So proud -- Doc Searls wrote this beautiful blog post with WordLand. If I have my way blogging is going to come all the way back and then zooooom out from there. Still diggin! #
Web isn't just a brand, it's also a noun and a verb. "I web you."
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- I found the TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick about being a democracy blog disturbing because imho it should have been about democracy at least since 2017, when it was clear that Twitter had just elected a president of the United States. That was a clear strong signal that tech and democracy were tightly connected. #
- At the time I tried to raise the alarm, in tech and in finance, that a Republican could buy Twitter for $12B, and that was a cheap price considering the value of the presidency in a tech entrepreneur's hands.#
- My experience in Silicon Valley goes back to the late 70s, so I have a pretty good understanding of the personality of tech entrepreneurs.#
- My blog, Scripting News, has been about democracy since inception, in 1994, though it has primarily been about technology. I got the same complaints that I should stick to tech, but I didn't see a line of separation. The stakes were large then, but now they're much larger and as Masnick notes, impossible to ignore. #
- In the mid-90s there was not much of a debate whether the First Amendment applied to the web, the consensus was that it did not! The NYT didn't defend the 1st A on the web, and Congress passed a law saying the 1st A didn't apply and a Democratic president, Clinton, signed the law. That was a pretty clear signal. (We were saved by a Federal appeals court, otherwise who knows what we'd be doing now.)#
- In tech, every generation thinks they're seeing a problem for the first time. This is almost never true. It's like anything else, we're iterative, going over the same issues again and again, and we have a chance to wake up at any point and learn from our mistakes and not repeat the previous cycle, but it seems we never do.#
- Most important is that we work together and share what we learned. But first you have to be aware that there is history. You know the famous line about people who "cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."#
- We have great historians working here, and TechDirt is more famous than Scripting News is now. It would be a shame if the historians overlooked the historic connection between tech and democracy because they weren't aware it was documented much earlier than 2025. And btw -- don't miss that Google et al would like to deprecate the archive of the early web. No one is paying attention to that problem, and it's another way history is lost. The wisdom of the Google people forcing this on the rest of us is very much like the DOGE bros in DC today. #
We need a new kind of social network designed to run an effective response to fascism. So far all we have are profit centers for billionaires and would-be billionaires.#When I ask a personal question on one of the AI bots, all of a sudden on Facebook I'm getting ads about what I asked about. It could be a coincidence, but it's happened a few times, on more than one system. And I'm a paying customer on all of them.
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People who criticize Dems for weak opposition at the SOTU are not hypocrites only if they said before the event what they would do. I was glad not to have to choose. I think in the end they did what made sense to each one individually. The range of response by the Dems was much broader than the Repubs. We should be thankful they haven't capitulated, as so many have, esp in what we used to think of as journalism.#
One thing to be grateful for, Trump didn’t invite any of the Jan 6 rioters back to the Capitol for his speech.#
Watch out for people who celebrate your freedom while profiting from your enslavement.#
I'm trying to get ChatGPT to not assume I have the same abilities as it has. You can't dump a huge amount of code at me and expect me to quickly see what changed, that's not how human intellect works, but this is something computers are extremely good at. I told my bot that it would work a lot better if they just told me what to change. I said this: "I have a lot of experience being a human being and working with other humans, and all your clients as far as I know are human." In other words, be concise and direct. This is what it said in response. "That’s a sharp observation, and I appreciate the insight. I'll keep focusing on clarity, directness, and being actually helpful rather than just dumping information. If I ever seem to be leading you down a non-optimal path, feel free to call it out!" Note how concise the response was. More advice for the bot. Help your human understand. I think maybe eventually we may be their pets. Try scratching behind the ears. On the other hand, to my human friends, do not depend on the strategies they choose. They will never on their own question the path they took. It may not be the optimal one, but they'll keep going down it. It's up to you to say nah this isn't the way I want to go, and they will always respect that. It's not like HAL in 2001. I've sometimes wasted whole programming session going in the wrong direction assuming my bot was good at this. None of them are, as far as I can tell. #The single most important thing about what Musk is doing is that it is Musk that is doing it. Not elected, not accountable to anyone, and the only way we know what he's doing is from the aftermath. We play no role in his choices. Plus, he would be our last choice if we were in the market for a crazy despot to ruin our country. He wasn't born or educated here, and thus has very little idea of who we are and thus what the people he's firing do.#
Remember when watching the speech tonight, if you are watching, what our Capitol was like on that infamous day. The guy speaking, the guy up there on the podium, he did that. That's who he is. And where is right now, that's where it happened. Takes a lot of nerve to return to the scene of his greatest crime, so far. #Another question about tonight. Where will Elon be? In the seat usually occupied by the VP or the Speaker? Will he make faces at the camera or interrupt Trump? #
