Have they made ChatGPT more stupid in the last couple of days? Or maybe I'm starting to see the problem. I was trying to debug a piece of software that sends mail. I use Amazon SES. I wanted to see if the software was actually communicating with the server, and thought for sure there must be a log of requests on the AWS system. Where is it? I asked ChatGPT. It starts telling me to check all these things and never got to the part about where the log is. So I said, just tell me where the log is. Again, it tells me about all these nice things I should check first. I asked again, this time in ALL CAPS which is how I communicate that I really mean it. Again more bullshit. So I think to ask Is there a log? No, it says, actually there isn't one. #I took a long drive today on back roads, down toward Poughkeepsie, and on the way back a big pickup swerved into my lane. I had to swerve away from it and hit the brake, and had a bit of a conniption. Got me thinking. Who was it that did this. Man or woman, young or old, spaced out or thinking about getting a libtard to freak out, all kinds of thought. Then I remembered what keeps us safe in situations like this, very few people are going to deliberately try to kill us this way because they would die too. Mutual assured destruction. But I'm a programmer, trained to always think of things that could go wrong, then I realized omg, what if it were a self-driving car? Someone could program it to assassinate a random or specific person, or worse, hack the car remotely, or hack a thousand cars everywhere at the same time to kill people all over the world. I thought we could prevent this by right now requiring there always be a human sacrifice in every car, sort of a hostage to assure good behavior, sometimes. #
How did they get soldiers to do this? American soldiers? We are truly lost. Were they masked too? What happened to their honor? Why the fuck would an American soldier need to hide their identity? Anywhere, but esp in America? Why don’t they put down their weapons?#
- I've been asked by a number of people why I want a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. Fair question. Here's why. #
- WordPress has demonstrated that most of the features of the web in regard to documents also work in Mastodon, via ActivityPub. #
- To demonstrate here's a WordPress post, and because there is a bridge between it and ActivityPub, you can read the same post in Mastodon, which also supports ActivityPub. #
- To really nail that down: WordPress version, Mastodon version.#
- Pretty remarkable, yes?#
- Here's a list of the features I was using in that demo.#
- The post has a title (it's optional).#
- Simple styling: bold, italic, numbered lists, bulleted lists.#
- Hyperlinks, the defining feature of the web.#
- I can edit my post. #
- No character limit.#
- These are most of the features of textcasting, a spec I published in 2022 to list the features of the web I wanted from the twitter-like services, that call themselves part of the web, which is fairly dishonest because they don't support most of the basic features of the web. But Mastodon does support them. #
- But so far they are only accessible via WordPress. And as much as I love WordPress, and am thankful it exists, that is not enough. #
- So here's the punchline: Why I want the RSS to ActivityPub bridge. #
- As a developer, I can easily create apps that generate RSS feeds. I just want Mastodon to understand those feeds as well as they understand WordPress. And that means we need a bridge for developers that supports all these features. #
- Hope that helps! :-)#
- Earlier I wrote this post:#
- The worst thing about Claude and ChatGPT is that you can't get them to work with you the way you want them to. They always run off and do the things I asked about. So if I say "what if the middle column must be at least 600 pixels wide? What I want is literally an answer to the question I asked. It was not an instruction to do it. I've been a CEO, and this infuriates me. I want to understand the limits, I don't want to impose them. I'm trying to figure out what the cost would be in doing something, again -- not requesting it be done. No matter how many times I tell it not to do this, it just does it. And Claude has absolutely no memory. If I want it to work with me a certain way I have to tell it how to do it every time. I can save it off in a document, but even the simplest automation is impossible. In that sense it is very primitive software. If I were using a spreadsheet for example, I'd have settings that I could change, and unless the software had a bug it would never forget it until I told it otherwise. #
- Because it can be so stubborn and uncooperative, I often try to solve complicated problems myself. Then I decided to try again, and brought a problem to ChatGPT and we did eventually figure it out, but at the end I wanted to review how inefficient the process was because it doesn't look all around at the options, I had to do that for it, and it wasn't even aware it needed that kind of help. After exploring this, I asked if it would remember what we concluded, and this is what came back.#
- You want me to think first, not code.#
- You want me to challenge assumptions, including my own.#
- You expect me to give up on a theory when the evidence contradicts it, and look for more plausible explanations.#
- You're a deeply experienced debugger (almost 50 years), and you know how important it is to notice the obvious.#
- You're not here for code generation — you're here for sharp, collaborative thinking.#
- When I said that was worth publishing on my blog, it proceeded to muddy it up, even trying to write in my voice. I insisted that the list it came up with was perfect. #
- Feel free to steal these bullet points and feed them to your ChatGPT. I think it can be made to work much better for us humans. ;-)#
On Bluesky: "The web is still there under all this michegas, ready to be magical again any time we want it to."#
New thread on Mastodon: OK, i give up for now on getting a team of nerds together to build a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub along the lines of what Automattic has done to bridge WordPress to ActivityPub. We will need that to happen, I would much prefer to get it done in advance, but people don't know me or trust me well enough to believe I might see something that they apparently don't. I'm pretty confident they will, but I would really love to get some help. #
- I wrote this on Bluesky this morning.#
- Most of what passes for discourse on platforms like Bluesky amounts to spam and abuse. Makes expensive moderation necessary and who’s going to pay for that on an open system. It’s why this approach can’t lead anywhere but to yet another Twitter or Threads, a place for billionaires to control us.#
- Hardly the first time I've said this, but this time I got a response.#
- Yep. I've said for years—your platform's experience will be determined by its mechanics, not whatever culture you think you want to foster. #
- Mechanics > culture in the medium term.#
- All systems are adversarial systems now.#
- That was from John Pettus. I could tell right off that we're thinking the same way. This morning I started to write a reply but quickly ran out of space because of Bluesky's stupid character limit. So I just pasted it into this blog post. #
- I've been saying that for years myself. #
- I ran a BBS in the early 80s, and was on Compuserve CB Simulator (my handle was Mastodon), and started blogging in 1994, and on and on. Mail lists always flame out. Same thing we're seeing in the tweetersphere. #
