As of Sunday I will have been blogging for 27 years
here.
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Since Sunday is the 27th anniversary of blogging at scripting.com (or anywhere, for that matter), let's make that the day that the doors officially open for
Drummer. There will still be things to do at that point, and that's ok. As they say software is a process.
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It's a fitting moment to flip the switch, because
Drummer will open the doors for a new
fluid style of blogging, based on outlining. To create a post, you click the
big plus icon and start typing. When you're ready to publish, choose a menu command. No more slogging your way through Wordpress or a static site generator. It all happens in a second or two. And making a change to your blog is as easy as making the change in your outline, and publishing -- again -- just one command and a couple of seconds. Wordpress's blogging model is a slog. The command structure is organized to make it a time consuming process. Drummer does away with that. Welcome to the world where
tools for thought meets publishing.
Blogging at the speed of thought. #
If we
default, the damage to the US economy will be permanent. It won't just be a recession, because we eventually get out of recessions. Poverty will explode. This time the US really will become a third world country. And it won't just cause chaos in the US, it'll be world wide. The media should start explaining what a
reserve currency is, how the US dollar is basically the only one, and what advantages it gives us (they're huge). Increasing the debt limit costs us nothing, not even money because we can print the currency we repay our debt with. All the Repub hype about economics is, like everything else they say, a lie. The US isn't a family on a budget, it's the foundation on which the world economy runs. Look at it this way, if your family could repay its debt by writing numbers on a piece of paper, would you worry about how much you owe? That a simple version of the reality for the US and our dollar.
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Facebook is so powerful because
Obama shut down his campaign after winning in 2008. The tech industry organized the people around its values, which they were very
open about. The Dems could've done it. Any news org could have. I begged them to do it, publicly and privately. Everyone who's complaining now, news people and politicians, punted, had no idea what FB did was possible, didn't listen when they were told. If they wanted their values represented, they should have done it themselves. That's how this works.
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How about if we put together say $5 million offer to give to Sinema and Manchin if they vote for the big reconciliation package? If the bigco’s can bribe them, why not the people? It’ll end their careers of course, but at least they’ll have some money to soften the blow.
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Poll: Which should I get, Tesla or Peloton, neither or both?
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I started watching
Maid on Netflix but it was too depressing, and that’s saying something after watching
Squid Game straight through.
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This image is stark.
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- Pretty sure it was Photoshopped, so don't take it literally. #
- But it reminds that there was an earlier attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, where the attackers tried to take down one of the buildings and failed. In the second attempt, both towers came down. #
- If this happened with the US Capitol, it would shatter America.#
Apple's Celebrating Steve Jobs video. Ten years since Steve Jobs died. Watching this video takes me back many years, to when we were young and full of hope and right in the middle of the whole thing. I had the same realization he had, that you can make the world conform to your ideas rather than the other way around. It may feel like things stay constant, but they're always changing. And the people who made the rules were no smarter or better than I am. I still hope to be able to pull a few more rabbits out of my hat.
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- Rant! #
- The bullshit about Facebook keeps coming. It's not a fucking autocracy, it's a carrier. You could say everything you say about FB about a city like NY. All the companies selling cigarettes were once hq'd in NY. The mayor of NY must be a cancer criminal, right? Such idiots. The journalists have no sense of perspective on what Facebook is. It's hundreds the size of a city like NY. So much happens there. It's created mostly by the people who use it. It's what remains of all the great ideas of networking in the 90s and 00s. A ton of good stuff happens in FB, and a bunch of nasty shit, because -- because Facebook is us -- it's human. Get a fucking grip pundits. You're making asses of yourselves. I tried watching CNN last night. All these people fighting for their own continued existence and to hide the depravity of journalism are desperate to blame FB for fear someone might blame them. I was expecting to see McNamee (longtime friend) on TV last night, thankfully maybe he's gotten a bit of perspective himself, and realizes it isn't just about Zuckerberg. #
- Plan#
- How to radically restructure FB.#
- Separate the users and the content from everything else.#
- Now figure out what that means and we have a plan. ;-)#
So if Facebook is evil, why isn’t Apple evil too, because there couldn’t have been a Facebook without the iPhone. The answer is neither is evil. They're both big companies, no better or worse than companies in other industries.
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I had this thought when I was driving into San Francisco in 1979 -- I bet I know a bunch of people here, but I have no way to find them. At some point between then and now, that vision was achieved. Add that to the
list of things Facebook is other than Mark Z. I think it's time for people with a sense of the foundations Facebook is built on speak up and say what it represents. The press, given the benefit of the doubt, has no clue.
