Rob Fahrni

UPDATE: I was able to recover all my content because Micro.blog maintains versions of your posts! That is a life saving feature! 👍🏼

Wow, that’s a first. I just lost some content on Micro.blog. 😔

I was making some edits to Saturday Morning Coffee to add additional links to things and after publishing I realized some prior edits are missing.

I’d imagine the Micro.blog folks are having issues related to the flight of folks from Twitter to better homes, Micro.blog among them.

Mark Jardine

When I heard the news that the sale of Twitter went through, I was literally shaking. My family and I have had a rough year health-wise. My wife was diagnosed with Lupus and my 5 year old started having panic attacks out of nowhere that resulted in seizure-like symptoms. We had to up our health insurance premium to $2500 a month (Yay America!) for access to specialists previously not in our network. Then I had a bad crash on my bike where I had a concussion and lost consciousness.

Read the entire thread it’s a really great read by a Tapbots co-founder. They’ve gone all in on creating a brand spanking new app for Mastodon called Ivory and it’s stunning. I’d expect nothing less from this little company of two.

Beyond the iOS version I hear they’re bringing their Mac version to Mastodon as well. Sweet!

Now, if we could convince The Iconfactory to bring good ole Ollie to Mastodon I’d be happier than a pig in slop.

Good morning. I’ve just finished my first cup of joe time to do a little writing while the second cools a bit. ☕️

The back is still misbehaving and I’m over it. Don’t you wish it was that easy to heal something? You just say “I’m over it” and it’s magically fixed? Yeah, me too. Physical therapy, I’m coming to see you. Be kind to me.

Grist

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have allegedly achieved the first-ever net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction, according to the Financial Times, which cited three unnamed sources with knowledge of the recent experiment.

I know this is just the beginning and it may take another 20 to 50 years to get where we need it to be. Hopefully we can keep the planet alive that long.

The Iconfactory

More than any other year in recent memory, 2022 brought big changes—some good, some bad, and some sad. During our 25 years in business we’ve learned to roll with all manner of punches and continue forging ahead. This year was no different.

I’m a huge fan of The Iconfactory. I use more than a few of their products, including Tot, which I’m using now to write this post.

I also use Twitterrific, xScope, and Wallaroo. Really great software, excellent people.

Comic Sands

Social media users cheered as Democratic President Joe Biden masterfully trolled former Republican President Donald Trump’s big “announcement” with a few announcements of his own.

President Biden announced a bunch of really nice accomplishments.

TFG’s big announcement was a bunch of NFT trading cards with his face superimposed over the top of various fit men. Laughable, but true.

The great grift continues. You too can own these gems for $99.00US. I wonder how many of his poor cult members fell for it? Poor saps. 🤣

Fortune

Cavill, who has played Superman since 2013’s “Man of Steel,” took to Instagram on Wednesday to share the “sad news” that he would not be returning to the iconic role.

I loved Mr. Cavill as Superman and will miss him as The Man of Steel.

And to really rub salt in the wound he had to turn down his role as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher, which kind of ruins that too. 🤬

Six Colors

Lawsuits, new laws, and proposed regulations have been swirling around Apple and some of its core business practices for years now. But on Tuesday came the first report—from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, perhaps the most reliable breaker of secret Apple news—that Apple’s planning on changing its App Store policies in major ways.

Apple allowing Third Party App Stores? What? Has hell frozen over?

Look, if we do get Third Party App Stores I Apple will require each of them to pass a percentage of each sale directly to Apple.

Tim Apple: “Welcome to the Apple Platform, Third Party App Store.”

Third Party: “Thank you, Tim. It’s good to be here.”

Tim Apple: “I’ll take 27% of every sale, due at the first of the month.”

Third Party: “😳”

Apple always wants their piece of the pie, so to speak. 🥧

The Washington Post

HOUSTON — Employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety in June received a sweeping request from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office: Compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender on their Texas driver’s license and other department records during the past two years.

What is wrong with these people? Trans rights are human rights! Get lost Paxton. Texas, what a terrible state. Embarrassing and dangerous.

