Wouldn't it be smart for Kia or Rivian or some other EV competitor of Tesla's to name their car Bluesky and have it only come in blue?#
Another idea. One of Tesla's competitors could offer a trade-in, where they commit to recycling all the parts of your Tesla, so you are actually taking a Tesla off the road. And for a few extra dollars they can send you a scrapbook of your old Tesla being lovingly taken apart suitable for RT'ing.#
- The most depressing moment of Trump 1.0, for me, was leaving the local supermarket, after seeing the kind of empty shelves you see in third world countries with broken or non-existent economic systems. This was when it sunk in how far the United States had fallen. #
But somehow those of us who survived Covid could relax on January 20, four years ago -- which was also coincidentally the day I got my first Covid vaccination -- the nightmare was over. We could relax for at least a few months before paying the price that was sure to come when we cleaned the mess that Trump had created with his January 6 insurrection. The question was will there be a war over this? Well, I reasoned, as I assumed the incoming president would, that it's better if you have to fight a civil war to do it when the military is responsible to you. But then a few months turned into a couple of years, and nothing happened. No indictments. He hadn't been arrested. I thought geez if we had done something like what he did, the scale of it, the audacity, the terror, my god how could he be left to walk around as if nothing had happened. I figured there must be a reason and our president had a plan. He didn't. Neither did journalism. When Trump ran for re-election he got the consideration any major party candidate would get from the press. As he is getting now as a newly sworn-in president. But we know his oath is meaningless. #- So that day when the shelves were empty is now only the second worst day, and yesterday I was still living with the respite of a four year trance of normality, as if all it took was belief that somehow we'd get through this. But now it's so depressing. I feel both like dying and living at the same time. I know many others feel this way. I don't imagine too many of the people who voted for Trump are full of joy right now. #
- If we get another shot at cleaning this up, we must not let that opportunity slip by. #
I spent a few days designing and implementing the protocol that allows WordLand to be the writing tool for Bingeworthy, thus giving it a real writing and publishing function, instead of the usual ridiculous tiny little textbox. Today I'm going to make it work for writing and reading actual reviews for shows I have opinions about. I've always wanted to do this in a way that it's not just scattered into the wind, to rely on Google to find it again. Now I'll be able to scatter it, and also have it maintained in context, where it can help me remember what I liked about a show, and why perhaps I gave it an excellent rating when some parts really sucked. This was something that was missing in Bingeworthy, I knew it -- just didn't know how to make it work. Now I think I have it working.#- Here's the flow:#
- In Bingeworthy, I rate a program. Then I realize I want to say more, I want to write a review that explains the rating.#
- I click on the Review in WordLand button. The bingeworthy client asks for a token from the bingeworthy server. The token is is part of the database record for the user's rating of the program being displayed. #
- The button switches me over to WordLand using window.open, along with a package of data that gives the editor all the info it needs to update the post when published. It's worth clicking the link to see the data involved. #
- In WordLand, I see a dialog confirming that I want to write a review for Bingeworthy. If I approve, it creates a new WordLand draft. #
- I write the first draft of the review and when I'm ready I publish it. The protocol supports revisions, btw.#
- When the user publishes, in WordLand it builds a URL with tv.bingeworthy.org as the destination. The post body has a JSON object with title and content properties, both of which can contain markdown. The URL params contain the id of the program, screenname of the user, the token that authorizes updating the comment for the rating of this program by this user. #
- On tv.bingeworthy.org, if the token agrees with the one in the database, it updates the comment field of the rating, #
- Then tv.bingeworthy.org sends a websocket message to the author, in Bingeworthy, so they can update the display of the rating for the user, if they still have the program displayed on their screen.#
- I've done these kinds of protocols before, for example, menu sharing on the Mac in the 90s and rssCloud on the web. These are increasingly complicated things, because they require secure coordination between a circle of programs, and allow choice in each of the nodes. #
- There's nothing hard-coded about the protocol only working for this pair of programs. #
- It also supports updating. And the post is also available in WordPress and RSS, so even though it's editable in a great editor, and displayed in a collection of similar writing, it is also fully scattered into the wind. And there's no need for federation, it's just a protocol. We don't even rely on the apps using the same identity system.#
- A thread I started on the WordLand support repo.#
I just wrote a review for Industry in BingeWorthy, but it doesn't have a text editor. It farms the job off to WordLand, which shoots the text back to Bingeworthy as the user publishes to WordPress and RSS, in Markdown. So the text is on both BW and WP and the feediverse. And through WordPress it has a presence on the web. This is the goal, writing exists on its own, but can be shared in all the contexts it makes sense in, but it lives primarily in your blog, your home base. That's why WordPress is so important in the scheme of things. It's a consensus, this is where a lot of people are blogging in 2025. And there's a lot of mostly unexplored interop. And they don't break developers. This may not make total sense at this time, but soon, I hope to be able to point back at this post, and say it was the first time something important worked. #BTW, actually the term social web is probably too big a compromise. The "web" part is the only part that's imho useful. The sad part is that "social" means "we removed most of the features of the web." Why? Some vague sense that people would write too much if given the space. Or link too much. Or edit too much. Or be too emphatic. It's worse than Disneyfied -- at least at Disneyland you get actors, and color and rides, and bland food with tons of sugar and fat. But there is some fun and nutrition. In the social web, it's just memes and slogans. Not even much room for a metaphor. There's so much more to say about being human.#
