markjgsmith

Following on from yesterday‘s success in setting up devcontainers, I got Gemini to create me a poster for a film based on the classic hacker movie War Games. Here was the prompt:

Make me picture for a new movie. It's based on the classic Hacker movie War Games, but it's set in modern day. The new film is called Vibe War Games, and features Matthew Broderick, who has not aged since the last film. He is eating a whopper from burger king while coding using an orchestra of GPTs.

In my mind I was thinking it would be a bit more like a sureal comedy rather than a thriller, given the current ridiculousness of the world, but perhaps it‘s a mix of both, given the current insanity of the world.

Glorious full resolution image.

Full transcript here. #

Alex Gleason [43:11]: “The new way I'm approaching software development at this point is not to try to go in and Discord code these features into these vibe coded apps, rather it's to see what are ways I can improve my stack, so that when I re-run these prompts, it'll produce a better result the second time and it will do it faster [...] to me this is like a compleately different software development methodology.” #

Alex Gleason [43:58]: "When things get stale, you may consider just deleting and re-vibing. I kind of view it as like every 6 months you just re-vibe the app. You are improving your stack the whole time and upgrading all of your shit, and improving the components in there.” #

I re-wrote an API app that I had written a while back, updating it to work better with devcontainers. One of the cool things is that it runs either as an express app of express apps, or as individual serverless functions using the serverless-http library. It‘s just one environment variable you have to set to switch between environments. Means you can run your apps on serverless, but if you decide for whatever reason you need to move over to a VPC server or kubernetes, you can easily do that. It's the very same code running in both places. I had an idea I could do this a while back, but it‘s the first time I‘ve got it working. It‘s pretty cool. #

Lots of copyright infringement claims are starting currently, Disney vs Midjourney for example. Is training an AI copying? Maybe it‘s next level copying, sort of like if you copied the entire printing press rather than a specific newspaper. You get the entire solution space of ideas for a particular paper. All possible combinations of the ideas outlined in a work of art. It's like stealing the negative of a film, except the negative is dynamic. #

Matt Odell [1:11:42]: “Not only do I expect there to be pain, I expect it to be like, in terms of measurement, in terms of like dollar amount, and people amount, like the most pain we've seen out of all of the cycles, just because we are operating at a scale higher than we've ever operated at before, and I think that the easy thing is to say […] it'll just go up forever. Directionally I actually do agree with that, I just think there are going to be valleys in between. I think there is going to be pain in between, and you have to be able to survive that pain and not be over leveraged and destroyed when it happens, and that's why the stay humble part is important.” #

I finally managed to get VSCode devcontainers working with private Github repos. The trick was to mount some files from the host OS to the container. Works pretty well, but the thing to remember is that with ssh keys, you get access to all repos in a Github account, so the only really safe way is to have seperate Github accounts for each project, and use different key pairs for each. I never got it working with the fine grained access tokens over https, no idea if it‘s even possible. #

I made some pretty good progress on setting up my development environment using VSCode devcontainers. It‘s a bit slow at first because you have to download the image from the container registry. It quite straight forward for a typical setup. However I have quite a lot of code in private repositories, and of course once it‘s all running inside a container, the running code no longer has access to my ssh keys on the host OS. And that‘s where things get quite confusing.

Some people are saying to use ssh agent forwarding, which I don‘t think sounds very secure. Others are saying to use a fine grained Github access token, which sounds alright security-wise because you can create a token that only has read access, and if anything weird happens in the container, because say a vibe coding tool gets hacked, then it can only read the code. But I go through and set it up and I think I have it configured correctly, and it‘s still throwing up a popup asking me to login when I npm install. I‘ve been at it the whole day, tried a million and one different ways, and I still can‘t get it working.

It‘s looking like I‘m going to have to abandon my plans to use dev containers because it‘s just to complicated to configure securely. It‘s definitely better than last time I tried containers, but the devil is always in the details. Unless I can get it to work with private repos, it‘s not worth it. It would be awesome if all my code was open source and public, but I am still very far away from that point. I might try again tomorrow. #

I’m going to be concentrating on a few development things the next few days:

• Development environments that use containers
• Converting some old code to Typescript
• Creating simple frontend using React

I already know quite a bit about these three things but there‘s nothing like doing something practical for real. Luckily I already have quite a bit of old code to play with, so hopefully I‘ll be moving forward both in my hireability as a developer and on a few personal projects.

It‘s nice to have a focussed plan.

I also started doing some morning exercises again today. Nothing crazy, just a 20 minute routine, but feeling good about it. #

Dave Winer: "I'm trying to make a linkblog with a WordPress RSS feed".

