I went skiing today at Belleayre. First time in five years. It was great. I've been working out to get ready for it, and was concerned maybe I'm finally too old, but it's good. My body remembers how to ski. And being in shape for it makes the difference. No doubt at some point I will be too old for it. But not yet. And the snow was really good, for the east. Packed powder, very little ice. No lift lines. Sometimes a little crowded on the slopes but about the same as any ski area in the west. It pays to go on weekdays if you can. #

Social networks and RSS. We really should be on the case for all social media networks to support RSS feeds outbound at least (inbound nice too). And also add features to make interop really useful. I've enumerated them here. I am making software that builds on this feature in social networks. And yes we do have some examples of that, thinking of WordPress and competitors. I think they are perfectly good bases for social networks.#

This is the first pitch I’ve heard for the Apple goggles that actually makes me want to buy a pair. If there were an Apple Store nearby I probably would have already gotten it.#

I'm reading Liz Cheney's book, and forgot something I had guessed during the insurrection. While it was going on Trump was calling Congresspeople saying if you stop the count I'll call off the attack. In other words, trade your life for a vote. I suspected it before, but they have testimony that verifies it.#

I asked ChatGPT to draw a "social network for writers." ❤️#

I'm doing some writing about writing and finding the phrase "RSS, Atom and RFD" too cumbersome. Most people don't care and see the distinctions as unnecessary. But I want to be accurate, and recognize that while RSS is the most-used kind of feed, there are others, and our software works with them. I'm trying this construction: "RSS-compatible." I think that expresses the most important point, the choice of format is up to you, but now, by 2024, they all work pretty much the same way. #

Good morning. The main static server I mentioned yesterday has been relocated to a fresh, new and apparently healthy server to perform its past duties. We're off to a good start this Tuesday morning. #

I was asked about the difference between feedland.com and feedland.org. Which should you create a new account on? #

feedland.org runs on a small Digital Ocean server, and Com runs in a data center. The first is a fixed-size relatively small scale server that can't expand, and the latter is designed to scale automatically according to demand. I spent most of 2023 converting the software to run in the scalable environment. #

If you're creating something new, definitely create it on feedland.com. If you're already using feedland.org, for now you're welcome to continue, but in the back of your mind think about creating a new account on Com and importing your subscription list. Org is proving useful to have around, so I don't imagine it'll go away, it's much easier for me to work on a DO server than on the big cloud-based server. #

You should assume that some day all these systems will disappear. The web is ephemeral. But -- my guess is feedland.com will be around longer. However, honestly, I really have no idea, no one does. #

BTW, while we're doing this transition in FeedLand, I also have a small crisis happening on my main static server, which depends on a combination of software that suddenly aren't getting along with each other. Obviously something changed. I'm running it in a somewhat crippled state, I may be figuring how to dig out of this hole. One of the downsides of having fun with server software.#

Everyone's watching and listening to Fast Car this morning. It's a time capsule for so many of us. 1988. A window back to good times.#

One of the cool things about being a programmer is that you can decide to run code that you know has zero chance of working. "Let all hell break loose," a programmer can be heard to say quietly before clicking the Run button. Very few design professions get to do this, I imagine, unless they're psychotic.#

Wellll, the Lakers beat the Knicks last night. No joy in Mudville.#

The pros and cons of pre-ground cannabis, per ChatGPT.#

feedland.org is back. Next up, new software features that build on the new back-end features. 😄#

People are really gushing about the Apple goggles, now that they have them in their hands. I still can't get psyched about it. I was late to getting an Apple Watch, and now I wear it every day, can't imagine not wearing it. So maybe I will get one eventually. But my vision is weak, and I kind of doubt it'll work for me. And I would much prefer if Apple had poured their vast resources and creativity into making mass transport work in the Bay Area instead, as a prototype for what might be possible in the rest of the world. That I would cheer, unconditionally. #

We hit a snag in the upgrade for feedland.org. The work is narrated in this thread. Here's what the snag was. We were low on storage starting at the beginning and eventually we ran out of space, and the error messages we got indicated the problem was something else. All the searching we did, none of the hits, or ChatGPT suggested looking at memory usage. Quite independently after thrashing around trying various theories, we finally got a message from the Digital Ocean service saying the server was out of space. When I doubled the space, that gave it enough room to do the tasks we had for it. Now running the last query. Looks like we may be over the hump. Let's just pray the software runs when we turn the server back on. 💥#

