End the War on Freedom

By John Klar

Mainstream media opposition to government accountability has shifted to alarmist attacks against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s days-long tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The nation’s debt tops $36 trillion as federal spending and debt service devour the economy like a ravenous dragon. Recalcitrant Democrats scream tyranny and suddenly discover the US […]

Aziz Poonawalla wrote a review of WordLand. I'd like to respond.

First, I'd like to say I put a lot of thought into this product, so it is the way it is for good reason.

I'm trying to escape from the limits of twitter-like systems. I want a writing world where we get the features of textcasting. So your belief that the product has to support Bluesky and Mastodon cross-posting would be like saying an EV should only run on gasoline. The whole point is to not limit ourselves to the features of Bluesky.

On the other hand, I'm not saying limits in software aren't good. A product is as much defined by what it can't do as with what it does. All feed reading software has to strip large amounts of HTML from what it finds in feeds, because RSS doesn't place any limits what you can use. So we strip off all the HTML except (in FeedLand) simple styling and links. And so to fit into FeedLand and as a suggestion to other feed reading software, I've said my limit is Markdown. I think we can all support that. I ran the idea by my former colleague Brent Simmons, who does NetNewsWire, and he was quickly convinced, and plans to support it in his product. This is a way to get new stuff happening in the RSS world. Start with supporting the source:markdown element in your feeds and in your feed reader.

You say there's no use-case -- but there is a use-case, just not for you which is fine.

The typical user is a writer who publishes to WordPress. As passionate as I am about the limits of twitter-like systems, I am also feel that WordPress has never adequately served the needs of writers, and what a shame that is. WordLand, imho, is exactly what writers need. Get all the other non-writing stuff out of my way. Let me clear a space for iterating over something I publish to the web. Give me a menu with all my documents, so I can quickly make a change. These are the basic principles we implemented successfully in Radio UserLand in 2002. They were available for anyone in the WordPress world to copy, but for some reason they didn't. It's so weird to me, I'm like a time traveler who has come 20 years in the future to find out they lost the purpose of a product like WordPress. It's supposed to be a place writers love to come to do their writing. I think when writers discover WordLand they will see a product designed by someone who is one of them. It's just a beginning, there's lots more to do. I take the long term view, a road to anywhere begins with one step.

Back to Bluesky and Mastodon -- because they both support outbound RSS, we will be able to include stuff written there in our collections of published feeds. I fully intend to integrate features from FeedLand in WordLand. That's why the names are so similar. 😄

It's good that you like micro.blog, this isn't in the way of it and it isn't in the way of WordLand. I'm in regular contact with Manton, and if his product grows, I win because he's got the right model. He's still trying to work with the limited platforms and I, again, gave up. That right there defines the two products.

Sometimes giving up is the right thing to do. The first time i gave up btw was in 2017, when I stopped trying to cross-post from Scripting News to Medium, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It was liberation. I had come to hate my writing because I couldn't use links, and I couldn't edit or have more than 140 chars. What a miserable existence, and I love writing, and I had to make a choice. I'm doing it again, but now have made the investment in meeting people with the kind of writing tool they expect and want. That was the same thing that worked so well with Radio.

My real goal was to not need to do any of this! I would have much preferred if Bluesky had decided to break out of the tiny little box Twitter put them in. Then I could do all my writing there. And I wish WordPress had a team of developers working on making the product the best for writers in addition to programmers and designers, but they didn't. Should I give up there? Maybe. Maybe we were destined to give up on the web as a writer's platform. But I saw so much potential there in 1994 when I started working here exclusively. That potential is still very much there, you just have to believe, and against all odds, I do still believe. One more time, let's give it a try.

Anyway, it's okay if you don't use it, but I wanted to disagree with some of your conclusions. :-)

PS: I wrote every word on this page, not an AI bot, in case you were wondering. 😄

By Liberty Nation Authors

Trump’s presidency is forcing world leaders to take a nation-state first approach. For more episodes, click here.

Which major car brand will be the first to disappear this year? There are several contenders, including Chrysler and Dodge and VW. But it may be Nissan that goes the way of Pontiac and Plymouth and Oldsmobile first. Moody’s –  which ranks the creditworthiness of corporate borrowers – has downgraded Nissan’s to “junk,”  reports Reuters. […]

The post The First to Fall? appeared first on EPautos - Libertarian Car Talk.

By Leesa K. Donner

Detractors and supporters alike have said more than once that Donald J. Trump reminds them of P.T. Barnum, but the only difference is that the president’s followers mean it to be a compliment. Much like American showman, philanthropist, businessman, and politician Phineas Taylor Barnum, President Trump is not someone who can be easily pigeon-holed. That […]

By Graham J Noble

Most Americans have never heard of Ed Martin, but his name will likely be on a lot of people’s lips in the very near future. Martin is the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, and he has ruffled the feathers of some Democrats in the nation’s capital, as well as their stenographers in […]

By Liberty Nation Authors

Join the C-5 Panel on a rough ride through tariff trivia. For more episodes, click here.

