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Scripting News: Tuesday, October 20, 2026

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Tuesday, October 20, 2026 Today's song , for the Knicks. "And when the morning light comes streaming in I get up and do it again." Knicks in 5! # My friend Guy Kawasaki has a quote from the early Mac division at Apple. "Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players. But B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to F players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies." You see this over and over among the very rich in tech. The money is supposed to make them invincible, but they don't hire the best people, I guess, for fear of being found out to not be the genius that the money says they are. # I have a longtime friend from tech who is a San Antonio Spurs fan. I am from New York, and thus am a lifelong Knicks fan. Until tonight's game starts at the Garden between the Knicks and the Sixers with their new acquisitions from Boston and the Lakers, ...

Scripting News: Monday, October 19, 2026

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Monday, October 19, 2026 Anyway -- I figured out what I want to do. I want to go back to the point where CSS and JavaScript were added to the web. Everything is a document. It's a writer's web . The reader owns the look of the pages. The writer has no say in colors, or arrangements, it's just writing. No character limits. Simple styling. Full fidelity text . Reading and writing, and then the developers can come up with a million different ways to read, and everyone gets to use their favorite editor, always, and store all their writing where they live, and let everyone read it where ever they read. Any structure they can think of, but all the rendering code is with the reader. I think we can take what we've learned since the web got corporatized, and bring it back to the basic platform we had then. And btw, no HTML, just Markdown. :-) # I would like to have one day when Claude Code doesn't fuck everything up by doing things it is explicit...

Inside the CPC's drive for full and rigorous self-governance

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China News 19-Oct-2026   Inside the CPC's drive for full and rigorous self-governance What does it take for a political party of more than 100 million members to maintain discipline, hold itself accountable and translate national goals into tangible improvements in people's lives? The answer lies in the Communist Party of China's full and rigorous self-governance.   But what does this principle mean in practice? How can a party guard against the misuse of power, strengthen oversight and renew itself from within? And how should government performance be measured? Explore our special coverage to discover the ideas, institutions and practices behind th...

Scripting News: Sunday, October 18, 2026

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Sunday, October 18, 2026 I wrote a piece entitled The Web of Markdown on Oct 6. I have to keep looking it up, but I do remember writing it very quickly and deciding it needed a memorable title, like the ones about textcasting, and podcasting and all the other bits that went on to be something. It's one of those times when it seems to have potential with other developers, they seem to see the same logic in it that I do. A way to disconnect from VC control of the web and try again with the open basis, the un-owned basis. There was a fork here at some point in the last 10 or so years, we just refused to see it as such. And btw it was not a very polite piece, but I wasn't feeling polite when I wrote and decided not to edit the anger out of it. I don't like having been so wrong. But it's a fact and denying it doesn't change it. # Anyway, what this means is we're building a site of files that live in Markdown-Land while what you're re...

Scripting News: Saturday, October 17, 2026

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Saturday, October 17, 2026 Try going to web.org in a recent version of Chrome. # Realization: There are two webs, one created by TBL that flourished until about 2006, and the VC-web that appealed to the masses, and grew like a weed -- and they also called it the web. The confusion -- you could read it in a web browser, but that didn't make it of the web. My regret, looking back, is I tried to make software in the VC-web. Never got traction, anywhere. My heart, mind and home was always in the first web. And I think what we're coming to terms with now is that has been languishing for 20+ years, it didn't realize its promise, lots of interesting stuff to read that stimulated more thought and thus writing. We should be way ahead of where we are. Because writing has become something for the elite (Substack) to speak through, and limited to grunts and snorts, "social media," for the rest of us. They basically recreated the publishing envir...

Beijing's 12345 hotline: Connecting citizens' needs with urban governance

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China News 17-Oct-2026   Beijing's 12345 hotline: Connecting citizens' needs with urban governance How can cities better listen to their residents and turn public concerns into effective services? Explore Beijing's 12345 hotline through expert insights, international media perspectives and firsthand accounts, examining how the platform is shaping discussions on urban governance and offering lessons for cities around the world. Read More   ...

Scripting News: Friday, October 16, 2026

Friday, October 16, 2026 Tried a Wirecutter podcast about the state of sound bars. I thought, wow if they could really cover this I might try buying one again. But it was one of those all giggles shows and people saying how they didn't know anything about soundbars except that they suck. The person they were interviewing was also quickly giggling after a giggle-worthy intro, I guess to try to make what they're saying more interesting but he was just agreeing with them about how they don't know anything. I waited and waited for them to get to something new, some new development I might learn about or something I had been doing wrong, but I gave up after five minutes or so, while I was skipping ahead 30 seconds at a time. It would be much better to err on the side of assuming your listeners know a bit about consumer electronics, these are not actually very exotic things. The NYT does this with their podcasts, I'm rarely willing to risk any time on them...

Scripting News: Thursday, October 15, 2026

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Thursday, October 15, 2026 Reminder, Atlantis is the codename for the new Frontier that runs in Electron. As I work on other projects now, it's not on my front burner, but in a way it is, because I'm using it constantly as I work on FeedLand and the other project. We just released a new set of parts that make it possible for it to open a Markdown file for reading when you 2-click on it in the Finder. Things like that are great to add, because they fit into the 2026 web environment. How did I discover that? Accidentally 2-clicked on a .md file, expecting Atlantis to open it, and it just sat there. Filling in things like that. And for some reason it can't get the find command ported from the C kernel to the new JavaScript one. I have told it countless times that the source of truth is the 2014 repo. I told it again. A neat way to follow this project is to subscribe to the codecasting feed , the comment for each new part release gives you an idea where some...

Scripting News: Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Wednesday, October 14, 2026 Thread : "Imagine rock and roll without the Beatles." # Occam's News reports that Trump et al are selling out the US. Putin can get the US to do what he wants by giving Trump money. Total win-win. And the US is flushed down the toilet. That's all that's going on there. All of the journalistic feigned bafflement is make-believe. It's totally obvious what's going on. And don't forget Musk has the world encircled with satellites. If he doesn't want you communicating, you don't communicate. In other words the selling-out has been going on for some time. # Someday all the pieces will be interchangeable. Then there won't be different brands of social networks, just different brands of the software. All parts replaceable. It won't have all the chaos of the web. And that will be a good thing. # Linkblog items for the day ICE Planning $100 Million Domestic...

Scripting News: Tuesday, October 13, 2026

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Tuesday, October 13, 2026 I'm a recent convert to new versions of the MacOS, last version I was using was High Sierra . In this version, Tahoe , it's entirely too easy to make a window go full screen with no obvious keystroke to undo the mistake. I learned if you move the mouse up to the top of the screen you get the menubar, but unfortunately there is no obvious command in the menu for undoing the mistake. I still don't know which gesture does this. And btw, the longtime Mac bug where some keystroke moves the dock to another window, that's still here. I can tell as I'm clicking the mouse, too late to stop, that this is one of those times. I've memorized a finger macro to get it back, but it used to piss me off a lot, but now it's kind of a gentle reassurance that someone is remembering how we got here. # firstSentence , a JavaScript function that returns the first sentence in a string. Useful in coming up with something to displ...