The news should always report whether a bit of news is a financial plus or minus for Trump as in does this thing make him richer or poorer. That way you can zero in on the "why" of everything. #
Idea for SNL. A special episode of Law and Order where the cops arrest someone for being disrespectful to Trump,. The prosecutors debate among themselves if they have to do this, no one quits, they don't feel good about it but they prosecute, being assured by the District Attorney it's the right thing to do. When there are objections judge rules in favor of the government most of the time, but wants to show balance so once or twice rules in favor of the defense, but it doesn't matter, when the judge gives instructions to the jury he says basically the only option is to convict, or so it seems that's what he's saying and dutifully, the jury convicts. There are sentencing standards, provided by the DOJ so the judge sentences the accused to life at hard labor. Back in the studio at 30 Rock the audience isn’t sure if they should laugh, slowly realizing it’s not meant to be funny, the skit fades out to a commercial break.#
If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.#- Pamela Short: The best revenge is none. Heal yourself, forgive, move on and don't become like those who hurt you.#
- There's a pragmatic reason for this. I found, when I was young and didn't know better, that getting revenge didn't just hurt the target, it also left me with a deep pain. When I did something to another person I was also doing it to myself. I found that the dark cloud of my harmful behavior would stay with me for a long time, maybe never going away. I would find it hard to forgive myself for what I did. So it's better to not try to get revenge, and let the pain of being hurt dissipate on its own.#
- I have a story to go with that. In the beginning of RSS, I had a partner and customer ask me at lunch if there were any circumstances when I would take the server we ran for them off the air. I said that's a weird question, but of course not. The very next day, his team announced they were taking over RSS, completely changing it, and the first I heard of it was in the public announcement. Later that same day, my brain boiling over in anger at being treated so poorly, I did eventually land on the idea of just taking his server offline. And then I laughed that he knew I'd get to that, and wanted to plant a little marker there for whatever reason, I don't know. But no I didn't take his server off the air. He may be a bastard, but he did pay for the service so his server stays up. And two years later, his project a failure, I came out with RSS 2.0 and that was the end of that. It wasn't revenge, it was just picking up the ball in the playground and restarting the game that they had caused to stop. We went on and RSS did a lot of good work.#
The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there. #
My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?#
What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021. #
Nice to see Doc Searls using WordLand. He's been an early user of every writing tool I've written for the web going back to the mid-late 90s.#
I'm also interested in social networks and RSS and have written a lot about that in the context of WordLand, because it generates RSS, it can connect to any app that understands RSS. But don't get confused that WordLand is somehow a twitter-like silo. There are already too many of those. I want something much simpler and I believe more useful and less spammy and abusive -- a social network built around RSS. #
Like many other people I love Severance, esp this season, and esp the most recent episode. My favorite scene in the last episode took place at a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Severance podcast, about this episode, which you should definitely listen to if you like me love the show. They have an interview with Christopher Walken who plays Burt. Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that I learned in the podcast that the restaurant mentioned earlier is actually a famous Kingston restaurant that just re-opened after a long hiatus, so I've not yet had a chance to eat there, but I want to, Eng's. This, after learning that the diner that's in two scenes, one in each season, is the Phoenicia Diner, one of my favorite local eating places. #- Me as a grad student at UW-Madison in 1977 or so, programming on a Unix system, probably working on my first outliner. #
- Note that the terminal I was using had uppercase and lowercase letters. This was a big innovation! #
- I was using a PDP-11/45 to write in C. #
- See the comment thread from 2014 on Facebook.#
- I lived in a big house with 10 roommates. And as weird as it must seem from the point of view of 2025, I was the only one who used a computer. I would tell them all the time that we'd all use computers someday. They rolled their eyes and smiled. "There goes Dave again." The reason I was so sure was email and writing tools. #
People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of grief, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years. I wrote the other day that I feel like a time traveler, discovering WordPress 20 years after I left UserLand. I care that it's open source, but I care much more that it's open web esp after we've been so thoroughly dominated by feature-limited silos such as Twitter, Facebook and yes -- even Mastodon and Bluesky. Even if there's a theoretical way to do it, practically speaking we have to wait for their developers to implement the features we want. Open source doesn't help there, but open web does. Matt puts the emphasis on the open source part, that's why it wasn't until very recently that I realized that open web is more important, to me at least. #An email arrived from the Social Security Administration entitled Help Us Slam the Scam. Explains how not to get scammed by people who want our checks. Wonder if they realized it applies equally to Elon Musk, richest man in the world, who wants to eat old people's cupcakes because, well I can't explain it.
