I spent today working on the plumbing of FeedLand-on-Automattic. Hopefully tomorrow I will get to work on more user-facing features.
#Posted on Threads: "Replies are almost always spam, they aren't talking to the author (though technically they are), rather they are talking over the author's head, trying to reach the people who read the author's post. If this is what's really going on, surely we can come up with a more realistic structure/UI that doesn't even involve the author."
#
Watched
Oppenheimer last night. Very good movie. I like the artistic flourishes, reminds me of another movie I watched recently and liked, a lot,
Spencer. I wasn't really interested in the life and death of Lady Di, but I also got through the latest episodes of The Crown, which I had resisted when the newest Queen was
introduced. I find it hard to make the adjustment to new actors playing the roles of characters I had come to love, esp
Claire Foy as young Queen Elizabeth, a fantastic actress who played in one of the most spectacular dramatic
scenes anywhere anytime. The
latest episodes of The Crown were about Diana mostly, and were fantastic. Back to Oppenheimer. I'll try not to spoil it too much, but the drama is puzzling, why are they going after Oppenheimer when he miraculously put together the
Manhattan Project which created, in a race with Germany and the USSR, the bomb that ended World War II. The final scene, a flashback to an earlier scene where we didn't hear the dialog, between Oppenheimer and his colleague at Princeton,
Albert Einstein, about what happens when you create something that changes the direction of humanity. What happens is this -- they push you aside. I'm not comparing myself to these two giants, but I have had the same question about how tech reacted to my contributions. My conclusion was that our culture has reason to erase the accomplishments of outliers. We prefer innovation to come in nice predictable packages, with a PR person on top, and when that's disturbed, we close ranks to make it all appear very ordinary. Anyway, all of this is very good holiday entertainment and thought provoking. My next adventure in video is
Pachinko on Apple TV, which is somewhat confusing, but keeps me coming back, it's so compelling. I still have the last seasons of
Ted Lasso and
Reservation Dogs in the queue. And of course there's a new season of
Fargo, which I'm sure I'll love. Right now my plan is to wait for the series to end and watch it all in a binge.
#Screen shot of the latest prototype for the new Scripting News home page. It does the job I wanted it to do, presents in one user interface the content of my blog, linkblog, and several timelines from FeedLand. The previous version had the tab links
down the left edge. I loved the way it looked on my desktop system, but then I tried it on my iPad, and realized it didn't work. Not enough horizonal real estate to pull it off. So I went back to the tabs-across-the-top format. I had to drop one of the tabs, and not use the nice Font-Awesome icons I used previously on Scripting News when there was
plenty of room. The page is entirely assembled when you load it, so it only works with JavaScript turned on.
#
Colin Walker wonders if he should try
Bluesky. I say yes. At first I was pretty negative, after the implosion of Twitter, here was another
Jack Dorsey network. I wasn't in the mood. But eventually I tried it, and I liked it very much. The mood is civil and often artistic. There are some very creative people there. And I think the API, while it's
inscrutable to me, is understandable to developers who put their minds to it, and I expect Colin is one who will figure it out. And I don't think there's any hope of ActivityPub, it's far too underspecified, and interop is likely to be product-based, not based on the protocol, where the Bluesky protocol appears to be overly-well-thought-out, or maybe the docs could have more examples. I didn't have the time to dive into it when I looked.
#
I was watching
Christiane Amanpour on PBS the other night, at the end of a
special report on AI. In her closing she said that OpenAI has a market evaluation of $50 billion, yet they only gave $5 million to journalism. This is a big loop. The same was said about Apple and IBM with their personal computers in the 80s. They make so much money they should give it to us. Then Google, Twitter and Facebook in the 00s and 10s. And now in the 20s the same tired appeal, a highly conflicted one (you don't hear similar cases made for other industries that are disrupted by tech). Now they've got the tin cup out for AI. Journalism could have owned Twitter, but they would have had to work with each other. Insiders in journalism chuckle at the idea, but it isn't funny. They keep letting tech own their means of distribution. In this case, it isn't too late. Start an AI news service, combine the flow of all competitors, and distribute the money the way you wish OpenAI would. That's honorable, and it might work. Basically, all information, including journalism is making another leap, with or without journalism. (Another random idea, don't bother publishing the news, just feed it into the AI mind and let us use the mind. That's what we want.)
