My
one-tweet manifesto for users of note-taking outliners. "There should be a standard format for notes apps so that switching is something you could do as often as you like, so that you can always use the best tool for the job."
#Outliners should support
OPML, then users will be able to switch between products without having to convert their work. OPML is the best candidate for interop between outliners, and we are
not a long way from that. It's a mature format, widely deployed. it's something I think the users are going to have to ask for because the developers are either too busy, or are not on board with the idea of people being able to use their work independently of the tools they use. I'm not looking to profit here, any more than I profited from RSS or podcasting. I want the users be empowered, because we need better-organized thinkers more than anything. I'm here to help.
#What got me going on this was a
tweet from the editor of Protocol, about the pain in switching from different outliners, and a
subsequent tweet in the thread where he said the answer was a
long way off. Emphatically it is not a long way off. This isn't that new. We were doing outliners 40 years ago. These problems have been solved. Let's work together, users and developers.
#In journalism there's conventional wisdom and there's what everyone knows. Sometimes they are at odds. When that happens, they report the conventional wisdom. It's
like "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM."
#
Is "Web3" the web, or just a scheme to make VCs richer?
#ACB stands a good chance of wiping out what
RBG did, and more.
#
- I finished Get Back, and I kind of hated the way it ended, but it is what it is, it's not like there were screen writers who chose the wrong ending. The rooftop concert was a Ouija board thing. Something Ringo could have an opinion about, so they had the concert. I thought it was awful, esp for the last live performance of the Beatles. It wasn't really a concert, it was cheap, they used London, acted like dicks, it made the whole Let It Be process suck. #
- At one point the idea of going back to The Cavern was brought up, and I thought that would have been great. They clearly have very strong feelings for that period of the Beatles, even though it's something most of us never experienced (it was before the mania). Or they could have arranged to be surprise guests at a London club. I'm sure they were there, and any of them would be happy to host the Beatles. Then it would have been legal, the enthusiasm would have been there, and they could have fucked around and everyone would've loved it. #
- Or maybe there was just no place for the Beatles to go in 1969. I've noted this about superstar basketball teams. Once they win a couple of championships, I felt, they should just disband the team, because there would be no joy in a third or fourth. It seems like everything they did in the album Let It Be was no more interesting than what they did in Magical Mystery Tour or the White Album or Sargent Pepper, Revolver, they were all huge leaps. Let It Be -- no -- it's great stuff, historic -- it all really matters, but none of it was necessary. Anything past that, well there was no vision for it. #
- Another thing I learned, over the whole three episodes, is how little the Beatles cared about business and how much of it they delegated. I had read the story of Billy Joel, and was amazed about how he kept money far away, and had gotten ripped off massively by someone he trusted. Lennon was in awe of Allen Klein, but he sounds like a schmuck. I think if the Beatles had a manager who loved them, and cared about them, they might have continued writing music together for many years, and gotten what they wanted out of independence. It doesn't seem like it had to be either/or, and what's also clear is how much love there was between them. It's a common pattern, something great happens, and the assholes move in and squeeze the life out of it. How strong the Beatles were that they got so far. Or how much their manager, who had just died, must've loved them. #
- PS: A good movie to watch after finishing Get Back is the Ron Howard documentary about the touring Beatles. It's on Hulu. #
Saw this on Facebook. Seems like an idea worth sending around.
#
Poll: Does your mouse have a scroll wheel? Do you use it?
#
Poll: Should the US pay reparations to descendants of slaves?
#
Andrew Sullivan wrote a
piece where he wonders why men don't have as much at stake in abortion as women. This is like imho "all lives matter." Fact: You and I have already been born, not aborted, so we do not have a personal interest in abortion.
#Going forward, I don't expect to be using the relatively new
tagging functionality on
Scripting News. I think that's over. I have something I believe is better that requires no effort, no forethought, no decision-making. It's one of those things that Just Works. Yes I plan to share it. And it's not just for blogging, and it's not just for
Drummer.
#I'm now on the third segment of the Beatles show on Disney. The amazing thing is how much fun they had doing Let It Be. And you can see the process, they talk about it. I had the wrong idea about the Beatles as people. I love them now even more than I did when I was a kid.
#My Tesla endorsement: I haven't had a car that was this much fun to drive since I had a
Mazda Miata in the early 90s.
