markjgsmith

Relatively okay day yesterday. There was some small amount of harrassment here and there but I was able to ignore it. The girl staff in the shop cafe that always seems to be doing a C3PO from Srar Wars impression was a bit weird. I noticed that her thing is to always be slightly ahead of you in whatever interaction you have with her, so she's always in some way waiting for you. So she will move very quickly, then slow down, move very quickly, then slow down. But the whole charade stops as soon as she’s done interacting with customers, she’s completely normal with other staffers. Naturally I did the same thing to her while buying a second coffee and some biscuits. Evidently this was not appreciated, because right after finishing the coffee she materialised from downstairs on her way to the toilet, casually making a fake sneeze 'choo' sound as she passed.

The only other thing was that, quite predictably, the penis grafiti has spread so now there is also a sticker of a cartoon fast car on the wall next to the bathroom. Someone’s obviously tried to scratch it off but it’s too well on the wall to be easily removed. What a shame the walls had been nice and white for so long, now it’s being over run with vandalism. Before long the whole place will no doubt become unusable and be shutdown for a renovation or something.

Forgot to mention a couple of days ago that a lot of the time when sketchy lady with the fancy hat turns up, a bit later towards the end of whatever money dealings she’s up to, a sort of twin of her shows up, hangs around, usually sitting on the other side of me. She also had a fancy hat, but more importantly is dressed in a very similar style as OG woman with fancy hat. She’s the same exact height. She’s basically a twin. Weird.

I made some progress on the reusable workflow. As suspected the minimal example with 17 secrets works totally fine. Even tried a variant with the same number of required and optional secrets. Also works. So who knows where the bug is. The only thing left to do is laboriously rebuild the production workflow piece by piece, testing each time if it’s still working. Eventually, hopefully it will work and I can do a diff to see what was different.

Not much blog post inspiration at the minute. #

Some interesting subtleties about Telegram’s encryption implementation. Firstly the UX is a bit weird: although they advertise as being a fully encrypted product, they only offer end-2-end encryption on 2 person chats, not group chats, and it’s not the default, and to enable it you have to hunt through deeply burried settings, and even then it only works if the other person in the chat is online when you setup the chat.

Also their encryption implementation is a little bit "non standard". The author of the article linked above suggests that combining all these subtleties, it would be understandable if some people formed the view that their implementation was in some way malicious, i.e. user hostile. IMO there are a huge amount of right up to the line and no further situations in this story.

Like a weird honey pot inside a honey pot inside a honey pot. A honey pot fractal? Is that even a thing? Why did Pavel get fired for trying to unresign? There’s definitely something uncanny about this whole thing.

Has this entire story been written by an AI? #

I’m finding this whole Mike Lynch british entrepreneur super yacht sinking story very weird. Especially the latest bit about him being interested in this bizare and very dark Letby case.

It’s weird to me that Letby has been given 15 life sentences, and 2 days ago I wrote about a RL conversation I had with a person I said apparently works 15 simultaneous jobs or something. What an odd coincidence. And especially, given the details of the case, right after the pedo pervert apocalypse.

Also since numerology is clearly trending, what’s up with all the sevens in this article? I feel like all this is going to be fed into a powerful AI and turned into the next Iron Maiden album cover art or something.

Did I mention that yesterday morning a street food vendor ordered me to 'buy', as I stood there, after I communicated to his female collegue what dish I wanted and she was preparing it, and I was quite clearly waiting already holding the money in my hand to pay. This was, judging on the smile and chuckles they made, very funny to them.

Come on world, you are clearly warpathing at extreme levels. #

Oh and Ronny Chieng hates Smiths now.

Come on world, wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of non-escallating normality? #

Joe Rogan and Luis Elizondo discuss the possibility that non-human higher intelligences live among us:

Luis: To this day in China, we have the Panda bear exhibits. What do we do? We don’t disrupt the pandas, we wear panda suits. It sounds silly but you can actually get online and see zoo keepers wearing panda suits because they want to interfere as least as possible with the natural flora and fauna there inside the exhibit.

Rogan: Do you think there are non-human intelligences that look like us, moving around with us, living amongst us?

Luis: Do I think it’s possible? Well we are doing it already with the panda bears.

OMG, politicians are going to turn into furries. #