Uncovered: 428-year-old secret dossier reveals Elizabeth I’s network of spies - Imagine how such a network would have evolved over the years, with generation after generation involved in such activities, raised surrounded by all this deception. What would it look like now? Today‘s open culture is very opposite of all this, but I can't help but wonder if this still an unnexplodded bomb that we still need to difuse? Maybe that's what we are already doing without really knowing. I mean where did mafias come from? What will the mafias of the future look like? theguardian.com #

Scientists find desert moss ‘that can survive on Mars’ - The idea would be to use it to make martian soil better adapted to grow other things. They've tested it in Mars-like conditions and it survives. theguardian.com #

Vitalik Buterin backs new blockchain MegaETH as it raises $20 million at '9-figure' token valuation - Strange that this story appears just as there is big funeral occuring around the corner where I am. MegaEth looks like a Solana competitor focusing on high transactions per second. It's a bit worrying that there is an entity called MegaLabs that launched a builder program called MegaMafia. Note that EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan is one of the investors. EigenLayer has a very interesting anti-mafia feature, but what use is that if it's literally run by the mafia? Seems unlikely these are all coincidences. Maybe that's their point, or maybe they literally are the mafia and just don't give an f anymore. Weirdly this article loaded in Pocket App in Web View mode even though I am not connected to the internet. theblock.co #

Macron told ‘people detest you’ as far-right bids to be biggest party in France - Things seems really messed up in France. Why are they arguing so much about inconsequencial things? This really could be France's biggest moment on the global stage. theguardian.com #

New Post: France turn your dysfunction into the central powerhouse of Europe markjgsmith.com #

Uniting Web And Native Apps With 4 Unknown JavaScript APIs - Takes a look at some web platform APIs with some simple examples: The Screen Orientation API, the Device Orientation API, the Vibration API and the Contact Picker API. smashingmagazine.com #

Julian Assange received USD 500k in Bitcoin from anonymous donor - Apparently to pay for the debts he accumulated throughout his ordeal. Good to know there are still people that recognise and value positive contributions to hunanity, even if they manifest in unnexpected ways. threadreaderapp.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Liberalism, Free Speech, and Even More Politics (Issue #170) markjgsmith.com #

The 11ty Bundle continues - A year in review - If you're looking for some great Eleventy related content, this is looks like a great place. Lots of content about building sites with the Eleventy static site generator. bobmonsour.com #

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately - Sounds like quite a bad supply chain attack. Polyfills have been very popular for years, hence the very large number of affected sites, including big ones like the world economic forum. theregister.com #

Sunak and Starmer clash over gambling scandal in final head-to-head election debate - It reads like it was quite a show down, like some sort of old school boxing match. Likely won't make much difference looking at the polls. theguardian.com #

EU braces for the nightmare scenario- a eurosceptic France - "It’s always been a bit of a strange phenomenon within the European project that at political, policymaking level, [France] drives the project, but at a public level it has always been quite sceptical" - Apparently 69% of french voters feel the EU and domestic political systems are broken, against a 38% EU average. That sounds quite dysfunctional to me. theguardian.com #

New Post: The printing press vs the world wide web markjgsmith.com #

New JavaScript Set methods - Seems like these could be very useful in some situations, especially because they are optimised for speed. Doing everything with arrays can get tricky. developer.mozilla.org #

ES Modules are a mess - ES modules are definitely a mess. I'd love to use the new syntax, but everytime I've tried, I've ended up in some totally intractable disaster. They took something that worked flawlessly (require) and tried to replace it with a russian roulette footgun, that occasionly is a bit better. But it's a friggin russian roulette footgun! I'm not at all suprised by the adoption stats. I think forcing people to migrate as the author suggests is a very very bad idea. borischerny.com #

Node.js is Here to Stay - Yes there are some parts of node that aren't great, like the difficulties with the new ESM module system, but nodejs is still one of the best programming languages out there, especially for web development. This article highlights some of the newest features. blog.platformatic.dev #

Does personal AI require Big Compute? - Doc Searls thinks we need to shift the focus from from Big AI and Big Compute, to personal AI, where users control make good use of all the data they are generating. doc.searls.com #

