(date: 2024-09-01 11:20:24)
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-09-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
And for some companies, the founder of a company they acquire might make the best CEO when the founder of the original company isn’t available. Again Apple is a great example. Steve Jobs ultimately replaced Gil Amelio, after Apple bought NeXT.
http://scripting.com/2024/09/01.html#a165719
date: 2024-09-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Wordle Kitty is watching TV along with 80 other convicted house pets serving life sentences at Attica high security prison. They’re watching a mushy political psycho drama starring Wordle Kitty herself, the cutest most adorable kitten known to mankind. The NYT headline reads “Cushy kitty crushes mushy melodrama in prison laugh riot.”
http://scripting.com/2024/09/01/165153.html?title=cushyKitty
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-09-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Graham uses Steve Jobs as an example. He knew what was and wasn’t an Apple product. A hired CEO would have to have that explained to him. Sculley, who Graham cites, is a perfectly nice person in my experience, had no idea how to deal with Windows. Very different from a consumer product like fizzy water. Who but Steve Jobs would have thought that an iPod was a proper product for a company that made PCs. I think he himself wanted it, and that’s what made something an Apple product. It’s probably why post-Jobs Apple is pretty much stuck selling only the products Jobs created for them. He told Cook to innovate on his own vision and timetable, probably knowing full-well that nobody would be able to do it. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/09/01.html#a164543
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-09-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Another rule for whoever runs a tech company, they must themselves be a fanatical user of the company’s product. They must love it the way a founder loves it. They must think the users are the smartest people in the world because they love the best product in the world. As a founder, I could not visualize the day I left the company for the last time. In hindsight I felt that was the one factor most responsible for the success of the company.
http://scripting.com/2024/09/01.html#a164402
date: 2024-09-01, updated: 2024-09-01, from: Daring Fireball
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/08/31/ep-408
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-09-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Paul
Graham wrote a very
useful piece
about “Founder Mode.” As a founder myself, I think I can tell you why
founders have a central role to play as the company grows. They’re the
only ones who know how the company was built, and what works and what
doesn’t and how to keep it consistent for customers and partners, and
the founder, if the company grew, is tuned into to what makes the
company work, and will see opportunities that even well-intentioned
managers miss. I remember when a company I was a developer for, early in
my career, switched out the founder and replaced him with a professional
CEO. The founder had problems managing, and could have used help imho,
but – the founder understood what the company was about, and the
professional claimed to be a “market of one” and therefore didn’t have
an opinion about what products the company should make. That would be
delegated to people he hired. Almost as if the people running a company
were just modules and servers, and if you needed to grow you just bought
new modules. In this case. I can write this because I don’t have to get
approval from anyone else. I’m sure in a company of today someone would
take offense at something I wrote here. That my friends is another
reason why companies have a hard time scaling. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/09/01.html#a155212
date: 2024-09-01, from: Enlightenment Economics blog
Already September 1st, and a tang of autumn in the morning air. I had a two-week holiday with no laptop or emails, and lots of reading. Then a two-week scramble to catch up with the accumulated email and work. So … Continue reading
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/09/where-did-summer-go/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-09-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
August is archived. Let’s start September.
http://scripting.com/2024/09/01.html#a124605
date: 2024-09-01, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/the-chicks
date: 2024-09-01, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/caption-contest-the-view
date: 2024-09-01, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Buddy took this picture on his way to work one morning while I was in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-31-2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Why does JD Vance have so many opinions about women?
http://scripting.com/2024/08/31.html#a173455
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It’s worth reflecting that the press took its best shot at Kamala Harris, and it was a big puff of smoke, she just cruised right through it.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/31.html#a171542
date: 2024-08-31, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-30-2024-140
date: 2024-08-31, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
An investigation by the Committee on Government Operations’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations doesn’t sound like something that would change history, but in 1954, it did.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-august-30-2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Thread: Blogs and the social web will merge.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/31.html#a143408
date: 2024-08-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
A feature I’ve wanted to add to the textcasting server app is a plug-in architecture so you can add a new platform driver without having to reconfigure or even reboot the server.
There’s a new folder at plugins/platforms. Each subfolder contains a driver for one platform. Initially there are four folder: bluesky, mastodon, twitter and wordpress. Each driver is a Node module that exports a single function that posts an item to the platform.
As an example here’s the driver for WordPress.
The drivers are invoked through an HTTP POST call, where the body contains the parameters to the driver. The parameters for each driver are different, because their APIs are different. To add support for a new platform, you just write a new driver.
I also have a client app that does linkblogging through this server, that’s why my linkblogging these days is so relatively effortless.
Even though the current situation is done without standards, I think not only will that change over time, but this is a good thing. What used to be a corporate silo owned by Twitter, Inc is now a competitive market with lots of players. That’s what we wanted back in 2006 when Twitter started, and now we have it.
This isn’t the last step or the first step toward getting them all to coalesce, but it is progress.
If you’re a developer have a look. And if you’re a user, know that we’re on the road to make cross-site posting a reality. It works for super-geeks like myself now, but eventually it’ll work for poets too.
