Spent most of the day working on
timezones for non-American blogs. Still more to do, tomorrow.
#
I was chatting with Scoble on Facebook at wrote this: There's this great line in Succession where the father's wife says to one of his kids "he built you a playground and you think it's the world" -- that's Silicon Valley. It's a tiny little place that thinks it's everything when in fact it's a bunch of factories filled with grunts, and due to the pandemic it's not even that anymore.
#
Hopefully at some point President Biden and his administration will turn their full attention to preventing the collapse of America's political system.
#
I ordered a new
Tesla Model 3 today. It's blue. Arrives in December. I haven't been as excited about a new toy in a long time.
#
Enes Kanter, an NBA player for the Boston Celtics, wrote a
tweet saying the leader of China is a "brutal dictator." And of course China is
shitting its pants. This is a big problem. They don't understand that there's a line they're not allowed to cross. In the US, Kanter has a right to his opinion. And the leader of China
is a brutal dictator. And even if there's some question about it, Kanter is allowed to say what he thinks. This is a similar problem to the one they're having at Netflix with Dave Chappelle's show which I have not watched. I find him incredibly offensive. I'd love to have a private conversation with him where I ask what he's trying to accomplish. I find his stories humiliating. Is there some lesson I'm supposed to learn? If so, could we skip to that part. Anyway, I won't watch him.
Employees at Netflix were offended too, and they want Netflix to remove him. That's just as wrong as what China is doing to pressure the NBA about Kanter. One more. The NYT fucked up when they fired
Donald McNeil. I think even the assholes who forced him out would agree, as their coverage of Covid is now bullshit, where before McNeil was canned, it was stellar. They had no place trying to control what appears in the NYT. They just work there. It's a platform for speech, I think even the most jaded and cynical reporter at the NYT would agree with that. And just because you get a paycheck from the NYT, that doesn't empower you to control other people's speech, same as China and Netflix. I wrote
yesterday that when Zuck rolls out his new thing next week, we'll find out if the journalists properly understand their role. There will be no fake news yet on their new platform for them to complain about. But I guarantee you it will restrict speech in an effort to appease the journalists. Will they see this, and call bullshit? Or will their vanity and narcissism prevail. Obviously they don't care about our speech, but will they mind being so visible about not honoring it?
#
I'm watching
Succession from the beginning, just to see how all the michegas got started. Seeing the first appearances of all the characters. The special relationship with
Roman and Gerri is flirtatious from the first meeting. Cousin Greg plays a starring role in the first few episodes. And my friend
Nick Denton is in the show, via proxy, only this version of Denton gets revenge over the rich capitalists who were tormenting him (no spoilers beyond that). Season 3 of Succession started last Sunday, it's just getting better all the time. One of the best TV series ever.
#
How could a court decision on abortion not be political? It's as silly as saying you could go swimming without being immersed in water, or breathe in a vacuum. It's as ridiculous as the
view from nowhere in
journalism.
#
I spent most of today
grabbing bits of docs from the
change notes outline for Drummer, while it was in development, and merging it with the already-existing docs. I can see we're going to need a new structure, because people aren't finding a lot of it, and there's more coming. Most of the newly public stuff is on the
FAQs page.
💥#
- A rambling thread from this morning that somehow fits together.#
- When people say they love RSS, it's not specifically RSS that they love imho, it's the open format, no-lock-in philosophy of software development. If your data can move around the net effortlessly, that's what you love, and that's what you give up when you use a silo. #
- One thing you can be sure of, when Zuck announces his new Zuckerverse thing, it'll be locked up and owned by him and his stockholders. #
- He can't pay all those employees if you're free to move out of his universe any time you want.#
- There will be lots of eye candy, but he has the only keys to the doors.#
- Reminds me of a story. In 1980 i went on vacation to Jamaica. #
- In the cab from Montego Bay to Negril, the driver pointed out a town with lots of new modern-looking shacks. #
- He said they were a gift from Cuba. #
- They had front doors, but no back doors. #
- Think about it. ;-)#
- I've been very critical of the way journalism covers Facebook, because they miss the human freedom part of the story, which is just as important as the fake news part. But of course journalism is only concerned with the freedom of journalists, not our freedom. In fact journalism would probably prefer if we had no means to speak publicly, if we just got our ideas from them. Only thing is they don't have any ideas. #
- I'm absolutely 100 percent sure that when they get a chance to kill Zuck's new invention, they will ignore (or miss) the controls over our freedom in his new world. #
- I'm sure it'll be designed to make the journos happy. #
- Whether they buy it or not, that's another question. 🚀#
A
longish podcast about the origins of blogging in the mid-90s and a lot more, and why it's time to return to the roots. We couldn't trust journalism then, and nothing has changed, and today the stakes are much higher. And there are reasons they don't tell the truth in journalism. It's the same reason no one got fired for
buying IBM.
