BTW, I've started using Mastodon in place of GitHub for comments on posts like the one below. GitHub has a better model for text with comments, supports full Markdown the way it was meant to work. I have an instance of Masto that I can use that supports Markdown but they do an unacceptable rendering of links. Example post. I want a simple, widely accepted easy place to comment, on the social web, not Discourse or GitHub, that isn't controlled by one vendor (so ActivityPub for now is probably the best approach) and supports plain old Markdown without any weird embellishments. I don't work in the Mastodon world, I'm already committed to the projects I'm doing. But we could really use something nice, designed to plug into blogs. This is a good use-case, and it's pretty close. #One advantage of using GitHub for questions tied into a blog is that you get a great archive of all the questions you asked and how people answered or contributed, going back to 2016.#
I wrote rules for standards-makers and it caught on, and has been used by a few open source projects. I hope that the new rules for journalism, which is just getting started, will be similarly influential. If existing journalism is going to start working again, they're going to have to have some rules. Comments welcome on Mastodon.#
August 15, 2004: My audio blog post from NYC, from my Podcast0 feed. Had just listened to an Adam Curry podcast and one from the Gillmor Gang. Played a bit of music, described how a podcatcher would work, pretty close to the way they work today. Shortly after the feature would be in Radio UserLand. It was the only episode I did in August 2004. The next one is on September 1 and there are a total of nine shows in September, including the first Trade Secrets which is a podcast Adam and I did together. Here's the archive for this blog in August 2004.#
I am addicted to buying domains. Latest example. Ideally it would be a news site with all the latest videos from the Land of Kamala aka the United States of America. #The best journalism is coming from the candidate. I think you could make a pretty good hour-length show on MSNBC with 12 of their posts, five minutes each, one after the other, with a small panel of pundits quickly snarking about what they just saw. Go have a look at the feed and see if you agree. The best thing about it is that the writing is totally blogger-style. #
So what are we doing on Threads and why does Facebook (aka Meta) want to get the best minds of Twitter using their software. I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the user agreement, but that said, I bet it has something to do with building out their AI model so they can compete with OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.#
In today's installment of the Adventures of Wordle Kitty, the world's cutest and most adorable kitten was sentenced to life at Attica. #
- Podcast: 11 minutes.#
- I see happy talk all over the place that Twitter is done, Musk is killing it, blah blah blah. #
- It's bullshit. In the next few months Twitter is going to morph into the political system that Barack Obama could have and should have built.#
- It turns out creating a president of the United States is worth a lot of money. Trump is inept at squeezing the money out of it, he's a loudmouth who proved one thing, Twitter is all you needed in 2016 to get elected president. That's going to change, as competition shows up (Zuckerberg, for example, with Threads). #
- They know, even if you don't -- that it can be very profitable to own the presidency. #
- If Trump loses, Musk won't get it on this round, but eventually he will own a big piece of the president, and then he will move his deals with SpaceX and Tesla up a notch.#
- Listen to the podcast, it's only 11 minutes. You probably haven't considered this angle, but I promise you he's moving, and he's mostly unopposed right now. He's not the nudnick so many people seem to think he is. #
I asked ChatGPT to put the Statue of Liberty on a $100 bill.#
If you don't buy the new rules for journalism because the liars will tell lies about you, the journalist -- well, you get that either way, no matter what you do, so I don't see the problem. And if you want people to trust you, you've got to tell the truth. Your reputation gets destroyed by their lies if you pass them through. Doctors can tell you to stop smoking to save your life and the tobacco companies will accuse them of lying or whatever and some people (such as myself, earlier in life) will continue to smoke. You still have to do what's right if you want people to trust you. #- I am so impressed with how well the new Democratic Party is running this campaign. Latest innovation, they're going to do at least one public rally during the convention, so everyone can be part of the celebration, and I plan to watch every minute of it. What I don't want to witness is what the journalists try to provoke. I've been to two DNCs and later heard what they were talking about on CNN, and my god they invented crises that simply didn't exist. Who's going to have time to call them out because no one at the convention is watching TV. #
- I heard on a podcast yesterday that it's weird that Harris is polling as well as the generic Democrat, which they felt was odd because she's not a white man, which made me think that in 2024, she is the face of the Democratic Party. Obama and Hillary Clinton knocked down those barriers, and now it would feel strange if the candidate at the top of the ticket were not interracial and female.#
- I'm proud that my country has nominated such an attractive group of talented people with such fierce competence and humility. For these moments I wish I had a new graphic to put in the margin to symbolize the United States. We're strong, and we win, and when we don't we get back up and fight. Uncle Sam is a great symbol. But we've yet to create the interracial and female version that symbol. #
- One more thing, there are a lot of white male voters to be courted and welcomed back into the fold. Trump has had the advantage there, but it doesn't have to be that way. A hand reached out in brotherhood could turn this election into the kind of landslide we need to cleanse our political system its flirtation with fascism. #
I ordered a Pixel Pro 9 today for delivery in September. Look forward to seeing what makes it so AI.#
I started a this.how page for the new rules for journalism. Common-sense rules for reporters that they violate regularly, so now it's time to write them down. #
