FAT to SFO š«
Saturday Morning Coffee
The week has come to an end. Grandma, the final of the grandparents, was laid to rest Wednesday, December 7. She had a very full 96 years. We miss you already, Grandma.
Now we head home. Bug ā our daughter Taylor ā and I are at Fresno-Yosemite International waiting for our plane to San Francisco. Sipping my quad-grande-vanilla-mocha and typing away on my iPhone. Coffee is good. āļø
When Swift began life as an open source project, we wanted to open not just the language itself, but the ecosystem around it. Foundation has been instrumental in the success of decades of software and has been an integral part of the Swift developer experience from the beginning, and we knew it had to be included in the open source offering.
This is really nice to see. Apple does have a history of open source projects.
Swift is an amazing language and Iād love to see it spread to all operating systems. To write shared code for Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android, and have it be a first class citizen would be incredible.
C and C++ are still great choices for that of course and we now have Rust, which becomes more tempting with each article I read about it.
In late November, Amazon began making what are expected to be the largest corporate staff cuts in its 28-year history, axing as many as 10,000 corporate employees, or about 3 percent of the companyās office staff.
Itās sad to see a company have to lay off so many people, especially around the holidays.
Good vibes to all those affected.
Over the last four years, weāve evolved Dart into a fast, portable, and modern language. Our next release, Dart 3, completes the journey to a fully sound null safe language.
Another interesting language getting safer by the day. This could be a really interesting cross platform choice for model, network, and data persistence code if it doesnāt rely on an interpreter. Even if it does it makes me go hmmmm. š¤
Also, Dart Engineering folks, use Blogger instead of Medium. It is a Google property after all.
Recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal didnāt shake hands with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, at a ceremony on Tuesday.
Good. Those assholes donāt deserve to be recognized by any of us. Support an insurrection and the man who instigated it and you donāt deserve any respect.
When a man got lost deep in the dark Alaskan wilderness, it was his iPhoneās satellite that saved him.
Iāll be darned. It worked! š„³
Predictably, many Rust advocates (of which I am one) pointed out that this is exactly the kind of vulnerability that can be statically prevented by Rust, and is a clear example of where āRewrite it in Rustā can have real benefits.
Speaking of Rust. Weāre seeing a movement to Rust as a low level language. Even Microsoft is going to move to it for low level stuff. It would be really great to see it treated as a first class language by Apple and Microsoft in their respective IDEās.
The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraineās long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putinās multiple missile strikes against Kyivās critical infrastructure.
I like the idea of tactical strikes into Russian territory. After almost a year of defending themselves itās nice to see Ukraine go on the offensive.
Putin has succeeded in making sure Ukraine becomes part of the United Nations. Nice job dude. š¤Ŗ
I have never had my social media account at any social media platform suspended. But it just happened at Mastodon, a place I have posted so few times that I can literally count them on a single hand.
Iād love to hear the other side of this story. Since Mastodon instances are not beholden to any one corporation they can make their own rules. It couldāve been as simple as the instance admin not liking Mr. Abramsonās work.
He couldāve found a different instance to participate in. Itās really easy to move and I know of at least two instances dedicated to journalism.
It would be nice to see Post federate with other services, Mastodon being the primary one. Post could still maintain their own unique identity and allow others to at least see headlines to paid articles. Just spitballing.
Nice work, Jack. Your buddy Elon has turned Twitter into 8Chan.
Elon is ruining Twitter.
Also, Iād love to see Mastodon support embedding cards in websites. Maybe it does and I donāt know how. That would be amazing.
Tore up my back Monday morning putting on my shoe. Yes, you read that right. I hurt my back putting on a shoe. š³
Iāve become a physical disaster.
Saturday Morning Coffee
This week will be slightly abbreviated. Iām in California for a funeral.
Itās 4:50AM here and I really need the juice. āļø
The internetās town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.
The open web is still the best web and weblogs play a big role in making the web better. When I post to my blog it generates an RSS and JSON Feed so you can point your feed reader of chioce to it and get updated when my blog changes. Itās nice in that way because itās completely decentralized.
