lists.opml.org: The other day I asked a famous blogger who uses RSS if he would be willing to share his list of feeds, so others could subscribe to them. He declined, for good reason, there was private stuff in the list he couldn't share. I certainly understand that. Then I ...

Tomorrow if you are an American, and haven't voted yet and are thinking of sitting it out -- get off your butt and get out there and do your civic duty. We need great turnout this year, record-setting turnout, as a show of love for our country and our Constitution. Vote now, because later you might not have any power to change direction. Tomorrow, you do have power. And remember that voting is not you expressing yourself, it's not free speech, it's you and I governing. This is our moment of greatest power. Use it or lose it.

My opinion: At this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election. After the election if we still have freedom of speech, we should reboot news around the simple idea of news written by experts. They must know ...

Heard on Facebook: Next week has been exhausting. Yes.

About polls, I learned how they work and how much they are a Ouija board, where the reports are tuned up based on the pollsters assumptions about who are the real voters, and account for the limited people who can be polled. They're trying to estimate what millions of people...

Cory Doctorow: "I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will." It's a good practice, and while I completely support it, I am part of several communities that could remove me...

People may question my credentials as a language designer. I've designed a very innovative system that unfortunately the academics don't think is worth studying. It's utterly ridiculous. Who says you can only learn from systems developed at big companies or universities. I cover a lot of ground, it's true -- no one gave me permission to create Frontier, but I didn't feel I needed permission. Or funding for that matter. I think what happened is Apple positioned us as less significant than their system scripting language, and people just accepted that, when Frontier is a far superior system. Anyway, the ideas are there anyway, and you're welcome to learn from them.

See also: Rules for standards-makers. Language is a very similar to protocol design.

Must-read: “It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.”

Programming language design should follow half of Postel's Principle, be conservative in what you send. There should be one way to do anything, not many. That way I can include your code in mine and vice versa. I can understand what you're doing. Tools can be developed that ...

I kept waiting for Kamala to say what we're not going back to is Trump. We've paid our dues. He's had enough of our attention.

Government should do its work quietly, making things better for the people and that's all, and until there's a crisis that demands our attention, stays out of the way.

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...