New feature: FeedLand for linkblogging. It's new today, so if you have any issues, please report them in the thread. #

I asked ChatGPT to write a story in 35 words. Simple but beautiful.#

I don't often see links to articles on Semafor, a new journalism platform started by Ben Smith formerly of Buzzfeed and the NYT. One of the reasons I rarely see links from them is that they still apparently don't have an RSS feed for their stories. If they had a feed, I'd be subscribed and I'd be much more likely to notice, and would probably occasionally pass a link on to my followers. There is a distribution system that helps new pubs like Semafor boot up. My advice, do two things: 1. Put a linefeed at the end of each line in your HTML source so I can get some ideas where you might have put your RSS feed. 2. If you don't have a feed for your top stories at least, stop everything and do it. Every day you delay is more exposure you don't get. I asked them to do this when they started, so this is the second request. #

A reader named Bruno writes with a link to the Semaphor RSS feed. "I never found it on the site. It was completely by accident, just typed the most obvious thing et voilà!" I'm subscribed. #

The journalism industry ought to form a news Twitter. It could be part of the fediverse, but it should also have its own easy UI. There are ease-of-use advantages to centralized systems. A lot of the people who use Twitter need the simplicity. A service can be both centralized and open at the same time. A lot of people got their first exposure to the web on AOL, for example. But news needs to have a single point of congregation. Twitter was providing a useful service there.#

Meanwhile Substack seems to be doing exactly what I was proposing for the journalism industry to do, another end-run around the asleep-at-the-wheel journalism industry. They learned nothing from the Twitter experience. #

Imagine sending this tweet to yourself 20 years ago, say. #

I asked ChatGPT to write a story containing 75 words to use in a test post for a new FeedLand feature I'm working on. #

Why aren't we marching in the streets over the Dobbs decision?#

I woke from a dream where I was smoking as I was saying “I don’t smoke” in the dream to a disbelieving friend, but, by the time I finished the sentence I was awake saying it out loud and telling the truth, to myself. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since June 14, 2002, except in dreams, still.#

A feature Google should have had a long time ago. I want to tell Google where my blog is. Have it be a preference setting. Then when I do searches it automatically gives priority to anything on my blog. Why would this be so incredibly powerful? I'd have a way to leave notes for myself on my research trips through Google's database. And if they let me do this in an outline and represented the structure in the query results, it would be explosively powerful. All without any AI, btw. Really cost effective. #

What would it take for Google to do stuff like this? Invent a new department, the department of User Lovers, or Product Lovers (same thing of course). No tech company has ever had such a department. They mindlessly assume that love of the product is ingrained in all their people when the truth is the opposite, they have contempt for users. I've seen it grow in my own company, and in the blogging community. A sense that because I work for the company that made the product, I know everything all the users know and more. It's the same fallacy that applies to Silicon Valley billionaires. You have to step into a new perspective to love the product, one that has nothing to do with who you work for or how validated you are by reporters and the public. #

I find this interesting, maybe you do too. But with my personal chatbot, the next step is to have a Dave-emulator, right? Wouldn't be that big a stretch. I basically write like I talk. It's almost dialog. I do go back and edit and take out the parts where I'm thinking while talking, and in the end those parts aren't needed to make the point. I'm sure you could write an AI thing that did that. It probably already does it. I knew there would be a reason to put an effort into having a good archive. (I deliberately left this bit unedited.)#

1994: "I try not to get offended on principle."#

I just stumbled across this list of images from my blog. #

This is a link to my personal chatbot.#

President Bartlet: You may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the Ignorant Tightass Club.#

If I were going to write a Rules for Love Makers document, like the one I did for Standards Makers, I'd make the first rule: If you're going to be in a love relationship with this person, and you can't visualize them as your best-best friend, keep looking. It has to be someone you can go to with any problem, no matter how personal, involving them or someone or something else, and be totally confident they'll help. #

