(date: 2024-12-29 07:06:08)
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-29, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
It
took me a long time to figure out that when people respond to you on
twitter-like systems they aren’t actually speaking to you,
they’re talking over your shoulder to the masses they imagine are
reading what you posted. Three comments. 1. There are no masses. You can
see this by looking at the stats for each tweet, available on most
platforms. 2. Most users on the social web are trying to get attention
for themselves, the only reason they read the posts is to see if there’s
a place for them to attach their message. 3. A simple tweak to the
software would make it so that only the author of the post being
responded to could see the replies. Then they could RT a reply if they
thought everyone should see it. This would make the
social web a lot more useful
imho.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/29.html#a141642
date: 2024-12-29, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/happy-new-year-875
date: 2024-12-29, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-2025
date: 2024-12-29, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Today’s Observer column: If 2024 was the year of large language models (LLMs), then 2025 looks like the year of AI “agents”. These are quasi-intelligent systems that harness LLMs to go beyond their usual tricks of generating plausible text or … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/ai-as-the-miss-moneypenny-of-the-21st-century/40270/
date: 2024-12-29, from: Om Malik blog
Today is my 17th re-birthday. If you’ve been a longtime reader, you know why I call it my re-birthday. If you are new around here, well, here is a short recap. Just after I turned 41—17 years ago—a life of poor habits and family genetics caught up with me. I had a heart attack and …
https://om.co/2024/12/28/the-story-of-stent/
date: 2024-12-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-28-2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-29, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Idea: Pipe new posts from feeds in my blogroll list to Bluesky.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/28.html#a003934
date: 2024-12-28, from: Robert Reich’s blog
I refused to bow to industry pressure 30 years ago, and my reasons are as legitimate now as they were then.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-the-muskrat-is-wrong-about-opening
date: 2024-12-28, from: Dave Rupert blog
Hottest October on record. November weather was much nicer, but lacked the much needed rain. We now pass the solstice and crash into the new year without so much as a sneeze from the gods of winter. My son’s team took second in the Fall baseball championship game. My daughter’s cheer team won their first competition gaining them a bid to nationals in the spring. Exciting times in Rupert family sports, I tell ya.
Three major holidays have passed since the last update so I’m sure it’s going to be too much to distill, but I’ve tried to blog through the bigger vibes like my cat passing away, my ADHD diagnosis, and releasing some games. So with those abstracted out, let’s reminisce on the recent past…
The biggest event was my trip to Microsoft in November. It’s been nearly
a decade since I’ve been to the Microsoft campus, but notably this is
the first time I’ve met my new coworkers in person! I’m happy to report
that my coworkers are all great people. Thankfully my small engineering
team as well as the larger design organization is high functioning when
it comes to hybrid/remote work, so I don’t feel left out of the
on-premise centralized loop that I’ve felt in previous Microsoft
engagements. My team made it easy to <slot> (!!!) in
and feel welcome.
An example, my sweet coworkers hung up a print out of my avatar in one of the conference rooms with a little speech bubble that says “I‘m here with OPINIONS” which I find endearing. The side bonus is that Teams the app sees the avatar and thinks its a person and will zoom-in on it in every meeting. My avatar is an ever-present participant in a lot of meetings to the extent that five different people walked up to me said “Oh, it’s the guy from the conference room!” which is probably the biggest payoff to a long running gag that I’ve seen in my lifetime.
We spent most days strategizing in conference rooms but also did morale building events. One highlight for me was our studio’s tour of the Microsoft Inclusive Tech Lab where I got to talk with Dave Dame. I’ve been a fan of his for awhile now, he has a way of communicating the need to reject “other-ism” that sticks with you. He shared with us some of the challenges he faces as a person with limited mobility and how AI is impacting his life for the better. One night a group of us remote and local employees went out for dinner and ate grasshoppers. Another highlight was sneaking into a demo day event where designers at Edge were prototyping in the browser with web components. This grinch’s heart grew three times that day.
Everyone apologized for the rain while I was there but I loved the soggy weather coming from six months of Texas heat. I found it nothing but charming. Redmond has grown up considerably in the decade since my last visit, and the Microsoft campus is almost unrecognizable to me. Redmond used to be a bunch of small one or two story buildings but now it’s all enormous five story buildings. Redmond was wooing me pretty hard though I won’t lie; next to my hotel was an outdoor mall that had an izakaya, a games shop, a guitar center, and an upscale Hobbytown with Gunpla! It felt like my own personal Disneyland generated from my search history.
Spent a lot of time with work folks, but I caught up with a couple old friends while I was there. One night I met up with Kyle who was the other engineer at Luro who now works at Amazon. We were long overdue to celebrate in person together and close a chapter on the two years of intense sprinting we did together at Luro. Then I got to see Kelly and Charles who I worked with through multi-year engagements on microsoft.com, it’s great to know other people at such a big place like Microsoft. And one night I snuck over to Fremont for a memorable night of playing vintage and indie arcade and pinball games with Adam Argyle. It’s good to have good friends from the internet.
