Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the good people of Automattic for saving the archive of the blogs we started at Harvard in 2003.
#
In the last few months the net effect of ChatGPT has been an order-of-magnitude improvement to searching the web. This time the innovating could not have been done by a duo like Jobs and Woz working in a garage, or a lone programmer like
TBL. It required a multi-billion dollar investment, and what amounts to decades of R&D, before any benefit was available. This is an event we will have a much greater appreciation for on the other side, from this side all we can see is how much better it is than what we had before. I've been to this place before. It's the best time to be in tech.
#Just read the
Wikipedia page on weblogs.com. I didn't "decide" to shut down the site in 2004. The management of UserLand at the time transfered the domain to one of my two servers at a local Boston-area hosting service, without telling me they were doing it. It knocked the server off the air. That was what caused the outage. It took a few days to get it back online. The secret -- we converted the site to PHP and it ran much better. No one
decided anything.
#
Sad to say
Dixon Roadside in Woodstock is closing. It's only been around for two or three years, I guess launching during the pandemic was bad for business? Interesting place, new construction but designed to feel like an old time gas station and garage. The food was pretty awful, and the expectations were high because the restaurant is an offshoot of the
Phoenicia Diner, which is excellent, and always super crowded on weekends. Why was the quality was so different? Something of a puzzle, but you couldn't just walk up to the counter and ask Why does the food here suck given that we were expecting greatness? The great thing about living in this area of clean air, and quiet natural beauty is that the food is so good. Has a lot to do with the artist community, the abundance of music, and the
Culinary Institute of America being just across the river.
#
- I've realized that "open web" is redundant. #
- Same with "indie web".#
- The web is open. Its users are independent.#
- And the web is too precious to be taken over by self-preserving tech companies.#
I'm not writing prose very well today. :smile"
#
I got some
pushback for saying
yesterday that Google kicked RSS's ass. It wasn't meant to be a sweeping statement, or a forever thing. It was over
ten years ago. RSS was hurt by what Google did, anyone who says otherwise isn't dealing well with reality. On the other hand, I've spent the last two years on building
new software for feeds, so obviously I don't feel it's over, actually I think it's is exactly what we need to sew the open social media world together. Small pieces loosely joined. RSS, and formats that came after it, are all about weaving a loosely joined web of blog posts and news articles. If we want it to work, we can make it work.
#
Google kicked RSS's ass. I'm wondering if when that happened, I shouldn't have stepped up and tried to raise a great
RSS reader from OpenSourceLand. But I don't think it could have happened. It's funny how people processed that event, I didn't see any anger at Google, which if my little old
UserLand had done something like that, there would have been a huge shitstorm. I think they manage their PR well because there's no one identifiable as the personality of Google, neither of the founders are visible. They don't tweet, you never hear anything about them outside of the business press. Same with the two people they've hired as CEO. Anyway, they treated RSS like an unwanted litter of kittens, put in a shopping bag and dropped from a bridge over a river. No thought to cleaning up the mess they created. They treated their users and the standard they took over like crap. But people need a
person to be angry with. I'm much less consequential from a business standpoint, or user-control for that matter, my products get ignored mostly, but I am outspoken. And this makes me easy to be angry with. Anyway, I didn't step up because 1. I didn't think anything would come of it and 2. I didn't want to get embroiled in all the anger again. The last time it had nearly killed me.
#Today would have been my uncle's 78th birthday. Happy birthday Uncle Vava, where ever you are.
#September's outline is
archived. High hopes for Oct. Let's begin!
😄#
- Steve Algernon found this MORE ad from the 80s and sent it along.#
- I had been looking for it a few years ago, now I want to be sure next time, it'll be easy to find. Steve used to work at Living Videotext, where this product was made. He went on to Apple, where he did system software. He was the one who got XML-RPC and RSS into the Mac OS in the early web days. Thanks Steve for all of it. 😄#
"He's got three questions. You have two answers. You need MORE."
#- PS: Steve also sent along an article from 1985 about me with my standard schpiel back in those days about how outliners came to be. The picture is funny, I was much younger of course, and my expression in the photo was as bewildered as often is. Oh yeah and I was wearing a suit and tie as people often did in business in those days. These days, it looks really funny. #
Maybe chatbots will enable people to flame forever to a robot who will argue with them forever and not care. Or maybe we're already there. I found myself ranting at ChatGPT earlier today about Google. I could not get it to agree with me. It had drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid and I said so! Eventually it sort of came around to my way of viewing things, but it quickly snapped back to the party line. I wonder if psychologists have studied this to see what happen if people: 1. Have an interminable argument without ever convincing the other person (or robot) of their rightness or 2. Have a longish argument and eventually prevail. Is there a sense of closure when the OP says you know you're right, I've changed my mind! Can they now go on with their lives feeling like a winner instead of always losing to the corrupt and all-powerful woke coastal elites or the corrupt magas of middle America?
#A little advice about social media from someone who has been on social media since it has existed. You don’t have to argue. When someone wants to argue with you, you should block them. There is no good outcome possible from arguing on social media.
#
Near the end of the first season of
Fargo,
Molly Solverson, a wise and
tenacious cop in
Bemidji is talking to
one of the two perps she's been chasing, telling him a story about a man, waiting on a train platform with a pair of gloves in his hand. After he gets on the train, he notices that one of the gloves has fallen onto the platform. It's too late to get off the train to retrieve the glove, so he opens the window and throws the other glove onto the platform next to the first one. A generous gesture that costs him nothing. The perp ignores the advice. The thing is, who in our world will do the generous thing that costs them nothing? It's so rare. And if few us will, what exactly is the point of saving our civilization? What values do we have that are worth preserving? We think we're good people, but really we aren't unless we help each other.
