markjgsmith

I‘ve had a few days of very much heads down programming. I decided not to get demoralised with the issues I had had with Gemini a few days ago, and well to be very honest it got a lot worse before it got better. First of all I ended up losing about an entire day‘s work, but I persevered, and found way to use Gemini direct from within VSCode. That fixed much of the issues I had seen in the web UI losing work. There were a bunch of different issues, but I‘ve actually made a load of progress. I'll write more about it over the next few days. #

I was hoping to be writing this note in better spirits. However once again Gemini has led me into another impossible situation. After a phenomenal start to the day, lots of forward progress, and generally great coding, we've reached that point where Gemini just won't do anything. It won't do anything I suggest, insists on adding crap in all the project files, seems to be derailing the entire project. It‘s very disappointing, and I am left in the middle of the road with traffic everywhere, having to pickup all the pieces and not die. Enough said. #

I know I've been a bit critical of MCP the past few days. That's how tech goes. It's definitely how things go in software development. I think it's important to voice your concerns as they happen. That's part of the learning process, for everyone. Some technologies last, some don't, but either way it's okay and good to say what you think.

But it's also important to keep at it. The more you grapple with a new piece of tech the more you get a feel for it, the more you understand how it stands up against the other tech you are familiar with and the more you can see how it fits into the bigger picture.

All this to say, I haven't totally written off MCP, I'm still playing around with it. And I am, somewhat reluctantly I suppose, finding things about it that aren't so bad. #

Jameson Lopp: "Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds just met for the first time 🤯"

One of those tectonic plates shifting momentous moments that mean absolutely nothing to normal people. Tectonic plates isn‘t quite the right way to describe it, but you likely know what I mean. I like the understated subtlety of these types of events. They happen very rarely. I also thought it was kind of interesting that I found out about it on Nostr. Shit I wonder if it‘s fake news.

Update: Seems like it‘s legit. #

I just updated a note I wrote yesterday to a blog post. I don‘t do that very often, or at least I try not to, because I know it kind of fucks things up for feed readers. But this idea to me really feels like it should have been a blog post, with a title. It was one of those notes that ends up being way longer than a note, and should have definitely been a blog post from the start, but I didn‘t know that at the outset.

Sorry, sometimes things just aren‘t all perfect. I did add some hamsters though. Of course the conversation that led to the hamsters was quite funny. The gallows humour these days is very pop punk. #

Matt Odell on what you need [26:56] to set yourself up to be fully sovereign in the most privacy preserving way with Bitcoin [26:56]:

"Bitcoin Core or Nots, Electrum Server, Mempool Space. And boom you are off to the races".

Obvs this is if you are quite technical or a bit adventurous. #

I just installed Primal which is a Nostr client. Very smooth signup and onboarding. I already had a Nostr account but the signup sets you up with like 150 accounts based on your interests, and so I figured might aswell go with that. I don't think anybody was following my original Nostr account in any case.

It's nice to have lots of messages to read in my feed. That's probably the main reason I never checked Nostr before, I only had a few accounts I was following. I also couldn't figure out how to find people to follow. I had previously setup a nip5 so I guess I'll need to do that again.

Anyway here's my new npub. #

Feeling a bit flat this morning, wondering if it‘s AI related. It‘s weird, I completed the project yesterday, there are loads of cool directions I can take it today, but I‘m just not feeling like it. #

It‘s one thing after another today. It‘s rabbit hole day. Maybe that‘s why I was feeling down earlier. Maybe I subconsciously already knew it was another rabbit hole day. Just discovered the space bar on the laptop sometimes squeaks when I tap it. Fuck. Rabbit hole days suck. #

I hadn‘t noticed before but PM‘s Question Time seems like it‘s modelled after a marriage counciling session. Everything is Mr Speaker this and Mr Speaker that. Perhaps that‘s the only way of doing it. The other way of looking at it, is that it‘s two small siblings having an argument. Do any other nations have a PM question time type setup? It‘s quite a weird public dynamic to force your politicians into. And maybe a strange thing to make the nation watch. Then again perhaps it‘s a good thing. #

More AI developer tools weirdness. Yesterday and the day before Gemini had absolutely no problems whatsoever seeing / remembering our previous chats, and it also had no problems reading files online. In fact I had it do both of those things many times in our chats. Today it‘s telling me that it can‘t do either.

