Saturday 18th November, 2023 - Surrounded by Bears (Issue #141)
Oh gosh it’s another one of those weeks, emergency issue, with 1 podcast, 1 article and 1 thoughtful bit of analysis :)
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
It’s been a tough week, I’m preparing this issue early. It’s Saturday, and issue #140 will be sent out in around 40 minutes time. Just want to make sure something gets sent out as the tea leaves from the past 7 days are looking narly. When you build in public, it’s sometimes a rough ride.
One topic that’s been coming up a lot recently is AI regulation. One thought that occurred to me yesterday was since we are essentially talking about intelligence, even if it isn’t the same yet as human intelligence, isn’t it essentially like regulating humans? If so, don’t we already have regulations for humans?
I guess the big difference then is that humans are not owned whereas AIs are owned. So isn’t creating AI regulations like creating a charter for slavery? Are we sure we want to do that? It would be kind of terrible if it was repurposed.
Anyway, on with this minimal issue, hopefully I’ll be able to add more to it later. The last podcast I’ve listened to and article I’ve read, both great:
Is the Bull Market Back? With Alex Thorn? (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Bitcoin price has been rising again after plateauing for quite a while. Some interesting discussion around the current and future bitcoin environment.
Write your own terminal - There isn’t any code, but the author lays out what you need to build to get a minimum viable terminal up and running. There’s not that much to it, at least for the basics. It’s a cool project idea because you can use the thing you are building as you’re building it, which is very motivational. https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/write-your-own-terminal
Update: It’s Friday now, I’ve made it through the week, things picked up a bit the past few days. I’ve added a few more links below. Here’s another pod that was pretty great:
Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism Ep#565 (Changelog Interviews Podcast) - Great interview and conversation, looking at tech but through the lenses of science fiction, government policy and freedom. https://changelog.com/podcast/565
Links
How to Build a Server-Side React App Using Vite and Express - It's essentially a minimal example that demonstrates data fetching and server side rendering (SSR) with a browser client that hydrates the app with a copy of the fetched data that is stored in a <script> tag on the SSR'd page. It's pretty cool, though I'm a little confused by the statement at the beginning saying that it isn't using a framework, when it clearly is using React. Reguardless, it's an imformative tutorial, uses Express to serve the app, with a vite development server that Express loads as a middleware. It all seems suprisingly straight forward. https://markjgsmith.com/links/2023/11/15/105700-thenewstack.io
Lots more links on the daily linkblog, and they often include extra context links which there isn’t an easy way to include in substack. Please check them out:
https://markjgsmith.com/links
Notes
The elephant in the room - The thing that we aren't talking about when it comes to AI, is that essentially we are enslaving intelligences. And it matters a lot because we, the humans that are doing this, are intelligences ourselves. That's obviously very problematic.
We have only just gotten out of the trap that is slavery relatively recently, and we are sleep walking right back into an even bigger slavery trap.
That's the bottom line, and nobody is talking about it because in the short term many people are making money. https://markjgsmith.com/notes/2023/11/13/091700-markjgsmith.com
Kind of dark stuff in the notes this week. That’s life sometimes. There’s also more details about my development work. Please check them out:
https://markjgsmith.com/notes
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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