(date: 2024-12-31 07:05:42)
date: 2024-12-31, from: Liam on Linux
I learned about a new DIY machine to me, the Cody Computer.
comments
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/93665.html
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Braintrust query: I’m kind of stuck with my little feed reader in Bluesky. It works, but a few hours into it, at 10PM last night, we start getting rate-limit errors from bluesky. If it really is a rate limit, shouldn’t reset after a while?
http://scripting.com/2024/12/31.html#a142517
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-31, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Still looking for WordLand testers who write good bug reports and use WordPress for writing on a regular basis, even daily.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/31.html#a140849
date: 2024-12-31, from: Enlightenment Economics blog
This decision – again, entirely arbitrary and my own – was harder than ever this year because I left the long/shortlisting so late I had little time to mull it over. So I’m going to follow last year’s precedent and … Continue reading
date: 2024-12-31, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Bruce Schneier blog
It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:
Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.
[…]
In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/gift-card-fraud.html
date: 2024-12-31, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Establishing a baseline.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-20-realities-of-the-american
date: 2024-12-31, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
The fight between MAGA and DOGE continues.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-30-2024
date: 2024-12-31, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
I’ve been playing the game Satisfactory with my sister for about the past year. Neither of us have played games much, and that mostly pre-2000. It’s been slow going as we learn what tools are available to us, how to interact with the world, and what goals we’re meant to pursue. But another thing we’re […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/30/mindset-of-more/
date: 2024-12-31, updated: 2024-12-31, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/jimmy-carter-accomplishments-james-fallows/673146/
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/30/gurman-magic-mouse-voice-control/
date: 2024-12-30, from: Matt Haughey blog
As the year draws to a close, I figured I should look back at the highs and lows and take an assessment of where I'm at. So here goes.
The biggest project I'm most proud of completing this year was the guidebook/travel guide to
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/reflections-on-2024/
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/great-art-explained-the-last-supper-by-leonardo-da-vinci
date: 2024-12-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-29-2024-41e
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Daring Fireball
https://kenthendricks.com/52-things-i-learned-in-2024/
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045934-if-the-silurian-hypothesi
date: 2024-12-30, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
As a noun phrase, “The intention economy” first appeared in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006. A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen. Six years after that, I wrote this book, […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/12/30/the-real-intention-economy/
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045928-52-things-kent-hendricks-
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/77-facts-that-blew-our-minds-in-2024
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045925-haalarit-are-overalls-wor
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045929-the-walmart-effect-accord
date: 2024-12-30, from: Dave Rupert blog
For last year’s check-in, I foreshadowed a year of changes for ol’ Dave Rupert and boy was I not kidding. New job, new car, new pets. But before we get into all that – for accountability’s sake – let’s check in on my resolutions from last year and see how I did…
Final score: 50%-ish. That’s better than I expected. What did I do with the other 50% of my time if I wasn’t crushing it on my SMART goals? Let’s see…
Finding a job dominated the first half of my year. After some ups and downs I ended up in a good place at Microsoft. There’s a lot of positives going from self-employment to the corporate world (hey! actual benefits! stocks even!) but also a lot of organizational bureaucracy that I’m not used to navigating. I’m happy with the work I’m doing and feel lucky to get to work on web components each day.
My wife and I’s trip to Pittsburgh for Frostapalooza was a big crescendo for the year. Months and months of practicing culminating in one big night. It’s hard to describe it other than some kind of nerd-flavored camp reunion but with guitars instead of computers. We had such a good time and the amount of music filling our house on a daily basis has increased ten-fold this year. For that I’m thankful.
I often judge years based on if we hit our health insurance deductible and we hit it again this year. A lot of medium grade background stress: job hunt stress, new job stress, healthcare stress, election stress, etc. Thankfully – and I could be basking in the limelight of a good Christmas holiday and a week off from work – I hardly remember that stress anymore. It feels like I’ve shedded those layers of anxiety.
With all the qualitative out of the way, let’s get more quantitative about what we did this year…
A pretty good year for me and it’d be great to maintain that pace next year. To be totally honest, my actual goal would be to do less next year. Sounds crazy, I know, numbers should only go up and to the right. But hear me out… what if they didn’t? Have we considered that option?