In the last days of Trump's first term, I had a nice little web app that told you how much time remained in his term. It was a one-line change to make it work again, which, sigh, is necessary now. #
- There's a great scene in No Country For Old Men, where a character is facing imminent death, but he's arguing with the character who will kill him, who asks if all your great ideas led to this (his death) how good were the ideas (paraphrasing).#
- Along those lines.. If Twitter was such a great idea but it led to the death of democracy (for now at least) maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Maybe when we try to reboot we should try something realllly different.#
- As they say -- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.#
- PS: This started as a thread on Bluesky.#
- Sad news: Longtime friend Pam McQuesten passed away on January 1 after a brief illness. #
- I knew Pam in Silicon Valley, as we were starting up Living Videotext in 1983. Our office was on Elwell Court in Palo Alto, just off 101, near the golf course and airport. Pam was managing editor of BYTE, the class act of tech pubs in the early personal computer business, then editor of Popular Computing, the magazine for the people (ie users of computers). When she was at BYTE, her office was on the same floor as ours. #
- The tech industry was rough even then, all the young egos, people who were sure they could do everything, not much collaboration, lots of betrayal. She was one of the few people I could talk with on a personal level, with trust and intelligence. We talked about the future of the technology we were creating, and what we wanted from all this. She was a mentor, like a big sister, best friend, someone I trusted and loved. A very rare friendship. #
- BTW, her name in the 80s, before her marriage to Paul McQuesten, was Pam Clark.#
- Our paths crossed again a few years ago on Facebook. I invited her to join a private group I have with friends I love and trust, to share the life I had at my "pond house" in the Catskills. #
- I wanted to post a brief remembrance here in case any of Pam's friends are tuned in, so they can be part of the celebration of her life. #
- Random observations posted on Bluesky in the early morning hours.#
- 5:09AM: "Biden had one job to do, and he didn’t do it."#
- 5:17AM: "The NYT had one job to do, and they didn’t do it."#
- 5:21AM: "The NYT is the saddest excuse for the leading news org of the most significant democracy in human history. They flushed it down the fucking toilet. They, like the Washington Post, deserve to die in darkness."#
- 7:39AM: "Being impartial about last year’s election was not an option for the NYT. It was democracy’s Pearl Harbor. We will never forget or forgive what they did."#
- Editor's note: Soon, I will do all my writing in one place, and these kinds of snapshots will be easier to assemble.#
How easy would it be to create a twitter-like app using RSS, and in what ways would it differ from other twitter-like apps. Here's the deal. You need a place to write a posts and a way to read a timeline of posts. That's the basic functionality. To do that with RSS you would start with a blogging app like WordPress, and a feed reader like FeedLand or NetNewsWire. Manton has integrated the two into a single user interface at micro.blog. I'm going to approach it in a somewhat differently, not sure yet how it will work, but I'm getting there. And I will offer a way for people to hook in any feed reader they want, thus opening up innovation to tech-curious users. The take-away is that you need to handle inbound and outbound feeds. That's the basics of being twitter-like. #When I put an image in the margin of a post I often pause and think about what I want to convey with the image as it relates to the writing that it's next to. In the previous piece the idea was interop. I tried to think of what images I've used in the past, then I thought why don't I just look. I switched into Daytona, entered interop, and found one I loved, but then kept scanning, and found another that I liked even more. Tools are important. Web writers haven't gotten any new tools in a long time. All the tool development has been for other stuff. Let's make tools for users again, as we did in the olden times. Craftwork in software. Playin in the band! #
Steve Jobs: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” #
I posted something to my linkblog this morning that really should have been on my blog. Here's what it said. "Every blog should have a nice search engine like mine. I can search for ideas and it creates a story, like this search for 'Madison' where I had love, fun, creativity, friends, youth, music, strength, health, sex, and could see the future clearly. Best time of my life, I had everything anyone could want. Pick another term get another synthetic story." Ironically, since my linkblog doesn't flow through the search engine, I would have lost this post. Which makes a bigger point. All the ideas we throw into the silo'd social web are basically trash, not part of our collection, that we might use tools in the future to find value in (as my Madison posts surely did, for me at least). #Then, I got a response from Nick Weaver and the Madison story continues: "Here’s a roundabout Madison connection for you. I started working at UW 28 years ago today as the World Wide Web Editor in the Office of News and Public Affairs. My first project was to implement Userland Frontier for the university news page." Now Nick is in my Madison story too. And he mentions Frontier. With Frontier, we not only had the internet over networks, we also had networks on our computers because Frontier could send tasks to scriptable apps, and get back results. So databases could be hooked up to page layout programs, and people could use their writing tool of choice, and didn't have to use some teeny little excuse for an editor provided by a company that doesn't cater to or care about writers. Imagine writing with software that was designed to hobble writers instead of glorify them! That's the horror of the world as proposed by Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, all of them. It's like no one stopped to think about what they are doing, half their product is writing, and they suck at writing and have no plans to improve the situation. Geez Louise, it's as if we collectively lost our minds. #
