Mark Smith’s Newsletter - Saturday 8th May, 2021
Audacity, Intel & TSMC, RSS, Apple anti-trust, Linux bad patches, Privacy & AdTech, Neuralink, Apple podcasts, Twitter Spaces & TipJar, Deno, celebrities, ESM, crypto all the things & a cool tutorial
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
This week’s intro is super brief, hopefully the regular newsletter intro will be back next week.
I had done the first pass yesterday, spent a couple of hours on it, and the intro was shaping up to be a good one, there are a lot of great links, I was still able to gather the links thankfully, but today it’s pretty clear that the world is configured in a way that is going to make it very difficult to get it finished. So I’m writing this now so you at least get the links. My health and safety has to come first, before the intro, without that there won’t even be any links. It’s with a sad heart I have to make these executive decisions sometimes.
That’s all from me this week…
I hope you enjoy the links!
As usual all the articles from the linkblog in chronological order are included below, which is also a good way to explore, there are some pieces there amongst the main summary items that didn’t make it into the main themes, but these are interesting in their own right, and often end up developing into something more substantial further down the line.
Special mentions
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Stuff from me
Nothing from me this week :(
Stuff from around the web
Articles
Muse Group formed to support MuseScore, Ultimate Guitar; acquires Audacity - Another interesting development in the audio space, Audacity has been used for many years by podcasters and music producers because it’s open source, it looks like Muse Group has some experience developing open source audio products, so hopefully it’s a net positive for Audacity and its users scoringnotes.com #
Intel’s CEO seeks $10 billion to develop chip manufacturing in continental Europe venturebeat.com #
osmoscraft/osmosfeed - A web-based RSS reader running entirely from your GitHub repo github.com #
The EU is cracking down on Apple’s App Store. Is Congress next? fastcompany.com #
All four of the U.S. big tech companies now have antitrust charges against them twitter.com #
How a university got itself banned from the linux kernel - Good writeup of the situation from a couple of weeks ago theverge.com #
Apple takes on the internet - the Big Tech battle over privacy - I’d like to hear from the big tech companies what a future with no/less privacy, user tracking and especially AI, AR/VR, crypto, smart contracts and brain implants looks like, because that’s what is on the horizon, I think it’s quite understandable that many are worried about possible bad scenarios, it’s not something we can just wonder into hoping that it will all be fine, but also we need to imagine a great future for all, we just can’t destroy humanity in the process ft.com #
From the spookily timely department: President of Elon Musk’s Neuralink venture tweets that he’s left the company theverge.com #
Apple Podcasts has so much potential; it’s here are some ways it could be taken to the next level 9to5mac.com #
Progress Delayed Is Progress Denied - Do App Store policies harm developers? Is the web a credible alternative? A look at the data infrequently.org #
Twitter Opens Audio Spaces to All Users with Over 600 Followers, Announces New Spaces Features socialmediatoday.com #
Deno a Thoughts - Nothing Earth shatteringly new here but it’s nice to have a summary of the main things that make Deno a nice programming runtime to work with written by a developer that has been testing it out recently des.wtf #
Will Linux Phones stay around this time? - Roundup of the past and current efforts to get Linux running on phones linmob.net #
Bill and Melinda Gates are ending their 27-year marriage mashable.com #
Epic CEO argues Fortnite trial is an existential fight for the future protocol.com #
Donald Trump’s ‘social media platform’ has launched, and it’s just a blog - Personally I think it looks more like a microblog theverge.com #
Donald Trump’s new social media / blog / microblog - It renders pretty well on mobile, he doesn’t seem to share many links but I’ve seen a least one so it looks like he can add anchor tags in his posts, I couldn't find an RSS feed though so the only way for automatic updates is via email and that's a bit much for me donaldjtrump.com #
Chipmaker TSMC may be planning to build more chip factories in Arizona - The Taiwanese company, the world leader in chip foundry services, looks set to build up to 6 factories in the area venturebeat.com #
Bittorrent Creator Bram Cohen has a new crypto blockchain project called Chia - It differs from Bitcoin and Etherium by using proof-of-space rather than proof-of-work bitcoin.com #
I’ve been reading Donald Trump’s microblog, he’s got a very distinctive style, however the posts feel a bit detached from reality, something which could be improved by including a timestamp on each post, there’s currently no sense of when the posts were made, the other thing that would make it immensely better is an RSS feed, and wouldn’t it be cool if Mr Trump implemented Web Mentions and became a proponent of the IndieWeb? donaldjtrump.com #
IndieWeb and Web Mentions - Chris Coyier post from a few years back but it goes through the pros and cons in quite a lot of detail, highlighting what I was thinking which is that they are very similar to pingbacks / trackbacks but more modern css-tricks.com #
Bootstrap 5 has officially landed getbootstrap.com #
Are the royals going to vlog?theverge.com #
Twitter Introducing Tip Jar - It’s a way to support people financially via several payment methods including Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo twitter.com #
Hello, Modules! - Package maintainer extraordinaire, Sindre Sorhus, is going all in on ESM and he has written some migration guides to get things moving in the community now that Node 10 is no more sindresorhus.com #
Build a SaaS Platform with Stripe - This tutorial series looks awesome, it’s amazing to me how much easier this is to do than even just a few years ago I am going to incrementally jonmeyers.io #
Podcasts
Lex Fridman Podcast #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Netwo - Experienced crypto systems architect, specialising in smart contracts and decentralized oracle networks which are the equivalent of APIs for smart contracts - It’s a great interview because he has hands-on experience building high performant crypto systems, so his knowledge isn’t just about theoretical concepts, it’s based on real world experience, and he’s able to communicate that very effectively - My favourite quote which should give you a sense for the potential in this space, and it lines up with what I saw when listening to that Cointalk Podcast a few months back - “DeFi and NFTs aren’t even the tip of the ice berg, they are the snow coming off of the tip of the ice berg” lexfridman.com #
Re-Post: Coin Talk Podcast - Confessions of a Man Who Bought 20 Hashmasks.... w/ Ledger Status - I’ve never been super into crypto, but I like this podcast mostly because of the dynamic between the hosts and the guests they have on the show, they don’t take themselves too seriously, but they are clearly very into the crypto space, are very knowledgeable about it and their enthusiasm is entertaining - This episode sort of blew my mind a bit, if you are at all into building digital media production workflows and automation you might find this interesting too, there are a lot of very crypto and fintech nerdy concepts thrown about but they also interject every now and then to summarise at a high level what is going on, essentially you can do basically anything with etherium, which is kind of awesome, but on the other hand, you can do basically anything with etherium, which could be kind of risky, but maybe it’s just hilarious, or not, hard to tell, either way it’s the first time I’ve listened into a crypto deep dive discussion where my web developer spidey-sense got activated, no idea if it’s good or bad but there’s something interesting there for sure markjgsmith.com #
Ride Home Podcast (Bonus) Bull-Bear Case For Clubhouse - Pretty great debate episode that looks at the pros and cons of Clubhouse style applications, it’s very much an episode of two halves, I was totally convinced after the first segment, but then after the second segment I was totally convinced in the other direction, now I just don’t know, I still personally like the Clubhouse style audio recordings, but there are definitely some challenges to building a business around the format ridehome.info #
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Thanks for reading!
Mark Smith‘s Newsletter is a weekly roundup of some of the best javascript, tech and web development links published to my daily linkblog.
If you liked this newsletter you might like my blog, daily linkblog or experimental podcast :)
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Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!