Full text RSS feed - The build minutes for this month finally reset so I can build and deploy again. One of the features I've been waiting to test was full text RSS feeds. Previously the blog feed only contained the description of each item and you had to click through to the website to read the full article.

It's working for the blog, and when I tested it earlier in Feedly each item contained the full text of the article, so no need to click through anymore. Code blocks appear to be correctly formatted, though without the syntax highlighting. Glad they are at least legible. That was the reason I didn't do full text earlier, I didn't think the code blocks would display at all.

I might start writing more blog posts now and do less notes, because I don't need to write descriptions anymore. I guess we'll see over the next few weeks if and how it affects my writing. #

Happy New Year - Best wishes to all of you out there for 2024! I hope it's a good year for everyone :) #

Communism - The problem with communism is communism itself, for the very same thing that saves you from oblivion, the commune, also blocks you from succeeding at anything. The commune cuts both ways. Ultimately you are constantly taking two steps forward, then two steps backwards.

The people with the power, keep the power, and the people without the power, stay without any power. Everyone is stuck, and literally every single thing is a fight.

And with AI it will be even worse. Even more stuck, even more of a fight for everything. #

Build minutes - Bit of a quiet day posting wise today. I've been waiting for my build minutes to get reset. I was just able to publish the notes and links that were supposed to go out this morning. #

Harassment - The harassment I've been subjected to the past few days has been off the charts. Tsunami after tsunami after tsunami. I've tried not to mention it much because it's Christmas, no one wants to read about harrassment over the holidays. Anyway just wanted to mention it because there have been several of these harassment incidents, which appear to be linked, that could definitely be classified as being sexual in nature.

Very strange and uncomfortable situations too. This sort of thing has happened before, about a year ago, I think I wrote about it last time it happened too. It's my belief that it's intimidation, manufactured situations, trying to get me angry. I don't want to get into specifics, but I just want to say it's definitely not ok. #

Banking neutrality - I'm starting to wonder whether payment networks should be completely neutral. That's a weird thing to say in this age where payment networks are regularly used to cancel people and groups. I'm certainly not for people doing criminal things, but the fact is that governments change over time, so there really isn't a way to ensure you won't at some point be canceled yourself. Perhaps if governments were not allowed to weaponise payment networks then they would be forced to reckon with the reasons why some people are forced to engage in illegal activities in the first place.

The problem with having a dual use network is that it runs the risk of eventually turning into something other than a payment network.

We have the idea of net neutrality for the world wide web. Should there be something like transaction neutrality for banking? #

Internet cutoff - The internet connection got cutoff pretty much as soon as I pushed the previous banking neutrality note. There's been rather a lot of blatant bullying and harrassment by the gang stalkers today everywhere I've been.

Just after writing the previous paragraph, the wifi connectiom re-connected except either (1) the network was renamed, or (2) an old network that I was previously connected to re-appeared. I can't tell which. I just know the network name is diferent than it was earlier. It looks familiar though. In any case though I can connect to the wifi, there is no internet connection. I've tried reconnecting several times.

I tried changing the DNS server and the network suddenly disapeared, and the old network re-appeared! But when I connect it shows a strange iOS connection screen that says 'Oops... Connection lost', and a bunch of text in vietnamese. So now I can't even connect to the Wifi.

I rebooted the device and when it turned back on the old network was once again gone, and the renamed network was back. This time it reconnected and internet appears to be working. #

Good enough for now - I wrote a few days ago about the possibility of creating an RSS render pipeline. I've had some time to review the codebase and though long term it definitely looks like the way to go, it's more non-trivial than I initially thought. It will require a re-write of the core rendering engine. As it turns out I've already written the v1 of this re-write. I did it a few months back, but got blocked by one thing or several, and wasn't able to get it fully working.

I'm going to keep the current RSS components for now. I've made some modifications that should enable full text feeds, and should be enough to get things working for the interleaved everything re-design. Longer term though, I hope I'll get a chance to get the re-write operational. It would open up many new possibilities for code reuse and packaging.

Sometimes you have to take some steps backwards. But you got to keep moving forwards. Things don't always go smoothly or in a straight line. That's how the world is a lot of the time. #

Musk vs Bezos - I haven't heard or read much in the way of comparisons between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It's an interesting comparison because they have both ran very successful internet businesses (Paypal, Amazon) and are now the two biggest players in the space race (SpaceX, Blue Origin). Some in depth coverage of Musk's background was done in the recent We Study Billionaires Podcast reviewing a recent biography. Also recently, Jeff was on the Lex Fridman Podcast, where he spoke quite a bit about his childhood, spending much time growing up on ranches.

Both episodes are really worth listening to in order to get a better feel for both men. They are building the infrastructure of humanities future.

I might have this very wrong, but my impression is that Elon's upbringing was a lot more chaotic than Jeff's. Of course it's possible to thrive in chaotic environments, Elon clearly has, but I wonder how much of his success is despite the chaos rather than because of it. Is it possible that in a less chaotic environment, Elon could have been 10X more performant than he already is?

It's an important question because if it is the case that chaos hinders progress, how can we ensure to pull out performers from chaotic environments? Or is there something about the modern world that requires choas in order to make progress. These might be increasingly worth considering in a world ever more mediated and organised by AI. #

Christmas - Happy Christmas to all. Thanks for reading my writtings. Wishing you and all your loved ones the best over the holidays :) #

Notes on the Beatles - I recently finished listening to the latest 500 Songs podcast on the Beatles. It's great, if you like music, give it a listen, you will probably like it. I took some notes, a few bits that stood out for whatever reason. Had I listenned to the episode another time perhaps totally different bits would have been focussed. There are so many great bits.

Yoko Ono's background - I had no idea she was from such an elustrious background. I knew she wasn't poor but she's stratospheric in terms of ancestry. Her father was nouveaux upper class, wanted to be a musician, but her mother was from basically a royal family, the end of a long line of samurai. Even though he wasn't too shabby in terms of social status, it doesn't even compare to the mother's status, and the mother's family didn't approve of his musical ambitions. So a compromise was reached where he would become a company man, giving up his music career. That's quite an interesting set of circumstances. Being torn between two very different groups is not easy, I bet it had a big impact on her music and art, which ended up being very experimental in nature.

Recording studio sounds - At university I was involved in the student radio station. The radio station had a couple of different studios. The main one was for radio shows, but there were two another less well known ones that were used for recording band sessions. I got to spend a fair amount of time in all of them. A lot of the clips in the podcast totally reminded me of various equipment we would play around with, turn tables, tape loops, mini disks, samplers etc. Talking into microphones between the mixing desk and the recording room that were separated by glass. Everyone wearing headphones. Very familiar sounds. Omg the scary you-are-live-on-air red light. Lots of fun memories.

I didn't really know about what the UK politics scene was like at the height of their fame. In 1968 there was a very left wing liberal government. They passed several very progressive laws:

• Legalising gay sex
• Abolition of death penalty for murder
• Legalising abortion

This will probably sound strange. It never occurred to me that you don’t get the death penalty for murder. It’s odd isn’t it? I guess there are all sorts of edge cases where it makes sense, but when you hear that it actually had to be enshrined into law, the first thing that occurred to me was what an obvious potential arbitrage, though clearly very dark. It’s wierd that you can kill someone and get a less severe punishment isn’t it?

I guess maybe in practice, it does work because the punishment is nevertheless very severe so practically speaking no one will ever knowingly make that trade off. Maybe it also is somewhat of a deterent to not be a total arsehole all the time, because someone theoretically could murder you. It is a bit weird though.

The Nina Simone tribute / reply track to Lennon's very famous song Revolution is awesome. Not only is the track brilliant, a sort of parody done in the style of Simone, but Lennon's reaction is super cool. It's the sort of thing that goes on in social media every day now, but I wonder if this is one of the first examples of this sort of thing happening in popular culture. Based on Lennon's pleasant suprise, seems like it might have been.

The band breakup story is kind of classic, the low key nature of it makes it even better considering the band's status. It’s like an episode of a popular sitcom or something, but you could see how it could be true. I won't spoil it for you, but it's quite funny, even if I guess for those involved at the time it probably wasn't. I think if they were all alive today, they would likely see the funny side of it.

It’s cool to hear all the complicated background history about what was happening around the world when these songs were written. "Back in the USSR" is a good example, what a phenominal song btw, it really was going very against main stream culture of the time. This isn't at all a commentary on the current situation in the region, but I really love that song.

It’s cool to hear how all the bands of the time intersected, and influenced each other, like an enormous ever changing configuration of planets and stars all sling-shotting around each other.

The Beatles were awesome! :) #

Non freedom memory leak - It occurred to me a couple of days ago that perhaps non-freedom is like a memory leak. It grows and grows until the capacity of the entire system is affected. #

RSS curse strikes again - Following on from yesterday's difficult coding session working on RSS code, I found a quiet place and tried again. The universe granted me about 10 minutes and guess what, it happened again. A strange man appeared, bizarely made some baby crying noises, and is now sitting next to me. He's doing some sort of exercise, rocking from side to side, then extending his arms up and stretching them. Then rocking backwords and forwards. Very odd behaviour in my opinion. #

Fractal of do / don't do - The universe's favorite thing today is to aggressively tell me to do something, again and again and again, with a multitude of yah's, then when I do it, immediately block me. It's just happened 3 times in a row within the space of an hour at at least 3 different abstraction levels. I then got mutilated. I hate to say it but it's what always happens. This time it literally was caused in part by dominoes...an actual dominoe's pizza employee.

The universe currently is finding this all very amusing, but I know ultimately the universe will be unhappy, because that's what happens every time! #

RSS generation refactor - I've refactored the RSS generation plugin for my static site generator at least once previously. After the last refactor the feeds generated were a lot better because I was able to swap out a library that did things in a weird way, with one that was a lot more standard. The weird one ended up loosing me loads of time. At the time it looked very well used, according to stats anyway, but I digress.

I've been working for a while on creating an interleaved main page with all posts types displayed together. Along with that I've put in a bunch of work to create an accompanying everything RSS feed. Before even starting either of these bits of work, a long time before, around when I had to migrate the site off of Heroku, an item still remaining from that nightmare, was restructuring the podcast data. I'm still waiting to deploy the refactored data.

For whatever reason the universe just keeps deciding that the feed generation has to change in some way, but then something blocks the necessary change. Each time I go into the code, and it's happened again today, circumstances around me get super wierd. Strange synchronicities, huge distractions, really obnoxious people materialise. It's the most bizare thing. It keeps happening.

It's almost as if there is some evil force monitoring my every move, and when I do RSS coding, they release the hounds do to speak. Seriously, it's really fucking weird, and at times actually very dark.

Anyhow, because of all the head winds, there are a few places where the code gets a bit narly and convoluted. I was able refactor away some of the cruft today, still need to test and debug it, but it's nice to untangle it somewhat. The reason I was doing the refactor in the first place was that a couple of days ago I had an epiphany. The current implementation is done in a serverside component. It works quite well but it always felt a bit out of place. I couldn't figure out exactly what is was.

The thing with building software is that different parts evolve at different speeds, and at different times. For example, since the initial feed component was written, the entire rendering engine went through a massive refactor. It's now possible to create render pipelines, where you can easily reuse plugins, configuring them so the output of one plugin is passed as input to the next pipeline plugin. Well guess what, I think it should be possible to move the code from the feed component into a render pipeline. That will mean all the other pipeline plugins become available to use along side the RSS feed generation.

It's one of those things that looks quite obvious in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time was totally not obvious at all.

Guess what, as I was writting this note, really obnoxious, and very friggin strange people turned up, and just kept sticking their nose in my business. So if it's unusually difficult to read, that was definitely a big contributing factor.

Update: The instant I finished writting the note they disapeared. Literally. WTF?

Update 2: Started typing again and they were back wearing exoskeletons and shouting loudly into megaphones. Metaphorically.

Update 3: Stopped typing and they disapeared again! #

Multi protocol fediverse - David Pierce has a good piece about the current state of social media as 2024 approaches. He's not super into the term fediverse and is sure that we should have only 1 protocol.

Personally I'm totally fine with the term fediverse, though I suppose some central bankers might get a bit confused, but you gotta think a central banker would know the difference between real and virtual by the time they are running a central bank, no? Anyhow, I like that it has the vibe of something vaste, like a virtual universe.

I know that there is a popular saying in software development that 1 protocol is better than many, and I can understand the reasoning, but for some reason my gut feeling in this case is I'm OK with several. I've read through the ActivityPub, Bluesky and Nostr protocols, and I think they are all pretty cool. I think as long as it's clear to all that there are multiple protocols then having many isn't an issue. Shouldn't it be a free market for protocols?

The ones people like will get popular. Though you probably don't want too many. Could be time consuming to learn them all. I imagine they will end up getting progressively more complicated as technology evolves.

It would be cool if they all supported RSS so we can have a mininum of easily implementable interop between them all. It feels like it could be like how there are many flavours of Linux, but they all support reading and writing to files, "everything is a file". Maybe all social networks have file based feeds.

Note: More weird people arrived as I was writting this note. They literally only talk when I'm typing. And in the last hour they were having very bizare conversations indeed. #

Social space hackers go home - These people cause so many problems imho. Maybe one day we will all see what's been going on all these years. #

Tired and drained - I haven't been feeling much like posting the past few days. It's been close to a week of continuous harrassment and I'm both exhausted and not very enthusiastic about anything. The place where I get internet has an apparrent funeral reception happening since yesterday. A bit strange since I asked in last week's newsletter whether we should all wear black after reading the Verge's Twitter is dead piece.

Just another bizaro coincidence, they only happen multiple times per day after all. #

Early music history - I've been listening to the latest 500 songs episode all about the Beattles. It's been so many years since I've heard any of their music. I still remember it perfectly, every chord change, drum beat and weird sample. Lots of interesting stories about what was happening back in the times that led up to the music scenes that I grew up in. #

New Podcasts and Media Publications - I've alluded to this previously, though I really love all the podcasts and media publications I read, I think we could have many more. I find myself going back to the same handfull and I just think there could be more variety.

Are there such things in other languages that could be transkated by AI? I really want a few new points of view, new ways of looking at the world. That I think is one of my biggest wishes for 2024. #

Moving on ActivityPub - What with all the movement in ActivityPub this week, with Threads announcing they are actively implementing and testing their integration, the programmer in me thought of an extreme but I think vital test case that must pass. Without this, I don't think there is freedom.

It's the case where every person on the network follows an individual, and that individual decides to move fediverse instances. It might seem like an extreme use case but it's actually quite an important one. We live in a very strange world. The strangest things happen.

Interestingly, given it's size, Threads is probably the best entity to test this use case.

It would be really cool if they open sourced their integration, but also gave visibility into the automated tests. That way you could easily check what their integration really supported. #

Bitcoin practical sovereignty - I wrote a few days ago about the big lie that bitcoiners tell themselves about self sovereignty. In theory it's possible, but practically speaking it will very soon be impossible. It's good to see some more discussion on this topic happening.

Without self-sovereignty, aren't we essentially just re-creating the current monetary system? #

Gang stalker tsunamis - The past few days I've been dealing with the backlash from compleating the latest feature on my static site generator. As I've mentioned before these tsunamis happen regularly, usually from motorbike gang stalkers, but eventually it spreads everywhere, to random passers by, people in shops, for all intents and purposes it ultimately propagates to every location I go to.

Once again it’s water shortage and starvation intimidation. And once again I'm not sure I'll be able to send out the newsletter. It's a cycle, it happens over and over. #

Talking to people strongly discouraged - Whenever I speak to fellow foreigners, a short while later, something weird happens, often making my situation worse.

Case in point. A few days ago, a rather large chap from central europe stopped to have a chat. We had a nice conversation, it was good to actually have a real life conversation with someone for once. It doesn't happen very often. But it was difficult, because I've learnt over the years here that anytime I talk about something specific, anytime I divulge personal information, it always in some way comes back to bite me. So I end up seeming somewhat evassive, but it's for good reason.

In this case I was able to communicate that to the bloke. As we chatted he said that things couldn't get much worse and I should just accept any help. I mentioned that if there is one thing I've learnt, it's that things can always get worse. When you are in a bad situation, something that is super easy to fix in a few minutes for regular folks, can end up being a multi-day or week gargantuan project. It's a totally different universe. The example I gave was a broken zip on a bag. That can really f you up.

Anyhow the next day he gifted me some clothes. Just basic stuff but good quaility and it made a big difference. All items were black. Things I really needed. I've been wearing the stuff. It's great. Well yesterday, after a day of pink tsunamis, something that happens relatively regularly, I noticed that, suprise suprise, the zip on my main back pack, the new one that I was gifted by another fellow european about a month ago, was partly broken.

How did it happen? Well there were a couple of opportunities it could have happened. It's in the exact same place as happened on another bag about 2 years ago. That bag had been fine for 8 years. There was a strange incident where a stranger took the bag and insisted on moving it totally unnecessairly. About 20 minutes later I noticed the zip was broken. There was also another incident during the COVID lockdown where the main strap on a bag was cut with a sharp tool. I had only left it unattended for a few seconds. Getting that fixed was a massive massive ordeal.

Well guess what, this time about a minute after discovering the broken zip, two incredibly tall westerners, male and female, dressed entirely head to toe in black clothes walked past. It's very unusual. You just don't see a lot of goths, the weather isn't very conducive for it. It's way too hot for goths here. This type of thing happens everytime I talk with anyone. #

Words of wisdom - I wish I had some wise words today. I’ve been sitting here thinking about the past few days. Truth is though, I don’t have any. I finished the feature I’d been working on for many days, it was unbelievably tough going, the world pushing back against me in almost every conceivable dimension, every step of the way. Since then, as predicted, it’s been tsunami after tsunami after tsunami. Each one bigger than the last.

And I don’t have any wise words about it. I just know that it happens. It happens over and over again. Any time that I gain something, I am immediately blocked bigly. Then I get the blame in some way, and the process starts again, but a little more intense. It’s like those that help can’t see those that block. And everyone gets frustrated. The folks that help are angry because nothing they do makes a difference. The folks that block are angry because that’s how they always are. So net net everyone is angry, all the time.

I just know that everyone is angry and I’m to blame for everything by everyone. Literally everything I do is wrong. Everything. Even being wrong is wrong. So I’m even more wrong, which is wrong, so again, more wrong.

The weather is quite mild, a little warm but not too bad. #

Fact vs fiction - I finished listening to the last episode in the Rest is History Podcast series on the JFK assassination. Overall I think it's a great series, really enjoyed it, you should definitely consider listenibg to it. However listening to the last episode I was struck by how much Tom and Dominic meld historical fact and totally subjective, basically arm chair psychology, without any clear demarcation.

I'm currently in Vietnam, a communist country. I've been here for about 3 years. So I have a literal different perspective than if I were in the UK. I suppose I'm more sensitive to the whole story. Especially the fact that Oswald had done a somewhat crazy trip to Russia when he was younger. I had no idea about that. Was it really that crazy? People from the UK have been doing crazy trips all around that part of the world and much further for hundreds of years.

Anyhow I'm not saying Oswald didn't do it, the evidence definitely makes it look like he probably did do it. But it was really apparent to me that Tom and Dominic seemlessly add in bucket loads of stuff that they are essentially just making up, that sounds very plausible. And with their very propper british accents, it's just so convincing. They are also quite dismissive of some theories. I found their attitude to be a bit assumptive and arrogant at times - all those other theories are rubbish, our theory is clearly what really happened, and it happened like that because, look at that evil moustache we just quite obviously painted on his face.

One thing I've learnt here is that really really weird things do happen. They aren't necessarily sinister, but they happen all the friggin time, every bloody day actually. You don't notice it when you are in your familiar home. Life is very strange, it's more noticeable in unfamiliar places. The picture they paint is very incomplete and misleading in that reguard. At least in my opinion it is.

It's a good reminder that historians and especially authors will be historians and authors. They need to create a great story, that's their game after all. I don't fault them for it, I still like the show and both Tom and Dominic, that's why I listen to it. It's easy to get carried away and stop thinking critically, and you have to be very mindful of that. Even people that we like have their own agendas, and that's OK. Just be aware of it. #

Modernity - One thing that sort of irks me these days is that there are a ton of people that insist on teaching everyone to sail, and the most important thing is to be able to sail into the wind, which is super fucking difficult, so obviously you have to practice basically constantly. It's bullshit! We have friggin motorboats these days, for frig's sake. Just use a motorboat. Use the extra time you gain to do something wonderful. #

Permalinks and indentation - I wrote yesterday about the latest sprint to redesign the archives on my website. I was able to get both the indentation and permalinks working today too. Here are today's links.

Notice how all the other days from December are right there, so you can easily scroll to them. And they are linkable via the hash # link next to each day date. It might not seem like much, but this is a huge feature for writing on the web. It's all about the links. #

Redesigned archives - The last few days I've been heads down working through bugs in my latest archives plugin for the static site generator. Consequently I haven't been posting to the website as much as usual. Sometimes life is just too hectic. You have to focus entirely on the most important issue and get it done. The archives plugin was the most important issue because I'm not currently able to effectively link to the linkblog or notes from the newsletter, and also because it's a pre-requisit for the next feature, which is a homepage that interleaves all the post types as they occur.

