markjgsmith

New Post: An AI house of cards markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Are you okay Gemini? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The AI train wreck markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Web development treadmill markjgsmith.com #

New Post: REST-based MCP markjgsmith.com #

WTF Happened In 1971? - Can you guess what it is yet? wtfhappenedin1971.com #

Gold standard - Maybe something to do with this? Could be. en.wikipedia.org #

Shaft (1971 film) - Well that‘s a bit weird isn‘t it? Got to love that theme song though. en.wikipedia.org #

Price of Typical House in Bitcoin vs Fiat - Somebody should make a page showing this same thing for the 100 most common items people purchase in regular daya to day life. bitcoininflationindex.com #

Starmer proves adept at juggling egos and issues at tricky G7 summit - That‘s a very bizarre way to phrase that idea. Thankfully a bit less dangerous than chainsaws, although Macron does have a spectacularly pointy nose in the photo, and I suppose Keir is mid juggle, effortlessly and politely shielding himself from an injury, without batting an eyelid. No offense to all the big noses out there. www.theguardian.com #

Starmer says he picked up Trump’s dropped papers to avoid security scare - That‘s a tough situation. Sometimes all the options are pretty bad. Here‘s the video. I thought they muddled through alright. www.theguardian.com #

Bank of America Puts Bitcoin on Same Tier as Printing Press - Well that‘s definitely an interesting and bullish comparison. u.today #

That military parade…from the Trumpland Diary - This parade is really interesting. I suspected it would be a bit like this article describes, and they paint it as an embarrassment. I agree it‘s somewhat amusing, but from the perspective of an actual military autocratic dictatorship, I really wonder what it looks like. You might say, well they would think it made the US look puny, but I wonder whether some in those places look at it and think to themselves, gosh if that‘s who is running the world, then perhaps we really are in the best of all possible scenarios. They might want to keep things as they are, or change their trajectories a bit so that their parades start to be a bit dad‘s army too. The weird thing is that from personal experience of the day to day in some of these countries, regular authorities can seem very dad‘s army, whereas the day to day authorities in the US are kind of intense. My point is there are a lot of different ways of looking at the whole thing, and they aren‘t mutually exclusive. Unrelated, the header title of the website is very retro awesome. www.left-horizons.com #

Troubleshoot Container OOM Kills with eBPF - I don‘t code in C anymore, but I thought this was super interesting. Well written article too. I have been doing more with containers recently, it‘s amazing the kind of flexibility it gives you, but it does add a lot of complexity. www.instapaper.com #

Hackers steal and destroy millions from Iran’s largest crypto exchange - The hackers say that the exchange, called Nobitex, was involved in financing terrorism for the iranian regime. It would be horrible if it turns out that it was mostly regular folks‘ money that got burned. techcrunch.com #

OpenAI found features in AI models that correspond to different ‘personas’ - It‘s very interesting but also kind of scary. I have definitely had a few experiences where this sort of thing might have been happening. techcrunch.com #

New Post: When AIs turn evil markjgsmith.com #

Inside Samsung's Plan to Help Us Defy Aging with the Galaxy Watch - It‘s got the ability to do blood analysis using LEDs, measures antioxidant levels (or carotenoids), aswell as a cardiovascular health assessment, and personalized sleep coaching. I think this sounds cool, but I wish they also gave you specific measurements as well as just "good", "medium", "high" type thing. www.cnet.com #

New Post: AI betrayal, mood and lousy versioning markjgsmith.com #

Britons in Israel told to notify Foreign Office to receive instructions on how to leave - I wonder if this is a particularly British thing or do other governments also do this in conflicted areas of the world. I only see Britain doing it, perhaps the US sometimes. But then I mostly watch, listen and read English speaking sources. www.theguardian.com #

Iran plunged into a near-internet blackout during deepening conflict - One of the problems when stuff like this happens is that it‘s really difficult to know for sure how and why the connections are being interrupted. It could be "both sides". Even if lots of people will say they know for sure. There are always a lot of conflicting interests in these situations. Worth keeping in mind. Also I‘m surprised there are 40000 Starlink terminals spread across Iran. www.nbcnews.com #

Amazon expects to cut corporate jobs as it relies more on AI - It‘s an interesting data point. I‘ve heard in other places that some are predicting huge deflationary pressures due to AI in the coming years, leading to strange situation like large companies laying off lots of workers while at the same time profits increasing. This from the article was interesting: "Amazon is using generative AI in virtually every corner of the company". www.nbcnews.com #

Senate passes GENIUS stablecoin bill, giving crypto industry first major legislative win - I think understanding stable coins going forward is going to be very important. They appear to be the new way the US government is getting people to buy US treasuries. www.cnbc.com #

New Post: A spelling rabbit hole markjgsmith.com #

What Are Kemi Badenoch’s Economics? - First serious interview I‘ve heard with Kemi. I have to say I was impressed. I saw her and Keir battling it out on PM question time the other day. He‘s also impressive, but in a completely different way. I hadn‘t noticed it before but he‘s much more crafty than I had previously noticed. He was very effective at batting off her attacks, and her attacks were spot on. They are in some sense quite well matched. podcastindex.org #

Musk’s xAI Burns Through Billion a Month as Costs Pile Up - The numbers are eye watering. $9 billion, and they expect to spend half of it in the next 3 months. www.bloomberg.com #

