Speak plainly. As Brent says, lessons not learnings. Keep it simple. This is one of the foundations of blogging, btw. "Try to write correctly."#
Just a guess, but the people doing the "ice" raids are not real police any more than the "doge" people are/were actually part of the US government. In this New Yorker podcast, they dug into what "doge" actually was/is. Some weren't actually Trump supporters, they just thought it would be interesting to be empowered to fix the government. They learned the government doesn't work the way they thought it did. Spending is way up over the years, but number of government employees has stayed flat. It has already been largely privatized. Tangentially they appear to have found some things actually worth fixing. Tech culture isn't just the billionaires, far from it. There's a lot of hippie ethics in there too, you just have to look past the money, which seems too much work for some/most journalists. But The New Yorker tends to do this well, btw, sometimes. 😄 #
I read through the QuickDraw API summary from 1985. For me it was like someone who built applications of electricity, going back to see Edison's workbench before there was an industry. It was so seminal. It would never work in today's architectures, almost everything was global. There were five color constants, white, black, gray, ltGray, dkGray. You could see the whole archtecture in just a few pages. It wasn't bloated yet. And the best thing was there was the screen memory. Not hidden. If you didn't like the way QuickDraw worked, you could go around it. It was an idea I only ever used on the Apple II, it was imho Woz's big contribution, for me coming from Unix it was incredible to have so much power. On the Mac it showed up as a variable in a high level language, on the Apple II, you had to know the physical address, but in both cases, when you stored a bit in the memory it showed up on the screen. We never saw anything like that on the previous generation of machines, IBM mainframes and Digital minis. Someday someone will go through all this and see how it evolved. These pages are a tiny but hugely significant slice. Maybe with next year's ChatGPT. #I had an experience like the one Paul Simon described on Colbert last night. I was at the Apple Store on 14th St in NYC to pick up a new phone I had pre-ordered, lined up with some much younger folks who asked if I knew what was new on the phone. I said I wasn’t sure, so I asked if they knew. They all agreed the coolest thing was called “pod casting.” They said it slowly to be sure I could understand. They said it was great, it was like radio, but you could get it from the web, and there was always lots of new stuff. "What will they think of next," said the old man, impressed, nodding with respect. #
As you get older and see your friends of 30, 40, even 50 years -- you realize how silly this all is. I see them and I see an old person, but I know who they are inside. The old "don't judge a book by its cover" adage probably wasn't coined by a younger person. 😄#
Until further notice dissent is an act of patriotism, support of and belief in our country.#
- Bill Atkinson died two weeks ago today. #
- I was explaining to a friend why he was so important. Most people who know of him know about MacPaint and Hypercard, both were fantastic contributions to the evolution of personal computers. But underneath all that he created a layer of the Macintosh OS called QuickDraw, which was a core innovation of the Mac, its graphic system. Every piece of software that ran on the Macintosh ran on top of QuickDraw.#
- Here's what QuickDraw is. Software could do things at the pixel level, a dot so small it's barely visible to the eye. What you're seeing on the screen is made up of collections of those dots, forming lines, boxes, ovals and text, and later page layouts, beautiful photography, and the text you're reading right now. The software that does all that, on the earliest Macs, is called QuickDraw. (Later a successor called QuickTime made the dots move and added sound, and now we have streaming.)#
- QuickDraw is great. #
- That's the thing. You could tell from the API that the designers really understood the tech. It wasn't the first time this had been done. And either Atkinson did it himself, working on it for years, or he "stole from the best" -- probably a lot of both. The prior art came from Xerox in Palo Alto, and the experience came from being a hard-working dedicated hacker who didn't give up until it was done. That's like saying if he were a basketball hero, he was like Bill Russell or Steph Curry. We don't talk about our accomplishments that much in tech, on a personal level, we have an idea that Steve Jobs made the Mac, but it was really created by developers, designers, graphic artists, writers and application developers. Like Bill Atkinson.#
- I spent many years building on his work, and many more years wishing I still was. He made a contribution, and that's, imho, pretty much the best you can say for any person's life. #
- Thanks Bill. 😄#
- PS: For programmers, here's a summary of the QuickDraw API.#
- I had a conversation on Bluesky with a writer saying she didn't have much use for ChatGPT, though she had tried it. #
- I wanted to see if I could open a door, suggesting that next time there was an problem using a computer, that she bring the question to ChatGPT. #
- I think that's good advice for anyone who hasn't seen how useful these are as tools. You can use it like a search engine. What comes back answers your question. With Google you'd have to read through docs that are meant to cover every angle, but the AI bot zeroes in on the issue you're dealing with. And the writing on ChatGPT is better than what you would get on a random web page explaining a technical concept. #
- Passkeys#
- Previously I had tried to approach passkeys to get an idea of how I should use them, but never grasped the big picture. I just didn't understand what they were doing, but I understood it was about authentication. A hardware approach to identity, that much I got. How it worked and how I would use it did not click. #
- And then earlier this week, an essential site that I use infrequently, required using a passkey. When I had set it up a few months ago, as part of a bigger develolpment task, I had no idea what I was doing, and eventually bailed out, and left it unable to get back into the system, which happened on Sunday. By default the browser, Chrome, had previously connected it to my Pixel 9 Pro. There was a record of the connection being used for a variety of other services, but the one I needed was not there. This was after a full day of trying to debug it from the other side. I now have a lot more info about how passkeys work, I won't be able to say I know enough until I've re-established the connection. #
- I know a lot of readers of this site understood passkeys without anyone having to piece it together for them. I have never been one of those people. Just the way my mind works, it's why I'm a good person to test software, I get lost easily. #
