Saturday 1st July, 2023 - Offline in a Digital Asset Economy (Issue #121)
It’s full steam ahead with digital asset economies, crypto communities, the future of re-staking and society. It’s wonderful. But also if you are a web developer, good luck when you are offline dude.
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
Oh heck, this week has been a week of struggles for me.
The world is on a blocking frenzy. Literally everything I’ve started has ended up being blocked in one way or another. But I did manage to write several blog posts, some of which were about getting blocked, which I guess might have made the world block even more, but that was literally the only thing that didn’t get blocked. C’est la vie.
As for the tech sphere, I feel like it’s mostly been about AI and crypto this past week. Lots and lots of mentions of “amplification”, that appears to be the new framing permeating. Don’t be scared of AI, on the contrary AI will amplify your creativity! Okay, I’m on board, but why are you blocking practically everything? Perhaps it’s just me.
The two stand out podcast interviews I listened to were with Michael Saylor and Vitalik Buterin. They are both well into the wider realms of crypto now, Saylor is building narratives around digital asset economies and Vitalik has been exploring what the future of distributed communities, network states and collaboration could look like. It’s refreshing to hear these two talk about things they feel passionately about. I like their visions.
There’s a very technical discussion around re-staking on Etherium. I was surprised at how much I was able to grok given that I’m not that familiar with Etherium core. It reminds me somewhat of what Bluesky is trying to do with it’s AT protocol. I previously blogged that the system outlined in the spec had a sort of very professional well thought out Cisco system kind of vibe to it, but it’s scoped to social media. Etherium and re-staking is similar but it’s on an even grander, maybe even unbounded, scale. It’s impressive but I sense dangers, and they do too. They say it’s all about finance and money, but the implications could have big impacts throughout societies. They appear to be treading carefully, which I think is wise.
Reading through the Bluesky protocols https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/05/06/reading-through-the-bluesky-protocols
Vitalik: “This is the west, this is the frontier, this is the absolute unknown, and you could lose all of your assets and your sanity. But for those of us who have been here, it is and I expect will continue to be a wonderful journey”.
I worry that these technologies could be repurposed for something nefarious. With the current moment’s rise of AI, and based on the language they use, the most obvious is some sort of dystopian training network. And guess what, we’re not that different from AIs, at least that’s the conclusions many of the prominent AI experts I have been listening to seem to be realising.
Can we get to a place with cool communities, network states, loosely coupled parts, freedom of people and expression while avoiding locking ourselves into a dystopia?
Maybe we can, I don’t know, I hope so. I too have been nomading for 10 years, so Vitalik’s Suzulu project sounds cool. I liked hearing about his experiences, both good and bad, and the various paths he sees stretching into the future. Meet, hang out and collaborate with people that have similar interests. That sounds awesome.
A quick list of the avenues I’m currently getting blocked on, sorry if it’s boring.
Trying to get iSh setup and working to build the site, various segmentation faults on npm installs
Discovered some linkblog links to old blog posts have been corrupted, must have happened during my escape from Heroku, I guess I’ll have to find and fix, searching in my editor currently takes ridiculous amounts of time, eg 10-15 mins for a single search
Battling huge slowdowns doing git push/pull operations, switching branches, can take up to 5-10 mins at times, which causes enormous confusion, leading to things accidentally getting deleted etc, and is making something like posting to the blog, which should take minutes, take hours, and remember I currently only have internet access while physically standing, this issue is literally breaking my back
Harmonising deploy workflows by reusing workflows - I got a minimal workflow that triggers another workflow working but I really need a way to share API keys across repos, and that’s only possible with org accounts, so I would have to migrate all code to an org account, and realistically that’s not something I can take on with my current situation
