markjgsmith

Your Eco-Friendly Lifestyle Is a Big Lie - People aren’t always very honest with trade-offs. I’ve pointed that out recently about bitcoiners and self-custody, it appears some aspects of ecologically minded lifestyles could do with being re-considered too. www.wired.co.uk #

The Guardian view on the AI conundrum: what it means to be human is elusive - Ultimately its not the technology that is dangerous, it's the people directing the technology. Short and somewhat mediocre article about that. www.theguardian.com #

Why 2024 will be the year of ‘curated chaos’ - I don't want to take all the credit for this trend, but I think it's fair to say I have been doing currated chaos for #147 issues now. I don't look into the fashion world all that often, but I found this an interesting read. There's something about how the fashion looks at the world that reminds me of how crypto views the world. www.theguardian.com #

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again - I had just emerged from a pretty serious crypto black pill session when I got down to reading this. Very refreshing. The year 2000 and the years that followed were indeed a lot of fun. Let's do that again. www.rollingstone.com #

How AI-created fakes are taking business from online influencers - The big worry currently is AIs that pretend to be real humans. I wonder if we will look back and realise how quaint this worry was. Perhaps the real threat will be when people actively find AIs cooler than boring humans. www.ft.com #

Happy new year! New Zealand welcomes in 2024 - Wow fireworks! Colors! Not long now, 2024 on the way :) www.bbc.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Happy New Year (Issue #147) markjgsmith.com #

UK vinyl sales at the highest level since 1990 - The cool thing about vinyl is the awesome artwork that often is included. There’s so much creativity that goes into the production. That’s the one thing that we lost with digital. I’m glad people are still collecting, record stores are a big part of the music scene. www.bbc.com #

Jacques Delors: Architect of the modern European Union - European politics is a weird thing growing up in Europe. I recognize many of the names, including Delors', but it felt like all the politics was happening just out of reach, sort of peripherally. Anyhow based on the description of his role, I guess his passing is probably quite a big deal. My recollection was that UK politicians didn't like him that much, but that was likely shaped by the mainstream media of the time. I'm curious to see what the next phase of the european project will look like. Who are the current day European Union 'architects'? www.bbc.com #

‘We don’t want the kids to be afraid of each other’: the Jews and Arabs uniting to heal rifts of war - "We don’t want the kids to be afraid of each other and hate each other. Here, they get to know each other and the parents get to meet". This is really great. www.theguardian.com #

I’ll never stop blogging: it’s an itch I have to scratch – and I don’t care if it’s an outdated format - Music journalist Simon Reynolds on why he'll always keep on blogging. My brain thinks blog-like too mate. What a phenominal Tricky reference. Saying blogging is outdated though is a bit like saying jquery or a Sunday roast is outdated. Some very vocal people say it a lot, meanwhile 80% of websites still love their Sunday roasts. www.theguardian.com #

Great unknowns: nine top scientists on the one mystery on Earth they’d like to solve - I love reading all these various questions from the scientists, it creates new and interesting perspectives in your head, new ways of looking and seing the world. Honestly I'm also completely transfixed by the first image in the article of planet Earth, just floating there in the deepest of space, doing it's thing, with all the oceans and enormous weather system of clouds and that blue glow around the edge. It's so unbelievably beautiful, isn't it? That's where we live, every single one of us. Take a look and think about it for a few seconds. www.theguardian.com #

Chilly dips and cherry blossoms: photos of the day – Christmas Day - It's a bit chilly where I am this morning so I feel a bit connected to all these Christmas swimmers :) www.theguardian.com #

Apple Vision Pro Currently In Mass Production - The much anticipated device is set to be released in the first quarter of 2024. Estimated number of units looks to be less than expected. Staff in stores will be trained soon. You will need an appointment to test it out. wccftech.com #

‘It feels very fun and freeing’: US sees ebike boom after years of false starts - I've been seing more of these here too. They are noticeably bigger than regular bycicles. It's a bit strange to see them zip by with their fat wheels and the rider doesn't even need to pedal. I supppse I remember even regular mountain bikes looked a bit strange whrn they first got popular in the 80s, pushing aside racers and bmx‘. www.theguardian.com #

