Poll: If you own a Tesla and you're American, how do you vote?
#
All of Musk's Trumpy bullshit comes at a time when a flood of competition is coming for Tesla and it looks like they're copying the basic design. This is giving them a chance to rip out a lot of old crap, and turn their cars into computers with big batteries and wheels. I think Tesla has a huge problem in front of them, no Carplay or Android Auto support, therefore
no app ecosystem. There are a few apps that I miss not having on my Tesla that I can use on my Subaru (which I never drive because I love the Tesla so much). So Musk is playing Trump. How stupid and dull. I thought he was smart. I thought I was being smart buy buying his product. Ech. What a
stupid waste of energy.
#
I bought a
Tesla and I love the car, but I never thought it would become a
MyPillow type
thing.
#I am a JavaScript programmer. I've learned to stack my code via indentation when it could all be done more simply the way you do it in most other languages. It's provable. I can never understand why developers who have worked on the language itself aren't as bothered by this as I am. I realized there might be one difference, something that's been a foundation for all my programming work -- before I was a programmer, I was a math major. In math, you're always looking for broader and simpler statements that you can derive from more narrower and more complicated truths. In a sense that's what math is. So perhaps the language designers of JavaScript didn't study math? This has been a vexing puzzle for me ever since I moved into JavaScript. Not how to simplify JS, that's clear -- rather why don't other people see it, or if they do why don't they fix it?
#
I'm always telling people who think about products to learn about
positioning. Unless you understand how the human mind works, how can you market something to humans? It's like becoming a driver, you have to learn what all the controls do. And how products fit into people's minds is one of the biggest controls, and you'd be surprised how not-different people's minds are when it comes to positioning. An example. An ad I saw on Facebook recently for
T-shirts of all things. How many brands of T-shirts can you think of? Probably not too many, but you know there are a lot of them. None have any particular meaning. But what about a T-shirt that Looks Good On You? That's a position. A
ladder that no one, so far, is positioned on. Maybe the ladder doesn't exist? Positioning has lots of examples of those. But sometimes it does, and it's huge. Think of all the brands that defined new ladders. Like Starbucks. Tesla. Nike. Coca Cola. There was coffee before Starbucks and cars, shoes and cold drinks before these brands carved out new segments of these markets and because they were first in the prospects' minds, they own them, until they throw away their positioning, which many products do, foolishly, through
line extension. Heinz is a company that does not understand positioning and is as a result destroying their #1 brand. Think about Heinz. What does the name mean to you? Ketchup, right? Then, recently they decided there are lots of
different ketchups,
look at all of them! And they named them all Heinz. Oy. I bet when you add the sales of all the different Heinz ketchups, it's less than standard good old Heinz ketchup. Go to the grocery store, look for ketchup and try to find the Heinz ketchup you grew up with. Good luck! Line extension is a bad idea. If you own the top spot on a ladder, don't do line extension. You'll lose out to someone who specializes in what you used to own.
So much to say about this.
#
Avis is #2 on the ladder. And they owned it, beautifully.
#
One my favorite things to tweet is that
there are No Nets fans, and wait for a Nets fan to show up and flame me. It never happens. I think even the Clippers must have some fans in NYC, or the Expos, but I can honestly say I've never met a Nets fan.
#
It's amazing that senators like Susan Collins expect an extrordinary level of
service when they have given their (necessary!) approval to four SC justices who they had to know were part of the open-but-deniable plot to dismantle the Constitution, starting with voting rights, and foreign money in our elections, and the latest offense the overturn of Roe. Collins plays on our assumption that grandmothers who appear kindly are more likely to be fooled than shifty. She milks that for all it's worth. Obviously if someone rises to her level of the Republican Party, a multi-term senator from a
blue state, her reliable vote for Republican atrocities gets her a lot of deference, and we know it.
#One of the most important principles in programming is that you want to expose problems in code when you're working on it. The more time between when you did the work and when you find the problem, the more impossible it's going to be to implement a good fix. It's analogous to finding a flaw in the design of something buried under the foundation of a skyscraper, long after the whole building has been constructed.
#
An example, after shipping Drummer in October of last year, immediately a
design flaw in
Old School popped up. It was written in 2017. The fix required raising the structure and building in another layer below a previously middle layer of the onion,
without breaking anything. The job got done, but it was incredibly stressful. Required the moral support of a few users spread all over the world (that was the nature of the problem).
#I'm seeing this principle today because I'm adapting an app I wrote in 2020 to a new environment. I'm getting to fix problems in this code that would have been very difficult to fix if I weren't doing a complete from-the-ground-up rebuild. And there are no users of this stuff, so no compatibility to preserve. It's one of the reasons that an app doesn't really get done right until you fully implement it for the third or fourth time.
#
- Why is Musk trying to pull out of the Twitter deal?#
- I don't think it has much to do with how many bots are using Twitter, or whether Democrats are assholes, or even that Musk did or didn't show his dick to a stewardess. I think what really matters is what's happening to Tesla stock, and with it, Musk's wealth.#
- Here are some facts.#
- Musk sent his acquisition offer to Twitter on April 13. #
- On that day Tesla stock was trading at $1022.37 per share.#
- Today Tesla is selling for $645. That's about a 37% drop. #
- I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that Musk and his partners are all borrowing to buy Twitter. They certainly don't want to sell stock to raise the money to buy Twitter because that would be a taxable event. And if you take out a loan with your stock as collateral, you don't have to sell the stock, so -- no taxes. It's how rich people buy things. Even not-so-rich people do it. A moderately wealthy person who could afford to pay cash for a house, probably would just take out a loan, to avoid paying taxes. #
- But the huge drop in Tesla stock, and whatever stocks Larry Ellison is borrowing against to raise the money for his part of the deal, means that the bankers who are lending against that stock as collateral will want more stock. No problem you say, they all have lots of stock. But maybe he's already used that stock as collateral on other loans? Who knows how much of a stretch this is for Musk. He might not have enough stock to do the deal now. But he signed the deal, so.. #
$TSLA before and after April 13.
