markjgsmith

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 wigh folks, especially for it's 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 thi gs LLM, it's all so wordy, and you also end up feeling like some sort of computer psycologist. I wonder weather 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, 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. #

Me: "I’m currently sitting writing this in a small local police station in HCMC near Le Van Tam park. It’s very confusing, I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me." #

Slept in a little later than usual to try and catchup a bit on some sleep. Feeling better than I would have done otherwise but running a bit late compared to normal. I’m relatively happy with the amount of blogging from the past few days though not necessarily with the quality. Much of it has felt a but rushed and forced.

Anyhow, development-wise I’ve made a few small fixed to the RSS feed refactor that so far hasn’t had any major conplications so I’m going to slowly move ahead with that one small piece at a time, trying to make sure I don’t run out of build minutes.

Figured out that the logging synchronisation fix I made hasn’t worked. There was a bit of movement on the issue I raised in the debug module repo that said as much, but it was good to confirm it in my code. I have to re-read their latest advice because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it when I read it a few days ago. #

Following on from this piece I just wrote, which is effectively a dénouement post of the past few week’s blogging, I wouldn’t be suprised if worldo has a hissy fit and makes me ill. We shall see. I wrote this note because I just had an impromptu very brief runny nose, barely a few minutes after finishing said blog post. #

Jason Calacanis on the Nvidia Digits workstation [42:15]: "I’d say the thing that’s teally interesting about things that start as toys, or as hobbies, this feels like the raspberry pie, it feels like the PC in the early days. These things were toys and people were tinkering with them, and then an application comes out, and then people really want it, and then everybody has to have it. The Palm Pilot, the General Magic machines were these little digital assistants, they were PDAs, personal digital assistants, they had a dictionary on them, a calendar on them, they weren’t connected to the internet, you had to plug them in with a big fat cable to your computer to get the data to sync, it never worked, it took an hour, and then all of a sudden, now we all have iPhones and Android phones." #

I got quite a bit of rough sketch, slightly scrappy blogging done yesterday, and resolved a really annoying bug in my code. Several very interesting podcasts, all seemingly related at a high level. I had a quick look at the RSS refactor, I might try and fix a few bugs in that to get a feel for how much work it might be.

The thing with blogging is you need to absorb a bunch of stuff, have time to process and analyse it, putting it into context, before the good quality posts start to flow. The world at the minute doesn’t understand this and just expects posts to pop out on command. It’s constantly trying to maximum. But it doesn’t work like that. Also blogging doesn’t work if you are being starved and have no fuel in the tank so to speak, and that’s another of it’s favorite things to do.

Anyway here’s to hoping worldo will figure out a good balance, and allow itself to do the things it needs to do. #

Was planning to spend some time this morning reading and posting links, it’s been a few days since I’ve had a chance to do that, but worldo has other ideas. Specifically an exageratedly loud young teenage boy has situated himself nearby playing video games on a portable, smacking and door nocking the table over and over, as well as periodically having strange epileptic type convulsions of his pelvis. He’s wearing a school uniform. It’s almost as if he’s been sent to annoy me.

Earlier there was an apparent motorbike taxi bloke wearing a yellow top who wouldn’t sit down, insisting on standing next to the white washed grafiti dick. Then he kept leaving then coming back. Must have done it 5 or 6 times.

I guess I’ll read and post links later when worldo has gotten over it’s episode. Are you getting angry again worldo, while trying to say it’s me that is angry? #

Worth noting that yesterday I door knocked the glass at the sandwich store to get the attention of the sandwich guy bloke, who is always moody with me. It was a busy morning so I wanted to make sure yet another person didn't cut the queue ahead of me, something that has been happening almost everyday the past few days. As it happened it appeared he was already preparing my sandwich even though I hadn’t asked for it yet. He seemed annoyed at me. Yet was happy to recieve orders from the queue cutting overly loud and bossy women.

I decided against a sandwich this morning. Strange then that teenage boys sitting next to me are going on impromptu table knocking rampages today.

Worldo trying to create contradictions so it can get angry perhaps?

