markjgsmith

The Framework Laptop 16 just got a modular gadget that enables quadruple SSDs - You are now capable of having a ridiculus 38TB of storage...on a laptop! And a modular one too so you can have spares of all major parts and be able to swap them in easily if the original ones fail for any reason. With feature films clocking in between 2TB and 12TB, I wonder if vfx artists will start using these. You could literally take the entire film home with you to work on it. www.theverge.com #

Blackmagic Debuts $30K 3D Camera for Capturing Video for Vision Pro - Haven’t seen much about the Vision Pro recently, figured folks had moved on to other things. Maybe we’ll see another wave over the holidays? www.macrumors.com #

Leak Reveals Russia’s Bid For Bitcoin Reserve Amid Huge 2025 Price Predictions - Both the US and Russia are seriously investigating setting up Strategic Bitcoin Reserves. Kinda bullish. The game theory is insane though. It’s essentially a massively high stakes multiplayer game of the opening scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I find mildly triggering to be honest. Perhaps even a bit rude. But I’m happy for Bitcoin. www.forbes.com #

New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn't want to be forced to change its views | TechCrunch - It’s all very interesting, but surely the worry in all this is how long until this tech is repurposed and used on humans, to create Clockwork Orange or indeed reverse Clockwork Orange type scenarios, especially since we know certain parts of the world have forced re-education camps, and given the world has recently been rather prone to a propensity for emergent censorship industrial complexes. techcrunch.com #

UK arts and media reject plan to let AI firms use copyrighted material - Noticed that Guardian has pinneaple pizza’d all their articles with no prior warning. You have to either register or say you will register later. Has a malicious dark patterny kinda vibe to it imo, especially since for years now GDPR has ensured we always have a clear opt out option. How meta that the article is all about an opt out. Enough to break your brain. I didn’t read the article. The kicker: I got a 'good' from the world as clicked through, and a 'aaaaahhh' from the world, as in relief, as I decided not to read the article. Just saying. The world is cray cray AF. www.theguardian.com #

Germany is in a sorry state – and all our leaders can do is yell at each other - Oh noes! What about the steins & wienerschnitzel? Good lord europe, think of the pretzels, the sauerkraut, and the glühwein. And all the other wonderful german things I don’t have time to mention. Pull yourselves together. www.theguardian.com #

Spain introduces bill to combat online fake news - A part of me is hoping that this will lead to some truely epic and possibly distasteful spanish punk and post-punk bands. And honestly might be a good sign that freedoms and democracy are still going strong. www.theguardian.com #

‘World’s first’ grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant announced in the US - Seems like this could be a big deal. The worrier programmer in me is wondering if an alien civilisation has previously tried this and accidentally turned their planet into a supernova somewhere else in the galaxy or wider universe, would we be able to see traces of that? edition.cnn.com #

Goodbye, Moogs - Just catching up with feeds, hope I’m not digging up old graves, but I thought this was probably the best darn pet obituary I’ve ever read. I actually teared up a bit at the end, though it’s also possible that was my alergies. Damn cats. daverupert.com #

A look back at Node's 2024 - Might be a good article to have bookmarked for the holidays. There’s nothing like some mince pies and a bunch of interesting nodejs articles to read. I recognise several of articles linked to. nodeweekly.com #

On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople - John Gruber summarises a recent controversy around background checks for Pete Hegseth who will be taking over control of the US military. What I find interesting is how incredibly good Gruber’s piece is. It’s easily as good as any main stream media journalist, and actually a lot better than most. Some bloggers sure can write. daringfireball.net #

3 shell scripts to improve your writing - Simon Wilson turns some bash scripts into a web tool. What’s interesting is how he did it: basically gave the scripts to an LLM and asked it to do it. Writing little helper tools is now a lot easier than it user to be. simonwillison.net #

Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits - Great Cory Doctorow piece about the importance of data portability in social networks. pluralistic.net #

New Post: Cory Doctorow on data portability in social networks markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Sorry about the feeds markjgsmith.com #

Some pubs start to run out of Guinness as supply limit bites - Oh noes! The article sort of implies you can only get Guinness in irish pubs. That’s not the case. Guinness is sold in most pubs. www.bbc.com #

Hampshire pupils 'sob' as vicar discusses existence of Santa - You would think this sort of thing would happen every year, but I don’t remember ever, in all my years, reading about such a thing happening before. Odd then that it should happen just a few days after I wrote about Mike Benz’ description of the censorship industrial complex and it’s similarity to the vfx industry. Thankfully not much chance Christmas will ever get banned, even if Guinness is in short supply this year. www.bbc.com #

WordPress.orgs login page demands you pledge loyalty to pineapple pizza - I’m somewhat conflicted on this. I quite like pinneapple on pizzas, but it depends on what the other topings are, because the sweetness needs a counter balance, like ground pork. I find that it’s often a bit mediocre with ham for instance. Now I’m wondering what pinneapple would be like with another ingredient that is amazing on pizza, but not well known for it: chille con carne. Chille con carne pizzas are phenominal. My guess is that it would be kind of great. On the other hand it’s been so long since I ate a pizza that I think any pizza would be amazing at the minute. Anyway why the fuck is Matt maybe fake blocking / maybe real blocking people based on pizzas topings? mashable.com #

Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter--and It Doesn’t Need to Be - Cool idea for a project. I wonder how many on Blacksky are actually secretly white users pretending to be black, just curious about how to interact with black people and culture. I haven’t grown up with many black people around so I bet I say a ton of things that might be offensive without even realising it. There are so many double meanings in english and cultural references that one might not have, it’s bound to happen all the time. www.wired.com #

New Post: Hello RSS clarity markjgsmith.com #

Czech Republic abolishes capital gains tax on Bitcoin held at least three years - The UK should do something similar to get some growth in the crypto sector. The time to do it it is now while it’s a wide open field. In a few years, the tea leaves will have settled, and likely in places with pro-crypto tax rules. cryptobriefing.com #

Britain joins trans-Pacific pact in biggest post-Brexit trade deal - Good to see things moving forward. Interesting the selection of countries. I wonder whether it will have any visible impact having trade agreements with exotic countries around the pacific. www.reuters.com #

Will A.I. Eat The Browser? - Web developers everywhere, who’ve spent a significant part ot their lives sitting on a chair stating at a screen learning the intricacies of HTML, CSS, and javascript, are like seriously bro? crazystupidtech.com #

A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation - Hadn’t read a Doctorow piece in quite a while. Good to see one of my favorite leftists is still pulling punches. I’m a bit worried his boo to the billionaire’s stick is becoming a bit worn. Personally I’m less worried about the billionaires, but more worried by the evil coorporations that surround them. pluralistic.net #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Memeplexes, Podcasting & the Movies (Issue #194) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Inbound RSS for social media? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: You will like your default reality markjgsmith.com #

Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish - I made a scrabble related joke earlier in a shop cafe I was in. What are the chances that just a few hours later I should now see this article on the front page of HN, especially given that earlier I posted a note that requires an understanding of both french and spanish. The kicker is that if you read the article you will learn that the scrabble star has also previously won the french world title. Seriously what are the chances? Come on world, you're not fooling anyone. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Earnie C. from Body Count on Gate Keepers markjgsmith.com #

Node.js Delivers First LTS with require(esm) Enabled, Enhanc... - I reckon this is probably quite a big deal. I think it will have a massive effect on ESM adoption. Import has so many ways where it stops working, whereas require just works everytime. The whole CommonJS vs ESM thing has been such a terrible situation for so long. It made nodejs look so bad. Making using external modules seamless again is huge. socket.dev #

Romania’s top court annuls presidential election result - Tough decision, it’s certainly seems true that there is russian meddling now in all politics across the continent, but we need to be sure people aren’t just using that as an excuse to block legitimate political rivals. I hope they publish the criteria they used to determine the annulment, so everyone can learn from it. www.cnn.com #

Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino Ep#2240 - I’ve always maintained that growing up Pulp Fiction was a sort of coming of age movie for me. Life before Pulp Fiction was in black and white, life afterwards was in glorious technicolor. I don’t mean that literally, it’s more about how life felt. I walked out of the theatre and suddenly it felt like there were possibilities everywhere. Maybe I’ll write more about that sometime. This interview was great. Tarantino and Avery make a really interesting combo, they seem to balance each other in interesting ways. For me this interview had a sort of magical quality to it, though a bit bumpy. In places it felt like to me they were channeling higher forces. That’s the best way I can describe it. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Censorship, AI Memecoins, 100K BTC, Time & the Ruliad (Issue #193) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Questions for Wolfram about time markjgsmith.com #

France faces months of political instability as government nears collapse - Literally tldr; based on title alone, fitting. Then again today is shaping up to be another synchronicity apocalypse day. Weather is crappy today, though no faces in the clouds, just undifferentiated white for as far as the eye can see in every direction. www.bbc.com #

Biden's Angola visit aims to showcase his attempts to rival China - An interesting non descript choice for Biden’s final overseas bit of business. I’m sceptical these days about many of these large scale investment projects, but perhaps the thing to focus on here is the stated goal of developing local processing rather than just extraction, and the fact that Angola is keeping their options open. That at least looks like it might be a step forward. Many steps to go though, but perhaps the foundations are sound. www.bbc.com #

Brazilian lawmaker proposes national bitcoin reserve to hedge economic risks - Looks like maybe nation state strategic bitcoin reserves might be starting to trend. That would certainly create some big inflows. Interesting that it’s one of the BRICKs countries. The bitcoin hedge might start to become very popular amoung sovereign gardners. www.theblock.co #

New Post: Finished the item hash link feature markjgsmith.com #

Bluesky implements a 'more aggressive' impersonation policy - I didn’t know it had an impersonation issue. Much like the real world. There are doppelgangers everywhere. www.engadget.com #

