markjgsmith

2024/11/17 #

  • I didn’t take any escallation notes yesterday but there was tons of weirdness everywhere. I got gifted some nice food late last night and so I have something nice for breakfast this morning.

    I’ve been thinking quite a lot about a major simplification that I might do to the major static site generator plugins. Currently you have plugins for the blog, notes, podcast, newsletter and linkblog, then there are seperate plugins for bells and whistles like archives, tagclouds, rss feeds. I think it would make more sense to move the later into the former, so that for instance when you instantiate the blog plugin it sets up all those other bells and whistles things for you.

    The bells and whistles plugins could still be used seperately if you wanted to, but making the main app plugins a bit more featured would make setup and configuration a lot simpler in many cases. Also, I think over time I’ll be able to add lots of other cool things to them like serverless and edge functions.

    Yesterday felt kinda crazy. I did manage a blog post. Hoping to get a bit of additional blogging today, but less surrealist humour. #

  • cat << EOF > Thoughts on integrating your website with Bluesky

    There’s been much talk about Bluesky this past week, mostly because of a big exodus of people from Twitter following the US presidential election result. It seems many of them have chosen Bluesky as their new social media homebase. I’ve had an account for a while, and though I quite like it as a product, I currently only really post promos for the newsletter there.

    There’s been quite a lot of folks writting about the whole thing, for example Gavin Anderegg has a piece that goes into a bit of detail about the Bluesky architecture. It’s kind of interesting. I previously wrote about my signup experience and the AT protocol that underpins the service. I didn’t end up getting that engaged over in Bluesky because it felt like most people and topics I liked where still mostly on Twitte.

    The recent migrations to Bluesky have me wondering, what exactly would you need to do in order to integrate an existing website with Bluesky? What would that even look like?

    I did a quick online search for blog posts and tutorials, but to my dismay there wasn’t much out there in the wild, only the official developer docs & tutorials. Figured I’d jot down a few notes on what such an integration might look like. I guess you could do a bunch of complicated things, but in it’s simplest form I think a Bluesky integration would have the following features:

    • Ability to mark a website post to be syndicated to Bluesky, with ability to use the various Bluesky publish settings from within your post’s markdown frontmatter.
    • Some sort of counter next to each post on the website that shows number of replies on Bluesky, and links to the thread on Bluesky.
    • An engagement section on post pages that displays any replies from Bluesky users.
    • Ability to publish to Bluesky via an RSS feed

    These were the first things that sprung to mind. I’m super curious to hear how others are thinking to integrate their websites with Bluesky.

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/11/16 #

  • I’m both complelely exhausted, even more so than yesterday, and very creeped out by the weird pedo sex goading that was going on all day yesterday. I took some escallation notes, I have no idea if any of this makes any sense. Bear in mind while I’m taking these notes I’m trying as much as possible to get on with productive stuff like listening to podcasts and planning development work on the website and static site generator, and it’s reached the point now where basically nothing is possible, even the escallation notes are just a mess.

    Anyway here they are:

    • Teenage kid dressed all in red, appeared out of nowhere in shop cafe, I’m sitting head down typing on my internet device, he passed and says something while waving his hand like he is saying hello except he was basically waving directly at my groin. Then steels my receipt, that was laying on the table, as he walks down the stairs. I manage to grab it back from him while he was looking at it. I think this was the kid from yesterday that was wearing yellow T-shirt and had a yellow plastic bag. Very weird.
    • Btw yesterday evening there was a young woman that got offended at me for sitting in the seat that she had gotten up from a minute earlier. She had a very bright yellow bag.
    • Today one of the female shop staffers that is carrying various stock items up and down the stairs is wearing a dark yellow T-shirt instead of then usual uniform. I bought a banana today, so perhaps that’s why. Based on past experience, invariably, things always get weird when bannanas are involved anywhere. Bananas are like vietnamese cryptonite.
    • Woman sandwich shop vendor for no reason said ‘see’ after I asked for more mayonnaise
    • In the next shop a few minutes later, the woman staffer said ‘more’ before the price I had to pay while I was paying.
    • It’s evening now, woman wearing Fluoro yellow dress behaving oddly sat next to me
    • On the other side of the road woman wearing the most red tight dress ever walking with a small boy wearing a black and white striped tshirt. He looks like a mini version of the security guard that has lots of energy but is also quite fat, from a few days ago at the shop cafe.
    • A bit later a teenage boy wearing all black with apparent family, mother and brother perhaps, sat next to me, across the road was a woman taking photos with camera aimed directly in my direction. Next to the boy a man had attached his white helmet to the bench. They sat, waited to hear my reaction, when I didn’t react they left. They then came back and started to get on a bus but right after getting on they changed their mind and all got off the bus. Note a few days ago a strange old lady tried to get me to get on a bus, motioning ‘come here’ with her fingers.
    • The bus family thing was followed immediately by a white car stoping in front of me, with a woman getting out wearing a very skimpy all white miniskirt and white top.
    • Ow harassment

    Don’t know if any of that made sense. I don’t have time to re-read it. I still have to write the newsletter. Really not feeling like doing that. Feeling majorly rushed and overclocked by the world, so I’ll likely have to make some drastic cuts to what I’m doing. Perhaps Elon, Vivek and Doge could slash 2 trillion dollars from all this fucking harassment.

    The harassment is so bad I don’t even have the words, let alone energy, to describe it. It’s all consuming. It never ends. It’s like being forced to do other people’s sodoku puzzles, but you have to do your own puzzles too. And not starve. #

  • cat << EOF > Bull runs, economies, politics, browsers & crypto AI (Issue #190)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-11-16)

    In this week’s edition:

    UAPs, history of democracy, Trump wins, self-hosting, crypto bull market, expert pivoting, bitcoin forks & consensus, Uk government & economy teardown, 3rd party browser script security, and crypto AI

    Issue details:

    • Title: Bull runs, economies, politics, browsers & crypto AI
    • Issue: 190
    • Page: issue webpage

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > The peaceful transition of humour

    This cycle’s transition of humour began last week when satirical publication the Onion bought the right wing conspiracy conglomerate Infowars. Infowars will become a parody of itself while John Stewart’s Daily Show will slowly transition to a serious conspiracy show, selling health supplements. Infowars founder Alex Jones and John Stewart will try to spend the next few months showing each other the ropes. The seriously funny transition is expected to be complete by the new year.

    When asked how they felt about the whole situation, neither Stewart nor Jones really knew what to expect:

    Stewart: It’s a bit like learning to ride a bicycle with your hands back to front.

    Jones: You just have to re-learn when to shout and when to laugh.

    Podcaster, extreme mole and right wing communist comedy club owner Joe Rogan enthusiastically commented, somewhat out of context [1:43:29]:

    "This is peak woke. This is absolute peak woke insanity."

    According to "sources", he apparently went on to say

    "Finally my evil plan is fully realised. We are going to have so much fucking fun."

    Before riding off doing a wheely on his BMX, spinning the front wheel in 180 degree increments shouting:

    "Serious... funny... serious... funny. Hahahaha ... aaaaaaarrrrggh I’m a red blooded man! ... Now I’m a giggling trans woman."

    Everyone else’s brain, in his comedy club’s green room, promptly fell out of their heads, but it was fine because John Stewart, the designated driver, had been prepping for the transition for months and was wearing a rubber swimming hat just in case a brain related situation should occur. He was able to drive everyone home, giving everyone an emergency swimming hat and some Alcaseltzer.

    It all ended happily ever after, though everyone had a bit of a hangover. The end.

    Newsletter writer Mark Smith was interviewed for this piece, but declined to comment, shouting "fake news...fake news" before hanging up the phone.

    He then rang us back and said he could not guarantie any of the logic in this post checks out exactly or indeed at all, and told us to subscribe to the newsletter, which he assured us doesn’t have surrealist crazy jokes all that often, it’s mostly tech, javascript, webdev, and a tiny segment pleading for a donation so he can buy a new laptop, and get back to doing normie web development.

    He added, "please world don’t punish me for this post, I just want to get back to some form of normality".

    EOF

  • I want the ability to run ChatGPT queries from an iOS Notes note bulleted list.

    This would be the workflow:

    • Be able to write a note offline containing many queries
    • Send the note when you get online to a service that runs all the queries and brings back responses that you can store onto your device
    • Read the results offline later

    Theorectically ChatGPT ciukd be really awesome for offline workflows, but I don’t see anyone trying to build something around that. #

Today’s links:

2024/11/15 #

  • Too tired and exhausted and consuned by the world to write anything today. Here are the escallation notes, it was a day of non stop nastiness.