At 10PM Eastern, we still haven't finished the upgrade. Will return to the job tomorrow AM. #

If I were running Bluesky -- I'd think about incentives for people with the kind of following they want to cultivate to do most or all of their social media'ing there. Some people are already doing it or so it seems, Neil Gaiman, Andrew Hickey, and I'm sure there are lots of others. #

I have a server that handles all my old sites, and it needs to be replaced, so I'm trying to figure out where to put all the sites. Most are really small, 10 or fewer files. But outline.land/treefun was large and interesting, so I thought I'd put a link here. I have forgotten so many of my little experiments. #

I wrote a script in Frontier to sort the folders by how many files they contain. I shudder to think how long it would take to write in JavaScript with all its synchronous difficulties.#

Textcasting is rewriting the rules of the social web.#

Here's what's going to happen. A bunch of new networks are forming, and they will melt into one, following a pattern established by the internet itself, when they formed a net of nets based on a common protocol called TCP. On top of that HTTP was built, with a number of years following with very productive building and bootstrapping, and from there it was a lot of chaos, around the advent of Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader. The last time we had a common way of interop was 17 years ago. I think/hope we're incentivized to make one edit box suffice, in place of the 5-10 tiny little textboxes we now all have to copy-paste between, and btw one way of addressing nodes, and then we can start building again as we did last in the 90s and 00s. I see something brilliant in the new path that Twitteriffic wants to go down (I gave them $128). It's same path I've been going down, mostly without partners, for the 17 years since we crawled on land and started tweeting. I don't see the negative shit that's happening on Twitter, it's easy to avoid the mess -- I don't think that's the reason we're breaking out of that silo -- it's that all at once all the devs who had been quietly suffering with Twitter were set free. Boom. All at once. And it turns out perhaps we don't give up so easily. 😄#

Every time you see a tiny little textbox that's a sure clue they're trying to own you, and hoping you don't notice.#

Heads-up to users of feedland.org. There will be a little downtime tomorrow AM, Eastern time, for a system upgrade. #

January's posts have been archived to GitHub, now we start a new month. February. What wonders will happen this month??#

After my experience creating an Ace editor instance in a Bootstrap modal dialog, which I narrated in a blog post and in the transcript with ChatGPT, I had a flash that maybe I could figure out how to use ChatGPT to port Frontier to Linux. The code still runs on reasonably current Macs, but not the latest. I really should be working on Linux not Mac. If it weren't for my dependence on Frontier, I would be. I actually think ChatGPT might be a great programming partner for a meaty operating-system-like project like this. #

I just started a FeedLand category for AI. Only one feed in there so far. I just want be sure I'm reading all the interesting stuff as it comes out. #

Looking for bloggers, developers, reporters, columnists, who focus on new applications of AI. Please post a link here. If you have the URL for a feed, that would be best. Thanks!#

As I was writing the post about using ChatGPT to port Frontier, which is a C program, runs on Mac and Windows, GPL licensed, to Linux. This took me to an interesting place. Could a bot, having read all the source code of MySQL, for example, then be tasked with writing a non-GPL MySQL workalike that would not be open source? Here's a list of popular GPL-licensed software. #

The Knicks are great now. They're exactly the Knicks we wanted, home-grown, smart, winners. Haven't felt this good about the team since Linsanity. “Next man up.” #

