20-minute podcast. I got involved in a discussion with Mathew Ingram, Om Malik and others on Twitter on what is going on with Civil and what's needed to get journalism the support of the people that it so totally needs. I want to tell the story of the W3C and the IETF and how the tech industry made it look like the tech was open without it being open. We need journalism, and we can't afford to wait for the experiments to prove not to be the answer. I outline emphatically what needs to happen now. Journalism needs to grow, without the limits that journalism has placed on itself. This is addressed to Mathew but it's really meant for everyone. I apologize in advance for using him as a foil. 💥 #
We're a few weeks into the new Chrome way of labeling sites like Scripting News as NOT SECURE. I haven't seen any notable changes among readers. The only people questioning the security of the site, that I know of, are the same ones who followed Google's lead without considering the negative consequences on the web as an archival medium. I took a poll of my followers on Twitter and found that 68% of the Chrome users are seeing the NOT SECURE message. Here was a chance for some to express concerns, and there were none. My Chrome hasn't updated yet, apparently, so I don't see it here. I'm sure there are less draconian solutions for sites that are basically archives to Google's stated goal of assuring the content hasn't been meddled with in a MITM way while in transport. I have ideas, but so far I haven't seen much evidence of Google's interest. A bad sign for a platform manager, btw. But it's par for the course for Silicon Valley tech companies. I've had this experience with all of them, Sun, Apple, Microsoft, even the company I founded, after I left. We're the power, you're nobody, why should we listen. It's a terrible way to govern an even worse way to manage a platform. #I think there should be a panel of tech security experts who keep track of security concerns in the 2018 election. Otherwise the press is going to mangle the story, the way they did with HRC's email server in the 2016 election.#
- As I wrote in this tweet, Johannes Ernst is smart and brave. He says decentralized networks never make it, and there are reasons for this. I agree, in a way, but ultimately think his theory is wrong. Because decentralized networks have blossomed and survived, and imho will still be operating when the silos are gone. #
Consider the case of RSS vs Twitter. When Twitter came along it grew fast, it overtook RSS. It didn't do away with RSS, because it's still here co-existing with Twitter. It still has advantages over Twitter. Richer data. Extensibility. Podcasting. Titles. Styling. Multiple links per item. No character limit. If RSS has so much going for it, why did Twitter surpass it? Not for any of the reasons Johannes cites. Imho it was because subscribing was done with a single click. That could have been done with RSS too, in fact we had it working in our own RSS network at UserLand, we called it the coffee mug. One click to subscribe. it could have become a universal one-click subscribe, if our competitors were willing to go along with UserLand's leadership, but they weren't. One click to subscribe was an important survival trait in the Darwinian ecosystem of online social nets. Twitter had it, RSS didn't.#- Johannes mentions two other features: trending topics and search. I guess he's right about trending topics, but the feature has no value for me, it's there on the Twitter screen, but I never look at it. For search, it's been proven that search works well on distributed networks. Google is a good example. There's no reason an equivalent search function couldn't be created for blogs or feeds, in fact last week I wrote a post about features that would make search much better for distributed systems. All are technologically possible and none are implemented on Twitter.#
- There will come a time when Twitter shuts down. But it's hard to imagine that day coming for the network of RSS feeds. It's been wishful thinking for TechCrunch and the VCs and BigCos they serve, a kind of wet dream that open systems will bend to the will of tech titans, that vast wealth is what makes the nets work, but it hasn't happened, even though they've been reporting its demise for a decade now. Really it has been that long! You can even shut down the beating heart of the RSS network, and it routes around the damage, quickly. (A corollary to Gilmore's Law, perhaps.)#
- I'm not sure why Mastodon didn't use RSS, I think they should have. Then the power of the two open distirbuted nets would combine, there would be more interfaces, greater know-how among developers, and more choice for users. I have to dig into it. I think Johannes' theory depends on using Mastodon as the counter-example to Twitter, because while Mastodon is strong and growing, it hasn't withstood the challenges that RSS has. I suspect it will. And I also suspect it will still be running when Twitter is gone. #
- I really appreciate his post, no sarcasm. It's great when we step outside the silos and use our own disparate tools to discourse about things that matter. #
I'd like to add that when I swim my body exudes good feelings from every cell. I'm a radio of good feels.#
I got an email in the middle of the night asking if I had seen an announcement from Berkman Center at Harvard that they will stop hosting blogs.harvard.edu. It's not clear what will happen to the archives. Let's have a discussion about this. That was the first academic blog hosting system anywhere. It was where we planned and reported on our Berkman Thursday meetups, and BloggerCon. It's where the first podcasts were hosted. When we tried to figure out what makes a weblog a weblog, that's where the result was posted. There's a lot of history there. I can understand turning off the creation of new posts, making the old blogs read-only, but as a university it seems to me that Harvard should have a strong interest in maintaining the archive, in case anyone in the future wants to study the role we played in starting up these (as it turns out) important human activities. #Also, thankfully it's not where the RSS 2.0 spec is stored, but it was originally posted on one of the Berkman blogs. #
In a tweet: "Throwing out this archive is like throwing out an academic journal. Why would a university do that? One of the reasons we did this work at a university was the hope/expectation it would survive over time. Only 15 years later, they want to throw it away?"#