By Guest Author

by F. Andrew Wolf, Jr. It has been going on since the COVID-19 pandemic. The federal government and large tech-media companies have colluded to censor Americans. President Trump, in an effort to right this wrong, is issuing executive decisions designed to undermine this toxic censorship before Americans lose all their trust in the media and […]

For day 13, we're asked to find the solutions to some linear equations. We use the cl-ppcre library to parse the equations and then use Cramer’s rule to solve them.

;;; -*- Lisp -*-

(in-package "ADVENT2024/DAY13")

;; Cramers Rule to solve Ax + By = M, Cx + Dy = N
;; x = (MD - BN) / (AD - BC)
;; y = (AN - MC) / (AD - BC)

(defun cramers-rule (A B C D M N)
  (let ((det (- (* A D) (* B C))))
    (if (= det 0)
        nil
        (values (/ (- (* M D) (* B N)) det)
                (/ (- (* A N) (* M C)) det)))))

The input is in blocks of three lines with a fourth blank line between them. We parse the input with a regular expressions and then apply cramers-rule to solve the equations. The conversion factor is a delta that is added to the coordinates of the target.

(defun puzzle (pathname &optional (conversion 0))
  (collect-sum
   (multiple-value-bind (line1 line2 line3 line4)
       (chunk 4 4 (catenate (scan-file pathname #’read-line)
                            (scan ’list ’("")))) ;; extra blank line at end
     (#M(lambda (line1 line2 line3)
          (cl-ppcre:register-groups-bind ((#’parse-integer ax)
                                          (#’parse-integer ay))
              ("Button A: X\\+(\\d+), Y\\+(\\d+)" line1)
            (cl-ppcre:register-groups-bind ((#’parse-integer bx)
                                            (#’parse-integer by))
                ("Button B: X\\+(\\d+), Y\\+(\\d+)" line2)
              (cl-ppcre:register-groups-bind ((#’parse-integer px)
                                              (#’parse-integer py))
                  ("Prize: X\\=(\\d+), Y\\=(\\d+)" line3)
                (multiple-value-bind (x y) (cramers-rule ax bx
                                                         ay by
                                                         (+ px conversion)
                                                         (+ py conversion))
                  (if (and x y (>= x 0) (>= y 0) (integerp x) (integerp y))
                      (+ (* x 3) y)
                      0))))))
        line1 line2 line3))))

(defun part-1 ()
  (puzzle (input-pathname)))

(defun part-2 ()
  (puzzle (input-pathname) (expt 10 13)))

By Liberty Nation Authors

On this edition of Liberty Nation Radio we ask where the taxpayer cash went, how Elon Musk is reshaping government, and whether globalists are on their last breath. For more episodes, click here.

This started out as a post on the support group, but it became a post that needed to be on the blog.

The groundrules here are -- if you see a problem in the support group and you can help with it, please give it a try and speak up.

It's important to develop a community here if the product is going to gain users, and become solid for all people and achieve all its potential for blazing a new trail. If it's just me, the results are predictable and not good -- I'm one old man here, with limited capability. The product still has issues, so there is still plenty of work to do, but I think the result will be worth it.

The goal is to bootstrap something new -- a social network without all the problems of Twitter et al. Ultimately the limits they impose on writers are unacceptable. I've waited for them to fix these problems for 18 years now, and I've come to see, amazingly, they don't see them as problems. They are happy to have writers paste images of their writing instead of the words themselves. Or break their writing up into 300-character chunks that are basically impossible to read and a bitch to write. And no titles, no editing, no style, no links. And they call it the web? (End of editorial.)

If this works, it will blaze a trail for new products on both sides, reading and writing. We've got reading covered from a technical standpoint with FeedLand, and some good UI, I want to integrate them with WordLand. And, as with everything based on RSS, you can replace my stuff with others, easily. Unlike the twitter-like systems, which are monolithic, and rely on federation (which imho doesn't actually work) to make it possible for components to be replaced. They should have all started with RSS and slowly and carefully added features without sacrificing the replaceability of components. Instead they decided, imho unwisely, to try to reinvent RSS. The result is confusion and stagnation.

I would also like to encourage people with WordPress experience to help come up with a template that accomadates WordLand sites in a canonical form. Makes sure WL's idea of a category is a good match with WP's. I am a very casual WordPress user as you can see from my test site. I like the template, but it has errors in it. I don't plan on becoming a WordPress expert, there are so many of you, and I have my plate full with all kinds of other stuff where I'm the only expert.

I chose WordPress for the same reason I chose MP3 and XML for podcasting in 2001. There's absolutely no question it's the consensus platform for web publishing. There are others, but the one that's most deeply installed is WordPress. So many people know how to make it work. It's a 20+ year thing, and they've done an excellent job of maintaining compatibility. Stuff we developed that worked with WordPress in the 00s still works today. That probably has a lot to do with it being the consensus.

Anyway, it's encouraging to see how many people are trying WordLand. Now I expect there will be lots of problem reports. It's an important time when help is needed.

Dave

My much-better-half’s windshield wipers stopped working just in time the other day – which was the day a two-day snowstorm descended on our part of SW Virginia. More accurately stated, the windshield wipers in her ’05 Toyota RAV4  stopped working just as it began snowing. The perfect time for them to stop working! That’s what […]

The post An Easy Fix! appeared first on EPautos - Libertarian Car Talk.