markjgsmith

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 #

Invalid username or password errors earlier.

Very strange world. #

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. #

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. #

Since I was previously posting about trillionaires, here's an angle from David Sachs that describes what wealth actually looks like practically speaking because it's not just a big pile of money.

We need better ways to more easily get a feel for what is normal and what is excessive in this realm. #

Yesterday's notes got rendered in to the site without issues :) #

Great new episode from Peter McCormack, talking with Fernando Nikolic about how they've both been building cool stuff with AI.

It's interesting seing how AI tools are empowering people to build their own custom software. People who wouldn't have previously interacted with Github repositories, environment variables or deployed code to hosting providers are starting to become software engineers.

I think content creation using these tools is well aligned with this trend. And you only need to understand a small subset of the commands to go from md file to published. #

Just added a blueprint to the config and a template in the template folder and now let‘s see if this works... #

Appears to have worked, a PR was created, the real proof it‘s operational will be if it gets rendered in tonight‘s build. #

I have always liked Christmas and eating cake. #

Unnexpected internet connectivity issues this evening. What is up with all this blocking world? :( #

Let's avoid the advertising distopia. What even is advertising, or distopia or indeed let's and avoid for the matter. Such is the importance of all this, but we probably shouldn't worry about it too much because guess what, that's a distopia too. Oh noes! We're all gonna die! :) #

I feel like we might be about to enter a phase where a large number of people are going to get trapped in impossibles, and where there are no right answers and you just end up hanging onto something for dear life and waiting for it to pass. Whatever ‘it’ is. The darkness possibly. The corners of reality that reality has forced us into. That maybe we are about to see some of the strange contortions that exist here there and everywhere. And with some sort of probabilistic mathematical certainty we will be forced into yet more contortions. And it might at times look very ugly. #

The world is on an epic allow blocking rampage at me today. It's hard to put into words. Perhaps I'll disappear into an acme hole. Feel like that would be the world's favorite option. Apparently I'm impossible. Well guess what world, if I'm impossible, then you're impossible too. #

It's really quite unbelievable but the world would like things to be even more impossible. That appears to be it's answer to everything. Just add more impossible. #

Destiny always seems to find a way to squeeze in one more more. I'm completely physically and mentally exhausted. #

It literally never ends, the literal next moment after the last note, and the world added another little extra bit on top. Literally literally literally. Literally.

It's pointless asking for a stop, because that means more. Everything means more. #

As far as I can tell, yesterday's fixes to the social media auto-poster Github Actions appear to have worked :) #

Another suspiciously timed allergy flare up day today. The world continues to be very unhappy with my imperfections. Likely another tsunami on the way. Life goes on. Looking forward to another day. #

The alergy attack appears to have past, took almost the entire day. It can be completely debilitating when it happens. Very hard to concentrate on anything. It's sort of difficult to describe, not entirely disimilar to how it would feel to have stinging nettles rubbed all over your face, and right into your eyes. Sometimes I describe it as being punched in the face. It really drains your life energy. Roll on tomorrow :) #

It took the whole night to download but it did finally download and I am now running Tahoe 26.1. So far most things seem to be working find, but somewhat worryingly the vpn app is behaving a bit strangely. I connects but none of the buttons in the interface work. The weird thing is that the issues started happening right before I installed the updates. After the OS update I updated the vpn app, but the issues persist. And people wonder why folks hate updating their software.

The biggest difference so far with Tahoe is that it changed the wallpaper from giant redwood trees to a sunny beach with giant rocks and snow covered mountains far in the background. Perhaps mountains are trending. I appear to be ahead of the curve on mountains. #

Looks like the worldo breakages aren’t quite over yet. My MacBook Air M4 just kernel panic’d and crashed while I was using VScode pushing code. Gemini seems to think it’s something to do with low level hardware.

This kernel panic was caused by an unexpected and unrecoverable error in the system's low-level hardware management software, likely concerning the Accessory Operating Processor (AOP) or a peripheral it controls (like the audio system or other internal controllers).

It is almost certainly not caused by a third-party application, but rather an issue in the macOS kernel, Apple's firmware, or potentially a rare hardware malfunction.

Not a particulary great sign. At the exact moment it happened a woman outside made a noise that can be best described as "very suprised". Also not a great sign.

I’m running updates now, it seems to be upgrading me to Tahoe 26.1, 14.62 GB of updates to be precise. Might take a while... #

I've been listening, and occasionally watching, the TBPN Podcast a lot recently. It occurred to me today that it might be this era's Techcrunch, in terms of the flow of interesting stuff that goes through them. It feels similar in a lot of ways, but it's a 10x version of it. Their analysis of the bizarre moment we are in is very often quite incredible and it's also a lot of the time fucking hilarious. Now it is a bit heavy tech bro style silicon valley cultureish, so you have to be ok with that, but it's very much it's own thing, and I find I'm even sort of into the ridiculous add reads. There are of course some bits that are a bit average, but I just skip through those. Overall it's really high signal. #

Quite bad allergies flare-up today. It’s a real pain. This seems to often follow after several days of tsunamis. #

I got pretty much right to the end of the refactor of the auto-poster, everything was working, and then I notice that the workflows in Github are suddenly corrupt, appearing as the path instead of the name of the workflow. That’s exactly the same thing that happened last time. This is not normal. Hey world can you please stop getting in a huff and breaking everything? Would you please consider it? #

The internet connectivity issues where joined by their friends broken kettle, broken headphones, and a whole lot of world being prickly. I had a feeling there was going to be a streak of broken things a few days ago when I accidentally broke my coffee cup after being repeatedly tsunamied by worldo. Hey ho, that’s how it goes sometimes.

Well I just finished a pretty big refactor of the Github Actions social media autoposter. Not tested yet but it’s looking pretty good.

Managed to get myself a new kettle and I had a spare pair of headphones tucked away, and the internet and vpn both seem to be stable again, so I was able to listen to some great podcasts earlier. It’s such a crazy great time we live in, even if it is very confusing a lot of the time. #

I've been putting the finishing touches to new post to social media Github Action workflows. It's looking real good, very close to having it working, and now the internet just went down :( #

Elon Musk on All-In Podcast [51:06]: “Try using any of the recent so called Open AI open source models, they don't work. They basically open sourced a broken, non-working, version of their models, as a fig leaf.”

Great interview, especially the bits at the end about solar energy. Ultimately all energy production leads to solar. I hadn’t heard this perspective before. It’s completely obvious if you are thinking about it from the right scale. But of course few of use are. #