John Palfrey, former executive director of Berkman wrote the project info page for blogs.harvard.edu in 2011. #
I just looked for some of the old 2003-2004 sites, and they're already gone. Earlier this year we lost the handle on Radio UserLand weblogs because the new owner of weblogs.com was unwilling to maintain a DNS entry pointing to them. That and Google's marking HTTP sites as not secure have been huge blows to the web as an archival medium. It's a good time to pause and reflect on the question of what was the value of all the work, and why bother continuing if the people who should care, a major university, a large research company and one of the largest tech companies, don't care about maintaining the web. What hope is there for it being maintained in the future?#
I posted a note on the Berkman-Thursday mail list which, amazingly, is still operating. Sarcastically, I don't see Yahoo saying they're getting ready to take it offline. 💥#
When I left Berkman I archived my test site from the Harvard server, and it's still here on scripting.com, and I'll do my best to keep it around. I used it to post pictures and ask stupid questions, and try out new features in the software. There are pictures of people I've known for a long time and haven't seen in ages but still love. ❤️#
We had a thunderstorm in Manhattan last night. It woke me up and I was in a foul mood, as I sometimes am when I wake up in the middle of the night. The lightning and thunder scared me. First time that ever happened. My mind started playing games. I imagined the flash of lightning was a nuclear weapon detonating, and the thunder was the wave of destruction. It's a good approximation of the time it would take between the flash and death. Great move, I said to my mind. Now I'm even more scared and sad. Eventually I fell back asleep, but it wasn't a good sleep.#Journalists think Twitter stands out as a bad tech company, I think the opposite. Their unwillingness to follow the herd is a sign of hope that we may continue to use the net to speak freely, even if the majority wants us silenced. And what does it say about journalism that there are few if any dissenters? You see this regularly, they’re too scared for some reason to present all sides of a discussion. It’s amazing at times, the way they form herds.#
Writing in the age of silos. After their August 1 change, I can't cross-post to Facebook. So if I want to speak to people I know on Facebook, I have to write on Facebook. Today if I want to even post a link, I have to do it by hand. And Twitter, new forms of writing have developed there to work around the 280-char limit. Again, if I want to write for people I know there, I have to write it there. This is what always happens with corporate platforms, they become silos. Maybe they start with good intentions, on FB, the open graph, with Twitter their API, but over time, they evolve to become their own completely self-contained very unweblike worlds. You can see that evolution in action today, at a super-high pace. For me this is the Nth time around this loop, so I have an idea what to expect next.#- Three ideas for making the open web, and blogging, more valuable and interesting, by building a search engine for the next decade, not for two decades ago. Sorry Google, your search engine is showing serious signs of age and boredom. We can do so much better. Here are the ideas.#
- I just pointed to a post written by Davis Shaver. A nice database would note that, and create a link between his blog and mine. I could ask for a list of all the blogs that I've pointed to, and that would become my blogroll. Lots more ideas after that esp if the blogs are willing to share data with the centralized resource.#
- You know how the index in the back of a book works? Topics, sub-topics, and lists of pages that those topics are discussed on. 99 percent of the searches I do on my own blog are really just navigations of this structure. Search engine technology is getting smart enough to recognize not just words but concepts. How about a service that sucked down all the content of my blog and created the back-of-book index of my writing. Realtime. Updated every time I post something new or modified an existing post. #
- A search engine that knows I'm a blogger and where my blog is, and uses all the info it can glean from that to give me more relevant searches. For example, when I search for Frontier, esp if the first letter is capitalized, what kind of cockamamie search engine shows me the airline? I'm obviously referring to the scripting environment I developed and worked on for a couple of decades, and still to this day use every freaking day. Google started out ridiculously smart, but it never figured this part out (or #2 above). It's been stagnant for too long. They clearly need some competition. #
- BTW, Google knows I'm the "owner" of this blog, they threaten me as such. 💥#
xkcd's story for today is right on. I’m a software developer and I concur. We throw out our base technology every few years and start over, leaving the stuff that’s already deployed hard to evolve or fix, and the latest stuff full of bugs, and long before it’s mature and reliable we do it all over again. #I commented in a thread on Twitter on the controversy re the recent hire by the NYT editorial board and sweeping comments she made previously about white men. I am responding to a piece by Ezra Klein in Vox. I waited a few days for the furor to die down, and to try to say thoughtfuly and carefully how I as a man feel about such statements. Klein had said, for the first time I can recall for a reporter, how he feels about these things. I'll let the comments speak for themselves now. #
How can so many elections come down to a fraction of a percent of the vote? Doesn't probability say that this outcome is extremely unlikely? Why does it happen so often?#