I'm starting to think about the finale of Succession. I listed to the Succession podcast and heard the showrunner say he really liked the finale of Six Feet Under, which is one of the best. I asked ChatGPT to summarize the finale of Six Feet Under, Mad Men and The Sopranos. #

I would like to use a wonderful gateway from RSS to Mastodon.#

Update: It appears MastoFeed is the one I should try. #

You suck, I'm great! April fool.#

Silicon Valley, when I first got there in 1979 was the place where big change was coming fast. There's always been confusion about the power of individuals, even the richest ones -- imho they don't have the power to change the world, even though they're in the middle of the big change. If they weren't there someone else would be. The changes happening now can only happen because the systems they depend on are already in place. As individuals we get to make art from the change, give it style, a message, make it usable (or not), make it come into existence a bit faster perhaps. But the change itself is coming from evolution, not from individual people. #

In a voicemail to Om Malik yesterday I observed that these things are not chatbots. I don't like the word chat. They have a chat-derived UI, true, but I find I go there when I have a question, much like I go to a search engine. It's a way to search a database that's also capable of writing. I'm looking for docs that might not exist, if so the software will try to create it for us. Much more useful than Google. As much of an advance over Google as Google was over Yahoo's directory. #

Jake Savin, longtime friend and ex-UserLander, has been playing with my personal chatbot. He discovered that he could teach it how to program in UserTalk, the scripting language of Frontier. It also appears he was able to correct mistakes? I wonder how that works. But it's no longer purely my chatbot, now it's Jakes too? Hmm. (I trust Jake, that's not a problem. But I might not trust other people who explore my pod.) #

Also the Chat Thing people have made it possible to share sessions without screen shots. That will make a big difference. #

Learned yesterday that Twitter is turning off version 1 of their API. So even if I wanted to pay, I'd have to do a bunch of dev work to stay on their system. Makes the decision to walk away that much easier. No way I would choose to spend my very limited time on such make-work.#

I updated the Markdown archive of Scripting News going back to 1994 to include March, which just concluded. #

Welcome to April 2023. The outline for March has been archived. #

Poll: This may be the last poll I run on Twitter.#

Tomorrow is, of course, April 1 -- the day when people on the net lie about the people they hate and call it humor. #

The Twitter Blue thing would’ve worked better if they added new features instead of taking out existing features.#

For AI to become a medium for the people like blogging or podcasting the cost will have to come down.#

The first mention of the Twitter API on this blog appears to be: Feb 20, 2007, with discoveries scattered through the month. #

I keep watching the last scene of this week's Succession. #

Can you imagine growing up, going to school, knowing that the adults couldn’t or wouldn’t protect you from terrorists who are slaughtering kids just like you, or maybe actually you.#

I think I figured out how to get Radio3 functionality into FeedLand. #

Ken Smith reports breakage in the connection between Drummer and Twitter. Yup. There's going to be a lot of that, could happen tomorrow, or really any time. I'm not going to try to go with Twitter on this trip. Drummer and FeedLand have been converted to email-based identity, all the rest, including features on Scripting News, could break. That's how the web works. We know when we build on corporate APIs at some point they will stop working. Twitter has had a good run. I started writing to their API in 2006. I was hoping for great innovation and huge growth, but it didn't happen for devs, for whatever reason. Je ne sais quoi. C'est la vie. Que sera sera. #

Good morning. Still excited about the personal chatbot I've been writing about all week. But -- now that more people are running queries, I see how "inventive" it can be. Someone asked what awards and honors I've received. It provided a list, but as far as I can tell they're all bogus, awards that may exist, that I did not receive. I've had a nice career, but only one award, if my memory serves me. Oddly that award was not included in the chatbot's list. #

Not song of the day: The Disgusting Brothers. 💥#

This is where my personal chatbot is.#

I've been trying to figure out what to call these things. For now, I've settled on personal chatbot, like a personal computer. #

My personal chatbot is a good writer, composition-wise. I asked it what kind of food I like, and it answered with a story about me and my longtime bud Dave Jacobs and how we both like Chinese food. It's been a long time since I've taken a writing class, but I think that would get a good grade. Find a way to tell a story, rather than just reciting facts. Make it about people, and people will read it. #

