markjgsmith

The New Internet - Well written piece, entertaining read, by an internet old timer building new technology. It’s an interesting vision of a different type of internet that’s more peer to peer, less client server. The are trying to get rid of many of the layers of gunk that have accumulated into modern software stacks. I keep hearing about Tailscale, I think the Changelog guys mention it a bunch. Might be worth knowing about. tailscale.com #

California DMV puts 42 million car titles on blockchain to fight fraud - Interesting to see some large scale non-money blockchain projects. It’s using the Avalanche blockchain. Also includes a client that end users install to browse the cars that have been registered. www.reuters.com #

Labour’s defining moment and the next Tory leader (The Rest is Politics Podcast) - Great episode with thorough analysis and roundup of UK politics, how the government handover is going, who is up for the Conservatives leadership position. Also what’s going on with the Bangladesh riots, the Olympics in France, Maduro in Venezuela. Rory has a bit of a man crush on Tom Tugendhat! But in all seriousness his Tugendhat review is quite spectacular. I thought he looked the part last week. Very interesting background, especially with his european connections and being bilingual, but kind of a scary vibe, which might make him the perfect opposition leader. Oh and a fascinating look at Pretty Patel’s Essex - Hertfordshire Christopher Walken style accent. More accent reviews please! podcastindex.org #

StreamPot/StreamPot - "StreamPot is a project that provides scaffolding for transforming media in your app (e.g. trimming a video, stripping the audio from a video, transcoding a video from mp4 to webp). We are building this because an increasing number of projects are transforming media as part of their workflow." - I thought this looked pretty interesting. Uses ffmpeg and can be fully self hosted, but they also have a hosted service. github.com #

Western DJs accused of ‘normalising war’ for playing at Russian techno events - It’s really a tricky one this situation because I think a complete boycot from western DJs would likely make the divide wider, especially as the war is so protracted. I tried to think of a creative way to do this but ultimately the west is worried that the war spreads and turns into something bigger, perhaps even with North Korea and China joining in, so westerners playing DJ sets in Russia are really playing with fire, especially if you are getting paid extra, that’s pretty gross. www.theguardian.com #

Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source - Overall I think this is really good news, I’m a big fan of open source software. The one thing that makes me incomfortable is that open source is not a panocea in every dimension. There are some aspects of open source that aren’t very desirable for society at large. I’m thinking specifically about the tendency for project maintainers to get abused. There is a tendency for exploitation to happen. It would be great if these government projects tried to tackle such issues. They are well positioned to do so. Generally though, more OSS in government is very cool, but let’s do it in a responsible way. www.zdnet.com #

Mag-7 sell-off, Wiz rejects Google, UBI, Kamala in, China’s nuclear buildout, Sachs responds to PG (All-In Podcast) - I was pretty beat up when I listened to this on Saturday, having been starved for several days, and tsunami tsunamied several times by the gang stalkers, so I found it really difficult to concentrate while listening to this episode. The two standout things for me were the discussion around UBI and the later discussion around power comparing US and China capabilities and future plans. It’s all somewhat of a blur but I feel like it was a pretty good episode even if I didn’t agree with several things they brought up. It’s good insight and perspective. podcastindex.org #

Bitcoin War Games with Matthew Pine (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - I listened to this yesterday evening and much the same as the previous podcast, I was in quite a state from all the sustained bullying and starvation, so I didn’t take notes. I think I’m still shaken by last week’s physical assault or maybe I've got PTSD or something. I could hardly concentrate on any of it, but two things stood out. First was after Matthew got through much of his macro analysis, Peter commented something like "It feeld like we are living in a scripted reality". This is exactly how everything feels to me at the minute. The second thing was his roundup of the US aliens situation. I remember last time he was on, his aliens analysis was amazing, there’s also probably the best quantum physics roundup I’ve heard and though I didn’t retain much from this episode, I remember very much enjoying it. I like aliens stuff. I guess this isn’t the best review ever, but it was a good episode, totally check it out. www.whatbitcoindid.com #

Trump tells supporters they won’t have to vote in the future: ‘It’ll be fixed!’ - This is definitely a weird thing to say, and pretty sure he knows what he’s saying. "We’ll have it fixed so good" is one of his classic turns of phrase. There might be a simple explanation. He likes to give the crowd what they want to hear, so could be this is him testing to see if there are people that would prefer non-democratic governance. Definitely worrying. I wonder what the Silicon Valley elites crowd, that have recently stood behind him, think of this bizare thing to say. www.theguardian.com #

Trump proposes strategic national crypto stockpile: 'Never sell your bitcoin' - It’s very strange seing all these politicians suddenly turn pro-bitcoin. The fact some want to increase US holdings to approx 1/5 of all bitcoin in existence and use it to pay the national debt is deeply weird. Surely that would kill the dollar? How would we value bitcoin? This is starting to feel like a startup that promises it’s staff loads of options, only for them to end up being worthless after working there for a decade. On the other hand maybe it could trigger a gold rush as all nations worldwide try to buy bitcoin with their fiat while it still has some value. www.cnbc.com #

New Post: Fractional reserve thinking markjgsmith.com #

The Kidnaping of Ape #8398 (Search Engine Podcast) - I listened to this yesterday evening, I was super tired so found it a bit difficult to focus, but it’s a very interesting episode all about the NFT craze that swept past us last year. That has sort of subsided for the minute, but I think perhaps NFTs will make a come back after the bull market when people need to park their millions. People like Raoul Pal seem to think so. The back story is kind of fascinating involving comedian Seth Green trying to create a genuinely new form of series using a blend of celebrities and the NFT characters he owns. The twist to the story is that his NFT wallet got hacked, so he had to figure out how to get back the NFTs that were stolen or the show couldn’t be made. Interesting that Quentin Tarantino and Paris Hilton are bigtime into NFTs. podcastindex.org #

