I read somewhere that when you look at someone's eyes, you're looking at their brain. I suppose this is true of every part of the body, but I've been looking at eyes differently ever since I heard this.
#We should
retroactively free Americans who were enslaved prior to the
13th Amendment. They should be thought of today as full citizens of the United States to whom unthinkable harm was done.
#
A San Diego library had a Pride display. Republican parents checked out all the books and said they would not return them until the library agreed to remove the display. When this became public, the library received replacements, many times over.
#Who's the most famous person you've met who introduced themself to you and you had to stifle a chuckle because of course I know who you are, but still appreciate the respect. For me it was
Goldie Hawn. I rode up on an elevator with her twice. We lived in the same building in Manhattan. A real sweetheart. I was so honored.
#Last year around this time I went to a Mets game in
Queens, and this year, I'm returning to NYC, in Manhattan, for the whole week, M-F. Going to see friends, get some work done, ride
Citibikes up and down the
Hudson River bike trail. First stop:
Zabars, of course.
💥 #
- I'm having a great time with my new librarian assistant, Miriam. #
- Basically she's an AI chatbot that has ingested a lot of the OPML files from my archive. #
- I did the writing, the development was done by Automattic. I get to be a user here. Very relaxing.#
- So the other day I very casually asked Miriam how the weather was. #
#- Being software, she dutifully answered the question, by referring me to various times I had discussed the weather on Scripting News. #
- We don't yet have a way to archive the results of queries, which will, when it's ready allow me to share the actual query with you, so you can take it off in different directions if you're so inclined. #
- A surprising take-away: I really like how she summarized my posts. #
- Since Automattic also makes WordPress, which is used for blogging I thought this might be an interesting service they could offer. It could also be used to improve their feeds, esp if writers don't want to include full text. I know this is not a popular view, but I like sites that provide descriptions that are not full text, like the NYT. Much easier to skim. #
- Miriam's digest of my writing would make a good feed. Maybe this is something we should try. (BTW, I do provide full text in the feed for all my sites.)#
- Another thing to like about her summaries -- they are respectful of the reader. No clickbait anywhere in sight. She's a librarian after all. 😄#
- I asked DALL-E to draw Miriam for me. This is how I described her. #
- I have a vast library of information nice people are interested in reading. So I have hired a librarian named Miriam. She has a standing desk, in front of a vast library of books, spreading out all around her. She has glasses and a very friendly but wise look to her. She wants to help. She has gray hair and bright eyes and a very big smile.#
- Here are the first images.#
- I asked Dolly to elaborate.#
My personal librarian now has a name:
Miriam.
#I described Miram to DALL-E, here are some
samples.
#
- This is about a service that is sold to end users and developers. The users pay for the service, and developers invest in it. Once it's up and running it will be the foundation for the web as an open platform for users and developers. #
- My personal timeline#
- Until recently I was using Twitter as my identity service. I knew there was some risk, but as long as one of the original founders was still involved, I felt it was pretty safe. #
- Then with new ownership, I had to quickly pivot to create my own identity system, based on email. It took four months from beginning to end to transition Drummer and FeedLand. The rest of my products that used Twitter identity were left to break. I wrote about this effort in the roadmap doc for FeedLand. #
- Every developer needs the same service. And it's a mess for users that there's a new identity system for every app. #
- Users need storage. I have to provide them storage for their writing in Drummer, and in FeedLand for things like bookmarks, their personal feeds (ones they generate). Again, I have no interest in this. But I have to do it. And I am stuck paying for their files. They should be paying for them. #
- And if my service should ever go off the air, they lose their data (I also provide ways for them to back up their data, but a lot of them don't do it). #
- No surprise there's almost no developer community for the web in 2023. The hurdles are pretty close to insurmountable.#
- Describe the service#
- An identity service as a business. Operated by a strong company with longevity and a track record for treating users and developers fairly. #
- A standard OAuth interface for logging on. Can handle multiple identities per user, make it easy to switch from one to the other. For prior art, look at how Twitter or Bluesky do this.#
- No per-app storage. Rather functional storage. A folder for PNG images, a folder for OPML outlines, or Markdown files, graphs, spreadsheets, or whatever. And make it easy to form projects with files of whatever type. So a user can have 15 programs that use OPML files and decide which get access to the OPML folder. #
- Here's a key point -- such a system enforces the need for interop. Teaches users they have a right to demand it. When users know this, good things happen in markets. (Example: Podcasting has not gotten siloized because users know they have a right to choice in listening apps.)#
- Competition?#
- Dropbox got incredibly close to doing this, but punted.#
- Amazon should do this but for some reason hasn't. They have end-user identity working (their shopping system) and they lead everyone in storage as a service. Connecting the dots seems to be incredibly easy for them, but they haven't done it. #
- When I started at Harvard in 2003, one of the first things I did was get my official ID card. When I got it, there was my picture. Underneath that was my name, and underneath that my status: Officer. It was a bit breathtaking. A few minutes before I was a schmuck. Now I was an officer at Harvard.#
- I just had that kind of experience again. I went to my profile page on DALL-E, which I've been playing with lately, and there it said I was:#
#- What an unusual perspective. Here's a place where saying someone is human is saying something. A familiar tweak I haven't felt in a while -- I am once again living in the future. 2023 has been like that for me, a lot of living in the past, and bringing it forward into the future, and then living in that future. I hope to do a lot more of that. Shoveling ideas from 20+ years ago that never got a chance into the future. #
- You know what we say about that..#
- Still diggin! #
- PS: I get this feeling sometimes when I start using a new keyboard, as I did this morning. It's a nice one, the same model as it replaces, which I just plain wore out. It will go to one of my other computers where it won't have so much work to do. Its profile would say: Dave's Keyboard, Keyboard. #
- I did some searches on Tina Weymouth, the bass player for the Talking Heads. In an interview with her husband, he said everyone's eyes were on her when they performed, I thought I was the only one. When I listen to a Talking Heads song with a strong beat (a lot of them) I think of her. That's what she represents, the driving power of the group is a woman. Try listening to this song and look at images of her.#
Tina Weymouth, bass player for Talking Heads.
