markjgsmith

Just listened to Willem Dafoe on the Louix Theroux podcast. Very strange experience listening to it while the bloke in the prison cell periodically looses his shit, while me and the other two blokes in here in the ajoining room sit quietly, while officers from the main room periodically entrr and leave room with cigarettes, water and food for everyone but me. Can’t say I was fully able to appreciate the podcast. The bits I did hear were quite good. #

I’m listening to lots of podcasts while stuck in this bizare situation, but it’s even more impossible than in the shop cafes, because there is so much crazy stuff going on. Starvation, thirst, prisoners, police officers. Really very far from an ideal situation. Sorry dear readers, I imagine this makes fir really terrible reading. I eish the world would allow just a tiny bit, instead of this constant walking into total blocking of everything. #

John Gruber: "Project Digits is a genuinely innovative idea. And Jensen Huang is a charismatic presenter. He’s good. But one thing that’s very clear to my eyes is that they didn’t rehearse enough. Or more specifically, they didn’t rehearse nearly as much as Apple did when Apple performed live keynotes. Part of Steve Jobs’s on-stage appeal was that he came across as largely winging it, speaking off the cuff from an outline of prepared Keynote slides. But that was an illusion. Jobs rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, and then rehearsed some more. Jobs might have been better than anyone else even if he had just winged it, but he still put in the work of rehearsing long hours to be as good as he could be."

Given that Gruber has been one of the most faithful Apple reporters over the years, really interesting to hear his take on Nvidia’s new Digits project. Some great anecdotes. #

I notice Zuck is on Rogan today. He always seems to appear on podcasts at the same time as big events are happening to me. It’s very bizare.

Also what a week for the wildfires in LA to happen. Was looking at some posts on twitter last night. That looks completely foobared. Never seen anything like it.

Saw a post on Threads from Kevin Rose. Apparently his house got burned to the ground. The whole thing looks not far off a scene from a nuclear bomb aftermath movie. #

For whatever reason, Rogan podcasts are not downloading. Both the Zuck and Mel Gibson podcasts are not downloading. They keep failing at around 60-70% complete. Other pods, though they are taking ages, are successfuly downloading. Strange. #

Me: "I’m currently sitting writing this in a small local police station in HCMC near Le Van Tam park. It’s very confusing, I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me." #

Slept in a little later than usual to try and catchup a bit on some sleep. Feeling better than I would have done otherwise but running a bit late compared to normal. I’m relatively happy with the amount of blogging from the past few days though not necessarily with the quality. Much of it has felt a but rushed and forced.

Anyhow, development-wise I’ve made a few small fixed to the RSS feed refactor that so far hasn’t had any major conplications so I’m going to slowly move ahead with that one small piece at a time, trying to make sure I don’t run out of build minutes.

Figured out that the logging synchronisation fix I made hasn’t worked. There was a bit of movement on the issue I raised in the debug module repo that said as much, but it was good to confirm it in my code. I have to re-read their latest advice because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it when I read it a few days ago. #

Following on from this piece I just wrote, which is effectively a dénouement post of the past few week’s blogging, I wouldn’t be suprised if worldo has a hissy fit and makes me ill. We shall see. I wrote this note because I just had an impromptu very brief runny nose, barely a few minutes after finishing said blog post. #

Jason Calacanis on the Nvidia Digits workstation [42:15]: "I’d say the thing that’s teally interesting about things that start as toys, or as hobbies, this feels like the raspberry pie, it feels like the PC in the early days. These things were toys and people were tinkering with them, and then an application comes out, and then people really want it, and then everybody has to have it. The Palm Pilot, the General Magic machines were these little digital assistants, they were PDAs, personal digital assistants, they had a dictionary on them, a calendar on them, they weren’t connected to the internet, you had to plug them in with a big fat cable to your computer to get the data to sync, it never worked, it took an hour, and then all of a sudden, now we all have iPhones and Android phones." #

I got quite a bit of rough sketch, slightly scrappy blogging done yesterday, and resolved a really annoying bug in my code. Several very interesting podcasts, all seemingly related at a high level. I had a quick look at the RSS refactor, I might try and fix a few bugs in that to get a feel for how much work it might be.