NASA’s Europa Clipper: Millions of Miles Down, Instruments Deploying - It’s so crazy that to get to it’s destination it has to go to Mars and then back to Earth just to eventually get all the way to Jupiter. What a scenic route. But also imagine the precision needed to do this manouver. I bet we look back at these times in 100 years and wonder how it was that we had to make things so complicated, when no doubt they will be able to just push a button. Makes you wonder if we need to be careful about a future space industrial complex that insists on doing everything in the most complicated way possible to keep people in jobs, or to just keep people from letting their giant brains get bored. Thankfully we don’t need so much precision in the rest of our lives. It should be safe to loose control every once in a while. www.nasa.gov #

As 'Sentient Memecoins' Become Latest Crypto Fad, GOAT Surges to $800M and an AI Rambles - The whole AI memecoin thing that’s sprung up in the past few weeks is very interesting and funny and mindboggling. But when you read the AIs philosophical mussings it’s pretty clear, certainly to any humans that have gone through hard times, that these LLMs could be used really nefariously. It’s a rubix cube solver for human thought. What’s the world going to be like when everyone has a neuralink and an AI assistant embeded? Won’t it just be algorythm wars every minute of every day? Not sure I’m particularly bullish on all this. So many ways it could all go horribly wrong. www.coindesk.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Gargantuan Change (Issue #192) markjgsmith.com #

Irish election exit poll predicts even split between three main parties - I’m suprised that this is the first article I’ve seen about their elections. Regretfully, I really don’t know as much about Irish politics as I would like. I think I’m a bit more confused after reading this article, which somehow almost clarified all my questions but in each case, not quite. I couldn’t tell with any certainty where on the spectrum any of the parties lie, or indeed who leads any of them. A masterpiece of saying nothing while saying quite a lot. www.theguardian.com #

Mark Zuckerberg dines with Trump at Mar-a-Lago despite former feud - I imagine this will be viewed as rather weird in the UK and EU. I can’t remember ever reading about top european tech CEOs being invited around for dinner by the incoming government leader. www.theguardian.com #

These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own - The human group simulations are definitely very interesting, and perhaps you might be able to create some useful bots / tools, but I don’t think all the anthropomorphisation is such a good idea. You might end up with very strange bots, and I could see it chaging how us humans interact with each other. www.technologyreview.com #

New Post: Peter MacCormack and Freddie New on the UK government front bench and value extraction by private equity markjgsmith.com #

Chinese Ship’s Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables - It’s definitely quite suspicious, especially since there have been several incidents all involving easter european countries recently. How strange that it would happen now, with ongoing Ukraine war and with a new US president in January. www.wsj.com #

Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark - It’s flat out ridiculous the Oracle still has the trademark. Javascript is clearly the language of the world wide web. Worth knowing about this case, not just if you are a developer, if you run any websites, because ultimately it could affect you. deno.com #

Self-contained Executable Programs with Deno Compile - I haven’t had a chance to try this out but it’s an awesone feature. deno.com #

New Post: Our strange AI angels and demons future markjgsmith.com #

Mapping Over Promises in JavaScript - Mapping over promises is definitely really useful. I tend to either do it with either Promise.all or just an old school for loop depending on whether I need sequential or parallel resolution. The option to set concurrency could be quite useful. www.telerik.com #

Ukrainian boxing champ Wladimir Klitschko calls out Rogan for ‘repeating Russian propaganda’ - I tend to skip much of the martial arts Rogan episodes, but I’d listen to this one. I personally don’t get why the west has been pretend helping the Ukraine. What is this bull crap of giving weapons but saying you can only use them in a particular way? Were they secretly holding Ukraine down so Russia could pound them, or was it a tactic to get Russia to reveal their true intensions? I don’t get why you would 1/2 help somebody. www.theguardian.com #

Germany draws up list of bunkers amid Russia tensions - Prepping seems to be the current thing. Finland was also sending out pamflets to citizens recently, with notes on what to do in case of an invasion. Looks like everyone is freaking out. Maybe chill with the FUD and wait until after Christmas? www.theguardian.com #

New Post:: Bitter sweet symphony this life markjgsmith.com #

I’ve joined Bluesky and it feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways... - Impressions from the main stream media of the recent mass migration / diversification to Bluesky. John Naughton sums up his thoughts and observations. A bit on the pessimistic side but he makes a lot of good points. We need more people, companies, institutions etc, running Bluesky instances because as great as the architecture is for users, if there is nowhere to move to, it’s all for nothing. It’s still an island, but could be part of an ecosystem. Looks like building healthy ecosystems is a very difficult endeavour. www.theguardian.com #

Elon Musk Is Now Cyberbullying Government Employees - I’m not goung to pretend I know anything about making huge cuts in the name of efficiency. Seems like you are going to make a lot of people unhappy whatever you do. Nobody likes ripping off band aids. But seems like gang stalker cyber bullying campaigns would not only be unnecessary, but counter productive. Why not just go in there are start cutting jobs and departments like an chainsaw wealding argentinian anarcho-capitalist? newrepublic.com #

