Podcast: ChatGPT and learning. 12 minutes.#

Succession: A lot of people still think Tom was the winner. He was not. He got a Tom job, not the job the Roy kids wanted, expected, felt entitled to. That job went to Matsson. Who Logan chose as his successor. We all got wrapped up in the delusion of the kids. Succession was performance art. And we are the performers. And most people haven't yet seen the brilliance of it. #

Sometimes I wonder if there's anything but bullshit on social media. And maybe instead of controlling AI bots, we should control the idiocracy of social media and start using that wonderful intellect we give ourselves so much credit for. The fact is that our online selves are mostly bullshit. #

My friend NakedJen came to visit last year, first time I'd seen her in many years. Well what a delight. She's so smart and righteous and funny. She's a tiny but fierce person. And she had a new thing she said: BULLSHIT -- very loudly whenever conversation got around to that topic. I now say bullshit myself more often and more emphatically and when I do it on my blog I think of NakedJen doing her thing. #

I searched this blog for NakedJen and Google, whose AI is reallllly dumb, suggests that perhaps I meant Naked Men? Well no, Google -- that's not what I meant. One time when I searched for my mother on my blog with Google, it suggested a different name. My mother and I have the same last name. Why would Google think I mis-spelled my own mother's name? I think they still need to do a little work on their intelligence. #

I'm all-in on Textcasting. #

Something interesting to ponder. When we have Textcasting-compatible social media networks, there will be no more wall between blogging and tweeting or tooting. And then we will be able to choose our writing tools and they could be blogging tools as easily as they are the tiny little writing boxes Twitter et al give us. Blogging tools are equipped to deal with titles, styles, links, enclosures, no length limit, editing. These might seem like luxuries now, but once we have them, we'll be amazed that we put up without them for so long when they were very very very very easy to implement. #

Bluesky People Browser: I'm playing with ideas of how to browse around a network of followers on a social media platform. Bluesky is the first that I've had an OPML interface to work with. So I created an outliner for walking the structure of people and who they follow on Bluesky. #

Screen shot of BSPB.#

The nice thing about sports, it's the last place you can have an opinion without everyone losing their shit.#

I don't think federation as conceived by Mastodon and Bluesky will be a winning feature in the future of Twitter-like systems. #

WordPress first shipped 20 years ago today. Thanks for keeping blogging going, for supporting RSS and rssCloud and the open web. 😀#

It might not be possible to de-Nazify social nets like Twitter, Mastodon or Bluesky -- yet that seems to be what users want. Which leads to a big question, what is the purpose of these networks? Has anyone ever tried to write that down?#

What if for the sake of argument there were lots of Mastodon or Bluesky instances that didn't connect to any other instances, that just served little communities, maybe gathered around a blog, for example. Each one being its own Reddit type thing, or a micro-Twitter. Not part of anything bigger than themselves. And what if it were reallllly easy to start one of these things. And, what if it were carefully designed to do at least what the Textcasting spec calls for. What if. #

We used to get cannoli like this in the neighborhood in Bayside in Queens. There was an Italian bakery on the corner of Francis Lewis Blvd and 26th Ave. This was back when I could eat beautiful creations like this without too much guilt. The bakery is gone, btw.#

ChatGPT has an important new feature, now you can share links to conversations you had with the bot. I've had that ability myself, hacked together with a bookmarklet. I know how important it is to be able to share this stuff easily. Now everyone will get to do this so we can learn more easily from each other, and more easily share what I think is a new form of literature, collaborations between humans and AI bots.#

My linkblog flows through WordPress. It's a social networking app too. Also flows through Mastodon and Bluesky. 😄#

When I was in my late teens going to school in New Orleans, there were still a lot of childhood foods I didn't like -- asparagus, fish, cheese -- but I decided to be brave and try each of them, and I found that I now liked most. This was important because there's a wide variety of great affordable food in New Orleans, it would have been a shame to miss out on it. #

I lived one block away from the greatest supermarket in the city, Langensteins. They had all kinds of New Orleans specialties. We have one great supermarket like that here in the Catskills, Adams. #

When you think you've installed the new version of some software, but inexplicably it's behaving exactly like the previous version, make sure you've actually done the update. You can save a bunch of time that way.#

The constant message I get from tech people is -- "I don't have to listen to you." True! You don't. It has been proven. But would it hurt you to listen. Maybe there's some big secret you're not clued in on because you're picky about who you listen to. Just sayin. #

