Obama once said to the bankers who had just crashed the economy, much like Trump/Musk are trying to do now -- that his administration is the "only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back from 2009 and this time they want everything. They don't care what's left, they're machines. All they know how to do is to consume. Squeeze a cent of value from every dollar. This clip from Goodfellas explains. I saw a quote from one of the Dogeheads saying that all universities should be shut down. Hey you can say whatever you like, but they want to actually do it. #

A piece that Paul Krugman should write. How what Musk is doing to the US is worse than the 2009 near-collapse of the world economy. People who think he's going to bring down just the US, should recall how close we all came to falling into the abyss. But this time there will be no one to save us.#

The basic thing about tech is that attracts people who take things that don't belong to them. There's no policing. The richest people are the ones who are best at grabbing control of other people's creations. That's the common theme. Now they're in DC, going for all of it. The whole thing. But they're like the dog that catches the car. They don't have the slightest idea what to do with what they're taking. How could they? It's incomprehensibly vast.#

The data behind a WordLand blog post I wrote a few days ago. I'm publishing these so people get an idea of the structures we're working with. It's basically a WordPress post with added metadata. They have these kinds of structures in RSS, Atom, ActivityPub and AT Proto. Eventually some of these will die out, there are too many formats to support. At any moment in time it feels like each one is enormous and permanent. But show me where the new OS/2, Novell, UCSD Pascal or CP/M apps are. Go back far enough, Alogol, Smalltalk, Lisp, Simula. I am very much a less-is-more type protocol designer, don't try to plan for things you don't have a working model of, because the ideas you gain when you actually put the app together will work much better. And only add things you're willing to live with forever. Slow down to hurry up. Etc. Anyway, this is the format we work with inside WordLand, and more important, in the new APIs, that build on and simplify the excellent API that Automattic had already produced.#

Of course I'm getting ready to ditch my Tesla Model Y, and thinking about what my options are. I saw someone comment on the Rivian truck, and I've seen them around but didn't imagine they'd have the same muscle car profile as the Tesla, but apparently they do. That's the thing I'd miss the most about the Model Y. Its power and handling. It's a big car, but it drives in many ways like the Miata I drove in the 90s. #

Techdirt has a well-deserved rep for exposing the false claims tech companies make. I’d love to see a Techdirt analysis of Bluesky’s claim that they’re billionaire-proof and they don’t lock users in. For background check out this TechCrunch piece from SXSW. #

This post is for idiots like you me who click on links to The Bulwark.#

This is the data we keep for every post in WordLand. #

Palfrey's alarm yesterday was about the Americans who were whisked off to El Salvador. Who they are and what they're accused of is unknown, as if there's any substance to the accusation. No indictment, trial, verdict, appeals, etc. El Salvador wants to be the US dumping ground for undesirables. This is where we have, as Timothy Snyder says, regime change. I thought the elmination of Social Security would have been the moment the light went on for most Americans, but this should be it. Citizens like you and me being disappeared. It's a pretty quick way to get most of the people to behave according to the rules of the government, or off you go. #

Poking around on old servers I found this cute little app that jsonifies an RSS feed. Not sure why I did it. Postscript, it only works for one feed, mine. I replaced it with a template in the feeder app which was a useful version of the cute little app. Here's a demo of it viewing the contents of a feed in JSON using a special template. #

I put out a call for Old School Bloggers, and got back a bunch of notes on Mastodon. Gettin' the band back together! :-) #

Pradeep is using WordLand for some of his WordPress blog posts, and has given them a special category. Very smart, good use of categories. #

I'd love to get a list of old school bloggers who are still at it. How would you go about that? I decided to give it to Gemini, limiting it at first to 100 bloggers. Here's the prompt I wrote. For a while I was wondering what "deep research" was for, but as it's starting the work, I'm thinking of resources that would fit in -- like blogtree.com -- a fascinating site, gives a clear picture how blogs emerge out of the community of an earlier blog. Anyway it's working on it while I write this post. 😄 #