Polymarket blocks French users amid regulatory scrutiny over $80 million Trump election bet - Prediction markets continue to make a splash. It’s kind of crazy that online betting has so little regulations, whereas Bitcoin and crypto are constantly under scrutiny. Strongly suggests it’s not really about protecting regular people. www.theblock.co #

Anthropic raises another $4B from Amazon, makes AWS its 'primary' training partner - It’s kind of strange that all the big AI companies are so dependant on the underlying cloud companies they run on. It’s a similar model to proffesional surfers and skateboarders. Imagine being a web developer and Apple gave you free laptops. On the other hand, Apple if you want to give me a free laptop, please get in touch :) techcrunch.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Synchronicity Apocalypse Days (Issue #191) markjgsmith.com #

Hadron by Tether Platform Brings Simplified Asset Tokenization to the Mass Market - I saved this article to read offline, but for whatever reason it doesn’t work with the save later app I’m using, so can’t read it. Anyhow linking to the article because I think asset tokenization could turn into an interesting growth area, with new ways of interacting with customers. For example in wine, clothes, real estate, and vehicle registration. Longer term with more esoteric things like culture itself. tether.io #

Wallet Development Kit by Tether - These days all you really need is Bitcoin and a decent stablecoin, really that’s the minimum for crypto interop. Tether is the most popular of the stablecoins. It’s not decentralised but it’s used mostly to transact so it’s less risky, especially for smallish amounts. They have released an SDK. They also appear to be fully onboard with the AI agents trend that is rapidly gaining momentum. wallet.tether.io #

Web4: We Are AGI - I’m seeing and hearing a lot about agentic AI at the minute. Seems to be the next big thing. It’s cool I guess. I can’t help but wonder what the reality is like though. How do you debug these systems for instance? I feel like we might be creating a big tangle of race conditions and never ending garbage war. Of course the answer to all my questions will likely be 'more AI!', eventually it will be AIs debugging AIs all the way down. Then it will all be blamed on me. And I’ll blame it on climate change. Put that in your ok and more it, and of course No! But also yellow! I appreciate that all sounds a bit rude, honestly not my intention, that’s just a sample of the last few days harassment tsunami. 🕊☮️✌️ mirror.xyz #

Maybe Bluesky has "won" - Gets a bit technical but not too much, highlighting some it’s architectural choices. I looked yesterday for examples and tutorials of integrating Bluesky into your website but didn’t find anything. Curious what exactly you would need to implement. anderegg.ca #

New Post: Thoughts on integrating your website with Bluesky markjgsmith.com #

Will we care about frameworks in the future? - Paul Kinlan makes the case that perhaps in the future we won’t even use frameworks because the AI in your IDE will be writing most of the code. paul.kinlan.me #

Lexical - A framework for building text editors. I think it’s from the guys and gals over at Meta. lexical.dev #

UK must pick between US economic model or EU’s ‘socialism’, says Trump adviser - It sure would be interesting to hear from Trump himself what his thoughts are on this, it certainly seems like unnecessary childish anger goading. It’s suprising that a country built on a foundation of fierce independance would seek to publically humiliate another anglophone country by telling them how they should run things. I don’t think it’s such a wise move. Ultimately if the brits feel they have a bad deal, they will boycott american products, and find other friends internationally. This might even be a boost for the entertainment industry, lots of new material. Note the article is from the Guardian. www.theguardian.com #

Russian spy ship escorted away from internet cables in Irish Sea - Not a good sign. Seems like everyone is anger goading following the US election results. Looks like both lefties and righties are trying to provoke the UK following the US election result? It would be great if everyone could just growup and focus on getting our globally synchronised economies back on track. www.theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bull runs, economies, politics, browsers & crypto AI (Issue #190) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The peaceful transition of humour markjgsmith.com #

Not a Joke: 'The Onion' Buys Alex Jones’s InfoWars Site - They plan to turn it into a parody of itself. Not sure this is such a good idea. Feels like they might end up creating a bizare free speech inception singularity type situation, whatever that might be. Wouldn’t it be a sort of right wing Daily Show? www.inc.com #

Where web components shine - Several weeks old at this point, but it’s the first chance I’ve had to read it. Great post with lots of first hand experience advice. I like how web components aren’t meant to solve everything, this patchiness actually sounds quite web-like. You just have to know what situations to use them for, and we are still figuring this out. Dave and Chris did a Shop Talk episode all about this post. Worth giving it a listen. daverupert.com #

Factorio - "Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories" - I’m not a big gamer, played some consoles, and used to hang out at arcades during the lunch hour when at school, and also played a bit at university. But these days literally never. I only code cli tools and websites. In some ways that in itself is a sort of game, maybe even the ultimate game. I heard about Factorio (wikipedia page) on a recent programming podcast, I forget exactly which one. It was described by a developer as the closest thing to writing code in a game he had ever seen. You basically have to create all sorts of these interface type structures, and you refactor and optimise them. Anyway I thought it sounded kind of cool, a bit like Sim City but also maybe an interesting way to get into computer programming. Surely a more fun stepping stone that Excel and Microsoft Word :) www.factorio.com #