    • The big thing today is ‘lie’. 3 food vendors in a row have said it while preparing my food. The first, a well known warpather butch woman who pretends to be all nice then always without fail metaphorically gut punches you as she gives you the food, confidently said ‘lie’ to me as she gave me my food order. The next place, a few minutes walk up the road, as I told him what I wanted suddenly it was imperative for him to shout ‘lie’ across the street at someone. The place after that, again a two minute walk away, the staffer there said ‘lie’ to the apparent customer before me, as soon as I entered the shop.
    • Today at the shop cafe I’m being front run in everything I do by parents. Being told ‘I learn’ just at as I’m about
    • Shop staffers angrily snapping elastic bands. The elastic band that someone body else left a couple of days ago on the table usually sit at is still there. Evidently they incorrectly think I left it there, or are lying, and have decided to not clean the table. Nevermind that I always clean up my garbage. Never mind that’s 50% of other customers don’t. Nope I’m still to blame for a single neutrino being out of place in the entire universe again.
    • Now there is a shifty looking bloke wearing very white T-shirt drinking red bull and with a packet of masks, making 'I’m ill' type noises, ‘uuurgh’, and walking around like his feet are super heavy, slapping them all over the place. Also he’s drunk a small bottle of Pepsi which he has placed right next to the graffiti dick, which someone has obviously tried to paint over but it hasn’t worked, so you can still see it. The forward slash is still there above it.
    • Shifty looking bloke moved seat and left an elastic band directly on front of me. The elastic band based harassment continues. He’s getting quite agitated btw. He keeps quickly turning around to try and catch me looking at him. Looking at him is the last thing on my mind, I’m just trying to concentrate on a podcast.
    • Young woman staffer downstairs shouts an exasperated ‘they knooow!’. I literally have no idea what she is talking about. I wonder if anyone in the building does.
    • Bloke doing overly exaggerated quenching thirst noises. Literally every 10-15 seconds. Told you there was a thirsting escalation happening yesterday didn’t I. There was a large empty bottle of water on the table I sit at when I got here. It’s pure anger goading. I spot these attacks almost immediately these days. It was by a well dressed man vaguely my age wearing a white dress shirt.
    • After taking a selfie with the updated white washed graffiti dick at the shop cafe, a few moments later a voice from the back room that sort of sounds like he’s on the phone to somebody : ‘we know’
    • Young teen boy shows up in shop cafe, I’m the only other customer. He is being strange. Wearing a bright fluoro yellow T-shirt, with a dark yellow thick plastic bag. He sits behind me on a stool, and shouts in my direction in a bizarre accent that sort of hides what he is saying ‘You won!’. It’s aimed at me, but it could be that he’s shouting downstairs. I don’t respond and he moves seat. Shouldn’t he be in school with all the other kids?
    • Shop cafe staffer right before cleaning up the mess left by the morning rush left around me: ‘liar’. I was the only person in the seating area. He used a put-on very deep voice. He cleaned up everything apart from the elastic band directly in front of me, left by the shifty looking bloke in white T-shirt earlier.
    • Big incident at the sandwich shop at lunch time. The young woman vendor who is only there occasionally was doing something shifty with the sandwiches. It all got very strange as I waited for the customer before me to get served. She changed the order several times, 1/2 prepared 2 different sandwiches then putting them aside, making it look like the previous customer had changed their mind, she never asked me what I wanted, then used one of the old 1/2 prepared sandwiches that had had other meat in them and then removed, and tried to force me to take that, even though it was incorrect with some stuff I didn’t want. It turned into a big argument, she kept trying to force me to have the incorrect sandwich. The whole situation was clearly manufactured, and part of the bigger anger goading arc. That’s why at the shop cafe they have been doing the whole elastic band thing. All these things are related. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. It literally happens every few weeks. Same exact pattern. They will act all upset now for days. I did eventually get the fresh sandwich I wanted but only after being chastised as being ‘a man!’. This is also linked to the whole hot water blocking manufactured situation from a few days ago. All the women are trying to exert their authority. This whole place is a hellhole of manufactured hate atm.

    I tried my best to listen to some podcasts but it was realy ifficukt to concentrate on anything let alone write any blog posts. I did eat some food so that was nice. It seems at the minute like when I’m able to get food, I get blocked in every other dimension.

    I just hope today will be better. Have got to somehow prepare the newsletter for tomorrow. Feel like that’s going to be difficult as everything is such a spiritual mess. I can’t even remember shat podcasts I listenned to. I just know I’m kinda tired with all the elections stuff everywhere. #

Today’s links:

2024/11/14 #

  • I didn’t get much done yesterday, listenned to a few podcasts but it felt like most of the day was filled with harassments and dealing with that. Hard to even concentrate on the podcasts or write any blog posts when you are totally consumed by the gang stalkers. There were a lot of very bizare situations.

    Escallation notes from yesterday:

    • The milk left on the ground next to where I stand at the internet place that had basically been washed away in the rain has been ‘toped up’ with new milk.
    • Right after arriving and noticing the milk, the bloke that runs one of the shop cafes shouted ‘Aah! ... Okay Maaak’. Pretty clearly an escalation. They know they are currently starving me, food goading me, sex goading me and anger goading me. If I say nothing they get more angry, if I say something they get more angry. They are really just angry at themselves.
    • Strange bizarre set of situations today at the shop cafe. It was quite busy when I arrived, the apparent morning school rush, lots of kids and mothers. I went to the till with a bloke staffer avoiding the young woman staffer that pretends to be an angel but then takes every opportunity to shiv you, she is a fucking psychopath imo. I wasn’t avoiding her exactly, that’s just how the queues were emptying out, but she did that thing where you go one way and she pretends to try to get you to go the other way, classic psycho move that. Anyway, I paid went upstairs and there were two people that had clearly imo been waiting at the top of the stairs and only started down the stairs when they saw me turn the corner 1/2 way up the stairs. All these little things are anger goadings. In fact right before that an apparent mother had blocked the way with her child, with some ridiculous situation with a tupaware box, literally the worst time and place to have a mother - child tupaware situation. Anyhow I got to the top of the stairs, put my stuff down and noticed that the toilet looked occupied, and a red school bag and red helmet were on a nearby table. The toilet door occupied signal was 1/2 closed 1/2 open. I needed the bathroom so after a minute or so I tentatively slowly pushed the door open. There was someone in there just standing behind the door. They pushed the door closed as if it was unexpected. Already something didn’t seem quite right. I went back to organise some of my stuff. After a minute or two I went back to the toilet and opened the door again: This time a young boy, probably about 8-10 years old jumped out. It really seemed like he had been just standing there waiting for me to open the door again. I entered the toilet after he exited, and discovered the loo hadn’t been flushed properly. Still had murky brown water with bits in it. I turned around and motioned at the boy, pointing down at the loo, signalling that he had forgotten to flush it. I exited, he entered and flushed the loo. As he left he did a 2 thumbs up gesture. So nothing completely out of the ordinary, but later after the school rush had finished. The young woman staffer that pretends to be an angel but is actually a psychopath, went to the toilet, and upon leaving as the passed me, descending the stairs with light footedness of the sort a cartoon criminal breaking and entering carrying a sack full of swag would have, saying ‘good’ in my direction, as she descended. I find that all very odd. But that’s not all. When I entered the store there was, what I presume was dog shit, on the floor all around the door. What a strange set of coincidences. Each one of these things is very unusual, but for all of them to happen one after the other like that, the odds are just way too unlikely for there not to be something strange going on. I document it because, no doubt this isn’t the end of this escalation.
    • Young apparent couple, probably late teens. Having a bit of an argument. The bloke says as he passes me: ‘he knows’. I literally have no idea what he is on about.
    • The next most interesting podcast in my queue is of course a Tim Ferris interview with Derren Brown. Of course. How could it not be Derren BROWN after all the bizarreness that has been today.
    • I’m sitting at the window in the shop cafe. It’s a 1st floor window perpendicular to the street outside, overlooking it. Down the way, there is a short and somewhat stumpy bloke that attends to the motorbikes outside several of the shops along the street. He’s always very active, strangely a lot of energy for someone his size. Today he’s looking a bit fatter than usual, he’s also wearing a cartoon bandit white and black stripe T-shirt. Just worth noting. Seems somehow relevant. In fact this entire street is a bit relevant. There are home made camera frames with cameras attached to sign posts at each end of the street. It’s a very weird place. Did I mention that there were some announcements today that Apple are getting into the home camera business? Just another day. I’m probably on a street housing Derren Brown fans, or crew members. Might also be a giant debugger.
    • Random male customer says ‘Ah-yah’ as they leave after nobody here said anything for at least 30 mins
    • The previous customer appears to have led to another male customer leaving who quietly said no! In my direction for whatever reason. Food goading, anger goading, sex goading, could be all 3. Whatever it is, it’s not normal imo.
    • 2 young woman acting kinda shifty. They turn up and start f-ing around with the power outlet where my device is charging. They unplug the other device which isn’t mine. They are now doing some sort of makeup thing in the toilet and saying things like, ‘we know’ and ‘he knows’. Where they have put their stuff they have left 2 empty bottles of water, and a bunch of fake "stuffed" flowers, that they appear to have brought with them. One has a red bag with the words "where impact matters". One of them has a face that looks swollen.
    • Earlier I stumbled while exiting the toilet, because my flip flops, which I’ve been trying to replace now was for weeks but keep getting blocked again and again, are uneven and so I momentarily lost balance and hit my head slightly on the door frame. It was a bit painful. Specifically I hit my ear. Now a bloke has appeared sitting right in front of me with really strange ears. I reckon he could be in a film staring elves. His ears bend out from his head at the top of the ears. Quite odd looking. What are the chances? It also looks like he’s just had his hair cut into a type of mullet, cut almost to accentuate his strange ears from behind.
    • The bloke the girls tried to unplug his device is now watching videos and laughing historically.
    • The group of people behind me now are laughing hysterically. The girls left while saying "we are lying". My sinuses then flared up in pain, nearly sneezed. Now the group behind me just said ‘sorry’, then said ‘okay’, and all left.
    • Just noticed that the table I am sitting at, which is made of wood, has a sad face and some large scratches vandalised into the surface of the table. One of the large scratches, which intersects with a dashed line that intersects with the forehead of the sad face, points in the direction of the graffiti dick on the wall a few meters away. The graffiti dick had a forward slash above it, that is angled the same as the large table scratch.