Gerry Gets Savage Ep#295 (Punk Till I Die Podcast) - Since last week’s issue had a big segment all about electronic music, I thought I’d check in with the PYID guys. It’s an awesome show, they have on Gerry who organises Savage Mountain which I gather is some sort of underground punk focussed music festival. I though his music selection was awesome, it’s got a very distinct vibe, quite pop punk in places but not scared to go off piste into some pretty dark metaly stuff. And I say pop punk, but it’s not bubblegum, it all has an edge to it. Like I said, I thought all the tracks were great. Gerry really reminds me of Anthony Scaramouchy from the Rest is Politics US Edition for some reason, so maybe he knows why many Americans think MI6 are behind the Trump assassination? I think maybe the Mooche’s wife might be a fascist communist so maybe we’ll get some interesting new punk tunes at some point, hopefully before WWIII starts. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Kicking Poverty’s Ass (Issue #174) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Why people aren’t into politics markjgsmith.com #

Facing American Poverty and Global Supply Chain Issues (The Daily Show Podcast) - John Stuart chats with Rev Doc William Barber about poverty in America. The very well spoken and knowledgeable reverend is endearingly religious, polite and pretty funny too. The numbers speak for themselves: 41% of Americans are poor and low wage people, that’s 135 million people, shockingly over 50% of children. It’s not even a race thing, 60% are white. These numbers are at least double what I had assumed was the case. 295000 people die each year from poverty, that’s 800 people a day. It’s the 4th leading cause of death in the country. Higher than respiratory disease, higher than gun violence. It’s unbelievably shocking that this is happening in the richest country on the planet. It’s a great interview that will let you see how bad the situation really is. It’s a bit strange to hear all this on a comedy channel, but it’s no joke. I think the humour helps us hear and see the size of the problem without our brains shutting it out. IMO this isn’t a partisan issue, both sides should make this a priority. Trump showed us that he spoke to regular folks that are getting screwed by the system, and the Democrats have historically been the party that championed and stood behind the poor. The reality is poverty will only get worse if it isn’t addressed, and that ultimately affects everyone. The sad thing is that there is technically plenty for everyone. Put aside your political views for a few minutes and listen to this short episode. It will be worth it. podcastindex.org #

Bridget Phetasy (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - Great episode that takes a somewhat winding path covering all sorts of social issues of the day, a bunch of conspiracy theories, all with loads of humour and curiosity. Topics including solving starvation, reproduction & pro-choice, menstrual cycle synchronisation, creepy government and commercial tracking, 40 year old in a fake Biden suit, the entertainment business and AI, seeing behind the curtain of the fakers that run the world, trans craziness and puberty blockers, and the strange outdated sex laws that still exist in some US states. There’s a lot in there, but it’s a good mix of the latest current zeitgeist, the stuff you won’t hear on main stream media, what people are likely talking about in the interesting conversations down the pub. podcastindex.org #

New Post: Solving poverty even cooler than rocket science markjgsmith.com #

InteractiVenn - Web tool to create Venn diagrams interactivenn.net #

Google's Exclusive Reddit Access - Only Google can now scrape Reddit content, they are blocking most other crawlers. They have a multi million dollar deal with Google, and don't want bulk access without setting up a deal in order to protect reddit users from having their content used to train other people’s AIs. www.404media.co #

Tom Tugendhat enters race for Conservative party leadership - In addition to looking very much like a bond movie villain, he says he would be prepared to take the UK out of the European convention on human rights in order to restore full control of the countries borders. Seems kind of hardcore, is there something up ahead they can see that we can’t? www.theguardian.com #

Germany challenges Turkey’s protected status claim for the doner kebab - Kind of a bold move by Turkey. Is the US going to do the same thing with the hamburger? www.theguardian.com #

Spot Ethereum ETFs get final sign off to begin trading Tuesday - Good news for crypto in general, my guess is that many folks will re-allocate some of their Bitcoin to Eth, so not necessarily lots of new inflows. Longer term though there might be especially is Options and staked Eth become a reality. TradFi people are really into yield generating assets. www.theblock.co #

Apple Reportedly Working on Foldable iPhone With Similar Design as Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip - Rumours sparked by leaks from production partners, looks like they are figuring out supply chain, parts and that sort of stuff. I always though foldables were a cool idea. They will have arrived properly if Apple release one. Code name is apparently V68. Could be a couple of years until they are in stores though. www.macrumors.com #

So you think you know box shadows? - This is about as far away from the type of code I write as a web developer. It’s true that I mostly do backend but still I find it pretty crazy that web development is so broad. Interesting in any case just to get a vague idea of what’s possible. dgerrells.com #

DeFi Giant dYdX Says Its v3 Platform Is Compromised – Just as It's Reportedly Up for Sale - Very scary compromise where the hacker got control of the entire domain and put up a fake site looking entirely like the old site. Users were then asked to approve a transaction that stole their funds. www.coindesk.com #

Open Source AI Is the Path Forward - Leaving aside for a second this crazy world we now live in where everything imaginable is tracked and monetized which Zuck helped create, I think most of his thinking about AI that he writes about in this post seems well thought out, and generally in the right direction. I still though would like to read critiques from other industry leaders. He seems to be mostly talking about inference. What about training? about.fb.com #

Spotify CEO confirms a ‘deluxe’ version with hi-fi audio is coming soon - A deluxe product for music would of course be awesome. I’m also interested in their plans for product offerings in the podcast space. I listened to several podcasts about a year ago where CEO Daniel Ek was talking about all sorts of cool new podcast features. There’s no mention of that in this article though. www.theverge.com #