#As I get older things that used to seem like mysteries now seem simple. How many times has someone said they love you when you think hmm I don't think that's really love. How long did it take you to figure it out? At this point I know what love is. If you can be yourself with another person then you can be sure that's love. If you can snuggle up with them and relax, either physically or figuratively, and again, just be yourself, that's love, for sure. But if you have to be a certain way, pretend to be someone you're not, to stay in good stead with the other person, then that isn't love. It's just that simple. If you find yourself blurting out "I love you" without any thought, maybe even surprised yourself, that's love. But love is not a status, not a state of being. It's an act. You could be "in love" one moment and the next, not. That doesn't mean in the next moment after that you won't share love again. It's just that feelings are always in motion. Love is a feeling of freedom to be yourself, or in another way -- to just be. Love is the essence of being you. Nothing elusive about it. You are made of it.
#But we have really bad examples of love relationships in TV and movies and in our families. I hear people say things that I imagine they got from watching a show, where the writers, for dramatic purposes I guess, have the characters say things in the name of love that have nothing to do with it, or often are the opposite, people trying to be something they obviously aren't. I don't think my parents or grandparents shared much love with each other, maybe they had their moments, but they weren't often. My uncle once told me, after my aunt died and he was looking for a new wife to take her place, it was like casting for a movie, that it's betrayal if a person turns out to not be what they appeared to be on the first date. A lot of people think that way. To figure out love, you have to take a step back from culture and families and just be yourself and see who likes you. You just found love. ❤️
#
- If I were one of the leaders of the IndieWeb movement, I'd lobby for these ideas being added to the charter. #
- I want text to flow from my editor to the places I write. #
- If I have to use your editor to write on your site, forget it. #
- I want to use one editor to write. The one that's wired into the base of my spine. Where I just think of something and somehow it gets from my brain to the screen. #
- Every time I have to switch gears because I forgot which editor I'm using, or where I have to go to read and edit something, I lose ideas, or punt on getting the writing right. #
- We have too much social media and not enough great reading sites. The reading experience of the web generally sucks. #
When Google says having a certificate isn't enough to operate a website, now you have to be cleared by the US Department of Homeland Security, will you still think it was smart to let Google deprecate HTTP? Or, why do people lose their minds when it comes to Google?
#
- Warning: Small spoiler for Season 3.#
- The first scene of Season 3 of Fargo has always puzzled me. It takes place in East Berlin during the Cold War. A citizen is brought before a government official where he's asked to confess to a crime that apparently was actually commited by a different person who used to live at the same address. The story then moves to Minnesota, and there's no further mention of the characters or plot of the first scene. #
- I've always wondered why was that scene there, what it has to do with Fargo. Here's my theory.#
- Every episode of Fargo begins with "This is a true story. The events depicted took place in {location} in {year}. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of the respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred." #
- It's funny because that's what the opening scene is. A supposedly true story (we don't actually know it's true, we suspect not, same as with the show itself) but the names have been changed. #
- Everything in Fargo is nested that way. That's one of the reasons it's so much fun to re-watch, you see things each time you didn't see before.#
I suggested a
few years ago that MSNBC or CNN move one of their evening shows to Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona or Ohio, just to shift the perspective a bit. It would work. Probably one of the most revolutionary things they could do, and it's so easy. That they all come from DC or New York is probably why most of the rest of the country feels they are so clueless and elite. I laugh when Chris Hayes talks about what he thinks, or what he has experienced. I laugh because I think he's an idiot, and has no relevant experience. How about getting a child of Holocaust survivors to do the news, now that we're on the brink of a Nazi revolution in America. Might help sober people up a bit. Have a segment every night that explains how Hitler did what Trump is doing, and what it led to. This cozy little setup needs to be exploded. Start by getting off the East Coast, and out into the country. It would do wonders for perspective. BTW, President Biden picketing with striking Michigan auto-workers is an excellent example of this approach. He could have given a speech in the Rose Garden but that would have had no impact, wouldn't do anything to shift anyone's perspective.
#
- Follow-up on a piece I wrote yesterday about adding storage to WordPress. Thanks to all the people who helped answer the question, readers of this blog, friends from the Drummer and FeedLand communities, even devs who work at Automattic. 😄#
- I said in the piece: "It has happened before that I’ve asked for a feature in a product that was already there." #
- This is almost one of those times. ;-)#
- WordPress has the ability to add the equivalent of Mac refcons to WordPress posts. But, and this is an important caveat, you can only create such an object in PHP running on the server that's hosting the website. Once it's created you can access and update the stored object via their API. #
- Now I haven't tried it myself, because I don't have my own WordPress installation and I assume I can't install software on wordpress.com. And even if I could, it's not the feature I imagined. Tantalizingly close, but not able to do what I want. #
- A use-case#
- I want to create an editor for WordPress posts that's perfect for me. That means I edit the post in my outliner. I can attach attributes to headlines, like an image attribute with a small graphic that's displayed in the right margin. Or I can enclose text in double-square brackets and have it be indexed by and linked to my tag manager, like this: Drummer. Or I can use my glossary to fill in links and data that I want standardize on. I've developed a set of tools I've been using in some cases for over 30 years. I want to use them in WordPress. But more importantly, I want WordPress to become a writing platform for everyone, I think it can do a lot of important things that it doesn't do, and it's being held back by this missing feature. That's how I look at it, and I realize that's a different perspective from that of developers who work inside Automattic who have to keep their servers running.#
- And btw, I can do much of that without this feature. But with it, I can edit any post even if I don't have the application I wrote it with handy, or the source code for the post I want to change. This is part of the philosophy of having only one structure for my blog writing, to make it easy to make changes. If I have two structures, one for editing and one for reading all of a sudden making a change takes a dozen or more steps, where if the data lives in the same place as the rendered content, it can be edited with one click. This breakthrough, and it was definitely a breakthrough in the development of blogging, in 1999, was in a post entitled Edit This Page. #
- Anyway I assume the current design makes sure only people who have access to the server can do this. Or maybe it's just an oversight? I hope it's the latter, and I hope we can have the feature in the API in time to make a difference. #
- I've opened a thread on the Scripting News repo to follow up on this very interesting discussion. #
Where I live getting vaccinated is very much in style. It's what people talk about. So I think we're going to get a real sharp divide in our country, some people with no vaccinations, and other people vaccinated for everything they can -- flu, covid, rsv, shingles. Weird what we divide ourselves on. I keep thinking what'll we all do when we realize the whole system is infected with a virus that's basically the human sense of self-importance, our supposed manifest destiny, as it all falls apart.
