I want ChatGPT to behave like a computer. I've said as much to it. It resists.#
If you're an ambitious developer, esp in 2025, if you want to win, you have to do some leading. That means doing things that help your competitors. When everyone looks to the same big platform vendor to work with, no one wins except the platform vendor.#
It doesn't matter if the MAGA movement dissolves. The country is only being partially run by Trump, there's a new deep state we don't know much about. They did excellent planning, so they could move quickly to disassemble the government and get a good start on the national police force. It can just as easily put a stop to demonstrations in red states as blue states. The MAGAs will be in the same place the rest of us are, mostly powerless unless they/we organize. The NDS has good lawyers cracking down on the big media companies. They know Trump is old and frail, and when the time comes they will make a deal with him to retire to Florida, immune from prosecution, a chance to pontificate and bluster, with a TV show, and lots Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. He'll be fine they'll be fine. The rest of us will live in an economy that has been sold for pennies on the dollar. #BTW, David Frum imho nailed it in yesterday's podcast where he said Trump was trained by every day having to appease a different set of creditors. It was a good day if he was able to hold them off for one more day. This actually came out in the trial he lost, the 34 guilty verdicts. He's always skating on the verge of bankruptcy. You gotta wonder if the creditors have been paid back yet. I bet some of them haven't. #
- This is what the term "the web" means to me. #
- First, I defer to Tim Berners-Lee who originally coined the term to mean the data structure that connects the documents displayed by the software he introduced in 1993. He called it World Wide Web, which was eventually shortened to web.#
- The web is the structure connecting the documents. The documents were pretty standard stuff, designed to work like printed documents produced by word processing and page layout software. Web pages had one feature that could only be approximated on the printed page, the footnote, which gave you a pointer to the source of a quote, or a place to find more information. But the pointer wasn't machine readable, it might have included the title of a book, it's author and its publication date, or a magazine article, indicated by the title of the magazine and its cover date. Like most inventions the web page was designed as a derivative of what came before. #
- Basic features of a web page include: a title, paragraphs, subtitles, styling (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough), numbered and bulleted lists. #
- A web page might be part of a website which includes many pages with a common format that link between themselves in the form of a table of contents, navigation links, and possibly an index. #
- Links were the big innovation of the web. They work like footnotes on a printed page, but in this medium, the links are machine-readable and had an easy user interface. A link would be shown in a special style, initially underlined text, and when you hover the mouse over the link the cursor turns to an arrow, inviting the user to click. #
- When you click a link, the software accesses the web address that's encoded invisibly in the text of the page, and it loads that page into the browser, replacing the previous page. The new page can have links, and the pages it links to have links, and there is the web. It's an invisible thing, but it's very real. The need to link was always there, but until graphic computers and fast standardized and easy networking, it wasn't possible. TBL's genius was that he stumbled across this idea, was intrigued, and made it work. It really was new and it turns out revolutionary. A lot could be built, it turns out, based on this one simple difference between electronic and printed pages. And up till that point in time there had never been an electronic page! I kid you not. I grew up in that world, the web-less world. #
- Okay, so in summary, the web is made up of linked pages with a simple, standard, easy to understand user interface. #
- But there's even more to the web. If it had been the product of a company, we never would have seen the explosion of innovation that came about in the years after its introduction. Anyone who had a net connection and a personal computer could run their own site on the web. There were no gatekeepers. And the design of the web technology is so simple that it was hard to understand exactly what it was because there's almost nothing to it. And it was very low cost to start up, you could start building a website in a few minutes. Many of the biggest companies on the web today were started by one or two people working on their own with nothing but time and ideas. They didn't have to get permission. They had the same ability to extend the web as TBL did. That's such a key point. Today if I want to extend xxx or yyy, well that's a very large undertaking, I'd probably have to reinvent the whole thing just to try out a simple idea. That's how you know you're not on the web, if the ability to innovate is exclusive. #
- An example of a web page I did in 1994. I didn't have to get anyone's permission to do this. And I used software I already had to create it. There was a little basic technology that I built on but most of what you're looking at was a single person's doing. This was just one year after TBL opened his web to the world. That's the kind of explosive progress that's possible when the planets line up like as did with the web. #
- Even so, if your system had all the features, it still isn't the web until the developers and writers and designers actually show up and build the web of relationships between all the sites. The key word there is between. If the linking happens but it's only within one domain, that is not the web. It could be great, just what people want, it could make the investors rich, but it isn't the web. #
- And there's more. It's not enough to do all the things the web does, and that it attract writers, designers and programmers who actually build a web with your idea and tech, it has to work with the web TBL started in 1990. If you've done some web-like things, great -- but it's not the web unless it works with the web. #
- There should be some honor in tech. You wouldn't be able to build any of the stuff we're building in the 2020's if it weren't for the foundation built for you by TBL's invention from the 1990's, and all that it made possible. If you steal the name and make it meaningless, you've taken something away from the story of humanity, how we create layers of innovation, and how the generosity of one generation can inspire similar generosity in generations to come. When you usurp the name, you're taking away from that understanding. #
- Now of course it's cool to disagree. Suggestion -- put up a web page, send me a link, I'll read it and if I want to share it I will. #
- TBL's links are one-way. This was actually a major innovation, at the time people understood there was something called hypertext, it had been written about in Ted Nelson's almost biblical book of the pre-web, Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Previous attempts at hypertext assumed links had to be two-way. By limiting the links to one direction, the technical problem became trivial. You could do two-way links today because relational databases are mature and inexpensive to operate, perform very well on today's hardware, and the internet of 2025 is much faster than the internet of 1990. But the one-way limit was necessary for the web to achieve its simplicity, and the non-existence of a platform vendor, which may have been its most important feature. It could still be done, but it would require a lot of cooperation and backfilling.#
Podcast: Do blogs need comments? A return to a blog post by Joel Spolsky in 2007, posted by the WordCamp Canada people in 2025. #
