FeedCity

We're diving head first into a world run by AI bots, before we've even begun to understand how to use them. Musk couldn't be more diabolical if he were cast as a comic book anti-hero. Trump is like the straight man police commissioner. I grew up reading those kinds of comic books. We all did I guess. Probably Elon Musk too. He needs a biographer, asap. Someone please get to work on this.

BTW, no one thought much about the threading structure we use on Bluesky. As far as I can tell it was copied from Twitter. It's not a very good structure. It encourages spam and abuse. You gotta wonder if the threading structure had evolved, or if there were more competition, different approaches to see what would happen, we might have avoided our meltdown with a better design.

Great quote from a favorite show. "He put the dick in contradiction." This is a show that doesn't often indulge in that kind of humor. I imagine they must've had a great time with it in the writer's room. Or was it ad-lib'd? And wtf does it mean?

The idea of a coup in the US is one we all presumably have a hard time thinking about. I sure do. It has never happened before. But it has happened now, and the group that is governing is doing it illegally, and is dismantling the country as quickly as they can, assuming someone will at some point try to stop them? Is that correct? What comes next?

The way to get even is to win. A lot of people don't get that, and it's almost always their downfall.

I’m not giving money to Democrats. I will give to campaigns that run hard-hitting ads telling the full truth about what Musk is doing now. I want to see the actual ads before I chip in, and will do so enthusiastically, but they can’t be anemic.

Hypercard stacks were the equivalent of websites.

If it had been built around the Macintosh Toolkit, and had an API that fit in with Mac apps, there wouldn't be a web, we'd all be using Macs. Alas it was all on its own, didn't work with Mac apps. Missed opportunity.

A lot was lost because the Mac development model was far in advance of what existed on the web, and it was well-thought-out unlike the app model of the web, which is a hodgepodge of horribly designed modules that don't work well together.

I was a Mac developer at the time, so I know a lot about this moment of history.

The Dems don't do positioning. The Repubs run circles around Dems. They are masters at positioning. It's not hard, you just have to decide to do it.

Musk will defund Medicare.

More than death panels.

Say goodbye to everyone who needs health care

Because almost no one can afford it without coverage.

That's what they mean when they say they'll cut $2 trill.

That's your health care.

Podcast: Dems must campaign 365 days every year.

Anne Applebaum writing in the Atlantic says that people in the US feel like we're living in an occupied country. I get it. That's what it feels like to be in a Silicon Valley company that has been acquired by another Silicon Valley company, a subject I wrote about on Wednesday. I wish there was some way for us to communicate with each other about this, because I'm sure my description comes closer to the way Musk sees it, though they are very similar ideas. One of the defects of the social web is that we live in little bubbles and not much information is exchanged over bubble boundaries. So if anyone knows Applebaum, please send her a link to this post. Thanks.

New motto: Pissing in the wind for the good of mankind.

I wonder what Kurt Vonnegut would have thought of twitter-like systems?

Here's the thread that's created in the demo.

Here's a two-minute demo of my new writing tool for Bluesky. This is quite a bit simpler than the last version, you log on directly to Bluesky, doesn't go through my server at all. This removes a whole layer of complexity for the user, and means a lot of people can use it without it having to scale up. Also made it simpler, more of a writing tool, closer to where I'd like this stuff to be when we have across-the-board textcasting support. Really focused on the flow.

If the US were a company, what would its market capitalization be?

If you’re getting bummed about the news, remember tonight there’s another new episode of Severance to kvell about.

Re-did the social media links at the bottom of each story page. Screen shot. Used to be just RSS and Linkedin. I got rid of Linkedin because I never use it. Added Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads. Debated whether to remove Twitter, but it is still a way to follow my posts, the ones that go out through the linkblog. A lot of people still use Twitter. Had to include the latest version of Font-Awesome, but since my story pages don't otherwise use FA, I figured nothing could break. Haha. ;-)

I've had an experience few people have had, and it's relevant to the way all of us feel right now. The experience: Being part of a Silicon Valley company that was acquired by another Silicon Valley company. I was the CEO. It's not a very comfortable place. I recognize the f...

If only political reporters had the same knowledge of their subject as sports reporters do.

First, the New Republic is beginning to think like Musk and Trump. But they have to think a bit more and ask how does this all tie together? Remember you have to consider what would normally be unthinkable. And believe that Trump isn't actually president of the United State...

If you depend on not considering the unthinkable in 2025 then you aren't really thinking.

A note to users of feedland.org and feedland.com. We'll be turning the servers off sometime before the end of March. I haven't chosen the actual date yet. In the meantime, it's very easy to download a copy of your subscription list. You can also run your own FeedLand. I started a thread on the support site if you have questions, remember the comment guidelines. I've learned a lot from the experience of running FeedLand this way, looking forward to trying some other configurations. 😄

At some point soon we’re going to have to stop business as usual. Remember when we realized Covid was deadly and we’d have to radically change our lives to survive? Most of us did that. We’re going to do that soon re the overthrow of our government and looting of the economy.

It was remarkable watching the SuperBowl last night, you could conclude everything is normal. It’s not. We’re going to have to start shutting down all the services we can to make the point to our fellow citizens that we, the United States, are not coming back from this without major change.

First, that's just a theory, but I need to get your attention. Rooting a computer means you own it. You have superuser powers. You can do anything, install or uninstall anything. Mostly journalism has been reporting "He has our social security numbers." Sigh. That's not nea...

We need a word for this, like a spoiler alert, this is heavy, and if you're not in the mood, hit the Back button. I listened to this week's On The Media podcast, and there's a segment (at [12:51]) you should listen to as background. It says that no one in the DoJ as we go f...

BTW, being in my blogroll means that your posts have a chance of being included in my Little Feed Reader on Bluesky.

I subscribed to Wired because of their famous coverage of the Musk Coup, so I also added its feed to my blogroll so I could see what I bought, and was actually not surprised that they've been hit by the same disease all online publishing has, the need to bait the clicks, and of course not very much of it is hard-hitting.

I'm still fixing bugs in the new Bluesky feature I wrote about yesterday. If the URL of an image has search args, I wasn't getting the type correct and Bluesky rejected it. I used a post about Aaron Swartz's statue unveiled in San Francisco yesterday to test the fix. I knew Aaron of course, he was part of the group developing RSS in the early 00s. He went on to do other things, as did I, and I met up with him again in NYC in the early teens, and then a few months or a year or two (I don't have the exact date of the meetup) he commited suicide. It was a real shock. Now, many years later -- a statue. And the random snarky slogan my test script picked out was really appropriate to the event. It was a tragedy, because an older more confident Aaron would have made a big contribution. I often think about that.