markjgsmith

Happy Easter - Best wishes to all for the Easter weekend :) #

Eat chocolate - I heard on the latest All-In podcast that the price of the commodity cocoa has gone through the roof recently because some of the main supplier countries have had a particularly bad harvest this year. Analysts are saying this will affect the price of chocolate starting in a few weeks, and / or the size of chocolate products. Could be a good time to either stock up the freezer and eat as many chocolate easter eggs as possible. #

Interleaved main page take 2 - Since I was blocked on the plugins tidy up on my static site generator development, I took another look at the previous feature I was working on. That feature is the interleaved main page, which would display all post types, blog, notes, links etc interleaved by day. This would take the place of the current latest page. I think it will be awesome.

I think I've found a much simpler way of implementing the feature. One of the reasons for the tidy up was to try and simplify things. So anyway I've made a start at getting it implemented and it's going quite well, no major show stoppers so far. Hoping to have something operational this week. #

Email paradigms are trending - Just finished listening to latest Citadel Dispatch discussion all about Nostr development. They spent nearly the entire time talking about email based paradigms. I fell asleep about a quarter of the way through, when I woke up, they were still talking about inboxes and outboxes. I honestly can't tell if it's a massive piss take or not. Email paradigms seem to be trending at the minute. #

Illness update - Still feeling mostly okay. No coughing, no flem, though slight strange taste in my mouth. So that's encouraging. However, ankles are still swollen despite two days of applying anti-inflamatory cream.

The other weird thing is that earlier as I got back to were I am now, about 30 metres down the road, there was a pile of seemingly random business papers thrown about the place. A4 sheets of paper, folders etc. As I passed I noticed that there was a big pile of xrays. Actual medical xrays. All the xrays were of pairs of lungs.

What the fuck is that about? Intimidation much?

This was after a day full of escallations everywhere I went, including being blocked from drying clothes and sleeping blanket.

Had I not found a way around that blockage, I quite literally would have had to sleep in wet clothes and under an actual wet blancket. This while I'm trying to recover from actual suspected pneumonia. Once again, the world is not only blocking me from getting well, but actively trying to make me ill again.

And guess what, I was later punished for getting around the blockage. Punished for saving my own life. #

Big tech blocks smaller companies - One of the things that is very different during the AI revolution we are in is that the big companies are being as nimble as historically the smaller upstarts have been.

This means for the first time ever, it's not obvious that the ecosystem will turn over. Smaller companies might never again become bigger players, and the big players will always be at the top. Much of the innovation is coming frlm the big players. That's a new dynamic and quite clearly could have terrible concequences for diversity throughout society.

Do we need to redesign how all these institutions interact so the ecosystem remains healthy?

If bitcoin was designed as the business system is stuctured, 4-5 people would do all the transactions in the entire world. #

Swollen ankles - The strange thing about my ankles swelling again is that after the initial round of antibiotics that I did, they didn't swell up after I stopped taking the medication. After this round of antibiotics, they started to swell up the day after finishing the course. I find that strange. #

What would bitcoiners do? - With all the regulatory issues Apple is up against about it's software it's worth considering what development methodologies we want people to use. Is it still ok to build software that's good enough, or does everything have to be solved from first principles now?

What would an app store built by bitcoiners look like? What would it's layer 0 look like? #

Illness update - I'm still feeling relatively okay this evening. This morning I did wake up early and coughed up a small bit of flem, but the rest of the day no couging or flem, lungs feel mostly normal.

So that's all great, almost 3 days since I finished the antibiotics and I can't feel any symptoms returning. Or at least direct symptoms. One thing I have noticed since I stopped the antibiotics both my ankles have swollen up slighlty.

That's worrying because when I was ill, the ankles got very swollen, to the point where it was difficult to walk. I had a theory it was due to liquid from the lungs accumulating in the ankles, but my lungs don't feel like they are full of anything. Like I said, they feel okay.

Maybe it's a side effect of the antibiotics and it will pass. Or perhaps it's just related to activity. I did quite a lot of walking today.

Anyway that's the update. Feeling alright but worried I'm not out of the woods yet. #

Masks are dumb - I imagine this will be unpopular but anyway needs to be said. There's nothing like a lung infection, and 3 months of flem vomming, to make you paranoid about air quality. So I bought one of these specialist disposable masks that everyone is wearing. One of the tight fit ones. Until now I had a cloth mask that I washed.

Well one thing that was immediately obvious was how innefective the mask actually is. It only really works if you press it down at the top of your nose. Otherwise when you inhale, 90% of the air just comes in around the side of the mask. So you end up inhaling the anbient air anyway. It's dumb.

I don't get it. Why is everyone wearing these stupid masks if they don't filter the air? #

Apple has been facing off against EU regulators recently. One of their complaints was about how Apple treats super apps. If you take the idea of mobile super apps to the extreme, don't super apps eventually become app stores?

At what point then does the OG app store require the app to actually become an app store? #

Glassy food and bad water - I finished the second lot of antibiotics for my lung infection Monday morning. I'm feeling mostly quite good today, not much coughing, hardly any flem. Hopefully it will last this time and I'll be well again.

