markjgsmith

The Framework Laptop 16 just got a modular gadget that enables quadruple SSDs - You are now capable of having a ridiculus 38TB of storage...on a laptop! And a modular one too so you can have spares of all major parts and be able to swap them in easily if the original ones fail for any reason. With feature films clocking in between 2TB and 12TB, I wonder if vfx artists will start using these. You could literally take the entire film home with you to work on it. www.theverge.com #

Blackmagic Debuts $30K 3D Camera for Capturing Video for Vision Pro - Haven’t seen much about the Vision Pro recently, figured folks had moved on to other things. Maybe we’ll see another wave over the holidays? www.macrumors.com #

Leak Reveals Russia’s Bid For Bitcoin Reserve Amid Huge 2025 Price Predictions - Both the US and Russia are seriously investigating setting up Strategic Bitcoin Reserves. Kinda bullish. The game theory is insane though. It’s essentially a massively high stakes multiplayer game of the opening scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I find mildly triggering to be honest. Perhaps even a bit rude. But I’m happy for Bitcoin. www.forbes.com #

New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn't want to be forced to change its views | TechCrunch - It’s all very interesting, but surely the worry in all this is how long until this tech is repurposed and used on humans, to create Clockwork Orange or indeed reverse Clockwork Orange type scenarios, especially since we know certain parts of the world have forced re-education camps, and given the world has recently been rather prone to a propensity for emergent censorship industrial complexes. techcrunch.com #

UK arts and media reject plan to let AI firms use copyrighted material - Noticed that Guardian has pinneaple pizza’d all their articles with no prior warning. You have to either register or say you will register later. Has a malicious dark patterny kinda vibe to it imo, especially since for years now GDPR has ensured we always have a clear opt out option. How meta that the article is all about an opt out. Enough to break your brain. I didn’t read the article. The kicker: I got a 'good' from the world as clicked through, and a 'aaaaahhh' from the world, as in relief, as I decided not to read the article. Just saying. The world is cray cray AF. www.theguardian.com #

Germany is in a sorry state – and all our leaders can do is yell at each other - Oh noes! What about the steins & wienerschnitzel? Good lord europe, think of the pretzels, the sauerkraut, and the glühwein. And all the other wonderful german things I don’t have time to mention. Pull yourselves together. www.theguardian.com #

Spain introduces bill to combat online fake news - A part of me is hoping that this will lead to some truely epic and possibly distasteful spanish punk and post-punk bands. And honestly might be a good sign that freedoms and democracy are still going strong. www.theguardian.com #

‘World’s first’ grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant announced in the US - Seems like this could be a big deal. The worrier programmer in me is wondering if an alien civilisation has previously tried this and accidentally turned their planet into a supernova somewhere else in the galaxy or wider universe, would we be able to see traces of that? edition.cnn.com #

Goodbye, Moogs - Just catching up with feeds, hope I’m not digging up old graves, but I thought this was probably the best darn pet obituary I’ve ever read. I actually teared up a bit at the end, though it’s also possible that was my alergies. Damn cats. daverupert.com #

A look back at Node's 2024 - Might be a good article to have bookmarked for the holidays. There’s nothing like some mince pies and a bunch of interesting nodejs articles to read. I recognise several of articles linked to. nodeweekly.com #

On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople - John Gruber summarises a recent controversy around background checks for Pete Hegseth who will be taking over control of the US military. What I find interesting is how incredibly good Gruber’s piece is. It’s easily as good as any main stream media journalist, and actually a lot better than most. Some bloggers sure can write. daringfireball.net #

3 shell scripts to improve your writing - Simon Wilson turns some bash scripts into a web tool. What’s interesting is how he did it: basically gave the scripts to an LLM and asked it to do it. Writing little helper tools is now a lot easier than it user to be. simonwillison.net #

Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits - Great Cory Doctorow piece about the importance of data portability in social networks. pluralistic.net #

New Post: Cory Doctorow on data portability in social networks markjgsmith.com #

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Some pubs start to run out of Guinness as supply limit bites - Oh noes! The article sort of implies you can only get Guinness in irish pubs. That’s not the case. Guinness is sold in most pubs. www.bbc.com #

Hampshire pupils 'sob' as vicar discusses existence of Santa - You would think this sort of thing would happen every year, but I don’t remember ever, in all my years, reading about such a thing happening before. Odd then that it should happen just a few days after I wrote about Mike Benz’ description of the censorship industrial complex and it’s similarity to the vfx industry. Thankfully not much chance Christmas will ever get banned, even if Guinness is in short supply this year. www.bbc.com #

WordPress.orgs login page demands you pledge loyalty to pineapple pizza - I’m somewhat conflicted on this. I quite like pinneapple on pizzas, but it depends on what the other topings are, because the sweetness needs a counter balance, like ground pork. I find that it’s often a bit mediocre with ham for instance. Now I’m wondering what pinneapple would be like with another ingredient that is amazing on pizza, but not well known for it: chille con carne. Chille con carne pizzas are phenominal. My guess is that it would be kind of great. On the other hand it’s been so long since I ate a pizza that I think any pizza would be amazing at the minute. Anyway why the fuck is Matt maybe fake blocking / maybe real blocking people based on pizzas topings? mashable.com #

Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter--and It Doesn’t Need to Be - Cool idea for a project. I wonder how many on Blacksky are actually secretly white users pretending to be black, just curious about how to interact with black people and culture. I haven’t grown up with many black people around so I bet I say a ton of things that might be offensive without even realising it. There are so many double meanings in english and cultural references that one might not have, it’s bound to happen all the time. www.wired.com #

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Czech Republic abolishes capital gains tax on Bitcoin held at least three years - The UK should do something similar to get some growth in the crypto sector. The time to do it it is now while it’s a wide open field. In a few years, the tea leaves will have settled, and likely in places with pro-crypto tax rules. cryptobriefing.com #

Britain joins trans-Pacific pact in biggest post-Brexit trade deal - Good to see things moving forward. Interesting the selection of countries. I wonder whether it will have any visible impact having trade agreements with exotic countries around the pacific. www.reuters.com #

Will A.I. Eat The Browser? - Web developers everywhere, who’ve spent a significant part ot their lives sitting on a chair stating at a screen learning the intricacies of HTML, CSS, and javascript, are like seriously bro? crazystupidtech.com #

A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation - Hadn’t read a Doctorow piece in quite a while. Good to see one of my favorite leftists is still pulling punches. I’m a bit worried his boo to the billionaire’s stick is becoming a bit worn. Personally I’m less worried about the billionaires, but more worried by the evil coorporations that surround them. pluralistic.net #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Memeplexes, Podcasting & the Movies (Issue #194) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Inbound RSS for social media? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: You will like your default reality markjgsmith.com #

Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish - I made a scrabble related joke earlier in a shop cafe I was in. What are the chances that just a few hours later I should now see this article on the front page of HN, especially given that earlier I posted a note that requires an understanding of both french and spanish. The kicker is that if you read the article you will learn that the scrabble star has also previously won the french world title. Seriously what are the chances? Come on world, you're not fooling anyone. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Earnie C. from Body Count on Gate Keepers markjgsmith.com #

Node.js Delivers First LTS with require(esm) Enabled, Enhanc... - I reckon this is probably quite a big deal. I think it will have a massive effect on ESM adoption. Import has so many ways where it stops working, whereas require just works everytime. The whole CommonJS vs ESM thing has been such a terrible situation for so long. It made nodejs look so bad. Making using external modules seamless again is huge. socket.dev #

Romania’s top court annuls presidential election result - Tough decision, it’s certainly seems true that there is russian meddling now in all politics across the continent, but we need to be sure people aren’t just using that as an excuse to block legitimate political rivals. I hope they publish the criteria they used to determine the annulment, so everyone can learn from it. www.cnn.com #

Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino Ep#2240 - I’ve always maintained that growing up Pulp Fiction was a sort of coming of age movie for me. Life before Pulp Fiction was in black and white, life afterwards was in glorious technicolor. I don’t mean that literally, it’s more about how life felt. I walked out of the theatre and suddenly it felt like there were possibilities everywhere. Maybe I’ll write more about that sometime. This interview was great. Tarantino and Avery make a really interesting combo, they seem to balance each other in interesting ways. For me this interview had a sort of magical quality to it, though a bit bumpy. In places it felt like to me they were channeling higher forces. That’s the best way I can describe it. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Censorship, AI Memecoins, 100K BTC, Time & the Ruliad (Issue #193) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Questions for Wolfram about time markjgsmith.com #

France faces months of political instability as government nears collapse - Literally tldr; based on title alone, fitting. Then again today is shaping up to be another synchronicity apocalypse day. Weather is crappy today, though no faces in the clouds, just undifferentiated white for as far as the eye can see in every direction. www.bbc.com #

Biden's Angola visit aims to showcase his attempts to rival China - An interesting non descript choice for Biden’s final overseas bit of business. I’m sceptical these days about many of these large scale investment projects, but perhaps the thing to focus on here is the stated goal of developing local processing rather than just extraction, and the fact that Angola is keeping their options open. That at least looks like it might be a step forward. Many steps to go though, but perhaps the foundations are sound. www.bbc.com #

Brazilian lawmaker proposes national bitcoin reserve to hedge economic risks - Looks like maybe nation state strategic bitcoin reserves might be starting to trend. That would certainly create some big inflows. Interesting that it’s one of the BRICKs countries. The bitcoin hedge might start to become very popular amoung sovereign gardners. www.theblock.co #

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Bluesky implements a 'more aggressive' impersonation policy - I didn’t know it had an impersonation issue. Much like the real world. There are doppelgangers everywhere. www.engadget.com #

NASA’s Europa Clipper: Millions of Miles Down, Instruments Deploying - It’s so crazy that to get to it’s destination it has to go to Mars and then back to Earth just to eventually get all the way to Jupiter. What a scenic route. But also imagine the precision needed to do this manouver. I bet we look back at these times in 100 years and wonder how it was that we had to make things so complicated, when no doubt they will be able to just push a button. Makes you wonder if we need to be careful about a future space industrial complex that insists on doing everything in the most complicated way possible to keep people in jobs, or to just keep people from letting their giant brains get bored. Thankfully we don’t need so much precision in the rest of our lives. It should be safe to loose control every once in a while. www.nasa.gov #