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The tech industry was and is so much about self-promotion, selfishness, that there's no way for people who know the history, how we got here, to explain in that context, what Facebook is, beyond all the things the press says about them, and the distilled evil they represent. They are a product of tech, and there was some good in the foundations we built for them to use. And that good is in their product, whether or not they know it, or anyone believes it. It's still there. And if you use it, you must know that. We have the ability to share deep ideas here, not just screaming "look at me" -- maybe this is the time for tech to grow up, before the generation that built the foundation for FB is gone.
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- This piece was originally published on October 6, 2011, the day after Steve Jobs died, ten years ago tomorrow. #
- In 1983, my little software company was lucky to be invited to work on Apple's new computer in development, the Macintosh. Back then Apple wasn't as secretive as it is today. Everyone knew something was coming. We knew what it was called, but no one was saying what it was. #
- I gladly signed the agreement, and to this day I remember my first glimpse of the Mac. I arrived at a building on Bandley Drive in Cupertino some time in August 1983, and was met by Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki from the Mac team. As we walked to the conference room, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a beige plastic box that was small and upright. And personal. How it said that to me, in just a glimpse, I have no idea. Is that a computer? Another thought popped into my head: It said "I'm new." And that was something because back in those days everything was new. And it was personal, for me. All this from a fraction of a second look. #
- Before that I had been an Apple II developer for a number of years, and was a devotee of Apple's products, though I also loved IBM's PC. There was a sense that we were all creating a new world, we all loved our work -- and Jobs and the people he nurtured at Apple, were leaders. I was on stage during the rollout of the Mac at Flint Center on January 24, 1984. We shipped our product later that year and went on to have one of the first hits for the Mac. #
- But I want to tell a different story. Not a personal one, because I did not have a personal relationship with Steve Jobs. However, I built products that made it to market through his platforms. And in doing so, my vision was shaped by his. And later, with podcasting and RSS, I got to influence the direction of his products. #
- I wish Jobs had been a blogger, had written about his design process, so I could quote something. But he was the opposite of a blogger. Jobs was a mass communicator. No one in my generation has mastered the art as Jobs did. Today, with the outpouring of feeling on the net, are people mourning the man, or the phenomena he could unleash, just by saying "One more thing." #
- And he was a designer, even though people seem to be overlooking that in their remembrances, calling him more of a visionary. He got down in there and made small but very important design decisions about his products. Ones that had wide impact, for better, or worse. And often they weren't things his products did, rather things his products didn't do that defined them. #
- The Mac was full of them. No cursor keys, so you had to use the mouse to navigate. I doubt if money was the reason, though leaving out the cursor keys probably saved a bit, and allowed the other keys to be bigger. It also meant Apple had to design its own keyboard, because they all had cursor keys. #
- No hard drive. No expansion slots. No fan. #
- A standardized user interface. This was very controversial with software developers such as myself. We felt what we did was user interface design. What would we do if the UI was already designed. New ideas sometimes don't get accepted right away by everyone. #
- And there were the almost-great ideas, like having networking built into every Mac starting with the Mac Plus. At the time networking wasn't even an option on IBM PCs. The networking, while a bold and great idea, didn't have the impact it should have had because the programming APIs were impossibly difficult. Had they been easy the Mac would have been the web, and we could have saved 20 years of incremental upgrades to turn the web into what the Mac was in 1984. ##
- And at times Steve forgot where his ideas came from, or seemed to. He tormented Bill Gates, probably in jest, that he was stealing his ideas from Apple, when they both stole from Xerox. #
- I had some personal interactions with Jobs, but they weren't very special. I doubt if he knew who I was. He called me once, out of the blue -- to rant about the stupidity of people at Apple. This was in 1997 just after coming back. Even today, after all these years, I have a hard time saying I agreed with him, and I didn't say so in the conversation, I just stayed silent. He doesn't suffer fools quietly, that's for sure. Ooops, he didn't. Hard to think of him in the past tense. Why did he call me then? I have no clue. ##
- One more thing. #
- In the first rush of memorials, people are comparing Jobs to Henry Ford (industrialist), Thomas Edison (inventor) or Walt Disney (media). But there's also a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright in there. All these men had imperfections, and greatness. But Wright's were, imho, more Jobsian than the others. #
- "He's so wonderfully prickly and famous for bursting into any house he built un-announced - just come in with a troop of people and show them the house, rearrange the furniture. He would even sneak into the houses to rearrange the furniture when the owners were away," T.C. Boyle wrote of Wright, but it also describes how early Mac developers felt after demoing their products for Steve. #
- To both Jobs and Wright the people who used their products were not as important as the computer or the building. More than the thing itself, what mattered to Wright, and I think what mattered to Jobs is the integrity of his vision. In a way it was a shame that the vision had to be instantiated. #
- Jobs has also been compared to Leonardo Da Vinci, but I think that's something for historians to say, a couple of hundred years from now. Honestly, even comparing him to Ford or Edison is a bit over the top, because their achievements are understood with a hundred years of perspective. We are all contemporaries of Jobs, so our judgment isn't historical. He had a lot of impact on our lives, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a historical impact.#
- Of course that's what made their ideas so great and influential. Among the many Jobs quotes worth remembering, and quoting -- Artists ship. I agree. And when you ship, along with the vision, comes reality. And then you learn and ship again. #
- There might still be Jobs shipments to come. We don't know what's in Apple's pipeline. But his thinking and vision, his person, will influence others and drive them to greatness, for generations to come.#
All of
today's MLB games begin at approximately 3PM Eastern. Today is the last day of the regular season and there are all kinds of ties, some of which will be broken in today's games, and some will likely wait for a special game, that's
how close the races are. A day of huge drama in baseball.