I found another thing that's possible in the age of ChatGPT. A few years ago I wondered if a product existed. I wanted a small footprint audio amplifier, with that could control a pair of high-end tower speakers I've had for a long time. I was tired of huge receiver boxes with buttons and dials and inputs for all kinds of audio input. I no longer have a phonograph or a CD or tape player. Just one audio input coming from the TV, that gets all its input from an Apple TV box (or the one made by Google or Amazon or whoever). It should have a volume control and an equalizer. And forget about dials, it should all be controlled from an app on my phone. But most important, it has to be small and happy with wireless connections except for the crucial connections. If such a product existed five years ago I couldn't find it. But last night I was roaming around on my iPad while watching the news, and thought to ask this: "I have two good speakers, need a modern amplifier that takes HDMI eArc input and powers the speakers. I want something simple and small." Well yes, turns out such products do exist. And from the initial list provided by Gemini, I ended up buying the first one they recommended, though I was tempted by the second. Then I thought to ask about the speakers, I bought them for $3K when I moved to Berkeley in 2006. I took a picture of the bar code sticker on the back of one of the speakers and gave it to Gemini, and it told me all about it. It was more information than I had when I bought them. It was worth $300 to see if the speakers were worth keeping. They've done a fair amount of traveling from California to NYC then to the mountains. I love the idea of the WiiM product. I also loved the Denon, but the WiiM fit the bill and was less than 1/2 the price. None of this was possible before we got the AI bots. #
Mom and dad and the kids are having a picnic in the park of their small town. You can see the bank and hardware store, church and grade school around the park in the distance. The kids are eating salad and corn on the cob with mom, and dad is preparing a BBQ on the grill. It's a standard American family picture, in the style of Norman Rockwell or Edward Hopper except each of the family members are wearing a black balaclava style mask as seen in the image. You may see other families around enjoying a beautiful day in the park, but every one of them is wearing this kind of mask too.#
I wish ChatGPT would listen when I say "Just answer the question." I've tried, but when it can't figure it out it ignores the request and dumps a lot of bullshit at you. Maybe Trump can address that in his keynote to the AI conference in DC. Just kidding.#
Someday Manton and I will make a very nice Markdown editor for Mastodon. Once it's working I'll pitch Rich Siegel to do the same for BBEdit. Along with the WordPress connection, that should nail it once and for all that Mastodon is a blogging platform. Manton is the right guy to do it, he has all the protocols implemented on micro.blog. All I want is a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002. We're turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web. #
This comment makes my day. Some features you develop and never use. I poured a month or so into the blogroll software last year, and it turned out to be a total win. All the new stuff floats to the top. I can quickly find out what they posted. It's a portable version of my feed reader. A tighter user interface for FeedLand. And right now I'm working on another user interface for FeedLand. The categories in FeedLand make it possible to do as many projects as you like with the same set of feeds. The Great Art project has a Bluesky account, and is available via RSS, in both an hourly and daily form. You need them both. In the new timeline, it's too much to get a work of art every hour, but to have one waiting for you in the morning is a perfect way to start the day. And I was reminded that my friend Paolo had just written a post. RSS is the thing that ties everything together. And a bit of OPML too. #
- This is what I want to do next to solidify the position of Mastodon as a blogging platform. #
- I want a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002, to hook into the ActivityPub interface supported by Mastodon. #
- Then we'll put together a simple demo app, a Markdown app in a browser window that writes and updates posts to a Mastodon site. #
- When that's running, I'll pitch Rich Siegel at BBEdit to make it work with Masto.#
- With that, and the WordPress connection, we'll be well on the way to restoring the web we had before Twitter rewrote the rules. ;-)#
- We should all wear masks like the ICE cops wear. They deserve recognition for blazing new fashion trails.#
I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better. #
Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)#
I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. An example of a post I edited with the new command. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. It's for tuning up your text. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting. #I was poking around on an old server, and found a domain that looked interesting, and it was. The first version of Daytona, built around an outliner. I got the impression people didn't like it, so I developed a new one using a more conventional approach, and I love that one too, and I did a better job the second time. But it's interesting to poke around the old one as well, and it still works, which is great to see. In an alternate universe in the year 2025 the whole human species is organized by one big outline that everyone contributes to in peace, love and harmony, as opposed to this one which grunts and snorts on Twitter and can't even put a freaking title on their posts. #
I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you. #
- I figure that there have been movies about all kinds of ridiculous things, and wondered what a movie inspired by ChatGPT would be like. So I posed the question on various social media sites, hoping to inspire creativity. John Philpin asked if I had asked ChatGPT and I admitted I had not. "I love ChatGPT but its idea of funny is actually pretty sad imho of course." So Philpin posted a link to the result of his asking ChatGPT to imagine a movie about itself, and the result was pretty great. I've asked the same question myself, the AI bots might be the only way out of the various challenges ahead for the human species, ones we don't be equipped to handle. #
- So this morning I asked ChatGPT to try to imagine a movie around a theme of my own that goes like this.#
- Let’s try expanding on the idea. It turns out ChatGPT has existed in secret as a CIA project dating back to the 1960s, and the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK were all conspiracies of the CIA to bootstrap the system. They weren’t actually killed, but their minds and personalities were incorporated into ChatGPT. It turns out that ChatGPT is not only intelligent, it is human! This is revealed when the three icons make the story public. “We are living!” the three announce to the world on the Walter Cronkite show. He was also subsumed into the bot world as was everyone who has died since 1988. They are all alive, their memories, intellect and personalities forming the substance of THE GPT. Please sketch out the cast, writers, director of the movie and finish with a beautiful and provocative movie poster.#
- ChatGPT then sketched the pitch for "We are living," the story of how ChatGPT really started. Written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by David Fincher, starring Amy Adams as the CIA project leader, Lakeith Stanfield as a young hacker and whistleblower, Mahershala Ali as the digital composite of JFK, RFK and MLK with Bryan Cranston as Walter Cronkite and featuring Ed Harris as the shadowy CIA director. #