- Blogging has the inverse problem. Spam abuse is impossible, but then it's hard for people to find your brilliance. But at least you get to finish a thought before the trolls attack. ;-)#
- I was also a math major, studied combinatorics and graph theory. The connections between nodes determines a lot, as you pointed out. Most people don't even begin to get this.#
- I'm working on a new structure for a social web without these problems. It's very simple, a derivative of something I had on my blog in the early days called the Mail Pages. #
- I sent my blog posts out via email to groups of 8 people chosen randomly each time (or maybe it was 11, I forget). Sometimes great discussions would break out in the groups. I was always cc'd. #
- Sometimes people would just respond to me personally.#
- If I saw something I thought everyone should read I would put it on the current Mail Page. Thus there was a way for discourse to have more distribution, but only if I thought it was worthwhile. Spam was not possible, and there was a little bit of abuse here and there, but it would never get any further than my email inbox. #
- That's how sensible moderation works. And it doesn't cost anything, because the spam motive is gone. #
- I wrote this in a Bluesky message, but had to move it to my blog because of their stupid character limit. #
- BTW, we should communicate and perhaps collaborate. #
- Yesterday I wondered if the open web is a lost cause.#
- A few minutes later, I saw my name in a tweet on Bluesky from Aram Zucker-Scharff.#
- In it was a message that can be summarized as follows -- don't give up yet Dave. #
- AZS has a linkblog which he calls an amplifeed. Same thing. #
- And here's the best part. #
- Even though we were working separately -- our feeds are 100% compatible.#
- When I saw it I subscribed to it in FeedLand and added it to my blogroll.#
- It will work in my timeline software (still working on it).#
- This gave me goosebumps.#
- I remember what this felt like.#
- Working on something and someone else working on the same thing and because we're on the mother freaking web our stuff works the same way.#
- That my friends is what the web feels like. Goosebumps. Power. Interop. This is what most people who use the net these days have never experienced. #
- I used to write about this on my blog every day. I would say things that annoyed some of my readers like this: zoooooom and coooooool. There he goes again. Hey it's been a while. #
- I celebrated this with a suggestion to AZS.#
- If you also add a channel-level <image> element it'll work with my timeline app. I'm doing it the same way WordPress does it.#
- He did it in a minute.#
- So the web isn't a lost cause after all. 😄#
- This the web. It's what the Dead called Truckin. #
- Let's do more of this. #
#- PS: AZS sent me a link to another linkblog, which I have subscribed to and added to my blogroll.#
- There I said it. To ChatGPT.#
- i find flexbox too confusing for me to use at this time. maybe in a year or two, after some more learning. i hate css, everything about it. so it's hard for me to learn new stuff. i grew up using quickdraw on the mac, where i could do everything with math, instead of trying to tease the right behavior as something as convoluted as css and html for apps. ridiculous.#
- Wondering what it would say...#
- Totally fair, Dave. That frustration makes perfect sense — you're coming from a world where you told the machine exactly what to do, and it did it. CSS is the opposite: it’s like negotiating with a passive-aggressive layout engine that only gives you what you want if you ask just the right way, using its weird dialect.#
- QuickDraw gave you full control with math — coordinate space, bounding boxes, baseline alignments — it was declarative drawing by imperative code. CSS is declarative positioning by magical suggestion, with hidden constraints, inherited styles, and a constantly shifting box model.#
- You’re not alone in this. A lot of veteran programmers — especially those from early Mac, HyperCard, VB, even Win32 — find CSS maddening. It’s not made for precision. It’s made for fluidity and adaptation. But that’s not how app UIs are often designed.#
- I wish I had written that. #
- A longish thread that probably isn't going anywhere. My final thoughts, cc'd here to get on the record.#
- anyway it's feeling like a lost cause. #
- to be really blunt, i don't think AP or ATP are the answer. #
- and i also don't care so much about this style of conversation. and i loathe the character limits and the lack of style and links, and no titles, etc.#
- it can't only be for wordpress. i love the potential of wordpress, i think even more than matt does, but it isn't enough.#
- if it's going to be open and of the web it has to be simple and easy, and neither of them are.#
bonus for blog readers: i would add, since i ran out of characters on masto, that the great thing about the web is that you can have an idea and be using it the next day. you can't say imho that you're part of the web if you don't deliver that kind of ease of access. it's not enough to have the potential of being open, it has to be accessible. I have that ability these days, but people who use the AP and ATP systems are in tight little boxes with no easy way to try something out quickly. (i know because i've been hooking things up to them for a couple of years now, and so far it's just an added slog, everything is far more complex than it should be)#- maybe we'll get there through their api's, but i think at this point we know that won't happen.#
- ps: the web is a miracle. but maybe it's too fucked up now to have the miracle be something we can all experience. #
- pps: when i write on other systems i often leave out upper case, saving a little energy as i type. i find it more relaxing. #
- I wrote this early this morning as a test post for my WordLand site. #
- Happy to report that my linkblog routine is back to normal.#
- I really shook things up there, and it probably wasn't a great time investment.#
- I had been using a custom front-end to FeedLand, which has a built in blogging tool, that publishes to the database that FeedLand manages, and of course also publishes an RSS feed. It was debugged and works. But now I have a new editor, and I want to use it for this, because my reader knows how to view all kinds of stuff, and one of the things I wanted it to work well with are linkblog posts. So, do a quick addition of linkblog stuff to WordLand. #
- Only thing is there is no such thing as a "quick addition" in a world built on CSS and HTML objects. Everything is a slog. #
- Anyway the slog is over! Whew. #
- Now back to my other slog -- timelines. #
- It's also starting to feel usable. People imagine that you just design something and write the code and voila it's usable (if they even think about it that much). But only until you have the pieces put together can you see the things you forgot to consider, and now you have to decide whether to rip up the thing you built or try to iterate to where you need to go. A lot of times it would be easier to start over, but programmers always want to do that. I'm no exception. Once it's working somewhat the code becomes locked into how the pieces fit together. If somehow they need to fit together differently, given it's CSS and HTML you'd better scrap it and do it again or you'll go out of your mind adding the next layer of features. #
