I'm reading Lies My Teacher Told Me. Chapter 2 is a real eye-opener. How the story of Columbus is told, how it's designed to serve a purpose, all from the perspective of Europeans. You might think, of course it is, this is the US, but a lot of the people who are taught that history are not descended primarily from Europeans. So it isn't their history. #
Trump is our enemy. I've been tweeting this the last few hours, attached to evidence. We're all in thrall with him, not just his base. We're in Jonestown. Covid is the Kool Aid. #Last night on MSNBC they just now started talking about how Puerto Rico was the canary in the coalmine. That should have been topic #1 as it was happening. Moderator, ask your pundit, geez if he'll leave Puerto Rico to die, do you think he'll care whether we live or die? And then wonder what if we get hit by a calamity that isn't local, that affects the whole world. Why do they leave the tough questions on the table until it's too late. The point of the canary is to pay attention when the canary dies. When you're about to die, it's too late. It's so repetitious, they say the same things over and over, for weeks and months. Yet all the important questions, the obvious ones, go unasked. #
Every election there's a new contributor that makes the process more tolerable for die-hards like me. Previously it was FiveThirtyEight, then there was the Daily podcast. And this time around, no doubt about it, it's the Lincoln Project.#
Every so often you see an article that says men are responsible for all the problems of the world. I don't comment on them very often, I've learned that's a good way to get the online equivalent of a kick in the balls. People can believe what they want, but every man had a mother, I'm fond of saying, and if men are fucked up as a gender, well you made us the way we are, ladies, so there's that. And then there's this. 😄#
Meanwhile I'm doing some interesting work, and have a nice roadmap of projects each of which should take about a week. Summer is good in the mountains. Eating well, exercising, breathing clean air. #
One thing people don’t get is the rate of death in the US is about to increase, radically. There is no living with this, we have to fight it. That our government is okay with such a massive rate of death is a problem, but even worse is the people seem okay with it.#
Some of the silos being created today are thin. Not a whole lot of tech keeping the users locked in. However the fact that their content is immovable is what keeps them dependent on the platform.#
RSS makes à la carte software possible. Substack is like prix fixe software. You must to use their editor to publish a newsletter. No substitutions. But what if you already have an editor you like? No soup for you!#
Overnight came news of a Spanish research project to find out if the virus has the potential of herd immunity. Apparently not. So we are stuck in this mode until when? Could a vaccine work if there's no possible herd immunity? Anyway, this is like one of those classic fables or myths about the people who were so divided, so hated each other, that they couldn't get together to fight a disease that they can't overcome until they can work together. It's like that famous O Henry story, which I won't spoil in case you haven't read it. #
I've been thinking of getting a new Twitter account. I'm pretty sure the one I've had since 2006 has a flag on it that says "Don't suggest it." Explained here. I think this stems back to the controversy about the Suggested Users List. They eventually did phase it out. And something was done to my account. My follower count, at one time one of the top ten accounts on Twitter, hasn't grown in many years. So maybe it's time to start over, and see if I can have more followers without whatever was done. Anyway, some of the names I've considered are taken: boomer, elgrande (a few friends call me that), uncledavey (one of my favorite titles), scripting, scriptingnews (not sure what this account is), savemylife. Or I could use one of the many names I already have. Then there's the question of how to transition? I think about it sometimes, but I never actually do it. 💥#
Of all the things to be angry about, and there are a lot, the one that gets me the most is that Trump has had Fauci muzzled for three months.#
Perfect. Take down all Confederate statues and ship them to Trump for his Garden of Heroes of White Supremacy and the Not See Party.#
A few days ago I said I figured out that the not-pleasant burnt smell in the air came from fireworks. That was incorrect. A neighbor is having work done on trees. I live in a forest, where trees are a big deal. They're always falling over, and then you need to cut them up and haul the wood away or chop it into firewood. When you cut trees with a chain saw the wood burns, and it doesn't stop burning when the cutting is done. And that adds a stink to the air, like a fire that was put out with water. That's what I was smelling. I know this because I had some trees cut last year, and the stinky smell stuck around for a week. It's the sad smell of a dying creature. On the other hand, when you wake up on a summer morning with dew on everything, and a nice warm feel to the air, with a bit of residual chill, the forest smells like life. It's a wonderful smell. #Snopes and CNN say Trump did not say Desert Storm took place in Vietnam. I ran a link on my linkblog yesterday that said otherwise.#
Poll: If you could have a reincarnated Martin Luther King, Jr leading the Democratic Party today or Barack Obama, who would you chose?#
After Trump is gone we have to get rid of the cancel cult. It’s an ugly side effect of the power of online communication. When Trump uses it in his campaign it’s one of the very few things he’s right about.#
Suggestion: Choose to not be offended, at least once a day.#
Here's a list of the 37 Node.js packages I've made available through NPM. I was just planning a project and was sure I must have created a package for reading to and from a GitHub repo. There it is. Two entry-points, getFile and uploadFile. Voila. Not much in the way of docs. But there is an example app.#
Arnold Schwarzenegger on his love for America. I totally concur. The US welcomed my family in the 1940s. My parents were children, their parents were running for their lives. All of our love of country is being tested, but as it is, it is revealed. It takes on new meaning. We'll come back from this. There are a lot of reasons for the trouble we're in, some habitual, some technical. I've heard Americans say they wish they had left when they could, but there's a reason we didn't leave. This is our country. We can't abandon it in its time of need. We're the ones who stayed. We will make it work.#The infinite scrolling feature on the Scripting News home page wasn't a good idea, because it made it difficult to reach the bottom of the page which has useful stuff on it. I just turned it off. I did a video demo of the feature so we can remember how it worked, and if needed I can turn it back on. And the More button remains, so you can use that to scroll back, one day at a time.#
I've been smelling burned ash everywhere, esp at night. Everywhere I go. I'm thinking this must be a symptom of the virus, so I'm afraid to ask if anyone else smells it. Then on my bike ride I saw a bunch of spent fireworks on the road. Yeah that's the smell. July 4. That should be over soon enough. #
Why more white people understand Black Lives Matter now. We're realizing that our lives don't matter, and now all of a sudden Black Lives Matter makes a different kind of sense. It's a bit too subtle for some people. But the virus and our society's response to it is making the lights come on, gradually at first, eventually for everyone.#
Dear Lincoln Project people -- how about forking off a new PAC to convince more Americans to wear a mask. Use your marketing smarts to crack this nut. And save my life.#
I like how they have a Get Involved button on their website. But when you click they don't say what being involved means, beyond giving them money and your email address and zip code, presumably so they can spam you. I'd love for a campaign to define involvement as solving a problem we have in America, right now.#
I like listening to audio books, but I have two peeves. 1. When a book provides numbers for comparison, repeat the numbers at least once. 2. Put the introductory material at the end. Authors go on and on, assuming you won't read it. Oops. #