#
Trump is the broken clock that's right twice a day. The people who are gushing about
Powell are wrong. He owns the Iraq war. It was on his say-so that we accepted what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice were saying. He was their credibility.
#
I hear
Dems might lose in Virginia because of voter apathy. Right now the big issues are abortion, COVID, climate and fascism. That’s a pretty good set of issues. Run some freaking ads on social media. Never stop campaigning, every day of every year.
#
I was pretty sure the Dodgers would crush the Braves, but wow, the Braves are up 2-0. Gotta love it. I'm sorry if you're a Dodgers fan, but I was born in Brooklyn and people such as myself don't forget. I also remember when
Chase Utley broke the leg of the Mets shortstop during the 2015 playoffs. I also remember when I sat in scalped seats during the World Series
in 1988, in the Dodgers wives' section and they tried to get us thrown out for rooting for the A's who won, btw. I really feel justified in hating the Dodgers, but honestly even if I wasn't, I would still hate them.
💥#
Meanwhile the NBA season starts tomorrow with a
game between last year's champion, the Milwaukee Bucks, and a much-hyped superteam, the Brooklyn Nets. I will be rooting for the Bucks. Superteams suck.
#
- Just before Drummer shipped I sent an email to Manton Reece, the developer and runner of micro.blog, asking if he was interested in being the first blogging system to hook up with Drummer via the OPML bridge. The same interface we use in Drummer to connect to Old School. #
- Well here it is. He works fast. 🚀#
- Just watched the video -- I love how he did it. Beautiful. #
- Amazing how people are kvelling over Colin Powell.#
- His speech at the UN was chilling, implying but not directly saying that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was getting ready to use them, and we had no choice but to go to war with him.#
- It was a lie.#
- No one would have believed Cheney, Rumsfeld or Rice. They got the only person in the Bush administration who had credibility. If Powell was willing to say this, it must be true, we had to act. #
- It was a lie. A way to transfer wealth from the US Treasury to the war industry.#
- When people act naive as they do horrific things, seriously -- he knew what he was doing. Powell wasn't a tool, we were the tools. He abused our trust. And in death he doesn't deserve the acclaim he's getting. Too many people died because of his lie.#
I think you have to be very young and very healthy to be medication-averse. There are some people who make it to old age without needing medical care. My mother was one of those people, she didn't get sick until she was in her 80s. Me, on the other hand, I would have died before I was 10 if it wasn't for health care and antibiotics. I had a ruptured appendix, mis-diagnosed by a doctor as a stomach ache. Okay so medicine fucks up, a lot. I have limited vision because two eye doctors gave me bad advice and did surgery, the first fucked my left eye and the second made it worse. My hearing is blown in my left ear, because a doctor used a device to clear out earwax that damaged my eardrum. So now loud noise, including loud music, makes my head vibrate in an unpleasant way. Too bad, I used to love loud music.
But I am alive. My life having been saved twice by medicine now. So when medicine says "take this vaccine it'll make you safer against a horrible disease" -- I take it. Gladly. Why? Because I get how medicine works to an extent and am appreciative for the life I would not have had were it not for medicine.
#
Drummer is really going. I'm trying to scope out in my mind now where I want it to go. With all the programmers around now, and maybe more on the way, I'm thinking bigger in terms of open source projects that could spin out of Drummer.