I wonder if my personal chatbot should have a name. I asked the bot if it had a preference. I quote the bot: "As an AI language model, I don't have personal preferences or emotions, so I don't require a name. However, if you'd like to refer to me in a specific way, you can choose any name that you prefer." Reasonable. #

My personal chatbot just invented a feature for BingeWorthy, by lying about its existence. #

A theme you keep hearing is that bots spell doom for programmers. If so, it's justified. There are orders of magnitude too many programmers. The tech industry doesn't factor, they do the opposite, reimplement things that work well, or throw out things that work well in favor of things that don't work at all. I think the bots are now going to help us do the factoring we humans wouldn't do on our own. All the layoffs in tech foretell this. The truth is stranger than fiction. #

The reason it's nice to have old people around is that we don't care about the future in a personal way, so we might just tell you the truth. We also tend to be smartasses. 😄#

I think "personal chatbot" may be a fanciful anachronistic name, like weblog for the ears, which ultimately became podcasting.#

The British reporter did not coin the term podcasting, my dear chatbot. You're in the shithouse now. It's even worse. The chatbot thinks I credited the British reporter with coining the term. No I did not. The term was coined by Dannie Gregoire. #

Seth Godin has a personal chatbot just like mine, also produced by the Chat Thing folks. As Seth says, pretty soon, everyone will have one. #

A question to start the day. Has Dave been to Italy?#

The exploration of my personal chatbot filled with the archive of Scripting News going back to 1994, continues. #

BTW, let me get in a plug for Chat Thing. I've been working with the developers to get this up and running. They've been fantastic. #

I asked my chatbot to describe my style of writing. Flattering.#

I asked my personal chatbot what I think about coral reefs. An example that puts no writers out of business, since they weren't writing about this topic.#

I just asked my chatbot about the San Francisco newspaper strike in 1994, which was a seminal event for blogging, believe it or not -- and there's probably more stuff in my archive about that event than in the rest of the web. So I'm going to link to a Google search result instead. Let's see how that works! It's a reminder that for some things, Google is still considerably better than my chatbot. #

I've been asking my chatbot what I think of various tech companies, people and products. For example, here's what I said about General Magic, a Silicon Valley company that led in early PDA products. The team was made up of past and future tech superstars. Note that I just added to what I say about the company, so it'll be interesting to ask this question again in a few days. We haven't got the Markdown version of my RSS feed flowing through the database yet.#

BTW, it seems Markdown has become the default way to feed new data into chatbots. We're converting my OPML files to Markdown. As always -- Markdown is "Just Enough HTML."#

I asked the chatbot if it knew what "Just Enough HTML" means. It did a great job, but didn't pick up the connection to Markdown. #

Noted that my blog has been taken over by my chatbot which desperately needs a name. I wonder how the chatbot will absorb references to itself. And of course then come the third level references, which is what this post is. Oh the humanity!#

Then I asked if there was a connection between "Just Enough HTML" and Markdown, and omg it got the answer totally right! If this were a student of mine, they'd get a freaking A+. Maybe just an A because it didn't include the connection in the answer to the first question. #

It was suggested we ask questions related to time. For example, "When was the first time Dave wrote about the iPhone?" January 10, 2007. But how does it know which article was first?#

Summary: Today's experience with my personal chatbot has been fantastic. I love it. We're just getting started. Yesterday was the first day. Learned so much today. Expect to learn a lot more tomorrow. #

Today's song: Christopher Lydon. Hi Chris! #

My new (today!) chatbot, programmed with the archive of my blog, going back 28+ years, is up and I've been playing with it, and am as impressed as I hoped I would. An example, I asked who invented RSS? Can you imagine how much I’ve written about RSS in 20+ years? The first part is boilerplate, could have come from any site, but the second part was a very concise, thorough and interesting synopsis of years of my writing about feeds. The chatbot did very good work. #

