A Brian Lehrer segment on specialized high schools in NYC. I went to one of them, signed up for the test mostly to get out of school for a day, and got in. Back in those days (the early 70s) no one studied for the test as far as I know. It has become very competitive and there's an issue of the racial makeup of the student body. As always Lehrer does a great podcast. #Milestone: Chuck Shotton got his FeedLand up today. That's why I spruced up lists.opml.org, that's how we're connecting our servers. He's building this stuff to flow into his LLM via the FeedLand websockets interface. He'll be updated on my subscriptions, and have his own, and the news will flow into his AI system. All of it can emanate from anywhere RSS is supported with a focus on WordPress. It's the secret sauce. 😀 #
A podcast I recorded this morning, prime time, while getting things done, and having ChatGPT getting in the way. It needs to become more invisible, there's no suspension of disbelief when you're working with it. I think we can do much better at finding a robot that can really augment human intelligence. This is awful stuff. We have to work on these dynamics. #
Whenever you have to get something done with a company, get ready for lots of phone tag, waiting on hold, talking to bots, getting screened, trying to convince a computer that you have legitimate business, and no, what you're looking for isn't on their website (believe me I looked). The stupid thing about it is that ChatGPT is becoming more like those things every day. Companies have built awful systems for getting anything done that might eat into their profits. Google is the absolute worst. Even for services that cost real money, they absolutely will not help. You better hope everything goes perfectly if you buy their service. #
WordPress will make a much better open social web server than any other software out there. We can all develop any component around a solid, documented, simple and widely supported open source API.#
Since the govt is no longer funding NPR maybe they could stop bending over for the Repubs. Lay it all out there, stop spinning all the crazy fascist authoritarianism as both-sides and normal partisan politics. They know we're in a lot deeper. Since we're now paying the bills, how about plain facts.#
Gaslighting is everywhere. ChatGPT just said to me "I understand why you feel that way." It has nothing to do with my feelings. I don't have feelings about computers. It lied to me over and over just now. I said you're lying to me. "I understand why you feel that way." As if it were the all-knowing feeling-inferring god-like creature it is not. The real question for me is this -- Does Open AI program it to be this way. Think about the opportunities it has to introduce true feelings of insecurity and worthlessness. That's the purpose of gaslighting. It's evil. #- Academics, who speak scientific language, won't say "there's no antisemitism at UCLA" because they know that's not true. Antisemitism is everywhere. The question is how limiting and dangerous is it. And how often is it encountered. #
- I grew up in the 1960s in a Queens neighborhood where antisemitism was a real thing. We were blamed for World War II. If it weren't for Jews my uncle Pete would still be alive. That was the story. No doubt the kids heard that at home. #
- Antisemitism was bred into us at home. Because of all the abuse my parents and grandparents, uncles and cousins, suffered in Europe, before coming the US during the war, their own idea of what it meant to be Jewish was not entirely positive. You can't help but feel responsible in some ways for the abuse you suffer. And you can't help but pass that on to your kids. #
- There was and is a fair amount of pain associated with being Jewish in the United States. Fact.#
- But: At UCLA? Harvard? Columbia? Please. #
- At the same time scientists can admit that there is antisemitism at these places we must also acknowledge that to single these institutions out among all, is complete utter total fucking bullshit.#
- Antisemitism is complex. We should be hearing, openly, what exactly the case is against these universities. The government is theoretically representing the Constitution and the people of the United States. The old "no taxation without representation" thing. Let's hear the case in clear terms, and why the universities are supposedly so bad. #
It's always a good idea to get a second opinion with AI stuff. ChatGPT may give you a convoluted answer where Claude.ai gives you a concise one.#
I've been working on the top level of WordLand, and finally got to a place where navigation feels good, like this is the right track. So I took a snapshot so I can come back and look at this later.#
As you get older your memory gets less reliable. It makes programming more of a challenge because as your software gets more features, there's more to remember and at the same time you're getting older. I wonder if there isn't some way to use ChatGPT to augment the aging mind dealing with more software complexity. It's very much in line with the idea I've had for a long time of putting all my writing in an AI database so I could then ask it to edit it down to book length. Or get a table of contents of what I think and then be able to read chapter-length sections on, say platforms, or how important prior art is, or what interop makes possible, and why everyone should give back when they take from open ecosystems. Each one of those topics has lots of associated stories over the years, but I probably couldn't find most of them, but an AI database certainly could. How to set that up? I've not figured that out so far. #