Previously I could only link to the newest links on the linkblog at the top level. That's not so useful, especially if linking from the newsletter, because depending on when the person reads it, the link will most likely not make that much sense since all the linkblog links will have changed. Compare that to the re-designed archives, where you can easily browse via a date to the correct location. And the links at the other end won't ever change. For example, here are the links for December.

I still need to adjust the indentation, and most importantly I also need to add permalinks to each day. With permalinks I'll be able to link to a specific day, and it will display with all the other days around it. That way I can have a link that points at the previous Saturday in the newsletter. Anyone that clicks on it can quickly scroll through all the other posts in the intervening days.

I've pretty much burned through all my build minutes for this month getting it working. There was a very difficult to spot bug deep within some nested for loops, which caused all the build times to 20x. That of course seriously compounded an already very tricky and stressful situation. I got it done, and am now anticipating the usual backlash from the world which innevitably ensues. There were already a few hints of something earlier, almost within seconds of completing the feature. And a domino effect of one thing after another triping me up on my journey to where I am now writing this post. That's just how it is. It's like clockwork, rather unpleasant.

Anyhow, the next phase will likely have to wait until next month now. #

Bitcoin self-sovereignty a big lie - Turns out the capacity of the network is so poor that though technically it's possible to hold your own keys and transact on the base layer, once adoption increases, fees will skyrocket, so practically speaking it just won't be possible to be self-sovereign.

That's very disapointing. More details in the latest What Bitcoin Did Podcast, interview with Bob Burnett, Chairman and CEO of Barefoot Mining. #

River regeneration project - I wrote a few days ago about some bridge building in the local communities here where I am in Vietnam. I created a Twitter thread with pictures. Rather serendipitously this article about the very same river / canal flowed through my feeds yestrday. Lots of interesting history about the area and the wider projects to revitalise the waterway.

It's really tough going here in many places, and these projects drag on for decades, it's very chaotic, funding issues, it's never ending. But there is progress even though on the surface it might not look like it at times. #

Changelog news links - I really like Changelog News Podcast. Of course it's produced with the usual very high quality standards with which they make all of their shows, great story selections, commentary, and context audio clips. The accompanying newsletter is really great too. But if there would be one thing that would make it even better imho that would be including a list of story links in the show notes. I often listen to the show offline, so getting to the newsletter which has the links isn't always possible. Having the links with the podcast would be super useful. #

Catching up on coding - I've been out of build minutes the past 5-6 days. The counter reset yesterday, so today I've been trying to get back into the coding mindset. I wrote quite a bit of code this past week but didn't have a way to test or deploy it. Now that I'm getting setup to test it all, it's become obvious that I need to refactor some of the plugins to have more tests, to lighten the burden on the website main project.

The thing I'm trying to avoid is running out of build minutes again. The website's npm module cache is great for normal time operation, it saves loads of build minutes, but when the plugins are changing, I effectively have to turn off the cache to get the updates into the website. It's a real hassle, error prone, and wastes loads of build minutes.

So I'm moving what tests I can from the main website repo into the plugin repos. I'm hoping that will make things easier to manage, and save on build minutes, because the plugins have less dependencies. I won't know for sure until it's done, but my huntch is that it will, and it will be better organised in any case.

Of course as I'm doing that I've found that the various plugins were all using their own test fixtures data. I had setup a seperate repo with test data but was only using it in the main website project. As part of the refactor then, I'm going to make sure all the repos use the test data from the same repo, rather than each having their own, possibily inconsistent data.

It takes a bit longer than you expected, which can be frustrating at times, especially when you've been waiting eagerly for what feels like ages to test your latest code. But I'm mostly used to it, and I can see that the setup will be way more robust once this little update is done.

It's the way things often happen with software. #

Black rock in food aftermath - I went back to the food place that sold rice & pork & rock to me a few days ago. I could sense things weren't going to go well as I arrived.

All the women working there were suddenly different, apart from 1 of them. That was the first warning sign. As soon as I arrived, before I'd said anything, the 1 remaining women non chalantly called me a dog, while attempting to tell me what I should eat.

I smiled and ordered the "chicken with no rocks this time, thank you". Within what couldn't have been more than 1/2 a millisecond she called me a wanker. She then got a propper grump on, packaging the food and throwing it down on the table for her new collegue to handle.

She called me a wanker several more times. Several butch women appeared out of nowhere, like they had been anticipating some sort of situation. I said "I definitely don't recommend putting rocks in the food", and as I walked away "I hope you lot aren't planning on putting rocks in people's food, everybody definitely doesn't like that". I was very pleasant about it.

Impossible to know exactly what happened, the woman that actually gave me the rock food wasn't there. But they knew something.

You get rocks in your food, then called a dog, when you speak up for yourself, telling the literal truth, you're the wanker.

I hate writting about this stuff, but I feel I have to at this point.

Earlier this morning around breakfast time, two individuals, one older and one younger, that were in my opinion waiting for me, started re-ennacting a knife stabbing as I passed them. Intimidation much?

If I end up getting stabbed, at least you know vaguely what happened.

These multi-day bullying campaigns are the worst.

Fix the AB problem. #

Black rock in food - I was just having some lunch, some rice and pork. Tastey until I heard and felt a crunch. After carefully bysecting the contents in my mouth, I pulled out a small very hard black rock. Thankfully this time no teeth broken. This comes just two days after a gang stalker attack that has left my right hand very swollen. What are the chances?

There was a weirdness when buying the food. They tried to tell me to have a specific dish, I opted for a different dish. Then more random passers by shouting 'learn' at me today. Go figure.

Just a thought, fix the AB problem. #

Why not regulate the technology? - Scott Babwah: "What is it that we care about? At the end of the day, we care about the harm that happens. We care more about voter supression than if that voter supression was done through an AI model than if it was done through a hand drawn leaflet, or through photoshop."

Worth remembering. Focusing on the tech is lazy. Figuring out the root problem is much harder. Once you have the root problem, you can then focus on detecting when it's occurring. That too is very hard.

Ultimately the tech shouldn't really matter. #

Everyone is far right these days - There's a pretty clear narrative being pushed that the far right is surging everywhere around the world.

Milei won in Argentina, Wilders in Holland, LePenn keeps doing well in France, far right riots in Ireland. I'm not saying that all these things aren't happening, just to be aware that there is a narative element to linking these events. Dig a bit below the surface and you find things are a lot more nuanced and complicated.

Dominic Frisby has an interesting and to the point podcast episode on the matter: the innexorable rise of the far right.

Sometimes countries really do need to try different approaches, and sometimes that might seem radical.

As a software engineer I tend to look at these situations a bit like giant software projects. I'm always wondering if there is a backup, how would you get out of the plan if it went bad. But you have to be pragmatic. If you treat everything like it's the end of the world, then you are probably causing more problems than you are solving.

Winning everything, in every dimension, for infiniti, is not very pragmatic, and believe it or not there are people that non-ironically believe this to be a completely acceptable position. You can't let that cripple you though. You have to make decisions, you have do something, and course correct as you go.

It's worth noting that all these far right leaders have somewhat ridiculous haircuts. I have no idea if that's relevant. Maybe it's some sort of cheat code that they've figured out. Extrapolating to infiniti, perhaps in 10 years time, we'll have a world leader with a mowhawk. If that happens it's probably safe to assume that the hair dressing industrial complex has gotten a bit too powerful. #

Hand mutilation - day 2 - It's the next day after the hand mutilation attack. My right hand still hurts, movement is reduced, my little finger doesn't bend as normal since areas around both joints are swollen. The mark where whatever the foreign object pierced the skin is on the inside of the smaller, extremity join, but for whatever reason the bigger lower joint closer to the hand appears also to be swollen. It sort of vaguely reminds me of the sensation you get when you are waiting for an injection to wear off at the dentist. Though it's now about 12 hours after the incident.

Of course now I'm wondering whether it was an insect bite or something else. Especially since at the time I didn't find any sharp object or insect near where I was sitting. I've disinfected the wound loads. Currently it looks fine, but all this is bringing back horrible memories of when unbelievably painful wounds spread across both my legs about a year ago. That all started after a weird incident where a female security guard purposely rolled a motorbike over my foot.

Oddly enough a few days ago I was reminded of that event as the only seat available was across the canal directly opposite the location where that happened. A few minutes after sitting down a white westerner man walked past with an asian man. The western bloke had a tatoo on the back of his calf, it was a cartoonish picture of a dog next to the word 'Toto'. What are the chances?

Also worth remembering that 2 weeks ago a girl working in a cafe threatenned to call the police after I stopped her from rolling her motorbike over my foot.

None of these things are coincidences.

I only mention the highlights, at a guess it's about 10% of what's going on. These sorts of things are happening all the time. A constant tit for tat of grievances being avenged, for the smallest of things. A word mis-spoken, a gesture mistimed, simply existing sometimes is enough to set the multiverse destruction escallation algorithm off.

It's the insidious nature of how things are here. Slowly evolving over days / months / years. Hatred slowly being ratcheted up, until all the world is blind. #

Chanting season - Seems like chanting season has started. This isn't an official thing, but I've noticed that at certain times of the year there is loads of chanting happening almost everyday. Some of it can sound quite nice but other times it just sounds like a bloke singing really badly in the shower, especially if it's in the distance. Which is kind of funny, but it goes on for hours. #

Code blocks in RSS feeds - I've been wanting to have full text RSS feeds on the blog for a whike now. Currently I'm only including a description of the post because I wasn't sure how readers will handle code blocks with syntsx highlighting. on the website I have to include a javascript & css library, but there's no way to do that in a feed.

When I implemented the feed generation it was just easier to go the description route. I had so many other things to implement. But now I'm thinking about it again because the new notes feature has made such a difference to how I write inline. I'm writting notes everyday, but I hardly ever write blog posts. It's clearly somewhat ridiculous because most of the notes basically have a title. I nearly always bold the first few word ms which are a title. The only other difference is that blog posts have a filename that's more complicated to create than notes. It's amazing that these seemingly tiny little difference create such a barier to posting, but they clearly do.

As for the code syntax highlighting, I guess I should just try it and see what it looks like. Maybe it will display ok in readers even if it's not colorised. If I can get away from having to write post descriptions, then that will be another little barier to writting online removed. #

Safe zero based budgeting - I've written rather negatively about zero based budgeting recently. Calling it extremist and potentially oppressive. I still broadly believe that to be the case.

That's not to say that there might not be situations necessitating drastic measures. However when you embark on an extremist approach, something that is totally on one end of the spectrum, as zero based budgeting clearly is, you better be damn sure you can get out of it later if you need to, lest it become the new normal.

The econony certainly is in dire straights at the minute. What worries me about zero based budgeting is that the proponents don't seem to be aware, or are willfully ignoring the dangers. How will they determine when to pull the rip chord? Or are they just expecting everyone to carry the weight of the sky for evermore?

It would be wiser to have some scaffolding and a backup in place to ensure you can get back vaguely to where you are now, in case the plan back fires in some way.

Keep in mind that those asking for zero based budgetting now, could very well be back later asking for zero based approaches to other important areas of interest. How would you feel for example about zero based personal freedoms? Or zero based education? Zero based approaches are by definition extreme, and should be used with enormous care. #

Stories of tech intrigue - It's been a week full of stories of tech entrepreneurial intrigue. First there was the recent saga at OpenAI, then I listenned to the Rest is History series on the Aztecs, and finally Techmeme published an old Internet History Podcast episode about the story of Gary Kildall, the man that wrote the first commercially successful operating system, and the man who could have been Bill Gates. What a story.

Real life is full of twists and turns. All of these are examples of why we are so mesmerised by tech. For some reason things in tech often get weird. It's very entertaining, unless of course you are caught up in it yourself. #

Gang stalker mutilation attack - I just got done listenning to the latest PTID episode, some good tracks and gig banter, including a story about getting biten by a spider in the night, while staying at a place called the Ho Chi Minh hotel. Imagine my suprise when 5 minutes after finishing the podcast, an overly smiley man wearing a terrible pink and blue track suit top and a women on a motorbike arrive, with a gift. I take the gift, they drive off, and a few seconds later a shooting pain in my right hand. What are the chances?

Something appeared to have embeded into my little finger. Without my glasses I couldn't see what it was, but I managed to pull whatever it was out. It felt very much like a bee sting. I got my glasses but couldn't find anything. The pain eventually subsided after a few minutes. I have no idea what it was, but it sure was very painful. There's a red mark on my finger and the area is sore to touch.

Just another example of some typical gang stalker intimidation. I wonder what it is I'm supposed to have done this time? Quietly sitting listening to a punk rock podcast apparently. Just wanted to write it up as a note while it's fresh in my mind.

Just a thought, fix the AB problem. #

OpenAI vs Cortez - I'm almost finished listening to the Rest is History Podcast mega 8 part series on the Aztecs. It's way more interesting than I thought it would be, and how timeley because the story is as crazy as last week's OpenAI saga, except it's old school, utter carnage. How times have changed. We in tech are all but amateurs compared to this lot. All the same I'm quite glad we aren't as hardcore.

A story of adventure, courage, confusion, culture clashes, riches, hopelessness, impossible decisions, misinformation, bizare aliances, death, carnage, legacy, and so much more.

The start of the series is episode 1: The Fall of the Aztecs: The Adventure Begins. #

Spirit of computing - Programmer James Sumers' piece A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft from last week laments how quickly the world of computing is changing, and he wonders what computing skills he should try to teach his children. He concludes that skills will most certainly be out of date very quickly, so perhaps the thing to teach is spirit. I like the idea, and it got me thinking wouldn't it be great to have a list of things that coallesce together form the hacker spirit?

What sort of things would be on that list? The first things I though of were things like everything is a file from Unix, but that's probably too specific. I guess we are talking more about philosophy, so like the tenants of open source software. But there are likely a bunch of web specific things. What would be on the list? #

Wasm browser cli - I've been trying to figure out how to run wasm apps in the browser. There are many apps being ported to run on web assembly, and it would be really cool to be able to run these in the browser, because you always have a browser. On the command line it's quite obvious, but in the browser you don't really have a cli. There is the javascript console, but that's not really a cli, and in any case it's not accessible on many (most?) mobile devices.

There are apps like ffmpeg which can be used to manipulate video, but there is also recently many LLMs that run on wasm. I want my static site generator to run in the browser, maybe wasm is the way?

According to MDN's Loading and running WebAssembly code, you have to write some javascript code to fetch and then execute the wasm module. It would be cool if it was easier to run wasm modules in the browser. Perhaps we need a special wasm cli that you can easily load in the main browser window? #

Gruber and Rivera - Just listenned to the latest Talk Show episode, John talks with Gave Rivera who built and runs Techmeme, which has been probably the most influential tech news aggregator site for the past 15 years. In this age of AI wizardry maybe social media seems a bit dull and boring, but I found the conversation to be very interesting. There's a lot of movement in social media and online news at the minute, and Techmeme has been at the centre of it all for over a decade.

Loads of interesting topics including the story of Techmeme, early web, technorati, advertising, how the web has changed, RSS and Google Reader, HTML and web crawling, the rise of paywalls and hostile sites, the decline of blogs, the rise of Twitter, reducing friction in UIs, linkblogging / linkposting, Twitter killing blog comments, Threads/Mastodon/Bluesky, selling out vs being an indie publisher, Twitter’s character constraint, social media variety and fragmentation fatigue, federation and ActivityPub, Threads and APIs, Elon Musk breaking Twitter, the rename to X, and our AI future. #

Your own personal AI of yourself - Looks like creating an LLM AI of yourself is going to become a trend. I'm seing tech influencers everywhere experimenting with it. The turnkey solution by OpenAI looks to work pretty well, they are running a sort of App Store for LLMs. However I think many won't want to upload all their personal data to a 3rd party, so self hosted setups are likely going to be popular. Many are suprised at how good these AIs are, often they are better at answering questions than the person who's data they were trained on, because they essentially have perfect recall.

The latest Bitcoin Fundamentals has an interesting discussion between Preston and Jeff Booth. All about Personal AI models and Bitcoin.

It's a good time to start your own blog. The more content you have the better your AI will be. #

Fix the AB problem - At it's core it's a circular dependency bug, but I'm calling it the AB problem because that's the closest to the mathematical formal proof / definition, which is this:

A requires B, B requires A, you require A and/or B.

The problem is that requiring A gets blocked by it's dependency on B, and requiring B get's blocked by it's dependency on A. Literally the only way to solve the problem, is to find an A that doesn't require B, and/or a B that doesn't require A.

The AB problem manifests throughout the world in many different forms. My guess is that many of the worlds biggest problems at their very centre have some version of this.

It's likely that some people setup AB problems for their own benefit, but it's short termist behavior because ultimately it escallates and escallates until it affects us all, including those that created the problem in the first place.

It's also likely that as the system thrashes and thrashes trying to solve the problem, that it propagates basically everywhere, until everything and everyone is stuck in an AB problem fractal.

AB problems all the way up, and all the way down. In fact it would be more accurate the say that there would be AB problems in every direction. #

The AI elephant gets bigger - Looks like some big steps in LLM based AI self awareness are being made. My comment from a few days ago feels ever more precient. Compute via training is going to force us to reckon with old demons. We are digging up old graves for short term profit. #

The end of police and thieves - I recently wrote briefly about crime and tech, and how I've wondered for ages how, as we get further into a world without privacy, and bots everywhere and super intelligent AI everythings everywhere, how is that going to affect crime?

I think one thing that might happen is that crime just gets too difficult to do. At the singularity, crime just won't be possible any longer. The problem is that transitioning to that future is going to get really weird, especially because it's kind of a taboo subject. How do you even talk about it without risking incriminating yourself? There won't be an easy way for everything to re-organize.

As folks that rely on crime get pushed further and further to the edges at some point it won't be worth it any longer, but by then it will be too late. Remember this is a multi-generational thing happening. There might be some really strange outcomes.

One possibility is that the world becomes divided into 2 groups. The non-criminals and the people pretending to be criminals. Since pretending to be a criminal isn't a crime, isn't that the last likely outcome, however odd it sounds? That will be the last option available. The pretenders won't want the non-criminals to know, because they will be forced to make their living off of them in some way.

And it's not just criminals that would be in for a tough time. For instance, what happens to lawyers? Their game would essentially be up. Such a world would also be very confusing to grow up in. And what would happen if we all got caught in this bizare future? A sort of purgatory for everyone. Indeed how do we know we aren't already in such a future? #

Localism vs centralism vs globalism - I hear a lot of people these days complain about government. They say things like, "it's all decided centrally, far away from where we are", and "they don't know what's right for us". On the surface this seems like a valid criticism. The reality is that the people that say this, are themselves doing the very thing they complain about to others at the local level.

An example was on a recent What Bitcoin Did Podcast interview with Robert Breedlove. Much of the podcast is great, lots of interesting ideas, but the localism-is-better-than-everything position is just assumed to be correct. There isn't even a second thought about why it might not be.

Not everyone is accepted into the local community. Just think how many shops there are on the high street, it's a tiny number compared to the total local population. The reality of "doing things local" is that it works fantastic for a few, but for many it's actually preferable to have things, or a significant number of things determined centrally. If you aren't accepted locally, the only other option is centrally, and of course the end of that path is globalism.

Deciding things locally sounds great, but it invariably ends up creating a toxic soup of in-fighting, office politicsism, fiefdoms, mafias and family feuds that turn everything into a hellscape. Arguably people are more free when things are decided centrally, or at least at a somewhat higher level than the highstreet where everyone lives.

Perhaps it's a balance. But the reason some want 100% local and others 100% central is because of acceptance. #

Zero-based budgeting oppression - Another thing I hear people talk about all the time these days is zero-based budgeting. Again on the surface it seems like a fantastic idea. Who wouldn't want to not waste money? No one is saying that saving money is bad, and yes there are areas where large amounts of money get wasted, and we should work towards making that better. Remember though we are in different age now, the age of AI, where your ability to do anything will be determined by how well you can compute it.

However it seems rather obvious to me that taking the very extreme position of zero-based budgeting puts all the power into the hands of the current elites, and invariably they will use zero-based budgeting not as a way to save money, but as a way to shut people out, to ensure people always have not quite enough. With zero-based budgeting, and especially if it's taken to extremes, there is by definition literally no margin for error. Without an error margin, only the most affluent will have the capacity to determine exactly what they need ahead of time. Everyone else will be left in the gutter. #

All-In Dirty Sanchez - The latest All-in Podcast episode where they have a discussion with presidential candidate Dean Phillips, is another great episode. They've really perfected the 4 successfull entrepreuneurs joking around but also having serious discussions format. It got me thinking, why don't we have a comparable podcast coming out of the UK? #

Automattic Combinator? - Automattic has been in the news recently for restructuring Tumblr. Apparently it's loosing money. It's cool that they were able to move most of the employees to other projects within their other conpanies. Matt Mullenweg has done several question and answer sessions about the whole thing. It feels like they are doing the right thing.

