markjgsmith

Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight - Writeup from James Vaughan of how to still have fun when your airplane wifi connection is lacking internet connectivity. Fun article though some code snippets would have been useful, especially around how he did the graphs. jamesbvaughan.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bitcoin Butterfly (Issue #134) markjgsmith.com #

Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians? - Bandcamp was the spiritual successor to MySpace as far as usage by bands. It's not an absolutely huge web property like say Instagram, but it sort of ticks along in the background doing it's thing. It has a huge variety of artists, it's cool. All that to say that what happens to it is massively important to the music scene. Let's hope it goes well, though I wouldn't be suprised if we see moves by artists to start preparing life boats in case the new owners turn out to be too hands on. rocknerd.co.uk #

Announcing Deno Queues - This is really cool, I've been waiting for some of the more modern web hosting providers to start offering queues. They are a must have for pretty much any SaaS you might want to build because they enable you to decouple the backend job processing from frontend web page rendering. Their implementation is interesting, with ability to run locally using SQLite, and a way to combine with Deno KV atomic transactions. Great for background tasks like scheduling email notifications and handling webhooks. Would be cool if there was an admin dashboard. deno.com #

Microsoft is going nuclear to power its AI ambitions - This could be quite cool but I would like to see the numbers on the plants waste. There isn't much sense in making clean energy if it creates a different hazardous sutuation instead. www.theverge.com #

When tech says ‘no’ - When the public says no to regulation policy makers are proposing, it usually is either because it's annoying, it has serious concequences for them, or it simply isn't technically possible. Bennedict goes into each, citing recent examples in the current batch of government regulations that are passing through the tech industry. www.ben-evans.com #

earthly/earthly - 🌍 "Earthly is a build automation tool for the container era. It allows you to execute all your builds in containers. This makes them self-contained, repeatable, portable and parallel. You can use Earthly to create Docker images and artifacts (e.g., binaries, packages, arbitrary files)." - "It can run on top of popular CI systems like Jenkins, Circle, GitHub Actions." github.com #

Running jobs in a container - It's good to know it's possible to run custom containers. I have wanted to do that in order to speed up workfkow runs. It's still not totally clear to me from these examples where the workflow steps are defined though. What's the point in specifying a container if you don't also specify workflow steps? Maybe these aren't a complete example? Confusing. docs.github.com #

nektos/act - Gives you the ability to run your workflows locally. Runs off of the workflows defined in .github/workflows and uses docker images. Sounds cool though I've read some reports on HN that it doesn't always work very well. It does seem a bit complex. Sometimes it ain't worth all the extra effort. Linking to it here for completeness, as I've seen it mentioned many times. github.com #

Michael Saylor's microstrategy buys 5,445 more bitcoin for $147.3 million - He's been pretty accurate with his bitcoin predictions to date, so this is likely quite a bullish sign. Interesting choice of header graphic. bitcoinmagazine.com #

Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024 with listeners migrated to YouTube Music - Very disapointing. Many podcasters don't have their own websites so Google podcasts has been my go to place for getting show urls that I include in the newsletter. The interface is minimalist and contains all relevant info. I wonder what will happen to the urls. Will they let them rot or be a good web citizen and keep them alive? If they disapear they will atlantis a massive part of the web which was built during a perhaps unrepeatable period of human intelectual enlightenment. techcrunch.com #

The Booking.com Decision Shows the True Scope of the EU’s Big Tech Crackdown - It's a bit of a suprising decision because to date regulators have focussed on american and chinese companies. But their reasoning seems well thought out, trying to avoid monopolies forming that would ultimately impact users across the eurozone. I'd like to know more about the regulators long term plans to ecourage genuine diversity in the ecosystem. www.wired.co.uk #

Jony Ive is reportedly developing an AI gadget with OpenAI’s Sam Altman - I've always thought it would be cool to have some linux based hardware designed by Jony Ive. Perhaps it will be a GNU humanoid robot, or maybe a super intelligent roomba. Actually what I'd really love would be a podcast audio and video player, with cool new podcasting features like being able view show attachments like images, slide decks and even small html5 apps. www.theverge.com #

