President Biden pardoned his son. I have no problem with that, because his son was accused as a proxy for his father. If there is any legitimate use of presidential pardons, this is it. Perhaps relatives of the president should also be immune from prosecution. Does anyone really think Hunter Biden would have been tried for such petty crimes if he weren't Biden's son? The journalists, as always, have equated two very different things. They're playing their own game, trying to self-pardon in a way, to avoid being a target for the incoming administration, which we're all scared of, and I guess that's the point, to scare us. #BTW, another thing journalism is getting wrong, the FBI is not the squeaky clean organization they present it as. #
I frequently have trouble remembering the names of things I want to use in my writing. I've come to rely on ChatGPT for help. So I wrote to ChatGPT: "I'm trying to remember the name of the stone that has the key to understanding a language." To which it replied: "You're likely thinking of the Rosetta Stone. It was crucial in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs because it featured the same text written in three scripts: Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphic. The Greek text provided the key to understanding the other two scripts."#
- I was very happy to see this post on Bluesky this morning from a friend, Matthias Pfefferle, who works at Automattic on the connection between WordPress and ActivityPub. #
- In his post he asks if there is a BDG for creating a PDS for Bluesky. #
- A BDG is a Busy Developer's Guide, something we did first for SOAP in 2001 when we were trying to figure out how to map XML-RPC onto it. Since then there have been lots of BDGs for all kinds of things. It's a useful concept because developers are often overly busy, so we need to get right to the problem before understanding all the theory behind it. We need an example that works, and we'll just do what it does. That also guarantees interop, which is the point of course. #
- Now we have a similar problem. Bluesky stores a user's writing in a PDS. If we can generate a PDS for our blogs, theoretically Bluesky should be able to see them and use them as if they were created inside Bluesky. If it were easy to understand we could get busy converting everything so it works there. We can do that because we're using popular simple formats like JSON (see below) to organize our work. #
- For example this is how I use JSON for my blog, the one you're reading right now.#
- Here's a folder in a repository on GitHub. Broken down into years, months, days, and posts. #
- Each post is a JSON file, like this. It has three bits of data, the text of the post, when it was created (which also serves as a unique ID, no two posts have the same creation date) and type. This item has a type of outline, because it can have structure, though this post does not. #
- Here's another post that does have structure. In Bluesky it would be represented as a thread. #
- Here's the question. What's the absolutely simplest way to have that structure of posts represented in a Bluesky PDS?#
- PS: I had a conversation with ChatGPT to scope this out. #