All said, I think the main purpose of my trip – firm handshakes and letting my coworkers know I’m a real person – was a success. Hopefully, I’ll find myself in Redmond more often.
A speed run of other notable events but in the interest of time we’ll keep it brief:
Recapping three whole months isn’t fun, but spinning off some of the major events into their own posts was pretty efficient so I should do that more.
I’m sure this list is incomplete, but went down some rabbit trails researching health issues like my ADHD but a couple non-health issues as well.
I got hellbent on releasing some projects this quarter and feel accomplished even if they are small in scope.
I wrote about my little games workshop more in depth if you’re curious about the why or my process. I’m also play testing a game with the ShopTalk Discord and am slowly iterating towards a release.
Read a lot more than I expected. After multiple recommendations I finally started reading The Murderbot Diaries and holy cow, what a great series. Each book is like a little 150-page snack that I get to enjoy. It feels good to read (e-)paper books again too, not just audiobooks.
Finished
Started
Let’s take a look at what was on the ol’ boob tube.
Movies
TV
Podcasts
Recorded some great episodes of Shoptalk, chief among them was a live action role play episode of ShopTalk.
Cooled off on Gunpla but have got the bug to pick it back up as work becomes less busy. Exhausted by the slower process of the master grade format, I decided to go back to high grade models to get the passion back.
Renaming this category because technically work is open source a bit and that’s confusing, so I thought I’d make it more about growing and maintaining web objects.
Spent more time making games than playing games. My PC had a catastrophic BIOS update failure and the verdict’s still out but I might need to rebuild the whole thing.
Got an Anbernic RG35XX Plus pocket emulator for Christmas, so hopefully my vintage game plays list will grow.
https://daverupert.com/2024/12/vibe-check-36/
date: 2024-12-28, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-27-2024-269
date: 2024-12-28, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I just had a fairly incredible experience using Claude.ai. Rather than write up the work we did, I asked Claude to do it.
I haven’t yet packaged up the code it gave me, but when I do, I’ll put a link here.
BTW, here’s the app I wrote that generated the tree I asked Claude to render.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/28/165021.html?title=usingClaudeToWriteSoftware
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-28, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Peeve: A podcast uses a siren as a sound effect. It causes panic when driving. “Where’s the siren!” the driver looks everywhere, only to realize it was just the podcast. This has happened a few times, this time I remembered to say something.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/28.html#a160342
date: 2024-12-28, from: Robert Reich’s blog
With Heather Lofthouse and Yours Truly, Robert Reich
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-coffee-klatch-holiday-special
date: 2024-12-28, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-27-2024
date: 2024-12-28, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Win of the week: took the whole week off work Looking forward to: finishing the blog posts I’m working on 😀 Stuff I did: I’m cranking away on a multi-post blog series 🦾 I was hoping to post the intro this week, but I realized I need to get the posts into a little bit […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/27/weeknotes-dec-21-27-2024/
date: 2024-12-27, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-26-2024-936
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045922-depending-on-the-printer-
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/crazy-football-commentary-animated
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045911-the-7-coolest-mathematica
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045921-architecton-is-an-epic-in
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045919-you-can-use-this-game
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045910-the-most-popular-wikipedi
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/costco-board-pushes-back-against-anti-dei-activists
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
BTW, as a longtime speaker of English and programmer, I think the term refactoring is re-dundant. The term comes from mathematics where you simplify a statement without altering its truth. Factoring is a repetitive process. You factor, and then factor some more if you can.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/27.html#a153648
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
We
should be thinking about a new SQL that’s much higher level. Another
layer. Get all the efficiencies of a
50+ year
platform, with all the understanding gained at the top level in all
that time. Most of the learning I did in the last five years can be
hidden behind a much simpler programming interface, imho. It’s worth
trying
factor,
again imho.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/27.html#a152504
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-27, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045920-brilliant-interactive-exp
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The problem with everyone who says you have to get off Twitter is that we’re giving up the meeting place we had and spreading all the bits into the wind. Are you going to leave the United States now that Trump is going to be president again? Leaving Twitter is a lot like that. How do you know Musk isn’t going to have to sell it? Might happen. How would you feel then about having quit Twitter in a huff as if it would always be the bastion of assholes. It’s a mistake. He isn’t making money with it. The more you use it the more it costs him, btw. By leaving you might actually be helping him survive. Nothing is so linear, first big point. Second big point, no one cares about your gestures.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/27.html#a142748
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
If you think woke is the problem, try reading the US Constitution and amendments. Really read them. Pretend you didn’t know it was the Constitution. One woke idea after another. Basically if you don’t believe in woke, you’re in the wrong freaking country.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/27.html#a142140
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Last night’s email had a YouTube video in it. I had forgotten that they get lost somewhere in the email delivery supply chain, so the fire that I put in the email was not transmitted. It’s even worse than it appears. Here’s a link to the video of the fire, with any luck that will get through in tonight’s email. Happy holidays everyone!
