One of the best investments I've made is in the S&P 500. It's an index fund, the less famous of the two big ones, the other being the Dow Jones. It's a collection of stocks, chosen by a company named S&P Global. Simplifying just a little, they buy shares in those stocks and then in turn sell shares of the collection to everyone, people like you and me. The value of the fund is the totall of the value of all the stock it owns, and fluctuates as their prices change. Every day it goes up or down, like a stock. It means that even if one of these companies does badly, the collection doesn't crash. It's designed to reflect the value of the "stock market." So why is the S&P 500 such a good investment? This is what I think, everyone has an opinion about this. It's the way presidents are evaluated. If the stock market is doing well, then analysts say "the economy" is doing well, and the president's approval rating goes up. It doesn't make any sense, but that's how it works. So the president will work really hard to make sure that your bet on the S&P 500 goes up and up and up, always, in good times and bad. Now, there are times when the S&P 500 will go down, but usually it goes up. If you put some money there it will probably grow. Over time it will grow a lot. You can track the value of the S&P 500 here. Here's a graph of the S&P 500 from 1981 to now. You can see it does go up, but there are times it goes down. You can buy shares in the S&P 500 from any brokerage firm. The list is open source, so any reputable broker can sell you an S&P 500 fund. They all, by definition, behave exactly the same, though commissions on transactions differ according to brokers. That's why I say I "simplified" just a little.#

I still think this is the sexiest way to embed a tweet in a blog post. #

I got this in the mail. Obviously a scammer. Watch out for this. #

I have a couple of Blink cameras. Blink is owned by Amazon. They're sending me emails saying that my free plan is about to expire and that I should pay them, for something, they're not clear what, but it sounds like my cameras will be useless once they turn off the plan. In about a week. I don't like that they are so vague about what will happen if I don't pay the money. Amazon hasn't always been the most customer-friendly company, but this is unusual for them, not to be reasonably clear what the proposal is. This is the kind of slimy crap I expect from a cable tv company like Comcast or Spectrum. Or AOL back in the day. Companies that want your money and will do everything ot keep it coming, no matter how unprincipled. Of course I can and will let it expire to see what'll happen. I doubt seriously if, as they threaten, then it will be too late. Heh. This is the kind of campaign that just keeps coming. #

Has BitCoin been centralized? I don't really know enough to know the answer to that question. In other words, is Coinbase to Bitcoin as Facebook is to the open web?#

They're having a Social Media Summit at MIT next week. I have always been bothered by conferences that call themselves summits. Here's a picture of a summit. At the end of WWII, FDR sat down with Stalin. That's an actual summit. BTW, not sure why Churchill is there. :-)#

BTW, if it's a summit, you don't have to say it's a summit. The conference with FDR, Stalin and Churchill was simply called the Yalta Conference. My father once told me that a university doesn't have to say it's a university if they really are one. You don't see car window decals for proud parents that say Harvard University or Stanford University. Just Harvard and Stanford will do. He was putting down the window decal I got him for my school, which did proclaim itself a university. Even worse, they called themselves The Harvard of the South. Oy! That's not a good sign. I wonder if they still do that. And doing a search today I learn that Duke, Rice, Emory and Vanderbilt also consider themselves THOTS. Maybe they should forget it and just try to love their students more.#

BTW my father was an undergrad at Rutgers, which, while a fine school, isn't exactly The Harvard of New Jersey. Just sayin. 😄#

The Harvard of New Jersey is Princeton, another school that can leave off the University part. Some people think it's an even better school than the other top most prestigious schools in the US, which imho would be Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale. #

I like to listen to audiobooks on my daily walks and bike rides, they're good to have around when podcasts aren't so interesting to me. It happens. Right now I'm listening to Roots, narrated by Avery Brooks. It's a beautifully crafted story, and the narration is among the best I've heard. I'm still at the beginning, but I love it, I'm even listening when I'm not out getting my exercise. #