#
What made the news worth watching
Wednesday night was that finally the most important question was asked -- will our system defend itself? Finally, we've gotten around to insisting that this question be answered. And a jury of Americans will make this decision. How perfectly American.
#Speaking as someone who has
served on a jury all the way to a verdict, I have great respect for my fellow citizens in this context. When trusted, we do an amazing job. And whether most of American culture treats individuals like mindless blobs, the justice system is built on trust in the wisdom of the people, who once so challenged, don't let us down.
#Facebook friends in Canada. If you can see
this, what do you see?
#Between August 1 and 9 every year
Deadheads around the world pause to reflect on and to celebrate the
life of Jerry Garcia.
#
I've finished the first pass of my review of the
FeedLand docs. I converted them to Markdown, with the source hosted
on GitHub, to make it easy for people to see the changes over time, and to make bug reports. I want to get more systematic in working on FeedLand. When you're reading a docs page, there's a command in the menu that opens the same page in GitHub. If you're a FeedLand user, you may want to read the new docs, it's always a good idea I find to review the docs of products I use. You often see things you didn't pick up on the first time around.
#
Also
testing a new bookmarklet for FeedLand.
#It's been a while since I looked at the
everything timeline in FeedLand. In the interim, a bunch of people have subscribed to Bluesky feeds, and they are the most active, and also support rssCloud (!) so the list is skewed toward Bluesky posts from people who are on now.
#
I am not a lawyer, but it seems the indictment against Trump is elegant and right to the point. As president he ruled like an autocrat, with contempt for the most American idea, that we pick our own leaders. So the jury will be asked to decide if he should go to jail for being an autocratic president. In other words, will the system validate itself. It's like asking a program to decide if it's functioning correctly. If the validator works, it should reject any argument that Trump makes. Sorry, you're going to jail because you tried to rob us of our right as citizens to replace you with Joe Biden. It's pure, brilliant, gets right to the heart of the matter. Is our system of voting real,
do we choose the president, or does our system crumble when it's violated by its top official. Finally we're asking the right question, making the correct accusation. And if it's decided the way it should obviously be decided our country says no to this bullshit, no matter what a bunch of our fellow citizens want. We had a
revolution to get rid of the king.
#What made the news worth watching tonight was that finally the most important question was asked -- will our system defend itself? Finally, we've gotten around to insisting that this question be answered. And a jury of Americans will make the decision. How perfectly American.
#For some reason
this story from 2015 is getting more hits today than the
home page of the blog. It's a good one imho, more true today, eight years later. If you have an idea where the hits are coming from, referrers don't seem to work any more, please let me know.
#
It’s great finally we’re going to
fight back against Trump.
#The Washington Post
headline, as with most other pubs, says that Trump is accused of trying to "overturn the election." More accurate: he
tried to "overthrow the government."
#
I guess the
Mets were reading my blog? In the lead-up to the trade deadline, they dumped the two three-time Cy Young winning pitchers,
Scherzer and
Verlander, they bought in the last two years, presumably in an effort to buy a championship, which totally didn't materialize. They traded them for young prospects, players they can develop. Maybe the Mets realized that they can't buy a kickass team, and that real fans aren't inspired by money, we want love, and
philosophy. Maybe the Mets will once again be the Mets, in the spirit of Casey Stengel, Cleon Jones, Tom Seaver, Tug McGraw, Mookie Wilson and Ed Kranepool and far too many soulful players to mention in this small space.