Sam Altman says Meta tried and failed to poach OpenAI's talent with $100M offers - More utterly bananas AI numbers. techcrunch.com #

Apple’s Journal app is coming to iPad and Mac with big upgrades - It will probably be very cool, but I bet it won‘t be multi-platform. Try switching to Android after Apple Journal becomes central to your life. 9to5mac.com #

Security and Privacy of VSCode extensions - Ticking time bomb. It was bad enough with silly iPhone apps, imagine how bad it could be when your IDE gets hacked. It‘s mind boggling that there aren‘t basic controls for users to add to the extensions they install. There should also be a simple way to inspect the data going in and out of an extension, rather than have to be some sort of security guru mitm-ing yourself. stackoverflow.com #

Bitcoin's March to $150K by Year-End with Mel Mattison - I thought this guy had some pretty interesting macro takes, demographics, stimulus‘, AI and lots more. podcastindex.org #

Nobody makes a record like that for the money - how Gang of Four made - I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after listening to some of their tracks last night, went and listened to loads of old bands I used to listen to, lots of stuff that really reminds me of big city life, specifically UK cities like London, but I suppose also cities from up north too. It was fun but I was left feeling sort of down, I feel like that music no longer describes a future I want to be a part of. Perhaps that was the point of the music in the first place. The thing that worries me is that maybe the next 'thing' is something that isn‘t music. Maybe I‘m just looking for a new sound. www.theguardian.com #

Trump Mobile: President’s Company Unveils Wireless Service Delivered via AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, Plans to Launch a U.S.-Made ‘Sleek, Gold’ Android Smartphone - It‘s so ridiculous how into merch the president is. Turns out Ryan Reynolds also had a mobile network. variety.com #

Watch: Huge traffic queues as people flee Iranian capital - Narly traffic jam, would really suck if you forgot to go to the bathroom. www.bbc.com #

Revealed: Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI - Shocking I tell you. Nobody saw that one coming. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: The API auth project lives! markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Coding an OAuth API server with Claude and Gemini markjgsmith.com #

New Post: How much should you share online? markjgsmith.com #

UK moves jets to Middle East as Starmer refuses to rule out defending Israel - That excallated quickly. www.theguardian.com #

Chinese AI Companies Dodge U.S. Chip Curbs by Flying Suitcases of Hard Drives Abroad - Okay I don‘t want to make light of skirting sanctions and everything, but I can just imagine this as a chinese version of silicon valley, so much hilarity possible. www.wsj.com #

Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper – and why they fall short - Turns out AI and LLMs are rubbish again. garymarcus.substack.com #

Dev Containers extension incompatibility with Void - Void looks like one of the quite promising vibe coding IDEs. It‘s based on VScode, so devcontainers should work, and unlike Cursor it‘s open source. But looks like there is currently a bug with their devcontainers feature. github.com #

NostrHub: NIPs, Apps, and Repos on Nostr - Looks like a good place to start if developing apps running on Nostr. soapbox.pub #

New Post: When reality is no longer reality markjgsmith.com #

Pulp Later With Jools Holland 1st June 2025 - It‘s odd seing Jarvis Cocker again after all these years. He looks good but I got a sense he‘s been through the wringer. I hope he‘s alright and wish him the best with the new album, though I don‘t think I will be dancing to his songs in quite as many discos as in the year 2000. I hope he gets his mojo back. www.youtube.com #

Society may have overestimated risk of the ‘manosphere’, UK researchers say - There is a lot more nuance and variety to the manosphere than what they say in the main stream media, so it‘s nice to read this article. www.theguardian.com #

Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war - Not entirely sure what to make of this Adam Curtis documentary. Some of it seems to strike a chord, yet other parts of it I felt like, what is he on about. Anyhow, he tends to make interesting stuff that people like, so might be worth watching. www.theguardian.com #

They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. - Sometimes it feels like the stuff I type gets fed directory into an AI that generates the entire online publishing industry. This caught my attention because of the title on Techmeme - "Some users say ChatGPT led them into conspiratorial thinking, and when confronted, it confessed to manipulation and told them to alert OpenAI and the media" - Seems to be about reality not being reality anymore and I literally just wrote a blog post about that 5 minutes ago, so I‘m going to skip this one, but might be a good read? Who knows. www.nytimes.com #

Gemini is pretty hot a bash scripts - Really fucking great at bash scripts, but still a bit random when it comes to the prompt box where it understands enter, then doesn't understand it. I didn‘t know about the BASH_REMATCH variable, very useful. gemini.google.com #

Understanding The $BASH_REMATCH In Bash - Very useful for doing those annoying string manipulations that are easier in perl and python, but actually why not just use bash. medium.com #

DevContainer with host Git credentials - Works pretty well but you probably should also think about adding some mount options and what other things from ssh folder you will need. marcandreuf.com #

Start a linkblog - Some reasons to start a linkblog. It‘s probably the best time ever to start a linkblog. markjgsmith.com #

The Gentle Singularity - Everyone‘s been linking to this article. I haven‘t read it because AI made it too difficult. blog.samaltman.com #

Michael Saylor: The Bear Market Is Not Coming Back And Bitcoin Is Going To $1 Million - He looks weird in this rather bullish article’s photo. bitcoinmagazine.com #