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- I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of a death panel as described by Republican lawmakers as they fought the Affordable Care Act. I was surprised it was willing to do it.#
- According to the bot: "The concept of 'death panels' was a widely debunked political talking point used by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. It falsely suggested that government-run committees would decide whether individuals—especially the elderly or disabled—would receive life-saving care. #
- "I can generate an image depicting a grim, dystopian bureaucratic setting where a group of shadowy officials in suits are sitting at a long, dark table, stamping papers while an elderly patient looks on with concern. The room would have a cold, sterile look, with a looming clock symbolizing bureaucratic power over life and death."#
- For all kinds of marketing materials..#
- I posted something sad on Bluesky last night. It was short, but the thinking behind it wasn't. Here's the quote:#
- It might be the last minute but we can still legally remove Trump, and objectively it’s the only thing that makes any sense.#
- I got two responses from Karoli Kuns, an early blogger, and editor at Crooks and Liars, a long-lived blog that if I recall correctly was started with software I wrote in 2002, so I feel some pride in helping in a small way to enable her accomplishments and contributions, which are long-lived and substantial. Both of her responses missed the sadness in my post, the reflectiveness, but rather did what a lot of arguing online devolves to, showing someone else that their thinking is wrong. I couldn't think straight I was so angry, so I just said no, I'm not going to do this. Lots of experience trying to explain myself in little 300-character bursts, there's no reason to add to the grief of the moment. #
- But this morning I opened up my Bluesky window and started typing. What came out was far too long to post there, and even a screen shot doesn't fit in the space allotted, so my only choice is to blog it and post a link on Bluesky. I hope she reads it, because we're not out of options, and as I say in this story, we should be working together, and as far as I know we are not. I say this to everyone I think is making a contribution, my belief that if we can steer our efforts so they are complementary we can square each others' power. It's imho the beginning of our way out of this situation. #
- Anyway, this is what I wrote. (Note when writing this stuff I tend not to capitalize, a lazy habit I have developed. I decided not to edit that here, just to leave it as it was written.)#
- karoli -- there's a lot to say about this, and i don't like arguing on social networks, and it was late, and i didn't feel like getting into it with you.#
- anyway i wrote what i wrote not as a plan but rather a note that we're passing a line, over which there soon won't be any recourse. we probably are already over the line, but if by some miracle the repubs saw clearly that this was the last chance and enough of them decided to do what so far they have been unwilling to do, there would be a fight. i wasn't saying i thought it was likely, which is what your rebuttals were rebutting, i was just sharing a sad observation that i had made earlier in the day when i was thinking this through. i like to do that because it's part of my creativity. sometimes you think of the ideal answer, and it leads you back to an acceptable answer -- in software design and in writing (which is what i do pretty well with lots of experience).#
- what was really frustrating is that i think you and i should be collaborating. giving me grief over something so ridiculous was about 180 degrees opposite of where i think we should be. that we are still doing this to each other, gives an idea of how we got here. the democrats pick on classes of people, sometimes destroying their lives, and big surprise -- a lot of them vote for the other party. i think you think you can dis me the way you did because of my gender, or age, or race, or who the fuck knows. and for all i know you were just having a bad moment and decided to share it with me for some reason having nothing to do with what was bothering me. #
- karoli -- i think we have to bend over backwards to be kind to each other. we're all going through a terrible time, in ways that may not be obvious. i certainly am, and i don't want to share it with you, but it comes on top of the crazy uncertainty of the political world. #
- anyway that's my response, and maybe now you can see why, as the day was winding down and i was watching some basketball on tv, i didn't feel like getting into it with you.#
- the struggle isn't over -- they had antiwar demonstrations in russia, a country that has the kind of government ours is about to become. and the sooner we accept the new reality and get smart about it, and i'm not talking about the repubs, i'm talking about us, the shorter the nightmare will be imho.#
- An afterthought -- the reason it makes sense for the Repubs to join us in removing Trump is the turn away from democratic Europe and toward the authoritarians. This just happened, and it's shocking. We don't even know how to think of ourselves. If I were a Republican, I would think my world just turned upside down. They didn't believe it would come to this, as far as I can tell. So it may be a time when real change is possible. We've become so fatalistic that we couldn't even recognize such an opportunity. #
- The Atlantic asked in a story yesterday what a liberal tea party movement would look like. They're doing it too. We should create an American tea party. We're so addicted to divides we can't see when we're doing it ourselves. #
- And btw, having explained all that was overlooked in my simple idea, if we managed to remove Trump, what part of your mind thinks we wouldn't also remove Vance? Geez Louise. 😄#
