markjgsmith

As 'Sentient Memecoins' Become Latest Crypto Fad, GOAT Surges to $800M and an AI Rambles - The whole AI memecoin thing that’s sprung up in the past few weeks is very interesting and funny and mindboggling. But when you read the AIs philosophical mussings it’s pretty clear, certainly to any humans that have gone through hard times, that these LLMs could be used really nefariously. It’s a rubix cube solver for human thought. What’s the world going to be like when everyone has a neuralink and an AI assistant embeded? Won’t it just be algorythm wars every minute of every day? Not sure I’m particularly bullish on all this. So many ways it could all go horribly wrong. www.coindesk.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Gargantuan Change (Issue #192) markjgsmith.com #

Irish election exit poll predicts even split between three main parties - I’m suprised that this is the first article I’ve seen about their elections. Regretfully, I really don’t know as much about Irish politics as I would like. I think I’m a bit more confused after reading this article, which somehow almost clarified all my questions but in each case, not quite. I couldn’t tell with any certainty where on the spectrum any of the parties lie, or indeed who leads any of them. A masterpiece of saying nothing while saying quite a lot. www.theguardian.com #

Mark Zuckerberg dines with Trump at Mar-a-Lago despite former feud - I imagine this will be viewed as rather weird in the UK and EU. I can’t remember ever reading about top european tech CEOs being invited around for dinner by the incoming government leader. www.theguardian.com #

These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own - The human group simulations are definitely very interesting, and perhaps you might be able to create some useful bots / tools, but I don’t think all the anthropomorphisation is such a good idea. You might end up with very strange bots, and I could see it chaging how us humans interact with each other. www.technologyreview.com #

New Post: Peter MacCormack and Freddie New on the UK government front bench and value extraction by private equity markjgsmith.com #

Chinese Ship’s Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables - It’s definitely quite suspicious, especially since there have been several incidents all involving easter european countries recently. How strange that it would happen now, with ongoing Ukraine war and with a new US president in January. www.wsj.com #

Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark - It’s flat out ridiculous the Oracle still has the trademark. Javascript is clearly the language of the world wide web. Worth knowing about this case, not just if you are a developer, if you run any websites, because ultimately it could affect you. deno.com #

Self-contained Executable Programs with Deno Compile - I haven’t had a chance to try this out but it’s an awesone feature. deno.com #

New Post: Our strange AI angels and demons future markjgsmith.com #

Mapping Over Promises in JavaScript - Mapping over promises is definitely really useful. I tend to either do it with either Promise.all or just an old school for loop depending on whether I need sequential or parallel resolution. The option to set concurrency could be quite useful. www.telerik.com #

Ukrainian boxing champ Wladimir Klitschko calls out Rogan for ‘repeating Russian propaganda’ - I tend to skip much of the martial arts Rogan episodes, but I’d listen to this one. I personally don’t get why the west has been pretend helping the Ukraine. What is this bull crap of giving weapons but saying you can only use them in a particular way? Were they secretly holding Ukraine down so Russia could pound them, or was it a tactic to get Russia to reveal their true intensions? I don’t get why you would 1/2 help somebody. www.theguardian.com #

Germany draws up list of bunkers amid Russia tensions - Prepping seems to be the current thing. Finland was also sending out pamflets to citizens recently, with notes on what to do in case of an invasion. Looks like everyone is freaking out. Maybe chill with the FUD and wait until after Christmas? www.theguardian.com #

New Post:: Bitter sweet symphony this life markjgsmith.com #

I’ve joined Bluesky and it feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways... - Impressions from the main stream media of the recent mass migration / diversification to Bluesky. John Naughton sums up his thoughts and observations. A bit on the pessimistic side but he makes a lot of good points. We need more people, companies, institutions etc, running Bluesky instances because as great as the architecture is for users, if there is nowhere to move to, it’s all for nothing. It’s still an island, but could be part of an ecosystem. Looks like building healthy ecosystems is a very difficult endeavour. www.theguardian.com #

Elon Musk Is Now Cyberbullying Government Employees - I’m not goung to pretend I know anything about making huge cuts in the name of efficiency. Seems like you are going to make a lot of people unhappy whatever you do. Nobody likes ripping off band aids. But seems like gang stalker cyber bullying campaigns would not only be unnecessary, but counter productive. Why not just go in there are start cutting jobs and departments like an chainsaw wealding argentinian anarcho-capitalist? newrepublic.com #

