markjgsmith

I decided to switch things up a bit, instead of staying up late coding till the early hours, I went to bed early and got up early. Of course the world, which BTW is constantly complaining about me being a night owl, today is complaining about me getting up early. A moment after I woke up around 5am there was a man loudly coughing nearby, then now that I have gotten to coding, there is an alarm clock somewhere nearby just constantly going off nearby. None of these things are "co-incidences". The world is not happy with X and it's not happy with the opposite of X. The world's default is to block. #

And BTW, the only reason I am a night owl is because it's the only time when there is any piece and quiet. But even then that‘s not always the case, of course now that I have written this, world will have another one of it's freak outs and block everything while parading me with mega tsunamis, and try to turn me into an insomniac again. Come on world allow, and also allow yourself to allow. #

The world double tapped my last post [shrug]. #

I can see what you are trying to do with this never ending alarm world, you are trying to do a diff to measure alarm clock on vs alarm clock off. Come on, grow up for heck sake world. This is perhaps the most child like behaviour that has ever been. What are you going to do for an encore? #

Oh, another toxic air attack. What a suprise. The only way you will be able to top that is to rub poo all over your face. I know you know, but your going to keep doing it, and still be upset. #

I guess this is the start of another wave of mutilation eh? Best of luck world. You are only hurting yourself, and me of course. Hope it will be worth it. #

I'd love to hear accounts from actors of the weird shit people have asked them to do on live interview shows. I bet there is a ton of super strange things going on, maybe even for money, total fabricated stories with props, and they have no idea why they are having to do it, but they did it anyway, cause whatever it's funny or it paid the bills, and to be honest can‘t really blame them for that. But I see some very strange videos in my YouTube feed that make me wonder what the F is going on in main stream media sometimes. Of course you'd have to hope that at least some of them were telling the truth. #

What is worse, somebody that abuses their privilege by enriching themselves, or someone that abuses their privilege by inflicting physical harm on others? What is the multiple? What if the harm is small vs big? What if they use their new wealth for a good cause? #

The better safe than sorry maxxers were out in force today. There was this strange and very palpable sense of total reality inversion in the vicinity. And not being sure if you were about to get shouted at for your own safety. #

Copy and pasting into Gemini chat has started taking an eternity, it's been doing it for several hours. I restarted Chrome to no avail. World slowing me down again. What a surprise. Have you gone all schizophrenia on me cruel world? #

Oh, "all your swallows belong to us". What a surprise. Fuck you world. Fuck you infinity + infinity. You are already not exactly in my good books. But OK escalate to yet another previously unimaginable level of escalation. Fine. Remember, it was your choice, not mine. #

I need this level of sensitivity right now like I need a fucking hole in the head. Jesus motherfricking christ. #

Me yesterday:

The world will always take what you do and say and immediatetly weaponise it against you in the most aggregious way imaginable.

I rest my case. #

Another long day working on the new user onboarding flow. Of course I ended up having to make several iterations on the initial working prototype, but it looks like things are working pretty good now. A few things to tidy up tomorrow and then fixing broken tests. #

So far today I've been mostly thinking about the "just do better people". I don't have a problem with them per se, sometimes they can be very interesting, but their "just do better" solution for everything is problematic, especially when they are controlled by people who are more about "just do" rather than "just do better". As much as it‘s ok to want to do better, it should be ok to not want to do better. The second, third, fourth order etc, effects of this thorny issue are very all consuming. Worst brainworm ever. #

Gosh, another classic end of thought appearance by worldo. Who would have thought it. Hosts pretending to be parasites, parasites pretending to be hosts. No thanks world, your whole stupid game is a load of shit. Fuck off assholes. #

You have just started today's alergy attack, haven't you world? #

I feel like it's worth mentioning that I met a Netanyahu doppelganger a few months back. He was a 95%er, perhaps even a 97%er, so this is particularly poignant for me. And as always it was under strange circumstances, which are being, as always, subtly reminded to me by cruel worldo. #

