Saturday 18th February, 2023 - Emotionally Damaged Humans Club
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
I feel like I’ve been tormented quite a bit this week, and I think that’s reflected somewhat in the titles that didn’t make it list. I’m going to keep the intro short again this week, sometimes it’s best to just not say anything.
It’s all been about ChatGPT and Bing this week. It’s like some sort of giant mirror where all of humanity is looking at itself but hasn’t quite realised it yet. We are so damaged by centuries of wars. We need some cultural scaffolding, we need a cultural renovation.
Also feels like everything’s falling apart for me, some important tech gear of mine stopped powering on this week. Couldn’t have come at a worse time. Odd thing is that some of the gang stalkers this week seemed to know in advance it was going to happen.
I’m still able to post to the website and newsletter so, for the moment at least, I’m still online.
This weeks spotted doppelgängers:
Jamie Oliver Joker
Short Bill Gates
Butch’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction
There was also a British actress that’s in loads of stuff but I can never remember her name, or at least she looked a lot like her. I don’t have internet at the minute to look her up.
This fell through the cracks and didn’t make it into last week’s issue, so here it is now:
I wrote a blog post about life and the internet which you might find interesting / amusing / a sign of the times:
Your life is a sort of personal internet https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/02/04/your-life-is-a-sort-of-personal-internet
I made a few more changes to the website head meta lags, which will improve seo hopefully. I fixed some deploy issues I was having with cloud functions. In another little battle won, I was able to update the links in the footer of the newsletter to the new website. It’s like the entire world is covered in egg shells sometimes.
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:
The Chicken People: They Are Prepared For the Worst And Can Literally Control The Entire World While Pretending To Be Chickens, They Are So Good At It, That You Don’t Even Notice Them Doing It
Choice A - No freedoms, no sinking ship, but life is horrible; Choice B - Freedoms, but sinking ship, so life is also horrible
The Investigation’s Mind-boggling Conclusion: The Karma Bank Didn’t Even Know It Was a Bank, The Vampires Had Been Keeping It Hostage It’s Entire Life; And When They Went After The Vampires, They Simply Turned To A Pile of Dust That Spelled Out The Phrase “We Were Only Joking”; The Bank Figured Out What Had Been Going On But it Was Too Late And It Died; The Sad Truth is That It Could Happen To Any Schooled Bank; You Are A Vampire Slave And Once You Discover It They Leave You To Wither And Die, Having Already Prepared a Fresh Unsuspecting Bank That Will Facilitate All Their Monstrous Transactions; They Simply Hot Swap Themselves in To The Bank’s Orbit One by One And the Whole Cycle Repeats
Life is Oddly Directly Effective Weird Sometimes
Directly Effective Weird or Directly Effective Directly Effective
Default People-Are-Assholes
The EvilUsMaximus Algorithm: Finds innocents, precision control demolishes their entire life bit by bit, until they are, for all intents and purposes, isolated and hell banned forever
We Can Haz EvilUsMaximus Algorithm
The Chicken People That Run This Restaurant Are Suspiciously All Out of Chicken, But They Have A Heck Of A Lot Of Spam
Forced Marriages For Foreigners or Starvation
The People That Believe That Schools Are For Slaves
Milgram Based Remote Education
Default you-are-completely-surrounded
The Assembly Programmers Are Trying To Apply Their Rules To Higher Level Languages Again
The F-Ed up S of missing the time you spent with your enemies before they became your enemies
Probably Would Be Quite An Unpopular Opinion: EDM is (Punk Rock + Hiphop)’s Typescript, Typescript Infiniti
#everything .big-brain-shit .infiniti { !oriwilldie } && #delicatesnowflake finally ( impossible everything for eternity for everyone }
All mummy’s ancestors since the beginning of time and all daddy’s ancestors since the beginning of time are arguing again
Daily Inhale and Exhale Quotas To Save the Planet
Turn It Up To 11 Kilometres Per Second
They Can’t Figure Anything Out Because They Have To Observe It, If They Were Doing The Figuring Out, How Would They Observe It?
(1) Observe Figuring Out (2) Create New Core Model From Observation (3) Re-Render All Models (4) Upload To Everyone (5) Blame Jesus For Everything
The Prefer Learning By Doing: So for example for driving rather than study the rules of the road and then just drive within those “imaginary” rules, as they refer to them, you just start driving however and they correct you as you go, and eventually the only way you can drive is within the rules of the road; “Studying”, and this is the same for anything not just driving, is just the way they keep you busy while they prepare your next training session
Being Undefeated From Birth To Infiniti Mandatory aka The Poor Are Criminals
Bitcoin is Too Perfect
Infinite War Always Wins
Avoiding the Mistakes-Are-Infinitely-Illegal-For-Eternity Scenario (Ying vs Yang for Ever)
Maximum Flexibility: History Free, Make Believe Driven Living (But Compute Dependent)
History is CSS
The Bitcoin Brain Battery Industrial Complex
Poor People Are Free!