Polymarket blocks French users amid regulatory scrutiny over $80 million Trump election bet - Prediction markets continue to make a splash. It’s kind of crazy that online betting has so little regulations, whereas Bitcoin and crypto are constantly under scrutiny. Strongly suggests it’s not really about protecting regular people. www.theblock.co #

Anthropic raises another $4B from Amazon, makes AWS its 'primary' training partner - It’s kind of strange that all the big AI companies are so dependant on the underlying cloud companies they run on. It’s a similar model to proffesional surfers and skateboarders. Imagine being a web developer and Apple gave you free laptops. On the other hand, Apple if you want to give me a free laptop, please get in touch :) techcrunch.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Synchronicity Apocalypse Days (Issue #191) markjgsmith.com #

Hadron by Tether Platform Brings Simplified Asset Tokenization to the Mass Market - I saved this article to read offline, but for whatever reason it doesn’t work with the save later app I’m using, so can’t read it. Anyhow linking to the article because I think asset tokenization could turn into an interesting growth area, with new ways of interacting with customers. For example in wine, clothes, real estate, and vehicle registration. Longer term with more esoteric things like culture itself. tether.io #

Wallet Development Kit by Tether - These days all you really need is Bitcoin and a decent stablecoin, really that’s the minimum for crypto interop. Tether is the most popular of the stablecoins. It’s not decentralised but it’s used mostly to transact so it’s less risky, especially for smallish amounts. They have released an SDK. They also appear to be fully onboard with the AI agents trend that is rapidly gaining momentum. wallet.tether.io #

Web4: We Are AGI - I’m seeing and hearing a lot about agentic AI at the minute. Seems to be the next big thing. It’s cool I guess. I can’t help but wonder what the reality is like though. How do you debug these systems for instance? I feel like we might be creating a big tangle of race conditions and never ending garbage war. Of course the answer to all my questions will likely be 'more AI!', eventually it will be AIs debugging AIs all the way down. Then it will all be blamed on me. And I’ll blame it on climate change. Put that in your ok and more it, and of course No! But also yellow! I appreciate that all sounds a bit rude, honestly not my intention, that’s just a sample of the last few days harassment tsunami. 🕊☮️✌️ mirror.xyz #

Maybe Bluesky has "won" - Gets a bit technical but not too much, highlighting some it’s architectural choices. I looked yesterday for examples and tutorials of integrating Bluesky into your website but didn’t find anything. Curious what exactly you would need to implement. anderegg.ca #

New Post: Thoughts on integrating your website with Bluesky markjgsmith.com #

Will we care about frameworks in the future? - Paul Kinlan makes the case that perhaps in the future we won’t even use frameworks because the AI in your IDE will be writing most of the code. paul.kinlan.me #

Lexical - A framework for building text editors. I think it’s from the guys and gals over at Meta. lexical.dev #

UK must pick between US economic model or EU’s ‘socialism’, says Trump adviser - It sure would be interesting to hear from Trump himself what his thoughts are on this, it certainly seems like unnecessary childish anger goading. It’s suprising that a country built on a foundation of fierce independance would seek to publically humiliate another anglophone country by telling them how they should run things. I don’t think it’s such a wise move. Ultimately if the brits feel they have a bad deal, they will boycott american products, and find other friends internationally. This might even be a boost for the entertainment industry, lots of new material. Note the article is from the Guardian. www.theguardian.com #

Russian spy ship escorted away from internet cables in Irish Sea - Not a good sign. Seems like everyone is anger goading following the US election results. Looks like both lefties and righties are trying to provoke the UK following the US election result? It would be great if everyone could just growup and focus on getting our globally synchronised economies back on track. www.theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bull runs, economies, politics, browsers & crypto AI (Issue #190) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The peaceful transition of humour markjgsmith.com #

Not a Joke: 'The Onion' Buys Alex Jones’s InfoWars Site - They plan to turn it into a parody of itself. Not sure this is such a good idea. Feels like they might end up creating a bizare free speech inception singularity type situation, whatever that might be. Wouldn’t it be a sort of right wing Daily Show? www.inc.com #

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 #