user freedom, what would the system that emerges look like? Perhaps it would naturally be better for everyone.

Something that did occur to me, is that sure, the system might be great for privacy, but wouldn’t that favour criminality?

It would likely eliminate the worst of the worst because, since the system is more private, criminals would no longer have access to non criminals income data, it wouldn’t even exist, so they loose the ability to easily target them. I imagine that’s quite a big downside for criminals. On the other hand, they gain the ability of much easier financial transactions.

Consider the case where somebody looses everything. How that happens isn’t that important, a bad business decision, a messy divorce, whatever. Aren’t criminals in a better position, especially internationally, to get back on their feet?

For the non criminals to be okay with zero tax policies, it makes sense for them to demand free movement and removal of work visa systems globally so there is a level playing field.

It’s an interesting thought experiment, especially because it makes you think about how things currently are practically speaking, how they might look in a future where the systems we build really do promote user freedom, and how we would get to such a future. It’s an important thing to think about because there is the real danger of folks pushing for freedom for we but not for thee arrangements.

If the freedom tech advocates could see that freedom tech would make their situation worse in some aspects of their life, would they still remain true freedom tech promoters? #

I was able to finally replace my old ear plugs with a new set. it took me a while to save up for them, I kept running into situations where I had to use the earplug money fir ither more inportant things so it had gitten quite bad. The old ones were in a very sorry state indeed. The difference is night and day. The instant I put them in, the crazy world just disapeared into a dimmed silence. It was like some sort of dissociation paradise. I uttered a quiet 'wow' without even realising it.

The funny thing is that the gang stalker bullies must have realised pretty quick because they sent a whole load of stooges to test out the new setup with both walkbys and drivebys to test things. But I couldn’t hear them! Well I could still hear them, but not much, they are really just blips in the background now. I could see they were having to raise their voice, to strain in order for me to even register their subtle harassment. I can’t tell you how good that felt.

I guess it likely won’t take long until I get used to the new normal, but for now at least everything feels somewhat more peaceful :) 🕊✌️☮️

Today’s newsletter is already done and scheduled. I’m feeling relatively nornal today as I had 3 meals yesterday, which has been quite a rare thing of late.

Last night, somebody gifted me quite an exotic fruit I had never tried before. It tasted incredible. Very sweet, but the texture of coconut ice scream, or maybe one of Ben and Gerry’s cooky dough ice scream flavour. It looked like some sort of pre-historic fruit, with skin a bit like a pineapple, but softer. There were these really hard coffee bean sized seeds inside that you had to watch out for, but it really tasted amazing.

It’s the second new fruit I’ve tried in as many weeks. Last week somebody gifted me this fruit that was a bit cruncy, sort of like a cross between a plumb and an apple, except yellow and the size of a large tomato. They have some really great fruits out here.

Finished off the evening last night listening to an interview with Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and another with UK Labour pilitician Alan Johnson. Both really great interviews. Quite a fasinating boots on the ground window into life growing up in Britain in the post war period. I recognised a lot of similarities with my early life. Of course I grew up outside the UK, but their stories felt like the other side to a coin that I’d never really been able to see propertly on both sides.

They were from the Rest is Politics hosts Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell’s interview podcast which I only just came across. #

Early signs of another cold / alergy reaction starting, been sort of a bit sneezy all morning, and just had the first slightly painful needle like sensation in my nose that usually precedes runny nose and sneezing fits. Here I go again. #

cat << EOF > Beams Of Light (Issue #187)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Toolboxes, taxing billionaires, be happy with your chips, namesakes, inflation, BTC & real estate tricks, ETH & SOL, Vision Pro & vfx, milkshakes, AI & Lords, black holes, and of course fairies

Issue details:

• Title: Beams Of Light
• Issue: 187
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Well the world is back up to it’s old tricks again. Pretending to be massively offended by something totally normal that I did, which btw was caused by the world in the first place, then escallating and escallating and escallating, until the whole universe is stuck, then trying to blame the whole thing on me.

