Scripting News

Time 2020-12-10 01:05:34

Web Name: Scripting News

WebSite: http://scripting.com

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1994-2020 Dave Winer. Last update: Tuesday December 8, 2020; 3:01 PM EST. You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-) Tuesday, December 8, 2020Back in the day there was a million pixel web page, they sold individual pixels, $1 a pixel. The guy made the money, got paid for all the pixels. Anyway what made me think of this was President-elect Biden could sell seats at the virtual inauguration and use the money for a good cause. I'd like to be part of a million people participating in the inaugural, without endangering people's lives (including my own).#Highly recommend yesterday's Cuomo podcast, esp the conversation between Cuomo and Fauci. Important: we need 80 percent to be vaccinated to eliminate the virus. Everyone, legal or illegal, no matter where they live. Of course, not likely, given that more than half of NYC firefighters say they will refuse the vaccine. These are people who run into burning buildings, but think the vaccine is too dangerous? #William Blair sent me an email with his story of mysterious old house sounds, I suggested his comments were so good they should be a blog post. I suggested starting one at wordpress.com, and man he really went to town on this. #Not to jinx anything, but the first thing I’m going to do when the pandemic is over is...#Let’s all meet in NYC for a big party when the pandemic is over.#Monday, December 7, 2020Today's song: Respect. #If there were an open and free way to read news on the web that was so good, so fast, so in tune with the way news flows, that would break the paywalls, because all the pubs would want to be part of it. #Basically it's a bad idea to ride bikes on a ski slope. #Zeynep Tufecki is getting deserved acclaim as a smart on-the-money analyzer of Trump chaos and Covid chaos. She also deserves kudos for being an insightful media analyst, observing in an Atlantic piece: "Punditry can tend to focus too much on decorum and terminology, like the overachieving students so many of us once were." That explains concisely what is wrong with the way our pundits analyze cataclysm. The world is burning and they're debating whether it's the fire or the lack of oxygen that's destroying civilization. They're not getting to the central problem, which is this -- the crazies have figured out how to dominate online media and thus they swamp old school media by forcing them to cover the crazy stuff they carry. No matter where you turn, it's mostly this garbage. Conclusion: we need to reinvent media, soon, or we're going down the toilet. #Journalism should use some of their space to debate how they should conduct journalism going forward, the discussion not overseen by journalists, btw. Assuming Trump doesn't manage to overturn the election before January 20, the first chance they're going to get to change things radically over in journalism-land is if Trump has a rally to counter-program the inauguration, in what will probably unprecedented moment of misery for the country re Covid. Journalism no longer has to cover Trump because he's no longer POTUS. They could choose to focus totally on the inauguration and the virus. It's so perverse now that they could go the other way, they could have Chris Cilizza and Gloria Borger discuss whether infecting millions of people and destroying the health care system was a brilliant political move, horse-race-wise, for Trump to set up on his way out, moderated by Wolf Blitzer (who btw, sometimes seems to think he's Speaker of the House).#Until very recently my Twitter feed didn't have ads. They really suck. It’s all stupid tabloid celebrity paparazzi bullshit. Mostly people I’ve never heard of, so I don’t care if they got fat or are too skinny. Apparently they don’t "offer the micro targeting that sometimes brings interesting niche ads to Facebook." (Most of the ads on FB interest me, because they're watching me look at products on Amazon and elsewhere.)# My plan for Twitter# Today Om Malik posted a piece outlining the future of Twitter as very different from where Twitter is today. As I read it I thought, yes that is the future, and about a dozen other things. We should do them all. # Note I said we, not they.# Here's my plan for Twitter. Become an investment banker and distributor. It's the same advice I have for every tech company that achieves the size and seniority that Twitter has achieved. # Their strength is operating servers and raising money. They have access to an infinite supply of both. They also have a unique platform, with virtually universal adoption. Their service is so many places, that's where the distribution comes into it.# Commit to the API as a developer ecosystem, and invest in developers with promising apps. Buy them when that would be in the interest of both. That's how you grow from where Twitter was. # Also for crying out loud, broaden the pipe to allow text objects greater than 280 chars. Please.# It was the advice I came up with for Microsoft when we were studying them in the 90s and they were helbent on taking over the nascent web. With hindsight it was good advice. # It was also my advice for pre-1997 Apple. I even wrote a piece where I dreamed I was CEO of Apple, and outlined how I would reorganize Apple's relationship with devs. That plan would be perfect for Twitter in 2021. Imagine Jack Dorsey as CEO of a new Twitter that does deals with devs. # Twitter is too big a boat to turn. But it can be a safe harbor for thousands of startups with ideas for what to do with the basic ingredients of Twitter. #Sunday, December 6, 2020Andrew Shell is now blogging using an outliner. #We're focusing a lot of attention on the crazy lies of one crazy person, and ignoring the truth all around us.#If you haven't tried thread.center, you should. We're going to eventually figure out how to merge the outliner and Twitter. thread.center is on that path. # We. Have. To. Work. Together.# When we were first rolling out podcasting in the winter of 2004, we had a hard time getting anyone in established media to listen. I think people could have understood, but they didn't make the effort to listen. # It does take effort to listen, I've seen it in myself. We just have our heads down and are focused on what we do. It's even worse today, sixteen years later.# Trump stumbled across the idea we were selling, me, @ev, the other blogging and RSS folk. Trump understood it intuitively, we understood it technologically (and some of us as writers and designers).# So now this method of communication is owned by the tabloids, only worse. Real journalism is reduced to writing about the hoaxes spread in the more powerful media channel. # To win, we have to work together. The people with a vision for how the tech could help, and the people who are able to actually run the complex machinery of government.# We. Have. To. Work. Together.# In the past when that happened, when there was real collaboration, the result was explosive, in a good way.#Saturday, December 5, 2020People seem to think Trump is just being destructive, but what if the real coup is yet to come. What if he's firing people in the DoD who would get in the way of a military takeover of the government.#Studying the Unix source code when I was a CS grad student was a revelation. Here's how I summarize the gestalt. This code looks like what it does. It takes a lot of time, care and craft to do. Up till that point, my code tended to quickly get out of control, but somehow the Unix developers kept it clean. From that point on I knew it was possible, and it's what I always strive for. Some languages make it easier than others, but even if you're writing in assembly language, if it's a well crafted language, you can make the code look like what it does. JavaScript is notorious for making it very difficult. As a language designer I keep wanting to fix it. Someday I will.

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