PS: There’s also an RSS feed emanating from my textcasting system, that, in conjunction with the masterful Manton Reece at micro.blog, is how I do my cross-posting to Threads. Eventually I expect there will be a platform driver for Threads too, but for now – this is how it works. Thanks Manton! It’s great to work with you on this stuff. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/08/31/141919.html?title=platformDriversForTextcasting
date: 2024-08-31, from: Robert Reich’s blog
With Heather Lofthouse and Yours Truly
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-incredibly-shrinking-trump-the
date: 2024-08-31, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Highlight of the week: picnic dinner and a sunset walk at the Bellevue Botanical Garden Looking forward to: I’m planning another writing push this weekend 🤞🤞🤞 Stuff I did: 2 hours consulting 6 hours writing — I casually mentioned a plot issue to a friend and realized a character was an unnecessary holdover from the […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/30/weeknotes-august-24-30-2024/
date: 2024-08-31, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Somehow, despite living twenty minutes away for a decade, I’ve never brought my husband to Bellevue Botanical Garden before! No, I’ve dragged him down to Federal Way and out to Bainbridge Island, but the free, close garden got overlooked. (I’ve been on my own, with friends, with family, and even for work, so I didn’t […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/30/a-sunset-stroll-at-bellevue-botanical/
date: 2024-08-31, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Trump and the MAGA movement garnered power through performances that projected dominance and cowed media and opponents into silence.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-30-2024
date: 2024-08-31, updated: 2024-08-31, from: Anil Dash blog
https://anildash.com/2024/08/31/oprah-wrong-ai/
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-23, from: Bruce Schneier blog
date: 2024-08-30, from: Robert Reich’s blog
On my Substack starting Friday, September 6, and each Friday thereafter through Election Day
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/announcing-a-new-video-series-to
date: 2024-08-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-29-2024-e37
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Feature I really need: A way to search all of my conversations with ChatGPT. It’s the one feature I’m most missing, and the most surprising. I’m sure there’s a huge amount of utility locked up in that.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/30.html#a172047
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
What if Trump had been killed in the assassination attempt. What would have happened next? Biden was still the Democratic candidate.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/30.html#a171332
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I was thinking about Wisconsin news orgs and remembered we called the two Madison papers the Crap Times and the Wisconsin State Urinal. I don’t know why that’s so funny. Everyone does it. We used to call our own company Living Videosex, and the company that bought us out was Cementech or Sementech. Still makes me laugh. And there are company names that are funny without changing them like Microsoft. Sorry.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/30.html#a170924
date: 2024-08-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The need to protect the United States from financial crimes is why the U.S.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-august-29-2024
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It has come to my attention that “It’s even worse than it appears” might not be the right overlay for Kamala Harris, whose picture is the current banner art for Scripting News. Of course she’s still even better than she appears. I really mean that, and if you read this blog regularly you know. But what would a random person think? Hmm. Maybe that it’s strange, this is a picture of the would-be president, and it’s a good one. I wonder if there are many levels of irony going on at this moment, the visitor might think. No matter how much I love the Democratic team this year, this is not a campaign site. I don’t take ads. This is just a blog. You might have to peer below the surface to figure out what’s going on. Even the guy who writes this freaking thing can’t see all the angles. For now neither the image or motto are changing. There hasn’t always been a motto there you know.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/30.html#a144724
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Humor
and putdowns in politics are great if you know how to do it and if the
time is right. Trump was the only comedian on stage at the debates. And
his act was fresh. The people who loved him loved that the other people
hated him. It really was simple. Like a sports team or a favorite comic.
Anyway, the Harris folk are good at putdowns and comedy, and the
time is right. Trump’s act is done, people are tired of the same old
bullshit (which is exactly what Kamala said last night in the big
interview). That’s the cushion they’re floating on. If they had called
Trump weird in 2016 it wouldn’t have worked, and probably not in 2020
for different reasons (he wasn’t a joke at that moment, a huge number of
Americans were sick and dying, and the economy was in ruin and there was
no end in sight, not a good time to be joking around). But now Trump
is a joke. So it feels right. Another perspective you should get
is James Carville, who was on the
Daily
Blast podcast on Tuesday. Real eye-openers re how campaigns really
work and why it’s working for Team Harris now. And btw, why she’s doing
great now and not so good in 2019, two things. 1. Obviously she’s grown.
The last four years she’s been VP of the United States. That’s got to be
some kind of education for someone as brilliant as she is. 2. In 2019
she was on stage with 20 other people, and only got tiny slivers of
time. Look at what you find appealing about her now (assuming you do).
It’s the pauses and looks as much as anything, the facial expression.
Anyway, she’s really good at what she’s doing now, at all levels, and
Donald Trump is washed up. That’s why it still feels good because of
course he still could win.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/30.html#a143623
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I use my blog in the earliest part of the day to warm up and procrastinate.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/30.html#a143601
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/secret-message-in-one-million-checkboxes
date: 2024-08-30, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
Karoshi is when you are being worked to death without the use of prison guards. Survive the intense pressure of the workplace, of course! But then speak up about it. Name the organizations that are part of this scheme to squeeze us for all the hours we help them make a profit, name the techniques they use, start resisting in big and small ways, help each other to resist. 99% of us are in this, together.
I’m watching family members working long hours for the Swiss federal government, and on the weekend, too, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.
This is what happens when people want a balanced budget and tax cuts for the rich: there’s not enough money to go around, the work still needs to get done, and so those who want to do a good job get to bear the burden. The good start leaving. The experienced start leaving. The longer this continues, the work is done by fewer people, desperate people, inexperienced people, until it all fails, all at the same time.
We need to vote for people and parties that want to increase the tax burden for the rich, that want to solve the problems of tax evasion and of capital flight. We need that money and the rich don’t.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-30-taxes
date: 2024-08-30, from: Robert Reich’s blog
It was Trump on full display
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-cemetery-gate
date: 2024-08-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
And now the U.S.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-29-2024
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045192-rip-to-journalist-author-
date: 2024-08-29, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Petrolhead nostalgia As long-suffering readers of this blog know, I am a recovering petrolhead — and the only member of my extended family who can recognise vintage cars at sight. I spotted this beautifully-preserved 1960s Alvis TD21 in a car … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-30-august-2024/39802/
date: 2024-08-29, from: Matt Haughey blog
My father passed away today.
It was a shock to get the call that he was "code blue" at his nursing home and the news that followed came as a surprise. But it was also something that hopefully gave him some relief after struggling with a long recovery
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/richard-haughey-1944-2024/
date: 2024-08-29, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
I also notice people don’t swear much on their blogs. I have cut back on cussing in my writing myself, more from fear of sounding strident than causing offense — as a woman in patriarchal society, expressing strong emotion can undercut my argument — but I do believe in the power of a perfectly placed […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/29/escaping-corporate-mindsets-on-the-indie-web/
date: 2024-08-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-28-2024-63d
date: 2024-08-29, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
I tried to send an email from Emacs and it didn’t work. The error was:
msmtp: account default not found: no configuration file available
I was able to reproduce the problem with the following
hello.txt file:
From: Alex <alex@alexschroeder.ch>
To: Alex <alex@alexschroeder.ch>
Subject: Test
This is the test.