The new rule for journalists is sweeping Threads and Mastodon. People have power we don’t use but could. We could turn off the interview after the first egregious lie, even if the reporters don't. #
Just got a message from Slack that should serve as a warning to people who use other free services, expecting their archive to be maintained over time. It was too good to be true before. Now you need to ask vendors if that's true on their system.#
- The new rule for journalists on Threads is big. #
- How big is it? #
- So big I got my first Fediverse reply, ever. #
- I had another morning of driving around so I listened to a bunch of podcasts about how the campaign is going, all good news for Democrats which of course makes me happy. The last podcast I listened to was Ezra Klein's interview with Nate Silver. I only listened to the first 20 minutes because I ran out of time. I may pick it up later on my afternoon walk (it's a gorgeous day in the mountains). #
They talked about their bond as old school bloggers. I didn't know either of them when they were starting out, which is kind of sad -- most of the bloggers I heard from in that period were mad at me the way they are mad at Elon Musk now. Both Silver and Klein campaigned for Biden to step aside, which I felt it was inappropriate -- for Silver who was/is a trusted polling analyst, and Klein who is a columnist for the NYT. I had already listened to Klein's interview with Nancy Pelosi. But I really don't like that both of them crossed a line I felt they had no business crossing, becoming an advocate rather than a journalist. I can't thikn about either of them without thinking about that. But I listened anyway, because I'm interested in both, and esp the combination. #- The discussion was interesting and even agreeable until Klein asked Silver about his relationship with Peter Thiel. I had read that Silver was connected to Thiel in some way. Before they moved on neither commented on Thiel's funding of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that destroyed Gawker. I don't know how they can both, for their careers, which depend on free speech, still have a kind word for Thiel. I never liked Gawker, they made fun of me, and others, in horrific ways, that weren't even based on facts, the kind of bullshit pre-teens make up about people when they can't think of anything else to say. Even though they hurt me, embarrassed me, aroused my hate, even if I had the kind of money Thiel has, I never in a million years would use that money to destroy them. #
- Thiel's wealth is a weapon aimed at all our freedom. This is something imho that has to at least be mentioned when a journalist talks about Thiel, and neither of them did. I guess they feel safe from Thiel's attacks, perhaps because they have adjusted their writing so as to never risk offending him, which totally undermines their integrity, if so. A good way to prove that's not true would be to never mention him without saying his behavior the Hulk Hogan vs Gawker was reprehensible. #
- I still listened, even though they provoked my ire in a very fundamental way. I'd be interested in hearing from them, as a fellow old school blogger, if they justify Thiel's funding of the Hogan lawsuit and if so, how. But I expect that both of them consider themselves in an elite class and wouldn't deign to explain themselves, or the truth is something they don't want disclosed. Either way, to be blogger-blunt, they both suck. #
- Update: I listened to more of the interview. I think these guys need to get out more. The reason Harris is having such a strong response is that we the voters are desperate to not have another term for Trump. We understand the stakes in the election. You always try to reduce it to numbers, when the facts are available at a more human level. The reason we love Kamala is born of desperation. Stop talking to each other, you already know why we care, because underneath it all you care because you're human and you come from America too. And btw about VCs, I know a lot about them, I'm assuming at some point Klein will leave the NYT to make millions with Thiel, and I imagine Silver is already doing that, but you both have the disease. You assume great money makes people interesting. It can make them dangerous. #
A new rule for journalists. End the interview on the first egregious lie. Turn the lights out, switch off the recorder, get up and leave. And your report should state clearly that this is why the interview was terminated. It never should have been tolerated in the first place. #
I listened to a bunch of podcasts this morning about how freaked out Trump is. If a president freaks out over something like this, how would he handle a Cuban Missile Crisis? Remember the phone call at 3AM? We saw what he did with COVID, he froze, like he's freezing now. #
When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day.#
When Google tells you it's easy to convert a site to HTTPS they're wrong. It's an insurmountable job for scripting.com. 30 years of writing is on that domain, lots of different runtimes on lots of different domains which would also have to be converted. Images in all the pages. All that breaks when you flip the switch. I can't walk away from a big part of my life's work. Sorry, not for Google. Every time someone assumes I'm to blame for this situation, that's how Google has tricked you. I followed the rules. They broke them. #
Speaking of which, I must've converted DocServer some time ago and didn't test it well enough. It didn't even load. Oy. It works now. #
Idea for a neat product from Automattic or really anyone: Configure WordPress for writing a book, hook it up to an AI service that can always turn that site into prose, reorganized into chapters, however you'd like, on demand, in an instant. You could use an outliner to arrange the table of contents and it could automatically generate a back of the book index. Technologically I think today's AI is ready to do this, just needs to be packaged. Charge a fair price for the service, esp at the beginning it would totally be worth it. Who knows where it would lead. I bet a lot of writers would use it, I certainly would. #