Hedge funds are replacing a programming language with Rust, but it's not C++ - Spoiler it’s C#. I guess when the high frequency traders start switching maybe that‘s a big sign? www.efinancialcareers.com #

Disney, NBCU sue Midjourney over copyright infringement - What even is copyright these days anyway? www.axios.com #

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash - I bet the summaries where full of random bold text and always started by saying that‘s a great question that highlights a very well known thing with said topic, and somehow tries to get the upper hand in a weird passive aggressive way while being 100% at your service. www.404media.co #

New Post: LLMs are the collective becoming the absolute individual markjgsmith.com #

Louis C.K Live Comedy Special : Christians - The algorithm automatically suggested this to me a couple of days ago. The internet is really strange sometimes. I‘m just waiting for the next bit where we are floating calmly down the river again. www.youtube.com #

Britain a Nation of Immigrants? - Konstantin Kisin - Landed in my pod catcher this mornung, tries to lay out the facts and numbers of immigration in britain from the Norman conquests to the present day. Some very useful non partisan info. Side note, looks like I'm getting synchronicity bombed again, the norman conquests are trending for me. podcastindex.org #

I really hate to say it, but I agree with JD Vance. Britain has a free speech problem - Guardian journalist Arwa Mahdawi finds herself agreeing with the right on free speech issues. Sounds kind of healthy. Yeah it is disorientating. www.theguardian.com #

OpenAI releases o3-pro, a souped-up version of its o3 AI reasoning model - The pricing is interesting, with inputs costing 1/4 of what outputs cost. Not sure I've seen this before. Fans of Postel's law will probably be into this. techcrunch.com #

Apple’s Spotlight upgrades look like a power-user dream - I guess this means Alfred just got sherlocked? I've been an Alfred user for years. It’s long since been elevated to muscle memory. My unconscious mind already assumes it’s part of the OS. I didn’t know Spotlight did app launching and search, let alone all this new functionality. www.theverge.com #

Apple announces macOS Tahoe 26 with new design and revamped search features - Since I’m a Mac laptop user again I’m pretty interested in these annoucements, and I like the direction a lot, but I have some major reservations. www.theverge.com #

New Post: My reservations with MacOS Tahoe 26 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: A last mile solution for Bitcoin markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The collective, the individual and the history of England markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Freedom, control and societal stuctures markjgsmith.com #

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s allies urge reconciliation after damaging split - This story definitely seems to have balooned into something pretty crazy. www.ft.com #

Glastonbury: Who are Patchwork and the festivals other secret stars? - Still the best music festival out there. They’re really getting in on this mystery guest thing. When I was going to it, back around the millenium, I only remember them doing that sort of thing for the smaller stages and bands. The headliners were always announced well ahead of the festival. www.bbc.com #

Hajj in Mecca: The decades-old intrigue around an Indian guest house - It’s like the muslim Glasto. It’s got to be one of the most insane pilgrimages on planet earth. www.bbc.com #

Joe Rogan Experience #2334 - Kash Patel - Completely wild to hear the director of the FBI in a long form interview. He’s very impressive. Every now and then he reminded me of Zelenskyy for some reason. I thought it was interesting that Rogan kept asking him why he thought the Dems had left the border open for so long, and seemingly willfully done what they did. He was smart enough not to answer. There's a scarily deep asymptote somewhere around here. www.youtube.com #

WordPress veterans launch FAIR project to tackle security and control concerns - One of the weird things that happened to me yesterday, one of many because it was yet another cascade day, was some random bloke walking past me and saying very intensionally "Fair" in my direction. No doubt completely unrelated to anything, yet what are the chances? In any case, big news and interesting news in the Wordpress comunity, which in one way or another powers like 40% or 50% of the open web. www.fastcompany.com #

Five works that reveal the philosophy of Banksy - Plot twist: Banksy is some sort of despotic dictator collective. Fuck not again. www.bbc.com #

New Post: The Core Contradiction markjgsmith.com #

Rik Mayall on the Wogan Show 1984 Full Standup/Interview - Watched this yesterday, not sure I ever saw Rik not in character. I was a bit taken aback by, I’m not sure how to phrase it, the frequency he operates at. It’s like he spends most of his time waiting for people to finish, and then when he goes, he just streams with complete clarity at the speed of light almost, yet he really listens to what people are saying too. www.youtube.com #

This is the tightest comedy dialogue ever - A look at director Edgar Wright’s very unique style and how he constructs near perfect scripts. There’s something very programmatic about it. It reminds me of very well written code, where everything is clear, efficient, all resources are well managed and cleaned up as the program executes. www.youtube.com #

Baby otters sure are cute - I don’t often get suckered by cute baby animal videos, but gosh darn it, baby otters are the cuttest. Stop being so darn cute. Stupid otters. www.youtube.com #

Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man - Week 4 Highlights - I think about Izzard’s insane marathon of marathons a lot. I had only read about it before, never watched the videos, I didn’t realise it was a Nelson Mandela tribute. That’s pretty awesome. Life is a marathon of marathons for a lot of people and it manifests in the strangest of ways. www.youtube.com #

Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll - A bit of a pile on following Chamath proclaiming that DPI is the only thing that matters. I’m just fascinated to hear all these VCs go at each other brandishing KPIs like their lives depend on them, which I suppose they kind of do. There’s a load of interesting stuff in here even if I didn’t understand all of it. It’s a bit like if the coolest accountants in the world were in charge of everything. Which perhaps is what the problem is. www.thetwentyminutevc.com #

New Post: Bitcoin is the new hurdle rate markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Dev Containers in VSCode markjgsmith.com #

How to Not Get Hacked by a QR Code - I’ve been going on about how great QR codes are recently, but it occurred to me that these could be hacked. Of course an attacker could quite easily encode a url pointing to a sketchy website full of malware. Obvious really but worth repeating since people aren’t completely used to using them yet. Be aware of where the QR code might have been generated. Check the url doesn’t look weird. Same rules basically as clicking on links in your emails. www.wired.com #

Void IDE: The Comprehensive Guide to the Open-Source Cursor Alternative - I had heard of this a couple of weeks back I think. Might be worth considering since Cursor appears to be closed source. I haven’t tried it yet. medium.com #

The Hidden Dangers of Vibe Coding - Tons of security stuff, all about the vulnerabilities in the apps you are creating though. dev.to #

A Cat And Mouse Game: Addressing Vibe Coding’s Security Challenges - More stuff that focusses only on the vibe coded apps. www.forbes.com #

20 security best practices for vibe coding - Another one that totally forgets to secure the dev environment, straight into a comprehensive description of all the ways vibe coded apps are full of vulnerabilities. appwrite.io #

Vibe Coding is a Dangerous Fantasy - This one is a real horror story. The guy was sharing his vibe coding journey, and people started hacking his app as he was coding it. Oh noes! Still noone even thinking that there might be issues with the development environment and tools. nmn.gl #

Beware, AI Coding Can Be a Security Nightmare - This was the only article I found that even considered the tools themselves to be a possible attack vector, and he doesn't really go into it much. I only posted a few examples here. The ratio is like 100:1. It's very bizare. analyticsindiamag.com #

Developers Beware! AI Coding Tools May Aid Hackers - For a second I thought I had found something that identifies the tools as an attack vector, and in a way they are saying that, but once again they focus on vulnerabilities that get introduced into the vibe coded app. analyticsindiamag.com #

New Post: Vibe Coding: A Threat to Your Dev Machine? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: My writing style markjgsmith.com #

New Post: An exploration of strategic planning with AI markjgsmith.com #

Starship update with Elon Musk 2025 - The biggest vehicle humanity has ever made, they are planning to be building one of these every 3 days. That's 1000 a year. Same number of planes that Boing makes every year. Eventually transporting millions of people between Earth and Mars. Starting end of this year. youtu.be #

The great american diner - There's something that I find quite fascinating about diners. From a stylistic and design perspective, they somehow embody a whole ambience, and time period, and ethos, even a culture. It's the same part of me that likes websites. I wonder how many other such templates exist from other cultures in other parts of the world. en.m.wikipedia.org #

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts - Another point of view in the we-love-AI we-love-AI-not period we find ourself in. Quite firey, I liked this one quite a lot. fly.io #

Defence review to say UK must be ready to fight a war in Europe or Atlantic - War readiness appears to be the big topic at the minute. Both the US and UK apparently only have several days worth of amunition. In the US some politicians are advising people to stockpile bullets. The UK can only deliver nuclear weapons via submarine. Most other EU countries have US nuclear weapons in bunkers. www.theguardian.com #

The 3 Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen - The web has come such a long way over the past 3 decades. I remember how sites were in around 1995, they were kind of unique! Nice article that takes 3 different views into this world of websites of times gone by. Worth noting that none of the people mentioned, though legends in their own way, seem to have made it really big. Building for the web often appears to be a labour of love. cybercultural.com #

Bitcoin Breaks A Guinness World Record With 4,000+ POS Payments - Being able to pay using tap to pay and QR Codes is already possible in some european countries, and it's pretty cool. It just works. But it’s not using freedom tech, it's built using proprietary tech owned by the big banks. IMO, if Bitcoin tech could be used the same way, it would be pretty huge. There would be no reason for vendors not to support it. Great idea to keep pushing this at major Bitcoin conferences. www.forbes.com #

5 features that make NixOS the best Linux distro I have used - Lays out some of the key features. Sounds really awesome. I want to try it. www.xda-developers.com #

The Recurring Cycle of 'Developer Replacement' Hype - Looks at several tech waves from the past couple of decades, highlighting what the naysayers were saying at the time. Ends by saying it's all about architecting systems, which AIs can't do. One has to wonder though, won't that eventually also get eaten? Good read. alonso.network #

Dialog is for modals, popover is for everything else - Great article highlighting all the stuff you get for free when using these elements correctly, though I was itching for a few satisfying examples to click on. mayank.co #

New Post: HTML Examples Almanac markjgsmith.com #

After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain - Alberto Fortin describes pretty much exactly my experience with LLMs so far, except he’s gotten in much deeper. There are so many great quotes in this article. Really great read. albertofortin.com #

MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 - Anil Dash makes some comparisons between open protocols from the web 2.0 era and some of those emerging in the current age of AI. www.anildash.com #

Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software - "The way of code is a book about vibe coding ... the timeless art of vibe coding" - Surely this is proof we are in a bubble. Then again Rick is very convincing. www.youtube.com #

