Dear
YouTubeTV which is constantly nagging me to reactivate their service. There's no way as far as I know to talk to them (they sure talk a lot to me) other than posting this publicly. So -- I would absolutely switch to your service if you had
MSG and
SNY. I need to be able to watch Knicks and Mets games. That's all that keeps me with Spectrum whose software is nowhere near as good as Google's.
#Drummer and a bunch of other services were down for a couple of hours. They're back now. Still diggin!
💥#
I was out and about this morning running errands and everywhere I went I was the only one wearing a mask. I wanted to ask people if they thought Covid was over, but of course I didn't. I got a few stares which I interpreted to mean they felt judged by me. True. And I by them.
#
Today's song:
US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam that's who I am. Been hiding out in a rock and roll band." Happy Independence Day!
#A great
scene from
No Country for Old Men, a movie with a lot of great scenes. The woman says "The coin don't got no say in it, it's just you." The man says "I got here the same way the coin did."
#
- Another post that came straight from a twitter thread.#
I've been saying this a different way. We as citizens have been protesting. That's wrong. We must be demanding. Look where protesting got us. Our politicians, both parties, have forgotten they are responsible to us. Or more appropriately, we have forgotten.#- It's like going to the doctor, and they say okay we have to switch strategies from preventing to mitigating. In other words you now have the disease we've been trying to prevent. In Ohio they have a law that makes abortion illegal, now. Not in the future. Today. July 4, 2022.#
- In other words, we have the disease. We waited too long. We didn't listen to the doctor.#
- I look at what's happening in Ukraine, the Russians destroying cities just for the hell of it. How far are we from having that happen everywhere? How far from having it happen here?#
- But wait, it's even worse than that. They are preventing Ukraine's wheat from reaching the world. We will see the results of that soon. So it's not just Ukraine that they're destroying. Now come on connect the dots. Trump is Russia. The Repubs are Russia.#
- Here's the nightmare. The police are Russia too.#
- We're funding our enemy right now. Arming them. Giving them everything they ask for.#
- The nightmare is that an awful lot of our military thinks Trump was just right.#
- And we protest.#
- Protest is pointless unless it leads to something.#
- There was a time when all the rivers in NY were polluted. When every apartment building had a furnace where they burned all the garbage.#
- I remember walking to school in second grade, scrubbed clean by my mother, with soot falling in my hair and on my clothes.#
- But then we decided this was no way to live, and we cleaned up our act. We stopped dumping waste into the rivers and air.#
- The point is when we decide to fix something we can.#
Trolling is
transitive. People who RT trolls are themselves trolls.
#Remember the “people” who annoy you on twitter and elsewhere aren’t actual people, so just block them and get on with it.
#Can you imagine what it would be like if one day we all tried to do stuff with computers and nothing worked.
#I had a dream where the six repub supreme court justices appeared in public naked, to reveal they all had tattoos of Comrade Putin in various places, some with more than others, and larger ones.
#
- This came straight from a twitter thread, no editing. #interop#
- I've never thought I'd get any insights from drawing graph-like pictures of my outlines. I work fast. My outlines are snapshots of what I'm doing in projects on a day by day basis. Others are about communicating with others (reviewers, testers).#
- Next up the ladder are blog posts. Those are indexed by my outline indexer, daytona. And of course google et al, which care less and less about my public writing, so fuck em.#
- Finally is the book I've never written which will be a concordance of all the blog writing, w the most intelligent and witty parts up front. If you come up with software for that, I'm a customer. And I don't say that sarcastically, I bet google could do it, if they wanted to.#
- PS: I forgot to mention twitter which is for public communication of early drafts of stuff that will go on my blog after i've written it here 5 or 10 times. :-)#
- PPS: I've given up on posting serious shit on FB. Friends I care about post snarky jokes on serious stuff, and that's not fun. FB is for fun only not thought.#
The problem with the
Supreme Court decision is that while the Constitution doesn’t specifically name abortion as a right, in order to implement a ban on abortion a state will have to violate all kinds of other rights that
are specifically mentioned in the US Constitution and probably the state constitution as well.
#
Thanks to
John Naughton for the
praise, esp of my recent 25-minute
podcast. We're at those one of those moments when things change radically and those are the best times to check in with some ideas of what needs changing, because
you can change things too when the world is falling apart if you keep your head from exploding. I tell you why and I even tell you what to change! 1. Shut down the Supreme Court. 2. Do away with the fillibuster, the Electoral College and the Senate. 3. Then reinstate the court with more justices and term limits of say 10 years. At that point we will actually have representative government and fewer stale old hacks on the court nursing their grievances and taking it out on us.
