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Archive: April 2024
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 Hi all - if you're a longtime reader you may remember my comments thrashing from a year ago, in which I tried to implement blog comments via Mastodon. It didn't work. By which I mean, it worked technically, but nobody used it. Chirp. In the intervening year the buzz around Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter/X has largely subsided; as usual, the network effect won. Even Facebook's Threads have barely made a dent.
And so poof, bye Mastodon, we hardly knew ya.
Also in the intervening year, I became more of an X user. Partly this is because of Feedly and rss.app, which make following X feeds as easy as following RSS feeds, and mostly this is because X itself has become better, with less political bias and better filtering. (Okay, you can debate that, but do so on X, not here :)
So I'm back to wanting blog comments on X. As I wrote:
The perfect experience is, links to blog posts appear on Twitter. Each of these Tweets has a Reply button. Each blog post has a Reply button, which does exactly what the Reply button on Twitter does. Each of these Tweets has a link to display the Tweet and all its Replies. Each blog post has a Comments button, which links back display the Tweet and all of its Replies.
With the Mastodon experience in hand, this can be even easier:
The experience is, links to blog posts appear on X (as Tweets*). Each blog post has a Comments button, which links back display the Tweet and all of its Replies. To reply to a blog post, a reader clicks through to the Tweet, and replies to it. Yes they can like it, and re-tweet it. And yes they need to be an X user to do this, but many/most of you are already...
[As of 4/4/24: this is the current experience]
* the Xiverse haven't yet decided what to call Tweets now that Twitter is renamed to X**. Some people call them Xeets.
** Possibly interesting fact: Back in the dawn of time, 2001, I worked for PayPal; at that time we owned the X.com domain as an alias of paypal.com, and my email address was o@x.com
But but ... this brings me back to the original challenge of linking blog posts on X. No it doesn't! Because also in the meantime, dlvr.it have figured out how to do this! So my posts automagically post there, just like they posted to Mastodon. (Who knows, maybe people will even [gasp!] find them there... you may have found this one that way too.)
So now ... how do I figure out how to link to the Tweet. Surely that is possible? Stay tuned...
[Update 4/4/24: yes it was possible, and yes it has been done. Comment away!]
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"out to lunch"
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As I've noted, one of the joys of having blogged for 21 years (!) is checking old posts. Maybe nobody else ever clicks my flight link, but I do, all the time.
 Back on April 2, 2017 I posted progress ratchets, one of my favorite posts ever (accompanied by the illustration at right, one of my favorite images), about how "liberalism" tries new ideas and "conservatism" locks-in the best ones, enabling progress.
As a side point, worth noting; all cultures do not do this with equal efficiency, which is why all cultures do not make "progress" at equal rates.
In watching our present society careen between the end stops of wokeness and [what passes today for] conservatism, it occurs to me that this is what happens with a little too much liberalism, a little too much trying new things, and too little lock-in. Perhaps the very degree of swing is itself a knob society can turn, and we have ours set too far to the left.
Speaking of trying new things; I'm making progress on Twitter/X comments; you are anxiously waiting on this so you can comment on this very post, I know. Since it is possible to make an RSS feed from an X feed (via rss.app), and since every post I make is relayed to my X feed (via dlvr.it), it follows that there can be an RSS feed of my X feed, a sort of mirror of my blog's RSS feed, but with Tweet URLs instead of blog URLs. And so these can be matched! And so one could map blog URLs to Tweet URLs. All still to be done, but easily (for an engineer, "easy" means "I know how to do it", even if the actual act of doing it is "hard"). Stay tuned. 
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 Nope, not a post about Tesla's FSD feature - which I love, by the way - but about apps which use your contact information for marketing. This is an instance of "just because you can doesn't mean you should".
We've all experienced this; an app has your contact info - phone#, email, or perhaps direct access because it is on your phone - and the info is there for alerts; notifications which have to do with the app's function. And the silly marketing people decide "hey we can use this for marketing, too!" Thereby pissing everyone off.
Instances of this:
- Apps like Doordash sending you marketing messages
- Skype sending news reports (probably one of the worst!)
- Apple photos offering you a "memory"
- Bank apps offering to "check your credit"
- Uber - a bad offender because you must have alerts enabled but then they use that channel for a million ads
Etc. For some reason every app wants your attention. In some cases I've blocked the app from notifications completely - degrading its function - and in extreme cases even deleted the app entirely - if you're going to be a bad actor, I don't want to work with you.
Please stay in your lane!
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If you were hiding yesterday (or perhaps on your Lear jet to Nova Scotia), you might have missed that we had a solar eclipse. I won't be the 1,000th site to share pics - though they were supercool - but thought these reactions were great:
from the incomparable xkcd, a perfect take
and loved this, from the Oatmeal
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 News item: NASA confirms nuclear-powered Dragonfly drone is going to Titan. Aw, be still my beating heart.
Of course this is only a press release, and it's easier to ship those than to fly space missions, so we'll see. This was originally scheduled for 2026, but now looks to be 2028. When you're slipping years you know the project isn't fully under way. The price tag is supposedly $3.35B, a mere pittance, but still.
The article notes "NASA did not specify which heavy-lift launcher would be used", although this should be possible with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, so at least they don't need to wait for a new rocket. And of course they have been to Titan before - remember Cassini / Huygens, my favorite spacecraft of all time?
As you all know, I can't wait to go to Titan myself, but perhaps Dragonfly will send us enough telemetry that we can construct a VR tour instead - that would be a decent alternative...
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I've been spending most of my time on the virtual road, on Zwift, but I still escape to the *real* road every once in a while, and so it was today, as I rode the Wildflower Century, up in Creston, CA (near San Luis Obispo). I've ridden this before, it's a great ride, although this year it was truncated to 82miles because of the conditions of some of the roads. So be it.
It was a beautiful day on beautiful roads, 4,900' of climbing, and took me 5:49:16 riding time. Onward!
At the start. Yep, 40 degrees, but it will warm up.
Lots and lots of nothing out here - and the roads are ... interesting
Plenty of vineyards shining in the sun
And yes, wildflowers! SO amazing.
Many miles of quiet roads and pretty rolling hills
Blasting down the home stretch
(click to play)
yay, made it!
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Happy King's Day!
Hope you had as much fun as your Dutch friends :)
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