markjgsmith

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. #