Every Programmer Should Know #1: Idempotency - Yes idempotency is an important concept and this article is pretty good at illustrating how it applies in HTTP requests. Personally I have found it to be even more useful in the context of shell scripts. I've previously linked to some articles when I was setting up the backend automation for linkblog.io. Since I've recently added a sitemap, let's find out if these links are findable by a google search. www.berkansasmaz.com #

30 years of the web down under - Stories about the early internet are kind of fun. The commercial internet started picking up steam around 1994. I was around at the time but didn’t do much apart from email and occasional searches to get extra information for the university coursework essays and disertations I was writting. We actually still used real physical libraries quite a bit back then. Anyway, it's quite a trip to think that was 30 years ago. Time flies, but it also takes ages :) theconversation.com #

🚀 New Post: Where is all the missing money? - Ever wondered where all the money that regular people lost in the stock markets actually went? There’s a part of the money system which is essentially hidden called FX, with enormous amounts of money flowing through it, and unbelievably, it keeps the entire system functional. markjgsmith.com #

🚀 What can web developers learn from the industrialisation of farming? (2022) markjgsmith.com #

GitHub Actions could be so much better - The linked article is quite good, but the HN discussion is great. Lots of useful tips and practical examples for writting better Github Actions, mixed in with a healthy amount of complaints and positivity. Reminds you that there are other programmers out there struggling with the very same issues you are day in day out. news.ycombinator.com #

Get All That Network Activity Under Control with Priority Hints - Browsers have a lot of functionality these days. Some pretty straight forward improvements to your site's pageload times possible using these techniques, but I'd be careful trying to use them on everything because I could see debugging priority issues could be a challenge. Always have a base you can fall back to in case it doesn't function as you expected. www.macarthur.me #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Beware Of Circularity (Issue #133)markjgsmith.com #

Swup - "Versatile and extensible page transition library for server-rendered websites. It manages the complete page load lifecycle and smoothly animates between the current and next page." swup.js.org #

WebKit Features in Safari 17.0 - Lots of new HTML, CSS, javascript and developer tool improvements. webkit.org #

How to make your code faster using JavaScript Sets - I rarely use Sets at the minute. I still intinctively use arrays or objects. I'm looking at the performance characteristics of Sets now though, because when you are handling tens of thousands of files then performance can quickly become an issue. bretcameron.medium.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Wonderfull and Strange Nerdy Discussions (Issue #132) markjgsmith.com #

Arm climbs 25% in Nasdaq debut after pricing IPO at $51 a share - "About half the company's royalty revenue, which totaled $1.68 billion in 2022, comes from products released between 1990 and 2012". Arm is valued at around the same price-to-earnings ratio as Nvidia, but without the 170% growth forcast. www.cnbc.com #

Amazon debuts generative AI tools that helps sellers write product descriptions - At some point isn't it just going to be AIs selling to AIs? techcrunch.com #

Arm prices IPO at high end of range, raising $4.87 billion - That's pretty incredible when you consider that they don't actually make anything physical. They are entirely a knowledge product. It's the biggest US IPOs this year. www.marketwatch.com #

Some notes on Local-First Development - Interesting article discussing the local first movement where web applications are designed to run locally. They tend to use technologies like CRDT-based sync engines, to replicate data structures or database tables between client abd server, but could also use replication protocols. The focus is on realtime, multiplayer and offline. The movement aims to have a positive impact on privacy, decentralization, data control. I like the general idea though I can't help but think we are trying to run before we can walk. These fancy technologies are great, but what I want, what I think we need first, are regular content based websites that by default can be viewed offline. I want to be able to browse the web, find a bunch of sites to read, then be able to seemlessly read them later offline, including all the links in the content. It needs to work with images, and code snippets. Currently even that experience is very poor, forget about complicated javascript apps. bricolage.io #

