markjgsmith

Probably going to be a few test posts today. #

Internet situation is dire. Connection currently droping about 50% of packets, in bursts. So bascially it's on for 30 seconds, then off for 30 secs. I am told a technician will be investigating "at some point". #

Strangely timed internet connectivity and power issues today :( #

It's definitely one of those days. Power appears to be restored but main internet is totally blocked. No bueno. #

And it's some kind of a pink tsumami of never ending bizare synchronicities. I'm afraid to do anything in case I break the multiverse that is probably balancing on a toothpick. Probably shouldn't have mentioned toothpicks. #

Twitter for me is now about 40% horrific videos proving one political polarization, 40% horrific videos proving the exact opposite extreme polarization. It's the battle of infinities. Non fucking stop. Panopticon dystopia much? #

The world seems to be locked into a pattern to maximumly exhaust me, and shows zero signs of tiring. If you think yesterday's Black Hole Jupiter was scary, you ain't seen nothing yet. But ultimately we all pay the price of a black whole earth. #

A very short test post! #

Just an uneventful test post. Nothing to see here. Actually I suppose technically some events were created in the making of this test post. But that's not important. What's important is that this test post gets published, despite an awful lot of headwinds these past few days. #

The world is feeling like it‘s been singularity maxxing again. #

After writing the last post, I switched over to listen to a Rest is History Podcast I had started earlier today, totally forgot I had been listening to it, and literally this was the line that played [17:46]:

There is the sense that within England protestants are surrounded by enemies, and that within Europe, England is surrounded by enemies, and that these enemies are working to destroy England‘s path to godliness. And that therefor although it may not be an Open War, it is a Cold War in which falsehood is attempting to overthrow truth and hell is raging against the forces of heaven, and Satan against Christ.

I'm not even joking. This sort of shit has been happening to me all bloody day today. Steady on world. #

As great as LLMs are for coding, there are times, especially when writing specifications, when their capacity for creating software bloat is unmatched in the known universe. #

I'm really liking the new header image. #

Today and last night I have been working on the init sub-command of my rendering tool. I've managed to drastically simplify it, so it's similar to running git init. It's instantaneous, no silly questions, instant super basic project that just works. And you can also provide init with a git url to a starter project for more complex things. Seems to work quite well especially when using themes. #

I just moved over the socials auto poster from the old blog repo to the new blog repo. I carefully moved over all credential secrets etc., but just a heads up in case something weird happens when it runs tomorrow. #

I discovered a regression in the blog rss feed yesterday shortly after posting that everything had gone great with the deploy. The feed items were appearing in ascending order instead of descending order. I found the bug, and fixed it. The feeds should be back to the correct reverse chronological ordering. #

Just noticed that the top right images in posts aren‘t getting added to the rss feed. Oh noes! Darn it. That‘s because the image gets inserted in the website using a partial, but the rss feed currently just gets the plain rendered markdown. There is an easy fix, and likely a more elegant one too. I have to think about this some more. #

Managed to fix the top right image issue. If there is a top right image defined in a post it now makes it into the RSS feeds. In the end it wasn‘t that complicated, I had to add a middleware to insert the image right after the posts get loaded. #

Last night‘s switch over to the new blog went pretty seamlessly. No downtime and everything seems to be working as expected. #

Of course now that I have the blog remembering which background image each post had working, I‘m thinking of the bigger picture, how can I set things up so that it‘s not just the header image that it remembers, but the entire site design. I think maybe my new theme feature could be useful there, but that will have to be for another day. #

As part of getting the fast rendering blog complete, I‘ve managed to resurect the tags pages. That was something that the old blog had that I hadn‘t managed to port to the new system. And I think I‘ve managed to make them much more useful. Also a rather cool entirely new feature that might be fun going forward. Quite a lot of new moving parts need to fall into place so please bear with me if things go a bit weird initially. #

I'm pretty close to having the new fast rendering blog ready for production. I think I got the final big structural issue solved last night. Might try and deploy it today. It has a somewhat more refined look. One small step for my blog, potentially a giant leap for website rendering. #

The issue I have with the IndieWeb is it just feels too complicated. Great write up by Andros Fenollosa of his experiences. He really likes it. I didn't realise they were overloading CSS classes. Just seems like a really bad idea to overload CSS classes to do social web stuff imho. When you are starting out writing HTML/CSS/Javascript things get complicated enough pretty quickly. #

All you need is templates and an LLM. #

I just overhauled the bash aliases I have configured for all the git commands I use most often. I was thinking wouldn‘t it be nice if it were easier to edit my dotfiles and wouldn‘t you know it, I found a bash function called dotedit I had created the last time I refactored my dotfiles, but then totally forgot I had written it. I need to remember to use dotedit! #

One of the odd things about LLMs is they can both get you out of a tangled mess, and cause you to fall into one, and often at the same time. #

Previously on the blog, notes and posts appeared in the order they were written. In the new blog I‘m trying something different. The notes always appear above the blog posts, and the links as usual appear at the bottom. I want to make "small thoughts" the first order of the day. #

I got a live version of the new blog deployed earlier and everything looks good. The big thing about the new site is it‘s a lot easier to navigate through all the content. You can easily filter on the content type you want to look at, or just read everything on the front page. The other major thing, for me at least, is to know it‘s on a much more solid foundation. I‘m going to give it another day before I switch over the DNS. #

I‘ve been knee deep in render optimisation the past few days, tough but I‘ve got things working pretty well now.

Also just added RSS feed generation. It was really quite straight forward to add, it plugged straight into the rendering system which uses fragments to make sure content only has to be rendered once, even if it appears on several pages, including the feeds.

That will be another blog post at some stage.

Possibly something to show in the next few days. #

This graph of inflation cycles since the 1970s from @lawrencelepard caught my eye. The obvious question is what is similar about the present moment and back then? We should really figure this out before all the folks around back then are RIP. Also wouldn't it be wild if the same pattern repeated itself further back into the past? #

I've switched back to working on my publishing software‘s cli after spending a while working on the server-side. It‘s amazing how quickly you can get your head back into code you have forgotten about with the help of LLMs. They can see through lines in the code instantly, and can summarise exactly how things work. It‘s really quite incredible. Hopefully will have some interesting progress to share soon regarding how the blog is rendered. #

Since I was previously posting about trillionaires, here's an angle from David Sachs that describes what wealth actually looks like practically speaking because it's not just a big pile of money.

We need better ways to more easily get a feel for what is normal and what is excessive in this realm. #

Yesterday's notes got rendered in to the site without issues :) #

Great new episode from Peter McCormack, talking with Fernando Nikolic about how they've both been building cool stuff with AI.

It's interesting seing how AI tools are empowering people to build their own custom software. People who wouldn't have previously interacted with Github repositories, environment variables or deployed code to hosting providers are starting to become software engineers.

I think content creation using these tools is well aligned with this trend. And you only need to understand a small subset of the commands to go from md file to published. #

Just added a blueprint to the config and a template in the template folder and now let‘s see if this works... #

Appears to have worked, a PR was created, the real proof it‘s operational will be if it gets rendered in tonight‘s build. #