#- Musk and his partners are squeezed in a hard-to-have-foreseen way. The deal has become more expensive and harder to do. And maybe the market "correction" isn't done yet. Maybe Tesla will be worth half what it was, or less?#
- BTW, if you want to get an idea of what this is like, season one of Succession has the young Kendall Roy in a similar bind. đ#
- Unless the market and $TSLA recover quickly this downturn is hitting Musk a lot harder than it would have if he had not done the Twitter deal. But he did, so he's kind of fucked, or so it seems. #
I find sometimes my mind isn't open to learning, much to my detriment, I've learned. #- Suppose there was a public figure you loathed, say their name was X, and one day you see in a book entitled "X's plan for world domination."#
- I would buy the book right away, without a second thought, and read it cover to cover. I would want to know exactly what's on this person's mind. At least I hope I would!#
- But I find that often I turn away from gifts like this.#
- This is a note to remind myself not to do that. ;-)#
- I'll give you an example. I was telling a friend about a girlfriend who I had just broken up with. They said it sounds like she's playing The Rules. He explained it was a book that was the rage, I had never heard of it. I got the book, it was a quick read, and I think my friend was right. In the future I knew what to watch out for.#
I don't get where people who are selling their stock are putting the proceeds. Anything that's "safe" will be subject to inflation.
#
If no one had ever climbed the tallest mountain in the world, you can be sure there would be people whose life goal is to be the first to climb it.#- No one person has ever dominated the entire world economy. And there have always been people who wanted to be the first. And in no time in human history has it been more possible, and the resulting power been more awesome. And the people who want it, will soon have it. #
- Probably some of them aren't actually trying to dominate the world, some probably just want to kill a lot of people. And that sure is happening. Covid. #
- But here's the really scary part. When Hitler tried to achieve world domination in the 1940s, he controlled a very small country, and even though he managed to grow it significantly through war, he never got close to dominating the world.#
- I think if he had come before FDR, there's a fair chance the US would've sided with Germany, not the allies. Why do I say that? Slavery. It was a very Nazi-like thing we did there. Hitler learned a lot from slavery in the US. America's philosophy with its big ideas was a lie. Our corrections have been big, but short-lived, the post Civil War reconstruction, the New Deal, and the period after WW II when the Repubs foolishly bet too much too early with Goldwater, yielding a huge Democratic majority and a president (Johnson) was knew how to use the power. But it quickly snapped back with Nixon's Silent Majority. And Reagan. And the Bushes. And Trump and who knows what comes next, but it's going in the wrong direction, obviously.#
- World domination is definitely at stake in the fight between the Repubs and everyone else. Remember, this isn't a small country like Germany in the 30s, we're the military behemoth with the reserve currency for the world. The Repubs won't have to fight a world war to get further than any world dominator has ever gotten. They will have that from Day 1. No need to fight anyone. Putin and Xi will be at the inaugural. NATO will not be invited.#
- I've read a lot of American history in the last two years when it dawned on me how big the lie was we were told in school. It seems in the last few years we've been starting to tell more truth to the kids, and the Repubs are putting a stop to that.#
- Anyway, lots of destruction if we don't get in the way of the Republican Party's assumption of power. #
Yesterday I wrote about a
utility that takes an OPML list of RSS feeds and validates them. Only feeds that can be read and are parseable are added to the OPML file it creates. It's what I use to clean up old lists before putting them in a database. I can see from where I'm going next that I won't be swinging back this way for a bit, so I thought it was better to
point to it now, in case people could use it. Important: It's a programmer's utility and meant to be example code. You have to be a JavaScript programmer to use it. If you have questions, post a comment in this
issue thread.
#Thread: There's a new Mac outliner which is designed to interop with Drummer. Gotta love that.
#
I've been buying smart battery-powered Bluetooth speakers almost since they first came out, starting with the Beats Pill, which I had mounted on the handlebars of the bike I rode in Manhattan. Lots of people asked what it was, and where could they get one. Since then I've bought speakers from JBL, Tribit, Ultimate Ears, and others. None of them cost more than $100. My favorite so far is the Tribit, it's tiny, has a huge sound, and it's got a great feel in the hand.#- Then the other day I figured out what I wanted for summer outdoor lounging -- a battery-powered speaker that had Alexa built in. So I did a little shopping, found there aren't many, and they're all really expensive. I asked for advice on Twitter, and decided to blow some money, ordering a $400 Bose speaker. The reviews were stunning. I had a hard time imagining how the sound could be that great, compared to how great the much cheaper models were, but I had to find out. They offered free returns. So all I was risking was a little time. #
- Here's the top line. It was a huge disappointment in every way. #
- I had to download their app just to turn it on, and then I had to create an account on their service. I also had to check off their agreement, which of course I didn't read. So right off the bat, before it even says anything to me, I hate it.#
- Then it takes ten minutes to download the updated system software. #
- To use Alexa, I had to go through another signon process which required me to remember the password I used for their system, which very luckily I did (I didn't try, I never plan on using that service again). #
- Okay now finally, I say "Alexa WNYC," our local NPR station. Nothing happens. Then the speaker upstairs starts playing WNYC. I yell ALEXA STOP upstairs. No good. So I go upstairs and tell it again to stop, and again it doesn't. So I pull the plug. Then I hear the Alexa in the bedroom is doing the same thing. I go in there and pull the plug. Go back downstairs. The Bose speaker is doing nothing. Okay I take a deep breath and try it again. "Alexa WNYC." Exactly the same thing happens. So I go upstairs again, pull the plugs on the speakers, this time, leave them unplugged, go back downstairs and try again. "Alexa WNYC." Nothing. I figure I'll try it again later.#
- I'm not done with the flaws of the product, but I want to pause here for a moment. I'm accustomed to setting up Alexas by plugging them in, waiting a few seconds while it boots up, then it looks around and somehow finds one of the other Alexas and asks if it's okay if it uses the data on it to configure this one. I always smile at this point, man that's good design, and I say YES of course, and in a few seconds I'm listening to NPR. The process involves no work beyond plugging it in and giving my consent. I imagine it needs to download updated system software, but wisely waits until late at night to do it. Why make the human wait while the robot does its housekeeping?#
- Okay the next day I figure enough with Alexa, let's see how this is as a speaker. So I press the Bluetooth button on top of the speaker, and I connect my iPhone in the normal way for Bluetooth. Then I play an old McCartney song. It sounds like any of the other speakers I have. I hit pause and start playing another song, and it never plays. I hit pause and play again, and it plays for a few seconds then freezes. I repeat the pause-play thing again and again, that's it -- it never plays another bit of music. #
- Conclusion: This is a piece of shit product. Maybe the Alexa problems are really Amazon problems, but if so, I can't believe they shipped the thing in this condition. But Bluetooth is mature technology. I've never had a problem with Bluetooth on any of the other speakers. #
- And there's no way this product is worth $400. Even if it worked it wouldn't be worth any more than $100, and probably a lot less because the idea is this is supposed to be a portable product and it's much less portable than the $43 Tribit, and honestly -- if it sounds better, I couldn't tell the difference. #
Today I wrote a Node app that reads an OPML subscription list, loops over all the feeds and only passes on the ones that are reachable and parseable. Yes, I plan to share the code, because it's useful and also good example code for reading and writing lists, and reading feeds.