WordLand user: "Does it make a difference if I can just dash off a short note without all the other bullshit that goes with publishing online." Yes, it should be as easy to take a note in WordPress as it is in Bluesky. I didn't buy that assumption that WordPress has to be heavy machinery for writers. What if I just want to write something quickly and get back to the other thing I was working on. Also the edit box in WordLand starts out the size of a tiny little text box, but grows as you add more words. You are allowed to keep going. No character limit. #
Just saw a report that styling isn't working in WordLand in latest versions of Safari. We're using MediumEditor to do the editing. Did a quick query in Claude.ai and there do appear to be some compatibility issues with Safari. A request that people actually report these problems in the repo, via the Support link in the main menu, otherwise it's hit or miss. Thanks. #
Since Bluesky gave us the ability to limit responses to people I follow, the amount of spam/abuse has been reduced to a trickle. People can still comment, by quoting my post. But they want to troll, to gain exposure to my followers. Helping promote my ideas is not their idea of fun. #
Would have preferred if, when replacing Joy Reid, MSNBC had hired someone in Detroit or Miami, or St Louis or Dallas. Or a different city each day. Put yourself where the people are. The drumbeat: Enough is enough. #
- Aziz Poonawalla wrote a review of WordLand. I'd like to respond.#
- First, I'd like to say I put a lot of thought into this product, so it is the way it is for good reason.#
- I'm trying to escape from the limits of twitter-like systems. I want a writing world where we get the features of textcasting. So your belief that the product has to support Bluesky and Mastodon cross-posting would be like saying an EV should only run on gasoline. The whole point is to not limit ourselves to the features of Bluesky. #
- On the other hand, I'm not saying limits in software aren't good. A product is as much defined by what it can't do as with what it does. All feed reading software has to strip large amounts of HTML from what it finds in feeds, because RSS doesn't place any limits what you can use. So we strip off all the HTML except (in FeedLand) simple styling and links. And so to fit into FeedLand and as a suggestion to other feed reading software, I've said my limit is Markdown. I think we can all support that. I ran the idea by my former colleague Brent Simmons, who does NetNewsWire, and he was quickly convinced, and plans to support it in his product. This is a way to get new stuff happening in the RSS world. Start with supporting the source:markdown element in your feeds and in your feed reader. #
- You say there's no use-case -- but there is a use-case, just not for you which is fine. #
- The typical user is a writer who publishes to WordPress. As passionate as I am about the limits of twitter-like systems, I am also feel that WordPress has never adequately served the needs of writers, and what a shame that is. WordLand, imho, is exactly what writers need. Get all the other non-writing stuff out of my way. Let me clear a space for iterating over something I publish to the web. Give me a menu with all my documents, so I can quickly make a change. These are the basic principles we implemented successfully in Radio UserLand in 2002. They were available for anyone in the WordPress world to copy, but for some reason they didn't. It's so weird to me, I'm like a time traveler who has come 20 years in the future to find out they lost the purpose of a product like WordPress. It's supposed to be a place writers love to come to do their writing. I think when writers discover WordLand they will see a product designed by someone who is one of them. It's just a beginning, there's lots more to do. I take the long term view, a road to anywhere begins with one step.#
- Back to Bluesky and Mastodon -- because they both support outbound RSS, we will be able to include stuff written there in our collections of published feeds. I fully intend to integrate features from FeedLand in WordLand. That's why the names are so similar. 😄#
- It's good that you like micro.blog, this isn't in the way of it and it isn't in the way of WordLand. I'm in regular contact with Manton, and if his product grows, I win because he's got the right model. He's still trying to work with the limited platforms and I, again, gave up. That right there defines the two products. #
- Sometimes giving up is the right thing to do. The first time i gave up btw was in 2017, when I stopped trying to cross-post from Scripting News to Medium, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It was liberation. I had come to hate my writing because I couldn't use links, and I couldn't edit or have more than 140 chars. What a miserable existence, and I love writing, and I had to make a choice. I'm doing it again, but now have made the investment in meeting people with the kind of writing tool they expect and want. That was the same thing that worked so well with Radio. #
- My real goal was to not need to do any of this! I would have much preferred if Bluesky had decided to break out of the tiny little box Twitter put them in. Then I could do all my writing there. And I wish WordPress had a team of developers working on making the product the best for writers in addition to programmers and designers, but they didn't. Should I give up there? Maybe. Maybe we were destined to give up on the web as a writer's platform. But I saw so much potential there in 1994 when I started working here exclusively. That potential is still very much there, you just have to believe, and against all odds, I do still believe. One more time, let's give it a try.#
- Anyway, it's okay if you don't use it, but I wanted to disagree with some of your conclusions. :-)#
- PS: I wrote every word on this page, not an AI bot, in case you were wondering. 😄#
- This started out as a post on the support group, but it became a post that needed to be on the blog. #
- The groundrules here are -- if you see a problem in the support group and you can help with it, please give it a try and speak up. #