And then feeding that to msmtp with debugging enabled
(-d) and reading recipients from the mail
(-t):
msmtp -d -t < hello.smtp
Now I had more info, however:
ignoring system configuration file /etc/msmtprc: No such file or directory
ignoring user configuration file /home/alex/.config/msmtp/config: Permission denied
falling back to default account
msmtp: account default not found: no configuration file available
I checked permissions, and it was 0600 for the config file. Online, I
found a reference to AppArmor. Taking a peek at
/etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.msmtp I didn’t see anything
surprising. But then I grew suspicious… I had in fact moved
~/.config/msmtp to ~/src/home/.config/msmtp
(which is a Git repository) and replaced that with a symbolic link.
AppArmor didn’t like this and decided that msmtp was not
allowed to read that other file. Moving the directory back solved this
problem.
I guess I’ll be making occasional copies of this file into the Git repository. 😒
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-29-msmtp-app-armor
date: 2024-08-29, from: Stephen Wolfram blog
So…
What Happened? Today is my birthday—for the 65th time. Five years ago,
on my 60th birthday, I did a livestream where I talked about some of my
plans. So… what happened? Well, what happened was great. And in fact
I’ve just had the most productive five years of my life. Nine books.
3939 pages […]
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/five-most-productive-years-what-happened-and-whats-next/
date: 2024-08-29, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
This is a follow-up for 2024-08-16 JSON feed for indexing where I linked to IndieSearch, byJP. I want to see what’s required for this to work.
First, I need to install Pagefind. Lucky me, I already have a Rust build environment installed.
cargo install pagefind
Next, I need a static HTML copy of my site:
env ODDMU_LANGUAGES=de,en oddmu static -jobs 3 /tmp/alex
Create the index:
pagefind --site /tmp/alex
Upload:
mv /tmp/alex/pagefind .
make upload
It’s now available at
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/pagefind.
Adding the info to the page header:
<link rel="search" type="application/pagefind" href="/wiki/pagefind" title="Alex Schroeder’s Diary">
<link href="/wiki/pagefind/pagefind-ui.css" rel="stylesheet">
<script src="/wiki/pagefind/pagefind-ui.js"></script>
<script>
window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => {
new PagefindUI({ element: "#pagefind", showSubResults: true });
});
</script>
And a div to the page body:
<div id="pagefind"></div>
And I had to add ‘unsafe-eval’ to the
script-src Content-Security-Policy header.
Too bad the search result links all end in .html … that
requires an extra rewrite rule, to get rid of. On the other hand, it
also allowed me to get rid of baseUrl: "/view/".
Since there are still rough edges, this search is only available via Pagefind. I’m also not promising any updates to the index.
2024-08-19. While I was experimenting with this all, I asked @byjp some questions.
Sites provide local indexes in the Pagefind format, as a static file?
Correct — except it’s many files, organised so as to allow minimal transfer for a single search query — but all can be retrieved to have a full local index
Clients register one or more of these files and allow searching them?
Correct — they can be retrieved/cached to query locally, or queried efficiently remotely.
Users can install a large number of them, locally? Like I have 23 local dictionaries installed for my dictd and I can query them, locally.
Yes. Many can be kept locally or remotely. The sites you “register”/add become your search index.
Is it possible for a website to offer just a Pagefind installation with a number of URLs to Pagefind indexes without hosting pages and indexes? Clients visiting this Pagefind installation would download all the indexes pointed to in the list and search them locally?
Yes (with minor hackery). Each Pagefind instance is the index, a small bootstrapping JS/WASM blob, and ~5 lines of init JS. Those 5 lines can include locations of multiple indexes for the (exclusively client-side) JS to query when searching; by default the only one configured is the “local” index that created with the Pagefind JS/WASM blob, but you could strip away an empty index and have what you describe — in fact, that’s what my IndieSearch demo does!
If instead of visiting a site with a Pagefind installation one installs a Pagefind browser extensions, is it possible to point it to a URL that hosts a list of indexes?
I haven’t built that (yet), but yeah — I’d want to build an mf2/IndieWeb compatible “new user experience” that’d guide folks to finding a good-for-them set of defaults. My demo automatically (provisionally) adds any site you visit that supports IndieSearch, so you’d get better coverage fast. I’d also consider default-importing from blogrolls and the like. (Management & performance gets tricky with 1000s of indexes. Probs an “if we get there” problem. 😅)
Is it possible to “merge” Pagefind indexes and pass those aggregates on? I’m afraid that having local copies of the indexes means that clients will have to at least query thousands of sites for updates to their page indexes.
Not yet, but I asked exactly this question of the Pagefind devs and they offered that it’s currently too hard, but that there is a potential route they’d consider, see #564.
Thank you so much for answering the questions!
I’m still thinking about the situation where I’m part of a community and we want to all share search, like using Lieu for a webring – except I’d like a solution where I don’t have to do the crawling.
Sadly, the communities I’m part of are planets such as RPG Planet or Planet Emacslife, each with hundreds of blogs. I suppose most of them don’t offer a Pagefind index, being hosted on Blogspot and Wordpress, but what I’m considering is ingesting their feed and indexing it. This could be a service I could perform for people. Luckily, it’s often possible to get all the blog pages via the feed. This is how I’ve made local backups of other people’s blogs. I guess that each site would be a separate index, however?
I’d like to find a way that doesn’t require me to always download all the pages. I’d like to find a way to update the index as it’s being used.
I’d need a way to figure out how to configure it such that the results link back to the original pages, of course.
Another thing I’m considering is that my own site is rendered live, from Markdown files… it’s not a static site. So ideally I’d be able to ingest Markdown files directly. Or I can go the route of exporting it all into a big feed and ingesting that, once I’ve solved the problem above, I guess. But the problem above might also be easier to solve by extracting HTML pages from the feed. It’s what I’ve done in the past. Create something that works, first, then improve it later?
Anyway, ideas are swirling around.
2024-08-19. I notice more things that aren’t quite working the way I like them to work.
The sort order of the results is less than ideal, for example. I like to emphasize more recent blog posts. Pagefind, however, returns them in some sort of scoring order so that I’ve seen quite a few results with pages around 20 years old.
Image previews seem to rarely work. I suspect the problem is pages in subfolders linking to images in that same subfolder. Such relative links don’t need a path – but they do if Pagefind is not in the same directory.