BTW, to follow up on yesterday's posts about tabs and bookmarks in the outliner part of Drummer. It looks like I did get it stabilized yesterday. I have to qualify that because I saw some problems before I shut down for the day yesterday, after fixing a huge number of really serious mistakes and omissions. But I feel confident that I can start the post corner-turn cleanup and get ready for more fun projects starting tomorrow. (Update: Re the problems, oy there was a huge problem. In the main closure for a tab there's a background thread that I did not kill when the tab was closed. As a result it kept running. Whenever it saw a change in a file (not its file) it would save it, to the now-closed file, thus wiping out the contents of the closed file. This was hard to track down. Now everything is really smooth. Haha until I find the next horrible omission! Users never see these problems, hopefully, but this is what you have to deal with getting to the point where software is useful.)#

Hope you don't mind me saying this, but the Mac Finder should have a Bookmarks menu. #

I'm learning that more people from my Ulster County neighborhood are reading this blog. I find that exciting. Maybe we should have some meetups this summer? At the beer garden at the Colony? I love the idea of a beer garden in Woodstock, and as everyone knows, summers here are the best. There's a lot of planning to do now that cannabis is legal everywhere in NY State now. And Tuesday is 4/20. It looks like the weather is going to be nice. #

I don't know if I've ever told this story about my uncle at his hippie commune outside St Augustine, FL. Once I went to visit, on vacation from my Silicon Valley startup. When I arrived at his little off-grid geodesic cottage in the woods, he showed me they had pinned up an article in Business Week with a picture of me, which labeled me as President Dave Winer of Living Videotext. My uncle who claimed he had changed my diapers when I was an infant, thought this was insanely funny. He told me they started calling each other President Ken, or President Dorothy, or President Pumpkin (one of their dogs) or President Dump Kitty (one of the cats). I didn't object because in my mind I had a terrible case of impostor syndrome. No one in California dared make fun of it, but here in the woods with my dear uncle and friends, it seemed fine. #

BTW, there's a whole neighborhood on his 25 acres. Unbelievable how fast things grow, esp in Florida. #

I've been reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. It's a great book, but already dated. The missions he talks about for the future have already happened. Our understanding of Saturn, for example, has greatly increased since 1994. Now that Cassini has visited, so much more is known. Sagan of course is not alive to do this for us. But it seems someone should. Next up I'm going to re-read Cosmos. #

Just watched a bit of CNN. Overwhelming feeling — they have no reason to exist.#

Drummer has a feature that LO2 doesn't have -- Bookmarks. Here's how they work. There's a Bookmarks menu. When you choose the first command, Add Bookmark, a dialog confirms that you want to bookmark the current outline. If you click OK, the bookmarks file opens in a tab, and a link to the file you had open appears as the first item in the list. You can move the link where ever you like, and change the text. If you look in the Bookmarks menu, the changes are reflected. The menu can be hierarchic. As you have probably guessed the file is an outline, like any other outline. But it has this special UI. There are a number of other features like this. Anyway, Bookmarks are tricky because of the way asynchronous code works in JavaScript. If bookmarks.opml isn't already open, you have to wait until it is open to create the bookmark link. If you don't, weird things can happen. Now that I've changed how tabs work internally, this feature is broken. It drives me crazy because I depend on Bookmarks, and I'm starting to use Drummer for real work now. So today I must get this problem solved. I'm not getting up until it works. 💥#

BTW, it's not exactly true that no outliner I've shipped has had a Bookmarks menu. "Electric Outliner" has one. But I haven't exactly promoted it. I use it to write my blog, in fact I'm using it right now to write this. It has had a Bookmarks menu for years, and I've been able to manage lots of complex projects more easily because of it. EO is an Electron-based outliner that runs on the desktop. There will be a desktop version of Drummer, using lots of what's in EO, hopefully. It's possible we did a bookmarks feature for Frontier too. And menu sharing is something like Bookmarks. My memory sucks. Sorry.#

BTW, there is a hair trimming product called Electric Outliner. It's screwing up my search for mentions of my Electric Outliner outside this blog. #

Today I learned that the jQuery attr function, if you pass it a function, it calls the function. This. Is. A. Bug. It blew my mind when I figured out what was going on. Phewwww. That's the sound of my mind being blown. Back to work Davey.#