http://scripting.com/2024/12/27.html#a134044
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Bruce Schneier blog
The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presumably AI will soon obviate the need for an accomplice.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/casino-players-using-hidden-cameras-for-cheating.html
date: 2024-12-27, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Pizza Hut in Taiwan has a history of weird pizzas, including a “2022 scalloped pizza with Oreos around the edge, and deep-fried chicken and calamari studded throughout the middle.”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/friday-squid-blogging-squid-on-pizza.html
date: 2024-12-27, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is the dominant partner. It was dominant from 1933 until 1980. Then hyper-capitalism took over, and finally gave us Trump.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-big-picture-how-we-got-into-this
date: 2024-12-27, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
This week I took an aggressive initial pass on cleaning out my music library, trying to err on the side of removal. In the past, I’ve been hesitant to remove older tracks that I don’t listen to much for the sake of historical records, to keep old playlists playable. But now that I’ve cycled through […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/26/how-im-cleaning-out-my-music-library/
date: 2024-12-27, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
It is starting to seem like the best way to interpret social media posts from President-elect Donald Trump is through the lens of professional wrestling.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-26-2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-27, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Happy holidays everyone. Here’s a nice fire to keep you warm. ❤️http://scripting.com/2024/12/26.html#a010050
date: 2024-12-27, from: John Naughton’s online diary
A Modernist duck-pond In the gardens of the Barbican Centre. Quote of the Day ”God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed; Give me courage to change things which must be changed; And the wisdom to … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-27-december-2024/40259/
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045916-a-reader-found-her-father
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045917-the-unbearable-slowness-o
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/an-epic-2024-movie-trailer-mashup
date: 2024-12-26, from: Dave Rupert blog
I always promised myself that if I was ever unemployed that I’d make a video game. When life dealt me an unpaid work hiatus though, the last thing I wanted to do was code in my spare time1. I worried I would have to let that dream, that part of me, die on the vine. But as interviews started going well the desire to try my hand at making a game came back. And in true adult ADHD fashion I didn’t focus on one game, but rather made a half-dozen different games in different formats and three of those games have made it to the release stage. Here’s an overview of those games and a little background on how I manage to make them.
During my unpaid hiatus I found myself getting a lot of pleasure in the small things; seeing a cool bird, staring at trees, or watching animals be animal-like. To not lose sight of those moments and with a desire to replace my social media addiction, I made Mundango, a bingo game about noticing life’s small things.
The icon is a chill turtle because it invokes the feeling of going slow. The font is a playful little handwritten sans. And there’s a (Japan-inspired) minor pentatonic scale that plays as you check items off. I hope you enjoy it but more importantly I hope it nudges you (and myself) to stop doomscrolling on our phones so much and to start looking outside the windows a bit more often.
In January, the unemployment got to my head and I got inspired to make a role playing game called Hard Code & Soft Skills. It’s a workplace-themed2 clone of Lasers & Feelings, a one-pager by John Harper. The original game is loosely based on Star Trek, where you can use lasers or diplomacy to solve your problems. I wanted to flip that a bit and have the game world be a startup because tech needs to realize that soft skills are as valuable as code, so that’s my big social commentary.
It wasn’t labor intensive to clone the original game, but I put a lot of time into building a little one-page website with a character generator. It’s Astro and web components, if you’re curious. I also put a lot of mental energy in planning out the first episode of Hard Code & Soft Skills on Shop Talk. It went better than I could have imagined and what a thrill to get it out the door.
The pentatonic scale sound effects in Mundango were a hit with some folks, so I dug in and built a whole instrument that only plays pentatonic scales and called it Pentablaster! It took about a week and I’m pleased with how it turned out. It’s jammy and a little unique. I extended it to allow you to change the key and to choose which pentatonic scale you want to play.
There’s some features I’d like to add, but worry it’ll enter the “so complicated I don’t want to work on it anymore” paradox. I’ll park it for now, but I learned a lot about Tone.js in the process.
I went on a short bender learning about Solo RPGs (like Ronin) and that sparked an interest in trying my hand at making one. I challenged myself to prototype the game on pen and paper first to prove the game mechanics. After an evening of brainstorming, I devised a game system based on a standard 52-card deck of playing cards as a prototype. I play-tested it with my son and we both thought that I should make a mobile app version. After some nights and weekends, I had a rough alpha prototype.