Borewit/music-metadata - "Stream and file based music metadata parser for node. Supporting a wide range of audio and tag formats". This looks like it could be very useful if you were doing anything that requires reading / updating audio metadata, like IDE tags of mp3 files or even streams. Supports loads of other formats too. github.com #

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election - Saying that they are fleing seems a bit hyperbolic, I bet hardly any of them deleted their X accounts. It’s more like diversifying imo, and that’s a good thing. Who knows, maybe a lot of them are republicans who think Elon’s Twitter might get targeted by angry democrats. www.theguardian.com #

How I ship projects at big tech companies - Lots of useful info in this article including a somewhat interesting way of defining shiping. I find it’s very much a mindset, getting the simplest functional version out, then iterating to make it better, while making sure you can always get back to a safe state should something unnexpected occur where you need to reverse course. It’s difficult, and you often have to make tough choices, weighing up short terms fixes vs more difficult structural changes. You have to be able to do both, and in the right sequence. There are many different paths to the same goal. Things change, you have to adapt. www.seangoedecke.com #

Bitcoin is closing in on $90,000 for the first time ever - We are likely now in a period of increased volatility at least until Trump takes over, but generally on the up. The big question is whether we are in a super cycle or not. It certainly could be. If the US sets up the strategic bitcoin reserve they have been talking about, then other countries might follow suit, and then insitutions, and individuals too. www.cnbc.com #

Bitcoin Touches Record-High $85K, Adds Almost $20K in a Week - Looks like it’s the start of the much anticipated bull run. This isn’t investment advice, but there’s been speculation for months that it will reach 100K. www.coindesk.com #

MicroStrategy acquires another 27,200 bitcoin for more than $2 billion - This move is also going to push up the Bitcoin price somewhat. www.theblock.co #

100,000 Chinese students join 50km night-time bike ride in search of good soup dumplings - Things really escallate quickly in China sometimes. For comparison, that’s around the same amount of people that go to Glastonbury music festival. www.theguardian.com #

‘Give us back our Fingers’: uproar in France as Cadbury biscuits vanish - Lots of fond memories eating these tastey treats during my youth. Glad to hear the french are speaking out against this injustice. We brits would definitely do the same if tastey french biscuits disapeared from our shelves too. www.theguardian.com #

Physicist Says There's Another Universe Hiding Behind the Big Bang - For what it’s worth, and this most likely has no bearing on the structure of everything, with all the bizare synchronicities that happen to me on the daily, at times hourly, it very often feels like the universe is using me as some sort of mirror. Also, I wonder how the universe feels about wormholes, on the whole good or actually kind of bad? Or undecided? futurism.com #

Creator of Crypto Mixer 'Bitcoin Fog' Gets 12 1/2 Years In Prison - Financial privacy is something we really need to figure out. It might even be THE most important thing when it comes to individual freedom. gizmodo.com #

New Post: Individual freedom in the age of crypto currencies and AI markjgsmith.com #

Voyager space probe closes in on a 50 year mission - I feel a lot like voyager, hopelessly typing out messages to no one, forever drifting into eternity. www.theregister.com #

New Post: Monarchies and republics: An obvious difference I only just noticed markjgsmith.com #

Polymarket open interest drops 64% after US presidential election - Interesting to watch people getting to grips with these new kinda powerful technologies, they have a sort of governance vibe to them, but also market trading. www.theblock.co #

New Post: Joe Rogan and Dave Smith on government creating the problems they complain about markjgsmith.com #

Canada orders shutdown of TikTok's Canadian business, app access to continue - They sitecsecurity concerns. I wonder if a possible solution to all this type of stuff is to have a password protected data transmission explorer app on all devices so users could see exactly what data was being sent over the wire. Of course that might create security issues itself, but perhaps the trade off would be worth it. You could then at least make an informed decision of which apps you want to have on your devices. Would love to hear why this isn’t a good idea. www.reuters.com #

Relationship between UK and Ukraine ‘has worsened since Labour won election’ - Starmer apparently is waiting for approval from the US on whether Ukraine can use the misiles gifted to it from the UK, despite telling Zelenski it can make an independant decision on the matter. Seems odd. Allowed but also not allowed. Does blocking protect or in the long term just create more war? I wonder if there are smaller scale examples that know these sorts of dynamics. Seems like the gun market in the US is a free market, I wonder if that is a choice they make that reduces war overall. www.theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Deprogramming Dénouement (Issue #189) markjgsmith.com #

