markjgsmith

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 :) www.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? www.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. www.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. www.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 #

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. www.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? www.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. www.wired.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. www.nobsbitcoin.com #

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

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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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? www.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 #

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