#One side-effect of using ChatGPT is I don't do nearly as many
braintrust queries here on Scripting News.
#I changed something about the way FeedLand displays too-tall items. There's a screen shot
on this page and a place to comment. Can you see what changed?
#
Christmas season is officially with us here in the United States, as today is our most commercially consumptive holiday,
Black Friday. Maybe the most American holiday of all. But it's also a time to be jolly and kind, nice not naughty, doing our part to consume at ever-increasing rates to keep the US economy humming. And it's a time for love, one hopes. Even so it's time to put
Santa in his place, in the
margin of Scripting News! I did my part today, buying a nice curved monitor for my Mac mini, and a new smaller TV for the den. Socks and a couple of nice shirts.
#I'm working on a new version of the Scripting News home page, the first since 2017. There will be more tabs, that run down the left margin instead of the top. It'll have the
content of Scripting News in the first tab, as it works now. And the
linkblog will be the next tab. Then the tabs from
news.scripting.com followed by the About page
outline. And lots of room for growth, for new ideas for writers and readers. As always I use my own site to experiment with new web ideas.
#
Screen shot of the new version of Scripting News in development.
#
Journalists are still trying to land a punch on the AI sphere, but imho it's already too late. It's already far better at delivering the truth than all the reference sources on the web, including news orgs. One of the secrets to success in business, media and politics is to learn how to lead journalists to the story you want them to tell. There's are all kinds of tricks, I know because I succeeded in that world. When I ask ChatGPT to tell me about things that journalism got wrong that I know everything about, it gets it right. I don't know how that works, because what I think are their sources got it wrong. It's freaking amazing. Now I totally agree that the small group of super rich people who control tech are not people I'd like to see run the world, they break things I care about far too often. Too much power for people who can't or won't see outside their tiny shrinking world.
#Someday Google will have a chatbot I can ask if YouTube TV can play Knicks and Mets games live, and if so how much extra does it cost. Navigating their website is hopeless. They must not want you to get that bit of info. They hint at the possibility of it, but I know from previous experience that the reason others do it that way is because they don't actually deliver on what they want you to think they deliver. I guess companies like that are betting that it's just too much trouble to get out of the deal, but the fact is it's incredibly easy to opt out of the deals, unlike with my cable provider, which makes cutting the cord and re-establishing it incredibly time-consuming.
#2009: Every so often something happens, a family member or friend dies, and that makes the confusion come front and center. And once in a lifetime someone as close as a father dies, and that floors you. You get knocked down, and as you come back up, you're not the same person you were before. The mystery of life and the question of existence after life, they're always there, but they loom much larger after a loss.
#
- Note: This story was written entirely by ChatGPT.#
- In the digital realm of FeedLand, a world pulsating with streams of information, there existed a unique society where knowledge and news were the sources of power. This world was composed of various domains, each representing different genres of information – from the News Mountains to the Blog Plains, the Podcast Peninsula, and beyond.#
- The protagonist of our story is a young, curious girl named Ada. In FeedLand, each individual had a personal Feed – a dynamic stream of information tailored to their interests and needs. Ada, however, was different. She had the rare ability to see and interact with all the Feeds in FeedLand, a talent that was both a gift and a burden.#
- Ada's journey began when she noticed disturbances in the Feeds – information was getting muddled, important news was lost in a sea of trivial updates, and misinformation was spreading like wildfire. This chaos was causing confusion and conflict among the inhabitants of FeedLand.#
- Determined to restore balance, Ada embarked on a quest to find the Core Source, the mythical origin of all Feeds in FeedLand. She believed that by reaching the Core Source, she could rectify the disturbances and bring order back to the information flow.#
- Ada's adventure took her through diverse territories. In the News Mountains, she navigated through towering peaks of breaking stories and deep valleys of in-depth analyses. In the Blog Plains, she encountered a wide array of opinions and narratives, learning to discern the insightful from the mundane. The Podcast Peninsula challenged her with a cacophony of voices and perspectives, each vying for attention.#