Bitcoin pioneer Julian Assange free from prison – leaves UK after striking US deal - Saw this news earlier on Twitter from a Jack Dorsey tweet. Very unnexpected. Glad he's finally free, very happy for him, his family and friends. My thoughts go out to all others around the world who are unjustly imprisonned, having their lives stolen, being slow murdered. cryptoslate.com #

Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse - Only viewing and liking fediverse posts will be possible initially. You will still need to login to the other networks in order to reply. It's good to see progress on their AP integration. I think they should focus on being able to move accounts between networks. From what I've read, that experience is really dire at the minute. theverge.com #

Macron's election gamble puts French democracy on the table - Things are looking very bad indeed in France at the minute. bbc.com #

The Eternal Truth of Markdown - A bit of an ode to Markdown, one of the unsung greats of the web - "It’s messy. It’s ambiguous. It’s human. And this, in the end, is the Way." wired.com #

Modern liberalism in the United States - I'm curious about this somewhat nebulous concept after listening to a recent Keen On episode #2105. Lots I didn't realise I didn't know about. Much bigger topic than I previously thought. en.wikipedia.org #

John Rawls - American philosopher and probably the OG liberalist. en.wikipedia.org #

John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ - Most famous Rawls writing. This is a bit of a summary. 1000wordphilosophy.com #

Nvidia remains a little-known brand despite briefly passing Apple, Microsoft in market cap - Interesting to see how Nvidia brand compares to the other top companies. Not so well known but brand recognition is climbing, especially in sectors such as gaming. cnbc.com #

Starmer’s growth plan ‘doomed’ without access to EU markets, warn economists - Free movement and access to the single market are such big downsides of not being in the EU. We are going to need meaningful and clear alternatives. theguardian.com #

You've probably never heard of the biggest band at Glastonbury - It's a K-pop boy band from South Korea called Seventeen! They have the Friday afteroon spot on the Pyramid stage. bbc.com #

‘Get real, wakey wakey, red pill time’: Reform candidates in their own words - Good idea for a news piece. To be honest I was expecting some really dreadful stuff, but most if it isn't that bad. theguardian.com #

Mother of all battles’: French left join forces to beat far-right electoral threat - Pretty good summary of the situation, it's the left coalition vs the center vs the hard right. Heck of a showdown. theguardian.com #

Punch and Judy, penny slots and Pontins: why the great British seaside continues to hold our imagination - Oh we do love to be besides the seaside...it's really worth trying a beach holiday in nothern europe. It's very very different to beach holidays in hot climate places. Both are great in their own way. theguardian.com #

The magic of Glastonbury music festival markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The great british seaside holiday markjgsmith.com #

The EU Is Reaping What It Sows With the DMA: Uncertainty - Mostly common sense piece by John Gruber outlining quite effectively why Apple is having to tread very carefully in the EU. daringfireball.net #

Threads finally launches its API for developers - "Developers can publish posts, fetch their own content, and deploy reply management tools. That means developers can let users hide/unhide or respond to specific replies" - "It will also allow developers to tap into analytics with measurements such as the number of views, likes, replies, reposts, and quotes at the media and account level". techcrunch.com #

New Post: Jews and Arabs of Jaffa markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Does my Bitcoin have a covenant attached to it? markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Politics, Bitcoin and UFOs (Issue #169) markjgsmith.com #

The Framework Laptop 13 is about to become one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops - Mostly aimed at tinkerers abd hobbyists, it's a first step in getting it into the hands of developers. Interesting because RISC-V is fully open and free, nothing propriety, so anyone can use it. However this incarnation is quite under powered compared to regular current laptops. The good news is that with a Framework laptop that shouldn't matter that much. Since it's modular you can easily swap out the main board for something more powerful when you aren't hacking on RISC-V. Pretty cool. theverge.com #

Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine - Perplexity seems to be everywhere this week, multiple podcasts and articles. Reading this it seems they might be up to somewhat shady stuff but the whole article had this sort of flat nothing burger vibe about it. Perplexities answers and explanations often read like someone really struggling, just stuck between many rocks and hard places. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. A feeling I'm all too familiar with. Also I can't tell if it's an honest article or a hit piece. wired.com #

