New Post: Happy Christmas markjgsmith.com #
Links
2025/12/19 #
New Post: Changes partially successful markjgsmith.com #
2025/12/18 #
New Post: Bluesky clickable links markjgsmith.com #
New Post: Social media cards markjgsmith.com #
2025/12/16 #
The 1950 heist to reclaim the ancient Stone of Destiny. www.bbc.com #
New Post: The Eternal markjgsmith.com #
2025/12/15 #
RAM prices are going through the roof, likely caused by the AI boom. lifehacker.com #
Tether has bee trying to buy italian football club Juventus. www.theblock.co #
JSDoc is TypeScript. hn. culi.bearblog.dev #
Google unkills JPEG XL? tonisagrista.com #
Miniflux implements the Google Reader API. miniflux.app #
Rob Zolkos opens up the hood on some of 37signals most popular products and discovers vanilla CSS is all you need. No build step. www.zolkos.com #
New warp drive designs are poping up. thedebrief.org #
2025/12/14 #
Trump: Make Europe Austro-hungarian again. www.dw.com #
New Post: Saving state markjgsmith.com #
zrepl is a one-stop, integrated solution for ZFS replication. zrepl.github.io #
"Simple cloud service to store ZFS snapshots" - Simple off-site backups. zfs.rent #
Syncthing - Open source software and protocol to synchronize files between 2 or more computers in realtime. No need to go through the cloud. syncthing.net #
2025/12/13 #
New Post: Writing CLIs markjgsmith.com #
Trump signs order banning states from regulating AI. www.theguardian.com #
Underground art: exploring the unique designs of London’s tube seats. www.theguardian.com #
Rclone syncs your files to cloud storage rclone.org #
Singing for Animals compilation. I thought this was kind of amazing. www.youtube.com #
Parrot at the vet. Funny but not real. Also made me wonder if the previous link was real or not. The everything can be faked world is gonna be very weird. www.youtube.com #
Saylor selling his futuristic digital credit instruments in the middle east. The end is kind of wild. Infinity as a service? x.com #
Marktext - A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows. github.com #
CFTC Launches Digital Assets Pilot Allowing Bitcoin, Ether and USDC as Collateral. www.coindesk.com #
2025/12/09 #
New Post: Auto-poster up and running markjgsmith.com #
Tiny Core Linux - Nomadic ultra small (~16MB) graphical desktop operating system capable of booting from cdrom, pendrive, or frugally from a hard drive. www.tinycorelinux.net #
First complete dictionary of ancient Celtic to be compiled. www.theguardian.com #
Bcachefs is an advanced new filesystem for Linux, ZFS inspired, Filesystem as a database. bcachefs.org #
Codeberg is a Github clone - "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects". codeberg.org #
Liz Truss has started a podcast. Very right wing in places. justthenews.com #
I asked Gemini to tell me a really funny cellular automata themed joke. As is often the case, things got a bit ridiculus. gemini.google.com #
Cryptoeconomics - "Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin" - Audio version distributed via a podcast, kind of hardcore but contains concise descriptions of all the theories underpinning Bitcoin. voskuil.org #
2025/12/08 #
New Post: Sorry about the duplicates markjgsmith.com #
Tesla bros take the new full self driving (FSD) v14.2 for a spin going through Times Square in New York. Very impressive. www.youtube.com #
Officials in China warn of bubble occurring in the humanoid robotics industry. Already 150 companies make humanoids. www.digitaltrends.com #
Apple's market cap surpasses all but 6 top global economies. www.pressrundown.com #
Your mitochondria are under attack from artificial blue light, which is worrying because they produce ATP, the energy currency that powers literally everything your body does. vivarays.com #
New Post: Blocking and allowing markjgsmith.com #
2025/12/07 #
New Post: First few posts markjgsmith.com #
2025/12/06 #
New Post: Refactoring and minimal examples markjgsmith.com #
2025/12/03 #
New Post: TPUs, GPUs and the future of everything markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/25 #
Britain and Europe have become colonies of US big tech who operate toll roads all across the lands. www.theguardian.com #
timgit/pg-boss - Message queue library for background jobs backed by postgres. Reminds me of mongodb-queue. github.com #
SBoudrias/Inquirer.js - "A collection of common interactive command line user interfaces". This looks like it could be super useful for creating CLI tools. github.com #
Stefan Judis looks at built in tools nodejs has for depracating methods in your public repos. Good to know. www.stefanjudis.com #
Simon Willison lays out how he automates his substack newsletter from his blog posts. Kind of hacky but could save a lot of time. simonwillison.net #
Personal blogs are back. disassociated.com #
New Post: Strategy still popular markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/21 #
New Post: Things to look forward to markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/14 #
