- At some point soon we’re going to have to stop business as usual. Remember when we realized Covid was deadly and we’d have to radically change our lives to survive? Most of us did that. We’re going to do that soon re the overthrow of our government and looting of the economy.#
- It was remarkable watching the SuperBowl last night, you could conclude everything is normal. It’s not. We’re going to have to start shutting down all the services we can to make the point to our fellow citizens that we, the United States, are not coming back from this without major change.#
- First, that's just a theory, but I need to get your attention. #
- Rooting a computer means you own it. You have superuser powers. You can do anything, install or uninstall anything.#
- Mostly journalism has been reporting "He has our social security numbers." Sigh. That's not nearly the problem folks.#
- With root access on the financial computers of the US, you can delete debt. Trump threatened to do that last night, in a really menacing way. They are smart fellows those guys. #
- You want to destroy the world economy? Start deleting records of debt to the US treasury. Ask an economist if you don't believe me.#
- More likely is they want to hold the world economy hostage, and then they will take their demands of Gaza and Canada more seriously. It's clever because it doesn't require soldiers, not one shot will be fired. My guess is that they already have this power. #
- BTW, here's SQL code that randomly deletes 1 in 5 records in a table named inventory. #
delete from inventory where rand () < 0.2;#- Run that command on the debt of the United States, and voila, the greatest depression ever.#
- You don't have to be a math wiz to come up with that, btw. You can ask ChatGPT. And before you blame ChatGPT this would be an early exercise in a textbook on SQL programming.#
- Deleting the debt would be like trying to withdraw money from your account at a bank and them saying they have no record of you having an account. The US treasury is basically the root bank of the entire world economy. It's where people store their money. #
I'm still fixing bugs in the new Bluesky feature I wrote about yesterday. If the URL of an image has search args, I wasn't getting the type correct and Bluesky rejected it. I used a post about Aaron Swartz's statue unveiled in San Francisco yesterday to test the fix. I knew Aaron of course, he was part of the group developing RSS in the early 00s. He went on to do other things, as did I, and I met up with him again in NYC in the early teens, and then a few months or a year or two (I don't have the exact date of the meetup) he commited suicide. It was a real shock. Now, many years later -- a statue. And the random snarky slogan my test script picked out was really appropriate to the event. It was a tragedy, because an older more confident Aaron would have made a big contribution. I often think about that. #I subscribed to Wired because of their famous coverage of the Musk Coup, so I also added its feed to my blogroll so I could see what I bought, and was actually not surprised that they've been hit by the same disease all online publishing has, the need to bait the clicks, and of course not very much of it is hard-hitting. #
BTW, being in my blogroll means that your posts have a chance of being included in my Little Feed Reader on Bluesky. #
I still haven't decided what to do about my Tesla Model Y, which still is a wonderful car, and I still love driving it after 3+ years, which is amazing. But the other day it updated, and gave me a pause, if they let Musk hack their computers the way he's hacking ours, should I trust what it installs on the vehicle I drive every day that theoretically has the ability to take control of my car and drive it off the road? I wonder if the people at Tesla would like to reassure people who drive their cars that the updates are safe from hacking by one of his associates? How is security on the Tesla network?#It's our social web. “We started off with a network of writers, and ended up with business models of oligarchs. It's time to start building webs like we mean it and damn all the wannabe-billionaires.”#
I have to say, a judge ruling that Musk has to stop, and delete all the info he has stolen, has made me feel much better. I don't know why, but I'm actually laughing out loud. The tight knot in my stomach has relaxed.#
When we get back control of the government, ie they're following the Constitution, the Democratic leader in the Senate should be as ruthless as this bastard. Chuck Schumer is a nice guy and that sucks.#
Behind the scenes in the US government I imagine it's like a Vonnegut novel, or an episode of Pinky and the Brain. #
I've cracked the code for adding OpenGraph data to Bluesky posts. The key was I learned how to do the equivalent of a View Source on a Bluesky post so I could see how others did it. I tried Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, none of them even understood the question of how to get Bluesky to add the data. I was amazed to learn that each developer has to do it for themselves, that this isn't something they built into their server. Anyway, I'm halfway there. #I wish Bluesky had just used the Twitter API. That's how I would've done it. Continuity matters a lot. And think of all time wasted at re-doing something we had working a long time ago. #
The AI world would have done much better with a president like Biden than we will with Trump. AI is a very potent tool for surveillance. Completely changes the game. And if it were just Trump and not Musk we'd have a chance, but Musk and Thiel fully understand the power, and probably already have all the code written, they just need the database records to scan and now they have all of them. Eventually we'll be talking about the "peaceful uses of AI" as we do about nuclear tech. But just saying that will get you punished. #
Another thing to watch while you still can, The Lives of Others, about life in East Germany during the Cold War. #
I saw a bit on CNN that was like the Dean Scream, an extended clip of how awkward Chuck Schumer is at a rally. It was used to shame a Democrat who was doing a great job of explaining the danger, Sen Murphy of Connecticut. I switched to basketball in disgust, thinking these people, CNN, they are not serious people. This problem isn't on the Dems, it's on all of us, and it always was. To pin it on the Dems is to say it's hopeless because right now they're just our representatives in Congress and some of our state governments. We have a big problem and we probably can't dig out of it, but if we have any hope at all, orgs like CNN have to stop being such idiots. Every so often I see a spark of brilliance over there, and then one of these things happens. What's more depressing, Trump or CNN? CNN by a lot. And the NYT and all the rest of the broken media. We are all in the same boat. #In January I started an online diary where I list each of the apps I manage, as I work on them. When I work on one, I move it to the top. The notes are brief and to anyone but me might seem cryptic. But at least you can follow what I'm doing. No I don't plan to do an RSS feed for it. It's just a place to keep track of all the things I work on, for people who I work with, and most important, me. #
