If Bluesky is open source, which it
appears to be, someone who has time and has experience packaging products, should create a Bluesky distribution for a few popular hosting services, so installing a new instance is as simple as it can possibly be. One click? That would be awesome. We need to have
thousands of these running. If it really is like the web, as they say it is, then it should be like the web in every way. There are lots of websites. If you sell your website to a billionaire, that has no effect on my website. Right now we are totally vulnerable to the Bluesky folk selling their service to another country, or
our country for that matter -- or a billionaire, or whoever. Whoever did this packaging job would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Anticipating the objection that Mastodon is already doing this -- it is not. Setting up and using a Mastodon instance is good for nerds. Not for poets.
#
My guess is that they haven't released enough code to run a Bluesky of your own, because all the answers from people who say they know say the same thing -- "It doesn't work that way." You
could write your own, but if we were to do that, why use their one-off API, use a standard instead, and we might have a chance to interop with other systems in a meaningful way. I don't blame them for wanting to cash out, but I do blame them for conning people into believing it's some kind of escape. Until I hear otherwise Bluesky is a dead-end, not worth investing your hope in. If you're migrating from Twitter this is no better. Keep looking. But I promise to let you know if I get any info that changes my opinion, so if I've got it wrong, people from Bluesky, just answer the freaking question in the post at the top of this page. Thanks.
#
Does anyone know who was doing the work at
kamalahq on the various social networks? I wonder if they would like to keep posting. They stopped updating on Election Day. We could change the names of the accounts. I thought it was great that there was a steady source of political news that didn't equivocate like the NYT-inspired news orgs. I would love to help fund a continuation of that flow.
#
It might be time to get our shit together.
#
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what's missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network. It is not represented online 7-by-24-by-12 every year, not just presidential election years. Democrats, when you lose it's because you didn't show up. It's happened three times so far, at least. We could have led here because most of the innovators in this space vote Democratic, but the leadership doesn't listen. The voters could get to know all the stars of the parties. People were right when they said they didn't know Harris. It's time to let the leaders rise from the net, not just from the insiders. This is how you do it.
#
ChatGPT's web search can search my blog, as I do on Google, but it's way more useful. Here's a
screen shot. We're getting there. Really nice.
#
I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question.
#
It's worth listening to
On The Media, interview with
Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through social web and podcasts, if that's where we're all getting our news from, and btw MSNBC are already pretty well limited in what they'll tell us (this was our beef with NYT if you recall) -- the next step is to make it impossible for us to hear what each other are saying. Now is the time to plant seeds for a defense of our speech and communication later.
#
I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere."
Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic.
#
- I asked ChatGPT: "Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like."#
Dave's life as imagined by ChatGPT.
#
BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product
FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the
news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can
create your own.
#
- I've actually written a lot, but haven't wanted to publish most of it. So many reasons why the Dems lost. Maybe I should just list them.#
- Biden shouldn't have run again. There would have been a primary. Given the result of the election this week, we should have found out what support each candidate had with voters. We didn't get to choose the candidate. That said Harris ran a fantastic campaign. #
- Biden should not have shut down his campaign website. Rather than using it to raise money to feed to the media industry, they should have organized and listened, to develop new channels of communication with voters that were not dependent on journalism. Every time the Dems run a campaign, win or lose, they shut down their connection to the electorate. The voters' only role in the party was when they needed our money and our vote. We were not part of governing. Huge mistake. And I'm not just saying that now, I've said that about every Democratic campaign since Obama. This is probably the biggest single mistake the Dems keep making.#
- We needed a prosecutor at the top of Justice. I don't know what Garland actually did, but I'm sure it will all be swept out by whoever is Trump's AG. #
- Men's votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which is why so many voted for Trump. We could have had a bunch of them this year, if we had only spoken to them with respect. #
- I don't know if we can reboot the Democrats as an opposition party given all these problems. Whatever comes next is going to perform very differently from the party that lost this election. If we try to do it again the same old way, it will fail even worse. I think everyone knows this by now. #
I prayed. I really did. But I got the wrong answer.
#
In 2016, on the night of Election Day, when it was obvious Trump would win, before taking a Xanax and going to sleep, I wrote a
piece, that my friend Chuck Shotton
says I should run again. Rather than doing that, I'll quote the important part. "I don't think it's about economics, I think it's about change happening too fast. And the Trump voters had the power to bring it to a screeching halt, they saw the chance and took it."
#
First thing --
Don't shut down the campaign. We must keep communicating with the electorate, independent of what they get from the news orgs. The Harris campaign did an exemplary job. Why shut it down. Keep setting the agenda. Help keep us organized. Preserve the perspective and expectation of democracy in the US. Change the message from raising money, to keeping us all in touch with the opposition (ie us). This is the mistake we made in every election since we had the web to organize. The Repubs, almost by accident, never stopped organizing. And now that Musk, who will be part of the new administration, owns Twitter, you can be sure they will stay and get more organized. We can do it too! We have to stop making this mistake of going back to zero after election, whether we win or lost.
