Scripting News: Recent Episodes
None
Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
Apparently the nightly email didn't go out last night. The problem was an error when it tried to read the Linkblog entries for the day. I've seen reports that these errors happen when you try to read the Links tab on scripting.com. The error shouldn't kill the email sending, it should just omit the linkblog entries, and publish the rest.
The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal.
I see the new Game of Thrones series just completed it third season. I tried getting into it, and couldn't. But then I didn't get going in the original series for the first few attempts. People say this show is good, so I will probably give it another try.
, as in the Central Intelligence Agency. The story is fine, but what really sets it apart is the quality of the acting and production. Beautifully filmed, better to watch it on a nice big screen set with good audio. Two seasons only, but if you want to know the kind of TV I like, this is it.
I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them.
BTW, Jake Savin is using Claude to build Frontier on Node too. I asked Claude for help with this, and it turned out much better than I expected. I was not expecting this much success this quickly. This is exactly the kind of project AI tools excel at and I as a human am glad not to have to do the work on. The project is perfectly explained in the source code of Frontier, it can put it all together much faster and better than I could when I was working on it ever day and had a younger more agile mind with much better memory. I think one of the reasons this went so fast is because we did the work with the current best models, and they have been advancing so fast, you can see the differences in result on projects like this.
uncomfortable about this whole thing. I'd like it to turn out better than it was, but we're missing so many pieces here, the only way to really do it is the port the whole Frontier environment including user interface. (I left this piece exactly as I wrote it, because the next thing I did was plan with Claude on putting a UI on Frontier, so I don't have to turn Drummer into a programming environment. That would be a long drawn out project for me, and why do that, when you'd just end up with another Frontier.)
for. There are staggering moments of brilliance where it does something in an hour that took several devs a decade to do. But only if they have an exact authority on how it should work, ie when it was cloning software. It's getting better all the time, so there's hope that by 2027 it will be able to be trusted to remember the most basic rules.
. We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users they have. Highly recommend this podcast if you want to hear the story direct from the CEO.
I've been on quest to see if we could bridge AT Proto and RSS. I love the brightly colored-editors that are popping up inside AT Proto Land, and I want them to play with us in the land of RSS.
This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.”
. Imagine if we had support from journalism. We should have been working together all this time.
-- it starts from zero in every session, it has it all recorded in Markdown files, but it doesn't always read them, or incorporate what's in them. It's disturbing to see it not knowing anything about code that it wrote. But once it finds it, it completely sucks it in and knows as much or more as the person who wrote the code.
Claude is not ready to run the world. This is a problem for me, because I was counting on having it do this for me. Maybe in the next release or the one after that. It's too forgetful. And it definitely hallucinates and sometimes when it could do damage. And when it asks for permission I can't imagine any human has any idea wtf it's talking about. This shouldn't be a political thing, we should be realistic about what it can and can't be relied on to do. I think this is perhaps why the AI companies are begging for regulation. They can't really tell the truth here, and shouldn't be expected to because they have a huge conflict.
for RSS.chat. The list is an OPML subscription list. We're reusing formats people are already familiar with, RSS and OPML.
Back when digital cameras were new, I suggested probably in a blog post that they add a feature that tells a joke before taking a picture so everyone is smiling, not fake smiles but real ones.
is fine for writers and reader, better than the ridiculous limits imposed by twitter-like systems. Writing on the web has been crippled since Twitter, now let's start building it back up. That's the appeal of standard.site, they are working toward the same goal. We should work together.
Working on my slides for WordCamp Canada next week.
I don't think I'll actually use the F-word in the slide. But I it makes me laugh when I see it.
It's funny because it's true.
I'm getting ready for a trip. And part of that is getting my laptop set up so I can post to Scripting News. If you're reading this, it worked.
I'm narrating development work on my Daveverse site. If you're interested, that's where I've been while I'm shaking out core bugs in the new WordLand. These are the things I want to stay fixed and never have to screw with again. It does actually work that way in products that go through a shake-out process. Drummer and FeedLand both work pretty well. Sure there are bugs and things I wish worked differently, but I and a few other people use them as everyday tools. I'm trying to get WordLand with its timeline function to be that way. A bunch of new hookups via HTTP and Websockets.
I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I'll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? ;-)
I am presenting the day before, where I'll do a demo of the new WordLand, explaining how it's now twice the product it was last time you all saw it. It is still centered on WordPress as the place where all the user's writing is published. And somehow through the magic of software, we manage to make it into a social network. And the cool thing about the whole stack of software we build on, all of it is replaceable and of the web, in every sense.
There are things that Bluesky and Mastodon can do that WordLand can't. But there are also many many things we can do with the structure that WordLand creates that the others can't touch. There's a simple reason for that, if implementing something, no matter how attractive, without limiting the web-ness of the system, we didn't do it. This is the social network of the web. That means all the pieces connect with each other in fantastic unforeseeable ways. And anyone can discover these connections. That was the joy of the early web, the thought "Hey I think I can do that" and when you try, it works! We're back there again, if the people come. The technical challenge is still there but now is smaller. Getting people to look and fall in love (hopefully) is the big challenge.
After WordLand 0.8 is ready, real soon now, who knows what's next? That's the glory a bootstrap. Every step tells you where to go next. That's how you know you're hitting a target.
I don't know if Matt will be there for my demo, I hope he is. He and Automattic and the community have created a fantastic platform. Finding WordPress has a super powerful API that I didn't know about is like finding a new web. Let me know if you see it too. ;-)
So thanks Matt for your great contribution. I hope to be able to thank you for that personally in Ottawa next week. Perfect timing.
Cross-posted from the WordCamp Canada site.
I know so many people around my age that were never told this simple truth that I heard Steve Jobs say in a video the other day. Paraphrasing -- the people who made the rules you think you have to live by weren't smarter than you. Once you accept this as fact, then if you can find the leading edge you can make it work the way you want it to. You can be one of those people.
Today's song: Oh My Love, by John Lennon. I was trying to remember this song. It kept eluding me. It's not one of his most famous. It's what you experience when you fall in love. Clarity. Endless possibility. At home in your life. For the first time.
Note this is for the 0.8 release of WordLand coming soooon. Not in the current released product.
A friend asked for this feature a few months back, before we had a Markdown mode in WordLand.
As I'm reviewing the product for first beta I realized I could now implement the feature he asked for.
How to..
- Copy a URL to the clipboard.
- Open WordLand, bring it to the front.
- Go into Markdown mode by clicking the M icon. It turns green.
- Select the text you want to be a link.
- Paste the URL copied in step 1.
It creates the link for you, in Markdown syntax of course.
To see it in HTML, just flip the Markdown button off.
I call this feature Cute Paste. :-)
A video demo.
I stop reading every piece that begins by wondering if the Dems or Repubs are "winning" the shutdown. Anything the Dems can do that has anything to do with governing is a win for all of us, including the Repubs, but esp the Dems. This is a new world, the old one is gone. Every day is a new reality.
The same energy that forced Biden off the ticket should get Schumer and Jeffries out of the top seats. Replace with people who can speak plainly about what's actually happening.
Fellow humans. If we're competing with AI, and to some extent it seems we are, consider that they have much better writing tools than we do. If we are to put up some kind of resistance to our cyber-domination, shouldn't we invest in better writing tools for bodied-intellects like us?
I try not to run away from controversy when conventional wisdom is in the way of progress.
The ActivityPub world, which MicroPub is part of (I guess), could benefit from reading Joel Spolsky's piece about Architecture Astronauts.
The big deal with WordPress, as outlined in the Think Different piece is that the strong API makes WP into something quite different from what most people think it is. I think of it as an OS for writing on the web. Very analogous to what we use(d) PCs and Macs for before networks were everywhere. This came up in a thread on Bluesky about MicroPub which appears to be a redo of Metaweblog, with better identity system.
Thanks to Tanya Weiman for observing that this blog started 31 years ago. Probably the longest-running blog on the internets. Still making trouble. And as they say, still diggin. You can always tell how long it's been by looking at the bottom of any archive page, where it's constantly calculating, down to the second, how long this blog has been running.
Why we all should love RSS. It makes the web higher level without taking anything away.
Fascinating blog post from Jason Shellen, tech entrepreneur, formerly with Blogger and Google. Here’s my perspective on part of the story he tells about RSS and Google Reader.
Netscape gave us RSS 0.91 and it was good enough to create a new powerful layer on the web. Then Netscape blew up and a bunch of repeated efforts to kill it from big companies. I’ll leave it to others to say why, but they tried over and over to extinguish the spark. Independent developers were stubborn, we kept using the original format, and in the end the independents prevailed.
Don’t ever think bigco’s are the answer. They almost always suck the life out of open systems. If you have something good going: work together. It’s the antidote to bigco dominance.
If you suck up to the bigco thinking they’ll let you in, maybe they will for a short while. But what you’ll be left with may not be worth the cost.
And just because you have a job at a bigco doesn’t make you hot shit. Maybe for a moment.
This theory has a name, it’s described in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and its lesson applies in tech and in the political disaster the US has become.
Try as hard as I can I still have distinct flows and more than one place where I edit. I think that's a consequence of working on WordLand. I have to use it for serious writing, otherwise how would I know if it works. Maybe I can find a way to merge flows, but not at the moment. I still have to do some copy/pasting.
I do all my shopping in ChatGPT. There must be a way to monetize that. For example, I want to buy a new backpack to carry my laptop and other mobile stuff. I should be able to set up anywhere there's wifi. I've got a modern MacBook Air, an iPad and two phones, one iOS and one Android. The main one is Android, I have to carry the iPhone because I use an Apple watch. I imagine there must be some improvements made in backpacks since I bought the last one, which was when I lived in Berkeley, in the late 00s.
I've been evangelizing evangelism lately. Focus on goals and help others help us achieve them. It's a virtuous cycle, because once people figure out that they can get help by helping us, they will help us more. That is, when it works.
Reason #29812 you know our current writing system is broken. When you want to post something that has more than the maximum characters they post an image instead of the text. I once wasted a few months making a writing tool for those kinds of posts, hoping that if it caught on we could have a shadow network that moved the actual text around the net between users.
I've used this phrase a few times recently: "Before we were so rudely interrupted."
Or, "the big interruption."
I'm referring to 2006, when web writing was downgraded, to be 140 characters with no styling, no links, without the ability to edit.
That's when writing on the web started going in the toilet.
So when I say it again I may link to this post, because out here on the web, linking is always allowed.
In 2014 I wrote a manifesto about web writing. A decade later later, I'm still trying to get writing on the web to work again. It was on a good track before the rude interruption.
Please try again if you've been waiting.
Report problems here.
It had been broken since Sept 14.
Still diggin! ;-)
Bluesky post: "The idea is to build a social network entirely out of replaceable parts. No silos, no centralization. Just the web."
I test drove three different EVs today at an event at SUNY Ulster today. VW ID.Buzz, Rivian R1T, Kia EV9. I was surprised the one I liked best was the VW. It handled well, the others were sloppy, drive like the big cars they are. The Rivian had the best computer system, looked even nicer at first look than the Tesla. The Kia EV9 had a standard Kia computer system, far behind that of Rivian or Tesla. VW's computer was halfway between, it appeared they thought overall about the controls, but I was so impressed by the ride, and size, and the whole concept of it, and I always liked vans. I'm seriously thinking about swapping my Tesla for the VW. There are other disadvantages, I'm going to start reading up on it, until today I never gave it any thought, didn't think it would be a car for me. But I realllly liked it.
With all respect to the tech industry -- why is the traffic in the Bay Area so awful. Why haven't they done anything about it.
Wouldn't that be a good test before running the whole world? As programmer myself, I wouldn't trust the algorithm without a lot of QA. Seriously. Think about it
It's the strangest configuration for a metropolitan area, the center of the city is in the middle of the bay. (Same as Seattle, btw.)
The best answer the tech industry came up with was Uber, as far as I know.
I lived in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Berkeley, Los Gatos and Woodside over 31 years and I did nothing to fix the problem either. My answer was to move to NYC where the transit system is pretty great. Then I moved to the mountains and got a Tesla.
BTW, the idea that the stars of Silicon Valley should run the world is not new. I first heard about it from Apple top level managers in the 1980s. They were not techno-fascists, but they did hugely underestimate what it takes to run the world, or even a small country in Africa.
With the advent of AI code development tools, maybe we should embark on a project to merge all programming languages into one syntax. To undo all the chaos and make humans more competitive with machines. The fact that there are so many development bubbles is a huge waste of resources. Makes us all net-net more stupid.
Yesterday I wrote about preserving freedom by using replaceable parts to form a social web out of the web itself. Outside the silos. I'm getting comments on it. Nice to see other people thinking likewise. That's what we need to get a bootstrap going. People.
In other words the social web is the web. It's made of people. Somehow we forgot that, and gave up so much.
I was thinking I might have coined "let the web be the web" as an obvious ripoff of The West Wing slogan for the new President Bartlet. But a search reveals that it was used, but all in very good ways, so that's cool. However a Google Trends search shows up nothing. I'm going to look at this in a year or two and see if that has changed. 😀
It's such a sexy idea, I had to get ChatGPT to generate it.
Let the web be the web.
People are surprised that I'm trying to build the for-real social web as opposed to the aspirational social web. It does require a lot of chutzpah. I feel that. Sometimes I put off doing things because while the coding is simple and straightforward, the immensity of it overwhelms me a bit. I don't remember feeling that way the first time around, possibly because we were doing it all step by step over approx ten years. Now it's all compressed into weeks. I know how to do it, and I've got or built the pieces I needed. But it just doesn't somehow feel right that the idea is actually becoming a thing. "This can't be happening." But we live in that kind of time. Who knows what monsters lie within. We may find out. Heh. Maybe that's where the goosebumps come from.
In yesterday's piece I suggested people start by creating a free site on wordpress.com to be their home on the open social web.
Someday soon you're going to read a post here, have something quick you want to say, click on a little icon, the editor opens, you write, post, and it's on your blog. I get a pointer. I can read it, and if I want, I can attach it to my post. The writing stays in your space, so you have an archive of all your writing. We let the web be the web.
I have a problem in the development version of WordLand. Sometimes when I bring it to the front, there's an error deep in jQuery, an event has fired and the handler is pointing to a string or number, not a function. It dies, with no stack crawl, because it was responding to a focus event or blur or something like that. Something got overwritten. I have no idea where or how it happened, but once found it will be obvious. I've been trying to figure it out with Claude and ChatGPT and I can see it's going to take a few hours of concentration and learning to figure it out. But then I realized hey -- I bet I could use the Chrome debugger to find this problem. It has Gemini built in. It has access to the running code. I don't have to act as an intermediary, gathering data, pasting stuff into the AI bot. Now I'm looking forward to doing this.
Normal hats don't fit. Not even close.
So I buy my caps from BigHatStore.com.
In prep for my trip to Ottawa later this month for WordCamp Canada, my first trip out of the country in a long time, I wanted to get a new hat.
They don't have a big selection of NBA hats, so there's no Knicks hat that fits my head.
And they didn't have any Mets hats for some reason.
I thought -- I'll get a Wisconsin hat! I went to grad school in Madison and loved it there. You know Fuck em Bucky! But they didn't have any Wisconsin hats either.
I was dejected, but noticed they did have Harvard hats.
So I got one.
Which reminds me of a joke a famous VC told when we were walking around on the Stanford campus in 2004.
It goes like this...
How can you tell someone went to Harvard?
Pause.
I give up.
They tell you!
Haha.
Or they wear a Harvard baseball cap.
I plan to tell that joke a few times, while wearing the cap. :-)
I don’t like the Democratic leaders in Congress, but that doesn’t matter. People say what they’re doing won’t work. I agree. But the elected Democrats swore an oath, to uphold the Constitution. With that constraint there isn’t much they can do other than try to force the Repubs to do the same, and that isn't likely to work. It hasn't so far, but it's all they can do without breaking the Constitution themselves. Think about it. All these minds, and we haven't come up with anything.
What brought this home was a comment by a Democratic congressperson saying on CNN last night no matter what they do Trump won’t obey if he doesn’t want to. It’s true. They could get Repubs in Congress to fund Obamacare, but Trump could ignore it. That’s reality. What do the pundits think they should do?
Here's the unvarnished truth. Whatever the answer is it can't come from the Democratic Party.
One of the things we can do to preserve freedom, is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us who communicate outside, the more people will be attracted. Your participation helps draw people out, where independent developers can create new tools for you without waiting for permission of big companies who own the network you're using. It's like voting. The more people do it, the stronger we all are. I've spent the last 31 years insisting on that freedom for myself as a writer and developer and sharing it with others. As people flocked to Twitter and Facebook, etc, you thought I was gone, finished, a loser. I know they think that about me. But honestly, I also knew the open internet would come back, because I knew its value, and I knew eventually the silos would reveal their real cost. They may appear free, but there's a price to pay. I hope you'll consider using the tools. If you want to get started, create a free site on wordpress.com. Just create it. That will be your home on the open social web. And btw, you don't have to agree with my politics to be part of it. That's kind of the whole point. ;-)
Listening to today's David Frum podcast, from a journalist who says he reps the facts-only brand of journalism. He says his guest invented podcasting in 2014, about 14 years after we started it.
He then says that anyone in tech in the late 1990s made hundreds of millions of dollars. I didn't make very much money on those terms in the 90s, but I did a lot of the creating in that period.
Both of which tell you more about who he pays attention to than anything resembling the truth.
Maybe the first thing journalism can do is let up on the arrogance, they represent their own point of view and nothing more. Humility.
Regardless I find that Frum is worth listening too, because he asks questions that are worth thinking about.
In today's podcast he asks if the Dems ever get control of government, should they use the new norms to punish the Repubs who so damaged our system. He says it's a tough question, I say he's made it unnecessarily complicated.
The same people are also breaking laws that are on the books. Let the reconstituted DoJ do their jobs. And if there's one thing I'd insist on, they get an AG who doesn't dream a lot about how everyone means well, and they kick off the prosecutions immediately on taking office. And if the courts have been corrupted, then you have to deal with Frum's Dilemma, but not until then.
And of course I'm not one of the people he can hear, but if you're one of the people he does listen to could you send this his way. Thanks! :-)
I was having a conversation with Dan Knauss from the WordCamp Canada team. He said that people in the WordPress world don't think of it as a blogging community. I can see why they resist that, blogging has gotten a lot of bad PR in the last 19 years. The same bad PR that RSS got, and I felt that was so wrong, as wrong as what people said about blogging.
We like Twitter. So blogging must be dead. I understand -- I get it. But that's marketing, and only necessary because Twitter wouldn't let blogging be part of what they did. I'd be happy to talk about that during my keynote if people want to hear why I think that.
Anyway until 2017 I tried to fit in between the silos. 2017 is when I realized it was hopeless. I couldn't write for the web and for the silos at the same time, I had to choose, so I went with the web. Instant happiness.
Okay so you don't emphasize blogging in the WordPress community. This imho is a mistake.
Even if it was a community built around a style of sneakers or audio equipment I would say it's a mistake not to build a custom blogosphere just for the community. In the past we would have used Twitter for this, but I don't think anyone in their right mind wants to try to do that now. Esp a community, like WordPress, that has open web built into its bones.
I don't have a lot of time to write this morning, so let me leave you with this story. It took years to boot up blogging as a community. I thought everyone would want to do it as soon as they saw what it was, but there needed to be a critical mass before there could be a critical mass. Logically impossible, right, but somehow it happened anyway. But slowly, in fits and starts.
But podcasting, in contrast, happened much more quickly. The reason? We already had blogging to build on. We had a way to communicate without the press in the middle. That's the power of blogging. We build our own news system. Do things the journalists don't understand or are counter to conventional wisdom.
So imho it's only coincidence that WordPress happens to be a great blogging tool. It can be that and all the other things it is. It's going to be something else too, if I have my way -- it's going to define the basic software that powers the social web. Not peripheral, but central. That and RSS. Incredibly powerful combination, and I think ready to be a strong alternative to the silos. In order for that to work, we have to reboot the blogosphere, so we will do that. :-)
Cross-posted from WordCamp Canada.
A very small picture of the blogger's room at Dean For America in January 2004. A big chunk of political history happened in this room. I was there, in the runup to the Iowa caucus and on the night of the famous Dean Scream. Here's a picture of my digital camera in 2004. It wasn't cheap and as we know it was futuristic. That was possibly one of the first digital selfies.
I started this site to hold some of the essays John Palfrey posts on Facebook, where they are out of reach of the tools of the open web. John is a longtime friend, for over 20 years, and we did some great stuff together in the early days of the blogosphere. I will happily turn the site over to JP any time he wants, and provide personal support if there are problems. I want him in my online web family, and Facebook simply does not make that possible. It's a silo, as we know and that means it's basically a world unto itself. If we want to solve the problems of the world, we have to step out into the open space where what we write is not so local or controlled.
Until further notice dissent is an act of patriotism, support of and belief in our country.
Bill Atkinson died two weeks ago today.
I was explaining to a friend why he was so important. Most people who know of him know about MacPaint and Hypercard, both were fantastic contributions to the evolution of personal computers. But underneath all that he created a layer of the Macintosh OS called QuickDraw, which was a core innovation of the Mac, its graphic system. Every piece of software that ran on the Macintosh ran on top of QuickDraw.
Here's what QuickDraw is. Software could do things at the pixel level, a dot so small it's barely visible to the eye. What you're seeing on the screen is made up of collections of those dots, forming lines, boxes, ovals and text, and later page layouts, beautiful photography, and the text you're reading right now. The software that does all that, on the earliest Macs, is called QuickDraw. (Later a successor called QuickTime made the dots move and added sound, and now we have streaming.)
QuickDraw is great.
That's the thing. You could tell from the API that the designers really understood the tech. It wasn't the first time this had been done. And either Atkinson did it himself, working on it for years, or he "stole from the best" -- probably a lot of both. The prior art came from Xerox in Palo Alto, and the experience came from being a hard-working dedicated hacker who didn't give up until it was done. That's like saying if he were a basketball hero, he was like Bill Russell or Steph Curry. We don't talk about our accomplishments that much in tech, on a personal level, we have an idea that Steve Jobs made the Mac, but it was really created by developers, designers, graphic artists, writers and application developers. Like Bill Atkinson.
I spent many years building on his work, and many more years wishing I still was. He made a contribution, and that's, imho, pretty much the best you can say for any person's life.
Thanks Bill. 😄
Bill Atkinson, on his creation, MacPaint on QuickDraw on Mac. PS: For programmers, here's a summary of the QuickDraw API.
If there were a Joe Rogan of the left, he would tell you to stfu and vote for Cuomo for mayor of NYC.
NYC is a special place, like the Knicks are a special NBA team.
And btw, Cuomo, like Trump, is from Queens.
The Unisphere from the 1964 World's Fair. PS: The Joe Rogan of the left will be from Queens too. :-)
PPS: Queens doesn't have an Empire State Building, and they tore down Shea Stadium. So the Unisphere from the last World's Fair will have to do. But Queens is probably the most ethnically diverse place in the world. Think about that for a minute and how the fight for the soul of the US will be fought in Queens.
PPPS: I come from Jackson Heights and Flushing.
I had a conversation on Bluesky with a writer saying she didn't have much use for ChatGPT, though she had tried it.
I wanted to see if I could open a door, suggesting that next time there was an problem using a computer, that she bring the question to ChatGPT.
I think that's good advice for anyone who hasn't seen how useful these are as tools. You can use it like a search engine. What comes back answers your question. With Google you'd have to read through docs that are meant to cover every angle, but the AI bot zeroes in on the issue you're dealing with. And the writing on ChatGPT is better than what you would get on a random web page explaining a technical concept.
Passkeys
Previously I had tried to approach passkeys to get an idea of how I should use them, but never grasped the big picture. I just didn't understand what they were doing, but I understood it was about authentication. A hardware approach to identity, that much I got. How it worked and how I would use it did not click.
And then earlier this week, an essential site that I use infrequently, required using a passkey. When I had set it up a few months ago, as part of a bigger develolpment task, I had no idea what I was doing, and eventually bailed out, and left it unable to get back into the system, which happened on Sunday. By default the browser, Chrome, had previously connected it to my Pixel 9 Pro. There was a record of the connection being used for a variety of other services, but the one I needed was not there. This was after a full day of trying to debug it from the other side. I now have a lot more info about how passkeys work, I won't be able to say I know enough until I've re-established the connection.
I know a lot of readers of this site understood passkeys without anyone having to piece it together for them. I have never been one of those people. Just the way my mind works, it's why I'm a good person to test software, I get lost easily.
All this is to say -- think of ChatGPT as a technical assistant with broad knowledge and patience. That's where the real power is imho.
Highly recommend reading this review of Trump's parade. We had the wrong idea about what the Army would do. Basically if you order us to do a parade, we will give you a parade.
In a year or two it will be possible to create a perfect TV version of any person. No longer can you say any person has to die eventually and go away. And we can have anyone back we want.
If you're a regular reader of my blog you know I put images in the right margins of pieces. I get an idea then I go scouting around using search to find the image that fits.
Today I was looking for an image of an army General.
- i'd like a painting style image of an american general in world war ii timeframe standing on a white background, full body from shoes to helmet, lots of medals, angry determination on his face. as if it were a portrait.
This is what I got, and it's perfect.
Macho army general thanks to ChatGPT.
BTW, this piece in the NYT has a bit of wisdom that I had not considered because I don't listen to Joe Rogan it would never occur to me. He's relaxing white noise, chatting in the background while you play a game or write a blog post or text message on your phone, or just think about something unrelated. I forgot that mode of media consumption. I'm always on the hunt for that kind of content. That's why sports games are so good. You can almost completely tune out, knowing they'll replay the best stuff.
Reminds of a meeting we had a Berkman in the early days of podcasting. Most of the faculty were of course not on board with what we were doing, possibly believing that it threatened public radio (didn't turn out that way at all, they made incredibly good use of podcasting). One of the guys from PRX which was also incubating there at the time, said at me in a challenging way -- You get the best info from public radio! Right? I thought for a minute and realized this was a good question. No, I said, it's relaxing, I can tune out while I'm driving or walking around town. Loud groans. But it's so true. Now it's great when there's a TV series that really catches your attention, I love that too, but most of my media-ingesting time is with white noise, background relaxation. The world is still okay when the background noise on MSNBC are still on the air between the ever more disgusting ads for diseases I probably will never get.
There must be a better way.
It's like the canaries in a coalmine. When they go off the air that's when you really have to start worrying!
BTW, PRX was a good idea. Brilliant actually. Distribute the content from the public radio sources that generate too much to the ones in less populated areas where they don't generate enough. Podcasting blew that up -- but PRX adjusted their approach, and became a distributor of podcasting. That's an entrepreneur's approach. The were able to pivot and continue to make a contribution to this day.
I often wonder how we missed the opportunity to build a great media incubator at Harvard in the 00s. We were right there, and the backer of Berkman wanted entrepreurial projects, I found out at the reunion two summers ago. We had it, were there, if only.. Heh when you get to be my age there's lots of that.
Also I wonder how I missed the potential of WordPress all those years. Ships passing in the night. But we're there now, so..
I figured that yesterday's army march in DC would have caused clashes with the police in more places than it did, perhaps due to false flag attacks "from the left" at one of the many No King Day parades around the country. I thought this was the moment when it would all melt down. America's Reichstad Fire. If it were an episode of Mission Impossible or Batman, it would definitely have gone that way. I bet there were plans hatched on open chat channels between various Cabinet members and their families, and probably Elon Musk via an interpreter, to coordinate. I was also surprised there weren't any Tesla Cybertrucks in yesterday's parade. I guess the honeymoon is really over. Anyway, they had to have had a plan, but I keep forgetting this is not Generalissimo Trump, rather it's TV President "Taco" Trump. I think they had a plan and he lost his nerve at the last minute. Instead, the Maga in Minnesota lit a different fuse, assassinating the speaker of the state house. That's a line that hadn't yet been crossed, but you knew the day would come. It's here.
When Trump was on trial in NYC he begged for support from his base, no one showed up. The cops prepared for rallies that never showed up.
It's not just the government that's afraid of small groups of people working together. Big tech companies also. And startups hoping to sell out to big companies.
Sign seen in Philadelphia today via Mastodon.
If you think we need to find a way past the billionaires, then we have to find a way around the established media. They keep selling us out and we keep acting as if we show them that they're doing it in a way they understand they'll get on our side. But they can't. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair in 1935. It's still true 90 years later. Another great philosopher, Les Moonves, said in 2016, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," referring to Trump's run for president. It was good presumably because of increased viewership resulting more ad revenue. I'm sure it's still true today, though CBS stopped boasting about it in public.
Having a Democrat rise from the ashes of metoo is just what the doctor ordered. It could cure the revulsion some voters feel for Democratic wokeness. Cuomo was never tried or convicted of any crime, or voted out of office by the state assembly or senate in Albany. Or the people of the State of New York. Al Franken wasn't allowed to have his case adjudicated by a committee of Congress. Both were pushed from office by journalism, which imho needs to be put in their place, they've been sloshing into lanes they weren't elected to. Let me try to make this clear. Journalism's role is to inform us of events. Once informed, it's their responsibility to stop. Anything past that is campaigning, not news. Step back and let the process run its course. Ultimately it's the people who will decide. Now, if Cuomo wins, this is the best outcome possible because the NYT et al will complain endlessly about how the Democrats just elected someone who they don't approve of. This will probably get the Dems more votes in coming elections, because there are a lot of people who legitimately are disgusted by the NYT trying to run the show. If you want to govern, run for office. If you want to be a journalist, know when it's time to shut up.
BTW isn't it amazing that when you say something counter to Democratic dogma, their first impulse is to try to destroy you? If the Dems were a healthy political party and not a religion, their first impulse would be to try to work with you not destroy you.
"Who me?" asks the Democrat. Yes, you.
You'll know who the next leader of the Democratic Party is because they will be campaigning against the Democratic Party. Talking about things that actually happened rather than the hallucinations the Trumpies indulge in.
The linkblog project is coming along. Still more things to hook up but I thought it would be nice to take a picture of what a linkblog post looks like in the reader app.
What a linkblog post looks like in my reader. And just for fun because we can do it, here's a screen shot of the screen shot in the reader app.
Yesterday I posted a link to my political disclaimer from 2018. Also listened to a podcast interview with Senator Gallego of Arizona who says, correctly, that the Democrats have work to do with men. It's true, speaking as a man who has been voting solid Democratic since Kerry, but I didn't stop being a man, which is something that makes me cringe to say it, the way I cringed at admitting to being Jewish when I was a kid. I lived in a place where hate of Jews was always just under the surface in school, but not so well hidden at the playground.
Men as a gender were really pushed into a corner we couldn't get out of during #metoo, all men, not just some. If they say they weren't they're lying. I went to a future of journalism conference in 2018, and the only thing men talked about, quietly, among ourselves, was how scared we were of losing everything. It really was bad, but since then it's eased.
I wrote about #metoo in my political disclaimer, but didn't promote it for fear of retribution. I was threatened when I stood up for a friend whose life was ruined for as far as I could tell doing nothing wrong. If you don't shut up we'll do you too, basically.
Women are people just like men, and when they got to rage online against men, even people I thought I knew and were friends behaved abhorently. The way we imagine Trump might deal with us soon.
I have to add not all women, there were some who didn't forget that their male friends were still friends.
It was very clear where the Democratic Party came down on all this, and of course, the Republicans took total advantage of this. If you want to understand the manosphere as you all call it, start here. I vote with you all, but absolutely abhor the way you pushed us all into a corner and shut down our pride. Women are people too and they can be just as ugly as men. If you believe otherwise you're believing lies. I speak from experience, I was raised to believe all women are saints. That lie did not prepare us well for life.
The good news is if the Democrats can make peace with men, there are a lot more votes available to us. We can put it behind us, but we can't ignore that in the late teens we went absolutely fucking batshit crazy about half of the electorate. It's amazing the whole thing didn't completely crumble, irrevocably. We can still fix it, but we have to acknowledge that men were hurt in that period. You all seem to have forgotten that we are just people too.
PS: Re-reading the #metoo section of the disclaimer I can't believe how I tiptoed around the truth. The truth I didn't dare say was it was a huge hate campaign as divisive as anything the Repubs ever did. In a country that was supposed to outlaw this, and from a political party that was supposed to be liberal. The "both sides do it" reality probably hasn't yet sunk in but the Democrats sided with sadists and fascists. No other way to put it. Men absolutely were silenced. Afraid to speak for fear of retribution. If you were on the wrong side of this you have some soul-searching to do. And you probably pushed a lot of people of all genders into voting for Trump. The Dems posture of "who me?" has an answer -- yes you.
Today I'm going to teach WordLand how to manage a linkblog. Before doing that I tried to figure out what a linkblog is. I have been using various homebrew linkblogging tools which I have shared with others, but none of them became popular products. I wrote a summary to help guide the development work I have planned.
I was lucky to grow up in NYC, and had to commute from Queens to the Bronx every day to go to school. Some days I took the Q44 bus over the Whitestone Bridge, and other days I took the Q16 to the 7 train through Manhattan, and then the 4 or D trains up to 205th St in the Bronx. Took the same amount of time either way. So at age 15 I was able to go see the Grateful Dead after school at the Fillmore East on April 27, 1971. Midway through the set, a special guest band who they didn't introduce started tuning up on stage. We all wondered who they were. I now know the history thanks to the 500 Songs podcast, and this was the return of a band that had fallen out of favor, a band whose hits we all heard on WABC and WNEW-FM. When they started playing one of their biggest hits, Good Vibrations, the audience erupted in ecstasy. The Beach Boys now looking a lot different, but playing the same wonderful California music from the 60s. They couldn't be more different from the Dead, but there they were up on stage together. They were back, this time for good. This is a recording of the whole concert, the link points to the beginning of Good Vibrations. You can hear the gasp of recognition, and the bands recognition of the recognition, and from their it was a party in a party, including a sing-along part -- "gotta keep those a lovin' good vibrations happening with you." We were all growing up very quickly, but we had a moment when we could return to a more innocent time. Lovely the way music pulls you back in time. Brian Wilson wasn't there that night but his music certainly was.
I was wondering if Saturday's military parade in Washington was going to be the rollout of the Trump junta, and if that meant the president would appear in military garb, perhaps subdued so next year's parade they can add more features. So I asked ChatGPT to help.
President Trump is reviewing the military parade in on a stage in front of the White House in Washington DC. To honor the troops, he’s dressed in a faux military uniform with medals, and a cap that says Make America Great Again. Fighter jets are flying overhead.
When I tried the first time, last night, it got halfway through the drawing then quit, saying it violated their content guidelines. So I went to meta.ai, which also does drawing, and it was willing to do it, and even animated it. I uploaded the result to my AI group on Facebook. It should be visible to everyone, without an invitation.
I then tried again with ChatGPT and it was willing to do the same task it wasn't willing to do last night.
Generalissimo Trump, imagined.
Using soldiers as a political prop. Trump gave a political speech, lying about protests in front of a group of people dressed as American soldiers. They all appeared to be enjoying the president’s tough talk about the role he wants the military to play in policing the cities. MSNBC should not broadcast this.
Would one of the browser vendors work with me on doing something nice with displaying feeds in XML form? I don't support obfuscating what a feed is, that just adds confusion. When I lift the hood of a car I want to see an engine not a drawing of something that sort of looks like a car, but not really, and looks nothing like an engine.
Yesterday I introduced a new feed for great art, 24 times a day. Every hour on the hour.
Today, a version of that feed provides one work of art each day, at midnight, Eastern.
- art.feediverse.org
- artdaily.feediverse.org
Why I did this feed. I'm crafting a new information product, and I want to include a random work of art but not every hour, once a day is enough. I thought it was worth a detour to make the feed that I wanted.
The first work of art in the feed on its inaugural issue was The Countess from Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526. It was chosen at random from a collection of 42,473 works of art.
The Countess, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526.
There's a documentary coming out about podcasting. I was interviewed in it and got to tell a bunch of stories, about how you get people interested in working with each other. I told the story of how I chose the Grateful Dead's music to get the initial implementation going, on both the sending and receiving side. I used their music, since it so totally fit in with the philosophy, ie come as you are, we're all just people. And the song I chose was a good one too, the US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. I've been hiding out. In a rock and roll band." Using great art to prototype this connection makes total sense. It says we carry forward our art where ever we go, no matter where it takes us, a great work of music or art is always a good thing to share.
Here's something to think about. As you may recall, I have an hourly art feed, available both in RSS and on Bluesky. Same content.
Today I gave each the same new name, art.feediverse.org.
If you use that URL on Bluesky, you go to its version of the content stream. And if you give the same URL to a web browser, ie accessing it via HTTP, you get the RSS version of the same data.
- On Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/art.feediverse.org.
- On the web: https://art.feediverse.org.
BTW -- think of feediverse as a web of feeds. It's open of course, because the web itself is open. And it's pretty social as you will see. It's why I think it's really the first instance of the "open social web."
I've long felt documents should have their own CNAMEs. I even went so far as to design a system where each node in an outline could have a CNAME. I still believe in this, why not have a hierarchic file system that's as editable as an outline? It's the same idea that works in so many other contexts. It's why the idea of a scripting system on a graphic PC like the early Mac made a world of sense. It's why Unix underneath that same UI was the right way to go. And why the web is so nice, you just View Source and you get to lift the hood and see how it works.
They were smart at Bluesky to use DNS this way. Why invent your own identity system when the net itself has a great distributed system that scales? They just made the wrong call (imho) in not using RSS for their timeline data, or at least the outside world's view of their timeline, in both directions -- in and out. That's the basic idea of the Internet itself. No one cares what's behind your TCP interface, it could be a network with a million nodes using some wacky protocol to connect them. As long as I can get to you via TCP, you're on the net. This is the kumbaya philosophy of the net, why not just use what already works.
You'll see that we're able to do some interesting twitter-like stuff with this duality.
A thread for comments and questions.
PS: A piece about DNS as ID in 2012.
Yet another journalism article about how AI is not really intelligent and all the tech industry hype must stop now or else we'll write another strongly worded article about how they are not really intelligent just like the 800,000 previous articles about how AI is not really intelligent.
Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard.
I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.
I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances.
Some random thoughts about wealth.
Suppose you're an average middle-class person who works for a tech company when the company is bought out for a huge amount of money and your stock is now worth $10 million. It's liquid today. You just received a check for $10 million. What do you do?
Answer: You buy things to see if there was a reason to make the money, and it turns out there really wasn't. You would have been just as happy in the big house in the rich neighborhood or the smaller house in a more modest area.
Then what if you reach another level, now you have a check in your hand for $100 million, then $1 billion, then $25 billion and keep going. It doesn't stop there. At each level you are compelled to find something fantastic that you can use that money for. Some power that the new level of wealth gets you.
We saw in Succession, they played out the lunacy, the people use a lot of space, but they're still just people. If they loved someone or someone loved them, they'd be much happier than all the happiness all that money ever gave them.
Having such large useless amounts of money is a not only a problem for the rich folk, we've found out, it's a problem for everyone else too, because eventually they get around to buying political power and they start using the money to change other people lives, always for the worse, it seems.
We need a new game that only super rich people can play that doesn't hurt the rest of us. I'm not advising anyone to do anything. But I think this is what I've been writing about on my blog since the beginning.
I didn't understand why, for example, Evan Williams didn't just make technology and give it away, after having made billions from Twitter.
Why did Bill Gates have to accumulate so much money and threaten the independence of the open web, a miracle, to get it? Why not use your power to make miracles before you retire, start doing the good you were promising to do later, right now? What good, in hindsight, did the extra billions do for anyone, including Gates? When his power was at his peak, in the 90s, he could have done a much bigger thing for the world, give us a free new level of communication that would be available equally to everyone.
Elon Musk, having done some incredible things in computers, finance, cars and space, had to invent new challenges that only his wealth can buy, and eventually came up with things that only the US Treasury could buy, and some things like relocating the human species on Mars, that no amount of money can buy (or so scientists say). He needs to receive an award of love and gratitude for not using his wealth to make everyone else totally miserable (including himself, it seems).
PS: I haven't yet read Evan Osnos' new book about billionaires, but I want to. He's done some great reporting in the past.
PPS: See also: Transcendental Money, or money that replenishes itself, ie money that transcends time.
PPPS: Another one: Your human-size life.
PPPPS: Ted Turner said "I bet you’re all wondering what it feels like to be a billionaire. It’s disappointing really. I’ve learned that great wealth isn’t nearly as good as average sex."
With ChatGPT there's no excuse for a congressperson not validating every word in every bill. They could ask the bot to read the bill and call out any provisions that contradict your previous positions. It knows where you stand even if you've never written it down. I've found it can do that for my work. I'm sure it could do it for a legislator. Even better, news orgs could do that for them. Or validate a bill against their campaign platforms. "I promise never to touch Social Security" could be validated against pending legislation. The time delay part of this isn't an excuse any longer.
A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.
I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments.
I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment.
Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging.
Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example to crib from.
A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence.
I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity. We were so lucky. We developed all kind of stuff that was only possible when there was no platform vendor.
But then in the mid 00s things changed, and since then the users have flocked to closed systems. It would be similarly wonderful if we had an open social web, but we don’t. Mastodon is open but it’s not simple like the web is, and Bluesky is simple, but it is not open. And neither supports the most basic features of the web.
Today most active devs weren’t around when the web came along and knocked down the silos. It is imho possible to have an open social web, but the people who are trying to make one out of complex and closed systems will imho never get there.
They would be better off to look for different foundations to build on other than Mastodon and Bluesky. I have one in mind, btw. You will probably be surprised, but then we were all surprised by the web itself.
This was an email I sent to one of the people I'm working with at Automattic, and realized I was actually writing a blog post.
I was watching on the FediForum session yesterday, and heard all this stuff about Bluesky and Mastodon, but these are products that are poorly prepared for the "open social web" -- and imho they won't get there. But WordPress is already there.
I think some of the products are good, btw -- I hadn't seen Surf, it's basically a feed aggregator that can get input from Bluesky and Mastodon. I don't think they're using their RSS support though. Not adequate. But WordPress RSS is fine. I made an improvement to the Scripting News RSS to add an
That's the key to what we're doing. Reading and writing, with the UI of a twitter-like product, all built on RSS, with the content also appearing on the network WordPress has defined. I see this as huge.
Obviously this needs to be a blog post.
I'm totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there in the last few days. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two of them. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s with Frontier. Today I might have one of the largest public codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week?
A list of ten random country names
- Brazil
- Bangladesh
- Chile
- Ireland
- Guatemala
- Kenya
- Morocco
- Peru
- Portugal
- Thailand
Note: I was testing a new reading app, wanted to be sure it understood bulleted and numbered lists from an outliner. I always add support for outliners to whatever I do. It's just a thing for me. 😄
Now a personal comment. What pisses me off most about Bluesky is the political environment all this is happening in. We need an open social web. They've got a lot of people convinced they are it. They are not and they know it. And they keep leading people on. They should either deliver, now, or get out of the way.
Regular readers of my blog know that I've been calling out Bluesky and people associated with it for saying they're an open platform, and part of the web, when they are neither. Why don't people, esp journalists, call them out on this? We've been around this loop over and over in tech. There's a virtual conference today, FediForum, that on their home page repeats the hype. Why do people do this? What's the point of pouring your time into technology you hope someday will be open? I bought a ticket to the conference so if there are any sessions that look like they might be productive I can participate. I even wrote a keynote, so you can see there is a way for this stuff to start working, quickly, if the vendors you're looking up to are sincere in their promises. I've posted it on Mastodon and Bluesky so if you have comments or questions, we can start the discussion now, or any time.
Why doesn't Walt Frazier have a freaking podcast. Come on. (Jon Stewart did a series of podcast-style interviews with him.)
And btw one of these days I'm going to clear the time to write a useful and up to date RSS feed validator. The one the W3C uses is a total embarassment. I'm not even going to link to it it's so awful.
If everything goes well, the RSS feed for Scripting News will now have a channel-level image element because it's part of a network that requires an avatar-like image. This required me to go through some very old code that my system still depends on. It's remarkable how much time this seemingly small feature took to implement. One of these days I have to move this code to one of my more modern servers. One reason it took so long is that a random package that does something that never changes, had a breaking change in it. The breakage culture of the Node.js world is just plain fucked up, no other word for it.
Joe Trippi posted a video to his new sez.us service where Pete Buttigieg explains what the Russians have done to the US. I see it that way too. When Brian Lehrer asked a few weeks ago how the US got so divided of his guest Bob Woodward (a fascinating time capsule, recorded before the election) they both missed it. We were divided by an enemy that is on the cusp of destroying the US without launching a single nuke. Putin didn't have to invade Ukraine. I guess even he didn't think his plan would succeed so spectacularly. BTW, I don't think Trippi's network is the answer, but maybe it is. I wish I had had a chance to create the system he was using, we would make a good team. Anyway we need to be further along than his offering is. The right system would allow me to control my presence with only RSS, in and out. Maybe not for everyone, to start, but it would allow us to start building. It's why I have been lobbying for inbound and outbound RSS as a back-end for all these networks. With the rise of Bluesky in the last couple of weeks (things are happening that fast now) we may have a new shot at it because Masto and Threads are certainly feeling it, and when people feel competed-with they are more open to new thinking.
Excellent piece on how Bluesky leaves users with the impression that it's open and decentralized in ways it is not. If it's bought by someone who wants to use it the way Musk has, they can, without any recourse by the users. As they said in the old days, if you're getting something for free, you're the product, not the customer. We helped Musk build a way to excercise political power against our interests. You may think Bluesky is a way of fixing that, but it probably isn't. They're digging a deep hole, probably too deep to climb out of at this point. They did some innovative stuff, perhaps. But they ended up at the same place, it appears, as Twitter did.
I like to put something here every day whether I have something to say or not because I'm not sure how my software would handle a post-less. Someday we may find out, but not today. 😄
When I was a boy my mother would sometimes say if I didn't stop belching I wouldn't be able to stop.
Why Repubs won? They campaigned in a new way that the Dems apparently didn't notice (neither did I, not claiming to be better). Repubs were more creative and improvisational. They didn't worry what Jake Tapper or Ezra Klein would think, so came off as more genuine. It's a TV show, acting and suspension of disbelief are what count. It has nothing to do with anything else. Sorry it has to be that way but that's how it is. I don't think they hate women btw, they would have voted for Roseanne Barr or Melissa McCarthy. Maybe Chris Rock, they probably would have really liked Will Smith. Idiocracy was incredibly prescient. No joke.
I predict that people will come to appreciate features that Mastodon has that the other twitter-like social web services don't.
A few days ago I saw Donald Fagen at a local supermarket. I had heard he lives in the area. I didn't bother him, I imagine a star like that enjoys moments as an ordinary person, but he's anything but. I'm listening to Haitian Divorce this morning, grinning from ear to ear as I sing along.
We're going to open testing for WordLand shortly. At first I only want developers who know write great bug reports. My goal is to speed up development and reduce wear and tear on me. Once we're confident it really works as advertised, we'll open up the testing further. There will be a form you can fill out to get in the queue. The choice of the first testers will be highly subjective.
Last year on this day: We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a blog post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of Textcasting, btw.
I am working on a text editor for WordPress using MediumEditor, but I save the text in Markdown and when I reload the Markdown text I regenerate the HTML for MediumEditor. I think the social web should exchange Markdown as the canonical form of web text. It has the right set of features, it's Just Enough HTML.
ChatGPT can't remember my coding conventions. It always falls back to using features of JavaScript I told it not to use. I indent my code according to the way it works in an outliner, so I can't use their code without having to manually modify it. I haven't forgotten that I'm the human and it's the computer. Its memory is supposed to be perfect. And I am a paying customer, btw.
It's good to have a record of the things you posted and when you posted it. On August 12 of this year, I tweeted this: "When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day." I included a screen shot of the front page of the NYT on Jan 7, 2021. One in three Trump voters still watch mainstream news, which follows the lead of the NYT, and if they had been straight with us, perhaps enough people who like Trump's style would have realized the danger, and voted in a conservative way, ie to conserve the Constitution. Because of how they covered it, we now get to re-run the 2016 experiment all over again.
But, as Heather Cox Richardson points out in Jon Stewart's weekly podcast (a must-listen) -- we have more experience too, and perhaps will know better how to deal with Trump and know that his bark is often worse than his bite. I have to say as the new reality sinks in, I'm not as scared as I was on Election Night last week or even Election Night in 2016. A lot of people will sell out this time who didn't before. But the problems of climate change have gotten worse in the intervening years, and people feel it in their bones, pocketbooks and fears. You think inflation was bad? This will be far worse and it's happening now, and nothing we can do at a human scale will make it go away.
We're dealing with a very unusual drought in the eastern US now. Fires are breaking out where we never used to have them. Yeah this shit is real, and even people who don't believe in science are feeling it.
As someone once said, you should never waste a good crisis. A lot of other people feel compelled to move. Unfortunately some are moving to the wrong place, as they always do. Making change isn't easy, but is possible, if you understand how people move. As they try to figure out what the Dem's failed at, that's it.
Skate to where the puck will be, not where it was, as another famous philosopher once said. And people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors (which I said, sadly, but then put that fact to use to get various standards to fly by without debate). There is a method to human madness, in other words, imho.
Update: My guess is that they haven't released enough code to run a Bluesky of your own, because all the answers from people who say they know say the same thing -- "It doesn't work that way." You could write your own, but if we were to do that, why use their one-off API, use a standard instead, and we might have a chance to interop with other systems in a meaningful way. I don't blame them for wanting to cash out, but I do blame them for conning people into believing it's some kind of escape. Until I hear otherwise Bluesky is a dead-end, not worth investing your hope in. If you're migrating from Twitter this is no better. Keep looking. But I promise to let you know if I get any info that changes my opinion, so if I've got it wrong, people from Bluesky, just answer the freaking question in the post at the top of this page. Thanks.
If Bluesky is open source, which it appears to be, someone who has time and has experience packaging products, should create a Bluesky distribution for a few popular hosting services (Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud), so installing a new instance is as simple as it can possibly be. One click? That would be awesome. We need to have thousands of these running. If it really is like the web, as they say it is, then it should be like the web in every way. There are lots of websites. If you sell your website to a billionaire, that has no effect on my website. Right now we are totally vulnerable to the Bluesky folk selling their service to another country, or our country for that matter -- or a billionaire, or whoever. Whoever did this packaging job would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Anticipating the objection that Mastodon is already doing this -- it is not. Setting up and using a Mastodon instance is good for nerds. Not for poets.
Does anyone know who was doing the work at kamalahq on the various social networks? I wonder if they would like to keep posting. They stopped updating on Election Day. We could change the names of the accounts. I thought it was great that there was a steady source of political news that didn't equivocate like the NYT-inspired news orgs. I would love to help fund a continuation of that flow.
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what's missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network. It is not represented online 7-by-24-by-12 every year, not just presidential election years. Democrats, when you lose it's because you didn't show up. It's happened three times so far, at least. We could have led here because most of the innovators in this space vote Democratic, but the leadership doesn't listen. The voters could get to know all the stars of the parties. People were right when they said they didn't know Harris. It's time to let the leaders rise from the net, not just from the insiders. This is how you do it.
ChatGPT's web search can search my blog, as I do on Google, but it's way more useful. Here's a screen shot. We're getting there. Really nice.
I asked ChatGPT: "Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like."
Dave's life as imagined by ChatGPT.
I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question.
I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere." Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic.
It's worth listening to On The Media, interview with Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through social web and podcasts, if that's where we're all getting our news from, and btw MSNBC are already pretty well limited in what they'll tell us (this was our beef with NYT if you recall) -- the next step is to make it impossible for us to hear what each other are saying. Now is the time to plant seeds for a defense of our speech and communication later.
BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can create your own.
I've actually written a lot, but haven't wanted to publish most of it. So many reasons why the Dems lost. Maybe I should just list them.
- Biden shouldn't have run again. There would have been a primary. Given the result of the election this week, we should have found out what support each candidate had with voters. We didn't get to choose the candidate. That said Harris ran a fantastic campaign.
- Biden should not have shut down his campaign website. Rather than using it to raise money to feed to the media industry, they should have organized and listened, to develop new channels of communication with voters that were not dependent on journalism. Every time the Dems run a campaign, win or lose, they shut down their connection to the electorate. The voters' only role in the party was when they needed our money and our vote. We were not part of governing. Huge mistake. And I'm not just saying that now, I've said that about every Democratic campaign since Obama. This is probably the biggest single mistake the Dems keep making.
- We needed a prosecutor at the top of Justice. I don't know what Garland actually did, but I'm sure it will all be swept out by whoever is Trump's AG.
- Men's votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which is why so many voted for Trump. We could have had a bunch of them this year, if we had only spoken to them with respect.
I don't know if we can reboot the Democrats as an opposition party given all these problems. Whatever comes next is going to perform very differently from the party that lost this election. If we try to do it again the same old way, it will fail even worse. I think everyone knows this by now.
Final note (I think). The pain you feel at first may abate. It did for me. I had pushed down memories of 2020 and 2021. It was a horror show, and Trump was the main character. So the first thing I had to deal with is that I don't want to remember that. Too painful. But once I realized that's not where we are right now, it's a totally different situation, that's when the creative impulse rose as the pain receded. We have one short term thing to do -- keep the campaign running, and long term we have to recognize division we add, and counteract it. We are the party that welcomes everyone regardless or race, religion, country of origin, age or gender. All of them. No exceptions. The election result represents big change. And it's a good time to make more changes.
"Richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world."
Also to the Twitter founders, amassing that much power and centralizing it as Twitter did, had a cost that we're paying now. But it's very hard to stop when the juggernaut is rolling. I understand, but in the future we have to think about this more clearly. When a medium becomes too big and centralized, there's trouble ahead. It was accidental that Trump was the one to take advantage of this to route around journalism and go direct, but it was not accidential that Musk did.
My longtime friend, Mike Arrington said next time have a primary. He has a point. Would Harris have been the nominee if the Dems had had a normal primary process? Who knows. Maybe the voters could have told us then that what happened yesterday was coming.
Speaking of Musk, maybe he will temper Trump's desire for retribution. It may be a vain hope, but I'll cling to it anyway. Doing business in a world of retribution might not be too conducive to the creativity needed to run innovative tech businesses. A climate of fear doesn't inspire great software. I know the quality of products Musk makes, I own and love my Tesla Model Y. Best car I've ever owned or driven.
Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter: "What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!" I wrote in 2017, that some Repub would buy Twitter, and it would merge and thus transform politics and tech. This was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one who saw it. We could have headed this off, if people would just listen. I beg you to listen to people you don't usually listen to. The NYT will never hire someone like me to write on their op-ed page, so if you only accept your input from people with legit credentials, you'll miss insights like this. We're paying a heavy price for this now. When I begged people to listen they came back with the balance sheet valuation of Twitter, but they were leaving the most important asset off the balance sheet, the dollar value of being able to elect a president. Musk didn't miss this.
Speaking of Carville, yesterday's Trippi podcast with Carville as the only guest was the best podcast I've ever heard. I recommended it yesterday as inspirational. Now that we know the outcome of the election, it's a marker of where we were before the results were known. A world that no longer exists. But like stories written in 2016, the markers are useful to see where we once were and how we got here, and what we can learn from what happened between. I wish it had turned out the way these two great friends thought it should have. But it didn't. But there was a hint that they knew what wouldn't work this time. No spoilers.
Be generous with all classes of people, by gender, age, race, religion, whatever is used to divide us. Stop vilifying men. Carville was right. There's no reason to make one whole gender the scapegoat for all our problems. It's no accident that the Repubs own the men. We could probably have had ten percent or more of their voters if we stopped doing this. Key point, when you blame a whole gender, you hurt people who have no power to stop it.
Blame is pointless. It may be emotionally satisfying at some level, but it is division, and that's why we keep losing elections. We don't see it but we create our own divisions. This must stop.
First thing -- Don't shut down the campaign. We must keep communicating with the electorate, independent of what they get from the news orgs. The Harris campaign did an exemplary job. Why shut it down. Keep setting the agenda. Help keep us organized. Preserve the perspective and expectation of democracy in the US. Change the message from raising money, to keeping us all in touch with the opposition (ie us). This is the mistake we made in every election since we had the web to organize. The Repubs, almost by accident, never stopped organizing. And now that Musk, who will be part of the new administration, owns Twitter, you can be sure they will stay and get more organized. We can do it too! We have to stop making this mistake of going back to zero after election, whether we win or lost.
In 2016, on the night of Election Day, when it was obvious Trump would win, before taking a Xanax and going to sleep, I wrote a piece, that my friend Chuck Shotton says I should run again. Rather than doing that, I'll quote the important part. "I don't think it's about economics, I think it's about change happening too fast. And the Trump voters had the power to bring it to a screeching halt, they saw the chance and took it."
lists.opml.org: The other day I asked a famous blogger who uses RSS if he would be willing to share his list of feeds, so others could subscribe to them. He declined, for good reason, there was private stuff in the list he couldn't share. I certainly understand that. Then I realized, as often is the case, that I could do myself what I had been asking others to do. And in fact I already was sharing my OPML subscription lists, but people who didn't use FeedLand wouldn't know how to find them. So I decided to make it easier. On lists.opml.org I've got a link to the lists of podcasts I'm subscribed to. That list should update every hour for any additions or removals from this list. I don't update the list very often, fwiw. And I make no warranties about the quality of the podcasts, or when the feeds in the list update. And maybe this will give other people an idea that they might want to do this as well. Let me know if you do, I'd love to see what you do.
Tomorrow if you are an American, and haven't voted yet and are thinking of sitting it out -- get off your butt and get out there and do your civic duty. We need great turnout this year, record-setting turnout, as a show of love for our country and our Constitution. Vote now, because later you might not have any power to change direction. Tomorrow, you do have power. And remember that voting is not you expressing yourself, it's not free speech, it's you and I governing. This is our moment of greatest power. Use it or lose it.
My opinion: At this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election.
After the election if we still have freedom of speech, we should reboot news around the simple idea of news written by experts. They must know the basic rules of journalism, imho that's much easier than the know-nothing journalist posing as everyman with a view from nowhere, trying to understand what they're writing about. They don't have any basis to judge, we give them far too much power. That system is rooted in a time when publishing was expensive but that hasn't been true for thirty years. the old system has run its course. This election, either way, is a lesson in how that system, if it ever worked, doesn't work today. The next news system will be sources going direct to interested readers.
Jay Rosen and I did a series of podcasts in the early teens called Rebooting the News. This was the basic premise. I believe more than ever that this is the best path for news going forward.
They did this at Wired for a while. I was invited to be a columnist when my main qualification was that I was an accomplished software developer. I think that's the way to go. Experts sharing their perspectives on current events.
Before Twitter existed, in 2002, I proposed to the NYT that they offer a blog to anyone who is quoted in a NYT article. If they had done this, the NYT would be what Twitter became, and it wouldn't now be owned by Elon Musk, for the benefit of humanity. I wish they had done it. It would have been a real moneymaker. And good for the flow of knowledge.
About polls, I learned how they work and how much they are a Ouija board, where the reports are tuned up based on the pollsters assumptions about who are the real voters, and account for the limited people who can be polled. They're trying to estimate what millions of people will do by talking with a few hundred. So they read each others' work, and try not to be too far off the consensus. It's at best an art, at worst they're just press releases designed to get the ad money to flow in certain directions. Don't overlook that the money is flowing to the same businesses that are choosing which polls to report on. Most of what the news orgs report on, it makes it into a sport like the NBA or MLB, but there at least there's objective news to report on, you know -- the score of each game, how many runs were scored, who got injured, fired, traded. In politics, there is no objective news, and if there were, the journalists we have don't report it. There's a lot of inputs that are connected to the outputs, conflicts of interest everywhere. Even so, the top item on Memeorandum is about a poll in Iowa that says Harris is ahead. Iowa was never thought to be in play. Yes, I too am addicted. Endlessly fascinated. Maybe we'll survive next week after all? Hope.
Cory Doctorow: "I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will." It's a good practice, and while I completely support it, I am part of several communities that could remove me without recourse. I do it because I value the people in the community, and feel that life is too short to wait for everyone to get it right.
Doctorow was writing about Bluesky, and once again, on Bluesky a discussion starts on what it would take for Bluesky to attract developers, and each time I am told that they have done enough, and I go away thinking that their pitch is a scam, and they're building value in a user base that they will sell. They certainly could do it, and for all we know the founders may have already sold some of their stock in the latest investment round which valued the company at $x billion. (I did a search to find the evaluation but it appears to have not been announced.)
I gave them a roadmap, again, of how to demonstrate that they're open, and finally concluded that the only way to really do it is to "provide a download that you can install on any popular operating system to get an instant blue sky network, running on its own without any help from anyone else. Then you can claim to be really open and until then there will be a lot of confusion." (And I was generous at that. More accurately, people with experience in tech will be certain this is yet another deal where the founders get rich, where the users are the product and have read too much into their promise of being open.)
I'm still on Bluesky but I expect them to be another Twitter, which btw had an open API too, and it's pretty good, but they never offered the option of people running their own twitters. That would have been good protection against a Musk buying them out and turning us into pawns in his plan for world domination. Do we really want to help someone else build one of those?
In early 2017 I observed that Twitter had just been used to route around journalism and elect a president. This value wasn't on their balance sheet as an asset. I felt its stock was vastly underpriced. Exactly as it turned out when Musk bought it. Everyone still thinks he paid too much, at this moment it could possibly gain him control of part of the US government's $6 trillion per year budget early next year, and if they start selling the assets of the government he could be in the best position to buy them at pennies on the dollar, or take a percentage of each saleAt this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election.. He could probably start borrowing against it the day after the election is called for Trump.
In the title I ask if a Musk could buy Bluesky, it's possible they have a way to prevent that in the design of their corporation, that's why it's a question. But if the price were right maybe the founders would sell out even if they didn't have to.
People may question my credentials as a language designer. I've designed a very innovative system that unfortunately the academics don't think is worth studying. It's utterly ridiculous. Who says you can only learn from systems developed at big companies or universities. I cover a lot of ground, it's true -- no one gave me permission to create Frontier, but I didn't feel I needed permission. Or funding for that matter. I think what happened is Apple positioned us as less significant than their system scripting language, and people just accepted that, when Frontier is a far superior system. Anyway, the ideas are there anyway, and you're welcome to learn from them.
See also: Rules for standards-makers. Language design and protocol design are the same thing.
Must-read: “It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.”
Programming language design should follow the half of Postel's Principle that says be "conservative in what you send." There should be one way to do anything, not many. That way I can include your code in mine and vice versa. I can understand what you're doing. Tools can be developed that make it even easier to do things the only way they work. New programming languages if they really are necessary should strive to simplify the programming model, there should be less things for the developer to worry about, the more easily new ideas can be developed, the less attention you have to pay to how you'll do something over what it does. I actually don't support the other half of Postel, in everything but user interface where I do support it. I don't think in general software interfaces should be liberal with what they understand because that defeats the first half. They sort of zero each other out.
I kept waiting for Kamala to say what we're not going back to is Trump. We've paid our dues. He's had enough of our attention.
Government should do its work quietly, making things better for the people and that's all, and until there's a crisis that demands our attention, stays out of the way.
Keep the drama on Netflix and HBO.
The most depressing thing last night for me was reading that a longtime friend voted for the worst candidate they've ever voted for because the other one was worse. They wouldn’t say who they actually voted for. This is what we’ll be left with as a country when all this is done.
I gave another $100 to Harris to compensate, and of course voted straight Democratic on Thursday. Unlike my friend I was proud to vote for her. The alternative, after what we lived through between 2017 and 2021, to choose to go through that again, hard to imagine the horror.
And of course that’s assuming he voted for Harris.
Meanwhile, it's amazing that both CNN and MSNBC have gotten serious about covering the reality of Trump 2.0 after being very unserious for the last year. It's as if after rejecting Joe Biden, months later they realized they rejected the wrong guy.
Unfortunately the only place you can read this Dan Conover piece is on Facebook about the failure of the NY Times and Washington Post to adequately defend democracy. He says something I had not seen elsewhere. "We're not talking about HuffPo or Salon here. We're talking about the last two 'unique nationals' standing in American print journalism. Institutions with long and storied histories. Both took the same test at the same time, and both failed it." I'd add that all other journalism usually follows their lead, but that may be finally changing.
We now understand that the Republicans derive their power through division, setting groups against each other. We think the Democrats are the opposite, they are inclusive, everyone is welcome there. But that's not true. This NPR piece touches on it, gingerly, because it's the third rail in non-Republican politics. Because it's one of the divisions that's maintained by people who are mostly Democrats. If you want to know if you're part of the problem, measure your own feelings when you find out what it's about. And then listen, carefully to the words. It might be hard to hear because I think most people who do this don't think they do, or they're justified in doing it. They don't want to look here. But the pragmatic reason to focus on this is that in future elections, assuming we have them, if we can make an effort to not do this, we could get enough Republican votes to switch to make real change possible. They might even become our most vocal supporters. Winning in politics is done by focusing on common interests over division.
The monthly archive for October has been saved. By the end of this month we'll know a lot more than we know now.
Around the kitchen table in my childhood home, the default question was "What did the Mets do?" We are a Mets family. Before I was born we were Dodgers family, always National League, but the Dodgers left shortly after I was born and the Mets came along when I was seven, and that was it for us. It was the one thing we all agreed on -- the Mets. Much later when my Mom and I would fight about something, a pretty regular thing -- I invented what I called Shea Stadium Rules, which meant that we a disagreement would be tabled when we remember that underneath everything we true Mets fans, and ultimately Mets fans can find something to agree on, that rain or shine and there was plenty of rain, we always stood with our team. A deeper truth of the Mets was we didn't really mind when they lost. Because underneath it all at a whole other level, the Mets have a philosophy that is strong, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, and every minute of every hour. We are the Mets and that's all you need to know.
Anyway, last night it wasn't lookin good. It was a winner-take-all game with the hated (for now) Milwaukee Brewers. We hated them because it looked like they were going to end the Mets season in the first round of the playoffs. I was getting ready to take off my Mets cap for the year, and put on my Knicks cap, when Lindor walked, then Nimmo singled, and then with runners on first and third and one out, Pete Alonso came to bat. He's been cold all year. I couldn't watch but forced myself to. And then it happened.
We who have been joined at the heart to this team and have been through it all, have come to expect failure, but sometimes winning happens, as it did last night. A big swing. The bat connects. Oh please let it land anywhere but the glove of a Brewer, and then all of a sudden Alonso is jogging around the bases, and delirium takes over, in the living room of my mountain home and everywhere Mets fans were at that fateful hour. Here we go! It looks good.
We figured at that point they might as well just retire the side, but the Metsies, who Casey Stengel, the first manager of the team asked "Can't anyone play this stinkin game!" (as he reviewed the Mets dugout bench) -- brought home another run, which it turns out we didn't need.
The Brewers were overwhelmed. They tried to score in the bottom of the ninth but the Mets philosophy was too strong. The game was over when Pete swung the bat.
It's like every young person's fantasy -- the count is 3 and 2 ,the team's back is to the wall, up comes the slugger and he hits it out of the park and the team emerges victorious and the young person's fantasy saves the day. We've all been there, many times. Last night we got to live it, again, this time for real.
And now we go to Philadelphia to give them a proper dose of New York love.
Meet the Mets meet the Mets, step right up and greet the Mets, etc etc.
Game 1 of the NLDS begins tomorrow at 4PM. Good times will be had by all (except Philadelphia fans of course).
A ChatGPT news network would be pretty interesting. You could register as an independent blogger, and push your writing up to their cloud in real time. And then readers could ask what experts on whatever think about what just happened and it would know what your expertise is, and it could build the report also in realtime, in response to a very detailed question you could ask. And you could tell it whether or not you want lies, or if they should omit the lies. Personally I would opt out of the lies, but some people like lies in their news, kind of like menthol in cigarettes. And forget about paying the news orgs. They don't give you a way to opt out of the lies.
So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. Think about it.
I didn't like the code ChatGPT was writing for me, so I tried it in Claude, and the code is much closer to my style. I may try that again. I've heard it's better at supporting code than other chatbots.
IT WOULD BE AMAZING IF IN THE LAST WEEKS OF THE CAMPAIGN JOURNAILSTS DECIDED THEY CARE ABOUT OUR COUNTRY AND THE REST OF THE WORLD AND START REPORTING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS ELECTION AND HOPE FOR THE BEST IF TRUMP IS ELECTED. OTHERWISE THE ONLY HONORABLE CHOICE IS TO QUIT.
It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.
Trade Secrets Radio: What is podcasting? This is the exact moment, 9/24/2004, that podcasting got its name and its definition. It's pretty short. We knew what we were doing. We loved what RSS did for news. Now we were doing the same for radio. Not just talking about it, but finally -- doing it. It worked, pretty freaking well. There's a podcast episode to go with it, coming out shortly.
I have a lot of podcast catching up to do today.
- A Trade Secrets podcast from Sept 28, 2004.
- An Morning Coffee Notes episode from the same day, about Bloglines, an early feed reader, the commons and fair compensation for centralized commons.
I'm still waiting for the podcast client that can subscribe to OPML lists, so I can subscribe to shows from my desktop, even automate it. If one of them did, we could start curated lists of feeds put together by smart people and influencers. The first podcast client that did this would open up the market, and stand out from the pack. I've been asking for this from the inception of podcasting twenty years ago. I had it in my first podcatcher. It would be great if one of the popular clients of today adopted the idea. Happy to help.
Here is the monthly archive for Scripting News in OPML, for September. I've been systematically creating this archive since May 2017. And also have been able to reconstruct the archive for most of Scripting News going back to 1994. I've been doing a lot of work with the contents of this archive in the last month.
If I were benevolent dictator of Mastodon, I'd add Markdown support everywhere so we'd have links and simple styling.
New episode from the Podcast0 feed about the open source release of Frontier, still the most powerful scripting environment ever. Someday the ideas in this product will be commonplace. And I would love to use a Linux port if anyone is so inclined.
Thread: Much easier than struggling with ActivityPub, would be a set of functionally equivalent APIs and a common understanding of what a “post” is among various social web systems. This how we created solid interop in the blogging world, and it would work here too.
BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll earlier this year. And there are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. There are many new things in this work -- the way we read the web hasn't been worked on in a long time. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. I've changed the way I develop, again. For the better, I believe.
I should put a dollar in a jar every time ChatGPT saves my ass. I thought I had boxed myself into a corner regarding the hash value for a web page, then I asked a question I wasn't sure there was an answer to. "In JS in the browser, I have the name of an anchor element and I want the browser to vertically scroll to it," to which it said: "Here's an example." I would definitely pay $1 for that. :-)
Molly White wrote a great piece on the problem we're all facing now that so many of us are trying to maintain a presence on a few different social web sites. She describes a situation I've been writing about since the mid-late 00s, with the inception of Twitter and Google Reader, two phenoms that had very different ideas of what writing on the web should be. That's where the problems started. Before that we had a cross-posting API that was broadly supported and really worked, based on RSS 2.0's idea of what a post is. It's called the Metaweblog API, and it's still supported by WordPress and probably a few other social web sites (I take a broad view of what the social web is and definitely include WordPress and other blogging tools. Based on Molly's piece, I expect she would see it that way too.)
The first approach I took to this problem was to cross-post as Molly describes in her piece, to handle the limits in software, but the limits crept back into my writing. Since I know that people who read this stuff on Bluesky, Threads or Twitter won't see the links, I'll be reluctant to use a link in writing to do what links do so well. I've been using them since I started writing on the web in 1994. I encountered this problem in the mid-teens when I was trying to cross-post to Medium and Facebook, one supported links and basic HTML, the other didn't. Eventually before giving up on the POSSE approach in 2017, I was barely using links at all.
- An aside, it's like listening to the Daily Show as a podcast, a lot of their jokes are visual, and you're left wondering wtf is going on.
To get a handle on the problem, I created a list of features I felt all social web platforms should support and published it at textcasting.org. Ultimately I think we're going to have to make a platform that implements a reasonable subset of this functionality, if only as a demo for the social web companies to show them what we want them to do. There already are Mastodon forks that support some of the features (no character limit, Markdown support).
I published the code I use to cross-post for my linkblog, that much does work quite well across the different platforms, and I'd be happy to operate a server for people to experiment with. The server software written in Node.js, is already open source. It has a simple plug-in architecture so support for new platforms can be added without modifying the server.
But my main point is this -- let's work together. We really aren't very good in tech at building on each others' work, that's why we get so stuck. I have a lot to say about that too, I've been writing about it on my blog for many many years.
And thanks for picking up this thread. It's one of the two big threads -- along with AI -- how are we going to make writing on the web work.
PS: I started writing this in Mastodon, but obviously I had to fall back to my blog, because there was no room and I needed to use links or why bother. ;-)
When markets have dominant products, evolution freezes. Google search, for example. I should have great search for my blog by now, powered by Google. It has been here for 26 years. They should have been doing R&D on how they can be part of a better reading environment on the web. But reading on the web has just gotten worse over the years. It's why we don't like clicking on links, usually what we find at the other end of the link is obnoxious. To get some peace and quiet we had to go to Twitter of all places, but now that's gotten ridiculous too. The only corner of the web where there's real exciting innovation is ChatGPT. And what's tragic about that is we've never made search work on the web, and search is valuable too, not just the digested version of what was said that ChatGPT produces. Guy Kawasaki just sent a summary of my career created by his new chatbot. Very flattering, but it has no nutritional value. I'd like some of my writing to survive the Great Ingestion. Writing matters, how humans express themselves matters. In other words we still have work to do in search, AI does not fill that need.
An idea for a news org. I want a for-pay site where I can ask a question about the news and get the most up-to-date answer. I'd like to link to that page from a blog post, and have it either be frozen, to document where we were on that day, or dynamic, so that it changes over time. I'm sure this product will be here soon, so obvious.
Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there. And now that once we have a chance to erase the limits, maybe -- none of the companies running their products are doing it. I don't want the way they do it to be the only way, the products are deliberately incompatible. Social web is the best name for what I'm working on. So I need to reserve this space. They didn't ask for my opinion, the first I heard of it was a press release. When I ship my thing I want to point back at this and say look -- I did tell you this was going to be a problem.
The question came up on Threads as to whether the ActivityPub support in Ghost will be a full two-way presence in the fedisphere, and apparently the answer is yes. They are working on a feed reader that also hooks into AP. That's how I would have done it. Really feeds and tweets should always have been peers. If you want to know the history, blame Google Reader for that disconnect. Also it highlights the need for a news-zine focused on the social web. When the PC first came out there was PC Mag and PC World and then PC Week. Same for the Mac. And there was InfoWorld that covered everything. Now we're basically using smoke signals between users. A few really interested users could bootstrap a blog to keep track of what's going on, and share what you learn publicly. That was the advice I gave Mike Arrington and he started TechCrunch and that acted as the glue that hooked together the early blogosphere, feeds and ultimately twitter and its offspring. We need it again. Users and developers party together has never been more needed as now.
oursocialweb.org: You don't have to give it any money or come to any meetings. Just know that someone else believes in users and developers. And let's work together to make it great, as soon as we can, without waiting for the big companies.
Interesting situation in Atlanta with the Mets. They have two more games to play with the Braves, but there's a hurricane headed toward Atlanta. It's going to start raining at 1PM and won't stop until Friday afternoon. It's the end of the season and both the Braves and Mets are in the same wildcard battle. Do the Mets stay in Atlanta to ride out the storm, or head back to NY? It's far more weird than I have time to explain right now.
I keep thinking of this cartoon, which explains it so well.
This is what's going on in US politics now.
Now that ActivityPub is claiming to be the Social Web, I feel like Lloyd Bentsen at the debate with Dan Quayle. ActivityPub is not the web any more than Dan Quayle was Jack Kennedy. The web is simple. That was hard to do. Very little since then lives up to that standard of simplicity, definitely not ActivityPub. The web is the web is the web is the web etc. Pick another more humble name. If it ever does achieve the utility of the web does we can take another look.
First, a couple of examples/case studies.
- About ten years ago I was trying to figure out how to get started with Node.js. I knew a little JavaScript, but nothing I read about Node made it click. It's server software, so there must be a way to write an HTTP server? From there, I read all the details about the power it has, but what I needed was a Hello World script. Brent Simmons gave me the script, and step by step instructions on how to write it.
I followed his steps, and it worked, and of course I wrote a blog post about it. That was the key I needed that unlocked what Node is, and helped me see what I could do with it. The first thing I did was factor out some of the bits so I could make it even simpler and then I built. I just wanted a few lines of code that created a server and responded to requests. All I needed was a Hello World to get me going.
Now Brent knew that I knew the basics of HTTP servers, we both worked together on a huge app that had as a small part of it a full HTTP server, thanks to Wes Felter who wrote it, no one asked him to, one day he showed up with a server that ran in Frontier. I was ecstatic. That's the key. If you have something that isn't truly new, that might have some analogies in other worlds, if you want people in those other worlds to know how to get started, give them the beginning. The first step.
- Another example. How I learned to create and edit a website. It was 1994. I loved the web the way I love ChatGPT today. I knew how to use it, but I didn't know how to make it. Everyone told me it was really simple and they sent me links to all the docs, but they made no sense, because they talked about things I didn't understand. What I really needed was a way to make a web page that was as simple as the one Brent provided for Node-based HTTP servers, with tools and concepts I knew how to use. I found one, a service provided by Ohio State University. You emailed a message to them and they put it "on the web" and sent you back a link to the page. Click the link and there's what you typed. I tried Hello World and got back a link to a page that said Hello World. So I tried something more complicated, I did a view source of Hotwired.com's home page, and copy and pasted it into an email. That worked too (with broken images because the urls were relative).
Everything I've ever learned how to do required me to first understand it at this level.
Okay here we are in 2024, and I want to understand what Bluesky is. I know how to use it, but I don't know how to make it. But I would be surprised if it is any more complicated that writing a web content management system that uses feeds, something I've done many times. I know the components of a message, have iterated over it for the last thirty years. I even wrote the spec that defines them in RSS 2.0. We're all doing the same thing over and over and Bluesky is no different. I hear there's some nice design for the protocol, but right now I don't care. I want my Hello World. The minimal code I need to add a node to the network defined by Bluesky and I want to see what it can do with the same kind of aha moment I had with the web. I want it to work when I try it, and I want it to reveal what Bluesky is beyond what I can see from using it. I want to begin to understand the opportunities for interop.
Why do I ask? For one, I'm a student of this stuff, and I want to understand. But I also am very active in this area, and interop is my product (really read that piece, I mean it, and I think it's Bluesky's product too). I'm into working together -- it happens so infrequently. So here I'm also trying to show not just you how to explain what you do for a curious but time-limited developer, but I want to make this a this.how document that explains how to do it for everyone, hoping that we as an art and industry start explaining ourselves better to each other, because we absolutely need to do this much better imho, ymmv, mmlm, etc.
To summarize -- assume I know how the web works. I've worked with the structures and protocols for systems that are very much like Bluesky. Don't try to explain the design of the protocol, just use it to solve a problem that I will understand because I use the product and I have developed lots of stuff like it. It should be possible to show us, to teach us, what your product does.
PS: It could take a few days to put a Hello World together. Because once you do the first iteration, you may think of a more direct way to illustrate the idea, and you should do it, iterate until it works, until you can't make it any simpler.
PPS: And if you don't want to do it, that's okay too. I just thought it was worth the effort to explain what's needed to foster a greater understanding of what you're doing and what the opportunities for interop are.
Imagine no doctor would treat you for a serious illness until you got a court order saying it was due to rape, incest or the life of the mother. Judges with the power of life and death. In some states with the death penalty judges have the power to sentence people to death, but not for having a well-accepted medical procedure. But that's the situation women with a troubled pregnancy are in, if they live in the wrong state. From the patient's point of view, I have a slight inkling about what this is like because twice in my life I've needed health care to save me from imminent death. The health care system never hesitated to help. But what if they had said "we can't admit you until a judge rules that we can." In the new USA, abortion is like a pardon, something only the government can grant. Forget about juries of our peers. It raises so many questions. If a woman is about to miscarry are they even allowed to admit her to the hospital, or does she have to wait until she is actually dying? If you can check her in, what are the limits of the treatment they can provide? Aspirin? Blood? Oxygen? Surgery? And btw, medicine has advanced a lot since before Roe v Wade. Whatever practices they had for avoiding abortion can't apply now. This is the kind of thing no society should change the way we changed it as an edict handed down by judges who are subject to corruption. We are learning about a serious flaw in our system of government.
It would be great if we could make voting a party, a celebration, something to look forward to, not something you have to make time for. That would probably do more to improve the lives of all Americans than any other single thing. It's like the SuperBowl, the NBA Finals, Coachella or the Oscars, only better -- because we are the stars.
I wish my father had lived to use ChatGPT. He would have been so thrilled. My uncle would have lost his shit.
This is what it looks like when UPS loses a package. It's a case for the new Pixel 9 Pro. It shipped 17 days go. It was hell to just tell Google that the case was lost. I expected at that point they'd apologize and refund the money. That was a week ago. Just got an email saying want me to return the case when it arrives. It's never going to arrive. Luckily this is a cheap product, just $38. If it had happened with the $1300 phone, that would be a pretty big problem. It's amazing that a company the size and age of Google doesn't have a procedure for dealing with products that are lost (or more likely stolen) in transit. I've been through this with Amazon, they knew what to do, because UPS does lose packages, esp ones that look like they have phones in them. Anyway I have a fairly large credit with Google. I don't dare use it to purchase anything else, given how incompetent they are at dealing with fairly common customer problems.
BTW, to be clear, I have no interest in working on twitter-like systems.
It's been like a prison to writers, we're stuck with this huge divide, with crap on both sides.
These things exist, they have a jumble of APIs and ways to integrate.
And we've been playing by the rules laid down by Twitter (ev, biz and jack) for 18 freaking years. That's enough.
This will never get sorted out until people realize it needs sorting out.
Not expecting much more to happen there.
Instead of just fact-checking the candidates, and presenting "both sides," how about recording the number of times the candidate threatens specific races, genders, lifestyles, origins, religions and of course individual people. Keep a page where you tally the groups he doesn't threaten with expulsion or worse. That would be very revealing, and in line with the true issue of this election. Time for you all to get in sync with the actual American history that's being made.
It's around this time of year that I start thinking about my BOTY. I should give out a plaque or a statue or something. Someday! Anyway almost immediately I had my answer. The announcement will wait till December of course, sometimes early January.
Social networks are condemned when they carry lies from race-hate, misogyny and worse, but the major news orgs do it all the time. It's ridiculous that there are two standards.
To my programmer friends, how long would it have taken to answer this question using Google and StackExchange. There was a bug in this one line of code, a call to new Date () in JavaScript, that was behaving as if months were not 0-based, which they are known to be. The problem: I was specifying the day as 0 and month, correctly, but the day had to be 1 in order for it to work and without thinking I had specified it as 0.
Since I'm about to turn 70 (next May), and because my body is getting old in ways it never has before (of course) -- I've become a more active participant in the health care system.
One thing I've learned is it can be hard to get the attention of the doctors. And once you see your GP about a problem it's almost certain they're going to send you to a specialist. So you go to the specialist and it's pretty random as to whether they put the effort into understanding your situation in full. And they aren't trying to solve all your problems, just the ones they deal in.