With my nani in Chennai I was loved just for being me. Isn’t that the essence of Christmas? - It's strange and often difficult living in between two different cultures, but people figure out ways to adapt. A short story about wisdom, principles, integrity and growing old. www.theguardian.com #

Intel's CEO says Moore's Law is slowing to a three-year cadence, but it's not dead yet - They have some tech that will enable transistors to be stacked in 3 dimensions which will keep things going until at least 2030, when they expect to reach a 1 trillion transistor chip. Current chips have around 100 billion transistors. spectrum.ieee.org #

Midnight Mass and surfing Santas: Pictures of Christmas around the world - Not the most extensive collection of photos but its good to see some festivities. www.bbc.com #

Constellations are Younger than Continents - Interesting tangentially relevant Christmas fact. www.lesswrong.com #

Quantum Computing’s Hard, Cold Reality Check - Researchers have been lately trying to figure out what types of problems quantum computers would in practice be useful for. It currently looks like even if big improvements in reliability and throughout are achieved, classical computers are good enough for the vaste majority of computations. If I understand correctly quantum computers are good at problems with small data sets who's complexity increases exponentially with scale. Perhaps we just need to try and find more of these types of systems, which have problems that actually need solving. spectrum.ieee.org #

Huge 2TB microSD card is on the way - This is aimed at gamers. I don't do much gaming, but this stood out to me because...2TB on an SD card! That's insane. overkill.wtf #

Bluesky makes web view public, login no longer required to read posts - That took a while, but at least you can view posts on the web now. For example here’s last week’s newsletter issue #146 announcement. bsky.app #

Alternate Futures for "Web Components" - Carlana makes the case that though Web Components were released a decade ago and still haven't really made a big impact, the general idea of moving functionality into the browser is worthwhile pursuit. Based on how developers are currently building apps using 3rd party libraries, perhaps some primitives implementing reactivity, optimised DOM rendering, and self-sizing iframes would be better places to start. blog.carlana.net #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Nutritious Tech (Issue #146) markjgsmith.com #

How Christmas pudding tried to 'save' the British Empire - It's been so many years since I had Christmas pudding. I distinctly remember hating it when I was young, but it's funny how your tastes change as you get older. Eventually it was one of my favorite things about Christmas. And of course mince pies too. www.bbc.com #

Glynn Simmons: US judge exonerates inmate after 48 years in prison - It's impossible to comprehend that the government can literally steel your life away from you even if you did nothing wrong. Having your life stolen is about the most rotten thing that can happen to you. Makes you wonder if AI will make justice any better, or isn't it more likely that we will all in some way end up like Glynn Simmons? Like that Andy Warhol prediction that everyone would be "famous for 5 minutes", except it would be more like everyone will be "guilty for life but innocent". Seems like it might be a good idea to mathematically prove this remixed prediction wrong. www.bbc.com #

Poland’s new government sacks state TV, radio and news bosses - The exiting far right government had a bad reputation for using the public media to target opponents. The worry is that this show of force is a sign the new centrist replacement government might start using similar tactics. www.theguardian.com #

Ireland to launch human rights case against UK over Troubles legacy act - I'm probably hopelessly out of touch on this situation, but my initial thoughts were anger at the no doubt millions and millions that will be spent on lawyers and consultants and all the rest of it, dragged out over years. Why can't both sides just estimate the cost of the whole endeavour and instead spend the entire amount to lastingly lift people in the region out of poverty. Wouldn't that be a better way to remember all those that were affected, by actually working together to fix and strengthen the community? www.theguardian.com #

Multi-protocol fediverse - "It would be cool if they all supported RSS so we can have a mininum of easily implementable interop between them all. It feels like it could be like how there are many flavours of Linux, but they all support reading and writing to files, "everything is a file". Maybe all social networks have file based feeds." markjgsmith.com #

How Rock Icons Influenced Culture Outside of their Music Mop Tops Psychedelics and More - A few interesting examples of music personalities using their style to influence the scene they are participating in. The article isn’t that great but the examples are quite good. It’s a good idea for an article, but could have been a much better piece in my opinion. americansongwriter.com #

