Everybody's maxing out on Wordle today. I stopped with one step left. Stumped. I may lose my streak today. A lot of people are. #
- A long time ago I ran a free service called weblogs.com. It was the early days of blogs. RSS didn't exist yet, so there was no way to find out which blogs had new stuff other than going through your blogroll and clicking links. #
- So I built a simple server, running in Frontier, that handled pings. When you updated your blog, you'd send a message to weblogs.com saying your blog updated. It would then read the HTML of the blog and verify that it changed, and it would be added to a list of blogs that updated, in reverse chronologic order. It also published an XML version of the update list called changes.xml, so if you wanted to run a search engine off the list, you could do that too. #
- There were several ways to send a ping. You could go to a web page and enter the URL of your blog. Or you could save the URL as a bookmark and click the bookmark when you updated. Or if you used blogging software like our Manila or Radio UserLand, or later EditThisPage.com or weblogs.com (which eventually hosted blogs itself), it could ping on your behalf, automatically. #
- Aside: Here's a snapshot of the weblogs.com site, preserved. #
- A number of search sites appeared. And we were happy, until another developer, funded by venture capitalists, who expected a return on their investment, built on our open and free changes.xml list, started asking for and receiving pings on their own, and (key point) they didn't make their change list public. This struck me as highly un-weblike and unfair, but they could do it and we had to live with it. #
- Based on what Matt has been saying it sounds to me like it's something like our experience. Except weblogs.com was a short term thing, and not a business, and it didn't last twenty years, and it didn't have a payroll to support. #
- But it still felt wrong that they weren't giving back as they received. If it had persisted like WordPress has, it would have eventually been a seriously diseconomic and unsustainable problem. And I can imagine I might write about it publicly as Matt has and maybe even get a famous lawyer like Neal Katyal to advise me. And here we are. #
- Have we heard anything from the other side, or anyone who is familiar with what their position might be. Do they not feel obligated to support the continued development of WordPress or maybe there's another issue we haven't heard about. #
- I can't imagine that Matt would make such a big deal out of this if it weren't actually a big deal. He probably knew in advance how disruptive this would be. And I imagine the others knew it would be too and counted on him not wanting to make a fuss. #
- I have gotten embroiled in these kinds of things in the past, and I don't like it. I love to make software and make users happy and then make more software, round and round. Anything that involves lawyers is not me doing what I was made to do. #
- And I do see a silver lining. As with twitter-like systems, I now see the possibilty to help WordPress serve writers better in the future. Before this, people didn't think change was possible in the WordPress world, like they didn't see the possibility of change with Twitter. But now Twitter has quite a bit of viable competition. I know that WordPress could be better tuned for writers, and the product has a very nice API that would make it possible for lots of writing tools to flourish. It is a strong platform that's debugged, scaled, documented and worked on for a long time, and they don't tend to break users. And where commercial vendors like Facebook and Twitter often have excellent technology, ultimately they are run by execs and bankers who don't believe in being open, where this is something that has been deeply ingrained in the WordPress culture from the beginning and would be hard to change and that's a good thing for users and developers. #
- Here's the exciting part -- between WordPress and Twitter lies a product that would bring the web back to life. Imagine a twitter-like system with the writers features of WordPress. Amazingly, we are on the cusp of that being a reality.#
- There's lots of opportunity to better serve writers here, and that's what I love to do, and honestly I think Ghost and Substack have left themselves open to a writing environment built on WordPress that doesn't try to lock users in. And at the same time, I think we can use this platform to help all the twitter-like services to support all kinds of writing, not just severely limited tweets typed into tiny little text boxes. Somewhere along the line they got the wrong idea that taking features out of the web was a good thing. I want to bring these features back so we can get going again with the web as a writer's platform. #
- Anyway, I don't need to think anyone is right or wrong here, and I don't think anyone else should either. I think this platform is very nicely open and we can do lots of interesting new stuff here. I hope to open a new thread here, focused on writers and the web. It's been too long. #
Highly recommend today's Olbermann podcast. I've seen video of a recent press interview where Trump said he's use the military to arrest and in some cases kill Americans, starting with but not limited to Hispanics. This is not being reported in the major news orgs. We can't wait for them to fix it, we have to create new channels for news flow that have credibility and work, and we need it before the election. People need at least have a chance of understanding what they are voting for. #
BTW, why doesn't Netflix buy Metacritic and integrate their ratings aggregator in their user interface. I predict I'd watch far more stuff on Netflix than I do now. Or Apple TV, Max, Hulu, Disney, etc. The idea that such a valuable resource is not part of the user experience is crazy imho. What a waste. What reminded me of this is Plex has integrated the equivalent of Bingeworthy in their service, which is also a good idea and will glue communities of users to you. The idea is to systematize recommendations. If I know a specific friend liked a movie or a show is valuable information for me, not just advertisers. #Someday I have to reboot Bingeworthy, it's the software snack I miss the most. It broke when Twitter broke their identity system.#
I am totally having a blast with my hybrid blog, built by textcasting WordPress and Mastodon. Just wrote a post about the day the NYT signs off, finally realizing how fcuked we are if Trump is elected or manages to steal the election next month. Their final headline in this story is GOOD LUCK AMERICA. #
I would switch to any podcatcher that let me edit my subscription list outside their app, because I use that list in different contexts, also because I’d like to share my list with others, and would like that to be a dynamic connection, so I could add feeds as I learn about them, or remove feeds that have stopped updating. Also because there are lots of others, aka influencers who’d like to too. You’d own the market if you did this. #Cynicism isn’t always the right explanation. Sometimes people just want to share something good with you, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re stupid, maybe they just like you. #
The common denominator between journalism, business and politics is that none of them have any respect for people. To rise in influence, money or power you have to give up imagination, and be ruled by cynicism. If you don’t believe this, show me a journalist who listens, a business that makes products for thinkers, or a politician who lets individual people lead them. #
- BTW, the reason there's such a confluence of power between WordPress and Mastodon is this.#
- WordPress has a complete, debugged, deployed, scaled and frozen API. It's been around since 2016 or so.#
- In contrast Mastodon, while they're doing excellent work, is trying to wrangle an already large community into a set of consistent interfaces. It's very hard for an outsider like myself to approach, esp when you're overloaded with your own work (which we all are).#
- Meanwhile, Automattic has a small team whose only job is to make WordPress work with Mastodon.#
- So I can build software that works with Mastodon without venturing into the rough seas of Mastodon-land. I can stay on the cruise-liner, which is the WordPress API.#
- I didn't even know they had this API until last summer. My jaw dropped when I first saw it. It even works with Node.js. And now that I'm on the other side, I haven't hit any insurmountable obstacles or had to wait for something to be decided.#
- This is the proper way to build interop. Implementors make things work, not W3C committees (I say that with decades of experience with this, btw).#
- I thought it deserved an explanation.#
- Well we know who the Mets are facing, starting tomorrow, in the National League championship series. #
- Last time we played the Dodgers in the postseason we kicked their ass. And now they have the nerve to show up again. Geez some people never learn. #