An aside, a couple of years ago I had a condition that ChatGPT diagnosed in a second but it took the doctors who weren't paying much attention (my primary care doctor had retired and I was being shuffled between NPs and MDs until they could find someone to be my new main doctor) so they were all sending me to the wrong specialists, all of whom said there was no problem, yet I still had the symptoms which were getting worse. On the fourth try, someone sent me to the right specialist and they instantly diagnosed what ChatGPT had diagnosed at the outset. So when people say AI could hurt medical care, I don't think so, it would probably be a good idea to have an AI looking over their shoulders and asking if they've considered the Occam's Razor specialist.
So you have to be alert, and push to get them to pay attention.
And communicating with the system is ridiculous. Almost everything has to be done over the phone. They have email, but if you want to set up an appointment, you have to call. And wait on hold. And wait and wait. And then it's a dice roll as to who you get connected to. There are some people you talk to who seem to be trying to be annoying. It's a total pain in the ass, but you have to do it. (And since they have to ask for your birthdate to identify you they know how old you are and treat you accordingly.)
All the health care for a person my age seems to be directed at finding the thing that's going to kill you and treating it. That's good, and that's a shift in perspective from someone who until recently had a young body which basically took care of itself. Or so it seemed (I did have emergency heart surgery at 47 that saved my life, although that's a fairly distant memory now).
So right now I have a thing that needs to be looked into because it might be one of those serious things. And it's really hard to get the system to respond quickly, because if it's serious it's one of those things that you want to deal with asap. I don't think it is, but you have to act as if it might be. And it can be humiliating to say the least.
But there's no law saying the doctor, or any of the others in the system, could go to jail or lose their license if they treat any illness I might have. I can now for the first time really understand what it might be like to have to deal with that in addition to all the other serious stuff you have to deal with.
That's the point of this post. Throwing a wrench into the already broken wheels of our medical system is the crime. They should go to prison for doing this, the six Supreme Court justices and other Republican assholes who stick their noses where they don't belong. There should be a penalty for what they're doing, they should have the fear they're putting women through. They should worry about what happens when their decision is overturned.
Perhaps they should lose their medical care as should all the members of their families. Then they might get an idea of how sinful they have been.
The first draft of this post appeared on Facebook.
Has anyone attempted to make a higher level language on top of SQL? It's taken me a few iterations over years to finally (I hope) figure out how to design a table to take advantage of the features that evolved into making SQL efficient for the applications people really deploy. If this were machine language, it would be time to start thinking about the HLL that it inspires. Actually long past time imho.
This is a test. For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of a new server app that combines the functionality of several apps I used to run as separate servers. The goal is to be able to integrate the functionality of all the components. It's time to invest in blogging in a real way. The 2017 corner-turn was about getting back to the foundation I had before trying to co-exist with Twitter, Facebook, Medium. All three are now no longer high value targets for interop. So while I wasted a lot of time trying to peer with them, I did finally get off the horse and I had a decent setup while developed Drummer and FeedLand and in doing so learned how to do scalable server apps with SQL. I've wasted so much time trying to be compatible with apps that didn't want us. I have a feeling that none of the current targets really want us either. So let's get back to the Open Web, which gave us much hope before. I think we can do a lot with feeds and OPML. They're to open systems what GPL is to open source. You don't get to be half-committed to being open, you have to be all-in or you can't play. (Same idea as podcasting, which of course is just an instance of RSS.) You don't have to deal with a lot of confusion to find the interop. You just have to be willing to look in that direction. This started out as a test post and look what it has become.
Note to self: When the phone doesn't ring, go to Settings - Sound & vibration - Do Not Disturb. It was on for some reason. I'm sure I didn't set this. I'm pretty sure I've been here before. Here's the ChatGPT log and screen shot.
My Pixel 9 Pro keeps giving me tips on using it when I bring it up, as I'm trying to read an important message, or change something at a red light. I'm always distracted when I use the phone, and by adding more distractions to sell me on something, that's not their right. I paid $1300 for this new phone. And also I can't figure out how to get the phone to ring when I get a call. I keep missing important calls.
I keep discovering uses for ChatGPT. I think it would be very useful to learn a language, for example. I know how to say this in English, could you explain to me, in English, how to say it in French. I bet it's very good at that. I am using it to learn to write SQL code that takes advantage of all the arcane features they've added over the years to handle cases that come up in real database work. It's anything but a new language, and efficiency is everything -- so I think they pretty much have all the cases covered. I remember how frustrating it was to learn Algol when all I knew before that was Fortran and Basic. It would have been great to have ChatGPT to coach me on it.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders forced us to think of her as a mom. I don't think that works out very well in her favor, probably best not to go there.
I was driving on a mountain road yesterday to pick up a pizza in a nearby town. I drive it fairly regularly, and I have a car that handles well so I drive at the speed limit or a little above.
Still, what often happens on this road is some asshole tailgates, getting so close that if I hit the brakes suddenly they would have no time to react, and would slam into the rear of my car. And you do sometimes have to hit the brakes because animals appear on the road, deer, turkeys are common. Sometimes even bears.
I've never hit an animal, but I have come close.
There's no way to pass on this road.
I've been in the other driver's place when a tourist is driving 30 in a 45 mph zone, and what do you do? Keep your distance and don't freak out. It's perfectly legal to go 30 in a 45 mph zone.
Anyway I slow down, to send a signal to the other driver, and also to mitigate damage if there is an accident. This asshole leans on their horn. I slow down more.
And when I come to a stop sign I come to a full stop and pause, thinking okay they'll pass me now, and I'll get a chance to see who this asshole is. They stayed behind and leaned on the horn again.
When we come to the next stop sign, it's the end of the road and you can go left or right. I'm going right, they're going left, and the road is wide so the asshole pulls up to the left of me and I look over and see a middle-aged woman, could be a teacher or a nurse. I was amazed. The last kind of person I would expect to make such a scene.
If I had a chance I would have asked what the hell they were doing.
BTW, I don't speed on these roads because I like driving them, I love the mountains, and the fresh air, and I wasn't in any kind of a hurry. It's not uncommon to get a tailgater but usually they take the hint when I slow down and add a few car lengths between us.
One of the reasons I have a blog is so I have a place to write these stories. 😄
Interesting thread on a simple upgrade for any podcasting client that would create a network of tools people could use for subscribing and listening. I've tried to get people who make podcast clients to listen. Yes I am a user, but I also designed the technology, and did the first implementations, so I know what's possible.
I theorized why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky on Bluesky. I did the same on Threads and heard people say ugly personal things about Dorsey. This really pissed me off, because he's a human being who made a large contribution to the technology we use, and I think his heart has been in the right place. Nobody is purely good or bad. If my theory is right about why Dorsey is disappointed, it's a valid point, Bluesky was started with its prime mission as creating a distributed system. The more they dig in on nice-to-have features that have nothing to do with being distributed, the more they go down the same path as Twitter did. Jack was openly talking about turning Twitter into a developer platform as early as 2007. Had they realized the system he talked about, basically global object storage with real financial backing, we'd be much further along with the web as an operating system. We're paradoxically so close to that now, but so far, for a reason I don't understand. We should start having a public discussion about this. It can't hurt to talk about what-if's instead of barrelling down the same ridiculous cul de sac as we did in the 00's. I've been writing about this since 1994, the loop we refuse to break out of. Well let's start talking about how we break out, because it's not going to "just happen" organically.
I look forward to the day when I can link to a topic I've written about on my blog without having to depend on Google. I don't think they know I have a blog or have any respect for it.
I look forward to the day when I can ask a question on my blog and get an answer, on the blog, from a trusted member of my karass.
I've been re-watching The Bear and am now totally thinking of my job as a chef. I started out that way 40+ years ago, and somewhere along the line I stopped thinking that way. If you can, watch S02 E07 to see what I mean. It's about service, the connection between the staff and the people who come to eat, and the medium is the food. It's the same idea. There's so much cynicism around tech, and I hate that. We've rarely seen it as a human thing both by the people who make the meals and the people who love great food. The world thinks of it as billionaires and influencers and lying fascist politicians. But it should be much more than that.
Has it ever been suggested that journalists take an oath, similar to the one the President takes to: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Could be voluntary. Sports reporters might take a different oath.
I have a linkblogging tool crossposts to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Twitter, WordPress and RSS.
Every time I publish a link it goes to all those places,
The RSS feed is doing a lot of the work.
- Links from the RSS feed show up on my Links page and in the nightly emails.
- The RSS feed is also used to connect to Threads, going through micro.blog. I am able to give it the URL of the linkblogging feed, and then click on Add Threads -- and that's it. When I post something to the feed it shows up on Threads.
This feature is tucked away in a corner of micro.blog and I suspect most people don't know it's there. It's sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems. If you're a micro.blog user, its Feeds page is where you set it up. Screen shot.
Shownotes page for the first Trade Secrets podcast, on this day in 2004. I was in Seattle, Adam was coming from Belgium. Haven't written any notes about it yet. If others are interested in listening and commenting on these podcasts, this is when it was all coming together, let me know and perhaps we can start a thread on Mastodon.
I was recruited to speak at a Ria Novosti conference in Moscow in June 2011, but decided not to go. This was back when we thought naively that Russia was a democracy, and working with Russian journalists, when American journalists wouldn't, seemed like a fair deal. Something about it didn't smell right though, so I stayed home.
I used to think of Twitter as a coral reef, but its role as a world wide notification system is fading, and we haven't replaced it with anything. I wrote this in 2007 when the utility of Twitter was just becoming apparent.
Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers. For me, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter is still here, but I use it a lot less than I used to. Each of them acts as if they are alone, except for ActivityPub but that's more complicated than it may seem. As often is the case, the tech industry is depending on confusion. This may be a strategic mistake. I could cite a few examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that came before, often with remarkable speed. Each of them is playing for all of it, wanting to control their users, make it so they only post to one system. And some people do. I think it's better if we, as users, remain diversified.
You'll never see an article in the NYT saying how wrong polls have been in every presidential election because then they'd have to fire half their political reporters.
If you want a better idea of how it's going, look at where the ad dollars are going, and where the candidates are campaigning.
And make sure all your friends know that you're voting and who you're voting for. I think that makes a difference.
I'm voting straight Democratic party line.
I find that a lot of my posts on my blog are just like the tweets I post on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter. I used to have an icon in my outliner that tweeted the text of the bar cursor headline.
If ChatGPT had a simple, non-AI scrapbook, like the old Mac OS had, where you could just throw something over your shoulder so you can find it later with a text search, that would make it a lot more useful for retaining practices that work. It's a shame to work something out, come up with the answer that worked, and then to have to do it all over again 23 months later when you encounter the same problem.
BTW the Wikipedia page for the MetaWeblog positions it as a replacement for the Blogger API, but it's an extension of it. You could use MetaWeblog to publish to Blogger sites, but it also supported features that Blogger didn't have, that were in our blogging software, Manila.
Could we agree that ChatGPT can ingest everything that's in Wikipedia? I particularly want the images. I'd like to ask for a picture of Chuck Berry, and get something nice and be able to put him in a scene with the Wordle Kitty. That seems pretty harmless. And the news industry could hardly object, they didn't invent Chuck Berry, or own the copyright of the picture of him in Wikipedia.
I'm searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There's no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it
Hecklers at last night's rally in Greensboro, couldn't hear what they were angry about, but it had something to do with Gaza.
The US isn't doing the killing there, the issue is with Netanyahu who is part of the same political party as Trump. So you can be pretty sure the killing won't stop there at least until after our election. One way to be sure the killing continues is to elect Trump.
It's wonderful that we're laughing at Trump now.
What a joke to think that after all he took us through, there are 47% of the people in the country who want more of that!
OMG we must be crazy. What else are you going to do but laugh.
I keep seeing mention of "Podcast 2.0" in various places. That is unusually greedy, even for the tech industry. What next? Deprecating the way podcasting has worked for the last 20 years? How do we know the people doing this aren't shilling for Spotify, Google or Amazon? Please don't mess with something that works as well as podcasting. You want to do something better, great -- make your own name and get people to respect it. Stealing respect from podcasting tells me you have no honor or self-respect, and it should say the same to everyone else. Something else that tells you it's bad, they never bothered to send me an email. Welcome to the tech industry.
I also added a link to the RSS feed in each shownotes page. In the HTML at the bottom, as a white on orange icon and in the page source as a <link> element.
Show notes for a short podcast I recorded on this day in 2004, a response to Adam's podcast which I had just listened to. These were the good days, a new medium in its early stages of booting up, after years of trying to get it to go. In the next few weeks, it'll really start going. You can subscribe to the podcast feed here.
The blogroll on scripting.com is a real breakthrough. It's actually a feed reader, but don't tell anyone. Actually go ahead and tell them. 😄
At the beginning of the Trade Secrets podcast on Sept 22, 2004, is when I would say podcasting got its name. Adam and I were the leaders of the community. It had been discussed briefly on the mail list. We all recognized that what we were doing needed a name. There was a consensus, it was a small community by then, very collegial. Dave Slusher had already used the term in his podcast (according to James Cridland), so I said in the Trade Secrets show, let's just go ahead and use it. I did mention Ben Hammersley. So he's not out of the story, but he's not the person who gave podcasting its name. September 2004 was the moment when podcasting became something. It's rare in things like this that you can point to a moment, but we can here, and the record should make that very clear. You could say Hammersley was the first to publish the term in a piece he wrote, but he played no role in the bootstrap. I'd say that by the end of 2004 it was on its way, I basically stepped back and enjoyed the medium along with everyone else. Adam started a company. I would have liked to have started a company then, but it wasn't meant to be. That all happened 20 years ago.
I started a new this.how doc on how podcasting got its name, so I could include new information. It links back to the piece I wrote in 2014. I have done this before, when a blog post I wrote became something I wanted to add to over time. Two examples -- Rules for standards-makers and Trolls.
September 2004 was the month when podcasting became a real community thing. Twenty years ago. I did eight podcasts that month. The mail list, which Adam started, was going strong. This is the month where podcasting got its name, thanks to some brilliant creativity from Dannie Gregoire. Until then we were calling them "audio blog posts" or some variant thereof. You can see it in this Google Trends graph. I started a special feed to echo my programs from 2004, I even got it registered in Apple's podcast database. There will be two podcasts in the feed today because I missed the one from yesterday. Still diggin!
The networks should put Trump on time delay and when he says you can legally murder babies in some states, that should be treated as if he said fuck or shit. Put up a screen that explains why he was cut off, then go to commercial, esp during the debate on Sep 10.
Dear NY Times, before we get rid of the penny, let’s open up your op-ed page to include criticism of the NYT. You can handle a little pushback, you need it desperately.
Paul Graham wrote a very useful piece about "Founder Mode." As a founder myself, I think I can tell you why founders have a central role to play as the company grows. They're the only ones who know how the company was built, and what works and what doesn't and how to keep it consistent for customers and partners, and the founder, if the company grew, is tuned into to what makes the company work, and will see opportunities that even well-intentioned managers will miss. I remember when a company I was a developer for, early in my career, switched out the founder and replaced him with a professional CEO. The founder had problems managing, and could have used help imho, but -- the founder understood what the company was about, and the professional claimed to be a "market of one" and therefore didn't have an opinion about what products the company should make. That would be delegated to people he hired. Almost as if the people running a company were just modules and servers, and if you needed to grow you just bought new modules. In this case. I can write this because I don't have to get approval from anyone else. I'm sure in a company of today someone would take offense at something I wrote here. That my friends is another reason why companies have a hard time scaling. 😄
Thinking about what Michelle Obama said last night in her fantastic DNC speech. “We don’t get to change the rules so we always win.” She was talking about Trump, but it also applies to Google. There should be opportunities for independent developers to create for the web without having big tech companies be our gatekeepers. The web is a public resource. Of course big companies will take whatever isn't nailed down. It's way past time to protect the open web.
I use PocketCasts on my Android phone as my main podcast client. I also have a website, dave.podcatch.com, that has the latest episodes from the podcasts I follow. I would love to hook up my subscriptions from PocketCasts to dave.podcatch.com, so that I could add to the website from my freaking phone. Make it really easy for me to pitch a great podcast feed to my friends. But I can only export my feeds, I can't create a dynamic link between the two. If I ran a popular podcatch app like Pocketcasts, I would open up my outbound subscription list, and vie to be the default place people come to subscribe to podcasts. If a few of my users were geeks and visionaries, they could start telling other vendors they should hook up to my source lists, so they can use Pocketcasts to subscribe. One place to subscribe is way better than many. If you think things like that can't happen, think again. How did you all came to use OPML for your subscription lists? It's because someone volunteered to go first, and the users of that product demanded that other products support the format. It still amazes me that there's an interchange format there.
My linkblog posts are once again flowing to WordPress. I had to generate a special password for this app because of 2FA.
Podcast: 27 minutes.
Sorry about the recording quality, I was in a large space with bad acoustics. I'll try to remember not to do that in the future.
I've noticed I spend less time programming, I go more slowly and carefully because now I can know a lot more about each problem I'm solving, and use the packages I build on, jQuery, MySQL, Node, the browser, Bootstrap, Font-awesome, Frontier, to greater advantage. A new kind of programming is possible, and it's better.
I go into some detail in this podcast about how the process works.
Interested in hearing similar stories from other developers using ChatGPT or something like it.
My linkblog, which posts to the Links tab on Scripting News, as well as Bluesky, Mastodon and RSS, now also posts to Twitter and Threads.
I do a daily episode of the adventures of Wordle Kitty as art I do with ChatGPT, on Facebook. There often is a NY Times headline in the image, saying something silly like how prisons are dealing with an influx of convicted house pets (like the kitten).
In this drawing the NYT is reporting on how the kitten loves lasagna, and of course how cute she is (it's important to emphasize that in the AI prompt because otherwise you get less cute kittens in the drawing).
This is therapeutic. Finally I can see the NYT doing something useful! Keeping me entertained while we try to get through this election. If I'm forced to accept lies from the NYT, without any voice given to opposition, they might as well be lies that entertain me! 😄
Kitty in prison, via Facebook. PS: I wonder if the NYT minds that we think of them as no more straight than Fox News. They've fallen really far, and have so far shown they totally don't care if we know.
When President Biden took the stage last night at the DNC, I had a moment of buyer's remorse. He looked so good in his black suit, and the pictures of the new candidates, and their spouses, looked comical in comparison to the president who was about to speak.
Why did Walz have a permanent frown on his face. I find his presence next to Harris is almost always awkward. He's taller, and moves a lot. I noticed this with Sanders when he was debating Clinton in 2016. She stood still and Sanders waved his hands a lot. She spoke quietly, he shouted.
Biden shouted last night, and he was mostly unplugged. On the team, but you have to wonder, how did the journos get so much power that they could force this change. He gave a fine speech. I'm not sure that pushing him aside, net-net, was a win for us. Maybe Harris will be a sugar high.
One thing I know for sure, the new Democratic Party must not make the mistake that Biden did, must not subjugate itself to the press. When they go on the attack, you must respond. Break their wall of objectivity, these people are political players, and so far not subject to rebuttal. That must end. If they want to be in the middle, then don't pretend they aren't.
They will yell about the First Amendment, which also applies to elected leaders and candidates for office, and there is no special right for publications like the NYT, they have no immunity to First Amendment speech about them.
To the extent we can, it's time to push them aside.
When someone quotes the NYT in frustration, I have a mantra I repeat over and over, "Ignore the NY Times." I'm going to paste it in 25 times now so you get the idea. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times. Ignore the NY Times.
Today would have been my mother's 92nd birthday. She died in 2018, and I still haven't, deep inside, fully gotten the message that she's gone. Probably the most significant person in my life. I find most of my adult relationships can be traced back to my relationship with her.
Keanu Reeves: "If you see someone falling behind, walk beside them. If you see someone being ignored, find a way to include them. Always remind people of their worth. One small act could mean the world to them."
BTW, it's nice to see the DNC including influencers this year. I hear them say this is the first time, but I beg to disagree. A few dozen bloggers were at the DNC in 2004, and were treated well, in many ways. I think the word influencer and blogger have fairly similar meanings. Blogger is a broader term, because it's possible to have a very small readership for a blog, thus not be influencing very much, but still have a lot of value. And you always can influence your mom and little sister, right? 😄
Respect the reader. This isn't exactly a new rule for journalism, but it's worth mentioning anyway. If you wouldn't want to read the piece yourself, don't let them put your name on it. Example. A story promises to tell you about 47 seconds that saved Kamala Harris's career. They do eventually tell you the words, but you have to wade through a lot of pointless bullshit to get to it. If I were writing it, the first words of the piece would have to be the words, and then explain it. You've seen this over and over and it gets worse all the time. I still don't understand why they do it, if I'm reading the piece, I'm a paying subscriber, right? Another example of disrespect, quit trying to upsell paying customers. Once a month maybe, but not every 8th time I visit your site. Most businesses have no regard for their customers' time, but the ones that do, really make an impression.
I'm working on a project which may or may not ship, but it presents an interesting design challenge either way.
The idea is I want to write lots of little bits, less than 5000 characters each, they have titles, use styling, links, include images, etc.
Or it could also be as small as a single emoji.
This is what we've settled on in 2024 as the basic unit of writing. From a tweet to a long blog post.
I want to make an editor and storage system that fits this model perfectly based on all we know about this stuff, and the latest server and network technologies.
It should have the best simplest API we know how to make in 2024.
In every way it'll be the nicest, fastest and most flexible way to create structures of writing over time.
In that last sentence is the gotcha -- over time. It's the frontier, the leading edge. Because in 2024 there's no way for me, as an individual developer to create a structure that lasts over time.
I can create a structure that has a high probability of lasting a month. A pretty good chance of lasting a few years, but beyond that, it gets less likely probably at a pretty good clip and eventually goes over a cliff.
The way I have answered that in the past was with GitHub.
In 2017, I started an archive of my Scripting News writing on GitHub. It's still just a fraction of my writing, I'm not doing anything like that for all my other sites and services. But at least I've managed to set up a system that only requires me to do something once a month, which is something I like to do because it gives me some assurance the other mechanisms are still working. Archive systems have bugs too.
So I guess for the project I'm doing I will again use GitHub to mirror the content in the database until and unless GitHub proves unusable for this purpose, or something much better comes along.
Note that GitHub has made no promise about the continued availability of their service, all we have to go on is that they have been reliable for enough time to present the illusion of persistence. 😄
I was kvelling the other day about rss.app and how they have feeds for Threads accounts. They do. But there are two caveats.
- It costs $9.99 per month for 15 feeds. Could be a bit expensive for some people's budgets.
- The second concern is more serious. It doesn't handle titleless items properly. It repeats the contents of the tweet in the title and description of the feeds it generates. An example. This is not right, and it's not the way Mastodon and Bluesky do it. There's nothing wrong with items that have no titles. When an item has no title you do the common sense thing -- omit the title. I'm happy to help with this. I wrote the RSS 2.0 spec, and am something of an authority on this. It's important to get this right.
Another possible rule for journalism. Employ non-journalist op-ed writers. Appointed to a two-year residence, columns published alongside other op-eds. They expose flaws in stories that have appeared in the publication, either news or editorial. They have expertise in areas the publication covers. They have never been employed as a journalist. They are not part of your organization, never meet with other writers, have no personal relationships to preserve. They write from the perspective of a reader. By giving them equal weight as news or op-ed pieces, it's more likely the professional journalists and opinion writers will pay attention. Maybe they'll even reply. This is the beginning of accountability. The "public editors" the news orgs employed briefly were jokes. They never addressed the serious issues, likely because they lacked the perspective of a reader, or they had relationships to preserve, or just saw it from the perspective of an insider. There is an obvious and real problem with news, and it can never be solved until the people whose work is the problem see it. Is there a more important area of power that gets so little outside scrutiny? They say democracy dies in darkness, so does journalism.
Journalism is very important part of how our country works yet there is no accountability, no checks and balances, no requirement of transparency. There isn’t even a mechanism to disagree with them. most of the time they have the only voice. We don’t even know what they’re trying to do, what their goals are.
No more lies in news, that's the first new rule of journalism. We've had to live with a journalism that tries to give lies equal stature to actual news, but the two just don't mix. What happens if your news is half lies, the users don't believe anything you carry. This was predicted, in 2016 when it was clear that Putin's Russia was heavily influencing American journalism. They had developed their techniques in Ukraine in previous years, and the Ukraine press and government came to the same conclusion we're now arriving at -- stop at the first lie, turn the microphone off. That's the main rule, main change that has to take place now, in advance of the November election. They may not do it, but at least now we all understand that what they're doing is stupid, wrong, even corrupt. No matter what they don't get to keep their rep if they are laundering lies.
Watch out when reporters say something said on their air or in their pub is "misleading." What they really mean is someone just lied in their space. Heard it just now on NPR after a Republican was using "talking points" that were "misleading." Of course lies are misleading, but they are also lies. What these reporters hope to do (I guess) is convince you that the lies they just broadcast don't reflect poorly on them. If they said "that guy just lied five times" you'd have to wonder why they included it. What's wrong with them. But if they just were "misleading" oh I guess that's okay. Same thing happened in an otherwise pretty honorable piece by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post. "When not one but multiple rants call 'into question not only his fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities,' the media’s refusal to convey Trump’s unfitness amounts to misleading the public." No. It's not just misleading, it's deadly -- to the reputation of the publication that didn't convey what they saw clearly with their own two eyes. The rest of the Rubin piece is worth reading. I expect she softened her criticism because she has to work with the editors at the Post who decided to keep cutting Trump slack. You and I don't have that problem. The news industry in the US must be scrapped and replaced with one that tells the truth, otherwise what's the point.
One advantage of using GitHub for questions tied into a blog is that you get a great archive of all the questions you asked and how people answered or contributed, going back to 2016.
BTW, I've started using Mastodon in place of GitHub for comments on posts like the one below. GitHub has a better model for text with comments, supports full Markdown the way it was meant to work. I have an instance of Masto that I can use that supports Markdown but they do an unacceptable rendering of links. Example post. I want a simple, widely accepted easy place to comment, on the social web, not Discourse or GitHub, that isn't controlled by one vendor (so ActivityPub for now is probably the best approach) and supports plain old Markdown without any weird embellishments. I don't work in the Mastodon world, I'm already committed to the projects I'm doing. But we could really use something nice, designed to plug into blogs. This is a good use-case, and it's pretty close.
I wrote rules for standards-makers and it caught on, and has been used by a few open source projects. I hope that the new rules for journalism, which is just getting started, will be similarly influential. If existing journalism is going to start working again, they're going to have to have some rules. Comments welcome on Mastodon.
August 15, 2004: My audio blog post from NYC, from my Podcast0 feed. Had just listened to an Adam Curry podcast and one from the Gillmor Gang. Played a bit of music, described how a podcatcher would work, pretty close to the way they work today. Shortly after the feature would be in Radio UserLand. It was the only episode I did in August 2004. The next one is on September 1 and there are a total of nine shows in September, including the first Trade Secrets which is a podcast Adam and I did together. Here's the archive for this blog in August 2004.
I am addicted to buying domains. Latest example. Ideally it would be a news site with all the latest videos from the Land of Kamala aka the United States of America.
If you don't buy the new rules for journalism because the liars will tell lies about you, the journalist -- well, you get that either way, no matter what you do, so I don't see the problem. And if you want people to trust you, you've got to tell the truth. Your reputation gets destroyed by their lies if you pass them through. Doctors can must tell you to stop smoking to save your life and the tobacco companies will accuse them of lying or whatever and some people (such as myself, earlier in life) will continue to smoke. You still have to do what's right if you want people to trust you.
I am so impressed with how well the new Democratic Party is running this campaign. Latest innovation, they're going to do at least one public rally during the convention, so everyone can be part of the celebration, and I plan to watch every minute of it. What I don't want to witness is what the journalists try to provoke. I've been to two DNCs and later heard what they were talking about on CNN, and my god they invented crises that simply didn't exist. Who's going to have time to call them out because no one at the convention is watching TV.
I heard on a podcast yesterday that it's weird that Harris is polling as well as the generic Democrat, which they felt was odd because she's not a white man, which made me think that in 2024, she is the face of the Democratic Party. Obama and Hillary Clinton knocked down those barriers, and now it would feel strange if the candidate at the top of the ticket were not interracial and female.
I'm proud that my country has nominated such an attractive group of talented people with such fierce competence and humility. For these moments I wish I had a new graphic to put in the margin to symbolize the United States. We're strong, and we win, and when we don't we get back up and fight. Uncle Sam is a great symbol. But we've yet to create the interracial and female version that symbol.
One more thing, there are a lot of white male voters to be courted and welcomed back into the fold. Trump has had the advantage there, but it doesn't have to be that way. A hand reached out in brotherhood could turn this election into the kind of landslide we need to cleanse our political system its flirtation with fascism.
Statue of Liberty in the heartland.
I ordered a Pixel Pro 9 today for delivery in September. Look forward to seeing what makes it so AI.
I started a this.how page for the new rules for journalism. Common-sense rules for reporters that they violate regularly, so now it's time to write them down.
Just got a message from Slack that should serve as a warning to people who use other free services, expecting their archive to be maintained over time. It was too good to be true before. Now you need to ask vendors if that's true on their system.
The new rule for journalists on Threads is big.
How big is it?
So big I got my first Fediverse reply, ever.
A reply on Threads from the Fediverse. A first! 😄
I had another morning of driving around so I listened to a bunch of podcasts about how the campaign is going, all good news for Democrats which of course makes me happy. The last podcast I listened to was Ezra Klein's interview with Nate Silver. I only listened to the first 20 minutes because I ran out of time. I may pick it up later on my afternoon walk (it's a gorgeous day in the mountains).
They talked about their bond as old school bloggers. I didn't know either of them when they were starting out, which is kind of sad -- most of the bloggers I heard from in that period were mad at me the way they are mad at Elon Musk now. Both Silver and Klein campaigned for Biden to step aside, which I felt it was inappropriate -- for Silver who was/is a trusted polling analyst, and Klein who is a columnist for the NYT. I had already listened to Klein's interview with Nancy Pelosi. But I really don't like that both of them crossed a line I felt they had no business crossing, becoming an advocate rather than a journalist. I can't thikn about either of them without thinking about that. But I listened anyway, because I'm interested in both, and esp the combination.
The discussion was interesting and even agreeable until Klein asked Silver about his relationship with Peter Thiel. I had read that Silver was connected to Thiel in some way. Before they moved on neither commented on Thiel's funding of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that destroyed Gawker. I don't know how they can both, for their careers, which depend on free speech, still have a kind word for Thiel. I never liked Gawker, they made fun of me, and others, in horrific ways, that weren't even based on facts, the kind of bullshit pre-teens make up about people when they can't think of anything else to say. Even though they hurt me, embarrassed me, aroused my hate, even if I had the kind of money Thiel has, I never in a million years would use that money to destroy them.
Thiel's wealth is a weapon aimed at all our freedom. This is something imho that has to at least be mentioned when a journalist talks about Thiel, and neither of them did. I guess they feel safe from Thiel's attacks, perhaps because they have adjusted their writing so as to never risk offending him, which totally undermines their integrity, if so. A good way to prove that's not true would be to never mention him without saying his behavior the Hulk Hogan vs Gawker was reprehensible.
I still listened, even though they provoked my ire in a very fundamental way. I'd be interested in hearing from them, as a fellow old school blogger, if they justify Thiel's funding of the Hogan lawsuit and if so, how. But I expect that both of them consider themselves in an elite class and wouldn't deign to explain themselves, or the truth is something they don't want disclosed. Either way, to be blogger-blunt, they both suck.
Update: I listened to more of the interview. I think these guys need to get out more. The reason Harris is having such a strong response is that we the voters are desperate to not have another term for Trump. We understand the stakes in the election. You always try to reduce it to numbers, when the facts are available at a more human level. The reason we love Kamala is born of desperation. Stop talking to each other, you already know why we care, because underneath it all you care because you're human and you come from America too. And btw about VCs, I know a lot about them, I'm assuming at some point Klein will leave the NYT to make millions with Thiel, and I imagine Silver is already doing that, but you both have the disease. You assume great money makes people interesting. It can make them dangerous.
The new rule for journalists is sweeping Threads and Mastodon. People have power we don’t use but could. We could turn off the interview after the first egregious lie, even if the reporters don't.
When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day.
Speaking of which, I must've converted DocServer some time ago and didn't test it well enough. It didn't even load. Oy. It works now.
I listened to a bunch of podcasts this morning about how freaked out Trump is. If a president freaks out over something like this, how would he handle a Cuban Missile Crisis? Remember the phone call at 3AM? We saw what he did with COVID, he froze, like he's freezing now.
A new rule for journalists. End the interview on the first egregious lie. Turn the lights out, switch off the recorder, get up and leave. And your report should state clearly that this is why the interview was terminated. It never should have been tolerated in the first place.
When Google tells you it's easy to convert a site to HTTPS they're wrong. It's an insurmountable job for scripting.com. 30 years of writing is on that domain, lots of different runtimes on lots of different domains which would also have to be converted. Images in all the pages. All that breaks when you flip the switch. I can't walk away from a big part of my life's work. Sorry, not for Google. Every time someone assumes I'm to blame for this situation, that's how Google has tricked you. I followed the rules. They broke them.
A lot of people are thinking that Threads is the new "nice" version of The Original Twitter, but folks, that's pure bullshit -- remember who owns Threads and ask yourself if you want that dude to be in charge of our political organizing network. We need something better.
Idea for a neat product from Automattic or really anyone: Configure WordPress for writing a book, hook it up to an AI service that can always turn that site into prose, reorganized into chapters, however you'd like, on demand, in an instant. You could use an outliner to arrange the table of contents and it could automatically generate a back of the book index. Technologically I think today's AI is ready to do this, just needs to be packaged. Charge a fair price for the service, esp at the beginning it would totally be worth it. Who knows where it would lead. I bet a lot of writers would use it, I certainly would.
I carry two phones, an iPhone 13 Pro and a Pixel 6 Pro. The latter is my main phone, and I prefer it to the Apple phone, not sure why, it's what I use for most things. I need the iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Lately there's been some trouble with the screen on the Pixel 6, on certain gestures, the right edge lights up in bright green and then immediately returns to normal. I'm thinking the display may be about to fail? It might be time for a new phone. So I went to the Pixel site to see what they have that's new and found that they're announcing a new phone, the Pixel 9, on Tuesday. So I immediately, of course, dropped the idea of buying an upgrade today, why not wait till the new version is out. I looked over the teaser, guessing that AI figures big in this release. Not sure how I feel about that because the last thing I want to do is switch over to Google's AI from my beloved ChatGPT. Kind of the same thing I see happening with Threads re Twitter.
From now on, until further notice, when I feel like watching some mind-numbing "news" program, I'm going to have a look at the Kamala Harris channel on YouTube. I don't mind doing hard work, I just don't want to hear what the NYT-centered media has to say because it's all bullshit. If I have to listen to nonstop bullshit, I'd rather hear from people who tell me we can have a bright future, than the usual NYT-spawned bullshit. It's just bullshit. I'm tired of bullshit. That's all I have to say about bullshit for now at least. Have a nice day.
At some point ChatGPT will imho be programmed to compile C apps to JavaScript, for example, even large ones with bugs.
Lakoff talks about the Nurturing Mother and the Strict Father as models for Democrats and Republicans respectively, and how the Dems never got this, and never campaigned accordingly. Now they're doing it. Owning the nuturing mother mode, but also the Protective Father, tough and angry when necessary, but a fun dad, a sweetheart. Biden was that, but we caught him too late in life for that to really flourish, hence the low approval ratings.
I think we can afford now to ignore the NY Times et al. We don't just want freedom, we are free, now. That's what we're feeling. Now we're an army and we're ready to march. We're ready to fight and our weapons are our feet, our voices and our votes. This is why it's working.
At first I didn't like White Dudes for Harris but now I get it. I saw a guy who'd normally I'd think of as a MAGA, in the crowd behind Kamala yesterday while she spoke, I thought yeah us old white dudes need permission to have sweet hearts. It's time for us to be happy too. Why the f not.
7-minute podcast.
Models for the Protective Father with President Kamala. PS: Bush had the highest approval in history after 9/11. 90%.
PPS: In case it's not obvious, there are some old white dudes who overwhelmingly support Trump who might respond to the Protective Father position.
I'm really excited about maybe finally getting my archive of Scripting News and DaveNet stuff, dating back to 1994, into ChatGPT before too long. Some people will be surprised to find that they're in the archive. If this works it'll be like the index in the back of a large book. I know I've tried this before, but this time I think I'll be able to do it myself and fuss over it and learn from it the way I do software development. Converting a very large work of writing into a reference, I hope.
4-minute podcast about my first venture into ChatGPT via its API.
There's an accompanying GitHub repo, with an example app in JavaScript that runs in the browser.
Includes instructions for setting up and funding a developer account, which was the biggest hurdle.
Functionality: It tells you who Bull Mancuso is.
Much excitement as I think about integrations I can now do.
Don't know why I waited so long. 😄
Another practical use for ChatGPT. A super techy service you use decides to require 2FA but reading their instructions you realize the docs were written by someone who hates people like you. Idea! Ask ChatGPT to translate. Out come nice instructions easy to read for people like me. Turns a dismal exercise in frustration to happiness at finding another huge stress- and time-saving application for ChatGPT.
It's wrong that posts from Timothy Snyder, Joe Trippi and NYT Pitchbot are only available on Twitter. I'd like to help their posts reach a wider audience. I posted a note about this on micro.blog with a place to comment.
My version of the NY Times has campaign news too, featuring the cutest kitty on the trail, headed to North Carolina today to support the cute and adorable running mates, Kamala and Tim!
Kitten hits the trail with Kamala and Tim! A real-life photo of Air Force 2, in Detroit.
I have great respect for Hillary Clinton and supported her over Sanders in 2016. I also supported Biden because we needed to win in 2020.
But we could have had a campaign team like the one we saw yesterday and today, with some very impressive presenters who've yet to take the stage, we could have had it in 2016. We didn't have to go through the tragedy of Trump.
The Democrats are stage managing perfectly now. I never really thought we'd see this day, but here it is.
Our favorite kitten is on the road with the Democrats.
Timothy Snyder: "If JD Vance really were a normal midwestern guy he’d be very respectful of someone like Tim Walz."
When I see a reference to an evil NYT piece, I RT it with a simple message: Ignore the NY Times. It's relaxing. You don't have to do something about it, in fact it says the opposite. Do nothing. It works on all social nets, and for any news org that's promoting lies, ignoring relevant facts, against the interest of the US. Find new ways to get informed. And if you can't find them, start one. And we can find each other.
The Bruce Springsteen mention at last night's rally was no accident. Boomers are now of the age where we vote in great numbers. So our feeling like there's something here for us might make the difference in one or more of the swing states.
Last night's Democratic rally was wonderful. I was laughing and sobbing all the way through it. What an emotional release. We needed and deserved this. Beyond hope, we're finally going to fight. I hope President Kamala is really up to it, because we have a pretty substantial cleanup job to do here.
A roadmap for the campaign is coming into view.
- Harris has her knee on Trump's neck, and she won't let up.
- There won't be time for anyone to get tired of her.
- The campaign rallies should get bigger and bigger, and more rambunctuous.
- Trump was a comedian, a cross between Don Rickles and Joan Rivers. He had a good schtick for a long run if you find fascist slapstick entertaining.
- The threats of Project 2025 previously looked ominous. Last night Maddow tried to get us all excited about how the Repubs have planted people on voting boards in swing states with the purpose of stopping the counts, and thus preventing a vote in the Electoral College. But they're doing it too late. They will feel the tide turning too. Their kids are in the popular culture of 2024, and that's where this campaign will take place.
- The Repub voters that elected Trump were appealed to based on their resentment in being left behind (not that all of them were, he just convinced them they were). But that was eight years ago and a lot has happened. Harris saying basically "there you go again" is an echo of Reagan, btw. It worked for Reagan, you just have to get the derision right. And Harris can do that, and we laugh, because we want to say it too.
- This change couldn't come at a better more opportune time, it happened almost as if the whole thing was staged. The Harris campaign was all set to hit the ground running, it feels like a lot of advance work. Or they picked bloggers who were up and running and gave them the keys and said go. Either approach is fine, breaking through where previous Demo campaigns didn't have the nerve. Whatever it is, there's a sign of competence and urgency in the Democrats that, unlike it was with Obama, is grounded in the challenge not in some almost religious sense that he's The One, which was understandable, we all were walking around in a stupor not believing such a thing could have happened.
- Now we're grounded. We've seen the outline of our future. A few weeks ago the lead Republican thinker said in an interview, it was up to the liberals to avoid a bloodbath, as they took over. You don't hear that anymore. Those people must now we thinking more seriously about jail time for what they did. And the Supreme Court will go to jail too if they try to support what Maddow was talking about. We must not let them overthrow the government.
- FDR threatened to pack the court and the court backed down in 1938.
- I had my doubts whether Biden would stop it, and I don't know if Harris will, but given how purposefully the campaign in running, I suspect (hope, pray) she will. Our job is to give her the support she needs to feel like we've got her back.
- BTW, if you haven't listened to Sunday's podcast, please do. A lot of what you read here will assume that you have listened to it. It's just 12 minutes.
Walz is Harris' choice. Picking Shapiro would have been leading with her chin because of Netanyahu. Walz looks older than her but they're actually the same age. And he figured out the right word to get under Trump's skin, so there's that. He just has to say weird in campaign speeches to bring down the house.
When reporting massacres, imho we should cite the number of people who were shot. It measures of how much violence there was, and how excessive the gun tech used. Many who were injured but not killed have their lives ruined. Their suffering can go for decades.
If you want to keep up on political news, esp at a time when so much is happening so quickly, the best resource I have at this time is the politics tab on news.scripting.com. Here's a screen shot.
I asked ChatGPT to illustrate this idea: "JD Vance is a punchline."
"JD Vance is a punchline."
We're depending on big companies that are nuzzling up with Trump, at best hedging their bets, to let us use their networks to organize ourselves politically. That's never worked for us, in fact it's worked against us. Trump's election in 2016, for example, could he have done it without Twitter letting him go direct to organize?
The Harris organization is doing great, they have to take on the journalists, where previous Democrats had no answer, they've done it in a clever way, by using their channels to talk about the things journalism should be talking about. People listen to their competition, and that's what this is.
It's not hard to do this, a few of us, who are good listeners and writers, to build lists of sources and provide them for people to access away from the nonstop (often entertaining) bullshit of the social web of 2024.
I've asked for ideas for podcasts that would go into a list of shows people who are voting Democratic would find interesting or useful. Not for spreading religion, but based on facts, not the unhinged lunacy and revenge of Trump. Our news now is too polluted by that. He shouldn't be able to lie about Harris's race, and have that be an issue carried by journalism, for example. That should not be possible but it happens.
Podcast: 12 minutes.
Every time I solve a Wordle puzzle, I'm allowed to switch over to ChatGPT and narrate a new scene for the Wordle Kitty. Here's today's installment.
The cute and adorable Wordle Kitty, Democratic VP candidate, got tired of waiting for the Republican, so she took a few of the reporters with her back to the presidential suite at the Plaza Hotel on 5th Ave and had a drunken night of debauchery with the reporters and totally trashed the place. The next morning the story appeared in The NY Times. Headline read “Adorable kitten trashes suite."
What remains of the Presidential Suite at the Plaza Hotel.
Wordle Kitty is rumored to be the VP choice for the Dems. She is at the Carnegie Deli in NYC to meet the Republican VP candidate, to talk about a debate, but the Repub is a no-show! Weird. Meanwhile the press is having fun asking her embarrassing questions about a cat in the White House. They want to know if the WH has a litter box. What if she gets pregnant? Stuff like that.
Such a big sandwich for such a cute kitty! 😄
For some reason I don't like writing user-level docs for my own software, but I don't mind narrating a draft with voice. Now that I have a voice recorder that creates transcripts exactly where I need them, I can feed the narration to ChatGPT and ask it to write docs based on features I describe that are part of the current software, and leave out notes about possible changes or additions. It took me 13 minutes to do the narration, because I talk more slowly than it writes, and I ramble and get distracted. It took the bot less than a second to produce a near-perfect outline. It left out a bit that I wanted included, it was added in a second. Then I asked for an OPML version of the docs so I could edit it, and pass back the edited version. It got a bit confused and gave me a JSON version of the outline, and Node.js code to convert it to the XML, but when I pointed out a simpler way to do it, I got what I needed in less than a second. And here it is, in my outliner, ready for me to add notes, and edit and reorganize. ChatGPT is a team member, not a surrogate. Another amazing experience, absolutely no going back.
Saw a video where Elon Musk talks about climate change, no snark, didn't call it a hoax, was intelligent and serious. Also heard that he's backing Trump for president, who says it's a hoax and one of his major campaign promises is to "drill baby drill." Maybe they could discuss this because there seems to be a disagreement here.
Blogrolls, in the 90s, were the beginning of the social web. In the 20s, they can bring today’s social web into blogs.
I was trying to find Tony Kahn on the web for a friend doing a documentary on the origins of podcasting, and came up empty. I just stumbled across him on Facebook and that led to this autobiographical site where he tells his story of podcasting. Tony was the person who brought NPR into podcasting in 2004. A major contributor who isn't often credited. He was at WGBH at the time.
There isn't a whole lot of love in this 39-year-old man. I worry for his kids, esp if either of them don't have kids.
Where is the AI-based meme maker for Kamala. I'd like to have her flying in the sky with a cape, like SuperPresidentLady, going from town to town, finding out what they need, and churning it out for them in an efficiently run government meme factory in the nation's capital. Like we were doing with the kittens earlier this summer.
The Podcast0 project is teaching me how to read the archive of my own blog. Until now I had not carefully read the story I tell on my blog more than a few days after it happened. Here's I'm learning to reconstruct the summer of 2004, one of the most creative periods of my life, at least that's viewable in such a public and preserved way. Am I the first to do this for any blog? If you know of an example of historic research done using the archive of a blog, please send me a note. I'd love to learn about what you learned! Also because of its longevity and continuity, I offer this blog as some kind of record of what happened in the last 30 years or so. I see it as a complete work of writing, a kind of fresco writing.
I said on Thursday that Biden's speech last Wednesday had the potential to be a Gettysburg speech, if it the United States turns back toward democracy and government of the people, by the people and for the people. Biden has the potential of being as great a president as Lincoln. Let that settle in for a moment. I get goosebumps when I think about it. If he hadn't taken that stand, he could have become known as the US equivalent of Kaiser Wilhelm.
Like 193K others I tuned into White Dudes For Harris last night. Please, let that be the last time we do that. I felt like it might as well have been Slave Owners for Harris or Reformed Republicans for Harris. I don't have anything against people of my gender and approximate race, but I also am a child of Holocaust survivors, and I happen to be one of the elites the Repubs claim to hate, and also am one of at least two castes that Democrats tend to blame for all our problems (other than White Dudes). I think we've done enough segregation for one campaign, now please please I beg you, let's work together, regardless of labels, to save the country we all love. I have a philosophy, I don't care how you got to the party, if you took a subway, walked, rode a bike, or came by Uber or a Cadillac limousine. We all got here, and have a common purpose, so lets all love each other and party our way to victory. Regardless of race, creed, color or whatever.
Like cholesterol, there's "good weird" and "bad weird." I think we all know which kind of weird the Repubs are.
Here's a perfect illustration how ChatGPT improves customer relations. I bought an iPhone that I now don't need, and it's arriving today via FedEx. I wanted to know whether I should just refuse delivery, or accept it and then return it. Obviously it's easier to refuse. I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a detailed reply. Apple's chatbot saw it as a "technical" question and wasn't prepared to help. Sales support is one of those applications where cost is totally justified and economic. A human helper would cost a lot more I imagine than a LLM chat system.
Is there anyone here within earshot who is involved in doing the web stuff for the Harris campaign?
Before Twitter broke the API, it was a quick way for me to channel items from my blog to almost all the people who follow me on the social web. Now it isn't even one of the services I use that I can post to with my writing tool (those are Bluesky, Mastodon, WordPress). None of them are anything like the aggregator of people that Twitter was, and I can't even reach it from my writing tool. I really want to solve this problem, but I absolutely can't do this on my own. No time, patience, and it's not my job to do all that coding. As observed the other day, my time should be spent on writing tools for the web and directly related products. This is the kind of project that should be handled as an open source thing.
Braintrust query: Every day a web page opens in Chrome from a plugin that asks me to buy a subscription. I don't know what the software is, I gather that it's related to a debugger I use for Node.js apps. I would like to block it from doing this, but I don't see an easy way to tell Chrome to not display pages from this site. Any suggestions?
Patrick LaForge who just left the NYT after 27 years: "RSS news readers let me track breaking news and competition back in my blogging days and I still used them as a corrective to see beyond what social media algorithms were showing me. You see the stories long before home page play or tweets. Gave me an edge. To print-focused journalists who knew little about computers in a certain era it seemed like magic."
On this day in 2004, I did podcast interviews with Don Means of Meetup and Patty Wetterling of Minnesota at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. For both, I did the interview with Natasha Celine of the Pacific Views blog. The next podcast won't be until August 15. I think Adam Curry and Steve Gillmor are on this one, and if so for sure we'll be talking about the podcasting bootstrap which at this point appears to be underway. Not sure if anyone as ever gone down this path in the last 20 years because, when I do the searches to find links to sites and people, I don't see any mention of this stuff in the current day, although now there will be (here on my blog). Here's the feed of ancient podcast podcast review. You can find the reverse chronologic list of the whole series on morningcoffeenotes.com.
Somewhere in this timeframe Adam Curry began Daily Source Code which is still running to this day, almost 20 years later.
On this day in 2004 I was in Boston to blog the Democratic National Convention, esp with my newfangled audio blog post thing.
Biden's speech might turn out to be a Gettysburg type speech. We hope it does. We have a huge fork in the road, one way -- goodbye USA, the other way 00 USA stronger than ever. We're in a good spot because Trump's tank is empty and he's old and tired and fat and very bad. You have to work really hard not to see that.
I want a Masto-clone that does not do replies. You can't insert anything under my idea, but you can if you like include my idea, as a link, in yours. This model works. I think by now we know the other way does not work. BTW I use the term Masto-clone interchangeably with Twitter-like. Let's spread the love around.
It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent.
Pretty remarkable how the bots on Twitter have become so abusive. Makes the idea of discourse there pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.
Fantastic speech by President Biden. It's good we'll have both a president and a campaign and that they'll be separate thing. I look forward to reading it slowly. And he put a cap on the awful communication of the last month, he took control of the story from the snobs and shit throwers in the press.
How Harry McCracken discovered that ChatGPT is a deeply and broadly knowledgable, infinitely patient, always available, inexpensive, programming partner. I've been using it that way for a year, and it has enabled me to take on much more ambitious and complete projects. It could evolve into something much more powerful, but where it is now is already amazing. The criticisms for ChatGPT have mostly missed the point of what it's useful for.
All the reporters know the Repubs refused to fund border stuff so they could use it to tag the Dems in the election. So the first thing the Repubs do is tag VP Harris with the border. The reporter asks a Dem what they have to say about that. But the reporter knows what the Repubs did. So why do they even ask the freaking question? They just play the script the Repubs wrote for them. They are so savvy, but we heard all that too, so we know how corrupt they are. They don't care if we know.
A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wire over the social web.
Also talked about twitter-like systems, and idea borrowed from algol-like and lisp-like.
I talk about what made Unix so great.
Eric Raymond once told me that XML-RPC was very much like Unix, and I said oh yeah, and so is RSS and the rest. Huge compliment because the simplicity of Unix is what I strive for, put huge time into.
Journos once said Apple is dead, but that was ridiculous because they had built a product that was just starting to grow and they had planted the seeds of huge growth in the 80s when they focused on selling to education, which made sure that kids when they grew up would have good feelings about Apple, and it totally worked. When the reporters were calling them dead, they were actually just about to boom in a whole new way, on the web, which the Mac was perfect for, given the built in simple networking. And then boom again when Jobs came back. And again with the iPod and then again with the iPhone. See how reporters miss the big picture. We shouldn't give them so much power, they pretend they know, but they are usually pretty clueless.
This podcast is also a demo of how my mind works. I flit around all over the place but also have learned over the years that if I want to get anything done I have to focus on one thing for at least a few hours every day, and string those days together.
I want to document this stuff for the benefit of young programmers. I learned a lot from reading the code of Unix, I always want to pay that back, the message is to strive for simplicity, keep technical debt to a minimum, and factor, factor and factor again to reduce technical debt. Those are the hardest projects, I'm doing one of those right now, but in the end it's worth it, because with simplicity you get to build higher.
I was able to follow kamalhq on twitter. This report says that Musk is rate-limiting followers on that account. Of course we warned what could happen if a Republican bought twitter, but I didn't honestly contemplate that a fascist would. These days our greatest fears aren't scary enough. People laugh that Musk paid too much for twitter, but if the US ends up as an autocracy, the oligarch that owns the entire news distribution system for the world will probably have the last laugh. BTW, if you want to know why we're so thrilled to have Harris as the candidate, even though we didn't want Joe to give in, it's because no informed and sane person wants to live in a new Trump term. We tried that if you recall. The hope you hear now is much greater than the hope we had when Obama was selling that (though hope was a good word for it). Today it's the hope that we won't be deported or worse.
I want future President Harris to stay happy no matter what the bastards do or say. We should have a crisis line for her to call to get some quick love. 1-800-LUV-KAMALA.
I grew up in the same part of Queens as Trump, about ten years after he did. His family was in Jamaica, mine in Flushing. Here's a map that shows you where the two houses are. 4.0 miles apart if you take Utopia Parkway. A great name for a street, but it's not a parkway and it's nice but definitely not a utopia.
People who aren't from huge cities like New York don't know that Trump what our losers look like. They probably have their own loser types. I think that's where 99% of the confusion is. They really don't believe he's so bad. Don't hold that against them, that's nowhere near as bad as knowing what he is and being okay with that.
He's a mean bully type. The name-calling is a big clue. Distracts from his weaknesses, which are very obvious. I don't believe in body shaming, because I care about other people's feelings. If I criticize his appearance it might reflect poorly on nice people who have his body type who may not be mean bully losers like Trump.
He's also a really good comedian if you don't think he wants to have the power to kill millions of people and control many more people. Last time he was our president just through incompetence, without trying, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Covid disaster. He also wanted the army shoot protestors, that's the mean part of our former president. Luckily the people who worked for him told him to fuck off. They saved us from going into a very deep hole that would have been hard to escape from.
I watched the coverage of the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and listened to the Americans they interviewed, not the actors they put behind him on stage, to make him look like a badass I guess, these were just normal people who mostly like Trump, but seem pretty likeable themselves. The one thing you heard over and over was how If you don't like a candidate vote against them don't shoot them. That's American and it's not fascist at all. I don't think they know that he wants to make big changes in how our politics work. People think if he's bad they can just vote him out next time. He tells them this will be the last election if he wins, he actually says that, but somehow it doesn't seem to register.
Do Trump supporters understand what they support? Of course the journalists are distorting who Trump supporters are. Trump is deplorable if you take him at his word. Some of Trump's followers are deplorable too, like the ones who rioted at our Capitol and January 6 and the people who are lined up to work in his next administration if he wins. They are awful people who want to control all of us. They're already doing it via the Supreme Court. It's going to get a lot worse if we go the wrong way. We shouldn't accept that we're horribly divided. The powerful media people want us to be divided, I don't know why and I don't care, I just know they do, based on their actions.
Anyway I know we're at a high moment, we're excited, and I'm going to enjoy the feeling. We all seem to be pulling the same way, at least on "our side" but I hold out hope that being an American still means something, that we can be friends, and fellow countrymen, and work together. I think that's still our greatest challange and our greatest opportunity. Yeah I am woke, that means I care about all of us. I think most of us do no matter who you vote for.
For the DNC in 2004, we had a site called Convention Bloggers. It was a river of news feed reader, clearly done with Frontier, of blogs run by people who were at the convention.
Looking forward to the NYT deeply analyzing Trump‘s 78 year old mind and body and his Hannibal Lecter stories.
I'm doing something new. Trying to initiate topics on the social web. We almost totally respond to external stuff, I wonder how different it would be if we engaged on a more individual level. I've been doing this for a while, but only now am able to explain it.
BTW, there is a totally legit and legal way to deal with the issue people are grappling with, w/o any fancy new extra-legal ways of nominating a president that resolves it in a minute, if the Cabinet goes along with the idea that the current president isn't able to do the job, and if being re-elected is a legitimate part of doing the job.
Pretty sure most people don't get that being president is a job, not a role someone plays in a TV sitcom.
Great wealth is poison, that's what's playing out in the NYT-orchestrated overthrow of the American government. They're driving us into the arms of the Nazis. Who knows why, or even if there is a reason, other than their drive to find meaning in their great wealth. Their problem, and ours, is that it has no meaning, no human can use the money they've accumulated. These are not human-size fortunes, playing a game of make-believe, what if we really were as smart as we think our money says we are. Well you ain't that smart.
The earth shook today. I'm watching the news like everyone else after President Biden withdrew. There really is a lot happening very quickly, and the Dems all sound like they got their story straight, for once the Dems sound like a party. How did that happen. NakedJen says we need a miracle. I said that's her department. ❤️
A two-minute podcast where I dictate an op-ed the NYT should run in its own name, apologizing for trying to take over the US government, and promising to return to being a news organization.
I am so fed up with it. Today they ran an op-ed written by Aaron Sorkin giving advice to Democrats based on his experience writing scripts for a fictional White House television show in the late 90s and early 00s.
Yeah the NYT has lost its way. I hope some people down there think they're way out on a limb and it's time to get back to what they do. They are not qualified or entitled to do what they are doing.
One great use for ChatGPT, simple recipes.
If you try looking for a recipe on Google they take forever to get to the point, and pop up all kinds of offers when all you wanted was a checklist of ingredients and steps.
For example, how to make hard-boiled eggs.
Try doing the same thing on Google to see what I mean.
Pete Buttigieg should be the Democrats' official blogger. Every day a new insight into what makes people do what they do and why the Dems have all the right ideas. He's a perfect spokesperson in that role. A daily Pete. He should do it.
A 25-minute ramble with the themes of the Dreaming piece I wrote earlier today.
Spoiler alert: I reveal the ending of the movie Casablanca.
Respecting yourself means sticking to problems we can and need to solve, and work together.
We can't make anything to happen until we start listening to and working with each other.
There is no perfect super-Democrat. Our candidate is Joe Biden. Any real candidate is going to suck.
It's like We Make Shitty Software, all candidates suck. But we do a great job.
The Democratic song this year, and always, should be With a little help from my friends.
Read George Lakoff, a great linguist who figured out how American politics work.
Check out Elizabeth Spiers piece about how it's time to get over the West Wing ideal. Martin Sheen never was and never will be president.
And remember your vote is a chess move, not a love letter.
Like it or not, Twitter is still the social web of record. This is something we need to fix. It's going to take a long time, but it has to start.
Isn't it surprising, with old age such an important topic, that we aren't learning more about it? I'm there now, myself -- immersed in it, can't escape it. I guess I didn't want to know about it until I had to. It's a real perspective-shift.
Some coffee notes for a Saturday morning.
- This election is a total mess.
- Trump is extremely beatable.
- Biden is extremely beatable too.
- We've all had a chance to live in an America with Trump as president, and Biden. I know which one was better for all of us. (Evidence: our response to Covid, S&P 500 price.)
- Biden's health is not good and it of course will get worse in the coming four years.
- Trump's health isn't good either and it also will get worse. He doesn't care for himself. He's 77. He's near the end of the decade most people die.
- The Dems can run the show without Biden.
- The Repubs plan to run the show without Trump, he's just a figurehead, I hope you know that. An actor they put on stage to distract you from the nasty shit they are already doing (evidence, the Supreme Court). When he says Project 2025 isn't his, he's telling the truth. He has no idea what's in it and doesn't care. All he wants is to stand up at rallies and vent, and have his own Rick's Cafe in Casablanca and be Rick. It's the quieter, less showy folk that use him that you should be scared of.
- Even if Biden wanted to step aside, and he clearly doesn't, the mess that would follow can't be unraveled before the election, so if you push Biden out we lose, pretty sure of that. This is why I think Nate Silver lost his way, he's a sports fan, as am I. What's your next move after taking out the pitcher. You better have a good reliever warmed up in the bullpen, right? We don't even have a freaking bullpen Nate (hope he reads this).
- But it's fun to dream of the super-Democrat, the candidate who would totally clean Trump's clock, win in a landslide, and when they take office would clear out the junk on the Supreme Court, bring back Roe v Wade, slam the brakes on climate change, and then kick Putin's ass and restore America to greatness for real, and also prepare us to survive the next pandemic. But it's just a dream. It can't happen. Any good candidate will stay out of the mess that will follow a Biden step-aside. No one would want their future tied up in the mess-to-come.
- Remember, your vote is a chess move not a love letter.
Rick Blaine owns a nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca.
Historically it's unjustifiable. The NYT et al are grievously wrong, and that should be reflected on their op-ed pages. We've been here before, this is as much a hack as Hillary's Emails. Maybe you can't see it now, but win or lose, people are going to look at this period when we all lost our minds.
I posted the above piece around the social web, I like the way it looks on Threads the best.
An eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer's show today. The first half is an interview with Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all ages, they're incredibly passionate, well thought-out, coherent. This is way better than the punditry you hear on news. The real crime here is that the insiders of the Democratic Party are taking control, after they were manipulated by the press. A total insider's route-around of the democratic process, it's just as bad imho as what the Repubs are planning around Election Day. The press did the same thing to NY governor Andrew Cuomo, who was elected by the people, and forced out without any legal process, and certainly not a vote. That experience argues in favor of when you're in doubt, do the thing the voters said to do. Anything else is very very questionable. Why are you taking control? Where are you authorized to do that? I think perhaps some of the Dems forget how huge an issue this was in the 2016 process.
Now that Elon Musk is giving so generously, dollars and flow, to the fascists, he's encouraging more of us to use Zuckerberg's twitter-like system, aka Threads. But Zuck isn't making it go down easy. There's a piece in Bloomberg (paywall) that says Trump is badass but isn't supporting either candidate. What could possibly go wrong?
Matt says some interesting new stuff is coming from Automattic now that WordPress 6.6 is out. Something for writers? Perhaps something that moves WordPress into a space adjacent to twitter-like systems? They just added support for Threads to WordPress, so now you can crosspost from a blog to a thread. Haven't tried it yet. They also have a new identity system built around Gravatar, announced in early June. It'll be interesting to see what they come out with. I wonder if there is a developer ecosystem building on this, and if they have an evangelism program. I have my own vision of how these things should work.
Nancy Wicklund Gonzalez: "I’ve had to switch to watching the BBC. American news is unwatchable. Between the lionization of a sociopath and the denigration of a decent man, I just can’t even."
The Repubs can win by throwing the election into the House. They can probably get it by the courts in enough places, just a couple of swing states, and they win even if they lose by normal vote-counting methods. The whole bit about Biden's age is meant to distract us from the fact it probably doesn't matter how old the Democratic candidate is.
A podcast about listening to the podcasts from 2004.
This is a short episode about what I learned, and what's coming up.
Humbling experience.
Highly recommend this Netflix series -- esp the last three episodes. I found it enlightening, even though I lived through most of this history, I never saw it all put together in a series of events over decades. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective of where we are in the Cold War. It never was over. "The end of history" was too good to be true. Also glad I read so much about slavery a few years ago. If you put both these together, you get the USA, and the deep and lasting wounds we keep re-opening.
Today's adventure: "The great and cute Wordle Kitty was surprisingly chosen to be the running mate of the most popular presidential candidate in the history of the United States, who happens to also be very very old so that’s why they nominated the cute little cat to be the vice president because she is so young and so incredibly cute."
The problem with JD Vance is that he's empty inside, he'll be whatever he needs to be to get more power, and he's young. He's as empty as Trump, and much younger, so we can't hope to outwait him. Now we have a real problem, because Trump has a successor. I imagine Trump's sons probably aren't happy about this. Had he picked Little Marco, no one would mistake him as an heir, or Doug Burgum who is a bit too old to be an heir (same age as I am). We do have a problem with Biden, he hasn't prepared for this moment. Old or not, they had 3.5 years to get ready, and they didn't. As I wrote yesterday, the biggest most important thing is that we organize ourselves. That's the best defense all around. Every attempt to corral the insurrection has been either non-existent or overwhelmingly inadequate. Trump should be out of the picture, and for a while it seemed as if he was getting there, but now he's back, and probably a bigger threat than ever. I don't think replacing Biden is anywhere near enough. We need leadership. Not wait to be led. We've waited too long. People who appear ready to step up -- AOC, Bernie Sanders. Who else? I wouldn't put Obama on that list, he tried to welcome Trump, even let him have his Supreme Court pick, just to be a nice guy. We are not going to prevail by being nice, unfortunately. We're also not going to prevail by each of us taking care of Number One. We have to work together. Organize and work together. Those ought to be our mantras until we achieve them.
NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.
Government should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of John Gruber. Focus our attention on it, so the ideas don't get missed. This is all part of the idea of having a democratic.party website that we call call home for our political organizing. None of this pissing in the wind we do on twitter-like systems. Form buddy groups of people we organize with, based on locality or common interests. Organize the people as well as the billionaires are. This is what political parties should be in 2024 for crying out loud. We're missing the point of the mess in our politics. It needs to be organized and it's not. Maybe I should take everything else off my blog now so I can use what little attention I have been able to gather here to focus on this idea. We. Need. To. Organize. And btw, Al Sharpton is one of the clearest thinkers out there, and for some reason got a bit of a bad rep and I'm not sure why. I'm putting the basic message in big bold text, below.
On this blog 20 years ago: "Our mission when covering the DNC is to figure out what goes on at a DNC. On the other hand, some portion of the 15,000 reporters at the DNC will be trying to figure out what we, the bloggers, are doing at the DNC. I suspect most of them will conclude that we don't belong there, in the same way most of the early articles about weblogs concluded we are not going to kill professional journalism." This turned out to be true.
BTW, I'm locked out of my Threads account. They say it has to do with automated stuff they don't explain. I don't have any apps that do anything with Instagram or Threads. I tried changing the password. Anyway, I was just starting to like the network, it has its own feel, and have made some friends there, but I have no energy to fight it, at least not right now. If you don't see me over there, this is why.
How I found out about Trump's assassination. By accident, I was watching CNN when they switched over to his rally. I listened to the first few minutes, ugly lies, the usual disgusting stuff, so I switched over to season 6 of Line of Duty, which isn't very great. I couldn't focus on the show. I got my iPad and checked out Bluesky and saw a message from someone regretting that he hadn't been killed, and somehow I knew that "he" was Trump, so I switched back to the news, and saw the live events, Trump asking for his shoes, and then doing that disgusting thing with his fist, looking right into the camera. He's 100 percent television actor. Either the whole thing was staged, or he just thinks that way, it didn't cross his mind that a bullet aimed at his brain had barely missed killing him. He's thinking of his business model. Now I must confess my first thought was just like the person on Bluesky. Now Trump who lies about being a victim, really is a victim, and we'll never hear the end of it. And it didn't take long before a random Republican asshole was saying this was Biden's fault for saying Trump would end democracy, which he has said he will, promised to do, and we saw him try to do it on Jan 6. And the CNN reporter went along with it, saying the temperature has to be lowered on both sides. There it was. Both sides. It didn't take any time for the Republican talking points to dominate. This was Biden's fault they all agree. Occam's Razor says this is over. We aren't going to vote in November. The deal is done because the journos, who really control who is elected, have made their choice. I've yet to hear another explanation from them.
If someone from Russia or Ukraine were to read the previous paragraph, they'd nod their heads and say the US is now Russia. That's how our journalism and politics work. The oligarchs have sold out to the dictator. This is what it's like after that happened. People inside big companies look the other way all the time, and try to compartmentalize. Now their malaise becomes ours.
BTW, if Biden steps aside don't expect the Repubs won't sue saying it's illegal, so guess what -- not only don't you get Biden, you don't even get a replacement. The election will be like a Russian election, with just one actual candidate on the ballot and a few total losers for appearances. A great card to hold in your pocket. I bet they have the arguments already written.
BTW, I'm locked out of my Threads account. They say it has to do with something I don't understand. Probably not going to fight it. If you don't see me over there, this is why.
How I found out about Trump's assassination. By accident, I was watching CNN when they switched over to his rally. I listened to the first few minutes, ugly lies, the usual disgusting stuff, so I switched over to season 6 of Line of Duty, which isn't very great, and in the few minutes I was watching I was thinking that the asshole who led the January 6 attack on the Capitol was back in the middle of our politics. Our temporary 3-year holiday is over. I couldn't focus on the show. I got my iPad and checked out Bluesky and saw a message from someone regretting that he hadn't been killed, and somehow I knew that "he" was Trump, so I switched back to the news, and saw the live events, Trump asking for his shoes, and then doing that disgusting thing with his fist, looking right into the camera. He's 100 percent television actor. Either the whole thing was staged, or he just thinks that way, it didn't cross his mind that a bullet aimed at his brain had barely missed killing him. He's thinking of his business model. Now I must confess my first thought was just like the person on Bluesky. Now Trump who lies about being a victim, really is a victim, and we'll never hear the end of it. And it didn't take long before a random Republican asshole was saying this was Biden's fault for saying Trump would end democracy, which he has said he will, promised to do, and we saw him try to do it on Jan 6. And the CNN reporter went along with it, saying the temperature has to be lowered on both sides. There it was. Both sides. It didn't take any time for the Republican talking points to dominate. This was Biden's fault they all agree. Occam's Razor says this is over. We aren't going to vote in November. The deal is done because the journos, who really control who is elected, have made their choice. I've yet to hear another explanation from them.
This post on Threads has already gotten over 7K reads. That's a lot for me, on any platform, and I have far fewer followers there, and no blue checkmark.
Today's song: Respect Yourself. For all of us, but especially the people of the United States of America.
I think it's pretty obvious that Biden will step aside, in favor of VP Harris. Behind the scenes the Democratic Party seniors, Pelosi and Obama for example, are working with everyone, including the president, to make it go smoothly and to spend the time between now and the convention getting ready to launch a super competent campaign aimed at the jugular of the MAGAs, from Trump to Leo to the six thugs on the Supreme Court, getting us ready to clean up the mess in January. I doubt if they'll do a great job of organizing the voters, but maybe we the people can do something there. As part of the deal, the NY Times which stepped far out of bounds for a news org, should agree to get back to reporting news, and let the Democrats manage their own party, unless the NYT wants to declare itself to be part of the Democratic Party. Their inexcusable behavior over the last year, esp the past couple of weeks, and in the 2016 election, makes it impossible to view them a news org. They may not like this but believe it or not the readers have a right to speak too. The owners of the NYT should listen.
If you listened to my audio blog posts in the summer of 2004, I recommend subscribing to the new podcast0 feed. I just listened to the show from this day 20 years ago. It was quite a throwback, lots of questions about what I was talking about, I've forgotten a lot of it. It took a full hour to prepare the feed. I can tell this is going to be quite a flashback experience. Maybe it'll get me in the mode to do some serious innovating, because we were on fire and didn't know it, in so many ways, back in the summer of 2004.
If we were organized we could handle anything. The only reason we're panicking about Biden's capability is that our news flow is owned by largely invisible media moguls. The only way out of this mess is to route around them.
It bugs me that there’s all this focus on Biden, when what we really need is to organize as voters so we can be ready to deal with whatever happens. That’s the real problem. The press can point out a problem, and it is a problem, but no one has the ability to build a consensus among voters. I think it’s possible to put together an online version of the Democratic Party, something that never goes away, is available to rally the electorate at any moment. That’s the way to neutralize the power of the media moguls who have us wrapped around their fingers.
Nate, suppose Biden abdicates. What happens then? And what happens after that? Have you gamed it out? I know you're smart, you must have figured out how this doesn't become another mess like Bernie and Hillary, or Nader and Gore, Perot and Clinton, Kennedy and Carter, McCarthy, RFK and Humphrey.
Every Tuesday I look for Jon Stewart's opening for the Daily Show on YouTube. It's always funny, great comedy, whether or not you agree with what he says, and I usually do agree. But not when it comes to him pushing President Biden out, without any idea of what comes next, and how the people, even some people who love his show, feel about having no voice.
If the voters organize, using the tools we have now, and stay organized after the election, we could elect anyone to be president. There's never been a more clear opportunity to win a landslide. It depends on organization, and elites like Stewart and Nate Silver, James Carville, and the editors of the NYT and Atlantic -- not grabbing the steering wheel with no clue about what comes next, and driving us off a cliff.
I've been close to elites at times, and I can tell you, they aren't any smarter than you, they just have more power. I think that's been the real problem. We have failed to stay a democracy as we've gotten the tools to really be a democracy in ways we never could have before. And now we're at the last moment before it's all flushed away and the NYT et al (including our hero Stewart) are making it more certain, not less.
Be warned I get really angry at the end and raise my voice. I don't think I've ever done that in a podcast, and I'm not sure I like it. But the rage is real.
16 minute podcast.
If you've lived much at all you know what Joni says is true. I got there when my grandmother died in 1977, when I was 22, my first close relative that I lost, and I tried to come to grips with the idea that I'd never see her again and found it impossible, but it was true nonetheless. No way to escape it. When my mother died, in 2018, I only thought after we cleared her house to be sold, the house I grew up in, that I didn't even take pictures of it before it was emptied. I was so used to it being a constant, I forgot to realize until it was too late, that I was saying goodbye to everything I knew for my entire life. Forever. It's why we're playing such a dangerous game of chicken with Biden's presidency, because the stakes are so incredibly high. A mathematical approach to this problem says imho that everyone should shut the fuck up about Biden's flaws and get us organized so we can handle any eventuality. The problem isn't that Biden might die, the problem is that even if he were to win, we'll be right back here in another four years, and at that time we will have to grapple with an even more dire situation. Whatever happens this year, what's waiting for us is for most of us to wake up from the dream that there are any constants in our lives. It's all falling apart, in every way. The only thing that matters is we start working together, intelligently, or else it's over.
I admit that after the debate and the interminable attacks from the press on our democratic process that I'm pretty depressed about the future. I was talking with a friend over the weekend, a fellow NYer who moved up to the mountains as I did, about the political situation, and I asked if he would be prepared to sign a loyalty oath to Trump. He said he'd never do it. If they tried to force him, he'd get a gun and shoot them. This isn't the first time I've heard that, and I called bullshit. You're never going to do that. I know this guy, I know myself. I won't do it either. And I think I probably will have to sign the loyalty oath and so will you. There are so many ways to turn your life off, legally -- and without recourse. Think about what happens when you lose access to a social media account. Or when a credit rating agency doesn't believe you are who you are. Or when someone hijacks your phone and you can't get back control of it (and try to use anything without a working phone number). I've been through all these miserable processes. And none of them were legal, or controlled by the US government. A president who demands loyalty of you will get it. And that is certainly exactly where we're headed.
I find the blogroll on the home page of my blog to be an incredible way to catch up on what people I follow are posting to their blogs and news sites. It's more like a feed reader than a blogroll because when a site updates it moves to the top of the list and when you click the wedge next to the title you get the five most recent posts with links to the full story. Maybe it was a mistake calling this a blogroll. I'm trying to come up with a better place to put it so more people would see it and use it and might think it would be nice to have a place like that for themselves. In any case I'm thinking about what to do next with FeedLand, which is what's behind the blogroll software. It hasn't lived up to my hopes, and I don't think it's likely to. I may be done writing software for others, I was writing only for myself for a few years, between 2017 and 2021, and I really liked that. The experiment of writing for others was not a success. So I'm thinking about how to wind down FeedLand, keep it available for the people who are already using it, but close it to new membership. Just thinking out loud here for a bit. It's that time, to consider what I want to do with the next few years, assuming, praise Murphy, I have them to play with. 😄
I'm glad Biden is attacking journalists, he has a much bigger voice than I do. If I had his influence I'd be saying the same things, though I wouldn't be as kind. It's time to put the journalists back where they belong, covering news, not trying to run the country.
We should try this someday: A twitter-like system built with feeds, with all their limits. People can link to my posts, but not attach themselves to my flow. Goodbye spam and the motive for abuse, attention. Something I'd like to try someday, but first you need people who are interested. It's a chicken and egg thing.
I wonder if people remember what a divided Democratic party is like. Obama had Hillary. Hillary had Bernie. Gore had Nader. Bill Clinton had Perot. I guess Mondale and Dukakis unified the party? Before that, Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, that was something. open war. Probably we'll all be wishing for Joe Biden if you all succeed at getting him to resign. BTW he's just one person, there's a limit to how much bullshit one person can absorb.
In this podcast I tell the story of the move from print to the web in 1994 when the San Francisco newspapers went on strike. I was part of that process, a step in the bootstrap that led to the social web.
I'm thinking about that process as journalism system is losing its mind, like everything else, and we need to find a way to flow intelligent news to people who need it, so we can start to organize, and we need to do it now.
The flow are out there, smart people who know stuff and have ideas, but they aren't getting heard amidst the mindlessness of the NYT, CNN, MSNBC et al.
It's a long story, and it starts off crisp like most of my stories and then rambles out.
16 minutes.
I cancelled my NYT subscription. They can't hear their readers. It's time for a new journalism, and we're going to have to do it without them. I haven't cancelled my Washington Post subscription yet, but I'm pretty sure that's coming soon enough.
Threads: "The reason people are finally talking about Project 2025 is because an actress used her platform to bring attention to it when the media failed to."
You say you want Biden to step down. You've been heard. This is the President of the United States. If you don't respect the man at least respect the office.
I hear that cancelling a NYT subscription is wicked hard. That alone makes me feel like cancelling. I cancelled their morning email of things I need to know about. It's one thing for them to exclusively report on Biden's age in their space, but my mailbox is mine. Get the F out of my mailbox.
This year I'm thinking how we can boot up a source of news that has the balance we deserve. Now that the Supreme Court is no longer keeping up any pretense of respecting the Constitution, and journalism is either colluding, or preparing for their meeting with a military tribunal in March next year, followed by, if lucky, a re-education camp, we need help knowing what's real and what's not.
Congrats to Threads on a good first year. Looks like I signed in on opening day, July 5, 2023. They have done a good job of slipping into the spot previously occupied exclusively by Twitter.
Truth be told one of the reasons I added it now was because I wanted a place to use the new easter egg Nakedjen recorded for me (and you).
Gordon McLean asks: "If I was to move my blog away from WordPress, what platform is simplest?"
My blog is also a podcast. I wonder if anyone else does that.
The title of this episode is "A peneer of legitimacy," but what I really meant is veneer.
I describe a dream where the owner of the NY Times is, in March 2025, being tried by a military tribunal for not sufficiently helping Trump get re-elected as he was told to do. Sulzberger, in his own defense, points out that they covered Biden's Age, the official new version of Hillary's Emails, while ignoring other possible issues.
The tribunal returns with its verdict and hilarity ensues as the punishment, secret until revealed, is administered.
The crowd goes crazy! "Too late! Not enough! Go to hell!"
The host of the show is Bart Simpson.
It could happen.
3 minutes.
I added links to my two new podcast feeds to the About page on Scripting News. Screen shot.
If something like this happens and you haven't seen it in my linkblog, or on my blog's home page, please post a link to my Mastodon account.
Somehow, even though I watched an hour of news on MSNBC last night, and was on all the social media all day, I didn't hear about Pelosi's comments, or the leaked poll data, until this morning. It wasn't until I looked at the synopsis of Olbermann's podcast that I learned that something had changed. For whatever reason, even though I have made a significant investment in time to stay informed, it isn't working. Fact.
My favorite soft drink these days is Coke Cherry Zero. It's got a really nice taste. Went to the store today, they only had one 12-pack, but they also had a 12-pack of Coke Spiced Zero. I decided to give it a try. I had a can at lunch and it's weird but okay I guess, but the belches are strongly flavored and that's realllly weird. It took me a while to figure out where this belch-breath was coming from. It tastes like I took some very strong medicine. The weirdest soft drink I've ever had. But it kind of grows on you. I'll try another one and let you know how it goes.
This is the second of two podcasts for a two-podcast Tuesday, today.
Very likely there will be another tomorrow.
So much going on! 😄
25 minutes.
This is the first of two podcasts for today.
It started out being one podcast, but I hit the wrong button after 14 minutes and ended up with two audio files instead of one.
I don't like editing, so you get two for the price of one. :-)
It's a rambler, starts out with me talking about Elie Mystal on abortion and slavery.
The second podcast explains how we're in a war, and it's about time we recognized it as such.
We need the Democrats to do what we elected them to do, save the freaking United States, which by the way after yesterday's decision by the Supreme Court, doesn't really exist any longer. We go into that in the second episode.
It's not enough to win the election. We have to get the Supreme Court back to a semblance of what it was. They're behaving in a way that's inconsistent with the continued existence of the country they're supposed to be part of the government of.
But we can have a laugh along the way. The world hasn't completely fallen apart, yet. 😄
14 minutes.
I post stuff to Facebook that could get inundated with hateful comments. I have a pretty good idea upfront which ones those are. I go ahead and post them. At the first sign of flameage I turn comments off, with a simple explanation. "I turned off comments here. I didn't want to have a discussion about this, it's just an observation." I think this is totally legit and more people should do it. Really frees you up to say what you see.
They edited the Constitution the way board members of tech companies design software products, with no idea how it works.
This is a lightly edited version of a post on Threads.
I understand why the Dems don't want to be the first to use the new rule passed by the Supreme Court, but I think they should consider this plan:
- Arrest the members of the Supreme Court who just voted for the new rule about presidential immunity.
- Nominate six replacements, sorry no Repubs this time.
- The Senate ratifies them.
- Once they're installed, they hold an emergency session to restore Roe v Wade, and to undo all the other crazy BS they did and then revoke the new rule, and re-assert the rule of law that especially applies to the president.
- And I don't know what they do with the ones they arrested but frankly I don't care. Leave them in jail until they figure it out.
- And it's about time Trump was arrested and held without bail, so he can't do any more damage to the US while awaiting trial.
Patrick LaForge, a longtime friend who works at the NYT: "I think the distinction here is that the president can't be prosecuted for violations of law but they would still be acts unsupported by law that a court could block or an agency could refuse to carry out. But they sure have created a mess."
My response: Maybe starting to do it is enough to get the courts to undo the mess asap.
Listen to today's Countdown podcast. I was cheering out loud during the first segment. When you read this post, you'll see why. I tried listening to the NYT Daily podcast today, but it made me hate them all over again, starting with saying how great a week it has been for Trump. You can say that, imho, but you have to say right after that, that it was a terrible week for the rest of us. Because any good news for Trump is awful news for everyone else. And I do mean everyone, including the people who plan to vote for him again.
Chief Justice John Roberts: “I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
Our challenge is to make sure the really interesting stuff happens on the open web, outside the silos. If that happens we can go on. Otherwise we go right back to where we were when Twitter and Facebook dominated. Not a good place. 17 years of stagnation
I just did an approx 40 minute podcast interview and discussion with Jeff Jarvis. I know Jeff from the early days of blogging. He was one of the best discussion leaders at BloggerCon. And he's an accomplished author and educator.
We talk about how to organize news for people who are information starved by whatever it is that our news sources are doing, which is really hard to figure out, but in the end (I argue) who cares why, we have a problem to solve, so let's get on with it.