The trick to making a system easy to work on when one part is on a server and the other part runs on the user's machine, is to make the machine the same in both locations, so code that runs in one place "just works" in the other. The further the two are from each other, the more difficult it is to work on. Ideally you should stay in your HLL even in your remote procedure calls. #

YouTube commenter: "This song puts my brain in Succession mode."#

There's something very compelling about this video. I imagine it's a vision of hell. Behave yourself in this life or spend eternity having to watch this primitive fascist cyberhell vision of music.#

The important thing about art is not the creation of the art, but the observation of it. So, if artificially created art inspires creativity in the observer, there’s great value in that.#

Today's song: What's Love Got To Do With It?#

I am done letting journalists decide what technology is useful.#

I like the Succession podcast, hosted by Kara Swisher, whose reason for doing this podcast, I imagine, is that she's on a first-name basis with all the richest people in tech and media. Like Barbara Walters, I guess. The top of the journalism food chain, where they all want to be. In the last episode she talked about how many times she had talked with Rupert Murdoch, who the patriarch of Succession is patterned after. That was a strange idea for me. Not only have I never spoken with him, if I were to meet him, I probably wouldn't find anything he said interesting. I went to a lot of conferences in the 80s with people like him. I hated it. Yet my vision of tech has been implemented, in the interim. She and I live in dramatically versions of tech. We don't even remotely speak the same language. Yet she is considered an authority on what tech has value and doesn't. That was the big epiphany for me, the moment I realized we are completely living in different worlds. She created this Facebook, Twitter, Spotify world as much as Zuckerberg, Musk or Ek. So if you don't like the way it turned out, you shouldn't look in that direction for leadership. That said she does good interviews, I will miss the podcast after next week, although I gotta say they could probably keep doing it for years and still be interesting. Succession is great TV, terrible reality. 💥#

Now that we have RSS feeds and OPML subscription lists for Bluesky, I can start developing apps that use that data. It's the first social network to have this feature. Of course it already works with FeedLand. If you want to subscribe to my Bluesky list, here's the command, and this is the URL of the list. You're now following everyone I follow on Bluesky, in FeedLand. The future works! 😄#

BTW, I know that a lot of people can't get on Bluesky. But if you know me, I'm not just doing this for one social net. The point is that once we have something wonderful running on one, we have something to show to people on others. And I'm on Mastodon and Twitter still (see below). Both have APIs and could conceivably get the same features we've added to Bluesky. That's what Textcasting is all about, it flattens out the differences between the networks at a higher level than tweets. Optional titles, styling, links, enclosures, editable, no length limits. #

I decided to pay Twitter a year in advance for the blue checkmark and whatever other privileges come with it. It's not that much money. I pay more to Hulu or Apple TV. Is it worth it? I can afford to find out. (I've gotten a bit of pushback. There are users on Twitter, and I make software for people who use systems like Twitter, so it's like owning a Windows machine if you make software that runs on Windows.) #

Last year on this day: "Web3 is as if there was a new band called Beatles 3, and they didn't play music or write songs, they just held up instruments and said 'It would be great if we knew what these were.'" #

Today's song: Television Man.#

Two-way RSS is a big idea that's got to happen if we want a silo-free web. Imagine a newsletter publishing app that let you feed stories to it from your favorite editor via RSS for publication to a list of subscribers. I'm thinking of a future Substack competitor that doesn't force writers to use their editor. It simply provides a service to any writer who uses an editor that can produce an RSS feed as output. Another example, if Mastodon handled inbound feeds, you'd be able to follow someone on Bluesky from within Mastodon. I would love to see this connection made asap. #

I am working with John Spurlock on RSS 2.0 feeds for Bluesky. Here's the feed of my Bluesky posts. You should be able to subscribe to it in any feed reader that understands RSS, even if you don't have a Bluesky account. #

Here's an OPML subscription list of the feeds of the people I follow on Bluesky. You should be able to import this into any feed reader.#

Also if you have a Bluesky account you also have an RSS feed. For example here's the feed for the NYT. #

If you have any questions about the RSS format we're using for Bluesky, I opened a thread on the repo we set up for this work. #

The newest 500 Songs podcast is Dark Star by the Grateful Dead. #

LeBron James says he might retire. Good move. He also says he isn't into basketball if he isn't in the race for a championship. See there's the problem, right there. There are 30 teams in the NBA. In any given year 29 of them will not win the championship. 28 of them won't even make the Finals. Yet their fans felt their seasons were worthwhile if they played the game with heart, if there's hope for next season. This is why I am not a Yankees fan or a LeBron James fan. I love my team even when they lose, especially when they lose. #