#
- I had a radical idea about patents many years ago, when they were starting to spoil the software world.#
- The idea -- open source patents.#
- Develop something new. Document it, have it evaluated by a panel of experts. If it's new you get a "patent". #
- The ersatz patent does a few things.#
- It prevents Google or Apple from patenting it. #
- It gives the inventor proper credit for their work.#
- It makes the idea useful to other software devs because it isn't just some random feature ready to be patented by Microsoft or Amazon.#
- You can find out if something you did really is unique or if someone did it 25 years earlier (this has happened to me, I thought I had invented outlining until I read Ted Nelson's book and leared about Doug Engelbart).#
- It's good publicity, giving people an incentive to participate. #
- Unlike non-open patents, everyone is free to use the idea for free. However they can't claim that they invented it. It's like Creative Commons for patents. #
- I must not have been very good at explaining it, I thought it was something my friends at Harvard Law School would help with, but we're still stuck in this horrible situation where inventors of new ideas are forced to put up gates to simply get credit for their work. I'm never willing to do this myself, so I've seen many of my works being ignored or even undermined (notably podcasting by the f'ing EFF) or patented by IBM or Salesforce.#
I had a nice thought that maybe when you die you wake up as from a dream. And you resume your higher level reality. Life is like a procedure call. This was one of the ideas in the movie
Inception. When you die in a dream you wake up. I think that's how it worked.
#
- I wrote in a tweet yesterday that the Tesla needs to run Apple Car Play. This was a short statement with a lot packed in it.#
- My Tesla is both a car and a computer system. #
- Almost all the controls for the car are on a big screen in the middle of the dashboard, between the driver and the passenger, slightly tilted toward the driver. #
- There are other controls, a stick attached to right side of the steering wheel that shifts between Reverse, Neutral, Drive and Park. A stick on the left signals turns and I think adjusts the brights, but honestly I'm kind of confused about that. I think the car decides when you need lights and what intensity, and it's not possible to overrided it? #
- There are two pedals on the floor, roughly analogous to the brake and gas pedals in a gasoline-powered car. When you press the gas pedal the car accelerates, but unlike previous cars when you let up on the gas pedal, the car slows much faster. You only need to use the brake pedal when you need to stop quickly, otherwise all your acceleration and decelration is done via the accelerator pedal.#
- There are also controls on the outside of the car. Handles on each of the doors and the two trunks (front and rear). If you tap the charging port door, it opens. There probably are other outside controls that I'm not yet aware of.#
- Otherwise, everything is done through the UI of the big screen in the middle of the passenger compartment. It works as it would if it were created by Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft. There are tech industry norms, and people move around between the companies. This is a standard tech industry UI. But the design is radically different from every other car anyone has ever driven. And it works, but -- and this is important -- there is no app ecosystem. I can play music from my iPhone via Bluetooth, but I can't control the music via the car's screen, I have to use the screen on the iPhone. Since my Subaru has Car Play and Android Auto, I've gotten used to controlling music, podcasts, and anything else -- directly on the car's screen, and this is imho a must-have feature that Tesla does not have. #
- For right now this doesn't seem to be an issue for most Tesla users. I'm happy to drive my new wonder machine knowing that it's missing its app ecosystem. Tesla (again imho) has to have one, either they start to develop it now, or they hook up with Apple and/or Google, and allow their apps to run in TeslaLand. In a few years I think it will be necessary, because esp luxury car makers are going to feel the pressure to do what Tesla does in terms of controls. I'm pretty sure Apple and Google will offer it to them. And I think both of them are capable of doing what Tesla does. And they both have app ecosystems. #
FAQ: How to get started blogging in Drummer.
#
Good morning and welcome to December. One more month. And then another year and another, and on and on.
#A short podcast about the Beatles and Get Back and what it must've been like to be Paul McCartney and meet John Lennon and vice versa.
#
I'm sure others have noticed that today is a symmetric day -- 12/1/21. It might be the last one in this century? Have to think about this. š
#
- The Beatles, I realize now, have played a really important role in my life going back to when I was eight years old and in the hospital recovering from a ruptured appendix. She Loves You was the big hit. I only had the vaguest idea of how they made such a song, I didn't think about it too much, but after watching Get Back (I'm now on the second installment) I see the magic. #
- They invented The Beatles, it was a real thing, you can see it in the relationships and the end result. A song starts as an idea, and they hack at it, over and over, and gradually the song emerges. I kept wanted to say it's "Tucson Arizona!" but of course they didn't know that yet. #
- I recognize the dissatisfaction of people who don't share the bond that Lennon and McCartney did. Ringo accepted his role as an onlooker, George struggled against it. And all the hangers-on with opinions about this and that. They remind me of the VCs and execs in tech. #
- The magic was Paul working out a hit song on the bass, with Ringo and George looking on. Then John coming back and loving it, and adding his bit. #
- The conversations reveal so much. If only we had understood all this less than 50 years after the fact. I think of all the young creative people who can watch this, and how it will help them understand, and how we got by, feeling our way around this the way the Beatles. #
- I wrote to a friend yesterday that this feels biblical. This is how it all began. I expect we'll be talking about this for years to come #
- I wish we had the equivalent video for all kinds of other seminal events. I'd love to see a video of all that Trump did on January 6, for example, while the Capitol was under attack. Who was he calling on cell phones, threatening them in not so subtle ways while they were feeling so vulnerable?#
- Listening to She Loves You reinforces the point made by Paul McCartney in a recent Fresh Air interview. He said when they were young, when the Beatles were starting out, mostly what they wanted was girlfriends. #
- At one point, in the struggle over George Harrison's departure, Lennon talks about how they'll feel about all of it when they're old. How profoundly sad that he didn't get to be old, and we didn't get to learn from an older John Lennon. #
- In the music Lennon and McCartney produced separately after the breakup there was (evidently) a lot of bitterness between them. But in this movie you feel the love they had between them. I wonder where the bitterness came from, or if it was just an illusion. Maybe we imagined it. #
- Update: A podcast about the invention of the Beatles. #
Poll: When will you watch
Get Back?