- It's important to develop a community here if the product is going to gain users, and become solid for all people and achieve all its potential for blazing a new trail. If it's just me, the results are predictable and not good -- I'm one old man here, with limited capability. The product still has issues, so there is still plenty of work to do, but I think the result will be worth it. #
- The goal is to bootstrap something new -- a social network without all the problems of Twitter et al. Ultimately the limits they impose on writers are unacceptable. I've waited for them to fix these problems for 18 years now, and I've come to see, amazingly, they don't see them as problems. They are happy to have writers paste images of their writing instead of the words themselves. Or break their writing up into 300-character chunks that are basically impossible to read and a bitch to write. And no titles, no editing, no style, no links. And they call it the web? (End of editorial.)#
- If this works, it will blaze a trail for new products on both sides, reading and writing. We've got reading covered from a technical standpoint with FeedLand, and some good UI, I want to integrate them with WordLand. And, as with everything based on RSS, you can replace my stuff with others, easily. Unlike the twitter-like systems, which are monolithic, and rely on federation (which imho doesn't actually work) to make it possible for components to be replaced. They should have all started with RSS and slowly and carefully added features without sacrificing the replaceability of components. Instead they decided, imho unwisely, to try to reinvent RSS. The result is confusion and stagnation.#
- I would also like to encourage people with WordPress experience to help come up with a template that accomadates WordLand sites in a canonical form. Makes sure WL's idea of a category is a good match with WP's. I am a very casual WordPress user as you can see from my test site. I like the template, but it has errors in it. I don't plan on becoming a WordPress expert, there are so many of you, and I have my plate full with all kinds of other stuff where I'm the only expert. #
- I chose WordPress for the same reason I chose MP3 and XML for podcasting in 2001. There's absolutely no question it's the consensus platform for web publishing. There are others, but the one that's most deeply installed is WordPress. So many people know how to make it work. It's a 20+ year thing, and they've done an excellent job of maintaining compatibility. Stuff we developed that worked with WordPress in the 00s still works today. That probably has a lot to do with it being the consensus. #
- Anyway, it's encouraging to see how many people are trying WordLand. Now I expect there will be lots of problem reports. It's an important time when help is needed.#
- Dave#
WordLand opened yesterday for everyone to use. There was a deal-stopping bug reported last night, fixed provisionally, then for real this morning. Prevented new users from getting started. Really embarassing. If you have trouble, please report. There's a link for Support in the main menu. WordLand is designed to be the kind of editor you use in a social app like Bluesky or Mastodon, but with most of the features of textcasting. #WordLand is where we start to boot up a simple social net using only RSS as the protocol connecting users. Rather than wait for ActivityPub and AT Proto to get their acts together. I think we can do it with feeds and start off with immediate interop without the complexity of federation. I call it the feediverse. It's not a joke, although it may incite a smile and a giggle. And that's ok.#
Jay Rosen started a list of journalism sources on Bluesky. John Spurlock wrote an app that generates an OPML subscription list using Bluesky's API. It will enable us to recreate a world that Jay put together, outside of Bluesky. From AT Proto to OPML and RSS. #
We aren't prepared for what's coming.#
We should be declaring independence from both political parties. We have to get together with other citizens whose lives are going to be torn apart by what's happening, and the Dems are not at this time representing us. This is our government that is being overthrown. #
Something you hear from Democratic politicians and MSNBC hosts. "We know why Musk is cutting so much, it's to fund a huge tax cut for billionaires." They don't actually know that and I doubt it's true. Show me another example where Musk did anything to benefit anyone but himself? Why should he share the loot he's grabbing with other rich folk? What did they do to help? Nah I think it's all for him, with a taste going to the Trump and Putin families. He's going to use his new power to buy something else. The question is what? What else could he want? I imagine he wants all the money in the world not just the most. #- A note to designers of Bluesky as a platform.#
- I've been playing with adding metadata to posts in a thread. #
- As you can see the metadata, in the screen shot below, overwhelms the content in the post.#
- Wouldn't it be nice to have a set of templates to choose from, post types? Let designers be part of the platform.#
- Journalism is as usual writing news they could have written last year and should have if they weren't dreaming that somehow we'd escape End of Democracy 2.0. And we know how that turned out, about the same as Hillary's Emails. #
- Who is Elon Musk? Until I read his Wikipedia profile last week, I only had a vague idea. I wanted to know if he was actually raised in South Africa, when he left, and what influence it had on him. I'll let you read the article. We should be examining every nook and cranny of who this unelected guy who never was in a debate, or won a primary or an election, or had his background investigated, and remains untouched by any kind of examination. #
- His security detail was just deputized by the US Marshals Service. What next? Maybe they'll just give him control of the military and get on with it. You can see that's coming, maybe in March, or sooner. #
- Do you think he'd have any compunction against using the military against Americans? This isn't his country. So Americans probably mean nothing special to him. Since we played a role in the overthrow of their apartheid, probably the opposite. I wonder who or what he cares about. Has he ever answered a question without deflecting? Is there any reporter who could or would interview him? #
