Saturday 6th August, 2022 - Free Speech in Crypto
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
The slightly later than usual weekend edition.
I haven’t had much time to do any analysis. It feels like most of the interesting stuff has been in the crypto space, but perhaps that’s just the last few days. Looking back through the links and podcasts there was some cool discussions ressurecting RSS/web2.0, and some really out there predictions on how we might start to use AIs in our everyday lives.
The one crypto related thought that’s on my mind, mostly because I listened to the podcast earlier, is how crypto and digital coins affect free speech. Cobbie and Ledger talk about it on the Uponly Podcast. I mention it because it seems to me that blockchain tech has the potential to be used in many places aside from money, and if the people running crypto podcasts are highlighting it as an issue talking about crypto on their crypto podcasts, then what might that mean further down the line in other places? Is crypto good for free speech?
I’ll keep the intro short this week. My over active audio matcher brain continues to match podcasters, and I continue to mention it. I like them all by the way, it’s all good. I suppose I should be worried about this sort of thing, but I’m more worried about meeting an AI version of myself that’s 1/2 me and 1/2 John Wayne. The future is going to be so crazy, no sense in avoiding that side of things.
The big development for me in the static site generator that I’m building is that I’ve finally gotten around to setting up unit and integration testsuites. So far it’s just really basic tests, making sure all the files that should have gotten rendered, actually got rendered. It’s working splendidly.
The code base was in quite a bit of flux until recently, and since I haven’t written an ssg before, it didn’t really make sense to have tests. It would have just added extra self inflicted jungle to hack through.
Having said that, I’m glad it’s setup now, the tests run on each build in the CI and the build doesn’t get deployed if any tests fail. It’s re-assuring and is way better than manually verifying, which is what I was doing previously.
It’s also resulted in changing how the repos are setup. Previously I had the ssg, various plugins and a test website. All separate projects in separate repos. I tested everything manually in the test site, which was fine but it was getting tedious and error prone jumping between the repos.
Now each plugin runs automated tests, building a small test site that tests just the relevant features. It felt a bit odd to me that each plugin would install the ssg. I was worried about circular dependencies. But it’s only needed for the tests, and so it’s only a dev dependency. In a real deployment the plugins don’t install the ssg, instead the website that’s being built installs the ssg and the plugins, and builds the website.
It’s nearly working, though I have quite a few feature branches running in parallel at the minute. It’s well organised though. Hopefully by next week I’ll be building websites with blogs, linkblogs and archives, and confident they got built correctly because the tests all pass.
Update: I was literally just about to click the send button on this issue and a stranger walked up to me and touched my knee, placing his entire palm over it, the one without infected mutilations, just wanted to mention that, last time something similar happened, the next day all the knee infections started
Podcasts
Long Live RSS! (Changelog Podcast) - Loved this discussion around RSS, good memories of web2.0, some interesting developments happening in podcasting2.0 with extension to the namespace that would enable new feature; I listen to nearly all the Changelog episodes, they are all so well produced, but I honestly still can’t tell the difference between Adam and Jarrod, they just sound like the same person to me (Jarram?), seriously good editing and audio stop motion going on if that is infact the case https://changelog.com/podcast/499
Work from anywhere: sailboats solar generators and Starlink (Vergecast Podcast) - I like that David’s ‘out and about’ in this episode, makes for a fun audio tour sort of vibe, the guy he talked to about the sail boat sounds like someone I’ve heard on a crypto podcast, but at this stage everything is blurring into everything else for me, I sure would like to be on a sailboat though https://www.theverge.com/23290304/work-from-home-gadgets-starlink-power-jackery-battery-connectivity-vergecast-podcast
The role of Bitcoin maximalism part 2 with Pete Rizzo (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - This is a very interesting listen, they get really in the weeds at one point, I found Rizzo’s approach somewhat belittling, laughing snidely at the questions and positions, but I think perhaps that’s just how he reacts when he feels uncomfortable or cornered, for whatever reason admitting ‘not knowing’ appears to be an issue for him, and he might have good reason for that, anyhow all things considered it’s not much worse than someone being sarcastic, I’m glad they kept at it because I feel like they made some sort of progress, highlighting areas that need exploring; he’s so very clearly a voice twin with Brian Keating from the Into the Impossible Podcast https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-role-of-bitcoin-maximalism-part-2
Crypto narratives with Cobbie and Ledger (Uponly Podcast) - Includes one of the best money system minimal examples I’ve heard, which cuts straight to the core of why the money system seems so insane, convincingly answering that question should be a priority imo https://uponly.tv/crypto-narratives-with-cobie-ledger
Shane Moss (Duncan Trussell Podcast) - I love how these two always have hilariously fun and wild conversations about the future, including hanging out with AI versions of your dead relatives, exploring aspects of your personality with AI GPT generated versions of yourself, and even hanging out with Jurassic park style aliens via the James Webb telescope https://audioboom.com/posts/8129847
Links
The Node ecosystem (still) has tooling problems https://maxleiter.com/blog/node-has-tooling-problems
SpaceX Starlink service could come to iPhone and Android through satellite hotspot https://spaceexplored.com/2022/07/27/starlink-mobile-users
Apple Completes $445 Million Acquisition of a New Campus in San Diego https://www.techtimes.com/articles/278511/20220727/apple-acquires-67-acre-campus-san-diego-part-technological-expansion.htm
I Looked Into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To https://weh.wtf/34-blockchain-projects.html
Use One Big Server https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server
Simplicity of IRC https://susam.net/maze/wall/simplicity-of-irc.html
Why I Love Still PHP and Javascript After 20+ years https://the.scapegoat.dev/why-i-love-php-and-javascript
The Illustrated QUIC Connection: Every Byte Explained https://quic.xargs.org
China-Taiwan: Beijing begins biggest military drills around island https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62416363
Zenbook 17 Fold OLED UX9702 - Could be pretty cool for a mobile second screen since it folds in half https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Zenbook/Zenbook-17-Fold-OLED-UX9702
The Nightmare of Targeted Individuals in the Age of Paranoia - Interesting article, probably something we’ll hear more about given how pervasive consumer surveillance tech is becoming; also article mentions that there is a “TI community” which seems to me would be at best most pointless community ever https://roundtable.io/failed-state-update/features/the-nightmare-of-targeted-individuals-in-the-age-of-paranoia
Parsing command line arguments with util.parseArgs() in Node.js - Axel Rauschmayer has been publishing lots of high quality articles recently, this one is another very practical one with just the right amount of detail and examples https://2ality.com/2022/08/node-util-parseargs.html
ehmicky/safe-json-value - ⛑️ JSON serialization should never fail https://github.com/ehmicky/safe-json-value
Hello: Search Engine for Developers
https://beta.sayhello.so
Announcing Docusaurus 2.0 https://docusaurus.io/blog/2022/08/01/announcing-docusaurus-2.0
Alex Jones must pay $49.3m for Sandy Hook hoax claim https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62444302
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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