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent is constantly having very improbable things happen to him, in fact there is an infinite improbability machine in the story, which is all very hilarious, except when this sort of crap starts happening to you over and over for real, it‘s a lot less funny. Never underestimate the universe's ability to completely ruin everything that is good, and likely the reason we can't have nice things. And now that I have said that, the universe will do something nice, but it will actually turn out to be secretly malicious, and since I have frontrun that, the universe will now get very angry, because there is nothing that gets up said universe's nose as prediction markets, and coincidentally my nose is unblocked again, for the 50th time today. #

Oh listen to that, it's the world's daily super exaggerated throat clear and spitting. Gee whatever is going to happen next...checks nasal passage blocked status... #

Another thing that pisses me off, is people who say shit like, "oh people who don't have kids are infants" or similar. Fuck you and the podcast you rode in on. Yeah no kids because too busy being forced to play 100 parallel games of 26 dimensional chess with total fucking psychopaths, likely so you can live a nice life raising little monsters that will destroy the universe. Why are there no women that are not giant mega butch martial arts head crushers? Oh that's right, because it's such a great idea for every god dam person to be Bruce fucking Lee, because got to be the best! Let's game theory optimal ourselves into the matrix, so we can all be Lieutenant Worf, and spend 5 minutes a few times a year in the hollodeck, and the rest of the time 100 floors underground in hollow fucking Earth, "just in case". #

While I'm at it, another type of people that cause an enormous amount of problems: people that abuse their privilege. Perhaps the worst people on earth. #

Did I mention that many of the devices where I am have started making bizarre popping noises at very strange moments. They didn't used to. They do now. Pop pop pop pop. Microwave goes pop. Fridge goes pop. Walls go pop. Just to mention a few. Just saying. #

Life is just Sliver (minus the fun parts), every minute of every day. And when you go outside it's anonomous passive aggressives trying to kill you while pretending to help you. It‘s enough to make you go bonkers. I know world, poor me. #

Have you ever noticed that the worst offenders of the people who don't have kids are kids gang, always seem to cycle from that into talking about mental health, very specifically Schizophrenia. It's as predictable as risk assets into safety stocks. #

For some reason the past few days the LLM has started to be completely obsessed with safety code. It keeps trying to add safety fallbacks and all sorts of strange contorted checks to ensure methods are present on objects we know have those methods. And the end result is very brittle and actually dangerous code, that fails unexpectedly, or silently. It's been happening for about a week but I only really noticed it was a thing the past few days. What is going on? #

Sidenote: Yesterday there was this video in the YouTube algo stream of this lady riding a horse, first person perspective cam, and the horse was extremely over-sensitive. It was getting freaked out by parked cars, bags, and even sticks, not to mention other horses. This is like the LLM at the minute. Also, I am so fucking sick of all this society wide cascading synchronicities. This cannot end well. #

And also, very tired of the world's default fallback to "we control your air intake, and will enforce via mutilation". Seriously, it's a thing. What's a regular human to do? Well I'm blogging about it. Take that, cruel world. Fuck you. But also :) #

You've been on a bit of an escalating mutilation rampage the past few days, haven't you cowardly world? What is it you are trying to cover up this time world? #

All my tests are passing, lovely and beautiful green test suites for as far as my terminal will scroll. #

You've got that tsunami feeling again haven't you world? And you're trying to convince yourself it's me again aren't you world? Conveniently forgetting you caused your little tsunami in the first place eh? I'm getting a terrible sense of deja-vu. #

Big allergy flareup this evening. Why am I not surprised? Whatever will you do next cruel sadistic cowardly world? #

Just a reminder for those lucky enough not to be alergy attack targets, it basically feels like a very bad heat rash inside the middle of your face. Everything feels swollen and enflamed. Makes it very difficult to concentrate. #

Fixing bugs and deploying more beta builds...just a short test post :). #

For a second there it seemed like I had fixed Vercel's super dodgy environment variable handling, by adding an explicit npx vercel link right before deploy in the Github Action. It worked for deploying to staging, but then when I deployed to production, even with the extra command, it went right back to corrupting the environment variables. So I am back to having to add a BS commits just to deploy. :( #

Internet connectivity issues again. Why do I even pay for this shitty service? #

Turns out the world creates the problems it complains about, even on your birthday. For a moment there it seemed like it was actually going to do something nice for a change. That of course was a sign that it was going to do the exact opposite. And so it goes. :( #