#I've stopped doing
Wordle. I start, and then I get to the third guess and think of something I'd rather do.
#One of the coolest things about the web is that people do tutorials with videos showing how they do things like install a new antenna on your roof, or put together an Adirondack chair. When people bad mouth the web, they forget about miracles like that.
#
- A thread from Twitter converted to a post. Someday I'm going to have to write a script to do this automatically.#
- If Twitter had a Steve Jobs type leader he'd come up with a brilliant idea, akin to noise-cancelling headphones (and call it that), and explain how satisfying it can be to tell the trolls to shut the fuck up. Ahhhh nice and quiet. #
- I used to live on noisy streets in Palo Alto and Berkeley. I moved to NYC, even worse (I lived in the West Village, then the East Village) until I moved uptown and then ahhh nice and quiet. Moved to the mountains, even better! There's something to be said for a little peace. #
- Here's how I made my twtr quiet. At the first sign of trollish behavior, I mute or block. Works great. #
- The trollish behavior is basically anyone who wants to argue with you. People who say unfair things and you want to point out how unfair they are. If you find yourself protesting, the chances you're communicating with a troll approach 100 percent. #
- To determine if the person conversing with you is a troll, look at your own feelings. If you feel they misunderstand you and want to correct them -- it's a troll. #
- We've learned so much about trolls. Trolls aren't nearly as frustrating as newbies who refuse to turn them off and insist on setting them straight for all to see. Ohhh, that's exactly what they want. It's like having a cat who brings home dead birds. I'm sure the cat meant well, but..#
- And btw, in 2022, the entire Republican Party platform is trolling. #
- Whoever runs Twitter needs the sass of Steve Jobs with his incredible ability to make simple ideas simple. Noise-cancelling headphones for Twitter. Instead of focusing on trying to diminish the brightness of the sun, give everyone sunglasses. #
- A Repub is someone who likes to troll Libs. #
- A Lib is someone who thinks Repubs want to know why they're wrong. #
- One of the coolest things about the web is that people do tutorials with videos showing how they do things like install a new antenna on your roof, or put together an Adirondack chair. When people bad mouth the web, they forget about miracles like that. That said, there must be videos that demo how to shut down the trolls yourself.#
The more you make a certain
upstate NY congressperson famous for pissing off libs, the more popular you make her with her constituents. Sometimes it's better to just stifle.
#Interesting results from
yesterday's poll about when life begins. Clearly the poll got spammed by right-to-lifers, many hours after the poll went up, the proportion who said life begins at conception shot up from 10 percent to over 35. A poll like this of course only means what you personally take from it, it has no mathematical significance. It's as if I asked a group of people in a subway car what they think, but the car was only going to my neighborhood.
#I've been using
Hover.com for years, and have a lot of domains parked there, and I wish I could get the list of domains into my outliner easily. I don't need a full API, just a page that lists all my domains in an OPML file. Access it through the browser and save it locally. Read it into my outliner as a file. And then I can do whatever I want. It seems like an easy thing to implement. Not sure how many other people would use it right away, but I bet a bunch would use it once it was available.
đ#BTW, speaking of Hover, they took out the
killer feature I wrote up in 2019. I read their explanation (sorry can't find it now), it has to do with DNS tech of course, it's why the other guys don't do it either. But it really seemed to work and made my setup a little more flexible, which is something we really look for from DNS. Helps keep our sites working.
#Twitch did an amazing job, turning off the
livestream of the Buffalo shooter in two minutes. The current governor of NY,
Kathy Hochul, says that isn't good enough. As usual, NPR completely mangled the story. They should get reporters who have some idea of what livestreaming is before reporting on it.
#For the Knicks, we set our expectations low, and therefore are not disappointed.
This is the equivalent of winning the championship. It's just as gratifying.
#
Poll: When does life begin?
#
It was always possible to edit subscription lists in
Drummer, its native format is
OPML which is the same format used for subscription lists for
RSS applications, but a feature was added and a
howto written that makes it easier. You can start with a list exported from your feed reader, or write one from scratch to import into your reader.
#I've noticed my Spectrum bill inches up a few dollars every month. Not enough to make a stink about but it adds up. I have
StarLink now, but haven't mounted the antenna well enough to get good connections, so I can't turn off Spectrum, yet. ;-)
#Two Game 7s in the NBA playoffs today. Uncle Davey will be watching TV. The two games mean different things, to me at least. Either way, in the first game, one very deserving team will move forward and another very deserving team will go home. The other game will determine if future
Hall of Famer Chris Paul will get another shot at the championship, or if he's forever banished to being a great player who never got there. You get a sense this, at age 37, is his last shot. There's no shame in that, he has lots of company.
#
If a baker may not be forced to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding on the basis of religious freedom, surely a woman canât be forced to give birth.
