For me, using FSD in my Tesla is like riding a roller coaster. I don't trust the car not to kill me though. I spend most of my working life dealing with bugs in software. #
The last tab on news.scripting.com now contains news from the blogroll on scripting.com. Same feeds, different view. #
Far more important than machine consciousness is: 1. Human consciousness. 2. Species-level consciousness.#
BTW, straight -- everything Kara Swisher claims to be, the insider with the best view of the industry, they got that wrong. The things that matter happen far away from her conferences and dinners. It's as if Silicon Valley were Hollywood. To some people it is. But the big changes are never recognized by those people until they're juggernauts. They don't make the changes. They soak them up and devour them. They best of the people she writes about are not creators, they're pirates.#
- I'm not sure I'd buy a Tesla today because of Musk's politics which he puts in our face, thus influencing other people to inflict their nightmares on us. I bet in the end Musk will be responsible for a lot of people dying. #
- On the other hand, I love the car, and thus love the people who developed it, who I don't know. I hope they're not Nazis. I don't see how someone who could design such a thing as a Tesla Model Y, in 2021, the year I bought mine, could be anything like that. #
- This car is going to be copied. There will be a generation of cars that comes along, some that have not arrived yet, that will have to stand up to a comparison to a Tesla. This is the original. #
- To be alive when such a product comes out and not own one, that would be hard for me to do. I don't think my "support" of Tesla could mean that much. The money is already spent. It costs nothing to maintain the car (one of its innovations). #
It's like the Macintosh of cars. I would have owned a Macintosh in 1984 even if I wasn't one of Apple's top developers. I also know that Steve Jobs didn't design the machine, he stole it from people at Xerox who did. Apple refined the idea, made it practical, like a Tesla, commercial. That's a huge accomplishment, commercializing and humanizing a concept like the Mac was harder than inventing, imho. I have a feeling that Tesla must stand on the shoulders of giants in a similar way. #- Tesla is always sending me emails, which I usually read, but last week I got one urging me to join X. I thought what bullshit. I don't want these products connected. There was a time, not that long ago, that I would have thought a car hooked up to Twitter as a fantastic and futuristic idea, but now, I think it means no one of principle, certainly no one who is a target of Nazis could work at Tesla in the future. And those are some of the brightest people out there. #
- Meanwhile I'm looking at other company's EVs with lust. I might like a Kia or a BMW. If you're making a consumer product, Nazi branding is not a good look. And X is becoming a stinker too. #
- PS: I was inspired to write this piece by one written by Ben Wurdmuller posted yesterday. I've had much the same feeling about FSD. This piece started out to be about FSD, but the preamble, like the one in his piece, got so long I decided to post it first as its own piece. #
I don't think eclipsy is a word. #
Something disturbing about America in 2024. Over a million Americans died of Covid, but they aren’t on our minds. A million more have long Covid, perhaps. This suggests a million Americans could be killed by our government in the name of a conspiracy, and we’d shrug it off like good Germans. “We didn’t know,” a likely defense.#
Back in the day, many of the early writing tools were called Word-something. WordStar, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect. #
I wrote four posts on micro.blog just before midnight. Probably some of the ideas will appare on Scripting News before too long. #
On Bluesky, Andrew Hickey explains how hard it is for him to focus while construction is going on at his house. I recognize the problem. I had major work done on the roof of my house last summer, and lost focus for a good two months, even though I had rented office space and at times an AirBnb to get away from the chaos. It wasn't until the work was over that I was able to start to get back into my flow. #- In my work, I start pretty much at the same time every day, and I get a good five or six hours before it's time to do the next thing. The first hour is warming up. Then I go to the notes I left the night before about where I'm going next. By hour two, I'm not quite at my highest rate but getting there, by hours 3-5 I get monster stuff done, if I'm in a good groove. Hour six is iffy. All the while I'm taking short breaks to check email, tweets, whatever. All of it asynchronous. Waiting for my attention to be available, for a short period.#
- After 5-6 hours of this, I'm wiped out.#
- I can handle small interruptions, like a package delivery.#
- But if it involves the front of my brain for any real amount of time, if I have to shift my attention elsewhere, boom, it all drops out of my head. It doesn't take much of a shift in attention to lose the whole thing, and basically have to start over the next day.#
- Try to imagine a professional tennis player. Do they talk about anything other than tennis during the game. Not with any focus. I'm sure of it. Their attention is fully on the sport. Same deal with intellectual achievement. If you're doing something that few other people do well, you're not only doing the complex things, and require multiple steps and a lot of detail, and memory, but you're sometimes inventing things that no one has done before. All the levels interact and affect each other. And you're doing a shitload of learning the whole time. Until you're burned out for the day that is. Or your deck gets shuffled. ;-)#
- PS: People sending you emails saying how great your last thing was, they don't interfere at all. ;-)#
- PPS: I wrote this post during one of my breaks. I won't edit it until the evening, when I do lite work that doesn't require much focus for any duration.#
- Somewhat-related notes about different kinds of networks, ActivityPub and RSS, various twitter-like systems, as the social web spreads out and tries out new ideas.#
- With ActivityPub you know who's following you and in RSS you don't. This may sound like a negative until you think about it from the user's standpoint: no spam, spyware, etc. Which is probably why Google didn't like RSS btw. #