Sure would be cool to have propper linkblogs built on Wordpress, which is the biggest open source web publishing environment in the world. Looks like it’s early stages, where things are complicated and convoluted, but eventually things could be streamlined. Imho great project to dive into if you are a Wordpress developer, or just a project to keep on your radar if you are a Wordpress user. #

I was going to read this Sam Altman blog post that everyone‘s been linking to yesterday. I think it‘s about the future, and how the crazy shit that is happening now is nothing because soon humans will be out numbered by robots, so we ain‘t seen nothing yet. Ok I did glance at the first paragraph. Anyway, I was very caught up in other stuff, it was lunch time and so I needed something to listen to while I prepared lunch, so figured I could multi-task. How hard could it be to get my Android phone to read a webpage to me? This is the age of AI and robots and what have you right?

Spent 35 minutes googling, ai-ing, searching through settings, literally nothing worked. It was kind of funny because the AI said to use the phone‘s voice assistant which I did, and the phone‘s voice assistant said sure no problem just give me the url, which is odd given the AI said that it would know automatically based on the context, but anyway the assistant openned up a text box presumably for me to paste the url into. So I did, and it went off and did a text based summary, and so I asked why it didn‘t read it aloud and it said it couldn‘t do it because it was a text based AI, so I then asked it why it didn‘t do the thing it said for me to do, and it started asking me to change settings and it was basically a total waste of nearly an hour, and probably would have broken my phone had I not stopped. I also would have starved to death.

Is the voice assitant an AI? Why is it talking to me with audio, clearly being an audio based tool, then the next minute it‘s saying it‘s text based? What the fuck is that about?

No, I‘m not going to read the article now, because this is fucking stupid. We cannot even do email, notes and basic automation in a bulletproof way, and now we are building AIs that lie to our faces? Surely we are on a very precarious path right now? #

Github support finally got back in touch with me yesterday. They said they have identified a bug in their system, said they were very sorry for the troubles caused and gave me several months worth of extra build minutes free as a good will gesture. They also unblocked my account, so I was able to finally run the builds for my websites and publish the backlog of content.

I'm not totally thrilled about the whole situation, I mean it's nice to get the free minutes, but I'm wondering what happens when the several months of extra minutes finishes, will my account get blocked again? This situation just has the vibe of one of those sagas that will go on for ages. I hate to be defeatest, but my long winded saga pattern recognition is triggering. It's horrid because it's sort of paralysing because you are afraid to change anything in case it makes the situation worse. You are not even sure it's safe to blog about in case that makes it worse somehow.

And then there is the innevitable totally unrelated knock on effects. Today where I am there are issues with the water plumbing. One problem fixed, and within minutes another one pops it's head up. The plumbing issues actually started last night, literally a few minutes after I got the website updated.

Oh world. What are you doing to me again? #

Github support are still ghosting me. It’s been over two weeks since my account started being blocked. How dare me for trying to buy a few extra build minutes.

I’m not able to run any Actions workflows, which means I can’t publish content to any of my websites. I've openned up two support cases now. The original one, where eventually it seemed they had fixed the issue, and had given me 1000 free Actions minutes as an appology for the troubles, and a second support case oppened when the account got completely blocked again when I literally did exactly what they told me to do. They have stopped replying on both support case threads. Actually the second one they haven’t even replied at all yet. I have been very polite throughout in my correspondences, and I have given them lots of time, haven’t swamped them.

As I explained today to them, it’s starting to feel very much like they are trying to extort money from me. But it’s actually weirder than that, because they won’t let me pay them. It’s very very bizare. #

Micha Kaufman [37:40]: “I was asked in another conversation how is it to be a CEO right now, and I said you know it's like you asking the captain of a ship in the middle of a storm, how is it to be a captain? And the answer is it's wet, it's dark, and you can't see a mile ahead”. #

Micha Kaufman [44:48]: “I never use the term speed. I always use the term velocity. Speed is just the speed of movement, velocity is speed plus direction. Speed is not enough. You need energy in a certain direction. If you are unable to push the code that you generate, it means you didn't solve your infrastructure, to be able to do this, so it means that your priority is incorrect because you didn’t solve the bottlenecks that are keeping you from moving fast.” #

I’m more and more convinced that the entirety of the tech industry is a scam. It’s unbelievable how often it happens that you spend ages building something only for one of the pieces you rely on screwing you in some way, and so you eventually rebuild replacing that piece with something you built yourself, only for the next piece you rely on doing the exact same thing again to you. This has happened to me so often over the past 2 decades that I have lost count.

It’s truely ridiculous now. I'm literally at the point where I have refactored all my stuff so much that everything is powered by git, the most well used most well tested software development tool ever to have existed, it's all files, the simplest most well understood primitive in all of computing. And wouldn’t you know it, Github the most bulletproof company in the space, owned by one of the wealthiest tech companies of all time, now has decided to block me.

