Saturday 28th January, 2023 - Extreme Plumbing
Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
Why the title? I think that will become obvious once you read the podcast links. The Rest is History just did a series on the rise of the Natzis in Germany in the 1930s. It’s really good. I learn lots of stuff that I had no idea about. You really get a sense for the various currents of the time and how things went the way they did. And you finish wondering if such a thing could happen again.
The conclusion is no it couldn’t. Which is easy to say now because we have the benefit of hindsight. At least it couldn’t happen in the way it happened then. If it happened again it would likely be a lot more subtle. It’s a sort of eerie conclusion, and I think today’s newsletter has ended up sort of exploring that idea. I didn’t plan it that way by the way, that’s just how the pieces arranged themselves this week.
Are we already in a subtler Natzis Germany? How would we know? Do we need to worry about self fulfilling prophesies when it comes to testing out our theories? How do we stop ourselves from creating the very thing we are trying to avoid?
Here’s the first of the 3 parter to get you started if you want to, don’t worry I haven’t spoilered it, knowing the end doesn’t at all detract from the full work, in fact in this specific situation it might make it even better:
The Natzis: The Beer Hall Putsch (The Rest is History Podcast) - https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/296-the-nazis-the-beer-hall-putsch
As far as the rest of the newsletter goes, there’s actually a load of great tech / webdev / javascript podcasts and links this week.
I’ve been continuing to migrate my RSS feeds. The Apple Podcasts support team have been really responsive, answering many of my questions. I think the podcast feed migration will likely be fine, it’s the linkblog I’m most worried about. I’m probably going to just put a redirect and face the consequences of changing the item GUIDs. I’m likely over thinking it, because most likely there aren’t many people actually subscribed. Anyhow, I’m mentioning it here in case you are subscribed. Expect that you might see some duplicates.
Although I’ll be adding a redirect, but you might want to update to using the new feeds directly in your RSS reader software:
https://markjgsmith.com/feeds
I wrote a few blog posts this week, including a couple of write-ups about the migration:
Perpetual website DAO https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/01/22/perpetual-website-dao.html
Safely Moving Your Podcast Feed https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/01/24/safely-moving-your-podcast-feed.html
The importance of good RSS feed GUIDs https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/01/25/the-importance-of-good-rss-feed-guids.html
Ok time for 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:
Doppelgänger Triggered Speculative Loading
Cafe Window Puppet Theatre
Recognising Bullying: Yah-ing a Person That You’ve Blocked
Front Running Generic Algorithm Mutations Using a Fake Reverse Lava Lamp Farm
Blocked Yah-ing vs Yah Blocking
Which Mafia Do You Want To Join? Also there Are No Mafias
The Bill Lawrence Double (Probably) Actor Troupe Infiniti Trap Min Example
Oh No They (Probably) Killed Millie Again
Pan-Generational Millie Infiniti Trap Detection
Abraham Lincoln Fake Beard Club
The problem is the solution is causing the problem
Eternal Actingance
White Whoopi Goldberg Doppelgänger Effectively Probably Said Get Outahere Punk
No Internet For You Because Vietnam (You) is Angry Again, And Later Vietnam (Again You) Will Be Angry At Being Angry And So It Will Be All Your Fault Again
The Color Ven Diagram Light Dark Infiniti Loop
All Domain & Scale Infiniti Loop Detection
The Space Karens of Rock
I Have It On Very Tenuous Authority That Charles Barclay is in-fact Mexican
The Surrender Supremacists
The Surprisingly Common Evil Manipulator Puppet Archetype
For Actors, Kryptonite Is Holiday
First Principles Thinking Dilema
Start Building Anti-Evil Manipulator Puppet Tools or Become Fake Evil Manipulator Puppet?
Be a Pretend Evil Manipulator Puppet Building Anti-Evil Manipulator Puppet Tools
Has Capacity Been Reached Yet?