It‘s actually stranger though, because today I got it to read my blog, but it said the latest post was the one called "Vibe War Games", which was a post from several days ago. #

If you are a hardcore leftist you might at first find this a bit triggering, but I think it‘s worth pursuing until the logical conclusion. I asked Gemini: Why dont they call the public sector the government sector?, a very very interesting discussion ensued. #

I‘m really curious and kind of excited to see how well Gemini can build the API specification we put together yesterday. Feels just the same as when you are excited to build a new feature when you aren‘t using a GPT as a coding assistant. #

I just created an OAuth 2.0 API server and another example server that consumes the API. I was able to get it all working in a couple of hours with the help of Claude and Gemini. It wasn‘t totally straight forward, but definitely sped things up overall. #

I wonder if physicists that spend all their time studying the very small quantum world get on well with those that study the very very big, like solar systems and galaxies. You would think that those who study the very small things would somehow have internalised at an unconscious level that they are absolutely enormous, like giants that can get away with anything, and that those who study very large things are minuscule, insignificant and on some level not worthy. One would think that it would lead to a lot of tension, miscommunication and misunderstandings. I wonder if the universe has to somehow balance it all out. But of course at infinity things get very strange, and distance turns into time, and time into distance, and everything gets rather unbearable. On the other hand perhaps any publicity is good publicity? I‘m not super bothered, just wish it was a little (or a lot) easier to pay the bloody bills. #

Following on from yesterday‘s success in setting up devcontainers, I got Gemini to create me a poster for a film based on the classic hacker movie War Games. Here was the prompt:

Make me picture for a new movie. It's based on the classic Hacker movie War Games, but it's set in modern day. The new film is called Vibe War Games, and features Matthew Broderick, who has not aged since the last film. He is eating a whopper from burger king while coding using an orchestra of GPTs.

In my mind I was thinking it would be a bit more like a sureal comedy rather than a thriller, given the current ridiculousness of the world, but perhaps it‘s a mix of both, given the current insanity of the world.

Glorious full resolution image.

Full transcript here. #

Alex Gleason [43:11]: “The new way I'm approaching software development at this point is not to try to go in and Discord code these features into these vibe coded apps, rather it's to see what are ways I can improve my stack, so that when I re-run these prompts, it'll produce a better result the second time and it will do it faster [...] to me this is like a compleately different software development methodology.” #

Alex Gleason [43:58]: "When things get stale, you may consider just deleting and re-vibing. I kind of view it as like every 6 months you just re-vibe the app. You are improving your stack the whole time and upgrading all of your shit, and improving the components in there.” #

I re-wrote an API app that I had written a while back, updating it to work better with devcontainers. One of the cool things is that it runs either as an express app of express apps, or as individual serverless functions using the serverless-http library. It‘s just one environment variable you have to set to switch between environments. Means you can run your apps on serverless, but if you decide for whatever reason you need to move over to a VPC server or kubernetes, you can easily do that. It's the very same code running in both places. I had an idea I could do this a while back, but it‘s the first time I‘ve got it working. It‘s pretty cool. #

Lots of copyright infringement claims are starting currently, Disney vs Midjourney for example. Is training an AI copying? Maybe it‘s next level copying, sort of like if you copied the entire printing press rather than a specific newspaper. You get the entire solution space of ideas for a particular paper. All possible combinations of the ideas outlined in a work of art. It's like stealing the negative of a film, except the negative is dynamic. #

Matt Odell [1:11:42]: “Not only do I expect there to be pain, I expect it to be like, in terms of measurement, in terms of like dollar amount, and people amount, like the most pain we've seen out of all of the cycles, just because we are operating at a scale higher than we've ever operated at before, and I think that the easy thing is to say […] it'll just go up forever. Directionally I actually do agree with that, I just think there are going to be valleys in between. I think there is going to be pain in between, and you have to be able to survive that pain and not be over leveraged and destroyed when it happens, and that's why the stay humble part is important.” #

I finally managed to get VSCode devcontainers working with private Github repos. The trick was to mount some files from the host OS to the container. Works pretty well, but the thing to remember is that with ssh keys, you get access to all repos in a Github account, so the only really safe way is to have seperate Github accounts for each project, and use different key pairs for each. I never got it working with the fine grained access tokens over https, no idea if it‘s even possible. #

I made some pretty good progress on setting up my development environment using VSCode devcontainers. It‘s a bit slow at first because you have to download the image from the container registry. It quite straight forward for a typical setup. However I have quite a lot of code in private repositories, and of course once it‘s all running inside a container, the running code no longer has access to my ssh keys on the host OS. And that‘s where things get quite confusing.