- And we haven't forgotten how Chase Utley broke Rubin Tejada's leg, deliberately, basically ending his major league career. We thought he should have been arrested for that, no kidding -- it was a vicious un-baseball assault. He and the Dodgers showed no remorse. #
Update: The Jankees are playing Cleveland in the ALCS, and while some people with limited imaginations wish for a Subway Series betw the the two NY teams, I do not. I have a rule, I always root for the team the Jankees are playing. Thus I hope to see a World Series between the Mets and so-called "Guardians." And of course the Mets would be heavily favored in that contest because the Cleveland team has changed their name to something impossible to pronounce, ethically. When you change your name, like tearing down your stadium (something that took the Mets a long time to recover from) you basically put a hex on your team making it virtually impossible for your philosophy to prevail. So Mets v Guardians, while not necessarily what I predict, rather is something I hope for, and as long as the game is played with philosophy, that's the real victory! So get em METS and never forget there's always next year. ❤️#
Summarizing the last 18 years on the web. Between Twitter and Google Reader, the web was cut into two, and they didn't get along. We may now be on the cusp of fixing that. Why? Because WordPress and Mastodon work with each other in unforeseen ways. We got lucky, because I don't think this was done consciously by the developers of either product.#
- I have a morning ritual which begins with breakfast and iced coffee, and my laptop, on the kitchen table, to review the news, sports, whatever. Write a few tweets or share a few links. Usually with WNYC playing in the background until I find something I want to read carefully, then I shout at Alexa to go away. When done, I head upstairs where the work begins, often with a blog post, as I'm writing now, and sometimes with a bit of code, but that usually waits until my brain is warmed up. #
- But today I had a different assignment. Instead of tweeting, I wrote a few wordpress/mastodon posts, a new hybrid, a medium that I may well be the first person to explore, to do actual writing in. #
I have a writing tool I call wordLand, it connects directly to WordPress, and from there, one of my sites is hooked up to Mastodon via ActivityPub. I choose to view it that way, to keep from going crazy. I know that it's hooked up to the "fediverse" -- meaning my writing can be viewed by any other app that supports the protocol Masotodon supports which is kind of ActivityPub+ -- where the + is the Mastodon API. Not sure what the ratios are, and I don't care. In this context I am a user, and happy to be that. The developers at Automattic are taking care of the technical details. #- Here's the conclusion that appeared in one of the posts I wrote in my kitchen this morning -- "I am more excited about the web than I have been in a lonnnnng time." I am. I explained why in one of my posts, but it comes down to this. I have most of the features I asked for in textcasting (!) and I am typing in a respectable editing window, where I retain copies of my writing, and there's no freaking tiny little text box. And because I'm hooking in through a protocol (here's the punchline) this writing can go anywhere. Anywhere. Let me say that again. Any. Where. #
- Like I said the other day, I doubt if Automattic knows what they have. I seriously doubt it. But in a few years, we're going to look back on this as the moment when Twitter stopped controlling our writing, as they have since 2006. #
- No more character limits. Posts can have titles, or not. We can use links, as many as we like. Styling works. We can edit our posts. And the really big payoff, I can use a writing tool I love and you can use a tool you love and they work together perfectly well. And if one day you feel like using mine, and I feel like using yours, it just works. So in one step, we turn the clock back to 1994, when the web had all the features a writer could want.#
- Links to the stories I wrote earlier, on Mastodon:#
- My new writing environment does textcasting.#
- I have bad luck hooking up to platforms.#
- A place for a 90s blogosperic reboot.#
- WordPress versions are linked to from the Mastodon posts. #
- Enter this in the address box: @daveverse.wordpress.com to follow this blog in Mastodon.#
Quick note about last night's Mets win over Philly. The series is over, the next game on Sunday will be against the winner in the west, either San Diego or Los Angeles. Last night's game was stressful, low scoring, until the Mets star shortstop hit a freaking grand slam home run, and that was all the scoring we needed. The Mets are the hottest team in baseball. It doesn't feel like a long time since 2015 when they got to the World Series before crashing. Who knows how far we'll get this year, honestly -- I'm surprised (and pleased) we got this far. And in the meantime, I caught a tiny bit of last night's preseason game between the Knicks and some other team I don't care about. They have two new stars to add to the roster after losing one star as a free agent, and trading two others for the second new star. All in all, very enticing. New York has some excellent sports teams, which is unusual, because it isn't just the Jankees this time, a team I will, I promise, never root for. Quite the opposite. I will root for whoever they are playing. You can probably tell I don't like them. 😄#I'm posting development notes on the wordland product in my wordpress/mastodon account. I'm starting to like using the new editor. Today I switched the format we save drafts in from HTML to Markdown. More consistent with my belief that Markdown is the ideal subset of web writing features for the social web. #
Isn't it weird that businesses work hard to get better position on Google search, but fight the other way with AI to be excluded. At some point they could realize that one of the approaches isn't correct. #
- A tweet that says something that's obviously true until you realize it's not. "No kid remembers their best day in front of the TV." In fact I have four memories from my youth, watching TV. #
- I remember my father rolling around on the floor when the ball went through Buckner's legs. My father never rolled around on the floor, before or since. But I liked seeing him let go just that once. #
- Another with my father. When the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan he said they were wearing wigs. He knew that because no man would actually have hair like that. I was 8 or 9 years old and remember telling him I didn't think he got that right.#
- I remember exactly where I was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. At the Newport Folk Festival and about 500 people were watching a tiny TV on top of a VW bus. Somehow everyone could see. It was outdoors and it was silent, everyone was in awe.#
- One that's only peripherally about TV. I remember every time I went to see a game at Shea Stadium as a kid I was blown away by the color, because most of the Mets games I saw were on TV, in black and white. #
- Here's one from adulthood. Watching young Barack Obama give his victory speech on election night in 2008 in my house in Berkeley with a group of friends, with tears running down all our faces.#
After Katrina I went to New Orleans to see what was left, esp in the areas where there was a 15-25 foot storm surge in coastal Mississippi. If you went inland from the coast for a few miles there was nothing left. No trees, only a few skeletal all-concrete buildings where the beach used to be, otherwise everything destroyed. What you don't necessarily realize that it isn't just 15 feet of water, it's 15 feet of stormy ocean with cars and building debris being pushed around floating in the water. This video on Threads provides a visual illustration of what a 9 foot surge is like. #
Thanks for all the good wishes re the 30th anniversary of the start of blogging here. It's not the same as it was at the beginning, but it's still pretty good. And to all the friends no longer with us, and there are plenty of them -- you are appreciated, respected and missed. #
Podcast: I was able to write a post that appeared on Mastodon using ActivityPub. Via the WordPress API. Congrats to the ActivtyPub community, Automattic and Mastodon. "It just worked." #
Okay this is blowing my mind. My friends at Automattic showed me how to turn on ActivityPub on a WordPress site. I wrote a test post in my simple WordPress editor, forgetting that it would be cross-posted to Mastodon. When I just checked in on Masto, there was the freaking post. After I recovered from passing out, I wondered what happens if I update the post in my editor, and save it to the WordPress site that's hooked up to Masto via ActivityPub. So I made a change and saved it. I waited and waited, nothing happened. I got ready to add a comment saying ahh I guess it doesn't update, when -- it updated. Oh geez look at that. Folks, I did nothing here but write an app that can be used to edit WordPress posts. And I got in return an app that is part of the freaking Fediverse. And I never had to write a line of ActivityPub code. Think about that. I don't know if Automattic understands what they have, honestly. #BTW, it also supports HTML pretty well, but the title does not appear on the Mastodon version. That's going to be a problem. Actually the title is visible at the bottom. Let's call that an anachronism. Of course the title should/must be at the top.#
