markjgsmith

Shallow clones versus structured clones - Definitely useful to know the details of this, I had sonething very similar happening to me a while back and it took quite a long time to figute out and resolve. philna.sh #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Mon 13th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress contributor accounts over alleged fork plans - It’s very strange that Matt Mullenweg’s approach was repeatedly and widely described as 'scorched earth' in the press end of last year, and now the case resurfaces at the same exsct time as the uterly mind boggling LA wildfires. I wonder what odds you would have gotten on polymarket for predicting those two events happening. What is up with that? Kinda strange. techcrunch.com #

Yoast’s former CEO calls for a ‘federated’ approach to WordPress repository - Interesting article that was linked to from the previous techcrunch piece. techcrunch.com #

New Post: Something is very wrong with open source markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Sun 12th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

A Rare Alignment of 7 Planets Is About to Take Place in The Sky - It should be happening the evening of 28 February 2025. Alignment of 7 planets is apparently a very rate occurance. www.sciencealert.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Sat 11th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Maybe the end of Season 2? (Issue #198) markjgsmith.com #

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pushed Meta ‘super hard’ to take down vaccine content - I’m listening to the Zuck - Rogan intervew as I write this, it’s pretty good. Zuck sounds more normal and relaxed than I remember him being. The bit about him looking like a fucking idiot on TV when he was younger was very funny. Yeah it’s a softball interview, but he’s had quite a few hardcore ones the past few years. www.cnbc.com #

Twin-headed Trump-Musk onslaught leaves Europe floundering for response - Things are definitely getting interesting. I like that Starmer responded, but it had a bit of a David Brent vibe to it. Not Starmer’s speech, but the whole event at an NHS event was a bit cringe. I just feel like we could do a lot better. Europe could do a lot better. At the minute Europe is both innefective and unfunny. Really needs to find it’s political personality. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Captivity Notes: Fri 10th Jan 2025 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Elon vs the UK markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Why right leaning folks should listen to the Rest is Politics markjgsmith.com #

Emmanuel Macron joins growing criticism of Elon Musk in Europe - Quite a pot stir. Seems like everyone who is anyone has something to say now. Imagine if we had so much unity in peacefully working together. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Pressure cooker world markjgsmith.com #

Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits - "1 petaflop of AI performance, 200 billion parameters, 2 systems can be linked together to handle models with up to 405 billion parameters" - Sounds pretty cool, a top end workstation. Also sounds a lot like NVidia is eyeing up Apple’s lunch, and looks like they are about to go out to an S&M party. It would be kind of funny if all Nvidia employees wore Jensen Huang leather jackets to the office. He is so trying to be bad ass Steve Jobs. www.theverge.com #

Belgium issues food advisory against consuming Christmas trees - One memory I have of belgian Christmas’ was that for a number of years the big tree in Brussels’ main square had the usual christmas tree ornaments but additionally had several life size plastic sheep and cows, containing lit up neon bulbs of various colors, that were jammed in between the branches. I had no idea this little tradition had escallated and morphed to the point where people were eating the trees. They are quite surrealist in Belgium. I think it’s mostly well meaning even if it’s sometimes a bit risqé. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Git complains about a non-existent branch while npm installing markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Physics is so weird markjgsmith.com #

New Post: What has happened with the FED, money printing and debt creation? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the importance of digital communication markjgsmith.com #

Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration - I imagine british people will be agast at this whip around from tech billionaires. I have no idea if this is a normal thing in US politics. The whole 'unity' vibe is an interesting way to dress it up. What are they going to spend the money on? One metric to watch out for during the next 4 years is how diversified the stock market is by the end of it. At the minute it’s very heavily weighed towards the mag 7, which is quite risky. www.axios.com #

comfyanonymous/ComfyUI - "The most powerful and modular diffusion model GUI, api and backend with a graph/nodes interface". This appears to be quite popular in the AI / LLM space. It’s interesting that no code node based graph UIs are being used. It hadn’t occurred to me, but it makes complete sense. github.com #

The Great American Tradition - John Gruber wonders about the whole tech billionaires inaugural donations whip around thing. Quite possibly a new tradition. daringfireball.net #

The Intricacy of ASML’s Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machines - The precision of these machines which are behind all the chips manufactured around the world these days is kind if unfathomable. daringfireball.net #

