This is amazing. Some of my friends at Automattic quickly put together a toolkit for WordPress that allows it to host my blogroll. There are still some missing pieces and some CSS glitches. But this is exactly where I hoped we would be at this point.
#
Read this on Threads. The thing that's great about this moment is that people are just beginning to get the possibility of not being locked into silos. They don't know how to parse my posts and screen shots, because I can do something they never thought they'd be permitted to do. Well we've got some visionary and lovable techies at Masto and Blueski who want you and I to be able to do that. And we've been building on that. And will continue to do so, Murphy-willing.
#
Blogroll fix. The blogroll was grabbing the up and down-arrow and Return for keyboard navigation, one of my favorite blogroll features. Put the cursor where you want, and arrow through the list. Press Return to expand, and again to collapse. Then down-arrow and repeat. But sometimes you want to use these keys for other functions. So I changed it so you have to click the blogroll to set the focus. Its border turns blueish, and the keys work as described. Press the Tab key or click outside the blogroll to take the focus off the blogroll.
#
I'm working with developers again, thank goodness. I once thought I could make server products or toolkits for people I called "poets" -- motivated writers. I have given up on that, at least for the time-being. I think a properly motivated intelligent writer could get developer-like results, I've seen it happen (Brent Simmons, Dan MacTough). They make really good developers because they understand the user perspective so well, it still lives inside them. The problem seems to be motivation, and a poet knowing that they need to be super-motivated and have the time, to get
anything technical to work. If they knew what was required, my 2024 theory goes, and had studied for it, the way they studied for their degree, they could not only be successful, but they could contribute to the developer process. Analogously, we all have to learn a little cooking just to get through life, but only a few people are chefs.
Julia Child, a hero of mine, believed she could teach anyone to be a good-enough cook. But I bet she was frustrated by human reality.
😄#
Now that I have ChatGPT around, my
Lorem Ipsum text for testing can be slightly more interesting.
#
- Linkblogs work differently in blogrolls. When I click a link it takes me to the site the blog linked to, not to the blog.#
- So.. When you click the link in the screen shot below it takes you to a Metacritic review of the program#
Screen shot.
#
It's so funny, the editor of Wordle on a
podcast on Friday, 1000th puzzle day, said there are some puzzles that you might not solve in six moves not because of skill rather because of luck. I was pretty sure when I took my second guess, but that's just when the cursing started. By the third guess I thought she's screwing with us! I should not have listened to the podcast.
#
On Mastodon: I've done this before, starting 25 years ago. Find some new connection I can make because someone was wise enough to add an RSS interface. I get to have an
aha! moment and a good laugh at how great this is and then write a freaking blog post about it, and people think man this web thing is pretty cool.
#
On this day
in 1999. Not much happened in RSS. But I'm going to keep checking for the next couple of weeks.
#
An upgrade idea for the web. I'd like to have a bit of JavaScript code ask to be notified when the user clicks on a link on my page that gets them a 404. I'd like a chance to do some looking around and seeing if I can find the thing they wanted. This comes up when you look at the archive of this blog for
March 1999. Back then my server was a Macintosh which had a case-insensitive operating system. A few years later I moved all the stuff to Amazon S3, much less hassle, and probably cheaper too. But over there the filesystem is case-sensitive. I must've been typing in URLs by hand and not caring about case, because why should I, my server didn't care. Except now it does care and when I click links to pages I know
are there, but
can't be found, I get depressed. I wanted to read the damn thing, that's why I clicked on it. Not to see some cute
404 page (although it is pretty nice). Even better would be a way to tell Amazon to serve this bucket without regard to case.
#
Saying the web
misses Google Reader is like saying the United States misses President Trump. Why do I think that? Think of the mess Google left behind when they dumped the web. Putting all our cards in one basket in software is a very very very very bad idea. As everyone who misses The Orange Feed Reader is evidence of. It's like someone rips you off bad and all you can think about is how much you miss them. You, sir or madam, need to get your head examined.
#
- As I complete a big project I like to re-center, to remind myself what I'm working for.#
- My goal is to create a social web that includes blogs and twitter-like systems. To set a new baseline where titles, simple styling, links, enclosures and the ability to edit are tools writers can use.#
- Somehow twitter pushed writing into a tiny little box. If we work together we can dig ourselves out of this box. #
- I love that I can read Mastodon posts in my freaking blogroll. #
Eugen is the founder of Mastodon.