#
Blame is pointless. It may be emotionally satisfying at some level, but it is division, and that's why we keep losing elections. We don't see it but we create our own divisions. This must stop.
#
Be generous with all classes of people, by gender, age, race, religion, whatever is used to divide us. Stop
vilifying men.
Carville was right. There's no reason to make one whole gender the scapegoat for all our problems. It's no accident that the Repubs own the men. We could probably have had ten percent or more of their voters if we stopped doing this. Key point, when you blame a whole gender, you hurt people who have no power to stop it.
#
Speaking of Carville,
yesterday's Trippi podcast with Carville as the only guest was the
best podcast I've ever heard. I recommended it yesterday as inspirational. Now that we know the outcome of the election, it's a marker of where we were before the results were known. A world that no longer exists. But like stories written in 2016, the markers are useful to see where we once were and how we got here, and what we can learn from what happened between. I wish it had turned out the way these two great friends thought it should have. But it didn't. But there was a hint that they knew what wouldn't work this time. No spoilers.
#
Ben Thompson wrote in his
Stratechery newsletter: "What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!" I wrote in 2017, that
some Repub would buy Twitter, and it would merge and thus transform politics and tech. This was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one who saw it. We could have headed this off, if people would just listen. I beg you to listen to people you don't usually listen to. The NYT will never hire someone like me to write on their op-ed page, so if you only accept your input from people with legit credentials, you'll miss insights like this. We're paying a heavy price for this now. When I begged people to listen they came back with the balance sheet valuation of Twitter, but they were leaving the most important asset off the balance sheet, the dollar value of being able to elect a president. Musk
didn't miss this.
#
"Richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world."
#
Also to the Twitter founders, amassing that much power and centralizing it as Twitter did, had a cost that we're paying now. But it's very hard to stop when the juggernaut is rolling. I understand, but in the future we have to think about this more clearly.
When a medium becomes too big and centralized, there's trouble ahead. It was accidental that Trump was the one to take advantage of this to route around journalism and go direct, but it was not accidential that Musk did.
#
Speaking of Musk, maybe he will temper Trump's desire for retribution. It may be a vain hope, but I'll cling to it anyway. Doing business in a world of retribution might not be too conducive to the creativity needed to run innovative tech businesses. A climate of fear doesn't inspire great software. I know the quality of products Musk makes, I own and love my Tesla Model Y. Best car I've ever owned or driven.
#
My longtime friend, Mike Arrington
said next time have a primary. He has a point. Would Harris have been the nominee if the Dems had had a normal primary process? Who knows. Maybe the voters could have told us then that what happened yesterday was coming.
#
Final note (I think). The pain you feel at first may abate. It did for me. I had pushed down memories of 2020 and 2021. It was a horror show, and Trump was the main character. So the first thing I had to deal with is that I don't want to remember that. Too painful. But once I realized that's not where we are right now, it's a totally different situation, that's when the creative impulse rose as the pain receded. We have one short term thing to do -- keep the campaign running, and long term we have to recognize division we add, and counteract it. We are the party that welcomes everyone regardless or race, religion, country of origin, age or gender.
All of them. No exceptions. The election result represents big change. And it's a
good time to make more changes.
#
PS: I bet
Bezos wishes he had bought Twitter.
#
lists.opml.org: The other day I asked a famous blogger who uses RSS if he would be willing to share his list of feeds, so others could subscribe to them. He declined, for good reason, there was private stuff in the list he couldn't share. I certainly understand that. Then I realized, as often is the case, that I could do myself what I had been asking others to do. And in fact I already was sharing my OPML subscription lists, but people who didn't use
FeedLand wouldn't know
how to find them. So I decided to make it easier. On
lists.opml.org I've got a link to the
lists of podcasts I'm subscribed to. That list should update every hour for any additions or removals from this list. I don't update the list very often, fwiw. And I make no warranties about the quality of the podcasts, or when the feeds in the list update. And maybe this will give other people an idea that they might want to do this as well. Let me know if you do, I'd love to see what you do.
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Tomorrow if you are an American, and haven't voted yet and are thinking of sitting it out -- get off your butt and get out there and do your civic duty. We need great turnout this year, record-setting turnout, as a show of love for our country and our Constitution. Vote now, because later you might not have any power to change direction. Tomorrow, you do have power.
And remember that voting is not you expressing yourself, it's not free speech, it's you and I governing. This is our moment of greatest power. Use it or lose it.
