Saturday 14th January, 2023 - Communism vs the Infiniti Simulacrum
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
It’s a bit of a quiet one this week. As I write this I’m listening to this mix in case you want to get into the same headspace momentarily:
It’s quite chilled so far, it’s my first listen so not much idea where it’s going, which is a bit like the newsletter this week. It’s by Dam Swindle, no affiliation as far as I know, sort of an appropriate name given all the mayhem that’s been happening in the world of crypto and Bitcoin.
That’s not entirely true, I’ve pre-gathered the links and podcasts the past couple of days so a lot of the heavy lifting so to speak is done. There isn’t really a theme, though the list of possible titles is somewhat more interesting than usual.
Just had to ff the mix a bit so perhaps that’s a bad sign.
This week I’ve been wondering about what the future of the finance industry looks like. I was complaining about financial analysts the past few weeks, comparing them to early web sys admins that would purposely make it difficult to learn. Ultimately I think this strategy was misguided, but it’s probably a dynamic that humans do when we gather into groups, which causes about as many problems as it solves.
Then I listened to a pretty hardcore technical podcast all about linux, and it was very evident to me how inaccessible that would be to new comers. I’m able to follow without any trouble because I’ve spent literally years and years creating mental models that enable me to ingest all the information with ease. I’m able to effortlessly skip over parts that I’m not familiar with because I know the general categories they fall in. I’m super familiar with the entire stack, knowing specifics in detail but also generalities, I have a very good idea how all the pieces fit together.
That’s not at all the case when I listen to podcasts about finance.
I’m lacking in both specific knowledge but also about generalities, so it’s really hard to zoom in and out through the layers of abstraction. I think perhaps with computer science we are spoiled somewhat in terms of the mental models and data structures. They have been most often distilled down into the purest of the pure, until they can’t be distilled any further, so the solutions are basically fully optimal. My sense, and I could be wrong about this, is that that’s not the case for many of the financial instruments and mental models in finance. They feel much more woolly, there’s more room for ambiguity and miss communication.
I’m not exactly criticising, for all I know this might actually be a feature, it’s just quite obvious that if engineers talked about web development the way finance folk talk about financial systems, we wouldn’t have very many large scale websites.
Anyway all that being said, the present moment is super interesting because the rise of crypto and bitcoin is forcing folks to re-examine the fundamentals. It’s probably the most exiting time ever to be in the finance industry.
I started wondering to what extent in the future the finance industry would be run by system admins. In the end it’s all just flows of data, so it makes sense that it would be. And if that’s the case, what does it mean for programmers? I think it would be prudent for people to be adept at both skills. We need to make sure we don’t brick ourselves in.
This week in my ssg development I got some long needed offsite backups working. It feels good to know I have crucial data in more than one place now. Quite a lot of head winds from the world when I was finalising the tests. That’s an understatement. Felt like the world really didn’t want me to have backups. Well I got backups.
This week’s doppelgänger was Jeff Beck. I know how it sounds, but he showed up just as I was putting the finishing touches to the backups. He was sort of just standing there about 20 meters away, arms crossed wearing a white T-shirt. I read about Beck’s passing the next day in the main stream news. It’s a really strange world we live in.
I mentioned last week I was having issues logging into my podcast account. Apple support confirmed that my podcast account still exists, and they are investigating with their tech team why I’m being sent through setup again when I try to login. It’s not clear how long that will take.
Why this week’s title? I don’t know, there was some thought process going on where that seemed important at the time, which I can’t exactly get back to now on the re-read, but mostly because it sort of sounds cool. There’s something there about extremes, about the future of consciousness, of finding optimal solutions, of evaluating if an approach is even appropriate or possible.
I can’t quite put it into a coherent thing. Are there failure modes in societies we are unaware of that would cause us to be constantly chasing our tails so to speak? Sometimes things aren’t computable. That’s the idea behind Communism vs the Infiniti Sumulacrum. It’s not a knock on communism, or infinitis or simulacrums. Just smashing these ideas together to see what happens. To see where that goes.
Anyhow I’m 50 mins into the mix, it’s still pretty good, I’m going to go listen to the rest of it somewhere a bit more scenic.
Here’s the list of titles that didn’t make it. If you are wondering what that is, I write a blog post:
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:
No matter what you do they will always say ‘good lie’ or ‘what a liar’ right after your accomplishment, often both, then hammering
The Bizarre Secret Dynamic Assembly-like Language From Which All Spoken Languages Derive (Probably/Maybe, but could be a big waste of time)
Maybe They WON’T Start A New Internet This Time, Imagine That
The Metaverse Will Kill The World Wide Web
Suggesting not killing ourselves is now a declaration of war again
Observing a neutrino once is now a declaration of war again
Waiting for maximum collective neutrino sensitivity to wear off again
‘Up’ Will Stop You Poop, Good Luck
‘Up’ wave followed by laxatives
‘Up’ Bowel Arbitrage
HCMC - Where Galaxies Come To Die
Vietnam: Better Living Through Precision Poisoning of Everything
Have You Tried Poisoning It And Unpoisoning It Again?