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- Idea. For a few weeks, assign a reporter to read the Twitter comments for all the stories, but don't announce anything. Look for people who write intelligent comments with new ideas that people in your circle never come up with. #
- They are out there, might take some effort to find them. Recruit new ideas. We need you to do that. Be a contrarian. In journalism the assumption is that comments are disgusting. Take an opposite view for a short period of time, and see objectively if there aren't some diamonds out there in the middle of all the crap.#
- Another radical idea for political pubs. #
- Did you hear blogs are back? They call them newsletters now. They all have RSS feeds, of course. How about gathering a list of all the newsletters people on your staff read, publish the list, and run a river of all their letters, when they come out. A way of revealing your sources in a new dimension. #
- Build relationships with the smartest of them. Become known as connoisseurs of political thought. How could that hurt your pub? Pay special attention to ones that criticize your specific publication. Always listen to your most passionate users, that's how you improve over time. #
What it feels like when you're sure you've found the bug that's been kicking your ass, and it turns out you actually did.
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Every time I read about how Biden's popularity is dropping, I wonder if there's any reality to this. If it were really a troubling sign that means in the next election, Americans will do what Germans did in 1932, we'll vote into power a fascist party, and open the US to concentration camps and mass exterminations of our own citizens. You may think this is wild, but before Covid the idea of 700K Americans dying of a disease that was largely preventable, because of disinformation from the government itself, that would have seemed like a paranoid delusion. I recorded a
podcast in
March 2020 to preserve that perspective. If the US actually does vote Repubs into power, we deserve what we get.
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The
Links page on Scripting News should be more reliable and faster after the change I made in
Radio3 today.
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Pet peeve: People talking about me in the past tense. Do me a favor, wait until it's true.
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I added
Squid Game to the Bingeworthy database. My rating -- Good, after watching the first five episodes. I want to see how it turns out, it could become Loved, depending on what they do with the story, which so far is gripping.
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I'm watching
Ted Lasso just to see how bad a TV show can be. Best line so far: "A sad white person is still a white person." Try changing that to black and see if it gets through the censors. Also a reporter that gives up his sources shouldn't be a reporter.
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Here's the big problem with Ted Lasso season 2. You have to like at least one character in a sitcom like Ted Lasso. That was the charm of season one, the star, the person the show is named after, was very likeable, and so were almost all of the others. Nice people, you cheer for them. This season you have to brace yourself because at any moment the formerly likeable Ted Lasso is going to do something supremely assholelike. I'm not joking. Come on. Anyway it's just like Apple to switch the user interface radically without any warning, just
ask Gruber about where they moved the freaking
tabs in the new version of Safari. It's conceivable that a character could reveal a very well hidden dark side and pull it off, but it's not very common and they totally don't pull it off.
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Metacritic was having problems with its SSL certificate, it's so bad that
Google won't even let me read the site, even in "advanced" mode. "Your connection might not be private" they warn. Skirting the question: "private from whom?" Google can
read every word no matter how much encryption there might be. The press loves to rail on Facebook, but I gotta say Google is dug in deeper than FB. And for some reason they escape the scrutiny of journalists.
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Welcome to October. The monthly ritual is done, the
OPML for September is uploaded to the GitHub repo, where interested
tools for thought geeks can use it to experiment with interop. There's over
four years worth of archives there to play with. Also
Drummer testers can see techniques that work in
Old School blogs that they may not have seen.
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Facebook tells me today is
Jake Savin's birthday. He's a young man, I don't know exactly how young. Jake worked at
UserLand on Manila. Oct 1 was also my dear departed
uncle's birthday, it would have been his 76th. I miss him every day. He would have loved the web, especially Wikipedia. Ken was always looking stuff up in the
Information Please Almanac. Ken's mind would no doubt be
blown that cannabis is legal in much of the US, at least the parts of the US you'd want to visit. He grew the best
sinsimilla back in the 70s and 80s. I was trying to explain to a friend what that was, to no avail because all weed is seedless these days. Ken had an efficient way of killing off the male plants. He'd cover and uncover his seedlings with a blanket to simulate spring. The tiny baby plants would flower, and thus reveal their gender. Only the female plants produce the resin that humans like so much. 😀
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I don't want to jinx anything but
Drummer is getting pretty solid. Nothing much will change when the product is available publicly, the process will continue, more fixes and features, more interop. I have a lot of little projects I want to do, all designed to build an open ecosystem of thought tools and their adjuncts. The first verison of Drummer will be a blogging tool and a scripting system. But there will be more of all of it.