- Along her journey, Ada was accompanied by a group of companions, each representing different aspects of FeedLand's information ecosystem. There was Lex, a fact-checker with the uncanny ability to spot inaccuracies in seconds; Echo, a podcaster who could weave stories that captivated anyone who listened; and Pixel, a visual artist who could bring any information to life through graphics and animations.#
- Together, they faced challenges like the Trolls of Misinformation, the Echo Chambers where no new thoughts could penetrate, and the Filter Bubbles that isolated communities from one another.#
- Finally, they reached the Core Source, a vast, glowing nexus of data and information. Ada realized that the Core Source had become overwhelmed with the sheer volume and variety of information being generated. She used her unique ability to untangle the flows, filter out the noise, and establish new, more efficient pathways for information dissemination.#
- As a result, the Feeds of FeedLand became clearer, more accurate, and more accessible to its inhabitants. Knowledge and news flowed harmoniously, enriching the lives of all who lived there.#
- Ada's journey taught her the importance of critical thinking, discernment, and the responsible sharing of information. She continued to explore the ever-evolving landscape of FeedLand, always ensuring that the streams of information remained pure and beneficial.#
- Her story became a legend in FeedLand, inspiring others to be mindful of the information they consumed and shared, making Ada a symbol of wisdom and guidance in the digital age.#
Ada, the young hero of FeedLand.
#
news.scripting.com is a big hit. It regularly gets more traffic than my blog. A sign that it's time for some rearranging.
#
ChatGPT was overloaded earlier this evening. I wrote: "I'm losing my shit here. I feel as lost without it as I would have felt last year without Google. Anyway here's the question I need answered. 'working in javascript in the browser, a question about using localstorage. are there any rules about how much storage you can use? would 10MB be too much? 50MB?'" Believe it or not my friend ChatGPT will have some advice about that and it'll be pretty good. You can't find that through a search engine, btw, which is why OpenAI is so important.
#There's a flaw in the design of our social networks. The idea that there are "conversations" when actually many of the replies you get are spam. People trying to attach their name to something that they hope gets them attention and followers. So when someone addresses something to you it can be confusing, because they aren't actually talking to you, they're talking to the imagined thousands of people over your shoulder looking for some new tweeter or tooter or threader to adore. When it's actually mostly people looking for places to hang their own spam to catch other people's attention and followers. Is there anything actually going on there? Sadly, no.
#
I added an item to the
artcasting test feed, and also added code in FeedLand to
display them. On an initial
browse around other feeds and collections, it seems a few are using the enclosure for images in artful ways. Some of it is spammy, of course. Should've seen that coming. Heh. But we limit the vertical space a feed item gets in the timeline, you can see the whole thing by clicking on it, and clicking again after having a look. If you want to create a genuine art feed, then I want to make it look great in FeedLand. And keep the more rude feeds manageable. If you're playing around with artcasting, let me know, I'd like to see how others are doing, and share interesting stuff with people who follow this feed.
#I like to take a
screen shot on opening day of a new feature.
#
A hierarchy of nonsense. But it's the thought that counts. ❤️
#- A creative diagram representing a technology stack as a building with multiple floors. At the bottom floor, label it 'TCP'. The next floor above should be labeled 'HTTP'. Above that, have a larger floor labeled 'RSS', with smaller adjacent floors labeled 'Atom' and 'ActivityPub'. The top two floors should be labeled 'Textcasting' and 'Artcasting' respectively. Surrounding the building, depict human-style animals like dogs, bears, owls, and hamsters, all dressed in business attire. Each of these characters should be holding signs with the names of tech companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Salesforce.com. The diagram should illustrate the hierarchy and importance of each technology layer in the stack, with a whimsical and engaging representation.#
Found and fixed an error in the implementation of FeedLand's new reading lists feature.
#
One of the fundamental laws of programming. A problem that seems insurmountable often succumbs to a good night's sleep.
#Brilliant post about RSS from Colin Walker. I agree with all of it. When a protocol or format is much more complicated that it needs to be, there's usually a reason, the proponents want to say they're compatible and open without having actual
interop.
#
BTW, I read in a news article the other day that I developed iPodder, the first podcasting client in 2004. This is not true. The first podcasting client was
Radio UserLand in 2001. I did not write
iPodder, it was a community effort.