Sunak to lose seat in Tory wipeout, major poll predicts - This poll is even worse than the one that predicted the worst defeat in 100 years. They say the Lib Dems might even stand a chance of becoming the opposition. The colored map is quite something. telegraph.co.uk #

Threads API - I'm a bit suprised it took this long to release an API. I want to be able to auto-post new content from the website. Should be possible I guess. The tricky part is each social media has different character limits on posts. developers.facebook.com #

New Post: My main worry with an ultra strong labour government markjgsmith.com #

New Post: I got assaulted again markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Assault aftermath 1 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Assault aftermath 2 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Assault aftermath 3 markjgsmith.com #

Safe Superintelligence Inc. - Ex OpenAI employees Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy start a new safety focussed AI company. I think Ilya is the bloke that got Sam Altman fired, before he was re-hired. It occurs to me that his name is a bit unusual for the founder of a super intelligence company. Sometimes pronounciation is everything. ssi.inc #

Postgres is all you need, even for vectors - I don't have a ton of experience with postgres, however if you can simplify your setup by just having 1 database, things will be much easier. Looks like you can do vector db stuff with postgres by just adding some plugins. I guess the implication is that it could be used for AI / LLMs workloads? It's not specifically mentioned. anyblockers.com #

Good code is rarely read - Not the best article title, the thesis is that you shouldn't need to read good code much because it's so effortless to read and understand it. Sounds simple enough but it's actually really difficult to write code that's easy to read, especially on larger code bases. alexmolas.com #

New Post: The UK, the EU, podcasting and AI markjgsmith.com #

Nvidia passes Microsoft in market cap to become most valuable public company - The new dynamic among the top spots is interesting. Nvidia is more similar to Apple than Microsoft since it's trying control the entire stack. It's good that not all the top companies are full stack, but I think it would be interesting to have a top company that was full stack and building exclusively open source software. And for that matter a purely software company that was all open source. I wonder if that's even possible. cnbc.com #

New Post: On being accepted in asia markjgsmith.com #

The Myth of the Tin Foil Hat - Fun article about the humble tin foil hat, maybe not the best invention ever, but I think it became one of the most useful turns of phrase in our lifetime. gizmodo.com #

AI in finance is like ‘moving from typewriters to word processors’ - Nothing ground breaking in this relatively short article but it's good to read about how management consultants and business schools are approaching the AI revolution. Let's please make sure AI tech also makes it into the hands of artists. ft.com #

YouTube is experimenting with Notes, a crowdsourced feature that lets users add context to videos - Seems like I was somewhat ahead of the curve with the whole Notes thing. I know my notes aren't exactly the same as what's described here, but short public messages are the generalised feature, what you do with them depends on the context. The big discovery in my opinion, and it might sound like it's not something that's all that meaningfull, is that they stand independantly from blog posts. And turns out, imo anyway, that it is actually quite meaningfull. techcrunch.com #

The Architecture Behind A One-Person Tech Startup - Great tech stack writeup by Anthony Simons covering the personal tech stack he uses for all his projects. Loads of great stuff in this post. It's very focussed on Kubernetes, which is somewhat complex, but once you have it configured it's very easy to deploy all the components of your infrastructure. If you are looking for something a bit more old school, check out my writeup of a robust setup for nodejs apps. If you are just starting out probably best to follow Anthony's advice to use a hosted service, at least initially. These sorts of self-hosted configurations are awesome, but a lot of up front effort. anthonynsimon.com #

Apple’s Slow Rollout of Intelligence Features Will Stretch Into 2025 - A bunch of interesting Apple related info in this multi-part article, the most noteworthy probably being more details about Apple Intelligence and a whole load of VisionOS improvements. bloomberg.com #

The Light Phone - "The Light Phone III adds a metal frame, USB-C, fingerprint ID, a flashlight, 5G, an NFC chip, and a clickable wheel." - The idea behind this phone is kind of interesting. It's a phone but with a lot of the smartphone features stripped back. It only does the basics that a feature phone does but with a few extras like podcasts. The point is to try and create a device that is purely functional, that doesn't distract you from the real world around you. There is no web browser, no social media for example. The promo video does a good job of explaining things. Interested to see if this takes off. thelightphone.com #