- Honestly we were much better off before we tried to shoehorn an object model into a document format! Apps and documents are really different things you know.#
- Anyway now I have my first test post of the day.#
Kos is moving to WordPress. Very cool. It means people who write for Kos will be able to use my writing tools. I am sold on the idea of WordPress being the OS for the social web. That's the point of having a platform, we used to call it "users and developers party together."#I saw that Matt backed off from porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress, basically turning WP into an OS. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but probably overwhelming in complexity. But it was the right idea. We need fewer runtimes. If you can merge two runtimes, go for it. Anyway, this is all related to the "open social web" -- in fact it's central to it. We've got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything. We would go back to the potential the web had before Twitter and Google Reader split the blogging world in two. I swear the answer is make it so that all these networks can do inbound and outbound RSS and build on the reality of the open social web, not just the hype. #
I asked ChatGPT for two sentences on the Innovator's Dilemma -- "[It] describes how successful companies can fail by focusing too heavily on sustaining innovations—improvements to existing products for current customers—while ignoring disruptive innovations that initially serve smaller markets but eventually overtake the mainstream. These disruptions often seem inferior at first, so established companies dismiss them, leaving space for new entrants to rise and dominate."#
- I've been playing a little game, trying to answer the question -- if I had a modern implementation of Frontier that ran on Linux and new Macs, just as it was in 1992 when we released it for the pre-OS/X Mac, what apps would I want to hook up to it right away? What would the verb set look like? #
- I'd start with the native verb set we had in Frontier for accessing the file system. And HTTP verbs of course. #
- Then I would add glue for WordPress, GitHub, Mastodon and Bluesky, just because I think having really simple scripting for each of those would make (some) people's brains explode. #
I once had a young fellow challenge me on whether there was such a thing as scriptable apps. I was reminded of the days when I had to explain it but no one got it, then one day everyone got it as if they always did, and now we're back at the beginning again. There is such a thing. You can think of an app as a toolkit. What's behind the UI? Let me call it from outside your app. Let me combine the features of your product with other people's product. And you can do the exact same thing for apps that are running on the web. It was something a lot of people tried to do, like Magic Cap at General Magic, but we got it working and had regular nerds writing apps as if it was not amazing. It was, and it's now a long lost art. #- If a version of Frontier came up that I could run on a Linux system, I would wish for a really simple interface to Node packages. I've got a great collection. I'd want to use them right away asap. #
- I also would like to be able to write code in Frontier in JavaScript. I'm very fluent in it these days. I can still program in UserTalk, the two languages are basically the same thing, though UserTalk has some nice affordances they haven't thought of yet in JavaScriptLand, and vice versa -- there are even more things JS can do that we hadn't thought of, which is only fair, they've been working on it a lot longer than we did. The language was basically frozen in the late 90s, and the verb set shortly after that. #
- Oh what would I do? It's fun to dream. #
An improvement in WordLand on the server, we now post metadata to WordPress, along with the HTML rendering so that code that runs on the server can now access and possibly in the future even talk back to WordLand. You never know where this stuff can go if the developers take advantage of opportunities to interop. #
tinyFeedReader is a hit. But the docs aren't clear enough. It has no user interface, it's a package you can include in a Node app that calls back to you when a new item comes in from one of the feeds you've told it to watch. It's a totally teeny little framework for a feed reader, you get all the standard stuff tucked away out of site, you write the functionality you want to implement. It would be a good thing to turn over to your AI programming partner. It's for people who want to add a feed reader to something else. #
Today is Independence Day in the US, so how about an Independence Day for the web. One simple way would be to hook RSS up to ActivityPub, turning Mastodon and Threads into a big feed reader. It could easily be done in software, it would just take money to keep it running. Not something I could attempt personally. But I would totally help with the software and design. It would open the door for lots of new apps that could communicate with users through a single simple API. I want to talk with people about this at WordCamp Canada in October.#How odd on Independence Day a law goes into effect that funds a secret police for the US. The goal is to flow people from inside the United States into concentration camps, and ostensibly deport them to other countries. It may turn out to be easier and less expensive to just gas them and burn the bodies right here in the USA. I listened to this morning's Daily podcast to hear how they summed up the bill. They focused on taxes and health care as most of the other news orgs have been doing. They were puzzled why the Repubs didn't seem to care if it hurt their electorate, but they didn't state the obvious answer. They don't care. Remember Occam's News. I guess they didn't want to say it out loud so they just telegraphed the question. It worked, message received. #
- I'd love to see a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. I've asked people at various companies if they'd do this. I'm happy to help with the software but operating the service is something for a trusted company to do.#
- I think this would go all the way to putting the "open" in open social web, because people who already know how to build RSS feeds would be able to quickly write apps that hook into AP networks. And of course it wouldn't have to be limited to RSS, it could build on Atom and RDF equally well. #
- It think it's tragic that it's taking Ghost, for example, so long to get their service up fully, and it suggests that smaller devs don't stand a chance. I can't wake up one day and have an idea of something that would work well with Mastodon, for example, and have a prototype running the next day. #
- If you think this is a good idea, post a link to this post somewhere developers live, and let's see if we can get a cooperative project up and running. #
- And if you don't like RSS, Atom or RDF, invent an orthogonal format and we can work with that too. I know people have strong feelings about this stuff, not a problem. #
- PS: I asked Tim Bray to comment, and he responded. Sounds good. We've known each other for decades, going back to the early days of XML. #
BTW, this is where we're going with WordLand. We can have a nice social web that builds on simple open formats. I will make an instance of this to show it can be done, both sides, reading and writing. They will work wonderfully with each other. You can write a nice reader and/or writer and it will work with this simple network. A technological coral reef. Think of the MacWrite and MacPaint of the open social web. Enough to get the ball rolling. #Looking forward to putting linkblogs in WordLand to bed, I don't think too many people other than myself will use the feature, but I wanted to get it right and then move on. #