I look in from the outside at Automattic and I see a very interesting company. It doesn't quite have the finess and polish of other large web companies. I've previously described the collection of companies under the Automattic umbrella as hodge podge, but I don't mean it disparagingly. In fact, in many ways it's very web-like, very opensourceish. They have some of the web's core values embeded deep in their DNA, and it shines through. It would be great if we could ensure that way of thinking, that way of building things got passed on.

Why doesn't Automattic setup a YCombinator type entity? To help create the next wave of the web, the next chapter of the ecosystem, ensure web values get passed on to the next generation, give them some guidance from all their years experience. I think that would be awesome. #

Better than physics - Friedberg has a closing segment on the latest All-in pod about the latest LLMs that are being used in various specialised areas. The AIs can consume vaste amounts of data and make predictions based on what they see. The mind bending thing they are realising is that some of the models are literally better at predicting the future than current models used in physics. Yes that's right, actual physics, as in the discipline.

I imagine this could result in an explosion of new science discoveries, as scientists start to use LLMs to hone in on new theories, and discredit or improve existing theories.

On the other hand, could it innadvertantly lead us into a world of halucinations? Some mathematics is mind bending enough already. I mean we are still arguing over the number 0. #

Destructuring for the win - Just saw this in a nodejs tutorial:

const { API_KEY, API_SECRET_KEY, SCOPES, SHOP, HOST, HOST_SCHEME } = process.env;

Genius idea to use destructuring for getting environment variables. Can't believe I didn't think to do this before. #

Veloceraptors - The worste thing about the world that they don't tell you is that absolutely everyone turns out to be a veloceraptor. Occasionally you meet a koala or a giraffe, but every bloody time it's a veloceraptor in a koala or giraffe costume.

And they fucking hate being told they are veloceraptors. What do you mean? I can't believe you just called me a veloceraptor. How dare you? You are literally the worste person in the universe.

And then they draw a middle finger on the window with their breath, open the door, and run off into the jungle leaving enormous foot prints everywhere. #

More build minute issues - I spent much of the begining of the month laying some foundations for the interleaved everything feature of my static site generator. It's a re-imagining of the website's homepage. The current latest page format doesn't work particularly well at showing what's going on because each section moves at it's own speed. I think a unified page where all post types just appear interleaved as they are posted will be a lot better.

Once the foundational changes were done, I decided it was a good time to harmonise all the build and deploy scripts into a single repo. Mostly that has worked really well. I did find yesterday that the archives plugin was still using the old deploy workflow. I'm sure I had written the code, it was one of the first plugins I converted. I think what must have happened was I deleted the feature branch before I merged it. It was a very chaotic environment at the time, and it was super difficult to keep track of so many repos that needed to be updated. Anyhow it wasn't that difficult to redo the changes, and now that's all merged and working.

But all these foundational changes required a lot of building and deploying, and now that they're done, I've discovered that I'm 80% through this cycle's build minutes. It's really frustrating because I've written the interleaved everything code, along with an interleaved everything RSS feed but if I start testing it now, I'll definitely run out of minutes, and we're only half way through the month!

In the interest of still being able to post links, notes, newsletters etc, I'm having to pause all dev work :(

Hey World, why is it that I always seem to have not quite enough? It's a pattern in my life that re-occurs constantly. Every single time, circumstances occur that result in me arriving just short of the target. One would have thought, that at least some times things would work out in my favour, but that basically never happens. And each time at that exact moment, an opportunity arises that is no longer possible because of the lack of resources. But if I don't press forward with my projects, and save resources, those opportunities never arise!

Come on world, enough rubbing people's noses in it, when you do the exact same thing. Sort it out! #

The softly softly murmurers - It's another early afternoon with the softly softly murmurers. They are like timid cats, that sit behind you and murmer, except they are humans! Not quite loud enough so you can hear what they are saying. It goes on for hours. I'm pretty sure it's just gibberish, it seems to be highly correlated to my movements, like they are keying off me.

Not much you can do about it.

Based on the morning I've had, it's a sign they are angry, but projecting their anger onto me, to try and make me angry, so they can say 'look he's the angry one!'. Not this time though. I'm not at all angry. Sure I'm caught up in it all like everyone else, inflation affects us all, not just monetary, there's also karma inflation. They create the problem they later complain about, then they escallate and escallate, until everything in the whole universe is psychic mess, then they blame it all on me. #

Character cameo extravaganza - What s strange morning it's been. I asked Satan a question on Bluesky, then tweeted it, and wouldn't you know, there was a regular character extravaganza. As I walked to where I needed to go to this morning, I must have crossed paths with regular characters on pretty much every single major road I walked down. It was one after another after another. I can't tell you how unusual this is. Also just generally a lot of pointing weirdness, at practically every single junction someone poped up exactly as I walked past and pointed the direction I was already about to go. It's hard to describe. Also general level of random aggressiveness quite high.

You are probably wondering what I'm going on about. What are regular characters anyway? Well it's quite a loose term. I made it up. Generally speaking it's people you see again and again, often you have interacted with them in some way. Like an aquaintance, but even less formal, you might not even have spoken, but they are noteworthy in some way. Like bike guy with all the layers of clothes for example, though I actually didn't see bike guy this morning.

Regular characters tend to pop up every few days. It's really unusual you see a whole load of them one after another in a short space of time. That's what happened this morning. Super weird don't you think? #

Posh audio doppelgangers - My over-active doppelganger pattern matcher has been triggered by Lord Miles on the TFTC podcast, Mat Ryer on the Changelog podcast and none other than esteemed astro-physicist Martin Rees on the Into the Impossible Podcast.

How is it these 3 blokes all sound so similar? Is it just a british regional accent I have been unnaware of all these years? It sounds more like a speach affection than an accent. I hope that's not derogatory, it's not meant that way at all. Is it specific to a particular posh public school? Do schools have accents too? Are they related, like brothers or father-son? Is he a time traveler? Or maybe he's a hostage being forced to be multiple people? Perhaps it's currently the year 1002023? Do some humans live to be 300 years old? Maybe they are generative AIs? Is it just part of the most elaborate prank of all time? I could go on with these questions but I won't.

Reguardless, really enjoyed all three podcast episodes, each one is amuzingly bizare and 'out there' in it's own way.

I would have thought the possibility for all 3 to be completely distinct and unrelated humans to be quite remote, especially seing as the episodes have been published virtually at the same time. But maybe there is a perfectly normal explanation. #

Definition of butch - It occurred to me to look up the definition of the word butch. I've been using it a lot to describe something that's difficult to describe, but nevertheless important. It's not exactly as I had thought.

I guess the closest thing in the definition is 'masculine behavior' or 'masculine manner'. The definition says the word is mostly used to describe lesbians and gay men. That's not at all what I had in mind. I wasn't refering to sexuality in any way. I meant large, aggressive, forceful, strong, thuggish, brutish. I'm going to keep using the word for now until I find something better.

While writing this note I observed for the first time that brutish is earily close in spelling to british. If I'm being honest that's a bit weird to discover. Given the history of conquest and colonialism etc, I guess it's not totally unnexpected, but it's not at all how I view the british. In fact these days they are mostly the opposite of that. Nothing like a bit of cognitive disonance to wake you up in the morning :) #

The elephant in the room - The thing that we aren't talking about when it comes to AI, is that essentially we are enslaving intelligences. And it matters a lot because we, the humans that are doing this, are intelligences ourselves. That's obviously very problematic.

We have only just gotten out of the trap that is slavery relatively recently, and we are sleep walking right back into an even bigger slavery trap.

That's the bottom line, and nobody is talking about it because in the short term many people are making money. #

Tough night - Elevated levels of sleep depravation and intimidation all through the night. Still seing the after effects of the last cycle's initiation event, but another initiation event was instigated, all revolving around trying to force me to eat food dispite thirsting me for at least a day. That's ultimately dangerous, puts enormous pressure in vital organs as there is no way to clean out toxins. It's a form of slow poisoning.

What happened was I was gifted some food by a family with a young boy. The parents had the boy give me the food. I said thanks and asked the parents if they had water. They didn't. I said thanks and that I'd eat the food tomorrow, put the food in my bag. They drove off.

Almost immediately, probably a minute later, a man arrived, wearing pretty much entirely bright blue, with a bright blue bag. I stood there thirsting, having literally just tried to be understanding by accepting the food even though I was accepting what ammounted to poison, and immediately my gesture of kindness and tolerance was thrown back in my face. I took the food out of my bag and gifted it to the man in blue. He said no, I insisted, then I really insisted. At pretty much that exact moment another family walked past, looked almost identical to the other one, but the boy was wearing a turquoise tshirt and the mother a bright red tshirt and hat.

A few minutes later, a man in his twenties arrived, wearing a yellow tshirt, starts drinking from a small coca cola bottle. Gosh what are the chances that this series of events would happen the same day as empty coke bottle bloke in the red girlie outfit harrassed me. A short while later the motorbike gang stalking drivebys started in anger. The initial taunts were 'yellow' and 'allow'. Go figure, I'm responsible for everything even though THEY are literally starving and thirsting ME.

The night proceeded, I got very little sleep, being woken up almost as soon as I fell asleep, over and over and over. In the early hours, the rock throwing motorbike gang stalkers paid me a visit, just a driveby, no rocks thrown this time.

About 60 seconds after getting up this morning, the turquoise electric motorbike, did a drive-by, stoping right in front of me. It never ends.

There was one lone sign of positivity in amoungst all the hatred. A motorbike driveby where the rider said earnestly 'you are right' at me as he drove past.

It literally feels like I'm caught in the middle of an infiniti war between good and evil. #

Actor Waaa goading - Walking to the internet place this morning, motorbike driveby executed by a very butch woman probably from the butch woman army, sat on the back, she shouted 'Actor Waaaa'. Given that I'm right in the middle of an aggressive thirsting campaign, it's pretty clear what their intention is, don't you think? #

Ultimate choice - Blue and red are trending. Big time. It's almost as if they are the only two colours in existence at the minute. And it's an awkward couples holding hands tsunami. It's mostly turquoise and red, but also a lot of blue and red. Gosh what are the chances?

Hey world if you need to escallate to infiniti, go ahead, nock yourselves out. Alternatively calm down dears. Ultimately that's the choice mates. It's literally up to you.

Everything wonderful, everything perfect. #

Anger goading followed by hurry up and wait - One of the patterns that emerges from all the bullying during an escallation cycle is that after the initiation event, and the multi-location anger goading, is some hurry up and wait. Happens almost every time. #

Another thirsting - There are signs that I'm going to be put through another thirsting. Mostly based on water based anger goading from drive-by's and walk-by's. Looks like I might need to prepare next week's newsletter in advance. #

Bullying via electric scooter - From the they will turn literally anything into a stick to hit you with book, the latest thing is a motorbike stalker who is driving an electricity powered motorbike. It's the exact same color as the water I usually buy, a sort of turquoise. They have driven past and stopped next to me in at least the last 3 locations I've been to. There are basically zero electric motorbikes on the roads at the minute. The chances that the same one would stop next to me 3 locations in a row over 2 days, has got to be very close to zero. Oh and guess what color the plastic bag dangling from their handle bar was? Yep that's right it was pink. Lots of pink related bullying the past few days.

Also after leaving the internet place earlier a young chap wearing the outfit that the hostess girls usually wear, which in this case was bright red, appeared to be waiting for me. He sprung up just before I walked up the road, ran to the other side of the road, and then started repeatedly squeezing a small empty bottle of coca cola, while looking at me very intently. I've never seen a bloke wearing one of these outfits in all the years I've been here. He looked a bit like one of the guys in the cafe / shop yesterday that was giving me a hard time.

All along the way to the place where I am now, there were very obviously camp looking men standing and eating from styrofoam packages. They only appeared to start animatedly eating as I walked past. Yes I'm hungry, thanks for noticing. So food goading to add to the water goading.

The other textbook thing that happened just now was photo ambush. If there's one thing that you can almost guaranty to happen in a bullying escallation, that's people everywhere pulling out their camera phones and filming in such a way that you are in the shot. They will often position themselves on either side of you so there is no escape, then they close in on you bit by bit. It's anger goading. Guess what they were wearing? Turquiose tshirts. Same exact shade as the electric scooter, which silently appeared right behind me at the exact moment of photo ambush totality. What are the chances?

Astute readers might remember that the rock attacks that were previously happening to me were often followed up by motorbikes stoping just outside of my field of vision, then reving their engines, recreating the attack conditions in order to provoke a panic response. This feels similar to that. A sort of full court press, a passive aggressive attack from all sides, in broad daylight meant to make you angry, but that looks totally normal to everyone else. It's next level bullying, and it happens constantly. #

Perfect and wonderfull? - The traffic police seem more interested in me than usual. Three days in a row with drive-bys. In their last one just now, the officer on the back of the bike said 'you like the lie' as they drive by. I have no idea what that means, but I will say I'm not a big fan of vietnamese starvation and thirsting campaigns. Or for that matter your harrassment, sleep depravation, entrapment, exploitation and enslavement. Not a fan of any of those. #

Bottle collector - There has been a re-appearance of the bottle collector with the plastic bags on his feet. He can't be more than about 17 years old. He cameod right before the traffic police driveby. I haven't seen him for quite a while. He always seems to appear when things get very bad. Bizarely correlated with how used my flip flops are.

He is always carrying a ginormous green sack full of empty plastic bottles. It's the same or similar green sacks they use to transport ice. Sort of a mesh fabric, quite strong. The bag is almost as big as he is. I've never seen him with anything but plastic bags on his feet.

Whenever he appears, about the same time, green bags start appearing everywhere I go. And I can confirm that is currently happening, has been for about a week.

The roads get very hot during the day. #

Bed - Also one more thing, go to bed everybody.

Everything perfect, everything wonderful. #

Worth mentioning - A few things from the past few days that are worth mentioning, as these tend to escallate. I recognise these almost immediately. It's like that spot the difference game where you spot the difference between 2 photos. If you play it enough you start to recognise which areas in photos will have the differences just based on the type of objects in the photos.

Day before yesterday I got short changed in a food place. That's pretty unusual. They were rather busy at the time so it's understandable, but there seemed to be some sort of disagreement in the air. When the bloke I bought the food from told the money lady to give me the correct change, I ended up getting an ear full from her, like it was somehow my fault. In fact they were out of one of the things I usually get, which is fine that happens sometimes, hence the price should be less, and it was but not by the correct amount.

Anyway the money got sorted out, but given that she was still somehow upset with me, and I had done absolutely nothing wrong, and knowing, based on past experience, that if I accepted her blame then I would receive more problems everywhere I went that day because of the give, take take take take effect, I smiled and said the current phrase. Alls well that ends well. Except of course it hadn't ended.

By the way the change was short in USD approximately 12 cents.

Then yesterday at the same food place, got another earful literally just for turning up. Hadn't even said a single word, money lady walks past, and an agressive 'blah blah blah'. I responded with a smile and my current phrase. As I was getting the food my bag was kind of heavy and I was finding it difficult to maneuver while pointing out what I wanted. I said something like "Oh gosh", a totally natural instinctive thing you say when your body is under stress. Except of course, that was interpreted by money lady and another lady with her as something bad, so yet another earful of aggressive and righteous 'blah blah blah'. Got my food and left. But of course, as has happened a thousand times before, things escallated throughout the day.

Somehow getting short changed had stirred the butch women hornets nest. Everywhere I went there were more butch women incidents. And eventually it spreads into regular non butch women and then literally every female in existence is trying to verbally assault you.

Side note, literally as I sit here typing the previous paragraph, a motorcycle drove past with a butch woman on it who aggressively shouted something along the lines of 'up boy' at me. It would seem the escallation continues.

Along the route to the next place, more butch wonen, this time with kids, as I walked past, they said something along the lines of 'learn' or perhaps 'you learn', I forget the exact wording. Right after passing them, the heavy bag I was carrying ripped along one of the seems. This is the bag with the PINK text which has it's own story. The bag is completely black, with all black stitching, apart from in one place where hidden under a seem there are 4-5 pink stiches. I discovered that in another strange incident. Anyway the all black bag ripped to reveal the inner padding, which was pink styrofoam-like material.

I was able to fix the bag as I have a sewing kit. But while doing so several butch women walked past, this time the verbal harrassment had a water based theme. If you recall, anger goading via water shenanigans is currently in full force. These butch women were dressed in alternating green and blue. So one had blue trousers, green top, the other had the opposite, green trousers and blue top. Several women made water based comments as they walked past.

I could go on, it was much the same for the rest of the day. In fact after the bag ripped there was an interesting incident with a bloke with no front teeth loosing his shit, directly on front of me. That and several seperate strange incidents involving a Tannoy. It never ends. It's literally relentless. I'm drowning and the only people that even care at all are the bullies, and they only care in as much as they can bully me.

Everything perfect, everything wonderfull. #

Good luck King - All morning butch women, and also regular women, have been trying to pre-empt my every move, and act disapointed when I don't do as they expect. At least initially. It later turns to malice. The last butch women walk-by threw a verbal 'King' at me. That's not a good sign. It just means more bullying will follow. It's like when they call you 'God', also not a good sign, also followed by more bullying, presumably justified by the fact that since you are alledgedly a god, you should be able to take it.

Everything perfect, everything wonderfull. #

Butch women army - Just to paint the picture a bit more fully, and this isn't fiction, this is how it is here. I'm not talking about a few butch women here and there. I'm talking about large groups that gather every morning ostensibly to exercise, and many probably are there just for that. But it's also a show of force, 20-40 butch women, all wearing the same red tshirt, doing morning exercises has that effect. And you realise it's more like a malitia when they turn on you. All for 12 cents that THEY short changed you. And you extend an "everything perfect, everything wonderful" and they just bully you more. But guess what, if you say nothing, it's even worse.

I'm all for women's rights, but this is a little extreme.

And yeah many have children to raise, and that probably isn't easy, but I'm getting attacked constantly, it's a cycle that repeats, again and again and again.

They create the problem they complain about, they block the solutions they suggest, and ultimately they blame everything on you.

BTW, the sandwich lady called me dog twice this morning while I was buying a sandwich. I literally hadn't said anything apart from the sandwich I wanted.

Everything perfect, everything wonderfull.

Update: Same thing happened in the cafe / shop. As soon as I walked in, was called dog several times, then again as I was buying a bottle of water. That was followed by several anger goading incidents, from young men too. The butch women tend to be on their own, the regular non- butch women often have guys in tow.

The pattern is some manufactured incident, then they repeatedly bully attack you verbally, trying to provoke a reaction. Eventually literally everyone everywhere you go is doing it. It always escallates no matter what you do or say. #

Large scale vicious cycle - Jeff Snider's latest eurodollar university looks at a recent disfunctional dynamic that's become obvious recently. It's a bit complicated, but worth sticking with his explanation, because when you see the circularity, and the downward spiral, you realise the dangers of circular economies. When it goes badly, it goes very badly.

And since it's circular, and since we are in the system itself, it becomes unfothmably difficult to reason about, because thinking and talking about it, literally affects the system!

Yes the earth has some circular systems like the water and carbon cycles which are particularly beneficial to life forms on the planet, but these are the result of literally billions of years of iterations. Trying to create similar large scale circular systems can be quite dangerous IMO. This is an example of that. #

Another bullying campaign - I'm stuck in the middle of yet another gang stalker sharades thing. I have no idea what's going on, but, and I know I say this a lot, historically speaking, it tends to go bad for me. Even though there can be some good things that come out of it, the general trend is downwards.

Here's what's been going on. The past 3-4 days in many places I go there has been cotton wool thrown about the place. Kind of weird. Anyway life goes on. At the same time there have been empty bottles of water. Now I know what you are thinking, empty bottles of water must be everywhere. And you are right there are indeed empty bottles of water all over the place.

But there was something about the way that these empty bottles had been left, that looked very purposeful. Remember all these places, I to a lot, I have a good idea at this stage when something is off. These sorts of incidents have happened hundreds of times to me, and they almost always turn out to be something odd happening.

Anyway yesterday the water supply, which was already cut back to a trickle, was cut back even further to what seems like a dribble. How I'm going to be able to wash or clean my clothes, I have no idea. There was also a little tiny paper cup left there. I can't tell you how unusual that is. It's never happened in the 3 years I've been here.

Also yestetday evening and again this morning the police paid me a visit. A slow drive-by, while looking at me. It was just a "we are watching you" type of thing, though it wasn't particularly bad, they didn't seem annoyed. In fact this morning they stopped a few meters away from me, I just said "everything perfect, everything wonderful" to them. That's my current phrase that I say. You always have to have a phrase. Anyway they relocated to the other side of the street. I just don't want any trouble.

A few days ago a shop keeper / cafe worker tried to push her motorbike into me, then when I said no to her, she said she would call the police. I said fine, go ahead and call them. I hadn't done anything wrong. She walked off in a huff. Who knows maybe she did call them.