I didn’t play video games as much as I would have liked to this year, so I’ll need to remedy that. I’ve got a backlog brewing but I’m having a good time making games and that’s a time tradeoff I’m okay with. But from a “great writers read” perspective, I should play more games. Related, I had to quit late night gaming with the boys because it effected my sleep and stress levels, but I want to get back to that. AAA gaming is in a rough state though.
There’s five focus areas I’d like to pursue next year and I already have traction on most of these feel achievable, But I’ve been wrong about that in the past.
Seize work opportunities - It’s been a great first 7 months at Microsoft but I have some big projects shipping in the next quarter so I need to shift out of my “learning the ropes” mode into a more melee combat ready position.
Hunker down and be creative - I’m not excited about the state of the union right now, so I’m going to trust my instinct to burrow. I’ve got some apps, games, and shitty sci-fi ideas that I’d be happy to work on instead of doomscrolling the news. I feel okay about pursuing those ideas rather than getting mired in political headlines.
Slow down to 1x mode - The ability to consume books, podcasts, and videos at 2x is a super power but I feel a nudge to take life slower. Slowing down would hopefully increase the time-cost and make me more discerning about what I choose to consume. The fact that I view listening at 1x as a challenge tells me I should probably pursue it.
Join a club - Inspired by the documentary Join or Die, I think I need to join a club and participate in IRL more. Clubs give me an opportunity to burst my personal/internet bubble and meet people who don’t share my background, income, or political beliefs. But I can’t even think of what I’d want to do. Perhaps something hobby-related? Join a lodge? Volunteer at a food bank? I feel woefully unprepared that I don’t even have the beginning of an answer here.
Understand myself - Beyond work and side projects, the biggest project I’ll be undertaking in 2025 is going to be… me. Since the Summer, I’ve been on a mission to understand myself at a clinical level. Last year I lost a lot of weight, more than half of it has come back without much change in diet. I want to know what’s in this mountain of flesh and bones and brains that God gave me. I want to begin to untangle the Gordian Knot of Anxiety, Weight, and ADHD. This has meant seeing a new doctor, getting blood work done, seeing a therapist, evaluating medication, and a whole lot more. I even made it a “Project” in Notion so I’d actually follow through on it. My ideal outcome is to come up with a plan to get through the next five, ten, fifteen, thirty years and beyond. In the immediate future an unexpected medical malady has presented itself and I’ll probably have to undergo surgery next year.
I know some had an awful 2024. I’d say mine was hard but good over the long haul. 2025 seems primed to bring its own existential challenges and I hope you find shelter. Tech is still in shambles right now but I’m starting to see hints of the icy job market thawing, but I’m unsure if it will ever go back to “normal”. And politics… oof. We’re already seeing the outputs of the self-inflicted chaos machine. Keep in mind that chaos is the goal; chaos to exhaust and disarm us, to flood the zone with shit. So hold fast to your principles and conserve energy for the long haul. Keep your hand on the plow and keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.
https://daverupert.com/2024/12/twenty-twenty-four/
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/eight-clams-control-this-polish-citys-water-supply
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045938-great-read-heather-cox-ri
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I’m playing with using Bluesky as a very simple feed reader. 1. Running up against its lack of style and formatting. Very bare bones. Not sure if people will like. 2. What’s the rate limit? My app is getting rate-limited with not very many posts. (According to their docs on rate limits, I don’t think my project is anywhere near the limit. It’s creating posts. I’ll start counting them, I guess.)
http://scripting.com/2024/12/30.html#a133258
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-30, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Braintrust query: Do you subscribe to one or more AI services?
