markjgsmith

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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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 #

New Post: The blogging virtuous circle 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. www.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. www.theguardian.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. www.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 #

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. www.abc.net.au #

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. www.cnbc.com #

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

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Good Output (Issue #159) 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 #

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. www.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? www.theguardian.com #

New Post: The softly softly murmurers 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. www.bloomberg.com #

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

New Post: The overrides bug markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Pushing To Main (Issue #158) markjgsmith.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. www.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. www.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: Masks are sort of dumb markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Module caches and reusable workflows 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. www.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. www.theguardian.com #