markjgsmith

New Post: Happy New Year 2025! markjgsmith.com #

Likas Wigflex RA696 - I’ve been listening to this mix for the past couple of days, lots of bleeps and bloops, very up beat, dark in places, happy and trippy and expansive in others, no lyrics, great for programing, and dare I say, if you find yourself needing something to party to in the early hours, would no doubt be kind of great for that too. And here are a couple more just in case :) ra.co #

New Year's Eve fireworks over Sydney Harbour - Waaow! m.youtube.com #

Starmer throws down gauntlet to watchdogs with growth edict - Glad that it seems to be a matter of urgency. news.sky.com #

How I Automated My Job Application Process. (Part 1) - Interesting to see how people are using AI for these types of one off tools. I used to do this sort of thing for stuff like flat hunting. blog.daviddodda.com #

Thanks to Keir Starmer we’re about to see what a class war really looks like - Life long "of the Left" Aimee Meade reviews Starmer. He likes rich elites too much. inews.co.uk #

British charcuterie is the new English sparkling wine - and Brexit could be helping - Got to love that tastey tastey charcuterie platter, my goodness what a picture. I love this. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Happy New Year 2025! (Issue #196) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Best blog posts of 2024 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Is Russia asking the US to dance? markjgsmith.com #

Russia Imposes 6-Year Ban on Crypto Mining in 10 Regions, Citing Energy Use - They haven’t banned crypto for international payments and in fact Putin recently has been dicussing Bitcoin publicly. It’s a very interesting posture. It's like he’s saying 'you know about bitcoin, we know about bitcoin, would you like to dance?'. This might be the perfect time for western nations to head out onto the dancefloor. coindesk.com #

UK Prince of Darkness Peter Mandelson Donal Trump-Whisperer - I like this pick, good to have a bit of the ghost of Chritmas past sometimes, especially since Trump will be sending the producer for the Apprentice over to the UK. A bit of experience might go a long way. To be honest I don’t know much about Mandelson though. politico.eu #

Meta to add display to Ray-Bans as race over smart glasses intensifies - I still don’t understand how the UI on these glasses works. The article is confusing. Is it an actual small lcd screen or something projected onto the glasses? ft.com #

Elon Musk among billionaires set to donate to Reform UK, says treasurer - Funny picture, jacket makes it appear like he just rocked up in a Spitfire. This is bound to cause some leftist media heads to explode with rage. Seriously though, wouldn’t it be worse if he wasn’t interested in the UK? Hellooow, we need economic growth. It’s strange that leftists are totally fine with russian oligarchs, arab princes, and rich Chinese but US billionaires are totally off limits. theguardian.com #

French PM names new government, hoping to avoid another no-confidence vote - C'est le dream team francais! Nice photo. I feel like their image could be improved with a bit of workshoping. Interesting there‘s been a move towards the right, I wonder how much the US result influenced them. I guess it makes sense to follow suit in some way. theguardian.com #

New Post: The imminent AI vs SaaS war markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Replacing SaaS with AI agents markjgsmith.com #

Ukraine closes series F funding round worth $1.1bn in debt obligations from IMF - The war torn country punching above it’s weight is competing against the Russian Gallactic Empire for sovereignty of the region. They hope to ensure freedom to Europe. The openly anti-Bitcoin IMF has been making several geopolitical moves recently, even while politicians across the world are trying to setup strategic bitcoin reserves. Okay I’m being a bit sarcastic here in an attempt to try and highlight what a wild situation this is turning out to be. No offense to anyone involved intended. theguardian.com #

Outrage as Elon Musk claims ‘only AfD can save Germany’ - Read this to get an idea of the epic pot stiring that is happening. While this will no doubt get many in the UK even more worked up in fist shaking, I think many will be relieved it’s not just the UK that is being proded. I like that it’s opening up conversations that would not otherwise be occuring. It’d also somewhat amusing to see how the left leaning journos are reporting. You can almost feel them being torn between shifting tides. Saying things and not saying things in quite odd ways. Like the whole system is creeking and bending, with many contorsions becoming exposed. theguardian.com #

Greece’s former royal family seeks to regain citizenship 50 years after end of monarchy - I bet it’s horrible to go though this sort of thing, to have your foundations ripped out, to fight for your own existence, even if you are from a priviledged background. There seems to be all these fights between 'the individual' and 'the group' at the minute. We see these high profile cases but I bet, and to some extent I know, this is happening at every level, all over the place. theguardian.com #

Tether expects over $10 billion in net profits for 2024, plans major AI investments - Since these stablecoin companies are making so much money from buying treasuries, it’s interesting to see what they are buying with the money they are making. Presumably they aren’t just going to buy more treasuries, though I guess why not, that kind of play is working out for some. They are investing in companies that align with their vision of the future, trying to grow the whole pie rather than just carving it up, giving themselves the biggest piece. cryptopolitan.com #

El Salvador makes Bitcoin payments voluntary in $1.4B IMF loan deal - Apparently it’s always been voluntary, and their Bitcoin adoption hasn’t changed. But I think it’s noteworthy because it shows that these big financial institutions are anti-bitcoin. And they say they are doing you a favour, making things safe for you, but is that really the case when they have so much invested in their system? cointelegraph.com #

Readers want UK to prioritise EU relations – not US relationship - The worry I suppose is whether or not europe is cooked. So many parts of it appear to be falling apart. The US, though it is in enormous debt, is very well positioned for lift off. However how are they going to grow if everyone else is in decline? As with many things in life there has to be the right balance, on many levels. independent.co.uk #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Maybe Pork & Rice (Issue #195) markjgsmith.com #

US Senate passes government funding bill, averts shutdown - Is this sort of nail biting down to the wire budget shennanigans happening in other countries? It only seems to happen in the US. reuters.com #

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. 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? 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. forbes.com #

New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn't want to be forced to change its views - 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 the 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 I 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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](https://markjgsmith.com/newsletter/2024/11/23/synchronicity-apocalypse days) #

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. 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. 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? 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 :) 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. cnbc.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. thoughtco.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. bbc.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. 🕊✌️☮️ 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". 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 ✌️🕊☮️ :) 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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'? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. gov.uk #

New Post: Progressive enhancement underrated markjgsmith.com #

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

New Post: Grand slams markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Simply Refreshing (Issue #185) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Funny old world markjgsmith.com #

Online shopping returns to growth in Europe amid fierce competition - Well it’s nice to hear some good news about the europeans. I am of course a european, but I haven’t been in europe for many years. reuters.com #

New Post: Tom Tugendhat on the british system of government markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Joe Rogan - Michael Shellenburger on science in the context of vacines markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Scarebundance markjgsmith.com #

Hurricane Milton: nearly 3 million without power in Florida as category 3 storm makes landfall - This US hurricane looks very scary, the photos from space make it look like it’s the end of the world or something. I thought it was interesting that it appears to be named after a famous economist, especially since the US is in such economic troubles. theguardian.com #

Des communes sous l’eau, des dégâts localement, le code jaune maintenu : la tempête Kirk a quitté la Belgique - While in Belgium there’s a smaller storm named after Captain Kirk from Star Trek! lesoir.be #

‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In - And the storm over at Wordpress looks very narly indeed. The latest is that Mullenweg is now forcing users to say if they are affiliated to WP Engine. That’s obviously going to go down rather badly. I continue to be taken aback by his actions, yet there’s a part of me that is impressed by his convictions. He’s likely thought this through an enormous amount and he must see a real long term threat here, so I’m prepared to hear him out on his reasons, because he’s been a great steward of Wordpress and the open web for many years. 404media.co #

‘Trump-proof’ European security by setting up ‘Nato bank’, thinktanks urge - I think the framing of this is pretty dumb on their part, but I’m glad there is at least recognition that they urgently need to get together, come up with some contigencies, practical solutions, and take control of the future of Europe. There’s too many fires happening all around to be complacent and complaining about the past. theguardian.com #

Shein records £1.5bn UK sales amid plan for HQ in heart of Manchester - Undoubtably very popular, but lousy for the environment and I hear they avoid import taxes compared to other similar compsnies because of how they ship products. Interesting they are basing themselves in Manchester. manchestereveningnews.co.uk #

US mulls Google break-up after landmark monopoly case - They sure do have a lot of power. I just wish they would ship more ground breaking products, like in years gone by. I also really don’t want the DOJ to do anything that might break Gmail. independent.co.uk #

New Post: Keen & Tear on innovation in Europe markjgsmith.com #

New Post: New heading fonts :) markjgsmith.com #

Starmer urges all sides in Middle East to ‘step back from the brink’ - Could everybody please stop being shot? Also please stop shooting. Thank you. theguardian.com #

Ireland is a ‘playground’ for Russian intelligence, says former army chief - This is very interesting, especially the planned russian embassy expansion that would have includes 10 subteranian power plant rooms. That’s insane. Also which countries in the east are western countries doing the same to? It’s bound to be happening in both directions, and likely via proxies too. I bet it’s a nice little money maker for many. But what happens when it spans generations? How are we ever going to untangle all this mess? theguardian.com #

Does China now have a permanent military base in Cambodia? - I don’t know anything about the military bases, but I suppose to a certain extent it’s to be expected. One thing I do note on my extensive travels around south east asia is how embeded the chinese community is basically everywhere. In many places there are streets where almost every house had some form of chinese decoration. It seems odd, but accepted. Imagine if there were streets all throughout France and Spain with Union Jack flag's everywhere, it would be a bit odd wouldn’t it? Somehow the chinese have managed exactlyish that. Imho, the european and US expats in comparison tend to blend in a bit better, though I guess I might be a bit biased. bbc.com #

Why tech unicorns struggle to avoid the glue factory - Heck of a numbers game the whole tech scene. ft.com #

Chinese stocks jump as markets reopen after Golden Week break - I’ve also heard in some places that the effect of the stimulus wasn't as big as expected. No obvious signs of it here in Vietnam yet as far as I can tell. bbc.com #

W Hot Drama Week (Wordpress, WP Engine, and Web Components - Oh My!) Ep#636 (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - I’m not going to get into how good this episode is right now, as the moment I started writing this paragraph I started getting harassed by the world. If you are in any way involved in the web or curious about the web, and / or open source for that matter, then do yourself a favour and listen to this episode. Might even change your world view. What version of the simulation are Chris and Dave in that they can have such a nuanced and clear view of things? IMO, it’s a sign that a lot of important things are getting figured out at a very high level at the minute, hopefully for the better. It’s like we’ve reached some sort of tipping point where the number of minimal apps / mental models is approaching a big shift. shoptalkshow.com #

New Post: Another configurable headers test post markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Configurable day and article headers markjgsmith.com #

The Medieval Masterpiece the Book of Kells is Now Digitized and Available Online - Trinity College Dublin has published a high resolution digital version. This is awesome. Hopefully whatever revolutionary tech is the hot new thing in 1000 years time will port the entire internet / world wide web onto itself, so that folks then can read this note about the hot new tech from 1000 years ago getting ported onto the internet / world wide web. If my static site generator is open source and still around perhaps they would consider making a generous donation. Also please ensure the maintainers aren’t hungry, and still living outside in the rain as I am. Rainy season is kind of brutal. And that the world isn’t still enslaving developers to write it’s open source code. Thank you. openculture.com #

I stayed. - Jeffrey Zeldman writes a piece about why he decided to stay at Automattic even though they offered all staff a severence package following the WP Engine controversy. zeldman.com #

Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ - Really seems like a full on war, which is quite unWordpress-like. Matt usually seems like a relatively calm and quiet fellow, which is somewhat at odds with the situation. Suprised to hear WP Engine are making billions of dollars. theverge.com #

Keanu Reeves spins out at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in pro racing debut - I didn’t realise he was a race car driver. Pretty awesome way to promote his new graphic novel. Also great to see someone doing a debut at 60. theguardian.com #

UK ‘resolutely committed’ to its overseas territories, says foreign minister - It’s interesting how many foreign territories the UK still has, very long term strategic in an uncertain world. theguardian.com #

The Why of Crazy Stupid Tech - Om Malik was one of the first tech bloggers I started reading when I first seriously got online. I guess that was around 2003ish. He’s starting a newsletter, partnering with ex-Wired reporter Fred Vogelstein. The focus is interesting: the tech that powers the foundational layers of the stack, from materials science to sythetic biology and how they might change the future. Sounds awesome, can’t wait, subscribed :) crazystupidtech.com #

159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO's fight with WP Engine escalates - Matt Mullenweg founder of Wordpress and CEO of Automattic has been in a rather public fight with WP Engine for a few weeks. The whole saga is bringing to the surface some core issues with open source and specifically Wordpress, one of the most popular open source projects. Many are worried they aren’t as safe from despotic centralised control as they once thought, since Wordpress is using some of the very tactics it was setup to avoid, namely removing things from people. Many open source projects have been runing into philosophical brick walls recently. This case could have a big impact in the space. techcrunch.com #

Boris Johnson calls for referendum on leaving ECHR - That’s the European Convention on Human Rights. The problem is that though it might appear to make sense from the perspective of fixing immigration, it would ultimately decrease valuable protections for all citizens across huge swath of completely unrelated areas. Not being part of a human rights treaty sounds very dangerous to me. theguardian.com #

liriliri/eruda: Console for mobile browsers - This basically does what it says on the tin, ads devtools to mobile browsers. You include a library in the page, and then can open up a devtools style webapp in the page to look at HTML, network requests etc. Very awesome. I wish there was an app that was a dev webserver that automatically added this to your pages, so you could do local frontend development on your mobile device. github.com #

@parischap/pretty-print - This looks awesome. All sorts of additional customisable features to JSON.stringify and util.inspect. colorisation and treeifying for example. I could see this really improving the debugging experience, printing to console is still one of the most popular ways to debug, because it works in most environments, might as well make it better. npmjs.com #

Get ready to meet your AI best friend (Vergecast Podcast) - Lots of awesome tech reporting in this episode, and not just about AI. OpenAI mega funding, the Wordpress community values meltdown, progressive web apps, and a mindboggling description of the Dish/Direct TV timeline over the past few decades, which bizarely sounds to me like a simulacrum of a single week of my life right now here in Vietnam. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Punished For Being Born (Issue #184) markjgsmith.com #

OpenAI gets $4 billion revolving credit line, giving it more than $10 billion in liquidity - It’s one of the biggest VC fund raises of all time. The company’s value is now $157bn. cnbc.com #

Spotify adds a new, automatically updating playlist for offline listening - Really great to see some big players support offline features. Offline is massively underprovided for, but massively important for resilience and independance. You don’t realise you need it until it’s too late. Interesting to learn that Youtube music already has a similar feature. techcrunch.com #

Biggest solar flare since 2017 erupts from sun and Earth is in the firing line (video) - The video of this is quite mesmerising, especially when they turn off the ultra violet filter and you see what is the biggest object for several light years distance, and it’s so completely on fire, like a burning Hades. Earth is expected to be impacted over the next few days. space.com #

UK hands sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - It’s clear immediately from the map hiw strategic the location is, it’s to the east of Aftica and south of India. There is a joint UK-US military based on one of the islands that will remain there. Many of the islanders now live in Crawley of all places. Britain still has quite a long list of around 17 overseas territories. bbc.com #

New Post: Notes on the question of the meaning of life markjgsmith.com #

Croissant debuts a cross-posting app for Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon - I don’t know if it supports posting from an RSS feed. That would be cool. Interesting that it supports threaded posts. I want something that I pass a post to via an RSS feed or an API and it just figures out all the details of making it compatible with each platform. Like a jQuery for social media posting. techcrunch.com #

Spending cuts needed to tackle France’s colossal debt, Michel Barnier tells MPs - Michel Barnier is now the prime minister of France, having been recently appointed by president Macron. He is right leaning and so doesn’t have much support in parliament since the left co-alition’s big win. He’s trying to reign in excessive spending. Interesting situation, big lefty dreams meets reality. Since taxes are already so high in France he wants the rich to step up, and lots of efficiency projects. Europe seems week, Russia is getting stronger, the EU is busy squabling with partners like Britain over old graves, the middle east is turning into a major war, the US is tired of being the world’s police force. theguardian.com #

New Post: Tom Luongo on seing people from all sides - markjgsmith.com #

Irish finance minister calls €14bn tax windfall from Apple ‘transformational’ - Kind of an interesting time for a country all the way on the west of Europe to be having a windfall as the countries all the way in the east to be having issues with the local hedgemon. theguardian.com #

Catholic Belgian university ‘deplores’ comments by Pope Francis moments after speech - Women were upset he has traditional views on women’s role in society, and they spoke out to him about women being subjugated in the past by the church. I thought his comments about victims of church pedophilia were a bit odd: "There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims, so that we can help them feel our closeness". I find the use of the term 'mercy' strange here. Doesn’t it imply the victims did something wrong? And that the church needs to be mercifull towards them? WTF is that about? But also doesn’t it sound a bit pedo? 'Feel our closeness'? What are you saying mate? And lastly, I happen to know there is an american parish in Brussels called 'Our Lady of Mercy'. Bit of a coincidence. I note that last week there was news the woman president of the European Commision unilaterally re-organised all lead roles, flipping from 60/40 male-female to 40/60 male-female. Just 'because'. This whole thing seems weird. theguardian.com #

Top Russia diplomat warns west not to fight ‘nuclear power’ in UN speech - Russia’s "we can invade any small nation and you can't do nothing" policy is fucking demented. theguardian.com #

European ministers call for immediate ceasefire in Lebanon - This ground invasion thing is strange. I feel like it’s a rather extreme thing to do unless there is some sort of existing teritorial dispute. Ground invasions don’t tend to happen unless there’s a fight over said ground. I wonder if there are some facts thag are being omitted. theguardian.com #

UK universities urge government to restart flow of EU students after Brexit - I think that for university places, it’s a free market and there should be a corresponding number of good quality high standard places made available in the EU. Both sides should need to convince the students their courses are valuable. As long as fees are being paid based on demand for places there shouldn’t be much of an issue. Seems like they could figure out something. I think likely the bigger thing is the work placements side of things which is complicated, and Starmer is right to hold off on that. Using british youth as a bargaining chip doesn’t seem like such a great idea. theguardian.com #

China, South Korea, Taiwan to spend most on chip equipment 2025-2027, industry body says - It’s all about chips at the minute, at least until the current AI wave runs out of forward motion. reuters.com #

Keir Starmer calls for the 'return of the sausages' in Labour conference speech - Amusing gaff. Strange that it happened just a few days after my sausage pastry incident in the park, which was also the day I innadvertently Keith’d Keir. I think the return of the sausages would be magnificent right now, I've hardly eaten anything today. m.youtube.com #

Raised by the internet - I thought it was noteworthy that the first time I’ve been subjected to a 7 day starvation, that the day after I finally got some food this article popped up on Hacker News. Interesting also no dates on the other blog articles on the site. It highlights the dilema of a captured truthful person. If you extrapolate, at some point it stops being feasible. Would the articles keep popping up with ever more impossible scenarios? The only way to find out would be to lie, but then you would be pointed out as a liar. If you don’t then eventually maybe you’ll actually get murdered by the world. This kind of thing is happening constantly to me, and not just on HN. Pretty much everywhere. jimmyhmiller.github.io #

Starmer visit to Brussels could lead to overhaul of Brexit deal - This really sadens me. I want the youths, in britain and europe, to have mobility for sure, but the reality, the thing that no one is saying out loud is that europeans want this because they want free native level english language exposure and immersion. It’s not really about becoming friends. Be honest europe. So I think Starmer is right to hold back on that for the moment. The other thing that really sadens me is this notion that 'britain quit'. WTF is that? Were we employees of europe? No. European leaders you need to re-evaluate your morals, and grow up. Britain democratically chose to leave, and no country has ever done that before, and so it’s been incredibly difficult for everyone involved, but both europe and britain will be better in the long run, as long as you can manage to get past your mummy and daddy issues, and stop projecting them all on britain. This is a great opportunity for all involved, especially because there are many wars developing around europe’s edges. Stop procrastinating, start thinking creatively, leave your exploitative thinking behind you, lets build something better for the next generations. theguardian.com #

New Post: Merdeism markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Vampires Vampire Attacking Vampires (Issue #183) markjgsmith.com #

Boris Johnson: we considered ‘aquatic raid’ on Netherlands to seize Covid vaccine - On one level this whole invade Holland for vacines thing is obviously quite amuzing, but when you combine it with the no birthday cake story, no matter how you feel about Boris, how pathetic is it that the primeminister couldn’t even have a birthday cake on his birthday. Even if he’s lying about it, it’s so ridiculously pathetic my brain is having difficulty comprehending. What is going on? theguardian.com #

New Post: Altman’s reality distortion field markjgsmith.com #

UK must stop being naive over resetting relations with EU, thinktank says - There something that this article captures but I’m not convinced that the important thing is that the EU is all offended that a country should dare to leave. Looking at the macro happening with elections everywhere europe is looking more and more like it could be a sinking ship long term. To be sure that would be undesirable for everyone. There’s likely naiveté on both sides, but using that as a thing to hit the other over the head with is unproductive and childish. Better would be to move as quickly as possible to mend some core elements and stop procrastinating. Both sides stand to benefit in these uncertain times. theguardian.com #

New Post: Joe Rogan’s vision on immigration sounds cool markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Marty Bent and Matt Odell on Trump family World Liberty Be Defined markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The crazy future of RL deep fakes markjgsmith.com #

We have done more in 11 weeks than the Tories did in 11 years’: Keir Starmer defends his record - I thought this was a pretty good roundup of the story do far. It’s very high level, but I kind of like the general vibe. theguardian.com #

New Post: Our Keir Starmer Journey markjgsmith.com #

Microplastics in the Olfactory Bulb of the Human Brain - It’s a very detailed study, the intro section is quite skimable, but it doesn’t have the level of detail I was looking for. Still gives a vague idea of the potential dangers. jamanetwork.com #

New Post: Human body threat detection tech markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Front Running the Big Bang (Issue #182) markjgsmith.com #

Why Generalists Own the Future - First of all nobody 'owns the future'. I’m not saying there aren’t some interesting ideas in this article, there are definitely things worth thinking about. But I hate most of the framing. The notion that it’s even useful, let alone a safe thing, to reduce the entire universe to a binary is stupid. 2/3 of the Romans were slaves, avoiding such vampire dynamics is probably a much more important task than getting overly worried about pigeon holing people. every.to #

New Post: Punish yourself so you can be nice to yourself markjgsmith.com #

Israel bombards southern Lebanon after Hezbollah chief vows ‘punishment’ - This is aweful but the details are actually very interesting. It’s not just Gaza, it’s Lebanon involved now too. There’s a thing called the 'Axis of Resistance' setup by Iran as a counter organisation and narrative to the 'Axis of Evil' thing which I guess dates back to the Iraq war. The details of the supply chain attack are all interesting too, various companies in different countries. But the final thing mentioned is that Isreal submitted a ceasefire
proposal to the US. Basically they are saying, 'we got you back for the attacks at the Isreali music festival, now the war ends'. It will be interesting to see how the international community reacts. theguardian.com #

Explosions linked to walkie-talkies kill at least 20 in fresh Lebanon attack - This story is so f-ed up. I sure hope this isn’t the future for all of us, but the way the world has been going it doesn’t seem that far fetched to imagine that it could be. How many of us even have any idea how many degrees of separation we are from potential targets. The further we go down this road, the closer such a reality becomes. Next year’s, actually fuck it, this year’s most popular Christmas prezzy: bomb proof phone cases. theguardian.com #

New Post: Sparrow people markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Matt Walsh on racism, social media, US politics & the strange world of professional cuddlers markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Slavery, the bible, and the changeability of institutions markjgsmith.com #

11ty is joining Font Awesome - Well that's an interesting development. Font awesome is well...awesome, so really interested to hear more about how and why this team up happened :) 11ty.dev #

Inbox ten - Ingesting information around you, not blocking other teams, and other interesting thoughts and tips about being successful in a digital world. boz.com #

France picks Sejourne as nominee for EU Commission after Breton clash - Looks like France and Germany might be having a bit of a power struggle in europe. theguardian.com #

Singer Tito Jackson dead at 70 - There’s a Tito Jackson doppelganger that I see out and about quite often here, except strangely he’s white. Aside from the skin color the resemblance is uncanny. bbc.com #

Why the world has to be built by innovators rather than just hoped for by optimists Ep#2191 (Keen On Podcast) - Great discussion between Andrew and Keith, covering I think some of the more important tech topics du jour. I find their occasional somewhat different use of language kind of fascinating, and listening them both explore that as a sort re-occuring side quest to the main show topics is really eye opening. Andrew is quite ruthless in keeping them on track, and it’s very effective, they stay on topic much more than other shows. Some useful off pistes but not too much. I think that’s part of what gives their show an interesting and unique flavour. I love the variety you get in podcasting. podcastindex.org #

Starmer says rebuilding UK means painful decisions, not just ‘a lick of paint’ - I quite like this home renovation metaphore. theguardian.com #

Emil Amos (Duncan Trussell Podcast) - The shocking prank call episode. I feel like I am surrounded by people perfecting their prank call skills most days, maybe I am living in prank call school? That would certainly explain a lot. Such timing from the universe. podcastindex.org #

Joe Biden dismisses Russian threats during meeting with Keir Starmer - This entire situation is abhorent, and the US - UK bickering is worrying. It seems like Putin is under the impression he is in some sort of unspoken agreement with western nations to continuously bully Ukraine while the western nations pretend to help but are really just holding the Ukraine in a tight grip while Russia pummels them. Which side are you helping? It’s time to decide. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Massive Enormous Gigantic Huge (Issue #181) markjgsmith.com #

Pope criticizes Harris and Trump and tells US Catholics to choose ‘lesser evil’ - He boils it down to immigration vs abortion, which is the most insane thing. It’s like 'kill our babies and take our jobs' vs 'have our own babies and keep our jobs'. It’s like the most nightmarish IQ test ever. The answer is obvious, yet somehow there’s the most insane reality distortion field and it’s totally not obvious. theguardian.com #

Starmer tells Putin he started Ukraine war and can end it any time - Clearly a war with Russia, which has the potential to turn nuclear, would be bigtime shit for everyone. Ironically non nuclear nations might survive. But that’s not why I’m posting this. I’m posting this because it’s weird to me that the day after I write about the importance of no strings attached aid, the main story is about no strings attached aid. This sort of thing is happening constantly to me, like most days. Why universe are you spiritually, metaphorically and physically always on the friggin warpath with me? What is up with you? theguardian.com #

