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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2021-10-28T01:55:34Z

- 2021-10-27T13:23:02Z
I began this workday with Morning Drummer Notes.

Our lives have value - 2021-10-27T15:40:06Z

But our lives are cheap when Trump is president.

And it follows that if the DoJ lets Trump be president again, many of us will die.

It stands to reason, having done it before, next time more of us will die, and not just because we got a virus.

And yes, it is up to the DoJ. If they don't prosecute and convict him of insurrection, there is nothing legally standing in the way of him being president again.

The 14th Amendment is the relevant law, specifically section 3.

I am not a lawyer, but I am an American citizen, a child and grandchild of Nazi survivors, and I can read, and feel, and I'm not so stupid that I don't see where all this is going.

Apple season - 2021-10-28T01:55:34Z

It's apple season in the Hudson Valley.

- 2021-10-27T03:15:44Z
I am now rewriting a fairly large part of Old School.

- 2021-10-26T14:43:05Z
Drummer has a command that downloads a zip archive of all your files. It takes a couple of seconds, so it's really quick (OPML files compress nicely). Even so the users, some of whom are quite technical, are writing scripts to download them automatically. I love seeing this, because backups are the best insurance against software or server problems. And I like to see users take charge and solve problems for themselves.

- 2021-10-26T12:11:00Z
Re Facebook and hate speech, every online system is a haven for all kinds of speech. No one knows how to control it, and esp not at the scale that Facebook operates. You could see the revelations differently, at least now Facebook is trying to control the damaging speech. That's progress. But we do have bigger fish to fry. Journalism has decided that we should all aim our hate at Facebook, exclusively. That's a Fox-like tactic. If we're blaming Facebook, I guess we can't blame the NY Times or the WSJ or CNN, MSNBC, etc. As authoritarianism rises, we have to watch our journalism, for signs they are manipulating our focus, for signs they are controlled by or pandering to the fascists. Right now most of us, regardless of what we say to pollsters, accept what the press says as truth.

- 2021-10-26T11:56:09Z
Next time you hear yet another revelation that Facebook is a haven for hate speech, ask if you've gotten any info on what's going on inside the DoJ and why haven't there been any indictments of Republican insurrectionists. At least Rolling Stone has started to cover this. But where are the others? Surely there are patriotic insiders in Congress who would provide background info.

- 2021-10-25T22:04:24Z
Some notes on the second blog timezone experiment.

- 2021-10-25T13:56:07Z
Last night's Succession was a playoff game of the characters of Succession, after two full seasons, we've gotten to know them, and now they're all ready to wrestle each other at the same time. I laughed all the way through the episode. The craftwork. Sat on the edge of my chair to absorb it all. It's a lot like post-season baseball, where you get as many as seven games to get to know all the players. I don't think this is the World Series yet, but we're getting close. Everyone's still in the game, and new people are showing up, more powerful than ever. And it seems the most powerful ones are the women. At one point Kendall says as much. I love this stuff. (And btw, the Dodgers and Red Sox lost the actual playoffs, so we're left with Atlanta and Houston, and I don't care for either team. Onto the NBA season.)

- 2021-10-25T14:10:26Z
BTW if you blinked you might have missed a new Succession character, played by Hope Davis.

- 2021-10-25T13:54:18Z
Watched I May Destroy You on HBO over the weekend. It's highly rated, but I had not heard of it before last week. Very unusual show, artsy, emotional, a page-turner. Twelve half-hour episodes, quick binge.

- 2021-10-25T13:54:08Z
I'm getting my Covid booster shot on Friday.

- 2021-10-24T17:29:39Z
You can't have both free speech and only speech you approve of in the same world.

- 2021-10-24T14:21:26Z
I've been dealing with some complicated problems with JavaScript dates in Old School, which is the blogging CMS that Drummer uses. It's the same software I use to build Scripting News. I had to take a step back on the project yesterday because I was having so much trouble wrapping my head around what exactly the problem was. It was showing up in India and the Far East mostly. We didn't hit this set of problems with Fargo, because the blog rendering happened on the user's machine, so there was no timezone difference. And oddly, there is no problem with the RSS feeds of sites in the Far East. But at some times during the day if you posted something new from India, Malaysia or Australia, it would not appear on your home page. Anyway, it's great to have a bunch of smart super-interested people. It's very early days in Drummer Land, and the people really want their blogs to work, and of course I want this even more than they do. But I've never dealt with these issues before and they are mindfucks. You can read about it in this thread on the Drummer support site, starting here. I am figuring it out, it seems, I hope, Murphy-willing.

