Saturday 8th July, 2023 - Pandemonium in cyberspace (Issue #122)
A lot of bigger picture stuff swirling around this week, the group vs the individual, access and permission, new tech launches and old tech revivals.
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
It’s been another difficult week for me. People have been following me around making barfing noises everywhere I go. Mostly kids. That was followed by food that tasted weird but was ok. But it continued through the week and yesterday I ended up with pretty severe stomach cramps. Eventually, once total destruction of the multi-verse has been initiated, one way or another, I end up getting mutilated. That’s how it always unfolds. Time after time after time. So I’m feeling under the weather, tired and hungry. That’s life sometimes as a foreigner in Vietnam, but also Asia. That’s been my experience, at least recently. Usually you can walk away from bad situations, but recently I’ve been feeling like that’s becoming less and less possible, like walking away sets off even more mutilation campaigns. Sorry if it sounds bleak, I don’t know how else to describe it.
It’s been quite a hectic week in technology land. I’ve gathered together my notes and these are loosely the themes that cropped up:
Fish in water
Unions, mafias, individuals
Lawyers for programmers
Chaos and impossible everything for everybody
Invites and permission
Let’s get into it.
Not sure exactly where this thought came from, bubbled up from the last several weeks of activities. I noted it down early in the week. It occurred to me that we (the west) believe we see how Russia / China behaves badly towards it’s people, free speech, totalitarianism etc, and we try to let the people of these countries know using soft power, which ultimately is some form of media.
How about for a second we assume that we too are a fish swimming in water we can’t see because we’ve grown up in it. What is the water that Russia / China can see that we can’t? Which aspects of our system are we blind to that others might be able to see?
The thing about things you can’t see, is that you literally can’t see them, so of course it’s going to seem like the other side is doing it wrong. I reckon there are a lot more similarities than we realise and also it might be surprisingly difficult to communicate information about each other’s water. Attempts to communicate would likely seem like attacks. Of course sometimes they might be, but not always. Doesn’t that seem likely?
Well funnily enough this idea came up later in the week in the Balaji interview podcast. Writing it up here because perhaps it’s an emerging theme. Lots of other interesting topics in their conversation. One thing I keep wondering is how we avoid things degrading to the point where everything is a war of attrition. We defo don’t want that to become the norm, but it could. Must find more ways to be together.
Last week’s All-in Podcast has a great bit about the Ukraine war. They are currently one of my favourite sources of information on the topic, lots of detail and insightful analysis linked back to the tech sector, general macro and global politics. There’s also an interesting bit about education and how laws in the US are changing the landscape. There is a shift around equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome.
The guys relay their personal experiences growing up, including about the importance of unions. I never really considered that before. It got me wondering about what makes a Union, what makes it different to a mafia, and somewhat relatedly, social media company silos vs the open web. Education is so nuanced, we are all learning but people are in different life situations, it’s an incredibly complicated optimisation problem. How do we help people get up to speed in areas they are passionate about, while avoiding zero sum games, politics, backstabbing. We’ve got all these powerful AIs that could really help here, but we need to avoid people weaponising things. We need the right environment, the right culture. I hadn’t appreciated the finer details of this until listening to their episode.
Peter MacCormac has another great episode about bitcoin and the legal system. It’s very eye opening. These systems in our society that have played central roles for a long time are being re-written by the technology we are building. As per usual, there are some incredible things that could happen, but there’s also the possibility of bad things happening. Understanding the vision that legal professionals have of the current system and how it could be in the future is important, even if it’s tangential to tech. It will be important to anyone wanting to start and grow businesses. How far will it go? Will programmers need lawyers to review their booleans? Will the legal system be integrated directly into VSCode? The idea of a modular legal stack kind of blew my mind.
There’s also been a lot of chaos this week. Everyone seems to be getting blocked everywhere.
Twitter blocking - no more tweets
HN RSS feeds opml - no more social media
French Riots - no more nothings
Meta threads - no more Twitter
Reddit apocalypse, no more AMAs
But on the plus side, Meta released their Threads social media app. I installed it, it’s quite minimal, I think it looks nice. I made a few posts. I’m @markjgsmith there, add me! :-)
I’m still lamenting still not being invited onto Bluesky even though they have had so many new users from Twitter they had to shutdown signups. Perhaps one one day someone will notice me [crying emoji]. Feel free to send me invites or re-post the newsletter. Every little helps. So it was cool that some folks on Hacker News decided to put together a list of blogs from users. I’ve imported the list into my RSS reader. No need for invites or permission. RSS still rules, even if the social medias are a lot of fun. It’s just a shame it’s such a horrible user experience.