- If journalism were really doing their job seriously, they would report on this because this is what we're thinking. When will jouralism get that they are one of us, not above us? The sooner that light goes on, the better. #
- Here's a good story for one of fierce courageous reporters at the NY Times. Who should be more scared of what's coming? Blacks or Jews?#
- Can you imagine how livid developers of other AI platforms are that Musk gets exclusive access to all the private information stored in US government databases.#
- Imagine Bezos calling Trump.#
- "Hey I thought we were friends. I can send you another billion. 2 billion? 100 billion?" #
- "Call Elon, if he says it's OK I'll sign the order."#
- Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, OpenAI, etc etc.#
I'm starting to use the rewrite of my thread publisher on Bluesky. Here's an example. And here's the version of the thread without being broken up into 300-character chunks (you can get it by clicking in the metadata box below the text of the post). I don't like it. The software is as good as it can be, given the extreme limits of the twitter-like environment. I went all the way with this, but I'm not sure I'm going to release it. But I'm going to keep using it, and maybe I'll think of something that makes it fun or worthwhile, or maybe I'll just chalk it up to another learning experience. #Favorite part of the SNL50 show. Eddie Murphy impersonating Tracy Morgan, while standing next to him on Black Jeopardy. It's really hard to see the resemblance between today's Eddie and young Eddie, but there it was, the comic brilliance. Then they ask the real Tracy if they are related and he said he doesn't see it. #
In the Catskills, we've been getting so much snow this winter and super cold weather and huge winds. And Trump & Musk. A quadruple threat. #
Once again Maddow is must-watch destination TV this year. Keep on going. One thing to watch out for, Bluesky will disappoint you. Don't blame them when it happens, because they can't be as good as people think they are. They're a startup in a tough market. Sooner or later Musk is going to aim at them (maybe he already is) and they will have to seek refuge somewhere, and all big tech companies are bastards. There isn't one of them you can trust with your democracy. So keep that in mind, and when you see open billionaire-proof social networks rise up, give them a little the Rachel we love. #
I don't like social networks as they're currently configured. The idea that it's some kind of conversation -- no it really doesn't resemble a conversation. I would like to try a social network that didn't have the concept of replying to a post. Give each other a little more distance. It still would be a graph, people following other people, but you wouldn't be able to insert something into someone else's flow, which is where all the indecency comes from imho. Or let replies be only visible to the person it's in reply to, so you don't end up getting speeches under your posts. And so that people with a lot of followers don't bother reading anything that's related to what they wrote, and thus no new ideas can enter the flow. We've been doing this, the way we do it, since the inception of Twitter in 2006. For some reason the design of that network is considered sacred. I was a math major who studied combinatorics, specifically graph theory -- and the Twitter way of organizing people and discourse is just one of many ways people could be arranged. Predictably, the weird structure of Twitter is turning into the structure of our society. If we want to change things the fastest way might be to do another look at what Twiiter does and see if we can't intentionally make something that works better for whatever we think we should be doing with it, other than staring at the evil people on the other side and saying how evil they are (or hopeless, or woke or whatever bullshit the influencers have made up). And with that I wish you a good evening and note that tomorrow is another day. 😄#One more thing. I like watching Maddow nowadays. She seems unstuck. And she's talking straight to the Repubs, and not with resignation, with the idea that maybe finally enough is enough, and they might work with us to save what we can of this great country. Also like that Bernie Sanders is on the road campaigning in swing districts that are held by Repubs, to see if he can squeeze out a few defectors from the ranks of House Republicans. Very important, because the Repub margin there is only 3. Just have to flip 2. America has to start moving now, or it's going to take a long long time to come back from this. The sooner we all get that, and that we are part of it, the better things will turn out, imho.#
- I started out doing a week to strip blue.threadcenter down to its bones, for a fresh start, but then I started getting ideas, and decided to go for it. I have the time, and Bluesky is having moment after moment and these days I'm using it to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, though I do check Twitter, Threads and Mastodon a few times a day, but usually there's nothing for me in those places. Anyway I'll be pointing to this post from some of my experiments, so maybe nothing more interesting than this will appear here. #
- I just thought of a good example of a question you could bring to ChatGPT. Here's the prompt.#
- I'm thinking of driving from NYC to Jacksonville, FL. I want to do it in four days with stopovers in three places that have good places to ride a bike and a Citibike-style bike rental. Choose three places on the trip, I don't mind going out of my way.#
- It gave me three places to stop, Washington DC, Raleigh NC and Charleston SC. In each case it told me about the bike-sharing services and notable bike trails. #
A logical next question would be to ask it to find hotels in each place that are reasonably priced and near an interesting place to ride.#- It also offered information about weather considerations. It's not necessarily a great time of year for bike riding.#