Om Malik, a long-time friend, NBB and supporter: "The best version of Dave is the Hopeful Dave." I agree. That's certainly when I'm happiest. Because it means someone is working with someone else. Imho, that's the only source of hope in our world. #
I'm really proud of what John Gruber said about me as a blogger in his Daring Fireball yesterday: "Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what’s kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News’s 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant." #I've mentioned the wpIdentity package a few times recently, and thought I should explain its purpose and history. #
Guy Kawasaki and I have been going back and forth privately about what we want from our personal ChatGPT. Here's one thing for the list. When I go to Google and search for NBB, it should take me to this page on my blog. It shouldn't even require me to click on Feelin Lucky. Google has had 26 years to get to know me, and it still thinks I might mean National Bank of Blacksburg. Folks, this is my blog, read it and use it as context when I ask a question. And they don't have to even read my blog, NBB is defined in my glossary, which I make public and is used in rendering all my pages. #- A few years back, Google, when I searched for my mother, using her correctly-spelled last name, which happened to also be my last name, showed me results for Eve Wilmer.#
- Back to Guy. I asked if he's written about what an evangelist is. To me, he is the prototypical evangelist. He's #1 and there isn't a #2 or #3. He has written about it, in the Harvard Business Review in 2015. But his story is, excuse me, bullshit. I should record a podcast about what an evangelist is, as I was very well-schooled in this by Guy. Let me try here. #
- The evangelist for a product or organization is the person who deliberately tilts the playing field in favor of developer products that absolutely must get out there for the organization to achieve its mission. How is the tilt determined? Intuitively. If some random schmuck approaches him out of the blue at a developer conference, and explains their problem, where most BigCo people ignore them, the evangelist listens carefully. Helps without a second thought. And his door is open, if the developer wants to follow up. He helps route his needs through the organization. No developer is on their own if Guy is there. #
- And when the killer product comes along, the one that will give Mac users something to get charged up over in 1986 when the hardware problems were being solved (they were!) and the software flow had dried up, Guy gets the developer the $400K they need to keep the doors open to ship the freaking product. The level playing field approach, which most tech companies follow, results in dead developers and platforms whose capabilities go unexplored. Users get bored, and move on to where the excitement is. #
- I've seen products and companies fail to look around them to see what's possible. They only look inward at their own organizations who fail year after year to create products that users love. There's a reason for this, but you don't need to know it -- you just need to keep looking at every possible victory and when one comes along, do anything it takes to get it out to users.#
- I've applied Guy's teaching in every project I've done since I got to know him in 1983 and when we, together, rode the wave of success in the Mac in 1986. He was like a member of our team inside the Mac Division at Apple. And we did have the hit product that year. And Guy pulled every string to make sure the world knew. #
- This is how I applied the lesson. When I saw the potential in another developer and a way for their project to help me achieve my goal, I go for it. I know those things are very rare, and not to worry if it doesn't arrive in exactly the way I expected it to. #
Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog. Hola! #
I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I'd add this. My blog started because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent emails on my Mac using Eudora, which was an early scriptable app and I had a nice scripting system that worked with it. I looked around for something to send (30 years ago today), and shot out an email to the people whose business cards I had collected at various tech conferences. It was a thrill, so I did it again, and again and three more times, before I realized hey I could use this thing to get my own ideas out there. And thus began this thing that I still do to this day. Look at the two posts I wrote about WordPress in the last few days. There may be hope to find a blogosphere buried somewhere in there. And it may be possible to give them some sweet new writing tools so they can get excited about writing on the web the way we did all those years ago. I actually am kind of optimistic about that. Maybe we can stand up something in the midst of the noise. When we booted up podcasting, approx 20 years ago, we had a slogan -- "Users and developers party together." It worked! That is still the way I want to build stuff, it's the only way I know how to do it. Blogging started out as a programming adventure and eventually became a form of literature. How about that. I'm up for doing more of that if you all are. But please expect to make contributions, don't expect it all to come to you for free, because as we know nothing really is free. #Today's the big day. Thanks to John Naughton's wonderful piece in the Guardian, I'm hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you're proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don't support linking, the web is still there and it still does. #
Interestingly, the clock at the bottom of the nightly emails does not agree with the clock on the home page of Scripting News. It's a hard thing to test in real life. And it's completely fitting, given the motto of the blog is: it's even worse than it appears, which could be the motto of all programmers everywhere, and probably bloggers too. We always focus on the bad news, of course -- that's human nature -- but always remember, it could actually be worse. #
- Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics.#
- The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least at first, be pretty much exactly like we do it now, but the way you specify how they work, how they interact both in the UI and on the backend, will be done more or less as you would document the user interface. The AI system is almost ready to work at that level. With a few more iterations by human designers it should all meet up in a place where the slogging type work I've been doing for 50+ years will be obsolete. We will all become anachronisms. All of us. Get ready for it. And btw I was the biggest skeptic of the idea of a higher level more human way of programming. Scoffed at the idea. Repeatedly. Never say you can't teach an old dog new tricks.#
- The second part is about kitchen-table conversations in families, the bored rantings of our ancestors, passed on lovingly from generation to generation. Should have realized that we did not turn a racial corner with the election of Obama, we all should have gotten prepared for the backlash from children of the slavers and fascists, who were raised alongside us as victims of slavery and fascism were raised to feel persecuted. We all revert to our comfortable roles. The question is can we rise above that and forget for a moment what our ancestors taught us as gospel and take an interest in going beyond that, or do we have to do another loop around the genocide and its consequences, which this time will be far worse than they were in the 1940s because of all the new war and computer tech and the damage done by the post-war growth. #
- I feel good about this podcast, because it has nothing to do with the milestone. I have an idea of what it feels like to have been blogging for 30 years, but no conclusions to offer that would mean anything to me or anyone else, except perhaps a psychologist. #
- I've been watching a lot of sports recently and the interviews with star athletes saying the same predictable bullshit after being asked how it felt to do whatever heroic thing they just did. All of TV and news is like that, none of it is news, all of it is predictable bullshit. That is probably why they have so much trouble reporting the truth about Trump and Musk. It doesn't fit into their job description, it's not in anyone's job to tell the truth. And that's the truth. #