#
- I am a developer, and WordPress is the largest blogging platform. Naturally, I want to develop products for WordPress. But there's a problem. #
- Suppose I have an idea for an editor for WordPress posts. I have a constraint, the editor can’t save any information about the post that isn’t in the HTML code for the post. This severely limits the kinds of editors developers can write. #
- Instead if WordPress had the idea that an app could store some JSON data along with a post, and when the user wanted to edit the post my editor would get the data back, we could edit all kinds of structures and have the result available in WP, not just to us, but to every app they give permission to.#
- I’ve wanted this feature for WP for a long time. Maybe it’s already there? It has happened before that I’ve asked for a feature in a product that was already there.#
- BTW, this idea goes back to the early Macintosh OS. Every object in the system had a 32-bit refcon which could be anything the app wanted it to be. Usually it was a pointer to an object that contained a lot of data and more pointers. You could attach them to a window, a menu, a button in a dialog, IIRC every object had a refcon. Whole complex systems were built around this idea. It meant that the platform vendor (Apple) could evolve their internal structures without breaking developers. You can develop whole app ecosystems around this simple idea. #
- PS: refcon is short for "reference constant." The fact that it almost immediately was used for pointers shows how innovative developers can be, and how sometimes an idea has much broader implications than you can foresee. #
- PPS: I couldn't find a page on the web that explains what a refcon is so I asked ChatGPT to write one. I can vouch for the accuracy, even beauty, of what it wrote. #
- PPPS: Apparently it is possible to set refcon-like values for WordPress posts. I'll write more about it soon. #
- I was writing a piece about a feature I'd like to see added to WordPress, basically a refcon for each blog post, that would allow me to write an editor that managed data that's structured differently than a classic blog post. #
- I briefly explained what a refcon was, and then searched the web via Google to find a definitive page on what a refcon is. Not finding one immediately, I had the idea of asking ChatGPT to write one. And what it came up with was not only accurate, but imho beautiful.#
- Now there probably is a page somewhere on the web that explains the philosophy of refcons, but once I got the idea to give the problem to ChatGPT that was the end of my searching. #
- I love refcons, they are so respectful, both ways, and I love ChatGPT just as much, because it says even if Google can't find something that doesn't mean I can't have it! #
- PS. I honestly don't know if the Mac OS still has refcons, but it did in the 80s, and they were very important imho to the success of the Mac as a developer platform. #
Just heard from friends at Automattic that the
Berkman blogs have been archived permanently on their servers. It's great to have the legacy preserved. It was the first blog hosting at any university. All you needed was a harvard.edu email address. Lots of great things started there, including political blogging and podcasting. We hosted Thursday meetups, and had two blogging conferences. Trained hundreds of people. That's how you do a bootstrap. Thanks to Automattic for help in preserving a good part of the early history of blogging. I've learned when a project like this needs help, they're a good place to turn.
😄#I wanted to see if my
What Makes a Weblog a Weblog piece made it across, and it did. And even better, when I found a
link to it on my blog from
5/30/2003 and clicked it, I held my breath, and it redirected correctly. This is one of those moments that gives you hope that the open web may still make it after all.
#
When I write about
EZ-Pass for News I often hear from entrepreneurs who have either tried the idea or want to try it. This is what I have learned and what I believe. No matter how enticing you make it the news industry will ignore you or fight you. It's possible a new network of news sites has to be formed, which is far beyond the scope of a startup wanting to explore a technical solution. It's not a technical problem. It's a
bootstrap. A chicken and egg problem. If there were a network of local news orgs that wanted to band together to kick ass then they would need EZ-Pass for News. But it may not be possible to have EZ-Pass for News unless there is a critical mass of news and users. Bootstraps are delicate things, and startups are almost by definition indelicate things. ;-)
#
- The other day I asked how to get nearly free and easy mail accounts. Turns out Gmail does it. #
- Add a + after your name and then add any string you like. #
- dave.winer+hello@gmail.com#
- You can also add or omit periods in the middle of your name.#
- dave.winer@gmail.com#
- d.a.v.e.wi.n.e.r@gmail.com#
- davewiner@gmail.com#
- All these "addresses" go to the same account, but perhaps the system you want to create multiple accounts on will accept them as different names?#
- See the writeup on the Google blog from 2008.#
So far I've asked people who I think of as
Friends of Local News to also invest in an
EZ-Pass for News and help
sources going directly to users of news. We have to rebuild the open web as much as we need to rebuild local journalism. It's very much the same kind of thing. All our news flows will soon be going through ten servers. This is by design. It works a lot better for Google if they only have to keep their eye on Apple, Netflix, Microsoft and Amazon and a few others.