Oh No All the Sysadmins Are Natzis Again!
Neutrino Man: Journey To The Bottom of the Recursion
E = Recursion Squared
Giant Ruff And Tumble Mega Merge
Merge Time Mayhem
111 Dimensional Way Merge Tools
All Protest Ants, All the Time
Epic Moment of Birth of the Multiverse
The Entirety of Everything Splintered Into An Infinite Amount of Everythings
Encoding a Fractal into a Fractal
The One Who Found the Audience is Trying Not to Cry Again
The Limitations of Neurons
Maybe 2.1 Quadrillion Years
How to Ensure the Infiniti Simulacrum Doesn’t Take Over the Multiverse
Communism vs the Infiniti Sunulacrum
OmG They Are Trying To Train The Everything Using a Series of 99.99999 Attacks
Does tech exist to make things better or to make things worse? You can’t have both
Resentment Leaks Are Not A Feature
In Resentment Leak Land Everything is a Resentment And Things Mysteriously Go Boom
Trust is Power, No Trust is Dysfunctional
The 200 Year Hangover
Education is What You Need
Hangover University
Oh Noes, Not Again
Entrapment Powered Immigration
Fractal Based Foreigner Management
We Are The Big Last Man Standing Tom Petty That Keeps On Falling Forever
Technologies We Laugh At Now: Marvels in Synchronisation - Everyday Perfect Group Shits
It Will Be Your Fault Until It’s Not Your Fault Improves
Hope you have a nice week.
Podcasts
Collateral. Collateral. Collateral. Confirmed…by the Fed (Eurodollar University Podcast) - I complained quite a bit about financial analysts in last week’s issue, and I still stand by what I said, however here’s an example that’s actually pretty darn good, Jeff very often does a mostly great job of explaining very complex flows; Now it’s not perfect, and I don’t think I would have been able to follow the logic had I not already familiarised myself with many of the terminology and concepts by listening to other episodes for several months already, but by enlarge I was able to follow the logic and dynamics described; I wish there was a better way to get my brain used to juggling these entirely abstract concepts, I don’t fully have an appreciation for their properties, and how they interact, so when listening to these types of shows it often feels like as soon as you get up to a decent speed, you hit a brick wall, and all the imaginary ideas you had floating above your head, miserably fall out of the sky into a thousand pieces on the floor, and you look up and everybody else is merrily speeding off into the distance, laughing at your shitty hoverboard that just lies flat on the ground; anyway this one is all about the repo market which means repurchased securities / bonds, the state of the repo market gives a good indication of where people think the economy is going, because deals get structured differently depending on how much risk they are willing to take on https://share.transistor.fm/s/1ce5f687
China & America’s Economic War With Mathew Pines (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Usual WBD high quality analysis, including the phase diagram view of geopolitics, dynanics of the shifting balance to China, the petro dollar system, the belt and road initiative, and the increasing US realisation that China has little intention of opening up despite it’s public signaling to the contrary https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/china-americas-economic-war
Bare Metal Meets Talos Linux (the k8s OS) (Shipit Podcast) - Some interesting linux developments, this OS is super simple by design, but hides a lot of complexity, and is meant to provide a strong foundation on which to build bigger things, rather than a gazillion options to tweak ad nausium https://changelog.com/shipit/84
Revisiting My 2022 Predictions (The Flying Frisby Podcast) - This takes the form of a game of darts which I quite liked because I used to play a lot of darts in years past, also interesting to hear what shape financial markets predictions take
Can Adam Smith Fix Our Economy (Freakonomics Radio Podcast) - Final episode in a 3 parter, I didn’t take any notes and as I write this I can’t remember exactly apart from that it was really a good episode and worth the listen, includes a visit to Smith’s grave in Scotland, and an interview that although has some hints of a cultural and generational gap, ultimately turns out relatively well https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-adam-smith-fix-our-economy
Breaking free from big tech and big content with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin {Decoder Podcast) - Nilay Patel from Vergecast interview, lots of interesting topics including authors and creators getting screwed, streaming, collusion including through public signalling, possible systemic solutions, and some hard hitting views on bitcoin, crypto and NFTs; Cory is one of those rare geeks that’s made it up to the stratosphere, where he writes fiction, and he’s spent a lot of time observing and experiencing the dynamics of the higher level systems that are built ontop of the tech we build, he distills the often murky dynamics that occur there into something that is understandable by people building tech, so much of what he talks about is eye opening https://www.theverge.com/23547877/decoder-chokepoint-capitalism-cory-doctorow-rebecca-giblin-spotify-ticketmaster-antitrust