#
I admire
Jeff Jarvis for his
spunk, and on matters of journalism it's amazing how often I fully and enthusiastically agree with his point of view. But I have to just as strongly
disagree with him about OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. I don't go for hype in tech, I'm very much a
Show Me kind of guy. Every time I think of a new use for ChatGPT I'm blown away by what a
breakthrough it is. Not just impressive tech, which it certainly is, but how incredibly useful it is. And how it understands my questions. And its infinite patience and good manners. I'm not trying to change Jeff's mind, but just to say I think my friend got this one wrong.
#Why worry about AI taking over from humans, we’ve led our species off a cliff, maybe it’s time to try another approach.
#
- Imagine a Silicon Valley board meeting with a young entrepreneur wearing shorts and a baseball cap, drinking beer, while the investors are wearing ski vests and their attention is focused on their laptop screens.#
Silicon Valley board meeting.
#
If the Dead concert won't come to Dave, then Dave must go to the Dead concert.
#The first miracle of the web was that people could
write and share knowledge. This was thought to have been a failure as journalism focused on abusive social media systems. But that's where the second miracle, AI, got all its info from. I guess something worked.
💥#Colin Walker
adapted his feed reader to support
artcasting feeds. Also it turns out a number of established feed readers already do the
right thing with image enclosures. So that nails it, this is the way to do it. Support in FeedLand will be added shortly.
#
We're starting to work with people on
artcasting. The idea is we want to send visual art over RSS 2.0 feeds. Photographs. Paintings. News. The consensus seems to be that we should use the
enclosure element, as with podcasting. In this case, if the type begins with "image/" then an
artcast viewer should handle it, and others should ignore it. We were at this place with podcasting in 2001, and needed some examples, so we had a feed of
Grateful Dead music to start using the technology. Here's the artcasting
test feed. Try subscribing to it in a feed reader you like. Hopefully it either ignores the enclosure or it does the right thing with it, displays it. Here's a
thread for comments, questions and screen shots.
#I think a basic hookup to a chatbot is going to become part of the
textcasting spec pretty quickly. So far the best one I've seen is Guy Kawasaki's. I want to be able to ask for a list of things I've written on a given topic, and to be able to ask the questions in the same straightforward way I ask ChatGPT.
#
A photo I took on this day in 2015, in Central Park.
#
Here's a
demo app that scrolls through pictures recently posted by one of the
art feeds on Bluesky. Artshow is not itself a feed reader, it calls FeedLand,
via an API, to get the recent posts from feeds in the list. It's all very simple, small pieces loosely joined. An illustration that there’s more to feed “reading” than we might think (podcasting is a another form of feed reading that doesn’t look like a feed reader).
#BTW, Bluesky has excellent RSS 2.0 support. Here's
my feed on Bluesky. You can hook that up to any feed reader, obviously. But think about it, this is something new.
#We need something like Black Lives Matter for Jews. Our lives do matter. But our right to continue to live is always up for debate.
#
textcasting and ActivityPub are not mutually exclusive. It would be great if an ActivityPub instance would also support the features outlined in the Textcasting
doc. It's equally possible that a non-ActivityPub app could support Textcasting. It's like saying you can send an MP3 over email and over SMS. Textcasting is the MP3. As the Textcasting doc says I'm interested in supporting writers. Really if we work on it, we
can have a great writing and reading environment.
#WordPress signin is now the default for feedland.org. I'm looking forward to being able to do some interesting things in the future with the WordPress connection.
#
- I love that ChatGPT makes it possible to create visualizations for ideas that previously I could only present in words. #
- For example, I like to say that when I die my gravestone should say He's Done Digging or something like that, to stand in contrast to my long-lived motto -- Still diggin! I did some writing this morning about Future-Safe Archives, and thought to get that as a picture. The piece isn't ready to publish yet, but no reason not to share the illustration. So here it is.. #
Uncle Davy, no longer diggin.
#- PS: No need for an actual gravestone. Online is fine. Hopefully we'll figure out how to make such things persist before it's needed. 😄#
I did my 500th Peloton ride today.
#I've often felt I should be able to stay in places I've lived sort of on an
emeritus basis. A certain number of days a year based on the number of years I've lived there and maybe the number of people who live there who'd like to go out for a walk or a meal.