- It has been pointed out that some level of spying happens based on IP address, and I can testify to that, I get podcasts with ads for a local supermarket, kind of spooky but I guess ok. I can't recall ever receiving spam as a result of subscribing to a feed, and I never get messages from them when I unsub begging me to come back. So it isn't a huge problem in a real way at least for me, yet.#
- I block spammers. In twitter-like systems, like Mastodon, spam means you attached a post to my post that is in no way responsive to it. You're just trying to coast on the flow generated by other posts. I don't abide that. Have a nice day.#
Facebook, 3 years ago: "I want to use my own editor and have my writing emanate from there, without me having to copy and paste into various forms on different sites. I’m not a copypaste machine. Technically, it’s an easy problem to solve, and I don’t see how it hurts various tech companies to let users write in their favorite editor. This is severely limiting what we can do with networks, and there seems to be no reason for it. APIs let us build networks out of software. Devs, take a chance on other developers. Let the web expand. Let the web breathe."#- I think you can save time by starting over sometimes, and rebuild the complexity, carefully testing at every step. #
- Going back and fixing a poorly tested corner-turn, esp one you did a while ago, is a time-consuming and frustrating process. You need to have a fully consistent model to evolve. When you try to reorganize a complicated bit of code, and you find yourself scratching your head about how this or that works, that's a sign that it doesn't work. #
- But it's much more fun to add new features to a broken foundation than it is to either fix the foundation or rip it out and put in a new one. #
No no we are not supposed to have earthquakes in NY. #
Yes we're having an eclipse next week. Earthquakes often find other kinds of energy to feed on, like the one during Game 2 of the Bay Bridge series between the As and Giants in 1989. The Bay Area doesn't really get baseball. You have to pick sides. You can't root for both teams. So an earthquake knocked out the Bay Bridge and screwed up the Bay Area for quite some time to come. #
I have lived on the San Andreas and Hayward faults, was in the Valley for the Loma Prieta quake -- and I have to say this was a real earthquake. It wasn't very long, but it had a real jolt. Scared the shit out of me. I'm still very sensitive to this kind of disaster.#
Perhaps Twitter will be like Algol, as in there are algol-like languages, of which one is Algol itself. There will be a mass of twitter-like systems, of which X is one. They really should have tried to keep ownership of the trademark, another one of Musk's mistakes he's about to realize he made. Twitter really is on its way to achieving its destiny as a coral reef. More of a concept than a product.#
When I can't quickly find a good definitive page on Google for a concept, I ask ChatGPT to explain it, and if they got it right, I spawn a new page with their explanation. Just doing my part to tend the commons garden. 😄#
One thing Twitter is good for — getting support from your cable ISP. Spectrum’s other ways of providing support are designed to get you to give up without using too much of their employees' time. On Twitter, they pretty much always stay with it to resolution. And on Twitter, they have real people who have access to network tools, so they can see the problem from their end, and can give you a clue of what if anything you can do to fix it. #- I'm pretty good at bug reports, and that appears to work with the online support people they have on Twitter. If you try to chat with them or call them on the phone they read from a script which has you completely tear down and rebuild your system before they'll consider thinking about the data you have. And all this after keeping you on hold listening to their insidious advertising for 15 or more minutes. #
- I don't think the other twitter-like systems have any critical mass with support people from ISPs. Not like Twitter.#
- BTW, support is one place ChatGPT would excel, btw. All kinds. And I don't think too many people will lose their jobs, because their support systems are so bad because they don't hire enough people, or give them enough time with customers, or training, to actually help them very much. I know how to completely tear down the network without them instructing me how to do it. #
Today we got Doc's blogroll working on his WordPress blog. This is the first of our blogrolls on WordPress anywhere. It's been tricky to get the CSS worked out, but we're getting there. It's worth the effort. #
Threads: Maybe The Atlantic or New Yorker could write a detailed article about what the great purges in China and Russia were like. How many millions died. Hitler isn’t the only recent model for an authoritarian government. We should be studying this, you can be sure Trump’s government has and is.#
- What does ActivityPub does that RSS doesn't?#
- Off the top of my head, it's not the ability to syndicate, RSS already does that. I can follow anyone on any server. #
- I think it's the timeline? And the ability to delete posts. Keeping all that in sync is a lot of work, and presumably a lot of traffic? #
- Also replies. If I reply to a post when viewing it on another server, the reply should show up under any other view of that post.#
- What else??#
- PS: Only thinking about features that are used by Mastodon to federate, not potential future features. If that were the rule, then RSS could do anything AP could do, right -- because you can always add the feature. So, just the features that are in use.#
- PPS: I posted this on Mastodon and may post it elsewhere, if I do I'll link them in here. #
- Back in the Valley some of my friends called me El Grandé.#
- Some still do.#
- Dave Jacobs has been playing with ChatGPT art, and sent me this one, and I thought it belonged here. #
- PS: You say the El part softly then pause on the G and add a slightly gutteral H before proceeding with rand and then stretch out the "ay" with a smile and you got it. #
- PPS: You could roll the R too, for fun, if you're into it.#
- PPPS: Guy Kawasaki calls me Beeeeeeg Stuffff. #