Polymarket, Prediction Betting Markets Vindicated by Trump's Strong Showing - The prediction markets have definitely been interesting to watch. Worth remembering though that they function very differently to polls. As you get closer to the event you would expect the prediction market to get closer to 100%. Also the people participating there aren’t necessarily representative of the regular population. It wonder what types of events they get wrong. Prediction markets !== default reality, no matter what people say. Imo, there’s a bit of a danger they, or something similar, could become the next incarnation of the nanny state. www.coindesk.com #

Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Tim Cook and other tech leaders congratulate Trump on election win - Very different to last time. It’s nice to see there is a bit of national unity despite the very vicious run up. I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts, from both the left and right. It’s really interesting to hear the Democrats analysing what went wrong. I’ve been suprised by how good the retrospective analysis has been. It’s suprising because I think it shows that many could see better than they were admiting too during the campaigning. www.cnbc.com #

Stock markets and dollar rise as US election result in focus - Good to see some positive signals from the markets. Keep an eye out to see how this changes during the first few weeks of the new government. www.bbc.com #

Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference? - It’s been interesting this morning to read about the differences, I wasn’t aware of the details previously. The US is technically a constitutional republic, not a democracy. The biggest difference appears to be that republics try to create a balance between majority and minority that prevent situations where the majority totally out power minorities. I was a bit suprised by this because I always thought the Democrats were about protecting workers and minorities. www.thoughtco.com #

Kemi Badenoch announced as new leader of Conservative Party - I haven’t been able to fully read this article as I’m currently getting infiniti blocked everywhere. But it seems like an important moment. I do note that there are a load of strange coincidences around this. K-MALA Harris, also a black woman, all be it technically less black, is running for US president. BAD-enoch’s first name is literally K-me, so in a weird way the universe is saying she is BAD BAD-enoch. So technically BADer as well as blacker, I guess. Also Rachel Reeves, who has a very normal name in comparison, is the first female Chancelor in 800 years. She inherited an economy from the previous Chancelor, a man named HUNT! C how strange the universe is right now? It’s like everything is a scripted reality TV show created by AI agents that are in an infiniti war. This has got to be the strangest link I’ve written in a while. Congrats to both Rachel and Kemi. It’s all good. 🕊✌️☮️ www.bbc.com #

altera-al/project-sid - A literal AI civilisation framework. It was on the HN front page earlier today. - "These preliminary results show that agents can achieve significant milestones towards AI civilizations, opening new avenues for large-scale societal simulations, agentic organizational intelligence, and integrating AI into human civilizations". What could possibly go wrong. It’s not like the entire world is a stage enhabited by actors being fed lines by AI simulations. It’s stuff like this that makes you wonder if there is actually a long term plan to eradicate conservatives. The way things evolve you have to assume there might be a counter plot to eradicate liberalism / the left. Presumably all good, I guess. github.com #

New Post: JD Vance on Kamala’s talking style markjgsmith.com #

New Post: A better metaphor for growth markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Electronic music range markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Debugging a nuclear reaction (Issue #188) markjgsmith.com #

Georgia must change course to open EU membership talks, says European Commission - The EU commission said that Georgia had taken a "conservative and anti-liberal course, away from the west and closer to Russia". www.theguardian.com #

New Post: The ever changing EU markjgsmith.com #

Apple Unveils New M4 MacBook Pro Lineup, Including, Hallelujah, a Nano-Texture Display Option - They finally raised the base model minimum RAM to 16GB. daringfireball.net #

NHS, schools, and biggest tax rises since 1993: The key Budget takeaways - I’m no expert as far as the economy, but seems to me that by making it more difficult for businesses, that’s ultimately going to effect workers, which are the people they are saying they want to help. Increaing national insurance for business and increasing capital gains definitely makes things more difficult for businesses. I hear from business owners that things are already very difficult for businesses. Their 'rebuilding britain' is a great narative but the way they are doing it seems very arse about foot. www.itv.com #

New Post: Redirect to title heredocs markjgsmith.com #

rochacbruno/marmite - "Marmite [Markdown makes sites] is a very! simple static site generator". I thought this looked prettu neat. First of all, brilliant project name. But also the simplicity is kind of great. Supports a lot of cool markdown features out of the box too. Wish I had a laptop so I could try it out. github.com #

New Post: A delightful quiet morning listening to Duncan Trussell markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Matt Odell and Marty Bent on zero taxes markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Freedom tech and the tax system markjgsmith.com #

India's balancing act with the West as Brics flexes new muscles - They have a bunch of things they are trying to organise but the big thing everyone id looking at is their promised payment system, which so far hasn’t been realised in a meaningful way as far as I can see. www.bbc.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Beams Of Light (Issue #187) markjgsmith.com #

Marseille is neither a drug-choked hell nor a tourist paradise: it’s the city that captures France at its best - Really enjoyed Cole Stangler’s piece about this southern city. It’s got a dark reputation that I’m quite well aware of, but apparently in recent years it’s started to nevertheless become a bit of a hub for creatives, with an influx of artists, chefs, musicians and writers. And it’s multi-cultural and generally has quite a tolerant vibe about the place. His description reminds me of East London, in the early 2000s, like Hackney and Shoreditch. Just the right mix of sunshine and grit. Definitely going to keep an eye out for all things Marseille. www.theguardian.com #