No One Is Talking About Brexit - I've heard this mentioned in a few places and I've noticed it too. I can understand it though, it is a bit of a distraction. I'm curious about the ongoing relationship with the EU, but I think we need to give the new outside the EU thing a chance to develop. Lots of opportunity to learn about ourselves as a nation imho. politicalwire.com #

New Post: My thoughts on Brexit markjgsmith.com #

Why the pope has the ears of G7 leaders on the ethics of AI - This is likely more important than it appears, the pope has a very big influence on over a billion people worldwide. It's also interesting because like Biden, only the second Catholic US president, he's very old, yet still influencial, but also because what I get from the article is that what he speaks about AI actually seems somewhat well thought out. Perhaps his position enables him and his entourage to think deeply about these matters. Other names that might be worth remembering, Paolo Benanti an influencial fransiscan friar who advises the pope on AI, and Georgia Meloni, Italy's PM who’s the first to invite the pope to a G7 meeting. The other thing that's interesting is that not only is he at the G7 but he has been meeting with large groups of comedians recently. That's perhaps another sign of the times. It's hard to tell because there are so many levels of traditional media involved here, but maybe, just maybe it's not all garbage that this old fellow is leaving in his trail, which I'm afraid to say is more than can be said for some old people, at least in my vecinity this morning as I typed this paragraph. theguardian.com #

Blur: To the End review – sentimental journey for four likely lads on their way to Wembley - I saw them live in Ghent sometime around ’93 when they were just starting to get really big. Then at several festivals over the years, one particularly memorable. In a way, they sort of openned up the english music scene to me when I moved back from abroad to the UK to go to university. I got quite into them, even though it wasn't really the sort of music I listenned to at the time, which was much more dark and metally. Coincidentally the first post on the linkblog was to an article about Damon's shape shifting career. It's nice to see and read about them again after all these years, even if the review of the documentary isn't all that great. theguardian.com #

More than mere camembert: why France leads the world in cheesemaking - I guess the Guardian must synchronize some of their articles, I saved this without thinking it had anything to do with the previous Blur link, but surely it can't be a coincidence given Alex James’ passion for cheesemaking. You could make the argument that there's even a comedic cosmic link to the one before that too. In any case, I saved it because it occurred to me that I quite missed all the nice cheeses I used to eat when I was living in Belgium. The cheese here in Vietnam is very strange. It's this dry stringy stuff, a bit like shredded chicken. theguardian.com #

ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack - The massively refactored ChromeOS will be based on the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, and will enable improved security, faster development of new AI features and better interop of different devices like phones with Chromebooks. Sounds awesome, especially the interop. That in my experience has always been where Android has performed very poorly. It will take a while to get there, but they will provide seemless transition when it's ready. blog.chromium.org #

Apple paying OpenAI with exposure, not money - Interesting collaboration, I wonder how long the honeymoon will last. Looks like Apple is already eyeing up other AI companies, planning to offer a variety of functionality to their customers. It's also interesting that OpenAI made a statement about privacy, how Apple customers won't be tracked. Do they treat other customers differently? Will they be audited around privacy? appleinsider.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Big Changes At Every Layer (Issue #168) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Elon’s insane pay package markjgsmith.com #

No magic wand for growing the economy, says Starmer - Could be because I've just written a blog post about his pay package, but this article makes Keir Stalmer sound like an Elon Musk type character. That really would be pretty interesting. bbc.com #

Vladimir Putin issues fresh demands to Ukraine to end war - It really feels like we are heading towards WW3 with all these wars going on. A tin foil hat wearer could be forgiven for thinking that such a thing would align with a world where AI tech puts millions of people out of work. Maybe time to invest in nuclear energy companies. Pains me to say it but that’s realistically the only thing that will loosen Russia‘s grip on the west. theguardian.com #

French leftwing parties form ‘Popular Front’ to contest snap election - I have to say the name of the combined party had me thinking of the classic Popular Front sketch from Monty Python's Life of Brian. In any case French politics is definitely heating up. Might be quite interesting. theguardian.com #