Software internally is mostly pipes connected to other pipes, each adding a specific quality to whatever passes through it. If you have nice standards for what you send through the pipes, you can do more of what you imagine. This is called orthogonality. Factoring is when you notice a repeating pattern, give it a name, and a set of things you can do to it, those would be names of pipes. I have to ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this, but I am also asking my human friends. BTW I expect this seems so natural because our minds probably work that way too, internally, below our conscious awareness. #Bullshit. Lisa Murkowski goes on a press tour and sounds like she could be the one that breaks away from Trump in the Republican Senate. As with all of them, always, it was an act. She has a role to play, she's The Agonizer. They are amazing in terms of how organized and orchestrated their campaign is. #
- This is the address of my linkblog feed: dave.linkblog.org. #
- I think it's kind of interesting to have the top page of a site be a feed. I don't hide the XML-ness of it. I never supported the obfuscation, it's confusing, makes people not trust RSS, imho. #
- I think the feed is pretty stable now, so if you want to subscribe, go ahead. I haven't redirected from the old feed yet, probably should do that soon, since it more or less has stopped updating. #
- This is all managed in WordLand and therefore is part of the WordPress ecosystem. #
- I felt it was time to do a definitive linkblog, since as far as I could tell no one has tried to explain what it is: basically, a feed where the <link> element of each <item> points to some other site. That's the basic difference. #
- Also a linkblog feed should specify the channel-level <image> element, which is used as the avatar for the feed when it appears in a twitter-like timeline.#
- I think the only other product that is open to feeds being part of the open social web is Surf from Mike McCue's company, Flipboard. I asked ChatGPT to brief me on how it works with feeds, and saw that we're more or less doing the same thing, except I'm not trying to work with the output from Twitter, Bluesky, etc. Even when they have outbound RSS feeds they aren't good enough to be part of the social web defined by feeds.#
- I only want really good feeds. It's time to stop being so careless about what we transmit to the world. If we want an open web we're all going to have to be good gardeners. It's like a food system where all the food is grown by family farmers and I'm running a restaurant, and only want the good stuff, and we want it to look good too! :-)#
- PS: Another thing, the feed items must have working guids. All software that runs on feeds should be able to depend on this. #
- PPS: Linkblogs aren't the only kinds of feeds that will be used in this RSS-based feediverse. Scripting News will work with it. You would be able to read this post in this new medium (not yet delivered, btw).#
- PPPS: More here and here.#
If the Dems were competitive they would run ads now with Senator Tillis talking about the damage the new Repub bill will do to Americans, emphasizing this is a Republican speaking, taking one for the country. #
Another criticism of the Bluesky API. They make each developer do the support for Open Graph metadata, when it would be much more efficient for them to support it on their end. I would be happy to give them the code. It's not that complicated. But translating the OG format, which for crying out loud is a huge standard, into their arcane format which is only supported by Bluesky, is going in the wrong direction, and frankly is ridiculously arrogant. Show a little humility. Facebook is huge, and the format isn't just used by Facebook, everyone uses it. #
When I was having trouble getting into my AWS account last week, I ordered a Yubikey, which everyone says is the best way to go. I thought I'd set it up first thing Monday morning (ie now) but it turns out it's a major undertaking? Why does this have to be so hard? I guess I'll find out, but not today. I want to make some progress on my development project first. Maybe later. #
- Advice from a longtime developer. #
- If you think "I should do a backup," do it. Now, don't wait. #
- Make it really easy to do a backup. Choose a menu item that's always available when you're working.#
- The reason is karma. God hears all your thoughts. When that thought pops into your head and you don't do a backup, or don't do it soon enough, He crashes your data, and you think "I should have done a backup when I thought of doing it." Even this doesn't please Him. At that moment it's even more urgent that you do a backup. #
- My hippie uncle taught me this. God has a terrible sense of humor, and thinks it's really funny when you have a good thought and ignore it. When something didn't work he would say that's God goofing on me. #
- In this case, we're talking about is the Programmer God. There are all kinds of gods, a baseball god, a basketball god, and very specifically a Knicks god. That god has the absolutely worst sense of humor of them all and by worst I mean best. #
- Benjamin Wittes: "It’s remarkable how many non-New Yorkers seem to care who the mayor of New York City is." #
- They do and they're right to, the same way we were concerned how the Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles would react to the invasion of the Marines and hijacking of the National Guard. #
- Right now the NYC mayor is a hostage of the US govt. Not in a position to help. An inexperienced first term NY mayor, have we seen that before? How does the NYPD respond to that? #
- Then there was the snowstorm that derailed John V Lindsay, a heroic and transformative mayor. NY is a tough place to govern even when the US government isn't aiming to regime change the place.#
- Local government is our last line of defense. #
- "Think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine."#
- You all fell in love with a candidate, I do it too. #
- But think about the context the next mayor will govern in.#
- The thing about NY that people might not understand is that the politics are dirty and fucked up. Dems tend to elect handsome young heros who when they have to deal with NYPD and the sanitation workers, the teachers union, and the federal government, also the ancient infrastructure, melt.#
- Now that we know the outcome of the 2024 election, not just in numbers but in what it's doing to our beloved country and the rest of the world, it's interesting to revisit the campaign that journalism ran last year to force President Biden to step aside. That's one of the functions of Facebook, they play back your posts from years ago, so you can see how things changed, or didn't. #
- Anyway, last year on this day I wrote this on Facebook: "Why don't journalists cover the Biden base? Do they even consider the possibility that there is one? Or do they think they are the base? I thought they weren't supposed to care who the nominees are? Why do they feel entitled to say one candidate should withdraw but not the other? Have any of them even thought this through?"#
- Nick Arnett, a former tech journalist, said in a comment: "Until I read this, the madness of the Times calling on Biden, but not Trump, to withdraw didn't dawn on me." #