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I watched the beginning of
Jon Stewart's show on Apple TV. He says he doesn't look well, but he looks fine. I'm not sure this show is going to work. The old JS was confident, sassy even. Certainly never self-conscious. In charge. Comfortable.
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I was mentioned once on The Daily Show when Jon Stewart was hosting it. As a result I was invited to do a
BloggerCon at Stanford, the third one. It was a good event.
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As someone who ran a social net long before Facebook booted up, I suspect what we're seeing on FB has less to do with the company and more to do with the scaling up of humanity on social nets. Journalism has made this about one person, Zuck, probably because that's how the journalism works. Kind of like
Don Geiss on 30 Rock?
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TFT Hacker is
looking for an open source JavaScript outliner, other than
Concord.
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Today is the first day of real autumn weather in the Catskills. I just got back from my daily bike ride. I was fairly cold as I started, by the end I was all toasty, zesty and feisty. Feeling my Wheaties.
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Journalism is highly conflicted re Facebook, and they never look at their own culpability in weakening democracy. If it weren't so damned profitable for journalism, I doubt if we'd have had Trump. but you never read that in the NYT or WSJ, or even MSNBC.
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Other people get mystical about
outliners, I prefer to stay pragmatic, to emphasize that the inspiration comes not from the tool, rather from the human being using the tool.
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- A story about the Node.js ecosystem. #
- Yesterday I noticed that one of my server apps had restarted 21 hours ago, so I looked at the log, saw where it should have checked if something was undefined, added the check, published a new release, then went to the app, updated it, tried to restart it, and it failed. The source of the failure was a very small module known as dateformat that had updated, which is fine, maybe they have bugs. So I went to their repo, and saw a reference to a breaking change, which sounded like it might be the thing that broke my app (not well documented imho), and I found a version before the breaking change, released on Jan 30, and updated the package.json for the app at the beginning of this tale to require the earlier version, rebuilt it, and it worked. #
- Sounds painless enough, but each step involved me figuring out how this or that worked. A tiny area of one app that I had long ago forgot about because you figure once date formatting is done, it's done. Right. It's not like there's any great technological breakthroughs in date formatting, btw. #
- It turned out that the maintainers of the dateformat module wanted to use a feature that wasn't in the version of Node my server was running. As far as I can tell the feature had nothing to do with its mission, formatting dates. What they were saying is I should accept their change and upgrade to the version of Node they require. if I were to do that, I'd have to shut down the server, upgrade Node, and then test all of the apps running on the server to see whether the new version of Node broke them, which imho is much more likely than dateformat breaking them. #
- This is the culture of development these days. Breaking changes for stylistic reasons are fine. It's the reward for maintaining a useful little module -- you can force the attention of developers all over the place. This is just one module, add it up and the half-life of a Node app is very short indeed. Not a good situation imho. #
Uncle Don's Band, who knew?
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I always feel great after a bike ride.
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I was thinking of adding a landline feature to my cable service. $12.99 a month sounds okay. But then I saw the
fine print. Oy. I remember how hard it was to get rid of a feature last time around. I swear if only they'd stop scamming. I'm paying $8.99 a month to rent an Apple TV, even though I already had an Apple TV. Them's the rules they said. Can't get TV without paying the set top box tax. Oy oy. An Apple TV costs
$169 on Amazon.
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What made me think of getting a landline? All of a sudden the phone app on my
Pixel 4a refuses to connect over wifi, a requirement since there's no cell service here. Not having a reliable way to make a phone call, that's not okay. And the way I used to make calls on my computer with Google Hangouts, that doesn't work anymore either. They said use Google Chat now. OK, but where in Google Chat, on my desktop (which they have) can I make a phone call? Every one of these companies is missing part of the plan for how to build reliable service around the still relatively new (I guess) open network. They all still want to completely control you and soak you for services you don't want, and change things around so you never get to feel confident in using their software. How that helps them, I have no idea.
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It drives me crazy that the press makes everything about Dems and Repubs. Yes the Dems will be disappointed if the country disintegrates into civil war and becomes a zombie zone full of covid, but don't you get that other people will be unhappy too?
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We’re really governed by journalism. They are not transparent, not accountable to anyone, dishonest, corrupt, no moral compass. Controlled by oligarchs. Not subject to recall. We are powerless against them. We have few if any rights.