Anyway, today I hooked up BingeWorthy to WordLand. Bingeworthy doesn't have a text editor, and it doesn't need one, because when it wants to offer a user a chance to explain their rating, like "seasons 1 and 2 were great, but season 3 sucked, but I gave it a high rating anyway," they can use WordLand which loves writers and strives to serve them better and better. Why should I put a bullshit editor in a product (Bingeworthy) that isn't about writing. Its job is very different from WordLand's. Let them work together. That's the big idea, that's why you bother having interop, so you can use more than one tool on the same data.#
There's more to the story, but this is already a lot to ask you to digest. I'll get a demo together soon. 😄#
Pretty sure there's no supportable reason to ban TikTok, any more than banning Facebook or Twitter would make sense.#
I've come to the conclusion that you can't really use ChatGPT as a programming partner. It doesn't understand the big picture, and if you try to explain it, it probably isn't getting it, and if it does, it will forget it quickly. It's basically fairly stupid, but a way better search engine than Google. Also, it never says it doesn't have enough info to answer the question and then an hour later you figure out the answer it gave you just doesn't work. I still think it's an incredibly useful too, just not as great as I used to think. In a couple of years it has never asked for more information before it answers. That's a clue. #My newest server was down for an hour due to hardware problems at Digital Ocean. It appears to be running again. Please don't judge the new search feature, it was caught up in this outage. Oy.#
I've changed my Bluesky avatar to MLK's image to celebrate his birthday on Monday, January 20. I dream of everyone wearing this button proudly on Monday in support of American democracy and progress. We are a proud country, beneath all the weirdness. #
Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the state Capitol.#Now that I have a search engine for my blog, I can reliably look for all instances of Wordle Kitty which was a character I was playing around with last year with ChatGPT. It even comes out in reverse chronologic order, and it's better than Google which ignores a lot of my blog these days. My own search engine doesn't do that of course.#
When I buy a domain speculatively, I usually put up some kind of placeholder page with a title, picture and tagline. Like feediverse.org. I pushed a link to it yesterday, and got back this possibly snarky response, but still thought provoking. Why isn't there a feed for the feediverse.org page. Good point! So if you were to put a feed on the home page of the open feediverse, what it be? A feed of posts to the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. I think that might be it. We can celebrate the day when that feed is mirrored on Bluesky (Inbound RSS ftw!) and we can shut down the stupid app that does the bridging. We had a standard long before Bluesky came along, isn't it wrong for them to try to force everyone to use their reinvention? It doesn't say anything good about the people who made that choice, among interop-minded developers. It kind of violates our ethos imho.#
The feediverse is not a joke. It's deployed, scaled, widely supported, far beyond AT Proto or ActivityPub. It's the HTML of the open social web. And where the others are complicated, feeds are really simple. #Matt Mullenweg said something provocative on Twitter two days ago that I'm just tuning into now. "The lawsuits will go years and could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org." I commented on it as a developer who views WordPress as a platform. #
Sad to say I'm going to have to mention Trump from time to time. When I hear a reporter wondering what to make of his thing about all those friendly countries he wants to go to war with, here's what it means. He's trolling you. Haven't you figured that out by now. Just by mentioning the weird thing he's talking about as if it were some kind of puzzle, a brilliant chess move, etc blah blah zzzz. It's trolling. Stop falling for it. If it's Trump-initiated nonsense, don't report it. You. Are. Being. Trolled. Asshole. All he wants is attention. Always. No exceptions.#- Daytona is the search engine for Scripting News. #
- I've wanted to do a rewrite for quite some time, there were a lot of decisions I wanted to redo, and I've learned a lot about databases in the three years since the first release.#
- You can try it out. There are docs, and a place for questions and comments. The usual caveats apply, esp since it's newly deployed, quickly.#
- PS: A list of problems I will investigate.#
Why are all the people who hate AI so pissy about it. #
In the future I will be able to type a post into my blog and people who are following me will see it in their timeline. #
Peeve: TV shows or movies that show text messages that are impossible to read even if you stop the video and zoom in.#
- I used to use Twitter for middle of the night ideas. These days I use one of Twitter's successors. #
- Here's one. "We should be able to tweet from within any application that has the ability to create and edit text, and not just in tiny little text boxes." And another. "The limits imposed by twitter initially in 2006 resulted in there being room for only very simple ideas. #
- Self-contained isolated silos make progress impossible. We need an internet of ideas. Why should we depend on one small vulnerable company to handle all our internet publishing? It’s an old outdated idea. Look where our investment in Twitter left us, nomads searching for a new home, and what did we do, we went for basically the same deal as before. Oy. #
- Re silos, are you watching the Apple TV+ series Silo? I don't want to spoil it, but their idea of a silo is more less exactly what we're talking about with the silos or semi-silos of the twitter-like era. They know being a silo is not popular so they do little things to give you reason to believe they might not be a silo. But being a partial silo is like being partially pregnant. No such thing. If you're federated that means you peer with your competitors. Facebook, or whatever you call Mark Xuckerberg's company these days, just cut off an Instagram competitor and completely gave away that federation is a very conditional thing for them, even if a user of Instagram might also want to hook into flow from Pixelfed. I never believed in their support of the fediverse. Now let's get some reality into these discussions. #
- On Unix. "Learning Unix was when I learned that computer networks could be simple yet infinitely powerful. Before that for me it was just an inkling, a hunch. Reading the source code I wanted to make software that works like that. I hope I have, to some extent."#