This time it’s the sandwich shop trouble makers again. They created a manufactured situation yet again, this time involving mayonaise. Last week they started adding a bit of extra mayonaise in the centre of the sandwich. I didn’t say anything about it at the time, and as it happened it actually made the sandwich taste better. So I went with their new thing. But yesterday it was a different bloke who didn’t appear to know about the extra mayo thing, though I’m almost certain he did, but when I asked for the mayo, which I remind you they themselves have been adding to at least the last 4-5 sandwiches I’ve had, suddenly that’s some earth shatteringly big deal, and the bloke became offended, and everything everywhere has gone to pot, in a massively multiplayer we are infinitely offended at every single thing that you do, and by the way you are wrong about everything, and wrong just for existing, so there thing.

Well once again, nothing I can do until worldo stops being offended.

✌️☮️🕊

But even the peace signs are an enormously offensive thing at the minute.

Stop being offended at everything worldo, you are really just offended at yourselves! It’s so ridiculously obvious. #

Oh yeah I nearly forgot, in what I think is an exact copy of what happened last bullying cycle, which I wrote about at the time, I’ve lost my voice. I haven’t been shouting, and the only thing I’ve eaten is the sandwich. My voice has definitely disapeared, it’s gone all croaky. Last time this happened a few weeks ago I recorded it, so it’s definitely the same exact pattern.

And guess what, several butch women last night were harassing me in walk-byes where they were aggresively shouting 'you learn'.

Oh look I got mutilated yet again.

And that’s not the only mutilation. I have quite a bad skin irritation thing on one of my toes, and that appeared the day after a person walked by stomping the very same foot at me. And that was following me picking up a gift that was left for me but that appeared to have fallen to the ground. So once again being blamed for the thing they are doing to me. Had I not accepted the gift I would have been cast as the ungrateful foreigner. Double mutilation.

Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t, blamed for everything no matter what. #

cat << EOF > The future of court cases and the legal system

I was going through old notes and felt this one was worthy of a blog post. It was birn out of listening to various podcasts covering some of the recent anti-trust hearing in the US, particularly centering around Google. In general I was struck by how complicated these cases were, on many level. The technologies are complicated, the market dynamics are complicated, the company structures are complicated, the existing regulations are complicated.

The description from the journalists of the ridiculousness of it not being possible to show the software, the lawyers having to rely on archaic techniques like screenshots and printouts, really gave the sense that the limits of what the courts would technically be able to handle resonably were not very far away.

This also happened with the backdrop of having been somewhat imersed in the tech from both the crypto / blockchain scene and the AI / LLMs scenes. It’s very clear to me that we are about to enter a step change in the types of advances we are about to see powered by these technologies. I wondered simply, how will the legal system keep up? Is it in danger of falling by the wayside in favour of some form of autonated AI adjudication.

Anyway here were the notes:

How long until court cases that are fully analogue get transformed by AI welding real-time lawyers that can parse, analyse, synthesize and display data on the fly as they take juries through a case? Cyborg legal teams.

How will judges deal with lawyers that try to bambuzel and distort reality at unparalleled levels, from subliminal messaging, and side channel Derren Brown style psyops to uncheckable claims, with insane logic chains that only computers could follow.

How will they analyse software similar in complexity to the online advertizing market but in other domains? How long until they are pissing in the wind?

Will they have the awareness and power to tell us that the legal game is up, that it’s effectively just shadow puppet theatre? #

Yesterday was actually a rather productive day. As I wrote in Twitter, how amazing that when you get a bit of piece and quiet and you aren’t starving, it’s actually possible to get a lot done. Gee who would have thought it?

I wrote a whole load of blog posts, posted a lot of links and a note. What I didn’t mention was that I also got a bunch of development planning done:

• I went through the feature backlog did a tidy up.
• The sequence of fix features needed for when build minutes get reset at the end of the month.
• A feature to greatly simplify how the app plugins are packaged, removing a huge amount of unnecessary code duplication.
• An all posts shared hash link feature, that would ensure all post types always have a hash link to the individual item.
• A feature to modify the build so a backup of the fully rendered site would get pushed to a Github repo. That would enable running a local version of the rendered site, which would be very useful for both offline blogging but also offline dev work.

Of course the world wasn’t too happy about all this productivity and did it’s best to assert it’s authoritey!

I don’t suppose today will be as productive but maybe a bit productive. Maybe the world will allow 1 more neutrino. You can do it world!