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Twitter appears to be down, at least through the web.#
Obviously
the Repubs want to force Dems to nuke the filibuster to prevent default.
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Poll: Netflix or HBO Max?
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Netflix CEO takes a shot at HBO Max, which makes me think, I can't remember the last time I watched something on Netflix, and I watch HBO Max content all the time. I think they have a deeper and more intelligent base of stories than Netflix, which seems to be skewing toward mindless garbage, although HBO is trying to catch up in that area.
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Repubs are great at organizing. Dems just want money.
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Maybe it's time for someone to take over the Dems and get people organized. The rule-of-law people in the US still vastly outnumber the bombthrowers, at least that's what I hear from journalism.
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Background: "I expected that when the transition started, the Obama campaign website would turn into the White House website, and would continue to organize us."
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The basic problem (imho) is that we all have been raised to believe that
getting ahead is the thing to do with our lives. It's deeply ingrained over many generations. We're still doing that, even though the three big crises we're going to be dealing with for the rest of our lives. demand a different impulse --
working together.#
I just got a
link to "A wholistic RSS namespace for podcasting." I wasn't even aware that it existed. No one tells me anything.
😄 #
I like that they use my
Rules for standards-makers as guidelines for the work. It was my hope that future developers wouldn't have to repeat all the pointless arguments about what
matters.
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When I find myself replying to a reply on Twitter with "Are you really that stupid?" I just block them instead.
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The
OPML package has a new
end-point that reads an OPML file, and if it has an
urlUpdateSocket head-level attribute, sets up a subscription, and calls back when the outline is modified. Captures all the complex code behind the interface, so an OPML-consuming app can have instant updates with no effort. It's wonderful to see this in action, hope to have a public demo soon.
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We are
backing off the Twitter feed feature I had developed for Drummer.
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To developers wishing to work in the
tools for thought world, we can work together as equals, instead of platform vendor and third-party developer. There's a huge difference between the two models. In the first model we are free to compete, but never on the basis of user lock-in. In the latter, the platform vendor has all the power, you can only coexist with them on their terms, and they can change the terms at any time. This has always been true in my experience. The way we work as equals is we agree on an interchange format. I have committed to supporting
OPML in all my products. So they can all be replaced. And so can yours, if you make it easy for users to migrate, and when you do that you also open the door for people to create products that plug into yours without having to replace yours. We compete as equals. We compete to please users. We are free to build on each others' work. That's the kind of discipline I like as a developer.
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Journalism did their part in screwing up the 2016 election. No contrition, they’ve never done an exposé, and they have the gall to be sarcastic. I’m no fan of Facebook, but journalism is actually making them sympathetic.
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- I have taken the feature out of the first public release of Drummer. #
- It turned out it was a mistake to try something so ambitious so late in the game. We'll come back to it in a due time. #
- This happens sometimes, I wish it hadn't happened in view of the testers.#
- They all have been wonderful, enthusiastic, and understanding. #
- Onward! 😄#
- I judge journalism in the aggregate. #
- In other words, I say "journalism" did this or that.#
- I do it that way for a number of reasons.#
- They do act as a unit. You'll see basically the same stories on all websites and cable news stations. They often interview each other, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. #
- To balance the way they treat online writers. They talk about us in the aggregate too. #
- And to balance the way they view Facebook, with 2.7 billion users, they only consider one user when they talk about Facebook, as if we all are just Zuck-clones. I made a list of all the things Facebook is, and journalism rarely considers anything but the personality of one person when talking about "Facebook." Not that they really have any insight into his personality, btw. #
- To tell journalism, to the extent that I can, how unthinking and automaton-like they are. There will come a day when computers do what they do, because they use so little of the intellect they certainly have. #
The Dems should run ads saying how much the average retirement account will go down if the Repubs crash America's credit. Make it concrete. Estimate how the market will react. Now is the time to run those ads. If the campaigns didn't go to sleep between elections...
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As an experiment, I created a
blog post out of a tweet stream, with no editing. Copy/paste.
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I remember what I was doing at 24 and it wasn't
dying of a completely and easily preventable disease.
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Yesterday's
Now & Then podcast, about the history of NYC, was the first
episode that was disappointing. At one point Heather Cox Richardson said, almost proudly, that the only thing she knows about NYC is the line in the song
New York, New York "If you can make it there you can make it anywhere." This is one of my big problems with podcasts, the thing that tunes me out, when people speak from a position of false expertise. They're having a grand time, while I (the listener) am deciding whether or not to cut them off, based on the probability that they'll ever say anything interesting before the end. Yesterday I cut them off and listened to music for the second half of my ride. It's the same reason I can't watch any MSNBC show for more than 3 minutes. They're filling the air, meantime I know there are things going on they should be informing me of, and add to things my mind can think about. Okay so N&T; had a bad episode, not the end of the world, the other most recent episodes are totally worth listening to, I highly recommend them, and I will keep listening in the hope that the NYC episode was just a bad idea they followed through on instead of canning.
