markjgsmith

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 #

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