Saturday 29th October, 2022 - Captain Elon

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Oct 29, 2022

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

So much has happened since my last email. Where to start?

The world economy is going off into a bit of a whirlpool of doom, because somehow we managed to pull the plug on it, and everything and everyone is slowly getting sucked into it. Oh noes!

Fear not though because though some of us may die, the world will be a better place. And Elon took over Twitter and brought an actual sink with him on his first day.

His plan is abundantly clear: make a scaled down model of the entire world economy, add small boats and micro machines, simulate everything until we know what’s going on, solar panels and then all tweet about it at the exact same time, causing an electromagnetic gravity wave pulse to be transmitted far out into the galaxy. Simples.

If you aren’t being fooled by my incredibly upbeat nonsense, you are right. Everything is still rather shit. But it’s funny shit.

Honestly I think the best approach might be to delete money entirely, attack world wide poverty together like it was world war 3, rebuild everything, then re-instate money.

As far as development on my ssg goes, I was hoping to have something ready for today, but that’s looking like it will happen in the next few days instead. I have all the old data converting correctly from json to markdown, and the site is working with test data, so it’s just about putting pieces together and doing tedious stuff like creating repos and adding deploy keys, and that sort of thing, which isn’t something that’s easy to do o when useful access to internet is spotty. It’s also not helped much by people doing cognitive load ddos attacks on me almost everywhere I go. Anyway, I hope to have a v1 up and running by next weekend. Prepare to be bigly underwhelmed.

Lots of podcasts with commentary and most of the links are about Elon this week.

PS - Check out the Elon doppelgänger tweet, it’s pretty funny. Strange thing is that since I’ve been stuck out here unexpectedly because of COVID, I’ve seen doppelgängers of pretty much every single person I know. Including doppelgängers that look like brothers and sisters of the people I know. Seriously. It’s so weird.

Podcasts

Fake Legs Till You Make Legs (JS Party Podcast) - I feel like this episode should win some sort of award for the title, 1000 monkeys typing on typewriters for 1000 years wouldn’t have been able to come up with that, it’s genius; pretty funny episode too, also I feel like Jerod has been playing footsie with someone out there in recent Changelog episodes, best of luck bro https://changelog.com/jsparty/248
Balaji Srinivasan - How to fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA - Ep#331 (Lex Fridman Podcast) - This one is so epic, it’s almost tantric, at several points Lex appears to have drifted off into a srinivasan meditative coma; it’s also pretty great with interesting analysis of most of the active topics dujour; at the 7 hour mark it occurred to me that Balaji is an audio dead ringer for inventor of the hash tag and fast sense talker Chris Messina, who is on the weekend episodes of the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast; Balaji must be from a future timeline though as he sounds like Chris will no doubt sound in 10-15 years https://lexfridman.com/balaji-srinivasan
Xi Jinping’s vulgar display of power and it’s target was aimed at you and me (Eurodollar University Podcast) - Some interesting hot takes on the situation in China following the shunning of Xi’s predecessor idealist technocrat at the party conference; looks like a course to nationalist China has been set, wither international co-operation, but perhaps the action is somewhat justified https://share.transistor.fm/s/fd4e5437
Investing in Chinese Tech Means Investing in 1 Man’s Whim’s (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast) - More analysis about the current China situation that is developing https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RlY2htZW1lLXJpZGVob21l/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL0NPSHlqMWFydlVlaW9WU3EtOUU2WFBKVXFucXFmTjdpdlZ4NkhGdjlWOWs?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiQ5dmbsIT7AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg
Javascript Testing (Vanilla Javascript Podcast) - Mostly I’m on the same page as this though I do separate unit and integration tests with unit tests testing individual functions, and integration tests testing larger chunks, mocking out 3rd party services, using database seed data etc, and I haven’t had the chance yet to do proper end-to-end tests using browser tools like cypress https://vanillajspodcast.com/javascript-testing
Kanye ‘Ye’ West Interview #Ep332 (Lex Fridman Podcast) - One thing that stood out to me immediately is the way Lex interacts with Kanye is very different to all other guests, it’s noticeably odd, it’s like they already know each other very well, like they have been bickering friends for years; Kanye attempts to describe a dynamic that I’ve definitely seen and experienced, but it’s very hard to describe because it happens to be tangled up in words and cultural norms; I think it’s real, but I’m not convinced it’s something only black people experience, it’s like being trapped in an invisible Bermuda Triangle that nobody else can see, things, events, history, language itself, are all setup and organised in such a way that trying to describe the situation and dynamic makes the situation worse, like quicksand; we don’t have a way to describe it yet, and it’s strange, but remember in the future everything is miscellaneous; the “My people are sick” bit is very powerful, personally I just wish I could find “my people” whatever that means https://lexfridman.com/ye-aka-kanye-west
4th Quarter Macro Overview w/ Luke Groman BTC101 (We Study Billionaires - Bitcoin Podcast) - More high quality China stuff, through a macro Bitcoin lens, also Russian oil, the dire energy situation in the EU, who are being propped up by US liquid gas shipments, we are in a mad whirlpool of doom https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RoZS1pbnZlc3RvcnMtcG9kY2FzdA/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL01IWkt6TGZjdEFOM0FwVzdkNWtRNy1XY3JhajA5dUZ6THBxejBmS0gxdmM?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwiQ5dmbsIT7AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQGA
How Cheap Credit Distorts Money with Joe Consorti (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - I found this episode really useful in my ongoing side quest to understand the monetary system https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/how-cheap-credit-distorts-money
Meta (Insert Bomb Emoji Here) Thu 10/27 - Some interesting coverage of the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RlY2htZW1lLXJpZGVob21l/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL0h4LUhlSGZiTk1WbDd5MUp3ZVV3WldQVU53WmRZNXpLTXpWOE5tZlh1QXc?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiQ5dmbsIT7AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQDw
Trafalgar: Victory Ep#245 (The Rest is History Podcast) - Listened to this yesterday, so today everyone in my head, Elon, Kanye, Lex, everyone at the Verge and Changelog and the Techmeme army are all dressed up in 18th century sea regalia outfits, brandishing swords and firing cannons, and we all won, the war against ourselves! It’s a giant massively distributed, loosely coupled, web fleet all fighting battles that are incredibly important so that we save humanity! https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/245-trafalgar-victory

Mark Smith’s Newsletter

Saturday 29th October, 2022 - Captain Elon

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Podcasts

Links