Saturday 16th July, 2022 - Saving deprecated

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Jul 16

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

I’ve been getting a lot of push back from the world around me the last few days, so I’m preparing the podcasts and links with minimal commentary to ensure that at least something gets out later today.

Maybe I’ll get a chance to add a few comments before then.

…

I got a chance! :)

Lots of things going on

There’s been so much turbulence in the atmosphere this week. I was reading news sites where almost every single story was an epic dumpster fire. Well ok then world, epic dumpster fires it is, no point in fighting it. Sometimes the ocean is rough.

Lots of shifting of the political tectonic plates. In the UK, the prime-minister Boris Johnson was kicked out somewhat spectacularly, but in a very british way. In Sri Lanka the president had to flee to Bermuda and then Singapore, on a private military plane, amidst protests and revolts. In the US, Twitter declared war on Elon Musk, internet forums around the internet swelled with glee and vitriol.

Being an “elite” sucks at the minute.

The dumpster fires continue to burn. We all watch in horror. Wouldn’t we prefer a nice game of tic tac toe?

Underestimating the No-coiner mindset

The standout thought for me this week was by Peter McCormack of the What Bitcoin Did Podcast in his interview with David Zell. About 1/2 way through their conversation gets into some really interesting territory.

I’m paraphrasing…

Mindset of a no-coiner is hard to imagine for bitcoiners
There is a lot to consume before you can lead a normal normy life
You gotta to do a lot of work, listen to a lot of podcasts
“My friends think I’m a nutter”
It’s a big leap

This rang true to me. It’s similar in a lot of ways to how the entire web has evolved. Right before web2.0, most people just didn’t use the web. I remember telling people about Facebook and LinkedIn, and they would just look at you weirdly. Remember how we used to view taking selfies? It was super weird. But we did it anyway, and people started to see it differently. That was just the beginning.

Well actually that was the beginning for people that onboarded to the web at that time, me included. In reality people before that had been going through similar experiences in the “internet ancient times” with telnet, gopher, newsgroups etc.

After the rapid growth of Facebook et al, there’s been a corresponding increase in world wide awareness, of basically everything. Of each other. It’s beautiful, but it’s messy, bumpy and uneven. Lots of jagged edges, misunderstandings, and conspiracy theories. It’s mind blowing to me how normalised conspiracy theories have become. I think on balance it’s a good thing. We are learning to listen. Less afraid of exploring ideas. We aren’t burying our heads in the sand as much.

Anyway Peter asks some important questions:

You have a right to free speech, a right to bear arms, do you have a right to monetary sovereignty?
Should the government be able to switch you off from access to cash? To money? That’s the fundamental thing
Should they be allowed to cut you off from the financial system?

They then try to work out a Bitcoin bill of rights, the red lines that shouldn’t be crossed:

The right to run a node
The right to run a coin join
The right to own your private keys and self custody
The right to mine

It’s great podcasting.

It got me thinking about the magnitude of what we are going through. Imagine a world where Bitcoin has won, where we are all using Bitcoin. How will we remember all the battles, all the things we learnt, all the dangers we overcame, all the reasons why we use Bitcoin, how will the next generation learn and remember?

Ssg development

I continue to plod-on in developing my ssg, dumpster fires to the left of me, dumpster fires to the right of me. Serious head winds this week.

I previously created an archives plugin which worked for linkblogs. I wanted to generalise this somewhat so it could be used for other types of source data, for example regular blogs. I set out to create a universal calendar based archives structure and code to parse it and render HTML pages. It got pretty f-ing narly pretty f-ing quickly. Thank heavens for git and feature branches, though even with git, it was very tricky to keep track of what was going on. Don’t delete your backups until you’re sure it’s working.

I ran into a series of dreaded memory heap errors. Crashes that occurred seemingly at random, no stack trace, often not even mentioning the fact that it was a memory heap issue, in totally random places. Other non-related bugs from refactoring the way files were ingested and parsed mixed in. Narly.

Turns out things get weird when you log more than around 5000 lines to the console in Github Actions. I added a superDebug mode to hide much of the logging detail that’s unnecessary most of the time. Things got a bit better. I’ll need to revisit the logging at some stage, but for now it’s good enough.

Yesterday evening I got it mostly working. Files are being output to the right places. It now includes individual post pages, when previously the most granular was a day, that was ok for linkblogs but for blogs you need item pages. Source files can be JSON or markdown. Data can have varying shapes. There’s a lot of progress and cool stuff.

Still a few things to iron out, the main thing being that currently all the files outputed contain the same HTML, which seems really bad, but in reality it’s probably just something silly like a variable declaration in the wrong place. I’m not super worried about it.

The thing to concentrate on is that all the data is being ingested, and the code is correctly iterating over it, and creating files in the right places, and the logs are mostly readable, that’s huge!

Hopefully by next week I’ll have an archives plugin that can be used for linkblogs and blogs.

Scattered thoughts

I had so many notes for this week’s issue, so many places I wanted to explore. In the end I decided to drastically cut back in the interest of cohesiveness.

There are many difficult and thorny topics that are emerging at the minute such as

Freedom
AI and intelligence
The state and governance
Cancel culture
Handling oppression

Maybe I’ll find some time to develop those ideas in a blog post, until then, at least I’ve got a list, which makes my head feel a bit more organised.

Okay, on to the podcasts and links…

Podcasts

Orange Pulling the Whitehouse with David Zell (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/orange-pilling-the-white-house
What is Web 5? with Mike Brock, project lead at Block for the TBD project (Techdirt Podcast)

The Macro Hurricane w/Lawrence Lepard Ep #068 (Bitcoin Fundamentals Podcast) https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/bitcoin-fundamentals/the-macro-hurricane-lawrence-lepard
George Orwell (The Rest is History Podcast) https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/208-george-orwell

Mark Smith’s Newsletter

Saturday 16th July, 2022 - Saving deprecated

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Podcasts

Links

Ready for more?