Apple is pushing mini-apps, which are apps built in HTML5 inside other apps. techcrunch.com #
Bezos' Blue Origin launches twin Nasa spacecraft heading to Mars. www.theguardian.com #
@daverupert: Could IndexedDB be sync'd by the browser like bookmarks? mastodon.social #
Justin Drake on Etherium Beast Mode - scaling the L1 to 10k transactions per second using zk proofs. podcastindex.org #
HTTP+HTML cartoonist OG Hugh MacLeod on Culture vs. Command. www.gapingvoid.com #
@elonmusk: Congratulations @JeffBezos and the @BlueOrigin team! x.com #
Winklevoss invest into Zcash. The privacy focused coin tripled in value since I last mentioned it 3 weeks ago. Zero knowledge (zk) proof tech and snarks, a particular type of zk proof, appear to be getting hot. coincentral.com #
Wow Mozilla users are really really not into AI. connect.mozilla.org #
2025/11/13 #
A suite of Bitcoin onchain charts to help you navigate the volatility and market cycles. charts.checkonchain.com #
macieklamberski/feedsmith - Looks like a pretty solid RSS feed library, with custom namespace support. github.com #
Zod + Typescript - Basically the foundation for what I’ve been call end-to-end data integrity. www.telerik.com #
Matt Smith breaks down the Error.clause property introduced in 2022. Very useful for seing exactly what’s been going on in your code. allthingssmitty.com #
privatenumber/tasuku - Create CLIs with awesome and simple task based visualisations. github.com #
sindresorhus/fkill - Cross platform process killer. The f is for fabulous. github.com #
anders94/render.js - Raytracing in pure javascript, with RenderMan RIB format support. github.com #
Tons of interesting articles in Node.js Weekly this week, so linking to it here. nodeweekly.com #
New Post: Static websites + git every time markjgsmith.com #
New Post: Social media auto-poster progress markjgsmith.com #
My hour vibe civilization engineering with Gem: The Peace Bomb is coming. This geopolitical "Singularity Shock" forces an emergency 100bps rate cut, vaporizing bond yield. It’s the only event big enough to restart the TINA 2.0 boom. OMG. gemini.google.com #
2025/11/12 #
New Post: Improved RSS feeds markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/11 #
The hot new role that AI companies are hireing for: Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs). www.interviewquery.com #
There are benefits to bubbles, infrastructure gets built out that lasts, in the case of AI that's mostly, but not only, energy infrastructure. stratechery.com #
Intel CTO Sachin Katti to join OpenAI to help build out their compute infrastructure for artificial general intelligence. www.crn.com #
Trump threatens BBC with 1 billion dollar law suite over doctored documentary. www.theguardian.com #
New Post: Not much fun with Gem markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/10 #
New Post: Google’s new coding agent called Jules markjgsmith.com #
You Britons go to the pub, we go to the swimming pool! www.theguardian.com #
Seems like it could be a challenge getting this working on a laptop, but it’s a new open source model that looks a bit impressive. minimax-m2.org #
Beets: media library management system for obsessive music geeks. Looks very cool. hn thread. beets.io #
2025/11/07 #
Elon Musk $1 trillion pay package approved by board. www.wsj.com #
New Post: It’s 1997s era of making agents markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/06 #
Apple to pay Google $1 billion to power Siri with Gemini backend. techcrunch.com #
Vibe coding is the Collin’s dictionary’s word of the year, beating biohacking, clanker, glaze, aura farming, boat kid, broligarchy, Henry, coolcation, taskmasking and micro-retirement. It’s kind of cool that the art of looking cool is not actually the coolest this year IMHO. www.theguardian.com #
New Post: Emoji fixes everything markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/05 #
Perplexity won't identify it's user's shoping bots and Amazon is not happy about that. techcrunch.com #
Radiohead first gig in 7 years, rare 5 star review, set list looks kinda awesome imo. www.theguardian.com #
Apple to release a Chromebook competitor. www.bloomberg.com #
Bitcoin briefly drops below $100k. www.cnbc.com #
2025/11/03 #
There are a ton of awesome things big and small happening around the world. The week in pictures. www.theguardian.com #
Kevin Jivani on using git bisect to find exactly when a bug got introduced. kevin3010.github.io #
21 facts about throwing good parties. www.atvbt.com #
Ahmad Alfy on how to elegantly craft URLs to solve a huge variety of situations requiring state. alfy.blog #
Royal Mail now owned by a Czech billionaire rolling out solar powered post boxes across the UK. www.bbc.com #
2025/11/02 #
New Post: Peak plumber markjgsmith.com #
New Post: Platform generated AI slop at scale markjgsmith.com #
2025/11/01 #
An ode to creating simplified versions of complicated open source software. danieldelaney.net #