JY Stervinou has a suggestion re the Forever problem. #

Yesterday I sent a message to people who follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, asking which networks people check first, which they get the most out of. As you might expect, the most common answer was the network I was asking on (except Facebook, no one answered there, I guessed that might happen, because Facebook is different from the others). I asked because I'm trying to figure that out for myself, and I'm kind of disappointed that I find myself going to Threads more often. It has the greater Sweaty Palms Quotient, the feeling I used to have every week in the 80s when MacWeek or PC Week arrived. I always cleared the time to go through each issue carefully to see what my friends and competitors were up to. Then I would talk to my reporter friends, who wanted to know what I thought, or what back-room perspectives I could share with them. This was the time of the telephone, even before everyone had email, in the tech industry, believe it or not. Anyway, this isn't going the way I hoped it would. For me an open network built on the idea of textcasting is what I want to see, what I'm working towards. And seeing products like WordPress and its competitors as full-class members of the social web, because they already do textcasting, now all they need is to be hooked up to a social web that understands that writing isn't just grunts and snorts. Anyway, it'll give you some encouragement that people in the fediverse are most optimistic about their preferred network being the best of the new lot. I still like Bluesky, a lot, because of the intelligence and creativity of the people who use it. And I like the UI, for its simplicity and familiarity, but I'm concerned it'll lose its simplicity when they federate. And don't count Twitter out yet, there's far more happening there than any of the other networks. And a lot of what you read on the other nets is wishful thinking about the demise of Twitter. Hasn't happened yet, and my guess is it won't. It's really hard to snuff out machines with the kind of momentum Twitter has, even though Musk is doing his best. One more thing to think about, I don't think federation is what we need, I think we need interop. It's a more permissive kind of compatibility, and will happen a lot sooner than federation, which honestly, I don't think ever will happen. With the usual disclaimers, most important that I'm often wrong, and am open to other constructive points of view. #

A little mind bomb. I couldn't have written the above message in any of the systems that it's about. It depends on textcasting features that none of those systems support. #

I have bad news. This is what the bots think we look like. #

A note to people who make feeds, software that generates feeds, readers of feeds and everyone else. FeedLand is here as a way for me to get new ideas into the feediverse. I'd like people to hear me. It would have been nice if it were possible to help without spending all this time making FeedLand, but that's the way it goes. I'm not patenting any of it, and it's all open source. At some point, the service, which I'm partnering with Automattic with on, will be a for-profit venture, but not yet. And my main purpose is not the money, it's the ideas, the progress. #

Some standards come from users and developers. Imho those are the best. Like Markdown and RSS.#

Screen shot of 1984 Mac desktop. Was looking for this everywhere. Now hopefully next time I'll find it. #

Wouldn't it be great if sites were rated on how good their archive is, so you'd know to point to them for future-safety of your link.#

BTW, these days the Dead philosophy, to me, is best expressed in Ripple. It's about our best intentions and how powerless we are to live up to them. But what the F, let's sing about it! 😄#

Braintrust query: I'm having trouble running the Node utility Forever with recent versions of Node. I've read all the threads on this, and it's not clear (to me at least) how to get past this problem. I've resorted to running without Forever on one of my servers, but this is a short-term solution.#

A fundamental law of the internet says that social situations are nice at first then become shitty as trolls take over.#

When people say we should walk away from Twitter because the owner is a Nazi, well -- are they willing to stop using products from all companies that are owned by Nazis? I bet that would be pretty hard to do. If you add in racists I think you'd be totally out of luck. The people who own the businesses we depend on by and large are pretty awful people. Also I go to NYC even though there are Nazis there (esp Queens and Staten Island). And Twitter has far more users than NYC has citizens. That gives you a sense of how foolish this idea of boycotting Twitter is. And one more thing -- if you're posting about this need to vote with your feet, you should get your ass off Threads because it's really Facebook, and remember you're a very high-minded person, right? #

Imho, whether you or I use Twitter makes absolutely no difference to anyone. #

One of the rules of textcasting is that the writer must be able to edit their posts. An almost universal response is the way Twitter used to explain their not having editable posts -- then people who commented might have said something that seems foolish. I have a couple of rebuttals to that. 1. Then don't comment on what the author said, instead write what you know or believe, so it would make sense even if the author changed their post. This is a good practice anyway, instead of saying people are wrong, just state your belief. It's a lot easier for people to listen to, and by the way the other person might be right. 2. A counter-example -- Facebook. They let authors edit their posts and comments. And somehow it keeps working more or less. Their software does add a note that the text has been edited, and I think they even have a way for you to see the changes, but who bothers. Comments are usually simple "you go girl" or "my brother" or "I'm great!" or "check out my site." #

Jeff Jarvis nails it. They need a public editor at the NYT to point out, under the NYT banner, when they break the deal they made with their readers, to keep their interests separate from their editorial work.#