I wonder if people know that news.scripting.com is a simple UI on top of FeedLand. It's 98% FeedLand, 2% hiding the power so people will feel more comfortable. I'm thinking of pulling back the curtain. 😄#
Twitter is the place old friends who haven't heard they should find a new home are still posting. There are quite a few of them. Fact. It's kind of like what Facebook has become. There are a set of people I expect to see there regularly, and that's why I keep going back. Again, fact. #
I want all the information about the products I make to be instantly available to anyone who wants to know, in exactly the form they want it. Until ChatGPT, that was a totally unattainable dream. But now, for many topics, it's reality. For example, if I have a question about CSS, and believe me, I do -- if I can ask the question clearly enough, I can get a clear and complete explanation of why the browser did the crazy thing with layout that it did. It means I could do something beautiful and refined like the blogroll I worked on in February and March, and the UI stuff I'm working on in March and April. #- I can't wait until ChatGPT can answer all those questions about my stuff. But then people who make music don't want their songs to be available the same way. As someone who wants to know as much as possible about songs I have always loved but had no idea how they were made, or what they meant to the writer, knowledge about the work is equally valuable as understanding technical topics. I think the big difference is knowing that life is short, and if we want to leave something behind of ourselves, having the information be available is a blessing, not something to fight against. I don't see why software designers in the future should have to reinvent what my generation has already figured out. I don't want them to have to. It keeps coming back to this one idea -- to solve the problems we have as a species we're going to have to work together, and part of that means not being so guarded and selfish about sharing what we've learned. #
- We had this problem with music before, with Napster. The users of music, such as myself, found that the ability to program our own music was so liberating. To listen to a song a few times before moving on made a huge difference, or to choose a song to hear because we just thought of it for the first time in 30 years. But we were literally mocked by music promoters and artists. But ultimately, like it or not, the users got the power they wanted. It's got to happen that way too for ChatGPT et al. I guess some people must've felt that search engines were going to rob creative people of control of their creations. I guess this is something we always have to go through. #
We're starting to test the blogroll software with a few users, but we hit a problem before we began. The blogroll code includes the CSS for the Bootstrap Toolkit. I use it as if it were part of the OS, but not everyone does, and it changes the global values of things. So when you install it on a page that has its own ideas how things should work, you can get an unpleasant effect (to put it mildly). So I created a localized subset of Bootstrap's styles, to be a better guest in other people's pages. That is now done. I expect we'll see more of that kind of thing. Web plugins are a new area for me. I guess that's pretty obvious. #
- I can't stand to look at images of Trump or his followers. Fed up with it. I want our own heroes. #
- When I see a picture of Trump, and they are impossible to avoid, I will envision a washed out picture of a dead dictator on a screen and the runner slinging the hammer at the image and it crashing. #
- She represents life and strength. She is the America I love. #
We need a resistance movement that reporters can report on. A new women’s march for reproductive health would be a great place to start. I'm not giving up on journalism yet, just knowing they need to see a resistance to report on it. That means big marches, streets filled with Americans, who will sound angry and determined when interviewed by reporters. And spokespersons who can be interviewed by Maddow and Blitzer. #Ken Smith summarizes: "Figure out what kinds of events the press likes to cover, then create that kind of event." That's right. Let's not argue about what the press should cover. We can't change them. Just give them what they need to do the right thing. #
After a couple of tests, the fix below is implemented here. For some reason I wasn't subscribed to my own feed, which accounted for the fact that updates from this blog weren't getting into the blogroll. That troubles me, I have to try to piece together how that happened. In the meantime it's nice to have the instant updating working again. I didn't know that I had missed it, but I did.#
I introduced a bug in the blogroll code where it was ignoring instant updates. Probably the sexiest feature in the whole thing. The bug was introduced on March 21, so it's been there a while. You have to hard-reload the page to get the new version. So, when I post this on Scripting News, it should move to the top of the list immediately. So a good use-case is to leave Scripting News open with the blogroll visible and every once in a while you may find something interesting to read. I like having it there, but of course, it's my baby, so that's understandable. :-)#I tried listening to one of Kara Swisher's interviews for her new book. The interviewer was someone I respect, Brian Lehrer at WNYC. But he has an old and imho unfair view that CraigsList and Facebook are responsible for the demise of local news. I was surprised when he said as much near the start of the interview. Then Swisher went into an obviously very well rehearsed schpiel that confirmed that he was absolutely right and the tech gods weren't fooling anyone. OK that was my limit, I switched to another podcast. She's got a great business model. Tell the press what they want to hear and you will get good press, pretty much guaranteed.#
Started a new outline for the month of April, with March safely archived on GitHub. If you want to read the month in outline form, click this link and it will open read-only in Drummer. That's a pretty good approximation of how I edit it, except I use the desktop version of Drummer that writes files to the local Mac filesystem as well as to the cloud. #
Tomorrow is, of course, April 1 -- when people on the net lie about the people they hate and call it humor.#