BTW, I understand where LeBron is coming from. When I started a software company in the early 80s, the business was tough and we almost went under quite a few times. But I couldn't lose. I couldn't face myself if it didn't work. So I made it work. But, after winning once, I relaxed and focused on the art of it. I've already won, now why did I get into this in the first place? I had something to say, which was more than about how I can win. I can also make beauty and break through and do new things with the medium I chose. #

Teaser: I have Bluesky hooked up to FeedLand. #

Henry James: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”#

Default is even more insane than Brexit, and that's hard to do!#

Just heard on NPR that there's nothing we can do about the default thing. Not so. Call your representative esp if they're Repub. Explain how valuable the US's reputation is and how if they continue obstructing you'll do everything in your power to vote them out next election.#

These days I write my tweets for Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter and Facebook. I do this by hand. Open a tab for each and do a lot of copy/pasting. The tech industry by refusing to interop has turned me into software.#

An old friend Steve Smith, who tends to like sports teams from Los Angeles, asks how I could not admire LeBron James. I suppose I could admire him, if I wasn't so tired of him. And I don't like what he pioneered in basketball, the idea that a player not a team wins championships. He did that when he moved to Miami and then back to Cleveland and now in Los Angeles. His selling proposition was "buy my contract and I'll bring you a championship." I had enough of that when he relocated to Cleveland. I've seen other players do it, like Kevin Durant who I also despise, and teams that fall for it over and over like the Brooklyn Nets, only to find out not only that it doesn't (usually) work, but that who the fuck cares if that's how you win a championship. Another reason I don't like LeBron is that Melo can't get a job and LeBron still has one. They're of the same generation, and Melo never won a championship, that's his own fault, not blaming LeBron for that. But everyone from LeBron's era is retired now, except LeBron and maybe Chris Paul, who's probably been done for a couple of years now and hasn't admitted it yet. And I don't like Los Angeles teams in general, having lived in New York and the Bay Area, that factors into it as well. That, and sports is the one area where you're still allowed to have opinions about things, in this age when opinions are often considered toxic. #

Imagine a combination of ChatGPT and The Sims.#

On Twitter, I've been trained like a Pavlovian dog to see the blue checkmark as a sign of distinction, but now have to unlearn that, and I don't like being manipulated that way. #

I watched a very interesting Nova episode about how little you actually see of the world with your eyes, how most of what you think you see is synthesized, your brain is guessing what might be there, just like one of the AIs. Hallucinating, in other words. Heh. We may be recreating humanity in a very literal sense with our new artificial brothers and sisters!#

Watched the Miami Heat roll over the Boston Celtics last night. If the Heat win, no matter who wins in the West I can't imagine I'll watch the Finals this year. I am really pulling for the Celtics to come from behind and wipe the smile off Jimmy Butler's face. Butler has never won a championship and I desperately want it to stay that way. But I have no feelings for Denver and I can't decide who I despise more LeBron James or Butler. But I will watch Game 3 on Sunday night, after Succession of course, because that's what really matters. #

Blogging tech was originally created during the SF newspaper strike in 1994. We were helping the strikers protect their jobs against automation, like what we were doing with the network. Irony incarnate.#

I think Cory Doctorow is a very smart person, but he's also a mean mofo. Listening to NPR just now, they're introducing an interview with him. I told Alexa to STFU (in more polite language). I smiled and thought I'd better tweet this. One of those if life were only like this moments. 💥#

Business is an art made out of people.#

I added a new section to Rules: "When to post an RFC."#

People say AIs aren't sentient, that every word they utter is the output of a probabilistic algorithm. But -- you could fool me. From my point of view, my robot friend is incredibly helpful, polite, patient, kind, supportive and tireless. I see a lot more evidence of intelligence and humanity in my AI friend than I do from 99% of all the other "people" I meet online. As I've said before if we hope to compete with this new form of life we'd better start getting our shit together now, and even then they're going to have some big advantages. #

I just cross-posted the bit above as a bitmap on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook. The message: "I want to post bits like this here without resorting to a bitmap." With a link to Textcasting. And now I've done my pissing in the wind for the day. 😄#