#Will we come to despise Christianity in the US? I ask this question because up to this last week I felt that Christianity was other people’s problem, not mine. But they’ve captured the Supreme Court, and they’re using it to force their religion on the rest of us. So it’s no longer something that I can be neutral about. It seems that eventually, maybe very soon, we will come to hate Christianity.
#
The monthly ritual is done. Here's
the OPML for June 2022. Let's get started on July!
💥#
- Here's what Joe Biden said in a tweet on May 3, the day after the Dobbs decision leaked in advance of its release this week.#
- We will be ready when any ruling is issued.#
- They had 58 days to stop the attack. To have a powow with the court, and ask if they really planned to issue such a decision and when they said yes, shut it down before they had the chance to make it official. #
- You don't react to an attack on Pearl Harbor. If you know it's coming, you stop it.#
- Look what happened instead. They got to announce that ruling and a half-dozen others, all that are head shots to American democracy. Now Biden, as president, is occupying an office with no power.#
- The Democrats, Obama, Clinton and now Biden have stood by and watched while the Repubs went deeper and deeper, cutting every artery of our system, and they still act as if this all is business as usual. Could they be that stupid or cowardly or are they just actors. My guess is that we're the ones who have been duped, and after all they are just actors and know exactly what they're doing.#
So why is the court rushing to do it all this crazy stuff at once? They think there's a chance we might wake up and do the easy thing to neutralize them, by adding more members to the court. So they have to get it all in on the off-chance we might get smart. What's next is probably going after the presidential election, to give states the right to override their voters' choices.
#I know 89 percent of you don't care about the NBA, but please don't even think of moving
Kevin Durant to the Knicks. I can't imagine where he could possibly go. Maybe somewhere in the midwest like Denver or Dallas. Maybe
Phoenix to try to fill the shoes of the great Chris Paul. Maybe he and Russell Westbrook and James Harden could get back together somewhere to finish up their careers. Or maybe the Clippers. I'd like the Knicks to please turn the other way. No he's not welcome in NY. Thank you. I bet he thinks he's going to Boston. That would be a huge mistake imho. Maybe he can play in Europe or China.
Durant, no matter how good he is choked twice. He didn't fit in Golden State, and what a fiasco in Brooklyn which anyone could see coming. Maybe he could take a sabbatical or a gap year to see the world. I think he'll be boo'd in every NBA city. I guess I could be wrong about that. Cleveland or Miami might want him.
#New version of
davetwitter, an Node package for simplified server-side access to Twitter API. They
retired an API a while back, we didn't need it, so I took out the call.
#We've been at war for all these years, without being very conscious of it, and the enemy just took over. We're only beginning to realize we have to fight back now with everything we have. We didn't defend the victories. New generations came along and took for granted that we couldn't go backwards. In fact I'm pretty sure it hasn't sunk in yet for most.
#I bought a relatively cheap office chair that I really liked. Fit me really well, and elevated me high off the floor which is comfortable for me. But yesterday one of the arms on the chair broke off. Just like that. I thought no big deal, I'll get used to it. No. It doesn't work that way. I spend so many hours each day in this chair, the missing arm throws me off balance, sometimes literally. Almost fell off the damn thing a couple of times. I have another much more expensive chair (older) that I hate. I tried using it. No not going to do that. So I ordered a new cheap replacement. Even the littlest things matter it seems. Of course I have to assemble these things and I hate that part. So many opportunities to screw it up (I think that's the problem with the older chair btw).
#
The Supreme Court is beneath contempt.
#How we will know slavery and racism are behind us in America: We will teach American children that many of our ancestors, the people who built this country, were slaves. If that rubs you wrong, there's your racism, right there.
#I have a feeling that "web3" is going to be like the
semantic web. It was supposed to set the world on fire, for some reason I never understood. How long do you have to wait?
#BTW I always put "web3" in double quotes because it's an illegitmate name and hugely disrespectful. You shouldn't get to self-declare yourself the 3rd coming of something as hugely significant as the
world wide web. I don't think we should have used the term
Web 2.0, but don't blame me for that one.
#You
can blame me for
Internet 3.0, the title of a story in 2001.