#
Maybe the thing I'm most
proud of is that the
blogroll can host
Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, because they
support outbound
RSS. I can also follow
Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon, for the same reason. And of course
Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, whose WordPress supported RSS from inception. Bluesky, Mastodon and WordPress, in the same social web. One of those
Golden Spike moments.
#
The blogroll is a lot like weblogs.com combined with its successor my.userland.com. All this happened first in 1999. Today's blogroll is far in advance technically from the blogrolls of
25 years ago.
#
When I was growing up they taught us that humans were the only animals that were conscious. They wasn't any scientific evidence of this, we know now, because it obviously
isn't true. And to my own credit, I was sure it was bullshit when I was a kid.
#
Finally seeing a real blogroll bug. We're getting notified that feeds are updating that we aren't following, yet they're showing up in my blogroll anyway. Either have to add some code or look for a bug. Good thing I've got the only really deployed blogroll now.
#
This is a nit, but it bugs me anyway. I'd love to know why Threads, which in every way is a modern JavaScript app running in a web browser, uses
urls that begin with www. In 2024. There's no harm in it, it's just there was a consensus a long time ago that the
www part was not necessary.
#
- We've noted this before.#
- Established facts about Trump eventually lose their currency, reporters forget and report it as big news next time they see it happening. #
- Trump's fealty to Putin for example. How could a reporter forget that? Yet they seem to. #
- Two moments to bring you back. #
Picture 1.
#
Picture 2.
#
- There are so many of these pictures. #
- Remember we tried letting Trump play president, we shouldn't have survived it, and in a lot of ways we didn't.#
- Collectively we're like the main character in The Sixth Sense (no spoilers, but if you have seen it you know what I mean).#
- So please, dear reporters and editors, try to factor actual proven facts into the context of your reporting.#
- Four things.#
- We're selling ourselves out by letting Facebook own a new social network and not putting that energy into building something that preserves our choice.#
- I understand that Facebook's claims of supporting the Fedisphere won't amount to anything. They will end up controlling what interop means, which means we end up with yet another app store, with all the nonsense that comes with. Welcome to CyberDisneyland.#
- You know all this, as well as I do. But we have decided not to care.#
- This is exactly how we snookered ourselves into using Twitter for 17 years.#
Lots of cleaning up after yesterday's party. I love that people are open to new ideas with blogs in 2024. It's been a while.
#
BTW, this is the
feed list for my blogroll. Feel free to import or subscribe to it into your feed reader.
#
The Scripting News
RSS feed now has a <source:blogroll> element.
#
A popup menu with all kinds of background info.
#
10-minute
podcast about today's Blogroll-out.
#
That's
a blogroll, over there.
#
Blogrolls were a common feature in early websites. A list of blogs you follow. A checklist of places to look at. Advertising our web friendships. Blogrolls were the beginning of today's social web.
#
It's time to take a fresh look at the humble blogroll.
#
Screen shot of home page, with blogroll, shortly after launch.
#
- Here's a screen shot of the new software that came out today, the blogroll feature on Scripting News. #
- It's a post on Manton's blog, viewed in the blogroll on my site, talking about stuff on my site. #
- As we used to say in the Old School Blogosphere: "Watching them watch us, watch them watching us, etc, etc."#
Manton's blog is expanded, revealing the five most recent posts. The cursor points at one, showing the full text in a tool tip. Click the link to visit the post on his blog.
#
Shortly after posting this item, Scripting News showed as the top item in the blogroll.
#
Then Doc Searls posted on his blog, and I had to snap a screen shot.