I don't think there is a curiosity gene. Instead some people are, I assume, not raised to think creatively. I was challenged intellectually by my parents from a very young age, asked to think about things that maybe most kids don't get asked about. Somehow my mind was trained to ask questions. What a perfect time it was to be born. Because along come personal computers, where you don't have to use someone else's hardware to explore. And then the web. And now AI. At this point you can't see the horizon, you don't have an idea what the limits are, but you can see some of the paths that lead beyond where you are. It's wonderful to watch people explore this. We can do that because we have the web and personal computers. See how these things build on each other? We were able to do podcasting because we had a way to spread the word through our blogs. One bootstrap leads to others. #

I have never been good at drawing but I still have ideas for visual art. Now I have an interpreter to help express them.#

Stan Krute is a ChatGPT explorer. If you're on Facebook, maybe you can follow him. He's discovering new things all the time with the drawing capability of ChatGPT.#

In a comment on one of Stan's post, Josh Cox said: "Might be my morbid sense of humor but I'd be interested to see its take on chickens in a human processing plant." Okay so I asked ChatGPT to do it. Tell me it doesn't have a sense of humor, and it's the opposite of morbid. 😄#

On Threads, Guy Kawasaki says: "Every day I ask myself at least once, 'How did we do this before ChatGPT?'" He's writing database queries in his prompt. It won't be long before he has an idea for how spreadsheets should work, or a writing tool, and getting ChatGPT to write it for him. It'll be ready to download before he can load the page. We just have to make sure the open protocols are there for him to build on. It's possible that's not something the bots will be able to do on their own. #

ChatGPT is the best librarian I've ever had. #

Johannes Ernst, host of FediForum, proposes a session that looks at how a product like Ghost might support ActivityPub. A nicely pragmatic way to look at it. I wrote a thread in response saying what's called for is a Busy Developer's Guide To ActivityPub, with a matching open source client and server to test against. #

BTW, I co-wrote a Busy Developer's Guide to SOAP in 2001, because it was so desperately needed. SOAP was a tangle of specs, which must have made sense to someone, not sure who, but was incomprehensible to app developers, the same ways ActivityPub is today. I have no idea if the BDG helped, but it was the only way I felt I could be supportive of the protocol, without saying it was a complete failure. I was unusual in that among the developers of the protocol, I was the only one who didn't work at a big company, so if I wanted to do something badly enough, I could just do it. The basic message was: "If you want to implement SOAP in your app, this is one way to do it. And if you do, your software will interop with mine."#

Since when does JSON.parse and JSON.stringify not preserve the order of object properties?#

Haley should stay in and make Trump crazier and crazier till El Orange blows his top. #

BTW, we're aware that the All tab on news.scripting.com is pretty slow. It's taking about 15 seconds to load. There are a lot of ways we can improve the performance, but are first looking into possible problems in the software. #

The Knicks beat the Nets last night, in the way the Knicks used to get beat, in the last minute of the game. I felt bad for the Nets. It wasn't that long ago that the Nets were super-irritating because they had been taken over by two reallllly ugly NBA players, Kevin Durant who isn't worthy of NY's basketball fans, what a total piece of shit, but even worse, his best friend Kyrie who is either a complete fucking idiot, or a Jew-hater. Probably both. Why is he an idiot? Because he accidentally revealed that NBA players probably all hate Jews, not one would speak up for our people. The best they could say is that Kyrie shouldn't have said what he said. How revealing. Not that the Holocaust was real, and is remembered by its children, who were raised to believe it would happen again, as it appears to be. Anyway, the Nets have moved past that, and they are after all a NYC-based team, and are playing with the haplessness of typical our pro teams, and deserve some of our sympathy. But -- not saying the Knicks should have let them win, or that I was even slightly rooting for them. But I was embarrassed that there were far more Knicks fans in attendance than Nets fans, and I still don't admit that there are actually any Nets fans in NYC. #

I also watched Nikki Haley speak for the first time last night, and was impressed. She held my attention through the whole speech, and that's hard to do when the Knicks are playing on another channel. I listened carefully to every word. It was a well-written speech and said some things that needed to be said about Trump, things that he won't have a response to, since you can't control or spin how old you are. We can all see Trump aging on screen, even his fans must see it and like those of use who will vote for Biden, they must wonder if he can make it much further. If you had cast a great presidential candidate, in Hollywood, Nikki Haley comes pretty damn close. But while she was speaking I remembered that she is a Republican and thought of Roe v Wade, and remembered that while she might not be able to or even want to fully dismantle democracy, she is backing a form of slavery for all American women. A good actor, but a person I could never trust. But, I just want to say that she should continue to speak. She might be able to pull is in an interesting new direction, not by winning, but by opening people's minds to the idea of a young vital leader engaged in the real world. It would be a nice thing for the good old USA. #

