My notes from a talk I gave at a
CUNY journalism class led by Jeff Jarvis and Douglas Rushkoff.
#
Matt Mullenweg's
comments on the open source model for WordPress, as part of an open discussion with Jack Dorsey who is (I assume) talking about an open source Twitter with
BlueSky. He isn't very clear on what he's talking about when he says they're working on something related to the open web. If you read the
BlueSky website, it's also pretty vague except that it'll be using XMPP and ActiveSomethingOrOther which is yet another (sigh)
RSS not-invented-here project inspired by Google as far as I can tell. I was not invited to their meetings. People have to stop doing that btw, defining projects about who and what they will not work with. I don't care if you're Jesus Christ, you still have to deal with the momentum of the installed base. People who thought they could make a feed reader and ignore RSS soon found out that people basically ignored
them until they got on board. You don't get to fight over petty bullshit like the wire format. If you do, that says you're doing something other than building products for the open web. I think Jack is creative, and has courage, but that's a mistake he shouldn't be making at this stage of his career. I honestly and humbly think Jack could benefit from reading my
rules for standards-makers. It's based on a lot of real-world experience, both successes and failures at establishing new standards for the open web.
#Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter's stock. Very interesting move. It appears he's now the largest shareholder. I like the idea of Twitter being managed like SpaceX or Tesla, speaking as a user of their products. I bought some Twitter stock a few years ago, and have held it. I think the smart move for Twitter is to remove limits, allow editing of tweets, support basic HTML features link linking, titles, style and some features from
RSS such as enclosures (ie podcasting). And then federate, so they can peer with other instances, much as WordPress offers their product as open source. I already have built a lot of functionality for peering with Twitter in
Drummer. It could be moved into any product. Then we could have a twitterverse with lots of experimentation. Hopefully a Musk-led Twitter wouldn't be closed off to competition.
#
If Twitter and Facebook had been federated from the start, like the web or email, or the internet itself, the companies wouldn't be in any way responsible for what's posted on the network. They would just be one node and would be unable to cut anyone off.
#
- I'm wondering if another blogging system could develop in competition with WordPress, using the same model they use. An open source base, with a commercial service.#
- Or will evolution allow only one huge open source blogging system.#
- Another related thought.#
- Did you know Twitter is a feed reader?#
- It is except it's private, doesn't use RSS.#
- You could build a feed reader, based on RSS that had Twitter's user experience. It can be done. #
- But why haven't RSS-based feed readers evolved to work like Twitter?#
I am soooo glad that
sports are coming to the
Nintendo Switch. Now I will use mine. I thought they would, of course, have ported
Wii Sports to the Switch as the first thing. Kind of like MacWrite and MacPaint. I never bought any other software for my Wii. The fact that I could play tennis in my living room, or golf or go bowling -- that's all I ever wanted. I imagine the new Sports will do a bunch of things the original couldn't, they've had fourteen years to work on it.
#Will I ever stop using
Wordle or is this a chronic addiction?
#Ken Smith
says Twitter is anti-writer. Hmm. Interesting thought.
#One of these decades the tech industry is going to grow the fuck up and stop insisting on being the boy wonder and respect what has been accomplished before they showed up. Then we won’t have to constantly be retooling and ripping up the pavement and starting over.
#If the Dems had a passion for humanity they’d ratify
twenty new Supreme Court justices this year, and pass a law that limits the term of a justice to ten years. I am not a lawyer but I read
a book written by one and this is what the author recommends.
#I'm working on a piece of software built around a single closure. The data type that's at the center of the user experience. When you create it as a closure, it is very easy to tweak it up. Every instance of a closure is a little world unto itself. You have to set up protocols for the outside world to speak to the object. That's good because there can't be any other interactions. When debugging you just have to look there. And when there are no deeply hidden bugs, its deliciously easy to work on. But when you type
[feedItem, theFeed] when you really meant
{feedItem, theFeed}, and your eyes are imperfect as mine are, and you tend to see what you expect to see in debugging, and miss the little subtle mistakes. Whether you use square or curly brackets makes all the difference in the world. It can turn rich structures into
undefined. And all the debugging code in the world doesn't help until you see the square brackets are where there should be curly ones. I think this is a lot like Wordle. The pattern has to be seen by the subconscious. You don't move on until you've solved the problem. But unlike Wordle you get as many tries as it takes.
#BTW, written explanations of
closures always read like gobbledygook. Here's what I would say. A closure is an
instance of a function, as opposed to a
call to a function, but they start life as a call. If when you call the function, it still has work to do, in the form of local functions that run every second or minute, for example, or to respond to messages from the outside, such as a click on an object it created (and is linked into the DOM), or an HTTP request, then all its data sticks around. And it's private to the function, no one else can get at it. That helps you keep the overall program simpler, there are fewer things that can go wrong. Now as I read this I'm not sure I got it, but it's close. I guess the thing is I've never written an interpreter for a language that has closures. In my experience that's when you really understand a piece of machinery, when it stops being magic -- when you've implemented it.
#
- The Wordle-clone for geography is Worldle. At first it looked promising, but in the end, it's usually either impossible, there are huge numbers of tiny island nations in every ocean and sea on the planet, or totally obvious like today's "puzzle," an instantly-recognizable landmass for probably everyone with an internet connection.#
Today's
Worldle, no spoilers so I didn't solve it for you.
😄#
A user said he’d be more inclined to use
Drummer if i planned for it to continue to work after I stop working. First, yes I did plan the best I could. All your files are in an
open format which can be read by most outliners. You can easily and quickly download all your files with a
single command. You should do it frequently. If you want Drummer to keep going, help out next time there are new features, get involved in testing. Anyone can do it. It should be possible for me to introduce a new fix or feature and find out if there are any problems within a few hours. That's what the process needs from users, at least to be somewhat viable going forward.
#One of the streaming entertainment services should have a user interface like
MetaCritic.
#
- I sat down at the breakfast table to solve the Wordle puzzle for the day. I was sad to solve it in less than a minute. Now what to do? Guess I have to get to work! #
- BTW -- I find that only my subconscious mind can solve the puzzle, to actually see the solution. I can analytically arrange for the clues to be available to my subconsciousl but the word pops into my conscious mind in an instant. I have no awareness of the process.#
- Usually I'm sure when I have the answer. Today I wasn't even sure the correct word was actually a word! What a nice surprise when all five letters came up green and then did their little dance. #
#
I hate April 1 on the web and esp in news orgs, whose
business is posting stuff that's true. I tend to take things literally as I read them, and puzzle my way through strange news, until it hits that I've been burned. I waste a fair amount of time on April 1 wading through this nonsense. The only thing you can do is let people know in advance that if they troll you with one of these things, if it's on a system where I can block you, that's what I do. If it's a news org, I try to remember never to trust anything they write, because they clearly have no respect for their own mission. So I posted a
message on
FB and
Twitter establishing this rule, and wouldn't you know it, some people actually post "jokes" there. Mostly it's harrassment. Bitterness I guess. They don't like life, so they drop little turds on message threads to get attention. Yes I block them. Yes, it's tiresome. There is a certain amount of overhead to maintaining one's integrity. If you say you're going to block someone, you have to actually do it. Kind of like the
second to last scene in
No Country for Old Men, if you remember it. I got here the
same way the coin did. Gotta do what I gotta do.