#
- My opinion: At this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election.#
- After the election if we still have freedom of speech, we should reboot news around the simple idea of news written by experts. They must know the basic rules of journalism, imho that's much easier than the know-nothing journalist posing as everyman with a view from nowhere, trying to understand what they're writing about. They don't have any basis to judge, we give them far too much power. That system is rooted in a time when publishing was expensive but that hasn't been true for thirty years. the old system has run its course. This election, either way, is a lesson in how that system, if it ever worked, doesn't work today. The next news system will be sources going direct to interested readers. #
- Jay Rosen and I did a series of podcasts in the early teens called Rebooting the News. This was the basic premise. I believe more than ever that this is the best path for news going forward. #
- They did this at Wired for a while. I was invited to be a columnist when my main qualification was that I was an accomplished software developer. I think that's the way to go. Experts sharing their perspectives on current events. #
- Before Twitter existed, in 2002, I proposed to the NYT that they offer a blog to anyone who is quoted in a NYT article. If they had done this, the NYT would be what Twitter became, and it wouldn't now be owned by Elon Musk, for the benefit of humanity. I wish they had done it. It would have been a real moneymaker. And good for the flow of knowledge.#
About polls, I learned how they work and how much they are a
Ouija board, where the reports are tuned up based on the pollsters assumptions about who are the real voters, and account for the limited people who can be polled. They're trying to estimate what millions of people will do by talking with a few hundred. So they read each others' work, and try not to be too far off the consensus. It's at best an art, at worst they're just press releases designed to get the ad money to flow in certain directions. Don't overlook that the money is flowing to the same businesses that are choosing which polls to report on. Most of what the news orgs report on, it makes it into a sport like the NBA or MLB, but there at least there's objective news to report on, you know -- the score of each game, how many runs were scored, who got injured, fired, traded. In politics, there is no objective news, and if there were, the journalists we have don't report it. There's a lot of inputs that are connected to the outputs, conflicts of interest everywhere. Even so, the
top item on
Memeorandum is about a
poll in Iowa that says Harris is ahead. Iowa was never thought to be in play. Yes, I too am addicted. Endlessly fascinated. Maybe we'll survive next week after all? Hope.
#
- Cory Doctorow: "I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will." It's a good practice, and while I completely support it, I am part of several communities that could remove me without recourse. I do it because I value the people in the community, and feel that life is too short to wait for everyone to get it right. #
- Doctorow was writing about Bluesky, and once again, on Bluesky a discussion starts on what it would take for Bluesky to attract developers, and each time I am told that they have done enough, and I go away thinking that their pitch is a scam, and they're building value in a user base that they will sell. They certainly could do it, and for all we know the founders may have already sold some of their stock in the latest investment round which valued the company at $x billion. (I did a search to find the evaluation but it appears to have not been announced.) #
- I gave them a roadmap, again, of how to demonstrate that they're open, and finally concluded that the only way to really do it is to "provide a download that you can install on any popular operating system to get an instant blue sky network, running on its own without any help from anyone else. Then you can claim to be really open and until then there will be a lot of confusion." (And I was generous at that. More accurately, people with experience in tech will be certain this is yet another deal where the founders get rich, where the users are the product and have read too much into their promise of being open.) #
- I'm still on Bluesky but I expect them to be another Twitter, which btw had an open API too, and it's pretty good, but they never offered the option of people running their own twitters. That would have been good protection against a Musk buying them out and turning us into pawns in his plan for world domination. Do we really want to help someone else build one of those? #
- In early 2017 I observed that Twitter had just been used to route around journalism and elect a president. This value wasn't on their balance sheet as an asset. I felt its stock was vastly underpriced. Exactly as it turned out when Musk bought it. Everyone still thinks he paid too much, at this moment it could possibly gain him control of part of the US government's $6 trillion per year budget early next year, and if they start selling the assets of the government he could be in the best position to buy them at pennies on the dollar, or take a percentage of each saleAt this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election.. He could probably start borrowing against it the day after the election is called for Trump.#
- In the title I ask if a Musk could buy Bluesky, it's possible they have a way to prevent that in the design of their corporation, that's why it's a question. But if the price were right maybe the founders would sell out even if they didn't have to. #
Programming language design should follow the half of
Postel's Principle that says be "conservative in what you send." There should be one way to do anything, not many. That way I can include your code in mine and vice versa. I can understand what you're doing. Tools can be developed that make it even easier to do things the only way they work. New programming languages if they really are necessary should strive to simplify the programming model, there should be less things for the developer to worry about, the more easily new ideas can be developed, the less attention you have to pay to how you'll do something over what it does. I actually don't support the other half of Postel, in everything but user interface where I do support it. I don't think in general software interfaces should be liberal with what they understand because that defeats the first half. They sort of zero each other out.