Here’s another thing to consider: The index takes up more space than the full HTML of the entire site, compressed!
alex@sibirocobombus ~> du -sh alexschroeder.ch/wiki/pagefind alexschroeder.ch/wiki/feed.json.gz
43M alexschroeder.ch/wiki/pagefind
9.7M alexschroeder.ch/wiki/feed.json.gz
So the Pagefind index takes about 4× more space than the full HTML, for this site. This matches my experience with better indexing for my own site where I experimented with full text indexes and trigram indexes. Back then:
the 15 MiB of markdown files seem to have generated an index of 70 MiB – 2023-09-11 Oddµ memory consumption
Of course, in terms of copyright incentives, handing off the entire site like that is tricky. Doing it with a feed feels OK. Doing it for a search engine seems like handing the keys to Google. This provides an incentive to use a pre-computed index.
It also reminds me that the idea I had of building a search engine out of feed slurping without consent is probably a bad idea – like all ideas based on non-consensual acts.
Whether self-indexing is a good thing in terms of avoiding an English-first focus I don’t know. I suspect that most people will be using free software and therefore there’s no reason to suspect that a search engine doesn’t have the means to process the languages. Then again, that’s a lock-in where in order to support a new language, you have to support the software your favourite search-engine supports. So people indexing our own pages might have long term benefits.
I’m still wondering about the comparison of Pagefind and Lunr, to be honest. How many such static search solutions are there? Is there a benefit of one implementation over another?
I guess now I should look into Pagefind some more? Indexing non-HTML pages, handling image previews for pages not in the root directory and relative image source URLs, the sort order of results, the use of the .html extension in results… there are still rough edges as far as I am concerned – and per discussion above the onus is on me to fix my indexing. 😭
2024-08-29. Would caching help? I don’t think so. Let’s check!
First, a script to find an IP number that is doing many requests: leech-detector.
root@sibirocobombus ~# tail -n 10000 /var/log/apache2/access.log \
| bin/admin/leech-detector \
| head
Total hits: 10000
IP | Hits | Bandw. | Rel. | Interv. | Status
------------------------------:|-----------:|-------:|-----:|--------:|-------
185.103.225.81 | 1057 | 0K | 10% | 1.7s | 302 (50%), 401 (49%), 200 (0%)
…
root@sibirocobombus ~# whois 185.103.225.81
…
org-name: Muth Citynetz Halle GmbH
…
I have never heard of them. Sounds like a small hosting company, responsible for 10% of all hits on my server, right now. Let’s print the status code they received from my web server and the path they requested.
root@sibirocobombus ~# grep 185.103.225.81 /var/log/apache2/access.log \
| awk -e '{print $10, $8}' \
| sort \
| uniq -c
524 /edit/logo.jpg
529 /view/logo.jpg
2 /view/RPG.rss
2 /wiki/feed/full/RPG
This is simply broken shit that cannot be fixed by caching.
OK, let’s pick another IP number. Let’s look for an IP number that is getting a lot of 200 results but isn’t accessing my fedi instance:
root@sibirocobombus ~# grep -v '^social' /var/log/apache2/access.log \
| grep ' 200 ' \
| bin/admin/leech-detector \
| head
…
51.210.214.160 | 411 | 4K | 0% | 155.8s | 200 (100%)
…
root@sibirocobombus ~# whois 51.210.214.160
…
org-name: OVH SAS
…
This is totally a hosting provider. What are they hosting?
root@sibirocobombus ~# grep 51.210.214.160 /var/log/apache2/access.log \
| awk -e '{print $10, $8}' \
| sort \
| uniq -c
…
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=InterWiki
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=InvestmentWebOfTrust
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=IrcTranscription
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=JohnCappiello
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=JulianKrause
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=JustinKao
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=KarlDubost
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=KarlTree
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=KurzAnleitung
1 200 /wiki?action=rss;rcidonly=LangageClair
…
For every single wiki page it learnt about its feed from meta data and it indexing that. I don’t know what to do. Producing these feeds is expensive. It can be a interesting service for humans that want to monitor a page or two. It’s a waste of CO₂ for machines that want to pre-emptively ingest these pages. And since there are thousands of these pages, every search bot ends up storing all the URLs, calling the wiki engine every time to ask for the latest change, making it load the page and check the metadata and send the reply, and TLS handshakes and cryptography on top of all that. It hurts my heart to think of all this waste. I think this is terrible design that cannot be fixed by adding caching. My wiki does client side caching (pages are said to remain fresh for 10s); http caching (with ETag header); html caching (attempting to reduce the time spent parsing the wiki sources and generating the html). In a way, these bots are forcing me to abandon dynamically generated content on the open net – or to waste more time and energy for squid cashes or varnish, more RAM, more resources, more of my time. And that’s what making me so angry. Dynamically generated HTML is excellent for low traffic sites. These days, there seems to be no more low traffic because robot traffic is so high. They keep the caches warm, all the time, on a global scale.
I remain unhappy.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-18-indie-search
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: Bruce Schneier blog
The “long lost lecture” by Adm. Grace Hopper has been published by the NSA. (Note that there are two parts.)
It’s a wonderful talk: funny, engaging, wise, prescient. Remember that talk was given in 1982, less than a year before the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the internet went operational. She was a remarkable person.
Listening to it, and thinking about the audience of NSA engineers, I wonder how much of what she’s talking about as the future of computing—miniaturization, parallelization—was being done in the present and in secret.
…
date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I can’t read most of the stories I want to read. I have the money and am willing to spend it. But there is no system that allows me to pay.
On the other hand the distribution of video entertainment is somewhat functional, I spend an ungodly amount of mostly wasted money to get access to that.
I am not cheap. The news system realllly doesn’t work. It could be fixed, but for the usual problem – they would have to work with each other.
If you think the NYT is a huge success, compare its size to the size of Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon or Apple, all of whom have made great businesses out of distributing other people’s products.
We were getting somewhere with RSS, btw – but the journalism industry lost its minds over Twitter, and let the tech industry own the distribution system, and now it’s a total mess, a good time for a re-think, I think.
I generated graph in ChatGPT by just asking for it. It has great chart software built-in. Quietly they are rearranging all the pieces of software we use. They will end up owning everything, and meanwhile people are asking if this is a bubble. Not really. More like an invasion.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/29/153350.html?title=newsOnTheWebStillSucks
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
In
elections we get to say who we are, ie who comes closest to who we are.
It’s all made of imagery. Bernie Sanders is someone you either love or
don’t. He reminds me of people in my own family, who I would
never want to be president of anything. But
this ad, the
best ever imho, says wait a minute, please reconsider. A campaign is a
series of messages from candidate to electorate: “Is this who we are?”