I play-tested the game with friends in the ShopTalk Discord and I got great, actionable feedback. They confirmed my suspicion that the RNG (randomness) was too high, creating a lack of decision making agency and thereby ruining the fun. I made some tweaks and the second round of play-tests went much better. It’s feeling pretty good now, but I think there’s one more ingredient needed to tie it all together before public release.
Since acquiring a little yellow wind-up boi, it’s been a small dream to write a game for Playdate and I picked the idea that seemed like the easiest and most PlayDate’y and descoped the hell out of it so that I’d have an achievable goal. It’s an office-themed3 RPG type game.
After playing with Playdate’s web-based game editor Pulp and trying PulpScript, I felt the chafing of limitations and wanted to get closer to the metal. I watched every one of SquidGod’s Development Tutorials and decided to download the Playdate SDK and write the game in Lua. This is my first time writing Lua and it’s been interesting because everything in Lua is a table: Arrays are tables, Dictionaries are tables, Objects are tables… tables all the way down. That takes some “undoing” of prior programming best practices to feel comfortable but after awhile you learn to embrace the chaos and for-loopedness.
To short cut some of the player controllers and level building I picked Cotton, a Lua-based framework for Playdate. Cotton uses the LDtk map editor for easier map making and that was a feature I was looking forward to using. However, I encountered a bug somewhere between the framework and LDtk. If I updated the map, my player could no longer get to a different room. Insecurity started to set in:
Feedback from the Playdate Dev Discord was “Last commit is 2 years ago, project’s dead” and “Use [Framework X] instead”… 😮💨 Ugh. I thought only JavaScript dorks did this but apparently Lua dorks do it too. I understand they’re trying to be a version of helpful; but this is terrible advice for someone who is learning. “You need to start over” or in video game parlance “The Princess is in another castle” kills the dopamine rush needed when learning something new.
But I didn’t give up. And after many shower thoughts, I mustered up the energy to do some good ol’ fashioned debugging. The first step was step-by-step isolation where I manually diff’d thousands of lines of JSON line-by-line. That one step taught me there was a change in the exported JSON somewhere between the version of LDtk that Cotton used (v1.3) and the latest version of LDtk (v1.5.3). The primary key for joining map tiles no longer exists in v1.5.3. Then I followed the breadcrumb trail of how Cotton imports LDtk files and I fixed the bug by creating a new table (because Lua) to act as a join table for the neighboring map tiles.
I was able to finish my core game loop and I’m proud of that, but fixing a framework level bug cut the wind out of my sails. I may PR the bug fix… but it’s more of a patch job than a holistic fix and I’m unsure if the author of Cotton is even interested in supporting that on their abandoned project.
Will this game ever come out? I hope so, but it’s emotionally hard to pick up after fighting with it so much. If I buckled down, built some assets, and wrote more NPC dialog I bet I could finish it in a couple human weeks of work. Perhaps I could outsource the asset creation.
I make my games after the kids and spouse go to bed or while the TV runs mindlessly. In some ways I’m borrowing from my own mental health staying up late tinkering with little apps that I’m going to give away for free. But these ideas all occupy brain RAM, so it feels good to chip away at ideas and get them out the door, to make room for more ideas, to chip away at ideas, to get them out the door… it’s a vicious cycle, but I think a net positive for my mental health.
To hedge against wasting my spare time, I get prototypes out for review as soon as possible to gauge interest and invest accordingly. Shopping prototypes curbs emotional over-investment in an idea. Time builds attachment to bad ideas, making them seem good and grander in your head than reality. If you build in secret too long, it ends in disappointment when the public doesn’t understand your genius you spent all your time on.
I default to web tech because it’s what I know best and staying in your wheelhouse means you can move faster with less mystery roadblocks (like the LDtk map issue above). But I’d like NOT WORK to not feel like work and see value in that, so this may change going forward.
At times I create artificial limitations (e.g., limit myself to a single asset pack) because if the scope is overly broad and infinite, that guarantees failure. Having rules, even if arbitrary, allows for play.
The last tool in the toolbelt is scoping the hell out of my ideas. When attention is your biggest limitation (e.g. ADHD) then keeping checkpoints small and achievable are critical. Then once you have the foundations established, do as much as time and ambition allow.
I have dozens of ideas kicking around in my head at all times, so my main issue is prioritization. Here’s the ideas that occupy a lot of brain RAM:
That’s a sampling of what’s going on up in the ol’ electric meatball. Not to be too macabre, but I’m not sure I have the lifespan left to get through even half of that short list. Hopefully there’s a banger billion dollar idea in there that allows me to retire and work on all the non-profitable dumb ideas.
While doing this for a living is far off and/or will never happen I am at least pleased that I lived up to the promise to myself to make games if I had spare time. I made games, smaller in scope than what I had originally imagined, but I’m comfortable with that given the timelines. No regrets there.
