Saturday 13th January, 2024 - Everything Bitcoin (Issue #149)
Bitcoin ETFs, Bitcoin history, generative AI legal discussion, webdev juniors vs AI, and my website’s new incredibly sexy everything RSS feed. Lol worst issue desc ever. Brain full.
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
The week was pretty atrocious for me in many ways, sorry this issue feels a bit rushed and disorganised, there’s still some great podcasts though, but let’s focus on good things…
They approved the Bitcoin ETF! So that’s pretty cool :)
I made some great progress on my website’s everything RSS feed.
Hence this week’s issue title.
It’s not investment advice. Please drink responsibly :)
So yeah the good news as for my static site generator is that I got the new per item RSS feeds deployed on the website. It includes an everything feed, so you only have to subscribe to 1 feed, but you can also use the individual ones. They are full text feeds too so you can read everything in your feed reader. The newsletter still has to be read on Substack though.
I’m working on the redesigned homepage. The plan is to have it display all post types interleaved as they occur. I think it will look great, but I need to update the archives and maybe the source data too so it isn’t totally straight forward.
Substack still won’t let me schedule posts like everyone else clearly can. They closed my support case without even trying to contact me! What’s up with that? Anyone know any good substack replacements? Please email me with suggestions.
I wrote several blog posts this week, trying to get back in the habit, trying to have a balance between links, blogs and notes now that the feeds have been updated. Check them out here:
Everything feed operational - Some notes after completing the website’s new everything RSS feed. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2024/01/11/everything-feed-operational
NYT vs OpenAI oddity - Something about the recent rebutal kept reminding me of something, I couldn't figure out what it was. Then of course I did figure it out. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2024/01/11/nyt-vs-openai-oddity
Viewing the everything feed - Describing some things you can do if the new everything RSS feed doesn’t display all that well in your feed reader. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2024/01/12/viewing-the-everything-feed
Writing annoyances - Listing of the current writing annoyances that get in the way of writting blog posts. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2024/01/12/writing-annoyances
Causing the problems they complain about - I had some more starter incidents happen to me at some food places and a shop. These type of incidents always get escallated to infiniti. It literally happens every time. So I‘m detailing them here so I have something to link to. It‘s also to try and paint an accurate picture of what it’s like here. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2024/01/12/causing-the-problems-they-complain-about
And on to the stuff you are all no doubt here for…
Podcasts
New Year’s Party Ep#306 (JS Party Podcast) - This is a spill over from new year’s. There’s some great discussion around new developer training in a future where AI has run amock, and some webdev predictions and resolutions for 2024. https://changelog.com/jsparty/306
It’s already the year of AI again (Vergecast Podcast) - As per usual covering all the essential current topics with style and humour. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/ZjdjMWM4MzYtODRiZS0xMWVlLTk4MWMtNjcyMmYyOWRhMDBj?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwjI-JO72teDAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQDg
What is Bitcoin? with Robert Breedlove Ep#204 (Bankless Podcast) - A tour de force of Bitcoin fundamentals via the pretty fascinating history of money. Focusing in on life, liberty and property. Confirms something I’ve been saying for a while now, that steeling someone’s freedom is equivalent to murder. https://www.bankless.com/early-access-what-is-bitcoin-with-robert-breedlove
The I in LLM stands for intelligence (Changelog News Podcast) - Generally a good bit of tech news but I added it because in a strange bit of synchronicity they have a story about a person that caused all sorts of chaos at npm when they created an ‘everything’ package. It’s synchronous because the day before I listened to the episode I released my new everything RSS feed in the website. What are the chances? https://changelog.com/news/76
How Adobe is managing the copyright dilemma, with general council Dena Rao (Decoder Podcast) - This was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be especially when they got into talking about the intricacies of how they are handling generative AI. Adobe has spent many years thinking about such things since that’s their wheelhouse. It’s interesting that their solution feels very developerish, basically version control, show the base image and all edits you’ve made so people can trust what they are seeing doesn’t depart to much from reality. I’m not sure how you prove the base image is real though. Anyhow worth listening to. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vcmVjb2RlZGVjb2Rl/episode/MjYyYjA4ZDgtNjEzYi0xMWVlLTkwZTAtZjNiZTEzN2Y3MDJh?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahgKEwjI-JO72teDAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQkAQ
The Genesis of Bitcoin with Aaron Van Wirdum (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Winner of the most oddly brilliant surname competition, Aaron delivers another awesome bitcoin history podcast, but this is through a much more technical lens, looking back at the evolution from austrian economists like Hayek to the Cypherpunk and Extropian movements and all the various groups that ultimately paved the path to where we are now. I’m only about 1/2 through listening to this, and I’m really enjoying it. Fascinating story. It’s about some of the cool parts of the internet before the world wide web even really existed. https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-genesis-of-bitcoin
Links
Lots of interesting links this week. You can find them all by scrolling up. Please check them out:
https://markjgsmith.com/links/2024/01/#08Jan2024
Notes
The new permalinks also work for notes, you can see them all here. Again to see the notes for the whole week just scroll up:
https://markjgsmith.com/notes/2024/01/#08Jan2024
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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