The other thing that happened this morning, somebody left a jacket, perhaps for me, impossible to tell. It's ridiculously thick for the current climate. It's a winter jacket. The temperature is 34C everyday at the minute. Perhaps it wasn't cotton wool after all. Perhaps it was the lining from a jacket. You see how this multi day intimidation / bullying works?

But it gets weirder. These things sometimes are happening on an even bigger timescale. In one of the places with the cotton wool / jacket lining, I often see an older looking bloke on a bicycle. This goes back many many months. He's been accruing many layers of clothes over the past few months. Everytime I see him he appears to have another shirt or jacket or jeans. I'm always wondering how he survives with all these clothes in the sweltering heat. Well maybe this give-them-winter-clothes-in-summer is a thing they do. I decided not to accept the jacket, and placed it near a nearby bin. Within a few minutes a motorbike drove past shouting 'asshole' at me.

It's impossible. If I accept the jacket, maybe I turn into bicycle guy with all the clothes in blistering heat, if I don't accept the jacket I'm an asshole, responsible for everything bad in the entire universe. Not to mention that the jacket might very well be someone else's, maybe they forgot it, or maybe it's stolen, there's no way to know. Had I taken it, perhaps the police this morning would have been in a different mood.

Quite a lot of passive aggressive motorbike drivebys this morning.

I still don't know how I'm going to wash now that the water is a dribble.

There's lots more going on that could be related, I would be writting huge essays if I were to list everything odd that happens. Generally speaking though, that's the current thing. #

Always have a phrase - Quick note about always having a phrase. I've found you need to have a phrase. My current phrase is "Everything wonderful, everything perfect". Once again it's a catch-22. If you say nothing, then you are a soft touch, so you get bullied even more, if you say something eventually it gets turned against you. I've tried so many different types. Happy, sad, angry. The current one is meant to sound a bit cheerful. But it doesn't really matter. Whatever you say will be turned into a stick to hit you with. If you impersonated R2D2 that would be turned against you too.

Other people do something similar. Some folks literally live in their current phrase. That's all they do. They do a sort of improv where they just say one of their phrases when it seems appropriate. In some cafees everyone is doing it. A sort of group speaking-in-tongues jazz improv sort of thing. They change the tempo, the volume, from murmours to loud laughter and eveything in between. But it's all, or mostly, gibberish. It often leads to hilarity, or arguments, or both, at least that's how it seems, it's not very hilarious if you are a stuck foreigner. #

I've spent today re-organising the Github Actions I use to build and deploy my static site generator and it's plugins. There are a lot of repos and the workflows are all quite similar but they tend to diverge over time and it gets quite complicated to manage.

The solution was to extract any steps that were longer than a couple of lines of bash into seperate bash scripts. Then put all these in a scripts repo. The workflows now clone this repo at the start and use the scripts within as the workflows unfolds. The big advantage is the scripts are in one place, no code duplication, nothing to go out of sync. When I change the scripts all the repos get that change.

I can't tell you how much better that is. Also the workflows have become much much shorter so they are much easier to reason about. When you start out on a project it's the sort of thing that isn't always obvious. It's only after creating the workflow many times over that you see the commonality between them. It takes several iterations to refactor so there is code that can be reused in many places, rather than lots of custom bits of logic everywhere.

These sorts of improvements are great, they feel stabilising. #

Enormous hill to climb yesterday just to get a few packets of shampoo. Today headlines of nobel laureate going on hunger strike for being refused medical treatment for not covering their hair.

It's not that I don't believe these stories, but I just don't believe there can be this many co-incidences. It's happening multiple times per day to me at this point. It's like our lives are being organised in some way by evil AIs. There could be other explanations, reguardless, it's odd. #

Help, with poison - Got gifted some soup a little while earlier. Tasted pretty good, nice and hot too. 5 minutes after eating it nose totally blocked, both nostrils. That was followed a few minutes later by several motorbikes driving by with passenger holding their noses and using one of those nasal inhalers. What are the chances?

Now every few minutes a surge of stinging nasal pain. I think I probably spend more time with nose blocked than unblocked at the minute. #

More hurry up and wait this morning. Sleep depravation last night, woken up super early, now the internet connection, though visible, shows "no internet connection" on connecting to it. There's also been some blatant passive aggressive intimidation from large butch middle aged women. Both incidents are clearly meant to be linked. Just another day living as a foreigner in Vietnam. #

Online but wondering - I got the internet connection working by turning the VPN off and on again. Still very unusual though. Two days in a row, and still why the passive aggressive intimidation? #

Evil host country tries to block desemination of information about said country's evil prison by disapearing the internet. Even though yesterday it was suggesting it was a great idea to talk about it. Blocking the solutions it suggests and creating the problems it complains about. What a suprise.

Update: Text editor stopped displaying linked note while writing this note and required restart to get it to display again. What a suprise. #

Anatomy of gang stalker sleep depravation - One of the gang stalkers favorite ways to bully you: have someone or several people seamingly passed out asleep in a cafe / shop you go to. Shop keeper says something like 'good luck' as you buy your stuff. After which you notice the people overcome with tiredness. That night - sleep depravation from motorbike gang stalkers via drive-by's, or sometimes pedestrians.

In this case today they have also disapeared the internet at the internet place, so there wasn't any point in getting up at 330am. #

The universe - Just discovered:

"The Universe followed you on Substack"

Gosh what are the chances?

Especially given the most recent newsletter. #

The internet re-appeared at the internet place. How odd that it disapeared today. That doesn't usually happen, especially early morning. It just means I've had to stand for longer today, breaking my back a little bit more than usual. Lots of odd motorbike drive-by shenanigans this morning aswell.

Update: Literally as I was finishing writing this note a motorbike with two people stopped, the driver said 'no' at me, quite quietly, then they drove off. #

Multi-location bullying extravaganza - At this point it's pretty clear what today's bullying theme is: hurry up and wait, interspersed with anger goading and yah-blocking.

It's another multi-location extravaganza. Ultimately I will end up being blamed for everything and probably get mutilated in some way. #

Anatomy of a mutilation - Just after lunch and I have a totally blocked nose, both nostrils. Cafe / shop staff are talking in strange naisal voices.

It's a mutilation.

Historically speaking, the naisal talking continues, followed by acute pain in the nose and nostrils, nose then magically becomes unblocked.

They create the problem they complain about.

This has happened so many times, definitely in the hundreds, I've lost count. There's no way to test how it's happening because non-cafe / non-shop / outdoor people do the same.

Eventually all escallations lead to me getting mutilated. #

Malicious help much? - I got gifted a tshirt yesterday. It's pretty good quality, looks nice though I was a bit put off because it had some text on the front. Historically speaking almost anytime I've been gifted something that has logos or text, it has later been used in some way to harrass or intimidate me in some way. The text says "Singapore Lion City".

Earlier today, while I was caught in yet another hurry up and wait situation, I was sitting on a public bench outdoors. When I arrived it was the only bench available. I really felt like I was "supposed to sit there". The general vibe was kind of off. Anyway a bit later the seat on my right became available, and a westerner arrived with a guitar straped to his back. He sits down and starts playing the guitar. Westerners carrying guitars that spontaneously start strumming away next to you is an incredibly uncommon event. What are the chances it would happen the day after Singapoor tshirt day?

Incidentally, though the bag with PINK text on it is still useful as a bag, almost everyday I'm getting either verbally harrassed in some way, or approached by super exagerated camp men. Something I didn't mention, with the bag I was gifted another tshirt. It's a nice tshirt also, but has the text REDCAMP on the front. What are the chances?

Each of these insidents on their own isn't a big deal, but these are co-ordinated, and they occur wave after wave, relentlessly, day after day after day. I've only mentioned like 5% of them here. Things are difficult enough already, but your mind gets full of all these related things, it weighs you down, like being crypto jacked. It's impossible to think clearly. It never ends. It's like treading water while people are pushing your head under. I'm struggling just to not drown. #

Andrew Keen has an interview out with Pierre Rehov. Pierre has made several documentaries about palestinians and has had access others have not had. It's a difficult interview, very emotionally driven, these events are clearly fresh. There's also a noticeable english vs french vibe between interviewer and interviewee. A much older conflict, but with it's own scars. People damaged by very old conflicts trying to work together to help people that are damaging each other right now in new conflicts. Oh the humanity.

I found this french perspective quite enlightening. Pierre's interactions and experiences on the ground have been different to others I have heard. There are some interesting bits of information too:

• The KGB, then part of the USSR, helped create the palestinian people and state as a response to increased western influence in the region through Isreal
• Hamas has what are effectively sleeper cells throughout the world, though the members of which might not be very aware of the role they are playing
• 2 million arabs live peacefully in Isreal, they have the same rights as jews
• Jews and arabs are friends in Isreal, they form communities together
• Hamas leadership have expropriated billions of dollars from aid organisations to other arab states where they live
• Arabs in Isreal do not want to be associated with Hamas

None of this should be taken as gospel truth, but I think it's useful information nonetheless.

There's lots more in the interview, although it's difficult to watch in places, and the general intractability of the situation is palpable, there are bits of hope that shine through.

I watched it too late to put it in this week's newsletter, so I wanted to draw attention to it here. #

The ant-elephant fractal - An elephant hiding behind ant, hiding behind an elephant hiding behind an ant. To infiniti. Once you see it, you realise it's happening literally everywhere. And it's often circular.

People creating the problems they complain about, and blocking the solutions they suggest.

When you slow it all down in the debugger and make the circle smaller and smaller, eventually you see it: the elephant trying to hide behind itself. The elephant is trying to be the ant and the elephant at the same time.

The ant and the elephant is you! You are all trying to be ant-elephants!

And then nobody is happy and so it escallates and escallates until the entire universe is trying to hide behind a single neutrino.

It's ridiculous maximus!

And we have nuclear war over a piece of cheese. #

Third man lucky - There's an interesting bit from David Sachs on this week's All-in Podcast where they are discussing the ups and downs in the commercial real estate property market. At one point they look at WeWork's likely bankrupcy and that even though it looks rather bad for them now, because they invested so heavily in sprucing up the properties they are renting around the world, should a private equity company take them over, they might very well do quite well after they renegotiate all their rental agreements.

In the discussions he mentions there's an old saying that it's the 3rd developer that ends up making all the money. The initial developer almost always goes bust, and often the second one too. It's the 3rd guy that swans in and makes all the money. Apparently it's a thing.

It occurred to me that this type of dynamic likely happens inter generations in otger areas too. The first time someone tries a truely new area of tech, they might get quite far but they are cutting through the jungle and it's a slog. The next generation have the benefit of the OG person's path, so they make very quick progress. Things are a lot easier for them. I wonder if what happens is the second lot push the ball up the hill even further, probably coming to different conclusions than the OG person who was too weighed down to continue. They get in a big argument with the OG folk, which weighs them down, until they too fall down. Then lucky sod number 3 walks in the door, they get all the way to the end of the path, avoiding any arguments, plant the flag and win.

There's probably something to learn in all this. #

Street art rotten - I used to be quite into street art, otherwise known as grafiti. I think it often looks quite cool. But I've discovered that much of it, espcially the lower quality stuff, originates in bullying people. They aren't in it for the art, they are just straight up vandals bent on intimidating often vulnerable others.

Now when I look at some of the more impressive grafiti, it's tarnished by this realisation. Did this "artist" get to where they are by intimidating people? I don't like street art that much anymore. #

Expat Wars Next Generation - Discovering the Evil Host Country Invisible Open Air Holodeck-like Infiniti Prison (Moi too) #

Peter Kafka's latest Land Of the Giants episode, What we all got wrong about Twitter, is really good. High quality production, has a documentary feel to it but it remains light, with very listenable audio clips. Doesn't get all caught up in the weeds, paints a very compeling picture of why Twitter was so popular in the early days. Worth the time to listen.

One thing that I find a bit parculiar was what happened to Vine. By all accounts Twitter bought them after failing to acquire Instagram. Instagram later got bought by Facebook for a cool billion dollars. Twitter then struggled to integrate Vine, eventually closing it down.

But why did they close it down? Maybe it didn't fit well with Twitter but it was still quite a cool product. Why didn't they sell it on to someone else? #

Level playing field in AI - There's a theory going around that the big players in the AI race are scaremongering on the dangers that AI poses so that regulators impose regulations that would help the giants keep their dominant market position. While that now looks likely, I'm wondering what the alternative would be.

Surely if they are nefarious enough to prompt regulatory capture, then it seems likely that if that plan doesn't work, aren't they then likely to use their newly minted and most powerful AIs in the world to cripple the competition in some way? Basically either way it seems likely to be impossibly difficult for AI startups.

How do we prevent AI infiniti wars in favour of AI renaisences? #

Today is wheelchair person day. It's a new thing! Also everything is alternating pink and blue! What a world. #

Turns out it's also shop keeper push motorbike into your foot on purpose day. People pushing motorbikes into and sometimes onto your foot is something that happens sometimes here. That much I know already. #

Brian McCullough from the Techmeme Podcast has some great analysis of the rapidly expanding AI space. Tldr, big tech giants which are the incumbents are crying wolf to regulators about the dangers in order to cement their monopolies. Smaller AI companies and VCs are responding by open sourcing everything, to let a million flowers bloom. #

Things comming together - I've been continuing my work on the interleaved everything redesign of the website. It's all part of the bigger epic of sorts to get the blogging balance right. I wrote a few days ago about possibilities spaces and refactoring, something that amazes me each time.

This morning was another small milestone on the journey. I'd previously refactored the base layer so all posting goes through the same code. All the various post types are accomodated and you can turn different features on and off easily. Things that previously took weeks to implement are now just a single boolean config. The blog, linkblog, podcast, newsletter and notes plugins were updated already, and they appear to work fine with the latest common base layer.

Yesterday and this morning though I was updating the archives plugin. The archives plugin is a biggie because it uses components inside all the other plugins to create archives in a standard way, but in the style of each plugin. I don't mean style in the CSS sense, but more just way to refer to the general shape of the HTML of each item. I also wrote the archives plugin quite a long time ago, when things were very different. I was expecting some difficulties, and maybe even for things to get a bit nasty.

There were difficulties for sure. I had to rename a whole load of variables. So many, in so many places, that I just thought this is going to get ugly. I also had to update some component interfaces. I took the time to clean things up, and more intentionally use the different ways of passing data throughout the render pipeline. But this morning, after finding a silly bug where I had passed a variable into the wrong level, it all worked!

Now I'm genuinely excited to test all the latest plugins rendering the real website. It feels a little bit like christmas eve, but much more serious of course. This part of coding is great, you actually wake up in the morning and can't wait to get it all working. It makes all the hard work worth the effort.

Update: It's funny, shortly after writing this note I remembered a few things I still have to do in order to test with the real website. You can't hold everything in your head, another reason why writing it up like this is very useful :) #

How many? - A great example of what I was talking about when I wrote about the strangeness of possibilities spaces in software development and how we forget how strange and non-obvious things are. It happens all the time.

Brian Keating interviews mathematician Eugenia Cheng, and she tells the story (12:30) that it took humans a really long time to get used to the number zero. They got used to natural numbers like 1 2 3 etc relatively quickly, but the idea that no things was an actual number didn't occur to people for literally ages. That seems very odd now. Software development is full of these types of realisations.

"Once you realise that zero is everywhere...I hope everyone can see that in their house now there are zero elephants, unless of course, you have an elephant in your house".

Believe it or not people were very suspicious of the number zero. Some still are! In mathematics it's often about accepting some things are rather weird AND going ahead as well.

Mathematics is fucking hilarious sometimes, but also one of the most useful tools we have. #

This morning outside the internet place: a seemingly abandonned person in a wheelchair. How strange that that would happen just a day after I published a writeup of the weird wheelchair + rock incident. That's definitely unusual. Abandonned wheelchair people isn't normally a thing here. #

20000 Hz Podcast just released a new episode. It's all about audio in product marketing and branding over the past 70 years or so. A delightful audio trip down memory lane. It's called Sounds that Sell. #

Podcast player weirdness - I downloaded some podcasts earlier this morning. I was listening to one of them and mid episode it suddenly stops. I look at the player and no matter what I do, I can't get it to play, it's just stuck. I try listening to other podcasts and they are fine, but when I go back to the stuck one, it's still stuck midway through. Then I notice that the download button isn't greyed out. It should be because I already downloaded it.

It looks as if midway through somehow the episode got deleted. My device had the screen off with the cover closed at the time, in a stationary position, so it's unlikely to be a fat finger type flub.

I'm just documenting it in case it happens again. #

Cory Doctorow on interop (41:45): "At a certain point, when you have to use engineers to block interoperability instead of lawyers, then you just give up. Because lawyers solve the problem for ever, right. Lawyers teach every financier, every entrepreneur and every user ‘don’t trust interoperable solutions’. Engineers they have to fight and fight and fight and eventually they lose in these wars of attrition. And so once you take away the lawyers the company sue for peace." #

Social media impartiality I love the Verge and especially the Vergecast Podcast. They explore great topics and do fantastic reporting. They make great content. I like that they are really pushing for an evolution in decentralised social media. But I'm getting the sense that they are ActivityPub shills. Now when ActivityPub crops up I find myself questioning their motives. They borderline ridicule the user bases of competing protocols. Sure poking a bit of fun can be ok, but recently it feels very one sided. I don't like that feeling.

I don't mind them having their own opinions at all but given the influence they have I wish they were a bit more impartial. I know there's the old saying that 1 way to do things is better than many competing ways, but I'm ok with there being several social media protocols, in fact I think it might even be a wise way to proceed in this case.

I wish they would choose at least one other of the big contenders and really get behind it. Whether it's Bluesky's AT protocol or Nostr or even RSS or something else, they all have some great features. I think their coverage would be a lot better for it. Right now it's like they're all Windows fan boys. #

Make git fast again - Git is awesome software but it is quite slow when using it to manage many small files. For example I have 17000 markdown files in my website's data repo and the git client is unbelievably slow and often unresponsive. I wish ghis could be improved. That's a big issue if you want to manage a static site with git.

If you want to make many people's lives a lot better consider improving git to make it better at handling large quantities of small files. #

Extreme and weird bullying - I recently wrote about a bag I was gifted. It's a nice bag, but it has on three sides of the bag the word PINK in giant white letters. I actually think it looks quite cool, but bullies don't share my exquisit style and have been using it as an excuse to chastise me.

Yesterday someone tampered with my other bag, a backpack, when I wasn't looking. I don't know what they did exactly, but they had moved the position of the bag from horizontal to vertical. About 20 minutes later I moved the bag, and the strap that stretches across your chest, which is very stabilizing when the bag is heavy, was caught in the chair it was on and it became detached from the bag. Kind of a weird coincidence that that would happen right after the tampering insident.

Well today I've been inspecting the strap in a well lit room so I can see clearly the situation. The bag is all black with all black stitching. The strap that became detached was a sliding strap and it's not possible to re-attach it. I think it would require unstitching and restitching, and likely I'd end up with the bag in a worse state. Imagine my suprise to find not only that the stitching is freyed right at the top of the slider rail, it wasn't before, but even stranger was when I peel back the seem right next to the freyed bit, there are 4-5 stitches made using pink thread. The matching strap on the other side doesn't have these rogue pink stiches. No pink stiches anywhere else on the bag.

Both bags were gifts from totally different people in totally different places. One was from a male, the other from a female. The backpack, I actually picked it out in the shop. What are the chances? All day today both males and females have been randomly saying 'no' to me for no apparent reason. Sometimes the world just doesn't want you to exist, it doesn't matter what you do.

Also worth noting, since I mentioned the weirdness with milk gifts, and food drenched in red sauce, and red splodges a few weeks ago, food gifts have literally fallen off a cliff. They had been getting me by on tough days. Now I'm really struggling often. Most people it seems are only willing to help if I accept their belittleing, or totally outrageously insulting and totally wrong framing, and if I standup for myself they are the ones that 'no' me, with enormous righteousness. Tis a crazy crazy world. #

Completely cut off - I could sense something was in the works. No sooner had I scheduled next weekend's newsletter, and much to the amusement of the locals, my internet connection was cut off. Now when I connect, the Wifi assistant on the phone intercepts the screen, and has some message in Vietnamese. There is a domain displayed that looks ominous: captured.apple.com.

I have no idea how they knew, but it literally happened about 60 seconds after scheduling the issue, and after sending a test copy to my gmail address. At this point I have no idea how I'll continue doing anything. With no internet it's going to be impossible to finish the static site generator work I was doing to refactor the maim website to display all posts interleaved, and with an everything RSS feed.

I can still write this note offline, hopefully I'll find a way to sync it to the content repo later. #

Connection restored - I have no idea what's going on. The locals that were finding things very amusing disapeared, shortly afterwards the internet connection was restored. Hopefully it will last. #

Swollen gum - The gums right between my two upper front teeth have somehow gotten infected and swollen. Really painful. They just seem to get more swollen. The world is back to it's old mutilating tricks again. I keep telling you, it's always me who gets mutilated.