Simon Willisons’s Approach to Running a Link Blog - I’ve been thinking for ages to add a 'via' field to my linkblog posts frontmatter. I do try to mention author names. I read both John and Simon’s writing so it’s interesting to hear how they think about it. daringfireball.net #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Blocked (Issue #197) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Starmer first podcasting prime minister? markjgsmith.com #

Trolling the UK: the issues enraging Elon Musk, world’s richest ‘pub bore’ - Oh stop complaining, start a podcast. Real leaders that people love, blog and podcast awkwardly and imperfectly. They iterate. They get better in public. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Be the change you want to see in the world markjgsmith.com #

Meta will appoint Republican Joel Kaplan to lead global policy team, replacing Nick Clegg - Sad to hear we will no longer have a brit over there. But times change. It was kind of cool that Zuck hired Clegg when he did IMO, and kudos to Clegg for trying something well outside of the orthodoxy. I wonder what Clegg will do next with all this tech industry experience under his belt. www.semafor.com #

Scandinavians came to Britain long before Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, finds study - The lead researcher’s last name, Skoglund,
and especially his penchant for pickled hearing, suggests maybe some impartiality issues? Interesting research nonetheless, especially the reverse migration they seem to have uncovered. www.theguardian.com #

Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South - It would be funny if it turned out to be an elaborate psyop to save the dying print media industry. www.404media.co #

The Biggest Challenges Create The Biggest Opportunities - Mike Masnick’s yearly optimistic take on the state of everything, focusing on social media. www.techdirt.com #

New Post: Better debug logging markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Elon Musk’s $200 million Reform markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Happy New Year 2025! markjgsmith.com #

Likas Wigflex RA696 - I’ve been listening to this mix for the past couple of days, lots of bleeps and bloops, very up beat, dark in places, happy and trippy and expansive in others, no lyrics, great for programing, and dare I say, if you find yourself needing something to party to in the early hours, would no doubt be kind of great for that too. And here are a couple more just in case :) ra.co #

New Year's Eve fireworks over Sydney Harbour - Waaow! m.youtube.com #

British charcuterie is the new English sparkling wine - and Brexit could be helping - Got to love that tastey tastey charcuterie platter, my goodness what a picture. I love this. www.theguardian.com #

Starmer throws down gauntlet to watchdogs with growth edict - Glad that it seems to be a matter of urgency. news.sky.com #

How I Automated My Job Application Process. (Part 1) - Interesting to see how people are using AI for these types of one off tools. I used to do this sort of thing for stuff like flat hunting. blog.daviddodda.com #

Thanks to Keir Starmer we’re about to see what a class war really looks like - Life long "of the Left" Aimee Meade reviews Starmer. He likes rich elites too much. inews.co.uk #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Happy New Year 2025! (Issue #196) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Best blog posts of 2024 markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Is Russia asking the US to dance? markjgsmith.com #

Russia Imposes 6-Year Ban on Crypto Mining in 10 Regions, Citing Energy Use - They haven’t banned crypto for international payments and in fact Putin recently has been dicussing Bitcoin publicly. It’s a very interesting posture. It's like he’s saying 'you know about bitcoin, we know about bitcoin, would you like to dance?'. This might be the perfect time for western nations to head out onto the dancefloor. www.coindesk.com #

UK Prince of Darkness Peter Mandelson Donal Trump-Whisperer - I like this pick, good to have a bit of the ghost of Chritmas past sometimes, especially since Trump will be sending the producer for the Apprentice over to the UK. A bit of experience might go a long way. To be honest I don’t know much about Mandelson though. www.politico.eu #

Meta to add display to Ray-Bans as race over smart glasses intensifies - I still don’t understand how the UI on these glasses works. The article is confusing. Is it an actual small lcd screen or something projected onto the glasses? www.ft.com #

Elon Musk among billionaires set to donate to Reform UK, says treasurer - Funny picture, jacket makes it appear like he just rocked up in a Spitfire. This is bound to cause some leftist media heads to explode with rage. Seriously though, wouldn’t it be worse if he wasn’t interested in the UK? Hellooow, we need economic growth. It’s strange that leftists are totally fine with russian oligarchs, arab princes, and rich Chinese but US billionaires are totally off limits. www.theguardian.com #

French PM names new government, hoping to avoid another no-confidence vote - C'est le dream team francais! Nice photo. I feel like their image could be improved with a bit of workshoping. Interesting there‘s been a move towards the right, I wonder how much the US result influenced them. I guess it makes sense to follow suit in some way. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: The imminent AI vs SaaS war markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Replacing SaaS with AI agents markjgsmith.com #