Development on my static generator continues. I got linkless posts working on the linkblog. They even work with multiple paragraphs, which is pretty cool. I have to use two different types of markdown renderers, but it works. It’s all a little experiment for perhaps a new feature. I also started looking at building an everything RSS feed. That’s quite involved but I made some very good progress. I think I found a way to at least prepare the data, interleaving blog, linkblog, podcast and newsletter posts ordered by date. It wasn’t so obvious how to do it, but I found what I think is quite a clever way, reusing existing utilities. It’s nice when you can see through the fog long enough to find a path.
I wrote a couple of blog posts, maybe some of you will like them:
Hello HN bloggers - Saying hi to the folks that might have made their way here via the hacker news big list of blogs someone put together over the last few days. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/07/07/hello-hn-bloggers
Bulk importing the HN bloggers OPML - Documenting my experience bulk importing the HN bloggers OPML into Feedly, wondering why I can't dynamically subscribe to an OPML file of blog feeds. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/07/07/bulk-importing-the-hn-bloggers-opml
Podcasts
Justice in a Hyperbitcoinized World with Aaron Daniel Ep#678 (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - This was an awesome episode, covers a lot of ground. Legal stuff can seem kind of boring but it’s fundamental to large parts of society, certainly the parts where interesting things are happening. Topic areas covered include difficulties of operating businesses, Nostr based public escrow system, Bitcoin externalities on legal system, what a hypothetical full bitcoin standard world might look like, how the civil justice system will react to increasing self sovereignty over wealth, frivolous libel suits & anti-slap laws, 12 most common life legal events, the litigation industrial complex, legal traps & extortion, world wide legal accessibility & stratification, private dispute resolution, criminal justice system, transitioning from retributive justice to conciliatory justice, truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa and Canada, private prisons, broken incentive structures everywhere, jurisdictional arbitrage, the “social contract”, the fully private Isreali insurance industry legal resolution system, efficiencies and automation, creating the modern modular legal stack of the future, legal as a service. https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/justice-in-a-hyperbitcoinised-world
The Pragmatic Apocalypse with Balaji Srinivasan Ep#679 (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Balaji’s clarity of thought is so unbelievably ridiculous, it’s like he is running on alien software. He’s in another dimension. Is there a point learning all this stuff where you just sort of start levitating and are able to effortlessly mentally teleport to any topic with perfect recall? So much great stuff in this episode, which is only slightly affected by the passing notion that there is a non zero chance you might be being brain washed a little bit. https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-pragmatic-apocalypse
Bitcoin, Economics & Mimetics with Robert Breedlove #Ep680 (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Listened to this earlier. Doesn’t Robert sound like one of Peter’s other guests, Jeff Booth perhaps, I don’t recall. Anyway it’s nice listening to these two get to know each other. There’s so much denouement in this episode, it’s like we are getting close to having a very accurate picture of what’s actually going on. Famous last words I suppose. It’s all about our biology and meme’s, but also about hearing about London through the eyes of an american visiting for the first time. I absolutely love it because you get to see glimpses of the water you’ve been swimming in all this time. https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-economics-mimetics
Wagner rebels, SCOTUS Ends AA, AI M&A, startups gone bad, spacetime warp and more Ep#135 (All-in Podcast) - The Russia - Ukraine war coverage is exceptional as is the beasties analysis. It’s unnerving to realise how much the world still relies on mercenaries to govern in many places. It’s a miracle we have peace at all in so many places. Incidentally I met a total Prigozhin doppleganger last week, utterly uncanny, I’d almost say there was a non-zero chance the bloke is in Vietnam, but of course it’s way too bizarre for that to happen. Anyway great section on education and also loved the pulsar / dark matter / dark energy / gravity astrophysics bit, which was made even better by Jason’s hilarious why-the-f-is-this-even-useful reaction, he’s wrong because it is interesting, but he’s also kind of right, for most people it’s totally irrelevant. We could do a better job helping folks see the amazing possibilities these kinds of methodologies and technologies could lead to. Variety is the spice of life. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbGxpbmNoYW1hdGhqYXNvbi5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw/episode/ZDkyNzgyMGUtMDAzOS00MDg5LThhYTUtNDJiOTc4MTdjNTBi?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwjItrPF0Pz_AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQNg
Bitcoin Valuation PSR Update Ep#78 (Crypto Voices Podcast) - Ok you remember your high school maths don’t you? You know calculus, standard deviations and all that shit? Well turns out that shit can be tremendously useful in analysing bitcoin trends. Prices recently went up, but how significant was that jump in the overall bitcoin story? The key to doing such a fundamental analysis is to choose an index that is independent of price. I’m only partially convinced the index he chooses is truly independent, to me it seems like it would at least be very correlated, but anyway it’s a great little bit of analysis. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9kOGRlY2YzYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/NzNhNTFmNWQtNGYyMC00MTAyLWJhNjItMjEyNmNlYjFkMjMw?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwiAtqv00Pz_AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