Poll: Will Derek Chauvin be convicted?#

I've been trying to watch the news on MSNBC and CNN, but it's really hard to get into. Their product transformed under Trump, and now that he is gone, or so it seems, knock wood -- what's left for them to cover? Here's what I suggest. This requires that you put the heat on Biden and Judge Garland. First I've heard it said that January 6 could happen again, which I think is too meek. It will happen again. And until the prosecutions begin, the news should be filling in the details the same way they were covering every detail of the Trump crime scene when he was in office. Who are the leaders? Their names, pictures, backgrounds, are they free, awaiting trial, on the run? These people, and the politicians that are covering for them, the six sentators who voted against the Asian hate crimes bill, to name a few, are vying for the position of The Next Hitler of the United States. We need a bunch of good enemies. And why aren't the Bidens prosecuting them. We need some bodies in cells for January 6, now. 🎈#

So, instead of watching the news from 6PM to 10PM every night, as I did during the Trump years, I've been reading books, watching the Mets and Knicks, watching British movies, also the Godfather I and II. On the whole this is a better deal. More variety, it's more personal, much less repetitive, and besides the Knicks are playing entertaining basketball, and that's more than I can say for whatever sport they're playing on MSNBC. #

On the Drummer front, I decided to rewrite the tab code to use JavaScript closures. Much simpler code and hopefully more easily extended to add new functionality. But right now the app is a mess. I learned some new jQuery tricks with custom event handlers and triggers. You can have a very isolated function with persistent and private storage but you can still make calls into it, for the times when the outside world needs to know something about what's inside. #

Everyone above 16 in New York State can now get vaccinated, and where I live, without an appointment. So vaccination scarcity is over. All you need is ID. But people without ID can get and spread the virus. What’s the plan for such people?#

An unusual day is one where It's almost 6PM and I haven't posted anything to the blog. This is one of those days. I think I actually have to update at least once a day for the nightly mail app. Not sure what it would do if midnight came and there was nothing new. I don't really want to find out. Everything's fine, in the middle of a pretty heavy bit of development so my focus is there. See you tomorrow! ;-)#

Hello. My name is Dave and I'm addicted to Granny Smith apples.#

I have to say, a consistent theme in my career has been, I create something, through a lot of work and trial and error, and years later it's out and people like it. And then people say thanks for doing that, now I'll take over. The first time I saw that in a huge way was with OPML. It came a couple of years after RSS's success, and a lot of people assumed OPML would be big and they could get rich if they owned it. I had a colleague at Harvard even tell me literally he was going to take over now. Those were the words he used. He had no idea what OPML was! I thought this is the height of ridiculousness. It got so awful I just dropped the project, to let them all fail, which is exactly what happened. These things aren't designed to get anyone rich. There is no lock-in possible so nothing to charge money for. How stupid can you be. Obviously, I learned the lesson that people can be very very very stupid. And unbelievably, larcenously, greedy. (BTW, the guy from Harvard was already very rich. He did not need more money. I had been to his house.)#

So many more examples. Like the VCs and RSS. They all lost all their money because they thought a format can be owned. None of them were interested in where I thought the products were, they all created the same product, badly -- and failed. Podcasting, more of the same. My partner, Adam Curry, thought I was just a programmer, and therefore fungible. I am a programmer, for sure -- but I think about things in a different way, there's a part of the stack almost no one else gets into. I see new media before it exists. I work at it. You can't just hire someone to do what I do. That's why my consistent drumbeat is Let's Work Together. Instead of stopping here, there's much more to do and no one gets to do it all. The interchange format isn't ownable. But most people don't get that, and when they bet money that they can, they lose it all. #

