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Let's all wear MLK buttons to stand in solidarity with our fellow Americans. They're as easy to make as masks, and really make a statement. Here's the news experience I want. As I read Twitter or my river, and I see an article I want to read, I click the link. I get a preview and a price. Click the button and I pay the price, read the article. No spyware, no ads, nice big font. It's in my story list so I can go back and re-read it any time. This requires a centralized payment system, it could be Scroll or something similar to it. The tech is not a problem, the problem is the news orgs giving users what they want. Now questions come up -- what's the price? The news orgs set the price. They have to experiment. They could run specials. They could drop the price to $0 after a story has reached a certain threshold, giving readers a further incentive, to help a story they think is important to circulate. Lots of possibilities. We should get on this train asap. What is an outliner? It's a "a text editor that organizes information in a hierarchy, allowing users to control the level of detail and to reorganize according to structure." Interesting juxtaposition. Protester yells at cop in Minnesota. Protester yells at cop in Michigan. Bug fix release of LO2. For a new user, one who has never logged onto LO2 before, there was a problem with the initialization code that creates your first outline. It's possible that you would get a blank screen instead of a new outline. Not a very good user experience. It should be fixed now. If you had previously tried to create an account and failed, it might be a good time to try again. If it works. please let me know. Who could blame Twitter now if they deleted Trump's account. I got lots of good suggestions for yesterday's prior art search, but no one had advice on getting iPhone to update. And then the problem got even worse. As I was about to go out for my afternoon ride, my iPhone informed me that it had disabled Bluetooth for everything but my AppleWatch. No explanation of why it decided to do this. On my way out, with no music or podcasts to fill my mind, I thought how ridiculous it was that I had spent over $1000 on this device and I still don't own it. Apple says "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." They should change the name of the company to Hal. Journalism has to take chances I was an entrepreneur in my youth. I've never stopped thinking like one. Journalism needs to be entrepreneurial. And that means taking risks. And challenging your assumptions. There seems to be a resolution that "micropayments" don't work. I don't like the term either, because I was thinking of giving them large amounts of money. I like to splurge. I like making impulse purchases. I like voting with dollars, but... As a user, I don't trust subscriptions. It's incredibly hard to change your mind. How many times have you found out that you have to jump through endless hoops to cancel a subscription. A subscription is a commitment. I want to date before we get married. Anyway, every time I try to start a discussion about this, the users agree, and the journalists that show up tell me why they don't have to to listen to scum like me. It really feels like that. They have to take chances. That's the way of business. And money and business are kind of the same thing. The biggest chance they have to take is recognizing that their users are sentient and smart and are good people who they are not treating very well. PS: This started as an email to my friend Jeff Jarvis, but I could hear myself saying -- why are you saying this just to him, say it to the world. Twitter's market cap is approx $26 billion, so one could buy a controlling interest for $13 billion. Prior art search: I'm writing a command line tool to talk with PagePark, a web server running on the same machine. The question is what should the URLs look like. I get this cryptic dialog when I try to update my iPhone XS/Max using iTunes. I've tried all the things the recommend, to no avail. Do you know what it means? I really don't want to reformat the phone. Old TV shows had a laugh track that simulated audience applause and laughter. This was before they started recorded sitcoms in front of a live audience. As a little kid, I thought they must have little microphones in the TVs, maybe only some of them (not mine of course) and they could pick up the sounds made by people at home. The laugh track and other audience sounds were real, little Dave imagined. So you gotta wonder why they don't do actually that for live sports events in the upcoming seasons for basketball, baseball, hockey, football, etc -- when there won't be any fans in the stadiums and arenas. You could even pipe the audience sounds into the venue so the players can experience them. The technology is totally up to it. Why not have some fun with it? On Twitter, Joe Pezillo says he's pretty sure Dave Winer (me) got the idea for RSS from Newton. He's also pretty sure I won't admit it. He's wrong on the first count, and right on the second. ?? I wrote a tweet that was too long to fit in 280 chars that lists the steps that led to what we think of as RSS today. It wasn't an invention as most people think of invention, it was more of a synthesis, one idea leading to another and then another.
And thus was born what we now think of as RSS. Main development platforms over time.