Billionaire completes first private spacewalk - Looks like the space race is really getting going. bbc.com #

Farmers and students star in China's viral new football league - Interesting to see that the small football leagues trend that’s been gathering steam in the west is doing the same in China. bbc.com #

Jon Stewart Tackles Harris & Trump's Debate and What This Means for the Election | Steve Ballmer (Daily Show Podcast) - I feel like Jon Stuart is on some strange quest to explore the limits of comedy. I’m not sure I like it. At times I just felt confused like I imagine a child feels when seing his alcoholic father go on a hate filled bender. It just stops making sense and turns into some form of nightmare. Note I’m not saying Jon had been drinking alcohol, just that the behaviour is in some way similar. The second half of the show is pretty good, putting the weird comedy aside, his analysis of the political situation is great, he asks great questions, and it feels like his heart and concern is in the right place. But do we really have to go through the nightmare synthetic abusive comedy alco dad to get to that? podcastindex.org #

What Makes a Good Sense Of Humour? Ep#210 (No Stupid Questions Podcast) - Good episode, even if the universe is clearly still in abusive alco father mode. This just felt like I was taking another spiritual beating, but you know, the content was pretty good, ymmv. Just made me feel more tired. freakonomics.com #

Express v5.0.0 released - There isn’t an official blog post about it yet, but looks like v5 is out. This is just the list of PRs included, difficult to get any sense of what’s new. Lots of folks have been waiting for this for years at this point. github.com #

To end extreme poverty give cash - not advice | Rory Stewart (TED Talk Daily) - I have to say I quite often disagree with Rory and Alistair, for instance my heart sank after listening to a pretty good episode all about the recent US election debate, when they finished it off by saying Trump watched too much tele while eating Big Macs, out Trumping Trump as it were. They do the exact thing they so veheminently object to in others. I guess it’s just this horrid bit of human nature that is in us all. Anyway putting all that aside for a second, because this TED talk is a real tour de force. I think Rory is right about cash, because aid work so often is just a way to hide people stealing, it never reaches the vulnerable. Just give it to them directly. And the no strings attached thing is important too, and perhaps the most difficult. Saying 'buy some food' to a homeless person as you give them cash, is an attached string. What if they need to buy a bar of soap or a bottle of water instead, you’ve just removed their agency or turned them into a liar. You can’t live their life for them. Blocking them is really just you blocking yourself, because next time it will be even more difficult. Worth listening to this episode. podcastindex.org #

Apple must pay 13 billion euros in back taxes, EU’s top court rules - There’s something really not right with this case. It’s taken many many years, and there’s this enormous back taxes that have to be paid, yet somehow all sides, whether that’s Apple, the government of Ireland or the European Union are still literally all claiming they did nothing wrong. What the fuck happened? It feels eerily similar to my situation here in Vietnam, all be it on a much bigger scale. I wonder do any of the sides in the bigger case feel they are slaves and / or prisonners? cnbc.com #

Battle of Waterloo dig uncovers horror of severed limbs and shot horses - If there’s one thing the universe is definitely not doing to me right now, that’s it being on the warpath. Definitely not a warpathy universe today. No sir. Nope. Universe !warpathing. Interestingly I once came 1 person away from meeting the queen of England in Waterloo. True story. theguardian.com #

Mel B among Britons taking fight against afro hair discrimination to parliament - I love Mel. When I moved to the UK for university was the time when the Spice Girls were just taking off big time. It was totally not my type of music, I was always indie and alt rock, but they were always on the tele and newspapers, so she was part of the backdrop of me discovering my home country for the first time. I find this afro hair protected status thing quite strange. Won’t it lead to more bullying in reality for regular afro wearers? What about white people with perms? Do they get protected status too. Is Gerry going to do the same for red heads? I could get a partial beard protection in that case. What about asian straight black hair? How are we discussing hair styles as a government rule? Isn’t this a little bit ridiculous? While we are here, what about freckles? I have a lot of those. I want my freckles to be a protected characteristic! I bet I’m not allowed to say that. Definitely my favorite story so far this week :) theguardian.com #

The Big Tech Sandwich (June 2022) - A piece I wrote a while back. I’m re-posting it again now just to give a sense of the scale of the challenge the world is up against. It’s no doubt an example why I’ll never be running for office anywhere, but I‘d like to live in a world where it’s a lot easier to build. We need our leaders to step up to the challenge. markjgsmith.com #

EU ‘needs €800bn-a-year spending boost to avert agonising decline’ - Mario Draghi: "For the first time since the cold war we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation". The former Italian prime minister has published a hard hitting "we are pretty fucked" report. Where are the european challenge accepted folks hiding? theguardian.com #

New Post: How great, or not, is poker? markjgsmith.com #

Mastercard Launches Crypto Debit Card in Europe: Spend from Self-Custodial Wallets - Pretty interesting, could make using self custodial crypto in daily life much easier. watcher.guru #

Why Peter Schiff Hates Bitcoin & The Bull Case For Gold (Bankless Podcast) - The notorious Bitcoin hater makes quite a compelling case. I was a bit suprised how little Ryan and David pushed back on him. Also what timing, to have him on in September, known to historically be one of the worst performing months for Bitcoin. Interesting choice. bankless.com #

DJI’s $199 Neo selfie drone is going to be everywhere - This looks awesome, likely will end up being the new digital nomad / solo traveller must have. theverge.com #

Should everyone get free money? (The Rest is Money Podcast) - Really enjoyed this episode as I siped on a hot cup of coffee this morning. Two main topics: how do we configure society to handle the coming AI revolution? And what can we learn from the recent Oasis tickets fiasco? Both great topics, with some thoughtful analysis. Like Robert I was always much more of a Blur fan, but I softenned my stance during university because I saw how much fun we all had at the student union when Oasis tracks came on. I like both now, like two great flavours of ice scream. podcastindex.org #

Elon Musk now controls two thirds of all active satellites - Interesting fact. It’s kind of a shocking figure. On the other hand perhaps it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps in the future all serious entrepreuneurs will need to have satellite constellations, and not just around Earth. independent.co.uk #

Top 10 people most likely to reach trillionaire status - Seems like this will have happened by 2030 and be accelerating for many. cnbc.com #

Google and DOJ return for round two of their antitrust fight -- this time about ads - This looks likely to be one of the big court cases happening over the next few years. Certainly looks like Google took control of all sides of the online ads market and tightenned the screws to extract as much as possible, but the devil is in the detail. theverge.com #

Boris Johnson faces ‘serious questions’ over new business with uranium entrepreneur - Boris is clearly soldiering on too, as is the universe. In all seriousness though, this does look like quite a story, with some pretty thorough reporting. Shell companies, uranium trading, Iran, nuclear power plants, a mysterious appointment of a junior assistant to the House of Lords, and a series of links that lead back to RFK in the US. It’s like a plot setup right out of a Bond movie. theguardian.com #

New Post: We have control issues markjgsmith.com #

Official NGINX Open Source development repository has moved from Mercurial to GitHub - Big news because Nginx is such a big part of web infrastructure. It‘s used as a reverse proxy / load balancer, and sits on front of much of the web’s websites. It will be interesting to see how the visibility of the project changes. mailman.nginx.org #

YouTube takes down right-wing channels linked to DOJ Russia indictments - Two interesting points I’ve heard about this story: (1) another russian interference story right before elections, what a suprise, (2) strange it’s always right wing media that is colluding with russia, why would Russia care which side to collude with? (3) it could be an attack on podcasting, the only fully open publishing medium. washingtonpost.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Unified Narratives (Issue #180) markjgsmith.com #

AIs are now paying other AIs with crypto - Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong announces this crypto milestone. I'm wondering if we should all rewatch the Termintor movies. [sarcasm] but also [kind of not sarcasm?] especially given that my git client is currently blocking me from changing the history on one of my repos, one which I literally just finished integrating into most of my other repos. Coincidence? Something tells me this isn’t the end of this story. x.com #

New Post: Extremely evil, duh markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Could we build a decentralised podcast index? markjgsmith.com #

A mega-merger aims to reshape India's entertainment landscape - Could capture 40% of the TV market including sports, which importantly includes cricket. I’m suprised the deal is only worth $8.5bn. If it does go through, could be one of those deals that is worth a lot more 10 years down the line. bbc.com #

US, UK and EU sign on to the Council of Europe’s high-level AI safety treaty - I’m not sure how important such a thing is, though probably worth knowing it exists. It looks like it’s seeking to bring together a whole load of similar sounding initiatives that already exist. One thing that raised my eyebrow: signing countries are committed to a "circular requirement". The programmer in me looks at that and thinks, that + AI sounds like it could have some unnexpected and unbounded negative externalities. techcrunch.com #

New Post: Is the concept of money blocking our understanding of the universe? markjgsmith.com #

Multithreaded Programming in Node.js using Atomics - I hadn’t read about atomics before, so far never needed to use worker threads outside of a test app. It’s cool there’s way to avoid race conditions. At some point I want my static site generator to support worker threads so might be the thing to use. pavel-romanov.com #

New Post: Journalists do definitely spread false information markjgsmith.com #

Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress - This sounds awesome. I hope they document a publish the journey as they go. techcrunch.com #

New Post: Tumblr moving open source, Wordpress getting cool techcrunch.com #

There’s only one way to keep Germany’s far-right AfD at bay. Address the concerns it exploits - Big changes in Germany, at least according to the Guardian. theguardian.com #

New Post: How to get a balanced view of Europe? markjgsmith.com #

I just crossed $1 million on GitHub Sponsors. 💰🎉 - Lots of interesting tips. It’s cool to know it can be done. Seems light years away from me right now. calebporzio.com #

Dave’s Second Brain Idea, Notion Thoughts, And Google’s LLM in Chrome - Really enjoyed Dave and Chris’ discussion about second brains in this episode because somehow it fits in quite well with a lot of the stuff I think about while making my static site generator and website. Also LLMs in the browser! Very cool, I do believe I predicted this! shoptalkshow.com #

LLMs in the browser (17/03/2024) - Supporting evidence, my prediction of LLMs in the browser :) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Perverts vs Normies markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Hyper hyper control days markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Sequence down at the canal markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Javascripts, Exponentials, Aliens & Slaves (Issue #179) markjgsmith.com #

‘Hold them captive’: Australian billionaire boss aims to end staff going out for coffee - So I write and publish a blog post about the Ukraine war aid being used to turn britons into slaves and this article pops up literally right after publishing said blog post. What are the chances? Probably just magic confirmation bias. Sure. I guess things are so f-up they are actually fine. Sure. theguardian.com #

Who needs GitHub Copilot when you can roll your own AI code assistant at home - Seems like a good idea to get familiar with how to run these open source models locally, especially for code assistants. theregister.com #

New Post: Britain’s Ukraine aid situation markjgsmith.com #

Google Meet’s automatic AI note taking is here - This does sound kind of cool, though much like the author, I wonder what the quality of the notes will be like. I was listening to a podcast recently in a podcast app that had follow along style auto generated transcriptions, which most of the time was very accurate but it would get many propper nouns and peoples names incorrect, and differently incorrect each time. theverge.com #

Ministers are considering banning smoking in a variety of places, including pub gardens, outdoor restaurants and outside sports venues, nightclubs and in small parks - Seems a bit excessive. I’m really glad I don’t smoke anymore, but the one important thing it taught me was how insane your inner self can be. I knew I needed to give up when I reached the top of a flight of stairs one day, hardly able to breath, and my inner self’s first thought was to reward myself with a cigarette. That obviously made zero sense. It was difficult to give up, but when I did it was the beginning of a long journey of discovery about my mind and body. I wonder if without cigarettes would I ever have noticed? Now that I’m smoke free a total ban feels like it could be like pulling up the ladders to awareness for others that haven’t had that experience yet. news.sky.com #

Nvidia reports 122% revenue growth on surging demand for data center chips - Nvidia still riding that sweat AI wave. The thing that made me read the article was that it’s doing some big share buybacks. cnbc.com #

New Post: Chris Coyier on LLMs using your data markjgsmith.com #

Macron on Telegram CEO’s arrest: French government was not involved - "This is in no way a political decision" - That’s a very strange way to deflect. Surely the judges are part of the government, no? What a strange game of hot potato. politico.eu #

New Post: Politics ambidextrous markjgsmith.com #

London’s Luxury-Home Market Looks to Rich Americans to Save It - Make London great again ’init. bloomberg.com #

French officials question Telegram CEO about child sexual abuse images and drugs - I wonder if these days it’s the case that just being a tech business CEO opens you up to being arrested abroad. Makes travel a lot more worrisome, because the rules are different everywhere. We should all probably just be mindless dumb henchmen drones, and put the humanoids in charge. npr.org #

What's new in ECMAScript 2024 - Some of these seem kind of fun, e.g. emojis in regexes, but the rest just feel overly complex to me. GroupBy looks useful but it’s annoyingly not on the Array object where one would expect it. Have we reached ECMAScript peak usefullness? I dunno I’m just a boring web programmer, all this fancy juggling just seems a bit over the top to me. pawelgrzybek.com #

New Post: Liberalism should be about liberty not beer markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The Game in a game problem markjgsmith.com #

Billionaire Telegram CEO Pavel Durov Arrested In France: Here’s What We Know - A strange fact from the Telegram CEO arrest. On his departure from social network VK - "he was fired after trying to withdraw his resignation". That’s surely quite unusual. Based purely on the amount of Techmeme associated articles and social media posts from anyone who’s anyone online, this story appears to have really stired things up. forbes.com #

Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app? - Some interesting subtleties about Telegram’s encryption implementation. blog.cryptographyengineering.com #

Mike Lynch had concerns over Lucy Letby conviction, says former minister - I link to this because I’ve already been linking to several articles on this story, a story which seems very sketchy. independent.co.uk #

New Post: The mind bending realities of the universe’s scale and deep time markjgsmith.com #

Telegram app founder Pavel Durov reportedly arrested at French airport - Arrested aboard his private jet, there was a warrant for his arrest. He’s been living in Dubai since he refused to comply with russian government demands to shut down opposition groups on a social media app he used to own. It’s unclear why there was a french warrant out for his arrest. His fortune estimated to be $15.5bn. Telegram has 900 million users. theguardian.com #

How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing - Lidl is similar in a way to Aldi, it’s sort of a budget supermarket chain, but it’s got quite a unique vibe, stocking lots of lesser known brands, so there’s lots of choice and you often find products you would never normally try. Super interesting they are getting into cloud computing. I wonder if this is a new trend, where large local businesses start running their own clouds and offering services to smaller local businesses. I think it makes a lot of sense. Interesting they ended up buying a security company co-founded by a former boss of Israel’s secret service Mossad. That ticks the security box for sure. Clients include SAP and Bayern Munich football club. Their main offering is experience keeping competitively sensitive data very confidential. ft.com #

‘No thanks, I’ll pass on the service charge’: Why UK diners are opting out of tipping - Really not a good sign. It’s crazy to think that waiting staff have to pick up the slack when the economy goes down the tubes. Huge numbers of people are opting out of discretional service charges. Time for those with money to start overtiping, because if these places go out of business, it will be really tough to get them back up and running again. Tipping works great in good times, gives businesses flexibility, not so great in hard times though. independent.co.uk #

China's robot makers chase Tesla to deliver humanoid workers - It’s fucking wild that there is now a tech category called 'humanoids'. Big push to start selling humanoid robots by 2025. The economic singularity is approaching. How long until digital nomads start moving around with a 3D printer and small teams of humanoids? reuters.com #

Apple will let developers
use the iPhone's NFC chip - Lots of cool examples of how the new chips could be used. I wonder what the privacy implications are for this new technology. Since it will likely become pervassive tech used everywhere, I’d like to know which services are worth the trade off and which it makes sense to just opt out of using. indiehackers.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Supercuts, Urban Art, Bitcoin, AI & Aliens (Issue #178) markjgsmith.com #

As Telegram, WhatsApp, and numerous other web services go down in Russia, Moscow blames attackers while activists suspect Kremlin interference - The rumour is that the authorities enabled ‘anti-messenger mode’, something that apparently has been used at the regionsl level before. It’s the first time such a thing has been observed at the national level. Authorities have blamed a DDOS attack. meduza.io #

Balaji’s Network State Becomes a Reality in Singapore - I like almost every aspect of this project. I think there's a huge potential to build something truely ground breaking. But I don’t like the idea of focusing on 'Dark Talent' because it makes it sound like some sort of clandestine thing, especially since he explicitly says that legacy institution people aren’t suitable. I don’t like this exclusionary vibe, seems kind of elitist. The main thing that worries me about the network state movement is that it could very easily be used for bad purposes. Imagine a world where secret criminal network states exist, run by mafias, alongside the existing nation states. That seems scary to me. But if it’s all done in the open it could be brilliant. thedefiant.io #

CCTV emerges of moment Sicily yacht sank as search efforts continue – video report - Not exactly convincing. theguardian.com #

Government borrowing surges to higher than expected £3.1bn as Reeves under pressure to raise taxes - They are missing billions and having to borrow it, abd of course everyone is blaming everyone as they sip on their $10 frapachinos. independent.co.uk #

Being on The Semantic Web is easy, and, frankly, well worth the bother - I’ve been hearing about the semantic web for years, but nothing ever happens with it. This article makes it seem quite straight forward, at least to get started. Also mentions some competing standards that gave emerged. Seems like there could be an npm module or something to make it easier to add these semantic pieces during my site build. csvbase.com #

U.S. Elections-Linked Bitcoin Options Draw Nearly $350M in Open Interest - Seems the hive mind is predicting a big Bitcoin rally around the elections from current $60k price to $80-100k. coindesk.com #

New Post: Rory and Alistair on the treatment of palestinian prisoners markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Steph and Grace on how education affects collective organising & action markjgsmith.com #

Body of Mike Lynch pulled from Bayesian superyacht wreck - Such a bizare story, and a lot of strange synchronicities with things going on in my life for some reason. ft.com #

Running Postgres inside Node-RED via WASM and PGlite - I’m always curious about Node RED, it reminds me of Shake in vfx which is the software that’s most popular for 2D compositing. Or at least was when I was working in vfx. I’m undecided whether such a tool would be a good idea in say news publishing. I wonder how much such software shapes the quality and easthetics of the final product. conoroneill.net #

Announcing Official Puppeteer Support for Firefox - I haven’t used puppeteer on any projects myself but I understand that it’s very popular. I guess they just need to get it working with Safari. No mention of if that’s on the horizon. hacks.mozilla.org #

Sicilians are brought up to hate our island – but those of us who flee are seen as the enemy - Lots of stuff in the news the past few says about Sicily. It’s interesting to learn some of the details about their expat culture and how it’s connected to long histories of invasions, and is kind of toxic in places. Every country handles expats slightly differently, but there are commonalities for sure. Some of the things she describes ring true to me too. I find it all very complicated. I’m a sort of double expat, having grown up outside the UK, then returned for university and early career then moved away a second time. Being an expat is definitely weird. I wonder whether I’ll ever have english friends again sometimes or if they just think of me as a foriegner too. theguardian.com #

UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch among missing in Sicily yacht sinking - Weird story, everyone appears to have died apart from a baby and her parents. And in an aparrent completely unrelated accident that happened over the weekend Lynch’s old company’s accountant was killed, hit by a car while he was out jogging. theguardian.com #

Stephen Chamberlain who was Mike Lynch’s accountant dead after being hit by a car - They had both just been aquited of fraud after selling their software company to HP a decade ago. The trial lasted for 10 years. This whole story is so bizare it seems like it could be a setup or something. independent.co.uk #

Final artwork in Banksy animal series removed by London Zoo - It’s not clear to me why they couldn’t just keep on using the entrance as before. Kind of comical that a real world entrance is being blocked by an imaginary exit. Seems a bit heavy handed. theguardian.com #

Sicilian town angered after ‘vile’ social media post by son of mafia boss - He used the wrong street name, everyone freaked out, he deleted the street name from the post. Seems like a storm in a tea cup that got amplified out of all proportions because it’s the town that gave it’s name to the Corleone family in the God Father films. I can see why people are annoyed I guess, but ultimately it’s just a typo, all be it perhaps an intentional one. theguardian.com #

Digital euro faces skepticism in Germany over privacy concerns - They say "The main motivation for the digital euro is to decrease Europe’s reliance on non-European payment services". Seems like a worthy goal but many countries still prefer cash, worried that a CBDC would enable government surveillence. Apparently their CBDC has an offline mode. I wonder sometimes how good the privacy is with cash since all notes have serial numbers, technically you could trace usage if you really wanted to, though might be difficult at scale. It will probably be a moot point eventually once they track our thoughts with the brain implants. cryptobriefing.com #

X says it’s closing operations in Brazil - They were apparently being ordered in secret by the government to censor certain accounts, and their legal representative was threatened with jail time. The government was apparently trying to combat election disinformation and "digital militias", a term that’s likely going to be trending given how much governments around the world are cracking down on online speech. techcrunch.com #

Beyond Banksy: the other British street artists you should know - I love street art when it’s done right. It can really transform the character and ambience of a place. Nice article though I wish the authors had added more examples theguardian.com #

New Post: The culture jaming qualities of urban art markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Supercuts show you the manipulation markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Hyperperversion and All Dimension Controls (Issue #177) markjgsmith.com #

Crypto executives meet White House officials to discuss policy, grievances during virtual roundtable - Certainly looks like crypto industry is making a lot of progress. Perhaps some of those priveledged bitcoiners with kids will finally be able to up themselves a little bit. Sure hope so, there are a lot of us folks out here that need to up ourselves, but the world sure doesn’t make it very easy. theblock.co #

Actors demand action over 'disgusting' explicit video game scenes - I thought this was a particularly unlikely and strangely synchronous article to be published the same day I’ve written about the really dark and bizare harrassment that’s been happening to me. It often seems like many of the perpetrators are in some way actors. Like they have been given a specific task to do and thing to say but without being aware of the broader context. What on earth is going in with all these weird incidents and synchronicities world? bbc.com #

X’s new AI image generator will make anything from Taylor Swift in lingerie to Kamala Harris with a gun - Seems to be making quite a splash. Yes also controversy, but that tends to work out quite well for Musk, though it will undoubtedly make quite a lot of folks roll their eyes. Regular non-nerds have always liked riské stuff though haven’t they. It’s weird to think there is now a category of software that is a bit like a movie PG13 rating or something. theverge.com #

Kim Dotcom’s Extradition to the U.S. Given Green Light By New Zealand - Weird coincidence / synchronicity, one of the blokes that works in a cafe shop I go to, I realised today, after reading this article, is a total Kim Dotcom doppelganger. Seriously could totally be his brother or cousin or something. Strange world sometimes. Anyhow I hope Kim is okay, he’s one of the early internet heavy weights, both physically but also from an entrepreneurial perspective. Did a lot of crazy stuff. I like his views on free speech and trying to break down old world barriers. From what I’ve read, it appeared he had been somewhat harshly treated, though I don’t know the specifics. Hoping he doesn’t get memory holed. Let’s remember to watch out for updates on this story. torrentfreak.com #

Zelenskiy: Ukraine’s troops now in full control of Russian town of Sudzha - I know the war is serious business and I don’t mean any disrespect to either side but I have to say this made me smile a bit. It has a certain comedic sense to it. It reminded me of the opening sequence to Dad’s Army a bit. It’s definitely unnexpected. I heard that the Ukrainian moral was very low, because soldiers had basically lost hope of ever returning home, they had resigned themselves that they would likely remain at the frontline for the rest of their lives. So perhaps this will make things somewhat more interesting for them. Who knows maybe it could unlock a whole new dimension to resolving the conflict peacefully. As I understand it Zelenski used to be a comedian after all. Strange, and sometimes good strange things can happen during wars. Here’s to hoping this is one of those times. Also sorry no disrespect to germans either. I have no idea what they think of Dad’s Army. I grew up watching it, so I’m quite fond of it. Easy for me to say, I suppose, since we were on the winning side. I’d love to see any german satire / comedy from that era if any exists. Is that still a sore point? I really don’t know. Update: Was listening to Duncan Trussel’s latest Jamar Neighbors episode while writing this, and there’s a really really bizarely hilariously synchronous relevant bit 1/3 into it. Weird but kind of funny. theguardian.com #

Google’s $1,799 Pixel 9 Pro Fold arrives with 8-inch inner display and Gemini - I’m very intrigued by these new foldable phones from Google. They have almost comparable specs to laptop! 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage. The screen unfolded is small compared to a laptop, but 8inch is huge for a phone. And it appears each pane can operate independently, so you could have an editir in one and a browser in the other. Since it’s Android and thus Linux does that mean you can get a bash shell? A small foldout keyboard and perhaps you could do dev work on it? And the AI features look very snazy in the promo video. Seems pricey though, same price as the MacBook Air! techcrunch.com #

Sunil Bharti Mittal: who is the Indian tycoon now BT’s largest shareholder? - I’m not saying this is bad per se, but it is a bit suprising that a nation state would allow it’s communications network to be mostly owned by foreign interests. It’s certainly a lot of trust to put in someone. On the other hand, if the trust is merited, having run the main comms network in a country as large as India might be great in terms of experience in getting high performance and value for money. It would be interesting to hear what the sentiment is from current BT staff members. theguardian.com #

How Spotify started -- and killed -- Latin America’s podcast boom - I find the whole Spotify approach to podcasting very puzzling. CEO Daniel Ek has seemed to be in interviews I've listenned to, a complete audio nerd, with tons and tons of great ideas for podcasting, yet his approach has seemed very anti-podcasting, more of a take over of the entire medium, than helping to build the whole ecosystem up. I don’t get it, why isn’t he putting effort into the whole podcasting 2.0 movement? Seems like an opportunity missed for everyone. It will be interesting to see how the podcasting scene in Latin America develops. restofworld.org #

New Post: Carry trades, far right riots, and upside down flags markjgsmith.com #

‘Unforgettable days’: French papers rejoice over successful Olympics - The article’s image of the fireworks display looks pretty spectacular. Snippets from all the major french newspapers. theguardian.com #

Celsius targets Tether, Badger DAO, Compound, and Netanyahu's niece and nephew in lawsuits - It’s been a while since there was some newsworthy excitenent in crypto markets. That’s why these litigation stories stood out a bit. They involve a company well known to have had a big downfall in the previous cycle and several interesting counter parties including the biggest stablecoin issuer, a company run by family members of a very famous politician, and a service provider that got hacked. Likely lots of interesting facts will transpire, interesting things to learn, and will probably have an impact on the current sideways leaning bull market. theblock.co #