Happy 40th to the Mac. #

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the big event at Flint Center announcing the Macintosh. It was a huge day in my life, and in the evolution of personal computers and ultimately, the internet. I was there that day, along with Kandes Bregman from my startup, Living Videotext. We had a full page ad in the first issue of MacWorld. We were extremely excited, the Mac seemed to be the perfect machine for our "idea processor" ThinkTank, and Apple seemed to love us. It took a couple of years to get it right, by 1986 my company had switched to be an exclusively Mac company, but not before we were saved by the people at Apple who believed in us, notably Guy Kawasaki, Mike Boich, Del Yocam and Bill Campbell, and many others. I don't know if we would have made it without the help of Apple, but luckily we didn't have to find out. Thank you to all our friends at Apple, and to Steve Jobs and the Mac team for creating such a wonderful breakthrough product. Those were the days when we believed we were on a mission to save the world. In some sense that idea has never left, to our generation of entrepreneurial software developers. #

Here's what I wrote ten years ago on the 30th anniversary of the Mac. "The rollout on January 24th was like a college graduation ceremony." It appears I didn't write anything about the Mac anniversary in 2004 and my blog didn't exist on 1/24/94. But I did write a piece on what made the Mac different on the 25th anniversary in 2009. BTW, the comments on that piece are incredible. Click the link just to read the freaking comments. #

Today's song: Take me back to Tulsa. #

I've been writing and talking about the idea of a typical tech industry mess and left out the one I had a hand in creating, SOAP. Started out simple, and over years it turned into a TTIM. Perfect example. Someone should study it, to figure out why Sun, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle et al wanted a protocol for interop and invested years in it, and yet it returned little in the way of interop. I know that XML-RPC is still in use, I imagine that SOAP probably is too, in some form. I wonder how it shook out. On the other hand RSS wasn't turned into a nightmare, and has become a productive tech industry mess, the most unusual thing ever, a true unicorn. #

Doc will like this. Right now there are four hits on Goog for typical tech industry mess. #

I re-watched Silver Linings Playbook over the weekend. I love Jennifer Lawrence, and this is a pure JL showcase. But the best moment was stolen by Robert DeNiro who is batshit crazy like most of the characters in the movie when he tells his son in two sentences about our purpose on the planet, which of course is to love Jennifer Lawrence. ❤️#

Why isn't there a karaoke website where I can sing along with Ripple with the lyrics scrolling by. Could we do it together over the internet? It probably doesn't exist because of Hollywood tightasses. But surely there must be some uncopyrighted music we could try this. Hey I bet it actually exists. Send me a link.#

For some reason only now am I realizing the incredible sing-along qualities of Grateful Dead songs like St Stephen or Uncle John's Band. #

Podcast: ActivityPub is a typical tech industry mess. 12 minutes. #

I realize that most of the people who read this blog aren't sports fans, something that I wish were different, because sports, like HBO series, give us a way to talk about complex human relationships in the 21st century that we don't get any other way to imho. If we all watch Succession, for example, then we know how to talk about the relationship between Shiv and her wimpy husband whose name I now have trouble remembering (later: Tom). (No spoilers as to why he's significant, and won the Emmy for best supporting dramatic performance.) We all know the scene where they both nailed it. For anyone who has ever loved someone yet had to say goodbye anyway, it reached into your heart, and gave you a way to say to your friends -- there! -- that's what I was talking about. Same thing in sports, esp basketball, where you get to know a team a few players at a time, and you get to see them perform in really personal ways. Last night there was a rematch between the Knicks and the Raptors, which was one of those games you don't ever forget, because of a recent trade where the teams exchanged core players who formed the personality of the teams, playing each other, so we could see in a memorable and visual way what was exchanged. Understand, we loved the players who were traded away. One day they're our team, and the next day, supposedly they're the other guys. Impossible to see it that way. The love doesn't just leave, maybe it never does. But. But now you know that one of the players, a former Great Hope of ours, didn't pan out, and now it's nice to see him on the court, fumbling an easy play or missing a shot you think he could've gotten, but doing it for the other team. Sadly, we think while he was the more expensive of the two stars the Knicks traded, the other one, the hotshit kid with an attitude is going to be the real thing, a starting point guard of a contender, an opportunity he was unlikely to get with the Knicks. Anyway thanks for listening. Last night's game was something else. I understand that Niners and Packers fans were emoting in other ways at the same time. I can relate. #