#
People may question my credentials as a language designer. I've designed a very innovative system that unfortunately the academics don't think is worth studying. It's utterly ridiculous. Who says you can only learn from systems developed at big companies or universities. I cover a lot of ground, it's true -- no one gave me permission to create
Frontier, but I didn't feel I needed permission. Or funding for that matter. I think what happened is Apple positioned us as less significant than their system scripting language, and people just accepted that, when Frontier is a far superior system. Anyway, the
ideas are there anyway, and you're welcome to learn from them.
#
Must-read: “It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.”
#
- I kept waiting for Kamala to say what we're not going back to is Trump. We've paid our dues. He's had enough of our attention. #
- Government should do its work quietly, making things better for the people and that's all, and until there's a crisis that demands our attention, stays out of the way.#
Keep the drama on Netflix and HBO.
#
- The most depressing thing last night for me was reading that a longtime friend voted for the worst candidate they've ever voted for because the other one was worse. They wouldn’t say who they actually voted for. This is what we’ll be left with as a country when all this is done. #
- I gave another $100 to Harris to compensate, and of course voted straight Democratic on Thursday. Unlike my friend I was proud to vote for her. The alternative, after what we lived through between 2017 and 2021, to choose to go through that again, hard to imagine the horror.#
- And of course that’s assuming he voted for Harris.#
Unfortunately the only place you can read this
Dan Conover piece is on Facebook about the failure of the NY Times and Washington Post to adequately defend democracy. He says something I had not seen elsewhere. "We're not talking about HuffPo or Salon here. We're talking about the last two 'unique nationals' standing in American print journalism. Institutions with long and storied histories. Both took the same test at the same time, and both failed it." I'd add that all other journalism usually follows their lead, but that may be finally changing.
#
Meanwhile, it's amazing that both CNN and MSNBC have gotten serious about covering the reality of Trump 2.0 after being very unserious for the last year. It's as if after rejecting Joe Biden, months later they realized they rejected the wrong guy.
#
We now understand that the Republicans derive their power through division, setting groups against each other. We think the Democrats are the opposite, they are inclusive, everyone is welcome there. But that's not true. This
NPR piece touches on it, gingerly, because it's the third rail in non-Republican politics. Because it's one of the divisions that's maintained by people who are mostly Democrats. If you want to know if you're part of the problem, measure your own feelings when you find out what it's about. And then listen, carefully to the words. It might be hard to hear because I think most people who do this don't think they do, or they're justified in doing it. They don't want to look here. But the pragmatic reason to focus on this is that in future elections, assuming we have them, if we can make an effort to not do this, we could get enough Republican votes to switch to make real change possible. They might even become our most vocal supporters. Winning in politics is done by focusing on common interests over division.
#
The monthly archive
for October has been saved. By the end of this month we'll know a lot more than we know now.
#
I did the first demo of my new editor to a couple of developers I'm working with on our ActivityPub project, something I'm ever-more-excited about. Happy to say the demo was a success. They appeared to love the product, and for the right reasons. It makes WordPress into a fantastic writer's platform. This is what I love to do more than anything. People think I'm most interested in protocols and formats, but that's just part of it, and not the main part. I love making writing tools. I got interested in that in the late 70s working on editors for programming languages, then ran a company that made the same kind of editor, outliners, for writers, and then with Frontier went back to programmers. Now I'm trying something new. I want to create a whole category of editors. Editors where none existed before but should be there. The web. Instead what we have in 2024 is a lot of
tiny little text boxes that hoard your writing making it pointless for developers to compete for writing tools that writers love. So writing on the web remains something that's not for writers. That's freaking stupid! Anyway right in the middle of all this is the perfect product, really a platform -- WordPress. It needs 100 great editors. I'm going to provide the first, and the toolkit to create more. Then Murphy-willing I'm going to create another editor, to show that it can be done. Then I'm going to kick back and smell the roses, a lifetime's work done, so now I can play. It's looking like the plan might just work.
#
There should be a prize for developers who create the most
interop.
#
A few days I concluded that Trump doesn't think he's going to win. Now it seems he doesn't want to win.
#
When we vote we are governing, not expressing ourselves or protesting. It's not just the first amendment, it's the whole thing.
#
What
Musk has been saying is cover for what the oligarchs did to the Soviet Union as it was breaking apart. Only the US has vastly more wealth. And unlike Trump, Musk understands how money works, presumably Putin does too. They want the entire flow of cash that's generated by the US economy to go through them. So "richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world." Forget about any benefit from government, that's over. The health care system would fall apart. The situation with abortion is just the beginning. When Musk says it'll come back better after a few years, that's a lie. Something like that never comes back. We've encountered this before, when the Repubs were threatening default.