2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse - Pretty good summary of where we are at with social media as we head into the new year. www.theverge.com #

Our website is currently unavailable - The british library got cyber attacked and has been offline for over a week. They expect it could take seceral months to get things fully operational again. The library is still open but some services are unnavailable. www.bl.uk #

Adam Mosseri spells out Threads’ plans for the fediverse - Looks like all the essentials will be supported including following accounts from other fediverse instances, seing replies in your home timeline and eventually also moving followers between fediverse instances. Currently it only works with a few of their testing accounts. ETA is about a year, which seems very long IMO given there are only 3 features. Ability to walk away is key, that's a feature that historically companies have been very unwilling to ship, even in apparrently freedom-centric areas like for example bitcoin. www.theverge.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: The Bitcoin Self Custody Lie (Issue #145) markjgsmith.com #

The await event horizon in JavaScript - Interesting black hole analogy used to describe a situation where async / await could get you into trouble. It revolves around what happens when acquiring a resource using a promise, and that promises never settles. There’s a way around the issue using generators. frontside.com #

Awesome Netlify Updates - Features include caching in edge functions, a new way to define serverless functions (aka functions 2.0), image optimization similar to Cloudinary, and a simple blob storage mechanism. The new functions format give you extra useful things like the ability to specify the endpoint custom location without needing a redirect, route parameters, geo data, http method matching, and easier streaming of data. www.raymondcamden.com #

EU to open membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova - Ukraine appears to already have mostly met the requirements for membership. It will be interesting to see how this changes the positions of other EU countries. Anecdotally I overheard some high schoolers speaking yesterday, here in Vietnan, the name 'Orban' was mentioned repeatedly. I guess they were speaking about the war, and Europe. www.bbc.com #

Threads launches for nearly half a billion more users in Europe - Personally I haven't been using Threads much recently, aside from posting links to the newsletter. Simply not enough time, and all followers are still on Twitter/X. If follower counts increase obviously that would make a big difference, and of course a good quality ActivityPub integration would be a big advantage too. www.theverge.com #

War or peace? Dictatorship or democracy? Europe’s future is on the line - Timothy Garton Ash makes the case that there are two europes. On the one hand there’s a coalition of liberal democracies seeking to peacefully agree and solve their differences, and on the other there is the emergence of more autocratic, dictatorial in nature, far right groups. It's a very cohesive piece, looking at recent history. Ukraine war, Russian aggression, central and northern Europe adapting, immigration issues and more. It paints a high level view of what's going on in the melting pot that is Europe. www.theguardian.com #

Meta starts testing Threads integration with ActivityPub - Great to hear this is actually going ahead, especially since many doubted it would actually happen. I’m not able to read the article because now that I’m offline, the Pocket app has decided that 80% of the articles I saved to read later, still need to be downloaded. This happens almost daily. Anyway, maybe I’ll be able to read it at some point. techcrunch.com #

Ukraine’s intelligence claims cyberattack on Russia’s state tax service - I tend not to link to hacking stories very often. Mostly I don’t find them that interesting. I’m a builder, I’m more interested in building rather than demolition. However this is interesting because of the scale, but also it’s the first example I’ve seen of cyberwar activities that directly impact one of the main sources of funding of a nation state. therecord.media #

Argentina peso: Milei begins ‘shock therapy’ by devaluing currency - Another article that Pocket is today blocking me from reading. Oh well. It occurred to me yesterday that Milei looks a bit like old Bilbo Baggins from the Lord Of the Rings. Seems like he’s got a similar sized challenge. It would be very cool if like Bilbo he suddenly started non-chalently disappearing and re-appearing in totally different places. www.bbc.com #

Uk allows remote working on tourist visa - It was happening anyway, but it’s good to have this clarification. Hopefully other countries will follow suit. smithstonewalters.com #

FFmpeg Lands CLI Multi-Threading As Its "Most Complex Refactoring" In Decades - If you are doing any type if video transcoding automation, ffmpeg is the cli tool you use, so it's pretty big news that it's gone through a big re-write. Discussion on HN with some interesting talk about, amoung other things, re-encoding workflows for generating versions with varying bit rates, resolutions, formats, and also device specific versions. www.phoronix.com #