Nasa says distant exoplanet could have rare water ocean and possible hint of life - The planet is 9 times the size of earth, might have oceans, and they have detected some hints of molecules that on Earth are emmitted by phytoplankton. The discovery was made by the James Webb telescope, which was able to capture light from the planet's star that had passed through it's atmosphere. And that all happened 120 light years away. Mindblowing. Some other cool examples of JWT detections listed at the end of the article. www.theguardian.com #

From zero to one hundred in 0.956 seconds - This caught my eye because I had the opportunity many years ago to be driven on the back of a very fast motorbike. I think it was 0-100 in around 3 seconds and it totally freaked me out. I just can't imagine there could be anything 3 times faster than that. Anyhow interesting story, the cigar shaped car was built by students and has a vacuum suction device to keep it on the ground before it's aerodynamics kick in. ethz.ch #

🚀 New Post: Last Man Standing Tech - It seems like powerful AI could become a bigger part in mediating how we interact with each other. What might this look like? markjgsmith.com #

🚀 New Post: The Mental Health Deception - How we view mental health issues has changed a lot in my lifetime. We didn't really even have non-derogatory ways of talking about it. It's a lot better these days but I think we still need to evolve our understanding of the topic. markjgsmith.com #

Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition - Scientists have been able to not only entangle constellations of many particles simultaneously, but by measuring their state in a clever way, stochastically, use the measuring as a way to have some control over the entanglement, since measurement causes entanglement collapse. And by doing that they were able to explore the entire entanglement space. Similar to how many materials go through phase transitions, say from liquid water to solid ice, there appears to be phase transitions in the quantum world. The weird thing is that it's not a material per se it's literally a phase transition in information, where the information shared between two things undergoes an abrupt change. As well as cool science, it's a tale of multiple reasearch groups discovering each other and combining forces. The story mixes in quantum computers, entanglement entropy and even time crystals in what is defo one of the best science writeups I've read this year. www.quantamagazine.org #

🚀 New Post: Where might the Vision Pro make a big impact? - I make the case for why the really exciting opportunities for the Vision Pro might not be as a consumer media watching device but as an information welding mask for those working in science and engineering. markjgsmith.com #

Dear Duolingo: Are any words the same in all languages? - Absolutely fascinating post about culture and history and language and travel. I've never used Duolingo myself but I've heard lots of good things about their app. You know a company is really into their core mission when they write a blog post like this. Just brilliant. I wonder if they have a podcast? blog.duolingo.com #

ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm - "ffmpeg.wasm is a pure Webassembly / Javascript port of FFmpeg. It enables video & audio record, convert and stream right inside browsers." - That could come in handy. Would be awesome if somebody created a frontend in the form of a PWA. It's not clear to me how a user would start using some of these wasm based tools in their workflow. github.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Circles or Squiggles? (Issue #131) markjgsmith.com #

What OpenAI Really Wants - Stephen Levy profile piece about Sam Altman and OpenAI. Starts out comparing the attention he's getting to the Beattles when they first got popular. Seems a bit of a stretch, but in the piece he follows Altman and his small PR team around London as they hop between presidents, prime ministers, university lecture theatres, and more, and you do get a sense that something quite unusual is unfolding. Some interesting insight into the nascent AI / LLM scene. www.wired.com #

How Apple inspired creators to take a risk on its $3,500 Vision Pro - I'm still very intrigued by the Vision Pro, but I think people might be missing the real opportunity. In any case it's a good idea to keep the Vision Pro on your radar. There's going to be a lot of nuances to deal with and it could dramatically change the landscape for developers. I keep asking myself how best to position myself for the new paradigm. www.digitaltrends.com #

The End of Airbnb in New York - NYC officials brought into effect Local Law 18 which aims to put in place limits on short term rentals which some believe are having a variety of adverse effects on local residents. It's not just NYC, many other large cities are passing similar regulations. Some in NYC are calling it a defacto ban on airbnbs. www.wired.com #