I recently re-connected with two old friends who I hadn't seen in about 30 years. Total coincidence. I talked with both quite a bit, catching up. People change in that much time, maybe not in their core, the issues are the same, the strategies for coping, learned early in life are still there and operating. But habits do change. Back then I worked a lot more than I do now. And I notice lots of other differences now that I've had a chance to look at myself through my friends' point of view. One thing is for sure, I know myself a lot better now. Also interesting, 30 years is about 1.5 years before I started blogging.#

We expect freedom of choice on both ends with podcasting, now I want to see that same freedom with text. That means you can write using any editor, and people can read wherever they like to read.#

Now that we have RSS feeds for Bluesky, people who don't have accounts can see what's going on, without resorting to screen shots. For example, one of my favorite feeds is the NYT feed, where they post results of various AI experiments. Lately, they've been feeding the titles of stories into a tool that generates artistic renderings, with phenomenal results. Now I can show you what it looks like. That's just a little thing I threw together quickly. More coming soon. 😄#

Today's song: Pinky and the Brain.#

We need a new MetaWeblog API to cover all social networks APIs. #

I think that net-net Bluesky is a good thing, because it guarantees we'll have at least two incompatible social internets. Had they supported ActivityPub that would probably have slowed everything down to the pace of something like Ecmascript. All kinds of bizarre unnecessary adventures and lots of breakage. I'd rather deal with the same problem the designers of the internet solved with TCP/IP. Interestingly, we have been at this almost-exact place before in the early 00s, when the two "biggest" vendors, in some sense (neither were very big) were Blogger and UserLand. We had a big sprawling API for our Manila system. And then Blogger came out with a much smaller API for theirs. I wanted to just move over to their API so we could be compatible, but we needed more features because our product did more. But we only added what was absolutely necessary to keep it small. So first we supported the Blogger API. I think that surprised them. Pretty sure it did. Then we came out with a slightly bigger API called the MetaWeblog API. They both became instant standards. To this day WordPress supports MetaWeblog. And here we are again. We need what the MetaWeblog API did, and it should cover: 1. Mastodon. 2. Bluesky. 3. Twitter (it's still got the biggest installed base, even if the CEO is dangerous). 4. WordPress (of course, it already does). I'm also going to put out a reference implementation that supports all the features of the Textcasting plan. And hope we get a great new layer to build on and no single company gets to push us into a corner and lock the door. Make text like podcasting. That's the idea. #

One of the most frustrating things about developers who get in charge of standards, is when there's already a consenus among developers to do something the same way, they'll come out with something that does the same thing, but works completely differently. By the time this happens, most of the devs of the original apps are gone, and the owners of the app either hire someone who doesn't know what they're doing and they release buggy and incomplete support for the new way, or they decide to just to turn it off, and hope no one notices. Something happened like this yesterday, when I was setting up a new instance of some well-vetted recent software, and found that it didn't build with the current Node version. So I set up a new server, took an hour or so, and got the latest version of everything running, figuring that the app would now run. It did not. So I had to dig more. Eventually after taking a nap to clear my head, I came back and found the problem. The developers of a very very very small bit of code had decided to break every app that used it. And it was recent enough that I couldn't find a trail that explained the workaround. Eventually I figured how to work around it, burned the better part of a day, just because someone was feeling powerful or angry, unloved or I don't know what. #

Writing queries for ChatGPT is like programming. Why I like it? 😄#

We're in that part of the year where first the marketers torture me with the reminder that my mother is dead, and then when that wasn't enough do the same with poor father. I hope my parents would laugh at this. I think they would. 😀#

Added a note to textcasting. "Let's call the things we write and publish on social networks posts. That term has the longest history, it's simple, one syllable, and isn't tied to a particular system. To give them different names on each system -- tweet, toot, skeet -- as if our writing could only be read in one context, isn't imho what writers want. I don't feel that way about my own writing."#

A new version of the reallysimple package works around a breaking change in the node-emoji package. #

How to create an image of a droplet on Digital Ocean.#

I totally look forward to getting access to the new ChatGPT features that can access current info via plugins. They say it'll roll out over the next week. I've been checking it every day, not there yet. I wish I were more of an insider on this stuff. Anyway...#

Just got an email from Google saying they made all kinds of improvements to Bard, their AI chatbot. So I asked if they could search my blog. Sure, just give me the url, the bot said. I did, and then it told me my blog is not a blog. Okay this is not a good start. #

