- Glad I wrote the piece I wrote yesterday. #
- I could have written it any time in the last year as I was investigating and developing on the WordPress API and back end, but now seemed to be a good time, with all the attention its getting, and Matt's interviews, I and others are getting a better idea of what the various components of the community are. I don't know about the rest of you, but I had only a vague idea of what WordPress is beyond a piece of software used for commerce and to a lesser extent these days, writing on the web.#
- A few ideas -- not in any particular order:#
- From my point of view, blogging and the social web, WordPress is being built around more than being built on, when it is such a potent and surprisingly open platform. I took the time to look, and underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on. #
- If a community developed at this level, writing tools, we'd be compatible at a very deep level, so the opportunities for interop are amazing. I don't say that lightly. (I had asked them to allow apps to attach their own data to posts for years, until I discovered earlier this year the API has that feature. If only they had listened to the question and answered it thoughtfully, we could have saved years. The company desperately needs an evangelism function.)#
- The WordPress platform could be a very strong part of the social web. The comparison between developer freedom on the WordPress platform and the Facebook one (which is what Threads is built on) is stark. I have worked on the Facebook platform, btw -- and from a software design perspective it's brilliant, a breakthrough, something to emulate, which I did in the wpidentity package I wrote. But from a policy standpoint, after the 2016 election Facebook's API was radically restricted, not something many people know about (it was a fully public event). WordPress has an API that doesn't appear to have any such limits, and even if they imposed them, in theory their server could be cloned (it's open source) but it certainly could be emulated at an API level. #
- It's enticing. All those users -- there should be a market for writing tools there, but there isn't. Why is that??#
- I feel like we're like ships passing in the night. I thought I should point this out, at least once, as Matt and company go off in a direction I don't understand and don't see why I should want to. Did they care when the move to HTTPS undermined what remains of the original blogosphere? I don't see any evidence of it. It's like Walmart sought to build a shopping center on the remains of the Library of Alexandria. People don't seem to have any respect for independent writing on the web, what we dreamed of in the beginning, and the dream was realized. No wonder the tech industry wants to tear it down. It contradicts a basic premise of the programming priesthood. And no wonder journalism doesn't defend it, they are offended by the idea of people writing for free, based on the incorrect assumption about what we do. We're their sources, dammit, not their competitors, at least if they would do their jobs (which is another problem altogether) and if they spent any time thinking and questioning before condeming.#
- Look at John Naughton's piece today in the Guardian. He's doing more to focus attention on the web as a writing environment than the whole tech industry which is built on our work, especially Automattic. The ignorance and in some cases resentment in the industry is huge, something else Naughton points out so well. We can turn this around, I guess since WordPress is open source, it doesn't have to wait for Matt to turn in that direction. #
- Just some thoughts as the world seems to be converging on something, not sure what. There are so many doors that are now open that never were before, the question is -- do we have the courage to connect the dots and work together, or do we all insist on going our own ways to a fairly dark future. #
- PS: If you're a developer, this is the API you use in browser-JS code for the wpidentity package. This was the way Facebook packaged their API for developers, and it was far more efficient than the way Twitter did and WordPress too. So I added this to the stack, and built on it. #
- I am reminded of 2015, when the Mets were so charmed -- they could be down 9-0 in the 8th inning and you would tune into the game to see how they'd win it. It's not the usual thing for the Mets, who pull defeat from the jaws of victory far more often than the other way. #
- And omg, 2024 is shaping up the same way. #
- Sit down and shut up, here come the Mets!#
- Briefly, because I have stuff to do -- the Mets were down 1-0 in the bottom of the 8th, having been thoroughly shut down by the amazing Zach Wheeler. Imagine someone throwing a ball at you at 100 mph that looks like it's going down but actually goes up and to the left. Or next time down and to the right. You could try to swing but you'd have to be very lucky to connect. And so it was for the first seven innings until they took out Wheeler (pitchers don't do complete games any longer, they used to). #
- The Mets were ready. Hit after hit after hit and before you knew it, it was 5-1. Alonso, the star of the last Milwaukee game drove in one of the runs with a long sacrifice fly to center. #
- The Phillies and their fans who had been so confident of victory were shocked. And left to plan for today's game at 4PM on Fox. You gotta know where I'll be -- glued to the set and dreaming about the fate of this Mets team who shows real signs of strong philosophy. #
- A few years before WordPress came out, I did a product called Radio UserLand which was a combination blogging tool and feed reader. Two main screens, a streamlined UI. You could get in quickly, write and publish a post in a minute, and see it show up in the reader a moment later. It worked, and it added a major new component to the blogging world, and I think still represents the simplest most focused UI for writing. It was a really popular product. #
- The same idea, really simple blog post writing and editing, with all the features that should be available to web writers, optional titles, links, simple styling, enclosures, the ability to edit. The things the common social web apps generally don't have. #
- This imho is a huge opportunity. I wish this is where the focus in the WordPress community was, but I think right now the world is building around WordPress, not on it. It could be great, it could totally solve the problem of a new document standard in the social web that makes it really like the web. Instead they're fighting over who owns what part of the WordPress trademark, at least as far as I can tell. #
- Last year I created a Node.js package called wpidentity that acts as a bridge between a browser-based JavaScript app and the WordPress back-end, and the result is fine. It suggests that there could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea! #
- And I think the users, the writers, would love it, because we developers could compete to delight them, and not have to worry about building a huge server capability as Automattic already has debugged and scaled. And maybe the battle that's going on now could fade into the background.#
