For once I agree with the Orange Turd in the Whitehouse.
He should be the first convicted criminal we ship to a prison outside the United States.
Remember those 37 convictions? I do.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I’ve had a pretty fun week. Our dev team is doing really great work for our client, got to hangout with my grandson at his very important preschool graduation, and I had my first physical therapy session yesterday.
Overall a darned good week! 😃
Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter
Joe Don Baker, the broad-shouldered Texas tough guy who portrayed characters on both sides of the law, most notably Sheriff Buford Pusser in the unexpected box-office hit Walking Tall, died May 7, his family announced. He was 89.
I remember watching Walking Tall as a kid and thinking Sheriff Buford Pusser was a real badass. I think I’ll have to watch it again.🪦
Mike Wendling, Rajini Vaidyanathan & Paul Coletti • BBC
Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he intends to give away 99% of his vast fortune over the next 20 years.
This is really nice of him in today’s world of Oligarchs. He’d have been worth so much if he hadn’t started giving his money away. We need more kindness like this in the world.
Thank you, Mr. Gates. ❤️
Apple is trying to dissuade Europeans from using iOS apps that support alternative payment options by making them look scary.
Apple will absolutely not give up on its 15-30% cut of each app sale in the App Store.
What I really dislike about these scare tactics is how they imply that a third party purchasing system is not safe and secure. Web payment systems have been around for years and years and predate the App Store. I’d imagine there are some questionable players out there but I trust companies like Stripe and Shopify. I’m sure there are many other trustworthy companies out there.
If Apple keeps fooling around they’re gonna get some major fines in the EU.
When I started writing apps, the availability and quality of developer tools was considered to be an advantage for native development vs. the Web. These days, I still think native APIs usually lead to better apps—though there are some awful Catalyst and SwiftUI apps that would have been better as Electron—but the Web tooling has really improved. I think many would now consider it a strong advantage.
I know this article by Michael is talking about Electron but I’ve spent the last year and a half working on a project to slowly transform native iOS and Android apps into 100% React Native Apps and it’s gone really well. Same idea, different frameworks and platforms.
The start was slow and we spent the first four to six months building our bridging strategy and coding it. Once that was in place, along with React Native code to go with it, we started replacing hunks of functionality, feature by feature.
Recently a new Expo App was created and all that React Native work we started in the hybrid app has been shared via npm packages with the brand new app. It’s completely jumpstarted the new app with many features already built and tested in isolation. I’d say somewhere between 40-50% of the new app now works just by using these packages. Our networking, UI navigation, analytics, and telemetry packages were thoughtfully created to work with the native bridge code and 100% React Native code.
Anyway, I’ve written about it. Check it out if you have a minute. It’s been a really fun project.
Crypto giant Coinbase has confirmed its systems have been breached and customer data, including government-issued identity documents, were stolen.
Whoops. Will anyone ever be able to create a website and/or service that’s secure enough to not have breaches?
I’d imagine the best way to do it is not create the website or service in the first place. 😃
Warner Bros. Discovery is changing the name of its streaming service back to HBO Max. During its Upfront event on Wednesday, the company announced that it will rebrand Max this summer, a change HBO head Casey Bloys said “better represents” its offering.
I’m glad they did this. HBO has always been a place for quality series and originals. It’s a premium brand and with the addition of the Max name says “Hey, it’s the HBO you love with this other stuff we think you might enjoy.” 😆
Chiara Mooney • Microsoft React Native Blog
Let’s first talk about why Office chose to use React Native. Office has hundreds of millions of customers who expect visual consistency across desktop, mobile, and web. Currently, there are over 40 Office experiences which use React Native to build cross-platform features such as Privacy Dialog and Accessibility Assistant.
This is fascinating and weird to me all at once. Microsoft, one of the greatest software shops of all time is using React Native in Office. Yeah, you read that right, React Native in Office.
Did you know Microsoft is the primary contributor to React Native for Windows?
Can you imagine if someone did this for Mac? Oh, Microsoft did? Wait, what! I’m not sure how good this support is, but I’d love to see how it works.