Also multiple coffee and small bottle of water situations today. Coffee and water bottle incidents have been trending since coffee was blocked a couple of days ago at another shop cafe. #

Konstantin Kisin [42:46]: "What people don’t seem to realise on the progressive left, for want of a better term, on the extremes is the cancelation, the silencing people, for shaming people for having mainstream political opinions or cultural opinions, they don’t seem to realise that they are then fueling this rise on the opposite side of the spectrum. That the more they push down here, the more this rises. Then they complain about what’s happening to the culture. And you say to them, do you not understand that this is partially being created by what you are doing here?" #

Gare Davis and Ed Zitron at CES 2025 [28:04]:

GD: Because everyone is so bought into it, if you make any objection during any Q&A panel, people are like SO surprised. It’s like you’re a heretic. It’s insane. It’s like you don’t believe in the project of humanity, to these people.

EZ: It’s like you don’t believe in Santa Claus

GD: It’s wild.

Note that Zitron has setup a sort of confessional with an actual fully stocked bar in the heart of the conference, and people are being amusingly candid about their CES experience.

They will be recording pods for the next few days. #

I’m finishing off a few smaller tidy up type features. Getting rid of some old configuration that’s no longer necessary. I had left it in while I was making bigger changes and put in new configuration alongside it, to avoid inconsequential things breaking. But now that the bigger changes are all implemented it’s time to remove the old config and fix any things that are affected. So far it’s as I expected, none of the old config was even being used for anything, so just removing it hasn’t caused anything to break.

After that I’m not totally sure. It will depend on how many build minutes are left. There is the RSS feed refactor, but since I got it working using the old structure, and I’m enjoying seing all my posts in the RSS reader, I’m thinking to leave that for a while. It would be nice to get that done at some point but it’s not urgent. The refactor is all written, it just needs testing, but my sense is it will take up lots of build minutes because the feeds plugin has an npm module cache, and that always eats up build minutes during testing because anytime you change anything in a plugin you have to refresh the module cache.

So more blogging would be great but worldo has started blocking things again the past few days. The new thing is coffee has been removed from one of the shop cafes I go to. They are suddenly only selling big boxes instead of single items. And of course it’s accompanied by people playing badmington ordering me to 'blog!', so they are literally blocking the thing they are ordering me to do by people doing the opposite. There’s also some new thing at one of the sandwich shops, where as soon as I turn up the apparent customer being served says 'maximum' then some new people suddenly appear out of nowhere and cut in line right in front of you. It’s just the same old bullcrap bullying. And of course it escallates in every shop as everything in the universe gets blamed on you, and then they start removing cold drinks in the fridges, replacing them with warm ones. And then in the evening you get gifted tons of milk and cold sugar free coke just when you are brushing your teeth, and I’m being gifted a million small bottles of water, so many I can’t carry them. It’s just maliciousness dressed up as kindness.

And so it goes. World keeps on turning, everyone gets a bit more angry, and blames it on me. The world win win win wins while ademently pretending that it’s lose lose lose losing. It then has a win maximus tiddle wave of win, where literally thousands and thousands of people are blowing air horns and waving flags in an enormous celebration orgy, keeping me awake all night, then is sad and angry and will probably block coffee again later.

And so it continues going. Yet again, even more more total reality inversion maximus. And still it is sad and unhappy.

All I can do is shrug. #

Maybe leaders don’t run blogs or podcasts because they literally can’t. Strange to think this, because it’s so easy these days, but maybe for whatever reason, they literally can’t.

Things might be a lot worse than they appear. #

On the latest Punk Till I Die podcast, Neal shares stories from his recent trip home to England.

England belongs to Neal Ep#320.

All sorts of funny shit, but also heart felt stories from people and families stuck in between cultures. Oh yeah, and tons of excellent non pop punk punk and metal.

People stuck in between cultures in bizare ways seems to be trending the last few days. #

Glad I got the better debugging feature complete. The plugins refactor to use more utility functions and the output synchronisation will make figuring out issues much easier. I’ve used up about half my build minutes for this month so I will concentrate on features that can be done without much iteration and building.

