markjgsmith

I’ll start with some good news today. I finished restructuring the main website HTML. It’s looking pretty good. On the surface the website of course looks the same, but if you look at the HTML underneath, it’s a lot simpler. I updated one of the core plugins, the one that builds lists of posts, which previously just put all posts into unnordered lists, to make the lists optional. I realised that there was no point in having lists for everything since really the only benefit is the layout they provide, and for most of the website I was removing that with CSS.

The only place on the website that uses unnordered lists is the linkblog. I like the look of links inside bullet pointed lists. But all the other parts of the site, the blog, podcast, newsletter and notes, don’t have lists. It’s just <article> tags inside <article> tags. Each day is an article, and each post within a day is an article. That works well because each article is dffectively a stand alone piece of content, so that matches up quite well with the intent of the <article> tag.

Along the way I had to totally disable code syntax highlighting. It was already not working for some reason. I don’t know why yet. I had turned off the prettifier for blog posts because it was removing the newlines on code blocks, but it meant the HTML was full of newlines and spaces, which made it very verbose and difficult to read. Now it’s all tidy, which is a nice feeling.

I hopefully will find some time in the future to find a way to have both syntax highlighting and pretty HTML. The RSS feeds are still for some unknown reason displaying weirdly in readers. There are a bunch of HTML escape characters that are being added somewhere causing the start of every post to look really strange. I’ve refactored all the code, added a bunch of debuggging and new helper functions that will make it easier to debug. Again though, that will need to be next month now.

There are a few small tidying tasks still to do, which I’ve coded up already, but will wait until my Github build minutes reset at the end of the month. I’ve got just about enough left to run the daily build to publish content to the website. The big question though is whether I’ll have enough food. This always seems to become an issue when there are problems with the RSS feeds for whatever reason. Consequently I really hate going anywhere near the RSS code. Starvation will do that to you. It goes without saying that no food, no blogging. Dispite what some people say, you just can’t run a vehicle on an empty tank.

And there have been signs there might be water issues over the next few days. They’ve stopped filling up the soap dispensor at the shop cafe, the women attendents at the public toilets have been groutchy recently, and there was another night of sleep depravation last night, followed by anger goading and another garbage war. I’ve got about 10 days until the next alergy flareup / cold. It would be nice to get some blogging done but it’s bext to impossible with all the angry young women tsunanis that happen almost everywhere I go now.

That’s the state of things. #

Michael Sayman [26:42]: "Maybe what comes next is human to human conversation is in real life and human to internet conversation becomes the primary value of the internet." #

Michael Sayman [30:04]: "The app would respond with thousands and thousands of different perspectives on how to handle a situation. Fundamentally the big learning from SocialAI is that a chatbot interface for AI gives you one response, one truth. But the truth isn’t really there for a lot of these questions. Where I should go for dinner, where I should go on vacation, should I move to one city or another. There’s no right, true correct answer, there are many perspectives, and it’s up to me to want to decide what I want to do. And so giving people [...] an interface with multiple responses is really the breakthrough with SocialAI. I’m just excited to see how it expands in the rest of the industry." #

Given how close politics is to the economy, something I observed about UK political parties a month ago, was how close Tory is to toro, and Labour is to (a female?) bear. You need to have an small appreciation for both spanish and french for this to make sense. #

An artificial village entirely made up of "the only X in the village" people, incredibly, somewhat predictably, is having yet another new person problem. #

What if balancing the budget was dangerous? Okay sure maybe this is an out there thesis, but in this age of infinitely powerful AI, what if by balancing the budget you give away what your minimum survival rate is. Those that have control of you can then lock you into that box forever. In order to grow you have to run at a deficit to escape the enslavement by the other players. If this could happen to an individual, why couldn’t it happen at the nation state level? #

Do highly controlled societies have huge alcohol problems? There are quite a few that do. What if it’s a natural consequence of technology advances? It’s the only way to make progress because everything is so locked down. If you run a balanced budget they can fully control you. The right to bear alcohol. The right to get off your head. #

That thing where you realise your entire life might be an elaborate simulacrum being used in a sting operation to uncover the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, across all realms of the multiverse.

Some Bitcoin parents are going to be real a-holes. #

cat << EOF > You will like your default reality

The automate everything crowd are lying about freedom. They say you’ll be more free, but that’s not true. At best the only thing that will eventually be possible will be that we all must share the exact same default reality. You won’t be allowed to deviate from it, because it will be too costly. Each time you deviate you will be punished. Essentially you won’t be allowed to be you.

People that try to be themselves will be shunned.

It doesn’t mean that we will all be the same, there will still be rich and poor, but you won’t be able to chose a path that deviates from the path that the AIs calculate for you. It will just be too difficult. The closest you stick to the calculated path, the easier it will be.

But people will be trained to be anti-calculated path, to show as bad examples, to help the calculated path folks learn to stick to their path.

Things will become perverse. The non business people will insist on teaching the business people.

I wrote a wonderfully positive and feel good blog post earlier. It was great, all about how cool the future might be. Well worldo created a whole situation that resulted in it getting deleted as I was trying to commit it to the repo.

Yeah feeling a bit dystopian, I bet worldo hates this dystopian note now. #

Internet connection is clearly being throttled today. Downloading podcasts is taking way way way longer than usual.

I told you worldo was angry. #

Lots of people randomly saying 'our!' today. Both western and eastern folks. Wow the game theory on this is out of control. I guess I should just join in.

I told you our worldo was angry. #