- Glad I wrote the piece I wrote yesterday. #
- I could have written it any time in the last year as I was investigating and developing on the WordPress API and back end, but now seemed to be a good time, with all the attention its getting, and Matt's interviews, I and others are getting a better idea of what the various components of the community are. I don't know about the rest of you, but I had only a vague idea of what WordPress is beyond a piece of software used for commerce and to a lesser extent these days, writing on the web.#
- A few ideas -- not in any particular order:#
- From my point of view, blogging and the social web, WordPress is being built around more than being built on, when it is such a potent and surprisingly open platform. I took the time to look, and underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on. #
- If a community developed at this level, writing tools, we'd be compatible at a very deep level, so the opportunities for interop are amazing. I don't say that lightly. (I had asked them to allow apps to attach their own data to posts for years, until I discovered earlier this year the API has that feature. If only they had listened to the question and answered it thoughtfully, we could have saved years. The company desperately needs an evangelism function.)#
- The WordPress platform could be a very strong part of the social web. The comparison between developer freedom on the WordPress platform and the Facebook one (which is what Threads is built on) is stark. I have worked on the Facebook platform, btw -- and from a software design perspective it's brilliant, a breakthrough, something to emulate, which I did in the wpidentity package I wrote. But from a policy standpoint, after the 2016 election Facebook's API was radically restricted, not something many people know about (it was a fully public event). WordPress has an API that doesn't appear to have any such limits, and even if they imposed them, in theory their server could be cloned (it's open source) but it certainly could be emulated at an API level. #
- It's enticing. All those users -- there should be a market for writing tools there, but there isn't. Why is that??#
- I feel like we're like ships passing in the night. I thought I should point this out, at least once, as Matt and company go off in a direction I don't understand and don't see why I should want to. Did they care when the move to HTTPS undermined what remains of the original blogosphere? I don't see any evidence of it. It's like Walmart sought to build a shopping center on the remains of the Library of Alexandria. People don't seem to have any respect for independent writing on the web, what we dreamed of in the beginning, and the dream was realized. No wonder the tech industry wants to tear it down. It contradicts a basic premise of the programming priesthood. And no wonder journalism doesn't defend it, they are offended by the idea of people writing for free, based on the incorrect assumption about what we do. We're their sources, dammit, not their competitors, at least if they would do their jobs (which is another problem altogether) and if they spent any time thinking and questioning before condeming.#
- Look at John Naughton's piece today in the Guardian. He's doing more to focus attention on the web as a writing environment than the whole tech industry which is built on our work, especially Automattic. The ignorance and in some cases resentment in the industry is huge, something else Naughton points out so well. We can turn this around, I guess since WordPress is open source, it doesn't have to wait for Matt to turn in that direction. #
- Just some thoughts as the world seems to be converging on something, not sure what. There are so many doors that are now open that never were before, the question is -- do we have the courage to connect the dots and work together, or do we all insist on going our own ways to a fairly dark future. #
- PS: If you're a developer, this is the API you use in browser-JS code for the wpidentity package. This was the way Facebook packaged their API for developers, and it was far more efficient than the way Twitter did and WordPress too. So I added this to the stack, and built on it. #
- I am reminded of 2015, when the Mets were so charmed -- they could be down 9-0 in the 8th inning and you would tune into the game to see how they'd win it. It's not the usual thing for the Mets, who pull defeat from the jaws of victory far more often than the other way. #
- And omg, 2024 is shaping up the same way. #
- Sit down and shut up, here come the Mets!#
- Briefly, because I have stuff to do -- the Mets were down 1-0 in the bottom of the 8th, having been thoroughly shut down by the amazing Zach Wheeler. Imagine someone throwing a ball at you at 100 mph that looks like it's going down but actually goes up and to the left. Or next time down and to the right. You could try to swing but you'd have to be very lucky to connect. And so it was for the first seven innings until they took out Wheeler (pitchers don't do complete games any longer, they used to). #
- The Mets were ready. Hit after hit after hit and before you knew it, it was 5-1. Alonso, the star of the last Milwaukee game drove in one of the runs with a long sacrifice fly to center. #
- The Phillies and their fans who had been so confident of victory were shocked. And left to plan for today's game at 4PM on Fox. You gotta know where I'll be -- glued to the set and dreaming about the fate of this Mets team who shows real signs of strong philosophy. #
- A few years before WordPress came out, I did a product called Radio UserLand which was a combination blogging tool and feed reader. Two main screens, a streamlined UI. You could get in quickly, write and publish a post in a minute, and see it show up in the reader a moment later. It worked, and it added a major new component to the blogging world, and I think still represents the simplest most focused UI for writing. It was a really popular product. #
- The same idea, really simple blog post writing and editing, with all the features that should be available to web writers, optional titles, links, simple styling, enclosures, the ability to edit. The things the common social web apps generally don't have. #
- This imho is a huge opportunity. I wish this is where the focus in the WordPress community was, but I think right now the world is building around WordPress, not on it. It could be great, it could totally solve the problem of a new document standard in the social web that makes it really like the web. Instead they're fighting over who owns what part of the WordPress trademark, at least as far as I can tell. #
- Last year I created a Node.js package called wpidentity that acts as a bridge between a browser-based JavaScript app and the WordPress back-end, and the result is fine. It suggests that there could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea! #
- And I think the users, the writers, would love it, because we developers could compete to delight them, and not have to worry about building a huge server capability as Automattic already has debugged and scaled. And maybe the battle that's going on now could fade into the background.#
- Update: There's an important follow-up piece. #
I think a lot of confusion about AI products comes from the name. It's not clear what intelligence in humans is or how it works. We just believe it exists. So then the question is, can machines do the same thing? The truth is no one knows. It could be that human intelligence, once we figure out what it is, will be as trivial as they tell us the AI "intelligence" is. So if you're trying to make sense of it, or if the idea is offensive, try pretending that "intelligence" was "pomegranate" or "cauliflower" -- these are two terms John Lennon suggested George Harrison use in place of words in lyrics he hasn't come up with. Say ChatGPT is "Artificial Cauliflower" and that should be less offensive, yes? It would make as much sense as calling it intelligence. On the other hand, conversation with my favorite Artificial Cauliflower app does feel pretty much exactly like conversing with a human. A very patient and very knowledgeable and intelligent (whatever that means) but not infallible human. #An idea for Gabe at Techmeme. Here's a screen shot of a story on Techmeme. I don't have time to click on each of the links, but a machine can. I would love to get a AI-generated summary of all the links, the range or reactions, or a consensus if one has emerged. #