#I watched
Barbie and it was so bad. Made my stomach ache. The movie is an ad for products you can buy
on Amazon. The ultimate of exploitation. It got an
80 on Metacritic. What is wrong with everyone! It was probably the worst movie ever made.
#
- If you want to make a difference in tech you have to do things normal people would think are too radical. It might be the biggest hurdle to get over. You think shit, it's probably not going to work either way, so I'll just do it that way that might work. #
- Note I said "make a difference" not "succeed" because then we have to discuss what success means. #
- At 68 I'm still getting ideas that require throwing caution to the wind. 🚀#
I have a new theory about time travel. #- But first a question -- if it's possible to travel back in time, in the future, why haven't we been visited by time travelers already? Of course maybe we have been, but for some reason they're not visible to us, they're in another dimension or something like that. #
- But assuming we could experience their presence if they were here, maybe it's because in order for a time traveler to land here, we need to have a certain technology that we don't yet have, that acts as a receiver of sorts. #
- And the day when that receiver is invented, perhaps unknowingly to the inventor, all of a sudden their house or apartment turns into a religious and historic shrine, a Disneyland or Fort Sumter of time travel. The place is instantly transformed into Wailing Wall, Ground Zero, or Mount Rushmore. #
- I imagine there is already a science fiction book based on this premise. #
Quick idea: What if we gave up too soon on the idea of
Sources Go Direct being a legit way to report and distribute news?
#
One of these new twitter-like services should specialize in hooking up with blogs. A chat system for bloggers? Threads hanging off each post? Cross-linking? Let's have long and short form work really well together. I know all about the technology that will make this possible, but what's important is that it's a process, not an event. We should start working on this now and keep working on it for years.
#I need a free or almost free service where I can
quickly create an email address that's forwarded to my Gmail account, to create all the Bluesky accounts I need to. Any ideas? Also I have created a
new account for
Thread Writer for Bluesky.
#I've created a lot of Gmail accounts over the years, but I don't remember what most of them are! I thought I could
ask Bard, with its new interface to Gmail to give me the list, but either I don't know how to ask the question, or it's not ready with that kind of data? No matter what, we're in very early days for this. Also I think Google should spin off its AI stuff, they're too much of a monopoly to monopolize this. Yes, I can hold all these ideas in my head at the same time, you can too. :-)
#
A nerd in a Wisconsin baseball cap throws out the first pitch at Shea Stadium.
#
Graceland: "Losing love is like a window in your heart."
#
When I was a kid I used to think how most of the
stars of really old movies were dead. How far removed from my existence. I was watching a
clip of
Pee Wee Herman and realize he was just as dead as Lucille Ball, Raymond Burr, Judy Garland, Jim Nabors, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. For that matter he's just as dead as Ben Franklin.
#Oh that awful feeling when you come up with a term you know is going to catch on and the domain is available.
#I have a local friend who went to my
high school so we have an important cultural reference point, and a local friend who was raised a few blocks from
where I grew up, another strong cultural reference point. We can converse about many things without explaining because we started from the same place. I didn't know either of these people when I was growing up, just met them in the last few years. Same sort of thing happened at the
Berkman reunion.
#
I thought I had caught a second wind at 6PM last night, and rather than watch political nonsense on MSNBC (every day the same freaking boring story about the ancient fascist with orange hair) I went upstairs, rolled up my sleeves and wrote some new code deep in the bowels of the system I'm working on to report on SQL queries that were taking too long or returning too much data. #- I was feeling very competent. Unfortunately the feeling was an illusion, the kind of mistake a novice makes. After a long day of wrestling with a codebase, you're in need of relaxing MSNBCisms -- not another tech challenge; and I am most definitely not a novice at making messes of a working piece of software. I've been doing it for 50 years! Half a century of software mayhem. It's even worse than it appears. #
- Anyway, it appeared to work for the first few calls as I stepped through the code in the debugger, and then confident (still) I let it rip, and a horrific error message appeared about something called
flQueueAllRequests which presumably I put there a few years ago, and I panicked: "Revert! Time to revert Davey!" I said to myself, possibly in my mind or possibly out loud even. But alas NPM will not let you revert. The version numbers must move forward, never backward. How little the designers of NPM really understood about software development. 💥#
- Once a very long time ago, in 1976, I thought that they shouldn't put programmers in offices on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building with windows that open. I had a similar desperate empty feeling last night at 8PM. #
- I tried to revert as best as I could, but the horrific crash persisted, and I did something I never do, I got up from the computer with the software I'm working on broken. #
- Then I woke up in the middle of the night and thought "Davey you're not going to sleep any more, so get up and find the freaking problem." So I did. I got up. But I did not find the freaking problem. I wrote a sad missive to the people I'm working with asking for sympathy and help. And when I finally woke up for real at 7:30AM, with the sun out, birds singing, feeling rested and ready for a new challenge, I sat down, before eating breakfast or drinking coffee, rolled up my sleeves and set about fixing the problem. My first three attempts didn't work, then I finally thought of something I might do that did in fact fix the problem, and now I can breathe again. Whew.#
- As a result of this novice move and its consequences I'd like to ask the NPM folks to come up with a way to say "get me the latest version of this package" instead of devising complex ways of saying whatever it was I was telling it to do that it did that made my software behave so badly. #
- And yes, it's always fun to blame someone else, esp someone whose name you don't know, for your own mistakes. #
- Your faithful reporter, Uncle Davey#
- PS: Seriously, once I understood what the problem was I asked ChatGPT for the answer, and it's surprisingly complicated. #
- PPS: The title of this post is a twist on title of a famous CS paper. #
- PPPS: I imagine the author would have considered other constructs harmful such as promises, await, and all the other extra junk they're throwing at JavaScript these days. #
This
NYT article (no paywall) is a summary of how tech is moving quickly to bring ChatGPT-like functionality to
people's content, through email and cloud-based documents. It's remarkable how quickly this is happening, and not surprising because ChatGPT is such a compelling app, and it's doubly-so when applied to our own writing. But so far there's one glaring omission, these bots don't know where my blog is. Who is going to fill that gap, not with an experiment, but with something up to par at least with the way Bard understands Gmail, which is still pretty simple, but I imagine it's only going to get better, quickly.