#How does the market feel about a
public company making forward-looking April Fool jokes?
#I end all my Peloton workouts, while I do a few cool-down laps, with two songs.
Radio Gaga and
I Am The Walrus. They're my reward for taking care of myself, which is of course its own reward.
#I heard a BBC reporter ask a Ukrainian official if they would attack Russian military in Russia. What kind of question is that. Of course they would. It's a war. Russia attacked Ukraine. All of Russia is a fair target for the Ukraine military.
#
There are too many niches in tech. Niches are defended by lack of interop. You can see categories being born with limited interop, features vendors can say deliver interop, it would be hard to argue, but they don't deliver much practical interop for users. That's why the tech industry was so ho-hum about RSS. Where's the fun for them if they can't lock users into a niche product and then another and another? As a technologist, what gets me excited about computer networks are all the combinations users can make, but that works only if there's
lots of interop.
#
Journalism has fallen back into covering the horse race, and don't see giving respect to the Repubs as being the same as respecting Putin, but it is. They are the same thing.
#Putin + Trump + Fox == our enemy. We have to defeat all of them, not just one or two.
#
Is there a browser-based workbench app for MySQL databases?
#A kind of obvious question. Why isn't there a realtime connection between Facebook and Netflix or HBO or Apple TV or whatever. So that when I'm browsing movies I can see which of my friends loved it. I'm sure they must've had talks about this. it's so obvious. Or why didn't Facebook buy one of them? Wouldn't it be more of a sure thing than (drumroll please) The Metaverse. For that matter why isn't there a similar connection between Amazon and Facebook?
#
- Cutting off the public funding of Fox News is as important to the security of the United States as providing arms to Ukraine in its fight to survive the Russian attack, or sanctioning Russia to cut off the money they need to continue the war. #
- People seem to forget or overlook that the United States is very much under attack by Russia, since they dominate one of our two political parties. The source of that dominance is Fox News. If there is a World War III, Fox will have played a major role in making it happen. #
- In the US, many of the cable systems were given monopolies by local government. For example if you live in Berkeley, CA, your only choice is Comcast. In NYC, it's Spectrum (formerly Time-Warner Cable). #
- Fox News is always included in the basic minimal package. That means we're all paying for it, even if you believe as I do that they are deliberately trying to overthrow our government and turn it over to Putin, for some reason I seriously do not understand. #
- I don't want to pay for Fox News, yet I'm paying just the same. Some portion of my monthly bill is paid to them, even though I think they are the enemy of the United States, and funding them I am undermining the future of my country. #
- The system must change. We must be given a choice of stations that are included in our package. I would probably choose to subscribe to MSNBC and CNN, though there are times when I think I would unsub them too. #
- I think we can afford more competition in this area. But I am sure we can't afford to keep subsidizing Fox News. #
The Scripting News
community on Twitter is off to a friendly start. We're here to help and learn.
#A question for devs. When connecting a web client to a server, do you do polling, long polling or websockets for real time updates? Do you know what Twitter does? Facebook? Any other popular "live" web app.
#I did a bunch of driving today and thought of a couple of
Twitter communities I should make. Unfortunately at this point you have to apply to do it. I guess I must've applied at one point. I'd like to start a community to
Defund Fox News. Basically it'll be a mail list. I'd only mail to it when there's an action you can participate in to help unbundle cable systems so you and I don't have to give money to Fox News which is now hosting an openly
anti-semitic news star.
#A Google
search for "Defund Fox News." Lots of hits. This is already a popular idea. Now all we have to do is get Congress to force cable companies to give us choice. No one should be forced to fund Putin's propaganda arm in the US.
#
- I took a drive upstate this morning, on the NYS Thruway and on country roads. #
I drove as much as possible with the car self-driving such as it is. It's a lot of fun to see what it can and can't handle. There was one place where the Thruway narrowed to one lane, and it freaked out because it couldn't tell if it was driving off the road or what. So I took over. It's like having a teenage driver helping out, and you just have to be ready to take the wheel to get it through difficult situations. #- Once when a truck was exiting the highway in the same lane I was in, as it switched to the lane to the right, the Tesla slowed from about 50 or so to 25, very quickly. I couldn't figure out what it thought it saw. Just guessing that the software, confused, decided better to be safe. I love it for trying to #savemylife, but it really wasn't necessary. ;-)#
- On the way back, after I told it where I was going, it first looked for charging stations, apparently found none that were on the way. Then after a pause of a second or two, this message appeared. Basically if you stay under 75 you have enough battery to get home without detouring to get a charge. #
- It correctly merged onto the Thruway all on its own. A long curved on-ramp, its max MPH as I instructed it was 70, but it slowed to 30 to handle the curve on the ramp. The speed limit was 25 btw. As as passenger, basically, I was glad it slowed down a little. More time to appreciate how well it was doing. I tend to be a nervous passenger, much prefer to be the driver. That's changing now. #
- Also at one point I was being followed by another Tesla. I imagined they were doing the same thing I was doing. Appreciating the teenage intelligence of the machine. Eventually they passed me. I wondered why. #
- One other thing -- instead of listening to my own music I let Amazon Music choose it for me. Very nice. I don't know how they know I like the bands they gave me to listen to. But they guessed very well. Their best choice was a Dead song I hadn't heard in a long time but had special meaning to me. #
- I got the car in November, it's almost April now, and I'm actually starting to use the car as more than a thrilling ride, beginning to appreciate its finer points. It does take that long to get the feel, and yet it seems I've only begun. This is fundamentally different driving than what I learned when I was 17. Of course my 2020 Subaru ICE is too, but this is another level beyond that. #
The
closing scene of
Mystic River is a very dramatic demonstration of why you don't want
big men taking punishment into their own hands. I can't tell you why without spoiling it. But it is so powerful.
#It's okay to be angry, it's definitely not okay to act out that anger on other people's bodies.
