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The order doesn’t change the law; it says to ignore the law. It’s going to be a very telling test of Republicans in both houses of Congress.

The most depressing moment of Trump 1.0, for me, was leaving the local supermarket, after seeing the kind of empty shelves you see in third world countries with broken or non-existent economic systems. This was when it sunk in how far the United States had fallen. But someh...

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR: According to the order, the law will be paused for 75 days and companies that work with TikTok will not be liable for doing so. I take issue with this framing. The order does not pause the law, because executive orders can’t “pause” laws...

Apple Support document, which is linked from the App Store if you search for any of the apps from ByteDance: Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications ...

I spent a few days designing and implementing the protocol that allows WordLand to be the writing tool for Bingeworthy, thus giving it a real writing and publishing function, instead of the usual ridiculous tiny little textbox. Today I'm going to make it work for writing and...

Please -- to the people in charge at Bluesky, add a setting that allows me to restrict who can reply to posts.

Choices:

1. Anyone can reply.
2. People who follow me can reply.
3. People I follow can reply.
4. No one can reply.

For all posts, not on a post-by-post basis.

Defaults to #3.

Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard.

Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app: Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little...

Wes Davis, writing at The Verge, under the headline “Instagram Announces a Blatant CapCut Clone”: Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with ...

In the last days of Trump's first term, I had a nice little web app that told you how much time remained in his term. It was a one-line change to make it work again, which, sigh, is necessary now.

BTW, actually the term social web is probably too big a compromise. The "web" part is the only part that's imho useful. The sad part is that "social" means "we removed most of the features of the web." Why? Some vague sense that people would write too much if given the space. Or link too much. Or edit too much. Or be too emphatic. It's worse than Disneyfied -- at least at Disneyland you get actors, and color and rides, and bland food with tons of sugar and fat. But there is some fun and nutrition. In the social web, it's just memes and slogans. Not even much room for a metaphor. There's so much more to say about being human.

I just wrote a review for Industry in Bingeworthy, but it doesn't have a text editor. It farms the job off to WordLand, which shoots the text back to Bingeworthy when the user publishes. So the text is on both BW and WP. And through WordPress it has a presence on the web. This is the goal, writing exists on its own, but can be shared in all the contexts it makes sense in, but it lives primarily in your blog, your home base. That's why WordPress is so important in the scheme of things. It's a consensus, this is where a lot of people are blogging in 2025. And there's a lot of unexplored interop. This may not make total sense at this time, but soon, I hope to be able to point back at this post, and say it was the first time something important worked.

There's a great scene in No Country For Old Men, where a character is facing imminent death, but he's arguing with the character who will kill him, who asks if all your great ideas led to this (his death) how good were the ideas (paraphrasing).

Along those lines.. If Twitter was such a great idea but it led to the death of democracy (for now at least) maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Maybe when we try to reboot we should try something realllly different.

As they say -- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Interesting selection of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes they’ve chosen for the homepage (PDF archive for posterity):

• “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”
• “You must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.”
• “We cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves.”

Read into those quotes what you will, given today’s other national significance. I think there’s an implied message here, but it’s subtle. I’ll pick a different quote from King, one that I believe better speaks to the current moment:

“The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.”

Tim Cook on X: Dr. King once said, “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” True greatness lies in lifting others, making a difference, and serving with purpose. Let’s honor his legacy by finding ways to serve and create a better world together. Curious t...

Sad news: Longtime friend Pam McQuesten passed away on January 1 after a brief illness. I knew Pam in Silicon Valley, as we were starting up Living Videotext in 1983. Our office was on Elwell Court in Palo Alto, just off 101, near the golf course and airport. Pam was managi...

A few random observations posted on Bluesky in the early morning hours.

5:09AM: "Biden had one job to do, and he didn’t do it."

5:17AM: "The NYT had one job to do, and they didn’t do it."

5:21AM: "The NYT is the saddest excuse for the leading news org of the most significant democracy in human history. They flushed it down the fucking toilet. They, like the Washington Post, deserve to die in darkness."

7:39AM: "Being impartial about last year’s election was not an option for the NYT. It was democracy’s Pearl Harbor. We will never forget or forgive what they did."

Editor's note: Soon, I will do all my writing in one place, and these kinds of snapshots will be easier to assemble.

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Apple and Google, seemingly, are following the law, not Trump’s good-as-gold word and pinkie-swear promise that they won’t be held liable for violating it. But Oracle and Akamai seemingly are going with Trump’s word.

Steve Jobs: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”