I think a lot of confusion about AI products comes from the name. It's not clear what intelligence in humans is or how it works. We just believe it exists. So then the question is, can machines do the same thing? The truth is no one knows. It could be that human intelligence, once we figure out what it is, will be as trivial as they tell us the AI "intelligence" is. So if you're trying to make sense of it, or if the idea is offensive, try pretending that "intelligence" was "pomegranate" or "cauliflower" -- these are two terms John Lennon suggested George Harrison use in place of words in lyrics he hasn't come up with. Say ChatGPT is "Artificial Cauliflower" and that should be less offensive, yes? It would make as much sense as calling it intelligence. On the other hand, conversation with my favorite Artificial Cauliflower app does feel pretty much exactly like conversing with a human. A very patient and very knowledgeable and intelligent (whatever that means) but not infallible human. #An idea for Gabe at Techmeme. Here's a screen shot of a story on Techmeme. I don't have time to click on each of the links, but a machine can. I would love to get a AI-generated summary of all the links, the range or reactions, or a consensus if one has emerged. #
We are a Mets family. Around the kitchen table in my childhood home, the default question was "What did the Mets do?" Before I was born we were a Brooklyn Dodgers family, always National League, but the Dodgers left shortly after I was born and the Mets came along when I was seven, and that was it for us. It was the one thing we all agreed on -- the Mets. Much later when my Mom and I would fight about something, a pretty regular thing -- I invented what I called Shea Stadium Rules, which meant that a disagreement could be tabled when we remember that underneath everything we are true Mets fans, and ultimately Mets fans can find something to agree on -- that rain or shine and there was plenty of rain, we always stood with our team. A deeper truth of the Mets was we didn't really mind when they lost. Because underneath it all at a whole other level, the Mets have a philosophy that is strong. We are the Mets and that's all you need to know. #- Anyway, last night it wasn't lookin good. It was a winner-take-all game with the hated (for now) Milwaukee Brewers. We hated them because it looked like they were going to end the Mets season in the first round of the playoffs. I was getting ready to take off my Mets cap for the year, and put on my Knicks cap, when Lindor walked, then Nimmo singled, and with runners on first and third and one out, Pete Alonso comes to the plate. He's been cold all year. I hoped for a base hit or at least a long sacrifice fly to bring in the runner on third. I couldn't watch but forced myself to. And then it happened. #
- We who have been joined at the heart to this team and have been through it all, have come to expect failure, but sometimes winning happens, as it did last night. A big swing. The bat connects. Oh please let it land anywhere but the glove of a Brewer, and then all of a sudden Alonso is jogging around the bases, and delirium takes over, in the living room of my mountain home and everywhere Mets fans were at that fateful hour. #
- We figured at that point they might as well just retire the side, but the Metsies, who Casey Stengel, the first manager asked "Can't anyone play this stinkin game!" -- brought in another run, which it turns out we didn't need. #
- The Brewers were overwhelmed. They tried to score in the bottom of the ninth but the Mets philosophy was too strong.#
- It's like every baseball kid's fantasy -- the count is 3 and 2 ,the team's back is to the wall, up comes the slugger, the crowd is silent and then he hits it out of the park and the team emerges victorious and the young person's fantasy saves the day. We've all been there, many times. Last night we got to live it, again, this time for real. #
- And now we go to Philadelphia to give them a proper dose of New York love. #
- Meet the Mets meet the Mets, step right up and greet the Mets, etc. #
- Game 1 of the NLDS begins tomorrow at 4PM. Good times will be had by all (except Philadelphia fans of course).#
- PS: This wasn't Mookie in game 6 of the 1986 World Series, but it was along those lines of improbability.#
- PPS: I love that they give a realtime readout on screen of the probability of each team winning. At the top of the ninth, before all the michegas, the Mets had only a 6% chance of winning. I think every game should come with a graph over time of this stat. It would be an emotional map, much more interesting than the other stats.#
A ChatGPT news network would be pretty interesting. You could register as an independent blogger, and push your writing up to their cloud in real time. And then readers could ask what experts on whatever think about what just happened and it would know what your expertise is, and it could build the report also in realtime, in response to a very detailed question you could ask. And you could tell it whether or not you want lies, or if they should omit the lies. Personally I would opt out of the lies, but some people like lies in their news, kind of like menthol in cigarettes. And forget about paying the news orgs. They don't give you a way to opt out of the lies. #So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. Think about it.#
I didn't like the code ChatGPT was writing for me, so I tried it in Claude, and the code is much closer to my style. I may try that again. I've heard it's better at supporting code than other chatbots. #
- I didn't read the WSJ story about the deflation of expertise, quoting Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who I know from my time in California. He says AI leads to a deflation of expertise. I agree with him, AI absolutely deflates the value of expertise. #
- It aggregates all of our knowledge in one place where it's easy to access, about anything you want to know. It answers questions that you can't get any other way. #
- Some technological developments are profound. We never understand all the implications of a new technology when it comes online, but you do get some strong clues. You have to use it to know learn how to think about it. That's not unreasonable because we all grew up in a world that didn't have this technology, as my parents grew up in a world without television, and I didn't use a computer until I was 18 or use the web until I was 37. None of us grew up with anything but fiction about AI, and the fiction imho didn't grasp the implications very well. #
- If I ask good questions ChatGPT stretches my mind in ways it never has been stretched before and I'm well educated and in my work have explored frontiers of knowledge, even so -- this is the most mind-stretching experience I've ever had. Not kidding. And I'm not a VC or prone to overhyping tech. #
- So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. #
- A reading portal brings a lot of writers together so you can read them all in one place.#
- A writing portal is the same idea but in reverse. I write in my portal, and it flows where ever I want it to.#
- The problem is the reading portals aren't open to allow this to work.#
- They all want you to write in their tiny little text boxes.#
When news excuses lies and when all the viewers know they're doing it, we're beyond the point of no return. #
Trade Secrets Radio: What is podcasting? This is the exact moment, 9/24/2004, that podcasting got its name and its definition. It's pretty short. We knew what we were doing. We loved what RSS did for news. Now we were doing the same for radio. Not just talking about it, but finally -- doing it. It worked, pretty freaking well. There's a podcast episode to go with it, coming out shortly. #
I have been looking for this picture of John Palfrey, and just found it via digging through the archive for September 2004.#
It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.#
- I have a lot of podcast catching up to do today.#
- A Scripting News podcast from today, about the Podcast0 feed and the power of OPML subscription lists ftw.#
- A Trade Secrets cast from Oct 1, 2004. #
- A Trade Secrets cast with Adam and myself from Sept 28, 2004.#
- An Morning Coffee Notes episode from the same day, about Bloglines, an early feed reader, the commons and fair compensation for centralized commons. #