#
In the back of my mind is the question of could we get a Linux version of
Frontier going. That would send this project into the stratosphere, imho. Even after a year's work, Drummer is still a shadow of Frontier, which I use as my development platform for all of this. That's how I'm so productive. Invest as much time in tools as you do in product, and some years, invest all your time in tools. BTW, when I say a Linux version -- I mean an exact clone. The benchmark is whether it runs my software, not that it's a cool project. With these things it's the base of apps that matters. I think the language designers at big companies have lost the tune. The apps are what matters. That's why I program in JavaScript -- it's where all the code is. And that's why projects like
Deno (A different arrangement of N O D and E) are such a bad idea. And deprecating the
request verb? Only the most commonly called function the whole fricking language. Deprecated!! Someone has lost their sense of what matters. It's as if one day they decided the new
Tappan Zee Bridge is too cool to drive cars over, so we'll require people to convert their cars so that the wheels are inside and the seats are outside. Always going backward is a good way to never get anywhere. BTW the Tappan Zee Bridge Is a beautiful bridge. It carries exactly the same traffic the old one did.
#
The
old Tappan Zee Bridge and the
new one.
#
I'm doing most of my writing these days in Drummer Land, but it's nice to remember that things I want to write about that don't belong there, still have a home, here.
#
Car drivers suck. I usually ride my bike on the right edge of the road, making it easy for cars to pass. But if I have to make a left, I move left, and if a car approaches behind me, they have to momentarily slow. They always honk. I never carry a gun, but sometimes I wish I did (not really).
#
I hope
Manchin is getting paid more than $500K per year to sell out our last chance at having a planet that supports human life.
#
I have a thing. If they're
forecasting rain, showers or even a thunderstorm, and it's not raining when I want to go out for a ride, I go out anyway. Worst that can happen is I get soaked, I reason. And I usually make it home in time. And often as soon as I walk in the door it starts to pour. That's exactly what happened today. I'm feeling very oxygenated and strong, writing this post in my bike clothes, and outside it's pouring cats and dogs. Amazing.
#
We know what we have to do -- we should be campaigning like everything is at stake (it is) instead we're hearing
weak statements like this. It's not his fault, btw -- the national Democrats are looking in the wrong direction. I don't know how they can do it, but they are. Where is the Lincoln Project, why aren't they turning out
ads like this, every day, about abortion rights? This is the big problem that the Democrats keep making. To them campaigns are about elections, but they're really about everything, 365 days a year. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops.
#
I've been doing a lot of support this last week. Noted that a lot of times the problem is web caching. Learn how to get your browser to do a
hard reload. Always try that first. Once you have that mastered, it's amazing how much time you'll save.
#
The P&J; Coffee Shop, San Francisco.
#
The Giants lost. I'm so sorry. I knew however that it would end in an awful way when the batter, with two out in the bottom of the 9th with a runner on first, the
Dodgers leading by one in what was the last game of the season for one of these teams, was
Wilmer Flores. Mets fans remember him and love him like a son, because the Mets broke his heart and he didn't hide his feelings. So they didn't trade him in 2015 when the Mets went on to win the National League pennant, Flores was the
team mascot, but they eventually did let him go, and he was on the forever to be remembered as the ill-fated Giants of 2021. When he stepped into the batter's box late last night I knew it would not end well. It didn't. In a very
unsatisfactory way. Which I think was inevitable, probably the instant the Giants signed him. He is a man of great consequence.
#
A friend asked if it was true that Spotify now owns podcasting. They read something in
Wired that said they did. They're idiots. Or trying to get clicks. Or maybe they're idiots
and they're trying to get clicks. Anyway -- no, Spotify does not own podcasting. As long as people say "subscribe where ever you get your podcasts" at the end of their podcast you have nothing to worry about. I'm not even going to link to the Wired article.
#
- An iOS and Android app. #
- It can manage multiple notes. They are simple things, simple styling, multiple paragraphs per item. Of course Markdown. #
- It stays in sync with something that's accessible over the web, kind of like an RSS feed just for me. #
- Then I tell Drummer, Roam, whatever -- where to hook into it. And it appears in my writing world as a flat outline. I can edit in both places. So I can put a note from my desktop into this mobile world, and write something while I'm out and about that hooks into my larger writing world. #
- Super important: Not part of Apple or Dropbox or whatever's world. Then I would have to go through them to get my own writing, and eventually they will break me. #
- It's amazing how broken this shit is now. I'm almost broken in Apple's world. And Dropbox blew up what we were doing a few years back. We're about to get evicted by Chrome. But Linux, RSS, OPML and Markdown keep chugging along. And Twitter too btw. They've actually been very good, even though the hype says otherwise. #
See today's updates on the
Drummer blog. I think we have the initial fires taken care of. Knock wood, praise Murphy, I am not a lawyer. Time to take a step back, catch my breath and figure out what the next steps are. In the meantime I'll be rooting for the Giants tonight.
