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Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
One of the not-good things about Mastodon is that you can't moderate comments under your own posts.
If someone says something abusive, it's there for everyone to see, forever.
I've come to value the feature in Facebook that gives the author full discretion over what comments remain, to head off bad vibes.
I think of a post I write as my house, and I want people who visit to feel respected.
A turd in the middle of the living room is not respectful.
A simple idea, a quid pro quo.
If we want Democrats to support the Constitution, we have to demonstrate that we will support them.
We are the government of the US, Congress represents us.
We have been too passive.
But then, they have to include us in governing.
No more shutting off the connection after the election.
Seems like a fair deal.
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.
Screen shot of a Hypercard stack home page.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.
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. ;-)
If only political reporters had the same knowledge of their subject as sports reporters do.
If you depend on not considering the unthinkable in 2025 then you aren't really thinking.
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.