markjgsmith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Beatles were awesome! :) #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update 3: Stopped typing and they disapeared again! #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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