markjgsmith

Thursday, October 31, 2024

NHS, schools, and biggest tax rises since 1993: The key Budget takeaways - I’m no expert as far as the economy, but seems to me that by making it more difficult for businesses, that’s ultimately going to effect workers, which are the people they are saying they want to help. Increaing national insurance for business and increasing capital gains definitely makes things more difficult for businesses. I hear from business owners that things are already very difficult for businesses. Their 'rebuilding britain' is a great narative but the way they are doing it seems very arse about foot. itv.com #

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

rochacbruno/marmite - "Marmite [Markdown makes sites] is a very! simple static site generator". I thought this looked prettu neat. First of all, brilliant project name. But also the simplicity is kind of great. Supports a lot of cool markdown features out of the box too. Wish I had a laptop so I could try it out. github.com #

Friday, October 25, 2024

Marseille is neither a drug-choked hell nor a tourist paradise: it’s the city that captures France at its best - Really enjoyed Cole Stangler’s piece about this southern city. It’s got a dark reputation that I’m quite well aware of, but apparently in recent years it’s started to nevertheless become a bit of a hub for creatives, with an influx of artists, chefs, musicians and writers. And it’s multi-cultural and generally has quite a tolerant vibe about the place. His description reminds me of East London, in the early 2000s, like Hackney and Shoreditch. Just the right mix of sunshine and grit. Definitely going to keep an eye out for all things Marseille. theguardian.com #

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning - I had been wondering what had happened to old Thom. It’s been ages since I’ve seen him in the news. Glad he’s still making waves. Can’t help but wonder what weird and wonderful things he might come up with using AI tech though. But perhaps for it to have any effect for him, the AIs would need to get a lot more powerful. He has after all historically speaking been very okay with computers hasn’t he, more than most anyway. theguardian.com #

I am so incompetent, I lose things I never had in the first place - Adrian Chiles writes about how the world is now punishing him for it’s own short commings. I sympathise. I’ve found that having considerably improved my competence in many areas of my life, the world is constantly offended at me now. This happens multiple times per day. It’s constantly trying to trap me, and when I catch it red handed, it gets even more offended. It’s kind of hilarious. But you can’t let on, because you can guess how that makes worldo feel. It’s hard to describe, but it’s definitely a thing imo. theguardian.com #

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

VladimirMikulic/route-list - "Beautifully shows Express/Koa/Hapi/Fastify routes in CLI". This project made me smile. One of the very first weekend projects I built when I started learning NodeJS was routes-builder, which had a routes visualiser rendered in the browser. That was 9 yesrs ago! How time flies. I like the idea of having this as a standard CLI tool. Listing routes is such a great feature. github.com #

IMF warns Trump trade tariffs could dent global economy as it upgrades UK outlook - It’s all very well saying that tarriffs are bad for everyone, but you have to somehow address the observation, which I understand might be somewhat controvertial, that there are very large reality inversions happening. Seems to me that we need to be at least directionally somewhat aligned on the fundamentals, on the macro dynamics, before we can hope to make any progress at other levels. I’d love to hear why the IMF thinks the US should be borrowing money from the people it is buying products from in order for them to buy said products. Extra points for not doing it in a patronizing style. Peace ✌️🕊☮️ :) theguardian.com #

Trump files extraordinary complaint claiming meddling by UK Labour Party - While I don’t personally believe UK MPs have been purposely meddling with the US elections, I think it’s important to recognise that, even though most of the time americans and brits, or should I say britains :), are very friendly, there is significant stuff in our history that could cause various red lines to be crossed, even if inadvertantly done. We should be mindfull of that. It’s a bit much to call it 'extraordinary' imo. And there have been a lot of UK MPs doing trips to the US during the elections, I’ve seen tons of podcasts with trip reports and interviews. If russian politicians were traveling to the UK during elections then it would raise some eyebrows surely. On the other hand I seem to remember a few years back Trump landing in Scotland to buy a golf course or something on election result day. Perhaps it was Brexit, I don’t remember exactly. Bit if a power move. Both sides can at times complain a little too much. theguardian.com #

Elon's American 'technopoly' - I think this piece is a little alarmist, but it’s actually a good sign, it’s how free speech is meant to work. But I’m also happy people like Musk and even Trump are using social media, that’s a massive thing for humanity. We are all learning how these systems work as we go along, and actually you could do a lot worse. For all his faults Musk is actually pretty good at listening to feedback, can and has changed his mind and approach on many topics. Better to have that than regulate it all before we can see all the great ways it could improve things. It’s fascinating stuff, user testing at the nation state level. I think the mainstrean / corporate media could recorgise this and have the vision to facilitate this process rather than get in the way. They might even discover new ways of using the tech themselves. politico.com #

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Meta Glasses Are The Top Selling Product In Many Ray-Ban Stores - I really like the concept of having smart glasses, I could see it being really useful, but privacy-wise it’s going to be a complete nightmare. There are so many a-holes in the world already taking photos of people with their cell phones without permission. Happpens to me multiple times per week currently. You can spot the cameras in the glasses quite easily. Now anyone with thick glasses will be suspect. uploadvr.com #

Build A Static RSS Reader To Fight Your Inner FOMO - Great article, it actually looks suprisingly easy to get something basic running. Add HTTP basic auth on the path, and basically you have your own self hosted private feed reader. Might be enough for those morning catch ups with the people you follow in the blogosphere. Uses netlify serverless functions but could also use cron. smashingmagazine.com #

Monday, October 21, 2024

My solar-powered and self-hosted website - Man I love this kind of project. There something that’s so very indie web about it, with independance, resiliency and tech geekery shining through. This is exactly the sort of thing I’d get into in the early years of the web and my tech journey. Annoyingly as my mind has been so consumed by global politics and big important things recently, I found it difficult to concentrate on topic while reading through. Really hope one day I can return to these sorts of small scale hobbie projects. dri.es #

Sunday, October 20, 2024

North Korean troops have arrived in Russia to fight Ukraine, says Seoul - Quite a funny headline image in this article. Probably a good time to mention that one of the security guards in a nearby office building where I an here is Vietnam is a total Vladimir Putin doppelganger, a 99%er no less, it’s very strange. He showed up a few weeks ago, about the same time I started giving peace signs in response to harassment. theguardian.com #

Introducing Express v5: A New Era for Node.js Framework - Feels like this release took forever. It’s a purposely pretty boring release, mostly cleaning up old interfaces, making things consistent. The improved promise support is probably the most useful new functionality imo. Hopefully this will be the foundation for increased development momentum on the project. expressjs.com #

Saturday, October 19, 2024

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Authentic blocking frenzy antidote (Issue #186) markjgsmith.com #

Monday, October 14, 2024

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 #

Thursday, October 10, 2024

‘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. 404media.co #

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

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? 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. 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 #

Monday, October 7, 2024

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. 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 #

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Saturday, October 5, 2024

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. 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. 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 #

Friday, October 4, 2024

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. bbc.com #

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

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. theguardian.com #

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

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. 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. theguardian.com #

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