- All this is to say -- think of ChatGPT as a technical assistant with broad knowledge and patience. That's where the real power is imho. #
- If there were a Joe Rogan of the left, he would tell you to stfu and vote for Cuomo for mayor of NYC. #
- NYC is a special place, like the Knicks are a special NBA team. #
- And btw, Cuomo, like Trump, is from Queens. #
- PS: The Joe Rogan of the left will be from Queens too. :-)#
- PPS: Queens doesn't have an Empire State Building, and they tore down Shea Stadium. So the Unisphere from the last World's Fair will have to do. But Queens is probably the most ethnically diverse place in the world. Think about that for a minute and how the fight for the soul of the US will be fought in Queens. #
- PPPS: I come from Jackson Heights and Flushing. #
In a year or two it will be possible to create a perfect TV version of any person. No longer can you say any person has to die eventually and go away. And we can have anyone back we want. #
I figured that yesterday's army march in DC would have caused clashes with the police in more places than it did, perhaps due to false flag attacks "from the left" at one of the many No King Day parades around the country. I thought this was the moment when it would all melt down. America's Reichstad Fire. If it were an episode of Mission Impossible or Batman, it would definitely have gone that way. I bet there were plans hatched on open chat channels between various Cabinet members and their families, and probably Elon Musk via an interpreter, to coordinate. I was also surprised there weren't any Tesla Cybertrucks in yesterday's parade. I guess the honeymoon is really over. Anyway, they had to have had a plan, but I keep forgetting this is not Generalissimo Trump, rather it's TV President "Taco" Trump. I think they had a plan and he lost his nerve at the last minute. Instead, the Maga in Minnesota lit a different fuse, assassinating the speaker of the state house. That's a line that hadn't yet been crossed, but you knew the day would come. It's here. #When Trump was on trial in NYC he begged for support from his base, no one showed up. The cops prepared for rallies that never showed up.#
BTW, this piece in the NYT has a bit of wisdom that I had not considered because I don't listen to Joe Rogan it would never occur to me. He's relaxing white noise, chatting in the background while you play a game or write a blog post or text message on your phone, or just think about something unrelated. I forgot that mode of media consumption. I'm always on the hunt for that kind of content. That's why sports games are so good. You can almost completely tune out, knowing they'll replay the best stuff. #- Reminds of a meeting we had a Berkman in the early days of podcasting. Most of the faculty were of course not on board with what we were doing, possibly believing that it threatened public radio (didn't turn out that way at all, they made incredibly good use of podcasting). One of the guys from PRX which was also incubating there at the time, said at me in a challenging way -- You get the best info from public radio! Right? I thought for a minute and realized this was a good question. No, I said, it's relaxing, I can tune out while I'm driving or walking around town. Loud groans. But it's so true. Now it's great when there's a TV series that really catches your attention, I love that too, but most of my media-ingesting time is with white noise, background relaxation. The world is still okay when the background noise on MSNBC are still on the air between the ever more disgusting ads for diseases I probably will never get.#
- There must be a better way. #
- It's like the canaries in a coalmine. When they go off the air that's when you really have to start worrying! #
- BTW, PRX was a good idea. Brilliant actually. Distribute the content from the public radio sources that generate too much to the ones in less populated areas where they don't generate enough. Podcasting blew that up -- but PRX adjusted their approach, and became a distributor of podcasting. That's an entrepreneur's approach. The were able to pivot and continue to make a contribution to this day. #
- I often wonder how we missed the opportunity to build a great media incubator at Harvard in the 00s. We were right there, and the backer of Berkman wanted entrepreurial projects, I found out at the reunion two summers ago. We had it, were there, if only.. Heh when you get to be my age there's lots of that. #
- Also I wonder how I missed the potential of WordPress all those years. Ships passing in the night. But we're there now, so..#
- If you're a regular reader of my blog you know I put images in the right margins of pieces. I get an idea then I go scouting around using search to find the image that fits. #
- Today I was looking for an image of an army General. #
- i'd like a painting style image of an american general in world war ii timeframe standing on a white background, full body from shoes to helmet, lots of medals, angry determination on his face. as if it were a portrait. #
- This is what I got, and it's perfect.#
If you think we need to find a way past the billionaires, then we have to find a way around the established media. They keep selling us out and we keep acting as if we show them that they're doing it in a way they understand they'll get on our side. But they can't. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair in 1935. It's still true 90 years later. Another great philosopher, Les Moonves, said in 2016, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," referring to Trump's run for president. It was good presumably because of increased viewership resulting more ad revenue. I'm sure it's still true today, though CBS stopped boasting about it in public. #- It's not just the government that's afraid of small groups of people working together. Big tech companies also. And startups hoping to sell out to big companies. #
- Having a Democrat rise from the ashes of metoo is just what the doctor ordered. It could cure the revulsion some voters feel for Democratic wokeness. Cuomo was never tried or convicted of any crime, or voted out of office by the state assembly or senate in Albany. Or the people of the State of New York. Al Franken wasn't allowed to have his case adjudicated by a committee of Congress. Both were pushed from office by journalism, which imho needs to be put in their place, they've been sloshing into lanes they weren't elected to. Let me try to make this clear. Journalism's role is to inform us of events. Once informed, it's their responsibility to stop. Anything past that is campaigning, not news. Step back and let the process run its course. Ultimately it's the people who will decide. Now, if Cuomo wins, this is the best outcome possible because the NYT et al will complain endlessly about how the Democrats just elected someone who they don't approve of. This will probably get the Dems more votes in coming elections, because there are a lot of people who legitimately are disgusted by the NYT trying to run the show. If you want to govern, run for office. If you want to be a journalist, know when it's time to shut up.#
