Scripting News

May 2018
  May 15
    One could argue reasonably that the Citizens United decision made an American monarchy inevitable.
    I've been thinking about how we were told not to accept this stuff as normal, but people are misinterpreting that as "do not accept it." That's a bug. Because until we accept that we have a royal family, we won't be able to mobilize to oust it. We're lucky because we still have a legal system that's designed to overthrow monarchs.
    Signal which I started using a few weeks ago and am encouraging others to use is open source. The desktop version is an Electron app.
    Collapsible post text
      Back in the old days of "Scripting News" I had a feature that let me collapse the text under a given headline. An in-place footnote. Parenthetical text that doesn't disrupt the flow of a story.
        This is an example of such text.
        Think of it as another form of linking.
        Not off-site and not as far away as a standard link.
      The way the feature works is you put an attribute on the headline named collapse and set its value to true. When the page is displayed the subordinate text is hidden (display: none in CSS) with a gray wedge to its left. If you click the wedge it expands, as you would expect.
      I have the feature in Old School for videos and tweets. For example, this line references a tweet. It has an attribute named urltweet whose value is (doh) the url of the tweet. :boom:
      And as of this morning, it's in the current version of Old School, so you will be seeing me use this feature on Scripting News.
    More rigorous test of collapsible text
      This is a collapsible headline
        sub 1
        sub 2 -- also collapsible
          Orange
          Blue
          Silver
        sub 3
  May 14
    It seems fair if a news org can keep us from reading their articles that we should be able to tell Twitter or Facebook not to show us their links.
    Medium, the blogging site, is gradually closing itself off to the world. People used it for years as the place-of-record.
    In Facebook, AirBnB shows me a place they think I might like. I click on it. I get the generic home page for AirBnB. I think they're wasting their ad money.
    Last night's Westworld was the best. I was thinking the show was turning into Lost when all of a sudden there was a huge plot reveal, and I saw oh shit it makes sense now.
  May 12
    Universities can help preserve the web
      I've asked this question for years. It's a question that should be on the mind of everyone who has personally created a website with its own domain name. The question: What happens when I die?
      It's not hypothetical. I am holding on to sites for two relatives who have passed on. My mother's blog was (and is) hosted on wordpress.com, so that's pretty well taken-care-of, I hope. But my father and uncle had their own domains.
      Then there's a matter of scripting.com and all the other domains I've started over the years. In those sites are notes about early web technologies, and how they came to be. These will be interesting to future scholars. I know because I'm interested in how, for example, the subways were started in the United States (Boston was first, not New York, and a key invention made it possible). I'm glad historians have the records to refer to. I want to be sure that future historians have access to what I've written about the early development of the web, and the links I've kept in my blog. (In general, I am interested in how all technologies boot up, the older the better.)
      Yes, I know about archive.org, but that's a backup. A very important piece! I'd like to keep the actual sites around. I'd like to put down some money now to reserve the name and protect the contents of the site, for perpetuity, or as long as possible. :rocket:
      It struck me that this is a service that the alumni associations of the two universities I attended could provide, for a fee of course. Universities tend to be long-lived, and they are places where historians work, so they can hopefully be trusted not to modify the contents of the sites.
      As far as I know, no university does this.
      And it need not be limited to the schools you have attended. If another university offered the service, I'd give them the money.
      The service, to be clear has two parts:
        Keep the name scripting.com registered for perpetuity. In other words, pay the $10 registration fee every year.
        Keep the static content accessible over HTTP.
      For that, you'd be entitled to $1000, say. Or even more, possibly. It should be hugely profitable. And why wait until I die. Let's start hosting the static sites there asap. :boom:
      PS: This is a service they'd provide for free to faculty. Many universities probably already do, but not the domain name part.
  May 11
    20-minute podcast. Some things are true even if you can't prove them. This is the bug in news that, if you account for it, news becomes a lot more useful to us. Utility in news is a foreign idea to journalism, but it should not be. I talk about the four-color theorem in the podcast. Also Michael Avenatti. Here's the picture of Lavrov, Trump and Kislyak, with the poll about who is the alpha. And oil prices have risen substantially since Trump withdrew from Iran deal. A lapdog is "a dog that lies comfortably on a person's lap."
    Nixon was never proven guilty of anything, but we still know he did some terrible criminal things. That's Occam's News in action.
    "You can't be forever blessed."
    One thing I am doing over time, is mapping sites to sub-domains of scripting.com. For example, the XML-RPC and BloggerCon sites both do this. I'm concentrating my meager efforts to preserve my work, and they really are inadequate, on scripting.com. I should probably use a permanent redirect, but I am chicken, permanent redirects really are permanent these days. :boom:
    Lesson learned on radio.weblogs.com. We should have mapped to one of my servers, where I did a permanent redirect to radio-weblogs.com, which points to the archive on Automattic. If you are left with the task of preserving a community of static sites, as I was, don't just point a CNAME at the site, have it pass through a redirect. That gives you the flexibility to, after a certain amount of time, make the mapping permanent. I didn't understand this when we originally did the mapping when I sold weblogs.com.