#
- We're still under Putin's thumb. #
- That's the uneasy feeling that somehow the public discussion is missing the big picture. There's something that should be factored into every story but is being ignored. We're under Putin's thumb. Ukraine might be a mistake, or a distraction. But it's still true that the odds favor the Repubs, Putin's party, taking over everything by 2024. I can't imagine Putin thinking that the prize is Ukraine. The prize is the US Treasury.#
- Putin's army in the US is Fox News.#
- The only mystery is what the deal is, who's paying whom. Murdoch and Putin, they're in charge. We're also under Murdoch's thumb.#
- Until we fight back.#
- I watched King Richard over the weekend, so it's fresh in my mind. #
- There's a scene where Smith and his daughters are on a tennis court in Compton, all of his daughters, not just Venus and Serena. There are a bunch of asshole teenage boys nearby who are hassling one of his daughters who's trying to study. #
- After they're done practicing, Smith confronts the boys. They beat him up. He does nothing to respond, he just takes it (like Chris Rock last night).#
- Later in the movie he's bullied by an agent and his response is to fart out loud at him (which I like, it's aggressive but nonviolent). The agent definitely had it coming.#
- Later, the character tells Venus a story about him getting beat up as a kid, and his father was nearby and did nothing to help him.#
- The speech Smith gave in accepting his award could have been the speech the character in the movie would have made. About protecting people. #
- It's odd how closely the events last night track the ones in the movie, but opposite. What the character did is hard. The character did it right. The actor was confused, life is not a movie, and he got it wrong.#
Today's tweet-like posts are mostly in random order.
#Elon Musk: If you do a new social network, please make sure it supports posts with optional titles, simple styling, links, and
RSS in and out. These are the things that are missing that make it impossible for networks to interop. And if you want free speech
interop is a must.
#
Crypto does a lot of marketing. Still, all I see is a pyramid.
#
While we're facing the truth that sometimes
regime change is necessary, we must also get Fox News off the public news network. Ask Ukraine about that. Their first impulse was to let their equivalent of Fox News continue to poison them in the name of free speech. Ultimately they realized what Twitter did, freedom only goes so far. Countries can have free speech in their Constitution, but that's not a
suicide pact. The root of our problem is Fox. Every day they weaken us. It's time to say enough. Let Tucker Carlson find a new way to spread his poison.
#I don’t like it when pubs run ads that are links to stories I can’t read. If they want me to buy a subscription, have the decency to make a pitch. Otherwise I just request not to see anymore ads from them.
#Any network that doesn't allow peering is going to be under the same kind of political pressure Twitter is to ban unpopular people.
#It's interesting to review the
archive for January 2021.
#I had a mentor back when I was a software entrepreneur. He told a metaphoric story how in the army they teach soldiers if they see a dead enemy on the side of the road, you should put a bullet in his head, just to be sure.
#Whenever a pundit criticizes Biden on TV, an angry voice in my head asks: Compared to what? We've had the comparison, you know. Four
harrowing years of it.
#Spoiler alert. I was pretty sure I had the answer to today's Wordle puzzle, so I did a
screen recording of the reveal, to capture the animation, so I could experience it over and over. Now you can too. But of course if you haven't solved today's puzzle -- this is a spoiler.
#
- So much disappointment in what Biden said about Putin. As I've said, I don't care. Putin has to go, whether or not Biden said it out loud. #
But there's a much more dangerous despot-in-waiting here in the good old US of A.#- He tried to overthrow the government and came incredibly close to doing it. I remember while it was going on, wondering if the entire US Congress was being executed while we were watching the riot. If the attackers had been somewhat better organized, that's exactly what would have been going on. And how would our country ever recover from that. #
- The coup didn't work, but that was only luck. The organizers are still free, and they're getting ready for Coup II and this one is going to work. They're using our own laws to pre-rig the outcome of the next national election.#
- So to President Biden, who was refreshingly honest and open about Putin (and I don't think it was a gaffe, btw) what are we going to do about the Putinites in America?#
- PS: The only punishment for Trump was he lost his TWTR.#
- PPS: No one scanned them for weapons as they entered the Capitol. That the Capitol was completely undefended can't have been an accident. I wasn't born yesterday and neither were you. If that had happened in another country would have believed there wasn't help on the inside?#
It's nice to see two people you know on Facebook are friends only because you know both of them. Like Dan Conover and Steve Goodman. Cori Kesler and NakedJen. I'm sure I'll think of others. A visible legacy. In basketball, an assist.
#
- I remember Watergate and the Gerald Ford pardon of Richard Nixon. Because right now that's the prior art. That's the event we're paying for now, and it seems as if we're about to repeat the mistake Ford made. While all the attention is focused on Putin and Ukraine. #
- I remember Watergate. And I remember the pardon, and remember that some people were very angry about it but I wasn't -- I was relieved. Finally we could stop obsessing over Nixon. He was obviously guilty right from the outset. Yet it took what seemed an incredibly long time to get from the initial reports of the break-in to his waving goodbye from the White House lawn as he left for the last time. That was the way I wanted to remember Nixon. Humiliated, brought down, going off to exile to spend the rest of his days wondering what if he hadn't cheated. Because the heart of Watergate is the same issue as the heart of Trump, only what Trump did was a million times worse. We excused Nixon. I guess Trump, who is also old enough to remember it (he's ten years older than me) wasn't too concerned about paying a price if his attempted coup didn't work. Now they're getting ready to do it again, they're doing it in the open, and it looks like a perfect plan. If it works, we've already had the last real national election in the US. From now-on they will all be Putinesqe parodies of fair elections. #
- So here we are.#
- Can you imagine how the rest of the world sees the January 6 attack on the US Capitol?#
- Spoiler: It scares the shit out of them. Because the main product the US sells is safety. Our financial system is where the world stores their money for safe keeping.#
- What scares them even more? We haven't done anything about it. Trump and all the people who organized the coup are free. No prospect of any punishment. The can do it again and again.#
- If you're smart you're looking for the next safe place to put your savings.#
- I want to know this -- why isn't journalism running constant articles, reports and panels on this topic:#
- When will Trump be charged?#
- We failed to learn the lesson from Nixon it seems. #
- Maybe one of the networks should give time to Dan Rather to look at the story from that angle. Every night at an assigned time. Rather reported Watergate. No doubt he remember.#
- PS: One thing that seems evident after the Putin attack on Ukraine. The only people outside the US who want the Repubs to win are other despots whose people would kill them if they could. #
Good morning sports fans!
⚾#When I finish a programming session, the top note in my outline is always how I'm going to start the next session. Otherwise I get the "staring at a blank sheet of paper" thing. My judgement on the next thing is much better at the end than at the beginning of a session.
#Wouldn't it be cool if we had a channel that could speak directly to the Russian people to tell them that many of us in the US are of Russian descent, we celebrate the culture, but we can't have you guys invading sovereign countries, and that's our main problem with Russia.
#When we got to the bottom of why people hated us for hosting their blogs for free it was this. They thought that if they did a blog, people would listen to them. They thought we were promising that. We weren't, we had no illusions about that.
#I gotta say the
Tesla grows on you. I love driving it places. I'm using the driving assist more and more. Still keeping my eyes on it to be sure it's not driving off the road. But I really enjoy driving in a way I haven't in a long time.