- BTW isn't it amazing that when you say something counter to Democratic dogma, their first impulse is to try to destroy you? If the Dems were a healthy political party and not a religion, their first impulse would be to try to work with you not destroy you.#
- "Who me?" asks the Democrat. Yes, you. #
- You'll know who the next leader of the Democratic Party is because they will be campaigning against the Democratic Party. Talking about things that actually happened rather than the hallucinations the Trumpies indulge in. #
- The linkblog project is coming along. Still more things to hook up but I thought it would be nice to take a picture of what a linkblog post looks like in the reader app.#
- And just for fun because we can do it, here's a screen shot of the screen shot in the reader app. #
Today I'm going to teach WordLand how to manage a linkblog. Before doing that I tried to figure out what a linkblog is. I have been using various homebrew linkblogging tools which I have shared with others, but none of them became popular products. I wrote a summary to help guide the development work I have planned. #
I was lucky to grow up in NYC, and had to commute from Queens to the Bronx every day to go to school. Some days I took the Q44 bus over the Whitestone Bridge, and other days I took the Q16 to the 7 train through Manhattan, and then the 4 or D trains up to 205th St in the Bronx. Took the same amount of time either way. So at age 15 I was able to go see the Grateful Dead after school at the Fillmore East on April 27, 1971. Midway through the set, a special guest band who they didn't introduce started tuning up on stage. We all wondered who they were. I now know the history thanks to the 500 Songs podcast, and this was the return of a band that had fallen out of favor, a band whose hits we all heard on WABC and WNEW-FM. When they started playing one of their biggest hits, Good Vibrations, the audience erupted in ecstasy. The Beach Boys now looking a lot different, but playing the same wonderful California music from the 60s. They couldn't be more different from the Dead, but there they were up on stage together. They were back, this time for good. This is a recording of the whole concert, the link points to the beginning of Good Vibrations. You can hear the gasp of recognition, and the bands recognition of the recognition, and from their it was a party in a party, including a sing-along part -- "gotta keep those a lovin' good vibrations happening with you." We were all growing up very quickly, but we had a moment when we could return to a more innocent time. Lovely the way music pulls you back in time. Brian Wilson wasn't there that night but his music certainly was. #
- Yesterday I posted a link to my political disclaimer from 2018. Also listened to a podcast interview with Senator Gallego of Arizona who says, correctly, that the Democrats have work to do with men. It's true, speaking as a man who has been voting solid Democratic since Kerry, but I didn't stop being a man, which is something that makes me cringe to say it, the way I cringed at admitting to being Jewish when I was a kid. I lived in a place where hate of Jews was always just under the surface in school, but not so well hidden at the playground. #
- Men as a gender were really pushed into a corner we couldn't get out of during #metoo, all men, not just some. If they say they weren't they're lying. I went to a future of journalism conference in 2018, and the only thing men talked about, quietly, among ourselves, was how scared we were of losing everything. It really was bad, but since then it's eased. #
- I wrote about #metoo in my political disclaimer, but didn't promote it for fear of retribution. I was threatened when I stood up for a friend whose life was ruined for as far as I could tell doing nothing wrong. If you don't shut up we'll do you too, basically. #
- Women are people just like men, and when they got to rage online against men, even people I thought I knew and were friends behaved abhorently. The way we imagine Trump might deal with us soon. #
- I have to add not all women, there were some who didn't forget that their male friends were still friends.#
- It was very clear where the Democratic Party came down on all this, and of course, the Republicans took total advantage of this. If you want to understand the manosphere as you all call it, start here. I vote with you all, but absolutely abhor the way you pushed us all into a corner and shut down our pride. Women are people too and they can be just as ugly as men. If you believe otherwise you're believing lies. I speak from experience, I was raised to believe all women are saints. That lie did not prepare us well for life. #
- The good news is if the Democrats can make peace with men, there are a lot more votes available to us. We can put it behind us, but we can't ignore that in the late teens we went absolutely fucking batshit crazy about half of the electorate. It's amazing the whole thing didn't completely crumble, irrevocably. We can still fix it, but we have to acknowledge that men were hurt in that period. You all seem to have forgotten that we are just people too. #
- PS: Re-reading the #metoo section of the disclaimer I can't believe how I tiptoed around the truth. The truth I didn't dare say was it was a huge hate campaign as divisive as anything the Repubs ever did. In a country that was supposed to outlaw this, and from a political party that was supposed to be liberal. The "both sides do it" reality probably hasn't yet sunk in but the Democrats sided with sadists and fascists. No other way to put it. Men absolutely were silenced. Afraid to speak for fear of retribution. If you were on the wrong side of this you have some soul-searching to do. And you probably pushed a lot of people of all genders into voting for Trump. The Dems posture of "who me?" has an answer -- yes you. #
Using soldiers as a political prop. Trump gave a political speech, lying about protests in front of a group of people dressed as American soldiers. They all appeared to be enjoying the president’s tough talk about the role he wants the military to play in policing the cities. MSNBC should not broadcast this.#
Would one of the browser vendors work with me on doing something nice with displaying feeds in XML form? I don't support obfuscating what a feed is, that just adds confusion. When I lift the hood of a car I want to see an engine not a drawing of something that sort of looks like a car, but not really, and looks nothing like an engine.#