    Yesterday's piece about how the Internet is going in the wrong direction started as a set of notes for an interview I was doing with German public radio about the Angry Founders of the Internet post. They got a kick out of it. It was meant to be funny, like Angry Birds. But what came out was one of the best summaries of what the Internet is, what makes it important, and what needs to be preserved. In a way, a 2018 followup to JPB's declaration. Main point: companies must not take on the role of governments. When they do, disaster results. A thoughtful company would realize this. All the companies say they are thoughtful. Perhaps they should think a bit more and take a step back. Apple must stop trying to hijack web links. Google must live with the flaws in HTTP. Facebook must care about preserving what's good about the web (links, styles, titles, podcasts). And Medium must take steps to preserve their user's writing outside a paywall. All of them would do better, long-term, if they didn't consume what's great about the web, rather invested in making it even better at doing what it does so miraculously well.
  May 10
    I don't know why I waited so long to find the day that I first used the term podcast to describe what we were doing with audio and RSS. That was one of the reasons I kept a blog (still is) -- to have a chronological record of how ideas develop.
    Doc Searls an old radio guy wrote about podcasting in the same month of September 2004. He followed this with another piece in October, explaining that podcasting is not radio. October was an incredible month, lots of adoption, new aggregators, tools, an audio version of weblogs.com, and signs of the grief that was about to happen, starting to happen.
    Bad news re radio.weblogs.com, etc
      I got the response from Lexis/Nexis re the mapping of radio.weblogs.com, doc.weblogs.com and scoble.weblogs.com. Here's what they said.
        "During a recent security audit related to the GDPR, we removed the DNS entries for doc.weblogs.com, radio.weblogs.com , and scoble.weblogs.com . We had concerns about cross-domain issues such as cookie sharing, along with general concerns about having subdomains that were not under our control. At this point, the only suggestion we can make is for you to update the links on scripting.com to point to the newer domain names that are under your control."
      Of course it's not just links from scripting.com that are broken. Radio UserLand was a large early blogging community. Links into the archive of these weblogs are also broken.
      The sites are still on the web, but at this address:
        http://radio-weblogs.com/
      That isn't going to change in the immediate future.
      Also thanks to Automattic for hosting the archive of the Radio UserLand sites.
      We will have to do something special for doc.weblogs.com.
      And you can access Scoble's Radio blog at scoble.scripting.com. That's a completely new name, there are no links to it anywhere on the net (except here of course).
      Earlier today I wrote about making the web more long-lived. This is how the web's history disappears. A cut here another one there, sooner or later, it'll all be gone.
    The Internet is going the wrong way
      Evidence
        Click a link in a web browser, it should open a web page, not try to open an app which you may not have installed. This is what Apple does with podcasts and now news.
        Facebook is taking the place of blogs, but doesn't permit linking, styles. Posts can't have titles or include podcasts. As a result these essential features are falling into disuse. We're returning to AOL. Linking, especially is essential.
        Google is forcing websites to change to support HTTPS. Sounds innocuous until you realize how many millions of historic domains won't make the switch. It's as if a library decided to burn all books written before 2000, say. The web has been used as an archival medium, it isn't up to a company to decide to change that, after the fact.
        Medium, a blogging site, is gradually closing itself off to the world. People used it for years as the place-of-record. I objected when I saw them do this, because it was easy to foresee Medium pivoting, and they will pivot again. The final pivot will be when they go off the air entirely, as commercial blogging systems often do.
      Instead
        We should preserve the past on the web, and learn to make sites even more future-safe. The web is where human knowlege accumulates.
        It's time for tech people to have values, as journalism, medicine and law do. Deliberately taking features out of the web, claiming pieces of the web as corporate property, forcing the history offline, all are terrible abuses of what make the Internet great. An ethical technologist would refuse to do this work.
        When we teach people to create technology, they should learn to respect and enhance the things that make the Internet great, not help modern day robber barons appropriate them.
        The Internet is a place for the people, like parks, libraries, museums, historic places. It's okay if corporations want to exploit the net, like DisneyLand or cruise lines, but not at the expense of the natural features of the net.
  May 9
    Journalism has to consider, at some point soon, the possibility that assuming Trump is not compromised is making their reporting wildly inaccurate.
    I listened to today's Daily podcast on Trump pulling out of the Iran deal. I guess because they can't prove that Trump is owned by Russia they can't consider that his actions have to be viewed in those terms. If they could, then the explanation is clear. Trump is trying to dismantle American influence in the Middle East and create a vacuum for Russia to move into. This is the Occam's Razor answer.
    If you were going to make a product that helped people write Twitter threads, how would you like it to work? I'm thinking of taking a stab at this.
    Elsewhere the NYT says Evan Williams plans to save the Internet.
    With tech billionaires so visible in the news these days we can all see the conundrum clearly. There really is nothing good you can do with the billions. You still are a person, you still are the person you were before you had the billions. There's no escaping yourself, I know I've tried, it doesn't work. There is no better when it comes to people. We're all slightly different variants of the same theme.
    The NYT Daily podcast is spawning a weekly show on FX. It will not be hosted by Michael Barbaro. I think this is a mistake. The thing that makes the Daily good is not that they're NYT reporters, though that is of course important, it's that Barbaro is an inquisitive and empathetic interviewer. There are lots of NYT reporters, but I've never seen an interviewer so capable of bringing out an unusual point of view as Barbaro.
    We could divide the world in two, those who think H stands for Humble and those who think it's Honest. Because they are two distinct viewpoints. The former says "I could be wrong" and the latter doesn't admit that. I am solidly in the first camp.
  May 8
    Survey: Do you want Trump at your funeral?