A great scene in Goodfellas where they explain what it's like to have Paulie the mob boss as a partner. In this scene Paulie is Musk. The restaurant owner is Trump. The United States is the restaurant. #
BTW, I found that video using ChatGPT. I had tried explaining it to Google and it didn't understand. ChatGPT found it in an instant. #
People might be curious to see the list of feeds that make up the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. It's dynamic, I can add or remove feeds through a very simple user interface designed for managing systems like this. It's like the user inteface of a product like WordPress, for designers and developers, producing results that are for users. There are now apps for the NBA, Devs and all my feeds.#
Big picture, the US is being turned into Russia.#
California Senator Adam Schiff said, I think it was yesterday, that Trump and Musk are removing honest FBI investigators and DOJ attorneys so they can raid the treasury of the United States. It's obvious, but you don't hear it said very often. It's the money they want. All of it.#
- Do 1000 profiles of federal workers being attacked by Musk.#
- Don't use real names. Have AI provide real-looking photos of fictitious people. Explain what they do. Don't focus on their lives. Make readers think of what life will be like without them.#
- We should have done this a long time ago, when Reagan said, arrogantly, the government is the problem. #
- That should have been rebutted, strongly and regularly.#
- We need to learn what they actually do, all of them, at least understand what we're going to live without.#
- I asked ChatGPT to try it out. "I want to tell a story about a typical person who works for the US government. It shouldn't be a glamorous job, but an important one. It should improve people's lives, health, happiness, fulfillment. Pick the role at random, as well as gender, age, race, geography. Write a 100 word job description, and provide a realistic looking profile picture. Nothing about their personal life, or actual name, but it's okay to talk about the required education and experience for the job."#
- Here's what it came back with: "An Environmental Health Officer (EHO) plays a crucial role in safeguarding public health by identifying and mitigating environmental hazards. Employed by federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), EHOs conduct inspections of facilities like restaurants, swimming pools, and nursing homes to ensure compliance with health regulations. They investigate complaints related to air and water quality, noise, and waste management, and implement measures to prevent disease outbreaks. A bachelor's degree in environmental health or a related field is typically required, with many positions preferring candidates with a master's degree. Professional certification, such as Registered Environmental Health Specialist (REHS), is often preferred. Strong analytical skills, attention to detail, and the ability to communicate effectively are essential for success in this role."#
Highly recommend this week's Ezra Klein podcast. It made me wonder if any of the readers of my blog voted for Trump. I can't imagine too many did, unless they've been willing to overlook my strenuous support for any option that opposes him. However if any of you are still here, I'd like you to know that what's happening now is exactly what we thought would happen. If you agree that this is unacceptable, maybe we can use that as common ground to work together to get our country back from the chaotic authoritarian mess that Elon Musk is turning it into. He makes Trump look like an absolute moderate. Certainly no one who voted for Trump with any kind of appreciation for the American system, where your vote and mine matter, can stand by and not object to what he's doing to our system of government. If not now, keep this in mind as Musk's chaos becomes more and more real. #And btw to Mitch McConnell, fuck you. You had a chance, with one freaking vote, to avoid this. You are among a small number of people who could have stopped this. This should be the first line in your obituary. "He could have saved the United States, but chose not to do it."#
I updated the Developers account on Bluesky to follow Tim Bray, Simon Willison, Techdirt, Manton Reece and Cory Doctorow. I took my feeds off the list, and added other developer accounts I regularly read. I'm trying to bootstrap something here, to see what can be done, and feel it's important to take myself out of the list for now. #
I possibly was a bit hasty in declaring the coup over yesterday. I'm sure there will be new restraining orders from the courts telling Musk to stop, and so far Trump has been obeying those, so there's some hope when that happens he'll order Musk to stop, and then we'll find out who the boss is and how our new post-coup reality works. The shock of Trump's plan for Gaza, announced yesterday may get even the most "loyal" Repubs in Congress to think again about what hell they hath wrought on they country they all grew up in. I have some faith that American values are installed in their personal operating systems, somewhere in there is the remnant of the ideals of the Constitution. So I might have missed the mark, I hope I did. Meanwhile I wonder if Musk's wonderboys have managed to penetrate the military, and if they're planning on giving them orders about how to restrain the anti-Musk protests that are starting to break out around the country. Oh mama we live in interesting times. #The coup is over. This time, unlike the last time it was tried, it worked. We're in the post-coup world now. He showed us exactly what he would do if he could and we somehow collectively acted as if he hadn't shown us. Sanewashing was just the tip of the iceberg, you can't blame it on the press, we didn't demand they get their shit together, we didn't try to change the subject so they'd have to tell the real story. We had a lot of tools available to us that we didn't use because we are lazy and selfish. BTW, if you want to follow the power, don't look at what governments do, look at what the other oligarchs do. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc.#
