It's even worse than it appears.
President Shithole
goes for his physical.
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XML-RPC started in 1998, which means it's about to be 20 years old. I think this is the first
post about it. Not very specific. We were already working on it, but we hadn't yet hooked up with the people at Microsoft. From a quick scan it looks like the actual protocol we standardized on didn't come out publicly until June. Pretty sure we had something working internally at UserLand in March or April.
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Ooops. We missed the 20th anniversary of
RSS. The format that became RSS was rolled out in December 1997. Here's the
piece where that was announced. I guess we missed the party. Open formats don't have PR firms.
💥#
It's really weird, the date on the
piece is wrong. It was December 27, not December 15. You can see that in the copy, it talks about being between Christmas and New Years. And mentions a
piece that wasn't written until December 23. And I actually remember that this was on the 27th. Somehow, at some point, my CMS screwed this up. Which is weird because this is a static file. Looks like it was rebuilt some time in 2004. In any case if anyone wonders, the date is incorrect.
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An unusually long
podcast about Occam, Wolff, war, medicine, programming, debugging, hacking, Russia, war again, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Watergate, Buzzfeed News, Ben Smith, the dossier, ladders, the elite, working together, and the day it hits us that this is not Watergate, will be another day like
November 8, 2016. The gatekeepers, the elite, don't want to give up their positions on the ladder, so ideas that threaten that can't get through. Instead we have to be
systematic about letting ideas in. There's a lot of tough love in here, but it's important.
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I was out walking in the morning rush hour in Manhattan, everyone looks so nice. I
wondered, since #metoo has the world been treating attractive women better? Has cat-calling diminished? Leery looks? Inappropriate comments?
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- I've been pushing the idea of Occam's News, where we talk about what's obvious not what we can prove. Michael Wolff's approach is exactly that. It's not what you can prove, but it's what we know anyway. Both this and proof-based news are valid and needed.#
- Wars are fought with Occam's spy info, and guesswork about what the enemy is doing, and trying to figure out what's a decoy and what's real.#
- Also medicine. Sometimes they don't know what disease you have and they just start treating the one they think you might have and see if it works.#
- Programming, what I do, is most definitely not Occam-like, it's proof-based. But debugging is very much an Occam art.#
- I watched MTP Daily yesterday. For a few minutes, and then went back to work. It's an awful awful show. The worst of the worst. #
- I hate the show because Chuck Todd only talks about the horse race. I swear, the day after the 2016 election he was already talking about how people were "positioned" for 2020. This kind of analysis never means anything. Go back and listen to the talk about the 2016 election in 2015 for a clue.#
- And they don't even think about elections in a realistic way. Yesterday they were talking about how the Dems failed to sell competence last time (Hillary), so they probably shouldn't try that again. I wonder if they listen to themselves. There was a time, believe it or not, when both parties nominated people who were fairly competent. Even Ronald Reagan, who people thought was a joke, had served as governor of California before becoming president. #
- Anyway, assuming competence is an attribute like hair color or gender, height or whatever, the next election is exactly the time to be selling competence. Why? Because the electorate flip flops. We always elect the opposite of what we elected last time.#
- For example, we elected Trump to follow Obama. #
- Obama is black and Trump is a racist.#
- Trump throws tantrums and Obama's nickname is "No Drama."#
- Trump is a complete idiot, drooling at the mouth, and Obama has a law degree, is a professor, a total technocrat who probably aced every test he took. Trump probably bought his grades with money or blackmail (probably blackmail).#
- Extrapolating, the next president will probably be a woman, obviously -- but bland and reliable, not too old, known for listening and studious, even pious, and not rich. And not a celebrity. #
- Although I don't know much about her, I would take a good look at Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota. She's intelligent, passionate, confident, speaks well, has a sense of humor, is well-educated, young but not too young, thoughtful, and has the right values to start to undo the damage done by Repubs during the reign of Trump.#
- Why not Kirsten Gillibrand? She has many of the same qualities as Klobuchar, but she's from New York. I come from NY too, but I don't think our president should. NY is our largest city, but it's actually a pretty small place. Trump stood out in NY, but we're seeing how that doesn't work globally. But even if it's great to have a president from NY, remember we flip-flop, and I'd say the odds of two consecutive presidents from NY is pretty slim. #
- Anyway, as you can see, there are some interesting things to think about for 2020, even though it's so far away. Of course they discussed none of this on MTP Daily yesterday.#
- PS: You want a courageous Democratic ticket? Klobuchar for president with Keith Ellison as VP. Unlike most Democrats these two can complete a sentence without sounding like an idiot. Both from Minnesota, btw, but look at how different they are. They say to white men who vote Trump, fuck you -- you had your chance, this is the way things look now. Get a pair, growth the fuck up and let's really start winning. #
- They announced something. #
- What this all means, I have no freaking clue.#
- Since the Algorithm is proprietary, I don't know what it did before that was so different. I gather they're reneging on their deal with professional journalism? #
- I always thought friends had huge influence over what I see in the timeline.#
- And won't Putin still be able to buy ads to fuel the virality of his mischief?#