I carry two phones, an iPhone 13 Pro and a Pixel 6 Pro. The latter is my main phone, and I prefer it to the Apple phone, not sure why, it's what I use for most things. I need the iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Lately there's been some trouble with the screen on the Pixel 6, on certain gestures, the right edge lights up in bright green and then immediately returns to normal. I'm thinking the display may be about to fail? It might be time for a new phone. So I went to the Pixel site to see what they have that's new and found that they're announcing a new phone, the Pixel 9, on Tuesday. So I immediately, of course, dropped the idea of buying an upgrade today, why not wait till the new version is out. I looked over the teaser, guessing that AI figures big in this release. Not sure how I feel about that because the last thing I want to do is switch over to Google's AI from my beloved ChatGPT. Kind of the same thing I see happening with Threads re Twitter. #A lot of people are thinking that Threads is the new "nice" version of The Original Twitter, but folks, that's pure bullshit -- remember who owns Threads and ask yourself if you want that dude to be in charge of our political organizing network. We need something better. #
From now on, until further notice, when I feel like watching some mind-numbing "news" program, I'm going to have a look at the Kamala Harris channel on YouTube. I don't mind doing hard work, I just don't want to hear what the NYT-centered media has to say because it's all bullshit. If I have to listen to nonstop bullshit, I'd rather hear from people who tell me we can have a bright future, than the usual NYT-spawned bullshit. It's just bullshit. I'm tired of bullshit. That's all I have to say about bullshit for now at least. Have a nice day.#At some point ChatGPT will imho be programmed to compile C apps to JavaScript, for example, even large ones with bugs. #
Lakoff talks about the Nurturing Mother and the Strict Father as models for Democrats and Republicans respectively, and how the Dems never got this, and never campaigned accordingly. Now they're doing it. Owning the nuturing mother mode, but also the Protective Father, tough and angry when necessary, but a fun dad, a sweetheart. Biden was that, but we caught him too late in life for that to really flourish, hence the low approval ratings. #- I think we can afford now to ignore the NY Times et al. We don't just want freedom, we are free, now. That's what we're feeling. Now we're an army and we're ready to march. We're ready to fight and our weapons are our feet, our voices and our votes. This is why it's working. #
- At first I didn't like White Dudes for Harris but now I get it. I saw a guy who'd normally I'd think of as a MAGA, in the crowd behind Kamala yesterday while she spoke, I thought yeah us old white dudes need permission to have sweet hearts. It's time for us to be happy too. Why the f not.#
- 7-minute podcast.#
- PS: Bush had the highest approval in history after 9/11. 90%.#
- PPS: In case it's not obvious, there are some old white dudes who overwhelmingly support Trump who might respond to the Protective Father position. #
I'm really excited about maybe finally getting my archive of Scripting News and DaveNet stuff, dating back to 1994, into ChatGPT before too long. Some people will be surprised to find that they're in the archive. If this works it'll be like the index in the back of a large book. I know I've tried this before, but this time I think I'll be able to do it myself and fuss over it and learn from it the way I do software development. Converting a very large work of writing into a reference, I hope. #Lawrence is the new Rachel.#
What we call journalism in the US isn’t.#
Any news org with cash to invest could do to the NYT what ChatGPT is doing to Google. #
- 4-minute podcast about my first venture into ChatGPT via its API. #
- There's an accompanying GitHub repo, with an example app in JavaScript that runs in the browser.#
- Includes instructions for setting up and funding a developer account, which was the biggest hurdle. #
- Functionality: It tells you who Bull Mancuso is. #
- Much excitement as I think about integrations I can now do. #
- Don't know why I waited so long. 😄#
It's wrong that posts from Timothy Snyder, Joe Trippi and NYT Pitchbot are only available on Twitter. I'd like to help their posts reach a wider audience. I posted a note about this on micro.blog with a place to comment. #
Another practical use for ChatGPT. A super techy service you use decides to require 2FA but reading their instructions you realize the docs were written by someone who hates people like you. Idea! Ask ChatGPT to translate. Out come nice instructions easy to read for people like me. Turns a dismal exercise in frustration to happiness at finding another huge stress- and time-saving application for ChatGPT.#
- My version of the NY Times has campaign news too, featuring the cutest kitty on the trail, headed to North Carolina today to support the cute and adorable running mates, Kamala and Tim!#
Timothy Snyder: "If JD Vance really were a normal midwestern guy he’d be very respectful of someone like Tim Walz."#
When I see a reference to an evil NYT piece, I RT it with a simple message: Ignore the NY Times. It's relaxing. You don't have to do something about it, in fact it says the opposite. Do nothing. It works on all social nets, and for any news org that's promoting lies, ignoring relevant facts, against the interest of the US. Find new ways to get informed. And if you can't find them, start one. And we can find each other. #The Bruce Springsteen mention at last night's rally was no accident. Boomers are now of the age where we vote in great numbers. So our feeling like there's something here for us might make the difference in one or more of the swing states.#
Last night's Democratic rally was wonderful. I was laughing and sobbing all the way through it. What an emotional release. We needed and deserved this. Beyond hope, we're finally going to fight. I hope President Kamala is really up to it, because we have a pretty substantial cleanup job to do here. #
- I have great respect for Hillary Clinton and supported her over Sanders in 2016. I also supported Biden because we needed to win in 2020.#
- But we could have had a campaign team like the one we saw yesterday and today, with some very impressive presenters who've yet to take the stage, we could have had it in 2016. We didn't have to go through the tragedy of Trump.#
- The Democrats are stage managing perfectly now. I never really thought we'd see this day, but here it is.#
Walz is Harris' choice. Picking Shapiro would have been leading with her chin because of Netanyahu. Walz looks older than her but they're actually the same age. And he figured out the right word to get under Trump's skin, so there's that. He just has to say weird in campaign speeches to bring down the house.#