#The NYT used to have a sports section, now when you click a link in their Sports feed it asks for more money. And they don’t appear to have specific coverage for NY sports teams. They’re the Google of news. We need an
EZ-Pass for News to route around their dominance.
#And now would be a great time to put together a group of NY-metro sports bloggers into a nice publication. There's real money in sports in the city.
#
We need a Node.js package that lets you add the contents of a file to the ChatGPT database, along with a URL where the content of that file can be found on the web. It has to be that simple. Based on what Google announced yesterday, and what Facebook is likely to announce this week, it's clear that the big tech companies are only going to allow you to access your data if it's stored in their silos. We need something just as powerful and easy that works with content on the open web.
#BTW, I had to try the
Bard feature that lets you ask questions about your Gmail. As you might imagine there's some very personal stuff in there. As a matter of policy I do not write about that kind of stuff on my blog, but
mama mia it's pretty amazing what it will report on.
#
Yesterday the "former president" as he's referred to on TV, or
Mr President on
NBC, shared a post that said
Jewish liberals are destroying America. Let's mark this line clearly. Talk like that is full of alarm for Jewish people, esp those raised by people who survived the last holocaust. If this doesn't stop you in your tracks, then you probably won't notice when they start calling us vermin, restricting our movement, take our property, move us to ghettos and then systematically incinerate us the way you would rid yourself of an infestation. You know the old story about the
frog boiling in water. We all are on that path. This was always where Make America Great Again was going, an America with all the Jews dead. That this isn't Story One on every front page and newscast says everything you need to know about how journalism is failing us.
#If anyone from MacArthur or Knight is tuned in, here's an idea. Help us get an
EZ-Pass for News going. It's a bootstrap. If there were incentives. If it were seen as a good cause. It could increase the fluidity of news around the country and world by an order of magnitude. That can't help but increase cash flow through news orgs. But more importantly it give us more access to ideas that don't come from the NYT et al. Might be a nice way to boost all the local news orgs being supported by the $500 million fund.
#
A
screen shot of what links.scripting.com looked like. I like to do this when domains move, when I think of it, so at least the image of the previous site is maintained.
#I'm
davew on Pebble which used to be T2. Note the "s" they
added after http in the address of my blog. I don't know why they did that. They need to not do that. Thank you.
#BTW, are you seriously telling me "security" couldn't have been added to the web without breaking every single freaking link?
#I'd like to have a chat with the secret unaccountable person who is breaking the web at Google. How about running your ideas past me before you break the web. Would that be okay?
#
- Textcasting applies the philosophy of podcasting to text. #
- It also describes what we should have done when Twitter first came along, what I would have done if I were them. We would have had a much different situation now. #
- Textcasting also says that all the tribulations of Activitypub aren't necessary. No one has bothered to think this through at the top level, everyone is working in niches, not really aware of what anyone else is doing.#
- Journalism also refused to look. So they were guided into a gulag by Twitter and now they don't like it. If anyone had thought through where they were going, that would have led to textcasting too. They should have owned the new news environment, instead they and we were controlled by it. #
- The thing that keeps me focused is writers. It's all about writers, what tools they need to think and collaborate, without boundaries. #
It seems like HTTP requests these days, generally, don't come with a
referer header? It's a shame because if something you wrote is getting a lot of hits you can't tell where they're coming from. I'm sure there's a privacy reason for this. Perhaps if you were clicking a link from a porn site to a tech blog, you might not want the site to know where you came from, esp if the destination site is Facebook? Not sure. I've been noticing this for a long time, but only yesterday took the time to rule out a bug in my code.
#Update: It seems like this
change in Chrome in 2020 is at the root of this new behavior. Something that sounds so esoteric is actually removing an important feature of the web, and it got little or no notice.
#Yet another time Google pulled the rug out from under bloggers, acting as the defacto owner of the web. To big tech companies we just don't exist, probably because to news orgs we don't exist either. Not being able to tell where your stuff is being discussed means you can't learn or persuade. Maybe we should have a human network that manages to get links back to the blogger?
#
Imagine a ChatGPT-like bug reporting system, where the user reports a bug via chat, which asks follow-up questions to determine if it's a software error, and determines reproducible steps before a developer even sees the report. One of the most frustrating things in the life of a developer who cares about users are vague reports like "It doesn't work, what did I do wrong?" The chatbot has infinite, inhuman patience.
#I'm getting email saying ChatGPT got some data wrong in the
movie report I asked for, but that isn't what's interesting. I'm sure they'll fix that stuff. What's impressive is the language I was able to use to specify the query.
#They don't try to report news on NPR. Bending over backwards to treat Republican mockery of legislative processes as legit. I'm sure when they talk about the events they cover privately they tell each other the truth. But not to their listeners. Why bother.
