markjgsmith

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. #

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

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Today’s links:

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