It's even worse than it appears.
Sunday, September 6, 2020
I wish Bloomberg was keeping his promise. #
People ask what if Trump refuses to leave. Let's see if we can figure it out. He watches TV all day. I assume he’ll continue to do that. I suppose we‘ll have to sign loyalty oaths to him. Penalties very harsh for not doing so. What else? I bet his health continues to deteriorate, which means perhaps Melania will be running the country, or the Trump kids. There won't be any checks and balances, I guess. #
Braintrust query: Less expensive Biden lawn signs. #
The press repeats their blaming Facebook for the terrible state of our political system. In such damning terms. I wish they'd find a way to take their share of that responsibility. On The Media is the worst. #
I know I'm an outlier, but I thought the Kaufman movie was not interesting, entertaining, thoughtful, funny, colorful, artistic, whatever. I've read the explainers, but please, any story that needs that much explaning isn't much of a story imho. #
SF Chron review: "It goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did."#
I hope the NBA is working on a better version of virtual fans.#
Australia and Facebook#
  • Something weird about this.#
    • At least in the US, if I link to an article on FB, the text of the article isn’t on FB, it’s on the original site.#
    • Any text from the article that appears in FB is in the metadata put in the file specifically so it can be quoted by FB. Totally voluntary. There's no requirement you include that data.#
    • If the news org wants to stop FB, just don’t include that metadata.#
  • To be clear, the metadata is saying FB, please include this information when someone links to this story. It's kind of pissy to then complain that they included the information you asked them to include. If you want them to not include the information, mate, stop asking them to. It's really fucking simple. I'm sure there are plenty of Australian programmers who can explain it to you. #
  • For example, view the source code of this article. Near the top of the page look for <meta> tags with the og: prefix. Those are put there for Facebook. There are others, with the same info, for Twitter. It's smart to put those in there, they're kind of like ads. #
  • PS: I'm not a big fan of Facebook. Really. But I'm also not a big fan of bullshit. #

© 1994-2020 Dave Winer.

Last update: Sunday September 6, 2020; 6:16 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)