- 2021-10-24T14:45:45Z
BTW, if you want to follow along in code, or to just see how I work, here's a snapshot of the oldschool source outline. That link opens in Drummer. Warning the code is a snapshot, a working document so to speak. Not designed for casual reading, but imho is quite readable. ;-)

Edward Hopper - 2021-10-23T15:39:45Z

Houses of Squam Light, Gloucester, 1923.

- 2021-10-22T21:51:35Z
Spent most of the day working on timezones for non-American blogs. Still more to do, tomorrow.

- 2021-10-22T19:21:02Z
I was chatting with Scoble on Facebook at wrote this: There's this great line in Succession where the father's wife says to one of his kids "he built you a playground and you think it's the world" -- that's Silicon Valley. It's a tiny little place that thinks it's everything when in fact it's a bunch of factories filled with grunts, and due to the pandemic it's not even that anymore.

- 2021-10-22T13:42:35Z
Hopefully at some point President Biden and his administration will turn their full attention to preventing the collapse of America's political system.

- 2021-10-21T14:51:46Z
I ordered a new Tesla Model 3 today. It's blue. Arrives in December. I haven't been as excited about a new toy in a long time.

- 2021-10-21T12:35:59Z
Enes Kanter, an NBA player for the Boston Celtics, wrote a tweet saying the leader of China is a "brutal dictator." And of course China is shitting its pants. This is a big problem. They don't understand that there's a line they're not allowed to cross. In the US, Kanter has a right to his opinion. And the leader of China is a brutal dictator. And even if there's some question about it, Kanter is allowed to say what he thinks. This is a similar problem to the one they're having at Netflix with Dave Chappelle's show which I have not watched. I find him incredibly offensive. I'd love to have a private conversation with him where I ask what he's trying to accomplish. I find his stories humiliating. Is there some lesson I'm supposed to learn? If so, could we skip to that part. Anyway, I won't watch him. Employees at Netflix were offended too, and they want Netflix to remove him. That's just as wrong as what China is doing to pressure the NBA about Kanter. One more. The NYT fucked up when they fired Donald McNeil. I think even the assholes who forced him out would agree, as their coverage of Covid is now bullshit, where before McNeil was canned, it was stellar. They had no place trying to control what appears in the NYT. They just work there. It's a platform for speech, I think even the most jaded and cynical reporter at the NYT would agree with that. And just because you get a paycheck from the NYT, that doesn't empower you to control other people's speech, same as China and Netflix. I wrote yesterday that when Zuck rolls out his new thing next week, we'll find out if the journalists properly understand their role. There will be no fake news yet on their new platform for them to complain about. But I guarantee you it will restrict speech in an effort to appease the journalists. Will they see this, and call bullshit? Or will their vanity and narcissism prevail. Obviously they don't care about our speech, but will they mind being so visible about not honoring it?

- 2021-10-21T12:52:51Z
I'm watching Succession from the beginning, just to see how all the michegas got started. Seeing the first appearances of all the characters. The special relationship with Roman and Gerri is flirtatious from the first meeting. Cousin Greg plays a starring role in the first few episodes. And my friend Nick Denton is in the show, via proxy, only this version of Denton gets revenge over the rich capitalists who were tormenting him (no spoilers beyond that). Season 3 of Succession started last Sunday, it's just getting better all the time. One of the best TV series ever.

- 2021-10-21T12:58:09Z
BTW, I took the picture of Denton on his Wikipedia page, but don't seem to be credited. Is that fair? The picture was taken at a restaurant in Berkeley.

- 2021-10-21T21:05:44Z
How could a court decision on abortion not be political? It's as silly as saying you could go swimming without being immersed in water, or breathe in a vacuum. It's as ridiculous as the view from nowhere in journalism.

- 2021-10-20T16:39:04Z
I spent most of today grabbing bits of docs from the change notes outline for Drummer, while it was in development, and merging it with the already-existing docs. I can see we're going to need a new structure, because people aren't finding a lot of it, and there's more coming. Most of the newly public stuff is on the FAQs page. 💥

When people love RSS... - 2021-10-20T19:48:52Z

A rambling thread from this morning that somehow fits together.

When people say they love RSS, it's not specifically RSS that they love imho, it's the open format, no-lock-in philosophy of software development. If your data can move around the net effortlessly, that's what you love, and that's what you give up when you use a silo.

One thing you can be sure of, when Zuck announces his new Zuckerverse thing, it'll be locked up and owned by him and his stockholders.

He can't pay all those employees if you're free to move out of his universe any time you want.

There will be lots of eye candy, but he has the only keys to the doors.

Reminds me of a story. In 1980 i went on vacation to Jamaica.