    Looks like I’ll be able to get some food today. Not much else to add.

    Another day. #

Today’s links:

  • Where web components shine - Several weeks old at this point, but it’s the first chance I’ve had to read it. Great post with lots of first hand experience advice. I like how web components aren’t meant to solve everything, this patchiness actually sounds quite web-like. You just have to know what situations to use them for, and we are still figuring this out. Dave and Chris did a Shop Talk episode all about this post. Worth giving it a listen. daverupert.com #

  • Factorio - "Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories" - I’m not a big gamer, played some consoles, and used to hang out at arcades during the lunch hour when at school, and also played a bit at university. But these days literally never. I only code cli tools and websites. In some ways that in itself is a sort of game, maybe even the ultimate game. I heard about Factorio (wikipedia page) on a recent programming podcast, I forget exactly which one. It was described by a developer as the closest thing to writing code in a game he had ever seen. You basically have to create all sorts of these interface type structures, and you refactor and optimise them. Anyway I thought it sounded kind of cool, a bit like Sim City but also maybe an interesting way to get into computer programming. Surely a more fun stepping stone that Excel and Microsoft Word :) www.factorio.com #

  • Borewit/music-metadata - "Stream and file based music metadata parser for node. Supporting a wide range of audio and tag formats". This looks like it could be very useful if you were doing anything that requires reading / updating audio metadata, like IDE tags of mp3 files or even streams. Supports loads of other formats too. github.com #

2024/11/13 #

  • Yeah the usual starvation escallation bull crap continues. Got given some food last night, which was nice but they are also purposely doing a thirsting campaign so it was difficult to eat. They then followed that up with some really dry fallafel and pita bread food, with two small dry bread rolls. I’ve literally not only never been given fallafels but I’ve never even seen such a thing here the entire time I’ve been here. There was what appeared to be a manufactured situation earlier that morning with a local clandestine motorbike mechanic throwing a bottle of water in my direction that nearly hit me. A broken small pair of pliers had also been left near where I sit. So there’s some sort of water / thirsting malicious help thing going on.

    Escallation notes from yesterday:

    • Everyone and their dog is No-ing, people on motorbike, butch women, kids going to school. It’s the No-pocalypse.
    • Bloke shouted ‘bear!’ at me as I left the internet place.
    • Milk left on the floor at the internet place last night, with butch woman appearing as soon as I got there saying No!. Today at the shop cafe I arrived early, only 1 other customers, a young woman drinking a small kids size carton + straw of milk. She left as soon as I noticed the milk. She was sitting next to the graffiti dick.
    • Two elastic bands left on the table I usually sit at in the shop cafe when I arrived very early. Seems innocuous, but it’s actually food goading because they know I haven’t been able to buy a sandwich this morning, which are always packaged with an elastic band. Note also the blocking of roast pork sandwich two days ago. It’s all part of the current escallation campaign. No doubt someone will be shouting money! at me later.
    • Since yesterday several incidents with guardians and small children / babies appearing right after an anger goading incident. Happened right after the incident at the public toilet with the overly camp bloke, right on front of the fruit stand next to the bananas, a woman standing there almost blocking the path holding a baby. Happened this morning at the hot water and egg shop. A man loitering with a 5 year old who was wearing a green T-shirt. Also a bloke in a yellow T-shirt entered the shop right before me. This often happens when they are doing the sex and anger goading. It’s a well known thing at this point. I’ve documented it quite a bit in the past.
    • Young woman wearing pink top and white mini skirt repeatedly gyrating legs and entire body, while sitting on front of the graffiti dick, in 10 second bursts. I think she might start having an epileptic fit.
    • The gyrating woman left her keys on the surface and came back 30 seconds later to get them. Looked to me like she did it on purpose.
    • Empty green energy drink bottles was left next to the graffiti dick lying on it’s side
    • Shop staffer who acts like an angel but will metaphorically shiv you whenever you are not looking and she gets the chance, on going downstairs to buy another noodle: ‘good’
    • Right after, a tall westerner stood next to the graffiti dick the entire time I was eating noodles then left. He just typed on his phone but never sat down. Very odd.
    • On way to internet place, passed by two blokes, one says apparently to the other ‘you are harder’
    • At the exact place where I cross the road to get to the internet place: 1 elastic band. No other elastic bands in either direction for as far as the eye can see. After crossing the road, two elastic bands on the ground exactly where I rejoined and pavement
    • More elastic band based harassment. Never would have thought something so ridiculous could be a thing. But it is definitely a thing. This will be escalated until the entire universe is entirely composed of elastic bands. Then it will all be blamed me. But presumably by then I too will be made of elastic bands, but that doesn’t matter, they will always find a way to blame me.

    As per usual, I’m not always right with all of these, but I’m right with an aweful lot of them.

    Today I’m feeling quite tired. I know it’s going to be a tough day without much food. Difficult to be enthusiastic.

    One awesome thing from yesterday is that I had just enough build minutes to get the new item hash links feature working in staging. Not enough minutes to merge and deploy the feature, but it totally works. Just gotta wait till the end of the month. I still have enough build minutes to run the daily build for about 12 of the 16 days remaining until the reset.

    That cheered me up a bit.

    It’s going to be really awesome when all post types finish with an item hash link. Technically I probably won’t need the bash heredocs feature any longer since you’ll be able to see where posts end by the hash link. And since I put in the extra work to turn that into a feature, it’s easy to just turn it off if I decide I’d rather not have them anymore.

    The way I’m feeling about the heredocs to title feature currently is I quite like it, and I think it does broadly speaking fit with my linux / opensource / hacker / maker roots, but since I don’t currently have a functional laptop it’s a bit of a daily slap in the face, constantly reminding me of another time when things, at least computing related things, were a lot better.

    We shall see I guess. A lot can happen in the space of a few weeks. Sad that I can’t do much in the way of development until the end of the month, but looking forward to deploying the new feature now that I know it definitely works. #

Today’s links:

  • How I ship projects at big tech companies - Lots of useful info in this article including a somewhat interesting way of defining shiping. I find it’s very much a mindset, getting the simplest functional version out, then iterating to make it better, while making sure you can always get back to a safe state should something unnexpected occur where you need to reverse course. It’s difficult, and you often have to make tough choices, weighing up short terms fixes vs more difficult structural changes. You have to be able to do both, and in the right sequence. There are many different paths to the same goal. Things change, you have to adapt. www.seangoedecke.com #

2024/11/12 #

  • The starvation cycle they are putting me through continues, and they are back up to all their usual tricks again. I’ve documented them at length in notes and blog posts in the past. Broadly speaking it’s anger goading alongside food goading and sex goading. Really it’s all anger goading, and when you see it for what it is, it’s really them that are angry, they want you to be angry so they can blame everything on you. If you you get angry, and sometimes you have to because the harassment often gets dangerous, then they reward that in some way.