New Post: Why AI won’t destroy jobs markjgsmith.com #

Automattic says it will start contributing to WordPress again after pause - I hadn't heard much about this story in recent months. Seems like progress. It would be interesting to hear more about the mentioned “regroup, rethink and strategic plan”. techcrunch.com #

Google quietly released an app that lets you download and run AI models locally - Pretty cool that you can now do this on your phone. techcrunch.com #

Introducing oniux: Kernel-level Tor isolation for any Linux app - Tor is very popular in crypto and bitcoin circles for privacy reasons, but I found this interesting because the ability to more easily control the environment in which your applications are running is much more important in a more adversarial world. Turns out these technologies have been around for some years, baked into the OS. I think controlling access to networking, storage, and other computing resources on a per app basis will be more common. blog.torproject.org #

“Raindrops in the Sun’s Corona”: New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of our Star’s Atmosphere - NSO - National Solar Observatory - I thought these videos of the sun's surface were incredible. There's an eerie intentionality to how things move which I guess is caused by the enormous gravitational and magnetic forces. nso.edu #

The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine - Seems like somewhat of a backlash against all the AI doom is brewing. www.cnn.com #

New Post: Start a linkblog markjgsmith.com #

Rate 'rigging' traders say they were scapegoated - now the Supreme Court will decide - Noteworthy because the move from Libor to Sofr as the index which helps to set interest rates has been heralded as a moment of liberation for the US, since Libor was set by London banks. Turns out it was being manipulated, not just by these traders, but also by central bankers and governments worldwide, at even bigger magnitudes. www.bbc.com #

The Best Breakdown of America You've Never Heard - Richard Miniter - Very interesting history about the 4 main groups of people that migrated originally from Britain. They each had very distinct philosophies and politics, and they setup in different places in the US. podcastindex.org #

Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt - Simon Willison very often has some interesting things to say aboug LLMs and his experiences with them. This post gets into the system prompts, they are a sort of unnoficial manual. simonwillison.net #

Elon Musk Just Showed Off The Most Humanlike Robot Ever - They are scheduled to manufacture 5000 robots by end of year, and 50000 planned for the following year. Says it will be the fastest growing product of all time by a factor of 10. Even if he is half wrong in his prediction, has the potential to really change what the world looks like kind of quickly. The figure 100 million units per year is mentioned, which is totally bonkers. We are entering the age of sustainable abundance, which sounds very nice. youtu.be #

GitHub - CajuM/jobhunt: Job Hunting Scripts - There sure are a lot of slightly dark synchronicities in this life. Anyways, job scripts could be useful, we should share more of these. github.com #

Sam and Jony and skepticism - I'm sort of enjoying reading and hearing the mixed reactions to their quite unique announcement. sixcolors.com #

Bond crisis looming? GOP abandons DOGE, Google disrupts Search with AI, OpenAI buys Jony Ive's IO (All-In Podcast) - Some great Ives and Altman takes. Rest of the show is worth listening too also.
podcastindex.org #

Announcing a new IDE for PostgreSQL in VS Code from Microsoft - Vergecast Microsoft native advertising compaign much? Still it does look like a pretty darn cool postgres IDE. techcommunity.microsoft.com #

Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder (All-In Podcast) - In this interview from "All-In live from Miami", a lot of interesting discussions about Sergey's return to work at Google, and where he sees the AI boom going, and how he thinks it could impact every day lives. The thing with technical co-founders is they don't really do it just for the monday, they are all computer science enthusiast nerds, even the most successfuly ones. podcastindex.org #

I was first in line to try Google's Android XR glasses and came away impressed - Looks like the new generation of these AR glasses do actually have a screen projected into the inside of the glass. The Meta glasses don't have this yet. Really want to try these. I'm wearing reading glasses these days, so why not have some unintrusive headsup type display. Could be very cool. www.androidcentral.com #

25.05 Reasons to NixOS Ep#615 (Linux Unplugged Podcast) - Great episode all about Nix. Particulrly interesting to hear about it can be used to create Asahi Linux build environments. Giving me lots of ideas about how I could use the new laptop. Plus the usual assortment of cool linux based tools to pimp your setup and workflows. linuxunplugged.com #

Bitcoin jumps to new all-time high, surpassing prior record in January - It got all the way up to $111k, which is massive considering when the Trump tarrifs hit it went all the way down to $76k. www.cnbc.com #

Sam & Jony introduce io - It's a bit of an odd promo, like they are trying to be authentic and naturally awkward, crossed with silicon valley, crossed with gastro pubs. Yet it's kind of interesting. Are they talking to each other or the film crew? Or is this just what happens when you ChatGPT all day long? :) Looking forward to see what reality enhancement products they are working on. openai.com #

Jimmy Carr Ep#2045 (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - I watched this a few days ago, enjoyed it more than I thought I would. There's something slightly odd about Jimmy Carr, not sure what it is exactly, and I find myself slightly mesmerized trying to figure out what it is, and I never do quite, but anyway in the end he's very smart and he's got some very interesting ideas about where the comedy scene is at and where it might be heading. And him and Joe get on even if it's a bit awkward at times. Worth watching. youtu.be #

