The Repubs and some Dems think they can make Covid go away by legislating it out of existence. Oh they are so stupid, and we're about to pay the price, again, for their stupidity.
#Twitter is still the easiest blogging platform out there. Just add titles, styling and links, and get rid of the character limit and Twitter will own the world. Hopefully with the new management they will do this. Why is it OK with me? They have a fine API. I've got good
support for it in my
scripting environment. They run the servers, that's OK with me.
#I had to do some driving today, I love driving the
Tesla, I wanted to say that. I hope people who get other electric cars have a similar experience. It's just such a smooth ride, and so much power. I have also mostly got the getting in and out part down, just the right way to twist my body, thanks to advice from my friend Chuck Shotton who is a longtime Tesla owner.
#At one point in the ride I was shuffling podcasts and thinking this is too dangerous and then I remembered I'm driving a car that theoretically can drive itself. So I clicked the right stick down twice to activate the driving functionality and took my hands off the steering wheel. I talked to the car as if it were a 17-year-old learning to drive, giving it encouragement and preparing to take over when it started to drive off the road. Something weird happened, it started flashing red, and then really started flashing red, which I interpreted as "I can't handle this, you take over, Mr Human." Which I did. But I was driving on
US 209, basically a
freeway, two lanes in each direction, divided, lots of room everywhere, good weather, well marked lanes. If it couldn't handle this, what could it handle? This was the first time I tried letting it drive itself. Not sure what went wrong.
#I listened to the
latest Open Source podcast. You must listen to this one. It's about the new reality of nuclear war. Chris Lydon talks to all the most interesting academics, and it's clear they really like and respect him. If you watch MSNBC, skip Rachel Maddow one night every week and listen to Chris and his guests. I think they should put him on TV with exactly the same guests as he has now, and let him cover exactly what he covers. It's much higher quality than anything you get from any other source. Swear to god. It's for adults, smart ones. It's not a bedtime story (and that's a good thing).
#So I was thinking about a lot of things. Like how I have really good friends for a long time who have never used an outliner, and somehow must think they understand me at some level, when they just can't. Imagine for example you had a friend who was a guitar player. Not the most famous or best ever, but still someone who had devoted their life to creating music with guitars. And then imagine not only had you not listened to your friend playing the guitar, but you hadn't listened to
anyone play a guitar. You didn't know what a guitar was. You sent them a link to a story about someone humming while driving and asked if it was like that. That's been my experience. I live with it. But I've never liked it. My software actually isn't hard to learn, at least not compared to other software like Twitter, Facebook, a word processor, an ATM. It's a low-grade source of frustration. Most days I write stuff on this blog and hear back nothing. But it seems some people read it. I just write for myself. I think I'm going to go back to doing that with software too. 2021 was an exceptional year, I decided to devote the whole year to creating a real end-user piece of software --
Drummer. I never hear anything nice about it. Mostly from people who refuse to read the docs complaining that they don't know how to do something that's covered in the docs. This isn't what I had in mind when I spent all of last year building the product and writing excellent docs.
#Another example. I probably spent in total a whole month doing the
Tree Chart app. Two comments. One saying they wanted more features, and another from a semi-famous person who said he missed MORE, so I pointed him to Drummer. He complained that the tree chart part of Drummer wasn't as good as MORE's and that's it. Nothing beyond that. I wonder if people know how much effort it takes to create something like this (obviously they don't) or are willing to invest anything at all in helping? Obviously not that either. So I think the only way to go is to create software for a market of one -- me -- and leave it at that. Maybe I'll share some of it, maybe I won't. It's a lot of extra work to share it, and from my point of view, the work is an utter waste of time. Basically most people are selfish assholes. I think the Beatles felt this way about their fans too. I've been learning so much about them this year. But at least we all listened to their music, even if we had no idea who they were, and how they created the music.
#A few months ago I read a comment on Twitter, not directed to me but with my name tagged, that said that RSS will be able to move again once Dave Winer is dead. Isn't that
special. I'm sure that's not true btw, but to be thought of as only contributing obstruction. I think it's like that in a lot of things I've worked on. People have tried to buy my products away from me, not realizing I still owned them. That was comedy. Other people, supposed friends, told me they were taking over, I should get out of their way or I'd get hurt. The first couple of times that happened, from someone who was very rich, I fell for it. It wasn't true. His products were flops because he had no idea what people valued in the products. I did because I had connections with the users and I listened, systematically. At LVT we got very good at listening, we knew in advance that new releases would be loved because were simply giving the users what they wanted. Once another rich guy offered me $1 million for my company or he was going to blow me out of the water (his words). Yeah I said, i've heard that before. Go right ahead. He never shipped anything even remotely competitive. BTW, our product was making more than $1 million
a month at the time. He didn't even bother to get the numbers. All this says to me is that
we should fucking work together dammit. Look at the Beatles and how individually they reached out to other musicians and recorded with them. Why don't we do that in software. If there's going to be more RSS, why shouldn't it benefit from what I've learned? You might be surprised to find that a new RSS can't happen
unless I am involved, Mr Waiting For Me To Die. Why take the chance? I didn't save the tweet because I didn't want to ever close that loop. Imagine how that felt. The world is full of self-important assholes, and we've given every one of them tools to express their assholyness. You can quote me on that.
#Putin was probably inspired by Dubya and his shock and awe, but too bad for Putin he didn’t have America’s arms industry and wealth. So no one was very awed at Putin’s shocking depravity. Whatever punishment he gets should also be applied to the Americas war criminals, Bush, Cheney, Powell etc.
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