Another peeve. I was watching a Dave Chappelle show on Netflix. He is really funny. Great comic. But he uses the N-word a lot. And get this -- he uses it to talk about white people. Like this: You my <N-word>. I've been told, not by Chappelle, that it's a term of endearment. To me, that's ridiculous -- it's a threat. Because if I use that term of endearment, a 10-ton weight comes down on my head. I don't like it. We're also told this is a word African-Americans use among themselves, and we wouldn't understand what it means. But many of the people in Chappelle's audience are white. We're his N-words. I'm watching it, and reminded every time I hear the world, and he says it a lot, that this is something I'm not allowed to like. The more I listen to him use the N-word, my inner voice, constantly yapping about nothing, repeats what he says, and I'm concerned that will eventually come out of my mouth, without thought because that actually happens in real life. It's a painful word, not just for African-Americans. I saw Jelani Cobb write on Twitter the other day about the possible capitalization of the word black when used to talk about people of African descent. "Does anyone feel strongly about upper-casing the B in black? I’m generally opposed to this because it turns race, a nonexistent category, into a proper noun." Maybe we should use words everyone can say, and try to stick to words that have meaning, and preferrably one obvious meaning, so we all can understand wtf you're talking about. 😄#- When I was in sixth grade there was a school-wide spelling bee. I had finished in the top group in my class, so I got to go to the bee for the whole grade. By luck I went first and only got 5 of 10 right. People actually laughed. I went out to the yard to play and wait. #
- One by one the others came out and each had lower scores than me. In the end I had the highest score of all.#
- Moral of the story for countries who pity the US. This isn't over yet. And it's bad luck to declare victory before it's over. And this isn't really a contest. We like to say we're all in it together, and you know what, we are. #
- JavaScript is a lovely language once you’ve spent a few years getting comfortable with its quirks. Not what I’d recommend as a starter language. Yet it is the language most people choose to learn as their first language. #
- Here are the qualities I look for in the ideal starter language. #
- One way to do things not 20. #
- Boring, so the newbie can focus on their own app, not the language weirdnesses. #
- Frozen. They should be able to run their student projects 40 years from now. Not a place where language designers try out new ideas.#
- No callbacks, synchronization handled in runtime.#
- Algol-like, so you can get support form millions of experienced developers. #
- May think of more qualifications later...#
A 25-minute podcast I did this morning. It was mostly about what's in the gaslighting post below. Expanded, and starting with an observation by Ken Smith, English prof at Indiana University, that students deserve to be shown how to use the power tools of our culture. Teachers should say that to them, out loud. I tried saying it loud and felt the power. Led to a story or two. The title of this podcast is Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Wish I had thought to play that song during the podcast. Next time. 💥#Really interesting discussion going on globally on what objectivity means in journalism, esp in re #BLM. I spent many podcasts with Jay Rosen talking about his idea of the mythical View from Nowhere. You must disclose who you are, and disclaim that your writing comes from who you are. This came up in another discussion yesterday about integrity. "A [person] has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in sync. Change the appearance if necessary." It's material if the editors of a publication are predominantly of one race. Until this year, however, as far as I know, the subject had never been raised. Times are changing. #
Reporters can't get it through their heads that someone might want to write publicly to help steer the conversation, not for self-aggrandizement. I know what that's like, I've been a columnist at a big pub. I've had the name of a big university on my business card. This is different. I want to see us survive the virus. I want to survive it myself. Otherwise I don't have any great personal aspirations. I think I can help. That's it. I don't honestly see how, in this moment of crisis in the US, anyone could be worried about getting ahead. Our concern has to be for keeping our system going. It's falling apart, right now, before our eyes. Any idea should be considered, no matter where it comes from. But the gates are really high right now. The keepers are struggling to hold on, and that's exactly what's wrong with discourse.#
BTW can you see now why I want HTML in bash? All those names in the list of apps the server is running should have scripts attached to them.#
- a virus hits the world.#
- far east then europe then the americas.#
- they know what to do in the far east, they've been here before.#
- europe learns fast.#
- but in the americas, it's a disaster. the rest of the world walls itself off. isolating the two americas.#
- within months almost everyone has died of either the virus or starvation or in the various civil wars that break out all across both continents.#
- after a few years, expeditions are sent from europe and asia to survey the remains. they found pockets of former americans, mostly naked, living off the land, many practicing cannibalism.#
- the story, from there is about how the natives adapt or don't and the murderous cruelty of the colonists.#
- Early this morning I wrote a tweet. #
- I enjoy writing my blog because as I’m writing I feel like I’m helping straighten things out, but it’s an illusion, none of it ends up in the bigger conversation, none of it ends up mattering.#
- I think that's pretty straightforward. The only emotion I mention is enjoy. It's true, when I'm writing a long post that organizes something I've had in my mind for days or weeks, and it comes out well, I do enjoy the process. I imagine people reading it, and thinking man this is a great idea or I don't know, I see a problem with it, and then either passing it along as-is, or expanding on it. Either way, I would be happy, because I made a contribution. #
- This last week I've written two pieces like that. #
- One which says let's not waste this moment of political action around BLM, at the same time the government is going to spend $10 trillion (a number I made up) to keep the US from collapsing. Instead of having the money go to the 1% which is the default, let's have the money solve the real problems that are behind #BLM, and in the process help everyone. It was a strong piece, and it contains ideas you never hear among pundits. #
- The other was about the virus and what's in our immediate future, and how, if we eased up on some of the rules of how politics work, if Biden were to appoint Andrew Cuomo as his primary virus advisor, we could start to have a national response to the virus before January 2021. That we're frozen, can't act, scares the shit out of me, both for my own existence, that of my friends and family, and my country, and honestly the world. The US is too important a part of the world for us to just let it go. We have to do something. I put my plan in writing. #
- The response to both these pieces, predictably -- crickets.#
- Now I may or may not be upset about this, I didn't say, but that's not the point. It's not wrong to be upset. You don't have to talk someone down from being upset, assuming I was (I wasn't, it was more frustration). You know what would be better? Ask how you can help. If one person had asked that, I would have said, in glee -- READ THE FUCKING STORIES AND IF YOU LIKE THE IDEAS, PASS THEM ON WITH ALL YOUR POWER. #
In the first case, let's try to steer the #BLM conversation to real political action, now, not in the future, and while the marches are great, we must do more. It's so predictable that we'll just let the moment pass and settle for a few symbolic gestures. Monuments come down. A black person is on the $20 bill. Maybe Biden nominates a black woman for VP. But that money -- that's where the power is, and it goes to the friends of Trump and McConnell, Pelosi and Schumer. #- In the second case, obviously we need and can have, a national response to the virus. We do not have to wait for Trump to leave the White House. And you know what, combining the two, BLM and the response to the virus, there's real power in that, too. If putting these ideas out there resulted in real power and real change, your friend Dave would be over the moon. #
- If you want to know what I really think -- there's no point in continuing to write these pieces on my blog. They accomplish nothing and leave me with a lot of frustration. I can ride my bike, work on the garden, read books, and enjoy my retirement (I turned 65 this year). I don't want to do just that, but geez if nothing happens when I pour my best ideas into the blog, why bother.#
- Let me try to put it in perspective. I think Andrew Sullivan is a great thinker and writer. I don't agree with everything he says, but every time I read one of his pieces in New York, I get lots of ideas. I feel compelled to act. I think I'm in that class of writer, and I think my talent and experience and ideation process are wasted in this space. #
I spent the day so far combining the Radio3 docs into one Howto page. Consider this a draft, I still have to do a couple more read-throughs. If you have any questions or comments, please post them here. #