Risky as it may be, I may jump to a 3D engine because I’ve had a lot of fun building in environments like Unity in the past. That balloons the scope and raises the level of difficulty beyond my current expertise and it has never worked in the past… but perhaps this time it’ll be different! 😂
https://daverupert.com/2024/12/my-little-games-workshop/
date: 2024-12-26, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And why they have led us to Trump
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-ten-biggest-myths-about-the-economy
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/how-to-make-80s-school-cafeteria-pizza
date: 2024-12-26, from: Matt Haughey blog
As the year wraps up, I wanted to jot down some quick reviews of the lesser known apps that I've come to rely on in my daily life. I looked at my phone's apps and listed things that are very good at doing one thing well.
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/my-favorite-weird-little-apps/
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045909-you-can-watch-the-first-1
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045912-minnesota-guaranteed-free
date: 2024-12-26, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them!</p>Your browser does not support the video tag.
Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as the weather and timing of an antenna inspection lined up perfectly with his schedule.
I’ll summarize a bit of what we talked about in today’s Geerling Engineering video, but if you want to watch that directly, it’s embedded below:
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/documenting-1115-ft-radio-tower-climb
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045913-californias-raised-the-mi
date: 2024-12-26, from: Enlightenment Economics blog
There has been a long gap since my last post, which coincided with the start of Michaelmas Term – suggestive timing. Life was indeed very busy, and although I carried on reading, sitting tapping away at the laptop had diminished … Continue reading
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Scammers are hacking Google Forms to send email to victims that come from google.com.
Brian Krebs reports on the effects.
Boing Boing post.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/scams-based-on-fake-google-emails.html
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045914-whooping-cough-cases-reac
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045908-10-years-ago-i-wrote
date: 2024-12-26, from: Chris Heilmann’s blog
X isn’t Twitter. X isn’t even driven by human emotions any longer and is run by a management that doesn’t care about people, emotions or the dangers of propaganda. That’s why a lot of people who made Twitter grow in the beginning – real content creators – now meet on BlueSky. I do, too, but […]
date: 2024-12-26, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Hope my drawings made 2024 a bit less dismal.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-year-in-drawings
date: 2024-12-26, updated: 2024-12-26, from: Ron Garret
Don Geddis left a comment on my last post. My reply grew far longer than would reasonably fit into a comment reply so I decided to post it as an article. Don wrote:I wonder if you’ve considered that perhaps you have more in common with the people who frustrate you, than your current self-image suggests.My reply:I’ve not just considered it, I will happily concede that I am not as
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/12/a-reply-to-don-geddis.html
date: 2024-12-26, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Buddy and I spent the day with family, and while I did sneak peeks at the news, it seems there is nothing that cannot wait.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-25-2024
date: 2024-12-25, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
This essay is so good. You probably have seen it linked a few times on social media. I certainly have. And yet, perhaps you have not. If you have not, it’s a great read tying together our terrible computer experiences, us being exploited by big tech, enshittification and rot economy. The growth mindset that kills us all.
Holding these people to a higher standard at scale is what brings about change. Be the wrench in the machine. Be the person that explains to a friend why Facebook sucks now, and who chose to make it suck. Be the person to explain who Prabhakar Raghavan is and what his role was in making Google Search worse. Be the person who tells people that Sam Altman burns $5 billion a year on unsustainable software that destroys the environment and is built upon the large-scale larceny of creative works because he’s desperate for power. – Never Forgive Them, by Edward Zitron
Now there is a mission statement for bloggers and people on social media.
It also confirms my peculiar service offerings like Emacs Wiki or Campaign Wiki. They are free for users. They are simpler and they don’t change much. There are no ads and there is no “growth” to be had. In fact, if more people set up similar sites that are similar in these respects, it’ll be better for us. We’ll be more resilient, more adapted to our local needs, it’ll be more like community tools for all of us instead of slop for us and billions for them. This is where I want to go.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-12-25-rot-economy
date: 2024-12-25, from: Om Malik blog
As an avid Reddit user, I’ve learned to approach everything I read with skepticism, echoing Jerry Seinfeld’s catchphrase, “Really?” This morning, I encountered an unsourced post about Boox, a tablet and e-reader, which I viewed with a critical eye. According to the post, an upgrade to the Boox tablet’s operating system, which is based on …
https://om.co/2024/12/25/perception-is-reality/
date: 2024-12-25, updated: 2024-12-25, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/louis-armstrong-reads-twas-the-night-before-christmas
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-25, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
am ready to start programming ChatGPT, the same way I have built my own
code writing and deploying software on Macintosh. I want to create rules
in some kind of macro language that it will never violate. I find it has
huge problems with memory, it says it’s remembering something, but has
forgotten it 24 hours later. This is like the
Fail
Whale in the early days of Twitter. Cute, because the system is
doing something so new, futuristic and useful, but after a while it’s
not cute because we’re using the system for real work. The web is
programmable, our operating systems are, of course the AI-o-verse will
be programmable too. We are able to create entirely new development
environments, these platforms deserve a fresh new look at
everything. I’d also like to note that at the same time, the
platforms are breaking through in web user interfaces. Remarkable
progress. Far beyond what we were doing in the very stagnant Web 2.0
world. They’re still stuck on whether or not our writing can have
titles. So bizarre to exist in a world that is deliberately hobbled, and
another with infinite horizons. Anyway this is what I’m thinking about
just before hunkering down with my Knicks and popcorn, a Christmas
tradition for many many years. Ho ho ho.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/25.html#a163255
Advent of OS/2
date: 2024-12-25, updated: 2024-12-25, from: Uninformative blog
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-12-25/0/POSTING-en.html
date: 2024-12-25, from: Robert Reich’s blog
How do you deal with the Trumper in your family? (with special guest Sam Reich.)