- I had followed his metamorphosis over years from a journalist to a worker who goes where there are fires or other natural disasters, for the government, to support the effort to save people's homes and lives. I watched him via Facebook, in awe, as he went around the country,
not being paid very much I imagine, butdoing good. # - I learned something important when my father was in the hospital many years ago, in a coma, after losing a lot of blood and being unconscious for hours before he was found. He was in a ward in Flushing Hospital, along with a lot of other comatose people. All were unconscious, unable to feed themselves. Hard to know if they had any awareness. From an outside perspective they, and my father included, were lost. Some had been there for years, probably weren't ever going to come out of it. We were lucky, my father survived, after a month, and had seven more years to live. #
- I visited him every day, and got to know the flow of the hospital. Workers came in and out of the room to attend to these comatose people. Imagine the kind of support they needed just to keep their bodies functioning and not wasting away for lack of movement. I thought these people must have the worst jobs imaginable, imagining myself in their shoes.#
- I got to know them, asked about what else they do, how they got here, where they live, etc. Somehow I got up the courage to ask one of them if they liked their job, imagining I'd get a New Yorker comment like "You know, it's a living." But what I heard was a complete surprise. "It's the best job in the world," he said, because I can see so clearly how my work helps real people. He was looking right at me. It hit me, this man is doing what I can't do, what my father's parents, who were long gone, couldn't do. Caring. Caring for my dad. Then I got it. #
- Back to Nick, who was and still is, and probably always will be doing things to help other people, no matter what he does. #
- He was canned in one of the DOGE purges this spring. #
- Now you tell me whether the "Trump base" deserved a chance you wouldn't let us have with Biden? Why journalism felt entitled to make this decision for all of us? When are you going to get the idea that you're supposed to help us. Do the right thing. I get so angry at journalism for getting in the way. Once informed of the facts, it was their job to get out of the way and let us, the voters, make the decision. #
- PS: In the very next post on FB, I wrote an HTML hack that makes the same point, more concisely. #
We live in interesting times. Never a dull moment! The latest David Frum podcast is about crazy tech billionaires. Once again he talks about who he's willing to listen to. He's really smart, thinks about things, and speaks brilliantly, but cultivates his ignorance and seems somewhat proud of it. In contrast, I listened to Jon Stewart's weekly podcast yesterday and it was as usual outstanding. Like Frum he thinks and speaks brilliantly, with the addition of being hilarious at times. In this episode he talks to an Iranian friend, a new perspective we don't hear often, but fits in with what I had understood about Iran. It's a highly educated country, a good standard of living and are mired with a repressive government and no options for regime change. When you hear that talked about on other podcasts and cable news shows, remember -- it's impossible to change regimes unless the country has prepared for that. There is no regime-in-waiting in Iran, hasn't been one since the 1979 revolution. This is the next danger in the US. Will there be anything remaining of our political system? It's almost all gone now. Funny to listen to the people on TV about surviving the next 3.5 years -- what do they think will happen then? Nothing will happen, that's the most likely thing. Back to Frum, what a shame there's such a smart guy, so cloistered, and boastful about it. That's not a good way to proceed now imho. #
Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho, and probably very funny, and respectful.#
I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook. #
I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited. #
Fixed the images that broke on morningcoffeenotes.com, a site that dates back to 2003, when it transitioned to https in 2024. #
With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.#
- You hear the term Open Social Web used in places where things that are social are neither open or web. They aren't that far, and here today I'm going to give you a fast and easy recipe for linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness open social web#
- Add inbound RSS feeds. The social site allows a user to specify an RSS feed that represents their posts. When a new one shows up, it appears in the timelines of people who are following the user. They can add items to that feed however they like. It can come from anywhere. That's 1/2 of "open."#
- Add outbound RSS feeds. This gives you the other half. When a new item shows up in a users feed, however it got there, it appears in their outbound feed, which can be tied into the input feed of one or more other sites. #
- Support links in users' posts. You really can't claim to be part of the web if you don't implement this core feature of the web. #
- That's all there is, except this: The feeds have to be good. Don't be cheap with the information they contain. Work with other developers to make sure all the information they need that you have is present in the outbound feeds you generate. Same with the inbound feeds, be reasonable, if you can accept certain information and match it up with your service, then you should do it. Think of the users first. #
- You could try to use ActivityPub or AT Proto to play the role of RSS. I think you'll find that's more work, and not that many people have mastered these formats. RSS is simple and lightweight and has had 20+ years of burn in. Lots of familiarity, lots of working code. #
- It's time to stop claiming you are the open social web when it's so easy to be the open and on the web. #
I have a Google Alerts query for my own name, just to see if any journalism outlets mention me. When it happens, it's often to give me credit for co-creating an app called iPodder, which they say was where podcasting started. None of that is true. But that's what journalism says about me.#- On the other hand if you ask ChatGPT what role I played in developing podcasting it gives a more accurate answer. #
- So tell me what the role of journalism is. Hallucinating myths into fact? That would be my estimate.#
- Here's the ChatGPT result. I actually did a bit more than that, but what they say is closer to the truth and gives an idea of how things like podcasting come into existence. A lot of work and struggle against people's disbelief, and most of the time it doesn't work -- podcasting is one of the successes.#
- BTW, the second item in ChatGPT's list is not true. Adam's Daily Source Code came after my own podcast Morning Coffee Notes. I was urging him to do a podast but he didn't get one going until after I went first, proving the old adage "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." So somewhere along the line it got confused and it hallucinated just like the journalists. The actual first podcast was a Grateful Dead song in 2001 which I used to test Radio UserLand which was the first software to implement podcasting. There's a documentary coming out soon and I believe they have a bit about that, so maybe that'll get on the record. #
