markjgsmith

Thursday, June 19, 2025

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 #

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 #

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

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 #

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 #

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 #

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

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 #

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Saturday, June 14, 2025

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 #

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 #

Thursday, June 12, 2025

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Sunday, June 8, 2025

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 #

Friday, June 6, 2025

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 #

Thursday, June 5, 2025

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 #

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

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 #

Tuesday, June 3, 2025

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 #

Monday, June 2, 2025

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 #

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 #

Sunday, June 1, 2025

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 #

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