#
Progress on the
YouTube TV front. Thanks to all the responses, I've gotten F*cks News out of the startup position, but it still appears in the upper left corner of the
2-by-2 news multiview display, and thus is the default, and when I launch it I hear them talking which is not pleasant. Further I always have to see what their freaking chyron says, and the commercials from the
Hitler-fanboi pillow salesman. Basically I want to be able to see what they're doing
when I want to, but never have it forced on me. Help.
#
The Major League Baseball season is finally over. The no-philosophy mess in the Bronx was near-swept by the infidels from California, on their home field no less, so we expect Jankee Estadium to be either haunted in perpetuity or torn down (latter solution preferable) and replaced with something more appropriate, hopefully
very far away from Queens, maybe they'd consider moving to California too? Since the Jankees fans only sanction winning, I don't imagine too many would mind if they had to hate them from afar? And now NY baseball is united in our disrespect from the so-called Bronx Bombers, whose bombs were duds this year. Anyway the
Mets did better against the Dodgers in the NLCS, and their
star hitter wasn't injured when the lovable Metsies played them. The Mets scored far more runs and of course far more philosophy. And in a desperate attempt to win, when losing was already baked-in, two Janks fans were ejected for trying to
interfere with a Dodger outfielder on a stinking foul ball! I mean if you want to try to steal the game, at least have the good sense to interfere with a home run? Not too smart. Oh well. At least the Janks were humiliated, a bright spot for baseball in the Big Apple.
#
YouTube TV when it starts up, the station it automatically opens is Fox News. I posted this on various social webs and heard from people this is not their experience.
#
"When your house is on fire there aren’t two sides." A few people misunderstood. In this
analogy there are no arsonists. There is the house and there is fire. If you were reporting on this situation, you don't need to find out what motivates the fire, the only important thing is that if not checked it will destroy the house.
#
- My op-ed for the Washington Post, if there was such a thing..#
- I didn't imagine that Bezos cared what subscribers to the Washington Post thought about his decision to cancel their endorsement of VP Harris in the election one week from today. #
- But 200K people unsubscribed, and I guess that message got through to him, so he wrote an op-ed that ran in the Post yesterday, explaining that this was a principled thing. #
- If it was really a matter of principle, they wouldn't have chosen this election, and one where his own personal interest was so involved. It doesn't look principled, and when you're trying to do something principled, it pretty much has to look that way or you have to conclude that it's bullshit, which it obviously is. #
- It's surprising that he cares. The Post was worth $250M when he bought it in 2013, maybe it's worth more than that now, but it's a very small part of his current $205B net worth. If owning the Post would interfere with his other businesses in a negative way, and if the problem could be solved by dropping it, I don't doubt that he would do that. Then why this op-ed? It could be that someone in his family objected, sometimes people react to that in ways that could cost money. It's possible. It's also possible that he's not sure that Trump will win, and being a calculating person, he realizes now that he's created a similar problem for himself if the Democrats win. The Trumps won't care if he lies about the reason, so lying about the reason was the obvious path for him. #
- I think what we're really seeing is that owning a high profile news org like the Post isn't something for Mr Bezos. He would probably be better off selling the Post, so he doesn't have to make these kinds of principled bullshit choices, when clearly the only principled thing to do is not abandon American democracy in its hour of greatest need.#
I started to read Ben Thompson's email newsletter
Stratechery this morning, it was about Trump on Joe Rogan's podcast, which I didn't want to listen to, because I am overdosing on Trump, again. I was surprised to see it begins with the story of podcasting, which has my name in it, which was gratifying. A lot of people will read that. I'm including a
screen shot of the beginning because his newsletter is not something you can read without a subscription.
#
The people who are alive right now are the first to create knowledge that we know in advance will be part of LLM databases. So far we've heard from the resisters, the ones who don't want any part of this. But what about people who want to create knowledge in the maximally useful form? Are there any howto's for this? A busy writer's guide to creating human knowledge?
#
It appears Trump expects to lose.
#
If the Washington Post already had their endorsement written when is it going to leak?
#
Listened to
Charlemagne tha God for the first time on the
New Yorker podcast. I agree with everything he said. Really glad that people with clear mind and purpose are using our medium to do the good we hoped for. Best part was where he quoted Obama agreeing that things don't change when you elect a new president. Change can't come that fast unless we bring a substantial majority of other Americans with us. The vote isn't a way to make change, it isn't a way to express yourself, it's
your role in governing our country. It's not the First Amendment or the Second Amendment, it's the whole Constitution. It's the most power every one of us gets. Even the president doesn't have the power of our votes. You don't get a specific result from your vote, that would be the fascism that we're trying to avoid. It's the consenus that build that makes the difference. And Obama is too modest because he made at least a couple of big changes. First, everyone has a right to health insurance now because we elected Obama. That's no small deal, coming from someone who has depended on health insurance to survive, a couple of times. And second, we stirred the racial pot in this country in a positive way. Not to say we got peace and love as a result. Because there are a lot of white folks who don't want that pot stirred. But that was change nonetheless. The only way we get there, and I've said this many times, is by working together. Blame is powerless. Acceptance is powerful.