The great ads tap our optimism, imho. The Sanders
ad says we’re
nice happy people who have jobs and help each other.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/29.html#a151645
date: 2024-08-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place on August 28, 1963 in Washington, D.C..
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-august-28-2024
date: 2024-08-29, from: Jeff Geerling blog
New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Raspberry Pi <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/2gb-raspberry-pi-5-on-sale-now-at-50/">launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50</a>, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip.</p>
This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5’s shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said:
The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.
Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don’t change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences. I wanted to see exactly what happens when I push one of these new chips to the limits.
First, I wanted a performance baseline, so I ran Geekbench with the latest Pi OS and all the defaults.
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/new-2gb-pi-5-has-33-smaller-die-30-idle-power-savings
date: 2024-08-29, from: Enlightenment Economics blog
Colleen Dunlavy’s Small, Medium, Large is an interesting and thought provoking read – and relevant to today’s debate on industrial policy. It’s a relatively short book, a history of the emergence of standards in US goods in the 1910s and … Continue reading
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/08/standards/
date: 2024-08-29, from: Liam on Linux
This is interesting to me. I am on the other side, and ISTM that the tiling WM folks are the camp you describe.Windows (2.01) was the 3rd GUI I learned. First was classic MacOS (System 6 and early System 7.0), then Acorn RISC OS on my own home computer, then Windows.
Both MacOS and RISC OS have beautiful, very mouse-centric GUIs where you must use the mouse for most things. Windows was fascinating because it has rich, well-thought-out, rational and consistent keyboard controls, and they work everywhere. In all graphical apps, in the window manager itself, and on the command line.
– Ctrl + a letter is a discrete action: do this thing now.
– Alt + a letter opens a menu
– Shift moves selects in a continuous range: shift+cursors selects text or files in a file manager. Shift+mouse selects multiple icons in a block in a file manager.
– Ctrl + mouse selects discontinuously: pick disconnected icons.
– These can be combined: shift-select a block, then press ctrl as well to add some discontinuous entries.
– Ctrl + cursor keys moves a word at a time (discontinuous cursor movement).
– Shift + ctrl selects a word at a time.
In the mid-’90s Linux made Unix affordable and I got to know it, and I switched to it early ’00s.
But it lacks that overall cohesive keyboard UI. Some desktops implement most of Windows’ keyboard UI (Xfce, LXDE, GNOME 2.x), some invent their own (KDE), many don’t have one.
The shell and editors don’t have any consistency. Each editor has its own set of keyboard controls, and some environments honour some of them – but not many because the keyboard controls for an editor make little sense in a window manager. What does "insert mode" mean in a file manager?
They are keyboard-driven windowing environments built by people who live in terminals and only know the extremely limited keyboard controls of the most primitive extant shell environment, one that doesn’t honour GUI keyboard UI because it predates it and so in which every app invents its own.
Whereas Windows co-evolved with IBM CUA and deeply embeds it.
The result is that all the Linux tiling WMs I’ve tried annoy me, because they don’t respect the existing Windows-based keystrokes for manipulating windows. GNOME >=3 mostly doesn’t either: keystrokes for menu manipulation make little sense when you’ve tried to eliminate menus from your UI.
Even the growing-in-trendiness MiracleWM because the developer doesn’t use plain Ubuntu, he uses Kubuntu, and Kubuntu doesn’t respect basic Ubuntu keystrokes like Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, so neither does MiracleWM.
They are multiple non-overlapping, non-cohesive, non-uniform keyboard UIs designed by and for people who never knew how to use a keyboard-driven whole-OS UI because they didn’t know there was one. So they all built their own ones without knowing that there’s 30+ years of prior art for this.
All these little half-thought-out attempts to build something that already existed but its creators didn’t know about it.
To extend the prisoners-escaping-jail theme:
Each only extends the one prisoner cell that inmate knew before they got out, where the prison cell is an app – often a text editor but sometimes it’s one game.
One environment lets you navigate by only going left or straight. To go right, turn left three times! Simple!
One only lets you navigate in spirals, but you can adjust the size, and toggle clockwise or anticlockwise.
One is like Asteroids: you pivot your cursor and apply thrust.
One uses Doom/Quake-style WASD + mouse, because everyone knows that, right? It’s the standard!
One expects you to plug in a joypad controller and use that.
comments
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/91647.html
date: 2024-08-29, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Both good news and worrying news
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/georgia-on-my-mind
date: 2024-08-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Former president Trump appears to have slid further since last night’s news about a new grand jury’s superseding indictment of him on charges of trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-28-2024
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Daring Fireball
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/08/28/ep-407
date: 2024-08-29, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
See also: The Homogeneity of Millenial Design Taste Read A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy Steered towards wanting The overwhelming loudness of performance Coziness comes from life
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/28/the-mindset-of-un-curating/
date: 2024-08-28, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Trump disrespects a shrine to American heroes
https://steady.substack.com/p/a-new-low
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-29, from: Daring Fireball
https://support.apple.com/en-hk/guide/iphone/iph203ab0be4/ios
date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
In the next scene, Wordle Kitty, lithe and slender, and fiercely cute, is doing an AMA on Reddit.
One of the questions asks if Wordle Kitty knows anyone in the US Government.
“I don’t know anyone in the US Government,” she said, “but I do know their kittens!” she concluded.
This scene is shown on the front page of the NY Times along with the headline “Wordle Kitty is leading an insurrection in DC, other kittens are colluding!”
http://scripting.com/2024/08/28/190028.html?title=wordleKittyIsColluding
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
An idea for the Harris campaign. Let me buy some swag and have it sent to 10 of my best friends, esp ones who live in swing states. Plus you get the names and contact info for people at least one of your supporters thought would be a potential Harris voter. I’d send something less presumptuous like When We Fight We Win stickers. Another related idea, let me buy a whole set of promotional materials, kind of like the gift baskets they sell at Zabar’s.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/28.html#a183721
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Today
Automattic
announced that they’re converting
Tumblr,
which they
acquired
in 2019, to run on WordPress as its foundation. This could get a
simple colorful user-friendly interface for WordPress, something it’s
needed for a long time. WordPress does everything in its UI, Tumblr has
its UI better organized for writers and more casual users. If they can
move in this direction, it seems that WordPress could be large part of
the emerging
social
web.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/28.html#a182023
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-08-28, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
Marc Miller’s email was reposted in a few places, like Usenet (oh yes, it was posted on rec.games.frp.misc!), Rob Conley’s blog, and elsewhere. What are your thoughts on it?