I'm still waiting for the podcast client that can subscribe to OPML lists, so I can subscribe to shows from my desktop, even automate it. If one of them did, we could start curated lists of feeds put together by smart people and influencers. The first podcast client that did this would open up the market, and stand out from the pack. I've been asking for this from the inception of podcasting twenty years ago. I had it in my first podcatcher. It would be great if one of the popular clients of today adopted the idea. Happy to help.#I had a dream last night with many of my dead relatives present. We were at some kind of social event. My grandfather had a new wife or girlfriend, but he didn't recognize me, though he pretended to. My mother was far off in the distance taking pictures. I wonder what that means. Some of them were dead and gone. I had to remind myself of that. Meanwhile both my parents were alive and being themselves. (Heh.) My subconscious has a clear idea of who they are/were, only it doesn't register that some of them are gone. #
Here is the monthly archive for Scripting News in OPML, for September. I've been systematically creating this archive since May 2017. And also have been able to reconstruct the archive for most of Scripting News going back to 1994. I've been doing a lot of work with the contents of this archive in the last month. #
- Cross-posting is here now. I am not surprised Croissant is getting such a positive reception. #
- That is where the fediverse will be defined imho, in the intersection between the competing social web services. #
- You'll know it's working when they feel they have to match each others' features because with cross-posting their difference in character limits, titles, styling, links etc will be much more visible. #
- Activitypub is too much. Cross-posting is exactly right and here now.#
If I were benevolent dictator of Mastodon, I'd add Markdown support everywhere so we'd have links and simple styling. #
If I were benevolent dictator of BlueSky, I'd add Markdown support there too. Btw, can you really claim to be part of the social web when you don't support the web's most basic feature -- linking??#
If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I'd add Markdown support to Threads so writers could use the basic communication tool of the web.
#
BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll feed reader earlier this year. There are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. The way we read the web hasn't received enough attention, we've been so focused on the twitter-like interfaces, forgetting that reading on a full page is important too. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. #This blog has been running for: 29 years, 11 months, 22 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds. Still diggin! #
Thread: Much easier than struggling with ActivityPub, would be a set of functionally equivalent APIs and a common understanding of what a “post” is among various social web systems. This how we created solid interop in the blogging world, and it would work here too. #
If you want to help the open web, when you write something you’re proud of on a social web site like Bluesky or Mastodon, also post it to your blog. Not a huge deal but every little bit helps.#
I should put a dollar in a jar every time ChatGPT saves my ass. I thought I had boxed myself into a corner regarding the hash value for a web page, then I asked a question I wasn't sure there was an answer to. "In JS in the browser, I have the name of an anchor element and I want the browser to vertically scroll to it," to which it said: "Here's an example." #
Molly White wrote a great piece on the problem we're all facing now that so many of us are trying to maintain a presence on a few different social web sites. She describes a situation I've been writing about since the mid-late 00s, with the inception of Twitter and Google Reader, two phenoms that had very different ideas of what writing on the web should be. That's where the problems started.#- Before that we had a cross-posting API that was broadly supported and really worked, based on RSS 2.0's idea of what a post is. It's called the Metaweblog API, and it's still supported by WordPress and probably a few other social web sites (I take a broad view of what the social web is and definitely include WordPress and other blogging tools. Based on Molly's piece, I expect she would see it that way too.)#
- The first approach I took to this problem was to cross-post as Molly describes, to work around the limits in software. But the limits will creep into your writing, since you know that people who read your stuff on Bluesky, Threads or Twitter won't see the links, you'll be reluctant to them in your writing. I encountered this problem in the mid-teens when I was trying to cross-post to Medium and Facebook, one supported links and basic HTML, the other didn't. Eventually before giving up on the POSSE approach in 2017, I was barely using links at all. I was trying to keep four pieces of software happy and doing so made my writing suck.#
- To get a handle on the problem, I created a list of features I felt all social web platforms should support and published it at textcasting.org. Ultimately I think we're going to have to make a platform that implements a reasonable subset of this functionality, if only as a demo for the social web companies to show them what we want. There already are Mastodon forks that support some of the features (no character limit, Markdown support). #
- I published the code I use to cross-post for my linkblog, that much does work quite well across the different platforms, and I'd be happy to operate a server for people to experiment with. The server software runs in Node.js, is already open source. It has a simple plug-in architecture so support for new platforms can be added without modifying the server. #
- But my main point is this -- let's work together. We really aren't very good in tech at building on each others' work, that's why we get so stuck. I have a lot to say about that too, I've been writing about it on my blog for many many years. #
- And thanks for picking up this thread. It's one of the two big threads -- along with AI -- how are we going to make writing on the web work.#
- PS: I started writing this in Mastodon, but obviously I had to fall back to my blog, because there was no room and I needed to use links or why bother. ;-)#
When markets have dominant products, evolution freezes. Google search, for example. I should have great search for my blog by now, powered by Google. It has been here for 26 years. They should have been doing R&D on how they can be part of a better reading environment on the web. But reading on the web has just gotten worse over the years. It's why we don't like clicking on links, usually what we find at the other end of the link is obnoxious. To get some peace and quiet we had to go to Twitter of all places, but now that's gotten ridiculous too. The only corner of the web where there's real exciting innovation is ChatGPT. And what's tragic about that is we've never made search work on the web, and search is valuable too, not just the digested version of what was said that ChatGPT produces. But I'd like some of my writing to survive the Great Ingestion. Writing matters, how humans express themselves matters. In other words we still have work to do in search, AI does not fill that need, at least not yet. #An idea for a news org. I want a for-pay site where I can ask a question about the news and get the most up-to-date answer. I'd like to link to that page from a blog post, and have it either be frozen, to document where we were on that day, or dynamic, so that it changes over time. I'm sure this product will be here soon, so obvious. #