An advantage of using an outliner to edit a blog, is that you can easily split one post into several because they're edited in one document. Or move a paragraph from one story to another with drag and drop. In a page-oriented editor, you get to focus on the writing for one page, but navigating outside that post is more jarring, a writer more easily loses the train of thought. I've been writing in an outliner almost exclusively for decades, only now considering the writing world outside. Learning a lot.#I start a fresh outline for this blog on the first of every month, so tomorrow I will archive my blog.opml file on GitHub, start a new month, and delete the previous month. I've been doing that since 2017, when I finally forever gave up trying to interop with the great blogging silos (ie Twitter and Facebook mainly). I think outlining is like double-diamond skiing, but for writing. #
Popular on Mastodon: "The reason it's nice to have old people around is that we don't care about the future in a personal way, so we might just tell you the truth."#
I loved hanging out with fellow math and compsci majors in college and grad school. It's nice when you get to speak in the language of math and programming, where you can't be fuzzy about things, you have to be direct, because it's the only way to communicate. #- No one attaches their feelings to the things other people say in this context. But sometimes it hurts anyway. I think I've told this story many times. I had posted some example code on the door to the office I shared with a few other teaching assistants at UW in the late 70s, and there was a mistake in it. It wouldn't have compiled if I had tried to run it. I was told by a TA who was senior to me, never to do this again. It stung for an instant, but I recall suppressing that and accepting that the OP was right. I should never have to learn this lesson again, and as far as I know, many years have passed and I have never have had to re-learn that one (though I have with many others). #
- But nothing prepared me for the experience in 1981 or so when the company I was working for hired a professional tester to report on the software. Page after page of my mistakes. Written in cold dispassionate unyielding text, with no concern for anyone's feelings. And since I was the lead developer on the project, the feelings were pretty much all mine. But the concerns were valid. Some of the things were the result of confusion about how the product worked, and others were outright mistakes. All of them were my responsibility. Later when I started and ran a company of my own, I hired people to test our software in exactly the same way.#
- Many many years later, if you work with me on a project, I expect you to report problems with my code directly. Please don't beat around the bush. I've been through this a million times. It still stings sometimes, but I recover quickly, because my mission is to make flawless software, a feeling that the "software thinks like I do" that only comes from addressing all the issues you can. No software is ever anything close to perfect. But we strive to make it more perfect. This is the ethos of developers, and why our conversations may sound weird to others. #
- PS: An editorial about news that expresses the same idea. #
I have to admit that I like cats. People think they don't have a sense of humor, but they do.#
This is a test. For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of the blog posting system. Not an emergency.#
I'll leave you with this question. Where is the Resistance?#
One more thing. Why isn't Michael Moore on MSNBC, give him an hour on Saturday. It would be the most watched program they have. Call it Michael Moore tells you the truth about what's actually going on, and what you should do. It could be a call-in show. My first question for him would be, how can I help the Resistance?#
Working on a big software project is like hiking the Appalachian Trail. You keep a diary so people who come through there next year and the year after will know what you tried and why it didn't work. Like using a GET when the RESTful thing is a POST. I once got excoriated by a famous security expert in public for doing this (XML-RPC only uses POST) but I had and have the best intentions. Back then in 1998, when I made the choice, I was juggling a billion flaming bowling pins. Back then there was no ChatGPT to ask about prior art. I had to move on. Well here we are again in 2024. I hope the next person traveling through the area in question sees what I didn't see. People who have worked on my code know that if you read it in an outliner, you'll see lots of blog posts with extensive comments that read more like a blog than software. Some functions have a thread of comments going back to the early 90s and not just from me. Outliners are great for writing code, because a long comment takes up exactly one line until you expand it. So you can go on and on and not stop until you're finished. Thank you and have a nice day. 😄#The first time ChatGPT argued with me. It said I was wrong, but in fact, it was wrong. Doubly foreboding. #
Braintrust query: I've been encouraged to switch to the mysql2 package for Node, saying that it would improve performance and compatibility. I'm interested in knowing if people had problems, and is the new package much better than the original?#
An algorithm for content moderation for reducing the human contact trolls have. If you notice an account that gets blocked by a lot of people who don't follow them after they reply to one of their posts, then slow them down or throw out their replies. Eventually if it keeps up, you pretty much know it's software, and you can delete the account. I guess. Just thinking out loud. ;-)#
I wish I could send ChatGPT a pointer to a page I'm working on and ask it questions about my CSS. Or imagine ChatGPT running in Node, supervising my server app, looking for problems, odd usage patterns, and later looking for optimizations. And that's just the beginning. #
Journalists who say I saw these Sony buds advertised and I had to try them. They're now my favorite way to listen to music and podcasts. Most ear buds in my experience don't do very well with bass, and I love music with a strong beat. Sony makes great inexpensive headphones. #
I think micro.blog is going to get very interesting once the APIs for all these random social networks fill out.#
