Behind the scenes in the US government I imagine it's like a Vonnegut novel, or an episode of Pinky and the Brain.

I wish Bluesky had just used the Twitter API. That's how I would've done it. Continuity matters a lot. And think of all time wasted at re-doing something we had working a long time ago.

I've cracked the code for adding OpenGraph data to Bluesky posts. The key was I learned how to do the equivalent of a View Source on a Bluesky post so I could see how others did it. I tried Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, none of them even understood the question of how to get Bluesky to add the data. I was amazed to learn that each developer has to do it for themselves, that this isn't something they built into their server. Anyway, I'm halfway there.

Another thing to watch while you still can, The Lives of Others, about life in East Germany during the Cold War.

The AI world would have done much better with a president like Biden than we will with Trump. AI is a very potent tool for surveillance. Completely changes the game. And if it were just Trump and not Musk we'd have a chance, but Musk and Thiel fully understand the power, and probably already have all the code written, they just need the database records to scan and now they have all of them. Eventually we'll be talking about the "peaceful uses of AI" as we do about nuclear tech. But just saying that will get you punished.

I saw a bit on CNN that was like the Dean Scream, an extended clip of how awkward Chuck Schumer is at a rally. It was used to shame a Democrat who was doing a great job of explaining the danger, Sen Murphy of Connecticut. I switched to basketball in disgust, thinking these people, CNN, are not serious. This problem isn't on the Dems, it's on all of us, and it always was. To pin it on the Dems is to say it's hopeless because right now they're just our representatives in Congress and some of our state governments. We have a big problem and we probably can't dig out of it, but if we have any hope at all, orgs like CNN have to stop being such idiots. Every so often I see a spark of brilliance over there, and then one of these things happens. What's more depressing, Trump or CNN? CNN by a lot. And the NYT and all the rest of the broken media. We are all in the same boat.

In January I started an online diary where I list each of the apps I manage, as I work on them. When I work on one, I move it to the top. The notes are brief and to anyone but me might seem cryptic. But at least you can follow what I'm doing. No I don't plan to do an RSS feed for it. It's just a place to keep track of all the things I work on, for people who I work with, and most important, me.

if you're feeling stressed, hum a few bars of alice's restaurant.

i find it very calming and satisfying.

it's a nice place we can always go home to!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM

just remember --

you can get anything you want

at alice's restaurant!

Do 1000 profiles of federal workers being attacked by Musk. Don't use real names. Have AI provide real-looking photos of fictitious people. Explain what they do. Don't focus on their lives. Make readers think of what life will be like without them. We should have done this a...

BTW, I found that video using ChatGPT. I had tried explaining it to Google and it didn't understand. ChatGPT found it in an instant.

A great scene in Goodfellas where they explain what it's like to have Paulie the mob boss as a partner. In this scene Paulie is Musk. The restaurant owner is Trump. The United States is the restaurant.

People might be curious to see the list of feeds that make up the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. It's dynamic, I can add or remove feeds through a very simple user interface designed for managing systems like this. It's like the user inteface of a product like WordPress, for designers and developers, producing results that are for users. There are now apps for the NBA, Devs and all my feeds.

Big picture, the US is being turned into Russia.

California Senator Adam Schiff said, I think it was yesterday, that Trump and Musk are removing honest FBI investigators and DOJ attorneys so they can raid the treasury of the United States. It's obvious, but you don't hear it said very often. It's the money they want. All of it.

One of my next projects, Murphy-willing, will be JavaScriptScript.

And btw to Mitch McConnell, fuck you. You had a chance, with one freaking vote, to avoid this. You are among a small number of people who could have stopped this. This should be the first line in your obituary. "He could have saved the United States, but chose not to do it."

Highly recommend this week's Ezra Klein podcast. It made me wonder if any of the readers of my blog voted for Trump. I can't imagine too many did, unless they've been willing to overlook my strenuous support for any option that opposes him. However if any of you are still he...

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.