Ukraine closes series F funding round worth $1.1bn in debt obligations from IMF - The war torn country punching above it’s weight is competing against the Russian Gallactic Empire for sovereignty of the region. They hope to ensure freedom to Europe. The openly anti-Bitcoin IMF has been making several geopolitical moves recently, even while politicians across the world are trying to setup strategic bitcoin reserves. Okay I’m being a bit sarcastic here in an attempt to try and highlight what a wild situation this is turning out to be. No offense to anyone involved intended. www.theguardian.com #

Outrage as Elon Musk claims ‘only AfD can save Germany’ - Read this to get an idea of the epic pot stiring that is happening. While this will no doubt get many in the UK even more worked up in fist shaking, I think many will be relieved it’s not just the UK that is being proded. I like that it’s opening up conversations that would not otherwise be occuring. It’d also somewhat amusing to see how the left leaning journos are reporting. You can almost feel them being torn between shifting tides. Saying things and not saying things in quite odd ways. Like the whole system is creeking and bending, with many contorsions becoming exposed. www.theguardian.com #

Greece’s former royal family seeks to regain citizenship 50 years after end of monarchy - I bet it’s horrible to go though this sort of thing, to have your foundations ripped out, to fight for your own existence, even if you are from a priviledged background. There seems to be all these fights between 'the individual' and 'the group' at the minute. We see these high profile cases but I bet, and to some extent I know, this is happening at every level, all over the place. www.theguardian.com #

Tether expects over $10 billion in net profits for 2024, plans major AI investments - Since these stablecoin companies are making so much money from buying treasuries, it’s interesting to see what they are buying with the money they are making. Presumably they aren’t just going to buy more treasuries, though I guess why not, that kind of play is working out for some. They are investing in companies that align with their vision of the future, trying to grow the whole pie rather than just carving it up, giving themselves the biggest piece. www.cryptopolitan.com #

El Salvador makes Bitcoin payments voluntary in $1.4B IMF loan deal - Apparently it’s always been voluntary, and their Bitcoin adoption hasn’t changed. But I think it’s noteworthy because it shows that these big financial institutions are anti-bitcoin. And they say they are doing you a favour, making things safe for you, but is that really the case when they have so much invested in their system? cointelegraph.com #

Readers want UK to prioritise EU relations – not US relationship - The worry I suppose is whether or not europe is cooked. So many parts of it appear to be falling apart. The US, though it is in enormous debt, is very well positioned for lift off. However how are they going to grow if everyone else is in decline? As with many things in life there has to be the right balance, on many levels. www.independent.co.uk #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Maybe Pork & Rice (Issue #195) markjgsmith.com #

US Senate passes government funding bill, averts shutdown - Is this sort of nail biting down to the wire budget shennanigans happening in other countries? It only seems to happen in the US. www.reuters.com #

The Framework Laptop 16 just got a modular gadget that enables quadruple SSDs - You are now capable of having a ridiculus 38TB of storage...on a laptop! And a modular one too so you can have spares of all major parts and be able to swap them in easily if the original ones fail for any reason. With feature films clocking in between 2TB and 12TB, I wonder if vfx artists will start using these. You could literally take the entire film home with you to work on it. www.theverge.com #

Blackmagic Debuts $30K 3D Camera for Capturing Video for Vision Pro - Haven’t seen much about the Vision Pro recently, figured folks had moved on to other things. Maybe we’ll see another wave over the holidays? www.macrumors.com #

Leak Reveals Russia’s Bid For Bitcoin Reserve Amid Huge 2025 Price Predictions - Both the US and Russia are seriously investigating setting up Strategic Bitcoin Reserves. Kinda bullish. The game theory is insane though. It’s essentially a massively high stakes multiplayer game of the opening scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I find mildly triggering to be honest. Perhaps even a bit rude. But I’m happy for Bitcoin. www.forbes.com #

New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn't want to be forced to change its views - It’s all very interesting, but surely the worry in all this is how long until this tech is repurposed and used on humans, to create Clockwork Orange or indeed reverse Clockwork Orange type scenarios, especially since we know certain parts of the world have forced re-education camps, and given the world has recently been rather prone to a propensity for emergent censorship industrial complexes. techcrunch.com #