An application ChatGPT is great it. You're staring at some code, it's really straightforward, you've done this a thousand times, but it doesn't work. Stare at it some more. Try re-entering it. Change the names of things. Still doesn't work. Copy and paste the problem code into ChatGPT and in an instant it tells you without you even having to ask that your comment isn't properly terminated, so the runtime was never seeing the code, and nothing I did made the slightest difference. The information was there. I had been staring at it, but humans see what we expect to see. Machines don't have that problem, at least not in this way (thinking of hallucinations).#

Why is scripting.com not https? I hope you can see that I have no trouble deploying https sites here. I use Caddy on my Linux servers, and I don't see why anyone uses anything else. It's really easy and requires none of the work people complain about. Anyway the reason scripting.com is http and not https is that the site dates back to 1994, before there was such a thing as https. Google didn't start their push to get the web to convert to https until 2014, 20 years after I started blogging. Have a look at any of my archived blog posts and docs, the're pretty much all there. This is something I'm proud of. I wanted to create a record from the start, it was very deliberate. I was already an experienced developer when the web started up, so I had an idea what I was doing. I also use images on my site, in the right margin of posts, and lately as "inline" images, in their own boxes with a caption. It's a way for me to play with the ideas, and adds color to pages that are almost all text. So if I were to move the site from S3 to one of my hosted servers, which would be a fairly major undertaking on its own and add a lot of overhead because Amazon takes care of a lot of the bullshit you have to deal with, there would be a small matter of what about the images? They would all break if scripting.com was hosted on https and they were served from http. Now you might say -- Dave all you have to do is move all those images to a place with https support and remap the domains, and take care of all the michegas that's going to pop up. Or suffer with broken images. I decided to instead tell Google to stop trying to own something that belongs to no one and everyone. If they want a more secure web, create it, and make a browser for it, and respect the original web alone. Hopefully this clears it up. #

I asked ChatGPT when Google started making HTTPS a requirement. Then I asked when was HTTPS first deployed, and was surprised it was in 1994 in Netscape Navigator. But apparently it was really buggy and wasn't codified until much later. Then I asked when HTTPS became the norm? 2017. So there's a lot of web out there that isn't being maintained by anyone, it just works, that predates HTTPS being widely adopted, if you believe the timelines ChatGPT produced. #

BTW, these days the images are served via HTTPS so they don't show up in broken links in RSS readers, including my own FeedLand which is served over HTTPS. #

Another BTW, I'm still thinking about how I want to transition from the public and open-to-anyone FeedLand servers. So if you're still using .org or .com, they're still on the air doing the same thing they've been doing all along.#

Looking for help with wpcom API in Node.js app.#

My suggestion re Schumer et al. It's over -- remember the lessons, let's look forward, tonight's vote is already history. Let the Dems in the Senate take care of themselves. It's we, the people, who created this country, and we the people are the only ones who can make it work again.#

I heard an idea that really resonated in a Brian Lehrer interview with Anand Giridharadas, who says among many other things, that we should aim our ire at the leaders of the MAGA movement, and stop bringing our angst to the people who voted for them. Every time I see a condescending TikTok story about them, I think about how that takes us further from getting where we must go. We have to reconcile, we share a country, and our interests are totally aligned. We need each other, that will become completely obvious, and the sooner it does the better. #

Question for WordLand users. When you published your first post, were you surprised that the window didn't clear? Did you understand that you can make changes and update the public post? I was just talking with a friend who didn't expect it to behave the way it did. #

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post using the technology of 1993. #

I was looking over my blog archive for August 2006, which was when I started using Twitter, and came across this video of Jason Calacanis, at a Wikipedia conference in Cambridge. This is what videos were like back then. I probably took it with a fairly expensive Nikon camera.#