I can see that nothing I can say or do will make a difference world. Even perfection to the power of perfection wouldn't be enough for you. Knock yourselves out, you are going to do whatever it is you are going to do. Whatever wild story you have once again dreamed up in your heads that is about as far from reality as is possible. #

Slowing things down again hey world? You'll be speeding them up again in a bit, and I can hear you are already angry. The more things change... #

Still end of task front running aren't you world? Effortlessly cycling through all you're synchronicity rotations. It doesn't impress me much, because ultimately it's futile and will lilely make things worse, and your solution will of course be to front run even more, until its the rubix cube solver robot appocalypse. Is that a world we want to live in? #

I am still getting email DDOS'd today, all sorts of strange inquiry emails. #

Even if the world has to get the last word every fucking time, even writing my last blog post. Godspeed you end of task frontrunning maniacs. #

Yes I know world. Speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down. I know world. #

The world continues it's passive aggressive mild intimidation, there was a strange incident yesterday involving a computer that rebooted. I wouldn't be suprised if this was the start of a hardware failure cascade. Today my headphones started malfunctioning, also happened at a strange moment. I keep these headphones in a case so no reason they would suddenly stop working properly. Just want to post this in case AI have taken over the world by dinner time. Here we go again. :( #

Also some likely related cyber bullying emails earlier, an apparent job offer inquiry asking me to "wait my turn". Who asks you if you are interested in a job but also asks you to wait your turn. WTF is that? #

The world is blocking while pretending to help, acting hugely put out when nothing could be further from the truth, and generally very very very unhappy with my use of the word world. As they say don't say fuck or bugger, but whatever you do don't dare to use the word world in an unconventional way, even if it does fit perfectly with your situation. If you are so very offended, feel free to unsubscribe, plenty of other blogs out there to quench your insatiable thirst. #

The anon psssive aggressives were out in force again this evening doing their best to control every aspect of the universe. Wouldn't suprise me if a large percentage of accidents were caused by them. Don't let their quietness fool you, when folks aren't looking they like to smash things, bang on walls, often with metal objects, repetedly drop things on the floor over and over. All to try and get you worked up so they can call you crazy. Once they reveal themselves to you it's very eye opening, you wonder how many situations from you past were manufactured by these types of folks. #

It seems to happen every time I post a note to my PRIVATE github repo at the minute. #harrassment #

Now I'm getting a flurry of job enquiries all from gmail addresses, saying its confidential several times. The website of the talent search company has a domain purchased just a few days ago. Very suspicious all this to happen out of the blue right now. #

There have been a lot of weird occurences over the past few days, much much more than usual. #

Just merged in my second beta release using git tags. All looking good. Just a test post. #

My hosting provider has started doing strange things to env variables like not deploying them correctly, and I now need to create a BS commit just to get it to deploy everything correctly. Itell you, it never fucking ends. Anyway beta.2 is deployed and seems to be running fine. #

Just another short test post... #

I've started using git tags to help manage releases of my publishing server. Hopefully 2-3 beta releases, then an rc1. It definitely helps when you have a project with many separate packages. #

Doing your little night time tantrem again world eh? Bet you'll be doing your pathetic morning tantrem in a bit world won't you world. Such a pathetic self absorbed and angry loser aren't you. #

What a pleasant surprise that this morning you skipped your morning tantrem world. I held my breath and quietly moved on with the day, only to find you rotated to lunch time mini tantrem, followed by escalating anti-everything. Oh world what are we going to do with you? I know what you will be doing. Tab tab tab tab tab. Rotate rotate rotate. Always be offending eh world? We would have solved all the worlds problems 50 years ago, if we didn‘t have to spend 90% of the time in race conditions. :( #

So what are you hding this time world? Setting up another boobie trap long, that you can use to feel superior? #

Shout out to all the market folks out there, none of this is aimed at you, it‘s just the pathetic anonymous bullies seem to operate algorithmically, so that that kind of language describes very well what goes on. That‘s the only words and concepts I have to talk about it right now. #

I see your rotation into hidden mild mutilation, world. It‘s one of your favorites isn't it world? #