AI’s big rift is like a religious schism - You know the AI carfuffle is going mainstream when it reaches the economist. I reckon this might start to expose what many have theorised for years, namely that much of religion is about controling people. Or at least that's the case for many, maybe even for people that seem genuine about what they believe. We might very well discover that this type of behaviour is very counter productive, blocking the free flow of information could very well lead to some form of inflation. It will become more obvious now. That's why I think it's notable to see an article like this in the economist. www.economist.com #

What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2024? - This yearly list is always quite interesting. They have some sort of advent calendar of people on the main page, but there are links to more detailed wikipedia pages. Each year I wonder whether we will see an outburst of creativity. I wish there was a way to see if they were having an impact. Culture is massively important, often we are too focussed on tech. We need a forum, but for artists, where you talk by creating and remixing art. publicdomainreview.org #

Fear not spot the robot (Politico Tech Podcast) - Short and kind of fun. It's an interview with Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics, who make very advanced robots. In the future maybe there will be robots everywhere. Best quote: "For every terminator there is a C3PO". podcasts.google.com #

A list of factors that act(ed) as drag on the European Tech/Startup scene - halvar.flake compares silicon valley / US tech scene and the European tech scene. They really are very different. He covers culture, fragmentation, capital markets, regulation and a bunch of other interesting differences. I've done business all over Europe, travelled extensively while doing it, and much of what he mentions rings true to me. addxorrol.blogspot.com #

Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight - This could result in lots of new app stores run by independant developers. Could be pretty interesting. Google will likely appeal the verdict. www.theverge.com #

Elon Musk restores X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones - Trump, Kanye accounts also restored. I guess this is good for free speech. Hard to tell what is cause and what is effect. Did Elon chase away the advertizers to save free speech, or is he saving free speech because he needs more views? I bet it's difficult to plant a free speech flag when everything is shifting beneath your feet. I worry that this will just repeat itself. It doesn't feel like a resolved problem. apnews.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Swimming in Nested For Loops (Issue #144) markjgsmith.com #

UK names FSB unit behind hack-and-leak campaigns, summons Russian ambassador - There seems to be an increase in russian cyberwar efforts recently. Anecdotally I was having a conversation with someone a couple of days ago, and they mentioned that they had read that the wife of Ukranian president Zelinsky had been seen buying a million dollars worth of jewelry on a recent war funding negotiation trip to the US. I looked up the story, and it appears to be fake, likely part of a russian misinformation campaign. I read today that russian president Putin is running for a 5th term in office. therecord.media #

Initial thoughts on the Arc browser - Chuck Grimmett writeup of his first impressions using the Arc browser. I've been hearing it mentioned a lot recently, all very positive reviews. Two standout quotes: "Chrome already looks outdated after a couple hours of using Arc" and "Using Arc + Raycast + Obsidian makes me feel like I’m working in the future". I haven't had a chance to try it yet. I miss not having a proper computer. cagrimmett.com #

‘There’s no winning strategy’: the pacy, visually stunning film about the dangers of AI – made by AI - The world's first AI documentary, made in 3 weeks, 99% generated by AI tools. www.theguardian.com #

Belgian character created to add inclusivity to festive season dragged into row - I have many fond memories of St Nicholas / Sinterklaas festival. It was always the christmas season warm up. The christmas before christmas. I agree with the sentiment that the Zwarte Piet character was a little confusing, but I wouldn't say it was overly so. At least for me, it just wasn't the focus. But I could totally see how these days it might be. I also have great memories of the african communities in Belgium. It's a difficult history but it's also perhaps an opportunity. We have had many integration difficulties in the UK too, though it's different for sure, it's a different vibe. It's a long time since I was in Belgium so maybe I'm very out of touch with how things are now. My initial reaction reading this, to be honest, was it felt a little like some floozy was trying to steel St Nicholas, and it's weird because St Nicholas was never about kings and queens. Also I think St Nicholas might have a wife, so I imagine she's probably a bit miffed. I could be getting this confused with Santa Claws though. Anyhow, in this age of user generated content and fan fiction, perhaps this is just the first iteration of an adaptation. These things take years, but the kids these days are very creative, maybe they will eventually arrive at a more modern story. It might even be a fun journey. www.theguardian.com #