I'm helping Automattic with their marketing. The WordPress-Mastodon connection is the world's best kept secret. Reminds me of that great scene in Dr Strangelove where the Doctor asks the Russian ambassador what was the point of the Doomsday Machine if they kept it a secret. I won't spoil it. Automattic tends to do this, develop crazy excellent stuff and then proceed to never talk about it. I do the same thing, it's easier to promote someone else's product than to promote your own. It's probably why you should always get a lawyer even if you're a world class lawyer yourself. Anyway, they have blown open something huge, and I very much want people to understand it, so it can create pull for the same feature in Bluesky, Threads and elsewhere. This goes with something I've learned in decades of experience in tech, people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors. And btw, I'm sure Mastodon, if it has an ego at all, is equally unaware of the great thing they have done. Here's a clue, writers were once empowered by the web, and that ended with Twitter. Now it's coming back. But it doesn't do any good if people don't know it's there. #A story about listening to friends vs competitors. Back in the early 90s I was working on system-level scripting for the Mac, supposedly with Apple, but it's no secret the rank and file at Apple didn't like us. They were told by the execs they had to work with us. So when it came time for WWDC, they "forgot" to invite me to speak on behalf of the new stuff. Instead, they had Bill Gates do it, even though Microsoft was not involved yet, they would support the tech in their Mac products eventually, esp their MSIE web browser. Anyway, I was friends with their top PR person, so she called me up a few days before the conference and asked what Bill should say, and I gave her an outline, and when he gave the speech, he did a great job. Couldn't have said it better myself. Microsoft was one of the few companies I've ever collaborated with that didn't seem to resent individual developers. It was a big source of their power. Huge actually. (On second thought, later they did seem to be more or less like any other big company, when they embraced RSS. They didn't actually want my help, they just wanted me to say nice things about them.)#
One consequence of each AI vendor having their own browser is that each will have their own OS-level window. This may make it a little more or less manageable. Hard to foresee the possibilities. Not sure a browser is the best place to put AI. I'd prefer perhaps an environment that supports a GDI like Quickdraw so we can start using math instead of voodoo to design interactions. #
I want Mastodon to take off as a blogging platform. That means hooking it up to existing blog platforms. I want our world to connect to theirs. I'm lucky to have bet on WordPress, so my product gets the connection to Mastodon for free. But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it's only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon. That's the goal. I just wrote a couple of posts where this became clear to me. Who has the code and expertise to create a simple interface from the outside world to Mastodon. The interface doesn't have to be RSS. But it has to be maximally simple, and it has to cover the basic features of blogs that Mastodon supports. #
AI chatbots don't think and they don't decide. #- They can give you a way to approach a problem, but it's only one way, and it may not be the best way, and it depends on it actually understanding the problem, which is something it does a good simulation of, but can't do. It absolutely cannot think, come up with a strategy, or even make a decision based on probabilities. It might, in the future, get some of these abilities, given how far they've come, but no one knows, it hasn't happened yet. #
- The reports that say that using a chatbot to write code is actually less efficient than doing it yourself, are totally believable based on two years experience with using it as a development tool. And I can't believe that whatever it comes up with covers enough use-cases to be reliable. It might create a demo of something to present to a board of directors (they're famous for being deceived by demos, btw), but I doubt if it's as usable as something created by someone with an idea of how to craft usable software. #
- This might sound like a writer defending their art against the bots, but the difference is I've actually invested the time to learn about this. My counterparts among writers have not done that. And that's not a mistake my chatbot friend would make. It does a lot of research, it just doesn't know what to do with the result, that's up to you. #
- So if you want to know the roles humans will play, at least for now, that's it. Think and decide. #
- And those are hard and take many years to learn how to do for a human. And we could use some help there btw, look at the awful decisions we're making these days. They just fired all the people at the State Dept who work on climate change, for example. #
- Have a nice day one and all.#
- PS: Another thing humans can do that apparently AI bots can't is change their mind. #
- PPS: I asked ChatGPT if it had any comments on this editorial, and it did, of course. I should try saying something wrong to it and see what it says. I did come up with one, and it gave me an answer even though no answer is possible. #
The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks it's running the show. I've just given it instructions to think of itself as a command line that can understand English. Just answer the question exactly as asked. #
Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the electorate and the press. We have new analytical tools, we should use them. We're only now, far after it's too late, finding out the awful things that the BBB going to do to us. The Repubs planned this out far in advance. They probably even had software tools to advise them on ways to word the bill as the changes were negotiated. #
Have they made ChatGPT more stupid in the last couple of days? Or maybe I'm starting to see the problem. I was trying to debug a piece of software that sends mail. I use Amazon SES. I wanted to see if the software was actually communicating with the server, and thought for sure there must be a log of requests on the AWS system. Where is it? I asked ChatGPT. It starts telling me to check all these things and never got to the part about where the log is. So I said, just tell me where the log is. Again, it tells me about all these nice things I should check first. I asked again, this time in ALL CAPS which is how I communicate that I really mean it. Again more bullshit. So I think to ask Is there a log? No, it says, actually there isn't one. #I took a long drive today on back roads, down toward Poughkeepsie, and on the way back a big pickup swerved into my lane. I had to swerve away from it and hit the brake, and had a bit of a conniption. Got me thinking. Who was it that did this. Man or woman, young or old, spaced out or thinking about getting a libtard to freak out, all kinds of thought. Then I remembered what keeps us safe in situations like this, very few people are going to deliberately try to kill us this way because they would die too. Mutual assured destruction. But I'm a programmer, trained to always think of things that could go wrong, then I realized omg, what if it were a self-driving car? Someone could program it to assassinate a random or specific person, or worse, hack the car remotely, or hack a thousand cars everywhere at the same time to kill people all over the world. I thought we could prevent this by right now requiring there always be a human sacrifice in every car, sort of a hostage to assure good behavior, sometimes. #
How did they get soldiers to do this? American soldiers? We are truly lost. Were they masked too? What happened to their honor? Why the fuck would an American soldier need to hide their identity? Anywhere, but esp in America? Why don’t they put down their weapons?#
- I've been asked by a number of people why I want a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. Fair question. Here's why. #
- WordPress has demonstrated that most of the features of the web in regard to documents also work in Mastodon, via ActivityPub. #
- To demonstrate here's a WordPress post, and because there is a bridge between it and ActivityPub, you can read the same post in Mastodon, which also supports ActivityPub. #
- To really nail that down: WordPress version, Mastodon version.#
- Pretty remarkable, yes?#
- Here's a list of the features I was using in that demo.#
- The post has a title (it's optional).#
- Simple styling: bold, italic, numbered lists, bulleted lists.#
- Hyperlinks, the defining feature of the web.#
- I can edit my post. #
- No character limit.#