Anyone who lives in Manhattan and has made it through the last few months without going completely crazy deserves a prize. The Karen story with the off-leash dog in the Ramble, an area I am familiar with, imho deserves a second chance. Wouldn't that be great if out of the virus we learned to forgive. Give her the dog and the job back and accept her apology. As someone who used Central Park when I lived in the city, the rules are broken a lot, my peeves were no smoking and no bike riding on the walking paths. Two rules I felt strongly about, as the man did about off-leash dogs interfering with birding in the Brambles. A lot of NYers, even when they aren't stressed by isolation, act in a way that might look insane to someone not from NY, when you say they've violated the rules governing use of space. And NYers are sensitive to those rules being broken because there is so little space. It's kind of a powder keg that way, even in normal times. She did something awful, but it doesn't rise to the level that requires her life to be destroyed. I think it would be good for all of us if we perhaps just this once practiced forgiveness. Laurie Garrett, one of the most knowledgeable journalists about pandemics, who is frequently interviewed on TV and speaks science clearly, has an awful video setup in her apartment in Brooklyn. The video and audio quality should be great, so everyone can hear what she's saying. She asked for help on Twitter, I jumped on it, putting out an appeal for help and Logitech, the company who makes the webcam she uses, just closed the loop. Tech helping journalism in the new media age. I love it. Perfect. The idea of a self-contained news product you subscribe to is a vestige of the way news used to be distributed. Now, in my Twitter timeline, or RSS river, I see links to stories all over the place. This is the way I want it. I want a mix, my choice. GitHub, platform for time capsules An idea.. Microsoft owns GitHub. When I post a project to GH, I'm hoping I'm preserving that work for a long time. As long as MS exists? Would be cool. This is something MS could market. Think of the repos at GH as time capsules. Tech can be imaginative. Like this. ;-) PS: Chad Tolkien says they are planning on it, but it's only for some projects. So it's going to have a Microsoft bias. Oy. I want to send my stuff into the future so they can use it as prior art for the software they'll be doing then. Bug reports, not pull requests Basic philosophy: If you spot a mistake, I want to know about it so I can fix it. Always. Now here's the background: I share most of the software I write as open source on GitHub. Sometimes people report bugs by submitting pull requests. That doesn't work out very well because I write my code in an outliner, and it generates the JavaScript code from the outline. So what you see as source on GitHub actually isn't what I edit. I couldn't accept a pull request to the generated code. It would just be wiped out the next time I made a change to the outline and re-generated. So the best thing to do when you spot a mistake is flag it as an issue in the repo, point to the code in question if that's helpful, and I'll thank you and make the fix myself. I'm like Johnny Appleseed of RTs. I like to just swoop in and RT something and share a sexy idea from someone else with the people who follow me. It's like opening up a worm hole in the universe. We get a peek of someone else's reality. New Biden ad. It's true. Trump is a deer caught in the headlights. A president who can't handle a crisis is no president at all. As I wrote yesterday I really liked Season 2 of Homecoming. I noted that it's based on a podcast from Gimlet of the same name. I've started to listen to that. It's also very good. I like the whole thing. I think finally I'm going to have to re-watch Season 1 on Amazon, to complete the experience. So what a nice feeling that a podcast started all that. I can't recall any pundit saying Podcasting is really great. It's made my life so much better. Hooray for podcasting, or something like that. All they write about is how it's going to die, as if they have a clue. In The Atlantic Tom Nichols writes that Trump is not a manly president. I don't particularly care for that approach, I think honor and modesty are traits that should apply regardless of gender. We have the president we deserve. We're the country that went to war without a draft, whose citizens got tax cuts while at war, whose citizens expect more of that, to us it's never enough. We expect to be able to inflict chaos around the world and somehow never to be touched by it ourselves. That's why people are out partying with abandon this weekend. They can't imagine they can pay a price. There's a reason Vietnam is responding to the virus so incredibly well and we're responding so poorly. They remember fighting for their independence. To us, independence is a birth right. A distant memory that's become perverted. We have to fight for it again. The virus is giving us that chance. We can't get out of the pandemic until we grow up as individuals and collectively. Trump is the right president for who we are. We won't get a better one until we deserve a better one. Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president? Admitting that, and incorporating it into public discourse, is on the road to moving beyond Trump. I'm always looking for a good binge, and I found one. The second season of Homecoming is out, on Amazon. I started it the other night instead of watching the news. I had forgotten most of the plot of the first season, I remember liking it, but it didn't leave much of an impression. The second season is nicely done, has a Mr Robotish feel, there's a constant stream of twists and surprises, it's fun and so far intellectually gratifying, and it reviews the plot of season 1 as it goes. We have an inkling of how it will end because the first episode is about how it ends, or so we are led to believe. I don't know otherwise because I still have a few episodes to go. But nothing in this show is a straight line, and as I said it's well done. I especially like the end of each episode. They end with a twist, but they stay wtih the scene as the credits roll. I had not seen this technique before. Thread: A friend tells me that Node does breaking releases regularly. I've been working in Node for seven years so far and it hasn't affected me yet. So they must not be heavy earth-shaking things. Horserace journalism has never seemed less relevant. Read this quote from the Republican governor of North Dakota about masks. A silver lining to the pandemic is the only way out of it is to cut the level of insanity to zero and start acting according to science. There is no other way out of it, assuming you don't want to bet exclusively on a miracle. Either we stay collectively insane, we'll all get the virus, sooner than later, and a shitload of us will die, and the survivors will have a new Dark Ages. If we could only apply the objective brainpower to this problem that we do to a sports game like football or basketball. There is a winning strategy but it requires teamwork. When you hear someone you love and think is smart and literate say Oh it's no big deal if I catch the virus, say "I love you and you're smart and literate, and please read this story, because you're wrong about it not being a big deal." Perfect example of save my life story-telling. I've heard reports of people having trouble unsubscribing from the nightly email. If you've been having trouble, please let me know by respoinding to the email. The latest save my life story (must-read) makes me wonder how to listen to people we support. People who are suffering. What conclusions to draw from what they say? This is part of the "we're going to have to learn to live with it" approach, which is another part of save my life. It's not only about medicine, math, politics, money and power -- it's also about individual people who need -- what? How can we help? How to listen? How can we help? What to say? And how can we help? The author wasn't able to convey her condition to the first doctor over the phone. I wanted to know how the doctor could do better. Also how the doctor could have made a difference when there was no treatment, at the time -- not sure if there's treatment possible now, even. It's about more than science. It's about us. This is a technical post. The three words in the title of the post are noun, verb and subject. Let's go through them one by one.
A couple of stories to go with this.
At UserLand we came up with the fundamental rule, so fundamental that we called it Rule 1. It was this: Don't break users. There's nothing more sacred in the relationship between platform vendors and the devs. So with all that background, I wonder what the Node platform vendor thinks we should use in place of request? To make it as smooth as possible it should just be request, of course. ?? My brother found this picture of me as a kid in my father's photos. New version of publicFolder, a Node app that runs on your desktop and keeps an Amazon S3 location in sync with a folder on a local disk. It's available as an NPM package and an Electron app. I use it to publish this.how, and am starting to use it in place of Dropbox. Much lighter weight, and I have all the source (and so do you). I have a Subaru Forester. Nice car. But every so often the rear door refuses to open. Three beeps. So I search, have trouble finding an answer. So confusing, they talk about buttons my car doesn't seem to have. Anyway it turns out if you hold the touch point for six seconds it'll open the rear door. Software glitch of some kind. From then on it works as normal. Wonder what the logic is. If it has the means to reset itself why doesn't it just reset itself without me having to jump through hoops? My longtime friend Matt Ocko says it's hot in Brazil and they have a lot of virus there, so the virus must do okay in heat, so therefore no reprieve during the summer in the US. I don't know whether the virus does better or worse in summer months, but saying it's doing fine in Brazil doesn't add much data about how it will do in the US in the summer. Maybe the virus doesn't care about the heat, but humans behave differently when it's warm. We spend more time outdoors, and the virus isn't as infectious outdoors, because it's the virus load that determines how infectious it is. At least that's what we currently think. Human bodies are generally in better shape in the summer. That might make us better able to fight the virus. Brazil is a different place from the US and is responding socially to the virus differently, so it's hard to conclude anything about what happens in the US based on what happens in Brazil. And of course the US is a very varied country, so what happens in NYC is different from what happens in Calif, is different from other parts of New York State for that matter. Pretty remarkable. Is the common cold a vaccine for Covid-19? Or a drug that prevents the virus that is not a vaccine?
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