The world continues to make things difficult. Found small glass pieces in my breakfast this morning. Examined the pieces using a magnifying glass, and managed to crack the small piece into two but I had to use a metal cup. It was definitely glass. This evening a large bottle of water I bought in a shop, which was sealed and looked totally new, contained water that tasted very strange.

It's been attempted escallations everywhere I've gone today too. Everyone is on the war path. I've managed to walk around all these without reacting, giving them a wide birth and plenty of space.

Hey world, come on, allow me to get well. #

There are efforts to get Linux running on Apple silicon chips. They seem to be successful. I wonder if there are any efforts to get Android running on iPhones? #

Medical info wikipedia - One thing that's become apparent to me while being ill, is that getting medical information online, especially relating to medication, is a total shitshow at the minute. Try and search for a specific medication and you enter a dark world of popups, preditory advertising, and blatant misinformation. Even if you try to read scientific papers, you end up down a never ending rabbit hole. It's the last thing you are able to deal with when you actually are ill.

We need a common resource for humanity, non-profit, for medical info. You should be able to easily find illness symptons, medication descriptions. It should be easy to compare different medications. The current leave it to the open market, quite clearly does not work. #

Nvidia's modern platform play - Nvidia is everywhere at the minute. Not only are they killing it in hardware, they have released a load of cloud based software. Each one very unique, tailored to future tech like AI and also spacial computing. Their spacial computing offering even includes a world wide streaming delivery network that will enable companies to stream 3D content directly to Vision Pro devices.

Their example is a digital twin car configurator. Pretty cool, but one wonders how many other 3D applications currently rendered to 2D screens will want to move to spacial computing environments.

As I wrote about last year, a lot of science and engineering companies might be interested. #

Illness is back - I've mentioned this on Twitter already, but not here yet. The illness that I had since the beginning of the year. It had looked like the antibiotics I took had cleared it up, but that only lasted 2 weeks or so. I am most definitely ill again, coughing up loads of flem, pain in my right lung, flem vomming too. It's so horrible.

I got some more antibiotics. They are supposedly better than the previous antibiotics. Different brand, based on different chemistry, suppsedly is able to kill more types of bacteria, which is what we suspect has infected my lung. These ones are 10x more expensive. I took the first one last night, this morning it doesn't appear to have had any effect. In fact if anything, it's gotten worse.

Please world, work with me on this, so that I can get well again. #

VMs for mobile - With all this worry about Tik Tok and what access apps have on mobile devices, doesn't it make sense to develop some form of VM for mobiles? That way you can have trusted apps on the base phone OS, and put all those 'dangerous' but fun social networking apps on a VM that you can switch to. This would be a feature I think many business executives and high net worth individuals would be very interested in.

At the very least there should be much better logging. You should be able to see exactly what data is being accessed and sent over the network. #

Computer nerd humour - "Ligging". Darn it, not again, stupid auto-correct. #

From an earlier blog post: "How can sending, receiving and storing money be so fucking complicated? It's literally 3 fucking features y'all. WTF crypto?"

I also mentioned in this week's newsletter that Bitcoin development reminded me of a collection of hodge podge ActivityPub protocols, that no longer fit the use case. Ironically email, I think we can all agree, has pretty much mastered send/receive/store.

In case you aren't aware ActivityPub uses an email style paradigm, with an inbox and outbox. I'm not sure what this all means apart from perhaps my analogy was a bit off I guess.

I'm wondering now if ActivityPub could be built on top of the AT protocol. Maybe email done right is actually quite involved. #

Nifty npm scripts - Apparently the static site generator Jakyll has an npm post install script that automatically sets up a Github Action workflow that gives you the ability to publish your site to Github Pages. That's pretty cool. #

Navigating around blockages - I've been having a terrible time doing a much needed consolidation of all my static site generator's plugins. There's some sort of bug in the Github Action library that I wanted to use to figure out if files have been modified in a specific repository folder. Necessary so I can trigger a build and deploy a plugin when I change something.

Well I think I've found another way to do the same thing. Hoping to get something working this week. It will be great to have things tidy. Sometimes it's worth slowing down so you can go faster later. #

Micropayments for humans - I wrote a few days ago about an easy way to make a crypto wallet discoverable on personal websites. The use case I had in mind was AI visitors to a website. AI tools that browse and synthesize information from websites is becoming insanely popular recently. They are great but they break the web. Content creators essentially get cut completly out of the loop, so they no longer have any incentive to create content. Eventually thus there will be no human content creators online. Auto-discoverable cryptp wallets for websites could be part of a solution.

Auto-discoverable wallets could also be used for human website visitors. For example a human visitor might consume some content they like while visiting a website, and if their browser had a built in crypto wallet, theoretically they could then send a micro payment to the website in a single click. No setup required, even if they had never visited that particular website before.