Freaky warning. As easily as Musk can turn off government websites, he can turn off our sites. He could turn off all .com or .org sites. He'll probably do it just that way. Only one domain will work in the future, x.com. Goodbye Google, Amazon, your drug store. Bubye. Not sure if moving your DNS to Europe or Asia will make a difference. He's taking advantage of centralization, and will try to make it more centralized. Totally centralized. A journalist couldn't report this, because what proof do I have? It's because there's a pattern here. And it's pretty obvious the tools he's using. #I was just setting up an account for another Feed Reader experiment on Bluesky and found that they have a Suggested User List that recommended the usual people who get in the way of telling the story that's really happening. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, really felt it. We went through this with Twitter, it created influencers based on how loyal they were to the people who run Twitter, people who overlooked the obvious flaws in the system. We're living with their influence to this day, they have a million followers, completely manufactored by fealty to the owners. I swear to god these systems have to be publicly owned. The idea of turning to tech insiders to run them has run its course, don't you think. Over on Facebook this morning I saw an old friend with a cute meme that says people should paste swastika stickers on Teslas. That's nice. The reason you can get away with that is that you're attacking innocent people. More of the same. Of course publicly owned now means Musk Owned. See how things have changed, so quickly.#
Jesse Stay who I have known from early blogging days proposes to build the billionaire-proof social network using the AT Protocol. I'm going to help if I can. I'm developing apps that run on AT Proto, so at least I should be able to test my apps with his service. #
I would love to manage individual DNS domains using GitHub. I already have great tools for updating stuff over there. And everything on my current DNS system is manual and laborious. #
What's happening in the US is like when a person who is a lifetime smoker gets cancer and stops smoking. You hope the cancer doesn't kill you, and swear to never smoke again if you're lucky enough to survive it.#- We didn't appreciate how good we had it with our representative form of government. We could have stopped the erosion of our power at any time, when our reps would have more or less had to listen. Now, when we start trying to get their attention, which hasn't happened yet, it's going to be a competition between the rule of law, which is undermined, and the forces that would keep our would-be rulers in line if only our reps felt we were behind them, which they justifiably, do not. #
- The prognosis isn't good. But we should get our shit together asap because it's our only hope. #
- PS: Blaming other people is easy and powerless. Accepting your own responsibility and doing something to change it is powerful.#
Anyone who says competent white men should be in charge probably has never actually run anything. Women are better in general at seeing the big picture and managing accordingly. A man is more likely to hone in on one aspect of the problem and if they're good, do something brilliant, but misses out on pretty much everything else. I, as a man, have had to severely discipline myself to get anything done, because that's how I'm built. Given a chance I will always put my head down and focus on one thing until its done, then the next and the next and so on. #We need to change who reps us as much as we need to get the ones who current do rep us off their butts and actually do some representing.#
Imho it would be smart for Musk to stop shutting things down and just do his work, whatever it is. By creating constant shitstorms he's making it impossible for anyone to defend him, and you can be sure some would be if what he was doing wasn't so blatantly outrageous. We never voted for that mofo. And every American alive, whatever their preference, thinks their own vote should count. That's going to be a massive hurdle for them to get over. #
A bit of advice for Dems in Congress. Go home and have town halls, and listen. And stop listening to the consultants and each other. Find out what the people want, and bring that back to DC. And let the press attend the town halls so they can report. Make our own Tea Party.#
Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, David Frum for fantastic pieces posted in the middle of last night. We are having a fresh awakening in this country and in the end we may come to thank Musk and Trump for facilitating this. And I'm so glad that online media is making this possible too, in addition to all the nasty shit we're also responsible for. :-) #I'm 99.9% sure, as crazy as it sounds, when Musk is finished with his software project, you will have to use X for everything related to the government. To pay taxes, to receive health care, to renew your passport. And if you try to arrest him, he'll stop paying interest on the US debt, and that will be the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. He won't just control the US government, he will control the world economy.#
BTW, it turns out that Pip's, a restaurant in Severance, my favorite show in a while, was hot at the Phoenicia Diner, which is one of my favorite places to eat in the area. Funny thing I didn't recognize it until I saw an article about it in a local magazine. #Saw a commercial on CNN this evening from Ontario in response to the tariffs, respectful, talking direct to Americans about the bonds with the people of Canada. Why can’t the Dems do this, say how important the independence of the FBI is, to start. We’d love to pay for that. Get in the game Dems.#
Even if Congress doesn't do anything to rein in Musk and Trump, the stock market will have something to say on Monday, one assumes. And this might be one time to hope for a market crash.#
I rewrote the oursocialweb.org home page. It needed to focus on linking. The term web is being thrown around too casually, without regard to what the web is, the same kind of dilution that's happening with podcasting. But the social web idea is fairly new, and it's really important that we get this right.#
Given what Musk is doing now, do you think the internet will still be here in a year? Will there be any tech companies that aren't wholly owned by Musk, Inc. Will owning things even mean anything? Or is this the beginning of the rule of the tech bros, world wide. I can't imagine what they're planning for us. In the meantime, me divesting my Tesla, which seemed so urgent just 24 hours ago, now seems like a powerless gesture. I heard it said that now feels like the moment in Covid when you realized everything was about to freeze, and you'd better head to the supermarket right now, and when you got there, you found you weren't among the first to see it this way. I was very reassured by the blog post that Krugman did. It's nice to hear a sane voice out there. #I've been using claude.ai for programming work lately, and it does one thing better than ChatGPT. It reads your code and tries to mimic your coding style. ChatGPT won't do that. It's really frustrating to have to edit their code before I can even try it out. I like it and am paying the $20 per month in addition to the money I'm paying ChatGPT.#