- A roadmap for the campaign is coming into view.#
- Harris has her knee on Trump's neck, and she won't let up. #
- There won't be time for anyone to get tired of her. #
- Their rallies are going to be the best in a very long time. They're executing perfectly. #
- Trump is a comedian, a cross between Don Rickles and Joan Rivers with a bit of Sam Kinison. He had a good schtick for a long run if you find fascist slapstick entertaining, as millions of Americans do or did. #
- Last night Maddow tried to get us excited about how the Repubs have planted people on voting boards in swing states with the purpose of stopping the counts, and thus preventing a vote in the Electoral College. But they're doing it too late. The administrators will feel the tide turning too. #
- This campaign will take place in the popular culture of 2024, which thankfully is not centered on cable news or the NYT. But Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are in control. In my 2017 piece I thought Zuck would run for president, given his new style makeover I wouldn't discount that, but these two will certainly have influence over how the election goes. Both Facebook and Twitter have algorithms that are opaque and controlled by them. Same deal as with the owners of cable media. #
- Trump stoked resentment with voters for being left behind, even if individually they were doing fine. But that was eight years ago and a lot has happened. Harris saying basically "there you go again" is an echo of Reagan, btw. It worked for Reagan, you just have to get the derision right. And Harris can do that, she laughs and we laugh. Trump loses his mind.#
- The Harris candidacy happened almost as if it was staged. The campaign hit the ground running, it feels like there was a lot of advance work. Or they picked bloggers who were up and running, gave them the keys and said go. Either approach is fine, breaking through where previous Demo campaigns didn't have the nerve. Whatever it is, there's a sign of competence and urgency in the Democrats that is grounded in the challenge not in some almost religious sense that she's The One, which was understandable with Obama, but won't do now. We have no illusions about what's ahead. I think for that Biden must have been a great teacher. #
- Now we're grounded. We've seen the outline of our future. Our eyes were fully opened on Jan 6. A few weeks ago the lead Republican thinker behind Project 2025 said, like an idiot, in an interview, it was up to liberals to avoid a bloodbath, as they took over. You don't hear that anymore. Those people must now be thinking more seriously about jail for what they're doing. And the Supreme Court will go to jail too if they try to support what Maddow was talking about. We must not let them overthrow the government. And that's why Maddow's concern is okay but overstated, imho.#
- I had my doubts whether Biden would stop the dissolution of the Supreme Court, and I don't know if Harris will, but given how purposefully the campaign in running, I suspect (hope, pray) she will. Our job is to give her the support she needs to feel that we've got her back. #
- PS: FDR threatened to pack the court in 1937. #
- PPS: If you haven't listened to Sunday's podcast, please do. It's just 12 minutes. #
When reporting massacres, imho we should cite the number of people who were shot. It measures of how much violence there was, and how excessive the gun tech used. Many who were injured but not killed have their lives ruined. Their suffering can go for decades.#
If you want to keep up on political news, esp at a time when so much is happening so quickly, the best resource I have at this time is the politics tab on news.scripting.com. Here's a screen shot. #
- I asked ChatGPT to illustrate this idea: "JD Vance is a punchline."#
- We're depending on big companies that are nuzzling up with Trump, at best hedging their bets, to let us use their networks to organize ourselves politically. That's never worked for us, in fact it's worked against us. Trump's election in 2016, for example, could he have done it without Twitter letting him go direct to organize? #
- The Harris organization is doing great, they have to take on the journalists, where previous Democrats had no answer, they've done it in a clever way, by using their channels to talk about the things journalism should be talking about. People listen to their competition, and that's what this is. #
- It's not hard to do this, a few of us, who are good listeners and writers, to build lists of sources and provide them for people to access away from the nonstop (often entertaining) bullshit of the social web of 2024.#
- I've asked for ideas for podcasts that would go into a list of shows people who are voting Democratic would find interesting or useful. Not for spreading religion, but based on facts, not the unhinged lunacy and revenge of Trump. Our news now is too polluted by that. He shouldn't be able to lie about Harris's race, and have that be an issue carried by journalism, for example. That should not be possible but it happens. #
- Podcast: 12 minutes. #
- PS: Here's a computer-generated transcript.#
- Every time I solve a Wordle puzzle, I'm allowed to switch over to ChatGPT and narrate a new scene for the Wordle Kitty. Here's today's installment.#
- The cute and adorable Wordle Kitty, Democratic VP candidate, got tired of waiting for the Republican, so she took a few of the reporters with her back to the presidential suite at the Plaza Hotel on 5th Ave and had a drunken night of debauchery with the reporters and totally trashed the place. The next morning the story appeared in The NY Times. Headline read “Adorable kitten trashes suite."#
For some reason I don't like writing user-level docs for my own software, but I don't mind narrating a draft with voice. Now that I have a voice recorder that creates transcripts exactly where I need them, I can feed the narration to ChatGPT and ask it to write docs based on features I describe that are part of the current software, and leave out notes about possible changes or additions. It took me 13 minutes to do the narration, because I talk more slowly than it writes, and I ramble and get distracted. It took the bot less than a second to produce a near-perfect outline. It left out a bit that I wanted included, it was added in a second. Then I asked for an OPML version of the docs so I could edit it, and pass back the edited version. It got a bit confused and gave me a JSON version of the outline, and Node.js code to convert it to the XML, but when I pointed out a simpler way to do it, I got what I needed in less than a second. And here it is, in my outliner, ready for me to add notes, and edit and reorganize. ChatGPT is a team member, not a surrogate. Another amazing experience, absolutely no going back. #Saw a video where Elon Musk talks about climate change, no snark, didn't call it a hoax, was intelligent and serious. Also heard that he's backing Trump for president, who says it's a hoax and one of his major campaign promises is to "drill baby drill." Maybe they could discuss this because there seems to be a disagreement here.#