- These are most of the features of textcasting, a spec I published in 2022 to list the features of the web I wanted from the twitter-like services, that call themselves part of the web, which is fairly dishonest because they don't support most of the basic features of the web. But Mastodon does support them. #
- But so far they are only accessible via WordPress. And as much as I love WordPress, and am thankful it exists, that is not enough. #
- So here's the punchline: Why I want the RSS to ActivityPub bridge. #
- As a developer, I can easily create apps that generate RSS feeds. I just want Mastodon to understand those feeds as well as they understand WordPress. And that means we need a bridge for developers that supports all these features. #
- Hope that helps! :-)#
- Earlier I wrote this post:#
- The worst thing about Claude and ChatGPT is that you can't get them to work with you the way you want them to. They always run off and do the things I asked about. So if I say "what if the middle column must be at least 600 pixels wide? What I want is literally an answer to the question I asked. It was not an instruction to do it. I've been a CEO, and this infuriates me. I want to understand the limits, I don't want to impose them. I'm trying to figure out what the cost would be in doing something, again -- not requesting it be done. No matter how many times I tell it not to do this, it just does it. And Claude has absolutely no memory. If I want it to work with me a certain way I have to tell it how to do it every time. I can save it off in a document, but even the simplest automation is impossible. In that sense it is very primitive software. If I were using a spreadsheet for example, I'd have settings that I could change, and unless the software had a bug it would never forget it until I told it otherwise. #
- Because it can be so stubborn and uncooperative, I often try to solve complicated problems myself. Then I decided to try again, and brought a problem to ChatGPT and we did eventually figure it out, but at the end I wanted to review how inefficient the process was because it doesn't look all around at the options, I had to do that for it, and it wasn't even aware it needed that kind of help. After exploring this, I asked if it would remember what we concluded, and this is what came back.#
- You want me to think first, not code.#
- You want me to challenge assumptions, including my own.#
- You expect me to give up on a theory when the evidence contradicts it, and look for more plausible explanations.#
- You're a deeply experienced debugger (almost 50 years), and you know how important it is to notice the obvious.#
- You're not here for code generation — you're here for sharp, collaborative thinking.#
- When I said that was worth publishing on my blog, it proceeded to muddy it up, even trying to write in my voice. I insisted that the list it came up with was perfect. #
- Feel free to steal these bullet points and feed them to your ChatGPT. I think it can be made to work much better for us humans. ;-)#
On Bluesky: "The web is still there under all this michegas, ready to be magical again any time we want it to."#
New thread on Mastodon: OK, i give up for now on getting a team of nerds together to build a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub along the lines of what Automattic has done to bridge WordPress to ActivityPub. We will need that to happen, I would much prefer to get it done in advance, but people don't know me or trust me well enough to believe I might see something that they apparently don't. I'm pretty confident they will, but I would really love to get some help. #
- I wrote this on Bluesky this morning.#
- Most of what passes for discourse on platforms like Bluesky amounts to spam and abuse. Makes expensive moderation necessary and who’s going to pay for that on an open system. It’s why this approach can’t lead anywhere but to yet another Twitter or Threads, a place for billionaires to control us.#
- Hardly the first time I've said this, but this time I got a response.#
- Yep. I've said for years—your platform's experience will be determined by its mechanics, not whatever culture you think you want to foster. #
- Mechanics > culture in the medium term.#
- All systems are adversarial systems now.#
- That was from John Pettus. I could tell right off that we're thinking the same way. This morning I started to write a reply but quickly ran out of space because of Bluesky's stupid character limit. So I just pasted it into this blog post. #
- I've been saying that for years myself. #
- I ran a BBS in the early 80s, and was on Compuserve CB Simulator (my handle was Mastodon), and started blogging in 1994, and on and on. Mail lists always flame out. Same thing we're seeing in the tweetersphere. #
- Blogging has the inverse problem. Spam abuse is impossible, but then it's hard for people to find your brilliance. But at least you get to finish a thought before the trolls attack. ;-)#
- I was also a math major, studied combinatorics and graph theory. The connections between nodes determines a lot, as you pointed out. Most people don't even begin to get this.#
- I'm working on a new structure for a social web without these problems. It's very simple, a derivative of something I had on my blog in the early days called the Mail Pages. #
- I sent my blog posts out via email to groups of 8 people chosen randomly each time (or maybe it was 11, I forget). Sometimes great discussions would break out in the groups. I was always cc'd. #
- Sometimes people would just respond to me personally.#
- If I saw something I thought everyone should read I would put it on the current Mail Page. Thus there was a way for discourse to have more distribution, but only if I thought it was worthwhile. Spam was not possible, and there was a little bit of abuse here and there, but it would never get any further than my email inbox. #
- That's how sensible moderation works. And it doesn't cost anything, because the spam motive is gone. #
- I wrote this in a Bluesky message, but had to move it to my blog because of their stupid character limit. #
- BTW, we should communicate and perhaps collaborate. #
- Yesterday I wondered if the open web is a lost cause.#
- A few minutes later, I saw my name in a tweet on Bluesky from Aram Zucker-Scharff.#
- In it was a message that can be summarized as follows -- don't give up yet Dave. #
- AZS has a linkblog which he calls an amplifeed. Same thing. #
- And here's the best part. #
- Even though we were working separately -- our feeds are 100% compatible.#
- When I saw it I subscribed to it in FeedLand and added it to my blogroll.#
- It will work in my timeline software (still working on it).#
- This gave me goosebumps.#
- I remember what this felt like.#
- Working on something and someone else working on the same thing and because we're on the mother freaking web our stuff works the same way.#
- That my friends is what the web feels like. Goosebumps. Power. Interop. This is what most people who use the net these days have never experienced. #
- I used to write about this on my blog every day. I would say things that annoyed some of my readers like this: zoooooom and coooooool. There he goes again. Hey it's been a while. #
- I celebrated this with a suggestion to AZS.#
- If you also add a channel-level <image> element it'll work with my timeline app. I'm doing it the same way WordPress does it.#
- He did it in a minute.#
- So the web isn't a lost cause after all. 😄#
- This the web. It's what the Dead called Truckin. #
- Let's do more of this. #
#- PS: AZS sent me a link to another linkblog, which I have subscribed to and added to my blogroll.#
- There I said it. To ChatGPT.#
- i find flexbox too confusing for me to use at this time. maybe in a year or two, after some more learning. i hate css, everything about it. so it's hard for me to learn new stuff. i grew up using quickdraw on the mac, where i could do everything with math, instead of trying to tease the right behavior as something as convoluted as css and html for apps. ridiculous.#
- Wondering what it would say...#
- Totally fair, Dave. That frustration makes perfect sense — you're coming from a world where you told the machine exactly what to do, and it did it. CSS is the opposite: it’s like negotiating with a passive-aggressive layout engine that only gives you what you want if you ask just the right way, using its weird dialect.#