David Rothkopf: "There was a time in our history when the people of this country would be saddened were the president of the United States to stumble into an open pit that was actually a wormhole that sent him hurtling for all eternity to the farthest, coldest, most hostile corner of the universe."#
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a video game that simulates a worldwide pandemic. You get to be Fauci, and have to deal with a mentally incapacitated president and Republican governors who just want to reopen. Your challenge is to make the US virus free, and win the Nobel Peace Prize.#
The best defense against Putin and Trump is to teach every student the basics of journalism. Not just how to detect fake news, but how to write a news story. If we do it now, we'll be glad we did in a few years.#
- I know a lot of people don't like Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York. I had a sligntly negative opinion of him before the virus hit. My mom didn't like him. She said NY Democrats were really Republicans. I trusted her opinion on that. #
- I also remember his father ran a really dirty personal campaign against Ed Koch, so dirty that if he did it today he'd be disqualified from running for anything as a Democrat. I've heard it said that young Andrew did the awful deed. I don't know. #
- Anyway somehow I've never engaged in state politics here, never understood why a city like NY isn't its own thing at a national level. More people live in the metro area than in the rest of the state. A nice little state could be formed with the five boroughs, Westchester, Rockland, Nassau and Suffolk counties. #
- Anyway, I went from meh on Cuomo to admiring him when he led us when we desperately needed leadership. I've never seen a politician rise to the occasion like Cuomo did with the virus. Never. #
- Now the process is more or less complete in New York. Our immediate neighbors, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts have also done an outstanding job of controlling the virus. #
- But then there's the rest of the country. Ultimately our health will be the same as the country's. So if the US doesn't get its act together, soon, we're going to be right back where we were in March. Except it will be much worse for a couple of reasons. #
- Wear and tear. In many ways we've used up the reserves we had, as people, as economic beings, in our relationships with other people. Rent is due today, it's a crisis for an unthinkable number of people. There's going to be hunger soon, on a scale not seen here in my lifetime, and who knows how bad it will get. It's here now, in March, it was just looming. School is scheduled to resume in a couple of months, but no one really thinks it will. #
Math. Based on a NYT study, the virus had spread much more than we realized by March, but now it's had another three months to push into every nook and cranny of the country. This wave is going to crest a lot higher than the first one, assuming we can manage to get it to crest before everyone is infected. The higher density means when you go to the supermarket instead of on average there being 1/2 of a Covid carrier with you, now there will be 3. And the load in the air you're breathing will probably be an order of magnitude more dense. Which means you and I will get it, where two months ago, we wouldn't have. Everything about the virus, math-wise, has led the curve straight up, vertical. We're there now. Exploring terrible new territory. It's like being cast out of a space ship in a vacuum with very little oxygen and no possibility of a rescue ship. We're going to have to ride this out.#- Cuomo, in his daily briefings, kept saying look at the numbers, look at the numbers. Okay. Assuming he is looking at the numbers, he sees we're at the very last moment when the government might be able to help. Not unlike the position NY, Connecticut and NJ were in in March. So here are the two questions on my mind.#
- When I think about the second question I think of Biden. He's in a position to appoint Cuomo his top adviser on the the virus. Then Cuomo has a sliver of a national platform to speak on. Not unlike the sliver of a platform Fauci has. And what about the Repubs? Now everyone but Trump is actively saying Wear A Mask. Great. That's new. What more could they do right now? #
- Have Fauci testify in the Senate, and treat him with respect. That would send a strong message to the country and the world. Even if the orange blob tweeting in the bunker doesn't get it, we do, and we're taking charge. #
- Even better, have Andrew Cuomo testify, and let him spew his Cuomo arrogance. Let him lecture. Let him show you the numbers. Let him tell you what to do. With Fauci next to him, agreeing, and now we have a much better shot than we had with the leadership of Pence, who still hasn't let go of his allegiance to Trump (he must have some good dirt on him).#
- Let's get our shit together while we still have shit to get together.#
A podcast voicemail to Doc, who reminds me of Martin Sheen and Wilford Brimley. He has a piece today that he wants you to read. And I thought of a way to make that happen automatically. That's what this podcast is about. 26 minutes. Rambly. 🚀#
How many people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs the number of people who have died so far in the US of Covid-19? The numbers will surprise you. (Answer: We're getting close to the death toll of Hiroshima.)#
Colin Nederkoorn reminds us that the NY Times, even though they've opted out of Apple News still has a full complement of RSS feeds. The feeds are perfect. A headline, a synopsis and a link to the paywall'd article. I still would like to see a way around the paywall for non-subscribers. #Little-known feature on Scripting News. You can read a whole month's worth of posts on one page. For example, here's the page for June 2020. I think you can see how the URL is formed. #
It would be interesting to make a list of people whose lives, net-net, matter and don't matter, and to what extent, and how that changes over time. For example, American soldiers' lives in Afghanistan didn't matter much before the latest scandal, but now we know their lives matter even less than we thought.#
- More work on Radio3, continuing from previous notes. #
- The RSS icon now links to an XML Viewer page for the feed (example), rather than the feed itself. A longstanding problem: browsers try to make RSS feeds useful without showing the XML, but in this situation we want to see the XML. #
- Cleaned up the row of icons to the right of every post. Now we have three, a link to the tweet, an icon to edit the post, and one to delete the post. There used to be icons that linked to Facebook and Wordpress versions of the post, but support for both products hasn't worked in a long time, so I disabled it in this release. #
- BTW, I'm trying an experiment, editing the actual running copy of Radio3, so when you see a note appear here, you can immediately try the feature in the software. It's like climbing a mountain with no safety net. When I make a change that introduces a bug, you get to see that too. 💥#
- Why didn't Ken and Karen, the gunslinging mansion owners of St Louis end up with a cop's knee on their throat, pleading for their lives and mothers, gasping "I can't breathe" as they died on the sidewalk. #
In October of last year, before impeachment, I proposed a permanent citizen's occupation of DC. 100K people constantly in protest in DC, rain or shine, 365 days a year, until Trump is gone. On a rotating basis. No one signs up for more than one day. Never more than 100K. Keep a constant presence there for the Democrats and Republicans to remember. To be in the way. To be loud and obnoxious. To help them remember who they work for. #
Not wearing a mask is like not wearing pants.#
I try to keep focused on the bigger picture, and let the small stuff be background noise.#
People who love outliners, esp MORE from 30 years ago on the Mac, we could have an outliner renaissance on the web, now. I have a great lab for development, and the core outliner in JavaScript is open source. I've always felt every app should have a nice outliner built-in. Let's have fun!#Thanks to Gruber, there's renewed interest in Little Outliner. I'd love to have an excuse to work more on its evolution. I have a series of steps in mind, but not enough of a user base to do it with. Gruber would be an excellent user to help drive development. Note that I did a fair amount of work on it earlier this year, adding a feature that I use every day, to grab all my tweets from the previous day. It's turned Twitter into a blogging tool for me, believe it or not. Pretty cool. #
BTW I should add a feature to LO2 that makes it possible for me to send the URL of an OPML file in a link and have it open in LO2. Might help people get the idea of what an outliner is. Heh. After I finish with Radio3. This is what I mean by "sexier and speculative" ideas. 💥#