Bitcoin and Global Recession with Dylan LeClaire (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - More sensible bitcoin discussions, and Dylan for sure understands more than most, but I’m left still ultimately confused, though I do get parts of it, it sort of feels like learning about how the tides of the ocean work, except there are 50 oceans all happening at once in the same place, and although you manage to follow along for extended periods, it’s like you zoom out and it’s a big circle of people all looking at a giant washing machine, totally convinced they know what’s going to happen, and yes we know the water drains, then a refill for a rinse, then drain again and spin cycle, but how is that even helpful? There’s something fundamental we are missing, we want stability but we need speculation for money to flow, like there are opposite competing forces, money should be simple, but we are having to make it really complex, with all these fancy financial instruments, to solve problems that really should be solved in a totally different way https://www.podpage.com/citadeldispatch/cd85-bitcoin-and-global-recession-with-dylan-leclair/
Links
tropicbliss/symphonia: An audio playback library for Node.js - I so wish I had time and resources to play with libraries like this one, would love to be making audio tools https://github.com/tropicbliss/symphonia
Why Does Private Equity Get to Play Make-Believe With Prices? - Something that occurred to me while reading this, maybe investing in PE is a bit like donating money to charity, it’s a way to distribute capital where the entire system figures out the good and bad players, and over the long term you can potentially make money as the system rewards those that invested wisely; and additionally it keeps the investors and receivers relatively decoupled, which is itself a huge feature; seen this way, it makes sense to invest in PE if you have extra money, because you are voting for a future that you believe in and are directly shaping the world with your money; going into PE expecting returns might not be the best mindset, but it probably makes a lot of sense for people to invest as a group https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1h9csrci656v4/Why-Does-Private-Equity-Get-to-Play-Make-Believe-With-Prices
So What's Good? - I cleaned up my RSS reader a bit, removing some really high frequency community feeds that had turned everything into a river of garbage, and this Dave Rupert piece was the first post that made it through, and how timely, I’m constantly wondering and worried about how repeatedly handling sad paths affects me as a person - programmers literally do this 1000s of times more than the average person per day, whereas most people get to pretty much only deal with happy paths https://daverupert.com/2023/01/so-what-s-good
UK space launch: Historic Cornwall rocket mission set to blast off - This cheered me up quite a bit, being able to launch into space without relying on external forces would be huge https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64190848
UK space launch: Historic Cornwall rocket launch ends in failure - I found this out at the same moment I got an important feature of my ssg working, my feature test flight did work which was great because it felt like going through space rocket level difficulties to get it working, websites are getting so difficult to build, the tech gets better but the environment gets harsher; the space launch team will be back at it and let’s hope progress is made, the space industry is growing rapidly at the minute https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64218883
Insurer Beazley launches first catastrophe bond for cyber threats https://www.ft.com/content/a945d290-a7f1-427c-84a6-b0b0574f7376
GitHub Discussions just got better with Category Forms! https://github.blog/2023-01-09-github-discussions-just-got-better-with-category-forms
THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE IS FINDING TOO MANY EARLY GALAXIES - Some slightly odd language chosen to describe the findings, an “embarrassment of galaxies”, why is the pinnacle of scientific discovery being described as an embarrassment? An area of the universe called SMACS, and an analogy using toddlers and teenagers, there’s something else being communicated here https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-james-webb-space-telescope-is-finding-too-many-early-galaxies
Best Node.JS Schedulers - Schedulers are important for most projects, as soon as you want to decouple your backend processing from the frontend UI, especially for managing message queues, personally I’ve had pretty good results using Agenda, though there were a few quirks, I found it relatively ok for small to medium sized projects as long as you avoided some of the features that don’t work so well https://deadsimplechat.com/blog/best-nodejs-schedulers
Video Rendering with Node.js and FFmpeg - This tutorial is awesome, it reminds me of my days working in vfx, so cool to see that it’s now possible using javascript, though it does get kind of complicated despite the really great use of async/await, which presumably is why software vendors like Autodesk can charge the big bucks, so regular non programmers can put together motion video graphics without needing to spend 10 years learning how to code, and be able to create much better videos than us lowly programmers that build the tools for them, and get called liar dogs for the “privilege”, and that’s not even the worst bit, not even close; how’s that ai race going? Likely I’ll be getting some form of lashes for this paragraph down the line, which in itself is probably an indication of the answer to my question https://creatomate.com/blog/video-rendering-with-nodejs-and-ffmpeg
creamcropdev/creamcrop - A cream-of-the-crop, top-of-the-top, slice-and-chop, absolutely minimalist news getter https://github.com/creamcropdev/creamcrop
Jeff Beck: British guitar legend dies aged 78 - "I play the way I do because it allows me to come up with the sickest sounds possible." https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64228780
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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