    The 4 big harassment themes as of last night were:

    • Drugs - they gave me a small can of energy drink yesterday evening. No food. This morning, early, I woke up to a motorbike gang stalker shouting 'owl' at me. That’s notable because last night before going to sleep I was listening to the latest Rogan and the guest spoke about an incident where he did some illegal drugs and felt and looked like an owl, I guess awake with enormous eyes. Yeah somehow they track what podcasts you are listening to aswell. These synchronicities happen ALL THE TIME.
    • Sex - White tsunami after white tsunami, tissues being left everywhere I go. Young women in skimpy all white outfits getting on busses right after crochety old laddies that I had never seen before, who had been loitering nearby shiftily, motioned me to 'come' onto the previous bus. Followed almost immediately by the old laddy that hangs out in front of the store croutching down to go for a piss directly on front of me, followed immediately by a motorbike gang stalker shouting 'come Aaah' as they drive past. All the security guards nearby have recently started wearing white uniforms. And they now crouch down and sit on a flowerbed curb, like little children, to smoke their cigarettes. It’s odd. They don’t normally behave like that. Something is up.
    • Water - They are up to something with the water taps in the public toilets again. For months now these have been turned to just a trickle, but a couple of days ago, one of the taps was suddenly full flow again, but 20 seconds after starting to use the tap it was turned off completely. Same for the other tap. That was the day when everything was blocked everywhere I went. Well last night when I got there, there was some sort of, what certainly appeared to me to be a manufactured situation, with the overly camp bloke that keeps turning up at the toilets. I don't know what was going on, I was listening to music and just waited outside while the situation unfolded. They seemed very annoyed that I didn’t walk into their trap, whatever they had planned. They kept looking under the sinks like they were trying to fix it or something. Anyway when they finally left, both taps had been somehow jammed into full flow mode, with no way to turn them off. Great for washing your hands, but not for anything that requires the sink to fill up and then empty. Looks like they weren’t set to a trickle to save money.
    • Racism - There was a manufactured situation that occurred with a black guy a couple days ago. They had just been harassing me for previous few hours so I wasn’t in any mood to talk or help anyone. So whatever he said to me I just said No. Honestly it seemed like a manufactured situation. I was exhausted, and people literally everywhere I went had been randomly just saying No to me, even when I wasn’t interacting with them. So No was stuck in my mind. Anyway since then the world has made a big effort to paint me as some sort of white supremacist racist.

    There’s other stuff happening, but that the general pot of madness that is swirling around at the minute. Everything is precarious.

    With food and water in short supply, I’m not going to be able get much done. And it’s going to be very difficult not to at some point get angry with the lying gang stalkers. #

Today’s links:

2024/11/11 #

  • Well yesterday appears to have been the world wide front running and allow blocking festival. I say world wide, but there’s really is no way to tell. It certainly was where I am. I already wrote it up here. Today will likely be much the same, but eventually everyone will have a sort of bad karma hangover, which will be blamed on me, of course.

    No point in writing anything. Can’t do any dev work as no build minutes. Angry offended world keeps on turning even if a single neutrino is out of place. Strange that isn’t it.

    An infinite stream of lies from the world for me, a single neutrino in the entite universe out of place for thee, and it’s still all my fault.

    Likely incorrect, [shrug]. #

  • cat << EOF > Individual freedom in the age of crypto currencies and AI

    Roman Sterlingov was recently convicted of operating the Bitcoin mixer Bitcoin Fog. The case is worrying on a few levels. Firstly based on the article, the amount of data needed to prove guilt looks to be very thin indeed. Essentially just a few records in a database. Seems to me that could very easily be manufactured. But on a larger level, in my opinion the whole notion of financial privacy, and how it relates to individual freedoms, is going to become increasingly important.

    The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that without some privacy when it comes to financial transactions, people can never be free. They will always get exploited by entities that seek to opress them, monitoring their transactions and activities to determine their minimum viable capital requirements for survival. That can then be used to oppress them. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Same goes for individuals all the way up to nation states.

    As many of us have discovered over the past decade or so, access to money has long been a tool to oppress people. It happens on a truely massive scale via organisations like the IMF and World Bank, that proport to help developing nations while actually saddling them with enormous debt that they can never pay back.

    But it happens on a small scale too. It’s the sort of thing that you don’t realise how scary it is until it has happened to you. Here in Vietnam it’s been happening to me on a daily basis now for several years in one way or another. And that’s with cash. Once things are digital this sort of oppression could be deployed at scale and used in combination with powerful AI to target individuals in a fully automated way.

    It’s such an important thing because, in our modern societies, financial transactions are the basis of pretty much everything we do as humans. Of course the tricky thing is that financial privacy would be for both non-criminals and criminals alike. It also seems to me that given how prone to corruption institutions are over the long term, that criminals would eventually manouver themselves into positions where they could use transaction data to target non-criminals. The regulations put in place would be repurposed and used against the very people they aim to protect.

    It’s likely that the criminals, at least the smart ones, will actually want anti privacy regulations. Much in the same way that large tech companies want regulation, because once you are an established entity, regulations make it more difficult for startups, and indeed individuals, to succeed and retain their freedom.

    Ultimately I think it might boil down pretty close to an all or nothing situation. Either we all have freedom, or none of us have freedom, because with pervasive AI, even the criminals would eventually end up oppressing themselves.

    What’s the value of individual freedom?

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/11/10 #

  • They’ve started another bought of malicious help, with some clothes gifts that on the surface look like they could be a useful gift, but actually when you examine the items, at least some of them have been chosen imo with the express intention of causing me trouble, possibly even harm. I don’t want to go into details but there are multiple signs from the last few days that point to the fact that it’s all part of some sort of bigger escallation war plan.

    I’ve taken a few of the items that might be useful and left quite a few of them. That will probably be used as some sort of precursor to war in itself. There’s really nothing else I can do. Just another impossible situation to deal with in my already very precarious life.

    As far as development goes, I’ve essentially run out of build minutes for any development this month, with only just about enough to publish content to the website every morning, not that there’s likely going to be much good content because I’m being blocked in the only dimension that really matters. Hard to be a dev that works in public when you can’t even run builds. Never mind that I don’t even have a functional laptop.

    Not much different to it being hard to being a human when you can’t even eat food, and drink water, which is also happening much more than is workable.

    Life at the minute is just this constant never ending sudoku puzzle trying to figure out how to arrange what little I have so I don’t die. And there’s never enough. And everytime I figure something out, the dark side of the world uses that to figure our how to constrict me even more.

    Hello world? I guess you’ve banned hello now have you. What a suprise. #

  • cat << EOF > Monarchies and republics: An obvious difference I only just noticed

    Another no doubt totally incorrect observation about the US political / govermental system that I only just noticed...

    As a brit, I find it kind of strange how in the US, the majority leader of the house, who I guess maybe is somewhat similar to the prime minister in the UK (?), is totally unknown generally and over-shadowed in terms of popularity by the president.

    In the UK, the prime minister is elected, and then that’s the bloke or gal that you see literally leading the government in parliament every week. They are the one answering questions, they are the one on the tele and in the newspapers. They have quite a lot of power. They are running the entire show so to speak. They get a lot of attention from the general population, but it’s kind of like they are a tech CEO of a subsidury company. They do this both internally and internationally.

    The monarch on the other hand has basically no power, and though they have lots of attention from the public, it’s a very different sort of attention, more similar to the attention an actor gets. You follow them your entire life, growing up with them mostly in the background, though occasionally they are front and center. They operate both internally and internationally, but they aren’t really ever involved in actually running the government. They aren’t officially part of a political party.

    In the US, it feels like a totally different dynamic. The president is sort of outside of government, a bit like a monarch type figure, but they have quite a lot of power, signing all sorts of executive orders and what not. They operate internally as a sort of monarch, but internationally they are more like a prime minister. Also, I don’t know how much this has any practical significance, but since they are part of a political party, there’s a sense that one party is totally in control of everything, from top to bottom. A bit of cognitive disonence perhaps for a republic, which is supposed to protect minorities from the rule of the majority?

    All this probably seems very obvious to many, but I just never noticed it before. I had in my head made a vague equivalence between the US president and the UK prime minister, because in international diplomatics stuff, which is what you see in various media, that’s what it looks like.

    Really the equivalency is that the president is more like an elected monarch.

    Is that a good thing? I don’t know, I’m still trying to get my head around this observation. I wonder if it affects how much the general population pays attention to politics. And I suppose it creates a totally different balance of power to the entire governance apparatus.

    With all this in mind, it really must have been rather a big moment when Reagan became president. Much bigger of a moment than I had previously realised. It was sort of saying, in not so many words, hey look, our president is a monarch now too. And likely it was saying a lot more than just this. Perhaps we are still trying to figure out exactly what.

    Just wanted to mention, sorry if it’s all clumsily said. Based on how much I had to edit this piece as I wrote it, some of these are very new concepts to me.