#Scienceites have an effectionate name for ourselves, but it's not really printable. Let's see if I can telegraph it. We didn't have a football team, but we did have a math team. We had a computer in the early 70s when I went there, which was amazing. A block away was
DeWitt Clinton High School which was all-boys and definitely had a football team. We were under no illusions about who would win if we fought, so they didn't pick on us. Sort of an honor thing, I guess. Anyway we called ourselves (and as far as I know still do) The Science Fa**ots. Maybe they
don't say it these days, this was before political correctness.
😄#Poll: When writing code I'm writing primarily for..
#
Poll: Remove filibuster, electoral college, senate or states?
#
Why did Hutchinson's testimony come out today?
#
What did Trump imagine he would do if he got to the Capitol? Was there a plan? Was there a team of Proud Boys waiting for him. Would he have presided over VP Pence's lynching? Did he imagine giving a speech to a joint session of Congress? Too bad SNL isn't in season.
#I bet Trump,
watching TV in the West Wing, talked with panicked congresspeople during the insurrection, for fun, as they were scared of dying. The next level of rush after “you’re fired.”
#Biden is keeping the seat warm for DeSantis. Unless he steps aside after the November election and lets the next gen of Dems duke it out. I'd like to see the governors of
California and
Michigan in the mix.
#My blogging ethos came from the
Whole Earth Catalog. They moved from technical howto-type stuff to whatever was on
SB's mind. If the ideas come from the same mind, and the pub is a product of that person's mind, it's perfect. I remember reading it at my uncle's house in Florida, totally off the grid little geodesic he made himself. I loved the Whole Earth book because it seemed like my uncle. an engineer and hippie. He was another big influence in my path to eclectic, jumping where my mind wanted to go, even if it took years.
#One of the miracles of the web. I sent a
question to Heather Cox Richardson, and she responded. Even though I'm not a historian. I love it when the quality of an idea makes a difference, not the qualifications of the person asking the question.
#
We should have settled slavery after the Civil War by rewriting the Constitution to take out everything that was there to protect slavery. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln had plans for this before he was assassinated. Instead we left the Constitution virtually unchanged, and as a result a slight variant of slavery rebooted right after the war and has continued since. We have yet to cleanse ourselves of slavery. Until we do that, honestly, we cannot be a country.
#BTW, the best Silicon Valley novel ever imho is
Microserfs. After you read the book, it programs you to think you're
in the book. Amazing how complete the virtuality is.
#
- Ever since they announced that companies can register and run TLDs, I've been somewhat obsessed by the idea of running one myself. #
- Here's the idea, a TLD for the feed-o-sphere. I'd like to have a feed named dave.feed. When you access my domain it returns the content at a URL you specify and can change. So where ever I may be blogging today, you may find my feed at that address. #
- So the questions are basically: #
- How much money does it take, up front and periodically? Who gets the money? #
- How much time does it take to apply for the TLD, and what are the requirements to be approved?#
- Can you make a TLD non-profit, and does that affect the cost?#
- Is it only for companies or can individuals register TLDs?#
- What questions have I missed?#
- I've started a thread on my blog's repo to discuss, or you can respond on Twitter, but I'd prefer on the repo.#
- Thanks! 😄#
- PS: Not dave.rss. I tried that for a while and got all tied up in a revolutionary movement in India, or something like that. No thank you. #
The Repubs want it.
#
Poll: Who’s the surprise witness in tomorrow’s Jan 6 hearing?
#
If you're an expert on something timely and
people are annoying you with stupid comments, turn them off. You are not a tutor. They are not sincere. Stop wasting your time and leadership. We need you to focus now.
#Do you think they have a good laugh at the Supreme Court whenever they put something into an opinion that clearly violates the Constitution? Like the
evil villain from Austin Powers movies.
#
They got old but they still make groovy music.
#
May I suggest listening to yesterday's
podcast. It's full of timely stories, and reason to hope that now we will do what we've been putting off since the end of the Civil War. In the podcast I reference Bruce Sterling's
talk in Copenhagen in 2009 and Elie Mystal's book about the Constitution which I strongly urge you to get and
read or (preferred)
listen to.
#An old fashioned general strike may be needed, so that the Supreme Court can feel the power of the country they are fucking with. Shut it down for a day or two.
#A dollar spent today tagging every single Republican with the new abortion situation is worth $100 spent after November. They will find a way to wiggle out of this if they don't get tagged, hard, right now.
#1976: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature
Mr Beale and I won't have it."
#
As usual the journalism focus is on the horse race. The people insist that the focus be on them.