The other day I spilled a bottle of water on my keyboard, and have been limping along waiting for a new keyboard to arrive. I am now using it. This time I decided not to opt for the expensive Apple keyboard, instead I got a Macally keyboard which cost a fraction of what the Apple one did. So far it seems quite nice. My fingers need to set up in a different place, and the keyboard doesn't have lifters at the top to put it at an angle, but I'm already getting used to it. Unfortunately the modifier keys control panel isn't working, not sure why. Might have to reboot the system? I usually don't like doing that. And then as if by magic it started working! I like to map Control to Command and vice versa. My brain was trained by many years of using Windows, a long time ago. #This idea needs to get to the right people. Don't just like it, RT it. We can win this thing but we have to be smarter.#
Unforeseen consequences. It's not at all surprising that when a tech company hijacks an incomprehensibly huge, world wide platform that's been growing uncontrollably for 25 years, they might overlook some huge applications thereof, and in plotting a transition break the installed base. It's completely foreseeable. Which is why we don't let private companies hijack public resources if we have our heads screwed on straight, which we clearly do not. 💥#I fixed a serious startup bug in the new version of LO2. Thanks to Steve Hooker for finding and reporting it. Now would be a great time for people to try the new version. I'd like to put it to bed and move on to other projects next week. Thanks! 🚀#
Here's the outliner howto doc that explains what an outliner is and how to use the core outliner in LO2.#
Poll: Suppose all the social media sites ban a commentator whose ideas you detest. He no longer can communicate with most of the people who want to hear what he says.#
dave.blog now redirects to scripting.com. I was never going to start a new blog there. I don't know what I was thinking. One person, one blog seems to be the default. #
If you fight for free speech only for people who agree with you then you are not for free speech.#
- I've written here many times about the distinction between the terms blogger and journalist. In a Twitter thread, Lora Kolodny makes a distinction between journalist and reporter. I hadn't realized there might be a difference. Here's what she says.#
- Journalist (besides sounding hi-falutin) includes people who aren't reporters. Editors, producers, photographers, columnists, podcasters, vloggers and bloggers may not all be doing the primary research or interviews for a piece, but are all responsible for accuracy of it.#
- Reporters do the primary fact finding, interviews, field work, etc. But by no means are reporters the only journalists. It's not a commutative property. If reporter then journalist. But not if journalist then reporter.#
- My own two cents. I'd love to reserve the term blogger for people who write about their own experiences, not for pay, the "unedited voice of a person." I think of bloggers as sources in the journalism world. #
Spoilers ahead, you have been warned! 💥#- I had been hearing good things about the HBO series Succession so I chose it for my next binge. I made it all the way to the next to last episode about an hour before the finale aired last night, but waited till the morning to watch it. I wasn't prepared for how disturbing it would be. I wasn't expecting it to be so. #
- I think perhaps it was so disturbing because the Roy family reminds me of my own family. All the disconnects, vanity, foolish sense of self-importance. And the prohibition on every talking about it realistically. These were all big features of my upbringing. #
- They really play with you. At times it's so funny, it seems like a comedy, but then, in the next episode, it knocks you down. That's what the finale was like. Complete knock down, with the tour de force in the very last scene. #
- The best line delivered by the patriarch's latest wife to one of the adult children: "He built you a playground and you think it's the world." #
- There's a lot of self-awareness in the last episode, but mostly they avoid living their own lives, all of them, including the all-powerful father. #
- On reflection, the Roy family is not like my family, where the women fought, and the men, while they often roared, were mostly sidelined, not the main act. I guess when you participate in something so intensely for so many hours your subconscious starts accepting it as real. #
- I have a hard time recommending Succession. It's very well done. But hard to watch at times, it's so awkward and the people are such fools. And it's very disturbing, that gives it value, at least for me. As art, it's outstanding. #
An interesting thread with Amy Bellinger on Twitter. People think somehow hate of whites on the net is innocuous, I don't believe it is.#
I think it's time to start teaching regular people to do journalism. A civic thing, like jury duty. Every college grad should take a semester of journalism. It's a very important skill to at least appreciate, if not practice.#
I definitely don't want to be part of the debate about whether racism can apply to white people. The dictionary definition seems to imply it can. Sexism, on the other hand gives preference to women, but doesn't disallow sexism with men as the target. There's a lot of ridiculous gymnastics used to justify some pretty awful things said that should simply be retracted and apologized for. One thing is very clear, it's possible to be abusive without being either sexist or racist. And a lot of what passes for satire is imho abuse. We need a broad, simple, respectful, adult and professional code of conduct on Twitter, and we should have an amnesty for all past sins, and then set about solving problems working together, instead of having these ridiculous fights over who has the right to say what.#It would be interesting, as an experiment, to see a Democrat run for governor or senator and directly ask for Republican votes. "We're really all conservatives now, in that we'd like to turn the clock back to when the US was a world leader and respected itself."#
- Good morning. The new version of LO2 is ready for testing. #
- I've completed most of the features planned for this release, so it's a good time for people who'd like to help to start using the new version. I've made a backup of all the outlines, in case there are any data-losing bugs in the software. I don't think there are, because I've used it myself fairly thoroughly, and there aren't many changes to the core outliner in this release. #
- If you encounter any problems or have questions, please post an item in this thread on the Scripting News repo. #
- Here's a quick list of the new stuff.#