UK arts and media reject plan to let AI firms use copyrighted material - Noticed that the Guardian has pinneaple pizza’d all their articles with no prior warning. You have to either register or say you will register later. Has a malicious dark patterny kinda vibe to it imo, especially since for years now GDPR has ensured we always have a clear opt out option. How meta that the article is all about an opt out. Enough to break your brain. I didn’t read the article. The kicker: I got a 'good' from the world as I clicked through, and a 'aaaaahhh' from the world, as in relief, as I decided not to read the article. Just saying. The world is cray cray AF. www.theguardian.com #

Germany is in a sorry state – and all our leaders can do is yell at each other - Oh noes! What about the steins & wienerschnitzel? Good lord europe, think of the pretzels, the sauerkraut, and the glühwein. And all the other wonderful german things I don’t have time to mention. Pull yourselves together. www.theguardian.com #

Spain introduces bill to combat online fake news - A part of me is hoping that this will lead to some truely epic and possibly distasteful spanish punk and post-punk bands. And honestly might be a good sign that freedoms and democracy are still going strong. www.theguardian.com #

‘World’s first’ grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant announced in the US - Seems like this could be a big deal. The worrier programmer in me is wondering if an alien civilisation has previously tried this and accidentally turned their planet into a supernova somewhere else in the galaxy or wider universe, would we be able to see traces of that? edition.cnn.com #

Goodbye, Moogs - Just catching up with feeds, hope I’m not digging up old graves, but I thought this was probably the best darn pet obituary I’ve ever read. I actually teared up a bit at the end, though it’s also possible that was my alergies. Damn cats. daverupert.com #

A look back at Node's 2024 - Might be a good article to have bookmarked for the holidays. There’s nothing like some mince pies and a bunch of interesting nodejs articles to read. I recognise several of articles linked to. nodeweekly.com #

On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople - John Gruber summarises a recent controversy around background checks for Pete Hegseth who will be taking over control of the US military. What I find interesting is how incredibly good Gruber’s piece is. It’s easily as good as any main stream media journalist, and actually a lot better than most. Some bloggers sure can write. daringfireball.net #

3 shell scripts to improve your writing - Simon Wilson turns some bash scripts into a web tool. What’s interesting is how he did it: basically gave the scripts to an LLM and asked it to do it. Writing little helper tools is now a lot easier than it user to be. simonwillison.net #

Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits - Great Cory Doctorow piece about the importance of data portability in social networks. pluralistic.net #

New Post: Cory Doctorow on data portability in social networks markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Sorry about the feeds markjgsmith.com #

Some pubs start to run out of Guinness as supply limit bites - Oh noes! The article sort of implies you can only get Guinness in irish pubs. That’s not the case. Guinness is sold in most pubs. www.bbc.com #

Hampshire pupils 'sob' as vicar discusses existence of Santa - You would think this sort of thing would happen every year, but I don’t remember ever, in all my years, reading about such a thing happening before. Odd then that it should happen just a few days after I wrote about Mike Benz’ description of the censorship industrial complex and it’s similarity to the vfx industry. Thankfully not much chance Christmas will ever get banned, even if Guinness is in short supply this year. www.bbc.com #

WordPress.orgs login page demands you pledge loyalty to pineapple pizza - I’m somewhat conflicted on this. I quite like pinneapple on pizzas, but it depends on what the other topings are, because the sweetness needs a counter balance, like ground pork. I find that it’s often a bit mediocre with ham for instance. Now I’m wondering what pinneapple would be like with another ingredient that is amazing on pizza, but not well known for it: chille con carne. Chille con carne pizzas are phenominal. My guess is that it would be kind of great. On the other hand it’s been so long since I ate a pizza that I think any pizza would be amazing at the minute. Anyway why the fuck is Matt maybe fake blocking / maybe real blocking people based on pizzas topings? mashable.com #

Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter--and It Doesn’t Need to Be - Cool idea for a project. I wonder how many on Blacksky are actually secretly white users pretending to be black, just curious about how to interact with black people and culture. I haven’t grown up with many black people around so I bet I say a ton of things that might be offensive without even realising it. There are so many double meanings in english and cultural references that one might not have, it’s bound to happen all the time. www.wired.com #

New Post: Hello RSS clarity markjgsmith.com #

Czech Republic abolishes capital gains tax on Bitcoin held at least three years - The UK should do something similar to get some growth in the crypto sector. The time to do it it is now while it’s a wide open field. In a few years, the tea leaves will have settled, and likely in places with pro-crypto tax rules. cryptobriefing.com #