🕊☮️✌️ #

Bankless’ David Hoffman on what is DeFi? And why it’s important to Etherium? [27:37]: "DeFi is this very special thing that is coming out of crypto. The idea to break finance out of Wallstreet and democratise it, and put it on the internet, as internet protocols, is something that deeply motivates me and Ryan [...] it is fundamental essence that is highly related to crypto. You can’t really have crypto without DeFi. DeFi is so important. We are fighting over DeFi and being the home of DeFi." #

Bankless’ Ryan Adams on the Etherium roadmap [58:59]: "I really like the roadmap. To summarise the roadmap, it’s scale the L1, scale the L2s, scale the etherium economy, scale ether as a monetary asset inside of this economy, and do all of this while preserving the decentralisation that makes crypto special. That’s the roadmap." #

No doubt this will get me into some trouble. Today’s crazy thought of the day:

What if it was the UK that was the experiment, not the US? An experiment to see if we could all get out of poverty by applying Keynesian economics on a national level. As crazy as this might seem, how else would one ever test such an outlandish idea before getting everyone to do it? Yes it’s a crazy thought. But how crazy is the thought that most people are in forever poverty?

What if the entire UK was giant whopping lie?

Who would do such a thing? I don’t know, the decendants of the Pharoahs of Egypt, maybe non carbon based aliens, or how about artificial intelligence from the 22nd century. Who knows. #

Just finished listening to the latest Rest is Money podcast with Martin Lewis. Great episode. Listen to it, especially if you are from the UK.

I have a vague recall that Martin Lewis is a type of milkshake popularised in Pulp Fiction.

And that reminds me of a recent desert island discs with a chap called James Graham that I listenned to a few days ago. Great music selection, including a classic Pulp track that I definitely danced to a lot back at uni.

Martin reminds me of Graham.

My middle names are James Graham in case you hadn’t noticed.

I have a couple more of these dark crazy notes in my notes this week that I’m going to go ahead and publish after this note because it seems like the best thing to do. But it could very well be the opposite, I can’t tell anymore.

No doubt someone will be along in a minute to tell me to be happy, or as was the case earlier to 'blog!'. #

Perhaps everyone you have ever known was living a lie because base reality is so fucked that even the lucky ones only manage to succeed by arbitraging life costs by secretly living in developing countries. That is only the beginning of how fucked things are.

Some weeks reality really does apear very fucked from where I am. #

In the future, or who knows maybe even the present, pig butchering scams have gotten so bad that entire towns are designed to do enormous industrial scale pig butchering of entire families and all their entourages. Children are targeted thoughout their lives from birth by hotswaps that will divert your life into one of these butchering towns. Hilarity does not ensue. #

I don’t have the spirit to write this morning’s note. It feels like I’m always doing other people’s sodoku problems, and when I find time to do something for myself, I get blocked. A somewhat older lady did just give me a gift, no signs of maliciousness or strings attached. I’m thankful for that.

Let‘s see, maybe today will go better than the past week. #

cat << EOF > Lord Robert Skidelsky on Keynes

Robert Skidelsky, who is a member of the UK House of Lords, was on the Keen On podcast to talk about AI and it’s likely affect on society, how this new age of technology might change the human condition. Tons of interesting topics discussed, but this particular bit about Keynes stood out to me.

What I think you’ve got to bear in mind with Keynes is the distinction that was central to his idea between means and ends. Economics was the means. And economics was the means to get us over the hump of necessity, as quickly as possible, into the realm of freedom. That was the way he would put it.

Now in order to do that you have to have more of less the economy going full blast for some time. Only in that way would you eliminate the scarcity, which is what keeps us away from our utopia. So he wanted a full employment economy, he wanted a growth economy. If we don’t get those, then we are always going to be, sort of…behind. Behind the curve of what he would have liked us to be on. And that’s where we are at the moment.

In many of the podcasts I listen to, a lot of Bitcoin / Crypto shows, they are always banging on about austrian economics, and my impression is there’s a lot of suspicion towards Keynesian economics. I haven’t had any time to get into either at more than a surface level. I wish I had more time. In any case, interesting to hear some good words about Keynesian ideas.

Economic theories aside, I thought much of Robert’s approach to tech, AI and society at large was framed in very relatable ways. I think it’s interesting to hear from folks that think deeply about these ideas, especially when they aren’t spending all thier time in the tech industry themselves. I felt like it was kind of a refreshingly open and roomy perspective. #

cat << EOF > What are these heredoc style blog posts?

