markjgsmith

India and Canada expel top diplomats in escalating row over Sikh activist’s death - I’ve been peripherally following this story. You don’t tend to ever hear about indian intelligence services or operations. I can’t even remember a single occurence. It’s a bit of an odd one. Seems to have escallated dramatically. Officials in India deny it happened, asked why Canada didn’t contact them, apparently they did, via the diplomats. www.theguardian.com #

Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement - Service Manual - Progressive enhancement is awesome, very under rated imho. Great thing to keep in mind whenever you build for the web. www.gov.uk #

New Post: Progressive enhancement underrated markjgsmith.com #

Free Public APIs - Could be pretty useful for some of those weekend project test apps. www.freepublicapis.com #

victorqribeiro/TinyJS - "Tiny JS is a lightweight JavaScript utility for dynamically creating HTML elements". It‘s a bit like jquery but for creating snippets of HTML. Kinda cool. github.com #

The EU needs Britain as much as Britain needs it. Where is Starmer’s solidarity? - William Keegan makes the case that similar to the post world war I period, there is a need for a european "esprit de corps". I like this entire line of discourse, I’ve been thinking along similar dimensions recently. The 'le triple non' bit is a helluva quote. www.theguardian.com #

SpaceX Just Caught Its Starship Booster With Giant "Chopsticks" Arms - The video for this is pretty fucking rad. We are definitely more in the future now than we were in the year 2000, which was the year everyone looked at throughout my youth as the year of the future. It turned out to be quite normal in comparison, though some of the parties were mindbogglingly excellent. From what I’ve seen in the press recently parties appear to have gotten kinda nasty, and not good nasty. futurism.com #

In latest move against WP Engine, WordPress takes control of ACF plugin - Holey moley Mullenweg is impressively ruthless. What interests me with this story is that due to the fractal nature of reality, and because of how foundational Wordpress is, I expect there to be a lot of unnexpected externalities and weirdnesses in strange places. Like a collective discovery that there is nobody driving the bus, so to speak. A lot of previously hidden oddities mught start coming into view. techcrunch.com #

Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it? - I feel like at some point this story becomes, is it okay to defend yourself against somebody using your creation against you. What a bizare situation. torment-nexus.mathewingram.com #

New Post: Grand slams markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Simply Refreshing (Issue #185) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Funny old world markjgsmith.com #

Online shopping returns to growth in Europe amid fierce competition - Well it’s nice to hear some good news about the europeans. I am of course a european, but I haven’t been in europe for many years. www.reuters.com #

New Post: Tom Tugendhat on the british system of government markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Joe Rogan - Michael Shellenburger on science in the context of vacines markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Scarebundance markjgsmith.com #

Hurricane Milton: nearly 3 million without power in Florida as category 3 storm makes landfall - This US hurricane looks very scary, the photos from space make it look like it’s the end of the world or something. I thought it was interesting that it appears to be named after a famous economist, especially since the US is in such economic troubles. www.theguardian.com #

Des communes sous l’eau, des dégâts localement, le code jaune maintenu : la tempête Kirk a quitté la Belgique - While in Belgium there’s a smaller storm named after Captain Kirk from Star Trek! www.lesoir.be #

‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In - And the storm over at Wordpress looks very narly indeed. The latest is that Mullenweg is now forcing users to say if they are affiliated to WP Engine. That’s obviously going to go down rather badly. I continue to be taken aback by his actions, yet there’s a part of me that is impressed by his convictions. He’s likely thought this through an enormous amount and he must see a real long term threat here, so I’m prepared to hear him out on his reasons, because he’s been a great steward of Wordpress and the open web for many years. www.404media.co #

‘Trump-proof’ European security by setting up ‘Nato bank’, thinktanks urge - I think the framing of this is pretty dumb on their part, but I’m glad there is at least recognition that they urgently need to get together, come up with some contigencies, practical solutions, and take control of the future of Europe. There’s too many fires happening all around to be complacent and complaining about the past. www.theguardian.com #

Shein records £1.5bn UK sales amid plan for HQ in heart of Manchester - Undoubtably very popular, but lousy for the environment and I hear they avoid import taxes compared to other similar compsnies because of how they ship products. Interesting they are basing themselves in Manchester. www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk #

US mulls Google break-up after landmark monopoly case - They sure do have a lot of power. I just wish they would ship more ground breaking products, like in years gone by. I also really don’t want the DOJ to do anything that might break Gmail. www.independent.co.uk #

New Post: Keen & Tear on innovation in Europe markjgsmith.com #

New Post: New heading fonts :) markjgsmith.com #

Starmer urges all sides in Middle East to ‘step back from the brink’ - Could everybody please stop being shot? Also please stop shooting. Thank you. www.theguardian.com #

Ireland is a ‘playground’ for Russian intelligence, says former army chief - This is very interesting, especially the planned russian embassy expansion that would have includes 10 subteranian power plant rooms. That’s insane. Also which countries in the east are western countries doing the same to? It’s bound to be happening in both directions, and likely via proxies too. I bet it’s a nice little money maker for many. But what happens when it spans generations? How are we ever going to untangle all this mess? www.theguardian.com #