#
I bet Bezos wishes he owned Twitter instead of Musk.
#
Lots of Yankees fans at the Garden yesterday to see the great Knicks team of last year show up for the first time. The game in Boston on Tuesday was disheartening. It's a new team with the core of last year's team. And when the fans started roaring when there was nothing happening on the court, last night at the (NY) Garden, it was because the Yankees had scored in the World Series game
2794 miles away in Los Angeles. This is the
inconvenience of being a Knicks fan who hates the freaking Yankees. We have to share an NBA team. The Knicks are much more like the Mets than that other team. That's why it's so incredible to see the 2024 Knicks be able to manage both ends of the court, and completely shut down a team that last year beat them in playoffs, the Pacers, just like last year, but better. A validation of everything. Now the team has to stay healthy. But, even if they don't fly the Nazi flag at Trump's rally tomorrow, you know that they want to, and some of them probably brought them. It's a funny time for the Garden. The owner of the Garden btw is
James Dolan. We try to overlook that he owns the Knicks and he seems to be cooperating by staying out of the our faces. But he is known as a
vile man to the people of New York.
#
BTW if you're thinking why don't we just go for the Nets. As I've said here many times, there aren't actually any Nets fans to speak of in NY. That was the huge self-parody
Kevin Durant did when he claimed there was some kind of rivalry between the Nets and the Knicks. Really unfortunate unforced error he could have just asked a few people where are all the Nets fans.
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So when the Dodger hit the
walk-off grand slam last night, half of me was ecstatic because the Yankees were beaten, but oops, but I hate it even more that the freaking Dodgers won. This World Series is unique in that I desperately want both teams to lose. What do you do with that??
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- It probably does no good to cancel your Washington Post subscription. It's hard to imagine Bezos would lose any money from a complete writedown. Any loss would offset gains he would receive from selling a tiny bit of Amazon stock, it would wash out on his balance sheet.#
- You can't hurt him with money. In fact I'm pretty sure we can't hurt him in any way. So why not keep the reporters employed, for once the seem to be doing the right thing and keeping us in the loop on why they're doing the awful thing they're doing. Usually we're kept in the dark. #
Maybe political parties should have strongmen, that might have prevented us from having one as the head of the government.
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I just changed the header graphic for my blog from the
1969 Mets, to the
2024 Supreme Court. They're Americans too, and I have a feeling they're going to be on the train to Aurora or Springfield before too long, if the worst happens.
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What a sad situation. What started with the open web in the 90s is now owned by billionaires, who, looking for new worlds to conquer have adopted a fascist buffoon as their frontman. It was never supposed to be owned by anyone.
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- The Washington Post announcing it wouldn’t endorse a candidate for president is the first glimpse we’ve had of how news publishing in the US has been devastated by fear of fascism. This must go back at least as far as the 2016 election and Hillary’s emails. The editorial people broke the wall, deciding to give the readers the first glimpse we’ve gotten into the inner conflicts of one two most influential news orgs in the country. #
- Until now this was the one story they would never report on. Truly a milestone. And now that the window is open, open it further. Report on how a major news org holds back stories that would be of intense interest to the people, if only the news orgs did their jobs. This is where the "public editors" never went, and should have gone. #
- Why hasn’t the NY Times run a story that takes Trump at face value and explains to voters what it would be like to live in that United States? It should have been updated and run every time Trump ups the ante. #
- An example. Trump says Americans who criticize the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade should be imprisoned: “These people should be put in jail for the way they talk about our judges and justices.” #
- A news story on this subject should include calls to all the justices on the Supreme Court to ask if they agree or disagree. It's time to bust some new norms. They are above reproach, traditionally, but they decided that the president can do whatever he wants, break any law without penalty. Are they concerned that perhaps they might be imprisoned if they make a decision that Trump doesn't like? Let's learn from them, how they think American citizens should feel about this. After all they are American citizens too, aren't they? If we can be jailed, or worse, for our speech, why not them? 😄#
- Of course if they refuse to answer, which they probably will, that should be part of the story. No deference allowed, by the journalists. Simple factual statements. #
- We've relied too much on the Democrats to stick their necks out, when in fact all our necks are on the line here. So if you have something to say about this, now is the time to do it. In a couple of weeks it might be too late. #
If only voters understood that government isn't a TV show.
#
Last night I was surprised to see Wolf Blitzer reporting, on CNN, on all the worst things Trump has said, with supporting video. On CNN, one of the worst
sanewashing sources for our would-be despot. I can't imagine what happened there. Or maybe I can. Is it possible that the
owners of
CNN who might have gotten an education and possibly studied a little history from teachers who remembered WW II, and understood that Trump's lines are straight from
Mein Kampf, and maybe perhaps possibly maybe with only two weeks to go before the election started envisioning themselves and family on trains to American death camps. After all CNN ran some perceivably negative stuff about Trump, and who knows maybe President Trump won't be so discerning and might just have all media people euthanized.