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-what-about-your-uncle
date: 2024-12-25, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Happy holidays to you all, however you celebrate…
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-24-2024
date: 2024-12-25, from: mrusme blog
Project updates from the current consecutive three-month period, with info on the current status of my projects and next steps. You might find this interesting in case you’re using any of my open source tools.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/updates-2024-q4/
date: 2024-12-25, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Having’s one’s cake… … but not yet eating it. Merry Christmas! And thank you for reading this newsletter during 2024. Quote of the Day ”Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” Nelson Mandela Musical … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-25-december-2024/40248/
date: 2024-12-24, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
The stories of the atrocities committed by the Israelis in Gaza are so horrifying they make me want to puke. I can’t read this shit.
How will they ever dig themselves out of this again? Will they say that they didn’t know?
And what happens when these soldiers come back home? Will their deeds be forgotten or will these demons rear their ugly head in years to come? How will they treat their partners, their children, their neighbours if they have already shown this level of violence against fellow humans?
‘When You Leave Israel and Enter Gaza, You Are God’: Inside the Minds of IDF Soldiers Who Commit War Crimes, by Yoel Elizur, for Haaretz
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-12-24-israel
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-12-24, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Merry Christmas!
Israel is still committing genocide with my tax dollars and my representative is boasting about it.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113710110628035768
date: 2024-12-24, updated: 2024-12-24, from: Daring Fireball
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416
date: 2024-12-24, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-23-2024-199
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-24, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I have a fairly large and old C application that was written to run on the Mac and Windows. I still use it today on a relatively modern Macintosh. I wonder if it will soon be possible to turn this project over to an AI like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity or some other, to convert it to run on Linux, where it should be able to run in perpetuity, or at least a lot longer than on the Macintosh. I would be willing to pay a few thousand dollars to do this work.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/24.html#a190744
date: 2024-12-24, updated: 2024-12-24, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045906-you-can-watch-the-first
date: 2024-12-24, updated: 2024-12-24, from: Ron Garret
Nearly two months ago now I wrote:It’s getting harder and harder to find a reason to keep doing this. My opportunity costs are high, and writing a blog entry takes a non-trivial amount of time. I wrote this because I needed to blow off some steam, and I wanted to get my position on the election results on the record while they were still fresh in my mind. Whether I keep
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/12/i-have-failed-now-what.html
date: 2024-12-24, updated: 2024-12-24, from: Daring Fireball
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-12-24, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
It is a Christmas miracle!
I finally caved in to user pressure. I still think it looks like a Xmas tree, but developers demand these visual cues.
New Godot on iPad will include icons for the ScenePad. And true to the mantra on software design, I won’t have an option to hide it.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113708893648116217
date: 2024-12-24, updated: 2024-12-24, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/christopher-nolans-the-odyssey
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-24, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
How this stuff fits in? 1. RSS blew a big open hole in the distribution of news and ideas. 2. Now we want to blow the equivalent hole in the writer’s web. Put the two together and we will have finally, after 30+ years, delivered on the promise of the web.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/24.html#a142533
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-24, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Another idea that we continued to push in 2024 is textcasting. It was what I needed to build WordLand, it defines its objective, to form an open social web with all the basic features writers need. Titles, links, simple styling, ability to edit, no character limit, these are basic features we will drive the adoption of. Defining a new network where if you want to play you’ll need to start thinking about writers, their power, and interop. You can’t be on the open web and be a silo. And some of the most insidious silo-like features seem innocuous, like character limits. Whatever forces you into copying and pasting into tiny little text boxes, that’s how you know you’re in a silo. If you can use any writing tool to post to a network, then it is on the web. Pretty simple. Right now – none of the popular ones qualify. None.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/24.html#a141952
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-24, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Talking
with a friend about the
listening lists
idea and realized if it takes off it will turn podcasting into its own
loosely-coupled social network. Really low tech, like the web. And not
possible for one company to control. All it will take is one popular
podcast client to get the
pump
primed. The second and third apps should be much easier to convince.