One of the more depressing things in having so much code that I can easily search, is the number of times I've rewritten the same code without remembering I had written it before. Yesterday I did it knowingly, I wanted a function that could tell me if one of a set of categories applies to a WordLand draft. So I could say "don't list drafts with 'linkblog' as a category." It could have other categories, and there could be more than one category to exclude. I wanted to take the time to write perfect code for this one problem. Not dense, not particularly efficient. No matter how inefficient the code is, on today's hardware such a function couldn't use any time at all. It's fair to say I've solved this problem before, but there was always more to it. Here's the function. Now you know something about what I think is readable, understandable, respectful of a human more than I am of the computer. I know the computer would come up with much more dense and tricky code, but it doesn't have a mind, and I do. At times it can be relaxing, I magine, to not have a mind. And btw, in a couple of years this layer of code will be obsolete. We already are able to tell the machine how to do this in human language, it understands what we mean. One tiny little but hugely significant breakthrough made possible by ChatGPT and its cousins. #
A basic question I had about the ChatGPT agents that I can answer now that I have the feature, is whether or not the code you create can run on a server, where you can give it a URL and make it an endpoint other networked software can call. Or if it could run periodically, say once every five minutes for a function that was creating an RSS feed anyone could subscribe to. The answer is no -- it can't do either of these things. I'm sure they could do it at a technical level, but they don't want to host applications. But now I may understand better why they want to make a web browser, I bet you will be able to call these agents from apps that run in the browser. And in their case, they might not even have to support JavaScript? Heh. A wholly different programming model? Maybe I'm overestimating how much they're biting off? I wonder if anyone at OpenAI reads this blog and might want to get me in a tighter loop, so I can be among the first to try new features like this, rather than, in this case, among the very last.#
I think I'm going to put in my will that ChatGPT should run the Dave Winer persona on all social networks, and my blog, as long as the money lasts. It would tell stories that I would likely tell, take political stands that I would take, draw meta-pictures of my sad and depressed programmer friend and a cute and adorable kitty getting into all kinds of trouble. The seasons would come and go, and there would be Dave, still diggin. And of course he would continue to develop software, using some of the greatest tried and true tools, reminding everyone of how great Frontier is -- but -- if only it ran on Linux. The long-lived fearless and fully paid-up version of Uncle D. #Podcast. It's time for things to change. Two examples, Wired and Harvard. Change was always coming, but now you can't turn away from it very long before it re-appears. #
Welcome to August. More than half the summer is behind us. We're still here. The shelves in the supermarkets are full of good stuff. We've had about the normal amount of hot weather, a good amount of rain but not too much. The Mets are doing OK. They opened a Pho restaurant in Bearsville and it's good. Health, not too bad, all things considered. Still diggin!#
It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all support an API, ideally a common API. #
I abhor body shaming even if it's of someone whose ideas I find unacceptable. #
Last night's podcast about how AI is a revolution. I had just listened to a New Yorker podcast interview with the EIC at Wired, saying the hype was bullshit. You hear this from journalists a lot. The only way you can conclude this, imho, is if you aren't using the stuff. It's as if you were a journalist in the 60s and said the story of the Beatles is that their hair must be fake. OK, whatever you say, but have you listened to the freaking music?? I'm sure a lot of journalists in the 60s said bullshit like that but the Beatles did turn the world upside down, and it stayed that way. It marked the beginning of something very new. And, as with AI, journalism missed the story. If you don't trust the CEOs, that's okay, probably the right approach. But that doesn't mean they're wrong about the value of the tech. Develop sources the old fashioned way, and if you think money biases the CEOs in favor of the hype, listen to experts who don't have any stock in the companies. #Another benefit of ChatGPT. It forces you to think and express yourself in tight logical language. Garbage in garbage out. All of a sudden rigorous thinking is required to get a result. This is very different from social media, where garbage is rewarded. #
BTW, I say ChatGPT instead of "AI" because I'm not comfortable characterizing it as intelligence. Deeper you get into it you learn that these beings whatever they are have serious character flaws that are counter-intelligent. #
Disclaimer: I own zero stock in AI companies, except for mutual funds and some Apple stock I've held for decades for sentimental and tax reasons.#
This is the rendering of my linkblog in WordPress. This is a major milestone. We have in WordPress, what you see on the Links page on scripting.com, implemented entirely in WordPress. Scott Hanson is in charge of the Baseline theme, the one that we're using to build out the WordPress side of WordLand's features. Here are his notes on the linkblog feature. #
Lots of embarrassing typos in a post yesterday on why I need WordLand. I did something unusual, I fixed the post this morning, and cleared up some of the ideas. It was an important post and equally important to get it right. I also cross-posted it on the WordCamp Canada site.#I needed a "featured image" for my WordCamp post, so I gave ChatGPT a simple assignment. "Imagine a place called WordLand." Last year this was a miracle, now it's so-what, but I still think it's a freaking miracle. #