#
Taylor Lorenz gets a lot of shit, what else is new, that's what happens when you speak from a terrific pulpit, as she does -- she's a Washington Post columnist, before that was a reporter for the NY Times. If you go back far enough she was a blogger on Tumblr, so we feel pride, a local girl did good. And she adds a bit of open web, user-centric thought to everything. As a software developer, I see things the same way. I don't care how much money Zuck or Bezos or Musk have, like most journalists seem to, I care how empowered the users are, because that's how we will solve the problems of our world, by smart people who see things from important perspectives, who say what they see. Her
recent piece in the WP is about a group of startups who want the big silos to make it easier for their users to migrate to other platforms. This is a hard problem both economically and technically, and I'm not sure the startups are sincere, it could be they only want the publicity. There are no details
on the website, and a project like this is all about the details. Also VC-backed startups are the last devs I expect to go this route and I don't imagine if one of them is successful that they're going to rush to share their user lists with the others. The only way something like this can work is if they share a membership system from the start. And if they do that, and want credibility, there should be some non-VC open source devs in their group. One more thing, why not just use Twitter's identity system. It's got a great API, scales really well, and other devs (such as me) are using it that way. Instead of building my own identity system, I just use theirs. I have no interest in controlling my users, so it's a no-brainer. Sure the day could come when Twitter shuts off the API, but I could also get hit by a car riding my bike on a country road, or any number of other calamities.
#
There was a time back in the early-mid 00s, that I hoped the
World Outline would be the future of the web. Much later, in 2015, I ported the World Outline software from Frontier running as a server, to Node.js, but I left the site private, probably because I wasn't planning to build in this direction, I just wanted to get some sites that were running in Frontier to work in Node. This morning some of my work led me to this software, and I saw that it was private, and
made it public. Basically the
wo is like the
www except with outlines instead of HTML. You can of course render the outlines as HTML, and that's what the WO software does. Given all the interest in outliners these days, it seemed like a good time to open this stuff up. However at this point I don't plan to run the server software here. If you get it running, all I ask is that you continue to support OPML. Interop is everything. Thanks.
#I was out driving the new Model Y with a fresh pizza on the passenger seat, rounded a corner and there was a fat turkey waddling across the road. Slammed the brakes. They work, but turkey keeps waddling as if nothing happened. Pizza mess on the floor of the new car. Where the Model 3 had the new car smell even six months after getting it, this car smells of pizza. Hey at least it was good pizza. Heh.
#
I think a lot of people on Twitter argue for fame. They want to be famous for having an idea first, whether or not they did have it first. I don't think I do that. I like setting precedent in software. But even there, I have a
motto -- "Only steal from the best." My goal is to find ways to work with others so that the sum is greater than the parts. I think that's the challenge of our generation and all subsequent generations. We're not dealing with climate change, for example. We're losing our minds as a country in other ways, for example the decision the Supreme Court is contemplating. You know it's not going to work, it'll be as big a disaster as climate change, but we'll feel it right away. We can't connect enough so that the people who we've supposedly trusted for being wise to avoid jumping unnecessarily, with no possible gain, into an abyss that will certainly lead to war. It's that big a deal. At age 67, I don't have the same goals I had at 22. I'm not trying to set the world on fire, I'm trying nudge people into working with each other, even today's 22 year-olds. We should be giving out Nobel Prizes to people who find ways to work with others. That's the challenge for the human species, from now on, imho of course.
#
Twitter-as-a-service from AWS would kick ass.
#You know that
scene in
Annie Hall where Woody Allen gets into an argument with a Columbia professor about
Marshall McLuhan, who is waiting off-camera to support Allen. McLuhan says to the professor: "You know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach to teach a course in anything is totally amazing." Allen looks at the camera: "Boy if life were only like this." Well anyway, on Twitter, I am regularly pulled out from behind a poster to support someone who thinks
RSS is doing fine. I'm supposed to play the role of McLuhan. I would enjoy that once, but not all the time for decades.
đ„#Poll: Is Twitter too big to fail?
#
Re celebs and Twitter. They certainly are coming back, unless you think Twitter is over. These things go in cycles. Because the celebs are gone, one new name is going to emerge from twitter, because they can stand out by being the one on twitter, and for a while all the new ones will appear on twitter until that phase is over when the story that the celebs are gone will repeat.
#
Poll: What are the odds that Musk actually acquires Twitter? My bet is it's virtually zero. Why? The difficulties of Twitter have become more apparent, and at the same time, the difficulties of the companies he already controls have gotten bigger with the collapse of the tech stock market. Owning Twitter is a hobby he can't afford now.
#
Think of all the places you write and read. Why shouldn't all of them understand RSS, in and out, where ever possible?
#Twitter is like AT&T was in the 70s. Imagine trying to use the telephone in 1978 but you couldn't access AT&T's network. That's the role of Twitter in 2022.
#Twitter Pro, as I've described it
earlier, would have a legitimate claim to the term "Web3." Because this is what the web of 2022 is. It's basically a lot of tweets and blog posts. ;-)
#
Just guessing that the people who will force people to get abortions are the same people who won't wear a mask to protect others.
#
- TL;DR -- there's a new expandIncludes function in the OPML package for JavaScript.#
- As you know I'm working on a refresh of all the stuff I have related to RSS, and part of that is the use of OPML for subscription lists. #
- A subscription list is an outline containing nodes of type rss that have an xmlUrl attribute that points to a feed. Even though the type is rss, it can be used to point to feeds in any format, including Atom and RDF. #
- The lists can contain anything else you like, feeds, docs, and they can include other subscription lists. #
- Example: You could maintain a list of people you follow and plug that into your reader's subscription list, and also offer it to friends, where they could include it in their list. And because you're using pointers, when your list updates, your friends are automatically updated. #
- To include a list in another, just insert a node of type include, with a url attribute that points to another OPML file which should include nodes of type rss and possibly other include nodes. #
- They work like includes in C, which is where the name came from. #
- Anyway, the new thing is that the OPML package now has an expandIncludes function that can be given an outline, in a JavaScript object, and it returns an outline with all the include nodes expanded. #
- I've had code that does this for decades in various environments. It's trivial in a language like C, Python, or Frontier -- any rational language that takes care of I/O under the hood, but it's a difficult problem in a language like JavaScript where you have to manage your own synchronization. This code first appeared in 2014 as part of PagePark, then moved to the daveopml package, and finally, today into the opml package. This is where it belongs, where everyone else can easily get to it. #
- The new version, 0.4.24 is on GitHub and in NPM. There's a release note and example code with an OPML file that illustrates. #
- If you have questions or comments post an issue in the repo.#
- PS: This should also be useful in Tools For Thought projects.#
I saw a note from
Jeff Jarvis to tune into
twit.tv to hear their commentary on
Google I/O, so I went there, and saw a nerd talking about releasing
Asahi Linux, and when the camera stepped back I saw this
old dude (no other way to say it), white hair, classy glasses, and then I realized holy shit that's
Doc Searls. I haven't seen him in a few years, and at this time in our respective lives people's appearances can change dramatically. He looked good but old, like
Colonel Sanders. I think he got a stylist and I'm guessing the Colonel Sanders look is deliberate? I'm sure he'll tell me. Anyway
the nerd is going on and on, and if that really is Doc, I can't imagine he knows what he's talking about, and why the hell should he. The guy was talking very fast about problems that I thought would have been solved long ago. This is 2022 after all. I guess that's just nature of computer stuff, we're always re-inventing things. I do it too.
