Saturday 4th March, 2023 - Murderers
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
Slavery is murder. It’s the theft of someone’s life, and that’s murder. You can argue about the details, but at a high level it’s plain and simple. Slavery is murder.
I’m very constrained this week, I hardly have any power left, a power cable that keeps not working sporadically and charging is extremely difficult, so this is going to be short. I’m just going to bung in what I’ve gathered this week with all the commentary I already wrote and that will have to be this week’s issue.
The new rendering core in my ssg that I was working on is nearing completion. There was quite a big blocker that I hadn’t foreseen, but I think I’ve managed to find a solution, but it involved moving a large chunk of code so there is likely going to be some bugs. This morning Github actions is jammed, the moment I checked in the code subsequent builds all started being completely blocked. Nothing even runs.
Here’s the list of titles that didn’t make it. If you are wondering what that is, here’s a blog post about that:
The list of titles that didn't make it https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/01/07/the-list-of-titles-that-didnt-make-it
Here’s the list:
Dying is His Favourite Thing
People that walk in front of you clearly on purpose then blame you should check themselves
SnowdenishGPT
Lunatic Old Men In Wheelchairs That Drive Over Your Bare Feet Clearly On Purpose Even Though They Had Plenty of Room Are A Sign Society Is Doing A Very Poor Job
I wish you the best of luck
Remembering Your Seed Phrase When You No Longer Control Your Brain 100% of the Time, And Not Age Related
The Dreamlike Quality of a Hey That Passes By At The Exact Moment You Are Fixing An infinite Loop
Daring is Trending
Your Life is Your Passcode
People That Spy Your Life Can Steal Your Entire Life, Not Just Digital
Sim Overrun Error: You Are Now Owned Free
Tomato Funeral
The Infiniti Trillion Murderers
That’s all for this week.
Podcasts
Why is no one paying attention to this collapse? (Eurodollar University) - A look at what’s going on with crude oil, and then a look at entire countries that are going bankrupt, namely Sri Lanka, and the moves by China to step in with loans, which has caused huge problems just to keep up basic life necessities; also big problems in Pakistan, once again loans from China, once again causing money problems because growth didn’t happen, they announced bankruptcy last weekend, no one is stepping in to help; might be a reason everyone is currently maximumly hedged against apocalypse scenarios https://share.transistor.fm/s/0d08c12b
Why Net Zero Will Fail (Flying Frisby Podcast) - Going green is going to be a lot more difficult than people are anticipating, specifically it’s going to require huge investment in metal mines and will take many years
What’s the Matter of Everything with Particle Physicist Suzzie Sheehy (Into the Impossible Podcast) - Very much enjoyed this conversation, lots of interesting things discussed around why science and specifically the experimental side of things is so important, lots of really great real world examples so you can get a good feel for what incredible real world things are made possible by studying the world at elementary particle scales, reminded me the years I spent doing lab experiments using electron microscopes and other large precision instruments, such a long time ago now, really wish something like this podcast would have been available back then, it’s almost impossible to see clearly how all the things you are learning relate to the real world with only dusty corridors in old university labs and library books, I enjoyed it a lot but it could have been so much better, at one point I was considering going into science communication, but ended up going the computer science route, anyway this episode made me wonder how much work must go into building one of these precession instruments, personally I’d like to build something much less ambitious: a podcast player https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vaW50b3RoZWltcG9zc2libGU/episode/MDQ1NzNhODAtYjIzNC0xMWVkLTg0NTMtZGJmNDQ4MjA1OTE5?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwjI_p6w_L79AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
Greyscale, the SEC & Genesis with Michael Sonnenshein (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - This dropped at the start of the week, right in the middle of a fight frenzy that I was experiencing from all sides, certainly weird synchronicity for me, anyway discussion gets rather firey between these two, Peter asks some hard hitting questions, it’s good to see he’s got the WBD listeners interests in mind https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/grayscale-the-sec-genesis
Aaron Smith-Levin: Scientology #Ep361 (Lex Fridman Podcast) - Interesting episode, even hearing some of the oddball theories, like body theytons, mad hat stuff, but perhaps they are a way to describe something / some dynamic in the world that isn’t easy to impart to people; there were many times I was surprised by how eerily similar some of the descriptions are to the gang stalking incidents I have been experiencing the past few years, and I constantly feel like I have entities ‘hanging on to me’, which I know sounds odd but it’s honestly not such a terrible way of describing the feeling of reality sometimes, and reality is only going to get much weirder with AI tools merging into our lives; there were parts that didn’t add up though, I find it hard to believe an organisation so meticulous in architecting their setup would be so clueless when it comes to building revenge websites; the other perhaps out there thing that occurred to me was that having a cult centred around science could potentially be a very good way to defend actual science from people trying to convince you that science is a cult, or if science actually turns out to be a cult, something I hadn’t considered before, a way to get you to at least consider that that could be a possibility; would it make a difference if it was literally all made up? Hopefully the scientific method would shine through here, but it’s very imperfect in many ways, anyway I think it’s worth a listen and having an open mind https://lexfridman.com/aaron-smith-levin
Twiddler (Cory Doctorow Podcast) - The folks that run the present day platform have so much power to mediate so many people, and they twiddle knobs without putting much thought into how it can affect the lives of millions of people, and there’s a drive to make things shitter but not so shit people leave, anytime individuals find a way to profit, those ways are ultimately removed, and it generally has a bad overall effect for everyone https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/