    EOF

  • Yet another example we live in a simulation or simulation-like thing.

    I literally just finished writing a blog post about monarchies and republics, that concludes with a bit about how strange it must have been when Reagan, an actor, became president of the US, and a few minutes later the TFTC podcast with guest Matt Pines that I was listening to, has a bit on the technocrats starting to realise that Bitcoin is actually a serious thing [50:53]:

    "For that managerial technocrat, that prides themselves on having a domain of expertise and control, that they know the left and right corners of their field and their domains of responsibility, and they also have control of what comes in and out of that policy space, it affronts or offends them in a way psychologically to have something like Bitcoin. To come from this cyberpunk, anarcho-capitalist, internet, bitcoin-bro world, and now intrude on their staid, well managed, well curated, policy garden. It’s like the kids across the road have come across to trample on your gardiñas."

    What are the fucking chances?

    And guess what, I’m currently being badgered by people pretending to be trample kids in the shop cafe I am attempting to write this friggin note in.

    Seriously seriously. Reality is so much stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make this stuff up. We live in a series of ever changing reality fractals created by AI. There is no other explanation that fits. This sort of thing is happening to me constantly at this point.

    And before you ask, extrapolating the fractal a bit, for what it’s worth, no, I, am not actually that offended. Just constantly worried I’m going to starve to death. It’s reality that is constantly offended.

    Seriously. The kids, are trampleing their own gardiñas and are infiniti offended at me, even though I have nothing to do with these fucking gardiñas. Or for that matter, these stupid kids, that think they are infiniti gods from another dimension, or what have you, who are pretending to find this all hilarious but actually are infiniti offended at themselves. [shrug]

    Trampling inception on LSD. Boooooouuuuje.

    I guess I’ll be getting even more mutilated then. I’ve already got another runny nose. Some dinner later would be nice instead of a constant stream of total reality inversions. Just an idea.

    Done. No more writing today. #

  • I actually don’t even know exactly what gardiñas are. #

  • Now the internet at the internet place has been cut off.

    Butch women being butch women, kind of intimidating, loitering, just waiting to see my reaction.

    Offended much world? Definitrly seems like you’re offended world. #

  • 1/2 the places I've been to today I’ve been blocked.

    Sweat breads bloke wasn’t there. Sandwich shop was 'no pork today'. The internet place had the internet cut off. The places where I wasn’t blocked, there was some form of harassment. The egg and hot water shop bloke essentially instructed me to be a dog, the shop cafe somewhat predictably then behaved like I was a dog, at the other sandwich shop there were random people waiting to front run my every move, instructing me to get 'money' several times while I waited, and 'pay' right before staffer bloke gave me my order, and finally in the shop cafe I’m in now the staffer at the till once again ordered me to 'money' as I approached to pay.

    Please world explain to me how this is not you being infiniti offended by literally every fucking thing I do. Thank you.

    Oh yeah and you could say sorry and mean it. That would be nice.

    And saying "liar lie" is not saying sorry and meaning it, just so you know.

    Also trying to manufacture a situation where I slip on a piece of fruit is malicious. You did that exact same thing, same exact playbook, last week.

    You should probably say sorry for that and mean it too. Not telling you what to do, but your karma is going to be pretty f-ing bad. #

Today’s links:

2024/11/09 #

  • The starvation cycle continues. I am again a pariah, I have no idea why, just for existing I guess. The gang stalkers are harassing pretty much constantly. I take a few notes here and there, mostly to keep me sane, but there is just too much to document. And if you spend all your time documenting it that drives you insane too. I reckon I captured about 20-30% of it in these notes.

    Escallation notes from yesterday:

    • The street kid that carries ridiculous amounts of transparent bags full of golf ball sized fruits, that has been appearing at the height of the last few starvation cycles, has once again appeared at the shop cafe.
    • More examples of me getting punished for being kind and considerate. It always seems to be in relation to and by women. WTF?
    • Bit of a continuation of the white tsunami, with apparent scientists that were sitting next to the graffiti dick making a point of putting on their lab coats in the shop cafe then leaving.
    • Followed immediately by girl wearing bright green T-shirt turning up, also wearing pink shoes, behaving kind of shifty. Nothing purchased and keeping her quite big bag on her back. Note the young bloke who only wears plastic bags on his feet, carrying a bag of plastic recycle bottles bigger than him showed up again yesterday. Also several people doing feet related harassment. Plastic bag shoe bloke only shows up when I need to buy flip flops, but is a sign that if I do try to get flip flops, I will get blocked in some way.
    • Starting to get a pretty bad head ache for some reason. Odd because I don’t often get headaches. Probably another mutilation on the way.
    • A bit of large kitchen knife intimidation by bloke who alternates good / bad at the internet place. Maybe I’ll get my throat slit during the night eh?
    • Butch woman partner of alternating good bad bloke is doing that thing where she sits facing me looking like she is ill. In the way you do when you are sitting in the toilet with a tummy bug. When that happens in the past I’ve gotten ill the next day or so.

    I’ve gotten really close to finishing the hash links for all posts feature. I got a bit side tracked having to ensure it didn’t break the heredocs feature, which is somewhat ironic given that that was a stop gap feature to get around the problem of items not all having hash links. There’s something very fractal like to all this as fixes for the fixes, workarounds for the workarounds is sort of a daily theme of life around here.

    I’ve also, because of all the harassment and time pressure, been sort of forced into updating the plugins to have the latest version of components from the website. In the past I have customised several of the main plugin components on the website. That’s because it hasn’t always been obvious if the added features were generally useful. I’ve kept the plugin version simpler just so there were less moving pieces, less things to change. I had always planned to move the latest back into the plugins, but there hasn’t been many stable times to do that.

    Well with all the comotion of the past week, things got way too confusing, so I decided to move them all back into the plugins now. It made things a lot less confusing. The downside is that I’m very likely not going to have enough build minutes to both get it done and be able to publish content to the blog for the rest of the month. But that would probably have happened anyway with a more complicated setup. And so it goes.

    There are so many difficult decisions you have to make when you are resource and time constrained, and under constant attack, but you have to make those decision, sometimes with incomplete information, to make progress.

    Still have to write today’s newsletter, which should go out after lunch. Not feeling particularly great about that. There’s some pretty good podcasts, but everything is politics at the minute. Very little of any interest, or at least nothing really very original imo, happening in tech. #

  • cat << EOF > Joe Rogan and Dave Smith on government creating the problems they complain about

    This segment from a recent Rogan podcast jumped out at me. It was while discussing Trump, the possibility of some people being pardonned, and on the secret services entrapping innocent people [39:42]:

    Dave Smith: There’s an old saying, it goes something like "the FBI always get’s their man", because it’s always their man. There’s been dozens of these FBI, what they call, "Sting" operations, which are really entrapment [...] "Oh we thwarted another terrorist attack". No they didn’t thwart another terrorist attack. They planned a terrorist attack, and then thwarted it. It was never going to happen. [...]

    Joe Rogan: And then they say they are preventing crime. You are actually making it. You’re making it and then stoping it. And that’s fucking wrong, you’re fucking cheating. You are rigging the pinball game man. And we know that now.

    For what it’s worth this isn’t just a problem the US has. It’s everywhere, and not just in government. I see some version of it happening almost every day here in South East Asia. It’s something cultural. Perhaps it’s been around for ever, or maybe it’s the new information and technology landscape. Could be it’s just some narly phase humanity is passing through.

    Whatever, I think it’s worth highlighting, even if it’s complicated because we are all somehow caught up in it. It’s important to have empathy, try to see things from different perspectives, rich, poor, old, young, male, female, and the rest. We need to navigate our way through.

    It’s a great episode. Dave Smith, standup comic and libertarian commentator, is very eloquant when it comes to the recent elections. He’s obviously thought about all the topics they talk about at length. They cover the recent election and a load of the zeitgeist du jour, with a light touch of conspiracy theories, and some mostly good humour.

    If you are left leaning politics-wise this might be somewhat of a triggering episode. On the other hand if you really truely are trying to discover why the left side of politics seems to have lost it’s way, this might be the episode to help you rip off the band aid, and discover what some of the smart and often thoughtful folks from the other side really are saying.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > Deprogramming Dénouement (Issue #189)

    This week’s newsletter is out!

    In this week’s edition:

    JD Vance, state of the UK, bitcoin & memecoins, wine tasting and coding, Lessig, Bricks & mBridge, Kemi Badenoch, Elon Musk, left Trump analysis, Dave Smith, and Web Components still cool

    Issue details:

    • Title: Deprogramming Dénouement
    • Issue: 189
    • Page: issue webpage

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/11/08 #

  • It’s been more of the usual starvation cycle bull crap, with empty cigarette packets, and other garbage related anger goading. There are signs they are starting some fabricated 'Pay!' harassment too where they try to make it look like I didn’t pay for something. Of course they are escallating and escallating, and maximumly offended at everything.