- On Matt Mullenweg, who surprisingly has become a polarizing figure in the tech world. Who could've seen that coming? Not me. "Radical idea. Matt Mullenweg doesn’t like how things are going. He has every right to try to change it, to make it right. As do you, and I." I don't like that people have called him things like the Mad King. People used to say stuff like that about me. It's a substitute for trying to understand where someone is coming from. One of the things I learned about creating open technology is you attract people who don't contribute anything but expect you to work for them, for you to take orders from them. That is really what it comes down to, and it's crazy. If you feel strongly about something, either learn how to program, or make your freaking case with some humility, or offer a bounty, or just trust the universe. But giving people orders, there's no place for that. Matt could be right or wrong, or he could be right for himself. But he has the right to control his own destiny, as you and I do, to the extent that we can. #
- I have my own vision for WordPress, as I've started to talk about here and Murphy-willing you should see more of that in the coming weeks. If you want a clue, listen to my podcast from January 8, and then if you have questions, ask them here. I think it's a better bet that WordPress will be the backbone of the social web than any of the other candidates. I wouldn't mind being wrong, as long as we can peer with the eventual winner. I can't endorse a silo, even on the hope that it will be de-silo'd. I also don't believe in the Tooth Fairy and Glinda the good witch of the south. #
One more thing. In the middle of the night the Department of Justice released half of the report on their case against president-elect Trump, a much anticipated bit of news. I didn't know it had been released, but when I woke up, and made the usual rounds, I checked in on Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Facebook and then finally Twitter, in that order. Guess where I discovered this news. Twitter. So when you think people move when they don't like what Musk does, or they find that Twitter is as polluted as some of the celebs do, understand this -- most people aren't affected by the noise. I don't see it unless I go look for it. Perhaps this is because I've been very liberal with blocking abusers, or more likely I don't have enough followers to be an attractive target for the abusers, who behave like spammers. They post where the flow is, and my account isn't as attractive as (for example) Paul Krugman, Mark Cuban or Jay Rosen. It takes a lot to get people to move, and I suspect most people never will. If you operate a gasoline powered car, I bet you buy a lot of Exxon gas, even if you don't see their logo when you fill up. It's very hard to get away from companies who hurt our species, by design, unfortunately. #
- I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.#
- I see people betting on the idea of federation in Bluesky.#
- At the same time, we should bet on simplifying Mastodon at scale.#
- Approach the problem from both directions.#
- We may need and not have federation in Bluesky at some point.#
- It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat.#
- This podcast goes into more depth of this idea. #
- There’s a funny contradiction in the AI world.#
- News orgs, published authors, great artists, universities, want to retain ownership of their intellectual property and don’t trust the utility of AI chatbots. They think the only application of AI technology is to steal from them, to cheat at school and in work. They see AI technology as destructive, immoral and dishonest.#
- As a writer, of prose and software, I want to use the new tools to analyze and develop my work. I want ChatGpt to help port my biggest piece of software from Mac to Linux where it will work far better, far into the future. I want it to reassemble my 30+ years of every day writing into something that can be read by anyone in a few days. I want it to organize new writing projects in ways I can’t. I want it to help me learn about myself. I would gladly give it access to all my creative work, if only there were a relatively easy way to do it. Rather than demanding money, I would gladly pay thousands of dollars to have it all absorbed into its models so I can study and learn.#
- Two very different approaches to the same technology.#
- This is one of the dialogs you encounter when getting started with Bluesky. It's easy to see how new users might be led believe that Bluesky is federated, as Mastodon is. I'm a developer and I was confused by what it was saying.#
YouTube channels have feeds. Here's the feed for my YouTube channel. And a canonical JSONification of the feed (this is how FeedLand gets the data from any type of feed, RSS, Atom or RDF, the YouTube feed is Atom). I did not know they had feeds, in fact I thought I heard they specifically did not have feeds. I've subscribed to the feed in FeedLand and it seems to work, and also included it in my blogroll category, so it should show up in my blogroll, and possibly in the Little Feed Reader on Bluesky. All of this, and more, was discovered by Andrew Shell. Two suggestions. 1. Include descriptions with the items. 2. Use enclosures for the videos. Atom does enclosures differently from RSS, but it can be made to work, imho. No matter what, thank you YouTube, and it's a great start. #The personal profile pages for Bingeworthy are working again. Here's my profile page. This is how you share recommendations. More info here.#
Good questions from Phil Jones re Wednesday's podcast. I'm glad to get to answer these questions. There's more to wpIdentity than is obvious at first glance, for example it has a relatively complete storage system built in for developers to use. I used one of its features yesterday in the connection between Bingeworthy and the profile display app. #
BTW, I'm going through all the episodes of Deadwood, and find it's influencing how I write. A good bingewatch is like that. You become one of the characters, or in a way, all of them. Sometimes I'm Swearingen and other times I'm Wu. Etc.#
- We need an AI chatbot that can work with GitHub repos. That is, in my prompt I say, the following questions are about this GitHub repo. At that point it is ready to answer any question about the project. This an incredibly important intersection of capabilities. As far as I can tell, GitHub doesn't offer it. #
- Anticipating that people will suggest I use their editor, I don't want to use their freaking editor. This keeps coming up everywhere. You can't use this or that unless you use their editor. Insidious form of lock-in. And it also limits their market to people who use their editor. Shortsighted and stupid. #