#The idea that software is a process was the big idea in
We Make Shitty Software in September 1995. Here's a
screen shot of the relevant portion. I got a lot of shit from devs who said they don't make shitty software, but in fact, they do. All devs do. Those that don't know they do don't know to set up a process that accounts for the shittiness of their software. A corollary -- some of the shittiest software is made by devs who think their software
isn't shitty.
#
My
first post to the Scripting News "community" on Twitter.
#Putin must not have known how much power he had. Ukraine is small potatoes. He was the czar of one half of the political system of the US. It was a real possibility his party would control the whole government again in 2024. A lot of times people don't know how successful they've been.
#The point of yesterday's
philosophical question was this. The Constitution says the government may not search you unless there's
probable cause. That doesn't mean that people you invite to enter your house should be allowed to go through your private stuff. It may not be illegal, but we still recognize it as wrong. In the same way, you have "free speech" in America, even when it isn't the government restricting your speech, when it's your employer, school, family or friends. No law prohibits them from doing it, so you don't need to make that much-belabored
point, but being intolerant of other people's opinions is still, as far as I'm concerned, and many other Americans of all persuasions, wrong, un-American.
#
- First let me say up front that, of course, African-Americans are not fungible. It's a stupid question, but I didn't raise it -- the Supreme Court process did, over many decades of the comings and goings of black justices and also women. #
- So -- are racism and genderism part of the Supreme Court process? Yes they are and I can prove it.#
- When Thurgood Marshall retired, the Repubs replaced him with Clarence Thomas. Thus the "African-American" seat's significance was supposedly preserved. Marshall was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Thomas is the second. #
- African-Americans are fungible, they seemed to say. Of course Marshall and Thomas, even though both were black, were almost exact opposites in philosophy and rage-suppression. The former was very liberal, a highly respected scholar, and the latter is fascist and resentful, and the depths of his depravity are only now starting to be explored.#
- And when RBG died, she was replaced with ACB. Yes both are women, and thus women are considered fungible as well, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, at least by some people, in some sense. Politically, ACB is the opposite of RBG, probably is committed to reversing all of RBG's accomplishments. Yet the number of women on the court remains the same.#
- Of course Clarence Thomas is in the hospital while the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings are going on, which gets you to consider that the number of AA's on the court would be preserved if KBJ was ratified and the unspeakable happens to CT.#
- PS: I actually love the term fungible for some reason, always have, so I was somewhat delighted that the latest tech scam are NFTs where the F stands for fungible. This means I get to think of this word more often and that generally makes me happy for some odd reason. I hope the scamminess of NFTs doesn't end up spoiling that, or maybe I'm wrong and NFTs are the basis for a new capitalism? I have been wrong before. #
When I signed on Twitter earlier this evening I was offered a chance to create a community,
so I did. Not sure how to use this. In the meantime if you read my blog, go ahead and sign up.
#How art works. An artist asks a question and the viewer answers it.
#Here's a wild idea. If Ukraine needs money and I bet they do, how about selling honorary Ukraine citizenships. Let us all sign up on their side, not just our political leaders. Maybe there are creative ways millions of people could help save Ukraine.
#All the talk about cord cutting was bullshit, if you like sports, as I do. So if I want to watch the Knicks and the Mets, I also have to pay for Fox News. It took me a long time to figure that out. But in the end that's how it works.
#
- The Constitution says the government can't conduct unreasonable searches, without a warrent or probable cause. #
- Suppose someone you have invited into your house goes through your private stuff. Reads your diary, your financial records, calendar, contacts list. Looks in your medicine cabinet, your collection of drugs, legal and illegal, sex toys. Etc. #
- Should you be prevented from writing a tweet or a blog post about how it felt to be violated that way? Would it be fair to rebut the post by talking about the Constitution? Can you imagine someone actually doing that? (I can't, it would seem pretty cruel.)#
- In this situation, with the question posed this way, it's ridiculous to think someone would be condemned for expressing their thoughts and feelings about being so violated. Note that I didn't say their rights were violated, in any legal sense. But their rights were violated in some sense.#
- It might not be illegal for someone you invite into your house to violate your privacy, but legality isn't the only thing we're permitted to write about. #
Writing
yesterday, I stumbled across a concise summary of my tech philosophy. "Not leaving the past behind, but also not being limited by it." The best stuff evolves, still supports the past while moving into new territory. Sometimes things get so out of control, like feeds in the early years of RSS, that the requirements are contradictory, it seems something has to give. Which are you -- Twitter or Google Reader? The two models are very different. I think there is a middle-ground.
#I've been using Twitter's
edit box to write long posts, just because I have it open when I want to vent. Then I copy the text and paste it into the Scripting News outline. Edit it, review it and then decide it's not worth the trouble and hit the backspace key. Back to work.
#The nicest thing in
Wordle is when type your next word and the letters, one by one, all come back green. The worst thing is when you have a 12-day streak, you feel compelled to do it the next day and the day after and on and on.
#
I'm doing more work on feed reading, and realize the problem has never been with my feed reading software, rather it's the mess that was created around feed reading with the lack of working-together among the vendors. I've written about this
before. As I go deeper into this project, I'm becoming more resolved that I'm only going to support a subset of feeds. What will come out of it will not be a feed reader in the sense that people think of them for the last 20 or so years. They all try to read everything, and that makes it hard to go beyond the intersection of features found in all feeds. I don't see any point in producing yet another one of those. If people producing blogging software want to give this another shot, they should be ready to retool, a bit. Not very much. Maybe not at all (if you've been considerate in your feeds). And not breaking anything. This is absolute. I will not break anyone either with feeds I produce (I write a popular blog and make blogging software.) Which is a bit tricky because there are important features in my feeds that most readers don't support thanks to
Google. This is how everything got broken. I want to go back to before this all became such a mess, and slowly and carefully pull through something beautifully simple and easy to work with. And then go from there. Not leaving the past behind, but also not being limited by it. It's possible.
🚀#2022: Really Simple Syndication has become anything but simple.
#Today's song: "Don't the sunrise look so pretty, never such a sight. Like a rollin' into New York City with the skyline in the morning light."
#
I told Alexa to play George Harrison songs. She's playing the best ones. There are so many.
#I gotta say there are a few public figures who, if they died tonight, I'd do a little jig, drink a toast, in private of course. In anticipation my heart beats a little faster. Oh could we be so lucky! I'd put a George Harrison
song on the speaker, only
slightly with sarcasm.
#I'm watching
Severance on AppleTV+. It's good science fiction, good acting, a bit of a mystery that unravels slowly. The cast is amazing.