- Hoisting. There are two new commands in the Outliner menu, Hoist and Dehoist, and two icons in the sidebar, the two pushpins. The commands and pushpins are enabled when the operations are possible. For example, you can only hoist if a headline has subs. You can only dehoist if something is hoisted. You can nest hoists. As far as I know there is no limit to the number of levels. #
- The crumbtrail. At the top of the outline display is the crumb trail that leads back to the summit from the location of the bar cursor. You can click on any of the links to move the cursor back to that spot. The navigation undoes hoists if necessary. It's a good way to keep track of your context while you're focusing on a specific part of your outline.#
- The SAVED/NOT SAVED indicator. LO2 automatically saves your work. You can keep track of that by watching this indicator, just above the tabs, in the right margin. You may find it reassuring to know that your work is saved. Demo.#
- Integrated thesaurus. To start navigating the thesaurus, enter a word in a headline, click the suitcase icon and add a type attribute with the value word. Expand it the headline, and synonyms for the word, if any can be found, will fill in as subheads. Then you can expand any of its subheads to find synonyms. It is the basic functionality of the thesaurus.land application, integrated in LO2.#
- Known problems#
- There are problems with hoisting in readonly outlines. #
- My friend Stan Krute on Facebook wrote how astonished he is about conspiracy theories that real people believe in. I wrote a series of three comments, which I've included here, lightly edited.#
- My uncle, well educated, highly literate, creative, believed lots of conspiracy theories, and the people he hung out with did too. I believed a few myself when I was younger. So I have some familiarity with it. I think it’s a way of coping with the complexity and dishonesty of everything.#
- My parents too, when it came to Israel, had lots of what I considered irrational conspiracy like beliefs. Also very literate, highly educated, urban, liberal people.#
- Eventually as I grew older I got closer to the real power in the world, and understood that it’s just as confusing to the people at the top as it is to the people on the bottom.#
feedBase was having the Twitter logon problem, fixed. The problem: callbackfromtwitter != callbackFromTwitter. Also I have to swing back around to feedBase, definitely some unfinished business there. #
I use Twitter as the identity system for my browser-based apps. To see how it works, log onto Radio3, MyWord, feedBase, LO2 or Little Card Editor. #- I like it, it works well, and takes a difficult problem off my plate. It takes a complicated problem and makes it relatively simple for me, as a developer. #
- Here's how it works, at a very high level. I send you over there to log in, and in return I get your unique screenname and a bit of info about you (the stuff you put into your profile). And a few other bits, like when you created your Twitter account. #
- An example of the data that Twitter gives an app about a user (me).#
- I also get the ability to post in your name, but my software never uses that ability unless you specifically ask it to. For example, there's a tweet icon in LO2 that lets you send the text of the cursor headline to Twitter as a tweet. Nice functionality to have, but hardly mission-critical.#
- I'm concerned that at some point Twitter may decide not to allow this use. I would prefer if they tightened the restrictions on posting, maybe eliminate it, that would be okay. But I would have a problem if they canceled the service. #
- Pretty sure nothing this simple exists in the open source world. I could be wrong. Either way this is something we should have, and it should be good. debugged, well burned-in. It would be nice if a public foundation ran the service, the way Twitter does. I know, keep dreaming. 💥#
I really dislike complaining about free services. If you hate a service, my philosophy goes, just opt out. I've been on the other side of this, struggling to provide a free service to users who acted like they were paying huge money, long before there was any monetization of free services. I never want to be one of those people. #- But sometimes a service is very hard to opt out of, and they take advantage of that, by changing the service from tolerable to obscene. Disqus is now doing that, and it will be hard and/or painful, maybe impossible, for me to opt out.#
- Here's an example of one of the pages. And a screen shot. #
- I've used Disqus for comments for many years, probably a decade, maybe more. I included their code in my pages, so users could comment on posts. I've even built support for products on Disqus. Some pages have a lot of comments with valuable information. Just turning off Disqus, a brute force way of opting out, would also remove those comments. And turning off Disqus is hard to do because I don't control the HTTP servers that host most of my content, and changing the HTML pages themselves is a sizeable task (understatement).#
- How we got here. The old Disqus was fairly innocuous. Of course they spied on the users, and then a few years ago they started including ads, but they were small and out of the way. Now the ads are huge, and getting bigger. They're more prominent than the comments. It's as if I were running ads on my sites, and the comments were clickbait to get you to look at the ads, like so many sites these days. Their ads make me look bad.#
- Of course I don't run ads on my pages. It's never been worth it to me. Those are their ads, paying them money, on my pages. They're changing the deal on pages that were published a long time ago, and are there just to maintain a record.#
- I could probably turn off the display for most of them without modifying any content, using CSS. I now wish I had a central set of styles every page included, but I wasn't so wise as to foresee the need. I have a conundrum. Every time I look at one of the pages with those huge ads on them, I think what a problem, I need to fix this, now.#
- And then I remember how impossible it is.#
- First step in fixing it, I guess, is documenting the problem. Done.#
You can see in this image when Facebook turned off the cross-posting API. It's a screen shot of Radio3 -- the tool I use for linkblogging. It's amazing this has gotten almost no coverage in the press. It's like a tunnel under the Hudson was terminated, where FB is New Jersey and everything else is Manhattan (or vice versa, it doesn't matter). Only this TechCrunch story. Update: And a story on ProgrammableWeb. #