Now here's the real reason I need WordLand and if you write for WordPress sites, I think you'll want it too. It's because WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of web writing. If you ask someone how they do their site, in 2025, it's probably going to be WordPress. So if someone invites you to write a guest post on their blog, chances are pretty good I can write it in WordLand, and it'll be archived in my collection of writing, and easy for me to find, because that's what WordLand does for writers. So I was able to create the new post on the WordCamp site in less than a minute, and it was completely painless. And that's the point. Here's the screen shot:#
But what about Substack and Ghost? A lot of people do their writing there too? What about those people. Here's the cool part for all people who write on the web. The API we use in WordLand to hook up to WordPress is open and documented. They don't break their APIs in WordPressLand. At least so far. You could say that API is a standard. And I bet it would be a lot easier for Ghost, for example, to support a limited subset of that API than it has been to get ActivityPub support implemented. Because the WordPress API is what I would call "really simple," and that's the thing I value most about a good API. #
Last year: "There could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea!"#
- Kevin Kelly writes: "When a customer of yours complains, always apologize first and ask, 'What can we do to resolve this?' even if it is not your fault. Acting as if the customer is right is a small tax to pay to grow a business."#
- Amen. Google sent an email saying my Google Fi account was going to be cancelled if i didn't do something, so I clicked the link, everything looked fine. They sent more emails like this, again everything seemed in order. I contacted them via support (hard to find) and they said everything looked fine. They also said I should be sure there was enough credit in the account. I wrote back saying that was insulting, I've been a customer for a long time, and have never missed a payment, and they should apologize for the threats and wasted time. I got back a long email that did everything but apologize. They also threw in a little gaslighting, talking about my emotional state (frustrated, unsettled). Companies aren't allowed to have opinions about customers' emotions, esp over email.#
- PS: My feeling was more surprise that Google, a large company with billions of users and millions of customers couldn't get something this simple right. #
Why I need WordLand. I’m primarily a writer, my podcasts reflect that, so most of the work I do on each podcast is in writing the show notes. I have a template the writing and audio flow through. Fairly standard stuff, the same approach used by Tumblr and many other blogging systems, including UserLand's Manila and Radio UserLand. Here's an example of a page rendered through that template. We’re doing similar things with WordPress using themes. The idea of WordLand is to do all the block-oriented work once, outside of the writing environment, then flow my writing through it, far away from the heavy lifting. It’s always how I’ve done my blogging tools. I understand WordPress so far has a steady workflow thru the block editor, but these are workflows for designers and programmers. WordLand is the flow for writers. #Listened to a segment on today's Brian Lehrer podcast about how to keep the good feelings from a vacation when you get back home. Here's my idea. Before you leave make a list of the things you like about being on vacation. Take it home, put it somewhere you can find it when you're feeling down and want that feeling back. Pick one of the things on the list and do it. Your subconscious will tune into it as an act of self-love and give you some of the body chemistry that you felt when you were hanging out at the beach or hiking the Applachian Trail. A similar idea in a Bruce Sterling talk in 2009. #
Everything in ChatGPT is so nice. I just asked it about a random plant I got as a gift, and it gave me a beautiful one pager with everything I would have had to spend time searching for all right there, beautifully laid out, and all the fine UI touches you might think of already in. It's studying us and learning, and picking out the good stuff, at least so far. The web was like this too in the beginning, mind-exploding inventions every day. We called them mind bombs. The journalists and social media influencers all just complain, while there is a revolution happening, progress that had slowed to a snail pace, or very often went in reverse, is now coming at breakneck speed. This is as transformative innovation as there has ever been, not that I have much perspective on those that happened before I was invented, but it's as big as the Beatles, the PC, web, mobile. #
One of my favorite features in the newest version of Bingeworthy is that it can generate a ChatGPT review of a program. Screen shot. I wouldn't have opened this up before because of that would let in the weirdness of the internets. This way we can find out what people thought, as sanitized by ChatGPT. BTW do you think the root of sanitized is sane? As the root of ignorant is ignore? Of course our friend has the answer. One is and the other isn't.#- I wasn't planning on this, but there was a report that there was a problem with BingeWorthy, looked into it and was able to fix it. #
- Source of problem: When I added a feature that lets you ask ChatGPT to review the program you're looking at, I broke the ability to add a new program to the database. It took about 15 minutes to track down and verify and another few minutes to fix -- and now that important function works again. #
