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SCRIPTING NEWS It's even worse than it appears. More © 1994-2020 Dave Winer . Last update: Wednesday October 7, 2020; 8:35 PM EDT. You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email . It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-) Wednesday, October 7, 2020 This blog started 26 years ago today. Here's the song for that occasion. I was so much older then I'm younger then that now. Of course when I woke up I had no idea. Totally spaced it out. Thanks to my friend Geraldine, one of my constant readers, for pointing it out. ❤️ # Randy Rainbow and Patty Lupone . The best thing ever. # Today's song: Don't cry for me Argentina . # The fourth and final season of Mr Robot is now on Amazon Prime. It was so good, one of the best shows ever. But a lot of people stopped watching the show during the second and third seasons, which dragged on, were slow, arduous at times and always dark. This also happened with The West Wing, it languished in its late seasons, but the final season , the campaign for Bartlet's successor, was riviting, emotional, idealistic, optimistic. A lot of people missed it. I rated both shows tops on my BingeWorthy list . The finale of Mr Robot was a joy. I know it's hard to believe. 💥 # From December of last year, which feels like a decade ago, my writeup of the very last episode of Mr Robot. It's so vague and general it's not really a spoiler. # Killing Eve wasn't on BingeWorthy. Amazing. Please rate it, it should be among the top programs, even if the first season was better than the subsequent seasons. # Today's parody song: Maybe I'm Immune . # Breaking up tech companies # When they contemplate breaking up a tech company, this is how you should do it. Find the component of the company that really is open tech. Something that was open before they came along, that they foreclosed on, and used their monopoly to put everyone else out of business. # That's where you draw the line of separation. The core should be spun off into a new company that's well funded, with a charter to commercialize the tech while maintaining zero lock-in. Totally replaceable. Defined APIs that don't break. # If the company is viable with these constraints, great. If not, they have enough money to plan their own demise. The key thing is they cannot use their dominance to launch new products. Just the open tech. # You would find people willing to staff such a company, there are lots of idealistic developers, still, who believe in the open internet. # In Microsoft's case, in the 90s this would have meant spinning out the browser. # Today with Facebook it would mean spinning out the open graph. # With Google, it would have to be at least the core search engine. If Alphabet wanted to run ads on search, they'd have to get in line and compete with others who did. This is the price they pay for trying to use their dominance in search to control everything. # Google would also have to spin out Chrome, same way Microsoft would have spun out MSIE in the 90s. # That's the basic idea. Look for the old open tech buried in the company, that is the source of their monopolistic control, and extract it. Hopefully it's very painful, to keep successors from tying to do it in the future. # 26 years blogging # To get to to 25 years it could be stubbornness, the desire to reach a goal. To get to 26 is something different. It says I was really born to do this. I just cruised through the last year, of course I blogged it, through all the crazy shit, and beauty, why wouldn't I? # It might be time to change the motto from "It's even worse than it appears" to the motto of Battlestar Galactica." All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." Because it really is a loop. Back at the beginning it was Microsoft, Apple, Sun, IBM, etc. # Today the stories are mostly about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix.But amazingly the stories are exactly the same. Which is the story of humanity. And tech. "smile" # I got the blogging gene from my mother, and great-uncle. I am a software developer, I do love doing that, but I'm also a NBB, a Natural Born Blogger. Not sure what that's good for exactly. That at $2.50 gets you on the subway. I think. # Julia Child was a Natural Born Blogger. # Dutch artist Siegfried Woldhek’s pen drawing of Trump. # Tuesday, October 6, 2020 Posted a braintrust query asking how people are migrating from request in Node after it has been deprecated . # In a way, we are lucky Trump is so incompetent. In January, if he weren't insane and deaf he could have gotten his approval ratings to 90% simply by doing exactly what science said to do. He would be coasting to a landslide election at this point. # Digital Ocean has really good docs, and they strive for simplicity, and they pull it off. Good performance and pricing too. I've migrated all of my network apps to DO. Started using their database platform a year ago, and it "just worked." I don't like all the jargon in the writeup of their new app platform , but it's probably pretty good. Glitch is here too, but I don't think "real" developers get that it'll be useful for them, but it is. The core idea is put your app on GitHub, connect it to a node on the host (Digital Ocean, Glitch, etc), and deploy changes by updating on GitHub. I expect Microsoft will be here too. Imagine a button on the repo that says Deploy (MS bought GitHub recently). We're about to see a huge simplification of writing apps for the net. There's no reason it can't be a lot easier. Note that AWS or Google aren't remotely here, their systems are labyrinthine, designed for the priesthood . # Monday, October 5, 2020 If you want to follow my development work, I've created a public outline where I report my daily work, when I can. Click the link, and the outline will open in LO2 as a read-only live-updating outline. # If Fauci had a podcast we'd hear what he thinks every day. You wouldn't have to go hunting for him. The public needs a pulse for guidance about what's going on. Not getting him on the podcast network at the time that say Cuomo was booting up was a mistake. I think it would have saved a lot of lives. I don't know, maybe he's being so effective inside the government that they can't spare him. But I've seen his main value this year as a reliable communicator. # I don't understand why the debaters have to be in the same physical place. The whole thing would be much more manageable if they did it electronically. # Saddest moment yesterday was when Trump said he was learning all about Covid. This is why the world should pity us. We have a no-president president. Can you imagine how much Obama would know by now if he were president. Oy. # It's hard to believe but Repubs plan to challenge every absentee ballot in swing states. When they say it might take months to get a result, that's because they plan to make it take months. More info like this in Thursday's episode of Fresh Air. You probably have no idea how screwed up this election is going to be, by design. (Update: Check out what they're doing in North Carolina.) # You know how sometimes your brain as it scans sees one word but the word that's actually there is something else? It happens every time I see NakedJen's logo on Twitter. It says "nakedjen anarchist & agitator." But my brain always sees "antichrist" in place of anarchist. It keeps happening, finally I had to ment...