A big downside of ceding economic leadership to China is that their norms of freedom will become the norms of the world. Once Google's search engine censors access to the net in China, it's just a matter of time before they do it in the west too.#
When I moved to California from Madison in 1979, I put together a brochure, in a manner of speaking, about the work I had been doing on an integrated outliner and database that I build into the UCSD P-System running on top of CP/M on a Cromemco machine. I called the product HighFiles, for high level file system. That's how I thought of it. We found a copy of this document in my mom's house back in February. Finally got around to scanning it. It's a time capsule. Some ideas I didn't think I had that early, and some absolute SMH things, which I'm now putting on the record. I was only 24 back in 1979. 💥#Braintrust query: Looking for icons for Hoist and Dehoist. For a refresher on what hoisting is, watch this short video. The range of possible icons is what's in Font-Awesome. Here's the cheatsheet. I started an issue on the Scripting News repo, please post any suggestions you have. #
Silent movies are great. In this scene Buster Keaton is rejected by a hat check girl, without a word spoken. #
The Decentralized Web Summit starts today in San Francisco. Of course I totally support the decentralized web. I do it from NYC. The idea of a summit for something that's decentralized is interesting. Anyway, the web is decentralized. No one entity controls who can post to it or what they build on it. It is in danger of being centralized, always, usually by big tech companies, but sometimes governments. But that doesn't mean the web should run away from its decentralized nature. In fact, I think the "decentralized web" can't be anything other than the web itself. What is the naming protocol for the DCW? That's got to be DNS, the naming system of the web. It works, it scales, isn't without problems, but then whatever anyone comes up with as a replacement will have problems too, and will have to compete with a huge installed base. #So many security schemes are based on the control of phone numbers. But it’s relatively easy to hijack phone numbers. They're also the weak link in most 2FA systems. #
I skipped season 5 of Orange Is The New Black. Was that a mistake? Is season 6 any good?? (Apparently so. I'm going to get started on season 5.)#
- Over the weekend I watched the second season of Handmaid's Tale.#
- Note: A few mild spoilers, nothing imho that would interfere with the full-on HMT experience, until the very end, well labeled, which you should not read until you've watched the show. #
- It's super dark and depressing. The first few episodes aren't too bad, that gets you hooked, and then you're in for 10 hours of very seriously depressing stuff, with only a few outlets for the rage that builds. A trip to Toronto, for example, reminds you that the rest of the world is still as it was. It's just the US, now called Gilead, that's gone crazy.#
The season is all about separating children from their mothers. Pretty timely for the US. It was also timely for me, since my mother died earlier this year. It helped me better understand our relationship from her side. Perhaps. I think they idealize motherhood a bit. I think that's also deeply ingrained in our culture, perhaps because mothers have so much influence over how we perceive reality from the beginning of our lives.#- It does the job of a good binge-watch. You get pulled into its reality. This last weekend I was in the Handmaid's Tale world. I had no patience for the news in the real world of 2018. All I could think about was the pack of lies they're selling as news. I felt I was getting a better idea of our world by watching the fictional world of HMT. #
- Now for the spoilers. Don't read if you haven't watched. 💥#
- Spoilers in the form of questions..#
- Why were Emily and Janine released from the Colonies?#
- Aunt Lydia is a sympathetic character? Hard to parse.#
- Bradley Whitford must be a star in the third season. He still seems like Josh Lyman to me, even though he's now one of the Commanders of Gilead. #
- WTF is up with June's decision to give up Holly in the last scene of the last episode?#
Video: I figured something out about outliners a few days ago, and I have it working, and am ready to explain. 1. You only need two levels of hoisting if you have... 2. A crumb trail, like directory websites have. It belongs in outliners (none of mine ever had them). 3. You don't even need a dehoist command if you have the crumb trail. Watch the video to see how it works. It's remarkably simple. 💥#
Journalism should be imagining new ways the Russians can hack our election, not just replays of 2016. That was a quaint innocent world. Imagine in the next election the outcome is even more in doubt than it was in 2016. Most journalists don't know anything about tech. They studied history in college. They write about Facebook without even being users of Facebook. Not only is there no one home in the Oval Office, but it's even worse in JournalismLand. Remember last time around they were conned into believing that running one's own email server was nefarious. They are novices. (BTW, history is important. Don't want to diminish that.)#A widely-used open format is like an antibiotic in medicine. You don’t take unnecessary risks with losing it. Imagine a doctor undermining a medicine that saves lives. It would be just as wrong for a technologist to undermine an open format.#
When Twitter bans a user because it's a Russian troll trying to divide the American electorate, it would be useful to see what they were posting.#
Civilization builds in layers over generations. We leave our innovations to future generations to build on and maintain. In Manhattan we're building 100-plus story apartment houses. The people who build them know how to build them, but don't understand how they work. Same is true of the military, medicine, transport, energy, the arts. The resources of nature remain constant or diminish. Humans have the same basic design. The problems we deal with get bigger every generation, until at some point we will (it seems) reach a problem we can't deal with. When I was young we believed we had already reached the end with nuclear weapons. At some point something has to change, in a big way, or so it seems. #