Britain joins trans-Pacific pact in biggest post-Brexit trade deal - Good to see things moving forward. Interesting the selection of countries. I wonder whether it will have any visible impact having trade agreements with exotic countries around the pacific. www.reuters.com #

Will A.I. Eat The Browser? - Web developers everywhere, who’ve spent a significant part ot their lives sitting on a chair stating at a screen learning the intricacies of HTML, CSS, and javascript, are like seriously bro? crazystupidtech.com #

A Democratic media strategy to save journalism and the nation - Hadn’t read a Doctorow piece in quite a while. Good to see one of my favorite leftists is still pulling punches. I’m a bit worried his boo to the billionaire’s stick is becoming a bit worn. Personally I’m less worried about the billionaires, but more worried by the evil coorporations that surround them. pluralistic.net #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Memeplexes, Podcasting & the Movies (Issue #194) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Inbound RSS for social media? markjgsmith.com #

New Post: You will like your default reality markjgsmith.com #

Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish - I made a scrabble related joke earlier in a shop cafe I was in. What are the chances that just a few hours later I should now see this article on the front page of HN, especially given that earlier I posted a note that requires an understanding of both french and spanish. The kicker is that if you read the article you will learn that the scrabble star has also previously won the french world title. Seriously what are the chances? Come on world, you're not fooling anyone. www.theguardian.com #

New Post: Earnie C. from Body Count on Gate Keepers markjgsmith.com #

Node.js Delivers First LTS with require(esm) Enabled, Enhanc... - I reckon this is probably quite a big deal. I think it will have a massive effect on ESM adoption. Import has so many ways where it stops working, whereas require just works everytime. The whole CommonJS vs ESM thing has been such a terrible situation for so long. It made nodejs look so bad. Making using external modules seamless again is huge. socket.dev #

Romania’s top court annuls presidential election result - Tough decision, it’s certainly seems true that there is russian meddling now in all politics across the continent, but we need to be sure people aren’t just using that as an excuse to block legitimate political rivals. I hope they publish the criteria they used to determine the annulment, so everyone can learn from it. www.cnn.com #

Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino Ep#2240 - I’ve always maintained that growing up Pulp Fiction was a sort of coming of age movie for me. Life before Pulp Fiction was in black and white, life afterwards was in glorious technicolor. I don’t mean that literally, it’s more about how life felt. I walked out of the theatre and suddenly it felt like there were possibilities everywhere. Maybe I’ll write more about that sometime. This interview was great. Tarantino and Avery make a really interesting combo, they seem to balance each other in interesting ways. For me this interview had a sort of magical quality to it, though a bit bumpy. In places it felt like to me they were channeling higher forces. That’s the best way I can describe it. podcastindex.org #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Censorship, AI Memecoins, 100K BTC, Time & the Ruliad (Issue #193) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: Questions for Wolfram about time markjgsmith.com #

France faces months of political instability as government nears collapse - Literally tldr; based on title alone, fitting. Then again today is shaping up to be another synchronicity apocalypse day. Weather is crappy today, though no faces in the clouds, just undifferentiated white for as far as the eye can see in every direction. www.bbc.com #

Biden's Angola visit aims to showcase his attempts to rival China - An interesting non descript choice for Biden’s final overseas bit of business. I’m sceptical these days about many of these large scale investment projects, but perhaps the thing to focus on here is the stated goal of developing local processing rather than just extraction, and the fact that Angola is keeping their options open. That at least looks like it might be a step forward. Many steps to go though, but perhaps the foundations are sound. www.bbc.com #

Brazilian lawmaker proposes national bitcoin reserve to hedge economic risks - Looks like maybe nation state strategic bitcoin reserves might be starting to trend. That would certainly create some big inflows. Interesting that it’s one of the BRICKs countries. The bitcoin hedge might start to become very popular amoung sovereign gardners. www.theblock.co #

New Post: Finished the item hash link feature markjgsmith.com #

Bluesky implements a 'more aggressive' impersonation policy - I didn’t know it had an impersonation issue. Much like the real world. There are doppelgangers everywhere. www.engadget.com #