The thing with blogging is you need to absorb a bunch of stuff, have time to process and analyse it, putting it into context, before the good quality posts start to flow. The world at the minute doesn’t understand this and just expects posts to pop out on command. It’s constantly trying to maximum. But it doesn’t work like that. Also blogging doesn’t work if you are being starved and have no fuel in the tank so to speak, and that’s another of it’s favorite things to do.

Anyway here’s to hoping worldo will figure out a good balance, and allow itself to do the things it needs to do. #

Was planning to spend some time this morning reading and posting links, it’s been a few days since I’ve had a chance to do that, but worldo has other ideas. Specifically an exageratedly loud young teenage boy has situated himself nearby playing video games on a portable, smacking and door nocking the table over and over, as well as periodically having strange epileptic type convulsions of his pelvis. He’s wearing a school uniform. It’s almost as if he’s been sent to annoy me.

Earlier there was an apparent motorbike taxi bloke wearing a yellow top who wouldn’t sit down, insisting on standing next to the white washed grafiti dick. Then he kept leaving then coming back. Must have done it 5 or 6 times.

I guess I’ll read and post links later when worldo has gotten over it’s episode. Are you getting angry again worldo, while trying to say it’s me that is angry? #

Worth noting that yesterday I door knocked the glass at the sandwich store to get the attention of the sandwich guy bloke, who is always moody with me. It was a busy morning so I wanted to make sure yet another person didn't cut the queue ahead of me, something that has been happening almost everyday the past few days. As it happened it appeared he was already preparing my sandwich even though I hadn’t asked for it yet. He seemed annoyed at me. Yet was happy to recieve orders from the queue cutting overly loud and bossy women.

I decided against a sandwich this morning. Strange then that teenage boys sitting next to me are going on impromptu table knocking rampages today.

Worldo trying to create contradictions so it can get angry perhaps?

Also multiple coffee and small bottle of water situations today. Coffee and water bottle incidents have been trending since coffee was blocked a couple of days ago at another shop cafe. #

Konstantin Kisin [42:46]: "What people don’t seem to realise on the progressive left, for want of a better term, on the extremes is the cancelation, the silencing people, for shaming people for having mainstream political opinions or cultural opinions, they don’t seem to realise that they are then fueling this rise on the opposite side of the spectrum. That the more they push down here, the more this rises. Then they complain about what’s happening to the culture. And you say to them, do you not understand that this is partially being created by what you are doing here?" #

Gare Davis and Ed Zitron at CES 2025 [28:04]:

GD: Because everyone is so bought into it, if you make any objection during any Q&A panel, people are like SO surprised. It’s like you’re a heretic. It’s insane. It’s like you don’t believe in the project of humanity, to these people.

EZ: It’s like you don’t believe in Santa Claus

GD: It’s wild.

Note that Zitron has setup a sort of confessional with an actual fully stocked bar in the heart of the conference, and people are being amusingly candid about their CES experience.

They will be recording pods for the next few days. #

I’m finishing off a few smaller tidy up type features. Getting rid of some old configuration that’s no longer necessary. I had left it in while I was making bigger changes and put in new configuration alongside it, to avoid inconsequential things breaking. But now that the bigger changes are all implemented it’s time to remove the old config and fix any things that are affected. So far it’s as I expected, none of the old config was even being used for anything, so just removing it hasn’t caused anything to break.

After that I’m not totally sure. It will depend on how many build minutes are left. There is the RSS feed refactor, but since I got it working using the old structure, and I’m enjoying seing all my posts in the RSS reader, I’m thinking to leave that for a while. It would be nice to get that done at some point but it’s not urgent. The refactor is all written, it just needs testing, but my sense is it will take up lots of build minutes because the feeds plugin has an npm module cache, and that always eats up build minutes during testing because anytime you change anything in a plugin you have to refresh the module cache.