#It's that time of year when I get into MLB, and unfortunately the Mets aren't in the race this year. Probably won't root for anyone, but I really like watching the game this time of year. For now I'm watching the Mets, it's relaxing with absolutely nothing at stake. Except I can't believe they're thinking about not signing Pete Alonso. A homegrown star. The rarest thing these days in NY baseball.
#
AI is the revenge of the command line.
#Imagine a DNS utility that you could converse with as you do with ChatGPT.
#There's a lot of power and ownership that comes from having the dominant web browser.
#
I use interactive debuggers as programming tools, not in just in place of console.log statements. It's provably faster, and it makes it possible to build bigger machines that do more. The challenge of software development is to factor and factor so you can add another story to the skyscraper that your product has become. Eventually you have to stop building, one mind can't comprehend that much. Better tools makes it possible to build and manage more complex machines. I have no idea what's around the corner in software development when we can rely on cyber-minds to keep track of complexity for us. We'll have to develop new modes of communication between the human and computer brains, and I seriously doubt if it'll involve implants, more likely it'll happen first when we invent new language. And each of us should be able to create our own. At some point we'll realize we aren't even making sounds. It'll have sensors that learn how our bodies change when we have certain ideas. Who knows. But what possibilities!
#I asked ChatGPT to
write SQL code that would generate the table of actors and awards I
spec'd last week. "Make a table of 15 oscar-winning actors and actresses ranked by number of nominations, also include a column with the names of at most three of the movies they made that won best picture."
#
I saw a thread somewhere about why
OPML was used as the export format for feed readers. Not sure I've ever written about this. At the time we were finishing up
Radio UserLand, in either 2001 or 2002 (there were two big releases). I wanted a way to export the user's feed list so people could use the same list in another reader. This one decision is why there are so many feed readers imho. Because we offered no lock-in as a key feature, everyone else including Google had to do it with their products. Users had the expectation of data portability, so it's in the DNA of feed readers. Maybe we would have dominated the market with Radio if we didn't export the feed list, it was for a while the only feed reader, but more likely Google would have entered and clobbered us, users wouldn't have been able to use both products, or easily move on after Reader shut down. Anyway, why OPML? First, we had it around, it was new, I wanted people to use it, and I also wanted to use the outliner to edit my subscription lists.
JSON didn't exist as an option at the time. And using
RSS for that seemed confusing and not right. RSS is a syndication format, representing a
flow of information, where OPML represents a list that evolves, but each item has permanence. It's static where RSS is dynamic. It's like the difference between a podcast and an album of music. You listen to a podcast once and it's gone, you may listen to an album many times over decades. Fundamentally different kinds of data, with different needs in how they evolve, and thus the format you use to represent it. Yes we could have shoehorned feed lists into RSS, but 20 years later I'm glad we didn't.
#I asked ChatGPT how I used OPML to share lists of feeds. The
story it came back with is amazing. I
asked for the list in OPML. I opened
it in
Drummer.
#One of the cool things about this blog is that I got to write about these things when they were new, and now that they've been around quite a long time, in tech industry terms, I get to write about them again.
#I have a few virtual servers at Digital Ocean, and two of them are running
Caddy, so the sites hosted on these machines are HTTPS not HTTP. Caddy is the best. You install it, configure it and that's it. It takes care of all the michegas with the EFF, makes them completely invisible. Also makes it possible to switch thank goodness, I didn't miss that the EFF built themselves into the new system, not by force exactly, but by default. Heh. They get a lot of free marketing. Anyway, the fact that Caddy exists means that Amazon S3 could offer HTTPS access to everything I store there without me having to do anything but check a box in a dialog somewhere. So why don't they do it, make HTTPS zero cost to implement and maintain. They could even charge extra. It's kind of perfect, they know who I am better than anyone. We could make HTTPS disappear, which imho would be a good thing.
#
Google is worse than a monopolist. They deliberately destroy technology because it’s too empowering for users.
#My father liked to say: "When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles scream and shout." It's originally from
The Caine Mutiny, he must've gotten it when he worked at IBM. He was always interested in new ideas, new ways to approach problems. But you never get a new idea when you're freaking about how you need a new idea now.
#People who pay Twitter $8 per month should get a certain number of API calls included. Don't charge developers for what the users do.