- I was wondering if Saturday's military parade in Washington was going to be the rollout of the Trump junta, and if that meant the president would appear in military garb, perhaps subdued so next year's parade they can add more features. So I asked ChatGPT to help. #
- President Trump is reviewing the military parade in on a stage in front of the White House in Washington DC. To honor the troops, he’s dressed in a faux military uniform with medals, and a cap that says Make America Great Again. Fighter jets are flying overhead.#
- When I tried the first time, last night, it got halfway through the drawing then quit, saying it violated their content guidelines. So I went to meta.ai, which also does drawing, and it was willing to do it, and even animated it. I uploaded the result to my AI group on Facebook. It should be visible to everyone, without an invitation. #
- I then tried again with ChatGPT and it was willing to do the same task it wasn't willing to do last night. #
- Yesterday I introduced a new feed for great art, 24 times a day. Every hour on the hour.#
- Today, a version of that feed provides one work of art each day, at midnight, Eastern.#
- Why I did this feed. I'm crafting a new information product, and I want to include a random work of art but not every hour, once a day is enough. I thought it was worth a detour to make the feed that I wanted. #
- The first work of art in the feed on its inaugural issue was The Countess from Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526. It was chosen at random from a collection of 42,473 works of art. #
There's a documentary coming out about podcasting. I was interviewed in it and got to tell a bunch of stories, about how you get people interested in working with each other. I told the story of how I chose the Grateful Dead's music to get the initial implementation going, on both the sending and receiving side. I used their music, since it so totally fit in with the philosophy, ie come as you are, we're all just people. And the song I chose was a good one too, the US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. I've been hiding out. In a rock and roll band." Using great art to prototype this connection makes total sense. It says we carry forward our art where ever we go, no matter where it takes us, a great work of music or art is always a good thing to share. #Yet another journalism article about how AI is not really intelligent and all the tech industry hype must stop now or else we'll write another strongly worded article about how they are not really intelligent just like the 800,000 previous articles about how AI is not really intelligent.#
- Here's something to think about. As you may recall, I have an hourly art feed, available both in RSS and on Bluesky. Same content. #
- Today I gave each the same new name, art.feediverse.org. #
- If you use that URL on Bluesky, you go to its version of the content stream. And if you give the same URL to a web browser, ie accessing it via HTTP, you get the RSS version of the same data. #
- On Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/art.feediverse.org.#
- On the web: https://art.feediverse.org.#
- BTW -- think of feediverse as a web of feeds. It's open of course, because the web itself is open. And it's pretty social as you will see. It's why I think it's really the first instance of the "open social web."#
I've long felt documents should have their own CNAMEs. I even went so far as to design a system where each node in an outline could have a CNAME. I still believe in this, why not have a hierarchic file system that's as editable as an outline? It's the same idea that works in so many other contexts. It's why the idea of a scripting system on a graphic PC like the early Mac made a world of sense. It's why Unix underneath that same UI was the right way to go. And why the web is so nice, you just View Source and you get to lift the hood and see how it works. #- They were smart at Bluesky to use DNS this way. Why invent your own identity system when the net itself has a great distributed system that scales? They just made the wrong call (imho) in not using RSS for their timeline data, or at least the outside world's view of their timeline, in both directions -- in and out. That's the basic idea of the Internet itself. No one cares what's behind your TCP interface, it could be a network with a million nodes using some wacky protocol to connect them. As long as I can get to you via TCP, you're on the net. This is the kumbaya philosophy of the net, why not just use what already works. #
- You'll see that we're able to do some interesting twitter-like stuff with this duality.#
- A thread for comments and questions. #
- PS: A piece about DNS as ID in 2012.#
I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.#Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard. #
I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. #
- Some random thoughts about wealth.#
- Suppose you're an average middle-class person who works for a tech company when the company is bought out for a huge amount of money and your stock is now worth $10 million. It's liquid today. You just received a check for $10 million. What do you do? #
- Answer: You buy things to see if there was a reason to make the money, and it turns out there really wasn't. You would have been just as happy in the big house in the rich neighborhood or the smaller house in a more modest area. #
- Then what if you reach another level, now you have a check in your hand for $100 million, then $1 billion, then $25 billion and keep going. It doesn't stop there. At each level you are compelled to find something fantastic that you can use that money for. Some power that the new level of wealth gets you. #
- We saw in Succession, they played out the lunacy, the people use a lot of space, but they're still just people. If they loved someone or someone loved them, they'd be much happier than all the happiness all that money ever gave them. #
- Having such large useless amounts of money is a not only a problem for the rich folk, we've found out, it's a problem for everyone else too, because eventually they get around to buying political power and they start using the money to change other people lives, always for the worse, it seems. #
- We need a new game that only super rich people can play that doesn't hurt the rest of us. I'm not advising anyone to do anything. But I think this is what I've been writing about on my blog since the beginning. #
- I didn't understand why, for example, Evan Williams didn't just make technology and give it away, after having made billions from Twitter. #
- Why did Bill Gates have to accumulate so much money and threaten the independence of the open web, a miracle, to get it? Why not use your power to make miracles before you retire, start doing the good you were promising to do later, right now? What good, in hindsight, did the extra billions do for anyone, including Gates? When his power was at his peak, in the 90s, he could have done a much bigger thing for the world, give us a free new level of communication that would be available equally to everyone. #