#
The Washington Post's
daily podcast was
recommended to me as a replacement for the now-nauseating NYT daily. Well the first
episode I tried was exactly as depraved, incompetent and disgusting as the NYT podcast. Do we disapprove of Jason Aldean's
song because we want to deprive him of his right to free speech as the podcast says over and over. Please. We object to it because it's an expression by white people of their desire to
lynch black people, like they used to do when America was Great, as the slogan goes. They want to make it Great Again. Specifically, so you could
lynch blacks, again, when you don't like the way they look at you or your sister or when they have land you want to buy and don't want to pay a fair price for, or when a rich white guy made you feel like shit and you wanted to prove there were people
you could
terrorize. When a black life was worth nothing. And btw, they're not just coming for people of color and gays and trans people, or to turn women into slaves, they also like
Hitler's final solution for Jews. It's time for one of these pubs to have the guts to say out loud what the actual problem is with the Trumpsters like Aldean. They want to go back to when they could kill anyone with impunity. And btw, it doesn't matter if he "really" believes it or if it's a business model. It makes absolutely no difference. Someone should teach these pitiful spineless so-called reporters how and why to be angry. BTW, I live in a small town so fuck you Jason Aldean.
#
- From a Facebook post on this day in 2015.#
- My blog posts always "just write themselves." If they don't I do something else. #
- For me, a blog post is just the culmination of something I've been thinking about or a story I've told in person a dozen times.#
- It has to pop to the top of my consciousness a dozen times or more before I'm ready to write about it.#
- I blog therefore because I: 1. Think. 2. Tell stories.#
- I subscribe to the NYT, probably the only newspaper in the US that tries to get away with charging you more for sports. #
- I read less and less of their stuff, the only reason I keep it is that in some things they are authoritative for me at least, like TV and movie reviews. They'll probably start charging extra for that too. #
- Also I am nauseated by the Daily podcast, used to be a big fan. I don't know what changed, me or them.#
Something important about voting. Don't think of your vote as expressing yourself. It's not like First Amendment speech. Your vote is you governing us. We're like a fourth branch of government. We don't get to say who runs everything, just our part of everything. One vote is a small thing, but they add up to a decision. So when you vote for a third-party candidate, or you don't like any of the candidates and don't vote at all, you
are expressing yourself, but you are not governing. You don't like Hillary Clinton, so you stay home. You are not motivated. Then a few years later you're holed-up in your appartment, quarantined, because the government couldn't get its shit together to stop transmission of Covid. Or you're stuck with paying back your student loan because the court is 6-3 instead of 5-4. Because you and a lot of other people didn't "like" Hillary Clinton. See how whether you like her or not is beside the point? Or you or a family member has to carry a pregnancy to completion, have a baby you didn't want, or maybe die because your doctor couldn't figure out what the legislators meant, and didn't want to lose their medical license. So maybe next time, show up to govern. Put your feelings aside. Say what you feel on social media but use your mind when you vote.
#
Today's margin images thanks to
DALL-E.
#
An interesting idea, what if other companies changed their names to something as unbelievable as Twitter becoming X. I have a few things to say about that. First, I don't think that Twitter
has changed its name, at least not yet. Reorienting all those memory cells in all those human brains isn't a matter of changing the logo on a home page or putting a big X on the roof of a San Francisco building. 17 years of repeated drill has burned the Twitter brand into our minds. Second, I don't think HBO changed its name to Max, in fact I think the new owners of HBO (and many other names) are preserving the value of the HBO name by taking it off the the streaming site, which is a hodgepodge of random content, some good, some not. HBO is a small part of that. Instead, they withdrew HBO from the set of popular streaming services, which are due for years of battle for dominance. Why drag the HBO name into that mess. It also may make it easier for them to spin HBO off, or sell it to another media conglomerate. I thought it was weird at first, but now it makes sense.
#
What Musk actually destroyed -- Twitter as the
vertex for a certain kind of news and discourse. Until late last year, almost everything I posted online would flow through Twitter. Today, very little does. Not by choice really, I'm not like other people who think that my not posting to a site has political meaning. It's more of a sense of "does it belong there." It used to be that everything belonged there, that somehow it hadn't been said if it wasn't said on Twitter. That's a very recent and very fast change. It doesn't matter imho that Musk tries to change the name, what matters more is that he's given up on Twitter being
the place of record. Kind of like what would happen if the US gave up on the dollar being the reserve currency. And of course people much like Musk are trying to make that happen. What if all this isn't a big mistake as people in the press seem to assume? What if more likely it's a plan being executed in front of our eyes. I think in general you should assume the latter, not that people you want to think are idiots actually are.