This is how it worked with podcasting. Steady mission broadcasting, keep
beating the drum, and if it’s the right idea and when it’s the right
time, eventually, it happens. It will be that way too for this layer of
the network, but at this time I don’t own a podcast client, and that’s
the most basic ingredient in this bootstrap, so we wait, and keep
beating the drum.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/24.html#a140516
date: 2024-12-24, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Bruce Schneier blog
A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it.
Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case.
date: 2024-12-24, from: Robert Reich’s blog
There’s nothing there.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/do-not-move-to-the-center-democrats
date: 2024-12-24, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Today the House Ethics Committee released its report on its investigation of widely reported allegations that while in office, former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) had engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, shared inappropriate videos on the House floor, misused state records, diverted campaign funds for his own use, and accepted a bribe or an impermissible gift.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-23-2024
date: 2024-12-24, from: Jirka’s blog
December at work was a bit busy. A much more travelling than I have been used to and also other things. So I had little time for anything else. Even my cycling (I normally commute daily on a bicycle) was somewhat limited. Also I had some flu in November and as a result I was cautious when it came to outdoor and social activities.
http://jirka.1-2-8.net/20241224-0452_December_with_no_computing
date: 2024-12-24, from: Om Malik blog
While I now like dogs — hi, Sadie Michel — I wasn’t really a dog person until I met Mr. Gibbs, who out of nowhere captured my heart. He very quickly became my dog-son. Gibbs was a black toy poodle — though his face was as salt-and-pepper as mine. We became inseparable buddies from the …
https://om.co/2024/12/23/a-dogs-life/
date: 2024-12-24, updated: 2024-12-24, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-24, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
The damaging ethics report has finally been released
https://steady.substack.com/p/here-we-gaetz-again
date: 2024-12-23, from: Dave Rupert blog
I’ve realized something obvious again, this time about CSS; that CSS wants to be a system. At the core of CSS is a series of cascading rules and classes marrying and mingling in an elegant symphony of style application. Dozens and dozens of declarative instructions for painting pixels on the screen come together in under a millisecond. Sometimes it creates magic, other times it creates memes.
At its core, CSS wants to be a system and – besides its quirky selector
power ranking algorithm – it doesn’t come with one out of the box. CSS
wants you to build a system with it. It wants styles to build up, not
flatten down. It even has
layers
as a feature! You can start small with a
minimalist
reset or satisfy your inner typenerd with a
typographic default and
build up from there. You can make your own reset. You can establish your
own naming convention. You can decide to nest or not. You can use IDs.
You can use only-classes. You can even dip a toe into the Shadow DOM if
you crave the dark arts. Hell, I encourage you to use
!important just to feel something.
Not everyone wants to conduct that symphony and I understand that. A nice thing about that CSS is that it’s sharable! Plenty of pre-built systems exist to let you offload that skill. Through the magic of copy-and-paste, you too can have high quality design! But don’t mistake a shortcut as the only valid option. We as humans and technologists like to compare objects and declare winners – to be kingmakers! – but it’s a mistake to shop at only one store and only eat meatballs despite the ubiquitous appeal of Scandinavian design.
CSS wants to be a system and it’s not an impossible task to make your
own. Will there be mistakes and bad assumptions? Yeah. Will there be a
junk.css file? Probably. Will you commit CSS crimes?
Indubitably. Is CSS just thousands of key-value pairs with random
collisions implemented in an uneven distribution among a handful of
different browsers? It sure is, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
In all my years of programming I have never loved a language more than CSS. There’s no other programming language that sparks my brain and lights up my imagination like CSS. Even after thirty years, there’s a rush of adrenaline when I see a complex design and I wonder “How am I going to make that happen?” which leads me to “And how am I going to make that happen on a phone and older browsers?” That’s the fun part of the job. And it’s good to know that there are other people out there who are great at CSS, people who can build up and tear down these systems with ease, people I can siphon knowledge from and build up my own skills when a new challenge arises.
So cheers to the CSS folks, the tinkerers. Your obsessive animations, pixel pushing, and system building – both delicate and strong – are fun to see and experience.
https://daverupert.com/2024/12/css-wants-to-be-a-system/
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045897-this-hotel-in-monterey-ba
date: 2024-12-23, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-222024
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045903-you-shouldnt-be-driving-o
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>With its recent switch to a different kernel, SvarDOS moves from being a distro of FreeDOS to greater independence.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/23/svardos_drdos_reborn/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-12-23, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Recently I replaced the Godot shader editor with one I can fully control:
https://youtu.be/rOJLkIo13ho?feature=shared
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113703668124128701
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045902-a-roundup-of-the-words
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-12-23, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Cute, running the iPad version of Godot on the Mac works surprisingly well.
