markjgsmith

Where web components shine - Several weeks old at this point, but it’s the first chance I’ve had to read it. Great post with lots of first hand experience advice. I like how web components aren’t meant to solve everything, this patchiness actually sounds quite web-like. You just have to know what situations to use them for, and we are still figuring this out. Dave and Chris did a Shop Talk episode all about this post. Worth giving it a listen. daverupert.com #

Factorio - "Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories" - I’m not a big gamer, played some consoles, and used to hang out at arcades during the lunch hour when at school, and also played a bit at university. But these days literally never. I only code cli tools and websites. In some ways that in itself is a sort of game, maybe even the ultimate game. I heard about Factorio (wikipedia page) on a recent programming podcast, I forget exactly which one. It was described by a developer as the closest thing to writing code in a game he had ever seen. You basically have to create all sorts of these interface type structures, and you refactor and optimise them. Anyway I thought it sounded kind of cool, a bit like Sim City but also maybe an interesting way to get into computer programming. Surely a more fun stepping stone that Excel and Microsoft Word :) www.factorio.com #

Borewit/music-metadata - "Stream and file based music metadata parser for node. Supporting a wide range of audio and tag formats". This looks like it could be very useful if you were doing anything that requires reading / updating audio metadata, like IDE tags of mp3 files or even streams. Supports loads of other formats too. github.com #

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election - Saying that they are fleing seems a bit hyperbolic, I bet hardly any of them deleted their X accounts. It’s more like diversifying imo, and that’s a good thing. Who knows, maybe a lot of them are republicans who think Elon’s Twitter might get targeted by angry democrats. www.theguardian.com #

How I ship projects at big tech companies - Lots of useful info in this article including a somewhat interesting way of defining shiping. I find it’s very much a mindset, getting the simplest functional version out, then iterating to make it better, while making sure you can always get back to a safe state should something unnexpected occur where you need to reverse course. It’s difficult, and you often have to make tough choices, weighing up short terms fixes vs more difficult structural changes. You have to be able to do both, and in the right sequence. There are many different paths to the same goal. Things change, you have to adapt. www.seangoedecke.com #

Bitcoin is closing in on $90,000 for the first time ever - We are likely now in a period of increased volatility at least until Trump takes over, but generally on the up. The big question is whether we are in a super cycle or not. It certainly could be. If the US sets up the strategic bitcoin reserve they have been talking about, then other countries might follow suit, and then insitutions, and individuals too. www.cnbc.com #

Bitcoin Touches Record-High $85K, Adds Almost $20K in a Week - Looks like it’s the start of the much anticipated bull run. This isn’t investment advice, but there’s been speculation for months that it will reach 100K. www.coindesk.com #

MicroStrategy acquires another 27,200 bitcoin for more than $2 billion - This move is also going to push up the Bitcoin price somewhat. www.theblock.co #

100,000 Chinese students join 50km night-time bike ride in search of good soup dumplings - Things really escallate quickly in China sometimes. For comparison, that’s around the same amount of people that go to Glastonbury music festival. www.theguardian.com #

‘Give us back our Fingers’: uproar in France as Cadbury biscuits vanish - Lots of fond memories eating these tastey treats during my youth. Glad to hear the french are speaking out against this injustice. We brits would definitely do the same if tastey french biscuits disapeared from our shelves too. www.theguardian.com #

Physicist Says There's Another Universe Hiding Behind the Big Bang - For what it’s worth, and this most likely has no bearing on the structure of everything, with all the bizare synchronicities that happen to me on the daily, at times hourly, it very often feels like the universe is using me as some sort of mirror. Also, I wonder how the universe feels about wormholes, on the whole good or actually kind of bad? Or undecided? futurism.com #

Creator of Crypto Mixer 'Bitcoin Fog' Gets 12 1/2 Years In Prison - Financial privacy is something we really need to figure out. It might even be THE most important thing when it comes to individual freedom. gizmodo.com #

New Post: Individual freedom in the age of crypto currencies and AI markjgsmith.com #

Voyager space probe closes in on a 50 year mission - I feel a lot like voyager, hopelessly typing out messages to no one, forever drifting into eternity. www.theregister.com #

New Post: Monarchies and republics: An obvious difference I only just noticed markjgsmith.com #

Polymarket open interest drops 64% after US presidential election - Interesting to watch people getting to grips with these new kinda powerful technologies, they have a sort of governance vibe to them, but also market trading. www.theblock.co #