Why work on Radio3 now? I've had it on my list for a long time. It's long overdue for an overhaul. I wrote it when I was new to JavaScript and didn't really understand the rules, it's a weird language and the browser is a very weird runtime environment. But I always seem to find something sexier and more speculative to work on. Programmers notoriously hate to clean up their messes. I'm no different. Then I had a Come to Jesus moment. I use Radio3 all day every day. I use it on my iPad and iPhone as well as my desktop. It does a lot of my Twitter posts, it's the Links tab on scripting.com, and the links section of the nightly email. It's an important piece of software. Staring me right in the face. Improving it could make everything better. And making it easier to work on the code means I could add improvements in the future. #
Reading tea leaves and being a basically positive person, even when it might not make sense, I think what happened with Pence and masks is that the Repubs in the Senate are shitting their pants over the virus, and said to Trump you can keep trying to stoke race hate if you want, but Pence has to take over the virus and start actually trying to fight it and support the states, and stop undermining Repub governors. Trump said "Whatever" and Pence started, slowly, trying to do this job. Meanwhile get Governor Cuomo in there as a Guest President, and he can run the US effort against the virus, on loan from the Democratic Party. That would probably work, and if presented the right way Trump would probably be okay with it as long as he doesn't go to jail.#
Future possible use for Manhattan. A huge museum for how a centralized economy and cultural system worked before all that was blown apart by the net and a virus.#
I'm starting to work on the UI of Radio3 now that the server issues seem settled. Logging my work here. Will get more formal later. #
- A bulleted list in reverse order of stuff I'm looking at.#
- Have to test to see if it still works with Slack. I suspect it does. Here are the docs for posting to Slack from Radio3. (Tested: Works, so Slack remains in the UI.)#
- I'm removing the UI for the features that ping updates for the feed in custom ways. You can use rssCloud, which is specified in the feed Radio3 keeps for you. If you've built a system that depends on this please let me know. #
- OPML archive for the original settings dialog is here. #
- I'm removing Facebook and Wordpress from the user interface. Trying to preserve as much of the code as possible, so if we ever can resume the connection with one or both, it will be as painless as possible. #
In my humble opinion, it's no coincidence that #BLM has huge momentum now when we have the most racist president in generations. Just as it's no coincidence that the most racist president followed the first African-American president. #- It appears we're going to flip back to the positive direction, so the question is what do we want.#
- The big issues are imho: #
- Even more immediate: Assume the US government will spend $10 trillion in the next year to keep the US from crashing. Should that money go to the 1% (where it would go by default, imho) or should we focus on making sure the money goes to solve the critical problems.#
- That money could restructure health care so it works for everyone. It could start the transition to a green economy. It could certainly help assure voting rights, and therefore a fairer government in future years, and maybe prevent the flipping back and forth.#
- I'm very concerned that we will end up settling for symbolic victories, removal of the stars and bars from the Mississippi state flag, removal of monuments, and nothing material will change. Symbolism is important, but we have big non-symbolic problems to solve.#
- The focus has been on changing minds and attitudes. I am open to that in every way. I learned a tremendous amount from the 1619 podcast. More of that please. I am reading the People's History of the United States -- again, eye-opening.#
- But you can't change people who don't want to change. This is why the approach that pundits are taking, saying we have to change people, they have to understand what it's like to be X, as a prerequisite for real change, that's not a good approach.#
- We can find win-wins right now. Restructuring health care won't just help people of color, it will help everyone. But imho is is a #BLM issue.#
- Voting rights matter, even if it only re-enfranchises African-Americans, because many of us want the kind of government African-Americans will vote for.#
- It doesn't have to be either/or, in fact if it is, we will all lose. Repubs will continue to dominate, and all the resources will continue to flow to the 1%.#
- There will be a lot of change in the next year. This is a pivotal time. We must organize, black, white, all genders, all races, ages, erase the wedges and act in all our interests to save lives, and overcome the challenges in front of us.#
- Let's find our inner-Americans, and fight to live up to the promise of our nation.#
- Note: This post first appeared in a series of tweets this morning. No need to unroll it, here's the text in a single blog post. #
We're going to start on the road out of racism in the US when intelligent, loving, courageous, driven and visionary people of all races decide to listen to each other and find things we can do that benefit everyone regardless of race, now -- immediately, not some time in the future. Not symbolic things, but stuff to save my life. #Jason Calacanis writes: "Imagine if every day Trump and Pence did a data-lead briefing like NY Gov Cuomo did." Of course that the US government should be doing that. The Democrats could do it too, no imagination. Or a startup could. Hire a former head of the CDC, and do the hourlong briefing Cuomo did, a weather report for the virus, and make recommendations for business and people. Huge piece of blue sky here. JC is a risk-taking angel investor with experience in journalism. He would be a good person to do this. I wish someone would. We need it.#
For the next few days Radio3 will be unreliable if the past couple of days are any indication. I'm retooling the server, and grappling with some mysterious problems. BTW, the reason I asked about a Hello World app for WordPress is that if there's an easy way to get WordPress support working again in Radio3, (the WP API changed some time back and broke Radio3 in this regard), I will. But I don't have time to do a deep-dive into the WordPress API at this time. #
In the meantime, I think I found what was screwing up my new server. nodeStorage has a feature, that by default is enabled, where it checks with the GitHub repository every 15 minutes and downloads changes. It doesn't restart the app, so you don't see the effect of changes until you restart. The apps are running in the new version of PagePark that has Forever integrated. The way it knows which JavaScript file to run is via the main attribute in package.json. Here's how this goes wrong. At some point, the app checks with GitHub, sees that its version of package.json is different from the on the repo, and downloads it, replacing the one I customized. Ooops. That version does not have a main attribute. So next time I launch PagePark, which I am doing a lot of these days as I debug it and add features, the nodeStorage-based apps don't run. Vexing little bug. The feature should probably default to off. Thing is, when you implement a clever feature like this you want it to default true. Then, years later it bites you in the ass. That my friends is the way programming works, when it doesn't work. 💥 #In hindsight, it would have been smart if instead of starting the Space Force, the US had started the Health Force. #
Biden, who has suffered tragic loss in his life, and survived, may be the perfect president for 2021 and beyond as we deal with the wreckage of the two pandemics, Covid and Trump.#This may be the last I write about Trump. Suppose Trump were a brilliant political strategist. On hearing of how awful the virus was, in January, he would have thought to himself, "I just won re-election." How could that be you ask? Simple. He waits a bit until it's obvious to the press that it's an emergency then he gives a big Oval Office speech announcing the emergency and what we're going to do. It's exaclty what the CDC says to do. "This is going to hurt," Trump reads off the teleprompter, "but we'll get through it together." Then guess where his approval rating would be? 95%. Because that's how it works. We rally behind the leader in a time of crisis, even a douchebag like Trump. Who is more dumb than a sack of nails. I'm sure one of his advisors saw this as a political gift. All Trump had to do was listen. #
Braintrust query: I'm looking for a good Node package for posting to WordPress and updating posts. Really simple stuff. A basic Hello World app in JavaScript. Any pointers much appreciated.#
My bet is that none of NBA, MLB, NFL or NHL have a season of any kind this year. The shit is about to hit the fan, not a second wave, but a second order wave.#
I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting at the White House where they decided to try to nuke the Affordable Care Act once again. I just like to know where the depravity comes from, and were there any Russian commissars in the room giving the orders?#