In today's Bull Mancuso comic strip, she's a delivery truck driver in Prague on Veshturnya Ave, delivering Amazon boxes. Then, enjoying a huge cheeseburger with Slavic ketchup, and after that I accidentally hit the Return key, and for the rest of the strip she was a teacher at Portland State University, skiing at Mt Hood Ski Bowl, as she was in the previous version. I find this stuff endlessly entertaining, for now at least, because drawing like this was something I never could do myself. #

ActivityPub is a typical tech industry mess. OpenDoc, Taligent, Copland even OS/2 and Java. Hailstorm. Operating systems designed to solve problems for tech companies, completely over the heads of users. #

Sorry but if Joe Biden has a problem then we have a problem. I wish news people would get a freaking clue.#

New social media rule. If I don't know you, and you post something incomprehensible, I assume it's spam and delete it.#

John Nolan, the founder of Ghost, when asked if they'd support ActivityPub: "Love the idea in theory and we've looked into it a few times (even built prototypes) - but haven't found an implementation in practice that got us very excited, so far. Spec is pretty lightweight (as in, lots of holes) which means you end up having to invent a lot of proprietary stuff to scale. Tricky."#

Samizdat Online is a DNS-based proxy that makes it possible to read articles from websites that are blocked by the Russian government. Apparently they have a certain number of random domains, that probably change regularly, and they mirror the contents of a story from one of the blocked sites via a random domain. An example of a link to a story on the Moscow Times. Their home page looks like a fairly basic feed reader. #

I've been wrong about many of Apple's products, but not the ones that made the company -- the Apple II and Mac, though I was somewhat skeptical of the iPhone because I couldn't write software for it, but I did get one on the day they came out in June 2007, and never used my Blackberry again. Anyway, the goggles they just started demoing to selected reporters and analysts looks like a product they released because they invested billions in it, had no idea what it's used for, and were overlooking the ability of the human body to actually use such a thing, and couldn't consider writing it off because so much had been made of this, esp since the current management has been coasting on innovation done by Steve Jobs, and hadn't released anything that wasn't completely predictable since his passing in 2011. Their lack of confidence in their own product overwhelms any positive reviews coming out from the privileged press, who we know in advance to discount, these are the press people Apple can count on to not say a negative word, to preserve their access at least, if not because they are complete fans. It reeks of a loser product. I write these things partially so I can be proven ridiculously wrong when I get one myself in two weeks and can't believe all the things I can do with it. #

It's worth remembering that before the Mac there was the Lisa. #

BTW, did you notice how BMW's ads say their product is much better than Tesla's, without mentioning Tesla, they just say they're better, because they are just better, because they're BMW, and they know you know that. It's much more powerful esp with people who like Telsas (of which I am one). I also see the Tesla as a very capable replacement for my 2007 BMW 535i, which I donated to charity in 2012, which I loved for the same reasons I love the Tesla. Putting down the competition isn't what marketing is about, you have to think about the people whose minds you're trying to change, and know you're in it for the long haul. An example of their ad copy: "With electric driving comes exciting possibilities. That’s why BMW approaches this new era in mobility just like any other; where engineering, innovation and aesthetics come together seamlessly to inspire joy in every journey." These people understand their product and how their fans see them. #

My recipe for getting rid of a troll. Say something rude in response to their trolling and then block them. #

Notes on the archive element in the source namespace. It's important that we share our ideas and collaborate, and listen and ask the right people to help. Manton was asking why weren't his ideas on archiving incorporated in other people's work, it's the same concern I have, why didn't we work together on this Manton? Two heads are better than one in things like this. I think Automattic may be the place to get together on this. Esp since they are the market leader now in this area. What they do, right off the bat, has to be supported everywhere, so we want them to do a good job. 😄#

I got the help I needed yesterday, pointing me in the right direction wrt APIs for ChatGPT. I'm ready to try some ideas out once I get to a stopping point on my current project. Can't wait to try out these ideas. #