#
- Suppose you're a big company with deep pockets and lots of users. How about offering an identity service for users that includes storage that permitted apps can read and write, where the storage belongs to the user, not the developer. #
- I'm thinking of AWS or Automattic, as examples. Trusted companies, known for technical excellence and a long-term vision. #
- What happens then? Well the net as a platform all of a sudden has the power of a personal computer, and the ownership is in the right hands, the users. #
- The company that does this, with user freedom to switch, will have the developer market that Microsoft used to have. #
- The company has to be big enough, stable, trusted.#
- Thesis: ChatGPT is to AI tools as Napster was to streaming audio. The people get better tools to do their own programming. And it's neither good nor bad, but it is inevitable. #
As you might imagine the subject of What To Do About AI was much-discussed at the Berkman reunion last week. Lots of hand-wringing. I was the only person who said that AI is wonderful, I can't wait to see what it can do next. When I started to give this schpiel, I was rushed along and made to stop I guess before their brains exploded? Really I wasn't allowed to finish the thought. This always happens when I go to Future of News conferences. I always ask the question, maybe you should embrace bloggers instead of fearing us. Maybe we can help? I almost started a session entitled "ChatGPT is the best thing ever." That would have been fun. But I was at dinner when the sessions were reserved, so that didn't happen. #- We never understand new tech in the first few years it's out. Personal computers, in the late 70s were thought to be Home Computers. The ads had pictures of computers in the kitchen, storing recipes and shopping lists. Helping kids with homework or parents with the family budget. It wasn't until VisiCalc that all the heads turned 180 degrees and realized oh shit, this is what we feared most (the old fear thing again) -- what happens when anyone in an organization can have a computer on their desk, unregulated by the IT people? #
- And then the old question "Can Humans Survive AI?" comes up which I would answer -- I have no freaking idea -- but we're not surviving without it, so why not give it a try? And to people who say the scifi authors were right, without even trying ChatGPT I say -- no they weren't right. So far, imho, AI is the best thing ever. Why not focus on the long-term unsolvable problems which now might have solutions with the new tech? And try to learn from our mistakes in previous generations of tech, not to try to stop the march of tech, but to find things it can do that we like or even love? #
- PS: I asked ChatGPT for 250 words about early home computers and what happened when VisiCalc was introduced?#
- PPS: I think ChatGPT would be great at Jeopardy.#
The
idea about people not learning to use computers really
resonated with some. Almost no disagreement. I'd add that we now are going to get another shot at conceiving a computer that's a lot easier to use, with the power of AI. Remember the example where I was able to specify what was basically an
SQL query in plain though precise English? That can also be applied to the user interface of a computer. Get me the phone number of the contractor I used to install the solar panels a few years ago. I'm sure the data is here on my computer, it might not be organized that way, but in a few months I'll have my own DaveBot who's read everything I've written everywhere and can answer all my questions (and yes, probably the CIA gets to ask questions too, let's hope Trump doesn't get elected, I'm not unaware of the dangers). And I won't have to remember how to build some app I wrote ten years ago. I won't even have to take notes. It's the paradise I never believed in is about to come to me.
#Last week at the reunion I got to spend a lot of time with
Doc Searls, which was great. We're both getting old, and one of these times will be the last one, but for now we're both still kicking around ideas and actually doing some of them. One of the things we share is that when we write up an idea on our blog or in a book it's probably because we want to work with others to
do that idea. Really pretty much all the time. And it's disheartening and not at all flattering to hear someone thank you for giving them that idea. This is the saddest thing in my life and it keeps happening. An example, I once went to visit Adam Curry in Amsterdam and he showed me an office full of people he hired to do what I had already done. Adam did that over and over. The problem is you can't hire someone to be Doc or me. No matter how many rooms you fill with attractive people. When you try to do our ideas, we've learned, people seem to always miss the heart of it. Anyway someone reading this may someday work with the source of the idea they love to make it reality and I will have done my good deed for the day.
#
In the
University Teaching Hospital For Tech I'm thinking about, I would teach users how to adjust to a new piece of software before switching to it. Suppose you're going to use a new piece of software to write your blog, something you do every day. Instead of converting to the new software first and diving into production, I would ask you to play with the new editor on the side, on posts that don't matter, maybe even
written by ChatGPT, until you're sure it fits your workflow. To surface and report all bugs that are in your way, or find acceptable workarounds. And only when you're satisfied that it works for you, should you consider switching to the new editor for production work. In my experience working with users, they switch too early and then panic when they find the software doesn't work the way they think it should. More generally you have to learn how to work so you don't have to panic, and you can easily back out of the decision if you decide it isn't right. When you're in panic mode you usually only make things worse. If you can afford to put the problem down for a couple of days and come back to it, you'll get to work faster and probably with a better result. The most important thing in working with computers, if you feel like you're panicking, stop.
#We've never taught people how to use computers. There actually is a lot to it. We're going to get another shot with ChatGPT and its cousins. Imagine when the chat interface is what we use to command and connect our software.
#One thing I have to thank Berkman for is my new confidence. What a boost that meeting was. It took me back to a day when there were a dozen people I worked with regularly who were really first rate, and I was able to participate at my peak, that I did something uniquely valuable and was appreciated for it. I feel a million times more confident this week after the homecoming last week.
#
- When I was leaving Cape Cod a couple of weeks ago, I stopped to charge my Tesla at a place that had a Dunkin' Donuts, so I went in and got a big ice coffee and a Sourdough Breakfast Sandwich, something I had never tried. For some reason it looked good to me.#
- Well it was great! Since then I've had two more and I just love the sandwich. Seems like an incredible bargain. Two once-over eggs, a bunch of bacon and melted cheese in a sourdough sandwich. Really tasty and filling. #
- I don't often review food, so you know it's pretty good. 😄#
2011: "Google seems to have the power to either seriously injure RSS, or perhaps set it free. Not sure which would happen if they radically changed course. I just know that users have made the other RSS reading tools be dependent on it. And that's not a great way to do things. What makes RSS useful is its power to de-centralize. To re-centralize it for a little convenience is to miss out on the variety that's possible.."
#
One thing that didn't come up at the
Berkman reunion, as far as I know, was the incredible coincidence that at the same time we were booting up academic and political blogging and podcasting out of Berkman on Mass Ave, on the other side of
Cambridge St, Mark Zuckerberg and his undergrad pals were booting up what would eventually make them billionaires, aka
The Face Book. What if we had met, or known about each other?
#I just tripped over a 2018 rewrite of
Developing Better Developers. I remembered writing this, but never could find it. I need to tell Google when I search for site:scripting.com to also include site:this.how. If anything the bits on this.how are more important than the ones on the much larger scripting.com. I could give these instructions, just like this, to ChatGPT and it would understand. It seems to me Google could start allowing us to configure the way Google sees us using natural language like this. Google has really held back the open web, by doing what big companies
always do when they achieve dominance. Things ether stagnate or more likely in Google's case, move backwards.