#
I'm glad I read the
book about the
1918 pandemic last year, because I understand something that most people should and don't. Mutations aren't necessarily bad, in fact over time the mutations will make the virus less deadly. It's all about evolution and survival of the fittest. Mutation is how evolution happens. A new variant shows up and if it is in some way more likely to propagate and survive than previous variants, it will stick around and thrive, and continue to mutate. If a virus kills its host -- that's not good for survivability. So what happens over time, a virus like Covid becomes less harmful and more transmissible, that's how it becomes "the flu." The 1918 influenza virus is still with us today. But it doesn't kill people in the numbers that it did a hundred years ago. Over time Covid will get less deadly too.
#
Heather Cox Richardson confirmed
something that I had been wondering about -- do Congresspeople in the US, esp Republicans, worry about the safety of their families if they were to act independently of Trump. I was sure that some of them do, but I had never heard this reported on the news. So far they only talk about threats involving losing their jobs. But if the threats were about physical well-being, that's another thing. That's how it works in Russia for journalism and politics. The one year I was at Davos I spent some time hanging out with Russian journalists. This was in 2000, when Russia had supposedly liberalized. I went to a big session in the main hall where one of the officers of the Russian government was speaking, someone who I had been introduced to by my sponsor, the person who got me my white badge (a journalists' credential, the best one available, got me entry to every session, unlike most journalists attending). At one point I stood up and asked a challenging question of the Russian. He gave me a typical evasive answer. But here's the thing -- after I did that, none of my Russian journalist friends would talk to me. Obviously their political system didn't work like ours. Today when there is no pretense at freedom in Russia, I imagine it's much worse. And according to HCR's reporting, we're headed down that path in the US. The next year seems to be our last chance to turn it around.
#I have continued watching
Get Back. Everyone should watch this, if you're a creative, or your work involves creative people. Creativity needs to be nurtured and protected. I'm sure there are other lessons coming, but I'm going through it slowly, I'm still on the first segment.
#
- On Thursday it'll be two weeks since I got the Tesla Model 3. Here are some thoughts. #
- I haven't been using the autopilot more than just trying it, seeing it veer into a head on collision, I quickly took control. i'm pretty sure it wasn't actually going to kill me, it was a simple situation, Highway 28 from Boiceville to West Hurley, a wide road, easy for the autopilot.#
- But here's the thing -- like the self-driving features of the Subaru, the self-driving features of the Tesla are always there, ready to take over if it thinks you're fucking up. It did a thing weird on a drive out my little dirt road, it sounded an alarm that I was driving off the road. loud screeching sound. I was doing no such thing.#
- The thing that really distinguishes the Tesla as far as i'm concerned isn't the power, or battery, those are nice -- but the full integration of the computer system in the experience. The Subaru is a hodgepodge of different systems that don't know about each other. Very confusing. i've gotten to just using Car Play for everything and ignoring the rest. #
- What this says to me is that in a couple of years, there will be a Mercedes EV with a big screen like Tesla's and no dashboard again like Tesla. And the same or better integration. It'll be running Apple, Amazon or Google software. and it will be as good as Tesla's software because they hire out of the same talent pool. #
Jack Dorsey is leaving Twitter again. All kinds of paranoid thoughts go through my head. Meanwhile, he posted his announcement
as a tweet, not in text but as a
screen shot because Twitter
still doesn't support text in a reasonable manner, even though they support video, images,
Clubhouse-style conferences, and email newsletters. This is insane. Twitter is an important platform. Not supporting text is a religious thing, as if they didn't have water fountains in The Vatican. (I just came up with that randomly.) I hope the first thing the new CEO does is fix this situation. Let's move outlines over Twitter. Whatever. Text isn't a new innovation, the blogger said ironically.
#
I didn't give up on the
Beatles on Disney. It is totally worth watching. The Beatles were falling apart, but all they needed was a little help. A manager. Someone to keep the assholes away. So many jerks were wasting their time and talent. And someone to make sure that George Harrison felt loved, and they were focusing on the music, which is what they were so incredibly great at. At one point, John Lennon is getting briefed on some bullshit plan for a concert, it's all nonsense, and in the background Paul McCartney is working out the music and lyrics for one of the greatest songs of all time --
Let It Be. I always wondered what their collaboration was like, they really did like each other. Such a shame. They had something incredible, and they just needed a little help.