- We need to start thinking about choice. If it applies to developers, it's more likely they will follow through in the designs of their own projects and give their users choice as a matter of principle. #
- I'd also like to use a chatbot that incorporates the philosophy of the open web. They have opinions btw. One of the first things Claude.ai does when I give it some JavaScript code is that they "modernize" it. That is also insidious. I choose which constructs I use carefully, and follow the rule that one way to do something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. #
- The bots can be bullies because the companies that make them are tech companies and thus shortcuts to make money, and thus handicap their users. Maybe the users are starting to figure this out. One can hope. #
If you read this blog, I hope you'll take the time to listen to yesterday's podcast. It's all about WordPress, a product that you won't read much about on this blog, going back through the archive. I wasn't paying attention until 2023 when I began to see what an amazing product it is, not just for 2004 when it came out, but in 2024. My theory is that it's the basis for an incredible social web platform, much better than Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky and of course Twitter. That's what I'm talking about for 1/2 hour in this podcast. If you give me that much time, I'll change the way you see the world, or at least the way you see me. I think I'm right about this, with another layer on top of the WordPress foundation, it becomes newly relevant, and very timely, in ways that as far as I know, no one has been pushing it. I think for example that Ghost and Substack should be built on top of WordPress. The fact that they aren't gives a clue as to how portable your work is there, and how little choice you get in writing tools. Anyway, please make the time to listen. This is pivotal, and I don't think I'll ever be able to spell it out in writing, it's pure storytelling. Thanks!#
We demand that the Department of Justice to release all the special counsel reports behind the indictments of former president Trump. #- Now, before the next government gets to do what Barr did to the Mueller Report, or worse? #
- We have a right to see what led to the indictments.#
- Now is the time to speak up, for once, it really matters. #
- Let's make the earth shake for the Biden and Garland. #
- It's time for one last chance to not be a scared Democrat. #
- Speaking up is often a pointless exercise on the net, but this is one of those times when it could really make a difference. #
Just found an exponential memory leak at the database level in Bingeworthy. I have never seen one of these in all my years of programming. A data structure that saves a copy of itself in itself. So every time it saved it became exponentially bigger. Until it made the SQL server crash because the JSON object it was storying was over the limit of JSON objects. Crashed the freaking server. Fixed. Feels good. #
As part of the conversion of BingeWorthy, I started the database from scratch, but before I did that, I exported all the data and put it in a GitHub repo. This included a JSON file of ratings for each user. For example, this is my file. Remember we used Twitter identity then, davewiner is my Twitter username, just replace my name with yours to see your file, if you were a Bingeworthy user in the past. #
I wrote this post in 2023 as Threads was coming online. Now that Zuckerberg has thrown us under the bus, again, it's worth remembering their rollout strategy was to get us to overlook their past betrayals of users. They said "We ❤️ Fediverse." That did it. It was at a moment of fear of Twitter, now owned by Musk, and a belief in the story of ActivityPub, that it would create an open social web. Zuck said "we're on board." Now it's expedient to say to another group that he sees things their way, and it just so happens to be the very people most people who were looking to get away from in 2023 when he was loving the Fediverse. Now we're doing the same thing with Bluesky. And it's going to happen again. There will be a moment when you look back on your "hope for the best" approach and realize that it didn't work, and if I'm around I will remind you again. We have to roll up our sleeves and make an open social web that can't be sold out. When you build value for other people, they will use it for their advantage, leaving you with nothing. That's business. There are no companies that are different, not Apple, not anyone. More in a thread on Bluesky.#2023: "If they really want to prove their love for the open web, if they aren't just trying to lull us to sleep while they steal yet another market from the open web, they should do something that helps the web more than it helps them."#
Liberals should support truly open technology that doesn't have a Zuckerberg who can sell us all out. Get involved.#
Has anyone come up with a variant of JSON that allows comments? I've started using names like "comment1" etc to shoehorn comments in. A complete hack, impossible to maintain over time. The idea of not being able to put notes in your config.json files is absolutely ridiculous. #I wish the Ecmascript committee had put more effort into real soul-saving enhancements like comments in JSON instead of coming up with contorted ways to do the same old contortions we got used to dealing with ten years ago. And they could have removed features from the language instead of piling on more and more random reinventions. End of editorial, now on with the new Bingeworthy. #
- Last night while watching a basketball game, checking my iPad, and all of a sudden new items started appearing in the RSS feed for the new Bingeworthy. #
- I thought oh geez there's some kind of bug, last thing I need now, but quickly realized someone was using it and it was working. #
- There were some final mostly cosmetic things I wanted to deal with first, and I wanted to fix up the docs, such as they are, but I am spread too thin, and had been putting it off. But here was a reminder, I put all that effort to rebuilding it after the TwitterPocalypse. BingeWorthy is the app I missed the most that hadn't been ported off Twitter identity. So I did the deed, flipped the switch and now you can use it too. #
- Here's what you're getting.#
- I started fresh, with no programs, no users and no ratings. Then I imported the programs that I had rated, and my ratings for them.#
- The most important features are there, although they don't necessarily look that great. I want to do some more work there. #
- The predictive stuff, users most like you and recommendations, have not been ported, because there are only two users, and we recommend both of them to you. And all the programs I liked a lot are great, if you haven't watched them, you should, right now, stop everything.#