- If this is how history is written btw, I wouldn't trust anything in the history books. ;-) #
Glossary: Tiny Little Textbox. (An idea I might try, coupled with Daytona, I should be able to build a glossary of terms I want in my official vocabulary. Ideas that have stood the test of time, that mean something now, but eventually will be set aside and no one will know what a TLTB was.)#
I'm working my way through The Bear, and it's great because you remember that you love all these characters and you can immediately start living the ongoing drama of their lives. I feel like a cat perched on a window watching everyone doing their daily stuff. Looking forward to going back to the beginning and starting over. #
BTW, I think the right way to read Scripting News is getting the nightly email. That's the pulse. I jot stuff down during the day, mostly in the morning, and later add links and finish stuff up. The scripting.com feed is updated in realtime. So you may get many versions of an item over the day, which might be a problem with feed readers that don't watch for changes. I noticed that my changes to a recent podcast shownotes page don't flow back out to my podcast client app on Android. FeedLand btw, records changes, and they flow through to the timeline. Coupled with rssCloud, which is supported in every WordPress site, makes the whole thing realtime. People assume that feeds have to perform like a feed reader. But if you have a component running on the open internet, hooked up via websockets to the client, you get the flow they get in twitter-like systems. And we didn't have to invent anything that didn't already exist in 2009. #
Masked secret police is pure terrorism. We should ask NYPD what we have to do to protect ourselves from them, and then do it. #
I, like a lot of other people, assumed that Americans would be terrible at authoritarianism. Shows we have a lot to learn. Americans are pretty good at it it turns out.#
Krugman doesn’t understand what’s coming for NYC. And doesn’t understand the leadership Cuomo uniquely provided at the height of Covid. It’s pretty likely what’s starting in NYC will be worse than Covid or 9-11. Funny thing is Krugman did get it, a few weeks ago when the crisis in Los Angeles was peaking. He wrote a piece that was terrified, and realistic. The National Guard had been nationalized. Marines were invading California. But now that Calif hasn't been in the news, it's easy to swing back. I bet if the election had happened during the worst of it, Cuomo would've won. #
Bernie Sanders asks what the Democrats should learn from Mr. Z's victory in the NYC primary this week. Here's what I say. Forget about ever rising from the ashes of what remains of the party. Right now, the issue is how to defend the city from the coming war with the US government. They're already holding the current mayor hostage. This will be worse than 9-11 and Covid. We have no leadership. We're totally fucked, what the Democratic Party does or doesn't do, at this point, simply doesn't matter.#A preview of how a WordLand linkblog works, which is of course a WordPress site, viewed in my blogroll. When I clicked on the link, I was surprised that it goes to Poynter, and not to the linkblog. But then I remembered that's the point of a linkblog. And it flows through to the feed, and the blogroll software understands. So now I have an end-to-end linkblog. #
Another reason to love WordPress. Every freaking WordPress site had great RSS support. They did more to keep feeds alive than anyone else. Google tried to kill RSS in a particularly humiliating way. WordPress kept it going. #
A NYT article from last year about 34th Ave in Jackson Heights where "a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020." Before we moved to Flushing when I was in 5th grade, we lived on 92nd St and 34th Ave. What a difference that must make. I love it when cities take chances like this, and the people in the neighborhood seem to love it. #
- I tried an experiment, go back as far as I can in archive.org on scripting.com and see where it gets me. The first try got me to a classified ads site I was experimenting with in mid-November 1996. A few weeks later, on December 3, there was a colorful directory that took you to all the sub-sites on the server, DaveNet, Frontier, Classified ads, our Midas Website (Macintosh Internet Developers Association), DocServer, a BBS, and Guestbook. #
- I went digging around in the Frontier part. Lots of stuff there. By then we had been working on Frontier for eight years. It had been reborn once, from a Mac-focused single-user scripting environment to a networked one, all because the web had exploded and Apple didn't want us making system software for their platform. 😄 #
- BTW, some of this stuff is still here. #
- There are lots of paths to try out.#
- This was where my blog home page was then. #
- Then to DaveNet, and in the left margin Nerd's guide to this website. #
- I love the screen shots that show what a good match the Frontier object database was to the way a website is organized. #
Jeremy Herve is a developer at Automattic. Here's what he said about yesterday's podcast. He liked the idea of WordPress as the OS of the open social web. Glad that resonated. It has so much more than the other possible platforms. The others couldn't even realistically claim to be part of the web. They don't support writers very well. We're going to build slowly and deliberately around this idea, always staying open for competitors, because that's the most important thing about the web, beyond its simplicity, it never locks its users in. That's a deal-stopper. As I've learned how WordPress works internally, I immediately saw that they embraced the concepts of the web not just as words, but in their practice. I never hit a wall that kept me out of doing something they already did. And they also appear to never break users and developers. That's one of the basic rules of the web, it's an unchanging thing, no one can break it because everyone is a guest. Anyway, there is only one web. Keep that in mind. Nothing exclusive about it. #Dan Knauss, one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada, wrote a post on their blog using WordLand. Here's a screen shot of what that post looked like when he was editing it. That's all you need to see to understand the role that WordLand plays. It's a pretty self-describing product. #
A great scene from The West Wing. Use your imagination, something similar is probably happening right now.#
People talk about "regime change" as if the only regime that could change is the one in Iran.#
Note to linkblog readers: I just flipped a switch and am now using WordLand to do the linkblog. Today's links are good, but the ones from prior days were mainly test posts. They will scroll off in a few days, and it'll be as it always has been. Still diggin. #
One more thing about the linkblog, it no longer cross-posts to social media sites. I want to see if I miss having the links there. It also won't have the limits. Maybe it'll be better if my accounts are a bit more quiet. Also the RSS feed is in a new location, I want to wait a bit to make sure it works before publicizing the URL. #
- I'm keynoting the WordCamp Canada conference in October in Ottawa. It's the first conference I've attended since before the pandemic. #
- The timing is ideal, and the location is significant. As an American, I don't want to try to attract people from around the world to a meeting in my country. Right now, I wouldn't come here if I didn't live here. #