Discovered by accident today, I made a mistake and it ran in my Mac instead of the simulator.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113703550226390826
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045904-pricing-calculator-for-cr
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Bruce Schneier blog
The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware.
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/ricky-jay-and-his-52-assistants
date: 2024-12-23, from: Chris Heilmann’s blog
In recent times a meme has been making the rounds that allegedly shows a smart way to solve interview puzzles. In these memes developers are asked to create an ASCII pattern like the following: XXXXXXX XX XX X X X X X X X X X X X XX XX XXXXXXX The solution they come up with is a simple console.log() or print command. console.log(`XXXXXXX […]
date: 2024-12-23, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045900-gisele-pelicot-dominique-
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-23, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Instead
of having the Dems redefine the Dems, how about the people who vote for
Dems redefining the Dems. Agree on what the Dems are, and just as
important, are not. End arguments about whether the Dems are this color
or that, this gender or that, this age or some other. Draw a circle of
common interest and leave out everything else. Draw the biggest circle
possible.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/23.html#a152216
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-23, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
http://scripting.com/2024/12/23.html#a150750
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-23, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I wrote this piece in WordLand yesterday morning over breakfast. Started writing it as a Bluesky post, quickly ran out of space so I switched over to my own TLTB, and it’s very conducive to writing flow, which is its purpose. Then I did the same thing this morning. Sorry to keep talking about the product without it being in general release yet. I want to get it right before opening it up. Still a bunch of things I want to add/fix.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/23.html#a150139
date: 2024-12-23, from: Robert Reich’s blog
A note for the holidays
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/we-the-people
date: 2024-12-23, from: Melanie Mitchell, AI Guide for Human Thinking
OpenAI’s o3 model aces the “Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus” — but what does it mean?
https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai-just-solve-abstract-reasoning
date: 2024-12-23, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On December 23, 1783, General George Washington stood in front of the Confederation Congress, meeting in the senate chamber of the Maryland State House, to resign his wartime commission.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-22-2024
date: 2024-12-23, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Business Lunch, Soho Quote of the Day “America is a mistake – admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.” Sigmund Freud Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Alison Krauss | Down To The River To Pray Link Long … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-23-december-2024/40239/
date: 2024-12-22, updated: 2024-12-23, from: Daring Fireball
https://joeblogs.joeposnanski.com/p/being-rickey
date: 2024-12-22, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-21-2024-42a
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
BTW Twitter is innovating in ways that it never has. People not staying on Twitter would have no way of knowing. Another reason why, for software developers, quitting Twitter is stupid. As quitting Facebook was ten years ago. Great, now you have no idea what features your users are learning how to use. Eventually your software will be in a dead end while a new coral reef has been forming. Where are you going to get fresh ideas from. Not using these systems would be like not listening to the Beatles in the 60s,. You would have missed all that followed. And not just popular music. Same with Twitter in the 2020s. That story is far from over.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/22.html#a140711
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I love writing my morning missives in WordLand. It really fits.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/22.html#a133401
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
What
we need, now, is a system to compete with Twitter. A system as capable
as Twitter. It has to be privately held by a group that can be trusted
not to interfere with democratic use of the system. This can’t be
guaranteed, it has to be based on trust. It needs to scale very quickly.
Its vision is to represent democracy. And it has to be simple, clean and
quickly understood as parallel to Twitter. Bluesky has a lot of what’s
needed, but its ownership is not clear. But it more like Twitter than
Twitter is today and I expect that to continue.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/22.html#a133121
date: 2024-12-22, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/let-there-be-peace
date: 2024-12-22, from: Anton Zhiyanov blog
Techniques for handling time in concurrent programs.
https://antonz.org/go-concurrency/time/
date: 2024-12-22, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-big-guns
date: 2024-12-22, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Shortly after midnight last night, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government through March 14, 2025.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-21-2024
date: 2024-12-22, from: Om Malik blog
I recently wrote about the future of the browser and Surf, a new app from the creators of Flipboard. Both stories explore the changing nature of the web and its impact on the media landscape. I’m not shy about expressing my frustrations with the establishment media and the ever-present gulf between technology and old media companies. I’ve been involved with the internet and online publishing from the …
https://om.co/2024/12/21/dark-musings-on-media-ai/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-12-22, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Godot on iPhone, I forgot to disable it from the TestFlight and it sort of runs.
My opinion was that we should block it, but people love it. And in the last 12 hours I can’t stop thinking of some easy wins to make it at least passable.
But perhaps the right thing is still to prevent from running on iPhone or be destroyed by unhappy users reviews