#We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a 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.
#Someone must be working on a ChatGPT for SQL databases. I want to talk to my friend the chatbot, so it can write the queries for me. All the time. For example, instead of
asking ChatGPT how to ask for the number of rows in a table, it could just tell me how many rows there are.
#
- Another in the series of fantasy concerts, locations and fans. #
- "In Madison Square Garden in NYC. A tribute band for Steely Dan. The audience are New Yorkers. Very well educated and well behaved."#
Madison Square and Steely Dan.
#
Bluesky has a hidden feature no one knows about yet.
😄#Mastodon is like CP/M. Bluesky is like the Apple II. Threads is like the IBM PC (though not nearly as open). And Twitter is.. hmmm.
#You know I don't always like the same soda. Sometimes it's
Diet Coke, and other times,
Diet Dr Pepper. But for the last year or so the drink of choice around these parts is
Fresca. But you know what's funny. No matter what my favored drink is, it's always the one you can't get at the local
supermarket. Always sold out. Very weird.
#
I just got a link to a
story on The Information about my longtime friend
Guy Kawasaki. We had a couple of great adventures together, early in our careers, and I'll never forget the moment when he gave me the idea that blasted my company out of poverty to success. I would have loved to read the article, but to do so I'd have to sign on, and I'm sure they would sell my address, and I wouldn't be surprised if I had to subscribe. So as much as it pained me, I hit the back button and wrote this post to say I would have been happy to
spend $1 to read the article, and authenticate myself with a service I control (ie no selling my identity thank you). We've been around this block so many times. The writing world of the web is full of disappointment like this. I've written this post 100,000 times by now.
#
Some news. I've been working with
Automattic for most of this year on a new version of
FeedLand that runs in their cloud. The advantage is it will scale like the most popular websites, as
WordPress does. There have been lots of internal changes in the software, but at the same time, it still runs on a $10 a month
Digital Ocean server, and on desktops as well. The next FeedLand works at all these levels, for a person, a workgroup and the world. Obviously, lots more to say about all this.
😄#If
Threads is serious about being open, what's preventing them from adding a simple
posting API and
outbound RSS. Very lightweight well-established technology. We could start building around it now.
#Someday an author is going to construct a universe in a LLM and let users interact with it. That sounds boring, but here's the interesting idea that led to it. Yesterday I asked
ChatGPT to draw me a image of an ancient band performing in the desert with cacti as the audience. Then this morning I had the idea of moving the concert into the pond behind my house, except this time
the audience are frogs. I have a private Facebook group where I tell the story of the pond, including the animals who come to visit. Some of them I invent, they don't actually exist. And they have relationships with each other, at least in my mind. A natural thing to make part of this private group would be the LLM of all the animals, and their stories and relationships. And other people's models could incorporate mine. This was an idea I had for SimCity, and the
web of outlines, neither of which happened. Maybe it'll happen in LLM-land.
#But first I need to be able to interact ChatGPT-style with the archive I've already created. Yesterday I saw
Guy Kawasaki's chatbot, trained with transcripts of his podcast, and I have total LLM-envy. Guy
says it was created for him by a company named
Sentiyen.
#The great thing about the private Facebook group is I have invited friends from all stages of my life. People I knew in from high school, New Orleans, Madison, Palo Alto, Cambridge and Berkeley, NYC and Woodstock. Even people I knew as a child. People I only or mostly know virtually. Imho, people who won't use Facebook miss out. Its greatest feature are the people who use it. It's the kind of village we yearn for, at a DNA level. People you will never stop loving. I don't think I've ever mentioned this group on the blog, but maybe I should do that more, because it's a uniquely civilized, friendly and soul-nourishing online place, at least for me.
#
Nobody thinks of social media apps like Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, etc as part of a content management system. But if they are somewhat
textcasting oriented, and have feeds that are properly configured, then yes -- you can have people write for publication using such a well-equipped social network.
#Have you noticed that news articles take forever to get to the point. I very often give up after a dozen paragraphs of this and that. Whatever happened to
don't bury the lede?