Drummer is going to be the anti-silo, as Frontier was. What this meant for Frontier is when we saw a new protocol, our first impulse was to implement it. I wanted it to be able to communicate with anything. A silo'd outliner would instead usually not to support a protocol, and implement everything itself. Watching Roam, I'd say they are a half-silo. When it comes to exporting content from Roam they seem to be fairly liberal. They don't want to implement their own blogging software, for example, they'd prefer to export to a static site generator. But, they are fairly closed to allowing other editing tools to be able to push content into their graph. I wanted to see how at least some of my writing here on Scripting News, in outlines, would look in their graph. As far as I can tell, it might be possible to do, but it would require a lot of work by hand, and no one has time to do that. It would make more sense imho to support some kind of standard interchange format. Luckily, I created one, in the 00s, for just this purpose, and it's pretty broadly supported. Anyway they certainly don't make it easy. They really want me to use their outliner. I'm sure it's very nice, but I already have one. Anyway, like all recent text products and services, you're pretty much locked into using their editor. #

Follow-up to yesterday's braintrust query. Apparently WordPress still has an API, there's a Node package to interface to it, and even better, they still have the XML-RPC interface and support the Metaweblog API. So it should be possible to have WordPress support in Drummer and use the outliner to create and edit posts on a WordPress website, and who knows where that goes. What's especially cool about it is that in December 2019 I released a new reference implementation of XML-RPC in the form of a client and server for Node, in JavaScript of course, and a client that runs in the browser. So now there's a good reason to add XML-RPC support to Drummer, which I totally want to do. #

BTW, if someone is looking for an interesting not-too-huge project, hooking up the JavaScript XML-RPC package to WordPress via the MetaWeblog API is a totally self-contained project and would be very helpful. #

I'm glad the Free Software Foundation is standing with Richard Stallman. You don't get to destroy someone's life because you don't like him, or the questions he asks, or the things he says. This really is a question of freedom. #

Braintrust query: Is there a way to post to WordPress from an external app? If it has an API, I'd like to get support in the first release of Drummer. It's an important connection. For years they had an XML-RPC interface. I think that's gone now. Has something replaced it yet? (Update: This looks promising.)#

Earlier this month I wrote a piece called The Lost Apps of the 80s, wondering where the depth of early PC writing tools went. Also spreadsheets, databases, graphics programs. There were huge numbers of them. The reason imho is Microsoft and not just the Browser Wars which threw all of software into chaos for a number of years. There's another reason, and it might have happened even if the web hadn't come along. Microsoft Office. So quickly I forgot. It used to be that a word processor cost $495 as did a database, spreadsheet, and various other software. When you added up the retail prices it could easily come to $2000. Then one day, Microsoft bundled Word and Excel and a few other apps, for the price of a single productivity app. And over the years, they added more software to the bundle. This alone might have reduced the productiving software business to one vendor. The competitors couldn't afford to do what Microsoft did, they didn't have the royalties from the OS to support their price-cutting in apps. So that's another theory on where the apps went. Today, that's no excuse. Writing tools would have a different purpose today, writing for the network, rather than for printing. Different requirements. #

Why doesn't Georgia get rid of the lines for voters? Isn't this the obvious question. Has anyone asked Gov Kemp? Is that something he can help with?#

Someday users of network services, having been burned by lock-in, will only choose a service when they’re sure there’s a way out.#

We need a coach to get us through the pandemic. Whether or not you like him, Cuomo was doing that. That’s why I say Fauci should have a podcast. The interviews he does with various people isn’t enough. #

I just found a 1991 piece by Steven Levy at MacWorld about Frontier, which was still in development at the time. Really interesting read because now, only 30 years later (heh), I'm doing a smaller version of the same idea, not on the Mac but on the open web, once again using standard protocols to connect apps. It starts on page 51 of this PDF of the August 1991 MacWorld. Here's a screen shot of the first page. #

What neither Levy or I understood, at the same time in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee was working on the world wide web. Frontier's importance in bootstrapping the web as a content management platform, via blogging, RSS and podcasting, was where the real growth would come. It would require a pivot, of course. The Mac was entering middle age, as Levy postulated. But a new shiny thing that worked really well with the Mac was coming along and would soon change everything. The same vacuum that existed on the Mac at the time, now exists on the web. There is no simple-enough scripting language designed for power users to integrate the functionality of many and disparate apps. Why do I like this so much? I guess I'm just a pipes and wires kind of guy. And I think lots of new media will emerge from the ecosystem we'll create here. #