Riding in a crowded elevator in Manhattan today. A woman was talking loudly and obscenely about how she hates where she works. She was so angry, entitled, arrogant. One of her office mates died last week, she said, and they didn't announce it. She said the owner was an asshole. As I was getting off, she described the owner as "left wing," and then I got it. Next year he won't be left wing, he'll be a dirty Jew and she'll be wearing a swastika pin on her lapel. The nasty people are coming out of the closet. We're going to a bad place. #I was going to a dentist for an emergency root canal. While I was lying helpless and in great emotional distress, I wondered why the Nazis don't come fully out of the closet. They must be scared we will kill them. My train of thought went to just how I would like to kill the Nazi woman on the elevator. It helped me deal with the emotional pain of being so helpless while I could hear my tooth being drilled and smelling the fumes coming out of my mouth, sort of a burning tooth BBQ. I have to say there is a reason I am willing to endure so much discomfort to avoid being in the dentist's chair. Why don't they just put you under, or load you up with opiates? #
The big NYT map today was interesting, even if it is a bit dated. I looked up all the places I've lived and they were all blue, except the street I grew up on in Queens. That was red. I thought about all my mom's neighbors and how they must have mostly been Trump voters. In a way I was glad she never found out. Some of the racist things I've heard them say now make sense. The neighborhood is turning, from white and Christian to Asian. I can't imagine they will vote for Trump, but wtf do I know. #
There ought to be a social network called Happy Hour. In order to get in you have to take a breathalyzer to prove that you're legally drunk. Obviously nothing you say there counts.#
I made a small probably insignificant change to the scripting.com RSS feed. If you see any problems, please report them here. #
This is a test post. I don’t care how you got to the party. Whether you took the subway, walked, came by spaceship or were driven by your chauffeur. What’s important is you’re here. Now let’s party! 🚀#
I was reviewing some old podcasts, and came across one from 2007. I was talking about Google Toolbar and a conversation I had with Marissa Mayer. I didn't remember the controversy, but was able to piece it together from listening to the podcast and reading old blog posts. It was a really evil thing. They changed links in HTML pages in Firefox (this predates Chrome) to point to Google's sites. It came pre-installed in Firefox. This was Google eleven years ago. Obviously that attempt to hijack the web didn't work. But this time they're coming back with their own browser, and are doing it slowly. But I don't doubt for a minute the idea is to go all the way, to make the web as much Google's as Facebook's world is Facebook's (I know that sounds weird). #A friend sent a pointer to Assembly, which is a demoscene. I had heard about these, and filed it away as something to be puzzled about. Do I know anyone who is going to this event?#
Good morning HTTP fans. I still haven't gotten the new version of Chrome here so I don't have to look at their defacement of my blog and other sites, yet. I read in the CNET story (warning self-playing video) earlier in the week that Firefox isn't labeling HTTP-standard sites as evil incarnate. Is this true? Is it something they are perhaps willing to commit to? If so, I will probably switch to Firefox. I have some other ideas, like moving off the web and providing my blog in an Electron app, far away from Google's ability to push me around (hah, Electron is built on Chrome, I wonder how independent it really is). Anyway, If anyone knows what Firefox's plan is, please post a note here. Or any other browser that accepts the web as TBL defined it. Warning: I may have to delete the thread because posts like this tend to draw trolls. You know who you are. Restrain yourself! 💥#- Chris Hayes: "Facebook is the equivalent of a massively profitable factory that just dumps all of its waste into the river and never has to pay for the cost to clean it up."#
- Nicholas Thompson: "I think it's more like a massively profitable company that builds a giant river that everyone both drinks from and pees into. And it doesn't know how to clean it up."#
- Me: "That's not my experience as a FB user. I'd love to see a journalism outfit break out of the pack and take a contrary position, considering that FB has a tough problem and they're smart, and aren't doing a bad job of iterating to an answer."#
- There's a lot I don't like about Facebook, and I've been very public about it. But the criticism they're getting from the journalism world now is uniformly negative and not insightful and doesn't stimulate a useful discussion. It's mostly a woe-is-me look at how dumb they are (or corrupt or a horror show). #
- I'd love to see journalism take a dispassionate and informed look at this, teach us something, based on an understanding of the problem they're trying to solve. A perspective that a theater critic would have, or an art, movie, food or music critic. Some idea of how we got here. Think a few steps out into the future, add a sense of what's at stake, and what would happen if FB did what they believe they should obviously do (which would be imho about as successful as Trump's trade war). #
- People who use Facebook seem to like it. The advertisers pay money to be there. If it were as bad as these guys say why would they do that? There's a lot of sour grapes here, or the appearance of sour grapes. They have to watch out for that. And it begs the question if Facebook is so wrong, why have none of you ever tried to compete with them? #
A Republican trifecta. Spicer is a mess, Sessions is a little trollish Nazi and Hatch isn't dead yet. #
How to cut down trolling on Twitter -- give people control over who can reply to them. The more followers you have the more incentive there is to post something inflammatory as a reply. Muting is nice, but it only prevents them from replying to you. Long after you've stopped seeing their trollish droppings, they are still getting flow for their abuse with replies. On some posts, no replies, please. Or replies only visible to me, no one else. Or replies only from people I follow. Or, as Facebook does, let the originator of the post remove trollish comments. #Getting a late start today after wrestling with hoisting and fighting back a summer cold. Still going bike riding this afternoon. It's so good for my state of well-being. #
