markjgsmith

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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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. www.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 #