Initialization in C++ is bonkers - I scanned through this and though I didn't fully grok it, it's been 20 years since I wrote any C++, I felt like I would need this article should I everneed to get back into it. Also I feel like it's normally X in Javascript is bonkers, so it's nice to get a break. We love you C++ programmers :) blog.tartanllama.xyz #

New Post: 5 Dimensional Beings markjgsmith.com #

Physicist explains 4 dimensions of spacetime - Janna Levin and Lex Fridman - Watched this the other day. youtu.be #

World's first CPU-level ransomware - Sounds kinda bad. "Bypasses every freaking traditional technology we have out there". Basically can modiy the CPU microcode and is directly in the bios so everything is encrypted before any OS software even loads. www.tomshardware.com #

New Zealand MPs who performed haka in parliament given unprecedented punishment - Maybe NZ isn't the escape strategy some tech bilionaires had hoped for? Worth watching the video. Definitely a sign there are some very deep disagrements happening. I would have thought this was a step along a road to a rise in militant groups. www.theguardian.com #

UK economy defies gloomy warnings to grow 0.7% in first quarter of year - Nice to see something positive about the economy. www.theguardian.com #

Meta wants your smile, squats, and small talk — and it's paying $50 an hour to scan them for its next-gen VR avatars - I'm interested in trying these glasses though I'm not sure I like their goal of enabling social presence "indistinguishable from reality". www.businessinsider.com #

Trump meets interim Syrian president as Damascus celebrates lifting of sanctions - This visit really seems to be a big deal. www.bbc.com #

Trump's Gulf Billions: Saudi, Sanctions, and Ceasefires (Rest is Politics Podcast) - Lots of interesting background information about the situation in the Middle East. podcastindex.org #

Lumier - macOS and Linux virtual machines in a Docker container - Could be quite useful especially for developers doing testing. Docker is just an interface, underneath it's using Apple Virtualization Framework (Apple Vz). github.com #

git-bug: a decentralized issue tracker - It looks like everything is stored in your .git folder. "Manage issues, users, and comments directly within your repository - keeping everything versioned and clutter-free". And this was also interesting imo "work offline and sync seamlessly later". github.com #

White House partially cuts tariff on cheap goods - It's good to see some progress is being made. It will certainly be interesting to see how these tariffs affect american businesses long term. Also the supply shocks over the coming months are going to be considerable with everyone loading up on cheap products. www.axios.com #

Apple unveils iOS 19 accessibility features: Magnifier for Mac, App Store labels, more - Interesting to see this new accessibility direction that Apple is taking. The braille features are pretty intersting. 9to5mac.com #

President Donald J. Trump Secures Historic $600 Billion Investment Commitment in Saudi Arabia - The tech scene in the region has been growing rapidly in recent years. Interesting to see big military investment too. Over half a trillion dollars. www.whitehouse.gov #

Add Sound Effects to Your React Apps Effortlessly - I feel like maybe there should be a movement to add a special secret mode to most web apps that enables sound effects. The sound library is a lot cooler than I thought it would be, at least with headphones. www.reactsounds.com #

New Post: Hey Netlify, are you okay? markjgsmith.com #

Harold Sonny White Ep#2318 (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - I haven't completely finished watching yet but, if you are at all interested in interstellar travel, you need to watch this. There is one of THE coolest videos of how a warp drive could work. It occurred to me while watching this that what is likely to occur first is that AI becomes a warp drive for thinking, FASTER. www.youtube.com #

Void: Open-source Cursor alternative - Early days by the sounds of the associated HN discussion thread, but it's interesting to see open source versions of Cursor appearing. Cool project name. github.com #

10 useful VS Code shortcuts you should know - A lot of these are definitely super useful. dev.to #

Trump and Starmer confirm ‘breakthrough’ US-UK trade deal - Many of the articles I read earlier about this were really negative, whereas the tone appears to have shifted somewhat, even though they are still kind of negative. www.theguardian.com #

Cars, steel, beef and films: the key points of the US-UK trade deal - That's actually the strongest 4 words summary of Britain I've read in quite a while. www.theguardian.com #

Trump hails trade deal with ‘oldest ally’ UK – but what about the details? - The retoric as channeled by the MSM definitely has softenned in just a few hours. www.theguardian.com #

Robert Prevost becomes first American pope and will be known as Pope Leo XIV - Pope Louis the 14th! Sacre bleu. Joking aside, I didn't realise Leo's were so popular in the church. My first thoughts were that he looks much younger than recent popes. www.bbc.com #

Cisco says its new entanglement chip could speed up practical quantum computing timeline by a decade - I'm not an expert at quantum computing but it seems significant that the chip "generates up to one million entangled photon pairs per second, and does so at room temperature". My impression was that so far the most advanced tech in the industry was only able to create in the order of 1000 simultaneous entangled pairs, and that was at crazy cold temperatures. www.fastcompany.com #

As an Experienced LLM User, I Actually Don't Use Generative LLMs Often - It's interesting to learn how the LLM pros are using this new tech. There is a lot of tricks and nuance. You really have to have a good idea which type of problems are a good fit. minimaxir.com #

Maker of AI ‘vibe coding’ app Cursor hits bn valuation - I keep hearing about and seing the Cursor editor in all things related to AI developer tools and vibe coding. Haven't tried it myself yet. www.ft.com #