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We are now all complete newbies when it comes to understanding how networks can be used to spread misinformation. We might look back in a few years and realize that our first line of defense was Facebook, Inc. Maybe tearing them down is like the press tearing down HRC in 2016. I don't trust their judgement on this stuff, do you?
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The debt limit vote is filibusterable you say? Perfect time to nuke the filibuster.
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- If only we had journalism covering itself we'd probably learn they've been doing the exact same thing since the dawn of journalism. This is a big defect in our system, no one is watching journalism. (link)#
- For example, what do you think the Pulitzer Prize is, other than a bunch of ads they do about journalism every year. No doubt the awards are highly politicized, and stories looking too deeply into corrupt journalism probably don't stand much chance of getting an award.#
- Until there's some way for journalism's corruption to be exposed, why would any intelligent person think there's anything but corruption in journalism? In an Occam's Razor sort of way. I'm watching The Wire, about to start Season 5, btw, if you know what that's about. ;-)#
- There's this great scene at the end of Season 4, with Bodie and McNulty on a park bench. Bodie is talking about how fucked up the bosses are in the drug mob in Baltimore. It sounds just like what McNulty would say about the police department. That's the point.#
- Here's the scene with Bodie and McNulty. (link)#
Om Malik: "In increments the civilization is built. In haste it is dismantled." A concise description of my experience in tech, I gather Om sees it that way too. We labor for years, often lifetimes, to build a community of software and users, and it's all gone in an instant, replaced by people who didn't take the time to understand what was learned, wanted to do it again, themselves. It's much more honorable, imho -- to use the best of what's already been done, as much as possible. That way you don't have to always start over. Another wise
man once said be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.
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1996: "How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity."
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Twitter Pro probably seems like a weird idea. Could there be
professional Twitter users? There are. It's a writer's platform. The name they chose makes such an idea uncomfortable, perhaps. But it's a for real idea.
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The next round of changes in
Drummer will be about organizing tweets, using Twitter as a source for your writing work. Here's the use-case. You're out and about, and get an idea that belongs on the to-do list for your latest project. Open up Twitter, and post a note about it. When you get back to your desktop the note will already be in a Drummer outline, ready for you to act on it. It doesn't matter what kind of writer you are, whether you write for yourself, as a note-taker, if you write docs, research, news reporting, a blog, or a great novel. If you're a writer and and a steady user of Twitter, and interested in
tools for thought and outliners, I'd like to add you to the Drummer test group in a few days because I want to groom the product to your use of it. Send me an email, let me know if this interests you and we'll get you on board soon.
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All kinds of "twitterpro" names are
available, somewhat amazingly. I've learned to control my domain name buying fetish, somewhat. I bought
drummer.land recently. I found myself using that term when writing docs. I had to have it. Anyway. My name is Dave and I'm a domain name buying addict.
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Omar Little is the most likeable character on
The Wire.
Marlo Stanfield is the coldest. For some reason I think of Marlo as
Matt Mullenweg. I know that's weird. Matt is a very nice fellow. But I guess the parallel is that I am
Avon Barksdale to his Marlo Stanfield? The Wire is good, but it's
Season 1 that's great. The remaining four seasons kind of coast a little after the spectacular creative success of the first.
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One thing that makes The Wire so watchable is the huge number of fully developed characters interacting with each other.
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As summer winds down (tomorrow is the last day), I chose to listen to music instead of a podcasts on today's bike ride. I am loaded up with new ways of thinking from having gone through the archive of the
Now & Then podcast. If you find your podcast fare is repetitive or shallow, dive into that podcast. It's a great college course in the history behind current affairs. Anyway, I've loaded up my
iPhone SE, a very middle-class iPhone thank you, with lots of music history, and set it to shuffle the songs. The songs of my childhood. As this summer winds down, it feels like a metaphor for the summer of my own life winding down. The feelings from childhood that I re-experience with the music were the "other side" of the experiences of adulthood which is now passing just like summer. The dreams of a child were of the future, full of possibilities, are now balanced by the regrets of an old man. I'm doing my best to stay fit, but it gets harder every year. This fall, esp because the pandemic is now going into its
third winter, has a grim feel to it. I know winter can be beautiful in the Hudson Valley. But this winter, unlike recent past winters, there's a sense of dread that hasn't been there before.
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Lovely day. The kind of day that makes California living so nice, except this is the
Hudson Valley.
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Programming lesson still being re-learned after 46 years of programming: If your
program behaves like it has an infinite loop, consider the possibility that it actually has an infinite loop.