#
- Joe Trippi tweets: "You're probably paying for Putin TV." #
- He's right, you are. If you have a basic cable package that includes Fox News, you're paying your share to keep Tucker Carlson on the air. #
- Joe, I think this would be an incredible political cause to raise a fuss about. Focus the spotlight on how we're subsidizing Fox. I think that law, whatever it is that makes this possible or necessary, needs to be changed.#
- It's as fundamental as the First Amendment. I should not be required to fund speech that I find abhorrent. The Supreme Court ruled that money is speech. Let's get some lawyers working on this! Make news. It's the kind of issue Repubs raise huge money on. And it pisses me off that my money goes to fund the destruction of our political system. #
- PS: I wrote about this on 1/27/2021. #
Something I learned from reading
Elie Mystal's book. The Second Amendment’s original
purpose was to enable slavers in Virginia to put down a slave rebellion without depending on the federal government. It wasn't put in the Constitution so people could protect themselves against robbers, not that that's necessarily a bad thing, and if appropriate there could be laws that allow it specifically. But it isn't really a Constitutional right.
#Anne Tyler: "It would be very foolish for me to write, let’s say, a novel from the viewpoint of a black man, but I think I should be allowed to do it." What a world, where such an accomplished and respected author feels this intimidated.
#
Wordle is an addictive word game that became popular and then was bought by the NY Times. It's free to play, as far as I know (I have a NYT subscription so if it weren't free it's possible I might not know). The diagram to the right is a standard, produced by the game. It tells you how my last game went without giving away the answer. Even that part of the game is clever. #- Anyway, here's the hack...#
- Suppose you know the second and third letters, as above, and have eliminated a fair number of consonants, and are sure the first letter is a consonant…#
- Type one of the eligable consonants and the next two letters into a web browser and check out the auto completes. Repeat. That's how I figured out the answer to today's puzzle after I got to the situation in the third line. #
- I'm pretty consistently getting the answer in four steps. In the first two steps I'm not trying to solve the puzzle, just gathering data. By the third, I constrain my guess by the information I've gathered so far, assuming I've got one or two hits. #
- In this case I got two green squares on the first one. I thought for sure I'd get the answer in three instead of four, but I hadn't eliminated enough consonants to be able to puzzle it out. I was surprised by how hard it was after step three, mostly because (I think) this was a weird word, letter-wise. #
If you're good at JavaScript and familiar with outliners and are looking for a project to sink your teeth into, I'm not planning on doing any further development on the
Tree Chart project, but it could use more features, and should plug into any outliner. Lots of room for creativity.
#Defending your right to ruin people's lives seems really weird. Why not defend your right to love other people? I don't get people who get pleasure out of hurting others. I certainly don't respect that.
#
- I don't have a lot of time to write this morning but I wanted to get this out there.#
- First, my goal for the web has always been that I want the bright minds to be on the web, sharing important stuff that comes from what they do. These people would be considered sources in journalism, not reporters. I've been working on this since I first started using the web as a writing platform in 1994. #
- One of the things that keeps bright minds from fully expressing their ideas on the web is the sense that it's a savage place, where people cut you down, make your life miserable, possibly lose you your standing, even your job. So they don't take the step.#
- This idea comes from journalism. From organizations like the NYT.#
- They paint us all with the same brush. They talk about us as monsters. All the same. They don't listen. Only their ideas get out. Reporters are easily fooled, we've learned, with great cost for all of us. Journalism says Facebook sucks, a lot, and that scares some of my neighbors from using Facebook, and keeps us from making connections that would make things work better on a local level. We need more of that. Journalism has stood in the way of good uses of the web. Maybe they don't know they've been doing it, but they have been doing it just the same. #
- So when a big influential organization like the NYT says, in its official voice, that this is a problem, and presumably we should do something about it, I see that as huge progress. We have an ally in organizing our knowlege and passion, the good stuff of human intelect, with their support, instead with their derision.#
- And I am so sad when I see people who already have mastered the tools predictably try to put the NYT down for noticing this problem which all of them know about, I'm sure of it. So who has the old idea and who has the new one? Who's wired and who's tired? In my mind, the NYT has made a breakthrough. I love it. Build on it. Bring that philosophy into the NYT itself. Look for the good on the web, not just the mean stuff. Set the example. I think the light will come on for others, not all of them, some are too dug in, but progress can be made here, I feel it. #
- PS: Save me the lecture about the First Amendment. I go way back with the fight against the CDA in 1996. You use the First Amendment as a hammer, the same way the gun lobby uses the Second Amendment. I see you as exactly like them. #
- PPS: I used one of my montly gifts as a NYT subscriber to provide the link to the editorial. The link should go through the paywall. #
I like
this Elon Musk interview.
#
I have something new coming shortly, it's the beginning of a thread that implements a JavaScript API for feed reading in Node.js. Much like the update I did for
OPML last year. Really simple sample code. It was time to pull together the code I use to parse feeds these days in JavaScript apps and publish it as open source. It builds on Dan MacTough's
feedparser package, so it inherits its support of different feed formats:
RSS, Atom and RDF. The result is what developers want in 2022. A simple JavaScript object containing the information in a feed and nothing more. One system call to parse it. Works like
JSON.parse. From there, a simple feed reader could be built. Or any other feed-consuming software. I felt it was time to try to bring this together, enough time has passed, don't you think?
🚀 #My two cents:
The NYT Editorial Board is correct. We all
filter what we say to avoid all kinds of
tsuris. Sometimes it's cops at your house in SWAT gear, guns drawn, responding to a call there's been a murder. Or a knock on the door from a stranger, saying they just wanted to know if this is where you live. It could be a small thing, or it could drive you
out of business. The key point is people hold back what they think because they don't want the drama or danger that would come from expressing the idea. The rebuttals are stale. Heard them for decades. It doesn't change the fact that there's important ideas not being exchanged. And we need the best minds, with the freshest ideas to deal with the issues of the day. And btw this kind of suppression is just as effective as what the
Repubs are doing in Florida, for example. Think about that, and look in the mirror. You aren't that different from them.
#Poll: If you thought the NYT was right in their famous
editorial today, would you say so publicly or would you join the crowd condemning them?
#
“Listen where ever you get your podcasts” == the sound of victory in the battle to keep the podcastosphere from being dominated by evil tech companies.
#On Tuesday, just after doing a workout on my Peloton bike, I saw a question on Facebook, pure clickbait, that asked you to take the color of your underwear and the last thing you ate, put them together to form the name of your 80s rock band. I never go for these things, but I did this time. I was wearing
biking shorts, the kind with padding so you don't get a sore butt. So I wasn't actually wearing underwear. I had sushi for lunch. The combination: human sushi. It was too good not to
post. Already 96 likes. It's exciting I guess. Oh la.
