markjgsmith

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. www.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. www.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. www.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? www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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 www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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 www.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 www.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. www.wired.com #

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