So more blogging would be great but worldo has started blocking things again the past few days. The new thing is coffee has been removed from one of the shop cafes I go to. They are suddenly only selling big boxes instead of single items. And of course it’s accompanied by people playing badmington ordering me to 'blog!', so they are literally blocking the thing they are ordering me to do by people doing the opposite. There’s also some new thing at one of the sandwich shops, where as soon as I turn up the apparent customer being served says 'maximum' then some new people suddenly appear out of nowhere and cut in line right in front of you. It’s just the same old bullcrap bullying. And of course it escallates in every shop as everything in the universe gets blamed on you, and then they start removing cold drinks in the fridges, replacing them with warm ones. And then in the evening you get gifted tons of milk and cold sugar free coke just when you are brushing your teeth, and I’m being gifted a million small bottles of water, so many I can’t carry them. It’s just maliciousness dressed up as kindness.

And so it goes. World keeps on turning, everyone gets a bit more angry, and blames it on me. The world win win win wins while ademently pretending that it’s lose lose lose losing. It then has a win maximus tiddle wave of win, where literally thousands and thousands of people are blowing air horns and waving flags in an enormous celebration orgy, keeping me awake all night, then is sad and angry and will probably block coffee again later.

And so it continues going. Yet again, even more more total reality inversion maximus. And still it is sad and unhappy.

All I can do is shrug. #

Maybe leaders don’t run blogs or podcasts because they literally can’t. Strange to think this, because it’s so easy these days, but maybe for whatever reason, they literally can’t.

Things might be a lot worse than they appear. #

On the latest Punk Till I Die podcast, Neal shares stories from his recent trip home to England.

England belongs to Neal Ep#320.

All sorts of funny shit, but also heart felt stories from people and families stuck in between cultures. Oh yeah, and tons of excellent non pop punk punk and metal.

People stuck in between cultures in bizare ways seems to be trending the last few days. #

Glad I got the better debugging feature complete. The plugins refactor to use more utility functions and the output synchronisation will make figuring out issues much easier. I’ve used up about half my build minutes for this month so I will concentrate on features that can be done without much iteration and building.

Still feeling a bit rusty as far as blogging goes. I think it’s because things have been so chaotic it’s been difficult to see the woods for the trees. #

In the future we will want our leaders to run their own podcasts because it will be a way of demonstrating that they aren’t in the clutches of both billionaires but also the deep state. #

Tom Luongo [28:24]: "You can hold two positions that are seemingly against each other at the same time because they are not in parallel. You can have two different opinions about the same person, where one is negative and one is positive. I see the good and the bad in Elon Musk here. Him going after Keir Starmer, and inserting himself into german politics, and going after the European Union at a regulatory level and at a money level - they have had strategy discussions about this within the Trump team, it’s very clear to me. I look at the totality of what’s playing out, they are playing offence here. And I like that they are playing offence, and at the same time, the other side is going to play offence as well, and they are going to make mistakes." #

Was kept awake literally the entire night. Finally got some sleep from 5am - 745am. Feeling not great now. The weather is alright. I’ll likely be bullied for being tired for the rest of the day. My plan had been to write the newsletter this morning, I had prepared all the podcasts yesterday afternoon, but as it became clear I wasn’t going to be able to sleep I ended up writing an emergency issue just so something gets sent out. That makes me very sad because it’s really not how I wanted to start the year :( #

Jason Calacanis [1:53:37]: “I’m with you. I love conspiracy Gavin. This has been the best part of the show. Conspiracy Gavin is AWESOME! I love it!”

