markjgsmith

Notes

2023/10/31 #

  • 09:21:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 16:19:00 +07:00 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." #

  • 16:42:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 16:59:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 17:27:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/30 #

  • 12:20:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 12:36:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 13:08:00 +07:00 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? #

  • 13:38:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/29 #

  • 18:29:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/27 #

  • 15:51:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/26 #

  • 12:24:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/25 #

  • 09:17:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 13:55:00 +07:00 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? #

2023/10/24 #

  • 10:03:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 13:26:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 13:32:00 +07:00 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." #

2023/10/23 #

  • 05:39:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/22 #

  • 05:00:00 +07:00 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? #

2023/10/21 #

  • 05:24:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/20 #

  • 09:14:00 +07:00 Peak believable plausible deniability was reached a long time ago. We are currently at 99% plausible deniability events. #

2023/10/19 #

  • 06:37:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 14:41:00 +07:00 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! :) #

2023/10/18 #

  • 12:25:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/17 #

  • 05:41:00 +07:00 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? #

  • 09:26:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 09:38:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 10:31:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/16 #

  • 05:29:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 05:53:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 15:16:00 +07:00 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? #

2023/10/15 #

  • 14:31:00 +07:00 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? #

  • 14:45:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 15:00:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/14 #

  • 06:09:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/13 #

  • 07:29:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/11 #

  • 07:00:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 10:07:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/10 #

  • 10:10:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 16:14:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 16:27:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 17:48:00 +07:00 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.

2023/10/08 #

  • 20:00:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 20:00:00 +07:00 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? #

2023/10/07 #

  • 09:23:00 +07:00 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] #

  • 10:17:00 +07:00 Ridiculous infinite synchronicities are trending for me right now. Even as I type this note. #

  • 10:51:00 +07:00 Still have a totally blocked nose today. Both sodding nostrils. Bloody aweful. #

  • 12:44:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 12:56:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 17:36:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 21:36:00 +07:00 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? #

  • 21:47:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/06 #

  • 08:14:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/05 #

  • 06:00:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 13:45:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/04 #

  • 06:35:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 06:55:00 +07:00 Today is another sneeze day apparently. Probably just a coincidence. #

  • 08:55:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 08:55:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 10:16:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 10:51:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/03 #

  • 12:08:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 16:08:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 17:41:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 18:25:00 +07:00 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'. #

2023/10/02 #

  • 15:15:00 +07:00 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? #

  • 15:24:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 15:43:00 +07:00 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

  • 15:43:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 16:10:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 17:49:00 +07:00 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] #

  • 18:10:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 21:19:00 +07:00 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. #

2023/10/01 #

  • 16:24:00 +07:00 I've developed a bit of a raspy cough since yesterday. Probably not a coincidence. It's this cycle's mutilation. #

  • 16:41:00 +07:00 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. #

  • 16:50:00 +07:00 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. #

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