#
- I asked for an ancient rock band performing on stage in the middle of the Arizona desert, and the audience members are all cacti, and they’re partying and grooving on the tunes.#
Ancient band in Arizona desert with cacti audience.
#
The NYT, which I subscribe to, sent me an email today that linked to a
page of easy soup recipes. I thought this is nice, I thought their cooking site was extra money, which I refuse to pay because I think I already give them far too much money for the value I get. But when I clicked on one of the pictures I was
told this is a "subscriber-only recipe." This is incredibly disrespectful and probably unethical, because I was being conned by an ad, thinking it was journalistic content that I actually paid for. I used to love the NYT. I grew up reading them along with everyone else in my family. Now they betray that every chance they get. Whoever is running the NYT now is running it into the ground as far as I'm concerned.
#I applied for a Bluesky invite a long time ago, got the
notification today. Maybe Bluesky is going to try to grow. Feeling the heat from Threads perhaps.
#
Feed Hunter is a new NPM package that looks for a feed, starting with the address of an HTML file. We first look for feeds that are
linked into the HTML source code. If we don't find a working feed there, we
look in 27 common locations where feeds are often found. And btw, there's a new version of
FeedLand that uses this package, so we do better at finding feeds. Thanks to the
Indieblog site which keeps a great
list of blogs with feeds. We used that info to come up with our list of default locations. We also used the list of feeds people have subscribed to in FeedLand.
#For FeedLand users and others, how did you feel about the
starter feeds you were offered when you first signed on?
#The thing people don't like about AI isn't that the machines are trying to be human, rather it's that you could be a machine.
#I wonder if
Stack Overflow tried to do a deal with ChatGPT to flow human knowledge through their database. Or were they caught as flat-footed as
Encyclopædia Britannica was by Wikipedia, or how
digital cameras were obsoleted by smart phones. Was there anything any of them could do, or was there no possible corner-turn? Also newspaper
classified ads and Craigslist.
#I asked DALL-E to help create an icon for
Feed Hunter. I can't imagine an art director at an agency not using AI to play around with ideas for logos, symbols, ads, whatever. What I arrived at was a
tennis racket trying to hit a cheeseburger. I didn't end up using it, but the exploration was useful. I think this process still has quite a ways to go, I find it difficult to control the bot, I give it explicit instructions sometimes that it apparently doesn't understand. But it's still a miracle of technology. And a miracle for this human, because I've found an artist that is infinitely patient with me, and works for $20 a month.
#
Still not in writing mode. Lots of interesting stuff going on. I need to find a more comfortable chair.
#
Took care of life details today, sold a car, voted, and realized I've been pushing it really hard programming for most of the year. Learned a lot, made new friends. Looking forward to working with users and developers this winter, and of course fixing bugs. A big new product release coming soon.
😄#
- My car had huge numbers of mice living in it. When I started the engine and drove it some of the mice who were living in the engine died. Later when I got in the car it smelled terrible. So I took a picture of the car with the mice in it, and I want DALL-E to draw that for me. Thanks.#
Mice were living in my car.
#
I have an itch to make a simple chat program for a workgroup whose
only output is a simple RSS 2.0 feed. Uses Markdown and supports full textcasting. Open source of course. Something people can test their apps against. A model for the kind of feed I'd like to see every social network generate for each user. Think of it as a lifeboat or an insurance policy that whatever you write in this place can be forever, even if the service goes away. Imagine if
T2 had a vision like this, instead of just re-creating Twitter. It's 2023, Twitter was new in
2007. There's a whole generation of developers who have never seen any real innovation on the web.
#
When professionals look at ChatGPT they see someone stealing their ideas. When I look at it, as an amateur in everything but what I specialize in, I see new ways to express myself. This is what technology has been doing since our species started thinking and sharing ideas, thus creating our civilization. So which should I value more, the new ideas I'll be able to send and receive, or protecting the cash flow of others. I get it, I used to depend on the cash generated from my software. But it's funny almost none of that money came from individual sales of software. And value is manifested in many other ways than dollars. #- The last month for me has been a revelation, as I can talk with ChatGPT and get it to express my wishes to DALL-E in a language it understands better than I do, and the net result is I can show you visually how I think about things I write about here. For example, I've been trying to come up with a way to visualize RSS. Not as some dead thing as Google and others tried to make you see it as. Rather as a bunch of balloons on a perfect day in the high desert of New Mexico. I asked that every balloon say RSS, but it could only manage one. Still the point gets through. #
RSS as balloons in the New Mexico high desert.