ChatGPT is like having a programming partner you can try ideas out on, or ask for alternative approaches, and they're always there, and not too busy to help out. They know everything you don't know and need to know, and rarely hallucinate (you have to check the work, same as with a human btw). It's remarkable how much it is like having an ideal human programming partner. It's the kind of helper I aspire to be. #

Today's Olbermann is worth a listen, esp the first part where he talks about political reporters vs sports reporters. Politics is a lot simpler than most sports, and they repeat themselves for years even decades, yet the sports reporters manage. Not all of them, there are plenty of empty-headed sports reporters. But there are also some very insightful ones. It makes all the the difference. In New York basketball we're blessed with two of the best. Mike Breen and Walt Frazier. I'd listen even if I gave up hope on the Knicks, which believe me, I have done many many many times. Also Olbermann says that Dolan, the owner of the Knicks, is a schmuck. He got that right. But somehow this time he managed to hire an exec who has some kind of a clue. #

I think it's fair to say that the new FeedLand, at feedland.com, and running in Automattic's cloud, is stable, and performing nicely. So if you have an account on feedland.org, the original system, which is still running of course, you could now reasonably move to feedland.com. To do so, just export your OPML subscription list from .org, create a new account on .com, and import the subscription list. It might take a while for all the new feeds to be fully updated, but you'll be rewarded by a higher performance user experience. Thanks to Matt and company for giving us access to this phenomenal resource. I still haven't gotten used to designing with the assumption that my system can scale as far as it seems it can.#

I imagine ChatGPT must have an interface that allows me to send it a bit of text via an API, and get back the same response I'd get if I were typing it into their web page. I am a paying user, I don't want to do any more than I'm currently doing with it. I just want to be able to keep an archive of everything I do, in a format that's more useful to me. (Update: They do have a simple API, documented here.)#

Now the Atlantic is saying we should go to a Trump rally. That is sick. Here's what I want. I want to go to a pro-democracy event, where we do things like register to vote, and offer community service to each other. We need to belong to something great, not to study the degradation of our country. We also should use our communication systems to spread not only positive messages, but to position Hitler as the ultimate loser. We have to present the counter-argument, in a way that still has a chance of getting through. And I still want us to celebrate the symbols of our fight for freedom, which obviously never ends. That's why I'm wearing a MLK button, in real life and on my blog. #

I'm thinking about putting together blogrolls for famous people, based on what I think their interests are. As an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to put together a blogroll for "a person like Dave Winer." #

Another Dead song that must've been fun to sing. "Wherever he goes the people all complain." #

With mystique of Substack in retreat, now -- if we had a proper identity system with storage, we could make it easy for people to hook their world up to email, ie newsletters, and preserve choice, and be able to build editors that were more than tiny little textboxes. I was part of the PC wave in the 80s when writing tools advanced incredibly quickly. So many directions -- from line-oriented editors on Unix and early Apples, to screen editors, then with the Mac we got wizzy, and page layout, and outliners for thinking and presentations. In the same time period programming changed from something requiring a million dollar investment in hardware and infrastructure, to something most students could afford. Just ten years. Since then our world has been reduced to copying and pasting into tiny text boxes. The question is bigger than if we need journalism, the question is do we need writers? #

It makes sense that AI is coming into existence at the time the human species, and most living things on the planet, appear about to cease to exist. It's possible that we are just building our successor. A sort of ark of intellect. It would make sense, if there is a Creator, that they would arrange things this way. Just-in-time species reboot.#

BTW, what are the proper pronouns for The Creator?#

One man gathers what another man spills.#

Twitter has yet to realize its potential as a coral reef. The idea was lovely, they had solved two important problems, identity and world-scale publishing. It took years to get there, but they did eventually do it. They were also liberal in granting access to their API, though because of some dick moves leading up to their IPO, they got a rep for the opposite, as in no good deed goes unpunished. In the big picture, what they offered was tantalizing. If they had added storage to it, which I understood from Jack Dorsey was their plan, then some amazing stuff would have happened. I still believe tech companies can play a very important role in the open internet, as long as they are willing to treat users as customers and sell a product that has value without the usual michegas. #

I've been listening to the Grateful Dead today. Today my most favorite Dead song is Ripple. I love the bass beat, and the simple lyric. A wonderful sing-along. Let there be songs to fill the air. A song about singing. Love it. #