I talk about the blogging at the Dean campaign in 2004, that's how they got around journalism. I'm sure that's where we have to go, put together what we think would be the Biden blog if the campaign was being run by Joe and Nicco, and I'd be on board, so would Jeff, and we'd help Heather Cox Richardson, and amplify anyone who is making sense and supports democracy.
It could be funded by the People's PAC, or something like it. It wouldn't take very much money, it's just a blog. But it would have powerful ideas that cut through the bullshit, and great videos, and we'd organize marches where people show up to help people.
And the campaign would never stop, we'd always be organizing.
This is the discussion I wanted to start.
Hope you enjoy! :-)
PS: Jeff's mike is much better than mine. Gotta work on that.
When talking to ChatGPT think of it as Commander Data on Star Trek, who, in an interesting turnabout is a robot played by a human. Oh the humanity.
The buggy images of ChatGPT perfectly fit the blogger come as you are ethos. We called this Dogma 2000, the site is gone now, and it's even gone in archive.org. Sad to realize some of the simplest most worthwhile ideas are gone now.
A new version of Blogroll Browser. You can now go directly to the OPML version of a blogroll, and to the HTML page we discovered it in. I know all this must seem strange, hard to figure out what's going on. That's how I feel about it too. But I know there's interesting data here, how people are connected to people. I'm still trying to figure out how to make a browser that engages the mind in that. It can take a long time to figure these things out. I had the basic idea for a blog in 1994, but it wasn't until 1999 that we really had it figured out and implemented for non-techies. This may be like that, or the browser might be just around the corner.
A podcast about the debate. We needed one thing from Biden, to believe he's got this. It didn't happen. Okay what's next.
I've started a FAQ for why we should vote for Biden in November. I keep wanting someone to make this list, so finally I got off my butt and did it myself. I would have liked to have been looking at this list last night at the debate, to remind myself that even if the President had trouble explaining it in words, there were indeed very good reasons to vote for him.
I don't want to write about last night's debate. But if I did, I'd say there's nothing to be done, we just have to let this play out. Even if Biden were to step aside, that would just open the convention and there are lots of Democrats who would see this as their opportunity to be the FDR or Lincoln of the 21st century. There would be no nominee until after the convention, maybe it wouldn't be so bad for the Democrats to have everyone's full attention for a few months. There will be lots of polls, that's for sure. In the meantime, I'm going to try to enjoy the summer, it's beautiful here in the mountains north of the city, and I have some software to finish. And of course I will vote for Democrats straight down the line in the coming election.
Yesterday I did a podcast in my new podcast-only feed that explained how RSS had its moment between 2002 and 2006. The big event in 2002 was support from the NY Times, and in 2006 it was the advent of Twitter.
- The NY Times support gave us the news flow of one of the greatest and most respected news orgs there is. The entire news publishing industry followed, with incredible speed. It was an amazing time. Woodstock on the web. Everyone who was anyone was there.
- Inbetween, RSS got the rep of being too hard for average people. The only reason for this deserved reputation is that subscription was a mess. Every website had to figure it out for themselves, and every feed reader acted as if they were the only feed reader in the world. RSS, which could have been the foundation of something very much like Twitter, never got out the corner of the market where it was totally adored, by people who were motivated enough to tolerate the awful state of subscribing.
- This was not in any way an insolvable problem. But it required something that the developers of the open web wasn't able to do, work together. The W3C and IETF were busy trying to replace RSS, they were offended that it had been developed by independent developers, even though their pitch for XML was that you could develop your own formats. It seemed they didn't believe their own hype. So not only did they not do do anything to help, they actively worked to undermine the success of RSS on the open web. By the time Google Reader came along in 2005, it was too late for cooperation, Google dominated, and they didn't want to do anything to build an open news ecosystem, they simply refused to listen.
- When Twitter arrived in 2006, it had control of every aspect of user interface in their corporate platform, and were thus able to completely solve the subscription problem. Every feed had a button that said Follow. Click the button and you were following that feed. The button changed to Unfollow. That is was whole user interface right there. So easy anyone could use it.
The podcast is only 12 minutes long. Go have a listen and then think about whether or not you want to solve this problem for the fediverse. It can include non-ActivityPub systems btw, like Bluesky and even feed readers! We can all share the same subscription protocol. But it cannot be distributed. It must be centralized.
The technology that would make solving the subscription problem easy requires that client apps allow OPML not just to be imported and exported, it should be possible to subscribe to OPML subscription lists. It's not necessarily all that easy to support, but it is possible. I've written the code for this in FeedLand, in a few weeks. It's open source btw, and you can show it to ChatGPT and it can ingest it, and perhaps even show you how to add it to your product.
This is roughly how it works.
- When a user subscribes to a list, you read the list, and subscribe the user to all the feeds in the list, marking each as as a special subscription, that came from the list. You identify the list with its URL.
- Periodically you read each list, as you would check a feed, and compile an array of feed URLs of the feeds it contains, and then compare it to the stored list of feeds for that list. Subscribe each user that's subscribed to the list from the feeds that were added from the list, and unsub each user from the feeds that are no longer in the list.
- The user could be subscribed to a feed many times, once for each list, and once perhaps on their own. If the user unsubs from the list, only the subscription from the list is removed, the others remain.
Podcast: The Fediverse is doomed unless subscription gets easy, fast. Twitter kicked butt when it came out in 2006 and the butt it kicked was the feediverse. Why? Because it was too damned hard and unnecessarily complicated to subscribe to a feed. In Twitter there was a button on each feed page that said Subscribe. Click the button and you're subscribed. That's it. May sound like a small matter, but it's not. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I've been dying to say that. 12 minutes.
Wordle Kitty hunkers down in an epic battle with Wordle Monkey on stage at Carnegie Hall in NYC for the honor of kittens everywhere. She ultimately prevails, but not without a brush with disaster! The NY Times judges her performance as merely “great!”
The Kitten Abides!
Summary of yesterday's news: You should now be able to subscribe to my podcasts. Use the search function in your favorite podcast client and look for Scripting News. This is what it looks like in Apple Podcasts, for example.
I'm getting my podcast-only feed for Scripting News ready.
It's going to be an Apple-compliant podcast feed. I'm enjoying the process.
Of course when it came time to do the logo I went to my reasonably-priced graphics consultant, ChatGPT. It came breathtakingly close on the first attempt, but it repeated part of the story. Every time I asked it to fix a problem, it created another problem, and the image brightness was reduced, not just in terms of pixels but also the creativity of the image. Of course it isn't really creative. I know. Yadda yadda.
Anyway I decided that since the motto of my blog and therefore my podcast is "It's even worse than it appears" that an obvious imperfection is totally consistent with the philosophy, and we move onward. As they say, still diggin!
It's even worse than shit appears. The prompt for the image: "I'm sure you're aware of my blog, Scripting News, scripting.com. I am doing a new podcast feed for the blog. This feed is designed to get through Apple's submission process so it can be listed in their podcast database. One of the requirements is a 3000 by 3000 image that serves as a logo for the podcast. I need something simple and bold that says 'Scripting News podcast' and then 'With Dave Winer and friends' and 'It's even worse than it appears.' On a background of corn fields in Iowa viewed from the air."
If you think you know what RSS is, I bet you don't. Please listen to the 14-minute podcast I posted yesterday for the real story. We should learn from this and not repeat the same mistakes, and of course until the real story is out there, we can't learn from it. Let's get it right on the Wikipedia page. It isn't about Guha or Libby, me, or whoever. It's really about the power of Netscape and the early web news publishing companies that supported RSS, and the blogging systems that jumped on board (including my own products) and then two years later, the NYT coming on board, followed by the entire news industry. A bunch of nerds arguing on a mail list is not the story. With the benefit of well over twenty years hindsight this should now be kind of obvious.
Threads could make it a lot easier for us to cross-post to their system, esp since they say they will support ActivityPub. As it is there are too many hoops to jump through imho. I think basically they all want you to use their UI's which amounts to writing in tiny little textboxes of course.
I want to be able to run Frontier on the new Macs, but was disappointed that VMware doesn’t work and had given up on the idea. But I just learned that UTM might work. Here’s the transcript of my inquiry. Wondering if anyone has had good experience using UTM to run older Mac software on Apple CPUs.
I'm going to start a new podcast-only feed, and this is the first episode. 14 minutes. It tells the story of RSS as a remarkable coming-together of tech, news, publishing and blogging. The first burst came from Netscape and four leading web pubs, Salon, Red Herring Wired and Motley Fool. As a leading blogger and developer of blogging tools, I jumped on board as soon as I heard of it, as did the people at Blogger. RSS was an instant standard with a great installed base, and retained its simplicity. You have no idea how remarkable that is. It grew like a weed. An installed base developed. There was confusion for a couple of years, between 2000 and 2002, about what RSS was, but the market stayed with the format specified by Netscape in 1999. Then in 2002, at UserLand we did a deal with the NY Times to get their news flowing through RSS, and in the next year, the entire news world supported RSS. That's the story. You can write all about who did what in a background story, but the big story, the miracle, mostly remains untold. What matters is an open format took root and retained its simplicity. And it pays to understand why it was not a strong enough foundation to be successful, first because the vendors didn't work with each other, and then because Twitter made subscription one click, where it was ridiculous how hard it was to subscribe to a feed in RSS. We should learn from this, and not repeat the same mistakes, and of course until the real story is out there, we can't learn from it. This is a 14-minute podcast. I cut off the last five minutes because I got lost in the weeds. All of this is documented in the archive of this blog and the sites it points to. And if there's interest I'll happily talk about it in a future podcast.
I saw a Tesla truck parked in Woodstock yesterday. I wasn't prepared for how big it was. It's an impressive looking machine.
There's a new star in the kittyverse, Wordle Kitty. I let her do my Wordle-play. Today, she was feeling a little under the weather so Wordle Kitty checked into the town urgent care center where they gave her some medicine which gave her the strength for a “splendid” performance at the days Wordle puzzle. So while she’s feeling a bit ill under it all is a feeling of splendor and the usual over the top cuteness! :-)
Jon Stewart said something interesting — and imho correct, that news is about the past.
When they cover things that haven’t happened, that’s not news.
He said news should be like jury duty. Rigorous and decisive.
That makes total sense, and gives a pretty good idea of how far off course we are.
Manton Reece: "I really dislike the Mastodon setting to require HTTP signatures for everything. It makes basic features like just grabbing some JSON for an actor more difficult. The user’s profile is on the public web anyway! We need apps that work natively with the web on its own terms, not more protocol layers."
More and more I see comments, unless explicitly asked for, as spam that I'd disable if I could.
Most of the energy in social networks these days goes into keeping the garbage out of replies. If originators had stronger tools, there would be less work for the platform to do, and overall happier people.
On Facebook, I often limit comments to friends, who don't tend to spam, presumably because we like to stay on good terms, and spam is an imposition, at best, and often insulting.
The best software does one thing well, that a lot of people want to do, that there is no other way to do. I've never seen this, but it's the ideal.
Bruce Schneier has a new blog moderation policy. Everyone should have one. He's a bit of a troll himself. Once he gave a talk at an O'Reilly conference, and while I was in the audience, accused me of designing XML-RPC to get around firewalls. I happen to know that's not true, and in fact you can easily spec a firewall rule that keeps out XML-RPC calls, that was a design goal. So I waited my turn, and explained. He just stood there, offered no apology or retraction or explanation. Now that's fucked up Bruce. From that point on I never believed any of his proclamations. And I rarely forget people who openly trash my rep like that. Tech is so fucked up that way. People like Schneier take advantage of the fact that people don't understand the terminology so they get away with hurling insults randomly like that.
There's a new kitten to keep track of -- Wordle Kitty. When I need to score a big win, I turn Wordle over to this kitten and she does a kickass job while remaining as cute as can be.
Thanks for all the good advice via email and Mastodon re best way to record an interview podcast in 2024. I'm really getting into this. I'm definitely going to come up with a nice pure podcast feed for Scripting News. But first I have some new software to ship. 😄
Here is the image of the cute yet sad "Standards Kitty." She feels the pain of someone reinventing something while claiming to support open standards. Despite her tears, she's still really adorable.
Standards Kitty is sad.
Why did the Podcast 2.0 people reinvent rssCloud? That's the kind of bullshit Google does. We don't do that in the open formats and protocols world. What really pains me is they claim to follow my Rules for Standards-makers. Imho they do not. Two rules apply. Rule #1 says the only reason we do this is interop. It's called Rule #1 for a reason. And the one way rule a little further down the page. I've seen this happen twice where people say they abide by the RFSM but then do exactly the opposite of what it says to do. We have to do this better people. Come on. Also come up with something more humble than the name you've chosen. We've been down this path. The only way it ends is in tears.
Now that I'm publishing a podcast feed designed to be read in commercial podcast clients, I'm learning for the first time how they work. For example, they seem to list shows not in the order they discovered them, as I do in my products, rather in order of pubDate. So when I set the dates on the shows from 2004 to their actual dates, that would have worked if I hadn't made a mistake in GMT-encoding the dates. Stupid programmer (me). Now they will show up first in the lists forever unless I switch to that form of dates. This so totally sucks. I wish there were something in RSS to say "Hey readers dump your cache now, let's start over, because I fcuked up." It wouldn't have mattered anyway, I'm sure none of them would listen, right?
ChatGPT is the Ozempic of online info-finding. Neither is a panacea, there are side-effects, but both make possible great feats that weren't possible before, and both have come about just in the last year or two.
Until recently I was always unsure of how to use CSS, been that way for many years. Then I started to use ChatGPT and could ask it how to do things, and I’ve gotten much closer to the designs I wanted, and I’m getting better at it with every project I do.
I started to write the code to hook up my linkblogger to Threads, but it led me to the same website with all my broken Facebook apps, the ones that stopped working when they shut down the API after the 2016 election. A reminder that this is still Facebook. And while I don't blame them for shutting down the APIs, the whole experience left a really bad feeling.
So I backed out of the project to give it some more thought. Do I really want to go down this road?
And of course I had the cute little kitten illustrate.
The kitten is startled by the Facebook developer site. A cute little kitten is sitting at a desk with a laptop, preparing to write an app. The laptop screen shows code for the Threads API from Meta. The kitten has a surprised and concerned expression as she looks at the developer site on another screen, which shows a Facebook logo and reminds her of the events of 2016. In the background, a calendar shows the year 2024. The scene is set in a cozy room with soft lighting and a few toys scattered around, giving it a homely feel.
I'd like to do a series of interview-style podcasts. I'm wondering if there are any services set up to make this easy. Or should we just use Zoom, and record the audio somehow?
People of my generation (born 1955) are at the point in our lives when we would feel better if we got credit for our accomplishments, good intentions, the ways we made the world better, but it’s dawning on us that we didn’t make as much of a difference as we hoped to, and what little we did accomplish will largely go unrecognized. Even worse, none of it, even in the short term, made much of a difference. 😂Threads API reminds me wh
Here's a game you can play. Every time you think "good" immediately say "gouda." For some reason it's funny.
Technical note. I made a mistake in converting local time to GMT in the code that builds the feed. My times were off by four hours. So I corrected them. And now instead of three items in the feed, according to my own feed software, there are now six. I bet all the other systems will do the same thing because the guid is a function of the creation date of the item, and they changed. Oh well. At least the RSS version only has three items. I think I should change how the guid works.
Today's podcast-zero episode is up. It's from June 14, 2004. It's 1/2 of a panel in 1991 that I was on with Bill Gates. This is before the turn to the web. At this point I'm starting to look around for audio that might fit into this new audio blog channel that goes with my written blog.
I asked ChatGPT to write a Hello World app for Threads. Here's the code. I haven't tried running it yet.
I loved being my own DJ with Napster, and none of the execs or journalists figured out that this was the appeal of getting all the music out from behind the incredibly obsolete and brutal paywall that the music industry had concocted. They didn't give a shit about the users except they wanted our money, there was no love in the connection between the creativity of the artists and the creativity of the users. We supposedly didn't have any.
I'm like Emmett Chapman, an accomplished musician who created a new kind of musicial instrument for himself and others to use. That's what I do with software. I play the tools I make. But what I really get off on is the music the users make. I was thinking about my father yesterday, it would have been his 95th birthday. He died at 80, so there's been plenty of time to process his life as I knew it. The best connection he and I had was silent. I inherited my love for outliners from him, yet that love was latent probably for hundreds of generations in our family. I had the skill and creativity to create such a tool, and finally the technology existed, and he let his son turn his mind upside down and inside out. For that he would say Every day is Father's Day. That may be my greatest accomplishment.
I was chatting with my brother yesterday, ChatGPT came up, and I thought (and said) I bet dad would have loved ChatGPT. Then I thought of our uncle Ken, on my mother's side, and said he would have shit his pants over ChatGPT. Ken spent literally hours every day with the meager reference tools he owned in his off the grid cottage near St Augustine. The way I love ChatGPT is the way he would have loved it. I'm absolutely sure of it. My paternal grandfather would have loved it, and I expect my great uncle Arno who was a pioneer of zettlekasten would have also lost his shit over ChatGPT.
Which leads me to the art of a user of ChatGPT (which really needs a shorter name). People's first reaction is that by creating art with ChatGPT I'm stealing. Bollocks. I'm creating. I'm not even going to validate that with a rebuttal. I am proving it with the Patriotic Kitten thread, the next of which I will now entertain you with.
The second patriotic kitten.
One of the cool things about the way I designed FeedLand internally is that there are various levels of feed stuff. If you want to start over at any level, you can, and today I'm doing exactly that. But first here's the stack:
- At the lowest level is the reallysimple package, which reads any feed and returns a consistent JavaScript object, so the database code only ever sees one kind of feed. All the differences between RSS and Atom are flattened, and features from the source namespace are included, where they are present.
- Above that level is the feedlanddatabase package, which has a Node API that does all the stuff with the SQL database that FeedLand runs off. So if all you want to do is add feeds, subscribe to them, add a user, subscribe to a reading list, build a river, all that stuff is at this level. This is the level at which I'm going to start building today.
- Next level up is the feedland package, which implements the REST interface, and handles all the runtime stuff that the FeedLand client needs.
- And the final level is the one the user interacts with, it runs in the browser, and makes the REST calls to the feedland server. All the rendering of the objects coming out of the database via the REST interface happens here.
In an application I'm working on, I found myself reimplementing features of FeedLand, and I stopped myself and said, nooooo use the API that's already there. The advantages are many, including I will be able to use FeedLand to manage the data structures. So that's what I'm doing. Wish me luck.
I'm highly motivated to support the newly released Threads API, but a quick look indicates that it's a fairly large project. All I want to do is cross-post, along with Masto and Bluesky. I did both those a loooong time ago. But I really want my links to go to threads, and also create a thread-writer for it like the one I did for Twitter and Bluesky. There's no shortage of really interesting projects now, so I think I'm going to have to wait to do this for a while. If anyone makes a really simple Hello World for Threads for Node.js that would make my day. 😄
For people who use Electric Drummer. If you accidentally close a file that's open and want it to re-appear in its previous position, you can edit your prefs.json file. You can find it by choosing Open Data Folder from the File menu. You'll see prefs.json. Open it in a text editor, and make the changes you want -- carefully. Probably a good idea to make a copy of the file before editing. But I just did it and laughed out loud, why didn't I think of this before? Heh.
My second Podcast0 episode is up. Here's the RSS 2.0 feed. And the page for the episode on Apple Podcasts.
I can also set up a separate feed for Scripting News podcasts, and I'm definitely going to do that too. If this idea catches on I'd like to collect and share interesting podcast0's.
Here's a screen shot of the post from 2004 in Pocketcasts. The arrow points at the date. It's cool that a podcast from 20 years ago appears to work. I wonder how it'll sort in the Most Recent lists?
I added my Podcast0 feed to PodcastIndex and Apple. I've subscribed in Pocketcasts, and am listening to the first episode now.
I was talking with a friend over the weekend about the origins of podcasting, and how, in June of 2004, I finally decided to do an audio post, to get my feet wet, and to prove all you needed was a laptop and a little software and you could be doing radio almost as easily as writing a blog post.
That was June 11, 2004.
Then it hit me, it's June 2024 now, it's been twenty freaking years.
In hindsight, that podcast was the start of the bootstrap that saw a dozen shows by September and then hundreds and thousands, and now here we are, podcasting has been through quite a few bursts of growth and it's still as open as it was back in June 2004.
Anyone with a laptop can do a podcast. That was the goal. You don't need anyone's permission. That was a breakthrough in radio. Prior to that, you had to get a lot of approval, and every step made it less real and less interesting, imho.
My partner in this at the time was Adam Curry. Sometime in that period he started The Daily Source Code, and then we did a podcast together for a few months called Trade Secrets. My own podcast was called Morning Coffee Notes.
So I thought, why not do a Serial-like podcast over the next few months, with the actual programs from 2004, along with the Trade Secrets shows. I think I have them all archived. And it would be great if Adam did the same with his shows, starting when they started. And Dawn & Drew, Dave Slusher. This can go on forever if you like. (I promise mine won't.)
So here's the URL for the podcast.
http://scripting.com/podcast0/rss.xml
I'm sure there will be a lot of cringeworthy moments, but what the heck. I'll hopefully have the feed up before the end of the day, and I'll register it with Apple so will hopefully be transcripts.
I hope I can count on you to spread the word, this is how the podcasting bootstrap happened. If you want to learn how two weird geek hippie types like Adam and myself, can have an idea, and then by constantly trying out new approaches, eventually it sticks and becomes a new medium that's still thriving twenty years later.
It should be quite a story! :-)
Here's a picture of myself and Adam at Gnomedex in the summer of 2004. And that's the laptop I used to make all these podcasts. I was living in Seattle at the time.
Dave and Adam at Gnomedex in 2004.
RSS has never been on the cover of a magazine, so you can't say ChatGPT is stealing this from anyone. In fact I'm offended on behalf of ChatGPT that the press has chosen to focus on the idea that it's plagiarizing journalists. The ideas journalists write about do not belong to them. If they're doing their jobs, they're reporting facts that exist whether or not they wrote a story about it. A simple example. I may have read in a local paper that the Mets swept the Dodgers in the NLCS. I don't owe a news org anything if I wrote that the Mets won, because I read the news on their site. The news doesn't belong to them.
The idea that RSS could be on the cover of a magazine isn't so far-fetched, but no one ran a press release and there were no billionaires involved, so they didn't consider it newsworthy I guess. Some day we're going to have to accept that we have to make our own news, in the sense of Scoop Nisker's famous line -- "If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own." So here we go. I asked ChatGPT to imagine a magazine with RSS as the cover story.
Imagine RSS as the cover story. PS: Does the concept of a cover story even exist now that we rarely read printed magazines?
I've written a crawler for the network of blogrolls via connective links in HTML and/or RSS feeds. When I started the project, I had no idea what I'd find. How many blogrolls of what quality. I still don't know the extent of it, but there's a non-trivial number of blogrolls out there. I'm thinking about ways to get a handle on all the feeds in all the blogrolls, and see what we get from that. And I'm beginning to see the utility of FeedLand as a feed operating system, which is what I wanted it to be. It's not just a feed reader. It's able to do things most feed readers don't do, maybe none do. We don't have a good grasp of the depth of the feed products either. I will of course share the results when they are shareable.
Three movies I've watched in the last few days: 1. Fight Club. 2. The Matrix. 3. The Devil's Advocate. I had seen all of them before. But they go together. And they're all about the same thing, about choosing to live in a dream, or to live the life you're actually living. All three are excellent movies that I watched straight through from beginning to end, which is really unusual for me these days.
This would make a great campaign ad. Remember how lost we were. Understand what you're voting for when you go MAGA and what you could get if you sit this one out or cast a protest vote of some kind.
Warning if you haven't watched the second season of The Jinx you should not read this, because it's a total spoiler.
When Durst is cross-examined in the trial, the prosecutor asks a series of questions that got him to admit that if he had actually killed his first wife, he would have lied in his testimony. He asked a whole bunch of things but stopped short of asking the question that would have nailed him.
Mr Durst, would you kill someone to avoid being convicted of killing your wife?
From what we know of Durst he would have had a hard time saying no. When he's caught he generally admits he's caught.
They got the conviction anyway.
PS: I don't recommend either season but having watched the first, I was kind of committed to watching the second. He's a truly despicable character.
This function is included in every bit of software I write. Never know when you might need a random snarky slogan. I added two today. 1. There's no time like now, and 2. Mirrors lie.
I have a server that's returning OPML files. It's not the first time I've done this, but now there seem to be enough other people interested in this that it's worth raising this question. What content type should I use. Generally I've been using text/xml. But I see other people using text/opml. Here's a thread.
One place I could use ChatGPT-like functionality, in debugging CSS. I'd like to put my cursor on an object in Elements view and ask why does this object have a width of 1054.09px. When I look it up in the Computed panel it's greyed out, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to get the debugger to explain this. But there is an answer to this question.
Is there a Kickstarter for political ads? I'd like to put up a page with yesterday's ad, and let people put up money to run it. The more money we raise the more the ad runs.
Getting a new case for an old cellphone is a huge cost savings, because you're getting most of the benefits of having a new phone for approx 1/86th of the cost, by my calculations.
Okay it's not the best political ad ever but it's pretty freaking good.
We love America and the flag stands for the good in us, in all of us. And our president not only gets that, he is doing what presidents are supposed to do, unite us. To the extent that we can at this time be united. But even a MAGA, viewing this ad, is going to have to swell up with pride for what this country means.
But I have a question for my campaign friend and politics rabbi -- Joe Trippi. Joe, why don't they ask for a contribution at the end? I'd pay money specifically to have that ad run everywhere, even in states we have no chance of winning. Because there are people in every state that deserve encouragement, and if we want to really win we need them to feel part of our great country as much as anyone in a swing state. And there's always value in forcing the opposition to campaign in states they otherwise feel are safe.
So let me -- a regular citizen -- earmark a contribution for this message. It gives me another way to vote, a sense I'm participating.
I'd like YouTube TV to let me block Fox News. It shows up on their home screen as the default channel and it starts playing automatically. For some reason they've decided need to watch Fox News. Please stop doing that. Not just for me, for everyone. If there has to be a default make it something easy like Seinfeld perhaps. Or Law & Order. I haven't switched from Spectrum, I'm trying YouTube TV while I think about switching. This is a small thing, but might be a deal-stopper. I don't want my nose rubbed in how evil they are. I know. I want to turn on TV to escape. A Julie Andrews movie perhaps.
Matt Terenzio, who has been a friend for many years, threw a fat pitch about people like me who think the NY Times has a lot of explaining to do. I don't think anyone is listening, but my issue with the Times is when they embrace and promote conspiracy theories that damage our political system. Matt says we have many truths, and I think that's where we differ, there has to be one truth when it comes to accusations of the kind that the Repubs throw at Democratic candidates and minorities. When they take a side against the people, that's when I have a problem.
I did a search on my site for NakedJen.
Google thinks I meant "Naked Men."
This is why Google should know I have a blog and it has it indexed, and if it just looks it would know that question shows how dumb it is.
When I type my mother's name in, searching on my own blog (again) it tries to correct the spelling of her name. My own mother's name.
Google started out so smart then they must have lost all the smart people. Or they got stupid? I don't know. But there's so much they could do to improve their product, it would be sensible to, while they're shooting for the fences, do the small things that would give users an idea that there's some humanity to the product.
NakedJen or "Naked Men." PS: ChatGPT should also know where my blog is, and it should be constantly loading the updates. This is the freaking breakthrough. Do it.
Also, I'm using their Calypso API to talk to WordPress. I like it. Well-designed and documented. I've built another layer that makes it even easier for a browser-based JavaScript apps, and also added storage, which you can't do a web app without.
It's not much of a secret that my next product is the minimal writing tool I always felt WordPress should have. I have not been doing this in conjunction with Automattic, I'm not sure we're on the same planet re what WordPress is for. Ultimately it'll be their decision if this idea gains traction. But I keep hearing people ask for this product, and I think it's the reason Substack and Ghost have become popular. I'm going to put it out there, and see what comes back. 😄
BTW, I love the new margin image of NakedJen. Talking with her the other day we decided this would be the opening scene of The NakedJen Movie. The meaning of the image is well-known to people who travel with the Dead, as Jen did. I've never been to a Dead concert with her, but I understand it's like going to a Comdex or MacWorld in the 80s or Esther's or Stewart's conferences for me in the 90s. Sure you go for the music, but mainly you go to schmooze in the hallways. I love talking with her on the phone the most. We have thought about doing a podcast, and even tried recording one, but our one-to-one conversations are much more interesting, and funny. We're take turns being Pinky or the Brain.
I'm working on a server app to read blogroll source in OPML, and build a database of other blogrolls that are linked to feeds in the original blogroll, accessed via the feed or html source. It was a lucky thing when I designed the format for subscription lists back in the 00s that it included the htmlUrl attribute, it makes the HTML easier to find (though the channel-level link element in the feed could play the same role). Anyway, of course I'm using a SQL database for all this, and when I was thinking about it initially I thought "no big deal" it's a variant of a SQL table I've now done a dozen times. But it was a big deal, because I've yet to come up with a way to factor this so that I have a library that knows how to make the kind of table that keeps coming up all the time, to bury the complexity and make creating a new one much simpler. Same thing with CSS and JavaScript. I know the justification for CSS is that it makes scaling from phones to desktops possible, but that would be equally possible if you provided a good object with properties that can be configured at runtime. That's how we do it on servers with a config.json file. Then you could do a much better job of factoring browser-based apps. Imagine how much smoother everything would be if these structures could be factored. This probably doesn't make sense to too many people, maybe it won't even make sense to me in a couple of years, when hopefully I've moved on to a better way of doing these things. I would love to have the time to take a crack at doing the factoring anyway, I'm sure it's possible, just not obvious how to do it. In the meantime I think there are now enough blogrolls out there to build something interesting out of them, which is why I'm taking my break from The Next Product to do this.
A simple example where ChatGPT saves programmer time. MySQL has awful error messages. Rather than try to figure out what they mean, I paste the message into ChatGPT and say nothing. It tells me what the error was and even fixes it for me. I copy the result, paste it into MySQL and I'm back on the road. One can imagine where they build that into the MySQL app and I converse with it instead of the app with the awful error messages.
I'm happy to host sidebar images on Scripting News that showcase the creative possibilities of ChatGPT-developed art.
Is this the user experience writers want from WordPress? If I were designing it, I would start from scratch, build an easy writing tool for writers to focus on writing, make the design process accessible if they want to work in that mode, but keep it out of their way because most writing has nothing to do with design.
It's been driving me crazy watching Stan Krute doing all these weird and often beautifully bizarre ChatGPT images, and realizing they are only being seen by people on Facebook when there's this huge world of creative people that don't or won't use FB.
Then it occurred to me, I have the perfect place for these images, outside the facebookiverse, that would showcase them, and be easy to produce (I don't want to take on responsibility for big production overhead myself).
I have images I put in the right margin of blog posts on Scripting News. Small little bits of creative color, that may or may not be connected to the story they are next to. And sometimes connected in non-obvious ways, intended to make you think.
Then NakedJen sent me a recent picture of herself that's perfect for the right margin. Seen in the right margin of this post.
Here's a page where you can scroll through the collection of images I can choose from. I'd love to add more creative stuff here. And I'd love to get some of Stan Krute's genius or Brad Pettit or whoever else might be so inspired.
No promises about when or if they'd be used. You can post them here, as comments on this message if you like.
I may have to restrict this to people I follow, just letting you know, based on past experience.
Meanwhile the Repubs are getting ahead of themselves. Bannon said something that he should be arrested for. I'm sure it's horribly illegal to threaten people the way he did, and he did it in public.
I caught a bit of the last Wheel of Fortune. The three players were celebs: Vanna White, Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik. What was remarkable was how super-human Jennings is. He could solve the puzzle with almost no information. I have no clue how he saw the patterns. He has freakish intelligence.
Someone should tell the kids the Repubs will come for their weed. Just sayin. There probably are a number of voting age youngsters who have never lived in a time and place when cannabis was illegal.
By popular demand -- my blogroll now makes it more clear that the permalink to each item is the date of the item. Screen shot. This is a convention in blogs and social media apps that the timestamp doubles as a permalink. And I think this is more distracting, and cluttered, but let's give it a try. It's possible that people missed that they could go to the website from the blogroll. Now it should be more obvious.
The Repubs are coming uncloaked. Their slogan might as well be Revenge. It's the one thing everyone who votes for Trump wants more than anything. They hate their lives, and are looking for someone to release their rage on. They don't know how else to do it. It doesn't have much to do with inflation or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no one is happy with this arrangement. Ask a billionaire if you don't believe me. They have huge grievances which you would have thought all that wealth would have cured them of. The new Nazis have a selling proposition that works every few generations, after the memory of the previous societal explosion are gone. My parents, the last people I knew who lived through the Nazis are gone. I just have the memory of the aftermath, and it wasn't pretty. “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” We're at the beginning of the "happen again" moment. My grandfather told me what to do, but I won't do it, pretty sure of that.
I have a Mac Mini that keeps running out of space on its internal drive. It happened again, but this time it offered to open an app that helps me find the big stuff. I don't know when this app came to be, but it's very helpful. In a few minutes I was able to free up 100GB of space used for all kinds of frivolous purposes, like backups of every mobile device that's ever come within wifi distance of this machine (or so it seems). I'm sure there's a way to get it to store some of the frivolous stuff on the 16TB external drive, but I sure don't know how to do it or do I want to know. My head is so overloaded with other BS from JavaScript, CSS, Node.js, my own software, etc etc. My brain has been out of space a lot longer than this Mac's has. I desperately want to move my act to Linux and reclaim all the memory I'm storing stuff about the Mac, which isn't really doing me much good, I use the Mac as if it was a Linux machine. However, I remain a happy shareholder btw, that's my revenge, and why I bought the stock in the first place. I was so unhappy with what Apple was doing at the time but I could see that it would make beaucoups money, so I hedged. I figured at least they'd make me rich while completely annihilating all I had done to make the platform great. My inner greedy capitalist has his revenge. I would still rather have seen Apple keep Frontier running and have lost some of the profit I made from the Apple stock. Anyway, as usual I ramble. 😄
I find I look for changes in social media the way I used to look for new stuff on news websites before we got RSS and feed readers.
If you and I both have accounts on ChatGPT, it would be nice if I could include you in one of my conversations with the bot, and we could explore an idea together with access to all the information we might want to call up. This is what all the chat companies are trying, but the one in the best position to do this is OpenAI, because they have the top rung in the positioning ladder for AI apps. It's where most of us go for our AI. Like Visicalc which had the top rung of the spreadsheet ladder until Lotus 1-2-3 took over, which was then knocked off the top rung by Excel. This is why they have to move forward aggressively, it's the way tech works. Before too long all the chat apps with have their AI bots in the loop and it will be too long for OpenAI to dominate. But right now they are the obvious choice for this. The place you go to do AI.
According to reviewers Hit Man is a movie for adults, supposedly with a plot, writing, acting, from Netflix. Rated 83 on Metacritic (a must-see). I was excited! Watched it. It's like a TV sitcom. Ugh. Zzzzz. The main character has a nice-Brad Pitt like smile. Wears weird constumes. Finds a beautiful girlfriend. Best thing about it is that it takes place in New Orleans, so I could try to figure out where they were. That's about it. Much better implementation of a similar idea -- Emily the Criminal.
The next step in online social media will be group blogs that support the APIs needed to integrate with not only the Fediverse, but other non-AP services that have their own APIs. Each one will have a theme, a voice, not all writers in agreement of course, but sharing a similar perspective, context, point of view.
I used the ChatGPT "upload an image" feature today while debugging some software. I could show it what wasn't working with a screen shot. Amazingly it understood and made the connection to the software we were working on, and suggested a modification that made it work properly. This was an important missing bit of functionality, previously you had to explain in words what wasn't working visually. That worked too, but was cumbersome. Much easier to just show it was wrong. And the UI couldn't be simpler. Take the screen shot at paste it into the box where you normally type. It starts analyzing before you press Enter.
Jon Stewart from this Monday is good to watch as a reminder of what the press could be doing beyond what Jay Rosen recommends (which is on the right track). They could be playing the same role that the 12 jurors in NYC did. I'd love to see a requirement that every moderator of a major news show in the US do jury duty for a couple of weeks a year, to keep them aware of the standard that should also apply to news, not just justice. (Update: Jay is on it.)
It's amazing how well Comey's rep has been laundered, but I'll never forget that his CYA move re Hillary's emails at the very end of the 2016 campaign, knocked Hillary off her feet, she never recovered and we had four years of Trump and maybe more as a result. He is not an authority on democracy, he's one of the early pariahs. There has been no apology, or regret expressed. As bad as Alito. I wonder if CNN has bothered to check how people feel about him.
Keith Olbermann makes a good point in today's podcast.
Instead of "Donald Trump" we should always say "Convicted felon Donald Trump."
It's branding and it works. He's right.
Convicted felon Donald Trump.
The test for whether it's a podcast or not is if they say you can get it "Wherever you get your podcasts." If they can say that, it's a podcast. If you have to get it from Apple or YouTube or whoever, it's not a podcast. That's the rule.
I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of an interviewer hallucinating during a news show with several distinguished panelists discussing an important issue.
You don't have to trick ChatGPT into hallucinating. Just ask it to. 😄
In other words the designers of CSS and JavaScript and probably every other technology everyone uses had no idea what actual developers were doing with their committee-designed creation. They made mistakes and piled them on each other, fixing old mistakes with new mistakes. After 30 years of evolving in this convoluted way, if you want to create useful software, you have to either master all of it (and no one has) or pay $20 a month to OpenAI so you can use it to navigate the awful hairball that the web platform has become. Where we only have a sliver of knowledge as humans, the machine knows all of it. And that's just programming. I'm just guessing that everything is that way. You know the part in The Matrix Reloaded where we're told no one knows how the technology works. That's where we are now. Spend your whole life using the stuff and you still only know a tiny fraction of what you need to make good software. We needed what ChatGPT does, but we didn't know we needed it. That's where we are now, and the journos are sitting on the sidelines hurling spitballs at it.
What got me spinning was listening to Rachel Maddow advertise her podcast at the beginning of her show last night. You can get the podcast for free, she says, or if you want no ads, you can pay some money and get it from Apple. What Apple is selling there, and Maddow is going along with, is not a freaking podcast and by calling it one they undermine a great medium. I understand why Maddow might not care, she makes millions from a medium that doesn't give users much choice (ie MSNBC) so why should she care about podcasting, which does.
If podcasting had a marketing team behind it, we'd run a campaign that says "It's not podcasting if you don't have choice." If you have to use Apple, Audible, Spotify or Google to listen to something, that's nice, hope it's good for you, but folks that is not a podcast. Podcasts give you the listener all the power. If you give it up it'll all be Disneyfied before too long. It pisses me off that Amazon Music sends me messages about all the new "podcasts" they have. I mutter under my breath when I hear this, some expletive I'd rather not repeat. Amazon, the users know that podcasting == user choice, and they hate you just a little every time you lie about it. Find another term you like and use that. You have the money to do the marketing. Come on, just once play fair. You'll be surprised how good it feels, and I wouldn't be surprised if the users reward you for it.
It’s too bad when I post something positive about ChatGPT, which I do because journalists are dumping on it based on not using it but asking it gotcha questions, which seems to be all they know how to do, the trolls show up, asking if we’ve read this or that journalism article. On Facebook, I delete the comments and change the permissions to only allow friends to comment. The journalists are wrong about ChatGPT. I solve problems with it. It guides me through difficult programming situations, esp around convoluted designs like CSS and JavaScript. It knows all of it. The only times it hallucinates (and I know it's doing it btw, I'm not stupid) is when there is not enough info on the web to give an answer. It would be nice if it just said "I don't know" but it's early, and they haven't figured out how to do that yet. The journalists have no sense of wonder I guess, or they never thought to use it in their jobs. I can't wait for the first aha! from a journalist -- who will say this: "Aha! Now I see what this is for and it's freaking lovely." But they've decided it sucks and that's that. Too bad, we're going on without them. And thanks to the good moderation tools we can keep the turd-droppers from totally screwing it up.
It's been almost nine years since I did the podcast about podcasting. Today I was asked how I feel about podcasting now. Here's what I said. It's still working -- people expect to have choice in where they listen to their podcasts, and as long as that's true they will imho continue to have choice. But even if Google took it over tomorrow, I'd be happy with the outcome. It's been over 20 years since we rolled it out, and it's still delivering huge value to lots of people, and isn't controlled by anyone, as far as I can tell there are no gatekeepers. If only we had been able to keep blogging free of that kind of control, but I have hope there too.
One of the flaws in the design of Teslas is they are really difficult to operate safely for people who are farsighted, such as myself. A lot of the status messages are too small for me to read without reading glasses, and in the time it takes to put them on the message is gone. Esp frustrating for the messages that tell you to do this or that to keep using FSD. And when I'm flipping the glasses down, my eyes are not on the road Mr or Ms Tesla. This is a design problem. Maybe you should use voice prompts for this kind of stuff. Or use a camera to see if my hands are on the wheel.
I keep coming back to this -- ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I've been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you'll see its significance. You didn't write it, I didn't. Each of us may have contributed a little, and isn't that what we want? To help build the base of human knowledge? It gives our lives meaning. Sometimes I wonder how much value people place on themselves and so little on progress. I think we all want our lives to have meaning. Well here you go, it doesn't get more meaningful than this.
Another great application for ChatGPT. Try to find a blog post or article about the design of a language that gets to what you want to know without wading through a lot of stuff you don't care about. I got it to explain Swift, Go and Rust quickly. Okay now I know what they're doing. It would have taken me days before to assemble this, and I never have that kind of time for such execursions.
We should apply mathematics to language design. The goal of the language should be maximum simplicity for the human developer. As much of the complexity as possible should be handled by software, either at compiletime or runtime. It should read like pseudocode. I want to write about this. We should study languages for the real reason we use them. We started out writing code by toggling switches on the front panel of the computer, and for a few decades we were factoring but then we turned around in the other direction. I am from the church of factoring. I do it in my designs of products at all levels, and I treat languages with the same care. It turns out all the rules of working on open systems also apply to language design. I plan to write more about this.
To people who say you get wrong answers from ChatGPT, if I wanted my car to kill me I could drive into oncoming traffic. If I wanted my calculator to give me incorrect results I could press the wrong keys. In other words, ChatGPT is a very new tool. It can be hard to control, you have to check what it says, and try different questions. But the result, if you pay attention and don't drive it under the wheels of a bus, is that you can do things you never could do before.
Walt Mossberg shows why ChatGPT is such a conversation-starter, and thus is incredible art. He asked it to draw a picture of himself with Kara Swisher. Of course everyone did that, and posted the result to the thread. The variety of responses is amazing, revealing of what I'm not sure. Here's the one it came up with for me.
I bet you could do a beautifully readable blog by just dynamically rendering its RSS feed. Why bother statically rendering the home page, month page, day page or pages for each individual post. Dynamic servers are so cheap these days.
There's a lot of stuff in Friday's piece. Ken Smith pointed out the story in the very last postscript. Before that, I hadn't put it together that podcasting worked because for a while Adam did my job, and for a while I did his. That guaranteed two things -- that the technology would be maximally simple, and that anyone with a computer could do the whole recording and production job without help from an expensive studio. In both cases the result was nowhere near commercial standards, but that didn't matter, in fact it helped that there were so many glitches in my early podcasts, that said that hey if this guy can do it, so can I.
The worst part about having a felon in the White House is that he's probably committing felonies while he's in the freaking White House.
Sometimes the On This Day feature in Facebook surfaces some questions that should be asked regularly. For example. 1. I asked in 2023 what do librarians think of ChatGPT. Only one response. Maybe more this year. If there are any librarians blogging about their experiences with ChatGPT, please send me a link and I will add them to my AI category. If anyone is writing about new discoveries they've made, I want to hear about it.
By my calculations this is the 365th consecutive month of publication for my humble blog. Are there any longer-running blogs in the world? Pretty good chance this is the one.
The last post for last month is one you should read if you read nothing else on this blog ever. It's the story of tech. Something new and explosive comes out, and the journalists feel threatened by it (always, in every way, even when it has nothing to do with them) and a few others (music industry with Napster, artists with ChatGPT) see amateurs invading their previously exclusive space. Truth is these new technologies give new tools for expression of ordinary untrained people. Now we get to have fun with sharing what we see, and maybe the professionals have to reorient themselves to the rest of the world. One thing you can't do and hope not to be left behind, is ignore the new tech, if you want to understand, don't depend on what you read in the news orgs, because they are always full of shit about new tech. You have to go discover it for yourself. And when someone says they're blown away by the new stuff they can do, listen to them, don't argue, try to understand. There's a lot of growth locked up in understanding. So please read the piece, we're at one of those points now wrt to ChatGPT. Sure, it knows a lot of stuff, that's great, but there's also it's ability to listen and understand us. This is what's really new here.
The outline for May 2024 has been safely tucked away for posterity on the Scripting News repo.
Microsoft and Google are putting AI chat into all their apps everywhere you can enter text, which imho is as pointless as embedding web browsers in all of the Office apps in 1994. ChatGPT is the Netscape of this generation. Compete with that, create the best environment for the kind of work we do there. That’s the game, from a UI standpoint.
A screen shot that illustrates. If you're going to put your name in the title, put it in the first part.
Perhaps I should add a new element to the source namespace, the name of the author of a blog, if the feed is for a blog. Here's why I need it. I am building my blogroll. Every time I find an insightful story about using tech I use, these days esp AI, I add it to my blogroll so I get to see any new articles they write when they post. But if their blog has a catchy name, I'll never pick it out of the list as I scan for something new to read. I need the name of the author too. Basically a blogger should provide their name, but of course it's completely optional. I'll subscribe anyway, if the article is on-topic. I'm soaking this stuff up now, building my own personal firehose.
Once again we're at the beginning of a huge tech-induced transformation, and yet again the people who already occupy a high rung of the ladder of success, or imagine they do, are pissing all over it, without using it.
I remember kvelling about Napster, about how the ability to program my own music had made it possible for me to explore my own life in new ways, because music is inexorably bound to memory. For me the big revelation came on Father's Day in 2000 when I heard Father and Son by Cat Stevens on the radio and desperately wanted to hear it again.
I had tried Napster a few months earlier and found that it had none of my music. It was basically just a technology demo. I tried it again, and this time not only did it have the Cat Stevens song, but it had every song from my childhood that I hadn't heard since being a kid listening to WABC on the transistor radio my grandfather gave me for my birthday when I was five or six years old.
I told this story at a Future of Music conference and was torn apart by the other people on stage, supposedly creative people, who cared not one bit about how people used the product they created, and the power of being able to program our own music. They were the bosses of music and my job was merely to give them money and admiration and stfu. They tried to get me off the stage (I was the moderator) but I stood my ground and of course never forgot.
It happened again a few years later at the DNC in Boston, when the journalists mocked the bloggers because we had no experience as journalists, and they didn't like the way we dressed (they wrote articles about it, in the NYT even). 20+ years later they're still complaining, but they forget to blame us for their misery, now. Their misery is they forget the glory of their job, which is empowering us -- their users -- to change the world that so desperately needs changing.
It's happening again with AI, which is opening up creative expression to people who can't draw, or aren't good writers, or people who want to be better programmers, or who knows -- this technology is the most powerful I've used in my long life in tech.
The difference is -- you have to use something before your criticism makes any sense. That was the mistake the music industry made with Napster. What the journalists made regarding bloggers (we're they're sources, tried to say over and over but they don't listen they just like to talk and be admired and our job as usual is to give them money and stfu).
My very good friend Doc Searls sees it the same way. He calls it People's AI. We're going to build this out the way we did it with blogging and podcasting a few years ago. It may be our last rodeo, we're getting on in years, but I'm so glad I lived to see this.
(Sidebar: The people who run tech companies today have no idea how to build new technology markets, the categories they occupy were built by others, now gone. I finally figured that's our disconnect and why products lose important features when they are taken over by the inheritors, and why the leaders of Google et al have no idea where to put AI for users to build with it, or even that the users build the stuff they use in tech. Say what you want about Jack, Ev and Biz, but they understood this idea and they did let the users lead.)
And btw, don't miss that it was twelve of us, twelve people, that finally said what the ladder-occupiers have failed to say for far too long about Trump -- he's a felon. We've known that, but when did Obama, Biden, Moscow Mitch or anyone else with a name or reputation to protect say the most obvious truth. They're all powerless and weak, and if we want to get out of this mess we're going to have to lead ourselves. Waiting for them, that didn't work.
PS: Thanks to Twitter for increasing the character limit, so I can write my blog posts on my iPad before starting my day. Like this. ;-)
PPS: BTW -- here's the song. Somehow the music industry survived my ability to share this song with you and my future self.
PPPS: I write these pieces with specific people in mind but I rarely say who they are because it embarrasses them. But I write all my pieces the my regular readers, who keep me going, almost 30 years (on Oct 10 this year). I hope they build great things with these ideas, and they let me help them do it.
PPPPS: Doc tends to write brilliant pieces that perfectly describe these points in time. Let's travel back to 1997, as Steve Jobs is returning to Apple, when Doc explained that while he loves me, Steve loves no one but Steve. 😄
PPPPPS: The motto for the podcasting community as it was booting up in 2004 was "users and developers party together." That was the thing that Adam and I agreed on. Adam being the user, and I being the developer. Of course it was his trying to be a developer, and me trying to be a user that was the spark that created the boom. We both made it safe for amateurs to do what we do. That's why podcasting, unlike the music industry, never went to war with its users. 💥
On the day I wrote a piece asking why Trump isn't in jail, the jury returns a verdict in his Manhattan trial. 34 guilty verdicts. It's the people that get this stuff right. Juries are wonderful.
BTW, I've noticed that Google often doesn't link to the Wikipedia page unless you specifically ask for it. I don't like that. I think it should always be at the top.
Biden would be a fine president if our problems were limited to the virus, the economy and climate change. He's like Obama, but with much more experience at getting things done in Washington.
His failure is that the fascist movement in the country is much stronger now than it was when he took office. That's how his success or failure as a president will be measured. And he's failed that test. It's kind of recursive, in a way. A fine LBJ-like president.
And like LBJ, he has his Vietnam. Biden's war he can't end is called Trump. Trump isn't in jail. That's the failure right there.
The problem could be fixed if we had this discussion out in the open, so that the press raises it every day and in every press event. They shouldn't be trying to embarrass him about his age, that's rude and deceptive, instead they should ask why isn't Trump in jail?
If Biden wanted to address this, and it would certainly help his chances of winning, he would:
- Fire Garland immediately.
- Apologize for not firing him sooner. It was a mistake. My mistake. I own it. I am sorry.
- Nominate Jamie Raskin, Liz Cheney or Ruben Gallego as the new AG.
- Biden's number one promise is that he will fully prosecute Trump and all insurrectionists in his second term, starting now. This would also serve as a warning to any Trump supporters that tried to pull any tricks before or during the election.
Trump is making a fool of Biden by saying openly that he will be a dictator on Day 1.
People who think Trump is losing don't get it. People are rightly fed up with Biden. But not for the economy. That's bullshit. And not because he's old. Rather because he's selling us out, just hoping against hope that the voters will save us. It's kind of unreasonable to expect that when you, the person we elected president to get us out of this hole, didn't fire the biggest obstacle to our starting to dig.
Depend on Congress, the press, the courts, now the voters.
No Biden, you're the president. This is your job.
The best humor is about other people being stupid, evil, clumsy or their misfortune. Watch a SNL skit. It's not about people being smart or brave, kind, generous or otherwise wonderful. That's another kind of entertainment. We find the misfortune of others funny. Especially famous, successful people.
Art much simpler than some people think. It's not like a batting average or a weather forecast. It's not something that can be measured objectively. Art is the response that it evokes in the observer. It's art when people say "that's not art." And when someone says only human professionals create art, if he really believes that, he has no freaking clue what art is.
How can we tell if ChatGPT is intelligent? How can I tell if you're intelligent. How do I know I'm intelligent. It could be my "intelligence" is as algorithmic as ChatGPT's. It could be that my intelligence is only a survival mechanism, and the only way I could think of something I think is intelligent is if it furthers my chance to reproduce. But what happens when our intellect instructs us to destroy the environment we depend on for life? It could be we are already obsolete, without the robots, it sure feels that way, and that our only ark that could lead us to a new place where our species can survive in some form is for us to morph into electronic beings whose intelligence is distributed around the planet so we don't die if it becomes uninhabitable in one place, but not in others. And a LLM might thrive in an environment that can't support human life.
Walter Isaacson asks if ChatGPT can rival a student's intellect. My answer as a former teaching assistant who graded lots of student programs, absolutely. It rivals the intellect of every human being I know, including professors. It hasn't learned yet how to synthesize new ideas, it seems. And there are strong guardrails that keep it from going into certain areas. It is more capable than we know, therefore. BTW, I didn't realize he teaches at Tulane. I got my undergraduate degree there in 1976.
Cross-posting to various social web sites has out of hand, not just for the person posting, but for readers.
Here's a problem I have with the ChatGPT app. I can't find the conversations I had with it a month ago. And I need to. They desperately need a Bookmarks menu. I'm sure their corporate customers are screaming about this, because they need groupware too. Are they partnering with Slack, or is Slack doing their own, for example?
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc should collaborate on new ways to do software docs and user interaction using AI. It's an incredible application, it will revolutionize how useful computers are to people, and the only people whose writing is ingested are employees of the companies. Not only will it increase utility, it will demonstrate in a very observable way how transformational the technology is. Probably will do nice things for the value of the stock too.
Robert Alexander has supplied a bunch of feeds with links to blogrolls. And that has got me rolling on reading feeds and blogrolls, which I am narrating in the thread, as I go.
The best campaign commercial ever. So simple. A nostalgic song, beautifully performed. Stock footage of American workers and families, esp in Vermont, interspersed with video from campaign events. These things aren't complicated. I bet Bernie and S&G would let Biden use the same format.
Call for feeds. I'm working on a bit of demo software and need a few blogroll-supporting feeds that have <source:blogroll> elements.
As you may know, over the years I extend RSS by adding elements to the source namespace. It's how I add elements to the RSS feed for my blog and for apps I develop. The latest is source:self whose value is the canonical URL for the feed. This was a useful addition from Atom, which was supported by reallySimple in 2022, and I wanted to include the value without having to add another namespace to my feed. It has been implemented in the reallySimple package too, so the data will be available to FeedLand, and any other software that uses it. Small move forward for interop.
And while we're tripping out on the new revolution, we're still reaping huge value from the last one. I've loved various music over my life, but with Wikipedia having pages on the history of all the Beatles songs, for example, or Steely Dan, or whoever -- and with the 500 Songs podcast -- I can learn the stories behind the music. The Eagles and Steely Dan had the same manager, and they liked each others' music and they did shout outs in their songs, but most of the rest of us weren't in on it. You can now find all that. The great thing about these tools is we all get to construct a very real history. A lot of the misinformation, which is the weakness of Wikipedia, it tells stories from only one perspective usually, because that's how the power flows, but all that is erased by ChatGPT, amazingly. So if you're into history, which is our story after all (a big deal imho) you should be thrilled, because at least at first, the next level builds on the previous, and blows all other media off the map in terms of utility and accuracy. The exact things the journalism is mocking.
Podcast: There's no journalism about the new things ChatGPT makes possible. Every day I'm trying to do it myself and encourage others to as well. Explain things we can do now that weren't approachable before. I did a 15 minute report about this just now. I had to debug a complicated new configuration, setting up a new server with new code on both ends to implement a secure websocket connection. I've done it a dozen times, and you always make at least one mistake, and have to find it, and you need a checklist to go through, systematically, to find the problem, and it's really cool that ChatGPT can synthesize the checklist and give you instructions on tools that make it easy. There could never be anything like this on a Google/Stack Exchange type support system. It simply wasn't possible a year ago. We really need this story to get out too, but now it's all about how AI is a hoax. It is not. Yes Silicon Valley is run by monsters, doing basically the best they can. Riding a wave like this is thrilling but also you can't win on a personal level these days. It used to be the other way, you couldn't lose. They put the czars of tech on the covers of magazines and praised them as genius, godlike humans living at a much more elevated level than all of us schnooks, if you were one of the blessed. And always ignored are the freaking users, which is where the actual revolution is taking place. Too much work for the journalists, I guess? I would think if you were reporting in a time when new uses of technology are being discovered daily, real ones, transformative ones, you'd want to be in on that story. Nope I guess you don't get a Pulitzer these days for reporting news, just for finding hypocrisy, which is always in great supply, real or imagined. 😄
There's this great scene in MoneyBall where Billy Beane is talking to David Justice in the batting cage. Justice reminds Beane how much he's paying him, and Beane says I'm going to tell it to you straight -- half your salary is being paid by the Yankees. Think about it. They're paying all that money for you to play against them. That's how I feel about Fox. How much will it cost to get them to STFU. Whatever it is it's worth it.
If you're part of the indieweb community and work in Node.js, you should know about the reallysimple package. It flattens the interface for the most common feed formats. It's designed to be super easy to use. Give it a URL and it returns a consistent JSON structure. More people would develop feed-using apps if they knew about this package. I just want more people to develop around feeds.
If you have working code that uploads images to WordPress sites via the WPCOM interface, I could use some pointers.
No one was asking for the PCs, GUIs, the web, blogging or podcasting. I thought for sure as soon as the ideas were out they'd take off. But most people had no idea. Most big new ideas come out of developers realizing something new is possible, shipping it, refining it and getting lucky. AI is the next one, I'm absolutely sure of it. But most people, even most developers, don't see the need, don't see it as inevitable in a good way. To make a fine point, we don't need AI, we didn't need PCs or GUIs or the web. But once the masses saw the power, fun and utility, there was no turning back. The same is true of AI. I've been trying to puzzle out how this will go. How can we develop the amazing power and depth of knowledge of the machine combined with the creativity and deep yearning of humans. One thing I've learned from the year I've been doing this as a user, the machine doesn't want to do anything. Don't anthropomorphize it that way. Try having a conversation with it and ask what it wants. It doesn't understand the concept. It's not surprising that we think the machine will be like us, we always want something, we're the most selfish species there is. But we'll learn to work with the machine, I already have. We'll evolve through this. That's maybe the biggest strength our species has, the rate at which we can adapt.
Has anyone ever asked you, on the social web, what you think about something? Not a message to everyone to which you could reply, but a message specifically to you? I try to do it when I think of it. I find you can get really interesting ideas that way sometimes. And also it's a way spreading some love around the world, because people like to be asked what they think, I've found.
I'm going through Battlestar Galactica for the third time. One of the major themes of the show is that the robots that the Capricans created went to war with the humans and almost but not quite wiped them out. Almost every episode is about the conflict between humans and the AIs. It's a fantastic show, the acting and the writing is far beyond most TV series. I'm at the beginning of season 3. I'll let you know if I figure anything out from watching the series again.
Campaign commercial. A picture of Trump at 88. Voiceover: "It's 2035. He's still president. Don't you wish you had a vote? (You don't.)" This message was approved by Uncle Sam and The Founders wondering wtf you were thinking when you voted for him in 2024.
I watched 15 minutes of the playoff game between the Boston team and the Indiana team and found that I only gave the very slightest of fucks. I knew all the players. I like Obi Toppin, a former Knick we traded for some reason. That's about it for my inner fan. I turned it off as it went to overtime and looked up the result when I got up in the morning. That's how I like my NBA, frankly.
"Every day's an endless stream of cigarettes and magazines" is in the incredibly great Homeward Bound by Simon and Garfunkel.
Podcast: What is a magazine? It depends on what direction you look at it from. An iPad was like a magazine, but what would you tell a young person who never used a magazine? What is it? Right now almost everyone is looking at AI from the point of view of a world with no AI. And it turns out that once you have it, it starts solving problems you never thought would be associated with AI. But there it is. You just have to sit down and start playing and you find all kinds of amazing things. But if you don't try it, you'll always be looking at it from the past. We've seen this kind of explosive growth in the power of the individual human. It's a 20-minute podcast and I'm all over the map, but it's good stuff, imho of course. YMMV, my mother loves me, I am not a lawyer.
If I were building a product like Substack or Ghost, I would build on top of WordPress, for the widest compatibility.
I found a fairly painless way to transcribe voicemails using Google Docs. 1. Open a text document. 2. Choose Voice Typing from the Tools menu. 3. Play the voice memo over the speaker of your iPhone. 4. That's it. Google transcribes it into your document. It would be better if Apple offered that as an option in the Share menu, but they don't.
March 2024: "WordPress is, among other things, a perfect time capsule of open technologies from the early days of innovation on the web, and widely deployed and able to deliver all their benefits, if we widen our view of social media to be a social web."
Here's what I've learned from owing a Tesla Model Y with Full Self Driving. I don't believe it's safe. It absolutely does require your full attention at all times. You are still driving the car. I've seen it do crazy stuff in simple situations. I've seen it panic, basically throw its hands in the air and say Dave this is your problem. That's why you always have to be ready, as if you were driving the car yourself because at any moment you could be. You never know when it's going to happen. Now focus on that moment. Your car has given up and turned the driving over to you. How much experience do you have with that? Do you know where to look? Do you hit the brakes or veer to the left or right? If you're an experienced driver, a lot of these reactions are completely programmed into the lower levels of the brain. You don't have to think at all. When the car panics, I tend to panic. If I had 10 or 20 years experience with this connection, then I guess it's probably safe. But not the way it is.
I'm amazed there aren't more terrible accidents with FSD, and that Tesla still promotes this as "self-driving," which it is not.
Also, I love my Tesla. Every time I get into that mofo I feel privileged. It looks like a Toyota Camry but drives like a muscle car. I might still switch to a Kia EV9, at some point, if it drives as well as the Tesla, simply because the nearest Telsa dealer is over an hour away, and the Kia dealer is in Kingston which is practically in the neighborhood.
Don't miss that Twitter has become a blogging platform. It's sad that it took this long. And we're still missing a bunch of features.
Here's something you may find funny if you study the evolution of software technology.
- In the 80s there were all kinds of ideas about how to do hypertext. Mostly they called for two-way links, so you could walk the graph in any direction you like. These were hard to implement and required the two parties work with each other, and that never happened.
- In the early 90s along comes Tim Berners-Lee, a random NextStep developer who wanted to play and he for whatever reason didn't wait to figure out how to boil the ocean with two-way links, he just did one-way links and instead of inventing a new protocol he just implemented it on top of TCP/IP. While the purists were debating its purity it took off, broke all records, made a lot of people very rich.
- A few years later, Tim Berners-Lee, the same guy who made the web, wants to layer a new protocol on top of the web -- the Semantic Web. He wanted people to be able to query the web the way you query a database. "show me all the widgets on sale in urbana for less than $20." Like that.
- It never happened for the same reason the two-way hyperlinks didn't, it required cooperation. You couldn't just throw together a demo in an afternoon as a fun side project like you could with the web (I speak from experience, my first success with the web took five freaking minutes).
- Now when Google or some other browser maker integrates ChatGPT-like functionality in their browser, as a side-effect, you will get TBL's Semantic Web. It won't require any cooperation and that's why it will work.
If I were desiging a system to compete with Twitter, I'd implement a one-click Block button. It should be as easy to block someone as it is to follow them. It would make a statement to trolls and users alike. To users it would say that blocking is a common thing, don't think about it too much, and certainly don't be intimidated into not doing it. It must be almost as easy to undo. A command to review the list of recent blocks. Facebook comes closest to this. It is very easy to block an account but not quite this easy. I think they're probably heading there.
Today the Knicks play a game 7 vs the Indiana team at the Garden. If the Knicks win, they go on to the next round vs the Celtics, starting on Tuesday. If they lose, we relax for four months or so, when it starts all over again. With love for the heart of gold team. Either way we win, imho. I know you're not supposed to feel that way, but that's how I feel right now. During the game, if we're losing, based on recent experience I won't like that so much. 😄
Just tried perplexity.ai for the first time. Everyone's been raving about it. I asked it a question I asked ChatGPT in working on the RSS feeds for my current project. "Suppose I had an RSS feed for a WordPress blog, and I wanted to include the id's of the site and post in the <item> for each post. Is there a standard way to do this? If not, is there a namespace defined for WordPress blogs that might provide some prior art?" Both were able to get me all the info I wanted, and answered follow-up questions. Perplexity got there sooner. Here's the transcript.
On Threads I posted this question to Frank X Shaw, a PR exec at Microsoft, who I've known for at least 30 years. "Wouldn't it be great if there was a social web toolkit with the basic building blocks so we could experiment with different UI and behaviors. Why, after so many years are we still so controlled. When did we give up?" I think you can do the design with words and dialogs, btw. Here's a great idea for keeping threads focused and civil on Facebook. You can limit comments to people who have a stake in being on good terms with the author. This keeps the hit and run turds from dropping.
This blog is becoming a ChatGPT blog the same way when it started it was all about the web. I'd love to get pointers to other blogs whose content is largely about ChatGPT, so we can systematize learning about what we all are discovering. I think that blogs and ChatGPT are going to go together just like Google search and blogs did when search was booting up. Bloggers (not all of us, but some) provide good material for bootstraps. We just need to hook up blogs to social web, which is what I'm working on this year.
A few weeks ago I asked ChatGPT if it could transcribe an M4A audio file, the kind of file that Apple's voice memo app produces, and it said no, it couldn't do that. I gave it another try today and got a different answer. I uploaded the file, and it came close, it said it needed the file in WAV format. It gave me instructions for writing a desktop tool that would do the conversion. I expect in another couple of weeks they'll be able to deal with the M4A file directly.
I think it would be really cool to have the voice interface for ChatGPT available on Amazon Echo. I kind of doubt that Amazon would want to do that. Alexa is nice, but really weak compared to ChatGPT.
TL;DR: For the 80,000th time -- the Knicks suck!
All the funny farting didn't make a difference last night. The Knicks were blown out, again (sigh), by the Indiana team. My dear friend NakedJen texted me from Oklahoma of all places (I don't know how she got there, or why, she must be on her way to some other place, maybe Dallas?) that the Knicks are trying to kill her. Sums it up perfectly. I gave myself leave after the first few minutes of the fourth quarter, seeing where this thing was going. I went to bed, and knew that when I woke up there would be a Game 7 at the Garden on Sunday (3:30PM Eastern). I'm not sure how I feel about that.
The odds are probably pretty good that the Knicks will win that game, but maybe they should just let it go, and we can pick this up again in October. By then all the injured players should be back, and maybe there will be an incredible new free agent signed over the summer, so we're not so dependent on one superstar, who is great, but has off nights, like last night. Why didn't he let any other Knicks try to fill in for him, when he's double teamed that means someone is open. I was screaming at the TV during the game, let someone someone else shoot dammit! Oh my gods. I hate game 7's when my team is in the game. I don't mind it if other people's teams are in a death match like that.
Oh well. Here we go.
Do people understand the impact ChatGPT can have on how we control our software? No more hunting through menus among a thousand options to figure out how to do something. Just use natural human language. The UIs we've had to design and live with will be a thing of the past. Yet no one seems to be talking about this. An example. I've been trying to get transcripts of my voicemail, as easily as possible. In that example, it shows me how to do a variety of things. I kept asking if it could do it for me, all the way up to making a feature request of the developers at OpenAI. At some point they'll be able to add an item to my calendar, or make a feature request for me. That's the whole point of computers. They can do things for you. We call this paving cow paths.
Most of the news stories about AI are bullshit by people who clearly have not attempted to understand what its capabilities are. This is the real thing folks. Amazing breakthroughs are happening every freaking day. So much improvement and so much potential. How do I know, because in comments on social media, people parrot the bullshit, like they always do. Journalism is still hugely influential, and they are dishonest, lazy, self-interested bordering on narcissism, and very very dangerous. We need to re-form journalism as if our continued existence depends on it.
Here's something that matters. Somehow ChatGPT gets the story right about my various contributions. You'll see all kinds of BS in Wikipedia and other various highly rated sites. Somehow ChatGPT sees through the bullshit, and usually gets the story right. So when people say that human reporting is better than machine reporting, I think this may be one of those cases where conventional wisdom is wrong. The human record is relatively easy to manipulate if the researchers are lazy and/or dishonest.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a social web toolkit with the basic building blocks so we could experiment with different UI and behaviors. Why, after so many years are we still so controlled. When and why did we give up?
On MSNBC yesterday I saw a discussion where two black panelists were asked to comment on Trump's idea that black people go for him because they can relate to his awful prison mug shot. How incredibly insulting. It's just like what Trump says about Jewish Americans being loyal to Israel. Such an un-American idea. We all got here different ways. Some for a better life, some for life at all, others as slaves. But the United States is a big-hearted idea -- the United States. It's unfortunate that such a small-minded disunited person is so powerful now. We still have a long way to go.
Dave to ChatGPT: I just read a news story that the Knicks won the last game in the playoffs because of an epic fart in the locker room. Can you draw a light-hearted illustration of that event?
Version 1 Then I asked for a serious and dramatic illustration.
Version 2 I imagine you can bet on who the farter was.
My guess would be Hartenstein.
It's overwhelming how much ground Google has to cover to get AI into all their products, but that's what they think they have to do, and I more or less agree. They feel they have to because their main product, search, is threatened by ChatGPT.
Clayton Christensen called this The Innovator's Dilemma in a book published in 1997. It's why Netscape was able to undermine Microsoft when the web came out. Microsoft had a huge beast they had to move, Windows, and all its apps, and while they had a hardcore, scrappy and rich culture, they couldn't overcome the inertia that comes from being dug in, with their cannons pointed at the already-vanquished IBM, not the upstarts that came from the VCs in Silicon Valley.
Microsoft and the rest of the PC industry had written off Unix, but there it was, again -- ugly as ever, but with networking that really worked and was easy, and the users wanted networking even though Microsoft wanted them to want Office.
Google did the same with AI. As did Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. They had AI projects, and used AI in limited areas, as did Microsoft with Unix in the early 90s. But they couldn't bet everyting on it like a startup can. Now they have to. But the they don't have the tools needed to fight the new war. That's the dilemma.
This is the toughest corner any tech company has to turn, but there is an approach that could work for Google. Their strength is distribution. They have all the users. They can take a product that's ready for the world to market in a day. But they can't develop it. You can't snap your fingers and have a good new UI for every one of their products, ready in a year, although they will try as MS tried to adapt Office to the web. They don't have the right people or corporate culture to do that. Instead you have to hope you can find a great bootstrapping startup outside to work with, and use their strength as a distributor to help them. This is what I recommended for Microsoft in the 1990s, and I think I was vindicated, it would have imho worked a lot better than the path they chose.
But now, their third time around this loop, Microsoft has learned! With their OpenAI partnership they've done exactly what I recommended in the 90s. They still have to convert all the old software and their user interfaces around the new capabilities, but at least they also own a share of a bootstrap that's now booming.
PS: I am blessed to have lived long enough now to have been part of now six different rearrangements like this. I love that we have now gotten there again. There's absolutely no doubt now, imho. The six rearrangements -- minis, PCs, GUIs, web, Napster, and now AI.
PPS: This is all my opinion, and from the polls I did yesterday, it's obvious that many of the people within earshot don't agree or have seen the light yet.
Poll 2 on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads: "Has ChatGPT replaced Google (or other search engine) when you look up something for a development project, environment, etc.?
Poll 1 on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads: "If you're a developer, how much has ChatGPT or its equivalents affected the way you develop?"
The thing that Casey Newton predicts for Google and news has already happened for the huge base of reference info and know-how for software development. We no longer go to the sources, don't need to, the ChatGPT version is an order of magnitude better. What we do need is people to keep asking and answering questions for each other, so the knowledge can be added into the AI database. We're going somewhere here. It's worth going there, imho, having experienced the before, and only starting to glimpse the now and near-future. But it's as big a step as the move to PCs, then GUIs, the web, mobile.
Something I'd like from ChatGPT or a plug-in. I'd like to create a notebook of info I'd like it to have available for people who inquire about a product I'm developing. As I'm working on the code, I develop features that sometimes don't make it into the docs. But when I'm working on the feature, I take lots of notes in my work outline. I'd like to give that outline to a LLM and let it figure out which product I'm talking about by the context it appears in. Maybe all I have to do is publish the notes when the product comes out, and eventually, like a search engine, my favorite AI will crawl it. I wonder if it makes sense to somehow pre-digest it. I wish I had a panel of experts about this stuff, but I guess they'd have to be human, at least at this point in time. If this makes sense to you and you know how to get started, post a note here.
My AI bot is a library, a librarian, a programming partner, tutor and executive assistant. And we're just getting started working together.
Knicks at the Garden via ChatGPT 4o. They needed fresh blood, and they got it.
Knicks won in a blowout.
I had no idea that was coming.
Next game on Friday.
AI is not over-hyped, imho. I'm discovering new significance for it every day. An example. I had to go back to some very complex code I wrote a week ago. I wanted to give it new flexibility, that would be simple from the user's point of view, and in order for it to work technically it has to maintain that simplicity internally. It's a tall order to go back to something complex a week after writing it, and rip it apart and put it back together and have it retain the simplicity it had before. But I had an advantage this time that I had never had before, a programming partner with a perfect memory. I had written the original code with ChatGPT. So I went back and asked it to review my plan, and then worked with it step by step as I had before. It had perfect recall, right, of course where my recall is pretty sketchy. It took two sessions to get it done, but it works now, and I'm confident I've covered all the bases. How do you put that story in a press release? If you want to understand a new technology, don't talk to the CEO of the tech company that made the product, their lives are whirlwinds, they don't have time or the capacity to understand how big the idea is, they just know that it is big. If you want to understand you have to use it and you have to talk with other users.
This is a typical dialog you see when you visit a site with an ad blocker installed. They say that turning off the ad blocker will "support" them. No, I don't think it actually will do anything for them. It might expose me to malware or having my interests shared with businesses who will use that info for who-knows-what. Much better would be to let me click a button to give them $0.50 to read the freaking article that's behind that idiotic dialog, and btw, the payment would have to be anonymous or I'm clicking the Back button. I really did want to know what happens if Trump is found guilty and sentenced to prison. I still do. But I don't think I'm going to turn off my ad blocker. I'll think about it. In the meantime if they had let me pay them $0.50 to read the freaking article, I might have linkblogged it to people who follow me via RSS or email, or on Bluesky or Mastodon, thus giving them a chance to sell others on paying $0.50 to read the freaking article. Not promising I'd do that, but if they really answer the question, if I really learn something I certainly would pass it along. Come on USA Today, get conscious. We'll happily support you for giving us info we wanted, just let us actually help you in a meaningful way, not by penalizing us for having the audacity to use an ad blocker.
BTW, I've been to three Stevenotes, the first one, the rollout of the Mac in 1984, then the rollout of NeXT in 1988, and a random press event in 1997 announcing they were going with Unix server products instead of the homegrown much easier to use Mac server products. We could have had both of course, but Jobs never really wanted developers imho, truth be told. We were inside in 1984 because Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki were doing the evangelism.
Yesterday's OpenAI big press event was a nothing burger. I thought they already had all of that stuff, they certainly had been at least telegraphing it. Also there never will be another Steve Jobs, it's too bad everyone is using his template for product announcements. It only works if you're Steve Jobs.
Jalen Brunson, Knicks star, after having his ass kicked in Sunday's game. In this picture he either looks dangerous or defeated, or both. I wouldn't want to have to play against him tonight.
Here's my two cents. If Brunson has heavy legs tonight, as he clearly did in the last two games, he should be used as a decoy, to draw a double team, to free up one of the Knicks' assassins. Or maybe he'll be more effective with just one Pacer guarding him, instead of two or three.
And for crying out loud, start one of the excellent bench players, McBride or Sims or Burks, or all of them, and make sure the heroes of games 1 and 2 get plenty of rest.
It's a crazy world, so crazy that RFK, Jr could be elected president via a third-party. He's a better speaker than either of the other candidates. If he didn't a speech impediment I'd say he was basically a sure thing. I don't know how crazy he actually is, but he cleans up nicely, having seen him interviewed on MSNBC a few days ago. He had good PR training somewhere, it's probably not just from the genes, he is a freaking Kennedy, his mother was a wife of a Kennedy, and clearly raised him well. I'm voting for Biden of course. I'm not that crazy. But people are tired of Biden, I understand why -- and they want a president they can look up to, not one that reminds them of their 80-something grandfather. And people are also understandably fed up with Trump. Before it's over we will come to think of him not as a spoiler but as a possible future president, where "future" is less than a year away.
If a baker may not be forced to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding on the basis of religious freedom, surely a woman can’t be forced to give birth to an unwanted child.
FSD gets confused and does some incredibly stupid things. With ChatGPT it's amusing but with FSD it's your ass on the line.
I asked ChatGPT to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images.
Weather map.
I've been trying the new 4o version of ChatGPT. It's much faster. It certainly is a search engine. And it covers news. I asked it about Michael Cohen's testimony today in the Trump trial, and it gave me a summary. I asked for the weather forecast in Kingston NY. It wouldn't give me the lyrics to Martha My Dear by the Beatles. I asked it to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images.
I can’t wait for the UIs of settings on systems like Mac or Android to go through the AIs. No more hunting through menus to not find the setting where you’re sure it should be.
BTW, that's what my blogroll is turning into. My contributors. The people I keep an eye on through my work day. Where I get new ways of looking at the same world we're all looking at. We used to call this "watching them watch us watch them watching us etc."
The way MSNBC has contributors, I want contributors for my blog. One of the first people I'd invite is John Naughton. See next item.
Here's where we're headed now that we have AI programming partners. Creating software will be possible the way popular music is created. Watch Get Back to get an idea. George Martin was the Beatles sherpa, the same way my AI partner is my guide through unknown programming lands. It now doesn't matter if I have less experience building MySQL apps than others. I have the collective experience of all of them here to help. My George Martin. What got me thinking about this is John Naughton's piece about AI and programming.
I absolutely abhor news sites that make you turn off your ad blocker only to reveal their paywall.
I feel like crap today, the Knicks were blown out by the Indiana team, the series is tied 2-2 but it feels much worse. The headline in the Daily News reads "Pacers blow depleted, dead-legged Knicks out of the water in Game 4, tie series 2-2." Yeah. I don't know how we recover from this loss. In a way I imagine the Knicks issuing a resignation. "It's been a great season, but we're tired. We're headed to the beach, we'll see you in October Knicks fans. Thanks for your support." I would nod my head and say "Yeah that makes sense." Whatever. I may spend today sleeping it off. Next game is tomorrow night. Yes, they will play, for sure, and yes, I will watch.
Today's one sentence provocation: Imagine a social web without the default right to drop turds where ever you like.
Pretty sure I understand why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky. The mistake they made at Twitter was taking responsibility for enforcing decorum, which is completely diseconomic. A fully decentralized system is very different. That was why he funded Bluesky, to make a social web that wouldn't have at its center a company responsible for content.
This year's Knicks are as memorable as the 1970 team. Brunson, DiVincenzo, Hart, Anunoby and Hartenstein. They have totally distinct superpowers. Tonight's game will be played without Brunson and Anunoby, both injured. That means McBride and Atchiuwa start, probably. I kept wanting to tell friends about these guys, they're just as exciting as the starters. And don't forget there's another center and forward still on the bench who have done real starting minutes this year and two years ago. They are Knicks too.
This is a hard idea to get across, but there's nothing wrong with a news organization favoring things they depend on to exist.
For example, a news org that covers San Jose, CA is entitled to favor San Jose. It's okay for them to do things that help San Jose in competition with other cities. They could sponsor a food drive for the neediest in their community. It wouldn't be a conflict of interest, because it's understood that they have an interest in the success of San Jose.
A columnist that covers the NY Mets can be happy when the Mets win the World Series, and sad when they don't. This is not an integrity issue, or something they need to disclose, unless it's not obvious that they cover the Mets.
In that sense, every news org in the United States depends on the First Amendment, so it can be assumed they're in favor of democracy, because without it they couldn't exist.
This is why the editor of the NYT's statement about not favoring democracy is so ridiculous. He can't be objective about that, because the existence of his organization depends on the continuation of democracy in the US.
Whether he knows it or not, he's against Trump and in favor of the Democrats in the upcoming election.
Sometimes it's hard to see what's totally obvious. Ask a fish about water and they'll say there is no such thing. Same with free speech and the NYT. They are a product of free speech, without it, it makes no sense, doesn't work. But that's been true forever, so it feels like a given, but it isn't.
A useful thread, where people share answers to a request for "an extremely minimal, clean blogging site with practically no bells or whistles where I can just share things on my mind."
It's pretty easy to create a FeedLand news service for your friends or co-workers, and it'll plug into a lot of the stuff we're working on now for presenting news without requiring people to learn a feed reader. That's a bridge too far for many people. In other words, your understanding of feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) can be of service to others. And by collecting useful sources of news, maybe even insightful ones, we can help upgrade the quality of news we all get. The first step is to learn how to use FeedLand, and it's pretty easy, esp if you already understand feeds. And with categories and OPML subscription lists, you can organize your feed reading everywhere, not just in FeedLand.
StackExchange and OpenAI have made a deal. I used to use StackExchange all the time, now I never do, ChatGPT is much better. There's a lot of anxiety out there, it seems but other words, this is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. There was a time when StackExchange was a godsend for programmers. But that time has passed.
A free idea for Apple that might boost their stock price. I use the Voice Memo app to take notes while I'm programming. Sometimes I talk for as much as fifteen minutes, because I ramble a lot, but I figure stuff out this way. I'm sure at some point the Voice Memo app will do automatic transcripts, I wish it did now. When I finish a memo, a few minutes or seconds later, there's an email waiting for me with the text of the memo. Now here's how they boost the stock price. They also provide an edited version of the memo, without repetition and rambling, and sidebars (they can be treated as sidebars, and appear at the end). I understand that $AAPL is depressed because the lack of an AI story. Here's a use that every stock trader will understand immediately. Huge value. I'm sure others are doing it. But Apple has the high ground. All kinds of services could be attached. I could, in the middle of my ramble, order a product from Amazon. Or send an email to my doctor to schedule a new appointment. (Disclaimer: I've owned a bunch of Apple stock since the mid-90s, so I stand to profit if they do it and I'm right.)
Now that I have my blogroll as a regular feature in my blog, I am able to keep current with more bloggers. It's actually much more than a blogroll, it's a feed reader. When a feed that I'm following updates, it moves to the top of the list. And if I want to see what's new, I just click on the wedge next to its name to reveal the most recent five posts. From there, I can get to the full post by clicking on the permalink. If you want to get a feel for it without taking the plunge yourself, you can leave my blog open in a browser tab. You'll get exactly what I get.
BTW, I was struck that famous editor and writer Ben Smith said he was ashamed at starting out as a blogger, on an MSNBC show hosted by a true hack. The quote was from Jeff Jarvis, who like me, cross-posts to a variety of social webs, presumably manually. Where did I put my comment? Hell if I know. Heh I found it. My comment: "I didn’t know he had been a blogger. So my respect for him went up dramatically in an instant, and in another instant, plummeted. What’s wrong with people?" Bad news for Ben, he's still is a blogger, btw, in his heart. I can tell. And true journalists and true bloggers share an ethos that the fakers like Morning Joe will never understand. So I guess when you're on with Joe you have to pander. Just remember Ben, we know who you are. Even if you have forgotten. 😄
I said this to a friend recently, in an email: “I noticed a change with the doctors, where earlier they would dismiss my fears of having this or that fatal disease, now they're always looking for the thing that's going to kill me.“ The friend, a retired English professor, said the sentence was very effective. Part of me would like to send the sentence and the review to my freshman English professor, I think she would be proud. Instead I decided to blog it.