Mastodon also works that way. Itās a collection of different servers participating as a collective. I can follow folks from many different servers around the world and it just works.
I see my weblog as the central hub of communication and use Mastodon and other social networks as a means of broadcasting posts to a wider audience.
To subscribe to my Mastodon account all you have to do is point your favorite feed reader to my Mastodon account with a .rss extension appended and you get an RSS feed! How awesome is that?
Hereās what it looks like: https://curmudgeon.cafe/@fahrni.rss
Formula 1 drivers are truly athletes at the top of their game. As such, they all follow strict diets, have nutritionists on hand to monitor what theyāre eating and make sure that theyāre only consuming things that keep them in tip top shape over a race weekend. For Alfa Romeo driver Valtteri Bottas, this includes coffee. Lots of coffee.
I got into F1 a little bit while watch Drive to Survive on Netflix. If you havenāt seen it Iād recommed giving it a try. Itās fascinating.
While Iām in California Iāll probably visit Exeter Coffee Company and Dutch Brothers.
Itās nice to see others with an extreme coffee addiction. š
What worries me most about Trumpās dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, the outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of Americaās most prominent young white supremacists, and Kanye West, whose recent antisemitic outbursts have rocked the entertainment world, isnāt just that a former (and possibly future) president would dine with such avowed bigots.
The GOP is not even trying to hide their antisemitic and racist ways. Itās seriously pathetic and signaling to every other garbage human itās ok to openly talk about and act on their hate.
I signed up for Mastodon back in May 2019 and, at the time, I wrote on there: “I just heard about Mastodon a few days ago. I keep spelling it Mastadon. It’s a really cool platform and architecture, and I would love to see it completely replace Twitter one day. Do you think it could?”
I also spelled it Mastadon at first, whoops.
As far as replacing Twitter, I think it will for me as a place to collect, perhaps as a public square. š
Tapbots, the company behind the popular Tweetbot app designed for Twitter, is working on developing a new app called Ivory that integrates with the Mastodon social network.
Iāve been using Ivory for a while and itās absolutely gorgeous and works the way youād expect it to work.
Mastodon has turned into an iOS App playground and Iām loving it.
The past month has changed the Fediverse, and, by extension, our instance. Weāve continued as normal (apart from limiting sign-ups) to give ourselves time to figure out which changes were only temporary, what seems to be changed for good, and how to react. A month seems ample time, and here we are with a set of changes in how chaos.social will work in the future.
Folks thought Mastodon would be the wild west, without good and proper moderation, but many instances take things very seriously and are making changes as needed to make their instance a better place. The chaos.social instance is one such example.
Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, Iām resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actually, Iāve been posting a bit here and there this week already ā underpromise & over-deliver, etc.) Iām going to share more about what Iāve been up to (and what Iāve not been up to) in a massive forthcoming post, but for now, know that Iām happy to be back here in the saddle once again. (And that my fiddle leaf fig is doing well!)
Welcome back, Jason! Jason has been a mainstay of my web consumption for well over 10-years, most likely since 2001-2002 timeframe when I got into blogs and blogging.
Charlottesville, Va. ā December 1, 2022 ā Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC) will launch a new Associate of Applied Science Degree Program (AAS) in Technical Studies-Software Development, co-created with WillowTree, in the 2023 spring semester which starts January 9. The two-year degree program will provide high school graduates and those seeking to advance in or change careers with the digital and data skills needed to fill current and emerging jobs in software development.
I thought Iād humblebrag a bit. I was honored to be part of the group who helped define this new program at PVCC. The working group was full of wonderful WillowTree folks and I think we wound up with a great program.
Since I donāt have a degree of any type Iāve been thinking about signing up for this program.
Thank you PVCC!
Why does software need so many people and take so long compared to the recent past? Let's compare! š§µ cc @realGeorgeHotz
ā Peter Yared (@peteryared) November 26, 2022
Ahh, the life of the modern developer. š¤£
Letās get this party started!