You couldn’t make this shit up. The tech industry is never happy with anything. If I refactored myself into a perfect beam of consciously directional light, it would still be unhappy. I’m only partly kidding. #

Leo Laporte [56:11]: “You know a month or two ago, there was a whistle-blower at the veterans administration who said that when DOGE got access to the databases at the veterans administration, they turned off all logging, first thing they did, and then exfilarated 10gigabytes of data to some place we don't know and then within minutes, Russian accounts were logging in using DOGE credentials, into the veterans administration. The whistle-blower was a sysadmin, it got a lot of attention, NPR covered it. He was interviewed by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. He was threatened. There was a note taped to his door with a picture of him walking his dog from a drone shot, saying you might want to shut up about this. And then, btw, was it CSA? One of the federal agencies said yeah we're not going to investigate this. And I haven't heard a word about it since”. #

I’ve been working on a blog post, another Gemini collaboration post, for just over an hour. Working on stuff with AI is really bizare. It’s like the most extreme form of hit or miss ever. I’ve had loads of times when it’s a total disaster, both with writing code and with prose. Then again sometimes you get something back and it’s like nothing you could have imagined, and you are completely stuned by what you are reading, as if you’ve just been contacted by higher dimensional beings from another universe. That’s been the case today.

It seems to be particularly good at taking a jumble of thoughts, where there is an undercurent of something that you can’t quite put your finger on. I find that happens a lot when you read and listen to lots of online content from modern tech. I guess it’s often triggering many age old themes that have been hammered into you but they aren’t immediately obvious in a new context. This is great of course because often it’s exactly this sort of thing that can keep you awake ruminating at night as your brain tries to put all the pieces into a narrative that makes sense.

Of course you have to at some point put aside the awe of the situation, and get on with things, because neverending awe is stupid and annoying. Very odd this new AI world. Blog post to follow. #

What is up with these LLMs adding bold everywhere in text they write? It’s madening. #

It’s completely wild to me that I finished writing the latest Gemini collaboration blog post and the very next thing I did was pick back up a Rogan Protect Our Parks episode I had been watching yesterday, and they immediately start talking about Little Richard and the lyrics from Tutti Frutti, followed by a bit about modern content being sythesized from many different places.

For the record my Holy shit balls comment at the end of my blog post was lifted from the latest Rabbit Hole Recap Ep#360. I was listening to it as I finished the initial bullet point list that created the blog at the exact moment Marty said it comicly. I just thought it sounded funny, so added it to the list without giving it any thought. Don't think I'd ever heard the expression before. Just another set of data points that indicate we are living in some sort of AI guided, possibly nefarious, simulation.

Oh well, world keeps on turning. #

Still no word from Github support. My Github account is still blocked, so still can’t publish to the website. #

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if Bitcoin fixes anything. #

Google Gemini: "This isn't just about profit; it's about the preservation of consciousness itself!"

Just saying. #

Today I‘m trying to get Dev Containers run in VSCode. Putting aside all the vibe coding / Cursor craziness for a second, it seems that Dev Containers is actually quite a mature feature in VSCode, and it looks pretty cool. Last time I tried doing development with containers a few years ago, it was all a bit of a mess, especially on MacOS where Docker wasn’t even running properly. Anyhow, it seems that things have moved on considerably, and things are quite streamlined. I've managed to clone a public repo from Github, install all of the project dependencies, compile the code, and access the created website over HTTP. Crucially, everything is running inside a VSCode devcontainer, and that devcontainer is running in a container management tool that does not require root priveledges to run. At least that’s the idea. There were a few issues along the way, so blog post to follow. Once I have it all working in VSCode, I think it should be quite straight forward getting it to work in Cursor since as far as I understand, Cursor is based on VScode.

As I’m writing this I’m discovering that Cursor is proprietary software, which imo isn’t great because it’s running all sorts of things on your behalf, which requires a lot of trust. And of course it’s an AI that’s controlling Cursor, and who the heck knows what that means. And why the fuck have they taken VSCode which is open source and made it proprietary? That’s weird. Anyway, these are just the toughts going through my head as I tentatively walk down this new "shiny" road. #

I've been doing a bit of research into security implications of vibe coding environments following on from yesterday's attempt to install and configure Cursor. I'm really surpised at how little there is online about this topic. To be clear, there is a ton of stuff about security issues related to vibe coding, but it’s 99% about the security issues in the apps that people create with vibe coding tools, hardly anything published about the security concerns the tools cause themselves, though there are signs that some are aware of the issues. #

I had already used Gemini quite a bit trying to uncover the info related to setting up vibe coding environments securely, so I figured what the hell, might as well try to write a blog post together and see what happens.

I started by having Gemini read all my previous blog posts, to get my writing style. Then we put together the article based on a list of bullet points I had already created. I thought it worked out kind of good. Not entirely sure it sounds exactly like me, maybe a bit formulaic in places, but not too terrible.

I included links to the full chats. I think it’s worth experimenting with the tools, and sharing the process.