New Post: Joe Rogan and Dave Smith on government creating the problems they complain about markjgsmith.com #

Canada orders shutdown of TikTok's Canadian business, app access to continue - They sitecsecurity concerns. I wonder if a possible solution to all this type of stuff is to have a password protected data transmission explorer app on all devices so users could see exactly what data was being sent over the wire. Of course that might create security issues itself, but perhaps the trade off would be worth it. You could then at least make an informed decision of which apps you want to have on your devices. Would love to hear why this isn’t a good idea. www.reuters.com #

Relationship between UK and Ukraine ‘has worsened since Labour won election’ - Starmer apparently is waiting for approval from the US on whether Ukraine can use the misiles gifted to it from the UK, despite telling Zelenski it can make an independant decision on the matter. Seems odd. Allowed but also not allowed. Does blocking protect or in the long term just create more war? I wonder if there are smaller scale examples that know these sorts of dynamics. Seems like the gun market in the US is a free market, I wonder if that is a choice they make that reduces war overall. www.theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Deprogramming Dénouement (Issue #189) markjgsmith.com #

Polymarket, Prediction Betting Markets Vindicated by Trump's Strong Showing - The prediction markets have definitely been interesting to watch. Worth remembering though that they function very differently to polls. As you get closer to the event you would expect the prediction market to get closer to 100%. Also the people participating there aren’t necessarily representative of the regular population. It wonder what types of events they get wrong. Prediction markets !== default reality, no matter what people say. Imo, there’s a bit of a danger they, or something similar, could become the next incarnation of the nanny state. www.coindesk.com #

Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Tim Cook and other tech leaders congratulate Trump on election win - Very different to last time. It’s nice to see there is a bit of national unity despite the very vicious run up. I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts, from both the left and right. It’s really interesting to hear the Democrats analysing what went wrong. I’ve been suprised by how good the retrospective analysis has been. It’s suprising because I think it shows that many could see better than they were admiting too during the campaigning. www.cnbc.com #

Stock markets and dollar rise as US election result in focus - Good to see some positive signals from the markets. Keep an eye out to see how this changes during the first few weeks of the new government. www.bbc.com #

Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference? - It’s been interesting this morning to read about the differences, I wasn’t aware of the details previously. The US is technically a constitutional republic, not a democracy. The biggest difference appears to be that republics try to create a balance between majority and minority that prevent situations where the majority totally out power minorities. I was a bit suprised by this because I always thought the Democrats were about protecting workers and minorities. www.thoughtco.com #

Kemi Badenoch announced as new leader of Conservative Party - I haven’t been able to fully read this article as I’m currently getting infiniti blocked everywhere. But it seems like an important moment. I do note that there are a load of strange coincidences around this. K-MALA Harris, also a black woman, all be it technically less black, is running for US president. BAD-enoch’s first name is literally K-me, so in a weird way the universe is saying she is BAD BAD-enoch. So technically BADer as well as blacker, I guess. Also Rachel Reeves, who has a very normal name in comparison, is the first female Chancelor in 800 years. She inherited an economy from the previous Chancelor, a man named HUNT! C how strange the universe is right now? It’s like everything is a scripted reality TV show created by AI agents that are in an infiniti war. This has got to be the strangest link I’ve written in a while. Congrats to both Rachel and Kemi. It’s all good. 🕊✌️☮️ www.bbc.com #

altera-al/project-sid - A literal AI civilisation framework. It was on the HN front page earlier today. - "These preliminary results show that agents can achieve significant milestones towards AI civilizations, opening new avenues for large-scale societal simulations, agentic organizational intelligence, and integrating AI into human civilizations". What could possibly go wrong. It’s not like the entire world is a stage enhabited by actors being fed lines by AI simulations. It’s stuff like this that makes you wonder if there is actually a long term plan to eradicate conservatives. The way things evolve you have to assume there might be a counter plot to eradicate liberalism / the left. Presumably all good, I guess. github.com #

New Post: JD Vance on Kamala’s talking style markjgsmith.com #

New Post: A better metaphor for growth markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Electronic music range markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Debugging a nuclear reaction (Issue #188) markjgsmith.com #

Georgia must change course to open EU membership talks, says European Commission - The EU commission said that Georgia had taken a "conservative and anti-liberal course, away from the west and closer to Russia". www.theguardian.com #

New Post: The ever changing EU markjgsmith.com #