#
I drive a Tesla because it's a
great car. No other reason. I have owned other great cars. I had an early 90s Miata. I've owned a bunch of BMWs of varying quality. My Model Y combines the feel and agility of the Miata with the intoxicating power of my 2007 BMW 535i. I've had the Tesla for 1.5 years and I still feel it's a privilege
every time I drive it. That has never happened before, driving a great car usually becomes normal too fast. I pity people who are so one-dimensional that they think they understand everything about other people. I wouldn't want to be a relative of theirs, never would be a friend.
#I used to be a fan of the
Daily podcast, but something snapped, and now I see them as ignorant, lazy and overly self-important. I was disgusted by the premise of
this bit. I'm a writer too and I
want the bots to index my work. It's how my ideas might get heard over their monopoly on the flow. Where did they get the idea that they speak for all writers?
#
- BTW, for a few days I tried to do my blogging in Drummer as a web app, instead of as a standalone Mac app. Huge difference. I hated it. So I spent this last week reorganizing my file system so I could use my laptop to work and still use the app. In the last few days the difference is evident. I love writing again. I didn't like it if it had to fit in with all my other web stuff. Writing is different. It deserves its own app. For me it makes all the difference.#
- At my first company, Living Videotext (aka LVT), we had a lot of slogans, some of which have become famous.#
- Others -- not so much.#
- Like this: "Buy em out, shut em down!"#
- It's what we'd say to insult a competitor. #
- It was pure bluster. But fun!?#
- The idea was we were so rich (we weren't) that we could buy our most offensive competitor just to get rid of them.#
- We'd talk that way about IBM, Lotus, etc.#
- Just before hopping on the red-eye to Bucharest.#
- A shortening of a LVT tall tale about either buying IBM's PC division to shut them down, or, if we failed, getting on the overnight flight to Bucharest, the capital of Romania, at the time the most famously evil country in the world, or so we thought, and also where my father was born in 1929. Either we'd be taking the red-eye to Boca Raton (to take over the IBM division) or going into an awful exile in Bucharest. #
- You had to have been there. 😄#
My friend for life.
#
- Homer Simpson throwing first pitch at Mets World Series game.#
Via DALL-E.
#
In 2015, the year the Mets won the National League title, I saw a friend who I knew was a Yankees fan wearing a Mets hat, and asked about it. He said we've always liked the Mets, it's Mets fans we don't like. I thought that wsa pretty good, esp for a Yankees fan. I doubted he ever had actually been a Yankees fan.
#Social media is a moral parade.
#
Wonder what the joke was.
#
What I write on the web, by default, should be publicly readable.
#
Braintrust query: I had an impulse to write a little web app that takes the address of a post on Bluesky and flows it through an html template and serves it, so I can easily publish stuff I wrote on Bluesky. I thought to use a
toolkit John Spurlock pointed me to. But where to start? All the theory upfront, like the spec, I just want something that takes the ID of a post and returns a JavaScript object with a bunch of info like the text, any image enclosed, when it was posted, stuff like that. There really are only 5 or 10 endpoints most apps need. If you're interested in solving this problem for Bluesky, please post a note in the
thread.
#Reporters say the allegations against Trump are damaging or incredible are yet again selling the same Trump story they’ve been selling since 2016. He’s a full time 24-by-7 criminal. If Trump is doing anything it’s incredibly damningly criminal, and he doesn’t care because he openly says the laws don’t apply to him. The only news here is that someone in government is finally trying to really do something about it, or at least that’s what it kind of looks like. We’ve been here many times only to find out at some point they decide for some reason he’s right and the laws don’t actually apply to him, and so far they haven’t.