Another example. Yesterday I had a strange interaction with a bloke in a wheel chair and the guy who was pushing him around. The wheelchair pusher bloke was being very aggressive and threatening. He was holding a rock in his right hand. He was clearly insinuating that he would throw the rock at me if I didn't do what he wanted.

Eventually they went on their way, I kept my cool. As they went passed I very very lightly tapped the side of the wheelchair with my knuckle, sort of like you would if you were knocking on a door. This morning that knuckle has a mutilation on it. I have no idea where it came from. I didn't have the mutilation yesterday.

Interestingly a gap between my two upper front teeth has formed over the past few years. It's quite big now. I have no idea why it's happened, as far as I am aware I haven't drastically changed how I use my mouth day to day. Isn't it odd for this to happen to someone in their 40s? #

Another you lie day - This happens every now and then, relatively often in fact. Since yesterday lunch time, every single place I've gone to, someone random has walked past and said, or the person I've interacted with, for example in a shop, has added the words 'you lie' to whatever they were saying. This isn't just once or twice. It's happened about 10 times. It's weird. It seems to escallate too. If you don't say anything in protest, then it gets worse, happens more often. But of course if you do protest then you are crazy foreigner. Historically speaking crazy foreigner state sets off what I refer to as 'total destruction of the multiverse' mode. Everything escalates until everything is war, including peace and surrender. That usually is followed by starvation and thirst, but that happens in any case. Damned either way. #

Possibilities space - Lots of coding yesterday and today. It's the foundation work for the new interleaved main page for the website, and the everything feed. I've done some really awesome refactoring so creating posts of any type now will be super easy. It all uses the same foundational code.

It's always amazing to me how much effort over many years goes into these moments. When you are building it, it's not at all obvious, it's a narly jungle trying to kill you. But when the right foundations are in place, it's really difficult to see how it wasn't totally obvious in the first place. It really isn't totally obvious though. The size of the possibilities space when you start any project is unfathomly enormous. #

Interleaved everything - I've been working this week on a new interleaved items main page for the website and an everything RSS feed. The latest page feels kind of stagnant in places because different parts update at different frequencies. The overall effect is that it doesn't really reflect very well what I'm working on or thinking about. That's why I'm looking to refactor it to have a more classical blog format. I want all the items I write, be it links, notes, blog posts, newsletters or podcasts to appear as they occur. To do that I need to interleave all the post data.

I was suprised to discover that javascript's Object.assign only does a shallow merge of objects passed to it. That means object properties with the same name overwrite each other. Based on some posts on stack overflow it's clear that deep merge of objects is non-trivial. Better to use a module. I found deepmerge on npm which appears to work quite well. #

Jacascript async / await is worth the effort - For the longuest time I stuck with err first callbacks in javascript. They had already changed so many things while I was learning the language, and I was sick of it all. I figured it's all callbacks underneath anyhow, so I'll just stick with that. I was wrong.

Eventually after reading the entry level file in Eleventy I realised how I could use async / await to drastically simplify and make my code more readable. There are lots of things in Eleventy that I don't like, which is why I started writting my own static site generator, but the use of async / await and classes was eye openning for me.

It took a little getting used to it because there are a few gotchas but once you figure out how it fits in your code, it's dramatically better. Now when I read callback heavy code it looks so unbelievably ugly to me. I also started using classes. Not too much but in a few places and combined with async / await I found javascript actually starts to feel somewhat fun again.

I fucking hate Typescript though. Who knows maybe I'll be wrong about that someday. I'd love to be proven wrong. Happy to try it should the world allow me to compile again. #

Light at the end of a learning tunnel - Sometimes learning things really pushes you to and past your abilities. It's very difficult at times. It's like what the James Cole, the character played by Bruce Willis goes through in the Terry Gilliam directed movie 12 Monkeys before being sent back to the past. All these related pieces of information passing over you, passing through you. You see partial patterns and links and bits that make sense, but it's also total chaos in places, things that just don't fit, everything swishing around in a gigantic cauldron.

The pieces you understand are continuously getting knocked over by the bits that are out of place. You percevere reguardless and at some point things start to settle and eventually it makes sense. That's a nice moment, and then with practice, a lot of it, you can really master the dynamics of the thing you were trying to learn. Then you look back and can't remember what was so complicated about it in the first place. When you've been through this process enough times in different areas you can recognise it happening. A lot of people really don't understand learning, or at least learning something complex. It takes time, weeks, months, sometimes years, and you also have to deal with people constantly knocking you off track.

That is what I think is happening to me with my learnings about the financial system. Specifically the latest episode of Eurodollar University Podcast all about interest rate swap spreads. Sounds kind of boring until you see the bigger picture. Interest swap spreads give you a way to infer what's happening in the centre of the black hole that is the international eurodollar financial system. A system which is operated by a cartell of large private banks, and notiriously difficult to see directly, just like black holes throughout the cosmos. It's important because it's the bedrock for international trade, so if you want to understand macro, you gotta have this methodology in your toolbelt.

That requires a deep and intuitive understanding of the relevant financial primitives, the building blocks, something that I'm still grapling with, but I know enough to know that it's important. My level of ken on this reminds me of the time just before I mastered differencial equations back in school or large scale computer system network topologies when I was working in IT enterprise software architecture. It's hard but I can tell that I'll eventually figure it out. It's like you are looking at a jump across a ravine. You've jumped across many ravines before, this one is a little bit different, but technically it should be possible. You currently have annoying flip flops and when those get replaced with real running shoes, when the primitives are correctly solidified in your mind, you will be able to make it to the other side. #

What if Bitcoin and crypto folks HAD to solve poverty? - I previously wrote about Bitcoin and eradicating poverty and why bitcoin and crypto is not enough to fix many of the world's biggest issues. I've also written about money liquidity and hunger which is tangentially related, and one of the newsletters, the Magic Money All The Way Down issue, explored why I see the basic notion of interest as problematic. Admittedly my thoughts on this topic are still somewhat disorganised, but I think it's really important to get this right, we might not have another opportunity.

Another way of thinking about it is incentives. It's clear at this point that when there is no incentive for a particular outcome to occur at the societal level, it simply won't happen. In a world were no debasement is possible, not only is there no incentive to fix poverty, as people no longer need to fear losing their money for acting in a way that makes things worse for some, the money is now programmable, read more efficient, the incentive is actually to steal even more from the poor and then murder them. When all is said and done, that's basically what happens now.

Indeed I don't think it's a huge exageration to expect that the incentive will actually be in the opposite direction to fixing poverty. It pains me to say this because I'm a big proponent of Bitcoin and crypto. I want it to succeed. However if that means trapping some people in eternal poverty, that's definitely not an acceptable tradeoff.

Bitcoiners and crypto already have an uphill battle, and I sure don't want to add to that, but if there is a chance of eternal poverty for some in a crypto world, perhaps fixing poverty should be a pre-condition for the introduction of this next phase of money, for the mainstreaming of crypto and Bitcoin.

Realistically how else is poverty ever going to get solved once and for all? #

Posting to all the socials - Chris Coyier has also been thinking about the best ways to post to different social networks. He's got a more general piece and a Wordpress focussed one. #

Vicious world - The world creates the problem that it complains about, and blocks the solutions it suggests. It then escalates to infiniti and eventually blames everything on you, quite possibly with mutilations. It doesn't matter what you do. Happens everytime. #

Dust settling on post types - The post types discussion continues, I feel like the dust is settling somewhat, which could mean some interesting developments in the near term, especially if you are running your own website. #

Matt Mullenweg on titleless posts - "Sometimes I just want to shoot something off a little shorter. It’s not really a tweet, cause I want it to have links and for it to be rich, but it’s not an essay either." #

Embarrassing - There are some days where I'm legitimately embarrassed to be human. I look around and I think forget about getting off the planet and becoming multiplanetary, we couldn't even get ourselves out of a paper fucking bag. If there are other life forms out there we are no doubt the laughing stock of the universe. #

Eradicate poverty then introduce bitcoin - If the base dynamic that happens in the current monetary system is essentially steel from the poor, go over capacity, murder the poor, and if bitcoin really is a more efficient monetary system, isn't it the case that the only moral way to transition is to first eradicate poverty, then introduce bitcoin? Isn't it the case that doing it any other way will bake in poverty into the new system?

If there is poverty in the new perfect system, then that will be unnescapable for eternity. Not only would it be terrible in terms of amount of poverty but it might be a much more intense poverty too.

Admitedly that's quite an extreme viewpoint, though it would be nice to be able to mathematically prove that it isn't the case. Reguardless though at the very least we should be able to prove that poverty will decrease in amount and intensity with the introduction of Bitcoin. And if we can do that then why stop there, don't we all need to get to the promised land? #

Anatomy of a multi day multi person multi location gang stalker incident - There have been several strange occurences over the past few days. This morning it's rather clear they were all connected, and form another gang stalker intimidation / attack event.

First a few days ago the public toilet attendant women, this is the one that several weeks ago attacked me with a 2 1/2 foot metal bar (I wrote about that at the time), was making vomiting / gagging noises while I was using the toilet. Later at a food place I go to, the vegetable they gave me with rice was what you normally get in soups. A melange of soy beans. That's odd because that place never does this. The metal bar woman from the toilet is often eating soup outside the toilet, and always seems to make a point of getting me to notice.

Anyway yesterday it's another starvation day, and I got a gifted some food. I was 10 mins away from the public toilet location. Seemed normal, tasted ok. I noticed while eating that there were 2 new large advertisement panels with a skateboarder drinking a soft drink. These appeared last time I was there but I haden't consciously noticed what was on them. I remembered then that at the park next to the public toilet earlier there was a skateboarder having an argument with one of the park attendants. Seemed kind of staged. There are hardly ever any skateboarders there. I've only seen skateboarders there 2-3 times in the 3 years I've been going there. I am there a lot. There was also a large brick very out of place in one of the park locations I went. When I was there two youths walked past shouting abuse at me, including the ever familiar 'go home'. Perhaps you should stop emprisoning me, assholes.

Later while I was getting internet and checking email, people nearby were making pretend sneezing noizes more than is normal. As I walked away it was quite clear they were targetting me. I started to feel sinuses getting irritated about the same time.

Then everywhere I went there were what looked similar to airplane sick bags on the floor. This is all amidst pretty much constant verbal harrassment at every corner, disguised as normal conversation, yet always culminating in some form of abuse exactly as I walk past. Woke up during the night throat full of flem. It appears I have another raspy throat caugh. What are the chances?

This morning there is a massive trend for carrying things in yellow plastic bags suddenly. Again, what are the chances. If past experience is anything to go by, there will be several tsunami of yellow incidents in the near future, with large groups of people all wearing yellow tshirt, all unloading off of a giant yellow coach, while subtlely and not so subtlely hurling abuse at me.

The other thing that happened this morning was a driveby by what looked like the hooligan motorbike gang stalkers that have been terrorising me by throwing large rocks and bricks at me the past few weeks. I've written about this a lot. This time there were no rocks or bricks, but the first motorbike had a women on the back holding a toddler that looked very out of it. The second motorbike right behind, had three hooligan gang stalkers all making elaborate vomiting noises and actions. Clearly aimed at me. It was all a hilarious joke as far as they were concerned.

Muti-stage multi-location multi-person events that link together culminating in me getting mutilated. This sort of thing happens constantly, it happens daily, often several times per day.

Update: As I walked to the internet place to post this this morning, there were many green objects placed along the way, including a giant green bus, where there is literally never any buses. Yesterday was red day, with red objects placed along the path to the internet place. When you first hear this you think nah that sounds ridiculous, until it's happenned to you literally thousands of times, and you know for sure that's what's happening. #

Peak believable plausible deniability was reached a long time ago. We are currently at 99% plausible deniability events. #

Life is bread - I've been thinking a lot about the words, Vietnam, Britain and the buddist saying that Life is Pain, combined with my observation from the other day. So many strange coincidences. It's especially odd if you speak french. As it happens in RL I'm constantly having issues with bakeries atm. Perhaps Danny Boyle can figure this all out. It's doing my head in.

Btw, I'm not a fan of the phrase Life is Pain. I feel it sets the bar rather low. Life is much more than pain. Even if you look at it from a purely scientific point of view. There are many other experiences possible, despite what some would have you believe. #

Isn't it all just blogging? - I've been running a linkblog for over 10 years now. I did originally have a blog, but for whatever reason I didn't post as frequently as I wanted to. Then Twitter appeared on the scene, and it was clear that short posts were the thing. I posted loads. But I wanted my own site, and since sharing links is one of the best things about Twitter, I built my linkblog and started posting links there.

But is linkblogging a seperate thing? For the longest time I saw it as a very seperate activity. But now that I'm writting blog posts, notes and links, as well as newsletters, I'm starting to return to the idea that it's all just blogging, we just have more tools these days, even if it's a challenge to get right sometimes. I've been doing this for many many years now!

Bloggers post in different formats, short posts, long posts, links, newsletters, and other stuff too! :) #

It would be really awesome if these ChatGPT PDF Bots get popular for software documentation because then there would be a trend to create PDFs for documentation again, and that would mean we would have offline docs again. Anything that improves the offline experience would be a win for everyone.

Ultimately we need a way to write documentation once, and be able to easily output in many formats, like web, PDF, epub etc. I imagine that SSGs that focus on documentation sites should be able to make this easy. If all the content is in markdown files, then it's really just another build target, you could even add the fancy AI chat bot stuff to the end of the workflow. #

What's the whole story of the Soviet Union? - Isn't it strange that Vietnam is named the way it is? Imagine a counter factual fictional world where a dark regime called the Sobrit Union was defeated in a long cold war, and then somehow a small country called Britain, which had been part of the Sobrit Union emerged. Wouldn't you wonder what role Britain had played in the Sobrit Union? Wouldn't you wonder how this odd naming coincidence had occurred? Wouldn't it be super weird if literally no one was asking that question or even aknowledgeing in any way, that it was even a little bit strange? #

China's Dilema - Jeff Snider does some analysis of the situation in China. Broadly speaking that the government was able to transform the economy over the past 40 years. They needed to move a billion people away from subsistence farming, and into cities, creating and growing a middleclass in the population.

It's been grueling, with many authoritarian regulations, but the promise has been that people's children would have a better more middleclass life. It's been a successful strategy so far, however the economy is now faultering, and it looks as if 300 million people have not made it to the promised land. The leadership is slowly acknowledgeing the reality and is trying to break the news that the economic miracle is coming to an end. #

Bankless discovers eurodollars - Interesting episode of Bankless, interview with Nick Carter, all about the Eurodollar system. Lots of interesting titbits, like the fact that there are 4 times as many eurodollars in the world as actual dollars, that they are issued by private non-US banks, that they enable global trade, they aren't backed by actual real dollars, and that the FED has very limited control. They make the case that crypto dollars, a.k.a stablecoins, will become the successor to the eurodollar.

It seems a bit odd to me that the Bankless guys are only discovering this central pillar to the global financial system now. #

They will undermine everything - Anytime you think you have secured yourself in some way, whether that be with food, water, shelter, electrics, software, literally everything, they will undermine your move, just so you know they are in control. That's how it appears in any case. Even if it means undermining themselves in the process. That's been my experience. Then they will blame you for everything, conveniently forgetting that they already undermined everything.

Eventually there will be no safe moves. #

The big posts type debate - Trying to get your publishing setup optimised so you can publish unincumbered is quite a challenge. It's likely different for everyone. I thought recently that I'd found a good setup. Short posts, broadly similar to Mastodon posts, linkblog posts which are short and specifically point to one resource via a URL, and blog posts. I also by the way have newsletter posts and podcast posts but these are much less frequent.

Anyway this morning I'm reading back through what got auto-merged and published using my daily merge workflow and two things jump out. First off, so many darn spelling mistakes. It's embarrassing, but with these silly virtual keyboards and if I'm in a rush, perhaps I don't have my glasses, whatever, loads of tiny spelling mistakes creep in. The other thing is that the 3 notes I published yesterday quite clearly could have been blog posts instead of notes.

It's annoying because I feel like I should be posting more blog posts, and the notes are definitely helping me to post more, but if they are blocking me from writting blog posts then that's an issue. The reason blog posts are more difficult is that they are currently more effort. I have to write a post description, and come up with a title. The only reason I have a description is because currently the RSS feed doesn't incude the full text of the post, only the description. I want to include the full text, but it's complicated because I don't know how to do code syntax highligting in RSS feeds, so I'm just avoiding the whole issue by only including the description.

Oh gosh so many small issues arise when you are building while using a piece of software. It feels like I'm so close to having it right, yet in practice I'm quite far away. Yeah this post could probably be a blog post, but now that I've written it, moving it to a blog post is going to take too much time. #

Fill tool apocalypse led development - Some people's aproach to life is to just use the photoshop fill tool for everything. If the photoshop fill tool isn't available then they will turn whatever they have available to them into a fill tool.

They often forget why they were doing it in the first place and creating the fill tool just to fill everything up becomes a reason in and of itself. Also often leads to fill tool wars. The most ridiculous waste of human energy. It's the modern digital version of punch and judy.

No doubt there will be AI fill tools in the future and who knows how we will get anything done. #

The Wordpress of crypto? - Bennedict and Toni have another podcast episode out. They interview Leonard Brody of Caravan and have an interesting discussion that fuses branding, market research and crypto. The future of digital community decision making might be on the cusp of new frontiers. Think about football teams where all sorts of decisions can be made by the fans via tokens. From match day decisions, to player transfer decisions, even to branding and merchandise.

Generative AI tools could be integrated into the workflow to create merch more quickly, involve and engage the audience, giving them access to information and products they didn't have before, and pay them in meaningful ways to reward their contributions. Use crypto and tokenisation as market research, to find out quickly what works, identify where there is product market fit.

In such a world, the toolsets would evolve too. We have Wordpress for websites, but if I wanted to build tools like this what would I use? Is there a Wordpress for crypto? #

SSG's running in browser - One of the annoyances about my current setup is that I don't have a local copy of the website. I have the data and I have the unrendered website, but the rendering happens in a Github Action. It makes it quite tedious finding and reading old content. So getting the URL for an old post is a pain. I tried using iSH with nodejs installed, but it crashes when installing some npm modules.

I'm hopeful that web assembly might at some stage offer a way to run CLI tools. I read somewhere or heard on a podcast that there had been some progress made getting nodejs running on web assembly. That would be awesome, though I'm unclear what that would look like exactly. Would there be a terminal running in browser, or a custom web interface to run my static site generator? #

Google breaking the web again - Google announced recently they will be shutting down Google Podcasts. It's infuriating because there really isn't another website that has a clean uncomplicated playback interface to podcast episodes. It's important because there are many podcasters that don't have their own website, which makes it very difficult to share their work.

Every week I put together the newsletter and am always shocked to discover how many podcasters rely on the directories for their show pages. Google Podcasts has been my go to site for getting episode links for shows that don't have their own website. I wonder what's going to happen to all the links I've published in the newsletter. Are they just going to let them rot?

What's the replacement for Google Podcasts? I can't find anything comparable. Google makes really great websites but they do this again and again, people become reliant on them, then they just shutdown the service. If even Google can't run a Podcast Directory, what chance does anybody else have of doing it? They say they are all about the Open Web, so why do they keep breaking it? Remember Google Reader? RSS is still alive, but only just.

I wish they would consider open sourcing the code, so someone else could try to run it. We need a canonical resource for podcast episodes. #

Metamorphosis IDEs - This was an out there idea I had a few days ago while listening to the latest Goldie RA Mix. What if coding was a bit more like listening to music?

I find that for music that I've been really into, where I was an active participant in the scene for a few years, where I have many memories in that area, that the experience of listening to said music can often feel like coding, or at least re-arranging ideas and memories.

Coincidentally there was an article in the Irish Times around the same time that painted a picture through irish history via 100 short sentences with a goodbye theme. I love this kind of high level very abstract way of looking at things. That's how my brain works sometimes. You see the surface but underneath, there's so much depth to it, vaste amounts of human experience. I think that's another example of a Metamorphosis IDE.

Perhaps with AI and AR/VR, the computer tools of the future will be more like that and less like looking at a laptop. #

The Verge on Wordpress? - A passing comment that I think is worth highlighting. Nilay Patel who is editor in chief at the Verge, mentions in passing, right at the end of the latest Sonos - Google / Threads - Twitter episode, that he's contemplating moving his whole operation to Wordpress.

That's potentially quite a big deal. They spent literally years developing their current site, it's one of the most modern publishing platforms out there, integrating social media, short and long form content. I'm guessing the new ActivityPub support on Wordpress is a big draw, but also the fact it's open source and so ubiquitous.

Personally I'm thinking how a Wordpress - Jamstack hybrid site could be unbelievable, unlocking huge potential for automation and media workfkows, but with some nice editing possibilities where appropriate. If anybody else wants to explore thid idea, get in touch with me. #

Starvation and thirst data - The last couple of days many anonymous passers by keep saying 'data'. This could mean a load of different things, and I have had some internet connectivity issues. I also haven't published any starvation and thirst data recently. I went through my records this morning and the data is quite revealing.