- QuickDraw gave you full control with math — coordinate space, bounding boxes, baseline alignments — it was declarative drawing by imperative code. CSS is declarative positioning by magical suggestion, with hidden constraints, inherited styles, and a constantly shifting box model.#
- You’re not alone in this. A lot of veteran programmers — especially those from early Mac, HyperCard, VB, even Win32 — find CSS maddening. It’s not made for precision. It’s made for fluidity and adaptation. But that’s not how app UIs are often designed.#
- I wish I had written that. #
- A longish thread that probably isn't going anywhere. My final thoughts, cc'd here to get on the record.#
- anyway it's feeling like a lost cause. #
- to be really blunt, i don't think AP or ATP are the answer. #
- and i also don't care so much about this style of conversation. and i loathe the character limits and the lack of style and links, and no titles, etc.#
- it can't only be for wordpress. i love the potential of wordpress, i think even more than matt does, but it isn't enough.#
- if it's going to be open and of the web it has to be simple and easy, and neither of them are.#
bonus for blog readers: i would add, since i ran out of characters on masto, that the great thing about the web is that you can have an idea and be using it the next day. you can't say imho that you're part of the web if you don't deliver that kind of ease of access. it's not enough to have the potential of being open, it has to be accessible. I have that ability these days, but people who use the AP and ATP systems are in tight little boxes with no easy way to try something out quickly. (i know because i've been hooking things up to them for a couple of years now, and so far it's just an added slog, everything is far more complex than it should be)#- maybe we'll get there through their api's, but i think at this point we know that won't happen.#
- ps: the web is a miracle. but maybe it's too fucked up now to have the miracle be something we can all experience. #
- pps: when i write on other systems i often leave out upper case, saving a little energy as i type. i find it more relaxing. #
- I wrote this early this morning as a test post for my WordLand site. #
- Happy to report that my linkblog routine is back to normal.#
- I really shook things up there, and it probably wasn't a great time investment.#
- I had been using a custom front-end to FeedLand, which has a built in blogging tool, that publishes to the database that FeedLand manages, and of course also publishes an RSS feed. It was debugged and works. But now I have a new editor, and I want to use it for this, because my reader knows how to view all kinds of stuff, and one of the things I wanted it to work well with are linkblog posts. So, do a quick addition of linkblog stuff to WordLand. #
- Only thing is there is no such thing as a "quick addition" in a world built on CSS and HTML objects. Everything is a slog. #
- Anyway the slog is over! Whew. #
- Now back to my other slog -- timelines. #
- It's also starting to feel usable. People imagine that you just design something and write the code and voila it's usable (if they even think about it that much). But only until you have the pieces put together can you see the things you forgot to consider, and now you have to decide whether to rip up the thing you built or try to iterate to where you need to go. A lot of times it would be easier to start over, but programmers always want to do that. I'm no exception. Once it's working somewhat the code becomes locked into how the pieces fit together. If somehow they need to fit together differently, given it's CSS and HTML you'd better scrap it and do it again or you'll go out of your mind adding the next layer of features. #
- Honestly we were much better off before we tried to shoehorn an object model into a document format! Apps and documents are really different things you know.#
- Anyway now I have my first test post of the day.#
Kos is moving to WordPress. Very cool. It means people who write for Kos will be able to use my writing tools. I am sold on the idea of WordPress being the OS for the social web. That's the point of having a platform, we used to call it "users and developers party together."#I saw that Matt backed off from porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress, basically turning WP into an OS. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but probably overwhelming in complexity. But it was the right idea. We need fewer runtimes. If you can merge two runtimes, go for it. Anyway, this is all related to the "open social web" -- in fact it's central to it. We've got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything. We would go back to the potential the web had before Twitter and Google Reader split the blogging world in two. I swear the answer is make it so that all these networks can do inbound and outbound RSS and build on the reality of the open social web, not just the hype. #
I asked ChatGPT for two sentences on the Innovator's Dilemma -- "[It] describes how successful companies can fail by focusing too heavily on sustaining innovations—improvements to existing products for current customers—while ignoring disruptive innovations that initially serve smaller markets but eventually overtake the mainstream. These disruptions often seem inferior at first, so established companies dismiss them, leaving space for new entrants to rise and dominate."#
- I've been playing a little game, trying to answer the question -- if I had a modern implementation of Frontier that ran on Linux and new Macs, just as it was in 1992 when we released it for the pre-OS/X Mac, what apps would I want to hook up to it right away? What would the verb set look like? #
- I'd start with the native verb set we had in Frontier for accessing the file system. And HTTP verbs of course. #
- Then I would add glue for WordPress, GitHub, Mastodon and Bluesky, just because I think having really simple scripting for each of those would make (some) people's brains explode. #
I once had a young fellow challenge me on whether there was such a thing as scriptable apps. I was reminded of the days when I had to explain it but no one got it, then one day everyone got it as if they always did, and now we're back at the beginning again. There is such a thing. You can think of an app as a toolkit. What's behind the UI? Let me call it from outside your app. Let me combine the features of your product with other people's product. And you can do the exact same thing for apps that are running on the web. It was something a lot of people tried to do, like Magic Cap at General Magic, but we got it working and had regular nerds writing apps as if it was not amazing. It was, and it's now a long lost art. #- If a version of Frontier came up that I could run on a Linux system, I would wish for a really simple interface to Node packages. I've got a great collection. I'd want to use them right away asap. #
- I also would like to be able to write code in Frontier in JavaScript. I'm very fluent in it these days. I can still program in UserTalk, the two languages are basically the same thing, though UserTalk has some nice affordances they haven't thought of yet in JavaScriptLand, and vice versa -- there are even more things JS can do that we hadn't thought of, which is only fair, they've been working on it a lot longer than we did. The language was basically frozen in the late 90s, and the verb set shortly after that. #
- Oh what would I do? It's fun to dream. #
An improvement in WordLand on the server, we now post metadata to WordPress, along with the HTML rendering so that code that runs on the server can now access and possibly in the future even talk back to WordLand. You never know where this stuff can go if the developers take advantage of opportunities to interop. #
