FeedCity

Jesse Stay who I have known from early blogging days proposes to build the billionaire-proof social network using the AT Protocol. I'm going to help if I can. I'm developing apps that run on AT Proto, so at least I should be able to test my apps with his service.

What's happening in the US is like when a person who is a lifetime cigarette smoker gets cancer and stops smoking. You hope the cancer doesn't kill you, and then swear to never smoke again if you're lucky enough to survive it.

We didn't appreciate how good we had it with our representative form of government. We could have stopped the erosion of our power at any time, when our reps would have more or less had to listen. Now, when we start trying to get their attention, which hasn't happened yet, it's going to be a competition between the rule of law, which is undermined, and the forces that keep our would-be rulers in line.

The prognosis isn't good. But we should get our shit together asap because it's our only hope.

Anyone who says competent white men should be in charge probably has never actually run anything. Women are better in general at seeing the big picture and managing accordingly. A man is more likely to hone in on one aspect of the problem and if they're good, do something brilliant, but misses out on pretty much everything else. I, as a man, have had to severely discipline myself to get anything done, because that's how I'm built. Given a chance I will always put my head down and focus on one thing until its done, then the next and the next and so on.

Wouldn't it be something if the WordPress community were mobilized to get shit done right now?

We need to change who reps us as much as we need to get the ones who current do rep us off their butts and actually do some representing.

Imho it would be smart for Musk to stop shutting things down and just do his work, whatever it is. By creating constant shitstorms he's making it impossible for anyone to defend him, and you can be sure some would be if what he was doing wasn't so blatantly outrageous. We never voted for that mofo. And every American alive, whatever their preference, thinks their own vote should count. That's going to be a massive hurdle for them to get over.

A bit of advice for Dems in Congress. Go home and have town halls, and listen. And stop listening to the consultants and each other. Find out what the people want, and bring that back to DC. And let the press attend the town halls so they can report. Make our own Tea Party.

BTW, it turns out that Pip's, a restaurant in Severance, my favorite show in a while, was hot at the Phoenicia Diner, which is one of my favorite places to eat in the area. Funny thing I didn't recognize it until I saw an article about it in a local magazine.

Tea Party 2025, a modest manifesto.

I'm 100% sure, as crazy as it sounds, when Musk is finished with his software project, you will have to use X for everything related to the government. To pay taxes, to recieve health care. To renew your passport. And if you try to arrest him, he'll stop paying interest on the US debt, and that will be the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world economy.

Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, David Frum for fantastic pieces posted in the middle of last night. We are having a fresh awakening in this country and in the end we may come to thank Musk and Trump for facilitating this. And I'm so glad that online media is making this possible too, in addition to all the nasty shit we're also responsible for. :-)

I whipped up a little manifesto. What do you think?

No taxation without representation.

Saw a commercial on CNN this evening from Ontario in response to the tariffs, respectful, talking direct to Americans about the bonds with the people of Canada. Why can’t the Dems do this, say how important the independence of the FBI is, to start. We’d love to pay for that. Get in the game Dems.

Even if Congress doesn't do anything to rein in Musk and Trump, the stock market will have something to say on Monday, one assumes. And this might be one time to hope for a market crash.

I rewrote the oursocialweb.org home page. It needed to focus on linking. The term web is being thrown around too casually, without regard to what the web is, the same kind of dilution that's happening with podcasting. But the social web idea is fairly new, and it's really important that we get this right.

I'm working on a new version of my thread-writer for Bluesky.

Given what Musk is doing now, do you think the internet will still be here in a year? Will there be any tech companies that aren't wholly owned by Musk, Inc. Will owning things even mean anything? Or is this the beginning of the rule of the tech bros, world wide. I can't imagine what they're planning for us. In the meantime, me divesting my Tesla, which seemed so urgent just 24 hours ago, now seems like a powerless gesture. I heard it said that now feels like the moment in Covid when you realized everything was about to freeze, and you'd better head to the supermarket right now, and when you got there, you found you weren't among the first to see it this way. I was very reassured by the blog post that Krugman did. It's nice to hear a sane voice out there.

Another month, starting a new year in the archive on GitHub. 2024 is complete. We've been following this pattern long enough. I wish GitHub had existed in 1994, and I wish we understood how to use it sooner than we did. Onward!

