A case study in APIs. Creating a new post via Bluesky's API.#

We live in interesting times. Never a dull moment! 😄 #

The latest David Frum podcast is about crazy tech billionaires. Once again he talks about who he's willing to listen to. He's really smart, thinks about things, and speaks brilliantly, but cultivates his ignorance and seems somewhat proud of it. In contrast, I listened to Jon Stewart's weekly podcast yesterday and it was as usual outstanding. Like Frum he thinks and speaks brilliantly, with the addition of being hilarious at times. In this episode he talks to an Iranian friend, a new perspective we don't hear often, but fits in with what I had understood about Iran. It's a highly educated country, a good standard of living and are mired with a repressive government and no options for regime change. When you hear that talked about on other podcasts and cable news shows, remember -- it's impossible to change regimes unless the country has prepared for that. There is no regime-in-waiting in Iran, hasn't been one since the 1979 revolution. This is the next danger in the US. Will there be anything remaining of our political system? It's almost all gone now. Funny to listen to the people on TV about surviving the next 3.5 years -- what do they think will happen then? Nothing will happen, that's the most likely thing. Back to Frum, what a shame there's such a smart guy, so cloistered, and boastful about it. That's not a good way to proceed now imho. #

Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho, and probably very funny, and respectful.#

I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook. #

I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited. #

Fixed the images that broke on morningcoffeenotes.com, a site that dates back to 2003, when it transitioned to https in 2024. #

With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.#

Glossary: Tiny Little Textbox. (An idea I might try, coupled with Daytona, I should be able to build a glossary of terms I want in my official vocabulary. Ideas that have stood the test of time, that mean something now, but eventually will be set aside and no one will know what a TLTB was.)#

The longest continuously updated RSS feed in the known universe. #

I'm working my way through The Bear, and it's great because you remember that you love all these characters and you can immediately start living the ongoing drama of their lives. I feel like a cat perched on a window watching everyone doing their daily stuff. Looking forward to going back to the beginning and starting over. #

BTW, I think the right way to read Scripting News is getting the nightly email. That's the pulse. I jot stuff down during the day, mostly in the morning, and later add links and finish stuff up. The scripting.com feed is updated in realtime. So you may get many versions of an item over the day, which might be a problem with feed readers that don't watch for changes. I noticed that my changes to a recent podcast shownotes page don't flow back out to my podcast client app on Android. FeedLand btw, records changes, and they flow through to the timeline. Coupled with rssCloud, which is supported in every WordPress site, makes the whole thing realtime. People assume that feeds have to perform like a feed reader. But if you have a component running on the open internet, hooked up via websockets to the client, you get the flow they get in twitter-like systems. And we didn't have to invent anything that didn't already exist in 2009. #

WordLand v0.5.15 is out. #

Masked secret police is pure terrorism. We should ask NYPD what we have to do to protect ourselves from them, and then do it. #

I, like a lot of other people, assumed that Americans would be terrible at authoritarianism. Shows we have a lot to learn. Americans are pretty good at it it turns out.#

Krugman doesn’t understand what’s coming for NYC. And doesn’t understand the leadership Cuomo uniquely provided at the height of Covid. It’s pretty likely what’s starting in NYC will be worse than Covid or 9-11. Funny thing is Krugman did get it, a few weeks ago when the crisis in Los Angeles was peaking. He wrote a piece that was terrified, and realistic. The National Guard had been nationalized. Marines were invading California. But now that Calif hasn't been in the news, it's easy to swing back. I bet if the election had happened during the worst of it, Cuomo would've won. #

Bernie Sanders asks what the Democrats should learn from Mr. Z's victory in the NYC primary this week. Here's what I say. Forget about ever rising from the ashes of what remains of the party. Right now, the issue is how to defend the city from the coming war with the US government. They're already holding the current mayor hostage. This will be worse than 9-11 and Covid. We have no leadership. We're totally fucked, what the Democratic Party does or doesn't do, at this point, simply doesn't matter.#

Podcast: Holding your nose, the aftermath. #

A preview of how a WordLand linkblog works, which is of course a WordPress site, viewed in my blogroll. When I clicked on the link, I was surprised that it goes to Poynter, and not to the linkblog. But then I remembered that's the point of a linkblog. And it flows through to the feed, and the blogroll software understands. So now I have an end-to-end linkblog. #