Still feeling a bit rusty as far as blogging goes. I think it’s because things have been so chaotic it’s been difficult to see the woods for the trees. #

In the future we will want our leaders to run their own podcasts because it will be a way of demonstrating that they aren’t in the clutches of both billionaires but also the deep state. #

Tom Luongo [28:24]: "You can hold two positions that are seemingly against each other at the same time because they are not in parallel. You can have two different opinions about the same person, where one is negative and one is positive. I see the good and the bad in Elon Musk here. Him going after Keir Starmer, and inserting himself into german politics, and going after the European Union at a regulatory level and at a money level - they have had strategy discussions about this within the Trump team, it’s very clear to me. I look at the totality of what’s playing out, they are playing offence here. And I like that they are playing offence, and at the same time, the other side is going to play offence as well, and they are going to make mistakes." #

Was kept awake literally the entire night. Finally got some sleep from 5am - 745am. Feeling not great now. The weather is alright. I’ll likely be bullied for being tired for the rest of the day. My plan had been to write the newsletter this morning, I had prepared all the podcasts yesterday afternoon, but as it became clear I wasn’t going to be able to sleep I ended up writing an emergency issue just so something gets sent out. That makes me very sad because it’s really not how I wanted to start the year :( #

Jason Calacanis [1:53:37]: “I’m with you. I love conspiracy Gavin. This has been the best part of the show. Conspiracy Gavin is AWESOME! I love it!”

This really made me laugh. Great episode btw. #

I think maybe I’ve fixed the debug / console.log synchronisation issue. It’s a bit difficult to tell. With the fix all the output appears to be all synchronised, and henceforth therefor much easier to read. It will likely take a while to get used to it. I’m going to put it behind an environment variable so you can always turn it off. It’s likely only really necessary in some circumstances. It might turn out to be in practice overly restrictive. Same as with a debugger, it can be useful but really you don’t want to spend your whole life in the debugger or else you end up debugging the debugger. Only turn it on when you need it, then turn it off again. #

Duncan Trussell and Luis Gomez solve a very different kind of synchronisation issue on the latest Duncan Trussell podcast [Female advisory: explicit boy humour].

Also: drones with machine guns, teaching your kids entrepreneurship, manufacturing wins, sales, business as magic, truth, manipulation, magicians, insane mindfucks, beauty, skill, craftmanship, politicians, social media vs cigarettes, phones & doom scroling, pass-par-tout, perfectly targeted propaganda, compassion, the shocking tik tok dancing psyop conspiracy.

Worth the listen, no need to feel guilty about it. Just go back to base but also be the kindness you want to see in the world. #

Today has been another day of contradictions. The world is plus infiniti minus infiniti-ing everything, then getting upset and doing all it’s usual tricks, making 1 equal infiniti, making minimum equal maximum, and all sorts of other bullcrap, all culminating in everything being blamed on me and everyone being sad. Then I get blamed for that too. I can see how this might seem exagerated or overly negative, but it’s only when you see it happening for yourself, that you realise it’s a real thing. I’m not sure what the answer is but I’m pretty sure some things make it worse. But it is ultimately all self defeating because, at least for now, we are all on this spec of space dust together. #

I’ve gotten all the plugins refactored with utility functions to improve debugging. It’s looking pretty good, and from the debugging I’ve had to do making the updates, appears to be much easier to focus in on specific places in the code without having to deal with a deluge of output.

Once I’ve merged in those changes, it will be the next phase, which is to try and setup a way get the regular console.log output synchronised with debug output. I have no idea if that will work. I openned up an issue on the node-debug repo a while back, got some good feedback, but my recent questions have gone unanswered. At least now I’ll soon be in a position to try it myself.