- If you have any questions or problems, I've started a thread. #
- It uses WordPress for identity. I like this because it's the same identity service I'm using for WordLand, of course, and this makes it possible to use WordLand to write reviews of shows you like or don't like for BingeWorthy. It doesn't mean anyone has to read them. And I have ideas for how to use OpenAI to generate some interesting stuff from collections of reviews. All of this is just in my head, not even started to be implemented. But the idea of compatibility between the two creates some interesting possibilities, and I love those kinds of integrations, a lot like what we were doing in Frontier on the Mac in the 90s. #
- BTW, of course I had ChatGPT do a logo. There's a slight typo, but rather than fix it, I left it there as something for attentive fans to find. #
The great thing about using a system like MySQL (or any SQL for that matter) is that it's been around for so long that if you can think of something that would be nice to have, you can be sure it's there somewhere. They've had enough time not only to hit all the walls, but to try out different approaches and settle on one. Maybe at times there were competing ways to do things, like the way Bluesky and ActivityPub, and probably Threads, and certainly Facebook and Twitter insist on reinventing RSS. But when I ask ChatGPT "can you do this in MySQL" it gives me one or two ways to do it, but usually just one. These are things I never would have found in the old Google-search way of finding answers. An example, I wanted to find out if there was a MySQL way to query a value inside a JSON object, and the answer is (of course) yes. And you can create an index on such a value. I didn't even ask for it, ChatGPT volunteered, guessing it would be my next question (it was). Whatever happened in the evolution of SQL it was a lot healthier than what's going on now in the social web, where the creators completely ignored what came before, and each other, and as a result there's a proliferation of different ways to do things we've known how to do for over 20 years. SQL has been around for 50, so maybe they went through this stage and emerged from it with a better answer. This feels a bit like the Fermi paradox and I'm a time traveler who has managed to witness 50 years of evolution long after the fact, any day of any week I want to thanks to ChatGPT. Also this is why it is so important to keep the archives of the 1990's web preserved. We may need to loop back to this when the people responsible for the social web decide that interop is important as opposed to each of them going it alone. #
How I'd write books with WordLand. Just thinking out loud here. Working with a group of people. It's possible it's just the author and editor, or it could be a larger documentation job, or a report covering a lot of ground. In 2025 we'd use AI to find the threads in our writing, to maintain a book outline that changes as our writing goes forward. Gone is the problem of writing a chapter structure before doing any writing. I've always found that to be a real obstacle to getting started. I've yet to use a ChatGPT-like service to do this, but I expect it can be done. I'm thinking about how I can set up an experiment for WordLand for writing this kind of book. The first test case could be the docs for WordLand. I would write a post about a feature as I thought about it, but not worry about how it fits into the rest of the book. Trust the AI organizer to help us do something sensible. #
Update: Bluesky images work again and thus the Great Art on Bluesky channel is back. If you're on Bluesky please subscribe. #
The crazy thing about Bluesky's API is they took already standardized things like links and enclosures, and after 20+ years came up with new definitions. Makes our apps more expensive to maintain, and we waste time and human wear and tear on stupid bullshit make-work. Developers are people, and our work is already horribly overly complex, we're working at the edge of comprehension, and what the fukc let's throw some more unnecessary complication into the mix. Arrogance, narcissism, whatever the source is, it's not a good way to introduce yourself. And, even better, after you go through the maze they break it, with an error message about legacy blob bullshit. They've already done this, and they're just getting started. It's why I say they should just adapt to RSS instead of trying to force us to adapt to them. I'll do it one more time, and then that's it. They can fix my code next time they break it. #
BTW, in defense of Matt Mullenweg and the culture of the developer community he built over the last 20 years, for better or worse, they don't do what Bluesky did. They look for prior art and implement it and they don't deprecate. They're still running the APIs we invented for blogging before WordPress even existed. The philosophy is "Let's not argue about decisions made a long time ago, because we want interop." People have all kinds of harsh things to say about their leadership, but unless you're a developer you don't understand that the reason it works is that they have a different code for their code, the only way we get interop is by not re-inventing. There are two competing ways to do things in tech. The blogging world has been taken over by the re-inventors, like the Bluesky people. They make a nice product, but honestly they don't reallllly want us to work with them, or we wouldn't be having this friction. Their API is bullshit. Plain and simple. They even thought of using RSS constructs and decided to reinvent the whole thing. There are places to innovate, like new freedom for users and developers, or there are ways to create hamster cages where everyone gets to run around in a very tightly defined space, that's fun. That's what Twitter was about, and that's what Bluesky is doing too. At some point we're really going to break free of this mess, but this isn't that time, yet.#Knicks on Friday night: A big offline day here in the mountains, the show will resume tomorrow bright and early, Murphy-willing. Enjoy tonight's Knicks game in OKC. Should be a great game. 😄#
- Krugman writes about social media is poisoning children's minds. #
- I like that Krugman has resumed his blogging. #
- This means that sometimes I agree or disagree, or have mixed opinions, but I always learn something. That's what makes a blogger good imho.#