Another reason to love WordPress. Every freaking WordPress site had great RSS support. They did more to keep feeds alive than anyone else. Google tried to kill RSS in a particularly humiliating way. WordPress kept it going. #

A NYT article from last year about 34th Ave in Jackson Heights where "a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020." Before we moved to Flushing when I was in 5th grade, we lived on 92nd St and 34th Ave. What a difference that must make. I love it when cities take chances like this, and the people in the neighborhood seem to love it. #

Jeremy Herve is a developer at Automattic. Here's what he said about yesterday's podcast. He liked the idea of WordPress as the OS of the open social web. Glad that resonated. It has so much more than the other possible platforms. The others couldn't even realistically claim to be part of the web. They don't support writers very well. We're going to build slowly and deliberately around this idea, always staying open for competitors, because that's the most important thing about the web, beyond its simplicity, it never locks its users in. That's a deal-stopper. As I've learned how WordPress works internally, I immediately saw that they embraced the concepts of the web not just as words, but in their practice. I never hit a wall that kept me out of doing something they already did. And they also appear to never break users and developers. That's one of the basic rules of the web, it's an unchanging thing, no one can break it because everyone is a guest. Anyway, there is only one web. Keep that in mind. Nothing exclusive about it. #

Podcast: WordPress and me.#

Dan Knauss, one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada, wrote a post on their blog using WordLand. Here's a screen shot of what that post looked like when he was editing it. That's all you need to see to understand the role that WordLand plays. It's a pretty self-describing product. #

A great scene from The West Wing. Use your imagination, something similar is probably happening right now.#

Today's song: Peace in our time.#

People talk about "regime change" as if the only regime that could change is the one in Iran.#

Note to linkblog readers: I just flipped a switch and am now using WordLand to do the linkblog. Today's links are good, but the ones from prior days were mainly test posts. They will scroll off in a few days, and it'll be as it always has been. Still diggin. #

One more thing about the linkblog, it no longer cross-posts to social media sites. I want to see if I miss having the links there. It also won't have the limits. Maybe it'll be better if my accounts are a bit more quiet. Also the RSS feed is in a new location, I want to wait a bit to make sure it works before publicizing the URL. #

Speak plainly. As Brent says, lessons not learnings. Keep it simple. This is one of the foundations of blogging, btw. "Try to write correctly."#

Just a guess, but the people doing the "ice" raids are not real police any more than the "doge" people are/were actually part of the US government. In this New Yorker podcast, they dug into what "doge" actually was/is. Some weren't actually Trump supporters, they just thought it would be interesting to be empowered to fix the government. They learned the government doesn't work the way they thought it did. Spending is way up over the years, but number of government employees has stayed flat. It has already been largely privatized. Tangentially they appear to have found some things actually worth fixing. Tech culture isn't just the billionaires, far from it. There's a lot of hippie ethics in there too, you just have to look past the money, which seems too much work for some/most journalists. But The New Yorker tends to do this well, btw, sometimes. 😄 #

I read through the QuickDraw API summary from 1985. For me it was like someone who built applications of electricity, going back to see Edison's workbench before there was an industry. It was so seminal. It would never work in today's architectures, almost everything was global. There were five color constants, white, black, gray, ltGray, dkGray. You could see the whole archtecture in just a few pages. It wasn't bloated yet. And the best thing was there was the screen memory. Not hidden. If you didn't like the way QuickDraw worked, you could go around it. It was an idea I only ever used on the Apple II, it was imho Woz's big contribution, for me coming from Unix it was incredible to have so much power. On the Mac it showed up as a variable in a high level language, on the Apple II, you had to know the physical address, but in both cases, when you stored a bit in the memory it showed up on the screen. We never saw anything like that on the previous generation of machines, IBM mainframes and Digital minis. Someday someone will go through all this and see how it evolved. These pages are a tiny but hugely significant slice. Maybe with next year's ChatGPT. #