One great thing about the new chatbot for my blog is that it gives me a greater incentive to post here, vs social media. Of course we must be just days away from a Mastodon instance that you pay to join that adds every tweet to its dataset. A place of record. Maybe they should even charge per tweet. #

In the next election the Dems must make the Repubs defend the idea of school kids being murdered without any help from the government. If they can't manage that, we need to find new political leaders. And when the Repubs bullshit, the Dems have to say they're bullshitting. #

Silicon Valley is full of sore winners (and losers). Not a whole lot of grace there, imho. But, tucked away in the corners, far from public view, there are still a few people there who get off on making great products and actually do.#

I got my Tesla over a year ago and it still feels like a privilege to drive it. Like I won the lottery. I feel like a teen with his first car when I drive it. It's so smooth and powerful, grabs the curves on mountain roads so effortlessly. Elon Musk -- feh. What a schmuck. But they obviously have some wonderful engineers inside Tesla who dreamed of making the best car ever, and somehow they did it. #

I watch Succession, the HBO drama. Spoilers follow. Last night was the first episode of the last season. At the end, two characters who are married came to the conclusion they'll divorce. A sad moment, beautifully acted. The scene ends with them lying on a bed together, clothed, far apart, but holding hands. I thought, if you're going to do it, this is the way. Let there be at least a little love in the last moment. #

It would be nice if someone developed a Mastodon gateway for apps. A system that played the role that twitter.com played for the Twitter API (only it would be really easy to be better, btw). Otherwise does every developer really have to do one of their own? That's gotta be factorable. Just because Twitter is languishing, it doesn't mean that a new system that does what Twitter did, without any of the Muskness or history, couldn't come in and fill the space occupied by Twitter. Don't assume people don't want. I bet a lot do. Learned this from our experience with RSS. You have to accept facts, not be wishful about these things. Be prepared. #

Watching the demonstrations in Israel, I wonder why this hasn't happened yet in the United States after the Dobbs decision. What will it take to get our people to feel the threat to the country? #

Ken Smith tried an experiment. He asked ChatGPT to give him a few interesting stories on Scripting News. So I tried it too. I'm pretty sure none of the recommended stories exist.#

Today's song: Loving Cup. It took me the longest time to find this song which was buzzing around my head this morning, but I couldn't find the lyrics. What I was ultimately looking for was this line: "What a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz." I was asking for beautiful world and then beautiful girl. A few minutes later another bit of a lyric became clear and it turned out to be the title of the song. I brought it to Bard, it got it right off. A few seconds later Alexa was playing it for me. So ChatGPT is also like Napster, which was a breakthrough because all of a sudden we could program our own music. It'd amaze today's young people to know there was a time when we had to depend on radio stations to get around to the song we were jonesing for. We'd sit there with our cassette recorder waiting for the song to come around so we could get a copy of it. Then think of what a huge revelation Napster was. All of a sudden the floodgates of music opened up. Jerry Garcia didn't make it to that moment, he would've loved it, I'm sure. Pete Seeger was alive, not sure how he felt about it. But anyone who really loved music imho, had to have been overjoyed. People were talking about music in airports and supermarkets. You had to be there. Napster was like years of Christmas every day for music lovers everywhere. Of course the music industry didn't agree. #

Open question: What do you think of ChatGPT for porn?#

I only like imperfect beauty in women. I find there's little that's interesting in supposedly perfect bodies. #

I got access to Bard this morning, which is Google's version of ChatGPT. I'm still pretty confused about what it is, the same way I was confused about the web in 1994 when I first got Mosaic and was reading various early websites. I can use it, but how do I create for it? I have a huge dataset of my own, most of 28+ years of my writing here on Scripting News starting in 1994. Anyway, the first thing I did was ask if I can add my own data to their massive dataset (their term) and it said yes. I asked how, and it sounds really easy, totally within my ability to do, and almost certainly within your ability too. I took screen shots of the relevant parts of the discussion and added it to the thread I started on this topic. I will try this out and report back. #