It’s too bad a dyed in the wool Mac shop doesn’t take this on. Having an AppKit expert building this would make for a better framework, in my opinion. Of course Apple wouldn’t do it, but they should. I’d continue to build apps with Apple’s native tooling because I think it makes for better apps, but having something that opens the door to thousands and thousands of developers is good for the platform and might encourage more developers to create desktop apps instead of websites.
Ulrik Egede • The Conversation
While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.
I wonder how much it cost to create 29 trillionths of a gram of gold from lead? 😂
It is pretty amazing. I wonder what else they’ve created in there? Hopefully not a world ending virus. 😳
Royal Enfield’s eagerly anticipated electric motorcycles, unveiled late last year under the Flying Flea brand, are now confirmed to hit the market early next year.
This is a nice looking bike. Very modern construction with the look of a bike from days long past. Not a bad option for motorcycle enthusiasts.
Microsoft is redesigning the Start menu in Windows 11 this month with a new, wider design that finally lets you disable the recommended feed of files and apps. While the new Start menu looks different to what exists in Windows 11 today, this design refresh could have looked a lot different as Microsoft has now revealed in concept images.
Finally. 👍🏼
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
My struggles continue with sciatica. Thankfully it is much better than it was a week ago but I have a ways to go. Physical therapy is just under a week away and I’m hoping they can help me get this darn impingement un-impinged. I’m getting three to four hours of decent sleep a night then I get restless.
It’s gonna get better. I know it.
I had a really great time at work at the end of the week. I was called on to help some of the iOS Devs on our team to fix a few bugs. It was a blast pairing, what a great way to end the week.
Looking for a weekend escape? The first two episodes of Long Way Home, the latest installment in Apple TV+’s best travel series, have just dropped — and it’s the perfect watch if you’re craving a scenic adventure.
The Long Way series on Apple TV have been so much fun to watch. Highly recommended. 👍🏼
Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.
So this hunk of space debris is supppsed to crash down soon, if it hasn’t already, and it’s supposed to fall on land. Duck! 🛰️
This is a big step forward. Stripe Managed Payments is designed to handle all the heavy lifting for digital businesses from sales tax and fraud prevention to global compliance and customer support. Simply put, you can focus on growing your business.
When I read this I wondered if it could be used as a new in-app purchasing system for iOS Apps that want to bypass using Apple’s payment system? I bet it can.
The small creatures look like oval mini-sailboats that can grow up to 4 inches long. Their gelatinous bases can range in color from vibrant blue to deep purple, and they have transparent triangular “sail” on top. It’s what allows them to be blown across the surface of the open sea where they typically live — and with strong enough winds, onto coastal sands.
I lived in California for over 50 years and I’ve never heard of these. They’re beautiful. ⛵️
Many horses, including Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle Store, have already left the barn. But Apple is moving quickly to shut the external payments door opened by last week’s ruling that the company willfully failed to comply with court orders regarding anticompetitive behavior.
I didn’t think it would take long for big companies to flip that switch.
Now we wait and see if Apple can get the courts to overrule the judgement. I can’t see that happening but I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. 💸
Within hours after the news broke, our team shipped a Web Paywall Button. A new component you can drop into any RevenueCat paywall to whisk users over to a RevenueCat-hosted web checkout, complete the purchase, and then unlock access in-app as if it were a native buy flow.
That sure didn’t take long.
It makes me wonder if anyone is going to use Apple Pay for their payment system? 😃
Heck, if Apple switched their payment system to charge something like 5% I’m sure folks would use it.
I’d put money on that happening if the ruling remains in effect.
Doctors uncover link between increasing number of children getting measles and their parents being gullible morons
What a headline! I couldn’t resist! 😂
Of course it’s all about the money! DUH!
“A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property,” Apple’s lawyers wrote in the motion.
I don’t like it when Apple makes claims like this. I know my software uses their SDK but I wrote the code that is the app, it’s not theirs.
