Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
All the Thanksgiving leftovers are long gone and I celebrated my 56th birthday this week. I got my free birthday coffee at Starbucks, had BBQ for dinner, and chocolate cake for dessert. Luckily the cake didn’t have 56 candles on it. That would’ve been bad. 😃
I hope you had a great week and enjoy the links.
Robert Kagan • Washington Post
Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination. In the RealClearPolitics poll average (for the period from Nov. 9 to 20), Trump leads his nearest competitor by 47 points and leads the rest of the field combined by 27 points. The idea that he is unelectable in the general election is nonsense — he is tied or ahead of President Biden in all the latest polls — stripping other Republican challengers of their own stated reasons for existence.
I can’t see how trials and even convictions can stop Trump from becoming our next President.
Only we, the people, can stop it. If we don’t stop him we’ve lost our nation.
VOTE!🇺🇸
This is a substantial update to MarsEdit 5, featuring all new support for the Mastodon publishing system, which is used to host a large number of independently operated Twitter-like microblogging services.
I’ve been a MarsEdit user off and on for well over a decade. This classic Mac assed Mac App is fast, stable, is great at what it does, and has a developer who cares deeply about it and the Mac.
It’s well worth its $59.95 price tag.
It’s time for an opinion. I wish this were subscription based for Daniel’s sake. He depends heavily on major releases and upgrades to keep his business afloat. This is where I believe subscription pricing could help. Her could do something like $9.99/yr, or $0.99/mo, then he could get off the upgrade cycle train and just add features whenever they’re ready. He provides excellent support and fixes bugs on a regular basis.🚂
Of course I’m not a successful indie giving advice to a man with a long established company and app, so there you go.😃
Capo was not playing audio for some users on Intel Macs running Sonoma. After spending almost two weeks (and about $850) I discovered that macOS Sonoma had a rather nasty bug that was triggered by loading JPEG images.
I love a good debugging story. 🐞
Sophie McEvoy • gamesindustry.biz
Xbox is working with unknown partners to open a mobile storefront to rival the App Store and Google Play.
It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft can actually make a nice experience for mobile users. Beyond that will Apple no longer demand their 15-30% take, even if on another store? I very much doubt it.
It’s been more than six years since images of a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., shocked the world — hundreds of people with tiki torches chanted antisemitic slurs, and a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed.
When this all went down I wasn’t at all familiar with Charlottesville. We were living in California and little did I know we’d move to the area in 2019.
When I started at WillowTree we were located in downtown Charlottesville and I had no idea Heather Heyer was murdered right by our office. It was pretty surreal the first time I walked by it and realized this was the place.
I took this photo five days after my start date with WillowTree.
This week OpenAI had a fantastic keynote at their Dev Day event. They announced new products and enhancements to ChatGPT[1]. Interestingly, some parts of the internet described the keynote as an “Extinction Event”[2] for many AI startups. Many of the startups reportedly facing extinction share the common trait of being thin wrappers over OpenAI’s APIs.
I don’t think Nish sleeps at all. He’s into everything and is well versed in every topic he talks about.
Always worth a read when he shows up in my feed.
Rep. George Santos survived the first two attempts to expel him from Congress. The third vote, however, led to the New York Republican’s ouster.
Well, what do you know. Some folks actually do have an ethics line. Took long enough for them to find it. 🤬
Earlier this week I had a need to manually find a bunch of people’s RSS feed links. It seemed simple enough: go to their website and look for an RSS/Subscribe link but I was surprised to find that a lot of people don’t have a link anywhere to their feed.
I see where Robb is coming from. He’s after a link of image with a link to your sites RSS file.
Most modern feed readers will auto discover feeds by looking in your sites head for a specific alt tag.
Sites should embrace the tag based method but it doesn’t hurt to include a link somewhere.
Debbie Truong • Los Angeles Times
Montiel, an environmental science major, and Butterfield, a journalism major, had lived in their vehicles for several years, the only way, they said, that they could afford to attend college. They usually found parking in campus lots or on nearby streets.
There was a time when we lived in California where I thought I’d have to get a job in the Bay Area because tech in the San Joaquin Valley is hard to find. I was thinking I’d drive in from Exeter on Monday morning, stay the week, and return home Friday afternoon. I was planning to put a shell on my truck and turn the bed of the truck into my home.
For my first year of employment at LEVEL Studios in 2009-10 I did something similar but I found a room to rent for $250/month.
I doubt you could find anything close to that in the Silicon Valley.
There is another reason why I stopped developing Gluon, for now, and time will heal this. It’s personal. I never said this publicly, but here we are. Funny how one individual in a nice community can just blow everything up 💥 I had super strong feelings about this today, and I can’t get it out my head. Hence this post I guess.
Vincent’s app, Gluon, is an excellent app for Micro.blog. For the longest time it was much better than the first party app and it was my iOS App of choice for Micro.blog.
I wish you nothing but joy and happiness, Vincent. Thank you for all of your hard work making Micro.blog a better place.
Anita Chabria • Los Angeles Times
A unicorn costume, a hammer and a belief that pedophiles are using public schools to destroy democracy: The trial of David DePape for attacking Paul Pelosi was strange and disturbing.
This attack on Paul Pelosi was just about as weird as it gets. The dude who did it was so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole he was seeing pedophiles everywhere. These people are the GOP’s base. They’ll believe anything no matter how wild the story. Remember the lizard people who drink children’s blood for the adrenochrome? Yeah, that’s something these people believe.
They all need extreme therapy to repair their addled minds.