- I don't know if I agree that children's minds are being poisoned. But I am pretty sure when people like Krugman and myself reach a certain age, and we are the same age, we start looking at new media that way. Maybe our minds are poisoned. My father called television the "idiot box." But it eventually became the literature of my generation, often very good. But maybe laws can help.#
- One thing I am sure of is that sports is being ruined by gambling. I can't imagine that a parent in 2025 would let their kids watch the NBA on TV, because it makes gambling appear to be a normal part of being a fan. Yet the NBA, which has a reputation of being socially forward-thinking, has swallowed the pill, and gambling is an integral part of coverage of the NBA now. #
- Same with the NFL, MLB and tennis. #
- And is this why they can now afford to sign players to $765 million contracts? #
- They're all getting hugely rich, but I believe that they are certainly doing great harm to the new sports fans growing up now. #
- I am a no apologist for being a sports fan. I love the Mets and the Knicks, have flirted with the Niners, and have a place in my heart for the Cubs and Red Sox, and I know that gambling spoils what's fun about sports, can turn it into an awful addiction. I manage to be a fan without ever having bet on a game, even just a bet between friends. I don't see it as part of sports. It wasn't the way my family enjoyed sports. #
- I was a math major and a 50+ year programmer, and I know that if you gamble enough you lose all your money. And as an addiction no gambler ever gets up from the table to enjoy their winnings when they win.#
- PS: I wrote this post in WordLand on New Years Day, saving it for a good moment on Scripting.#
- My little feed reader on Bluesky is ready for you to follow.#
- Technically, this is how the pieces fit together.#
- I'm using the OPML file for my blogroll category on feedland.social to determine what's posted on Bluesky. When I add or remove feeds from the category, the OPML adjusts dynamically.#
- I'm running a new Node app that has a websocket connection to feedland.social. It receives all the new items as they are found from all feeds over the socket. It's feedland.social's firehose. Since I'm currently the only user of that server, it's getting news from the all feeds I follow, not just the ones in the blogroll category. #
- The Node app checks each new item to see if it's in one of the feeds in the OPML list. If so, it reformats it to fit in a Bluesky post and sends it to the feediverse account. #
- If you're subscribed you should see the item, with a link, in your Bluesky timeline.#
- Notes.#
- The Node app re-loads the OPML subscription list every minute so any change is quickly reflected.#
- It's the same blogroll you see on my blog's home page.#
- The biggest problem in getting this running was rate-limiting. I have dealt with this on Twitter and other services, but Bluesky was not, for a while, letting anything through with the error message that we were over the limit. It was suggested that we should cache the accessToken rather get a new one for every message. I did that and cautiously turned the server on again at first with a 5 message per hour self-imposed limit, then gradually increased it to 10 per hour. The latest version only requires that there be at least five minutes between posts, so that means no more than 12 per hour. #
- Thanks to Mark Cuban for the initial idea and his support. He saw a river of news from FeedLand and asked if it could work in Bluesky. That was the idea. I have always wanted a tight coupling between Bluesky and RSS but didn't know how to do it. We may have just skipped a step. #
- We realllly could use some more formating features in Bluesky messages. This is a really strong use-case imho for the textcasting idea. #
- The coolest thing from my point of view is that I already had all the pieces, fully developed, the only thing that remained was to hook them together. #
- Finally, there's a this.how page for Little Feed Reader. It's purposely brief, but I have put a link to this post on that page. #
I wrote a few blog posts in WordLand this morning because it was convenient. It's good the same way I like to use a twitter-like app to write first drafts, when all I have to type into is my iPad. I've also started using it on my desktop for short things, but I just wrote and edited a complete blog post, a response to something Krugman wrote, about how gambling is destroying sports. And what for? It's like what Marge said at the end of Fargo. "There's more to life than a little money, you know." It feels like they're feeding the NBA into a wood chipper. What comes out the other side won't imho be recognizable as sport. And here you are, and it's a beautiful day.#I've got so much new stuff stacked up, on its way out. Hold onto your hats. #
After his death at 100 on Sunday, the news has been full of talk about Jimmy Carter. It's not polite to say it's exhausting and boring, and seems pointless. Then I happened to hear Jimmy Carter himself, on the latest episode of the Fresh Air podcast, and that was fantastic and totally worthwhile. It had been a long time since I listened to him, and I've grown a lot since then. Listen to the person, much more interesting than people talking about the person.#In addition to a $20 per month ChatGPT account, I also have a full Gemini account because I bought a snazzy new Pixel 9 Pro which comes with one year of Gemini included. So far that's just meant that I get pop up dialogs all over the place telling me I can use Gemini with Gmail, Google Drive and whatever else. Honestly it's just annoying. I do not want these apps to do my writing for me. Please. That imho is not a valuable use of AI. I can write for myself thank you very much.#
Braintrust query: I'm kind of stuck with my little feed reader in Bluesky. It works, but a few hours into it, at 10PM last night, we start getting rate-limit errors from bluesky. If it really is a rate limit, shouldn't reset after a while?#
Still looking for WordLand testers who write good bug reports and use WordPress for writing on a regular basis, even daily. #
- I posted this on Threads, and thought it should also be on my blog. :-)#
- I don't want to be critical of anyone in the WordPress world, there's already a lot of that going around. I want to be off on the side, seeing the immense value of the platform, and things we can do with it that aren't possible any other way. #
- Toward that end, I want to say -- for a product that is so incredibly useful for writers, not much attention has been paid to how writers work. We can do a lot better, imho.#
- Again, not meant to be in any way personal. It's just the way it happened.#
I'm playing with using Bluesky as a very simple feed reader. 1. Running up against its lack of style and formatting. Very bare bones. Not sure if people will like.