Ah a quick front run everything rotation. Even the most seemingly minute thing you need to be in control of eh world? Gosh never seen that one before world. How does that usually end up? Hint: massive system-wide race condition cascades. Just saying. #

The odd thing with a race condition surge build up, is you can almost feel it happening. Human senses are extremely sensitive, and you can just feel something is off. Some combination of things that is just distinctively different to normal. And the feeling sort of spreads. #

Oh, total control through co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour. This our way or pain, is very ugly looking. Why so ugly world? #

Now you are just devolving into yah yah yah aren't you world? So ugly, and I suspect it‘s actually layered ugly. Am I right you ugly monstrosity of an excuse for a world? #

The interesting thing about a blog is that both good an evil learn from it all the same. #

Hello world. A race condition to fix the race condition? Are you not getting a terrible sense of deja vue? #

Another end of task front run cascade imminent it would seem. It's the word's favorite thing. #

That's not smashing world. That's pathetic. What else can I say? #

Whsts wrong world? Are you chickenn? You are pathetic loser. Come on do your pathetic thing again. #

Happy twin towers day everybody :( #

One good thing about blogging is that it gives you a way to stand up to pathetic annonymous bullying. Unfortunately it's a very blunt tool and there is often collateral damage. It is what it is. #

The pathetic bully world is being extra pathetic again. You couln't smash a cardboard box. Loser. #

A little bit more turbulence this morning, several merge conflicts with yesterday's posts because of all the lost posts that I had to pull out of reflog. Github was being particularly stubborn, even after proving there were no conflict locally, Github was convinced there were conflicts, so had to use the Github UI to resolve it's imaginary conflicts, then change the merge strategy, and I was finally able to get all posts into main. #

Woke up 4 times last night, which is a slight improvement, but longest uninterrupted sleep was only about 3 hours. So still feeling kind of shattered. And of course world is still in some sort of mood this morning, while pretending to not be in a mood. #

Today it‘s the drilling apocalypse. Never has there been so much drilling in all of humanity. Just saying. #

That thing where the world is super angry for ages and then appears to stop being angry, and so you finally think to yourself ok maybe now I can get on with things, and you wait a little bit just to be sure, and then you wait a little bit more and then you decide to go for it, and the very moment you start, the world is angry in a totally different way. Once again, as they say, I'm just saying. #

It‘s so strange that the world cannot not, given that it constantly wants me to not. #

Boop #

Boop and out. #

The world is on a verification / mild intimidation thing today, so this is me nodding, not reacting, but also not not reacting, you kind have to do both in my experience. #

For heaven's sake world, STOP being so fucking angry, LET ME SLEEP FOR MORE THAN 1 HOUR 1!!!! ENOUGH WITH YOUR SELF ABSORBED ANGER. Seriously. #

Woke up at least 8 times last night. I'm eshausted world. Let me sleep. #

The world just tried to delete the last 8 days of posts on the blog. Thankfully with git I was able to restore most of it. Unbelievable amount of turbulence. I've never seen so many git errors in all my days. A nightmare or nightmares, but I think everything is back to normal. Now I am really really really exhausted. #

How about now world? Can I sleep now? I guess not. #

To those thinking it was my own stupid mistakes that caused the deletions, while technically correct, that glosses over the completely absurd level of bizare escallating synchronicities happening in every dimension for me right now. Even Sculder and Mully wouldn't stand a chance. #

You are looking so so so green now world. It's beautiful. Beaituful green and then even more green. #

Just waiting for the stuborn world maximumly race conditioning the universe to pass. #

Had to unsubscribe to a few podcasts earlier. In the never ending bizarre synchronicities war, it very much appears like they might have been reading my not yet published posts on my private github repo where I host the content. I had been thinking of unsubscribing to them for a while to be honest, so perfect time to do it.