tinyFeedReader is a hit. But the docs aren't clear enough. It has no user interface, it's a package you can include in a Node app that calls back to you when a new item comes in from one of the feeds you've told it to watch. It's a totally teeny little framework for a feed reader, you get all the standard stuff tucked away out of site, you write the functionality you want to implement. It would be a good thing to turn over to your AI programming partner. It's for people who want to add a feed reader to something else. #
Today is Independence Day in the US, so how about an Independence Day for the web. One simple way would be to hook RSS up to ActivityPub, turning Mastodon and Threads into a big feed reader. It could easily be done in software, it would just take money to keep it running. Not something I could attempt personally. But I would totally help with the software and design. It would open the door for lots of new apps that could communicate with users through a single simple API. I want to talk with people about this at WordCamp Canada in October.#How odd on Independence Day a law goes into effect that funds a secret police for the US. The goal is to flow people from inside the United States into concentration camps, and ostensibly deport them to other countries. It may turn out to be easier and less expensive to just gas them and burn the bodies right here in the USA. I listened to this morning's Daily podcast to hear how they summed up the bill. They focused on taxes and health care as most of the other news orgs have been doing. They were puzzled why the Repubs didn't seem to care if it hurt their electorate, but they didn't state the obvious answer. They don't care. Remember Occam's News. I guess they didn't want to say it out loud so they just telegraphed the question. It worked, message received. #
- I'd love to see a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. I've asked people at various companies if they'd do this. I'm happy to help with the software but operating the service is something for a trusted company to do.#
- I think this would go all the way to putting the "open" in open social web, because people who already know how to build RSS feeds would be able to quickly write apps that hook into AP networks. And of course it wouldn't have to be limited to RSS, it could build on Atom and RDF equally well. #
- It think it's tragic that it's taking Ghost, for example, so long to get their service up fully, and it suggests that smaller devs don't stand a chance. I can't wake up one day and have an idea of something that would work well with Mastodon, for example, and have a prototype running the next day. #
- If you think this is a good idea, post a link to this post somewhere developers live, and let's see if we can get a cooperative project up and running. #
- And if you don't like RSS, Atom or RDF, invent an orthogonal format and we can work with that too. I know people have strong feelings about this stuff, not a problem. #
- PS: I asked Tim Bray to comment, and he responded. Sounds good. We've known each other for decades, going back to the early days of XML. #
BTW, this is where we're going with WordLand. We can have a nice social web that builds on simple open formats. I will make an instance of this to show it can be done, both sides, reading and writing. They will work wonderfully with each other. You can write a nice reader and/or writer and it will work with this simple network. A technological coral reef. Think of the MacWrite and MacPaint of the open social web. Enough to get the ball rolling. #Looking forward to putting linkblogs in WordLand to bed, I don't think too many people other than myself will use the feature, but I wanted to get it right and then move on. #
Software internally is mostly pipes connected to other pipes, each adding a specific quality to whatever passes through it. If you have nice standards for what you send through the pipes, you can do more of what you imagine. This is called orthogonality. Factoring is when you notice a repeating pattern, give it a name, and a set of things you can do to it, those would be names of pipes. I have to ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this, but I am also asking my human friends. BTW I expect this seems so natural because our minds probably work that way too, internally, below our conscious awareness. #Bullshit. Lisa Murkowski goes on a press tour and sounds like she could be the one that breaks away from Trump in the Republican Senate. As with all of them, always, it was an act. She has a role to play, she's The Agonizer. They are amazing in terms of how organized and orchestrated their campaign is. #
- This is the address of my linkblog feed: dave.linkblog.org. #
- I think it's kind of interesting to have the top page of a site be a feed. I don't hide the XML-ness of it. I never supported the obfuscation, it's confusing, makes people not trust RSS, imho. #
- I think the feed is pretty stable now, so if you want to subscribe, go ahead. I haven't redirected from the old feed yet, probably should do that soon, since it more or less has stopped updating. #
- This is all managed in WordLand and therefore is part of the WordPress ecosystem. #
- I felt it was time to do a definitive linkblog, since as far as I could tell no one has tried to explain what it is: basically, a feed where the <link> element of each <item> points to some other site. That's the basic difference. #
- Also a linkblog feed should specify the channel-level <image> element, which is used as the avatar for the feed when it appears in a twitter-like timeline.#
- I think the only other product that is open to feeds being part of the open social web is Surf from Mike McCue's company, Flipboard. I asked ChatGPT to brief me on how it works with feeds, and saw that we're more or less doing the same thing, except I'm not trying to work with the output from Twitter, Bluesky, etc. Even when they have outbound RSS feeds they aren't good enough to be part of the social web defined by feeds.#
- I only want really good feeds. It's time to stop being so careless about what we transmit to the world. If we want an open web we're all going to have to be good gardeners. It's like a food system where all the food is grown by family farmers and I'm running a restaurant, and only want the good stuff, and we want it to look good too! :-)#
- PS: Another thing, the feed items must have working guids. All software that runs on feeds should be able to depend on this. #
- PPS: Linkblogs aren't the only kinds of feeds that will be used in this RSS-based feediverse. Scripting News will work with it. You would be able to read this post in this new medium (not yet delivered, btw).#
- PPPS: More here and here.#
If the Dems were competitive they would run ads now with Senator Tillis talking about the damage the new Repub bill will do to Americans, emphasizing this is a Republican speaking, taking one for the country. #
Another criticism of the Bluesky API. They make each developer do the support for Open Graph metadata, when it would be much more efficient for them to support it on their end. I would be happy to give them the code. It's not that complicated. But translating the OG format, which for crying out loud is a huge standard, into their arcane format which is only supported by Bluesky, is going in the wrong direction, and frankly is ridiculously arrogant. Show a little humility. Facebook is huge, and the format isn't just used by Facebook, everyone uses it. #
When I was having trouble getting into my AWS account last week, I ordered a Yubikey, which everyone says is the best way to go. I thought I'd set it up first thing Monday morning (ie now) but it turns out it's a major undertaking? Why does this have to be so hard? I guess I'll find out, but not today. I want to make some progress on my development project first. Maybe later. #
- Advice from a longtime developer. #
- If you think "I should do a backup," do it. Now, don't wait. #
- Make it really easy to do a backup. Choose a menu item that's always available when you're working.#
- The reason is karma. God hears all your thoughts. When that thought pops into your head and you don't do a backup, or don't do it soon enough, He crashes your data, and you think "I should have done a backup when I thought of doing it." Even this doesn't please Him. At that moment it's even more urgent that you do a backup. #