I know this is just math, but 1980 is to 1940 as 2020 is to 1980.#

Tweeted in 2014. "We are just beginning to come to grips with how over-reliant we've been on the imagined ethics of tech companies." #

Embarrassing mistake. Yesterday, in a longish piece about bingewatching, I gave Kazuo Ishiguro credit for writing the novel Howard’s End. He actually wrote Remains of the Day. There is a connection. Both were made into movies starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. I corrected the piece, but here's a screen shot of the error. BTW, interestingly, I received an email from Netflix last night suggesting I watch Howard's End. Is it a coincidence, or does their algorithm read my blog? That would be amazing if it did. (I'm sure it doesn't but it's an incredible source about my interests.)#

I find the resurgence of outliners inspiring, I wonder about all the addons, and I’d like to see them support import and export standards, and most importantly, APIs. #

BTW, for people who are trying outliners for the first time, may I suggest my own Little Outliner. It's browser-based, easy to use, has lots of features, isn't world-encompassing, just a way to make lists, plan stuff, think into your computer screen. It's free to use, no gotchas, and the outlines are in a standard format, and there's a command to download all your work to your local system, for backup or to use in another outliner. So there's absolutely no lock-in. 🚀#

TimeShifter for vaccinators has a simple purpose. Instead of writing on someone's tag 30 Minutes or 15 minutes, you write the time at which they can leave if there are no complications from the vaccine. #

I don’t understand why CNN reports on what Fox says. Isn’t there a risk of too many mirrors reflecting only on each other. News about news about news about news, etc.#

Journalism is not accountable. We can’t impeach the NYT, or remove them from office in the next election. Yet they pretty much determine what we talk about, so much so that Wolf Blitzer on CNN actually negotiates with politicians we do elect, who are accountable.#

If Congress wants to get the attention of tech companies, make them liable for lock-in.#

I've been catching up on the Chauvin trial every night on the news. The testimony is damning. He is obviously guilty of murder. But, the defense isn't trying to win all the votes of the jurors, they only have to convince one juror, and I'm pretty sure they'll do that.#

One reason Manchin might want to vote to cancel the filibuster is that it would maintain his power to veto non-budget Democratic legislation. With the filibuster in place the only power he has is to keep the filibuster. If he sticks with that he might as well switch parties now. However, if Biden and the Dems sold the voting plan that the Repubs will certainly block, if 90 percent of West Virginians supported the reforms, I would imagine that Manchin could change his mind. It all comes back to the same thing. The campaign never stops.#

Today's song: For the benefit of Mr Kite. #

Twitter thread: "These days I see twitter as an essential utility. Largely because the API is so good."#

BTW, Drummer will have a collection of built-in Twitter verbs. #

"Use the product for its intended purpose." This is something I say to myself and people I work with, a lot. A steady drumbeat, to stay on track. #

I watched the beginning of President Biden's press conference today. Both VP Harris and the president gave very good talks. Sometimes their cadence is wrong, they speak in typos, and other times (like today) I say YEAH that's right, that's how you do it. #

It would be amazing if all software developers used compatible back-end databases.#

Poll: When Trump says Matt Gaetz never asked for a pardon, what percent chance is it he's telling the truth?#

If you use Little Outliner you should download your files regularly, as a backup. It's saved my ass more than once. The Download My Files command is in the Tools menu. You quickly get a zip archive of all your files. #

After watching The Making of Sgt Pepper, I've listened to the album a few times, from beginning to end. They said it's a concept album, but it isn't really. There are four songs that are in keeping with the Sgt Pepper theme, but the rest are Beatles songs. A few that could have been from the pre-Pepper Beatles. But the album made another statement that did mark a turning point: We're going to try new ideas. We're really going to do it, not just talk about it. We're going to use the remarkable place we're in to innovate. Further, this isn't about fame or wealth, it's about creativity, human expression. For the rest of their careers, as a group and individuals, they continued to try new ideas. And they inspired a generation of us to believe in our own ingenuity as much as any tech hero did, more I think (though I wasn't inspired by them, I was of them). The beauty of Pepper is the lives of the people who created it and their ability to influence. #