I am of two minds. Mongoose has been good for Traveller, I think. I liked Mongoose Traveller 1st ed., which I ran for a bit, and I have no reason to doubt that the current Mongoose Traveller 2nd ed. is as good a system the many other Traveller editions out there.
I also have my doubts regarding Mongoose’s quality in terms of editing – but who am I kidding, these days people are cutting corners all over the place and sometimes they’re cutting corners in editing. It happens. It’s the Zeitgeist. I guess in the world of quality assurance Mongoose wouldn’t actually be all that bad because I’m assuming they fix all the typos in later printings. 😏
Also they based a lot of follow-up products on the Traveller system and what’s not to like about more 2d6 systems! 😸
This at least ensures that they remain committed to the basic idea. And maybe that means that the PDFs will remain around for much longer. That’s certainly better than ending up being managed by kids or being sold off to the highest bidder after Miller’s passing. It’s not the greatest plan but it’s a plan. Wouldn’t a real TAS be great? An association that had a board elected by its members, the community? An association based on Swiss law, like FIFA or the ICRC? Anyway, that’s a dream and it wouldn’t be clear whether it would work in the long run so perhaps passing it on to Mongoose was the best idea after all.
I wonder if Mongoose has a better succession plan, though. Looking at State of Mongoose 2023, it seems that the whole company is owned by Matthew Sprange. Is he so much younger than Marc Miller? What’s the long term plan, here?
Anyway. Thinking about what happens to our games when we die is a good idea.
Perhaps Miller should have slapped a CC-BY-SA 4.0 or a CC0 onto the products he owns and said: “On the day I die, these licenses go into effect immediately.”
But that’s not how these things go. I suspect some money changed hands and that’s probably for Miller’s best.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-28-traveller
date: 2024-08-28, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-27-2024-1ce
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-28, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-08-28, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Between October 1787 and May 1788, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison anonymously published the Federalist Papers, a series of 85 letters to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the proposed U.S.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-august-27-2024
date: 2024-08-28, from: John Naughton’s online diary
The millennial spire A church that is over 900 years old, framed by autumnal leaves. Quote of the Day ”When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-28-august-2024/39795/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-28, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Note to the Harris campaign: This Google search should return a complete list of your ads. Or a pointer to a site with a complete list of your ads. I want to make sure everyone who follows me sees every one of them! Let us help you help us.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/28.html#a135724
date: 2024-08-28, updated: 2024-08-29, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Matthew Green wrote a really good blog post on what Telegram’s encryption is and is not.
EDITED TO ADD (8/28): Another good explainer from Kaspersky.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/08/matthew-green-on-telegrams-encryption.html
date: 2024-08-28, from: Robert Reich’s blog
She’s being criticized for lack of specifics. Is it time for her to put more beef on the bare bones?
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-should-kamala-spell
date: 2024-08-28, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Sam Stein of The Bulwark reported yesterday that the Trump campaign is about to start running ads in the area around Mar-a-Lago.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-27-2024
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/taking-some-time
date: 2024-08-27, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
I like this framing — that attention has been globalized. What he’s really getting at is the harm of demanding that everything scale. The corporate imperative to scale has infiltrated our understanding of success, till we cannot imagine success without scale. Related (emphasis mine): I do think the art industry needs to be a […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/27/the-globalization-of-attention/
date: 2024-08-27, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Before the Fall Seen on a woodland walk yesterday. Quote of the Day ”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-26-august-2024/39785/
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/things-become-other-things-a-walking-memoir
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045189-edith-zimmerman-my-main-t
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045188-what-we-learned-in-our
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Very
insightful Greg Sargent
interview
with James Carville. Two take-aways for Democrats. 1. Avoid NPR
politics. 2. Appeal to college-educated white men. Most of them vote
Republican, but with Walz on the ticket, they have a special ambassador,
he represents that straight-talking country folk are part of the
Democratic coalition. It’s still true that white voters are the
majority. Get a small number to vote Democratic could be enough to win
the election. It never is about policy. It’s about whether you are like
them. That’s what it means to avoid NPR politics. And btw, imho –
getting the press to like you might not be good. I wonder if the Dems
would ever have the courage to sever itself from the journos. Imagine
Harris saying “If the press says we’re bad you know that means we’re
good.” She could say that in her big interview. 😀
http://scripting.com/2024/08/27.html#a175917
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045186-the-tinyawards-have-annou
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.platformer.news/telegram-durov-arrest-france-explainer/
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/08/apple-announces-chief-financial-officer-transition/
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.matthewball.co/all/roblox2024
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045185-from-the-school-of-public
date: 2024-08-27, from: mrusme blog
“Barcelona is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain.”
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/travel/spain/barcelona/
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045184-an-extensive-report-by-er
date: 2024-08-27, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-26-2024-72c
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045183-oasis-is-reuniting-after-
date: 2024-08-27, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
After the Fifteenth Amendment recognized in 1870 that keeping Black men from the polls on the grounds of race was unconstitutional, white southern Democrats switched their opposition to Black voting from race to class.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-august-26-2024
date: 2024-08-27, from: David Rosenthal’s blog
Six years ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered:Surprisingly, I’m getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.Here are the subsequent annual updates:
| Month | Media | Good | Bad | Vendor |
| 01/04 | CD-R | 5x | 0 | GQ |
| 05/04 | CD-R | 5x | 0 | Memorex |
| 02/06 | CD-R | 5x | 0 | GQ |
| 11/06 | DVD-R | 5x | 0 | GQ |
| 12/06 | DVD-R | 1x | 0 | GQ |
| 01/07 | DVD-R | 4x | 0 | GQ |
| 04/07 | DVD-R | 3x | 0 | GQ |
| 05/07 | DVD-R | 2x | 0 | GQ |
| 07/11 | DVD-R | 4x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 08/11 | DVD-R | 1x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 05/12 | DVD+R | 2x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 06/12 | DVD+R | 3x | 0 | Verbatim |
| 04/13 | DVD+R | 2x | 0 | Optimum |
| 05/13 | DVD+R | 3x | 0 | Optimum |
The drives I use from ASUS and LG report significant numbers of read
errors from the CDs but verify the MD5s correctly. I didn’t notice them
reporting any read errors from the DVDs. An off-brand drive fails to
read the CDs, but read one of the older DVDs with no read errors.
