FeedCity

They're still sanewashing Trump. Example. Just listened to Brian Lehrer, a news interview and call-in show on WNYC, which I revere, for many reasons. Lehrer is smart, and doesn't dumb things down for his audience. He usually asks the question I'm dying to hear the answer to,...

We're doing some research into the origins of my family in Germany, learning a lot.

Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is: Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then...

The Economist: On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overal...

CNBC: Markets plunged the day after President Donald Trump imposed a far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy, including a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country on earth. The plan slaps much steeper tariff rates on many countries, including 34% on China, 20% on th...

Great roundup from The Verge: While Nintendo told us very little in the official reveal of the console in January, now we know when the Switch 2 is coming and how much it will cost at launch: June 5th and $449.99. We also have more hardware details and specs to pore over...

Stephen Battaglio, reporting for the LA Times:

MSNBC viewers have seen the last of Steve Kornacki’s big board.

The popular data maven has signed a deal with NBC that will expand his presence across the network’s news and sports divisions. But the new contract does not include working for MSNBC, which is being spun off into a new corporate entity formed by parent company Comcast.

They might as well just switch off the lights and lock the doors at MSNBC.

Watts Martin:

If we hold things to this list, programs like Nova, MarsEdit, and Apple Pages — canonical Mac-assed Mac apps — all do unsurprisingly smashingly. But Obsidian, the Electron-based program I’m writing in right now, does shockingly well, too. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code doesn’t do quite as well (most notably, it opens its settings “window” as an editor tab), but it does better than Sublime Text (which opens a text file for settings), and much better than the banana crazypants menu and icon design of the cross-platform e-book management program Calibre.

Martin has a good list here of fundamentals, but ultimately, you know it when you see it.

Gambling and sports don’t mix for me. I want a version of games without the gambling. I don’t know how parents can let their kids watch games with all the gambling ads.

Cory Booker asked the right question. "Where does the Constitution live? On paper or in our hearts?" Every living American was raised under the Bill of Rights. That's different from other countries which have long traditions of autocracies. Fascism on a mass scale will have a harder time taking root in this country. Joe Rogan said what Trump is doing is wrong. He knows he has the right to say that. Setting a fine example. It will be hard to suppress that.

Jason Snell:

While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?

The chickens of sanewashing come home to roost.

How did the music industry get through hip-hop sampling in the 80s without blowing itself up? I was paying attention to copyright issues in software at the time, we used copy protection, but we knew it didn't work. It was just how things were done.

The prompt: Here's a drawing and a profile picture. I'd like you to insert the person in the profile into the drawing, and adapt it as you see fit, but the face of the person in the profile should be in the same style as the ones around it.

I gave it a snapshot of the art from the season finale of Severance, and my profile picture from Facebook.

The beautiful art that came with the season finale of Severance could have been drawn by ChatGPT, it's that good, in the way that machine art is good. There's a point of view reflected in its creations, looking into a soul that in no way exists. We're learning about it, but it's a moving target, evolving before our eyes, in huge steps.

My server has been coughing up hairballs tonight. It coughed up a link to this piece from two years ago, when Twitter pulled the plug on their API. It knocked everything I had built on the Twitter API off the air. Every thing. Just like that. That's what tonight was like here. It was just some of my apps, suddenly, not working. Whew.

WordLand and Scripting News and a bunch of other sites/apps were off the air starting about 1AM Eastern, but mostly things seem to be working now, shortly after 6AM. It was a big scramble, I had to provision a new server on Digital Ocean.

WordLand and a bunch of other apps are down. The server that was hosting the apps went down, that happens sometimes, but it isn't coming back up when restarted. I am provisioning a new server, and hopefully when that's up I will be able to restore each of the apps. This is not an April Fools joke. :-)

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

These are not just words, they are a pact. A civil contract. Not to party, not to policy, not to an ideology or an individual. It is a compact between a people, our people, and it is under threat. A democracy is a government of collective action by the people. Let this be a reminder, it is time to do more … before it is no more.

Daring Fireball is brought to you this week by the enduring and aspirational project that is democracy.

I changed the domain for Radio Free America and the Bluesky channel. It's not a Canadian site. Maybe at some time we can have a version of the news flow from Canada. We may need it!