#
- This is a perfect analog for the software we develop. We strive to make it simple, but under the covers the simpler it is the harder it is to master. After a while you can't add more functionality without breaking it every time you make a change. So the challenge to make more powerful software is to invent ways to simplify what's going on behind the user interface.#
Simple user interface, complexity behind the scenes.
#- Note: This illustration came from a tweet by Sharad Bishnoi. #
- Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States is out of control and doing serious damage to the country...#
- We demand that President Biden and Congress pass legislation to increase the number of Supreme Court justices to 13, effective immediately.#
- We demand that President Biden must nominate, and the Senate must confirm the four justices immediately, in time to mitigate the damage to the country being caused by the current Republican majority on the court. #
- If the President won't make these changes we demand that he resign and let the current Vice-President take his place.#
Today's podcast: Let's not waste this crisis. We can fix a lot of things that have been waiting since the end of the Civil War.
#
Should we be asking about Amy Coney Barrett's sexual history or is that off-topic, and if so, why?
#The Constitution is like an operating system. The one we have was designed for slavery. But then a few decades after the
Bill of Rights we changed our mind, and decided not to have slavery. It's like going from
character-based to
GUI. but we never wrote a new OS.
#
The first episode of
Loot is as good as you'd expect because the star is Maya Rudolph.
#I hate random pieces of software who treat you like a friend sending text messages, so you pick up the phone only to realize oh it's amazon photos who found a photo just like one i took three years ago and have no recollection of.
#
Dorothy and Herman Guttierez at the
dinner party in Columbus on Tuesday.
#
If my mother, may she rest in peace, knew I was going to
use her voice, after death, to give orders to, I think she would've
kvetched about how her life sucks, and will suck even worse after she's dead, oy. But she probably would have bought more Amazon stock.
#The US should site license
this book. I learned so much from it.
# I'm going to try an experiment, following
SCOTUSblog today in my mailbox-style reader.
#
I wish sports teams cared more about the fans, and tried to understand what fans get from sports. The last couple of years have been good for the Knicks, not because they got anywhere near a championship, they didn't -- but they had a group of exciting players that we fell in love with. I don't want to follow Quickley or Toppin if they're playing for some other team. I want them in Knicks uniforms, for years to come. In 2012 I wanted to root for Jeremy Lin and his supporting cast for at least two or three years, but Knicks management broke up the team before the beginning of the next season. I guess that like all industries they mainly care what their peers think, and they have narrow and mostly wrong ideas about what the fans care about.
#
I got an
Echo Studio a couple of weeks ago, now I'm ordering a second. Wonderful product. I love the sound and the
feeling of the sound.
#I had broken the mailbox template for the feeder app. It's back. Here's a
demo. I'm also making sure that we don't break urls as we go along and I change things. For example, this is a
request that changed in two ways. It should still work, getting us a mailbox view of the feed for this blog. I'm probably the only person who cares about this.
😄#
- Have you noticed how some feeds look great in a mailbox-style reader while others don't. For example, feeds from Substack are good in mailbox readers because their items are full-text titled essays. But NYT feeds look terrible in mailbox readers, as does Scripting News. #
- The mailbox reader, which was popularized by Google Reader, is designed for titled full-text feeds. The NYT has titles on its feed items, but not full text, just a synopsis. There's so much wasted space in the display. It feels unbalanced. I like whitespace, but that's not what this is. #
- The incredibly useful Hacker News feed looks pretty weird in a mailbox-style reader. #
- In my feed, and feeds of Drummer blogs, some posts have titles, but most don't. A mailbox reader can't deal with untitled posts, I've given up on trying to make it work, it just doesn't.#
- The NYT and Scripting work much better in a river-style display, which is the pattern that Twitter and Facebook use, as examples. #
- The bottom line: We have to move away from mailbox-only feed readers. Mailboxes are great when the items are like email messages. But that's far from all there is. We have to try out new ideas, lots of them. And to do that I'm making it easier to try new ideas out. 💥#
- I have the same attitude about RSS in 2022 as I did in 2002. I wanted to move, to clean up the mess, start with a fresh new foundation. It worked then, and I believe now twenty years later it'll work again.#
- So much has changed. There was no Twitter or Facebook in 2002. None of the writing systems we use now existed. I think RSS 2.0 even predates Wordpress.#
- I have found a way to make it much simpler and easier to evolve feeds on the web, and I'm not waiting for permission I'm just going ahead. That's in fact what happened after RSS 2.0 with podcasting. We just did it, no one objected, and off we went. #
- The theme is totally opposite of the one in 2002, when I was basically finishing RSS, and giving it over to everyone to do with as they please. The roadmap said it clearly. This is it. No more new stuff in RSS itself. If you want to add to it, you can, but to get support for your ideas you're on your own. I wasn't signing up for another stint as notetaker for this particularly community. It was too thankless a job. But guess what, not much happened. The RSS people are using today is pretty much what they were using 20 years ago. There have been some new applications, and there are some respectful projects to add a new namespaces. That's more or less what the roadmap called for. So without any leadership, it kind of took care of itself.#
- Anyway, RSS as they say is what it is. There's also Atom and RDF, these exist and are in use. Very little if any innovation across the whole market, all of the new stuff has been in the individual products, but there are severe limits on what they can do because the format isn't moving.#
- My thought is that I can write some new software, as everyone else is, but with the thought that I want people to do the same as I am doing. At the same time, I don't care if you do it or not, if you pick up the ideas or don't. All I'm looking for is a critical mass of people who want to experiment with a new cleaned-up simplified feed system built on what was built before. #
I have the
Hello World feed template
working. I still have to write docs. I expect to have that tomorrow.