- Wordle Kitty is rumored to be the VP choice for the Dems. She is at the Carnegie Deli in NYC to meet the Republican VP candidate, to talk about a debate, but the Repub is a no-show! Weird. Meanwhile the press is having fun asking her embarrassing questions about a cat in the White House. They want to know if the WH has a litter box. What if she gets pregnant? Stuff like that.#
Blogrolls, in the 90s, were the beginning of the social web. In the 20s, they can bring today’s social web into blogs.#
I was trying to find Tony Kahn on the web for a friend doing a documentary on the origins of podcasting, and came up empty. I just stumbled across him on Facebook and that led to this autobiographical site where he tells his story of podcasting. Tony was the person who brought NPR into podcasting in 2004. A major contributor who isn't often credited. He was at WGBH at the time. #
There isn't a whole lot of love in this 39-year-old man. I worry for his kids, esp if either of them don't have kids.#
Where is the AI-based meme maker for Kamala. I'd like to have her flying in the sky with a cape, like SuperPresidentLady, going from town to town, finding out what they need, and churning it out for them in an efficiently run government meme factory in the nation's capital. Like we were doing with the kittens earlier this summer. #
People who get a sense of self-esteem from having procreated place a heavy burden on their children. What if the child doesn't live up to their expectations? Creating a new human is not an accomplishment. Treating that new life as a full person starting at birth, and through their whole life, that's an accomplishment. For a man to father a child just means they have a functioning reproductive system. It's not anything to be proud or to expect to be rewarded or respected for.#Heather Cox Richardson: "When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. He passed it to us."#
A note to anyone making a twitter-like system. If you supported outbound RSS, I could use your system as a note-taking tool. I know Bluesky does, and I should use it that way, but these days I'm more drawn to Threads, even though I know it's really Facebook under the covers. #
- Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States. #
- In the context of who we are as a country, and what the Repubs do and say about the country, "weird" is pretty mild. What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist columnist of the NYT, writing that column. (Safire was a Republican btw.)#
- And to the Democrats, no matter what the NYT says, keep using the term. This is where you get to speak out about what they're doing over there, and how it's not journalism. One of the rare things we agree with Trump on. #
- Podcast: 3 minutes.#
- PS: Safire went to Bronx Science! I did not know that. (So did I.) I love the idea of writers who aren't scared of tech stuff. #
- PPS: Even Richard Nixon would think today's so-called Republicans were weird. #
I said on Thursday that Biden's speech last Wednesday had the potential to be a Gettysburg address, if it the United States turns back toward democracy and government of the people, by the people and for the people. Biden has the potential of being as great a president as Lincoln. Let that settle in for a moment. I get goosebumps when I think about it. If he hadn't taken that stand, he could have become known as the US equivalent of Kaiser Wilhelm.#
The Podcast0 project is teaching me how to read the archive of my own blog. Until now I had not carefully read the story I tell on my blog more than a few days after it happened. Here's I'm learning to reconstruct the summer of 2004, one of the most creative periods of my life, at least that's viewable in such a public and preserved way. Am I the first to do this for any blog? If you know of an example of historic research done using the archive of a blog, please send me a note. I'd love to learn about what you learned! Also because of its longevity and continuity, I offer this blog as some kind of record of what happened in the last 30 years or so. I see it as a complete work of writing, a kind of fresco writing. #
Like 193K others I tuned into White Dudes For Harris last night. Please, let that be the last time we do that. I felt like it might as well have been Slave Owners for Harris or Reformed Republicans for Harris. I don't have anything against people of my gender and approximate race, but I also am a child of Holocaust survivors, and I happen to be one of the elites the Repubs claim to hate, and also am one of at least two castes that Democrats tend to blame for all our problems (other than White Dudes). I think we've done enough segregation for one campaign, now please please I beg you, let's work together, regardless of labels, to save the country we all love. I have a philosophy, I don't care how you got to the party, if you took a subway, walked, rode a bike, or came by Uber or a Cadillac limousine. We all got here, and have a common purpose, so lets all love each other and party our way to victory. Regardless of race, creed, color or whatever. #- Notes accumulated during the day -- not in any particular order. 😄#
- I keep a solid line between my personal life and blogging, learned the hard way. When I started blogging in 1994, I didn't have such a solid line, and found that I couldn't have a personal life if I made it public. But now I want to reveal something. I am "childless" which is a term I find pretty insulting, as if being childful is the only normal state of being. #
- I find, in general childful people are not great friends or family members. They want special privileges and they often get them. If childful vs childless is going to be an issue in this campaign, I say -- bring it on. We should have this discussion. #