- I've had the same thought as Dan Froomkin, of course -- esp given how much voodoo is in weighting various things, the polls are junk. #
- But, she could be winning much bigger than the polls say. And wouldn't that be nice. ❤️ #
- But do you remember part of the 2016 postmortem was that yeah it was a problem for the racists among us that we elected a black president, and now they want a woman president. Many of us thought this is the price we're paying for the euphoria we felt in 2008.#
- All he says about Harris is true. She's a dream candidate, she had my vote at "Hello." How could anyone not see what's so obvious, here's someone who organized her party's support in the blink of an eye, and she was ready to run, all the pieces were in place in record time. Such competence, drive, humor, did I say drive? :-)#
- I worry that maybe all that was enough to get her even with Trump because now we're pressing the race and gender button again, and they still don't buy the idea of a non-white-male, Christian president.#
- Oh and btw her husband is Jewish, and... all the childless bullshit. #
- So I worry that we may be borderline fucked again. Pray. Pray, even if you don't believe.#
Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there. And now that once we have a chance to erase the limits, maybe -- none of the companies running their products are doing it. I don't want the way they do it to be the only way, the products are deliberately incompatible. Social web is the best name for what I'm working on. So I need to reserve this space. They didn't ask for my opinion, the first I heard of it was a press release. When I ship my thing I want to point back at this and say look -- I did tell you this was going to be a problem. #oursocialweb.org: You don't have to give it any money or come to any meetings. Just know that someone else believes in users and developers. And let's work together to make it great, as soon as we can, without waiting for the big companies.#
The question came up on Threads as to whether the ActivityPub support in Ghost will be a full two-way presence in the fedisphere, and apparently the answer is yes. They are working on a feed reader that also hooks into AP. That's how I would have done it. Really feeds and tweets should always have been peers. If you want to know the history, blame Google Reader for that disconnect. Also it highlights the need for a news-zine focused on the social web. When the PC first came out there was PC Mag and PC World and then PC Week. Same for the Mac. And there was InfoWorld that covered everything. Now we're basically using smoke signals between users. A few really interested users could bootstrap a blog to keep track of what's going on, and share what you learn publicly. That was the advice I gave Mike Arrington and he started TechCrunch and that acted as the glue that hooked together the early blogosphere, feeds and ultimately twitter and its offspring. We need it again. Users and developers party together has never been more needed as now.#
Interesting situation in Atlanta with the Mets. They have two more games to play with the Braves, but there's a hurricane headed toward Atlanta. It's going to start raining at 1PM and won't stop until Friday afternoon. It's the end of the season and both the Braves and Mets are in the same wildcard battle. Do the Mets stay in Atlanta to ride out the storm, or head back to NY? It's far more weird than I have time to explain right now.#- I keep thinking of this cartoon, which explains it so well. #
Now that ActivityPub is claiming to be the Social Web, I feel like Lloyd Bentsen at the debate with Dan Quayle. ActivityPub is not the web any more than Dan Quayle was Jack Kennedy. The web is simple. That was hard to do. Very little since then lives up to that standard of simplicity, definitely not ActivityPub. The web is the web is the web is the web etc. Pick another more humble name. If it ever does achieve the utility of the web does we can take another look.#
Imagine no doctor would treat you for a serious illness until you got a court order saying it was due to rape, incest or the life of the mother. Judges with the power of life and death. In some states with the death penalty judges have the power to sentence people to death, but not for having a well-accepted medical procedure. But that's the situation women with a troubled pregnancy are in, if they live in the wrong state. From the patient's point of view, I have a slight inkling about what this is like because twice in my life I've needed health care to save me from imminent death. The health care system never hesitated to help. But what if they had said "we can't admit you until a judge rules that we can." In the new USA, abortion is like a pardon, something only the government can grant. Forget about juries of our peers. It raises so many questions. If a woman is about to miscarry are they even allowed to admit her to the hospital, or does she have to wait until she is actually dying? If you can check her in, what are the limits of the treatment they can provide? Aspirin? Blood? Oxygen? Surgery? And btw, medicine has advanced a lot since before Roe v Wade. Whatever practices they had for avoiding abortion can't apply now. This is the kind of thing no society should change the way we changed it as an edict handed down by judges who are subject to corruption. We are learning about a serious flaw in our system of government. #It would be great if we could make voting a party, a celebration, something to look forward to, not something you have to make time for. That would probably do more to improve the lives of all Americans than any other single thing. It's like the SuperBowl, the NBA Finals, Coachella or the Oscars, only better -- because we are the stars.#
- First, a couple of examples/case studies.#
- 1. About ten years ago I was trying to figure out how to get started with Node.js. I knew a little JavaScript, but nothing I read about Node made it click. It's server software, so there must be a way to write an HTTP server? From there, I read all the details about the power it has, but what I needed was a Hello World script. Brent Simmons gave me the script, and step by step instructions on how to write it. #
- I followed his steps, and it worked, and of course I wrote a blog post about it. That was the key I needed that unlocked what Node is, and helped me see what I could do with it. The first thing I did was factor out some of the bits so I could make it even simpler and then I built. I just wanted a few lines of code that created a server and responded to requests. All I needed was a Hello World to get me going. #
- Now Brent knew that I knew the basics of HTTP servers, we both worked together on a huge app that had as a small part of it a full HTTP server, thanks to Wes Felter who wrote it, no one asked him to, one day he showed up with a server that ran in Frontier. I was ecstatic. That's the key. If you have something that isn't truly new, that might have some analogies in other worlds, if you want people in those other worlds to know how to get started, give them the beginning. The first step.#
- 2. Another example. How I learned to create and edit a website. It was 1994. I loved the web the way I love ChatGPT today. I knew how to use it, but I didn't know how to make it. Everyone told me it was really simple and they sent me links to all the docs, but they made no sense, because they talked about things I didn't understand. What I really needed was a way to make a web page that was as simple as the one Brent provided for Node-based HTTP servers, with tools and concepts I knew how to use. I found one, a service provided by Ohio State University. You emailed a message to them and they put it "on the web" and sent you back a link to the page. Click the link and there's what you typed. I tried Hello World and got back a link to a page that said Hello World. So I tried something more complicated, I did a view source of Hotwired.com's home page, and copy and pasted it into an email. That worked too (with broken images because the urls were relative). #