- Elon Musk, having done some incredible things in computers, finance, cars and space, had to invent new challenges that only his wealth can buy, and eventually came up with things that only the US Treasury could buy, and some things like relocating the human species on Mars, that no amount of money can buy (or so scientists say). He needs to receive an award of love and gratitude for not using his wealth to make everyone else totally miserable (including himself, it seems).#
- PS: I haven't yet read Evan Osnos' new book about billionaires, but I want to. He's done some great reporting in the past. #
- PPS: See also: Transcendental Money, or money that replenishes itself, ie money that transcends time. #
- PPPS: Another one: Your human-size life. #
- PPPPS: Ted Turner said "I bet you’re all wondering what it feels like to be a billionaire. It’s disappointing really. I’ve learned that great wealth isn’t nearly as good as average sex."#
With ChatGPT there's no excuse for a congressperson not validating every word in every bill. They could ask the bot to read the bill and call out any provisions that contradict your previous positions. It knows where you stand even if you've never written it down. I've found it can do that for my work. I'm sure it could do it for a legislator. Even better, news orgs could do that for them. Or validate a bill against their campaign platforms. "I promise never to touch Social Security" could be validated against pending legislation. The time delay part of this isn't an excuse any longer.#Experience managing developers makes me a better ChatGPT user. #
A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.#
I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment. #I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments. #
Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging. #
Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example to crib from.#
I'm totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there in the last few days. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two of them. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s with Frontier. Today I might have one of the largest public codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week? #A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence. #
I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity. We were so lucky. We developed all kind of stuff that was only possible when there was no platform vendor. #- But then in the mid 00s things changed, and since then the users have flocked to closed systems. It would be similarly wonderful if we had an open social web, but we don’t. Mastodon is open but it’s not simple like the web is, and Bluesky is simple, but it is not open. And neither supports the most basic features of the web.#
- Today most active devs weren’t around when the web came along and knocked down the silos. It is imho possible to have an open social web, but the people who are trying to make one out of complex and closed systems will imho never get there.#
- They would be better off to look for different foundations to build on other than Mastodon and Bluesky. I have one in mind, btw. You will probably be surprised, but then we were all surprised by the web itself.#
- This was an email I sent to one of the people I'm working with at Automattic, and realized I was actually writing a blog post. #
- I was watching on the FediForum session yesterday, and heard all this stuff about Bluesky and Mastodon, but these are products that are poorly prepared for the "open social web" -- and imho they won't get there. But WordPress is already there. #
- I think some of the products are good, btw -- I hadn't seen Surf, it's basically a feed aggregator that can get input from Bluesky and Mastodon. I don't think they're using their RSS support though. Not adequate. But WordPress RSS is fine. I made an improvement to the Scripting News RSS to add an <image> element that works like the one on a WordPress site. Now my posts can show up in the timeline via RSS. #
- That's the key to what we're doing. Reading and writing, with the UI of a twitter-like product, all built on RSS, with the content also appearing on the network WordPress has defined. I see this as huge. #
- Obviously this needs to be a blog post. #
Regular readers of my blog know that I've been calling out Bluesky and people associated with it for saying they're an open platform, and part of the web, when they are neither. Why don't people, esp journalists, call them out on this? We've been around this loop over and over in tech. There's a virtual conference today, FediForum, that on their home page repeats the hype. Why do people do this? What's the point of pouring your time into technology you hope someday will be open? I bought a ticket to the conference so if there are any sessions that look like they might be productive I can participate. I even wrote a keynote, so you can see there is a way for this stuff to start working, quickly, if the vendors you're looking up to are sincere in their promises. I've posted it on Mastodon and Bluesky so if you have comments or questions, we can start the discussion now, or any time.#Now a personal comment. What pisses me off most about Bluesky is the political environment all this is happening in. We need an open social web. They've got a lot of people convinced they are it. They are not and they know it. And they keep leading people on. They should either deliver, now, or get out of the way. #
Why doesn't Walt Frazier have a freaking podcast. Come on. (Jon Stewart did a series of podcast-style interviews with him.)#
If everything goes well, the RSS feed for Scripting News will now have a channel-level image element because it's part of a network that requires an avatar-like image. This required me to go through some very old code that my system still depends on. It's remarkable how much time this seemingly small feature took to implement. One of these days I have to move this code to one of my more modern servers. One reason it took so long is that a random package that does something that never changes, had a breaking change in it. The breakage culture of the Node.js world is just plain fucked up, no other word for it. #And btw one of these days I'm going to clear the time to write a useful and up to date RSS feed validator. The one the W3C uses is a total embarassment. I'm not even going to link to it it's so awful.#
I've heard that Andor is great stuff. I'm on episode 6 of season 1, and it's the usual Star Wars bullshit. It was fun in 1978. But now? It's so freaking boring. Tell me it's worth continuing to watch, that it gets an actual plot at some point.#
I had a neighbor and friend a long time ago named Ann Doerr. I used to joke with her how her name was a combination of two of the main types of logic gates in computers. I think that's what attracted me to the Star Wars Andor show.#