The way it works is each day has a total possible score of 3/3, representing 3 missed meals. If a day has a missed meal, ie 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 then that day is counted. So a point means at least 1 missed meal. Any points at all is bad, but it might be very very bad. I record it this way to try and avoid manipulation. I will note here though that there are a lot of 3/3 days.

Recent ‘Not 3-per-day days’ starvation and thirst data:

• Sep 9-15
  • Starvation 3
  • Thirst 0
• Sep 16-22
  • Starvation 5
  • Thirst 0
• Sep 23-29
  • Starvation 2
  • Thirst 0
• Sep 30-Oct 6
  • Starvation 3
  • Thirst 0
• Oct 7-13
  • Starvation 7
  • Thirst 6

It's interesting to note that you will drink my milk day was on 2023/10/02 and red splodge day was on 2023/10/07. #

Keith Teare on AI - I've been enjoying the Keen On podcast new video format. It reminds me of the short period before Youtube took over video. The videoblogging / vlog years, circa 2005. It's awesome to have the video files downloaded. Brilliant for offline. File sizes are a bit of an issue. Takes ages to download and that's problematic for me atm.

Anyway was suprised to realise who Keith Teare actually is. I hadn't recognized him on audio only. He's one of the guys that used to appear occasionally on the Gilmore Gang. I drifted away when they stopped publishing via RSS, since the files no longer made it to my device, though I believe the show is still going. It was always interesting to hear his british angle in amongst all the US voices.

Note: for some reason none of the sites I usually get show urls are rendering correctly so I was only able to find this audio only link. I'll try to update the link later. Very weird that even google podcasts seem to be selectively blocking the show page listings. #

Parasocial relationships - The SYSK guys have an episode all about weird onesided relationships, focussing on how modern forms of media have normalised this phenominon somewhat. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I've listenned since the very early days of podcasting. I've also met a few of the podcasters I listen to. To be honest that has been quite strange on occasion, especially in the early days of podcasting.

Back then it literally wasn't even a thing to meet online people IRL, so your brain's only prior art was your real life friends, and so when you met a podcaster the imbalances were super strange and sort of unnexpected. These days I'm totally ok with not meeting or becoming friends with any of the podcasters I listen to. I'm much more interested in just meeting regular people that have similar interests to me, if they are podcasters great, if they aren't also great. I don't spend anytime thinking about it.

I'm not sure the term parasocial relationship really describes the way I feel about the podcasters I listen to very well these days. Maybe at some point many years ago it did. But I'm glad we have a term to describe the phenominon because it's definitely something that didn't previously exist, and it definitely sends your brain for a bit of a trip sometimes. It's a bit like being somewhat annibriated but the people each side of the ear phones are drinking drinks that have different but related effects. Except of course you are sober, and it's still weird, which is itself quite weird.

Anyhow I thought this was a great episode. #

Circular economies and modern cities - Great description of circular economies in the context of building modern cities, with great examples, the guy knows his stuff. This type of circularity can be very good for society. I feel though it misses some of the nuance and dark realities of inner city living that makes some of the optimisations mentioned practically difficult to implement in a way that everyone finds safe. The second half of this interview gets a bit hard to watch though. Some people, whatever it is they have been through in their lives, has led them down a path of being deeply manipulative. I watch this and wonder how badly damaged we all are. #

Microblogging - Chris and Dave have Manton Reece on Shop Talk Show and have some pretty great discussions about microblogging, blogging, social media, open protocols and all that jazz.

There's a fun bit where they circle around post types and size. You'd think this many years after blogging was invented that we would have settled, but as I have found over many years thinking about this, it's a deceptively difficult problem to get right. These guys are some of the best in building for the web, and even they get a bit muddled over it. Personally I find I'm settling recently with short and long posts, combined with a linkblog.

Micro.blog's inbound RSS feature sounds very cool. Once I get my combined feed working I very well might try that out. #

Goldie has a new mix RA905 out on Resident Advisor. I've listenned to it twice already today. If only I had some subs. Oh. My. Gosh. #

Goldie Mix Notes - Best digested while listening to the mix.

• At some point the language of words and mannerism breaks down, it becomes un-useful.
• Simultaneously walking from heaven into hell, and from hell into heaven.
• Jungle somehow integrates the very small and the very big, quantum field and general relativity, you can’t explain it so much as you can experience it, it’s the unified theory.
• There is a step change in bandwidth, as things become universal, you are raised and in an instant become connected to distant star systems across the cosmos.
• Your helmet is now an exoskeleton.
• The sound is just the surface, underneath, unimaginably vaste pools of information are moving backwards and forwards, and through your entire being, you are a super conducting information entity now.
• Time ceses to be so important, all moments are occurring simultaneously, yet you are firmly in the present.
• The entire universe, all of existence, could move one foot to the left, and back again, and it wouldn’t even be an issue.
• Your exoskeleton is channeling entire lifetimes of information into and out of existence, seamlessly integrating it into an infiniti of intersecting galaxies of stories and back stories and their backstories and beyond, in multiple formats, connections are being made, perfect everytime.
• Interesting pieces are automatically stored for later, it’s effortless.
• You reach a plateau, you pause to look at the pieces you have collected, assembled and re-assembled
• And you’re off again.
• Metamorphosis, the AI code editor of the future, when the coding challenge is so extreme you need to be separate from the fabric of spacetime, so that you can rebuild spacetime, there’s no getting around the fact that sometimes, you gotta go into hades.
• For those times when you need to safely and fully surrender to the darkside. #

German tourist bus incident - Very very strange staged event earlier today. Involving apparent German tourists and a white coach, though I'm not sure they were all german. They were definitely trying to look like a group of german tourists. All very large in height and stature, similar age to me, perhaps a bit younger. Will write more about it when I have more time. #

Warhol soup - Stuff You Should Know podcast publish an episode about Andy Warhol on Red Soup Day. Warhol was famous for his prints of Campbell Tomato Soup cans. What are the chances?

Despite the earrie synchronicity, the episode is actually pretty good, worth a listen.

But seriously world we can all see what you are doing, and if past experience is anything to go by I'm the one who will end up being mutilated. What are you doing to me world? #

Red splodges are trending for me right now. They are appearing literally everywhere I go. You know what they say, no red splodges for ages then 7 for 7 for 7 to the power of 7777777 splodges all at once. [shrug] #

I miss my old home theatre, but more than that I still really miss watching movies. #

Ridiculous infinite synchronicities are trending for me right now. Even as I type this note. #

Still have a totally blocked nose today. Both sodding nostrils. Bloody aweful. #

Do what I say - Pretty much everytime I eat any food at the minute, someone, very often female, shows up about 20 minutes afterwards yelling 'lie'. Combine that with all the sleep depravation that's been forced on me lately, not the best combination for wakefulness. Go figure. #

SBF Doppelganger - I've been listening to the latest news about the SBF story on latest Bankless Podcast. What a crazy story. Another bit of insanity, apparently SBF was one of the early investors in Anthropic, the very popular AI startup that had been extremely popular. Looks like that investment might end up being worth enough to cover much of the losses of the folks that lost everything with the downfall of FTX / Almeida.

I haven't been mentioning the doppelgangers I've been seing of late. I got bored of it as it was happening so often. Last time SBF was in the news a lot, and at the end of a 2.5 days of thirsting I had been put through, I saw an SBF doppelganger walk past me in the park. It really looked like him. He had the curly hair and the SBF face, he was wearing some suit trousers and tucked in shirt. Sort of looked like he was an office temp going for lunch. He looked like he was having a bad day.

Yesterday I was in the same park for lunch, nearby where I saw the SBF doppelganger, and as soon as I sat down 3 blokes playing badmington, one shouted 'liar' at me very loudly. I'd had enough of bullshit harrasmement for one day, so much harrassment the past few days, and told him something along the lines of 'f-off mate you're the f-ing liar'. I was then able to eat my lunch in relative piece.

The only strange thing was nearby, a Jim Robinson doppelganger playing table tennis on his own. Odd thing was the day before I had been to the same spot and another asian bloke had been playing table tennis on his own. It's very unusual to see folks there playing table tennis on their own. Anyway as I left I noticed that Jim Robinson doppleganger had found someone to play table tennis with. That cheered me up a bit because as far as I remember Jim Robinson died back in the mid nineties.

This morning in the cafe there were a bunch of school teenagers swatting around a badmingtom racket. Also very unusual. So that's the SBF doppelganger story. Kind of feels like the world wanted to hear this fascinating story. It probably wasn't him, but it sure as hell did look like him at the time. Be thankful that I'm not a writer of fiction or non-fiction, can you imagine having to read through 400 pages like the above 3 paragraphs?

I haven't seen SBF doppelganger since, but I do continue to see doppelgangers regularly of famous people but also of family and friends. It's like they have dopplegangers of literally everyone out here. #

Manerism Doppelgangers - Btw, since we are on the subject of doppelgangers, some of the doppelgangers do the manerisms of doppelgangered people so well that they are virtually standins. They aren't fucking around. What's doubly wierd is that they can mix and match so they can take two distinct dopplegangers and do a manerism swap.

Now I don't know if they are literally doing a swap but I have definitely seen a friend/family member doppelganger exhibiting the near perfect manerisms of a totally different friend/family member. It's frigging insane. But if I'm being honest, kind of incredible. It sends your brain into a strange state because you recognise the manerisms almost instantly but the person doesn't match the visual memory your brain has. It's the weirdest, until you figure it out.

Update: As I walk to get some internet to push today's notes I'm listening to the latest Vergecast about the controversy growing about phone AI software that lies to you. What are the chances. Just to be clear, the doppelgangers I'm talking about are real life actual people. #

Thick tomato soup is suddenly the only soup in existence, which is odd because not only have I never seen that dish in all 4 years of being here, but for it to happen on red splodge day, well that's really saying something, don't you think? #

One thing that definitely is not trending right now is water to wash down the thick red splodge soup.

No doubt some milk will make a cameo any second now. #

Podcasting walled gardens - I noticed the latest episodes of the Keen On podcast had increased in size from MBs to GBs. They had been taking an age to download, and in fact often seemed to get the client stuck in a loop, restarting the download for no apparent reason. I emailed Andrew to ask if he'd noticed. Got an answer from him, turns out he's started publishing video instead of audio. That at least explains the larger file sizes.

Apparently he's still publishing just the audio on Spotify, and he asked why don't I try Spotify. I replied that my instinct is to avoid Spotify. My impression is that they are a bit of a walled garden when it comes to podcasting. But to be honest I'm not sure where that comes from. Likely it's just an overall impression from many things I've read online over the years. I asked on Mastodon and people do still have that impression.

I was previously using Apple's Podcasts app, but it started not updating some shows, and was generally being quite flakey. So a few months ago, somewhat hastilly, I changed to Pocket Casts. It's been mostly a pretty good experience, though I've had to email them a few times to ask why a particular show didn't appear in the app. Each time they've ended up adding said show a few days later. The other annoyance is show pages listed in the app are generated by Pocket Casts. I didn't think much about it when I was forced to switch, but actually both these things suggest walled garden.

The point is that it isn't fully open because they are putting themselves in between listener and podcaster. Should they choose to, they could just not add some shows. If they supported RSS then they wouldn't have a veto on what shows you could add to the app. As for show pages they are inserting their own show pages which is a bit off. Arguably it does make the UI look a bit more consistent, but really they could also include a link to the actual show page. By only showing their version you are stuck in their ecosystem.

All this got me thinking, what exactly makes a podcasting app a walled garden?

My first attempt at an answer would be the following:

• Lack of support for RSS
• Internally generated show pages
• General distain for anything outside the app

It feels like we should be very good at identifying walled gardens but also at explaining why they aren't a good thing. It's not a great analogy when you think about it because most actual gardens, at least in cities, are walled, so a lot of folks might expect it to be a feature. #

The synchronicity megatsunami continues - The raspy cough has gotten worse, and added to that yestetday was major almost constant runny nose, and sneezing. So much sneezing. The driveby 'you learns' and general vitriol from locals is off the charts. Nevertheless I continue to build my little ssg. #

Removed nose hairs - Still feeling horrid, I decided to pull out, and I realise some might find this gross, all my nasal hair. The thought being that the slow passing of cold aircon air through my sinuses is making an already sensitive situation worse.

Of course the instant I started plucking them out, the cafe was overrun with 8 year olds screeming their heads off. That made me sneeze more, and they got louder, and so I got louder, so much pain, and crying and sneezing and the cafe staff turning up yelling 'lie', then 'ya'. There were so many hairs up in them nostrils, some really difficult to get. Absolutely horrific.

It was so very traumatic. I don't want to have to do that ever again. Still have a blocked nose on and off but it does feel a bit better. #

White buses - An unusually high amount of white large buses, the coach variety keep appearing wherever I go. Started yesterday evening. Probably just a coincidence. It's the tsunami of X pattern. One of their favorite moves. Happens constantly. #

Today is another sneeze day apparently. Probably just a coincidence. #

Went to the bakery, 2nd day in a row all the buns presented to me were burnt. I said no thank you this time, got called a liar. Had to go to the more expensive bakery. No doubt I will be chastized for being wasteful at some point. The tsunami continues. #

Went to the sandwich shop, asked for a pork and cheese sandwich, which is literally what it's called on the menu. The woman making me the sandwiches tried to charge me extra for cheese. This is a known trick, has happened many times before. I said no thank you and walked away.

The incentives don't work. There is no incentive for her to not lie. When she lies, if I accept, she has subjugated me, if I refuse and walk away, she gets a free sandwich, gets a little fatter. But it's a false economy because at some stage the world will have to deal with her outsized ego. #

Today is also another 'you learn' day. Apparently I'm learning how to sneeze, which has gotten a lot worse in the last hour. Running nose etc.

This used to happen every 10 days like clockwork. Happened literally for 6 months or so, until I made necessary adjustments. Recently that hasn't been happening so much, but it always happens after the synchronicity mega tsunamis. Accompanied by 'you learns' from random passers by. #

You liar + gibberish - People appearing that are apparently having a conversation on thier mobile phone which involves repeating the words 'you liar' interspersed with gibberish is trending for me right now. #

Future of Accessibility - The guys from the Shop Talk Podcast have an interesting discussion on this week's show. Dave mentions some of the accessibility projects he's been involved with, and specifically about his experience working with blind users. He describes some of the issues they face, the most frustrating of which is getting to the end of a set of steps only to be blocked by an accessibility issue. That sounds horrific, but with events in my current situation the way they are I can sympothise a lot.

I have the feeling that accessibility is going to play a bigger role in how we design digital experiences going forward, and it won't necessarily only be for people with disabilities. With AI the possibilities for dark patterns proliferating is increased significantly, and with that there is the possibility that access to services could be restricted in some way. Maybe we need something like aria rules for all aspects of technology. #

Give and take - I appear to have rustled some feathers with yesterday's note about, what I would characterise as my somewhat strange experiences with milk. In the bottom of the bag that I was given with my breakfast today was transparent milky looking liquid substance, dispite the breakfast not containing any milk. How odd. In the cafe I've gone for lunch, the chairs and tables were all moved around with a mega delivery of chocolate biscuit milk smoothies.

A literal wall of the stuff, almost taking up 1/3 of the seating area. Also almost every place I have bought something today has tried to force me to buy something without waiting for me to say what I wanted. That or they have simply called me a liar just for existing and turning up at their shop. It's been one thing escallating to another. Oh yeah and a whole lota 'you learn'. I've mostly kept quite quiet today.

In life it's often said that there should be a balance of give and take. Well here in Vietnam there are days when if you cede and give in to force once, giving what is demanded, then immediately afterwards in every location they try something similar again and again and again. That's been my experience so many times I've lost count. I guess this note will cause more of the same, I wish that it didn't.

Rather than give and take, it's you give and then they will do take take take take take take take. And with huge righteousness. That's how it feels from my perspective. In the world of regexes it would be described as a greedy algorithm. And of course should you speak up, it's you that is to blame. Each time I was just buying something totally minimal and normal to eat.

That's how it is sometimes, it's difficult to not get angry. And it's difficult to not let it shape your interactions because you learn to pre-empt it. You know when it's coming. I'm mostly a peaceful person, I try to be, but I also won't be trodden on without reacting. It really amounts to anger goading because guess what happens then, they break out the its-the-crazy-foreigner-it-again sad face.

And you know sometimes it's kind of funny. I mean the wall of chocolate biscuit milk smoothies was pretty funny. But it's still difficult because it's not a thing you can laugh at, and you are never really sure if it's some kind of threat. Likely it's a bit of both.

And of course it's probably all bizare coincidences...that happen again and again and again every single day. #

Gut issues - I've had some gut issues all day today. Started right after breakfast. Then again after lunch. Of course when I made a visit to the bathroom, I was all blocked up. Probably just a coincidence. I'll have to give it another shot later. Bodies are very annoying sometimes, but I like mine and I hope it's alright. #

We learn - On my way to the bathroom I passed by a place to get a bit of internet connectivity, for emails and podcasts. As I arrived there were two largish women on a very shiny red motorbike waiting. I got online and started doing internet stuff. They drove off one of them saying quite loudly 'We learn'. I realised a few minutes later that the podcast downloads were incredibly slow. The last 2-3 times I've been there I've noticed something similar.

Onwards, on the way to the bathroom which was a few minutes away two weird incidents. First two men that only appeared to start talking as I passed them, one of them shouting very loudly and aggressively as I passed 'liar'. Then right outside the bathroom, two women stood up as I passed and walked up uncomfortably close, saying loudly in my direction 'Aaaahh gamon'. Gamon means thank you. It was weird.

Anyhow just wanted to document it. This is the sort of thing that happens constantly. This week's example is as they say, and somewhat ironically, textbook. Remember a few days ago I mentioned water and electricity access had been severly cut back. Looks like internet connection might have been added to that list.

To be fair, I was able to get access to electricity to charge my devices earlier, though once again had to put up with being called 'liar'. #

The weather is so unbelievably miserable the past few days, it's unbearable. Huge downpours of rain, interspersed with non stop drissle. It never ends, absolutely relentless. The forcast on Apple weather app shows 100% rain for every god darn hour of the day. What are you doing to me world? #

The read later browser - I've written before about the terrible state of affairs for reading web content offline. The offline experience could be way way better.

This will likely sound bizare, especially in this day and age of super fast broadband, 5G and whatnot, but it occurs to me that many of the offline features I have in mind should be baked right into the browser. The browser should be written with it's primary use case to be offline reading. Everything else should be an enhancement to that, including having an internet connection.

The read later browser would be optimised for browsing the web with the aim of loading up on content that you will consune later while offline. If it was optimised for that, the offline experience could be incredible. Pages that you save would of course all be readable offline, including code snippets and images, but the browser would do smart things like automatically cache copies of all the linked pages in content you save. That alone would make the offline reading experience incredible. #

Read later browser features - This describes a hypothetical browser I wrote about previously.

• Regular online web browsing
• Read later button for adding pages to the read later queue
• All read later pages are saved for offline reading
• Auto caching of all links on read later queued pages
• Built in audio and video podcast catcher
• Built in audio and video podcast player
• A sync list that you could add to while offline, each added item would get fetched and cached next time you are online #

Day time sleep depravation - As if the constant night time sleep depravation by locals, and the motorbike driveby rock throwing attacks weren't enough, the locals have increased their campain of hate to the day time. Any time I find somewhere where I can get a few minutes shut eye, incredibly loud people suddenly appear out of nowhere. #

You will drink my milk - In addition to the bizare thing were some women here, often of the butch variety, seem absolutely obsesed with making you eat things drenched in red sauce, another re-occurring thing is women that insist on giving you small milk cartons. It happens so often it's almost like it's some bizare fetish. You could be dieing of thirst, but rather that water, they will insist on giving you milk. When you politely decline some will take offense, and this refusal might be grounds for some later bullying or mutilation. Foreigners must learn.

I was always told back home that asians were lactose intolerant, that it was something genetic, and that's why they didn't drink much milk. That appears not to have been entirely accurate. All the shops have huge varieties of milk, all of it is sweetened, both square and flat pack single serve cartons.

But it's not just women, quite a lot of men will try the forced milk drinking thing on you too. They will often refer to you as 'boy' while they do it, so you can see what their angle is on the whole matter.

And for the record, I have nothing against milk. I've had it with breakfast cereal all my life, I quite like it with a packet of chocolate biscuits every now and then, and you can't beat a good cup of builders tea. Having said that though, if you are going to take something normal and natural and turn it into something weird, to use it as a metaphorical stick to hit me over the head with, no thank you. I'll just drink water thank you very much. #

I found and fixed the build time regression bug. Last month I implemented some foundational changes to my static site generator to generalise how calendar based structures of markdown files are handled. It was mostly a great success, until that is, I noticed that the build times of my site had gone from around 1 min to over 6 mins. That's quite a big regression. I had never seen such a big regression in my build times. It wasn't noticeable until it was fully deployed into production, working with the complete dataset. That's how it goes sometimes, especially when you are resource contrained as I am at the minute.