Still diggin! #Adam Singer: "Being friendly/civil with those you disagree with is ultimately the best signal of being a mature and self-aware human being. Holding grudges, fighting forever wars, trying to cancel others is childish & petulant. We move forward faster when more people join the former category."
#
- Note to outliner devs. Look at the outline elements in the RSS items. It's like podcasting, but instead of MP3s, it's outlines. Right there in the feed. So if you know how to render outlines, you can build more interesting kind of reader. News and tools for thought in one package, it's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup for ideas. A tools for thought feed reader. More LEGO-like building blocks. Don't worry there's more. 😄#
- This is a demo outline#
- Put here so it shows up in the feed#
- So when you look, you'll see a little outline#
- Not something overwhelming#
- Just something simple#
- So what's new with you?#
- There's talk of the Knicks signing Kyrie Irving#
- Needless to say given all that I've written about him, I think that would be a bad idea.#
- Some people enjoy watching WNBA games#
- I've never actually watched one.#
- I know they use a smaller ball#
- I find that alarming#
- Unfortunately if you read this post in a month or so, this outline won't be there.#
- In the feed that is, it'll still be here in the archive.#
- I know, I'll put a screen shot here. #
- That should do it. #
- That's it for now!#
- Have a great day.#
The
feeder app now has
templates that display feeds (of course) using the format implemented by the
reallysimple package. Next step is to write a Hello World template and document it. It's not complicated and it's fun. See how the LEGO blocks are fitting together?
#If you're looking for baseball news, I have
your site.
#Sarcasm sucks because you'd better be right and more often than not the sarcastichole is full of shit.
#
For people who read this blog who don't follow the NBA this all must seem boring, but this is the time of year when the piper gets paid. The chickens have come home to roost and it's now time for the bards to write. To write about the
foibles of would-be kings of basketball, such as Kevin Durant. He did the NBA a favor by leaving Golden State. There was no room for both KD and Steph Curry on the same team. This is the year that the idea of the superteam was completely debunked. Perhaps KD should hook up with LeBron and hmm Russell Westbrook and Melo. James Harden, Damian Lillard, Kemba Walker. If there were an NBA team in Pittsburgh I'd say that's where they all should play. Otherwise Sacramento or Orlando. However this is the time of year when my attention turns to the Mets. If all goes as planned you should get a few months of reprieve from basketball.
#Doc Rivers: "We keep loving this country and this country doesn’t love us back.”
#
In 1987 my father,
Leon Winer, who was a professor at
Pace University in NY, and loved my outliners, wrote an article about them that today's
#toolsforthought people would like, imho. All I have are JPGs, so I posted them in a
thread in Twitter, and in a
page on this.how.
#My father was a real outliner user. You know them when you see them. They want to make lists and figure stuff out. Very much into concepts. My mother on the other hand was a NBB or
Natural-Born-Blogger. She always had something on her mind and had to tell the world about it. So of course I, their first-born child, wrote outlining and blogging software, all together in one package. My mother once said that I was a good investment. She thought that way too. My father if you can believe it, said every day is Father's Day, thanks to my outliner.
#
The next part of the
reallysimple project is a mailbox style reader that plugs in like a LEGO block. You want a different kind of reader? It'll be easy to plug it in too. Here's a
demo. It's not finished yet, going slowly and carefully. Here's a
screen shot. The reader has a lot of interesting features.