I had an experience like the one Paul Simon described on Colbert last night. I was at the Apple Store on 14th St in NYC to pick up a new phone I had pre-ordered, lined up with some much younger folks who asked if I knew what was new on the phone. I said I wasn’t sure, so I asked if they knew. They all agreed the coolest thing was called “pod casting.” They said it slowly to be sure I could understand. They said it was great, it was like radio, but you could get it from the web, and there was always lots of new stuff. "What will they think of next," said the old man, impressed, nodding with respect. #

As you get older and see your friends of 30, 40, even 50 years -- you realize how silly this all is. I see them and I see an old person, but I know who they are inside. The old "don't judge a book by its cover" adage probably wasn't coined by a younger person. 😄#

Until further notice dissent is an act of patriotism, support of and belief in our country.#

Podcast: Hold your nose and vote for Cuomo.#

Highly recommend reading this review of Trump's parade. We had the wrong idea about what the Army would do. Basically if you order us to do a parade, we will give you a parade. #

Progress report on linkblogging in WordLand. #

In a year or two it will be possible to create a perfect TV version of any person. No longer can you say any person has to die eventually and go away. And we can have anyone back we want. #

I figured that yesterday's army march in DC would have caused clashes with the police in more places than it did, perhaps due to false flag attacks "from the left" at one of the many No King Day parades around the country. I thought this was the moment when it would all melt down. America's Reichstad Fire. If it were an episode of Mission Impossible or Batman, it would definitely have gone that way. I bet there were plans hatched on open chat channels between various Cabinet members and their families, and probably Elon Musk via an interpreter, to coordinate. I was also surprised there weren't any Tesla Cybertrucks in yesterday's parade. I guess the honeymoon is really over. Anyway, they had to have had a plan, but I keep forgetting this is not Generalissimo Trump, rather it's TV President "Taco" Trump. I think they had a plan and he lost his nerve at the last minute. Instead, the Maga in Minnesota lit a different fuse, assassinating the speaker of the state house. That's a line that hadn't yet been crossed, but you knew the day would come. It's here. #

When Trump was on trial in NYC he begged for support from his base, no one showed up. The cops prepared for rallies that never showed up.#

Today's song: Queen of the Roller Derby.#

If you think we need to find a way past the billionaires, then we have to find a way around the established media. They keep selling us out and we keep acting as if we show them that they're doing it in a way they understand they'll get on our side. But they can't. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair in 1935. It's still true 90 years later. Another great philosopher, Les Moonves, said in 2016, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," referring to Trump's run for president. It was good presumably because of increased viewership resulting more ad revenue. I'm sure it's still true today, though CBS stopped boasting about it in public. #

Today I'm going to teach WordLand how to manage a linkblog. Before doing that I tried to figure out what a linkblog is. I have been using various homebrew linkblogging tools which I have shared with others, but none of them became popular products. I wrote a summary to help guide the development work I have planned. #

I was lucky to grow up in NYC, and had to commute from Queens to the Bronx every day to go to school. Some days I took the Q44 bus over the Whitestone Bridge, and other days I took the Q16 to the 7 train through Manhattan, and then the 4 or D trains up to 205th St in the Bronx. Took the same amount of time either way. So at age 15 I was able to go see the Grateful Dead after school at the Fillmore East on April 27, 1971. Midway through the set, a special guest band who they didn't introduce started tuning up on stage. We all wondered who they were. I now know the history thanks to the 500 Songs podcast, and this was the return of a band that had fallen out of favor, a band whose hits we all heard on WABC and WNEW-FM. When they started playing one of their biggest hits, Good Vibrations, the audience erupted in ecstasy. The Beach Boys now looking a lot different, but playing the same wonderful California music from the 60s. They couldn't be more different from the Dead, but there they were up on stage together. They were back, this time for good. This is a recording of the whole concert, the link points to the beginning of Good Vibrations. You can hear the gasp of recognition, and the bands recognition of the recognition, and from their it was a party in a party, including a sing-along part -- "gotta keep those a lovin' good vibrations happening with you." We were all growing up very quickly, but we had a moment when we could return to a more innocent time. Lovely the way music pulls you back in time. Brian Wilson wasn't there that night but his music certainly was. #

I needed an updated bio for a conference in October.#

I'm trying to make a linkblog with a WordPress RSS feed.#

Using soldiers as a political prop. Trump gave a political speech, lying about protests in front of a group of people dressed as American soldiers. They all appeared to be enjoying the president’s tough talk about the role he wants the military to play in policing the cities. MSNBC should not broadcast this.#