Some people are saying to use ssh agent forwarding, which I don‘t think sounds very secure. Others are saying to use a fine grained Github access token, which sounds alright security-wise because you can create a token that only has read access, and if anything weird happens in the container, because say a vibe coding tool gets hacked, then it can only read the code. But I go through and set it up and I think I have it configured correctly, and it‘s still throwing up a popup asking me to login when I npm install. I‘ve been at it the whole day, tried a million and one different ways, and I still can‘t get it working.

It‘s looking like I‘m going to have to abandon my plans to use dev containers because it‘s just to complicated to configure securely. It‘s definitely better than last time I tried containers, but the devil is always in the details. Unless I can get it to work with private repos, it‘s not worth it. It would be awesome if all my code was open source and public, but I am still very far away from that point. I might try again tomorrow. #

I’m going to be concentrating on a few development things the next few days:

• Development environments that use containers
• Converting some old code to Typescript
• Creating simple frontend using React

I already know quite a bit about these three things but there‘s nothing like doing something practical for real. Luckily I already have quite a bit of old code to play with, so hopefully I‘ll be moving forward both in my hireability as a developer and on a few personal projects.

It‘s nice to have a focussed plan.

I also started doing some morning exercises again today. Nothing crazy, just a 20 minute routine, but feeling good about it. #

Dave Winer: "I'm trying to make a linkblog with a WordPress RSS feed".

Sure would be cool to have propper linkblogs built on Wordpress, which is the biggest open source web publishing environment in the world. Looks like it’s early stages, where things are complicated and convoluted, but eventually things could be streamlined. Imho great project to dive into if you are a Wordpress developer, or just a project to keep on your radar if you are a Wordpress user. #

I was going to read this Sam Altman blog post that everyone‘s been linking to yesterday. I think it‘s about the future, and how the crazy shit that is happening now is nothing because soon humans will be out numbered by robots, so we ain‘t seen nothing yet. Ok I did glance at the first paragraph. Anyway, I was very caught up in other stuff, it was lunch time and so I needed something to listen to while I prepared lunch, so figured I could multi-task. How hard could it be to get my Android phone to read a webpage to me? This is the age of AI and robots and what have you right?

Spent 35 minutes googling, ai-ing, searching through settings, literally nothing worked. It was kind of funny because the AI said to use the phone‘s voice assistant which I did, and the phone‘s voice assistant said sure no problem just give me the url, which is odd given the AI said that it would know automatically based on the context, but anyway the assistant openned up a text box presumably for me to paste the url into. So I did, and it went off and did a text based summary, and so I asked why it didn‘t read it aloud and it said it couldn‘t do it because it was a text based AI, so I then asked it why it didn‘t do the thing it said for me to do, and it started asking me to change settings and it was basically a total waste of nearly an hour, and probably would have broken my phone had I not stopped. I also would have starved to death.

Is the voice assitant an AI? Why is it talking to me with audio, clearly being an audio based tool, then the next minute it‘s saying it‘s text based? What the fuck is that about?

No, I‘m not going to read the article now, because this is fucking stupid. We cannot even do email, notes and basic automation in a bulletproof way, and now we are building AIs that lie to our faces? Surely we are on a very precarious path right now? #

Github support finally got back in touch with me yesterday. They said they have identified a bug in their system, said they were very sorry for the troubles caused and gave me several months worth of extra build minutes free as a good will gesture. They also unblocked my account, so I was able to finally run the builds for my websites and publish the backlog of content.

I'm not totally thrilled about the whole situation, I mean it's nice to get the free minutes, but I'm wondering what happens when the several months of extra minutes finishes, will my account get blocked again? This situation just has the vibe of one of those sagas that will go on for ages. I hate to be defeatest, but my long winded saga pattern recognition is triggering. It's horrid because it's sort of paralysing because you are afraid to change anything in case it makes the situation worse. You are not even sure it's safe to blog about in case that makes it worse somehow.

And then there is the innevitable totally unrelated knock on effects. Today where I am there are issues with the water plumbing. One problem fixed, and within minutes another one pops it's head up. The plumbing issues actually started last night, literally a few minutes after I got the website updated.

Oh world. What are you doing to me again? #

Github support are still ghosting me. It’s been over two weeks since my account started being blocked. How dare me for trying to buy a few extra build minutes.

I’m not able to run any Actions workflows, which means I can’t publish content to any of my websites. I've openned up two support cases now. The original one, where eventually it seemed they had fixed the issue, and had given me 1000 free Actions minutes as an appology for the troubles, and a second support case oppened when the account got completely blocked again when I literally did exactly what they told me to do. They have stopped replying on both support case threads. Actually the second one they haven’t even replied at all yet. I have been very polite throughout in my correspondences, and I have given them lots of time, haven’t swamped them.