NASA’s Europa Clipper: Millions of Miles Down, Instruments Deploying - It’s so crazy that to get to it’s destination it has to go to Mars and then back to Earth just to eventually get all the way to Jupiter. What a scenic route. But also imagine the precision needed to do this manouver. I bet we look back at these times in 100 years and wonder how it was that we had to make things so complicated, when no doubt they will be able to just push a button. Makes you wonder if we need to be careful about a future space industrial complex that insists on doing everything in the most complicated way possible to keep people in jobs, or to just keep people from letting their giant brains get bored. Thankfully we don’t need so much precision in the rest of our lives. It should be safe to loose control every once in a while. www.nasa.gov #

As 'Sentient Memecoins' Become Latest Crypto Fad, GOAT Surges to $800M and an AI Rambles - The whole AI memecoin thing that’s sprung up in the past few weeks is very interesting and funny and mindboggling. But when you read the AIs philosophical mussings it’s pretty clear, certainly to any humans that have gone through hard times, that these LLMs could be used really nefariously. It’s a rubix cube solver for human thought. What’s the world going to be like when everyone has a neuralink and an AI assistant embeded? Won’t it just be algorythm wars every minute of every day? Not sure I’m particularly bullish on all this. So many ways it could all go horribly wrong. www.coindesk.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Gargantuan Change (Issue #192) markjgsmith.com #

Irish election exit poll predicts even split between three main parties - I’m suprised that this is the first article I’ve seen about their elections. Regretfully, I really don’t know as much about Irish politics as I would like. I think I’m a bit more confused after reading this article, which somehow almost clarified all my questions but in each case, not quite. I couldn’t tell with any certainty where on the spectrum any of the parties lie, or indeed who leads any of them. A masterpiece of saying nothing while saying quite a lot. www.theguardian.com #

Mark Zuckerberg dines with Trump at Mar-a-Lago despite former feud - I imagine this will be viewed as rather weird in the UK and EU. I can’t remember ever reading about top european tech CEOs being invited around for dinner by the incoming government leader. www.theguardian.com #

These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own - The human group simulations are definitely very interesting, and perhaps you might be able to create some useful bots / tools, but I don’t think all the anthropomorphisation is such a good idea. You might end up with very strange bots, and I could see it chaging how us humans interact with each other. www.technologyreview.com #

New Post: Peter MacCormack and Freddie New on the UK government front bench and value extraction by private equity markjgsmith.com #

Chinese Ship’s Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables - It’s definitely quite suspicious, especially since there have been several incidents all involving easter european countries recently. How strange that it would happen now, with ongoing Ukraine war and with a new US president in January. www.wsj.com #

Deno v. Oracle: Canceling the JavaScript Trademark - It’s flat out ridiculous the Oracle still has the trademark. Javascript is clearly the language of the world wide web. Worth knowing about this case, not just if you are a developer, if you run any websites, because ultimately it could affect you. deno.com #

Self-contained Executable Programs with Deno Compile - I haven’t had a chance to try this out but it’s an awesone feature. deno.com #

New Post: Our strange AI angels and demons future markjgsmith.com #

Mapping Over Promises in JavaScript - Mapping over promises is definitely really useful. I tend to either do it with either Promise.all or just an old school for loop depending on whether I need sequential or parallel resolution. The option to set concurrency could be quite useful. www.telerik.com #

Ukrainian boxing champ Wladimir Klitschko calls out Rogan for ‘repeating Russian propaganda’ - I tend to skip much of the martial arts Rogan episodes, but I’d listen to this one. I personally don’t get why the west has been pretend helping the Ukraine. What is this bull crap of giving weapons but saying you can only use them in a particular way? Were they secretly holding Ukraine down so Russia could pound them, or was it a tactic to get Russia to reveal their true intensions? I don’t get why you would 1/2 help somebody. www.theguardian.com #

Germany draws up list of bunkers amid Russia tensions - Prepping seems to be the current thing. Finland was also sending out pamflets to citizens recently, with notes on what to do in case of an invasion. Looks like everyone is freaking out. Maybe chill with the FUD and wait until after Christmas? www.theguardian.com #

New Post:: Bitter sweet symphony this life markjgsmith.com #

I’ve joined Bluesky and it feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways... - Impressions from the main stream media of the recent mass migration / diversification to Bluesky. John Naughton sums up his thoughts and observations. A bit on the pessimistic side but he makes a lot of good points. We need more people, companies, institutions etc, running Bluesky instances because as great as the architecture is for users, if there is nowhere to move to, it’s all for nothing. It’s still an island, but could be part of an ecosystem. Looks like building healthy ecosystems is a very difficult endeavour. www.theguardian.com #

