The NYT et al aren't even doing a fair job of covering the election as a horserace, because they're making sure it's a virtual tie, so even if our team has overwhelming power, speed and depth, and gets on base in every at bat, and plays by the rules but and in spirit of the game, our odds are no better than the other team.

The Twitter API still works, with some serious limits. Not easily incorporated into products, but useful for individuals with developer accounts. Not an insurmountable hurdle, it seems, though I was a developer from before. A few bullet points. My linkblog now reliably work...

Doing the investigation into getting UserTalk running in 2024 has been a trip. The last time I did any work on this code, or even in this area of computer science, was approx 1990. It comes right back, like riding a bike. I saw a tremendous amount of potential fun here, but I had to move on to runtime, object database, verbs, user interface -- for Frontier. In the 34 years between then and now -- a lot of software has been written, and I'm only looking at a fraction of it, limited to stuff that runs in Node, the browser and Electron. And I have to say I'm totally enjoying reading about what they've done. I'm learning about evolution of technology, a facet of development I am extremely drawn to, in a whole new way, as if viewed through a tunnel in time.

The problem with the state-by-state abortion laws that Trump says he favors: 1. The women in states that ban abortion who will die as a result of the bans, and many more who will be severely injured, and all will have their freedoms severely restricted. 2. He's lying. When Congress passes a national abortion ban he'll sign it and boast about it, of course.

If you're interested in languages and compiler compilers and how to bootstrap a scripting environment, then you'll enjoy the progress I've made in the project to get UserTalk running in today's environments. I welcome comments from experienced or curious language devs.

My response: "We have no visibility into the inner workings of the NYT. We can't vote them out of office. We can't even rebut them. They rarely carry opposing opinions."

Walt Mossberg: "Journalists have one core job: to tell the truth, especially when it’s clear. The staff of the NY Times has done it in the past, even at great risk. Why don’t they do it now?"

Full audio for Kamala Harris's acceptance speech at the DNC.

Thanks to Ian Landsman for converting the video to MP3.

My blog post about the speech.

Podcast: 37 minutes.

Braintrust: I want to get a UserTalk parser running in C.

My linkblog now reliably works on Twitter and Threads, in addition to Mastodon, Bluesky, RSS and WordPress. I find it really empowering to be able to publish to all those places at once.

Trump is not the incumbent, but it might feel that way because the coup that started on Jan 6 is ongoing. It won't be over until there is a peaceful transfer of power from Biden to Harris and Trump is out of the picture.

About the podcast I just did a 34-minute podcast, not sure I'm going to publish it. I asked ChatGPT to do an outline of the talk, and that's what I've included below. Kamala Harris is much more than I thought. It’s not just me; millions of people are realizing her capac...

This is how I explained what a sidebar art is: There's a certain kind of art I need to create with you. I call it "sidebar art" -- they are images between 75 and 135 pixels wide. The content is on a transparent background. They are designed to fit in the right margin of my blog at scripting.com. Please remember this definition, so you can help me create new sidebar art.

I'm trying to teach ChatGPT how to do sidebar art. So far, it's not a great student. But I have hope. My instructions for the image in the post in the sidebar for the previous post: "e pluribus unum" is the motto of the United States. Out of many one. I would like a simple picture of an eagle with this motto over its head, in the same style it is in on the back of a quarter coin.

No more shaming people for being who they are.

I just realized something else -- there isn't a female America and a male America. What made me realize it is how natural the idea of President Kamala feels. Men and women are different, just like blacks and whites are different (it couldn't be otherwise) but we are all Americans, and further, taken together we all are America. All of this sprung from that Obama quote in his 2004 convention speech (which I was lucky to be present for, that was the year they welcomed bloggers). It's the one country that's the Union of all of us and we are United.

VP Harris gave the best speech I've ever heard. There were some great speeches at the DNC. Michelle Obama stood out. Bill Clinton, of course. But it was her show, President Kamala's, and she stole it. She's perfect for our time. A prosecutor running against a convicted fe...

I have a feeling this thread is going to go a long way, maybe all the way. Maybe the last Ignore the NYT note will be "The NYT has been put out of its misery" in which case "Ignore the NYT" will be what everyone does, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Or maybe the last one will...

Podcast: 17 minutes. Note: You can skip the first five minutes, it's a long preamble on a different subject. I left it in because it's interesting imho. It's possible that what happened to Joe Biden in the debate is like something that happened to me almost ten years ago wh...

Speaking of Michelle Obama, she made the most powerful political statement I've ever heard. "Who's going to tell Trump the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs." The way she said it made you think. Here we are, and one way or another, we have changed. America in 2024 is vastly different from the American of 2008. America is moving both toward self-acceptance and away from it at the same time. But here in the half of America my feet are planted in, we realize that there isn't a black America and a white America, there's just one America. We finally have come to accept ourselves as we have been all along.

Thinking about what Michelle Obama said last night in her fantastic DNC speech. “We don’t get to change the rules so we always win.” She was talking about Trump, but it also applies to Google. There should be opportunities for independent developers to create for the web without having big tech companies be our gatekeepers. The web is a public resource. Of course big companies will take whatever isn't nailed down. It's way past time to protect the open web.

I use PocketCasts on my Android phone as my main podcast-listening app. I also have a website, dave.podcatch.com, that has the latest episodes from the podcasts I follow. I would love to hook up my subscriptions from PocketCasts to dave.podcatch.com, so that I could add to t...

My linkblog posts are once again flowing to WordPress. I had to generate a special password for this app because of 2FA.

Podcast: 27 minutes.

Sorry about the recording quality, I was in a large space with bad acoustics. I'll try to remember not to do that in the future.

I've noticed I spend less time programming, I go more slowly and carefully because now I can know a lot more about each problem I'm solving, and use the packages I build on, jQuery, MySQL, Node, the browser, Bootstrap, Font-awesome, Frontier, to greater advantage. A new kind of programming is possible, and it's better.

I go into some detail in this podcast about how the process works.

Interested in hearing similar stories from other developers using ChatGPT or something like it.

What should we expect from the Department of Justice in the Harris Administration?

My linkblog, which posts to the Links tab on Scripting News, as well as Bluesky, Mastodon and RSS, now also posts to Twitter. I'm also working with Manton Reece to hook up to Threads via micro.blog.

I do a daily episode of the adventures of Wordle Kitty as art I do with ChatGPT, on Facebook. There often is a NY Times headline in the image, saying something silly like how prisons are dealing with an influx of convicted house pets (like the kitten).

In this drawing the NYT is reporting on how the pets enjoy lunch, making new friends with other convicts.

This is therapeutic. Finally I can see the NYT doing something useful! Keeping me entertained while we try to get through this election. If I'm forced to accept lies from the NYT, without any voice given to opposition, they might as well be lies that entertain me! 😄

PS: I wonder if the NYT minds that we think of them as no more straight than Fox News. They've fallen really far, and have so far shown they totally don't care if we know.

When President Biden took the stage last night at the DNC, I had a moment of buyer's remorse. He looked so good in his black suit, and the pictures of the new candidates, and their spouses, looked comical in comparison to the president who was about to speak. Why did Walz h...

Today would have been my mother's 92nd birthday. She died in 2018, and I still haven't, deep inside, fully gotten the message that she's gone. Probably the most significant person in my life. I find most of my adult relationships can be traced back to my relationship with her.

Keanu Reeves: "If you see someone falling behind, walk beside them. If you see someone being ignored, find a way to include them. Always remind people of their worth. One small act could mean the world to them."