#
- Did you know that Doc coined the term blogroll? #
- Today was a very exciting day here, I think tomorrow will be too.#
- #
- This image was the result of a late night collaboration with ChatGPT. For some reason it can't spell anything right, and when I asked it to correct the spelling it mocked me. But I loved the design. It understood the hard part of what I was asking for. #
- The Knicks have been slumping since two of their top players have been out with injuries for over a month, after having an amazing January. One of the two star players came back last night, and what a difference! They went from being a team that could barely put a starting five on the court to having the deepest bench in the NBA. I was trying to do the math, but came up empty. They were absolutely unstoppable. Now that they have two superstars on the court at once, the opposing team can't just double or triple-team the one player, it's basically impossible to defend against their schtick. At the same time, the Knicks are great at defense. When the second injured player comes back, and it seems that will be soon, we might be back in the January mode that was so exciting. Even so, last night's game was a return to greatness. They blew out the 76ers, something that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. It's fun being a Knicks fan again! ❤️ #
Tim Berners-Lee's idea for user-owned and controlled storage is good. Can't tell you how many times, as a developer, I wanted this. To get it going it'll need at least a couple of compelling apps, to seed the bootstrap. Like
MacWrite and MacPaint for the Mac. Without that, it can't even begin. I could help with their bootstrap if I had some belief they had would not crush developers, which is harder to do than it sounds. The only times it has worked for me, for a little while, was when I created the platform and apps and content (you need all three). But the huge companies have no vision for the role of developers, so these things rarely even get off the ground, and who's going to sign up to believe in the goodness of a huge company. It's a very steep road TBL has chosen to travel. I have argued with my friends at Automattic that they are in a golden position to do this since they already have a large installed base product that's popular with users, and lots of developers who could make good use of storage attached to each account. I hope someone with deep pockets and longevity does it. Then we can really start building an app ecosystem on the net. We've been doing this for 35 years as TBL points out, and we still haven't created an economic developer ecosystem on the web. Storage, believe it or not, is the big missing piece.
#
We need a protocol for embedding a tweet in a web page. We used to have one with Twitter, but it now works only intermittently. Mastodon has one, and I have been able to use it. But really it would be nice to have a sort of jQuery of this stuff. If they're all going to create their own APIs we obviously need a container for that so developers don't have to worry about all of it.
#
BTW, has Twitter abandoned "tweet" as a trademark? Is it now public domain? Could someone ask?
#
I bet someone could develop and AI bot that takes a NYT article and removes the spin. It'd be interesting to see the befores and afters.
#
This
screen shot illustrates the core weakness of Mastodon. We need the ability to log on to Mastodon, not to an instance. A factoring of that functionality. It totally could work, some person, company, foundation or whatever could build software that acts as a simplifier. Have you ever used plex.tv? Somehow they manage to do it. You're connected to someone's server, but you log on through one site.
#
- Manton is doing great work.#
- His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.#
- We've been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.#
- That's imho the best part.#
- PS: Blogrolls is where the social web started.#
- PPS: I have to write a short "what is a blogroll" doc, re OPML and RSS. There's not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.#
- PPPS: I'm having flashbacks to Manila. We're using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software. #
- Zach Seward, a friend from my days at Harvard and NYU, got a kickass job, starting up the AI effort at the NYT. He's just the right guy for it. Young, curious, creative, and very ambitious. And he has a strong startup journalism background. I couldn't think of anyone I'd want more to be in this position. #
- Now that he's published notes for a talk he gave at SXSW, it's time to share some ideas I have for the NYT re AI.#
- Current events. This is something ChatGPT doesn't do. Not sure why. I'd like to be able to connect to ai.nytimes.com and ask it to give me a rundown on the lawyer who's testifying in Congress today about how our president is "elderly." I don't want pointers to stories, though they should be included in the response, I want a custom report, like the ones ChatGPT provides, that answers the questions I have about the MAGA lawyer. Maybe the AI will just give me the story without the spin. #
- More useful NYT archives. When I was a kid I spent so much time at the big library in Jamaica (Queens) going back through microfilm of the NYT from before I was born. So far all we've done is replicate the microfilm user experience (which is great and very useful) but the thing that ChatGPT does so well is prepare custom reports. All that source material, used to answer very specific questions. Answer questions like "has anything notorious happened in the neighborhood I grew up in, as far as the NYT knows?"#
- Sell a service to your readers where you manage the archive of their blogs, and in doing so you create a much broader archive for historians, journalists and others to study in the future, and, in the context of AI, feed it all kinds of perspective on the time we live in. Maybe in the future history won't be written by the winners (lotsa luck with that). Anyway, if at some point the NYT and other journalism outlets will harness the energy, knowledge and intelligence of the readers, why not start now? #
- I criticize the NYT a lot, I know. But that means I care. When I stop criticizing you'll know that I've given up. #
- Alan Kay said of the Mac, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. That's the spirit. #
Manton Reece:
Recommendations and Blogrolls. We have been working on this together for the last couple of weeks. Really exciting to see it come to fruition.