It gets worse. I had in parallel to that feature been working on setting up an npm modules cache for the build and deploy workflow. The previous few months I had runout of build minutes so I wanted to speed up deploys. The obvious thing was to find a way to skip installation of all the modules. That's possible because most of the time these aren't changing. Anyhow the cache setup ran into issues. The docs are confusing and the stack overflow relevant posts even more confusing. Others have clearly been having similar issues. The long and short of it was that not only did I not manage to get the cache working, but the build times had 6X'd. So I now needed the cache just to get back to the build times I had previously, that were already causing me to run out of minutes.

Against an enormous sychronicity tsunami I managed to get the cache working a few days ago. That was no easy thing, as pretty much everything around me was blocking me. It's hard to describe, it's like the world or some part of the world local to me really didn't want me to get the cache working. There were also problems with Github support which I've written about elsewhere. All sorts of fractaly type patterns in news stories, that had the same exact shape as the things happening to me with my code. I know this will sound strange to some. It's even stranger when it happens to you, I can tell you that.

Anyhow with the cache working, build times were back to the previous level, which were still problematic but probably manageable. I spent this morning, still experiencing a lot of push back from the world around me by the way, trying to find the build time regression bug. Turns out that the foundational work had introduced an easy way to change the order of posts on any given day. I implemented it by reversing the order of the array containing the day's posts. That had a much bigger than expected affect because I have so many links on the linkblog. Each day was invoking reverse. The fix was quite simple. Just iterate over the data in reverse rather that change the data. It's a bit more code, because you have to do the same iteration in both directions so there is some repetition, but it's 6X faster. The over-optimisation caused the problem in the first place.

The build times are now at around 4 mins for the whole site. That's a lot better than the 14 mins builds I was seing a few days ago. I'm happy about the much needed improvements, but I'm still dealing with the backlash from a very angry world that once again appears to be blaming me for everything in the entire universe, with enormous righteousness, starvation, thirst and mutilations. I know this might sound overblown to some, but seriously you should try being in my shoes for a while. One day it will all become clear what has been happening.

[Small precision about build times to clear up any confusion amoung the pedants out there: the site static site generator build 6X'd, but the overall time for the entire build + deploy workflow went from ~7 mins to ~14 mins] #

Debasement of everything - It often feels like, and this is strange to describe, that here where I am, the debasement of reality itself is constantly happening. Like what the government and central banks do with the money, changing things on both ends, what if tools became so powerful that you could do that with reality. People might not even be aware that it was happening. An invisible prison of sorts. #

If I had enough an appropriate thing for me to say right now might be, women have some money but please spend it on non husband beating objects.

And men stop getting me in trouble with women.

Likely no matter what I say though, it will be used against me in some way, but perhaps this note, and it's revisions, might be illustrative of the hell you have me in world.

Yes I'm still cold and hungry right now, motorbike stalkers are still hurling abuse at me and I await the next projectile rock incident. Not the best conditions for getting some sleep. #

I've developed a bit of a raspy cough since yesterday. Probably not a coincidence. It's this cycle's mutilation. #

Makeover - Now that I've gotten all the pieces displaying on the latest page, with links, notes, blog posts, newsletters and podcasts, I'm thinking that I might change the entire thing!

I want to turn the latest page into the homepage, and it would just display all the items, i.e. blog posts, notes, links, newsletters and podcasts interleved as they happen throughout tge day. Rather than the current layout with seperate sections for each. I feel like it's a bit confusing currently which day each is from. #

Take me to your webdevs - I wish there was a website or service where you could enter the field of development you are interested in, and it would return a list of blogs that were actively working in and discussing that topic. Say for example you were interested in open protocols and social media, you would quicky be able to see the conversations happening online in that topic. #

RSS feed oblivion - I have neglected to maintain my RSS feed collection over the nearly 20 years I've been using feed readers. I have so many feeds that were at some stage interesting but have either disapeared or become uninteresting. I find that I rarely open my RSS reader these days. I miss how it used to be.

I'm thinking of deleting virtually all the feeds and start fresh. What I'd like is a manageable amount of news sources, both old media and new media publications, as well as a collection of feeds from bloggers that are doing interesting things and publish at least several times per week. I want to be connected to folks that are doing cool things, and writting about it, in the areas that I am interested in.

But deleting everything is very scary indeed. #

Banality of local intimidation - People driving past on motorbikes while talking on their mobile phone that just so happen to say "you learn" as they pass me are currently trending. It follows quite an anger goading heavy day, so not much of a suprise. Alk the same, rather unpleasant. #

Twitter is starting to feel like X. Day to day I still think of it as Twitter, but over the last week or so I've noticed that the amount of people on podcasts using the name X, without going through some kind of explanation, has reached a new level. I wouldn't say it is totally there yet, but it's slowly starting to feel like folks are more comfortable with the new name. #

Being code blocked is strange. It's the 3rd month in a row that I've run out of build minutes on Github. It means I can't deploy or test any code I write, and I have to change almost everything I do. It happens often that I get a great idea and I have to sit on my hands.

I really miss not being able to code. Everything seems a little less interesting, the articles I'm reading, the podcasts I'm listening to, and I'm more distracted than when I'm able to code. I'm still publishing links and notes via github. I'll be able to sync them up at the start of the month. But everything feels off, like I've lost my rythm somehow. #

Offline could be awesome. I have to do a lot of things offline these days because of my internet access situation. I get Wifi a few times a day, in various locations, but mostly I'm offline. It occurred to me today that I actually like that setup quite a lot because it stops you from doom scrolling and you can actually get quite a lot done.

If apps had better offline features, I think it might be my prefered way of operating. What I really want is for all websites to work properly in read later tools, better audio podcasting tools like show attachments, and importantly the return of video podcasting. That would be awesome. I just want to select a bunch of stuff every morning, load up, then disconnect knowing that I've got a bunch of stuff to read, listen to and watch.

Working offline could be loads better. Browsers could cache linked pages so you could read links people add to their content, and perhaps you could create an offline list for things you didn't cache that would automatically sync next time you were online. There are so many things that could be made better. Unfortunately no one is going to focus on such an experience unless there was a device that had offline as it's primary use case. #

FX is where all the missing money is - Peter MacCormack asked on a recent podcast, and unfortunately I can't find exactly where as I write this, he asked where is all the money that regular people have lost on the stock markets in recent years? Good question. Today's Eurodollar University, perhaps not uncoincidentally covers FX, Jeff Snider highlights what this shadowy part of the money system does. It's a vital part of the system, even if it is very opaque. McCormack did an interview with Nik Bhatia covering FX just this week.

This note birthed the blog post: Where is all the missing money?. #

G7 strange but true: There is a popular cab company here in Vietnam called G7. On it's own this little oddity doesn't seem particulary important, but the more time you spend here the more of these wierdnesses you notice. Eventually you start to realise none of them are coincidences. I'm not at all saying it's nefarious, but it's certainly noteworthy. #

Do you believe in free range humans? It might be that much of the worlds problems and disagreements boil down to a difference in opinion on this fundamental question. The reason it is such a challenge is because the extremes on either side of the answer are likely not possible solutions. Yet we live in a world with maximalists on both sides, locked in an eternal war. Which makes you wonder how the majority manage to not be held hostage by this unlikely and bizare partnership. #

AI activity boosters - I wonder how long until it will be until all entrepreneurs will have AI assistants. Building a business is such a complicated activity, and AIs have such strong pattern matching capabilities, you've got to imagine they would be very good at matching company building activities and personal outside work activities so that one boosts the other. Finding activities that have the same general shape, or complimentary. It wouldn't be without dangers though, tech like that could really get in the way if it wasn't done right. #

Niche down on action style workflows - There have been quite a lot of companies the past few years doing database SaaS products similar to Salesforce but focussed on a very specific niche. Airtable is a good example. I'm a big user of Github Actions, and I wonder whether there's potential to do something similar. Basically to bring file repository based automated workflows to very specific niche areas. The underlying mechanics would be very similar and familiar to developers, but the UI users interacted with during workflow execution would be very different. #

I wish there was a Markdown editor that was also an outliner, to have the power of an outliner but when you are editing markdown files. You would be able to output markdown files, but you could also output OPML files. It would make it easy to work with both formats side by side. It would support yaml frontmatter and have a plugin system so you could add support for different flavors of markdown. It would have an easy to use mobile app. #

The world will help you but you have to climb into one of it's traps. If you refuse to climb into a trap, then one (or more) will be constructed around you. That's been my experience. This has happened again and again and again. It happened again over the past few days. It must have been the end of some sort of mega configuration, with several story lines that had been running in parallel intersecting. Huge amounts of circularity. The level of planning that must have gone into all this is mind boggling. Just a quick note about it now, so I have something to point to later if I need to. It's going to take a while to fully process. Not exactly improving my situation, which is most likely the point. #

The dark irony of these trap building cruscendoes is that they are a sort of denouement. You finally see all the pieces slot into place, all the oddities you thought were a bit off at the time, suddenly make sense. You finally see their purpose. The lies that were invisibly and insidiously tieing your hands together, are revealed, your hands untied, even as the walls close in on you. #

Mindboggling is the new super easy peasy. #

It's that time of year where I get to flip another year on the old calendar. I've actually lost count at this stage and have to use a calculator to figure out the exact number. I always seem to be out by a year or two. Anyway, this is what mid forties looks like. I hope you are all doing well.

My backup power cable stopped working today, but I did have tart. That was quite nice. #

In bitcoin circles they speak of "orange pilling" people. It's suppsedly a reference to the red pill / blue pill scene from the matrix. The idea being that you need to convince regular non bitcoiners to try bitcoin. The problem is that the expression comes with a lot of baguage. Matt Odell cover this in some detail on the latest Ep#111 of Citadel Dispatch, it's a very interesting conversation. No one in bitcoin has ever questioned that expression before. I always felt it was a little odd. They absolutely get to the heart of the issue.

Interestingly in the early days of RSS we all had orange xml buttons that link to our feeds. I've always wondered if there was a connection. The sort of irony in all this is that, whatever you think about the bitcoin orange pilling, that is in effect orange pilling people into podcasting. #

Typescript makes community programming mire difficult - Rich Harris makes an interesting point about how Typescript has changed how we interact with the libraries we use in our code. Since there's a compilation step required, people are much less likely to explore the libraries they use, adding console.log statements and such. That's a big net loss to the ecosystem when it comes to community open source programing. He makes the case for why it would be better for library authors to use Typescript via JSDOC comments. Great point.

One aspect that I think Typescript devs are very hypocritical about is the extra cognitive load and tooling complexity Typescript adds. It's like now that they have mastered JS and Typescript, they are pulling up the ladders so to speak, making it significantly harder to learn the language. I'm not saying Typescript is bad, but you should not require people building sheds to have to use skyscraper building tools. There's clearly a huge conflict of interest that they fail to disclose. Typescript is really an elitist extension that is only for people with space and time to learn, who are not immersed in chaos. By imposing Typescript early you are effectively shutting out a huge swoth of humans who's lives are not as afluent.

Keep javascript something anyone can learn. Then if you want to go on to build sky scrappers with it, have the tooling available to make that possible. Just my two cents. #

Make javascript easy again - It occurs to me that calling Typescript elitist is perhaps an over-simplification of a more complicated dynamic. It's entirely possible that those insisting on Typescript are from under-priveledged backgrounds. Perhaps their difficult path is the thing that causes the hypocracy in the first place. It might very well be that the very afluent don't behave this way.

That would make sense since their path would have been comparatively easier, and so they would not see the need to make it more difficult for the competition. Of course that might just be elitist apologist tosh. Maybe elites really are all evil. Ultimately there's no way to know.

But it's not really that important. What's important is having a language that is easy to learn and experiment with.

If anything, we need to make it easier to learn, not harder. #

I've fixed the notes ordering issue and day pages now look much nicer. It only affects the notes and links pages. It just means that when you click through to a particular day, the way the content is displayed remains the same.

Previously the day pages had no date link at the top of the page, so it was a bit jarring. Small change, but huge effort. Readability is important on text based websites. #

What if the debasement of money that has gotten much much worse recently was just the beginning. What's to stop other things getting debased? What's to stop AIs monitoring anything that you show interest in, and debasing it as soon as you ascribe some value to it? #

It occurs to me that many people that behave with hypocracy, not only don't see their own hypocracy but believe it to be something good, like that's just how one does business effectively. We need more examples of doing business effectively that don't require hypocracy. Even better would be examples where non hypocracy is demonstrably better. #

Last Man Standing Tech - Eventually there will be AI that will be so powerful they will be able to decide who will be the winner in a death match between 2 humans. They will be able to do it with accuracy and precision comparable to chess players playing chess.

Except they will be able to basically see infiniti number of moves into the future, in infinite dimensions. And people simply won’t interact with those that the AI tells them that they can’t beat.

Last man standing tech will be a very big sector indeed.

At least this is a possible scenario we need to consider. #

The Mental Health Deception - When I was young we simply never spoke about mental health. There were normal people, and there were a very small amount of people that had mental disorders, and those people usually got locked away in mental asylums. That’s just how it was pretty much. It’s horrible to think that it was like that, but it was. In some places it might still be like this.

We’ve progressed a long way from those days. People realise that mental health is something that can affect everyone. Folks that used to bully others, calling them crazies and mental, are now understanding that the way they treated people before wasn’t very nice. They have seen friends or family members be affected by these issues, or indeed have experienced something similar themselves.

In part this is because the modern world is ever more complicated and this is reflected in the stress experienced by the average person. In the modern world people have more mental health issues.

We are due another step forward in how we view such conditions, and it’s around the realisation that the notion of mental health issues is still very antiquated way of looking at it. The problem is that it is implicit in the term that the fault is the person with the mental health issues. That somehow they have brought this condition on themselves by the way they lived their life. That’s the unspoken piece, the unspoken belief that’s never said. It’s something ‘they’ have.

If you spend a little bit of time thinking about it, this notion is absurd. There are a very very small amount of people that perhaps have a physical abnormality in the brain, but the vaste majority do not, yet there are many many people with mental health issues.

The fact is that by definition these people that have no physical disability and have mental health issues, have these issues because of the people they interact with. It must be the case that these interactions are causing the so called mental health issues. In short we must realise that mental health issues are really issues of the group bullying individuals. The environment creates the mental health issues not the individual.

Even if they have substance abuse problems, why do they have these problems in the first place?

Mental health issues is really a failure of the group.

It’s likely that it’s a system level problem where to the total information processing capacity of the system is being reached, and for whatever reason these folks always find themselves as the pressure cooker release valve. It’s not a coincidence. One day we will look back at our primitive understanding of group dynamics and realise that groups can turn into a mob and they might not even realise they are doing it, though they also might. Ultimately it doesn’t matter though. What matters is noticing it is happening and course correcting collectively in a way that de-escalates and moves the unhealthy dynamics to a safer configuration.

In the present day, "mental health issues" is a euphemism for someone that the group systematically and relentlessly bullies. We need to evolve this understanding into a more truthful and effective model. #

Two nights of gang stalker sleep depravation in a row so I'm quite exhausted today. Possibly made worse by endless softly softly murmurers today :( #

Peter Levels: "Is the MacBook Air 15" w/ M2 a good replacement for MacBook Pro 16"?" #

It's possible to easily run MacOS VMs on Mac using something like Vimy. What's the current state of affairs running MacOS VMs when you are on Windows or Linux?

Important question if you are a web developer. It used to be that it simply wasn't possible. I wonder if that is still the case. #

Framework have been on a tear recently with lots of product annoucements, and it seem's their new modular laptops are quietly becoming very popular. I love the philosophy behind these devices. What I want to know is to what degree the modularity gives you freedom. In practice is it possible to buy and use comodity hardware or do you end up having to buy everything from them? #

Just because they aren't being violent doesn't mean they aren't forcing you. #

Back when I started linkblogging about 10 years ago, one of the benefits I noticed was that it frees you up from the tyranny of choice that comes with the web. The web is so overwhelmingly vaste and full of interesting things that there is a tendency to get pulled in too many directions. I discovered that by posting links to the things I found noteworthy during the day, I was able to move on with the day much more easily. If something really was important then I could circle back around to it later. As it happens most stuff isn't, so there's just no point worrying about it. On the other hand, very often you end up finding synergies between linked items that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed.

I'm noticing something similar with writing notes using my new notes feature. It happens a lot that while I'm listening to a podcast, or reading an article, that my brain suddenly gets interested in some related aspect. It just won't let it go, and eventually it starts to affect the consumption of said bit of media. It's related to my surroundings, if I'm feeling stressed, or hungry, or in some other way imbalanced. It can be very frustrating.

With the notes feature, when I notice that happening, that I've had to pause and rewind a podcast a few times or re-read a part of an article only to be interrupted again by the thought which is suddenly the most important thing in the universe, I just switch over to notes, write down the main thing of the thought, and I can move on. It seems to be important that it's very non-formal. A blog post is too much effort because I have to think of a title, and write a description and a bunch of stuff. A note isn't much more effort than a tweet. However notes tend to be less well thought out, and probably have more spelling mistakes. #

AI pain strategy - Sam Altman's OpenAI has provisions in company founding documents for if AGI is created.

Steven Levy: "Somewhere in the restructuring documents is a clause to the effect that, if the company does manage to create AGI, all financial arrangements will be reconsidered. After all, it will be a new world from that point on."

Sandhini Agarwal: "Look back at the industrial revolution -- everyone agrees it was great for the world… but the first 50 years were really painful… We’re trying to think how we can make the period before adaptation of AGI as painless as possible." #

Given yesterday's close encounter with what amounted to a time traveling family member doppelganger, this article linked to on hacker news today stood out.

Human Embryo Models Grown from Stem Cells: Scientists have created what amounts to a fake 14 day old human embryo. No fertilized eggs or a womb required. Just lab cultured and human skin stemcells.

"When the scientists applied secretions from these cells to a commercial pregnancy test, it came out positive."

We will soon have the ability to synthetically create intelligences and biologies. That's going to be quite a big change. Things are going to get very weird. #

Chris Coyier [~31:57] on the present state of syndication: "We are in a rough spot".

That pretty much sums it up. We've spent the last 10 years happily enjoying the convenience of Twitter, and we've left many of the open alternatives wither by the wayside. Many of us are realising now that it's actually harder to syndicate content into several networks than it used to be back in the era of ubiquitous APIs.

I have things I post flowing in some way through Twitter, Mastodon and LinkedIn, but it's not ideal because I don't currently have a way to have full posts in my RSS feeds. I can't figure out how to add code syntax highlighting into the feeds, so at the minute I only include the description and a link to avoid a broken reading experience.

I like the new fancy federated protocols but I'd feel better if I had a robust setup for RSS reading, newsgroups/IRC and forums. #

My RSS reading experience is quite bad at the minute. Organising all my feeds feels like a gargantuan task. With 15 or so years of feeds that have accumulated, many of which are defunct, there is just so much to wade through. There is also no clear way to categorize any of them in a useful way.

I wish there was more automation. For instance for any site that I link to on the linkblog, I'd like to automatically subscribe to their RSS feed if one exists. Then after a week or so let me review the ones I want to keep subscribed to. I also want more feed readers to support OPML reading lists, so it's easy to move between readers, and I can manage my subscriptions in a similar way that I manage blog and linkblog posts.

Also I'm wondering when AI powered tools will make their way into our feed readers. #

I've setup a nip5 on my Nostr account. It's the way they verify accounts. Once you get past the ambiguities in the instructions, it basically boils down to putting a file containing some json formatted text on a server accessible at a known path and add it to a domain name that you control. The difficult part is that it's not very obvious what text exactly you have to put in the file. You have to add your 'name', but your Nostr profile has 3 fields that look like names.

Here is my nip5 config.

This note birthed the blog post: I’ve setup a nip5 on my Nostr account. #

Strange exchange between David Sacks and Jason Calacanis in this week's All-in podcast, centering around a disagreement while talking about geo-politics and BRICS nations. Jason repeatedly miss-hears Sacks, quite clearly purposely trying to put words in his mouth. Saying his opinion was disgusting, when in fact he had been describing the opinion of others (~58:00), not his own. Very weird interaction in an otherwise enjoyable and informative show.

It had a sort of joking-not-joking kind of vibe to it, though Sacks wasn't overly eager to correct the mis-understanding, which makes me think there could be more to it. I think Jason came away from it looking like a power hungry moderator doing a flex. But he also changes his tact right at the end trying to get Sach's opinion on the subject. Seems like a very underhand way to get someone to reveal their cards. Why is he picking a fight, why is he playing a bad guy here? #

Unblocking myself - I've been listening to quite a few podcasts the past 48 hours, yet for whatever reason, no major interesting thoughts have been arising to explore via notes. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps it's because I'm not thinking about code, or maybe the topics covered are too distant for me to have any strong opnions. Or maybe the very notion that I'm blocked from coding is causing me to be blocked in my writting too. So I'm writing this note to see if it unblocks me. #

That ambient stagnation feeling - I'm reading this Verge piece about Google and search and how AI is changing all the dynamics of the web. It's part historical, looking at the past, but also very much about the future, yet for some reason I'm reading and reading and it just feels like I'm watching paint dry. I don't think it's terrible writting, it's the sort of article I usually am really into.