The Ticking Yen Time Bomb - James Lavish’s explanations of major market incidents are always top notch, and this look at the recent falling apart of the now infamous Yen Carry trade is no exception. Another cracker of an article that perfectly illustrates the dynamics at play, but also packed full of nuance that I didn’t see in any of the other roundups I read. jameslavish.com #

Imagining a Personal Data Pipeline - Looks at what components you might think of including in an extract, load, transform (ELT) data pipeline for all your personal data. It’s a follow on post expanding on the author’s journey into life logging and quantified self. I found it pretty interesting especially in the context of my static site generator which has some very similar features, but also could interface really easily with something like this. I’ve heard a lot about ELT data pipelines in an enteprise setting, but not much for personal use. Seems very synergistic with my Github powered workflows for content creators idea. joshcanhelp.com #

New Post: Writeup of epic vietnamese bullying mutilation cycle markjgsmith.com #

Apple Is America’s Semiconductor Problem - There’s definitely some anti-Apple sentiment brewing at the minute. Buffet has been getting out of his Apple position recently. Regulators in the US and EU are going after them for monopoly practices. Add to that they aren’t really innovating products very effectively. This looks at the scale of their market position and influence. semiconductor-digest.com #

Online Safety Act to be reviewed after Sadiq Khan criticism, says minister - I don’t know specifically about Khan’s criticism, but I’ve read and heard about many crack downs that sound very authoritarian. Regular folks being arrested just for sharing links on social media. It’s made me wonder about whether anything I post could be misinterprated in such a way. For years western countries have been pointing out censorship of repressive regimes abroad. Why is it happening in the west now? Strange times. theguardian.com #

Venezuela's Maduro blocks X access in country for 10 days - Two things stand out to me on this. First it’s a bit bizare that Maduro sounds really a lot like Mad euro. Also this whole episode happening in parallel to the sort of similar situation between Elon and UK government, sort of makes the UK seem a bit like Venezuela, doesn’t it? reuters.com #

King Charles sends ‘heartfelt thanks’ to police for restoring order after riots - What worries me about all this is that those that might want to create a widespread chilling effect on online speech, now have a way to do that. The vaste majority of people don’t do all this violence stuff, why should we be paying the price by having our freedoms curtailed? I myself am now worried about what I post, and I in no way consider myself to me part of any extremist groups. Ironically by cracking down on the bullies, you might just be helping them get their way, a repressive society that is inflexible, and can’t handle any sort of disagreement. The internet existed during previous riots, why were there no crack downs on online speech then? Perhaps that was the better approach. Having said all that I like that King Charles is thanking the police, they do in many cases do a very good job under difficult circumstances. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Maximum Frontrun (Issue #176) markjgsmith.com #

Putin signs law on legalizing cryptocurrency mining in Russia - This sounds pretty cool, perhaps nation states really are getting into crypto currencies. How long until they start mining operations themselves I wonder. It’s interesting that the Bank of Russia is involved though somewhat unclear what this means: "the Bank of Russia will have the right to ban the placement of individual issues". tass.com #

Meta is closing a beloved first-party Quest studio - I don’t know much about the VR side of the tech industry, but it’s an interesting data point. It’s kind of cool that the way the sector appears to be structured is lots of smaller studios rather than one super large mega company. I wonder why most of the tech industry doesn’t take this form. androidcentral.com #

What lies beneath: the growing threat to the hidden network of cables that power the internet - Most interesting fact from the article: an underwater cable is cut on average every 3 days. The vaste majority is accidental rather than planed attacks. Small islands need to get multiple cables to hedge against these types of events since it can take weeks to repair a severed cable. New Zealand for example has 7 different cables, whereas Tonga only has one. I guess many likely also use the new satellite constellations. theguardian.com #

Michael Saylor X Odell Bitcoin Park Fireside (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - Odell interviews Saylor live at Bitcoin Park. It’s a relatively short interview compared to some of the Saylor interviews I’ve listened to over the years, but it’s interesting because it feels like there’s been a noticeable shift in the overall narrative. This conversation to me felt like it was grounded in actually very practical and immediate topics, rather than a lot of the interesting but sometimes long winded bitcoin philosophy. It seems to coincide with the big recent increase in bitcoin interest from companies and institutions. You get a sense there is a wave coming and people are positioning their businesses for some bitcoin action. It’s not just businesses, countries too. All sorts of useful things talked about including operating companies vs investment trusts, hurdles to companies holding bitcoin treasuries, bitcoin as medium of exchange, stable coin + bitcoin as the perfect combination, building nation State FOMO?, and Bitcoin strategies the US Treasury could take. Great interview. podcastindex.org #

Edmund Fawsett compares the future of liberalism and conservatism Ep#2151 (Keen On Podcast) - Edmund’s last name makes me think we are in the fractal version of the simulation currently. Regardless it’s an interesting conversation exploring a topic that I’ve always found quite confusing. Deciding if you are liberal or conservative has always seemed to me to be like deciding to be a fast or slow car driver. Surely, it depends? Needless to say Edmund has a much more complete understanding than my overly simplistic take on things. History, ideas, traditions, and how it all relates back to the current day political environment we find ourself in. It’s all very interesting and I feel like I need to listen to this one again because the world ironically was trying to be both at the same time as I was listening to this yesterday, so it was a bit tricky to focus. This feels like a fundamental topic any person operating in the business world today should better understand, and I think this episode lays out the somewhat amorphous problem space pretty well. podcastindex.org #

Elon Musk calls PM ‘two-tier Keir’ over police response to UK riots - I’m not sure how I feel about the Elon vs The Police situation. I wish people would just get along. One thing though is I’m glad Elon, a person developing both powerful AI tools and powerful brain implants, is very much against the concept of a two tier society. In the overall scheme of things I don’t think it matters that much that he’s defending so called far right folks, or that he’s insulting the new prime minister. In fact it might be the most free speech thing possible. If the government really is against a 2 tier society then perhaps this is an opportunity to explore that idea in public in full transparency, because that IMO is the thing we are all worried about. Show us that you really do have all of our backs long term, even after all the riots have passed. theguardian.com #

Asia stock markets plunge after US shares tumbled - Big downturn across markets globally, crypto is down bigly too. bbc.com #

Bitcoin briefly tumbles below $50,000 for the first time since February - People are starting to doubt Bitcoin’s store of value narrative. In the short term it can be very volatile but over the long term, 3+ years for example, it’s value increases quite consistently. cnbc.com #

Worst far-right violence should be treated as terrorism, says ex-police chief - I’m definitely not a defender of thugery and violence, but at the same time it’s clear that there are many communities that for whatever reason are not able to process the level of change they are being subjected to. The crack down is a short term solution, and of course you have to make sure people are safe, but I hope accompanying this they announce some programs that explore long term how to bring communities that are divided closer together, and ways to stop the festering of resentment. The violence is terrible, but at least you can see where the difficulties are. If all this gets pushed further underground, it might end up being worse long term, for everyone involved. theguardian.com #

No 10 criticises Elon Musk for ‘civil war is inevitable’ post on England riots - Very interesting that Elon is getting involved here. It’s obviously a difficult situation and police are no doubt doing the best they can, but I think it might be short sighted to rebuf this attention. We’ve had riots in the UK several times before, the difference here is I think the wider context and environment is unparalleled. I’m betting that the AI revolution we are in is freaking people out. They don’t want to be left behind, or find themselves at the bottom of an impossible heap to climb just to live a normal life. Yes the tools create the problems or at least give them a way to surface, but they can also be part of the solution. It’s time to be creative about how we respond. theguardian.com #

Banksy confirms new goat mural in south-west London is his creation - Classic header photo in this article. I wonder what Banksy thinks about AI. Cool goat mural btw. Are goats the new polar bears? theguardian.com #

The debauched rise of New York’s wildest bar - The story of one of New York’s most infamous bars where people from Warhol to Lennon went to hang out. I wonder what the equivalent is these days. My sense is that things these days aren’t as drug fueled as they used to be, which is definitely a good thing. Rogan’s got his comedy club which seems to be attaining legendary status. There are quite a lot of Bitcoin related hangout places being setup. What other cultural institutions are springing up these days? theguardian.com #

GitHub Models gives developers new power to experiment with Gen AI - This sounds interesting, I wonder how easy it would be to integrate some AI stuff into some of my static code generator builds. The article mentions you need a codespaces account, and ultimately it seems to be a Microsoft Azure play, so I’m not sure how useful it will be in practice. venturebeat.com #

Rioters try to torch Rotherham asylum seeker hotel amid far-right violence - The map that shows all the locations quite interesting. The riots appear to have spread across England and into Nothern Ireland. I guess Wales and Scotland for whatever reason don’t have so much pent up resentment. theguardian.com #

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid - I haven’t heard much about Altman in the past month or so. I found this hit piece kind of intetesting because (1) he’s still being painted as the bad guy at least in main stream media, (2) it’s actually quite well written, and (3) it really illustrates how main stream loves to turn everything into some sort of Hollywood movie. It feels somewhat comically out of step with what's been happening in Tech IMO. Also I heard that the car he’s driving is the most ridiculous electric vehicle in existence. theguardian.com #

New Post: Max Richter on infusing context into your work markjgsmith.com #

Norman Ohler (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - I thought this was a pretty fascinating look into a side of german cultural history that has been completely missed. It’s about the drugs that germans were taking around the time of the second world war. The attrocities of the war were of course happening but in parallel, psychadellic drugs were literally being discovered by scientists, and they were having hippie like experiences, hoping to spread love and togetherness to the world. These were the origins of the psychadelic movement in the US. It was also a time where mild stimulants like coffee didn’t exist yet, so people took meth instead! Norman’s research adventure took him deep into the archives of companies working on drug programs, and he discovered a treasure trove of information that paints a much more complete picture of what was actually going on around that time. It’s almost as if the seeds of destruction and it’s solution where somehow being created at the same time. And the story of how Norman got to the information, in it’s own way, is as interesting as the stories he eventually found. Really worth listening to this one. podcastindex.org #

New Post: Trump assassination counter factuals markjgsmith.com #

Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3 - We need more power Captain! There’s a dilithium crystals joke in here somewhere. techcrunch.com #

Why CSV is still king - I’ve really only used CSV a few times personally, but I can imagine that many businesses do use it all the time. The simplest data exchange formats tend to get widest adoption. These days it’s actually quite rare that I need to export and re-import data between applications, which might be a sign that we are far too silo'd. konbert.com #

Government warns that rioters ‘will pay the price’ as wave of violence sweeps UK - Riots across many cities in the UK. It will be interesting to see how the new government handles the situation. Riots as bad as they are, perhaps are a bit like error logging in an application. You obviously don’t want them to happen but they at least do communicate that there are serious issues that need addressing. If you crack down too hard on them, you are really just turning off error logging without addressing the problem. So the resentment still builds but you won’t even know about it next time. In hell there are no flareups, but everything is resentment, but noone can be sure. theguardian.com #

Kamala Surges, Trump at NABJ, recession fears, Middle East escallations, Ackman postpones IPO (All-in Podcast) - They featured in last week’s newsletter issue, and this latest episode was once again a cracker. The Harris - Trump election build up discussion was great, with some very insightful observations and analysis. That was later followed up with an even better discussion of the Isreal/Mossad/Hamas/Iran assassination situation. The All-In guys are at their best when they are handling geopolitics and relating it back to global macro and Tech. There are some other smaller topics peppered in amongst those. Jason is pulling a Biden this week having caught COVID, but the show was still top notch, though there were signs of a few small resentments festering, which were kind of funny but will no doubt need some fielding from the best moderator in the universe. I bet it’s a tough job keeping the train on the tracks when your team is made up of an alternating current of Sith Lords and Rebel Aliance Jedi knights. Likely that’s why he took the week off in the first place, to see how well balanced everyone is performing. podcastindex.org #

Alan Graham (The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - Interesting exploration of the homeless and poverty situation in the US by talking to someone that has 25 years boots on the ground experience with his Mobile Loaves and the Fishes organisation, has been organising food trucks and programs to promote hope, meaning and purpose for the chronically homeless. They talk about his background, his religious thinking and how he integrates that with the difficulties and contradictions of modern life. Interesting discussion around some of the core drivers in city regeneration, problems with the education system that have all contributed to the homeless situation that has been getting worse since the 70s. Overall will give you a different way to think about some of these highly politicised problems, which underneath are about real people doing the best they can given the circumstances. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Fractional Reserve Bullying (Issue #175) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Stablecoins vs Treasuries vs CBDCs markjgsmith.com #

Tether Nets $5B Profits This Year, Says Its US Debt Holdings Surpassed Germany's - These stablecoins are making a lot of money, and they are investing heavily in crypto mining and AI companies. They are also becoming the biggest holders of US treasuries, at the same level as nation states. I’m not an expert in all this but that seems like a very very strong position to be in. coindesk.com #

The US government needs Bitcoin with Luke Gromen & Preston Pysh (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - I wasn’t able to follow everything in this episode, it rapidly gets pretty complicated, but IMO there’s some very important information in there. It’s basically a macro discussion around how Bitcoin is intersecting with the old school financial system, how the interplay between stablecoins and treasuries is shaping up, and how this might affect and be affected by geo-politics. It gets very abstract in places, but they always bring the discussion back to grounded truths and examples. I think even if you don’t fully understand everything, seeing things through a Bitcoin lense gives you the ability to see where things are moving at least directionally. I’m wondering if there are stablecoins backed by chinese treasuries, that’s were the biggest productivity gains from recent years are currently. Somewhat sad to hear that it’s one of the last WBD episodes, it appears they are moving onto other ventures still to be announced. whatbitcoindid.com #

RA.947 Lydo (Resident Advisor Podcast) - I listenned to this mix by vietnamese - america electronic music artist last night. It’s pretty great, hard techno, gets pretty dark, especially at the end, I could totally imagine listening to this in a club with an incredible sound system. Probably quite good music to code to also. ra.co #

Michael Malice (Joe Rogan Podcast) - I think Malice was previously on Rogan, and I think I really enjoyed their conversation. They are very well balanced together, I feel like they bring out the best in each other. It’s a very conspiracy heavy episode, so if you’re into that, you’ll enjoy this episode. All sorts of topics including the Biden body double, deep fakes & cheap fakes, sceptical being the new norm, Elon and free speech, Harris wine mom, Google memory holing, Trump shooter weirdnesses, Silk Road Ross Ulbricht, Prince Charles’ sausage fingers, aristocrats being perverts, prince Andrew loosing ability to sweat, 1000 space monkeys writing the Art of the Deal, and a whole lot more. If you have a few hours to chill, worth listening to. podcastindex.org #

New Post: Bitcoin strategic sovereign reserves markjgsmith.com #

The New Internet - Well written piece, entertaining read, by an internet old timer building new technology. It’s an interesting vision of a different type of internet that’s more peer to peer, less client server. The are trying to get rid of many of the layers of gunk that have accumulated into modern software stacks. I keep hearing about Tailscale, I think the Changelog guys mention it a bunch. Might be worth knowing about. tailscale.com #

California DMV puts 42 million car titles on blockchain to fight fraud - Interesting to see some large scale non-money blockchain projects. It’s using the Avalanche blockchain. Also includes a client that end users install to browse the cars that have been registered. reuters.com #

Labour’s defining moment and the next Tory leader (The Rest is Politics Podcast) - Great episode with thorough analysis and roundup of UK politics, how the government handover is going, who is up for the Conservatives leadership position. Also what’s going on with the Bangladesh riots, the Olympics in France, Maduro in Venezuela. Rory has a bit of a man crush on Tom Tugendhat! But in all seriousness his Tugendhat review is quite spectacular. I thought he looked the part last week. Very interesting background, especially with his european connections and being bilingual, but kind of a scary vibe, which might make him the perfect opposition leader. Oh and a fascinating look at Pretty Patel’s Essex - Hertfordshire Christopher Walken style accent. More accent reviews please! podcastindex.org #

StreamPot/StreamPot - "StreamPot is a project that provides scaffolding for transforming media in your app (e.g. trimming a video, stripping the audio from a video, transcoding a video from mp4 to webp). We are building this because an increasing number of projects are transforming media as part of their workflow." - I thought this looked pretty interesting. Uses ffmpeg and can be fully self hosted, but they also have a hosted service. github.com #

Western DJs accused of ‘normalising war’ for playing at Russian techno events - It’s really a tricky one this situation because I think a complete boycot from western DJs would likely make the divide wider, especially as the war is so protracted. I tried to think of a creative way to do this but ultimately the west is worried that the war spreads and turns into something bigger, perhaps even with North Korea and China joining in, so westerners playing DJ sets in Russia are really playing with fire, especially if you are getting paid extra, that’s pretty gross. theguardian.com #

Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source - Overall I think this is really good news, I’m a big fan of open source software. The one thing that makes me incomfortable is that open source is not a panocea in every dimension. There are some aspects of open source that aren’t very desirable for society at large. I’m thinking specifically about the tendency for project maintainers to get abused. There is a tendency for exploitation to happen. It would be great if these government projects tried to tackle such issues. They are well positioned to do so. Generally though, more OSS in government is very cool, but let’s do it in a responsible way. zdnet.com #

Mag-7 sell-off, Wiz rejects Google, UBI, Kamala in, China’s nuclear buildout, Sachs responds to PG (All-In Podcast) - I was pretty beat up when I listened to this on Saturday, having been starved for several days, and tsunami tsunamied several times by the gang stalkers, so I found it really difficult to concentrate while listening to this episode. The two standout things for me were the discussion around UBI and the later discussion around power comparing US and China capabilities and future plans. It’s all somewhat of a blur but I feel like it was a pretty good episode even if I didn’t agree with several things they brought up. It’s good insight and perspective. podcastindex.org #

Bitcoin War Games with Matthew Pine (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - I listened to this yesterday evening and much the same as the previous podcast, I was in quite a state from all the sustained bullying and starvation, so I didn’t take notes. I think I’m still shaken by last week’s physical assault or maybe I've got PTSD or something. I could hardly concentrate on any of it, but two things stood out. First was after Matthew got through much of his macro analysis, Peter commented something like "It feeld like we are living in a scripted reality". This is exactly how everything feels to me at the minute. The second thing was his roundup of the US aliens situation. I remember last time he was on, his aliens analysis was amazing, there’s also probably the best quantum physics roundup I’ve heard and though I didn’t retain much from this episode, I remember very much enjoying it. I like aliens stuff. I guess this isn’t the best review ever, but it was a good episode, totally check it out. whatbitcoindid.com #

Trump tells supporters they won’t have to vote in the future: ‘It’ll be fixed!’ - This is definitely a weird thing to say, and pretty sure he knows what he’s saying. "We’ll have it fixed so good" is one of his classic turns of phrase. There might be a simple explanation. He likes to give the crowd what they want to hear, so could be this is him testing to see if there are people that would prefer non-democratic governance. Definitely worrying. I wonder what the Silicon Valley elites crowd, that have recently stood behind him, think of this bizare thing to say. theguardian.com #

Trump proposes strategic national crypto stockpile: 'Never sell your bitcoin' - It’s very strange seing all these politicians suddenly turn pro-bitcoin. The fact some want to increase US holdings to approx 1/5 of all bitcoin in existence and use it to pay the national debt is deeply weird. Surely that would kill the dollar? How would we value bitcoin? This is starting to feel like a startup that promises it’s staff loads of options, only for them to end up being worthless after working there for a decade. On the other hand maybe it could trigger a gold rush as all nations worldwide try to buy bitcoin with their fiat while it still has some value. cnbc.com #

New Post: Fractional reserve thinking markjgsmith.com #

Gerry Gets Savage Ep#295 (Punk Till I Die Podcast) - Since last week’s issue had a big segment all about electronic music, I thought I’d check in with the PYID guys. It’s an awesome show, they have on Gerry who organises Savage Mountain which I gather is some sort of underground punk focussed music festival. I though his music selection was awesome, it’s got a very distinct vibe, quite pop punk in places but not scared to go off piste into some pretty dark metaly stuff. And I say pop punk, but it’s not bubblegum, it all has an edge to it. Like I said, I thought all the tracks were great. Gerry really reminds me of Anthony Scaramouchy from the Rest is Politics US Edition for some reason, so maybe he knows why many Americans think MI6 are behind the Trump assassination? I think maybe the Mooche’s wife might be a fascist communist so maybe we’ll get some interesting new punk tunes at some point, hopefully before WWIII starts. podcastindex.org #

The Kidnaping of Ape #8398 (Search Engine Podcast) - I listened to this yesterday evening, I was super tired so found it a bit difficult to focus, but it’s a very interesting episode all about the NFT craze that swept past us last year. That has sort of subsided for the minute, but I think perhaps NFTs will make a come back after the bull market when people need to park their millions. People like Raoul Pal seem to think so. The back story is kind of fascinating involving comedian Seth Green trying to create a genuinely new form of series using a blend of celebrities and the NFT characters he owns. The twist to the story is that his NFT wallet got hacked, so he had to figure out how to get back the NFTs that were stolen or the show couldn’t be made. Interesting that Quentin Tarantino and Paris Hilton are bigtime into NFTs. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Kicking Poverty’s Ass (Issue #174) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Why people aren’t into politics markjgsmith.com #

Facing American Poverty and Global Supply Chain Issues (The Daily Show Podcast) - John Stuart chats with Rev Doc William Barber about poverty in America. The very well spoken and knowledgeable reverend is endearingly religious, polite and pretty funny too. The numbers speak for themselves: 41% of Americans are poor and low wage people, that’s 135 million people, shockingly over 50% of children. It’s not even a race thing, 60% are white. These numbers are at least double what I had assumed was the case. 295000 people die each year from poverty, that’s 800 people a day. It’s the 4th leading cause of death in the country. Higher than respiratory disease, higher than gun violence. It’s unbelievably shocking that this is happening in the richest country on the planet. It’s a great interview that will let you see how bad the situation really is. It’s a bit strange to hear all this on a comedy channel, but it’s no joke. I think the humour helps us hear and see the size of the problem without our brains shutting it out. IMO this isn’t a partisan issue, both sides should make this a priority. Trump showed us that he spoke to regular folks that are getting screwed by the system, and the Democrats have historically been the party that championed and stood behind the poor. The reality is poverty will only get worse if it isn’t addressed, and that ultimately affects everyone. The sad thing is that there is technically plenty for everyone. Put aside your political views for a few minutes and listen to this short episode. It will be worth it. podcastindex.org #

Bridget Phetasy (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - Great episode that takes a somewhat winding path covering all sorts of social issues of the day, a bunch of conspiracy theories, all with loads of humour and curiosity. Topics including solving starvation, reproduction & pro-choice, menstrual cycle synchronisation, creepy government and commercial tracking, 40 year old in a fake Biden suit, the entertainment business and AI, seeing behind the curtain of the fakers that run the world, trans craziness and puberty blockers, and the strange outdated sex laws that still exist in some US states. There’s a lot in there, but it’s a good mix of the latest current zeitgeist, the stuff you won’t hear on main stream media, what people are likely talking about in the interesting conversations down the pub. podcastindex.org #

New Post: Solving poverty even cooler than rocket science markjgsmith.com #

InteractiVenn - Web tool to create Venn diagrams interactivenn.net #

Google's Exclusive Reddit Access - Only Google can now scrape Reddit content, they are blocking most other crawlers. They have a multi million dollar deal with Google, and don't want bulk access without setting up a deal in order to protect reddit users from having their content used to train other people’s AIs. 404media.co #

Tom Tugendhat enters race for Conservative party leadership - In addition to looking very much like a bond movie villain, he says he would be prepared to take the UK out of the European convention on human rights in order to restore full control of the countries borders. Seems kind of hardcore, is there something up ahead they can see that we can’t? theguardian.com #

Germany challenges Turkey’s protected status claim for the doner kebab - Kind of a bold move by Turkey. Is the US going to do the same thing with the hamburger? theguardian.com #

Spot Ethereum ETFs get final sign off to begin trading Tuesday - Good news for crypto in general, my guess is that many folks will re-allocate some of their Bitcoin to Eth, so not necessarily lots of new inflows. Longer term though there might be especially is Options and staked Eth become a reality. TradFi people are really into yield generating assets. theblock.co #

Apple Reportedly Working on Foldable iPhone With Similar Design as Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip - Rumours sparked by leaks from production partners, looks like they are figuring out supply chain, parts and that sort of stuff. I always though foldables were a cool idea. They will have arrived properly if Apple release one. Code name is apparently V68. Could be a couple of years until they are in stores though. macrumors.com #

So you think you know box shadows? - This is about as far away from the type of code I write as a web developer. It’s true that I mostly do backend but still I find it pretty crazy that web development is so broad. Interesting in any case just to get a vague idea of what’s possible. dgerrells.com #

DeFi Giant dYdX Says Its v3 Platform Is Compromised – Just as It's Reportedly Up for Sale - Very scary compromise where the hacker got control of the entire domain and put up a fake site looking entirely like the old site. Users were then asked to approve a transaction that stole their funds. coindesk.com #

Open Source AI Is the Path Forward - Leaving aside for a second this crazy world we now live in where everything imaginable is tracked and monetized which Zuck helped create, I think most of his thinking about AI that he writes about in this post seems well thought out, and generally in the right direction. I still though would like to read critiques from other industry leaders. He seems to be mostly talking about inference. What about training? about.fb.com #

Spotify CEO confirms a ‘deluxe’ version with hi-fi audio is coming soon - A deluxe product for music would of course be awesome. I’m also interested in their plans for product offerings in the podcast space. I listened to several podcasts about a year ago where CEO Daniel Ek was talking about all sorts of cool new podcast features. There’s no mention of that in this article though. theverge.com #

After years of uncertainty, Google says it won’t be ‘deprecating third-party cookies’ in Chrome - I still don’t really understand what’s going on after reading this article. I can see why advertisers might be annoyed. As a developer I’m now wondering if it affects anything I might need to do. digiday.com #

Node.js 20.6.0: Say Goodbye to 'dotenv' - Tutorial on how to use the new --env-file nodejs flag to set environment vatiables from a file. Something the article doesn’t mention which could be useful in unixy environments, the 'export' keyword is ignored when prepended to a variable, which means you can use the env file from a shell script as well as via node command line argument. Might be useful in development or in places where you need to use the settings in other non-nodejs places. See nodejs docs for details. dev.to #

Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean - "About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean" - That’s mental. The article describes they have found oxygen being produced without light, therefore without photosynthesis. Apparently mining companies want to extract various metals from these sites, but scientists warn it could kill local life. I would have thought a bigger concern would be that it could kill humans since so much of the oxygen we breath comes from the sea, but that doesn’t appear to be a concern. bbc.com #

New Post: Balaji on civil wars, nations and the state markjgsmith.com #

Selects: The Duality of Caffeine (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) -
Very useful episode, especially since I started drinking coffee again this week. Just another what are the chances. Turns out there are quite a few health benefits to caffeine, but also downsides. I’ve been finding it definitely improves my ability to write blog posts, especially in adversarial environments. The science behind how caffeine works is kind of fascinating. If you drink coffee definitely worth listening to this episode. podcastindex.org #

What do small businesses think about the new worker’s rights? Ep#77 (The Rest is Money Podcast) - Robert and Steph have on Dragon’s Den dragon Deborah Meaden. A load of interesting discussion around the change in government and what it means for small businesses. Why the need for employment rights, pros/cons of zero hour contracts, weening employers off of their reliance on immigration to keep wages lower, and betting on the green economy future. They then have a more personal chat with Deborah about her entrepreneurial journey, touching all sorts of topics including running your own business, franchising if you don’t have money, investing in other entrepreneurs, scaling up, British risk aversion vs US risk appetite, dealing with business failures, time value vs impact value, technical vs instinct when making investing decisions, crowd sourced investment, looking beyond the pitch deck, meeting founders and other investors, and the importance of shared values. Great episode with a good mix of the current business zeitgeist and more general long term advice for entrepreneurs. podcastindex.org #

The all-seeing AI webcam (Vergecast Podcast) - Will Poor piece that looks at Dries Depoorter, who not only includes Will’s family name in his family name, but also creates weird absurdist internet based AI / surveillance themed art and installations. He’s flemish belgian so has a cool accent and a downtempo kind of vibe. His projects tend to turn the tables on power, highlight important aspects of modern society that we aren’t considering, and create tools that use the latest AI models to create delightfully odd tools that make you think. podcastindex.org #

ROLLUP: Trump Pump | ETH ETF Next Week | Mt. Gox & Germany | Crypto Wars 2.0 (Bankless Podcast) - They are all about crypto but I feel that the Bankless guys are often a bell weather for what’s going on in the wider world. Their takes are often sensible yet also they regulary appear to notice important trends before others do. This Rollup episode has all sorts of interesting titbits from commentary on the Trump assassination and it’s aftermath, but also prediction markets becoming more mainstream, top bitcoin holding countries worldwide, ETF and Larry Fink fully orange pilled and maybe opening the door for etherium, bullish miners, uniswap browser wallet improvements, legal cases changing the playing field and tracking the growing crypto lobby. bankless.com #

Joe Biden withdraws from presidential race following debate debacle - Not much to say about this. Can’t say I’m all that enthusiastic about it. I was never really into Biden, but still it feels like when they replace the lead singer in a band. Or a lead actor in a film or TV series. It rarely works. Can I really be arsed to invest time learning about a whole new cast of characters right now? Nope not really is how I feel about it today. I bet many feel similar to me. theguardian.com #

The Academics That Think ChatGPT is BS (Better Offline Podcast) - I didn’t take detailed notes on this one, and probably should have, because it was packed with very insightful and well thought out hypothesis’ about how LLMs work but also about how we should view them, whether they are actually thinking, how they differ to human learning, and how they are impacting academia. These researchers highlight some of the most important things to consider, such as lying vs bullshitying vs hallucinating, and the danger of anthropomorphising them. It vears into philosophy and psychology, but grounded in computer science and mathematics. You'd think these boffins would have the whole thing figured out, but even these guys occasionally run into difficulty describing what’s going on. LLMs seem to be teaching us humans about our own cognition and consciousness. It’s the sort of episode that should be required listening when using these tools, they are powerful but could be detrimental to your abilities if used in the wrong way long term. IMO, use them as a booster rather than a crutch, imagine they could be taken away at anytime, you still need to be able to function at a high level without them. podcastindex.org #

Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy - Steven Levy looks into the recent trend of Silicon Valey big wig VCs like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz changing their allegiance from the Democrats & Biden to the Republicans & Trump. It appears to centre around Biden’s idea to impose 25% capital gains tax on unrealised assets for folks earning more than $100 million per year. They are trying to close a loop hole where the very rich never pay taxes by never realising their assets but monetize them by borrowing against them. They argue that it’s a slipery slope that starts with the very rich, but eventually canibalises wealth from all wealthy households. The argument is that it destroys philantropy and ultimately Silicon Valley itself. Interesting article, no less because Levy appears to be a staunch Democrat. Big changes in the tectonic plates of the tech industry. wired.com #

J. Malcolm Garcia on the humanity of San Fransisco's homeless community (Keen On Podcast) - Homelessness is a difficult subject to talk about and I think Andrew and Malcolm manage to have an interesting conversation, while being respectful to the people they are talking about. Many have experienced significant trauma, there is mental illness, sometimes drugs or alcohol, but they are real people with both happy and sad stories, and they can be very interesting and even fun to talk to. It can be awkward at first to strike up a conversation, and it can be risky as you might end up liking them, and feel a responsibility, but the truth is regular folks "need some skin in the game". It’s worth breaking down the barriers, they are within the community even if they aren’t a part of it. Waiting for the government to fix things in many places might be unrealistic. I think it’s worth remembering the world they live in is very different to the one lived by the housed, so they will likely be in a very different mindset to you. They spend most of their time thinking about things you probably never even have to consider. Things you take for granted that take minutes can take days to accomplish for them. Their timelines are very different. They might not trust you initially, they have likely had many bad experiences talking to housed people in the past so they might be cautious, not wanting their situation to get any worse than it already is - Malcom ends by reminding us that "they are great people". podcastindex.org #

A guide to reading and writing Node.js streams - Great tutorial by
Matteo Collina that looks at how to use Streams in NodeJS. The article focusses on readable and writable streams, backpressure, handling errors, and advanced techniques like async iterators. The render pipelines concept I introduced to my static site generator is only partly realised, I only introduced the minimum needed to get the job done. I have partially implemented a more complete version of the feature and it’s crazy how similar in shape it is to the streams examples here, but it just uses the fs module. It would be very cool to explore using streams in the render core, certainly would be a good way to reduce memory consumption, and maybe even give a speed boost. Streams also support HTTP as well as files on the filesystem. Maybe one day ... :) blog.platformatic.dev #

How to Build a JavaScript UI Component-First DevTool Startup in 2024 - Well writen article, and the modularity of their final solution is pretty cool, and understandable given current state of things. However it all feels so complicated. Why can’t the next cohort of Facebook type startups take up the mantle for building the next React ontop of Web Components? Why can’t Lit, which looks very cool btw, be worked on to get it to be comparable in features to Vue and React? corbado.com #

Promises From The Ground Up - Josh Comeau summarises pretty succinctly how javascript promises work, with just the right amount of detail, without getting caught up in the weeds. This enables you to get to grips with async / await, which the article finishes with. I’ve found async / await to be one of the more useful primitives for simplifying my code. It did take a little while to get to grips with though. Reading existing code bases for popular libraries that use it helped too. I don’t miss callbacks in my NodeJS code at all. joshwcomeau.com #

New Post: An architecture for art markjgsmith.com #

Quantum computers aren’t what you think...they’re cooler | Hartmut Neven (TED Talks Daily Podcast) - A look into the weird science behind quantum computing where huge computations can be carried out using parallel universes. It’s very early days for this technology, but we will soon be able to use quantum computers to solve problems in medicine, AI, neuroscience and more. All sorts of interesting examples of what we might be able to do in the future. We might even be able to discover the dynamics of consciousness, and perhaps even ways to expand it. ted.com #

Caitlin Long and the Conundrums of Europe Ep#183 (Goats Gold 'n Guns Podcast) - Caitlin Long who runs Custodia Bank is on the show to discuss the recent elections in the UK and France, and how they have been affecting the markets. She also goes into her difficult experiences trying to setup a crypto focused full reserve bank, Trump and crypto, Tether & US treasuries, and the unconstitutional structure of the FED. podcastindex.org #

Bicep Ep#722 (Resident Advisor Podcast) - Interview with Irish duo Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar. Setting up a label, their background in graphic design and advertising, tech gear, the writing process, live shows vs writing albums, mixing seminar at Abbey Road, upping their game and working with tech wizards, working as a duo, Belfast vs London, people’s differing views on emotions, writhing with purpose, being maximal with minimal, negative spaces, giving your brain space, taking the essence out and striping it back, teasing the audience, harnessing energy, 1 word song titles, the Brit awards, creativity during the pandemic, fear & worry in the community, signing with Ninja Tune, performing live vs DJing, being on the road, Glastonbury, first Essential Mix, first Beats in Space mix, first show in Japan, rave energy and clubs in general, blogging their sets, artistic kinship, making tunes and getting them out as quick as possible, collaborating, and shooting video for visuals. ra.co #

Cafes to work from in Chiang Mai - I miss Chiang Mai, it’s been so many years since I was last there. James Clark has re-written one of his oldest cafe review pieces. I'm linking to it because in a freakish bit of synchronicity, I started drinking coffee again this week and it’s resulted in me writing loads of blog posts. Some of these new places sound awesome. nomadicnotes.com #

Nvidia and Mistral’s new model ‘Mistral-NeMo’ brings enterprise-grade AI to desktop computers - This feels like it could be one of those low key announcements that goes mostly unnoticed but then ends up being quite important. The model is not anywhere near as powerful as the latest OpenAI models but it’s open source, and runs on your own personal hardware, rather than on a data centre monster GPU. Turns out there are many applications that don’t require the bestest model, but do require much more privacy, because small busineses want to be in control of their data. venturebeat.com #

Bicep - Bicep 2017 - A Pitchfork review of their self titled debut album. I couldn’t find anything in podcast form that I could download, but this review popped up. I love reading electronic music reviews, they are often pieces of art in their own right, capturing the vibe in textual form, of something that attempts to capture the vibe of something in audio form. There’s something very magical happening when it works. It’s funny because I imagine they probably read like total gibberish to folks that are not familiar with the genres. I assure you though, there really is an undiscovered parallel dimension, or several, to all this modern electronic stuff. pitchfork.com #

Zelenskiy to attend UK cabinet meeting in effort to disrupt Russian oil sales - He attended the European Political Community summit and will address the new government caninet. It’s intetesting to see Zelenskiy in the UK but also how the UK will operate on european matters while outside the EU. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Fiction, Art, Music, Aliens & Evolutionary Biology (Issue #173) markjgsmith.com #

Working with Pasted Content in JavaScript - Nothing earth shatering but useful to know. Depending on what you add to the clipboard, say HTML text or files for example, you get different data in the event object, which you then need to handle in some way. raymondcamden.com #

A Developer's Review of a Snapdragon X Laptop (Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x) - Interesting to see a price and spec comparison with MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Looks like, as I suspected, 16GB RAM is pretty much the minimum these days for a development machine. Makes sense, even my now defunct MacBook Pro from 2013 had 16GB of RAM, and these days they need to run AI coding copilot tools. Any less RAM just isn’t viable. wezm.net #

SqLite for NodeJS - They are adding Sqlite to nodejs core, so you’ll be able to write database driven apps right out of the box. Very cool! github.com #

New Post: Rogan’s secret to building cool businesses markjgsmith.com #

Andrew O'Hagan goes up the Caledonian Road in search of Truth, Justice & a Man in Blue Ep#2027 (Keen On Podcast) - I really enjoyed this interview, on many levels. The fact it’s about a novel written about a place in London I’d spent some time in, the fact that the novel is a rich tapestry, weaving together stories and characters from different walks of life, and class, together with contemporary topics, and even the diverse real life cast of the podcast interview itself. It’s like some sort of giant living jigsaw puzzle, where the interesting pieces find each other and intertwine like a patch of garden in a bigger patch of a larger garden. Fascinating waters in which to go for a swim, with so many different cultural topics intersecting, the novel really gives a sense, a multi-dimensional snapshot of a place in time. Local pubs, politics, austerity, Brexit, migrants, fake news, fake life, global vs local, renters vs home owners, big city, urban vs country side, art, perspective, concreteness, optical illusions, capitalism, englishness, the working class, unions, working men’s clubs, the miners strikes, russian oligarchs, aristocrats, crypto utopianism, landlords, paying your taxes, beaurocracy, gangsters, Balzacian & Kafkan nightmares, Britain, the similarity of father & sons relationships across classes, all with the backdrop glow from a distant US culture. The complexity of modern life in all it’s imperfect glory. Seems like a really wonderful example of the art and stories the technologies we build everyday now make possible. podcastindex.org #

The Jonathan Haidt Interview (All-in Podcast) - New interview format for the All-in pod. They interview writer and evolutionary biology and psychology specialist Jonathan Haidt. All sorts of interesting topics covered, including the origins of sociology, a somewhat dubious social media drugs analogy but kind of interesting comparison nonetheless, how the human brain and mind evolved, the dopamine reward system, hacking evolutionary biology, Boomers vs GenX vs Millennials vs GenZ, Buddhism, the alleged perils of desire and dualistic thinking, influencer culture, collective action traps, oppressor / oppressed mindset, the 3 great untruths, how the political left has changed since the 70s, traditional liberalism and conservatism, boredom & creativity, and some things to be aware about video games. Very much recommended if you spend a lot of time thinking about the future. podcastindex.org #

New Post: GenZ vs evolutionary biology markjgsmith.com #

Resisting a Surveillance Technocracy with NVK (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Great discussion with always in a good jovial mood NVK, all about the future of society with AI, language models, cryptography, and bitcoin, focusing on how it will affect government surveillance. Topics including talking with AI, natural language translation, non carbon based alien intelligences, open source models, creating business AIs using your own data with really good privacy, how AIs "think" using vector maps, AI in government and politics, pattern matching and pre-crime, anyone being able to fake anything, digital signatures, Nostr and private keys, data sharing between agencies, and chain analysis using AI. Worth the listen to get a reslistic idea of where we are heading, while trying to not get too depressed about it all. whatbitcoindid.com #

Is SOL Undervalued? 83% discount to ETH? | Michael Nadeau (Bankless Podcast) - Solana is generally considered to be the 3rd most popular blockchain after Bitcoin and Etherium. Micheal comes from a TradFi background but has been into crypto for a number of years. He’s identified some interesting things about Solana by doing a classic TradFi analysis of core fundamentals. He presents his findings. He looks at things like total value locked, number of active users, number of transactions, number of developers, fees, to where investment capital is flowing, DEX trading volumes and more. It would seem to still be somewhat undervalued. He makes some predictions for the future. Good solid episode. bankless.com #

Samsung’s new image-generating AI tool is a little too good - These new tools are indeed very impressive. The democratisation of imagination and even art creation is going to be a massive shift. It won't be revered as much. What will that do to the value of real high end artworks I wonder? theverge.com #

New Post: Competition for criminals markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Bitcoinifying arguments markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The real vs digital assets equilibrium markjgsmith.com #

Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto" - Vitalik outlines many reasons why you shouln’t just vote based on whether a candidate is pro-crypto. As with many things in life, it’s a lot more nuanced, and pro-crypto candidates might turn out to be very much the opposite in the long term. vitalik.eth.limo #

Why Facebook doesn’t use Git - I’m rather heavily invested in git. I use it to write all the software I write, but also for all my blogging. So this was a super interesting article. It’s a great writeup and very interesting software story. Turns out FB use Mercurial which apparently is written in Python, and is very extensible. At the time they chose it, it was way better at handling very large monorepos with many files. Thinking about it, there isn’t any reason I can think of that would stop you from using alternative version control tools with my static site generator, at least not clientside. If I ever do get some form of product off the ground, I might consider adding support for other DVCS’ than git. graphite.dev #

Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI - How long until this training theft sweeps into the wider society? It’s going to have a much bigger impact than we are currently aware, as many realise they are being exploited by thieving infiniti liars. And the infiniti liars could very well be the most exploited of all. This is going to make Gaza - Isreal seem like a walk in the park. It will be like mini Gaza - Isreals literally everywhere, like fucking Gremlins. That was quite a fun film though. Not so sure it would be fun in real life though. proofnews.org #

Thoughts on Node.js, Deno, and Bun - Some pretty solid advice about writting code that’s portable between javascript runtimes. ckarchive.com #

New Post: Just ignore them virtually impossible markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Kings and Queens and politics markjgsmith.com #

Stocks Up & Crypto Flat...Why? (Bankless Podcast) - There’s a whole lot of interesting and very practical stuff discussed in this episode, including how crypto must outperform AI, that 7 companies account for most of the equity markets, the internet bubble vs the AI bubble, money market funds, the disappointment of ETFs, what stablecoins bring to the table, the often forgotten yet very compelling TradFi promise. bankless.com #

My search for proof aliens exist (Ted Talks Daily Podcast) - Astrophysicist Avi Loeb talks about the possibilities of alien civilisations existing in other places in the universe, and describes an expedition he led to find reminents of the first detected interstellar asteroid that crashed into the ocean in the last few years. It’s quite a humorous talk, scientists can be quite funny too :), definitely worth the listen. ted.com #

Why a Bitcoin Treasury is the Winning Strategy with Eric Semler (TFTC Podcast) - I listenned to this earlier under pretty extreme conditions so it was very difficult to concentrate. The part I found very interesting was around why holding Bitcoin in a company treasury can be very beneficial in some circumstances, especially for high margin businesses that tend to hold a lot of cash on their books. It’s an interesting discussion, I wish there were more examples of businesses integrating crypto and Bitcoin into their operations and talking about it. tftc.io #

New Post: The offline video cache web browser markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The newsletter preparation experiment markjgsmith.com #

Bank of England Economist: Interest rates must be cut (The Rest is Money Podcast) - Robert and Steph have economist and external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Swati Dhingra on the show. There’s much interesting and intelligent discussion all very relevant to the government changeover in this episode. While listening to this I was struck by how special it is that these 3, with such different backgrounds, are all living in the same country, all call it their home, and all earnestly working together at a very high level to make it a better place for everyone. Even just the variety in accents is something that is incredible. There are very few other places in the world that have this. It’s amazing. podcastindex.org #

New Post: Do you even memecoin? markjgsmith.com #

Shares in Trump’s media group leap by a third after assassination attempt - Around $2bn has been added to the valuation of Trump Media and Technology Group, which uses his initials DJT as its ticker. The company is 60% owned by thr former president, so his personal stake had risen by $1bn. theguardian.com #

New Post: Rudimentary backup of our civilization markjgsmith.com #

Whitney Webb & Mark Goodwin on How Intelligence Agencies Capture Everything (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Whitney Webb has this unbelievable ability to paint enormous, completely self consistent pictures, based on limited available data. It’s really quite something. What it amounts to is one possible version of reality, of "the truth", that’s incredibly convincing. Mark Goodwin is pretty darn good at it too. I think it’s worth remembering that before embarking on a podcast journey with them. Worth remembering also, especially if you are a builder of things, that there are other, as self consistent realities possible. It’s still nevertheless a fascinating ride. In this part 1 of 2 they discuss among other topics, why stablecoins are keeping the dollar afloat, the dwindleing petro dollar system, the emerging bitcoin dollar system, banks becoming information brokers, Arpanet’s (the precursor to the internet) history with intelligence agencies, and some of the dangers of public private partnerships. Kind of heavy in places, but so much to think about. Really looking forward to part 2 :) whatbitcoindid.com #

‘Britain is back’: Keir Starmer promises UK will be at the heart of Europe - With both Germany and France in disarray politically, thd UK is stepping up efforts to strengthen relations with Europe around defense. Seems like a good strategy that could lead to other deals. theguardian.com #

‘A galvanising sense of unity’: a football team that is multiracial and distinctively English - As I write this the match will have finished a few hours ago. I need to get to the internet place so I can see the result. What a way to start a new government for England it would be. I find this whole thing about englishness fascinating. I wonder how it will trickle into other non-football parts of society. theguardian.com #

The return of crypto venture capital - Investments from VCs rose from $2.5bn in Q1 to $3.2bn in Q2, median deal size rose from $3mn to $3.2mn. ft.com #

Webvm - A serverless vitual linux OS running in your browser using HTML5 and Web Assembly. Pretty darn cool. It’s entirely running in your webvm.io #

New Post: Parodying yourself markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Enough will never be enough markjgsmith.com #

Eno review – exhilarating Brian Eno documentary that’s different at every screening - I’ve always liked and been very curious about Brian Eno. His is a very unique way of looking at the world. I really liked his auto generated music, had one of the albums that came out of that, and found it very relaxing. I also like his vision around ambient music and sound. This documentary sounds awesome, but as the reviewer points out, and somewhat amuzingly, posses a certain amount of difficulty to review. It would be fun to watch this documentary every year, I wonder what it would do to your memory. theguardian.com #

‘This is biblical’: England fans blag lifts, camp and get ready for Euro 2024 final - I’m of course incredibly happy they’ve gotten to the finals and hope they win. Though I don’t recognize many of the names, because it’s been years since I really followed any sports, I really hope they win. All the best everyone, would be great to have something to tease those tapas eating spaniards with, even though I am very fond of both tapas and spaniards :) theguardian.com #

‘Amazing’ new technology set to transform the search for alien life - We are about to be in a position of being able to capture way more data than at any time previously, with several new telescopes abd radio arrays about to come online. Add to that powerful AI to analyse the data. We'll be in a position to detect not only intensionally directed communication but unintensional too, such as emisions from alien airport radar, or powerful TV transmitters. theguardian.com #

Donald Trump rushed off stage at rally after sound of gunshots ring out – live updates - The footage I saw on Twitter was kind of weird. I didn’t have audio, but he appeared to be repeatedly saying the f-word, which is compleately understandable if you've just been shot at. But the very weird thing is that as the security staff huddled him off, he seemed to do a nazi salute. Bizare. In any case, hope he’s doing okay. theguardian.com #

Solana-Based Pump.fun Emerges As The Go-To Platform For Memecoin Creation, Report - I’ve been wondering how easy it would be to setup a memecoin for some of my development projects. I wonder if it’s a feasible way to raise money or attention for serious projects. Anyway, based on this site it seems it probably isn’t, as it just looks like a glitchy mega scam site. Is there anything like this but for semi-serious projects? bitcoinist.com #

New Post: The future of crypto and high end NFTs markjgsmith.com #

Lowest turnout in UK general election since universal suffrage, report shows - Only about 50% of people voted. Another interesting way of thinking about it - "if non-voting was a party, it would have the largest share of support by far". theguardian.com #

New Post: Some half baked thoughts about election turnout numbers markjgsmith.com #

TryGhost/ActivityPub - A multitenant ActivityPub server for Ghost, built with Fedify. github.com #

h4l/json.bash - "json.bash is a command-line tool and bash library that creates JSON" - I could see this being a very useful tools to have on your toolbelt. Syntax looks really easy to understand. github.com #

Waiter, there's a whale in my bucket! - It’s possible to use S3 buckets to hist your container files, and though you can't docker push, docker pull not only works fine but is much faster than hosting using a container registry, since yhe image layers download in patallel using regular HTTP requests. Could be useful in some dev and testing situations. ochagavia.nl #

New Post: Cobbling together companies is trending markjgsmith.com #

Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring - These look pretty cool. Definitely want to try one out. It's a $200 dollar smartphone, a $69 smartwatch and $59 wireless ear buds. The smartphone looks kind of cool, runs Android and has relatively good spec with 8GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, 5G support, dual-SIM, an under-display optical fingerprint sensor, 5,000-mAh battery cell with 33-watt fast-charging, 50-megapixel main camera, sensor to capture depth for portrait mode, 16-MP selfie shooter, and expandable storage up to 2 terabytes via microSD. Unfortunately only in bright orange which is gastly. Hopefully they will try some less intense colors at some stage. wired.com #

US Disrupts Russian Bots Spreading Propaganda on Twitter - The big thing in this story is the involvement of RT, which I guess is the quite popular in some places Russia Today media company. They alledgedly participated in the development of the bot farm software called Meliorator, which enables people to manage hundreds of fake social media accounts to distribute pro-russian Ukraine war propaganda. pcmag.com #

This $1.5 Billion AI Company Is Building A ‘General Purpose Brain’ For Robots - Reminder that we are kind of close to T2 Judgement Day type scenarios. Are they really going to open source robotics specific models like the one mentioned here? So many catch-22s everywhere, we want freedom but with control, but who will end up having the control? The game theory on this stuff is insane, in a way, it makes nuclear deterents feel a bit quaint. forbes.com #

The Right Kind of Stubborn - Makes the case that there are two types of stubborn people, namely persistent and obstinate. And that the later is bad. It’s well written just like all PG's writting and very thoughtful. Interesting observations, important to be aware that there is a difference, but also remember life can sometimes throw you into very extreme situations. IMO, these can be choices rather than something built into a person’s character. paulgraham.com #

YouTube Embeds are Bananas Heavy and it’s Fixable - Apparently not only do they add entire mega bytes to the page, but if you add multiple embeds then multiple mega bytes get added. I’m kind of suprised to hear that because I remember videobloggers over 10 years ago with many youtube embeds on their pages and the pages didn’t take that long to load. Anyhow worth knowing about if you are working with video and having unnexpectedly large pages. frontendmasters.com #

Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships - I wish there were more real world examples of data structures used in large RL projects. While I do use things like classes to keep data and functionality together in my static generator for example, and I put a lot of thought into the best way to store and combine these, I’m not sure that that qualifies as data structures. I tend to use simple objects and arrays to store class instances. I've tried a few times to write, for example, a generalised queue data structure and got into trouble. The code was way simpler just using an array. Not to say I wouldn't consider this though. It very well might be easier now that the main app structure is much better defined and might allow for more advanced features. read.engineerscodex.com #

Rachel Reeves plans urgent assessment of spending inheritance - Is it just me or is that a strange way of phrasing this topic. Using the word inherit sure, but inheritance? Hasn’t that got a very high probability of triggering people with assets? It wreeks of we are coming for your money subtext. Perhaps that's their point, sort your shit out. theguardian.com #

Mapped: the vast network of security deals spanning the Pacific, and what it means - Seems like there's an opportunity to create a canihas style info website for this sort of information. I bet there would be a lot of traffic. theguardian.com #

