Latest

Linkblog

2023/09/30 12:45:00 +07:00 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bitcoin Butterfly (Issue #134) # markjgsmith.com
2023/09/30 06:00:00 +07:00 Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight - Writeup from James Vaughan of how to still have fun when your airplane wifi connection is lacking internet connectivity. Fun article though some code snippets would have been useful, especially around how he did the graphs. # jamesbvaughan.com
2023/09/29 16:52:00 +07:00 When tech says ‘no’ - When the public says no to regulation policy makers are proposing, it usually is either because it's annoying, it has serious concequences for them, or it simply isn't technically possible. Bennedict goes into each, citing recent examples in the current batch of government regulations that are passing through the tech industry. # www.ben-evans.com

Notes

2023/10/02 15:15:00 +07:00 The weather is so unbelievably miserable the past few days, it's unbearable. Huge downpours of rain, interspersed with non stop drissle. It never ends, absolutely relentless. The forcast on Apple weather app shows 100% rain for every god darn hour of the day. What are you doing to me world? #
2023/10/02 15:24:00 +07:00 The read later browser - I've written before about the terrible state of affairs for reading web content offline. The offline experience could be way way better.
This will likely sound bizare, especially in this day and age of super fast broadband, 5G and whatnot, but it occurs to me that many of the offline features I have in mind should be baked right into the browser. The browser should be written with it's primary use case to be offline reading. Everything else should be an enhancement to that, including having an internet connection.

The read later browser would be optimised for browsing the web with the aim of loading up on content that you will consune later while offline. If it was optimised for that, the offline experience could be incredible. Pages that you save would of course all be readable offline, including code snippets and images, but the browser would do smart things like automatically cache copies of all the linked pages in content you save. That alone would make the offline reading experience incredible. #
2023/10/02 15:43:00 +07:00 Read later browser features - This describes a hypothetical browser I wrote about previously.
- Regular online web browsing
- Read later button for adding pages to the read later queue
- All read later pages are saved for offline reading
- Auto caching of all links on read later queued pages
- Built in audio and video podcast catcher
- Built in audio and video podcast player
- A sync list that you could add to while offline, each added item would get fetched and cached next time you are online
2023/10/02 15:43:00 +07:00 Day time sleep depravation - As if the constant night time sleep depravation by locals, and the motorbike driveby rock throwing attacks weren't enough, the locals have increased their campain of hate to the day time. Any time I find somewhere where I can get a few minutes shut eye, incredibly loud people suddenly appear out of nowhere. #
2023/10/02 16:10:00 +07:00 You will drink my milk - In addition to the bizare thing were some women here, often of the butch variety, seem absolutely obsesed with making you eat things drenched in red sauce, another re-occurring thing is women that insist on giving you small milk cartons. It happens so often it's almost like it's some bizare fetish. You could be dieing of thirst, but rather that water, they will insist on giving you milk. When you politely decline some will take offense, and this refusal might be grounds for some later bullying or mutilation. Foreigners must learn.
I was always told back home that asians were lactose intolerant, that it was something genetic, and that's why they didn't drink much milk. That appears not to have been entirely accurate. All the shops have huge varieties of milk, all of it is sweetened, both square and flat pack single serve cartons.

But it's not just women, quite a lot of men will try the forced milk drinking thing on you too. They will often refer to you as 'boy' while they do it, so you can see what their angle is on the whole matter.

And for the record, I have nothing against milk. I've had it with breakfast cereal all my life, I quite like it with a packet of chocolate biscuits every now and then, and you can't beat a good cup of builders tea. Having said that though, if you are going to take something normal and natural and turn it into something weird, to use it as a metaphorical stick to hit me over the head with, no thank you. I'll just drink water thank you very much. #
2023/10/02 17:49:00 +07:00 I found and fixed the build time regression bug. Last month I implemented some foundational changes to my static site generator to generalise how calendar based structures of markdown files are handled. It was mostly a great success, until that is, I noticed that the build times of my site had gone from around 1 min to over 6 mins. That's quite a big regression. I had never seen such a big regression in my build times. It wasn't noticeable until it was fully deployed into production, working with the complete dataset. That's how it goes sometimes, especially when you are resource contrained as I am at the minute.
It gets worse. I had in parallel to that feature been working on setting up an npm modules cache for the build and deploy workflow. The previous few months I had runout of build minutes so I wanted to speed up deploys. The obvious thing was to find a way to skip installation of all the modules. That's possible because most of the time these aren't changing. Anyhow the cache setup ran into issues. The docs are confusing and the stack overflow relevant posts even more confusing. Others have clearly been having similar issues. The long and short of it was that not only did I not manage to get the cache working, but the build times had 6X'd. So I now needed the cache just to get back to the build times I had previously, that were already causing me to run out of minutes.