I dream of a day when I can subscribe to a podcast on my desktop and have my mobile podcast app know about it automatically. (To be clear, using open formats and protocols, so that this convenience does not lock me into using one podcast client, obviously.)#Experiments. I pasted the URL of a Mastodon post into a Threads post. I was kind of expecting it would use the power of federation to just get the post and put it in Threads. I asked a similar question on Mastodon, pasting the URL of a Threads post into a Mastodon post. As in the other direction it did nothing with it. #
On Threads: My goal for the next few years is to get the feed world and the social web world to merge, and I'm pretty sure the style of reading of the social web will prevail because it is the rational most news-like way to read news.#
I don't usually watch Maddow on Monday nights. I lost my faith in her when she went after Facebook a few years ago, not that Facebook didn't deserve her attention, but her arguments while condemning them were exaggerated. I knew the facts, she left out important details. #- She steered viewers into believing things that weren't true. Didn't exactly lie, but pretty close. I figured if she does that for stories I know, then she's probably doing it other times when I wasn't so well informed. #
- But the Knicks were blowing out the Pistons on the next channel over, and I had tuned in Jen Psaki, who as luck would have it, at the exact moment I switched, was explaining how the fact that she served in the Biden Administration before joining MSNBC was very different from the controversy over Ronna McDaniel, who Maddow went on to explain was basically a terrorist and traitor and Trump co-conspirator (not just an enabler), and not in a war that was over, but one that was still being fought, and not insignificant because this fascist movement has control of one of the two major parties in the US and McDaniel was instrumental in that. There are good arguments that she should be in a prisoner of war camp, not employed by one of America's major news networks.#
- That NBC hired McDaniel as a contributor says something awful about Maddow's employer. And Maddow, if she has any details on that, isn't saying what they are. #
I've had this problem with other reporters in the past whose owners were caught up in some controversy that made them newsworthy. The reporters refused to cover it, or even be a source for others who were. This is where journalism goes wrong imho. Maddow should know the details, and if she does, she is obligated to share them, because they are significant, and go to how much trust any of us should give to any news coming to us from NBC. Maybe she has to quit to do that, and if so, go ahead and quit. Because the shadow it casts over everything touched by NBC, which includes MSNBC and Maddow is just too freaking long. It's similar to the "news" she reported on Facebook, except now instead of steering us to believe lies, she's holding it back, and instead of it being about one very powerful social media company, it's about the future of the government of the US. And maybe she doesn't know, as Upton Sinclair once said: “It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends on [them] not understanding it.” #- I don't blame Maddow for liking her job. But as a reporter, there are more and more reasons not to trust her and esp to not trust the company that employs her. When it was obvious she wasn't going to tell us the story behind McDaniel's hiring, or even name the people responsible for it, I switched back to the Knicks, where at least I think I understand who they are and what they're trying to do. #
- Update: MSNBC backed down on hiring McDaniel. #
This is a screen shot of my blogroll. I can have posts from Mastodon or Bluesky here. But not Threads. It's really easy. Just support outbound RSS and we can add you to the club. #
I was glad to have 3 Body Problem to binge over the weekend. Created by the showrunners for Game of Thrones based on a much-loved series of science fiction novels, which btw I have not read. This was emphatically not Game of Thrones, though some of the actors played roles in both series, and in each case that was awkward. Not the best actors, they didn't get much screentime in GoT, but here, they get the big lines and omg it was embarrassing, they don't pull it off. Creepy. I loved the first four episodes, incredible story, and the special effects, awesome. Then it really started to stink in episodes in 6 and 7, endless stupid dialog with music that made every stupid thing like a climax of a sort. But I was still watching, and then it came back roaring in the final episode. On the other hand it's like so much of today's TV, superheros, epic conflicts, resolution, good guys win. A cross between Lost and Ender's Game. A space adventure and the supernatural. Net-net -- it was worth it. A good distraction, I will probably watch Season 2.#
I still love reading my own stuff in the blogroll. Learning how to make stuff look good in a tiny little format like that. I don't mind having a small space to deploy in, but I like to have lots of room where I write. Linkblogs and blogrolls go together really well. Blogrolls work best for smaller groups of people and projects, not the huge number of followers people have on the twitter-like social web. But I think even a few hundred items in a blogroll work, as long as it's dynamic, and it's reverse chronologic. #Never thought I'd be so glad to see the xml-rpc site back up and running. I found out about it being off by someone sending an email asking if they could buy the domain from me. Otherwise I'm not sure I would have noticed. The whole idea is to put these static sites in a safe place and forget about it. But clearly there are no safe places and someday you might get dragged back to try to debug some work you did a bunch of years ago. #
Braintrust query: I have not been able to reliably get to a bunch of my sites that use HTTP this morning. For example, feeder.scripting.com, a site that I use to test feeds. Also xmlrpc.com. It's possible that something broke overnight in my server. Or Digital Ocean is having a problem? Doesn't seem like it's something Google is doing to punish me for using HTTP, though that is always the first thing that comes to mind. I tried moving the XML-RPC site to a different server, but the problem follows it. No changes have been made to the site in years. Not exactly what I had planned to be digging into on a nice (but cold) Sunday morning in the mountains. I started a thread, if you have any insights. At least scripting.com is still working, but it's not served through my software or Digital Ocean. #