Surprisingly, with no special storage precautions, generic
low-cost media, and consumer drives, I’m getting good data from CD-Rs
more than 20 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 18 years old. Your
mileage may vary. Tune in again next year for another episode.
I also checked my Memorex
NetBSD1.2
CD written in October 1996. It has checksums generated by
cksum(1), all of which verified correctly despite a number of
read errors. So that CD-R is delivering good data after nearly 28
years.
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/08/2024-optical-media-durability-update.html
date: 2024-08-27, from: James Fallows, Substack
From libraries to factories to college rankings, some things are moving in the right direction. Let’s pause to notice a few of them.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/now-for-something-different-promising
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The reason I asked yesterday if NYT reporters sign NDAs (with the NYT, not sources), then when a reporter leaves the NYT they can write a book about WTF happened at the NYT, and it would be an instant best seller imho.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/27.html#a123005
Reading the icons of “Quickstart”
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-27, from: Uninformative blog
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-08-27/0/POSTING-en.html
date: 2024-08-27, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Ars Technica has a good article on what’s happening in the world of television surveillance. More than even I realized.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/08/the-present-and-future-of-tv-surveillance.html
date: 2024-08-27, from: Robert Reich’s blog
His mind cannot conceive of anything else
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-claim-of-a-coup
date: 2024-08-27, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The point that is currently holding up plans for ABC’s September 10 presidential debate is whether the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is the other’s turn to speak.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-26-2024
date: 2024-08-27, from: Om Malik blog
Link: The Changing Role of the U.S. Dollar / Brookings TLDR: Whether it’s sanctions overuse, U.S. political dysfunction or crypto-led fintech innovations, the dollar can’t take its preeminence for granted anymore. Key Points: My Thoughts: More than military dominance, the U.S. dollar has been the key instrument for America’s global dominance. It remains so, but it will increasingly come under pressure due to digitization and disaggregation of money. This is very much a continuation of the “routing around …
https://om.co/2024/08/26/dollardrums/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I know a kitten who’d like to be EIC of the NYT.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/26.html#a013046
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Do NYT reporters sign NDAs with their employer, the NYT?
http://scripting.com/2024/08/26.html#a012926
date: 2024-08-26, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Dems amass team of legal eagles to fight
https://steady.substack.com/p/magas-plan-to-suppress-the-vote
date: 2024-08-26, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
I miss writing history, and have started to play with fun little historical reflections that jump off from the regular letters, usually with an on-this-day-in-the-past orientation.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-august-25-2024
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/thanks-xoxo
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.threads.net/@chriswelch/post/C-8LF4BOSAP/
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224754/sonos-ceo-old-s2-app-re-release-cant-be
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuGba6Cw4lY
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/opinion/beach-read-ai.html
date: 2024-08-26, from: Robert Reich’s blog
It will be awkward. Here’s an example.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-will-team-trump-tell-him-he-should
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045181-the-limited-edition-2024-
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/-new-every-frame-a-painting
date: 2024-08-26, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Positron - an upside-down and portable 3D printer
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>I've been getting into 3D printing lately. I have an older Ender 3 V2 at home I bought during COVID. And in the past year I've acquired an Ender 3 S1, Bambu Labs P1S, and Prusa MK4.</p>I also dove head-first into 3D CAD, and designed a number of small SBC cases or parts to help with things around the house.
But I’d never built my own 3D printer from a kit—all the printers I’ve had were pre-built and at most, required assembling the prebuilt gantry or toolhead. That finally changed with the Positron V3.2:
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/positron-upside-down-and-portable-3d-printer
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/26/apple-september-9-iphone-event/
date: 2024-08-26, from: Om Malik blog
Link: The Big Stack Game of LLM Poker / Sarah Tavel TLDR: The AI race is a high-stakes poker game where tech giants are all in. With more than $600 billion invested and trillions at stake, it’s a battle of deep pockets and nerves. The winner takes all, but the real jackpot? Unprecedented innovation will …
https://om.co/2024/08/26/big-techs-llm-bets-is-trillion-dollar-poker/
date: 2024-08-26, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-25-2024-605
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-26, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I don’t want to give Trump any ideas, but he’s complaining that Harris is forcing him to run as an incumbent, so he might as well take credit for all the things Biden did.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/26.html#a160738
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-26, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
know it doesn’t matter why the NYT are so fucked up about covering the
election, but I can’t stop thinking about it anyway. Then,
Greg
Sargent’s podcast gave me an idea. The oppressor in a fascist state
doesn’t need you to love them, so long as you don’t love anyone else.
The NYT isn’t trying to make us love Trump, that’s impossible. But they
are trying to make us not fall in love with Harris. I doubt they foresaw
that possibility. But our feelings about Harris are very much love. The
NYT is our only master, they must think. There’s no room for us to love
someone else, because we might listen to them. In a sense they respond
like a first born child on the arrival of their little sister or
brother. I don’t know. As I said it doesn’t matter why. That’s their
problem. Our problem is to get them out of the way.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/26.html#a150923
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-26, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The NYT et al aren’t even doing a fair job of covering the election as a horserace, because they’re making sure it’s a virtual tie, so even if our team has overwhelming power, speed and depth, and gets on base in every at bat and plays by the rules, our odds are no better than the other team.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/26.html#a135108
date: 2024-08-26, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
The Twitter API still works, with some serious limits. Not easily incorporated into products, but useful for individuals with developer accounts. Not an insurmountable hurdle, it seems, though I was a developer from before. A few bullet points.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/26/133249.html?title=theStatusOfTwittersApi
date: 2024-08-26, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Doing
the investigation into
getting
UserTalk running in 2024 has been a trip. The last time I did any
work on this code, or even in this area of computer science, was approx
1990. It comes right back, like riding a bike. I saw a tremendous amount
of potential fun here, but I had to move on to runtime, object database,
verbs, user interface – for Frontier. In the 34 years between then and
now – a lot of software has been written, and I’m only looking at a
fraction of it, limited to stuff that runs in Node, the browser and
Electron. And I have to say I’m totally enjoying reading about what
they’ve done. I’m learning about evolution of technology, a facet of
development I am extremely drawn to, in a whole new way, as if viewed
through a tunnel in time.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/26/131440.html?title=aTunnelInTime
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Bruce Schneier blog
This is a big deal. A US Appeals Court ruled that geofence warrants—these are general warrants demanding information about all people within a geographical boundary—are unconstitutional.