Our country lacks empathy for fellow human beings. It’s sickening.

Fulton News & Record

The men standing before the cameras in Moore County were sober-faced and serious as they addressed the intentional and targeted attacks on two electric substations the night before. Forty-five thousand residents lost power, schools and businesses closed, the county was forced to declare a state of emergency and curfew, and local communities were put both at risk and on edge.

So, yeah, this is what its come to. Militant groups destroying our infrastructure. Osama bin Laden didn’t need to strike at our country, we’re destroying ourselves.

Swift.org

The Foundation framework is used in nearly all Swift projects. It provides both a base layer of functionality for fundamentals like strings, collections, and dates, as well as setting conventions for writing great Swift code.

If you’ve written an app for iOS or Mac or any other Apple Platform you’ve used Foundation. I checked out the repository and there’s an awful lot of C code in there, which isn’t bad, but makes me wonder if the plan is to slowly replace all that C code with 100% Swift?

Kenny Kerr

The windows crate provides bindings for the Windows API, including C-style APIs as well as COM and WinRT APIs. This crate provides the most comprehensive API coverage for the Windows operating system. Where possible, the windows crate also attempts to provide a more idiomatic and safe programming model for Rust developers.

While Apple is all in on Swift, Microsoft is embracing Rust as their language of choice for low level orogramming. This new set of Windows “crates” as the Rust community calls them sounds like an excellent way to write Windows applications.

I find it really interesring it includes Win32 API’s, COM, and WinRT all rolled into one cohesive package. Hopefully the interface is consistent and hides all the ugly details. I have a feeling it does.

Vox

It’s not about doxxing. It’s about Elon.

Bingo. This entire time a man we all thought was some kind of genius was just another grifter. Don’t get me wrong, the man is smart, but I don’t think he’s a genius. He’s a narcissists and needs to be in the news. See, even I’m talking about him. That’s his super power.

How do you go from society’s Tony Stark, focused on accelerating the world toward sustainable energy, to being the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving screaming about the woke mafia?

— Christian Selig (@ChristianSelig) December 16, 2022

My back hates me. A week ago I hurt it putting on my shoe and it’s been rough ever since. Heck, it’s been downright painful.

I see my doctor tomorrow and I’m hoping it’s not too bad. It’s been a wreck since I hurt it the first time in my mid-20’s. One little mistake and POW! Back pain.

Aging hasn’t been kind to me and to make matters worse I’ve never been kind to myself. Couple that with genetics that gave me a predisposition to knee and back problems and you have a perfect storm for physical ailments.

Both of my brothers have had back surgeries and I had a knee replacement in August of this year.

I am very grateful I make my living in an office environment. I can’t imagine having to go out and do physical labor in this condition. I’m hurting enough today that I only made it through a half day of work.

Hopefully the doc can get me on the right track to recovery. I’d put money on physical therapy but I’m sure X-rays will point the way.

Free advice: Refuse to age. 😁

Arrived IAD 🛬

Now for the drive to Charlottesville and getting to sleep in my own bed.

Boarding SFO to IAD 🛫

Should get in around 9PM.

Touchdown! SFO 🛬

Now we wait a couple hours then homeward bound.

FAT to SFO 🛫

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 — our daughter Taylor — 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. ☕️

Swift.org

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 I’d 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.

Vox

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 company’s office staff.

It’s sad to see a company have to lay off so many people, especially around the holidays.

Good vibes to all those affected.

Dart Engineering Blog

Over the last four years, we’ve 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 doesn’t rely on an interpreter. Even if it does it makes me go hmmmm. 🤔

Also, Dart Engineering folks, use Blogger instead of Medium. It is a Google property after all.

Rolling Stone

Recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal didn’t shake hands with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, at a ceremony on Tuesday.

Good. Those assholes don’t deserve to be recognized by any of us. Support an insurrection and the man who instigated it and you don’t deserve any respect.

The Sacramento Bee

When a man got lost deep in the dark Alaskan wilderness, it was his iPhone’s satellite that saved him.