As I explained today to them, it’s starting to feel very much like they are trying to extort money from me. But it’s actually weirder than that, because they won’t let me pay them. It’s very very bizare. #

Micha Kaufman [37:40]: “I was asked in another conversation how is it to be a CEO right now, and I said you know it's like you asking the captain of a ship in the middle of a storm, how is it to be a captain? And the answer is it's wet, it's dark, and you can't see a mile ahead”. #

Micha Kaufman [44:48]: “I never use the term speed. I always use the term velocity. Speed is just the speed of movement, velocity is speed plus direction. Speed is not enough. You need energy in a certain direction. If you are unable to push the code that you generate, it means you didn't solve your infrastructure, to be able to do this, so it means that your priority is incorrect because you didn’t solve the bottlenecks that are keeping you from moving fast.” #

I’m more and more convinced that the entirety of the tech industry is a scam. It’s unbelievable how often it happens that you spend ages building something only for one of the pieces you rely on screwing you in some way, and so you eventually rebuild replacing that piece with something you built yourself, only for the next piece you rely on doing the exact same thing again to you. This has happened to me so often over the past 2 decades that I have lost count.

It’s truely ridiculous now. I'm literally at the point where I have refactored all my stuff so much that everything is powered by git, the most well used most well tested software development tool ever to have existed, it's all files, the simplest most well understood primitive in all of computing. And wouldn’t you know it, Github the most bulletproof company in the space, owned by one of the wealthiest tech companies of all time, now has decided to block me.

You couldn’t make this shit up. The tech industry is never happy with anything. If I refactored myself into a perfect beam of consciously directional light, it would still be unhappy. I’m only partly kidding. #

Leo Laporte [56:11]: “You know a month or two ago, there was a whistle-blower at the veterans administration who said that when DOGE got access to the databases at the veterans administration, they turned off all logging, first thing they did, and then exfilarated 10gigabytes of data to some place we don't know and then within minutes, Russian accounts were logging in using DOGE credentials, into the veterans administration. The whistle-blower was a sysadmin, it got a lot of attention, NPR covered it. He was interviewed by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. He was threatened. There was a note taped to his door with a picture of him walking his dog from a drone shot, saying you might want to shut up about this. And then, btw, was it CSA? One of the federal agencies said yeah we're not going to investigate this. And I haven't heard a word about it since”. #

I’ve been working on a blog post, another Gemini collaboration post, for just over an hour. Working on stuff with AI is really bizare. It’s like the most extreme form of hit or miss ever. I’ve had loads of times when it’s a total disaster, both with writing code and with prose. Then again sometimes you get something back and it’s like nothing you could have imagined, and you are completely stuned by what you are reading, as if you’ve just been contacted by higher dimensional beings from another universe. That’s been the case today.

It seems to be particularly good at taking a jumble of thoughts, where there is an undercurent of something that you can’t quite put your finger on. I find that happens a lot when you read and listen to lots of online content from modern tech. I guess it’s often triggering many age old themes that have been hammered into you but they aren’t immediately obvious in a new context. This is great of course because often it’s exactly this sort of thing that can keep you awake ruminating at night as your brain tries to put all the pieces into a narrative that makes sense.

Of course you have to at some point put aside the awe of the situation, and get on with things, because neverending awe is stupid and annoying. Very odd this new AI world. Blog post to follow. #

What is up with these LLMs adding bold everywhere in text they write? It’s madening. #

It’s completely wild to me that I finished writing the latest Gemini collaboration blog post and the very next thing I did was pick back up a Rogan Protect Our Parks episode I had been watching yesterday, and they immediately start talking about Little Richard and the lyrics from Tutti Frutti, followed by a bit about modern content being sythesized from many different places.

For the record my Holy shit balls comment at the end of my blog post was lifted from the latest Rabbit Hole Recap Ep#360. I was listening to it as I finished the initial bullet point list that created the blog at the exact moment Marty said it comicly. I just thought it sounded funny, so added it to the list without giving it any thought. Don't think I'd ever heard the expression before. Just another set of data points that indicate we are living in some sort of AI guided, possibly nefarious, simulation.

Oh well, world keeps on turning. #

Still no word from Github support. My Github account is still blocked, so still can’t publish to the website. #

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if Bitcoin fixes anything. #

Google Gemini: "This isn't just about profit; it's about the preservation of consciousness itself!"