Also things get kind of meta sometimes when you collaborate with AI. Reminds me a bit of a recent Rogan show with Ehsan Ahmad. This new AI powered world gets very weird sometimes. #

Elon Musk [26:17]: "With Starship 3 and Raptor 3 it will be possible to have a rapidly refillable rocket with orbital refilling. Basically all of the ingredients necessary to make life multi-planetary will be possible with version 3 of Starship, which we are aiming to launch for the first time at the end of this year [...] anyone who wants to move to Mars and help build a new civilization, can do so [...], like how cool will that be? And even if you don't want to to do it, maybe you have a son or daughter who want to do that, or a friend who wants to do it. I think it would be the best adventure that one can possibly do, to go and help build a new civilization on a new planet". #

Thomas Ptacek: "Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans." #

I’m looking at the Cursor editor, that seems to be what everyone is using at the minute because it uses AI agents. These new development workflows rely on agents doing lots of things on your behalf. All sorts of things: "They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results". Sounds amazing in many ways, but also sounds kind of dangerous.

The two things I’m worrying about right off the bat, are whether I am essentially giving a 3rd party control of my laptop, and second, am I also allowing Cursor to upload all my code to their servers? There are several security realated posts on their forum, and it seems they do upload your code but they don’t store it, and you have to trust them on that. I haven’t found any info on the editor having control of my machine. I’m going to hold off installing it until I know more about how it deals with these two issues. #

Internet connection appears to be restored today, though it was doing weird things when I first got online like upload speeds of 0 Mbps. I had to reconnect several times, but the past few hours have been normal. #

I ran out of build minutes a few days before the end of the month, which is why I haven’t been posting the past few days. Also been incredibly busy. Github have a new billing interface that imo makes it very difficult to see when you are about to run out of build minutes. I openned a support case to try and buy a bit extra but they’ve been so slow dealing with my ticket that the new billing cycle is here now. Oh well. #

Chamath Palihapitiya [36:54]: “It’s going to create a tough job market for new grads in the established organisations. What should new grads do? They should probably steap themselves in the tools and go to younger companies, or start a company. I think that’s the only solution for them”.

That’s essentially word for word the conclusion I had reached a few minutes ago. Yes sometimes I write these while I’m listening. #

Power cuts and internet issues where I am. Just another block in a long succession of blocks. The world is just not able to not block me in some way. It's mindboggling. Just writting this note now in case this gets blocked too. #

Busy day today, not much blogging probably. #

I do find all the LLMs stuff interesting, and I've noticed the latest Anthropic release for Claude seems to be reverberating with folks, especially for its better coding ability. The developer in me was immediately curious about this Simon Willison deep dive into the system prompts. Though there was definitely some interesting stuff in there I found myself skimming through it, because like all things LLM, it's all so wordy, and you also end up feeling like some sort of computer psycologist. I wonder whether my web developer trained brain will ever get as into this as Simon appears to be.

At the minute, to me it feels a bit too close to horoscopes than I am comfortable with, no offense to any psychics and mediums that might be reading this post. I find myself craving for the unambiguity of if statements, for loops, variables and of course async/await. #

Jason Calacanis (17:20): "Employees are going to get to certain points in their day and they are going to say can I get some more work to do? Humans are going to be begging for work". #

Jason Calacanis: "I have heard stories from founders, that people will get…they don't have the shares, they will say hey do you want to buy some Andril, I dont have the shares, would you pay this, then they setup an SPV or something, they collect your money, then they go find the shares, they have charged you over…I don't know if any of that is true but that's the back channel, is that there are people claiming they have access to shares, maybe they are buying shares in another SPV, and the markups, and the circular nature of this, is unregulated […] it's kind of another boiler room." #

The Ives - Altman collaboration announcement is interesting. There's something very funny about the whole thing, but also it's like hey maybe it's sort of serious, or they are partly aware of the ridiculousness. Perhaps this is the frontier of reality comedy hybrid. They have certainly got everyone talking about them. #

Since moving to Android I've been using QR codes a lot more. I noticed that several products I've bought recently have QR codes that encode a url. It's kind of neat. Well it just occurred to me that the ability to share a url with someone nearby you could be very useful. Turns out you can do this in Chrome. It's just another option in the share menu. You don't need an internet connection, you don't need to exchange contact details or login info, the url is encoded into the weird looking pixelated image. The person nearby that you are sharing the link with just has to scan the image with their phone's 'scan qr code' feature, which most modern phones have.

BTW, I'm seeing QR codes everywhere here in Europe. I think you can even pay bills using them, but I haven't figured out how people are doing that yet. Stablecoins perhaps? #

Lots of insightful stuff in the latest Vergecast podcast, especially around AI and the future of the web. Great episode, worth listening to. A few snippets that stood out:

Nilay Patel (1:11:31): "The web is the place where the information is, is quickly getting abstracted away to the web is the database that the new AI Google search synthesises for you."

Nilay Patel (1:16:05): "The web is a miracle. Straightforwardly, the web is a miracle. We have, in the world, a giant interconnected interdependent mostly open application platform. That's weird."