PDF to podcast - I haven't tried this but it was on HN yesterday. You upload a PDF and get back a podcast episode. I guess it could be useful if you read a lot of PDFs. Kind of niche. pdf-to-podcast.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: This is Funworld (Issue #172) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Static site generator archives plugin update markjgsmith.com #

Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models - Looks like a ptetty strong AI product offering. Will be very interesting to see how folks use it. machinelearning.apple.com #

Omakub - "An Omakase Developer Setup for Ubuntu 24.04 by DHH" - Sort of like oh-my-zsh but for an entire Ubuntu install and setup. Aiming to create the perfect OS optimised for software developers. DHH discusses it in a recent Rework podcast episode, I also blogged about it. Cool project. omakub.org #

New Post: Leo Laporte on AI markjgsmith.com #

The Endgame for Stablecoins - I haven't had a chance to read this yet, but looks super interesting. I'm trying to understand stablecoins a lot better, they are clearly a bug deal in the crypto world. multicoin.capital #

Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models - Apple enters the AI software race, with a focus on privacy and high quality training data. They appear to have spent a lot of time thinking their product offering through. machinelearning.apple.com #

Ed Davey vows to fight for UK to rejoin EU single market and eventually overturn Brexit - I quite like the understated simplicity of their 'fair deal' pitch. Yeah most people just want to be sure they have the basics covered so they can then try to meaningfully contribute to society. I guess their cannabis shops thing will be popular with younger voters, on balance I think it's probably a good idea, with the criminality aspect removed it would eventually stop being such a draw for risk takers, it would just be a normal thing, so less likelihood of leading to other crime. The pro-EU stance also interesting. I'd like to know their what their approach would be within the EU should a rejoin occur. Seems like they could do quite well with these policies. independent.co.uk #

New Posts: The Lib Dems pro-EU pro-cannabis ticket markjgsmith.com #

Robinhood to Buy Crypto Exchange Bitstamp in Effort to Expand Outside the U.S. - Pretty interesting article. Robinhood has clearly hit upon a massive intetest in investing for regular folks, makes total sense for them to get into crypto. coindesk.com #

New Posts: Linux desktop for developers movement markjgsmith.com #

UK unemployment rising at fastest pace of OECD countries, analysis shows - Of all member states, only Costa Rica suffered a similar rise. Managers are blamibg the economy, risibng costs but also interestingly a sizeable oroportion are also pointing to increased automation. No mention if that's related to AI but seems likely since that's the biggest tech trend at the minute. theguardian.com #

EU elections: populist right makes gains but pro-European centre holds - Pretty good round up of the elections. I'm finding all these parties with similar sounding names, and parties within parties, and the trans-national nature of the whole thing very confusing. Quite an exiting event this time around. I feel someone should make something like a Ven diagram of all the parties. theguardian.com #

EU elections: Macron to dissolve French parliament after crushing loss to far right - France seems to be somewhat at the centre of much of the election drama. It's kind of shocking that Le Penn has done so well, getting twice the support as Macron did. In what has been described as a poker move Macron has called a snap national election in response. Exciting stuff. Interesting that it will happen only a few days after the UK's snap election, which was called last week by Sunak. So much happening in Europe at the minute. Plus it's the first time 16+ year olds have gotten the vote in several countries. theguardian.com #

Hundreds of millions head to polls on final day of European elections - Great sunmary piece, this one has just the right amount of detail and breadth across the entire region. Seems like the final results will be known by the end of today. I'm interested to see the participation rates in the various countries. theguardian.com #

Centre-right on course to strengthen majority in EU election, as far-right makes gains - Some coverage from the Beeb, several bite sized summaries from various reporters across the continent, focusing in on hard facts rather than over analyse, quite successfully I think cutting through much of the confusing system of coalitions. I'm still kind of confused, but maybe I'll at least recognise some of the names over the next few years. bbc.com #

India outpacing Asian rivals in data center capacity, report says - In non EU election news, turns out data centre growth is a pretty intetesting metric, a proxy for economic growth? India has been doing relatively well recently as a country. asia.nikkei.com #