• In the cab from Montego Bay to Negril, the driver pointed out a town with lots of new modern-looking shacks.
• He said they were a gift from Cuba.
• They had front doors, but no back doors.
• Think about it. ;-)

I've been very critical of the way journalism covers Facebook, because they miss the human freedom part of the story, which is just as important as the fake news part. But of course journalism is only concerned with the freedom of journalists, not our freedom. In fact journalism would probably prefer if we had no means to speak publicly, if we just got our ideas from them. Only thing is they don't have any ideas.

I'm absolutely 100 percent sure that when they get a chance to kill Zuck's new invention, they will ignore (or miss) the controls over our freedom in his new world.

I'm sure it'll be designed to make the journos happy.

Whether they buy it or not, that's another question. 🚀

- 2021-10-19T13:56:03Z
I started a thread for people using Drummer with micro.blog.

- 2021-10-19T14:50:34Z
A longish podcast about the origins of blogging in the mid-90s and a lot more, and why it's time to return to the roots. We couldn't trust journalism then, and nothing has changed, and today the stakes are much higher. And there are reasons they don't tell the truth in journalism. It's the same reason no one got fired for buying IBM.

- 2021-10-19T15:15:36Z
Trump is the broken clock that's right twice a day. The people who are gushing about Powell are wrong. He owns the Iraq war. It was on his say-so that we accepted what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice were saying. He was their credibility.

- 2021-10-18T21:36:15Z
12-minute podcast about the new connection between micro.blog and Drummer.

- 2021-10-18T21:41:48Z
Here's the initial post I mentioned in the podcast.

- 2021-10-18T20:21:15Z
I hear Dems might lose in Virginia because of voter apathy. Right now the big issues are abortion, COVID, climate and fascism. That’s a pretty good set of issues. Run some freaking ads on social media. Never stop campaigning, every day of every year.

- 2021-10-18T17:38:18Z
I was pretty sure the Dodgers would crush the Braves, but wow, the Braves are up 2-0. Gotta love it. I'm sorry if you're a Dodgers fan, but I was born in Brooklyn and people such as myself don't forget. I also remember when Chase Utley broke the leg of the Mets shortstop during the 2015 playoffs. I also remember when I sat in scalped seats during the World Series in 1988, in the Dodgers wives' section and they tried to get us thrown out for rooting for the A's who won, btw. I really feel justified in hating the Dodgers, but honestly even if I wasn't, I would still hate them. 💥

- 2021-10-18T19:55:28Z
Meanwhile the NBA season starts tomorrow with a game between last year's champion, the Milwaukee Bucks, and a much-hyped superteam, the Brooklyn Nets. I will be rooting for the Bucks. Superteams suck.

Micro.blog and Drummer - 2021-10-18T21:03:47Z

Just before Drummer shipped I sent an email to Manton Reece, the developer and runner of micro.blog, asking if he was interested in being the first blogging system to hook up with Drummer via the OPML bridge. The same interface we use in Drummer to connect to Old School.

Well here it is. He works fast. 🚀

Just watched the video -- I love how he did it. Beautiful.

Colin Powell lied for war - 2021-10-18T20:47:38Z

Amazing how people are kvelling over Colin Powell.

His speech at the UN was chilling, implying but not directly saying that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was getting ready to use them, and we had no choice but to go to war with him.

It was a lie.

No one would have believed Cheney, Rumsfeld or Rice. They got the only person in the Bush administration who had credibility. If Powell was willing to say this, it must be true, we had to act.

It was a lie. A way to transfer wealth from the US Treasury to the war industry.

When people act naive as they do horrific things, seriously -- he knew what he was doing. Powell wasn't a tool, we were the tools. He abused our trust. And in death he doesn't deserve the acclaim he's getting. Too many people died because of his lie.

- 2021-10-17T19:34:35Z
I think you have to be very young and very healthy to be medication-averse. There are some people who make it to old age without needing medical care. My mother was one of those people, she didn't get sick until she was in her 80s. Me, on the other hand, I would have died before I was 10 if it wasn't for health care and antibiotics. I had a ruptured appendix, mis-diagnosed by a doctor as a stomach ache. Okay so medicine fucks up, a lot. I have limited vision because two eye doctors gave me bad advice and did surgery, the first fucked my left eye and the second made it worse. My hearing is blown in my left ear, because a doctor used a device to clear out earwax that damaged my eardrum. So now loud noise, including loud music, makes my head vibrate in an unpleasant way. Too bad, I used to love loud music. But I am alive. My life having been saved twice by medicine now. So when medicine says "take this vaccine it'll make you safer against a horrible disease" -- I take it. Gladly. Why? Because I get how medicine works to an extent and am appreciative for the life I would not have had were it not for medicine.

