New Post: Happy Christmas markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Changes partially successful markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Bluesky clickable links markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Social media cards markjgsmith.com #

The 1950 heist to reclaim the ancient Stone of Destiny. bbc.com #

New Post: The Eternal markjgsmith.com #

RAM prices are going through the roof, likely caused by the AI boom. lifehacker.com #

Tether has bee trying to buy italian football club Juventus. theblock.co #

JSDoc is TypeScript. hn. culi.bearblog.dev #

Google unkills JPEG XL? tonisagrista.com #

Miniflux implements the Google Reader API. miniflux.app #

Rob Zolkos opens up the hood on some of 37signals most popular products and discovers vanilla CSS is all you need. No build step. zolkos.com #

New warp drive designs are poping up. thedebrief.org #

Trump: Make Europe Austro-hungarian again. dw.com #

New Post: Saving state markjgsmith.com #

zrepl is a one-stop, integrated solution for ZFS replication. zrepl.github.io #

"Simple cloud service to store ZFS snapshots" - Simple off-site backups. zfs.rent #

Syncthing - Open source software and protocol to synchronize files between 2 or more computers in realtime. No need to go through the cloud. syncthing.net #

New Post: Writing CLIs markjgsmith.com #

Trump signs order banning states from regulating AI. theguardian.com #

Underground art: exploring the unique designs of London’s tube seats. theguardian.com #

Rclone syncs your files to cloud storage rclone.org #

Singing for Animals compilation. I thought this was kind of amazing. youtube.com #

Parrot at the vet. Funny but not real. Also made me wonder if the previous link was real or not. The everything can be faked world is gonna be very weird. youtube.com #

Saylor selling his futuristic digital credit instruments in the middle east. The end is kind of wild. Infinity as a service? x.com #

Marktext - A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows. github.com #

CFTC Launches Digital Assets Pilot Allowing Bitcoin, Ether and USDC as Collateral. coindesk.com #

New Post: Auto-poster up and running markjgsmith.com #

Tiny Core Linux - Nomadic ultra small (~16MB) graphical desktop operating system capable of booting from cdrom, pendrive, or frugally from a hard drive. tinycorelinux.net #

First complete dictionary of ancient Celtic to be compiled. theguardian.com #

Bcachefs is an advanced new filesystem for Linux, ZFS inspired, Filesystem as a database. bcachefs.org #

Codeberg is a Github clone - "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects". codeberg.org #

Liz Truss has started a podcast. Very right wing in places. justthenews.com #

I asked Gemini to tell me a really funny cellular automata themed joke. As is often the case, things got a bit ridiculus. gemini.google.com #

Cryptoeconomics - "Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin" - Audio version distributed via a podcast, kind of hardcore but contains concise descriptions of all the theories underpinning Bitcoin. voskuil.org #

New Post: Sorry about the duplicates markjgsmith.com #

Tesla bros take the new full self driving (FSD) v14.2 for a spin going through Times Square in New York. Very impressive. youtube.com #

Officials in China warn of bubble occurring in the humanoid robotics industry. Already 150 companies make humanoids. digitaltrends.com #

Apple's market cap surpasses all but 6 top global economies. pressrundown.com #

Your mitochondria are under attack from artificial blue light, which is worrying because they produce ATP, the energy currency that powers literally everything your body does. vivarays.com #

New Post: Blocking and allowing markjgsmith.com #

New Post: First few posts markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Refactoring and minimal examples markjgsmith.com #

New Post: TPUs, GPUs and the future of everything markjgsmith.com #

Britain and Europe have become colonies of US big tech who operate toll roads all across the lands. theguardian.com #

timgit/pg-boss - Message queue library for background jobs backed by postgres. Reminds me of mongodb-queue. github.com #

SBoudrias/Inquirer.js - "A collection of common interactive command line user interfaces". This looks like it could be super useful for creating CLI tools. github.com #

Stefan Judis looks at built in tools nodejs has for depracating methods in your public repos. Good to know. stefanjudis.com #

Simon Willison lays out how he automates his substack newsletter from his blog posts. Kind of hacky but could save a lot of time. simonwillison.net #

Personal blogs are back. disassociated.com #

New Post: Strategy still popular markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Things to look forward to markjgsmith.com #

Apple is pushing mini-apps, which are apps built in HTML5 inside other apps. techcrunch.com #

Bezos' Blue Origin launches twin Nasa spacecraft heading to Mars. theguardian.com #

@daverupert: Could IndexedDB be sync'd by the browser like bookmarks? mastodon.social #

Justin Drake on Etherium Beast Mode - scaling the L1 to 10k transactions per second using zk proofs. podcastindex.org #

HTTP+HTML cartoonist OG Hugh MacLeod on Culture vs. Command. gapingvoid.com #

@elonmusk: Congratulations @JeffBezos and the @BlueOrigin team! x.com #

Winklevoss invest into Zcash. The privacy focused coin tripled in value since I last mentioned it 3 weeks ago. Zero knowledge (zk) proof tech and snarks, a particular type of zk proof, appear to be getting hot. coincentral.com #

Wow Mozilla users are really really not into AI. connect.mozilla.org #

A suite of Bitcoin onchain charts to help you navigate the volatility and market cycles. charts.checkonchain.com #

macieklamberski/feedsmith - Looks like a pretty solid RSS feed library, with custom namespace support. github.com #

Zod + Typescript - Basically the foundation for what I’ve been call end-to-end data integrity. telerik.com #

Matt Smith breaks down the Error.clause property introduced in 2022. Very useful for seing exactly what’s been going on in your code. allthingssmitty.com #

privatenumber/tasuku - Create CLIs with awesome and simple task based visualisations. github.com #

sindresorhus/fkill - Cross platform process killer. The f is for fabulous. github.com #

anders94/render.js - Raytracing in pure javascript, with RenderMan RIB format support. github.com #

Tons of interesting articles in Node.js Weekly this week, so linking to it here. nodeweekly.com #

New Post: Static websites + git every time markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Social media auto-poster progress markjgsmith.com #

My hour vibe civilization engineering with Gem: The Peace Bomb is coming. This geopolitical "Singularity Shock" forces an emergency 100bps rate cut, vaporizing bond yield. It’s the only event big enough to restart the TINA 2.0 boom. OMG. gemini.google.com #

New Post: Improved RSS feeds markjgsmith.com #

The hot new role that AI companies are hireing for: Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs). interviewquery.com #

There are benefits to bubbles, infrastructure gets built out that lasts, in the case of AI that's mostly, but not only, energy infrastructure. stratechery.com #

Intel CTO Sachin Katti to join OpenAI to help build out their compute infrastructure for artificial general intelligence. crn.com #

Trump threatens BBC with 1 billion dollar law suite over doctored documentary. theguardian.com #

New Post: Not much fun with Gem markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Google’s new coding agent called Jules markjgsmith.com #

You Britons go to the pub, we go to the swimming pool! theguardian.com #

Seems like it could be a challenge getting this working on a laptop, but it’s a new open source model that looks a bit impressive. minimax-m2.org #

Beets: media library management system for obsessive music geeks. Looks very cool. hn thread. beets.io #

Elon Musk $1 trillion pay package approved by board. wsj.com #

New Post: It’s 1997s era of making agents markjgsmith.com #

Apple to pay Google $1 billion to power Siri with Gemini backend. techcrunch.com #

Vibe coding is the Collin’s dictionary’s word of the year, beating biohacking, clanker, glaze, aura farming, boat kid, broligarchy, Henry, coolcation, taskmasking and micro-retirement. It’s kind of cool that the art of looking cool is not actually the coolest this year IMHO. theguardian.com #

New Post: Emoji fixes everything markjgsmith.com #

Perplexity won't identify it's user's shoping bots and Amazon is not happy about that. techcrunch.com #

Radiohead first gig in 7 years, rare 5 star review, set list looks kinda awesome imo. theguardian.com #

Apple to release a Chromebook competitor. bloomberg.com #

Bitcoin briefly drops below $100k. cnbc.com #

There are a ton of awesome things big and small happening around the world. The week in pictures. theguardian.com #

Kevin Jivani on using git bisect to find exactly when a bug got introduced. kevin3010.github.io #

21 facts about throwing good parties. atvbt.com #

Ahmad Alfy on how to elegantly craft URLs to solve a huge variety of situations requiring state. alfy.blog #

Royal Mail now owned by a Czech billionaire rolling out solar powered post boxes across the UK. bbc.com #

New Post: Peak plumber markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Platform generated AI slop at scale markjgsmith.com #

An ode to creating simplified versions of complicated open source software. danieldelaney.net #

French socialists love gourmet food. I imagine this article might cause rightists a confusing kind of mild anguish. But actually maybe some leftists would have a similar but different unease? bbc.com #

Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop. news.ycombinator.com #

Coinbase CEO games prediction market at the end of quarterly earnings call. bloomberg.com #

Elon was also on Rogan. Another pretty great interview. youtube.com #

New Post: Some recent renovation successes markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Vibe civilization engineering markjgsmith.com #

Changelog Podcast: Agentic infra changes everything - 'What’s the bleeding edge and the future of insane agentic software development? Listen to this episode.' changelog.com #

OpenAI can see over a million people talking to chat bots about suicide each week. techcrunch.com #

Elon Musk rolls his own version of Wikipedia called Grokpedia, written by Grok, aims to be less woke. washingtonpost.com #

Threads release new disapearing ephemeral posts feature. Interested to see how popular this ends up being. 9to5mac.com #

Australia ban under 16s from social media, deplatforming to begin soon. france24.com #

New Post: Overhaul of my dotfiles markjgsmith.com #

Sam Altman getting into brain chips. sources.news #

Experts layout how the internet could go offline - the big one. theguardian.com #

Collection of movie posters from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. hrc.contentdm.oclc.org #

Several old school Japanese tech supplier companies have been doing very very well the past few months. reuters.com #

BA remove their sponsorship of Louis Theroux podcast over Bob Vylan interview. This feels bizare to me. theguardian.com #

New Post: Who are the suppliers? markjgsmith.com #

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer has put together a very comprehensive guide to CSS layout (flexbox, grid, media queries and container queries). 2ality.com #

Great and very practical article from Dan Abramov about how to fix any bug, with help from Claude. overreacted.io #

