Saturday 11th March, 2023 - Bleak Beyond Belief
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
It’s looking very very bleak indeed. I’m writing this on Wednesday because it looks like I won’t have any power by the weekend, and no way to charge. I have 28% battery left. Here’s what I gathered so far this week.
The ssg new rendering core is basically working with a few minor bugs to fix. Probably just a few more hours to get it done.
Update: It’s end of week now and I got some access to power so I’ve been able get this issue looking a bit better. Conditions still dire though. There are some truly horrible people out there who really just want to be cruel to their fellow humans and openly inflict pain and suffering on others, in plain sight, and what’s more they feel completely justified doing this. I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed to be a human being this week.
Here’s the list of titles that didn’t make it. If you are wondering what that is, here’s a blog post about that:
The list of titles that didn't make it https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/01/07/the-list-of-titles-that-didnt-make-it
Here’s the list:
They Force You Into An Imaginary Corner They Have Constructed, By Repeated Slavery Or Freedom Choices, Accompanied By Well Crafted Goading At Every Station, Whenever You Choose the Freedom Path, You Mysteriously Get Blocked in 12.5 Dimensions, And Then When You Walk Through The Wall They Tell You You’re Having A Tantrum via the Medium of a Carefully Choreographed And Executed Massively Distributed Next Level Tantrum; Then When You Manage to Escape They Reluctantly Tell You That You Have Won, Even Though Winning Anything Hadn’t Even Crossed Your Mind; Only to Immediately Start A New Cycle Of Entrapment That Will Once Again Unfold Over the Coming Days
Just Say Murderer
Next Level Weaponised Tantrum in a Help Coat
State Sponsored Bagpuss Tantrum
The Gang Stalker Frontier: Simulating a State Sponsored Bagpuss Tantrum
Stupid Slow Tantrum
Tantrums Are So Ingrained They Have Become The Core Primitive, Literally Everything is Some Form Of Tantrum, Meaning Doesn’t Even Exist Any Longer
They make tantruming look like chilling out
From Looks Ok to Mass Murderer Stay Away At All Costs in 3.7 Seconds
Podcasts
Kaizen! Embracing change #Ep90 (Ship It Podcast) - Sad to hear that Ship It is going to have to go on a break to avoid burn out, best of luck to Gerhardt, certainly hope he manages to continue podcasting somehow, he is really very good at communicating dev topics via podcasts; very weird synchronicities going on between my newsletter titles and some of Gerhardt’s other projects, WTF world?https://changelog.com/shipit/90
The Future of Bitcoin Banking with Eric Yakes (What Bitcoin Did Podcast)- With the future of bitcoin still very much uncertain this was an interesting episode that explores what a future Bitcoin banking system might look like, a load of topics covered including communities, federated banking, fractional reserves and the free banking system, the lightning network, finance in Africa, stability pools, fedimint, the risk of debasement, regulation; it’s one of those episodes where you end up learning a lot about the current system, I was left wondering whether the current system could secretly be running on Fedimint and we wouldn’t really be able to tell, I reckon it would be possible to design a perpetual plan where every couple of generations a new technology called [tbd]coin is created that will fix the world, it gets adopted, fades into the background, eventually turns into a fiat money system, and the cycle starts all over again; if that does happen then the really interesting thing might be how the runners of the system would move their money from one system to the next without being detected; you’ve got to imagine there would be some weirdness, does such a system already exist? Will today’s system runners be experimenting with that in mind as we go through the current cycle so they can learn to handle the moment in -150 years where all coins have been mined and the system is unsustainable? There’s a ton of very large distractions going on at the minute, now would be the perfect time I would have thought https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-future-of-bitcoin-banking-eric-yakes
Stupid Slow (Eurodollar University) - A look at China’s re-opening, and why it looks like there is already a slow down in global manufacturing, despite the positive looking data in other parts of the economy; anecdotally here in Vietnam the number of tourist busses has literally exploded in recent weeks, it’s night and day, coaches everywhere lining the streets, none of the passengers are Chinese, they all look like slightly grumpy and glum looking europeans/ americans, which is a bit odd since there’s supposed to be a slow down going on there, I’ve also noticed lots of regular folks tipping which is unusual, but the money definitely isn’t filtering through to everybody, still lots of people struggling here https://share.transistor.fm/s/ab2db126
