Scripting News: Saturday, February 7, 2026
BTW, this is what Scripting News in WordPress looks like. I really like it. Just writing. And a modern 2020s blogroll. Room to add more features without too much clutter. The beginning of an upgraded web?#
My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it. #
Doc has a idea how to stop teams from tanking. Get rid of the lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the Dallas Mavericks, who were not a lottery team with only a 1.8% chance of getting the first pick. They got a player who looks to be a great star but you can't always tell if a #1 pick will turn out to be a star, sometimes they do, but often not. #
An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they're real.#
Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb -- you know -- the thing that looked so easy.#
- Om Malik says the internet is the greatest invention of his life, and since we're roughly the same age, that would be my life's greatest invention too. I think it would be if it weren't such a tragic invention, one whose growth was cut off by the very thing he quotes John Doerr saying, it could be harnessed to make huge amounts of money. #
- Back in 1999, Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr commented: "Believe it or not, the Internet is actually underhyped." He called it "the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet." He was so on the money. Twenty-five years later, 10 out of the world's 12 trillion-dollar companies are internet or internet-related companies.#
- Doerr would, of course, look at it in terms of money, because money is his business. But because of that, we ended up crashing our political system and haven't gotten past that yet. #
- If we had kept the one thing about the internet that made it different, we could be far ahead of where we are now, and perhaps would have arrived at a different form of network that didn't favor the kind of people it favors. #
- Three things that made the internet special: #
- Every part is replaceable. #
- You can use each part to make something new. #
- Each part is as small as it can be.#
- BTW, I know Doerr. He was the backer of Symantec, the company that bought my company in 1987, then took it public a few years later and thus made it possible for me to make software for the rest of my life. He's a really nice guy. I've only met a handful of people in my travels that had mastered something important so well but managed to still care about people. ;-)#
- So if the internet is not the greatest invention, what is? I haven't spent much time thinking about this, but my initial choice is AI. Because it's so hugely powerful and yet almost entirely undefined. Uncharted territory, which is all human knowledge. It might be the invention whose product is invention. Whatever it is I'm sure the things it does now will be seen as we see the first moving pictures. A demo of the greatness to come. #
- What about products? A single act of creativity that made a huge difference. I might suggest Unix is the greatest product of our lifetimes (not invention). Or perhaps Visicalc. People would likely say the iPhone, but I still want something in that form factor that I can write software for and share with others without having to go through a company like Apple. So in that sense the iPhone might have been a negative invention, it cut off possibilities for an amateur development community to develop, as it did on the Apple II, Mac, PC, etc. #
- PS: If you had asked me in 1999 is the internet the greatest invention, I would have been as enthusiastic as Doerr. There was nothing but blue sky then. Everything was possible, and we were going to do it all! #
- I want news to work. #
- I would love to see a standard model for community news orgs, starting with the city of Washington DC, with some of the reporters who were recently laid off.#
- But the community would be very much a part of this. No more news without community involvement. Let's make it community published. How does that sound? #
- And bloggers would be part of the story flow, we're amateurs so we work for free, and we take an oath. We bring other expertise. We can tell you when the tech companies are lying, for example. Professionals can still do both-sides news. Bloggers will follow all the integrity requirements of journalists, but then so will the journalists (let's not pretend all journalists even try to play by the rules, btw). #
- There will be no paywall, instead there's a toll system, like the EZ-Pass we have on roads in the US. How how we pay to ride the subway. We pay per article read. A user can buy a subscription, if they think it would be a better value than paying per article. No more paywalls that say "if you want to read this article you have to subscribe." That would be an essential part of the deal for readers. #
- No ads. Let's get rid of them. They suck. Now there's incentive to put the punchline near the end. Tell the story and sign off.#
- The readers can buy shares in the news org, with maybe very little hope of getting a return in dollars, rather in a more functional community.#
- The veterans from the Washington Post could have the most exciting job in news in generations -- finally making the news work for the people they serve. And no more oligarchs pulling the strings. As readers we know you're often full of it because of who owns you. We're not that stupid. ;-)#
- And I am sure the independent developers of the web would love to write editorial and publishing software for the new enterprise. We won't charge for it. And we won't lock you in and we will support standards everywhere so all software is replaceable. You can check my references on this, I think this ethos for technology is as central as the Hippocratic Oath in medicine. #
- I want news to work. #
Linkblog items for the day
News from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. feedland.com
Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey. mitchellh.com
Prosecutors Began Investigating Renee Good's Killing. Washington Told Them to Stop. nytimes.com
Jeffrey Epstein files shake political careers in Europe. apnews.com
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