Sure, the operating system is theirs, the tooling is theirs, and the software that gives our software access to the operating is theirs. But me selling an app using a different payment system denies them money and doesn’t jeopardize their “products, services, and intellectual property.” They’re worried about the, potentially billions, of dollars they could lose.
Just say that. Say “we’re going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars if people choose different payment methods.”
Or, or, how about this! Change your percentage to 5% and call it a day. I’ll bet folks wouldn’t change their payment mechanism then, because it would be competitively priced.
I’m happy for developers who want to take advantage of the new rules. Good for them and their bottom line.
I don’t make much off of Stream and RxCalc so I’ll probably continue to use Apple’s payment system.
I had such a rough night sleeping. I didn’t sleep much due to pain and not being able to find a comfortable position.
I’m thankful I had some Hydrocodone/APAP left over from knee surgery. At least it takes the edge off. 😊
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter
Ruth Buzzi, who was so hilarious as the lonely spinster Gladys Ormphby, the lady who swung her handbag as a lethal weapon, on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, has died. She was 88.
I’m old enough to remember Laugh-In and Ruth Buzzy was a hoot.
R.I.P. 🪦
The judge ruled that developers should be able to link to other ways to make purchases from inside their apps, so they could process payments via their own website and payment systems. In doing so, developers should have been able to forgo paying Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases.
Some developers are already making changes to use their own payment system. I’ve read that Spotify is preparing a new release and Epic wants to return to the store with their own payment system. John Grubers hot take on Epic returning is a good read and one I hadn’t considered. I just figured it was a done deal, it might be?
Danish consumers are boycotting Coca-Cola, Carlsberg (CARLb.CO), opens new tab CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen said on Tuesday, noting that the brewer, which bottles the drink in Denmark, had seen Coca-Cola volumes decline while local rivals gain share.
It makes sense that other countries are abandoning American products. Prices are being driven up and who wants to pay a huge tax to buy something they can get locally?
“When we started working on ‘Moving Pictures’, everything came along just so effortlessly,” he continued. “We were well prepared, we’d written all the material, we knew what we were doing. We went in, we got sounds. We did things a little differently.
I’m pretty sure the Rush video for Limelight was recorded during this studio time. I wore that cassette tape out, it was so amazing.
Race and Commercial Breakdown of the 2025 Jack Link’s 500
Total minutes of complete race broadcast: 212 Minutes of race broadcast: 187 Minutes of traditional commercials: 25 Minutes of side-by-side commercials: 36
I’ll be checking this site out after each race this season. The total time we saw full screen racing was 186 minutes, which feels much longer than I recall.
The total commercial time was 61 minutes! An hour of commercials! One third of the time watching the race was commercials. Their side by side commercials, which they think is the cats meow, suck. The commercial takes up most of the screen and we get commercial audio.
I’ve seen action happening on the track I’d love see and hear full screen.
The coverage is very substandard. I hope Amazon does a better job than The CW and Fox. I’m not holding my breath.
Jerry Cantrell lends his voice to a song on the soundtrack to new vampire film Sinners.
It’s a nice little article and we get some insight into the directors mindset around the music for the film.
3 billion users = $15–$20 billion is not real math. It’s just bullshit. The users are only valuable right now because they perform a lot of Google web searches within Chrome. Chrome users also make money for Google by using other Google properties that show ads, like Maps and Gmail. And Chrome encourages users, in general, to use Google properties and services like Docs. If you try to work out how valuable Chrome is to Google, it’s seemingly worth a veritable fortune. But that doesn’t mean Chrome holds any value of its own, on its own.
Before reading this I was wondering how a company who forked WebKit to create Chromium is worth anything? As John points out it’s basically Google Search and Marketing. They also have great online services in Gmail and Google Docs. Read John’s piece he says it all.
Ben Smith and Liz Hoffman • Semafor
JC Chandor likes to joke that you could trade off the viewership data of Margin Call, the 2011 film that tells the story of an unnamed bank’s catastrophic 24 hours during the 2008 financial crisis.