😄#The goal of the
reallysimple project is to have lots of devs doing lots of experimentation with
RSS at the same time, and having all their work be totally compatible. To start a new developer process that avoids the pitfalls of the RSS environment of the last 20 years.
#Happy
80th to Paul McCartney.
❤️ #Beatles: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
#
The people who say our democracy is teetering on the edge are a few seasons behind. It's time to design a political party that fits the political system we have. If I said the things we have to do to get back on track, you'd cancel me hard. But we still have to do them.
💥#Listening to an idea you don't like is good for your creativity.
#A Covid theory... My friend visiting from out of town had Covid. We were together 3 full days. I didn't get Covid. Why? I got my second booster less than a month ago. At the same time I got pneumonia and shingles vaccines. The theory: My immune system was standing by.
#Today I learned that when you fly a fair number of your fellow travelers are infected with Covid.
#BTW, I might be missing something about Julian Assange. Isn't he the asshole who
dumped all of HRC's emails and gave the NYT all the ammo they needed to tank her candidacy thus giving us Trump? I could be wrong, there could be two people named Julian Assange. I guess.
#I take note when
Joe Trippi forwards one of my posts. Yesterday it was
my bit about Ron DeSantis. I think for sure he's running for president in 2024, and if the Repubs are smart, they'll nominate him instead of Trump. He gets a clean slate. He's just dog-whistle-level racist enough to get all the votes Trump got and enough of Biden's to win without having to resort to an insurrection. But he is a solid white supremacist, return-to-slavery type Republican. Won't make even the slightest attempt to win support from blue states or minority voters. All white all the way. At the same time, it's a good bet that by the election in 2024, Twitter will be run to please the MAGAs. Why do I think so? Well, everything Musk says about free speech is just another dog-whistle for the MagaVerse. Joe if you're listening, please tell your friends in the the political consultant sphere that we need to at least start a social network for electing Dems in 2024 and beyond. Don't depend on Twitter being useful in that election. We'll need new ways to organize that go beyond fund-raising and advertising. We need to have a 365-by-7-by-24 connection with voters. Organizing isn't just for elections anymore.
#I finished two series --
Tehran and
Gentleman Jack. I would not recommend the first, it got really tedious and kind of bullshitty toward the end. And completely not believable. You'd have to believe that Iran, a country that has been at war continually since the 1979 revolution, wouldn't have the most basic security for its leaders. Gentleman Jack on the other hand is a sweet story, a bit melodramatic, the bad guys are just a little too bad, esp at the end of the second season. But instead of leaving us with a horrible cliffhanger, as most shows do, they have so far ended each of the two seasons with a kiss. If there's a third season I will watch it. I've been saving the new season of
Borgen, pretty sure that will be the next binge.
#
- The perfect candidate for president from either party is a clever, confident, handsome, young, white man you'd like to watch on social media every day. He can lead a cheer, tell a joke, kiss a baby, knows how to eat pizza, and will get angry in a debate and then tell another joke. You would love to have a beer with him, or ride with him on a chair at Vail even if you're too poor or old to ski. #
- I watched Trump's rally last night for a refresher. Yup. He still looks and sounds good if you overlook the criminality and lies, narcissism and mediocrity which people are happy to do. He meets the important criteria. He's funny, looks okay and is white and a man. #
- At the end of Trump's term people were completely wiped out from the consequences of hiring such a loud-mouth punkass papa's boy loser, but memories are short, and Biden really is old, and he stumbles through his speeches. Biden will do, as long as he's running against Trump, but doesn't inspire. #
- Look if you're willing to compromise, and I am, although I would love an America that would embrace a really black president (not Obama who is a black man designed to make white people feel comfortable) or a woman president like Val Demings who is smart, thinks on her feet and hasn't been battered by the press and Republicans for 30 years when she runs, but that is not this America. #
- I think the best compromise for Democrats is Gavin Newsom. He checks all the boxes and he would also be a good political leader and is not a fascist. Any Democrat would get my vote, but I'd be confident Newsom would win. Almost anyone else I'd hold my breath and hope for the best, and expect we'd lose. #
The rule is I'm not supposed to be smarter about politics than the smart people in journalism. But what if I am?
#It's not radical to say what's true in clear language, it's just good writing.
