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John Gruber blogs that it’s the guns: The truth is that our nation, great though it is in so many ways, has a horrific history of political violence and a seemingly innate obsession with firearms. […] Tomorrow morning Chuck Schumer should put on the floor of the Senate a la...

Highly recommend this Netflix series -- esp the last three episodes. I found it enlightening, even though I lived through most of this history, I never saw it all put together in a series of events over decades. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective of where we are in the Cold War. It never was over. "The end of history" was too good to be true. Also glad I read so much about slavery a few years ago. If you put both these together, you get the USA, and the deep and lasting wounds we keep re-opening.

👊 It's a secret to everyone! Read more about RSS Club. In den letzten Monaten habe ich an einigen RSS-Plugins für WordPress gearbeitet, über die ich bisher noch gar nicht geschrieben habe. Also hier mal ein bisschen Werbung: RSS Club Wir sprechen nicht über den RSS Club! RSS 3.0 Ich glaube nicht, dass Aaron Swartz […]

A lovely choose-your-own-adventure blog post by Robin.

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Ethicswishing (in tech) is the belief that if you are committed to being ethical and understand technology, then you are well-equipped to build technology for social good. But the truth is that building tech for social good is a lot like having sex in a bathtub: if you don’t understand the first thing about sex, it won’t help that you’re a world-class expert in bathtubs.

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The new Overcast is looking good! Smooth upgrade. From Marco’s blog post:

For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency.

Back when South by Southwest wasn’t terrible, there used to be an annual panel called Browser Wars populated with representatives from the main browser vendors (except for Apple, obviously, who would never venture onto a stage outside of their own events). I remember gettin...

I’ve recorded a short 2-minute video to show how we’ve updated Micro.blog’s editor layout for blog theme templates. Simpler, faster. You can find it on YouTube here.

Today's adventure: "The great and cute Wordle Kitty was surprisingly chosen to be the running mate of the most popular presidential candidate in the history of the United States, who happens to also be very very old so that’s why they nominated the cute little cat to be the vice president because she is so young and so incredibly cute."

And btw, don't panic. You can't accomplish anything that way.

The problem with JD Vance is that he's empty inside, he'll be whatever he needs to be to get more power, and he's young. He's as empty as Trump, and much younger, so we can't hope to outwait him. Now we have a real problem, because Trump has a successor. I imagine Trump's so...

Shownotes for the Podcast0 from July 16, 2004.

Thank you, Gareth – for everything.

Finished reading: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. I enjoyed the first half of this book. But after the time jump, for me it couldn’t recapture what had worked in the opening characters and story. 📚

From the news blog:

We’ve updated how blog themes are edited. If you don’t have a custom theme, Micro.blog will now create a placeholder one for you, with an “Open” button to edit any templates. There’s a new sidebar of template names, faster search, and faster CSS editing.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2024/07/15/weve-updated-how.html

There are a bunch of little tweaks to make themes easier to use. Going to try to do a video tomorrow to help explain it.

NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.

Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like Up In The Air or Michael Clayton, but we don't know anything about his political judgement. He hasn't done anything to tell us who he is ...

We. Need. To. Organize. Democrats should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of John Gruber. F...

We should hire an intern at some J-school to keep track of all of my tweets, write them down, then translate each into a rule for what a news organization should do instead of not do. Flip the sense of the rule in other words.

Then we feed those rules to an AI.

Then we flow in the news stories of the day from various sites through the same AI for translation. Yes I know they'd complain vociferously, but which ones you use don't matter because the AI algorithm will translate whatever they are to Dave Winer tense.

Then of course publish them to another site called The News That Helps Us All Stay Sane.

In today's Kitty Komix episode: "The very cute but also very courageous Wordle Kitty is learning how to be a surgeon. They brought a mysterious leader into the operating room and asked the Kitty to please operate on the leader and save his life so Wordle Kitty got out the textbook and read up on brain surgery, even though the patient only had a nick on his ear, which was admittedly very bloody, she operated on the patient’s brain and unfortunately the patient died. So we are looking at the scene where the dead body of the patient is on the operating table and Wordle Kitty is smoking a cigarette, relaxing and reflecting on what she learned. She’s still very cute of course."