After years of uncertainty, Google says it won’t be ‘deprecating third-party cookies’ in Chrome - I still don’t really understand what’s going on after reading this article. I can see why advertisers might be annoyed. As a developer I’m now wondering if it affects anything I might need to do. digiday.com #

Node.js 20.6.0: Say Goodbye to 'dotenv' - Tutorial on how to use the new --env-file nodejs flag to set environment vatiables from a file. Something the article doesn’t mention which could be useful in unixy environments, the 'export' keyword is ignored when prepended to a variable, which means you can use the env file from a shell script as well as via node command line argument. Might be useful in development or in places where you need to use the settings in other non-nodejs places. See nodejs docs for details. dev.to #

Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean - "About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean" - That’s mental. The article describes they have found oxygen being produced without light, therefore without photosynthesis. Apparently mining companies want to extract various metals from these sites, but scientists warn it could kill local life. I would have thought a bigger concern would be that it could kill humans since so much of the oxygen we breath comes from the sea, but that doesn’t appear to be a concern. www.bbc.com #

New Post: Balaji on civil wars, nations and the state markjgsmith.com #

Selects: The Duality of Caffeine (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) - Very useful episode, especially since I started drinking coffee again this week. Just another what are the chances. Turns out there are quite a few health benefits to caffeine, but also downsides. I’ve been finding it definitely improves my ability to write blog posts, especially in adversarial environments. The science behind how caffeine works is kind of fascinating. If you drink coffee definitely worth listening to this episode. podcastindex.org #

What do small businesses think about the new worker’s rights? Ep#77 (The Rest is Money Podcast) - Robert and Steph have on Dragon’s Den dragon Deborah Meaden. A load of interesting discussion around the change in government and what it means for small businesses. Why the need for employment rights, pros/cons of zero hour contracts, weening employers off of their reliance on immigration to keep wages lower, and betting on the green economy future. They then have a more personal chat with Deborah about her entrepreneurial journey, touching all sorts of topics including running your own business, franchising if you don’t have money, investing in other entrepreneurs, scaling up, British risk aversion vs US risk appetite, dealing with business failures, time value vs impact value, technical vs instinct when making investing decisions, crowd sourced investment, looking beyond the pitch deck, meeting founders and other investors, and the importance of shared values. Great episode with a good mix of the current business zeitgeist and more general long term advice for entrepreneurs. podcastindex.org #

The all-seeing AI webcam (Vergecast Podcast) - Will Poor piece that looks at Dries Depoorter, who not only includes Will’s family name in his family name, but also creates weird absurdist internet based AI / surveillance themed art and installations. He’s flemish belgian so has a cool accent and a downtempo kind of vibe. His projects tend to turn the tables on power, highlight important aspects of modern society that we aren’t considering, and create tools that use the latest AI models to create delightfully odd tools that make you think. podcastindex.org #

ROLLUP: Trump Pump | ETH ETF Next Week | Mt. Gox & Germany | Crypto Wars 2.0 (Bankless Podcast) - They are all about crypto but I feel that the Bankless guys are often a bell weather for what’s going on in the wider world. Their takes are often sensible yet also they regulary appear to notice important trends before others do. This Rollup episode has all sorts of interesting titbits from commentary on the Trump assassination and it’s aftermath, but also prediction markets becoming more mainstream, top bitcoin holding countries worldwide, ETF and Larry Fink fully orange pilled and maybe opening the door for etherium, bullish miners, uniswap browser wallet improvements, legal cases changing the playing field and tracking the growing crypto lobby. www.bankless.com #

Joe Biden withdraws from presidential race following debate debacle - Not much to say about this. Can’t say I’m all that enthusiastic about it. I was never really into Biden, but still it feels like when they replace the lead singer in a band. Or a lead actor in a film or TV series. It rarely works. Can I really be arsed to invest time learning about a whole new cast of characters right now? Nope not really is how I feel about it today. I bet many feel similar to me. www.theguardian.com #

The Academics That Think ChatGPT is BS (Better Offline Podcast) - I didn’t take detailed notes on this one, and probably should have, because it was packed with very insightful and well thought out hypothesis’ about how LLMs work but also about how we should view them, whether they are actually thinking, how they differ to human learning, and how they are impacting academia. These researchers highlight some of the most important things to consider, such as lying vs bullshitying vs hallucinating, and the danger of anthropomorphising them. It vears into philosophy and psychology, but grounded in computer science and mathematics. You'd think these boffins would have the whole thing figured out, but even these guys occasionally run into difficulty describing what’s going on. LLMs seem to be teaching us humans about our own cognition and consciousness. It’s the sort of episode that should be required listening when using these tools, they are powerful but could be detrimental to your abilities if used in the wrong way long term. IMO, use them as a booster rather than a crutch, imagine they could be taken away at anytime, you still need to be able to function at a high level without them. podcastindex.org #

Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy - Steven Levy looks into the recent trend of Silicon Valey big wig VCs like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz changing their allegiance from the Democrats & Biden to the Republicans & Trump. It appears to centre around Biden’s idea to impose 25% capital gains tax on unrealised assets for folks earning more than $100 million per year. They are trying to close a loop hole where the very rich never pay taxes by never realising their assets but monetize them by borrowing against them. They argue that it’s a slipery slope that starts with the very rich, but eventually canibalises wealth from all wealthy households. The argument is that it destroys philantropy and ultimately Silicon Valley itself. Interesting article, no less because Levy appears to be a staunch Democrat. Big changes in the tectonic plates of the tech industry. www.wired.com #

