Note to the Harris campaign: This Google search should return a complete list of your ads. Or a pointer to a site with a complete list of your ads. I want to make sure everyone who follows me sees every one of them! Let us help you help us.

Very insightful Greg Sargent interview with James Carville. Two take-aways for Democrats. 1. Avoid NPR politics. 2. Appeal to college-educated white men. Most of them vote Republican, but with Walz on the ticket, they have a special ambassador, he represents that straight-talking country folk are part of the Democratic coalition. It's still true that white voters are the majority. Get a small number to vote Democratic could be enough to win the election. It never is about policy. It's about whether you are like them. That's what it means to avoid NPR politics. And btw, imho -- getting the press to like you might not be good. I wonder if the Dems would ever have the courage to sever itself from the journos. Imagine Harris saying "If the press says we're bad you know that means we're good." She could say that in her big interview. 😀

The reason I asked if NYT reporters sign NDAs with the NYT, then when a reporter leaves the NYT they can write a book about WTF happened at the NYT, and it would be an instant best seller imho.

I know a kitten who'd like to be EIC of the NYT.

Do NYT reporters sign NDAs with their employer, the NYT?

I don't want to give Trump any ideas, but he's complaining that Harris is forcing him to run as an incumbent, so he might as well take credit for all the things Biden did.

I know it doesn't matter why the NYT are so fucked up about covering the election, but I can't stop thinking about it anyway. Then, Greg Sargent's podcast gave me an idea. The oppressor in a fascist state doesn't need you to love them, so long as you don't love anyone else. The NYT isn't trying to make us love Trump, that's impossible. But they are trying to make us not fall in love with Harris. I doubt they foresaw that possibility. But our feelings about Harris are very much love. The NYT is our only master, they must think. There's no room for us to love someone else, because we might listen to them. In a sense they respond like a first born child on the arrival of their little sister or brother. I don't know. As I said it doesn't matter why. That's their problem. Our problem is to get them out of the way.

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.