Waiting for MSNBC's Steve Kornacki nightly "weather report" on Covid outbreaks around the country. Crosspost to YouTube, Twitter, where ever people watch videos. Both a public service and a competitive coup. Free advice from your friendly media hacker. Dave#
One thing I love about having an iPhone and a banking app is that I no longer have to drive to a bank to deposit a paper check. Progress.#
Everywhere you go people will tell you we don't like your type here. In my old neighborhood in Queens, they said it about Jews, when we moved in. Many years later, same neighborhood, it was Chinese and Koreans. In Ulster County it applies to people from NYC. It's bullshit.#
BTW, when the Chinese and Koreans moved in, the food got a lot better. Funny story. A few years ago my mother and I went out to eat at a popular Chinese dumpling place near Main St. The waiter asked if we were tourists. I said, no -- we're natives. 💥 #
Social media is a moral parade. All we've done is give voice to stupid.#
In 2012, Obama liked to say the Repubs drove our economy into a ditch, and the Dems would have to pull it out and dust everything off. This time, if Biden were to tell the honest total truth, the Repubs drove us off the cliff and not just the economy. #
Now is the moment when no incumbent Republican can fool themselves into believing that Trump isn't doing massive harm to America. They can lie, but every one of them without exception understands. #
I haven’t had any interaction on my Facebook posts in the last week. No comments, no likes, nada. It’s like it just ended. The people are gone, or Facebook algorithm isn’t showing anyone my posts. Meanwhile it’s rock and roll on twitter and on my blog. Later: Well it turns out, I have been posting mostly-private messages on Facebook since May 23. Not sure how it happened but only a few people were seeing them. I just posted something public and it's as if the lights turned back on. Now I'm going back through the last months' posts and changing the privacy setting on them. Whew. #Driving on the Masspike yesterday, going west, listening to the audiobook of the People's History, when a phone call comes in. Looks like spam so I don't answer. Then the car's audio, coming from my fully updated iPhone XS Max, via CarPlay switches over to the Podcast app, and plays an episode of The Daily podcast, an episode I didn't want listen to, and there's nothing I can do until I can stop the car and reactivate the Audible app, about 15 miles of driving. To be very clear, it should have resumed the book, which was interrupted, not start a podcast. This is the kind of software lunacy that never gets fixed. Next year they'll revamp the OS of the car, or the phone, or switch the processor, or get rid of iTunes or Cookie Dough or whatever, and more stuff will break, and the process will continue next year and the year after, and it will not have been worth it. At some point some adult will run Apple, someone who can't be bluffed on software, will tell the engineers to shut up and eat your vegetables, you can watch TV when you finish your homework. It's an analogy. You can figure it out. 🚀#
- Glitch asks a very interesting question. #
- If you could rename JavaScript what would you name it?#
- Let's talk this through.#
- First what is JavaScript. Let's make a list of things it is. #
- It's a single syntax that works in the browser and on the server. A lot of the built-in routines work in both place.#
- It's a vastly too-hard-to-learn language, but it's what we got. #
- If you were going to design one language that everything should be translated to, it would never be JavaScript, but once again, it's what we got. #
- Every toolkit shows up as a package in the server runtime for JavaScript. It's the default platform. If you want to write software that integrates lots of back end services, JS is your best choice. #
- It was created by the immediate competitive need of Netscape's visionary, and a future venture capitalist, combined with the longevity of a standard syntax that has grown a lot especially in the last couple of years. #
- In most of the answers to What Is It? you could summarize it by saying Worse Is Better. In every category, given a choice between elegance and simplicity, performance and ease of use, JavaScript picks the worst of the options. And since worse is better, that's good! That's why it wins. It doesn't worry about being better, does it work, if so, let's use it and go forward. #
- Let's go back to the beginning when Marc Andreessen didn't (presumably) want Java to run away with the web. That's the position Java had, and they were pressuring Netscape to bundle it with the browser, and he didn't want to do it, but he had to have something to put in his place. Pretty sure that's why he asked Brendan Eich to write it, the legendary 10-day project. So what was that product? Maybe that should be the name? #
- Even though they weren't thinking of server-side language that JS would become, really JS is the language of the web. That idea fits both the original vision and the current use. #
- But that's not really a product name: Language Of The Web. LOTW. Nah doesn't really live well in the mind. #
- I would have just called it Netscape. It's so central to everything the company was doing, you could have said -- this is the reason we created the company. The web is the UI, and that's important, but the real power is the network behind it, and that network is defined by the language, and this here is the language. It would have given Java a run for the money, probably would have pushed it closer to Microsoft (that's a whole other story) but long term, it would have worked. #
- BTW all that's left of Netscape today is -- JavaScript.#
- They didn't do it then, but you could do it now and it would be cool and fun, historic, respectful and something people would talk about. #
I had to drive today on the New York State Thruway, south of Albany. It was a long enough drive that I had to stop to use the facilities. I dreaded going into the rest stop. Happy to report that everyone, without exception, was wearing a mask. I had another thought, watching a woman walk her dog in the special area set aside for that. I thought geez if the dog can pee outside.#I started reading People's History of America. It was just what I was looking for. After this, I want to read the equivalent book about the Jews in Europe. I have very little idea what that was about other than it was rough and didn't end well. ;-) #
Trillions will be spent by the US government in coming months to keep the country from crumbling. Do we use the money for big change, or do we settle for symbolic victories with most of the money going to the 1%. PS: IMHO the protests are a good sign.#
- I want an E-Z Pass for news. #
- Not micropayments. Tolls instead of paywalls. #
- If I don't have an E-Z Pass, no access. If I do, it's seamless.#
- Suppose one month I spend $84 to read stories on The Atlantic. They can make me an offer to subscribe. Look dude, you're wasting money. Let us help you.#
- That's a lot nicer than -- hey asshole you can't read this article unless you subscribe. #
- This is called marketing. A little romance with your sales pitch. 🌻#
Braintrust query: I'm trying to catch the error in a Forever-managed app that caused it to restart. The error shows up when the app is run on its own. I want the same info when Forever is running it.#
Yesterday I linked to a Joni Mitchell song, Twisted -- not knowing it was a cover for a song written by Annie Ross. A reader, Richie B, sent me a link, and I like this version even better. Very sweet, jazzy. 💥#
I asked a friend who’s Jewish, as am I, how he’d feel if a statue of Hitler was in the middle of his town. He said it’s different. It’s not. Imagine, after surviving the war, getting your freedom, the people you lived with, who controlled the town you live in, celebrated your enslavers. #
The people who flirt with KKK tactics, use the intimidation of Jim Crow, we can’t cleanse their minds, but we can force them back into the shadows. Blacks are every bit as American as any of us. Stop worrying about the feelings of the evil people, start caring for their victims.#
My friend Enoch Choi, a brave doctor who risks his life to save people all over the world, reminds us that racist terms like Kung Flu, coming from the filthy mouth of our president, give permission to evil people among us to target Asian Americans. Unacceptable.#
Today is WWDC day, and announcements from Apple. My longtime friend Scott Love says Apple should focus on the user experience. I say it's even more basic. What matters to me is how broken everything is. Every day it seems my flow is stopped because I have to find a way around something someone broke that broke something else. Stop deprecating, stop changing, let’s spend a decade fixing breakage.#
- I watched a Dave Chappelle concert last night on Netflix. Great stuff. But. He says the N-word over and over. Even to talk about white people. It gets imprinted in your mind, that's just a fact. #
- Another example, after watching The Wire, my brain starts using the N-word all the time as my mind drifts. God forbid the word should ever come out of my actual mouth. Someday it will and I will get excoriated. #