    Contract with America 2.0
    Tax reform, Universal health care, Climate change is real, Peace with Iran, Free training for American workers, Jobs, Black lives matter...

      Democrats say: Let us remind you what we stand for. You should believe we'll do it, because it's what we always do when we're in power. Think about this America, is this what you want? Then you should vote us in. We'll do it. It's a contract.
        Tax reform
        Universal health care
        Climate change is real
        Peace with Iran
        Free training for American workers
        Jobs
        Black lives matter
        Equal protection
        Prison reform
        Choice
        Campaign finance reform
        Legal Cannabis
        Assault weapon ban, background checks
        All candidates must make tax returns public
        Equal pay for equal work
        Clean water for Flint
        Relief for Puerto Rico
  May 7
    Ultimately journalism will have to choose sides. And it's not Repubs vs Dems. It's the ruling class vs the people. Today's journalism sides with and is immersed in the ruling class. When journalism says it wants subsidies from the government or from rich tech companies, that just pushes them further over the edge. If they ever get them, they will be in freefall.
    2015: "To come so far, when all my material dreams of childhood could be realized with a single click, to realize that what I had then is what I most desire now."
    BTW, magically sometime in the last few weeks I aged another year. I am now 63. One more year before I get to sing the Beatles song. I don't believe in celebrating birthdays on the net. I know other people like it. No judgment. I had to edit my personal page just now, so I thought I should mention it here.
  May 6
    Braintrust query: I'm looking to connect to the people at Lexis/Nexis who are running weblogs.com. There's a new configuration problem.
    A building going up in my neighborhood. I usually view it from way up in the air. It's more impressive viewed from the ground.
    With Rudy it's all about the eyes.
    On podcatch.com, I have removed Facebook comments and replaced them with Disqus comments.
    I don't know how to report a bug re the Washington Post website, so I'll try posting it here.
    There were two incredible basketball games yesterday, both with exciting scores.

    The Angry Founders of the Internet
    We've had it with your crapware. We're The Angry Founders of the Internet.

      We should start an "Angry Founders of the Internet" social club to discuss what the fuck happened and how can we tell people about the magic that underlies the crapware that the bigco's are shoveling at us. It really is beautiful and amazing in there.
      Think of it this way. It's easier to take the Interstate highway everywhere, but if you do that, you miss the charming B&Bs, the dramatic beaches, restaurants, jazz clubs. The thrill of riding a bike, hiking the Appalachian Trail, skiing. All that intellectually unperpins this.

    Instant outlining in LO2
    A simple howto checklist for a self-demo of the Instant Outlining feature in LO2.