#
Journalism talks about Trump's trials, but they are trials for the Constitution too. If Trump is guilty (spoiler:
he is) then if he isn't punished we no longer have the rule of law. So don't miss that we are on trial too. And -- when journalism frames the faceoff as Democrat vs Republican, they ignore us, the people of the United States. Whether people know it or not, they will lose if the Republicans win. We know that, it's provable. And anything that's true should be built into the stories journalism writes about.
#
Last night's
email was a repeat of Saturday's. The reason was the switch to
Daylight Savings Time. This happens every year. The fix is to edit stats.json in the mail sender app's folder, and change
whenLastUpdate
to the day before, save it, and restart the sender app. It immediately sends out the correct email. I put this note here so I might find it next time it happens and I forget how to fix it.
😄#
- The other day I wrote proudly that we had better more reliable server software in 2024 than we did the first time we bootstrapped blogging communities. #
- And then this happened...#
- We've been having serious problems on feedland.com since Friday when I made a software version mistake. At first it caused the server to crash when you tried to subscribe to a new feed, so you'd get an awful error message, either from the FeedLand website, or the browser, saying the server had gone away. I quickly fixed that problem and another, and restored the server to some basic functionality. But when I did some work on my account over the weekend, I saw that there were new errors. And then noticed that none of my feeds had updated since March 8, they still haven't. #
- We're going to fix it this morning, by reverting the server software to the version as it was before the update, and the server should return to its previous reliability, Murphy-willing. Then we're going to upgrade the database, and then install the new software, and try again. That won't happen today and probably not tomorrow. #
- Most people probably don't know that feedland.com is a project I'm doing with Automattic. It's running in their cloud. This system should be able to scale up in ways that a Digital Ocean droplet can't, where feedland.org and the new feedland.social are running. So when there are many thousands of users, we should be okay. That's why I did the work to convert FeedLand so everything is stored in the SQL database, and nothing in the file system, among other changes that had to be made last year, like getting off Twitter for identity. That was not much fun, but it had to be done. #
- Anyway I am very sorry and embarrassed for the unreliable performance on our main server in the last few days. I can't promise it won't happen again, but we learned a lot in this experience, and in some cases re-learned. #
- It's even worse than it appears and as they say -- still diggin! #
Journalism is missing the story of the century. Does the American experiment end here? That's the horse race worth covering.
#
I still haven't found whatever it is that is causing the tabs not to respond to clicks sometimes on mobile devices on news.scripting.com and scripting.com. I'm thinking about all the time that's going into this and how much value there is in the tabs. I could also cut through all the michegas and just redirect from news.scripting.com
into FeedLand. The same data. There
are advantages to doing it that way. For some people that is what news.scripting.com will turn into. It's an on ramp to the world of collaborative feed subscriptions. The open social web, in feeds. Which is why we call it Feed
Land. You know The Land of Feeds. I like "land" names for products and companies. I started a company called UserLand a long time ago. I was skiing in Utah in 1989 when I decided on two names: UserLand and Frontier. I like product names that begin with F, esp if you come from the Mac -- where the
Finder is the app you spend a lot of time in. So Frontier was a good name simply because it was two syllables and began with F. I know it's weird. It's also why FeedLand feels like a homey name to me. :-)
#
Good morning. Here's the
next tabs test. Yesterday's test showed that tabs that switching between images is fine. The tabs never get hung up. Today's test is the same except one of the tabs is a FeedLand timeline. I want to see if somehow click events are getting lost on their way to the tabs manager.
#
Here's the
fourth testbed. This one has all the tabs in news.scripting.com. This testing has been really helpful. Please stay with the process.
#
The CEOs of Mastodon, Bluesky, Automattic and Ghost are all in my (real soon now) blogroll because their systems all support feeds. There's something new afoot. An open social network that "just works" across platforms because of simple easy well-established standards.