So I went ahead and moved xmlrpc.com to a HTTPS server. The other day I forgot to mention that style sheets might not be readable when you move from HTTP to HTTPS, leading to this striking breakage I saw when I first got to look at the site in its new location. And now thanks to Google and the EFF, I get to spend time debugging something that worked just fine in 1998 and every year since then. Should I send them the bill for my time? Fuckers. #
I've had my blogroll for a couple of weeks now, and I've got it on-screen a lot, as I'm developing another user interface that has the blogroll in it. This blogroll is much like the one I had in the 00s, but it's in motion, and it's a source of news and ideas. It's also doing the thing that Twitter used to do, it lets me have a way to see what specific people are interested in. I expect more of that as new people get this kind of blogroll. Right now I'm pretty much the only one. The next step is getting the blogroll running in WordPress. And then getting it running on Om's blog and Doc's blog, both of whom have real experience with the art of blogrolling. From that, I expect to have a better idea of what the editorial UI should look like for people creating and managing these blogrolls. We'll iterate until it's pretty easy to set up and manage one. Also to be clear, I want it to run in other platforms, this is not exclusive to WordPress. It's just the place where the people are right now, the ones I really want to work with. But I wouldn't mind it running in Substack for example, if there are any writers there who find this compelling. That would require cooperation from the company though, their platform as far as I know, does not support other-party plugins. #I saw someone get upset that ChatGPT can beat humans at debate, but we humans, esp here in the US for the last few decades, haven't been taking good care of ourselves intellectually. It would be one thing if we placed a high value on being informed and thoughtful, but we're going the other way. However, if we were aiming to be as smart and knowledgable as possible, we'd be losing to them anyway. The machines have infinitely expandable memory, and we don't and we lose stuff, and we hallucinate a lot more than they do. But why is it a problem if a machine does something better than we do, even something we (foolishly) think we're the best at. That's why we make machines. I have a great car, and live in a house that's heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. If I want to travel to the other side of the world, no problem. These are all things that machines do for me. One thing a machine might not be good at is inspiration. I asked ChatGPT to give me a good idea for something to write today. The idea it came up with: "The Day the World Forgot How to Yawn." I rest my case. #
Back in the 80s before many of you were born, you could buy a word processing program, which was basically a text editor, and you could use it to write and then when it came time to send that writing to other people, you would print it. And get this the printer could take its input from any of those writing tools. There were no tiny little text boxes. The printers didn’t come with their own editors, you had choice and therefore there was lots of competition. Amazing, right?#What if climate change comes to where you live in the form of tornadoes that last 30 days.#
If only Brendan Eich had incorporated UCSD Pascal units into JavaScript. It was easy to make modular reusable bits of code. #
Something the HTTPS evangelists must not understand: there's substantial breakage when you convert an HTTP site to HTTPS. Every image in every page breaks. Broken images make a statement, they're like broken windows, they say no one gives a F about this site. Well I care about the archive of scripting.com, I hope people understand that. I have been creating a record here since 1994. It'll be 30 years in October.#- Instead of trying to blackmail me into breaking my archive, Google should be helping to preserve it. And not just mine, the entire early web. We poured our hearts and hopes into this, and massive amounts of time, without which Google would not exist. #
- I know Google doesn't have a heart and it isn't a living thing, but it's bad PR to make that so freaking obvious. #
- I think that perhaps Google is already run by the machines. Maybe it was the first such company. #
- To remind you of what Google's idea of the ancient web is, I put a broken image next to this post. #
- Thanks for listening. #
- I spent some time this week reviewing the UI of Radio UserLand, released in 2002. It was both a feed reader and a writing tool. #
- One would have thought, btw, that from that start that all subsequent blogging tools would have the same connections, even if the functionality was not all in the same product. But then came Twitter and Facebook, and they said they weren't blogs, and presumably would start a new tradition with new user expectations. And that worked. The new blogging platforms were silos.#
- So the integration opportunities were limited, something that took me 11 years to fully appreciate, and to give up on. I was in a intellectual cloud, not thinking straight. #
- Meantime, the tradition of blogging was preserved by WordPress. As a blogging tool, it supported the same connective features that Radio did. There were some it couldn't cover because Radio was a desktop app, not a web app (though it looked like a web app, you installed a piece of software on the desktop). #
- This was the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea realized. #
- So for example, we had upstreaming, which was a one-way Dropbox, a number of years before Dropbox existed. This meant that the link between the CMS and the server went through the file system. The product didn't live long enough to fulfill the potential of that feature. The idea was that you could use any editor you wanted to write something that was posted to the blog, you could choose to have it rendered through the site template, or uploaded as-is. #