- My hippie uncle taught me this. God has a terrible sense of humor, and thinks it's really funny when you have a good thought and ignore it. When something didn't work he would say that's God goofing on me. #
- In this case, we're talking about is the Programmer God. There are all kinds of gods, a baseball god, a basketball god, and very specifically a Knicks god. That god has the absolutely worst sense of humor of them all and by worst I mean best. #
- Benjamin Wittes: "It’s remarkable how many non-New Yorkers seem to care who the mayor of New York City is." #
- They do and they're right to, the same way we were concerned how the Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles would react to the invasion of the Marines and hijacking of the National Guard. #
- Right now the NYC mayor is a hostage of the US govt. Not in a position to help. An inexperienced first term NY mayor, have we seen that before? How does the NYPD respond to that? #
- Then there was the snowstorm that derailed John V Lindsay, a heroic and transformative mayor. NY is a tough place to govern even when the US government isn't aiming to regime change the place.#
- Local government is our last line of defense. #
- "Think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine."#
- You all fell in love with a candidate, I do it too. #
- But think about the context the next mayor will govern in.#
- The thing about NY that people might not understand is that the politics are dirty and fucked up. Dems tend to elect handsome young heros who when they have to deal with NYPD and the sanitation workers, the teachers union, and the federal government, also the ancient infrastructure, melt.#
- Now that we know the outcome of the 2024 election, not just in numbers but in what it's doing to our beloved country and the rest of the world, it's interesting to revisit the campaign that journalism ran last year to force President Biden to step aside. That's one of the functions of Facebook, they play back your posts from years ago, so you can see how things changed, or didn't. #
- Anyway, last year on this day I wrote this on Facebook: "Why don't journalists cover the Biden base? Do they even consider the possibility that there is one? Or do they think they are the base? I thought they weren't supposed to care who the nominees are? Why do they feel entitled to say one candidate should withdraw but not the other? Have any of them even thought this through?"#
- Nick Arnett, a former tech journalist, said in a comment: "Until I read this, the madness of the Times calling on Biden, but not Trump, to withdraw didn't dawn on me." #
- I had followed his metamorphosis over years from a journalist to a worker who goes where there are fires or other natural disasters, for the government, to support the effort to save people's homes and lives. I watched him via Facebook, in awe, as he went around the country,
not being paid very much I imagine, butdoing good. # - I learned something important when my father was in the hospital many years ago, in a coma, after losing a lot of blood and being unconscious for hours before he was found. He was in a ward in Flushing Hospital, along with a lot of other comatose people. All were unconscious, unable to feed themselves. Hard to know if they had any awareness. From an outside perspective they, and my father included, were lost. Some had been there for years, probably weren't ever going to come out of it. We were lucky, my father survived, after a month, and had seven more years to live. #
- I visited him every day, and got to know the flow of the hospital. Workers came in and out of the room to attend to these comatose people. Imagine the kind of support they needed just to keep their bodies functioning and not wasting away for lack of movement. I thought these people must have the worst jobs imaginable, imagining myself in their shoes.#
- I got to know them, asked about what else they do, how they got here, where they live, etc. Somehow I got up the courage to ask one of them if they liked their job, imagining I'd get a New Yorker comment like "You know, it's a living." But what I heard was a complete surprise. "It's the best job in the world," he said, because I can see so clearly how my work helps real people. He was looking right at me. It hit me, this man is doing what I can't do, what my father's parents, who were long gone, couldn't do. Caring. Caring for my dad. Then I got it. #
- Back to Nick, who was and still is, and probably always will be doing things to help other people, no matter what he does. #
- He was canned in one of the DOGE purges this spring. #
- Now you tell me whether the "Trump base" deserved a chance you wouldn't let us have with Biden? Why journalism felt entitled to make this decision for all of us? When are you going to get the idea that you're supposed to help us. Do the right thing. I get so angry at journalism for getting in the way. Once informed of the facts, it was their job to get out of the way and let us, the voters, make the decision. #
- PS: In the very next post on FB, I wrote an HTML hack that makes the same point, more concisely. #
We live in interesting times. Never a dull moment! The latest David Frum podcast is about crazy tech billionaires. Once again he talks about who he's willing to listen to. He's really smart, thinks about things, and speaks brilliantly, but cultivates his ignorance and seems somewhat proud of it. In contrast, I listened to Jon Stewart's weekly podcast yesterday and it was as usual outstanding. Like Frum he thinks and speaks brilliantly, with the addition of being hilarious at times. In this episode he talks to an Iranian friend, a new perspective we don't hear often, but fits in with what I had understood about Iran. It's a highly educated country, a good standard of living and are mired with a repressive government and no options for regime change. When you hear that talked about on other podcasts and cable news shows, remember -- it's impossible to change regimes unless the country has prepared for that. There is no regime-in-waiting in Iran, hasn't been one since the 1979 revolution. This is the next danger in the US. Will there be anything remaining of our political system? It's almost all gone now. Funny to listen to the people on TV about surviving the next 3.5 years -- what do they think will happen then? Nothing will happen, that's the most likely thing. Back to Frum, what a shame there's such a smart guy, so cloistered, and boastful about it. That's not a good way to proceed now imho. #
Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho, and probably very funny, and respectful.#
I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook. #
I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited. #
Fixed the images that broke on morningcoffeenotes.com, a site that dates back to 2003, when it transitioned to https in 2024. #
With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.#
- You hear the term Open Social Web used in places where things that are social are neither open or web. They aren't that far, and here today I'm going to give you a fast and easy recipe for linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness open social web#
- Add inbound RSS feeds. The social site allows a user to specify an RSS feed that represents their posts. When a new one shows up, it appears in the timelines of people who are following the user. They can add items to that feed however they like. It can come from anywhere. That's 1/2 of "open."#
- Add outbound RSS feeds. This gives you the other half. When a new item shows up in a users feed, however it got there, it appears in their outbound feed, which can be tied into the input feed of one or more other sites. #
- Support links in users' posts. You really can't claim to be part of the web if you don't implement this core feature of the web. #
- That's all there is, except this: The feeds have to be good. Don't be cheap with the information they contain. Work with other developers to make sure all the information they need that you have is present in the outbound feeds you generate. Same with the inbound feeds, be reasonable, if you can accept certain information and match it up with your service, then you should do it. Think of the users first. #