#
- BTW, I find I don't write screeds on Twitter any longer. #
- If I want to piss in the wind I either do it elsewhere or don't do it at all.#
- I use Facebook more now, in addition to Bluesky, but I wonder why I use it because it's behind a very high silo-wall. I only realized today if say Substack were doing this, it would so irritate me that I wouldn't use it. I don't know why I give Bluesky a pass on this. #
- Mainly Masto is interesting again because Liza Sabeter aka blogdiva resurfaced, and chose Mastodon to be her stage. She's so smart and irreverent and also incredibly dedicated to her truth. She's enough of a reason for me to check in on Masto. #
- I also write on my blog regularly and seem to appreciate it more these days perhaps because it doesn't shut down on me, it seems to care whether I like it or not. #
- PS: That's kind of a joke because I have always written my own blogging software going back to 1994. #
- PPS: Of course I wrote this screed on Twitter, proving once again that it's even worse than it appears. #
- PPPS: Facebook's folly -- aka Threads -- is of no significance whatsoever to me at least. #
- I'm uncomfortable that the stuff I write on Bluesky is not visible without being logged-in to Bluesky. #
- If Substack were doing this, for example, it would be a reason to not to use it.#
- Not sure why I let this go for Bluesky.#
- Imho, what I write on the web, by default, should be publicly readable. #
- Another corner-turn seems to be working now. I'm sure no one cares about this but me, but this blog is also for me to record big changes in the way I work. So here goes..#
The problem was that over the last four years I've created systems that depend on me sitting at my desk in the mountains, surrounded by nature, a good net connection and lots of disk space. Now I want to be mobile, camp out in various places, and still be able to keep the servers running, update and write new code and docs, and my blog, basically everything I do at my desktop. This has meant going back to Dropbox, but not sacrificing the very nice systems I've built that don't depend on Dropbox, because the Linux version is hard to install, and is unpredictable and flaky. #- I have one server system that runs Dropbox well, so I'm moving all the software I ran locally to push stuff into the cloud onto that server, and instead of saving things to local folders, I save them to Dropbox-hosted folders. The server versions of the software watch the Dropbox folders and move things to where they belong, just as they did on the desktop. Voila, Uncle Davey can move around, and theoretically everything works as it did before. And so far it does. #
- I am able to edit all my docs in Electric Drummer, and my blog, and I'm much happier than I was when I was trying to do all that in web Drummer. E/D is a much better fit for the way I work. The Bookmarks menu in Drummer was key to making this a (so far) relatively easy transition. But figuring out what to do and doing it took pretty much the whole month of July. Still have a bit more to do.#
My response to
Manton's response to my open
voicemail. I agree with all you said, had discovered it on my own, quickly -- that I could build on Mastodon's docs (and did), but the ActivityPub maze of specs is not an API, and not something a busy developer can approach. It all has to be simplified. We're still far away from the dream. As I said in my open voicemail -- it's time for developers to do a
BDG for the social web, with docs
and software, that embraces not just Mastodon and other ActivityPub services, but also Bluesky, and WordPress, which has a very mature API, offers stability, a foundation with clear value.
#In general, if there's a change in
FeedLand or
Drummer, you want to be sure you're getting the latest client software. Normally the browser caches the code, but you can force it to get the latest versions. In Chrome/Mac with Cmd-Shift-R. Obviously it's different in different browsers.
#
I am now able to edit my blog on my desktop and my laptop in
Electric Drummer. My mind is now possibly on the path to sanity. One can hope. Four Drummers on two machines is at least two too many.
#There was a problem in
Sally's Reader that only showed up on some machines, having to do with
CORS permissions. I think I've worked around it, so it should work everywhere, one hopes.
#As we are fond of saying in show business, this is a test. Had this been an actual emergency, well we would have found some other way of notifying you, because this is hardly the way to tell a fine person such as yourself about an emergency. I hope all is well with you and yours and have a nice day!
😄#
15 ways to say hello in American English thanks to ChatGPT.
#
When I look through
the tabs in my browser, the blue twitter icon has been replaced everywhere with an ugly white X on a black background. Confusing enough that I thought where did I put that tab with the tweet I'm quoting in it. In the meantime, someone ought to grab the trademark MuskCo is abandoning. It's hard to express how valuable it is, the words twitter and tweet are in the everyday language of everyone. It might be the most valuable thing Musk owns. Even the Tesla name is nowhere near as deeply entrenched. I hesitate to say it's a bad decision because I've been proven wrong so many times. But my brain doesn't like what he's done. That one person has so much power over me, I don't like to be reminded of that either.
#
How exactly does MuskCo get people to say X instead of Twitter? Has Google gotten any recognition for Alphabet. Has Facebook got anyone beyond a few reporters to say Meta? I call bullshit. The name is Twitter.
#
Hey if
slavery is so great, why doesn't Desantis enslave white folks? His kids should be slaves right? Why wouldn't they want to be slaves? They should be be lining up.
#
Now
Elon Musk wants to kill one of the best known brands there is, in favor of X. In hindsight, how foolish was it for Facebook to change its name to Meta. Google is still Google now whatever they changed their name to (yeah I remember, but it takes some effort to pull it up, and as I'm doing it, I'm reminded how much I don't care) Alphabet. These geniuses should study
positioning. Yes, their brands got tarnished, trampled, humiliated, charged and convicted. But the smart money is on
responding to the problem, not running away from it, which 99 out of 100 people recognize this as. Classic example:
Johnson & Johnson and Tylenol. My grandfather taught the basics of business with a motto, "pay for your sins." It means if you fuck up you give the customer their money back and apologize, because business is built on your rep. And you can't run away from your sins. Once you put a name in everyone's minds, it stays there until they die. Think of another brand that sinned --
Coca Cola with New Coke. They admitted they were wrong, and got rid of the mistake, not the brand, and they're still #1.
#
Working on a little project in
Drummer that uploads a file to GitHub. I went to add the code to the server, and found it was already
there. I traced my steps up the stack and found where the call is. Amazingly there's a complete Drummer verb set for GitHub, and even better, it's
documented. Who wrote this? Me! I've been doing this too long. (Postscript: It wasn't exactly what I needed.)