- 2021-10-17T15:14:22Z
Drummer is really going. I'm trying to scope out in my mind now where I want it to go. With all the programmers around now, and maybe more on the way, I'm thinking bigger in terms of open source projects that could spin out of Drummer.

- 2021-10-17T19:42:09Z
In the back of my mind is the question of could we get a Linux version of Frontier going. That would send this project into the stratosphere, imho. Even after a year's work, Drummer is still a shadow of Frontier, which I use as my development platform for all of this. That's how I'm so productive. Invest as much time in tools as you do in product, and some years, invest all your time in tools. BTW, when I say a Linux version -- I mean an exact clone. The benchmark is whether it runs my software, not that it's a cool project. With these things it's the base of apps that matters. I think the language designers at big companies have lost the tune. The apps are what matters. That's why I program in JavaScript -- it's where all the code is. And that's why projects like Deno (A different arrangement of N O D and E) are such a bad idea. And deprecating the request verb? Only the most commonly called function the whole fricking language. Deprecated!! Someone has lost their sense of what matters. It's as if one day they decided the new Tappan Zee Bridge is too cool to drive cars over, so we'll require people to convert their cars so that the wheels are inside and the seats are outside. Always going backward is a good way to never get anywhere. BTW the Tappan Zee Bridge Is a beautiful bridge. It carries exactly the same traffic the old one did.

- 2021-10-17T19:25:45Z
The old Tappan Zee Bridge and the new one.

- 2021-10-17T15:18:01Z
I'm doing most of my writing these days in Drummer Land, but it's nice to remember that things I want to write about that don't belong there, still have a home, here.

- 2021-10-17T15:05:50Z
Car drivers suck. I usually ride my bike on the right edge of the road, making it easy for cars to pass. But if I have to make a left, I move left, and if a car approaches behind me, they have to momentarily slow. They always honk. I never carry a gun, but sometimes I wish I did (not really).

- 2021-10-17T01:47:35Z
I hope Manchin is getting paid more than $500K per year to sell out our last chance at having a planet that supports human life.

- 2021-10-16T20:01:54Z
I have a thing. If they're forecasting rain, showers or even a thunderstorm, and it's not raining when I want to go out for a ride, I go out anyway. Worst that can happen is I get soaked, I reason. And I usually make it home in time. And often as soon as I walk in the door it starts to pour. That's exactly what happened today. I'm feeling very oxygenated and strong, writing this post in my bike clothes, and outside it's pouring cats and dogs. Amazing.

- 2021-10-16T17:37:45Z
We know what we have to do -- we should be campaigning like everything is at stake (it is) instead we're hearing weak statements like this. It's not his fault, btw -- the national Democrats are looking in the wrong direction. I don't know how they can do it, but they are. Where is the Lincoln Project, why aren't they turning out ads like this, every day, about abortion rights? This is the big problem that the Democrats keep making. To them campaigns are about elections, but they're really about everything, 365 days a year. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops.

- 2021-10-16T13:49:16Z
I've been doing a lot of support this last week. Noted that a lot of times the problem is web caching. Learn how to get your browser to do a hard reload. Always try that first. Once you have that mastered, it's amazing how much time you'll save.

R. Crumb - 2021-10-17T00:43:26Z

The P&J Coffee Shop, San Francisco.

- 2021-10-16T02:01:56Z
Today's Drummer change notes.

- 2021-10-15T15:49:03Z
The Giants lost. I'm so sorry. I knew however that it would end in an awful way when the batter, with two out in the bottom of the 9th with a runner on first, the Dodgers leading by one in what was the last game of the season for one of these teams, was Wilmer Flores. Mets fans remember him and love him like a son, because the Mets broke his heart and he didn't hide his feelings. So they didn't trade him in 2015 when the Mets went on to win the National League pennant, Flores was the team mascot, but they eventually did let him go, and he was on the forever to be remembered as the ill-fated Giants of 2021. When he stepped into the batter's box late last night I knew it would not end well. It didn't. In a very unsatisfactory way. Which I think was inevitable, probably the instant the Giants signed him. He is a man of great consequence.

- 2021-10-15T20:52:16Z
A friend asked if it was true that Spotify now owns podcasting. They read something in Wired that said they did. They're idiots. Or trying to get clicks. Or maybe they're idiots and they're trying to get clicks. Anyway -- no, Spotify does not own podcasting. As long as people say "subscribe where ever you get your podcasts" at the end of their podcast you have nothing to worry about. I'm not even going to link to the Wired article.

#rss