#I wanted to ask a question on a local Facebook group about a construction project being done in town (the town the FB group covers). The admin rejected the question, suggesting I call the company. I find this sad and humorous at the same time.
#
I would love to have a very simple XML viewer app. I have
one that I don't like very much. The app would run in a web page or on a server (if so, must be a Node app). It takes a
url parameter, displays the contents of the file, parsed and indented consistently, and uses the same display that
GitHub uses to display code, though it doesn't need any of the GH features, just the appearance. Horizontal scrolling, not wrapping text. I would use it in
my existing app, with credit of course. I need this because my work requires me to look at XML files. And as far as I know there isn't a great way to do that, and given all the XML that's out there (web pages are XML, RSS feeds are XML) it would make sense to solve this problem well, as a very useful upgrade to the user experience of the web. Comments/questions
here.
#
It'd be interesting to see the results of a poll: 1. Do you wear a mask to protect against transmission of Covid? 2. Are you in favor of repealing Roe v Wade to force people who are pregnant to go through months of painful, risky and expensive medical procedures?
#
I started reading Heather Cox Richardson's
How the South Won the Civil War and I can tell it's going to be another transformative reading for me. There's a basic bug in the American myth of self-reliance, the bug is this -- it's a lie. Humanity is like an ant colony. Our lives follow a rigid template that's
hard impossible to break out of. Unless you're a hermit, you pay taxes, get the same medicine as everyone else, celebrate the same holidays (even non-Christians in the US observe Christmas in some fashion). You are only unique in your mind, but even there, where you are free to be different, there's a lot of conformity. We rely on each other, there is no such thing as a pioneer on the open range, fending for himself. Richardson doesn't say any of those things, at least not in the beginning of the book, instead she describes the American myth. And as I'm reading it, I recognize it as the argument between the people and the oligarchs that's still raging. We think of it as North vs South but that's all part of the puppetry. We're being manipulated into blaming each other for nothing, distracting us from what we could be if we didn't pander to the oligarchs. Really looking forward to this read.
#
- Journalists and pundits have been doubting that Twitter/Musk can double their revenue with subscriptions. I don't doubt they can because Twitter in all the years they've been around has never even tried to make products that run on their platorm for money. #
- So here's a Twitter package I'd pay for and so would a lot of other people.#
- Call it Twitter Pro:#
- Posts can have titles.#
- Simple styling.#
- Links.#
- Podcasts. #
- Unlimited length.#
- $10 per month.#
- I'd pay. Without a moment's hesitation. #
Tesla news. I'm trading my Model 3 for a
Model Y this week. The Y's were hard to get when I decided it was time to get a Tesla. The way values have been going, I'm paying very little to make this switch for cars of comparable value. The mileage on the 3 is low. And the cars are still very much in demand, it's a seller's market. I want the Y because I am tall, and getting in and out of the 3 is a pain. The Y, which has a different seating arrangement, is easier.
#
- Our politicians are such artificial people the president canât express legit rage at what the Repubs are doing to our country. #
- Heâs reminiscing about bipartisanship, when he should be putting them down, destroying them, no compromise.#
- Biden dreams of the Old South, the plantation and Mammy and her long underwear. He imagines himself as Rhett Butler, and Moscow Mitch as Miss Scarlet.#
- He finally is fed up when the Trump Court nixes Roe and says in resignation to Mitch...#
- Frankly my dear I don't give a damn!#
- I fear for Ukraine. What happens when we decide it's over even when the war is still raging, as we have done with Covid, not caring how many people's lives will be ruined, or ended.#
- I expect it'll be the same with Roe v Wade, until we really get woke and see the big picture. We need societal mechanisms to stay focused on what matters, and not lose focus in meaningful ways, until the problem is solved or the threat is over. #
- Lots of other things fall into that bucket btw: climate change, regulating guns in the US, black lives matter, LGBTQ rights. We only focus briefly, leaving us vulnerable to dishonest power-hungry people who are more patient.#
- Social networks can help, but only ones that are carefully crafted to stay focused on the goal they are assigned to. Twitter and Facebook et al were invented and bootstrapped in chaos. I understand this process as well as anyone. There are other ways to do it. #
- PS: I posted this as a thread on Twitter. I know no one there will latch onto it, because it's not the kind of thing Twitter-the-network pays any attention to. Which is the point. The only way to get something like that going is to go first, the same way podcasting and RSS and blogging before it got started. Do it until it seems obvious, and then there's a FOMO, and let the people with the loudest voices pretend they were there at the beginning. All those things have to happen. So we're a long way from being able to work together, but until we start, we'll still be mired, and the people who think and act long-term will keep running everything. #
- Richard Nixon used to say his mother was a saint.#
- I always thought that was weird, because I could tell she was not a saint, because you have to be pretty fucked up to raise a Nixon.#
- Nixon hated himself, you could tell. #
- Where do you think he learned that?#
- PS: Watching the video I'm reminded he was also a human being. #
- My mother was born in 1932 and died in 2018. #
- She did a lot of good in her life. #
- She got a PhD at age 50 after raising two kids. #
- She was active in political causes, from school integration, to getting buses to stop running their engines while parked at the Main Street bus depot, to planting trees in the neighborhood we grew up in. #
- She spoke English like a native even though she was born in Prague.#
- She was my mother and I loved her and I still to this day want her love. #
- She did the best she could. #
Mom with cat, knitting
#
Our rulers, the
royalty of the US, is so inbred and out of touch, they think
we're bullying them because we don't want them running our lives.