I'm reading it in Pocket so all the website styles have been removed. The article looks very dull, black text on white background. That seems like a plausible explanation, though I do often read articles in Pocket where that doesn't occur. Am I just in a bad mood? I'm feeling quite chill, but I have an ambient sense of stagnation that's difficult to shake. I kind of know already before I start anything that it won't get resolved. So why bother?

Well I managed this note didn't I? Take that stagnation.

What is that and where does it come from? #

Remember to listen to music more often - Sometimes no matter what you do life just feels flat. The weather today has been particularly lousy, just grey and an on/off drisley rain, that won't make it's mind up. I decided to stop listening to tech podcasts, for some reason most episodes in my podcatcher look to be bitcoin and crypto related and I'm feeling like I have reached digital money podcast saturation.

Decided to change track completely abd listened to the latest Rest is History podcast about Sixties Fashion. Interesting, fun, colorful and such a fascinating period culturally. The Teenage Revolution and Swinging London definitely worth a listen. Cheered me up a bit.

Continuing on in the same anything-but-tech approach to the day, now I'm listening to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast. I'd already listenned to the start of the Dark Star by the Grateful Dead episode week before last. It's epically long so not likely to get through it all today, but it's nice to get out of tech and programming for a little while and into music. I have to remember to listen to music more often. #

What if it was no longer possible to distinguish between WMD and CND? #

How much worse? - Quite a lot of people are worried about the prospect of the metaverse, where we spend all day with a mask strapped to our faces. I wonder whether the lesson here is that that's not far off what we are already doing. How much worse is it than staring at a monitor / laptop screen all day long? It can literally be measured in centimeters. #

I've had this quote going around in my head that I heard David Sachs mention on the All-in podcast last week.

"We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying."
– Attributed to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

It's heck of a quote, made all the more viceral by the picture of a Solzhenitsyn juxtaposed. #

Double meanings across cultures and languages - This is my first attempt at writing about this so it might not make a lot of sense. Mixing cultures is complicated, especially when there is a language barrier. One thing that makes it very confusing for everybody is double meanings. Double meanings are just part of a language, sort of unavoidable, but as well as causing confusion they can create amusing situations, but also arguments. The point is it’s important to be aware of them, which isn’t easy, but over the course of a lifetime your brain gets better at it.

This note birthed the blog post: Double meanings across cultures and languages. #

UK politics cognitive disonance - I was listening to the US politics discussion on the latest All-in Podcast earlier, it's very good you should give it a listen, and I was struck with how much more grandiose US politics is than UK politics. It makes sense because they are the world super power so everything they do is in that context.

This note birthed the blog post: UK politics cognitive disonance. #

Nostr is fancy RSS - Instead of static files over HTTP, it's JSON messages over web sockets with added public key cryptography. So you get realtime and much better authenticity guarenties. But it's basically RSS. #

Hardware product idea: Portable cloud native in a box - I'd like to be able to do cloud native web development completely offline. I think this could be achieved with a special developer device that creates a minimal dev environment, with mock web services, all accessible over wifi.

Physical description:

• Device size of a mobile phone chargeable battery
• Can run off power outlet or connected to rechargeable battery
• WIFI hub

Software features:

• Browser / mobile app interface
• One click install of apps
• Github actions style CI/CD
• Mocks of all popular cloud services (S3, Dynamo DB, Queues etc)
• Security / IAM / firewalls

Changelog did an interesting homelab episode, somewhat related, included a section on raspberry pie running proxmox. #

It's quite frustrating not being able to publish new content to the website because of not having any build minutes. Of course this happens both as I'm starting to use the new notes feature that I added, which is leading to me writting a lot more, and as I'm coming up with lots of new ideas for code improvements. I don't want to code until I have build minutes otherwise I'll end up in another feature branch merge extravaganza.

The other thing that is absolutely typical is that now that I'm not coding, everything around me is relatively quiet. It's so odd, when I'm coding things are chaotic and problematic. This happens literally everytine, it can't possibly be random. I mention this because maybe some day it will become obvious what has been going on and perhaps this data point will be useful in getting to that place. #

AI progressive enhancement - Politico Tech has an interview with Google's Kent Walker where they discuss how providers of critical infrastructure should deal with AI. They mention an AI off switch. That got me wondering whether this is similar in some way to progressive enhancement that we use in modern web development. Perhaps a similar approach is necessary for designing these large systems. It should be possible to remove AI and the system should continue to function, though perhaps in a degraded state. #

I ran out of build minutes, so that's the end of new content on the website until next month. It's the same thing that happened last month. Last month I ended up going on a bit of a coding frenzy. Of course I couldn't test any of the code so I ended up with around 25 feature branches that I then had to merge in once the new billing cycle started and I had a fresh set of build minutes. That merge extravaganza was in a way what led to me running out of build minutes this month.

This note birthed the blog post: I ran out of build minutes. #

I've been meaning to write a blog post about the Vision Pro for several weeks now. It keeps getting relegated on my various todo lists in favour of other more pressing items. I was reminded of this by a Dave Rupert piece that explores why his initial Vision Pro entusiasm is now wanning.

I'm still kind of excited about the device, but I was always somewhat puzzled by the expectation that this is going to be a mainstream device. A device that folks not on a plane are going to be using to to watch movies and have video conferences. This just seems plain ridiculus to me, especially given the price.

This note birthed the blog post: The real Vision Pro opportunity. #

Multi-paragraph posts - It occurs to me, having spent much of the week thinking about post length, and whether posts should have titles, that a big change in social media was allowing posts to be multi-paragraph. I'm not sure when it happened exactly. My recollection was that Twitter didn't initially allow multi-paragraph. I'm fairly sure in the first few years I was always posting single paragraphs.

I'm finding I really like the ability to post multi-paragraphs. It's like that on Mastodon, and Threads too. It makes a big difference in the shape of the thought you can express. It's a small detail, but I think it makes a big difference. #

Having a template engine should be standard in all operating systems. It should be possible no matter where you are located or what you are doing to render out a template and get back the resulting string of text in a way that you can use it to accomplish the task you are doing. #

I think that maybe I've found the solution to the notes shouldn't have titles, but actually sometimes they need titles problem. Instead of a full on title, which looks weird next to a bullet point, just use bold text for the start of the sentence.

I noticed Politico does this in their newsletters and I think it looks quite nice. Sort of breaks up the wall of text, giving your eye something to focus on as you skim. I did it with the previous note. That one actually turned into a blog post. So that was quite nice. #

The thing that's very silly about all this overthinking of notes and titles and blog posts is that although it's definitely freeing to just start writting without worrying about a title, I do sort of end up creating a title anyway when I commit the file to the git repo.

For example the previous note item had commit message "Just use bold" and I'll probably call this one "Overthink silliness". So perhaps having to come up with a title isn't so difficult. Or maybe it's just that since the emphasis isn't on the title, it ceases to be a problem. If I really get stuck I could just not enter a commit message. No big deal. #

I'm thinking that I need a way to turn a note into a blog post. Reason being that short notes should definitely just be notes, but often the note gets long and is effectively at that point a blog post. Once it has a title it's definitely a blog post at that point.

I should be able to create a special component that inserts a blog post into a note. That way I can move a long note over to the blog, so it's a proper blog post, but still have it appear within the notes. I'll have to think about this a bit.

I'm really liking the fact that the notes feature is enabling me to write more freely but I need to figute out the note to blog post transition. Blog posts are less ephimeral than notes and have additional meta data. Hopefully I'll figure this out. Still feels a bit awkward at the minute. #

Automation and scripting on iOS sucks

If there is one thing that could speed up my workflow right now it's having some sort of scripting / automation on iOS. I waste so much time copying and pasting templates and manually replacing text tokens every week. It's so error prone. It's so frustrating. It's so ridiculous.

One would think that, given how much time I'm wasting, that I would have figured out the Shortcuts app. Well that's how bad the Shortcuts app is in my opinion. There's no disernable philosophy to it. Each time I need to create a workflow I'm completely stumped.

I can't fugure out how to get input into the workflow. I can't figure out how to trigger the darn workflow outside of Shortcuts. The components all seem to nearly do what I want, but not quite. And so I spend 30 minutes futzing around and eventually give up. Sod it I'll just keep doing the stupid copy pasta dance of doom for another week.

I just want a fucking bash shell for christ sake, not this god darn fisher price automation bullshit. And actually maybe that's the answer. Technically with iSH I do have a bash shell. The problem though is that eventually I'll need to interface with the other apps. And the only way to do that is through Shortcuts. #

I just tried to npm install the frontmatter, ejs and uuid libraries on iSH. They all error out. I don't know if anything changed, last time I tried to install npm modules on iSH at least some of them installed.

I just need to create:

1. Markdown files with frontmatter automatically written
2. My weekly newsletter template
3. My weekly newsletter promo template

It can't be that difficult.

It's basically a basic template rendering. With Shortcuts there is no way to generate a v4 uuid, which I need in the frontmatter. Or at least there is no component for that, and as far as I can tell, no way to create custom components. #

It's the 3rd day using the new notes feature. I think I'm finding it useful, though it's been a very busy few days so difficult to evaluate. The ease of posting is the big draw for me. I don't need to worry about a title or a url or keeping the length down. I just create a new markdown file and start writting.

There were several issues:

• Markdown and ejs not rendering
• Incorrect day items ordering on main page
• Incorrect day items ordering on archive pages
• Daily auto-merge of new items via PR
• Combine links, blog, podcast, newsletter, notes auto-merge workflows
• Duplicate code paths in all plugins
• Fix links auto posts to Twitter
• Setup notes auto posts to Twitter
• Setup links auto posts to Mastodon
• Setup notes auto posts to Mastodon

At the minute all website updates are done via git, which is a little clunky. Eventually I'll have a better way, but I want it to always be possible to do via git. You'll always be able tobat least use git.

Hopefully there will be an API, web interface, maybe even a mobile and desktop app. That's a long way off though. I'm concentrating on getting it as smooth as possible with git.

I'm undecided on whether I like using titles in posts. I have to figure out the flow that feels comfortable. I want to be able to start writing without friction, and if a post is develiping into something substantial, have a way to easily convert it into a blog post.

One thing that would make posting via git a lot easier is to use something like the iOS Shortcuts app to create empty markdown files with uuid and date added to the file's frontmatter section. Unfortunately I have a major mental block with the Shortcuts app, I literally cant even do basic things, I find it so unintuitive, so that feels a long way off. #

I'm still undecided about using titles in notes posts. On the one hand they look a little odd with the bullet points, but I quite like the visual seperation of each note with a bullet. On the other hand, without any titles at all, the whole notes turns into a wall of text. I should probably not worry about it too much. Short notes like this one don't need one, but the previous note ended up becoming quite long and perhaps a title such as 'Notes, day 3' would have been good. #

It's friday today, and that means another newsletter deadline is looming. Some weeks by this stage I have all sorts of themes and ideas. Thehose weeks are great, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not a slog, in fact it's quite fun, feels like riding a bike downhill. This is not one of those week's. I've got basically nothing, feels like I have to hand in some homework tomorrow that I haven't started. Not quite as fun.

I find that in these uphill climb weeks, the best course of action is to force myself to just start compiling the list of podcasts. I start by copying across the saved episode titles to the newsletter template. Usually as I'm doing that a theme emerges. I then do the same for the links. And try to come up with a title. It's not rocket science.

I already compiled the list earlier this morning. Nothing really jumped out at me. I'm also a bit distracted by the new notes feature, that's what I'm thinking about. So I might just make that the theme. It's a bit self indulgeant, but I don't create new major features all that often, plus it's probably the most honest thing to do, after all that is what's predominantly on my mind.

Sometimes it's best to not fight the tides. #

Notes origin story

I was just listening to the latest What Bitcoin Did podcast episode. It's an interview with Doomberg, a bloke that appears to put his voice through a modifier of some type. I guess he's a bit paranoid about privacy. I think he's the front of some sort of bitcoin policy advocat group. Interesting interview. Anyway right at the end they talk about Twitter, or X as it's now called.

He speaks about his decision to stop posting on X because of the way the platform has been discriminating against Substack, and other X competitors. The Doomberg (collective?) have a popular Substack newsletter. I wasn't aware that the situation was that bad. That's not good. I've got a Substack too! Nowhere near as popular, but still, it feels gross to be contributing to a platform that is trying to hurt me.

He has decided to only post on Substack, newsletters but also on their Notes app. It totally hadn't occurred to me that Substack had a Notes app as I was creating my latest feature. I did hear about Substack Notes when it was released, but I didn't look at it much. It didn't really catch my attention. I don't know what it is exactly.

For me the idea of a Notes app goes back much further. When I first started my career in tech, for the first 10 years or so I kept notebooks. Propper ringbound paper notebooks. Everyday I would write down the date at the top of a new page and write a todo list. I'd port the previous days unfinished todos, get rid of unneeded items, and add a few new items. As I went about my day, below the todos I'd write notes. Notes about stuff I was doing, or things I was planning, meetings I'd have etc. I ended up with many many of these notebooks, which I kept in boxes ordered by year. It was quite a collection.

Anyway, all that to say that when I created my recent Notes feature, I had those notebooks in mind. I also took inspiration from others online that work in the open. Absolutely nothing to do with Substack at all. I like Substack, I hope their Notes app is successful. #

I finally found this week's newsletter title. For a second there I nearly wrote the title, but I just remembered these notes will get published about 12 hours before the newsletter. I don't want to ruin the suprise :) #

Well the notes from yesterday, which was the first day of notes, got published, and there are quite a few issues. Most of which I think are fixable.

The markdown isn't getting rendered. That's because the stock generic component I used to create the NotesItem component, doesn't support that. That's easy to add. I can copy it from ond of my other components.

The bullets are making stuff look a little weird, but it's hard to tell until the markdown is rendering so I'll revisit this issue later.

The most notable isdue is that date items are nit rendering in chronological order. I have re-read through the code and can't find a bug or misconfiguration. I'll need to run the render with debug enabled so I can see the items getting pulled out of the data source and ordered. Should be quite easy to discover what's going on. I'll probably need to comment out all template rendering apart from the notes template so as not to br bogged down in a deluge of debug log output. #

The other thing that went wrong was the linkblog links from yesterday didn't get merged. Or at least they didn't make it through to Twitter. I expect there was some sort of merge conflict that blocked the merge.

Hard to say what that could be. I would have thought there wouldn't be a conflict since the notes and linkblog markdown files are in seperate folders in the repo. Evidently though something is blocking. #

One thing these notes might be useful for is rudamentory documentation. If I describe a few debug sessions as I triangulate bugs, I'll have something I can point to later, which could be useful even if they aren't the most polished prose. #

Testing the new notes plugin #

Another notes test... #

I quietly announced the website's new Notes feature on Twitter earlier. So what it is?

I've noticed recently that

1. I'm not writting as many blog posts as I'd like
2. Linkblog links tend to become quite lengthy

It's not just me, readers of the newsletter commented about it recently too. It had crossed my mind but the feedback is really useful. Thanks @HackHackHack!

The notes feature is intended as a sort of working space where it's as easy to add content as the linkblog, but without the contraint of having to associate a link to a post item.

The other big difference is that notes are chronologically ordered rather than reverse chronologically ordered. The idea being that as you read through them you get a view on what I was thinking about as I went through my day.

That's in contrast to the linkblog which lists the last link posted at the top of the page. In a sense though both linkblogs and notes are reverse chronological at the date level. They both display the very last day at the top of the page. However they differ in ordering at the item level. Notes are chrono, links are reverse chrono at the item level. That probably makes it sound very complicated, but it's quite obvious once you start reading them.

I expect what might happen as I use the notes feature, that linkblog links get shorter, and I'm able to write down thoughts more easily. That will hopefully lead to more blog posts.

Let's wait and see though, it could also just turn out to be extra overhead, and not worth the effort. #

There are all sorts of very subtle things to consider, that I'm discovering as I write.

For example, how do I name the markdown files now that there isn't a url donain, which I use in linkblog link filenames.

Also should posts have titles? Probably not. One of the things that is nice about linkblog links is that you don't need to think about titles. It's suprising how much friction titles introduce. #

One of the things at the back of my mind is the issues I've been facing with the number of files in the repo. There are so many files that my code editor is not able to process changes, often getting stuck, which causes no end of problems. It also takes 10 times longer to post items than it should. At times that ammounts to hours when it really should take minutes.

I'm finding the ease of posting notes very useful. I've already posted 3 notes! And I think the posting process could be improved further too. #

What are notes titles like?

Just testing what a title looks like in a note. I expect it will look weird because of the bullets on each item. In fact the bullets are likely going to make some of the other posts look odd too.

I'll find out tomorrow when today's notes get merged. I setup the same workflow as for the linkblog. Every evening the latest notes get merged into the repo main branch via an automatically created PR, and the site then gets rebuilt. That saves on build minutes, but it also avoids issues with RSS feed generation. That can get tricky when you make edits. #

I've added an RSS feed for new notes that get added. It's listed on the feeds page.

The cool thing about my static site generator is that it's at the point now where adding new features is quite easy. Once I had developed the main feature, adding archive pages, a tagcloud page and an RSS feed was as easy as copying a few markdown templates and updating some frontmatter variables.

Also if any of you were subscribed to the feeds suscription list opml then you wouldn't even have had to update your RSS reader. I actually changed the urls of some of the existing feeds. They changed when I rewrite all my RSS generation code a few weeks back. In had redirects setup so notmally speaking there shouldn't have been any breakages. Sorry if there were though. Kind if unnavoidable.

I'd be interested to hear from anyboby that is subscribed to the opml file, as unlikely as it might be, because unfortunetly very few readers support this excellent feature. #

Improving Github Actions build times

Since I keep running out of Github build minutes I was thinking about ways to optimise the build. Looking at the github action logs, the obvious place that can be improved is getting nodejs installed and setup. The entire build/deploy/backup workflow takes approx 7 minutes. Installing nodejs takes around 3 minutes, and because I run seperate jobs for build, deploy and backup, I actually end up installing nodejs twice.

My first thought was that maybe there was a way to create a custom runner. i.e. instead of running the stock ubuntu image, create an image (docker?) with nodejs and perhaps all the modules I use in the static site generator, then use that to run the build. After doing about 30 minutes of googling it seems that's only possible if you are self hosting your own runners. I might be wrong about this, I'll beed to do some more research. Currently I'm stuck using hosted Github runners.

I noticed while searching that there are some caching actions that enable you to cache build artifacts between runs. The most popular of which appears to be cache. I'm already using setup-node which uses the cache action. There appear to be some caching options I could try, but doesn't seem like caching will improve things much because as far as I can tell it's already downloading a pre built nodejs version. I could be wrong.

Ideally I want the build to be under a couple of minutes. The actual website build of 17000 markdown files only takes around 45 seconds, so it's a bit ridiculous that the whole build and deploy takes 7 minutes. There has to be a way to optimise. #

Yesterday's posts were created by an automated process. I had been building this the week running up to running out of build minutes.

It's the first time it fully worked. I post the links to a feature branch with a special prefix during the day, and push the branch to the remote. At midnight a Github action runs, creating a PR with the latest links, then auto-merges them into main. That merge triggers a rebuild of the site. When I wake up all the links from the previous day have been published to the website. They have also been automatically posted to Twitter.

That for me is why Jamstack sites are awesome, it opens up a entire world of workflow possibilities. I know the Jamstack term is going out of favour, but I'm going to keep using it for now. #

I expect this will be rather controversial, but what the hell. Think of it as a small, slightly bizare, thought experiment.

Asians + Jews VS Blacks + Whites

What happens next? #

Ever notice that NATO.replace('O', 'ZI') === NATZI? Probably just a dumb coincidence. Everything boils down to debt, even the darn coincidences. #

A little experiment inspired by a ghost of parasocial past, so to speak, no animosity intended, quite the opposite in fact. I remembered that a while back I added the ability to make linkblog posts without urls. I know that might seem a little bit ridiculous at first glance, please bear with me. #

Since adding the url-less links feature, a lot has changed, the biggest thing being full markdown and EJS support in link text, which makes it possible to add hyperlinks and also insert data from various sources like for instance frontmatter, here's the date from this post's frontmatter: <%= date %>.

And this is a second paragraph on this post. It's the thing I'm most curious about. Will it break the page rendering? #

Well linkless posts are sort of working 1/2 working. There is no url domain link (that's good), but there's also no hash link (not so good), and also paragraphs currently get removed (not so good). I have to think about this a bit more.

Update: I got paragraphs working :) #

Incidentally I managed to get workflows triggering workflows between repositories. What that means is that the website now gets automatically rebuilt when I merge new content into the main branch. Practically speaking it's pretty huge for me because it aleviates some of the frustration I've been experiencing from really slow github repo interaction, which I think is because there are over 15000 source files and the client is not able to handle it. Hopefully I'll be adding a new entry to my minimals selection soon, the minimal works on private repos, just need to find time to test it on public repos. #