I watch Margin Call once in a while and it’s loaded with amazing talent. Great film. It makes you realize how fragile our entire economic system really is.
Politics
So I guess we’re reaching the point where if you want to remain vaccinated against COVID, you’ll have to figure out how to buy an illegal import from this “dark web” I’ve been hearing so much about.
I’m digging the name Bobby Brainworms. I never ever thought our nation would ditch science for conspiracy theories.
American Healthcare is substandard
My trip to the ER today was a success, in a way, but also a failure.
My hope was I’d get an MRI to better understand what’s going on with the discs in lower lumbar. It’s where my pain is focused.
I arrived, got in pretty quickly, and had a great doc visit me. I explained what was going on and my hope for the outcome of the visit. She listened intently and asked a series of questions I answered.
She explained to me the only thing that would result in an MRI is the inability to empty my bladder, being unable to defecate, or weakness in a leg or legs. That’s it.
She shared that my insurance company would outright reject the MRI because I didn’t meet any of those conditions. She also said “You can pay for it yourself but I don’t know how you feel about a $10,000 MRI bill?” 😳
TL;DR - I don’t qualify for an MRI because I’m just in, at times, excruciating pain. But I can still walk (kind of) and pee and poop. 🤬
So, I got two injections; a muscle relaxer and a steroid. I don’t recall the names. The doc also prescribed a different muscle relaxer than I was prescribed prior because it did funny things to me.
This afternoon by 3PM or so the pain was back to a bearable level. In that regard, it was a success.
The lack of an MRI is a complete failure. Sure, I had X-rays a few weeks back so we know the bony parts are in rough shape, but we have zero clue how the soft tissues look. Do I have a bulging disc, or more? Who knows? The doctors don’t know and the physical therapists I visit won’t know exactly what PT plan I need to, hopefully, feel better.
We live in one of the richest nations in the world and our healthcare industry is driven by penny pinching insurance companies claiming we don’t need certain procedures, even though they don’t know.
One of the questions I was asked by the doctor was “Do you feel like hurting yourself or someone else?”
Think about that for a minute. Chronic pain can really screw with your mind. You get tired of it physically and mentally and just stop caring.
Yes, people commit suicide because of pain and insurance company games; Delay, Deny, Defend.
People also murder insurance company CEO’s because of their crap policies that delay and deny people the care they need.
I said “No” to both questions because I haven’t reached that “I can’t take this anymore” phase. I’m doing ok and I hope I’ll bet an MRI after my physical therapy, but I’m losing hope.
Oh, yeah, this seems to be the way in Virginia. I’ve had MRI’s in California that were never challenged by the insurance company. Maybe it’s because I have a different insurance company now? It’s probably the latter.
If you don’t need a back I’d recommend against having one. 🤣
Off to the ER we go. I’m hoping they’ll do an MRI so we know how much damage there is to soft tissues.
I’m so over the pain of it all.
WTF is he talking about?
Can someone smart please explain what this knucklehead is saying? 😳
How can people making less than $200k benefit from tariffs? Ultimately we pay for the tariff because the poor small business has to raise their prices to pay for the tariff. Right? RIGHT!
Calling Paul Krugman, come on Mr. Krugman. Can you please explain what the hell Marmalade Messiah is saying?
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Yesterday Kim and I were looking at homes on acreage. We’re hoping to find our final home and have enough land our kids could build on it if they want to. It’ll also be the perfect place to setup for the coming zombie apocalypse! 🧟♂️
Hope you enjoy the links.
Aisha Nyandoro, Ph.D. • Forbes
You come into a lot of money suddenly, and it’s like you’ve won the lottery. I had to think a lot about, “what is the purpose of money?” Why do we have money, and how much money is enough? The more I looked at it, the more I thought the money should be actually out there working to make the world better in some form. I didn’t see the purpose of holding on to a bunch of wealth if it’s not doing anything.
There are some extremely wealthy people who are empathetic to the human condition and want to help. See, not all of them are building dick shaped rockets or trying to take over the United States. 👍🏼
For a long while, I’ve felt that the design of iOS is too top heavy. While our phones seem to grow larger every year, our hands do not and so interface elements are pulled ever further out of reach.