Time to watch birdies and try to convince them they should come visit him. š¤
Saturday Morning Coffee
Itās Thanksgiving week here in the States so I had a three day week, which is really nice and Iād like to make it a standard moving forward. Show of hands, whose with me!
I need to have a very serious conversation with Kolby. He woke me up at 5AM, not to go outside, nooooo, he just wanted to get up. Goofy pup.
There is a good side to being awake, Iām alive, I get to write, and I get to drink coffee. Cheers. āļø
Sian, Iām seeing a lot of talk about a Martin Scorsese film called Goncharov. But Iāve never heard of a Martin Scorsese film called Goncharov. Whatās going on?
This is one of those delightful things that could only happen on the internet. Creative people gonna create.
Maybe Mr. Scorsese should make this film? It would have to be a remake, of course. š
Now, why should we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web? Oh, I donāt know. Wouldnāt it be nice to have a site thatās not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations?
Thatās right, author John Scalzi also has a really great blog and he understands the power of the open web. Heās also very entertaining on Twitter. Hereās hoping his Mastodon account is just as good.
Want to take your following list from Twitter to @Tumblr? We want to help you do that! Unfortunately, @TwitterAPI is returning an empty list for every user we check with our token using their API. š It's your data, they're locking it up!
ā Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) November 23, 2022
This new emphasis on advertising also undermines Appleās claims about privacy with its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature and its āPrivacy. Thatās iPhoneā ad campaign. In fact, it appears ATT may have been more about blocking competitors than protecting user privacy. Since Apple introduced ATT, its ad revenue has skyrocketed, leading German regulators to investigate Apple to see if itās abusing its power.
No matter Appleās true intentions here it just comes off as a real scumbag move and Iād imagine regulators are ready to pounce.
Elon Musk says that Twitterās check mark program could return on Friday, December 2nd, with a new procedure to verify individual identities in order to resolve impersonation issues. Musk described the new manual authentication process as āpainful, but necessary.ā Verified checkmarks will also be expanded with additional colors ā gold for companies, grey for the government, and the original blue for individual accounts.
Not that it matters but I like this move. I donāt agree with the color coding but I like the idea.
Iād make the people gold, governments blue, and companies gray. As it is having gold for a company makes them seem more important than people. The people make the platform not companies. Oh, and gray for the government feels like a slap in the face to governments.
these big brain posts about twitterās infrastructure make me all tingly inside https://t.co/qncdcUgAIf
ā Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) November 23, 2022
I think Musk is genuniely surprised he hasnāt been able (so far) to bluster his way through this.
Weāre finally starting to see cracks in Musks three ring circus. Heās spending so much time at Twitter blowing it up heās ignoring Tesla and Space X.
Hereās hoping he hires an adult to run Twitter soon. š¤š¼
I know I wasnāt alone in chuckling when the new Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav announced on an earnings call last week that heād really like to do āsomething with J.K. on Harry Potter going forward,ā noting that his film executives āhavenāt done a Harry Potter movie in 15 years.ā You donāt say! one rival exec texted, echoing a few calls I got from others on the Warners lot. People are terrible.
You need more than JK Rowling to boost your profits Mr. Zaslav but you know that.
Horror icon Stephen King became the latest celebrity to mock billionaire Elon Musk following his move to reinstate former Republican President Donald Trump to Twitter.
Stephen King, another author I love, is also extremely entertaining on Twitter and I hope he to makes his way to Mastodon.
I wish he and Mr. Scalzi would consider running their own Mastodon instance and invite authors to join them. That would be amazing.
Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol thatās today powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others.
I think this is a brilliant idea. Tumblr is a great little micro blogging platform and this will bring a massively scaled ActivityPub instance to the fold.
When I saw this announcement my gut reaction was āYes! I must get a job there to help!ā Yeah, seriously, thatās how I felt. Luckily I remembered how much I love WillowTree and came to my senses.
Hereās wishing the Tumblr team all the best! š§”
Oh, look, we still have pumpkin and pecan pie. Pie and coffee? Don’t mind if I do. š„§
If you like Barleywine, Bigfoot is a nice choice.
Having pumpkin and pecan pie for breakfast, as one does.
