FeedCity

My thanks to Nomorobo for sponsoring this week at DF. It’s perfect timing, especially if, like me, you live in an election swing state. The one thing all voters (and, now that I think about it, surely non-voters alike) agree on is annoyance at political robocalls and robotex...

The Des Moines Register: Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory. A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice P...

The New York Times:

Reflecting on the state of border security at the end of his tenure, Mr. Trump said he regretted ever leaving office.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “we did so well, we had such a great — ” and then cut himself off. He then immediately noted “so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”

I wish he wouldn’t have left the White House on his own (which he did like the complete turd that he is, refusing to attend his successor’s inauguration). Biden was prepared for that, and we’d have all gotten to enjoy seeing him marched out by the military after watching Biden take the oath of office.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, on CNN today:

My version of being a man is like, hey, I like rib-eyes, I like Motörhead, and I’m never going to pick on trans kids and gay kids. […] It doesn’t make you tough. It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole.

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.

Flexibits: We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you. [...] The best news is that Fantastical for Wi...

The Pixelmator blog: Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple. [...] Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmato...

Isaac Schorr, reporting for Mediaite (with video, in case you don’t believe the following was claimed in all seriousness, which it was): Asked by his interlocutor, John Heers, if he thought “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good?” Carlson a...

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.