We are a Mets family. Around the kitchen table in my childhood home, the default question was "What did the Mets do?" Before I was born we were a Brooklyn Dodgers family, always National League, but the Dodgers left shortly after I was born and the Mets came along when I was seven, and that was it for us. It was the one thing we all agreed on -- the Mets. Much later when my Mom and I would fight about something, a pretty regular thing -- I invented what I called Shea Stadium Rules, which meant that a disagreement could be tabled when we remember that underneath everything we are true Mets fans, and ultimately Mets fans can find something to agree on -- that rain or shine and there was plenty of rain, we always stood with our team. A deeper truth of the Mets was we didn't really mind when they lost. Because underneath it all at a whole other level, the Mets have a philosophy that is strong. We are the Mets and that's all you need to know. #- Anyway, last night it wasn't lookin good. It was a winner-take-all game with the hated (for now) Milwaukee Brewers. We hated them because it looked like they were going to end the Mets season in the first round of the playoffs. I was getting ready to take off my Mets cap for the year, and put on my Knicks cap, when Lindor walked, then Nimmo singled, and with runners on first and third and one out, Pete Alonso comes to the plate. He's been cold all year. I hoped for a base hit or at least a long sacrifice fly to bring in the runner on third. I couldn't watch but forced myself to. And then it happened. #
- We who have been joined at the heart to this team and have been through it all, have come to expect failure, but sometimes winning happens, as it did last night. A big swing. The bat connects. Oh please let it land anywhere but the glove of a Brewer, and then all of a sudden Alonso is jogging around the bases, and delirium takes over, in the living room of my mountain home and everywhere Mets fans were at that fateful hour. #
- We figured at that point they might as well just retire the side, but the Metsies, who Casey Stengel, the first manager asked "Can't anyone play this stinkin game!" -- brought in another run, which it turns out we didn't need. #
- The Brewers were overwhelmed. They tried to score in the bottom of the ninth but the Mets philosophy was too strong.#
- It's like every baseball kid's fantasy -- the count is 3 and 2 ,the team's back is to the wall, up comes the slugger, the crowd is silent and then he hits it out of the park and the team emerges victorious and the young person's fantasy saves the day. We've all been there, many times. Last night we got to live it, again, this time for real. #
- And now we go to Philadelphia to give them a proper dose of New York love. #
- Meet the Mets meet the Mets, step right up and greet the Mets, etc. #
- Game 1 of the NLDS begins tomorrow at 4PM. Good times will be had by all (except Philadelphia fans of course).#
- PS: This wasn't Mookie in game 6 of the 1986 World Series, but it was along those lines of improbability.#
- PPS: I love that they give a realtime readout on screen of the probability of each team winning. At the top of the ninth, before all the michegas, the Mets had only a 6% chance of winning. I think every game should come with a graph over time of this stat. It would be an emotional map, much more interesting than the other stats.#
A ChatGPT news network would be pretty interesting. You could register as an independent blogger, and push your writing up to their cloud in real time. And then readers could ask what experts on whatever think about what just happened and it would know what your expertise is, and it could build the report also in realtime, in response to a very detailed question you could ask. And you could tell it whether or not you want lies, or if they should omit the lies. Personally I would opt out of the lies, but some people like lies in their news, kind of like menthol in cigarettes. And forget about paying the news orgs. They don't give you a way to opt out of the lies. #So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. Think about it.#
I didn't like the code ChatGPT was writing for me, so I tried it in Claude, and the code is much closer to my style. I may try that again. I've heard it's better at supporting code than other chatbots. #
- I didn't read the WSJ story about the deflation of expertise, quoting Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who I know from my time in California. He says AI leads to a deflation of expertise. I agree with him, AI absolutely deflates the value of expertise. #
- It aggregates all of our knowledge in one place where it's easy to access, about anything you want to know. It answers questions that you can't get any other way. #
- Some technological developments are profound. We never understand all the implications of a new technology when it comes online, but you do get some strong clues. You have to use it to know learn how to think about it. That's not unreasonable because we all grew up in a world that didn't have this technology, as my parents grew up in a world without television, and I didn't use a computer until I was 18 or use the web until I was 37. None of us grew up with anything but fiction about AI, and the fiction imho didn't grasp the implications very well. #
- If I ask good questions ChatGPT stretches my mind in ways it never has been stretched before and I'm well educated and in my work have explored frontiers of knowledge, even so -- this is the most mind-stretching experience I've ever had. Not kidding. And I'm not a VC or prone to overhyping tech. #
- So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. #
- A reading portal brings a lot of writers together so you can read them all in one place.#
- A writing portal is the same idea but in reverse. I write in my portal, and it flows where ever I want it to.#
- The problem is the reading portals aren't open to allow this to work.#
- They all want you to write in their tiny little text boxes.#
When news excuses lies and when all the viewers know they're doing it, we're beyond the point of no return. #
Trade Secrets Radio: What is podcasting? This is the exact moment, 9/24/2004, that podcasting got its name and its definition. It's pretty short. We knew what we were doing. We loved what RSS did for news. Now we were doing the same for radio. Not just talking about it, but finally -- doing it. It worked, pretty freaking well. There's a podcast episode to go with it, coming out shortly. #
I have been looking for this picture of John Palfrey, and just found it via digging through the archive for September 2004.#
It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.#
- I have a lot of podcast catching up to do today.#
- A Scripting News podcast from today, about the Podcast0 feed and the power of OPML subscription lists ftw.#
- A Trade Secrets cast from Oct 1, 2004. #
- A Trade Secrets cast with Adam and myself from Sept 28, 2004.#
- An Morning Coffee Notes episode from the same day, about Bloglines, an early feed reader, the commons and fair compensation for centralized commons. #
I'm still waiting for the podcast client that can subscribe to OPML lists, so I can subscribe to shows from my desktop, even automate it. If one of them did, we could start curated lists of feeds put together by smart people and influencers. The first podcast client that did this would open up the market, and stand out from the pack. I've been asking for this from the inception of podcasting twenty years ago. I had it in my first podcatcher. It would be great if one of the popular clients of today adopted the idea. Happy to help.#I had a dream last night with many of my dead relatives present. We were at some kind of social event. My grandfather had a new wife or girlfriend, but he didn't recognize me, though he pretended to. My mother was far off in the distance taking pictures. I wonder what that means. Some of them were dead and gone. I had to remind myself of that. Meanwhile both my parents were alive and being themselves. (Heh.) My subconscious has a clear idea of who they are/were, only it doesn't register that some of them are gone. #
Here is the monthly archive for Scripting News in OPML, for September. I've been systematically creating this archive since May 2017. And also have been able to reconstruct the archive for most of Scripting News going back to 1994. I've been doing a lot of work with the contents of this archive in the last month. #
- Cross-posting is here now. I am not surprised Croissant is getting such a positive reception. #
- That is where the fediverse will be defined imho, in the intersection between the competing social web services. #
- You'll know it's working when they feel they have to match each others' features because with cross-posting their difference in character limits, titles, styling, links etc will be much more visible. #
- Activitypub is too much. Cross-posting is exactly right and here now.#
If I were benevolent dictator of Mastodon, I'd add Markdown support everywhere so we'd have links and simple styling. #
If I were benevolent dictator of BlueSky, I'd add Markdown support there too. Btw, can you really claim to be part of the social web when you don't support the web's most basic feature -- linking??#
If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I'd add Markdown support to Threads so writers could use the basic communication tool of the web.