- I'm often tempted to offer advice to the parents, but I won't offer it unless asked, except this. If you have children, there's a good chance one or more of them will not have children, and you should love them the same, and provide models of acceptance while they're growing up, by bringing childless people into your home, so the kids know that this is one of the legitimate choices in life, offering proof that you won't love them any less if they go down that path. And here's the hard part, imho, for people with children -- keep that promise. #
- BTW, people say it's seflish to not have children, but I don't agree, in fact I think it's the opposite. There was a point in human evolution where the struggle to survive for our species was fed by procreation, but some time in the last hundred years we crossed a line, where increasing human population worked against species survival. Our understanding of the meaning of procreating, like so much else about our civilization, has not yet caught up with the current reality. #
Like cholesterol, there's "good weird" and "bad weird." I think we all know which kind of weird the Repubs are. #
Here's a perfect illustration how ChatGPT can improve customer relations. I bought an iPhone that I now don't need, and it's arriving today via FedEx. I wanted to know whether I should just refuse delivery, or accept it and then return it. Obviously it's easier for me to refuse. I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a detailed reply. Apple's chatbot saw it as a "technical" question and wasn't prepared to help. Sales support is one of those applications where cost is totally justified. A human helper would cost a lot more I imagine than a LLM chat system. I tried calling 1-800-CALL-APPLE and talked to a human who was very nice, but couldn't find anything in her manual about refusing delivery. #Is there anyone here within earshot who is involved in doing the web stuff for the Harris campaign?#
Before Twitter broke the API, it was a quick way for me to channel items from my blog to almost all the people who follow me on the social web. Now it isn't even one of the services I use that I can post to with my writing tool (those are Bluesky, Mastodon, WordPress). None of them are anything like the aggregator of people that Twitter was, and I can't even reach it from my writing tool. I really want to solve this problem, but I absolutely can't do this on my own. No time, patience, and it's not my job to do all that coding. As observed the other day, my time should be spent on writing tools for the web and directly related products. This is the kind of project that should be handled as an open source thing. #
Patrick LaForge who just left the NYT after 27 years: "RSS news readers let me track breaking news and competition back in my blogging days and I still used them as a corrective to see beyond what social media algorithms were showing me. You see the stories long before home page play or tweets. Gave me an edge. To print-focused journalists who knew little about computers in a certain era it seemed like magic."#I reluctantly signed up for White Dudes for Harris. Would have enthusiastically joined Men for Harris group. Tech for Harris. New York for Harris. Voters for Harris. Americans for Harris. And why just Americans. People for Harris dammit. #
On this day in 2004, I did podcast interviews with Don Means of Meetup and Patty Wetterling of Minnesota at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. For both, I did the interview with Natasha Celine of the Pacific Views blog. The next 2004 podcast won't be until August 15. Banter with Adam Curry and Steve Gillmor probably about the podcasting bootstrap which at this point appears to be underway. Not sure if anyone as ever gone down this path in the last 20 years because, when I do the searches to find links to sites and people, I don't see any mention of this stuff in the current day, although now there will be (here in my blog archive). Here's the feed of ancient podcast review. You can find the reverse chronologic list of the whole series on morningcoffeenotes.com.#
Referrer logs and webmentions may be about to become obsolete with the advent of SearchGPT, and presumably Google's AI and search facilities are also about to merge. Here's the deal. When I write a blog post and want to know if anyone has mentioned it, I will simply be able to ask ChatGPT, "Have any sites mentioned, with or without links, the story I wrote yesterday entitled "Unix-like things" and if so please provide a title, synopsis and link, if available, so I can read the full text." I'm sure that will be appropriately shortened, or perhaps turned into something like the referrer lists of today. Something the network can do for us automatically. #John Batelle had an interesting observation about this yesterday, that SearchGPT is a clever way to get news orgs to think about ChatGPT in a different, less threatening way. They want to be in a search engine index (that's called SEO) where they want to be paid to be part of a chatbot. There really isn't a line there, in fact. That's what SearchGPT makes obvious. I for one, want all my stuff in their index so I can find out wtf I've been writing about here for almost 30 freaking years! 😄#
On this day in 2004 I was in Boston to blog the Democratic National Convention, esp with my newfangled audio blog post thing. #
Somewhere in this timeframe Adam Curry began Daily Source Code which is still running to this day, almost 20 years later.#
Has anyone ever seen Trump laugh?#
Somehow it's up to the Harris campaign to get the Trumps to have a normal American presidential campaign, not a prelude to a second attempted coup, which is what the Trumps are doing. I can see the op-ed they run in September saying that it's Harris's fault that the Trumps are fascist. #- I reinstated my subscription because I need to actually read their words, not because they cover news, but because they are news. The news is that the fourth estate in the US is gone. They have lost their minds. They aren't even trying. Their op-eds don't reflect facts, such as Trump will never be a serious candidate in the sense that the NYT thinks a candidate should be serious. The Democrats still will. But there's no need as far as I'm concerned, for a legitimate candidate to respond to their taunts. #
- They completely lost many of us in their extended campaign to force Biden to step aside. I knew they wouldn't stop there, because abusers never stop when you give in to them. They are the tragedy of America now, even more than Trump. We must replace them. The real question is who's going to step up to help restore journalism to our country. #
