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Fascinating tidbit from David Thomson’s biography of David O. Selznick: When Selznick heard what the studio did to The Magnificent Ambersons, he tried to get the original footage donated to the Museum of Modern Art (357). There’s no citation for this claim, however; I assume Thomson’s source was Irene Selznick, DOS’s first wife, whom Thomson interviewed at great length. If the story is true, which I doubt, DOS showed remarkable foresight; and of course if he had managed it, an artistic tragedy would have ben averted.

Love: I ask Claude for a list of names and values, it responds quickly with exactly what I asked for. Nothing more. Unconsciously I say "perfect" -- out loud.

I have been missing in action for a couple of weeks. I apologize for my tardiness, but I have been busy with personal matters. Both my heart and mind were not in it. Anyway, this week I have some great (and fun) pieces that I enjoyed reading in between meetings. One thing I noted is …

I have a Mac laptop that I keep updated with the latest versions of Mac OS. I got a warning today saying that Electric Drummer won't run on the next release of the OS. Now I don't use it very much if at all on that machine, but I wonder. ED is an Electron app, otherwise it's wholly JavaScript. It does include some Node packages of course, but not that many IIRC. This was a thing I wasn't expecting.

I just tried the latest version of the X editor. It's got all the features of textcasting. I wrote a test post entitled "X has nuked the limits, time for Bluesky to follow suit." I think you can tell I had fun writing it. They don't think anyone hears me, but I think they're wrong about that. The idea that they are part of the web is ludicrous. They're going to get called on it eventually. They should fix things so they are part of the web. Then we can all create. Or if you're not going to be part of the web, for crying out loud stop saying that you do.

One of the benefits of using Claude for all my coding is I'm now finding out what various things I do as standard practice are called in the outside world. Today I learned what agile is. I of course have heard it used, and even got to know the guy who coined the term.

There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming […]

I archived Prior art as a design method from 2003 on this.how.

My recommendation for Automattic and Bluesky.

• Bluesky supports RSS 2.0 inbound and outbound.
• Bluesky eliminates its character limit, allows bold, italic styles. Links. Optional titles. Users can edit their posts. More here.

Automattic already fully supports RSS 2.0 in both directions, in all their products.

This gives us the most interop with the most respect for prior art. No need to reinvent. There's nothing special about Bluesky, they can use what we've all been using for 20+ years.

It's really very simple, let's hook everything together and let the users and developers create.

There probably is a name for this development practice. Only works on a team with more two developers. At some point in a project after you've been working on Level N in the stack, you may decide you've done all you can there, and it's time for someone else to work at that le...

Michael Feldstein on the implications of the Canvas hack: Let’s be clear: This was not some rando script kiddie waltzing through a wide-open back door. The hackers used multiple attack vectors, including Canvas’s open course sites, their help desk software, and social engin...

Finished reading: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. One memorable story among dozens: All the Disney employees were profoundly anxious at the premiere of Snow White — it was after all the first animated feature and no one knew how it would be received. But when the dwarfs laid the dead Snow White on her bier, one of the animators could hear a couple near him sniffling and trying to stifle sobs. He couldn’t resist taking a peek. They were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. 📚

The Supreme Court’s typographic style has been stunningly consistent for — no pun intended — well over a century.

Following up on yesterday’s item re: Apple’s petition to the Supreme Court, here’s the Ninth Circuit ruling. It starts with a “Summary” that is specifically intended for the convenience of the reader. Page 50 is where it covers Apple’s argument regarding Trump v. CASA as precedent that an injunction on commissions should apply only to Epic Games, not to all developers in the U.S. App Store.

James Poniewozik, writing for The New York Times (gift link): He didn’t land the pope, but he got a Beatle. He didn’t have a new project to announce, but he left us with a song (in fact two). He didn’t choose to end his show, but he ended it his own weird, wonderful way....

I’m in the park reading Claire L. Evans’ book Broad Band, learning about Radia Perlman, her Spanning Tree Protocol, and the poem she wrote about it.

Kieran Healy kindly accepted my implicit homework assignment yesterday, and wrote a piece on Apple Sports’s bizarre “zero sum” team stats visualization: It also doesn’t do away with the core problem. That problem is principally one of information design rather than data ...

BTW, I don't think the web was created to make people rich.

Another way to look at Claude Code. It's a way to talk to your code, to ask it questions, and tell it how you want it to change.

I think maybe it's time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can't seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It's a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I'm not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That's what dr...