markjgsmith

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. #