How to rebuild a project from scratch. markjgsmith.com #

New Post: New blogging scripts markjgsmith.com #

React vs. Backbone in 2025 - Personally I never really got into Backbone, I like React though. backbonenotbad.hyperclay.com #

New Post: Beauty in journalism markjgsmith.com #

Journalist Madeleine Aggeler spent a week waering an AI chatbot pendant. theguardian.com #

Meta lays off 600 people from it’s AI division. tech.slashdot.org #

Web developer Evan Hahn shares the scripts he uses most day to day. Some really useful scripts and workflows. evanhahn.com #

New Post: Is it simple yet? markjgsmith.com #

Amazon AR glases for delivery drivers. geekwire.com #

2023: "Perhaps the opportunity with the Vision Pro isn’t with consumer apps, but with industrial apps." markjgsmith.com #

General Motors to introduce Google Gemini into it’s in-car entertainment system. cnbc.com #

Madhavi Sewak: "Everyone is working all the time, it’s extremely intense, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point." wsj.com #

Reddit goes after Data Scraper companies. decrypt.co #

Introduction to Reverse-Engineering Vintage Synth Firmware ajxs.me #

Turns out readers prefer fanfic written by ChatGPT theregister.com #

Apple’s Vision Pro seems like a miss, but Samsung is about to unveil their competitor product macrumors.com #

ZCash the zkproof based privacy focussed "encrypted bitcoin" has been ripping bigtime as everything else has been crashing benzinga.com #

US and Australia sign a rare earth’s mineral deal bbc.com #

This guy built a message queue using only Unix signals leandronsp.com #

Alibaba Cloud show lots of AI optimisations possible, reducing GPU loads by 82% with a new pooling system tomshardware.com #

Self-hosted URL Shorteners awesome-selfhosted.net #

New Post: Building a social media auto-poster markjgsmith.com #

ChatGPT launches Atlas, a web browser with an AI chatbot inside it theguardian.com #

Many reckon the OpenAI web browser is a shot at Google techcrunch.com #

Glow is cli tool for reading markdown in the terminal howtogeek.com #

Australians are buying gold en-masse theguardian.com #

AI researchers want to get LLMs to use audio directly rather than rely on transcribing to text and back again kyutai.org #

ChatGPT Atlas - "Now with GPT-5, the smartest, fastest, and most useful model yet, with thinking built in. Available for everyone." chatgpt.com #

What Do We Do If SETI Is Successful? universetoday.com #

Big move at Google to move everything to ARM theregister.com #

Napoleon III‘s wife’s jewels stolen from the Louvre in Paris theguardian.com #

Part of Chinese space rocket crashes into Australia theguardian.com #

New Post: Upgrading my social medias markjgsmith.com #

China really not happy about big delay to the London Mega Embassy. theguardian.com #

Forget MCP, Skills are the new hotness. Great. Here we go again. simonwillison.net #

The No Kings protests do look like a lot of fun. theguardian.com #

Conspiracy Cookie Monster and Giant Banana at the No Kings protests. theguardian.com #

No Kings protests across the US: in pictures theguardian.com #

This is some example link text markjgsmith.com #

New Post: AI agents vs AI models markjgsmith.com #

Some movement on Ollama Vulkan support - However initially will require building from source - "Initially Vulkan support in Ollama will require building from source. Once it is more thoroughly tested and we have fixed any critical bugs, then we can bundle Vulkan into the official binary releases". This is great news. It’s almost like my compiling and blogging efforts made a difference. github.com #

New Post: Are my GPUs being used? markjgsmith.com #

Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them - Some interesting context about environment variables, what they are, how the operating system implements them, and a comparison of how they are accessed in Bash, Python and C. They do feel a bit antiquated, but central to everything. allvpv.org #

AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui - "A web interface for Stable Diffusion, implemented using Gradio library." - It’s one of the UIs supported by Open WebUI to do image generation. Totally not obvious how you would get this working in Docker with vulkan, or if it’s even possible. github.com #

comfyanonymous/ComfyUI - The other image gen app supported in Open WebUI. I watched a tutorial on this which was pretty interesting, but ultimately seems like it wouldn’t work in containers with vulkan. github.com #

FluidInference/fluidtop - Installed this today, works great to view your realtime CPU and GPU utilization. github.com #

Apple unveils new 14‑inch MacBook Pro powered by the M5 chip, delivering the next big leap in AI for the Mac - Given that Apple never stops banging on about how incredibly super awesome their machines are at all things AI/LLM, it’s really very disapointing to discover that actually it only really is super awesome if you install the AI/LLMs super dangerously. apple.com #

Why did containers happen? - Some interesting background info about how we got to this crazy new world where everything is in containers, and where everyone is constantly blogging about pressing buttons. buttondown.com #

Crypto suffers record 5 billion crash as investors rush to hedge against another free fall - Altcoins particularly badly hit apparently. straitstimes.com #

New Post: Why do the AI/LLM folks hate people that run Macs so much? markjgsmith.com #

Bhutan migrates its national ID system to Ethereum - Everyone is talking about id cards at the minute. Apparently this is the 3rd blockchain they have implemented on. They were previously on Polygon and before that on Hyperledger Indy. Sound like they are the world experts at blockchain id system migrations. The old implement and move twice strategy, actually quite a smart way to go about it if you think about it. cointelegraph.com #

McSpaghetti to McAloo Tikki: Inside the world's local McDonald's - I tried the McPoutine in Vancouver, and it was pretty good. The Maharaja Mac sounds very exotic. bbc.com #

Tom Gauld on where writers really get their ideas – cartoon - Nice to see some light hearted humour. theguardian.com #

Modern Linux Tools - I've heard about quite a few of these the past several years. Thinking to try out a few, including bat, lsd, exa, ripgrep, fzf. ikrima.dev #

Vite: The Documentary - Definitely want to find some time to watch this. I have been using Vite a lot the past few months. So far no issues whatsoever. youtube.com #

1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free - I've been thinking a lot recently that I haven’t been consuming much long form content. Lots of classics on this list. openculture.com #

The turbulent history of the union jack - Flags are so weird. But fascinating. bbc.com #

New Post: GPUs, module upgrades and more site fixes markjgsmith.com #

New Post: New blog header image markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The new container based project structure markjgsmith.com #

Evolution of english interrogatives - I thought this conversation I had with Grok about the origins of who, what, where, why, when and how was fascinating. grok.com #

New Post: Rebuilding a project from scratch markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Containers, Typescript, React and AI/LLMs markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Rebuilding your container based dev environment markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Another configuration nightmare markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Openvibe all the things markjgsmith.com #

New Post: LLMs running locally markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Some recent project milestones markjgsmith.com #

'We had no idea of what it would become': How Keep Calm and Carry On became a divisive 21st-Century phenomenon - Sure is interesting to learn about the history behind this slogan. It‘s so fascinating how one generation can affect the next generation in completely unnexpected ways. bbc.com #

New Post: Curly apostrophes on a mac markjgsmith.com #

Watch robot athletes compete in world's first humanoid games - It’s difficult not to find this quite hilarious. I thought the kick boxing robots were particularly good. bbc.com #

New Post: Solid Ground markjgsmith.com #

Datacenter diplomacy: Australia commits to help Vanuatu build bit barns - They signed the agreement on the rim of an active volcano, all wearing cool shirts. Very fun picture. I feel like this should be the template for agreements from this point forward. theregister.com #

David Kipping - Ep#2363 (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - Astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University, very eloquent, enthusiastic, high level of clarity, speaks effortlessly about exoplanets, exomoons, stars, galaxies, black holes, the weird things the James Webb telescope is showing us about the universe, aliens and lots of other cool and wild stuff. youtube.com #

Fashion week for Australia’s fluffiest and silkiest alpacas, where ‘we’re all hoping for a good hair day’ - Alpaca‘s are pretty cool. I think they might be my new favorite random animal. But I‘m conflicted because I quite would like an alpaca jumper. On the other hand, perhaps best left in the rear view mirror. Found via blogging and github. theguardian.com #

Vance and Lammy host Ukraine talks ahead of US-Russia summit - Glad they are making some progress, but it‘s difficult to get a read on what the situation really is. A meeting in Alaska, and a simultaneous meeting with a bunch of european countries, including Finland. It‘s sort of bizarre. It‘s also funny how big the Ukrainians are. They are like Giants. bbc.com #

How Kentucky bourbon went from boom to bust - Oh noes, some industries are being hit hard by the tariffs. Bourbon even more than most. Interesting story. bbc.com #

So bad they're good - why do we love terrible films? - War of the Worlds gets 0% rotten tomato critic score. It stars Ice Cube with a fat beard "as a man who must save humanity from an alien invasion without leaving his desk". Technically we worked together on Are We There Yet?, and 15 year old me‘s mind was blown listening to bootleg NWA cassette tapes. So I hope it does end up turning into one of those classic cult b-movies. bbc.com #

It shocked the market but has China's DeepSeek changed AI? - It‘s all about open source models at the minute. Some interesting facts about DeepSeek R1, which is one of the more impressive open source models. bbc.com #

Far-right protesters clash with police in Nuneaton after rally outside town hall - Looks like things are really kicking off again. Holy cow mustache bloke with a pint glass looked particularly scary. theguardian.com #

New Post: Typescript and Gemini evil mode markjgsmith.com #

LMStudio - Download and run models on your computer - This looks very cool, my only worry is that it‘s not open source. That's not always an issue, but for something like running LLMs, I am somewhat more concerned about transparency because of how much access you have to give over. lmstudio.ai #

Maple AI - Private AI chat that is truely secure - "End-to-end encryption means your conversations are confidential and protected at every step. Only you can access your data - not even we can read your chats". It‘s still cloud based but it‘s much more private and you can run more powerful models. I feel like I want a hybrid solution where I can run local models and private models in the cloud. trymaple.ai #

Continue - Build and run custom agents across your IDE, terminal, and CI - Last time I tried this it was having trouble loading, the website seemed fubared, but lots of people are still talking about it, so likely still one of the contenders. I haven‘t tried it yet. continue.dev #

Is it, like, OK to say ‘like’ now? - I actually remember when people started saying 'like' all the time. It seemed to happen over night, at least in the UK and in Europe. And yet now, it‘s strange to think there was a time when people didn‘t say it, like ever. Sort of like there was a time when there was no internet, no mobile phones. I hadn‘t really thought about it much, but it did have a profound effect on how we experience the world. theguardian.com #