I now have the special ChatGPT function I've been waiting for. Codex. Give it access to my entire GitHub collection and let it go. I stopped myself from authorizing, wanting to sleep on it. I know I'm going to do it, but.. Gulp. Do I really want to dump all my thinking for Sam Altman?#
- I've been enjoying the new David Frum podcast. He's very good at thinking and does a lot of it, and expresses himself very well. I read all his columns and have read two of his books, even though I don't share much of his pre-Trump politics, I find it interesting to hear how he parses things. I also subscribe to The Atlantic. I listen to him. But in this week's episode it's clear that the listening is one-way. #
- In today's episode we heard from the elite journalist David Frum, interviewing elite editor in chief Marty Barrett, formerly of the Washington Post, and they both make what I believe are wildly inaccurate generalizations about the quality of the news reporting by professionals and the ugliness and inadequacy of bloggers and podcasters. #
- The problem is, they don't read widely enough to know that there are bloggers and podcasters with good intentions, ethics, deep knowledge and experience who are also well educated -- they don't know we exist and therefore can't hear about the huge mistakes they are making with their own self-perception of their role that we can see because we are not in their world. (BTW, I have been in their world, I was a contributing editor at Wired, a research fellow at Harvard and NYU, each for two years, and I have collided with Frum-like elites, the usual response is a hand-wave of dismissal, written off as not worth listening to, I guess.)#
- Frum, at the end of the episode talks about how the press covered Biden's incapacity, that led to the second Trump term. They should have stopped, once we were all informed of what happened, and let the electorate decide, it wasn't up to them, or the celebrities they gave space to in their op-eds. In the United States, the people decide. Instead they put up a roadblock and wouldn't let the issue drop. We all knew, we were all informed, probably long before we read a single article about his debate performance. They should have stopped. That was their malpractice. #
- Their responsibility was to give us the information, and it was also their responsibility to stop right there. Once informed, they were wrong in continuing to harp on it. #
- We saw them do it with Governor Cuomo of New York. And Senator Al Franken. And Donald McNeil at the NY Times. And on and on. There's so much reporting that's lazy and incompetent, but they'll never report on that, because of their conflicts. And they never listen to their critics. And as a result they play a role they are not entitled to play. #
- They need to wake up to the idea that while reporting from their bubble is still important and is heard, they misuse it regularly, and we are fed up with it. If they want to control the government, do the right thing, and run for office. Don't do it from your byline in the Washington Post or NY Times. #
- FediForum is a virtual conference that starts on June 5. If they had asked me to keynote, this is roughly what I would say. #
- Imho this stuff is pretty freaking simple, esp since there are well over 20 years of prior art to use, and not that many ways to do what we're trying to do. I'm impatient, so here's a quick set of observations with my opinion, take it for what it's worth, ymmv, etc. #
- You shouldn't be reinventing so much. Always look around for prior art. That will make it possible for you to interop more quickly at both a software level and at a human level. #
- Don't invent stuff you think you may need later. Save that for later. You have no intuition for what's needed and more important nothing to test against. You will get it wrong 100 percent of the time.#
- Don't invent stuff you think you may need later that makes what you're doing now more complicated. I see a lot of that in ActivityPub. #
- The only reason you're doing all this work is for interop. If you've been doing it for years and you don't have much meaningful interop you're doing it wrong.#
- Write the software first. Use formats that exist, or if you must invent new stuff, make sure it's simple. Work on its simplicity as you would any other feature. Factor! If there are going to be 100 interoperable products and you make it a little more difficult to implement, that work will be multiplied 100 times. And it be a barrier to entry, so you may not get the most powerful interop possible with the most interesting products. #
- Read and follow the Rules for Standards-makers. There aren't that many. But if you're breaking them, you're not going to end up with a standard. If your goal is to appear to be making standards, you should also read RFSM, and don't do anything in it. I've seen people do that btw. #
- Have you looked at the world outside the tech stuff to see how important this all has become? All the time we're wasting is very costly in everything that depends on the social web actually existing as opposed to just being talked about.#
- Now, what would I request if I could influence you??#
- Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more (see the next item). #
- They'd support the basic features of the textcasting spec, including Markdown because it's a great standard, very much of the same school as RSS. If it had existed when we did RSS 2.0 it would have been part of it. #
- That's it. Really not much work. #
- From there we'd have 25 years of interop to explore. #
- And we could really call this the open social web.#
- I'm ready to do it any time you all are. #
- Yours in not wasting time.#
- Dave#
- PS: I asked ChatGPT to visualize me giving this talk.#
- PPS: Comments or questions on Masto or Bluesky.#
On today's Bill Simmons podcast, their Knicks expert, Van Lathan said "I would under-react but they're going to over-react." I heard that about an hour before the Knicks fired their coach. I don't think it's good or bad, it could work out great. No one knows if this was The Season the Knicks were meant to go to the Finals, but if it was, maybe next year will be too? There's no right answer. Maybe this was Dolan's call. I hope not. #
"Courtesy" calls from insurance companies aren't.#
If you followed the Knicks through the playoffs as I did, I recommend the latest episode of the Bill Simmons podcast. It began with talk about the fan base and that got me thinking. We don't know what would happen if the Knicks were in the Finals. Honestly. It could be the antidote to the crazyness. Maybe the reason things are so fucked up is that it's been 52 freaking years since the Knicks won the title. Something happens every so often, the energy field around the Knicks shifts -- Patrick Ewing, Melo, Linsanity and now Brunson. It'd be interesting to map that out against events in the world at the corresponding times. We won't find out this year. In the same way I sensed that New Orleans was doomed when I went to school there, I have a strong feeling connecting the Knicks to something not sure what, but it feels big. #