Elon Musk Is Now Cyberbullying Government Employees - I’m not goung to pretend I know anything about making huge cuts in the name of efficiency. Seems like you are going to make a lot of people unhappy whatever you do. Nobody likes ripping off band aids. But seems like gang stalker cyber bullying campaigns would not only be unnecessary, but counter productive. Why not just go in there are start cutting jobs and departments like an chainsaw wealding argentinian anarcho-capitalist? newrepublic.com #

Polymarket blocks French users amid regulatory scrutiny over $80 million Trump election bet - Prediction markets continue to make a splash. It’s kind of crazy that online betting has so little regulations, whereas Bitcoin and crypto are constantly under scrutiny. Strongly suggests it’s not really about protecting regular people. www.theblock.co #

Anthropic raises another $4B from Amazon, makes AWS its 'primary' training partner - It’s kind of strange that all the big AI companies are so dependant on the underlying cloud companies they run on. It’s a similar model to proffesional surfers and skateboarders. Imagine being a web developer and Apple gave you free laptops. On the other hand, Apple if you want to give me a free laptop, please get in touch :) techcrunch.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Synchronicity Apocalypse Days (Issue #191) markjgsmith.com #

Hadron by Tether Platform Brings Simplified Asset Tokenization to the Mass Market - I saved this article to read offline, but for whatever reason it doesn’t work with the save later app I’m using, so can’t read it. Anyhow linking to the article because I think asset tokenization could turn into an interesting growth area, with new ways of interacting with customers. For example in wine, clothes, real estate, and vehicle registration. Longer term with more esoteric things like culture itself. tether.io #

Wallet Development Kit by Tether - These days all you really need is Bitcoin and a decent stablecoin, really that’s the minimum for crypto interop. Tether is the most popular of the stablecoins. It’s not decentralised but it’s used mostly to transact so it’s less risky, especially for smallish amounts. They have released an SDK. They also appear to be fully onboard with the AI agents trend that is rapidly gaining momentum. wallet.tether.io #

Web4: We Are AGI - I’m seeing and hearing a lot about agentic AI at the minute. Seems to be the next big thing. It’s cool I guess. I can’t help but wonder what the reality is like though. How do you debug these systems for instance? I feel like we might be creating a big tangle of race conditions and never ending garbage war. Of course the answer to all my questions will likely be 'more AI!', eventually it will be AIs debugging AIs all the way down. Then it will all be blamed on me. And I’ll blame it on climate change. Put that in your ok and more it, and of course No! But also yellow! I appreciate that all sounds a bit rude, honestly not my intention, that’s just a sample of the last few days harassment tsunami. 🕊☮️✌️ mirror.xyz #

Maybe Bluesky has "won" - Gets a bit technical but not too much, highlighting some it’s architectural choices. I looked yesterday for examples and tutorials of integrating Bluesky into your website but didn’t find anything. Curious what exactly you would need to implement. anderegg.ca #

New Post: Thoughts on integrating your website with Bluesky markjgsmith.com #

Will we care about frameworks in the future? - Paul Kinlan makes the case that perhaps in the future we won’t even use frameworks because the AI in your IDE will be writing most of the code. paul.kinlan.me #

Lexical - A framework for building text editors. I think it’s from the guys and gals over at Meta. lexical.dev #

UK must pick between US economic model or EU’s ‘socialism’, says Trump adviser - It sure would be interesting to hear from Trump himself what his thoughts are on this, it certainly seems like unnecessary childish anger goading. It’s suprising that a country built on a foundation of fierce independance would seek to publically humiliate another anglophone country by telling them how they should run things. I don’t think it’s such a wise move. Ultimately if the brits feel they have a bad deal, they will boycott american products, and find other friends internationally. This might even be a boost for the entertainment industry, lots of new material. Note the article is from the Guardian. www.theguardian.com #

Russian spy ship escorted away from internet cables in Irish Sea - Not a good sign. Seems like everyone is anger goading following the US election results. Looks like both lefties and righties are trying to provoke the UK following the US election result? It would be great if everyone could just growup and focus on getting our globally synchronised economies back on track. www.theguardian.com #

🚀 Latest Newsletter: Bull runs, economies, politics, browsers & crypto AI (Issue #190) markjgsmith.com #