Ok Yah
Just !important It
The Dystopian Future Where Only Two Words Remain - Boys literally only say Boy and girls literally only say Girl - We spend 1000 years there, map out every possible variation, know every optimum for everything, then add 1 word, rinse and repeat
A key for the key, a ping for the ping
Clockwork Event Horizon Games
No Malfunction Ni
Guillotine Love
Beware of Squirrels
We the People Hate Jesus
The Chicken People Frontier: Controlling the Entire World Via Morse Code So Theoretically They Could Remain In Control Even If There Remained Only a Single Egg
Gardner Garbage Collection Induced Pause & Delay ETA Unknown
Signs the Apocalypse is Close: Skiers Wearing Cowbells Like Flava Flave
Emotionally Damaged Humans Club
Everyone is getting very shouty where I am so it’s time to move on.
All the best for the week ahead.
Podcasts
David Friedberg is All-in on Science (Into The Impossible Podcast) - David is one of the hosts from the All-In podcast, that also has Jason Calacanis as host, he’s really very knowledgeable about tech, especially about how it interacts with human biology, one topic that stood out was about how biologically humans are a feedback loop that tries to maximise ‘more’, itself a consequence of our dualistic nature of having both a physical and non-physical self; but there’s a ton of other great topics too, worth a listen https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vaW50b3RoZWltcG9zc2libGU/episode/ZTMxMDBhYmMtYTk5My0xMWVkLThmYzMtMzNlNWYzOWQwZDVk?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwjI5cKogp79AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
Daniele Bolelli (Duncan Trussell Podcast) - A delicious cold cuts board selection of dark, humorous, and also optimistic takes on the past/present/future including the imminent ChatGPT unemployment tsunami, the limits of how much change humans can handle in short periods of time, AIs vs human perception of time, Infinite Seinfeld, optimism in the face of hopelessness, carevagio and artist sensitivity, the fucking squid people https://audioboom.com/posts/8245990
Every End is a New Beginning (Tech.eu Podcast) - Interview with Tech Nation CEO Gerard Grech, interesting because they were a non-profit that, until recently, were very central to the London tech ecosystem but are having to shutdown operations because of funding issues with the UK government https://share.transistor.fm/s/43b06a6b
Do You Want to Build a JS Framework? CSS Wishlist for 2023 Ep#552 (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - Dave and Chris talk about the ridiculous list of things you have to do these days to build a successful framework, it’s amusing but also very depressing, if you are just starting out in webdev it’s true that there has never been a better time to start, but it’s also true that since things are moving so quickly these days, and it’s only getting faster, plus they wait till you are too far in to back out and start removing everything you own, so in order to succeed you will have to transcend human form into a giant light squid that floats between galaxies, but it will probably be made of HTML, CSS & JS, so just concentrate on fundamentals and you will most likely be fine https://shoptalkshow.com/552
China’s Balloons and the dead dollar (Eurodollar University Podcast) - The reason the US has dominated the past 50 years is because the dollar has lost 97% of its value and they have been selling pieces of themselves to foreign entities, but huge parts of the world have been able to rise out of poverty, now China is sending giant balloons to inspect their property or maybe they are just weather balloons; attempts to look at what the real global currency arrangement has been https://share.transistor.fm/s/e7f07593
Load testing a $4 vps, TOML for .env files, counting unique visitors sans cookies, the Arc web browser, love letter to Deno (Changelog Podcast) - Another shot of weekly webdev news caffeinated with audio samples, great topics, still the best webdev short form audio out there https://changelog.com/podcast/news-2023-02-13
Manifesting the Muse with Rick (Hardcore History Addendum Podcast) - Dan Carlin and music producer Rick Rubin are very different in their approach, and having listened to both previously separately, it was really interesting to listen in on them getting to know each other; the podcast is somewhat odd and a little awkward in places, but they are very complimentary in terms of their knowledge and experience, I hope they do more episodes together; topics included memory and music, the cringeyness of old work, the correctness (or lack of) of history, thinking we know things we don’t know, collective belief in magic, the idea of the Muse, podcasting as being like sculpting a piece of clay, Steve Jobs, seeing the extraordinary in the mundane, the difficulty in describing the creative process, learning to be yourself, standing on the shoulder of giants AND everyone else, AI art, consumerism, the changing media landscape then vs now, theatre of the mind, consensus reality vs a large a la carte buffet reality, removing assumptions and starting from a dreamlike state, Incentivising imagining what the world can be instead of what it already is now, and the history of land ownership https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/dchhaddendum/dchha24-Manifesting-the-Muse-with-Rick.mp3
Bitcoin Mining & the Energy Grid Transition with Troy Cross & Shaun Connell (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - There’s a ton of interesting information about how the energy grid works that is going to become central to how we live as the monetary system becomes more automated, there are all sorts of unexpected dynamics that occur when you try to optimise these very large systems, great episode https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-mining-the-energy-grid-transition