Would one of the browser vendors work with me on doing something nice with displaying feeds in XML form? I don't support obfuscating what a feed is, that just adds confusion. When I lift the hood of a car I want to see an engine not a drawing of something that sort of looks like a car, but not really, and looks nothing like an engine.#

There's a documentary coming out about podcasting. I was interviewed in it and got to tell a bunch of stories, about how you get people interested in working with each other. I told the story of how I chose the Grateful Dead's music to get the initial implementation going, on both the sending and receiving side. I used their music, since it so totally fit in with the philosophy, ie come as you are, we're all just people. And the song I chose was a good one too, the US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. I've been hiding out. In a rock and roll band." Using great art to prototype this connection makes total sense. It says we carry forward our art where ever we go, no matter where it takes us, a great work of music or art is always a good thing to share. #

Yet another journalism article about how AI is not really intelligent and all the tech industry hype must stop now or else we'll write another strongly worded article about how they are not really intelligent just like the 800,000 previous articles about how AI is not really intelligent.#

I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.#

Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard. #

I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. #

With ChatGPT there's no excuse for a congressperson not validating every word in every bill. They could ask the bot to read the bill and call out any provisions that contradict your previous positions. It knows where you stand even if you've never written it down. I've found it can do that for my work. I'm sure it could do it for a legislator. Even better, news orgs could do that for them. Or validate a bill against their campaign platforms. "I promise never to touch Social Security" could be validated against pending legislation. The time delay part of this isn't an excuse any longer.#

Experience managing developers makes me a better ChatGPT user. #

A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.#

I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment. #

I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments. #

Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging. #

Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example to crib from.#

I'm totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there in the last few days. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two of them. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s with Frontier. Today I might have one of the largest public codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week? #

A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence. #

Regular readers of my blog know that I've been calling out Bluesky and people associated with it for saying they're an open platform, and part of the web, when they are neither. Why don't people, esp journalists, call them out on this? We've been around this loop over and over in tech. There's a virtual conference today, FediForum, that on their home page repeats the hype. Why do people do this? What's the point of pouring your time into technology you hope someday will be open? I bought a ticket to the conference so if there are any sessions that look like they might be productive I can participate. I even wrote a keynote, so you can see there is a way for this stuff to start working, quickly, if the vendors you're looking up to are sincere in their promises. I've posted it on Mastodon and Bluesky so if you have comments or questions, we can start the discussion now, or any time.#

Now a personal comment. What pisses me off most about Bluesky is the political environment all this is happening in. We need an open social web. They've got a lot of people convinced they are it. They are not and they know it. And they keep leading people on. They should either deliver, now, or get out of the way. #

Why doesn't Walt Frazier have a freaking podcast. Come on. (Jon Stewart did a series of podcast-style interviews with him.)#

If everything goes well, the RSS feed for Scripting News will now have a channel-level image element because it's part of a network that requires an avatar-like image. This required me to go through some very old code that my system still depends on. It's remarkable how much time this seemingly small feature took to implement. One of these days I have to move this code to one of my more modern servers. One reason it took so long is that a random package that does something that never changes, had a breaking change in it. The breakage culture of the Node.js world is just plain fucked up, no other word for it. #

And btw one of these days I'm going to clear the time to write a useful and up to date RSS feed validator. The one the W3C uses is a total embarassment. I'm not even going to link to it it's so awful.#

I've heard that Andor is great stuff. I'm on episode 6 of season 1, and it's the usual Star Wars bullshit. It was fun in 1978. But now? It's so freaking boring. Tell me it's worth continuing to watch, that it gets an actual plot at some point.#

I had a neighbor and friend a long time ago named Ann Doerr. I used to joke with her how her name was a combination of two of the main types of logic gates in computers. I think that's what attracted me to the Star Wars Andor show.#

I now have the special ChatGPT function I've been waiting for. Codex. Give it access to my entire GitHub collection and let it go. I stopped myself from authorizing, wanting to sleep on it. I know I'm going to do it, but.. Gulp. Do I really want to dump all my thinking for Sam Altman?#