I’ll be darned. It worked! 🥳

ReadySet Blog

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 “Rewrite it in Rust” can have real benefits.

Speaking of Rust. We’re 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 IDE’s.

The Times

The Pentagon has given a tacit endorsement of Ukraine’s long-range attacks on targets inside Russia after President Putin’s multiple missile strikes against Kyiv’s critical infrastructure.

I like the idea of tactical strikes into Russian territory. After almost a year of defending themselves it’s nice to see Ukraine go on the offensive.

Putin has succeeded in making sure Ukraine becomes part of the United Nations. Nice job dude. 🤪

Seth Abramson

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.

I’d 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 could’ve been as simple as the instance admin not liking Mr. Abramson’s work.

He could’ve found a different instance to participate in. It’s 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.

Ed Bott

Nice work, Jack. Your buddy Elon has turned Twitter into 8Chan.

Elon is ruining Twitter.

Also, I’d love to see Mastodon support embedding cards in websites. Maybe it does and I don’t 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. 😳

I’ve become a physical disaster.

This week will be slightly abbreviated. I’m in California for a funeral.

It’s 4:50AM here and I really need the juice. ☕️

Inessential

The internet’s 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. It’s nice in that way because it’s completely decentralized.

Mastodon also works that way. It’s 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?

Here’s what it looks like: https://curmudgeon.cafe/@fahrni.rss

Jalopnik

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 they’re eating and make sure that they’re 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 haven’t seen it I’d recommed giving it a try. It’s fascinating.

While I’m in California I’ll probably visit Exeter Coffee Company and Dutch Brothers.

It’s nice to see others with an extreme coffee addiction. 😀

Robert Reich

What worries me most about Trump’s dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, the outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of America’s most prominent young white supremacists, and Kanye West, whose recent antisemitic outbursts have rocked the entertainment world, isn’t 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. It’s seriously pathetic and signaling to every other garbage human it’s ok to openly talk about and act on their hate.

Jesse Skinner

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. 😀

MacRumors

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.

I’ve been using Ivory for a while and it’s absolutely gorgeous and works the way you’d expect it to work.

Mastodon has turned into an iOS App playground and I’m loving it.

chaos.social

The past month has changed the Fediverse, and, by extension, our instance. We’ve 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.

Jason Kottke

Hey everyone. Tomorrow, after almost 7 months of a sabbatical break, I’m resuming regular publication of kottke.org. (Actually, I’ve been posting a bit here and there this week already — underpromise & over-deliver, etc.) I’m going to share more about what I’ve been up to (and what I’ve not been up to) in a massive forthcoming post, but for now, know that I’m 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.

WillowTree

Charlottesville, Va. – December 1, 2022 – 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 I’d 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 don’t have a degree of any type I’ve 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! 🧵 cc @realGeorgeHotz

— Peter Yared (@peteryared) November 26, 2022

Ahh, the life of the modern developer. 🤣

Let’s get this party started!

Time to watch birdies and try to convince them they should come visit him. 🐤

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the States so I had a three day week, which is really nice and I’d 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, I’m alive, I get to write, and I get to drink coffee. Cheers. ☕️

The Guardian

Sian, I’m seeing a lot of talk about a Martin Scorsese film called Goncharov. But I’ve never heard of a Martin Scorsese film called Goncharov. What’s 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. 😃

John Scalzi

Now, why should we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web? Oh, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s 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?

That’s right, author John Scalzi also has a really great blog and he understands the power of the open web. He’s also very entertaining on Twitter. Here’s 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. 😕 It's your data, they're locking it up!

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) November 23, 2022

Proton

This new emphasis on advertising also undermines Apple’s claims about privacy with its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature and its “Privacy. That’s iPhone” 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 it’s abusing its power.

No matter Apple’s true intentions here it just comes off as a real scumbag move and I’d imagine regulators are ready to pounce.

The Verge

Elon Musk says that Twitter’s 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 “painful, but necessary.” Verified checkmarks will also be expanded with additional colors — gold for companies, grey for the government, and the original blue for individual accounts.