#Next time you're going to tell someone they're tone deaf or something like that pause for a moment and ask yourself how you know. Sometimes speaking truth to power means asking yourself questions you don't want to answer.
#Abortion gives men freedom too. A lot of people used to have kids before they wanted them and before they were ready to be parents. It's true of women and also men.
#Abortion made better families. People have the choice to grow up before becoming parents. They can have some life on their own, to find out who they are before they have to live with another crazy person with no experience as a standing on their own. Trying to form a family with no experience in lie is a weak structure.
#
This is what the tech columnist at the WSJ says is the difference between Twitter and Facebook. "Twitter has always been toxic, having a series of 'cool' CEOs tricked journalists and wonks into using it vs the uncool Facebook, new ownership will highlight that all (currently) social mediums are fundamentally toxic."#- Okay that's what a columnist at the WSJ sees. He's pretty clear it's from the point of view of a journalist. #
- My observations follow. #
- Twitter grew out of the blogging world and the people of blogs and the norms of blogging moved here. That's why Twitter is what it is. #
- Facebook started with students, then moved to families. That's why it is what it is.#
- Trolls follow crowds online. To say a place has trolls (Mims uses the word toxic) simply means enough people congregate there to attract trolls. Journalists btw were the ones who decided FB was evil and Twitter was fun. Some of us were shaking our heads and protesting loudly that they're missing the big picture. Journalism was wrong about Facebook, in a lot of ways that they still don't understand. #
- For non-journos, both Twitter and Facebook are useful, and if I had to choose I'd say FB is a little more useful. Twitter these days is choked with grievance, from people who aren't very toxic in real life, but choose Twitter as the place to purge their bile. But inbetween ventings, it's a place to be heard, maybe just a little. And if you listen carefully you might find out about something new. I first heard of the leaked Supreme Court opinion on Monday on Twitter, a few minutes before I heard about it on MSNBC (I was watching Chris Hayes at the time). By the time Maddow was on I had fully read the Politico article. So it has that value too, currency. It's the collective newsroom. #
- On Facebook we share pictures of our friends and talk about places you can ski even in May, in North America. And stay in touch with friends we otherwise would not be able to stay connected to. #
- That's what this blind man sees. #
Popping up every time there's a crisis, emitting rage on social media, is no answer. We got into this hole by not understanding the implications of our actions while the other side was working slowly and surely for 30+ years to get to this place.
#How many people who will be enraged over the abortion decision, didn't vote for HRC in 2017 because they didn't trust her. This would not be happening if a few more people came out to vote on election day in 2016.
#To Democratic marketers (I hope there are some) -- it's time to introduce a new actor to American politics -- The Federalist Society. Treat it like the right treats Sharia Law or Critical Race Theory, only of course the FS is real. And the conspiracy is real. It's how we got here. I heard Biden on the radio this morning talking about MAGA being behind this. That's not useful and it's not true. The MAGA people will really be hurt by this. Now is a good time Mr President, to try to unite us. This is the real anti-people Republican Party. The 1%. The Federalist Society. It's a plot to rob us of our rights. To turn America into a religious dictatorship. Mr President here's your chance to be transformative. But first you need to learn how to talk about it.
#Is abortion âdeeply rooted in this Nationâs history and tradition?â Among people alive today, most of whom have lived their whole adult lives in a country where abortion was always constitutionally protected, yes it is very much deeply rooted.
#Popping up every time there's a crisis, emitting rage on social media, is no answer. We got into this hole by not understanding the implications of our actions while the other side was working slowly and surely for 30+ years to get to this place.
#How many people who will be enraged over the abortion decision, didn't vote for HRC in 2017 because they didn't trust her. This would not be happening if a few more people came out to vote on election day in 2016.
#The events of the last few days are proof that reporters should never guess the outcome of an election months before it happens. Even today, after the news of the Roe v Wade decision leaked, they're saying that Repubs are expected to take control of Congress in the November election. Let's dive into that supposed fact. Who is doing this expectation? Shouldn't they say? Isn't it just reporters who expect that? Like so much news this is like barbers cutting each others' hair. They isn't any actual news. They should always be aware that anything could happen and almost always does that could change the expectation, so stop advertising your expectations, they have no value as news.
#
Consider the possibility that the leak of the Alito decision might not have anything to do with Roe v Wade. It might be the work of a Putinite wanting to distract attention from the atrocities they're committing in Ukraine.
#The Supreme Court protects the rights of Americans. Theyâre not a religious body, they are not chartered to adjudicate religious questions, because there is no religion attached to our government. That part is in
the text of the Constitution, for our textualist friends.
#
- I wrote: "I donât envy the Bluesky people. Everyone is watching with great expectation and theyâve bit off the problem of federating a closed system that has been built over sixteen years."#
- My friend Jeff Jarvis wrote: "I will admit that I am pinning hopes on bluesky." I know. #
- I responded: "Software takes time. Replicating the functionality of a system thatâs huge in complexity and scale while changing its underlying design, think about any other field, imagine rebuilding the NYC subway in a year or two with one of the basic constraints changed. People expect miracles of software mostly because they donât understand how itâs made but itâs pretty much like everything else, if it took a long time to make it the first time itâs going to take almost as much time the second and thatâs assuming youâre cloning it."#
- Scott Hanselman laments: "No one writes code comments today like we wrote code comments in the 90s," citing a tweet with a big example.#
- My response -- I do leave big code comments, and it's not painful because I use an outliner, and do it carefully and consistently. There's a big comment the top of each major routine, itâs like a blog, with reverse chronologic notes about each major change. At the end of the list in the first comment is an explanation of what it does, params, etc. And since itâs in an outliner, itâs all collapsed until you need to read it.#
- Here's a read-only outline listing of oldschool.js, the CMS that renders this blog. If you scroll down to publishBlog and expand it, you'll see a Changes sub-outline. Expand it to see the changes, and under each change are notes.#
- This format goes all the way back to the 90s believe it or not when we started coding in an outliner in Frontier. It's the way to organize internal docs. And yes they are absolutely necessary if you plan to maintain and build on the code. #
Roberts should resign to let Biden nominate and approve the next chief. Admit failure to maintain integrity of the court and let its reformation begin now. Gorsuch and Barrett should be removed and a conservative and liberal should replace them. McConnell should be strongly advised to retire now.