- I have been getting hoisting to work in my editing environment for Scripting News. I think I have it working now. If you're reading this, something is working. 💥#
- Let me just say this. Hoisting is hard. Especially if you're retrofitting it into an existing app. This is good practice for getting it working inside LO2, which after a short burn-in period is the next thing on my to-do list. Might take a few days to get there. #
- One more hoisting loose-end tied down, hopefully. 🚀#
By now it should be obvious if the news industry had built its own distribution system, they'd be raking in cash like FB and Google, and instead of laying off reporters, they'd be looking for new places to invest the proceeds.#
Apparently tomorrow is the day Google will start flagging sites that use HTTP, the standard web protocol, as "not secure." Curious to see how people react. BTW, this link has auto-playing video. It may be "secure" but it's also obnoxious. This blog and all my other sites use HTTP. I don't see that changing. I expect this will make writing for the web more of a chore. That's life I guess. I don't want Google to be able to mold the web to its needs. I never signed on to being a Google developer, and never would. Basic rule: Google is a guest on the web, as we all are, and guests don't make the rules. #One thing you can be sure of, when a lot of reporters get laid off, you'll hear about it. It's not true of a lot of other things. Big news happens, no coverage. It's not just because we're losing reporters, the ones that we have don't integrate well with the rest of the world.#
Yesterday I wrote that Frontier does not have hoisting. This is incorrect. It does. I found it in the docs written in 1996 and 2008, and tested it with the two built-in verbs, op.hoist () and op.dehoist (). My memory is imperfect. What I should have said is that I didn't use the feature, even though it was there. #
For my friends in journalism -- eventually Facebook, Google and Twitter will have to push the far right off their services, per your wishes. But that won't be the end of the tectonic plate shifts in news. The right will form their own services, where your product will be excluded, and will still apply pressure on the public companies to treat your work as suspect, and they will have to give them what they want. At that point you must have control of your own distribution. #
Trump's latest tweet is no joke. It's a huge escalation. He blew through all the defcons. The issue isn't whether or not to ban him from Twitter rather, where does he go for a rush after this? I wrote this about Trump as a troll in 2016: "Immunity to outrage builds up over time. What pissed people off six months ago will barely show up as a blip today." You can already see that this tweet isn't getting people riled up as it might have a few months ago. They understand how his trolling works. This is a serious problem for him. Without the ability to escalate through tweeting, he might have to resort to flyovers and actual attacks.#So it's almost official, Melo is going to the Rockets for the veteran's minimum. I predict they won't like it any more than OKC did, unless Melo is willing to lead the second unit. That might work. Otherwise there's one too many on the starting unit that needs the ball. It's great that Harden and Paul have worked it out. Melo is still going to be a catch-and-shoot three point shooting guy. Not many moves to the rim for him.#
Libraries have a purpose I’ve never seen written up — as sanctuaries for children of troubled households. As a child, there was a safe place I could go at night, when things were crazy at home. A place they cared about kids, as people.#
When Repubs say they want to vote Democratic, the correct response is to say hey great to have you on the team! Let's really make America great again. I was dismayed when people pissed all over James Comey when he said (basically) he want Democrats to win in November. That's good news. He found the right answer. The lights are coming on. People have so much trouble taking yes for an answer.#I have a philosophy. I don’t care how you got to the party. Whether you took the subway, walked, came by spaceship or were driven by your chauffeur. What’s important is you’re here. Now let’s party! 🎉#
- I wanted to say what I said above about libraries and librarians for many years, but as long as my parents were alive, I didn't want to write about it. I still don't want to write about it in any great detail, because I understand why it was like it was. #
- Anger, pain and fear are passed down through generations. I knew their parents, and I knew what they all went through to get to America. I came to believe later in life that the responsibility of a parent is to do better than was done to them as a child, and both my parents achieved that. #
- Back in the 60s, when I was growing up, things were different. Now, I think a kid could walk into a police station and tell the story of his house, and there might be some help. But not then. People stayed out of the internal life of families. #
- The library really was a sanctuary for me. The librarians at the Auburndale branch of the Queens Borough Public Library knew me, they knew what I was interested in, what books I liked, what stories I liked to hear, and tell. The most important thing was they treated me as a real person. For kids, even today, that's rare.#
- That's why librarians will always be special to me. Their ethos, their role, is so essential to a functional community. They don't get enough credit elsewhere, but with me, they are American heroes.#
I've been working on hoisting for the core outliner in LO2. Just got it working today. Saving while stuff is hoisted was the hardest part. I don't seem to have hoisting defined on my blog, probably because the outliner in Frontier didn't have the feature. There are two operations, hoist and dehoist. Put the bar cursor on a headline. If you hoist it, everything that's subordinate to the headline becomes your world. The other stuff is still there, but you can't see it or edit it. You can focus on just this part of the outline. I need it for my blog, when I'm working on a long post and want to quickly scroll to the beginning or end. Dehoist as you might imagine undoes the last hoist. #