#
- I just saw comments from two noted journalism thinkers, Jeff Jarvis and Mathew Ingram saying more or less the same thing. It's amazing to me, because it's the flipside of what I've been wanting to do for years -- develop software for writers and thinkers without trapping them into a tech industry business model. Today the software is inexpensive to make and operate. That isn't the problem, we know how to make the software, the problem is attracting a critical mass of users.#
- I think there is a way to do it. The challenge is not making the software, it's getting the users have to show up. What will convince them to use a system that lets them write for free, gives them a permanent archive of their writing so they don't get locked in and lets them use whatever writing tools they like? I can't convince them on my own. I'm not famous enough, trusted enough, or whatever. When I do it, it doesn't happen.#
- What I think would work is to get the support of foundations. Then, with the resources, hire professional testers to be sure that as we add features, the software keeps working. Use some of the money to hire a real PR firm to pitch the idea to pubs, tell writers we want to make the tools they want, without the gotchas. But wait to pitch until there's something they can actually sign on to and use. #
- When I was at Berkman, a very long time ago, we tried to get support from the tech industry, AOL, Microsoft, Apple, Google -- but they wanted to do this stuff themselves. Now I'd suggest asking the Knight Foundation, Newmark, MacArthur, not sure who else. This is far from my area of expertise. And it's not the money we need so much, but the endorsement. Grants would say: We looked at the idea and the people involved, and thought it was worth creating the service. #
- The users are the key. They have to trust it. Just going out straight, as a pitch -- well I've tried it. The problem is they expect software they use to come from VC-backed companies or huge multinationals. The foundations invest in projects at news orgs that are more proof-of-concept than actual systems people can use. This project would be different, its goal would be to get a public system up and running, cloneable, free to use, with features competitive with Medium and Substack. #
- Summary: Foundations acting as VCs, to get specific production software built to enable reliable and open systems to flourish, where the VCs always have gotchas, these projects would be guaranteed not to have them. The only ROI is the system itself, developed and up and running and freely clonable. No business model, guaranteed.#
23-minute podcast on the contribution
Chris Lydon and
Mary McGrath are making, and why we need a core of capable
Drummer users to test each new feature or we can't move. Also why I wanted to be at Harvard in 2003. And how lucky it was that Chris was there too. I ramble a lot, if you listen to me, you know that. But I do eventually get to the point.
😄#
I can’t imagine
Lebron has any fans left after he’s dumped so many teams. It’s not just that he wins championships, it’s that he leaves behind wrecks. Fans don’t want to win as much as we want to love. I’m glad he never chose the Knicks. I can’t imagine another team accepting LeBron unless he swears he will leave the team in better condition than he found it. That would be something worth giving a try. Go to Orlando, for example, and don’t bring any stars with you, just work. And do it for a dollar a year. Then there will be at least some goodwill for you going forward.
#BTW the first feed was mine. Here’s the
announcement. This is why we needed blogging before anything else. It was the way new tech innovation could be announced when journalism was ignoring it.
#
The other day, after
writing about a theoretical new RSS reader app, I decided to try an experiment. I took the feed of a well known tech publication and just displayed the
description element of an
item from its feed in my browser. This is
what showed up in the JavaScript console. How embarrassing for the publisher. That's what I mean about being picky about which feeds I'm willing to allow into my lovely theoretical RSS garden. If you're going to hack at the browser like that, you're not invited. Please no business models in my app. You want the people who read your feed to pay? Ask them for some money.
#To Kasparov: I'm sure you understand Russia much better than I do, but still, I think it's worth a chance to see if the situation doesn't get resolved without destroying civilization. Once we're in a shooting war with Russia there will be no more time to think.
#
I wrote something the other day that bears repeating. "When you read something, you're not in touch with the author's emotions, not when they wrote it, and esp not now, long after they wrote it. Emotions are fluid things, and unless you're very careful, it's unlikely that the emotions you are feeling, as you read the piece, are the author's. It would be a remarkable coincidence if they were. They're your feelings." It
goes on from there.
#
The Repubs and some Dems think they can make Covid go away by legislating it out of existence. Oh they are so stupid, and we're about to pay the price, again, for their stupidity.
#Twitter is still the easiest blogging platform out there. Just add titles, styling and links, and get rid of the character limit and Twitter will own the world. Hopefully with the new management they will do this. Why is it OK with me? They have a fine API. I've got good
support for it in my
scripting environment. They run the servers, that's OK with me.
#I had to do some driving today, I love driving the
Tesla, I wanted to say that. I hope people who get other electric cars have a similar experience. It's just such a smooth ride, and so much power. I have also mostly got the getting in and out part down, just the right way to twist my body, thanks to advice from my friend Chuck Shotton who is a longtime Tesla owner.
#At one point in the ride I was shuffling podcasts and thinking this is too dangerous and then I remembered I'm driving a car that theoretically can drive itself. So I clicked the right stick down twice to activate the driving functionality and took my hands off the steering wheel. I talked to the car as if it were a 17-year-old learning to drive, giving it encouragement and preparing to take over when it started to drive off the road. Something weird happened, it started flashing red, and then really started flashing red, which I interpreted as "I can't handle this, you take over, Mr Human." Which I did. But I was driving on
US 209, basically a
freeway, two lanes in each direction, divided, lots of room everywhere, good weather, well marked lanes. If it couldn't handle this, what could it handle? This was the first time I tried letting it drive itself. Not sure what went wrong.
#I listened to the
latest Open Source podcast. You must listen to this one. It's about the new reality of nuclear war. Chris Lydon talks to all the most interesting academics, and it's clear they really like and respect him. If you watch MSNBC, skip Rachel Maddow one night every week and listen to Chris and his guests. I think they should put him on TV with exactly the same guests as he has now, and let him cover exactly what he covers. It's much higher quality than anything you get from any other source. Swear to god. It's for adults, smart ones. It's not a bedtime story (and that's a good thing).
#So I was thinking about a lot of things. Like how I have really good friends for a long time who have never used an outliner, and somehow must think they understand me at some level, when they just can't. Imagine for example you had a friend who was a guitar player. Not the most famous or best ever, but still someone who had devoted their life to creating music with guitars. And then imagine not only had you not listened to your friend playing the guitar, but you hadn't listened to
anyone play a guitar. You didn't know what a guitar was. You sent them a link to a story about someone humming while driving and asked if it was like that. That's been my experience. I live with it. But I've never liked it. My software actually isn't hard to learn, at least not compared to other software like Twitter, Facebook, a word processor, an ATM. It's a low-grade source of frustration. Most days I write stuff on this blog and hear back nothing. But it seems some people read it. I just write for myself. I think I'm going to go back to doing that with software too. 2021 was an exceptional year, I decided to devote the whole year to creating a real end-user piece of software --
Drummer. I never hear anything nice about it. Mostly from people who refuse to read the docs complaining that they don't know how to do something that's covered in the docs. This isn't what I had in mind when I spent all of last year building the product and writing excellent docs.