About 2 weeks ago I added a new feature to the website. It was the first feature that changed things visually in absolutely ages. It wasn’t totally straight forward, required a bunch of tweaks to some of the core site rendering, but ultimately it resulted in new heading fonts.

I was quite happy with that, but it highlighted another issue. Namely that on the main page it was quite difficult to differentiate between different post types. Whereas notes have a hash link at the very end of each post that links to the individual note item page, other post types like blog, newsletter and podcast posts don’t have this. So when you are reading such a post, and it’s followed by a note post, there was no way to see you had finished the post and were now reading the note.

I could see I was about to tun put of build minutes, and that means it wouldn’t have been possible to make any modifications for several weeks. I decided to implement a temporary stop gap fix, to at least make sure posts were readable, so you could clearly see the start and end of all post types.

The obvious way to solve it was to add delimiters to posts, some visual thing at the beginning and end of each post. Turns out in programming that’s quite a common way to approach such problems. It shows up in code, for example comment bocks, but also if statements, function definitions in various languages. One place that’s quite well known to many programmers is Bash heredocs.

Heredocs are ways to define multiline strings in a bash script. It’s well known because bash is a shell scripting language, quite a low level way of accessing the operating system, through what is called a terminal. Most programmers spend their time in code editors editing code, but to actually run the code and to debug and analyse their code they will often drop down to using the terminal. It’s a much older interface than a graphical user interface, it’s all text based, but the tools are very powerful and versatile, which is what you want in that sirt of situation. It’s like the difference between a modern coffee shop and a motor vehicle mechanics workshop.

I figured the delimiters in the style of a heredoc might look quite cool, and were quite on brand for me given I’m a programmer. I wrote a brief description of the heredoc style delimiter feature and set off to build it. Before long I had it working.

The initial implementation worked, but I thought it looked a bit strange. Looking through the various syntaxes used fir heredocs, there was one where you specify a filename, and when the script runs the multiline text string gets outputed to that file. It’s a very conoact way to define the heredoc because the delimiter is on the same line as the filename. I figured I could update my implementation to use this style of heredoc, but instead of a filename, it would use the post title. I’m calling it the redirect to title style post delimiters. Very nerd cool.

I made some modifications, and after a bit of slightly difficult CSS wrangling, got it working.

It’s implemented in a way that makes it useful in other situations too, so even if it’s a stop gap solution, it might be useful in other situations. Basically you can add a prefix and postfix strings to your posts. So for example you could add emojis instead of the heredoc style delimiters.

I considered some other options:

1. Left margin color border for notes
2. Different color backgrounds for each post type
3. Modify all post types to have a final # link
4. Hoist all titleless posts above titled posts

(1) and (2) would be pretty cool to try out, and I hope to test these at some stage when I’m feeling a little adventurous, and have enough space.

I looked into (3) but decided to do that properly it was s bugger job, requiring a medium level code refectoring. I plan to do this at some point, it’s the most obvious and consistent way to approach the problem.

(4) turns out to be a variation of the daily links section added to each day. It would totally be possible, but not what I’m looking for for my site.

I’m glad I went ahead and got the heredocs delimiters working. They are currently operational on the website, but only the initial version. I ran out of build minutes before I was able to deploy the slighlty cooler looking redirect to title heredocs style delimiters.

This whole situation is an example of the sorts of compromises you sometimes have to make in the real world when you are faced with time presures. Get something functional working, then learn from that initial implementation and make the necessary updates to get to a better solution later when you have more time and resources. #

cat << EOF > The beams of light theory of relationships

I was having a bit of a strange day a few days ago. This theory / vision / whatever it is came to me so I wrote some notes. Turning it into a blog post because it just feels like it should be in a blog post even though it isn’t conpletely fleshed out. Think about it a bit like it’s a sketch.