- The editor we supplied with Radio was one of those tiny little text boxes, but I hoped that better editors would emerge. I wanted to make one myself, combining the outliner in Frontier with scripting, to drop posts into the folder structure that Radio expected. #
- Years later I tried to do it with Dropbox itself, with a product called Fargo. Dropbox was so incredibly close to the ideal user-owned storage server system, but they wouldn't go the final step, in creating a class of content that could be shared with two or more apps but not all apps. So the user didn't have enough control for it to work. #
- The idea of multiple apps working on the same data would be revolutionary. How do I know? Because that's how computers worked before the web. So to make the thing I want to do work, now, in 2024, I'm going to have to create my own storage system for the user, and I will pay for it, at least to start. #
- Hopefully at some point I'll be able to turn that over to Automattic and have them run it, or if they don't want to, maybe someone else will. But it has to be there for the web as a runtime environment to support the same diversity of software that the PC and Mac did in the generation before the web. #
- Technology does go backwards, a lot -- we lose valuable things without any thought, when we could keep them. #
- BTW, that's why it's good to keep some old people around, we might remember the things that were lost. I'm trying to make sure the really good ideas, the keepers, get another chance. #
Another random morning bit -- something subtle in the blogroll you might not have noticed. It has no trouble dealing with titled or untitled posts. Blog posts typically have titles, social media posts do not. RSS is opinionated about this -- it says you should support both views. But the feed reader folk ignored that guidance. My little blogroll shows you how to do it, it's pretty simple. If it doesn't have a title use the description. #- Think of it this way. What if motorcycles, cars, trucks and bikes couldn't all use the same roads? What kind of way would that be to run a civilization. Same thing with feeds. #
- There's a screen shot of the blogroll to the right, with Scripting News highlighted and expanded. Some of those posts have titles and some don't. You and I as developers care about that, but we shouldn't show that difference that in the user interface. The users don't care and rightly so. It's confusing and takes their attention away from the writing. #
- Another topic. Something I noticed in WordPress's RSS feeds. If I start a post out with an empty title, it uses the post ID to form the URL for the post. That's the right thing to do imho. But then if I add a title, which can happen, it changes the URL to use the title. But URLs shouldn't change. It also changes the guid, so a feed reader will think there were two posts when there was just one. Now I don't know if they can change it at this late date, I imagine there are workarounds out there. But I noticed this the other day, and thought I should mention it. Why not just use the post ID for the guid, esp since it says the guid is not a permalink? And use it in forming the URL. I totally understand the benefit of using the title in the URL. But you can't depend on the title being there. #
- Finally, to answer the question raised by the title of this piece -- WordPress is, among other things, a perfect time capsule of open technologies from the early days of innovation on the web, and widely deployed and able to deliver all their benefits, if we widen our view of social media to be a social web, and simply create places where posts with and without titles are equally supported. It's that simple. Without WordPress we would have to build all that, and wait for it to deploy in numbers, to matter in the market. All we have to do now is make the connections. #
Manton Reece gives Facebook the benefit of the doubt. I have at times been that optimistic. And there are good well-intentioned people at every bigco. The problem is, when you get to the top, they don't actually give a F about any of this. They like to keep their users where they are. Right now Facebook is hoovering up people who are looking for something new in the Twitter space. So it helps to encourage people to believe that there will be a way out if they want to try something else. But everyone knows for real that that isn't what's going to happen. This is in the tech playbook. When you're growing, you want everything to be open. When there aren't any more users to get from other places, well, that was a nice idea. #Paul Kedrosky is paying for feeds coming out of Twitter and subscribing to them in Feedly along with his other feeds. This is smart and futuristic. No reason to have two or more social webs, let's get them all working together.#
I was looking around the old social web circa 2003 and found the blogroll on my Radio UserLand blog home page. Screen shot to the right. It shows that the art was very much still being practiced then. It looks cared-for. All themes designed by Bryan Bell. I am going to set up a demo of the home page, because I want to look at it as "live" as I can get it, and see if there are ideas there I want to bring forward to 2024. #Developing great products is something like the NBA which they always say is a business, esp when a player you love is traded. Happened recently with a point guard, Immanuel Quickley, traded from Knicks to Raptors. He wasn't the only heart of the Knicks, but he was one of them. He has a competitive grace you don't see very often. Quickley was one of those guys you knew would be the starting point guard on some NBA team, he was that good. But he was unlikely to get there on the Knicks, so we can be happy for him because he is the starting point guard on the Raptors, but we lost something important there. But the business side, if done well, opens the door for bigger love. I love watching the Knicks win they way they are winning now. That's what I want from developing software. I want to create a global team of truly independent developers, filling the void left by the predation of the silos. There won't even be a business model for much of what we do, but there will be lots of teamwork and lots of fun, because the best accomplishment is when we do it as a team. We're going to play a game we started to play in the mid-90s, and somewhere somehow forgot we could still play it. We can. I am old now, I feel it, I can't produce end-user software much longer, but I don't want to leave until we have this thing rebooted. #