Reading tealeaves is not my thing any longer, but this is a really great take on what the next version of iOS may hold for us. 👩🎨
Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology
At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications.
I know a lot of shops really love GraphQL for its flexibility, but I’ve never had the pleasure of working with it. It is my understanding Twitter was using GraphQL for the updated Twitter API that Space Karen scrapped.
In a groundbreaking step for the future of construction, the first-ever 3D-printed Starbucks is taking shape in Brownsville, Texas.
How cool is that? I wish I could’ve seen the machine during the process. You can see the layers in the pictures and see a very visible seam or rib where it came together. Overall it’s extremely cool and it’s supposed to be less expensive than traditional construction. I hope these become options for young folks getting their first home.
This magical DIY Book Lamp teaches kids about creativity and electronics. It combines paper crafting and paper circuits using conductive tape. The materials used are simple, but the result is truly fascinating.
This could be a really fun project for me and my grandchildren.
DESIGN WAS so much easier before I had clients. I assigned myself projects with no requirements, no schedule, no budget, no constraints. By most definitions, what I did wasn’t even design—except that it ended up creating new things, some of which still exist on the web.
This is how I’d imagine most indie software developers feel. I know when I work on Stream or RxCalc or Arrgly or [top sekret project] I find the most joy there because I don’t have to worry about someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m coding thing the proper way. I’m just coding, crafting an application the way I see it. I don’t have to use all these different latest creates frameworks or new patterns. I can be my curmudgeonly self and use tried and true methods of old because I’m the only one who needs to worry about it. 😃
I’ve got a post-graduate certificate in artificial intelligence (AI). I’m also an author, and I believe writers and publishers should not use AI in publishing. So that’s why I was disturbed when a reviewer asked if I had used AI in writing my recent coming-of-age novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun.
I won’t go as far to say you should never use AI, even though I won’t on my personal projects, but you need to understand your craft so you can make an educated decision about the quality of any code you use from a third party. You do this with third party code you get from whatever packages you use, right? Why should AI be any different. In fact AI generated code should get more scrutiny than human written code. Don’t vibe your way to poor quality. 🌹
Nvidia’s GPU drivers have been a disaster over the past four months. It all started when Nvidia released its drivers for the RTX 50-series cards in January, and introduced black screen issues, game crashes, and general stability problems for new and existing graphics cards.
When I hear about something like this my brain always asks “I wonder if they rewrote the driver code.” That could definitely be a huge mistake. I don’t know if that’s what they did or if it was just rushed to get it to market but it’s not good to break something so many folks rely on. Software development is just plain difficult. All the best fixing your drivers, Nvidia!
Yes, AI-assisted development is transforming how we build software, but it’s not a free pass to abandon rigor, review, or craftsmanship. “Vibe coding” is not an excuse for low-quality work.
Ah, I mentioned this above. Check those outputs for accuracy and fix problems so you don’t get bit. ‘Nuff said.
The Sakura might be Japan’s best-selling EV (indeed, strong demand led to Nissan having to pause sales in late 2022 because it had too many orders), but it has the potential to be far more than that. It is the EV that many city EV drivers have been crying out for.
This is a really cute little car that would be perfect for city dwellers. Heck, I drive one these to work and back daily if I could convince my wife I needed it. 🤣 As it is I work from home and need a truck for towing our camping trailer and hauling dirt and rock. (You’d be surprised how often we used to do that!)
Finally got a bunch of tattoos on my laptop. I ordered a case for it so I could keep my stickers and make it easier to cleanup the laptop when I have to turn it in. 😃
What an idiot. 🤣
Captured a good picture of a Snowberry Clearwing.
‘There Is a Complete Meltdown in the Building’: Pentagon Reportedly in ‘Chaos’ as Hegseth Loses Four Staffers in One Day
Who’s a thunk it? 🤣
I mean, you put absolute morons in charge and chaos follows. They are the Chaos Monkey Party, not MAGA.