- So maybe our black bros (another word DC uses a lot) could take this into account and maybe not use it so much, at least when the audience has a lot of white people in it. Just sayin. #
- This is how a president should look. With the weight of the world on his shoulders. Finally, perhaps, it has dawned on him that he can't bluff his way out of this one. The virus doesn't intimidate. #
I love fresh cherries. 🍒#
BTW, I never made software for iOS. I remember clearly when I decided not to. The day they announced the iPhone. I was expecting it to run Mac software. I had a great scripting environment for the Mac. I thought this is it, the perfect platform for me. Then I heard it was going to be nothing like the perfect platform for me. Now, 14 years later, give or take, the big story in tech is that it's an awful platform for developers. Y'all should just read Scripting News. Save a lot of time. 💥#
Reboot journalism: Let the experts speak for themselves. Goodbye view from nowhere. #
Big story: The whole thing, politics, business, health care, journalism, a self-perpetuating mess that’s collapsing.#
If you want to feel good, watch a Dave Chappelle concert, or Stop Making Sense. They both totally rock, in different ways. #
The only reason we’re not in a declared war with Russia is the treason that put Trump in office. What Russia did certainly was an act of war.#
This. This is how you do political advertising. You are watching history here folks. Pay attention. #
A bug in journalism is that it tries to put people in boxes. Your ideas only have value if you have credentials to back them up. This method makes reporters easily replaced by algorithms, and keeps us from hearing the most interesting even eclectic idea stimulating ideas. Of course no one in journalism will hear this because heh I lack the proper credentials. #Observation: The US, not just Trump, wants to be distracted from the terror of the virus. Fact: We're so crazy we actually create events to help it spread faster. Action required: Pay more attention to the WHO and less to the antics of the US government.#
The WHO had something to say that we all must hear, but they didn't get much coverage. We were all too busy focusing on Trump's shenanigans, as always. There should be a daily briefing with Dr Fauci, broadcast on all channels, treated as news, I don't care if he has to quit the government to do it. The WHO message is this -- the virus is spinning up to a new level, and it's going to cost us hugely to get it to quiet back down. This has to be said clearly and repeatedly with authority. In America the only one who can do that is Fauci. Without Trump, obviously. Maybe Wolf Blitzer, who clearly has a rapport with Fauci should take a leave from CNN to be his partner in this. #
Before yesterday's rally in Tulsa, TikTok Teens and K-pop fans organized to spam the registration page. So they had 800K signups, with room for only 19K fans. Only 4 million live in Oklahoma. So the numbers were fishy. Even so the Trump campaign hyped them. They seem to have believed them. They must've wanted to. Ethan Zuckerman says it was activism, it was, and it's surprising how well it worked. #I can't get this song out of my head. "What's so strange when you know that you're a wizard at three? I knew that this was meant to be."#
- My dad, pictured below, probably around my age now, in Switzerland, having a snack of coffee and pie. My parents went hiking there every summer. They did a lot of traveling earlier in life, all over the world, but in the last couple of decades it was all about Switzerland. #
You don't learn the most from your parents until they leave you.#
There ought to be an amendment. As soon as an incumbent president tries to fire a US Attorney investigating him, he leaves office, and is automatically indicted for obstruction of justice. No bail. It's an admission of guilt, like taking the fifth.#
I went to grade school in Queens, not far from where Trump grew up. There were bullies in sixth grade who were more sophisticated and mature than our president. #
On GitHub, Sergey Ponomarev explains why he thinks JSON Feed was a bad idea. I wrote similar pieces in 2019 and 2017.#
The episode on Reconstruction of Radio Open Source is a must-listen, esp the interview with Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. I got goosebumps listening to her, and at the end I was fistbumping YES out loud on my bike ride. We are close to breaking through. The pandemic presents a huge opportunity for change that must not be wasted. Working together is required. I say something she didn't, white people will never know what it's like to be black, but we can work together, we must, we will. #
I started to record a voicemail to Om about his recent piece about Dropbox (it's short, you should read it before listening) but I kept going on, so I decided to make it a podcast. 13 minutes. #
Today was the last Cuomo briefing, and the end of the Cuomo podcast. Thanks to Richard Bluestein for doing the audio. Learned a lot from it, and also got to listen to some good leadership. I wonder who's going to fill the void. I hope the Democrats see there's a vacuum, maybe they could get Dr Fauci to do something like what the Governor was doing. Or a former head of the CDC? We need a trusted source of advice and scientific info to keep going. Not just in New York, but around the country, and elsewhere. #- Many many years ago I predicted that the US House would be filled with bloggers. I didn't dare predict that the president would be one. I thought it would be a good thing. Little did I know then..#
- I was very much active in politics when Gil Scott-Heron's 1971 song, The revolution will not be televised, was a hit. I just saw this video where he explains the idea behind it. Back then I liked the song, but it was scary. Maybe that's why I liked it. #
- The idea of blacks leading a revolution, when the images on TV were of violence and looting, was fear-inspiring. The Black Panthers were fear-inspiring. #
- Look, there's no absolute truth to any of this, only points of view. It was much later in life that I came to see that blacks can be hippies. When I was young as far as I knew only white people smoked pot. Did I ever see a black person smile? Not that I recall. #
- I remember in 1980 on a beach in Jamaica, the only white person, and feeling really scared. #
- We've come quite a ways. #
- I wish I had seen this video a long time ago. Gil Scott-Heron is a friendly artistic dude. I didn't get that way back when. Listening to it many years later, I realize now the song probably wasn't intended for me, a 16-year-old white kid. But it reached people like me, and influenced our thinking, the way we felt about blacks and revolution. But it's not 1971, and it seems we've learned how to listen to each other better. #
It's crazy. If everyone in America wore a mask, within a few weeks there would be no more new infections. We can't get that simple idea through the skulls of people who are entranced by the orange blob tweeting from the sub-basement of the White House.#With Twitter's new voice tweet feature, i'd like a very simple way to post a voice message to an RSS feed. I can help with this. I have lots of working code for dealing with feeds, as you might imagine. Let's make podcasts super easy for the people.#
- Yesterday I posted here and on Twitter this idea:#
- I’d like to do a new server-side JavaScript environment that’s compatible with Node, ie runs Node apps, no breakage, but it also eliminates the need for callbacks, promises or async/await. I believe it’s technically possible.#
- A friend suggested using Babel to prototype this. #
- I could imagine a modifier keyword on a function that means this function is internally going to do async things and calls to it should block until until it completes. That could be translated by a Babel plugin into somewhat that internally uses promises queuing to make callers wait for completion.#
- This is the way to start. I wonder if anyone reading this has the expertise in Babel to make this work. I've started a thread over in the repo to discuss. #
- I will write up some code to demonstrate what the Babel plug-in will do, hopefully later today. Stay tuned. #
- Why try to simplify?#
- I was asked on Twitter why I want this. There are all kinds of overhead, time, space, and intellectual. I program in a high level language instead of machine language because there's less intellectual overhead. It would save both time and space to use machine language. But I'm saving complexity by programming in a HLL, and that means I can build more complex and useful software. #
- Why not just use promises, they're easy my correspondent asks. I say it's easier to not have to program something than use something that makes it easier to program. That's the philosophy of factoring. However the JavaScript I envision would be backward compatible with EC6. It would run any code that runs in Node. But it would also be able to process asynchronous functions with syntax that's as simple for a programmer as calling a synchronous function. #