Saw an interview with Mark Cuban where they asked why would Elon Musk do something that would cause Tesla stock to tank. He's got the power to play with the biggest financial thing that has ever existed, and quite possibly that ever will exist. In comparison Tesla is just one car company, with a lot of competition, a market-leading product for sure, but the competition is catching up. They're constantly lowering prices to keep the volume up, so eventually the stock will have to come down anyway. He certainly knows stuff about the company that no one else can see, maybe their new product pipeline is empty? He also has had to deal with short-sellers who have the incentive to drive the price down, and he can't bet alongside them (how would that look, a CEO betting against his own company). No matter what, there is nothing bigger than the USA, and he's got it, and plans to keep it. But he's human, and thus has frailties, and he loses as often as he wins and knows it. Unfortunately for us we're all in his boat now, unless somehow we can wrench it back. #

Please, today -- write a blog post that explains why you believe in The Writer's Web. That's the best way to express our ideas on the web is with all the tools that writers have invented. And while we may enjoy using social media like Bluesky or Mastodon, we understand that they are not for writing and are not the web. Please send me a link to your post and I will read what you've written with thanks for believing in writers and the web! You can use any blogging software you like. My email address is dave.winer@gmail.com. And thank you. (And btw, your post can be about whatever you like, by just writing a blog post you're expressing your support for the writing on the web!)#

Today's song: Starting Over.#

Highly recommend this week's New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Stephen Kotkin of Stanford. He's an expert on Russian history, biographer of Stalin, he talks about what Trump is doing, and as I listened I realized we have not filled in how crazy or challenged the leaders of the other huge powers are. Trump apparently is not an outlier. Putin can't keep the war going in Europe indefinitely, their banking system is running on fumes and the people are tired of war (unlike in the US they feel their wars). There's tremendous corruption in the Chinese military, so Xi isn't rushing to try to take over Taiwan. It's easier and safer to just keep threatening. In the US we're shocked by what we've become, so quickly, we're failing to see the context. Kotkin also offers a perspective on the new media, relative to when TV and radio were new, and all the chaos the US has survived. He said something I believe is true, it'll be hard to turn America into a totalitarian state because every freaking American today was raised in a country where we had all the amendments. It'll be hard to get us to STFU. They have a plan in TrumpLand, but that doesn't mean it will work. #

BTW it's worth calling attention to a bit I linked to yesterday. Cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon is not on the roadmap for WordLand. They are too limited in the features they support for writers. This is a big point, not a casual thing. I am trying to create a network that's like stereo to mono. We're not going to try to scale down writing in WordLand so it fits into the tight little featureless well-silo'd boxes in order to peer with those systems. Instead, I want to force them to give writers a decent surface to write on. Somehow we lost our minds and decided deliberately to limit communication to grunts and snorts, and it should not be a surprise that when our civilization migrated to them, it became unable to understand complex ideas. I guarantee you Carl Sagan, if he were alive, would have seen this. Or maybe not? I don't know. But it's a bizarre situation that I've decided to try to fix. #

A hard lesson to learn -- people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors. #

A new kind of WordPress post for me. A big picture with a punchy caption and a teasing title. #

The word is starting to spread about WordLand. And the product is holding up pretty well. There are some issues in Safari with the toolbar that pops up over selection. I see people pasting in URLs that makes me think it's not working for them. Don Park started using it. I did my first project with Don in the late 80s. The project was very successful. His respect means a lot to me. The positioning -- it makes WordPress as easy to write for as Twitter, is great to hear as users write about it. That was one of the major design goals. What people are missing, and it's right in front of their eyes, they can use writing features that somehow never made it to the twitter-like systems, the ones listed on the textcasting memorandum (or manifesto, whichever you prefer). I'm glad people are seeing this as an enhancement to WordPress, not an attempt to create a new community. I want all WordPress writers to use this product. Every one of them. I want people to feel that it's an essential part of WordPress, for writers. The writer's web. Remember that, you'll be hearing a lot about that. And I want to be sure we fix all the bugs, and add all the features they believe are missing, as long as the features pertain to writing. Everything else is well-covered by the main product. There's also an API that comes with WordLand, I'll be talking more about that later. Makes it easier to write WordPress apps in JavaScript that run in the browser. #