Twitter Chaos: The Real Fireworks Wed 07/05 (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast) - Brian does a fantastic job of painting the chaos of the present moment, especially around Twitter, but also Meta’s new Threads app and Reddit apocalypse. https://www.ridehome.info/show/techmeme-ride-home/wed-0705-twitter-chaos-the-real-fireworks
The American Revolution - Part 1 of 3 (Rest is History Podcast) - I’ve listened to the first 2 of these in the series and they were both exceptional. It’s a different take on the story I’ve always heard because I think it’s the first time I’ve heard the point of view from the British. I hope I get the chance to listen to these again because, as is often the case when I’m trying to learn about the history of my country, the world conspires to put me in some weird fractal-like river of contradictions, so I’m mentally having to swim against very strong and bizarre currents, and I see quite a lot of the important information falling right through my hands like sand as I listen, which I find quite difficult to make peace with, but I think I managed to pull out of few key points, especially around how they felt somewhat victims of circumstance, and that even though the americans had a lot to rightfully complain about and eventually rebel against, it’s nice to hear that despite it all that the British remembered they were fighting their own people, as bad as it was, it could have been much worse, and I think that’s a part of the reason we brits are still broadly speaking quite good friends with those on the other side of the pond. If you are american I think you might like this, even if there is a small bit of silly accent humour, on the whole I think they are quite balanced, though you likely won’t agree with everything they say. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5hY2FzdC5jb20vcHVibGljL3Nob3dzLzAzMWMyZGNiLWM2NmMtNDJiNS04MTllLTI0NTIwMzFmZTRmOQ/episode/NjRhMWQ1NjNmMjNmMGIwMDExNjBiMGYx?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahgKEwiAtqv00Pz_AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQ1gQ
Links
Hacker News Blogroll - Someone on HN decided to compile a big list of people's blogs, and they turned it into a website. Someone else created a giant OPML file with all the blog feeds, and I imported the whole thing into my Feedly. It's a bizare sort of mayhem now in my feedly, I've seen english, russian, german and vietnamese posts pass by so far. It's nice to not require an invite, even if it's quite confusing :) https://markjgsmith.com/links/2023/07/06/170000-dm.hn
France riots: 'For the politicians we are nothing' - I've been reading some of the flow of news from the french riots coverage these past few days. It's such a complicated situation. I stand alongside the marginalised, it's crushing to hear that the youth have no prospects, that society has stratisfied. I spent a long time growing up in Belgium which had problems of a similar vibe, so I really feel for the communities. When I moved back to the UK, in London I experienced the british equivalent, first at a distance, then living in Hackney and Whitechappel. Though I very literally feel sad about it, I'm hopeful because I've also experienced what it's like when it works, moments when the communities were well integrated, when we were together, some incredibly magical moments. I think we can overcome the troubles, let's continue to make increadible art about the sometimes difficult realities, that's how we get through this together. We did it in the UK in the 80s with punk rock breaking through a horribly stratosphered society, then reaggae, ska, and later electronic music. Even if you aren't a fan of those genres, think of the importance of integrating the communities for the youth. That's what art does, it finds a way to bring us together. And we can do it again in whatever way we'll find this time. Having said that these past few years I've travelled the world and I've also experienced some bad things, so I know it's not all optimism, there are real concerns on all sides. Here in Vietnam it's an odd mix, because of the history of both french and english speaking influence, but also they have their own generational challenges, combined with relatively recent memories of war. Anyway, we need more innovation, more art, more building things together, and we need to grow the pie for everyone. https://markjgsmith.com/links/2023/07/05/170000-www.bbc.com
Microsoft unveils the world’s first analogue optical computer to solve optimisation problems - This is pretty cool. It's a rack mounted computer that uses streams of photons hitting a grid of modulators to perform basic matrix calculations at light speed. Initially they are using it to solve optimisation problems in bank settlements, but I guess it could be used for many optimizatiom problems. Maybe also AI? There's a lot of matrix calculations in AI as far as I understand. I feel it's worth mentioning, beware of over-optimisation. Technology is inherently deflationary, at a macro level you need to ensure you still have innovation, don't optimise the people away. There's no sense in being the best at shrinking the pie. An optimization mania could cause more problems than it solves. And I think emerging / developing economies are probably most at risk given the pressures they are under. Also worth thinking about: optimization neutrality and equality, because it's the sort if thing that could very well be weaponised. https://markjgsmith.com/links/2023/07/05/060000-interestingengineering.com
There are lots more great links on the daily linkblog, with light commentary by yours truly, but also bonus contextual links that don’t appear in Substack. Check them out:
Forced rather than through choice:
Starvation days this week: 5
Thirst days this week: 1
Food poisoning days: 1.5
For details about this check out the closing section of previous newsletter issue #114:
https://markjgsmith.com/newsletter/2023/05/13/optimism-in-a-constantly-deflationary-world
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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