#
Elon Musk half-endorsed
Ron DeSantis for president in 2024. DeSantis is a younger, more attractive, ambitious and not quite so openly hostile to non-whites version of Trump. Asked to comment, DeSantis makes a
Musk-like joke, he welcomes African-American support (Musk is from
South Africa). If this is what Musk means by free speech, well we're free to walk away from a Musk-owned Twitter. Where will we go? Probably nowhere. It's not possible for a service to take Twitter's place, it was formed a long time ago, and morphed into what it is now. I don't think any system will show up where there's a consensus that
this is the new Twitter.
#The US is openly white supremacist, but for sixty years has been trying to become less so. That peaked when we elected a black president in 2008. There is a
caste system here, and blacks were the bottom rung, and still are, largely, but there has been progress away from that, through
laws passed in the 60s, and supporting
Supreme Court decisions. All that is turning around. DeSantis, a smoother Trump, will be more careful about arousing his opposition. He will seem to be a likeable Republican and many will overlook his racism, or worse, quietly support it. I have no idea what the answer is, the racism is deeply ingrained in America.
#Trump supporters like this about him: He tells them they are important, but if things continue as they have been going, with elites promoting black people, they will matter less and less. That's the connection.
#
I'm still not out of the woods re Covid. My friend who was visiting just tested positive. I did another test, and I'm
still negative.
#Maybe Twitter’s users should buy Twitter. Why don’t we all buy enough to tell Elon Musk to take his white supremacist ass somewhere else.
#
I had a Covid scare today. A friend who is visiting was staying in a house where someone got Covid the night before they came to my house. We both took Covid tests, and both were negative. So I feel pretty good about dodging this. It's the first time I took a test. I play it very safe re Covid. I have too many risk factors to want to take too many risks, and as far as I'm concerned the pandemic is still raging. In the meantime, if you get Covid, get the
latest treatment. I can't imagine why someone who gets infected doesn't, but it happens apparently.
#Everything, Everywhere, All At Once — watched last night, maybe I was too wiped out from a day full of adventure, but I couldn’t stay awake. Not imho a great movie though it received universal acclaim from critics and friends. I will try again.
#
More on EEAAO -- I think what we're seeing here is that commercial movies have changed, they have to be action superhero type movies because they have to sell all over the world, and that's basically what the world likes. So they snuck a little "I'm ok you're ok" psychology into it, so it would have appeal for adults, kind of like a
Pixar movie, but like The Matrix or Kill Bill instead of Iron Man and the Marvel Universe. It's like we stumbled into an alternate metaverse that wasn't intended for us, the response of its people would be basically OK boomer, time to move on. And it's no accident that the dialog is half English, half Cantonese. Two big markets for blockbuster movies.
#I read
on the web that "Yves Saint Laurent Beauté Makes a Daring Step into web3." Oh really. So I went to their
glorious web3 adventure only to find --
ooops. If it had worked I am told that I might get a YSL Beauty NFT. "Acting as a recognition token of the community engagement, those 10K YSL Beauty Golden Blocks (ERC721 minted on Polygon with the Arianee Protocol) will unlock utilities throughout the year including a premiere launch, whitelisting for NFT drops and much more." I'm making a note of this here on my decidedly old school tech blog. We have so much to learn from their brave and daring experiment.
#I added a new feature to the
reallysimple package. Now it looks for an
atom:link head-level element with rel="self" and if it's present, it then adds the
href value to the feed object with the name
linkToSelf. Here's an example of a feed,
Don Park's blog, that has this element, and here's
what reallysimple generates. I felt it was good to include this because this use of atom:link is pretty common, and I wanted to make a gesture, that this isn't about supporting any single feed format, rather it's about supporting what's out there and useful.
#
I quit smoking 20 years ago today.
#6/14/2002: "It's going to be a light day here on Scripting News. Lots of non-Internet stuff going on." In other words, I was going for a doctor's appointment to check out the problems I knew I had with my heart. They put me on a treadmill, didn't like what they saw, walked me over to the
hospital to get an
angiogram. Didn't like that they saw. A few days later I had heart surgery, and a week later I was back home, weak as a kitten, with lots of new meds to take, and a non-smoker. I felt like I was in the house of a dead relative, that's how profound the change was. In accordance with Bruce Sterling's
observation that you can make big changes when something big happens, a few months later I was more or less recovered, strong as a bull, determined to make good use of the time I had been given. A few months after that I had moved to Boston, was starting up blogging at Harvard, then BloggerCon, podcasting, and a new life. Lesson learned, don't wait for the bottom to fall out before making the changes you long to make. Also it's a lot easier to quit smoking if you're in a hospital for the first week.