Also have the newsletter to prepare for tomorrow so quite a few things to get done. #

Matt Odell critique of Elon Musk on the most recent Rabbit Hole Recap podcast Ep#338 [31:09]:

"This AI piece is interesting, because my understanding is the X deal is way underwater. He completely overpaid for X, and the way he’s monetising it, the way he’s digging himself out of it, and digging his investors out of it, is xAI, which is fed by the Blue Checks. The killer advantage that xAI has is that it has real-time data, that is fed by a bunch of human Blue Checks, that have basically umbilical chords connected to this AI machine, and they are just feeding it information. And so at the same time he is attacking the people that are feeding it, and they are angry, and they complain about it on his platform while feeding the AI further. And they’re just gonna keep using it. Most of them are just gonna keep using it. It’s a pretty crazy Mandibles-esque backdrop that we are entering 2025 under."

Probably the best Elon critique I’ve heard in a while because it’s based on high quality analysis rather than hot headed personal attacks. The situation is odd, and he’s outlined exactly why. #

Mike Masnick: "I don’t like the fact that we are in a position where the biggest companies and our elected officials are equally untrustworthy, but if that’s where we are, we might as well use it as an opportunity to route around both and build better systems that aren’t focused on extraction from the public, but empowering the public." #

Ideas are starting to percolate for a few blog posts. I got a scrappy one out last night, but feeling a little bit rusty. It’s like I’m stretching tired old legs and arms. But you just got to press on regardless even if it isn’t perfectly written prose. This is blogging, it’s live thinking. It gets better over time.

I’m going to be merging in little bits of feature branches I had been working on while I had no build minutes. There are a few around refactoring plugins to make debug logging easier. Extracting out utility functions into seperate files. That makes it easier to turn on and off debug logging without getting overwhelmed with output.

Then a few blog posts, and I need to somehow seperate out full text posts and partial text posts in my RSS reader. Most feeds are annoyingly partial feeds, which is completely useless for reading offline. I guess I’ll add a 'full text' tag to the ones that publish full text. That way I don’t waste time trauling through stuff that I can’t read anyway. #

Interesting discussion on the latest Citadel Dispatch Ep#148 between Matt Odell and Buck Perley co-hosts of Austin BitDevs and an engineer at Unchained [21:32]:

"It‘s a great case for collaborative custody as the model for the future of Bitcoin custody. You collaborate with us, you get a key from us, you can use your wallet wherever you want outside of that, and in the future that’s going to open up even more models of collaboration. You talked about how we have you hold two keys and Unchained holds one key, well now we have connections where you can hold a key for your family member. Maybe you don’t want your funds to be KYC’d, but your family member doesn’t care about the KYC because they care more about ?, they don’t trust themselves as much, but they also don’t want to hold 2 keys. Now you can be a part of that. Your funds aren’t KYC’d but you are helping your friend and family member to manage their funds. You can now interact with that vault as well in Caravan or Sparrow or Electrum. Which one you use is irrelevant, it’s the fact that you can use multiple and be using an Unchained vault is the real magic."

This sounds like the right direction to me. Allow the user to choose what tools they use, and make it possible for them to connect to your services. It’s still early days in crypto and Bitcoin, so things still look a bit disorganised and complicated from the outside, but at least these devs are trying to make software that respects users. The tech is kinda interesting too, BDK, Rust Miniscript, javascript, WASM. #

Only a day after taking somewhat of a friendly pop at the Rest is History guys, I am reminded why I still listen to their podcast, even if they can often be infuriatingly self righteous. On their latest, really great segment covering the importance and nuances of interpreters in international negotiations. Complete with some amusing stories from their time in the field.

It’s not quite as grandiose as their adventurous stories, but it reminded me of some of my narly business trips to places in eastern europe and the middle east. One can really get into some very bizare situations traveling around the world, especially with language and cultural differences. #

I just remembered that this morning when I woke up I immediately coughed up an enormous glob of flem. It felt very much like the start of a flem cough, complete with raspy cough. The odd thing though was that it totally disapeared within 20 mins, and there‘s been no sign of a flem cough all day. Although I’ve been getting these alergy flareups / colds fortnightly, thankfully it’s been quite a while since I’ve had a flem cough.