Just saying. #

Today I‘m trying to get Dev Containers run in VSCode. Putting aside all the vibe coding / Cursor craziness for a second, it seems that Dev Containers is actually quite a mature feature in VSCode, and it looks pretty cool. Last time I tried doing development with containers a few years ago, it was all a bit of a mess, especially on MacOS where Docker wasn’t even running properly. Anyhow, it seems that things have moved on considerably, and things are quite streamlined. I've managed to clone a public repo from Github, install all of the project dependencies, compile the code, and access the created website over HTTP. Crucially, everything is running inside a VSCode devcontainer, and that devcontainer is running in a container management tool that does not require root priveledges to run. At least that’s the idea. There were a few issues along the way, so blog post to follow. Once I have it all working in VSCode, I think it should be quite straight forward getting it to work in Cursor since as far as I understand, Cursor is based on VScode.

As I’m writing this I’m discovering that Cursor is proprietary software, which imo isn’t great because it’s running all sorts of things on your behalf, which requires a lot of trust. And of course it’s an AI that’s controlling Cursor, and who the heck knows what that means. And why the fuck have they taken VSCode which is open source and made it proprietary? That’s weird. Anyway, these are just the toughts going through my head as I tentatively walk down this new "shiny" road. #

I've been doing a bit of research into security implications of vibe coding environments following on from yesterday's attempt to install and configure Cursor. I'm really surpised at how little there is online about this topic. To be clear, there is a ton of stuff about security issues related to vibe coding, but it’s 99% about the security issues in the apps that people create with vibe coding tools, hardly anything published about the security concerns the tools cause themselves, though there are signs that some are aware of the issues. #

I had already used Gemini quite a bit trying to uncover the info related to setting up vibe coding environments securely, so I figured what the hell, might as well try to write a blog post together and see what happens.

I started by having Gemini read all my previous blog posts, to get my writing style. Then we put together the article based on a list of bullet points I had already created. I thought it worked out kind of good. Not entirely sure it sounds exactly like me, maybe a bit formulaic in places, but not too terrible.

I included links to the full chats. I think it’s worth experimenting with the tools, and sharing the process.

Also things get kind of meta sometimes when you collaborate with AI. Reminds me a bit of a recent Rogan show with Ehsan Ahmad. This new AI powered world gets very weird sometimes. #

Elon Musk [26:17]: "With Starship 3 and Raptor 3 it will be possible to have a rapidly refillable rocket with orbital refilling. Basically all of the ingredients necessary to make life multi-planetary will be possible with version 3 of Starship, which we are aiming to launch for the first time at the end of this year [...] anyone who wants to move to Mars and help build a new civilization, can do so [...], like how cool will that be? And even if you don't want to to do it, maybe you have a son or daughter who want to do that, or a friend who wants to do it. I think it would be the best adventure that one can possibly do, to go and help build a new civilization on a new planet". #

Thomas Ptacek: "Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans." #

I’m looking at the Cursor editor, that seems to be what everyone is using at the minute because it uses AI agents. These new development workflows rely on agents doing lots of things on your behalf. All sorts of things: "They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results". Sounds amazing in many ways, but also sounds kind of dangerous.

The two things I’m worrying about right off the bat, are whether I am essentially giving a 3rd party control of my laptop, and second, am I also allowing Cursor to upload all my code to their servers? There are several security realated posts on their forum, and it seems they do upload your code but they don’t store it, and you have to trust them on that. I haven’t found any info on the editor having control of my machine. I’m going to hold off installing it until I know more about how it deals with these two issues. #

Internet connection appears to be restored today, though it was doing weird things when I first got online like upload speeds of 0 Mbps. I had to reconnect several times, but the past few hours have been normal. #

I ran out of build minutes a few days before the end of the month, which is why I haven’t been posting the past few days. Also been incredibly busy. Github have a new billing interface that imo makes it very difficult to see when you are about to run out of build minutes. I openned a support case to try and buy a bit extra but they’ve been so slow dealing with my ticket that the new billing cycle is here now. Oh well. #

Chamath Palihapitiya [36:54]: “It’s going to create a tough job market for new grads in the established organisations. What should new grads do? They should probably steap themselves in the tools and go to younger companies, or start a company. I think that’s the only solution for them”.

That’s essentially word for word the conclusion I had reached a few minutes ago. Yes sometimes I write these while I’m listening. #

Power cuts and internet issues where I am. Just another block in a long succession of blocks. The world is just not able to not block me in some way. It's mindboggling. Just writting this note now in case this gets blocked too. #