      To test this feature, open LO2 in two different browsers.
      They could be on the same machine or different machines. I am using Safari and Chrome on my desktop Mac.
      Arrange the windows so you can see both at the same time.
      In one of the copies of LO2:
        Create a new outline -- File/New.
        Make it public -- File/Get public link
        Copy the URL in the dialog to the clipboard.
      In the other copy of LO2:
        Subscribe -- File/Subscribe to outline
        Paste the URL from above.
      Back in the first copy
        Start typing. Note that what you type appears in the other copy of LO2.
        It waits for you to let up on the typing for a couple of seconds before sending.
        Then the update happens instantaneously through the magic of WebSockets!
    I ❤️ Michelle Wolf
      A few comments on Michelle Wolf's correspondent dinner routine.
        Please listen to her podcast interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
        I think one of the reasons people might have thought she was body-shaming Sarah Huckabee Sanders is when she said she burns facts it sounded at first like she said she burns fat. That's what I thought she said at first. If she had said that it would have been body-shaming, but since she didn't, it wasn't.
        She points out that no one has complained about the actual body-shaming she did. She made fun of Mitch McConnell's neck and Chris Christie's obesity. McConnell wasn't there, but Christie was. The camera showed him eating and laughing. Why exactly is it more terrible to body-shame women than men? (Answer: It's not. We're hypocrites when we denounce one and not the other.)
        She does make fun of her own body, and her voice. Especially with the voice she uses it to make a bigger point about how people treated Hillary Clinton as a candidate.
        She talks about why she doesn't want to have kids or to marry. I love her more for that. She even has good jokes about how "having it all" isn't that great. I won't spoil the jokes here, you should listen to the podcast. :rocket:
        She is a gift, a gift of truth, intelligence and guts. She is exactly what we need now. I'm very happy she has a Netflix show premiering at the end of May. I expect to be a regular viewer.
  May 5
    If we really wanted the Repubs to act as a check against Trump, we could make them. Legally. By putting human voting American bodies in their way everywhere they go, all the time 24 by 7.
    Kurt Vonnegut: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

    What should journalism do?
    Trump says you all are the enemy of the people and 1/3 of them agree. I am one of them, btw. By trying to collaborate with a government that is so anti-the-people, you have become our enemy.