- Thanks for listening.#
- PS: I am not pointing to their piece out of respect for people who have cancelled their subscriptions. #
- I lost my iPhone a few days ago. I think all the data is safe. First time I ever lost a phone. I ordered a new iPhone 15 Pro with 256GB, it will arrive on Monday hopefully. #
- In the meantime I've needed to use my Android phone to record voice memos. Google's product is called Recorder. It's just what I wanted. #
- It has a website, so you don't have to export your recording to get it where you need it to be, and it automatically does a transcript. There's an editor on the website, which again is exactly where I want it. #
- A 2-minute voice memo/podcast I recorded with the app.#
- BTW, I think the files are smaller?#
- Here's a screen shot. #
- I sent a tweet to Eric Raymond today, lightly edited here, following up on a thread that started in 2001. #
- What Raymond said in 2001.#
- XML-RPC, in particular, is very much in the Unix spirit. It's deliberately minimalist but nevertheless quite powerful, offering a way for the vast majority of RPC applications that can get by on passing around boolean/integer/float/string datatypes to do their thing in a way that is lightweight and easy to to understand and monitor. This simple type ontology acts as a valuable check on interface complexity.#
- It's very true, my design goal for my whole 50+ year career has been to factor my code so well so it was as clean as Unix is, from top to bottom#
- The virtue of relentless factoring is you can build higher if each layer of the stack lets through the functionality that's needed, and no more. Ideally there should be one way of doing something. and it should work pretty well. #
- I realized that the web, RSS and podcasting are also a Unix-like things. #
- Because they can be made to do anything, but are simple, not a lot to understand.#
- But -- there's been this huge proliferation of languages and frameworks, and incredibly complex and underspecified formats. #
- Meanwhile core functions like storage combined with identity for end users, has not been implemented, because of course if the users had their own networked data independent of any platform vendor there would be no lockin. that's 2024 version of the cathedral, to follow your analogy.#
- Anyway, seeing you here made me think of this, I've wanted to say this to you for a long to you and now I have. ;-)#
- PS: The 2001 email from Eric Raymond.#
Biden's speech might turn out to be a We're at a huge fork in the road. One fork -- goodbye USA, the other way, we're stronger than ever. We're in a good spot imho because Trump's tank is empty. He's old, tired, fat, addled, fetid, rotten. You have to work really hard not to see that. If it works, Biden will have stabilized the country, and Harris will erect the guardrails that make sure no one follows in Trump's path, and the Supreme Court gets back into its proper place. They've been overthrowing our society, economy and political system. That all has to be reversed before it does too much damage, and prevented in the future. I want to know why the court can't be expanded, and if Harris will put that in her platform. #
It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent. #
Pretty remarkable how abusive the bots on Twitter have become. Makes discourse there seem pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.#
I want a Masto-clone that does not do replies. You can't insert anything under my idea, but you can if you like include my idea, as a link, in yours. This model works. I think by now we know the other way does not work. BTW I use the term Masto-clone interchangeably with Twitter-like. Let's spread the love around. #
Software-wise I realized recently that everything that takes me away from creating really nice writing and publishing tools is a waste. I have to get off track because there are huge holes in the web as a runtime platform. And every year it gets worse as new incompatible languages are added, new incompatible stacks built. As a result we have to re-do everything all the time, and never get a chance to create new user experience. The market fragments, which is exactly what the tech companies want. It keeps their products from becoming commodities. And like it or not, the politicians and corporations don't want us writing too much, they just want us working, donating to their campaigns, paying taxes, buying their crap, and not getting all agitated about things they don't care about. #
I am optimistic that Trump is headed for the graveyard of history, shortly. #- First time I've felt like this in a long time. #
- When (if) that happens, we can use Cory Doctorow's excellent concept enshitification to describe what he did to the American political system.#
- He also stress tested it, and we would be the greatest fools imaginable if we didn't add some seriously enforceable guardrails to prevent this kind of attack happening in the future. #
- Might work out well to have a lawyer in the White House. #
Fantastic speech by President Biden. It's good we'll have both a president and a campaign and that they'll be separate thing. I look forward to reading it slowly. And he put a cap on the awful communication of the last month, he took control of the story from the snobs and shit throwers in the press. #
How Harry McCracken discovered that ChatGPT is a deeply and broadly knowledgable, infinitely patient, always available, inexpensive, programming partner. I've been using it that way for a year, and it has enabled me to take on much more ambitious and complete projects. It could evolve into something much more powerful, but where it is now is already amazing. The criticisms for ChatGPT have mostly missed the point of what it's useful for. #I was able to follow kamalhq on twitter. This report says that Musk is rate-limiting followers on that account. Of course we warned what could happen if a Republican bought twitter, but I didn't honestly contemplate that a fascist would. These days our greatest fears aren't scary enough. People laugh that Musk paid too much for twitter, but if the US ends up as an autocracy, the oligarch that owns the entire news distribution system for the world will probably have the last laugh. BTW, if you want to know why we're so thrilled to have Harris as the candidate, even though we didn't want Joe to give in, it's because no informed and sane person wants to live in a new Trump term. We tried that if you recall. The hope you hear now is much greater than the hope we had when Obama was selling that (though hope was a good word for it). Today it's the hope that we won't be deported or worse.#All the reporters know the Repubs refused to fund border stuff so they could use it to tag the Dems in the election. So the first thing the Repubs do is tag VP Harris with the border. The reporter asks a Dem what they have to say about that. But the reporter knows what the Repubs did. So why do they even ask the freaking question? They just play the script the Repubs wrote for them. They are so savvy, but we heard all that too, so we know how corrupt they are. They don't care if we know.#