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning - I had been wondering what had happened to old Thom. It’s been ages since I’ve seen him in the news. Glad he’s still making waves. Can’t help but wonder what weird and wonderful things he might come up with using AI tech though. But perhaps for it to have any effect for him, the AIs would need to get a lot more powerful. He has after all historically speaking been very okay with computers hasn’t he, more than most anyway. www.theguardian.com #

I am so incompetent, I lose things I never had in the first place - Adrian Chiles writes about how the world is now punishing him for it’s own short commings. I sympathise. I’ve found that having considerably improved my competence in many areas of my life, the world is constantly offended at me now. This happens multiple times per day. It’s constantly trying to trap me, and when I catch it red handed, it gets even more offended. It’s kind of hilarious. But you can’t let on, because you can guess how that makes worldo feel. It’s hard to describe, but it’s definitely a thing imo. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: The future of court cases and the legal system markjgsmith.com #

Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek - The Original Economics Rap Battle! - Beastie Boys style rap battle between Keynes and Hayek. I feel like this is some sort of analogy metaphore simily fractal thingy of life. Really worth watching if you are curious about economics fundamentals. Wishing there was transcript / lyrics so I could get into it in a bit more detail. www.youtube.com #

Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek - Economics Rap Battle Round Two - Another awesome economics based rap. Never would have expected to write that last sentence. It’s like they have figured out life’s ultimate question or something. www.youtube.com #

VladimirMikulic/route-list - "Beautifully shows Express/Koa/Hapi/Fastify routes in CLI". This project made me smile. One of the very first weekend projects I built when I started learning NodeJS was routes-builder, which had a routes visualiser rendered in the browser. That was 9 yesrs ago! How time flies. I like the idea of having this as a standard CLI tool. Listing routes is such a great feature. github.com #

IMF warns Trump trade tariffs could dent global economy as it upgrades UK outlook - It’s all very well saying that tarriffs are bad for everyone, but you have to somehow address the observation, which I understand might be somewhat controvertial, that there are very large reality inversions happening. Seems to me that we need to be at least directionally somewhat aligned on the fundamentals, on the macro dynamics, before we can hope to make any progress at other levels. I’d love to hear why the IMF thinks the US should be borrowing money from the people it is buying products from in order for them to buy said products. Extra points for not doing it in a patronizing style. Peace ✌️🕊☮️ :) www.theguardian.com #

Trump files extraordinary complaint claiming meddling by UK Labour Party - While I don’t personally believe UK MPs have been purposely meddling with the US elections, I think it’s important to recognise that, even though most of the time americans and brits, or should I say britains :), are very friendly, there is significant stuff in our history that could cause various red lines to be crossed, even if inadvertantly done. We should be mindfull of that. It’s a bit much to call it 'extraordinary' imo. And there have been a lot of UK MPs doing trips to the US during the elections, I’ve seen tons of podcasts with trip reports and interviews. If russian politicians were traveling to the UK during elections then it would raise some eyebrows surely. On the other hand I seem to remember a few years back Trump landing in Scotland to buy a golf course or something on election result day. Perhaps it was Brexit, I don’t remember exactly. Bit if a power move. Both sides can at times complain a little too much. www.theguardian.com #

Elon's American 'technopoly' - I think this piece is a little alarmist, but it’s actually a good sign, it’s how free speech is meant to work. But I’m also happy people like Musk and even Trump are using social media, that’s a massive thing for humanity. We are all learning how these systems work as we go along, and actually you could do a lot worse. For all his faults Musk is actually pretty good at listening to feedback, can and has changed his mind and approach on many topics. Better to have that than regulate it all before we can see all the great ways it could improve things. It’s fascinating stuff, user testing at the nation state level. I think the mainstrean / corporate media could recorgise this and have the vision to facilitate this process rather than get in the way. They might even discover new ways of using the tech themselves. www.politico.com #

New Post: Lord Robert Skidelsky on Keynes markjgsmith.com #

New Post: What are these heredoc style blog posts? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The beams of light theory of relationships markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Living as root, mostly a bad idea markjgsmith.com #

Moldovans back joining the EU by razor-thin majority - Yet another chapter in the russia is really bad again epic. www.theguardian.com #

Stripe in $1.1B Acquisition Deal for Stablecoin Platform Bridge - It will be good to finally see Stripe getting decent crypto currency support. I seem to remember that they have, over the years, had several failed moves into offering crypto payments rails. www.coindesk.com #

Meta Glasses Are The Top Selling Product In Many Ray-Ban Stores - I really like the concept of having smart glasses, I could see it being really useful, but privacy-wise it’s going to be a complete nightmare. There are so many a-holes in the world already taking photos of people with their cell phones without permission. Happpens to me multiple times per week currently. You can spot the cameras in the glasses quite easily. Now anyone with thick glasses will be suspect. www.uploadvr.com #

xAI, Elon Musk's AI startup, launches an API - Seems like the big hot AI companies to watch are OpenAI, Anthropic and now xAI. techcrunch.com #

