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Tea Party 2025, a modest manifesto.

A delight, as usual.

(My one suggestion for 2025’s list: My Dad’s Chips. Holy hell are these good potato chips. I’ve got a particular weakness for the French Onion ones. Chef’s kiss. Distribution seems mostly limited to the northeast for now.)

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Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.

Parker Ortolani: Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress s...

I'm 100% sure, as crazy as it sounds, when Musk is finished with his software project, you will have to use X for everything related to the government. To pay taxes, to recieve health care. To renew your passport. And if you try to arrest him, he'll stop paying interest on the US debt, and that will be the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world economy.

Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, David Frum for fantastic pieces posted in the middle of last night. We are having a fresh awakening in this country and in the end we may come to thank Musk and Trump for facilitating this. And I'm so glad that online media is making this possible too, in addition to all the nasty shit we're also responsible for. :-)

I whipped up a little manifesto. What do you think?

No taxation without representation.

Saw a commercial on CNN this evening from Ontario in response to the tariffs, respectful, talking direct to Americans about the bonds with the people of Canada. Why can’t the Dems do this, say how important the independence of the FBI is, to start. We’d love to pay for that. Get in the game Dems.

Even if Congress doesn't do anything to rein in Musk and Trump, the stock market will have something to say on Monday, one assumes. And this might be one time to hope for a market crash.

I rewrote the oursocialweb.org home page. It needed to focus on linking. The term web is being thrown around too casually, without regard to what the web is, the same kind of dilution that's happening with podcasting. But the social web idea is fairly new, and it's really important that we get this right.

You can’t see the link or click on it as rendered in a browser, because there’s no content between the opening `` and closing `` tags, but whoever at the LA Times edited Reinhart’s column to pervert its meaning, did so sloppily, leaving behind at least this one acerbic vestigial link from his originally-submitted prose.

I'm working on a new version of my thread-writer for Bluesky.

Given what Musk is doing now, do you think the internet will still be here in a year? Will there be any tech companies that aren't wholly owned by Musk, Inc. Will owning things even mean anything? Or is this the beginning of the rule of the tech bros, world wide. I can't imagine what they're planning for us. In the meantime, me divesting my Tesla, which seemed so urgent just 24 hours ago, now seems like a powerless gesture. I heard it said that now feels like the moment in Covid when you realized everything was about to freeze, and you'd better head to the supermarket right now, and when you got there, you found you weren't among the first to see it this way. I was very reassured by the blog post that Krugman did. It's nice to hear a sane voice out there.

Another month, starting a new year in the archive on GitHub. 2024 is complete. We've been following this pattern long enough. I wish GitHub had existed in 1994, and I wish we understood how to use it sooner than we did. Onward!

Alex Heath, writing at The Verge: Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s all-hands comments to employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in an internal memo that leakers will be fired. “We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Meta’s chief informa...

Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zucke...

NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”:

Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the social media company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, filed a notice of the settlement in federal court in San Francisco, where the lawsuit was pending. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone separately confirmed the terms: a $25 million payment from the company, with $22 million going toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library and the balance dedicated to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.

I really can’t wait to see that Trump Presidential Library.

Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes: The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable. Instead I’ve been using LocalSend wh...