It all starts with the idiot at the top. Good old Marmalade Messiah, Donald J. Trump.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Sippin’ on my coffee, sittin’ on the couch, typin’ this post out on my iPhone. Like most mornings the house is quiet so it’s a perfect time to write, or post a bunch of links.
The week has been good overall. Work was fine. Pretty quiet. Our Canadian and Brazilian brethren were off yesterday for Good Friday. I suppose that had a lot to do with it, well that and No Meetings Friday. 😃
Anywho, I hope you enjoy the links.
I hope someday we’ll get a version of Swift that isn’t chasing whatever the hot new coding paradigm currently is, and isn’t weighed down by ever expanding complexity. I think that could be pretty nice.
I understand Gus’ sentiment. Swift feels, to me, like a dumping ground for programming language nerds.
Apple had pushed it as a simple language to learn. Sure, the basics may be simple, but overall it’s an extremely complex language, especially all the new Swift Concurrency stuff. Does anyone really understand when to use @MainActor?
I’m behind the curve when it comes to fully embracing Swift Concurrency. I currently have one place in Stream for Mac that uses it, and it’s nice, but I’m not implementing any Sendable types, just taking advantage of Task() and Async/Await.
Get a first look at Daniel Suárez’s Telcel-Infinitum scheme as he makes a homecoming to Mexico at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Sunday, June 15
This is cool! NASCAR is headed back to Mexico! I’d actually love to attend this event but I didn’t plan for it this year and I’m not sure how much Kim would appreciate me going all the way to Mexico to watch a NASCAR race when NASCAR is mainly a south-eastern thing. I could drive 45 minutes to Richmond Raceway if I wanted to see a race. 😃
I still think Daniel Suárez should try to get Papas and Beer onboard. 🍻
After growing up using Commodore and Atari computers, the first PC I bought with my own money (as a college student) was a “Macintari” in 1987. Proper Macs were super expensive, so instead, I purchased a Mega ST series Atari computer, which ran the same CPU as Macs of that era (the Motorola 68000). If you installed a Macintosh ROM (or EPROM) chip, you could boot into Macintosh System Software (as macOS was known at the time) and use the Atari hardware as if it were a “real” Apple Macintosh computer.
I had no idea you could run MacOS on an Atari computer!
If you’re interested in one persons observations about moving from Windows to Mac, this is a good one. It’s interesting to me how much third party software Windows users use today.
I have no idea how muchuva pain it would be for me to go back to Windows. Ive been gone for so long and it’s changed so much since 2006.
Specifically, Schleswig-Holstein is dumping Windows and Office for Linux and the popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice. The Schleswig-Holstein cabinet made this decision not because of Linux and LibreOffice’s technical superiority, but because it values “digital sovereignty.”
This is another way our fascist regime has affected American companies.
On the flip side this year will be the year of the Linux Desktop! 😜
Sister Anita eventually gave up, mostly because she couldn’t make out the chicken scratch that my right hand was coming up with, and I guess she just decided that she couldn’t save us all, and I would be an acceptable sacrifice to Satan. For which I was thankful.
Of course I latch on to the left handed thing. My folks converted me from left to right handed when I was pretty darned young because “The world is made for right handed people.”
The madness started, as baseball madness tends to start, with the New York Yankees: At the end of March, during the opening weekend of the new season, the team’s first three batters hit home runs on the first three pitches thrown their way. The final score, 20–9, was almost too good to be true. And then, everybody noticed the bats.
This is a great read and why we need science in the world. 😃 Leave it to a physicist to redesign, of all things, the baseball bat. Something that hasn’t really changed in well over 100 years. Progress! Hopefully the Majors doesn’t outlaw them.
There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-women flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.
The Blue Origin trip into space with a bunch of crazy rich people definitely seems a bit tone deaf.
At least it didn’t blow up like Space Karen’s rockets do.
Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.
I’ve always been impressed by Mr. Zeldman’s willingness to write about his life. You will find many posts labeled My Glamorous Life where he shares personal life stories. He’s a great writer, technologist, and by all accounts and amazing human being. I wish him nothing but the best. ❤️
Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.