    There was a strange incident yesterday in the park where I got completely surrounded by what appeared to be school children. There must have been 30 of them, all around 4-5 years old. Most of them where dressed in blue martial arts clothes. But there was also a smaller group just dressed in white non martial arts clothes. It appeared to be some sort of kids martial arts class but it was very strange. Only 1 bloke instructor, then loads of butch women who were constantly taking photos of the kids with their phones. They lined them all up and got them to do kicks and punches one at a time, so they could get photos of each of them. It was the most disorganised improvised martial arts lesson I have ever seen.

    There was also another group of older late teenager school kids that appeared to be unsupervised. They were just hanging around. Why they weren’t actually in school I don’t know, but I caught one of them clearly using the group of kids as a way to hide they were taking pictures of me with a DSLR type camera. I had been looking in a different direction and someone momentarily stood in between me and the girl with the camera, I looked at them, and when the person moved out of the way, the girl quite obviously had the camera pointed directly at me, snapping away. When she noticed I was looking directly at her, she was very suprised, put the camera down and tried to pretend she hadn’t been taking photos.

    I mention all this because it was all quite strange and so I want a record of it. This morning an empty kids sized milk carton with a straw sticking out if it was left on the ground next to where I sit, so looks like that’s already being used to anger goad. But it’s a double whammy because the security guard is making it look like he’s got an eye on me, trying to make it look like he thinks I’m shop lifting, which I most definitely am not doing.

    As for development I got all the plugins working in staging with the new item hash link feature. Going to hopefully try to merge that today. I’ve burned through 75% of this month’s build minutes, that’s the problem with features that involve all the plugins because they require so many builds, especially because some of the repos have npm caches that you keep having to refresh to get the latest code to be picked up.

    Probably going to start running very low on energy today, given the lack of food. #

2024/11/07 #

  • Just had another multiday bullying escallation happen to me. I eventually got angry when they finally trapped me in a situation where they could at will metapharically speaking flush my head down the proverbial toilet over and over and I had zero way to redress the balance. A few minutes after getting angry I was rewarded with some tastey hot food.

    This whole incident had followed several days of starvation, food goading, anger goading, but also, and I think this is the most worrying, any attempt at being polite, well manored, kind, thoughtful, just saying hello back to people when they say hello, was brutally discouraged and punished.

    So literally being a good citizen is being punished and being bad is being rewarded. Presumably it would only be encouraged when they weren’t the targets. This is the problem with bullying and gang stalking, it traps people that really actually just want to be good citizens into being slaves.

    We make all this fuss about political parties, and democracies and elections, but what’s the fucking point of it all if gang stalkers are destroying societies at the ground level. Show me the party that gets rid of that, and I’ll gladly support it.

    Down with the gang stalker scourge.

    I’ve nearly gotten the hash links on all posts feature working. Hopefully I’ll have that done today or tomorrow, though food is very scarce and gang stalkers are very active basically everywhere. #

Today’s links:

  • Polymarket, Prediction Betting Markets Vindicated by Trump's Strong Showing - The prediction markets have definitely been interesting to watch. Worth remembering though that they function very differently to polls. As you get closer to the event you would expect the prediction market to get closer to 100%. Also the people participating there aren’t necessarily representative of the regular population. It wonder what types of events they get wrong. Prediction markets !== default reality, no matter what people say. Imo, there’s a bit of a danger they, or something similar, could become the next incarnation of the nanny state. www.coindesk.com #

  • Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Tim Cook and other tech leaders congratulate Trump on election win - Very different to last time. It’s nice to see there is a bit of national unity despite the very vicious run up. I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts, from both the left and right. It’s really interesting to hear the Democrats analysing what went wrong. I’ve been suprised by how good the retrospective analysis has been. It’s suprising because I think it shows that many could see better than they were admiting too during the campaigning. www.cnbc.com #

  • Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference? - It’s been interesting this morning to read about the differences, I wasn’t aware of the details previously. The US is technically a constitutional republic, not a democracy. The biggest difference appears to be that republics try to create a balance between majority and minority that prevent situations where the majority totally out power minorities. I was a bit suprised by this because I always thought the Democrats were about protecting workers and minorities. www.thoughtco.com #

2024/11/06 #

  • There was a load of harassment yesterday. Got quite a bit of coding done despite it all. Another starvation cycle has started. If no one can be bothered to give me real food, I can’t be bothered to write anything.

    Sneezing a lot this morning. Fucking alergies or whatever it is that makes me unbalanced and sneeze. Not much chance in getting anything done today. #

2024/11/05 #

  • Yesterday ended up turning into what I think I’m going to start calling a synchronicity appocalypse day. These happen every now and then, and in fact recently they seem to be happening quite often, like every couple of weeks. Basically weird synchronicities start happening literally everywhere. It’s like some sort of singularity. It becomes very difficult to make any decision because literally everything gets blocked by a synchronicity.

    It’s most obvious when you are listening to podcasts. You are listening to a podcast and it’s getting boring or you are just not into the topic or something annoyed you about what is being discussed so you decide to switch to another podcast, and the podcast you switch to is somehow in on the reason you decided to switch and BAM! in your face creates a weird synchronicity. So you switch again. And the same thing happens again. So this time you decide to wait at bit in a sort of exponential back off algorythm. But guess what? BAM! it happens yet again.

    So you decide fuck all this I’m just going to stop listening to podcasts, and put my ear plugs in, and sit quietly. The instant you take your ear plugs out somebody walks up behind you and shouts into your ear, as they are shouting at someone else but somehow position themself so they are shouting at you. Anyway this sort of thing keeps happening with literally every fucking thing, every fucking where. It’s literally like the universe is trying to fucking kill you.

    Now it’s entirely possible it’s gang stalkers that are creating a lot of these situations, and I definitely suspect that, adding fuel to the fire so to speak, but it feels like there is more to it than that. The level and rate of synchronicities is totally off the charts. There’s something else, something higher level than that going on.

    So that was yesterday. Another synchronicity apocalypse day.

    As for development, getting the item hash links working, it looks like doing it in CSS probably won’t be possible. I think what I’m going to do is create the item link url in a shared component and pass it into the item component. Then it will be up to the item component to use it or not. That way the link will appear in a place in the HTML that is easier to style. It won’t enforce item links but the code to generate the url will at least be in the same place rather than be duplicated in each component.

    The way I was inserting the hash link previously for links and notes was a bit hacky, using a regex. I might try to create a custom markdown plugin that inserts the link so it will work with any bit of markdown rather than just with paragraph tags. But maybe just get it working first, then improve it later.

    That’s the plan, hope it’s not majorly offensive to worldo. #

2024/11/04 #

  • This morning there is some variation of the garbage manufactured situation from the day before yesterday happening. I’m too tired to go into it. Seems like the world has already decided, I’ll repeatedly get blamed for everything over and over again now for the rest of the day. Even if I say it’s all good.

    Still trying to get the CSS working for the item hash links feature. I think I’m quite close to having a solution. I can’t seem to get the CSS nth-last-child pseudo selector to work. Trying to select the last two elements inside an element and make them display inline, so that the final tag from a user’s post has a hash link right next to it. Currently the hash link drops onto the next line which looks weird.

    Hopefully I’ll get that working today.

    Escallation notes from yesterday morning:

    • Staff young women fake coughing in hot water shop, and what sounded like some comment about being ill
    • ‘We won’ in shop cafe from staff bloke when I noticed they were now out of both items I always buy. Note yesterday there was a manufactured incident where a bloke running across the road outside a 7 eleven was showing me a new store had openned. That’s the only other shop that sells the item I buy. Basically I’m being blocked in one place but allowed in another place. This sort of thing happens constantly. They want to control your every move and decision. But maybe they are just trying to help fix a problem they created in the first place. Eventually their suggested solution will get blocked too.
    • Now that other customers have started arriving, I have started getting a bad runny nose, because all these "customers" are literally counter acting my every move, oppositing everything I do. That or they have introduced some sort of alergen in the air. This happens constantly. Literally every week.
    • Vapers clearly just in shop cafe because I am sneezing and have runny nose and they are all trying to ‘win’ at everything. There are normally never any vapers here. At least as far as I am aware.

    I hope things settle down. Please world consider not being offended at everything. Thank you. #

  • Weird day.

    I guess I’ll be getting mutilated again later, then blamed for everything in the universe by everyone again?