David Pierce (1:19:18) asks “Do we still need websites?” And after a bunch of interesting discussion including a quote from Sundar Pichai saying “What is the web but a series of databases” and eventually lands on this thought:

"The fundamental question here is what happens when display adds don't work anymore? What is the business of the web for the people that have traditionally relied on display ads? [...] but if the web is a series of un-rendered databases, the whole business of the web is suddenly immediately gone."

Alex Heath: Are websites just going to become like driving a vintage car? It's going to be this thing you do because it's a luxury, it feels good, it's a bespoke unique experience, it's not as efficient, but you do it and you spend more money. I kind of feel like that's the direction websites are going to go. #

In recent weeks, a lot of public companies are starting to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, doing the Saylor playbook. There are some websites poping up tracking these bitcoin treasury companies. It's interesing to see the distribution, they are all over the world. Could be the start of some sort of Bitcoin mania. #

CZ, Binance CEO (28:53): "There's a lot of data that we don't store, and now we are going to be smarter about how we store our data. They should be stored in a permissioned way, that we only allow access when we want to, and we should be able to monetise out of it. So your health data, you can be annonymised and used to train different AIs. Every interaction you have, every thought you have etc, if you want to you should be able to digitize that, blockchain tokennize it, and then be able to monetize it." #

CZ, Binance CEO (33:18): "What we are short on is not ideas. The same ideas, the same people have. What we lack on is strong founders that have very strong conviction, founders who are mission driven. Founders who are money driven...in this industry, in the crypto industry though, it's quite easy to raise 10, 50, 100, even more millions of dollars. People who are money driven, once they raise 100 million they think they have made it and the drive they kind of lose it. People who are mission driven, they continue to go. And also people who are mission driven, when there is some adversity, they plough through it. From our perspective what we lack most is strong founders in the space. We have a lot of strong founders, but we need way more, we need 10 X more. Strong founders with conviction, with ability to execute. If you have all 3, there is so much money to be made. You don't even have to think about money, the money will just come." #

Quite a crazy few days for me, hopefully things have settled at least for a short while. The world keeps on turning :) #

Not the most productive day, quite strange in places, but there were quite a few nice bits too. A very pleasant stroll along a big river, and some very tastey food. Everyone enjoying the sunny weather as best they could. #

Lots of crazy stuff happening seemingly everywhere at the minute. Feels like it's important to stay upbeat about things. #

I've never been to Syria but I've seen first hand people living in very difficult conditions in other parts of the world so I can imagine how this might feel for the Syrians. All we in the west have heard for so many years is all these terrible things happening in Syria, so I'm just so happy there's some hope for them finally. Best wishes for all. #

It's interesting to see that the US and the Saudis are getting on. This article made me smile a bit. It wasn't all that long ago, probably a decade ago, that I got pulled over into secondary at the US - Canadian border. I was going for a weekend snowboarding in Vermont. What was the issue? I had UAE stamp in my passport, because I had been to Abu Dhabi a few years before. Why had I been there? I was doing solutions architect work there for a US company! They were building a new television broadcast center there and I was integrating our software into their internal workflows and systems.

Anyhow the trip went well, I found the emeratis to be very friendly. It was kind of wild as the plane was landing in the early evening, looking down across the vastness of the desert, to see in the distance tiny pickup trucks and people riding camels battling the sand storms.

How times change. I hear and see lots of tech entrepreneurs visiting the region the last couple of years. #

I just rewatched the very cool Harold White space warp drive explanation that was featured on the latest Rogan. It's at 25:42 if you want to skip straight to it. The thing that I keep wondering is that if you are traveling at say warp 5, how do you ensure you don't smash into anything? The stoping distance at WARP5 has got to be spectacularly long, and I would have thought that across such large distances the chances of hiting something that is vaguely space ship sized must increase. #

Netlify support did finally get around to updating their cli github action, so all my deploys are working again. Thanks to those that took the time to post their similar experiences in the thread. #

All sorts of strange issues today. As well as all the deploy problems, I had some really quite bizare interactions with GPTs today. I have previously had some good experiences working on CSS with AIs, but today was with javascript, and it was really quite terrible. I was trying to do something very simple, and the AI was repeatedly failing, and adding complexity while doing so. So I asked it to remove the styling that it had added without asking me, and it said yep removed it. And it hadn't. This went on for at least 30 mins. Over and over it would say that it had removed it, but then it still hadn't, and it would even check itself and say, oh yes I didn't remove it, then still fail to remove it.