#We have to FILL the Senate with Democrats. And we need to have a lot more Dems in the House and we need to add a dozen Supreme Court justices who aren't Federalist Society nuts and get Roe in there as a law and whatever else we need to turn this corner. We are really WOKE now.
#My mother had an abortion in the 60s, in Puerto Rico. We lived in NYC at the time, but it was illegal.
#Update. The
person who said it was Ted Cruz who was getting involved in her body was the great
Amy Klobuchar. What an image. I can see so many ads, of women in the bathroom with Ted Cruz in the next stall peeking over the top.
#
I watched a lot of news this evening. I forget who said this -- women do not want Ted Cruz controlling their bodies. I think that's compelling. I, too, would not want
Ted Cruz anywhere near my body.
#An idea for a movie. Get a writer to transcribe the latest
QAnon fiction, turn it into a screenplay. That's the story. I bet it would be a box office smash. I'm surprised Hollyood hasn't done this yet.
#People used to assume you have to make money from a blog, which is ridiculous. My blog did make me money but only incidentally, by making products of mine more famous, or helping establish standards that allowed me to build other products. But I never did this for the money, I pay money to do the blog. I do it because I have ideas that I want to get out there. It's worth it.
#I
could save $0.24 a year if I switch to Spectrum. Hmm.
#Ukraine had to deal with what we're
going through now. Their political system was undermined by Putinites, proclaiming their right to speak, but they were undermining their democracy like the Putinites here are today. They solved the problem by being hardcore about it. Free speech is not more important than survival of democracy. We will have to make that choice too, until we do, we'll be stuck where we are.
#I don't know how McCartney came up with the idea for
this song, but I imagine he goes into a junk store and takes a look around. Then he goes home and
writes a song about what he saw. "Candlesticks, building bricks, something old and new. Memories for you and me."
#
It's time to do whatever you were sent here to do.
#
I'm
trying to figure out why Wordle's reports get mangled when they come through the Twitter API. I find when I paste them into a local text file they
look pretty bad too. Update: It appears it has nothing to do with the Twitter API, rather
the fonts that are used to render the page.
#The monthly ritual is complete. Here's the
archive for April.
#My tweets for April are automatically archived
in JSON. I can leave notes to my future self in this manner.
#
- The problem on Twitter is that no one will hear this tweet. Because trying to stay in touch with 1000 people is utterly impossible. Some people follow many more. And then there are the people you don't follow who have a good idea. How do you keep that channel open without also leaving it open for scammers. We haven't figured that out yet. As far as I know, no one is trying. #
- What we are left with -- everyone's attention even for the things you follow relatively closely is infinitesimal, and it's constantly diminishing. So it gets even harder for ideas to circulate because nothing penetrates. How can I forward you something you need to know if I never see it?#
- What I yearn for is a "karass" system, for the 12 people who I want to communicate with who I know will pay attention, and will let me build up ideas over a period of weeks or months. And I do the same for them. Their projects connect with mine, we're constanty improving the system, creating new gateways, modifying others. #
- I've had that work once in 2001, when I was working on Radio UserLand with a small team of people spread out over the world. Ever since I have been trying to recreate the experience. #
- PS: According to the Wikipedia page on Cat's Cradle, a karass is "a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident."#
Thank god we have prickish billionaires to protect our freedoms.
#
Four months ago I shipped a package called
myLogseqBlog that made it possible to publish from LogSeq outlines to Old School, following the same path as blogs written using Drummer, like
Scripting News. My hope was this would serve as a seed that would help someone who was skilled at doing LogSeq add-ons to take my code and convert it to something that ran inside LogSeq, so blog publishing from an outline would be just as easy there as it is in Drummer. Well it took a while, but
Scott Block, a brilliant and persistent programmer, made it work. Here's the
project and his
announcement on Twitter. Please if you can, and you are a LogSeq user,
help him out. I want to build
interop between outliners based on
OPML. I don't want to see silos rule something as wonderful as outlining, the way they do in so many other areas of tech.
#
People often ask if when I talk about having our own TWTRs that means Mastodon. It could, if that's your thing. But the center of this space will host all kinds of apps. Just like vehicles with wheels aren't all Chevies and Hondas. Some are buses, trucks, Teslas or eBikes. There will be a lot of variety in the middle. #- There was a time when all computers were basically the same. Big honkers in air conditioned rooms with raised floors. You had to have a degree to run one.#
- Then we got personal computers. Steve Jobs had a term for this. He called them "fractional horsepower" computers, to compare it to large mainframes.#
- I loved the idea of the Mac because it made the power of the mainframe usable by independent and free individuals. People who had ideas, and wanted to organize and share them. In the old centralized way of doing things it wasn't so easy to get a computer to do the kinds of things Macs did, because there was such a variety of software, and anyone could make software, ordinary people who were motivated. That's how the great stuff was made, by people. This was a form of freedom we don't enjoy so much these days because we all use big corporate mainframe-style software, like Twitter, Facebook etc. (I'm different, I've kept making software in a personal way, now for almost 50 years believe it or not.)#
- Back then freedom was a big part of what tech offered. And it worked. We wouldn't have Twitter today if it couldn't build on PCs. Twitter is made out of our freedom, captured and condensed into billions of dollars to make a few very rich people even richer. You and I how much do we get for our risk and creativity? Nothing. They've been really cheap in sharing the profits, and the credit, btw. #
- Tech goes in cycles, like everything else. Now that an oligarch owns Twitter, even though he knows how to tweet, and feels like a man of the people, he lives in a different world from you and I. He's cute but he owns us. He has freedom, don't believe for a minute that you do. Key point. This is how rich people trick us all the time. They get us to identify with them. That's why so many poor people vote Republican. This idea goes all the way back to slavery.#
- We have to think about what we really want to use -- we won't be able to use this TWTR forever. This was always true, but now a lot more people can see it.#
- The old owners of Twitter used their power to make Twitter be like they wanted it to be. If you were their friend you did better than if you weren't. This is a fact. That kept people from criticizing them. The same way the owners of the big media companies are immune from criticism, or even exposure. Who owns MSNBC. Think about it. I bet you don't know. (This dude.)#
- But the web doesn't work like that. So far no one owns the web, but Google is trying to. That's where we need to escape to. And while Mastodon is, I'm sure, a fine product, it will not be the only kind of fractional horsepower TWTR.#
- PS: My handle on CompuServe in the early 1980s was Mastodon. I've often wondered if this is a random coincidence or what?#
- PPS: My TWTR will of course be two-way RSS top-to-bottom.#
I got my
Nintendo Sports and was pretty excited till I found out there's
no golf. Oy. That was my favorite. But bowling and tennis are pretty good. They say golf is coming.