Ban Assault Weapons
A shooter opened fire in a Walmart in Virginia late Tuesday, leaving six people dead in the second high-profile mass killing in a handful of days. Police confirmed that the assailant is also dead.
Let me guess: white male, AR-15ā¦
Ban assault weapons, now.
Kolby decided at 3:45AM it was time to get up. Heās a very kind pup in how he wakes you. He starts with a very low growl and escalates the volume level ever so slightly until you wake up. I let him out for a bit and convinced him to go back to bed. He woke me again at 5AM. š
I know, I know buddy. Life is extremely hard.
Poor fella just woke from his, one of many, daily naps. Looked at me and laid his head back down.
And, yes, when youāre pet parents you have blankets and weird furniture coverings in the house! š
Saturday Morning Coffee
What a week! That dude that took over Twitter is driving it in the ground with a gigantor hammer all while we watch from the cheap seats sipping our soda and eating popcorn. What a spectacle.
This week was a busy week at work, promotion time. Lots of meetings. Iām all Zoomāed out.
Enjoy that morning elixir of life. I certainly am. āļø
Eugen Rochko looks exhausted. The 29-year-old German programmer is the founder of Mastodon, a distributed alternative to Twitter that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks as Elon Muskās ownership of the platform has rained chaos on its users.
Iāve heard some folks doubt the survivability of Mastodon and doubt hate can be squashed there. In my experience on the platform itās quite the opposite. If youāre running a server full of racist white nationalists, Nazis, or other hate groups itās extremely easy for the admin of your server to block federation of that entire server.
Iāve found Mastodon to be so much better for conversation with folks outside my little friend bubble on Twitter.
For writers, artists, podcasters, journalists, and people who make things in public, Twitter was the one social networking site we all had to use.
Brent is a long time blogger, Mac programmer, creator and leader of the NetNewsWire team, and all around great guy. If youāre a consumer of RSS point your feed reader to his site. Itās a great read.
Musk went on to say that āTwitter will be much more engineering-driven,ā and that while design and product āwill still be very important,ā engineers āwill have the greatest sway.ā And then Musk presented employees with an ultimatum: click āyesā on a Google form affirming your desire to ābe part of the new Twitter,ā or leave in exchange for three monthsā pay.
Iāve heard from a friend that most of the US Engineering staff left. Thatās just wild.
Last week, I made the decision to leave my role leading Trust & Safety at Twitter.
ā Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 18, 2022
Today, I'm sharing a few thoughts about what comes next for the site. https://t.co/QPAQR6zpqU
I donāt have a NY Times subscription but Iāll bet this piece by Mr. Roth is quite good.
If you had told me three weeks ago that Twitter, as a company, would today be embroiled in turmoilāāāperhaps outright existential crisisāāāover a company-wide email from Elon Musk centered around the phrase āextremely hardcoreā, v-1 is not the scenario Iād have imagined.
In my career Iāve worked for some hardcore companies, like the old Microsoft, itās not fun. Donāt do it.
NEW: Email from Elon to the engineering team: "Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months" 1/
ā ZoĆ« Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022
I donāt understand why he continues to ask for snippets of code from his employees. Itās just some random metric heās using to what what end? What about the devs who made Twitter better by removing code?
Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, two days after multiple outlets the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.
Itās been a rough couple weeks in the tech sector. Iām sorry to see so many folks having to deal with this. Hereās hoping they land on their feet quickly.
While Central Valley agricultural leaders warn of jobs loss during California’s ongoing drought, some local leaders say it’s time for less water-dependent economic opportunities.
California is in deep trouble so the United States food supply is in deep trouble. Youāll see it at the grocery store.
When I tweeted my way into the iOS community so many years ago, I felt the same energy and excitement, if not necessarily the same level of closeness. You all gave me the confidence I needed to keep going with programming when I felt like giving up. Weāve person. Like her I lament the loss of the Twitter we knew but all good things come to an end, right?