- You could try to use ActivityPub or AT Proto to play the role of RSS. I think you'll find that's more work, and not that many people have mastered these formats. RSS is simple and lightweight and has had 20+ years of burn in. Lots of familiarity, lots of working code. #
- It's time to stop claiming you are the open social web when it's so easy to be the open and on the web. #
I have a Google Alerts query for my own name, just to see if any journalism outlets mention me. When it happens, it's often to give me credit for co-creating an app called iPodder, which they say was where podcasting started. None of that is true. But that's what journalism says about me.#- On the other hand if you ask ChatGPT what role I played in developing podcasting it gives a more accurate answer. #
- So tell me what the role of journalism is. Hallucinating myths into fact? That would be my estimate.#
- Here's the ChatGPT result. I actually did a bit more than that, but what they say is closer to the truth and gives an idea of how things like podcasting come into existence. A lot of work and struggle against people's disbelief, and most of the time it doesn't work -- podcasting is one of the successes.#
- BTW, the second item in ChatGPT's list is not true. Adam's Daily Source Code came after my own podcast Morning Coffee Notes. I was urging him to do a podast but he didn't get one going until after I went first, proving the old adage "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." So somewhere along the line it got confused and it hallucinated just like the journalists. The actual first podcast was a Grateful Dead song in 2001 which I used to test Radio UserLand which was the first software to implement podcasting. There's a documentary coming out soon and I believe they have a bit about that, so maybe that'll get on the record. #
- If this is how history is written btw, I wouldn't trust anything in the history books. ;-) #
Glossary: Tiny Little Textbox. (An idea I might try, coupled with Daytona, I should be able to build a glossary of terms I want in my official vocabulary. Ideas that have stood the test of time, that mean something now, but eventually will be set aside and no one will know what a TLTB was.)#
I'm working my way through The Bear, and it's great because you remember that you love all these characters and you can immediately start living the ongoing drama of their lives. I feel like a cat perched on a window watching everyone doing their daily stuff. Looking forward to going back to the beginning and starting over. #
BTW, I think the right way to read Scripting News is getting the nightly email. That's the pulse. I jot stuff down during the day, mostly in the morning, and later add links and finish stuff up. The scripting.com feed is updated in realtime. So you may get many versions of an item over the day, which might be a problem with feed readers that don't watch for changes. I noticed that my changes to a recent podcast shownotes page don't flow back out to my podcast client app on Android. FeedLand btw, records changes, and they flow through to the timeline. Coupled with rssCloud, which is supported in every WordPress site, makes the whole thing realtime. People assume that feeds have to perform like a feed reader. But if you have a component running on the open internet, hooked up via websockets to the client, you get the flow they get in twitter-like systems. And we didn't have to invent anything that didn't already exist in 2009. #
Masked secret police is pure terrorism. We should ask NYPD what we have to do to protect ourselves from them, and then do it. #
I, like a lot of other people, assumed that Americans would be terrible at authoritarianism. Shows we have a lot to learn. Americans are pretty good at it it turns out.#
Krugman doesn’t understand what’s coming for NYC. And doesn’t understand the leadership Cuomo uniquely provided at the height of Covid. It’s pretty likely what’s starting in NYC will be worse than Covid or 9-11. Funny thing is Krugman did get it, a few weeks ago when the crisis in Los Angeles was peaking. He wrote a piece that was terrified, and realistic. The National Guard had been nationalized. Marines were invading California. But now that Calif hasn't been in the news, it's easy to swing back. I bet if the election had happened during the worst of it, Cuomo would've won. #
Bernie Sanders asks what the Democrats should learn from Mr. Z's victory in the NYC primary this week. Here's what I say. Forget about ever rising from the ashes of what remains of the party. Right now, the issue is how to defend the city from the coming war with the US government. They're already holding the current mayor hostage. This will be worse than 9-11 and Covid. We have no leadership. We're totally fucked, what the Democratic Party does or doesn't do, at this point, simply doesn't matter.#A preview of how a WordLand linkblog works, which is of course a WordPress site, viewed in my blogroll. When I clicked on the link, I was surprised that it goes to Poynter, and not to the linkblog. But then I remembered that's the point of a linkblog. And it flows through to the feed, and the blogroll software understands. So now I have an end-to-end linkblog. #
Another reason to love WordPress. Every freaking WordPress site had great RSS support. They did more to keep feeds alive than anyone else. Google tried to kill RSS in a particularly humiliating way. WordPress kept it going. #
A NYT article from last year about 34th Ave in Jackson Heights where "a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020." Before we moved to Flushing when I was in 5th grade, we lived on 92nd St and 34th Ave. What a difference that must make. I love it when cities take chances like this, and the people in the neighborhood seem to love it. #
- I tried an experiment, go back as far as I can in archive.org on scripting.com and see where it gets me. The first try got me to a classified ads site I was experimenting with in mid-November 1996. A few weeks later, on December 3, there was a colorful directory that took you to all the sub-sites on the server, DaveNet, Frontier, Classified ads, our Midas Website (Macintosh Internet Developers Association), DocServer, a BBS, and Guestbook. #
- I went digging around in the Frontier part. Lots of stuff there. By then we had been working on Frontier for eight years. It had been reborn once, from a Mac-focused single-user scripting environment to a networked one, all because the web had exploded and Apple didn't want us making system software for their platform. 😄 #
- BTW, some of this stuff is still here. #
- There are lots of paths to try out.#
- This was where my blog home page was then. #
- Then to DaveNet, and in the left margin Nerd's guide to this website. #
- I love the screen shots that show what a good match the Frontier object database was to the way a website is organized. #
Jeremy Herve is a developer at Automattic. Here's what he said about yesterday's podcast. He liked the idea of WordPress as the OS of the open social web. Glad that resonated. It has so much more than the other possible platforms. The others couldn't even realistically claim to be part of the web. They don't support writers very well. We're going to build slowly and deliberately around this idea, always staying open for competitors, because that's the most important thing about the web, beyond its simplicity, it never locks its users in. That's a deal-stopper. As I've learned how WordPress works internally, I immediately saw that they embraced the concepts of the web not just as words, but in their practice. I never hit a wall that kept me out of doing something they already did. And they also appear to never break users and developers. That's one of the basic rules of the web, it's an unchanging thing, no one can break it because everyone is a guest. Anyway, there is only one web. Keep that in mind. Nothing exclusive about it. #Dan Knauss, one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada, wrote a post on their blog using WordLand. Here's a screen shot of what that post looked like when he was editing it. That's all you need to see to understand the role that WordLand plays. It's a pretty self-describing product. #
A great scene from The West Wing. Use your imagination, something similar is probably happening right now.#