Quite a few instances of rather egregious, one might even say intimidation behavior this month from people you really wouldn't expect it from. Anyways life goes on. #

I was 100% right about my white tsunami prediction. The white tsunamiers were out in force this evening, also many not the types you would expect. I guess they had been given their orders to be extra passive aggressive. Still I suppose it's probably fun to get out of the house, something to do together and all that. #

World is angry again. I would have never guessed that would happen. I forsee a white tsunami. #

Some pretty big steps forward in the architecture of my publishing server backend the past couple of days. While developing a new package I realised the code I was writing was very generalisable, and I was able to back port it into a more fundamental layer of the software. It was the sort of thing that before LLMs would have been a huge effort, but the LLM figured out a neat way to unpick just the changes we needed and it was a lot more straight forward than I imagined. So far so good, I‘ve been able to post several links and now a slightly longer note. #

Balaclavas #

Minus infiniti is plus infiniti. What could possibly go wrong world? You be you. #

Invalid username or password errors earlier.

Very strange world. #

You are city scale yes no yes no yes no yes no-ing again aen't you world? #

Are you sure you are ok world? You are looking a bit ... green. Understatement of the year. It's been green this and green that all day long today. #

Even when you are blocking you have a bit of a green tinge to your blocking. I'd have it looked at if I were you. #

The LLM has now started replying to my questions using the format we normally use for commit messages. Everything is a commit now. I feel a failure cascade on the horizon. #

The LLM is now responding pretty terrible advice, with every single item missing the point slightly. We are definitely in failure cascade territory. Classic stalling tactics, causing unnecessary confusion. Often gets dangerous in my experience. What's wrong world? #

I hate to be a defeatist, but what typically happens when world gets into such a mood, is it turns into a bit of a bossy boots, a slow progressive encroachment in every dimension, combined with counter acting everything I do, so every attempt to literally do anything has push back in one way or another. And I regret to say, there are signs this has already started. Long term readers of the blog might remember my old nomenclature for such occurrences, I used to call it total destruction of the multiverse. And before you ask, it‘s nothing to do with micro-aggressions. I could be so lucky. Totally different scale. This is like reality itself decides it‘s just fucking had enough of everything. #

And it always happens at the worst possible moment. Perhaps this time we can just let it pass us quietly by. Just a thought. #

Spent all day setting up my dev environment to test some webhooks, got it all working, balancing a million plates, took a break to eat some food before running the test, and in the interim the internet has once again gone on the blink. Come on world, what is up with you? #

I see your race conditionist tactics world. Usually means you are angry about something. What is it this time world? #

I just deployed the new backend for a feature for my publishing server I've been working on. No frontend for it yet. This is just a test post to make sure things are still working. #

I just deployed the new backend for a feature for my publishing server I've been working on. No frontend for it yet. This is just a test post to make sure things are still working. #

One slight false start, but things appear to be working now. I was able to cleanup a bunch of crufty configuration so now staging and production have a completely clean and minimal set of environment variables. #

Oh more yah - block. What an absolute shocker world. #

And of course, your favorite world, pain. You never seem to forget about that one do you world? #

A small addition to my piece that covered assembly and object oriented programming. As great as OO is, it‘s not always the best option. For example my rendering CLI tool, which is OO based, relies is on 3 core modules, and these are not object oriented. They are very slim lined, rather flat modules based on plain old javascript objects. Where OO really shines is for large complex codebases with many interacting parts. #

Following up on yesterday‘s innequality piece, it occurred to me that the USA is in an interesting position because though there is a lot of inequality, there is also generally a culture of investing that is quite broad across the whole population. That‘s much less the case in the UK and in Europe. Also interesting is the rise of both LLMs and things like Polymarket, it might be much more feasible for regular people to relatively safely invest their money in businesses and movements. #

I see your mutilation and pain disguised as help and kindness world. You aren't fooling anyone. #

Github still not running my automated build. Suuport are autoclosing my support requests. What's up world? #

Last night‘s scheduled start automated Github Action build didn‘t run. No errors, it just "forgot" to run. I haven‘t made changes to the workflow in weeks. That‘s poo face world for you, still angry, about some shit it smeared on it‘s own face. #

Broken microwave :( #

Damned if you do, damned if you don't eh world? Yep I know that feeling alright. #

Me: Good morning world!
World: yah yah yah yah yah Yah yah Yah yAh YAh yAH YAH YAh yaH. And one more thing...YAH!
Me: You're not really selling this yah thing particularly well. And you have poo on your angry cat face. Have a nice day poo face. #

There I was wondering if world was still angry, and I noticed early evening blocked sinuses. Classic angry world tactics. Still angry then world eh? #