#
Time for the loser to STFU.
#
I've had
this song in my head all day. So that makes it the song of the day I guess.
#
I was talking with my friend
Dave Jacobs last night and we got around to what should be done with
Facebook. The only thing to do when a tech company gets too big, is to force them to unbundle.
Bundling is how their size becomes a problem for us. So, for example,
Google owning the dominant search engine and the dominant browser means they're inevitably going to turn the web into a perfect way to continue to own search. That's all that's going to matter to them. But the web has more to do. Google doesn't care. Facebook has also been successful at strangling the open web, forcing all writing on the net to flow through them. Or at least keeping it from flowing outside of them. If Facebook's
fat ass wasn't squatting over the web, there would be a lot more movement. That might not solve the problem of Nazis ruining the world, but at least it gives the rest of us a chance to organize and solve the other vexing problems we have to deal with. RIght now all we're tasked with doing is making Zuck even richer, and even Zuck must be bored with that by now. The task for FB is to make it easy for the rest of us to run our own FB's and stay in touch with the people who use his FB. That's what happens when you get as big as they are. And it's far from an unsolvable problem. In fact they already have all the software written.
#
To people who wanted to use a custom domain for their
Drummer blogs, we now have an
answer. There's a new head-level attribute for your blog.opml file that tells the CMS where the links should point. It works on my
test blog for the clueless newbie.
#
It's hard to imagine approval rating means anything in 2021. Even if you don't approve of Biden, are you really going to vote for Trump? It seems that even the Dems could market that you're better off not electing Hitler.
#
One of the saddest things I've ever heard is Jeremy Lin saying "I think the NBA has given up on me." I would say to him, they had reasons to give up on you when you were 18 and every year since then. That's the way the world works. Assholes climb the ladder, and then think they can stop listening.
#
- An asshole NYT columnist once asked if I was too old to understand the latest technology. I was so offended, I didn't think to just answer the question.#
- The answer is unknowable. I think I understand a lot about tech, because I've spent my entire professional life trying to. I also have created some of the technology that young people feel so proud of understanding better than older people. I think I understand podcasting, for example, as well as any young-un.#
- Once when I was a kid, commuting to high school in the Bronx from Queens, I was struck by all the apartment houses whose windows faced the 4 train. Mile after mile. Countless windows facing the train. And behind them more buildings and more windows. #
- Behind every window was a family, with all their challenges, accomplishments, pride, love, beliefs, bad habits, histories, everything. It gave me an idea, how could you possibly think you understand all that's going on. #
- Now, 50 years later, I think the thing is to be open to learning from other people's experiences, and don't presume you understand anything better than anyone else, because when you do that, you close yourself off to learning from them.#
- I would say to that NYT asshole that it's the disease of your profession to think you don't have to listen anymore. It's also the disease of programmers, doctors, professors, everyone who gets somewhere in life, to think they've arrived at the top and they have a full understanding of everything they need to understand. That asshole could learn a lot from an asshole like me. All those years, he didn't. And that's not just his problem, because so many people listen to him, it's our problem too. Because he's not as informed imho as he could be. .#
- I got an email last night that said the person felt I had been hypocritical in using Twitter for identity for Drummer.#
- Obviously, I don't think I was hypocritical. #
- I use Twitter for identity because they have a nice API that scales, and they have kept it open for this kind of use for many years. In all that time, they didn't change their mind because of new management, didn't deprecate anything, it just keeps running reliably.#
- Are you sharing some information with Twitter? Yes, a little, but not as much as you might think. They certainly never see your outlines. They don't know how many times you log in, that information doesn't pass through to them.#
- We don't keep any information on that ourselves. I don't care. I'm not in any business at all, and certainly not in the business of knowing how much you do whatever you do.#
- They don't know your location, btw -- if they know a location, it's the location of the server, which is at Digital Ocean. I'm not even sure where they keep their servers. That information it seems to me is of no value.#
- If you don't want them to know anything about you -- just create a fake account for this purpose. #
- Also I want to build features around Twitter. It's a fact of life. It's there. It ain't going anywhere. If I chose not to use it for identity it wouldn't hurt them one bit. I'd have to write an identity server myself and I already have plenty of things to do trying to keep Drummer users happy.#
- Net-net -- I don't see a problem here. 😀#
I’ve called myself a developer, media hacker, showrunner, programmer, never a coder (ugh), maker of software snacks and shitty software (with bugs). Now I’m thinking of calling myself a software factor.