New Post: The peaceful transition of humour markjgsmith.com #

Not a Joke: 'The Onion' Buys Alex Jones’s InfoWars Site - They plan to turn it into a parody of itself. Not sure this is such a good idea. Feels like they might end up creating a bizare free speech inception singularity type situation, whatever that might be. Wouldn’t it be a sort of right wing Daily Show? www.inc.com #

Where web components shine - Several weeks old at this point, but it’s the first chance I’ve had to read it. Great post with lots of first hand experience advice. I like how web components aren’t meant to solve everything, this patchiness actually sounds quite web-like. You just have to know what situations to use them for, and we are still figuring this out. Dave and Chris did a Shop Talk episode all about this post. Worth giving it a listen. daverupert.com #

Factorio - "Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories" - I’m not a big gamer, played some consoles, and used to hang out at arcades during the lunch hour when at school, and also played a bit at university. But these days literally never. I only code cli tools and websites. In some ways that in itself is a sort of game, maybe even the ultimate game. I heard about Factorio (wikipedia page) on a recent programming podcast, I forget exactly which one. It was described by a developer as the closest thing to writing code in a game he had ever seen. You basically have to create all sorts of these interface type structures, and you refactor and optimise them. Anyway I thought it sounded kind of cool, a bit like Sim City but also maybe an interesting way to get into computer programming. Surely a more fun stepping stone that Excel and Microsoft Word :) www.factorio.com #

Borewit/music-metadata - "Stream and file based music metadata parser for node. Supporting a wide range of audio and tag formats". This looks like it could be very useful if you were doing anything that requires reading / updating audio metadata, like IDE tags of mp3 files or even streams. Supports loads of other formats too. github.com #

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election - Saying that they are fleing seems a bit hyperbolic, I bet hardly any of them deleted their X accounts. It’s more like diversifying imo, and that’s a good thing. Who knows, maybe a lot of them are republicans who think Elon’s Twitter might get targeted by angry democrats. www.theguardian.com #

How I ship projects at big tech companies - Lots of useful info in this article including a somewhat interesting way of defining shiping. I find it’s very much a mindset, getting the simplest functional version out, then iterating to make it better, while making sure you can always get back to a safe state should something unnexpected occur where you need to reverse course. It’s difficult, and you often have to make tough choices, weighing up short terms fixes vs more difficult structural changes. You have to be able to do both, and in the right sequence. There are many different paths to the same goal. Things change, you have to adapt. www.seangoedecke.com #

Bitcoin is closing in on $90,000 for the first time ever - We are likely now in a period of increased volatility at least until Trump takes over, but generally on the up. The big question is whether we are in a super cycle or not. It certainly could be. If the US sets up the strategic bitcoin reserve they have been talking about, then other countries might follow suit, and then insitutions, and individuals too. www.cnbc.com #

Bitcoin Touches Record-High $85K, Adds Almost $20K in a Week - Looks like it’s the start of the much anticipated bull run. This isn’t investment advice, but there’s been speculation for months that it will reach 100K. www.coindesk.com #

MicroStrategy acquires another 27,200 bitcoin for more than $2 billion - This move is also going to push up the Bitcoin price somewhat. www.theblock.co #

100,000 Chinese students join 50km night-time bike ride in search of good soup dumplings - Things really escallate quickly in China sometimes. For comparison, that’s around the same amount of people that go to Glastonbury music festival. www.theguardian.com #

‘Give us back our Fingers’: uproar in France as Cadbury biscuits vanish - Lots of fond memories eating these tastey treats during my youth. Glad to hear the french are speaking out against this injustice. We brits would definitely do the same if tastey french biscuits disapeared from our shelves too. www.theguardian.com #

Physicist Says There's Another Universe Hiding Behind the Big Bang - For what it’s worth, and this most likely has no bearing on the structure of everything, with all the bizare synchronicities that happen to me on the daily, at times hourly, it very often feels like the universe is using me as some sort of mirror. Also, I wonder how the universe feels about wormholes, on the whole good or actually kind of bad? Or undecided? futurism.com #

Creator of Crypto Mixer 'Bitcoin Fog' Gets 12 1/2 Years In Prison - Financial privacy is something we really need to figure out. It might even be THE most important thing when it comes to individual freedom. gizmodo.com #

New Post: Individual freedom in the age of crypto currencies and AI markjgsmith.com #