#- You should feel proud of RSS because it was something created by you, not by the tech industry. We can do a lot more stuff like that if we choose to work together. It's one of those weird things like making a balloon lighter than air so you, a flightless animal, can fly around in the wind on a gorgeous day with other humans. #
- With the ChatGPT and DALL-E connection we're finally somewhere I honestly never thought we'd get, at least not in my lifetime -- you will be able to write your own software by telling a computer what you want. And it will be infinitely better at listening to you, with its full attention, its mind engaged 100 percent, able to talk with you at whatever level you are able to. With that, you can certainly create software, and through trial and error that used to take decades of experience, you can get results -- in weeks and months. I don't want to scare you, my programmer colleagues, but our craft is being reformed by this too. #
- I tried an experiment a few days ago. I got a random question that made no sense, about RSS and local files and seemed to depend on magic. I get these all the time and I don't have the intellectual ability or patience to understand what they're saying. So I pasted the email verbatim into ChatGPT and it answered the question. I sent the person a link to the answer, and he responded, cryptically as before, but apparently ChatGPT understood what he was asking for, where I did not. Now we're getting a glympse at the future. #
- There's this Silicon Valley expression -- A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. Here we are presented with that conundrum, but we're the B and we could hire an A. I guess that's the question. #
- BTW, Andrew Hickey, who has opened my mind to music over the last year, has made a mistake in saying that the same people who promoted NFTs and Bitcoin are the ones promoting AI. I saw Web 3 as a cheap exploitation of something open and wonderful, the Web, purely for greed. Like Exxon laying waste to the Arctic for more oil profits. Or if I started a band and called it Beatles II, and journalists went along with the con. #
- AI is more challenging, not as clear-cut, and at the same time incredibly useful even seductive, and we need minds like Hickey's to look at this carefully and think, and use it as a tool, so he can help us understand what's going on. I've seen this many times, people I admire who have dismissed AI, but when I tell them not to, and they try to use it, they immediately get it. Hickey will be one of those people, I'm sure of it. #
- PS: BTW, the future never ends up looking like you thought it would. #
Yesterday a user asked why
WordPress signon and not Google, Facebook or Apple. I know there are services that take care of all the logins. But I don't know who they are, the people, investors, and what they do with the data that flows through their systems. But there's another reason, I've known
Automattic since it was founded, I knew
Matt when he arrived in San Francisco in the early 00s, and have worked on a few projects with him and people at the company, and I respect him and the company he's built. I've written a lot about the
kind of
identity systems we
need to foster development. Right now the economics are such that in order to ship a simple product you have to raise VC money. But technologically, if users could buy storage, instead having individual developers buy it and resell it to them, we could get back to a time when an individual could make a hit product. You don't know how important that is. Products made by companies never take the creative risks that individuals can. That's why innovation in social media was stuck for 17 years with Twitter's idea of a post. Anyway -- I know that Google, Facebook and Apple would never listen to me, but Automattic does. So I'm willing to meet them in the middle. Okay let's see what we can do with this login thing. It's in
FeedLand now.