Not that it matters but I like this move. I don’t agree with the color coding but I like the idea.

I’d 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 twitter’s infrastructure make me all tingly inside https://t.co/qncdcUgAIf

— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) November 23, 2022

Flicker Fusion

I think Musk is genuniely surprised he hasn’t been able (so far) to bluster his way through this.

We’re finally starting to see cracks in Musks three ring circus. He’s spending so much time at Twitter blowing it up he’s ignoring Tesla and Space X.

Here’s hoping he hires an adult to run Twitter soon. 🤞🏼

Puck

I know I wasn’t alone in chuckling when the new Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav announced on an earnings call last week that he’d really like to do “something with J.K. on Harry Potter going forward,” noting that his film executives “haven’t done a Harry Potter movie in 15 years.” You don’t 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.

Comic Sands

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.

TechCrunch

Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that’s 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 ”Yes! I must get a job there to help!” Yeah, seriously, that’s how I felt. Luckily I remembered how much I love WillowTree and came to my senses.

Here’s wishing the Tumblr team all the best! 🧡

Oh, look, we still have pumpkin and pecan pie. Pie and coffee? Don’t mind if I do. 🥧

If you like Barleywine, Bigfoot is a nice choice.

Having pumpkin and pecan pie for breakfast, as one does.

NPR

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-15…

Ban assault weapons, now.

Kolby decided at 3:45AM it was time to get up. He’s 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. 😂

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 you’re pet parents you have blankets and weird furniture coverings in the house! 😂

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. I’m all Zoom’ed out.

Enjoy that morning elixir of life. I certainly am. ☕️

Wired

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 Musk’s ownership of the platform has rained chaos on its users.

I’ve heard some folks doubt the survivability of Mastodon and doubt hate can be squashed there. In my experience on the platform it’s quite the opposite. If you’re running a server full of racist white nationalists, Nazis, or other hate groups it’s extremely easy for the admin of your server to block federation of that entire server.

I’ve found Mastodon to be so much better for conversation with folks outside my little friend bubble on Twitter.

Brent Simmons

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 you’re a consumer of RSS point your feed reader to his site. It’s a great read.

Platformer

Musk went on to say that “Twitter will be much more engineering-driven,” and that while design and product “will still be very important,” engineers “will have the greatest sway.” And then Musk presented employees with an ultimatum: click “yes” on a Google form affirming your desire to “be part of the new Twitter,” or leave in exchange for three months’ pay.

I’ve heard from a friend that most of the US Engineering staff left. That’s just wild.

Last week, I made the decision to leave my role leading Trust & Safety at Twitter.

Today, I'm sharing a few thoughts about what comes next for the site. https://t.co/QPAQR6zpqU

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 18, 2022

I don’t have a NY Times subscription but I’ll bet this piece by Mr. Roth is quite good.

Daring Fireball

If you had told me three weeks ago that Twitter, as a company, would today be embroiled in turmoil — perhaps outright existential crisis — over a company-wide email from Elon Musk centered around the phrase “extremely hardcore”, v-1 is not the scenario I’d have imagined.

In my career I’ve worked for some hardcore companies, like the old Microsoft, it’s not fun. Don’t 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/

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022

I don’t understand why he continues to ask for snippets of code from his employees. It’s just some random metric he’s using to what what end? What about the devs who made Twitter better by removing code?

CNN

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.

It’s been a rough couple weeks in the tech sector. I’m sorry to see so many folks having to deal with this. Here’s hoping they land on their feet quickly.

Fresnoland

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. You’ll see it at the grocery store.

Becky Hansmeyer

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. We’ve person. Like her I lament the loss of the Twitter we knew but all good things come to an end, right?

America, America

I’m 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.

The Register

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. It’s gonna be interesting to see how many new products come out of Microsoft and other companies written in 100% Rust.

The Brookings Institution

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 “regular” people had done this we’d be thrown in a dungeon.

Jalopnik

Haas’ Kevin Magnussen just scored his first-ever pole position in Formula 1 during the Brazilian Grand Prix. Yes, I intended to write that sentence. It’s not April Fool’s Day. Kevin Magnussen is polesitter for Saturday’s sprint race.