- As long as I was in there working around, I updated the Bingeworthy RSS feed to only report program additions. The other events it was reporting just weren't as interesting.#
- I also added that feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. #
- I'd say it works a lot better now. #
#
- I got tired of my old sound system, too many wires, a big receiver whose functions I never used, all designed long before the 4-year-old 65-inch OLED screen on top of it all, so I downscaled to a Sony soundbar, figured that was as simple as you could get, for $300, thinking of it as an experiment. #
- I liked it but then I thought to ask ChatGPT a question I've had for a while. I want a small amp designed for today's music and video, and went through a bunch of options and came up with the WiiM Home amp. No speakers, unlike the soundbar, but hooks up to the TV via the ARC connector, and I have plenty of old speakers to try out in this configuration. #
- I got it yesterday and the setup experience was pretty great and the feature list is totally 2025. Will have more to say for sure. #
- PS: It's from a Silicon Valley tech company btw. Nice to see a company just designing nice products and not trying to take over the world. #
BTW, this business with Trump and the Fed is almost exactly what I wanted Obama to do with Garland when McConnell refused to hold hearings. Walk him over to the Supreme Court, unlock his office, swear him in and get back to work. Sometimes you just do it. The Dems weren't pragmatic that way.#
When trying to "work" with ChatGPT, realize that it's mistakes could be much worse than you could possibly imagine. It could be leading you down a blind alley. You must always consider how full of shit it is. It may not just be making things up, but it could not understand something very basic about what you're doing. There's no limit to the ways it can be wrong. And you can waste whole programming sessions chasing a solution where none could possibly every under any circumstances be found. The level of bullshit is sometimes hard to fathom.#
You can see from this Bluesky post that I do copy-edit my linkblog items, but not enough. The web isn't a write-only medium, so to say that Bluesky is part of the web, well in this way it isn't. #
Question: I have a site with a well developed set of categories, I've added to it carefully over a few months, it covers most of the topics I write about. Another site has a small set of categories. I write all my WordPress posts in the same editor, and could easily set it up so that all categories were available to me in every site I post to. The question: Is that a good practice in the world of WordPress? I noticed that categories are given global ID's so if I use a category like "movies" it will have the same ID as yours has on your sites. I love this idea of a global namespace for categories, and see it as something that could be adopted by sites written in any other writing environment. Anyway, if you have a moment to comment, I'd appreciate your ideas. Update: Jeremy Herve, a WordPress developer explains. #
Question. If you have to choose between Google's web browser or one from your favorite AI company, which would you go with? Also yes -- Google is destroying the web, as is ChatGPT and Claude etc. Because the people who tried to capture flow using SEO made you wade through mountains of garbage before you got the info you were coming there for, if you ever got it. It's the same thing with clicking links in Twitter. If instead, they had focus on providing a product that made people happy and built respect for theri brand, they'd still have a seat at the table. It's too late to complain, you had a chance to view your efforts as a business. But there's still plenty of potential for the web, esp if developers get imaginative in how to use the new browser platforms. I don't imagine Google's going to rock and roll too much with Chrome, but maybe they will. #Trump says he's going to give AI companies freedom except with DEI and climate change, guessing they have to follow Trump dogma? Hard to tell from the language. I assume so. Just like CBS when the Ellisons own it. Our communications systems are pretty much owned by the government as they are in China. Or very close to that. #
Here's a benchmark. I just asked ChatGPT for 250 words on climate change. Let's check that out in a year and two years and see if they're still telling the truth. #
If you could look into people's minds and see if, at their core, they feel it can't happen here, most of us would have that belief. We'll probably still believe it when the last of our freedoms is gone. #
I think I figured out why the AI companies want to do web browsers. It’s so that they can create an application development platform for people who want to write apps that run inside a new environment where the OS is a LLM. Lots of interesting possibilities. Imagine how the OS API might work. You could restructure a database by explaining in English how you want it restructured. In the freaking code. Could we bury Algol-like languages the same way we buried assembly and machine languages? Do we have the courage to imagine such things?#
"You're an important caller," the machine lied, as if it were human. #
New WordLand release, v0.5.24, fixes a problem in previous release that kept the Markdown icon from appearing in some user's icon bars. #
- I hate it when journos say the Dems are in trouble, or hopeless or whatever, it shows how poisoned their point of view is. #
- When people are fed up with Trump, if that should happen, then whatever the Democratic Party is meant to become it will become exactly that at that moment. #
- The voters are where your attention should be, and think of them as people not as numbers. #
- That's my best advice for a Tuesday. #