I did a restoration of discuss.userland.com, the discussion group for scripting.com between 1998 and 2001. I think now finally it works. If you find anything interesting in the archive, send me a link. A lot of the early blogs started from discussions there, heated at times. But a lot of good stuff came from it. #

The very last message in the DG is, now, 25 years later, basically the design of the network I'm building -- with WordLand as the frontend and WordPress as the backend. The issue is the same. When people post only to get attention, forget about anything useful getting done there. It's strictly a broadcast system. So the investment Masto and Bluesky make in discourse is imho wasted complexity. What we want is linking, not replies. If they were the web, they would be designed very differently. Anyway, in 2000, I asked people to put their ideas on their own sites, send me a link, and maybe I'll post it on my site. That right there is the plan for the new network. Facilitating that, it's as easy as posting on a twitter-like system (the early users confirm that!), but the post goes into your space ie your blog, and a link goes to the person you're responding to, and it's up to them whether or not they want to amplify it, using their own criteria, in their space, to their subscribers. It's why twitter failed to be a keg of revolutionary ideas, instead one of warring factions in a prison. Not able to leave, but not able to do anything either.#

A question came up about the RSS feeds that WordLand maintains, so I wrote it up on the support site. Net-net: Unless you're developing a component of the textcasting vision, you should probably use the WordPress-maintained feed for your site. #

I love how people declare that Trump doesn't represent us. But the truth is as long as our representatives don't impeach and remove him, he absolutely does represent us. There aren't two definitions of represent.#

David Weinberger on WordLand. "It's a web page that clears out all of WordPress's cruft and gives you an interface that's so simple that it's actually enjoyable." #

Praise from David, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, is the best. He picked up WordLand overnight, and he loves it, for the right reasons. WordLand is an editor for "small pieces," maybe the first. Most of the really easy editors have been stuck in silos and thus are dead-ends. I'm sure the people who designed them wished they weren't locked up, but they had to work for billionaires-to-be, I don't. I called the locked-up editors tiny little text boxes. I created an editor that starts out slightly larger than the TLTBs, and grows as your idea grows. So David opened up WordLand and started typing. And it turned into a normal sized blog post. It flowed right into it. And unlike the TLTB's in twitter-like worlds, those bits live on the open web, and can use all the features of the web, and are fed out to software networks via RSS, which is a lot simpler than other protocols. It can grow faster because there already is a huge installed base of software and knowledge for RSS. Imho developers should build on existing standards, not try to replace them. They might be more alive than you think (or more accurately, wish). #

I updated the screen shot on the WordLand docs page. It was really out of date. WordLand is the best editor for people to write in WordPress. I've been developing it over the last couple of years. I wanted to get a really nice editor into this slot. I felt WordPress deserved one. It's designed to feel like the editor in twitter-like services, but without the limits. I've been writing about this on my blog, while I was doing that, I was developing WordLand in the background. We have ignored the needs of writers for too long. It's time to remove the limits. People believed the formula Twitter arrived at was the right one. It is far too limited for writers. WordLand is the answer, in software. #

The United States is Russia's 51st state, sad to say. Let's get it back for the people of the United States. We don't like Putin. Sorry.#

Before our media was gradually taken over by Russia, they did it to Ukraine, but they managed to dig their way out, had a democratic election, resulting in their current government. So it's not impossible to dig your way out. But you have to stop insisting that Hitler be allowed to speak.#

The Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it's trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: Stop trying to reinvent Twitter. It wasn't a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.#

I've been getting my exercise outdoors mostly, but then when the weather got bad for a bit, too bad to walk outdoors, I took up the Peloton again. I was really out of shape for that. So I started riding every third day or so. And then without any warning I just passed my 600th ride. Not too bad! :-)#

Web isn't just a brand, it's also a noun and a verb. "I web you." #

Doc Searls wrote this beautiful blog post with WordLand. If I have my way blogging is going to come all the way back and then zooooom out from there. Still diggin! #