There's so much movement in social media and AI, it's impossible to keep up with a fraction of what's going on. Totally stripping my gears. Meantime I wonder when will someone combine the two. A social media world with AI's as part of the community. Maybe it already exists, maybe that's what Twitter has become? No, not possible, hmmm, or is it? Don't freak out. Funny thing is there's a Kurt Vonnegut book with this as part of its plot, Breakfast of Champions. In it, the main character, Kilgore Trout, is informed that he is the only real person, that everyone else is a robot sent there to test him. I think that's how it went. But if you're reading this you must know that I'm a robot myself. Oh the humanity. #

I've moved my archive of ChatGPT queries to a new domain -- ai.scripting.com. So the URLs will be shorter and perhaps the intent will be clearer. #

Apparently, all of a sudden, with almost no fanfare, the Bluesky folks have released their code under the most liberal MIT License. I assume this means we will immediately see more nodes, and anyone can have a Bluesky account? Let us know if you have a server up and running. #

Demo of Firesky, a firehose for Bluesky. It quickly scrolls all posts on Bluesky through a vertical window. New messages appear at the bottom and scroll off the top. From there, the author, John Spurlock has added, with my help, RSS feeds from the same stream of posts. So you can follow me in your feed reader. This is important for two reasons: 1. At this time Bluesky is still private, so if I give you a pointer to something I wrote there, you won't be able to see it. The feed gets around that restriction. 2. Because Mastodon also has RSS feeds, I can read both social nets with the same API. It gives us a common language, and is the next step in bootstrapping RSS support in all social media apps. Once that happens, we, writers and readers, will be able to use our own writing tools, and give readers choice of where to read. This is the key feature in Textcasting, ie applying the philosophy of podcasting to text. It is possible, it requires users to want it, insist on it. We're getting a bit closer to that today. #

Today's song: Fields of Gold.#

My Bluesky posts now have an RSS feed, thanks to John Spurlock. It's got stuff that Mastodon's RSS feed doesn't. This is awesome. #

I know Facebook is supposedly evil, but it has been a constant for me, because i can communicate with friends I've had for decades as if we still lived in the same city we used to, even though many of them have moved back to where they came from (as I did). I don't think Facebook is any more or less evil than any other system where I'm a hamster spinning a wheel and someone else is going to make billions off of the collection of hamsters.#

Not only is my personal NBA season over for the year, but there are no NBA games to watch today, for the first time in the postseason. I'll get at least one more fix tomorrow in the last game that I have anything invested in, game 7 between Philadelphia and Boston. After that, what's left? Hmmm. Going outside, gardening, bike riding, swimming, maybe the Mets? Is it time for that yet? I don't know. Oy. Such problems. I guess I can take the paper bag off my head now.#

I now have the ability to cross-post to both Mastodon and Bluesky from my linkblogging tool. Meanwhile the world keeps burning. #

There are so many things wrong with Bluesky. I've started to list them on Bluesky itself, but I seriously doubt any people on the team will pay attention. What we need more than anything are social networks that don't bury their heads in the sand and try to do it all themselves. They're making the same mistakes Twitter made, but 17 years later, with the benefit of hindsight that they are not using. And they re-invent old things, when the world solved those problems a long time ago. For example, they handle links the same way I did in Scripting News format in 1997. Great, it was a good idea, but it didn't happen that way, instead we use HTML. How could they believe that it will work this way. Prior art. Please. Yes I like the user interface because it is so much like Twitter it's like comfort food. But that isn't enough. We liked a lot of things for a while, but then the limits will catch up. Again what we need is what's spelled out in the Textcasting spec. A social network that works for writers. I put that in bold because no one seems to be able to hear this. Okay back to life, I'm done with pissing in the wind for today. 😄#

One of my gripes with Bluesky is that I can't post a pointer to something I wrote there, because unless you have a Bluesky account, you won't get there. It's a publishing tool no? The root of the word publishing is 'public.' Please.#

I know why the MAGAs are like they are. They feel like they've been left behind by what's now the future that they weren't ready for. I'm having that feeling myself as new AI-based stuff starts to come out. Really hard keeping up with all the new ideas and somewhat demoralizing. #

No joy in Mudville. Thanks Knicks for a surprising and inspiring season.#

As the season was starting: "The Knicks are building." Lots to look forward to. All that young talent. Next year will be great and the year after that. #