J. Malcolm Garcia on the humanity of San Fransisco's homeless community (Keen On Podcast) - Homelessness is a difficult subject to talk about and I think Andrew and Malcolm manage to have an interesting conversation, while being respectful to the people they are talking about. Many have experienced significant trauma, there is mental illness, sometimes drugs or alcohol, but they are real people with both happy and sad stories, and they can be very interesting and even fun to talk to. It can be awkward at first to strike up a conversation, and it can be risky as you might end up liking them, and feel a responsibility, but the truth is regular folks "need some skin in the game". It’s worth breaking down the barriers, they are within the community even if they aren’t a part of it. Waiting for the government to fix things in many places might be unrealistic. I think it’s worth remembering the world they live in is very different to the one lived by the housed, so they will likely be in a very different mindset to you. They spend most of their time thinking about things you probably never even have to consider. Things you take for granted that take minutes can take days to accomplish for them. Their timelines are very different. They might not trust you initially, they have likely had many bad experiences talking to housed people in the past so they might be cautious, not wanting their situation to get any worse than it already is - Malcom ends by reminding us that "they are great people". podcastindex.org #

A guide to reading and writing Node.js streams - Great tutorial by Matteo Collina that looks at how to use Streams in NodeJS. The article focusses on readable and writable streams, backpressure, handling errors, and advanced techniques like async iterators. The render pipelines concept I introduced to my static site generator is only partly realised, I only introduced the minimum needed to get the job done. I have partially implemented a more complete version of the feature and it’s crazy how similar in shape it is to the streams examples here, but it just uses the fs module. It would be very cool to explore using streams in the render core, certainly would be a good way to reduce memory consumption, and maybe even give a speed boost. Streams also support HTTP as well as files on the filesystem. Maybe one day ... :) blog.platformatic.dev #

How to Build a JavaScript UI Component-First DevTool Startup in 2024 - Well writen article, and the modularity of their final solution is pretty cool, and understandable given current state of things. However it all feels so complicated. Why can’t the next cohort of Facebook type startups take up the mantle for building the next React ontop of Web Components? Why can’t Lit, which looks very cool btw, be worked on to get it to be comparable in features to Vue and React? www.corbado.com #

Promises From The Ground Up - Josh Comeau summarises pretty succinctly how javascript promises work, with just the right amount of detail, without getting caught up in the weeds. This enables you to get to grips with async / await, which the article finishes with. I’ve found async / await to be one of the more useful primitives for simplifying my code. It did take a little while to get to grips with though. Reading existing code bases for popular libraries that use it helped too. I don’t miss callbacks in my NodeJS code at all. www.joshwcomeau.com #

New Post: An architecture for art markjgsmith.com #

Quantum computers aren’t what you think...they’re cooler | Hartmut Neven (TED Talks Daily Podcast) - A look into the weird science behind quantum computing where huge computations can be carried out using parallel universes. It’s very early days for this technology, but we will soon be able to use quantum computers to solve problems in medicine, AI, neuroscience and more. All sorts of interesting examples of what we might be able to do in the future. We might even be able to discover the dynamics of consciousness, and perhaps even ways to expand it. www.ted.com #

Caitlin Long and the Conundrums of Europe Ep#183 (Goats Gold 'n Guns Podcast) - Caitlin Long who runs Custodia Bank is on the show to discuss the recent elections in the UK and France, and how they have been affecting the markets. She also goes into her difficult experiences trying to setup a crypto focused full reserve bank, Trump and crypto, Tether & US treasuries, and the unconstitutional structure of the FED. podcastindex.org #

Bicep Ep#722 (Resident Advisor Podcast) - Interview with Irish duo Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar. Setting up a label, their background in graphic design and advertising, tech gear, the writing process, live shows vs writing albums, mixing seminar at Abbey Road, upping their game and working with tech wizards, working as a duo, Belfast vs London, people’s differing views on emotions, writhing with purpose, being maximal with minimal, negative spaces, giving your brain space, taking the essence out and striping it back, teasing the audience, harnessing energy, 1 word song titles, the Brit awards, creativity during the pandemic, fear & worry in the community, signing with Ninja Tune, performing live vs DJing, being on the road, Glastonbury, first Essential Mix, first Beats in Space mix, first show in Japan, rave energy and clubs in general, blogging their sets, artistic kinship, making tunes and getting them out as quick as possible, collaborating, and shooting video for visuals. ra.co #

Cafes to work from in Chiang Mai - I miss Chiang Mai, it’s been so many years since I was last there. James Clark has re-written one of his oldest cafe review pieces. I'm linking to it because in a freakish bit of synchronicity, I started drinking coffee again this week and it’s resulted in me writing loads of blog posts. Some of these new places sound awesome. www.nomadicnotes.com #

Nvidia and Mistral’s new model ‘Mistral-NeMo’ brings enterprise-grade AI to desktop computers - This feels like it could be one of those low key announcements that goes mostly unnoticed but then ends up being quite important. The model is not anywhere near as powerful as the latest OpenAI models but it’s open source, and runs on your own personal hardware, rather than on a data centre monster GPU. Turns out there are many applications that don’t require the bestest model, but do require much more privacy, because small busineses want to be in control of their data. venturebeat.com #

Bicep - Bicep 2017 - A Pitchfork review of their self titled debut album. I couldn’t find anything in podcast form that I could download, but this review popped up. I love reading electronic music reviews, they are often pieces of art in their own right, capturing the vibe in textual form, of something that attempts to capture the vibe of something in audio form. There’s something very magical happening when it works. It’s funny because I imagine they probably read like total gibberish to folks that are not familiar with the genres. I assure you though, there really is an undiscovered parallel dimension, or several, to all this modern electronic stuff. pitchfork.com #