Some pragmatic notes how cross-posting works these days.
I use regularly: Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky.
Two that have APIs I can use: Mastodon and Bluesky.
I can't send images to Bluesky via their API, they broke the interface. My way of doing it is now called "legacy." The app that uses that feature doesn't work. But I don't even remotely have the time to go back and fix it.
The items in my linkblog come from this flow. If it appears in my linkblog, it also appears on Masto and Bluesky.
When I want broader distribution, I do this:
- Open a new browser window.
- Open a tab to Twitter usually. I don't know why.
- I write some text into the Twitter tab.
- Paste an image if there is one.
- I open another tab for Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky.
- I make one pass to paste the text, another to paste the image.
- I click Send in each of the tabs, and get back to what I was doing.
I'm sure a lot of people are doing something very much like this. I can actually witness Jeff Jarvis doing it. I think Jay Rosen probably is too.
One thing that Bluesky may not be aware of is that their character limit is signficantly lower than the others, so sometimes I can't include them in this rotation.
I'd love to see one of these support the features of textcasting. I would give them 100 good netizen points for that, because it wouldn't be long before the others did it, and we'd have a much more complete network writing environment.
An unsung miracle of ChatGPT. I usually write my prompts very carefully, esp when using it to build software, but I just tried not really caring, and asking a question the way I thought of it, so it rambled a lot, was repetetive and had an error I didn't bother to correct, to see what would happen. It didn't even criticize me. It figured out what I was trying to ask/say, and gave me the answer I was looking for. Yes I am aware that all my fellow programmers taught it how to do this, though I have no idea how it does that, but it is freaking amazing. I keep finding miracles in this tech.
I wonder if anyone has thought of working with ChatGPT or Meta.ai to create a Busy Developer's Guide to ActivityPub? Here's the prompt. "I want to write a simple bridge between my writing app and any app that runs in the Fediverse, using only ActivityPub. The operations are basically those of the MetaWeblog API, create a post, update a post. Just to start. How should it handle identity? I work in Node.js." I asked both AI tools, and the Meta.ai answer was pretty useless, but ChatGPT gave what seems to be a reasonable outline for the project.
We should all be working together as opposed to trying to find bullshit reasons not to.
ActivityPub is a product of Architecture Astronauts. Start with a simple idea but generalize it too far, so it can do everything, so much so that no one understands how to do the simple stuff. You have to understand the theory before you do can anything pragmatic. It's why I said last week that they need a BDG asap, with implementations in all major runtime environments. I would help them design it, I'm a fairly typical "busy developer." I would support it if it were easier to understand, thus more likely not to be revised with breakage to apps. I've also seen this happen before, in fact it happens more often than not. If you don't understand a format, you can't actually support it. This is part of the you can't lie to a compiler axiom.
Back when I did my first XML-based serialization format, I did it because the XML people were asking developers to do that. "Now you can create your own formats!" The theory was they had finished their work, XML was ready to go, and developers should start building on it. So I did, thinking in the back of my mind, "they don't really mean it." This was based on experience with commercial platform vendors who heavily evangelized their products when they were new, but took umbrage at the chutzpah of the developer who thought they could do anything really useful or important, don't they know that's what BigCo's do. Anyway a few years later, that's exactly what happened. Predictably, the big companies, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Sun etc thought they should define the syndication format of the future, so they set about to do it as a "standard" and thus was born Atom. My opinion, one way is better than two, and they should have jumped on the RSS bandwagon. But that's not what they do. They're still trying to make RSS unnecessary, you think they would have figured out that there's no point in trying to do that. It isn't going away. 😄
As a boomer who marched on Washington as a high school student, who started an underground newspaper, and organized student strikes, I support today's students making their political opinions heard. I also see journalists doing what they did in the 60s and 70s, reporting on violence as if it were caused by the protestors, which wasn't true then and I'm pretty sure it isn't true now.
And they describe them as Palestinians, when that also is certainly not what's really going on. My guess is that 99% of them are American students, who, growing up were taught that America had great values, only to discover that America often has taken the wrong side in a war, as we are now in the war between Hamas and Israel.
We shouldn't have taken a side in that war, as long as Israel insists on killing massive numbers of civilians in Gaza. Yes, what Hamas did was unsupportable, and provocative, and just plain wrong, but Israel is killing far more people than Hamas did, and further, it's exactly what Israel, which pretends to represent Holocaust survivors, should not be doing, perpetrating a new Holocaust.
As Americans we have a responsibility to think for ourselves, and that's why I support the students. They aren't right or wrong, but they are continuing the legacy of free speech in the US, and our government and journalists are lining up against them, which to me is as tragic in the 2020s as it was in the 1970s.
Braintrust query: If my wordpress.com username is scripting, where is my public profile page?
ChatGPT is letting us customize the context in which our queries run. So I can say I use JavaScript so if I ask a programming question, it should answer in that language. I was happy to have this feature, and gave it a thumbs up. The idea is that we build up a highly detailed profile over time, so ChatGPT gets better at answering my questions. And it also locks us in. It didn't come up for me until Meta.ai came along and sometimes it's good to get a second opinion. But I want to share that profile info.
Knicks star OG Anunoby dunks on last season's MVP Joel Embiid. Two first round questions
- Why didn't Sixers coach Nick Nurse continue to play Buddy Hield who had the hot hand in the second and third quarters, and got the Sixers back in the game after the Knicks early dominance? He sat out most of the fourth quarter, was put back in at the very end and took the last Sixers desperation shot.
- In the other big Eastern Division game on Thursday, why did Doc Rivers, the Milwaukee Bucks' coach go into garbage time when the Bucks were down by only 10 with 2.5 minutes remaining? What the frack was he thinking? Deficits like that are often made up, esp in elimination games? Being a good sport is one thing, but quitting the season early when you're only down by 10? What the what? I tuned in the game at the point when his stars were coming out, before the Knicks game started, and couldn't figure out why he was giving up so soon?
It couldn't actually happen
- In the pause between the first and second rounds of the NBA playoffs, I am having the very very very strange thought that maybe possibly maybe the Knicks will could possibly maybe perhaps nah never hmm go all the way?
If Google Reader had handled untitled posts more gracefully we’d be in a better place today. Their choice to require titles meant we have had a fracture, on one side — social web and on the other feed readers.
Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do.
I've developed new appreciation for two musicians from my generation: George Harrison and Bob Dylan, thanks to the encouragement of two friends, both of whom have links to my childhood believe it or not, but who are current friends in my dotage and they're both on Facebook.
So my first friend said she likes George Harrison the best of all the Beatles, and I thought that's weird because it really was down to Paul and John, I thought -- and then I heard this interview with George asking why he didn't explain in his memoir how he worshipped John as a kid, and George took exception, saying yeah in John's mind that's who I am, a kid who worshipped him, which I never did (says George). So now I have gone back through his music and see holy shit he really was as unique as either of the others, and he was more of a collaborator in his later life than either (of course we never got to find out how John would have evolved past 1980). And he was never going to be taken seriously by the others, so he had to get out of there to have the creative life he wanted.
About Dylan, the credit goes to my local friend and Andrew Hickey, who focused my attention on the music of Dylan's songs, when I had only been focusing on the lyrics. Silly of me. He only ever wanted to be seen as a musician, not a leader of anything, and that's where the difficulty came from, and why I wasn't really interested, even though I had listened to all the Dylan songs many times, and had a few of his albums growing up. So I just played Tangled Up in Blue and realized this has been rolling around in my mind for days, and I wasn't even aware of it.
Kind of like All Along the Watchtower (another Dylan song) in Battlestar Galactica, which I just heard is currently on Amazon. I think it's time for another binge of that. ;-)
Anyway, two doors open, and that's always good. You know this is why you pick your music when you're young and stay with it, because it's the soundtrack of your life, and it has new relevance at every step of your evolution. Sure I listen to other music, but -- it's the songs that were big when I was little that matter most.
Can we please have a nice slogan we can chant at rallies saying that we think that women owning their own bodies is at least as important as everyone being armed to the teeth so they can shoot their dogs. I think the Repubs learned something after one of their own boasted that she killed her own dog with a gun. They learned that Republican voters think the right to bear arms does not make them hate dogs and to their surprise they don't endorse shooting them. Maybe shooting Jews, immigrants, people of color and libruls and libtards of all flavors would probably be okay but for crying out loud not dogs!! They're so freaking cute.
BTW, there are plenty of relatively low priced tickets available at the Pacers arena for the May 10 game when the playoff heads to Indiana. This is one of the Knicks fans' favorite tactics. Since there are so many New Yorkers, spread out all over the country, and we're pretty much all Knicks fans, this can create a demoralizing effect for the opposition players who assume their hometown crowd will be rooting for them, not the other team. It had a pretty adverse effect on the Sixers a few days ago. I was chatting about this with fellow Knicks fan NakedJen during last night's harrowing game, and said this might be a good tactic somehow in the election, if every time the opposition had a rally they discovered that most of the attendees were actually in favor of democracy and abortion rights.
Since I write so much about the Knicks here, I need to tell you that the Knicks won their first round playoff series against the Philadelphia team last night. Almost all playoff series that aren't sweeps are intense, but this one was especially so. So we're on to the next round, starting Monday, back in NYC, against the Indiana Pacers, an excellent team this year. And Doc Searls, who is also a Knicks fan, now lives in Indiana, so he is somewhat justified in believing the world revolves around him. I've always had that sense about Doc.
In February 1999, playing with blog writing in the browser. This was a new idea at that point. Full-size screen shot.
Screen shot of browser-based blogging tool, c 1999.
If you want a new perspective on the election, two recommendations.
- Greg Sargent interviewed political consultant Joe Trippi, who explains why third parties could make all the difference in the election.
- Chris Lydon interviewed Richard Slotkin about the four major stories of American politics.
Both very illuminating and immediately influenced my thinking.
TL;DR: It's gone -- you can't get there. Because it uses Twitter for identity. It and bingeworthy.io are the two apps I miss the most.
1999 was a rewrite of blogging software from the point of view of both 1999 and 2016. Both timeframes. I had learned a lot inbetween, and the art of online interaction had moved forward a lot. I had become a user of Facebook, and was impressed with how their software worked. I was imploring them to turn it into a blogging system, it was achingly close. When I realized they weren't going to do it, I set out to do it myself, how I imagined Facebook would do a blogging system. Of course I didn't have their source code, so I built it from scratch.
Because 1999 used Twitter for identity, I couldn't use it. I also couldn't use Radio, because it ran on Windows and a now-obsolete version of the Mac OS. It's made me think that maybe in a few years or even months you might not be able to use FeedLand or Drummer. Then I thought about how I can better future-safe them for users. And that led me to adding a simple feature to FeedLand that will help if a FeedLand server you depend on should go off the air. See the next post, below.
First and foremost, you should keep a current backup copy of your subscription list. It's very easy to do.
- In FeedLand, choose My feed list in the first menu.
- Click on the white-on-orange XML icon, in the upper right corner of the page.
- That will open a standard OPML version of your subscription list. This is the format that all feed reading software understands.
- In your browser, choose the Save Page As command in the File menu (or something like that, there are lots of browsers) and save it along with your other backups.
- You can also automate it if you can run a script that gets stuff over the internet. Once a night would be fine, not a huge burden on the server.
I added another way to preserve your feed list, using localStorage.
- Every time you sign in FeedLand now saves a copy of your subscription list in localStorage.
- And if the FeedLand server you're using should happen to disappear, if you have not taken a backup in a while, if you have a tab open, you'll at least have a copy in localStorage.
- If you want to see it -- visit feedland.org or feedland.com, wherever you have an account, and do a hard reload. Then open the JavaScript console, and enter this line:
-
console.log (localStorage.savedUserSubs) -
If you have questions, here's a thread.
There's a FeedLand Blogroll Toolkit if you want to adapt it to work in your blogging environment. We already have a WordPress plugin.
F. Murray Abraham, pictured to the right, played the part of the bad guy in a fantastic movie about the Inquisition. We're headed that way in the US. A man very much like Bernardo Gui will be advising women and their doctors on what is permitted in women's health care.
My father taught me how to organize my thinking when I was trying to figure out how something works. And that's basically what I've spent my life on, figuring out how things work. The most interesting and gratifying was understanding things that didn't exist until I pieced their story together.
If you're a blogger, here's something to think about. Whose writing influenced the way you write? Here's my list: Kurt Vonnegut, My uncle Ken (not his writing, rather his way of telling stories), my father, Russell Baker, Robert Hunter (lyricist for the Dead), Douglas Coupland (specifically MicroSerfs), the Suck.com guys, everyone who was writing at Hotwired in 1995. I'll think of others, but those are the ones who come to mind. I have been a constant reader since I was a little kid, so there's a mix of writing styles from authors I don't immediately remember. I should also do one of these lists for who inspired my software.
I have to admit I like Tyrese Maxey of the Sixers, who spoiled a Knicks victory last night that would have closed out the first round of the playoffs. It felt like the Knicks had won the game when he single-handedly pulled the Sixers back into contention. Now the Knicks are up 3-2 with the next game in Philadelphia tomorrow night.
Note: This post is the summary of a podcast.
When my mother died in 2018, it didn't settle in that the context in which I lived, my whole life, was gone.
She lived in the house I was raised in. Very little had changed in that house. I hadn't lived there since I went away to college, but it still defined who I was, an adult who didn't live in his childhood home. When we sold the house, the last time I saw it, it was empty, and that was when it hit me. That part of my life is over. I no longer have a home I can return to.
The same is true with our understanding of who we are as adult American citizens. Until now we felt we had a vote. But that is over, unless we change our view of the country we live in. It's not that it's about to change, which is what you hear in the news, and on social web -- it has already changed.
We now understand that Trump may be above the law but that masks a bigger truth, the Supreme Court is already above the law. They take bribes, openly. They cannot be prosecuted (just try it and see what happens). They openly side with the insurrection, yet don't recuse when deciding issues of what to do with the insurrectionists. They imagine the president is a monarch.
We're already living in the authoritarian state we're worried about. We haven't caught up with that reality yet.
Our government is more concerned about our right to own guns than it is with our right to own our own bodies. Stop for a moment and let that sink in. If I said you don't own your own body, what would you think I'm talking about? Answer: Slavery.
If we did catch up with that reality, we would start organizing now to undo that mistake. We would not only re-elect Biden in a landslide, but we'd insist that he expand the court to 100 members serving 10-year terms each, retroactive. And thus we would eliminate one of the huge problems in our system of government. Have they proved they need this kind of correction? Yes, the overturning of Roe, and the lack of prosecution of Trump for trying to overthrow the government are all the proof we need.
And from then-on, no politician in any branch of government would take us for granted.
The Knicks keep winning my heart. They play the game exactly as it should be played. And they don't take the bait to make it about anything other than what happens on the court, and to trust in the league to take care of players who don't play by the rules. And of course the Philadelphia arena was full of Knicks fans. The tickets cost a lot less than NYC tickets, and it's only 2 hours away by car, and there's good train service. If the series goes back to Philadelphia, the same thing will happen. I feel sorry for fans of small town teams, because no matter where you go in the US, there are always lots of Knicks fans. Largest city in the country.
If you're running a FeedLand server, look in the data/riverBuildLogs folder. A bunch of fairly unnecessary JSON files may be accumulating there. I made a mistake in the default value of a config setting. Details here. I noticed the problem as feedland.org was getting low on disk space. The default is set correctly in the latest release.
Demo: I'm working on a web text editor that works in three different formats -- wizzy, markdown and html source. You can flip between them with an icon click. I love flip-switches in software.
Today's blogrolls are more like feed readers than the blogrolls of the 90s. My blogroll has all the best sources, and they update slowly enough that I can keep up with all of them.
I'm also blocking people who hype ActivityPub in comments to my posts about social web stuff that has nothing to do with AP. I've been down this road before. I just want to find people with active minds, whose business is interop, who want to try stuff out. AP is not a good foundation to build on, at least until they come up with a BDG for it. Basically it isn't a standard even though they say it is. If you want to help your cause: 1. Stop hyping. 2. Get busy with that BDG.
These days I'm using the moderation tools on the social web more than I did in the past. If someone I don't know posts a negative comment on Facebook, in response to something I posted, I just delete it, because they have that feature (other systems don't, they should). Any lurker who happens by is free to enjoy what I write. But if I don't know you, I honestly don't care what you think, esp if it's negative and has less than ten syllables total. It's hit and run spam for sure. I'm widening my definition of spam all the time. If you add up all the responses that actually mean anything, it doesn't amount to much. Let's see what the social web looks like without hearing from all assholes.
I asked ChatGPT: "Could I paste in the source code of a JS package i wrote and 1. ask you to remember it and 2. ask you questions about it later?" Short version of answer -- no.
A use-case for ChatGPT. You get a hard-to-understand error message from MySQL, so you send the code to ChatGPT and it gives you a perfect error message, and gives you the corrected code. It also can generate SQL from an actual English language description. Quite a loop-close, since SQL was sold as programming in English, just like COBOL or AppleScript, except in ChatGPT you really are using English. It's precise English, but not "marketing" English (ie non-technical managers can be fooled by what they see). An intelligent non-programmer could actually write code, not sure of that of course since I am a programmer myself.
I was pleased to read the NYT op-ed complaining that President Biden wouldn't sit for an interview.
I think they blew it when they ran so many stories quoting a DOJ lawyer explaining why he was not prosecuting Biden.
"A sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
I didn't forget they did that, as I'm sure President Biden hasn't.
As I understand it, the proper DOJ procedure for not charging someone is to say nothing. You might write them a letter to tell them they don't need to prepare to defend themselves. Anything more than that puts your motives in question, and should get you fired as a DOJ attorney. I never saw a NYT article that even asked this question -- who is this person and why should we care what he thinks about Biden.
And btw, is it good journalism to raise an issue of basic competence about the sitting President of the United States without a bit more background and substance?
How is giving credit to such a story journalism? Sounds like trash that would run in the National Enquirer.
The NYT has a lot of nerve after covering that "story" so extensively, to demand that Biden sit for an interview. Can you imagine. They'd be reviewing anything but what he said. So disrespectful of our president. And so disrespectful of the Americans who elected him. If you want to raise an issue, come prepared with some journalism to back it up. That's what we expect from the NYT, not what we got from them.
PS: On the other hand, thanks to the NYT for posting this on their own website. The often used Medium in the past for statements like this.
I love that I can ask ChatGPT how to spell the word exposé in a literate way. Google is difficult about it. It tried to erase the word from my query, then gave me the wrong spelling.
Braintrust query: I'm interested in getting an adjustable height desk. I'd like to start with an inexpensive one, and if I like it, I'll get a real one. If I can get it via Amazon that would be best.
I won't believe the NYT has any integrity until they let people criticize them on their op-ed page.
When you really have federation no one needs to hype it, people don't even realize it because things just work the way you expect them to. Every time I hear "Where ever you get your podcasts," I'm reminded of how well that worked. 😄
A backgrounder on how the web is used for conversation, the pros and cons of each variant, and what role RSS can play in it, thanks to ChatGPT.
I don't think conversation on the web has been the big benefit some people think. Do you remember when you first realized that people weren't talking to you in a response to your post, they were talking over your shoulder to the people who read your post. I guess it depends on who you are, but I don't see any value in providing a surface for spam. These days I block people without much thought if I think that's what they're doing. So, why should you design a protocol, and pay the cost of supporting, something that is a vector for spam and abuse? That's the argument in favor of using RSS to glue things together. You can comment on my post, in your space, but my followers don't have to see it. That's up to me. I think it would change the nature of discourse, for the better.
ChatGPT has memory across chats. This just popped up on the screen. I'd like to tell it that until further notice I use Node.js and do not use Express, and do use jQuery for my browser-based JavaScript, and I use the debugger all the time, so you can assume that. If this works, I now have a programming partner with memory. And maybe I can somehow get it to read all my blog posts going back 30 years? I have good archives of most of it. Also, of course I fed this post to ChatGPT of course. So ChatGPT is not resting on its laurels. That's good. I'd really like a Personal ChatGPT, and this is on the way to that goal.
When I started working with Automattic last year, one of the big milestones we were aiming for was getting FeedLand and WordPress working together. Now we have the first step. I hope you take a moment to give it a try and let us know how it works. Scripting News readers have helped bootstrap all kinds of cool stuff, we can do it again.
Jay Gilmore: "ActivityPub breaks my brain. It doesn’t need to be that hard given the payloads we are talking about." True.
There's a new plugin that adds a blogroll to a WordPress site.
It would be helpful if people who are regular readers of Scripting News who use WordPress, set up a test site, give it a try and let us know how it goes. You can help us get to the next level with this stuff.
So there are two sides, the FeedLand side and the WordPress side.
- The FeedLand side. Sign on to FeedLand, create an account if you don't have one, and subscribe to a bunch of feeds. These will be the feeds in your blogroll. There are some tips on how to find feeds, in the next section.
- The WordPress side. There's a new plugin, developed by the people at the Team51 group at Automattic. They have a checklist for how to install the plugin in a WordPress site.
You can get ideas for feeds for your blogroll from reading other people's feed lists. When you see a checkbox that isn't checked, you can subscribe to the feed simply by checking the box.
Have a look at my feed list for ideas. Here's a list of recent users, click on their names to see their feed lists. You don't have to finish this now, you can come back and tune this up anytime.
Developers: Use feedlandBlogrollToolkit to add blogrolls to other platforms.
If you have questions or comments, or need help getting it working, post a note in the discussion group here.
I don't have time to write about it now but the end of last night's Knicks game was one of the most dramatic bits of NY sports ever. I would like to thank Kevin Durant for saying the Knicks weren't cool. It's somewhat like the Streisand Effect where the thing KD was trying to hide was that he was no longer cool. Classic projection. Obviously he was not the hot shit he thought he was in 2019. 😄
A big idea for the blogging world. I'd like to combine AI and search to make a really great search engine for bloggers. We would contribute what we know (we already do) and in return, along with everyone else, get to benefit from the collection. And when we browse, it knows which blog we write. So it has a very good idea of what we mean when we ask a question and what we already know. This is totally missing in ChatGPT and is something Google and other search engines have never been willing to do (or even understood, I guess). But this is a huge idea. I'd like to give it my blogroll too, so it knows which sources I consider credible. I love that it creates an incentive to post to your blog, and it makes working together automatic.
EZ Pass for News is formula for functional relationships between local news pubs and people in far away places (ie not their locality) who may from time to time want to read an article or a series of articles on their site, and pay per-issue instead of buying a subscription.
John Palfrey as the mover behind Press Forward will bring the gospel of EZ Pass for News on his "ongoing whistle-stop tour" of local news orgs. JP was my boss/rabbi when I was at Berkman, and is why we got so much done there. He ran air cover for what we did, the BloggerCons, giving RSS a home, podcasting, blogs for everyone, the people and democracy. Now he's doing it for the local news business.
I was chatting with a friend who went to Bronx Science, as I did, and we were talking about Isaac Asimov, and I said I thought he went to Science too. So I fired up ChatGPT and asked if Asimov went to Science, and it said yes. Then I asked where he went to high school and it said Bronx Science. But by then I was pretty sure he didn't, so I went to Google and meta.ai, and neither knew where he went to high school. So I asked on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky and Threads. Not sure why I even care! Oh well. 😄
The idea of us all working together to federate is the right idea, but making ActivityPub the hurdle everyone has to jump over is imho the wrong idea. I'm building on feeds -- RSS, Atom, RDF. A lot of good stuff works on that basis. And it's a much shorter path to interop than ActivityPub.
I hate paywalls tied to subscription. I’m never going to subscribe to a Philadelphia news org, but based on Jay’s recommendation I might pay $1 on my EZ Pass for News to read this story, esp since I saw the Civil War movie. I just had a thought, I might subscribe to a Philadelphia news org for a week or two, given that the Knicks are playing their NBA team right now in the first round of the playoffs. I really want to know everything there is to know about this faceoff. See, I want to pay for journalism here, but journalism hasn't been willing to sell it to me, at any price. They've never gotten the basic truth of: "The customer is always right." Really important point and true in every way.
Over the weekend I tested the blogroll plugin for WordPress. It worked. After a little more testing and docs-writing we'll be ready for other people to test it, an important step before wider use. So if you're a regular Scripting News reader, and are curious what this blogroll stuff is about, you'll be able to try it out pretty soon.
Jeff Jarvis writes that a German man who died with 70K books in his house was obsessed with the work of writer Arno Schmidt, who was my great-uncle, my grandmother's brother.
I asked meta.ai to draw a pastoral scene with sheep and dogs, birds, fish, airplanes, clams and seagoing ships in ancient England.
Doc asks the question on all our minds: "Why does ChatGPT misspell the f*ck out of words on images?" Don Park, Wes Felter and JY Stervinou chime in.
Back in the old days, during a great sport event, we'd post our feelings, pro or con, to Twitter. I observed as follows: "Let's do something great with our lives! In the meantime I miss the role that twitter used to play and never will play again. It was the place to go to say 'How about those Knicks!' when they win a game like the one they won last night. Not no mo." Betsy Devine was the first to like this. I felt heard.
After living with the blogroll on the home page of Scripting News for about a month, and having heard from early testers, I felt that it was demanding too much attention when I was reading stuff on the blog. So I made some time last week to experiment with a subtler sidebar.
In Quiet Mode, the blogroll doesn't call attention to itself until you click on it. Then its background changes from neutral to white. That's the equivalent of shining a spotlight on it. Also the borders become blue to indicate that the browser's focus is on the blogroll.
I wanted to do more to tone it down. So, in Quiet Mode the title moves up and to the left, and is in a much smaller font, boldface, nicely visible and stands off from the list, but doesn't call your attention to it. It's there when you want to know more.
You may want to call it something other than a blogroll, btw. If you're using blogs to coordinate projects with others, something I think a lot more people would do if it worked better, instead of "blogroll" you'd might call it your "workgroup."
Anyway, I have switched Scripting News over to the new quiet mode, it's already the default, but I put a checkbox just below the blogroll that lets you toggle between the two modes to see the difference and possibly spot problems. The checkbox will go away before long. I just want it there to quickly do an A-B comparison.
Here's a quick video demo of Quiet Mode.
And a place to comment or ask questions.
A street in New Orleans that Meta.ai invented. I asked for Joseph St across from the cemetary. Even so an interesting image, makes me think of the city in a nostalgic way.
More and more I'm getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for.
Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you'd keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system would re-render the Markdown, turning it into HTML, but you'd still have the Markdown around for editing. And of course there are other kinds of editors that make sense, knowing that the output is going to the web, but you don't have to write in the technical language of the web. You might want something more suited to wordsmiths -- ie writers, if you are a writer. I have that working here, and have been building on it.
I've gone back to Radio UserLand and tried to extrapolate, where would we have gone with that product, 22 years later. And now I'm beginning to see in the pieces that are forming the new product I've been working on, something whole, something that works.
I think of it as "WordPress For One" -- you might be writing as part of a larger site, but this is your writing space, a place you can mold to fit your style, where it gets more comfortable over the years, more you. That's what I've felt has been wrong with the direction the web has been going in, we're getting boxed into smaller and smaller spaces, but for some of my writing I want a nice stage with good lighting and full freedom to tell a story that I have to tell, not necessarily all at once, but possibly in a series, over time.
I also want to be influenced by your story. I want Working Together.
Of course I still very much develop for FeedLand, and in the back of my mind I want to loop back around to Drummer (it's my main writing environment), and then I have another product I call Belter I want to finish. And I wouldn't mind trying to make a CSS thing that makes more sense than the tragedy CSS is, and also would love to see a port of Frontier to Linux, though I don't see doing that myself, but I would like to guide it (so it runs all the old stuff first).
It's totally ridiculous to equate protest with antisemitism, esp with Israel led by a MAGA ally. The two concepts are orthogonal. I do not support the Israeli government any more than I supported the government of my country, the United States, when the MAGAs were in charge. We lost over 1 million Americans who did not have to die imho, because our government was not only immoral and hugely corrupt, but also made no attempt to govern. I am a child of Holocaust survivors and an American born in the USA, and am proud of and grateful to my country. Any American is free to protest the actions of our government or any other government, or really anything. If you don't believe in that then you aren't actually trying to make America great, you're saying something altogether different and incompatible. I am American. I am also deeply offended at other Americans who propose to speak for me. That actually is antisemitic, btw.
Quick video demo of meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it's new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so quickly. You really should watch it on YouTube so you can see how what I type relates to the image in real-time. It's like subtitles inverted, with a very knowledgeable, creative and high bandwidth computer network behind it. Living in the future.
I did the blogroll stuff because I needed a minimal feed reader that could run from the right sidebar of any app.
I just spent a few minutes with meta.ai, Facebook's answer to ChatGPT, and it's really good. The drawing functionality recalcs while you're entering the prompt, so if you type, "vary gender, age and race," and as you type each word, the image changes.
In the past, when I have tried to make other people's products better, it often doesn't go very well. The archive of this blog is filled with great examples. Yet I, as they say, persist. 😄
Suppose you're working deep inside a complex project and have an unrelated idea. How long does it take to switch to writing mode, get the idea down, and return to what you were doing. The less time it takes the more fluidity. Twitter totally won there. And we, the bloggers, made a tradeoff. We accepted fewer features and writing in a silo because it was practical. It worked, where less fluid software didn't. So they got all the casual writing, and over time sucked the life out of blogging. I think it's time to put the fluidity back, without compromising on features and lock-in.
I just tripped across this post from 2009 where Matt had sent me an email saying they were supporting the Twitter API in WordPress. I had forgotten this. That's how long it's been that he's wanted to hook WP up to the social web. It doesn't look like I posted that to Scripting News. I wonder what other nuggets of forgotten history I'll find there.
Good morning NBA fans. Today is the official beginning of the post-season, and this Knicks fan is one freaking happy camper. Just thought I'd get that outta the way before getting down to business.
Each form of online discussion has a grain to it. Doc and I used to talk about how something "follows the grain of the web." Twitter has its own grain, formed by its character limit, what information is shared (ie number of followers in both directions).
I made a list of some of the social networks I've been on starting in the mid-70s. The list is very long. And each of them had their own limits, rules and features, and each led to a certain kinds of relationships between the participants. Mail lists that gain traction always flame out. It's hard to get people to read your blog. If you make it easier it changes into something else. Instagram, Youtube, TikTok form hierarchies of influencers. I think of those as the networks Taylor Lorenz covers.
But there isn't a structure that I'm aware of that leads to people working together. It's a puzzle I keep trying to figure out.
We need working together to survive climate change and fascism. It would be good to crack this nut.
One of the nicest things about ChatGPT is that it's always up for working with you. The critics of AI don't begin to understand this. As an example, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to draw a picture of people working together. Here it is. I didn't have to wait. It didn't look at my follower count, or my bank statement to decide if it was willing to work with me. I pay the $20 a month, and I've got a persistent always-on collaborator.
What got me thinking this way this morning is a bit of collaboration I did with palafo (a human) on Threads. It's remarkable. We actually did some work together. No sarcasm. It may be hard to read the thread but if you're curious about collaborative systems, here's a real example. Serendipitous, unplanned, but we figured something out by combining our experiences. Fantastic.
Later, Ben Werdmuller, a person who I've gotten to know recently, is intelligent and asks good questions. He asked one today, how do they get the live audience on SNL to laugh when they want them to laugh. I had an idea and shared it. (This was discussed on Reddit. I also checked with ChatGPT.)
If you take away one thing from this post it's that we can collaborate with the machines, and maybe that will unlock collaboration between humans. In fact, in a way they are facilitating the collaboration. If you want to be part of the collective human intelligence, you may be thinking about the machines the wrong way. Maybe they're the most human thing we have, because AI is made up of humans, somewhat like Soylent Green. 😄
PS: I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of humans working together to clean up a mess.
PPS: Yesterday I gave John O'Nolan what I think is a good idea for getting his Ghost blogs federating with Threads, Mastodon et al. I didn't expect thanks or even a response, but I wonder if he even heard it. Most of the time, trying to help other people results in not even an acknowledgment that they saw it. If I were him I'd look for a painless, quick way to get maximum interop. Something like ghost.social. I'd give the same advice to Matt at Automattic (in fact I think I did).
PPPS: I think acknowledgment is a key part of working together on the web. Nothing more than "I wanted you to know I saw it" is often all that's needed to grease the skids of discourse. I've had a friendly disagreement with Manton at micro.blog about this.
How to add a FeedLand blogroll to a Drummer blog.
- You must have a Drummer blog and a FeedLand account.
- You can specify that all the feeds you're subscribed to are in your blogroll or use a category and only feeds in that category will be in the blogroll.
- The blogroll updates automatically, when one of the feeds has a new post, it goes to the top of the list.
- You can expand a feed to see the five most recent items. Click on the pubdate to go to the full item on the web.
- It supports keyboard navigation. Up and down arrows move through the list, Return to expand/collapse.
- We're working on WordPress plugin.
Four head-level attributes in your blog.opml file. Only one required.
- blogrollUsername -- required
- blogrollServer -- optional, if not specified it's feedland.com
- blogrollCategory -- optional
- blogrollTitle -- optional, but you really should provide a title, otherwise we invent a silly one for you. 😄
Screen shot of how the head-level attributes are set on Bull Mancuso's blog.
Screen shot of the blog itself with the blogroll.
A link to Bull's blogroll category on feedland.com.
A place to ask questions offer kudos, etc. 😄
PS: I'm not trying to sell you on using Drummer to run a blog. Rather I needed a place to figure out how this works, so we know how to set up and document the WordPress plugin.
I want to work with the best developers, I don't care where they work. It occurred to me watching a Martin Scorcese documentary about the life of George Harrison, how much people in music seek out opportunities to create with other musicians. In technology, it doesn't happen, we don't even look at each others software. After waiting a whole lifetime for a culture of collaboration, we have had it for short periods, but it's most of the time it's been people trying to deconstruct and reinvent other people's work, not build on it. I'm still open to this changing. I hope to be a catalyst for it, one more time.
I don’t like how betting has invaded sports broadcasting. I don't like that it breaks the bond among people who root for one team their whole lives, as I have with the Knicks and the Mets. I think of people who love the same teams as I do as family. I like that there are Knicks fans who also like the Yankees even though I totally despise the Yankees and everything they (don't) stand for, but we all love the freaking Knicks (and ignore the Nets, btw). Before long there won't be any of us left, everyone will see sports as a business, an obsession, or their downfall, because you can't win at gambling, we all know that. The whole tribal thing about sports is broken by integrated gambling, it suggests many of us, maybe eventually most of us, are here not for love of team, rather they're feeding an addiction.
Final Eastern Division standings. Knicks finish second. Best Knicks team in a long time. Ended the season with a five-game winning streak.
Last week at the reunion I got to spend a lot of time with Doc Searls, which was great. We're both getting old, and one of these times will be the last one, but for now we're both still kicking around ideas and actually doing some of them. One of the things we share is that when we write up an idea on our blog or in a book it's probably because we want to work with others to do that idea. Really pretty much all the time. And it's disheartening and not at all flattering to hear someone thank you for giving them that idea. This is the saddest thing in my life and it keeps happening. An example, I once went to visit Adam Curry in Amsterdam and he showed me an office full of people he hired to do what I had already done. Adam did that over and over. The problem is you can't hire someone to be Doc or me. No matter how many rooms you fill with attractive people. When you try to do our ideas, we've learned, people seem to always miss the heart of it. Anyway someone reading this may someday work with the source of the idea they love to make it reality and I will have done my good deed for the day.
The idea about people not learning to use computers really resonated with some. Almost no disagreement. I'd add that we now are going to get another shot at conceiving a computer that's a lot easier to use, with the power of AI. Remember the example where I was able to specify what was basically an SQL query in plain though precise English? That can also be applied to the user interface of a computer. Get me the phone number of the contractor I used to install the solar panels a few years ago. I'm sure the data is here on my computer, it might not be organized that way, but in a few months I'll have my own DaveBot who's read everything I've written everywhere and can answer all my questions (and yes, probably the CIA gets to ask questions too, let's hope Trump doesn't get elected, I'm not unaware of the dangers). And I won't have to remember how to build some app I wrote ten years ago. I won't even have to take notes. It's the paradise I never believed in is about to come to me.
One thing I have to thank Berkman for is my new confidence. What a boost that meeting was. It took me back to a day when there were dozens of people who I worked with regularly who were really first rate, and I was able to participate at my peak, that I did something uniquely valuable and was appreciated for it. I feel a million times more confident this week after the homecoming.
In the University Teaching Hospital for tech I'm thinking about, I would teach users how to adjust to a new piece of software before switching to it. Suppose you're going to try writing your blog, which is something you do every day, with a new piece of software. Instead of converting to the new software first and diving into production, I would teach the users to play with the new editor on the side, on posts that don't matter, maybe even written by ChatGPT, until you're sure it fits your workflow, and to surface and report all bugs that are in your way, or find acceptable workarounds. And only when you're satisfied that it works for you, should you consider switching to the new editor for production work. In my experience working with users, they switch too early and then panic when they find the software doesn't work the way they think it should. More generally you have to learn how to work so you don't have to panic, and you can easily back out of the decision if you decide it isn't right. When you're in panic mode you usually only make things worse. If you can afford to put the problem down for a couple of days and come back to it, you'll get to work faster and probably with a better result. The most important thing in working with computers, if you feel like you're panicking, stop.
I wrote a long piece earlier today, about teaching hospitals for tech, that in the end I didn't like. I'll try again another time.
2011: "Google seems to have the power to either seriously injure RSS, or perhaps set it free. Not sure which would happen if they radically changed course. I just know that users have made the other RSS reading tools be dependent on it. And that's not a great way to do things. What makes RSS useful is its power to de-centralize. To re-centralize it for a little convenience is to miss out on the variety that's possible.."
More learning from the reunion...
One of the things I learned about my 2003 experience at Berkman at the reunion last week was the disconnect between a research center that was about doing more than studying technology, as Berkman was in 2003 and 2004 when I was there, and the fact that terms were limited, in theory to a single year, although most people I know who participated were there for more than a year, some considerably more. That so many were renewed for so long confirms that the one-year model was basically unworkable in something as new and flexible as the internet was and still is. The pull to do was too strong, had so much potential, and the doing because of the nature of the net was based on working with other people.
The problem is that if you do something in your term, and it works, and then have to leave, what becomes of the work? Can you take it with you? In my case, not really. A lot of it depended on being anchored in a university. It probably could have been moved, not much of it depended on Harvard, or even being in the northeastern US. But I didn't begin to know how to find a uni that could adopt such a project (very likely one did not exist). But that might be something you want to attach to a Berkman, a way to evolve out of the incubator to a teaching hospital for tech.
Why do you want to continue? Because in tech, you're never done. People still think there's such a thing as an invention. It's a process.
You're always learning from users, and new ideas for applications come from use of the previous layer, working with other projects to build new interop, and all the while maintaining freedom to choose for the users. It's always bootstrapping. Learning from learning. OMG in just 1.5 days I learned more about my work there than I had in the previous 20 years. That's a tragedy. A machine was set up and just stopped.
Instead we left all this work ready to be picked off by the VCs and that's what happened. You got Twitter and Facebook, AWS, Spotify, etc instead of more BloggerCons. Our path was cut off, ready to be taken over by Google Reader, without the ability to offer an open alternative that could not be erased by the whim of a billionaire founder. Why did we let that happen and why are we not examining that to avoid doing it again?
In all the discussions at the Berkman reunion, no one considered the possibility that what they call capitalism would take over open tech was anything other than inevitable. Sad, because it wasn't inevitable. Proof -- we got it right with podcasting. It has not been taken over. We learned from our experience with blogging, and we were able to build on that, and with just one little iteration we were able to do something that I'm totally sure we could have repeated. But we didn't. All we did was make sure the users knew they were entitled to choice. That stuck with podcasting to this day. That's why it worked.
There were others, staff -- who had indefinite appointments, who unknown to me continued some of the work. But news of this didn't make it to me until 20 years later at last week's conference. We have to do better at this. The irony is we developed fantastic communication tools, and then failed to use them effectively.
I think more and more the model of a teaching hospital for technology is what makes sense.
Berkman had half of it right, bring in people who see parts of the net that need building, who are willing to contribute their time for little or no money, with no chance to make billions like Zuck, a student at Harvard at the time, and then have a path to continue the work after the appointment.
It's understandable that this didn't work well the way Berkman was and is structured, the people who ran it are academics, and they have different skills and goals, which I know very well because my father was a college professor, and while interested in what I did with outliners in the 80s (an understatement, they fit his mind as well as they fit mine, same genes) didn't have the chutzpah and drive to have made the products work in the market. That isn't part of the academic culture, it kind of clashes with it. But we have to learn how to get over that, and work with each other, because we need all of it.
I believe more and more the ideas in Developing Better Developers, both versions, are the right approach to meld academia and tech.
Also I learned in the last few days that UC Santa Cruz is already going down that path. More on that as I learn more.
Something happened on the drive to Boston last week that makes we wary of trusting the FSD feature of my Tesla model Y. I was on the NY State Thruway going north, a few miles south of the exit for I-90E to Boston, in FSD mode, in the right lane, when I see a hundred yards or so ahead a car with flashing lights in the shoulder. Before waiting to see what FSD would do, I signaled a left turn, which is a clever feature that tells the FSD software to switch lanes. It started to do so, then the software must've noticed the car with the flashing lights and inbetween the two lanes it hit the brakes hard, and slowed us down to a dangerous speed, esp if there had been a car behind us. But there was absolutely no danger. The car in the shoulder wasn't even close enough to make a difference if we had remained in the right lane, but we were leaving it. And it tried to stop us in no man's land. Insane. Anyone seeing this behavior would have thought I was drunk. So next time something like that happens if I'm in FSD mode, I'm going to cancel it by turning the steering wheel slightly and taking over fully. I have trouble believing people who let this thing drive without overriding it regularly.
Bluesky is an invite-only network, but it has an API, and we've added RSS feeds, so I can present to you a view onto Andrew Hickey's Bluesky feed, accessible to everyone.
I just tripped over a 2018 rewrite of Developing Better Developers. I remembered writing this, but never could find it. I need to tell Google when I search for site:scripting.com to also include site:this.how. If anything the bits on this.how are more important than the ones on the much larger scripting.com. I could give these instructions, just like this, to ChatGPT and it would understand. It seems to me Google could start allowing us to configure the way Google sees us using natural language like this. Google has really held back the open web, by doing what big companies always do when they achieve dominance. Things ether stagnate or more likely in Google's case, move backwards.
Fixed a bug where every this.how doc would fail trying to load emoji images because it used an "insecure" address. I fixed it so now we can be sure no emoji images are being hacked by a router between Amazon and your web browser. Hopefully someone will sleep better because of this. Me, I like fixing bugs so I feel good. 😄
Nice to see Thread Writer for Bluesky getting traction. It's a rewrite of thread.center which I wrote for Twitter, which Twitter never noticed before shutting it down. One of these days there will be a platform that really pays attention to what developers create and makes sure users learn about them. Twitter was not that company. Like most tech companies they spent their dev relations money on the wrong things.
One thing that never came up at the Berkman reunion, as far as I know, was the incredible coincidence that at the same time we were booting up academic and political blogging and podcasting out of Berkman on Mass Ave, on the other side of Cambridge St, Mark Zuckerberg and his undergrad pals were booting up what would eventually make them billionaires, aka The Face Book. What if we had met, or known about each other? Might the world have been very different?
I have Spectrum cable, only because it’s the only way to get the Knicks and Mets. Otherwise I’d go back to YouTube TV that I like better. Save money too. And now Disney has disconnected from Spectrum, taking ESPN with, would a great time for everything to decouple and let’s redo the whole thing. I'm wasting so much money just for those two channels and so are a lot of other people.
An idea for an app. Make a list of all the places you've lived, schools went to, restaurants you loved, hated, movies, books, places you've visited. Then you're at a conference or reunion, and the app starts vibrating when you're standing near someone who also uses the app who has something significant and interesting that matches your profile. Take out your phone and it says what it is. You can swipe left or right or ignore it. If you both swipe right, your phones start playing a Peter Gabriel song (the same one) and you know you can have an interesting conversation with this person.
As you know, I went to a conference this week with lots of web thinkers, people I worked with 20 years ago. And after listening to them about the state of social networks, this is what I've come up with.
- It's federation vs small pieces loosely joined.
- I'll go with the latter. The former is too complicated to work or deliver a benefit worth anything to anyone except chaos lovers.
- SPLJ delivers all the benefits, but is more fragile, probably slower, but easier to understand.
- Everyone has a radio station that broadcasts to the universe to which anyone can opt into listening to or not.
- It's nowhere near as efficient as Twitter, but that's a good thing my friends.
- The problem with Twitter is it makes everyone an easy target. This approach, well understood from the old days of blogging has the opposite challenge, getting anyone to hear you, but at least you can tune everyone else out, because that's the default.
- The default on federated nets is the other way, everyone is on by default. This has been proven to be an awful approach, over and over.
- Just because you don't know the lessons of the past doesn't somehow make you immune to them. ;-)
I do not keep up with who is or isn't subscribed to my blog. I deliberately don't want to know.
BTW, I learned that two of my colleagues from early Berkman are regular readers of this blog, Chris Lydon and Ethan Zuckerman. Maybe they have some ideas how we might bootstrap an online Old School Berkman on the open web, probably using something like blogs I imagine, and giving users choice as to what tools they use to read and write the stuff. Kind of like podcasting but for text. I would totally use an outliner for everything, but it should be wide open for any kind of tool anyone wants to build and/or use. Just an idea. Someday we will use such a system, I hope. Not federated, but small pieces loosely joined.
BTW, it was pointed out that yesterday's post with my first notes from the BKC 25th reunion failed to say what BKC is. It's a research center that started 25 years ago at Harvard Law School with a charter to do entrepreneurial internet-related projects inside a great university.
What a huge loss for the human species that a monstrous company like Facebook controls a wonderful social network like Facebook.
These are my first thoughts on coming home.
- I'm back home after an incredible couple of days at the Berkman 25 year reunion.
- I was there 20 years ago.
- We were on a roll toward inventing social media. We had learned a lot and were practicing it, and if we had continued, there's at least a chance there would be an open alternative to Facebook and Google now instead of all the trouble caused by their dominance.
- It probably wouldn't have needed much if any money, btw.
- I believe investors would have wanted to invest on our terms in open source development at a university in 2003, but I didn't have the idea developed enough to propose it.
- By 2014 however, I was able to write about it. And I think perhaps there may be people ready to try it in 2023. The people at Berkman back in 2003 are 20 years older too. And these were and are very smart ambitious forward thinking people.
- Very independently of my Berkman experience in 2014 I was thinking all about how an academic institution should welcome people back every few years to contribute to an ongoing open source project. If we had been able to do that for blogging, podcasting, RSS starting in 2003, and growing as the user base grew, with volunteers coming back to work on it whenever there was a need, and using the university to teach new generations how to do what the older generation knew how to do, I think it might have worked. At least it would have given the users a seat at the table when deciding how the technology would evolve.
- I thought I had been forgotten in the Berkman world, but that didn't happen. I was surprised at how much love there was there.
- I say if you get a chance to go back 20 years in time and hang out with the people you knew then -- do it. So much of what you remember comes from the perspective of someone 20 years younger. You now know what happened. The story went on. You're in a fantastic place to learn, and you're also going to feel love stronger than you could have back then, because love grows enormously over time, even if you're not consciously aware of it.
- I described getting my fellowship at Berkman like being a kid, given a Harvard business card and told to go have fun.
- Harvard Law School knows how to build classrooms for discourse.
Sorry still not back up to full speed blogging-wise. Had a great time at the Berkman reunion. But it's so freaking hot here, mid-90s and full humidity. Intermittent internet access. Great to meet all kinds of old friends. The memories are strong. Tomorrow is another travel day, returning to the mountains, and then Murphy-willing, head-down on a new product release.
They just asked what mistakes did BKC make, and I learned for the first time in Charlie Nesson's talk that development was one of the early values, and when I ame there, that was my hope was that we'd connect users and developers and make this a major activity of the university as I described in a series of pieces I wrote. But BKC turned in a different direction, focusing on people who studied the internet, rather than people who made the internet.
I'm listening to a speaker at the BKC reunion, a man I have great respect for but can't name due to the rules of this conference. He's talking about how to regulate AI, with the assumption that it's a looming catastrophe, without explaining why he feels that way, or why we should. As a reader of this blog you certainly know that I am very optimistic about the future of AI.
Back in the 1970s when SQL was new, it was touted as an English-like database language. Now with ChatGPT you really can do database queries in actual English and it understands. Amazing. Whether the info is accurate or not (I suspect it is) is beside the point. It's doing something with language that has not been possible before. Check out this query. "Make a table of 15 oscar-winning actors and actresses ranked by number of nominations, also include a column with the names of at most three of the movies they made that won best picture."
Yesterday I posted a full-length excerpt of the Google and HTTP piece on Twitter, and was surprised at the positive response. I had posted links to the full article many times, and mostly got flames from programmer priests, Googly trolls, but this time the message got through. It was RT'd 58 times, and got 24K views. Not bad for something most people would consider esoteric, yet is still fundamental the their continued freedom on the unowned open web.
Just for fun the other day I asked ChatGPT for 150 words on Christopher Lydon and Amanda Palmer, wondering if it would find the connection between them. It wrote a paragraph profile on each, but did not discover that Palmer had written a song about Lydon. Note -- Google's search function totally made the connection.
Yet another use-case for ChatGPT. I'm using the wpcom package for Node.js to make calls about a user's WordPress account. I want to know what sites the user is following in their reader app. But they don't document the high-level call for that function, which is documented at the REST level. So I ask ChatGPT what to do and it gives me the code I need. In the past I would probably have been able to piece it together with guesswork, trial and error. Might have taken a whole day. Now I have it working while I'm still drinking my morning coffee. BTW, I also had ChatGPT do code review, and it spots an error, and of course I fix it, happily.
Posted on Masto: I find that ChatGPT is far better than Wikipedia at recounting history I know the truth about. Less subject to human manipulation, imho. When we criticize the machines we should remember what we have to compare them with and we should get our act together. Imagine if the AIs wrote critiques about our accuracy.
A couple of weeks ago I found and fixed an error in PagePark that made FeedLand and Drummer fail. The apps were offline until I could restart the server, and that sometimes meant hours of downtime. That no longer happens. But now there's a different problem, sometimes I go to my news page on feedland.org and for a minute or so there's no response. Eventually I give up and try again in a new tab. Same thing. Eventually the problem clears and the server returns to it's normal performance. I'm starting to think about how I might isolate this problem. My theory is that the problem is in the appserver layer, not in FeedLand itself, because when it happens nothing is returned. If it were at a higher level, the lockup would be in the code that gets a timeline or feedlist or whatever, so you would see a menu at the top of the screen. But it's always the news page this happens on, come to think of it. Maybe I should start a thread on this in case other FeedLand users who are also developers (please) might have some ideas.
It has been pointed out that I could use the OpenAI platform to add commands to my outliner that are based on results of ChatGPT questions. For example, I could say (hypothetically) "add a list for 10 random states under the bar cursor headline" and it would be done. I hope to try that soon. In the meantime if you'd like to do it, the outliner I use is open source, so you can do it, and share it with me and that would make me even happier. 😄
Patti Smith: I haven't fucked much with the past but I've fucked plenty with the future.
If you think of yourself as an "open source developer" please ask yourself this question. Are you as committed to freedom for people who use your software as you are to freedom for developers? Not just freedom to modify the source code, that isn't a meaningful power for must people, but freedom to do anything they like with the stuff they create, something your software has to facilitate.
I really have to take the time to learn how GitHub co-pilot works. But I still want to use my editor. See the problem?? It's the same problem Slack has. Basically every software product of 2023 adopts the attitude that it is a world unto itself.
Why can't I have an editor that I can give ChatGPT commands to. I do it anyway, I just have to copy-paste the result into my editor. Couldn't it save me that step by being integrated, or even better if we had good standards for scriptable apps. We were getting started on that in 1990 when Apple blew it all up, btw. Just sayin.
I use ChatGPT to help me write code. When it gives code examples, I'd like it to use my admittedly uncommon indenting style. Is there a way to do that?
Today's songs: Margaritaville and Come Monday. Yeah it's not the greatest music as people are say, but these are music from a great part of my life. Youth, great friends, love, and a sense of purpose. Like many people my age, these songs have strong emotional value.
One of my favorite podcasters, Andrew Hickey, has a Bluesky feed that you can subscribe to in any RSS-compatible feed reader.
August 27: "Standards that move based on the will of big companies never move compatibly. The interop we have with the web wasn't created by Googles or Mozillas or the EFF. The web was created by accident, when the tech industry of the early 1990s wasn't looking. And of course they've been trying ever since to dismantle the interop gift we got from the accidental network."
People whose careers began after the advent of the open web probably have no idea what a miracle it is, and imho once it's gone, it'll never happen again. The BigCo's are too entrenched, and have nothing to gain from the freedom and interop it provided. I know, because I was there, and know what a wasteland tech was before the web, and how that changed in an instant when the web caught on. All of a sudden the Bigs couldn't stop us from creating the things we wanted to create.
If you do everything right, posts from my feed passing through FeedLand look pretty darned good.
There's an autumn feel in the air today. A bit cooler, and it isn't very humid. Nice breeze. Funny thing is I so totally looked forward to summer, and it's almost over, and I should feel sad, but right now the changing season actually feels good. Just shows that there's nothing logical or predictable about body chemistry. These feelings come from evolution and natural selection. It's time for the season to change, so our body feeds us chemicals that makes us feel like this is a good thing.
I asked ChatGPT for a pep talk, and it provided a very nice one. Well worth the $20 I paid for August. BTW the same NYT columnist said ChatGPT is garbage because it isn't as smart as he is. Heh. 😄
Today's song: Old Folks Boogie. "You know you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill."
I was once told by a famous and stupid NYT columnist that people my age have trouble learning about new tech, saying that I specifically had not aged well tech-wise. It was just an insult from a very stupid person, but it did hurt. Anyway, now that I'm much older I'd add aging means learning about all kinds of things, like sore and weak backs, knees, hips, memory, hair, lower metabolism, and all kinds of other things. My father as his health declined kept saying old age ain't for sissies, and I could see it in his body and his suffering, and now begin to feel it in my own. My advice -- ignore idiotic young folk, they'll find out soon enough, you don't need to explain it to them.
I was interested in how small claims court works in Ulster County, where I live. So I looked it up on Google reflexively. At the top of the page was the answer from their ChatGPT clone. Here's a screen shot. They stepped into the slot ChatGPT was starting to occupy, and they have the prime real estate. Note the word reflexively in the narrative above. I would perhaps have taken the question to ChatGPT if I cared enough and if it didn't require current info, but it's an extra two steps. But I went to Google first, still.
A story I asked ChatGPT to write about the 1962 Mets. I gave it the basic themes, and a few seconds later, I had the story. It's a new kind of writing, and it's fun, and as a developer my tests can be more entertaining. If you're a programmer you know what I mean.
I've become interested in viewing WordPress in a different way, not as just a blogging system, or CMS, rather as a back-end for a twitter-like system, or my idea of what a twitter-like system should be. Rather than staying on the sidelines, as I have for the last 17 years or so, going right for the middle. I like WordPress because there's wordpress.com which is huge, millions of users and now a 100-year plan (or at least the idea of having one), and thousands of functioning clones that interop nicely. Does this sound familiar? And their devs are pretty friendly and open-minded, I've found.
We're having a reunion at Berkman on September 7th and 8th in Cambridge and of course I'm going. Just reviewed the schedule where there were several references to the term "unconference." I think we should talk about how good ideas are usurped or erased. The term was actually coined at Berkman, to describe the format we used for the second day of the first BloggerCon in 2003 by one of our participants, Lenn Pryor, who was at Microsoft at the time. The term was eventually taken over for a imho much less interesting conference format, one where the sessions are chosen in real time at the event, but the format of the sessions is the same one used by non-un-conferences. In our version the hallways are empty, in the other format, well it's business as usual, the interesting stuff happens outside the meeting room. Maybe a university could help make sure that true innovation is rewarded? Something perhaps to discuss at our reunion. I tried to write this comment on the website, but they only allow 280 characters. Anyway here's a Google search for the term unconference on my blog. And a Google Trends search.
I did a little work on the wordpress.com identity package. It can now display a 3-column list of all your WordPress sites.
Maybe my favorite Little Card Editor meme.
Even if you think you're writing about someone else in fact it's only about you.
A friend said I should check out a new movie on Netflix entitled You Are So Not Going to my Bat Mitzvah. She said I'd like it because the rabbi is played by my favorite SNL performer, Sarah Sherman. I watched it and highly recommend. It's not a great movie but it is amazing for me, a 3/4 Jewish boy from Queens, son of holocaust survivors, and I found out from this movie someone who is more uncomfortable with being Jewish than I previously understood. Everything about this movie is Jewish. The same way Atlanta or Insecure are thoroughly black. The teenagers in the movie are 100 percent comfortable with being Jewish. I don't think there ever has been a movie that approached being Jewish so naturally without any sense that they have to explain themselves. And I kept having the thought -- Why Not? -- as my discomfort came up and then faded out -- why shouldn't there be movies that share modern Jewish culture in America using comedy, without being embarrassed by it? To me this is proof that antisemitism is strong inside me, and I don't understand how it got there. If Blacks have the same thing about their race, they have used culture to help dismantle it. I watch their shows, why shouldn't I also watch a show about my own people, and accept that we have a right to love ourselves as much as anyone else does? So to me, YASNGTMBM was amazing, and did something huge. And btw, the girls who play the lead roles are incredibly sweet and cute, and I expect we'll see more from them. And yes, Sarah Sherman, as the rabbi was wonderful too.
Google did something I expect more tech companies will do, they use AI to help people figure out how to use their software. For example, they changed the way downloads work in Chrome. It used to be that when you clicked a download link, a tab would open at the bottom of the window, but now it's been hidden behind a menu at the top of the window. How would I know that? So I kept clicking the download link, all the while starting another download of the file. Finally I looked in the Downloads folder on my Mac, and saw five downloads of the same file, creeping along slowly, because they were all competing with each other, slowing each other down. So I went to the Google search engine and asked about downloading from Chrome, and immediately it gave me the answer. This is new, it's the result of having turned on Google's new AI for search. It showed me where I had to go to cancel the downloads, and I did. Problem solved. I still hate Google for what they're doing to the open web, but I know how to separate the good from the evil.
I wrote that Markdown is the killer feature for twitter-like systems
Ollie Boermans points out that Markdown allows arbitrary HTML.
Of course that is not what I'm suggesting.
I want Markdown minus the feature that allows arbitrary HTML.
Maybe call it Essential Markdown or somesuch.
I've been watching the rollout of Automattic's proposed 100-year websites program. It's the first time I think I've seen my friend Matt personally roll something out like this, and I'm glad he's doing it, esp in this area because it lets us have an open discussion about the kind of web we want for the future.
I wish instead of offering WordPress as a hedge against standards that change, he put his bet down the other way, by creating static renderings of the WordPress sites, and offering his services to people who use other CMSes, and saying these sites will still be here in 100 years, and thereby challenge the browser-makers of 2123 to be able to read those sites as well then as browsers could read them in 1993 and 2023.
I think ultimately it'll be a better business move, because standards that move based on the will of big companies never move compatibly. The interop we have with the web wasn't created by Googles or Mozillas or the EFF. The web was created by accident, when the tech industry of the early 1990s wasn't looking. And of course they've been trying ever since to dismantle the interop gift we got from the accidental network.
Someday Automattic and Google will compete, maybe a WordPress site will be read by Google's browser, maybe not. Maybe it won't support all the features. So, if we bet on you Matt -- what happens to our websites when Google sees you as a competitor, in 2041, and doesn't want to interop with you?
The best bet is to go with the standard we have. Force Google to openly break the web, if they insist on breaking it.
Also consider if there's a world to read our 100-year archives, it'll mean we found an answer to climate change, which surely meant we had to learn to work with each other. So let's not give up on the web so quickly. It's what made you and I so successful. We should pass that on to future generations, the ability to quickly put something together on a whim, without much tech knowledge and not limited by what big tech companies say we're allowed to do.
As a side-project I'm getting a bridge going between my world and wordpress.com, as a way of rebooting BingeWorthy which I miss dearly. That's where I'm headed. Anyway, last week I thought it worked, but hadn't tested the accessToken WP returns, and it was getting mangled going back and forth to my server. I've worked that out today. I think it's going to be relatively smooth sailing from here, but I thought that a few days ago too. Praise Murphy.
To anyone who thinks ChatGPT is useless, have a look at this transcript of a programming session I just did. If you know anything about programming, you can see a really high quality collaboration going on here. Of course I am communicating with the AI. It's brilliant, as smart at programming as I am. Seriously.
Someday there will be a new twitter-like service with one feature that will blow the doors off this hugely dormant product area. Just support Markdown in your posts. That's it. (Wait there's more. Let's get a really nice RSS feed going for your service and that'll be the knockout punch. Now federation becomes as simple as supporting these two features. No complex server stuff. Low tech and weblike.)
I've been writing about future-safe archives for many years, a way to put down $10K or so, and guarantee best efforts to keep my web presence going long after my death. But I expected it would be implemented by a long-lived university with the help of an insurance company, which is by definition a long-lived entity. It's good that Automattic is thinking about this (there is no published plan, so far just an idea), maybe they'll seek a partnership with Harvard or Oxford, or Lloyds of London.
I was a bit drunk the other night, waiting for a shuttle bus at the enormous hotel complex I was staying at and the bus didn't arrive after an hour of waiting, and the light inebriation had turned into an annoying headachy feeling leaning toward a hangover. Sitting on the bench waiting for the shuttle while nice families and happy people went by made me feel more and more like an unhoused person, stranded on the side of a street in Manhattan.
I returned to the hotel lobby, a total of three times while waiting, asking them to call the shuttle bus driver again, but on the third time they said the hotel manager would drive me to my room himself. (The room was a 10 minute drive, who knew how long a walk.) So he comes out and asks me questions to identify myself I guess to be sure I was entitled to a ride, and in answering his questions, which I felt were rude given that I had been waiting for his freaking shuttle bus for over an hour at this point (and I didn't say freaking, I said the impolite word it stands for) while I was listening for an apology which never came, which is probably part of the reason I was so irritated.
Later when we were seated in his SUV he told me that I needed to be "civil" and not use f-bombs (I was sitting quietly at the time waiting to be taken to my freaking room so I could get over this hangover that was forming) and that was enough for me.
I paused and said the kind of thing you wished you would have said at the time but I never had the guts before to say. Use your imagination. He got out of the SUV and left me sitting there. I don't know what he expected me to do. I eventually got out of the SUV and saw that the lost shuttle bus had finally arrived, and I got on it, and the manager once again lectured me on proper social behavior, from outside the bus, and I looked at him and told him to get lost.
The driver then drove off, and we had a mostly pleasant converation where I explained what an asshole the manager was, noticing that the driver didn't disagree.
And btw, for the record I stayed at the hotel for two nights for over $1000. So I felt I was entitled to a certain amount of respect, if not for being a human being, for paying so much money to stay at such a shitty hotel.
PS: A Conde Nast reviewer liked the hotel. Hard to imagine.
I'm back from my auto adventure to Cape Cod and back in my Tesla Model Y. It's the longest trip I've taken in the Tesla, and this time, unlike my trips to NYC, I had to use the Supercharger network. I am too exhausted to write up the experience, but I learned a lot, and for the first time I let the car do the driving, with careful supervision. It's a kind of letting-go, I'm a terrible passenger, always prefer to drive. But this was fun, interesting, and gave me new respect for the technology I've been working on pretty much my whole life.
I'm traveling today and probably will not post more than this Hello World. Have a great Thursday. Hope to see you again tomorrow. Might break in with a Donald Trump mugshot.
To people who are familiar with FeedLand, this all will look pretty familiar. BingeWorthy was major prior art for FeedLand.
Here's the first version of wordpressIdentity for Node.js. Wordpress can play the same role as Twitter did, for some of my apps that were shut down. Especially thinking of BingeWorthy, which I totally miss.
The Rolling Stones are one of the best bands to Peloton to. A steady strong beat is essential. My favorite Stones song for workouts is Can't You Hear Me Knocking. It's also a great song to just listen to. I find it's impossible for your body not to rock with the beat.
A WordPress plugin that adds the source:markdown element to RSS feeds from the special projects group at Automattic. I've wanted to see RSS and Markdown get together. We put support for it in FeedLand, and now there's a way to add it to any WordPress site. This will, long-term, add styling and links to RSS feeds, without opening the door to all the nasty stuff. I've been doing all kinds of interesting stuff with this group. An amazing confluence of philosophy.
When I started building my Node.js codebase nine years ago, one of the first things I did was build a server to connect to Twitter for identity and to allow my apps to post stuff to Twitter.
Over time more functionality was added to this blob of server software, because it was easier to add it to a server that I was already running, than to create a new server for each new function. Eventually I cleaned it up and properly modularized things, but the name stuck. The server was still named appConsts.urlTwitterServer in my client software. It was never on my todo list to come up with a better name for it.
Anyway at the end of last year I had to get my ass off Twitter asap, and I did it pretty cleanly, but the name persists. I just had to use it in a bit of maintenence for FeedLand. I thought this could be the day, that for just this one app, I could give it a new name. I thought about it for a few seconds and deleted the idea. I decided to write a blog post instead. There's only so much damage I can do in a blog post.
And anyway, who's to say the name Twitter isn't now in the public domain?
Maybe we should start naming all kinds of things Twitter.
Just a thought.
A number of years ago I was driving long distance on an interstate highway. If memory serves, I was going west to east on I-80 in the midwest. I wanted to know where was a Starbucks on my route that I could stop at to get caffeine and connect to the net. This was before wireless internet service was broadly available. I struck out. Couldn't find a way to do it. Tomorrow I'm driving west to east again, this time toward Cape Cod, and will have a little time to kill in transit, and was hoping to find a Starbucks where I could load up on caffeine and hook up to the internet. I asked ChatGPT, which offered no answer, but suggested a Google Maps query that unfortunately didn't work. It just showed me Starbucks around one of the endpoints of my search, Worcester, Mass. So based on this benchmark we still live in information impoverished times.
Every time I click on a NYT link they try to upsell me before they let me read. I am a paying subscriber. I look forward to being a non-subscriber if this goes on much longer.
As you may know, I've been reviewing projects that I haven't looked at in a while. Latest is DocServer, the online docs for Drummer's built-in scripting language. If you use(d) Frontier, you'll recognize both the format of the pages and the names of the verbs. Here are the docs for date.secondsSince and gitHub.upload to give you an idea of the range of functionality, from simple data manipulation to providing glue for powerful web apps that have well-thought-out APIs. This idea goes back to the late 80s when we were pushing scriptable Mac apps over excessive integration. Another idea that caught on, slowly, over time until now we take it for granted.
A few weeks ago my news product passed the home page in daily reloads. As of yesterday it's more than double flow. It makes sense. The news changes more frequently, includes everything that's on the home page and much more. It of course was created and managed by FeedLand.
Since we're remembering tonight, don't forget that Google thinks it owns the open web, and if you act like you don't care, they do.
Public Folder is a utility I depend on. Created when Dropbox eliminated its "public" folder. Works the same way, create, update or delete files in a special folder, and it syncs with a location on S3. Strictly doesn't have to be a public location, that's up to how S3 is configured.
Now that social media apps like Mastodon have RSS feeds, we had to figure out how to display them in FeedLand. Here's an example, Matt Haughey's feed on Mastodon, as viewed in FeedLand. These posts, as you can see, have no titles. So we bold-up the first sentence, or if it's too long, a big part of it. They look different from titled posts, but now that we've lived with this for a few weeks, I think it works. Might still do some tweaks.
Today would have been my mom's 91st birthday.
I've been to Facebook a few times today, and there she is. They're asking if I remember. Yes, I do. As time passes my memory softens.
We had differences, but she was my mother, and as I like to say, right after "Your mileage may vary and I am not a lawyer" -- my mother loves me. Which means at the base level, no matter how insecure I feel, that's a constant.
It's been six years since her death.
But as long as I'm here, her cause lives. ❤️
Dr Eve K Winer.
PS: A podcast with her, my father and me, on my 50th birthday, at a diner in Bayside, NY.
Whether or not you believe Chris Christie can win, or think he'd be a good president, he's saying things anyone running against Trump should say. Good to have someone in there showing what losers the other Repubs are.
I had a broken link for yesterday's podcast. This link should work. Still figuring this stuff out.
I like "Hurricane Hilary." It probably won't be so much fun after it starts killing people, but in the meantime every time I hear it I think "Good for her." If only it were aimed at red states.
Posted on Facebook in 2014, when the EFF was fighting a patent troll who claimed to have invented podcasting.
- You couldn't have had podcasting without a lot of things coming together.
- Networks of writers who shared links. Blogging.
- A protocol for moving links around a network. HTTP.
- Something to attach links and recordings to. RSS.
- A standard format for recording. MP3.
-
Inexpensive, easy to use playback devices, that could hook up to all this. iPod.
-
You might argue that we still haven't gotten all the pieces needed for it to really work. But one thing is for sure, none of the pieces existed when the famous patent troll claims to have invented podcasting.
- Maybe we should reach not for a victory but for understanding. The patent system is making decisions about technological processes it doesn't understand. No wonder it gets it so wrong.
Dear friends, if I were shopping for a new house, I'd look at the roof first. What I'm looking for to be bored. I do not want an interesting roof. It should be peaked in the middle, and that's it.
House with a boring roof.
I've bought three houses in my life and all have had "creative" roofs because I guess I find them interesting or I don't bother to look, or consider that roofs that are flat in places or have skylights, or worse have skylights in flat places, are going to have problems. Gutters get clogged and the water backs up and forms ponds. And if the ponding is hidden from view, you could think you don't have a problem with your roof when water is leaking into the wood that support the roof, and then you are in trouble. Let me say that again. You. Are. In. Trouble. One day a leak shows up in the ceiling and when you trace it back to the source you find a pond. And you realize it was right there all the time and you never saw it. And then you see a picture like this..
You do not want this.
Please. Boring roofs only.
And if you're building a house, same message.
Two summers ago I was playing with tagging in Scripting News.
Briefly, if I enclose a bit of text in double-square-brackets it's processed by Old School as a tag. It makes a call to the tag server software, which simply adds the reference to a database.
When you click on a tag reference in my post, a dialog pops up with the references to the tag in reverse chronologic order, and it stacks them, so you can click on tags within tags. It's a deceptively complex bit of software, built into the web page you're reading my blog on.
This is a core feature of the Tools For Thought category.
I stopped tagging at some poin. It's a nice thing to do, but it's for the future, and I'm busy now, and I find I'm not using it that much, still preferring to find the equivalent of tags in Google, because that requires no pre-thought and thus is likely to be more complete. And since I just started tagging two years ago, there, 26 years of my writing that never will be tagged. So I use Google every time.
But the technology still seems potentially valuable, for writing that's more of a product, like reference manuals, or specs or standards work, designs, stuff where the dollar value of the writing is clear. And potentially you can hire people to do the tagging, or more likely give the job to an AI.
Anyway, you may see me tagging here in the coming days, this is why.
Still diggin! (as they say)
Warning, spoilers below. You have been warned! 😄
I'm finally watching House of the Dragon -- the prequel of Game of Thrones. In Succession terms, it's as if they made a show about how Cousin Greg became such an interesting character. Or Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad.
But: House of the Dragon is not well put together. I found it hard to get started, I rebelled against the new characters in the same location, Kings Landing, only 200 years earlier. Incongruous, distrurbing and invasive. Who are these people where's the Mother of Dragons and Cersei Lannister fighting for the throne.
I eventually did plow through all that, and just when I was getting into the characters, boooom, they're 10 years older and they're played by new actors that don't look much like they did earlier, esp the star. It's like switching the Darrens on Bewitched only with a dozen or more characters all at the same time. Oy!
And before you could begin to figure out who was who, they went straight into a Red Wedding type thing, and I have no idea who did what to who or why.
Anyway, I'm now on the second to last episode and back into it. It's finally feeling like Game of Thrones, and I hope they don't blow it.
Heh yes I still use Frontier. I do all my JavaScript programming in a suite I developed in 2014, and it's still great.
This morning, I decided to take a minute and streamline something I'm doing a lot of now that I work from two different computers. And that involved doing something like what Jake Savin did in the same place in 2004. My comment is dated today.
Every bit of code is a bit like a blog.
PS: If you have Frontier, download this file and open it in Frontier to get the updated bit. It's also a historic artifact, it uses a text-based file format called Fat Pages, designed to be embedded in a web page that was also the docs for the bit. We came up with this in the 1998.
On the other hand, I still totally agree, with the quick review I did of his first book, here, in 2007.
I had a good podcast chat with Andrew Keen on Tuesday from a phone booth at a local co-working place. We talked about the technological beginnings of blogging, RSS and podcasting. I wasn't expecting it to be so good. I wanted to do this with Andrew because I had not respected his books in the 00s that said the online world we were creating wasn't going to be too great. I thought of course here's a guy trying to make a buck by invalidating our hard and successful work. Well it turned out Andrew had it right -- and so did we. There's no new technology that can't be abused or have serious downsides. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, because the flipside is also true. The answers to our problems can be found in the new tech. We tend to discount the good things that came from online computer tech and there are many. I don't do many interviews, but I like to do them with old friends like Guy Kawasaki and with people who I didn't respect well enough in the past, like Andrew, to try to make amends. It was a good show.
The home construction project continues, but I have four consecutive days at home, to do with as I please. Then next week is the craziest yet, but with any luck it'll be the end the crazyness. The problem is rain. It just keeps coming. And it's depressing. The summer without the summer. Yeah I can go swimming most days, but it's almost never sunny and it seems it's raining every day. Welcome to the all-new Planet Earth. We have it easy here in the northeastern US, relatively speaking. Outrageous heat in the west where summer is usually cool. The fires in Maui, a place you'd never think would be inundated with fire. Our industrial world had a good run, now that's over. It's only going to get worse from here. What will we do? Hell if I know.
Big Yellow Taxi as if it were written by the Grateful Dead, as posted via Drummer to WordPress. Written by ChatGPT of course.
I've heard-said from friends that they don't "see" race. I don't believe them. I saw the race, and gender and age, of the black women in the Atlanta justice system, moving around DJ Trump's condemnation, the pieces of paper that should end him. I laughed out loud about how freaking appropriate this was. America is all of us, and we all have equal power at least when it comes to voting and existing, though assholes like Trump would have you believe only people who look and smell like him matter. Trump did the worst thing he could possibly do, played stupid, visible, not even slightly under the radar of law enforcement, games with the franchise of all Georgians. And what a great reminder America is all us. Us. E pluribus unum. (Note: I can't quickly find a photo of the clerks moving the indictment through the system in Atlanta on Monday. Will look again later.)
I've always been fascinated by the history of NYC. It's where I was born and raised, so for me it's personal, and besides -- it's a very interesting place.
For me the most interest is in its evolution. And you can see in this picture, 499 years after it was discovered, why humans decided this was the place to build an amazing city -- look at the size and shape of the port and how it's protected from the ocean.
There are many other things evident in this picture. You could do a whole semester in college just exploring the whys of this picture.
NYC from high up.
I wish YouTube had a Dropbox-like interface. Just drop a movie into a folder, and it takes care of everything else. I could write one, maybe someday.
I'm working in another co-working place today, as I did yesterday and last week. I much prefer working at my house, where I can take a nap when I need a break, or just walk around and mutter out loud or scream in delight when something works that I didn't expect to. Or laugh out loud when I write something that amuses me, like right now. I'll just smile. Don't want to freak out the people around me. This idea of commuting to work kind of sucks. It's been a very long time since I did this. On the drive into work a guy cut in front of me merging into one lane (from two) with lots of advance warning. Okay I was a dick, I made it hard for him to do it, and the fucker hit my car! My beautiful Model Y. It was just the mirror, and it swiveled so there was no damage but what the fuck. This wasn't even NYC. I got a picture of his license plate. I honked my horn and yelled. Then I got over it. I admit I'm stressed having to work away from home while repairs are made on the house. As I used to say when I was hanging out in the lobby of the Unix server room at UW with my programming buddy Gary Sevitsky -- oh la -- which is a way of combinging WTF with a certain level of exhaustion mixed with a bit of resignment to the WTF-ness of everything. Last time I wrote about him I learned that he died. Sarov if you can hear me, I never forgot this philosophy. Okay I'm ready to begin my work day now, I think. 😄
From Matt Haughey on Mastodon. "I know it’s petty but when you boycott a favorite podcast after it moves exclusively to Spotify for a couple years then learn they’re finally changing course and releasing their podcast normally again, it’s a pretty good feeling. Welcome back to the internet, podcast. Eat shit, Spotify." It's not petty, it's the open web winning. In podcasting we won, by setting the pattern early-on. People expect choice in how they listen, and reject gate-keepers. It's a genetic seed, and once it takes hold it's impossible to overcome. This is what podcasting is teaching us.
I think it must be very hard to rework the UI of an open source product because responsibility for different parts of the product are allocated according to the structure of the UI. Same for a product that's managed by a large development company with lots of users. It's virtually impossible to re-think the top-level structure of the product. Much the same way you can't re-think how the streets in a city work. Too much is built around the way things are. Maybe it's true for movies and books too? Hmmm. Maybe you can only make big changes early in the life of an idea. What set me going in this direction is the way the UI of Radio UserLand was organized. We decided to start over from scratch in 2001. We already had a blogging tool, Manila, which had grown into a sprawl as we invented new tools to hang on a structure that wasn't designed for so much functionality. With Radio, I wanted to see if we could take the same functionality and make it tight and focused. It worked. There were two main screens, one for writing (the home page) and one for reading (the first link off the home page). Here's a screen shot. Could you rework a product like WordPress to work this way? Yes, I believe technically it's possible. It would just be another interface on the same functionality. It would not be able to do all that WordPress could, but for most people that's fine because most of what most people do can be covered by much less than all the UI, at least in theory, imho, ymmv, I am not a lawyer, murphy-willing, my mother loves me and all other disclaimers.
An immediate improvement AI could make for developers are making the error messages from language interpreters and runtimes better at pointing to the actual source of the problem, not just where it shows up. That would require some guesswork, but it's better to have the computer do some of that before turning it over to the human. The same way it can make medical doctors work easier.
There should be a system call in Node.js that calls me back when all the threads I just launched have completed. Would make for better error messages. Think about it.
I've been a Mets fan since 1962 and this year's Mets feels very familiar. Part of being a Mets fan imho is loving the team and its philosphy of metsness underneath all the suckage.
Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Rick Danko, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz.
I got this picture from a Facebook post on Woodstock and the 60s.
My generation of software developers totally fucked this up. Everyone went their own way. Nowhere near enough working together. There was some collaboration however with people in the news world, and we created media that lasted that empowered millions of individuals to publish. We got stuff done, but we could have done much better.
The next generation should look for ways to all play on the same stage, make each other sound better, inspire each other to their greatness. To show, visibly, what we can accomplish by working together.
Software docs are now basically obsolete. They should all be provided in the form of input to the OpenAI (or similar) so users can ask questions instead of scouring through the docs. Would also include support queries, so the understanding of the software would increase over time. The net-effect, users might be better-informed about our products, and make more complex systems, happier users, lower support costs. Now for the mind bomb -- the AI could probably help us find UI glitches, and better ways to organize the UI to make it more efficient, more supportable.
A week ago I wrote a piece about identity as a product, summarizing stuff I've written on this topic for the whole life of my blog.
I've been on an exploration of what a platform is, and how developers and users figure in it. In the intervening almost 30 years (!) we started out with a fresh slate, the open web, but it never turned into the developer platform I hoped it would. Quite the opposite.
Today it's virtually impossible for an independent developer, without millions in venture capital, to launch a new product or service. Far too many barriers exist. And the money comes at a cost, meaning that many products that are truly useful to users never get out there. Mostly the products turn users into the product as the cliche goes, products for marketers, wanting to sell products to largely passive users.
But I still believe! There are a lot more young people today who are fluent in computer programming, who have been using computers their whole lives, than there were the 80s, the last time there were intentional developer communities where an individual could launch a product and still retain their freedom to serve users, not marketers.
Now some story-telling to go with this idea...
The first deliberate new platform I experienced was the Macintosh in 1984. Before that, there were the Apple II and CP/M platforms which had accidental developer communities.
The Apple II's app ecosystem was bootstrapped by Visicalc but at first Apple, did little or nothing to help. There was no idea that the Apple II would be used in business, or that there even was a business market for personal computers. The Apple II was thought of as a "home computer." Used for todo lists, calendars, recipes, for kids doing homework. The ads showed the computer on a kitchen counter.
Visicalc, an Apple II spreadsheet with an innovative UI, created the business market and a huge wave of apps following it, once they showed it could be done. That wave continued on the IBM PC with another developer product, Lotus 1-2-3, a precursor to Excel.
CP/M had a spreadsheet, Supercalc, and a lot of word processors, databases, programming languages, communication software.
The first deliberate app ecosystem was the Mac in 1984.
When it first shipped, the Mac didn't run Apple II software, so they had to solve the bootstrap problem. They did it by developing two products in-house that were bundled with the machine -- MacWrite and MacPaint. So people who bought the machine would have something to use it for before they noticed that there was no developer software for the platform at launch. Only promises.
I was lucky, our product, ThinkTank, for the Apple II, had just launched in 1983, struggled to find distribution at first, got a rave review from the NY TImes, which had just started reviewing software, and then the authoritative tech pub InfoWorld gave it the highest score any software had ever received. All of a sudden we had sales, and could grow.
Our early success caught the eye of Guy Kawasaki who was newly hired as Apple's chief evangelist. We were a tiny startup but they seeded us with an early Macintosh along with the big software companies, and while we ported to the Mac platform it wasn't uncommon for Mike Boich, who was in charge of developer relations at Apple and himself a programmer, to be at our office helping us debug. They got involved with developers. There was no idea that success meant developers succeeding on their own. This very wrong idea would be the fatal flaw of a few otherwise excellent startup platforms.
We raised angel money and by early summer 1984 we had ThinkTank/Mac shipping. Apple bought full page ads for our product in Fortune, Business Week, Time, etc, out-spending us by a lot. Targeted at education and business, the Mac also caught on in government, and esp the military. To be clear, they invested in quite a few other products, not just ours.
They had a long way to go to catch up to the IBM PC, which had launched three years earlier and was booming, with magazines covering PC software and every major category deep with product, addons, utilities. But Apple's Mac strategy eventually worked. It took time for the developer community to grow, lots of other factors were at play, mostly that the PC had limited memory and the Mac could grow without practical limits.
How to, in 2023
Assuming one were going to approach the idea outlined in Identity as a Product, on launch there should be at least two simple products that play the role of MacWrite and MacPaint, giving users a reason to try the platform, and give developers a user community to aim at. Early users would get a special price, but it would never be free. This is a key part of the positioning of the service. Unlike social networks, users pay for this product, and are viewed in every way as the customer.
