markjgsmith

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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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". www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.bbc.com #

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

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

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

New Post: Start a linkblog markjgsmith.com #