#Another example. I probably spent in total a whole month doing the
Tree Chart app. Two comments. One saying they wanted more features, and another from a semi-famous person who said he missed MORE, so I pointed him to Drummer. He complained that the tree chart part of Drummer wasn't as good as MORE's and that's it. Nothing beyond that. I wonder if people know how much effort it takes to create something like this (obviously they don't) or are willing to invest anything at all in helping? Obviously not that either. So I think the only way to go is to create software for a market of one -- me -- and leave it at that. Maybe I'll share some of it, maybe I won't. It's a lot of extra work to share it, and from my point of view, the work is an utter waste of time. Basically most people are selfish assholes. I think the Beatles felt this way about their fans too. I've been learning so much about them this year. But at least we all listened to their music, even if we had no idea who they were, and how they created the music.
#A few months ago I read a comment on Twitter, not directed to me but with my name tagged, that said that RSS will be able to move again once Dave Winer is dead. Isn't that
special. I'm sure that's not true btw, but to be thought of as only contributing obstruction. I think it's like that in a lot of things I've worked on. People have tried to buy my products away from me, not realizing I still owned them. That was comedy. Other people, supposed friends, told me they were taking over, I should get out of their way or I'd get hurt. The first couple of times that happened, from someone who was very rich, I fell for it. It wasn't true. His products were flops because he had no idea what people valued in the products. I did because I had connections with the users and I listened, systematically. At LVT we got very good at listening, we knew in advance that new releases would be loved because were simply giving the users what they wanted. Once another rich guy offered me $1 million for my company or he was going to blow me out of the water (his words). Yeah I said, i've heard that before. Go right ahead. He never shipped anything even remotely competitive. BTW, our product was making more than $1 million
a month at the time. He didn't even bother to get the numbers. All this says to me is that
we should fucking work together dammit. Look at the Beatles and how individually they reached out to other musicians and recorded with them. Why don't we do that in software. If there's going to be more RSS, why shouldn't it benefit from what I've learned? You might be surprised to find that a new RSS can't happen
unless I am involved, Mr Waiting For Me To Die. Why take the chance? I didn't save the tweet because I didn't want to ever close that loop. Imagine how that felt. The world is full of self-important assholes, and we've given every one of them tools to express their assholyness. You can quote me on that.
#Putin was probably inspired by Dubya and his shock and awe, but too bad for Putin he didn’t have America’s arms industry and wealth. So no one was very awed at Putin’s shocking depravity. Whatever punishment he gets should also be applied to the Americas war criminals, Bush, Cheney, Powell etc.
#
The problem with Putin and any “great” person is that as their fame grows they remain a normal-size human. Eventually they revert to normal size in perception too. There are no exceptions.
#
A summary of the VC business model. Take an idea that was developed on the open internet, without lock-in, then fund a startup to do the same thing, with lock-in and don't change the name. In other words take something like
podcasting, which thrives because users and publishers have choice and there are no gatekeepers, and lock it up and still call it podcasting.
#This subject comes up in
Ben Thompson's latest newsletter, which he has kindly given me a free subscription to. He discusses
Substack's business model. The occasion is their releasing an iOS version of their
RSS reader. Since Substack is VC-funded, I am suspicious of their support for RSS. I expect there's lock-in in there. But I don't have the time or actual interest to dig in and find out what they did. I know they require you to use their editor to publish through their channel. When they came out I was looking for a way to distribute this blog via email, so I asked if they supported inbound RSS. No. You have to use their editor. Well I had been through that with Facebook and Medium and was fed up with software turning me into a typist. As with most writers, I have a writing setup that I'm happy with, and I'm not going to change all that just to get an email delivery system. I wrote my own
emailer. I wish we had a good way to offer that to everyone, but that takes time that I don't have. And frankly some users aren't adult enough to deal well with gifts. So writers who want to distribute via email are getting locked in. So it goes.
#
- This short video says so much to me. A fat Russian man named Nikas Safronov chains himself to a closed Moscow McDonald's, fighting for his right to a cheeseburger. #
- “They don’t have the right to close down!” he protests.#
- On Wikipedia he looks like a rock star. Seriously. If this is what we did to Russia, well I understand now what we're looking at. That could be Lincoln, Nebraska -- if they lost their Wendy's or Boston if they cut off the internet. We need to turn our attention to the people of Ukraine, and observe the difference. The future demands our determination. We are failing the test. #
- Putin, Trump, Boris Johnson, they're all the same disease. To break free and get our species on track, we need to face ourselves. So much of what I hear as criticism of Russia applies equally to the US. #
Russian cheeseburger man.
#
I don’t think
RSS feeds should have ads.
#Think about it, how is Ukraine doing such a great job of making sure they aren't forgotten. Their president is a comedian. It would be great if Biden had comedian friends. Let them explain what's going on. Let Biden do the behind the scenes stuff, he's doing that well.
#Poll: Should we protect Ukraine against the attacks from Russia?
#
An addendum to my
spec for how I'd do a
new feed reader. At least at first, we'd approve feeds the way Apple approves apps for their app store. We wouldn't let through feeds that look bad in the reader. Let me amend that. If it's due to a bug in my software, or my reader failing to support a feature of
RSS correctly, then the feed would be put in a different pile. One of the problems in the RSS world was people who made feeds didn't know that they had to care how their feeds behaved. Or they only cared about
one reader. That was a prescription for the mess we're in now. My hypothetical feed reader would not work like that. Bugs in feeds are not compensated for by workarounds in readers.
#
I wrote this piece in 2013, after Google Reader had its plug pulled. I'm guessing most people who read that piece have no idea what I'm talking about, because most don't think about online systems as defining a base of content they can move around. Think of it this way. Imagine if you couldn't fly into one city, you had to take a train, but to another city you had to fly, there was no train. The obvious thing would be to build a train route to the city without one, and do the same for air. #- Simply: Twitter says posts have no titles and Google said posts must have titles. #
- But the online world has been so dysfunctional that here we are nine years later, and RSS readers still can't deal with Twitter style content. I see Twitter is advertising that they're going to open up. Then this is going to be a problem they have to deal with too. I also believe it can be solved. I've been using a reader that handles both kinds of posts since the advent of RSS, there to be copied by anyone who dared to look. #
- Anyway... Maybe we can fix it.#
Do you ever say thank you to Alexa? I just started today.
#If the Dems had a good marketer, they would be running against Putin. The ads would be running now. So many great
pictures.
#Jeff Jarvis
said: "I would do anything
not to pay for Fox in my cable bundle." My response: Amen. I think that should be in the Constitution. Sort of the inverse of the First Amendment. No one should be forced to support speech they find unsupportable.
#
I heard a plausible theory why
Garland et al haven't indicted Trump. They think it'll give him a new platform, a new cause. He'll fundraise like crazy. Something to campaign on in November and in 2024. But I see a silver lining. Let him campaign in 2022, and make the issue about whether the US wants to go where Russia is. Do we want a Putinite running the US? If so, vote for Trump. Let's have an election about what it's really about for a change. Straight out, do you want to be ruled by an autocrat or do you want to keep trying to have the
more perfect union? I think a very compelling campaign could be had. And if, in the end, the people want to be ruled by an autocrat, then that's where we're going next. I don't think it'll last very long, when Americans find out what it really means. There's a good chance it all falls apart when the Supreme Court overturns Roe.