French socialists love gourmet food. I imagine this article might cause rightists a confusing kind of mild anguish. But actually maybe some leftists would have a similar but different unease? www.bbc.com #
Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop. news.ycombinator.com #
Coinbase CEO games prediction market at the end of quarterly earnings call. www.bloomberg.com #
Elon was also on Rogan. Another pretty great interview. www.youtube.com #
2025/10/31 #
New Post: Some recent renovation successes markjgsmith.com #
New Post: Vibe civilization engineering markjgsmith.com #
Changelog Podcast: Agentic infra changes everything - 'What’s the bleeding edge and the future of insane agentic software development? Listen to this episode.' changelog.com #
2025/10/28 #
OpenAI can see over a million people talking to chat bots about suicide each week. techcrunch.com #
Elon Musk rolls his own version of Wikipedia called Grokpedia, written by Grok, aims to be less woke. www.washingtonpost.com #
Threads release new disapearing ephemeral posts feature. Interested to see how popular this ends up being. 9to5mac.com #
Australia ban under 16s from social media, deplatforming to begin soon. www.france24.com #
2025/10/27 #
New Post: Overhaul of my dotfiles markjgsmith.com #
Sam Altman getting into brain chips. sources.news #
Experts layout how the internet could go offline - the big one. www.theguardian.com #
Collection of movie posters from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. hrc.contentdm.oclc.org #
2025/10/26 #
Several old school Japanese tech supplier companies have been doing very very well the past few months. www.reuters.com #
BA remove their sponsorship of Louis Theroux podcast over Bob Vylan interview. This feels bizare to me. www.theguardian.com #
New Post: Who are the suppliers? markjgsmith.com #
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer has put together a very comprehensive guide to CSS layout (flexbox, grid, media queries and container queries). 2ality.com #
Great and very practical article from Dan Abramov about how to fix any bug, with help from Claude. overreacted.io #
How to rebuild a project from scratch. markjgsmith.com #
2025/10/25 #
New Post: New blogging scripts markjgsmith.com #
React vs. Backbone in 2025 - Personally I never really got into Backbone, I like React though. backbonenotbad.hyperclay.com #
2025/10/24 #
New Post: Beauty in journalism markjgsmith.com #
2025/10/23 #
Journalist Madeleine Aggeler spent a week waering an AI chatbot pendant. www.theguardian.com #
Meta lays off 600 people from it’s AI division. tech.slashdot.org #
Web developer Evan Hahn shares the scripts he uses most day to day. Some really useful scripts and workflows. evanhahn.com #
New Post: Is it simple yet? markjgsmith.com #
Amazon AR glases for delivery drivers. www.geekwire.com #
2023: "Perhaps the opportunity with the Vision Pro isn’t with consumer apps, but with industrial apps." markjgsmith.com #
General Motors to introduce Google Gemini into it’s in-car entertainment system. www.cnbc.com #
Madhavi Sewak: "Everyone is working all the time, it’s extremely intense, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point." www.wsj.com #
Reddit goes after Data Scraper companies. decrypt.co #
2025/10/22 #
Introduction to Reverse-Engineering Vintage Synth Firmware ajxs.me #
Turns out readers prefer fanfic written by ChatGPT www.theregister.com #
Apple’s Vision Pro seems like a miss, but Samsung is about to unveil their competitor product www.macrumors.com #
ZCash the zkproof based privacy focussed "encrypted bitcoin" has been ripping bigtime as everything else has been crashing www.benzinga.com #
US and Australia sign a rare earth’s mineral deal www.bbc.com #
This guy built a message queue using only Unix signals leandronsp.com #
Alibaba Cloud show lots of AI optimisations possible, reducing GPU loads by 82% with a new pooling system www.tomshardware.com #
Self-hosted URL Shorteners awesome-selfhosted.net #
New Post: Building a social media auto-poster markjgsmith.com #
ChatGPT launches Atlas, a web browser with an AI chatbot inside it www.theguardian.com #
Many reckon the OpenAI web browser is a shot at Google techcrunch.com #
Glow is cli tool for reading markdown in the terminal www.howtogeek.com #
Australians are buying gold en-masse www.theguardian.com #
AI researchers want to get LLMs to use audio directly rather than rely on transcribing to text and back again kyutai.org #
ChatGPT Atlas - "Now with GPT-5, the smartest, fastest, and most useful model yet, with thinking built in. Available for everyone." chatgpt.com #
What Do We Do If SETI Is Successful? www.universetoday.com #
Big move at Google to move everything to ARM www.theregister.com #
2025/10/20 #
Napoleon III‘s wife’s jewels stolen from the Louvre in Paris www.theguardian.com #
Part of Chinese space rocket crashes into Australia www.theguardian.com #
New Post: Upgrading my social medias markjgsmith.com #
2025/10/19 #