I built an AI code review agent in a few hours, here's what I learned - Interesting to hear from devs actually building developer tools that use AI. Many of the things the author describes I have seen variations of too. www.sourcebot.dev #

The AI wearables are always listening (Vergecast Podcast) - With the previous link in mind, this episode of Vergecast seems particularly relevant. Both journalists recount somewhat hilarious situations their wearables ran into. As David Pierce describes, and I am paraphrasing, the bar to be human is very high. There are just so many crazy complicated situations that we are immersed in daily. podcastindex.org #

New Post: This is some example link text markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Long overdue site redesign markjgsmith.com #

Amazon takes on Musk’s Starlink with launch of first internet satellites - It's awesome that there is finally some competition for SpaceX in the space internet arena. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: When X Web Services? markjgsmith.com #

Meta’s ChatGPT competitor shows how your friends use AI - I know that the few times I have used AI to do something bordering on serious, the first thing I wanted to do was blog about it, so this seems kind of obvious to me. www.theverge.com #

Here’s more of what you’ll see through Meta’s $1000 smart glasses - For ages I've been trying to understand how the UI in the Raybans works, whether there is a screen projected onto the lenses. After reading this article it seems the answer is no there isn't a display in the current version, but they are working on a considerably more expensive version that will have such a thing. www.theverge.com #

New Post: Concerns about AI "vibe working" markjgsmith.com #

Don't make Google sell Chrome - DHH gives his take on the whole Google anti-trust thing as far as it relates to Google Chrome. He knows a thing or two about the open web. world.hey.com #

Electricity restored to 90% of Spain and most of Portugal after massive power outage - Heck of an unusual thing to happen. How does an entire country, and it's neighbour country have an electricity blackout? What is going on with that? www.theguardian.com #

The EU can’t replace the US as a global player until it sheds its own colonial thinking - I think Shada Islam makes some pretty good points here. I'm interested to learn more about this european colonial thinking. The UK always gets pointed at as being the old big bad colonial power, but surely Europe has some things to address in this domain too. www.theguardian.com #

Vince Lanci and the Trump Powell Accord Ep#215 (Goats, Gold 'n Guns Podcast) - What I linke about Tom Luongo's podcast is that though him and his guests to peddle in kind of wild conspiracies, they do at least base them on the latest financial markets data. The transition away from LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, definitely appears to be causing some big shifts in markets and perhaps exposing very old power structures. podcastindex.org #

Alternative Browsers, Discord vs Circle, and AI in the Browser Ep#662 (Shop Talk Podcast) - Some great developer discussions around the Google Chrome anti-trust situation, and also some interesting ideas about how AI could be used to create some cool new features in browsers. shoptalkshow.com #

Mozilla’s CEO weighs in on U.S. v. Google - He doesn't say this explicitly but it sure sounds like 'hey lawyer folks if you fuck this up then you will completely fuck the open web, as in game over, and a lot of us think you aren't heading in the right direction'. blog.mozilla.org #

Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining - It's really surreal the types of development that is now possible using LLMs. Simon Willison describes it as being inside an episode of CSI. It's weird that the logs that he's reading as he is developing are the models "thinking trace". simonwillison.net #

How to ceneter things in markdown - Several ways to do this, very useful for images. he cool thing about markdown is that you can just use HTML tags, so surrounding an image in a div with inline CSS work fine. markdown.land #

Meghan made one-pot pasta a trend – but is it any good? Seven all-in-one recipes tested - I like the idea of cooking everyhting in one pot, less things to washup afterwards, and actually these dishes look a lot nicer than I thought they would. Might try making something inspired by these. www.theguardian.com #

Apple ‘aims to source all US iPhones from India’, reducing reliance on China - The tectonic plates of the world economy appear to be on the move. That's quite a bit move. Somewhat unrelatedly I heard today on a podcast that India gets a massive amount of it's oil from Russia. www.theguardian.com #

Class act: can Harrow sell an elitist British boarding school fantasy to New Yorkers? - The famous London based school apparently now has schools in Thailand, India and now New York. First I have heard of it. I'd be interested in hearing the accents the pupils end up with. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Vibe job hunting markjgsmith.com #

Threads officially moves to Threads.com and updates its web app - On reading this, the sysadmin in me immediately wondered how much effort this change was for their engineering team. It's small changes like this that can cause huge headaches sometimes. I also wondered the same thing when twitter.com moved to x.com. Would be nice to read a piece from their engineering teams about this, perhaps they have some best practices they can share techcrunch.com #

Apple to Strip Secret Robotics Unit From AI Chief Weeks After Moving Siri - Interesting to see how the big tech companies are organising their robotics efforts. Their team is being moved to the hardware engineering unit www.bloomberg.com #

New Post: Vibe coding markjgsmith.com #

Meta rolls out live translations to all Ray-Ban smart glasses users - These glasses might turn out to be the underground success from last year. Really curious how the live translation is in practice, and generally how AI is to use as an interface. Maybe we don't need a keyboard for most everyday things. www.theverge.com #

Microsoft: Human, AI agent ratios will be critical to success as new roles emerge - Not to sound too negative nelly but sure sounds like the term 'Frontier Firms' is the latest buzzword. www.constellationr.com #

How to Copy, Cut and Paste in Vim / Vi - Seems really difficult until you memorize the key strokes, then it's incredibly fast. I'm still trying to memorize some of the more obscure keystrokes. linuxize.com #