We need a new kind of social network designed to run an effective response to fascism. So far all we have are profit centers for billionaires and would-be billionaires.#

When I ask a personal question on one of the AI bots, all of a sudden on Facebook I'm getting ads about what I asked about. It could be a coincidence, but it's happened a few times, on more than one system. And I'm a paying customer on all of them. #

People who criticize Dems for weak opposition at the SOTU are not hypocrites only if they said before the event what they would do. I was glad not to have to choose. I think in the end they did what made sense to each one individually. The range of response by the Dems was much broader than the Repubs. We should be thankful they haven't capitulated, as so many have, esp in what we used to think of as journalism.#

One thing to be grateful for, Trump didn’t invite any of the Jan 6 rioters back to the Capitol for his speech.#

Watch out for people who celebrate your freedom while profiting from your enslavement.#

I'm trying to get ChatGPT to not assume I have the same abilities as it has. You can't dump a huge amount of code at me and expect me to quickly see what changed, that's not how human intellect works, but this is something computers are extremely good at. I told my bot that it would work a lot better if they just told me what to change. I said this: "I have a lot of experience being a human being and working with other humans, and all your clients as far as I know are human." In other words, be concise and direct. This is what it said in response. "That’s a sharp observation, and I appreciate the insight. I'll keep focusing on clarity, directness, and being actually helpful rather than just dumping information. If I ever seem to be leading you down a non-optimal path, feel free to call it out!" Note how concise the response was. More advice for the bot. Help your human understand. I think maybe eventually we may be their pets. Try scratching behind the ears. On the other hand, to my human friends, do not depend on the strategies they choose. They will never on their own question the path they took. It may not be the optimal one, but they'll keep going down it. It's up to you to say nah this isn't the way I want to go, and they will always respect that. It's not like HAL in 2001. I've sometimes wasted whole programming session going in the wrong direction assuming my bot was good at this. None of them are, as far as I can tell. #

The single most important thing about what Musk is doing is that it is Musk that is doing it. Not elected, not accountable to anyone, and the only way we know what he's doing is from the aftermath. We play no role in his choices. Plus, he would be our last choice if we were in the market for a crazy despot to ruin our country. He wasn't born or educated here, and thus has very little idea of who we are and thus what the people he's firing do.#

Remember when watching the speech tonight, if you are watching, what our Capitol was like on that infamous day. The guy speaking, the guy up there on the podium, he did that. That's who he is. And where is right now, that's where it happened. Takes a lot of nerve to return to the scene of his greatest crime, so far. #

Another question about tonight. Where will Elon be? In the seat usually occupied by the VP or the Speaker? Will he make faces at the camera or interrupt Trump? #

The news should always report whether a bit of news is a financial plus or minus for Trump as in does this thing make him richer or poorer. That way you can zero in on the "why" of everything. #

I'm thrilled the Knicks are playing tonight. That's what I'll be watching. Let me know if anything happens in DC.#

Idea for SNL. A special episode of Law and Order where the cops arrest someone for being disrespectful to Trump,. The prosecutors debate among themselves if they have to do this, no one quits, they don't feel good about it but they prosecute, being assured by the District Attorney it's the right thing to do. When there are objections judge rules in favor of the government most of the time, but wants to show balance so once or twice rules in favor of the defense, but it doesn't matter, when the judge gives instructions to the jury he says basically the only option is to convict, or so it seems that's what he's saying and dutifully, the jury convicts. There are sentencing standards, provided by the DOJ so the judge sentences the accused to life at hard labor. Back in the studio at 30 Rock the audience isn’t sure if they should laugh, slowly realizing it’s not meant to be funny, the skit fades out to a commercial break.#

If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.#

The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there. #

These days I read Timothy Snyder's essays as soon as they come in.#

My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?#

What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021. #

New month. Last month's source code archived. Onward! 😄#

Nice to see Doc Searls using WordLand. He's been an early user of every writing tool I've written for the web going back to the mid-late 90s.#