• Imagine you are you but you also exist simultaneously in a parallel dimension that is sort of like overlayed onto base reality. Maybe we are in a future world, or maybe this is just an interesting thought experiment, a sort of a fantasy.
• You don’t exactly see it, at least in normal circumstances, it’s more of a feelings thing. Don’t get too caught up in the details it’s really a metaphor or a useful fiction, something like that.
• In the parallel dimension reality, people are made up of light beams. It has it’s advantages, but it’s also kind of annoying sometimes, you know like when people shine a light beam in your face. It’s annoying. On the other hand light can also be very pleasant, it can create incredible atmosphere, light is movies! Light is beautiful, million of colours.
• Anyway one thing in this strange world / parallel universe / dimension whatever, is that you grow up with these tiny creature that help you to manage all the light beams. The whole light beams thing is really complex and so they help us with making sure we don’t accidentally shoot light all over the place, causing havoc and whatnot.
• As much as this is a fantasy world, turns out there are practicalities, that don’t become obvious until later in life. For example sometimes these little creatures / fairies however you want to call them, they move on.
• They have lives of their own and sometimes they move on, and we have no control over them.
• When they leave they leave a gap in your reality. It’s kind of annoying, but also when it hasn’t happened to you before it can be really disconcerting. Scary even.
• You see over the years they have been busy making some small modifications to the light beams, likely both inbound and outbound, and so when they leave suddenly things start looking, or more precisely, feeling different.
• This mostly manifests in how other people appear to you. You suddenly become aware of light beam configurations that were previously dimmed, or not there at all. To cut a long story short this is often the beginning of falling out of love with people. But not always. Sometimes, if you are open to it, you discover new positive things about people you never could see before.
• It’s a bit unclear the exact mapping of fairies to people. It’s a bit chaotic, some people believe the fairies actually exist in a multitude of other dimensions. Anyway, sometimes when one moves on, it’s just a few light beams that change for specific people, but also sometimes it can be a massive change across many people and things, because it’s not just people, because btw everything in the universe emits light beams to some degree.
• It can get quite complicated, but basically, light beams, people, things, beautiful, love, but also can be a bit tricky to navigate when things change.
• And everything is always changing, for everyone, all the time, which sounds like a total nightmare and it definitely can be at times, but it can also be pretty great.
• Anyway that’s the theory. I guess it’s more like a mental model. I just wanted to mention it quickly. If you talk about it too much things start getting weird, feedback loops, spiritual storms, other technical stuff not worth mentioning.
• Peace world peace ☮️🕊✌️
• Oh yeah, another important thing worth mentioning, sometimes when a fairy moves on, we feel a bit of loss, a sadness, like something missing. It’s not as obvious like when a person leaves your life, but you notice something is different, missing, it can feel like a part of you has disappeared. But you get used to the new configuration after some time. But worth knowing that people around you change, things change, but also you change too.
• Ok that was the only additional thing I wanted to mention now.
• Okay another small thing. Sometimes because everyone has this parallel dimension, with their set of fairies, and everyone has this moving on thing blah blah blah, sometimes there can occur these strange spiritual storms that emerge. They pass. They can feel kind of intense sometimes. We are all sort of connected via the parallel dimensions and it’s a bit weird sometimes. But you know in base reality the weather is pretty weird sometimes too right? I mean literally enormous swimming pool amounts of water fall from the sky and huge electricity bolts fly out of clouds which literally float in the air. And all the rest of real world weather, that really is crazy when you think about it.
• Ultimately the parallel dimension stuff is just in our heads, it’s made up out of basically nothing, none of it really exists, so it’s nothing to get very worried about, but it does make us, our bodies and minds which are part of our bodies feel things, and sometimes that’s a little strange or unexpected.

I bet that didn’t make any sense. Sometimes life is like that, but I’m not some famous skilled artist that can turn my ramblings into beautiful things. I just have bullet points. And sometimes you just have to put it out there into the world nonetheless.

If I find time I might give this to ChatGPT and see what comes back. #

cat << EOF > Living as root, mostly a bad idea

Living as root, imho it’s a bad idea, but many people do this, feel they need to.

Any experienced Linux sys admin will tell you, learnt the hard way, that you really only want to be root for as little time as possible. Doing everything as root is dangerous.

Same goes for software development, the example in development which is analogous, is that you don’t want to spend all your time in the debugger. Just use a debugger when you absolutely have to. If you try to live your entire development experience in the debugger, weird shit happens, you end up debugging bugs in the debugger or the UI, and that’s a total nightmare. So only get the debugger out once you have exhausted all other avenues.