I've decided that trading in my Model Y for another EV is an acceptable solution. Let someone else ride around in this car that I love, but hate because it is a symbol of American terrorism and apartheid. This is compatible with my understanding that hate is love that was betrayed. I'm sure I won't love its replacement as much as I loved the Model Y, but I will feel better about driving it. And Tesla shareholders will, I hope, learn the lesson that products must be politically agnostic in order to work commercially. Or if you must take a stand, make it against fascism. So many of our oligarchs have made the wrong bet here. We will never forget what Zuckerberg, Bezos, the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, Open AI -- all these companies went the wrong way. #- TL;DR: The key to success is convincing developers to ignore the fact that you will eventually kill them.#
- Would-be platform vendors, open or not, in order to entice a developer to learn how it works:#
- Quick success. Hello World works in less than 30 minutes. Hopefully much less.#
- Easy to believe that the platform vendor won't want to kill me. This is a trick, because based on my experience, they always try to kill you, eventually. #
- Fun. If I can fill a need that I think users will want, without being resented too much by the platform vendor then I might take a jump knowing full well that the better the idea the quicker the vendor will kill me. For that reason it's better to do something they don't understand, or will see as irrelevant, ie a "third party opportunity." As soon as it appears to be "system software," that's when they started the project to eat your lunch. ;-)#
- The API works the way you think. This has been the highest hurdle for me to get over in most platforms I think about working with. I can't tell you how many times I've stared at the docs for a platform and have no idea how it relates to the product, which I know how to use. The concepts should mirror the functionality of the system it's the API for. Too much theory and I have to be very very motivated for other reasons to get through the fog. #
- It must be relatively easy for you to hang out in a corner where it's too hard for them to be worth the trouble.#
- Thing is if there is a platform vendor, they can kill you, no matter what they say. I once had a big platform vendor say they weren't trying to crush me. I could see on his face he realized he had just given up their plan, or how else would that term be in his head as applied to me. Never mind, I was already commited so what difference did it make. #
- The reason for all this is that as they grow, platform vendors hire employees to work on this stuff, and they resent independent developers. This surprised me when I first encountered it. I thought we were siblings, brothers and sisters. But they idealize our situation and only see the pain in theirs. So they will enjoy killing you. It will eventually happen. That's why it's generally much better if there is no platform vendor. #
- Here we are on an artichoke farm in coastal California, a place where migrant workers would normally be doing low-pay back-breaking work to pick the artichokes we could eat in our salads and antipasto. #
- Instead all we have are Trump's beautiful dancers! It is a beautiful scene, but hold your nose because the unharvested 'chokes are rotting and they don't smell very sweet!#
Good oligarchs and bad oligarchs. We need to help the good ones have the guts to get on the air, with really good creative advertising, telling the people exactly what's being done to them now, without pulling any punches. They have to be warned and they aren't. You have to be paying a lot of attention to understand. And it's hard to know what to believe. We have to have a voice in this, now. #
- Andrew Hickey wrote something I wholeheartedly agree with. "If you think the day job might literally kill you, and you have no kids, quit and try that mad idea. That might also kill you, but better to die trying something wonderful than be killed by a crappy job."#
- My response: "My life story since I was 22, and I'm 69 now. It's worked out okay, not perfect, I have regrets, but I would have far more if I hadn't bet on myself. My 22-year-old self was very right about a lot of things."#
There should be ads on tv tonight saying they're coming for the abortion pill. Spell it out clearly so the voters can hear it as it happened. Otherwise they will rightly blame the Dems for not telling them what was going on. It's not too late Dems.#
Molly White has an excellent OPML subscription list. I want to make something with this, maybe a Bluesky feed reader? I want to show people they can combine skills to make new media. We don't have to wait for big companies to do it for us. We can work together. That's how we rise to the challenges we share. We can flip this bad situation around, turning problems into opportunity. Big changes happen now. We can steer in the direction we want to go. #We're programmed to believe big companies make things the right way and individual people can't be trusted. We're going to have to break out of that rut, to stop trusting them so much. It's like the 2008 banking crisis, but this time they've taken over the government, not just the economy. The tech industry, believe it or not, started with assumption that it was the other way around. That people were the brilliance, and companies started wars to make money (we were the generation that stopped the Vietnam war, btw). I got into computers because I thought I could earn a living that way, but quickly discovered how inherently subversive they are. They weren't just for the nerds with the plastic pocket protectors, they were also for hippies. Some of us are still here and we want to create with you.#
One more thing then I have to get back to work. There's a great moment in Woody Allen's Sleeper where a time traveler was told that the world was destroyed when Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead. If you lived in NYC in the 70s and 80s you knew Albert Shanker as a NY character like Al Sharpton or Curtis Sliwa. New York had its own semi-celebrities, people who were famous mostly in New York, but not as much outside. So Albert Shanker with a nuclear weapon kind of fit his character as a bomb throwing type in city politics in an extreme way. A fitting and comic way for us to end it all. Proof that god has a sense of humor. It was an inside reference only NYers would get. Well in case you didn't know it, back in that time or a little later, Trump was one of those Albert Shanker types. And yes, now again he has all the nuclear weapons. And it still feels like he's only famous in a mediocre Queens real estate way. Isn't that weird?#
If our political system worked we’d have wonderful heart-grabbing ads on TV about all the people who have meaningful jobs thanks to DEI. It wouldn’t be hard to make the Repubs look like Scrooges. Get people riled up. Another ad, about the people Trump pardoned and what they’re doing now. Wait till one of them commits a major crime and run Willie Horton style ads. Make it understood who these people actually are. Trump has to own each and every one of them. This really isn’t hard. But the Dems think campaigns end. They don’t end. #Another ad. Donald Trump on Mt Rushmore. Donald Trump on the $20 bill. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial renamed Trump. Kennedy airport in NYC renamed Trump International. In the future the US will have one founding father: Donald J. Trump.#