I've been using claude.ai for programming work lately, and it does one thing better than ChatGPT. It reads your code and tries to mimic your coding style. ChatGPT won't do that. It's really frustrating to have to edit their code before I can even try it out.

TL;DR: The key to success is convincing developers to ignore the fact that you will eventually kill them. Would-be platform vendors, open or not, in order to entice a developer to learn how it works: Quick success. Hello World works in less than 30 minutes. Hopefully much l...

I've decided that trading in my Model Y for another EV is an acceptable solution. Let someone else ride around in this car that I love, but hate because it is a symbol of American terrorism and apartheid. This is compatible with my understanding that hate is love that was betrayed. I'm sure I won't love its replacement as much as I loved the Model Y, but I will feel better about driving it. And Tesla shareholders will, I hope, learn the lesson that products must be politically agnostic in order to work commercially. Or if you must take a stand, make it against fascism. So many of our oligarchs have made the wrong bet here. We will never forget what Zuckerberg, Bezos, the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, Open AI -- all these companies went the wrong way.

Here we are on an artichoke farm in coastal California, a place where migrant workers would normally be doing back-breaking work to pick the artichokes we could eat in our salads and antipasto.

Instead all we have are Trump's beautiful dancers! It is a beautiful scene, but hold your nose because the unharvested 'chokes are rotting and they don't smell very sweet!

After cleaning out the White House of scummy career woke liberals and replacing them with beautiful dancers and then offering buyouts to the 2 million federal leeches, President for Life Donald J Trump set his sights on journalism, beautifying the NY Times! Newly beautified briefing room. Air traffic control is just lovely. The newly beautiful NYT is a work of art. Oh my they are beauts, and loyal too!

Good oligarchs and bad oligarchs. We need to help the good ones have the guts to get on the air, with really good creative advertising, telling the people exactly what's being done to them now, without pulling any punches. They have to be warned and they aren't. You have to be paying a lot of attention to understand. And it's hard to know what to believe. We have to have a voice in this, now.

Andrew Hickey wrote something I wholeheartedly agree with. "If you think the day job might literally kill you, and you have no kids, quit and try that mad idea. That might also kill you, but better to die trying something wonderful than be killed by a crappy job."

My response: "My life story since i was 22, and I'm 69 now. It's worked out okay, not perfect, I have regrets, but I would have far more if I hadn't bet on myself. My 22-year-old self was very right about a lot of things."

There should be ads on tv tonight saying they're coming for the abortion pill. Spell it out clearly so the voters can heat it as it happened. Otherwise they will rightly blame the Dems for not telling them what was going on. It's not too late Dems.

One more thing then I have to get back to work. There's a great moment in Woody Allen's Sleeper where a time traveler asks how the world was destroyed when Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead. If you lived in NYC in the 70s and 80s you knew Albert Shanker as a NY character like Al Sharpton or Curtis Sliwa. New York had its own celebrities, people who were famous mostly in New York, but not as much outside. So Albert Shanker with a nuclear weapon kind of fit his character in an extreme way, and it was an inside reference only NYers would get. Well in case you didn't know it, back in that time or a little later, Trump was one of those Albert Shanker types. And yes, he has all the nuclear weapons there are. Isn't that weird?

We're programmed to believe big companies make things the right way and individual people can't be trusted. We're going to have to break out of that rut, to stop trusting them so much. It's like the 2008 banking crisis, but this time they've taken over the government, not just the economy. The tech industry, believe it or not, started with assumption that it was the other way around. That people were the brilliance, and companies started wars to make money (we were the generation that stopped the Vietnam war, btw). I got into computers because I thought I could earn a living that way, but quickly discovered how inherently subversive they are. They weren't just for the nerds with the plastic pocket protectors, they were also for hippies. Some of us are still here and we want to create with you.

Molly White has an excellent OPML subscription list. I want to make something with this, maybe a Bluesky feed reader? I want to show people they can combine skills to make new media. We don't have to wait for big companies to do it for us. We can work together. That's how we rise to the challenges we share. We can flip this bad situation around, turning problems into opportunity. Big changes happen now. We can steer in the direction we want to go.