If You’ve Got a New Car, It’s a Data Privacy Nightmare - Honestly this is quite shocking. Cars used to be the last space people felt they had privacy, often used as a place to call your doctor or just a temporary shelter from a crazy world. Turns out car manufacturers are now harvesting a plethora of user information, everything from driving habbits to sexual activity and health info to genetic data. They use a variety of sensors and recording devices built right into the cars. gizmodo.com #

Human Embryo Models Grown from Stem Cells - Scientists have created what amounts to a fake 14 day old human embryo. No fertilized eggs or a womb required. Just lab cultured and human skin stemcells - "When the scientists applied secretions from these cells to a commercial pregnancy test, it came out positive." - Synthetic intelligences and biologies on the horizon. Mindblowing. Also where is the .il domain based out of? (Update: Answer - Isreal) wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il #

Wikimedia DNS - Wikimedia have launched a public DNS service, currently a small-scale beta project. Supports both DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT). It's not served on the wikipedia.org domain. meta.wikimedia.org #

Building a wide news commons - Ben Werdmuller writes a piece about local news. How things were, how they have changed with social media, and how he hopes it plays out. Lots of interesting ideas and cool examples. Caffs not Cafes sounds cool, covering London caffs. I'll have to check it out later when I'm online again. Glad to come across this article via my RSS reader. It had been a while since I openned it. I think Ben is part of the HN bloggers feeds collection. werd.io #

The Fed, The Treasury, The White House…Who's Really in Charge of the Economy? - James Lavish takes a look at each of these entities in turn, asking what makes them tick, in order to attempt to figure out who's in charge. It's an unbelievably enlightening piece, which will leave you with your mouth wide open in astonishment at the insanity of it all. jameslavish.substack.com #

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars? - I'm struck by how WASM seems to be following javascript's path. Get it working clientside, then move it to the server and start adding APIs for available hardware interfaces. Personally though I'm more interested in the possibilities for running developer tools in the browser, be able to build for the browser entirely from the browser. I want to be able to build my static website locally from a browser. www.theregister.com #

CSS Grid Systems with CSS Grid - Why aren't there more frameworks that make good use of CSS Grid? Andrew Walpole believes the answer is quite simple and might suprise you. andrewwalpole.com #

🚀 New Post: I’ve setup a nip5 on my Nostr account - Writeup of my experience configuring a nip5 on my Nostr account. Kind of complicated, and I’m still not sure it’s correctly setup. markjgsmith.com #

Why I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency - Nela Dunato describes her reasons for prefering to remain working solo as a design freelancer. She's pretty candid about her reasons, clearly she's had some bad experiences in agencies, and of course she has adapted accordingly. Each person's situation and trajectory is different, no doubt there will be folks that have very valid reasons for doing the exact opposite. I think we can have a world where both models can work side by side, you never know when your life circumstances might change and having the optionality to switch models is a net win for everyone. I wish more people felt as confident to share their reasoning without fearing repurcussions. It's really helpful reading articles like this. I'd love to read something similar from the pro-agency perspective. neladunato.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: A Bit of a Trip (Issue #130) - We are entering into an era of very long timescales. This week we go on a bit of a journey in space and time to try and get handle on what this might mean exactly. markjgsmith.com #

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix - The central governing authority was reconvened in 2020 after 10 years of dormancy. There has been a bit of a resurgence of late. Turns out many of the usenet servers have been quietly ticking along all these years and much of the network is still functional. Might be an idea to have usenet access setup as a sort of backup plan in case modern social media further implodes. The article lists some interesting looking groups active for science fiction and computer history. www.theregister.com #

A lot of stuff is just fine - Chris Coyier, commenting on a Robin Rendle post, points out that as web developers we should be pretty embarrassed that most websites aren't 'just fine'. In contrast to most things in the real world which might not be amazing but are at least mostly alright, websites are full of popups and ads and tracking and too much javascript. It's a very good observation. It should be easier to get the basics right. All websites should render offline, be accessible, and be progressively enhanced with fancier stuff.chriscoyier.net #