Scripting News podcast

I want to talk about interop among the products that do more or less what Twitter does, including Twitter.

I think we're doing a replay of the way hypertext developed in the 80s, and then took off when TBL produced a much simpler product with one-way links instead of two. It made developing a website a matter of writing a text file and uploading it to a server. Almost no configuration.

Same kind of experience with Napster, in a minute you had access to all the music of the world. It was super easy to use, that was key to it being a breakthrough. Over and over, it's simplicity that has made new technology take off. That a developer without much training but a big idea can put something together in an afternoon or a weekend.

We need that kind of interface for the same kind of explosion to happen between the twitter-like products.

Also I am using a recorder app from Google that automatically produces a transcript, so here it is.

27-minute podcast.

Harris must become president of Twitter before becoming president of the United States.

After the debate, Harris should be interviewed anywhere they'll have her. Go ahead and be overexposed. Answer every question with one of your major positioning statements. Call in to radio talk shows, podcasts, whatever you can think of. Biden hardly ever promoted himself. Not being heard all the time was his biggest sin. Harris should get accustomed to being accessible when she's in office. Keep the kamalahq snark channel going. This will have been Trump's contribution to American politics, no fear of being heard.

BRIC countries == Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Brazil's population is 215 million, US is 333 million, so Brazil is 64% of US.

When we win the Twitter presidency we will have Jumped the Trump. 😇

12 minute podcast.

Full audio for Kamala Harris's acceptance speech at the DNC.

Thanks to Ian Landsman for converting the video to MP3.

My blog post about the speech.

Podcast: 37 minutes.

Podcast: 17 minutes.

Note: You can skip the first five minutes, it's a long preamble on a different subject. I left it in because it's interesting imho.

It's possible that what happened to Joe Biden in the debate is like something that happened to me almost ten years ago when I was turning 60. I tell the story in this podcast. It's still possible he was the best choice to go against Trump. We'll know soon enough. But there's something to learn here. No one wants their life to be over. No one wants to be thanked. They want you to let them keep going. The thing is that all through life people say you can't do what you then go on to do. It happens over and over. One day, after a life of accomplishment, you realize everyone refers to you in the past tense, but you're still here, you want to keep doing the stuff you do so well. But they won't let you. That's why I feel bad about what happened with President Biden, because I've had the experience myself. Anyway what's done is done, we all have to get behind soon-to-be President Harris. And stand behind her as she is attacked, and they try to get rid of her.

Anyway, the substance of this podcast, which I recorded yesterday, doesn't start until 5:25. Up until then it's a rambling story about Fox News and how a little truth slipped out when they covered the assassination attempt on Trump a few weeks ago. You can skip over that part if you don't find it interesting, but I hope you do listen to the part when I had an experience that may have been like Biden's at the debate, and how it was probably just a panic attack -- these things happen -- our candidates are people, and they have bodies that do strange things sometimes. No matter what I feel for Biden and that's the story I wanted to tell here.

Thanks for listening. :smile:

Podcast: 27 minutes.

Sorry about the recording quality, I was in a large space with bad acoustics. I'll try to remember not to do that in the future.

I've noticed I spend less time programming, I go more slowly and carefully because now I can know a lot more about each problem I'm solving, and use the packages I build on, jQuery, MySQL, Node, the browser, Bootstrap, Font-awesome, Frontier, to greater advantage. A new kind of programming is possible, and it's better.

I go into some detail in this podcast about how the process works.

Interested in hearing similar stories from other developers using ChatGPT or something like it.

Podcast: 11 minutes.

I see happy talk all over the place that Twitter is done, Musk is killing it, blah blah blah.

It's bullshit. In the next few months Twitter is going to morph into the political system that Barack Obama could have and should have built.

It turns out creating a president of the United States is worth a lot of money. Trump is inept at squeezing the money out of it, he's a loudmouth who proved one thing, Twitter is all you needed in 2016 to get elected president. That's going to change, as competition shows up (Zuckerberg, for example, with Threads).

They know, even if you don't -- that it can be very profitable to own the presidency.

If Trump loses, Musk won't get it on this round, but eventually he will own a big piece of the president, and then he will move his deals with SpaceX and Tesla up a notch.

Listen to the podcast, it's only 11 minutes. You probably haven't considered this angle, but I promise you he's moving, and he's mostly unopposed right now. He's not the nudnick so many people seem to think he is.

Lakoff talks about the Nurturing Mother and the Strict Father as models for Democrats and Republicans respectively, and how the Dems never got this, and never campaigned accordingly. Now they're doing it. Owning the nuturing mother mode, but also the Protective Father, tough and angry when necessary, but a fun dad, a sweetheart. Biden was that, but we caught him too late in life for that to really flourish, hence the low approval ratings.

I think we can afford now to ignore the NY Times et al. We don't just want freedom, we are free, now. That's what we're feeling. Now we're an army and we're ready to march. We're ready to fight and our weapons are our feet, our voices and our votes. This is why it's working.

At first I didn't like White Dudes for Harris but now I get it. I saw a guy who'd normally I'd think of as a MAGA, in the crowd behind Kamala yesterday while she spoke, I thought yeah us old white dudes need permission to have sweet hearts. It's time for us to be happy too. Why the f not.

BTW, Bush had the highest approval in history after 9/11. 90%.

Models for the Protective Father with President Kamala.

7-minute podcast.

4-minute podcast about my first venture into ChatGPT via its API.

There's an accompanying GitHub repo, with an example app in JavaScript that runs in the browser.

Includes instructions for setting up and funding a developer account, which was the biggest hurdle.

Functionality: It tells you who Bull Mancuso is.

Much excitement as I think about integrations I can now do.

Don't know why I waited so long. :smile:

We're depending on big companies that are nuzzling up with Trump, at best hedging their bets, to let us use their networks to organize ourselves politically. That's never worked for us, in fact it's worked against us. Trump's election in 2016, for example, could he have done it without Twitter letting him go direct to organize?

The Harris organization is doing great, they have to take on the journalists, where previous Democrats had no answer, they've done it in a clever way, by using their channels to talk about the things journalism should be talking about. People listen to their competition, and that's what this is.

It's not hard for a few of us, who are good listeners and writers, to build lists of sources and provide them for people to access away from the nonstop (often entertaining) bullshit of the social web of 2024.

I've asked for ideas for podcasts that would go into a list of shows people who are voting Democratic would find interesting or useful. Not for spreading religion, but based on facts, not the unhinged lunacy and revenge of Trump. Our news now is too polluted by that. He shouldn't be able to lie about Harris's race, and have that be an issue carried by journalism, for example. That should not be possible but it happens.

Podcast: 12 minutes.

Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States.

In the context of who we are as a country, and what the Repubs do and say about the country, "weird" is pretty mild. What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist columnist of the NYT, writing that column. (Safire was a Republican btw.)

And to the Democrats, no matter what the NYT says, keep using the term. This is where you get to speak out about what they're doing over there, and how it's not journalism. One of the rare things we agree with Trump on.

Podcast: 3 minutes.

PS: Safire went to Bronx Science! I did not know that. (So did I.) I love the idea of writers who aren't scared of tech stuff.

PPS: Even Richard Nixon would think today's so-called Republicans were weird.