Mark Smith's Newsletter
Saturday 27th August, 2022 - Actual red come cruelty
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Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
Short intro, comments scattered throughout the links. Last week's Salman Rushdie edition had no podcasts, but there's loads of them this week, and they are all awesome.
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There's been a noticeable uptick in co-ordinated gang stalking activity where I am. It's all very strange and often feels like a good versus evil type scenario. It's very unpleasant at times. I don't know how to talk about it. Best I can do is make a few notes, so I can remember, and move on. I dunno maybe this is what "smart cities" are like, at times a bit pan-opticonish. Sorry if it sounds weird, I'm just trying to describe the world around me. I hope things start to settle down.
The Fantasy Podcast League continues to gather momentum, at least in my over-active imagination. It will no doubt feel very normal in a few weeks, in a world with GPT3, DALLE, brain implants, autonomous self driving cars, super intelligent sentient AI, and the rest, I feel like it's probably a good idea to lean in to the craziness a bit. The rate of change is only going to increase.
Great things are happening with my ssg development. The past two weeks have been quite difficult going because of a base layer refactor that was necessary, and it had some knock on effects.
I had to make various assumptions and guesses in the original implementation around how the code reads and writes files to the filesystem. All things considered, I wasn't too far off in my estimation, and I was aware that a refactoring was going to be necessary, but I wanted to wait until things were mostly working. And that time was now.
Quite an uphill struggle though, especially because the world around me is like a big cauldron of reflections, everything I write, including code, seems to get reflected back at me in some insane and bizarre way. That might not make a lot of sense, it's difficult to describe. It's probably the metaverse.
Progress is frustratingly slow at times. You don't realise how great good internet access is until you don't got it no more.
I'm going to totally steel a sign-off for this issue, which I really like, because I can't think of one, and I really need to go to sleep. Hat tip to Vergecast. Rock and roll.
Mutilations update - these have nearly cleared up on both of my legs, it's the 3rd or 4th time now, each time they nearly clear up, there is a massive gang stalker campaign, followed by the appearance of new mutilations. Maybe this time it will be different. Not much I can do apart from note it, and keep the wounds clean. Hope to be mutilation free by next weekend.
The artists re-framing Chicago (Far Flung Podcast) - This is more art & community than tech but I love the audio documentary style, fantastic story telling, interviews with local people doing interesting things in "space based art" https://player.fm/series/far-flung-with-saleem-reshamwala/the-artists-re-framing-chicago
William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress and Cultural Innovation - I listened to this quite a while ago now, it was going to be in last week's issue which was fraught with difficulties, I don't remember much apart from that it was a thoroughly interesting discussion and also his way of talking really reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg for some reason, but Scottish of course (Conversations with Tyler Podcast) https://cowenconvos.libsyn.com/william-macaskill
The Origins of Breakfast Foods (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) - I really enjoyed listening to this as a nice break from tech overload; who doesn't love a great breakfast? When I first started traveling it was weird to me that in many places people eat dinner style food in the mornings, now I absolutely love it, and western breakfasts seem a bit strange, but I love them too :) https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-origins-of-breakfast-foods
The Drive at Five with Robin and Dan (Tech.eu Podcast) - I love this new format, a weekly discussion of the week's european tech scene, it's quirky and unpolished, great compliment to the usual interview episodes https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-origins-of-breakfast-foods
The Power of eBPF (Changelog Podcast) - eBPF has been on my radar for a little over a year, it's a way for userspace code to make safely make changes to the kernel, lots of new tools starting to make use of it https://changelog.com/podcast/501
Code, Nyms and Life with @r0ckstardev Ep #74 (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - Really interesting conversation about what privacy means in the modern world, with a web3 / tech focus, celebrating the end of an online identity that has become too exposed https://citadeldispatch.com/cd74
Duncan Trussell: Comedy, Sentient Robots, Suffering, Love & Burning Man Ep #302 (Lex Fridman Podcast) - I think both these guys are great, so I'm really happy they met, the conversation doesn't disappoint, they explore some super interesting places, I love it when worlds collide like this, faroutscience meets crazyfuntown https://lexfridman.com/duncan-trussell
Fractional Reserve, Base Money & Bitcoin with Mathew Mežinski (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Lots of eye opening discussion about how the money system really works in practice https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/fractional-reserve-base-money-bitcoin
The Corruption of Power with Maajid Nawad (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Really reminds me of being in London, his clarity of thought on incredibly socially difficult topics related to extremism is very impressive, so many interesting stories and so much information to absorb; I find the arabic names very difficult to remember, I feel like I need to listen to this again, for some reason he reminds me of DJ extraordinaire Tim Sweeney from Beats in Space https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-corruption-of-power
The Fabulous Bill Barrett (Hardcore History Podcast) - I wasn't thinking I'd be into this, but as soon as the clips start you realise how unbelievably good the bloke was, podcast classic https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/dchhaddendum/ep22_The_Fabulous_Bill_Barrett.mp3
Peter Hook Ep #63 (Punk News Podcast) - Of Joy Division and New Order fame, I get strange ASMR type responses to many Joy Division songs, it's super weird, especially 'Love will tear us apart', it's like the song is in my DNA or something, makes me both happy and sad at the same time. It's a great interview. Somewhat bizarrely, I also saw a 100% Ian Curtis doppelgänger a couple of days ago, and I'm about 35% convinced that John is actually Benedict Evans trying (quite successfully) to be cool https://www.punknews.org/article/78085/podcast-listen-to-punknews-podcast-603-peter-hook
What's new in Safari with Jen Simmons (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - There are some seriously great new features landing in CSS that bring incredible power to devs, what I love about this episode is the wonder bordering on delirious and slightly giddy happiness that comes through from all 3 of these devs as they detail and imagine what might be possible, also Jen is totally a slightly older Alex Cranz from Vergecast voice twin https://shoptalkshow.com/529
Bitcoin for Fairness with Anita Posch (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Enjoyed this, she looks to be doing a lot of adventurous cowpath paving on the African continent, very interesting stuff about tools emerging that enable lightning transfers via sms text message, and interesting observations about the side effects of living with hyperinflation; as a brit I can't get over how odd her name sounds for a german https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-for-fairness
The Creaturest of Habbits with Daniel Jalkut (The Talk Show Podcast) - This dropped right after I had fully written and scheduled this week's newsletter, and I've been listening to it this morning, it covers some important difficult topics worth thinking about, I'm adding it now rather than wait until next week because there are so many odd synchronicities with with all that has happened to me this past few weeks and I just want to draw a line with it here, and start next week fresh; Daniel sounds strikingly like a young Duncan Trussell https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2022/08/26/ep-355
Offline-First Apps: Why Should Apps Be Made To Work In An Offline State? https://www.dewsolutions.in/offline-first-apps
The web is a harsh manager https://daverupert.com/2022/08/web-is-a-harsh-manager
Energy crisis: UK expands gas emergency exercise ahead of winter https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-62604653
Elon Musk subpoenas Jack Dorsey ahead of Twitter court battle https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62641029
Soketi: Simple, fast and resilient open-source WebSockets server
https://soketi.app
Musk wants to do a public debate with Twitter CEO https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/musk-challenges-twitter-ceo-to-debate-twitter-will-stick-to-its-lawsuit-instead
Popular Node.js patterns and tools to re-consider https://practica.dev/blog/popular-nodejs-pattern-and-tools-to-reconsider
That's all from me…
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@markjgsmith
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