Today's song: We'll Meet Again. #

Knowing yourself is like a 12-step program. Sometimes you drop down a few levels into the trance, and you need a "sponsor" to help you pull yourself out of it. Obviously no one else can pull you out, you have to do it. A friend can help. #

Here's the thing about Twitter. Since they started showing the number of impressions on every tweet, you can see how meaningless the number of followers is. You could have 66.7K followers, but your tweet might still only get 764 views. Once, a long time ago, Twitter was a flow machine. Now it's like a dry lakebed. A void. It looks like Twitter used to look, but looks aren't everything. #

If there were no "organic" blue checkmarks on Twitter would you pay $84 a year for a blue checkmark, given that everyone who saw it would know that all it means is that you paid Twitter $84 a year?#

On the dark side, AI is going to be a great tool for 1984-type governments, because with a single script you could rewrite history everywhere. Write people out, and other people in. Kind of like Wikipedia of course, nothing new actually. 🚀#

BTW, please -- someone should offer a package that can load a series of RSS feeds into ChatGPT. Here's a Node package I wrote that makes reading a feed as simple as it can possibly be. #

I asked a question of ChatGPT: "I have a blog with archives going back to 1994. I'd like to have that content loaded into ChatGPT so it can be part of the knowledge base. I am a JavaScript programmer. What's the easiest way to get a quick result?" I understand the code, I think -- but I'm no closer to understanding what to do. How do I come up with the prompts? What if I have no prompts, what's the result? They say be careful of the cost, what is the cost based on. I feel lost like I did when I first saw what the web could do, I wanted to know -- how do I set up a node on the next. The answers I got from those in the know made no sense to me, until they did. Here's a place to comment. #

I wish journalists would pay more attention to issues a bit further away than their own navels.#

Not much going on today. Look for some posts tomorrow. 💥#

Today's song: Harvest Moon.#

Poll: When will we have a general strike re the Dobbs decision?#

Braintrust query: Getting AWS to stop emitting a message.#

Update: We got two good solutions to the BT query above. #

Fixed a problem in reallysimple package. It caused FeedLand app to crash, occasionally. Just had to check that something wasn't undefined. I love fixing problems like this. It's how software gets burned in.#

What if there were a social network for two people. So the messages wouldn't be mixed up with everything in a chat app or an email client. If the point of the conversation is to start a record, make it easy to go back through the chain of thought. And that a thread might last decades, even a whole lifetime. It's time to start thinking about long-lived special-purpose communication apps. We have the experience now, and the perspective. #

A thread on Mastodon in support of a social network for two.#

Would someone please make an easy way for me to feed 28+ years of writing into an AI model so i can ask it questions about what I wrote??#

FAQ: In FeedLand is it possible to load in a collection of feeds via an OPML file? Yes. Here's a screen shot. #

A cool feature for FeedLand users. When you Like an item, it's automatically added to two RSS feeds -- one for your likes, and one for the likes of all users on your FeedLand.It's basically a single-gesture linkblog. There's a lot of that in FeedLand, where things have been factored to a point where they couldn't possibly be simpler. Of course since they're standard RSS feeds, you could follow them from any feed reader. #

Archive of my blog from March 2003, marking the start of the war in Iraq, and my arriving in Cambridge to begin my fellowship at Berkman.#

Reading my notes on being at Harvard, it sounds like Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I was very excited, and it shows. In hindsight, I was about to have some great adventures. One of the best experiences of my life. Now twenty years later, I'm still very grateful for having had the opportunity to work with the people I met at Harvard, and the power afforded to me with the H-bomb business card. The friends I made there still benefit me to this day, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference. #

So it's been twenty years since I started at Berkman. Thanks to Charlie Nesson, Jon Zittrain and John Palfrey for giving me the chance. Met so many who became lifelong friends, and the things we accomplished really did make a difference. #

I remember when I got a key to the building. I didn't ask for it, and I certainly didn't expect it. My first thought was hmmm i wonder what i can do with this? That's where the regular Thursday evening meetup came from.#