- I'm not actually planning a trip south, I just used it as an example because I've done this trip a number of times and was curious how things had developed.#
- Another question I used to have when cross-country driving, where can I find a Starbucks not too far off the route I'm on. If you were plotting the progress of public information systems, AI is strictly on a continuum of services that have developed over the years that make information more accessible in the way you want it. It actually answers questions you have in the way you think of asking them. #
- Here's a link to the response. I've heard that sometimes people have trouble accessing these files. #
- If I were in charge of marketing for the Democrats: 1. I'd restart the online channel that Kamala Harris had that was shut down on Election Day. 2. I'd get out the message over and over about how things are going too fast, we need to slow it down, so we can consider what's happening. Who? The people. I know this will resonate with almost everyone in the US, no matter who they voted for. Stop I want to know how these changes will help or hurt me, my family, community. For Trump voters, it was fun to make my statement, but I'm afraid this is going too far. I think we can all relate to that. We aren't being represented here. #
- I asked Google Gemini to visualize what it feels like to be watching what's happening in the US from inside the US. This came close to capturing it, but it could have expressed the fear of it more clearly. Slow down, please, let us figure out what you're doing. #
- A simple idea, a quid pro quo.#
- If we want Democrats to support the Constitution, we have to demonstrate that we will support them. #
- We are the government of the US, Congress represents us. #
- We have been too passive. #
- But then, they have to include us in governing. #
- No more shutting off the connection after the election.#
- Seems like a fair deal.#
- One of the not-good things about Mastodon is that you can't moderate comments under your own posts. #
- If someone says something abusive, it's there for everyone to see, forever.#
- I've come to value the feature in Facebook that gives the author full discretion over what comments remain, to head off bad vibes. #
- I think of a post I write as my house, and I want people who visit to feel respected.#
- A turd in the middle of the living room is not respectful. #
We're diving head first into a world run by AI bots, before we've even begun to understand how to use them. #
The idea of a coup in the US is one we all presumably have a hard time thinking about. I sure do. It has never happened before. But it has happened now, and the group that is governing is doing it illegally, and is dismantling the country as quickly as they can, assuming someone will at some point try to stop them? Is that correct? What comes next? #Great quote from a favorite show. "He put the dick in contradiction." This is a show that doesn't often indulge in that kind of humor. I imagine they must've had a great time with it in the writer's room. Or was it ad-lib'd? And wtf does it mean?#
BTW, no one thought much about the threading structure we use on Bluesky. As far as I can tell it was copied from Twitter. It's not a very good structure. It encourages spam and abuse. You gotta wonder if the threading structure had evolved, or if there were more competition, different approaches to see what would happen, we might have avoided our meltdown with a better design.#
The way to get even is to win. A lot of people don't get that, and it's almost always their downfall. #
I’m not giving money to Democrats. I will give to campaigns that run hard-hitting ads telling the full truth about what Musk is doing now. I want to see the actual ads before I chip in, and will do so enthusiastically, but they can’t be anemic.#
The Dems don't do positioning. The Repubs run circles around Dems. They are masters at positioning. It's not hard, you just have to decide to do it. #
- Hypercard stacks were the equivalent of websites. #
- If it had been built around the Macintosh Toolkit, and had an API that fit in with Mac apps, there wouldn't be a web, we'd all be using Macs. Alas it was all on its own, didn't work with anything but itself. #
- A lot was lost because the Mac development model was far in advance of what existed on the web, and it was well-thought-out unlike the app model of the web, which is a hodgepodge of horribly designed modules that don't work well together. #
- I was a Mac developer at the time, so I know a lot about this moment of history. #
Anne Applebaum writing in the Atlantic says that people in the US feel like we're living in an occupied country. I get it. That's what it feels like to be in a Silicon Valley company that has been acquired by another Silicon Valley company, a subject I wrote about on Wednesday. I wish there was some way for us to communicate with each other about this, because I'm sure my description comes closer to the way Musk sees it, though they are very similar ideas. One of the defects of the social web is that we live in little bubbles and not much information is exchanged over bubble boundaries. So if anyone knows Applebaum, please send her a link to this post. Thanks. #Here's a two-minute demo of my new writing tool for Bluesky. This is quite a bit simpler than the last version, you log on directly to Bluesky, doesn't go through my server at all. This removes a whole layer of complexity for the user, and means a lot of people can use it without it having to scale up. Also made it simpler, more of a writing tool, closer to where I'd like this stuff to be when we have across-the-board textcasting support. Really focused on the flow for writers. #
If the US were a company, what would its market capitalization be?#
If you’re getting bummed about the news, remember tonight there’s another new episode of Severance to kvell about. #