- I'm also not happy with the tech industry of the US. I'd like a fresh start, a return to our roots, with the assumption that the people control their destiny and the role of developers is to give them to the tools to try out new ideas. #
- With WordLand I've created a product for writers, filling a need that's been there since the beginning of the web, using the practices in writing tools we learned in the 80s. It doesn't have the artificial limits imposed by Twitter et al. I think they're senseless. So we're going to blow that door wide open. No character limits. Simple styling. Links. Editable. #
- And it's also a product for developers. There's no lock-in anywhere in this stack. So you can make a different style of editor. Or play with new ways to view timelines.#
- I wanted to take discourse in a different direction too. A good design for the social web shouldn't require intense moderation. The reward for spammers is practically nil. Also, it'll be good for small groups in a way that Twitter et al never have been. #
- So far I haven't invented any new formats. We're building on what works now. WordPress is a remarkably deep product, so deep it could be used as operating system. and that's exactly how I've chosen to view it and it works incredibly well. Some of what we're building on is based on work I did with Joseph Scott of Automattic in 2009, believe it or not.#
- And as a bonus we get a great bridge into ActivityPub, from the great work Automattic is doing in bridging WordPress to ActivityPub. Think about it and you'll see how connections in and out of WordPress can facilitate a lot of interop, not just via RSS, but any format that comes along that people want to use. #
- We'll have a lot to talk about in October! #
- More on the vision for WordLand and RSS. #
- Imagine that WordLand is the editor of a twitter-like system built around RSS. It saves your writing to WordPress, where it is published on a website and via RSS. You don't have to use WordLand or WordPress, because RSS is an open format. Any editor that generates RSS is part of the network. Designed to be simple. #
- All that's missing is a timeline viewer, and that's what I'm working on now. It's coming together pretty nicely, imho. Not an easy project, though on the surface it looks like it should be. Also there's nothing proprietary about my timeline viewer. There could be a thousand of them. Anyone who has written an RSS feed reader will have all the low-level bits they need. #
- Hoping to have all the connections working by the end of the summer. #
- Once done, it will be the completion of the vision for RSS as the foundation of the open social web, the place that all the open formats agree on, so we can get on with interop and say goodbye to lock-in. It can be done, I'm almost 100 percent sure of that now. Still have a little ways to go. As they say -- still diggin!#
Speak plainly. As Brent says, lessons not learnings. Keep it simple. This is one of the foundations of blogging, btw. "Try to write correctly."#
Just a guess, but the people doing the "ice" raids are not real police any more than the "doge" people are/were actually part of the US government. In this New Yorker podcast, they dug into what "doge" actually was/is. Some weren't actually Trump supporters, they just thought it would be interesting to be empowered to fix the government. They learned the government doesn't work the way they thought it did. Spending is way up over the years, but number of government employees has stayed flat. It has already been largely privatized. Tangentially they appear to have found some things actually worth fixing. Tech culture isn't just the billionaires, far from it. There's a lot of hippie ethics in there too, you just have to look past the money, which seems too much work for some/most journalists. But The New Yorker tends to do this well, btw, sometimes. 😄 #
I read through the QuickDraw API summary from 1985. For me it was like someone who built applications of electricity, going back to see Edison's workbench before there was an industry. It was so seminal. It would never work in today's architectures, almost everything was global. There were five color constants, white, black, gray, ltGray, dkGray. You could see the whole archtecture in just a few pages. It wasn't bloated yet. And the best thing was there was the screen memory. Not hidden. If you didn't like the way QuickDraw worked, you could go around it. It was an idea I only ever used on the Apple II, it was imho Woz's big contribution, for me coming from Unix it was incredible to have so much power. On the Mac it showed up as a variable in a high level language, on the Apple II, you had to know the physical address, but in both cases, when you stored a bit in the memory it showed up on the screen. We never saw anything like that on the previous generation of machines, IBM mainframes and Digital minis. Someday someone will go through all this and see how it evolved. These pages are a tiny but hugely significant slice. Maybe with next year's ChatGPT. #I had an experience like the one Paul Simon described on Colbert last night. I was at the Apple Store on 14th St in NYC to pick up a new phone I had pre-ordered, lined up with some much younger folks who asked if I knew what was new on the phone. I said I wasn’t sure, so I asked if they knew. They all agreed the coolest thing was called “pod casting.” They said it slowly to be sure I could understand. They said it was great, it was like radio, but you could get it from the web, and there was always lots of new stuff. "What will they think of next," said the old man, impressed, nodding with respect. #
As you get older and see your friends of 30, 40, even 50 years -- you realize how silly this all is. I see them and I see an old person, but I know who they are inside. The old "don't judge a book by its cover" adage probably wasn't coined by a younger person. 😄#
Until further notice dissent is an act of patriotism, support of and belief in our country.#
- Bill Atkinson died two weeks ago today. #
- I was explaining to a friend why he was so important. Most people who know of him know about MacPaint and Hypercard, both were fantastic contributions to the evolution of personal computers. But underneath all that he created a layer of the Macintosh OS called QuickDraw, which was a core innovation of the Mac, its graphic system. Every piece of software that ran on the Macintosh ran on top of QuickDraw.#
- Here's what QuickDraw is. Software could do things at the pixel level, a dot so small it's barely visible to the eye. What you're seeing on the screen is made up of collections of those dots, forming lines, boxes, ovals and text, and later page layouts, beautiful photography, and the text you're reading right now. The software that does all that, on the earliest Macs, is called QuickDraw. (Later a successor called QuickTime made the dots move and added sound, and now we have streaming.)#
- QuickDraw is great. #
- That's the thing. You could tell from the API that the designers really understood the tech. It wasn't the first time this had been done. And either Atkinson did it himself, working on it for years, or he "stole from the best" -- probably a lot of both. The prior art came from Xerox in Palo Alto, and the experience came from being a hard-working dedicated hacker who didn't give up until it was done. That's like saying if he were a basketball hero, he was like Bill Russell or Steph Curry. We don't talk about our accomplishments that much in tech, on a personal level, we have an idea that Steve Jobs made the Mac, but it was really created by developers, designers, graphic artists, writers and application developers. Like Bill Atkinson.#