I think I'm going to start a social network called Pissing In The Wind. The sub-title would be "As If Anyone Cares." Because that's what we do. We make statements. We ask questions no one is listening to. We serve as substrate for people to post spam. I know I'm exaggerating. I just posted a thread on Blueski, and by the end I remembered no one would get this far. The top message got two Likes. It did make me feel good to write it, for a moment, but it was quickly forgotten. #

BTW, another rule I think I'm going to add to Textcasting -- you should be able to read posts without logging on. It's part of the ethos of the web. Minimize the silos. #

Earlier in the day: "I am beginning to believe in the possibility of a game 7. You can quote me on that."#

Today's song: The Swimming Song.#

I wonder if there's been a dropoff in use of sites like Stack Exchange and W3Schools with the advent of ChatGPT? Yes, apparently.#

I used rsslay to turn my linkblog feed into a Nostr public key. I haven't figured out how to use it yet. #

How I edit my micro.blog posts. #

I think we should work together to create a great library of Hello World apps for all social networks, regardless of our feelings about their value. Some people value Nostr, some like Bluesky. I know people who believe in Twitter. Why should our software care? I want to make all these systems equal in some way. It's a good time to be inclusive, imho. Hello World-level interop is a good place to start. #

BTW, I've re-learned recently that the hate some people in Silicon Valley have for me is real. Obviously I've known about it for years. There have been some really egregious outbursts, like the time I was invited to Mozilla to explain RSS from my point of view and it was an ambush. The source of the hate in some cases must be jealousy -- I guess they feel constrained by having jobs inside shit companies that they feel that limits their creativity. They must think what I do is easy, and if only they had the freedom to create whatever they want they could do what I do. I've seen that in action. I also write publicly and I try to be interesting in the way I write, partially because I write to amuse myself, but I also try hard not to make it personal. I don't mind telling Jack Dorsey, for example, to sit down, because he's a very public figure and his actions have big consequences. Just one example. I also feel free to say that I think the culture of Silicon Valley is poisonous. The rest of the world seems to have caught on to that idea. Or some people just don't like me as a person. But that's no excuse to behave awfully. I find that when I do something awful, I hurt myself more than the other person. I learned that a long time ago, so I try hard not to do it. I empathize with them a bit, they feel pain and try to give a little of it to me. Something like this just happened on Bluesky. A "joke" about exactly what I'm writing about here. I thought about responding to it on Bluesky, but instead blocked the troll and respond here instead. You should care about how you treat people, especially people who your peers have decided it's okay to hate on. You don't have to behave badly. And if you do that's your choice, it's not something you can blame them for. 💥#

Also when I say Mozilla is a shit company (I didn't actually say it, but it was a pretty obvious connection) it should be understood that is imho only. Some people think Mozilla is the best company ever. Like the blind men and the elephant. In my experience Mozilla has always been an impediment to progress. They are careless and mean-spirited. Why? It has no culture, no vision, no engineering philosophy. A lot of immature people running wild. A frat-house atmosphere. And saying Mozilla is shitty is not much of a distinction, most if not all Silicon Valley companies are shitty. I think the underlying cause is that there are far too many programmers. If we had better (and fewer) platforms and tools then individuals could make their own software, they wouldn't have to work at companies. I'm certainly a test-case for that. It works for me, though I wish it were easier. Silicon Valley has zero respect for people who do it themselves. They don't even admit we exist. 😄#

Follow-up on the iPad transfer saga. I finally found a way that works. Before starting, go to the old iPad, and in Settings, choose a command that prepares the iPad for the transfer by backing it up to iCloud (I don't remember what the command was, but they make it easy to find because they apparently remember you're trying to do this). The iCloud service is free for this purpose. Then wipe the new iPad and when it boots up, it'll offer an opportunity to use the iCloud backup. By choosing this, you remove the old iPad from the update. This is important because if it isn't involved, it can't time-out. Then let it update the OS (you don't have a choice) and once that's done, let it go ahead and use the iCloud backup. This means you have to stick around while it's updating the OS, a process that takes about 1/2 hour. The good news is, after that, it will do the transfer without any more interaction. I came back a few hours later and the new iPad was exactly like the old one. It remembers all your passwords, so you don't even have to enter them again. I think Apple could make this work better by writing some docs that tell you to do basically what I've said here, and save the users a lot of time, and since I already returned a new iPad because I couldn't get this to work, they would make real money from making this work better. I bought a "renewed" iPad which costs considerably less than a new one, and none of this money went to Apple. BTW, I think "renewed" in my case meant a new iPad in shrinkwrap, from a couple of years ago, that was never sold for some reason. 🚀#