      I listened to Jay Rosen on this very brief podcast. At the end they ask what should a conscientious journalist do re Trump. I happen to have an answer. And of course, me being me, it's pretty radical.
        Journalism has to be with the people. Ask yourself what would the people do, and do that.
        As journalism is with the government, it forces a route-around. Journalism will have to reboot, in the cause of the people. With or without you.
        As politics attacks journalism, it's journalism's job to balance it. The more radical the government, the more radical the journalism.
        Journalism is already taking the hit, Trump says you all are the enemy of the people and 1/3 of them agree. I am one of them, btw. By trying to collaborate with a government that is so anti-the-people, you have become our enemy.
        It's like everything in the rise of Trump, we tend to wake up to what we could have done when it's too late. This happens over and over. When we finally react in a timely fashion it will seem radical. It will be radical, and it will have a chance of working.
        Stop interviewing elites. They're as bad as journalists at wanting to pretend everything is okay. You all climbed the ladder. Say the ladder is gone, and they'll argue with you. "You're being too dramatic," but no in fact it's not too dramatic. Ladders are gone. The elites went to the ovens along with the Jews and the gypsies.
        Journalism wants to go back to the world we were in before Trump. Wishing for it won't make it so. Be stark and direct. We're losing. Say that. Forget about what Trump thinks. He's fucking us.
        And btw, Michelle Wolf was just what the doctor ordered. Get her a regular spot. Replace one of the wimps on MSNBC. Which one? Any of them.
      PS: You all are eventually going to be glad we kept working on news software for the people. (Also known as blogging.)
  May 4
    Every time Trump gives a speech (like today at the NRA) either Michelle Wolf or the Parkland kids should speak at a raucous rally, at the same time, competing for cable news coverage. Let's push the president's BS off the air by good, fun and truthful counter-programming.
    Poll: Do you think Jeffrey Tambor is guilty of sexual harassment and should have been fired from Transparent?
    Watched NBA playoffs while flying cross country and tweeting about it.
    I'm watching Wild Wild Country on Netflix. I'm through the first two episodes. I knew a few people who were at Rajneeshpuram in my massage school days. I wish I had asked them more about what it was like there. It's a really good story so far.
    I can't get this song out of my head. No problem. I love this song! :heart:
    My mom was a quilter, so I inherited a bunch of her quilts ones she made over many decades. There is a philosophy to quilting, which I observe as an outsider. The work is done very much with the idea of creating a legacy. I have a friend, Sheila, in Seattle who is a quilter. I wanted her to have one of Eve's quilts, even though they had never met. I thought of this because she posted a picture of her latest quilt on Faceboo. We hooked up in Seattle this week, talked about parents, and of course quilting. I don't know much about quilting, but I find it fascinating. Anyway, I just rolled over the archive for this blog, saving an OPML file of the writing I did in April, along with all the other months. In a way my blog archive is like mom's quilt collection. A hope to pass something into the future saying this is who I was.
    Here's a quilt Eve did of the ThinkTank logo.
    In hindsight, I realize we should have done a video walkthrough of mom's house as it was when she left us. Exactly as it was. Now it is staged for sale, all the personal stuff is out. It's a house transitioning to be a new family's house. It was our family house for over 50 years. I didn't think of it because at the time, the way the house was set up was the most normal thing. I never thought that it was an archive of lives that were now over, that it was about to disappear. I mention this so if you end up being the one to close up shop on a family house, take a good video snapshot before you start taking it apart.
  May 2
    I had an idea for a Twitter coop. A group of say 100 people with roughly the same number of followers get together and pool their logins. Every user gets the right to push one message to all our collective followers once a month. So you have to be careful about what you use it for. But that way when you have really great idea that needs to get out there you have a way to do it, without begging. Of course there has to be a way to check against abuse. Perhaps it requires the approval of five of the 100 people in order to actually be sent? It's a variant of an idea that Kyle Shank implemented a few years ago which allowed people to donate use of their accounts for a political cause. This would be more democratic, and wouldn't be limited to politics. BTW this is the tweet I'd push this month. If you feel inclined, please RT. We might just save the country with this idea.
    Also, you'd get a bonus push on your birthday. :boom:
    A variant on the above idea: You can will your Twitter account to another coop. The end-of-runway coop. So your online presence can be powerful in your afterlife.
    I've been in Seattle the last couple of days. One thing is different from last year when I visited, there are green and yellow bikes all over the place. I just signed up for LimeBike (the green ones) and am going to try a ride on one this afternoon.
  May 1
    Here’s what was really positive about Michelle Wolf at the dinner on Saturday, she knocked Trump off the air. Anything less and we’d be talking about the outrageous shit he said, but who cares? His jokes aren’t as funny as hers, and she said the truth and he lies.
    When Trump gives a speech we should arrange for Michelle Wolf to give one too. I'd fly across the country to be in the audience.
    Michelle Wolf is to Trump what the Parkland high school students are to the NRA.
    Dependent developers
      Reading Brent's piece about Mac development made me think about the ideal, what I really want from being a developer for as long as I've been a developer. The thing that got me started was the independence of it. I could have taken a job at Bell Labs or some big mainframe or minicomputer company, and had a nice career being pushed around by bosses at big companies. But I went for PC development because it was something I controlled. I could do what I wanted. Make my own art. The things I wanted to do were things no company would approve of, they had no way of understanding it. And at first it was lovely. Then the corporate bosses at the PC companies started pushing us around and it turned to shit.
      I think of Alan Cooper, a developer himself who now is a crafts person, building things out of his farm in Marin County, California. Things that are made of wood, glass and metal, not software. I've been reading his stories on Twitter. It's a very different kind of story from the ones Brent and others tell. There are no big companies pushing him around, as far as I know. The tools he uses have existed for decades, if not more, and they aren't going to change in a way that forces him to do anything. That's the ideal.
      On Twitter, Om is wondering if we should trust Zuck? Why is that even a question? Of course we shouldn't trust him. Any more than Zuck would trust me (although there are more reasons for him to trust me than vice versa). Where did we get this idea that 30-something young folk should push us all around just because they're rich? What a crazy fucked up world. Repeat after me: Don't. Trust. Zuck.
      And Google. Just read this TechCrunch article. Some people thought I'd be angry at Google. I have no problem with them offering HTTPS support in their TLD. I've often thought Amazon could do a lot more for people, like myself, who use S3, to support HTTPS. After all they know as much about me as any naming authority could. They have my credit card number. They know where I live. They know, if they look at my buying history, a lot of very personal things about me! No what pisses me off is the way TechCrunch perpetuates Google's lies about HTTP. One after the other. It's a rewritten press release. Something an AI could do. This is what most journalism is like. Rewritten press releases from companies taking things that don't belong to them. Like Google.
      No conclusion other than we lie to ourselves and each other when we say independent developers are independent.