Iām not anywhere close to assuming redemption for Rupert Murdoch or his publication for their role in empowering the dangerous desecration of the last six years, particularly since Fox News showed reluctance in quitting the man by airing nearly all of his sour announcement. (For me, the announcement at Mar-a-Lago had more of the air of a man running from the law than running for the presidency.)
How TFG avoids jail time at this point is beyond me.
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has had it with C and C++, time-tested programming languages commonly used for native applications that require high performance.
Russinovich is a legendary software engineer. Itās gonna be interesting to see how many new products come out of Microsoft and other companies written in 100% Rust.
In this second edition of our October 2021 report, we review the investigation and its basis. We assess the publicly known facts and relevant law and analyze the extent to which the former president may be held criminally responsible for his conduct in Georgia. We conclude that Trump is at substantial risk of criminal prosecution in Fulton County.
At substantial risk? How is he not already in handcuffs? If any of us āregularā people had done this weād be thrown in a dungeon.
Haasā Kevin Magnussen just scored his first-ever pole position in Formula 1 during the Brazilian Grand Prix. Yes, I intended to write that sentence. Itās not April Foolās Day. Kevin Magnussen is polesitter for Saturdayās sprint race.
I support Haas. Itās an American F1 team and Iām happy for Kevin Magnussen and Haas. Now, get some podiums! š
Between the Church Militant and Nick Fuentes, itās pretty clear what the theocratic Right wants to do: they want to kill you or force you to be as mad as they are.
Nick Fuentes is a piece of work but at least heās not hiding his White Christian Nationalism behind dog whistles, no sir, heās just saying it out loud.
From: @twittereng
ā DM of Engineering š² (@dmofengineering) November 17, 2022
To: @elonmusk
Subject: pic.twitter.com/EiDADFtMCN
Go check out that tweet thread. Itās full of Twitter Employees saying goodbye after the hardcore time limit expired.
Itās a sad day for the social network. How long will it stay up?
Shooting at UVA
āThree people are dead and two others wounded after a shooting at Culbreth Garage on UVa Central Grounds at the University of Virginia Sunday night, UVa President Jim Ryan said in an email to the community early Monday morningā
This is horrible. Our American obsession with guns ends, once again, in violence.
These two beautiful flowers are on the same rose bush.
The white ones tend to point down, thatās why I needed to hold it up for the picture.
Shhhh, donāt tell Kimās roses itās supposed to be fall. š¹
Saturday Morning Coffee
Time to sip some coffee and write. Itās that quiet time of the morning I love. Letās get to it.
This week has been a split in my various timelines; Mastodon, Twitter, and RSS Feeds between the war in Ukraine, Elon Musk bungling management of Twitter, and the mid term elections in the United States. Itās been quite a week.
āIn extraordinary scenes, crowds of jubilant residents greeted Ukraineās armed forces as they reached the centre of Kherson, as Russiaās retreat from the key strategic city appeared to have descended into chaos.ā
Letās go Ukraine! šŗš¦
āDemocrats outperformed history and expectations with a surprisingly strong midterm elections performance Tuesday, with the promised red wave nowhere to be found.ā
This is a real relief. Democrats may lose the house but it looks like the Senate may remain in control of the Democrats and leaves me hopeful we can still save Democracy.
One more term for Biden should keep TFG away from running again.
āEverything went from bad to worse at Twitter on Thursday. Today letās talk about a truly chaotic 24 hours at the company, and the mounting fears over what it means for the service that still serves as the heartbeat of the global news cycle.ā
There are so many wonderful hot takes I could post so Iāll probably do another Elon/Twitter hot takes post.
What a complete mess. Either Twitter will go down in a great ball of flames or it will be the most masterful recovery in tech industry history.
Possible outcomes, ranked by likelihood (high to low)
— David Frum (@davidfrum) November 11, 2022
1) Twitter is sold for pennies on the dollar.
2) Bankers foreclose and Twitter goes bust.
3) Servers fail and Twitter goes dark.
4) Divine intervention saves Twitter.
5)Musk's plans somehow work.
āIn a complete departure from my usual meanderings, Iām going to present an in-depth comparative review of eight iOS Mastodon/Fediverse apps.ā
So, right, Mastodon. The growth on Mastodon has been huge since Musk took over Twitter.
