Linked List: September 2, 2020

Wednesday, 2 September 2020

Bruce Weber, writing for The New York Times:

Tom Seaver, one of baseball’s greatest right-handed power pitchers, a Hall of Famer who won 311 games for four major league teams, most notably the Mets, whom he led from last place to a surprise world championship in his first three seasons, died on Monday. He was 75.

The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia and Covid-19, according to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The greatest Met who ever played. You read what teammates and opponents say about him, and they don’t know what to emphasize more: how great a pitcher he was, or how good a person. That’s a life.

Trump Encourages North Carolina Residents to Vote Twice to ‘Test’ Mail-in System ★

Lauren Egan and Pete Williams, reporting for NBC News:

President Donald Trump suggested that people in North Carolina should vote twice in the November election, once by mail and once in person, escalating his attempts to cast confusion and doubt on the validity of the results.

“So let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote,” Trump said when asked whether he has confidence in the mail-in system in North Carolina, a battleground state.

“If it’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote. So that’s the way it is. And that’s what they should do,” he said.

It is illegal to vote more than once in an election.

Of course it’s illegal. It’s also illegal to tell people to do it. But what’s disgraceful about it isn’t what the letter of the law says, but the utter contempt Trump and the entire Republican party have for the basic concept of democracy. It doesn’t matter if he’s “serious” or “joking” — either way it’s a goddamn disgrace.

A Lesson for UI Designers: Think Like a User ★

Cabel Sasser:

So, @JuliaMinamata is making an amazing EGA graphic adventure, drawing each pixel by hand.

But, one Photoshop setting — understandably! — eluded her for a lifetime.

I’ve been here! I feel this so much! This video should be required viewing for every UI designer on the planet!

I know that feeling. Also, the game Minamata is making, The Crimson Diamond, looks amazing.

You Should Follow Daring Fireball on Twitter ★

Longtime readers are probably aware that there’s an @daringfireball Twitter account, which auto-posts links to articles shortly after they’re published. You should consider following if you’re not already. It’s also a good place to publicly comment on posts — I generally read all the mentions there (and for my personal account), and am always more up to date reading Twitter mentions than I am email. Twitter beats email for reading comments from readers because of its enforced brevity and the fact that I don’t have to open them, I can just scroll and read. (I really do try to keep up with reader email too, and switching to Hey for my public address has truly helped in that regard.) With Twitter’s app, you can even get notifications of new posts — go to the @daringfireball account profile and tap the little bell icon.

What prompted this periodic reminder about the DF Twitter account was a strange bug in my auto-poster. I don’t use a third-party service for posting these tweets; I wrote my own script to do it, so that auto-posted tweets would be formatted just right, like, say, in the rare case when a headline is too long to fit in a tweet. I wrote about the Tootbot back in February, when I (finally) updated it after moving Daring Fireball to a new server in November.

Anyway, last night, something went wrong, and the @daringfireball account tweeted out a handful of weeks-old posts. Turns out they were tweets from my old instance of the Tootbot, running on another server. It had stopped working last year when Twitter tightened the SSL encryption requirements for its API, and I never turned the thing off. So the poor little guy had been running for the last year, trying to post tweets every minute, nonstop, and failing. And for some reason, last night, Twitter started accepting those requests and posting them — but only occasionally — which is why only four duplicate tweets were posted, and they were posted hours apart. What a weird bug.

The old Tootbot is now resting in retirement.

Ridley Scott on Epic’s ‘1984’ Spoof ★

Ridley Scott:

“I think the animation was terrific, the idea was terrific, the message was ‘ehh’.”

(Via Dave Mark.)