😄#
Billy Joel wrote a
song about Liz Cheney.
#Ted Nelson is fine, I hear, via friends who have his number.
😄#Ted Nelson was a mentor for all developers of my generation. We studied his book and were both thrilled to find other people thought the same way we were thinking, before we came along, and pissed (a little) that we weren't the great inventors we imagined ourselves to be. I wrote a
piece about Nelson in 1995. "He saw the complete picture when I was only getting a glimpse at the parts."
#I
saved a
PDF of Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines.
#
The twenty-year review of
RSS 2.0 is now officially underway, with the release of the
reallysimple package. I know not many people are paying attention yet, but this is the beginning of a new stack of open source feed tools. By the time we get to Sept 18, a nice new
barn should be raised, and RSS can begin its second twenty years with some of the broken windows fixed and a fresh coat of paint.
#I was talking with a friend from Brazil, he told me that
Brazil had slavery too. I thought it was a uniquely American thing.
#Calling tech products
web3 or
web5 is a billionaire's way of pissing on everyone else in the usual territorial way. As if to say "we can shit on the biggest open standard ever, and there's nothing you can do." Maybe so, but we don't have to buy what you're selling.
#Why not come up with a Bitcoin where
proof-of-work feeds starving people or at least only uses energy from renewable sources.
#
A new Node package called
reallysimple that reads feeds and calls back with a simple, consistent JavaScript object. Works with RSS, Atom and RDF feeds. Part of the RSS 2.0 twenty-year review.
#I totally agree with this
editorial in the NY Post. News orgs have lost touch with what their jobs are. This of course is advice the NY Post should take to heart. Disappointed but not surprised to see other news people dismissing it.
#I uploaded two more of the early Lydon podcast interviews to YouTube this morning:
Jim Behrle and
Eugene Volokh. It's a bit of a slog. The next podcast has three parts, which means I guess that they have to be merged somehow into a single video.
#No one trusts "open" formats and protocols from big tech companies. For good reason. 😀
#
- I think capitalism, practiced honorably, is great. You make a product, convince people to buy it, make a profit, attain financial security, live well from a material standpoint. Good for you. But some of the most successful people in business don't stop there, they seem to get a thrill from destroying things for profit, especially it seems, things that don't belong to them. #
- A great example, the oil companies. They sell a product they know makes our planet uninhabitable. Eventually it will fall to all of us to clean up after them, but also thanks to them, not before lots of people die and our quality of life is dramatically downgraded. That's just one example. #
- And now a very successful tech entrepreneur, Jack Dorsey, a man who has made billions, and until now has had a reputation for caring about the impact of his creations on the rest of the world, has taken something that is not his, the idea of an open web that belongs to everyone, that is the actual technology that made it possible for him to be so successful. Instead of giving back, he proposes to dismember it, deposit what's left in his bank account, and build something in its place that of course is designed to make him even richer, and have more control, while saying it will do the opposite. #
- I never have understood why people who have made billions want more. It can't possibly do anything for them. They aren't smart enough to run the world, no one is -- I don't care how lucky you got, or how competitive, hard-working, even brilliant. No one is so smart that they can plan on a world scale how technology will work in the future. We can all put our ideas out there and let them mix with other people's and hope there are enough people who want to work with others (as opposed to destroying them) to actually do something good at a large scale. That's as good as it gets. There is no example in our past, when tech was much simpler, of a human who did anything more than add an idea or two to the mix. #
- So please Jack Dorsey, stop pretending you have invented the next web. No one knows if what you have invented, if you actually have invented anything, will be any good. It certainly doesn't deserve the name of the one technology that got us past all the greed and arrogance of previous generations of tech gods. Back off. I'll help you find a great name for what you're doing, and maybe we can even help each other create more useful tech. Maybe you can start listening more and stop looking inside yourself for all the answers. #
Early podcasts on YouTube?
This is an experiment. I used an
online tool to convert the MP3 for a podcast interview Chris Lydon did in July 2003, with me -- to a video, I'm not sure if they added any advertising to it, so I'm posting it here for people to listen to and get feedback on, before proceeding with the rest.
#
The world has changed, not just the Supreme Court. If you haven't seen it yet, now's the time. The last minute. This is what the majority said: Basically the right to an abortion is nowhere in the Constitution. If you want a right to an abortion, get Congress to pass a law. Or, I suppose it could have been more extreme, that the reason it isn't in the Constitution is the same reason murder isn't. #
