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Saturday 13th August, 2022 - De-escalating Infiniti
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Saturday 13th August, 2022 - De-escalating Infiniti

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Mark Smith
Aug 13, 2022
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Saturday 13th August, 2022 - De-escalating Infiniti
markjgsmith.substack.com

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

You’re probably wondering about the insane sounding title of this week’s issue. There’s a very simple explanation. During the week, I keep a list of possible titles, so that when I’m putting together the issue, I have something to go on. I don’t always select one directly from the list, but often the title I end up going with is inspired in some way by that list. This week that was by far the least crazy sounding title on the list.

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I’m going to keep this super short because as you can probably guess, things are a little weird. This morning particularly. Feels like the sooner I get this done the better.

Right so the big news this week was the US government sanctioning Tornado Cash. It’s had a load of repercussions, especially for developers. Worth checking out relevant links/podcasts about that.

I managed to get all three plugins of my ssg working. It’s pretty cool. With about 5 lines of code, the ssg builds a website with blog, linkblog and date based archives pages. All the files are rendering to the right places, and all the integration tests pass. It was a heck of a challenging debugging effort to get all the pieces working. Next week I’m going to be concentrating on making sure that the content of the files is as expected. Lots more I could say here but it can wait.

Right that’s it for the intro. Done.

If you’re reading this then I didn’t get time to write a propper intro to the newsletter. Just want to make sure something definitely gets sent out tomorrow, so no matter what, you still get the podcasts and links…

Podcasts

  • John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets - First off he is Vitalik Buterin, or perhaps Vitalik’s dad or perhaps even Vitalik from the future who has taken a trip in a Delorian; a great nerdy conversation covering lots of interesting places - also at one point Lex channels Saleem Reshamwala host of the Far Flung podcast, subtle and very unexpected; I once spent an hour playing Doom in a VR cave, it was freaking awesome! https://lexfridman.com/john-carmack

  • Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis - This is the theory that humans only really developed what we now consider to be consciousness around 3000 years ago, before that we were metaphorless automatons, these days we at least have metaphors https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/thrill-to-the-stunning-bicameral-mind-hypothesis

  • The legacy of CSS-Tricks (Changelog Podcast) - Big up CSS Tricks and Chris Coyier! https://changelog.com/podcast/500

  • Chapters, PiBox, One Big server, on call compensation, being swamped is normal, Tablet & Gum (Changelog Podcast) - I’m really liking these weekly news short form episodes, the audio film snippets (audio gifs?) are a perfect compliment to Jared’s deadpan humour, and the topic selection is superb; curious how he finds the audio snippets, is there a search engine for that? https://changelog.com/podcast/news-2022-08-08

  • All Bitcoin, No Fiat with Sahil Chaturvedi (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Interesting to think about, even as a thought experiment, if only to consider what might be possible when we are able to harness some of the power of programmable money https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/all-bitcoin-no-fiat

  • The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak (TED Talks Daily Podcast) - Makes the case for tastey words, which I’m in total agreement with; I’m also completely fascinated by her accent, it reminds me of my youth, which is odd because I’ve never been to Turkey - It’s like she’s communicating with two streams at once, through the content, which is great btw, but also every now and then through the pacing, tempo and quirks of her use of english; like small unexpected bundles of surprise data, it creates a sort of ambience, a familiarity, which is great for story telling because it adds new dimensions and color to everything https://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_island_of_missing_trees?rss=172BB350-0207

  • Privacy in Adversarial Environments with tony and @sethforprivacy (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - I am occasionally red flagged by some of the language and turns of phrase they use, but they do make exceedingly good crypto technical discussions, this episode is no exception; Lots of topics relevant to the recent tornado cash incident, including why US sanctions instead of legal action, privacy history and different models across chains, freezing of assets, preparing for situations where sovereignty is necessary, the lock-in of Github, Fedimint, how the sanctions will affect developers; tldr tornado cash incident feels like a big deal, you sense a realisation that there is a sort of bleak catch22 situation emerging https://anchor.fm/citadeldispatch/episodes/CD72-Privacy-in-Adversarial-Environments-with-Tony-and-sethforprivacy-e1mbuaj

  • Aaron Bastani is thinking about automated luxury…communism? (TED Interview Podcast) - It’s an (effective) click bait title imo, he’s really talking about NHS style services for healthcare, education, transport and housing, makes the case that with AI and bio-tech advances, that it makes sense to centrally plan the basics; it sounds good but does it solve or make worse some of societies big issues like inequality, homelessness, exploitation and leadership? It’s also a long range time horizon, what about for people now? (Because something tells me that day will never come) https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5mZWVkYnVybmVyLmNvbS9UZWRJbnRlcnZpZXc/episode/MTAwMDU3MTUwMjkxMw?sa=X&ved=0CAIQuIEEahcKEwiIjsbs48D5AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg

Links

  • Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux - I liked this article because it got me thinking about what aspects of an OS are important, for a while now I’ve been looking for good reading material on how Linux OS’ are put together, like stuff about how to compile kernels, how to create distributions, the sort of stuff you want to know once you already have a pretty good handle on the basics, so far I haven’t found anything very good https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html

  • Build your own web framework - Each time I near the completion of some software, someone publishes a howto that makes my weeks/months/years of effort seem like you could do it in an afternoon, it’s like clockwork, happens literally every single time; looks like this is that article for this cycle https://vercel.com/blog/build-your-own-web-framework

  • To Uncover a Deepfake Video Call, Ask the Caller to Turn Sideways - Incidentally, this week I saw kids playing with what looked like deep fake software, running on their phones, like motion capture for your face, no idea what they were doing with it though  https://metaphysic.ai/to-uncover-a-deepfake-video-call-ask-the-caller-to-turn-sideways

  • Britney Spears returns to music scene with Elton John duet - I hope things work out for Britney, the stuff I read about the issues she had with her parents sound horrendous; Elton and Britney sounds like a great musical combo IMO, can’t wait to hear the duet https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-62471982

  • We should all have something to hide - Tornado cash takedown https://rnikhil.com/2022/08/09/tornado-cash-block.html

  • MakerDAO May Execute ‘Emergency Shutdown’ If Sanctions Hit DAI https://thedefiant.io/tornado-impact-makerdao-dai

  • Elliptic Introduces Product to Track Crypto Flows Across all Blockchains in Single Screening https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/08/10/elliptic-can-now-track-crypto-flows-across-all-blockchains-in-single-screening

  • :has(): the family selector - I linked to a Dave Rupert article 2 issues ago covering the new selector, this article includes a load more examples, definitely seems like it opens up a lot of possibilities https://developer.chrome.com/blog/has-m105

  • Designing for Long-Form Articles - I continue to want to learn techniques for making high quality text based sites, it’s what I spent most of my time online reading, so might as well get good at it; there is a massive difference between pages that are a delight to read and those that are tedious https://css-tricks.com/designing-for-long-form-articles

  • Best practices for inclusive textual websites - I haven’t had time to fully read this very long article, lots of useful info though I really dislike the name the author used for the approach: restricted enhancement. Yuk! Surely a better description is possible. https://seirdy.one/posts/2020/11/23/website-best-practices/

That’s all from me…

Best reguards,

Mark

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Thanks for reading!

@markjgsmith

If you liked this newsletter you might like my blog, daily linkblog or experimental podcast :)

I’m a freelance web developer, consultant and automation engineer, consider hiring me!

Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!

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