I wish there was a way in video conferences on a pc for your eye to be focused on the image of the other person talking. The camera is in the wrong place, in other words.#

Today's song: Dilly Dally.#

Don't wait for people to see things from your point of view, it'll never happen.#

Bernie Sanders on MSNBC last night talked about new Repub voter suppression. He never said the thing I hoped he would. Repubs know they can't win a fair election, so they cheat.#

I was asked if I know that tech companies hate the web, and asking them to help the web is stupid. I can't defend that, it might be stupid, who knows. But it isn't taking a lot of time, and in talking about wanting to rekindle the writing tools category, I'm not just talking to the platform devs, I'm also talking to users, who may not have realized that they don't have to become copypaste machines just to have a newsletter, or cross-post to Facebook. There's no technical barrier. And if they wanted to use their favorite editor to write blog posts or newsletters, because they now understand that it's possible, that would create pressure for tech companies to do it. Now the big ones wouldn't, at first, but one of the also-rans might, as a way to get users to use their service. And if the feature is as sexy as I believe it is, they will get more users, and in doing so might attract the other, bigger companies, to do it too. Also there are some idealists around, believe it or not, some tech founders who believe in the web, and even read this blog, and might respond to a friendly nudge. Anyway, what's the difference. It gives me pleasure to stand up for the web, and hope. I think the world can work better, and if I can help, you bet I'm going to say something. #

This story isn't really about George O'Connor (a made-up name), it's about something else. Here's the story. Many years ago I was at a party at CES, only people with connections were invited. So you could walk around this big ballroom and every few minutes you'd run into someone you know from a long time ago. In this case I ran into George, a person I knew from the early Mac days because he worked at Anderson (also a made-up name), one of the networking hardware companies of the Mac. A respected company, and George was well-thought-of. But I had another connection to him, his sister had worked for my company, a few years before, and I wanted to ask how she was doing and to say hi for me. George started talking after I said hello, and he said he couldn't help get me into TED. He was a producer there, and presumably everyone in the room was hitting him up for tickets, I guess he was tired of it. I didn't want to go to TED, and I also didn't hold this against George. I think I see this all the time, but rarely is it so open as it was at that party. People assume you want something from them, when you just wanted to say hi because you have good memories of them. It's the flipside of a story I wrote in 2013 about a clerk at a gas station having a bad day. #

With the Repubs openly threatening corporations, the question is who do they think they rep?#

Definition: An API makes it possible to do things with a piece of software from another piece of software.#

Why is it interesting to think about what became of the Apps of the 80s -- because imho we still need what they do. I want to use one writing tool, the perfect one for me, and flow the text through various services. We know how to. Rather than just accept more and more editors, let's build interfaces that allow choice. APIs. We know how to do it. We just need one or two products to demo the concept and define the interfaces. Any blogging tool or newsletter mailer could take the next step. #

I heard about Chia today. Sounds like it's a crypto currency, but what makes it interesting is that Bram Cohen is involved, and he's the guy who brought us BitTorrent, and that works pretty well, and seemed really wild when it first came out. #

Unless you're really sure the other person will get your humor, or appreciate it, it's usually better to say what you mean instead of trying to be funny.#

Today's song: Chuck E's In Love. #

Ruth: "Explain APIs to me like I’m 45 (and new to tech)." #

President Biden does something I thought Democrats forgot how to do. He goes around the obstruction in DC, bringing his ideas to the people. Journalism could learn from this. If they understood and took the side of the people more, they'd have more support from the people.#