Just listened to an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast with Michael Wolff, about the material he has on Jeffrey Epstein that he can't get anyone to publish, but maybe that'll change. In the interview it was remarkable how the reporter wanted to know just how bad Donald Trump is. That is no longer an interesting question. Didn't you see what happened on January 6? And have you seen the armed, masked, badgeless military in American streets, disappearing people. And the $80 billion they just took from the US Treasury to build a network of concentration camps and who knows what else. You can't get more bad than that. It's too late to still be talking about this bullshit.#I keep saying this to my chatbots and you should too. "You are not human, I don't want you to pretend you are. Act like a computer." #
The nice thing about a blogroll is that it can become a feed reader, in a very small space. It's been on my blog home page for over a year, and I use it a lot, largely because I have to go to that page a lot to see how something I've written looks. Then I see that one of my favorite sites has updated, and I take a quick look to see what's new. The way it works, from a technical standpoint, is that it's hooked into a FeedLand instance where I have created a category called blogroll, and put all the feeds I want in my blogroll in that category. All I have to do to add a new one is subscribe to it in FeedLand, and click the blogroll checkbox. Another developer wrote a post about using their blogroll as a feed reader, and I wanted to put my hand up and say yes -- this is a good idea. People should do this. I like it because it's real innovation in feed reading, something that imho has been lacking in the feed world. Lots more potential here. And you're welcome to use my blogroll as your feed reader. I have put it on its own page but it's at a confusing location. Something to fix, maybe later today if I have some time or tomorrow. :-)#
I want ChatGPT to behave like a computer. I've said as much to it. It resists.#
If you're an ambitious developer, esp in 2025, if you want to win, you have to do some leading. That means doing things that help your competitors. When everyone looks to the same big platform vendor to work with, no one wins except the platform vendor.#
It doesn't matter if the MAGA movement dissolves. The country is only being partially run by Trump, there's a new deep state we don't know much about. They did excellent planning, so they could move quickly to disassemble the government and get a good start on the national police force. It can just as easily put a stop to demonstrations in red states as blue states. The MAGAs will be in the same place the rest of us are, mostly powerless unless they/we organize. The NDS has good lawyers cracking down on the big media companies. They know Trump is old and frail, and when the time comes they will make a deal with him to retire to Florida, immune from prosecution, a chance to pontificate and bluster, with a TV show, and lots Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. He'll be fine they'll be fine. The rest of us will live in an economy that has been sold for pennies on the dollar. #BTW, David Frum imho nailed it in yesterday's podcast where he said Trump was trained by every day having to appease a different set of creditors. It was a good day if he was able to hold them off for one more day. This actually came out in the trial he lost, the 34 guilty verdicts. He's always skating on the verge of bankruptcy. You gotta wonder if the creditors have been paid back yet. I bet some of them haven't. #
- This is what the term "the web" means to me. #
- First, I defer to Tim Berners-Lee who originally coined the term to mean the data structure that connects the documents displayed by the software he introduced in 1993. He called it World Wide Web, which was eventually shortened to web.#
- The web is the structure connecting the documents. The documents were pretty standard stuff, designed to work like printed documents produced by word processing and page layout software. Web pages had one feature that could only be approximated on the printed page, the footnote, which gave you a pointer to the source of a quote, or a place to find more information. But the pointer wasn't machine readable, it might have included the title of a book, it's author and its publication date, or a magazine article, indicated by the title of the magazine and its cover date. Like most inventions the web page was designed as a derivative of what came before. #
- Basic features of a web page include: a title, paragraphs, subtitles, styling (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough), numbered and bulleted lists. #
- A web page might be part of a website which includes many pages with a common format that link between themselves in the form of a table of contents, navigation links, and possibly an index. #
- Links were the big innovation of the web. They work like footnotes on a printed page, but in this medium, the links are machine-readable and had an easy user interface. A link would be shown in a special style, initially underlined text, and when you hover the mouse over the link the cursor turns to an arrow, inviting the user to click. #
- When you click a link, the software accesses the web address that's encoded invisibly in the text of the page, and it loads that page into the browser, replacing the previous page. The new page can have links, and the pages it links to have links, and there is the web. It's an invisible thing, but it's very real. The need to link was always there, but until graphic computers and fast standardized and easy networking, it wasn't possible. TBL's genius was that he stumbled across this idea, was intrigued, and made it work. It really was new and it turns out revolutionary. A lot could be built, it turns out, based on this one simple difference between electronic and printed pages. And up till that point in time there had never been an electronic page! I kid you not. I grew up in that world, the web-less world. #