#Yesterday I had one of my
Drummer outlines overwrite another. There were no instant outlines updating while this happened, so that's not the source of the problem. If you've had this happen: 1. I am sorry this is happening, that's first. 2. Make sure you do backups. 3. Were you by any chance editing
the Scripts menu when this happened? If so, please comment
here. I'm looking for more clues. I added more debugging code so if it happens to me again, I'll get closer to knowing that the cause is. I really want to get this bug out of there.
#
I hear there's some kind of controversy over a frying pan that VP Harris bought. I also hear this is getting a lot of play on the news. My filters must be working, because all I've heard of it are ridiculous rebuttals from people trying to argue somewhat logically that this is an illustration of old white men in charge of the Republican Party. I'm sure that's not it. It's marketing. They are always focus-group-testing bullshit like this to see if the people will pick it up, and then they shoot blasts of this bullshit at news people, and 1-in-10 of the focus-grouped bullshit gets picked up by the press. It's worth it, because it keeps the real news off the air, and helps people forget that Trump paid for his golf vacations at his own resorts with taxpayer money. Hundreds of millions of dollars. There's no logic to any of this. And they're not old white menu, that's bullshit. It's just marketing people, and computers.
#I have a new project in the works that hooks up to
Drummer outlines (really any outlines in OPML) and puts all the items in a relational database and lets you do searches. I have a few applications in mind for this stuff. The codename of the project is Daytona. Coming soon to a theater near you.
#
If you could make an open Facebook without using carbon-spewing blockchain tech
why would you burn all that carbon? Do
you care about the survival of our species?
#New Drummer
verb that generates Markdown from an outline or part of an outline.
#
- Yesterday I wrote a bit about BingeWorthy, the app I wrote a couple of years ago that helps you find new shows to binge based on the ones you and your friends like. We need more users for it to really achieve its potential. #
- I would be happy to do a deal with a tech company on this product. I think Twitter would be great, but there are lots of companies where it could find a good home. I just want to see millions of people using so I can meet all the people who like the same stuff I do. I think we'd take over the world, figuratively. š#
- A network of people based on their entertainment tastes would make sense for a growing service like Hulu with lots of highly rated shows, that wants to grow their service. Part of the philosophy that "people come back to places that send them away."#
- BTW -- here's the readout of people most like me in their ratings. I don't know @alisonjfields but we seem to like the same stuff. @jsavin is #1. I also like to see @nakedjen and @leolaporte high on the list.#
I wonder why the tech industry hasn't done something like
BingeWorthy. I think it's because they create data mining tools for advertisers. This is a data mining for users. The more users, the better the data. A real incentive to get your friends on board. BW should really be a product offered by Netflix, Metacritic, Twitter, Facebook, even Google. What show to watch is a question millions of people have, esp this time of year. This is what the platform should look like. Share profiles w friends. An interesting twist, it's not just about finding shows to binge, it's about finding friends with similar taste.I was surprised to find that Jake Savin, who I worked with a long time ago, and I, have very similar taste. We like and dislike the same things.
#Maybe they should do interviews with
Covid doctors on CNN from the room where intubated patients are waiting to die.
#
Sometimes people deliberately mispronounce or misspell my name, I guess theyre trying to embarrass me? I have a name almost as bad as the
Boy Named Sue. Itās hard to get under my skin that way. š
#I tried watching
Get Back, but after five minutes of holy shit those are the young Beatles acting like normal people it became fairly boring. I guess I like a plot? Did it get better?
#Twitter Blue gives you a pretty lame undo command. I guess itās impossible to do it for real with their server architecture.
#
One of the stars of
The Great, the guy who plays emperor Peter, is a dead ringer for a young Elon Musk. Same mannerisms and look, but heās funnier and of course a better actor. One of the tech companies or car companies should hire him to do ads.
#
I just started
Get Back, the first few minutes of the first episode, enough to know that it's going to be a heavy emotional experience for me. As a kid I had so much invested in
the Beatles. Each period of their existence marked some big period or event in my life, things that I've mostly buried, but come right to the surface with (for example) Paul and George
flopping their heads in the chorus to
Twist and Shout. To see the Beatles, alive and young and at the peak of their creativity, in a way we couldn't see them at the time, that's like reading a letter from a long-dead relative. The people are gone, the experiences were seminal, and recoverable.
#I'm watching
The Great on Hulu, and it's really good. Didn't get the best
reviews. I'm only on episode 4. It's about
Catherine The Great of Russia. The story is pretty heavy, but believe it or not, it's a comedy!
#I am a NYT subscriber, but can't access Wirecutter. It's weird, the site seems broken -- when I try to log in it just sends me back to
the page that says I have run out of free articles. It could be they want more money for WC, if so, the answer is no. I don't read a lot of NYT articles as it is. I have a very bad feeling about them, and it gets worse every year. That took a lot of work on their part because I was raised on the NYT.