Iām following folks like crazy! Iām up to 465 and I now have 307 folks following me. That is absolutely insane and I never thought Iād see if happen. Itās been so refreshing. The mood on Mastodon has been extremely hopeful and folks are getting along rather well. Itās fun to be there!
If you decide to join take your time finding an instance thatās right for you. There are so many to choose from.
If youāre adventurous consider starting your own! There are hosts out there who make it easy to maintain your instance. Just pay them a few bucks a month.
āMy mind is not a sponge anymore. I still love learning, but it does not come as easily as it used to. Take programming languages, for instance. Iāve come to accept that after almost two decades of writing code, I am not really an expert in any single one.ā
I have never been as bright as Mr. Suzuki but I worked really hard at my craft and got decent at Windows programming in C and C++. Iāve worked in other environments like C#/.Net, Linux, and finally landing at home on iOS with Objective-C and Swift.
Iām still capable of learning new stuff but Iāve always been extremely slow to do it. I eventually get there it just takes time.
I relate so much to āmy brain is no longer a sponge.ā Mine is not. I used to keep a lot of stuff in my head as I was coding. It was easy for me to keep code flow and logic all stuffed in my brain as I was adding new features. Not anymore. It hasnāt been that way for a very long time. Now I have to refresh my findings often and when I step away from code Iāve written it can take a while to get back in the swing of things. Why do you think Stream development takes so long? š
I can still do the work itās just not as easy, or quick, as before.
Becoming an Engineering Director has been really good for me. I get to build up wonderful people and client relationships. I still get to solve technical problems and make recommendations but I no longer have to code them. Itās been a wonderful challenge in ways I never imagined.
āDonald Trump ended his pre-midterm rally blitz in disgusting fashion, calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi āan animal,ā championing the death penalty, and giddily imagining the prison rape of the journalist who reported on the Supreme Courtās decision to overturn [Roe v. Wade.ā
This guy cannot get near any government office ever again. Heāll destroy democracy.
āOne such monster maker is Mexican director, producer and author Guillermo Del Toro.ā
This piece is about Cabinet of Curiosities. Kim and I just completed it. I really enjoyed it, each episode was around an hour in length, and ended without the possibility of each episode having a part two. It was refreshing and I hope we get another season of new stories. Yes, think Twilight Zone, or Stephen Kingās Creep Show.
My favorite episodes were:
Episode 1: Lot 36 Episode 3: The Autopsy Episode 5: Pickmanās Model Episode 6: Dreams in the Witch House Episode 8: The Murmuring
Donāt get me wrong, theyāre all good, but those stand out in my mind. Pickmanās Model and Dreams in the Witch House really stood out.
Check it out.
āToday Iām sharing some of the most difficult changes weāve made in Metaās history. Iāve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.ā
Whoād of thunk Mark Zuckerberg would handle massive layoffs so well. Yeah, it terrible to see 11,000 folks out of work but at least he didnāt do it by sending them an email signed by Twitter. He put his name to everything.
āBut as a writer, I can’t use a system that doesn’t do inbound RSS. It’s the inverse of the silo problem.ā
At first I didnāt understand what Dave was after. I thought he wanted RSS to be used to thread a conversation like Twitter.
Dave just wants to populate his Twitter, Mastodon, and other social sites with an RSS feed. Thatās a nifty idea especially if he could work with some of the smaller players to agree to a standard way to connect it. Basically the sites need a way to point to the feed, read the feed, parse, and display it. Done and done.
I like it.
ābig brain type system shaman often say type correctness main point type system, but grug note some big brain type system shaman not often ship code. grug suppose code never shipped is correct, in some sense, but not really what grug mean when say correctā
I love the Grug, whatever that is. If youāre a developer and need some levity this is the place to go.
Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022
We will keep what works & change what doesnāt.
Ya think?
Sister and Brother enjoying the sun.
On the left is Priss and on the right is Flynn. She was named after Priss in the movie Blade Runner and he was named after Flynn Rider from the movie Tangled.