- I spent many years building on his work, and many more years wishing I still was. He made a contribution, and that's, imho, pretty much the best you can say for any person's life. #
- Thanks Bill. 😄#
- PS: For programmers, here's a summary of the QuickDraw API.#
- I had a conversation on Bluesky with a writer saying she didn't have much use for ChatGPT, though she had tried it. #
- I wanted to see if I could open a door, suggesting that next time there was an problem using a computer, that she bring the question to ChatGPT. #
- I think that's good advice for anyone who hasn't seen how useful these are as tools. You can use it like a search engine. What comes back answers your question. With Google you'd have to read through docs that are meant to cover every angle, but the AI bot zeroes in on the issue you're dealing with. And the writing on ChatGPT is better than what you would get on a random web page explaining a technical concept. #
- Passkeys#
- Previously I had tried to approach passkeys to get an idea of how I should use them, but never grasped the big picture. I just didn't understand what they were doing, but I understood it was about authentication. A hardware approach to identity, that much I got. How it worked and how I would use it did not click. #
- And then earlier this week, an essential site that I use infrequently, required using a passkey. When I had set it up a few months ago, as part of a bigger develolpment task, I had no idea what I was doing, and eventually bailed out, and left it unable to get back into the system, which happened on Sunday. By default the browser, Chrome, had previously connected it to my Pixel 9 Pro. There was a record of the connection being used for a variety of other services, but the one I needed was not there. This was after a full day of trying to debug it from the other side. I now have a lot more info about how passkeys work, I won't be able to say I know enough until I've re-established the connection. #
- I know a lot of readers of this site understood passkeys without anyone having to piece it together for them. I have never been one of those people. Just the way my mind works, it's why I'm a good person to test software, I get lost easily. #
- All this is to say -- think of ChatGPT as a technical assistant with broad knowledge and patience. That's where the real power is imho. #
- If there were a Joe Rogan of the left, he would tell you to stfu and vote for Cuomo for mayor of NYC. #
- NYC is a special place, like the Knicks are a special NBA team. #
- And btw, Cuomo, like Trump, is from Queens. #
- PS: The Joe Rogan of the left will be from Queens too. :-)#
- PPS: Queens doesn't have an Empire State Building, and they tore down Shea Stadium. So the Unisphere from the last World's Fair will have to do. But Queens is probably the most ethnically diverse place in the world. Think about that for a minute and how the fight for the soul of the US will be fought in Queens. #
- PPPS: I come from Jackson Heights and Flushing. #
In a year or two it will be possible to create a perfect TV version of any person. No longer can you say any person has to die eventually and go away. And we can have anyone back we want. #
I figured that yesterday's army march in DC would have caused clashes with the police in more places than it did, perhaps due to false flag attacks "from the left" at one of the many No King Day parades around the country. I thought this was the moment when it would all melt down. America's Reichstad Fire. If it were an episode of Mission Impossible or Batman, it would definitely have gone that way. I bet there were plans hatched on open chat channels between various Cabinet members and their families, and probably Elon Musk via an interpreter, to coordinate. I was also surprised there weren't any Tesla Cybertrucks in yesterday's parade. I guess the honeymoon is really over. Anyway, they had to have had a plan, but I keep forgetting this is not Generalissimo Trump, rather it's TV President "Taco" Trump. I think they had a plan and he lost his nerve at the last minute. Instead, the Maga in Minnesota lit a different fuse, assassinating the speaker of the state house. That's a line that hadn't yet been crossed, but you knew the day would come. It's here. #When Trump was on trial in NYC he begged for support from his base, no one showed up. The cops prepared for rallies that never showed up.#
BTW, this piece in the NYT has a bit of wisdom that I had not considered because I don't listen to Joe Rogan it would never occur to me. He's relaxing white noise, chatting in the background while you play a game or write a blog post or text message on your phone, or just think about something unrelated. I forgot that mode of media consumption. I'm always on the hunt for that kind of content. That's why sports games are so good. You can almost completely tune out, knowing they'll replay the best stuff. #- Reminds of a meeting we had a Berkman in the early days of podcasting. Most of the faculty were of course not on board with what we were doing, possibly believing that it threatened public radio (didn't turn out that way at all, they made incredibly good use of podcasting). One of the guys from PRX which was also incubating there at the time, said at me in a challenging way -- You get the best info from public radio! Right? I thought for a minute and realized this was a good question. No, I said, it's relaxing, I can tune out while I'm driving or walking around town. Loud groans. But it's so true. Now it's great when there's a TV series that really catches your attention, I love that too, but most of my media-ingesting time is with white noise, background relaxation. The world is still okay when the background noise on MSNBC are still on the air between the ever more disgusting ads for diseases I probably will never get.#
- There must be a better way. #
- It's like the canaries in a coalmine. When they go off the air that's when you really have to start worrying! #
- BTW, PRX was a good idea. Brilliant actually. Distribute the content from the public radio sources that generate too much to the ones in less populated areas where they don't generate enough. Podcasting blew that up -- but PRX adjusted their approach, and became a distributor of podcasting. That's an entrepreneur's approach. The were able to pivot and continue to make a contribution to this day. #
- I often wonder how we missed the opportunity to build a great media incubator at Harvard in the 00s. We were right there, and the backer of Berkman wanted entrepreurial projects, I found out at the reunion two summers ago. We had it, were there, if only.. Heh when you get to be my age there's lots of that. #
- Also I wonder how I missed the potential of WordPress all those years. Ships passing in the night. But we're there now, so..#
- If you're a regular reader of my blog you know I put images in the right margins of pieces. I get an idea then I go scouting around using search to find the image that fits. #
- Today I was looking for an image of an army General. #
- i'd like a painting style image of an american general in world war ii timeframe standing on a white background, full body from shoes to helmet, lots of medals, angry determination on his face. as if it were a portrait. #
- This is what I got, and it's perfect.#