I got politics.newsriver.org working again. Things got pretty shaky in news product land. I'm trying to figure out a general formula for getting things working again. And as I update them, I'm switching them over to HTTPS. Once again I have to put in a plug for Caddy. A real time-saver.#
Did the same for bloggers.scripting.com. I found what may be a bug in PagePark believe it or not. An ancient workhorse of Dave-Net.#
When they report on Trump’s financial situation they don’t take into account that the property, golf courses, buildings, etc are all mortgaged beyond the max, that’s what the NY trial was about, him lying about values for the purpose of getting loans on the property. So his equity in these investments is probably 0 or even negative (because of the fraud). No one is going to loan him anything on the properties, because he has no equity, and the story they tell about New York state liquidating his assets, there almost certainly is nothing to liquidate. Anyone who owns a home and has a mortgage can understand this, it works the same way even if the property is much more valuable than a family home. I asked jokingly what his credit rating must be, but it's a good question to ask, would help regular people relate to the situation. #
This is amazing. Some of my friends at Automattic quickly put together a toolkit for WordPress that allows it to host my blogroll. There are still some missing pieces and some CSS glitches. But this is exactly where I hoped we would be at this point.#
Read this on Threads. The thing that's great about this moment is that people are just beginning to get the possibility of not being locked into silos. They don't know how to parse my posts and screen shots, because I can do something they never thought they'd be permitted to do. Well we've got some visionary and lovable techies at Masto and Blueski who want you and I to be able to do that. And we've been building on that. And will continue to do so, Murphy-willing. #
Blogroll fix. The blogroll was grabbing the up and down-arrow and Return for keyboard navigation, one of my favorite blogroll features. Put the cursor where you want, and arrow through the list. Press Return to expand, and again to collapse. Then down-arrow and repeat. But sometimes you want to use these keys for other functions. So I changed it so you have to click the blogroll to set the focus. Its border turns blueish, and the keys work as described. Press the Tab key or click outside the blogroll to take the focus off the blogroll.#
I'm working with developers again, thank goodness. I once thought I could make server products or toolkits for people I called "poets" -- motivated writers. I have given up on that, at least for the time-being. I think a properly motivated intelligent writer could get developer-like results, I've seen it happen (Brent Simmons, Dan MacTough). They make really good developers because they understand the user perspective so well, it still lives inside them. The problem seems to be motivation, and a poet knowing that they need to be super-motivated and have the time, to get anything technical to work. If they knew what was required, my 2024 theory goes, and had studied for it, the way they studied for their degree, they could not only be successful, but they could contribute to the developer process. Analogously, we all have to learn a little cooking just to get through life, but only a few people are chefs. Julia Child, a hero of mine, believed she could teach anyone to be a good-enough cook. But I bet she was frustrated by human reality. 😄#
It's so funny, the editor of Wordle on a podcast on Friday, 1000th puzzle day, said there are some puzzles that you might not solve in six moves not because of skill rather because of luck. I was pretty sure when I took my second guess, but that's just when the cursing started. By the third guess I thought she's screwing with us! I should not have listened to the podcast.#On Mastodon: I've done this before, starting 25 years ago. Find some new connection I can make because someone was wise enough to add an RSS interface. I get to have an aha! moment and a good laugh at how great this is and then write a freaking blog post about it, and people think man this web thing is pretty cool.#
An upgrade idea for the web. I'd like to have a bit of JavaScript code ask to be notified when the user clicks on a link on my page that gets them a 404. I'd like a chance to do some looking around and seeing if I can find the thing they wanted. This comes up when you look at the archive of this blog for March 1999. Back then my server was a Macintosh which had a case-insensitive operating system. A few years later I moved all the stuff to Amazon S3, much less hassle, and probably cheaper too. But over there the filesystem is case-sensitive. I must've been typing in URLs by hand and not caring about case, because why should I, my server didn't care. Except now it does care and when I click links to pages I know are there, but can't be found, I get depressed. I wanted to read the damn thing, that's why I clicked on it. Not to see some cute 404 page (although it is pretty nice). Even better would be a way to tell Amazon to serve this bucket without regard to case. #Saying the web misses Google Reader is like saying the United States misses President Trump. Why do I think that? Think of the mess Google left behind when they dumped the web. Putting all our cards in one basket in software is a very very very very bad idea. As everyone who misses The Orange Feed Reader is evidence of. It's like someone rips you off bad and all you can think about is how much you miss them. You, sir or madam, need to get your head examined. #
- As I complete a big project I like to re-center, to remind myself what I'm working for.#
- My goal is to create a social web that includes blogs and twitter-like systems. To set a new baseline where titles, simple styling, links, enclosures and the ability to edit are tools writers can use.#
- Somehow twitter pushed writing into a tiny little box. If we work together we can dig ourselves out of this box. #
- I love that I can read Mastodon posts in my freaking blogroll. #
