Saturday 24th September, 2022 - The Infiniti Book Club
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
The title of this week’s issue is inspired by the future of the future piece I wrote a few week’s back. It was of course fiction, but it was based on my current life experiences, and my knowledge of what tech is ahead, so in a way it’s not fiction. It’s my best description of where I think things could go, it often feels to me like it’s already like this in a lot of ways. I make no pronouncements on whether it’s good or bad. Anyway I’m calling it the Infinity Book Club, but I could quite as easily have called it the God Book Club or You Think Things are Weird Now…
Unrelated / Related:
That’s totally a thing that happens sometimes! I have no idea how or why, but it does. Seriously. And it gets even weirder. Much weirder.
Great film btw, you also need to have seen the series Spaced to fully appreciate the joke. One of the best series ever made, really worth watching. When it came out it was very “Alt-British” before alt got corrupted into something bad. It was the sort of Britain I was experiencing, but that wasn’t being written about.
I’ve had my head in RSS all week, building some RSS plugins for my ssg. It’s mostly working, you drop a BlogFeed/LinkblogFeed/PodcadtFeed component into your template, add some frontmatter, and at rendertime it generates the feeds. You position the feeds on your site where you want using file based routing. It’s pretty cool.
The blog and linkblog feeds are generated in xml, atom and json formats. The podcast feed is a single file with enclosures and the necessary custom stuff for iTunes.
There is still an issue with the atom feed for my linkblog that I am debugging. It works fine for the blog so it’s likely just some quirky difference in the data.
One neat feature of the ssg is that it’s possible to customise how the data is inserted into the feed too. So if you wanted to create feeds for other type of data, it’s very straight forward.
One correction from last weeks issue’s doppelgänger watch section, the lookalike I saw on a scooter wasn’t Matt Groening, it was Matt Stone! I’m not a huge cartoon nerd, so I get the names mixed up. I had meant to check it out, but with all the technical issues I had sending out the issue, that got missed. Anyhow looked him up, and it really looked like him, even more so than I had thought at the time. Strange world we live in.
Bad news on the mutilations front. The gang stalker cycle happened again! The mutilations on my leg are almost fully healed, then a mysterious set of situations occur where I get blocked from changing the bandages for approx 1/2 a day, then the next morning new mutilations have appeared. Then lots of anger goading ensues over the next few days. It’s basically the same pattern every time. :(
Enough about that. All will be well. I hope.
Podcasts
Bitcoin Security & Freedom With Pascal Gauthier (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Great episode, it ends a bit weirdly though, I honestly couldn’t tell who said what to whom, entente cordial! https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-security-freedom
Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence and Immortality Ep #321 (Lex Fridman Podcast) - The legendary futurologist speaks about the future, great episode https://lexfridman.com/ray-kurzweil
Stable Diffusion Breaks the Internet (Changelog Podcast) - This AI stuff is nuts, and now it’s like totally open source, OMG https://changelog.com/podcast/506
Less Context Switching with Esteban Vargas of Watermelon Ep #109 - I hadn’t heard about this tool before, it’s incredibly popular, I like the idea though, find relevant stuff using the line of code you are on (Jamstack Radio Podcast) https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/jamstack-radio/ep-109-less-context-switching-with-esteban-vargas-of-watermelon
Are the benefits of Samouri Wallet’s light client mode a benefit to users (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - This discussion gets kind of heated, it feels like it gets to some of the core issues in crypto, there are some contradictions lurking that we are slowly closing in on, it feels like ambiguity might be unavoidable in some places, and in a world where devs are being arrested for writing code, might start to become a trend, everything-is-a-mixer oh noes! https://anchor.fm/citadeldispatch/episodes/CD76-DEBATE-Are-the-tradeoffs-of-Samourai-Wallets-light-client-mode-a-benefit-to-users-e1o31mu
Will the future of music be a lot like the past? (Vergecast Podcast) - 4 part series that looks at the tech trends in music, with a healthy amount of music past and present dropped in, all summarised in the shownotes https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/NmQ3ZDlkZjQtMGMxZS0xMWVkLTlhODAtYWJmZWYxNjQyZjJh?sa=X&ved=0CAcQuIEEahcKEwjYr5-E8qn6AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
Luis J Gomez (Duncan Trussell Podcast) - Duncan’s intro on this episode made me laugh, then it made me angry, then I was just sad, I think it highlights in it’s own weird, surreal and very very gross way, the utter strangeness of having a monarch that entire nations dearly love, the interview is interesting too, many amusing anecdotes and strange entanglements about life as a comedian https://audioboom.com/posts/8159386
Fluent Cupertinoese with Nilay Patel (Talk Show Podcast) - My first thought after hitting play, I hadn’t read the full show title, was oh cool it’s Nilay from Vergecast, then I realised I’d heard him with John before but that was before I started listening to the Vergecast; anyhow it’s interesting to hear Nilay outside of Vergecast, John’s show is such a different pace, I feel like the first part of the show they were doing some complicated ssh handshake, which upon completion allowed Nilay to be upgraded to full-Nilay, then they both settle into a great episode, that they clearly both enjoy, lots of fine detail appley stuff, and also a really interesting discussion about the Vergecast redesign and the open web in general https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2022/09/20/ep-357
Short stuff: Laugh tracks (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) - This short and sweet mini episode made me smile and lol, but also very interesting https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-laugh-tracks
Last minute addition while I’m waiting for a loading spinner: King Charles' less formal photo as working monarch - I image it’s nice not to have loading spinners and dodgy internet connections when one is doing important stuff https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63011493
Links
The future of the future - Scroll a bit to get to this piece I wrote about the crazy future
SafeQL - Linter for your sql queries https://safeql.dev
The hyperinflation gallery: examples of hyperinflationary banknotes from around the world https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/hyper
Why and how of blogging https://om.co/2022/09/16/why-and-how-of-blogging
Queen's name inscribed on family chapel stone at Windsor https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62974008
Slack decides to add document editing features, moving it into Google Docs and Notion territory https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23361717/slack-canvas-documents-messaging-google-notion?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
Discussing Backend For Front-end - Interesting area to explore, I’ve been wondering if frontend engineers should work on the frontend of the client AND the frontend of the API, and the same for backend engineers, that way the whole team gets exposure to both client and server programming, thus reducing the gap between the two groups https://blog.frankel.ch/backend-for-frontend
Last minute addition while I’m waiting for a loading spinner: King Charles' less formal photo as working monarch - I imagine it’s nice not to have loading spinners and dodgy internet connections when one is doing important stuff https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63011493
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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