There's already a protocol for it, though it doesn't appear to be very well used. I think something light-weight like this would ve very useful, both for AI and human website visitors. #

Chris Dixon: - "NFTs are atomic units of ownership. A very abstract concept. They are a form of what in computer science is called encapsulation". #

Websites still rule - Nilay Patel on why building your own websites still rules. #

Git based blogging - One of the cool things about basing your blogging platform on git is that you can blog even when offline. I'm still battling illness, my ankles are still intermitently swelling up, which means I can't walk anywhere, including to the place where I get an internet connection, and I'm still coughing up lots of flem. But I can continue to write posts.

I create a feature branch for each day, and I add posts, notes, links etc throughout the day. In normal times the branch would automatically get merged into the main branch and the site would get rebuilt at midnight. But if I'm not able to get online for whatever reason, then I just create the next day's feature branch, merge the previous day's content on my local device. The next time I do manage to get online, all the content I wrote while offline will get published.

Okay sure it's a little jaring that a load of content appears on the site all at once in those situations, but it's still all dated correctly, with the date and time I wrote it. The point is that I can continue blogging pretty much as normal, even when I'm not able to get online.

Git is an awesome tool. Yes there's a bit of a learning curve, but for writing you only really need to learn a few features, and the workflow ends up being quite simple once you have done it a few times. And you then get the benefits of everything being version controlled. #

Big infra build out done when? - We are in a very rare period of core internet infrastructure build out. The huge surge in Nvidia profits is part of this, as service providers are rushing to build out the compute necessary for the boom in AI / machine learning applications that have become runnaway successes everywhere.

I'm really curious how the infrastructure companies are estimating how much compute they will need. It's a complicated problem in normal times, but this is the age of generative AI and deep fakes. They have to lay down the infrastructure for companies that will be able to build the smartest bullshit machines ever invented.

We will probably avoid the pitfalls of the dot com crash this time, but the pitfalls in this build out seem like they could be very difficult to detect, especially when you are in the thick of it. #

Website crypto wallet auto-discovery - For RSS you can add a special meta tag in the head of your web page's HTML. That can then be used by applications that read your page to auto discover the RSS feed for the page. I wonder if there is a similar standard way to define a crypto wallet associated with a website?

Such a standard could enable automatic micro payments, which in this age of AI that consume everything without a care for the creators, might be very useful. Imagine a world where, not only are creators of content rewarded for the content they are creating, but the AI could give the wallet an exact breakdown of the user query and weighted payments for all sites that were used to contruct the final answer.

There is the possibility for almost perfect transparency. #

Swollen ankles - My ankles are still somewhat randomly swelling up. It can get pretty bad if I don't notice it, they can appear almost double normal size. When that happens putting on socks can get very difficult, if not impossible. I don't yet have a handle on what's causing it. It's really frustrating because it has a huge impact on my mobility. When they are swollen, I can't walk anywhere.

They definitely swell up when I walk somewhere. That much I do know. That in itself is odd, but I've also had on at least one occasion, where I didn't walk anywhere, and the next day they were swollen. It might be something simple like sitting in a position where I unknowingly put them under strain.

Whatever it is, it wasn't happening before I got ill in early January. Swollen ankles is not something I have ever had to contend with previously. I'm hoping that when the coughing / microbial infection in my respiratory system clears up, the ankles thing will disapear too.

When they do swell up, as they have done today, the only thing I can do is apply the anti-inflamation gel, put my feet up and rest. #

Antibiotics - I've completed the course of antibiotics. It was 1 week. Things have cleared up considerably, but they definitely haven't cleared completely. I'm still coughing a lot, and coughing up quite a lot of flem. So I'm continuing to take the antibiotics for a few more days. Apparently taking them for more days is supposed to be fine. #

Resurfacing - The last few days I've finally started feeling well enough to contemplate posting again. I've basically been completely incapacitated all of February, though I was ill most of January too. I just couldn't even think about writing or posting. Anyway, let's see how things go.

I'm still not able to get online everyday, so these posts might appear somewhat unnexpectedly, though I'm writing them at the publish time in the frontmatter.

My ankles are still periodically swelling up. I have no idea why. When that happens I have to stop walking anywhere. I'm also still coughing up flem, but much less since I started taking the antibiotics. I occasionally still feel queezy too. Keeping food down has been a challenge too, but that's improved too.

Still dealing with the pre-illness problems, having to use the internet standing up, my water access is still a trickle, other stuff I can't think of now. But I'm alive, and I'm still posting again.

Thank you to those who have helped and been kind these past few weeks. Hoping things continue to improve :) #

Participating - I don't currently have the opportunity to watch films or TV series. It's been like that for a while now. I really miss it. I find myself listening to people on podcasts talking about the stuff they are watching as a sort of proxy. Instead of watching films, I listen to people talk about watching films.

It occurred to me yesterday that my experience of social media is much the same. Since I can only get online while standing up at the minute, participating in social media is very difficult. I do post but getting into conversations is next to impossible. The current thing has always passed me by the time I circle back around to read my replies and messages.

I find that I spend much of my time listening to people on podcasts talking about using social media. This isn't the internet I imagined when I first got excited about being online.

Anyway, I'm not complaining exactly, just describing how it is at the minute. I'm super happy that at least through podcasting, I can experience things even if it's often second hand. #