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before, and I can't believe I hadn't thought if this, and I also can't believe I haven't heard anyone talking about this yet. How do we know that the GPT companies aren't just barely training their models, then releasing them to billions of users half baked, so that the users train them for free without knowing it. Surely this is bound to happen as VC money dries up. #

Having some errors with the deploy to Netlify this morning. This is just a test post. Bit of a mystery since the status page doesn't show any relevant errors or incidents. #

There's definitely some type of issue on Netlify this morning as far as I can tell. I've openned a support case. The good news is that since I run a static site all powered by git, I can continue writing posts locally and they will sync up later, the bad news is that nothing new is currently being added to the live site. #

Well I am able to deploy directly to Netlify, hence you can read this post, but deploys via Github Actions appear to be completely blocked for me. I haven't seen that before in all the years I've had my sites on Netlify. It's a bit strange. No reply yet on the support forum site, almost 7 hours after reporting it. Not great. Especially since deploys to all my sites are currently affected. #

What with the Trump tarrifs, new US trade deals being struck, and the new pope, it feels like a lot of big things are sliding into place. I wonder whether this could be the beginning of a nice bit of momentum for everyone. #

This whole transition to using AI tools is going to be very complex. Of course that's nothing new to hear, but I get a sense that some are starting to get a feel for the size of the issue at hand. Reality is very very complicated and it took humanity literally millions of years in a shared reality to build the current non-AI "solution". I feel like we need to be careful, but also not too careful, sometimes you have to press on reguardless. But also, empathy, kindness. #

Nothing huge or major today, but I did fix a long standing bug on the linkblog that had been causing a display issue on some links. Basically if you used a file editor that adds a newline at the end of files when saving them, then that caused the linkblog link created from said file to not have space between the link text and link domain, which looked kind of bad. I was having to use an annoying workaround using the linux truncate command to remove the newline after each save. Anyhow that's fixed now. #

Figured I'd try for one more feature for the redesign. Here's a bunch of text. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. And if I've done this right, there should be a picture in the top right of this note. #

Just discovered a small bit of collateral damage from the site redesign. A lot of the site links on the about and portfolio pages were 404ing. I've updated them, so they now point to the correct place. Sorry, the links should work again now. #

Just had a strange but interesting conversation with ChatGPT about Belgium politics and belgians. I learnt a lot. Wish I could have asked it to draw a few more pictures. I felt a good representation necessitates much more creativity. Then again perhaps my questions could be better too.

It asked me to try again tomorrow. Anyways, check out the conversation. #

Following yesterday's redesign, I've been re-organising the menu items and pages on the blog this morning so they make more sense. It's not exactly right just yet, but it's better than it was. The problem is that "blog" is what we call the entire site, and the main page of that site is a page that display the blog posts, notes items and links all interleaved. But the menu items give you a way to view these individually as well. However since /blog is the site main page, then where do you put the page that shows just the blog posts? Bit of a connundrum. Well I've opted for /posts. As in 'only the blog posts'.

The whole things is compounded slightly by the idea of archives. Basically this is just a way to find posts by navigating a date folder structure. I won't go into it here, but you'll see the problem if you click around a bit. Integrating individual posts with the ability to have archives isn't trivial. I've noticed others are having similar issues on their blogs. Anyways, things are getting better slowly, bit by bit. #

I ended up figuring out the archives issue I mentioned earlier. I was able to change just the breadcrumbs at the top of each page which show the current location. It wasn't as complicatd as I had thought, but just difficult to see. It wasn't actually all that difficult to change, which is a really good sign that my static generator is very flexible. Of course there are some simplifications that could be made, but on the whole, it's working rather well. I think it likely won't be too much effort to get it to a state where I can release it as open source. #

My new favorate thing: Writing CSS code with Gemini. CSS is actually kind of fun again. And now the blog looks half decent both in a web browser and on mobile. More changes to come no doubt. Technically I guess this is vibe coding. #

The ankle injury appears to have made some good progress. It's feeling less painful and wobbly today, and that's good because I did a bit of walking yesterday, so I was half expecting it to be all swollen today. I think I've also mostly recovered from yesterday's horendous alergy flareup, though sinuses are stil a bit red and irritated. Difficult getting going this morning though. #

Bit of a disaster getting places today because of a general strike, but the weather is nice. Having to make sure I'm not putting too much weight on the ankle, and not walking too much. Working on the mobile device today, listening to tech podcasts and writing cover letters as best I can. #

Seen on an old bronze / brass plaque, turned a metalic green by time and weather, over a small bridge in a small town earlier:

"Hommage a la 1ere armée americaine et la brigade piron - 5 September 1944"

Reminder that something big happened here 80 years ago. It's just part of every day life. #

Very difficult day today because I had another alergy flare up day. Completely exhausted. It's just impossible to do anything when you are repeatedly being punched in the face. That's not far off what it feels like. Seriously. Anyway still got some stuff done despite a very antagonistic world.

Why you trying to punch yourself in face world? #

The ankle had been getting somewhat better following 2 days of almost no walking. I went to the shops earlier though, just a 10 minute walk away, and it definitely still was feeling weak, I couldn't put any weight on it. I've been back now for a few hours and it feels quite painful again. Having an injury like this is basically the last thing I need right now. Very difficult to focus and stay motivated.