I support Haas. It’s an American F1 team and I’m happy for Kevin Magnussen and Haas. Now, get some podiums! 😂

PZ Meyers

Between the Church Militant and Nick Fuentes, it’s 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 he’s not hiding his White Christian Nationalism behind dog whistles, no sir, he’s just saying it out loud.

From: @twittereng
To: @elonmusk
Subject: pic.twitter.com/EiDADFtMCN

— DM of Engineering 🎲 (@dmofengineering) November 17, 2022

Go check out that tweet thread. It’s full of Twitter Employees saying goodbye after the hardcore time limit expired.

It’s a sad day for the social network. How long will it stay up?

The Daily Progress

“Three 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 morning”

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, that’s why I needed to hold it up for the picture.

Shhhh, don’t tell Kim’s roses it’s supposed to be fall. 🌹

Time to sip some coffee and write. It’s that quiet time of the morning I love. Let’s 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. It’s been quite a week.

The Guardian

“In extraordinary scenes, crowds of jubilant residents greeted Ukraine’s armed forces as they reached the centre of Kherson, as Russia’s retreat from the key strategic city appeared to have descended into chaos.”

Let’s go Ukraine! 🇺🇦

Vox

“Democrats outperformed history and expectations with a surprisingly strong midterm elections performance Tuesday, with the promised red wave nowhere to be found.”

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.

Platformer

”Everything went from bad to worse at Twitter on Thursday. Today let’s 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.”

There are so many wonderful hot takes I could post so I’ll 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)

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.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) November 11, 2022

Anna Nicholson

“In a complete departure from my usual meanderings, I’m going to present an in-depth comparative review of eight iOS Mastodon/Fediverse apps.”

So, right, Mastodon. The growth on Mastodon has been huge since Musk took over Twitter.

I’m following folks like crazy! I’m up to 465 and I now have 307 folks following me. That is absolutely insane and I never thought I’d see if happen. It’s been so refreshing. The mood on Mastodon has been extremely hopeful and folks are getting along rather well. It’s fun to be there!

If you decide to join take your time finding an instance that’s right for you. There are so many to choose from.

If you’re 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.

Alex Suzuki

“My 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. I’ve come to accept that after almost two decades of writing code, I am not really an expert in any single one.”

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++. I’ve worked in other environments like C#/.Net, Linux, and finally landing at home on iOS with Objective-C and Swift.

I’m still capable of learning new stuff but I’ve always been extremely slow to do it. I eventually get there it just takes time.

I relate so much to ”my brain is no longer a sponge.” 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 hasn’t been that way for a very long time. Now I have to refresh my findings often and when I step away from code I’ve written it can take a while to get back in the swing of things. Why do you think Stream development takes so long? 😁

I can still do the work it’s 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. It’s been a wonderful challenge in ways I never imagined.

Rolling Stone

“Donald Trump ended his pre-midterm rally blitz in disgusting fashion, calling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “an animal,” championing the death penalty, and giddily imagining the prison rape of the journalist who reported on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn [Roe v. Wade.”

This guy cannot get near any government office ever again. He’ll destroy democracy.

Horror Hound

“One such monster maker is Mexican director, producer and author Guillermo Del Toro.”

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 King’s Creep Show.

My favorite episodes were:

Episode 1: Lot 36 Episode 3: The Autopsy Episode 5: Pickman’s Model Episode 6: Dreams in the Witch House Episode 8: The Murmuring

Don’t get me wrong, they’re all good, but those stand out in my mind. Pickman’s Model and Dreams in the Witch House really stood out.

Check it out.

Facebook

“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve 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.”

Who’d 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 didn’t do it by sending them an email signed by Twitter. He put his name to everything.

Scripting News

“But as a writer, I can’t use a system that doesn’t do inbound RSS. It’s the inverse of the silo problem.”

At first I didn’t 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. That’s 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.

The Grug Brained Developer

“big 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 correct”

I love the Grug, whatever that is. If you’re 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.

We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022

Ya think?