Oh we are back where we started, but a lot more tired
Just assume happy paths
Oh shit a feather broke everything
The FED will eat the world, then it will eat itsel
Front Running is Now Just a Permissionless (theoretically) Gas Pedal, A Gas Pedal For the Gas Pedal
The Everything Defeating Jesus Pedal
Hows About Those Asshole Grifter Slaves Eh? Writing About Us in their Newsletters. Can You Believe it? How Dare They!
The World is Gonna Infiniti Grift And Try To Make It Look Like It’s You
Abraham Limecon
Globalism: Communism XXL
The International Community: Weaponising You Lie Tea Boy Since 2023
Extreme Plumbing
That’s all for this week.
Hoping I haven’t turned into a very futuristic kitchen sink.
Perhaps it’s unavoidable though, perhaps it’s the new famous for 15 minutes, perhaps we all turn into a kitchen sink eventually.
Podcasts
Slow-Moving Hurricane with Craig Hockenberry (Talk Show Podcast) - I generally find that John is too Elon negative, and ironically he’s one of my main sources for Elon news, because I just find myself ignoring it elsewhere because it’s just too much, anyway I do totally agree with him on Twitter’s horrendous handling of 3rd party clients, having cut them off in the past few weeks, they talk about that and also an interesting discussion about touch screen Macs and whether that could or should happen; incidentally I also found Elon’s “Let that sink in” stunt very very odd, in the strange world that I’ve been inhabiting recently that would be a sign that he’s actually just a chancer plumber who likes to make funny videos on his iPhone and see what he can get away with, but that would never happen, right? Of course Elon is always several steps ahead of everyone, so perhaps he’s a billionaire pretending to be a plumber, but then again he could be a plumber pretending to be a billionaire pretending to be a plumber; the way web development is getting so unbelievably complicated these days, it wouldn’t surprise me that being a plumber had become off the charts impossible too; I wouldn’t normally go this deep down a clearly ridiculous rabbit hole, except for the fact that about a year or so ago I saw a very very convincing Elon doppelgänger in an outdoor cafe opposite a small soup restaurant I was eating at, he had the whole place to himself, and was looking at me very curiously as I left, I wonder about base reality a lot more these days; incidentally another far out there possibility but perhaps worth considering, Elon is part of a gang of chancers, and Twitter is actually a cancel proof platform that provides a secret create your own Private Realm feature, how would you know? Maybe they just found out, and if software companies could do such a thing, wouldn’t you have to expect that entire towns or even countries would do something similar to get in on the burgeoning everything-is-fake-industrial-complex; I figure it’s probably better to mention this now rather than later https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2023/01/19/ep-367
Ben Ubois of Feedbin (Shop Talk Show) - Feels like it’s a good time to be getting your RSS feeds in order, this show might help you get the momentum needed to get into that https://shoptalkshow.com/549
Changelog News: Prioritising tech debt, ui components to copy/paste, learnings from 20 years in software, git-sim & jqjq - The tech debt comparison is quite relevant, making good decisions early on can save you so much time, but also you have to deal with the things that didn’t pan out as you expected; get the thing working but always be ready to revisit those dark corners of the codebase when you can afford to https://changelog.com/podcast/news-2023-01-23
Apple announces M2 MacBook Pros, a Mac Mini, and a new HomePod (Vergecast Podcast) - Some pretty good Elon / Twitter analysis that I enjoyed because I’ve spent the last several weeks keeping my eyes away from that carfuffle, which auto correct is trying to turn into car duffle, so I now don’t know how to spell it or even if it’s a word that I invented at some point, quafuffle? #offlineproblems https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/MjkyODk4ZTgtNDlhZS0xMWVkLWE2ZGMtOGZlNTBmMDYwYWFk?sa=X&ved=0CAgQuIEEahcKEwigy9Xjs-f8AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg
How do you define joy? Ep#265 (JS Party Podcast) - If I’m remembering right, I think this episode had one of those game shows type situations going on, good clean nerdy fun https://changelog.com/jsparty/259
Let’s Talk About John Delorean (How Stuff Works Podcast) - All about the bloke that built the car from Back To The Future, he was the Elon Musk of his day, really cray cray story in places https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/lets-talk-about-john-delorean
My Dumb Luck Ep#709 (Fake Doctors Real Friends Podcast) - Fun double length episode, though there’s a description of a really weird and dark story segment that sent my brain into Whirling Dervishes for a bit there https://omny.fm/shows/fake-doctors-real-friends-with-zach-and-donald/709-my-dumb-luck
