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I have United Healthcare insurance. I got it as part of my Medicare package when I turned 65. I've had good experience with them. I had major surgery in 2002, cost hundreds of thousands, included a one-week hospital stay and lots of followup treatments. I know the hospital did all the work with them, I was shielded from any complications, but as far as I know there were none. Never had a treatment questioned or denied. I had another insurance provider for many years after that, but when given a chance I went back to United. Just want to say, so far -- knock wood -- I am a happy customer.

Bingeworthy has RSS, and new ratings show up in my blogroll.

[Emma Roth at The Verge] I think this was almost inevitable: "On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins." Automattic is going to file a cou...

[Paul Kiel at ProPublica] If we're going to improve on Medicare, we have to fund it - and it turns out that even today's Medicare taxes are being skipped out on by some of the wealthiest citizens in America, thanks to a legal loophole that the IRS has not ad...

No more elections where Hope is the main theme. Better: Kicking ass. Kicking ass is for ass-kicking Americans. I personally like Hope, but I'm also a sports fan and understand the value of kicking ass.

Just added to my todo list -- add the option to use the WordPress REST interface in place of the WPCOM interface, this will give WordLand the ability to edit WordPress sites anywhere, not just on wordpress.com. When I made the choice to go with WPCOM I didn't have ChatGPT to look at the other options, I was surprised to find that WordPress actually had a good JavaScript API. It doesn't look like the conversion will be too bad. It's obviously better to be able to work with all WordPress sites.

Okay, I know, but hear me out. If you haven’t encountered it, Red Dwarf was an 80s / 90s science fiction comedy that has definitely aged interestingly, but still has a solid fanbase. Lister, a low-ranking engineer on the mining spaceship Red Dwarf is put into stasis as punis...

In 2024, A Book Apart closed its doors after publishing a much-loved collection of more than 50 brief books for people who make websites. The rights to each book have reverted to the authors — hi, that’s us — and we’ve put together this semi-official directory to help you find our books in their new homes.

…now including Going Offline.

adactio.com/links/21600

A shame that this must-read book won’t be out in time for Christmas—’twould make a great stocking filler for a lot of people I know.

A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.

adactio.com/links/21599

Feature suggestion: an end-of-year Spotify Unwrapped thingy but for Wikipedia contributions (maybe it would encourage me to contribute more).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Adactio

Cool to see Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) back working on Redis after several years away. Redis is a fantastic, unique tool. He shares his thoughts on the licensing drama, using AI, and new data structures that could be added to Redis.

Tuesday session

This is a great post by Laurens Hof of the Fediverse Report on the incomplete ActivityPub rollout in Threads, why it might be going so slowly, and whether Meta is committed to the fediverse at all. It seems clear now that it will not be practical to move an account away from Threads. Empty promises.

Day One can no longer import Instagram photos because of an API change:

We regret to inform you that, starting December 4, 2024, Instagram no longer allows apps to import content through the Instagram Basic Display API. This change means that Day One users will no longer be able to connect their Instagram accounts to import photos and posts into their journals.

Related to my short post this morning. Meta just doesn’t care much if they burn developers who invest in their platform.

Many Tesla drivers wish they'd evict Elon Musk. On the other hand can your car do this?

This time of year every day feels like Sunday.

Seth Godin blogged recently about constructive complaining vs. whining:

Whining is communication that exasperates others, because it is complaint without benefit or action. The best traveling companions are often those that don’t whine, even when they have a very good reason to. Whining is empty commentary where no action is possible, about something we already understand.

Here's a sad fact. When something open takes off, the vultures swoop in and try to own it. You wouldn't believe the greed I've seen. It's a virus, and it needs to stop, or at least be exposed as it's happening.

Because we are a very small team, I’ve always been good with “use whatever coding style you want!” I try to adapt to the conventions used in other people’s projects. But lately, I just want to go all-in on mandating real tabs. I’m getting too old to deal with tabs-as-spaces.

Yesterday I did a podcast about why it's important to choose humble names for groups of developers working on open formats, using podcasting as an example. Another case in point, the Social Web Foundation, which is about ActivityPub and the Fediverse, when there are many other forms of the social web. Here's where the rubber meets the road. They're having a meeting in Brussels where people can demo their social web apps, but it's only about ActivityPub. If you have a project for Bluesky, or Threads, or non-ActivityPub Mastodon, or RSS for that matter, you should feel welcome there, regardless of what their Call For Participation says.