- I don't think there's any question that callbacks are something we'd like to simplify. I'm saying it's possible to simplify callbacks by removing the need to use them for simple asynchronous I/O operations, yet give up none of the efficiency. Most other languages do it, so can JavaScript. #
- There's another reasons, transparency in APIs. For example, I might want to prototype a function by storing its data in memory, but at a later time may decide to store it on disk or on the net. I want to keep the interface unchanged, but with today's JavaScript you can't, you have to go to callbacks/promises/etc.#
- In general, the philosophy of factoring says you take a problem that you're solving over and over, and create a library of functions that do it, and call them instead of replicating the code. #
- In an email to John Gruber --#
- John -- A few things bother me about Hey.#
- They're doing what they say they don't like about Apple. If I want to make a product for their platform, something that does something different with their email, I can't even pay them 30% of revenue. I'm locked out. #
- Email already means something, and having choice in clients is part of that. So maybe they shouldn't call it email, that might alleviate my concern.#
- It's another Twitter. Five years from now people will get it. They're in a silo and there's no way out and no one can offer the features they offer without cloning the whole thing, which is kind of pointless, because the people you want to reach are still over there.#
- This will definitely be a blog post. ;-)#
- Also is there a non-hyped list of new features that aren't present in email? Not a marketing list.#
- Dave#
- PS: It's okay as far as I'm concerned to invent a new email protocol, and even have it be closed, but if others can't implement it, then we should know that.#
PPS: I did create a new Hey account, I'm davew. I like it, but hey what I actually want a really simple scripting interface so I could write my own rules without having to try to figure out how the user interfaces for rules work in Gmail or Hey or Ha or Hmm or Heh or Who or Whatever. Silly thing is I had exactly that a long time ago with Eudora and Frontier and it worked exactly as well as you would think. I did all kinds of interesting web content apps with it. Email is a nice interface for web work. I bet you didn't know that. 💥#
Black neighborhoods must get the same service as white neighborhoods. Very simple.#
White people are never going to understand what it's like to be black. But we can listen, empathize, and try to do what they ask us to do to help. That would be success imho. Last night Ari Melber asked a panel what victory looks like. It's a good idea for everyone to ask and answer that question. Let's find common goals and work together to achieve them. You have to figure out what needs to change to make America safe for blacks. We can help. One of the big lessons of the 1619 podcast was that the struggles of blacks for equality gave us all greater guarantees. This will happen again and again. But we must not waste the opportunity.#I’d like to do a new server-side JavaScript environment that’s compatible with Node, ie runs Node apps, no breakage, but it also eliminates the need for callbacks, promises or async/await. I believe it’s technically possible.#
- Smells are an incredible thing, a time machine, when you get a whiff of something from long ago, it reaches deep into your emotional memory and you experience the feelings from long ago, most deeply felt are the feelings of childhood and the people who raised me.#
- For example, when I moved to NYC from California in 2010, when I went for a walk in the morning in Central Park, I'd get the smell of the woods and the morning dew, mixed with salt air of the ocean. It took me back to my grandmother's house in Rockaway. She's long gone, the house isn't ours anymore, but the memory sure is.#
- Morning smells here in the Catskills, where I live now, take me back to summer camp. The rituals. Taps at bedtime, reveille to wake us in the morning. The food they served that my mother never did. Butter on bread. What a revelation. We didn't eat butter at home. #
- Playing softball every day. Swimming. Canoeing. And most deep gratitude for the weekly care package from mom with home baked cookies and stories from home. I'm sure she put as much care into the packages as I did in savoring them. Until I experienced the summer smell of camp, here and now, at age 65, mom gone, I never recalled those packages. If I had I would have never doubted our bond. #
- Yesterday I read a post from my friend Anna Masera in Italy who was going out to eat at a real restaurant. Not outdoor seating. Inside. Then I realized how great it's going to be to re-experience all the things we took for granted just a few months ago. If we survive this it'll have been worth it from that standpoint.#
I heard that Hey doesn't support standard email protocols and is not file format compatible with GMail. Is this true? What is their protocol like? How do you get your data out if you decide to switch? Can you? #
I'm thinking of providing free email too. No code written yet, but I do have the domain reserved. Heh.#
The Lincoln Project is going to win the Pulitzer for campaign snark. I want to know is that really Sir David Attenborough? #
Every once in a while, Siri in my back pocket says "Sorry I couldn't hear what you said." I didn't say anything. Or my Alexa says it doesn't recognize my voice, would I like to register. It was Andrew Cuomo talking in a YouTube video. Little unforseen consequences. It's like being in an episode of Westworld. I'm sure it's already happened that the two have had conversations, being confused about what the other said. #
In the piece below I mention the two local papers in Madison in the 70s. I remember their names as the Crap Times and the Wisconsin State-Urinal. One of my roommates put that in my head. #
I'd love to get a picture of Neal Katyal's study as he appeared yesterday on Ari Melber. It looks like the room of someone who spends all his time online and in his mind. I recognize it, I've existed in such a space as long as it's been possible. Also the interview with Fauci with Wolf Blitzer on Sunday which by luck I watched live. They've known each other a long time, clearly are friends. Blitzer asked him a personal question, Fauci answered. He said he spends all his time writing emails. He puts so much in, and he must have so much frustration, given how badly we're doing, and how he's prevented from speaking. I keep wondering if we, online media tech makers, couldn't do more to help him communicate, given the limits of TV.#
I was a paper boy as a kid. I had a route. I delivered Long Island Star-Journals to neighbors in Flushing on my bike. I was emulating the net. Very slowly. #
- When I was a grad student, I'd grab a copy of the Chicago Tribune, Capitol Times or Wisconsin State-Journal and hang out at the Memorial Union and catch up on the news, do the crossword or read the cartoons. The good old days in the 1970s. #
- Today, I'd still want to hang out at the Union but I'd get out my laptop or iPad and read the news via Twitter and my RSS river. Key difference: Today no single publication delivers the full news experience. #
- Looking back, they could have seen this happening, and done more to bind themselves to Twitter or RSS, or even produced their own hybrid and add their expertise as users of news. And if they had let it evolve it might have been, by now, a fantastic news reading and interacting experience, far better than what we use today. They didn't so this is where it's at now, an unbundled, à la carte reading experience. #
- But today the news industry is still set up as a business as if I'm going to get my news the way I did in the 70s. And how are they going to convince me to do this? A paywall. The price for reading the article that's caught my eye is to give them my credit card and the right to charge me $10 per month for perpetuity. No. The answer is no. Always no. #
- I wonder how many subscriptions the CEO of the Atlantic and Mother Jones have bought this way? #
- I'd like to see a bar graph with online subscription revenue for the top 15 pubs. I imagine it looks something like this. #
- If you're a person who thinks about business models of news, ask yourself, how many subscriptions can one reader afford? Feel good about? Feel like they aren't being ripped off by? For me the answers to the three questions are: 3, 0 and 0. #
- I'm paying about $30 per month for this, and am not happy about it. In contrast I pay $200 per month for TV. And I'm ready to spend more. But, get this, I spend a lot more time every day reading on the net. And I know the news orgs don't think very much of us readers, but I'm not reading crap, I'm learning, getting information about a lot of local stuff (despite the belief there is no local news, there is). And I can afford to pay much more than I am, I'm just waiting for some part of the news industry to wake up and realize it's not the 1970s anymore. #