I like this take. I’ve had numerous junior developers say to me something along the lines of “I can’t wait to see what you have to teach me.” Oftentimes that comment is met with a blank stare. 😳 The “teachings” will mostly come organically. I’ve just been around long enough to know how to build software from concept, to development, to shipping, and everything in between. I’ve had great mentors along the way and suffered through issues that seem to crop up in every product I’ve ever worked on. Experience is just age, repetition, and pain, but I do love sharing my experiences of only to help others avoid the pain.
We all know the saying “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan,” but reading a couple new reports about the current inner-workings of Apple, it almost feels inverted at the most valuable company in the world.
All monster companies eventually experience problems scaling up. Oftentimes it’s because they believe that standardization on some methodology is going to save them. Well, that and people.
We’re still going through growing, and transition, pains at WillowTree since the TELUS acquisition. The cultural and systems transitions haven’t been easy on anyone.
Someday I’ll write about it a bit more.
A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!
The remodel turned out really nice and it’s great to see them embrace the community by opening the doors for events. John Scalzi is one of those folks I wish I could know personally. He’s just so down to earth I imagine he’d be a great friend.
Forced RTO (Return To Office) is unacceptable, that is no discussion. But please also don’t forget how privileged many of us are to be able to work from home. The factory workers, the people working in grocery stores, doctors, nurses, truck drivers — the majority of the workforce out there — never had this luxury. I have always kept that in mind. They made it possible for people like us to actually be able to work from home.
The forced return to office put in place by many companies has been hard on folks and companies alike. WillowTrees CEO likes to have folks in the office. He likes the buzz and the randomness of bumping into folks. I can appreciate that and I also appreciate working from home. I must give him props for not forcing folks to return to office because he easily could have. ❤️
Would I go back if everyone was required to return? Yes, absolutely. There is a part of me that misses it.
Thanks to the openness of Mastodon and Bluesky, it’s possible to follow accounts across network boundaries.
And that’s the kind of openness that Tapestry, Reeder, and Surf are built on.
There is a new class of software that spans open networks and closed networks. I’ve thought about doing this for Stream ever since I learned more about ActivityPub. Folks can follow Mastodon feeds via RSS so it’s made it less important to write code to connect to ActivityPub directly, so I haven’t bothered.
The fine folks at The Iconfactory have created a pretty ingenious way to connect to any source material you’d like by writing a plug-in to Tapestry in JavaScript! Neat, right? 🙏🏼
Begs the question: What does native mean? 🤔
Last year it turned out that Elon Musk’s xAI had to install additional ‘portable’ generators near its facility adjacent to Memphis, Tennessee, to power the Colossus supercomputer with over 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs as local power grid could not support the load. Now it turns out that these generators were not exactly legal, yet they can keep running, reports The Guardian.
Musks genius is being a narcissist and a sociopath. He doesn’t give a crap about anything or anyone who stands in his way. He and our President are one and the same. Ignore the law and do whatever they want. 🤬
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. 🌞
Ms. Gracie loves the sun.
Don’t come to the U.S.
The European Commission has started issuing burner phones and stripped-down laptops to staff visiting the U.S. over concerns that the treatment of visitors to the country has become a security risk, according to a new report from the Financial Times. And it’s just the latest news that America’s slide into fascism under Donald Trump is having severe consequences for the United States’ standing in the world, all while the president announced Monday that he has no plans to obey a U.S. Supreme Court order to bring back a man wrongly sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The Cheeto in Chief is a piece of garbage.
Trump has lost his mind
In his meeting with President Nayib Bukele today in the White House, President Donald Trump told his Salvadoran counterpart that “home-growns are next” and that El Salvador would “need to be build about five more places” to hold American citizens.
So the president of the United States proposes, on camera, to deport Americans to foreign concentration camps.
We’re approaching a time when violence is going to be the only way to defeat this fascists regime. Constitutional crisis? The Constitution is on fire and his Orangeness is defying the Supreme Court. Law and order are gone, out the window.