I say Flynn was named after Kevin Flynn from Tron, but it was really Flynn Rider because he has a little soul patch on his chin.
Happy scarecrow!
Mastodon for News Organizations
Who has used Mastodon, and how do you decide which server to join?
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) November 5, 2022
Itās a prime time for news organizations to spin up their own Twitter like service.
Look, I believe [Mastodon] (https://joinmastodon.org/) is the beginning of something that could be very special. It uses the internet as it was intended to connect multiple Twitter like services together and anyone can have one. Think of how email works at a very high level. I have a GMail account and you have one at your company, say The Atlantic. If I know your email address I can send you email and our email servers know how to talk to each other. Brilliant! Thatās a 30,000ft view of Mastodon.
Ms. Applebaum is asking which instance, or server, to join. Yeah, thatās a tough one. Some of the most popular servers, those with the Mastodon name, are jam packed with users and until Mastodon is great at scaling horizontally itās going to be slow when you host a lot of people.
By contrast I have a teeny-tiny instance for me and my friends. It only has seven users but it slides right into the Mastodon ecosystem so anyone with an account on any Mastodon server can follow me and we can have a very Twitter like conversation. Itās really quite wonderful. Iām able to do this for $6/month. Thatās it.
Of course a server hosting thousands or tens of thousands of users would cost a whole lot more.
What if instead of piling on at one of the generic Mastodon instances writers formed a collective and spun up their own server? What if the companies they work for did it instead? In the Anne Apllebaum case The Atlantic could have a subdomain of The Atlantic running a Mastodon server. It could be something like stream.theatlantic.com. Boom! All writers for The Atlantic would have a home from which to write and the server wouldnāt be overwhelmed with users causing slowdowns.
A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More
Another service worth considering is Micro.blog. It is itās own service, not based on Mastodon, but it supports two way communication with Mastodon servers!
Micro.blog has a Twitter like timeline of folks and for posts over 256 characters it allows you to make a blog post that is linked directly into its timeline. If you have any followers on a Mastodon server your ātweetsā can be seen by people on that servers as well and you can see their replies. Micro.blog also supports custom domain names. Itās how I publish this very blog at rob.crabapples.net.
Micro.blog has really great service and help to get your rolling.
Another thing brewing from one of the creators of RSS, Dave Winer, is a way to federate using RSS. I donāt have a handle on this idea, at all, but if there was a way to do two way communication with RSS so we could carry on a threaded conversation, Iād be extremely interested given Iām the creator a feed reader.
There are so many things in a state of flux at the moment itās really difficult to see where theyāll land but itās another exciting time in the evolution of the web and Iām here for it!
Saturday Morning Coffee
I struggled to get started this morning. Not because I didnāt want to write. Thereās just so much going on at Twitter I could fill todayās post with all Twitter news stories. That could still happen. I havenāt decided yet.
Get that cup ready and strap in. To quote the legendary Forrest Gump. āļø
āLife is like a box of chocolates. You never know what youāre gonna get.ā
āIn the United States, we have midterm elections coming up. Many people aren’t interested in politics, or feel there is nobody worthwhile to vote for. If you’re an American inclined to skip voting in these mid-terms, I’d appreciate it if you read this appeal.ā
It seems that every election from now until we can rid the country of Trumpism will be the vote of our lives.
I have no doubt there are folks I interact with every day worried about the future of our great nation. Im terrified and fully expect a Civil War to erupt. That will happen if Republicans take over the House, Senate, and Presidency lead by TFG.
I predict if he returns the eight year Presidental term as defined will be overturned. TFG will become our dictator and the greatest Democracy every know will fade into the dark of a new dystopian America.
So, let me get this straight.
ā John Collins (@Logically\_JC) October 29, 2022
You canāt hand out water and snacks to people waiting in line to vote, but you can station yourself armed, in full tactical gear, and intimidate people trying to drop off a ballot?
āChilling new details continue to emerge about last weekās attack on House Speaker Nancyās Pelosiās husband, Paul Pelosi, at their San Francisco home as the suspect faces formal charges on Monday.ā
We absolutely need to call this what it was: an assassination attempt.