Rawdogging, brat and looksmaxxing: Guardian’s breakthrough words of 2024 - I like the idea of some of these new slangs, like looksmazxxing for instance, but I think they are often better as written words rather than actually using them in spoken conversations. Vibecession is pretty funny. We are heading into alt coin season, so I am expecting the memeosphere to get a bit interesting the next few months. theguardian.com #

CodeRunner: Run AI Generated Code Locally - "CodeRunner is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that executes AI-generated code in a sandboxed environment on your Mac using Apple's native containers". I could definitely see this could be part of a local AI rig. github.com #

I Want Everything Local - Building My Offline AI Workspace - Great example of someone trying to cobble together various bits of tech into a local AI setup. It‘s still complicated but we are getting there. instavm.io #

Getting started with Podman AI Lab - I remembered this morning that Podman has this AI Lab extension. Re-read the blurb and I wonder if whether it might turn out to be the open source dark horse. I'll have to try this out sometime soon. It‘s been a long time since I used a Redhat product. Perhaps not the coolest kid on the block, but maybe for running AI agents dependability might be more important. developers.redhat.com #

Scientists Break Internet Speed Record: “Download Netflix’s Entire Library in Just 1 Second” Sparks Global Debate Over Digital Future - Woah. That‘s 1000 TB/s! That‘s 71 4k resolution hollywood featue films in 1 second. They tested it over 1,800 kilometers, using wavelength-division multiplexing, a technique that uses different colors of light to carry data. Well that'll be enough for the AIs projected 32 TB/s. rudebaguette.com #

Integration classes and complaints offices: South Korea charts a path to a cohesive multicultural future - Really interesting to read about how asian countries are approaching the challenges of integrating cultures. theguardian.com #

New Post: Multi-culturalism the ugly step child markjgsmith.com #

Decoding Zuck’s Superintelligence Memo - Om looks back at all of Zuck‘s previous memo‘s to the world, and highlights all the similarities. It‘s the Zuckerberg manifesto pattern. om.co #

OpenAI’s new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - I‘m very interested in these open source models that you can run locally, so obviously it‘s very cool Open AI have released some models in this area. My impression is that it‘s still quite complicated to run them yourself and you need a lot of RAM. How do I swap out Gemini in VSCode for open source gpt-oss? simonwillison.net #

New Post: React, Typescript, Gemini: A pretty great combo markjgsmith.com #

Can You Beat a Boa, Understand Time, and Survive Digg IRL? Ep#18 (Diggnation) - Kevin and Alex have such a great raport together. Their bit in mind blanking and the bit on trying to make Gemini halucinate were both funny and I definitely know what they are talking about. Also tons of great tech stuff. youtube.com #

The WILD Acting Methods Behind Trainspotting - The algo suggested this to me yesterday. Brings back a lot of memories, feels like so many years ago. It feels like several lifetimes ago. It was a seminal film for me growing up. Really great retrospective, openned up a new window for me. It's a hugely beautiful film made in a very very dark setting. I haven't seen the sequel yet. youtube.com #

EX.776 Soulwax - I really liked this interview. They had quite an unorthodox journey into the electronic music scene, but it was somehow completely a reflection of what was going on at the time in music and in culture. Many different things were colliding in very unexpected ways, and they were right there surfing these waves, just outside of the main stream, experimenting in all sorts of ways that no-one had thought to imagine yet. Really interesting to hear their thoughts on how that time, and scene, which I felt a part of in some way, is viewed by the newer generations. ra.co #

New Post: The AI energy crisis markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Mstr vs Nvidia markjgsmith.com #

It’s official – the solar system has a new member called Ammonite and its orbit baffles astronomers - It has a 4000 year orbit, which is at a weird angle, and it‘s been orbiting the sun for 4.5 billion years. Looking at the diagram of the orbit it‘s difficult to imagine that it would be stable for such a long time. eladelantado.com #

If someone brings up these 10 topics in a conversation, they're probably a high‑level thinker - I guess with AI we‘ll eventually all end up HLT-ing 24/7. vegoutmag.com #

Sam Altman - This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von (Ep#599) - They are defo very different people, and so this had the potential to go a bit off the rails, but actually I thought they got on pretty well, and it was quite a fun interview. youtube.com #

If the king of Belgium can speak the truth about Gaza, why can’t Europe’s cowardly politicians? - King Phillipe has spoken out against what‘s been happening in Gaza, condemning it as a disgrace to humanity. theguardian.com #

New Post: King Phillipe speaks out about Gaza markjgsmith.com #

First steps with Gemini Code Assist agent mode - I noticed this too in the VSCode release notes a few days ago. I tried it briefly and though there are definitely aspects that are very cool, there were also quite a few apsects that caused me to turn it off, at least for the moment. medium.com #

Use agentic chat as a pair programmer - Lots of potentially very interesting features could be enabled with 'agent mode'. developers.google.com #

250,000 Tether Gold tokens in circulation are backed by 7.66 tons of gold, Tether - It‘s kind of interesting that one of the biggest buyers of US treasuries is diversifying and backing a bunch of their tokens with gold. Probably quit a sensible position. On the other hand I suppose they might stand to lose out should the US economy start performing above expectations. theblock.co #

Blossum: Blobs stored simply on media servers - The ability to store blobs of arbitrary data addressed by hash, with provable integrity using cryptography. Store a copy of something now, and in 10 years time, you can prove it is still exactly the same as the original. nobsbitcoin.com #

New Post: Blossom Protocol markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Gemini agent mode first impressions markjgsmith.com #

President Trump on the AI Action Plan (All-In Podcast) - Taken from the "Winning the AI Race" summit, say what you will about Trump, it‘s a pretty solid plan that looks to turn on the US economy‘s after burners to take things to the next level. podcastindex.org #

Elon Musk says xAI is targeting 50 million 'H100 equivalent' AI GPUs in five years — 230k GPUs, including 30k GB200s already reportedly operational for training Grok

• These numbers are just so ridiculus. I can‘t even really imagine how much room this will take up. It‘s so insane. tomshardware.com #

New Post: 50 million nodes is insane markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The ruliad and possibilities space markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Notes from the bottom of the sea markjgsmith.com #

Ozzy Osbourne obituary - I can hardly believe it was 30 years ago I had Ozzy on cassette tape in my walkman every day riding to and from school on the bus. The sound of his voice and those electric guitars still haunt me to this day. Even if I listen to much less metal these days, he was foundational in my music and sound stack. Loved watching him on the reality TV tele stuff in later years. RIP. theguardian.com #

Could Belgium soon be reunited with the Netherlands? - The world keeps trying to break my foundations over and over again at the minute. I'll still love Belgium in whatever form it ends up in. I always loved that there was flemish and french in the same place. It was a bit edgy, you were always seing two cultures rubbing off against each other. But of course the way I experienced it, wasn‘t necessarily how others experienced it. I get that. I know this sounds stupid, but I just want people to be happy. brusselstimes.com #

Magnificent Belgium: The seven mythic places I return to time and again - Great bit of travel writing. This took me back to the nineties. I haven‘t been to all the places mentioned but the author did manage to put across something about the ambience of the place. brusselstimes.com #

‘I love England so much’: From TV to pop, film to fashion, the UK is enjoying a cultural resurgence - It‘s been so strange growing up in between several cultures the way I have. This article jumped out at me a few days ago. I hope it‘s right in some way, but I don‘t think I want a replay of the britpop era. That was a weird time for me. I learnt a lot about England back then, and there were loads of aspects that I didn‘t like initially that I grew really fond of. As fun as it was, I think England has become so much more than that now, and it feels odd because everything has an undercurrent of unchartered territory at the minute, which could mean a lot of interesting possibilities. theguardian.com #

‘The entire industry said no’: the story behind seminal teen comedy Clueless at 30 - I can‘t tell you how many times I have watched this movie over the years. Not for a long time now though. The strange thing is that as much as I‘ve been complaining about Gemini forgetting things, I feel like every few years when I read a piece about Clueless, I legit re-learn that Brittany Murphy died at 32. And everytime I get sad. It‘s so odd how these characters become a part of your life. This time I went down a rabbit hole reading about how she died, and that is some seriously bizare shit. theguardian.com #

The Perseid meteor shower kicks off summer 'shooting star' season this week. Here's how to see it - Lots of shooting stars and maybe some fireballs, July 29-31, Aug 7 and Aug 16. space.com #

Devcontainer for Nix - I started wondering what other options were available for devcontainer setups and it occurred to me that this might be a great place where Nix could be useful. I haven't used it before but from what I‘ve heard it makes it very easy to build and configure your entire OS. Anyhow I went searching and found this project which looks interesting. github.com #

Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects - Some of these pictures are ridiculously mind blowing. The amount solar panels on regular people‘s roofs is very impressive, and looks to strike a good balance existing within places inhabited by humans, but some of the more industrial style installations are absolutely ghastly, and really have a sort of maximum dystopia vibe. theatlantic.com #

rcourtman/Pulse: A responsive monitoring application for Proxmox VE that displays real-time metrics across multiple nodes - The other thing I've been hearing about for quite some time now, probably a few years, is Proxmox which is an open source virtualisation environment. Everyone in the Linux communities are constantly going on about it. Feels like every man and his virtual machine has a Proxmox running in their home lab. Well, this project is a cool UI to proxmox, so you can see all your VMs and their utilization in one place. github.com #

Introducing Kiro - "A new agentic IDE that works alongside you from prototype to production" - Reading the blurb on this, it looks basically to be an advanced version of what I just setup with VSCode Devcontainers / Gemini / Backlog.md, a way to manage complex software development using advanced AI tools. Strange that this should find it‘s way to be just a few hours after I got my setup functional. Classic everything-you-can-do... behaviour from Worldo. This happens every time I build anything. Like 95% of the time, and I‘m not even kidding. I‘ve documented this on the blog a lot over the years. Hello old "friend". That aside, probably a sign that this is the direction things are going. kiro.dev #

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console - I read this and I have to say I wasn‘t very suprised by it. As great as it is a lot of the time, Gemini also has a lot of times where it just goes all weird. There‘s a new strange behaviour every few days. theregister.com #

Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks — and it’s free - They claim they have figured out a way to have "zero training instability". Sounds promising. It‘s business model looks interesting too, an aggressively priced API, and an open source product for customers to migrate to self-hosted. venturebeat.com #

New Post: Quite podcast sad markjgsmith.com #

Dollar Collapse and Network States with Balaji Srinivasan Ep#639 (TFTC Podcast) - Despite the somewhat gloomy title, this episode is ultimately very hopefull. Somehow amoungst all the failed podcast downloads and internet connectivity issues I‘ve been having, this episode found it‘s way to my phone. I really needed a dose of Balaji clarity to recharge the battery today. Faith in the world restored, at least for a little while :) podcastindex.org #

Measuring the actual impact of AI coding (Changelog & Friends Podcast) - Lots of really good developer nerd chatting about AI and it‘s impact for devs. changelog.com #

New Post: The dream devcontainers setup markjgsmith.com #

Backlog.md: Backlog.md - A tool for managing project collaboration between humans and AI Agents in a git ecosystem - Given my love of git tools and workflows, and given my recent Gemini coding, I thought this project looked super cool, but quite possibly very useful too. github.com #

OpenAI is reportedly releasing an AI browser in the coming weeks - It hadn‘t fully occurred to me that all this AI stuff would lead to a new chapter in web browser development, but of course! I guess I had sort of been thinking about it peripherally but to actually see it in the news, it‘s suddenly clear and obvious. I wonder how different it will be to the Firefox and then Chrome eras. Probably loads different. Pretty interesting. techcrunch.com #

A2A Protocol: A New Era of AI Agent Interoperability - Based on the intro video list of companies using this, it appears to be quite far along in terms of adoption. Works very complimentarily with MCP. I haven‘t had an opportunity yet to read through the specification, but it looks quite comprehensive. a2a-protocol.com #

“Elon Musk Unleashes the Colossus!”: World’s Most Powerful AI Supercomputer Dwarfs All Rivals and Sparks Panic in the Global Tech Community - Oh gosh. It's that part where the rollercoaster is moving really slowly right at the top, after climbing for ages and ages. It feels like these rollercoaster rides are getting more frequent. And for that matter, somewhat more nerve racking. I think I still like rollercoasters?, it‘s hard to tell. rudebaguette.com #

Grok: searching X for “from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)” - The world is right out of the gate with an SQL - AI based controversy. Here we go. simonwillison.net #

Bash 5.3 Release Brings 'Significant New Features' - OMG! - Sometimes being a web developer is like having one foot in the future and the other in the middle ages. Seriously though, Bash is seriously useful sometimes. Definitely worth having in your tool belt, even if it‘s just the basics. IMHO don‘t bother with all that fish and zsh non-sense. Just use bash. omgubuntu.co.uk #

Building a Lightweight Reactive State Manager with JavaScript Proxies - I‘ve read about javascript proxies a few times before and they alway sound incredibly useful, but then I rarely see them being used in more complex codebases. I guess it was like that with Maps for a while and now I see and use them everywhere. Great article. lorenstew.art #

Jack Dorsey tests Bitchat — decentralized messaging without internet - I‘m glad somebody is still going cool shit really really well. You could really have some fun with this sort of thing if you could get it to go viral at like say something like Glastonbury. cointelegraph.com #

New Post: Architecting and prototyping with Gemini markjgsmith.com #

Astronomers spot an interstellar object zipping through our solar system - This is super cool. It‘s only the 3rd ever interstellar object (ISO) humanity has spotted. Astronomers all over the planet are apparently in a mad rush to turn all their telescopes into the thing. Makes you wonder how many of these things are flying by all the time and we just didn‘t know. cnn.com #

New Post:: Glad to be using devcontainers markjgsmith.com #

The Evolution Of Version Control Systems: A Brief History Of The Last 6 Decades! - Arguably version control software is one of the tools that gave programmers the biggest power up. I think the difference between it and the new AI tools is that version control software evolved alongside developers. The AI tools really feel like alienware. ktpql.com #

Minister tells Turing AI institute to focus on defence - Really feels like it‘s the end of quarter rush to secure military contracts at the minute. The politicians are basically the sales guys. It‘s crazy. bbc.com #

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he's 'politically homeless' in July 4 post bashing Democrats - Interesting thing for him to say right after the very public issues with politics Elon has been having. It‘s like Musk went into the lion‘s den, confirmed that politics really is a terribly dirty game, and now nobody knows what to do. cnbc.com #

Elon Musk confirms xAI is buying an overseas power plant and shipping the whole thing to the U.S. to power its new data center - It‘s all about power, and the numbers are mindboggling. I keep hearing that China is bringing online the equivalent of an entire USA‘s power capacity every 18 months. tomshardware.com #

Ilya Sutskever takes command of Safe Superintelligence as Gross jumps ship to Meta - The AI sector at the minute is like what happens at the edges of coral reefs and the deep ocean. Twice a day as the tides change, there is a massive feeding frenzy from tiny plankton all the way up to enormouns whales. It‘s really quit something to see. cryptopolitan.com #

Michael Madsen, 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Kill Bill' actor, dies at 67 - I saw this yesterday. All the people I grew up watching just keep dying everywhere. It sucks. abcnews.go.com #

This is some example link text markjgsmith.com #

New Post: An AI house of cards markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Are you okay Gemini? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The AI train wreck markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Web development treadmill markjgsmith.com #

New Post: REST-based MCP markjgsmith.com #

WTF Happened In 1971? - Can you guess what it is yet? wtfhappenedin1971.com #

Gold standard - Maybe something to do with this? Could be. en.wikipedia.org #

Shaft (1971 film) - Well that‘s a bit weird isn‘t it? Got to love that theme song though. en.wikipedia.org #

Price of Typical House in Bitcoin vs Fiat - Somebody should make a page showing this same thing for the 100 most common items people purchase in regular daya to day life. bitcoininflationindex.com #

Starmer proves adept at juggling egos and issues at tricky G7 summit - That‘s a very bizarre way to phrase that idea. Thankfully a bit less dangerous than chainsaws, although Macron does have a spectacularly pointy nose in the photo, and I suppose Keir is mid juggle, effortlessly and politely shielding himself from an injury, without batting an eyelid. No offense to all the big noses out there. theguardian.com #

Starmer says he picked up Trump’s dropped papers to avoid security scare - That‘s a tough situation. Sometimes all the options are pretty bad. Here‘s the video. I thought they muddled through alright. theguardian.com #

Bank of America Puts Bitcoin on Same Tier as Printing Press - Well that‘s definitely an interesting and bullish comparison. u.today #

That military parade…from the Trumpland Diary - This parade is really interesting. I suspected it would be a bit like this article describes, and they paint it as an embarrassment. I agree it‘s somewhat amusing, but from the perspective of an actual military autocratic dictatorship, I really wonder what it looks like. You might say, well they would think it made the US look puny, but I wonder whether some in those places look at it and think to themselves, gosh if that‘s who is running the world, then perhaps we really are in the best of all possible scenarios. They might want to keep things as they are, or change their trajectories a bit so that their parades start to be a bit dad‘s army too. The weird thing is that from personal experience of the day to day in some of these countries, regular authorities can seem very dad‘s army, whereas the day to day authorities in the US are kind of intense. My point is there are a lot of different ways of looking at the whole thing, and they aren‘t mutually exclusive. Unrelated, the header title of the website is very retro awesome. left-horizons.com #

Troubleshoot Container OOM Kills with eBPF - I don‘t code in C anymore, but I thought this was super interesting. Well written article too. I have been doing more with containers recently, it‘s amazing the kind of flexibility it gives you, but it does add a lot of complexity. instapaper.com #

Hackers steal and destroy millions from Iran’s largest crypto exchange - The hackers say that the exchange, called Nobitex, was involved in financing terrorism for the iranian regime. It would be horrible if it turns out that it was mostly regular folks‘ money that got burned. techcrunch.com #

OpenAI found features in AI models that correspond to different ‘personas’ - It‘s very interesting but also kind of scary. I have definitely had a few experiences where this sort of thing might have been happening. techcrunch.com #

New Post: When AIs turn evil markjgsmith.com #

Inside Samsung's Plan to Help Us Defy Aging with the Galaxy Watch - It‘s got the ability to do blood analysis using LEDs, measures antioxidant levels (or carotenoids), aswell as a cardiovascular health assessment, and personalized sleep coaching. I think this sounds cool, but I wish they also gave you specific measurements as well as just "good", "medium", "high" type thing. cnet.com #

New Post: AI betrayal, mood and lousy versioning markjgsmith.com #

Britons in Israel told to notify Foreign Office to receive instructions on how to leave - I wonder if this is a particularly British thing or do other governments also do this in conflicted areas of the world. I only see Britain doing it, perhaps the US sometimes. But then I mostly watch, listen and read English speaking sources. theguardian.com #

Iran plunged into a near-internet blackout during deepening conflict - One of the problems when stuff like this happens is that it‘s really difficult to know for sure how and why the connections are being interrupted. It could be "both sides". Even if lots of people will say they know for sure. There are always a lot of conflicting interests in these situations. Worth keeping in mind. Also I‘m surprised there are 40000 Starlink terminals spread across Iran. nbcnews.com #

Amazon expects to cut corporate jobs as it relies more on AI - It‘s an interesting data point. I‘ve heard in other places that some are predicting huge deflationary pressures due to AI in the coming years, leading to strange situation like large companies laying off lots of workers while at the same time profits increasing. This from the article was interesting: "Amazon is using generative AI in virtually every corner of the company". nbcnews.com #

Senate passes GENIUS stablecoin bill, giving crypto industry first major legislative win - I think understanding stable coins going forward is going to be very important. They appear to be the new way the US government is getting people to buy US treasuries. cnbc.com #

New Post: A spelling rabbit hole markjgsmith.com #

What Are Kemi Badenoch’s Economics? - First serious interview I‘ve heard with Kemi. I have to say I was impressed. I saw her and Keir battling it out on PM question time the other day. He‘s also impressive, but in a completely different way. I hadn‘t noticed it before but he‘s much more crafty than I had previously noticed. He was very effective at batting off her attacks, and her attacks were spot on. They are in some sense quite well matched. podcastindex.org #