The first thing I did when I started at Berkman, twenty years ago, was to get a blogging server up and running. It was 2003, so I used Manila, a product we made at UserLand. It was the first weblog server at any university, in the world. Early days. A few years after I left they converted to WordPress. A solid move both times because by then UserLand had shut down and the default blogging server was the software made by my friend Matt. #

In FeedLand, if you're being asked to log in every time you go to the site, you're probably opening it via a bookmark that goes to the old URL. The easiest fix is to edit bookmark so it goes to https://feedland.org/ -- note the https. Another fix is to do a hard-reload of the page. This will force a new version to reload. It redirects if it gets a non https request. #

I get that people don't like that ChatGPT will return incorrect results. But as a software developer, I can experiment with the product with that caveat, and imagine its uses once the quality of the results are better, however they achieve that. I don't have to wait to think, in other words. With that disclaimer, I searched for docs about how to do a hard-reload in popular browsers. Those docs are hard to find, and when you find one it's heavily monetized. So instead, I asked ChatGPT to write a docs page to answer this question. Looks pretty good to me! No bullshit in the page either. #

A steady flow of new signups on the first FeedLand server. #

Almost everything you do on FeedLand is public. You can read anyone else's feed list. Example, Ken Smith's list. If you're signed in, to subscribe to a feed just click the feed's checkbox. You can also see who's been on recently, when they signed up, how many feeds they subscribe to, and how many pages they've viewed. You can also see the feeds that have recently been subscribed to. The idea is to make feed discovery as easy as it possibly can be. We steal (and improve on) ideas from social media apps that didn't exist last time I took a fresh look at feed systems. I don't think of FeedLand as a feed reader -- it's more of a feed management system, imho.#

I first wrote about the use of checkboxes in this way (see above) in 2007. I called it Checkbox News.#

Another important feature, every user has their own feed, which you can edit in FeedLand, of course. To write a post, click in the edit box at the top of the page, type some text, click the Post button. It should show up in the list of user-feed posts, below. If you want to edit one of your posts, click on the text, make the changes, click the Update button. Of course there's an RSS feed for each user, which you can subscribe to in FeedLand or any other RSS-compatible application (there are many, as I'm sure you know). #

It's important for users to have their own feed in the same way it was good to be able to develop software for the Mac on a Mac. Most users will never make a software product, and maybe most FeedLand users won't write publicly, but you want to make it was easy as possible for people to contribute to the ecosystem they use. It's a philosophy of the active not-just-eyeballs users. It's a basic democratic idea. #

Docs: Starting up in FeedLand.#

On reflection, it's amazing I wasn't killed in my teens. #

Poll: I was having a discussion with a friend the other day and I said none of my friends have had plastic surgery. They asked how I knew, and I admitted I didn't.#

It will be possible to create better teachers out of ChatGPT tech. What led me to that is that it certainly could help people write better bug reports. It would have far more patience than a busy developer, whose job is to fix bugs, not decypher a user's (justifiably) imprecise understanding of how software works. But a chatbot could help, patiently asking the user questions. Then, of course, over time -- the user would learn how to do it themselves, and get this -- they would also learn how software works. There might be some great programmers out there who don't know they are. 😄#

Back in the day, as they say -- when I was going to a city somewhere around the world, I'd post something on my blog and we'd get a meetup going. The world was smaller then or so it seems. Maybe it's just me, maybe I've gotten smaller.#

It seems like the transition of FeedLand from Twitter-based identity to email-based identity has more or less worked. As part of the transition, and please this is only for people who read Scripting News, so don't pass it on -- membership in feedland.org is now open. It had been closed since Dec 12 when I started working on the transition. You only need an email address to sign up, not a Twitter identity.#

My blog is being taken over by ChatGPT. It sometimes can replace four apps I used previously: Google, GitHub, Twitter, Wikipedia.#

I was wondering how I could create something that behaved like an app on the Mac desktop from a page in Chrome. I want to use web Drummer to write docs about something I'm working on in Electric Drummer. It helps to have each in its own window for something like that, rather than switching back and forth between tabs. I was going to post a braintrust query but realized I could use ChatGPT and get the answer right away. It seems to have worked. #