#
BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll feed reader earlier this year. There are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. The way we read the web hasn't received enough attention, we've been so focused on the twitter-like interfaces, forgetting that reading on a full page is important too. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. #This blog has been running for: 29 years, 11 months, 22 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds. Still diggin! #
Thread: Much easier than struggling with ActivityPub, would be a set of functionally equivalent APIs and a common understanding of what a “post” is among various social web systems. This how we created solid interop in the blogging world, and it would work here too. #
If you want to help the open web, when you write something you’re proud of on a social web site like Bluesky or Mastodon, also post it to your blog. Not a huge deal but every little bit helps.#
I should put a dollar in a jar every time ChatGPT saves my ass. I thought I had boxed myself into a corner regarding the hash value for a web page, then I asked a question I wasn't sure there was an answer to. "In JS in the browser, I have the name of an anchor element and I want the browser to vertically scroll to it," to which it said: "Here's an example." #
Molly White wrote a great piece on the problem we're all facing now that so many of us are trying to maintain a presence on a few different social web sites. She describes a situation I've been writing about since the mid-late 00s, with the inception of Twitter and Google Reader, two phenoms that had very different ideas of what writing on the web should be. That's where the problems started.#- Before that we had a cross-posting API that was broadly supported and really worked, based on RSS 2.0's idea of what a post is. It's called the Metaweblog API, and it's still supported by WordPress and probably a few other social web sites (I take a broad view of what the social web is and definitely include WordPress and other blogging tools. Based on Molly's piece, I expect she would see it that way too.)#
- The first approach I took to this problem was to cross-post as Molly describes, to work around the limits in software. But the limits will creep into your writing, since you know that people who read your stuff on Bluesky, Threads or Twitter won't see the links, you'll be reluctant to them in your writing. I encountered this problem in the mid-teens when I was trying to cross-post to Medium and Facebook, one supported links and basic HTML, the other didn't. Eventually before giving up on the POSSE approach in 2017, I was barely using links at all. I was trying to keep four pieces of software happy and doing so made my writing suck.#
- To get a handle on the problem, I created a list of features I felt all social web platforms should support and published it at textcasting.org. Ultimately I think we're going to have to make a platform that implements a reasonable subset of this functionality, if only as a demo for the social web companies to show them what we want. There already are Mastodon forks that support some of the features (no character limit, Markdown support). #
- I published the code I use to cross-post for my linkblog, that much does work quite well across the different platforms, and I'd be happy to operate a server for people to experiment with. The server software runs in Node.js, is already open source. It has a simple plug-in architecture so support for new platforms can be added without modifying the server. #
- But my main point is this -- let's work together. We really aren't very good in tech at building on each others' work, that's why we get so stuck. I have a lot to say about that too, I've been writing about it on my blog for many many years. #
- And thanks for picking up this thread. It's one of the two big threads -- along with AI -- how are we going to make writing on the web work.#
- PS: I started writing this in Mastodon, but obviously I had to fall back to my blog, because there was no room and I needed to use links or why bother. ;-)#
When markets have dominant products, evolution freezes. Google search, for example. I should have great search for my blog by now, powered by Google. It has been here for 26 years. They should have been doing R&D on how they can be part of a better reading environment on the web. But reading on the web has just gotten worse over the years. It's why we don't like clicking on links, usually what we find at the other end of the link is obnoxious. To get some peace and quiet we had to go to Twitter of all places, but now that's gotten ridiculous too. The only corner of the web where there's real exciting innovation is ChatGPT. And what's tragic about that is we've never made search work on the web, and search is valuable too, not just the digested version of what was said that ChatGPT produces. But I'd like some of my writing to survive the Great Ingestion. Writing matters, how humans express themselves matters. In other words we still have work to do in search, AI does not fill that need, at least not yet. #An idea for a news org. I want a for-pay site where I can ask a question about the news and get the most up-to-date answer. I'd like to link to that page from a blog post, and have it either be frozen, to document where we were on that day, or dynamic, so that it changes over time. I'm sure this product will be here soon, so obvious. #
- I've had the same thought as Dan Froomkin, of course -- esp given how much voodoo is in weighting various things, the polls are junk. #
- But, she could be winning much bigger than the polls say. And wouldn't that be nice. ❤️ #
- But do you remember part of the 2016 postmortem was that yeah it was a problem for the racists among us that we elected a black president, and now they want a woman president. Many of us thought this is the price we're paying for the euphoria we felt in 2008.#
- All he says about Harris is true. She's a dream candidate, she had my vote at "Hello." How could anyone not see what's so obvious, here's someone who organized her party's support in the blink of an eye, and she was ready to run, all the pieces were in place in record time. Such competence, drive, humor, did I say drive? :-)#
- I worry that maybe all that was enough to get her even with Trump because now we're pressing the race and gender button again, and they still don't buy the idea of a non-white-male, Christian president.#
- Oh and btw her husband is Jewish, and... all the childless bullshit. #
- So I worry that we may be borderline fucked again. Pray. Pray, even if you don't believe.#
Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there. And now that once we have a chance to erase the limits, maybe -- none of the companies running their products are doing it. I don't want the way they do it to be the only way, the products are deliberately incompatible. Social web is the best name for what I'm working on. So I need to reserve this space. They didn't ask for my opinion, the first I heard of it was a press release. When I ship my thing I want to point back at this and say look -- I did tell you this was going to be a problem. #oursocialweb.org: You don't have to give it any money or come to any meetings. Just know that someone else believes in users and developers. And let's work together to make it great, as soon as we can, without waiting for the big companies.#
The question came up on Threads as to whether the ActivityPub support in Ghost will be a full two-way presence in the fedisphere, and apparently the answer is yes. They are working on a feed reader that also hooks into AP. That's how I would have done it. Really feeds and tweets should always have been peers. If you want to know the history, blame Google Reader for that disconnect. Also it highlights the need for a news-zine focused on the social web. When the PC first came out there was PC Mag and PC World and then PC Week. Same for the Mac. And there was InfoWorld that covered everything. Now we're basically using smoke signals between users. A few really interested users could bootstrap a blog to keep track of what's going on, and share what you learn publicly. That was the advice I gave Mike Arrington and he started TechCrunch and that acted as the glue that hooked together the early blogosphere, feeds and ultimately twitter and its offspring. We need it again. Users and developers party together has never been more needed as now.#Interesting situation in Atlanta with the Mets. They have two more games to play with the Braves, but there's a hurricane headed toward Atlanta. It's going to start raining at 1PM and won't stop until Friday afternoon. It's the end of the season and both the Braves and Mets are in the same wildcard battle. Do the Mets stay in Atlanta to ride out the storm, or head back to NY? It's far more weird than I have time to explain right now.#- I keep thinking of this cartoon, which explains it so well. #