Does China now have a permanent military base in Cambodia? - I don’t know anything about the military bases, but I suppose to a certain extent it’s to be expected. One thing I do note on my extensive travels around south east asia is how embeded the chinese community is basically everywhere. In many places there are streets where almost every house had some form of chinese decoration. It seems odd, but accepted. Imagine if there were streets all throughout France and Spain with Union Jack flag's everywhere, it would be a bit odd wouldn’t it? Somehow the chinese have managed exactlyish that. Imho, the european and US expats in comparison tend to blend in a bit better, though I guess I might be a bit biased. www.bbc.com #

Why tech unicorns struggle to avoid the glue factory - Heck of a numbers game the whole tech scene. www.ft.com #

Chinese stocks jump as markets reopen after Golden Week break - I’ve also heard in some places that the effect of the stimulus wasn't as big as expected. No obvious signs of it here in Vietnam yet as far as I can tell. www.bbc.com #

W Hot Drama Week (Wordpress, WP Engine, and Web Components - Oh My!) Ep#636 (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - I’m not going to get into how good this episode is right now, as the moment I started writing this paragraph I started getting harassed by the world. If you are in any way involved in the web or curious about the web, and / or open source for that matter, then do yourself a favour and listen to this episode. Might even change your world view. What version of the simulation are Chris and Dave in that they can have such a nuanced and clear view of things? IMO, it’s a sign that a lot of important things are getting figured out at a very high level at the minute, hopefully for the better. It’s like we’ve reached some sort of tipping point where the number of minimal apps / mental models is approaching a big shift. shoptalkshow.com #

New Post: Another configurable headers test post markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Configurable day and article headers markjgsmith.com #

The Medieval Masterpiece the Book of Kells is Now Digitized and Available Online - Trinity College Dublin has published a high resolution digital version. This is awesome. Hopefully whatever revolutionary tech is the hot new thing in 1000 years time will port the entire internet / world wide web onto itself, so that folks then can read this note about the hot new tech from 1000 years ago getting ported onto the internet / world wide web. If my static site generator is open source and still around perhaps they would consider making a generous donation. Also please ensure the maintainers aren’t hungry, and still living outside in the rain as I am. Rainy season is kind of brutal. And that the world isn’t still enslaving developers to write it’s open source code. Thank you. www.openculture.com #

I stayed. - Jeffrey Zeldman writes a piece about why he decided to stay at Automattic even though they offered all staff a severence package following the WP Engine controversy. zeldman.com #

Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’ - Really seems like a full on war, which is quite unWordpress-like. Matt usually seems like a relatively calm and quiet fellow, which is somewhat at odds with the situation. Suprised to hear WP Engine are making billions of dollars. www.theverge.com #

Keanu Reeves spins out at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in pro racing debut - I didn’t realise he was a race car driver. Pretty awesome way to promote his new graphic novel. Also great to see someone doing a debut at 60. www.theguardian.com #

UK ‘resolutely committed’ to its overseas territories, says foreign minister - It’s interesting how many foreign territories the UK still has, very long term strategic in an uncertain world. www.theguardian.com #

The Why of Crazy Stupid Tech - Om Malik was one of the first tech bloggers I started reading when I first seriously got online. I guess that was around 2003ish. He’s starting a newsletter, partnering with ex-Wired reporter Fred Vogelstein. The focus is interesting: the tech that powers the foundational layers of the stack, from materials science to sythetic biology and how they might change the future. Sounds awesome, can’t wait, subscribed :) crazystupidtech.com #

159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO's fight with WP Engine escalates - Matt Mullenweg founder of Wordpress and CEO of Automattic has been in a rather public fight with WP Engine for a few weeks. The whole saga is bringing to the surface some core issues with open source and specifically Wordpress, one of the most popular open source projects. Many are worried they aren’t as safe from despotic centralised control as they once thought, since Wordpress is using some of the very tactics it was setup to avoid, namely removing things from people. Many open source projects have been runing into philosophical brick walls recently. This case could have a big impact in the space. techcrunch.com #

Boris Johnson calls for referendum on leaving ECHR - That’s the European Convention on Human Rights. The problem is that though it might appear to make sense from the perspective of fixing immigration, it would ultimately decrease valuable protections for all citizens across huge swath of completely unrelated areas. Not being part of a human rights treaty sounds very dangerous to me. www.theguardian.com #

liriliri/eruda: Console for mobile browsers - This basically does what it says on the tin, ads devtools to mobile browsers. You include a library in the page, and then can open up a devtools style webapp in the page to look at HTML, network requests etc. Very awesome. I wish there was an app that was a dev webserver that automatically added this to your pages, so you could do local frontend development on your mobile device. github.com #

@parischap/pretty-print - This looks awesome. All sorts of additional customisable features to JSON.stringify and util.inspect. colorisation and treeifying for example. I could see this really improving the debugging experience, printing to console is still one of the most popular ways to debug, because it works in most environments, might as well make it better. www.npmjs.com #