I thought this excerpt from Krugman's piece about his move back to blogging was right on. "For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts." There's a need for a system that combines the full-featured writing of blogging and the timelines of twitter-like systems. #
- Could what happened to Twitter, happen there?#
- To determine, ask yourself if you could continue to use it if it was acquired by a billionaire for their own personal political use?#
- What would you switch to?#
- Would you have to give up your history and followers?#
- And developers, what would you do if the billionaire acquirer dropped support for the api? How expensive and time consuming would it be to convert to a different protocol? Would you even bother?#
- We’ve learned a lot from the billionaire acquisition of twitter. The answer to these questions made a lot of us think we’d never want to do this again. But despite all the misleading hype, we very much are repeating the mistakes.#
- The current owners of Bluesky would be crazy if they closed off the opportunity to get rich. But they shouldn’t be misleading users and developers into believing that it’s safe to trust this as an open platform that couldn’t be acquired and have its utility consumed the way twitter's was.#
- This started as a thread on Bluesky of course. :-)#
- PS: Spoiler -- Bluesky is, as it is currently configured, not billionaire-proof. It's going to get acquired, it probably already has, based on what they're doing. Remember, pay attention to what they do, not what they say. It's just as true in tech as it is in politics, and these days, what's the difference anyway? #
- PPS: If you're thinking ahh but there's AT Protocol, our ace in the hole. Please. Twitter had an API too. It didn't make a difference. And AT Proto won't either unless there are proven systems that people are actually using that peer with Bluesky's servers, so those users can't be sold to the billionaire. We're nowhere near that. No one can say with any certainty that it's even possible. At this point the continued support of the API is entirely up to the owners of Bluesky. They could change it, break developers or completely drop it and the users and developers would have no recourse. #
- PPPS: Can you imagine the founders of Bluesky wouldn't take $20 million each for their share? #
- This is a post for longtime Scripting News readers. As you know, I've been doing feed readers for a long time. They've been mostly organized around the river of news concept, which also happens to be the way twitter-like systems work. My rivers are built around RSS and formats that interop with RSS. #
Then I got one of the ideas out of the blue that at first didn't make sense, but then the more I thought about the better the idea seemed. It came from Mark Cuban, who liked one of my posts on Bluesky, it was about some FeedLand rivers I had produced, and then I did what I often do -- I offered to do something like that for him. For obvious reasons I don't need to go into here, you all are smart or you wouldn't be reading this. :-)#- Anyway -- he said "I'd use that if it were on Bluesky." #
- My first thought, ridiculous -- can't be done. They have all these limits that aren't present in HTML. I don't have any idea how I could make this work. Here's a screen shot of what a river looks like in FeedLand. #
- But then after a few hours or days, the idea developed, as often happens, and I decided it might work and was worth a try. #
- So I wrote a piece of software that hooked into FeedLand's outbound news flow, and picked out stories from the right feeds, and shot them over to an account on Bluesky. Thanks to Cuban, who linked to it from his million+ follower account, it has 7.6K followers. It uses the list of feeds in my blogroll on Scripting News to feed the river. I think it's a really good pioneering effort, with quite a few followers who are active. And it's going to stay running for the indefinite future. That was in December. #
- Now I've gone a step further, and generalized the code so I can have N of these rivers instead of just one. And to prove it works, I now have two new rivers on Bluesky. #
- dave.feediverse.org -- the Dave tab on my news site. It subscribes to all the RSS feeds I generate. My linkblog, Scripting News, even my YouTube channel which has an RSS feed. Chuck Shotton requested this. It was a good idea so it was the first new river I did on Bluesky. Went on the air just yesterday and now has 10 followers. #
- nba.feediverse.org -- then my project for this morning is to do the same thing for the NBA. I'm a huge Knicks fan, and basically love all of the NBA. People say the Knicks must win a championship, but I say who cares. If they keep playing at this level, with new castmembers all the time, with the track record of current management, I'm a totally happy campter. If we won a championship all the more exciting, but after all those years in the wilderness, it's so nice to finally after all this time to have a great NBA team in NY (and sorry the Nets don't count). Anyway, there's nothing more really to say. If you like basketball, and use Bluesky -- here's what you follow. #
- One more thing -- no federation here folks. It's very simple. No new formats or protocols, built entirely on the tried-and-true RSS and OPML formats for feeds and subscription lists. (And of course support for Atom and RDF too.)#
- I'm glad Mark Cuban asked me to try this path, it provides something I hadn't thought of. Not just inbound feeds for Bluesky, inbound rivers. All we need now is Markdown support, and then a few more things, and we'll be back to where we were in 1997. :-)#
- I wonder if people understand what a sanctuary city is. #
- In a sanctuary city the local government accepts the fact that there are people living in the city who are not there legally. #
- They want these people to be able to call the police without fear of being turned into the feds. Otherwise crime would go unreported and that would create much larger problems. #
- They want the children of these people, who are often American citizens, to be able to go to school, again without having the parents reported to the feds. If they didn't guarantee that, the kids wouldn't be in school, and we all lose by having uneducated adults. It's a core principle of this country that educated citizens are a good thing.#
- They want them to be able to get health care, to go to a hospital when someone is seriously ill or injured. This is partly for pragmatic reasons, to slow disease spreading, and also because we are a rich country and keeping people healthy is a good thing, just like education. What other purpose could a government have? (A fair question for Republicans, one they probably wouldn't want to answer truthfully.) #
- The Republican talking points make it sound like local governments that declare as sanctuary cities are weak or immoral or anti-American, but that is not what's going on. You couldn't run a city with huge crimes commited against illegals because they would be so vulnerable, and kids need education, and everyone needs health care. Yet I hear the word used all the time in public discourse, and am concerned that most people don't know what it means. #