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Another programming lesson I haven't forgotten. It's amazing how many bugs that you spend hours not finding at the end of the day are found first thing the next day.
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I love house-shopping on Zillow, like a lot of people do. It's fun to dream about living in one place or another. This
house in Great Barrington would be fantastic for a family, as a country home perhaps, or a place to live in the age of telecommuting.
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Added an item to
yesterday's list of things Facebook is. "All the content -- video, images, posts, comments, live events, current and past."
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Frank Mitloehner: "It’s been two decades since British Petroleum and the marketing agency then named Ogilvy & Mather deceived lots and lots of unwitting Americans into believing the hands of fossil fuel companies are clean of contributing to climate change through imaginative messaging. To this day, their marketing campaign continues to be highly effective in getting the public to take on the weighty responsibility of halting climate change. We’ve cut back on meat, upped our recycling game and made the creative campaign’s key phrase – 'carbon footprint' – part of our vernacular. All in an attempt to make a positive difference – and yes, to clear our consciences.
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BTW, if you get
Scripting News via email, you are welcome to forward copies to friends. There's a subscribe link at the bottom of every email. And don't worry they can't unsubscribe on your behalf.
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A bee flew into my mouth while I was riding my bike today. I quickly swatted it out of there, but I got stung anyway. That was 1/2 hour ago, and the swelling went down quickly. Whew good thing I didn't inhale the little fucker.
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Everything we think is a new low in American governance is far from it. We were taught a lot of crap in school. The people whose egos were being protected are all long-dead. Was it worth it? No, of course not. It would have been much better if they taught the unvarnished truth.
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I thought this would make an interesting
screen shot. Each tab is an outline I have open in
Drummer all the time. Every idea can be slotted into each of these. And sometimes they move from one to the other as they get more "done." Most but not all are calendar structured. People often ask how I use outliners, this is at one level, the answer.
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- Here's the list. #
- Mark Zuckerberg. #
- A public corporation.#
- 60K employees. #
- Servers, software, other tech.#
- An advertising platform.#
- A user community.#
- Connections to the rest of the web.#
- All the content -- video, images, posts, comments, live events, current and past.#
- When journalism refers to "Facebook" I don't think they're ever clear on which Facebook they're talking about.#
- Each of the different Facebooks are limited by the others. #
- But if you are aware of all the different things "Facebook" is, their stories are usually mush. #
- I have no idea how many times I've watched The Wire from beginning to end, but it's probably more than five. The last time I remember watching it was in 2010 when I just moved to NYC. I was living in the West Village, and had an active social life, and The Wire was something nice to do calmly, alone, just to get absorbed by a fictitious yet very familiar culture, again. Like coming home in a way.#
- That's the thing about all good series that achieve suspension of disbelief, you feel like you're in the story, you're part of the family. And The Wire with five seasons of 13 shows each, each show an hour, with all the characters and their stories, and relationships, makes for very absorbing reality-shifting and an emotionally satisfying experience. #
- Sometimes I know what's coming, and amazingly, sometimes I've forgotten. But some big events, you remember, and experience them in full fidelity now, as you did the first time. #
- Also if I recall correctly the first seasons were only available in low-rez, they came out before 4K, but somehow they've upgraded the source material and it's all up state of the art, at least to my eyes, which aren't the strongest.#
- Anyway, I'm toward the end of season 2. Not even close to half way through. Looking forward to the end of the day when I might watch a couple of epsiodes.#
- And get this, while I'm working through The Wire, I can't watch cable news. It's just too sad, slow, repetitive and just wrong. On one hand you see how great we can be as story-tellers, and the stories told on MSNBC and CNN aren't stories at all. The characters say nothing. Even the ones with reputations for saying a lot. There's absolutely no human connection. And you can see that the things they're saying are repeats, just like watching The Wire for the 5th or 10th time, but there's never a question about what the characters might say or do, it's always exactly the same. Yet it's supposed to be The News which would lead you to believe their intention is to say new things. #
- I keep asking the question -- does news have to be as bad as it is? Could imagination bet part of it, curiosity, intellect, depth of knowledge about something other than politics or law? Maybe this is just what happens when you become older and more experienced than everyone on the news. They all seem flat and boring, and just plain stupid, bored with their jobs, but keeping the seat warm. But does it have to be this way?#
- I turned off Maddow last night as she was reporting a leak of software for elections. She left out the vital part of the story, was this the first time the software had leaked? If not, all it tells you is the people who are doing the "recount" in Arizona are bad people. This is not news. If they were new leaks, I doubt I'd be hearing about it first on Maddow.#
- Come to think of it for all their breathess breaking stories, I can't remember Maddow ever cited by another news org as the source of a major story. Yet they often present their work as such.#
- And the dishonesty when it comes to tech reporting, gives me an idea of how dishonest their other reporting must be. #
It seems to me if there aren’t enough hospital beds, unvaccinated Covid-19 patients should be the first denied service.