And Right On Schedule Here Come The APIs (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast) - Loads of APIs are being released to use the new AI tech that’s been flooding the news in recent months https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RlY2htZW1lLXJpZGVob21l/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL29sSkFWZUJkTDg4eGUxX3VySHNETXhIdl9wZjMxUHNEdlhvV2w4SlJQZnM?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwj4hvG6nsv9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
AI and the Future (Flying Frisby Podcast) - Very rambley, sort of all over the place but that’s actually quite exciting as it’s a sign that things are going to be very interesting in this space over the coming years
The “Cambrian Explosion” Moment fir AI (Techmeme Ride Home) - Brian has come to essentially same conclusion that I did this week, we’ve reached a very exciting time in the AI space, the pace of movement is like nothing I’ve seen before, it’s happening daily, it’s sort of mayhem, but there’s a load of interesting tech being built, it’s cool to think that somewhere amongst all the froth is the next Google or Facebook https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RlY2htZW1lLXJpZGVob21l/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwLy12RjNBUlJGWWgwZHdwbXFwR2RreWVYUTA2ZVlFYWNUSjZqSm5QYWd0ZTQ?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwjAxeOfmNH9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
How the FED “Went Broke” with Lynn Alden(What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Lynn is clearly super knowledgeable about the monetary system, but for some reason I have some trouble absorbing some of her arguments, I’m not sure what it is exactly, there’s some way she frames things that blocks my brain, I’m not sure exactly what it is, I think there are sone words or concepts that I’m not familiar with enough that she throws about assuming that they are easy concepts to mentally juggle, especially around assets/liabilities and balance sheets, my mental models in that area still block up lengthy logic chains; anyhow having said all that, I actually found this episode a lot less problematic than usual, I found her explanations very clear and less of the blockages that I have had previously listening to her; the outline of the different layers in the banking system was really enlightening, I feel like a few more episodes like this and I’ll have a really good grasp of the full system https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/how-the-fed-went-broke
Will Cole (Duncan Trussell Podcast) - All about the microbiome of the human gut, sounds gross, but it’s actually super interesting; we evolved alongside the bacteria in our guts over millions of years and it turns out they have a direct affect on our senses and mood, they literally communicate with our lower level brain continuously through the various systems of our body, I listened to this episode in two goes, I didn’t initially get into it, but the second attempt was awesome, maybe my microbiome took a while to get on-board? https://audioboom.com/posts/8257996
Spotify's redesign, streaming boxes suck, and Gigi Sohn withdraws from FCC nomination (Vergecast Podcast) - I just finished listening to this so very much a last minute addition, good balance of serious and funny but also lots of great tech reporting, you generally don’t need to worry that your feet will get horribly mutilated when you listen to their show, and that’s not a given in this world, I can attest to that, in the real world sone people will deliberately force you into a position where your feet get mutilated and then they feel perfectly justified wiping it under the carpet while saying ‘you learn’, YMMV I suppose, unless you are non-Asian living in Asia, their algorithms eventually get you, at least that has been my experience https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/NzRmY2JiMTQtMzUwZS0xMWVkLWFjNmUtYzMxY2IyMmNhZThj?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwiIvL6P6NL9AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
Links
Strapi Cloud is now available https://strapi.io/blog/strapi-cloud-is-now-available
Mitigating serverless cold start delays : My experiments & observations https://punits.dev/blog/mitigating-serverless-cold-start-delays/
Experiments with the JavaScript Garbage Collector https://dev.to/codux/experiments-with-the-javascript-garbage-collector-2ae3
The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era https://www.spicyweb.dev/the-great-gaslighting-of-the-js-age
Show HN: Total.js – Low-code development (Node-RED alternative) https://www.totaljs.com/flow
Europe's big tech bill is coming to fruitionhttps://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/06/1069391/safer-internet-dsa-dma-eu
How a single engineer brought down Twitter https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down
'Sushi terror' pranks outrage Japan as police make arrests - Sushi conveyor belts always make me think of RSS, that was one of the metaphors used to describe news feeds back in the early days of blogging; IMO there seems to be a lot of very poor behaviours emerging all over the world at the minute, I guess it’s an unintended consequence of social media https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64898111
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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