markjgsmith

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 #