WordLand is simply an editor for writers who publish to WordPress. #

I'm also interested in social networks and RSS and have written a lot about that in the context of WordLand, because it generates RSS, it can connect to any app that understands RSS. But don't get confused that WordLand is somehow a twitter-like silo. There are already too many of those. I want something much simpler and I believe more useful and less spammy and abusive -- a social network built around RSS. #

Like many other people I love Severance, esp this season, and esp the most recent episode. My favorite scene in the last episode took place at a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Severance podcast, about this episode, which you should definitely listen to if you like me love the show. They have an interview with Christopher Walken who plays Burt. Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that I learned in the podcast that the restaurant mentioned earlier is actually a famous Kingston restaurant that just re-opened after a long hiatus, so I've not yet had a chance to eat there, but I want to, Eng's. This, after learning that the diner that's in two scenes, one in each season, is the Phoenicia Diner, one of my favorite local eating places. #

People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of grief, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years. I wrote the other day that I feel like a time traveler, discovering WordPress 20 years after I left UserLand. I care that it's open source, but I care much more that it's open web esp after we've been so thoroughly dominated by feature-limited silos such as Twitter, Facebook and yes -- even Mastodon and Bluesky. Even if there's a theoretical way to do it, practically speaking we have to wait for their developers to implement the features we want. Open source doesn't help there, but open web does. Matt puts the emphasis on the open source part, that's why it wasn't until very recently that I realized that open web is more important, to me at least. #

An email arrived from the Social Security Administration entitled Help Us Slam the Scam. Explains how not to get scammed by people who want our checks. Wonder if they realized it applies equally to Elon Musk, richest man in the world, who wants to eat old people's cupcakes because, well I can't explain it. #

WordLand user: "Does it make a difference if I can just dash off a short note without all the other bullshit that goes with publishing online." Yes, it should be as easy to take a note in WordPress as it is in Bluesky. I didn't buy that assumption that WordPress has to be heavy machinery for writers. What if I just want to write something quickly and get back to the other thing I was working on. Also the edit box in WordLand starts out the size of a tiny little text box, but grows as you add more words. You are allowed to keep going. No character limit. #

Just saw a report that styling isn't working in WordLand in latest versions of Safari. We're using MediumEditor to do the editing. Did a quick query in Claude.ai and there do appear to be some compatibility issues with Safari. A request that people actually report these problems in the repo, via the Support link in the main menu, otherwise it's hit or miss. Thanks. #

Since Bluesky gave us the ability to limit responses to people I follow, the amount of spam/abuse has been reduced to a trickle. People can still comment, by quoting my post. But they want to troll, to gain exposure to my followers. Helping promote my ideas is not their idea of fun. #

Would have preferred if, when replacing Joy Reid, MSNBC had hired someone in Detroit or Miami, or St Louis or Dallas. Or a different city each day. Put yourself where the people are. The drumbeat: Enough is enough. #

WordLand opened yesterday for everyone to use. There was a deal-stopping bug reported last night, fixed provisionally, then for real this morning. Prevented new users from getting started. Really embarassing. If you have trouble, please report. There's a link for Support in the main menu. WordLand is designed to be the kind of editor you use in a social app like Bluesky or Mastodon, but with most of the features of textcasting. #

WordLand is where we start to boot up a simple social net using only RSS as the protocol connecting users. Rather than wait for ActivityPub and AT Proto to get their acts together. I think we can do it with feeds and start off with immediate interop without the complexity of federation. I call it the feediverse. It's not a joke, although it may incite a smile and a giggle. And that's ok.#

Jay Rosen started a list of journalism sources on Bluesky. John Spurlock wrote an app that generates an OPML subscription list using Bluesky's API. It will enable us to recreate a world that Jay put together, outside of Bluesky. From AT Proto to OPML and RSS. #

We aren't prepared for what's coming.#

We should be declaring independence from both political parties. We have to get together with other citizens whose lives are going to be torn apart by what's happening, and the Dems are not at this time representing us. This is our government that is being overthrown. #