It could happen. Maybe visions of their own mortality caught up with them and they decided to let Blitzer do what he can to douse the flames. Oddly the same thing seems to have happened at the
NY Times and the Atlantic, and Trump's former
Chief of Staff has gone
on the record now, with audio, explaining what we all know is waiting for us if the US actually goes down the path it appears we quite possibly are going down.
#
I think it's probably too late, anyway. Journalism should have reported, constantly, that the house is on fire. And nothing else. Biden's age didn't enter into it you fools. The much bigger story was and is that Hitler wants to be president, and this time he has a plan. It was true then and it's true now. The next question is what will Biden do if Trump wins. It was tough watching Obama greet Trump at the White House in 2016. I can't see Biden doing that. I wonder what ideas they're workshopping in the
actual Situation Room.
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Don’t depend on Threads to validate the Fediverse. That’s not what they’re doing. Some of the people working there have good hearts and mean well, but Meta is a huge company, competing with other huge companies, and the goals of the Fediverse do not show up in their roadmap.
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I got a notice that Threads had deleted one of my posts because they said it violated their rules. They thought I was claiming to have written something I had not written. I didn't keep the notice (it popped up when I signed on). I shrugged it off when I got it, but then realized that we are very far away from the web. It has been turned into Disneyland where the cops are algorithms and they err on the side of stopping innocent things. I was just passing on a
link to someone else's blog, something I thought an informed person would want to know about (that's the idea behind every link I share). We really do need to dig our way out of this hole, again. This is of course no better than Twitter or Facebook. Not a place to get work done.
#
It's amazing that the million-plus Americans who died from Covid during Trump's tenure aren't even mentioned as a campaign issue. Maybe people don't want to be reminded of those dark days.
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- I'm continuing to develop on WordPress. I see the opportunity regardless of what else is going on. #
- I could be wrong, I have been before. I kept using Twitter for identity after Musk took over, even though as time went by it was increasingly obvious that developers weren't part of his plan. I've been there before, with Apple, after Jobs came back. We had a great developer community for the web on the Mac, better than anything on Windows or Unix, and the management before Jobs, Heidi Roizen advising Gil Amelio, seemed to value our contribution, even if we weren't prospering. But there was a moment when Jobs introduced the open source equivalent of some of our products -- and that basically spelled the end of our little adventure, since Apple was putting the spotlight on them and not us.#
- But it doesn't always go that way. I kept investing in the Mac in 1985, a very bad year for Apple, and in 1986 we had a huge hit, and because we were almost alone in sticking it out, we were rewarded with booming sales. Of course it mattered that MORE was a lovely product. But if no one looks, it doesn't matter how lovely it is! #
- Anyway, the WordPress world is huge. Far bigger than the blogosphere in the 90s and 00s. Maybe somehow the trouble with WordPress will mean that people who see WordPress as a writing platform will all leave now, or stop considering new ways of writing. But honestly I don't think that's very likely. I have a few sites at wordpress.com that are archives, that I pay for, that I will continue to pay for. My father's memorial site, for example. Things would have to get incomprehensibly bad for me to consider moving it and where exactly would I move it?#
- But on the other hand, there isn't anything else out there that's offering something new for the writers. I think I'm pretty much alone working in this area. And maybe people need some good news? #
- My new product is a medium size writing tool. Less than a full word processor and more than a tiny little text box. I think there are a lot of WordPress users who will like it. And I think there's a chance they might notice it. So I'm going all the way with this one. I may lose the bet, but wtf, let's give it a try.#
- Last night the Mets were eliminated by the Dodgers playing in Los Angeles.#
- And I don't know about you but I'm really happy with how the season turned out. I didn't think the Mets would make it through any of the hurdles, making the playoffs, and beating the Brewers and Phillies. That was amazing. And the energy of this team, their humor and inventiveness, professionalism and perseverance. The Mets of 2024 were a great team, and they give us something to look forward to in 2025. #
- People say Mets pitchers walked too many Dodgers, but the walks were a result of discipline on the part of the Dodgers hitters. Most pitchers throw a lot of crap, and the hitters swing at it. The Dodgers are more discerning. If the Mets pitchers had thrown strikes they would have hit home runs. It's another way of saying that the Dodgers, no matter how much we despise them, this year at least, were the better team.#
- And there is a silver lining. I wasn't sure I wanted the Mets to beat the Dodgers once we knew the team from the "other" league was going to be the Jankees. Last time the Mets played them in the World Series, they beat us in Shea Stadium and as a result we had to tear it down and start over. I don't think any of us wanted that, or even to risk having to tear down Citi Field. I don't like to be reminded that the Jankees even exist, much less be forced to watch them play. And honestly between the Dodgers and the other NY team, I want them both to lose. Is there any way to arrange that? I don't even want to know. #
- Anyway thanks to the Mets for being such a wonderful team, a constant inspiration. So onward. Next year. And now..#
- The Knicks begin their season tomorrow night in Boston against the Celtics.#
Some of us do most of our writing on desktop computers. I guess we're in a very small minority. We can use a much better twitter-like system than the people who use mobile devices to tweet. I'm one of the desktop people. So I want
textcasting. Mobile people either don't care or don't want it. So it stands to reason we need a different user interface. We can use the same network, we just need a different UI for editing. Since the twitter-like systems already carry links to stories written by people on desktops, there's room in their pipes for our writing too. And it can work more efficiently if the stories are part of the message as opposed to living off-site. Think of it as a web of writing. A writer's web that also carries short messages.