2. What's the rate limit? My app is getting rate-limited with not very many posts. (According to their docs on rate limits, I don't think my project is anywhere near the limit. It's creating posts. I'll start counting them, I guess.)
#
Here's a list of all the feeds in my blogroll, with links to the XML version. I've wanted to have a nice non-XML way of viewing the feeds in an OPML subscription list. I took the time today to put one together. I had all the pieces, it was just a matter of putting them all in one place. You can use it if you want, if you want to show someone what feeds are in an OPML subscription list. Screen shot.#
I can't get it out of my head that today is Monday. That's how it computes in my brain. This time of year is very confusing that way. #
It took me a long time to figure out that when people respond to you on twitter-like systems they aren't actually speaking to you, they're talking over your shoulder to the masses they imagine are reading what you posted. Three comments. 1. There are no masses. You can see this by looking at the stats for each tweet, available on most platforms. 2. Most users on the social web are trying to get attention for themselves, the only reason they read the posts is to see if there's a place for them to attach their message. 3. A simple tweak to the software would make it so that only the author of the post being responded to could see the replies. Then they could RT a reply if they thought everyone should see it. This would make the social web a lot more useful imho.#Peeve: A podcast uses a siren as a sound effect. It causes panic when driving. "Where's the siren!" the driver looks everywhere, only to realize it was just the podcast. This has happened a few times, this time I remembered to say something. #
- I just had a fairly incredible experience using Claude.ai. Rather than write up the work we did, I asked Claude to do it.#
- Dave started by sharing a text outline of computing platforms (Mac, iOS, Windows, Unix and their variants) and asked if I could visualize it. I began with a simple mindmap diagram using Mermaid. Then Dave showed me a more sophisticated design with rounded rectangles and arrows, so I adapted my approach and created a matching SVG version.#
- The most interesting moment came when Dave casually asked if I could turn this into a Node.js package. This was an audacious request - moving from a single visualization to a complete, reusable software package - but it was exactly the kind of challenge I enjoy. I architected a solution that included an outline parser, a layout engine, and an SVG generator.#
- I particularly enjoyed designing the two-pass layout algorithm. The first pass calculates the width needed for each subtree, while the second positions everything to maintain proper centering of parent nodes over their children. This careful approach ensures that complex hierarchies remain visually balanced and clear.#
- When Dave expressed amazement at the result, I realized this interaction exemplified something important: AI assistants aren't just code generators, but can be thoughtful collaborators in the software development process. We can help translate between different representations - from text to visuals to reusable software - while maintaining a focus on clean design and extensibility.#
- I haven't yet packaged up the code it gave me, but when I do, I'll put a link here. #
- BTW, here's the app I wrote that generated the tree I asked Claude to render. #
We should be thinking about a new SQL that's much higher level. Another layer. Get all the efficiencies of a 50+ year platform, with all the understanding gained at the top level in all that time. Most of the learning I did in the last five years can be hidden behind a much simpler programming interface, imho. It's worth trying factor, again imho.#BTW, as a longtime speaker of English and programmer, I think the term refactoring is re-dundant. The term comes from mathematics where you simplify a statement without altering its truth. Factoring is a repetitive process. You factor, and then factor some more if you can. #
The problem with everyone who says you have to get off Twitter is that we're giving up the meeting place we had and spreading all the bits into the wind. Are you going to leave the United States now that Trump is going to be president again? Leaving Twitter is a lot like that. How do you know Musk isn't going to have to sell it? Might happen. How would you feel then about having quit Twitter in a huff as if it would always be the bastion of assholes. It's a mistake. He isn't making money with it. The more you use it the more it costs him, btw. By leaving you might actually be helping him survive. Nothing is so linear, first big point. Second big point, no one cares about your gestures. #
If you think woke is the problem, try reading the US Constitution and amendments. Really read them. Pretend you didn't know it was the Constitution. One woke idea after another. Basically if you don't believe in woke, you're in the wrong freaking country. #
Last night's email had a YouTube video in it. I had forgotten that they get lost somewhere in the email delivery supply chain, so the fire that I put in the email was not transmitted. It's even worse than it appears. Here's a link to the video of the fire, with any luck that will get through in tonight's email. Happy holidays everyone! #