Jeremy Herve of Automattic responded to yesterday's suggestion about when to set the og:image metadata in a page. His response is persuasive, but there may be a way to work around it. And a hat-tip to Jeremy, he's helped us so many times getting WordLand ready to market. When you're fitting a product to another product as a platform, it's so important to get help from the vendor, and usually you don't get much of that. Thanks! 😄#
Jay Rosen gave a brilliant short talk in 2008 about the role of links in the web, and how journalism would have a hard time translating their self-contained worlds with the idea of the web, which is there is no container other than the whole world. Lots of important ideas in Jay's talk. For example, the idea of developing something from one direction or the other. The problem with Bluesky and Mastodon is that they're coming from Twitter, and think they're aiming toward the web, apparently -- but they must not understand the web, because they're going to have to break with Twitter's model in so many ways to reach the web, they'll never get there if they go slowly. If you tried to develop the social web by starting with the web, you arrive at a different place, w/o all the problems of twitter-like systems. Different problems, but not the ones the twitter model has. How do I know? Because I know. 😄 #I asked ChatGPT if I moved to NYC in 2009 or 2010. It answered in an instant. "You moved to NYC in 2010." I asked how it knew. It used my blog as the source. We have arrived in the future. This is exactly the kind of query I've been begging Google to support for decades. They could have figured out where my blog is, or let me tell it where it is. Famously they once asked if I had misspelled my mother's last name in a query. How freaking clueless can you get. #
Krugman is right, living in NYC is amazing. When I lived in Manhattan betw 2010 and 2019, I had it great but toward the end I yearned to live in the mountains, the year before Covid hit (that was a bad time to be in Manhattan, btw). Now I yearn to again live in the city. Funny how that works. Even in the 70s I felt safe in NYC, and I commuted to school from Queens to the Bronx. It was safe enough to let a 14 year old kid ride the subway into Manhattan and up to the Bronx and back, every freaking day. I never got mugged. And I did all kinds of dangerous stuff that independent-minded teen agers do. If you can afford it, I recommend you spend some time in NYC before you believe the bullshit the Repubs say about it. They have reasons not to like the cities that have nothing to do with how nice it is. In NYC we don't trust our politicians to tell the truth. You shouldn't trust yours so much either, dear Republicans. 😄#
In honor of the Knicks' very successful season, I temporarily put the paper bags fans at the top of my home page as a reminder to anyone who wants to blame someone on the Knicks for how the season turned out. I think we should all wear the paper bags on our heads as a reminder of how we felt about being Knicks fans not all that long ago. They are always a horrible team to love, whether they're playing for the title, or just trying desperately not to be the worst team in the NBA this season. Love hurts as some wise person once sang. #
It's already June 2! It seems like just yesterday it was June 1!#
From Facebook on this day in 2015. "There should be a required college course called Introduction to Assholes. The student would learn how not to be manipulated by jerks."#
- Below is a screen shot of a post written by Doc Searls as viewed in Bluesky. It's jarring. The big picture of Doc gets in the way. #
- I realize no one designed this, but it also is reality, it's how a lot of people see Doc's writing. #
- Here's my suggestion. When the user specifies a featured image for a post, set the og:image element in the head section of the page. When they don't specify such an image, omit that element. #
- That's how we did it in the Baseline theme, and I, as the writer, am happy with the result.#
- Human beings spend far to much effort feeling better than some people or feeling inferior to others.#
- This is understandable, I guess, as far as evolution is concerned, up to a point, but I think we've been past that point for a long time now. Now, evolution brought us to a point where in order to survive as a species we have to get over this need to rank people and work together.#
- So if you feel other people are better than you, get over it. Same thing if you feel better than others. You aren't and they aren't.#
- Your shit still stinks and as the great Republican philosopher Joni Ernst so eloquently put it, she's going to be dead pretty darned soon and so will you.#
- I have to remind myself of this when I see a picture of someone who is really ugly but acts like they're not. And when I say ugly, I mean ugly inside. I say to myself "Davey, they are reflecting off something inside yourself that you don't like. On a different day they might seem very beautiful to you!" So I can relax and stop worrying so much about what I think about them in the moment. It matters not one bit.#
Good morning and welcome to June. Another month gone, and coincidentally the end of the NBA season. I woke up this morning with the worst hangover ever, and I haven't had a drink in months (never was my vice, I have others). The Knicks lost fair and square to the Indianas last night. My first message came from NakedJen who isn't as far as I know a Mets fan, saying simply "Let's go Mets!" I like that, though it will of course take me some time to get re-adjusted. I think the Knicks were jinxed because Brunson said in his podcast that New York has two teams, the Knicks (I agree) and the Yankees. What! No. I think we may have to consider trading him to a team without philosophy. I'm not sure anyone will have him though, considering this possibly fatal flaw, philosophy-wise. And no doubt the Knicks are going to change some things over the summer, and I've heard that they might try to get Kevin Durant. I sure hope not. I think the Knicks are benefiting from the jinx he put on himself when he tried in vain to stir up a "rivalry" between the Knicks and the Brooklyns. No, that isn't likely to happen, unless they try to become a contender without kicking the Knicks in the butt like KD did. Maybe the Portland Trail Blazers will want him. That's about as far from New York as you can get in the NBA. And with that I now officially shut the door on the 2024-25 NBA season. We had a great run. See you all in October! 😄#