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I did a
podcast this morning about the reality of Musk owning Twitter, which is now completely settling in. He might have enough influence on the election to push Trump over. He wins even if Trump loses, he gets a moon mission project to boot up a Musk Party. It's coming for sure, either way. Probably will pick up what's left over after Trump, who clearly is losing it, and even if he's president, someone else will be pulling the strings. I can't imagine the billionaire will let JD Vance do it. And by "billionaire" I mean Musk.
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A second elimination game for the Mets tonight. I almost don't want the Mets to win, because the World Series opponent from the "other" league are the Janks from the Bronx. I love the Bronx. That's about all I have to say about that at this time.
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Eugen Rochko, the lead developer of Mastodon: "Fediverse integration in Threads is still in a sorry state over a year since launch. They need to be able to follow us back. They need to see when we mention them. Those are such basic things." They got what they wanted, they got the users and press to relax because they’re Facebook who we know, but this is different, it’s the fediverse. And they got Eugen and others to validate them. This always works, standard tech playbook. they give up nothing, then the priority changes. I don't like being right. But they're never going to change in Silicon Valley. They do what works, and take advantage of newcomers who want to believe.
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It's possible the Dodgers let the Mets win as I
begged them to yesterday, but it's also possible the Mets just
crushed the Dodgers, but either way, the Mets are still in it. The series is now 3-2, and returns to Los Angeles tomorrow. So we don't have to tear down
Citi Field after all. If the Dodgers win it'll be in their own stadium. The Mets were magnificent! Absolutely inspiring. A three-run home run by Alonso started things off. Everyone got on base. Doubles and triples. It wasn't without the concern that our wonderful and lovable Mets would do the usual Mets thing and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but they held out. The final score was 12-6. We're still in it. Lets go Mets!
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I asked ChatGPT to
illustrate my post. Not bad. Very colorful!
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Bloggers, here's an idea. When you write a piece you're proud of, end it with a sentence like this: "And that's why I have a blog." It plants a seed, which through repetition and appearing in many places, might help people appreciate the purpose of a blog. We've had a lot of mud slung at us, let's start undoing that.
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The Dodgers
soiled our lovable slumping Mets last night. It was a sad sight. One to forget as soon as possible. And don't forget folks, there's always next year. If I were the Dodgers, I'd expect the Mets to win tonight, and the Dodgers will probably begrudgingly go along with it. Otherwise we'd have to destroy Citi Field as we did when the Yankees celebrated their World Series victory in 2000 on the field of Shea Stadium. I was actual there the night that will live in infamy. Back then at first I objected to the destruction of our shrine to the glory of past Mets teams, but then I realized we could never again rise to the peak of Mets philosophy in a chapel so soiled by the infidels. So if you don't mind Dodgers, we'd like to keep Citi Field, so we won't object if you let our Metsies win tonight's game. The song for tonight's game is
Ain't Too Proud to Beg by the Temptations.
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There's this great story in the Fargo TV series where one of the villains says there's a point when an animal that has been captured, relaxes when it realizes that it is no longer a being and
has become food. "At some level food it knows it's food." Evolution has been kind to us that way. At what point in last night's game did you realize that the Mets were no longer a baseball team and had become food?
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- Will the NYT make it through the election without running an editorial that says clearly if we elect this mad king fascist and give him nukes and our military, and our industrial might, and what remains of our virtue, then we deserve the hell that will rain down on us. If this were a Hollywood movie, we'd be waiting for the climax, but I have a feeling they will exit existence with a whimper. #
Are we in a loop??
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- Imagine the editorial the NYT runs the day after the election when Trump wins and it dawns on them that it's really over. For good. No backsies. We're going down. Sayonara. Thanks for the memories. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when. #
It was nice knowing you.
#