China really not happy about big delay to the London Mega Embassy. www.theguardian.com #
Forget MCP, Skills are the new hotness. Great. Here we go again. simonwillison.net #
The No Kings protests do look like a lot of fun. www.theguardian.com #
Conspiracy Cookie Monster and Giant Banana at the No Kings protests. www.theguardian.com #
No Kings protests across the US: in pictures www.theguardian.com #
2025/10/17 #
2025/10/16 #
New Post: AI agents vs AI models markjgsmith.com #
Some movement on Ollama Vulkan support - However initially will require building from source - "Initially Vulkan support in Ollama will require building from source. Once it is more thoroughly tested and we have fixed any critical bugs, then we can bundle Vulkan into the official binary releases". This is great news. It’s almost like my compiling and blogging efforts made a difference. github.com #
2025/10/15 #
New Post: Are my GPUs being used? markjgsmith.com #
Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them - Some interesting context about environment variables, what they are, how the operating system implements them, and a comparison of how they are accessed in Bash, Python and C. They do feel a bit antiquated, but central to everything. allvpv.org #
AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui - "A web interface for Stable Diffusion, implemented using Gradio library." - It’s one of the UIs supported by Open WebUI to do image generation. Totally not obvious how you would get this working in Docker with vulkan, or if it’s even possible. github.com #
comfyanonymous/ComfyUI - The other image gen app supported in Open WebUI. I watched a tutorial on this which was pretty interesting, but ultimately seems like it wouldn’t work in containers with vulkan. github.com #
FluidInference/fluidtop - Installed this today, works great to view your realtime CPU and GPU utilization. github.com #
Apple unveils new 14‑inch MacBook Pro powered by the M5 chip, delivering the next big leap in AI for the Mac - Given that Apple never stops banging on about how incredibly super awesome their machines are at all things AI/LLM, it’s really very disapointing to discover that actually it only really is super awesome if you install the AI/LLMs super dangerously. www.apple.com #
2025/10/14 #
Why did containers happen? - Some interesting background info about how we got to this crazy new world where everything is in containers, and where everyone is constantly blogging about pressing buttons. buttondown.com #
Crypto suffers record 5 billion crash as investors rush to hedge against another free fall - Altcoins particularly badly hit apparently. www.straitstimes.com #
New Post: Why do the AI/LLM folks hate people that run Macs so much? markjgsmith.com #
Bhutan migrates its national ID system to Ethereum - Everyone is talking about id cards at the minute. Apparently this is the 3rd blockchain they have implemented on. They were previously on Polygon and before that on Hyperledger Indy. Sound like they are the world experts at blockchain id system migrations. The old implement and move twice strategy, actually quite a smart way to go about it if you think about it. cointelegraph.com #
2025/10/13 #
McSpaghetti to McAloo Tikki: Inside the world's local McDonald's - I tried the McPoutine in Vancouver, and it was pretty good. The Maharaja Mac sounds very exotic. www.bbc.com #
Tom Gauld on where writers really get their ideas – cartoon - Nice to see some light hearted humour. www.theguardian.com #
Modern Linux Tools - I've heard about quite a few of these the past several years. Thinking to try out a few, including bat, lsd, exa, ripgrep, fzf. ikrima.dev #
2025/10/12 #
Vite: The Documentary - Definitely want to find some time to watch this. I have been using Vite a lot the past few months. So far no issues whatsoever. www.youtube.com #
1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free - I've been thinking a lot recently that I haven’t been consuming much long form content. Lots of classics on this list. www.openculture.com #
The turbulent history of the union jack - Flags are so weird. But fascinating. www.bbc.com #
2025/10/11 #
New Post: GPUs, module upgrades and more site fixes markjgsmith.com #
2025/10/04 #
New Post: New blog header image markjgsmith.com #
2025/10/03 #
New Post: The new container based project structure markjgsmith.com #
Evolution of english interrogatives - I thought this conversation I had with Grok about the origins of who, what, where, why, when and how was fascinating. grok.com #
2025/10/02 #
New Post: Rebuilding a project from scratch markjgsmith.com #
2025/10/01 #
New Post: Containers, Typescript, React and AI/LLMs markjgsmith.com #
2025/09/19 #
New Post: Rebuilding your container based dev environment markjgsmith.com #
2025/09/14 #
New Post: Another configuration nightmare markjgsmith.com #
2025/08/31 #
New Post: Openvibe all the things markjgsmith.com #
2025/08/30 #
New Post: LLMs running locally markjgsmith.com #
Older posts: check out the archives.