#
- An example of a social custom from two points of view.#
- It's wrong to bring sex into a work relationship. #
- I think it's equally wrong to bring business into a sexual relationship.#
- It has happened, esp in Silicon Valley or New York, when a woman I was dating, or interested in dating, revealed that she was really there for the business. I want to understand up front. If it's business, fine -- I'll evaluate it one way, if it's sexual, another. It's a really awkward situation where someone I was attracted to sexually, wants to do business -- and wouldn't have gotten a meeting if it were clearly about business. #
- Honestly I think the two sides are the same thing, but we view one as wrong, and don't have explicit rules for the second. #
- Another example.#
- If you work for me, or we're equals in a business relationship, either way -- no one is accountable to the other for what they do with personal time. Your boss can't call you up on the weekend and expect you to tell them what you're doing. You don't have to tell them anything, unless it impacts your ability to do the work. #
- I think it's equally wrong when a person who reports to me, or is an equal, reports to me on what they're doing in their personal time. It creates a conflict, am I expected to reciprocate, because I won't. I draw a solid line between work and personal time. If I share personal things in a work context, they are no longer personal.#
- These concerns are spelled out more carefully in professions like medicine, academics, law. A therapist isn't allowed to date a patient. A lawyer can't represent both sides in a legal battle. When the lines cross, there's trouble ahead. #
- Last year on Thanksgiving we were in the midst of the worst of the pandemic, and the best we could do is stay home and hope we don't get infected. This year it's very different -- thanks to the vaccine. I got my first dose of Moderna on January 20, the day we inaugurated the first post-insurrection president. What a relief, in two ways. The Orange Tyrant who tried to overthrow the US government was gone, and I was on my way to being protected from the virus he let run rampant through the country we all have been told is the greatest on earth, but did the worst job of protecting its citizens. I hope that was the low point, but who knows!#
- I also was thankful for my car. It's funny that I thought about that post just the other day driving my new Tesla around the neighborhood, marveling at its intelligence, muscle, and how much it is like the computers I use, the exercise bike I just bought, and the phone I carry everywhere with me. The Silicon Valley design ethos, which I am schooled in and in a small way helped develop, is eating the world, as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said so well. The Subaru I drove last year is a fine machine, and in some ways it's more comfortable than the Tesla, and it'll probably do better if we get a blizzard in the mountains. But its software is a jumble of poorly designed components that don't work well with each other from a UI standpoint. In that area the Tesla is perfect. It's a system designed to be understood by a modern user. The pre-Tesla car manufacturers have a long way to go to catch up to Tesla. #
- I am thankful for the first users of Drummer. We have reached a critical mass where I can add features, and get feedback from users, and that gives us the ability to move forward. I think this happened because I decided to put my head down on Drummer and work until it was really ready. There still are problems with the software, it is far from perfect, and I'm thankful for the users' patience, but mostly I'm thankful that there are users to be patient. #
- At 66, health is no longer something I can take for granted. it takes work to keep going, and I've had my troubles this year, but basically I'm still here, and most of my body is working fine. I'm thankful for that. #
For whatever reason I'm not very talkative this week. Not sure why. Often when this happens it's followed by a period of idearrhea. No apologies, I'm still here, feeling more pensive. Happy Thanksgiving! :-)
#
- This time I think I have it, for real. I swear. ;-)#
- Here's the deal...#
- All the action is in Old School.#
- A new head-level attribute, flSinglespaceMarkdown.#
- Default: false -- which means we generate two newlines per outline node, with one exception.#
- If a node has an flSinglespaceMarkdown att set true, its subs are single-spaced. #
- The assumption is that most often people will write in the outliner one paragraph per headline. but there are exceptional cases where you need more control over the markdown text we generate, and need to do your own double spacing, so you tell Old School to just do one.#
- Comment here. #
A
script that generates
the list of Drumkit verbs. For people who worked on outlines in Frontier, have a look. I found a way to work on outlines as JavaScript structs. It's very efficient and much easier to program.
#
I love
my new Tesla. I'm looking for excuses to drive places. I haven't felt this way about driving since I was a teenager with a new license.
#
There are so many interesting things about the Tesla, and I'm just getting started learning about them. It's as if I didn't get a PC until the IBM PC came out. Or maybe later. Here's something I figured out the other night, driving on a mountain road with lots of turns and ups and downs, a road I'm quite familiar with -- the Tesla makes you a better driver. This is something my Subaru does too, you only have to hold the steering wheel loosely while navigating the turns and ups and downs. The road is well-marked and the car knows what to do. The Tesla even more so. It's like my iPhone which takes better pictures in 2021 than the 2011 model did. We like to say "no filters" but the truth is they're just really good filters that make you think you're the photographer, but the phone did the hard work. Same with the Tesla. I like driving it in the same way. It flatters me to think I'm that good a driver. I know the truth though -- I didn't become a better driver, I just got a car that makes me feel that I did. And who wouldn't love that.