Let’s learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one - I was really excited to read this article, especially after Friday's, somewhat challenging, but actually very good article about using web components to integrate different frameworks. In a way the article is well written, but there are so many small code snippets, often relying on global variables, you quickly run out of memory. I found myself endlessly scrolling up and down, and just wanting to see the whole code. There are also things like Proxys, Weakmaps, tagged template literals, and especially the ?? operator that I'm only partially familiar with. I didn't have an internet connection, so no way to quickly readup on them. I have a vague idea how these frameworks operate now, but my current impression is there is a heck of a lot of indirection, and I wonder if it's more trouble than it's worth. Often feels like it's over complicated for not a lot of benefit. The world around me was really fighting me as I was reading this, it finally let up, but it was too late by then, so bear that in mind. Seems to happen every time I try to go modern JS. One of these days perhaps the stars will align, and I'll be able to learn and write some modern clientside javascript. Today was not that day. :( nolanlawson.com #

tomnomnom/gron - "Make JSON greppable!". This looks awesome. Apparently based on jq, but the interface is much simpler because it focusses on a more limited, but very useful, set of use cases. The world continues to be very confrontational and fighty :( github.com #

ikatson/rqbit - I haven't seen anything interesting come out of the bit torrent community for a long time. The latest v4 has a cli, HTTP and desktop app interfaces. Looks very straight forward to get up and running. Bit torrent is a very useful but underused protocol imo. I keep hoping that one of these days I'll figure out a good use for it. Amazon S3 buckets support it. Sharing LLMs perhaps? github.com #

good-lly/lowstorage - "for Workers using R2". Looks like it could be useful for when you are dealing with non complex situations in Cloudflare workers and handling JSON data. github.com #

AmrDeveloper/GQL - "Git Query Language (GQL) is a query language with a syntax very similar to SQL with a tiny engine to perform queries on .git files instance of database files". Kind of interesting. What would be even more interesting would be an adapter on npm so you could write GQL queries from Nodejs. github.com #

Google celebrates 1 billion RCS users with emoji-filled messaging features - Worth being aware of RCS. I'm hearing it mentioned quite a lot at the minute. Seems like a messaging protocol for mobile networks that's got some momentum. www.theverge.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Oddball Week (Issue #143) markjgsmith.com #

Web Components Eliminate JavaScript Framework Lock-in - I wouldn't say that I perfectly understood all this, it's a lot to get through reading it on a small screen. Combine that with an unfamiliarity with react and web components syntax, and the fact there are several frameworks, and even vanilla javascript. Kind of tough. But...I got enough to see I really like it. I've been wondering what slots are for ages. Pretty cool. It's really well written because the example is simple, but not so simple that it doesn't do anything meaningful. Naturally since all my dev work at the minute is serverside, I now want this serverside :) jakelazaroff.com #

Building bridges - A Twitter thread from me about how people come together in difficult circumstances and build things that make a real difference to everyone. It's tough going, but little by little progress is made. And then hopefully things get easier. It's worth taking a moment every now and again to reflect, so you can remember how things used to be, and see more clearly how things can be in the future. twitter.com #

Shane MacGowan, Pogues songwriter and Irish music legend, dies aged 65 - I haven't listenned to any of his music for years. Some really incredible albums. The anger, love and energy from 1000 years losslessly compressed into a few minutes of mayhem. RIP. www.theguardian.com #

London’s famed black cabs will be listed on Uber’s app in big win for the ridehail company - "Next to New York’s yellow cabs, the black cabbies of London are arguably the most iconic taxis in the world" - The Londoner in me was immediately outraged by this statement! But on reflection, the yellow cabs have a bigger marketing department don't they, so I guess they probably are a bit more iconic worldwide. Still, there's nothing quite like piling into the back of a black cab on a night out. And that turning circle really is very impressive isn't it. Anyhow hope all the cabbies back home are doing alright. www.theverge.com #