    I’ve already started to get a runny nose. By my records the cold / runny nose / alergy contractions are getting closer together. It used to be monthly, then it was biweekly for a while, now it appears to be weekly. #

Today’s links:

  • Kemi Badenoch announced as new leader of Conservative Party - I haven’t been able to fully read this article as I’m currently getting infiniti blocked everywhere. But it seems like an important moment. I do note that there are a load of strange coincidences around this. K-MALA Harris, also a black woman, all be it technically less black, is running for US president. BAD-enoch’s first name is literally K-me, so in a weird way the universe is saying she is BAD BAD-enoch. So technically BADer as well as blacker, I guess. Also Rachel Reeves, who has a very normal name in comparison, is the first female Chancelor in 800 years. She inherited an economy from the previous Chancelor, a man named HUNT! C how strange the universe is right now? It’s like everything is a scripted reality TV show created by AI agents that are in an infiniti war. This has got to be the strangest link I’ve written in a while. Congrats to both Rachel and Kemi. It’s all good. 🕊✌️☮️ www.bbc.com #

  • altera-al/project-sid - A literal AI civilisation framework. It was on the HN front page earlier today. - "These preliminary results show that agents can achieve significant milestones towards AI civilizations, opening new avenues for large-scale societal simulations, agentic organizational intelligence, and integrating AI into human civilizations". What could possibly go wrong. It’s not like the entire world is a stage enhabited by actors being fed lines by AI simulations. It’s stuff like this that makes you wonder if there is actually a long term plan to eradicate conservatives. The way things evolve you have to assume there might be a counter plot to eradicate liberalism / the left. Presumably all good, I guess. github.com #

2024/11/03 #

  • Everything is basically a hell hole of escallations at the minute. These seem to always coincide with the start of the month, which is a problem because it makes me look very crazy to potential employers from monthly job boards. Catch 22. To potential employers, for what it’s worth, I’m actually quite a well balanced person, just been caught up in a difficult situation since COVID.

    Anyway, here are yesterday’s escallations:

    • People outside egg and hot water shop saying good liar after I bought an egg but no sandwich, after avoiding them walking into me. They made no effort to correct their walking path as we crossed the road.
    • Was then called a liar at least twice in the next 2 minutes by people along the street that seemed to be waiting for me to walk past them.
    • Was told ‘maximum’ by the shop staff when paying and I asked for how much. When I asked again, she said 15, but only gave me 4 change. When I asked why she short changed me, she pointed to receipt and didn’t accept that she told me the wrong price. She hadn’t rounded up the amount correctly which was 15600, but the till calculator did.
    • A group of young men, one of whom had green hair, said ‘we won’ as they were leaving, then started laughing after I made a gesture like I have no idea what you are talking about, because I literally had no idea what they were talking about.
    • Strange security guard bloke from yesterday that tried to create a manufactured situation where making it look like a piece of my bread packaging had fallen to the floor, by picking it up and throwing it away. I am pretty sure it was there on the floor when I arrived and sat down. I remember thinking how strange that the previous person who sat at my table before me had eaten the same thing as me, especially given how early it was. Note he only did that once I had thrown away all my garbage AND the girl shop staff who pretends to be an angel but actually regularly tries to metaphorically shiv you, had cleared all the bins, so no way to check my garbage. I’m pretty sure when I opened the bread package there was no separate bit that came loose. It was still attached to the main packaging. Note I was gifted the bread the night before by a strange slow moving car that appeared to have a bag with a bunch of things, so somebody knew I would open a bread while sitting there. To me it all looks very much like yet another malicious manufactured set of situations.
    • Weird young boy teenager at the shop cafe when I arrived, who was loitering and standing uncomfortably close right behind me. Kept standing on front of power outlet and staring at it and also did some strange thing with one of the bar stools.
    • Shop staff bloke quietly saying ‘go’ as he walked past for no apparent reason.
    • Shop staff women are randomly shouting ‘pain!’. Note somebody has been leaving empty pain killer packages in places I go for the past few days.
    • My iOS device plug which stopped working right after a weird incident last week, started working again. I tested it and it was working again. Even unplugged it out and plugged it in again several times and it was fine. About 15 minutes later it started doing the weird on / off thing it was doing last week. Odd.
    • Note that the security guards seemed to have replaced the tutter bloke and his occasional girlfriend. That appeared to start the day my phone got smashed on the floor while I was getting to the very end of listening to a mr obnoxious podcast about innocent prisoners. I was very cognitively overloaded because of harassment and massive reality inversions in the situation because there were so many similarities by what the interviewee was saying and my situation. That was the second time in two days my device got smashed on the floor and I had slipped and fallen twice badly in the previous 2 days, all following intense harassment. I was quite shook up by it, because for me loosing my device would be very similar to actual death for me.
    • Random other customers at shop cafe saying ‘you no’ / ‘you know’ for no apparent reason to each other and finding it quite funny.
    • The bloke shop cafe staffer that earlier was saying ‘go!’ as he walked past, now is saying ‘work!’. Oh world, trying to front run everything again aren’t you. It ultimately just ends up creating traffic jams and blocking everything and offending everyone, including yourselves.
    • Quite a lot of people shouting ‘mother’ at me the past few days
    • The standing place at the internet place has been blocked by a wheel chair
    • Westerners walked past me at the internet place, one casually Up! harassed me, and that was followed by another westerner who shouted Cunt! directly at me. I’d never seen him before.
    • Butch women walked past shouted boy! at me
    • White clothes wearers tsunamis everywhere all day
    • Butch woman and man start having a very animated and quite loud discussion right in front of me, making a point to stand directly in front of me only cms away, lots of pointing by the woman who was wearing red T-shirt pointing at the man who was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt. It felt very manufactured. Eventually I have them both piece signs, they left, as they left the woman said ‘you know’ / ‘you no’. I have started sneezing a lot in the last hour and totally blocked nose. The bloke at the sandwich shop earlier where I got a pork bun was behaving very strangely. I seem to very often get ill after eating there. He said something about a cold as he got the pork bun. Then was angrily muttering something to himself.
    • The cold is one of these surging sneezing colds that seems to mirror the escalations. There is a surge, a bunch of sneezing, it calms down, nose clears, goes away then comes back worse. This happens again and again getting worse each time until I’m sneezing and runny nose constantly.

    No time to make sense of all that.

    I’ve made significant progress on my static sitt generator’s item has links feature. I’m just trying to get the CSS working. Soon all post types on the main page will have item hash links by default.

    Not much else to add. #

  • cat << EOF > JD Vance on Kamala’s talking style

    JD Vance who is running as the vice president pick for the Republicans in the US elections, was on Rogan’s podcast a few days ago. Putting aside political party preferences for a second, I thought this observation was kind of spot on:

    Vance: The only way I can describe it is that she talks in circles.

    Rogan: Tim Dillon says it’s like she does gypsy curses. She speaks in gypsy curses.

    Vance: [Big Lol] That’s very good. [...] There is actually a skill to this. I think that she is the Michael Jordan of using as many words as possible to say as little as possible. There’s actually a certain gift that she has because you listen to her talk, and you are 100 - 200 words into it, you’re 500 words into it, and you are like what the hell did she just say? She didn’t say anything.

    So yeah there’s a certain political skill in saying a lot without actually saying anything. But it actually worries me about her being president [...] what does she do when she’s in a meeting with a world leader, and she has to know the details of public policy to negotiate with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jin Pin? [...] and I don’t know that she has an ounce of curiosity about public policy. That’s what scares the hell out of me.

    It’s both a funny bit but also, it’s true! I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. I could certainly see her way of speaking be used to frustrate opponents and as a stalling tactic. But it’s worth noting because if it’s her only 'mode' then she might not be so great at getting things done. It’s worth listening to the whole bit as they do some impersonations which are kind of hilarious.

    Of course Trump has his own unique way of talking, now being refered to as "the weave", which some would argue can be quite difficult to deal with, so perhaps it comes down to preference. One thing I will say about Trump, based on his recent appearance on Rogan, is that he’s willing to sit down for long unscripted interviews, and though his style does definitely get in the way sometimes, he seems to be aware of this, and I thought he does show curiosity and empathy in the people he talks with. He listens. He’s prepared to learn in public. At least there’s a chance of getting a message through to him. I’m not so sure about Kamala, could be her talking in circles thing makes her impenetrable.

    It was an interesting interview with Vance. The two biggest things that stood out to me is that he’s very smart, knows his stuff, very well spoken on so many things, but he’s also clearly from a different generation to Trump. His dynamic with Rogan was totally different. Could be a great combo with Trump if they get on well.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > A better metaphor for growth

    Daniel Susskind was on the Keen On podcast this week. Lots of interesting topics covered centering around our current obsession with economic growth, from it’s historical origins, to the current moment and how it might be affected by AI.