TFG and his MAGA, Q loving, base are out of control and have to be stopped.
Almost all my family are Republicans. Weāve disagreed about a lot throughout the years but I never thought they were cruel. This isnāt my parentsā Republican party. MAGA-Republicans are a bitter, lonely, and violent bunch. When we need compassion they choose cruelty. https://t.co/Njvdd4XUAJ
ā Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) October 29, 2022
āOn Thursday evening, all employees received an email stating that they will be informed of their employment status at 9 A.M. PT on Friday. Each email will be sent with the subject line āYour Role at Twitter.ā If an employee is keeping their job, theyāll be notified via their work email ā if theyāre let go, theyāll be notified on a personal address.ā
āAs Twitter advertisers run for the exits, the worldās richest man has apparently decided to set his $44 billion investment on fireā
Musk is a strange bird and was forced to buy Twitter even after he realized heād made a terrible mistake. Twitter lawyers wrote a bullet proof deal after Musk declared he didnāt care to have any due diligence on the deal.
Major blunder. Now heās playing games with peoples lives. Laying off up to half of the Twitter staff.
The teams around making Twitter less of a hellscape are gone. I have one good programmer friend, who joined the company in May of this year, who was let go. He was barely getting started and had already contributed a great deal to improving internal iOS dev process and tools. Heāll be fine and Iām trying to get him to come back to WillowTree, wish me luck. š¤š¼
āToday weāre announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date. Weāre reducing the size of our team by around 14% and saying goodbye to many talented Stripes in the process.ā
While itās not fun to go through a layoff compare and contrast how Stipe handled it vs. Twitterās ham fisted version. Itās night and day different.
Stripe is taking care of those effected. Go read the piece. This is a very compassionate, empathetic, way to do something so devastating.
āFour years ago, Dodge showed up at SEMA with a thousand-horsepower crate engine that you could just buy off the shelf.ā
Raw unadulterated power. Donāt get me wrong. I want to save the planet and get rid of all carbon emitting gas guzzlers, but this engine gets my heart pumping.
āThe gambling/casino-related ads were so dominating the auctions for these new ad slots that they were even being presented at the bottom of the product pages for apps intended to help people with gambling addiction.ā
Apple becoming a home for advertising feels so, so, dirty. They make all this stink about privacy and go about destroying Facebook (whom I could care less about) by using the power of their platform to disallow the tracking necessary for them to survive. Then they say āHey! Look over here! We do safe ads with a captive audience on a platform with 50% market share in the US.ā
Steve is rolling in his grave and Tim Apple is running his hands together like Mr. Burns with a giant smile on his face because shareholder value.
Just stop.
Can you imagine having $48.2 billion cash on hand and YET still thinking "ah yes, those House of Fun Casino ads will grow our bottom line, let's do it" pic.twitter.com/j1k6WT8i2H
ā Federico Viticci (@viticci) October 26, 2022
āVISALIA ā Quesadilla lovers across the country should be excited as Quesadilla Gorilla begins their journey of spreading peace love and dillas throughout the states one store at a time.ā
I had to add this story this morning because I love this little speciality dining experience. Itās simple, itās just quesadillaās, but theyāre really good.
If you ever have one make sure you get the Liquid Gold sauce for dipping. Itās absolutely delicious. š
Lucky and Flynn
This is Lucky and Flynn. Half brothers from litters six months apart. Their momma was a stray we took care of and tried time and again to catch her so we could have here spayed. Her name was Binx. We eventually developed some trust with her, sheād rub against my leg in the morning when I fed her and her sister and we finally caught her. Great little momma kitty.
Itās that time of the year. Starbucks Red Cups are back!
Whoās going to complain about them this year?
Twitter smells like Musk
āIf Muskās tweet doesnāt raise bright red warning signs all over the world about his judgment and character, just days after he took over one of the planetās largest and most influential media machines, I donāt know what will.ā
Musk is already stinking up the place with conspiracy theories, also know as misinformation, also know best as a lie.