#
Zachary Vance is
looking for someone with a copy of MORE 2 or who knows how to read such files in MORE 3 or has some idea what to do with such a file? He's trying to extract the text from a book that was written with MORE 2 back in the day.
#
I've spent the last week trying to do my normal development work on a laptop. And at the end of the week, I'm kind of getting the hang of it. The secret is to use Dropbox again, not just to manage servers (as I have been, but am transitioning away from because Dropbox on Linux is unwieldy), but to keep several editing places in sync without too much chance for error. This morning I lost some changes I made to
Sally's Reader, but it's a really simple app, and not very mission critical, yet, so it was easy to re-do the changes. But that got me thinking about how to get it to work more smoothly and reliably. I've had various systems over the years for this, and it'll be interesting to do it again. Luckily all the saving and opening of projects flows through two scripts, and I wrote them both, and they work very reliably. So I'll add some features, already am doing that. Feels good actually, didn't think it would.
#
If you want to deserve a Pulitzer, not saying you're going to win one, run stories shining the same light your publication shines on ChatGPT on your own pub's stories. You'll get a lot of people angry, they're not accustomed to scrutiny, but your readers will love you. And imho that's the award that's worth winning.
#Journalists are concerned that replacing them with AI writers would make the news less trustworthy. On the planet I live on, when I read a news story about something I know about it's filled with bullshit and lies, ones that could easily be corrected, but they just copy what they found on Wikipedia. Thus I am pretty sure that stories about stuff I don't know about are filled with similar bullshit. On those same subjects, ChatGPT gets it just as wrong, probably because the bot is relying on the same Wikipedia article that had the original lies in it. If journalism really wants people to have to truth, try giving it to them instead of complaining about how your jobs are in jeopardy.
#
Let's create AI chatbots who take over the world to save us from ourselves.
#
I needed a nice little warmup project, maybe I'm finally getting productive away from my desktop. It's a little thing I call Sally's Reader. Not a big deal. Here's the
writeup. And here's
the app.
#
Interesting thread by Evan Prodromou, one of the originators of ActivityPub. He says basically everyone should get behind it and stop inventing new formats and protocols for the federated social web. #- Without any judgment, it seems to me that ActivityPub should have started with RSS 2.0, building whatever new features they needed on top of it. But they didn't. I don't know why. We were going down that path, but then one day I saw that all the people I was collaborating with were meeting with Google and out of that came a completely incompatible protocol, which I believe became ActivityPub. Not sure, because they seemed more interested in reinventing what already worked than trying to build as much interop as possible. #
- I really mean "no judgment" -- because this seems to happen in tech all the time. It's the knee-jerk reaction. People wanting to make a name for themselves, don't have a new idea, so they pretend that what already exists doesn't. Let the journalists sort it out. #
- Anyway, I think it's inevitable that there will be more protocols. There already are. So what will be needed is the analog of the internet, which bridged the differences between incompatible networks. I think at this point that's the best we can hope for. And in that spirit I offer the MetaWeblog API which did that for blogs. Maybe for once we won't have to start over from scratch. I doubt it, but hope is still possible. #
- BTW, before you pat me on the head and thank me for "fighting the good fight" (which I hear as "loser") remember this one motto: You can fake caring but you can't fake showing up. Put some skin in the game. You've been sitting on the sidelines your whole life. If you think we can make the new network useful and fair and learn from our mistakes and experience, get in the middle. There's no point accumulating capital if you never spend it. Now is a good time to get involved. #
I was reading yet another article that says my contribution to podcasting was adding the enclosure element to RSS. These people are beyond stupid. Why don't they take a minute to think about how you develop a new medium. Is it done by adding a few sentences to a spec? I don't think so. You get an idea, in this case it came from Adam Curry (thanks) and start figuring out how it will work. Then you make the software for both publishing and listening, and then publish Grateful Dead music, thinking all the people will now figure it out but they don't. So you try something else and another thing, and you give up for a while. Then you meet an NPR guy and ask him if he wants to try this idea out. For some reason he says yes, when everyone else said no or didn't listen. So you get that going, and it's great and for sure you figure now everyone will get it, but they don't. So a year later in frustration you decide to put out your own show, and do it again and again, and leave the freaking mistakes in, and because of that people get the idea that Hey if that schmuck can do it, I bet I can too, and 20 or 30 people start doing it, and it's fun, and from there, it builds and after four years you have the start of a new medium. And no that idiot journalist did not give this new medium its name. Only a total idiot would think that, which is something I get to say out loud on
Journalism is Stupid Day. 😄#
But
everyone already knows journalism is stupid, so why make a big deal about it today. Because the value of Bluesky has nothing to do with moderation. You can see how dull and lifeless and
disneyfied a perfectly moderated social network is. Look at that new bullshit thing Facebook just came out with. It's really Instagram, that's how they got all their users so fast by just getting them to
jump through another hoop. You can stop reporting that it set records. They just came up with a new design and name for Instagram and said it was setting records, knowing that the reporters were bored of hating Zuckerberg, and now were ready to say he's cool again because he is trying to embarrass the
Asshole Du Jour for journalists everywhere, Elon Musk. The thing you should say about Bluesky is that it's freaking nice that these people made a nice UI and backend for the social web and give it away for nothing. Yay Bluesky for believing in all of us. And come on if you think moderation is so great and you think it can be done for free, why don't you volunteer to do it. Yeah I didn't think so.