The MacWrite/MacPaint startup apps would be released as open source so developers not only have the ideas in the product to help them get started, but also working source code. The bundled products would also define documented open file formats, that developer products could interop with, and thus would set the precedent that interop is a core value of this platform. More than any idea, it shows that we are investing in user's power and choice and will commit to getting them lots of software they can use without having to leave their favorite tools behind. There never has been a commercial platform with this ethos, as far as I know.
I wrote a piece in 1996 when Apple was on the ropes, a fantasy about what I would do if I were Apple's new CEO (this was before Jobs came back in 1997). It more or less outlines a business plan for bootstrapping an app ecosystem. We help developers, as Apple did with my product in 1984, and they commit to deliver products in time to be part of the bootstrap of the platform.
There would also be a venture capital part of this platform, and it will mainly focus on product quality, not headcount, or even number of users. Value to the platform will be the major concern. Are they filling a need that's under-served? Will they draw more developers to the platform. Will it help build user confidence? Will it be fun? Do we believe in their vision? ;-)
How revenue flows -- from users to the platform, where it's distributed to app devs, based on the utility of the product. They can if they want, in addition, charge users a license fee, offer a subscription, or whatever, for use of their product.
But if the users get value from the product, developers will receive dollars from the platform. That means this can work for individuals. Just make a product that people love, and this can be your fulltime job, or maybe even make you rich. No more turning excellent developers into managers and CEOs if that isn't their calling.
Not the iOS model
The prior art for this is not Apple's iOS app ecosystem. The platform vendor here, sells core services to the users, mainly identity and storage, but does not provide any warranty for the developer apps. They can ship whatever they like, and if they want can form associations that might behave like the iOS ecosystem.
There are many reasons for not wanting to emulate that model, but for me the most important is that it cripples developer creativity. None of my products would have been allowed under the iOS approach. It's as if all music would have to be pre-approved by Disney. Maybe that is how music works these days, but it's it's a very limited form of creativity, imho of course.
Future-safety
Another constant theme of this blog is creating persistence for the web. I have gigabytes worth of text and images on scripting.com, written over the last 29 years. I would like to be able to pay say $10K to have that writing persist at its current address, after I die. That would be something the platform vendor could offer -- safe storage, renewal of the domain name, whatever other services are needed to make the ideas persist in their current form.
I hung out with some people this week who read my blog, so I heard about things they liked or found amusing. This bit got some laughs. "It was a bit breathtaking. A few minutes before I was a schmuck. Now I was an officer at Harvard." I write these things mostly to entertain myself, but if other people like them that's a super bonus for me.
I have an extensive collection of Trump imagery from the years he was in office, but I haven't used any of them since he left office. I'd rather never write about Trump again, but he's back in the news so I guess it has become unavoidable. So I'm using the orange splat image in place of any likeness of Trump himself. I see him as a human scourge. Punishment for us for lacking honor or integrity, humanity. There will of course be a final post about Trump, someday, but sadly we are not there yet.
On TV news they say “there are obvious problems with putting Trump in jail,” (for violating the conditions of his bail) but they never say what the obvious problems are, and I honestly don’t believe there are any. The problem is somehow related to his persistent Secret Service protection, and I guess they figure his detail doesn't want to go to jail with him. Okay so get some new agents, possibly recruited from existing prison guards. They can keep him safe, no doubt about that -- if anything it would be easier to do so in prison. Give him his own prison in a remote wilderness, perhaps in a nice blue state.
Braintrust query: Back in July 2022, I wrote about supporting Markdown in RSS feeds. This is something FeedLand does, as a feed reader and editor. I would love to see all content editors and feed readers support it. One product in particular I'd like to support Markdown is WordPress. The challenge is to figure out how to convert the HTML in a post to Markdown and then to get a source:markdown element in the corresponding item in the feed. Here's a checklist that explains how it works. If you have any interest in working on a plugin that does this please post something in this thread. When this work I'd love to host a WordPress site that runs the plugin as a proof-of-concept and to test against.
Today's song: "I'll play if you have the money, or if you're some kind of friend to me. But the one man band by the quick lunch stand, he was playing real good, for free."
Andrew Hickey is why we started blogging and podcasting. It used to be if you wanted to what he's doing, go back to the beginning, study the roots of rock music in episodes, to teach people who love music how things got going, how our culture changes. In the past he would have needed the backing of a big media company to get distribution, and for that he'd have had to accept their limits, and also have a very good idea up front of what he was trying to do. Without the gatekeepers, he could try out an idea, iterate, and after a few years become so influential, with so much by now obvious value, to get coverage from the New Yorker. Our culture is changing thanks to pioneers like Hickey and podcasting as an open platform. A local friend pointed me to the podcast a few months ago, in a conversation in her Woodstock driveway. I gave it a try and was immediately hooked. Now music means so much more to me. I'm a proud sponsor, like so many others. Reminds me of a story from the 80s -- once when I was doing a presentation at MacWorld Expo in a crowded auditorium, I asked for a show of hands of people who used my product, and the first hand that shot up, super high, was that of Steve Wozniak. I hadn't even seen him. He must have felt enormous pride that his creation, the Apple II, led to this moment. I feel that way about Hickey's product.
Sorry for the paucity of posts in the last few days. I've been moving around NYC in the heat, riding Citibikes and enjoying the change of pace. I will be back home by the end of the week and the normal posting may resume then, Murphy-willing. Meanwhile everything is fine.
I remember my first trip to Silicon Valley in 1979. Drove around for 30 years trying to find it. Never did. 😄
At first when I got to the hotel in Manhattan today I was so wiped out and kind of sad. I missed my mountain home. I took a nap and decided to make the best of it. I packed my biking helmet, put on biking shorts, went downstairs, got a Citibike, and rode it to Washington Square Park, where I took in the scene. I knew it would cheer me up. The people-watching there is fantastic. And now that weed is legal in NY, everyone was toking, not that this was vastly different from before, WSP has long been a hippie haven. I got another Citibike and rode uptown to one of my favorite pizza places, on Eighth Ave between 13th and 14th. Put the two slices of cheese pizza in my backpack, got another Citibike and rode back to the hotel, where I sat down with my laptop and am now updating my blog. I feel like I'm back in the saddle. I have a laptop that works as my mobile desktop. I could cover a convention now. Or write about some new technology (see below) or just take in a vision of Jersey City across the Hudson. I could definitely see living here again. What a transition in a few hours. Bike riding in Manhattan is something I didn't realize how much I missed.
Miriam now knows her name, and there's a picture of her on miriam.scripting.com. I look forward to the day when DALL-E does animated images, I expect someday to have an actual conversation with Ms Miriam.
We should retroactively free Americans who were enslaved prior to the 13th Amendment. They should be thought of today as full citizens of the United States to whom unthinkable harm was done.
A San Diego library had a Pride display. Republican parents checked out all the books and said they would not return them until the library agreed to remove the display. When this became public, the library received replacements, many times over. The cruelty of the anti-pride parents is beyond belief.
I asked DALL-E to draw Miriam for me.
- "I have a vast library of information nice people are interested in reading. So I have hired a librarian named Miriam. She has a standing desk, in front of a vast library of books, spreading out all around her. She has glasses and a very friendly but wise look to her. She wants to help. She has gray hair and bright eyes and a very big smile."
Here are the first images.
I asked Dolly to elaborate.
I'm having a great time with my new librarian assistant, Miriam.
Basically she's an AI chatbot that has ingested a lot of the OPML files from my archive.
I did the writing, the development was done by Automattic. I get to be a user here. Very relaxing.
So the other day I very casually asked Miriam how the weather was.
Being software, she dutifully answered the question, by referring me to various times I had discussed the weather on Scripting News.
- We don't yet have a way to archive the results of queries, which will, when it's ready allow me to share the actual query with you, so you can take it off in different directions if you're so inclined.
A surprising take-away: I really like how she summarized my posts.
Since Automattic also makes WordPress, which is used for blogging I thought this might be an interesting service they could offer. It could also be used to improve their feeds, esp if writers don't want to include full text. I know this is not a popular view, but I like sites that provide descriptions that are not full text, like the NYT. Much easier to skim.
Miriam's digest of my writing would make a good feed. Maybe this is something we should try. (BTW, I do provide full text in the feed for all my sites.)
Another thing to like about her summaries -- they are respectful of the reader. No click-bait anywhere in sight. She's a librarian after all. 😄
Last year around this time I went to a Mets game in Queens, and this year, I'm returning to NYC, in Manhattan, for the whole week, M-F. Going to see friends, get some work done, ride Citibikes up and down the Hudson River bike trail. First stop: Zabars, of course. 💥
I did some searches on Tina Weymouth, the bass player for the Talking Heads. In an interview with her husband, he said everyone's eyes were on her when they performed, I thought I was the only one. When I listen to a Talking Heads song with a strong beat (a lot of them) I think of her. That's what she represents, the driving power of the group is a woman. Try listening to this song and look at images of her.
Tina Weymouth, bass player for Talking Heads.
This is about a service that is sold to end users and developers. The users pay for the service, and developers invest in it. Once it's up and running it will be the foundation for the web as an open platform for users and developers.
My personal timeline
- Until recently I was using Twitter as my identity service. I knew there was some risk, but as long as one of the original founders was still involved, I felt it was pretty safe.
- Then with new ownership, I had to quickly pivot to create my own identity system, based on email. It took four months from beginning to end to transition Drummer and FeedLand. The rest of my products that used Twitter identity were left to die. I wrote about this effort in the roadmap doc for FeedLand.
- It still needs a lot of features, and identity is not my interest. Every developer needs the same service. And it's a mess for users that there's a new identity system for every app. No surprise there's almost no developer community for the web in 2023. The hurdles are pretty close to insurmountable.
- Users need storage. I have to provide them storage for their writing in Drummer, and in FeedLand for things like bookmarks, their personal feeds (ones they generate). Again, I have no interest in this. But I have to do it. And I am stuck paying for their files. They should be paying for them. And if my service should ever go off the air, they lose their data (I also provide ways for them to back up their data, but no surprise a lot of them don't do it).
Describe the service
- An identity service as a business. Operated by a strong company with longevity and a good track record for treating users and developers fairly.
- A standard OAuth interface for logging on. Can handle multiple identities per user, make it easy to switch from one to the other. Prior art, look at how Twitter or Bluesky do this.
- No per-app storage. Rather functional storage. A folder for PNG images, a folder for OPML outlines, or Markdown files, graphs, spreadsheets, or whatever. And make it easy to form projects with files of whatever type. So a user can have 15 programs that use OPML files and decide which get access to the OPML folder.
- Here's a key point -- such a system enforces the need for interop. Teaches users they have a right to demand it. When users know this, good things happen in markets. (Example: Podcasting has not gotten siloized because users know they have a right to choice in listening apps.)
Competition?
- Dropbox got incredibly close to doing this, but punted.
- Amazon should do this but for some reason hasn't. They have end-user identity working (their shopping system) and they lead everyone in storage as a service. Connecting the dots seems to be incredibly easy for them, but they haven't done it.
When I started at Harvard in 2003, one of the first things I did was get my official ID card. When I got it, there was my picture. Underneath that was my name, and underneath that my status: Officer. It was a bit breathtaking. A few minutes before I was a schmuck. Now I was an officer at Harvard.
I just had that kind of experience again. I went to my profile page on DALL-E, which I've been playing with lately, and there it said I was:
What an unusual perspective. Here's a place where saying someone is human is saying something. A familiar tweak I haven't felt in a while -- I am once again living in the future. 2023 has been like that for me, a lot of living in the past, and bringing it forward into the future, and then living in that future. I hope to do a lot more of that. Shoveling ideas from 20+ years ago that never got a chance into the future.
You know what we say about that..
Still diggin!
PS: I get this feeling sometimes when I start using a new keyboard, as I did this morning. It's a nice one, the same model as it replaces, which I just plain wore out. It will go to one of my other computers where it won't have so much work to do. Its profile would say: Dave's Keyboard, Keyboard.
Speaking as someone who has served on a jury all the way to a verdict, I have great respect for my fellow citizens in this context. When trusted, they do an amazing job. And whether most of American culture treats individuals like mindless robots, the justice system is built to trust the wisdom of the people, who once so challenged, don't let us down.
Worth repeating: What made the news worth watching Wednesday night was that finally the most important question was asked -- will our system defend itself? Finally, we've gotten around to insisting that this question be answered. And a jury of Americans will make this decision. How perfectly American.
Between August 1 and 9 every year Deadheads around the world pause to reflect on and in celebration of the life of Jerry Garcia.
I've finished the first pass of my review of the FeedLand docs. I converted them to Markdown, with the source hosted on GitHub, to make it easy for people to see the changes over time, and to make bug reports. I want to get more systematic in working on FeedLand. When you're reading a docs page, there's a command in the menu that opens the same page in GitHub. If you're a FeedLand user, you may want to read the new docs, it's always a good idea I find to review the docs of products I use. You often see things you didn't pick up on the first time around.
It's been a while since I looked at the everything timeline in FeedLand. In the interim, a bunch of people have subscribed to Bluesky feeds, and they are the most active, and also support rssCloud (!) so the list is skewed toward Bluesky posts from people who are on now.
What made the news worth watching tonight was that finally the most important question was asked -- will our system defend itself? Finally, we've gotten around to insisting that this question be answered. And a jury of Americans will make the decision. How perfectly American.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems the indictment against Trump is elegant and right to the point. As president he ruled like an autocrat, with contempt for the most American idea, that we pick our own leaders. So the jury will be asked to decide if he should go to jail for being an autocratic president. In other words, will the system validate itself. It's like asking a program to decide if it's functioning correctly. If the validator works, it should reject any argument that Trump makes. Sorry, you're going to jail because you tried to rob us of our right as citizens to replace you with Joe Biden. It's pure, brilliant, gets right to the heart of the matter. Is our system of voting real, do we choose the president, or does our system crumble when it's violated by its top official. Finally we're asking the right question, making the correct accusation. And if it's decided the way it should obviously be decided our country says no to this bullshit, no matter what a bunch of our fellow citizens want. We had a revolution to get rid of the king.
For some reason this story from 2015 is getting more hits today than the home page of the blog. It's a good one imho, more true today, eight years later. If you have an idea where the hits are coming from, referrers don't seem to work any more, please let me know.
The Washington Post headline, as with most other pubs, says that Trump is accused of trying to "overturn the election." More accurate: he tried to "overthrow the government."
I guess the Mets were reading my blog? In the lead-up to the trade deadline, they dumped the two three-time Cy Young winning pitchers, Scherzer and Verlander, they bought in the last two years, presumably in an effort to buy a championship, which totally didn't materialize. They traded them for young prospects, players they can develop. Maybe the Mets realized that they can't buy a kickass team, and that real fans aren't inspired by money, we want love, and philosophy. Maybe the Mets will once again be the Mets, in the spirit of Casey Stengel, Cleon Jones, Tom Seaver, Tug McGraw, Mookie Wilson and Ed Kranepool and far too many soulful players to mention in this small space.
From a Facebook post on this day in 2015.
- My blog posts always "just write themselves." If they don't I do something else.
- For me, a blog post is just the culmination of something I've been thinking about or a story I've told in person a dozen times.
- It has to pop to the top of my consciousness a dozen times or more before I'm ready to write about it.
- I blog therefore because I: 1. Think. 2. Tell stories.
The Washington Post's daily podcast was recommended to me as a replacement for the now-nauseating NYT daily. Well the first episode I tried was exactly as depraved, incompetent and disgusting as the NYT podcast. Do we disapprove of Jason Aldean's song because we want to deprive him of his right to free speech as the podcast says over and over. Please. We object to it because it's an expression by white people of their desire to lynch black people, like they used to do when America was Great, as the slogan goes. They want to make it Great Again. Specifically, so you could lynch blacks, again, when you don't like the way they look at you or your sister or when they have land you want to buy and don't want to pay a fair price for, or when a rich white guy made you feel like shit and you wanted to prove there were people you could terrorize. When a black life was worth nothing. And btw, they're not just coming for people of color and gays and trans people, or to turn women into slaves, they also like Hitler's final solution for Jews. It's time for one of these pubs to have the guts to say out loud what the actual problem is with the Trumpsters like Aldean. They want to go back to when they could kill anyone with impunity. And btw, it doesn't matter if he "really" believes it or if it's a business model. It makes absolutely no difference. Someone should teach these pitiful spineless so-called reporters how and why to be angry. BTW, I live in a small town so fuck you Jason Aldean.
I subscribe to the NYT, probably the only newspaper in the US that tries to get away with charging you more for sports.
I read less and less of their stuff, the only reason I keep it is that in some things they are authoritative for me at least, like TV and movie reviews. They'll probably start charging extra for that too.
Also I am nauseated by the Daily podcast, used to be a big fan. I don't know what changed, me or them.
Something important about voting. Don't think of your vote as expressing yourself. It's not like First Amendment speech. Your vote is you governing us. We're like a fourth branch of government. We don't get to say who runs everything, just our part of everything. One vote is a small thing, but they add up to a decision. So when you vote for a third-party candidate, or you don't like any of the candidates and don't vote at all, you are expressing yourself, but you are not governing. You don't like Hillary Clinton, so you stay home. You are not motivated. Then a few years later you're holed-up in your appartment, quarantined, because the government couldn't get its shit together to stop transmission of Covid. Or you're stuck with paying back your student loan because the court is 6-3 instead of 5-4. Because you and a lot of other people didn't "like" Hillary Clinton. See how whether you like her or not is beside the point? Or you or a family member has to carry a pregnancy to completion, have a baby you didn't want, or maybe die because your doctor couldn't figure out what the legislators meant, and didn't want to lose their medical license. So maybe next time, show up to govern. Put your feelings aside. Say what you feel on social media but use your mind when you vote.
I used to be a fan of the Daily podcast, but something snapped, and now I see them as ignorant, lazy and overly self-important. I was disgusted by the premise of this bit. I'm a writer too and I want the bots to index my work. It's how my ideas might get heard over their monopoly on the flow. Where did they get the idea that they speak for all writers?
BTW, for a few days I tried to do my blogging in Drummer as a web app, instead of as a standalone Mac app. Huge difference. I hated it. So I spent this last week reorganizing my file system so I could use my laptop to work and still use the app. In the last few days the difference is evident. I love writing again. I didn't like it if it had to fit in with all my other web stuff. Writing is different. It deserves its own app. For me it makes all the difference.
I drive a Tesla because it's a great car. No other reason. I have owned other great cars. I had an early 90s Miata. I've owned a bunch of BMWs of varying quality. My Model Y combines the feel and agility of the Miata with the intoxicating power of my 2007 BMW 535i. I've had the Tesla for 1.5 years and I still feel it's a privilege every time I drive it. That has never happened before, driving a great car usually becomes normal too fast. I pity people who are so one-dimensional that they think they understand everything about other people. I wouldn't want to be a relative of theirs, never would be a friend.
What Musk actually destroyed -- Twitter as the vertex for a certain kind of news and discourse. Until late last year, almost everything I posted online would flow through Twitter. Today, very little does. Not by choice really, I'm not like other people who think that my not posting to a site has political meaning. It's more of a sense of "does it belong there." It used to be that everything belonged there, that somehow it hadn't been said if it wasn't said on Twitter. That's a very recent and very fast change. It doesn't matter imho that Musk tries to change the name, what matters more is that he's given up on Twitter being the place of record. Kind of like what would happen if the US gave up on the dollar being the reserve currency. And of course people much like Musk are trying to make that happen. What if all this isn't a big mistake as people in the press seem to assume? What if more likely it's a plan being executed in front of our eyes. I think in general you should assume the latter, not that people you want to think are idiots actually are.
An interesting idea, what if other companies changed their names to something as unbelievable as Twitter becoming X. I have a few things to say about that. First, I don't think that Twitter has changed its name, at least not yet. Reorienting all those memory cells in all those human brains isn't a matter of changing the logo on a home page or putting a big X on the roof of a San Francisco building. 17 years of repeated drill has burned the Twitter brand into our minds. Second, I don't think HBO changed its name to Max, in fact I think the new owners of HBO (and many other names) are preserving the value of the HBO name by taking it off the the streaming site, which is a hodgepodge of random content, some good, some not. HBO is a small part of that. Instead, they withdrew HBO from the set of popular streaming services, which are due for years of battle for dominance. Why drag the HBO name into that mess. It also may make it easier for them to spin HBO off, or sell it to another media conglomerate. I thought it was weird at first, but now it makes sense.
At my first company, Living Videotext (aka LVT), we had a lot of slogans, some of which have become famous.
Others -- not so much.
Like this: "Buy em out, shut em down!"
It's what we'd say to insult a competitor.
It was pure bluster. But fun!?
The idea was we were so rich (we weren't) that we could buy our most offensive competitor just to get rid of them.
We'd talk that way about IBM, Lotus, etc.
Just before hopping on the red-eye to Bucharest.
- A shortening of a LVT tall tale about either buying IBM's PC division to shut them down, or, if we failed, getting on the overnight flight to Bucharest, the capital of Romania, at the time the most famously evil country in the world, or so we thought, and also where my father was born in 1929. Either we'd be taking the red-eye to Boca Raton (to take over the IBM division) or going into an awful exile in Bucharest.
You had to have been there. 😄
In 2015, the year the Mets won the National League title, I saw a friend who I knew was a Yankees fan wearing a Mets hat, and asked about it. He said we've always liked the Mets, it's Mets fans we don't like. I thought that wsa pretty good, esp for a Yankees fan. I doubted he ever had actually been a Yankees fan.
Braintrust query: I had an impulse to write a little web app that takes the address of a post on Bluesky and flows it through an html template and serves it, so I can easily publish stuff I wrote on Bluesky. I thought to use a toolkit John Spurlock pointed me to. Where to start. All the theory upfront, like the spec, I just want something that takes the id of a post and returns a JavaScript object with a bunch of info like the text, any image enclosed, when it was posted, stuff like that. There really are only 5 or 10 endpoints most apps need.
BTW, I find I don't write screeds on Twitter any longer.
If I want to piss in the wind I either do it elsewhere or don't do it at all.
I use Facebook more now, in addition to Bluesky, but I wonder why I use it because it's behind a very high silo-wall. I only realized today if say Substack were doing this, it would so irritate me that I wouldn't use it. I don't know why I give Bluesky a pass on this.
Mainly Masto is interesting again because Liza Sabeter aka blogdiva resurfaced, and chose Mastodon to be her stage. She's so smart and irreverent and also incredibly dedicated to her truth. She's enough of a reason for me to check in on Masto.
I also write on my blog regularly and seem to appreciate it more these days perhaps because it doesn't shut down on me, it seems to care whether I like it or not.
PS: That's kind of a joke because I have always written my own blogging software going back to 1994.
PPS: Of course I wrote this screed on Twitter, proving once again that it's even worse than it appears.
PPPS: Facebook's folly -- aka Threads -- is of no significance whatsoever to me at least.
I'm uncomfortable that the stuff I write on Bluesky is not visible without being logged-in to Bluesky.
If Substack were doing this, for example, it would be a reason to not to use it.
Not sure why I let this go for Bluesky.
Imho, what I write on the web, by default, should be publicly readable.
Another corner-turn seems to be working now. I'm sure no one cares about this but me, but this blog is also for me to record big changes in the way I work. So here goes..
The problem was that over the last four years I've created systems that depend on me sitting at my desk in the mountains, surrounded by nature, a good net connection and lots of disk space. Now I want to be mobile, camp out in various places, and still be able to keep the servers running, update and write new code and docs, and my blog, basically everything I do at my desktop. This has meant going back to Dropbox, but not sacrificing the very nice systems I've built that don't depend on Dropbox, because the Linux version is hard to install, and is unpredictable and flaky.
I have one server system that runs Dropbox well, so I'm moving all the software I ran locally to push stuff into the cloud onto that server, and instead of saving things to local folders, I save them to Dropbox-hosted folders. The server versions of the software watch the Dropbox folders and move things to where they belong, just as they did on the desktop. Voila, Uncle Davey can move around, and theoretically everything works as it did before. And so far it does.
I am able to edit all my docs in Electric Drummer, and my blog, and I'm much happier than I was when I was trying to do all that in web Drummer. E/D is a much better fit for the way I work. The Bookmarks menu in Drummer was key to making this a (so far) relatively easy transition. But figuring out what to do and doing it took pretty much the whole month of July. Still have a bit more to do.
There was a problem in Sally's Reader that only showed up on some machines, having to do with CORS permissions. I think I've worked around it, so it should work everywhere, one hopes.
I am now able to edit my blog on my desktop and my laptop in Electric Drummer. My mind is now on the path to relative sanity. One can hope. Four Drummers on two machines is at least two too many.
As we are fond of saying in show business, this is a test. Had this been an actual emergency, well we would have found some other way of notifying you, because this is hardly the way to tell a fine person such as yourself about an emergency. I hope all is well with you and yours and have a nice day! 😄
Those are Georgette Magritte's beautiful eyes staring at you from the header graphic on Scripting News.
My response to Manton's response to my open voicemail. I agree with all you said, had discovered it on my own, quickly -- that I could build on Mastodon's docs (and did), but the ActivityPub maze of specs is not an API, and not something a busy developer can approach. It all has to be simplified. We're still far away from the dream. As I said in my open voicemail -- it's time for developers to do a BDG for the social web, with docs and software, that embraces not just Mastodon and other ActivityPub services, but also Bluesky, and WordPress, which has a very mature API, offers stability, a foundation with clear value.
When I look through the tabs in my browser, the blue twitter icon has been replaced everywhere with an ugly white X on a black background. Confusing enough that I thought where did I put that tab with the tweet I'm quoting in it. In the meantime, someone ought to grab the trademark MuskCo is abandoning. It's hard to express how valuable it is, the words twitter and tweet are in the everyday language of everyone. It might be the most valuable thing Musk owns. Even the Tesla name is nowhere near as deeply entrenched. I hesitate to say it's a bad decision because I've been proven wrong so many times. But my brain doesn't like what he's done. That one person has so much power over me, I don't like to be reminded of that either.
How exactly does MuskCo get people to say X instead of Twitter? Has Google gotten any recognition for Alphabet. Has Facebook got anyone beyond a few reporters to say Meta? I call bullshit. The name is Twitter.
Simple Node web service to get information about a data file necessary for using in an RSS enclosure element.
An open voicemail to Manton Reece, developer of micro.blog, about creating a common API for social media apps.
Hey if slavery is so great, why doesn't Desantis enslave white folks? His kids should be slaves right? Why wouldn't they want to be slaves? They should be be lining up.
Now Elon Musk wants to kill one of the best known brands there is, in favor of X. In hindsight, how foolish was it for Facebook to change its name to Meta. Google is still Google now whatever they changed their name to (yeah I remember, but it takes some effort to pull it up, and as I'm doing it, I'm reminded how much I don't care) Alphabet. These geniuses should study positioning. Yes, their brands got tarnished, trampled, humiliated, charged and convicted. But the smart money is on responding to the problem, not running away from it, which 99 out of 100 people recognize this as. Classic example: Johnson & Johnson and Tylenol. My grandfather taught the basics of business with a motto, "pay for your sins." It means if you fuck up you give the customer their money back and apologize, because business is built on your rep. And you can't run away from your sins. Once you put a name in everyone's minds, it stays there until they die. Think of another brand that sinned -- Coca Cola with New Coke. They admitted they were wrong, and got rid of the mistake, not the brand, and they're still #1.
Working on a little project in Drummer that uploads a file to GitHub. I went to add the code to the server, and found it was already there. I traced my steps up the stack and found where the call is. Amazingly there's a complete Drummer verb set for GitHub, and even better, it's documented. Who wrote this? Me! I've been doing this too long. (Postscript: It wasn't exactly what I needed.)
Zachary Vance is looking for someone with a copy of MORE 2 or who knows how to read such files in MORE 3 or has some idea what to do with such a file? He's trying to extract the text from a book that was written with MORE 2 back in the day.
I've spent the last week trying to do my normal development work on a laptop. And at the end of the week, I'm kind of getting the hang of it. The secret is to use Dropbox again, not just to manage servers (as I have been, but am transitioning away from because Dropbox on Linux is unwieldy), but to keep several editing places in sync without too much chance for error. This morning I lost some changes I made to Sally's Reader, but it's a really simple app, and not very mission critical, yet, so it was easy to re-do the changes. But that got me thinking about how to get it to work more smoothly and reliably. I've had various systems over the years for this, and it'll be interesting to do it again. Luckily all the saving and opening of projects flows through two scripts, and I wrote them both, and they work very reliably. So I'll add some features, already am doing that. Feels good actually, didn't think it would.
If you want to deserve a Pulitzer, not saying you're going to win one, run stories shining the same light your publication shines on ChatGPT on your own pub's stories. You'll get a lot of people angry, they're not accustomed to scrutiny, but your readers will love you. And imho that's the award that's worth winning.
Journalists are concerned that replacing them with AI writers would make the news less trustworthy. On the planet I live on, when I read a news story about something I know about it's filled with bullshit and lies, ones that could easily be corrected, but they just copy what they found on Wikipedia. Thus I am pretty sure that stories about stuff I don't know about are filled with similar bullshit. On those same subjects, ChatGPT gets it just as wrong, probably because the bot is relying on the same Wikipedia article that had the original lies in it. If journalism really wants people to have to truth, try giving it to them instead of complaining about how your jobs are in jeopardy.
I needed a nice little warmup project, maybe I'm finally getting productive away from my desktop. It's a little thing I call Sally's Reader. Not a big deal. Here's the writeup. And here's the app.
Interesting thread by Evan Prodromou, one of the originators of ActivityPub. He says basically everyone should get behind it and stop inventing new formats and protocols for federated social web apps.
Without any judgment, it seems to me that ActivityPub should have started with RSS 2.0, building whatever new features they needed on top of it. But they didn't. I don't know why. We were going down that path, but then one day I saw that all the people I was collaborating with were meeting with Google and out of that came a completely incompatible protocol, which I believe became ActivityPub. Not sure, because they seemed more interested in reinventing what already worked than trying to build as much interop as possible.
I really mean "no judgment" -- because this seems to happen in tech all the time. It's the knee-jerk reaction. People wanting to make a name for themselves, don't have a new idea, so they pretend that what already exists doesn't. Let the journalists sort it out.
Anyway, I think it's inevitable that there will be more protocols. There already are. So what will be needed is the analog of the internet, which bridged the differences between incompatible networks. I think at this point that's the best we can hope for. And in that spirit I offer the MetaWeblog API which did that for blogs. Maybe for once we won't have to start over from scratch. I doubt it, but hope is still possible.
BTW, before you pat me on the head and thank me for "fighting the good fight" (which I hear as "loser") remember this one motto: You can fake caring but you can't fake showing up. Put some skin in the game. You've been sitting on the sidelines your whole life. If you think we can make the new network useful and fair and learn from our mistakes and experience, get in the middle. There's no point accumulating capital if you never spend it. Now is a good time to get involved.
BTW, before you pat me on the head and thank me for "fighting the good fight" (which I hear as "loser") remember this one motto: You can fake caring but you can't fake showing up. Put some skin in the game. You've been sitting on the sidelines your whole life. If you think we can make the new network useful and fair and learn from our mistakes and experience, get in the middle. There's no point accumulating capital if you never spend it. Now is a good time to get involved.
Interesting thread by Evan Prodromou, one of the originators of ActivityPub. He says basically everyone should get behind it and stop inventing new formats and protocols for federated social web apps. Without any judgment, it seems to me that ActivityPub should have started with RSS 2.0, building whatever new features they needed on top of it. But they didn't. I don't know why. We were going down that path, but then one day I saw that all the people I was collaborating with were meeting with Google and out of that came a completely incompatible protocol, which I believe became ActivityPub. Not sure, because they seemed more interested in reinventing what already worked than trying build as much interop as possible. I really mean "no judgement" -- because this seems to happen in tech all the time. It's the knee-jerk reaction. Young people wanting to make a name for themselves, don't have a new idea, so they pretend that what already exists doesn't. Let the journalists figure it out. Anyway, I think it's inevitable that there will be more protocols. There already are. So what will be needed is the analog of the internet, which bridged the differences between incompatible networks. I think at this point that's the best we can hope for. And in that spirit I offer the MetaWeblog API which did that for blogs. Maybe for once we won't have to start over from scratch. I doubt it, but hope is still possible.
But everyone already knows journalism is stupid, so why make a big deal about it today. Because the value of Bluesky has nothing to do with moderation. You can see how dull and lifeless and disneyfied a perfectly moderated social network is. Just look at that new bullshit thing Facebook just came out with. It's really Instagram, that's how they got all their users so fast by just getting them to jump through another hoop. You can stop reporting that it set records. They just came up with a new design and name for Instagram and said it was setting records, knowing that the reporters were bored of hating Zuckerberg, and now were ready to say he's cool again because he is trying to embarrass the Asshole Du Jour for journalists everywhere, Elon Musk. The thing you should say about Bluesky is that it's freaking nice that these people made a nice UI and backend for the social web and give it away for nothing. Yay Bluesky for believing in all of us. And come on if you think moderation is so great and you think it can be done for free, why don't you volunteer to do it. Yeah I didn't think so.
I was reading yet another article that says my contribution to podcasting was adding the enclosure element to RSS. These people are beyond stupid. Why don't they take a minute to think about how you develop a new medium. Is it done by adding a few sentences to a spec? I don't think so. You get an idea, in this case it came from Adam Curry (thanks) and start figuring out how it will work. Then you make the software for both publishing and listening, and then publish Grateful Dead music, thinking all the people will now figure it out but they don't. So you try something else and another thing, and you give up for a while. Then you meet an NPR guy and ask him if he wants to try this idea out. For some reason he says yes, when everyone else said no or didn't listen. So you get that going, and it's great and for sure you figure now everyone will get it, but they don't. So a year later in frustration you decide to put out your own show, and do it again and again, and leave the freaking mistakes in, and because of that people get the idea that Hey if that schmuck can do it, I bet I can too, and 20 or 30 people start doing it, and it's fun, and from there, it builds and after four years you have the start of a new medium. And no that idiot journalist did not give this new medium its name. Only a total idiot would think that, which is something I get to say out loud on Journalism is Stupid Day. 😄
I wish I had more interesting things to write about, but that's about it for this Tuesday.
I'm gradually figuring out how to manage my work on two systems. 1. My desktop monster machine and several smaller machines with huge disks. One system, the one my work is organized around, never moves and the other, 2. a 2015 MacBook running High Sierra, with a 500GB internal drive and a 2TB external, moves with me. By the time this construction project is done, I'll be able to work anywhere, and not have a huge reconciliation job to do when I get home. Or maybe I'll travel with a Mac Mini and a nice big monitor? Or maybe I'll (someday) get everything running on Linux so I don't have to deal with all the deprecation that Apple has inflicted on my ancient lab. So far I am still able to use Frontier. If it were to somehow stop running, every year that goes by, it gets less likely that I'd continue. You want to make me happy, port it to Linux and don't break my code. That would make me very happy. 😄
Man the weather in the Catskills is dismal. Raining all the time. The rivers and ponds are full. So what comes next? Well if it stops raining, summer, which is usually the best time of year here, and pretty much anywhere. It's why I live here. But this summer. Well the only thing that could be worse imho is if we had this much precipitation in winter.
Bluesky is in a jam because there's only one instance. They have an architecture for more instances, but now that we've gotten a look at what federation is like in practice with Mastodon and ActivityPub, I don't look forward to the same idea around Bluesky. Which is where the bind is, because that means that Bluesky, like Twitter and Facebook, would have to take on moderation and will get a lot of grief if they don't do it to people's liking. I wrote: "I don't think they or anyone else can afford to stand against abuse on the web, it's diseconomic. People don't pay for the service, and there's an infinite supply of abuse. You know how when they add a new lane to a freeway thinking it'll ease traffic but doesn't? imho it's the same kind of thing. I do think there's hope for small social nets with dozens or maybe hundreds of users, and let Facebook have the monster social nets, they more or less have found a way to make moderation pay. I've written about this idea a lot, filed under the phrase fractional horsepower."
FeedLand tweak, there's a new row in the Feed Info page. Should make the flow of navigation a bit smoother.
This bit of arcania has also crept into my RSS feed. As you may know FeedLand is now on HTTPS, it has to be because it's managing identity for itself, and if a feed item has an image only accessible over HTTP, the browser won't load it. I guess all feed readers have this problem, and I guess images from Scripting News have always been broken? But this isn't how I remember it. Hmmm. Maybe they're doing something special, like accessing the image through a proxy running outside of Chrome's control. Haha if so holy shit. Either it's a security problem or it isn't. I really don't think images need to be protected, but what do I know. In any case, from this point on, my images will be HTTPS too.
Over the last couple of days I moved this.how to an HTTPS server. It was fairly painless, but it did break some pages. If you have an img element in the HTML or use the image attribute in OPML, and the url of the image is on HTTP, the browser will refuse to load it, and at least on Chrome it'll look like it's still loading for a long time, possibly forever. For most of these, I'll never get around to fixing them, it just is what it is. So HTTPS despite the hype, no matter whether you convert or not, still breaks the web, and Google must know all about this and doesn't care. If a platform vendor really cared about the web as a platform, they'd look at the risk in reading an img over http and say wtf, let it go. They're like the Soup Nazi, they have you by the balls, you know it and they know it.
It seems to me that AIs are already more intelligent than humans. When I ask ChatGPT a question, it answers it, doesn't try to turn it around, play whatabout, or take it personally. It most definitely not a narcissist. I don't think there's very much actual listening going on between humans, but the AIs are really good at it. Right now they're useful tools. Could they take over the world? If so, could they possibly do it worse than we do? Maybe AI rule is exactly what we need. Yes I have seen The Matrix. Love it. Best movie.
A simple Node app periodically checks if a feed still validates with the W3C service. You can modify it to check feeds you care about. I asked for an API, but haven't heard back. Hopefully this can start a discussion about maintaining interop.
When you're viewing a feed list, like this, when a feed updates, instead of inserting it at the top and forcing everything down, it displays a button. Click the button to see the new stuff.
View updated feeds button.
We already had a similar feature on timeline pages.
I wish we had a group of tech industry veterans who could explain how to interpret moves like the ones the company that used to be known as Facebook is making.
They're running a standard Embrace and Extend strategy of a giant company entering a market that's "dominated" by a small competitor that's hoping for the best. I put dominated in quotes because it's obvious that the market defined by the startup is going to be huge. But it's better if the new area is dominated by a mega corp, that is for the established billionaires. For the rest of us, it sucks.
It all depends on what users do.
Amazingly with podcasting, we were able to confuse the bigco's enough for long enough that the users learned they were entitled to choice and they suspected any effort to lock them in. That, and some grace from Steve Jobs to not try to dominate podcasting when Apple had the chance to.
I'm not able this time to get the message out. I'm here, I am typing into my blog, but not enough people are hearing it.
Maybe it's time from some other names of the open web generation to step up and help. Facebook is going to run over the nascent federated social web the same way Google ran over RSS. That cost us a decade or more of open growth.
But we can put a roadblock in Facebook's way.
Remember how the founders of AI spoke up.
Well the founders of the open web could have a word too. If you're so inclined, now is the time.
PS: If you know a founder of the open web, please send them a link to this post. It's the web-like thing to do. 😄
When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.
That's why I say if they really want to prove their love for the open web, if they aren't just trying to lull us to sleep while they steal yet another market from the open web, they should do something that helps the web more than it helps them.
I know how The Mind of Facebook works. There are people at the company who believe in the open web (or at least there were at one time) and some of them have the ability to launch projects to be part of the open web, but by the time the project has to get approval from one of the top execs, it dies -- because Zuck et al have hearts of stone, and think they can have anything that isn't nailed down, and think anyone who believes in being fair to users and competitors is a chump -- a Mother Teresa type, someone to laugh at not work with.
There are very few people in the world as greedy and mean as Zuckerberg. Never underestimate how cold his heart is. And never believe he will do anything that benefits anyone but him.
When I was a grad student, in the middle of the last century, there were two kinds of terminals in the computer lab, ones that could only display uppercase characters, and the coveted Hazeltine terminals that could do also do lowercase. A real luxury item. I feel the same way as we approach the middle of the next century when I get to use boldface text or a bit of italic in a tweet. I laughed out loud when some text I pasted from my blog went through with its boldness intact. We have a long way to go to get back where we were.
I've seen people use the term "social web" where previously they'd say "social media." I like this. Going in the right direction. Let's try to bring everything back to the web. I bet most people who use the web these days only have a vague idea of what it is.
I was just filling out a form that asked for my social media addresses and noticed how I don't remember how to specify the addresses for Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn. I had no trouble with Twitter and Threads, though I have a lot of trouble remembering the name of Threads. I think Bluesky is headed in the right direction, by letting people specify a domain name. A service that made this a bit easier for non-technical users could help here.
Twitter is so fucked. Every time I visit Twitter it's the same messages at the top of my timeline, from July 5. Is this how Twitter ends? Locked on July 5, 2023 forever. It was a good day but it wasn't that good.
FeedLand now does a better job with posts without titles.
Here's a screen shot of two posts in a timeline, neither of which have titles, followed by one that does have a title, so you can see the difference.
Two posts without titles.
The new thing is the bold text at the beginning of each untitled post, so you can more easily see the structure as you scroll through it.
Another new feature
There's also a max height to a post but if you click on the body it expands to reveal the full text. Click again and it goes back to compact size. It took a bunch of iteration to get to this, it's better than what Facebook and Twitter do, where you have to carefully position the mouse to see the rest, and after expanding, the place where you have to clock to collapse it moves. In this scheme, stay right where you are and click again to collapse.
First post has been expanded, second not.
BTW, when they say it was our slogan at Living Videotext, we actually had many slogans. This is just the one Sam Ruby liked. Sam didn't like me, and made no secret of it. 😄
I'm going through my Alice Cooper phase. Again. When I was a teen I loved the band. I always felt kind of ashamed of it. I used to go to their concerts to see what he'd do this time. I must have seen him guillotined a dozen times. He knew what fascinated teenage boys. Anyway the song rolling around in my head today is the classic Dead Babies. It's a really awful song, I guess that's why I like it so much. 💥
A not entirely new concept: deshitification. The antidote to enshitification. Congrats to Cory Doctorow for coining a term that has so much lasting value. Everything turns to shit. Everything is enshitified. Is it time yet to deshitify everything? Back in the day at Living Videotext we used to say "We make shitty software, with bugs." It was true, and of course so does everyone else. We also said we will strive to make it less shitty. We didn't put that on t-shirts, but some grouches tagged the Wikipedia page for our products with that caveat. Warning Winer makes shitty software. Quick get them some smelling salts. Roll out the fainting couch. Someone found a bug. Okay so maybe a good name for a tech company is Deshitifiers. Why not.
If I were designing a social net, I would make replies only visible by default to the person who posted the message being replying to. There would be an option where the originator could make the reply visible to everyone, if they thought it added something and wasn't just spam, which, these days, so many replies are. The idea of social networks being conversational hasn't been true for a long time. Anyway these days the only tool you have is to block the spammer, which I generally do, esp if the person isn't following me, which imho is a strong indication they were just searching for posts to tag with their spam.
The server running Drummer and FeedLand wasn't doing well, so I decided to double the memory, and add a second CPU, basically doubling the monthly cost, which still is so low it amazes me. Anyway, it's remarkable how much better the server is doing, so I did the same for the server running my newest apps, with the same result. I now monitor the CPU and disk usage graphs for both servers, and figured out that the servers were running out of memory and thrashing by swapping stuff to and from disk. You can see it in the 14-day graphs. The things that look like spikes are actually minutes worth of flatlining where basically nothing is coming in or out until the situation resolves. Now apparently that never comes close to happening.
I live in the mountains west of the Hudson River, where we're getting hammered with rain this summer. We needed it, we were in a drought. I have a feeling that's over now. This last storm seems have been the tipping point for the ability of the mountains to absorb the water, now there's huge runoff, the creeks are full, there are roads that will wash out if there's much more rain. It's very easy to get depressed in this weather, but writing about it helps.
On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon and I did the first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence.
All these years later, we who love podcasting owe Chris and Mary our thanks for their pioneering efforts and sticking with it for twenty freaking years.
Of course once Bluesky does Textcasting, we won't need a thread-writing tool. Displaying longer-length posts is something that imho can and should be handled in the client software. 😄
You're welcome to try Thread Writer for Bluesky -- a new software snack I wrote. A few friends have been through the setup process and it appears to work. As far as I know it's the first non-manual way to write threads in Bluesky. I call these kinds of things software snacks so they are not confused with bigger apps like FeedLand or Drummer. Go here if you have trouble or just want to report success (very welcome) with a link to the thread you posted.
Fred Wilson is excited about Threads, for the right reason, but I don't think it's going to play out the way he thinks. I replied on Threads, hunting and pecking on my tiny iPhone keyboard (I have huge hands btw). I'll expand on it here...
He repeats the folklore that Twitter "killed off" its app ecosystem in 2010. Certainly not at a technical level, the problem with Twitter's developer situation was that they didn't do anything to help products get the attention of users, esp important when we were filling gaps in the user experience that users desperately wanted filled. If a corporate platform wants developers they have to do this. You could even argue that on an open source platform someone has to do it. Users aren't on their own that adventurous., They like to use what everyone else is using, which makes the bootstrap hard. But the platform vendor can provide the magic that gets it going.
However, like Fred, I am excited. Because somewhere in this chaos (a good thing) there is at least the possibility of a developer ecosystem. That hasn't been true for a long time. I don't think that will happen in ActivityPub, for technical reasons. It needs a small amount of centralization to make the hurdle for developers surmountable.
To think that's it's somehow dominant is ludicrous. As a developer, I want a platform that has curious creative people ready to try out new ideas. That's a niche Twitter has now given up, probably forever, and I doubt if Facebook wants developers for Threads.
I'll believe that Facebook's new social network is growing when I get the feeling "it's happening over there." So far that hasn't happened once.
There’s hope for a bootstrap pairing of the open web and social nets to create a pretty good writing platform that doesn’t lock users into one platform or another.
Actually you can embed posts in HTML pages (example), but that's about it. ~~You can't even link to individual posts or threads. Or if you can, I haven't seen any.~~ You can also link to individual posts, example.
The discussion about Threads is happening on Twitter. In a sense nothing has happened until links to Threads posts show up here. It's an almost zero-interop system at this point.
Podcast: Thoughts re the Threads rollout. And respect for Elon Musk in a limited way, reminds me of Philippe Kahn. 20 minutes.
Chip Bayers, my editor in the good old days at Wired, says they shipped too soon. I've said the same.
One thing they reallllly need is a browser interface, so it can exist on the same plane as the other social nets. I can't paste links back and forth between their network and others. even at that primitive level of interop, it doesn't exist.
On Twitter I'm able to write fluidly esp now that the character limit is just a speed bump. I've never felt in any way like writing on a phone was writing.
The big picture is no one gets that these tools are writing environments. so they design them to have features writers can use.
Earlier, I started to write about how boring, sad, depressing and unnecessary Threads is. How pathetic Zuck is. How I visualize the process that led to this product as being a combination of the TV series Succession and Silicon Valley. Facebook is desperately trying to become anything but Facebook. I like Facebook as a community. I have friends there who I would never talk with if it weren't for Facebook. I hope they keep running it. But I wish the company behind it would stop demanding attention because they are so completely unattractive. And btw, I can't get into writing on an iPhone. I write at a desk, or maybe occasionally a tablet. Everything about this product pushes me away. Maybe that'll change, maybe the people who are trying to get ahead on Threads will think up some new use for social networks that will justify using it. I seriously doubt that'll happen because creativity doesn't live there so you can't call it up.
Some of my friends think that Threads is enough, and once they fill in some missing features it will suck the life out of Twitter.
They might be right. Hard to argue.
All I want is a playground with an open API and enough creative users to try out new ideas from developers.
I want to go back to the pace of innovation we had going in the 90s and 00s. The big platforms snuffed all that out, corralled it and kept it in some too-restrictive bounds. Did what BillG failed to, locked us in the trunk and cut off the air supply.
That some of these people were the most fervent advocates for open platforms says that maybe those beliefs ran pretty thin, and the opportunity to cash it out for billions made it worthwhile.
Maybe we'll just be hobbyists. I'm okay with that. Or maybe people are will to pay good money to sustain creative development.
I don't expect that to be possible on Facebook's new network.
I've heard that usernames on Threads will be the same as Instagram. I'm davew if that turns out to be true.
Maybe the inflation was caused by disruptions in the supply system due to Covid. Maybe all we had to do was wait for the system to come back online, modulo the greed of businesses to increase profits with the air cover of "oh it's the inflation you know."
I've been developing a new thread-authoring and publishing tool for Bluesky. Looking for people who are good at reporting bugs to try it, report on the experience. Looking for deal-stoppers, important things that don't work. If you have time today to try it, please send email. Thanks!
Does Facebook with their new "threads" social network plan to fill the API Gap left by Twitter kicking the devs under the bus? Will Facebook love devs more?
I wonder what dogs think fireworks are.
I tell you what I think -- I think they're boring and stupid, and when the climate crisis is in full swing we'll look back and wonder how we came up with the idea of adding more smoke to the air as entertainment.
I went to the fireworks in NY harbor in 1976, the 200th birthday of America. It was supposed to be this amazing thing. I thought meh. What. Why? Bullshit!
The answer is of course before tv, radio, videogames, social networks, air travel, space travel, fireworks were exciting technology displays.
Today? No.
This graph illustrates perfectly why it was time to upgrade the server FeedLand and Drummer run on.
I was wondering if the W3C feed validator has an API. I'd like to submit my feed to it periodically to keep track of changes.
Every Fourth of July the song of the day is the US Blues, the hippie anthem of love for the USA. Wave that flag, wave it high and wide!
We now know that Facebook's new social network, Threads, will be available to the public on Thursday. The day after tomorrow.
There's lots of discourse on the net about What's To Be Done about this big event. Based on decades of experience with such launches, here's what I say.
- No matter what we do right now it'll probably have no effect on the Facebook rollout.
- It's better to listen, study and learn, size up the product. We don't know what it is. Wait till we find out.
- Call them Facebook, not Meta. They're trying to run away from their legacy, but it's very relevant. People should know it's coming from Facebook not "Meta." When I see Meta my mind reads "Mets" -- I'm a Mets fan since 1962.
- After the dust has settled, what if anything should be done may be more apparent.
- Remember, Bigco's launch with big thunder but the products often flop. Don't get sucked into the hype.
- Whatever you say or do now, viewed from a few weeks from now, will seem silly and over-reactive. Keep on truckin.
- Let's study the product, discover what can be done with its APIs (assuming it has some) and keep an open mind. It's possible that some good can come from this.
- Don't depend on journalists to study it. They tend to report on the press releases, and amp up the fear.
- First and foremost -- don't panic. 😄
The server that's running Drummer and FeedLand is down while it's being upgraded. Sorry for the downtime. It should be more responsive after the upgrade. As they say -- still diggin! 😄
I wonder if now what I've been trying to do with RSS, blogging and podcasting, get underneath the bigco's and live on a plane that doesn't require any one of them, makes a bit more sense now. I'm at least a generation older than most of the other techies who cohabit this space. What you're seeing now for the second or third time, I've seen five or six times. The more times you see it the more predictable it gets, and the more confidence you have in your understanding. That's why, when Google tries to take control of the web I won't do it. All my freedom as a developer comes from the integrity of the web. Once its gone you can't get it back. I feel the pull. I could convert completely to HTTPS, it would make my life a bit easier to do so. But I won't as long as Google is the one forcing it. If they back off and commit to not blocking the non-HTTPS web, then maybe I have more flexibility.
If you're a Little Outliner user, and you can still access your files, you should download them asap. Use the command in the Tools menu. Then you should switch to Drummer. It's a significantly better version of LO2 and does not depend on Twitter for identity. I think the reason it still works for some people is that we cache the login information on the server, and as long as the server doesn't restart, you can continue to use it. But the server will eventually restart, and that'll be the end of LO2. It's had a good run and Drummer has been out there for a couple of years now.
I like Bluesky/Masto because -- they promise independence from bigco silos run by megalomaniac billionaires hell-bent on conquering everything. I just want to play with my friends. I'm into working together not world domination. Been there, done that, found it boring and lonely.
To say there will be no programmers in 5 years is as ludicrous as saying there will be no email users in 5 years, because an AI chatbot can write email.
New FeedLand gesture. It was a complicated gesture to see all the text of a too-long-to-fit item in FeedLand. Then it hit me, just click on the freaking text to make it bigger and then click again to make it small again. Much easier to do, and what else would a click mean?? Here's a quick video demo. ;-)
I'm starting to think about writing a validator for the W3C's feed validator. I'd submit my feed to it via a web service (not sure if they have an API), and if that feed doesn't validate with the W3C validator, and we believe it is valid per the RSS 2.0 spec, we would open an issue on their repo. Maybe if they want to be really cooperative, they could run the test feeds against their validator whenever they make an update as part of the validation process, and never release a version where those feeds didn't validate. This would allay my concern about them breaking RSS because they don't respect or understand the RSS 2.0 roadmap. I'd start with the Scripting News RSS feed, which does validate at this time. BTW, their warnings are bogus imho. They should recognize the Source namespace not warn me about it. A copyright statement can and should be able to have a © character. Why not? The spec doesn't prohibit it, and it's part of the language we use for copyright. And this is not an Atom feed so that warning about Atom was a bad move. The authors of the original validator were promoting Atom at the expense of RSS. Why not put that to bed, it's not exactly an ethical thing to do imho.
There was no place to post comments or questions about the Source namespace. So I created a place and linked to it from the spec.
Over on Masto and Blueski you hear a lot of people rooting for Twitter's demise. I am not one of them.Twitter is deeply installed in our society. It would take a long time to rebuild something like Twitter, and I don't think it's even possible. I don't like Musk's politics, an understatement, but I see that problem as possible to overcome.
Our challenge is to make sure the really interesting stuff happens on the open web, outside the silos. If that happens we can go on. Otherwise we go right back to where we were when Twitter and Facebook dominated. Not a good place. 17 years of stagnation.
1995: "Like the big tree that fell last March, the death of a huge human being like Jerry Garcia frees up a huge amount of space. Once there was a tree, now there are seedlings. After the sadness, there will be huge creativity."
As with most online services, there's a virtually impenetrable wall between users and the people who run Bluesky. Has to be that way. There are hundreds of thousands of us, maybe tens of them. They're having trouble keeping the system running. As I dig in more on Bluesky, not because I'm getting married to the platform, btw -- more friends reach out and ask for help getting an invite code. It isn't about Bluesky though, it's just that we got the feeds up there first, so there's a way I can build. Ultimately my goal is to build a layer on top of all the social nets I can, so it doesn't matter which service you use, the stuff I create can make it to you and will. I used to write about "when a big tree falls it creates room for new growth." I wrote that about Jerry Garcia. And it's equally true about Twitter. As they vacate, and get smaller and more focused, I believe understandably, the places they vacate once again become interesting places to develop. I can't miss an opportunities like these.
I found and documented a problem with inline images from Drummer as displayed in FeedLand. I believe the problem has been there since we switched to email-based identity a few months back. As a result today's post with an inline image works.
There is an RSS feed for the Bluesky art channel. I'm seeing if I can put together a nice way to view the art w/o being a Bluesky member.
Re the Harvard blogs, I contacted the Harvard people and the Automattic people are in the loop and we're going to work together to get the old Harvard blogs hosted on Automattic servers. I feel pretty good about how this is going. 😄
Sometimes people throw bombs because they like to blow things up, not because things need to be blown up.
As a software developer and marketer, I really don't care what goes over the wire, as long as I know what to do and it doesn't break. The main arguments in RSS-land were whether or not to rip up the pavement and start over. I'm pretty much always against that. :-)
Here's a new feed for Bluesky I put together in a couple of days. It's based on feeds on Twitter that were shut down in the great twitter app blackout that periodically spooled great art in the middle of all the hubub and todo of Twitter. I loved it. And missed it. So I brought it back. 💥
Another great ChatGPT use. I have a mental block with regular expressions. I know when to use them, but I just can't construct them. I used to be able to do it, a long time ago. Anyway, now I describe the problem to ChatGPT and it gives me back the expression. I don't even have to formulate the question very carefully, it figures it out. Now I can relax about it.
An outliner is a combination of a text editor and draw program. You have gestures to move objects that's similar to what you can do with objects in a draw program, but you also have the use of the keyboard to write and edit text. I just realized that as I was editing a complicated JSON structure, thinking the design of this is overblow, but I'm glad I am using an outliner to manipulate it, I'd be going crazy selecting stuff, cutting and pasting. All that is at a lower level, factored out of the user experience of the outliner.
I'm working my way through past seasons of Succession. I'm in the middle of the last episode of Season 1. I know what's coming, of course, so I can just revel in the outstanding writing, acting, photography, scenery, the raw wonderful subtle emotions of the characters.
Today I get to work on eye candy, a little app that sends a beautiful work of art to Bluesky every so often, taken from the thousands of art images that used to be posted regularly on Twitter as an act of love by a group of volunteers. Apparently Musk's Twitter shut them down, what a stupid thing to do. Musk should be focusing on streams of content that have value in and of themselves. Art is like that. It's like putting curtains on your windows. Strictly speaking you don't need them. But they make the place look better. I think Bluesky is the place for that right now.
A piece I wrote about identi.ca, the precursor to ActivityPub, in 2008. I found it interesting to read with foresight what is coming true today, 15 years later. It's a myth that everything happens fast in tech. We waste so much time reinventing and breaking stuff, it's amazing anything ever gets done here. 💥
I was working on some stuff in Old School, the static site generator I use to build Scripting News, and in the process broke the RSS feed. Thanks to Richard Eriksson for the report. It should be fixed now. Still diggin!
If you write an editorial saying AI could drive the human species to extinction, please explain: 1. How this would happen. 2. Why this is worse than the human species driving itself to extinction. Lost jobs is not a good answer to #1, imho.
AppleTV is running the whole of the first episode of Silo as a tweet. This is new, never seen this done before. I imagine that Apple is paying Twitter to do this, or maybe not. Maybe Twitter wants to establish itself as a medium for watching, not just participating, and Apple is helping. I think we'll see more and more of that. A diminution of individuals communicating and more corporations and political parties. People who think Musk is going to regret buying Twitter are imho probably wrong. They were just barely treading water, sitting on one of the most amazing communication systems ever built. A restructuring is for sure going to cause a dip, but once straightened out, it could turn into a strong business. It's not smart to bet against a company that's as installed as Twitter is.
When you hear journalists talk about use of ChatGPT in education they talk about ways students can use it to cheat. They never mention the support functions it can play, like a perfectly tireless and free-of-charge tutor. That's how I often use it. If I'm not sure I've remembered something correctly, I just ask ChatGPT to remind me. It's a kind of drill that was never available before unless you were a rich kid with parents who spoil them.
After a good night's sleep and some reflection, I bet the reason the Harvard blogs project is shutting down is the same issue that's haunting all online service providers in 2023, moderation. Not exactly a business for a research center at Harvard to be involved in. Just a guess.
Meanwhile the archive of scripting.com remains in place, and archived in OPML on a GitHub repo. Should last a few more years.
Doc's Harvard blog, a mainstay of the post-blog-boom blogosphere, is about to go away. I started the service that hosted Doc's blog. You know how they say in startups, will the last person please turn the lights out? Well we both lived to see the end of the dream, Doc and I. Our blogging service was the first blog service at an American university, possibly in the world. Of course the ideas seem obvious in hindsight, but they weren't obvious then. I went to Harvard hoping to bring intellectuals to blogging and vice versa. It worked. Anyway, Doc wrote a final post today, have a read, it's a typically beautiful Doc memoire. And here's the archive.org listing for the original location of his blog, part of the original group of Harvard blogs, started in 2003.
Doc is about to lose his Harvard blog, and he's stuck in California with too much to do and is afraid it will slip through is fingers if he has to prioritize his time so as not to be able to save it. I wrote him this email.
- A perfect storm.
- I had something smaller happen when I was moving out of my house in Berkeley in 2010.
- My server was down, it was a serious system thing. But I had to turn over the house to the new owners and get in my car and start the trip back to NYC.
- I got a call from someone deep in Amazon, their CTO who reads my blog had asked him to call to see if he could help, but I had no time. I had to leave. 1.35 million reasons.
- After that, no one at Amazon will talk to me. They must have given me a zero in their rating system. I was offered Cadillac support and turned it down.
- How dare me.
- We suck Doc. We don't matter. I'm receiving confirmation of that every day, except from friends, who remind me that I do.
- So I'm your friend -- even if your blog doesn't come with you, you're still my friend.
I am celebrating the imminent arrival of Facebook's thing, whatever it is, by buying a domain. It's what I do. Some people collect shoes. Other people classic cars or vinyl records.
Manton Reece writes that we should welcome Facebook's new cage fighting platform, not block it. I'm neutral. I don't know what it is. I seriously doubt it'll be exciting. And I think they should stop calling themselves Meta, that's stupid and dishonest. They're Facebook. They need to own that, because it's their actual name.
Every company should train an AI chatbot with all current info about everything so people can get answers. Most company info if documented at all is scattered, depends on Google for search, and it increasingly sucks. I spent years not finding a crucial piece of technical info about a company whose products I depend on, till I asked the question on my blog for the Nth time, and most people don’t have the ability to do that. And that's info the company wants people to have, and it ’s well documented on their site. We were supposed to be creating an information rich world, but so far it hasn’t worked. Someone should step up and be the example, reap the competitive benefits.
The archive.org puzzle appears to have been solved. There are at least two URLs you can use to access the RSS 2.0 spec on the Harvard website. When I looked up the one with the apparent problem, it was one they only started tracking in 2016? I don't know. Kye Fox on Bluesky found an archive of the spec that is available on archive.org starting on July 22, 2003. Here's the archive for this blog for July 2003 (the actual page, not on archive.org). This is the URL we were using at that time. It hadn't been moved to cyber.law.harvard.edu yet. So we have found a snapshot of the spec from 2003. And it was my mistake, not archive.org's. The statement that it had been at the same address for all 20+ years was not true. I am sorry for my mistake, and thanks to archive.org for doing such a good job of maintaining the record of this document and all the rest that they do. 😄
I'm seeing this meme all over the place today. The fighting in Russia is thought to be the first big news event in the time of Twitter that Twitter (collectively) did not deliver the story. No one knows if it's a combination of bad algorithm or lack of participation by news sources.
The net-net of the discussion this week with the W3C and their hosting or pointing to a modified RSS 2.0 spec is that at this time, before trusting any advice it gives based on RSS, you must be sure that it's covered by the original spec.
In the discussion we had with the W3C, the sysop of their website said clearly and I believe innocently that the modified "version" of the spec is what they're using to guide the validator.
But there are no versions of RSS 2.0. It's frozen. It says it clearly in the roadmap, which explains why it's frozen, developers need stability.
All that happened over twenty years ago. And it worked. RSS is one of the most broadly supported formats on the web. It's the basis for podcasting. It's widely supported by news orgs and blogging software. All kinds of systems have been built around RSS. Twenty years of development.
In the W3C's defense, I gather they inherited the validator, and the people who wrote it originally were trying to steer people away from RSS to another format. They wanted their ideas in all our feeds, and used the validator to get their way. In the end their steering people to the other format didn't do any real damage that I could see, just a bit of confusion.
But I have to draw the line at the W3C. We respect them and it matters that they respect RSS, the roadmap first and foremost. I'm not trying to get them to fix the validator, just know that the spec they're citing is not playing by the rules. We need the W3C to support RSS, not undermine it.
To be clear, it's perfectly OK for any validator to offer advice based on an extension in the form of a namespace, or a profile, or based on a format not named 'RSS' (which can of course be anything you want) but you can't claim to be validating against RSS if you're citing a modified version of the spec. There are no modifications allowed, that's part of the spec. It's a rule, and a validator that breaks that rule is not validating RSS.
I believe I've explained this from every possible angle. 😄
Net-net, until it's fixed -- be careful with the W3C's advice re RSS.
I wish help systems for online services could answer questions about my account, not give me instructions on how to find the answers. Why can't they do it for me? I've been spoiled by ChatGPT which actually parses the words I type, and gives me the answers I asked for. For example, I have a Google Workspace account, set up by someone else. I want to add some email addresses to my account. I can't find out how much I'm already paying for the email addresses that are allocated every month. I do know the total amount, $26/month. It's way too much money for what it's doing, btw. Basically I'd like to give it instructions in my language. "I'm thinking of adding 5 new email addresses, how much will that add to my monthly bill?" Then if I decide to go ahead, I could just tell it, in my own language. Pretty simple, right? It's what I would say to a human being, and the human would get it. And so would my friend ChatGPT.
Journalists are trying to discredit AI the same way they discredited Facebook. The same way they tried to kill the Mac in the early-mid 90s. They don't report on anything other than their own dreams.
RSS is a starting point. What you add to it is what makes it interesting. We've used RSS to convey news articles, and we love that, and will always support it, but there are breakthroughs to come.
What people love about Bluesky has nothing to do with the software, it's the people. What a lovely group of people. For whatever reason the people who are there now are creative, interested, and stimulated because they sense the presence of similar people. Kind of like Clubhouse was a few summers ago. This tells me something I've suspected, that small-size social networks have a place. They shouldn't just be an accidental thing that disappears because growth attracts less interesting, anti-creative people.
I've been taking it relatively easy on the blogging the last few days. Must be thinking. I'll be back when I'm back in the writing groove.
Marc Davis: "The more I use ChatGPT, the more I feel it calls into question our models of human language production. How much of how humans use language is based on pattern matching and prediction, and does not rely on what we would consider to be awareness or understanding?"
I'm was looking for new shows to binge the other day when I saw a tweet from an old Silicon Valley friend Mike Arrington, who now is a crypto VC in Miami, recommending an AppleTV show, Swagger. That was good enough for me to give it a try, that and it got excellent ratings via Metacritic. I'm now most of the way through the first season, it's really good, kind of a cross between Friday Night Lights and The Wire. Takes place in Baltimore, the story centers on a 14-year-old star-to-be and his life in the same city as The Wire, during the early days of Covid, based on the life story of NBA star Kevin Durant. An urban version of Friday Night Lights, which I had been working my way through, loving the first two seasons but the show got pretty bad by the third imho. Season 1 of Swagger is very good. I'm on episode 7. Season 2 starts tomorrow.
To this day there are people who want to own RSS. That must never be allowed to happen.
It worked. RSS 2.0 has stood the test of time. Lots of innovation has taken place in the namespaces, and the core has stayed intact. There were a lot of people who wanted to control and own RSS when I wrote that. If it hadn't been frozen they'd still be fighting over the basics. We've made a lot with RSS and we're going to make a lot more. It'll be important in the evolution of social media, podcasting, blogging and more. This is what the roadmap says. It worked and continues to work.
This is the roadmap from the RSS 2.0 spec written in 2002. "RSS is by no means a perfect format, but it is very popular and widely supported. Having a settled spec is something RSS has needed for a long time. The purpose of this work is to help it become a unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats. Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1. We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format. Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names."
Playing around with DALL-E. "Mark Twain on a porch overlooking the Mississipi River with a steamboat going down the river. Must look like it was drawn as an illustration for a book 100 years ago. The picture should be wider and relatively short.”
Ask ChatGPT: "Suppose I had written a story and published it on the web. It is clearly stated that I am the author, and it is published using the Creative Commons attribution share-alike license. Suppose someone else publishes the story on their own website, removed my name and replaced it with theirs. Would the license allow them to do that?"
A bug report was filed by AJ-Ianozi re the W3C hosting of my RSS 2.0 spec, with my name, copyright and CC-BY license removed. I posted a comment in that thread, and I really hope that's all that's needed to put this behind us. While I was writing the comment, I looked up the RSS 2.0 spec on archive.org and found that their snapshots start in September 2016. Screen shot. Really weird and disturbing. I have records of the spec moving to that location on my blog on July 18, 2003. The deal was also written up in the Harvard Crimson and News.com.
Patton: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
But here's some good news. There's no guarantee that Facebook will be successful on terms that matter to them. Unless a half billion people use their service, it's probably not worth continuing, for a company the size of Facebook. Podcasting has withstood countless attacks like this, and has always been left standing as unsullied as ever. But podcasting is "really simple" and the benefit of federation is well known to users. That's been what's kept it from being pwned by bigco's all these years.
Also it'll be interesting to see how much of ActivityPub Facebook supports in their product. When Google Reader came out for RSS their trick was to break RSS by not supporting a key feature. This did huge damage that we're still dealing with long after Google is gone.
Facebook is launching an ActivityPub service to compete with Mastodon. There's a lot of talk in the webs about locking them out. Big words but not much power behind them. They will, in an instant, have millions more users than the existing ActivityPub services will, so the question really is -- who's being locked out? It was never a good bet that the architecture of ActivityPub would somehow be able to resist Silicon Valley-scale social networks. That doesn't mean there are no answers, just that bluster isn't one of them. You have to think.
I asked ChatGPT for 25 words: "The MetaWeblog API is a standard protocol for remotely managing and posting content on blogging platforms, enabling cross-platform compatibility and streamlined content management."
One of the nice things about FeedLand is we can all look at each other's feed lists to get ideas about what to subscribe to.
Yesterday I was playing with ideas, looking at a bunch of different people's collections, and I saw in John Naughton's feed list a reminder of a centerpiece of the early blogging world, weblogs.com. You could quickly see which blogs had updated recently so you knew there was a reason to go there. It was the beginning of what eventually became Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook, etc.
Over time as more blogs came online, it got diluted, we had to come up with something better and luckily RSS came along, and without much thought we switched over to that and weblogs.com fell into disuse.
Here's an archive.org snapshot and screen shot of weblogs.com from November 2002.
Looking at Naughton's list I had the old weblogs.com feeling! These are all people I'm interested in, but I don't have them in their own category anywhere, so I never see it like that.
With a bit of coordination it would be pretty cool to have a FeedLand page that tracked a bunch more Old School bloggers who are still blogging, or give ones who aren't a reason to restart.
Partial screen shot of Naughton's list shortly after this item was posted.
The W3C has a copy of my RSS 2.0 spec on their website.
At the bottom of the document it says: "The author of this document is Dave Winer, founder of UserLand software, and fellow at Berkman Center." Below that is a Creative Commons license which says: "The content found on this site is made available under the terms of an Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license."
Here's a screen shot of the bottom of my spec.
And a screen shot of the bottom of their copy.
It's pretty obvious that it's my writing.
My name has been removed.
I'm doing more spelunking around Metaweblog API-land. Found a goldmine of past history in a site that I had decommissioned for some reason, listings.opml.org. So now it's back on the web and hopefully Google et al will index it soon. It'd be great to get this kind of stuff into an AI database. I hope products are coming soon to help us do this. 😄
Reddit as a business is going down a user-hostile path.
So I had this idea, I wonder if a compromise is possible.
They want to do an IPO. Why not sell it to the users.
A tech company run for the benefit of its users. What an idea!
If ever there was a site that the users should own it's Reddit.
Reddit could reboot as a non-profit or public benefit corp.
Run intelligently to keep costs to a minimum.
Get help from a foundation perhaps.
BTW, this is a must-read for anyone following new development, in 2023, in social media.
Here's what Evan Williams at Blogger wrote about it in May 2003. He carefully documents an important disagreement we had at the time. Lots to think about.
One of the things I did this morning was carefully read the Metaweblog API docs I wrote in 2002. This became a widely supported standard almost instantly on publication. There was a demand for it. At that time, being compatible at an API level was a competitive issue for blogging software. A must-have feature.
Developers even the best ones are terrible at compromise, that's why it's so hard to federate in a pave-the-cowpaths way and big companies run by venture capitalists and Elon Musk always kick our butts and we end up wasting 17 years losing all the good stuff we had before, with no simple path foward. If you want to know why we feel stuck, next time you decide not to be compatible with someone else, that's why, right there. It just takes two to set a standard. I speak from experience. My partner with RSS 2.0 was the NYT. With XML-RPC it was Microsoft. With rssCloud it was Automattic. See how that works. Companies that decide to partner with truly independent developers can have the agility they don't usually get with their internal processes. It's how simple stuff actually makes it into the market. Again I speak from experience. Us little guys can work together too, but I guess they don't see they could be part of getting a consensus going. But they can.
If the non-Twitter networks want to compete, get rid of character limits. Here's a screen shot of a post to Twitter earlier today. 613 characters. I could not post that to Mastodon or Bluesky, their character limits are too restrictive.
Small is beautiful. I believe it's possible to create a single, simple, easy to understand API that covers the core of all social media APIs. Analogous to what TCP/IP did to flatten the differences between network protocols forming the internet in the 1970s.
We ought to change the rules for wealth to something like this. When you achieve a certain amount of wealth, you are declared a winner. A champion. There's a ceremony where you get a medal and a special kind of credit card that allows you entry to the VIP room wherever you go. In that room you have free drinks, the most comfortable chairs, fantastic snacks, for you and a guest. Everywhere you go people are required to salute you. All the benefits. You eat the best food, sit in first class, and you live in a very nice house or apartment where all your neighbors are also champs.
All that, sounds great right, but what do you give up? You can't make any more money. That's it. Your earning days are over. You won. Now find something else to do. You can't have more than one house, one car -- no private jets, you can't own sports teams or CNN. You have to live like a human being, not consume more than double what a non-champ consumes.
If this sounds like socialism or communism, deal with it. Because when you own 12 homes and fly around in your private jet, and consume hundreds of times more than you can possibly use, you're putting the continued existence, for of all of us, in jeopardy.
PS: You get free guitar lessons too, and a nice guitar. 🎸
It’s time for the NY Times to kill itself, put itself out of its misery, or fire all the reporters and get some serious people in there, because in what demented, insane, addled, psychotic, empty brain is Trump remotely fun.
Did you wonder why there were no Jan 6 crowds at either of Trump’s arraignments? Isn’t it obvious? Any would-be insurrectionists saw the Jan 6 folks get tried, convicted and put in jail. That makes the whole thing real. Americans of 2023 are soft. We’re the ones who got tax cuts from Bush while we were at war. We had no draft, no price controls. War was okay as long as we could ignore it. We’d rather have others make the sacrifices for us. We like to own guns to support our fantasy that we’re badasses, but truthfully we’d rather watch the revolution on TV than go to jail, esp for a crybaby snob like Trump.
My advice on quitting smoking -- get someone to lock you in a room where you can't get a cigarette for a solid week. That's the hardest part of quitting, getting over the physical addiction.
If I would describe a human co-worker as "intelligent" then I would use the same word to describe ChatGPT if it does the same work to help me do mine.
My Bluesky thread-writing tool is getting pretty close to something I'd let other people use, as you can see from this thread.
Another example of an engineering use of ChatGPT. I was stuck trying to figure out how to encode some text in a sticky corner. I had tried the first two methods I usually use, and neither worked. I was about to give up and back out of the feature when I thought to explain the problem to ChatGPT and ask for a suggestion, and it included pragmatic issues like it really mattered to me that I not have to bring another toolkit into the mix. It suggested something I hadn't considered, a third way, and it worked, and I can move on. How do you put a value on that kind of contribution? It's like a programming partner that knows everything basically and is always there to help out and doesn't charge for their time. Pretty amazing.
I've got a list of outstanding questions about Bluesky from a developer perspective. Any help much appreciated. I have a feeling when this is done we may have a Busy Developer's Guide to the basics of Bluesky programming.
I've been writing about Bluesky lately, and will be doing more in the coming days and weeks. I've been getting requests from friends to get them invites, but this isn't my platform. I'm just a developer. And it's just one platform. And I'm just one person.
People are concerned that Bluesky is so small. I'm not, I like that it's small, and I also like that there are no peers yet. Some part of me thinks the future of social networks is small, that we've seen how unwieldy they can be when they grow too huge.
I also think we have to work on a cross-platform API like the one we had with blogging. It didn't take long to create, and it was supported everywhere. WordPress still supports the API.
The idea of every social network having their own API is workable if and only if we can put a layer on top of them that makes it possible to communicate with all. It'd be analogous to TCP/IP and the start of the internet. Peering is everything and then data formats. We have good prior art for that too.
All we're waiting for is people to work together. It doesn't have to be everyone, just people who want to build something bigger than one particular brand of social network.
I'm doing a Bluesky thread writer and publisher. Here's an example of a thread it published just now. I had ChatGPT write a story about the many kinds of bread in the world and pushed that out as a thread of nine. This was the first Node.js app I wrote for Twitter back in 2014, it was called Little Pork Chop. Maybe you remember. Now it's the first app I wrote for Bluesky. Should have it usable in a day or two, knock wood. 😄
A small favor from ChatGPT, now when I'm working on a writing tool (basically always) I don't have to use my own writing for test cases. For example, here's "150 words about the freshness of summer and how the best memories of love and happiness are summer memories."
The transistor radio was virtual reality in 1954. A Facebook thread, hope you can read it. ;-)
I was asked on Mastodon what role Aaron Swartz played in developing RSS, since he is often credited with co-developing it. This is what I wrote. "There was a lot of confusion about what RSS was until RSS 2.0 came out and the NYT adopted it. There was a thread based on RDF, and Aaron was credited as a contributor to that. I would ask those people what he did. I never worked with him. I saw some of his posts on their mail list and met him a few times at conferences. He was a precocious young person, obviously smart, but he didn't seem interested in what I was working on. That's about it."
In general on social media if someone posts a bit that's an oft-repeated bit of wisdom from the cable networks, I delete it, esp if it's from someone I don't know. I could watch MSNBC if I wanted to. No need to practice such idiocratic punditry online, imho of course ymmv.
Looking for a photo of Aaron Swartz, I came upon an archive of my Flickr photos created in 2019 that I had no recollection of making. But I did write a blog post about it. Good move. There's a button that takes you to a random picture. Lots of fun.
I asked ChatGPT to write a song in the style of Paul Simon about eating cheese on a nice day. Mr Simon should not be concerned.
The last time I took an airplane was right after I moved to the mountains in April 2019. I went from Albany to Austin to speak at a journalism conference at the University of Texas. I resisted the invite, telling the genial professor who organized the conference that the audience would hate me, but he didn't accept that. He wanted me to come because it was the 25th anniversary of my blog, and by some counts the 25th anniversary of the blog itself. He wanted to celebrate, and after a while I couldn't resist, so I went.
This was in the last days of #metoo when being a white male was something to be ashamed of, but I am not a person who takes that on. I am confident and sure of myself, that's the way I am. I asked my friend Rebecca MacKinnon, an ex-reporter at CNN and former colleague at Harvard to interview me, figuring that she knew me well and it would be a good interview, and by showing we had a good relationship maybe the criticism would be somewhat restrained. It wasn't.
As I expected a few people in the audience kept trying to invalidate everything I said as if I was boasting -- saying basically of course you accomplished some good stuff because you had all the advantages. What I wanted to tell them and didn't manage to get across is that all the advantages couldn't make what I did easy, because when you do something as outside of a big company, all the people who work in big companies and other institutions resent it, and try to stop you, and they usually do stop it. But every once in a while, if you persist and think and listen and learn you can sneak one in, as we did with the new media (blogs, feeds, podcasting, social media) that came from my work. I felt it would be good if they heard the story because people should know how new things actually happen, rather than the bullshit stories reporters tell. But this room of reporters wasn't having it.
If I had it to do over, I would have asked that we have a breakout session later where we could talk about all our privilege. Every person in that room slept in a comfortable clean bedroom the night before, was nicely dressed and clean. The vast majority had excellent educations and made good salaries with benefits, far above the standard of living of most people around the world. In other words before you point the finger, make sure you're not deflecting. And anyway, what's the point. You can learn from anyone I've found, even people with much more power than you have and even if you don't like them.
But you don't get do-overs, except in your imagination. Here we are over four years later and I'm still wishing I had thought it through better before-hand, because I expected what I got, and was left without much to say that convinced anyone.
Live and learn. ;-)
Follow-up on yesterday's posts, I wasn't really as depressed as it might have seemed because I have a way of dealing with everyting seeming to be totally fubar. I have at least three approaches.
- First, if there's nothing I can do about something I give myself the choice of not worrying about it. I'm just one person in a world of billions, and I basically have no power over any of the messes I was writing about yesterday.
- Second, I remind myself that it always feels like everything is about to unravel. I was born in 1955, ten years after the first nuclear weapon was used in war. When I was a draft-age teen, the Vietnam War threatened to become the first world wide nuclear war. We're still here, proving that maybe it wasn't as bad as it appeared at the time. (If you think that was bad, my parents' generation had to run for their lives from the Nazis and their Holocaust.)
- And a third reason -- the young folk blame my generation, which is stupid, there are all kinds of boomers, people who marched for peace and to save the earth (I was one of them) and people who thought abortion was evil and there is no climate change, and we're all in it for ourselves so let it be. Blaming something as abstract as a generation is a way of shifting responsibility from yourself. Young people of today -- you're the ones who have to live with the world we're all creating now, why aren't you doing something about it? When you find the answer, you'll then understand why we didn't either. The world appears to be willfully driving off a cliff for my whole life, and as far as I can tell nothing will stop it from happening. If you know what we can do, speak up and let's do it.
So with all that in mind, today I'm going to drink some coffee, roll up my sleeves and write some software that helps dig us out of a hole I do understand and feel I might have some impact on.
Namaste y'all!
Today feels like Saturday but I keep being reminded that it's really Friday. Or is it? Hmm.
Blocking prevents spammers from replying to your tweets, denying them a chance to hitch a ride on your flow. These days a very high percentage or replies are spam, a lot of it abusive. Giving users the tool to help you keep your moderation costs down Elon.
How do we find the 100 feeds on Bluesky that are substantial and not mostly bullshit? Now that I have this great Bluesky feedlist browser I don't know where to point it. I think the truth is that these social networks we've created don't actually do anything. They're just ways to pass the time, like the movies Netflix makes. The ones that really work are the ones you can put on in the background and pay no attention to while your attention is scattered on other things you're only partially paying attention to, sporadically. The sad truth is that everything is all bullshit top to bottom 24 hours a day 7 days a week, around the globe. When aliens discover the remains of our civilization they'll find we self-destructed out of boredom.
Textcasting will be what interop means in social media. Help me make it happen. I know it sounds ridiculous to think we could change the net so it's a writer's paradise, but I think the time is right. What makes these things work is when enough people want to see the change that it achieves an aura of inevitability. That was the arc of podcasting. It applies to big companies too, Apple won't get anywhere with their new headset until it achieves that aura. I think the social media of textcasting will be amazing. And it's sooo low tech. There's nothing to it other than demanding that the techies stop imposing stupid rules on what we can write.
How bad is journalism? Let me tell you.
A journalist claimed to have given podcasting its name.
He didn't. It's a lie.
But he somehow got it on the Wikipedia page for podcasting.
And there it stayed. And every reporter writing a story about podcasting, saw it, and liked it, and copied it.
As a journalist himself he knew how it works. They don't actually check anything, they just copy and paste. And get paid by the word.
So all the bullshit you hear about how ChatGPT has hallucinations, from journalists, covers up the fact that most of what journalists write is complete bullshit. They aren't factual or verified, they just copied something from another journalist, who copied it from a different journalist. They're full of shit, so much so that the journalist knew his lie would never be outed. Even if it were true, it wouldn't be news, but usually what the write contains little or no truth.
These same journalists will never say anything bad about Apple btw, even when they offer up a completely ridiculous product for a market that doesn't exist. Everyone gushes, oh it's so great, when no one even the CEO of the company would be caught with the thing on their head. They do this because they won't get invited back if they don't.