#Hereās a
thread reader integrated into Twitter. Next: eliminate the numbers, add links, simple styling, let me give it a title (optional) and weāre ready to rock. Think theyāll have that by say 2030?
#Google's search engine really doesn't like this blog. I tried
searching for
Scott Love on my blog. It didn't find the instance where I wrote about him
here earlier this month.
#
Yesterday I did my tenth Peloton ride. The exercise is making me stronger. I don't know why I didn't want to do the classes. I love my teacher,
Emma Lovewell. She's super nerdy. When we're doing something particularly strenuous, I close my eyes, focus on my breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, and I listen to her say that this pain is worth it because it'll become strength when the workout is over. It's so true. I don't particularly care for the music she chooses, I don't know any of it, and it's not catchy. But she's a lot younger than I am, so I guess this is the kind of music the young folk listen to? I'd love it if there were a Tom Petty ride or a Grateful Dead ride. I can see riding to
Refugee or
US Blues.
#
Drummer, an outliner, now allows you to write blog posts in Markdown.
The question was -- how?
This is what we came up with:
- One newline per outline node.
- Indentation belongs to the author, generates nothing.
I think this works and is true to the philosophy of MD.
- Going to do some more cleanup work this morning on Markdown support in Old School. #
- In the meantime, the thread continues. If you're planning on using Markdown to write blog posts in Drummer, you might want to tune in, because things are being locked down today. #
- There are only two rules that govern how Old School generates source for the Markdown processor:#
- One newline per outline node. #
- Indentation belongs to the author, generates nothing.#
- I sent a private note to John Gruber a few days ago, letting him know this discussion is going on. As far as I know we are setting prior art for outliners used to generate Markdown for publishing. If there is prior art, I would love to know about it now, asap. #
- This is different from the Obsidian model also used by LogSeq -- which uses Markdown as a file format for outlines. #
- Update: Here's a list of this morning's changes to Markdown support for publishing. #
Video demo of a new Drummer feature. Headlines whose type is 'rss' can be expanded to reveal the items in the feed it connects to.
#
Poll: If a person from NY uses the word "fuck" in a sentence that means..
#
Does anyone seriously think that
Facebook-the-company wants to fuel hate in the world? Yet you see articles that say exactly that from supposedly credible news orgs.
#The Repubs get more
obnoxious all the time. There doesn't seem to be any limit.
#
A new Drummer verb,
rss.readFeed, returns a JavaScript object. This used to be a complex thing to do, but it's absolutely as simple as it can be. I did something new here. I'm only passing through values that are documented in the
RSS 2.0 spec and the
source namespace. That's not as draconian as it might sound, because I'm using a
Node package written by my friend Dan MacTough that handles all the common feed flavors, including Atom. His code translates the variants to a common vocabulary. And I further winnow it down to just the basic concepts. To some extent, RSS grew in an unruly chaotic way, but imho the core is solid. After all this time, with
Drummer as a new platform, I think it's a good time to pause and create (hopefully) a simpler future that can work better.
#A
discussion about how Markdown should be processed for Drummer blogs. Basically, what role if any should indentation play, and how many newlines to generate for each line in the outline. My current position -- indentation should play no role in the Markdown we generate from the outline, it should be ignored. And we should generate one newline for every line in the outline. Note this is not how Drummer works now.
#
- Something I've been hearing from employees of big tech companies for my entire career, going back to the late 70s --> "Who the fuck are you?"#
- That's what they say and do. So many examples. And almost all of them are gone. They were significant, maybe, for a few weeks. Then poof, some other asshole at some other tech giant comes along, and gets his or her (mostly his) few minutes to be a super asshole. #
- How much more would we get done if we lived up to the hype about supporting innovation. You can't do a lot of that as some random putz inside of a bigco. #
- You pretty much have to do what I've done, which is stay out of those monstrous structures, that is, if you want to actually do anything. #
- And then of course the jerks come along and kick over your sand castle. #
- And then they're gone in a few weeks. #
- So far I've survived them all. Knock wood, praise murph, etc. #
Here she is, my new blue Tesla Model 3.
#- Drives great. #
- A bit hard to get in and out of.#
- Very comfortable to drive.#
- Quiet.#
- Wish it had Apple CarPlay.#
- It's charging now in the garage. #
- It's as powerful a car as I've ever driven, like my 2007 BMW 535i.#
- Most of the Tesla people at the Mt Kisco store were assholes, but they finally gave me someone who talked like a New Yorker. Most of the Tesla people have the same smarmy attitude that they're doing you some kind of favor to sell you a hugely expensive car, like at an Apple store. The guy we finally got talked to us like human beings who love computers and are excited to own a new kind of car.#
- Thanks to Peter Politi for taking the trip with me. #
I did a refresh on the
ArtShow collection yesterday, a few hundred more classic paintings. Free to download, or use via web.