The decision seems obvious to me, but you can’t take anything for granted.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/08/us-federal-court-rules-against-geofence-warrants.html
date: 2024-08-26, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
So you’re considering self-hosting? You heard good things about GoToSocial? I like it. I use it. This post is about the problems you should be expecting at the moment.
It’s not surprising, after all. This is a very prominent sentence in their README:
GoToSocial is still ALPHA SOFTWARE.
But what are the exact problems? Sometimes alpha software is good enough, right?
No post editing. I hope you can handle your own typos. All you have is “Delete and Redraft”. But that orphans all replies, undoes all boosts, forgets all likes and removes posts from bookmarks. “Delete and Redraft” is a sledge hammer. “Edit post” is a delicate quill. And you don’t get to have it. YOLO! (You only live once.)
No filtering. You can mute and block and all that, but when everybody is posting about Monsterdon, the European Song Contest, the US elections, Caturday or Wordle, you can’t filter those hashtags. You must endure the enthusiasm of the people you are following. (I think the developers are implementing things, but it does not seem to have an effect in the front-ends I use, so who knows.)
Limited federation. This one is hard to spot. You want to follow this account and that account and it all seems to work until you go back and find that for one account, your follow request seems to hang in limbo, waiting. You cancel, and follow again. It seems to work. Come back later, back in limbo again, waiting. If you check the log, you’ll find errors about signatures failing and what not. I have no idea. There are currently 8 open issues containing the word ‘signature’. Something is not working and you’ll have to have an alt (a separate account) on a different server that doesn’t have this issue. That makes me sad. 😥
No automatic post expiry. You’ll have to use something like Mastodon Archive.
No front-end. There is no front-end. I use apps like Toot! on my phone and Semaphore on the web. I don’t need anything fancy. And for the non-fancy options, I have mastodon.el for Emacs, toot for the command-line, tuba for Gnome, bitlbee-mastodon for IRC, and so on. There are plenty of options.
Markdown in your posts. I like my code blocks.
SQLite on the server. It’s currently 8.4G. The media stuff is 11G.
Memory footprint. I use Monit to monitor processes and this process uses 185.6 MB.
No admin. I haven’t had to run any administration task. Not once. ❤️
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-08-25-gotosocial
date: 2024-08-26, from: Robert Reich’s blog
What I did at the bus stop when I was 10 years old
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-real-fight-now
date: 2024-08-26, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Make it an event! I have fun with the spreadsheet part of money tracking but the more involved money tasks, especially that involve calling a financial company, can get bumped way down my list. So, designating a day to deal with it is a good idea. A couple years ago, when I had to manually […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/25/mo-money-day/
date: 2024-08-26, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The Democratic National Convention buoyed the Democrats.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-25-2024
date: 2024-08-26, updated: 2024-08-26, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-08-25, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
U.S. Accuses Software Maker RealPage of Enabling Collusion on Rents by Danielle Kaye, Lauren Hirsch and David McCabe (NYTimes) + It’s the Land, Stupid: How the Homebuilder Cartel Drives High Housing Prices by Matt Stoller Consolidation –> developers outsource the building and become more of a financing and land speculation business, and smaller projects become […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/25/roundup-why-we-dont-have-enough-housing/
date: 2024-08-25, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/25/the-not-doing-list/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-25, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The problem with the state-by-state abortion laws that Trump says he favors: 1. The women in states that ban abortion who will die as a result of the bans, and many more who will be severely injured, and all will have their freedoms severely restricted. 2. He’s lying. When Congress passes a national abortion ban he’ll sign it and boast about it, of course.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/25.html#a230732
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-25, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
If you’re interested in languages and compiler compilers and how to bootstrap a scripting environment, then you’ll enjoy the progress I’ve made in the project to get UserTalk running in today’s environments. I welcome comments from experienced or curious language devs.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/25.html#a223121
date: 2024-08-25, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Friends,
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/vances-trumped-up-economics
date: 2024-08-25, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
So many people have worked on curbing climate change. What have we got to show for it? For starters: The projected warning has decreased by 0.9C. That’s considering only actually implemented policies. Pledged emissions cuts go even deeper. Is it enough? No. But we’ve gone from “It’s all going to hell” to “We made good […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/08/25/climate-roundup-august-2024/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-25, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
My response: “We have no visibility into the inner workings of the NYT. We can’t vote them out of office. We can’t even rebut them. They rarely carry opposing opinions.”
http://scripting.com/2024/08/25.html#a183349
date: 2024-08-25, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-24-2024-131
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-08-25, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Walt Mossberg: “Journalists have one core job: to tell the truth, especially when it’s clear. The staff of the NY Times has done it in the past, even at great risk. Why don’t they do it now?”
http://scripting.com/2024/08/25.html#a174735
date: 2024-08-25, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
On the right is the high school yearbook picture of Allan John Ontko, one of my best friends during the three years we were classmates at what I half-jokingly call a Lutheran academic correctional institution—because that’s what it was for me. For most of the boys there, however, it was a seminary. Allan, then known […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/08/25/the-organ-builder/
date: 2024-08-25, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/peace-love-and-music
date: 2024-08-25, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/caption-contest-next-attraction
date: 2024-08-25, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The raucous roll call of states at the 2024 Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, as everybody danced to DJ Cassidy’s state-themed music, Lil Jon strode down the aisle to cheers for Georgia, and different delegations boasted about their states and good-naturedly teased other delegations, brought home the real-life meaning of E Pluribus Unum, “out of many, one.” From then until Thursday, as a sea of American flags waved and attendees joyfully chanted “USA, USA, USA,” the convention welcomed a new vision for the Democratic Party, deeply rooted in the best of traditional America.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-24-2024
date: 2024-08-25, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Full audio for Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC.
Thanks to Ian Landsman for converting the video to MP3.
My blog post about the speech.
Podcast: 37 minutes.
http://scripting.com/2024/08/24/014006.html?title=kamalasAcceptanceSpeech