This really made me laugh. Great episode btw. #

I think maybe I’ve fixed the debug / console.log synchronisation issue. It’s a bit difficult to tell. With the fix all the output appears to be all synchronised, and henceforth therefor much easier to read. It will likely take a while to get used to it. I’m going to put it behind an environment variable so you can always turn it off. It’s likely only really necessary in some circumstances. It might turn out to be in practice overly restrictive. Same as with a debugger, it can be useful but really you don’t want to spend your whole life in the debugger or else you end up debugging the debugger. Only turn it on when you need it, then turn it off again. #

Duncan Trussell and Luis Gomez solve a very different kind of synchronisation issue on the latest Duncan Trussell podcast [Female advisory: explicit boy humour].

Also: drones with machine guns, teaching your kids entrepreneurship, manufacturing wins, sales, business as magic, truth, manipulation, magicians, insane mindfucks, beauty, skill, craftmanship, politicians, social media vs cigarettes, phones & doom scroling, pass-par-tout, perfectly targeted propaganda, compassion, the shocking tik tok dancing psyop conspiracy.

Worth the listen, no need to feel guilty about it. Just go back to base but also be the kindness you want to see in the world. #

Today has been another day of contradictions. The world is plus infiniti minus infiniti-ing everything, then getting upset and doing all it’s usual tricks, making 1 equal infiniti, making minimum equal maximum, and all sorts of other bullcrap, all culminating in everything being blamed on me and everyone being sad. Then I get blamed for that too. I can see how this might seem exagerated or overly negative, but it’s only when you see it happening for yourself, that you realise it’s a real thing. I’m not sure what the answer is but I’m pretty sure some things make it worse. But it is ultimately all self defeating because, at least for now, we are all on this spec of space dust together. #

I’ve gotten all the plugins refactored with utility functions to improve debugging. It’s looking pretty good, and from the debugging I’ve had to do making the updates, appears to be much easier to focus in on specific places in the code without having to deal with a deluge of output.

Once I’ve merged in those changes, it will be the next phase, which is to try and setup a way get the regular console.log output synchronised with debug output. I have no idea if that will work. I openned up an issue on the node-debug repo a while back, got some good feedback, but my recent questions have gone unanswered. At least now I’ll soon be in a position to try it myself.

Also have the newsletter to prepare for tomorrow so quite a few things to get done. #

Matt Odell critique of Elon Musk on the most recent Rabbit Hole Recap podcast Ep#338 [31:09]:

"This AI piece is interesting, because my understanding is the X deal is way underwater. He completely overpaid for X, and the way he’s monetising it, the way he’s digging himself out of it, and digging his investors out of it, is xAI, which is fed by the Blue Checks. The killer advantage that xAI has is that it has real-time data, that is fed by a bunch of human Blue Checks, that have basically umbilical chords connected to this AI machine, and they are just feeding it information. And so at the same time he is attacking the people that are feeding it, and they are angry, and they complain about it on his platform while feeding the AI further. And they’re just gonna keep using it. Most of them are just gonna keep using it. It’s a pretty crazy Mandibles-esque backdrop that we are entering 2025 under."

Probably the best Elon critique I’ve heard in a while because it’s based on high quality analysis rather than hot headed personal attacks. The situation is odd, and he’s outlined exactly why. #

Mike Masnick: "I don’t like the fact that we are in a position where the biggest companies and our elected officials are equally untrustworthy, but if that’s where we are, we might as well use it as an opportunity to route around both and build better systems that aren’t focused on extraction from the public, but empowering the public." #

Ideas are starting to percolate for a few blog posts. I got a scrappy one out last night, but feeling a little bit rusty. It’s like I’m stretching tired old legs and arms. But you just got to press on regardless even if it isn’t perfectly written prose. This is blogging, it’s live thinking. It gets better over time.

I’m going to be merging in little bits of feature branches I had been working on while I had no build minutes. There are a few around refactoring plugins to make debug logging easier. Extracting out utility functions into seperate files. That makes it easier to turn on and off debug logging without getting overwhelmed with output.