#
Think about it. Journalism controls what we think about everything. The online world has become an echo chamber for what's talked about on cable news and podcasts. The journalists who control so much of what we all think aren't required to be transparent, there aren't any rules governing how they get paid, and worst of all, we didn't elect them and we can't vote them out.#- They tell us how bad it is that Elon Musk owns Twitter (and I'm starting to see it that way too), but what do they have to say about the people who employ them? I guess we depend on their integrity, their good intentions. But what evidence is there of the goodness of their intentions. I turn off the "news" the first time i hear them overstating a case, leaving out important facts that would contradict the conclusions they reach. #
- And then there are gems like this.#
- I couldn't believe my ears when I heard Maddow say the other night, in passing: "...assuming the Dems lose congress, as expected." That's like your doctor saying: "Assuming you die of cancer in November, as expected," when you don't have cancer as far as the doctor knows. #
- We let these things go by without challenging them, and we start stating them as facts ourselves, and then no one bothers to vote because we already knew what was going to happen because according to people who know better, that's what always happens. #
- My friend Monica Loredan, an Italian who is vacationing in Venice, stopped to enjoy a nice ice cream with her husband Paolo, and posted this picture to her account on Facebook. I asked if I could publish it on my blog, because it reminded me of the fantastic sushi I had in Sausalito many years ago, that helped me understand what real wealth is. You can't be richer than Monica is, in the moment, with this fantastic creation sitting before her, ready to bring her soul the pleasure of eating it. I felt wealthy myself because I had the experience too, as a memory of past pleasure. Now I am sharing the experience with you. Enjoy!#
If you're working on an
RSS reader, you should allow users to subscribe to OPML files. It should be a standard feature in RSS reader apps. If you have questions or comments,
this is the place.
#Does anyone believe that with journalism as it is, we will be able to manage the climate crisis without huge lost of human life.
#I wanted to read the docs for the
MetaWeblog API, but found that the link was broken. I was able to
find the page in the new XML-RPC website, but I'm going to find some time to patch the original URL and the other docs that are locked up in the same folder.
#I figure if my Tesla can sense a human standing on the curb and slow down as my car goes by, Twitter can detect a troll's tweet, and warn you about it or even not show it to you at all (subject to a preference of course).
#
I'm
addicted to Twitter, but I could live without it, if I had something better. What I want is to be connected to smart people who want to work together to make cool things and solve important problems. That, emphatically, is
not what Twitter is.
#I love the
McCartney album even though at the time the
critics panned it. It's a really interesting album because they're all Beatles songs. He wrote them to do with the Beatles. But they had already broken up. At the time no one knew. So he bought a tape deck and recorded them all on his own. He has a beautiful voice. And they're not big productions, though they would've been if they had been done by the Beatles. This is like blogging or punk rock, but it's McC. What's not to like? It's Paul McCartney man. Get over yourself.
#Another band I've been appreciating more than ever is
R.E.M. The songs are so beautiful. I'm sure there will be more to say about this.
#There's so much power to be taken all around you. But if you're waiting for someone to give it to you, packaged up a gift box with a ribbon, that's never going to happen.
#
- Elon Musk took over for Steve Jobs as the audacious tech lover who did wtf he wanted and told people he didn't like to fuck off.#
- Jobs actually said the words, not if sure Musk does.#
- Both made audacious products that capture the imagination. Very few people do that. And their products were also outrageously successful.#
- And even with all that success, they both were willing to put it all on the line, over and over, because they had an idea they wanted to see through. #
- Making software for Jobs is another matter. He tended to blow up his developers' products, something that platform vendors get to do. #
- When I realized I couldn't be part of his platform, I bought some $AAPL stock to wipe away the tears, and as a result I can buy nice toys like my new Tesla. đ„#
- As Tesla stock goes down after the Twitter deal was announced, I realize I should probably be buying some. #
- If the NBA playoffs were Christmas, I already got the two presents I wanted, as a diehard Knicks fan.#
- The Nets were swept and eliminated.#
- Trae Young was ineffective against Miami and the Hawks were eliminated too. #
- I want to add, I don't have anything against the Nets, I would probably be interested in them if they stopped trying to form superteams and win at all costs "this year." And if they advised Nets players not to openly dis the Knicks because if they're ever going to get fans for the Nets they're all also going to be Knicks fans. #
- I feel about the Nets the way Lakers fans probably feel about the Clippers. Sort of meh. Why do they even bother, for example. But for years when the Knicks aren't in the postseason (which is most of them) why not root for the home team that's in contention? #
- I say this as a lifelong Mets fan. Proving I'm not all that simple.#
- Anyway I now get to relax and enjoy the rest of the playoffs, without any goals, just hoping for some good basketball. #
- PS: Why Trae Young? He wasn't nice to the Knicks last year. #