If ever there’s been a time to storm D.C, now is it.
Violence is coming.
Ratt
Ratt was my go to metal band of the 80’s. Sure, I liked Ozzy, like everyone else, but I think I was the only Ratt fan in high school. Pretty mellow Ratt here, but I just loved ‘em. song.link/rgtkvkjns…
I’d really love to see Puscifer some day.
I’m watching the recording of the Cup race and just like the Xfinity race Kyle Larson is putting on a clinic. He’s lapping people left and right and he’s putting his car wherever he wants. Wow.
I think my comment earlier about the Cup race being boring was totally wrong! 🏁
NASCAR - Bristol
I’m watching the NASCAR Cup race at Bristol and I gotta say it’s very boring compared to the Xfinity race yesterday. These guys get in a line and it’s like a long train driving around the track.
Those Xfinity cars can be manipulated and move all over the track. These Cup cars are impossible to pass. Their aero packages lose downforce when you pull out from behind a car to pass.
Did you know that Paolo Pasco, the winner of both the 2024 and 2025 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, uses MY APP, Black Ink?
That is so cool! I’d be thrilled to hear from dedicated Stream or RxCalc users!
Inbound RSS as a Protocol
The one that would really open them up is inbound RSS, the protocol that all the other twitter-like systems refuse to support. Want to blow the doors off now instead of some vague time in the future? Support outbound and inbound RSS. Let the trains come into the station and leave the station on a well established protocol. It could be done in a few weeks, really. Maybe the very intelligent and curious people who read this blog would like to take the time to understand what this means and the doors it would open? It’s a way to change the subject from “good idea but hopeless” to “hey we can have freedom now."#
When I first saw Dave mention inbound and outbound RSS I thought he was taking about a mechanism to do threaded replies using RSS so we could have something akin to Mastodon or Bluesky.
I was wrong. He would like to have the ability to not only subscribe to an RSS feed but also populate a social service timeline with an RSS feed. That’s a good idea.
Mastodon or Bluesky could add the ability to have your timeline subscribe to an RSS feed. When that feed changes it could publish the content into the timeline. There would be some intelligence baked in to know if it’s already posted the feed, and I’d imagine some other niceties, but the idea is really good!
The problem is the platform folks tend to say “use our API.” Which makes sense, but most API’s are painful in some way because of authentication or some hoop you have to go through. If the platform natively supported inbound RSS it would greatly simplify the developer and user experience. Let me pick an RSS feed to follow and use it! BOOM! 💥
Dave also believes Bluesky is leading us down the same path as Twitter. We’re all jamming our content into a centralized system. That’s not great. By having your own site with a weblog and the ability to publish RSS and have that content or link to that content published to Bluesky you’re not so locked in. Your blog is the primary source. A source you control.
To date I believe Micro.blog is the best at doing this. It supports ActivityPub so your @micro.blog account can be used as a Mastodon account and show up in your timeline. It also has its own timeline and it’s a full on blogging system. The post you’re reading now is a Micro.blog managed blog!
The other great thing it does is publish to other systems. My blog post text is either fully published to Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky or a link to the post is published if it has a title and goes over a certain character count. I believe this is the perfect solution to the limited character count issue on the various social networks.
E.G. when I publish Saturday Morning Coffee that post goes to this blog. Here’s what it looks like on Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky.
The main source is my blog. It’s then distributed to these secondary sources. Mastodon and Bluesky get links and Tumblr gets a full copy. 👍🏼
Now, Micro.blog goes to all the trouble to connect to those API’s so it can publish to each platform. That’s a royal pain for the team at Micro.blog. I am grateful they support all these platforms, but wouldn’t it be cool if Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr let me, the user, go to a settings screen and tell it to use my RSS feed instead? Yes, yes it would! 😃
Another great post from Dave.
Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature and stable, and well-managed. A better foundation imho to build on than the others. developer.wordpress.com
WHO DID THIS!
You deserve a medal! 🏅