- Everything I've ever learned how to do required me to first understand it at this level.#
- Okay here we are in 2024, and I want to understand what Bluesky is. I know how to use it, but I don't know how to make it. But I would be surprised if it is any more complicated that writing a web content management system that uses feeds, something I've done many times. I know the components of a message, have iterated over it for the last thirty years. I even wrote the spec that defines them in RSS 2.0. We're all doing the same thing over and over and Bluesky is no different. I hear there's some nice design for the protocol, but right now I don't care. I want my Hello World. The minimal code I need to add a node to the network defined by Bluesky and I want to see what it can do with the same kind of aha moment I had with the web. I want it to work when I try it, and I want it to reveal what Bluesky is beyond what I can see from using it. I want to begin to understand the opportunities for interop. #
- Why do I ask? For one, I'm a student of this stuff, and I want to understand. But I also am very active in this area, and interop is my product (really read that piece, I mean it, and I think it's Bluesky's product too). I'm into working together -- it happens so infrequently. So here I'm also trying to show not just you how to explain what you do for a curious but time-limited developer, but I want to make this a this.how document that explains how to do it for everyone, hoping that we as an art and industry start explaining ourselves better to each other, because we absolutely need to do this much better imho, ymmv, mmlm, etc. #
- To summarize -- assume I know how the web works. I've worked with the structures and protocols for systems that are very much like Bluesky. Don't try to explain the design of the protocol, just use it to solve a problem that I will understand because I use the product and I have developed lots of stuff like it. It should be possible to show us, to teach us, what your product does. #
- PS: It could take a few days to put a Hello World together. Because once you do the first iteration, you may think of a more direct way to illustrate the idea, and you should do it, iterate until it works, until you can't make it any simpler. #
- PPS: And if you don't want to do it, that's okay too. I just thought it was worth the effort to explain what's needed to foster a greater understanding of what you're doing and what the opportunities for interop are. #
This is what it looks like when UPS loses a package. It's a case for the new Pixel 9 Pro. It shipped 17 days go. It was hell to just tell Google that the case was lost. I expected at that point they'd apologize and refund the money. That was a week ago. Just got an email saying want me to return the case when it arrives. It's never going to arrive. Luckily this is a cheap product, just $38. If it had happened with the $1300 phone, that would be a pretty big problem. It's amazing that a company the size and age of Google doesn't have a procedure for dealing with products that are lost (or more likely stolen) in transit. I've been through this with Amazon, they knew what to do, because UPS does lose packages, esp ones that look like they have phones in them. Anyway I have a fairly large credit with Google. I don't dare use it to purchase anything else, given how incompetent they are at dealing with fairly common customer problems. #I wish my father had lived to use ChatGPT. He would have been so thrilled. My uncle would have lost his shit. #
- BTW, to be clear, I have no interest in working on twitter-like systems.#
- It's been like a prison to writers, we're stuck with this huge divide, with crap on both sides. #
- These things exist, they have a jumble of APIs and ways to integrate. #
- And we've been playing by the rules laid down by Twitter (ev, biz and jack) for 18 freaking years. That's enough. #
- This will never get sorted out until people realize it needs sorting out.#
- Not expecting much more to happen there. #
Instead of just fact-checking the candidates, and presenting "both sides," how about recording the number of times the candidate threatens specific races, genders, lifestyles, origins, religions and of course individual people. Keep a page where you tally the groups he doesn't threaten with expulsion or worse. That would be very revealing, and in line with the true issue of this election. Time for you all to get in sync with the actual American history that's being made. #
It's around this time of year that I start thinking about my BOTY. I should give out a plaque or a statue or something. Someday! Anyway almost immediately I had my answer. The announcement will wait till December of course, sometimes early January. #
Social networks are condemned when they carry lies from race-hate, misogyny and worse, but the major news orgs do it all the time. It's ridiculous that there are two standards. #
To my programmer friends, how long would it have taken to answer this question using Google and StackExchange. There was a bug in this one line of code, a call to new Date () in JavaScript, that was behaving as if months were not 0-based, which they are known to be. The problem: I was specifying the day as 0 and month, correctly, but the day had to be 1 in order for it to work and without thinking I had specified it as 0. #
- Since I'm about to turn 70 (next May), and because my body is getting old in ways it never has before (of course) -- I've become a more active participant in the health care system. #
- One thing I've learned is it can be hard to get the attention of the doctors. And once you see your GP about a problem it's almost certain they're going to send you to a specialist. So you go to the specialist and it's pretty random as to whether they put the effort into understanding your situation in full. And they aren't trying to solve all your problems, just the ones they deal in. #
- An aside, a couple of years ago I had a condition that ChatGPT diagnosed in a second but it took the doctors who weren't paying much attention (my primary care doctor had retired and I was being shuffled between NPs and MDs until they could find someone to be my new main doctor) so they were all sending me to the wrong specialists, all of whom said there was no problem, yet I still had the symptoms which were getting worse. On the fourth try, someone sent me to the right specialist and they instantly diagnosed what ChatGPT had diagnosed at the outset. So when people say AI could hurt medical care, I don't think so, it would probably be a good idea to have an AI looking over their shoulders and asking if they've considered the Occam's Razor specialist. #
- So you have to be alert, and push to get them to pay attention. #
- And communicating with the system is ridiculous. Almost everything has to be done over the phone. They have email, but if you want to set up an appointment, you have to call. And wait on hold. And wait and wait. And then it's a dice roll as to who you get connected to. There are some people you talk to who seem to be trying to be annoying. It's a total pain in the ass, but you have to do it. (And since they have to ask for your birthdate to identify you they know how old you are and treat you accordingly.)#
- All the health care for a person my age seems to be directed at finding the thing that's going to kill you and treating it. That's good, and that's a shift in perspective from someone who until recently had a young body which basically took care of itself. Or so it seemed (I did have emergency heart surgery at 47 that saved my life, although that's a fairly distant memory now).#