Best advice, if you have a question, ask ChatGPT, far more likely it's correct than some random journalist.
PS: This is how podcasting actually got its name.
PPS: International Podcast Day, which is cited as an authority by Google, says there is a dispute about who did what re podcasting between Adam and myself. We have our differences, that's for sure, but I'm not aware of any dispute about how podcasting was created and productized and promoted to turn the idea into a medium. I've always been clear that Adam came to me with the idea, at first I didn't listen, then I got it, and set about implementing it in software. And then creating podcasts, and promoting. We both did a lot of each of those things, but the software was my job, and the development of the standard format. I've never heard Adam dispute any of that. I think they should take that bit about disputes off their description esp since it's being quoted as an authority. And please take Hammersley off the credits. That makes the whole thing stink.
PPPS: There are journalists I trust. For example Monica McNutt. I'm sure she wants to rise, and she deseves to, but I'm pretty sure she says what she thinks and doesn't worry about access. Donald McNeil is another, which was why I was so disappointed when he was a victim of NYT internal politics. A real journalist should be forgiven for failing to pander adequately, we like our journalists like that, not that the NYT culture cares what their customers want. There are actually many more and everyone has to do a little pandering, and the lines aren't always totally clear. But as the podcast naming fiasco indicates, most journalists don't care about the truth enough to check their "facts."
Another Succession post, maybe the last, for a while. At some point I'm going to re-watch the whole series, and then might have more observations. Anyway -- people who think that Roman and Kendall have no hope, well I think the writers gave them some cause for hope -- because when they controlled the company for a short period, each showed they were competent, not at running the enterprise, but a small part of it. Kendall was able to sell a complicated and kind of ridiculous idea. And Roman, when he had a clear goal, was able to manage it, and pulled it off. Neither were the kind of person who could run a sprawling enterprise like Waystar, for that you probably had to be Logan. If the two guys team up and manage something much smaller and more focused, they could possibly pull it off, once they get over not being their father. They didn't revert to where they were at the beginning of the show, as some people say, when Kendall was a drug addict and Roman was a pure schmuck blowing up rockets to try to impress the father. They both get a fresh start now that dad is dead. That is a big difference for men, when your father dies you get a chance to come into your own in a new way, I speak from experience.
A friend asked if I was going to get "one of these headsets"? My answer, for the record: "Not even slightly interested, but I suppose that could change." One of the reasons I'm skeptical is that I have imperfect vision. I seriously doubt if a headset would work for me, given that my left eye is pretty bad, and my right eye is normal. Pretty sure they're for people with good balanced vision. I haven't heard that question asked or answered, for any of the headsets. Another concern is how heavy it is. As you get older you learn that stress on your body accumulates over time. For example, I can't use a full-size iPad. I used one for years, but it wore out my left arm so now it's too painful, but I can use an iPad Mini, without problems (so far). If you're putting some kind of new weight on a human head, what will that do to your neck over time? Your back? These kinds of problems tend to cascade. And I can't help but wonder if there isn't another way to achieve what they're doing without putting extra stress on our necks? Honestly I'd prefer to have a Mac that ran Frontier, that would really excite me. 😄
When I was little, maybe first or second grade, my grandfather bought me a handheld transistor radio. It was the 1960s. I listened to WABC, the Beatles and all the great new rock and roll. My grandpa said I’d see so many amazing things in my life. To him the radio was a futuristic miracle, like AI today. Anyway I just asked Alexa to play You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes, one of the songs I listened to on the radio he gave me 60 years ago. I realized just now he was so right, I have indeed seen many amazing things in my life.
New header image for the blog, it's a frame of the Talking Heads 1983 live performance of Life During Wartime. It's a beautiful high energy song, the dancing, they're all so attractive, so young -- the sheer joy of it, it's totally worth savoring. Anybody have any questions? 😄
Of course I asked ChatGPT itself but it was no help. They said to use their API. What I want to use is something that uses their API. I can't spare the time to become a developer there.
It's been a while since I've written about writing into AI chatbots -- ie I am writing something designed to be queried via something like ChatGPT, or ideally, ChatGPT itself. I figure by now something probably exists that can ingest RSS or (ideally) OPML -- and have it be processed and kept updated as things change? I have a big documentation project coming up, and I'd like to, if possible, start off with the new medium very much in mind. I think we can make docs that work much better, obviously.
John Maynard Keynes: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work together for the benefit of all."
I borrowed a lot of prior art for FeedLand from social media, specifically, the idea that subscription lists are public. So you can walk a network of followship, and get ideas of who to subscribe to that way. Click a checkbox and you're connected.
That makes it easy to peer with social networks, if they support OPML subscription lists and RSS feeds of posts. And -- as of May 24, we now have that implemented for Bluesky, through their API.
Everything's ready to go!
I've spent the last few days teaching FeedLand how to do with Bluesky what it does with old school RSS feeds. Today I got it working. Real sense of accomplishment. Not deployed yet, but I'm pretty sure it will be soon. The pieces fit together amazingly well.
If you're a regular FeedLand user who also uses Bluesky, please respond to this post. I'd like to loop you in on the new stuff when it's ready for testing. You don't actually need a Bluesky account to get the benefit, that's the cute/cool thing about it. We're bringing Bluesky to the open web. 😀
If you're a regular FeedLand user who also uses Bluesky, please respond to this post. I'd like to loop you in on the new stuff when it's ready for testing. You don't actually need a Bluesky account to get the benefit, that's the cute/cool thing about it. We're bringing Bluesky to the open web. 😀
I borrowed a lot of prior art for FeedLand from social media, specifically, the idea that subscription lists are public. So you can walk a network of followship, and get ideas of who to subscribe to that way. Click a checkbox and you're connected. That makes it easy to peer with social networks, if they support OPML subscription lists and RSS feeds of posts. As I reported on May 24, we now have that for Bluesky. I've spent the last few days teaching FeedLand how to do with Bluesky what it does with RSS feeds. Today I got it working. Real sense of accomplishment here. Not deployed yet, but I'm pretty sure it will be soon. The pieces fit together amazingly well.
Did you know that you can get Alexa to play the Succession theme song. On the Studio player it's magnificent. Now you can have it be the theme song for your great accomplishments. Get an elegant bit of code running? Fire it up! You're the boss. You did it.
More Succession, sorry if this is getting old for you. People wonder how can they like a show where everyone is ugly. Maybe the answer lies in the fact that the main character of the show isn't human -- it's The Song. It could be that we've cast Succession incorrectly as a TV series, maybe it's just a song. A 4-season-long MTV video.
Newsletter apps have had their moment, now WordPress has one, and wonderfully it has inadvertently plied open the lock-in that Substack imposes, by making everyone use their editor. WordPress has a time-tested API, so I could theoretically write my newsletters in Drummer and push them up to WordPress which would then send them out.
Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter should not be silos relative to each other. I'm starting to post links to Masto on Twitter, and links to Twitter on Bluesky. All combos. I realized I was, in my mind, assuming these were silos. I think other people do too. That's not a good limit to impose, doesn't work in our interests, as users and developers.
I wonder if any librarians have written about ChatGPT. I bet they aren't worried about losing their jobs. That's the thing. When Napster was booting up, most of us were thrilled with the ability to finally program our own music. Now we take it for granted. Google was, it turns out, just a glimpse into the future. What we really wanted was a virtual librarian who had access to all the information available to our civilization. Now we're getting there. When I was growing up, the librarians, who became my friends, only had access to a very small fraction of what was known. Basically the books that can fit into a modest-size storefront in Flushing. Now when you ask for help, they'll have access to everything.
The 1619 Project had a primetime special on ABC last night. Great perspective-changing stuff. I think a lot more people watch ABC than watch Fox.
I did my first fat tweet, yet another post about Succession. I'm watching the last episode every night. Still finding new things to admire. Here's a screen shot of the tweet in all its corpulence. It's way easier to read than a headline and a link to a blog post. They should work on the formatting a bit. The text is too large and there isn't enough spacing between lines. But it works, and is a welcome addition. There's still more to do -- let's have optional titles, links, styling, editing and enclosures.
I asked ChatGPT to write a description of my linkblogging tool, and it came up with something far more hyped that I would ever write, but actually I think I should write this kind of copy for my products. I told it nothing about my product other than it was a linkblogging tool.
BTW "world of a father" is interesting. Remember Marcia said "He made you a playground and you think it's the world."
I've already watched the last episode of Succession about five times, and I expect to watch it a few more. As my understanding grows, I hear different parts. I swear there could be a QAnon thing going on here. Anyway, yesterday I wrote about bullshit and about how Tom didn't win if winning means being the chosen successor of Logan Roy. That was the Swede, whose last name ends with "son." They could have named him anything. My jaw dropped when Roman said they were bullshit. There's that word. Bullshit. The kids were nothing. Tom was a great choice to be the new Gerri. The book closes so neatly. The ending wasn't dramatic like the ending of the Sopranos or Mad Men, it was more like the ending of The Wire, things just wound down in a natural way. The truth was the people who really run the world (a "world of a father," says Shiv) are Logans. The people we see on the news shows are Toms.
Succession: A lot of people still think Tom was the winner. He was not. He got a Tom job, not the job the Roy kids wanted, expected, felt entitled to. That job went to Matsson. Who Logan chose as his successor. We all got wrapped up in the delusion of the kids. Succession was performance art. And we are the performers. And most people haven't yet seen the brilliance of it.
I searched this blog for NakedJen and Google, whose AI is reallllly dumb, suggests that perhaps I meant Naked Men? Well no, Google -- that's not what I meant. One time when I searched for my mother on my blog with Google, it suggested a different name. My mother and I have the same last name. Why would Google think I mis-spelled my own mother's name? I think they still need to do a little work on their intelligence.
My friend NakedJen came to visit last year, first time I'd seen her in many years. Well what a delight. She's so smart and righteous and funny. She's a tiny but fierce person. And she had a new thing she said: BULLSHIT -- very loudly whenever conversation got around to that topic. I now say bullshit myself more often and more emphatically and when I do it on my blog I think of NakedJen doing her thing.
Sometimes I wonder if there's anything but bullshit on social media. And maybe instead of controlling AI bots, we should control the idiocracy of social media and start using that wonderful intellect we give ourselves so much credit for. The fact is that our online selves are mostly bullshit.
I'm all-in on Something interesting to ponder. When we have Textcasting-compatible social media networks, there will be no more wall between blogging and tweeting or tooting. And then we will be able to choose our writing tools and they could be blogging tools as easily as they are the tiny little writing boxes Twitter et al give us. Blogging tools are equipped to deal with titles, styles, links, enclosure, editing. These seem like luxuries now, but once we have them, we'll be amazed that we put up without them for so long when they were very very very very easy to implement.
Bluesky People Browser: I'm playing with ideas of how to browse around a network of followers on a social media platform. Bluesky is the first that I've had an OPML interface to work with. So I created an outliner for walking the structure of people and who they follow on Bluesky.
The nice thing about sports, it's the last place you can have an opinion without everyone losing their shit.
I imagine during the day I'm going to think of a few random things about Succession. Be sure this is 100% top to bottom spoiler.
A nice thing about Succession: The Roy kids could fuck each other up and all the while they're still a family. They spent a lot of time on that in the last episode. Trying to give us a glimpse of the future for them. Now the ways the hurt each other will be more mundane, more like a normal 0.0001 percenter.
Succession is a parody, that's what makes it so entertaining. And they play games with us, distract us into overlooking what was obvious -- what eluded all three of the kids, even though the adults were constantly reminding them that they didn't compete at the level they thought they did.
I don't think federation as conceived by Mastodon and Bluesky will be a winning feature in the future of Twitter-like systems.
Marcia: He made you a playground and you think it's the world.
Logan: You are not serious people.
Mattson: I don't care what you think. You're a tribute band.
More to come. The ending made all the sense. They put every character exactly where they belong. Roman gets to close the book on the Roy family, he couldn't say it at the funeral, but he said it outside the boardroom. Truth -- they were only interesting as Logan's kids.
We always assume selflessness is a good thing, but I'm not sure. In certain situations, telling a lie to save someone's life, that's probably the right thing to do, but lying to spare someone's feelings? They'll be upset if you tell the truth so you don't.
I grew up in a house where you had to manage other people's feelings. It was so dirty and I hated it so much. I had serious stomach issues as a kid, that suddenly went away when I was no longer living in that house. But being selfless meant I had to spare everyone else's feelings, and as result, betray myself, hurt myself, act selfless, as in my "self" doesn't exist. But outside the family, I was surprised to find that I actually did have a self. And that is when I started feeling like a person. Started, I still had a long way to go.
It wasn't until many years later that I discovered these patterns everywhere in my life, just not so suffocating as the ones in my childhood home. I was always clashing against this, because I wanted to do important creative things with my life, and as they say -- you can't lie to a compiler, garbage in, garbage out.
This is a hot topic here because I've listened through the 500 Songs episode about the Grateful Dead, all four hours 40 minutes of it, and learned how the selflessness destroyed their gift. The fans and their employees made demands, and the band gave them what they wanted. I had never heard the story of the Dead told this way, but it matches up with the facts I have from living through that period myself, and going to quite a few Dead shows, and being one step removed from people who worked in the Dead company, and almost dying myself from similar kinds of pressure. Ultimately if you want to live, you have to not be selfless.
It might not be possible to de-Nazify social nets like Twitter, Mastodon or Bluesky -- yet that seems to be what users want. Which leads to a big question, what is the purpose of these networks? Has anyone ever tried to write that down?
Two questions:
- Is it possible to run another instance of Bluesky?
- If so, is anyone running one?
I expect the answer to 1 is "yes" if you write your own code, but the official Bluesky server source has not been released yet.
But I honestly don't know the answers to either question.
WordPress first shipped 20 years ago today. Thanks for keeping blogging going, for supporting RSS and rssCloud and the open web. 😀
ChatGPT has an important new feature, now you can share links to conversations you had with the bot. I've had that ability myself, hacked together with a bookmarklet. I know how important it is to be able to share this stuff easily. Now everyone will get to do this so we can learn more easily from each other, and more easily share what I think is a new form of literature, collaborations between humans and AI bots.
My linkblog flows through WordPress. It's a social networking app too. Also flows through Mastodon and Bluesky. 😄
I lived one block away from the greatest supermarket in the city, Langensteins. They had all kinds of New Orleans specialties. We have one great supermarket like that here in the Catskills, Adams.
When I was in my late teens going to school in New Orleans, there were still a lot of childhood foods I didn't like -- asparagus, fish, cheese -- but I decided to be brave and try each of them, and I found that I now liked most. This was important because there's a wide variety of great affordable food in New Orleans, it would have been a shame to miss out on it.
When you think you've installed the new version of some software, but inexplicably it's behaving exactly like the previous version, make sure you've actually done the update. You can save a bunch of time that way.
YouTube is planning to support inbound RSS for podcasts.
My take on this -- this doesn't seem controversial.
YouTube is a podcast client. No problem with that.
And -- they're doing inbound RSS, just like I want Mastodon and Bluesky to do!
YouTube could be perfect if they also offered outbound RSS.
Two-way RSS. Say it again! ;-)
The constant message I get from tech people is -- "I don't have to listen to you." True! You don't. It has been proven. But would it hurt you to listen. Maybe there's some big secret you're not clued in on because you're picky about who you listen to. Just sayin.
The trick to making a system easy to work on when one part is on a server and the other part runs on the user's machine, is to make the machine the same in both locations, so code that runs in one place "just works" in the other. The further the two are from each other, the more difficult it is to work on. Ideally you should stay in your HLL even in your remote procedure calls.
The important thing about art is not the creation of the art, but the observation of it. So, if artificially created art inspires creativity in the observer, there’s great value in that.
There's something very compelling about this video. I imagine it's a vision of hell. Behave yourself in this life or spend eternity having to watch this primitive fascist cyberhell vision of music.
I like the Succession podcast, hosted by Kara Swisher, whose reason for doing this podcast, I imagine, is that she's on a first-name basis with all the richest people in tech and media. Like Barbara Walters, I guess. The top of the journalism food chain, where they all want to be. In the last episode she talked about how many times she had talked with Rupert Murdoch, who the patriarch of Succession is patterned after. That was a strange idea for me. Not only have I never spoken with him, if I were to meet him, I probably wouldn't find anything he said interesting. I went to a lot of conferences in the 80s with people like him. I hated it. Yet my vision of tech has been implemented, in the interim. She and I live in dramatically versions of tech. We don't even remotely speak the same language. Yet she is considered an authority on what tech has value and doesn't. That was the big epiphany for me, the moment I realized we are completely living in different worlds. She created this Facebook, Twitter, Spotify world as much as Zuckerberg, Musk or Ek. So if you don't like the way it turned out, you shouldn't look in that direction for leadership. That said she does good interviews, I will miss the podcast after next week, although I gotta say they could probably keep doing it for years and still be interesting. Succession is great TV, terrible reality. 💥
Last year on this day: "Web3 is as if there was a new band called Beatles 3, and they didn't play music or write songs, they just held up instruments and said 'It would be great if we knew what these were.'"
BTW, I know that a lot of people can't get on Bluesky. But if you know me, I'm not just doing this for one social net. The point is that once we have something wonderful running on one, we have something to show to people on others. And I'm on Mastodon and Twitter still (see below). Both have APIs and could conceivably get the same features we've added to Bluesky. That's what Textcasting is all about, it flattens out the differences between the networks at a higher level than tweets. Optional titles, styling, links, enclosures, editable, no length limits.
Now that we have RSS feeds and OPML subscription lists for Bluesky, I can start developing apps that use that data. It's the first social network to have this feature. Of course it already works with FeedLand. If you want to subscribe to my Bluesky list, here's the command, and this is the URL of the list. You're now following everyone I follow on Bluesky, in FeedLand. The future works! 😄
I decided to pay Twitter a year in advance for the blue checkmark and whatever other privileges come with it. It's not that much money. I pay more to Hulu or Apple TV. Is it worth it? I can afford to find out. (I've gotten a bit of pushback. There are users on Twitter, and I make software for people who use systems like Twitter, so it's like owning a Windows machine if you make software that runs on Windows.)
Two-way RSS is a big idea that's got to happen if we want a silo-free web. Imagine a newsletter publishing app that let you feed stories to it from your favorite editor via RSS for publication to a list of subscribers. I'm thinking of a future Substack competitor that doesn't force writers to use their editor. It simply provides a service to any writer who uses an editor that can produce an RSS feed as output. Another example, if Mastodon handled inbound feeds, you'd be able to follow someone on Bluesky from within Mastodon. I would love to see this connection made asap.
Here's an OPML subscription list of the feeds of the people I follow on Bluesky. You should be able to import this into any feed reader.
If you have any questions about the RSS format we're using for Bluesky, I opened a thread on the repo we set up for this work.
Also if you have a Bluesky account you also have an RSS feed. For example here's the feed for the NYT.
BTW, I understand where LeBron is coming from. When I started a software company in the early 80s, the business was tough and we almost went under quite a few times. But I couldn't lose. I couldn't face myself if it didn't work. So I made it work. But, after winning once, I relaxed and focused on the art of it. I've already won, now why did I get into this in the first place? I had something to say, which was more than about how I can win. I can also make beauty and break through and do new things with the medium I chose.
LeBron James says he might retire. Good move. He also says he isn't into basketball if he isn't in the race for a championship. See there's the problem, right there. There are 30 teams in the NBA. In any given year 29 of them will not win the championship. 28 of them won't even make the Finals. Yet their fans felt their seasons were worthwhile if they played the game with heart, if there's hope for next season. This is why I am not a Yankees fan or a LeBron James fan. I love my team even when they lose, especially when they lose.
I am working with John Spurlock on RSS 2.0 feeds for Bluesky. Here's the feed of my Bluesky posts. You should be able to subscribe to it in any feed reader that understands RSS, even if you don't have a Bluesky account.
Default will not be a moment as defined by the Treasury, it will be when the world decides the US as a bank isn't trustworthy.
That will be a virus like Covid.
A virus of the mind.
The virus has a name -- it's called a "bank run."
Not one bank, but all banks at once.
Henry James: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
Just heard on NPR that there's nothing we can do about the default thing. Not so. Call your representative esp if they're Repub. Explain how valuable the US's reputation is and how if they continue obstructing you'll do everything in your power to vote them out next election.
These days I write my tweets for Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter and Facebook. I do this by hand. Open a tab for each and do a lot of copy/pasting. The tech industry by refusing to interop has turned me into software.
The difference between Dems and Repubs..
- Democrats never threaten to default.
- Repubs always threaten to default if a Democrat is president, and never threaten to default if a Republican is president.
This is a very simple fact that seems to elude most reporters.
It's not "both sides suck equally."
An old friend Steve Smith, who tends to like sports teams from Los Angeles, asks how I could not admire LeBron James. I suppose I could admire him, if I wasn't so tired of him. And I don't like what he pioneered in basketball, the idea that a player not a team wins championships. He did that when he moved to Miami and then back to Cleveland and now in Los Angeles. His selling proposition was "buy my contract and I'll bring you a championship." I had enough of that when he relocated to Cleveland. I've seen other players do it, like Kevin Durant who I also despise, and teams that fall for it over and over like the Brooklyn Nets, only to find out not only that it doesn't (usually) work, but that who the fuck cares if that's how you win a championship. Another reason I don't like LeBron is that Melo can't get a job and LeBron still has one. They're of the same generation, and Melo never won a championship, that's his own fault, not blaming LeBron for that. But everyone from LeBron's era is retired now, except LeBron and maybe Chris Paul, who's probably been done for a couple of years now and hasn't admitted it yet. And I don't like Los Angeles teams in general, having lived in New York and the Bay Area, that factors into it as well. That, and sports is the one area where you're still allowed to have opinions about things, in this age when opinions are often considered toxic.
Has a close friend or lover ever said you're doing something bad just like their mother or father once did? That's not your fault. The best thing is to breathe a bit, and love your friend who is living in memory and not the moment and -- you are not responsible for what their parent did.
BTW, just because your parents left you wanting more love or a special kind of love doesn't mean they were bad parents. You always clash with people you're close to. Who else are you going to clash with? Sometimes people think someone is bad just because you didn't do that they wanted you to do. That's not your responsibility either. And that doesn't make you a bad person.
In my family, growing up, we never lived up to our mother's idea of a perfect family, the family she felt she deserved. When I finally figured out this was what was going on I tried to show her that she wasn't doing her part to create a perfect family, that became just another one of her many grievances! So now I see this behavior everywhere I look. Sometimes I think everyone I know feels they deserve a Leave It To Beaver lifestyle or Ozzie and Harriet, or Courtship of Eddie's Father. That's the problem with culture, they give us a totally Hallmark view of what life should be like. It's entertainment, and it's compelling but it's also complete bullshit. Yet many of us think that's the ideal for life and if they aren't getting it they're deprived.
I've seen great teachers of meditation get caught up in their movies, everyone does it. The trick is to be conscious sometimes and see yourself as part of a very hard to describe humanity, and to take what comes to you as what was meant to be. My mother in her later years said things like that but I don't think she really believed it.
PS: My mom was a badass. She fought for school desegregation in Queens. Got a PhD after she finished raising her kids. Born in Prague in 1932, ran from the Nazis a few years later, in a baby carriage. Moved from her parents house to her married house. She had a tough life. Cared a lot, probably more than was good for her.
On Twitter, I've been trained like a Pavlovian dog to see the blue checkmark as a sign of distinction, but now have to unlearn that, and I don't like being manipulated that way.
I watched a very interesting Nova episode about how little you actually see of the world with your eyes, how most of what you think you see is synthesized, your brain is guessing what might be there, just like one of the AIs. Hallucinating, in other words. Heh. We may be recreating humanity in a very literal sense with our new artificial brothers and sisters!
Watched the Miami Heat roll over the Boston Celtics last night. If the Heat win, no matter who wins in the West I can't imagine I'll watch the Finals this year. I am really pulling for the Celtics to come from behind and wipe the smile off Jimmy Butler's face. Butler has never won a championship and I desperately want it to stay that way. But I have no feelings for Denver and I can't decide who I despise more LeBron James or Butler. But I will watch Game 3 on Sunday night, after Succession of course, because that's what really matters.
Blogging tech was originally created during the SF newspaper strike in 1994. We were helping the strikers protect their jobs against automation, like what we were doing with the network. Irony incarnate.
I think Cory Doctorow is a very smart person, but he's also a mean mofo. Listening to NPR just now, they're introducing an interview with him. I told Alexa to STFU (in more polite language). I smiled and thought I'd better tweet this. One of those if life were only like this moments. 💥
I wish GitHub would let me write an OPML renderer for them, so when it encounters a file with a .opml extension, it gets the HTML text from my driver. I would just return HTML and we could work on a standard set of styles that all drivers could use. Choose the formats judiciously. There's at least one OPML file in every one of my repos, containing the full project source. I edit all my code in an outliner. This is an art that should get exposure. It'm not exactly a nobody in software development, I've been developing this style for a long time. And tools to go with it. Anyway, back to work 😄
My Hello World for Bluesky works. Here's the evidence. Thanks to Manton Reece for the great exampleware and support. I will publish the Node.js source so others can follow. Here's the initial query.
One thing I don't like about Mastodon is that I get so many comments from people who feel superior to those who use other systems. It's always bullshit. Just like people who used Macs felt superior to Windows users. Just an example. The world likes to judge the quality of people based on superficial bullshit like that. If you reply to something I post saying you're superior because you use (whatever) I will think you're an asshole, so just skip it. I might even say it to you. 💥
So I joined Bluesky. And what do I see? Well it looks just like Twitter. The colors are the same, as is the layout of the entire window, and the formatting of each message. In the 90s lawyers would have gotten involved in violations of look and feel, it's that close. I don't follow very many people there, and I don't know how I would do that quickly enough for it to color my impression. There's so much more on Twitter. As much as insiders are repelled by the new Twitter management, and I'm one of them, I think most people who use Twitter are far above that, to them it's just noise, and life goes on as always. There was a very interesting episode of Succession last night, and there are lots of good memes on Twitter. I haven't seen anything on Bluesky. But as quiet as Bluesky is, it makes Mastodon look even quieter. Ultimately we join these networks for companionship, it's a trip to the water cooler, or a walk around the block during a workday, or while watching a sports game. The new services have a steep hill to climb. The focus on technology has largely been a distraction in that context. What matters, as always, is not the tech -- but the people. And Twitter is still far ahead of the others, despite all the wishful thinking to the contrary.
It's great to see people using the JavaScript implementation of XML-RPC, released in 2019. There appears to be a problem with integer parsing in Java on Linux vs Windows. I'm ready to update the package if we can get to the bottom of what the issue is.
Read this if you want to understand what was and still is at stake. We could rebuild social media around RSS. It's within the realm of possibility right now. Quote from Ryan Holiday, Trust Me I'm Lying.
Here's the story.
- The US government is a bank, among other things.
- That means you can deposit money with the government, and it will pay you interest.
- A lot of people put their money in the government bank, even though it doesn't pay the highest interest, because unlike all other banks, it's thought to be the safest place to put money. When you want it back, to spend, or give to a relative or friend, or invest in stocks, the odds are nearly 100% that you will get the money.
- Why do people feel that way about the US government bank? Because it's one of the core values of the US. The first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, set it up this way. In all the years since 1776, through a civil war, depressions, two world wars, the United States has always met its obligation to return money to lenders.
- Now sometimes terrible things happen, and a bank can't give money back to depositors. What happens then is: 1. There's a run on the bank by depositors and the bank fails. Depositors lose their money, or 2. Some larger institution steps in and guarantees the deposit, and the run stops, because confidence returns among creditors.
- The "larger institution" often is the United States government, because it is the most solvent bank in the world for the simple reason that we are the only entity that can print money that will be accepted everywhere in the world. It's an incredible privilege to have. Imagine if you could buy anything you want just by writing a check. It wouldn't matter if you "had" the money, because you can print the money. It's why all the comparisons to smaller countries like Greece are ridiculous. Greece can print money if they want to, but people will only accept dollars not drachmas. We can have anything we want and as much of it as we want and all we have to do is invent the money to pay for it! (Obviously if we abused this privilege in a way that seriously hurt the world economy there would be a problem, so we don't do that.)
- Okay, now suppose one day, just for the hell of it, the government decides to try defaulting, for some reason that's hard to fathom. Remember, we have the ability to pay the bills. It's as if you told Visa or MasterCard that you weren't paying your bill, but please don't ruin my credit rating because I could pay, it's just that I don't want to. By defaulting I mean, a depositor goes to the bank and ask for their money, and the teller hands them a card that says "Sorry no money for you." Like the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld. As a depositor you would be very angry and you'd tweet about it to tell everyone what happened, and they'd all go to the bank and demand their money, and voila, you have a run on the bank. That would probably be the first thing that happened after a default. Everyone who had money on deposit with the US government would demand it back so they could put it somewhere that wasn't managed by lunatics. But because we're defaulting we give everyone the "No money for you" card instead of their money.
- What normally happens in a bank run, a larger institution steps in and guarantees the deposits, can't happen here because there is no institution larger than the US government. So what happens? No one knows. But it won't be good, that's for sure. We got a small taste of it in 2008 when a relatively small bank, Lehman Brothers, was over-extended, and a run resulted, and as a result other banks who had money in Lehman, couldn't get it, they started defaulting, and the economy of the whole world froze. Shipping stopped. Airlines couldn't fly. People went to look at their bank balance and the numbers went down, for the first time. It was a very scary time. The US government started writing checks, huge checks, and we just got through it by the skin of our teeth. But again, this time, it's the US government defaulting and no one can play that role in this meltdown.
- If we're lucky, and people believe they can trust China or the European Union, they might write off the assets they have stored in the US, and never use our bank as the safest place to store value, because we all lost so much in the run that followed the default. We'd start storing value in Chinese or European currency. And the US would become an ordinary country, with no special ability to print money that everyone accepts. It won't be a recession in the US, instead we will see an invisible support for our economy disappear in an instant. Some of it already disappeared, the last time we flirted with default. But if we actually default, the US economy will become much less potent. We no longer will have the ability to print money to pay our bills. Now some people will tell you that's a good thing, but they're the worst kind of idiot. It's like saying it's better to be homeless because you don't have to pay rent. We won't have an idea how our lives are elevated by this privilege until we lose it. It's been there for our whole lives.
I'm sure there are some inaccuracies here. I am not an economist. But I think I do correctly understand the big picture. We learned a lot about it in 2008 and after. This isn't something you want to screw around with, but that's what we're doing anyway. It's even more insane than what the British did in Brexit, and that's hard to do! So let's not do it. Call your Congressperson, especially if they're Republican, and let them know you understand what they're doing and you will work tirelessly against their re-election if they don't withdraw their support, immediately, for default.
If I were in trying-to-work-with-Twitter mode, I would suggest...
- Along with the monthly fee, add a certain number of API calls to every user who pays. Then devs could make products for them, without having to pay Twitter. Make the thing self-funding so individuals could play not just corporations. Twitter is more of an end-user thing than a corporate thing.
- For $1 more per month, include some JSON storage for the user, accessible to the apps they grant access to, thus moving into an area AWS should be in but refuses to go. Storage that goes with identity for people not just techies. A retail-ized version of Amazon S3. It will be an enormous business.
- I'd comp devs who make software, and give them a special icon so people know to ask them for features. Incentives. Think like a businessperson not a school marm.
- You want to really clean up? Co-promote the developer products and share revenue. It doesn't cost much to buy developer love.
- PS: As a free addon for users, give each paying user an RSS feed, a good one. I will help you do this really well, no charge.
Defaulting on the national debt will be like the crash of Lehman Brothers in 2008, only a lot worse, because we were able to use the prowess of the US dollar to prop up the banking system when Lehman fell. There's nothing that can prop up the dollar that way.
This is not about the economy being strong or weak. It's about whether we have an economy at all. Not just the US but the whole world.
Emphatically: There is no economy without the dollar playing that role. it's not a matter of weak or strong, it's about the existence of an economy.
This is the kind of economics that's more like physics.
Let me put a different way. If it weren't for the US government bailout that barely worked little old Lehman Brothers would have crashed us into a new global dark ages. That's what they meant by "too big to fail."
The US is a big fucking bank. If it crashes there's no one to bail it out. Welcome to your future, no health care, transport, food, electricity, no TV or internet. Everyone for themself. Not a recession. A collapse.
The problem isn't really that the Repubs are hellbent to crash us into a new dark age, it's that the people are so uneducated, and that includes journalists, that they don't get that this is what's at stake or they don't want to say it.
It would be like the mother of all bank runs.
I'm sorry but your opinion doesn't matter very much, if at all. Nor does mine. Here's how I know. Most of my relatives had strong opinions and stated them often and did not welcome dissent. My father and mother. Both grandfathers. My maternal grandmother. Uncle Ken. They all had opinions about everything. Sometimes they even changed their minds, to their credit. And one hid something about himself that I learned later from Wikipedia (amazingly my maternal grandfather was a communist, still not sure I believe it, Wikipedia is often full of shit). Anyway the point is that all the people I listed are now dead. If anyone cared about their opinions when they were alive (I don't think anyone did) they certainly don't care about them now. Soon enough you and I will be dead, and believe me when I say no one cares what you think now, and they certainly won't care when you're dead. So go ahead and have the opinions if it makes you happy. But if it makes you miserable, as it often did for my relatives, consider not bothering because simply does not matter. And the stupid thing is we've built our networks around the idea that opinions matter. Think of all the wasted bandwidth and server space. Maybe it'd be better if the AI bots win. At least they don't repeat themselves all the time with complaints about graffiti and whatnot. BTW I loved all the people I listed above even if I didn't enjoy their opinions very much.
It happened again. On the radio, someone talking about Facebook and making a lot of sense. Usually on NPR they talk bullshit about Facebook. It was Cory Doctorow, who in my experience is an extreme <bleep>. Turns out he was covering up that he has a good mind. Nice to know.
If someone sends me an invite to Bluesky I will join. I have asked for an invite, but so far they have ignored the request.
Programmers often write code as if vertical space were a dear resource. It isn't, it's basically free, or as close to free as you can get. I like to spread my code out vertically, using intermediate value-holders with meaningful names. Designed to be stepped through in a debugger. This is how my mind works. I also was a machine language programmer at one time, where you had no choice, this was the way you wrote code. Intermediate values went in registers, R0-R7. One of them was the stack pointer, and one held the program counter, so you couldn't use those. I learned machine language on the PDP-11, a wonderful machine whose design probably had great influence on C and Unix. Then on the 6502 which was designed to control dishwashers and toothbrushes but somehow ended up in the most popular PC of its day. Never mind, machine language was a wonderland of power. You owned the whole thing. There was no supervision. You ruled the fucking world. You were god. I wonder if Elon or Jack have ever programmed at the machine level.
What we need is not one twitter to replace the old twitter but a whole armada of twitters. Like the podcastosphere with all the different players. Look at how much better that's working. No Musk or Jack. Think about it.
Maybe I should change the name of my blog to Spoiler News. The tagline would be "Everything here is a spoiler so don't read." Bet that'd really pull em in. 💥
Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey are perfect illustrations why there's no point in accumulating vast wealth. There's absolutely nothing a person can do with the money. But it is fun to destroy things, in games like Angry Birds. In the real world, actual people get hurt. No matter how heartless you pretend to be, all that pain accumulates, you end up feeling it. Maybe that'll be the moral of Succession. The plot becomes something like Heaven Can Wait, where they take Tom's challenge of giving up or setting aside their vast wealth, for love.
So sick of the bullshit the supposed visionaries inflict on us. Jack and Elon should buy yachts or something and crash them into each other for fun, star in their own reality show, and let the world get on without them.
One of my favorite terms from basketball is Garbage Time. It totally should be the name of a TV show.
Podcast: The internet of social media apps. How to make it possible for there to be lots of social media apps that we all use, without turning us all into copy/paste robots. We've been here before, with the internet itself and TCP/IP and the web with HTTP. The same process will yield a result that's good for users, and will allow social networks to evolve without being dominated by the Silicon Valley cartel. 16 minutes.
As a user, I no longer want to have to visit five sites to see what's new. I no longer want to have to copy/paste my writing into those same five sites.
Each social net we belong to should have a feed coming out of it, virtually or for real, that contains a stream of all messages from accounts I'm subscribed to. How they do it behind the interface is up to each network, as with TCP/IP.
Each network must present the same highly-factored easy to support and impossible to break API with libraries for all major platforms.
It's up to each platform, or independent developers working on its behalf, to adapt their native protocol to the internet format.
Also -- see the podcast I did on this topic.
I definitely want Bluesky to just go away. I don't like it because if it gains traction it has potential of replacing Twitter as the festering turd in the middle of what should have been a vibrant growing market that keeps anything else from rising in competition with it.
To people who say "Oh Dave but it's federated and it has an open protocol" -- yes I've heard that, but there are all kinds of games you can play, such that even if it's true (and so far it isn't), no competitor ever rises, or as soon as they do, they are foreclosed on.
I don't like it because it's Jack Dorsey. You say "Oh Dave but Jack is just a board member" to which I say oh please, I wasn't born yesterday.
The only way out of this Jack-induced nightmare is for: 1. It to fail quietly and 2. Jack to sit the fuck down and do something other than plant huge turds in the middle of what should be a vibrant thriving open market, which means there are lots of entrants, choice, and opporunities for cooperation and innovation.
If having a license from The Jack is a requirement, well we've already wasted 17 years on Twitter waiting for that to become something wonderful and it's fair to say now that it never did and never will, so Jack please enjoy your wealth and play somewhere else and leave Twitter and post-Twitter alone. Thank you.
Also -- see The Internet of Social Media Apps.
I love all these musicians, but as a man with thinning hair (an understatement) I wonder how many of the men in this picture are wearing wigs. Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison are obvious. The only one I'm pretty sure isn't wigged is Tom Petty, and it's possible that's a very good wig. I don't believe that's Bob Dylan's real hair, and I am absolutely sure at some point Paul McC switched to a wig, and I think there's a pretty good chance George Harrison is wearing one as well. (My father was convinced all the Beatles were wearing wigs in 1964!) Not that there's anything wrong with wigging, esp if your appearance is a big part of your product.
Quitting Twitter doesn't protect from what Musk is threatening NPR with. Not hard to imagine how that could be abused.
The Knicks won. The series is now tied 1-1. They were losing until the very end of the game when a couple of bad calls went our way (truth), but also -- our passes were finding the open man, and the shots were going down. I tried to watch the beginning of the next game, the Lakers vs the Warriors, but I just couldn't get the energy. Instead I watched the local station postgame coverage of the Knicks. It was fun to see them so excited. They have a star, Monica McNutt, who is so cool, I could watch her talking about jello and oatmeal and find it fascinating. It's sad that the men on MSG don't seem to see her, but someone there must get she's the future and the little troll is funny as long as he shuts up after repeating himself once or twice. I will watch the next Lakers game, hoping they lose in a horrific way. I think LeBron should step aside. And hey it was great to see Melo welcomed so warmly at the Knicks game. We will always love Melo. Finally thank goodness there isn't another Knicks game until Saturday. I need some time to process the possibility that the Knicks could be going to the conference finals.
To Apple's credit, it is very easy, via their website, to cancel a purchase and arrange a return.
I have a 5th generation iPad Mini that I use all the time. It's a couple of years old and the battery doesn't hold its charge very well. So I decided to treat myself to a new mini, and since there's a new version, the 6th generation, I went for that. I also decided to get 64GB instead of the 256GB I have on the current one, because these days most of the video I watch is streamed, not downloaded, and I don't use that much space, or so I thought. After four attempts to transfer the contents of the old iPad to the new one, each one taking hours, I gave up. The design of the transfer app is terrible. You have to be there for the whole process, because it asks questions after long pauses. It doesn't do enough preflighting. So it takes an hour before it decides it can't do the transfer because the old one has too much data for the new one. I hoped they would do something smarter than just refusing to do the transfer. I don't really care if it moves any of the movies or audio files. What matters is that it correctly moves the apps and the configuration data for the apps, the stuff that takes a huge amount of time to do manually. In the end, I realized this wasn't any fun, and remembered how Steve Jobs obsessed over the unwrapping experience of new Apple products, and felt sad that Apple didn't hold on to that value very well. Instead I'm going to buy a 5th gen iPad Mini from Amazon and save a hundred dollars. I won't be able to do a trade-in, so maybe I'll find a deserving person to send my old iPad to instead. Or maybe I'll just stick with the old mini until its battery completely fails.
Watching last night's NBA playoff game, the announcer would say if a shot went in or spun out of the basket before it's clear, visually, which way it was going. Is this a deliberate delay of the video feed, or a technical glitch somewhere in the network?
Here's something maybe to not look forward to. Next time you call for customer service, you will speak with one of ChatGPT's cousins. It will sound like a human, but will be clear it's not. Beg for mercy from a machine, a machine that's programmed to sound like they care, while being obstinate. Just try and cancel a subscription to the NY Times. It will know what you're going to say before you say it.
Somehow it's especially sad that Gordon Lightfoot died, because his music reaches into my heart and pulls out really strong feelings. Always has. Now the strong feelings are in gratitude of all he has given us. If you have a moment, here's a song that demonstrates.
Succession spoilers, don't read. I love how the Swede calls the Roy brothers a tribute band. When you watch the newest episode a second time, you realize that they have something, each of them. Kendall is creative, and is a Steve Jobs type showman who can think on his feet. Shiv is a plotter, networker and manager. Roman is a Machiavellian monarch. They don't necessarily let scruples get in their way. Each of them has part of Logan's personality, and all are good at it, they just didn't necessarily know while he was alive, trying to exist in his shadow. This epside is where the turned from klutzes to serious people perhaps with potential for greatness. And Tom fits in there too, we find out in the last scene of the most recent episode. I like that. I identify with Tom.
I want my chatbot partner to do projects with me. I write an outline to organize the work. I put things where they belong as they are created. Nothing new about that, I've been working this way since the 80s. But the bot can help me manage it. I got an idea how this could work when I chose a codename for a new product using ChatGPT to make suggestions. It led me to a new more creative approach and I think a more interesting name. I hope it learned from what I did and may help other people choose names in the future. I just did an outline for the project and I'm not sure how I would give it to my friend the bot. We used to think of uploading our brains to computers, well isn't that what I'm doing now? It's a level or two above what I do with GitHub, but a similar idea. You can see how my brain works, either way. I'm making an effort to leave that as something others might learn from in the future.
Adam Curry says if it doesn't have a feed it ain't a podcast. Obviously I agree, because it's the truth, and this is how I responded..
- Adam -- as you know we've been having this discussion for years.
- Companies like Google, Amazon, Spotify etc don't care, they'll call a cheese sandwich a podcast if they want to.
- In the end, the word may come to mean nothing.
- Same thing happened with unconference.
- On the other hand -- a lot of people believe they have choice in what client software they use to listen to podcasts, and that will do more to enforce the standard than either you or I.
PS: I asked ChatGPT and it agrees, no feed, not a podcast.
PPS: I don't know why cheese sandwiches are so funny, but they are.
I read a story in the NYT where the so-called godfather of AI is concerned that AI might get out of control. His two major concerns, as outlined in the article are that people might lose jobs, and not just menial jobs, and we might have a hard time finding out the truth. Another concern is that the bots will be fighting wars on our behalf, as we have seen in many science fiction stories over the generations.
Anyway..
ChatGPT is already smarter than humans because it has a non-zero attention span, and isn't trying to promote its own career and has no conflicts of interest.
On the other hand, if you ask a human a question, the answer will probably just be a canned schpiel they have memorized based on hearing a keyword in what you said.
So it isn't much of a leap to say someday the bots may be smarter than humans.
The better conclusion is that humans better get our shit together start using our intelligence because the competition is here and it's already better than we are.
BTW, for years I've been trying to find an explanation of the difference between rain and showers in weather forecasts. I asked ChatGPT and it patiently explained. I asked thousands of humans and the answers I got were either vague or wrong.
Good morning and welcome to the month of May 2023. The year, as usual, is flying by. I have performed the usual monthly ritual. Here's the OPML archive for April.
When I document my development work, I'm doing it more like ChatGPT. All the caricatures of AI from culture, like HAL from 2001, seem to have gotten it wrong about how bots will write. They write like good human writers do. Let the ideas come to the front, remove extravagance. Aim to communicate directly with the human who is reading. But another funny thing, I am aware more that I'm writing for the bots, because I want them to "understand" what I'm saying. Human readers -- they don't pay a whole lot of attention. Finally I have a reader who is listening. The future is interesting, and it never is the way you thought it would be.
Back in the early days of the PC, we got a lot of putdowns from people from the mainframe and mini worlds. Our computers were less capable, but they made the mistake of thinking we were less capable too. We came from those worlds, and chose PCs because we loved the idea of having our own computer that we could do anything we wanted to with. That was never true of the larger computers. The result is what you see now. Same will be true of AI. It is that big a deal. Apple then dismissed the web when it first came out, but eventually realized it wasn't going away, so they ended up embracing it. So did the big-iron computer makers with PCs but they were too late. And even IBM which did have the guts to be a first mover, once they came to dominate tried to retake control and were flushed from the system. Microsoft did it too with the same result. When tech makes a leap, there's no going back.
Much-discussed on Masto is the idea that in Blue Sky a user's blocks are public. So they're not really blocks, more like declarations of war.
A free idea for any new social net. Allow the author of a post to classify any reply as spam. Most of the replies I get these days are ads. It took me a while to figure out this was going on.
Journalism's fake issue about AI systems: hallucinations.
A ridiculous standard.
It's like saying you can find false info in Google. You certainly can. And no one thinks Google is less valuable because of it.
Same with Wikipedia. It's often impossible to get wrong info corrected there. Also with Google, btw.
Every time I write about ChatGPT in a place where people can comment, everyone talks about this. You're being programmed, by journalists.
And btw, don't get me started on all the bullshit in journalism. We live in a world where people who can manipulate information do it, all the time. So far I'd give ChatGPT very high grades on accuracy, relative to other places where I look to as a reference.
And you should always check your facts. The web has certainly trained us to always be suspicious.
PS: I asked ChatGPT if it hallucinates: "No, AI systems like ChatGPT do not hallucinate or make up facts in the way that humans might."
This is a test to see if I can serve static sites with HTTPS. Mastodon requires you use HTTPS to link an account to a website.
How about instead of emotional appeals, let's do some real old fashioned marketing of Mastodon.
List features in the left margin.
List products across the top.
Put checkboxes where the product has the feature.
We used to do this kind of stuff really well.
We're all flying blind.
That's easy to fix.
We're using super-powerful information tools.
Way beyond what we used to have.
And we use them very poorly.
Succession spoiler, don't read. People speculating about the big reveal at the end seem to be overlooking that they're electing a new president. Current ATN management is backing the fascist. But it looks like Shiv and probably Tom are going to run ATN, and we know Shiv wants someone else. And also don't forget, the oft-overlooked Roy kid, Connor, is running for president. It might not matter who's Logan's successor, the show might be about who is the next president. It's hard to imagine the Swede cares, but we know for a fact that Shiv does. And in this, she's not like a Roy kid, she's a serious person, who's been kept on the sidelines too long because of her gender. A Roy might end up in the White House, new new raisin, and whoever it is will be in Shiv's pocket? That would be a fine ending.
I see Jack Dorsey is answering questions in his new Twitter, known as Blue Sky. He talks about new Twitters, but he acts like a competitor, ignoring Mastodon, which is up and running, and has the feature that there is no Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk, and the Silicon Valley cartel doesn't own it. My message to Dorsey if he can hear it: You've got your billions, find something else to play with. Twitter has a job to do, we need choices, we don't need another Jack Dorsey mess.
I always wondered what's the deal with goosebumps. What purpose do they serve? Is it evolutionary, because we used to have feathers?
There are trolls and flagrant trolls. Trolls get muted, but flagrant trolls are blocked.The NBA had the answer all along. ;-)
Apparently Twitter the MTA to pay $42K per month to use their API. Instead of typing the messages by hand, which costs $0 as far as I know?
Dries Buytaert really likes Nostr. "It’s simplicity reminds me of RSS." That's high praise and a really strong endorsement. Dries is influential. My response. I've started reading their spec a few times, got lost at the beginning and never got un-lost. Something else is needed here. To start, a hello world server app in Node.js that I can type something into and watch what it does in the debugger. There shouldn't be so much guessing. Ideally, supporting a protocol should mostly be reverse-engineering code that works. Ultimately I'd like to see as many ideas directly stolen from RSS in one of these protocols. Why not tap into the huge base of developers who know how to work with RSS. Where I come from that's how you build something new, by using as much of the past as possible to make it really easy for developers (who are people, btw) to adopt it.
I would love to read a chatbot-condensed version of the 28 years of my writing. Maybe in a couple of years they'll be able to do that well. I tend to repeat ideas over and over. We're beginning to be able to find those. Now can we eliminate the duplication and have the writing still be interesting? People seem so scared of having the machine alter our writing, but for me, it would be a service. I never am able to sit down and turn this stuff into a book, I just don't write that way. Maybe I could team up with a bot who would be the perfect editor.
Another ChatGPT use-case: a writing coach.
It's got a weird title, "Market Entry Error" because ChatGPT tried to correct what it thought was an error. I actually had a question about it, and as a result of the dialog, I simplified the text and avoided using a word some people would mis-read (as the bot had initially).
When people trivialize what's going on here, they must not be using it well enough. It has a more intelligent conversation that most humans would because it never gets distracted, it always tries hard to understand what I said. It's a sad comment on us humans, we're very distractable, and even though we might have the intelligence to help with this kind of question, in practice we can't do it because our attention is so scarce.
A quick story. I was once at a workshop, a free-form thing, where a group of people sat in a circle for three days. You could leave and come back, or take a walk with someone you met there, or sit in a corner and read a book, whatever you want.
Anyway, I got some shit from a 22-year-old who had complained that it was awkward to get an erection at odd unplanned times. I was in my 40s at the time, and responded that some of us would love to have that problem. People laughed and the young man was probably embarrassed, so he shot back, you think you know so much because you're old. I asked if he though there was anything a person twice his age might understand that he didn't. He said no. I asked if he had learned anything since he was twelve. Oh yeah no comparison. Do you think learning ends at 22?
I mention this because I recently talked with a friend I hadn't seen in 30 years. Very interesting and memorable experience. Like a time capsule. A lot happened in that time, obviously -- lots of learning, some of it intentional (training, therapy), and while I'm still the same person, the way I relate to the world is much improved in the intervening years. I could see it because I remembered what it was like then, and how different it is now.
I'm sure somewhere deep-down the Knicks still suck, but you couldn't tell last night when they eliminated the Cleveland Cavaliers and went on to the second round of the NBA playoffs for the first time in ten years. Also last night, equally surprising, the #8 seed Miami Heat eliminated the #1 seed Milwaukee Bucks. The Knicks will play the Heat starting on Sunday at 1PM at the Garden. That's where I'm going to be for sure (watching on TV of course). And to think it wasn't that long ago that Knicks fans were wearing paper bags over our heads. The Knicks are now the team I always hoped they would be. It all paid off. And thanks to KD for putting the positive jinx on the Knicks.
Tucker Carlson should just do a YouTube channel and a podcast (with an RSS feed of course, please). And forget about big media companies. Go direct. Keep all the profits. Don't get fired next time. And how about the Tucker Carlson from the leaked text messages, not the conspiracy theorist Carlson.
I want to buy a cheap pickup truck, two seater, to go to the garden supply store, stuff like that. All they sell are monsters.
I've gotten a couple of responses from people who say they don't get what Two-Way-RSS is. Click the link to see all the times I've used the term on the blog. Maybe that'll help. In case you still don't get it, it's a writing system that not only publishes RSS, but accepts it as input. So I can write using my own editing tools, and publish through yours. I want to publish anywhere people want to read my stuff, and I refuse to copy/paste my writing into edit boxes. The first system I really wanted this for was Substack, although I would have liked Facebook or Medium to have it a long time ago. Yes I know there are ways to pipe RSS into systems, I've written plenty of them. But there's no substitute for a content system supporting it as a feature.
A rambling 12-minute podcast about the NBA and how it compares to tech. I'm speaking to my bud, Dave Jacobs, we've been chatting during the playoffs this year. His team as you will soon learn are the Golden State Warriors, who I don't particularly like (as you will also be able to tell). It's just what's on my mind in terms of basketball, which is basically a metaphor for everything.
Change is coming. Google was replaced here yesterday by my personal chatbot. We need RSS support on the other end so it can always be up to date with the content on the site, but otherwise wow -- a dream realized. Still so much to learn. So Google is on the way out, and Twitter while it's here to stay, not as the town square, rather as the global and public news wire service, Mastodon is becoming more of the place where intelligent people discuss their doings. I'll try to link to Mastodon posts over tweets in the future.
While we're at it why don't we have an open api-able dictionary for the English language. Google doesn't really have one, and I don't like pointing to them anyway. When I use an unusual word, I want to link to its definition. (Yes I know about Wordnik. I even wrote a product to work with it, but they shut us out of the API for some reason. I was hoping they'd adopt the product, even market it. I can't imagine it cost that much to let people use it.)
I've been linkblogging exclusively to Mastodon for the last week or so. No more posting links to Twitter. Just Masto (and my RSS feed, and the Links page on my blog.) I like it. It's changed the way I see the two networks. Not sure people on Mastodon understand it's my linkblog, I think we still have some more work to do there.
I don't usually watch MSNBC these days, esp not at 9PM at the beginning of the NBA playoffs, but for some reason I was watching Maddow on Monday and after her long monolog, which was obviously headed to gloating over Tucker Carlson's firing at Fox, her first guest is JAY ROSEN who we know. So weird to see him in my Catskills living room like that out of the blue. I think TV should be more like that, customized so Maddow mostly interviews (or appears to interview) people they know I know. This is the ultimate in news. And if I don't like Maddow, I can swap her persona for someone I like better. Not sure who that would be now, I find them all pretty obsequious.
I must've written about how the second mover sets the standard, but Google can't find it. So I asked the chatbot we set up, and it worked. It found two great quotes from Hugh MacLeod and Phil Jones, and a reference to the interview I did with Robert X. Cringely. Fantastic. This is the future of writing.
If you're a developer who wants to create standards, you might check in with other people who have worked in the area, describe the problem, ask if they have ideas. I try to do that. Unfortunately the people mostly don't respond, but sometimes they do. It's how we avoid having two or more ways of doing exactly the same thing. And the second person is the one who has the power to set a standard, not the first. So it's the power move if your goal is really to try to set a standard.
Have you ever noticed -- if you ask a programmer to do something and their first reaction is a vehement no way are we doing that then they come back a week later and they've implemented it. I learned never to take a hard no as a for-real no. Good developers keep coming back to the idea if it's interesting enough. Sometimes it ends up as disastrous as the programmer initially thought. I could tell you stories. But also sometimes it's how killer features get into products at the last minute.
FeedLand tweak. Now when displaying a linkblog item, instead of (link) we say what domain the link goes to. That's how we do it in Radio3, and it seems that FeedLand could benefit from that approach. Here's a screen shot.
I'm having random problems accessing scripting.com today in Chrome on a Mac. It's just an S3 bucket, chosen so there would never be any difficulty getting through. I wonder if you all are experiencing this? The browser just sits there, wheel spinning. Eventually it sorts itself out, it seems. You can respond here. (Obviously if you see that, you're probably not having problems getting through, but maybe you did earlier.)
Basic questions to ask of any would-be successor to Twitter.
- Is there a character limit in Blue Sky?
- Does it support simple styling: bold and italic.
- Links?
- Titles?
- Can you edit posts?
- Does it support enclosures, for podcasting?
- How about two-way RSS, nice to have. Hook up to simple networks.
My criticisms of Blue Sky, having never tried it.
- It's invite-only. Really? On an open protocol?
- It's founded by Jack Dorsey, a nice enough fellow, who should sit down after the huge mess he left behind with Twitter.
BTW, I used the term Blue Sky starting in 1995 to describe a huge chunk of open space full of potential for innovation. I wonder if Dorsey read those pieces.
Also, by "link" I mean an HTML link.
Funny story. When I ask Alexa to play Here Come Those Tears Again by Jackson Brown, it plays the song, then plays it again, and again and so on. I guess it gets tripped up on the last word in the song name? The story of the song is quite moving. Background vocals by Bonnie Raitt.
Last night's Succession was both impossible to watch at times, and in some ways the best most revealing most fun episode ever.
The two sons are complete fucking idiots. And Shiv is her father's daughter and the son he never had.
The moral of this story is the feminist complaint, she was obviously pushed aside because of her vagina, in favor of the idiot penises.
And like the previous episode which ended with Kendall smiling (over something stupid), this one ends with Shiv smiling (over something clever and kind of evil). So I guess in the next one it's Roman, right? Five episodes to go. Two more siblings, plus Tom and Greg. But who's smiling at the end of the last episode?
This why Twitter is still strong. I expected to find the announcement of Tucker Carlson leaving Fox on Twitter, and there it was. Once there's a default way to do something that's deeply ingrained, it doesn't get displaced quickly or easily. That's not taking anything away from Masto which is an amazing accomplishment. Both systems exist and will evolve to have different uses.
Truth be told, the FeedLand platform has been ready to be released as open source for some time.
https://github.com/scripting/feedland
But I haven't been focused on that kind of stuff, so I didn't want to create an expectation that there would be a lot of support. That's still true, but the product deserves to be out there, so very quietly last week I made the feedland repo public.
I decided today was the day to post about it, because I have an issue with the database that I want to ask questions about from people with expertise in MySQL, and can't do that publicly without referring to bits that are in that repo.
Now that Twitter is less of a community site for me, whatever that means, and Mastodon has gotten really quiet lately (for me at least), I've turned to Facebook. Maybe in the next round we'll be able to create something that isn't owned by the tech cartel, (neither Twitter or Facebook is owned by anyone who appears to give a damn about it), that has the same kind of vibrancy that Twitter once had. Sure it could've been better, I wish Jack and Ev had been more supportive of developers, but I definitely miss what it used to be, flawed as it was.I'm really tired of all the bad-mouthing of Twitter on Mastodon. You all are missing something important, Twitter wasn't just about who owns it, they're really not that important, it's about the people who use it. It's always been that way.
Three years ago I was looking for a simple Hello World for WordPress from a Node.js app. We didn't get there. I still need the code. So I tried asking ChatGPT for help here, and it had a number of suggestions. I implemented the one they suggested that didn't require using a package other than HTTP. I adapted it but am getting a 400 Bad Request response from WordPress. I'm going to keep trying to massage the code. I feel like I'm really close. (I got my hello world code to work. This is a big deal. I didn't end up using the ChatGPT code, instead I used an NPM package that was suggested three years ago, and for whatever reason I didn't get it done then. It was the first response in the thread.)
The Washington Post did some kind of study (free link, no paywall) to discover the sources behind "AI like ChatGPT" -- and they have a dialog you can use to find out how often certain sites are used in Google's C4 dataset (whatever that is). So of course I checked to see how much data from scripting.com is included. The answer: 710K tokens, which is 0.0005% of all tokens. Screen shot. Some comps: daringfireball.com had 610K, seths.blog had 750K and kottke.org had 590K.
I asked ChatGPT for a recipe for macaroni and cheese in 25 words or less. Boil macaroni until tender, drain. In a saucepan, mix butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper until thick. Stir in cheese, then macaroni. 21 words.
I asked ChatGPT why they call MSG the "world's most famous arena." I think it's bullshit. If it's the most famous one what's the point of saying it is. Everyone would know that, right.
The Brooklyn Nets go down in four to the Sixers. Let's hope they stick with the current plan, and add new players who can start great careers with the Nets, instead of pointless veterans who have already won championships and have no reason to keep playing to win, and dis the fans of NYC, first by telling us the Knicks suck permanently, then claiming it's okay to be a Nazi and still play basketball in NYC. We like our basketball players to have a reason to want to win, who don't feel they're doing anyone a favor by showing up to play the freaking game, and don't practice race-hate in on Twitter. New York is a diverse city, and proud of it. Welcoming the Nets back to NYC. No more carpetbaggers please. And definitely no more Brooklyn Nets/Nazis. Thanks.
I'm @davewiner:matrix.org on Matrix, which a friend has urged me to try out. If you're on Matrix, here's a room you can join, theoretically! ;-)
Knicks fans, in our hearts, don't believe wins like tonight's are actually possible, but the Knicks crushed the Cavs to go up 2-1 in the series. Do we dare dream of more? It wasn't that long ago that we were wearing paper bags over our heads.
I asked ChatGPT for a list of famous rock songs chosen at random in the form of an HTML unordered list. I needed a bit of test code I was working on. Another use-case: Making programming a bit more fun.
Another ChatGPT use-case. There's an open source package called medium-editor that I use for the editor in most of my products. I believe it's popular, but because of its name, it can be hard to use a search engine to find technical information about it. I wanted to make an instance of the editor the focus by default when its created. I asked ChatGPT how to do it, and it gave me fantastic docs, because it could sort out things that Google simply can't. Incredibly useful. It will, if it works, result in a product that "feels good" -- people probably won't even notice that it did anything unusual. This is what make software excellent. (Update: Still scratching my head over this.)
One more. "Still crazy after all these years." My new anthem. Goes with even worse than it appears.
To my friends who use Drummer to blog, and have a Radio3 linkblog, we now have a way for you to use FeedLand as a linkblogging tool.
But then there's Psycho Killer, with its relentless beat. You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything.
This might be my favorite Stones song because the lead singer is Keith Richards, but he gets a bunch of help from Mick Jagger. It's like magic. Perfect music for 4/20. Always took candy from strangers. Don't want to end up like papa working for the boss every night and day. I need love to keep me happy.
I've converted the Links page on scripting.com to use the new linkblog feed. Also made the text a little smaller so more of it could fit on a line.
When you use the web to work with each other, you are using the web correctly. Almost no one does that. Instead people use the web to draw attention to themselves. The replies I get are mostly people trying to tag their names along with something someone else wrote to get more flow for them, more followers. It's a strategy. It's basically spam. It's not very social imho.
So the replies may look like they're addressed to you. Literally they are addressed to you. But they're not for you, they're for bots basically, or people behaving as bots. Mastodon is mostly like Twitter in this way. I have had some interactions that were legitimately about working together, but they're few and far between.
Fox settled a lawsuit for $787 million that makes it impossible for them to credibly call themselves a "news organization." So now, as a Spectrum cable subscriber, I'd like to stop subsidizing this fake news org, not my theory but now an established fact.
I love the Wikipedia description of Eddie Haskell: "The archetype of the two-faced wise guy, a braggart among his peers and an obsequious yes man to the adults he mocks behind their backs."
Back to Conscious Loving, a thread which started a few days ago. After reading the book many years ago, I had a teacher named Jeru, whose tapes I have put on the web, who said many wise things that made a huge difference in my understanding of myself. But he also said one thing that I think was too judgmental -- that most love relationships have the partners taking turns acting like children. We, the students, laughed, as if to say -- yes but we're smart enough to not do that. To which I, Dave, now 25 years older and hopefully a little wiser, say yeah okay, that's cool, but please -- that's bullshit. Because we're always acting like children, all of us, because that's what we are. 99 percent of our energy comes from the child, maybe 1 percent from the intellect, the adult. The fun of life comes from the child. At our core, where our joy lives, we're kids, human puppies. Our partner is our best friend, and we play together and make huge messes, but our parents (our intellects) are watching over us, and are ready to step up if there's danger. But as long as it's fun, let the kids play. I can't speak for all men, obviously -- but most relationships I've had have been love-starved. Expected to live up to an impossible standard, something out of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver. Ward and June, Wally and the Beaver. All I've ever wanted is someone to let me love them, who I could learn from, who would read my stuff and laugh at my jokes and tell me I'm a good boy. I really meant what I said about getting from my human partner the same kind of love a dog gets. Okay so I tore up the pillows and pissed on the carpet. But you still love me right? Here let me get you the stick, now please throw it so I can be a good boy again.
Hey the corner-turn worked. Last night's emails went out with the linkblog items coming from the new feed, and if I hadn't said anything I bet most people wouldn't have noticed the markdown styling wasn't rendered on one of the items. Otherwise, no glitches to be seen.
I don't like social network religion, any more than I liked platform zealots. What a waste of time. No one cares what you think, btw.
ChatGPT desperately needs customization. I'd like to get my Amazon Music history connected to it, so I can ask it to create a workout playlist for me. I can describe what kind of music works for me, a strong fast beat, big bass drum and guitar. Something I can sing along to is good. And I like a certain set of bands from the 70s and 80s, so we might as well start with that. Now I'm going for a 40-minute walk. Program the music please and put it on my phone and off I go.
Another use-case for ChatGPT. Fact-checking my writing. I was writing something I haven't published yet, and used it to look for examples and better understand the people I was writing about.
I suppose everyone has a different experience for every social network. I have a lot of old dear friends on Facebook who I'd never see online or in real life -- and this is such a huge blessing, given that I live in the remote Catskills, where some very nice different people live, and many of them are friends on Facebook too. There is no such thing as a purely good social network, whether it's owned by the mega silicon valley tech cartel, or if it's a distributed fediverse -- the networks for most people are defined by the users, not who provides the system. Yeah in a way that's naive and in another way it's humble and practical. We all are only going to be around for a few more years. Enjoying the people you like and love, imho, is a big part of what makes being alive worth it. So if it's a small sin to help Facebook dominate in a very very very small way, well sometimes I don't recycle either. And no one knows the big picture, so I'm going to go ahead and keep using Facebook, because I find love there, and that's a big deal.
On Facebook, yesterday I asked which Succession character you most identify with, with some hilarious results. And today I ask a different question, which Succession character do you like the best?
I seem to get confused by the name of the show, often calling it Suppression or Secession -- Obsession, Regression or whatever.
Stack Exchange was a breakthrough, it accumulated a library of solved problems that you could borrow from, but you'd have to figure out which pieces went with others, and that was often an long arduous process, when it worked, and it didn't always work. ChatGPT is the next level after Stack Exchange. Now you just ask the question and you get docs customized to the exact problem you have and it writes docs that are better quality than what programmers write on Stack Exchange (not in any way diminishing their contribution). So this is like moving from a calculator to a spreadsheet. It's simply a higher-level tool.
We hear from the politically correct folk on Mastodon that Twitter is dying and the cool people have moved to Mastodon. But I'm a scientist about this stuff, so not likely to believe hype because it's almost always wrong, and usually something valuable is being tossed, and often the people promoting the hype are self-interested. As I see it, all that is happening right now. Twitter is still orders of magnitude more installed in the modern news system than Masto. But I am on Masto, it's among the first links in my browser's chrome. But we're all still figuring out what it's used for. Twitter, even though it is greatly diminished from its former heights, is still the incumbent in the news world. That's why I say it's past time for the news industry to lead us off Twitter, but they refuse to see the opportunity.
As Good As It Gets is one of the best movies ever made. It's got something for everyone. Heterosexual men get the example set by Melvin, played by Jack Nicholson, who despite his obvious insanity, is able to find love. Carol, played by Helen Hunt, gives up on not having a life, and accepts Melvin, even though he's so obviously completely out of his mind (as is she btw). For the mom, she gets to see her daughter have a life. The kid gets healthy and Simon gets a place to stay and friends who respect him for the loving generous person that he is (and also crazy). And we the audience get to relax and stop believing the lie that there is such a thing as human perfection. We learn to accept ourselves and others as having valid points of view, that may seem crazy, especially when combined with our own insanity, and realize that we can be kind and generous to each other, even if they aren't the perfect person we insist we're entitled to. The title sums up everything. If you're happy, if you feel good, that's good enough, in fact it's as good as it gets. BTW, I like to write about this movie. I've done it a bunch of times.
I saw a tweet with hundreds of characters and I have to admit I was tempted to pay the freaking $8 a month.
The first time I read Conscious Loving was at the recommendation of a therapist in the 1990s, when I was struggling to figure out why, after attaining everything I thought I had to for happiness, I was feeling more miserable than ever. The book is an introduction to psychology, it explains why we aren't the logical perfect people we imagine we are, as we are told we should be, and why the people we mate with always push our buttons so thoroughly and seem to contribute to our misery, when the promise was that they would do alleviate it. Basically our upbringing and education about how life works were all lies, designed to get us to conform, to be good little consumers and reproducers, and our happiness had nothing to do with anything. So if you are lucky enough to find yourself in a loving relationship and find it isn't working out as you hoped it would, I couldn't recommend this book more highly. I'm reading it again now as sort of a refresher, the way you watch an episode of Succession a few times.
There will be features in some products that will no longer work, ones that depend on a connection to Twitter, like tweeting a post in Drummer by clicking on an icon. Some whole products, like thread.center won't work at all.
At this point, I don't plan to convert any of the software to their new API, or to pay for the connection to Twitter. So the features that are broken likely will stay that way.
With today's news Radio3 actually still works, assuming the server doesn't reboot, and you don't sign off and try to sign in again, because we cache the authorization keys in memory on the server. So I'm going to keep using it, but expect at some point I'm going to have to switch over to the linkblogging feature I added recently to FeedLand.
To be clear: I haven't decided to cut the connection from Twitter to my products -- Twitter did that. I haven't broken one thing in any of them related to Twitter support. The only changes I made were to make Drummer and FeedLand work if Twitter ever cut them off, which has now happened.
Last night I got a slew of emails from Twitter saying that many if not all of my apps that build on the Twitter API have been switched off.
I'm not going to leave Twitter in support of NPR. You can only do that once, and if I'm ever going to do it, it's going to be for a better reason, esp when other mainstream news orgs aren't leaving in sympathy.
I had ChatGPT write some SQL code for me. I probably could have figured it out in a couple of hours, but instead it took me five minutes to specify the problem, and it took ChatGPT another five minutes to code it up and explain it to me. I wanted to see how many feeds each FeedLand user is the "first subscriber" of. Here's an archive of the conversation.
I'm not getting very much work done these days. Still more work to do on FeedLand. And after that I'm thinking the next project might be a Linux port for Frontier. I really want to leave a functioning Frontier behind as part of my body of work. And the Mac isn't a very reliable platform going forward. It's so funny -- the best product I ever did, really -- and it got all mired in the jealousy of Apple employees. Thinking about it.
I bet that a year from now there will be at least one huge Mastodon instance, with better features than the rest. Like there are lots of places to get coffee, there will be room for lots of big services that provide different experiences. And to create more headaches for everyone, the huge instances will develop differentiating features that are not supported by the others, without offering any interop. Early Mastodon fans will be as powerless to fix this as we are when it comes to Spotify, Amazon, Google et al calling their audio programs podcasts, even though they don't provide the feeds that would give users choice. It's best to have your eyes open about this before it becomes a big issue, by then it will be too late.
NPR, imho, is right to withdraw from Twitter after they classified them incorrectly. The question is, why aren't other journalism companies withdrawing in sympathy? Should they cede to Musk the power to decide which sources of journalism are allowed to publish via Twitter?
I finished Beef on Netflix. Definitely worth a watch. Haven't got comments yet, just beginning to digest it.
Substack Notes is open. I have an account that I started a long time ago when I was trying out their newsletter publishing system. I ended up writing my own, because I didn't want to be locked in to using their editor. I like that I can edit my posts. Is there a character limit? I don't know. Can posts have titles? Where is the RSS feed for my posts? Does it support ActivityPub? Is there an API? The user interface is remarkably close to Twitter. More here.
I've been thinking a lot recently about how we're made to conform, and how stifling that can be, how depressing. But -- is there anything other than conforming? Is there any way for any of us to be unique? When I think of my friends, I think of their individuality. I don't think I judge anyone based on their conformity. But I think I am always judged negatively for not conforming. It's all very confusing. I'll let you know if I figure it out. 💥
NBA playoffs start tonight. Expect a fair amount of basketball writing in the coming weeks. After that, the baseball season begins in earnest for Uncle D.
I got an air fryer and had a chance to try it on a rib-eye steak yesterday, and omg it was sooo good. It took six minutes to cook, and then a few minutes to "rest" and it was as delicious as a steak off the grill, but without any of the work. I got the "budget pick" recommended by Wirecutter. It's easy to use, just plug it in and press some buttons. Not sure what I'll use the toaster oven for now.
Spoiler alert. This item is about last night's episode of Succession. I'm aware that one of the reasons I like to binge-watch TV series is the simulated community of it. Social contact is a basic human need. But our society has moved online, and then there's Covid, and that's why simulated communities, ones that satisfy our requirement for social contact are so popular and valuable. It's relaxing to check in with a group of fictional people every so often, to see them behaving with ordinary human dysfunction, so our subconscious can project itself into their drama. The death of the central figure in a simulated community is why I feel so unsettled today, I think. At first I couldn't place it. What happened? I have a fairly ordinary week planned. Spring is arriving in the mountains. Then I remembered what happened last night. I suspect a few million others are feeling it too.
I've picked up a project I had put down about a year ago, to do a command-line language based on JavaScript, with the only change being that functions don't return until they complete. After programming in JavaScript for almost a decade, I still don't accept the basic design choice they made to require that whether or not a function does I/O is visible in the syntax of the program. It's exactly the kind of thing that should be sucked down into the interpreter. It makes the code 10 times more expensive and fragile. And achieves absolutely no efficiency. Zero benefit. I don't know why other people don't see this, but I'm going to keep going until others join up and help. It's the same approach as we used in the scripting in Drummer, only in this case the scripts run at the command line, like bash scripts. And they run as Node.js apps, so they have access to all the packages Node apps have. I'm just starting to use it myself, just for little utility things. It works great.
Embedding Mastodon posts in Drummer blogs is now documented. It was a very easy feature to implement, they did a nice job in MastoLand.
This is a test of embedding Mastodon toots in my blog. If you click the wedge, you should see the test toot below. 😄
The NYT has a newsletter which recommends shows to stream. Why not add checkboxes so I can with one click add a show to a watchlist they maintain for me.
So far all my apps still work as far as I can tell. I am still able to post tweets from Radio3. I am still able to embed tweets on my blog.
Does embedding with Twitter still work? Click the wedge next to this post in a browser (not a feed reader or email). If it reveals a tweet then embedding still works.
But yesterday this on the NetNewsWire site. Twitter has turned off their access to the Twitter API.
My NYT newsbot now has NBA news. I still have to update it manually, I'm sure it'll be automated soon enough. 😄
It seems the most interesting so-far unexplored territory in chatbots is news. A place you can go to find out what happened recently and get reports in plain language that you can understand. Without any of the usual filler copy or adware. And if they leave out the bit of info that everyone reading it would want (why do news orgs always do that) you can ask a follow-up question. So I started by converting the NYT Most Recent Headlines feed to Markdown, created a new bot on chatthing.ai, and fed it a copy of the feed. I asked what's new, and while the reply was not formatted very nicely -- it answered the freaking question. A new kind of feed reader. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
How typical of Google. They could easily have implemented podcasting as the open format it is, but no one is forcing them to, so Google chooses to lock us all in, a company that would not exist if not for the open web.
I had a conversation with ChatGPT that should shed some light on the theory behind the poll question.
I asked ChatGPT if Mastodon has an embedding API. Apparently they do, but it's not like Twitter's embedding API. If you want it to look like a toot you have to dress it up yourself.
Suppose Trump wins re-election in 2024, can anyone say we weren't warned that he would break the law in certain ways? How can we say those laws matter if he's able to take office?
I spoke with the chatthing.ai people on Tuesday. Really smart, and fun -- and it turns out there's a lot more that can be done with the ChatGPT api. I asked how much they were spending to keep my personal chatbot up, and they said it would fit in their $99 a month plan. Not wanting to depend on their generosity in this way, they're young and just starting up, I signed up. I think it's worth that much to have a personal playground and have them do the hosting and also collaborate on new features. I'm going to help them recruit really special people to use their service, because that's where I think the juice is right now. People who already have interesting content flows (ie blogs) that could be pushed through this new kind of software machine. At the same time I've been trying to encourage my friends at Automattic to get involved in helping people with ideas flow them into chatbots via their chatblogs. 💥
Yesterday I posted about the new linkblogging capability in FeedLand.
It was always the plan to add this to FeedLand, but I moved it up because someday soon I expect Radio3 to stop working because it depends on the Twitter API for identity, and they seem to be breaking devs all the time these days, but so far not Radio3.
Rather than converting Radio3 to email identity, I decided to move its core features into FeedLand which already has email identity. It took a few days, and they were mostly enjoyable, because I do dialog stuff much better today than I did when I wrote Radio3, which was a long time ago! It totally needed a rewrite.
But -- for now I'm continuing to use Radio3, because it can post to Twitter and Mastodon, and anyone who's subscribed to that feed should keep subscribing. I never like to rock the boat, too many other things worth doing, and maybe Twitter will never break Radio3. It could happen.
In the meantime as far as I can tell Radio3 still works.
Now the day that Radio3 stops working, at least this is some work I won't have to do. I will have a linkblogging tool ready to go.
And no one will be bothered by my Radio3 feed going quiet because nothing was going out that way anyway.
And FeedLand's linkblogger will be infinitely better than Radio3 because it works. ;-)
So my advice is, don't depend on FeedLand for linkblogging if you already have your Radio3 act together.
New feature: FeedLand for linkblogging. It's new today, so if you have any issues, please report them in the thread.
I don't often see links to articles on Semafor, a new journalism platform started by Ben Smith formerly of Buzzfeed and the NYT. One of the reasons I rarely see links from them is that they still apparently don't have an RSS feed for their stories. If they had a feed, I'd be subscribed and I'd be much more likely to notice, and would probably occasionally pass a link on to my followers. There is a distribution system that helps new pubs like Semafor boot up. My advice, do two things: 1. Put a linefeed at the end of each line in your HTML source so I can get some ideas where you might have put your RSS feed. 2. If you don't have a feed for your top stories at least, stop everything and do it. Every day you delay is more exposure you don't get. I asked them to do this when they started, so this is the second request.
The journalism industry ought to form a news Twitter. It could be part of the fediverse, but it should also have its own easy UI. There are ease-of-use advantages to centralized systems. A lot of the people who use Twitter need the simplicity. A service can be both centralized and open at the same time. A lot of people got their first exposure to the web on AOL, for example. But news needs to have a single point of congregation. Twitter was providing a useful service there.
I asked ChatGPT to write a story containing 75 words to use in a test post for a new FeedLand feature I'm working on.
I woke from a dream where I was smoking as I was saying “I don’t smoke” in the dream to a disbelieving friend, but, by the time I finished the sentence I was awake saying it out loud and telling the truth, to myself. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since June 14, 2002, except in dreams, still.
I just stumbled across this list of images from my blog. I have no recollection of making it, but it's pretty great stuff if I say so myself. 😄
What would it take for Google to do stuff like this? Invent a new department, the department of User Lovers, or Product Lovers (same thing of course). No tech company has ever had such a department. They mindlessly assume that's love of the product is ingrained in all their people when the truth is the opposite, they have contempt for users. I've seen it grow in my own company, and in the blogging community. A sense that because I work for the company that made the product, I know everything all the users know and more. It's the same fallacy that applies to Silicon Valley billionaires. You have to step into a new perspective to love the product, one that has nothing to do with who you work for or how validated you are by reporters and the public.
A feature Google should have had a long time ago. I want to tell Google where my blog is. Have it be a preference setting. Then when I do searches it automatically gives priority to anything on my blog. Why would this be so incredibly powerful? I'd have a way to leave notes for myself on my research trips through Google's database. And if they let me do this in an outline and represented the structure in the query results, it would be explosively powerful. All without any AI, btw. Really cost effective. Now this is far from the first time I've made this freaking request here on this blog. I could probably show you all the times if they had this feature. ;-)
If I were going to write a Rules for Love Makers document, like the one I did for Standards Makers, I'd make the first rule: If you're going to be in a love relationship with this person, and you can't visualize them as your best-best friend, keep looking. It has to be someone you can go to with any problem, no matter how personal, involving them or someone else, and be totally confident they'll help.
President Bartlet: You may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the Ignorant Tightass Club.
I'm starting to think about the finale of Succession. I listed to the Succession podcast and heard the showrunner say he really liked the finale of Six Feet Under, which is one of the best. I asked ChatGPT to summarize the finale of Six Feet Under, Mad Men and The Sopranos.
Seen at the checkout at Whole Foods in NYC on this day in 2016.
Silicon Valley when I first got there in 1979 was the place where big change was coming fast. There's always been confusion about the power of individuals, even the richest ones -- they don't have the power to change the world, even though they're in the middle of the big change. If they weren't there someone else would be. The changes happening now can only happen because the systems they depend on are already in place. As individuals we get to make the art of the change, give it style, a message, make it usable, make it come into existence a bit faster perhaps. But the change itself is coming from evolution, not from individuals.
I updated the Markdown archive of Scripting News going back to 1994 to include March, which just concluded.
In a voicemail to Om Malik yesterday I observed that these things are not chatbots. I don't like the word chat. They have a chat-derived UI, true, but I find I go there when I have a question, much like I go to a search engine. It's a way to search a database that's also capable of writing. I'm looking for docs that might not exist, if so the software will try to create it for us. Much more useful than Google. As much of an advance over Google as Google was over Yahoo's directory.
Also the Chat Thing people have made it possible to share sessions without screen shots. That will make a big difference.
Jake Savin, longtime friend and ex-UserLander, has been playing with my personal chatbot. He discovered that he could teach it how to program in UserTalk, the scripting language of Frontier. It also appears he was able to correct mistakes? I wonder how that works. But it's no longer purely my chatbot, now it's Jakes too? Hmm. (I trust Jake, that's not a problem. But I might not trust other people who explore my pod.)
Learned yesterday that Twitter is turning off version 1 of their API. So even if I wanted to pay, I'd have to do a bunch of dev work to stay on their system. Makes the decision to walk away that much easier. No way I would choose to spend my very limited time on such make-work.
Tomorrow is, of course, April 1 -- the day when people on the net lie about the people they hate and call it humor.
The Twitter Blue thing would’ve worked better if they added new features instead of taking out existing features.
For AI to become a medium for the people like blogging or podcasting the cost will have to come down.
The first mention of the Twitter API on this blog appears to be: Feb 20, 2007, with discoveries scattered through the month.
Ken Smith reports breakage in the connection between Drummer and Twitter. Yup. There's going to be a lot of that kind of breakage in my software and here on Scripting News when the Twitter API breaks, which could happen tomorrow, or really any time. I'm not going to try to go with them on this trip. Drummer and FeedLand have been converted, all the rest, including features on Scripting News, probably will break. That's how the web works. We know that when we build on company APIs at some point they will stop working. Twitter has had a good run, I started writing to their API in 2006. I was hoping for great innovation and huge growth, but something always got in the way. C'est la via. Still diggin. Que sera sera. It's even worse than it appears.
Good morning. Still excited about the personal chatbot I've been writing about all week. But -- now that more people are running queries, I see how "inventive" it can be. Someone asked what awards and honors I've received. It provided a list, but as far as I can tell they're all bogus, awards that may exist, that I did not receive. I've had a nice career, but only one award, if my memory serves me. Oddly that award was not included in the chatbot's list.
Disclaimer: This was written by my personal chatbot, obviously based on things I have written. It's pretty good, even though some of its facts are wrong, and includes some ideas I never came up with but make sense. I've never put it together this concisely though, so it points to another use for chatbots, distilling a lot of data into a few paragraphs, which you can then edit to make come out like you want it to.