I want future President Harris to stay happy no matter what the bastards do or say. We should have a crisis line for her to call to get some quick love. 1-800-LUV-KAMALA. #
- A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wire over the social web.#
- Also talked about twitter-like systems, and idea borrowed from algol-like and lisp-like. #
- I talk about what made Unix so great. #
- Eric Raymond once told me that XML-RPC was very much like Unix, and I said oh yeah, and so is RSS and the rest. Huge compliment because the simplicity of Unix is what I strive for, put huge time into. #
- Journos once said Apple is dead, but that was ridiculous because they had built a product that was just starting to grow and they had planted the seeds of huge growth in the 80s when they focused on selling to education, which made sure that kids when they grew up would have good feelings about Apple, and it totally worked. When the reporters were calling them dead, they were actually just about to boom in a whole new way, on the web, which the Mac was perfect for, given the built in simple networking. And then boom again when Jobs came back. And again with the iPod and then again with the iPhone. See how reporters miss the big picture. We shouldn't give them so much power, they pretend they know, but they are usually pretty clueless. #
- This podcast is also a demo of how my mind works. I flit around all over the place but also have learned over the years that if I want to get anything done I have to focus on one thing for at least a few hours every day, and string those days together. #
- I want to document this stuff for the benefit of young programmers. I learned a lot from reading the code of Unix, I always want to pay that back, the message is to strive for simplicity, keep technical debt to a minimum, and factor, factor and factor again to reduce technical debt. Those are the hardest projects, I'm doing one of those right now, but in the end it's worth it, because with simplicity you get to build higher.#
For the DNC in 2004, we had a site called Convention Bloggers. It was a river of news feed reader, clearly done with Frontier, of blogs run by people who were at the convention.#
I'm doing something new. Trying to initiate topics on the social web. We almost totally respond to external stuff, I wonder how different it would be if we engaged on a more individual level. I've been doing this for a while, but only now am able to explain it. #
Looking forward to the NYT deeply analyzing Trump‘s 78 year old mind and body and his Hannibal Lecter stories.#
- I grew up in the same part of Queens as Trump, about ten years after he did. His family was in Jamaica, mine in Flushing. Here's a map that shows you where the two houses are. 4.0 miles apart if you take Utopia Parkway. A great name for a street, but it's not a parkway and it's nice but definitely not a utopia.#
- People who aren't from huge cities like New York don't know that Trump what our losers look like. They probably have their own loser types. I think that's where 99% of the confusion is. They really don't believe he's so bad. Don't hold that against them, that's nowhere near as bad as knowing what he is and being okay with that. #
- He's a mean bully type. The name-calling is a big clue. Distracts from his weaknesses, which are very obvious. I don't believe in body shaming, because I care about other people's feelings. If I criticize his appearance it might reflect poorly on nice people who have his body type who may not be mean bully losers like Trump. #
- He's also a really good comedian if you don't think he wants to have the power to kill millions of people and control many more people. Last time he was our president just through incompetence, without trying, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Covid disaster. He also wanted the army shoot protestors, that's the mean part of our former president. Luckily the people who worked for him told him to fuck off. They saved us from going into a very deep hole that would have been hard to escape from.#
- I watched the coverage of the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and listened to the Americans they interviewed, not the actors they put behind him on stage, to make him look like a badass I guess, these were just normal people who mostly like Trump, but seem pretty likeable themselves. The one thing you heard over and over was how If you don't like a candidate vote against them don't shoot them. That's American and it's not fascist at all. I don't think they know that he wants to make big changes in how our politics work. People think if he's bad they can just vote him out next time. He tells them this will be the last election if he wins, he actually says that, but somehow it doesn't seem to register. #
- Of course the journalists are distorting who Trump supporters are. Trump is deplorable if you take him at his word. Some of Trump's followers are deplorable too, like the ones who rioted at our Capitol and January 6 and the people who are lined up to work in his next administration if he wins. They are awful people who want to control all of us. They're already doing it via the Supreme Court. It's going to get a lot worse if we go the wrong way. We shouldn't accept that we're horribly divided. The powerful media people want us to be divided, I don't know why and I don't care, I just know they do, based on their actions. #
- Anyway I know we're at a high moment, we're excited, and I'm going to enjoy the feeling. We all seem to be pulling the same way, at least on "our side" but I hold out hope that being an American still means something, that we can be friends, and fellow countrymen, and work together. I think that's still our greatest challange and our greatest opportunity. Yeah I am woke, that means I care about all of us. I think most of us do no matter who you vote for.#