Mandibles with Lionel Striver Ep#92 (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - Interesting conversation, quite a lot of darkness but ironically kind of enlightening, topics discussed include, people not learning from 2008 crisis, stress as comparison: living with assets vs living hand to mouth, the 117 trillion USD estimated (by 2050) US sovereign debt, welfare state vs utopia / libertarian / take care of yourself, local governance vs big governance, issues american expats have with banking abroad, exit taxes when leaving the US, how Bitcoin addresses some of these issues https://anchor.fm/citadeldispatch/episodes/CD92-Mandibles-with-Lionel-Shriver-e1vfvbr
Stupid Slow (Eurodollar University Podcast) - This was kinda fun, macro and global trade, it’s a great combo, and some fantastic data sets that enable you to see the big picture, how all the tides are causing things to fill up in some places and get depleated others, looks like big drops in demand from western nations causing companies to slow down and even reverse their inventory build up, and a corresponding drop off in China’s imports of raw materials as they recalibrate their productions to the new reality of a slow economy; also japanese ultra long term bonds are inverting which is perhaps a sign of people hedging against a big slow down https://share.transistor.fm/s/ab2db126
Links
Building a simple CLI tool with modern Node.js - Great short and to the point tutorial, I read it because I suspected it might be using node’s new argument parsing, and it was, but also as a bonus it was using node’s new built in testing tools; also uses es6 modules which I guess is nice to see, though my experiences using import has been rather terrible, so personally I’m staying away from es6 modules for the moment because when it goes wrong, it goes wrong badly, i.e. your code won’t even get past line 1, that’s also the case for typescript, so be sure you understand these things through and through before becoming reliant on them https://evertpot.com/node-changelog-cli-tool
Pluralistic: Fighting the privacy wars, state by state - The privacy conundrum is going to get more relevant going forward especially with AI tools, and it’s really tricky, the issues have a lot of nuance and basically it’s complicated, in any case Cory Doctorow covers it well, even if at times he turns into a bit of a righteous-principled-so-and-so, sorry it’s not the best description of his writings, I very broadly see him as a sort of modern day green peace warrior, though again that isn’t a very good description either, he’s managed to carve out a very unique spot that is a combination of many things but also with new angles that didn’t previously exist, like cyberpunk, internet and copyright law, anyway his knowledge of the space and history is second to none, at least he’s fairly open about his politics, so you can usually quite easily see the difference between facts and hyperbole, his writing is very readable, and even if I don’t agree with all of his opinions and framing, I do like reading them, he often identifies trends and things to watch out for well ahead of others https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/23/state-of-play/#patchwork
Intro to HTML-first Frontend Frameworks - Nothing Earth shattering, kind of run of the mill article but it’s good for industry context https://www.sitepen.com/blog/intro-to-html-first-frontend-frameworks
Sandboxing JavaScript Code - Interesting for background knowledge but a bit too technical and low level for me https://healeycodes.com/sandboxing-javascript-code
Strudel - Free and open-source live coding platform to write dynamic music pieces in the browser - I hope I get some time with a good internet connection to play around with this, looks cool
https://strudel.tidalcycles.org
The Hollywood sign debuted 100 years ago in 1923, the year of L.A.’s ‘Big Bang’ - It’s a real shame when people wait till you finish reading an article and purposely ruin the effort you’ve spent reading it, an enjoyable read, not so sure about the ending, because some folks decided to poop on me https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-16/hollywood-sign-centennial-los-angeles
UK Proposes Even More Stupid Ideas For Directly Regulating The Internet, Service Providers- It’s an important topic to keep peripherally aware of, but to be honest I drifted off while reading about this, I so want to be better at all the things going on at this level, but it’s just so snoozy, maybe it would be different if the world would allow me to get some quality sleep https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/23/uk-proposes-even-more-stupid-ideas-for-directly-regulating-the-internet-service-providers
Elon Musk says Twitter employees will receive ‘very significant’ stock awards on March 24th https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/27/23616933/elon-musk-twitter-employees-stock-awards-march-after-more-layoffs
Elon Musk plans to grow Tesla to ‘extreme size’ - That’s interesting because I’ve been hearing that the electric cars industry will be limited by the availability of raw materials, specifically metals, and that’s because they use much much more metals (400%) than regular cars, and there hasn’t been much investment in those sectors for years, and they have huge lead times (decades!) because it takes so long to setup new mines; what increases in metals they do use will directly impact the move to Net Zero, because replacing gas turbines requires 4000% more metals, does Elon plan to move that mountain too? What’s the point in green cars if making them ends up holding back our move to green energy? Seems like there could be some better coordination, surely you have to make green energy before you can make green cars? See this week’s podcast section episode ‘Why Net Zero Will Fail (Flying Frisby Podcast)’ for more details https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/1/23620733/tesla-investor-day-elon-musk-event-live-blog-news-announcement-master-plan
Ukraine war: Viral conspiracy theories falsely claim the war is fake https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64789737
The history of writing tech! https://blog.benwinding.com/the-history-of-writing-tech
China aims to launch nearly 13,000 satellites to ‘suppress’ Elon Musk’s Starlink, researchers say https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3211438/china-aims-launch-nearly-13000-satellites-suppress-elon-musks-starlink-researchers-say
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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