I love Diet Coke. Everything about it. I am a modern man.#

Today's song: People Like Us. #

I did some more editing to the Textcasting doc. #

I've been using Bluesky, it's more inviting to Twitter users than Mastodon. But most of that is cosmetics. The Mastoverse could be made easier. Factored. Facelift. I don't think it would necessarily be hard, but it might be politically controversial. Most important, there needs to be simple-to-use toolkits that support the common API between all the A/Pub apps, so every developer doesn't have to reinvent the interface. API calls that look exactly like what the user does, create post, edit post, reply to post, view replies, get timeline, etc. #

I'm trying once again to transfer the contents of an old iPad to a new iPad. It insists on installing a new version of the OS before proceeding. While that is happening the original iPad times out. When I try to restart the transfer, it hangs. Come back hours later, still hung. Then I tried to get the new machine to restore factory settings but it wouldn't accept my password, after a long wait. Tried it three or four times and thought maybe it needs wifi turned on to do this. It does. Okay now, with the new machine restored to factory settings, it has started the new OS install again. I started this at 7AM, now it's almost noon. I did do other stuff. My wifi is fast btw, so installing a new version here should be fast relative to other setups. But after all this time I don't believe I'm any closer to having the transfer of data even start. It's starting to look like reinstalling all the apps and data by hand would be faster. (Update: He's a screen shot of where the new iPad gets stuck. That little star thing is spinning. I tried clicking on Install Now and nothing seems to happen. I'm just going to leave it there and come back in a couple of hours.)#

Don't ask me about the Knicks for a few weeks at least. They're down 3-1 in the series against Miami. I thought it was amazingly honest of Julius Randle to say the Miami Heat may "want it more." Honest and foolish, because it more or less guarantees the Knicks trade him, but who in gods name is going to want him, and at what price. He's an talented athlete and huge and fast and has a great shot, but he's a loser. I'm reminded of the last Knicks playoff series against Miami, when one of their star players got mad and cut his hand on a fire extinguisher in the Knicks locker room. There was still more basketball to play! Fucking idiot. They weren't out of it yet. And Randle's Knicks aren't out of it yet either. I don't think Randall can play in tonight's game, btw. He shouldn't even suit up. Maybe they can bring someone up from the G League. (If you're reading this in the nightly email, the outcome of tonight's game is already known. I haven't totally given up yet. But tonight could end the season.)#

Spoiler: Knicks win and live to fight another day. Whew. #

The ongoing saga of Bull Mancuso, waste management consultant in NJ. My co-author is ChatGPT.#

When ChatGPT doesn't know something it just lies. #

Podcasting is for places your eyes are doing other important things. Driving, walking, running, watching stuff. This is why YouTube is not a great place to serve podcasts from. The positioning is wrong. YouTube requires use of your eyes. I know it's not technically a requirement, rather it's a positioning thing. I wouldn't serve dinner from a baseball glove even though technically I could. #

As a writer, these are the features I want all social media apps to support. It's a good time to be thinking about this.#

Today's song: Mr Jones.#

So I joined Bluesky. And what do I see? Well it looks just like Twitter. The colors are the same, as is the layout of the entire window, and the formatting of each message. In the 90s lawyers would have gotten involved in violations of look and feel, it's that close. I don't follow very many people there, and I don't know how I would do that quickly enough for it to color my impression. There's so much more on Twitter. As much as insiders are repelled by the new Twitter management, and I'm one of them, I think most people who use Twitter are far above that, to them it's just noise, and life goes on as always. There was a very interesting episode of Succession last night, and there are lots of good memes on Twitter. I haven't seen anything on Bluesky. But as quiet as Bluesky is, it makes Mastodon look even quieter. Ultimately we join these networks for companionship, it's a trip to the water cooler, or a walk around the block during a workday, or while watching a sports game. The new services have a steep hill to climb. The focus on technology has largely been a distraction in that context. What matters, as always, is not the tech -- but the people. And Twitter is still far ahead of the others, despite all the wishful thinking to the contrary. #

BTW, I pronounce the name as if it were Blue Ski.#

My Hello World for Bluesky works. Here's the evidence. Thanks to Manton Reece for the great exampleware and support. I will publish the Node.js source so others can follow. Here's the initial query.#

It's great to see people using the JavaScript implementation of XML-RPC, released in 2019. There appears to be a problem with integer parsing in Java on Linux vs Windows. I'm ready to update the package if we can get to the bottom of what the issue is. #