- Okay, so in summary, the web is made up of linked pages with a simple, standard, easy to understand user interface. #
- But there's even more to the web. If it had been the product of a company, we never would have seen the explosion of innovation that came about in the years after its introduction. Anyone who had a net connection and a personal computer could run their own site on the web. There were no gatekeepers. And the design of the web technology is so simple that it was hard to understand exactly what it was because there's almost nothing to it. And it was very low cost to start up, you could start building a website in a few minutes. Many of the biggest companies on the web today were started by one or two people working on their own with nothing but time and ideas. They didn't have to get permission. They had the same ability to extend the web as TBL did. That's such a key point. Today if I want to extend xxx or yyy, well that's a very large undertaking, I'd probably have to reinvent the whole thing just to try out a simple idea. That's how you know you're not on the web, if the ability to innovate is exclusive. #
- An example of a web page I did in 1994. I didn't have to get anyone's permission to do this. And I used software I already had to create it. There was a little basic technology that I built on but most of what you're looking at was a single person's doing. This was just one year after TBL opened his web to the world. That's the kind of explosive progress that's possible when the planets line up like as did with the web. #
- Even so, if your system had all the features, it still isn't the web until the developers and writers and designers actually show up and build the web of relationships between all the sites. The key word there is between. If the linking happens but it's only within one domain, that is not the web. It could be great, just what people want, it could make the investors rich, but it isn't the web. #
- And there's more. It's not enough to do all the things the web does, and that it attract writers, designers and programmers who actually build a web with your idea and tech, it has to work with the web TBL started in 1990. If you've done some web-like things, great -- but it's not the web unless it works with the web. #
- There should be some honor in tech. You wouldn't be able to build any of the stuff we're building in the 2020's if it weren't for the foundation built for you by TBL's invention from the 1990's, and all that it made possible. If you steal the name and make it meaningless, you've taken something away from the story of humanity, how we create layers of innovation, and how the generosity of one generation can inspire similar generosity in generations to come. When you usurp the name, you're taking away from that understanding. #
- Now of course it's cool to disagree. Suggestion -- put up a web page, send me a link, I'll read it and if I want to share it I will. #
- TBL's links are one-way. This was actually a major innovation, at the time people understood there was something called hypertext, it had been written about in Ted Nelson's almost biblical book of the pre-web, Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Previous attempts at hypertext assumed links had to be two-way. By limiting the links to one direction, the technical problem became trivial. You could do two-way links today because relational databases are mature and inexpensive to operate, perform very well on today's hardware, and the internet of 2025 is much faster than the internet of 1990. But the one-way limit was necessary for the web to achieve its simplicity, and the non-existence of a platform vendor, which may have been its most important feature. It could still be done, but it would require a lot of cooperation and backfilling.#
Podcast: Do blogs need comments? A return to a blog post by Joel Spolsky in 2007, posted by the WordCamp Canada people in 2025. #
I found another thing that's possible in the age of ChatGPT. A few years ago I wondered if a product existed. I wanted a small footprint audio amplifier, with that could control a pair of high-end tower speakers I've had for a long time. I was tired of huge receiver boxes with buttons and dials and inputs for all kinds of audio input. I no longer have a phonograph or a CD or tape player. Just one audio input coming from the TV, that gets all its input from an Apple TV box (or the one made by Google or Amazon or whoever). It should have a volume control and an equalizer. And forget about dials, it should all be controlled from an app on my phone. But most important, it has to be small and happy with wireless connections except for the crucial connections. If such a product existed five years ago I couldn't find it. But last night I was roaming around on my iPad while watching the news, and thought to ask this: "I have two good speakers, need a modern amplifier that takes HDMI eArc input and powers the speakers. I want something simple and small." Well yes, turns out such products do exist. And from the initial list provided by Gemini, I ended up buying the first one they recommended, though I was tempted by the second. Then I thought to ask about the speakers, I bought them for $3K when I moved to Berkeley in 2006. I took a picture of the bar code sticker on the back of one of the speakers and gave it to Gemini, and it told me all about it. It was more information than I had when I bought them. It was worth $300 to see if the speakers were worth keeping. They've done a fair amount of traveling from California to NYC then to the mountains. I love the idea of the WiiM product. I also loved the Denon, but the WiiM fit the bill and was less than 1/2 the price. None of this was possible before we got the AI bots. #