#
- When you view a normal XML file in the browser, Chrome gives you a simple, readable XML viewer. #
- I want to be able to invoke that viewer from a JavaScript app running in the browser. #
- Some kind of JavaScript call like#
- window.xmlViewer (xmltext);#
- The only other option is to rewrite it from scratch, which I'm open to doing but would rather not. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?#
- BTW, one of the things that kind of silently limits the size of RSS is the way browsers display RSS feeds. They can handle other XML types in a normal sensible way. But the RSS viewer is broken. I wish they would just let it be, and show it as a normal XML file. #
- A thread to discuss.#
I'd love to discuss Markdown with people who know Markdown and use Drummer. We should have a Markdown nodetype. I've been playing around with it, but I'm not satisfied with what I have yet, not ready to lock it down. Here's
an RFC with a link to an example.
#
- The next Drummer-related project is called Glorp. #
- Glorp is for you if you document projects on GitHub. It's good at managing docs across lots of projects, all in one outline. #
- I'd like to get a small group of people who do a lot of doc-writing for GitHub to review the design and docs.#
- If you're part of the test group, you are making a commitment to use the software, to report problems, to let us know if fixes worked. #
- I'm looking forward to working on this software with some excellent developer docs kind of people. #
- If you'd like to be part of the test group, please fill out this form. #
- Glorp!#
- PS: A podcast about Glorp.#
- I've had my Peloton for a couple of weeks now. #
I've done a session every day for the last six days.
#- At first I didn't think I wanted to do the classes, but the second time I tried a class I was intrigued, then by the third, I was hooked. #
- The exercise on a Peloton is more than twice the exercise you get riding around the moutains on an E-bike. It's hard work going up the hills, but you get to just have fun going down, there's no work involved. So 20 minutes of Peloton riding equals 40 minutes of road riding. Only it's even more, because you're working harder. Always harder. #
- My legs feel stronger and healthier, and overall I feel that way too. #
- An entirely positive experience, and my idea of what exercise is about is shifting in an interesting way.#
- And -- tomorrow I get my Tesla Model 3. So I expect some more major horizon busting is to come. #
- Thinking of a Chromebook, for reading news over breakfast, possibly taking it with me to a coffee place to do a little writing. #
- Running an Electron app in Linux? Is this possible?#
- It should have a couple of USB ports, bluetooth, a nice keyboard, mike, camera, etc. #
- Looks nice. Light.#
- Under $200?#
- Comment here. #
- PS: I went with the Lenovo Chromebook Flex 5. #
Malynda Hale: "Imagine if Kyle Rittenhouse were a Black teenager."
#
There's a
dichotomy in outliners -- 1. The outliner as a document, like a spreadsheet or word processing file. A file format. 2. The outliner as a file system, a container for documents, a way of organizing them. Drummer, used as a blogging tool is a solid #2.
#In 2006 I ran into PC columnist John Dvorak at the
Apple store in downtown San Francisco. We got talking about how he was a troll, and he told me to turn on my video camera and he
explained how trolling works. A classic.
#If I had a billion dollars, I'd buy a
TLD and sell domains for 10 cents each, to see what would happen.
#
About this
Web 3 thing. Listen. I understood the Web in about a minute. Web 2.0, I played a role in defining and developing it. So you could say I got it. But Web 3? Why did they choose a name that promises so much, and more than anything -- simplicity. The idea of anything called "Web" being opaque, sounding like a scam, a VC's wet dream -- that's so counter to what the word means in tech. I shouldn't have to read a few white papers, and still not get it. Look, my intuition says that the web is the web is the web and there is no Web 3, there's just the web. I don't like that they usurped the name of something so simple and precious for something that looks scammy. I think they should have chosen a different name.
#
- I wrote this thread on Twitter this morning.#
- Iāve had a Peloton for a couple of weeks.#
- I got it so I could exercise when the weather is too nasty to go out for a ride or a walk.#
- Iāve done classes and rides with no content. I donāt like the classes. The impersonal āyou can do I itā motivation is a real turn off. Who the heck are you, and yiu have no clue who I am. Ugh.#
- Why not have classes where you learn something? Then Iād look forward to it, instead of dreading it.#
- Iām going to keep trying with the classes. Basically I am already motivated, I love the high I get from exercise. But I wouldnāt mind using the time to learn stuff.#
- Then this evening I took a class with a teacher I really liked. And it made all the difference. I got a better workout, and I had fun. I even talked back a few times. Totally got into it. Weird. Peloton#
- Jeff Jarvis generously gave me support for the idea of using rivers in news orgs. I want to clarify that:#
- I appreciate the support. š #
- I don't think I've ever "begged" though at times I imagine it might have seemed that way.#
- And I haven't been promoting rivers to them for quite some time, because I think the problems are much bigger now. #
- I think the most important thing news orgs can do to improve their service is to include ideas and perspectives from outside the newsroom, esp those that are critical of their work. #
- I would encourage a news org to run a river of sources their reporters consider authoritative. Blogs, newsletters, and whatever new forms come up in the future. This would initially be an internal resource, but the obvious next step is to share the resource with their readers, in the interest of increasing news flow, broadening perspectives, and also introducing transparency. And perhaps most important to introduce criticism of their work to their flow, something we need and they need. If I were going to beg for anything that would most likely be it. I wrote about how this would work in more detail in May 2015. #
- When I read yet another NYT article or op-ed about how Facebook is letting us down, I keep wondering when they're going to look at how they contribute to this problem, how their coverage of Hillary's Emails, for example, gave Trump the White House, and set the country on the path to authoritarianism. I think they did far more damage than Facebook, and not surprisingly, that has not been examined to anywhere near the extent Facebook has. This is a serious problem, and it's not going to get better in the current news system. That's where rivers could make a huge difference, if they cared enough about the service they provide readers.#
- PS: This is what a River of News looks like. #
Someone once said that music is
bass and drums, and all the rest is just dressing up.