http://scripting.com/2024/12/30.html#a130714
date: 2024-12-30, updated: 2024-12-28, from: Bruce Schneier blog
The US government has identified a ninth telecom that was successfully hacked by Salt Typhoon.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/salt-typhoons-reach-continues-to-grow.html
date: 2024-12-30, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
Back in September 2023, we extended the curl command line tool with a new fairly advanced and flexible variable system. Using this, users can use files, environment variables and more in a powerful way when building curl command lines in ways not previously possible – with almost all existing command line options. curl command lines … Continue reading curl with partial files
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/30/curl-with-partial-files/
date: 2024-12-30, from: Robert Reich’s blog
It’s a perfect way out for Trump, who doesn’t like these states anyway.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/canada-and-blue-america-a-perfect
date: 2024-12-30, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-29-2024
date: 2024-12-30, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakraken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passengers—just like every other car company. What would the world now be like if Volkswagen since 2014 had established itself as the only car maker not […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/12/29/the-kraken-won/
date: 2024-12-30, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Lest we forget The Cambridge American Cemetery on a dull December day. It contains 3,809 headstones, with the remains of 3,812 servicemen, including airmen who died over Europe and sailors from North Atlantic convoys. The long wall on the right … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-30-december-2024/40275/
date: 2024-12-29, updated: 2024-12-29, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-dead.html
date: 2024-12-29, from: James Fallows, Substack
The Panama Canal and its home country should be newly important to Americans. But in the opposite way from what Donald Trump has been talking about.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/panama-is-back-in-the-news-that-can
date: 2024-12-29, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Friends,
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption
date: 2024-12-29, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A man of honesty
https://steady.substack.com/p/jimmy-carter-1924-2024
date: 2024-12-29, updated: 2024-12-29, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045930-former-president-jimmy-ca
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-29, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Here’s a list of all the feeds in my blogroll, with links to the XML version. I’ve wanted to have a nice non-XML way of viewing the feeds in an OPML subscription list. I took the time today to put one together. I had all the pieces, it was just a matter of putting them all in one place. You can use it if you want, if you want to show someone what feeds are in an OPML subscription list. Screen shot.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/29.html#a210704
date: 2024-12-29, updated: 2024-12-30, from: Daring Fireball
OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution.
https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/openai_unimaginable
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-29, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I can’t get it out of my head that today is Monday. That’s how it computes in my brain. This time of year is very confusing that way.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/29.html#a205611
date: 2024-12-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-28-2024-5c9
date: 2024-12-29, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Trump, Musk, Sachs, and the other billionaires taking over in three weeks and one day want to do something quite different from what the previous generation of conservatives sought.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-are-they-really-seeking
@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.
It looks kind of fun, but once again, it does make me wonder why it’s so constrained. Extremely low-res graphics, for instance. TBH I would have sneered at this for being low-end when I was about 13 years old. (Shortly before I got my first computer, a 48K ZX Spectrum.)
Why isn’t anyone trying to make an easy home-build high-end eight-bit? Something that really pushes the envelope right out there – the sort of dream machine I wanted by about the middle of the 1980s.
In 1987 I owned an Amstrad PCW9512:
Later in 1989 I bought an MGT SAM Coupé:
Both had graphics easily outdone by the MSX 2 and later Z80 machines, but those had a dedicated GPU. That might be a reach but then given the limits of a 64 kB memory map, maybe a good one.
Another aspirational machine was the BBC Micro: a expandable, modular OS called MOS; an excellent BASIC, BBC BASIC, with structured flow, named procedures, with local variables, enabling recursive programming, and inline assembly language so if you graduated to machine-code you could just enter and edit it in the BASIC line editor. (Which was weird, but powerful – for instance, 2 independent cursors, one source and one destination, eliminating the whole “clipboard” concept.) Resolution-independent graphics, and graphics modes that cheerfully used most of the RAM, leaving exploitation as an exercise for the developer. Which they rose to magnificently.
The BBC Micro supported dual processors over the Tube interface, so one 6502 could run the OS, the DOS, and the framebuffer, using most of its 64 kB, and Hi-BASIC could run on the 2nd 6502 (or Z80!) processor, therefore having most of 64 kB to itself.
In a 21st century 8-bit, I want something that comfortably exceeds a 1980s 8-bit, let alone a 1990s 8-bit.
(And yes, there were new 8-bit machines in the 1990s, such as the Amstrad CPC Plus range, or MSX Turbo R.)
So my wish list would include…