The weather has cleared up a bit, with some sunshine this afternoon. It even got a bit warm, reaching to the low twenties (Celcius). #

I've noticed that all the links in yesterday's 'today's links' section all have words missing at the end of the link text. It's because the editor I'm using to edit the files adds a newline at the end of files when you save them, and that causes the link posts generated from them to not have space between the text and the domain. I wrote about it previously. I tried to modify the editor to not add newlines, but that didn't work for whatever reason, so I found a workaround which was to use the 'truncate' command. I thought it was only removing newlines, but turns out it was just truncating the file by a small amount each time, so if I ran it multiple times, which I was doing by running it on all the links each time I created a new link, then after removing the newline, it would start removing actual words. Oh noes!

Maybe at some point I'll find a better solution, but for the minute I jut need to remember to only run it once per file after saving the file.

Computers are fabulous, but also kind of annoying sometimes. #

I've been checking out the NodeJS certifications that the Linux foundation are selling. They look kind of interesting, though I find their marketing a bit confusing. I guess the JSNAD and JSNSD would be most appropriate for a web developer. It's a bit confusing whether the certification is included in the training course or not. I know some industries really like these types of certifications. #

Cold and drizzly rain day today where I am. Ankle still hurting quite a lot, so I'm trying to keep that leg rested and perched up on a cushion. All the new blogging scripts, bash aliases and of course the laptop, are making writing much more enjoyable. #

Now that I have my feed reading setup on the new laptop with Feedly and Newsify, I am familiarising myself with how everything looks. Around the start of the year, I pruned my RSS feeds and orgnanised them into two groups, News and Bloggers. News has stuff from media publications, organisations, that kind of stuff, while Bloggers is basically just for individuals running their own website. It's super simple and feels really clean. #

Jim Nielsen appears to have figured out the whole having your websites on different subdomains thing. When I did it myself, everything felt very scattered to me, which is why I decided to move to having everything on a seperate domain. Jim's setup looks pretty cool though. He's also got a lot of neat things on the websites like inbound and outbound links, useful stats, social validation, projetcs, notes. I think the fact that his main landing page doesn't have any tabs, menus or sidebars is crucial. #

I've managed to somehow twist by ankle so I've been hobbling along the past few days. It's swollen and really hurts to walk. So I'm trying not to put too much weight on it.

Making some progress on setting up the laptop. I think I finally got a cross platform solution for daily note taking using Notion. I've also gotten all my Bookmarks synched between all my devices using Google Chrome sync. And while I was on the organising front, I removed android apps I wasn't using, re-organised the ones I am using, and I just improved my blogging workflow by adding some bash aliases that will make it easy to create the markdown files I use for posts. Adding the uuids, date and times has been a real pain, as well as naming the files. With the new aliases that will all happen instantly and be always correct.

I also decided I haven't been listening to enough music recently, so I logged back into Spotify after many years not using the account, and used their very intuitive software to tell them what bands I like. It was a little trip down memory lane, passing through all the major music epochs of my life, with Spotify suggesting bands as I clicked on ones I liked.

One day all these small niggley things you have to do when you setup a new machine will be automatic. Though it's definitely getting easier in many places. There is a long way to go. #

Setting up a basic blogging environment on the new laptop. If this note makes it onto the website then it worked! #

Very hectic few days, so I haven't had much of a chance to do any blogging. I've been spending quite a lot of time setting up the new laptop, lots of sort of annoying issues that I've needed to iron out, maybe I'll get some time to write about them soon. Mostly they have been related to re-activating various accounts and online tools. The laptop itself is very great. I have things in a functional state, but still quite a bit to do. I have found some temporary accomodation which should make things a bit easier. I just moved in earlier today, I will be here for the next month, at which point I will have found a job, and be in a more stable situation. Lots to do. #

I just bought a new Mac Book Air 15". I've been trying to buy a laptop for something like 4 years now, so as you can imagine, I am quite happy :) #

Day trip into the capital today. Really sunny weather, cold in the mornings but by afternoon really quite warm. And oh my gosh Europe can be so very beautiful. #

I figured out a compromise as for the dotfiles dilema. Fully updating the dotfiles was indeed too big a job for right now, however progress was too slow not to do something, so I've created a temporary bashrc file containing alias' for navigation, file creation and file editing for all the basic blogging tasks I do day to day. That should make things a big more streamlined. Also backed it up. #

Some internet connectivity / WiFi issues today for some reason. Thankfully with a static website powered by git, I can still blog without complete interuption. #

Matthew Mazinski on the Peter McCormack Podcast [30:42]: "A very interesting phenomenon, since Trump has taken power, you could look at all the defence stocks in the United States, they are down. In Europe they are up. Complete polar opposites, and big. European stocks are flying right now. Europea defense contractors are flying right now. Specifically because Europe knows that they need to shoulder more of the burden, because they need to rely on the United States anymore". #