Now that ActivityPub is claiming to be the Social Web, I feel like Lloyd Bentsen at the debate with Dan Quayle. ActivityPub is not the web any more than Dan Quayle was Jack Kennedy. The web is simple. That was hard to do. Very little since then lives up to that standard of simplicity, definitely not ActivityPub. The web is the web is the web is the web etc. Pick another more humble name. If it ever does achieve the utility of the web does we can take another look.#
Imagine no doctor would treat you for a serious illness until you got a court order saying it was due to rape, incest or the life of the mother. Judges with the power of life and death. In some states with the death penalty judges have the power to sentence people to death, but not for having a well-accepted medical procedure. But that's the situation women with a troubled pregnancy are in, if they live in the wrong state. From the patient's point of view, I have a slight inkling about what this is like because twice in my life I've needed health care to save me from imminent death. The health care system never hesitated to help. But what if they had said "we can't admit you until a judge rules that we can." In the new USA, abortion is like a pardon, something only the government can grant. Forget about juries of our peers. It raises so many questions. If a woman is about to miscarry are they even allowed to admit her to the hospital, or does she have to wait until she is actually dying? If you can check her in, what are the limits of the treatment they can provide? Aspirin? Blood? Oxygen? Surgery? And btw, medicine has advanced a lot since before Roe v Wade. Whatever practices they had for avoiding abortion can't apply now. This is the kind of thing no society should change the way we changed it as an edict handed down by judges who are subject to corruption. We are learning about a serious flaw in our system of government. #It would be great if we could make voting a party, a celebration, something to look forward to, not something you have to make time for. That would probably do more to improve the lives of all Americans than any other single thing. It's like the SuperBowl, the NBA Finals, Coachella or the Oscars, only better -- because we are the stars.#
- First, a couple of examples/case studies.#
- 1. About ten years ago I was trying to figure out how to get started with Node.js. I knew a little JavaScript, but nothing I read about Node made it click. It's server software, so there must be a way to write an HTTP server? From there, I read all the details about the power it has, but what I needed was a Hello World script. Brent Simmons gave me the script, and step by step instructions on how to write it. #
- I followed his steps, and it worked, and of course I wrote a blog post about it. That was the key I needed that unlocked what Node is, and helped me see what I could do with it. The first thing I did was factor out some of the bits so I could make it even simpler and then I built. I just wanted a few lines of code that created a server and responded to requests. All I needed was a Hello World to get me going. #
- Now Brent knew that I knew the basics of HTTP servers, we both worked together on a huge app that had as a small part of it a full HTTP server, thanks to Wes Felter who wrote it, no one asked him to, one day he showed up with a server that ran in Frontier. I was ecstatic. That's the key. If you have something that isn't truly new, that might have some analogies in other worlds, if you want people in those other worlds to know how to get started, give them the beginning. The first step.#
- 2. Another example. How I learned to create and edit a website. It was 1994. I loved the web the way I love ChatGPT today. I knew how to use it, but I didn't know how to make it. Everyone told me it was really simple and they sent me links to all the docs, but they made no sense, because they talked about things I didn't understand. What I really needed was a way to make a web page that was as simple as the one Brent provided for Node-based HTTP servers, with tools and concepts I knew how to use. I found one, a service provided by Ohio State University. You emailed a message to them and they put it "on the web" and sent you back a link to the page. Click the link and there's what you typed. I tried Hello World and got back a link to a page that said Hello World. So I tried something more complicated, I did a view source of Hotwired.com's home page, and copy and pasted it into an email. That worked too (with broken images because the urls were relative). #
- Everything I've ever learned how to do required me to first understand it at this level.#
- Okay here we are in 2024, and I want to understand what Bluesky is. I know how to use it, but I don't know how to make it. But I would be surprised if it is any more complicated that writing a web content management system that uses feeds, something I've done many times. I know the components of a message, have iterated over it for the last thirty years. I even wrote the spec that defines them in RSS 2.0. We're all doing the same thing over and over and Bluesky is no different. I hear there's some nice design for the protocol, but right now I don't care. I want my Hello World. The minimal code I need to add a node to the network defined by Bluesky and I want to see what it can do with the same kind of aha moment I had with the web. I want it to work when I try it, and I want it to reveal what Bluesky is beyond what I can see from using it. I want to begin to understand the opportunities for interop. #
- Why do I ask? For one, I'm a student of this stuff, and I want to understand. But I also am very active in this area, and interop is my product (really read that piece, I mean it, and I think it's Bluesky's product too). I'm into working together -- it happens so infrequently. So here I'm also trying to show not just you how to explain what you do for a curious but time-limited developer, but I want to make this a this.how document that explains how to do it for everyone, hoping that we as an art and industry start explaining ourselves better to each other, because we absolutely need to do this much better imho, ymmv, mmlm, etc. #
- To summarize -- assume I know how the web works. I've worked with the structures and protocols for systems that are very much like Bluesky. Don't try to explain the design of the protocol, just use it to solve a problem that I will understand because I use the product and I have developed lots of stuff like it. It should be possible to show us, to teach us, what your product does. #
- PS: It could take a few days to put a Hello World together. Because once you do the first iteration, you may think of a more direct way to illustrate the idea, and you should do it, iterate until it works, until you can't make it any simpler. #
- PPS: And if you don't want to do it, that's okay too. I just thought it was worth the effort to explain what's needed to foster a greater understanding of what you're doing and what the opportunities for interop are. #
This is what it looks like when UPS loses a package. It's a case for the new Pixel 9 Pro. It shipped 17 days go. It was hell to just tell Google that the case was lost. I expected at that point they'd apologize and refund the money. That was a week ago. Just got an email saying want me to return the case when it arrives. It's never going to arrive. Luckily this is a cheap product, just $38. If it had happened with the $1300 phone, that would be a pretty big problem. It's amazing that a company the size and age of Google doesn't have a procedure for dealing with products that are lost (or more likely stolen) in transit. I've been through this with Amazon, they knew what to do, because UPS does lose packages, esp ones that look like they have phones in them. Anyway I have a fairly large credit with Google. I don't dare use it to purchase anything else, given how incompetent they are at dealing with fairly common customer problems. #I wish my father had lived to use ChatGPT. He would have been so thrilled. My uncle would have lost his shit. #