- So right now I have a thing that needs to be looked into because it might be one of those serious things. And it's really hard to get the system to respond quickly, because if it's serious it's one of those things that you want to deal with asap. I don't think it is, but you have to act as if it might be. And it can be humiliating to say the least. #
- But there's no law saying the doctor, or any of the others in the system, could go to jail or lose their license if they treat any illness I might have. I can now for the first time really understand what it might be like to have to deal with that in addition to all the other serious stuff you have to deal with. #
- That's the point of this post. Throwing a wrench into the already broken wheels of our medical system is the crime. They should go to prison for doing this, the six Supreme Court justices and other Republican assholes who stick their noses where they don't belong. There should be a penalty for what they're doing, they should have the fear they're putting women through. They should worry about what happens when their decision is overturned. #
- Perhaps they should lose their medical care as should all the members of their families. Then they might get an idea of how sinful they have been.#
- The first draft of this post appeared on Facebook. #
This is a test. For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of a new server app that combines the functionality of several apps I used to run as separate servers. The goal is to be able to integrate the functionality of all the components. It's time to invest in blogging in a real way. The 2017 corner-turn was about getting back to the foundation I had before trying to co-exist with Twitter, Facebook, Medium. All three are now no longer high value targets for interop. So while I wasted a lot of time trying to peer with them, I did finally get off the horse and I had a decent setup while developed Drummer and FeedLand and in doing so learned how to do scalable server apps with SQL. I've wasted so much time trying to be compatible with apps that didn't want us. I have a feeling that none of the current targets really want us either. So let's get back to the Open Web, which gave us much hope before. I think we can do a lot with feeds and OPML. They're to open systems what GPL is to open source. You don't get to be half-committed to being open, you have to be all-in or you can't play. (Same idea as podcasting, which of course is just an instance of RSS.) You don't have to deal with a lot of confusion to find the interop. You just have to be willing to look in that direction. This started out as a test post and look what it has become. #Has anyone attempted to make a higher level language on top of SQL? It's taken me a few iterations over years to finally (I hope) figure out how to design a table to take advantage of the features that evolved into making SQL efficient for the applications people really deploy. If this were machine language, it would be time to start thinking about the HLL that it inspires. Actually long past time imho. #
My Pixel 9 Pro keeps giving me tips on using it when I bring it up, as I'm trying to read an important message, or change something at a red light. I'm always distracted when I use the phone, and by adding more distractions to sell me on something, that's not their right. I paid $1300 for this new phone. And also I can't figure out how to get the phone to ring when I get a call. I keep missing important calls. #
Note to self: When the phone doesn't ring, go to Settings - Sound & vibration - Do Not Disturb. It was on for some reason. I'm sure I didn't set this. I'm pretty sure I've been here before. Here's the ChatGPT log and screen shot.#
I keep discovering uses for ChatGPT. I think it would be very useful to learn a language, for example. I know how to say this in English, could you explain to me, in English, how to say it in French. I bet it's very good at that. I am using it to learn to write SQL code that takes advantage of all the arcane features they've added over the years to handle cases that come up in real database work. It's anything but a new language, and efficiency is everything -- so I think they pretty much have all the cases covered. I remember how frustrating it was to learn Algol when all I knew before that was Fortran and Basic. It would have been great to have ChatGPT to coach me on it. #
Sarah Huckabee Sanders forced us to think of her as a mom. I don't think that works out very well in her favor, probably best not to go there. #
I was driving on a mountain road yesterday to pick up a pizza in a nearby town. I drive it fairly regularly, and I have a car that handles well so I drive at the speed limit or a little above. #- Still, what often happens on this road is some asshole tailgates, getting so close that if I hit the brakes suddenly they would have no time to react, and would slam into the rear of my car. And you do sometimes have to hit the brakes because animals appear on the road, deer, turkeys are common. Sometimes even bears. #
- I've never hit an animal, but I have come close. #
- There's no way to pass on this road. #
- I've been in the other driver's place when a tourist is driving 30 in a 45 mph zone, and what do you do? Keep your distance and don't freak out. It's perfectly legal to go 30 in a 45 mph zone. #
- Anyway I slow down, to send a signal to the other driver, and also to mitigate damage if there is an accident. This asshole leans on their horn. I slow down more. #
- And when I come to a stop sign I come to a full stop and pause, thinking okay they'll pass me now, and I'll get a chance to see who this asshole is. They stayed behind and leaned on the horn again. #
- When we come to the next stop sign, it's the end of the road and you can go left or right. I'm going right, they're going left, and the road is wide so the asshole pulls up to the left of me and I look over and see a middle-aged woman, could be a teacher or a nurse. I was amazed. The last kind of person I would expect to make such a scene. #
- If I had a chance I would have asked what the hell they were doing. #
- BTW, I don't speed on these roads because I like driving them, I love the mountains, and the fresh air, and I wasn't in any kind of a hurry. It's not uncommon to get a tailgater but usually they take the hint when I slow down and add a few car lengths between us. #
- One of the reasons I have a blog is so I have a place to write these stories. 😄#
Interesting thread on a simple upgrade for any podcasting client that would create a network of tools people could use for subscribing and listening. I've tried to get people who make podcast clients to listen. Yes I am a user, but I also designed the technology, and did the first implementations, so I know what's possible.#
I theorized why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky on Bluesky. I did the same on Threads and heard people say ugly personal things about Dorsey. This really pissed me off, because he's a human being who made a large contribution to the technology we use, and I think his heart has been in the right place. Nobody is purely good or bad. If my theory is right about why Dorsey is disappointed, it's a valid point, Bluesky was started with its prime mission as creating a distributed system. The more they dig in on nice-to-have features that have nothing to do with being distributed, the more they go down the same path as Twitter did. Jack was openly talking about turning Twitter into a developer platform as early as 2007. Had they realized the system he talked about, basically global object storage with real financial backing, we'd be much further along with the web as an operating system. We're paradoxically so close to that now, but so far, for a reason I don't understand. We should start having a public discussion about this. It can't hurt to talk about what-if's instead of barrelling down the same ridiculous cul de sac as we did in the 00's. I've been writing about this since 1994, the loop we refuse to break out of. Well let's start talking about how we break out, because it's not going to "just happen" organically. #When will ChatGPT be able to do a transcript of an audio file?#