New Post: The revival of Linkblog.io markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Rogan on living in the best days markjgsmith.com #

Labour to seek joint declaration with EU on wide-ranging security pact - It will be interesting to see the policy shifts that Labour will start to announce. This was one of the first articles I've seen. Makes sense to get the ball rolling on foreign policy pretty quickly. theguardian.com #

Exit poll shows surprise win for left-wing alliance in French election - High turnout at about 67%, far right in 3rd and Macron's centrist party in 2nd place. Tactical voting, with smaller party candidates withdrawing and asking their followers to vote for the left coalition, appears to have stopped the far right from forming a government. I wonder if Macron's snap election call will now be heralded as a successful yet risky bet. theguardian.com #

ElevenLabs launches free AI voice isolator to take on Adobe - I keep hearing about Eleven Labs, they look to be a pretty interesting AI audio tools company. This product could be very useful for podcasters. venturebeat.com #

After a 10 Year Wait, Mt. Gox Bitcoin Is Finally Being Returned - It‘s horendous what they put their customers through, and it’s not good enough they are only returning 15% of funds, even if the Bitcoin price has increased a lot. They gave been put through hell, at considerable risk, and now only getting back a fraction of what they would have had they invested it elsewhere. Total nonsense to claim that locking them in limbo was good for them. wired.com #

Viktor Orbán’s rightwing group hits quota for recognition by EU parliament - Just as France's newly formed left wing coalition pushes back the far right in their elections, Orban is creating a far right coalition at the EU level called "Patriots for Europe". All the far right parties across the block apear to be joining. More evidence that everything in life is a fractal. theguardian.com #

A Git story: Not so fun this time - I’ve been trying to read this for several days now, finally found time. It’s a little on the long side but really is a great roundup of the happenings that finally led to the version control tool almost all of us use today. I had no idea it was the Ruby community that was so instrumental in git's adoption around 2008. Glad I know the background, since git is so central to all my programming, and now blogging. Git is one of the best open source projects ever. Houray to all those that helped make it such a success, and indeed those that continue to do so, we are all very lucky to have such a great bit of software available, that we can all freely use to build the things we build. blog.brachiosoft.com #

Biden vows to stay in race and beat Trump in defiant speech - He apparently was massively jet lagged and nearly fell asleep on stage. With all the democrats constantly talking about Trump's lying, I found it interesting to learn yesterday that Biden was renouned for being very economical with the truth early in his career. He was known for big time plagiarising and quite lot of anti-left policies. bbc.com #

The French republic is under threat. We are 1,000 historians and we cannot remain silent - The historians speak out. A very IMO well worded message that articulates their concerns. For what it's worth I wrote about France's future in the exponential age of AI last week. theguardian.com #

Iran reformist Masoud Pezeshkian extends lead in presidential election count - I’m no expert in middle east concerns, but I feel like it could be a good time for the west to improve it’s relations with Iran, so maybe this is a rare bit of light appearing in an environment that has been very somber in recent years. I've heard Iran is a really wonderful place. I watched a great skateboarding documentary that was shot there a number of years ago. theguardian.com #

Keir Starmer to hold first Labour cabinet meeting as Tory leadership jostling begins - The times they are a changing. It’s times like these where culture can get very interesting. Lots of new dynamics to lift and inspire, lots of fresh energy and perspective. Also something I had totally forgotten about, highlighted and explored here, is that the conservatives will need to appoint a new leader. There‘s even some talk it could be Farage, though I gather that’s very unlikely. Still lots of activity happening. Britain will look and feel very different within a few weeks. theguardian.com #

Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows - Assuming they have discounted the possibility that this is some sort of ant on ant hate crime, that the patient really did need an amputation, it's pretty darned amazing. Cool video, ant arms flayling around everywhere. theguardian.com #

What heppened to Perl 7? - I've done quite a lot of Perl programming over the years, though not recently. Interesting to hear progress. Both the new governance structure and the new RFC process definitely sound like a great ideas. I also like the addition of feature flags. I'm not so sure about feature bundles, feels weird hardcoding the version number in the script. I wonder if this will lead to some form Perl renaissance. blogs.perl.org #

Npub.pro: Nostr-based Websites for Creators - "Npub.pro let's users create personal websites from their Nostr content. It's free for anyone getting started, it's open source and self-hostable. Built by Nostr.Band team." - They use Ghost themes and pull content from your Nostr account. There's a pro version where you can attach a custom domain. Useful to have nice shareable personalised links for your content. nobsbitcoin.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Surrounded By Paperclip Maximisers (Issue #171) [markjgsmith.com](https://markjgsmith.com/newsletter/2024/07/06/surrounded-by-paperclip maximisers) #

About 90% of people in Gaza displaced since war began, says UN agency - This is one of those facts that makes you pause and go holy fuck. theguardian.com #

Germany’s first African-born MP to stand down after racist abuse - It’s not entirely clear in the article if there are other people of color in Germany’s parliament. I thought Germany would have had more people of color in their parliament. He received death threats and gun shots through the windows at his office. theguardian.com #

How to Perform Data Validation in Node.js - Validation is one of the most crucial pieces when you are writting node servers, especially REST APIs. I've used several libraries over the years, including Joi and validator. blog.appsignal.com #

EU would not rush to reopen Brexit talks with Labour, say Brussel sources - Looks at some of the ways the UK might entice the EU into finalising some of the finer details. The UK is just not a priority for them right now, what with Russian aggression and various wars happening - "They are not thinking about the UK at all". theguardian.com #

SquirrellyJS - "Powerful, lightweight, pluggable JS template engine". I'm always interested in new templating laguages, this one looks pretty interesting. One day when I have the main features if my static site generator complete I'll write some renderers for other templating engines. Currently it only supports EJS, it's good to keep it simple while I build iut the main features. squirrelly.js.org #

Uncovered: 428-year-old secret dossier reveals Elizabeth I’s network of spies - Imagine how such a network would have evolved over the years, with generation after generation involved in such activities, raised surrounded by all this deception. What would it look like now? Today‘s open culture is very opposite of all this, but I can't help but wonder if this still an unnexplodded bomb that we still need to difuse? Maybe that's what we are already doing without really knowing. I mean where did mafias come from? What will the mafias of the future look like? theguardian.com #

Vitalik Buterin backs new blockchain MegaETH as it raises $20 million at '9-figure' token valuation - Strange that this story appears just as there is big funeral occuring around the corner where I am. MegaEth looks like a Solana competitor focusing on high transactions per second. It's a bit worrying that there is an entity called MegaLabs that launched a builder program called MegaMafia. Note that EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan is one of the investors. EigenLayer has a very interesting anti-mafia feature, but what use is that if it's literally run by the mafia? Seems unlikely these are all coincidences. Maybe that's their point, or maybe they literally are the mafia and just don't give an f anymore. Weirdly this article loaded in Pocket App in Web View mode even though I am not connected to the internet. theblock.co #

Scientists find desert moss ‘that can survive on Mars’ - The idea would be to use it to make martian soil better adapted to grow other things. They've tested it in Mars-like conditions and it survives. theguardian.com #

Macron told ‘people detest you’ as far-right bids to be biggest party in France - Things seems really messed up in France. Why are they arguing so much about inconsequencial things? This really could be France's biggest moment on the global stage. theguardian.com #

New Post: France turn your dysfunction into the central powerhouse of Europe markjgsmith.com #

Uniting Web And Native Apps With 4 Unknown JavaScript APIs - Takes a look at some web platform APIs with some simple examples: The Screen Orientation API, the Device Orientation API, the Vibration API and the Contact Picker API. smashingmagazine.com #

Julian Assange received USD 500k in Bitcoin from anonymous donor - Apparently to pay for the debts he accumulated throughout his ordeal. Good to know there are still people that recognise and value positive contributions to hunanity, even if they manifest in unnexpected ways. threadreaderapp.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Liberalism, Free Speech, and Even More Politics (Issue #170) markjgsmith.com #

The 11ty Bundle continues - A year in review - If you're looking for some great Eleventy related content, this is looks like a great place. Lots of content about building sites with the Eleventy static site generator. bobmonsour.com #

Sunak and Starmer clash over gambling scandal in final head-to-head election debate - It reads like it was quite a show down, like some sort of old school boxing match. Likely won't make much difference looking at the polls. theguardian.com #

EU braces for the nightmare scenario- a eurosceptic France - "It’s always been a bit of a strange phenomenon within the European project that at political, policymaking level, [France] drives the project, but at a public level it has always been quite sceptical" - Apparently 69% of french voters feel the EU and domestic political systems are broken, against a 38% EU average. That sounds quite dysfunctional to me. theguardian.com #

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately - Sounds like quite a bad supply chain attack. Polyfills have been very popular for years, hence the very large number of affected sites, including big ones like the world economic forum. theregister.com #

New Post: The printing press vs the world wide web markjgsmith.com #

New JavaScript Set methods - Seems like these could be very useful in some situations, especially because they are optimised for speed. Doing everything with arrays can get tricky. developer.mozilla.org #

ES Modules are a mess - ES modules are definitely a mess. I'd love to use the new syntax, but everytime I've tried, I've ended up in some totally intractable disaster. They took something that worked flawlessly (require) and tried to replace it with a russian roulette footgun, that occasionly is a bit better. But it's a friggin russian roulette footgun! I'm not at all suprised by the adoption stats. I think forcing people to migrate as the author suggests is a very very bad idea. borischerny.com #

Node.js is Here to Stay - Yes there are some parts of node that aren't great, like the difficulties with the new ESM module system, but nodejs is still one of the best programming languages out there, especially for web development. This article highlights some of the newest features. blog.platformatic.dev #

Does personal AI require Big Compute? - Doc Searls thinks we need to shift the focus from from Big AI and Big Compute, to personal AI, where users control make good use of all the data they are generating. doc.searls.com #

Bitcoin pioneer Julian Assange free from prison – leaves UK after striking US deal - Saw this news earlier on Twitter from a Jack Dorsey tweet. Very unnexpected. Glad he's finally free, very happy for him, his family and friends. My thoughts go out to all others around the world who are unjustly imprisonned, having their lives stolen, being slow murdered. cryptoslate.com #

Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse - Only viewing and liking fediverse posts will be possible initially. You will still need to login to the other networks in order to reply. It's good to see progress on their AP integration. I think they should focus on being able to move accounts between networks. From what I've read, that experience is really dire at the minute. theverge.com #

Macron's election gamble puts French democracy on the table - Things are looking very bad indeed in France at the minute. bbc.com #

The Eternal Truth of Markdown - A bit of an ode to Markdown, one of the unsung greats of the web - "It’s messy. It’s ambiguous. It’s human. And this, in the end, is the Way." wired.com #

Starmer’s growth plan ‘doomed’ without access to EU markets, warn economists - Free movement and access to the single market are such big downsides of not being in the EU. We are going to need meaningful and clear alternatives. theguardian.com #

Modern liberalism in the United States - I'm curious about this somewhat nebulous concept after listening to a recent Keen On episode #2105. Lots I didn't realise I didn't know about. Much bigger topic than I previously thought. en.wikipedia.org #

John Rawls - American philosopher and probably the OG liberalist. en.wikipedia.org #

John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ - Most famous Rawls writing. This is a bit of a summary. 1000wordphilosophy.com #

Nvidia remains a little-known brand despite briefly passing Apple, Microsoft in market cap - Interesting to see how Nvidia brand compares to the other top companies. Not so well known but brand recognition is climbing, especially in sectors such as gaming. cnbc.com #

You've probably never heard of the biggest band at Glastonbury - It's a K-pop boy band from South Korea called Seventeen! They have the Friday afteroon spot on the Pyramid stage. bbc.com #

‘Get real, wakey wakey, red pill time’: Reform candidates in their own words - Good idea for a news piece. To be honest I was expecting some really dreadful stuff, but most if it isn't that bad. theguardian.com #

Mother of all battles’: French left join forces to beat far-right electoral threat - Pretty good summary of the situation, it's the left coalition vs the center vs the hard right. Heck of a showdown. theguardian.com #

Punch and Judy, penny slots and Pontins: why the great British seaside continues to hold our imagination - Oh we do love to be besides the seaside...it's really worth trying a beach holiday in nothern europe. It's very very different to beach holidays in hot climate places. Both are great in their own way. theguardian.com #

The magic of Glastonbury music festival markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The great british seaside holiday markjgsmith.com #

The EU Is Reaping What It Sows With the DMA: Uncertainty - Mostly common sense piece by John Gruber outlining quite effectively why Apple is having to tread very carefully in the EU. daringfireball.net #

Threads finally launches its API for developers - "Developers can publish posts, fetch their own content, and deploy reply management tools. That means developers can let users hide/unhide or respond to specific replies" - "It will also allow developers to tap into analytics with measurements such as the number of views, likes, replies, reposts, and quotes at the media and account level". techcrunch.com #

New Post: Jews and Arabs of Jaffa markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Does my Bitcoin have a covenant attached to it? markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Politics, Bitcoin and UFOs (Issue #169) markjgsmith.com #

The Framework Laptop 13 is about to become one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops - Mostly aimed at tinkerers abd hobbyists, it's a first step in getting it into the hands of developers. Interesting because RISC-V is fully open and free, nothing propriety, so anyone can use it. However this incarnation is quite under powered compared to regular current laptops. The good news is that with a Framework laptop that shouldn't matter that much. Since it's modular you can easily swap out the main board for something more powerful when you aren't hacking on RISC-V. Pretty cool. theverge.com #

Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine - Perplexity seems to be everywhere this week, multiple podcasts and articles. Reading this it seems they might be up to somewhat shady stuff but the whole article had this sort of flat nothing burger vibe about it. Perplexities answers and explanations often read like someone really struggling, just stuck between many rocks and hard places. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. A feeling I'm all too familiar with. Also I can't tell if it's an honest article or a hit piece. wired.com #

Sunak to lose seat in Tory wipeout, major poll predicts - This poll is even worse than the one that predicted the worst defeat in 100 years. They say the Lib Dems might even stand a chance of becoming the opposition. The colored map is quite something. telegraph.co.uk #

Threads API - I'm a bit suprised it took this long to release an API. I want to be able to auto-post new content from the website. Should be possible I guess. The tricky part is each social media has different character limits on posts. developers.facebook.com #

New Post: My main worry with an ultra strong labour government markjgsmith.com #

New Post: I got assaulted again markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Assault aftermath 1 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Assault aftermath 2 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Assault aftermath 3 markjgsmith.com #

Safe Superintelligence Inc. - Ex OpenAI employees Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy start a new safety focussed AI company. I think Ilya is the bloke that got Sam Altman fired, before he was re-hired. It occurs to me that his name is a bit unusual for the founder of a super intelligence company. Sometimes pronounciation is everything. ssi.inc #

Postgres is all you need, even for vectors - I don't have a ton of experience with postgres, however if you can simplify your setup by just having 1 database, things will be much easier. Looks like you can do vector db stuff with postgres by just adding some plugins. I guess the implication is that it could be used for AI / LLMs workloads? It's not specifically mentioned. anyblockers.com #

Good code is rarely read - Not the best article title, the thesis is that you shouldn't need to read good code much because it's so effortless to read and understand it. Sounds simple enough but it's actually really difficult to write code that's easy to read, especially on larger code bases. alexmolas.com #

New Post: The UK, the EU, podcasting and AI markjgsmith.com #

Nvidia passes Microsoft in market cap to become most valuable public company - The new dynamic among the top spots is interesting. Nvidia is more similar to Apple than Microsoft since it's trying control the entire stack. It's good that not all the top companies are full stack, but I think it would be interesting to have a top company that was full stack and building exclusively open source software. And for that matter a purely software company that was all open source. I wonder if that's even possible. cnbc.com #

New Post: On being accepted in asia markjgsmith.com #

The Myth of the Tin Foil Hat - Fun article about the humble tin foil hat, maybe not the best invention ever, but I think it became one of the most useful turns of phrase in our lifetime. gizmodo.com #

AI in finance is like ‘moving from typewriters to word processors’ - Nothing ground breaking in this relatively short article but it's good to read about how management consultants and business schools are approaching the AI revolution. Let's please make sure AI tech also makes it into the hands of artists. ft.com #

YouTube is experimenting with Notes, a crowdsourced feature that lets users add context to videos - Seems like I was somewhat ahead of the curve with the whole Notes thing. I know my notes aren't exactly the same as what's described here, but short public messages are the generalised feature, what you do with them depends on the context. The big discovery in my opinion, and it might sound like it's not something that's all that meaningfull, is that they stand independantly from blog posts. And turns out, imo anyway, that it is actually quite meaningfull. techcrunch.com #

The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup - Great tech stack writeup by Anthony Simons covering the personal tech stack he uses for all his projects. Loads of great stuff in this post. It's very focussed on Kubernetes, which is somewhat complex, but once you have it configured it's very easy to deploy all the components of your infrastructure. If you are looking for something a bit more old school, check out my writeup of a robust setup for nodejs apps. If you are just starting out probably best to follow Anthony's advice to use a hosted service, at least initially. These sorts of self-hosted configurations are awesome, but a lot of up front effort. anthonynsimon.com #

Apple’s Slow Rollout of Intelligence Features Will Stretch Into 2025 - A bunch of interesting Apple related info in this multi-part article, the most noteworthy probably being more details about Apple Intelligence and a whole load of VisionOS improvements. bloomberg.com #

The Light Phone - "The Light Phone III adds a metal frame, USB-C, fingerprint ID, a flashlight, 5G, an NFC chip, and a clickable wheel." - The idea behind this phone is kind of interesting. It's a phone but with a lot of the smartphone features stripped back. It only does the basics that a feature phone does but with a few extras like podcasts. The point is to try and create a device that is purely functional, that doesn't distract you from the real world around you. There is no web browser, no social media for example. The promo video does a good job of explaining things. Interested to see if this takes off. thelightphone.com #

No One Is Talking About Brexit - I've heard this mentioned in a few places and I've noticed it too. I can understand it though, it is a bit of a distraction. I'm curious about the ongoing relationship with the EU, but I think we need to give the new outside the EU thing a chance to develop. Lots of opportunity to learn about ourselves as a nation imho. politicalwire.com #

New Post: My thoughts on Brexit markjgsmith.com #

Why the pope has the ears of G7 leaders on the ethics of AI - This is likely more important than it appears, the pope has a very big influence on over a billion people worldwide. It's also interesting because like Biden, only the second Catholic US president, he's very old, yet still influencial, but also because what I get from the article is that what he speaks about AI actually seems somewhat well thought out. Perhaps his position enables him and his entourage to think deeply about these matters. Other names that might be worth remembering, Paolo Benanti an influencial fransiscan friar who advises the pope on AI, and Georgia Meloni, Italy's PM who’s the first to invite the pope to a G7 meeting. The other thing that's interesting is that not only is he at the G7 but he has been meeting with large groups of comedians recently. That's perhaps another sign of the times. It's hard to tell because there are so many levels of traditional media involved here, but maybe, just maybe it's not all garbage that this old fellow is leaving in his trail, which I'm afraid to say is more than can be said for some old people, at least in my vecinity this morning as I typed this paragraph. theguardian.com #

Blur: To the End review – sentimental journey for four likely lads on their way to Wembley - I saw them live in Ghent sometime around ’93 when they were just starting to get really big. Then at several festivals over the years, one particularly memorable. In a way, they sort of openned up the english music scene to me when I moved back from abroad to the UK to go to university. I got quite into them, even though it wasn't really the sort of music I listenned to at the time, which was much more dark and metally. Coincidentally the first post on the linkblog was to an article about Damon's shape shifting career. It's nice to see and read about them again after all these years, even if the review of the documentary isn't all that great. theguardian.com #

More than mere camembert: why France leads the world in cheesemaking - I guess the Guardian must synchronize some of their articles, I saved this without thinking it had anything to do with the previous Blur link, but surely it can't be a coincidence given Alex James’ passion for cheesemaking. You could make the argument that there's even a comedic cosmic link to the one before that too. In any case, I saved it because it occurred to me that I quite missed all the nice cheeses I used to eat when I was living in Belgium. The cheese here in Vietnam is very strange. It's this dry stringy stuff, a bit like shredded chicken. theguardian.com #

ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack - The massively refactored ChromeOS will be based on the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, and will enable improved security, faster development of new AI features and better interop of different devices like phones with Chromebooks. Sounds awesome, especially the interop. That in my experience has always been where Android has performed very poorly. It will take a while to get there, but they will provide seemless transition when it's ready. blog.chromium.org #

Apple paying OpenAI with exposure, not money - Interesting collaboration, I wonder how long the honeymoon will last. Looks like Apple is already eyeing up other AI companies, planning to offer a variety of functionality to their customers. It's also interesting that OpenAI made a statement about privacy, how Apple customers won't be tracked. Do they treat other customers differently? Will they be audited around privacy? appleinsider.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Big Changes At Every Layer (Issue #168) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Elon’s insane pay package markjgsmith.com #

No magic wand for growing the economy, says Starmer - Could be because I've just written a blog post about his pay package, but this article makes Keir Stalmer sound like an Elon Musk type character. That really would be pretty interesting. bbc.com #

Vladimir Putin issues fresh demands to Ukraine to end war - It really feels like we are heading towards WW3 with all these wars going on. A tin foil hat wearer could be forgiven for thinking that such a thing would align with a world where AI tech puts millions of people out of work. Maybe time to invest in nuclear energy companies. Pains me to say it but that’s realistically the only thing that will loosen Russia‘s grip on the west. theguardian.com #

French leftwing parties form ‘Popular Front’ to contest snap election - I have to say the name of the combined party had me thinking of the classic Popular Front sketch from Monty Python's Life of Brian. In any case French politics is definitely heating up. Might be quite interesting. theguardian.com #

PDF to podcast - I haven't tried this but it was on HN yesterday. You upload a PDF and get back a podcast episode. I guess it could be useful if you read a lot of PDFs. Kind of niche. pdf-to-podcast.com #

New Post: Static site generator archives plugin update markjgsmith.com #

Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models - Looks like a ptetty strong AI product offering. Will be very interesting to see how folks use it. machinelearning.apple.com #

Omakub - "An Omakase Developer Setup for Ubuntu 24.04 by DHH" - Sort of like oh-my-zsh but for an entire Ubuntu install and setup. Aiming to create the perfect OS optimised for software developers. DHH discusses it in a recent Rework podcast episode, I also blogged about it. Cool project. omakub.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: This is Funworld (Issue #172) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Leo Laporte on AI markjgsmith.com #

The Endgame for Stablecoins - I haven't had a chance to read this yet, but looks super interesting. I'm trying to understand stablecoins a lot better, they are clearly a bug deal in the crypto world. multicoin.capital #

Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models - Apple enters the AI software race, with a focus on privacy and high quality training data. They appear to have spent a lot of time thinking their product offering through. machinelearning.apple.com #

Ed Davey vows to fight for UK to rejoin EU single market and eventually overturn Brexit - I quite like the understated simplicity of their 'fair deal' pitch. Yeah most people just want to be sure they have the basics covered so they can then try to meaningfully contribute to society. I guess their cannabis shops thing will be popular with younger voters, on balance I think it's probably a good idea, with the criminality aspect removed it would eventually stop being such a draw for risk takers, it would just be a normal thing, so less likelihood of leading to other crime. The pro-EU stance also interesting. I'd like to know their what their approach would be within the EU should a rejoin occur. Seems like they could do quite well with these policies. independent.co.uk #

Robinhood to Buy Crypto Exchange Bitstamp in Effort to Expand Outside the U.S. - Pretty interesting article. Robinhood has clearly hit upon a massive intetest in investing for regular folks, makes total sense for them to get into crypto. coindesk.com #

New Posts: The Lib Dems pro-EU pro-cannabis ticket markjgsmith.com #

New Posts: Linux desktop for developers movement markjgsmith.com #

UK unemployment rising at fastest pace of OECD countries, analysis shows - Of all member states, only Costa Rica suffered a similar rise. Managers are blamibg the economy, risibng costs but also interestingly a sizeable oroportion are also pointing to increased automation. No mention if that's related to AI but seems likely since that's the biggest tech trend at the minute. theguardian.com #

EU elections: populist right makes gains but pro-European centre holds - Pretty good round up of the elections. I'm finding all these parties with similar sounding names, and parties within parties, and the trans-national nature of the whole thing very confusing. Quite an exiting event this time around. I feel someone should make something like a Ven diagram of all the parties. theguardian.com #

EU elections: Macron to dissolve French parliament after crushing loss to far right - France seems to be somewhat at the centre of much of the election drama. It's kind of shocking that Le Penn has done so well, getting twice the support as Macron did. In what has been described as a poker move Macron has called a snap national election in response. Exciting stuff. Interesting that it will happen only a few days after the UK's snap election, which was called last week by Sunak. So much happening in Europe at the minute. Plus it's the first time 16+ year olds have gotten the vote in several countries. theguardian.com #

Hundreds of millions head to polls on final day of European elections - Great sunmary piece, this one has just the right amount of detail and breadth across the entire region. Seems like the final results will be known by the end of today. I'm interested to see the participation rates in the various countries. theguardian.com #

Centre-right on course to strengthen majority in EU election, as far-right makes gains - Some coverage from the Beeb, several bite sized summaries from various reporters across the continent, focusing in on hard facts rather than over analyse, quite successfully I think cutting through much of the confusing system of coalitions. I'm still kind of confused, but maybe I'll at least recognise some of the names over the next few years. bbc.com #

India outpacing Asian rivals in data center capacity, report says - In non EU election news, turns out data centre growth is a pretty intetesting metric, a proxy for economic growth? India has been doing relatively well recently as a country. asia.nikkei.com #

Solana saw nearly half a million tokens launched last month - It's become the most popular chain for launching new tokens recently, very popular especially with memecoins. Are there any open source software projects that have launched coins? I wonder if I could create a coin and attach it in some way to the development of my static site generator. I'd have next to no clue how one would actually run a coin. Probably a far too outlandish an idea. On the other hand might be kind of fun. theblock.co #

Who are the political supergroups in the European parliament? - It's good to see the main parties listed. I can't help but wonder how many regular folks turn off to the whole thing when they realise there are essentially parties inside parties, and none of the names really describe what they are very well. Politics is complicated already even when it's just 1 level of parties. How on earth are regular people supposed to compare and contrast and figure out what's going on with all this indirection? theguardian.com #