Zelenskiy to attend UK cabinet meeting in effort to disrupt Russian oil sales - He attended the European Political Community summit and will address the new government caninet. It’s intetesting to see Zelenskiy in the UK but also how the UK will operate on european matters while outside the EU. www.theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Fiction, Art, Music, Aliens & Evolutionary Biology (Issue #173) markjgsmith.com #

Working with Pasted Content in JavaScript - Nothing earth shatering but useful to know. Depending on what you add to the clipboard, say HTML text or files for example, you get different data in the event object, which you then need to handle in some way. www.raymondcamden.com #

A Developer's Review of a Snapdragon X Laptop (Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x) - Interesting to see a price and spec comparison with MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Looks like, as I suspected, 16GB RAM is pretty much the minimum these days for a development machine. Makes sense, even my now defunct MacBook Pro from 2013 had 16GB of RAM, and these days they need to run AI coding copilot tools. Any less RAM just isn’t viable. www.wezm.net #

SqLite for NodeJS - They are adding Sqlite to nodejs core, so you’ll be able to write database driven apps right out of the box. Very cool! github.com #

New Post: Rogan’s secret to building cool businesses markjgsmith.com #

Andrew O'Hagan goes up the Caledonian Road in search of Truth, Justice & a Man in Blue Ep#2027 (Keen On Podcast) - I really enjoyed this interview, on many levels. The fact it’s about a novel written about a place in London I’d spent some time in, the fact that the novel is a rich tapestry, weaving together stories and characters from different walks of life, and class, together with contemporary topics, and even the diverse real life cast of the podcast interview itself. It’s like some sort of giant living jigsaw puzzle, where the interesting pieces find each other and intertwine like a patch of garden in a bigger patch of a larger garden. Fascinating waters in which to go for a swim, with so many different cultural topics intersecting, the novel really gives a sense, a multi-dimensional snapshot of a place in time. Local pubs, politics, austerity, Brexit, migrants, fake news, fake life, global vs local, renters vs home owners, big city, urban vs country side, art, perspective, concreteness, optical illusions, capitalism, englishness, the working class, unions, working men’s clubs, the miners strikes, russian oligarchs, aristocrats, crypto utopianism, landlords, paying your taxes, beaurocracy, gangsters, Balzacian & Kafkan nightmares, Britain, the similarity of father & sons relationships across classes, all with the backdrop glow from a distant US culture. The complexity of modern life in all it’s imperfect glory. Seems like a really wonderful example of the art and stories the technologies we build everyday now make possible. podcastindex.org #

The Jonathan Haidt Interview (All-in Podcast) - New interview format for the All-in pod. They interview writer and evolutionary biology and psychology specialist Jonathan Haidt. All sorts of interesting topics covered, including the origins of sociology, a somewhat dubious social media drugs analogy but kind of interesting comparison nonetheless, how the human brain and mind evolved, the dopamine reward system, hacking evolutionary biology, Boomers vs GenX vs Millennials vs GenZ, Buddhism, the alleged perils of desire and dualistic thinking, influencer culture, collective action traps, oppressor / oppressed mindset, the 3 great untruths, how the political left has changed since the 70s, traditional liberalism and conservatism, boredom & creativity, and some things to be aware about video games. Very much recommended if you spend a lot of time thinking about the future. podcastindex.org #

New Post: GenZ vs evolutionary biology markjgsmith.com #

Resisting a Surveillance Technocracy with NVK (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Great discussion with always in a good jovial mood NVK, all about the future of society with AI, language models, cryptography, and bitcoin, focusing on how it will affect government surveillance. Topics including talking with AI, natural language translation, non carbon based alien intelligences, open source models, creating business AIs using your own data with really good privacy, how AIs "think" using vector maps, AI in government and politics, pattern matching and pre-crime, anyone being able to fake anything, digital signatures, Nostr and private keys, data sharing between agencies, and chain analysis using AI. Worth the listen to get a reslistic idea of where we are heading, while trying to not get too depressed about it all. www.whatbitcoindid.com #

Is SOL Undervalued? 83% discount to ETH? | Michael Nadeau (Bankless Podcast) - Solana is generally considered to be the 3rd most popular blockchain after Bitcoin and Etherium. Micheal comes from a TradFi background but has been into crypto for a number of years. He’s identified some interesting things about Solana by doing a classic TradFi analysis of core fundamentals. He presents his findings. He looks at things like total value locked, number of active users, number of transactions, number of developers, fees, to where investment capital is flowing, DEX trading volumes and more. It would seem to still be somewhat undervalued. He makes some predictions for the future. Good solid episode. www.bankless.com #

Samsung’s new image-generating AI tool is a little too good - These new tools are indeed very impressive. The democratisation of imagination and even art creation is going to be a massive shift. It won't be revered as much. What will that do to the value of real high end artworks I wonder? www.theverge.com #

New Post: Competition for criminals markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Bitcoinifying arguments markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The real vs digital assets equilibrium markjgsmith.com #

Against choosing your political allegiances based on who is "pro-crypto" - Vitalik outlines many reasons why you shouln’t just vote based on whether a candidate is pro-crypto. As with many things in life, it’s a lot more nuanced, and pro-crypto candidates might turn out to be very much the opposite in the long term. vitalik.eth.limo #

Why Facebook doesn’t use Git - I’m rather heavily invested in git. I use it to write all the software I write, but also for all my blogging. So this was a super interesting article. It’s a great writeup and very interesting software story. Turns out FB use Mercurial which apparently is written in Python, and is very extensible. At the time they chose it, it was way better at handling very large monorepos with many files. Thinking about it, there isn’t any reason I can think of that would stop you from using alternative version control tools with my static site generator, at least not clientside. If I ever do get some form of product off the ground, I might consider adding support for other DVCS’ than git. graphite.dev #

Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI - How long until this training theft sweeps into the wider society? It’s going to have a much bigger impact than we are currently aware, as many realise they are being exploited by thieving infiniti liars. And the infiniti liars could very well be the most exploited of all. This is going to make Gaza - Isreal seem like a walk in the park. It will be like mini Gaza - Isreals literally everywhere, like fucking Gremlins. That was quite a fun film though. Not so sure it would be fun in real life though. www.proofnews.org #

Thoughts on Node.js, Deno, and Bun - Some pretty solid advice about writting code that’s portable between javascript runtimes. ckarchive.com #

New Post: Just ignore them virtually impossible markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Kings and Queens and politics markjgsmith.com #

Stocks Up & Crypto Flat...Why? (Bankless Podcast) - There’s a whole lot of interesting and very practical stuff discussed in this episode, including how crypto must outperform AI, that 7 companies account for most of the equity markets, the internet bubble vs the AI bubble, money market funds, the disappointment of ETFs, what stablecoins bring to the table, the often forgotten yet very compelling TradFi promise. www.bankless.com #

My search for proof aliens exist (Ted Talks Daily Podcast) - Astrophysicist Avi Loeb talks about the possibilities of alien civilisations existing in other places in the universe, and describes an expedition he led to find reminents of the first detected interstellar asteroid that crashed into the ocean in the last few years. It’s quite a humorous talk, scientists can be quite funny too :), definitely worth the listen. www.ted.com #

Why a Bitcoin Treasury is the Winning Strategy with Eric Semler (TFTC Podcast) - I listenned to this earlier under pretty extreme conditions so it was very difficult to concentrate. The part I found very interesting was around why holding Bitcoin in a company treasury can be very beneficial in some circumstances, especially for high margin businesses that tend to hold a lot of cash on their books. It’s an interesting discussion, I wish there were more examples of businesses integrating crypto and Bitcoin into their operations and talking about it. www.tftc.io #

New Post: The offline video cache web browser markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The newsletter preparation experiment markjgsmith.com #

Bank of England Economist: Interest rates must be cut (The Rest is Money Podcast) - Robert and Steph have economist and external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Swati Dhingra on the show. There’s much interesting and intelligent discussion all very relevant to the government changeover in this episode. While listening to this I was struck by how special it is that these 3, with such different backgrounds, are all living in the same country, all call it their home, and all earnestly working together at a very high level to make it a better place for everyone. Even just the variety in accents is something that is incredible. There are very few other places in the world that have this. It’s amazing. podcastindex.org #

New Post: Do you even memecoin? markjgsmith.com #

Shares in Trump’s media group leap by a third after assassination attempt - Around $2bn has been added to the valuation of Trump Media and Technology Group, which uses his initials DJT as its ticker. The company is 60% owned by thr former president, so his personal stake had risen by $1bn.www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Rudimentary backup of our civilization markjgsmith.com #

Whitney Webb & Mark Goodwin on How Intelligence Agencies Capture Everything (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Whitney Webb has this unbelievable ability to paint enormous, completely self consistent pictures, based on limited available data. It’s really quite something. What it amounts to is one possible version of reality, of "the truth", that’s incredibly convincing. Mark Goodwin is pretty darn good at it too. I think it’s worth remembering that before embarking on a podcast journey with them. Worth remembering also, especially if you are a builder of things, that there are other, as self consistent realities possible. It’s still nevertheless a fascinating ride. In this part 1 of 2 they discuss among other topics, why stablecoins are keeping the dollar afloat, the dwindleing petro dollar system, the emerging bitcoin dollar system, banks becoming information brokers, Arpanet’s (the precursor to the internet) history with intelligence agencies, and some of the dangers of public private partnerships. Kind of heavy in places, but so much to think about. Really looking forward to part 2 :)www.whatbitcoindid.com #

‘Britain is back’: Keir Starmer promises UK will be at the heart of Europe - With both Germany and France in disarray politically, thd UK is stepping up efforts to strengthen relations with Europe around defense. Seems like a good strategy that could lead to other deals. www.theguardian.com #

‘A galvanising sense of unity’: a football team that is multiracial and distinctively English - As I write this the match will have finished a few hours ago. I need to get to the internet place so I can see the result. What a way to start a new government for England it would be. I find this whole thing about englishness fascinating. I wonder how it will trickle into other non-football parts of society. www.theguardian.com #

Spain beat England 2:1 in Euro 2024 - Oh crap. And the bloody world is defo on the warpath again with me too. Just another day in passive aggressive escallation hell.

The return of crypto venture capital - Investments from VCs rose from $2.5bn in Q1 to $3.2bn in Q2, median deal size rose from $3mn to $3.2mn. www.ft.com #

Webvm - A serverless vitual linux OS running in your browser using HTML5 and Web Assembly. Pretty darn cool. It’s entirely running in your webvm.io #

New Post: Parodying yourself markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Enough will never be enough markjgsmith.com #

Eno review – exhilarating Brian Eno documentary that’s different at every screening - I’ve always liked and been very curious about Brian Eno. His is a very unique way of looking at the world. I really liked his auto generated music, had one of the albums that came out of that, and found it very relaxing. I also like his vision around ambient music and sound. This documentary sounds awesome, but as the reviewer points out, and somewhat amuzingly, posses a certain amount of difficulty to review. It would be fun to watch this documentary every year, I wonder what it would do to your memory. www.theguardian.com #

