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The most depressing thing last night for me was reading that a longtime friend voted for the worst candidate they've ever voted for because the other one was worse. They wouldn’t say who they actually voted for. This is what we’ll be left with as a country when all this is done.

I gave another $100 to Harris to compensate, and of course voted straight Democratic on Thursday. Unlike my friend I was proud to vote for her. The alternative, after what we lived through between 2017 and 2021, to choose to go through that again, hard to imagine the horror.

And of course that’s assuming he voted for Harris.

Meanwhile, it's amazing that both CNN and MSNBC have gotten serious about covering the reality of Trump 2.0 after being very unserious for the last year. It's as if after rejecting Joe Biden, months later they realized they rejected the wrong guy.

Unfortunately the only place you can read this Dan Conover piece is on Facebook about the failure of the NY Times and Washington Post to adequately defend democracy. He says something I had not seen elsewhere. "We're not talking about HuffPo or Salon here. We're talking about the last two 'unique nationals' standing in American print journalism. Instiututions with long and storied histories. Both took the same test at the same time, and both failed it." I'd add that all other journalism usually follows their lead, but that may be finally changing.

We now understand that the Republicans derive their power through division, setting groups against each other. We think the Democrats are the opposite, they are inclusive, everyone is welcome there. But that's not true. This NPR piece touches on it, gingerly, because it's the third rail in non-Republican politics. Because it's one of the divisions that's maintained by people who are mostly Democrats. If you want to know if you're part of the problem, measure your own feelings when you find out what it's about. And then listen, carefully to the words. It might be hard to hear because I think most people who do this don't think they do. The pragmatic reason to focus on this is that in future elections, assuming we have them, if we can make an effort to not do this, we could get a lot of Republican votes to switch. They might even become our most vocal supporters.

The monthly archive for October has been saved. By the end of this month we'll know a lot more than we know now.

I voted today at the early voting place in Saugerties, NY.

A few days I concluded that Trump doesn't think he's going to win. Now it seems he doesn't want to win.

When we vote we are governing, not expressing ourselves or protesting. It's the whole thing. It's the governing part that this year is especially consequential.

What Musk has been saying is cover for what the oligarchs did to the Soviet Union as it was breaking apart. Only the US has vastly more wealth. And unlike Trump, Musk understands how money works, presumably Putin does too. They want the entire flow of cash that's generated by the US economy to go through them. So "richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world." Forget about any benefit from government, that's over. The health care system would fall apart. The situation with abortion is just the beginning. When Musk says it'll come back better after a few years, that's a lie. Something like that never comes back. We've encountered this before, when the Repubs were threatening default.

There should be a prize for developers who create the most interop.

I did the first demo of my new editor to a couple of developers I'm working with on our ActivityPub project, something I'm ever-more-excited about. Happy to say the demo was a success. They appeared to love the product, and for the right reasons. It makes WordPress into a fa...

The Major League Baseball season is finally over. The no-philosophy mess in the Bronx was near-swept by the infidels from California, on their home field no less, so we expect Jankee Estadium to be either haunted in perpetuity or torn down (latter solution preferable) and re...

Progress on the YouTube TV front. Thanks to all the responses, I've gotten Fucks News out of the startup position, but it still appears in the upper left corner of the 2-by-2 news multiview display, and thus is the default, and when I launch it I hear them talking which is not pleasant. Further I always have to see what their freaking chyron says, and the commercials from the Hitler-fanboi pillow salesman. Basically I want to be able to see what they're doing when I want to, but never have it forced on me. Help.

YouTube TV when it starts up, the station it automatically opens is Fox News. I posted this on various social webs and heard from people this is not their experience.

I was thinking about what I'm most proud of in my career, and one of the things is that I am not #1 for creation of interop or #2, but I might be in the top 10.

"When your house is on fire there aren’t two sides." A few people misunderstood. In this analogy there are no arsonists. There is the house and there is fire. If you were reporting on this situation, you don't need to find out what motivates the fire, the only important thing is that if not checked it will destroy the house.

My op-ed for the Washington Post, if there was such a thing.. I didn't imagine that Bezos cared what subscribers to the Washington Post thought about his decision to cancel their endorsement of VP Harris in the election one week from today. But 200K people unsubscribed, and...

We, the people who are alive right now, are the first people to create knowledge that we know in advance will be part of LLM databases. So far we've heard from the resisters, the ones who don't want any part of this. But what about people who want to create knowledge in the maximally useful form? Are there any howto's for this? A busy writer's guide to creating human knowledge after the introduction of functional AI?

I started to read Ben Thompson's email newsletter Stratechery this morning, it was about Trump on Joe Rogan's podcast, which I didn't want to listen to. I was surprised to see it begins with the story of podcasting, which has my name in it, which was gratifying. A lot of peo...

I like that Michelle Obama spoke to men in her speech, but it could have been done in a way that enters the male brain easier. I know there shouldn't have to be an easy way in, because child-bearing isn't easy, but we need more men's votes to win this election. Pragmatically, bending over backwards, with love and acceptance, not blame and threats, makes it more likely they'll listen. All of us who need health care need to be heard and believed, and most important -- helped. Anyway, to the men reading this who are planning on voting for Trump, think about the women you care about, and how you would feel if they needed help to survive and because you voted for Trump, that help didn't arrive in time. Would you forgive yourself for voting not to restore equal care for women if it caused the death of a friend or family member you care about? It really is that serious.

If the Washington Post already had their endorsement written when is it going to leak?

It appears Trump expects to lose.

Listened to Charlemagne tha God for the first time on the New Yorker podcast. I have to say I agree with everything he said. Really glad that people with clear mind and purpose been able to use our medium to do the good we hoped for. Best part was where he quoted Obama agree...

It probably does no good to cancel your Washington Post subscription. It's hard to imagine Bezos would lose any money from a complete writedown. Any loss would offset gains he would receive from selling a tiny bit of Amazon stock, it would wash out on his balance sheet.

You can't hurt him with money. In fact I'm pretty sure we can't hurt him in any way. So why not keep the reporters employed, for once the seem to be doing the right thing and keeping us in the loop on why they're doing the awful thing they're doing. Usually we're kept in the dark.

So when the Dodger hit the walk-off grand slam last night, half of me was ecstatic because the Yankees were beaten, but oops, but I hate it even more that the freaking Dodgers won. This World Series is unique in that I desperately want both teams to lose. What do you do with that??

BTW if you're thinking why don't we just go for the Nets. As I've said here many times, there aren't actually any Nets fans to speak of in NY. That was the huge self-parody Kevin Durant did when he claimed there was some kind of rivalry between the Nets and the Knicks. Really unfortunate unforced error he could have just asked a few people where are all the Nets fans.

Lots of Yankees fans at the Garden yesterday to see the great Knicks team of last year show up for the first time. The game in Boston on Tuesday was disheartening. It's a new team with the core of last year's team. And when the fans started roaring when there was nothing hap...

Who owns the Garden? James Dolan.

Will there be Nazi flags at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally?

I bet Bezos wishes he owned Twitter instead of Musk.