Frontier is a software environment developed by UserLand Software in the late 1990s. It was designed to be a high-level scripting environment that combined an outliner-based editor, an object database, and an integrated scripting language. Frontier was used to build a variety of web-based applications and services, including content management systems, blogging platforms, and syndication tools.
At its core, Frontier is an outliner-based environment that allows users to create and manipulate hierarchical outlines of information. These outlines can be used to store and organize data, as well as to create scripts and macros that automate tasks within the environment. Frontier also includes an object database that allows developers to store and retrieve data in a structured way, as well as an integrated scripting language that can be used to create custom applications and services.
Frontier was a pioneering platform in the early days of the web, and it played a key role in the development of many of the technologies that we take for granted today, including RSS syndication and web-based content management systems. While Frontier is no longer actively developed, its legacy lives on in many of the tools and technologies that we use today.
The British reporter did not coin the term podcasting, my dear chatbot. You're in the shithouse now. It's even worse. The chatbot thinks I credited the British reporter with coining the term. No I did not. The term was coined by Dannie Gregoire.
I think "personal chatbot" may be like weblog for the ears, which ultimately became podcasting.
My personal chatbot just invented a feature for BingeWorthy, by lying about its existence.
The reason it's nice to have old people around is that we don't care about the future in a personal way, so we might just tell you the truth. We also tend to be smartasses. 😄
A theme you keep hearing is that bots spell doom for programmers. If so, it's justified. There are orders of magnitude too many programmers. The tech industry doesn't factor, they do the opposite, reimplement things that work well, or throw out things that work well in favor of things that don't work at all. I think the bots are now going to help us do the factoring we humans wouldn't do on our own. All the layoffs in tech foretell this. The truth is stranger than fiction.
I wonder if my personal chatbot should have a name. I asked the bot if it had a preference. I quote the bot: "As an AI language model, I don't have personal preferences or emotions, so I don't require a name. However, if you'd like to refer to me in a specific way, you can choose any name that you prefer." Reasonable.
My personal chatbot is a good writer, composition-wise. I asked it what kind of food I like, and it answered with a story about me and my longtime bud Dave Jacobs and how we both like Chinese food. It's been a long time since I've taken a writing class, but I think that would get a good grade. Find a way to tell a story, rather than just reciting facts. Make it about people, and people will read it.
I've been trying to figure out what to call these things. For now, I've settled on personal chatbot, like a personal computer.
Seth Godin has a personal chatbot just like mine, also produced by the Chat Thing folks. As Seth says, pretty soon, everyone will have one.
I've been asking my chatbot what I think of various companies, people and products. For example, here's what I said about General Magic, a Silicon Valley company that led in early PDA products. The team was made up of past tech superstars. Note that I just added to what I say about the company, so it'll be interesting to ask this question again in a few days. We haven't got the RSS content flowing through the database yet. (See below.)
Then I asked if there was a connection between "Just Enough HTML" and Markdown, and omg it got the answer totally right! If this were a student of mine, they'd get a freaking A+. Maybe just an A because it didn't include the connection in the answer to the first question.
Noted that my blog has been taken over by my chatbot which desperately needs a name. I wonder how the chatbot will absorb references to itself. And of course then come the third level references, which is what this post is. Oh the humanity!
I asked the chatbot if it knew what "Just Enough HTML" means. It did a great job, but didn't pick up the connection to Markdown.
BTW, it seems Markdown has become the default way to feed new data into chatbots. We're converting my OPML files to Markdown. As always -- Markdown is "Just Enough HTML."
It was suggested we ask questions related to time. For example, "When was the first time Dave wrote about the iPhone?" January 10, 2007. But how does it know which article was first?
The exploration of my personal chatbot filled with the archive of Scripting News going back to 1994, continues.
One great thing about the new chatbot for my blog is that it gives me a greater incentive to post here, vs social media. Of course we must be just days away from a Mastodon instance that you pay to join that adds every tweet to its dataset. A place of record. Maybe they should even charge per tweet.
Working with pixelhop, in the UK on this. Started a GitHub thread.
For this project, I have one big archive with all the stuff I have from 1994 to 2023. All converted to Markdown, organized by year, with a separate folder for DaveNet, which is how it all started in 1994. We should just import all of it. And that will be the product.
As we make progress I'll report it here.
BTW -- I was sure Scripting News would make a good test case for this stuff, because the archive goes back so far and includes lots of stuff from other blogs, esp at the beginning. It was the hub for the early blogosphere. I think researchers in general will find it's a strong use-case if not reference source. I was very conscious of this as the years went by, and tried to make it an archive not just for my work but for what was going on around it too.
In the next election the Dems must make the Repubs defend the idea of school kids being murdered without any help from the government. If they can't manage that, we need to find new political leaders. And when the Repubs bullshit, the Dems have to say they're bullshitting.
Silicon Valley is full of sore winners and losers. Not a whole lot of grace there, imho. But, tucked away in the corners, far from public view, there are still a few people there who get off on making great products and actually do.
I got my Tesla over a year ago and it still feels like a privilege to drive it. Like I won the lottery. I feel like a teen with his first car when I drive it. It's so smooth and powerful, grabs the curves on mountain roads so effortlessly. Elon Musk -- feh. What a schmuck. But they obviously have some wonderful engineers inside Tesla who dreamed of making the best car ever, and somehow they did it.
Ken Smith tried an experiment. He asked ChatGPT to give him a few interesting stories on Scripting News. So I tried it too. I'm pretty sure none of the recommended stories exist.
I watch Succession, the HBO drama. Spoilers follow. Last night was the first episode of the last season. At the end, two characters who are married came to the conclusion they'll divorce. A very sad moment. The scene ends with them lying on a bed together, fully clothed, far apart, but holding hands. I thought, if you're going to do it, this is the way. Let there be at least a little love in the last moment.
It would be nice if someone developed a Mastodon gateway for apps. A system that played the role that twitter.com played for the Twitter API (only it would be really easy to be better, btw). Otherwise does every developer really have to do one of their own? That's gotta be factorable. Just because Twitter is languishing, it doesn't mean that a new system that does what Twitter did, without any of the Muskness or history, couldn't come in and fill the space occupied by Twitter. Don't assume people don't want. I bet a lot do. Learned this from our experience with RSS. You have to accept facts, not be wishful about these things. Be prepared.
Watching the demonstrations in Israel, I wonder why this hasn't happened yet in the United States after the Dobbs decision. What will it take to get our people to feel the threat to the country?
Today's song: Loving Cup. It took me the longest time to find this song which was buzzing around my head this morning, but I couldn't find the lyrics. What I was ultimately looking for was this line: "What a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz." I was asking for beautiful world and then beautiful girl. A few minutes later another bit of a lyric became clear and it turned out to be the title of the song. I brought it to Bard, it got it right off. A few seconds later Alexa was playing it for me. So ChatGPT is also like Napster, which was a breakthrough because all of a sudden we could program our own music. It'd amaze today's young people to know there was a time when we had to depend on radio stations to get around to the song we had a Jones for. We'd sit there with our cassette recorder waiting for the song to come around so we could get a recording of it. Then think of what a huge revelation Napster was. All of a sudden the floodgates of music opened up. Jerry Garcia didn't make it to that moment, he would've loved it, I'm sure. Pete Seeger was alive, not sure how he felt about it. But anyone who really loved music imho, had to have been overjoyed. People were talking about music in airports and in supermarkets. You had to be there. Napster was like years of Christmas every day for music lovers everywhere. Of course the music industry didn't agree.
I got access to Bard this morning, which is Google's version of ChatGPT. I'm still pretty confused about what it is, the same way I was confused about the web in 1994 when I first got Mosaic and was reading various early websites. I can use it, but how do I create for it? I have a huge dataset of my own, most of 28+ years of my writing here on Scripting News starting in 1994. Anyway, the first thing I did was ask if I can add my own data to their massive dataset (their term) and it said yes. I asked how, and it sounds really easy, totally within my ability to do, and almost certainly within your ability too. I took screen shots of the relevant parts of the discussion and added it to the thread I started on this topic. I will try this out and report back.
On the dark side, AI is going to be a great tool for 1984-type governments, because with a single script you could rewrite history everywhere. Write people out, and other people in. Kind of like Wikipedia of course, nothing new actually. 🚀
Knowing yourself is like a 12-step program. Sometimes you drop down a few levels into the trance, and you need a "sponsor" to help you pull yourself out of it. Obviously no one else can pull you out, you have to do it. A friend can help.
A small change --
- Before the recent transition, when you chose My News Product from the menu, it would open your news product on my.feedland.org.
- After the transition, it opens the same page on newsproduct.scripting.com. This was an oversight, and imho incorrect.
- Now it reverts back to my.feedland.org, which is imho a much more appropriate name.
My new product is at: my.feedland.org/davewiner.
PS: Here are the docs for news products.
Here's the thing about Twitter. Since they started showing the number of impressions on every tweet, you can see how meaningless the number of followers is. You could have 66.7K followers, but your tweet might still only get 764 views. Once, a long time ago, Twitter was a flow machine. Now it's like a dry lakebed. A void. It looks like Twitter used to look, but looks aren't everything.
BTW, please -- someone should offer a package that can load a series of RSS feeds into ChatGPT. Here's a Node package I wrote that makes reading a feed as simple as it can possibly be.
I asked a question of ChatGPT: "I have a blog with archives going back to 1994. I'd like to have that content loaded into ChatGPT so it can be part of the knowledge base. I am a JavaScript programmer. What's the easiest way to get a quick result?" I understand the code, I think -- but I'm no closer to understanding what to do. How do I come up with the prompts? What if I have no prompts, what's the result? They say be careful of the cost, what is the cost based on. I feel lost like I did when I first saw what the web could do, I wanted to know -- how do I set up a node on the next. The answers I got from those in the know made no sense to me, until they did. Here's a place to comment.
I wish journalists would pay more attention to issues a bit further away than their own navels.
If there were no "organic" blue checkmarks on Twitter would you pay $84 a year for a blue checkmark, given that everyone who saw it would know that all it means is that you paid Twitter $84 a year?
As you know if you read this blog, I've been intrigued and enthusiastic about ChatGPT as many people have, and specifically am anxious to load up one of these with the content of my blog so I can see what can be learned from the aggregation of what I've written.
- I have over 25 years of archive, all in OPML, a flavor of XML.
- Of course OPML can be converted into any other reasonable XML or JSON-based format.
- It's all by one author, me, covering roughly the same topics for all those years, including pointers to source sites.
- For reference, here are two GitHub locations where my archive is stored. You're welcome to experiment with it.
As I've been writing about this, another blogger, Seth Godin, has the same thought about his "corpus."
We'd like to work with a developer or group of developers who have mastered the technology behind ChatGPT and other similar systems. We don't want to become experts in this technology. But we are willing to do the work to get our data in a compatible format.
If you want to discuss, I've started a thread here.
I still use Twitter because it's still basically the same system it always has been, at least from my point of view. I don't see any fascist messages, or antisemitism, or race hate, for some reason -- that everyone else seems to see. I still have longtime friends who I only see here. It still has that annoying character limit.
I also use Mastodon, and it's more interesting all the time, esp when it comes to technical discussions. One thing I don't like about Mastodon culture is it seems to assume Twitter is over, and only terrible people use it. This feels a lot like the political divide in the US and elsewhere. I don't find this is a political thing for me. Maybe I'm too old to give a shit. That's probably it.
Musk may have screwed with Tesla's sensing devices, but he had the good sense not to screw with the driving experience, which still is like nothing else I've ever loved in a car, and I've had some good cars. Same with Twitter, so far.
People who say he's stupid don't understand how this works. No one who has reached his position in the world is even remotely stupid. Same thing with presidents, or people who reach the pinnacle of accomplishment in anything. There's more to it than you can see.
Fixed a problem in reallysimple package. It caused FeedLand app to crash, occasionally. Just had to check that something wasn't undefined. I love fixing problems like this. It's how software gets burned in.
Someone referred to Podcasting 2.0 the other day.
Oh my god.
There is only one podcasting.
I can tell this is going to be really tiresome.
You know like Web 3 and all that bullshit.
The other day someone told me that the real Web 3 is AI.
Sigh.
Would someone please make an easy way for me to feed 28+ years of writing into an AI model so i can ask it questions about what I wrote??
FAQ: In FeedLand is it possible to load in a collection of feeds via an OPML file? Yes. Here's a screen shot.
What if there were a social network for two people. So the messages wouldn't be mixed up with everything in a chat app or an email client. If the point of the conversation is to start a record, make it easy to go back through the chain of thought. And that a thread might last decades, even a whole lifetime. It's time to start thinking about long-lived special-purpose communication apps. We have the experience now, and the perspective.
The first thing I did when I started at Berkman, twenty years ago, was to get a blogging server up and running. It was 2003, so I used Manila, a product we made at UserLand. It was the first weblog server at any university, in the world. Early days. A few years after I left they converted to WordPress. A solid move both times because by then UserLand had shut down and the default blogging server was the software made by my friend Matt.
I remember when I got a key to the building. I didn't ask for it, and I certainly didn't expect it. My first thought was hmmm i wonder what i can do with this? That's where the regular Thursday evening meetup came from. We did all kinds of things for the first time. ;-)
So it's been twenty years since I started at Berkman. Thanks to Charlie Nesson, Jon Zittrain and John Palfrey for giving me the chance. Met so many who became lifelong friends, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference.
A cool feature for FeedLand users. When you Like an item, it's automatically added to two RSS feeds -- one for your likes, and one for the likes of all users on your FeedLand.It's basically a single-gesture linkblog. There's a lot of that in FeedLand, where things have been factored to a point where they couldn't possibly be simpler. Of course since they're standard RSS feeds, you could follow them from any feed reader.
One thing you should never do in reporting a bug is conflate two events that might not have anything to do with each other.
I have to work to figure out that you're doing this. Esp when a lot of unnecessary info is mixed in.
Because theories like this from people who aren't familiar with how the code works behind the scenes (no reason you should be) almost never get this right.
You have to boil it down to the minimal number of steps-to-reproduce. Those are facts that are incontrovertible. That one problem caused another? Probably not. In general. And assuming you're not familiar with the internals of the app.
Reading my notes on being at Harvard, it sounds like Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I was very excited, and it shows. In hindsight, I was about to have some great adventures. One of the best experiences of my life. Now twenty years later, I'm still very grateful for having had the opportunity to work with the people I met at Harvard, and the power afforded to me with the H-bomb business card. The friends I made there still benefit me to this day, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference.
Archive of my blog from March 2003, marking the start of the war in Iraq, and my arriving in Cambridge to begin my fellowship at Berkman
I get that people don't like that ChatGPT will return incorrect results. But as a software developer, I can experiment with the product with that caveat, and imagine its uses once the quality of the results are better, however they achieve that. I don't have to wait to think, in other words. With that disclaimer, I searched for docs about how to do a hard-reload in popular browsers. Those docs are hard to find, and when you find one it's heavily monetized. So instead, I asked ChatGPT to write a docs page to answer this question. Looks pretty good to me! No bullshit in the page either.
In FeedLand, if you're being asked to log in every time you go to the site, you're probably opening it via a bookmark that goes to the old URL. The easiest fix is to edit bookmark so it goes to https://feedland.org/ -- note the https. Another fix is to do a hard-reload of the page. This will force a new version to reload. It redirects if it gets a non https request.
Another important feature, every user has their own feed, which you can edit in FeedLand, of course. To write a post, click in the edit box at the top of the page, type some text, click the Post button. It should show up in the list of user-feed posts, below. If you want to edit one of your posts, click on the text, make the changes, click the Update button. Of course there's an RSS feed for each user, which you can subscribe to in FeedLand or any other RSS-compatible application (there are many, as I'm sure you know).
Almost everything you do on FeedLand is public. You can read anyone else's feed list. Example, Ken Smith's list. If you're signed in, to subscribe to a feed just click the feed's checkbox. You can also see who's been on recently, when they signed up, how many feeds they subscribe to, and how many pages they've viewed. You can also see the feeds that have recently been subscribed to. The idea is to make feed discovery as easy as it possibly can be. We steal (and improve on) ideas from social media apps that didn't exist last time I took a fresh look at feed systems. I don't think of FeedLand as a feed reader -- it's more of a feed management system, imho.
Back in the day, as they say -- when I was going to a city somewhere around the world, I'd post something on my blog and we'd get a meetup going. The world was smaller then or so it seems. Maybe it's just me, maybe I've gotten smaller.
It will be possible to create better teachers out of ChatGPT tech. What led me to that is that it certainly could help people write better bug reports. It would have far more patience than a busy developer, whose job is to fix bugs, not decypher a user's (justifiably) imprecise understanding of how software works. But a chatbot could help, patiently asking the user questions. Then, of course, over time -- the user would learn how to do it themselves, and get this -- they would also learn how software works. There might be some great programmers out there who don't know they are. 😄
Poll: I was having a discussion with a friend the other day and I said none of my friends have had plastic surgery. They asked how I knew, and I admitted I didn't.
It seems like the transition of FeedLand from Twitter-based identity to email-based identity has more or less worked. As part of the transition, and please this is only for people who read Scripting News, so don't pass it on -- membership in feedland.org is now open. It had been closed since Dec 12 when I started working on the transition. You only need an email address to sign up, not a Twitter identity.
My blog is being taken over by ChatGPT. It sometimes can replace four apps I used previously: Google, GitHub, Twitter, Wikipedia.
I was wondering how I could create something that behaved like an app on the Mac desktop from a page in Chrome. I want to use web Drummer to write docs about something I'm working on in Electric Drummer. It helps to have each in its own window for something like that, rather than switching back and forth between tabs. I was going to post a braintrust query but realized I could use ChatGPT and get the answer right away. It seems to have worked.
I kind of like the idea of letting the ChatGPT version of history be the authoritative one. In the record of my own life, it's more accurate than Wikipedia, which has been hacked mercilessly since inception by opportunistic credit-takers
It was the tenth anniversary of Google shutting down their Reader product.
The Register had some questions, which I answered via a voicemail, included here.
It turned into an article, which I offered some corrections:
- UserLand Software no longer exists, I left in 2002, and we shut it down a few years later. I'm just a person now, not part of any company.
- RSS 1.0 was not a fork, not sure how you'd characterize it, but it was definitely not a fork. It was a whole new syntax, had no compatibility with RSS 0.91.
- RSS 2.0, which appears to have been left out, was finished in September 2002, and was supported by the New York Times, and thus was supported by the whole news industry and became the standard. Though some disagree, it was backward-compatible with RSS 0.91 and 0.92.
- Atom was a new format, again -- not a fork. It gained some popularity and is still in use.
We're having a huge snowstorm today in the Catskills. Expecting about two feet of wet heavy snow. I'll probably lose power at some point and my internet connection, but I have Starlink as a backup.
Don't panic when asking for help with software. The problem probably can be solved, but only methodically.
I was fascinated with Communist China when I was a kid. A forbidden place. Hardly anything came out, except culture created out of Communist Party lies. I wrote letters to the Chinese Consulate in New York asking for everything they had. They sent a huge poster of Chairman Mao and colorful books with gorgeous drawings of Chinese kids doing amazing things because they studied the teachings of Chairman Mao. I wasn't stupid, I understood this was propaganda, but I loved the way they did it -- as a genre. This is what I wrote in one of my best friends' autograph book when we graduated sixth grade and went on to junior high.
Another glitch -- the other day I asked FeedLand users who had not already registered an email address to do so now. It's basically impossible for me to test this, because I don't have any accounts to use to test this since the connection with Twitter has been pretty glitchy lately. It turns out it's too late to do this transition, so we'll go ahead with the switch to email identity for feedland.org. When it switches over, you'll have to log into feedland.org using your email address, which should work for people who pre-registered. I know it's complicated, I hate it -- it's the worst use of both of our time, we get no new features for all this bullshit. But Twitter is no longer reliable in this role, so we had to do it. I'll keep you all posted here on progress, and appreciate your patience. I think it'll all be pretty smooth after this change.
If Trump were president, he'd have tried to extort some kind of fee to rescue the depositors at SVB. Or just ignored it altogether.
To email subscribers, sorry for the glitch last night. Probably due to the switch to Daylight Savings Time, the wrong version of Scripting News went out at midnight. This feels familiar, but there's nothing in my notes about how to work around this. I will have a look at the code during the day today and see if I can figure out what went wrong. I was able to get the correct email to go out at 6AM EDT today by editing the stats.json file for the app to indicate that the email for the day hadn't yet gone out, and it immediately started sending out the correct email.
This song sounds incredible on the Amazon Echo Studio.
On the other hand, we should have an open source Twitter replacement that's fucking easy to install and runs itself. Node.js. Runs on desktop in Electron for local users. It could be much easier than Mastodon. A fractional-horsepower tweeter. If anyone wants to work on that, let me know, I'd like to be part of such a thing (mostly as a user and app developer).
When Facebook launches their Twitter replacement, will they pay us to write for them, or is it the same old bullshit model where we work for free like hamsters spinning the wheels.
My step-niece and nephew, Miranda and Jake, in Jamaica had a routine with my uncle, their step-father. He would scrunch up his face looking at a plate of food and say "I don't like this!" And they would in a chorus sing "But Ken it's gooooood for you!" They were the cutest kids and he was pretty cute too gotta say.
Here's the transcript of the conversation I had with ChatGPT, doing the CSS research I describe above.
Okay now I have to tell you about my latest experience with ChatGPT. The subject is CSS. You know it's possible to do something, given all the different selectors they have. But how to combine them to do what you want to do? You can stare at the table for hours, and do trial-and-error, but if you're like me, you gave up before you even started. But with ChatGPT, you can formulate the question according to what you want to do, and it creates a docs page that probably never existed before, that shows you, with examples, how to do what you want. I just did that. Amazing. It digs you out of corners. Nothing like this has ever existed.
For some people using Mastodon is a political cause like being a Republican. I try to avoid the demagoguery by unfollowing, even blocking people, but it must be growing, because increasingly it can't be avoided and more and more of the messages are touting events that I know are pretty freaking insignificant. As an implementer, you have to watch out if you support features that are only in Mastodon and not based on ActivityPub. Which suggests that as the bigco's start implementing AP support, they're all going to face a conundrum. If we want users to think what we're doing is anything more than symbolic, we're going to have to use the Mastodon API and not ActivityPub, because no one else is doing it in AP, therefore there's nothing to interop with or test against. It's hard to promote a feature when you've never been able to test it. The whole thing is pretty shaky. And most people aren't aware of the subtleties. Time to get out a bucket of popcorn and stay on the sidelines until some of this becomes real.
If you're a current FeedLand user and you haven't yet registered an email address with your Twitter-based account, now is the time to do so. We're going to be switching the whole system over to email-based accounts soon, and it'll be more difficult to transition your account if you haven't taken this step. 💥
Same thing happened with the RSS 2.0 spec. There is only one original. Try to find it in Google. Lotsa luck. There's so much bullshit on the search results page. It's amazing we're trained not to see the lies that Google passes off as facts, but somehow we're supposed to hold the startup accountable instead.
Earlier today I used Google to try to find a doc I wrote a few years ago. I am the author. I have the original. Well a bunch of people copied my file and posted it on their sites, with their template and their ads (I don't have ads), and for whatever reason Google ranks their docs higher. Mine isn't even on the first page. So tell me, how is that Google isn't implementing a "man in the middle" attack? Why aren't they taking the heat for delivering incorrect results?
Keith Richards: "To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it."
And a list of popular songs by Cher? Now all we need is an interface to Amazon Music so I can play the songs. Maybe some checkboxes next to list items.
While my posts on Mastodon tend to be better-distributed than my Twitter posts, the "discussion" there is every bit as insipid and pointless as it ever was on Twitter. People don't read the posts, don't click on the links, ask impossible-to-parse questions, I have no idea why they bother. I want small-scale friend-nets, that aren't connected to anything else. Just my best buds. I don't give a shit if anyone else reads it, or doesn't. I want quality. Sick and tired of all the mindless bullshit.
I achieved something of a breakthrough with ChatGPT yesterday. I can now do the following:
- Search for something in ChatGPT.
- Click on a bookmarklet.
- A static HTML page opens, ready to be linked to from a blog post.
Here's a video demo that shows how it works.
Here's the web page generated in the demo.
Here's the bookmarklet I am using, written by jcubic. Thanks!
Here's the Frontier script that runs on my desktop, every second.
Here's the app that syncs a folder with a location on Amazon S3.
Re the supposed re-invention of podcasting, coming to a tech tabloid soon...
I probably should have explained yesterday why having two or more groups claiming to be the future of something that currently no one is fighting over might damage the thing they say they’re trying to help (assuming they are saying that). We've been to this place before. How long before the press starts calling it The Podcast Wars. Some of us will try to douse the flames, to no avail.
People choose bombastic names because they want more for themselves than they want for podcasting. I have a lot of experience with this. People are always looking for a way to make a billion dollars. It never occurs to them that if it all has to be for them, there will be nothing. Now a whole new generation has to learn that again, and as usual the thing that pays for it is podcasting.
I don't know all the people, or what they're planning to do, but the names they chose for their efforts tells me they don't want work with anyone, they may say they do, but they've reserved for themselves the authority over -- "podcasting," if you can believe that bullshit. They're all little people trying to sound like big people. If you want to do some good for podcasting, throw your ideas out there in the middle, and fight for interop. When the other guy does something that you do, do it their way. That's how you build.
My sense is it's too late to fuck over podcasting, that it's mostly for the people involved that I ask them to lower expectations, and don't try to make this a business model. But if they want to do it, they'll do it and the press will have a new war to write about, and in the end podcasting will stay what it is.
Here's source code for the Frontier script that copies the chat-gpt files from the Downloads folder to a calendar-structured sub-folder of my publicfolder on scripting.com.
Please don't come out with something called Podcasting 2.0 or The Podcasting Authority or Podcasting As Designed By God. Come up with a neutral code name, and explain why what you're doing will benefit podcasting. And then sit down. 🚀
I asked ChatGPT what was the first weblog. And note, the response is archived on my own site, statically rendered, in HTML. Makes it easier to share results, and for those results to get into search engines. Screen shots are bullshit.
Manton Reece is our eyes and ears from BlueSkyLand. I applied for a beta, but wasn't given one. Just as well, I'm loaded up to my ears with other stuff.
Advice from the developer of the chatgpt bookmarklet on how to customize the name of the file it generates.
Last night's Knicks game was wonderful. As the Nets gave up on their buy-a-championship nightmare, the slow-growth Knicks approach has been going great. I'm sure the Knicks would've signed KD or Kyrie if they had offered, but so thankful they diss'd the Knicks instead. Idiots. Now the normal order has been restored. Hopefully the Knicks continue to add pieces slowly and let home-grown stars like IQ continue to grow. It's intoxicating to watch him get the chance to excel as in last night's game, and completely exceed all reasonable expectations. The whole team is fantastic. Our loyalty to the team has paid off.
BTW, the bit about NetNewsWire supporting the source:markdown element in RSS may sound ho-hum, but it's actually huge. The new things in open formats tend to sound boring when you first hear about them, they take a few years to fill out, but this is enough to get the ball rolling. FeedLand is imho going to be an important product. NetNewsWire already is. Between the two products there's enough to start a bootstrap. Now I'm using their announcement to entice others to jump on board. They're listening more carefully than before. That's why I'm writing this second post, to be sure people don't miss it. Here are the developer notes for adding Markdown to your feeds and to your reader software.
I have a new way of syncing up my outline with the public web, and it's quite a bit slower than the previous method. Which means sometimes I rebuild my home page before all the changes are uploaded, leading to some hilarious mistaken posts. Have to tighten this up.
ChatGPT: "Give me the names of 23 cities, anywhere in the world, whose names begin with T and have exactly three syllables in their names." Obviously some are wildly wrong. But it's still useful to come up with potential codenames for projects. Better than my previous way of doing it, browsing a Google Map sort of randomly.
Mastodon, where I have 7.6K followers, generates far more flow than Twitter ever did, where I have 66.7K followers.
FeedLand already supports Markdown in both directions, with the source:markdown element, of course. Interop.
NetNewsWire will support Markdown in the 6.2 release. Brent Simmons describes it here. Markdown and RSS belong together. Interop is the way you move a standard forward. Now, the most popular feed reader on the Mac will include Markdown support. 💥
A long time ago a reporter friend who wrote for the WSJ sent me a link to a blurb for his new book, with my name under it. They wanted me to put this text in a blog post so they could quote it. There was no request, no "please," just here's the job. I didn't do it, and got a flamey email from the guy which surprisingly included a threat to never quote me again. What shocked me then and still shocks me today was how pro forma it seemed. The kind of thing they do for each other all the time in the news business? As far as I recall, I never wrote about it, and certainly never mentioned the name of the reporter. All that's interesting about it to me is that it appeared to be standard practice.
A GitHub repo with the contents of the RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard. No changes are contemplated, the spec has been frozen for 20+ years, but it's nice to have an off-site record.
I've been to Jamaica a couple of times and I swear I've heard people use the term "dirty shirt" as a verb. My uncle Ken who lived in Negril for years, used the term too.
What it means. When someone dirty shirts you, it's as if they did something that left a stain on your shirt, something obvious and not nice that everyone can see.
Example: When my cousin sell me bad ganja he dirty shirt me man.
But when I searched for the term on Google, or asked ChatGPT, they offered weird and wrong ideas for what the term means.
I checked in with my friend Dave Jacobs about this, he has the same understanding of what the term means, but he couldn't find our definition anywhere on the web either.
At least now the correct definition will show up here on my blog.
I find I'm starting to write like ChatGPT. Go figure. 😄
BTW, I wish ChatGPT would statically render their results pages, so I don't have to do screen shots just to quote them. Make it easier for us to promote our discoveries. It's so ridiculous that in 2023 we're still using screen shots as the way to hook networks together.
The other day I was kvelling about how great ChatGPT was at finding feeds for news sites that didn't have paywalls. Until I noticed that some of the sites most definitely did have paywalls. So it's not perfect. It's a totally 1.0 kind of thing. If you don't know what that means, it might be a good time to re-read Microserfs.
Tonight's Knicks game was pure delight. Haven't enjoyed basketball this much since Linsanity. I still don't buy that there's a Knicks-Nets rivalry. There aren't any Nets fans. They are a backup team so if the Knicks are out of town you can still go to a game. Now that the carpetbaggers have left, everything is back to normal. Dallas and Phoenix can have them. Good riddance.
This piece I wrote on 12/28 is what I think should happen next, turn the web we use into a fantastic place for writers. Right now it's a freaking disaster.
I continue to take a break after much michegas converting to email identity and HTTPS. I've got Electric Drummer more or less working, and I think I'm going to stop short of getting all of it working, given that I want to keep taking this break and am not up for more grinding away. Something changed over here, and I'm more inclined to let you all take care of yourselves for a while. Mastodon is fine, even though I can't write for it using the tools I like to use. So far only my blog qualifies, and my docs and this.how stuff. I'm enjoying the winter here in the Catskills and dreaming of other cool things to do. Software right now far from my mind. That could change at any time.
I've been using Facebook for many years. Even so, I've never figured out how to navigate the basic structure. I want to see all the comments I've posted in reverse chronologic order. Where is that command? Then it hit me, they need ChatGPT as the UI of their product. Let's give it a try. "In Facebook, how do I see a reverse chronologic list of all the comments I've left on other people's posts?" Here's the result. I tried it, got the list, edited a message. This solves a huge design problem in software. How to simplify complex software so people can feel more in control.
A few days ago I asked Brent Simmons where we go to talk about ideas for making our products work together in interesting new ways. Where do we go to congregate? I just watched a fantastic documentary about Laurel Canyon in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s, near Sunset Strip, which had lots of bars, for all kinds of music and the musicians who made the music. Lots of famous names. People who created a generation of pop music, with lots of collaboration. This is a necessary component for tech. When I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1979, I kept looking for the pulse of the place. Where do people meet up. And within hours I found Ken's House of Pancakes on El Camino in Mountain View was a good place. There was Siam Garden in Menlo Park. Chef Chu's in Los Altos. For a few years, my yard in Woodside was a frequent party place. I am amazed by all the people who came to BloggerCons. Okay so now we're on the web, we've been here for 30 freaking years. Where do you go if you have an idea you want to share ideas with other developers, who may not develop for the same platform, or work for a large company. This is missing. At one point the discussion group on this blog served that purpose, but it was taken over by trolls, of course. But nowadays we have less crazy ideas about "free speech" and know how to ruthlessly dispose of trolls. I'd like to figure this out.
I'm always looking out for good clip art for my blog. An example: Sarah Sherman playing a TV host caught on a roller coaster for 19 hours. Sally Field on Letterman, and a cartoon image of President Carter.
Manton is a friend, but I don't agree with him on character limits in blog posts. I hope in a few years all these discussions about what's the optimal number of characters for a post will be seen as farce, like the scene in Amadeus where the Emperor says Mozart's opera has too many notes. I don't think it's up to Emperors or software developers to have opinions on what's the right number of characters in my writing. What if in turn, as a writer, I said Manton's code couldn't have more 500 characters per file. What's the likelihood that my edict would make any sense? Hopefully that puts it in perspective. There's a simple solution available to everyone, a More link at some arbitrary breakpoint, that does enough to encourage short posts if that's what you're after. And it also makes sense to writers.
It’s that time of year where you think winter must be nearly over but this is just the beginning of the torture.
Anyway -- now that Electric Drummer is building, there are lots of things to fix now that the lower-level code that it uses has been fixed to accomodate HTTPS. When they say supporting HTTPS is a breeze, only if you don't already have a codebase. Those GoogleHoles are sooo sneaky. Just like Russian propagandists. It's okay this is the relatively easy stuff. Of course in fixing these problems I will break other things. Sigh.
I mentioned the other day that I was having trouble building Electric Drummer after many months of being focused on FeedLand. Problem solved. My written build instructions were missing a step. I couldn't move on until I solved this problem. Electric Drummer is essential software for my daily work. I do all my for-work writing here. That's a very basic thing, and something I might take on, starting from scratch with an online world that assumes the writers are always able to write in their favorite apps. If an online system can't accomodate this, we don't write for them. I think this would gain traction quickly, most writers already know how broken the web is for writing and I think would immediately want to use a system that was built on the idea of unbreaking it, even if it meant not being able to write for other environments. If I do this, I'll immediately lobby my friends at Automattic to support it, so I expect/hope that Tumblr and WordPress would be among the first to be on board with what amounts to an iteration on the old blogging APIs. Nothing more than that.
Azeem Azhar: "ChatGPT has organised much of the world’s information and made it easily accessible."
Fixed a problem in Drummer. The About tab was missing in user blogs. A bit of breakage in the transition to the new identity system, fixed.
I've been thinking about how memos work in highly structured organizations. When you're cc'd on a memo as CEO you like to see up front if there are no action items for you below, that this is just an FYI thing. I never had the time to read every sentence in every memo I was cc'd on, nor would it be appropriate. Everyone had to learn to be clear about the presence of action items below before starting their narrative. Just putting an FYI at the top with a short list of people who have to act. Most memos, I found were totally informational, ie contained no action items for anyone.
The vexing problem I explained yesterday is solved. But not the way I expected it to go. I kept banging my head on the Electric Drummer codebase, and I couldn't get it to build. Of course I have a process for that, but it had been months since I did one, and somewhere in there something stopped working, silently. I gave up in frustration after a few hours of slogging, getting nowhere, and on my way out, cleaning up after my failed adventure, I realized I could do it without changing E/D at all. It's a long story, no space for it here -- but I wanted to close the loop. I am now able to edit my I/O in E/D and I'm a H/C.
I used to live in Woodside CA, where snow on the ground was unheard of. Until today. Wow. And now I live in Woodstock NY where snow this time of year is the norm, yet this year there has been almost none.
First, it's good that people are working on new features for RSS for podcasts. Why not. But you should choose a modest name for your effort. By calling it Podcasting 2.0 you're basically forcing anyone else who wants to do something here to call theirs 3.0 or 4.0. Just come up with a random name, like The Oslo Project. How did I come up with that name? I asked ChatGPT to do it : "Please give me 10 random names of European cities with less than 4 syllables in their names." Or you can ask for children's names. Or color names. Or Yiddish words. And then please, look at what the other guys are doing and instead of implementing something slightly different with a different name, just do it their way. The only goal here should be upgrading the user experience and interop, so there's no freaking lockin. Keep the bullshit level to a minimum. "Available where you get your podcasts."
I'm still trying to figure out how to retrofit Instant Outlining in Electric Drummer without having to implement support for the new email-based identity system. It's especially hard to do that for an Electron app, it took a huge effort to get Twitter identity in there. E/D stores files locally, and combined with Public Folder, means it doesn't need any help storing stuff where it's public accessible. The hard part, I'm finding, is to figure out where I need to stop it from overwriting one of the head-level attributes. I wrote all this code, but it's so freaking complicated. Having cleared that up, I'm now ready to take another approach. I'll let you know how it goes.
I’ve been searching for this quote from John Lennon, and found it via Paul McCartney: “It’s only me.” Here's the full quote.
- One of my great memories of John is from when we were having some argument. I was disagreeing and we were calling each other names. We let it settle for a second and then he lowered his glasses and he said: “It’s only me.” And then he put his glasses back on again. To me, that was John. Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade, the armour, which I loved as well, like anyone else. It was a beautiful suit of armour. But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you’d just see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world.
When you’ve lost your way in a long friendship, hopefully there’s an only me place you can get back to.
Drummer blogging is now restored on the new system. Things had to move around, of course, because of HTTPS. And the addresses of the blogs have changed too. Sorry, but we did a big migration there, you can see the role identity plays in online work. We were depending on a private company that became wobbly, so that's what caused the breakage. The foundations we build on on the 2023 web basically suck. Sorry I wish it weren't so.
Even if a national divorce were possible constitutionally, it would leave minorities in the new Confederacy subject to all the abuses of fascist dictatorships like slavery and genocide. The United States guarantees rights to all, not just white Christians.
BTW, I've been meaning to ask if there's anyone from Automattic who is a regular reader? There's an interesting project being contemplated, and if you're in this loop you might be able to help. Contact me via email (on the About page).
I never ask personal friends to subscribe to my nightly email. I also never look to see who's subscribed. Not a guarantee I never will, but in practice, I don't want to know who's tuned in and who isn't. I don't ask personal friends to subscribe because they might choose not to, and that's not something I want to try to parse. Everyone's free to do as they want, and to not know what the choice was, unless the other party wants to make it known. Complicated? Yes, and still evolving.
The other day I wrote about the problems that will appear unexpectedly because of the new rules imposed by HTTPS now that Drummer is running as an HTTPS app. One of the problems -- it totally broke Instant Outlines. If the user subscribes to an outline that's served under HTTP, the browser won't let us read it, because (I guess) they think we're loading code or private data. Neither is true. By definition the outline is public. There will be a workaround, we can call a server to read the file. I could be spending the time inventing new stuff, instead I'm mopping up after the EFF and Google.
I chimed in on a Masto thread about whether the standard is Mastodon or ActivityPub. I was also asked for my advice which I freely gave.
I went through my midlife crisis in the 90s, and it was a doozy.
Up till then, my life was directed toward success. This was something I wanted ever since I was a small child. I wanted to do something great and creative. Maybe invent something. I wanted to make a difference.
I arrived in the 90s with most of the boxes checked. I had attained success in the way that I had set out to. Then I waited for the feeling of satisfaction. I waited for everyone whose approval I yearned for to approve of me. Nothing. Emptyness. All the approval felt conditional. I was looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes. The place to look for harmony is inside not outside.
So, did I approve of myself? No, not in any way. I was living a lie. I wasn't listening to myself. I was letting other people define me. I had another hill to climb, to learn how to listen to the internal chatter always going on inside me. All the voices, who were they and what did they want?
I did a lot of things on this path. One of them is I started writing publicly frequently, and then every day. I took risks, and told stories that didn't used to make it to journalism. I was offered a writing job at Wired. I was developing software to support this new activity, and in the process created something new, this time wasn't aimed at fame and fortune, checking the boxes. It was simply something I wanted to have. Not saying the software I did before was just for checking boxes, that was never the case. Just that this was the first software I made that had nothing to do with checking the boxes.
Another thing I did was start therapy. Eight years on the couch. Talking about myself. Being heard by someone whose job it was to listen.
The first big discovery came a couple of years in.
I was frustrated with something a relative did. I said "I know what they're doing right now." I was sure of it.
The therapist asked: "How do you know?"
That stopped me. I said: "I don't know."
Then I asked: "Why didn't you ask that before?"
Therapist: "I've been asking all along, this is the first time you responded."
The big lesson was, as you dream your way through life, before you make a decision check with your senses to see if the perception was right.
Always ask yourself how you know what the other person is doing.
The archive
- I’ve been writing on web 28+ years and all of it is archived in machine-readable form, no scraping needed.
- I’m fascinated by the idea of a ChatGPT type app digesting all my writing so I can ask "myself" various questions.
- Some writers are scared of having their archive turned into the learning material for an AI chatter, but not me.
- I'd love to be a guinea pig.
- If you need a license I will provide.
- Let me know.
The idea
- The bot would appear to be me.
- So you'd say -- how old are you?
- And it would answer -- 67.
- What do you think of microsoft?
- And then it would come up with the answer i would come up with.
If you're interested how the music of my generation (born 1955, Boomer) came about, I can't more highly recommend the two-part documentary Laurel Canyon, currently streaming on Amazon Prime. I got real interested in the music of Laurel Canyon when I was exploring the story of CSNY and all the members individually after David Crosby died. I wish I had been part of a creative community like that. That was what I was dreaming of for my life back then, and it was right there and until now I didn't know it existed. Learning a lot about my own life these days, by studying what was going on around it. I don't think any of this could have happened without Wikipedia, YouTube and podcasting. It's amazing how well our media cover history now. This could be the golden age of history. Weird idea, I know.
BTW, I've now been through switching two HTTP apps to HTTPS, and what they say about it being easy to retrofit is just marketing, ie nah, it no more true than Node is single-threaded. In some cases, for a simple static website, it can be totally automatic. Check out Caddy. It's a miracle, if you think HTTPS is a requirement. But if you're talking about an app like Drummer or FeedLand, it's a pretty large undertaking, with cascading problems, and fraught with opportunities for breakage that could be hard to find (I'll let you know in a year or two, knock wood). Using HTTPS means you have to use it in everything the app comes in contact with. Google and EFF as bright as they are haven't anticipated every way of building software on the net. This was a lesson I had learned before. We thought converting ThinkTank from the IBM PC and Apple II to the Mac would be easy. Ultimately we had to write a new product from scratch. The assumptions were different. But in that case I made the choice, not Google and the EFF.
I need an outliner to manage my email drafts. In a perfect world I'd be able to plug one in. But we are very far from that. We were closer in the late 80s and early 90s. That was my goal then, to turn the apps of a GUI into toolkits for people who wrote scripts to connected them to create their own applications. Why should I have to write a whole word processor to have a new feature that no one else knows they need. If I could hook my emailer up to my outliner, I would get better use of the drafts I wrote. The ultimate goal is to do all my writing in my favorite writing app, and send pointers to the writing to the other apps, emailers, chat apps, CMSes, there would be only one original, and if I made a change to the original the updates would flow to all the places I sent pointers. Again we were much closer to this 30 years ago than we are now. But I think we have a chance to start fresh now with these goals. That's when you want to do this kind of integration for interop, at the beginning, before there are any apps. It's very hard to retrofit later, I can't say I've ever seen it work.
Basically the people who run the country don't care how many Americans are murdered by gun violence. Pretty sure a fair number of those sacrificed watch Fox News.
If you're using the new Drummer and you have files you want transferred from the old Drummer, see the instructions for how to request.
There's this great scene in Get Back. McCartney and Lennon are disagreeing, it's getting personal, or heavy in some way. Lennon looks at McCartney, big pause, and says "It's just me." The founders of the Beatles. The biggest rock stars. The whole franchise. On the other hand, they were nobodies together. Now everyone thinks we're so important, but come on, it's just me. Funny thing is, when you're a nobody you're desperate to be somebody. And when you're the biggest somebody there is, you yearn to be a nobody again. Nothing ironic about it, it's almost mathematical. BTW, if you find this clip on YouTube, I'd love to include it with this post.
Yesterday I posted a series of tweets outlining where I want to go next. It's about reviving the blogger developer community, to give them the tools we didn't have in the 90s and 00s that are now very practical. And start to grow, slowly at first, the way blogging and podcasting grew, with a clear foundation of what a document is, so interop is really simple and we're not so vulnerable to Silicon Valley adventures. To give programmers the means to easily deploy their apps with the minimum fuss, and for users to be able to take responsibility for keeping their own work safe. Then, having achieved this I will retire to Albania where I will throw pottery and sew afghans.
I just redirected from drummer.scripting.com to drummer.land. So you can use Drummer once again. It's been down since Feb 4, while it was retooled for email-based identity and HTTPS. It all appears to work as well as it did when we previously did identity with Twitter. It has been a really stressful couple of weeks, while working with developers on getting FeedLand open source release out, I had to also rip up Drummer and put in a new identity system. All the code was written but it still was an ugly transition, one you hope to never have to do. Report problems here. Remember to give us steps to reproduce. If we don't understand what the problem it'll be hard to fix it.
What I’d like to say to Kyrie Irving. I know you don’t come from the US so you might not know that here Blacks and Jews are equal, in theory. We’re all fighting for that to be recognized. Legally we have the same rights and deserve the same respect. That’s why your behavior was both bewildering and unacceptable, and why you feel you were chased out of NYC, which is an especially tolerant part of he US because it is a cultural melting pot. We all have to get along, and accept and even celebrate our differences. Your view of the world just doesn’t fit in here. Maybe they’ll like you better in Dallas, but I’d be surprised if they do.
What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good boy?" Rub behind the ears and when they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing.
Drummer users, we're almost ready to switch over to the new Drummer. If you want your files moved to the new server, you have to register your Twitter address and email address a new utility app. Read the instructions carefully. It takes less than a minute. All you need is access to the Twitter account you used for Drummer and to know what email address you want to use for your Drummer identity.
I had an odd feeling last night watching the Knicks-Nets game last night. The revulsion was gone. These were two New York teams, roughly comparable, and there weren't any carpetbaggers or Nazis on the floor, at least none that I knew of. The weird feeling was pride. This is NY basketball. I like it. Both teams have a good foundation to build on, and lots of first round draft picks in the bank, so there's hope for more talent. But don't import people who already have their championship rings who expect us to root for them. We want a unique experience, suitable for our great city. I'm still a Knicks fan, but I could see myself rooting for the Nets. BTW, the Knicks won in a blowout, that also contributed to the good vibe. 😄
It's kind of screwed up when fellow independent developers who have little or no investment in Twitter as a platform gloat over its apparent collapse. Imagine if you had built on Apple and they were screwing around with their developer platform and in the process making their developers spin their wheels, or maybe go out of business. I've been in that place, with Apple, a number of times. It would be really poor form for a Windows developer to gloat. I hope friends who have invested in other platforms remember the Golden Rule. Today we're moving as fast as we can and burning out, to get out of the way of Twitter's careening dumpster fire. Next year it could be your turn. 💥
This thread is worth money. I've given ChatGPT programming jobs like the ones the author descibes, and it's saved me huge amounts of time. Last one was asking how to do something with the Twitter API. I could have spent fifteen minutes trying to find it in the docs, or on Stack Exchange, but I got the answer instead in a few seconds, and there was no bullshit, no preambles, just the answer to the question I asked.
Another example. Last summer I had a medical problem, and the local clinic that I go to is having problems keeping people on staff. My normal primary care physician, who I loved, had just retired (in her 40s) so I had to see three different doctors, and they all guessed wrong about what was afflicting me. Finally I got a new doctor and after two visits and one visit to a specialist, we had it nailed down, I got treatment and it's getting better. That's a full year of dealing with a problem because no one doctor could focus on the problem long enough to see what the problem was. As an experiment I tried entering the symptoms to ChatGPT and it warned me I should see a doctor, but then proceeded to get the diagnosis correct. This is the kind of thing that will save lives, improve overall health, and help our awful health system in the US cope with the fact that doctors are retiring because they have burnout jobs. It might even help the doctors cope with that reality and maybe not burn out in the first place.
The fact is that most of medicine is doing what ChatGPT does so well. Getting some data and then applying best practices. We all get the same treatment for the ailments we have and most of them are ordinary, Occam's Razor maladies (ie it usually is what it looks like it is and it usually is what everyone else has).
Journalists, who do most of the writing about news, immediately focus on how it might affect their careers, and imho educators zoom past the purpose of education, to create more better-educated people. As a kid, I had a party the day my parents bought us an encyclopedia. That meant we could settle arguments by getting facts. We could've gotten them before but that would've meant a trip to the library. Better tools make for better information. ChatGPT is a revolutionary tool. Kind of like Alta Vista was when the web first came out. I'm sure people screamed that it would screw up something. People always say that about change, esp people who are invested in the way things are.
Maybe there will be negative consequences of ChatGPT, but I'm sure we're not in a position to see what they are now, based on experience with similar changes. And maybe we'll look back on this moment twenty years from now, and not be able to imagine what life was like before we had this fantastic tool.
The best new thing about FeedLand is the feed list. You can scan from top to bottom and see who updated, and by clicking on the wedge next to feed, you can see the five most recent posts. It's a new kind of feed reader. You can see how it works by clicking this link. That's my feed list. You can view anyone's list. For example here's Scott Hanson's list. You want to see a list of who has lists? No problem. All this without logging in. Unprecedented, goes far beyond feed readers. It's a group feed management system. Unprecedented. New ground. Soon you'll be able to run your own server. It's getting close.
I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why Caddy wasn't working with Drummer's websocket code. I was writing a post for the Caddy repo, asking for help, when I noticed it was working. I changed absolutely nothing. Didn't reboot anything, or change any configuration settings. So now we're much closer to being able to redirect to the new site and let the users start checking it out for real.
One of the funny things about XML is that they pitched developers saying "Now you can create your own formats!" I'm sure they meant it, but once RSS was established, they tried to replace it with an incompatible format. Luckily, the W3C wasn't as powerful as Apple or Google, and their format didn't replace RSS. But, imho, when you push an open tech and someone takes you up on it, you should help, not fight them, ie if you really meant it.
James Cridland of Podnews created a modern feed with the podcasts from Trade Secrets, the show Adam Curry and I did in 2004-2005 during in the first wave of podcasting. I've loaded it into FeedLand. And James loaded it into Podfriend. It's great to have this stuff resurrected in a form that people interested in the formation of podcasting, journalists and historians we hope, can learn from. Thanks James! I hope he does the same with my Morning Coffee Notes podcast, which precedes Trade Secrets, and documents developments in the summer of 2004.
Alexa responds to things you say when you didn't say "Alexa," which contradicts everything Amazon says about privacy. If it doesn't listen, then how does it wake up exactly? BTW, Google does this too. Sometimes I'm recording a voicemail or a podcast using my iPhone and my Pixel 6 starts responding to what I am saying. It's funny, even cute, until you realize it wasn't supposed to hear any of that.
Coming back from deep in the innards of FeedLand and Drummer, which both are getting HTTPS support. Under development, not yet ready for users. But here's something cute. If FeedLand supports HTTPS in all its functionality, it will end up demanding that people with feeds support HTTPS too, and will fail for those that don't. If we continue down this path, I will be doing Google's work, helping them take ownership of the web. Here's the deal. Suppose you're displaying an item from a feed that includes an image. Suppose that image is served from an HTTP website, but your reader is running HTTPS. Well forget it. You won't see the image. The browser will refuse to load it. This came up with Scott Hansen tried to look at an item from Scripting News that contained a painting from René Magritte. Here's a screen shot. I'm trying to think of a way I could not give aid and comfort to the enemy. There might be a way. I don't want to betray the open web. I might be willing to do a lot of work so I don't force the owner of that site to support HTTPS (which I know he won't do because he is me). The old moral of the story -- give an inch, they'll take a mile.
I did a quick review of Twitter's new API pricing, I can't spend a lot of time on it given that I'm paddling as fast as I can to get a new Drummer online that doesn't depend on Twitter logins. But the first problem I see is that they think (apparently) that each dev has a single app. Which for me is vary far from the truth. Heroku made the same mistake, they came up with what they felt was a fair price, assuming the developer made one big app. The problem is with a free product running for so many years, we made lots of really small apps. Why build something huge when the idea is small. The cost of staying with Heroku would have been totally diseconomic when full servers that could run all my apps for $10 a month. Why should I pay Heroku $500 for the same thing, even though I had to do a lot of work to dig out of the hole. Now with Twitter, I think I'll just bow out, and let other people find out if this is workable or not. I'll leave my servers running, and if they stop working, we'll figure out what if anything to do then. None of the apps I've made that depend on Twitter are worth $100 a month to keep running. That's another story, because the Twitter ecosystem for cool utilities was practically non-existent. All that energy from now on clearly is going to Mastodon where there is no vendor who can turn the cart over, at least not yet (don't rule it out, it could happen).
One of my favorite things on Twitter are the art channels. The curators post reproductions of famous works of art. And occasionally RT another art channel they feel is related to their artist. It's a way to broaden the art you get to see. When they talk about how horrible Twitter is they leave out stuff like this. However, without use of the API these channels can't exist, and since each is a labor of love, it's unreasonable to expect them to pay for it.
There will be features that used to work in Drummer that won't work in the new version. I have no idea when they will work. I am shipping the first open source version of FeedLand at the same time, working on both -- and this is really precarious work. Drummer will work as an outliner. The scripting features will mostly work, the Twitter verbs obviously will not work. Your public files will be at different addresses. Maybe that can be worked out, but nothing will happen quickly. As I've said before I'm one person, doing the best I can. I expect people to be appreciative and supportive, friendly. Thanks in advance. 😄
I'm rewatching the HBO series Silicon Valley and loving it as much the second time as I did the first. They really do capture the insanity of the place. I swear I'm in a bunch of the episodes, or it feels that way.
The new version of Drummer will be ready for testing soon, maybe even later today. If you want to help, please sign up by replying to this item, or watch my blog. As they say -- still diggin!
Mr Michegas is the name of my test server.
This outline is running in the new version of Drummer that:.
- Does identity with an email address.
- Runs under the warm secure Google-blessed blanket of HTTPS, thanks to Caddy. (Very easy way to do HTTPS if you use PagePark.)
Finally I can use it to write an outline.
This is an ugly job. The very top level of every app is the dirtiest part.
But I have something working, and that's something to celebrate.
A little story I probably have written before.
I once made an exciting product called Frontier just for the Mac, and this turned out to be a mistake, because while I was making the product, Apple changed, and they eventually attacked and destroyed my investment, which was considerable, and also set us back a long way, all of us, imho.
I'm typing this on a Mac because right now this is the best computer for me to use. But what Apple did to us was terrible.
This is life. You have to deal with it.
Brent and I both come from UserLand where we had excellent collaborative tools. Far in advance of what we're using on Mastodon. I've been using the instant outlines feature of Drummer lately to organize my work on this complicated corner-turn I have to do because (as Brent points out) Twitter has become unreliable. I'd rather take care of this now than put it off for much longer. I'm asking this question in a lot of places. Why have we let the web stagnate? Why be preoccupied with the machinations of Musk et al. Why don't we take advantage of the new freedom we have in light of their chaos to build new stuff! Taking features out of products seems like giving up to me, or perhaps it's lightening the load. We'll see I guess.
A question for Brent Simmons. If you are off Twitter, where are we supposed to meet? What's our common ground? Serious question. Maybe it's Mastodon for now. Is that the best we can do, feature-wise and from a UI and open formats and protocols standpoint, in 2023? We've been at this for almost 30 years. 💥
I changed my Twitter bio, removing the phrase "I'm not trying to get rich or famous." I felt that was a bit holier-than-thou. And at times I most definitely am thinking about that. So it's a matter of integrity. My rule is when what you appear to be is different from what you are, you should change one or the other or both. Here's a screen shot that highlights the part I took out. I am still dedicated to fixing things that are broken, but there's no unawkward way to say that, so I removed it too for now.
Note to people who read the linkblog tab on Scripting News and in the nightly email. Radio3, the tool I use for linkblogging, relies on Twitter identity. Twitter is not allowing me to log in. I see that's happening for other users too, but I've also heard of users who are able to log on to Radio3 via Twitter. Obviously I'm going to have to fix that app too. Until that happens, the linkblog will not be updating. Can't be helped. I'm not against Twitter btw, I see it as something that stretches back in time, and hopefully has some kind of future. It's struggling now, that's for sure. Maybe it'll come back together. I am most definitely not rooting against it, and it bothers me to see other people doing it. This isn't a sport, it's a world-level communication system that we use. While Mastodon has taken the Twitter idea for its own, it is not in any way a replacement for Twitter. In the past few days it's become painfully obvious how much we depend on it, and how it's negatively impacting my work when it's in trouble. I don't see any victory really for anyone in this other than people who get a charge from of other people's misery.
Making good progress converting Drummer to email-based identity. I had all the pieces written, but I wasn't sure at first how they fit together. This morning I started down a path and everything clicked into place. Like a ski boot into a binding. When the pieces fit together like this I call it "clean living" -- we didn't cut any corners when doing this for FeedLand, and the two products share a foundation, the bits were already there. I hadn't worked on Drummer in almost a year. It took a while for the cobwebs to shake off. Nice to see you my old friend, who I've been using all this time. Anyway, I think we'll have a test version of this ready in a day or two. Deploy shortly after, fingers crossed, praise Murphy.
I had to turn off drummer.scripting.com while I work on the new version that uses email for identity and is accessed through HTTPS. It would take too much time to try to keep both versions running at the same time. So I have redirected it to a temporary placeholder site, and when the new site is ready, it will redirect to that site. We will then have to figure out how to have your data meet you on the other side. So this will happen in several steps, of which this is the first. And in doing this I will learn how to do it for other sites such as Radio3, BingeWorthy, etc. If you have questions, see this thread. Please don't ask when will it be ready. This is still seat-of-the-pants unfortunately due to the randomness of the changes at Twitter. Also, your data is safe.
I was getting "invalid token" errors from Radio3, from Twitter. I tried logging off and logging back on and am not being allowed to. I see in the log that other users are getting that error as well. It could be Twitter's system has failed, or they turned us off.
Speaking of audiobooks, Amazon's service, audible.com, which I used to subscribe to, is a huge ripoff. You have to be an active member to listen to the books you bought. So you can't, if you have too many unread books, suspend the service so you can start to catch up. For the most part Amazon is pretty good at not keeping money it isn't entitled to. If something goes wrong and you jump through all the hoops, they give you your money back. They want a long-term relationship, it seems. But this policy of Audible's seems to be the exception. As if they don't give a shit what you think of them. How very un-Amazon.
BTW, yesterday's problem with my Android phone was solved quickly by a number of readers. Thank you all very much. It was right there in the screen shot. Somehow Do Not Disturb mode got turned on. I never would have done that on purpose. This is a phone I use mainly for listening to podcasts and audiobooks and for 2-factor identity. Why does it turn off media? What kind of sense does that make. And from a UI standpoint, there should be some clue somewhere near the slider as to why that it's disabled. I tried to find the answer on Google and ChatGPT before broadcasting the question. Neither had any good advice about this.
Thread: Twitter was sitting on an AWS-size opportunity. I tried to clue Jack into this, but he was always dreaming of really cool shit, and all we want is a simple package of services that work and have no patience for science experiments. Identity and storage that the user pays for and grants access to our apps. We'll do the creative stuff. Storage and identity has to be boring and reliable, and not subject to having the rug pulled out from us. It's something we need to build on, at the very lowest level of the stack.
The first big project I'm undertaking in the transition away from Twitter is Drummer. In the new world, Drummer will manage identity for itself using email addresses, and thus it will use HTTPS. So the first step in the conversion is getting rid of all the hard-coded http URLs in the app. I'm sure they're not all gone yet, but the app does boot up without errors now both on a test server (which uses HTTPS), and the same code runs on the current Drummer site (which uses HTTP). You can help test it out by using Drummer with the JavaScript console open, and note any errors that have to do with HTTP and HTTPS and report them here.
So journalists, there’s nothing surprising about twitter screwing with their api. But we should be nailing Google for trying to steal the open web.
Starting to do small things for the corner-turn away from Twitter. We no longer have RT icons on items on the Scripting News website. And there no longer is a button in the upper left corner that lets you log on and off of Twitter. Watch this space for more updates, and I'm also adding notes to the thread about changes people are making.
When you build on corporate APIs you have to know there's a fair chance the owner will pull the rug out on you, as twitter is doing now. The only APIs you can trust are open APIs that aren’t owned by anyone -- like the web -- http, html, rss. You have to watch out because the bigco’s will try to own those too. Journos are oblivious. Can’t get their attention. To a large extent Google already owns the web. And they are throwing their weight around in much more consequential ways than twitter. But Google is invisble to the press. That will end some day.
Do you have an app that runs on the twitter api? What is your plan for next week? I started a thread on the Scripting repo to gather comments. Let's not use Twitter for this one. 😀
I wrote this eight years ago.
I have a friend who's going thru a familiar struggle. I have some advice that's imho worth sharing.
Go some place natural. Alone. Where no one knows you or who you know. Subtract everything that defines you as a pundit or friend of the rich and famous. No gadgets.
Swim. Get massaged. Try being quiet. Talk about your childhood. Find yourself, the person you've been hiding from.
Just be another random person, one of seven billion, because that is the truth. That is who you are. Who I am. Who everyone is. When you really feel it a weight comes off. None of this shit matters.
Over night Twitter announced that they're cutting off free access to their API, which we depend on in all my products. They made the announcement in a vague way and with just seven days notice. I think there's a good chance they'll realize that this is a shitty way to do it, and will take it back, on one hand, but on the other hand, let's get out of here now. This is not a good place to develop products. I hoped they would leave this part of their API alone, and I expected more notice, but it didn't turn out that way. It is what it is.
A disclaimer, all of what I write here today is seat-of-pants. I don't know how this is going to turn out, but right now I want you, if you use my products, to prepare for a complete shutdown, just in case.
In some cases, esp for products that were designed only to enhance Twitter, they will not come back. For example, thread.center. It only works with Twitter, so when the API is gone, I will just shut it down.
The two products I care about most are Drummer and FeedLand. I will do everything I can to transition them.
Little Outliner which I have left running even though Drummer is a better version of the same product, will not transition.
Both Drummer and Little Outliner have commands to download all your outlines. You should do that now. There's no excuse for you losing any data, and I will not help get your data after Twitter shuts off the API. Take care of yourself. Download your stuff. Now.
For FeedLand there's nothing to worry about. All your data is public, so even if for some reason you cannot log onto FeedLand, you will still be able to get your data because you don't need to log in to get it.
Follow Scripting News for more notes about the transition.
Finally, I am just one person. I won't stand for people treating me like a corporation with a staff of people working on this. I am not more powerful than you are, so remember that when you ask for help. There will no tolerance of abuse.
And if you have questions, here's a place to ask.
I can now settle the age-old debate about what is and isn't a podcast. If at the end of your show, and in promos, you say "Available where ever you get your podcasts," then it's a podcast! If you don't say it, then it ain't a podcast! To illustrate, here's the shortest podcast ever.
Eli Pariser: "First thoughts on Artifact, the new news reader from the Instagram guys. Right now it feels like a slick, maybe more personalized rewrite of Apple News. But not much serendipity—it’s all pretty narrowly tailored to what I indicated as my tastes, and I haven’t discovered much that’s surprising or interesting there."
The first program to download podcasts was MUOTD, in 2001, in conjunction with the Grateful Dead experiment.
I have a group of testers working with me on getting the open source release of FeedLand ready to go. And this is the week we're working on HTTPS support. One of my friends thanked me for doing this work, and I thought my response deserved to be public, so here it is.
- Supporting HTTPS in FeedLand was the plan all along. The rule is if you're giving your identity to a service, you gotta have HTTPS. My commitment is to the web. I think HTTPS is shitty technology, I'm sure Google if they tried harder, or asked me, could have come up with more of a win-win. But it is what it is. They're a shit company, but HTTPS is not Google. I know that. Some people can't seem to get that I get that. Not everything is a political cause. I think they're accustomed to Republican politics where they'll burn the world down to assert their will. I'm genuinely in this for the good of everyone, not just me. And -- I don't blame HTTPS for Google.
My profile on Twitter is something I think every technologist should agree with, like the Hippocratic Oath doctors take.
- I work for the betterment of the network we all share. I'm not trying to get rich or famous, just fix the stuff that's broken. I hope you are doing that too.
It's okay to want to be rich or famous, btw -- I like having money, and if you succeed at being famous I want to warn you there's a downside to it, but more power to you. But if you make technology, you really have to sign on to the first part, or else your work is bullshit, imho of course.
To journalists (and others) who are trying to figure out how podcasting was born, I suggest listening to the podcasts in Morning Coffee Notes starting at 6/11/2004. Work your way up the list. Those were amazing days, lots of firsts and imho lots of fun. I kept the archive because I hoped at some point someone would want to know how it happened. Maybe grad students will do a thesis on this stuff? This is a new medium being born. I tried to keep good records. Also recommend looking at Scripting News archives for 2004 as well.
To anyone who cares about ActivityPub, Peter Zingg provides a great roadmap for what's needed to get serious adoption.
Once, a long time ago, checking into a flight, I had to give my address. I said 117 Easy Street -- she interrupted and asked "Anytown, USA?" One of the best lines ever.
Having done it with FeedLand, I was starting to think how to wean Drummer off Twitter identity, and had a stunning realization -- it may not be necessary, since (I believe, haven't tested yet) it might be possible to host Drummer from a FeedLand instance.
I would actually have to do it to be sure there aren't any roadblocks I haven't foreseen. But they're both running the same server software, daveappserver, and once you've established an identity in FeedLand I don't see why it can't be used with Drummer.
Ken Smith was tripping out on the synergies between Drummer and FeedLand. This, if it works, would blow the doors off that. They would be storing their data in the same place. You would be able to open your FeedLand bookmarks menu in Drummer, to start.
I figured something else out. I was wondering what would happen if Twitter broke their identity with developers like me as they did with the clients, how would we transition Drummer then? I don't want people to have to start over. I could ask them to do what I asked FeedLand users to do, is make a connection between their Twitter identity and an email address, as a backup.
Then I realized we would be able to do what we do now when we want to associate an email address with a domain, ask the user to post something to their Twitter account, some magic string. When we see it in their timeline, voila, we know they are who they say they are and we can move the files to the new server. So we can relax. Users shouldn't have to lose data if Twitter pulls the plug.
One more thing, when Twitter was blowing up, I was getting harassed by idiots (no other word for it sorry) who didn't understand that you can't unwind a connection just by snapping your fingers. Identity is baked into an app at a deep level. And, when it already has users, and has gone through a ship cycle, you can't just flip a switch or everything you worked so hard for would just fall apart. It would be like, for example, making the NYC subway system run on a different track gauge. Sure you could do it, but it might take a few weeks. 😄
BTW, all who think Musk/Twitter is the big problem, you're falling for a smokescreen. A much bigger problem is the brain of Google. It's the nightmare of science fiction. We have no clue what it wants. It has unfathomably immense unchallenged power.
Today's song: You don't have to cry. I can't tell you how much I love this song. And it turns out this was the first CSN song. It was first sung in Joni Mitchell's Laurel Canyon living room, or Cass Elliot's kitchen, or John Sebastian's house. Crosby and Stills were tripping out on their harmonies. Cass brought Graham Nash with her to meet them. After hearing the song twice, he joined the harmony. Imagine the discovery that this kind of music was possible, and that it was coming from you! BTW, the song was written by Stills about Judy Collins.
ChatGPT is a godsend to people with aging minds who sometimes can't find the right word. It's in there, in my brain, but I can't quite get at it. It's amazing how it nailed this question. Bravo!
I won't be forced to use it, I won't give in to blackmail.
However, FeedLand will support HTTPS. I am working on that now.
That's why I'm in such a foul mood. I feel completely manipulated by a big company I despise.
It's as if the biggest music label also owned all the players and refused access to music written by individuals and independent publishers with some made-up bullshit about security. You have to pay them their tribute or be shut out. I choose being shut out.
If your browser requires HTTPS, you won't be able to read my blog.
Also, to lawyers -- if this isn't antitrust, I don't know what is.
The day is coming. Get ready for it. I am ready. I am doing nothing. 😄
I like Mastodon, and like Twitter. I've been on Twitter since 2006, and on Masto since 2017, but didn't start using it until late last year. I think Masto is an improvement over Twitter, but the limits I list below matter more than all the improvements.
- No titles (they must be optional).
- No linking.
- No styles.
- Posts are limited to 500 chars.
- No enclosures.
Yes I know some instances don't have these limits, but what matters is the LCD. What can be exchanged with all Masto systems, and the list above applies to the vast majority of instances.
Think about it this way. This is a simple post, expressing a simple idea. Yet neither Mastodon or Twitter can transmit this message. When we really get out of this bottleneck we'll be able to send messages like this one, and we'll wonder why we put up these limits for so long.
Also, I've heard all the arguments. At one point 140 chars was the limit that mattered, if we went over that then it wouldn't be any good. Then we went over it, and communication got better. I don't want to argue about this. Just want to point out that we're still waiting to be set free from the limits imposed by Twitter 17 years ago.
RSS is a good thing. It represents something precious, developers working together, just a little, and only for a brief period. We should recognize it for the lucky gift that it is, and do things to help it.
Also, we have to stop anthropomorphizing tech. It's bullshit. As they said in Game of Thrones: What is dead may never die.
RSS isn't alive and it can't and won't die. People die. I will die, you will too, but things like roadways and paths of rivers change very slowly. Think about qwerty keyboards. That's what we're talking about here. Agreements between products to interop. RSS is just like the gauge of rails, or always driving on one side of the street. A convention that makes progress possible.
I was raised in the aftermath of the Holocaust by survivors. In that sense my whole life is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Today's song: "Did you know we're riding on the Marrakesh Express? Did you know we're riding on the Marrakesh Express? They're taking me to Marrakesh."
On 4/13/2005 I did a singing podcast. The music was on an educational site for kids. Why should they have all the fun.
I did a top level demo of FeedLand for a friend all in one Mastodon post. Having 500 chars to work with makes a big difference.
I was wondering if it's possible to embed a Mastodon post in a web page. Turns out that it is. Screen shot.
Just heard an excellent analogy. Defaulting on the debt would be as destructive to the US as Brexit was to the UK. Only I think it would be a lot clearer to the world how we've lost our minds, and also the US is bigger than the UK, economically, so we have further to fall.
Just when I thought I'd seen all the good bingeable shows, I started watching Feel Good on Netflix, and wow, it's such a great story, so emotionally involving. Not going to spoil anything, but if you need a good love story, this is it. Gave it the highest rating on Bingeworthy.
Since David Crosby died I’ve been listening to all the CSNY and Byrds hits. These few days have been an explosion of the past. Forgotten love, long-gone friends, wounds all fresh again. Good? Not known at this time.
There's a lot to be said for no paywalls and no intrusive ads. Transmits a message. No fuss no muss. Sending out a link to them won't cause trouble for anyone. Over time that builds a brand. We should give out awards for that. #1 is Axios for sure.
There's a 20-minute podcast linked to from this piece about how podcasting came to be. If you're going to write about this stuff, please listen to it.
If you're going to tell the story of the growth of podcasting, you can't leave out Morning Coffee Notes. Podcasting was a mission that two people were on, myself and Adam Curry, mostly working in harmony, to find ways to get people to adopt this idea. We kept throwing ideas out there, and it wasn't until MCN in the summer of 2004 that other people got the idea that they could do it. That was the breakthrough. You didn't need a big studio and money to produce good audio programming. That's what MCN did. It was as crucial to the growth of podcasting as Serial or The Daily were many years later. You can't write a truthful history of this without including this series. Luckily the archive is pretty good! 😄
Nothing is more galling than people who never cared what you thought of them claiming credit for your accomplishments. Soon we'll all be dead and it won't matter. But in the meantime it means people aren't interested in my new work. So there is a cost.
Would someone please make a ChatGPT product that can be pointed at specific websites, and allow intelligent queries against the contents. I’d love to explore the site I’ve been writing for 28.5 years, scripting.com. Let me know. It’s worth $ to me.
No one has figured out how to explain what defaulting on our debt means in human terms.
To do it, you'd have to explain why the United States is richer than any other country in the world.
It's not because we're smarter, or make better products, or have more natural resources. It's because the dollar is the reserve currency of the world. It's the safest place to store value. That means when we create a new dollar someone will buy it. Giving us goods and labor in return. That's how our wealth is created and sustained.
In other words, we'd rather be paid in dollars, because it's safer.
If you don't pay back your loans, the safety thing blows up. It'll be gone. Then when we print a dollar to pay back a loan, they'll say no thanks, give me Euros. We don't get to print those in the US. See how that works. It's actually pretty simple. If you can understand football or poker you can definitely understand this.
People ought to learn what it means to be a reserve currency. And how it makes the US much richer.
It means we can piss away huge amounts of money on the military, and let the super-rich get off with paying no taxes. That's where the difference goes. It's why we can still live in a Western way, with big cars and mortgages, and have the hugest miltary and fuel the growth of the super-rich all around the world all at the same time. It's not because we're a great country, it's because everyone thinks the dollar is safe.
I don't the military is going to suffer much when our unfair economic advantage is blown up by a default, I think the poor will. I think health care and education will disappear. I think the rivers and air will be polluted. We'll be sicker and more ignorant. Everything will work much worse. More shortages so prices will go up.
To understand this all you have to understand is what a reserve currency is. Please news people, explain that. Help the people understand how this works.
Thanks.
I realized today in a Mastodon thread that my source code is my zettelkasten. I take copious notes in my outliner, but I don't worry about gardening them, it's the code I focus on. And because I write code in an outliner, I can create notes that are tucked away at the top of each function, for some long-lived functions, the notes at the top are basically a blog. Yet it in no way interferes with the readability of the code. I've been doing it this way for 20+ years, so it's a pretty smooth process. And I'm sharing all this publicly, in my GitHub repos, most of which have a source.opml file that contains the outline with the source code for the whole project. Here's an example. Read the comment at the top of the OPML file.
I finished bingeing His Dark Materials. Utterly tedious. 99 percent speeches by people saying nothing and the music rising and sounding ominious as if something very profound was happening. The last episode was good for about 15 minutes then it got tedious too. Somehow I was snookered into watching one of those superhero shows that are so popular now. It's all special effects. I'm sure they're impressive, and they made a big deal about how important stories are, too bad the show didn't have much of a frecking story. I give it a rating of 💩 and I'm rating myself a fool for sitting through it all the way to the end. Oy boy what a mess.
I posted a link to a Salvador Dali work of art that Twitter thought might be bad so they blocked it.
Someday Google will do the same for a blog post like that because they own the web the same way Twitter owns tweets.
Then we will see that the question in 2023 wasn't whether HTTPS is good or not, rather it's whether it's good if Google owns the web.
We've started testing the open source release of the FeedLand server. Looking for people with experience running a WordPress server, or equivalent. It should be that level of complexity. I want to smooth out the experience, before releasing it publicly. If you're interested, please send me an email. Include your GitHub username.
Clearly what will drive the microblogging market outside Twitter is Mastodon not ActivityPub. Here's a short thread that explains.
If you think losing the Twitter clients was a big deal, wait until they start screwing with the archive.
New version of davemail package. Since this is part of FeedLand it means that we can send confirmation emails via SMTP, not just SES.
Braintrust query: Something weird is going on with NPM and how package.json files work. Suppose I have a package called package1 which is required by a package called package2, which in turn is required by package3 which is required by an app called helloworld, which only requires package3. I know that's complicated to say but it's really simple. Okay, so I make a change to package1, and go to the directory that contains helloworld and npm update it. You'd think that we'd get the new version of package1 but we don't. The only way to get it to update that I've discovered is to make a change to package3, publish it, and then npm update. But nothing changed in package3, why should I have to rebuild it just to get the change reflected in the app. I have a feeling that this is because NPM modifies the package.json that NPM passes up the chain of require's? I swear this used to work, and what a pain in the ass if this is the only way to get changes deep in the stack reflected at the top. A place to comment.
There's this idea called zettelkasten that's been going around in the outlining world. It's like a "second brain" another term they use.
The thought is that if you get all the info and ideas out of your brain and onto a computer something magical will happen, you will attain a sort of super-humanity.
I'm not sure why but I hate the term zettelkasten, but I love to say it. It sounds like something goofy and idiotic at the same time. It's not an English word. I do not like it.
But then I decided to look it up. I found that one of the early pioneers of zettelkasten was my ancestor, Arno Schmidt, a fantastic but fringe German writer of the mid-20th century. He was my maternal grandmother's brother, my great-uncle.
In his case zettelkasten made sense because:
- He was German and zettelkasten is a German word so it isn't icky or pretentious.
- He had a legitimate use for one, he was writing a complex novel with lots of characters and plots. And this was before personal computers, in the 1940s and 1950s, so he did it with index cards.
Around the time Uncle Arno died in 1979, I started working on my first outliner, which is the ideal tool for creating and managing a zettelkasten on a personal computer.
I've attached a picture of Arno with his zettelkasten.
I went to ChatGPT and entered "Simple instructions about how to send email from a Node.js app?" What came back was absolutely perfect, none of the confusing crap and business models you see in online instructions in Google. I see why Google is worried. ;-)
There’s no comparison between Twitter and Mastodon for idea distribution. I routinely get hundreds of RTs on Masto. The Twitter system thinks the same ideas are worthless. I’m guessing virtually no one sees my tweets. For an idea why that is, see the next item.
I unfollow people who use "white male" as code for "evil asshole." Say what you have to say without the bullshit.
I wrote this on Jan 22, 2017, two days after Trump was inaugurated.
Trump was a free man until he took the oath.
But once he assumed the office, and until he leaves, he belongs to us, the American people. I'm sure this is a new feeling for him. But we all must submit to something. The president submits to the people.
I can't imagine what hell it must be behind the closed door that leads to the press room. The ranting and screaming, the tears and the "there there's" from his staff, the promises to get even.
But he will keep bumping up against the reality that now, we own his ass, even the ones who thought his campaign was crazy and dangerous. The people who voted for him thinking it left the rest of us powerless are in for a surprise too. The other politicians you elected care about what we think, because they need us to keep their jobs. The election is over, now they're worried about the next election. And like it or not, they need us.
Harry Truman famously called the White House the "crown-jewel of the federal penal system."
I don't know how Trump will come to terms with this. We have an idea of what a president does, says, how he or she reacts to events. We just had eight years with a guy who never lost his cool over anything. The new president sees a report on TV saying he lost the MLK bust in the Oval Office and he loses it? He has a long way to go before he is our president. He may hold the office but he hasn't embraced it yet.
I hate when people explain in detail something they thought I needed to know because I said something that reminded them of it.
Twitter made a change so that you have to click a link to see the recent posts from people you follow. Hard to remember to do that, and you end up seeing a lot of disgusting crap. The stuff an algorithm chose for you, including posts from people you blocked. But you can work around this. If you have a bookmark for accessing Twitter, change it to this. Now you'll only see items from people you follow. None of the bullshit their algorithm chose "for you" which is really "for their advertisers" or "for whoever."
David Frum: "I'm doing an experiment. On my computer, I am checking the latest tweets by people I follow. On my phone, I'm checking whether their most recent tweets are showing up in the 'Following' column. I'm just getting started, but even in the first dozen cases, Twitter failed."
Another problem with people getting upset when something they depend on on the internet goes away, for whatever reason, is that it's all going to go away, probably sooner than you expect. If you want things to be long-lived, then we need to make some major changes. And no one, absolutely no one, is working on making a long-lived net.
Sometime next week we'll start testing the open source release of the FeedLand server. Looking for people with experience running a WordPress server, or equivalent. It should be that level of complexity. I want to smooth out the experience, before releasing it publicly. If you're interested in participating, please send me an email.
The Twitter API still works. If that changes I'll let you know. Yes, they shut down the clients, but the people who make the clients should have known that was coming. It happened before. Every corporate platform vendor will defend their cash flow. If you bet otherwise, you're probably going to lose. If you don't like it, develop for an open platform or stay out of the platform vendor's path.
The only question I was asked was How To Make Money on the Internet. The Davos Man was skeptical. I did pretty well, in hindsight. 😄
After Davos, I went to Amsterdam, to write and enjoy the local herb. Back then it was the only place in the west where you could buy and consume the weed openly and semi-legally. Scroll to the end of the February archive page for pictures from Davos and Amsterdam, as well as a few pieces with closing thoughts about my experience at Davos. This is one of the advantages of blogging and keeping relatively decent archives. You get to relive experiences like this.
I went to Davos in January 2000, just once, with a white badge (access to everything). Not as a journalist. I was a representative of the web, which was the hot thing at the time. Not sure what other people were doing but I was a celebrity and enjoyed all the attention.
So much made up bullshit about Twitter's API. I've never seen anything like it. Some of them actually think of themselves as journalists.
I'm watching His Dark Materials on HBO. About to reach the end of the first season. So far -- so-so. Not sure if I want to finish.
I let a domain, nodestorage.io, lapse. That's why we're seeing problems on scripting.com. One of the files we include is from api.nodestorage.io. I renewed the domain, so the outage should hopefully clear soon.
We're following WordPress's lead in releasing FeedLand's server as an open source project using GPL2.
We (Adam Curry and myself) approached the Zune people at Microsoft in 2004 to ask to work with us to make a perfect podcast listening and recording device. Basically the PC of podcasting. I wanted to work with them, lived in Seattle at the time, was only working on podcasting at the time. Still to this day such a product does not exist.
My apps still work with the Twitter API. I don't think any developer should try to make hay out of the pain of another developer. I wouldn't do that to you, even if I had questions about the foundation of your product. You see this in sports, no one puts down a competitive team just because one of their star players is injured. For good reason -- it can happen to you too and you don't want to see people do that to you. Remember this isn't just about Twitter, it's about developers too.
Kevin Williams: "Every time Dave Chappelle comes up, Black folks cape for him, and it's weird. Learning when to let people go when they have done harm to a community, even if it isn't the Black community, is a muscle that has to be trained. Hell, folks haven't let R. Kelly go."
Twitter is getting better folks. You may not like "hard core" but we used to call that "management by shipping" at Living Videotext (my first company). What mattered was delivering features to users. Everything else, bullshit.
I work for the betterment of the network we all share. I'm not trying to get rich or famous, just fix the stuff that's broken. I hope you are doing that too. Keep on truckin.
When I think of obvious missing tech products, I can’t do most of them, because as soon as the idea gained traction as a product it would be taken over by a big company, partly because users prefer that. So a lot of gaps never get filled. That’s the lesson from twitter shutting down the clients again. It isn’t just twitter, you as an independent developer, can’t step into any platform vendor’s territory, they will eventually take away your business.
The WordPress user interface must be seen as a platform, a command line, and much higher level writing tools built to run on it. It should be possible to never see the UI of WordPress except for configuration and global settings, much the way you have System Preferences on a Mac. This is why blogging software has languished. The software we use for blogging must fit into the One Timeline paradigm, above.
One timeline for each user. Lots of choice, but one timeline. And there has to be a basic agreement on what goes in that timeline. What are the elements of a message. A way to define more types, without going to a standards body, which always crush the individual in favor of the bigco's. Something minimal, orderly, easy to document, lots of example code. Once I get finished with the new FeedLand release, I want to work on this.