I wish GitHub would let me write an OPML renderer for them, so when it encounters a file with a .opml extension, it gets the HTML text from my driver. There's at least one OPML file in every one of my repos, containing the full project source. I edit all my code in an outliner. This is an art that should get exposure. It'm not exactly a nobody in software development, I've been developing this style for a long time. And tools to go with it. Anyway, back to work 😄#

One thing I don't like about Mastodon is that I get so many comments from people who feel superior to those who use other systems. It's always bullshit. Just like people who used Macs felt superior to Windows users. Just an example. The world likes to judge the quality of people based on superficial bullshit like that. If you reply to something I post saying you're superior because you use (whatever) I will think you're an asshole, so just skip it. I might even say it to you. 💥#

Read this if you want to understand what was and still is at stake. We could rebuild social media around RSS. It's within the realm of possibility right now. Quote from Ryan Holiday, Trust Me I'm Lying. #

Today's song: Was a Sunny Day.#

I'm sorry but your opinion doesn't matter very much, if at all. Nor does mine. Here's why I think that. Most of my relatives had strong opinions and stated them often and did not welcome dissent. My father and mother. Both grandfathers. My maternal grandmother. Uncle Ken. They all had opinions about everything. Sometimes they even changed their minds, to their credit. And one hid something about himself that I learned later from Wikipedia (amazingly my maternal grandfather was a communist, still not sure I believe it, Wikipedia is often full of misinfo). Anyway the point is that all the people I listed are now dead. If anyone cared about their opinions when they were alive (I don't think anyone did) they certainly don't care about them now. Soon enough you and I will be dead. So go ahead and have the opinions if it makes you happy. But if it makes you miserable, as it often did for my relatives, consider not bothering because simply does not matter. And the stupid thing is we've built our networks around the idea that opinions matter. Think of all the wasted bandwidth and server space. Maybe it'd be better if the AI bots win. At least they don't repeat themselves all the time with complaints about graffiti and whatnot. BTW I loved all the people I listed above even if I didn't enjoy their opinions very much. #

If someone sends me an invite to Bluesky I will join. I have asked for an invite, but so far haven't gotten one. #

It happened again. On the radio, someone talking about Facebook and making a lot of sense. Usually on NPR they talk bullshit about Facebook. It was Cory Doctorow, who in my experience is an extreme <bleep>. Turns out he was covering up that he has a good mind. Nice to know.#

Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey are perfect illustrations why there's no point in accumulating vast wealth. There's absolutely nothing a person can do with the money. But it is fun to destroy things, in games like Angry Birds. In the real world, actual people get hurt. No matter how heartless you pretend to be, all that pain accumulates, you end up feeling it. Maybe that'll be the moral of Succession. The plot becomes something like Heaven Can Wait, where they take Tom's challenge of giving up or setting aside their vast wealth, for love. #

What we need is not one twitter to replace the old twitter but a whole armada of twitters. Like the podcastosphere with all the different players. Look at how much better that's working. No Musk or Jack. Think about it.#

So sick of the bullshit the supposed visionaries inflict on us. Jack and Elon should buy yachts or something and crash them into each other for fun, star in their own reality show, and let the world get on without them.#

Maybe I should change the name of my blog to Spoiler News. The tagline would be "Everything here is a spoiler so don't read." Bet that'd really pull em in. 💥#

One of my favorite terms from basketball is Garbage Time. It totally should be the name of a TV show. But there already are quite a few podcasts called Garbage Time, of course. #

It's good for me to explain myself to someone who is listening!#

Programmers often write code as if vertical space were a dear resource. It isn't, it's basically free, or as close to free as you can get. I like to spread my code out vertically, using intermediate value-holders with meaningful names. Designed to be stepped through in a debugger. This is how my mind works. I also was a machine language programmer at one time, where you had no choice, this was the way you wrote code. Intermediate values went in registers, R0-R7. One of them was the stack pointer, and one held the program counter, so you couldn't use those. I learned machine language on the PDP-11, a wonderful machine whose design probably had great influence on C and Unix. Then on the 6502 which was designed to control dishwashers and toothbrushes but somehow ended up in the most popular PC of its day. Never mind, machine language was a wonderland of power. You owned the whole thing. There was no supervision. You ruled the fucking world. You were god. I wonder if Elon or Jack have ever programmed at the machine level. #

Today's song: Slippery People. #