Our best hope is that the factions within MAGA fight each other. We're assuming they have a way to keep everyone in line, but the more power they capture, the harder that's going to be.#
It's been over 24 hours, and my viral post from yesterday is still getting lots of RTs and likes. An observation -- it's made my Bluesky account virtually unusable. Anything else I publish there is swamped by the viral post. I'm also working on a new version of the software that turns Bluesky into a feed reader. It will be able to manage multiple rivers, where the first version could only do one. The next reader will be all the posts from me on all the various services I post to that have outbound RSS feeds. After that, I have ideas for special feeds for specific publications. I want to help our friends in the blogging and news world, using the best communication tools available. I find now that people are much more open to ideas. This is good. But we should never be complacent. Learn from the competition. They were getting ready for this moment, we weren't. #- Hegseth's job is to stay out of the way while the Heritage Foundation separates the military into those who take loyalty seriously and those who are retiring.#
- For that job being an alcoholic is a plus. 😀#
- They're interviewing for who wants to be his replacement. #
- His job is to keep the seat warm.#
BTW, Bluesky, for me, is already a greater flow generator than Twitter ever was. My post about never forgetting Trump's coup attempt has already been RT'd 2.8K times, about three hours after it was posted. In all my years of using the social web I've never gotten that much attention. I have 11.7K followers, far fewer than I have on Twitter. By 5PM it had been RT'd 10K times.#
- I kept this screenshot assuming someday we might be asked to forget. Back when the NYT tried sometimes to report the news as it actually happened. #
- Objectively, January 6, 2021 was even more of a "day which will live in infamy" than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was more insidious because while Hawaii was an American territory, January 6 was an attack on the actual center of our government. Had the mob prevailed, the US would have been defeated, there and then. #
- The Capitol police were our last line of defense, they received no help from military. #
- The Supreme Court should count their blessings too, because their building is just behind the Capitol. #
The W3C should've gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They're controlled by big companies who are truly scared of interop, explains why most of their proposed standards go nowhere. BTW, I figure if Matt can openly discuss what's undermining WordPress as an open standard (which it is) no reason I can't tell the truth why the social web is not even a web. It's all a big corporate con. Everywhere you look, ripping us off and selling us out. #
To answer Mark Cuban's question of what could we do now to make things better. I forgot that I have two ready-made answers. First, let's get the Democrats or whatever its successor is called, on the air 365 days a year, every year, not just in election years, and have it do many things other than raise money to buy ads. We need to always be communicating with each other not just in season. You could see we had a problem when Obama's campaign website, which should have become whitehouse.gov was turned into a stupid feature of the site where people could petition their government. It said to voters, thanks we'll take it from here. We all saw that as putting us in our place. We must be invoved in governing, not just electing. Second, for podcasts and what's left of journalism, it should all move out out of the northeast and into the country. The hosts should be in St Louis, Dallas, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Phoenix even Memphis, Miami and Charleston. That would change the focus not only symbolically, but they could insist that guests go there to be interviewed. Change the meaning of flyover country. People would feel different about the country and that would come through. Democrats tend to cater their ideas to people in the Northeast. This part of what Repubs say is very true. They do the same thing, only worse, but they are smart about pretending they don't. Third, amplify AOC. She's the leader we need. The Dems are too scared of Republican criticism. Stop worrying so much. If they're complaining that means it's working. Her interview on Jon Stewart's podcast this week is wonderful.#It's a no-blogging Wednesday, will return tomorrow. #
Wouldn't it be smart for Kia or Rivian or some other EV competitor of Tesla's to name their car Bluesky and have it only come in blue?#
Another idea. One of Tesla's competitors could offer a trade-in, where they commit to recycling all the parts of your Tesla, so you are actually taking a Tesla off the road. And for a few extra dollars they can send you a scrapbook of your old Tesla being lovingly taken apart suitable for RT'ing.#
- The most depressing moment of Trump 1.0, for me, was leaving the local supermarket, after seeing the kind of empty shelves you see in third world countries with broken or non-existent economic systems. This was when it sunk in how far the United States had fallen. #
But somehow those of us who survived Covid could relax on January 20, four years ago -- which was also coincidentally the day I got my first Covid vaccination -- the nightmare was over. We could relax for at least a few months before paying the price that was sure to come when we cleaned the mess that Trump had created with his January 6 insurrection. The question was will there be a war over this? Well, I reasoned, as I assumed the incoming president would, that it's better if you have to fight a civil war to do it when the military is responsible to you. But then a few months turned into a couple of years, and nothing happened. No indictments. He hadn't been arrested. I thought geez if we had done something like what he did, the scale of it, the audacity, the terror, my god how could he be left to walk around as if nothing had happened. I figured there must be a reason and our president had a plan. He didn't. Neither did journalism. When Trump ran for re-election he got the consideration any major party candidate would get from the press. As he is getting now as a newly sworn-in president. But we know his oath is meaningless. #- So that day when the shelves were empty is now only the second worst day, and yesterday I was still living with the respite of a four year trance of normality, as if all it took was belief that somehow we'd get through this. But now it's so depressing. I feel both like dying and living at the same time. I know many others feel this way. I don't imagine too many of the people who voted for Trump are full of joy right now. #
- If we get another shot at cleaning this up, we must not let that opportunity slip by. #