I kind of like the idea of letting the ChatGPT version of history be the authoritative one. In the record of my own life, it's more accurate than Wikipedia, which has been hacked mercilessly since inception by opportunistic credit-takers#

I am surprised when things that depend on Twitter still work.#

I asked ChatGPT for information about "river of news."#

Don't panic when asking for help with software. The problem probably can be solved, but only methodically. #

We're having a huge snowstorm today in the Catskills. Expecting about two feet of wet heavy snow. I'll probably lose power at some point and my internet connection, but I have Starlink as a backup.#

Today's song: A Apolitical Blues.#

Rachel Maddow is bullshit. Every time I listen to her, when she's talking about something I know about, she makes something innocent sound nefarious, I assume depending on her viewers not knowing the facts.#

I was fascinated with Communist China when I was a kid. A forbidden place. Hardly anything came out, except culture created out of Communist Party lies. I wrote letters to the Chinese Consulate in New York asking for everything they had. They sent a huge poster of Chairman Mao and colorful books with gorgeous drawings of Chinese kids doing amazing things because they studied the teachings of Chairman Mao. I wasn't stupid, I understood this was propaganda, but I loved the way they did it -- as a genre. This is what I wrote in one of my best friends' autograph book when we graduated sixth grade and went on to junior high. #

Another glitch -- the other day I asked FeedLand users who had not already registered an email address to do so now. It's basically impossible for me to test this, because I don't have any accounts to use to test this since the connection with Twitter has been pretty glitchy lately. It turns out it's too late to do this transition, so we'll go ahead with the switch to email identity for feedland.org. When it switches over, you'll have to log into feedland.org using your email address, which should work for people who pre-registered. I know it's complicated, I hate it -- it's the worst use of both of our time, we get no new features for all this bullshit. But Twitter is no longer reliable in this role, so we had to do it. I'll keep you all posted here on progress, and appreciate your patience. I think it'll all be pretty smooth after this change. #

To email subscribers, sorry for the glitch last night. Probably due to the switch to Daylight Savings Time, the wrong version of Scripting News went out at midnight. This feels familiar, but there's nothing in my notes about how to work around this. I will have a look at the code during the day today and see if I can figure out what went wrong. I was able to get the correct email to go out at 6AM EDT today by editing the stats.json file for the app to indicate that the email for the day hadn't yet gone out, and it immediately started sending out the correct email. #

If Trump were president, he'd have tried to extort some kind of fee to rescue the depositors at SVB. Or just ignored it altogether.#

In five years most of us won't be using Google-like search engines. #

For some people using Mastodon is a political cause like being a Republican. I try to avoid the demagoguery by unfollowing, even blocking people, but it must be growing, because increasingly it can't be avoided and more and more of the messages are touting events that I know are pretty freaking insignificant. As an implementer, you have to watch out if you support features that are only in Mastodon and not based on ActivityPub. Which suggests that as the bigco's start implementing AP support, they're all going to face a conundrum. If we want users to think what we're doing is anything more than symbolic, we're going to have to use the Mastodon API and not ActivityPub, because no one else is doing it in AP, therefore there's nothing to interop with or test against. It's hard to promote a feature when you've never been able to test it. The whole thing is pretty shaky. And most people aren't aware of the subtleties. Time to get out a bucket of popcorn and stay on the sidelines until some of this becomes real. #

If you're a current FeedLand user and you haven't yet registered an email address with your Twitter-based account, now is the time to do so. We're going to be switching the whole system over to email-based accounts soon, and it'll be more difficult to transition your account if you haven't taken this step. 💥#

I asked ChatGPT to write a Zillow-style ad for a house in Hurley, NY. #

Poll: How broken is Twitter?#

A hundred years ago I asked a Microsoft exec when they’d ship open source and was told it’ll never happen, not in their DNA. It happened. When will Twitter peer with Masto? It could happen. #