The Demiurge [35:27]: "Let’s go back to base."

Gosh what are the chances eh? Neither, or even none, of the possibilities are mutially exclusive. #

First day of the new year!

It’s definitely 2025, I just had to create a '2025' folder in the website data repo to write this post. I don’t get to do that very often.

Last night was somewhat unneventfull but that was actually rather nice. It was nice people watching, seing everyone all dressed up and occasionally sparkly, all going out to whereever they were goong out to. Then a few hours later everyone making their way home, many children clearly past their usual bedtime, completely passed out in their parents arms, or somewhat precariously squashed between adults on the back of a motorbike. Everyone appeared to be in good spirits. Right before new year’s a group of twenty somethings bought me a drink, a sandwich and a sweet bun, and we exchanged 'Happy New Year’s', and smiled and laughed a little.

And I saw the end of the big fireworks display poking up above the roof tops a few miles away. I didn’t get hardly any sleep, but that’s expected on New Year’s isn’t it.

So many runners this morning. Hundreds of them, all in groups, wearing synchronised colored tshirts. Lots of folks who likely don’t usually run, looking a bit shell shocked and lost. Runners literally running in every direction. It’s amusingly chaotic, but folks are in a happy mood.

I’m happy to report I managed to mostly fix the RSS feeds last night. They are all looking great in feed readers now, without any strange HTML tags. There is still an issue with an incorrect url that is set in item link elements on the everything feed. The posts all contain hash links so you can still get to the post on the website, but I’ll hopefully figure that out and fix it over the next few days. It’s nice to see all my posts are finally readable.

Weather is cloudy, but at least it isn’t rainy or cold. #

I woke up this morning with a completely blocked nose which is a bit unusual. The security guards, actually it’s only one of them, has been doing his new thing of sweeping everywhere which makes it really dusty, so that’s not helping much either. I’m feeling quite sneezy now, sinuses are sensitive and enflamed. Yesterday evening was mostly quiet, people seemed to generally be in a moderately good mood. Let’s hope that continues.

Might get some more done on the RSS feeds refactor today.

In case I don’t get the chance later, best wishes to all for the new year’s celebrations and for 2025 :) #

Unhappy to report that worldo has sunk to a new low. Putting infant animals through pain and mortal danger is now being used to intimidate me. Yesterday evening a very small kitten suddenly appeared in the middle of the road directly on front of me during the evening rush hour traffic. There were motorbikes passing in both directions. The kitten was completely traumatised and scared out of it’s tiny little mind. It appeared to be limping quite badly so likely already got hit by one of the passing bikes.

There was a break in the traffic and I looked around, there didn’t apear to be anyone that had dropped a kitten. A motorbike that had been parked on the opposite side of the road, driven by a couple in their twenties, just happened to be turning in the street and found themselves in the middle of the road. I don’t think they had seen the kitten, who was at this stage scrambling for dear life down the middle of the road. I jumped up because it looked as if they were going to drive straight into the poor thing. I think perhaps me jumping up made them see what I was looking at and they stopped in their tracks.

The kitten ran under a large car that was momentarily stopped, trying to jump onto the rear axle but of course fell off as soon as the car started moving again. The couple on the motorbike drove up to the kitten, the bloke who was driving, got off the bike, and picked up the kitten and drove off.

A few moments later two young people on a motorbike drove by and said very clearly 'you learn' as they passed. Earlier in the day there had been a somewhat strange incident that seemed very planned to me, by 3 teenage boys, who appeared to be waiting for me and tried to make it look like they walked into me by accident but it felt like they did it purposely. It happened after I left the shop cafe were when I leave I often get punshed in some way. I managed to avoid them because I saw ahead of time what was unfolding.

It happened in the same location on front of the internet place, where a few months ago a local caused a situation where I ended up walking out into on coming traffic during the morning rush hour. I narrowly escaped without injury. In that same location, a few months previous to that there was another incident with kids doing the same thing, forcing me into on coming traffic. I also note that a while back at one of the shop cafes I used to go to, a strange sparrow person young women, started turning up with a kitten in her bag.