If you give a shit, and don’t want to end up in a concentration camp, stop fighting with others who care and close ranks.#
As I get older I have more confidence in the power of deliberation. Give my mind the time to weigh the alternatives, and I'll come to a better decision in 24 hours than I would in 2, and if it's important, it's worth it. #
- So Jack Dorsey is looking for ways to improve Twitter. #
- There are three I can think of:#
- Eliminate the character limit, allow for linking, simple styles, titles and enclosures (for podcasting). The move to 280 chars was so successful, that should be a clue. Remove the barriers to expression and let the whole web in via linking. Handle length the way Facebook does with a see more link. It's good prior art. #
- Help news orgs create collections of news feeds for people to follow on Twitter and on the open web. I think ultimately that's what news orgs will become. Experts on where to find the people who are saying newsworthy stuff. It's not much of an evolution, it's what they've been doing for as long as I can remember. The web gives us the ability to create new structures for that. Since Twitter is a place people go for news, it's a natural evolution for Twitter. I have a roadmap for how to do this.#
- Make a commitment to developers and make it irreversible. What exactly this means is subject to negotiation. But no one company can do what a medium does. As great a company as Twitter might be, its not something companies were meant to do, imho.#
- Bonus: A new rule. For every original tweet you write you have to RT someone else's.#
I'm a one-issue voter for 2018 and beyond. Make politics boring again.#
The business-as-usual approach of Bernie Sanders et al is unsupportable. We need to close ranks. Stop trying to optimize and just focus on getting the Repubs out of our government, asap.#
I like to write about Central Park as the analog of the open web, and the city surrounding it as the silos. This photo shows the analogous interface.#
It takes courage to write a blog post like this from Ben Werdmüller. Whenever we write, imho, we're saying something simple. This is what I see. These are my values. This is what it's like to be me. By showing yourself, you become vulnerable, and that has a cost. Better to be safe. But sometimes you have so much to say, the pain is so great, it has to come out. One thing I've discovered in a life of ups and downs -- it's true -- it's darkest just before dawn. 💥 #- I think Julia Ioffe got it right. This is what Putin has over Trump.#
- At any time they could leak to news orgs proof that without Russian hacking of the 2016 election Trump would have lost.#
- Anything else is BS, pee tapes, etc. No one, especially Trump, would care.#
- I'm a conservative. Something former-Republican conservatives can probably relate to. I think the vast majority of Americans who are freaked out about the Trump presidency could legitimately be described as conservative. However I've been voting solid Democratic since 2004.#
- For me, a bridge too far was the Iraq war. By 2004 we knew there were no WMDs, that the government had lied to us. This was huge. On such a serious matter as war or peace, you can't do what they did and keep the support of good Americans. At the moment they're talking about mushroom clouds you need to suck it up and trust the government has seen something unthinkable that you can't see. Not lying out of their ass, as the Bushies were. #
- It was the realization that this moment was based on a lie, that meant I would never vote Republican again.#
- Yes, I firmly believe in Choice, am in favor of radical gun control, I have a serious pre-existing condition, so I get how important health insurance is. But you could actually vote Republican before 2000 and still have these positions.#
- Or so I thought. ;-)#
- And voting Democratic is no panacea.#
- Think Snowden.#
- But the United States is what it is. No generation gets to radically change direction. I say that as a baby boomer who marched for peace in the 60s and 70s.#
- This is the lesson of America.#
- Change is continuous. A country that still hasn't shaken off the legacy of slavery isn't going to transform into a European socialist country in a generation. Not after what we've been through in the last 20 years.#
- We made a lot of changes in the last ten years. And our chain has been yanked back. Hopefully that's all it is. But it's a mistake to try to yank it again. It's time to compromise. We need to elect a president we'd all like to have a cup of coffee with. Not someone who wags his finger and talks over us. Who doesn't listen. Who is as much a narcissist as the current asshole in the White House.#
- My slogan, if you've made it this far is this -- Make Politics Boring Again.#
- I felt, once Obama was elected, that that was as good as it was going to get. We are the United States. That means we're fucked up. But at least let's think a bit before we start pushing people around.#
- Toby Ziegler nails it in this scene in The West Wing. "They'll like us when we win." This could be the motto of America right up there with E Pluribus Unum. 🚀#
- This is why I think that.#
- When I post an item to my linkblog, it also goes to an RSS feed.#
- I have an IFTTT app that watches that feed, and when something new shows up posts it to this Twitter account.#
- I also ping the rssCloud notifier, the one that's pointed to from the <cloud> element in the feed. It tells an app how to be notified immediately of an update.#
- Here's the thing. The Twitter feed gets the update immediately now. Sometime in the last year (?) or so it started being instantaneous. Unless they're polling the feed ridiculously often, they must be hooked in through the <cloud> element. #
- If they did, I think this is very cool. 💥#
- I don't like "left" and "right" -- because it implies that there are just two answers for everything, and a formula that leads to a correct answer.#
- Every left person thinks this way and every right person thinks the opposite on everything. I doubt if anyone is really like but I am not. #
- I am neither left or right. I think for myself. I try to understand each issue and form my own position. I do not delegate my thinking to others.#