markjgsmith

Notes

2025/01/02 #

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. #

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