#
This
quote, which is part of what I wrote for The Future of Text, kind of says it all, everything I've discovered and built on in my career. I guess it's the answer to the question: "What's possible with computers that most people don't know about." They posted this in a
tweet at the same time I was
posting one about how we fixed the big problem with JavaScript in
Drummer. I love JavaScript because it's the closest thing we have to a universal language. We have
Marc Andreessen to thank for that (no sarcasm!). But there's no reason JS has to be hobbled by
callback hell,
promises,
async/await, or whatever new hack they think up next. It's not hard to factor all that out. Every other language does it. There is absolutely no reason JavaScript has to leave all that mess visible to the programmer who wants it hidden. We proved that in
Drummer. Now our implementation may not be fully baked, and at least one JS guru thinks it may be too slow, all that can be fixed. I want to write straight-line code and let the runtime handle the synchronization. That's worth trading off some speed for, but I don't see why it should require that. And it's the way comptuers are
supposed to work, imho. If I didn't say anything most devs probably wouldn't even notice it's there, they still might not, that's how
natural it feels.
🚀#
Observed in a middle-of-the-night
tweet: Drummer is working. It’s possible finally we’re moving beyond blogging as a big production. Writing publicly can be fluid, fast. And not locked in a silo.
#
A frequently asked question -- where is
Drummer and how much does it cost? Hopefully the
link answers the first question. The
About page answers the second. "You can use Drummer at no cost." Further: "Much of the software is open source." Why is it so inexpensive and will it always be that way? I don't have big plans to take over the universe. I just want to make sure that outlining, web scripting and easy, fluid blogging are not lost arts. I have been very lucky in my career, so at this point, money, at least the kind of money it takes to operate Drummer, is not an issue. So let's have fun and see where it takes us!
💥#
The blog is an HTML rendering of the
Change Notes outline. That link opens in
Drummer, even if you're not logged in, and updates when there are new features or fixes. I would be honored if you leave that outline open in Drummer while you do your work, that way I can instantly inform you of new stuff. The file's icon will turn to green when there's news. It's the best channel I've had as a developer to users of my product. We've been using it in the Drummer test community. It really works. Instantly updating outlines are called
instant outlines, btw.
#
Today is the 27th anniversary of this blog. To celebrate, I'm opening up
Drummer to the world. I hope you love it as much as I do.
❤️ #
And now, we can start talking about Drummer in concrete terms. Finally. The first thing you should try in Drummer is to write a few blog posts. Follow the first part of the
Blogging howto, do the Hello World post. Then write some more, about whatever you like. Learn how to write publicly in Drummer first, in other words. It's the best demo we have right now, today, in Oct 2021, of the power of outlines for public writing.
#
Another note and then I'll wait till tomorrow. In this case the Docs are a big part of the product. Back in February, I decided this time, rather than leave the docs as an afterthought, or hire someone else to write them, I would do it myself. For a couple of reasons. This could be the last big product ship I do in my career. Docs were always treated as an afterthought. I want to try, just once, making it not an afterthought. To let the docs have enough time to become something I'm proud of, and something I can invest more time in, like the software, after we ship. Instead of staying away from them, I wanted to reach in, and do it up. As a result I've done enough writing for a book this year, you'll see it not only in the docs linked into the sidebar of the docs pages, but also in the
DocServer pages for each of the built-in scripting verbs. Lots and lots more to say.
#
If you have a question about Drummer,
this is where it goes.
#
I'm shopping for a refrigerator. I've spent some time with various web interfaces, on Home Depot, Consumer Reports, Loew's, Best Buy, Amazon. They're all pretty bad, and could make a simple improvement that would completely eclipse the others. Here's the idea. I have a fixed space to put a fridge, and it's unusually narrow. I wish the designer of the house had left more space but it is what it is. Now, they make fridges in this shape, but they don't always have them in stock, esp now, when the supply chain is so disrupted. Here's the feature, it's a very Doc Searls-like thing, btw. I want to say hey Home Depot, this is the space I have. Let me know when you have a fridge I can buy that can be delivered within a couple of weeks. Instead they send me links to their website for refrigerators (at least they remembered that I'm shopping for one, so has Amazon) but they make me start over from scratch every time. That really sucks. Esp if they, at the moment, have a fridge that fits my very easy requirements. It would also be good for energy savings, because my current fridge is not running efficiently at all.