#
The
next test for finding the conflict in my tabs code. I'm trying to isolate a problem with the tabs code I use in my blog, and in various pieces of software. Late last year, I decided to stop making new tabs systems, and to invest in a single great tabs manager. This app tests only that code. So I want to know if this works. I may add another test after a while, based on the results of this test.
#
Of course the Russians and Repubs have a plan to blow up this election like they did in 2016. Probably something that uses AI. They'll be two steps ahead of the Dems who are famously tech-averse. And they'll get plenty of help from the press who are happy to repurpose Repub talking points as news. They never questioned Huh or
whatever his name is, they just carried his quote as if it were gospel. Of course Trump's legal bills will be paid by his fellow fascists around the world. His fines are small change so far, less than a billion dollars. Putin is the
richest man in the world. He could buy a 50% chance of owning the US government again for at most a couple of billion, only this time he'll really know how to loot it, and with his hacking he can improve the odds. Trump doesn't care as long as he gets to go on TV and preen. He loves
bending the knee for Putin.
#
I got a text message from an unidentified person saying they were coming to SF soon for some event so now we could go for a nice walk on the beach. At first I wondered who this could be. I have a 415 number, but I live far away from Calif. My first thought this was a friend who didn't know I moved (in 2009 btw, must not be someone very in touch). Of course it's just phishing. D'oh. It's clever. I guess. I guess it isn't really that smart to send a message to a random 415 number and assume the person might live in the Bay Area.
#
I just added a <link rel="blogroll"> to my blog. I don't think it's ever had such a thing before. Now where's the freaking blogroll?
😄#
Poor Things on Hulu is excellent. Didn't get a good
review from NYT. I usually like their reviews but this time I think the reviewer didn't understand. As I see it, it's hey check out what
Emma Stone is doing now. Really entertaining because she is such a thrill.
#
Here's a test you can help with if you have a minute and are using a tablet or phone. Go to
this page. Click on each of the tabs. Do the clicks always work? Or do you have to click several times to get anything to happen. There is no good or bad answer. It's just a test. Please report result
here. Say what kind of device you were using. Thanks! :-)
#
There's a problem on
news.scripting.com and the
scripting.com home page. On a mobile device, sometimes you have to click several times on a tab to get it to switch. It doesn't seem to happen in desktop browsers. Yesterday I finally got it to reproduce on my own machine, when emulating an iPad Mini in Chrome on my desktop. I added debugging code and set breakpoints, and had a theory that tooltips were interfering, which turned out not to be the case, but now that I can reproduce it here, I really want to get this solved. If you have development experience, or just like a good technical puzzle,
here's the thread. Help much appreciated.
#
Why hasn't anyone invented a substance that has the properties of snow but doesn't melt. It's probably a crazy question. Why hasn't anyone invented a substance that has the properties of snow but doesn't melt. It's probably a crazy question. Why does it have to be cold to ski??
#
When I was a kid we used card catalogs, microfilm, encyclopedia and almanacs. Much later there was the web with search, Wikipedia and archive.org. Now there's ChatGPT. Each level was a dramatic improvement of the previous one. Now everything we're all working on is cast in a new context. They don't mean what they used to. What problem with the AI solve next? Any one of us can discover one, any day.
#
Evan Prodromou
explains that he has access to a feature in Threads that we don't have, which allows him to follow his Threads account from a Mastodon account. This is the easy side of interop, the other direction is more difficult, not technically, but from a regulation and PR standpoint. Facebook (they call themselves Meta now) heavily regulates what people can see on their network, and it's hard to imagine them not having an App Store like the ones on iOS and Android that allows certain services to peer with them and disallows the rest. This should be factored into people's thinking about the benefits of federating. It probably will feel fairly one-way.
#
The State of the Union tonight was great. MSNBC hosts are totally turned on by Biden's speech. They're actually having an interesting discussion. Remarkable. More later.
#
ChatGPT is everything the
lazyweb was supposed to be.
#
If blogging does come back now, it'll have features it didn't have last time we were really working on it. The reason is cheap servers, we know how to use them, and the software is already written. You'll get a chance to see how that works in a matter of days now, Murphy-willing of course.
#
January 6, 2021, a date which will live in infamy.