Not that life is exactly like sysadmin or web development, but to the extent that there are similarities, I think in most situations a similar approach would is what’s called for. Of course it’s not obvious what the equivalent of root and debuggers are in life, and it’s likely different for everyone, but maybe it’s something like finding the appropriate tool or approach for the task at hand.

Bad idea to build a shed with sky scraper building tools. And you could come up with similar examples in all walks of life. Try not to over do it.

It’s not an exact science, sometimes you get things wrong. Sometimes people over react, sometimes groups over react too. #

As predicted yesterday, things just kept on along the same lines. Too many escallations to mention, just non-stop, loterally everywhere I went. Was subjected to more sleep depravation by a gang of men and a butch woman that appear to be part of a much much bigger gang stalker gang. Hardly any sleep. They are at it already again this morning. Everything manufactured. It’s like some sort of open air improv acting school, and for whatever reason they have decided to organise all their activities around me. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Mind boby and sole stolen. Bleak bleak bleak bleak bleak bleak bleak bleak bleak bleak. #

The white tsunamis are clearly still in effect, the literal second I started writing this note was met with a white tsunami. Peace worldo ☮️✌️🕊.

I’m massively tired having been subjected to a blatant sleep deprivation attack the entire night by the small white cabinet breaker nightime recyclers. Worldo is still in a massive strop with me and dispite the fact that it’s already starving me, barely any food for several days now, it’s still escallating everything while blocking everything and pretending to allow. As I keep saying blocking while allowing, is still blocking. And blocking while pretending to allow, is definitely still fucking blocking.

I expect it will be more of the same, along with infinite righteousnes. That’s what always happens, and if the past few days are anything to go by, they are going for a big one.

It was raining all last night, very cold, especially since I had hardly any body heat because of lack of food. Still cold this morning. Still no build minutes, so can’t publish anything to the website. It’s basically pain in pretty much every direction at the minute. And of course I’m being blamed for everything. #

The big thing for the past 24 hours has been white tsunamis. I had a milk based hot drink yesterday morning near the canal and that appears to have set off the white tsunami the size of a level 5 huricane. 80% of the regulars down the canal were all wearing white, aggressive people parking their bright white motorbike next to me then proceeding to do very vigorous pelvis / humping exercises, then everywhere I went it was people all dressed in white. Young people, old people, thin people, fat people, lots of scantily clad young women acting all faux coquette, enormous gangs of 30 people all dressed in white. It was like some sort of epidemic.

Also people are doing malicious help where they gift you some food, but then try to make you feel bad that you are eating their food. They are still trying to convince me that food is a lie that needs to be given up.

I don’t know, it’s just more of the neverending nightmarigoround that is being stuck in vietnam.

I’m now fully out of build minutes so can’t even publish to the website. 10 days till reset. #

They’ve blocked the leaning wall again today at the internet place. Without the ability to lean on the wall, the amount time I can stand to use the internet is massively reduced, and that of course affects everything. It’s impossible enough as it is, but now they are blocking the only part of the day where it’s possible to do anything. The reality is that only the mornings are productive because the afternoons are a total washout wearher-wise.

I note that this new 'lovely for we and garbage for thee' policy is being applied across the board. As well as the internet, it’s with accomodation, water, electricity and the last few days with food too. In fact finding new places to apply their prime end game directive is some sort of group activity.

I’m literally not even joking. This is what a very large contingent of them quite happily do with enormous righteousness. #

cat << EOF > JD Vance on the weirdness of the current US - China relationship

The All-In podcast guys had a conference recently and tgey have started publishing interviews they did. One that dropped a few days ago was an interview with JD Vance, running for vice president. I thought the following question and Vance's answer was particularly interesting:

David Friedberg: The structural relationship that the United States has with China is a very codependent relationship. They buy our bonds, I guess they are selling them off now, we buy a lot of product from them, it allows us to go into a Walmart and get 40 dollar scooters for our kids, the technology industry is deeply dependant on a supply chain coming from China, there is a great commercial interdependency with China, they have historically been a very important partner to the United States and our economic prosperity, and I know about the hollowing out of the middle class because of moving everything offshore to China, but how do we rip that band aid off and not cause massive problems with inflation? How do we not drive the cost of everything up by tariffing things that are coming in from China? What is the way forward with China? Is it necessarily a deeply divided Cold War? Or is there a path that allows us to maintain a balanced trading relationship and a peaceful transition with China, as they continue to build up their capabilities economically and with energy? Which I think is one of the biggest drivers for their success.