#
- My longtime friend and sometime collaborator Andrew Shell is part of a program to write 30 posts in 30 days. Yesterday he wrote a piece about his career, and I got an idea for him, that I initially posted in a comment on Facebook, but wanted to include here. #
- Andrew -- i had an idea for you. #
- First imho it would be a shame to ignore all the experience you have with software, both as a developer and a user.#
- You could do something great by focusing on the interface between users and developers. A lot has been done about how programmers can be more effective when they listen to users (agile), but as far as I know nothing about the other direction -- how users can learn to communicate more effectively with devs to get what they want and to influence the future.#
- It's a branch off what I keep coming back to -- we don't teach how to write great bug reports. It can be an incredible literary form, different from any other and they can be very human, because imho it's all about empathy. The user wants the dev to be empathetic with them, and the devs want empathy too, not just because it's more economical, but because it's because programmers are people too! A fact sometimes overlooked, perhaps. #
- Anyway, best of luck with your exploration Andrew.#
- BTW, as far as I know Andrew is posting these ideas on FB and Twitter, as screen shots, but I don't see where they're posted on the web. If they are, I'll add a link here. 😄#
Google is apparently preparing to re-enter the market for
RSS readers. Before they do, shouldn’t they explain why they dumped RSS, hurting the cause enormously, and why anyone should trust them now. If you're on Twitter please
RT so users understand, they are not our friends.
#
- I recorded a 24 minute podcast about what's going on.#
- I'm taking notes on changes, but not publishing them now, rather I'll post them all at once when it's time to open up.#
- I talk about some of those changes in the podcast. #
- Keep on truckin! ;-)#
- #
- PS: I considered how we did the online docs for Frontier when doing Drummer's.#
Maybe other devs can make software without users, but not me. I need the feedback. I imagine it's like being a musician playing on a stage with no audience. Two users, in particular, have made the greatest contribution, Anton Zuiker and Ken Smith. Neither are devs. Anton works at
Duke University as a research communication specialist. Ken is an
English professor at Indiana University. Both are bloggers, both are intelligent, persevere, and put up with my demands (ahem). I need good bug reports, and they are learning, and the bugs are being fixed, and some have been quite vexing, as I've rewritten major parts of Drummer. I know it's been frustrating at times for them. I hope this is just the start of a wonderful new community. I know a bunch of other people are using Drummer, but Ken and Anton have been most actively helping the developer and that's very much appreciated.
#
Ken wanted to
see how long it would take to write and publish a Drummer blog post. I'd love to see the same benchmark done with other blogging software.
#
BTW, Anton got on my case about a bug in the
Links tab on Scripting News not updating often enough. He noticed this because the same thing was happening on his Drummer blog. This got me off my ass to fix the problem. So if you're a fan of the Links tab here, rejoice -- it works about a million percent better thanks to Anton. This is the power of users who actually care, and pitch in to help.
#
All the breakage I'm experiencing with HTTPS sites on my Macbook gave me an idea -- how about a proxy server for HTTPS sites, making them accessible over HTTP. Seems quite doable.
#
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.
#
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 menus 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. Welcome to the world where
tools for thought meets publishing. Blogging at the speed of thought. Where nothing gets in your way.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
Poll: Which should I get, Tesla or Peloton, neither or both?
#
I started watching
Maid on Netflix but it was too depressing, and that’s saying something after watching
Squid Game straight through.
#
This image is stark.
#
- 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.
#
- 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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
- 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.
#
- 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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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?
#
TFT Hacker is
looking for an open source JavaScript outliner, other than
Concord.
#
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.
#
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.
#
- 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?
#
I always feel great after a bike ride.
#
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.
#
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.
#
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?
#
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.
#
Twitter appears to be down, at least through the web.#
Obviously
the Repubs want to force Dems to nuke the filibuster to prevent default.
#
Poll: Netflix or HBO Max?
#
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."
#