- BTW, to be clear, I have no interest in working on twitter-like systems.#
- It's been like a prison to writers, we're stuck with this huge divide, with crap on both sides. #
- These things exist, they have a jumble of APIs and ways to integrate. #
- And we've been playing by the rules laid down by Twitter (ev, biz and jack) for 18 freaking years. That's enough. #
- This will never get sorted out until people realize it needs sorting out.#
- Not expecting much more to happen there. #
Instead of just fact-checking the candidates, and presenting "both sides," how about recording the number of times the candidate threatens specific races, genders, lifestyles, origins, religions and of course individual people. Keep a page where you tally the groups he doesn't threaten with expulsion or worse. That would be very revealing, and in line with the true issue of this election. Time for you all to get in sync with the actual American history that's being made. #
It's around this time of year that I start thinking about my BOTY. I should give out a plaque or a statue or something. Someday! Anyway almost immediately I had my answer. The announcement will wait till December of course, sometimes early January. #
Social networks are condemned when they carry lies from race-hate, misogyny and worse, but the major news orgs do it all the time. It's ridiculous that there are two standards. #
To my programmer friends, how long would it have taken to answer this question using Google and StackExchange. There was a bug in this one line of code, a call to new Date () in JavaScript, that was behaving as if months were not 0-based, which they are known to be. The problem: I was specifying the day as 0 and month, correctly, but the day had to be 1 in order for it to work and without thinking I had specified it as 0. #
- Since I'm about to turn 70 (next May), and because my body is getting old in ways it never has before (of course) -- I've become a more active participant in the health care system. #
- One thing I've learned is it can be hard to get the attention of the doctors. And once you see your GP about a problem it's almost certain they're going to send you to a specialist. So you go to the specialist and it's pretty random as to whether they put the effort into understanding your situation in full. And they aren't trying to solve all your problems, just the ones they deal in. #
- An aside, a couple of years ago I had a condition that ChatGPT diagnosed in a second but it took the doctors who weren't paying much attention (my primary care doctor had retired and I was being shuffled between NPs and MDs until they could find someone to be my new main doctor) so they were all sending me to the wrong specialists, all of whom said there was no problem, yet I still had the symptoms which were getting worse. On the fourth try, someone sent me to the right specialist and they instantly diagnosed what ChatGPT had diagnosed at the outset. So when people say AI could hurt medical care, I don't think so, it would probably be a good idea to have an AI looking over their shoulders and asking if they've considered the Occam's Razor specialist. #
- So you have to be alert, and push to get them to pay attention. #
- And communicating with the system is ridiculous. Almost everything has to be done over the phone. They have email, but if you want to set up an appointment, you have to call. And wait on hold. And wait and wait. And then it's a dice roll as to who you get connected to. There are some people you talk to who seem to be trying to be annoying. It's a total pain in the ass, but you have to do it. (And since they have to ask for your birthdate to identify you they know how old you are and treat you accordingly.)#
- All the health care for a person my age seems to be directed at finding the thing that's going to kill you and treating it. That's good, and that's a shift in perspective from someone who until recently had a young body which basically took care of itself. Or so it seemed (I did have emergency heart surgery at 47 that saved my life, although that's a fairly distant memory now).#
- So right now I have a thing that needs to be looked into because it might be one of those serious things. And it's really hard to get the system to respond quickly, because if it's serious it's one of those things that you want to deal with asap. I don't think it is, but you have to act as if it might be. And it can be humiliating to say the least. #
- But there's no law saying the doctor, or any of the others in the system, could go to jail or lose their license if they treat any illness I might have. I can now for the first time really understand what it might be like to have to deal with that in addition to all the other serious stuff you have to deal with. #
- That's the point of this post. Throwing a wrench into the already broken wheels of our medical system is the crime. They should go to prison for doing this, the six Supreme Court justices and other Republican assholes who stick their noses where they don't belong. There should be a penalty for what they're doing, they should have the fear they're putting women through. They should worry about what happens when their decision is overturned. #
- Perhaps they should lose their medical care as should all the members of their families. Then they might get an idea of how sinful they have been.#
- The first draft of this post appeared on Facebook. #
This is a test. For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of a new server app that combines the functionality of several apps I used to run as separate servers. The goal is to be able to integrate the functionality of all the components. It's time to invest in blogging in a real way. The 2017 corner-turn was about getting back to the foundation I had before trying to co-exist with Twitter, Facebook, Medium. All three are now no longer high value targets for interop. So while I wasted a lot of time trying to peer with them, I did finally get off the horse and I had a decent setup while developed Drummer and FeedLand and in doing so learned how to do scalable server apps with SQL. I've wasted so much time trying to be compatible with apps that didn't want us. I have a feeling that none of the current targets really want us either. So let's get back to the Open Web, which gave us much hope before. I think we can do a lot with feeds and OPML. They're to open systems what GPL is to open source. You don't get to be half-committed to being open, you have to be all-in or you can't play. (Same idea as podcasting, which of course is just an instance of RSS.) You don't have to deal with a lot of confusion to find the interop. You just have to be willing to look in that direction. This started out as a test post and look what it has become. #Has anyone attempted to make a higher level language on top of SQL? It's taken me a few iterations over years to finally (I hope) figure out how to design a table to take advantage of the features that evolved into making SQL efficient for the applications people really deploy. If this were machine language, it would be time to start thinking about the HLL that it inspires. Actually long past time imho. #
My Pixel 9 Pro keeps giving me tips on using it when I bring it up, as I'm trying to read an important message, or change something at a red light. I'm always distracted when I use the phone, and by adding more distractions to sell me on something, that's not their right. I paid $1300 for this new phone. And also I can't figure out how to get the phone to ring when I get a call. I keep missing important calls. #
Note to self: When the phone doesn't ring, go to Settings - Sound & vibration - Do Not Disturb. It was on for some reason. I'm sure I didn't set this. I'm pretty sure I've been here before. Here's the ChatGPT log and screen shot.#
I keep discovering uses for ChatGPT. I think it would be very useful to learn a language, for example. I know how to say this in English, could you explain to me, in English, how to say it in French. I bet it's very good at that. I am using it to learn to write SQL code that takes advantage of all the arcane features they've added over the years to handle cases that come up in real database work. It's anything but a new language, and efficiency is everything -- so I think they pretty much have all the cases covered. I remember how frustrating it was to learn Algol when all I knew before that was Fortran and Basic. It would have been great to have ChatGPT to coach me on it. #