Internet / WiFi connection appears to be operational again. #

A quick update to the issue I was having with the Notion UI a few days ago. I contacted their support team and after a bit of back and forth, and some screenshots, we were able figure out the issue. They had been describing a different interface for some reason. Turns out there is a button for turning text into a list. #

Turns out the text editor I was using in iOS was automatically removing newlines at the end of posts, but Neovim, which I'm using on Android, does not. That resulted in no space betwwen daily link text and it's domain. Removing the newline fixed the space problem. Now I just need to figure out a way to make this the default, because having the manually do it each time will be way too tedious. #

I really need to update my dotfiles so that they work on Android. It feels like a bit of an impossible task at the minute. Though I have the essentials of my publishing workflow working on Android, it's so tedious to do many things. Normally I would customize my bash shell, adding shortcuts and customisations that would speed things up, eliminating repetitive tedious steps in my workflow. That normally would go in the dotfiles. However updating the dotfiles I fear could become a much bigger job than I want to tackle right now. Classic programmer catch 22 situation. #

I've been testing out the Notion app on Android today, because I really need a replacement for OneNote which is so horrible to use. Notion looks great in lots of ways, but it seems impossible to turn existing text into a bulletted or check list. You have to know before you start typing that you are going to be writing a list. That's totally impractical, makes it very hard to work alongside existing apps. Cut and pasting a list from another app just isn't possible, as far as I can tell. #

As part of last week's Android setup I have installed all major GPTs. So that's ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. I've been using them to answer basic questions, like for instance which are the best Android text editors and git clients. The answers have been quite good.

Today I noticed that there was a push notification that Grok had been installed. I had tried to install it a few days ago but was told it wasn't available yet but that I could opt for it to auto-install when it was available, which I did. When I opened the app, this time instead of just using it a bit like a web browser, I decided to "have a chat" with it. It was pretty interesting, and to be honest quite fun.

We talked about general life stuff, and that turned into a conversation about my software development projects, and I gave Grok links to the docs, and it was able to read through them and asked me some useful questions. It was kind of like a brainstorming session where you are trying to find a way to best present your product. It was neat. I got the impression that I could have gotten very technical if I had wanted to.

Later we also talked about the Trump tariffs and the effect on the stock markets and general chaos around the world. Grok was able to search through live market data and correlate with tweets from the past few days. Everyone it seems is moving to safety, basically that's treasury bonds and gold. After a bit of back and forth we came up with a set of metrics to watch to get an idea of when the tides will be turning and folks will be starting to get back into Bitcoin.

Then I ran out of messages. I guess I used all my quota. Oh well.

Pretty cool though. I am wondering now how else I could use AI in daily activities. #

Just a test note to see if the notes feature is still working. If this note appears as the last post in the current day then this test worked! :) #

Just listened to Willem Dafoe on the Louix Theroux podcast. Very strange experience listening to it while the bloke in the prison cell periodically looses his shit, while me and the other two blokes in here in the ajoining room sit quietly, while officers from the main room periodically entrr and leave room with cigarettes, water and food for everyone but me. Can’t say I was fully able to appreciate the podcast. The bits I did hear were quite good. #

I’m listening to lots of podcasts while stuck in this bizare situation, but it’s even more impossible than in the shop cafes, because there is so much crazy stuff going on. Starvation, thirst, prisoners, police officers. Really very far from an ideal situation. Sorry dear readers, I imagine this makes fir really terrible reading. I eish the world would allow just a tiny bit, instead of this constant walking into total blocking of everything. #

John Gruber: "Project Digits is a genuinely innovative idea. And Jensen Huang is a charismatic presenter. He’s good. But one thing that’s very clear to my eyes is that they didn’t rehearse enough. Or more specifically, they didn’t rehearse nearly as much as Apple did when Apple performed live keynotes. Part of Steve Jobs’s on-stage appeal was that he came across as largely winging it, speaking off the cuff from an outline of prepared Keynote slides. But that was an illusion. Jobs rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, and then rehearsed some more. Jobs might have been better than anyone else even if he had just winged it, but he still put in the work of rehearsing long hours to be as good as he could be."

Given that Gruber has been one of the most faithful Apple reporters over the years, really interesting to hear his take on Nvidia’s new Digits project. Some great anecdotes. #

I notice Zuck is on Rogan today. He always seems to appear on podcasts at the same time as big events are happening to me. It’s very bizare.

Also what a week for the wildfires in LA to happen. Was looking at some posts on twitter last night. That looks completely foobared. Never seen anything like it.

Saw a post on Threads from Kevin Rose. Apparently his house got burned to the ground. The whole thing looks not far off a scene from a nuclear bomb aftermath movie. #

For whatever reason, Rogan podcasts are not downloading. Both the Zuck and Mel Gibson podcasts are not downloading. They keep failing at around 60-70% complete. Other pods, though they are taking ages, are successfuly downloading. Strange. #