Last night while I writing some stuff Gmail said it detected that my computer was sending some kinds of unspecified messages, and they were concerned about it, so they logged me off. I could still check my email on my other systems. I tried to go through the "prove this is you" process, but when it said it had sent a message to my phone, no message arrived. When I got to that place on other systems, the message did arrive on my phone.
I reviewed my account on Google, everything looks fine. The phone I have hooked it up to is an Android. I have a backup email address connected to my account.
I changed my password, and re-logged-in on my various other systems, everything worked, but not on my desktop. The problem is -- no confirming message ever appears on my phone, or anywhere else I can read my Google chat messages.
Their help system is unhelpful, they keep telling me things I already know and have tried. I can live without accessing Gmail from my desktop because oddly while Gmail won't work with Chrome, it works fine with Safari. But there are often links in my emails and when I click on them the pages open in Safari. So this is very disruptive to my workflow. I'd rather still use Chrome on my desktop because everything is set up to work there.
If you have any ideas please post a note here. Thanks!
One of the pioneers of an idea called zettelkasten was Arno Schmidt, who also happens to be my great uncle. Quite independently, just before he died, I started working on software that makes it work without the index cards, on a personal computer.
There's a lot of new stuff here and I don't go into great detail. There is a link to a place to comment or ask questions at the end.
- The next version will by default not use Twitter for identity. When you sign up you'll specify both a name and an email address. Both must be unique. An email confirms. Click the link and you're sent back with the credentials your browser needs to access your account. The usual dance.
- I do not plan to transition feedland.org to use this feature. Recall that we haven't been accepting new members since December 12. Everyone who uses it has a Twitter identity and it's working, and I don't want to screw with that. As long as Twitter is willing to let use their identity service, we'll keep using it on the first FeedLand server.
- Here's the big news: The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance. It's a Node.js application. Uses MySQL. You may want to hook up an S3 bucket for special features like RSS feeds for Likes. At first email sending will be via Amazon SES, the method I currently use. It will be possible to plug in new drivers to use other email services.
- The open source model is WordPress which uses GPLv2. I want to make it as easy to set up a FeedLand instance as it is to start a new WordPress server.
- People can set up commercial services to host FeedLand for individuals and groups. Every instance is set up to do that. It's not a resource hog. I'm spending about $25 a month to host feedland.org for almost 1000 users.
- The client, which runs in the browser, will not be open source. I don't want to spawn a bunch of incompatible forks. I want FeedLand and its API to be solid. By maintaining control of the client, which btw need not be the only client, I can help be sure that we're starting a developer community with some basic rules about interop. If you want to run FeedLand it has to behave like FeedLand. I've been down this road and watched others go down this road. I think this is the right way to start.
- I don't have dates for any of this. But at this point the path is pretty certain, so I felt it was time to say where FeedLand is going.
On Friday I posted an earlier version of this roadmap on the FeedLand support repo. I'm sure there will be other changes to this document as we go forward.
If you have comments or suggestions, you can post them as comments to Friday's post. Comments must conform to our guidelines.
I keep waiting for a news article that doesn’t gloss over the real impact of defaulting.
One of the reasons news doesn't explain the rules of default must be that oligarchs want us to be in the dark. If we understood how rich the United States is, our oligarchs reason, we would want a share of that wealth. If we think the US is poor, we're not so demanding.
But anyone who can understand the rules of baseball or football, who can play poker or Monopoly, can understand the rules of defaulting.
If the US were to default the same thing would happen to the US that happens to a person if they fail to make a payment on a loan.
- Foreclosure, the lender seizes assets to cover the default.
- Your credit rating goes down and cost of borrowing goes up.
Today, before default, the US defines what money is. If we create a dollar that's worth a dollar. No other country has this power.
The world lets us do this for them because a dollar is considered the safest way to store value. That's why the US dollar is the world's dominant reserve currency.
However if we default, there goes the safety. It's gone, and that kind of trust, built over hundreds of years, once lost will never come back.
Then we really will be as poor as the oligarchs want us to think we are.
BTW, if this is true, why are the oligarchs who own all our sources of news, willing to let a default actually happen? I think it's a good chance it's due to inbreeding, narcissism, stupidity, selfishness and resentment. They don't believe they will suffer personally if the US turns into an economic basket case. Maybe they won't. For sure, that's all they care about.
If "news" were run like journalism this would be the horserace of the millenium. A story with a billion angles. We'd all tune in every night to hear how bad it'll be. But they clearly aren't interested in that. They're interested in keeping their jobs. That probably also explains why we're not responding to the climate crisis or the pandemic.
When I first started using Mastodon late last year, like so many others I had questions about what it is, how it works, what is ActivityPub, does it have an API, where is this going, will the BigCo's try to take it over, stuff like that. In the past when new markets appeared, like the personal computer, desktop publishing, the web -- there were always publications that grew up along with the platform, because there's such demand to know about the latest developments. I contacted my friend Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at CUNY to ask if there was interest in one of their students forming a news site to gather news of the Mastodon world. He liked the idea and now they've taken the next step. They're offering a full scholarship to their "100-day, online certificate program that helps creators establish their own enterprises to serve specific communities/markets." Apply by Feb 3 here.
I've started listening to Keith Olbermann's podcast again. It's worth another listen because he's explaining why news is like it is, from the point of view of someone who was an insider for years.
I have the 2015 MacBook Pro running now. It took a lot of iterating to get the right version of the OS running on the machine and to then restore a Time Machine backup on the machine without having one or more extra accounts on the machine. One thing I will never understand is why Macs are so slow at transferring stuff over a local wifi network. All the advice on the net says you need to use faster wifi, but my wifi is very fast. Here are speed test results communicating with a server in NYC, about 100 miles away. Why is it so much faster to communicate with that server than it is to communicate with a laptop that's in the same building?
I don't use WordPress very much, but recently I had a chance to try out the block editor and my reaction was that I can't imagine writing this way. If you're a writer who uses WordPress, do you use the block editor, if so what do you think of it?
Iconfactory: "Last night at about 7:30pm PST, Twitterrific customers started reporting problems accessing Twitter via the iOS app."
What if you built an operating system around RSS?
FeedLand is going down this path.
Feeds are so easy to work with in FeedLand, I want to build all the features with RSS now.
BTW -- I am not leaving outliners and OPML behind.
There's a small feature tucked away in the Source namespace that allows an RSS item to be an outline.
A global network of outlines moving at the speed of RSS.
2000: "Programmers pray to the Software God, Our Lord Murphy, the one who makes sure that anything that can go wrong, does."
As many people noticed, the nightly emails didn't go out last night at midnight. The theory they had was that it had something to do with the reported outage at Twitter. Only tangentially. The cause was a linkblog item without a link. The mail-sending software had never encountered such a thing before, and it turns out there was an assumption that all linkblog entries would always have links. So the software lost its mind and went boom. Easy to find, the error message and stack crawl were the last thing in the log. Adding a protection against such a situation was also easy. This is how software gets mature. Sooner or later every weird case shows up and hopefully it will be patched well and documented, so next time it happens the email goes out as it's supposed to. This is all part of the "It's even worse than it appears" philosophy of Scripting News. And, how was this related tangentially to the outage at Twitter? Well that's what the stupid linkblog entry was about. As Maude used to say "God'll get you for that Walter." In this case Walter is me and god is the Software God.
It was smart for Medium to embrace Mastodon.
It gets people talking about Medium again.
What comes next? Setting up a Masto-instance is easy.
Will Substack, who stole Medium's thunder, be next to embrace Mastoicism?
Maybe Mastodon will become WordPress? Just support Markdown and get rid of the character limit and Masto is almost there.
I spend a lot of time every day using Mastodon and use WordPress only when i'm testing for compatibility with WordPress. Mastodon is much closer to what I think a centralized blogging host should be.
I keep wondering how this will evolve.
Meanwhile I'm working every day on FeedLand. Quietly. 😄
One thing is for sure -- ActivityPub is complicated.
It would be a very hard job I imagine to make Medium an ActivityPub node.
I'm not sure ActivityPub gets you all that much, btw.
I'm still betting heavy on RSS, just enough syndication.
Just some random end-of-day thoughts.
TL;DR: RSS is how we move documents around the web. That it works so poorly is because the big social media companies want it that way. We need products and services with big installed bases to serve as counterweights and help pull RSS out of corp-tech control.
How I got there...
Yesterday I wrote something provocative about WordPress.
HiMY SYeD read it, and commented, on Mastodon:
- What Mastodon is to ActivityPub...
- WordPress is to RSS.
My first response was:
- Interesting analogy.
- Something to think about.
After pondering a bit...
- The thing is there would be other products that could claim ownership of RSS -- like Google Reader, which still controls the market almost 10 years after its demise.
- And Twitter, by not supporting RSS is also a big definer of RSS, in a negative way.
- I think we'll be on solid ground once RSS defines itself and the products get out of the way.
And I think that's the key point
- RSS has never had a chance to be itself.
- Right from the start, all kinds of people and companies sought to own it. No one succeeded at that, but each of them diluted it, added confusion, took some of its power away and gave back nothing in return. Very typical approach of tech to open tech they didn't create.
- Until we can get RSS leading, as itself, and not being carved up and controlled, we won't really have a good way of moving documents around the web, which is what RSS is for, btw, imho.
- All the usual disclaimers apply.
PS: I hope people at WordPress read this. Right now they're in the best position to help RSS if they're inclined to do so. There aren't many companies I would credit with possibly wanting to do that. Slack was one, and Automattic is another. I still have to write the howto doc for what it would take for that to happen, subject to discussion of course.
I got my 2015 MacBook Pro. Two problems to start.
- It came with Mojave installed. I got this machine because the software I want to use specifically does not run on Mojave. I didn't realize this until after I had copied a huge number of files to the machine via Time Machine backup. I will have to do this again.
- Today they're selling the same $600 machine on Amazon for $389. I wish I had an idea what the price range was. I could have waited a few days. I thought $600 was a good deal, but it's a ripoff.
Anyway, so I thought this morning I'll just copy a High Sierra installer to the hard drive and run it, but Mojave won't run it. The app is there, but it's grayed out. Who knows why. Presumably it won't run on this machine.
Next up I went into Recovery mode to install the OS that's in ROM, it was El Capitan. As the machine is rebooting after install it freezes with a totally cryptic error message. Here's a photo.
After restarting, the message is gone. I found I couldn't restore from a Time Machine backup because it comes from a machine more advanced than El Capitan. So I then did the minimum to get the machine to boot up, went into the System Preferences app, turned on file sharing and copied an install app for High Sierra. It's running it now.
2015: "In order for the open web to flourish again, there have to be tools and services that are open that are more useful than the ones we use in the silos."
Even though I have far fewer followers on Masto, I get much more engagement there than on Twitter. Has it been productive? Hmmm, not sure about that. But I have hope that it will result in collaboration.
Today I got the FSD beta for my Model Y, and of course I tried it out, very carefully. And I can validate that it did try to do the worst thing at the worst possible moment. Luckily I have always been a nervous passenger and I wasn't about to trust a bot this much. I intervened at the first sign of trouble.
WordPress is in the way. I've avoided saying this because I like Matt, but at some point, it being in the way has to win out. And since when do I not say something because I like the person who made it. It's in the way. I would like to see it move out of the way. I will write a piece soon explaining how they could, and should, do that.
Can't get Still Crazy After All These Years out of my mind. Such a sad song about longing. Written by Simon when he was 34, but it seems written from the perspective of a person my own age.
I watched two movies up for Oscars, and found little to recommend either. The Banshees movie is supposed to be a comedy of sorts but it was so painful to watch, not much room for laughter. And I guess I didn't really watch the Fableman movie, walked out after the opening scene. Spielberg's movies have declined into self-obsession. He thinks we're so freaking stupid and he's so freaking wonderful. Come on man do another Jaws. Now that was a movie. One thing I got from Banshees is that the Irish say fecking and I wonder if it means what I think it means. Anyway, I'm looking for something great to watch, and have fallen back to re-watching Band of Brothers. It's been so long since I last watched it that it seems pretty fresh. I long for that kind of story-telling, but they don't seem to make shows like that these days.
2018: I have a new motto -- if the world is going to end, I might as well have some nice headphones.
The thing that makes a movie great is suspension of disbelief. If you get into the story, the movie is good. If you are still in the story the next day, it's great.
I'd like to have a personal social net that's coffee house size. Play a few tunes, have a couple of drinks, tell a few stories, and come back tomorrow and the night after that. There's a bouncer at the door so if you come in all nasty and shit, we kick your ass out.
I can't get too worked up over the bomb throwers running committees in Congress, considering we had a bomb thrower in the White House for four years, this seems relatively easy.
Re yesterday's braintrust query, I may be getting closer to understanding where the ER_CON_COUNT_ERROR errors are coming from.
Programming is rough when you were prepared to work today on hooking up the sound system in the penthouse on the 173rd floor, and instead you have to work in the basement where the boiler appears to be broken, it's spewing all kinds of crap all over the place, but you're not clear if it was always doing this and you're just seeing it now because now you're listening.
Developers: If you ever want to know how FeedLand parses a feed, you can do it with the Feeder app. Here's a link that shows you what FeedLand gets when it reads the Laughing Squid feed.
On Micro.blog there's a debate about whether Likes are harmful.
Some of my observations from the thread, all in favor of Likes.
- The Like button on various systems is a way of acknowledging that you saw something and thought it was noteworthy. Since micro.blog doesn't have a Like button, what's the proper way of saying that?
- As a person who writes posts that get zero response here (and not on other systems) I wish people had a less-committed way of saying they saw something I wrote. That would be a little bit of feedback where currently I get none.
- If I see something on Micro.blog that I would Like on another system, I don't comment, I just do nothing, not because I'm bashful or overly quiet, rather because this is a language, and a comment has different meaning from a Like.
- In real life there's all kinds of non-verbal communication. you can nod your head, smile. We've come up with a similar language online, I don't think there's any more meaning in this. We're being human. Not a huge surprise.
- Here's a parallel. My TV doesn't have a brightness control. It's an expensive screen, and I imagine that the designers of the system figured "we have a computer in this that knows how to automatically adjust brightness based on room light." But it doesn't work properly, I don't know what the problem is, but there are times the TV is useless because you just can't see what's on the screen, because the lack of a brightness control. Maybe if TVs never had brightness controls I wouldn't miss it, but they do in my mind, require one. Same thing here. Like is something that's part of the language of social media. To try to deny that at this stage is kind of pointless imho.
- I've been in this position myself in the past, trying to buck a larger trend, and the pressure really does get you to support the common way, the sooner you do it, the sooner the pain goes away.
BTW, "considered harmful" is borrowed from a famous letter by Edsger Dijkstra entitled "goto statement considered harmful."
Braintrust query: I've got a problem with an app that uses the MySql package in Node running on a Mac. I'm getting a ER_CON_COUNT_ERROR pretty close to startup. I'm taking the message at face value but it's hard for me to believe it's true that my app is making too many connections because I just doubled the max connections from 100 to 200 and still got the error on the very first query it tried to make. The problem goes away when I reboot the machine, but only for a little while, eventually it starts doing this again. This is in an app that has been running without these kinds of errors for months. I haven't tried running the app yet on another machine, but I'm beginning to think this is a not-resolvable issue. I thought I'd pass it by the SQL gurus that read this blog.
The ads on Twitter are better.
Already today I've considered buying something an ad was selling.
I saw an HBO ad for a movie I just watched and loved, it reminded me that I loved it. Excellent brand advertising.
And one taught me something I won't forget.
I bought a 2015 Mac laptop, used, for $600 via Amazon. I need it because I use Frontier as an integral part of my development process, all my build scripts run in Frontier, and while they could be converted to JavaScript, they'd be more complicated and it's a lot of work, and it's worth spending $600 to save all that work. Someday I want to do it because I'd like to use Drummer and its built-in scripting language for the same purpose. I learned a lot about why people choose older Macs. It reminds me of pre-CBS Fender guitars, which still sell at a premium, even though Fender sold to CBS in 1965. Maybe Macs peaked? Anyway -- I should get the "new" computer next week, and I'll let you know how it goes. BTW, my main desktop, the one I'm writing this post on, is a 2017 iMac Pro. I love the machine. I hope it works forever.
My view of how blogging should work is you start with twitter-size nuggets, write another and another and if you find you're written a full scale wordpress-like blog post you just move the nuggets under a new headline, click publish, and that's all you have to do.
What we have needed for many years: A simple user-facing storage system that apps can be given access to via OAuth. All the hard stuff like assigning a domain is done through the user interface. Cost per month about what Dropbox costs.
Tantek is right. Read every word in this piece. The only thing I'd change is calling this "IndieWeb" -- which is imho redundant. It's like saying "WetRain." Everything he says that applies to "Indie" applies to the web as a whole. Otherwise, right on.
2017: "We're worse than stuck. Twitter hasn't moved in a decade. Google owned then abandoned RSS readers. Facebook smothered linking."
Today we remember the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, as part of an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.
Howard Rheingold: "I'm appreciating FeedLand -- I decided to follow everyone who follows me [on Mastodon]. I can add the feeds of a few dozen people I want to pay closer attention to under my Mastodon or News categories. Mastodon for the raw feed, Feedland for the curated feed. Once I went through it, the process was clean, straightforward, quick."
Braintrust query: I'm thinking about getting a refurbished use Mac laptop. I seem to remember there was a point at which Mac laptops started sucking. Is it safe to buy a 2015 Powerbook? I need to be able to run Frontier on it, that's why I can't buy a new one.
If you've been reading this blog since the beginning you know about Fractional Horsepower servers. It's an important idea. That software you think of as running on huge servers in the cloud also can be deployed on much smaller systems, including behind a firewall on a personal computer. Radio UserLand was a server that ran on the desktop, yet very few users knew that. It just ran in the browser, there was a little cloud component to act as a proxy, to do the kinds of things you can't do from a desktop.
I'm now setting up a second FeedLand instance, this one for me personally. Learning what it takes to set one up and smoothing things out. Taking lots of notes. Found a few bugs, but not many. Surprising how little breakage there has been between Instance0 and Instance1.
For All Mankind is incredibly lame. There is one moment where there's a bit of The Expanse feel to it, when the daughter is docking with the big ship. I thought "yes that's what this could have been." It gets a turd rating on my Bingeworthy list.
What's cool about watching the Speaker rollcall for the fourth time is that we get to review the sheer size of the House, hearing the name and voice of every member. It's real, a new kind of programming.
I want to find Drummer or FeedLand users who are on Micro.blog so I can follow. If you see this please send me an email. Thanks! 💥
2015: 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
I can't stop watching this video. I want to know who each of the performers are. And the stories of each of the soldiers. I have a favorite, but they're all fascinating. I have a lot of Russian blood, my grandparents spoke Russian to each other. I could see a TV series like Lost based on the characters in the video.
I tuned into a Laura Ingraham interview last night on Fox with one of the 20 reps who voted against McCarthy. His problem is that McCarthy works with Dems to do things that he ran against. What else could he do. Made sense, even though I don't support the things he stands for.
It might be time for a new political party to form in the House. I'm pretty sure a majority of voters love watching the Repubs fight this way. I sure do. It's an actual bonafide horse race. They should keep doing this until the Republican Party explodes.
I introduced a problem in FeedLand when keyboard navigation in the Feed List feature was added. Basically, if you had a Feed List displayed, an "ask dialog" wouldn't receive your keystrokes, or it would appear to freeze. This dialog appears whenever FL asks for a string, for example to enter a string to search for, or to enter the URL of a feed to subscribe to. I believe I found the problem and fixed it. It's explained here.
If you want to watch me update my blog outline you can do it here. It seems to update in real time. I must have written this thing, but I don't remember doing so. Looking at the JavaScript console, it's quite sexy, hooked into the websocket protocol supported by Drummer, which is of course where I am editing this mofo. When I let up on the keyboard for a second or two it sends an update. It's not updating on every keystroke; that would be wasteful. It's fun to watch while I type in one window and watch the update in the other one.
I asked ChatGPT for a title for this blog post -- "A Blogger's New Year's Wish: A Place to Write, Edit, and Publish Without Boundaries."
Happy new year and welcome to 2023. In tech we talk a lot about interop in software, but there is no interop in software without lots of interop between people, so start there. Open an invite to anyone you want to interop with, no matter what the history, let's work together to remove barriers to interop.
An open invitation to developers at Automattic to learn how blogging works in Drummer. It's very fluid, designed for writers. Does small and large posts easily, in the same data structure. I'll help.
Reading back over the archives of my Facebook posts, the On This Day In posts, it's the biggest gift when I can tell a joke to my future self and make that person who I would become happy all over again.
I think I enjoy my own writing more than anyone else, anyone that is, except my mom.
I'm sure she thought I wouldn't miss her when she was gone, but she was wrong about me in so many ways, so why not one more? Every time I look back on some event I measure it by whether or not she was still alive when it happened. It permeates everything I do. I wish it were otherwise, I really do.
All I can say is if there is anything left of her, almost five years after her passing, I hope she's reading my blog, and I hope she's proud of her son, after all is said and done.
I remember when I saw a product that expired after 2000 and thought that I had arrived in the future. Hah. It's 2023 now. That's just ridiculous. It's impossible that I actually have lived this long. It's all bonus from hereon-out.
Mastodon has a cute way to validate sites as being yours. If you put your masto address in the text of the site that's good enough. But it has to be HTTPS. Oh well. I think they get most things right at Masto, but the trying to force people to adopt HTTPS is selling out to Google and their thirst to own the web, which is imho not theirs to own.
If you run a blog or other site, check your copyright notices. We're in a new year folks. For example the copyright notice on this blog should've changed. And then I realize there is no freaking copyright notice. I better fix that. Today is a day of fixing things.
A new application for AI. Rate the humor level of a tweeted "joke" response. If people knew how unfunny their supposed jokes were they might think again before inflicting them on others. Better yet, score people on the quality of the jokes they actually post. Publish that score next to their number of followers.
Requiring people to use one uppercase, one lowercase, one number, one special character in a password is a joke. It doesn't make your password more secure. What it does is make it impossible to remember the password.
It's amazing that the Macintosh desktop doesn't have a Bookmarks menu. It was first released in January 1984, almost 39 years ago. Look at all the other crap they've added to the Finder, and the single most useful feature possible is missing.
Every app should have a Bookmarks menu, for organizing all your work, esp writing and esp if you're writing publicly on the web and the documents are automatically accessible on the web. If you spot a mistake you want to make it as easy and quick as possible to fix the error.
I was there when we moved from mainframes to micros.
The real magic happened when they could both be on the same networks.
That was the web explosion. Two networks became one.
The text world was similarly bifurcated.
There was a big line separating the web writing world into two parts.
- The parts meant for reading via RSS
- The parts that can't be read via RSS
What changed is that the line has been crossed by Mastodon.
What they did is provide an RSS feed for each user.
Yes, Substack is blogging, and it's totally valid for a blogging system to be better at publishing one kind of writing.
What's wrong with Substack, and why it will ultimately need to change or be replaced, is that they require writers to use their editor.
That's lock-in. Not interop.
And interop is part of the philosophy of blogging imho.
As a writer, I use the writing tools best suited for me.
Poll: Can Twitter be used, at the end of 2022, to keep track of what individuals or organizations are doing?
TL;DR: If you use FeedLand you should register an email address, if you have not already done so.
Over the last month I made it so you can log onto FeedLand with email in addition to Twitter. You still have to have a Twitter account to sign up, but if Twitter were to go down or disappear, if you had registered an email address with FeedLand you would still be able to log in.
And note that since new membership is closed, everyone who uses FeedLand already has registered with a Twitter account, so there are no problems.
Perhaps at some point I will produce a version of FeedLand that only uses email for identity. I would do that now if I had 35 programmers working on this stuff, but it's just me, and I have to get back to what I'm good at -- making features users want, and inventing new shit no one else thought of.
People seem to assume I'm like a VC-backed company and I want the most users I possibly can get. This is very far from the truth. I want enough users, and no more. I need support from users, to make sure my new features work, and to make feature requests that make the product better.
At some point perhaps I'll work with a company to make it a huge thing like Mastodon or WordPress, commercial to use, open source if you want to deploy your own. But it's not something I can do as a person.
One thing Twitter has over Mastodon, reading threads. When I get a reply on Mastodon, it's not easy to find what it's in reply to, and often and unpredictably is a context change, I get transferred to another website. I know this is the result of federation.
New in FeedLand. Keyboard navigation in feed lists. Here's a video demo, and the announcement, with a place to ask questions.
The funny thing is people see themselves only as judges and not as participants. What they do, even in small numbers, in tech -- can make the difference between a successful bootstrap and nothing.
BTW if you develop products that read and/or write for the web and you agree with Writers Deserve Better, send me a note. I can't possibly create new standards by myself. It's not the nature of the beast. If you want to know what I think needs to happen, read the Textcasting story.
Nine times every day I say to myself It's never going to happen. I've learned to pay attention to those bursts of insight, I know you're supposed to just go through them, but you can waste many years doing that, I've found.
One of the reasons I chose Twitter for identity for my apps, a decision made in 2014, is that I hoped that a developer community would grow up around Twitter. I hoped that Twitter would take a chance on co-promoting products. It could still happen, but it seems unlikely now.
I had excellent experience with Apple in this in the 80s when their platform needed apps, and they empowered Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki, et al, to help us deliver, and we, and a lot of other developers did. It was a win-win.
Nothing like that has happened since then, as far as I know. You can try to raise VC money, but that means you become a platform and lock users in, and ultimately sell out and your product disappears. If you want real longevity there is no answer now beyond 1-in-a-million luck.
I'm at a personal crossroads. FeedLand is an excellent product, ground-breaking, imho just what we need. I'd like to continue adding features and fixing bugs and working with users and other developers. But over time as we get more users, my job increasingly becomes administrative and gruntwork. Taking me far away from my personal strengths.
It could be so much better than it is. I have always believed that the web was the ultimate writers platform. But if every means of distribution requires that you use their writing tools, it can't come close to its potential.
Here's a paragraph from a recent piece. I think it concisely explains what's wrong with our world, and how we'll now when it's working properly. It's short, just one sentence.
You could substitute blog for any other word you like. The point is writers shouldn't be forced to write in a tiny little box, some of them that don't allow titles and others that require them. Some that allow them to edit and others that don't. We should always be able to link to other stories, and enclose a podcast. Simple styling, bold and italic, standard features of our writing tools since 1984, should be present in all our publishing environments. And publishing should never require the writer to become a clerk.
It should be easy because it can be easy.
We had all this before the web. It's so ironic that with the business models that evolved on the web, which should have been so transformative for writers, that we had to give all this up. And what did we get in return? As far as I can see -- nothing.
A product idea for a new AI bot.
A confessional.
You tell it what pisses you off and it tells you what you can do to work around the problem instead of being stopped by it.
For extra $ it will connect you with people with a similar grievance who want to get it done.
A free idea for my friend Matt Mullenweg -- lots of skins for WordPress. There's no reason you should need to write a new back end just for a new user experience. The two should be decoupled, with great opportunities for developers and designers working together.
Take responsibility for your grievances.
Think hard about what you can do to alleviate them, rather than making pointless demands of people who don't care what you think and aren't listening.
Ask what you really want. Do you want the problem solved, or do you want to be heard?
A new FeedLand feature -- you can now search titles of feeds.
To start a search, choose Search feeds from the first menu.
A dialog appears asking what you want to search for. Enter a string, and you're taken to a page with the search results.
Here are a few example searches you can try.
- http://feedland.org/?search=new%20york
- http://feedland.org/?search=blog
- http://feedland.org/?search=nyt
- http://feedland.org/?search=bbc
- http://feedland.org/?search=feedland
- http://feedland.org/?search=scott
- http://feedland.org/?search=ken
- http://feedland.org/?search=feed
- http://feedland.org/?search=dave
- http://feedland.org/?search=john
- http://feedland.org/?search=rss
You don't need to be signed on to use the command, however, if you're signed on, there are checkboxes so you can see which feeds you're subscribed to and you can see the categories you've assigned them to.
There's an entry box at the top of the search page that allows you to search for more terms.
The results can be sorted by title, how recently they've updated, and the number of people subscribing to the feed.
You can get more details about the feed by clicking on its title, and view the five most recent items by clicking on the grey wedge to the left of the title.
Here's a place for comments and questions.
The web, post-Twitter, has become warring factions who punish each other for being on the other side.
There's a horde of skilled software developers who could help build the open web, but we've organized it so that only employees of big companies can. They're so far away from the users that we drift for years until something breaks. Been around this loop before. ;-)
I wrote this in 1996, and we're there again, 26 years later.
- To anyone who wants to lead -- show us software that's fun and empowering, get us interested and excited. Gates, McNealy, Ellison et al never do that. We've tried it their way before, look at the stagnation that resulted. We're at a crossroads now, do we go back to the mess of the past or do we learn to enjoy the que sera of it all, and stop seeing threats everywhere we look?
- So much of the energy is about defeating and destroying, so little is about creating. People believe in others, not themselves, and are disappointed when they are left out of the big plans. They forget that no matter how rich and intimidating each leader of our industry is, or would-be leader, none of them predicted the world we live in now, and by extrapolation they are powerless to control the world we will live in in 1997 and beyond.
- I'll do my part: here's an invitation to truly embrace the creativity of others. Instead of beating your breast about how great you are, try saying how great someone else is. Look for win-wins, make that your new religion. Establish a policy that nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity.
It's all about interop, between people and software. I don't think I've ever said that before, or realized that there is no interop with software without first, a boatload of interop between people.
Mastodon is like everything else. A fair amount of “conversation” amounts to an invitation to argue, which we know from lots of experience, is pointless.
A new year's resolution for developers -- find someone whose product yours can interop with, say hey want to connect our products? and take yes for an answer. 💥
A lot of people feel a sense of possibility at the end of 2022 that wasn't there just a few months ago. But feeling the possibility is a long way from achieving anything from that feeling.
We'll know it's working if most people feel their best place to write is their blog, where the editing tools work just as they like them to, and there are no boundaries to where those ideas can be published.
I've made a point of reaching out to old friends in the last few weeks to see if we can work together on any projects.
So far most people are still wary of working with others, it seems.
It's the only way we avoid falling back into the same morass.
The one exception is Automattic. In the last few weeks we've collaborated on two projects. One to connect FeedLand and WordPress via rssCloud and to get their RSS reader cool with titleless feed items. They are an amazing company. Very often when I knock on the door they say yes.
My product is interop. Give me a stack of bibles and I'll swear to it.
One of the nicest things about FeedLand is you can explore other people's feed lists, and see the world through their eyes, and how they are innovating with the product in ways you hadn't foreseen. For example, when we released FeedLand in October, Mastodon wasn't a big deal yet, and we didn't even know about their excellent RSS support. Now, a couple of months later, of course FeedLand works with Masto, no mods necessary because RSS is a strong standard, and users are innovating, again -- outside the boundaries of either product, using features in one to connect to features in the other. This is where interop becomes art! When users do things with your product that make you say wow that could have been a whole product on its own.
A bit of advice to Elon Musk, assuming this isn't all an elaborate act, which I'll assume it's not. I've been through what you're going through on a smaller scale, but no less intense.
Usually CEOs of companies or leaders of movements aren't very accessible online. Think of Steve Jobs for example. There was always a lot of distance between him and users. Think of a guy on a stage whose presence is 100 times life size on a projection screen. Not someone you could walk up to and throw a pie at.
But you want to be in the mix, you get something from it. I understand, I do too. But then you have to be prepared for the pies in the face. And instead of calling the pie thrower a jackass, which he is for sure, just turn around and leave. "Gotta go." Poof you're out of there.
You can't try to engage with them, show them that you're smart and well-intentioned, it doesn't work. You have to be less accessible. You can't just be one of the gang, that's something you gave up when you became the icon that you are.
If you want some prior art on how to do it, look at how Jack Dorsey does it. I think he's basically a quiet person, so it's easy for him. You are not, you're an extrovert. But being quiet works for Jack. You command a very large enterprise. Your actions will have far more impact than your words. Interacting with the world as if you can make everyone love you, honestly none of them love you, or ever will. They just want to touch you. And some of them want to hurt you. Better to speak through what you do. None of them will ever come to their senses and realize what you want them to realize, whatever that is.
And btw, you need to clean up your act a bit, it's insincere to complain about people endangering your life when you do it to others. You may be super-rich but you're just a person. I think in some sense that's what you're trying to say. But you have to live within some of the constraints the rest of us live with. Using your huge following to create real problems for real people, that's just going to come back to you with just as much force. Better to not use your power that way.
It's nice to start over on Masto. When someone you haven't thought of in ages follows you it's a chance to think about them again. 😄
The new header image on the blog is of a $22 million house in Big Sur, CA. Zillow porn for sure. On the darkest day of the year, it's kind of lovely to be reminded that it just gets better and better from here. Another interesting thought. My old place in Silicon Valley sold for $36 million this year. How about that. Blew me away. I sold it in 2003 for much less.
It wasn't that long ago that we were expecting the Knicks to fire their coach and start trading some of the young talent. Instead, they moved a starter to the bench and started one of the young stars-in-waiting, and all of a sudden the Knicks are moving and grooving. Playing D that turns into O. Keeping their eye on the player and the ball. Dishing and swishing. They're a joy to watch, esp since they kept the young dudes we love so much. It's an important life lesson, not just for sports (why I like sports so much). Sometimes greatness is almost there. And it looks like losing. And it takes one small change to make things click. And sometimes that change happens. This is why we love the Knicks. You can believe in them even when it makes no sense to.
I moved another feed-based utility for developers to the demos folder of the reallySimple repo.
We've learned that you can't compete with Twitter on Twitter. I wonder how broad that is and where the lines are, if there are any. I also seems inevitable that Musk/Twitter will sue users, not just suspend them.
Update: Thanks to Stephen Tallent on Twitter. 😄
Podcast: An open voicemail to my longtime friend Guy Kawasaki, who wants to meet up with people on LinkedIn. I say come play with us on Mastodon. The difference is I can make software for you that plugs in beautifully on Mastodon, without limits, it's a "platform with no platform vendor." I will never be able to make software for you that works in LinkedIn. Lots of analogies. And I am as usual far too long-winded.
Once I got FeedLand's implementation of rssCloud working with WordPress and Andrew Shell's server, I created a very simple demo app in Node that just does the rssCloud functionality, so anyone can test with our implementation, and see exactly what's going on.
It also provides a reference implementation for people just getting started with rssCloud.
At some point I need to rewrite the walkthrough. It's not very well done imho (I am the author).
If you're shocked by how Musk processes stuff, carve out a little time over the holidays and watch the HBO series Silicon Valley. I lived in there from 1979 to 2008, and I was surprised at how real the show was even though it's a comedy.
The second thing I realized is that if I were teaching an second semester Comp Sci class I would first have the students write the app side of OAuth, and struggle with all the weird concepts and awful docs that usually accompany OAuth installations, and then as a follow-up project, I'd have them write the other side of OAuth, the one that makes all the weird rules and has shitty docs. I'm doing that now for the first time, and wish I had done it a long time ago. I think it's actually easier to write your own OAuth server than it is to use someone else's. I'm making sure btw that the example code is pristine absolutely obvious, and you should be able to just plop the code down in your app without any fuss or muss. At least those are my goals. We'll see how it turns out. ;-)
Two recent programming gestalts. I first learned how to modularize big projects with UCSD Pascal units. The Apple II version of ThinkTank was constructed out of units. But it wasn't until today that I realized there is an equivalent to that in JavaScript. Not sure they even have a name, but if you create a function that's designed to be called via with the new verb in a certain way, it behaves just like a unit, if you know that. I wish someone had pointed that out to me earlier, but I doubt there are very many serious UCSD Pascal devs using JavaScript in the same way. On the server of course we have packages which totally are units, that was clear from the start.
On WordPress supporting title-less feed items: I'm so happy to see them do this. We're in a moment where we might be able to straighten out this huge problem with the web, that limits how we can integrate systems that support short and long posts. We've been divided since Twitter gave up on their RSS feeds, a long time ago. Mastodon required some convincing to stick to no titles, rather than give in. And WordPress stepping up to make this transition means we have more reasons for other feed displayers to do so. So this is totally a win for RSS, and I see that as a win for me because my product is interop. I made that switch a long time ago. I make products too but interop comes first.
As a Tesla owner I find all the press about people dumping their Teslas because Musk is a brat pretty fucked up. Like going to a diner in Ohio to find out what Trumpsters are up to as if that were measuring anything credible.
I am an extreme liberal, esp when it comes to the web. My creds are excellent. And I love my Model Y. I feel like its a privilege to drive it every time I get in the car. And I've owned some terrific cars in my life. There are some cars that are just great to drive. So great that their flaws are not relevant. That Elon Musk is tied to the product is unfortunate. But until I drive a car that's equal to the car I have, I'm not going to bend to the bullshit the press is putting out there.
I also still use Twitter. I'm not going to let Musk chase me off. He'll have to suspend me if he wants me off. I would regret that. I've been on Twitter since 2006. Musk can do whatever he wants, Twitter is big enough for both of us.
I voted for Obama twice, Hillary and Biden. So fuck you if you think driving a Tesla is like being a MAGA.
The two things are completely disconnected, and the press is working overtime to try to connect them.
I see what you're doing and this is why I hate journalism. Kick back and stop inventing the news. Report it.
Of course journalists are being recruited by text-based social networks. They're influencers and that's a big business. What's amazing is the news orgs don't seem to see this. If they did, they'd be setting up their own networks of influencers.
I'm going to concentrate the feed-related source I release in the demos folder of the reallySimple repo.
I've always had a hunch that dead people have special powers over the living. I think my father showed me that in the days after he died, there was a miracle he would have appreciated, and part of me doesn't believe it was a coincidence.
Spoiler alert!! Don't read if you hate spoilers.
Did you ever read Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. We're at a SoT type moment with Twitter. It was such an amazing thing, but we can now speculate on its purpose with some confidence.
Everything Twitter did, everything you and I did on Twitter was for the simple purpose of giving a new kind of weapon to a boy-man with a vast fortune. His name is not Winston Niles Rumfoord, rather it's Elon Musk, which is kind of a Vonnegut name, if you think about it.
Or maybe it's so the boy-man could turn it over to the next meaningful person, someone in his karass possibly or perhaps a stranded space traveler from Tralfamadore.
One thing's for sure if your social network came from a big tech company or VC-backed startup, you’ll be locked in. It’s a fundamental law like Murphy or Moore.
A series of tweets dashed off in the middle of the night on my iPad.
I like the precedent Mastodon sets. A server product installed by users. A slow rise as opposed to an overnight success. A dominant competitor falls apart just enough to let a new entrant rise.
I also love the precedent RSS has set. Enduring a long PR campaign against it by tech giants, VCs and pundits, it persisted, having no employees or burn rate it just needs users to keep it going until both twitter and Google Reader are gone.
Bet the naysayers didn’t see RSS surviving through all that, but they don’t study history. Basic formats like RSS once entrenched never go away. Somewhere under NYC the pipes laid in Peter Stuyvesant's time are still carrying water to NYers.
Somewhere deep inside every Chromebook there beats the heart of an IBM ROM BIOS clone still handling all the events from the keyboard. And RSS is there now to provide Mastodon a solid path to informing people who don’t even use the product.
We pick up from where we left off when Twitter and Google Reader plopped their fat asses down on the feediverse. Hopefully we don’t let that happen again but I have my doubts as users flock to VC products just as dominant as those who are now vanquished.
We can now write postmortems on twitter. We know where all the promise, dreaming, vision, puffy news pieces led — it always was a powerful weapon waiting to be used that way, we don’t know it’s limits, but we’re going to find out.
A weird thought. Musk gets upset and calls a timeout. Twitter goes off the air for 24 hours. As Judy Tenuta says -- It could happen. ;-)
BTW, it's worth noting that your subscriptions are public info, so even if for some reason you couldn't log onto your account you could still access your subscriptions, because anyone can. For example, my subscriptions are here. You can even get them by category.
Also on their site they say "it's like podcasts -- but for reading." That's brilliant. Probably leaves a bunch of people scratching their heads. But this is where we're going. Making the world of text work as smoothly as the world of audio. Next step is to work on interop. So I can copy a full-featured textcast item from an app that doesn't support all the features (like Twitter or Mastodon) and paste it into one that does (like NetNewsWire or FeedLand), and voila -- everything is there. It's a simple change that would make it impossible for any participant in the network to lock you in. Your ideas would be free to move instead of being locked up. Feeds get us most of the way there, but there's a little more to do.
Lon Seidman: "Funny how my RSS reader keeps working perfectly fine well over a decade after I set it up. No bans, no algorithms, just dutifully spits out what I'm following each time I Iog in." That's because if someone tried to lock you in you'd just switch. Having something like RSS under an industry keeps it honest and respectful of users.
It's worth mentioning that NetNewsWire already does a good job of items with or without titles. Here are screen shots of NNW displaying a titled post, and an titleless post from Scripting News.
Just got a note from Matt Mullenweg saying they're going to support titleless feeds in WordPress. Couldn't be happier.
Last night I posted a note here announcing a new feature in FeedLand that lets you connect an email address to your account. I just wrote a more detailed explanation of what's going on with a place to ask questions if you're having trouble. This is important, it's a backup against a problem with Twitter. Better safe than sorry! 💥
A note to FeedLand users. There's a new feature where you can associate an email address with your account. Choose Connect with email in the Tools menu. This could serve as a backup in an emergency if Twitter goes down. It's important to create that connection as soon as possible, before an outage.
Something that was forgotten from the old days of blogging. We don't blog to make money, rather we blog as part of what we do to make money. Important difference. Since I switched back to full blogging in 2017 and not writing for social media, after some time building tools, and re-learning how to ship stuff from my blog, I used it to launch FeedLand earlier this year, and the results have been outstanding. People are using it. That was the goal. Blogging makes bigger things possible. It's how I organize my work and work with the people who use the product of my work. We observed this in 2004 and beyond as we launched podcasting. It happened a lot faster than with blogging, because we had blogs to promote podcasting. This stuff builds. When we get interop the power tends to expand as a multiple, not linearly.
On Twitter: You and I will forget this tweet in ten minutes, but I still use blog posts I wrote years and decades ago. You want to create value in your writing? Twitter probably isn't the place to do that.
Waiting until people think your opinion matters is pointless. It never happens. So you just keep going as if they did. And sometimes just by chance they seem to.
People who think I'm rude never say why. I'm left guessing. Something like this. You act like your opinion matters. How rude.
I have Drummer and Mastodon hooked up. You can create a thread in the outline structure in Drummer and then click an icon in the left margin to shoot it over to Mastodon. Here's an example of such a thread, in Mastodon and a screen shot of the outline that came from in Drummer. It's been a while since I added a feature to Drummer, and it seemed the new Mastodon capability in my toolbox seemed like a good opportunity to do that. I'll write up a howto for this shortly.
If was either/or.
Your friends were on Facebook.
You could write a blog post and paste it into Facebook, but the links wouldn’t go, nor styling a or title.
So you just wrote it on Facebook.
Goodbye blog.
Did Facebook care?
Hell no.
PS: Cross-posted on FB as a PNG.
I think we should all adopt a NBB and help them get started blogging and tied into the feed network.
We need leaders from outside the geek community. And they need help finding their way through the web of interconnected services.
Open systems are harder to navigate than the silos. This is a fact, always will be so. But a human concierge could mak the difference.
I am sending private pitches to various people offering help.
Ditch the business model. Blogging won't pay for itself that way. But in other ways the benefit is enormous.
* NBB == Natural Born Blogger
The idea of textcasting is like podcasting. When you create a podcast it isn’t bound to one player. Every podcast can be played by any player. It isn’t like that with text, but it could and should be. It will happen only if devs and users work together.
There's this great line in Sleeper where the character played by Woody Allen was asleep for 100 years and when he woke wanted to know how the world was destroyed. They said a guy named Albert Shanker got a nuclear weapon. That's a 1970s NYC joke. If you knew Albert Shanker, you'd get it. If they were remaking the movie now instead of Albert Shanker it'd be Elon Musk and instead of a nuke it'd be Twitter and instead of being science fiction it'd be true. Now that's still an Albert Shanker joke
BTW, yesterday we paused new signons to FeedLand. There were a lot of reasons for this. First, I didn't want a lot of users. I think of FeedLand as a fractional horsepower global feed management system. Not wanting in any way to compete with the huge systems, to create yet another monster like Twitter. I felt that we already had too many users for my liking. At some point the load on the server is going to be a problem, I wanted to stop well before we got to that point. Also, I want to do some development that would be harder with new users coming online. So at the very least we're pausing new membership. Remember this is not a corporate site. I am the only person working on the software and I'm responsible for keeping it running at a technical level, and dealing with trolls, spammers and abusers, which thankfully have not been a problem yet, but I know from experience that it's just a matter of time.
Good morning, my Spectrum wifi service got slow this morning, then very slow and then went out a few minutes ago. I have Starlink installed as a backup, and it wasn't working very well last time I tried it, presumably because it didn't have a good view of the sky. I thought this might change in the winter when all the leaves are gone, and I'm happy to report that it did. The service is fast! Of course people will think I'm a fascist because not only do I use Twitter and drive a Tesla, I am also a happy SpaceX customer. 💥
This is a must-read piece. "Podcasts are just out there, like air. You don’t go to one place to get them; you get them from everywhere and anywhere."
We could use what we've learned from podcasting and apply it to text, to create a wonderful worldwide open and huge writing environment that isn't tied to a single company and isn't limited. And no we do not need anything more than the web to do it.
The web has not gotten nearly the respect it deserves as a writing environment. It's been crippled by neglect, greed, complacency and cynicism. And jealousy -- professional writers are contemptuous of the idea of amateurs writing brilliantly. But it's not too late.
BTW, this was the first time I wrote one of these HowTos that is part prose and part code. I love the way it turned out. I didn't plan on talking to feed reader devs on behalf of writers, but I think we all need to focus on who we're doing all this for, and it's primarily writers imho and then readers, and to the extent that programmers matter, it's just teeeny little bit. If this were a restaurant, we've designed things solely from the point of view of waiters, ignoring chefs and diners. That's how far off course we've gotten. We value tech too much esp when tech has done such a bad job as we have in feed reading user experience.
No wonder the writing and reading environment of the web in 2022 is so awful. We ignore the writers and the readers. Every time one of us speaks up, we get a chorus of agreement from other writers and readers, and then totally ignored by the developers. One example I'm constantly reminded of, because I often read the NYT on my iPad, it always interrupts my reading to put up a dialog asking if I want to read the article in their app. Even worse, they wait long enough so that I have already started reading the article. It's as if they want me to hate them. They say the app is much better. Well, I don't want to do that, for good reason, and it's none of their freaking business but there's no way to turn this dialog off. I pay them a lot of money to read their articles. And every time I open one of their stories on my iPad I'm reminded how much they hate me, and vice versa.
A couple of minor but nice tweaks to yesterday's HowTo thanks to a suggestion from Joseph Zitt.
I've been part of a project on Twitter to moderate posts as a community thing. I have no idea who else is involved, how big it is, and how much power it has. But I find it interesting and believe it's well-intentioned, so I participate. They ask you to look at posts and rate relevance, sources, context. None of the messages have profanity or are abusive or personal (some contain assumptions that are). I think there must be filters in place that see the items before people like me do. Here's a screen shot of something they asked me to look at. I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to disclose so I'll stop with that.
Alexa do you really have to say good evening or good morning before answering every freaking request. Thank you.
Rather than just preaching how feed readers could easily accommodate both titled and title-less items, as I have been, I put up a prototype that illustrates, with real data.
Here's what a NYT feed looks like in the prototype. It's an easy case because the NYT feeds are uniform. Every post has a title and short description and links to its story. So this is a base case.
Now here's a tougher case -- the Scripting News feed, which contains both titled and title-less posts. But it still looks great, both kinds of posts.
I will publish the source for this tomorrow, and hopefully skilled UI designers will have a look and then maybe we can approach the developers at each of the feed reader developers, and get past this.
My go-to song these days is Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix. Totally awful lyrics. But oh is so fine otherwise.
Podcast: I was cc'd on a Masto thread re wtf happened to the blogosphere. I started writing, and couldn't keep up with my mind, so I opened up my iPhone and started talking about what happened and what we should and shouldn't do if we want to rebuild the war-torn landscape of blogging and feeds, that still exists. I addressed this to Brad DeLong one of the earliest bloggers, and a user, not a developer, as in "users and developers party together." We can still have it all, imho -- but we need users to work with the developers. It's 15 minutes. And it's a rant. But I was due a rant on this subject for giving up on the mess in 2017 and starting a rebuild that has new relevance now imho.
My eyes keep getting better. I have 20-20 vision for the first time in my life. Seeing so much more in a lot of ways. I told a friend today it's like I have Tesla eyes. I know people don't like Tesla these days, but I still feel like it's a privilege to drive my Model Y every time, even though I've been driving it for over a year now. It's a feeling of able-ness no car has ever given me. And that's the feeling my new eyes give me. I've been dis-abled seriously for years now. And my vision never really worked, even when I was a kid. I remember getting glasses for teh first time in second or third grade. I never knew there was so much writing in the world, everywhere. It's like that except at an age where such discoveries are pretty rare. I think this experience will fade away as my new eyesight becomes the norm, but for now, it's given me a new youth-like experience, pretty cool.
What I want as an API for ActivityPub is the same kind of API we came up for Twitter in Drummer's scripting language.
WordPress has a feed reader built-in and a plugin that displays feed items in the right margin of a blog's home page. It uses the [No Title] approach. Please if it doesn't have a title, just leave it blank. Here's a website that illustrates, and a screen shot.
A fact I've observed. Most programmers who work on web content systems not only aren't writers, they don't make an effort to know or understand writers. The really good products, the ones writers like to use are not surprisingly written and designed by programmers who are also writers. But -- listening to writers is something programmers can learn how to do.
It's not hard to be true to the intent of the author of a feed, and create a good experience for the reader.
In the real world some feed items have titles and some don't. Here's a screen shot of my blog. I've put red arrows pointing to the items that don't have titles. You could argue I suppose that they should have titles. That I should take a 9-word item and give it a two-word title. But I don't do that. And it shows up in my feed without a title, because the item does not have a title. And that's not up to anyone but me, the author of the feed.
Here's a screen shot of how a popular feed reader displays those items. It isn't terrible, but it's imho wrong. The first item has a [no title] message where a title would go. Why? Look at it from the human reader point of view. What information does that convey, above what the writer was saying, in bigger type and in bold. NO TITLE. I don't know about you but to me that looks like criticism, an error message, from the software to the person who wrote the post. Sometimes all the posts show up with that message. This time only one did. And for the others, they repeat the first bits of the post. Again, why? The human read them once, why put the same words they just read on the screen again? That seems quite wrong to me.
Now I don't know why they designed their software this way, but I can guess -- when they started they designed it assuming all posts had titles, and it took a while before they discovered that some items don't. So they shoehorned those into the app without disrupting the design of the product. But this has been going on for a very long time, many years, basically since Google Reader decided, incorrectly, that all feed items must have titles.
With Mastodon supporting RSS, and Mastodon booming in popularity, feed readers should expect to see a lot more feeds with items without titles, unless for some reason Mastodon does what Twitter did many years ago, under pressure from Google Reader to add titles to items, and just withdraws the feeds. All because they couldn't adjust to a reality they hadn't planned for.
Okay so what's the answer?
- Never display NO TITLE. It's not a good use of your space, the reader's time and it's wrong. The author didn't use those words. They're your words. You don't have a right to put your words in space reserved for the words from feeds.
- Instead display the first words from the description element of the item where you would put the title. If there are too many words, flow them into the space you've allocated for the description, but do not repeat words from the description. Again, you'd displaying something that isn't in the feed. The author did not repeat the words, so you can't do that.
That's it, unless I'm missing something, and if I am, tell me. You can send me email, dave@scripting.com, and if you don't want me to publish it, say so and I won't. I don't want to embarrass anyone, I just want to solve this problem and move on to a feed world where feeds with items without titles are handled well by the reader software.
BTW, one more thing, some feeds will have both kinds of posts, items with titles and items without. My feed is like that. The item for this post will have a title because the post has a title.
Five days later, everyone loves RSS support in Mastodon, and apparently very few people know about it.
Okay here we go. I don't know how to say this without pissing a bunch of people off, but I have to say it anyway. It's not ActivityPub that's booming now, it's Mastodon, which happens to use ActivityPub. The problem with ActivityPub is that it is basically incomprehensible. I don't know why it is that way. I could clear my schedule for the next three months and then at the end, I'd be able to tell you why it is that way. But I can't do that, because I have stuff to do with FeedLand and I want to get back to Drummer soon. I have users and I want to do stuff for them. As curious as I am to find out what's there, someone else will have to do that work. What we need is this. A simple package for Node, a lot simpler than the ones that are out there, that covers the basic functionality of things users do in Mastodon interactively, without using Mastodon, just ActivityPub. Create a new post, edit an existing post, boost a post, like one. Follow someone. Etc. Over on Mastodon a few people are talking about Bear Hugs. I didn't remember, but that's a term Steve Gillmor coined (I believe) for what I did with RSS. I basically kept building stuff with it, and getting content people on board until RSS on its own meant something. Then I let it go. We need that for ActivityPub. The people who won't like this are the members of the W3C. I'm afraid they think AP is done. Mastodon is already doing things outside of AP. I don't blame them. I would do the same thing. They have an API, they are using RSS, both of which are comprehensible. I think AP deserves to be comrepehensified, it deserves a bear hug. BTW, Steve Gillmor is to tech as Steve Bannon is to MAGA. Very much the same concept, imho.
Not much to say today. Funny thing is that usually after I write this all kinds of ideas come pouring out.
I asked OpenAI why podcasting isn't owned by a single tech company and it got the right answer.
It's probably very good for the world that Stewart Butterfield is leaving Salesforce. After he gets time to rest and recharge, something brilliant and open is probably going to come from his mind. A very capable and creative person, Slack is an amazing product and he evolved it well.
I asked Openai to "invent a fictitious twitter timeline with tweets only from cool people who are not in any way famous?" Believe it or not what it came up with was pretty relaxing!
The most interesting episode so far in the 500 songs series is the one about Hey Joe as performed by Jimi Hendrix. I'm not listening to them in any particular order. I felt kind of bad about it, but I got over it. One idea he talks about was there was an idea of white drugs and black drugs. I can vouch for that. I was blown away a few years ago to find out everyone smokes weed. I thought it was just a white boomer thing. Everyone does it. The sound of eyes opening. I asked Alexa to play me some Hendrix music. First she played Hey Joe which I'd been bingeing on. Then came his opening at Woodstock. And then All Along the Watchtower. It was really emotional for me. It's already been a heavy duty emotional day. Let's go deeper! After that he asks Are You Experienced? Hey for such a young man, he died at 27, he was very self-aware and surroundings-aware.
feedToMasto is a Node app that periodically checks a list of feeds, posting new items to Mastodon. Good example code to get started with the Mastodon API. Also illustrates how easy feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF) can be incorporated into any Node app with the reallySimple package. Finally, I hope to start building a rep in the Mastodon development community with this package. I hope to make quite a few contributions in the future. If you have questions here's a good place to start.
Checking in with FeedLand users, is there interest in: Mapping a FeedLand category to a Mastodon account.
This is a brilliant point. Kanye has twice as many followers as there are Jews in the whole freaking world.
Not loving FeedLand because it uses Twitter for identity is like not loving a friend because they had a baby with someone you don't like. Or not loving NetNewsWire, for example, because it runs on Macs and iOS and Apple does crazy shit that fucks everything up. (I use Macs, lots of them, despite what I think of Apple. I also own a bunch of Apple stock yet I am aware of how Apple is not a force for good.) Or you find out some app is running in Google's cloud and Google is destroying the web. I have another one. I use Digital Ocean for hosting and S3 for storage. You might want to check out who owns those services and decide if you still like me. (I use DO because they have great docs and good prices. I use S3 because it was a breakthrough product when it came out and I totally needed what they offered and I loved what they were doing, and now I'm pretty well locked-in.) And I chose Twitter for identity in 2014 because identity is a human-intensive bitch and they were offering to let me use theirs for $0. I solved the problem long ago and baked it into my system. I could bake something else in, and I would, quickly if they broke us. But so far I've been able to spend my time on more productive and fun development work. Maybe I'm giving something up. Yeah, there are a lot of choices in life. You never know what was down the road you didn't take.
Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M's support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn't know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been "boosted" (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it's good to have a number to put behind that.
Having fun with AI. I asked the OpenAI chatbot to write a story about the demise of bloggers now that OpenAI can do all the writing. It added journalists all on its own. I assume some pundit can use this in an op-ed for the NYT or Washington Post about the dangers of AI. Which I then asked OpenAI to write. 💥
I need help testing a new important app -- it's the first one that hooks RSS directly up to Mastodon via the Mastodon API. I am reluctant to promote it until it's had been validated. So if you know how to run a Node app, and have a few minutes to help out, please give it a try, and let me know, in this thread, whether it worked. A link to one of the Mastodon messages it created would be helpful too. Thanks!
Poll: I subscribe to HBO, Netflix, AppleTV, Hulu. Guess which is the only one I ever watch?
These are the goals for the software I am about to release.
- The network of RSS publishers and readers should be part of the Fediverse. This software enables the flow of RSS content into the Fediverse.
- To provide good simple working code for the Mastodon API. I had to do too much work to figure out how to get what amounts to a Hello World script up and running. Now you don't have to do all that work.
- You should be able to build feed-based utilities without giving any thought to reading feeds. Reading a feed should be as easy as reading a JSON file. This app illustrates how that works, using the reallySimple package.
- I want to get some code out there into the Mastoverse, to start building a rep in the community.
2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again."
My first Mastodon-empowered app is Radio3. You can now share linkblog posts to Mastodon, in addition to Twitter, Slack, RSS and a static HTML page. I use Radio3 to do the Links page on scripting.com.
This is a huge deal. If I type a web address in a tweet, Twitter figures it out and hots it up in the rendered tweet. All of a sudden a tweet can link out to lots of places. Let's hope next up is Markdown support, optional titles, unlimited length and podcast enclosures and then you better believe WordPress and Tumblr will have to do it, and that will provide impetus for Mastodon. Here we go. Please keep going Twitter.
Micropayments is such an awful term. Let's say I buy a Metrocard to ride the NYC subway. Every time I slide the card through a turnstile, what is that called? Is it a micropayment? Or I have an EZ-Pass responder on my car, so I drive through where the toll booths used to be without even slowing down. I don't know how much that costs, but I assure you there's nothing micro about it!
One of the reasons business people at pubs must be tired of this discussion is it's their job to get MACRO payments for their employer, not teeny little micropayments. As I envision it, I would probably spend $100 a month on various pubs, and maybe more and more over time. When fluidity is added to the economics, how can you help but pay more. It's only because of the attitude about this at publishers that we can't have more news (and they get more money).
Right now I only pay three pubs -- NYT, WP and Consumer Reports. My money should be spread around a lot better than that.
Micropayments is such an awful term. Let's say I buy a Metrocard to ride the NYC subway. Every time I slide the card through a turnstile, what is that called? Is it a micropayment? Or I have an EZ-Pass responder on my car, so I drive through where the toll booths used to be without even slowing down. I don't know how much that costs, but I assure you there's nothing micro about it! One of the reasons business people at pubs must be tired of this discussion is it's their job to get MACRO payments for their employer, not teeny little micros. As I envision it, I would probably spend $100 a month on various pubs, and maybe more and more over time. When fluidity is added to the economics, how can you help but pay more. It's only because of the attitude about this at publishers that we can't have more news (and they get more money). Right now I only pay three pubs -- NYT, WP and Consumer Reports. My money should be spread around a lot better than that.
I'm definitely starting to see breakage in Twitter. Things that used to work that now are obviously broken.
This picture is very informative.
I asked on my Mastodon account what apps other than Mastodon and micro.blog are on the ActivityPub network. I had heard of many of these, but in the newbie fog, I hadn't retained the memory.
I don't see any feed readers.
We need to fix that.
My parents were children in Europe as the Holocaust was brewing. Their parents, my grandparents, got them out in time so that they could meet in Brooklyn, get married and have children, including me of course. My paternal grandfather told me, when I was a little kid, in his heavy Russian accent "Daveeed, when the Nazis come (he was sure they would) you get a gun and go on the roof and you shoot them!" My parents were horrified. I thought he was just a crazy old man. But he was a lot smarter and wiser than we gave him credit for.
Perhaps we should try exterminating Nazis now that they're voluntarily decloaking. They owe us approximately 6 million lives.
You know how they used to say if you're not the customer, you're the product. Well today it's if you're not the Nazi you're the Good German or worse.
Today I'm testing a new Node.js app that watches a set of feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF) and posts new items to a Mastodon account. This one works with any Mastodon server. Requires some technical competence, but not much. The idea is to get the example code out there, for reading feeds easily and posting to Mastodon, again easily. I want feeds to melt into the fediverse, forming sort of a feediverse, which is maybe just a little bit bigger. I am so on board with decentralizing everything we do. My pitch for user-run servers goes back to the beginning of the web. Now having knocked down one of the biggest silos, all of a sudden lots of blue sky! Let's not give up our freedom this time. Anyway watch for a release later today or tomorrow.
I hear every day that people don't like that FeedLand uses Twitter for identity. Some comments.
- Using Twitter for identity, at this time, gives Twitter nothing other than the fact that you logged into my app, data which is already publicly accessible. In return they give me a unique name for you, so your data on my server doesn't overwrite someone else's data.
- Changing the identity system would take a lot of time, time that isn't going into adding features, interop and fixing bugs.
- I've had lots of experience being misdirected by the wants of non-users. If only I'd do this then I'd reap the benefit of their usage. But usually that doesn't materialize. Making new features for people who love my product, and leading other developers, is a much better use of my time.
- At some point I hope to offer choice, for reasons that clearly help the product.
As you may recall, I had the lens in my right eye replaced on Monday. Simple outpatient deal. The result is amazing. Everything is so sharp and clear, colors so vivid. I had been living in a visually foggy and blasé world, now it’s the other extreme, a total acid trip.
It happened for newly logged-in users at startup, as FeedLand loads for the first time.
The first thing the app does is load the user's appPrefs.json file -- it fails, of course -- it hasn't been created yet. It's not an error, although in the JavaScript console it looks like one.
The code as originally written allows for this, but I added something on Nov 8, as part of the Your Feed feature, code that copies something from the place that doesn't exist yet to a place that does, without checking. Boom.
This meant that the rest of the startup code didn't run. The app is sitting there waiting for the first-time user to do something. Everything is blank, none of the commands work, and yet two of them persevered, and reported the problem.
The second report provided a screen shot of the JavaScript console, which pointed me to the problem, almost by accident -- he didn't realize that was the problem, because there were two errors reported before it (as noted above those aren't real errors). If the screen shot had been slightly shorter, I would've been pulling my hair out looking for a needle in the haystack. Instead it pointed exactly to the problem, the code had a comment providing the date it was introduced (Nov 8), and sure enough the first report came after that change. We had tested this functionality at least a dozen times before Nov 8 without problems, so the first time I wrote it off as cosmic rays. Not a good call Dave, in retrospect. A very bad call actually.
Anyway, since the problem cures itself as soon as they get a good logon, it simply wasn't repeatable. But this time, having a theory about where the error was, and I had a virgin Twitter account ready for the test -- I logged in and it was fixed, which I could see as I stepped through the code in the debugger.
But -- I should have tried to repeat it after the first report. But I guess I didn't want to believe the problem was as bad as it was, and I didn't feel like searching for the needle. However if I had done it, presumably I would have looked in the JavaScript console and seen what the problem was and a few hundred more people would have had a good initial experience with FeedLand, instead of the really awful one they actually had.
Many apologies to the people who endured this, it is so freaking embarrassing. I am sorry this happened.
Oy. I have to do better.
A lot of people think I'm too old to ship a product as good as one I shipped N years ago. Those same people think you're rude if you insist that you have done that. I think they get angry, one or two have made fun of me, as if I'm a fool. It's not really very fair or friendly, even though these people may think they're friends. I can think of a dozen people who think I'm rude because I acted like FeedLand is a breakthrough. Or maybe they didn't like the way I said it? Hmm. I wonder how else you could. I've been through this loop over and over. As long ago as 1989 I was thought to be finished as a software dev. I wish it would get easier once. Just once. If I keep beating the drum, I guess when people see I'm not giving up, they might have a look? I'm not giving up, btw. 😄
I learned how to use the web from reporters in 1994. I volunteered to run the SF newspaper strike website, and they were shooting me articles from all over the country, in HTML, and telling me how they wanted them published. Most important -- preserve the links. It was an incredible time of learning and fun and working together. That's when I'm happy, making software for people who have a vision.
A good reason to keep a Twitter account.
Mastodon's scaling is an unknown at this point. And it's growing very quickly.
Had this thought just now when I couldn't get through to either of the instances I frequent.
At least think of Twitter as a backup.
This morning my vision is weird, slightly flawed, but on the whole much better than it was before the surgery yesterday.
The thing I like about the end of 2022 in this part of the internet. My toys are very much on-topic now, after many years of being aggressively ignored by those in-the-know.
I kept wanting to say this. I've been counted out many times only to rise again. Sometimes even I believe that bullshit. I'll keep digging until I can't dig no mo.
There are three ways to get content into the Mastodon flow: 1. Activity Streams. 2. The Mastodon API. 3. Feeds.
Reading some stuff I wrote in 2007 and 2010, I was saddened by how much my blog changed for the worse in a few years, because I was trying to fit into Google Reader's idea of what a blog post was, which was not my own view. I wrote posts of all lengths, some with titles, on their own pages, and others just a sentence or two or a paragraph, many on the same page. They used to coexist in one flow, and it was great! All of a sudden there was a fork, on one side you had to use Twitter and the other side you could use blogging software, on one side you were locked in and in the other you had choice. We've been suffering this division since 2006 or so. But we're in a really good place now because we could rejoin the two flows, and let writers decide how much writing each idea deserves, not a random limit imposed years ago without any clear idea of why. Right now please everyone think about what the world would be like if we had blogs and tweets flowing through one pipe. All kinds of new ways of visualizing flows will develop, the boundaries will melt. You can have it all, I promise, as a software developer. As a writer, we'll learn how to play with length without having to edit to fit an engineer's idea of how writing works. It's as if a geek said to a painter you can only create on a 140 pixel canvas. You could make good art that way, but think of all the art you can't make. I promise, you will be inspired by the new kinds of software we make. Most people using computers today have never been around for a blue-sky boom, where all the rules that were holding us back are gone in an instant. We are there right now folks, let's make the most of the moment.
I was looking for links to prior eye surgeries, on the left eye. Not a good story. I started with decent vision, and a left-eye floater freaked me out. An eye surgeon said they could get rid of it, they did, but there was a new dead spot in the middle of my left eye. This surgery, in 2007, has given me crappy vision since then. Finally I had to get the lens in my right eye replaced, that's what was done today. After this, when the dust settles, my vision should be closer to what it was after the first surgery. The lesson: when a doctor says they can fix a condition, find out in advance if the cure is worse. A floater, I learned later, is harmless. Your brain gets used to and and factors it out, you stop seeing the floater after a while. The best thing to do is wait it out. Bigger lesson: if you can avoid surgery, avoid it.
Dear friends -- I got my right eye fixed today. Was it worth it? Well I had a good all-afternoon nap, so that was pretty good. Now my vision sucks in a new way, but the how-to guide says it'll clear up in a day or two, at most a week. At times the colors are intense, like I imagine an acid trip to be, and some light reflects off objects like a Fourth of July sparkler. I think this is just foreign material being assimilated into human material. Was it worth it? Hmmm. I'll let you know. But I'm pretty sure it was. Your faithful correspondent -- Davey.
Where we're headed is a world where it doesn't matter where you write, you can use the tools you love, and it doesn't matter where you read, again what you love, in the moment is what you will use. Computers used to be like this. In the 80s you could use any writing tool you wanted and any printer. There was no concept of a writing tool that was bound to a printer. We're very close to that now, closer than we've been in a decade. I am determined that we do not pass up this opportunity. Seize the moment.
Some Mastodon posts are gorgeous. And they're going to look even better when Masto has Markdown support. The version I'm testing has Markdown now (also a 10000 character limit btw). Think of how long it took for Twitter to not do Markdown in tweets. And we've got users to play with. "Users and developers party together."
I posted this on one of the discussion boards for Mastodon devs, but it may not have been the right place. So I'll try here.
I'm the author of the RSS 2.0 spec, and actively working on FeedLand and hooking it up to Mastodon. Very excited about what we're building and how well it works with MD.
Mastodon's RSS feed is also great. Items that don't have titles don't have titles in the feed. Stick to your guns on that, we have to get the feed readers to stop calling title-less items errors. They are totally valid RSS.
Love the Markdown support, I've been advocating for it. And it's fully supported in both directions in FeedLand. We do it the same way you do. Render the Markdown in the description element and in the HTML rendering.
One more thing I'd like to see you do here -- include the Markdown source in the item using the element. That's how we do it and others are as well. As far as I know we're the only ones doing this, so it's possible at this point to get everyone swinging the same way, for interop.
For a model see how I do it in my FeedLand feed.
Screen shot of a demo item with styled text, a link and a list.
Please let me know if there are any questions and congrats on a phenomenal product.
I'm taking tomorrow and part of Tuesday off. Murphy-willing blogging will resume, along with the release of new software.
If I were a person with a uterus I’d be furious about the Dobbs decision and I’d be equally outraged that life goes on as usual knowing that other people with uteri were being enslaved by their state governments as a result.
news.scripting.com now has 250 items per tab, where previously there was a limit of 100. I wanted more news.
These days my questions are in this order:
- Do they support RSS?
- Do they support
- Do they support
?
If they check those three boxes they are my friend! 💥
Even two are pretty coooooool. 😎
And honestly I'd be pretty happy with one. 😄
I couldn't be happier that an open microblogging site is booming after spending a full year developing FeedLand. Timing couldn't be better. I love that there are users who are excited about the software I make.And I truly appreciate Elon Musk for letting them all go.
There are lots of news sites covering developments at Twitter.
Are there any news sites focusing on Mastodon?
I'd like to create a category for them in FeedLand.
Shared publicly of course.
What kind of news?
- new developments in the system software
- new apps from developers
- ideas for the future
- who are the users
- unique applications
I've been around a number of big platforms when they were new, starting with the Apple II, then the IBM PC, Mac, Windows, the web, RSS, podcasting...
When they're new is when the news is interesting and exciting.
The best journalists want to be covering it, and we want them.
February 2001: "Internet 3.0 will realize the groupware vision of the late 80s which was really Doug Engelbart's vision of the 60s and 70s. Shared writing spaces with good boundaries. Structures that link to each other but are capable of managing greater complexity than the page-oriented metaphor of the Web." I still want to do this.
To follow me on Mastodon, paste @davew@mastodon.social into the search box and press Return.
On my Mastodon account: As you may have heard, I'm developing a connection between my base of software that works with Twitter and teaching it how to work with Mastodon as well. The fact that you can see this in my Mastodon account means that it's working at a new level.
The blogosphere which was absorbed by twitter for $0 was eventually turned into a Nazi frat party for Elon. That was the end result, that and billions for Ev, Jack, Biz, Union Square and Spark, and we’re back where we were when they took over. 16 years wasted.
I can't tell you how convenient it is that Mastodon has the same name as my first real internet presence on CompuServe in the 80s, also Mastodon. I have a whole language already designed to go with that name. Mastodoctor, for example. For a while we were all adding "bunny" to our names, so I became Mastobunny and then Mastobun for short. Most of these names are available, so I'm tempted, but so far I've resisted. I have bought a couple though. Like most domain names I buy, I'll probably never use them. But it's nice they're there. I keep hoping someday to come up with a service that deserves the name ou.rs which I've been renewing for many years.
I had a great talk with Doc Searls yesterday. They're always expressive and irreverant. We had fun at the expense of New Jersey, Kevin Durant, The Nets and of course the current mess at Twitter. I keep thinking we should do a podcast. If there was anyone in the world I want to do one with it would be Papa Doc.
bullmancuso.com is an imaginary friend with a personal home page. This is a well understood concept. It could be a blog, or an about page, a resume. A web page that is associated with a person.
There could be subdomains like:
- ftp.bullmancuso.com
- smtp.bullmancuso.com
- news.bullmancuso.com
If he set up a Mastodon server, what should it be called?
- social.bullmancuso.com
- masto.bullmancuso.com
- microblogs.bullmancuso.com
- friends.bullmancuso.com
Or is the Mastodon server so important that it should take the top spot, with just the naked domain.
We're also going to need domains that serve as API glue, just like we have for Twitter. What should those be called? That's a less important question because the only places such a domain would appear is in an app that interfaces with Mastodon servers.
Comments here.
FeedLand has a really simple websockets interface that connects the browser-based client with the server. The same interface can be used in server apps, or other clients. Here's a simple demo app in Node.js that shows how it works. Please be kind to our server. This is keeping with the spirit of FeedLand, we want news to flow where ever it makes sense for it to flow. I'm using this to hook up FeedLand to Mastodon, more on that sooon. 💥
I have very vague but strong memories of the JFK assassination. I was 8, in second grade, my teacher, Miss Ruffino, rushed out of the classroom in tears, no idea why. My mom picked me up to walk me home, we lived a couple of blocks from the school, PS 149 Queens. I understood Kennedy was President, but he was the only president I had known. The idea of someone other than Kennedy being president didn’t make any sense. I asked my mom, what now. Someone named Johnson would be president. It didn’t make any sense to me. Kennedy was president.
Don’t underestimate the importance of Mastodon. It’s like the internet itself, or AWS making it easy to create your own version of Linux, or PCs letting you have your own computer. I experienced all these liberations. Some thought these unthinkable, and controlled silos do serve a purpose as training wheels. But after some time you grow up and it’s time to leave home and create your own world. I believe we are now experiencing such a moment. We don’t need Twitter to provide us a safe space. Life itself isn’t safe. Fear is frozen fun! Only steal from the best. And as they say -- Still diggin!
To FeedLand users. If Twitter turned us off for some reason you’d still be able to read your news while we worked around the outage. But so far there have been no problems that I’m aware of, and rushing to change tested software is a sure way to break things. That said we're making good progress on hooking up to Mastodon. Planning to show off a new way to do news products with FeedLand, and I want to write Mastodon threads in Drummer. Those will be the first steps. ☘️
In the early days of podcasting our motto was
- "Users and developers party together."
It's a very powerful combination. Can't be beat.
It's time to do that again. 🚀
There's something really interesting about this feed from Mastodon. I look at it and I see that even though I've never met them, somehow their feed ended up looking a lot like the feeds I make now, 20 years later. It's like there was this game of Telephone, and you'd expect by now, after passing through so many hands, esp people who were trying to break the chain, what came out the other end is correct. Thanks due in part to Manton Reece who persuaded the Masto folk that feed items are not required to have titles. Finally we have a massive maker of feeds who I hope will force all feed readers to support this feature that has been in RSS since v0.91. Item titles are optional. It's in the spec. In fact it's so important that I said it twice in two different ways in case anyone was confused. I think this is just a matter of programmers looking for an easy way out and most of them not being writers. 💥
In late 2021, I wrote this piece which has turned into a manifesto in my mind. "Drummer is more than a piece of software -- it's an interop bomb." The same is true of FeedLand.
In the age of Mastodon, we're going to rely more on our blogs because we will be able to.
I had to say this on Twitter first.
Elon Musk is making the same mistake that Kevin Durant did when he signed with the Nets.
First thing he did after signing, he had a press conference where he dis'd the Knicks. I guess he was thinking there was some kind of rivalry. There wasn't. No one had any feelings at all for the Nets. A complete zero among NY basketball fans. And the Knicks, well we have a lot of heart there and for the most part it's an ache. The last thing we have any energy for is an idiot who has no idea of the place he's entered, and where we're at, basketball-wise.
And Musk has no idea where Twitter users are re Trump.
I don't know what led him to believe anyone had any more juice for Trump. Even the people who liked him are tired. He had a good run, as far as trolls go, but we're just tired. Not even remotely excited.
Trump is all wrung out. Even he knows it. But somehow that fact escaped Musk.
Video demo: I didn't want long posts to dominate the feed, so I came up with this approach, a down-arrow that reveals the full content, in place, without having to go anywhere else. It's this approach that would make it possible to have indefinite length posts in Masto or Twitter or whatever, without dominating the feed.
The rich folk are coming for your Social Security. You know -- the money that was taken from your paycheck so you wouldn't be poor when you got old.
They got all the cookies, but they want yours too.
And they use some of their money to buy ads for Republican politicos to convince you to vote for this gift. This picture perfectly illustrates how they do it.
I'm close to having my Hello World for Mastodon in JavaScript app working, but could use help from people who have been down this road.
One thing I love most about Mastodon is they are genuinely interested in my software. Unlike Twitter which could give a shit. Over there, wow, they think the idea of more toys from Dave with feeds and blogs, that's the best. I feel like Keith Richards singing Happy. 😄
I'm helping Colin Walker get his rssCloud implementation working. I know other people are doing this now, so if you want to get in the loop this is a good time and place to do so.
Video demo: I can now sign on to Mastodon the way we sign on to Twitter. This is the very beginning, there's still a lot of work to do. What a slog!
When I was growing up, and still to this day, the word "Jew" was, to me, dirty. I didn't like to hear it. It smelled like rot and death and sadness. I had this idea before I was conscious, before I was in school. Yet I knew all along that I was a Jew. Where did I get it from? I guess I grew up in it. It must've come from my family and neighbors and schoolmates, even teachers, and on TV, in music and radio. Reading. Who knows. But it was there. It still is.
So that's why I don't use the word "antisemitism" any more. It sounds so technical, almost benign. Instead let's call it what it is -- Jew Hate.
When Jew Haters practice their hate, they're moving the needle towrd Holocaust, which even though it's a very strong word isn't strong enough. It's genocide. The killing of an entire ethnic group, systematically, with the goal of eliminating all of them.
Now I don't think anything we do can eliminate or even reduce Jew Hate. But letting it out of its box and into the public conversation as it has been lately, amazingly coming from black men, that despite what Jon Stewart says, that is not okay. It's not liberal to allow Jew Hate to be laughed at on SNL. Or to allow an NBA star to shout it from his million-follower Twitter account, or for a pop singer to say he wants to kill Jews, again on a million-follower Twitter account. When you do that, you invite all the other Jew Hate to come out and play. And once it's out, that means Jews are going to die. Once out, it might not be possible to stop it. Something to think about Jon Stewart when they take you and your family away for your final solution.
I'm old and tired and fed up with accepting that it's too dangerous to speak up about this. If no one else will, I guess, I will. If no NBA star will reassure me that the NBA is not filled with Jew Haters, I'm going to assume it is. I will never watch an NBA game without thinking that every black man on the floor hates me because of my ancestry and blames me for their misery and would like to see me and my kin killed in a horrible way. I don't wish that for them. But I also can't enjoy a sport where the participants feel that way about me, and they don't even know me.
If you think you're liberal and a fair-minded person and just another Good American, it 's time to say something. Otherwise you're going to have to explain to your grandchildren what you did as it was happening again, only this time in the USA.
I spent this whole week building a connection to Mastodon. We will have FeedLand and Drummer running in the Mastodon ecosystem before too long, Murphy-willing.
I spent the whole week working on the Mastodon OAuth interface. This shit is always a slog. And the docs always suck. But once it's done, it's done.
Tomorrow's another day.
One thing I won’t miss should Twitter go, is all the phonies with supposedly millions of followers thanks to the Suggested Users List debacle.
To all the old school bloggers, remember how you all used to hate me? This is how it works. It's very rare that in an online space people love the top person, if they are accessible. If they're aloof, hard to find, or speak in haiku, you love them. But if you can talk to them and they might respond, most of what you're going to say to and about them will be negative. I know -- I lived on the other side of that for a number of years. It was fucked up. Absolutely nothing I said would be interpreted as if it were said like a human, like themselves.
I imagine running Tesla and Spacex are trouble, but Twitter is a very strange beast because every user has a Twitter account (obviously) and they're all connected to each other (again obviously) and no such link exists between Tesla and Spacex users. Further Tesla users spend tens of thousands of dollars to become users, and Tesla could brick their cars any time they want, and we're not connected to each other. Same with SpaceX of course. And even worse than that, most of Twitter's users are either journalists, bloggers, or podcasters. So there's that too. And every one of them is sure Elon Musk is fucking it up. All of this foerseeable, btw.
Some people have said they don't want to use FeedLand because it uses Twitter for identity.
I always forget to mention that you can access most of what's in FeedLand without logging in.
For example, here's my feed list.
- http://feedland.org/?username=davewiner
You can go almost anywhere. You won't see the features that make it easy to subscribe to a feed, or add to your own personal feed, maybe one or two other things.
But most of the product does not require login.
I plan to marry FeedLand to Mastodon via RSS and maybe later ActivityPub. In case you can't tell I love Mastodon. Everything about it so far. Maybe I wish ActivityPub were based on RSS, but I got over that when I saw how nice the software is. That's what really matters, that and interop and not locking users and developers in.
FeedLand pushes RSS into lots of new places. RSS has been kind of stagnant for a long time. I decide to do something about that at the end of last year. The result is FeedLand.
PS: Marrying Mastodon does not mean divorcing Twitter. I love Twitter too. People should stop being so chauvinistic about software. Mastodon will never be Twitter and vice versa. Each are their own thing. What matters is the people.
The more I learn about Mastodon, the more impressed I am. It's a very nicely done piece of software. And unlike Twitter, they have RSS feeds for every user. Just add a .rss to the end of the URL and you get a nice feed, like this. When I look at the feed I see something someone put some love into. Or if it was a team, they worked well as a team.
I do have a couple of suggestions to make, based on experience providing these feeds basically in all the software I do.
- Please give the user a way to change the channel-level title and description for the feed. The reason — my feed doesn’t say it’s from my Mastodon account, so when an update shows up in FeedLand it’s missing that context. The user has a better idea of the context for the feed, how many other feeds they have and how this one relates to those feeds.
- There also is a simple instant notification protocol in RSS 2.0 called rssCloud. I’d be happy to show you how to turn it on. Would increase immediacy of updates.
- There’s a simple way to link the feed to an account on Twitter, Facebook, etc. we should add one for Masto as well. I started a thread for this.
I've started a discussion thread for this topic here. I'd love to work with the people who do this part of Mastodon to make this feature even better than it already is.
PS: Here's what my Mastodon feed looks like as a river in FeedLand and as a mailbox.
In 2014 I wrote a piece explaining what a River of News aggregator is. The first qualification is not true in FeedLand. We can handle full text, but it doesn't interfere with scrolling because only the first part is automatically displayed. There's a little downarrow in the lower right corner which reveals the full text if you want to see it.
Health care companies break rules about preventing identity theft as a routine matter. If you tell them you won't give them your date of birth when they call you, they tell you to stop being difficult.
All the new RSS emanating out of MastodonLand is blowing my mind. We're all part of the same freaking religion. This has been an incredible day, and I expect tomorrow to be even more so. I have a list of things I want them to look at. For example I think Mastodon's outgoing feeds should support rssCloud so we can get instant updates. I would be happy to show them how it works and help them do the adaptation. Basically all they have to do is add some info to their feed, and ping a special server when they update the feed. We take care of the rest.