Saturday 8th October, 2022 -Maximly Maximiser

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Oct 08, 2022

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

This issue is kind of scattered. I’ve made some good progress on the ssg, but I’ve had a terrible cold, or perhaps it’s “allergies”, I don’t know. I do know it’s made it almost impossible to do anything.

There are some links but I haven’t been able to read all of them due to the usual internet issues. I can’t even remember which ones I’ve read, so I can’t put the ???? Prefix this week. Oh my days. Podcast listening has been split between two apps because of the issues I was having before. It makes no sense, some podcasts work on one player, some work on the other. I can’t get the show links from the other. It’s a total mess. Nothing works. I’m exhausted.

Biggest news is that after I called out Elon, Twitter and the whole entire tech industry in last week’s issue, the deal is back on. Please move along, nothing strange going on here at all. Everything is definitely real, and absolutely not fake. Though hyper intelligent AIs might be involved, and paper clips.

Speaking of which there is an interesting thread going on in crypto about proof of work vs proof of stake, and more generally being able to prove things online. I’ve noticed the subject apear in several podcasts, seems like it’s quite important, especially in the context of everything-could-be-fake situations. How do you know the system wasn’t already 51%’d before you got here? It’s all clever cool tech until you realise it could be used to harass people by selectively censoring transactions, and in the future transaction will no doubt be more than just money transfers. It could be everything you do, and if the things happening to you aren’t being added to the blockchain, who is going to believe you?

The cool feature I implemented this week in the ssg was a tagcloud plugin. It makes it trivial to add a tags page that enables you to view and navigate to posts via tags. It was quite simple to implement using a map.reduce on the loaded data, and the serverside components make it really easy to build the page. I’ve now got most of the features necessary to re-build my blog, linkblog and podcast sites, something I need to do because Heroku discontinued free accounts.

I’ll be spending next week getting all my data transformed into the right formats and then I’ll make a first attempt at building the sites. Turning 10 years worth of linkblog data from JSON to markdown is a little scary. I’ve got several backups, and it should be quite obvious if the data gets corrupted because the sites will stop rendering.

Podcasts

Proof of Stake (PoS) vs Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery BTC098 (We Study Billionaires - Bitcoin Podcast) - I’m convinced that the cover art for these shows are made specifically to freak out people that are tripping, I find them mildly scary and I’m always sober; great episode covering important Bitcoin fundamental concepts https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/proof-of-stake-versus-proof-of-work-jason-lowery
Banks had warned SOFR doesn’t work and that’s a huge problem (Eurodollar University Podcast) - A lot of the stuff from this podcast goes over my head, it’s all this-goes-up and then this-goes-down stuff in financial discussions, which after about 2 or 3 hops you loose track of, but this episode made quite a lot of sense https://share.transistor.fm/s/aefa88bd
A guided tour through ID3 esoterica Ep#508 (Changelog Podcast) - It’s hilarious to me how much I liked this episode considering how nerdy it is, this is what podcasting is all about, going through old specifications trying to figure out why they built it the way they did, and imagining what cool things you could build with it; I’m starting to be able to hear the difference between Jerrod and Adam’s accent, though I still think they could be the same person https://changelog.com/podcast/508
Young Churchill: Solder of Empire - Second part in a 3 parter that l’ve been enjoying, it’s apparent to me how much fiction and reality are mixed together in Britain, maybe much more so than in other nations, but perhaps that’s the result of all the stuff that’s happened https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/240young-churchill-soldier-of-empire
Wed. 10/05 – Elon Wants Twitter Now. We Think. Who KNOWS ANYMORE!!?? (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast) - Some level headed analysis, perhaps it really is as simple as it being only a tiny part of the things he’s doing https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RlY2htZW1lLXJpZGVob21l/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL1hVdEZ2alp1bGhEd3pNWjZPQXNyN2RqOG5LOFQtQkljaUt1WkZfZVNrT28?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiQ2snrp8_6AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
The State of the Universe with Eric Weinstein (Into the Impossible Podcast) - What is it about physicists that turns them into overbearing black hole-like entities? But they do make exceedingly good stories; Weinstein is so overbearing, and the way Brian Keating has to keep calling him brother in order to avoid it seeming like it’s his dad, borders on comical; but Weinstein speaks a lot of sense, many very interesting observations; he really reminds me of the satanist bloke that Duncan Trussel is always interviewing https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vaW50b3RoZWltcG9zc2libGU/episode/MzY0MjIxYmEtM2RmYy0xMWVkLTljZTQtMGYwNTdiYjY5MGRl?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwiQ2snrp8_6AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQCA