Saturday 5th August, 2023 - Our Fake Everything Future: Economies, Internets and Families (Issue #126)
Everything is fake these days. How bad could it get? In the future even cake will be fake. How will you prepare for our fake cake future?
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
I’ve spent most of the week merging a backlog of feature branches on my static site generator repos. They are all from last week where I’d run out of Github build minutes. There are still quite a few to complete, and bugs to troubleshoot and squash, but it’s looking pretty good. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll have all my RSS generation code fully re-written, built in sitemaps support, and an everything feed.
The cool thing this week is that I got my linkblog auto merge workflow working. I post links during the day to a feature branch, and at midnight these automatically get added to PR and then merged, that then triggers a rebuild of the website. Once that completes, the updated RSS feeds trigger a posts of the latest links to Twitter. There are a few small details to tweak, but it’s essentially working. This is what’s great about Jamstack websites and writing content in markdown files. Lots of possibilities for automation.
I got myself a Mastodon account. Follow me! :)
https://mastodon.social/@markjgsmith
I started wondering if it might be a good idea to have an entire dev stack running directly in the browser. Might sound a little crazy, but on the other hand, why not?
“One of the long term goals of my static site generator, which I haven't made much progress on so far, was to be able to run it entirely in the browser. To me THAT makes a lot of sense. And I suppose that if that ever does happen, having Wordpress also be runnable in that environment might be useful, because you could theoretically integrate it into the build process. How about some other serverside programs, like a queue, scheduler, s3 storage, and to go full on kitchen sink, how about a github actions ci/cd in the browser? Why not have an entire cloud dev stack running in the browser?” https://markjgsmith.com/links/2023/08/02/060100-techcrunch.com
In this week’s edition some great podcasts in epic history, the changing landscape of ownership, mad ride crypto, and an interview with Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker.
So what’s up with this week’s title? I’m not sure, I wrote it at the beginning of the week, things were a bit weird. It’s not so crazy the past two days but I haven’t gotten anything else. So I’m just going to go with that unless something better materialises.
The fact is that fake is the new black. And we are going to be at a stage soon where we won’t be able to tell fakes from real, and that can and could include things big and small, things we have always taken for granted. I don’t have any solutions, but it’s worth considering that is going to be part of the future.
As they say no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Whatever that means.
Podcasts
Roman Apocalypse: Pompeii 79AD (The Rest is History Podcast) - The start of the week was another super cycle of “synchronicities” for me, a mega crescendo if you will, and in that context this podcast fitted in pretty well. It’s epic. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYWNhc3QuY29tL3RoZS1yZXN0LWlzLWhpc3RvcnktcG9kY2FzdA/episode/ZjI0ZjdjYTgtMmVkNC0xMWVlLWE0MjYtOTM2ZmVmN2NmNTkx?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwiooozQ78KAAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQNg
Nothing You Own is Really Yours (Have a Nice Future Podcast) - A look at the changing notion of ownership. You might think that isn’t something that changes, but it’s a made up concept just like money, and with the digital age well on it’s way, it’s changing. Does owning things still make sense? How is autonomy, self sufficiency and access control being affected? And what about those power hungry mega corps? How are they positioning themselves vis-à-vis ownership? https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vZ2V0LXdpcmVk/episode/ZWIxMWZiZTAtMzBkZC0xMWVlLWIwMTYtY2JlNmYwZWRlNzVi?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiY5dXt78KAAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
Will DeFi Survive This? (Bankless Podcast) - This is a pretty wild ride of an episode. Though it gets quite technical in places, I found that if I just relaxed and stopped taking notes, I mostly was able to follow the flow of things. It’s quite something that someone known only by their first name can trade publically in such a way that they risk the entire sector. You can get a real sense for the grasp of the concepts you need in order to be successful trading in these markets. Seems like my nostrodamus-ey prediction that crypto will lead to a massively distributed consciousness race condition apocalypse might not be so far fetched after all. Sometimes the whole crypto space seems a little unreal, don’t you think? http://podcast.banklesshq.com/will-defi-survive-this
Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker says tech isn’t our problem - it’s us (Recode Media Podcast) - I’ve only ever watched a few Black Mirror episodes, some of the really early ones. Over the years I’ve watched several Charlie interviews and find he’s abundant with common sense. I generally like what he has to say, and this is another one of those. Good interview and discussion, some interesting tech topics. Also an interesting contrast between UK and US media and politics environment, which are very different. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vcmVjb2RlbWVkaWE/episode/YTA5Y2M5MTYtMzUwNS0xMWVkLTgzZTgtYjM0NDIyYTEyMjc1?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjDt7b08MKAAxX00bsIHat_DP8QkfYCegQIARAG
Links
Lots and lots of great links this week, I haven’t had time to make a selection yet, so please checkout the linkblog:
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!