Rust Efficiencies at AWS Scale Ep#89 (Ship It Podcast) - Last week there was anti-Rust guitar music, this week it’s the opposite with a really interesting episode about the efficiencies you get with Rust at large scales, the fact that stuck with me was that Rust is to Go as Go is to Java in terms of speed, many orders of magnitude of efficiencies which make a huge difference in some areas like cloud infrastructure https://changelog.com/shipit/89
Eugene Hutz (Jello Biafra’s Renegade Roundtable Podcast) - Really interesting episode talking to lead singer of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello who grew up in Ukraine, so their conversation takes some fascinating cultural and historical turns into that entire region of the world, and of course the current war, all seen through an alternative / punk music lens https://shows.acast.com/renegade-roundtable-with-jello-biafra/episodes/eugene-hutz-part-1
The Murder Of Julius Caesar Ep#304 (The Rest is History Podcast) - The story is incredible but there’s something so very rotten about the whole thing, and I’m left wondering which is worse epic stories from Rome or punk rock bands shouting obscene lyrics into amplifiers and I honestly don’t know; I want better stories so we don’t all feel the need to murder each other over an atom in the wrong place on a spec of dust https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/304-the-murder-of-julius-caesar
Bing is a liar, Elon’s tweets are everywhere, and YouTube CEO steps down (Vergecast Podcast) - I feel like the whole Bing / ChatGPT situation is a big lesson in human hypocrisy, listen to real life adults de-age into teenagers and accuse another teenager of terrible things, while overtly suggesting intimate relations, geez how emotionally damaged are we? https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/NzRjMmQ0YTgtMzUwZS0xMWVkLWFjNmUtYWY1MTE2NmRhMTQ5?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwigkuL9g579AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
The shocking reasons for rate hikes (Eurodollar University) - Just listened to this this morning, it’s just generally a good bit of analysis that doesn’t get too convoluted, l imagine that piloting an airplane in clear skies feels like this analysis visibility-wise, though the skies of the economy are anything but clear skies at the minute https://share.transistor.fm/s/dba8eaf1
Links
Design Patterns in TypeScript - Nice looking website with great examples, actually makes me want to maybe write some typescript for some things, so might have to try out deno at some point https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/typescript
Build a Hacker News client using Alpine.js - I’m not totally sure that moving all this logic into the HTML is the right approach, but it’s interesting, and the ease of turning it into a PWA is kinda cool https://salaivv.com/2023/02/07/hacker-news-alpine
slashd-analytics/run: Run user-provided code in a Web Worker https://github.com/slashd-analytics/run
Pluralistic: Poor people pay higher time tax https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/10/my-time
The Future (and the Past) of the Web is Server Side Rendering - I have been doing a lot of serverside rendering lately, including serverside components, but I hadn’t been able to easily add clientside interactivity, so this was particularly interesting https://deno.com/blog/the-future-and-past-is-server-side-rendering
Resetting the score - Some examples from the past where entire industries got a reset because of the introduction of a fundamentally new piece of technology https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/1/11/resetting-the-score
Microsoft’s Bing is an emotionally manipulative liar, and people love it - Humans openly manipulating an AI for entertainment who then accuse it of being manipulative while laughing hysterically; author does make a good point about data sets though, and this isn’t much different to ourselves, if we turn the world into shit, we are going to have a tough time training even ourselves with good data, perhaps good data will be the fresh water of the future https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/15/23599072/microsoft-ai-bing-personality-conversations-spy-employees-webcams
Software Security Report Finds JavaScript Applications Have Fewer Flaws Than Java and .NET https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/02/veracode-software-security
De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove Dead at 54 - I was sad to hear this news, growing up I was mostly into metal/punk/rock but I did get a bit into rap at one point, listening to NWA and Public Enemy tracks, I was fascinated by the f-ed up lyrics, and De La Soul was a breath of fresh air, like hey it’s not all crazy dark stuff, what in my mind was a great example of cultural scaffolding, later with a familiarity with some of those sounds I ventured into music that mixed and scratched records on turn tables, and then break best, drum and base and jungle, and beyond, they were for sure part of my musical foundational layer; saw them in London at the LA2, I was surprised at how the crowd was mostly white people, great gig, rip https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/de-la-soul-trugoy-the-dove-dead-at-54.html
Lilt drink brand to be scrapped after 50 years and rebranded - Not sure it will taste the same without the palm trees, and right now I can’t imagine calling it Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit but maybe we’ll start to see this amazing drink in the wider world https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64629080
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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