Margaret Sullivan on the Future of Media (Techdirt Podcast) - Discussion about newsrooms, citizen journalism, social media and the demise of local news; it’s become a bit of a boring topic but their chat is pretty interesting https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjEyMjUwODA0OC9zb3VuZHMucnNz/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMTQzMjQwNTQ0MQ?sa=X&ved=0CAQQ8qgGahcKEwigy9Xjs-f8AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQCA
The Great Uprising with Vivek Ramaswamy (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - The Great Uprising with Vivek Ramaswamy (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Very interesting conversation which I got 2/3 of the way through when a complete c sat diagonally across from me and kept repeatedly punching the air directly in front of my face, clearly trying to get me angry, and trying to be some sort of big man, anyway I listened through to the end but feel like I missed the last part - In any case topics covered included the outdated left-right model of politics, the managerial class vs worker class vs creator class, a potential american cold civil war, differences between UK and US media and how that affects society at large, democracy vs monarchy vs constitutional republic, reverse affirmative action, the co-opting of the term woke and social justice vs legal justice https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-great-uprising
Why Is It So Hard To Resist Temptation? (No Stupid Questions Podcast) - All about temptations, broadly what categories exist, how they shape our character, and our societies - I’m adding this again because the link was incorrect last week, you would be surprised how many of the top podcasters have incorrect show links in their episode metadata https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-it-so-hard-to-resist-temptation
Links
Largest-yet Milky Way survey: 10TB of data, 3b objects https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/20/largest_survey_milky_way
Public Domain Day Film Contest Highlights Works of 1927 - I haven’t had a chance to watch any of these because of horrid internet connectivity for much of this week, but it totally reminds me of the Copy Left / Creative Commons era of web2.0, it really felt like people were mostly nice and liked each other online, kind of like a digital version of the 60s I suppose; these days I wonder how much of it was totally fake https://blog.archive.org/2023/01/21/public-domain-day-film-contest-highlights-works-of-1927/
What does it take to make a JavaScript framework? https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/20/what-does-it-take-to-make-a-javascript-framework/
ehmicky/modern-errors: Handle errors in a simple, stable, consistent way https://github.com/ehmicky/modern-errors
Introducing the WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration API · V8 https://v8.dev/blog/jspi
The ins-and-outs of object destructuring with vanilla JS https://gomakethings.com/the-ins-and-outs-of-object-destructuring-with-vanilla-js
Getting a subset of properties from an object with destructuring and the spread operator https://gomakethings.com/getting-a-subset-of-properties-from-an-object-with-destructuring-and-the-spread-operator
Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34469078
Things CSS Could Still Use Heading Into 2023 https://chriscoyier.net/2022/12/21/things-css-could-still-use-heading-into-2023
FT: We tried to run a social media site and it was awful https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788ebcd
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (Cory Doctorow) - Great bit of synthesising of the various tech trends du jour, I notice Cory is posting full urls instead of using anchor tags, something I’ve been doing for a while now because of a dodgy UI, but I actually like seeing the full urls, having a nice looking organised url is a feature, and I think is often correlated with article quality https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai
Things I want to see in JavaScript and Frontend development in 2023 https://paularmstrong.dev/blog/2023/01/20/javascript-and-frontend-things-to-see-in-2023
Encrypting Data in the Browser Using WebAuthn - The article content is a bit of a snooze but I sort of like the site design, nice and clean, good use of different colors in the text but not overdone, nerdy slightly terminalish font, looks good on mobile, resizing font mostly okay just generally easy to read; not really a fan of the fixed header though https://blog.millerti.me/2023/01/22/encrypting-data-in-the-browser-using-webauthn/
The Sufi Whirling Dervishes - Istanbul, Turkey
Ok that’s enough world…no bullying for you…Infiniti ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!