#
I'm gradually figuring out how to manage my work on two systems. 1. My desktop monster machine and several smaller machines with huge disks. One system, the one my work is organized around, never moves and the other, 2. a 2015 MacBook running High Sierra, with a 500GB internal drive and a 2TB external, moves with me. By the time this construction project is done, I'll be able to work anywhere, and not have a huge reconciliation job to do when I get home. Or maybe I'll travel with a Mac Mini and a nice big monitor? Or maybe I'll (someday) get everything running on Linux so I don't have to deal with all the
deprecation that Apple has inflicted on my ancient lab. So far I am still able to use
Frontier. If it were to somehow stop running, every year that goes by, it gets less likely that I'd continue. You want to make me happy, port it to Linux and don't break my code. That would make me very happy.
😄#I wish I had more interesting things to write about, but that's about it for this Tuesday.
#
Good morning sports fans!
#
Not many updates coming probably in the next few days as I try to work in two different locations due to real-world construction noise. I have a big roof repair job going on, and, as you probably know it's
raining almost every day and quite a lot, which makes the job take longer and makes the work riskier, but it has to happen now. I have to work this out. And not lose any work, and not break anything. A real high wire act.
#
The web is pretty amazing, it’s all one big namespace.
#
Man the weather in the Catskills is dismal. Raining all the time. The rivers and ponds are full. So what comes next? Well if it stops raining, summer, which is usually the best time of year here, and pretty much anywhere. It's why I live here. But this summer. Well the only thing that could be worse imho is if we had this much precipitation in winter. Well, I know that isn't actually true. The heat wave in the west sounds pretty awful. Oh we really did it, the planet is on its way to being uninhabitable by humans? Whee here we go.
😄#I don't love writing, I
said to Elizabeth Spiers on Bluesky. I'm more driven to write. I’m a
natural born blogger or NBB. We write because that’s what we do. The first impulse is to write. First thing I want to do when I sit down to work is write and when I’m thinking about more things to do, I’m usually writing about it.
#
Bluesky is in a jam because there's only one instance. They have an architecture for more instances, but now that we've gotten a look at what federation is like in practice with Mastodon and ActivityPub, I don't look forward to the same idea around Bluesky. Which is where the bind is, because that means that Bluesky, like Twitter and Facebook, would have to take on moderation and will get a lot of grief if they don't do it to people's liking. I
wrote: "I don't think they or anyone else can afford to stand against abuse on the web, it's diseconomic. People don't pay for the service, and there's an infinite supply of abuse. You know how when they add a new lane to a freeway thinking it'll ease traffic but doesn't? imho it's the same kind of thing. I do think there's hope for small social nets with dozens or maybe hundreds of users, and let Facebook have the monster social nets, they more or less have found a way to make moderation pay. I've written about this idea a lot, filed under the phrase
fractional horsepower."
#FeedLand tweak, there's a new row in the Feed Info page. Should make the flow of navigation a bit smoother.
#
Over the last couple of days I moved
this.how to an HTTPS server. It was fairly painless, but it did break some pages. If you have an
img element in the HTML or use the
image attribute in OPML, and the url of the image is on HTTP, the browser will refuse to load it, and at least on Chrome it'll look like it's still loading for a long time, possibly forever. For most of these, I'll never get around to fixing them, it just is what it is. So HTTPS despite the hype, no matter whether you convert or not, still breaks the web, and Google must know all about this and doesn't care. If a platform vendor really cared about the web as a platform, they'd look at the risk in reading an img over http and say wtf, let it go. They're like the
Soup Nazi, they have you by the balls, you know it and they know it.
#This bit of arcania has also crept into
my RSS feed. As you may know
FeedLand is now on HTTPS, it has to be because it's managing identity for itself, and if a feed item has an image only accessible over HTTP, the browser won't load it. I guess all feed readers have this problem, and I guess images from
Scripting News have always been broken? But this isn't how I remember it. Hmmm. Maybe they're doing something special, like accessing the image through a proxy running outside of Chrome's control. Haha if so
holy shit. Either it's a security problem or it isn't. I really don't think images need to be protected, but what do I know. In any case, from this point on, my images will be HTTPS too.
