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Watched: Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E2, Darmok. A justly famous episode, and one day I need to write to explain why Ian Bogost gets it all wrong. 🍿

Watched: Blue Moon. Ethan Hawke’s performance as Lorenz Hart has been getting raves that it thoroughly deserves, but the story starts jumping off the screen when Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers shows up. The two of them together are electrifying. 🍿

Listening to Peter Gregson ♫

Okay, this might be the N+1 attempt to rekindle this newsletter format. I start with good intentions, but always fail at maintaining continuity. I am going to give this one more try, and see how it goes. As Yoda said, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” — Om If you were to look …

If you followed me on Twitter, follow me on Bluesky. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that book. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the fuck, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes.

Ross Barkan: People still do read, make music, watch films, and visit art museums. There is a culture, high and middle and low, even if it’s under attack. There’s an awareness, too, of the cultural and spiritual sickness of anti-humans. The AI revolution is not very popular...

Bodega Bay, California, September 2025.

My thanks to Sentry for sponsoring last week at DF. Sentry is running a hands-on workshop: “Crash Reporting, Tracing, and Logs for iOS in Sentry”. You can watch it on demand. You’ll learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. It’ll show you how to:

• Set up Sentry to surface high-priority mobile issues without alert fatigue.
• Use Logs and Breadcrumbs to reconstruct what happened with a crash.
• Find what’s behind a performance bottleneck using Tracing.
• Monitor and reduce the size of your iOS app using Size Analysis.

I know so many developers using Sentry. It’s a terrific product. If you’re a developer and haven’t checked them out, you should.

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements.

Sponsored by:

• Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.

A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders.

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work...

Terry Godier on his new RSS app:

When a source floods your feed with eighteen posts in a day, a quiet card appears between articles: “The Verge posted 18 items today.” With options to rate-limit or quiet the source. When you've skipped ten straight articles from the same source, Current notices: “You've skipped 10 from TechCrunch. Quiet or remove?” When you keep reading everything from a particular source: “You keep reading Craig Mod. Pin to the top?” When you keep reading about the same topic across different sources: “You keep reading design. Want a design Current?” 

To which I want to say: I’m reading my RSS feeds, I’m not taking questions right now. This seems far more intrusive than having an Unread count on your app’s icon (and I have that disabled in NetNewsWire anyway). 

Archive for Scripting News in February 2026, in OPML, as always.

Viktig samhällsinformation: snåla inte med isen i drinken. 🧊

Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic:

When the 2003 war with Iraq ended, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine said that when American diplomats embarked on reconstruction, they ruefully joked that “there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (the company formerly known as Square), went on X (the company formerly known as Twitter, which he co-founded) and shared a lower-case employee memo, candidly outlining his decision to cut about 4,200 people, just over 40 percent of the company’s staff. The memo was in sharp contrast to the investor …

Podcast: Why men hate the Dems. I tell my perspective of MeToo, and how that imho created enough anti-Dem energy to push Trump over the top. Polls won't tell you how the Dems got the rep of being the party run by women to cancel men, but I'm sure if we could cure that somehow, we could do everything we need to do to get American democracy working again. I did this in response to a Frum podcast where he and his guest conclude that the young folks are making a big mistake, they don't want the same old bullshit people coming back into power. Frum and Miller thought that the young men don't want was democracy, foolishly (I would agree) but there is real anger there, I know about it because I have it too. I still vote for Dems, but I also fear what happens if we snap back to the political correctness of Kirsten Gillibrand.

2022: "And while we were effectively silenced in the public debate, men do vote and that's a private thing."

Another point -- I don't think any of us realize what an un-democratic US will be like. When the things that make us furious these days are just the normal way of the USA. I got that from listening to a New Yorker podcast yesterday about the Iranian perspective of what's happ...

If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.