Auto-build on content merge, I have all the individual pieces working, so will hopefully be able to get this working over the next few days, this was blocked while I was trying to harmonise workflows
Reading web development content offline is basically impossible, as outlined in this week’s blog posts
Like I said, I wrote 4 blog posts this week, 3 about the difficulty reading web development content offline, and 1 about digital economies of the future. I was quite happy with these, maybe some of you will like them too:
The state of offline reading for web development content - Reading web content offline is very convenient, and occasionally essential. I have found however that it’s a terrible experience for reading web development content. I describe what I have observed in the hope that others will notice the importance of this topic. It’s one of those things you don’t realise that you need until you do, and if it does’t work, well then it’s too late and you are now stuck. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/06/26/the-state-of-offline-reading-for-web-development-content
Revisiting Instapaper for offline reading - A continuation of the exploration of Read Later apps that I did earlier in the week. This time I decided to try Instapaper again. The aim here is to have a way to read web development content offline. So far the results from using Safari Reading Lists and Pocket have been very variable. How about Instapaper, is it as bad as I remember? https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/06/29/revisiting-instapaper-for-offline-reading
Ideal offline reading app for web development content - Reading web development content offline has some specific requirements over and above what is generally needed to read other types of content. I detail the ideal required basic and advanced feature set. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/06/29/ideal-offline-reading-app-for-web-development-content
Building digital asset economies - Distinguishing between the different digital asset classes that DeFi is making available, and looking at some specific examples that demonstrate the new reality that is fast approaching. We are entering a world where new digital asset economies are being forged. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/06/30/building-digital-asset-economies
If you liked and/or thought these were insightful in some way then please share them with others.
Podcasts
The M&A Deluge in AI Begins 06/26 (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast) - Cluster of Amazon stories covering themes such as hyperlocal, dark patterns, deceptive practices, and regulation themes. Amazon does great things but also not so great things too. https://www.ridehome.info/show/techmeme-ride-home/mon-0626-the-ma-deluge-in-ai-begins
The Reddit Meltdown Ep#355 (Techdirt Podcast) - I like Mike’s point of view on this story, though I feel he’s somewhat extreme in his support for the people over the platform, perhaps he’s been burned by the people at some stage? Surely he sees Reddit needs to be able to make money, and that Reddit users are a little on the fanatical side? If Mike was running Reddit, he’d be eating pot noodles for the rest of his life, living in a cardboard box, while everyone else is having the time of their lives. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/22/techdirt-podcast-episode-355-the-reddit-meltdown
Ronnie O’Sullivan, snooker player (Desert Island Disks) - Quite the story. He’s an unbelievable player, the closest thing snooker has to someone like Michael Jordan. His upbringing is fascinating, he didn’t have it easy, basically lived in a London “mafia” environment, both his parents ended up in jail, he nearly went off the rails, moved away from some of the bad influences, found a better group of friends up north. It’s amazing what he’s accomplished, and to hear him speak of his wish to just be consistently very good rather than the epic 147s. People’s lives can be so different from person to person. I felt proud to be British listening to this, even if he does have somewhat questionable music tastes ;-) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001mc30
The digital transformation of property (Flying Frisby Podcast) - This was a pleasant surprise because it doesn’t mention it in the episode title, it’s an interview with Michael Saylor, they speak about the new narratives in Bitcoin, namely from Bitcoin as energy to corporate purchasing of Bitcoin, and the lofty goal of creating digital asset economies.