European elections: Dutch exit polls show progressive alliance just ahead of far right - What with all these coalitions, I wonder how many of the politicians actually remember their official policies. And even worse, how many remember the official policy positions of the opposing parties? The level of winging it has got to be through the roof. Perhaps they have a model checker embeded in their cravates. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Collaborating on a Rocky Road (Issue #167) markjgsmith.com #

Tinypool - the node.js worker pool 🧵 - Projects like this interest me because the could potentially be integrated into my static site generator. Good to keep the footprint small. github.com #

New Post: How digital collaboration works at VFX shops markjgsmith.com #

Nvidia passes Apple in market cap as second-most valuable public U.S. company - They passed $3 trillion market cap. The top most valuable are now Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple, with Apple dealing with a lot of head winds. cnbc.com #

sanack/node-jq - Node.js wrapper for jq - a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. Could be useful. github.com #

In Praise Of The Basics - With web development it's important go understand the basics, whether you are an advanced developer or a user who wants to make some modifications to their Squarespace hosted website. This article list some free resources to get people up to speed, could be a good piece to keep handy in case you need something to send to friends, family or clients. smashingmagazine.com #

Thousands of homeless people removed from Paris in pre-Olympics ‘social cleaning’ - This should be a national embarrassment. It's clearly not a money issue, the Olympics will bring huge amounts of money. These people have been forced into horrible conditions by a system that is clearly against them, and now the state is trying to disapear them. Just horrendous. Sadly this type of thing happens in so many places, it's the modern day gas chambers. theguardian.com #

Shein set to file for £50bn London listing - Interesting to see how local big clothes companies like Zara and H&M will react, apparently Shein skirts import taxes since many of the third-party suppliers, as well as contract manufacturers (i.e. small factories) ship direct to customers rather than import large shiping containers. bbc.com #

Open Collective - "Open Collective is a legal and financial toolbox for grassroots groups. It’s a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community." - It's awesome that there are now tools to help these grassroots movements be transparent. That enables them to carry out the great work they do with much less likelyhood they will fall victim to corruption. opencollective.com #

OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance - Interesting to see they are engageing Lawrence Lessig, well known for his work creating the Creative Commons, the copy left movement, and experiments in elections reform. I find the excessive secrecy in these AI companies worrying, these groups should be operating with much more transparency. nytimes.com #

New Post: EU elections AI analyst bot markjgsmith.com #

Open Timestamps - "A timestamping proof standard, OpenTimestamps aims to be a standard format for blockchain timestamping." - Use the bitcoin blockchain to create timestamps so you can verify that a particular bit of content existed at a particular moment in time. I'd like to integrate something like this into my static site generator at some point. The website isn't loading the CSS, so not sure if it's still maintained. Sounds like a cool project though. opentimestamps.org #

New Post: Static site vs dynamic web server markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Some people just want to watch you starve markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Utopias in the age of AI & crypto markjgsmith.com #

War, AI and more war: the 2024 Bilderberg agenda is sure to set off alarm bells - Haven't herd this lot mentioned in quite a few years. It was Bilderberg this and illuminatti that about a decade ago. Interesting they are trying to re-inventing themselves. Perhaps they should try being more 'open' and less secretive, have the attendees do some blogging. I'm struck today about the 'builder' root in the name that I hadn't noticed before. This year it's a who's who of heads Big AI tech apparently, oh and Big pharma, and Big warfare. So nothing to be worried about then. Probably just like Davos. theguardian.com #

Napster Sparked a File-Sharing Revolution 25 Years Ago - That era of the internet really was kind of wild. I don't remember being into Napster specifically but Bit torrent and NZBs were really awesome. Great post download automation features. I miss those days, you could really vicerally sense how the web was going to change literally everything. torrentfreak.com #

U.S tech giants are building dozens of huge data centers in Chile. Locals are fighting back - These data centers are massive and use huge amounts of water extracted from the ground to cool their servers. That's a big problem in areas that already have droubts since many years. I like that these environmental organisations are springing up to both highlight the issue but also to facilitate projects where the very rich Big Tech companies can offset their environmental footprint. I just hope there is transparency, I could imagine such efforts could easily fall victim to corruption. restofworld.org #

Computer makers unveil Nvidia Blackwell systems for AI rollouts - Two big new things in this article. First, 25-30X improvements in power comsumption, and second, the idea of "AI factories" that produce a new type of commodity: artificial intelligence. AI ETF anyone? venturebeat.com #

Young French leader's rise and Belgium's future existence: What to watch in EU elections - Pretty good article that briefly samples the pulse in various countries accross the EU. I didn't realise that Belgium was in danger of disapearing, I suspect it's a bit of an alarmist view. Lots of focus on the rise of far right groups. It would be good to find a few similar articles by different news orgs to compare and contrast. Certainly interesting times politically in the EU at the minute. bbc.com #

I’m a brown, Muslim European. For people like me, these EU elections are terrifying - Shada Islam piece about how the EU elections affect people like her. Every country has it's own slightly different flavour of disfunction when it comes to immigration, racism etc. I think also each place has it's own particulars where it's working well and producing net benefits for those involved. I wish we could spend some time unearthing those stories too. Interesting article nonetheless, both positive and negative aspects need to be written about and shared. theguardian.com #

‘I cannot take it lightly’: young voters urged to take part in EU elections - The view from young voters, also very interesting, they face quite different pressures and influences. And across the EU this group is massive. Some varied beliefs in ex-autocratic and russian states. Lots of concern for environmental issues. theguardian.com #

The future of financial analysis: How GPT-4 is disrupting the industry, according to new research - At some point the prediction capabilities are going to approach perfection. Won't that break the econony? Why would anyone invest? I guess when predicting company perfornance and economies has been solved those analysts will need to move on to analysing more complex systems? venturebeat.com #

UK within British empire is like last person left at a party, says David Olusoga - Quite the analogy. I'm not sure it's so accurate, it feels like we've been hungover for years at this point. theguardian.com #

The Guardian view on social media harms: the tech giants must be more open - I'm not so sure this is such a good idea. Yes there are occasionally some horrible cases that occur, but you have to realise the other side of the coin. There are also horrible cases of abuse by parents. I wonder what Britney Spears would think about social media companies allowing parents to snoop on their children. theguardian.com #

Whither Utopia? - This article by Rohit Krishnan has been getting some attention. I thought it started out as a sort of book list maskerading as a thought piece. But it does get more interesting from about half way through. It's a topic I'm curious about, especially in this new age of AI and crypto where everything can be predicted and everything can be turned into a transaction. strangeloopcanon.com #

Belgian police search EU parliament office over Russian interference - Looks like the EU is getting serious about russians behaving badly. The scale and sophistication of these co-ordinated attacks is quite worrying. At what stage though does it become censorship, because that could be used on anyone. Many believe russians are trying to break up the EU. theguardian.com #

Indexing all of Wikipedia, on a laptop - Out of all the talk of using publically available data for AI training and copyright etc, suprisingly this is the first time I've heard mention using Wikipedia. Most of this is over my head, it's just interesting it can be done on a personal laptop. You need Linux, lots of storage space (~190GB) and lots of ram (~28GB). foojay.io #

New Post: Lex Fridman on human memory markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Everything page version 2 markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Vibes, the Economy, Blogging and Freedom (Issue #166) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The future of iPadOS vs MacOS markjgsmith.com #

New Post: My static site generator series markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Renderers, middleware & renderer pipelines markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Server-side components markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Incremental progressive rendering markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Plugins and packaging markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Data loading utilities markjgsmith.com #

The reasoning behind publishers' desire to federate their sites is clear - The author talks to the Verge's Nilay Patel and 404Media's Jason Koebler to find out what federation has to offer smaller independant publishers, and what their plans are for this Fediverse centric future list23.com #

Inside Bluesky’s Engineering Culture - Pretty interesting piece, at least the first half, that looks at what it’s like working at Bluesky as part of the engineering team. Also great description of the tech stack. Annoyingly the second half of the article is behind a paywall. newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com #

Essays on programming I think about a lot - Great selection of programming essays that focus on specific aspects of the craft. For each item the author has extracted a poiniant quote from the essay, and written a short summary of the key ideas. I hope to find time to read some of these :) benkuhn.net #

Nigel Farage under fire after saying Muslims do not share British values - They should have a public debate about it. Reaching straight for the racism card feels like an over-reaction, especially since what he said wasn't particularly racist, just controvershal. And media is creating a tsunami out of it. Why? theguardian.com #

Who’s actually using Threads? Young protesters in Taiwan - As far as I remember Twitter started getting popular once protestors started using it. Interesting to see that happening for Threads. restofworld.org #

Zelenskiy calls on world leaders to attend Ukraine ‘peace summit’ after deadly Kharkiv strike - It's digusting that Putin is bombing supermarkets full of regular civilians. It's strange that many global south countries appear to be ignoring the war. theguardian.com #

Linux as the new developer default at 37signals - In my early days working in VFX (~2005), the default Desktop was Linux for both developers and artists. There was some Mac and Windows, but mostly everyone lived (and loved!) Linux especially because we had created tons of cool specialised tools and integrations that made collaborating really smooth. Awesome to see this is happening in software companies. world.hey.com #

A root-server at the Internet’s core lost touch with its peers. We still don’t know why. - Trouble at mill? Glitch in the internet base layer. Somewhat interesting turn of events. Probably nothing to worry about, but maybe worth knowing about. arstechnica.com #

How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding? - Turns out they are virtually the exact same thing from a technical perspective. Pretty good high level view from Vitalik about the main scaling techniques. vitalik.eth.limo #

Italy, Slovenia, Croatia: New train line offers ready-made rail adventure for as little as €8 - 3 countries in central and easter europe for 8 euros! Would love to do some travel in the baltics, a region of the world I've barely explored. euronews.com #

Life in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan - Great writeup by Flavio Massignan of his experience living in Bishkek while volunteering organizing a nomadic art camp and workshops. ionlytakepics.substack.com #

New Post: Friendly bowl of soup markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Maybe things will get better later markjgsmith.com #

Metamask Is Working to Add Native Bitcoin Support - Multi-chain wallets are looking like where the puck is going to be pretty soon. nobsbitcoin.com #

The AI data goldmine - Lots of opportunity in private data sharing for AI training. werd.io #

Rishi Sunak: I will bring back National Service - It's interesting that there's an option to volunteer in the local community intead. I think the nation should be ready for war but also peace. Both are actually a challenge. telegraph.co.uk #

No, Today’s AI Isn’t Sentient. Here’s How We Know - Essentially AIs don't have bodies so they can't actually sense things. Makes sense. time.com #

Rishi Sunak’s national service pledge is ‘bonkers’, says ex-military chief - I wonder, if such a program had been avaliable to my generation, would it have been an effective way to resist the the baby boomers that ruined our future? theguardian.com #

Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve - Things really could get quite strange. Some of the stories in this article have a silliness and hilarity to them, but I could see how it could get quite distopian too. On the other hand if used with integrity and perhaps a bit of humour, could help to unite a nation with many languages. wired.com #

New Post: Celebrity likeness endorsement via blockchain NFTs markjgsmith.com #

Bluesky now lets you send DMs - I didn't realise this wasn't already a feature. I hardly ever send DMs, even on Twitter. Reading the feature description I feel like it would be a good idea to allow everyone, but to have good tools to filter out all DMs except for those from people you follow. Allow all but with way to avoid tsunamis of hate. That would be a great feature in RL too btw, at least in my life it would. theverge.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Simulation Theory and Virtual Worlds (Issue #165) markjgsmith.com #

Rishi Sunak takes gamble by calling UK general election for 4 July - It feels somewhat strange that the UK can pull off these suprise elections, when the rest of the world has much more defined and repeatable election cycles. I wonder if this is a way of bring small and nimble on the world's stage? I guess it will be a very short election campaign. theguardian.com #

Why has the UK PM called a general election, what’s at stake and what happens now? - I don't know that much about these two. One thing I find interesting is that Sunak is the only politician I've ever heard publicly acknowledgeing that inflation is a hidden tax. That was quite suprising especially from a conservative government because they have the reputation as being mostly wealthy and always making life hard for the poor. The other thing I find interesting is that the King 'disolves' parliament. Like it's some sort of medicine that the whole population needs to ingest. Top quality politics analysis here as you can tell. theguardian.com #

Nvidia reports stratospheric growth as AI boom shows no sign of stopping - Their recent performance is something I don't think has ever been seen before. It's really incredible. An interesting thing I've read is that serious Bitcoin mining companies are converting their infrastructure to be hybrid AI / Bitcoin, so they can easily switch between use cases. theguardian.com #

Crypto Lobby Wins: House Passes FIT21 as Democrats Deride Historic Regulatory Framework - Looks like the schizophrenic reaction to crypto by US regulatory bodies might be coming to an end. The issue appears to be entering the upcoming election cycle too, with both democrats and republicans realising that it's a sizeable campaign issue that affects many voters. decrypt.co #

OpenAI, WSJ Owner News Corp Strike Content Deal Valued at Over $250 Million - It's interesting to see more of these content deals for AI training data. As far as I know Reddit did the first one, worth around $60 million per year. So deal values appear to be about the same, even across new media and old media properties, since the News Corp deal is over 5 years. wsj.com #

New Post: Development strategy ideas markjgsmith.com #

US SEC approves exchange applications to list spot ether ETFs - Good to see a potential sea change in crypto, though there is still possibility for the SEC to drag it's feet, it looks like eth ETFs are going to happen. reuters.com #

How to document your javascript package - A great compliment to writing blog post documentation is to use JSDoc directly in your code. This article runs over the basics of how to do that. Focuses on how JSDocs get parsed by Deno's JSR platform, but would be useful in any context. deno.com #

Reliable Task Execution - Decoupling your frontend from backend processing is vital in any serious web application. I've had good results in my robust nodejs architecture using Agenda but BullMq is another great option. It boils down to creating message queues which you can process seperately from web requests. gauravbytes.hashnode.dev #

Russia begins tactical nuclear weapon drills near Ukraine border - So he expects countries aiding Ukraine militarily to impose rules on Ukraine, even though he himself is breaking literally all the rules by invading a sovereign country? Then he's using that as justification for his idiotic intimidation of everyone. It's mindboggling that Putin would put the entire planet at risk with this maximumly excessive saber rattling. Surely he has to expect the world won't be ok with his threats. How can Ukraine be worth annihilation of literally all of humanity? Something doesn't add up. theguardian.com #

New Posts: Who pays for the high frequency blockchains? markjgsmith.com #

New Posts: Twitter app offline actually pretty good markjgsmith.com #

The Biden campaign is looking to hire a seasoned meme lord - Move over influencers, here come the meme lords. How long until meme lord is a trending job title on LinkedIn? Sign of the times init. techcrunch.com #

Bitcoin Pizza Day is this week. Here's what it's all about - It commemorates the first Bitcoin transaction used to purchase actual physical goods. It was a couple of pizzas bought for 10000 bitcoin. People like to figure out the value in today's exchange rate. In today's bitcoin, those pizzas cost $650 million. qz.com #

Matthew Perry: Los Angeles police launch investigation into actor’s death - I don't think I mentioned it at the time but a couple of months ago I saw a 99% Matthew Perry doppelganger. He was looking very healthy. He crossed the road on front of me, our eyes met briefly as he passed about 5 metres from me, he smiled. I remember thinking how uncanny it was, because not only did he look exactly like him, but his body movements were identical too. It was like he'd been resurected from the dead. Super weird. If for whatever reason he is alive I'm glad he's doing okay. I always enjoyed watching his acting. theguardian.com #

In case China invades Taiwan, ASML and TSMC have a plan - This is one of those eye opening facts you discover deep down a follow the money rabbit hole. Turns out that ASML, the dutch company that supplies extreme ultrovioley lithography machines to taiwanese chip manufacturer world powerhouse TSMC, can remotely disable them. They have plans in place with TSMC to do this should China invade Taiwan. US intelligence claims China has plans to invade Taiwan by 2027. Sounds like the plot of a Bond movie. phonearena.com #

New Post: AI futurism still interesting markjgsmith.com #

Julian Assange wins right to appeal against extradition to US - It's hard to believe this case is still going on 15 years after he published the classified documents. Reading through this, it's also unbelievable how in the weeds they are, it's the finest detail of the finest detail that they are arguing about at this stage. theguardian.com #

UK’s autonomous vehicle legislation becomes law, paving the way for first driverless cars by 2026 - The corporations that manufacture the vehicle, develop the driverless software or the insurance companies, will be responsible for any accidents that occur while driverless is activated. techcrunch.com #

New Post: I‘ve got AI fatigue markjgsmith.com #

OpenAI strikes deal to bring Reddit content to ChatGPT - No mention of the amount the deal is worth, but it follows a similar deal with Alphabet worth $60 million per year. Reddit stock is up by 12% on this latest news. reuters.com #

The carcinization of web frameworks - Front end frameworks appear to be converging on a similar set of features, and these might end up becoming part of the web platform. Immutabiliy, single-directional flow of data, signals, server-side rendering, resumability and web components are all patterns that are appearing across frameworks. toddle.dev #

Five Basic Things About JavaScript That Will Help Non JavaScript-Focused Web Designers - I thought this was a pretty good list. Basically if you are more of a CSS / designer person, these are the top javascript things you should get familiar with to make your job easier: selecting things, updating classes, listening for events, changing HTML, getting data from forms. Great examples and explanations of each, plus a few bonuses like web components. frontendmasters.com #

New Post: Documenting code while blogging markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Bitcoin is great for learning about money markjgsmith.com #

ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t - They try to force their employees to sign really excessive non-disclosure agreements that even ban employees from acknowledging the existence of the NDAs. That's not what you expect from a company who's publically stated mission to ensure AI benefits all of humanity. And turns out their NDAs are working, departing employees are being extremely quiet. Sam Altman now says he is embarrassed about the exit NDA. vox.com #

Twitter is officially X.com now - I'm totally not opposed to the new name, but I do instinctively still think of it as Twitter. Perhaps it will take a concerted effort for a few weeks to only refer to it as X. The name is just so short. I keep wanting to call it Twitter/X instead, it's like I'm worried non tech people will think I've written a typo or something. theverge.com #

Putin is seeking to weaponise threat of mass migration, says Estonian PM - The claim is that Putin has been using the Wagner group in north Africa to cause disruptions that lead to mass migrations towards europe. I hadn't heard this theory. Would be good to see more evidence that supports the claim. theguardian.com #

What Is MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) in Crypto? - I hear this mentioned constantly but had no real clue what is was aside from something to do with miners. It's actually quite involved and complicated. coingecko.com #

Announcing the Web Platform Dashboard - A little bit like Can I Use but focussed on being the place that lists new web API features. Sounds very cool though the page wasn't loading when I visited the site. web.dev #

New Post: Energy drinks markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Kevin Rose on metabolism and first tier bio-markers markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Black Death (Issue #164) markjgsmith.com #

Open source is neither a community nor a democracy - Interesting article, it's definitely got me thinking about open source projects in a new way. I'm not sure how I feel about it though, there's a sort of tragic side to it that I'm uncomfortable with. Nevertheless worth reading if you are interesting in open source, if only to expand you general awareness of the landscape we find ourselves in. world.hey.com #

MatthewWid/better-sse - "A dead simple, dependency-less, spec-compliant server-side events implementation for Node, written in TypeScript". I've wanted to try out server-side events as a web sockets alternative for ages. This implementation looks pretty cool. github.com #

Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It - Mike Masnick from Techdirt, who is likely the internet's most knowledgeable person when it comes to moderation, weighs-in on the recent Jack Dorsey - Bluesky flareup. His piece does a great job of highlighting the back story of the whole situation. The only thing I think he misses somewhat is Jack's focus on decentralisation, and soecifucally the lessons learnt from Bitcoin. Censorship resistant tech is very difficult to build, and I'm not sure Bluesky optimises for that. techdirt.com #

Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes - No more charges for HTTP 403 (Access Denied) and a few other error codes! aws.amazon.com #

At some point, JavaScript got good - A long time javascript reflects on howvit used to be vs how it is now. It's definitely easier than before with the new primitives. The obsession with Typescript is a bit of a shame in my opinion, much harder to learn, and it's like the community never really gave JS a chance, and now that it's actually pretty good, everyone has moved on to the new shiney. jonbeebe.net #

VMware giving away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro free for personal use - Back when I was working for film VFX shops, we used virtualisation a lot, though it was Parallels rather than VMWare. Good move by VMWare here, because as they have correctly realised, it's the best way to onboard new users, many of which will later upgrade to a paid license once they have an income from working professionally. theregister.com #

As Europe’s power shrinks, its fear is growing – and the result is huge mistakes - Well written article with a lot of good observations, that makes a pretty strong case for Europe being a bit of a wimp in terms of how it's handling the various crisies that are happening nearby. Ukraine, Gaza, immigration from Africa, Russian agression, it really is flip floping on all these fronts. One feels like a stronger more cohesive Europe is needed. But with the strength expressed in a creative way rather than increased authoritarianism. theguardian.com #

Heat Death of the Internet - I feel like most of the issues listed in this earily close to reality article could be cleared up by tidying up my RSS reader. takahe.org.nz #

How I made my GitHub profile README dynamic - Dynamically add content like stats or latest blog posts to your Github profile. Pretty cool. tduyng.github.io #

Global Chips Battle Intensifies With $81 Billion Subsidy Surge - Governments worldwide are getting into both tech regulation but also subsidising the base layer. There are huge amounts of investment going into chip fabrication. The total current amount is around $380 billion. bloomberg.com #

Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers' Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting - It's kind of shocking that something as crucial as food production has such a central point of failure that's been known for so long, yet nobody appears to have taken measures to make the systems more robust. Especially since the planting windows are so tight already. Surely these farmers need to be using locally stored GPS data or at the very least have the ability to switch to an offline mode. Or perhaps use drones to create their own data sets as a backup. 404media.co #

‘It was an act of desperation’: Irish singer on his housing crisis protest anthem - I would add to his sentiment, that everyone deserves food and water as well as a home. Without these three basics life is hardly even possible. Forget about all the bullshit politics, red, blue, labour, conservative, capitalism, communism, and all the other isms, none of that shit matters. If society isn't built around a core notion that everyone deserves to live, then it's all worthless. Anyone that has truely experienced starvation and thirst knows this instinctively. Yes there are lots of things that make it more complicated, but maybe it's only complicated because the core of society is, more often than not, completely rotten. theguardian.com #

Professor-Led Crypto Startups Such As Babylon and EigenLayer Spark Renewed Investor Interest - These are apparently being refered to as professor coins, something I hadn't heard previously. I know that the recent EigenLayer drop left many unhappy vecause the coins were not transferable and were locked, leading many to think they had essentially recieved nothing despite all their efforts popularising the network. One of Eigenlayer's interesting features is it's anti-mafia capabilities, though personally when i hear if such a thing my immediate thought is whether it could actually be doing the exact opposite. Anyway, lots of interesting thibgs happening in crypto at the minute. cryptoglobe.com #

What is the Cantillon Effect? - Another great James Lavish description both of the history behind the term, but also the dynamic itself. It's all about how close you are to the money spigget, and how there is a delay between the introduction of new money supply and when it actually gets to people, if it ever does. The people close to the spigget get huge advantage becsusecthey can invest that money at current rates, whereas those further downstream don't get that chance, since the value of money has changed by the time it gets to them. Thus re-inforcing existing innequalities. ckarchive.com #

Crypto is Trump’s new weapon against Biden - Great way to get younger voters on board. Pretty strong sign crypto is becoming very mainstream if it's being used as an election policy point. Interesting that Trump made a 180 on crypto, apparently he changed his mind after dabbling in NFTs and coins. politico.com #

U.K. agency releases tools to test AI model safety - It's interesting to see that governments around the world are getting directly involved with AI. I like that they are open sourcing their work, but I do worry that their new found AI prowess could be repurposed and used against the population. Hopefully they will add thr nexessary safe guards to make sure such a thing can't happen. techcrunch.com #

South Korea prepares support package worth over $7 billion for chip industry - Government chip programs seem to be trending internationally at the minute. reuters.com #

tembo-io/pgmq - Looks interesting though currently only client libraries in Rust and Python. I previously had success using mongodb-queue, similar but with a mongodb backend. You can get oretty far implementing your own queue solution ontop of your existing database. Having a queue to handle backend website tasks like for example sending emails and processing inbound webhooks is vital for most projects. A self hosted solution gives you extra portability. github.com #

Writers and publishers in Singapore reject a government plan to train AI on their work - Looks like there's push back from creators to makers of LLMs all over the globe now. This case stood out because it's the first time I've seen a government training LLMs. It's encouraging both that they asked the writers and that the writers were comfortable voicing their opinions. restofworld.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Everything 7/12th’s Crypto (Issue #163) markjgsmith.com #

The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey - Really great interview, might even be the best Dorsey interview I've read. He had the benefit of hindsight and distance from Twitter now, still on good terms with Elon, and working on some pretty great freedom projects ontop of Nostr. It's got me wondering about integrations I could create between my static site generator and Nostr. Just wish I hadn't ran out of build minutes earlier today because no one is going to read this linkblog post for 3 sodding weeks. I'm always impressed by how calm, collected abd zen Jack is despite everything being total chaos around him. piratewires.com #

New Post: Everything page version 1 markjgsmith.com #

Autogenerate Show Notes with yt-dlp, Whisper.cpp, and Node.js - I thought this was kind of impressive. It's basically some scripts that download a youtube video, extract the audio, run it through an LLM to create a transcription of the show, which is then used to create various length show summaries, a list of suggested show titles, and text and timestamps for episode chapters. You can run it on single videos or a playlist. I bet something like this would really speed up the post production of a podcast. ajcwebdev.com #

Vodafone looks to integrate crypto wallets with SIM cards - Crypto wallets on sim cards is an idea I wrote about several months ago. Seemed to me that it would be an ideal place to have such a thing. So this article made me smile. I'm suprised that the development costs are projected to be in the billions of dollars. Sure would be awesome to have secure wallets in such a small form factor on comodity hardware. cointelegraph.com #

When to Use Bun Instead of Node.js - I've been peripherally aware of bun for a while now. Really interesting project. Apparently 4x faster than regular nodejs runtime, and very interestingly up to 25x speedup for module installs. Module installs is the biggest thing that slows down my static site generator. If I ever get some time to look into this I might try to see if I can get my site building on bun. I'd love to get build times down to the point where they are negligeable. Currently I only publish content once per day to save on build minutes. If build times were sub 1 minute then I could rebuild on every change without any worries. blog.appsignal.com #