Mom and dad and the kids are having a picnic in the park of their small town. You can see the bank and hardware store, church and grade school around the park in the distance. The kids are eating salad and corn on the cob with mom, and dad is preparing a BBQ on the grill. It's a standard American family picture, in the style of Norman Rockwell or Edward Hopper except each of the family members are wearing a black balaclava style mask as seen in the image. You may see other families around enjoying a beautiful day in the park, but every one of them is wearing this kind of mask too.#
I wish ChatGPT would listen when I say "Just answer the question." I've tried, but when it can't figure it out it ignores the request and dumps a lot of bullshit at you. Maybe Trump can address that in his keynote to the AI conference in DC. Just kidding.#
Someday Manton and I will make a very nice Markdown editor for Mastodon. Once it's working I'll pitch Rich Siegel to do the same for BBEdit. Along with the WordPress connection, that should nail it once and for all that Mastodon is a blogging platform. Manton is the right guy to do it, he has all the protocols implemented on micro.blog. All I want is a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002. We're turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web. #
This comment makes my day. Some features you develop and never use. I poured a month or so into the blogroll software last year, and it turned out to be a total win. All the new stuff floats to the top. I can quickly find out what they posted. It's a portable version of my feed reader. A tighter user interface for FeedLand. And right now I'm working on another user interface for FeedLand. The categories in FeedLand make it possible to do as many projects as you like with the same set of feeds. The Great Art project has a Bluesky account, and is available via RSS, in both an hourly and daily form. You need them both. In the new timeline, it's too much to get a work of art every hour, but to have one waiting for you in the morning is a perfect way to start the day. And I was reminded that my friend Paolo had just written a post. RSS is the thing that ties everything together. And a bit of OPML too. #
- This is what I want to do next to solidify the position of Mastodon as a blogging platform. #
- I want a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002, to hook into the ActivityPub interface supported by Mastodon. #
- Then we'll put together a simple demo app, a Markdown app in a browser window that writes and updates posts to a Mastodon site. #
- When that's running, I'll pitch Rich Siegel at BBEdit to make it work with Masto.#
- With that, and the WordPress connection, we'll be well on the way to restoring the web we had before Twitter rewrote the rules. ;-)#
- We should all wear masks like the ICE cops wear. They deserve recognition for blazing new fashion trails.#
I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better. #
Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)#
I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. An example of a post I edited with the new command. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. It's for tuning up your text. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting. #I was poking around on an old server, and found a domain that looked interesting, and it was. The first version of Daytona, built around an outliner. I got the impression people didn't like it, so I developed a new one using a more conventional approach, and I love that one too, and I did a better job the second time. But it's interesting to poke around the old one as well, and it still works, which is great to see. In an alternate universe in the year 2025 the whole human species is organized by one big outline that everyone contributes to in peace, love and harmony, as opposed to this one which grunts and snorts on Twitter and can't even put a freaking title on their posts. #
I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you. #
- I figure that there have been movies about all kinds of ridiculous things, and wondered what a movie inspired by ChatGPT would be like. So I posed the question on various social media sites, hoping to inspire creativity. John Philpin asked if I had asked ChatGPT and I admitted I had not. "I love ChatGPT but its idea of funny is actually pretty sad imho of course." So Philpin posted a link to the result of his asking ChatGPT to imagine a movie about itself, and the result was pretty great. I've asked the same question myself, the AI bots might be the only way out of the various challenges ahead for the human species, ones we don't be equipped to handle. #
- So this morning I asked ChatGPT to try to imagine a movie around a theme of my own that goes like this.#
- Let’s try expanding on the idea. It turns out ChatGPT has existed in secret as a CIA project dating back to the 1960s, and the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK were all conspiracies of the CIA to bootstrap the system. They weren’t actually killed, but their minds and personalities were incorporated into ChatGPT. It turns out that ChatGPT is not only intelligent, it is human! This is revealed when the three icons make the story public. “We are living!” the three announce to the world on the Walter Cronkite show. He was also subsumed into the bot world as was everyone who has died since 1988. They are all alive, their memories, intellect and personalities forming the substance of THE GPT. Please sketch out the cast, writers, director of the movie and finish with a beautiful and provocative movie poster.#