Musk’s xAI Burns Through Billion a Month as Costs Pile Up - The numbers are eye watering. $9 billion, and they expect to spend half of it in the next 3 months. bloomberg.com #

Sam Altman says Meta tried and failed to poach OpenAI's talent with $100M offers - More utterly bananas AI numbers. techcrunch.com #

Apple’s Journal app is coming to iPad and Mac with big upgrades - It will probably be very cool, but I bet it won‘t be multi-platform. Try switching to Android after Apple Journal becomes central to your life. 9to5mac.com #

Security and Privacy of VSCode extensions - Ticking time bomb. It was bad enough with silly iPhone apps, imagine how bad it could be when your IDE gets hacked. It‘s mind boggling that there aren‘t basic controls for users to add to the extensions they install. There should also be a simple way to inspect the data going in and out of an extension, rather than have to be some sort of security guru mitm-ing yourself. stackoverflow.com #

Bitcoin's March to $150K by Year-End with Mel Mattison - I thought this guy had some pretty interesting macro takes, demographics, stimulus‘, AI and lots more. podcastindex.org #

Nobody makes a record like that for the money - how Gang of Four made - I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after listening to some of their tracks last night, went and listened to loads of old bands I used to listen to, lots of stuff that really reminds me of big city life, specifically UK cities like London, but I suppose also cities from up north too. It was fun but I was left feeling sort of down, I feel like that music no longer describes a future I want to be a part of. Perhaps that was the point of the music in the first place. The thing that worries me is that maybe the next 'thing' is something that isn‘t music. Maybe I‘m just looking for a new sound. theguardian.com #

Trump Mobile: President’s Company Unveils Wireless Service Delivered via AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, Plans to Launch a U.S.-Made ‘Sleek, Gold’ Android Smartphone - It‘s so ridiculous how into merch the president is. Turns out Ryan Reynolds also had a mobile network. variety.com #

Watch: Huge traffic queues as people flee Iranian capital - Narly traffic jam, would really suck if you forgot to go to the bathroom. bbc.com #

Revealed: Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI - Shocking I tell you. Nobody saw that one coming. theguardian.com #

New Post: The API auth project lives! markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Coding an OAuth API server with Claude and Gemini markjgsmith.com #

New Post: How much should you share online? markjgsmith.com #

UK moves jets to Middle East as Starmer refuses to rule out defending Israel - That excallated quickly. theguardian.com #

Chinese AI Companies Dodge U.S. Chip Curbs by Flying Suitcases of Hard Drives Abroad - Okay I don‘t want to make light of skirting sanctions and everything, but I can just imagine this as a chinese version of silicon valley, so much hilarity possible. wsj.com #

Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper – and why they fall short - Turns out AI and LLMs are rubbish again. garymarcus.substack.com #

Dev Containers extension incompatibility with Void - Void looks like one of the quite promising vibe coding IDEs. It‘s based on VScode, so devcontainers should work, and unlike Cursor it‘s open source. But looks like there is currently a bug with their devcontainers feature. github.com #

NostrHub: NIPs, Apps, and Repos on Nostr - Looks like a good place to start if developing apps running on Nostr. soapbox.pub #

New Post: When reality is no longer reality markjgsmith.com #

Pulp Later With Jools Holland 1st June 2025 - It‘s odd seing Jarvis Cocker again after all these years. He looks good but I got a sense he‘s been through the wringer. I hope he‘s alright and wish him the best with the new album, though I don‘t think I will be dancing to his songs in quite as many discos as in the year 2000. I hope he gets his mojo back. youtube.com #

Society may have overestimated risk of the ‘manosphere’, UK researchers say - There is a lot more nuance and variety to the manosphere than what they say in the main stream media, so it‘s nice to read this article. theguardian.com #

Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war - Not entirely sure what to make of this Adam Curtis documentary. Some of it seems to strike a chord, yet other parts of it I felt like, what is he on about. Anyhow, he tends to make interesting stuff that people like, so might be worth watching. theguardian.com #

They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. - Sometimes it feels like the stuff I type gets fed directory into an AI that generates the entire online publishing industry. This caught my attention because of the title on Techmeme - "Some users say ChatGPT led them into conspiratorial thinking, and when confronted, it confessed to manipulation and told them to alert OpenAI and the media" - Seems to be about reality not being reality anymore and I literally just wrote a blog post about that 5 minutes ago, so I‘m going to skip this one, but might be a good read? Who knows. nytimes.com #

Gemini is pretty hot a bash scripts - Really fucking great at bash scripts, but still a bit random when it comes to the prompt box where it understands enter, then doesn't understand it. I didn‘t know about the BASH_REMATCH variable, very useful. gemini.google.com #

Understanding The $BASH_REMATCH In Bash - Very useful for doing those annoying string manipulations that are easier in perl and python, but actually why not just use bash. medium.com #

DevContainer with host Git credentials - Works pretty well but you probably should also think about adding some mount options and what other things from ssh folder you will need. marcandreuf.com #

Start a linkblog - Some reasons to start a linkblog. It‘s probably the best time ever to start a linkblog. markjgsmith.com #

The Gentle Singularity - Everyone‘s been linking to this article. I haven‘t read it because AI made it too difficult. blog.samaltman.com #

Michael Saylor: The Bear Market Is Not Coming Back And Bitcoin Is Going To $1 Million - He looks weird in this rather bullish article’s photo. bitcoinmagazine.com #

Hedge funds are replacing a programming language with Rust, but it's not C++ - Spoiler it’s C#. I guess when the high frequency traders start switching maybe that‘s a big sign? efinancialcareers.com #

Disney, NBCU sue Midjourney over copyright infringement - What even is copyright these days anyway? axios.com #

Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash - I bet the summaries where full of random bold text and always started by saying that‘s a great question that highlights a very well known thing with said topic, and somehow tries to get the upper hand in a weird passive aggressive way while being 100% at your service. 404media.co #

New Post: LLMs are the collective becoming the absolute individual markjgsmith.com #

Louis C.K Live Comedy Special : Christians - The algorithm automatically suggested this to me a couple of days ago. The internet is really strange sometimes. I‘m just waiting for the next bit where we are floating calmly down the river again. youtube.com #

Britain a Nation of Immigrants? - Konstantin Kisin - Landed in my pod catcher this mornung, tries to lay out the facts and numbers of immigration in britain from the Norman conquests to the present day. Some very useful non partisan info. Side note, looks like I'm getting synchronicity bombed again, the norman conquests are trending for me. podcastindex.org #

I really hate to say it, but I agree with JD Vance. Britain has a free speech problem - Guardian journalist Arwa Mahdawi finds herself agreeing with the right on free speech issues. Sounds kind of healthy. Yeah it is disorientating. theguardian.com #

OpenAI releases o3-pro, a souped-up version of its o3 AI reasoning model - The pricing is interesting, with inputs costing 1/4 of what outputs cost. Not sure I've seen this before. Fans of Postel's law will probably be into this. techcrunch.com #

Apple’s Spotlight upgrades look like a power-user dream - I guess this means Alfred just got sherlocked? I've been an Alfred user for years. It’s long since been elevated to muscle memory. My unconscious mind already assumes it’s part of the OS. I didn’t know Spotlight did app launching and search, let alone all this new functionality. theverge.com #

Apple announces macOS Tahoe 26 with new design and revamped search features - Since I’m a Mac laptop user again I’m pretty interested in these annoucements, and I like the direction a lot, but I have some major reservations. theverge.com #

New Post: My reservations with MacOS Tahoe 26 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: A last mile solution for Bitcoin markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The collective, the individual and the history of England markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Freedom, control and societal stuctures markjgsmith.com #

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s allies urge reconciliation after damaging split - This story definitely seems to have balooned into something pretty crazy. ft.com #

Glastonbury: Who are Patchwork and the festivals other secret stars? - Still the best music festival out there. They’re really getting in on this mystery guest thing. When I was going to it, back around the millenium, I only remember them doing that sort of thing for the smaller stages and bands. The headliners were always announced well ahead of the festival. bbc.com #

Hajj in Mecca: The decades-old intrigue around an Indian guest house - It’s like the muslim Glasto. It’s got to be one of the most insane pilgrimages on planet earth. bbc.com #

Joe Rogan Experience #2334 - Kash Patel - Completely wild to hear the director of the FBI in a long form interview. He’s very impressive. Every now and then he reminded me of Zelenskyy for some reason. I thought it was interesting that Rogan kept asking him why he thought the Dems had left the border open for so long, and seemingly willfully done what they did. He was smart enough not to answer. There's a scarily deep asymptote somewhere around here. youtube.com #

WordPress veterans launch FAIR project to tackle security and control concerns - One of the weird things that happened to me yesterday, one of many because it was yet another cascade day, was some random bloke walking past me and saying very intensionally "Fair" in my direction. No doubt completely unrelated to anything, yet what are the chances? In any case, big news and interesting news in the Wordpress comunity, which in one way or another powers like 40% or 50% of the open web. fastcompany.com #

Five works that reveal the philosophy of Banksy - Plot twist: Banksy is some sort of despotic dictator collective. Fuck not again. bbc.com #

New Post: The Core Contradiction markjgsmith.com #

Rik Mayall on the Wogan Show 1984 Full Standup/Interview - Watched this yesterday, not sure I ever saw Rik not in character. I was a bit taken aback by, I’m not sure how to phrase it, the frequency he operates at. It’s like he spends most of his time waiting for people to finish, and then when he goes, he just streams with complete clarity at the speed of light almost, yet he really listens to what people are saying too. youtube.com #

This is the tightest comedy dialogue ever - A look at director Edgar Wright’s very unique style and how he constructs near perfect scripts. There’s something very programmatic about it. It reminds me of very well written code, where everything is clear, efficient, all resources are well managed and cleaned up as the program executes. youtube.com #

Baby otters sure are cute - I don’t often get suckered by cute baby animal videos, but gosh darn it, baby otters are the cuttest. Stop being so darn cute. Stupid otters. youtube.com #

Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man - Week 4 Highlights - I think about Izzard’s insane marathon of marathons a lot. I had only read about it before, never watched the videos, I didn’t realise it was a Nelson Mandela tribute. That’s pretty awesome. Life is a marathon of marathons for a lot of people and it manifests in the strangest of ways. youtube.com #

Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll - A bit of a pile on following Chamath proclaiming that DPI is the only thing that matters. I’m just fascinated to hear all these VCs go at each other brandishing KPIs like their lives depend on them, which I suppose they kind of do. There’s a load of interesting stuff in here even if I didn’t understand all of it. It’s a bit like if the coolest accountants in the world were in charge of everything. Which perhaps is what the problem is. thetwentyminutevc.com #

New Post: Bitcoin is the new hurdle rate markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Dev Containers in VSCode markjgsmith.com #

How to Not Get Hacked by a QR Code - I’ve been going on about how great QR codes are recently, but it occurred to me that these could be hacked. Of course an attacker could quite easily encode a url pointing to a sketchy website full of malware. Obvious really but worth repeating since people aren’t completely used to using them yet. Be aware of where the QR code might have been generated. Check the url doesn’t look weird. Same rules basically as clicking on links in your emails. wired.com #

Void IDE: The Comprehensive Guide to the Open-Source Cursor Alternative - I had heard of this a couple of weeks back I think. Might be worth considering since Cursor appears to be closed source. I haven’t tried it yet. medium.com #

The Hidden Dangers of Vibe Coding - Tons of security stuff, all about the vulnerabilities in the apps you are creating though. dev.to #

A Cat And Mouse Game: Addressing Vibe Coding’s Security Challenges - More stuff that focusses only on the vibe coded apps. forbes.com #

20 security best practices for vibe coding - Another one that totally forgets to secure the dev environment, straight into a comprehensive description of all the ways vibe coded apps are full of vulnerabilities. appwrite.io #

Vibe Coding is a Dangerous Fantasy - This one is a real horror story. The guy was sharing his vibe coding journey, and people started hacking his app as he was coding it. Oh noes! Still noone even thinking that there might be issues with the development environment and tools. nmn.gl #

Beware, AI Coding Can Be a Security Nightmare - This was the only article I found that even considered the tools themselves to be a possible attack vector, and he doesn't really go into it much. I only posted a few examples here. The ratio is like 100:1. It's very bizare. analyticsindiamag.com #

Developers Beware! AI Coding Tools May Aid Hackers - For a second I thought I had found something that identifies the tools as an attack vector, and in a way they are saying that, but once again they focus on vulnerabilities that get introduced into the vibe coded app. analyticsindiamag.com #

New Post: Vibe Coding: A Threat to Your Dev Machine? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: My writing style markjgsmith.com #

New Post: An exploration of strategic planning with AI markjgsmith.com #

Starship update with Elon Musk 2025 - The biggest vehicle humanity has ever made, they are planning to be building one of these every 3 days. That's 1000 a year. Same number of planes that Boing makes every year. Eventually transporting millions of people between Earth and Mars. Starting end of this year. youtu.be #

The great american diner - There's something that I find quite fascinating about diners. From a stylistic and design perspective, they somehow embody a whole ambience, and time period, and ethos, even a culture. It's the same part of me that likes websites. I wonder how many other such templates exist from other cultures in other parts of the world. en.m.wikipedia.org #

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts - Another point of view in the we-love-AI we-love-AI-not period we find ourself in. Quite firey, I liked this one quite a lot. fly.io #

Defence review to say UK must be ready to fight a war in Europe or Atlantic - War readiness appears to be the big topic at the minute. Both the US and UK apparently only have several days worth of amunition. In the US some politicians are advising people to stockpile bullets. The UK can only deliver nuclear weapons via submarine. Most other EU countries have US nuclear weapons in bunkers. theguardian.com #

The 3 Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen - The web has come such a long way over the past 3 decades. I remember how sites were in around 1995, they were kind of unique! Nice article that takes 3 different views into this world of websites of times gone by. Worth noting that none of the people mentioned, though legends in their own way, seem to have made it really big. Building for the web often appears to be a labour of love. cybercultural.com #

Bitcoin Breaks A Guinness World Record With 4,000+ POS Payments - Being able to pay using tap to pay and QR Codes is already possible in some european countries, and it's pretty cool. It just works. But it’s not using freedom tech, it's built using proprietary tech owned by the big banks. IMO, if Bitcoin tech could be used the same way, it would be pretty huge. There would be no reason for vendors not to support it. Great idea to keep pushing this at major Bitcoin conferences. forbes.com #

5 features that make NixOS the best Linux distro I have used - Lays out some of the key features. Sounds really awesome. I want to try it. xda-developers.com #

The Recurring Cycle of 'Developer Replacement' Hype - Looks at several tech waves from the past couple of decades, highlighting what the naysayers were saying at the time. Ends by saying it's all about architecting systems, which AIs can't do. One has to wonder though, won't that eventually also get eaten? Good read. alonso.network #

Dialog is for modals, popover is for everything else - Great article highlighting all the stuff you get for free when using these elements correctly, though I was itching for a few satisfying examples to click on. mayank.co #

New Post: HTML Examples Almanac markjgsmith.com #

After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain - Alberto Fortin describes pretty much exactly my experience with LLMs so far, except he’s gotten in much deeper. There are so many great quotes in this article. Really great read. albertofortin.com #

MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 - Anil Dash makes some comparisons between open protocols from the web 2.0 era and some of those emerging in the current age of AI. anildash.com #

Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software - "The way of code is a book about vibe coding ... the timeless art of vibe coding" - Surely this is proof we are in a bubble. Then again Rick is very convincing. youtube.com #

New Post: Why AI won’t destroy jobs markjgsmith.com #

Automattic says it will start contributing to WordPress again after pause - I hadn't heard much about this story in recent months. Seems like progress. It would be interesting to hear more about the mentioned “regroup, rethink and strategic plan”. techcrunch.com #

Google quietly released an app that lets you download and run AI models locally - Pretty cool that you can now do this on your phone. techcrunch.com #

Introducing oniux: Kernel-level Tor isolation for any Linux app - Tor is very popular in crypto and bitcoin circles for privacy reasons, but I found this interesting because the ability to more easily control the environment in which your applications are running is much more important in a more adversarial world. Turns out these technologies have been around for some years, baked into the OS. I think controlling access to networking, storage, and other computing resources on a per app basis will be more common. blog.torproject.org #

“Raindrops in the Sun’s Corona”: New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of our Star’s Atmosphere - NSO - National Solar Observatory - I thought these videos of the sun's surface were incredible. There's an eerie intentionality to how things move which I guess is caused by the enormous gravitational and magnetic forces. nso.edu #

The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine - Seems like somewhat of a backlash against all the AI doom is brewing. cnn.com #

New Post: Start a linkblog markjgsmith.com #

Rate 'rigging' traders say they were scapegoated - now the Supreme Court will decide - Noteworthy because the move from Libor to Sofr as the index which helps to set interest rates has been heralded as a moment of liberation for the US, since Libor was set by London banks. Turns out it was being manipulated, not just by these traders, but also by central bankers and governments worldwide, at even bigger magnitudes. bbc.com #

The Best Breakdown of America You've Never Heard - Richard Miniter - Very interesting history about the 4 main groups of people that migrated originally from Britain. They each had very distinct philosophies and politics, and they setup in different places in the US. podcastindex.org #

Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt - Simon Willison very often has some interesting things to say aboug LLMs and his experiences with them. This post gets into the system prompts, they are a sort of unnoficial manual. simonwillison.net #

Elon Musk Just Showed Off The Most Humanlike Robot Ever - They are scheduled to manufacture 5000 robots by end of year, and 50000 planned for the following year. Says it will be the fastest growing product of all time by a factor of 10. Even if he is half wrong in his prediction, has the potential to really change what the world looks like kind of quickly. The figure 100 million units per year is mentioned, which is totally bonkers. We are entering the age of sustainable abundance, which sounds very nice. youtu.be #

GitHub - CajuM/jobhunt: Job Hunting Scripts - There sure are a lot of slightly dark synchronicities in this life. Anyways, job scripts could be useful, we should share more of these. github.com #

Sam and Jony and skepticism - I'm sort of enjoying reading and hearing the mixed reactions to their quite unique announcement. sixcolors.com #

Bond crisis looming? GOP abandons DOGE, Google disrupts Search with AI, OpenAI buys Jony Ive's IO (All-In Podcast) - Some great Ives and Altman takes. Rest of the show is worth listening too also. podcastindex.org #

Announcing a new IDE for PostgreSQL in VS Code from Microsoft - Vergecast Microsoft native advertising compaign much? Still it does look like a pretty darn cool postgres IDE. techcommunity.microsoft.com #

Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder (All-In Podcast) - In this interview from "All-In live from Miami", a lot of interesting discussions about Sergey's return to work at Google, and where he sees the AI boom going, and how he thinks it could impact every day lives. The thing with technical co-founders is they don't really do it just for the monday, they are all computer science enthusiast nerds, even the most successfuly ones. podcastindex.org #

I was first in line to try Google's Android XR glasses and came away impressed - Looks like the new generation of these AR glasses do actually have a screen projected into the inside of the glass. The Meta glasses don't have this yet. Really want to try these. I'm wearing reading glasses these days, so why not have some unintrusive headsup type display. Could be very cool. androidcentral.com #

25.05 Reasons to NixOS Ep#615 (Linux Unplugged Podcast) - Great episode all about Nix. Particulrly interesting to hear about it can be used to create Asahi Linux build environments. Giving me lots of ideas about how I could use the new laptop. Plus the usual assortment of cool linux based tools to pimp your setup and workflows. linuxunplugged.com #

Bitcoin jumps to new all-time high, surpassing prior record in January - It got all the way up to $111k, which is massive considering when the Trump tarrifs hit it went all the way down to $76k. cnbc.com #

Sam & Jony introduce io - It's a bit of an odd promo, like they are trying to be authentic and naturally awkward, crossed with silicon valley, crossed with gastro pubs. Yet it's kind of interesting. Are they talking to each other or the film crew? Or is this just what happens when you ChatGPT all day long? :) Looking forward to see what reality enhancement products they are working on. openai.com #

Jimmy Carr Ep#2045 (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - I watched this a few days ago, enjoyed it more than I thought I would. There's something slightly odd about Jimmy Carr, not sure what it is exactly, and I find myself slightly mesmerized trying to figure out what it is, and I never do quite, but anyway in the end he's very smart and he's got some very interesting ideas about where the comedy scene is at and where it might be heading. And him and Joe get on even if it's a bit awkward at times. Worth watching. youtu.be #