I'm thinking about legal weed in Woodstock.#

I've thought more about Making of Sgt Pepper. It's amazing to hear the Beatles' perspective on the album, I had never really thought how it was created, yet as a creative person myself, I’m often surprised and even offended that people don’t consider my point of view about the things I created. But at one time, Sgt Pepper was their thing, their secret. That's why the final quote was so strong for me. "You just wait," says McCartney -- echoing the feeling in 1967 when he knew he had something great, that was going to shake the world (as it did) and no one but he and a few others knew what it was. And the lesson of the Making of Sgt Pepper is that you and I will never know Sgt Pepper the way McCartney does. And one more thought, if only John Lennon could have been there, what would we have learned. #

I can always watch Babe. Total feel-good movie. #

The best part of The Making of Sgt Pepper is the very last line, with Paul McCartney. "The musical papers which you used to read, started to slag us off because we hadn't done anything, because it took five months to record. And I remember with great glee seeing in one of the papers 'ohh the Beatles have dried up, there's nothing going on, they've been in the studio, can't think, what are they doing. And I was sort of sitting rubbing my hands just saying Oh you just wait."#

A famous John Lennon quote. He was asked if Ringo was the best drummer he knew. “Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in the world," Lennon is said to have said. "Let’s face it, he wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles.” Ringo complains about that in the video. He says all the other Beatles wish they were drummers. I think we were having our legs pulled. #

Sgt Pepper: "You're such a lovely audience, we'd like to take you home with us."#

Another great Beatles demo. Get Back. #

The best platforms are ones with lots of users. For example, the Finder on the Mac needs a simple scripting language. Starting with Lotus 1-2-3, spreadsheets had macro languages. Programmable editors are popular because writers love to get their writing environment just-so. The theory of Frontier was to pour lots of attention into the scripting language, and make it work across all apps. We did a pretty fair job. It didn't get as much attention as it deserved because Apple got in the way. We shouldn't give up on this ideal. It's still possible. #

Today is the first time I've lived in a place where weed became legal, on the day it happened. I've been to places where it is legal (Calif, WA, Colorado, Mass to name a few). It's one of those "did you ever think you'd live to see it" days. Weird that tomorrow is April 1. #

Highly recommend The Making of Sgt Pepper. Interviews with George Martin, the three surviving Beatles (in the early 90s). Many others. This album was the turning point from the Beatles being a touring phenom, to pioneering a new creative direction for pop music. It's inspiring, we need a similar turn in software. (It's also available on Facebook if that works better.)#

Someone has built a drone big enough to carry a human.#

OMG there's another. Much more ambitious.#

I could live off Granny Smith apples.#

Has anyone built a drone big enough to carry a human?#

Cuomo: Legal cannabis in New York, soon come.#

I've known Nick Arnett for a long time. He used to be a tech journalist, but in recent years, he's become a public service person. He has been on the front lines of fighting fires in California. Most he's recently has been working in Oakland, helping people get their Covid vaccinations at the Coliseum. This morning he asked for help on Facebook. They needed a simple app that could tell them when 15 minutes and 30 minutes were. These are the amounts of time people have to wait before leaving, to be sure that if they have a bad reaction to the vaccine, that they can be helped by medics. Makes sense that in the middle of everything else they have to do, adding 15 and 30 to the current time is a bit much to ask. I said I would be happy to do it. Just a small JavaScript project. I was glad to help. The result is this site: timeshifter.scripting.com. It's possible other vaccinators could use it, if so please pass it on. #

From the Something-Users-Don't-Understand-But-Could Department. Developing software is a bootstrap. It's analogous to building a bridge. Start by pulling a wire across the river. Use it to pull up another wire. When you have enough wires, bundle them to create a thicker wire, and use it to pull up something bigger. Eventually you have two thick cables going across the body of water. Use the cables to pull up a roadway. Build on-ramps and off-ramps and toll booths. But you can't build things out of order, and sometimes things are added earlier for features that won't be added until later in the bootstrap process. People who have evolved products know about this. And you never see it more clearly than when you're building your second or fifteenth or 200th bridge. By that point, you figure, if the users really wanted to understand they could, because they're teaching classes about it in universities.#

We should dream about what if the tech companies wanted to build a more customizable network, one that works better for users, not advertisers. The answer to every one of these ideas is: They'll never do it. That's what makes it fun.#