I look forward to the day when I can ask a question on my blog and get an answer, on the blog, from a trusted member of my karass. #
I look forward to the day when I can link to a topic I've written about on my blog without having to depend on Google. I don't think they know I have a blog or have any respect for it. #
I've been re-watching The Bear and am now totally thinking of my job as a chef. I started out that way 40+ years ago, and somewhere along the line I stopped thinking that way. If you can, watch S02 E07 to see what I mean. It's about service, the connection between the staff and the people who come to eat, and the medium is the food. It's the same idea. There's so much cynicism around tech, and I hate that. We've rarely seen it as a human thing both by the people who make the meals and the people who love great food. The world thinks of it as billionaires and influencers and lying fascist politicians. But it should be much more than that. #Has it ever been suggested that journalists take an oath, similar to the one the President takes to: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Could be voluntary. Sports reporters might take a different oath. #
Shownotes page for the first Trade Secrets podcast, on this day in 2004. I was in Seattle, Adam was coming from Belgium. Haven't written any notes about it yet. If others are interested in listening and commenting on these podcasts, this is when it was all coming together, let me know and perhaps we can start a thread on Mastodon. #
- I have a linkblogging tool crossposts to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Twitter, WordPress and RSS. #
- Every time I publish a link it goes to all those places,#
- The RSS feed is doing a lot of the work.#
- Links from the RSS feed show up on my Links page and in the nightly emails.#
- The RSS feed is also used to connect to Threads, going through micro.blog. I am able to give it the URL of the linkblogging feed, and then click on Add Threads -- and that's it. When I post something to the feed it shows up on Threads. #
- This feature is tucked away in a corner of micro.blog and I suspect most people don't know it's there. It's sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems. If you're a micro.blog user, its Feeds page is where you set it up. Screen shot.#
I used to think of Twitter as a coral reef, but its role as a world wide notification system is fading, and we haven't replaced it with anything. I wrote this in 2007 when the utility of Twitter was just becoming apparent.#
I was recruited to speak at a Ria Novosti conference in Moscow in June 2011, but decided not to go. This was back when we thought naively that Russia was a democracy, and working with Russian journalists, when American journalists wouldn't, seemed like a fair deal. Something about it didn't smell right though, so I stayed home. #
Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers. For me, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter is still here, but I use it a lot less than I used to. Each of them acts as if they are alone, except for ActivityPub but that's more complicated than it may seem. As often is the case, the tech industry is depending on confusion. This may be a strategic mistake. I could cite a few examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that came before, often with remarkable speed. Each of them is playing for all of it, wanting to control their users, make it so they only post to one system. And some people do. I think it's better if we, as users, remain diversified.#I find that a lot of my posts on my blog are just like the tweets I post on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter. I used to have an icon in my outliner that tweeted the text of the bar cursor headline. #
If ChatGPT had a simple, non-AI scrapbook, like the old Mac OS had, where you could just throw something over your shoulder so you can find it later with a text search, that would make it a lot more useful for retaining practices that work. It's a shame to work something out, come up with the answer that worked, and then to have to do it all over again 23 months later when you encounter the same problem.#
- You'll never see an article in the NYT saying how wrong polls have been in every presidential election because then they'd have to fire half their political reporters. #
- If you want a better idea of how it's going, look at where the ad dollars are going, and where the candidates are campaigning. #
- And make sure all your friends know that you're voting and who you're voting for. I think that makes a difference. #
- I'm voting straight Democratic party line.#
Could we agree that ChatGPT can ingest everything that's in Wikipedia? I particularly want the images. I'd like to ask for a picture of Chuck Berry, and get something nice and be able to put him in a scene with the Wordle Kitty. That seems pretty harmless. And the news industry could hardly object, they didn't invent Chuck Berry, or own the copyright of the picture of him in Wikipedia.#
I'm searching for some common ground between the twitter-like systems, a basis for interop, a common API even. We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. And you could write the script that did that in an afternoon or two. We started out with simple systems and the best of intentions. There's no technical barrier. And we could do it in a few weeks at most if there was a will to do it#
BTW the Wikipedia page for the MetaWeblog positions it as a replacement for the Blogger API, but it's an extension of it. You could use MetaWeblog to publish to Blogger sites, but it also supported features that Blogger didn't have, that were in our blogging software, Manila.#
- Hecklers at last night's rally in Greensboro, couldn't hear what they were angry about, but it had something to do with Gaza.#
- The US isn't doing the killing there, the issue is with Netanyahu who is part of the same political party as Trump. So you can be pretty sure the killing won't stop there at least until after our election. One way to be sure the killing continues is to elect Trump.#
Show notes for a short podcast I recorded on this day in 2004, a response to Adam's podcast which I had just listened to. These were the good days, a new medium in its early stages of booting up, after years of trying to get it to go. In the next few weeks, it'll really start going. You can subscribe to the podcast feed here. #
I also added a link to the RSS feed in each shownotes page. In the HTML at the bottom, as a white on orange icon and in the page source as a <link> element. #
I keep seeing mention of "Podcast 2.0" in various places. That is unusually greedy, even for the tech industry. What next? Deprecating the way podcasting has worked for the last 20 years? How do we know the people doing this aren't shilling for Spotify, Google or Amazon? Please don't mess with something that works as well as podcasting. You want to do something better, great -- make your own name and get people to respect it. Stealing respect from podcasting tells me you have no honor or self-respect, and it should say the same to everyone else. Something else that tells you it's bad, they never bothered to send me an email. Welcome to the tech industry. #
