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2024/04/30 #

2024/04/29 #

  • 06:02:00 +07:00 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. # www.thecut.com

  • 06:37:00 +07:00 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. # www.theguardian.com

2024/04/28 #

  • 16:36:00 +07:00 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

  • 17:11:00 +07:00 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. # www.euronews.com

2024/04/27 #

  • 05:30:00 +07:00 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. # www.coindesk.com

  • 05:40:00 +07:00 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

  • 05:50:00 +07:00 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. # www.theverge.com

  • 12:45:00 +07:00 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Space, Blogging, & Bitcoin (Issue #161) # markjgsmith.com

2024/04/26 #

  • 05:12:00 +07:00 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. # www.benzinga.com

  • 05:30:00 +07:00 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

  • 05:50:00 +07:00 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. # www.wsj.com

2024/04/25 #

2024/04/24 #

  • 05:36:00 +07:00 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. # www.theverge.com

  • 06:13:00 +07:00 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. # www.theguardian.com

2024/04/23 #

2024/04/22 #

2024/04/21 #

2024/04/20 #

2024/04/18 #

  • 05:44:00 +07:00 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

  • 05:44:00 +07:00 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

  • 06:38:00 +07:00 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

  • 15:38:00 +07:00 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

2024/04/17 #

2024/04/16 #

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 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

  • 06:05:00 +07:00 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

  • 09:19:00 +07:00 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

2024/04/15 #

2024/04/14 #

  • 11:29:00 +07:00 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

2024/04/13 #

2024/04/10 #

2024/04/09 #

2024/04/08 #

2024/04/05 #

2024/04/03 #

  • 12:58:00 +07:00 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. # www.theguardian.com

  • 13:34:00 +07:00 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

2024/04/02 #

  • 11:49:00 +07:00 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. # www.theguardian.com

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