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Something to think about. While we're debating all kinds of things, so far 4.5 million have killed by Covid in the last two years. In four years, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
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Frank X Shaw: "Stress dream last night that my old guitar required two factor authentication to use and the only way to turn it on was to accurately play six chords assigned by the app. I kept messing up."
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How long after your parents die should they still be in your dreams?
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Pet peeve: People who are too frazzled to read an email carefully enough to correctly determine its meaning, even though the words are simple and direct. I've done this myself. And when I realize I've done it, I feel like crap.
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- Saw a report on the news that Facebook is evil because they enhance pictures on Instagram. A really thin story because so many things other than Facebook damage people's self-perception based on ridiculous standards of appearance. #
- CNN does it, for sure in huge ways. The anchor reporting the story is a beautful woman, but probably not quite as beautiful has her makeup, hair and lighting people make her seem.#
- I wish they were required to have a constant critic in a window in the upper right corner of the screen, pointing out these hypocrisies.#
Brianna Keilar
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- PS: I will always admire Keilar for how she interviewed Michael Cohen, before he was famous. If you haven't seen it, you might love it. It's very different from the usual TV news fare. #
Thinking about the extent that Boomers are held responsible for where we're at, I still think that's nuts, the more I learn about slavery and how the Civil War is still going on, that's what we are fighting about in the US, that's why we can't get our shit together. We haven't accepted a very large part of our population, people who are fully entitled American citizens. Then I wondered about all the post-boomer generations that blame us. I wonder if they voted in every election they were entitled to vote in. What are the percentages of participation in democracy among the generations. I don't know if the idea of the vote as a sacred right is a Boomer thing, or what. I know my parents had the participation bug. I got it from them, I'm sure. But if you didn't vote, I think it's hard to blame others. My friend NakedJen has a wonderful slogan for this. You can fake caring, but you can't fake showing up. ❤️
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One reason I want Twitter to get rid of the character limit is so I no longer have to say "I wrote a tweet." I have never liked the idea of writing tweets. Tweeting is weird and joke-like, self-deprecating, which I don't mind, but please not about writing. Writing is a religion, not something I joke about.
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Today is one of those rare days where I have very little to say on the blog. I'm still working my way back through the
Now & Then podcasts, and
The Wire (still in season 1) and of course working every day on
Drummer, with the help of the test group.
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Don't assume they wanted advice.
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I'm
re-watching The Wire, after the
death of
Michael K Williams, the actor who played
Omar. He was right about
type-casting. His one great role was Omar. Once you get a part that good, and play it so well, and everyone else is that good, you just don't get to do that twice.
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- Chrome has done something insidious to break the web a little more. They do this so often, breaking the web seems to be Google's business model. #
- Here's what they changed. #
- If you type a domain name into the address bar of the browser, the protocol is hidden. This isn't new, or particularly bad, until they made the next change.#
- Now instead of automatically generating http as the protocol in the URL, they generate https. #
- So sites that are running fine appear to be broken. #
- It happened on a placeholder site to me just now. I was fooled, I immediately thought a server had gone down, and started looking for the outage. Then I was reminded of this trickery Google is doing. I was reminded of how much I hate what Google is doing to the web. They're fighting with me, and weakening the web in a way they have no right to. My site is a perfectly functional web site. It's just a placeholder. No one needs to worry about a "man in the middle" interference. There are no ads on this site. I don't know how else to say it. My choice of protocols is none of Google's business. #
- That's basically a protection racket. If mobsters were doing it. "Nice little website you have there, be a shame if people couldn't reach it because Google broke the web.#
The other night I was bored and noticed that
The Wire was on HBO, so I watched one episode. Then another. And another. Later I started at Episode 1. I don't know how many times I've watched
The Wire. I'm almost at a point where I can recite the lines along with the actors. I've yet to see a flaw in this show, there's nothing I don't follow with rapt attention. I can't believe there are people who haven't seen it. It's as I imagine Shakespeare was in his day.
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Public Folder is an app I put together after Dropbox stopped supporting a public folder. It's too important a feature to live without.
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Everyone but silo-builders wins if our products interop.
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Drummer has a feature called the
glossary, it's been part of every outliner I have done since the mid-90s. It's a very simple idea. A table that associates terms with text. If I use one of the terms in my writing, when it's published, the term is replaced with the text. We use
OPML to represent the glossaries. Here's my
personal glossary. I wish every place I type text could be configured to use my glossary, so where ever I go I can use my terms. It would also be great to configure my searches to use these terms too, so Google for example would know what I am referring to when I type the name of one of my own products.
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Braintrust query: I want to understand the extended Markdown some outliners use. If you use one of them, you can help.
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