Scripting News for email
• Dave Winer
TRUMP'S NEW EPSTEIN COVER-UP; WHY WAS PATEL DRINKING 'ON THE JOB' - 2.26.26
Little Red Dots
How many Jeffrey Epstein’s do you think there are?
I’ve been going back and forth about how to price the new RSS thing. It’s one of the best things I’ve built in a while. There are new costs, but it’s confusing to require Micro.blog Premium. Pretty sure the basics will he included for all Micro.blog subscribers, with one feature just for Premium.
Reading through the proposals for Growing the Open Social Web, which is on Monday. I think the best suggestions are actionable. Real ideas that can be implemented.
Joost.blog
• Joost de Valk
FAIR, WordPress, and Knowing When to Stop
Over the past year, we, Karim & Joost, have written and talked extensively about the challenges facing WordPress. We’ve been critical. At times, very critical.
‘H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery’
inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-frank-lloyd-wright-typographic
When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.
Terry Godier: ‘Phantom Obligation’
Bill Gates Apologizes to Foundation Staff Over Epstein Ties
wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-foundation-staff-over-epstein-ties-67f39ef5
Emily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
The billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly check his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein even after his then-wife Melinda French Gates expressed concerns in 2013.
“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates told staff. Speaking of his ex-wife, he added: “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing.”
“Kind of” is doing a lot of work there.
Greg Knauss: ‘Lose Myself’
Greg Knauss:
People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst kind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth while standing in front of the fridge at 2:00am. The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature. Digging a trench is a very different thing than telling someone to dig a trench. Assembling a clock is a very different thing than asking Siri for the time.
Splendid little essay.
The Talk Show: ‘Serious Opinionators’
Adam Engst returns to the show to talk, in detail, about certain of the UI changes in iOS 26 and Apple’s version 26 OSes overall. In particular, the new Unified view in the Phone app, and the Filter pop-up menu in both the Phone and Messages apps. Also: a shoutout to Balloon Help.
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- Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.
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Greg Mania writing at The New Yorker about Waymo:
Another car cuts in front of you. The Waymo brakes. It does not then surge forward to assert dominance. It does not briefly consider engaging in Reddit-sourced novice witchcraft to place a curse on the person who has wronged you.
🙂
I was looking for an adjective for the astounding wpcom api. aplomb seemed right. "Complete self-confidence, composure, or poise, especially under strain or in demanding situations." Yes that's the word I was looking for. BTW according to Daytona, this is the first time I've used that word in 31+ years of blogging.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter
• Sarah Kendzior
Just Answering Questions: Overload Edition
Got a question, like "What the hell is happening?" Ask it in the Q & A!
“A collection of images of trees at Dollar Tree...
“A collection of images of trees at Dollar Tree store locations across the United States.”
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display
9to5google.com/2026/02/25/samsung-galaxy-s26-ultra-privacy-display-demo-hands-on/
WIRED
• Miles Klee
Everyone Speaks Incel Now
After migrating from misogynist forums to social media feeds, terms like “looksmaxxing” and “mogged” are now impossible to avoid.
Scripting News for email
• Dave Winer
Scripting News: Tuesday, February 24, 2026
- It took me a while to realize..#
- Agents are server software. #
- The things you used to write in Node.js and before that PHP and Perl, and in my case Frontier.#
- I had been trying to get ChatGPT to do exactly that for months.#
- We're going to spend a while reimplementing all our server software.#
- It would be super helpful if the whole thing could be packaged up so we can write our servers in English or whatever our preferred Really Simple Language is, and have it compiled to whatever internal language it likes, and not have to learn too much new jargon.#
Physics Is a Conversation
Physicist Sean Carroll leads off this video with this line:
I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he is rated.
And then leads us through a history of modern physics and quantum mechanics that, Einstein and Newton aside, is much more collaborative than you often hear about.
This idea that there are many people contributing and many different parts of the pieces need to put together is actually much more characteristic of how physics is usually done than the single person inventing everything all by themselves.
Tags: Albert Einstein · physics · science · Sean Carroll · video