‘This is biblical’: England fans blag lifts, camp and get ready for Euro 2024 final - I’m of course incredibly happy they’ve gotten to the finals and hope they win. Though I don’t recognize many of the names, because it’s been years since I really followed any sports, I really hope they win. All the best everyone, would be great to have something to tease those tapas eating spaniards with, even though I am very fond of both tapas and spaniards :) www.theguardian.com #

‘Amazing’ new technology set to transform the search for alien life - We are about to be in a position of being able to capture way more data than at any time previously, with several new telescopes abd radio arrays about to come online. Add to that powerful AI to analyse the data. We'll be in a position to detect not only intensionally directed communication but unintensional too, such as emisions from alien airport radar, or powerful TV transmitters. www.theguardian.com #

Donald Trump rushed off stage at rally after sound of gunshots ring out – live updates - The footage I saw on Twitter was kind of weird. I didn’t have audio, but he appeared to be repeatedly saying the f-word, which is compleately understandable if you've just been shot at. But the very weird thing is that as the security staff huddled him off, he seemed to do a nazi salute. Bizare. In any case, hope he’s doing okay. www.theguardian.com #

Solana-Based Pump.fun Emerges As The Go-To Platform For Memecoin Creation, Report - I’ve been wondering how easy it would be to setup a memecoin for some of my development projects. I wonder if it’s a feasible way to raise money or attention for serious projects. Anyway, based on this site it seems it probably isn’t, as it just looks like a glitchy mega scam site. Is there anything like this but for semi-serious projects? bitcoinist.com #

New Post: The future of crypto and high end NFTs markjgsmith.com #

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

Lowest turnout in UK general election since universal suffrage, report shows - Only about 50% of people voted. Another interesting way of thinking about it - "if non-voting was a party, it would have the largest share of support by far". www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Some half baked thoughts about election turnout numbers markjgsmith.com #

TryGhost/ActivityPub - A multitenant ActivityPub server for Ghost, built with Fedify. github.com #

h4l/json.bash - "json.bash is a command-line tool and bash library that creates JSON" - I could see this being a very useful tools to have on your toolbelt. Syntax looks really easy to understand. github.com #

Waiter, there's a whale in my bucket! - It’s possible to use S3 buckets to hist your container files, and though you can't docker push, docker pull not only works fine but is much faster than hosting using a container registry, since yhe image layers download in patallel using regular HTTP requests. Could be useful in some dev and testing situations. ochagavia.nl #

New Post: Cobbling together companies is trending markjgsmith.com #

The Right Kind of Stubborn - Makes the case that there are two types of stubborn people, namely persistent and obstinate. And that the later is bad. It’s well written just like all PG's writting and very thoughtful. Interesting observations, important to be aware that there is a difference, but also remember life can sometimes throw you into very extreme situations. IMO, these can be choices rather than something built into a person’s character. paulgraham.com #

Nothing’s CMF Devices Prove Yet Again Cheap Doesn't Have to Mean Boring - These look pretty cool. Definitely want to try one out. It's a $200 dollar smartphone, a $69 smartwatch and $59 wireless ear buds. The smartphone looks kind of cool, runs Android and has relatively good spec with 8GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, 5G support, dual-SIM, an under-display optical fingerprint sensor, 5,000-mAh battery cell with 33-watt fast-charging, 50-megapixel main camera, sensor to capture depth for portrait mode, 16-MP selfie shooter, and expandable storage up to 2 terabytes via microSD. Unfortunately only in bright orange which is gastly. Hopefully they will try some less intense colors at some stage. www.wired.com #

US Disrupts Russian Bots Spreading Propaganda on Twitter - The big thing in this story is the involvement of RT, which I guess is the quite popular in some places Russia Today media company. They alledgedly participated in the development of the bot farm software called Meliorator, which enables people to manage hundreds of fake social media accounts to distribute pro-russian Ukraine war propaganda. www.pcmag.com #

This $1.5 Billion AI Company Is Building A ‘General Purpose Brain’ For Robots - Reminder that we are kind of close to T2 Judgement Day type scenarios. Are they really going to open source robotics specific models like the one mentioned here? So many catch-22s everywhere, we want freedom but with control, but who will end up having the control? The game theory on this stuff is insane, in a way, it makes nuclear deterents feel a bit quaint. www.forbes.com #

YouTube Embeds are Bananas Heavy and it’s Fixable - Apparently not only do they add entire mega bytes to the page, but if you add multiple embeds then multiple mega bytes get added. I’m kind of suprised to hear that because I remember videobloggers over 10 years ago with many youtube embeds on their pages and the pages didn’t take that long to load. Anyhow worth knowing about if you are working with video and having unnexpectedly large pages. frontendmasters.com #

Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships - I wish there were more real world examples of data structures used in large RL projects. While I do use things like classes to keep data and functionality together in my static generator for example, and I put a lot of thought into the best way to store and combine these, I’m not sure that that qualifies as data structures. I tend to use simple objects and arrays to store class instances. I've tried a few times to write, for example, a generalised queue data structure and got into trouble. The code was way simpler just using an array. Not to say I wouldn't consider this though. It very well might be easier now that the main app structure is much better defined and might allow for more advanced features. read.engineerscodex.com #

Rachel Reeves plans urgent assessment of spending inheritance - Is it just me or is that a strange way of phrasing this topic. Using the word inherit sure, but inheritance? Hasn’t that got a very high probability of triggering people with assets? It wreeks of we are coming for your money subtext. Perhaps that's their point, sort your shit out. www.theguardian.com #

Mapped: the vast network of security deals spanning the Pacific, and what it means - Seems like there's an opportunity to create a canihas style info website for this sort of information. I bet there would be a lot of traffic. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: The revival of Linkblog.io markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Rogan on living in the best days markjgsmith.com #