I spent a few days designing and implementing the protocol that allows WordLand to be the writing tool for Bingeworthy, thus giving it a real writing and publishing function, instead of the usual ridiculous tiny little textbox. Today I'm going to make it work for writing and reading actual reviews for shows I have opinions about. I've always wanted to do this in a way that it's not just scattered into the wind, to rely on Google to find it again. Now I'll be able to scatter it, and also have it maintained in context, where it can help me remember what I liked about a show, and why perhaps I gave it an excellent rating when some parts really sucked. This was something that was missing in Bingeworthy, I knew it -- just didn't know how to make it work. Now I think I have it working.#- Here's the flow:#
- In Bingeworthy, I rate a program. Then I realize I want to say more, I want to write a review that explains the rating.#
- I click on the Review in WordLand button. The bingeworthy client asks for a token from the bingeworthy server. The token is is part of the database record for the user's rating of the program being displayed. #
- The button switches me over to WordLand using window.open, along with a package of data that gives the editor all the info it needs to update the post when published. It's worth clicking the link to see the data involved. #
- In WordLand, I see a dialog confirming that I want to write a review for Bingeworthy. If I approve, it creates a new WordLand draft. #
- I write the first draft of the review and when I'm ready I publish it. The protocol supports revisions, btw.#
- When the user publishes, in WordLand it builds a URL with tv.bingeworthy.org as the destination. The post body has a JSON object with title and content properties, both of which can contain markdown. The URL params contain the id of the program, screenname of the user, the token that authorizes updating the comment for the rating of this program by this user. #
- On tv.bingeworthy.org, if the token agrees with the one in the database, it updates the comment field of the rating, #
- Then tv.bingeworthy.org sends a websocket message to the author, in Bingeworthy, so they can update the display of the rating for the user, if they still have the program displayed on their screen.#
- I've done these kinds of protocols before, for example, menu sharing on the Mac in the 90s and rssCloud on the web. These are increasingly complicated things, because they require secure coordination between a circle of programs, and allow choice in each of the nodes. #
- There's nothing hard-coded about the protocol only working for this pair of programs. #
- It also supports updating. And the post is also available in WordPress and RSS, so even though it's editable in a great editor, and displayed in a collection of similar writing, it is also fully scattered into the wind. And there's no need for federation, it's just a protocol. We don't even rely on the apps using the same identity system.#
- A thread I started on the WordLand support repo.#
I just wrote a review for Industry in BingeWorthy, but it doesn't have a text editor. It farms the job off to WordLand, which shoots the text back to Bingeworthy as the user publishes to WordPress and RSS, in Markdown. So the text is on both BW and WP and the feediverse. And through WordPress it has a presence on the web. This is the goal, writing exists on its own, but can be shared in all the contexts it makes sense in, but it lives primarily in your blog, your home base. That's why WordPress is so important in the scheme of things. It's a consensus, this is where a lot of people are blogging in 2025. And there's a lot of mostly unexplored interop. And they don't break developers. This may not make total sense at this time, but soon, I hope to be able to point back at this post, and say it was the first time something important worked. #BTW, actually the term social web is probably too big a compromise. The "web" part is the only part that's imho useful. The sad part is that "social" means "we removed most of the features of the web." Why? Some vague sense that people would write too much if given the space. Or link too much. Or edit too much. Or be too emphatic. It's worse than Disneyfied -- at least at Disneyland you get actors, and color and rides, and bland food with tons of sugar and fat. But there is some fun and nutrition. In the social web, it's just memes and slogans. Not even much room for a metaphor. There's so much more to say about being human.#
In the last days of Trump's first term, I had a nice little web app that told you how much time remained in his term. It was a one-line change to make it work again, which, sigh, is necessary now. #
- There's a great scene in No Country For Old Men, where a character is facing imminent death, but he's arguing with the character who will kill him, who asks if all your great ideas led to this (his death) how good were the ideas (paraphrasing).#
- Along those lines.. If Twitter was such a great idea but it led to the death of democracy (for now at least) maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Maybe when we try to reboot we should try something realllly different.#
- As they say -- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.#
- PS: This started as a thread on Bluesky.#
- Sad news: Longtime friend Pam McQuesten passed away on January 1 after a brief illness. #
- I knew Pam in Silicon Valley, as we were starting up Living Videotext in 1983. Our office was on Elwell Court in Palo Alto, just off 101, near the golf course and airport. Pam was managing editor of BYTE, the class act of tech pubs in the early personal computer business, then editor of Popular Computing, the magazine for the people (ie users of computers). When she was at BYTE, her office was on the same floor as ours. #
- The tech industry was rough even then, all the young egos, people who were sure they could do everything, not much collaboration, lots of betrayal. She was one of the few people I could talk with on a personal level, with trust and intelligence. We talked about the future of the technology we were creating, and what we wanted from all this. She was a mentor, like a big sister, best friend, someone I trusted and loved. A very rare friendship. #
- BTW, her name in the 80s, before her marriage to Paul McQuesten, was Pam Clark.#
- Our paths crossed again a few years ago on Facebook. I invited her to join a private group I have with friends I love and trust, to share the life I had at my "pond house" in the Catskills. #
- I wanted to post a brief remembrance here in case any of Pam's friends are tuned in, so they can be part of the celebration of her life. #
- Random observations posted on Bluesky in the early morning hours.#
- 5:09AM: "Biden had one job to do, and he didn’t do it."#
- 5:17AM: "The NYT had one job to do, and they didn’t do it."#
- 5:21AM: "The NYT is the saddest excuse for the leading news org of the most significant democracy in human history. They flushed it down the fucking toilet. They, like the Washington Post, deserve to die in darkness."#