#
Have you ever seen an investigative report on the
oft-quoted lawyer who
said the nasty shit about Biden's age? Where's the journalism there?? Tell us a bit about his flaws. Is he a Federalist Society guy? Who did he vote for. Any other conflicts of interest? What does he know about aging, btw? Is he an expert? Did he even take a college course on aging? Did he consult experts before forming his opinion? Also does he feel it's fair for a prosecutor to use his public platform to smear the reputation of an innocent person? And finally if there is no respect for the president as a person, what about the office, and the country the president serves? Does he have any respect for that? And did he expect to have the light shone on him for making such a bold and potentially damaging statement? And then let's find out why the journalists never shone the light on Mr Hur.
#
When a headline says
the presidential race is deadlocked, what actually happened, in terms of who, what, why, when and how. Could the people who write these stories pass a journalism course with this stuff?
#
This just in from Occam's News. The states of Colorado, Maine and Illinois have guts and the members of the so-called "Supreme Court" enjoy wearing robes to work and they have nice offices, and don't want to be shipped off to a gulag, or
worse, once Putin's lapdog is back in the White House.
#
Sidebar -- this also explains the behavior of the owners of the media companies, such as the
New York Times. He doesn't wear a robe, but otherwise,
Fear of Gulag probably has a lot to do with what he does.
#
From the Credit-Where-Credit-Is-Due department, links that are jokes was a practice I first saw in
HotWired in 1994. Here I am thirty years later and I'm still stealing the idea and every time I do, I think of Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman's
brilliance.
#
Screaming into the void, which is what the media we have now is really good at, gets us nowhere.
#
- A blogroll is a piece of an open, super low-tech, small pieces loosely joined, social network. And will help us bootstrap textcasting. #
OPML still has a lot to give.
#
The new version of
news.scripting.com is up. It's been a long time coming. It looks a lot like the previous version. But it's faster. And if you poke around you'll find some new stuff. There's an
About page, linked into the info icon at the top of the page. Basically the dust is settling on the big work we did last year, and now things are starting to feel more like products. I don't doubt there will be problems, as they say, still diggin! 😄
#
BTW, in case you're wondering where "still diggin!" came from -- here's the deal. I have a feeling that when I develop software it's a lot like digging a hole and then starting another, and another and using the dirt from a new hole to fill in the old holes. At any time there's more or less a constant amount of dirt and holes. It seems futile at first look, and second looks and third looks, but we do eventually get somewhere, or so we hope, maybe. It's like "even worse than it appears." Still diggin is meant to say we know it's really futile, you don't have to point that out, we never actually go anywhere or do anything, but we feel somehow that next time it really will work. It's a Vonnegut-like or Deadhead-like philosophy, which is also very Postel-like. In other words, realistic.
#
Emily Nunn: "I don’t understand how all the outcry about their bizarre and defensive political coverage and the scary effect it can have on the election is not a major investigative story being written by other journalists. Not some fancy media critic opinion or an editorial. A real report, taking defensiveness out of it and applying accountability." A regular reader of this blog will know how totally I agree with this. But oddly when I agreed with her, perhaps a little to strongly for her liking, she accused me of being a MAGA. It's so totally not true, and typical of reporters, to use an ad hominem to not have to listen to a non-journalist opinion about journalism.
#
I have been a reader of the NYT since I was a small child. I wanted to be a writer like
Russell Baker. I was quoted by
William Safire in an op-ed. I have done some of the
most successful work of my career with the NYT. I love journalism
like I love the Mets. I don't expect them to do great things every season, but I do hope for a
1969 or
1986 every once in a while. These days I don't have much hope for the NYT returning to its former glory. I also wonder if they ever really were that great, that maybe I was just a naive young hero-seeker, growing up in Queens in the 1960s. We
all have to work together to dig out of the hole we're in. And that means reporters have to start looking at themselves, and they have to listen to us, the people who care about the job that we need journalism to do, that it isn't doing.
#
- All these different networks, but it's all the same kind of writing. #
- I just pasted a link to a Substack post into a Threads document. #
- It would make so much sense if the document itself was readable right there, wouldn't it?#
- Is the concept of a "web page" all that valuable?#
- Imagine if each note was a node. #
- People learn to make art by studying previous artists. Would we want it any other way? #
- Imagine if everyone had to reinvent everything that anyone had ever invented just to make something new. #
- There is a lot of that in software, people won't put in an API so you have to rebuild the whole house just to get a window. #
- We can make progress when people don't try to lock up their ideas. #
- Individuals live just a short time, we can't do that much in a lifetime, but we are an amazing species, because we leave behind what we learn and we build. #
We learn by studying ourselves.