JD Vance: [...] I don’t want to go to war with China, I think that it would be hugely destructive, but I do think we have to re-shore more american manufacturing. Be of the weird things about China, if you think about past eras of developing nations. Right so go back to when the UK was the most advanced economy in the world and America was a developing nation, well one of the things that happened was capital was flowing from the UK into the United States. From the developed into the developing nation.

What’s really weird about China is that it’s like americans borrow money from chinese peasants to then buy the things the chinese peasants are making for us. It’s not just the goods flow that are jacked up, it’s the capital flows that are jacked up. [...] You need to balance both the capital and the goods flows. I’m not saying we are going to have absolutely no trade with China, but right now the relationship is fundamentally that the chinese have figured out they can create a massively powerful producerer society while america becomes a weaker weaker consumerer society. That is the broken nature of the relationship, and I think rebalancing is the right way to think about it, but we have got to do it and I think we are way way behind the [TBD].

I had never heard the dynamic described like that before. You don’t have to be an economist to see that that is indeed an extremely perverted relationship. It’s crazy that the situation is like this.

What is going on with the world that there are these complete reality inversions happening everywhere? I notice it in my life constantly, but it appears to be happening at all levels of scale.

It’s a really good interview, worth listening to the whole thing. #

Seems like they are back to another starvation cycle. They are doing the whole empty packets of cigarettes everywhere I go. The last time they gifted me some food a few days ago they said 'your lie', as if food was a lie, something to give up like a bad addiction, nevermind that I am stick thin at the minute following a week of being ill. They make you ill then they blame you for it calling you a liar then they punish you. Evil motherfuckers. They’ll be upset that I’m not happy and infinitely thankful in a bit.

Well the good news, at least for me, is that the newsletter is done. I can’t say I’m super happy about it, but at least it isn’t all doom and gloom, as I managed some hope & positivity despite an absolutely fucking horrible week. I know the newsletter could be so much better if I was living a slighlty more normal life, without all the harassment, a roof over my head, running water, electricity, no starvation, or thirst. Even with just the basics and a laptop I’d at least be in with a chance.

This is David vs Goliath Extreme. WTF world? And yeah, I know, now that I’ve said that you're going to go and make it even more extreme aren’t you worldo?

How about a nice game of peace worldo? 🕊✌️☮️ #

The butch women at the internet place have doubled down on their blocking frenzy. A blocking frenzy escallation. What a suprise.

The leaning wall is even more blocked now, with their motorbike clearly sticking out into their neighbours property. This has happened many times before. Each time there are new women staff that start working at the cafe it’s only a matter of time before they start the motorbike blocking. And everytime it follows the same pattern. Day by day they move their motorbike a bit more, blocking a bit more, first the leaning wall is blocked off, then eventually they take over the entire standing place. It’s pathological. Like some deep-seated need to block and blame, and anger goad.

That’s going to have a big impact unfortubately. The more they block, the less I can blog, and the less I can do development. The way the weather is here, only the mornings are productive. They of course know this, that’s why they are doing it. #

The universe is quite clearly trying to find the launch codes for another mutilation. I’ve seen this hapoen so many times before at this point. It hard to describe and might seem strange to hear about if you haven’t heard about it or seen it before. It permeates everything. Every conversation, every action, every scene of human existence. Little by little at first, things escallate, get moved into ever more precarioys position. In some ways it’s a bit like a game of chess tgat is unfolding all around you.

Anyway just wanted to note it hear.