Express 5 last push - I feel like folks have been saying Express 5 is right around the corner for absolutely ages now. Hopefully this time it's for real, Express is always my go to nodejs web framework. github.com #

VPS Showdown – May 2024 – DigitalOcean vs. Linode vs. Vultr - If you are starting a project might be worth looking at these numbers, depending on where the bottlenecks are in your app are you might get some extra performance. joshtronic.com #

The Bitcoin Stack - Great paper expanding on the fundamental mental model of the Bitcoin blockchain. It is a layeed set of markets, that get progressively more complex as you move up the stack, enabling ever more functionality, building on the previous layers. axiombtc.capital #

The Big Tech Sandwich - Repost of a blog post I wrote in 2022 about tech, culture and history. I was reminded of it after listening to several crypto podcasts focusing on the future of money. Specifically stuff around alt coins and how they are a form of tokenised culture. Figured it's somewhat relevant. I'm not endorsing alt coins, they can be very risky, but there are potentially interesting applications. markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Everything freedom vs everything automated markjgsmith.com #

Money Printing Simplified - A truly magnificent explanation of how money printing is done by central banks. If you read anything today, make sure it's this article. Best money printing explanation I've ever read. ckarchive.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Incredible Devs (Issue #162) markjgsmith.com #

X launches Stories on X delivering news summarized by Grok AI - I can see if done right news summaries could be very useful. I'm intrigued. But it will be interesting to see how many start sharing the summaries rather than use them as a way to find the underlying articles. Sharing the summaries would be generally rather bad, whereas as a discovery tool it could be a net benefit. techcrunch.com #

Tories face worst local election results in 40 years under Sunak - It's good to catchup a bit with british politics. I've only ever really connected with about 1/2 of either of the main parties policies. There are aspects of both parties that I like, but I've never really felt totally at home with either. There's quite a burn comment towards the end on Sunak by one of the Ukip / MEP members which is pretty funny, especialy if you are in tech. It all seems very storm in a tea cup in comparisen to US politics. Reminds me of the eurovision song contest for some reason. There's a weird disconnect between the pomp of british politics and the reality of managing what is these days a small country on the outskirts of europe. theguardian.com #

Video of sun’s surface captures solar rain, eruptions and coronal moss - Pretty fucking rad images. For some reason the idea of solar rain is sending my mind on a bit of a loop. This is probably going to sound stupid but I've always wondered what the sun is made of. From all the pictures it looks like it's entirely liquid, like a vaste ocean of fire and magma. But that can't be the case, there must be a hard surface at some point. Will we ever get pictures of the actual non liquid surface of the sun? theguardian.com #

New Posts: Old blues masters of 20th century Tibetan Buddhism markjgsmith.com #

Native Support for CJS/ESM Interoperability Begins in Node.js 22 - This is basically support for requiring ESM modules from inside CommonJS modules. This is bigtime awesome. I've had such bad experience with ESM import syntax, so the ability to at least use ESM modules as normal opens up lots of possibilities. Eventually I guess we will all transition to import, but it's a huge move in existing projects. zacharylee.substack.com #

Ditch dotenv: Node.js Now Natively Supports .env File Loading - Gives you the ability to specify all your node programs environment variables from a .env file which you specify using the node --env-file flag, or programstically from inside your app. Could be quite handy to easily switch between environments. Supports environment variables containing multi-line strings. Pretty cool. javascript.plainenglish.io #

New Post: Fixing an out of memory error markjgsmith.com #

A brief history of web development. And why your framework doesn't matter. - Skip 20 years of thankless web development grind by reading this handy, slightly opinionated, but actually rather good summary of what happened. Don't get your hopes up too much though, it's bound to get even more complicated, if history is any guide. gebna.gg #

Multichain Stablecoins: What Are They, and Why Are They Important? - The recent announcement that Stripe would be adding crypto support with USDC on Etherium, Solana and Polygon has me a bit confused about the nature of crypto coins. I don't understand how a coin can be on several different blockchains. It seems to be just stablecoins that can do this. arf.one #

New Post: HTTP Request/Response equivalent for crypto coins markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Asking stupid questions markjgsmith.com #

AI is making Meta’s apps basically unusable - I woukd have thought that, if they are providing the AI tools, then it should be pretty easy to filter out any posts or replies created using said AI tools. No? Personally I'd like to think users could be trusted to use AI tools responsibly. I guess the problem maybe then is that many of the accounts are fake AI accounts rather than humans using AI? Does that mean bot accounts are using AI tools. Oh noes. fastcompany.com #

The EU’s ‘right to repair’ rule is truly radical – British builders should copy it wholesale - Author Phineas Harper makes some really good points. I really like the idea of societies thst value repair, not just for electronics but for all sorts of things from clothes all the way through to bigger things like building construction. I think there's both a community aspect and a sustainability / self reliance angle too. And of course the underlying thingbis it's good for the environment. If the UK can be leader in modern tech and finance, wouldn't it be awesome if it could be a leader in healthy societies too? And there's no shame in taking great EU regulation whole cloth, in fact with something like this it might even be a great way for old and young to remain connected across borders. theguardian.com #

What It’s Like to Plan Vacations for Billionaires - Seems like a lot of ultra wealthy are part time digital nomads. I used to use a travel agency consierge service when I was doing a lot of business travel. It wasn't quite billionaire level like what's described in the article but it was super awesome. It made things so much more manageable. I'd realise I needed to be in a particular country and city the next day, and no need to scramble through booking sites, just email the consierge from the Blackberry (later it was from iPhone), get a few options to choose from within minutes, make a choice, everything booked and sorted, no need to do anything, just turn up. It was totally worth it. thecut.com #

The ‘boring phone’: stressed-out gen Z ditch smartphones for dumbphones - It's totally worth having a dumb phone for those times when you really want to be in the moment and not worry about being online. There are a suprising amount of services that work with dumb phones too, and they are very efficient, all features via simple text menu choices. Even for Bitcoin in some African countries. I think this 'Newtro' trend is pretty cool. theguardian.com #

Airdrop Farming 101: What Is It and How Do You Get Started? - I've been wondering what this was fir a while. Basically it's finding crypto projects early before they issue a coin, getting involved, in the hope of being sent free or nearly free coins when the project goes live. Sounds a lot like beta testers. rankfi.com #

Bitcoin Mining Decentralization ‘Not Great,’ Says Ordinals Creator - An investigation revealed that many mining pools have been flat out lying to miners, and miners, who decide on which transactions get into a bkock, were totally unnaware that their pools were actually just proxies for the same large mining pool. Currently 1 large mining pool handles 50% of all transactions. Miners have been reluctant to upgrade to a version which fixes the issue. Maybe they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them? Others blame the miners, speaking of 'the nuclear' option where the bitcoin community could change the algorithm in such a way as to put all current miners out of business, so a fresh cohort of miners that are willing to run the new version turn up. There's more detailed info in a recent TFTC podcast. On the whole quite bearish. Feels like it could result in quite a bit of a traffic jam. Also wouldn't the existence of a nuclear option cause some to conclude that ultimately the miners don't decide, even if that's what the marketing departments say? unchainedcrypto.com #

Bitcoin Mining Decentralization ‘Not Great,’ Says Ordinals Creator - Seems like this is way overdue. It will be even better when they start supporting other more popular coins like Bitcoin and Etherium. techcrunch.com #

Istanbul, Dalaman, Izmir: Where to go with Türkiye’s new digital nomad visa - There isn't a huge amount of information in the article, but nice to see more digital nomad visas. It can be used by 21-55 year olds, requires some documentation to be uploaded, after which you can get the visa at a local embassy. Worth making sure you have backup plans for banklessly procuring things like laptops and key gear you rely on before embarking on such adventures. euronews.com #

The rise of booze-free backpacking: why gen Z are choosing to travel sober - Gen Zers are apparently much more risk averse. Drinking is not seen as being very cool anymore. theguardian.com #

New Post: Crypto on Stripe markjgsmith.com #

UK to Issue New Crypto, Stablecoin Legislation by July, Minister Says - Economic Secretary Bim Afolami said the legislation would cover stablecoins, crypto staking, exchange and custody. This follows the Financial Markets Bill in 2023 which laid the foundations for stablecoins and crypto broadly to be treated as regulated financial activities. The current conservative government wants the UK to become a crypto hub, however the elections this year look likely to be won by the labour party. So the crypto strategy might change. coindesk.com #

Product Design Is Lost - Modern ways of working have turned product design into glorified list ticking. The days of new points of view and delighting users with meaningful experiences are unfortunately gone. designsystems.international #

Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis’ - Just you wait, eventually it will be 7 days per week, 24 hours per day, peanuts for pay and re-occuring periods of starvation on thirsting. And they will still be unhappy, and they will still blame everything on you, and they will still non-ironically tell you that you are lucky, and they will still tell you to learn, or lie or up or belittle you, while blocking any attempt you make to improve your situation. Unfortunately this is the world we live in for some of us. I've got a front row seat, that I am effectively chained to. theverge.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Space, Blogging, & Bitcoin (Issue #161) markjgsmith.com #

Edward Snowden Slams Justice Department For Action Against Samourai Wallet Co-Founders: 'The Way To Fix This Is To Make Money Private By Default' - It's great there are still prominent people standing up publicly for developers, but it is slightly odd that it's from a bloke who is famous for breaking privacy, and living in allegedly repressive Russia. The world is so twisted and perverted. The truth is that forcing non-privacy on all money transactions affects regular law abiding people more than the criminals, who have the means to purchase fake identities anyway. Really cracking down like this just makes things easier for the criminals, because they don't want regular folks to have the same advantages they have. It's somewhat counter intuitive, but that's the truth, the criminals want nothing more than to control regular folks through the money. benzinga.com #

I'm giving up -- on open source - The more of these im-giving-up-on-open-source articles, the more I worry that in the long arc of time, somehow open source maintainers and developers will become slaves. Same for most content creators. There are way way too many leeches that are making out like bandits. Some of them even proport to be massive generous givers, even though they give nothing back, financial or otherwise, only to their friends. The people they steel from are left to die. We need to figure this out before it's too late. nutjs.dev #

Microplastics make their way from the gut to other organs, researchers find - Really fucking scary. Pretty much every liquid I consume is packaged in plastic bottles. There's no other safe option. Even the safe option is now not safe. medicalxpress.com #

FTC Bans Noncompete Agreements That Restrict Job Switching - I think I'm broadly in favour of this. Non-competes create a huge barier for workers to leave and find new work, which creates a lot of friction in society, with people becoming ever more unhappy and trapped. Labour needs to be able to move between jobs, otherwise their employers have much less incentive to treat them well. I can appreciate their are difficulties with trade secrets etc, but trapping your employees is for sure not the answer to that problem. wsj.com #

New Post: Countries in EU with no limit on cash you can carry markjgsmith.com #

Jack Dorsey’s payments company, Block, is building its own bitcoin mining system - It was reported previously that Dorsey was working with Gridless to setup Bitcoin mining operations in several African countries. He's also been designing his own 3nm silicon chips tailored for mining and creating a mining rig product to help increase mining decentralisation globally, making it much easier for anyone to setup mining operations. Pretty cool. cnbc.com #

Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to President Biden’s desk - Looks like this time the Tik Tok ban is going to go through. They've packaged it inside an emergency bill that gives emergency aid to countries at war including Ukraine. theverge.com #

US Senate prepares to give final approval to $95bn aid bills for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan - Ukraine is to get around $60 billion, which is huge, especially when compared to the UK which gave $500 million, though they did include a bunch of military arms and supplies. A pretty big statement that they will defend democratic values globally. theguardian.com #

TSMC aims to produce ultra-advanced 1.6-nm chips by 2026 - It's the first time I've read about sub 3nm chips. I'm kind of suprised they've skipped 2nm. There's not much room after 1nm. Are they going to go sub 1nm? I know there are lots of plans to update chip architectures to be 3D stacked, and connect many pieces together to form bigger chips. The whole chip ecosystem is going through a bit of a renaiscence. Incredible that this should happen at the exact same time AI is becoming a thing. What are the chances after all these years of uninterrupted continuous improvements that these trajectories should intersect here? asia.nikkei.com #

Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’ - I'm pretty sure Ghost started out as a blogging platform, though I know they support newsletters. Did they fully pivot to being a newsletter platform? Anyway it's cool to see they are adding ActivityPub support. Very interested to see what form the features end up taking. My main gripe with ActivityPub implementations is that the reality of users moving between nodes is no way as straight forward as they advertise. I've read several user writeups that describe moving as a nightmare. theverge.com #

North Koreans Secretly Animated Amazon and Max Shows, Researchers Say - It's kind of amazing that these days it's possible to collaborate on animation projects remotely from anywhere. That certainly wasn't the case when I worked in VFX. Seems a bit harsh for sanctions to be cracking down on animation projects, but I guess if the money goes straight into their nuclear program then maybe not. wired.com #

Meta Opens Up its Mixed Reality OS to Third Party Headsets Beyond Quest - The VR OS called Horizon OS will run on any VR devices. It's expected to enable a ton of experimentation by manufacturers attempting to create specialised VR devices. Similar approach that Google took in mobile with Android. Potentially a very big move. cnet.com #

Sunak’s Rwanda deportations bill will become law after peers back down - This seems like a very dangerous and short sighted policy on many levels. I would have thought that just the possibility of it being used maliciously woulld be enough to stop it dead in the water. No matter what the details are, what it sounds like is, there is now a possibility that when entering the UK, you could very well end up in Rwanda, where only relatively recently they were having genocides and putting people's decapitated heads on 10 ft poles. No offense to people in Rwanda but that's a reality. It's probably lovely in some places, that is if the locals accept you. theguardian.com #

New Post: The utility of running a blog markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Max Hillebrand economics book recommendations markjgsmith.com #

Ideas for my dream blogging CMS - Matthew Haughey describes his ideal modern blogging CMS. It's a well thought out piece that takes into account interacting with the modern social media world, with the ability to write in one place, then publish to any target location or platform, connectivity to protocols like ActuvityPub, first class support for micro-content, a kick ass writer editor experience, lots of themes, import/export, syndication, support for things like linkblogs in the sidebar. Lots of interesting ideas in this post. Matthew was in the most recent Shop Talk Show where they discuss his post in detail. a.wholelottanothing.org #

$200 infra to serve your startup till 100k monthly users in 15 minutes. Self-hosted Postgres, caddyserver and docker-compose - I'm always interested to read latest tutorials on how to setup a self hosted infrastructure for small companies. I too have found that in many cases serverless can endbup being very expensive. In fact you can get pretty far with a boring linux box. This article was pretty good, though a little complex imo. grski.pl #

Robust NodeJS Deployment Architecture - I created this writeup that pulled together what I'd learnt building and deploying my linkblig SaaS. I still think it's a pretty solid self hosted solution. It runs on any standard VPS, can manually scale, fault tolerant, and is easy to maintain. Features a load balancer, application servers and a datastore. markjgsmith.com #

How a Jack Dorsey-backed bitcoin miner uses a volcano in Kenya to turn on the lights in rural homes - Jack has backed Gridless a company that has deployed several containers that house portable bitcoin mining farms, to Kenya, Malawi and Zambia. They work with local renewable energy companies making them cost effective since they soak up extra energy that would otherwise go to waste. It's a nice synergy that is having a big impact on local communities, many of which didn't previously have electricity. cnbc.com #

New Post: Investigating long Netlify deploy times markjgsmith.com #

Amazon Grows To Over 750,000 Robots As World's Second-Largest Private Employer Replaces Over 100,000 Humans - The company is steadily adding robots, around 250000 every two years. I'd kive to hear from current employees what it's like onboarding and working with the robots. finance.yahoo.com #

How Perfectly Can Reality Be Simulated? - I worked on some early productions built using fully simulated sets, it's amazing to see how far things have come in the interveaning 20 years. This article covers exhaustively all the places games engines like Unity and Unreal are now being used. It's very very impressive. Amazing to see that creating 3D object scans of the real world has turned into a big business. I imagine it would be a very cool job, travel, high tech, films, games, and cool architecture projects. Almost makes me want to check it out for something I could do. newyorker.com #

New Post: It can take a long time markjgsmith.com #

Sunak rejects offer of mobility scheme for young people between EU and UK - My initial reaction to this was that it was a bad decision, but on reflection I'm not so sure. One problem with it is that it seeds division between generations, because why shouldn't an older person be allowed to work in Europe. Generational division was something that led to Brexit in the first place. Lets be careful not to aggrevate the situation. Creating links between young people across Europe is a noble cause, but perhaps it can be achieved in a different way. The idea of cherrypicking countries with individual deals is also something I hadn't considered. Not sure how I feel about that. theguardian.com #

Apple's offer to open up tap-and-go tech to be approved by EU next month, sources say - Looks like the regulations are working, it's definitely good for consumers that the NFC tech on the phone can be used by other software vendors than just Apple. It will be cool to see what new products tge ecosystem comes up with. reuters.com #

Linus Torvalds on Security, AI, Open Source and Trust - I don't think there's anything ground breaking in this interview but it's nice to hear from Linus every so often. I wish some of his interviews would get more into the linux nitty gritty. Has he been working out? He looks like he's been bench pressing. thenewstack.io #

New Post: Cory Doctorow on the origins of capitalism markjgsmith.com #

Third-party iPhone app store AltStore PAL is now live in Europe - The word PAL is trending for me this week for whatever reason. It's intetesting that one of the first apps is a clipboard manager, which requires you to give it lots of priveledges. Also notable is the alternative app store gets developers to host apps on their own servers. It's almost like it's the setup to a bad exploit joke. theverge.com #

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot goes electric - These humanoid robots are pretty cool. I also like the new friendlier approach. But to be honest the movements like quick turning around and getting up look so unatural that you would be forgiven for wondering if there isn't secretly a kill everything mode that can be activated. It reminded me of the liquid metal terminator turning around right before it chases after Arni. Cool but probably need to make it more friendlier. Of course I could be wrong, I can see how these movements could indeed be useful. It's not quite the robot mate I've written about recently, then again the word PAL is trending this week, the internet is nothing if it isn't a bizare synchronicity generator. techcrunch.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Infinite Peace (Issue #160) markjgsmith.com #

‘Five-year-old on acid’: Liz Truss’s Ten Years to Save the West - I don't follow british politics all that much. I thought this satirical piece was mostly quite funny, but the ending takes it a bit far. Perhaps an indication that some of the left aren't quite the funny cuddly care bears they claim to be. theguardian.com #

New Post: The blogging virtuous circle markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Raoul Pal on the baby boomer savings complex markjgsmith.com #

OpenJS: "XZ Utils Cyberattack Likely Not an Isolated Incident" - The team at socket currently catch around 100 similar supply chain attacks per month. It's a really tough problem because you have to be on the one hand welcoming to new legitimate contributers while at the same time block malicious entities, and the communities are already pretty unwelcoming in my experience. There's a general feeling that the open source infrastructure is a bit behind the times. At some point we need to realise it's a common good, much like "clean water, roads and bridges, and healthy capital markets". If you look around the world in most places there are major issues funding all of these things. socket.dev #

The Many, Confusing File System APIs - Great bit of work and writeup by Scott Vandehey. I had an incling that this was a bit of a mess, but I had no idea it was so unbelievably bad. We really should prioritise to get this fixed, there's just no way web applications can ever compete if something so core as reading and writing files is a nightmare. We might as well all stop being web developers now. Is it any wonder that local first apps are having a hard time taking off? cloudfour.com #

Trip report: Node.js collaboration summit (2024 London) - Another great writeup, this time by Joyee Cheung. There are so many awesome things being investigated and worked on in nodejs. From web servers to cool new cli features, from package manager version management to scheduling and memory management, from nodejs release tooling to general governance, collaboration and information sharing. And ecmascript modules and interop, TC39 standards, there's so much going on. However I feel like all this swirling progress could do with a bit of direction, so it feels more cohesive, lest we end up with core parts that are a real mess. The various file system web APIs are an example of what could happen if the garden isn't pruned and refactored well. nodejs.org #

BTC ETF Fund Flow - Tracks the Bitcoin ETFs inflow / outflow to the Bitcoin blockchain. Nice looking graph with live data for each vendor's ETF. You can get a sense of the overall flow. It's weird that Greyscale looks totally different to others, apparently because their initial ETF cost was way higher than others so there's a lot of outflow as their customer move to other providers. btcetffundflow.com #

New Post: Promoting your own stuff is okay markjgsmith.com #

tc39/proposal-signals - A proposal to add signals to JavaScript - Signals have become an important primitive in most frontend frameworks in the last few years. They are ghe new hotness. So it's interesting to see a proposal that would bring this functionality into native jsvascript. Having libraries share this functionality would enable a lot of optimization. github.com #

Counterscale - Scalable web analytics you run yourself on Cloudflare - Run a simple analytics solution in a cloudflare worker, and view everything in a nice dashboard. Seem like much of this info is already in the Cloudflare analytics, though there's a bit more detail around individual pages. counterscale.dev #

nalgeon/redka - Redis re-implemented with SQLite. Interesting idea for a project espeviakly given all the licensing issues recently over at Redis. It's not as fast as the original project, but the API aims to be compatible with a few additional features. github.com #

Rabble on Nostr - Rabble decided to build his project on Nostr. He outlines the many downsides and missing features of the ActivityPub protocol, the Fediverse, and it's developer community. It's quite a comprehensive list, with some rather glaring downsides. I'm suprised I haven't heard anyone talk candidly about this before. Personally I really like Nostr but I'm really put off by these npub string. I can't figure them out, can't hardly find anyone on there. njump.me #

Dexie.js - A Minimalistic Wrapper for IndexedDB - I thought this looked kind of cool. Nice clean interface, I imagine this would really speed up creating local first apps. Looks like they also just released a product that enables easy sync of data to the cloud. dexie.org #

Eastern Europeans buy up property in the West as Putin steps up ‘war on nerves’ - Sign of the times. Folks throughout eastern Europe are buying western european properties, especially in Spain, as a backup plan in case the Ukraine war spreads to other countries. edition.cnn.com #

WhatsApp trials Meta AI chatbot in India, more markets - This will make available generative AI tech without WhatsApp chats for about 500 million people. Globally WhatsApp has 2 billion users. That's a lot of people. Meta also announced the release of its latest open source language model Llama 3. techcrunch.com #

Bluesky lifted its ban on heads of state signups - I find this mildly amuzing. How different the rollouts of social networks are compared to the early daysvof Twitter. I feel a bit bad that the heads of state missed out on Bluesky's showing-everyones-ass-phase. Hopefully they'll find another way to welcome them. theverge.com #

New Post: My current linkblog format markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Typos and missing urls markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Should we re-imagine git interfaces? markjgsmith.com #

The history of Wordpress from 2003-2024 - Really interesting post from Steven Miller that summarises the evolution of features. Of course I'm mentally comparing it to my static site generator, so the early years are particularly informative. Plugins, themes, admin dashboard, rest api, the direction is pretty clear. Setting up the corporate structure is eye opening too. I feel like the more recent direction is a bit less well defined, even if some features are pretty cool. thegww.com #

Richard Branson’s cruise line launches month-long cruise for remote workers - It's $10k for 2, includes all the basics, food, Wifi, laundry, tea/coffee. Apparently he noticed this sort if trip was already being done by remote workers, so he figured he'd create an official package. That package sold out almost immediately. cnbc.com #

NASA reveals view of total solar eclipse from International Space Station - I don't think I'd ever seen what sn eclipse looks like from space, aside from info graphics. These pictures of the solar eclipse as seen from the ISS are pretty amazing. abc.net.au #

New Post: Rogan‘s vision of our AI governed future markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Good Output (Issue #159) markjgsmith.com #

Spotify launches personalized AI playlists that you can build using prompts - Sounds like an amazing feature. Might have to check out Spotify again. techcrunch.com #

New Post: The improbabilty of total solar eclipses markjgsmith.com #

Microsoft is confident Windows on Arm could finally beat Apple - It's good to see competition in the space is leading to advances that benefit users on all platforms. I'm interested to see what these devices look like. theverge.com #

David Cameron meets Donald Trump amid push to shore up Ukraine support - It's just so horrible that Ukraine is stuck in the middle between Russia and western countries. Ukraine should be able to decide it's own future. It feels like this war is being made to purposely drag on, perhaps the military industrial complex is making too much money selling arms? It's strange to me that a massive country like Russia couldn't just crush Ukraine. What stars are they waiting to align before they end this thing? theguardian.com #

New Post: The softly softly murmurers markjgsmith.com #

NASA Earth Observatory website posted satellite images showing Chiang Mai's growth from 1989 to 2024 - Incredible image, especially if you've been to Chiang Mai before. Great place to visit. It's been too long. earthobservatory.nasa.gov #

New Post: The overrides bug markjgsmith.com #

New Post: What do they mean when they say lie? markjgsmith.com #

TSMC Gets $11.6 Billion in US Grants, Loans for Three Chip Fabs - Taiwanese TSMC will be investing more than $65 billion. They will build the first 2nm chip plant in the world, putting the US at the forefront of the AI boom. The US government has been on a shoping spree recently, deploying capital made available via the 2022 Chips and Science Act totaling $114 billion. Intel is to receive $20 billion, Samsung of South Korea $6 billion, with other announcements still to come. bloomberg.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Pushing To Main (Issue #158) markjgsmith.com #

Gender pay gap in Great Britain smallest since reporting first enforced - It's good to see progress, abd I say this as a man that gets constantly bullied by women. I want to live in a world where that behaviour isn't the norm. Where it doesn't feel necessary. Unfortnately it probably takes several generations to get that way. You got to start somewhere though. Incidentally it feels to me like many of the women here have more money than the men. theguardian.com #

New Post: Robot mates and LLM conversations markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Motorbike gang stalker drivebys markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Complex malicious help markjgsmith.com #

German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice - It would be cool to find out more about this project. Do they have a team of developers working on features? Seems like Linux could be a good fit for government, big possibilities for automation, but I'd say you would need to have a great technical team. zdnet.com #

Just 57 companies linked to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions since 2016 - Mostly oil and gas companies, the worrying thing is they are mostly paying very little attention to climate deals, increasing emmissions significantly in the last few years. theguardian.com #