The FED pause and Q2 Current Events w/ Luke Growmen #Ep136 (We Study Billionaires Podcast - Bitcoin) - The US debt crisis is so big that even the repayments are causing inflation. They need someone to hold $30 trillion at negative 10-15% interest rates for 3 years, that’s the only way the math works. The bond market is going into crisis. It’s affecting all G7 countries. Will folks move to bitcoin and gold? Also covers oil, ETFs, government collusion, regulation and the difficulties in decoupling from China. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RoZS1pbnZlc3RvcnMtcG9kY2FzdA/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL0VIVG05SkFYR3VVVEJPeFhVOXJRWDRyak9rU2wtYndqbW1KMExOUUhWOGc?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwiY7sbnp-z_AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQNg
Reid Hoffman on the Possibilities of AI (Conversations with Tyler Podcast) - This interview was both frustrating and enlightening in equal measures. It’s all over the place jumping around from topic to topic like everything is going out of fashion. But the questions are very specific and do highlight a lot about how big the sea change from AI is going to be. I appreciated Reid’s optimistic outlook. It’s a mess but things might get a lot better, let’s remember to allow ourselves to help ourselves. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/reid-hoffman-2
Vitalik Butterin Discusses the 2-Month Zuzalu Experiment (Bankless Podcast) - His description of the time he spent in this extended co-working / co-living experiment reminded me of glastonbury festival or burning man, different goals of course, but the thing we ultimately are all trying to do is find places to live where we are happy, where we fit in and can work and live together. https://www.bankless.com/zuzalu-vitalik
Restaking Alignment with Vitalik, Sreeram, Tim Beiko, Justin Drake, Dankrad & Jessy (Bankless Podcast) - Very technical but even if you don’t fully understand the tech, you can get a good sense for their approach. There are dangers for sure, but they are treading carefully. It’s very ambitious. One thing I noted is how Vitalik appears to be a bit disengaged, he seems much happier talking about network states and community than being in the tech minutia. https://www.bankless.com/restaking-alignment-with-vitalik-sreeram-tim-beiko-justin-drake-dankrad-jessy
Links
More on Preemptively Blocking Facebook’s Imminent ActivityPub Entry - More relatively wise words from John Gruber, along with some very worthy and relevant quotes from around the web concerning Meta being blocked before they have even started on ActivityPub. https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_blocking
Arctic Monkeys at Glastonbury review – breaking rock’s rules at their own strange pace - I love reading about Glasto every year, I have such fond memories from the 3 or 4 times I attended around the turn of the millenium. It's a long time ago now. Back then my music tastes were squarely in alternative rock but they were starting to broaden into breakbeat, drum 'n bass and electronic. These days Glasto is almost unrecognizable based just on the lineups. There are some really main stream acts that play, but my sensibilities have relaxed as I get older. It would be awesome to see Elton for instance. Sometimes the juxtaposition of old and new and main stream and alternative is what makes the magic of Glasto. I think I might have seen the Artic Monkeys at a festival when they were a small indie band. My favorite festival sets off the top of my head would have to be Bjork, David Bowie and the unforgetable sunny Sunday afternoon Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. Anyway all this to say, I miss music festivals and especially Glastonbury. It really is the closest experience I have had to being in a magical city. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jun/24/arctic-monkeys-at-glastonbury-review-pyramid-headline
The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook - I started out reading this article thinking I wasn't that interested in the topic, but as I read, memories of jobs past, and various digital collaboration environment infras I helped setup, flooded my thoughts. Turns out I actually have quite a lot to say about high end mac hardware. Most of the VFX shops I worked for used Windows and Linux, because of upgradeability/modularity but also because it was easier to integrate them into the workflows. The folks running macs tended to be one offs, on their own island so to speak, with their own custom setup. From a sysadmin perspective, those systems were harder to maintain. At one place all the engineers actually got Mac Pros because then we could have any OS we wanted by running Parallels, which made sense given we were supporting artists running all 3 OSs. I loved my silver tower, it was freaking awesome! But probably way more power than I actually needed at the time. Oh how things change. Dear lord how I wish I had enough power to not have to wait 5 minutes switching feature branches or pushing to remote. Life is waiting for progress bar atm. https://www.theverge.com/23770770/apple-mac-pro-m2-ultra-2023-review
Let's welcome Meta, not block them - The author Manton Reece, founder of micro.blog, writes about the movement to pre-emptively block Meta before it has even released it's product, mentioning Open APIs, data privacy, getting your own house in order, and monocultures. Micro.blog by the way supports posting to ActivityPub, Nostr and Bluesky. Pretty cool. https://www.manton.org/2023/06/27/lets-welcome-meta.html
Moving on - Doc Searls' blog is being unnexpectedly shut down. Doc was one of the first people I started reading and listening to online back in the early 2000s. He wrote much about Linux and open source, and was on quite a lot of the early tech podcasts. Looks like he'll be able to move his stuff over to his old domain. I’m glad he has some friends that can help him. It's not much fun being booted out. Best of luck with the move. https://web.archive.org/web/20230630233237/https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2023/06/27/moving-on
There are lots more great links on the daily linkblog, with light commentary by yours truly, please check them out:
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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