    His comments about how he thinks we should update the generally accepted metaphor for growth struck a chord with me [24:00]:

    DS: Very often when people talk about economic growth, the kind of metaphors they have in mind is a kind of train, and they are sitting in the drivers seat and they can push forward on the throttle and go faster or pull back and go slower.

    AK: Marx’s locomotive of history

    DS: Yeah exactly, and in that spirit the direction of travel is set, it’s predetermined by the rails that are set down for us to trundle along, and the only question is do we want more or less growth [...] that’s the dimension in which the debate takes place. I’m saying that actually a far better metaphor is a nautical one. We are sitting in a boat and we can put up our masts and go faster, or we can put them down and go slower. But also, the direction of travel is far more open. There are many possibly directions our economy can take. The choice is not simply do we want more or less growth, but it’s also do we want a different type of growth as well [...] I think there are ways for us to pursue growth without destroying those other valuable things we care about. Whether it’s the environment, the level of equality in society, the health of local places and communities etc.

    In some ways what he’s saying seems like common sense, like it’s obvious. But sometimes the obvious things need saying, because at some point in time, believe it or not the obvious things weren’t all that obvious. This feels like one of those things.

    The rest of the discussion is super interesting too, worth listening to.

    EOF

  • cat << EOF > Electronic music range

    Two electronic music mixes I’ve been listening to a lot recently really show the variety in the landscape of electronic music:

    I listen to these on my earbuds and I can visualise myself listening and dancing to them at outdoor festivals, underground clubs or beaches in the sun, on massive sound systems at some ridiculous hour in the morning. My entire body and mind is momentarily transported through time and place. The human mind is friggin’ amazing.

    I spent the early part of my life listening entirely to band based music. There was a time when I used to hate anything that wasn’t created on real musical instruments. I was into alt rock and metal, and looking back I was really closed minded about what I liked, about what I thought was cool.

    At some point along the way I gave electronic music a try, at first pretty dark stuff like drum & bass, break beat and tech house, I think probably because these were were most similar in vibe to metal. But over the years I found my way into so many other genres, some faster some slower, some happier, some darker. Entire universes exist behind each of these.

    It’s completely mindboggling to me how much my tastes have changed, expanded and refined over the years. Things I would previously have considered way too comercial, I now realise I just haden’t heard in the right place, I didn’t know the history, hadn’t sensed the vibe properly. Hadn’t been to the right parties, absorbed the culture from others. I love it all now. Tunes lots of tunes.

    I’m so glad I got into electronic music, it was a portal into a multiverse I could never have imagined before. And I’m also glad I started out listening to band music, I still return to that too, and that side of my music tastes has expanded too.

    All this to say it’s been a crazy amazing journey, can’t wait to see what the future will look like.

    EOF

Today’s links:

2024/11/02 #

  • I'm up earlier than normal this morning. The world got kind of aggressive in it’s escallations last night. There had been quite a lot during the day too, but the evening felt different. There was a very distinct flavour to it. Like when you watch a Quintin Tarantino, David Lynch or Wes Anderson movie. You recognise it almost immediately even if you can’t exactly point to which director. It just feels familiar for some reason.

    In the case of last night, it’s somewhat difficult to describe, but there were all sorts of situations occuring that were good, but always with a hint of bad. And bad in very specific high impact ways, but also very subtle. When that happens once or twice you just put it down to chance and move on with your life. But this was with literally everything. It was like lots of mini tsunamis. Not too bad on their own, but since there were so many, you start to wonder if there isn’t an actual big tsunami around the corner.

    It felt so familiar. All these situations had happened to me before. I started to get a real sense of dread, it just felt like one of those horror movies. Like no matter what I did I was heading to somewhere not great.

    Well that’s why I’m up early. I haven’t had a whole lot of sleep, but I have had some decent food, a few gifts last night.

    I'm working on finishing the feature to add hash links to every post. Currently blog, podcast and newsletter posts don’t have these. The new feature would make hash links something all posts would get by default. I’ve gotten quite far, but need to fix some places where the HTML generated has some duplication, because it’s causing the layout to break. I think I’ve figured out what needs changing and the steps needed to make the changes.

    I also need to prepare the newsletter. I have a resonable selection of podcasts this week. #

  • I’ve been quietly taping away for the past hour, working on the hash links feature, gotten loads done because it’s quiet. I just noticed that it’s Saturday. I thought it was Friday. Somewhere in between all the constant harassment, I lost track of what day it was. That’s a problem because I haven’t prepared the newsletter. Anyway, not a huge deal, still plenty of time, so I switch over to start on the newsletter. The literal second I do that a motorbike stalker with a woman in bright yellow tshirt appears on front of me pointing directly at me or right over my head. Really f-ing weird. The world pretends to allow while blocking. Example #92133. #

  • cat << EOF > Debugging a nuclear reaction (Issue #188)

    This week’s newsletter is out!

    In this week’s edition:

    Apple AI, parallel dimensions private tour, Trump empathy on Rogan, 90s british alt comedy, US elections, tech security & geopolitics, innocents in prison, AI bubble bursting

    Issue details:

    • Title: Debugging a nuclear reaction
    • Issue: 188
    • Page: issue webpage

    EOF

Today’s links:

  • 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Debugging a nuclear reaction (Issue #188) markjgsmith.com #

2024/11/01 #

  • Here are my escallation notes from yesterday. This is really just a sampling because there is too much of it happening to be able to document it all. It’s insane. I think you’ll agree there’s something not quite normal going on here:

    • Large bloke sitting on front of the graffiti penis doing strange pelvis gyration exercises while he taps away on his phone. Pink hoodey.
    • School girls at lunch are using the go home guy’s catch phrase aimed directly at me.
    • The surge in nunes over the past few days has reached the cafe shop. Now lunch time school girls are genuflecting before they eat. That’s very unusual. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that in the 5 years I’ve been here.
    • Kevin and Alex are 'bitching' each other on Diggnation.
    • It’s very strange that the days where they are starving me correspond to the days where there is a tidal wave of lunchtime school girls at the shop cafe. Keeps happening though. It’s literally 9:1 girls boys.
    • Did I mention the school girls also say things like ‘you are learning’ at me.
    • Approx 9/10 people today are eating sausages, many while sitting on front of the graffiti penis, while wearing the exact same color clothes head to toe as the color of my underwear.
    • Young woman sits in front of me with a bag with the text MARHEN.J placed in a way intended for me to see it. Given that they are basically starving me, with the only real food possible for me to eat being the occasional egg, and given it’s next to the graffiti dick which is also next to the underwear colored all in one woman, that’s clear anger goading. Even if the bag does look pretty cool. Come on world stop infinity lying and being offended, while constantly claiming to be the victim, and mutilating me.
    • Another bloke, this one wearing a red T-shirt, sitting in front of the graffiti dick gyrating his legs and pelvis over and over in quite an exaggerated way
    • A lot of women wearing all black behaving kind of weird
    • Got gifted a large hotdog covered in mayonnaise by a very camp man. It was a pretty great hotdog.

    It’s like they so want to demonstrate they aren’t offended that they escallate everything, thus demonstrating how incredibly offended they are, and then they see I’m not offended and get offended. Ultimately they’ll be more unhappy and will blame the unhappiness on me and mutilate me.

    Blogging isn’t going particularly well the past few days. It’s very difficult to get inspired when you have hardly eaten anything and the only thing you’ve eaten is really unhealthy processed food.

    I have a few small coding things I’ve been doing, small fixes from when I updated the fonts, and a few tweaks to the heredocs. I think I’ve also found a way to have hash links on all posts. That will be quite cool if it works. #

  • cat << EOF > The ever changing EU

    It’s really interesting watching the EU integrate new countries, like Georgia, Moldova and other eastern bloc countries, because it’s forcing them to really get to the core of what their values are. And it’s unfolding in a world that is increasingly changing politically and technologically at a rapid pace. I can’t help but wonder whether they have really figured those values out.

    They say it’s all about liberalism, but isn’t it something more like 'centrism' that they want? i.e. Not too conservative, but also not too liberal.

    To be sure, I personally like the sound of the notion of liberal democracies that western nations appear to see as being foundational values. What I find confusing is that all western nations have conservative political parties. For example in the UK currently the opposition party is literally called the Conservatives. So it’s clearly not just liberalism that is the main factor, even though that’s the thing they keep mentioning. I would have thought you would want to be in a range that is sustainable but also liveable? Even if the exact balance changes over time.

    But hey maybe I’m wrong, is the EU really about eradicating conservatism?

    They always seem to be saying it’s all politics, but isn’t it more likely to, in the end, just boil down to economics and money?

    EOF

Today’s links:

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