- Another thing I spend a lot more money on that might be closer to news is political campaigns. As Election Day approaches, I'm giving out $100 gifts to candidates to help save the world, the same way I would like to throw money at news orgs who help to save my life. #
- Subscriptions? I don't think so. I don't commit to vote for the governor or mayor beyond the next election. It sounds stupid to even put it that way. I'm sure the politicians would like that. And there are good arguments for it. But we get to choose again and again. And that's how I like it. It keeps them interested in communicating with me, maybe even slightly, to listen. #
- I've read so many stories about how news orgs feel about their role, maybe it's time for the news orgs to try to find out how their readers see their roles? Basic business. Know the people who pay your bills and do things that delight them. Not much of that going on with news. Too much talking to be heard by other news people. I visualize it as two barbers passing the time cutting each others hair. #
- BTW, I wrote about the news experience I want back in May. #
- Thanks for listening. #
I missed the anniversary again. 18 years ago yesterday, I quit smoking. The number of cigarettes I've had since, zero. Not one. Yet I still sometimes dream that I'm a smoker, buying packs of Marlboro Lights on the sly, feeling guilty that I'm lying to my friends when secretly I'm still a smoker. I quit smoking because the arteries on my heart were so clogged that they didn't work anymore. I had to get blood vessels from my legs and chest transplanted to bypass the blockages. These continue to work to this day, keeping me alive, riding my bike, writing software and blog posts that seem to make some people happy and piss other people off but are ignored by almost everyone. Makes sense. Anyway, I wrote something on my blog a few days after I quit. "I figured something out in the hospital. I'm the kind of person who likes to solve problems by smoking. How do I know this? Because every time my mind encounters a problem it says "OK, I'll just have a cigarette then." I bet a lot of other cigarette smokers deal with problems the same way. Now that I don't smoke, I still have the idea that smoking will help me deal with problems. It's funny, one part of my brain has figured out that this is wrong (in fact smoking causes more problems than it solves) but a deeper part of my brain still believes it. This leads to some funny arguments inside my brain. But so far so good. I got to go through the worst of the withdrawal in a hospital where there was no possibility of smoking, and now the craving seems manageable. No doubt other people have smoking stories to tell. I was one of the lucky ones, I survived to tell my story. So far so good."#A podcast about how I merged PagePark with Forever. A few weeks ago I did a podcast where I explained how the pieces came together for Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s. I was thinking about that then because a similar thing was happening with PagePark and Forever. I was putting the two together and had an aha moment where the pieces snapped together. PagePark has a very simple idea of what a website is, it's a sub-folder of the domains folder. The name of the sub-folder is the domain that maps to that content. The aha was realizing that you could also put a Node app, to be managed by Forever, which is a package you can integrate into an app, in one of those folders too. Not only did it work at a technical level, but it also provides Frontier-like integration. It's very nice. I've been managing apps in this little world for a couple of weeks now. #
A random screen shot for docs I'm writing. This is what a table for the command line tool I wrote for PagePark displays. It's equivalent to the table that Forever displays at the command line. #
I read that GitHub is going to get rid of the concept of master for repositories because it's a reference to slavery. According to their docs, "By default your repository has one branch named master which is considered to be the definitive branch." A search of github.com finds a lot of uses of the word master. And in the rest of the world, there are master bedrooms and master's degrees. Courts appoint special masters. There are a lot of synonyms in the thesaurus. #
The consensus from yesterday's query is that adding promises to JavaScript wasn't much of a gain. Some people find promises more readable. There are some problems that are unwieldy with callbacks that are simpler with promises. There are already packages that have cast aside callbacks and only use promises in their APIs. If I need to use those packages I will use their promises-based API. No choice. My two cents. I wouldn't have supported this addition to the language. I much prefer tech that adds functionality in a clear understandable way. I would prefer if we could put our effort into (for example) making Dropbox work on Linux. Everywhere you look systems we depend on are in disrepair. It's like the way NYC worked when I was in high school. Burned out neighborhoods that people still live in. At some point you have to start thinking about the size and shape of the community you're serving and focus on making the language work better, not making it more complex. I still think there should be a JavaScript option to bury the synchronization functionality in the runtime, and let people write code in the natural way they do in pretty much every other language. Why JavaScript is different is something I've never heard a good answer to.#
- Three things are going to happen this week. #
- The rate of hospitalization will explode in red states. #
- The stock market continues to crash.#
- Trump's rally in Tulsa is cancelled, or worse is a washout. #
- He threw a ridiculous and unnecessary Hail Mary pass that could only have worked if the virus was done with us.#
- It's going to sink in with many more people, even some MAGAs, that we're going to hit this wall again and again until we hunker down and wait for the vaccine. Eventually everyone will understand this. And the market will crash more. A new lifestyle will take over the US as we transition into something less than a First World country.#
- And by the end of this week there will be a consensus that Trump is no longer our biggest problem. We're already well on the way there.#
I'm guessing Trump's Tulsa rally won't happen, because as the next week progresses, the numbers are going to start rising more steeply from all the new unprotected activity. We're going to hit this wall many times before we're ready for the long haul. Even MAGAs will get the message.#
There's going to be hunger and homelessness, soon, and the virus isn't going to spike -- that's wishful thinking. It's more likely the curve is going to go up and up and up, getting steeper all the time, until we stop the party and get serious about saving lives. Let's find ways to help each other. Black lives mattering can help save all our lives. We're all in the same boat now, believe me. The police may loom large as the biggest problem, but imho, they are far from the biggest problem. That's the virus, and the broken political system. We have to work together. That's the only way out. #Health care is a #BLM issue. With all the trillions the US government is going to spend in the next year trying to keep the economy alive, we could use part of that money to convert the American health care system to a single-payer, no more paying the insurance industry their unearned cut. #
Republicans are desperate to whip up fear of something, anything, that seems more dangerous than Covid-19 actually is. They could, instead, embrace the actual disaster, and you know, as the governing party, help save American lives. #
Perhaps it should be illegal for a company to own both a search engine and a web browser, esp if they dominate. They might try to take full possession of something that belongs to the public.#
- In JavaScript, what do promises make possible that callbacks don't?#
- i've been writing large pieces of code in JavaScript for about seven years, all flow is via callbacks because: #
- That's all that existed when I started. #
- I like them, I think in terms of them. #
- My editor is proficient at managing them. #
- All this proficiency didn't come cheaply. A lot of time went into it.#
- I'm a big believer in this: one way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. Why? Because I'm going to end up supporting both.#
- Here's some space, please help me understand why you think promises is a game-changer. The more succinct the better. Thanks.#
Do you want to return to normal? Normal was pretty fucked up. Normal got us here.#
The Lincoln Project does to Trump what Trump did to his 2016 adversaries. Thank heavens someone did this. The Democrats are terrible at being nasty. For that you need a Republican. #
What if after journalism purges all the unacceptable points of view there’s nothing left but baby pandas and such.#
I think the #BLM protests will become more substantial as the hardships of the virus get deeper. In the US, for example, the rent moratoria are expiring. Unemployment subsidies as well. Hunger and homelessness will explode as unemployment did in March and April.#