Get ready to meet your AI best friend (Vergecast Podcast) - Lots of awesome tech reporting in this episode, and not just about AI. OpenAI mega funding, the Wordpress community values meltdown, progressive web apps, and a mindboggling description of the Dish/Direct TV timeline over the past few decades, which bizarely sounds to me like a simulacrum of a single week of my life right now here in Vietnam. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Punished For Being Born (Issue #184) markjgsmith.com #

OpenAI gets $4 billion revolving credit line, giving it more than $10 billion in liquidity - It’s one of the biggest VC fund raises of all time. The company’s value is now $157bn. www.cnbc.com #

Spotify adds a new, automatically updating playlist for offline listening - Really great to see some big players support offline features. Offline is massively underprovided for, but massively important for resilience and independance. You don’t realise you need it until it’s too late. Interesting to learn that Youtube music already has a similar feature. techcrunch.com #

Biggest solar flare since 2017 erupts from sun and Earth is in the firing line (video) - The video of this is quite mesmerising, especially when they turn off the ultra violet filter and you see what is the biggest object for several light years distance, and it’s so completely on fire, like a burning Hades. Earth is expected to be impacted over the next few days. www.space.com #

UK hands sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius - It’s clear immediately from the map hiw strategic the location is, it’s to the east of Aftica and south of India. There is a joint UK-US military based on one of the islands that will remain there. Many of the islanders now live in Crawley of all places. Britain still has quite a long list of around 17 overseas territories. www.bbc.com #

New Post: Notes on the question of the meaning of life markjgsmith.com #

Croissant debuts a cross-posting app for Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon - I don’t know if it supports posting from an RSS feed. That would be cool. Interesting that it supports threaded posts. I want something that I pass a post to via an RSS feed or an API and it just figures out all the details of making it compatible with each platform. Like a jQuery for social media posting. techcrunch.com #

Spending cuts needed to tackle France’s colossal debt, Michel Barnier tells MPs - Michel Barnier is now the prime minister of France, having been recently appointed by president Macron. He is right leaning and so doesn’t have much support in parliament since the left co-alition’s big win. He’s trying to reign in excessive spending. Interesting situation, big lefty dreams meets reality. Since taxes are already so high in France he wants the rich to step up, and lots of efficiency projects. Europe seems week, Russia is getting stronger, the EU is busy squabling with partners like Britain over old graves, the middle east is turning into a major war, the US is tired of being the world’s police force. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Tom Luongo on seing people from all sides - markjgsmith.com #

Irish finance minister calls €14bn tax windfall from Apple ‘transformational’ - Kind of an interesting time for a country all the way on the west of Europe to be having a windfall as the countries all the way in the east to be having issues with the local hedgemon. www.theguardian.com #

Catholic Belgian university ‘deplores’ comments by Pope Francis moments after speech - Women were upset he has traditional views on women’s role in society, and they spoke out to him about women being subjugated in the past by the church. I thought his comments about victims of church pedophilia were a bit odd: "There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims, so that we can help them feel our closeness". I find the use of the term 'mercy' strange here. Doesn’t it imply the victims did something wrong? And that the church needs to be mercifull towards them? WTF is that about? But also doesn’t it sound a bit pedo? 'Feel our closeness'? What are you saying mate? And lastly, I happen to know there is an american parish in Brussels called 'Our Lady of Mercy'. Bit of a coincidence. I note that last week there was news the woman president of the European Commision unilaterally re-organised all lead roles, flipping from 60/40 male-female to 40/60 male-female. Just 'because'. This whole thing seems weird. www.theguardian.com #

Top Russia diplomat warns west not to fight ‘nuclear power’ in UN speech - Russia’s "we can invade any small nation and you can't do nothing" policy is fucking demented. www.theguardian.com #

European ministers call for immediate ceasefire in Lebanon - This ground invasion thing is strange. I feel like it’s a rather extreme thing to do unless there is some sort of existing teritorial dispute. Ground invasions don’t tend to happen unless there’s a fight over said ground. I wonder if there are some facts thag are being omitted. www.theguardian.com #

UK universities urge government to restart flow of EU students after Brexit - I think that for university places, it’s a free market and there should be a corresponding number of good quality high standard places made available in the EU. Both sides should need to convince the students their courses are valuable. As long as fees are being paid based on demand for places there shouldn’t be much of an issue. Seems like they could figure out something. I think likely the bigger thing is the work placements side of things which is complicated, and Starmer is right to hold off on that. Using british youth as a bargaining chip doesn’t seem like such a great idea. www.theguardian.com #

China, South Korea, Taiwan to spend most on chip equipment 2025-2027, industry body says - It’s all about chips at the minute, at least until the current AI wave runs out of forward motion. www.reuters.com #

Keir Starmer calls for the 'return of the sausages' in Labour conference speech - Amusing gaff. Strange that it happened just a few days after my sausage pastry incident in the park, which was also the day I innadvertently Keith’d Keir. I think the return of the sausages would be magnificent right now, I've hardly eaten anything today. m.youtube.com #