Solana saw nearly half a million tokens launched last month - It's become the most popular chain for launching new tokens recently, very popular especially with memecoins. Are there any open source software projects that have launched coins? I wonder if I could create a coin and attach it in some way to the development of my static site generator. I'd have next to no clue how one would actually run a coin. Probably a far too outlandish an idea. On the other hand might be kind of fun. theblock.co #

Who are the political supergroups in the European parliament? - It's good to see the main parties listed. I can't help but wonder how many regular folks turn off to the whole thing when they realise there are essentially parties inside parties, and none of the names really describe what they are very well. Politics is complicated already even when it's just 1 level of parties. How on earth are regular people supposed to compare and contrast and figure out what's going on with all this indirection? theguardian.com #

European elections: Dutch exit polls show progressive alliance just ahead of far right - What with all these coalitions, I wonder how many of the politicians actually remember their official policies. And even worse, how many remember the official policy positions of the opposing parties? The level of winging it has got to be through the roof. Perhaps they have a model checker embeded in their cravates. theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Collaborating on a Rocky Road (Issue #167) markjgsmith.com #

Tinypool - the node.js worker pool 🧵 - Projects like this interest me because the could potentially be integrated into my static site generator. Good to keep the footprint small. github.com #

sanack/node-jq - Node.js wrapper for jq - a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. Could be useful. github.com #

In Praise Of The Basics - With web development it's important go understand the basics, whether you are an advanced developer or a user who wants to make some modifications to their Squarespace hosted website. This article list some free resources to get people up to speed, could be a good piece to keep handy in case you need something to send to friends, family or clients. smashingmagazine.com #

New Post: How digital collaboration works at VFX shops markjgsmith.com #

Nvidia passes Apple in market cap as second-most valuable public U.S. company - They passed $3 trillion market cap. The top most valuable are now Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple, with Apple dealing with a lot of head winds. cnbc.com #

Thousands of homeless people removed from Paris in pre-Olympics ‘social cleaning’ - This should be a national embarrassment. It's clearly not a money issue, the Olympics will bring huge amounts of money. These people have been forced into horrible conditions by a system that is clearly against them, and now the state is trying to disapear them. Just horrendous. Sadly this type of thing happens in so many places, it's the modern day gas chambers. theguardian.com #

Shein set to file for £50bn London listing - Interesting to see how local big clothes companies like Zara and H&M will react, apparently Shein skirts import taxes since many of the third-party suppliers, as well as contract manufacturers (i.e. small factories) ship direct to customers rather than import large shiping containers. bbc.com #

Open Collective - "Open Collective is a legal and financial toolbox for grassroots groups. It’s a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community." - It's awesome that there are now tools to help these grassroots movements be transparent. That enables them to carry out the great work they do with much less likelyhood they will fall victim to corruption. opencollective.com #

OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance - Interesting to see they are engageing Lawrence Lessig, well known for his work creating the Creative Commons, the copy left movement, and experiments in elections reform. I find the excessive secrecy in these AI companies worrying, these groups should be operating with much more transparency. nytimes.com #

New Post: EU elections AI analyst bot markjgsmith.com #

Open Timestamps - "A timestamping proof standard, OpenTimestamps aims to be a standard format for blockchain timestamping." - Use the bitcoin blockchain to create timestamps so you can verify that a particular bit of content existed at a particular moment in time. I'd like to integrate something like this into my static site generator at some point. The website isn't loading the CSS, so not sure if it's still maintained. Sounds like a cool project though. opentimestamps.org #

New Post: Static site vs dynamic web server markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Some people just want to watch you starve markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Utopias in the age of AI & crypto markjgsmith.com #

The future of financial analysis: How GPT-4 is disrupting the industry, according to new research - At some point the prediction capabilities are going to approach perfection. Won't that break the econony? Why would anyone invest? I guess when predicting company perfornance and economies has been solved those analysts will need to move on to analysing more complex systems? venturebeat.com #

UK within British empire is like last person left at a party, says David Olusoga - Quite the analogy. I'm not sure it's so accurate, it feels like we've been hungover for years at this point. theguardian.com #