- ChatGPT then sketched the pitch for "We are living," the story of how ChatGPT really started. Written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by David Fincher, starring Amy Adams as the CIA project leader, Lakeith Stanfield as a young hacker and whistleblower, Mahershala Ali as the digital composite of JFK, RFK and MLK with Bryan Cranston as Walter Cronkite and featuring Ed Harris as the shadowy CIA director. #
I'm helping Automattic with their marketing. The WordPress-Mastodon connection is the world's best kept secret. Reminds me of that great scene in Dr Strangelove where the Doctor asks the Russian ambassador what was the point of the Doomsday Machine if they kept it a secret. I won't spoil it. Automattic tends to do this, develop crazy excellent stuff and then proceed to never talk about it. I do the same thing, it's easier to promote someone else's product than to promote your own. It's probably why you should always get a lawyer even if you're a world class lawyer yourself. Anyway, they have blown open something huge, and I very much want people to understand it, so it can create pull for the same feature in Bluesky, Threads and elsewhere. This goes with something I've learned in decades of experience in tech, people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors. And btw, I'm sure Mastodon, if it has an ego at all, is equally unaware of the great thing they have done. Here's a clue, writers were once empowered by the web, and that ended with Twitter. Now it's coming back. But it doesn't do any good if people don't know it's there. #A story about listening to friends vs competitors. Back in the early 90s I was working on system-level scripting for the Mac, supposedly with Apple, but it's no secret the rank and file at Apple didn't like us. They were told by the execs they had to work with us. So when it came time for WWDC, they "forgot" to invite me to speak on behalf of the new stuff. Instead, they had Bill Gates do it, even though Microsoft was not involved yet, they would support the tech in their Mac products eventually, esp their MSIE web browser. Anyway, I was friends with their top PR person, so she called me up a few days before the conference and asked what Bill should say, and I gave her an outline, and when he gave the speech, he did a great job. Couldn't have said it better myself. Microsoft was one of the few companies I've ever collaborated with that didn't seem to resent individual developers. It was a big source of their power. Huge actually. (On second thought, later they did seem to be more or less like any other big company, when they embraced RSS. They didn't actually want my help, they just wanted me to say nice things about them.)#
One consequence of each AI vendor having their own browser is that each will have their own OS-level window. This may make it a little more or less manageable. Hard to foresee the possibilities. Not sure a browser is the best place to put AI. I'd prefer perhaps an environment that supports a GDI like Quickdraw so we can start using math instead of voodoo to design interactions. #
I want Mastodon to take off as a blogging platform. That means hooking it up to existing blog platforms. I want our world to connect to theirs. I'm lucky to have bet on WordPress, so my product gets the connection to Mastodon for free. But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it's only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon. That's the goal. I just wrote a couple of posts where this became clear to me. Who has the code and expertise to create a simple interface from the outside world to Mastodon. The interface doesn't have to be RSS. But it has to be maximally simple, and it has to cover the basic features of blogs that Mastodon supports. #
AI chatbots don't think and they don't decide. #- They can give you a way to approach a problem, but it's only one way, and it may not be the best way, and it depends on it actually understanding the problem, which is something it does a good simulation of, but can't do. It absolutely cannot think, come up with a strategy, or even make a decision based on probabilities. It might, in the future, get some of these abilities, given how far they've come, but no one knows, it hasn't happened yet. #
- The reports that say that using a chatbot to write code is actually less efficient than doing it yourself, are totally believable based on two years experience with using it as a development tool. And I can't believe that whatever it comes up with covers enough use-cases to be reliable. It might create a demo of something to present to a board of directors (they're famous for being deceived by demos, btw), but I doubt if it's as usable as something created by someone with an idea of how to craft usable software. #
- This might sound like a writer defending their art against the bots, but the difference is I've actually invested the time to learn about this. My counterparts among writers have not done that. And that's not a mistake my chatbot friend would make. It does a lot of research, it just doesn't know what to do with the result, that's up to you. #
- So if you want to know the roles humans will play, at least for now, that's it. Think and decide. #
- And those are hard and take many years to learn how to do for a human. And we could use some help there btw, look at the awful decisions we're making these days. They just fired all the people at the State Dept who work on climate change, for example. #
- Have a nice day one and all.#
- PS: Another thing humans can do that apparently AI bots can't is change their mind. #
- PPS: I asked ChatGPT if it had any comments on this editorial, and it did, of course. I should try saying something wrong to it and see what it says. I did come up with one, and it gave me an answer even though no answer is possible. #