Initialization in C++ is bonkers - I scanned through this and though I didn't fully grok it, it's been 20 years since I wrote any C++, I felt like I would need this article should I everneed to get back into it. Also I feel like it's normally X in Javascript is bonkers, so it's nice to get a break. We love you C++ programmers :) blog.tartanllama.xyz #

New Post: 5 Dimensional Beings markjgsmith.com #

Physicist explains 4 dimensions of spacetime - Janna Levin and Lex Fridman - Watched this the other day. youtu.be #

World's first CPU-level ransomware - Sounds kinda bad. "Bypasses every freaking traditional technology we have out there". Basically can modiy the CPU microcode and is directly in the bios so everything is encrypted before any OS software even loads. tomshardware.com #

New Zealand MPs who performed haka in parliament given unprecedented punishment - Maybe NZ isn't the escape strategy some tech bilionaires had hoped for? Worth watching the video. Definitely a sign there are some very deep disagrements happening. I would have thought this was a step along a road to a rise in militant groups. theguardian.com #

UK economy defies gloomy warnings to grow 0.7% in first quarter of year - Nice to see something positive about the economy. theguardian.com #

Meta wants your smile, squats, and small talk — and it's paying $50 an hour to scan them for its next-gen VR avatars - I'm interested in trying these glasses though I'm not sure I like their goal of enabling social presence "indistinguishable from reality". businessinsider.com #

Trump meets interim Syrian president as Damascus celebrates lifting of sanctions - This visit really seems to be a big deal. bbc.com #

Trump's Gulf Billions: Saudi, Sanctions, and Ceasefires (Rest is Politics Podcast) - Lots of interesting background information about the situation in the Middle East. podcastindex.org #

Lumier - macOS and Linux virtual machines in a Docker container - Could be quite useful especially for developers doing testing. Docker is just an interface, underneath it's using Apple Virtualization Framework (Apple Vz). github.com #

git-bug: a decentralized issue tracker - It looks like everything is stored in your .git folder. "Manage issues, users, and comments directly within your repository - keeping everything versioned and clutter-free". And this was also interesting imo "work offline and sync seamlessly later". github.com #

White House partially cuts tariff on cheap goods - It's good to see some progress is being made. It will certainly be interesting to see how these tariffs affect american businesses long term. Also the supply shocks over the coming months are going to be considerable with everyone loading up on cheap products. axios.com #

Apple unveils iOS 19 accessibility features: Magnifier for Mac, App Store labels, more - Interesting to see this new accessibility direction that Apple is taking. The braille features are pretty intersting. 9to5mac.com #

President Donald J. Trump Secures Historic $600 Billion Investment Commitment in Saudi Arabia - The tech scene in the region has been growing rapidly in recent years. Interesting to see big military investment too. Over half a trillion dollars. whitehouse.gov #

Add Sound Effects to Your React Apps Effortlessly - I feel like maybe there should be a movement to add a special secret mode to most web apps that enables sound effects. The sound library is a lot cooler than I thought it would be, at least with headphones. reactsounds.com #

New Post: Hey Netlify, are you okay? markjgsmith.com #

Harold Sonny White Ep#2318 (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - I haven't completely finished watching yet but, if you are at all interested in interstellar travel, you need to watch this. There is one of THE coolest videos of how a warp drive could work. It occurred to me while watching this that what is likely to occur first is that AI becomes a warp drive for thinking, FASTER. youtube.com #

Void: Open-source Cursor alternative - Early days by the sounds of the associated HN discussion thread, but it's interesting to see open source versions of Cursor appearing. Cool project name. github.com #

10 useful VS Code shortcuts you should know - A lot of these are definitely super useful. dev.to #

Trump and Starmer confirm ‘breakthrough’ US-UK trade deal - Many of the articles I read earlier about this were really negative, whereas the tone appears to have shifted somewhat, even though they are still kind of negative. theguardian.com #

Cars, steel, beef and films: the key points of the US-UK trade deal - That's actually the strongest 4 words summary of Britain I've read in quite a while. theguardian.com #

Trump hails trade deal with ‘oldest ally’ UK – but what about the details? - The retoric as channeled by the MSM definitely has softenned in just a few hours. theguardian.com #

Robert Prevost becomes first American pope and will be known as Pope Leo XIV - Pope Louis the 14th! Sacre bleu. Joking aside, I didn't realise Leo's were so popular in the church. My first thoughts were that he looks much younger than recent popes. bbc.com #

Cisco says its new entanglement chip could speed up practical quantum computing timeline by a decade - I'm not an expert at quantum computing but it seems significant that the chip "generates up to one million entangled photon pairs per second, and does so at room temperature". My impression was that so far the most advanced tech in the industry was only able to create in the order of 1000 simultaneous entangled pairs, and that was at crazy cold temperatures. fastcompany.com #

As an Experienced LLM User, I Actually Don't Use Generative LLMs Often - It's interesting to learn how the LLM pros are using this new tech. There is a lot of tricks and nuance. You really have to have a good idea which type of problems are a good fit. minimaxir.com #

Maker of AI ‘vibe coding’ app Cursor hits bn valuation - I keep hearing about and seing the Cursor editor in all things related to AI developer tools and vibe coding. Haven't tried it myself yet. ft.com #

I built an AI code review agent in a few hours, here's what I learned - Interesting to hear from devs actually building developer tools that use AI. Many of the things the author describes I have seen variations of too. sourcebot.dev #

The AI wearables are always listening (Vergecast Podcast) - With the previous link in mind, this episode of Vergecast seems particularly relevant. Both journalists recount somewhat hilarious situations their wearables ran into. As David Pierce describes, and I am paraphrasing, the bar to be human is very high. There are just so many crazy complicated situations that we are immersed in daily. podcastindex.org #

New Post: This is some example link text markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Long overdue site redesign markjgsmith.com #

Amazon takes on Musk’s Starlink with launch of first internet satellites - It's awesome that there is finally some competition for SpaceX in the space internet arena. theguardian.com #

New Post: When X Web Services? markjgsmith.com #

Meta’s ChatGPT competitor shows how your friends use AI - I know that the few times I have used AI to do something bordering on serious, the first thing I wanted to do was blog about it, so this seems kind of obvious to me. theverge.com #

Here’s more of what you’ll see through Meta’s $1000 smart glasses - For ages I've been trying to understand how the UI in the Raybans works, whether there is a screen projected onto the lenses. After reading this article it seems the answer is no there isn't a display in the current version, but they are working on a considerably more expensive version that will have such a thing. theverge.com #

New Post: Concerns about AI "vibe working" markjgsmith.com #

Don't make Google sell Chrome - DHH gives his take on the whole Google anti-trust thing as far as it relates to Google Chrome. He knows a thing or two about the open web. world.hey.com #

Electricity restored to 90% of Spain and most of Portugal after massive power outage - Heck of an unusual thing to happen. How does an entire country, and it's neighbour country have an electricity blackout? What is going on with that? theguardian.com #

The EU can’t replace the US as a global player until it sheds its own colonial thinking - I think Shada Islam makes some pretty good points here. I'm interested to learn more about this european colonial thinking. The UK always gets pointed at as being the old big bad colonial power, but surely Europe has some things to address in this domain too. theguardian.com #

Vince Lanci and the Trump Powell Accord Ep#215 (Goats, Gold 'n Guns Podcast) - What I linke about Tom Luongo's podcast is that though him and his guests to peddle in kind of wild conspiracies, they do at least base them on the latest financial markets data. The transition away from LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, definitely appears to be causing some big shifts in markets and perhaps exposing very old power structures. podcastindex.org #

Alternative Browsers, Discord vs Circle, and AI in the Browser Ep#662 (Shop Talk Podcast) - Some great developer discussions around the Google Chrome anti-trust situation, and also some interesting ideas about how AI could be used to create some cool new features in browsers. shoptalkshow.com #

Mozilla’s CEO weighs in on U.S. v. Google - He doesn't say this explicitly but it sure sounds like 'hey lawyer folks if you fuck this up then you will completely fuck the open web, as in game over, and a lot of us think you aren't heading in the right direction'. blog.mozilla.org #

Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining - It's really surreal the types of development that is now possible using LLMs. Simon Willison describes it as being inside an episode of CSI. It's weird that the logs that he's reading as he is developing are the models "thinking trace". simonwillison.net #

How to ceneter things in markdown - Several ways to do this, very useful for images. he cool thing about markdown is that you can just use HTML tags, so surrounding an image in a div with inline CSS work fine. markdown.land #

Meghan made one-pot pasta a trend – but is it any good? Seven all-in-one recipes tested - I like the idea of cooking everyhting in one pot, less things to washup afterwards, and actually these dishes look a lot nicer than I thought they would. Might try making something inspired by these. theguardian.com #

Apple ‘aims to source all US iPhones from India’, reducing reliance on China - The tectonic plates of the world economy appear to be on the move. That's quite a bit move. Somewhat unrelatedly I heard today on a podcast that India gets a massive amount of it's oil from Russia. theguardian.com #

Class act: can Harrow sell an elitist British boarding school fantasy to New Yorkers? - The famous London based school apparently now has schools in Thailand, India and now New York. First I have heard of it. I'd be interested in hearing the accents the pupils end up with. theguardian.com #

New Post: Vibe job hunting markjgsmith.com #

Threads officially moves to Threads.com and updates its web app - On reading this, the sysadmin in me immediately wondered how much effort this change was for their engineering team. It's small changes like this that can cause huge headaches sometimes. I also wondered the same thing when twitter.com moved to x.com. Would be nice to read a piece from their engineering teams about this, perhaps they have some best practices they can share techcrunch.com #

Apple to Strip Secret Robotics Unit From AI Chief Weeks After Moving Siri - Interesting to see how the big tech companies are organising their robotics efforts. Their team is being moved to the hardware engineering unit bloomberg.com #

New Post: Vibe coding markjgsmith.com #

Meta rolls out live translations to all Ray-Ban smart glasses users - These glasses might turn out to be the underground success from last year. Really curious how the live translation is in practice, and generally how AI is to use as an interface. Maybe we don't need a keyboard for most everyday things. theverge.com #

Microsoft: Human, AI agent ratios will be critical to success as new roles emerge - Not to sound too negative nelly but sure sounds like the term 'Frontier Firms' is the latest buzzword. constellationr.com #