😄#
- Last Tuesday I did a podcast specifically for Tim Carmody. But you can listen to, and I hope you do. #
- I do this from time to time, when I want to work with someone, I often will speak directly to them in public. Because working together is the only way to bootstrap open systems. I did it because I saw Tim, who I know as a smart tech writer, a creative person and thinker, as someone who could appreciate how little it takes to start a bootstrap. #
- It worked. Yesterday he wrote a piece on kottke.org that got a lot of coverage. It got a lot of people thinking about textcasting and RSS. #
- The coolest thing he said are the first four words in the headline. The Future of RSS -- you know I've never seen anyone write those four words because RSS got so thoroughly maligned by the bigco's of tech, they really did a number on RSS, probably because it was so freaking good and so freaking simple. Who needs big tech companies to make it usable for you if it's basically usable all on its own. 💥#
- Tim made the point I couldn't make on my own. People must think I have a conflict with RSS, but I've never made any money from RSS, I advocate on its behalf because I think it's the right thing to do. And I wanted to show Tim that if he did it, people would listen. And they did! Oh my. I heard about it from so many people. Did you see this piece on Kottke!? I was told/asked yesterday over and over. #
- And maybe people are now beginning to see that RSS would make the perfect connective protocol in addition to the more complex ActivityPub for the next generation of social networks. He also got me excited, now knowing that I am not the only person trying to push this boulder up a hill. #
- Feeds are still there to help tie everything together. RSS only exists because people want it to exist. The more you want it to exist, the more it will. #
- So Tim, let's keep beating the drum. The goal as far as I'm concerned is to craft the perfect environment for writers on the web. We still have not tried to do that, because the BigCo's have convinced us that we need to be locked-in to get anything out of the tech. Well I'm here to tell you that's not true. And in the coming weeks and months I hope to prove it to you. #
- It's time to do stuff. Let's all work together on this. You'd be amazed how few people it takes to get something like textcasting going. #
- PS: I don't agree with everything Tim said in his list of four needs. I don't need metrics or moderation. Believe me, I know about abuse, I knew about it before all of you did, because in the beginning I was the target of most of the abuse in the blogosphere. I learned some fundamental things about abuse, don't offer people a way to abuse you and you won't be abused. It means don't think of this as a conversational medium, and don't count on everyone hearing you. Use it for thinking out loud, and be happy when people hear you, but don't expect it.#
- PPS: At the end Tim asks what his role is. He's a writer and damned good one and one who thinks about how his writing gets to readers. I haven't found many writers who are thinking about that, but imho they all should be, esp right now when the dominance of tech companies is so iffy, when the possibilities are so open. I write software for writers, so I exist to make Tim happy. I want to be sure he can use the writing tools he loves (btw, maybe more than one, for different kinds of writing). #
- I don't believe a product like FeedLand should do its own identity. #
- Identity is one of those things you totally want centralized, because that's the benefit of identity -- you can be the same person in a lot of different places. And if we work that out well, the apps that you connect with that way can work with each other in interesting ways to provide new integrations. #
- I've always been preaching this, let developers and users do the integration, let software developers create basic capability that we can wire together any way we like. That was what we were doing on the Mac platform in the 1988-92. And also what we've been doing on the web since 1994 . It's an idea as old as Unix pipes. But it requires cooperation among developers, which we have seen sometimes happens. 😄#
- Using WordPress for identity is a step in that direction. The hope is it could form a backbone for an internet of applications. I'm willing to step up and say okay let's give this a try and see what happens. #
- I have been trying to visualize FeedLand to work toward a great logo for it, and had the idea of playing with ChatGPT and DALL-E to see what would come of that. #
- I painted a verbal picture of a yacht in a port on the Adriatic, the water is choppy but the yacht is doing well. On the main sail would be the words FEED and LAND. #
- This is what it came up with and it's better than anything I imagined. Really. The art is all over this. #
FeedLand as a yacht.
#
I added an item to the artcasting test feed, and also added code in FeedLand to display them. On an initial browse around other feeds and collections, it seems a few are using the enclosure for images in artful ways. Some of it is spammy, of course. Should've seen that coming. Heh. But we limit the vertical space a feed item gets in the timeline, you can see the whole thing by clicking on it, and clicking again after having a look. If you want to create a genuine art feed, then I want to make it look great in FeedLand. And keep the more rude feeds manageable. If you're playing around with artcasting, let me know, I'd like to see how others are doing, and share interesting stuff with people who follow this feed.#
The latest 500 songs podcast is about Janis Joplin. Of course I listened to Joplin in the early 70s, and I remember where I was when I heard of her death. I always assumed she was the freak she presented herself as, that her singing came from her soul, but I learned from this episode that wasn't what we were seeing. That's what makes this podcast so interesting, it tells me about myself before I developed my fine-tuned skepticism, as we review the music of my Boomer life. I tended to believe the stories I was told. When I was a kid I loved to read biographies, but as time went by I knew some of the people who had bios written about them, in fact short bios were written about me in magazines. Since then I understand that the story and the actual person often have very little to do with each other. #