Then a few blog posts, and I need to somehow seperate out full text posts and partial text posts in my RSS reader. Most feeds are annoyingly partial feeds, which is completely useless for reading offline. I guess I’ll add a 'full text' tag to the ones that publish full text. That way I don’t waste time trauling through stuff that I can’t read anyway. #

Interesting discussion on the latest Citadel Dispatch Ep#148 between Matt Odell and Buck Perley co-hosts of Austin BitDevs and an engineer at Unchained [21:32]:

"It‘s a great case for collaborative custody as the model for the future of Bitcoin custody. You collaborate with us, you get a key from us, you can use your wallet wherever you want outside of that, and in the future that’s going to open up even more models of collaboration. You talked about how we have you hold two keys and Unchained holds one key, well now we have connections where you can hold a key for your family member. Maybe you don’t want your funds to be KYC’d, but your family member doesn’t care about the KYC because they care more about ?, they don’t trust themselves as much, but they also don’t want to hold 2 keys. Now you can be a part of that. Your funds aren’t KYC’d but you are helping your friend and family member to manage their funds. You can now interact with that vault as well in Caravan or Sparrow or Electrum. Which one you use is irrelevant, it’s the fact that you can use multiple and be using an Unchained vault is the real magic."

This sounds like the right direction to me. Allow the user to choose what tools they use, and make it possible for them to connect to your services. It’s still early days in crypto and Bitcoin, so things still look a bit disorganised and complicated from the outside, but at least these devs are trying to make software that respects users. The tech is kinda interesting too, BDK, Rust Miniscript, javascript, WASM. #

Only a day after taking somewhat of a friendly pop at the Rest is History guys, I am reminded why I still listen to their podcast, even if they can often be infuriatingly self righteous. On their latest, really great segment covering the importance and nuances of interpreters in international negotiations. Complete with some amusing stories from their time in the field.

It’s not quite as grandiose as their adventurous stories, but it reminded me of some of my narly business trips to places in eastern europe and the middle east. One can really get into some very bizare situations traveling around the world, especially with language and cultural differences. #

I just remembered that this morning when I woke up I immediately coughed up an enormous glob of flem. It felt very much like the start of a flem cough, complete with raspy cough. The odd thing though was that it totally disapeared within 20 mins, and there‘s been no sign of a flem cough all day. Although I’ve been getting these alergy flareups / colds fortnightly, thankfully it’s been quite a while since I’ve had a flem cough.

The Demiurge [35:27]: "Let’s go back to base."

Gosh what are the chances eh? Neither, or even none, of the possibilities are mutially exclusive. #

First day of the new year!

It’s definitely 2025, I just had to create a '2025' folder in the website data repo to write this post. I don’t get to do that very often.

Last night was somewhat unneventfull but that was actually rather nice. It was nice people watching, seing everyone all dressed up and occasionally sparkly, all going out to whereever they were goong out to. Then a few hours later everyone making their way home, many children clearly past their usual bedtime, completely passed out in their parents arms, or somewhat precariously squashed between adults on the back of a motorbike. Everyone appeared to be in good spirits. Right before new year’s a group of twenty somethings bought me a drink, a sandwich and a sweet bun, and we exchanged 'Happy New Year’s', and smiled and laughed a little.

And I saw the end of the big fireworks display poking up above the roof tops a few miles away. I didn’t get hardly any sleep, but that’s expected on New Year’s isn’t it.

So many runners this morning. Hundreds of them, all in groups, wearing synchronised colored tshirts. Lots of folks who likely don’t usually run, looking a bit shell shocked and lost. Runners literally running in every direction. It’s amusingly chaotic, but folks are in a happy mood.

I’m happy to report I managed to mostly fix the RSS feeds last night. They are all looking great in feed readers now, without any strange HTML tags. There is still an issue with an incorrect url that is set in item link elements on the everything feed. The posts all contain hash links so you can still get to the post on the website, but I’ll hopefully figure that out and fix it over the next few days. It’s nice to see all my posts are finally readable.

Weather is cloudy, but at least it isn’t rainy or cold. #