Just watched a Harris rally in Charlotte NC. She's using what Trump said in the debate in her new campaign speech. Brilliant. Getting him on the record in that context is a gift. 60 million viewers. Up till then he only took interviews where he could bully his way past the interviewer. #
Braintrust query: I got an email from OpenAI saying I could access the new models, but I don't see the new models in the popup menu.#
I've been enjoying the recent blog posts by my longtime friend Jeff Jarvis. A couple of months ago, I was practically begging him to do this. He was pouring so much unfocused energy into making journalism play an appropriate role in our democracy. When Jeff started posting to his blog, it gave his friends something to point to. This writing had much more impact than a random tweet. Journalism crossed a line they should not have crossed. Now we fully expect them to try to do it again. We have to find a way for our ideas not to be scattered in the wind, so thorougly ignorable. And in doing so, I'm convinced we'd find a better way to organize the electorate online so it's more immune from unwise and unfair manipulation from the journalists. At the same time Dan Gillmor, who was also scattering his ideas about, has started a newsletter. Dan was a real blogging pioneer as was Jeff. We remember how this kind of thing boots up. We can set up any kind of distribution system we need. What matters is the collection of brilliance. Individuals are not so powerful unless they come from one of these. #
Another fantastic thinker and writer who is mostly scattering his ideas -- Dan Conover, who when he comes out with a piece, I stop everything and sit down and carefully read it and savor it, because not only is there sure to be new info and new ideas, the writing is sooo good. He's a former local reporter in South Carolina. I met him on a road tour I did a bunch of years ago. Where does he post this stuff? Facebook. I want it to be part of the concentrated web writers union. Maybe think of it as my karass, my version of The Atlantic, perhaps. Or my version of the op-ed page of the NY Times. I think there is definitely enough good stuff out there, unorganized, to easily rival them for originality, depth of thought, experience and great writing. Dan is on my list of such superheroes. #And btw I also am wasting my ideas too, one in a hundred has any influence, and even then it's minscule, the ideas drift away unimplemented or unused. I keep writing, hoping I see a way to get into the global conversation, again. I remember what it's like. But I'm not done. We still have a big problem to solve in our political and communication system. Online software is where it's at. #
Someday an election will be like Game of Thrones or Succession. A campaign would be a season. There would be character development, arcs, twists, revelations, unforseen events, cameos, acts of god. Near the end of the season you have the election, with the following episodes the plotting, intrigue, and undermining of democracy, and at the end of the season the inauguration of a new president. Each year you have more michegas, until four years later you go through the election all over again. People would really study the candidates, and would have reasons they like one character over another. And maybe the patriarch doesn't die, and decides to run again. This is where we're heading, we might already be there. #- I was trying to explain to Miguel de Icaza, a longtime developer friend, how Dropbox was within inches of making the web a million times more useful, ten years ago, and then backed away from it. I don't think I've ever told the story here on my blog, so here goes. #
- In 2013, Dropbox had a developer program, you could write an app, and register it with them, and then the user could run your app from a website, and log on to Dropbox in the app, and they would have access to files in a directory in the user's Dropbox hierarchy in the app, as if it were accessing it from the local file system, which in a way they were.#
- I made an outliner for that system, and loved it -- it was great, I didn't have to get into the business of reselling storage, or user identity. And for the users, it "just worked" as they say, because they were already using Dropbox, and now it could be used for something completely new and incredibly useful, and it didn't require huge venture capital to get it going, so it would enable very small niche products to find a market. It was brilliant and visionary, and I was very open about my feelings on my blog. #
- They also had a Public Folder, where any user files could be accessed over the web. #
- They were within an inch of the perfect system. The problem was my app couldn't access user files in any other directory. So it didn't allow for specialization in products, every editor had to do everything. #
- They had an option where you could give an app access to everything but that was ridiculous, I couldn't recommend users do that. Users store all kinds of private data on Dropbox.#
- Here's the howto for the product and how it connects to Dropbox.#
- They lost interest in this, btw -- and when they broke the API, I took that opportunity to shut down the product. #
- I wish they had gone in that direction, or someone would go in that direction. #
The most encouraging thing about last night's debate was that the moderators were journalists. When Trump repeated his most egregious lie about murdering babies being legal in certain states, moderator Muir confidently, almost derisively, said that there is no such thing. And when Trump said he didn't admit he lost the election, and then when challenged said in a snotty way he was being sarcastic, Muir plainly that wasn't true either. It was like the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. ABC News was the last place you'd expect real journalism to surface, maybe the NYT et al will follow their lead. #I wouldn't have traded places with Harris for anything in the world, she did fantastic. The pressure on her was enormous. I don't think Trump said one thing that was true. And Harris made the point that the division is coming from that guy over there, and if we don't want it all we have to do is turn the freaking page. For once the power is with the people. The Repubs in the Senate wouldn't vote to convict, the Supreme Court just gave him immunity, but the American people, in a few weeks, can tell them all to fuck off. #
Idea for TV series. Law and Order style crime drama where all the crimes are against humanity.#
Even if his supporters don't see it, Trump is a pathetic broken has-been. When he's gone we'll dance in good riddance. #
What Harris is doing is marketing. It takes a lot of impressions to get people to believe she can be president. If she wants to win, she has to do a lot of interviews and rallies and say quotable things, and be tweeting all the time, not just in the campaign snark accounts (which are great) but also seriously in her own name. #- People aren't going to care about the policies though they will say that's what they want more of. What they want to feel is that she is present. Biden was invisible that's why they didn't like or trust him, even though he is a good president. Trump is very present, and they like that, trust that, but most of them also know he's a creep. She just has to keep beating the drum. #
- And the secret is to keep beating the drum, constantly, after she wins. Don't disappear like Obama did. She must not only be president of the United States, but she has to be president of Twitter too (and by Twitter I mean all the twitter-like systems). #
- So don't expect undecided voters to all convert to Harris in one event. But they will if she stays in the news, even dominates the news (please) and help them see Trump as a thing of the past. #
- That's the way to win, and to win in governing too. #