#
- Someday tweets will allow you to link from words to any web page on the internet.#
- You will be able to give a tweet a title.#
- You can already style text bold or italic. They kind of snuck that in there quietly? #
- I'd like to see them support Markdown.#
- You can edit your tweets for up to an hour. That's pretty good imho.#
- Twitter is basically checking off the boxes on the Textcasting vision.#
- I wonder if their competitors are noticing.#
- Also a nice RSS feed coming out of Twitter?#
- And let me enclose an MP3 for a podcast.#
It seems to me that AIs are already more intelligent than humans. When I ask ChatGPT a question, it answers it, doesn't try to turn it around, play
whatabout, or take it personally. It most definitely not a
narcissist. I don't think there's very much actual listening going on between humans, but the AIs are really good at it. Right now they're useful tools. Could they take over the world? If so, could they possibly do it worse than we do? Maybe AI rule is exactly what we need. Yes I have seen
The Matrix. Love it. Best movie.
#
A simple
Node app periodically checks if a feed still validates with the W3C service. You can modify it to check feeds you care about.
#
- When you're viewing a feed list, like this, when a feed updates, instead of inserting it at the top and forcing everything down, it displays a button. Click the button to see the new stuff. #
View updated feeds button.
#- We already had a similar feature on timeline pages.#
When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.#- That's why I say if they really want to prove their love for the open web, if they aren't just trying to lull us to sleep while they steal yet another market from the open web, they should do something that helps the web more than it helps them. #
- I know how The Mind of Facebook works. There are people at the company who believe in the open web (or at least there were at one time) and some of them have the ability to launch projects to be part of the open web, but by the time the project has to get approval from one of the top execs, it dies -- because Zuck et al have hearts of stone, and think they can have anything that isn't nailed down, and think anyone who believes in being fair to users and competitors is a chump -- a Mother Teresa type, someone to laugh at not work with.#
- There are very few people in the world as greedy and mean as Zuckerberg. Never underestimate how cold his heart is. And never believe he will do anything that benefits anyone but him.#
- I wish we had a group of tech industry veterans who could explain how to interpret moves like the ones the company that used to be known as Facebook is making wrt ActivityPub.#
- They're running a standard Embrace and Extend strategy of a giant company entering a market that's "dominated" by a small competitor that's hoping for the best. I put dominated in quotes because it's obvious that the market defined by the startup is going to be huge. But it's better if the new area is dominated by a mega corp, that is for the established billionaires. For the rest of us, it sucks. #
- It all depends on what users do. #
- Amazingly with podcasting, we were able to confuse the bigco's enough for long enough that the users learned they were entitled to choice and they suspected any effort to lock them in. That, and some grace from Steve Jobs to not try to dominate podcasting when Apple had the chance to.#
- I'm not able this time to get the message out. I'm here, I am typing into my blog, but not enough people are hearing it. Don't believe Facebook has good intentions. If they did, they would hook the main Facebook product up to the open web, not the new one. #
- Maybe it's time from some other names of the open web generation to step up and help. Facebook is going to run over the nascent federated social web the same way Google ran over RSS. That cost us a decade or more of open growth. #
- But we can put a roadblock in Facebook's way. #
- Remember how the founders of AI spoke up. #
- Well the founders of the open web could have a word too. If you're so inclined, now is the time.#
- PS: If you know a founder of the open web, please send them a link to this post. It's the web-like thing to do. 😄#
Facebook hasn't done anything to support the open web. All they've done is put it in a press release and post an email to a mail list. It's a long road from there to being on the open web. More likely they're going to use the open web and leave it a
toxic waste site after they leave.
#If Facebook really loved the open web they'd hook Facebook itself up to it. Support RSS feeds in and out. Let users have rich text and links. Basically support
Textcasting proposal.
#
When I was a grad student, in the
middle of the last century, there were two kinds of terminals in the computer lab, ones that could only display uppercase characters, and the coveted
Hazeltine terminals that could do also do lowercase. A real luxury item. I feel the same way as we approach the middle of the next century when I get to use boldface text or a bit of italic in a tweet. I laughed out loud when some text I pasted from my blog went through with its boldness intact. We have a long way to go to
get back where we were.
#I've seen people use the term "social web" where previously they'd say "social media." I like this. Going in the right direction. Let's try to bring everything back to the web. I bet most people who use the web these days only have a vague idea of what it is.
#I was just filling out a form that asked for my social media addresses and noticed how I don't remember how to specify the addresses for Bluesky, Mastodon and LinkedIn. I had no trouble with Twitter and Threads, though I have a lot of trouble remembering the name of Threads. I think Bluesky is headed in the right direction, by letting people specify a domain name. A service that made this a bit easier for non-technical users could help here.
#