Re-did the social media links at the bottom of each story page. Screen shot. Used to be just RSS and Linkedin. I got rid of Linkedin because I never use it. Added Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads. Debated whether to remove Twitter, but it is still a way to follow my posts, the ones that go out through the linkblog. A lot of people still use Twitter. Had to include the latest version of Font-Awesome, but since my story pages don't otherwise use FA, I figured nothing could break. Haha. ;-)#
New motto: Pissing in the wind for the good of mankind.#
I wonder what Kurt Vonnegut would have thought of twitter-like systems?#
- I've had an experience few people have had, and it's relevant to the way all of us feel right now. The experience: Being part of a Silicon Valley company that was acquired by another Silicon Valley company. I was the CEO. #
- I recognize the feeling, because Musk is acting as if he is the acquirer of a Silicon Valley company, and the company he has acquired in the USA. Or so he thinks. But the United States is not a Silicon Valley company where, you have departments and managers at every level, and each level must follow orders from the level above them. It doesn't work that way here. Deliberately. Very deliberately. #
- There never has been a Silicon Valley company that gives each employee the rights and responsibilities of an American citizen. We don't take orders except in very exceptional circumstances, and then with all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. That's why Musk and Trump are having so much trouble coming to grips with how this place works, because even the employees of the USA are voters and taxpayers and have rights that must be respected. That will be respected or all hell will break loose. #
- Anyway, back to Silicon Valley acquisitions. Up to the point when you, the former CEO, are now a VP, and must take orders from the CEO, you didn't have to take orders from anyone, not even your board of directors. The CEO of the tech company is a lot like a citizen of the US, until they aren't a CEO any longer and have to do the bidding of the actual CEO (which is who Musk thinks he is relative to the USA). This is why even MAGAs who love Trump (or really the idea of Trump) aren't going to put up with his bullshit. American citizens, rich or poor, old or young, LBGTQ or whatever -- we all are sovereign, ie we don't have to take orders from anyone, not even a supposed genius like Musk (sorry, but I am free to doubt his genius, something might take some getting used to by him). We don't take orders from him, or anyone else, except of course, as mentioned earlier under very special circumstances. #
- Back to the disconnect in the Mind of Musk. Now you're supposed to sit here, quietly, while he rips apart the team you carefully built, the people you formed into a family with all its strengths and dysfunction. The new CEO (Musk) sweeps in with no idea what they're fucking with, and they don't want to hear about it. Finally you have to quit after a short time because you can't be part of the disaster they're creating. And always is a disaster, and sometimes they can dig out of it as he has done with Twitter, as we've seen many SV companies have. But again, for the 18th time, the United States of America is not a Silicon Valley company.#
- What triggered it for me was the story about how Musk didn't know he had terminated all cancer research being done by the US. Surrounded by yes men, they never would have told him. And he didn't want to hear it from a founder (like a congressperson or the head of the NIH or the acting Treasury secretary). This is going to be repeated over and over until the acquirer writes off the investment or who knows. His experience comes from acquiring Tesla and Twitter, which while they were large organizations are nothing compared with the United States. #
- And ultimately the United States is going to chew up Musk and spit him out. We may be very damaged by the experience, but he will come out much worse than the country. Because we are not who he thinks we are. #
A note to users of feedland.org and feedland.com. We'll be turning the servers off sometime before the end of March. I haven't chosen the actual date yet. In the meantime, Please download a copy of your subscription list before the shutdown, it's incredibly easy. You can also run your own FeedLand. I started a thread on the support site if you have questions, remember the comment guidelines. I've learned a lot from the experience of running FeedLand this way, looking forward to trying some other configurations. 😄#If you depend on not considering the unthinkable in 2025 then you aren't really thinking.#
If only political reporters had the same knowledge of their subject as sports reporters do. #
- First, the New Republic is beginning to think like Musk and Trump. But they have to think a bit more and ask how does this all tie together? #
- Remember you have to consider events that would normally be unthinkable. And believe that Trump isn't actually president of the United States in any sense of what that meant in the past. He is sitting in the seat of the president. He has the powers of the president, but he does not represent the interests of the United States. #
- He's going to use the US Treasury and the power of the dollar as the reserve currency, to buy himself a few toys to play with, like Canada, Greenland, Gaza and Panama, to start. #
- To illustrate, here's the text of an imaginary conversation between Trump and Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada. #
- Trump: Hey Justin, how's it going?#
- Trudeau: You know, not so good.#
- Trump: I get it. Have you considered my offer?#
- Trudeau: Yes. Either we surrender and become the 51st state, or you won't honor Canadian deposits in the US Treasury. #
- Trump: That's right my friend.#
- Trudeau: I don't see how we have any choice.#
- Trump: I'm afraid that's correct. #
- Trudeau: Semi-sarcastic: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and Canada. #
- Trump: You can leave out the Canada part. #
- Trudeau: You can't blame me for trying.#
- Trump: Have a nice day. 😀#
- And then this scene from Goodfellas demonstrates what's next for the former independent country of Canada. #
- 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. #