Against an enormous sychronicity tsunami I managed to get the cache working a few days ago. That was no easy thing, as pretty much everything around me was blocking me. It's hard to describe, it's like the world or some part of the world local to me really didn't want me to get the cache working. There were also problems with Github support which I've written about elsewhere. All sorts of fractaly type patterns in news stories, that had the same exact shape as the things happening to me with my code. I know this will sound strange to some. It's even stranger when it happens to you, I can tell you that.

Anyhow with the cache working, build times were back to the previous level, which were still problematic but probably manageable. I spent this morning, still experiencing a lot of push back from the world around me by the way, trying to find the build time regression bug. Turns out that the foundational work had introduced an easy way to change the order of posts on any given day. I implemented it by reversing the order of the array containing the day's posts. That had a much bigger than expected affect because I have so many links on the linkblog. Each day was invoking reverse. The fix was quite simple. Just iterate over the data in reverse rather that change the data. It's a bit more code, because you have to do the same iteration in both directions so there is some repetition, but it's 6X faster. The over-optimisation caused the problem in the first place.

The build times are now at around 4 mins for the whole site. That's a lot better than the 14 mins builds I was seing a few days ago. I'm happy about the much needed improvements, but I'm still dealing with the backlash from a very angry world that once again appears to be blaming me for everything in the entire universe, with enormous righteousness, starvation, thirst and mutilations. I know this might sound overblown to some, but seriously you should try being in my shoes for a while. One day it will all become clear what has been happening.

[Small precision about build times to clear up any confusion amoung the pedants out there: the site static site generator build 6X'd, but the overall time for the entire build + deploy workflow went from ~7 mins to ~14 mins] #
2023/10/02 18:10:00 +07:00 Debasement of everything - It often feels like, and this is strange to describe, that here where I am, the debasement of reality itself is constantly happening. Like what the government and central banks do with the money, changing things on both ends, what if tools became so powerful that you could do that with reality. People might not even be aware that it was happening. An invisible prison of sorts. #

Podcast

Morning Trance Exercise In The Park (Recorded Sounds #18)

2021-02-13 09:13:41 +07:00 by Mark Smith

Morning group exercises in the park to some seriously good trance tunes

Episode details:

Title: Morning Trance Exercise In The Park
Show: Recorded Sounds
Episode: 18
Page: show webpage
File: direct download link
Size: 0.22 MB
Duration: 00:00:28

Next:

2021/02/05 Foot Badminton In The Park At Sunrise (Recorded Sounds #17)
2021/02/04 Morning Sound Check In The Park (Recorded Sounds #16)

Blog

Where is all the missing money?

2023-09-25 16:57:00 +0700 by Mark Smith

Peter MacCormack asked on a recent podcast, and unfortunately I can't find exactly where as I write this, he asked where is all the money that regular people have lost on the stock markets in recent years? Good question. Today's Eurodollar University episode, perhaps not uncoincidentally covers FX, Jeff Snider highlights what this shadowy part of the money system does. It's a vital part of the system, even if it is very opaque. McCormack did an interview with Nik Bhatia covering FX just this week.

Up to 4 trillion dollars traded per day. Around 80-100 trillion dollars in contracts outstanding. That's a lot! For perspective total physical cash worldwide is 9 trillion dollars. Total debt in the entire world is somewhere in the region of 30-40 trillion dollars last I heard, though a quick search puts this number into question. This trade happens between money market dealers. Essentially it’s currency swaps but can be better thought of as collateralised loans. They function as a way to match people that need dollars with those that have dollars. They are redistributing currency and money and resources throughout the world system.

They keep everything functional, making sure there is the minimum money circulation necessary for the system to function. But because they are highly constrained, they do this off balance sheet, because they don’t have the capacity. The fact that it is off balance sheet means that it is very difficult to see what is actually going on. Interesting stuff.

Jeff points out that FX tells us something about the system from the perspective of the system, in a way that can't really be faked. In a normal world I'd be nodding my head, but in the current world I find myself in, that's the sort of statement that either is hidding fakery or will lead to fakery. It's almost a challenge. Anyway just wanted to note that.

I find it kind of mindboggling that the system is so inneficient that it basically relies on these dealers just to ensure a basic flow througout the system. Isn't it a little like saying the global food system relies on drug dealers to ensure people get fed regularly? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole concept. I also get the sense that this might not be the most unbelievable thing about all this.