Labour to seek joint declaration with EU on wide-ranging security pact - It will be interesting to see the policy shifts that Labour will start to announce. This was one of the first articles I've seen. Makes sense to get the ball rolling on foreign policy pretty quickly. www.theguardian.com #

Exit poll shows surprise win for left-wing alliance in French election - High turnout at about 67%, far right in 3rd and Macron's centrist party in 2nd place. Tactical voting, with smaller party candidates withdrawing and asking their followers to vote for the left coalition, appears to have stopped the far right from forming a government. I wonder if Macron's snap election call will now be heralded as a successful yet risky bet. www.theguardian.com #

ElevenLabs launches free AI voice isolator to take on Adobe - I keep hearing about Eleven Labs, they look to be a pretty interesting AI audio tools company. This product could be very useful for podcasters. venturebeat.com #

After a 10 Year Wait, Mt. Gox Bitcoin Is Finally Being Returned - It‘s horendous what they put their customers through, and it’s not good enough they are only returning 15% of funds, even if the Bitcoin price has increased a lot. They gave been put through hell, at considerable risk, and now only getting back a fraction of what they would have had they invested it elsewhere. Total nonsense to claim that locking them in limbo was good for them. www.wired.com #

Viktor Orbán’s rightwing group hits quota for recognition by EU parliament - Just as France's newly formed left wing coalition pushes back the far right in their elections, Orban is creating a far right coalition at the EU level called "Patriots for Europe". All the far right parties across the block apear to be joining. More evidence that everything in life is a fractal. www.theguardian.com #

A Git story: Not so fun this time - I’ve been trying to read this for several days now, finally found time. It’s a little on the long side but really is a great roundup of the happenings that finally led to the version control tool almost all of us use today. I had no idea it was the Ruby community that was so instrumental in git's adoption around 2008. Glad I know the background, since git is so central to all my programming, and now blogging. Git is one of the best open source projects ever. Houray to all those that helped make it such a success, and indeed those that continue to do so, we are all very lucky to have such a great bit of software available, that we can all freely use to build the things we build. blog.brachiosoft.com #

Biden vows to stay in race and beat Trump in defiant speech - He apparently was massively jet lagged and nearly fell asleep on stage. With all the democrats constantly talking about Trump's lying, I found it interesting to learn yesterday that Biden was renouned for being very economical with the truth early in his career. He was known for big time plagiarising and quite lot of anti-left policies. www.bbc.com #

The French republic is under threat. We are 1,000 historians and we cannot remain silent - The historians speak out. A very IMO well worded message that articulates their concerns. For what it's worth I wrote about France's future in the exponential age of AI last week. www.theguardian.com #

Iran reformist Masoud Pezeshkian extends lead in presidential election count - I’m no expert in middle east concerns, but I feel like it could be a good time for the west to improve it’s relations with Iran, so maybe this is a rare bit of light appearing in an environment that has been very somber in recent years. I've heard Iran is a really wonderful place. I watched a great skateboarding documentary that was shot there a number of years ago. www.theguardian.com #

Keir Starmer to hold first Labour cabinet meeting as Tory leadership jostling begins - The times they are a changing. It’s times like these where culture can get very interesting. Lots of new dynamics to lift and inspire, lots of fresh energy and perspective. Also something I had totally forgotten about, highlighted and explored here, is that the conservatives will need to appoint a new leader. There‘s even some talk it could be Farage, though I gather that’s very unlikely. Still lots of activity happening. Britain will look and feel very different within a few weeks. www.theguardian.com #

Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows - Assuming they have discounted the possibility that this is some sort of ant on ant hate crime, that the patient really did need an amputation, it's pretty darned amazing. Cool video, ant arms flayling around everywhere. www.theguardian.com #

What heppened to Perl 7? - I've done quite a lot of Perl programming over the years, though not recently. Interesting to hear progress. Both the new governance structure and the new RFC process definitely sound like a great ideas. I also like the addition of feature flags. I'm not so sure about feature bundles, feels weird hardcoding the version number in the script. I wonder if this will lead to some form Perl renaissance. blogs.perl.org #

Npub.pro: Nostr-based Websites for Creators - "Npub.pro let's users create personal websites from their Nostr content. It's free for anyone getting started, it's open source and self-hostable. Built by Nostr.Band team." - They use Ghost themes and pull content from your Nostr account. There's a pro version where you can attach a custom domain. Useful to have nice shareable personalised links for your content. www.nobsbitcoin.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Surrounded By Paperclip Maximisers (Issue #171) markjgsmith.com #

About 90% of people in Gaza displaced since war began, says UN agency - This is one of those facts that makes you pause and go holy fuck. www.theguardian.com #

Germany’s first African-born MP to stand down after racist abuse - It’s not entirely clear in the article if there are other people of color in Germany’s parliament. I thought Germany would have had more people of color in their parliament. He received death threats and gun shots through the windows at his office. www.theguardian.com #

SquirrellyJS - "Powerful, lightweight, pluggable JS template engine". I'm always interested in new templating laguages, this one looks pretty interesting. One day when I have the main features if my static site generator complete I'll write some renderers for other templating engines. Currently it only supports EJS, it's good to keep it simple while I build iut the main features. squirrelly.js.org #

How to Perform Data Validation in Node.js - Validation is one of the most crucial pieces when you are writting node servers, especially REST APIs. I've used several libraries over the years, including Joi and validator. blog.appsignal.com #

EU would not rush to reopen Brexit talks with Labour, say Brussel sources - Looks at some of the ways the UK might entice the EU into finalising some of the finer details. The UK is just not a priority for them right now, what with Russian aggression and various wars happening - "They are not thinking about the UK at all". www.theguardian.com #

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? www.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. www.theguardian.com #