FeedCity

Before long we’ll have Ukraine style drones raining down on American cities. Meanwhile we have built a military designed to fight WWII. We’d better hope Ukraine wins their war with Russia, and they’re still our friends. Journalism is letting us down bigtime here. The world is at war, it's going to get worse, and the US isn't preparing. We should be defending Ukraine with everything we have, we are still powerful enough to determine the outcome. But of course we are totally asleep at the wheel, gloating over Trump's approval rating, and how the Dems might win the Senate or whatever. Music to relax by. Bedtime stories.

The tech industry kicked the web out of the web. scripting.com is your canary in a coal mine. If you can read it then your browser is a real web browser. If it can’t it’s phony baloney. That's the big picture behind the Web of Markdown, an idea that has generated surprising...

Bringing receipts for xkcd.com/2347.

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An in-depth report from Galax, the Old Time equivalent of the fleadh.

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If programming languages don’t matter much anymore, but reviewing code matters more than ever, can we resurrect RubyCocoa? Ruby is still one of the most elegant, readable languages. Wish I could use it everywhere.

BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. They have no philosophy. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy. The Yankees philosophy is "We ...

Andrew Shell actually built a Markdown browser:

I quickly realized that much of this was already present with sites like mine that serve markdown for LLMs.

I knew about /llms.txt, but didn’t realize there were so many people using HTTP content negotiation with text/markdown.

Nick Heer has a blog post about Meta charging if you want to link outside their silos:

Instagram has never supported links of any kind in individual posts, so that is a new feature with two links per month permitted for free, and more enabled by this pricey subscription — starting at $50 USD per month for four posts per month containing external links

How the turn tables… Remember when Australia and Canada wanted Facebook to pay newspapers for linking to their articles? This is some twisted karma. In both cases, paying for links is fundamentally anti-web.

Margaret Hamilton:

Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way, and we did.

There’s an amazing photo of her standing with print-outs of code for Apollo missions. Rest in peace.

Reading Dave Winer’s notes on a hypothetical Markdown web browser. I don’t think we need to reinvent the web or HTML, but it would be neat if web browser’s had built-in Markdown preview by default. Why not? Browsers render PDF and all sorts of files.

32 is a lot of years. How much longer can this madness go on!

Do you know why people like Markdown? You can't hide the bullshit. It's all there for you to see. Thus the bullshit never gets added. It's so simple, I swear people are desperate for simplicity. I know I am. Where is the universal theory of the web? Actually I do know where it is. Go back to the roots, strip out all the crap, and let's make a Mardown-only web. Great for blogs, to start. Simple, fast, easy.

I don't care for podcasts that begin with 15 minutes of giggling between the hosts who I don't know so I don't get how cute it is. Esp if the title of the episode is something I'd like to learn more about. Why is giggling and non-funny supposed humor. The laughing I hate the most is when their cracking up over something tragic or ominous. Stop and think about what you're laughing about. Someone should do a podcast like the Markdown-only browser I'm thinking of doing.

That said, surprisingly Nicolle Wallace's podcast is really good, which surprised me because her two hour afternoon MSNOW show is kind-of nothing. On this show they have a lot of time to talk with one person, and maybe there are limits on the TV show that aren't on the podcas...

Wednesday session

Yesterday I wrote a piece about a Markdown-only browser, that worked nicely with HTTP. Maximally minimal. I got interested in what it would take to do this, and asked ChatGPT for a plan. If you want to implement it, please do. Let me know if you have something to try.

There’s a bit of accidental gamification going on with my releases.md gist. Feels good to work on something and then see it reflected in that file.

"Every federal and gubernatorial race, by name and by state, read from what people are actually saying" - all powered by the open social web.

The people who can see journalism most clearly are the people who have the least time and space to solve its problems.