Opera allows users to download and use LLMs locally - I predicted this would happen recently when I wrote about LLMs in the browser, seems like an obvious combination. Interested to see what form it takes. It's not obvious how it will change the browser UI. It's nice to get a prediction right for once :) techcrunch.com #

Apple’s electric car loss could be home robotics’ gain - Apple robots for the home sounds like it could be awesome. I'd love to have access to the design teams that are working on this at Apple. I bet a greenfield hardware project like this would have a ton of really crazy ideas sketched out with weird prototypes. Some Apple engineers are likely having the times of their lives right now, which makes me smile :) techcrunch.com #

Linux On The Laptop Works So Damn Well That It’s Boring - It's amazing how far we've come with Linux on the desktop. If I ever have a chance to have another laptop, please god :), I'd most likely run Linux on it. My biggest worry would be how it integrates with mobile devices. You really want stuff like syncing photos abd videod to 'just work'. clivethompson.medium.com #

New Post: Module caches and reusable workflows markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Masks are sort of dumb markjgsmith.com #

Trump’s stake in Truth Social falls by $1bn after company reveals $58m loss - This will be an interesting one to follow because it might very well be the future of financing. The first famous person to do this was David Bowie back in the 80s. He sold a David Bowie bond and investors got paid back within 10 years. It was a big success. It's sort of similar to crypto initial coin offerings (ICOs). Truth Social doesn't have much sales yet but their losses are less than Reddit's. I wonder if with these celebrity stocks whether controversy actually contributes to the value going up. We shall see. theguardian.com #

After the beep - Anonymous public voicemail with a retro interface. Looks kind of fun. afterthebeep.tel #

Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores - Interestingly it's keeping the tech in UK stores. The replacement is some sort of bar code scanner mounted on your shoping cart. Given how much hype this had when it came out, feels like a big loss for Amazon. gizmodo.com #

Redis’ license change and forking are a mess that everybody can feel bad about - The more I think about these open source project fiascos the more I wonder what incentive these large service providers have to make a deal with the original project maintainers. Surely they can just do the same trick everytime, which is to pay them nothing, then when the maintainers change the license, the service provider forks the project, inserting their own maintainers. Is this what is happening? arstechnica.com #

New laws decriminalising personal use of cannabis come into effect in Germany - I'm suprised that I hadn't heard anything about this previously. I guess it's not an April fools joke? The one fact that stood out was that only 10% of the population actually smoke weed. Very interested to see how it pans out, Germany is a big country so will be interesting to see how it affects crime. I'd like to think most people are responsible and can handle having the option to try without fear of being arrested. So much police time is wasted on the crime surrounding weed. theguardian.com #

Google Podcasts service shuts down in the US next week - I use google podcast links a lot in the newsletter. It's unbelievable how many podcasters don't have their own website, so Google Podcasts is the best place to get a clean and tidy page for their show. I hope they don't 404 all the old pages. We need a good replacement. I can't inagibe YouTube Music will be adequate. bleepingcomputer.com #

How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU - Currently we are maxing out at about 150 billion, and we are reaching the end of Moore's law, however this is causing chip makers to figure out new ways to incresse transistor count, and there is a sort of chips renaissance quietly happening in every layer. Innovative advances are being made in materials science, 3D stacking, integrated chiplets, lithography, and even the software and description languages used by chip designers. They will have a trillion transistors within a decade, which will fuel the AI revolution. spectrum.ieee.org #

The jobs being replaced by AI – an analysis of 5M freelancing jobs - It's good to see some facts based on real world data. Some of the results are suprising, several areas have actually seen an uptick in demand. The big thing at the minute unsuprisingly is chatbots and integrations with OpenAI. bloomberry.com #

Git as debugging tool - Some great tips including one of the most concise and clear summaries of git's architecture that I've read. Loads of useful commands I wasn't fully aware of. lucasoshiro.github.io #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Eating Glass (Issue #157) markjgsmith.com #

The Most Hackable Handheld Ham Radio Yet - The new device allows you to flash the firmware, and many users have started creating custom tools and interfaces. Eventually it might be possible to have an app store type entity fir Ham radios. spectrum.ieee.org #

Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far - Mike Masnick does a great job of describing in laymens terms why Bluesky shows the most potential going forward out of all the social networks. techdirt.com #

Meta’s Smart Glasses Are Becoming Artificially Intelligent. We Took Them for a Spin. - I'm super curious about these glasses, especially in the age of the Vision Pro. Sometimes a device that just does the basics is good enough. I was under the impression that they had a heads up display, but I guess that's not the case. That would be cool so you can read basic text. Anyway they look pretty good, even with a mustache. Fun article. nytimes.com #

Reddit shares plunge almost 25% in two days, finish the week below first day close - Happened after Reddit executives sold off over a million shares. Not investment advice, but I would have though this might be good time to buy up some Reddit shares at the new low price. cnbc.com #

US and UK Probe $20 Billion of Crypto Transfers to Russian Exchange - Interesting data point. It was using stable coin Tether which seems to be very popular, especially in developing nations, from what I have read. Based on this looks like it doesn't offer much in the way of privacy. bloomberg.com #

Three Cool (to me) Node.js Features - I didn't know about any of these either. A node --watch flag that is a built in replacement for nodemon, node --env-file which is a built in replacement for dotenv and styleText which gives you the ability to add colours to your console output, basically a built in replacement for chalk. Great writeup. raymondcamden.com #

New Post: Feature phone interfaces markjgsmith.com #

Digital wallets and the "only Apple Pay does this" mythology - Has some interesting and useful technical info about digital wallets, specifically about the reasons and uses for FPAN and DPAN numbers. birchtree.me #

Astronomers Unveil Strong Magnetic Fields Spiraling at the Edge of Milky Way’s Central Black Hole - I'm still a bit confused how we are able to get these side on views since we are in the same plane as the rotation of the black hole. Or is it that the black hole rotates perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy? Or is it because of how the light gets polarized? Anyway cool picture, and cool to discover similarities between these beasts. eventhorizontelescope.org #

Apple Announces WWDC 2024 Event for June 10 to 14 - The 35th anual event will be an online event rather than in person, anyone can attend for free. It's likely they will announce their AI strategy going forward. macrumors.com #

Julian Assange wins temporary reprieve in case against extradition to US - How can this case still be going on? I feel like he's been on trial for most of my career. theguardian.com #

Donald Trump media firm soars in stock market debut - At one point in early trading the company was being valued at $9bn. This is despite the fact that revenue last year was only $3.3m, and they lost almosy $50m. Trump stands to make $4bn. bbc.com #

Behind the plot to break Nvidia's grip on AI by targeting software - Qualcomm, Google and Intel plan to create open source software that will help people migrate off of Nvidia's platform - "The UXL Foundation, a consortium of tech companies, plans to build a suite of software and tools that will be able to power multiple types of AI accelerator chips". reuters.com #

New Post: Regulators as secret crypto shills markjgsmith.com #

Building a Micro HTMX SSR Framework - Super interesting to see how Vite works, and it's a very good tutorial, but I got about half way through and realised my idea of micro and the author's differ considerably. Imo this is very complicated, and it feels like there's quite a lot of 'magic' going on, or at least more than I am comfortable with. However I'm willing to concede it might just be my unfamiliarity with modern esm frontend applications. blog.platformatic.dev #

New Post: David Pierce summarises the complaints about Apple markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The AI layered tech stack markjgsmith.com #

BlackRock Unveils ‘BUIDL’ Tokenized Asset Fund on Ethereum--With $5 Million Buy-In - Blackrock are one of the biggest investors worldwide, with $10 trillion in assets under management. CEO Larry Fink has been making money via tokenization in traditional finance his whole career, being the first to use computers on the trading floor. His move to enable tokenization of real world assets onto blockchains could prove to be very popular. decrypt.co #

As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate -
Companies that use a lot of electricity are setting up shop near plants. theregister.com #

Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare - The article is a bit of a nothing burger, but it links out to the official report, which will no doubt be pretty interesting. How on earth could the British library be taken down for such a long time? It's mindboggling, and it has sort of paralleled my 3 month mysterious illness(es?). Perhaps the British library also found some small bits of glass in it's breakfast, as I did this morning? That really would be a strange coincidence. theregister.com #

Linux Crisis Tools - Could be an idea to follow the advice here, getting your servers ready for debugging future issues by having these tools installed before anything goes wrong. brendangregg.com #

Feedle - It's a world of feeds! - A search engine for blogs and podcasts. It has some interesting features like creating RSS feeds for all your searches. Worth checking out. Also the discussion on HN is interesting. feedle.world #

New Post: The bitcoin and crypto rollercoaster markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The bitcoin layered stack markjgsmith.com #

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defends his $193 million compensation following backlash from unpaid moderators - Looks like the redesigned his compensation package to be equity based, so that he effectively owns some of the company, despite being re-hired a few years back. He had to earn his company ownership back. He owns about 3% now. It's performance based so if Reddit does well, so does he. fortune.com #

AsyncBanana/microdiff - Microdiff is a tiny (currently <1kb), fast, zero dependency object and array comparison library - I can see this being really useful in clientside apps. github.com #

Reddit shares soar on first day of public trading - The company is now valued at $8.87bn, up from expected valuation of $6.4bn. It's been quite a turbulent journey for them recently. Hopefully they will get some stability, enough time to regroup and set their new public company direction. I bet Huffman feels somewhat vindicated about his high salary. I'm really interested to see what they do next. Congratulations to all involved. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Backlash (Issue #156) markjgsmith.com #

NVIDIA's shared VR environment technology is coming to Apple Vision Pro - Nvidia announces a very interesting streaming solution geared towards the Vision Pro. Hybrid cloud and local rendering, support for OpenUSD scenes and the use of the NVIDIA Graphics Delivery Network, are some of the included features. appleinsider.com #

Apple says it's complying with EU's Digital Markets Act amid criticism - Apple says it is focusing on user interests. There are similar 1 day hearings organized for Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, ByteDance and Microsoft. reuters.com #

A Beginner's Guide to Node.js Worker Threads - Very to the point and neat example of using a worker and a workerpool inside an express app. Also features handy ways to load test your app so you can see the workers are improving app performance. betterstack.com #

Reddit's IPO as much as five times oversubscribed, sources say - They look likely to get the $6.5 billion valuation they've been after. reuters.com #

Apple researchers achieve breakthroughs in multimodal AI as company ramps up investments - Interesting to see Apple quietly catching up on AI. They plan to announce many new AI features for iPhone at the next developer conference. venturebeat.com #

Hey YouTube creators, it’s time to start labeling AI-generated content in your videos - Basically if you manipulate content so that it depicts a reality that is reallybdifferent from
actual reality, then you've got to disclose it. Not necessary for obvious AI stuff like animations etc. edition.cnn.com #

Nvidia announces its most powerful AI chip as it seeks to become a platform company like Microsoft and Apple - They now have a software division in the company and are building a ton interesting cloud based services. Seems to be making quite a big splash judging by the number of times the word Nvidia appears on Techmeme today. Also interesting that all other cloud providers are buying up Nvidia hardware, essentially financing Nvidia to join their exclusive cloud providers club. cnbc.com #

Nvidia launches a set of microservices for optimized inferencing - Specialised containers that bundle in the inference model used to actually run the trained models. Should make it super easy to get up and running for teams that can't build out their own infrastructure. techcrunch.com #

China’s economic bright spots provide a warning - Chinese manufacturing has unnexpectedly picked up slightly with increased exports to the US. An interesting point made is that family run factories are now able to send products direct to consumers, which they are experimenting with via companies like Shein and Temu. I heard via Bennedict Evans on his podcast that large clothes stores like Zara and H&M are complaining they still have to pay lots of import tax on their container shipments, something the direct to customer shipers manage to avoid in many cases. economist.com #

What happened when the world’s most populous nation turned off TikTok - There was a period of opportunity for local social media apps, followed by massive competition from large US companies. They eventually took most of the displaced users. People still say the Tik Tok app experience was way better, abd many doubt the ban made any difference to user safety. edition.cnn.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Compositing the Sistine Chapel (Issue #155) markjgsmith.com #

Experiment on your code freely with Git worktree - Following up from the modern git commands linked article from a couple of days ago, this article goes into more depth on git worktrees, with some simple examples. opensource.com #

voici.js - A Node.js library for pretty printing your data on the terminal🎨 - I can imagine this could be very useful if you are writing CLI tools that retrieve data from an API. github.com #

Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog - Manton Reece introduces a blogroll feature on micro.blog, and suddenly the world feels a tiny little bit more like 2005. His implementation allows you to create several different named blogrolls, then insert them into your site's pages via a plugin. Cool feature. manton.org #

Welcome to AirSpace (2016) - Kyle Chayka piece about his noticing the international airbnb easthetic that was developing worldwide in apartments, cafes and restaurants. There's a lot of nuance to how culture is being spread in the age of globally hyperconnected people. When you connect people across large distances, it can have a big impact on the spaces we live in. Lots of interesting observations. theverge.com #

Modern Git Commands and Features You Should Be Using - Some of these look super useful. Specifically sparse checkout for speeding up monorepo CI / CD workflows, and worktree for elegantly handling emergency hotfix requests. I've been reading through Git from the bottom up. Looks at git from the lowest level. Ultimately it's all commits, trees and blobs. martinheinz.dev #

Cartesi - I'm certainly not an expert in this area, but this seems like it could be quite interesting. It's an etherium smart contract VM that runs a full Linux instance. Cool! cartesi.io #

Linux Crosses 4% Market Share Worldwide - It took 30 years to get to 3%, then they reached 4% in just a few additional months. Interesting fact. Maybe they've started getting the Desktop looking good enough for regular non computer nerd folks. linuxiac.com #

Moore on Moore - Quite an in depth look at the history, lots of stats and examples, and also the future. Sort of reminds me of how things are progressing with Bitcoin. thechipletter.substack.com #

Guide to software engineering contracting in UK - All items covered seemed like good advice to me. It's additional effort but you can get paid quite a lot more. codedeepdives.com #

Nvidia is sued by authors over AI use of copyrighted works - Increasing number of copyright litigations are arising because of AI training and uses. Interesting to see content makers going after the maker of the AI chips in addition to the AI companies. reuters.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Breathing Difficult (Issue #154) markjgsmith.com #

The Open Wallet protocol - Seems like somebody already proposed a way to add crypto wallets to web pages. It's simple, very easy to add to a website. It doesn't seem to be very popular though. There are no tutorials etc, just this lonely website. What's wrong with the proposal? I guess you need some app that uses it for it to become popular. Worth being aware of, especially since the big AI companies like Google will likely try to create some crazy complicated way of doing the same thing. Would be very cool if Google decided to go the simple root, and use this existing protocol. openwalletprotocol.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Antibiotics & Podcasts (Issue #153) markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: AI: the Good, the Bad, and the Lawyers (Issue #152) markjgsmith.com #

I miss RSS - Jason Lengstorf gets into why he thinks we lost a lot when we gave up on RSS. I too miss RSS. learnwithjason.dev #

Apple says UK could 'secretly veto' global privacy tools - It's still not clear to me after reading this article how the UK would actually execute one of these global veto’s. I suspect they would only be able to compel companies whether inside the UK or global in the deployment of their software across the UK territory. Sounds a bit like the government is trying to become the nation's IT department. bbc.com #

A 2024 Wishlist for Node's Test Runner - Colin J. Ihrig shares a list of things he'd like to see added the Node's new built-in test runner. I'd like to try out the test runner on a new project at some point so these are aticles are always interesting. cjihrig.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Death’s Door (Issue #151) markjgsmith.com #

British inventor seeks to take $18bn bite out of Apple in bitter patent war - I don't have an opinion on this but I'd like to hear more about it and the outcome. The case has been going for more than 20 years. theguardian.com #

Sadiq Khan: ‘Free young people from Brexit work and travel ban’ - I'm glad there is at least some people that are trying to mitigate some of the negative effects of Brexit for the next generation of UK citizens. I bet things feel very tight at the minute for them. I grew up in mainland europe, so I was always going to be pro europe. I decided early on during Brexit that I'd be ok with either decision, even if I'd prefer to remain. You have to support your country. I could see there were many things wrong with how europe was being run, and if there was a mojority that wanted to leave, then we should trust that. I never saw leaving as the end. I think people both sides have had a lot of time to think through importamt things. I also think many in Europe miss the UK being a member country. Who knows what will happen in the future, so many possibilities, but start by opening things up for the next generation, maybe they will find a way to build something better. They have the energy and vitality, they have more powerful tools, more well defined problem spaces. We did what was possible at the time. theguardian.com #

Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs - Somewhat missleading title, it's likely they want to create chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging facilities. I guess the details are still not yet known. It is interesting though, especially as much of the money would be coming from Abu-dabi or Japan. How much of our future freedoms would he be giving away to secure the deal? The answer should be none, but it's not always very obvious, so it's worth asking the question. Has he even thought about that? theregister.com #

BrigJS/brig: User Interface Toolkits for Node.js - Interesting because it's based on QT. Back in my days working in the VFX industry, several of the facilities I worked at used QT for their custom tools. I don't remember it being the best by any stretch, but for basic robust UIs that work well, it was pretty great. Would be cool to have something similar for node. github.com #

New Post: Belgium and communes - Remembering some aspects of what it was like to growup in Belgium. It's really strange the seemingly obvious things you missed, and wonder later how it was that you never noticed. Some things just weren't relevant, but they become more relevant as you get older. markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Quite Quiet (Issue #150) markjgsmith.com #

Astronomers spotted something perplexing near the beginning of time - They have found galaxies where according to current understanding of the laws of physics, there shouldn't be any. It's very interesting but I obviously have a lack of knowledge about how these measurements are being made. I find it quite confusing. When light hits the telescope, how do they determine how far the light has travelled? How can they differentiate between light from very far away and light from the very ancient universe? How do they know they aren't seing light that originated from a distance twice the length of the observable universe, created twice as long ago as the current estimate for the age of the universe? These are probably dumb questions, but I feel like I don't currently have good answers to them. There are likely a lot more if I spent some time to write them down. vox.com #

AfD plans to turn Germany into authoritarian state, vice-chancellor warns - Something to be aware of. This would of course be terrible. It's good that people are speaking out about it, and that liberal democrats are publically showing solidarity. Germany's energy prices have been hit hard by russian actions over the past few months. They really need more energy independence. theguardian.com #

Why is it so cold in the UK right now – and how long will Arctic chill last? - The explanation gymnastics in this article is quite amuzing. They basically use the exact same argument the so called 'climate deniers' use, that it's just normal weather. Anyhow whatever looks like it's currently mighty chilly in the UK! theguardian.com #

Taiwan elects William Lai president in historic election - Probably an important thing to be aware of, likely will have geopolitical implications. bbc.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Everything Bitcoin (Issue #149) markjgsmith.com #

The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn't Exist - Jake Lazaroff believes the website vs web app destinction doesn't do a good job of describing what's actually being built these days. He outlines a slightly different yet related way to break down the current web development landscape: informational, transactional, realtime and local websites. I think it describes what's out there quite well. Read this post to get a reassuring sense of where you are in amidst all the chaos. jakelazaroff.com #

Scholz urges unity against far right after mass deportation ‘masterplan’ revealed - They speak out against the secret plans for both forced re-migration, including of german citizens, and forced assimilation, whatever that means, it certainly sounds very barbaric. theguardian.com #

New Post: Viewing the everything feed - Describing some things you can do if the new everything RSS feed doesn’t display all that well in your feed reader. markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Writing annoyances - Listing of the current writing annoyances that get in the way of writing blog posts. markjgsmith.com #

CSS Media Query for Scripting Support - Gives you the ability to style content based on whether javascript is available, a little bit like <noscript> but for styling elements. blog.stephaniestimac.com #

FrigadeHQ/remote-storage - "remoteStorage is a simple library that combines the localStorage API with a remote server to persist data across browsers and devices." - I thought this looks pretty interesting for it's simplicity, could be great for some simple local first apps. github.com #

What’s the Value of 3 Million LPs in a Digital World? - We had a massive record collection at the student radio station I was part of back at university. Walls and walls of records. There was something very calming about being in that room surrounded by thousands of records. The ritual of queueing tracks up on the 2 Technics decks in the studio was very memorable too. And of course we would try to scratch like the pros, but we were terrible. We once had DJ Hurricane in to do a guest mix set. He was the DJ from the Beastie Boys. He was awesome. That was fun afternoon. Anyway yes records are amazing whatever the music genre. Keep vinyl alive! wired.co.uk #

New Post: Causing the problems they complain about - I had some more starter incidents happen to me at some food places and a shop. These type of incidents always get escallated to infiniti. It literally happens every time. So I‘m detailing them here so I have something to link to. It‘s also to try and paint an accurate picture of what it’s like here. markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Everything feed operational - Some notes after completing the website’s new everything RSS feed. markjgsmith.com #

Austrian heiress Marlene Engelhorn announces plan for €25m giveaway - Austria abolished inheritance tax a number of years ago. Marlene is putting together a team of 50 austrians, whom she will pay for their time, from across the social sphere who will decide how to spend the money. She's very literally doing her own taxation. An odd story but somewhat relevant given how unclear the future will be with pervassive autonomous AI, crypto currencies, as well as things like UBI and token based governance. I'm really curious to see how her project goes. Marlene if you need a web developer please get in touch with me :) bbc.com #

New Post: NYT vs OpenAI oddity - Something about the recent rebutal kept reminding me of something, I couldn't figure out what it was. Then of course I did figure it out. markjgsmith.com #

IT Employment Grew by Just 700 Jobs in 2023, Down From 267,000 in 2022 - Seems like the IT sector has been hit particularly badly compared to other areas of the economy. wsj.com #

The Apple Vision Pro will launch in February - When the initial annoucement happened back in June 2024 seemed so far off, but now it feels like that happened a month ago or something. So many things have happened to keep us busy. Prescription lenses will be $149. Base model will have 256GB storage. I would have thought that folks will need much more storage for the 3D spacial videos they record. theverge.com #

Kate doesn’t want Prince George to go to Eton – and for once I agree with her - I often wonder if the people that incesantly bully me here aren't boarding school victims. Pretty sure regularly schooled folks wouldn't behave so attrociously. I went to mixed schools myself and liked it. Seems like no matter what you do the bullies eventually get you. theguardian.com #

I kept a diary of how I use my phone. The results were depressing - I can't say this mirrors my experience, I clearly don't use social media anywhere near as much as the author, yet there are some aspects of what he describes that ring true. theguardian.com #

Hundreds block off Westminster Bridge in call for Gaza ceasefire - They should release those that were arrested, especially if they were non-violent. theguardian.com #

Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse - When it rains it pours, although in my case it would seem it's much more like the entire multiverse is repeatedly destroyed over and over for eternity. I don't even want to be funny about it. That's basically what's happening and nobody can or is doing anything about it. The weather isn't too bad today, a bit hot around lunch time. Even trying to sound normal has an annoying funniness to it atm. vice.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Another year! (Issue #148) markjgsmith.com #

FreshRSS - "A free, self-hostable feed aggregator". Open source, had been in development fir 10 years, has extensions system, runs fast for up to 50k feeds. freshrss.org #

You have one life. What do you want to spend it paying attention to – your phone? - Important to be aware of, even if you don't immediately change your usage. I for one would love to ditch the mobile device and just have a laptop. But that isn't possible at the minute. theguardian.com #

A restless Gen Z is reshaping the Chinese Dream -
I hope the jobs situation for the youth in China improves. It's an interesting article if only to get a window into a very different world. Anecdotally I'm less convinced by the developing world / developed world distinction these days, at least the way it's popularly understood. The more I have traveled, especially around asia, the more I realise how innadequate these comparisons are. Yes in some senses poverty and hardship is more visible in some places, but on the other hand while places like the US have giant shops with every concievable grocery, with abundance of products and colors everywhere, in asia you have entire streets that are a vaste sea of variety and beautiful colors, filled with exotic delights. I wonder what the UK equivalent would be of student girl they interview for the article with her thick brown sugarcane filled hotcakes, spicy Sichuan sausage, mooncakes, chestnuts and dried mango. Fish & chips, a savoloy and some mushy peas? Perhaps the metric we measure by should be something else. We have very different societies optimised in very different ways. bbc.com #

X Is Worth 71.5% Less Than When Elon Musk Bought It - Ouch 70% is brutal, but I think long term Elon's approach to stand up to customer bullies is good for the users of Twitter/X. me.pcmag.com #

Generative AI and intellectual property - Nice thought piece from Bennedict Evans that touches on many of the important aspects of intellectual property rights that ChatGPT is making us rethink. It's a real puzzler, do we all have to become mechanical turks for AI tech to work? ben-evans.com #

Vinyl is back for good and that’s exciting. Don’t let the greed of big labels ruin it - Recently people have been noticing the resurgence of vinyl records. John Harris' article goes into a bit more depth, looking at some of the dynamics at play between mainstream and independent labels, and the manufacturing realities in supply chains that seem currently to be predominently based in eastern european countries. I feel like a lot more could be written about this interesting topic. I would definitely read it. theguardian.com #

Britain is stuck in a doom loop: the system is rigged against growth. That needs to change - Will Hutton paints quite a bleak picture of the UK's coorporate sector. Chronic under funding of companies, money going abroad and UK companies increasingly being bought by foreign investors at an alarming rate. It's a doom loop that results in lower pensions, which are normally aggregated and invested in business. Overall it results in even less investment in home grown ventures, which results in even less pensions, and the cycle continues. He makes the case that the state needs to intervene. theguardian.com #

Transplanted to the US as a child, two accents seemed like a great idea. Until my first playdate - I too had a bit of a variable accent growing up between cultures. I'm suprised by how well the author remembers her experience. I for one do not remember hardly any of the details, to the extent my accent did change, it certainly wasn't something I was consciously doing. Of course you are going to change the words you use, otherwise people don't understand what you are saying. But it's not like you are staying up late studying and plotting coping strategies. Maybe I'm just thick. Strange article which rings true, but also feels very different to how it was, at least for me. theguardian.com #

RA 917 - Purelink - “90-plus minutes of intricately textured downtempo, dub techno and even UK garage, all cut through with a floaty, almost drowsy quality, with plenty of exclusives and unreleased cuts”. I’m really into this mix. It’s about atmospheric, about ambience. Reminds me of some of the stuff I was listening to in the early oughts. Reminds me of being in Belgium. It takes a while to get going but once it does it’s very good and very chill. Also liked this description - “a bridger of worlds, sounds and tempos”. ra.co #