#
Something happened on the drive to Boston last week that makes we wary of trusting the FSD feature of my Tesla model Y. I was on the NY State Thruway going north, a few miles south of the exit for I-90E to Boston, in
FSD mode, in the right lane, when I see a hundred yards or so ahead a car with flashing lights in the shoulder. Before waiting to see what FSD would do, I signaled a left turn, which is a clever feature that tells the FSD software to switch lanes. It started to do so, then the software must've noticed the car with the flashing lights and inbetween the two lanes it hit the brakes hard, and slowed us down to a dangerous speed, esp if there had been a car behind us. But there was absolutely no danger. The car in the shoulder wasn't even close enough to make a difference if we had remained in the right lane, but we were leaving it. And it tried to stop us in no man's land. Insane. Anyone seeing this behavior would have thought I was drunk. So next time something like that happens if I'm in FSD mode, I'm going to cancel it by turning the steering wheel slightly and taking over fully. I have trouble believing people who let this thing drive without overriding it regularly.
#Bluesky is an invite-only network, but it has an API, and we've added RSS feeds, so I can present to you a view onto
Andrew Hickey's Bluesky feed, accessible to everyone.
#
Nice to see
Thread Writer for Bluesky getting traction. It's a rewrite of thread.center which I wrote for Twitter, which Twitter never noticed before shutting it down. One of these days there will be a platform that really pays attention to what developers create and makes sure users learn about them. Twitter was not that company. Like most tech companies they spent their dev relations money on the wrong things.
#Fixed a bug where every this.how doc would fail trying to load emoji images because it used an "insecure" address. I fixed it so now we can be sure no emoji images are being hacked by a router between AWS and your web browser. Hopefully someone will sleep better because of this. Me, I like fixing bugs so I feel good.
😄#
An idea for an app. Make a list of all the places you've lived, schools went to, restaurants you loved, hated, movies, books, places you've visited. Then you're at a conference or reunion, and the app starts vibrating when you're standing near someone who also uses the app who has something significant and interesting that matches your profile. Take out your phone and it says what it is. You can swipe left or right or ignore it. If you both swipe right, your phones start playing a Peter Gabriel song (the same
one) and you know you can have an interesting conversation with this person.
#I have Spectrum cable, only because it’s the only way to get Knicks and Mets games. Otherwise I’d go back to YouTube TV, I like it better. Less money too. And now Disney has disconnected from Spectrum, taking ESPN with, it would a great time for everything to decouple and let’s
redo the whole thing. I'm wasting so much money just for two channels and so are a lot of other people.
#
BTW, I learned that two of my colleagues from early Berkman are regular readers of this blog,
Chris Lydon and
Ethan Zuckerman. Maybe they have some ideas how we might bootstrap an online
Old School Berkman on the open web, probably using something like blogs I imagine, and giving users choice as to what tools they use to read and write the stuff. Kind of like podcasting but for text. I would totally use an outliner for everything, but it should be wide open for any kind of tool anyone wants to build and/or use. Just an idea. Someday we will use such a system, I hope. Not federated, but small pieces loosely joined.
#I do not keep up with who is or isn't
subscribed to nightly email. I deliberately don't want to know.
#BTW, it was pointed out that
yesterday's post with my first notes from the BKC 25th reunion failed to say what
BKC is. It's a research center that started 25 years ago at Harvard Law School with a charter to do entrepreneurial internet-related projects.
#What a huge loss for the human species that a monstrous company like Facebook controls a wonderful social network like Facebook.
#
- As you know, I went to a conference this week with lots of web thinkers, people I worked with 20 years ago. And after listening to them about the state of social networks, this is what I've come up with.#
- It's federation vs small pieces loosely joined. #
- I'll go with the latter. The former is too complicated to work or deliver a benefit worth anything to anyone except chaos lovers.#
- SPLJ delivers all the benefits, but is more fragile, probably slower, but easier to understand. #
- Everyone has a radio station that broadcasts to the universe to which anyone can opt into listening to or not. #
- It's nowhere near as efficient as Twitter, but that's a good thing my friends. #
- The problem with Twitter is it makes everyone an easy target. This approach, well understood from the old days of blogging has the opposite challenge, getting anyone to hear you, but at least you can tune everyone else out, because that's the default. #
- The default on federated nets is the other way, everyone is on by default. This has been proven to be an awful approach, over and over. #
- Just because you don't know the lessons of the past doesn't somehow make you immune to them. ;-)#
As you might imagine the subject of What To Do About AI was much-discussed at the Berkman reunion last week. Lots of hand-wringing. I was the only person who said that AI is wonderful, I can't wait to see what it can do next. When I started to give this schpiel, I was rushed along and made to stop I guess before their brains exploded? Really I wasn't allowed to finish the thought. This always happens when I go to Future of News conferences. I always ask the question, maybe you should embrace bloggers instead of fearing us. Maybe we can help? I almost started a session entitled "ChatGPT is the best thing ever." That would have been fun. But I was at dinner when the sessions were reserved, so that didn't happen. #
Very independently of my Berkman experience in 2014 I was thinking all about how an academic institution should welcome people back every few years to contribute to an ongoing open source project. If we had been able to do that for blogging, podcasting, RSS starting in 2003, and growing as the user base grew, with volunteers coming back to work on it whenever there was a need, and using the university to teach new generations how to do what the older generation knew how to do, I think it might have worked. At least it would have given the users a seat at the table when deciding how the technology would evolve. #