#It’s kind of funny that Amazon, where we spend actual dollars doesn’t require two factor login but the sites where we don’t spend any money like Twitter require us to go through a dance were they send a code to a phone ignoring the fact that phones are easily hijacked.
#Putin is a coward. He can't beat Ukraine's military, so he picks a fight with their mothers, children and old people. He's a piece of human shit.
#
- I play both these games it seems every day. #
- Worldle is the less famous of the two. It displays a map of a country at the top of the screen. As with Wordle you guess what the country is in a stack of six boxes. It tells you how close you are for each guess, what direction the correct country is in and a percentage representing how close you got, 100 percent is perfect, the furthest you can be is 50 (I assume). #
The correct answer is 5398km from Bermuda, due east.
#
There's a lot of info you don't get, most important is the scale of the map. It could be 1000 miles or 3 miles wide. There are a lot of countries that are islands in the Pacific, Carribbean or Indian oceans. They have unique shapes just like the bigger countries. Although I think I have a good grasp of geography from having loved maps as a kid, there a lot more countries than I ever realized. For example, get out a map of Africa sometime and ponder. The names may be familiar, but I had little sense of relative position or the shape of most of them. It's also fun to try to figure out where the ocean is based on the shape of the borders. There are no straight edge shorelines as far as I know. Some of the puzzles are easy, like Indonesia or Poland, and some are surprisingly difficult, like Greece. Did you know there's an island country in the English Channel? I didn't. #- Spoiler! Here's a screen shot of today's puzzle, I just guessed wildly in the last slot, knowing Spain was wrong. I basically gave up.#
- Today's Wordle puzzle really screwed with a lot of people's heads, mine too. I was lucky, my strategy made it possible to solve this puzzle, though in general I get lower scores overall because of the way I do it. For the first two or three guesses, I'm not trying to solve the puzzle, just trying to find out which vowels are in the answer, and to eliminate most of the popular consonants. So in today's puzzle when I had two slots left, I had the last four letters right (as did most people) but unlike the others, I only had two possible choices left for the first letter. I guessed incorrectly first, and then got the correct answer in the sixth slot. Wordle's comment was whew. Indeed.#
- BTW, my standard first word these days is PENIS. I like it because it's got two vowels and three popular consonants.#
The artist with her portrait of Zelensky.
#
I think if I were designing an RSS reader app now, I would first do a reader that only worked with content written in my own blogging tool. That way I could really drill in there, sharpen the edges, create an ideal user experience for both writers and readers. I would not try to support everything that's out there. Anyway, once that was working well, I'd try to add feeds with the help of people who write on other sites, and hopefully they can tweak up their feeds so they work really well in my reader. Ideally I'd have good communication with the devs who work on their blogging software. But writers and readers drive the process, ideally ones with experience with user testing software. All the while I'd publish my notes so other designers could emulate them. See, the thing is: RSS is supposed to be a standard, but in the early days there was a free-for-all wild west mentality that meant no one worked with anyone else because they were all hell-bent on world domination. The idea was I don't need you because I own this shit. Well you can't all own it. That made a mess of things.
Now it's almost 20 years later, and it should be obvious that hurrying up isn't the answer. We can create another mess, or we can slowly rebuild and create a strong, well-understood standard, and forget about world domination, let's just make a nice reading and writing environment. Software is an art, not just a way to get rich. That would be what I would focus on. I have a motto "Slow down to hurry up." Think about the 15 wasted years in RSS-land, and you'll see what I mean. And btw, this would not be an invitation to have another fight with RDF nerds. It would be about writers and readers not nerds. Sorry.
#I live two hours north of NYC but I haven't been there since the summer of 2019. Just thought that was worth mentioning.
#
Nieman's Laura Hazard Owen writes about Substack's new RSS reader app for the iPhone. I think there's a chance we'll see a return to the more thoughtful blogosphere of the late 90s and early 00s, and I think Substack is part of it. I also would love to know, without having to dig through the app, if they've extended RSS, added a new namespace with Substack-specific data, or if it's straight RSS with common namespace extensions. Also it looks like their reader requires items to have titles. Is that so? I've been playing around with some new reader ideas, no claim that anything will ship, but one thing we have to accommodate is title-less posts, otherwise we're going to end up right back where we are now with a division -- the quick stuff on Twitter, and only long stuff in RSS. That was a divide forced on us by the now long-defunct Google Reader. Also factor in the idea that Twitter might be about to add longer titled posts to their ecosystem. #- They generate a title from the permalink of the post. I don't think this is necessary, I think designers of readers have to pick a different starting point if they want to work with the way writing in the web works today. I know they don't pay any attention to me, which is really weird, because I do know a thing or two about this. But it is a fact, a lot of posts don't have titles. If your reader can't accommodate them, you have a problem, imho.#
One of the biggest problems/design mistakes in JavaScript is that programming on the server and the client are so different. The built-in verbs are the same,
date verbs,
string verbs, but the data models are completely different. And the modules are different. How did that happen. Why couldn't
require work in the client? If I had been in charge, there would have been a rule that if we're implementing something in the client that has already been done in the server, we must do it the same way, unless it really is impossible, and it has to be
very impossible. And vice versa of course.
#Decades of debugging software help you see patterns other people miss.
#
- Two Grateful Dead songs. #
- Mama Tried, written by Merle Haggard, but I like the Grateful Dead version better. #
- And I turned twenty-one in prison doin' life without parole.#
- No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.#
- Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied.#
- That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried.#
- Me and My Uncle, another Dead song that says that uncles can have a lot of influence too. #
- Love my uncle, God rest his soul.#
- Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know. #
- Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold. #
- I left his dead ass there by the side of the road, yeah.#
- Seems perhaps we have a little more mercy for mama. 💥#
- When you read something, you're not in touch with the author's emotions, not when they wrote it, and esp not now, long after they wrote it. Emotions are fluid things, and unless you're very careful, it's unlikely that the emotions you are feeling, as you read the piece, are the author's. It would be a remarkable coincidence if they were. They're your feelings.#
- It just happened to me on Twitter, someone thought a tweet of mine was rage. I never feel that when I'm writing. Because writing is different, transcribing thoughts and feelings I had long ago. Writing feels very different. Usually I'm laughing out loud if I'm writing something that I really like. Writing is like riding a roller coaster. Often it's an exercise in frustration, but when you get it right, it's a wonderful feeling, it's a joyful act, paradoxically, even when you're writing about something that is far from joyful. #
- In this case, I was writing an idea I had in the early 90s, and first wrote about in the mid-90s, at much greater length than in the tweet. In all that time, I've continued to hold the belief that we create each other, that we're a single species, not two. #
- Anyway, projection isn't fun, on the receiving end. #
