Saturday 2nd July, 2022 - Bad help
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
Before putting this issue together it felt like slim pickings this week, but now that I’ve gathered all the links it’s not that terrible, a bit light on javascript articles though. The feed and time gods are not being very kind or all that generous at the minute. Internet access continues to be terrible.
You have to be really careful when accepting help from people. Both in things digital and physical. Sometimes, whether through malice or incompetence, help can leave you in a worse place than you were before. Don’t delete your backups until you know your new configuration is working and will last. Be open to help but also don’t be afraid to say no thank you. I was reminded of this fact in the last few days, figured I’d share. Luckily in this case I still had my backups.
Also if you are offering help, don’t be offended if a person politely refuses. There is likely some very valid reason that you haven’t considered which means that in that specific case your help, isn’t in fact help. It’s a complicated world, full of contradictions and things that are difficult to communicate. Don’t let that put you off, we need to help each other, but it’s not always very easy. Give people time to evaluate your help.
I made some good progress on my ssg yesterday, moving from having separate repos for each plugin to having all the plugins in the main repo. It was too much of a maintenance headache, especially because they were all currently private repos. Everything seems to work except for some Git / Github weirdness.
Currently a stylesheet is being applied even though it doesn’t exist in the repo. Very strange. Hopefully I’ll figure it out next week.
I’m going to keep t together intro short this week.
Podcasts
American Civil War: The Causes (The Rest is History Podcast) - 3 parter that starts off really great, though I found that I lost interest / concentration somewhat during the other two episodes, but that might be a reflection more of how my week was going rather than the quality of the podcasts https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/200-american-civil-war-the-causes
Avi Loeb + Eric Weinstein: UAPs, Academic Research, & Truth – Part 1 of 2 (Into the Impossible Podcast) - Some really great analysis of the current moment, particularly from Weinstein, yet I feel the discussion could have gone to much more interesting places if they engaged together on the truths more, also regret to say that the 3 jews speaking their secret language making secret jokes while the audience patiently waits is kind of jarring, blind spot much? https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vaW50b3RoZWltcG9zc2libGU/episode/MTA1OGM2NDYtZjAwYi0xMWVjLWFjNDAtNzcxZjk3OGYxNTFl?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwjYoO2Ortn4AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
Nick Hinton (Duncan Trussell Podcast) - Okay this is way way out there, lots of stuff about aliens etc, and the guy is selling books about his adventures, so several pinches of salt necessary, however it’s an entertaining listen, and the world really is a lot weirder than most people make out, he also comes across as really passionate about the historical research he does and that really shines through, even if a lot of it is quite bonkers https://audioboom.com/posts/8109335-nick-hinton
Bitcoin Tech #1: UTXOs with Shenobi - Deep dive into the underlying protocol, really worth listening to, it’s quite approachable, enlightening to discover the shape of the impedance mismatch between the UI and what’s actually going on underneath, bottom line is that privacy is an issue, if you don’t know what you are doing you might be setting yourself up for difficulties later down the line - The tech episode about wallets is also pretty good - The other episodes in the series are very good too https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-tech-1-utxos
Links
When You Should Prefer Map Over Object In JavaScript - Makes a great case for why to use Map over Object in many cases, Object has all sorts of edge cases I hadn’t considered, there’s also a very detailed section on performance testing, which personally I wasn’t really into https://www.zhenghao.io/posts/object-vs-map
Random notes around service workers development and testing https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2022-06-18-service-workers-tips-and-tricks/
Ecma International approves ECMAScript 2022: What’s new? https://2ality.com/2022/06/ecmascript-2022.html
DevOps is a failure https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/06/21/devops-is-a-failure.html
GPT-3 reveals my full name – can I do anything? (Hacker News Thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883373
How I create my JavaScript books and courses - Neat workflow for creating courses using markdown files https://gomakethings.com/how-i-create-my-javascript-books-and-courses
WARC, Web ARChive file format - I’ve been looking for a simple way to backup website pages, I’d love to have an internet archive type feature for my blog and linkblog to backup external links https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000236.shtml
How Websites Die https://notebook.wesleyac.com/how-websites-die/#27RpplDHTK:0:G
Google Public Sector' is a new subsidiary focused on US gov https://9to5google.com/2022/06/28/google-public-sector/
Vercel Edge Middleware: Dynamic at the speed of static - Sounds interesting though I can’t quite figure out where it fits in amongst all the other cloud things, could do with better diagrams https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-edge-middleware-dynamic-at-the-speed-of-static
Thunderbird 102 Released: A Serious Upgrade To Your Communication - Great to see this relatively ancient open source project still going strong, the new Matrix chat support looks pretty cool, I guess that could mean Mastodon right there in your email client https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/thunderbird-102-released-a-serious-upgrade-to-your-communication
The Petty Pleasures of Watching Crypto Profiteers Flounder - Makes quite a lot of high quality heavy hitting observations, though I feel that even though Marc Andreessen got caught short, he was honest about it, held his hands up, he’s also in amongst the hype and madness, but at least he’s trying - I’ve learnt this week just how difficult a task it is because there’s a massive difference between how the protocol works and how the UI abstractions are currently built https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/62ba500cbcbd490021aaef70/web3-crypto-movement-uses-marc-andreessen
How does a public key verify a signature? - I had to remind myself how this works to understand how the Bitcoin network can verify a UTXO using only the public key https://stackoverflow.com/a/18259395
Russia in historic foreign debt default, reports suggest - Strange coverage, looks like they had paid but the EU wasn’t accepting the payment because of sanctions related to the war in Ukraine https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61929926
Tesla virtual power plant pays Powerwall owners to help end brownouts https://electrek.co/2022/06/23/tesla-virtual-power-plant-pays-powerwall-owners-help-end-brownouts
Vim 9.0 released - It’s quite a big release, with a new programming language to customise things, imaginatively called Vim9, that is way faster, and has a syntax that is meant to be similar to languages such as Javascript/TypeScript/Java https://www.vim.org/vim90.php
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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