Why does Apple invent their own proprietary plugs when everyone else does USB? Even if you don't like to speak ill of Apple, you know why they do it. They want to control who can make add-ons to their products in hardware, just as they do in software. I still buy their products, but I also buy products that use standards, so I can use them on lots of devices. Now, the same thing happens in software from other people and companies. They can choose to use what already exists, or invent their own. Example, I chose MP3 for podcasting, did not invent a new format. If I were to do a social web network, I would use RSS, I wouldn't invent a new format. I want interop. I want to create an open platform, I don't mind making money, but that's not why I do it. #RSS never had a big corporation acting as a benefactor. Is that why imho RSS hasn't been considered as the backbone of the social web? Probably more likely it's the Fog Of War nature of tech development. We have so many forks of so many things we don't know what anyone else is doing. It's easier to invent your own than figure out what the other thing did. Perhaps ChatGPT et al will change that. Yesterday I used it to get an understanding of how the content:encoded element came to exist and evolved, and you'd think I of all people would know, but I didn't. ChatGPT did. #
Thinking of splurging on tickets for Game 7 at the Garden on Monday. I've been following the prices during the playoffs, never seen them this high. Courtside seats go for $27K each. BTW, there's no guarantee there will be a Game 7, first the Knicks have to win tomorrow in Indiana. #
- I'm working on something that requires an endless stream of test posts. Sometimes when I start writing I end up something that should be published. Should I edit it? Nah.#
- this shit is hard. when it's done it looks simple. but these pieces must fit together. #
- that's why it's soooo stupid to throw out all the interop, because it's going to take you forever to recreate it, if you ever can, which you probably can't.#
- this is the lesson that activitypub and atproto are teaching once again. and the people who are dealing with this have probably known it a long time.#
- it would be so much faster to use something that already works and is widely supported.#
- this is why we used mp3 in rss to make podcasting. we could have said oh shit i don't understand how mp3 works, so let's create one that does only what podcasting needs. only of course it'll turn out that podcasting needs everything that mp3 already does.#
- accept a win. don't feel compelled to reinvent everything. you'll find out it wasn't as easy as it looked.#
I love this piece about Anthony Edwards and how the OKC's guard against him by double-teaming, so he can't have the ball, and that allows them to steal the ball more often from other Minnesotan ball-handlers, and also limits Edwards opportunities to shoot, but it does make it more possible for others on the team to shoot. If he does his job, the pundits and fans say he's slumping (low points). But he's just doing his job. Same thing, flipped around -- when they say Brunson is scoring so many points, he's doing great, like LeBron or Kobe, but actually it's a sign the team is fucked up. Too dependent on one offensive player, the others are just standing around in case he wants to pass it to them. I exaggerate, but it does work out that way. What you want is a team where there are always lots of options, and to the extent that they're hot, the team is impossible to defend. But a Brunson holding the ball all the time makes it easier to beat the Knicks? That was (as I've said a few times) the problem with Melo. Now we've seen the non-Brunsons on the Knicks kick ass. If the Knicks don't make it past this round, and it is it seems pretty likely -- next season they should focus on configurations that have to sink or swim based on whether they can win without Brunson. Then, next year, we'll have something, perhaps. But I'm just a fan, seriously, no sarcasm. Same way I'm a fan of AI, I have no idea how it works, and I'm happy with that. And don't tell me it's like auto-complete, try using it for a while for real stuff, and tell me how you know that from using it. You don't. Each system has quirks that you have to learn the same way you have to learn the quirks of team members, and help them do stuff they're good at, so they can handle the ball and take shots without you getting involved. That's how you start to get teamwork. See how that works kind of like basketball? :-)#
And btw, that's why I wanted Chris Lydon to do interviews with people in his audience who are tripping out on all the new power they're getting from AI. How is it augmenting their work? I know Chris well enough that he probably thinks it's not for him, too technical -- but that's the point -- the excitement with AI is not technical. That's the story all the other reporters are missing. It's the light in the users' eyes when they struggle to make you understand why it's the most incredible thing ever and they're so glad to have lived to see this. That's the freaking story. Help them get the ideas through. BTW, we have no idea how AI will rock our boat, we never did for other similar inventions. Who knew what the Beatles would lead to when they came to America. They said (the Beatles did, with ridiculous humility) that they expected their fame will last a few years at most. PCs a few years later were supposed to be for the kitchen. Apple actually ran ads saying that in the late 70s. And the web? Well Chris was around near the beginning of that and knows how our eyes glazed over at the utopia we were envisioning, and we know, to some extent how all that turned out. The AI story is a great one, and as Chris had very little understanding of blogs when he did the series of podcasts in 2003 and 2004 that should win the Pulitzer Prize for being so presicent and courageous, he's the right guy to get this story, if he has the patience and stamina. This is the story. Sure you have to cover Harvard v Trump but AI is a story of love from the users and that story hasn't been told yet, and it's a big one, like what were the Beatles for and why, in 1964. #
The Knicks are playing the Pacers tonight. Very pivotal. If the Knicks win, it becomes a best of three series, and two of the three games are played at home. Not necessarily so great for the Knicks, they do well on the road. The players say it has something to do with being able to focus on the game and not on family, that came from Mikal Bridges.#I asked ChatGPT to review my archive on the Knicks and to summarize my feelings about the team over the years. This is what they said. "Your sentiments toward the New York Knicks over the years appear to be a blend of enduring loyalty, cautious optimism, and occasional frustration. Your writings reflect a deep-rooted connection to the team, celebrating their victories and expressing hope during promising times. At the same time, you don't shy away from critiquing management decisions or expressing disappointment during less successful periods. This combination suggests a passionate fan who remains committed to the Knicks, appreciating their highs and thoughtfully analyzing their lows."#