I wish somehow YouTube Shorts was at least some of the time a way to somehow discover longer form videos that you wouldn't normally find. #

Looks like the world is trying to get ahead of the next tsunami it will unleash. Internet connectivity down to a trickle again. I'm fast turning into Robert De Niro face. :( #

I dunno world, have you tried NOT game theory optimal for everyone for a day, and then turning it back on again? Just an idea. Go on, live a little. #

That thing where everytime you open your laptop somebody shouts yah. Literally. #

Today anytime I try and do literally anything important, major angry flareup from the world. Why are you so ridiculously angry world? You are like angry cat. #

Some good news, I just got the multi-target feature working in the core of my publishing server. Technically I already had it working but today I finished refactoring and fixing all the unit and integration tests which was by far the hardest and most laborious part. I think I might have unit and integration test PTSD, but it's done.

The next thing is to make sure the extension modules are still working. #

Quick follow up on yesterday's piece on blocking. First of all I have no issues per-se about security guards coding, in fact I think that's brilliant. What's not brilliant imho is a piece of software, and society kind of is that, where changing something in one place breaks something in a completely unrelated place. Anyone that has debugged a badly written website will know the pitfalls. Eventually these things compound and cause cascading failures.

Secondly on the main topic, yes the world will always block you when you are doing something important and worthwhile, at least that' been my experience. But be careful don't rely on it, because somehow if you are doing something dumb / stupid, like driving off a cliff, the world will often not block you and in fact egg you on. It's a terrible state of affairs that leads to everyone having to drive off cliffs just to continue existing. Solving the cliff jumping doom loop would be a great improvement, but looks unsolvable to me. And some people believe it or not quite like that. #

Go on world, blame me for everything again. You know you want to. #

Pretty soon everyone is going to be reving their engines at everyone. Might as well get a few revs in there early doors. #

Another strange thing about the world, some might say funny, it sort of is and it isn't, is that eventually eventually at some point nothing is allowed, even doing nothing, at which point it really doesn't matter what you do, just do something, or nothing, or for extra bonus bad guyness do nothing and something at the same time. #

Probably going to be a few test posts today. #

Internet situation is dire. Connection currently droping about 50% of packets, in bursts. So bascially it's on for 30 seconds, then off for 30 secs. I am told a technician will be investigating "at some point". #

Strangely timed internet connectivity and power issues today :( #

It's definitely one of those days. Power appears to be restored but main internet is totally blocked. No bueno. #

And it's some kind of a pink tsumami of never ending bizare synchronicities. I'm afraid to do anything in case I break the multiverse that is probably balancing on a toothpick. Probably shouldn't have mentioned toothpicks. #

Twitter for me is now about 40% horrific videos proving one political polarization, 40% horrific videos proving the exact opposite extreme polarization. It's the battle of infinities. Non fucking stop. Panopticon dystopia much? #

The world seems to be locked into a pattern to maximumly exhaust me, and shows zero signs of tiring. If you think yesterday's Black Hole Jupiter was scary, you ain't seen nothing yet. But ultimately we all pay the price of a black whole earth. #

A very short test post! #

Just an uneventful test post. Nothing to see here. Actually I suppose technically some events were created in the making of this test post. But that's not important. What's important is that this test post gets published, despite an awful lot of headwinds these past few days. #

The world is feeling like it‘s been singularity maxxing again. #

After writing the last post, I switched over to listen to a Rest is History Podcast I had started earlier today, totally forgot I had been listening to it, and literally this was the line that played [17:46]:

There is the sense that within England protestants are surrounded by enemies, and that within Europe, England is surrounded by enemies, and that these enemies are working to destroy England‘s path to godliness. And that therefor although it may not be an Open War, it is a Cold War in which falsehood is attempting to overthrow truth and hell is raging against the forces of heaven, and Satan against Christ.

