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2024/05/29 #

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2024/05/28 #

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2024/05/27 #

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2024/05/26 #

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2024/05/25 #

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  • 07:28:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 12:45:00 +07:00 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Simulation Theory and Virtual Worlds (Issue #165) markjgsmith.com #

2024/05/24 #

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2024/05/23 #

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2024/05/22 #

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  • 06:08:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 06:40:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 11:30:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/21 #

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2024/05/20 #

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2024/05/19 #

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  • 06:23:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 06:30:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/18 #

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2024/05/16 #

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  • 05:11:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 08:57:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/15 #

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2024/05/14 #

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  • 12:58:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 13:08:00 +07:00 ‘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 #

2024/05/13 #

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  • 16:06:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 16:17:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/12 #

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2024/05/11 #

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  • 11:31:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 12:45:00 +07:00 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Everything 7/12th’s Crypto (Issue #163) markjgsmith.com #

  • 20:47:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/09 #

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  • 05:26:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 09:12:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 09:47:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 09:59:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/08 #

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  • 13:25:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 13:37:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/06 #

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  • 08:54:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/04 #

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  • 12:45:00 +07:00 🚀 Latest Newsletter: Incredible Devs (Issue #162) markjgsmith.com #

  • 15:29:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 15:41:00 +07:00 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 #

  • 15:56:00 +07:00 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 #

2024/05/03 #

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2024/05/02 #

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