markjgsmith

Haseeb Qureshi on Kanye West releasing $YZY [59:05]:

It’s like the same cabal, it’s the same people [...], just like every villain, it's kind of like an Avengers movie, every villain from a previous cycle is also back, is part of this thing. It is a nice way to wrap up the saga, if this is the last celeb coin we are going to have to deal with".

The past few days I seem to be stuck in a bit of a configuration nightmare. Hopefully I'll have the thing I'm configuring working soon. It's partially working now, but practically speaking not functional.

I also added an anti-corruption layer to the frontend code, which is a fancy way of describing a standard way to unwrap the API payload, which theoretically makes the application more portable. #

The world is really getting very synchronicity overload the past few days for me. These sorts of times rarely end particularly well. Thought that was worth mentioning, not that it will make any difference at all, world is going to world. #

I was very happy when I started out writting this post, having a morning ice coffee, after a nice breakfast. The ordeal I had to go through to publish this little post has left me not quite as happy.

Such is life sometimes. #

Miljan Braticevic [38:46]: “When you create an account on X let's say, you are given this account by this corporation, this is something that they give to you, and it's something that they can take away from you at any point. In contrast, when you are on an open protocol like Nostr, you claim your key/pair. You take this massive number out of the universe, and that's you're private key. So you have claimed some territory in this massively large namespace of numbers and then you've claimed something and this is yours and then you defend it. What a stark contrast between these two, and then everything is downstream from there.”

I thought this was a great explanation of one of the central paradigms of key/pair based systems. Somewhat surprisingly, because I really am all for independence and self reliance and the rest of it, I found that the new knowledge that it unlocked, was accompanied by a roughly equal amount of unease. Like somehow there might be a side to this that is not being covered. Might be a bad idea to push to get rid of the centralised systems so completely, at least for a little while. I guess that has been my opinion for a while now. It seems to me like it might be one of those hills that isn't worth dying on, like an asymptote stretching off into infiniti that you can never quite figure out.

I'm making a mental note that it might be worth revisiting the tractability vertigo of this whole thing some time again in the future. Analysis paralysis is a real so and so. #

About a week ago I thought I'd gotten the codebase of my new project to solid ground. I knew I still had quite a few features to add to get the migration to a React frontend finished, but I soon discovered that there was considerable drift from the established project best practices.

I ended up having to go back over all the routes and standardise the API response envelope, and put in place some type checking to ensure that all the responses were consistent. It was rather a big effort with losd of knock on things that needed fixing and updating, but I got it done a couple of days ago. I was completely exhausted, both mind and body. I'm starting to feel a bit better now that I have had a bit of propper rest.

In any case the code is looking great, with a new react router, queries and loaders, end-to-end data integrity, and now a standardised response envelope. Hopefully I'll get some time to write a blog post about it soon. #

I’m trying to get a bit back into the habit of daily blogging. I’ve found that when I get very in depth absorbed into development work, my blogging output decreases. It’s a focus thing, but also a balance thing. There are times when blogging can be an ephemeral and non-distracting activity, something you just do in a few minutes in between tasks. But it can also sometimes turn into something more involved. And when you are really in the thick of some very difficult programming, you really don’t want to get distracted by that second type. On the other hand, you don’t want to completely not write either, because blogging does help you organise your thoughts. #

Matt ODell [26:26]: "Trump has absolutely filled his bags with as much Bitcoin as possible, including all of his cronies. I mean right now his stock, Trump Media, has 15000 Bitcoin in the Treasury. Bro has more Bitcoin than Coinbase." #

Calle [35:44]: "There is a thin sliver of a population of, let’s call them plus minus millennials, that grew up with an internet that was like wild west. Complete freedom. No identities, no logins, you know, just IRC chat rooms, anonymous people. You just talk about your interests, and you don’t present yourself, it’s not about look at me, it‘s about look at this interesting thing. And anything goes. File sharing, sharing of information, the age of Wikileaks, we are going to revolutionize the way that the planet works because we can now finally communicate. We are going to grow together as humanity, because now we have this internet that is this neural web, the global neural web that is going to put us together. There is this idealism from that time, affected only a small part of the population that is still around today, and those people are the people that care the most."

I hadn’t thought of it quite like that before, but he’s right. And from this zoomed out position it’s strange how you could see it as in some way similar to that period in the late 60s, especially in the US, the summer of love and all that, even if it didn’t really feel very much like that at the time. Same same, but different, as the saying goes. #

Haha just got the admin page fully working. Just after midnight. That‘s not too bad. This little Oauth based API and React frontend is starting to look pretty darn cool :) #

It‘s unbelievable the detours you have to make in programming sometimes, especially in the early days of a project. Just when you think you have the architecture well and truly figured out, you realise there is this other very important part you just absolutely have to refactor. Sometimes it really feels endless. You find yourself doing a refactor while doing a refactor.

And then you finally tie up all the loose ends, and a whole lot of other small bits and pieces and fixes you had to do along the way, and you are exhausted, and you are right back exactly where you were 24 previous, when you realised you had to do the refactor. You can finally really start the original thing you set out to do! But it‘s 1:37am and you are spent.

Programmer problems. #

I‘ve been reading about running LLM‘s locally for the past few days. It‘s something I looked into briefly before but it always seemed too complicated. I‘ve noticed that since OpenAI released their open source models, people on various podcasts have been talking about this more, so I‘ve been checking projects out and what not. It‘s seeming more achievable, I think partly because the tech has progressed but also my understanding of the space has evolved too.

It‘s tough not to get sucked into rabbit holes on some of this stuff. I am trying to spend a bit of time reading about it in the mornings, but then you have to put your half baked research aside and get on with your current project. Web development is strange in that you have to constantly be taking small bites at things, and eventually what was not possible, becomes possible. You have to do both, and then find time to write about it too. #