- 7:39AM: "Being impartial about last year’s election was not an option for the NYT. It was democracy’s Pearl Harbor. We will never forget or forgive what they did."#
- Editor's note: Soon, I will do all my writing in one place, and these kinds of snapshots will be easier to assemble.#
How easy would it be to create a twitter-like app using RSS, and in what ways would it differ from other twitter-like apps. Here's the deal. You need a place to write a posts and a way to read a timeline of posts. That's the basic functionality. To do that with RSS you would start with a blogging app like WordPress, and a feed reader like FeedLand or NetNewsWire. Manton has integrated the two into a single user interface at micro.blog. I'm going to approach it in a somewhat differently, not sure yet how it will work, but I'm getting there. And I will offer a way for people to hook in any feed reader they want, thus opening up innovation to tech-curious users. The take-away is that you need to handle inbound and outbound feeds. That's the basics of being twitter-like. #When I put an image in the margin of a post I often pause and think about what I want to convey with the image as it relates to the writing that it's next to. In the previous piece the idea was interop. I tried to think of what images I've used in the past, then I thought why don't I just look. I switched into Daytona, entered interop, and found one I loved, but then kept scanning, and found another that I liked even more. Tools are important. Web writers haven't gotten any new tools in a long time. All the tool development has been for other stuff. Let's make tools for users again, as we did in the olden times. Craftwork in software. Playin in the band! #
Steve Jobs: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” #
I posted something to my linkblog this morning that really should have been on my blog. Here's what it said. "Every blog should have a nice search engine like mine. I can search for ideas and it creates a story, like this search for 'Madison' where I had love, fun, creativity, friends, youth, music, strength, health, sex, and could see the future clearly. Best time of my life, I had everything anyone could want. Pick another term get another synthetic story." Ironically, since my linkblog doesn't flow through the search engine, I would have lost this post. Which makes a bigger point. All the ideas we throw into the silo'd social web are basically trash, not part of our collection, that we might use tools in the future to find value in (as my Madison posts surely did, for me at least). #Then, I got a response from Nick Weaver and the Madison story continues: "Here’s a roundabout Madison connection for you. I started working at UW 28 years ago today as the World Wide Web Editor in the Office of News and Public Affairs. My first project was to implement Userland Frontier for the university news page." Now Nick is in my Madison story too. And he mentions Frontier. With Frontier, we not only had the internet over networks, we also had networks on our computers because Frontier could send tasks to scriptable apps, and get back results. So databases could be hooked up to page layout programs, and people could use their writing tool of choice, and didn't have to use some teeny little excuse for an editor provided by a company that doesn't cater to or care about writers. Imagine writing with software that was designed to hobble writers instead of glorify them! That's the horror of the world as proposed by Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, all of them. It's like no one stopped to think about what they are doing, half their product is writing, and they suck at writing and have no plans to improve the situation. Geez Louise, it's as if we collectively lost our minds. #
Anyway, today I hooked up BingeWorthy to WordLand. Bingeworthy doesn't have a text editor, and it doesn't need one, because when it wants to offer a user a chance to explain their rating, like "seasons 1 and 2 were great, but season 3 sucked, but I gave it a high rating anyway," they can use WordLand which loves writers and strives to serve them better and better. Why should I put a bullshit editor in a product (Bingeworthy) that isn't about writing. Its job is very different from WordLand's. Let them work together. That's the big idea, that's why you bother having interop, so you can use more than one tool on the same data.#
There's more to the story, but this is already a lot to ask you to digest. I'll get a demo together soon. 😄#
Pretty sure there's no supportable reason to ban TikTok, any more than banning Facebook or Twitter would make sense.#
I've come to the conclusion that you can't really use ChatGPT as a programming partner. It doesn't understand the big picture, and if you try to explain it, it probably isn't getting it, and if it does, it will forget it quickly. It's basically fairly stupid, but a way better search engine than Google. Also, it never says it doesn't have enough info to answer the question and then an hour later you figure out the answer it gave you just doesn't work. I still think it's an incredibly useful too, just not as great as I used to think. In a couple of years it has never asked for more information before it answers. That's a clue. #My newest server was down for an hour due to hardware problems at Digital Ocean. It appears to be running again. Please don't judge the new search feature, it was caught up in this outage. Oy.#
I've changed my Bluesky avatar to MLK's image to celebrate his birthday on Monday, January 20. I dream of everyone wearing this button proudly on Monday in support of American democracy and progress. We are a proud country, beneath all the weirdness. #
Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the state Capitol.#Now that I have a search engine for my blog, I can reliably look for all instances of Wordle Kitty which was a character I was playing around with last year with ChatGPT. It even comes out in reverse chronologic order, and it's better than Google which ignores a lot of my blog these days. My own search engine doesn't do that of course.#
When I buy a domain speculatively, I usually put up some kind of placeholder page with a title, picture and tagline. Like feediverse.org. I pushed a link to it yesterday, and got back this possibly snarky response, but still thought provoking. Why isn't there a feed for the feediverse.org page. Good point! So if you were to put a feed on the home page of the open feediverse, what it be? A feed of posts to the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. I think that might be it. We can celebrate the day when that feed is mirrored on Bluesky (Inbound RSS ftw!) and we can shut down the stupid app that does the bridging. We had a standard long before Bluesky came along, isn't it wrong for them to try to force everyone to use their reinvention? It doesn't say anything good about the people who made that choice, among interop-minded developers. It kind of violates our ethos imho.#