Build A Static RSS Reader To Fight Your Inner FOMO - Great article, it actually looks suprisingly easy to get something basic running. Add HTTP basic auth on the path, and basically you have your own self hosted private feed reader. Might be enough for those morning catch ups with the people you follow in the blogosphere. Uses netlify serverless functions but could also use cron. www.smashingmagazine.com #

My solar-powered and self-hosted website - Man I love this kind of project. There something that’s so very indie web about it, with independance, resiliency and tech geekery shining through. This is exactly the sort of thing I’d get into in the early years of the web and my tech journey. Annoyingly as my mind has been so consumed by global politics and big important things recently, I found it difficult to concentrate on topic while reading through. Really hope one day I can return to these sorts of small scale hobbie projects. dri.es #

Today is Ubuntu's 20th Anniversary (ubuntu.com) - That’s awesome! It’s amazing how time flies. Here’s the HN discussion.lists.ubuntu.com #

Hike in capital gains tax will spark tech exodus from UK, investor says - An increase in capital gains would be a disaster. I wonder if an exodus is something they are actively trying to do. Are they saying to young people 'leave while you still can, go and find places abroad where you can thrive, realistically there is no life for you here'? www.theguardian.com #

North Korean troops have arrived in Russia to fight Ukraine, says Seoul - Quite a funny headline image in this article. Probably a good time to mention that one of the security guards in a nearby office building where I an here is Vietnam is a total Vladimir Putin doppelganger, a 99%er no less, it’s very strange. He showed up a few weeks ago, about the same time I started giving peace signs in response to harassment. www.theguardian.com #

Introducing Express v5: A New Era for Node.js Framework - Feels like this release took forever. It’s a purposely pretty boring release, mostly cleaning up old interfaces, making things consistent. The improved promise support is probably the most useful new functionality imo. Hopefully this will be the foundation for increased development momentum on the project. expressjs.com #

New Post: JD Vance on the weirdness of the current US - China relationship markjgsmith.com #

Traders bet the ECB's rate-cut floodgates are open - Looks like things are going to start heading up and to the right. Everyone in crypto is on the edge of their seat waiting for the big bull run to start. www.reuters.com #

Does France really make the best bread in the world? As a baker, I’d say ... maybe not - When I lived in Brussels in the 90s the bread and pastries were very high standard, way better than in the UK. But things improved a lot. I lived across the road from an artisanal bakery in London Fields for a year that was tremendously good. I miss those days. www.theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Authentic blocking frenzy antidote (Issue #186) markjgsmith.com #

India and Canada expel top diplomats in escalating row over Sikh activist’s death - I’ve been peripherally following this story. You don’t tend to ever hear about indian intelligence services or operations. I can’t even remember a single occurence. It’s a bit of an odd one. Seems to have escallated dramatically. Officials in India deny it happened, asked why Canada didn’t contact them, apparently they did, via the diplomats. www.theguardian.com #

Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement - Service Manual - Progressive enhancement is awesome, very under rated imho. Great thing to keep in mind whenever you build for the web. www.gov.uk #

New Post: Progressive enhancement underrated markjgsmith.com #

Free Public APIs - Could be pretty useful for some of those weekend project test apps. www.freepublicapis.com #

victorqribeiro/TinyJS - "Tiny JS is a lightweight JavaScript utility for dynamically creating HTML elements". It‘s a bit like jquery but for creating snippets of HTML. Kinda cool. github.com #

The EU needs Britain as much as Britain needs it. Where is Starmer’s solidarity? - William Keegan makes the case that similar to the post world war I period, there is a need for a european "esprit de corps". I like this entire line of discourse, I’ve been thinking along similar dimensions recently. The 'le triple non' bit is a helluva quote. www.theguardian.com #

SpaceX Just Caught Its Starship Booster With Giant "Chopsticks" Arms - The video for this is pretty fucking rad. We are definitely more in the future now than we were in the year 2000, which was the year everyone looked at throughout my youth as the year of the future. It turned out to be quite normal in comparison, though some of the parties were mindbogglingly excellent. From what I’ve seen in the press recently parties appear to have gotten kinda nasty, and not good nasty. futurism.com #

In latest move against WP Engine, WordPress takes control of ACF plugin - Holey moley Mullenweg is impressively ruthless. What interests me with this story is that due to the fractal nature of reality, and because of how foundational Wordpress is, I expect there to be a lot of unnexpected externalities and weirdnesses in strange places. Like a collective discovery that there is nobody driving the bus, so to speak. A lot of previously hidden oddities mught start coming into view. techcrunch.com #

Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it? - I feel like at some point this story becomes, is it okay to defend yourself against somebody using your creation against you. What a bizare situation. torment-nexus.mathewingram.com #