How to Copy, Cut and Paste in Vim / Vi - Seems really difficult until you memorize the key strokes, then it's incredibly fast. I'm still trying to memorize some of the more obscure keystrokes. linuxize.com #

Canada election is Carney’s to lose in contest turned on its head by Trump - Trump's recent activity has massively swung voters towards Carney and his Liberal party, away from the Conservatives that had been in the lead for a couple of years. theguardian.com #

Shot from the hip! A street level view of 1970s New York – in pictures - Photography is so awesome at preserving an entire culture, scene, ambiance and even time period. theguardian.com #

New Post: Start with aliases and scripts markjgsmith.com #

Stock markets rise as Trump says he will reduce tariffs on China ‘substantially’ - Nice to see something positive happening. It's kind of crazy to see realtime how much impact a few small comments can make across the entire world economy theguardian.com #

Cantor nears $3bn crypto venture with SoftBank and Tether - I think it's interesting that it includes the largest stablecoin issuer Tether, and that they are using SPACs. A lot of people are going to be watching to see what twist they add as they try to replicate the MicroStrategy playbook ft.com #

4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere - Can't say I really knew the site much more than just hearing people always talking about how aweful it was. Interesting that because of how the site worked, there won't really be a trace of how it used to be. wired.com #

Scientists hail ‘strongest evidence’ so far for life beyond our solar system - Hello aliens! theguardian.com #

Homebrew - The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux) brew.sh #

iTerm2 - iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm iterm2.com #

nvchad - Blazing fast Neovim config providing solid defaults and a beautiful UI nvchad.com #

Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ - It would be cool to hear more about this world without IP law that they envisage. His comments about the current system limiting creativity by payment gatekeepers is interesting. techcrunch.com #

YYYY-MM-DD format date in shell script - This date format is the most useful imho because files list alphabetically and so listing a directory gets you all the files in the order they were created. I've been using it for years. It's really popular with sys admins. Anyway I never knew there was a -I flag and had to google the date command syntax each time I was creating files in a script. Really usefful. stackoverflow.com #

AI-hallucinated code dependencies become new supply chain risk - This world where halluciations are being used as a feature isn't always a good thing. On the other hand I image they can lead to some interesting things creatively. bleepingcomputer.com #

Trump warns exemptions on smartphones, electronics will be short-lived, promises future tariffs - Important to be aware of how the tariffs are affecting tech. Really interested to see how the situation resolves as both China and the US try to paint each other as the bad guy, then act like the victim, then mysteriously revert to behaving like Godzilla again. theguardian.com #

New Post: Memory, maps and humour markjgsmith.com #

UK takes control of British Steel under emergency powers - A long long time ago I went on a university trip to British Steel, in I think it was Sheffield. It was really quite impressive seing the molten steel being turned into huge bus sized steel bars. But I didn't want to work there. bbc.com #

Fintech founder charged with fraud after ‘AI’ shopping app found to be powered by humans in the Philippines - It's so bizare that AI, which is supposedly taking people's jobs, in some cases is having it's lunch eaten by humans. I bet they use AI to figure out the best way to create their fakes. techcrunch.com #

Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries, hits China harder with 125% - This 90 day number sure is interestin cnbc.com #

Google to embrace Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data - Good to see that companies are using the same protocols rather than re-inventing the wheel each time. So far companies including Block, Apollo, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph are on board. techcrunch.com #

@francescociula4 does a pretty good job at describing the MCP protocol. He sites companies such as OpenAI, Google, and GitHub as developing their own MPC implementation. The VFX sysadmin in me is having a tough time not seeing "The Moving Picture Company" in that acronym. x.com #

New Post: Pysh and Lavish on China vs Trump markjgsmith.com #

Tariffs on China set to rise to at least 104% on Wednesday, White House says - That escallated quickly. 2025 the year of Desktop Linux? edition.cnn.com #

Removing a newline character at the end of a file - Fixing yet another bug that showed up because of the move from iOS to Android stackoverflow.com #

Tariff Panic And Recession Fears — Raoul Pal & Julien Bittel - Much like my little AI adventure earlier, others are using ChatGPT AIs to discover market trends. Sounds like they are doing some next level kind of stuff. podcastindex.org #

How to insert the result of a command into the text in vim? - Really useful for editing markdown files, for example generating and inserting uuids or dates. unix.stackexchange.com #

Rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia - Rsync is such an important tool in sysadmin, really interesting open source license story. derflounder.wordpress.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Back in the Europe (Issue #199) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Tue 14th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

Shallow clones versus structured clones - Definitely useful to know the details of this, I had sonething very similar happening to me a while back and it took quite a long time to figute out and resolve. philna.sh #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Mon 13th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress contributor accounts over alleged fork plans - It’s very strange that Matt Mullenweg’s approach was repeatedly and widely described as 'scorched earth' in the press end of last year, and now the case resurfaces at the same exsct time as the uterly mind boggling LA wildfires. I wonder what odds you would have gotten on polymarket for predicting those two events happening. What is up with that? Kinda strange. techcrunch.com #

Yoast’s former CEO calls for a ‘federated’ approach to WordPress repository - Interesting article that was linked to from the previous techcrunch piece. techcrunch.com #

New Post: Something is very wrong with open source markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Sun 12th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

A Rare Alignment of 7 Planets Is About to Take Place in The Sky - It should be happening the evening of 28 February 2025. Alignment of 7 planets is apparently a very rate occurance. sciencealert.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Sat 11th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Maybe the end of Season 2? (Issue #198) markjgsmith.com #

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pushed Meta ‘super hard’ to take down vaccine content - I’m listening to the Zuck - Rogan intervew as I write this, it’s pretty good. Zuck sounds more normal and relaxed than I remember him being. The bit about him looking like a fucking idiot on TV when he was younger was very funny. Yeah it’s a softball interview, but he’s had quite a few hardcore ones the past few years. cnbc.com #

Twin-headed Trump-Musk onslaught leaves Europe floundering for response - Things are definitely getting interesting. I like that Starmer responded, but it had a bit of a David Brent vibe to it. Not Starmer’s speech, but the whole event at an NHS event was a bit cringe. I just feel like we could do a lot better. Europe could do a lot better. At the minute Europe is both innefective and unfunny. Really needs to find it’s political personality. theguardian.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Fri 10th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Elon vs the UK markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Why right leaning folks should listen to the Rest is Politics markjgsmith.com #

Emmanuel Macron joins growing criticism of Elon Musk in Europe - Quite a pot stir. Seems like everyone who is anyone has something to say now. Imagine if we had so much unity in peacefully working together. theguardian.com #

New Post: Pressure cooker world markjgsmith.com #

Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits - "1 petaflop of AI performance, 200 billion parameters, 2 systems can be linked together to handle models with up to 405 billion parameters" - Sounds pretty cool, a top end workstation. Also sounds a lot like NVidia is eyeing up Apple’s lunch, and looks like they are about to go out to an S&M party. It would be kind of funny if all Nvidia employees wore Jensen Huang leather jackets to the office. He is so trying to be bad ass Steve Jobs. theverge.com #

Belgium issues food advisory against consuming Christmas trees - One memory I have of belgian Christmas’ was that for a number of years the big tree in Brussels’ main square had the usual christmas tree ornaments but additionally had several life size plastic sheep and cows, containing lit up neon bulbs of various colors, that were jammed in between the branches. I had no idea this little tradition had escallated and morphed to the point where people were eating the trees. They are quite surrealist in Belgium. I think it’s mostly well meaning even if it’s sometimes a bit risqé. theguardian.com #

New Post: Git complains about a non-existent branch while npm installing markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Physics is so weird markjgsmith.com #

New Post: What has happened with the FED, money printing and debt creation? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the importance of digital communication markjgsmith.com #

Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration - I imagine british people will be agast at this whip around from tech billionaires. I have no idea if this is a normal thing in US politics. The whole 'unity' vibe is an interesting way to dress it up. What are they going to spend the money on? One metric to watch out for during the next 4 years is how diversified the stock market is by the end of it. At the minute it’s very heavily weighed towards the mag 7, which is quite risky. axios.com #

comfyanonymous/ComfyUI - "The most powerful and modular diffusion model GUI, api and backend with a graph/nodes interface". This appears to be quite popular in the AI / LLM space. It’s interesting that no code node based graph UIs are being used. It hadn’t occurred to me, but it makes complete sense. github.com #

The Great American Tradition - John Gruber wonders about the whole tech billionaires inaugural donations whip around thing. Quite possibly a new tradition. daringfireball.net #

The Intricacy of ASML’s Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machines - The precision of these machines which are behind all the chips manufactured around the world these days is kind if unfathomable. daringfireball.net #

Simon Willisons’s Approach to Running a Link Blog - I’ve been thinking for ages to add a 'via' field to my linkblog posts frontmatter. I do try to mention author names. I read both John and Simon’s writing so it’s interesting to hear how they think about it. daringfireball.net #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Blocked (Issue #197) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Starmer first podcasting prime minister? markjgsmith.com #

Trolling the UK: the issues enraging Elon Musk, world’s richest ‘pub bore’ - Oh stop complaining, start a podcast. Real leaders that people love, blog and podcast awkwardly and imperfectly. They iterate. They get better in public. theguardian.com #

New Post: Be the change you want to see in the world markjgsmith.com #

Meta will appoint Republican Joel Kaplan to lead global policy team, replacing Nick Clegg - Sad to hear we will no longer have a brit over there. But times change. It was kind of cool that Zuck hired Clegg when he did IMO, and kudos to Clegg for trying something well outside of the orthodoxy. I wonder what Clegg will do next with all this tech industry experience under his belt. semafor.com #

Scandinavians came to Britain long before Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, finds study - The lead researcher’s last name, Skoglund,
and especially his penchant for pickled hearing, suggests maybe some impartiality issues? Interesting research nonetheless, especially the reverse migration they seem to have uncovered. theguardian.com #

Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South - It would be funny if it turned out to be an elaborate psyop to save the dying print media industry. 404media.co #

The Biggest Challenges Create The Biggest Opportunities - Mike Masnick’s yearly optimistic take on the state of everything, focusing on social media. techdirt.com #

New Post: Better debug logging markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Elon Musk’s $200 million Reform markjgsmith.com #