All these things lead me to think this was a planned intimidation event.

The rest of the day had been actually quite quiet but clearly worldo is exponangry again and blaming me. I hope the kitten is alright.

The other thing that was happening all day yesterday was people saying 'okay' everytime I moved location. Like I was being given permision. This was from adults but also from groups of children. It happened at least 7 or 8 times in a row as I walked from place to place.

Why are you exponangry this time worldo? #

Konstantin Kisin from the TRIGGERNometry podcast on loosing faith in the british main stream media [59:15] while at the Democratic National Convention in the US:

I’ll be honest with you [...] that one moment, being there and then reading the coverage on my phone while being there, that for me permanently broke what was left of my faith in the main stream media. Because that’s when I realised, they’ve been lying about this guy this entire time, and in Britain in particular. Even people, prominent conservatives, like Michael Gove and others were pro-Kamala, and I understand now, because in Britain what we do is we listen to british journalists who mostly don’t ever go to america, so they don’t see any of the stuff they are talking about with their own eyes, and if they do go to america, they don’t go to america, they go to Washibgton DC, or New York or if they go on holiday L.A. or something like that. So they aren’t seing the parts of america that are pro-Trump. They have no conception of how to understand it. And then they are swollowing the lies of the american journalists who marinade in their own echo chamber. And so what we get in Europe is a complete misunderstanding of what is going on. And then you add to that that because we speak the same language we assume that our cultures are the same [...] and our cultures are not the same.

Just realised that if I finish a note with a list or a quote then the hash link isn’t getting added, so I’m adding this sentence. A minor annoyance that I’ll hopefully world willing get to at some stage. #

Build minutes finally reset! Woohoo. I managed to publish all the content from the past few weeks to the website and I’ve also made loads of progress on merging in the fix to the RSS feeds. There’s still some work to do on it but definite progress.

Coding rocks :) #

Worldo is so hell bent on controling every damn thing in the universe that it’s constantly trying to fix things that aren’t broken, and by doing so, breaks the thing that was working perfectly fine, and would have continued without any issues whatsoever. Then worldo just expects things to magically get fixed or to fix themselves, getting angry or angry mcangry or exponangry if that doesn’t happen. While things that are actually broken are just left to rot.

Currently I’m being blocked from washing by the security guards, water is being turned off everytime I go to the public toilets, but it’s not being turned off for others. At the shop cafe gangs of school kids, usually girls, are showing up and loitering there the entire day infiniti nattering and causing trouble. They don’t seem very bothered about going to actual school. Getting anything done is impossible.

When I leave the shop cafe to find somewhere else I am immediately punished by random people everywhere. If I try to buy food, again I am punished, yet they’ve also stopped giving me any food gifts. It’s contradiction after contradiction, constant anger goading, by all the butch women everywhere and all the security guards everywhere.

You can’t eat, you can’t drink, you can’t wash, no no no no no. Non stop no! harrassment, primarily from angry women, but also from men, who are usually with one of the angry women. I wonder why. They are all pure evil.

Yet they appear to think they are doing me a favour.

Build minutes should reset in the next few days so that will be nice. Hopefully this new year’s eve I won’t get assaulted. #

I know britain can make food as good as on the continent. I’ve seen it first hand in all the gastro pubs. Yes it’s inspired by the produce of other places but that’s totally okay. When it really starts getting good is when parts of british culture and produce make it’s way into it somehow. Imagine if high quality british food was the norm for every day regular folks all over the country, instead of all the processed crap. That’s where we have to be to truely compete with the mainland. #

It’s kind of worrying that it appears Starmer and his team never really had a plan of action for growth themselves. I guess then the only thing left is to ask the already underperforming intitutions for a plan.

Maybe Starmer is turning into leftist Elon? Will he roll up his sleeves and personally sit in these groups and cut through the beaurocracy until they start firing on all cylinders? That would be kind of cool.

Running a handful of government watchdog orgs has got to be sort of similar to running multiple high performing companies. Or at east it should be imho. #