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We're at a huge fork in the road. One fork -- goodbye USA, the other way, we're stronger than ever. We're in a good spot because Trump's tank is empty. He's old, tired, fat, addled, fetid, rotten. You have to work really hard not to see that. If it works, Biden will have stabilized the country, and Harris will erect the guardrails that make sure no one follows in Trump's path, and the Supreme Court gets back into its proper place. They've been overthrowing our society, economy and political system. That all has to be reversed before it does too much damage, and prevented in the future. I want to know why the court can't be expanded, and if Harris will put that in her platform.

Biden's speech might turn out to be a Gettysburg type speech. We hope it does. We have a huge fork in the road, one way -- goodbye USA, the other way 00 USA stronger than ever. We're in a good spot because Trump's tank is empty and he's old and tired and fat and very bad. You have to work really hard not to see that.

Software-wise I realized recently that everything that takes me away from creating really nice writing tools is a waste. I have to do it because there are huge holes in the web as a development platform. And every year it gets worse as new incompatible languages are added, new stacks incompatible stacks built. As a result we have to re-do everything all the time, and never get a chance to create any new user experiences. The market fragments, which is exactly what the tech companies want. It keeps their products from becoming commodities. And like it or not, the politicians and corporations don't want us writing too much, they just want us working, donating to their campaigns, paying taxes, buying their crap, and not getting all agitated about the things they don't care about.

I am optimistic that Trump is headed for the graveyard of history, shortly. First time I've felt like this in a long time.

When (if) that happens, we can use Cory Doctorow's excellent concept enshitification to describe what he did to the American political system.

He also stress tested it, and we would be the greatest fools imaginable if we didn't add some seriously enforceable guardrails to prevent this kind of attack happening in the future. Might work out well to have a lawyer in the White House.

I want a Masto-clone that does not do replies. You can't insert anything under my idea, but you can if you like include my idea, as a link, in yours. This model works. I think by now we know the other way does not work. BTW I use the term Masto-clone interchangeably with Twitter-like. Let's spread the love around.

JD goes as a childless cat lady in the krewe Cretins of Trumpland.

I almost used enshitification in a post yesterday.

It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent.

Pretty remarkable how the bots on Twitter have become so abusive. Makes the idea of discourse there pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.

Is Reddit now only available on Google search?

Fantastic speech by President Biden. It's good we'll have both a president and a campaign and that they'll be separate thing. I look forward to reading it slowly. And he put a cap on the awful communication of the last month, he took control of the story from the snobs and shit throwers in the press.

How Harry McCracken discovered that ChatGPT is a deeply and broadly knowledgable, infinitely patient, always available, inexpensive, programming partner. I've been using it that way for a year, and it has enabled me to take on much more ambitious and complete projects. It could evolve into something much more powerful, but where it is now is already amazing. The criticisms for ChatGPT have mostly missed the point of what it's useful for.

When the EU enacted GDPR in 2018, executives and security professionals waited anxiously to see how the law would be enforced. And then they kept waiting ... and waiting ... but the Great European Privacy Crackdown never came. For a while it seemed like the only way you’d ge...

All the reporters know the Repubs refused to fund border stuff so they could use it to tag the Dems in the election. So the first thing the Repubs do is tag VP Harris with the border. The reporter asks a Dem what they have to say about that. But the reporter knows what the Repubs did. So why do they even ask the freaking question? They just play the script the Repubs wrote for them. They are so savvy, but we heard all that too, so we know how corrupt they are. They don't care if we know.

Show notes for today's Scripting podcast.

A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wi...

I was able to follow kamalhq on twitter. This report says that Musk is rate-limiting followers on that account. Of course we warned what could happen if a Republican bought twitter, but I didn't honestly contemplate that a fascist would. These days our greatest fears aren't ...

I want future President Harris to stay happy no matter what the bastards do or say. We should have a crisis line for her to call to get some quick love. 1-800-LUV-KAMALA.

Marco Arment, introducing the 10th-anniversary re-write of Overcast: Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person. That’s w...

Margi Murphy and Katrina Manson, reporting for Bloomberg: The local FBI bureau in Pittsburgh held a license for Cellebrite software, which lets law enforcement identify or bypass a phone’s passcode. But it didn’t work with Crooks’ device, according to the people, who sai...