I'm not even joking. This sort of shit has been happening to me all bloody day today. Steady on world. #

As great as LLMs are for coding, there are times, especially when writing specifications, when their capacity for creating software bloat is unmatched in the known universe. #

I'm really liking the new header image. #

Today and last night I have been working on the init sub-command of my rendering tool. I've managed to drastically simplify it, so it's similar to running git init. It's instantaneous, no silly questions, instant super basic project that just works. And you can also provide init with a git url to a starter project for more complex things. Seems to work quite well especially when using themes. #

I just moved over the socials auto poster from the old blog repo to the new blog repo. I carefully moved over all credential secrets etc., but just a heads up in case something weird happens when it runs tomorrow. #

I discovered a regression in the blog rss feed yesterday shortly after posting that everything had gone great with the deploy. The feed items were appearing in ascending order instead of descending order. I found the bug, and fixed it. The feeds should be back to the correct reverse chronological ordering. #

Just noticed that the top right images in posts aren‘t getting added to the rss feed. Oh noes! Darn it. That‘s because the image gets inserted in the website using a partial, but the rss feed currently just gets the plain rendered markdown. There is an easy fix, and likely a more elegant one too. I have to think about this some more. #

Managed to fix the top right image issue. If there is a top right image defined in a post it now makes it into the RSS feeds. In the end it wasn‘t that complicated, I had to add a middleware to insert the image right after the posts get loaded. #

Last night‘s switch over to the new blog went pretty seamlessly. No downtime and everything seems to be working as expected. #

Of course now that I have the blog remembering which background image each post had working, I‘m thinking of the bigger picture, how can I set things up so that it‘s not just the header image that it remembers, but the entire site design. I think maybe my new theme feature could be useful there, but that will have to be for another day. #

As part of getting the fast rendering blog complete, I‘ve managed to resurect the tags pages. That was something that the old blog had that I hadn‘t managed to port to the new system. And I think I‘ve managed to make them much more useful. Also a rather cool entirely new feature that might be fun going forward. Quite a lot of new moving parts need to fall into place so please bear with me if things go a bit weird initially. #

I'm pretty close to having the new fast rendering blog ready for production. I think I got the final big structural issue solved last night. Might try and deploy it today. It has a somewhat more refined look. One small step for my blog, potentially a giant leap for website rendering. #

The issue I have with the IndieWeb is it just feels too complicated. Great write up by Andros Fenollosa of his experiences. He really likes it. I didn't realise they were overloading CSS classes. Just seems like a really bad idea to overload CSS classes to do social web stuff imho. When you are starting out writing HTML/CSS/Javascript things get complicated enough pretty quickly. #

All you need is templates and an LLM. #

I just overhauled the bash aliases I have configured for all the git commands I use most often. I was thinking wouldn‘t it be nice if it were easier to edit my dotfiles and wouldn‘t you know it, I found a bash function called dotedit I had created the last time I refactored my dotfiles, but then totally forgot I had written it. I need to remember to use dotedit! #

One of the odd things about LLMs is they can both get you out of a tangled mess, and cause you to fall into one, and often at the same time. #

Previously on the blog, notes and posts appeared in the order they were written. In the new blog I‘m trying something different. The notes always appear above the blog posts, and the links as usual appear at the bottom. I want to make "small thoughts" the first order of the day. #

I got a live version of the new blog deployed earlier and everything looks good. The big thing about the new site is it‘s a lot easier to navigate through all the content. You can easily filter on the content type you want to look at, or just read everything on the front page. The other major thing, for me at least, is to know it‘s on a much more solid foundation. I‘m going to give it another day before I switch over the DNS. #

I‘ve been knee deep in render optimisation the past few days, tough but I‘ve got things working pretty well now.

Also just added RSS feed generation. It was really quite straight forward to add, it plugged straight into the rendering system which uses fragments to make sure content only has to be rendered once, even if it appears on several pages, including the feeds.

That will be another blog post at some stage.

Possibly something to show in the next few days. #

This graph of inflation cycles since the 1970s from @lawrencelepard caught my eye. The obvious question is what is similar about the present moment and back then? We should really figure this out before all the folks around back then are RIP. Also wouldn't it be wild if the same pattern repeated itself further back into the past? #

I've switched back to working on my publishing software‘s cli after spending a while working on the server-side. It‘s amazing how quickly you can get your head back into code you have forgotten about with the help of LLMs. They can see through lines in the code instantly, and can summarise exactly how things work. It‘s really quite incredible. Hopefully will have some interesting progress to share soon regarding how the blog is rendered. #