Canada election is Carney’s to lose in contest turned on its head by Trump - Trump's recent activity has massively swung voters towards Carney and his Liberal party, away from the Conservatives that had been in the lead for a couple of years. www.theguardian.com #

Shot from the hip! A street level view of 1970s New York – in pictures - Photography is so awesome at preserving an entire culture, scene, ambiance and even time period. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Start with aliases and scripts markjgsmith.com #

Stock markets rise as Trump says he will reduce tariffs on China ‘substantially’ - Nice to see something positive happening. It's kind of crazy to see realtime how much impact a few small comments can make across the entire world economy www.theguardian.com #

Cantor nears $3bn crypto venture with SoftBank and Tether - I think it's interesting that it includes the largest stablecoin issuer Tether, and that they are using SPACs. A lot of people are going to be watching to see what twist they add as they try to replicate the MicroStrategy playbook www.ft.com #

4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere - Can't say I really knew the site much more than just hearing people always talking about how aweful it was. Interesting that because of how the site worked, there won't really be a trace of how it used to be. www.wired.com #

Scientists hail ‘strongest evidence’ so far for life beyond our solar system - Hello aliens! www.theguardian.com #

Homebrew - The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux) brew.sh #

iTerm2 - iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm iterm2.com #

nvchad - Blazing fast Neovim config providing solid defaults and a beautiful UI nvchad.com #

Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ - It would be cool to hear more about this world without IP law that they envisage. His comments about the current system limiting creativity by payment gatekeepers is interesting. techcrunch.com #

YYYY-MM-DD format date in shell script - This date format is the most useful imho because files list alphabetically and so listing a directory gets you all the files in the order they were created. I've been using it for years. It's really popular with sys admins. Anyway I never knew there was a -I flag and had to google the date command syntax each time I was creating files in a script. Really usefful. stackoverflow.com #

AI-hallucinated code dependencies become new supply chain risk - This world where halluciations are being used as a feature isn't always a good thing. On the other hand I image they can lead to some interesting things creatively. www.bleepingcomputer.com #

Trump warns exemptions on smartphones, electronics will be short-lived, promises future tariffs - Important to be aware of how the tariffs are affecting tech. Really interested to see how the situation resolves as both China and the US try to paint each other as the bad guy, then act like the victim, then mysteriously revert to behaving like Godzilla again. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Memory, maps and humour markjgsmith.com #

UK takes control of British Steel under emergency powers - A long long time ago I went on a university trip to British Steel, in I think it was Sheffield. It was really quite impressive seing the molten steel being turned into huge bus sized steel bars. But I didn't want to work there. www.bbc.com #

Fintech founder charged with fraud after ‘AI’ shopping app found to be powered by humans in the Philippines - It's so bizare that AI, which is supposedly taking people's jobs, in some cases is having it's lunch eaten by humans. I bet they use AI to figure out the best way to create their fakes. techcrunch.com #

Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries, hits China harder with 125% - This 90 day number sure is interestin www.cnbc.com #

Google to embrace Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data - Good to see that companies are using the same protocols rather than re-inventing the wheel each time. So far companies including Block, Apollo, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph are on board. techcrunch.com #

@francescociula4 does a pretty good job at describing the MCP protocol. He sites companies such as OpenAI, Google, and GitHub as developing their own MPC implementation. The VFX sysadmin in me is having a tough time not seeing "The Moving Picture Company" in that acronym. x.com #

New Post: Pysh and Lavish on China vs Trump markjgsmith.com #

Tariffs on China set to rise to at least 104% on Wednesday, White House says - That escallated quickly. 2025 the year of Desktop Linux? edition.cnn.com #

Removing a newline character at the end of a file - Fixing yet another bug that showed up because of the move from iOS to Android stackoverflow.com #

Tariff Panic And Recession Fears — Raoul Pal & Julien Bittel - Much like my little AI adventure earlier, others are using ChatGPT AIs to discover market trends. Sounds like they are doing some next level kind of stuff. podcastindex.org #

How to insert the result of a command into the text in vim? - Really useful for editing markdown files, for example generating and inserting uuids or dates. unix.stackexchange.com #

Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia - Rsync is such an important tool in sysadmin, really interesting open source license story. derflounder.wordpress.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Back in the Europe (Issue #199) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Tue 14th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

Shallow clones versus structured clones - Definitely useful to know the details of this, I had sonething very similar happening to me a while back and it took quite a long time to figute out and resolve. philna.sh #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Mon 13th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress contributor accounts over alleged fork plans - It’s very strange that Matt Mullenweg’s approach was repeatedly and widely described as 'scorched earth' in the press end of last year, and now the case resurfaces at the same exsct time as the uterly mind boggling LA wildfires. I wonder what odds you would have gotten on polymarket for predicting those two events happening. What is up with that? Kinda strange. techcrunch.com #

Yoast’s former CEO calls for a ‘federated’ approach to WordPress repository - Interesting article that was linked to from the previous techcrunch piece. techcrunch.com #

New Post: Something is very wrong with open source markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Sun 12th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

A Rare Alignment of 7 Planets Is About to Take Place in The Sky - It should be happening the evening of 28 February 2025. Alignment of 7 planets is apparently a very rate occurance. www.sciencealert.com #