As I'm developing a Frontier-like product, I'm remembering how much I didn't like some of the developers we attracted. We used to believe in the goodness of everyone, but forgot the humanity, and that as a community grows, eventually you attract people who try to make your life miserable. The pressure of dealing with these people literally made me sick. I got better as soon as I stopped. We've learned a lot about moderating community systems since then. So I'm going to keep my promise to myself, this project is mainly for me, because I want it, and I love the idea of other people using it, and helping each other, and that includes me, but when they start abusing me, I'm turning them off without a second thought. #

In this seat-of-the-pants demo I show you how to post a single tweet or a thread from within Little Outliner.#

If I could make everyone listen to one episode of one podcast it would be this one. It's from 2017 and explains how Ukraine dealt with Russian fake news attacks. Everything Putin is doing in the US, he did first in Ukraine. Ukraine, like us, had high ideals about free speech and censorship. Eventually they came to the correct conclusion. At the first sign of trolling, shut them down. In the US today we should have no misgivings about having deprived Trump of his global platform. Let him build his own. It'll work much better. People will only have to hear from him if they want to. #

The Bible: Judge not, that ye be not judged.#

One reason I ask questions about the process by which people want to deprive a person of their life, is that it's come to the point where they want to erase an accomplished person because they don't like his ideas, or the questions he asks. When I read the accusations, I cross out all of those, give them no weight at all. It's fine if you don't like his ideas, now mind your own business. Why do I care? A couple of reasons. Offensive questions and foreign ideas help me think through my own values, and sometimes I find a way to compromise, and sometimes I even change my mind. I don't mind discomfort. I check to see if I'm in any danger, or if anyone else is, and if the answer is no, then live and let live. The second reason is that some people find my ideas offensive. I write every day. I don't know why but this has great value to me. I can imagine a mob of internet assholes people deciding that my ideas are too offensive to be permitted. If I can imagine that then I have to question it when it's happening to someone else. It's called empathy.#

When I lived in California people would always ask "Why is he like that?" The answer may simply be that I'm from New York. NYers are just as likely to tell you to fuck off as to say good morning or have a nice day. They mean basically the same thing. It's like "namaste" -- the divinity in my being acknowledges the divinity in yours. When you're in California you have to tone it down, a lot, or they'll kill you with passive aggressiveness. NYers are more transparent. You don't have to guess how they feel about something as much. #

It's spooky how accurate weather forecasts are these days. #

It's really cool to watch the Democrats in Georgia rip the Repubs to pieces.#

We can't impeach the NYT no matter how much they betray our trust.#

It’s time for a new Georgia tradition, handing friendly strangers a bottle of water and a tasty snack, but only if they’re not Republicans.#

I regret turning off the Knicks game last night with two minutes left in the 4th quarter. They were behind by too many points, and they weren't playing well. I figured this game is gone. I was surprised the starters were still playing. Much later I saw fan exclamations on Twitter, that seemed to say the Knicks had won. They did. I've learned my lesson. This season's Knicks are special. They win games they have no right winning. The roll over Russell Westbrook and Bradley Beale like they were the rookies and the Knicks were the team packed with franchise players. It's like the 2015 Mets, perhaps. I honestly don't care if the Knicks make the playoffs. They have such heart, such love for themselves and each other. It's pure joy to watch them play. #

Spectrum isn't finished with me. Yesterday they turned off my TV service. Not clear why. But after a long day's work I had to have four separate phone conversations with their reps, over three hours, to get it working again. I paid my bill, etc. They just have no idea what they're doing imho. Anyway, Spectrum is making me buy an AppleTV in order to watch the Knicks. The AppleTV will stay in its box and go into a closet, where I will pay a monthly fee for it. I already have two AppleTVs, and I don't use either one. Too many remotes, too many different UIs. Once i get over the sheer waste of it, the price is actually competitive. YouTubeTV costs about the same, w/o the AppleTV. And YTTV does not have the Knicks. Where I live there is no other way to get the Knicks. I actually think this is true for the entire NY area. And before you tell me about Fubo, they don't have the Knicks either.#