• Anger goading...check
• Starvation...check
• Thirsting...check
• Various colour tsunamis...check
• Spiritual stop start traffic jams...check
• Yah blocking...check
• False equivalences...check
• Righteousness...check

I could go on. It won’t stop until a mutilation event, then will instantly deny it, and blame on me. #

cat << EOF > Authentic blocking frenzy antidote (Issue #186)

This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-10-19)

In this week’s edition:

Workplace software, AI subprime, libertarian geopolitics, perfect accents, open source, podcasting origins, Wordpress chaos, cash freedom, Trump madness, BTC & stablecoins, ancient history and drugs

Issue details:

• Title: Authentic blocking frenzy antidote
• Issue: 186
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

I woke up this morning with a pretty bad chest cough. I guess it must have been in some of the food they gave me. I had just about recovered from the last chest cough. That one took many many weeks to clear up but it had cleared up and I was cough free for at least a few days. But of course they are on another mutilation rampage, first a sneezing cold, then a stomach bug poisoning, and now just as that is beginning to clear, another chest cough.

This morning already several gang stalker drive by attacks. The bloke that drives past every morning now and cheerily shouts 'go home!'. Today he updated it to 'god bless, go home!', so that’s a sign of religion based harassment on the horizon. Likely more pedo pervert shit or apparent nunes on bycicles. There was also an extreme aggressive motorbike driveby shouting I don’t know what, but it was very demented whatever it was.

The early morning young woman that appears always as I’m getting ready, who is IMO very creepy, turned up again this morning. I noticed she does the whole adult pretending to be a child thing. The way it manifest is how she gets on the bus. When the bus arrives, suddenly it’s as if she’s a 2ft tall toddler with a oversized backpack, scrambling flat footed, unbalanced and panicky to try to get onto the scary bus. She’s a grown friggin' women for christ’s sake. Every morning. Even a 4 year old would have improved their bus hop on technique by now.

See, that’s some pedo pervert shit right there. You’re never very far away from weird pedo pervert shit in Vietnam. That’s been my experience at least. It’s weird, it’s gross, and there’s nothing you can about it. Oh and did I mention they will try to blame that on you too? That seems to be one of their favorite moves.

Also green baloons are lying around this morning. How strange that that should happen the day after I mentioned being extremely bloated and feeling like a baloon. It’s more anger goading.

All I can do is ☮️🕊✌️ #

As predicted yesterday, the bullies gave blocked the leaning wall at the internet place. They have been tentatively testing this out over the past few days, like some sort of SaaS project. Each day going a little bit further trying to gauge my reaction. There’s little doubt in my mind that the early morning harassment by the motorbike gang stalkers is linked to this. If I don’t get ready when they say so, and do what they say, then the wall is blocked.

This is most likely just the first stage in a multi-prongued attack. Water, food, electricity are the next things they will try to block. And then they will try to frame me for the things they are doing to me, and to each other. Almost certain that‘s where this is heading.

This is literally what happens everytime, they’ve already decided, and they won’t stop until I get mutilated.

Peace vietnam peace. ☮️✌️🕊 #

Guy Swann on TFTC Podcast [58:08]: "War is just about the contracts for the bombs, and then the contracts for the re-building. We’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars now to Lebanon to help them rebuild from the bombs that we just sent, and we literally sent money to Lebanon and Isreal at the exact same time. To rebuild the neighbourhoods that were bombed by the bombs we sent to Isreal. It’s a racket." #

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: ☮️✌️🕊 #

cat << EOF > Progressive enhancement underrated

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. #

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. #

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. #

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 likely 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. #

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 feature 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. #

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 geeky bash heredoc style delimiters, 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. #

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 just got 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 ✌️☮️🕊 #

cat << EOF > Grand slams

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. #

cat << EOF > Simply Refreshing (Issue #185)

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:

• Title: Simply Refreshing
• Issue: 185
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

cat << EOF > Funny old world

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 :) #

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 their 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

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. #

cat << EOF > Tom Tugendhat on the british system of government

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. #

cat << EOF > Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenburger on the current problems in science and society

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. #

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." #

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. #

cat << EOF > Scarebundance

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? #

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’

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. #

cat << EOF > Keen & Teare on innovation in Europe

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. #

cat << EOF > New heading fonts :)

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. #

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. #

cat << EOF > Another configurable headers test post

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. #

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.

cat << EOF > Configurable day and article headers

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. #

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. #

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. #

cat << EOF > Punished For Being Born (Issue #184)

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:

• Title: Punished For Being Born
• Issue: 184
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

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. #

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. #

cat << EOF > Notes on the question of the meaning of life

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 :) #

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. #

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. #

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. #

cat << EOF > Tom Luongo on seing people from all sides

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. #

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. #