#
- That's how Facebook transforms into Meta.#
- Thatās how they solve the ills of social networks.#
- The humans behave because they are programmed to.#
- Thatās what they mean when they promise a Disney-like experience. #
Twitter Blue which I accidentally subscribed to, actually deletes your tweets if you arenāt paying close attention. Itās supposed to be a feature I guess, give you a chance to change your mind. Iāve lost a bunch of writing this way. Did they user test this?
#When I was starting out in tech, after getting a degree in computer science, I was drawn to PCs because the adults hadnāt gotten there first. They were still simple. If they had kept their stuff simple, I might have invested on their platforms. The web after all these years is still really simple if you ignore Google and use common sense. Itās still possible to see the web as unspoiled as it was at the beginning. Just ignore Google and itās all good.
#
A cat in an Abercrombie bag, via Facebook.
#
I donāt know what āWeb3ā is and Iām pretty sure I donāt want to.
#Just noticed that yesterday was the one month anniversary of
shipping Drummer. Continuing the long Scripting News tradition of missing milestones.
#I just want to say that the cultural stuff I get on Facebook is every bit as good as what I get from the NYT, and it comes for $0 and without the arrogance and pretension.
#
The name of the scripting language in Drummer is Drumkit. I have reserved a
domain for it. There's nothing there at this time but a placeholder.
Gary Teter came up with the name in a
blog post. When I read the post, I was pretty sure this was the name. I love how it connects to the name of the product, and it conveys the utility of having a language in a product such as Drummer. It also reflects the duality of the product. You can beat the drum in Drummer by writing, if you're a poet, and if you're a plumber, there's Drumkit. It's also nice because it leaves open the option of the language existing outside of Drummer, but no one will miss that the language
came from Drummer. That's important I've found. I left similar clues in RSS and in podcasting. I think naming a product is a community thing, the best names don't come from one person's mind. Gary understands a lot about what I'm trying to do with the language, how else could he have devised such a perfect name. He can be proud, much as
Dannie Gregoire can be proud of coming up with the name we eventually used for what we were calling audio blogging, even though there's a British journalist who falsely claims to have coined the term. Already the Drummer community has made a great contribution to Drummer. Many thanks! š„
#
- I signed up for Twitter Blue for $2.99 under the mistaken impression that it got me through paywalls. Okay it doesn't do that. Sigh.#
- I'd be happy to pay $100 a month, but even so I will not use Twitter as the primary way I read news. Not ever going to happen, I already have news reading tools that blow Twitter out of the water. Sorry Jack. I've been working on this stuff for a long time (just like you).#
- So we're still a really long way away from having rational networked news. Yet the deficiencies of news are what's killing us as a democracy and a world power. It isn't Facebook, that's just a diversion. Most people are falling for it. The problem is that the news system is sick. We talk about inequality in terms of how much money people have, but what about inequality in terms of the information they have access to. I pay for better news that poorer people can. But even with that I'm still impoverished. News people are lazy. I can't believe they weren't all trying to get a real ticktock of Trump on January 6, starting on January 7 (give them a few hours to get over the shock). But I hear from the Washington Post that they thought they had an innovative idea to look into this in October! Holy shit. Is that what they think news is. Oy we are so lost. #
- I want news like they portrayed it in Hollywood when I was young. The shit where they go out to get the story that brings down the empire. The biggest story of 2021 is what was Trump doing, who was he calling, what threats was he making, when the insurrection was actually going on. I read the WP story. It's really weak. We should know a lot more by now. And this was happening all through the Trump presidency. The news was resetting expectations constantly, noting that Trump wasn't a normal president over and over. Well we figured that out thanks, now how about telling us what he's actually doing. #
- We're all information impoverished, just pretending we're informed, but in our hearts all of us knowing we have no idea what's being done to us in our own name.#