The Guardian view on social media harms: the tech giants must be more open - I'm not so sure this is such a good idea. Yes there are occasionally some horrible cases that occur, but you have to realise the other side of the coin. There are also horrible cases of abuse by parents. I wonder what Britney Spears would think about social media companies allowing parents to snoop on their children. theguardian.com #

Whither Utopia? - This article by Rohit Krishnan has been getting some attention. I thought it started out as a sort of book list maskerading as a thought piece. But it does get more interesting from about half way through. It's a topic I'm curious about, especially in this new age of AI and crypto where everything can be predicted and everything can be turned into a transaction. strangeloopcanon.com #

Napster Sparked a File-Sharing Revolution 25 Years Ago - That era of the internet really was kind of wild. I don't remember being into Napster specifically but Bit torrent and NZBs were really awesome. Great post download automation features. I miss those days, you could really vicerally sense how the web was going to change literally everything. torrentfreak.com #

War, AI and more war: the 2024 Bilderberg agenda is sure to set off alarm bells - Haven't herd this lot mentioned in quite a few years. It was Bilderberg this and illuminatti that about a decade ago. Interesting they are trying to re-inventing themselves. Perhaps they should try being more 'open' and less secretive, have the attendees do some blogging. I'm struck today about the 'builder' root in the name that I hadn't noticed before. This year it's a who's who of heads Big AI tech apparently, oh and Big pharma, and Big warfare. So nothing to be worried about then. Probably just like Davos. theguardian.com #

U.S tech giants are building dozens of huge data centers in Chile. Locals are fighting back - These data centers are massive and use huge amounts of water extracted from the ground to cool their servers. That's a big problem in areas that already have droubts since many years. I like that these environmental organisations are springing up to both highlight the issue but also to facilitate projects where the very rich Big Tech companies can offset their environmental footprint. I just hope there is transparency, I could imagine such efforts could easily fall victim to corruption. restofworld.org #

Computer makers unveil Nvidia Blackwell systems for AI rollouts - Two big new things in this article. First, 25-30X improvements in power comsumption, and second, the idea of "AI factories" that produce a new type of commodity: artificial intelligence. AI ETF anyone? venturebeat.com #

Young French leader's rise and Belgium's future existence: What to watch in EU elections - Pretty good article that briefly samples the pulse in various countries accross the EU. I didn't realise that Belgium was in danger of disapearing, I suspect it's a bit of an alarmist view. Lots of focus on the rise of far right groups. It would be good to find a few similar articles by different news orgs to compare and contrast. Certainly interesting times politically in the EU at the minute. bbc.com #

I’m a brown, Muslim European. For people like me, these EU elections are terrifying - Shada Islam piece about how the EU elections affect people like her. Every country has it's own slightly different flavour of disfunction when it comes to immigration, racism etc. I think also each place has it's own particulars where it's working well and producing net benefits for those involved. I wish we could spend some time unearthing those stories too. Interesting article nonetheless, both positive and negative aspects need to be written about and shared. theguardian.com #

‘I cannot take it lightly’: young voters urged to take part in EU elections - The view from young voters, also very interesting, they face quite different pressures and influences. And across the EU this group is massive. Some varied beliefs in ex-autocratic and russian states. Lots of concern for environmental issues. theguardian.com #

New Post: Lex Fridman on human memory markjgsmith.com #

Belgian police search EU parliament office over Russian interference - Looks like the EU is getting serious about russians behaving badly. The scale and sophistication of these co-ordinated attacks is quite worrying. At what stage though does it become censorship, because that could be used on anyone. Many believe russians are trying to break up the EU. theguardian.com #

Indexing all of Wikipedia, on a laptop - Out of all the talk of using publically available data for AI training and copyright etc, suprisingly this is the first time I've heard mention using Wikipedia. Most of this is over my head, it's just interesting it can be done on a personal laptop. You need Linux, lots of storage space (~190GB) and lots of ram (~28GB). foojay.io #

New Post: Everything page version 2 markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Vibes, the Economy, Blogging and Freedom (Issue #166) markjgsmith.com #