I possibly was a bit hasty in declaring the coup over yesterday. I'm sure there will be new restraining orders from the courts telling Musk to stop, and so far Trump has been obeying those, so there's some hope when that happens he'll order Musk to stop, and then we'll find ...

I updated the Developers account on Bluesky to follow Tim Bray, Simon Willison, Techdirt, Manton Reece and Cory Doctorow. I took my feeds off the list, and added other developer accounts I regularly read. I'm trying to bootstrap something here, to see what can be done, and feel it's important to take myself out of the list for now.

The coup is over. This time, unlike the last time it was tried, it worked. We're in the post-coup world now. He showed us exactly what he would do if he could and we somehow collectively acted as if he hadn't shown us. Sanewashing was just the tip of the iceberg, you can't blame it on the press, we didn't demand they get their shit together, we didn't try to change the subject so they'd have to tell the real story. We had a lot of tools available to us that we didn't use because we are lazy and selfish. BTW, if you want to follow the power, don't look at what governments do, look at what the other oligarchs do. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

Freaky warning. As easily as Musk can turn off government websites, he can turn off our sites. He could turn off all .com or .org sites. He'll probably do it just that way. Only one domain will work in the future, x.com. Goodbye Google, Amazon, your drug store. Bubye. Not sure if moving your DNS to Europe or Asia will make a difference. He's taking advantage of centralization, and will try to make it more centralized. Totally centralized. A journalist couldn't report this, because what proof do I have? It's because there's a pattern here. And it's pretty obvious the tools he's using.

devs.feediverse.org on Bluesky. An interesting experiment.

I was just setting up an account for another Feed Reader experiment on Bluesky and found that they have a Suggested User List that recommended the usual people who get in the way of telling the story that's really happening. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, really felt ...

I would love to manage individual DNS domains using GitHub. I already have great tools for updating stuff over there. And everything on my current DNS system is manual and laborious.

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!