#
- So why shouldn't our machines be able to learn too? They already can do things vastly more complex than we can. We've invented a huge lever. #
- Science fiction tells us that we will lose control and be enslaved by our machines. I love those stories, like the Matrix and Battlestar Galactica. But those are stories, they didn't happen. The future is rarely so predictable. Things interact in unforseeable ways. #
- We're at dead-ends in climate and government. We need to make radical changes, and a fresh invention as radically progressive as any that has come before is now in our hands. #
We're going to use it.
#
- PS: I wrote the words, ChatGPT did the images. #
- A new version of news.scripting.com went up today.#
I like to save a screen shot when a new version of something goes up.
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There's been a slowdown in
feedland.org, I believe it's related to a limit reached on the database server. But for now you may see it take a long time to load pages. I have a ticket open with Digital Ocean. Update: Problem fixed.
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There are advantages to being older.
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If the Democrats had a sense of the moment they'd run the campaign on a plan to regain control of the House and keep the Senate and White House so we can pass a law that legalizes abortion in the whole country. Give people a positive reason to elect a governing majority. Think powerfully.
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- I found myself responding at length to my longtime friend and proto-blogger Jeff Jarvis, so instead of posting a thread of chained messages, I just made it a blog post. #
- The thing about Gaza is that there's the rest of the world, and they're watching to see how we deal with Israel, given that Netanyahu has been such an asshole to the US. He's a freaking MAGA. #
- So the president has to gradually increase the pressure on Israel, but he has to be mindful that there already is a shitload of pressure all around, more pressure is the last thing we need. A lot more people will die if it spirals out of control. But Biden is increasing the pressure. The images of the air food drops into Gaza from US planes is exactly the right way to proceed for the US. It shows that there's another path, compassion and help. #
- Being president of the United States is a complicated thing IOW. But they're doing it the only way we can, given who we are. #
- Jeff, I know you know this. This would be the adult discussion, which we never have. Journos seem to think Americans can't understand the basics of world politics, but somehow we understand the rules and history of the NBA, NFL and MLB. The functioning of politics isn't really any more complicated. #
There's a rule in covering elections that they don't make projections or even analyze results on TV until all the polls are closed. We need an analogous rule that says there should be no reporting on polls until after the election, to allow the people to form their own opinions, for the same reason. Also, people are less likely to vote if they feel the outcome is a foregone conclusion. People even form their decision re who to vote for based on the polls. That's not a very healthy way for a country to govern itself.
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The big deal with ChatGPT is that it's a huge improvement over search. Instead of hunting for clues to the info you need, you can ask the question you have and get an answer. It has encyclopedic knowledge of all the development environments I use. And it knows how to put the pieces together. I don't care how it does it, it's a much higher level tool than search. Like the difference between a calculator and a computer.
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When I was a grad student in Comp Sci, I was a teaching assistant for a class in
assembly language programming for a couple of years. One of my responsibilities was to grade the work of the students. Later, I was the CEO and lead developer at a software company I founded, and there I had to review other people's source code. I was pretty fussy about writing understandable code, because it was my job in both places to understand their code, and I also knew, even when I was just a TA, how important it is that your code be human-readable, not just machine-readable. I just want to say if ChatGPT were a student of mine, its code would get an A+, with thanks from the teacher for making my life easier.
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Actually it would get an A+ if it were a student, but not a very high grade for a member of my development team, because it can't seem to learn my coding style. I've pasted an awful lot of my code into its "tiny little text box".
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Ben Werdmuller
explains why he won't have a blogroll. This is the kind of thread we used to form in the old school blogosphere. I don't have an opinion about whether he will or won't have one, but for me, the process of putting this together in 2024 has been a really good thing. I'm better in touch with what other people are doing. My blogroll does more than it did 20 years ago. Actually it's a lot like his
Sources page, but more compact. I'm glad we're having this discussion. It's
exactly what I hoped would happen. And of course my feed list is behind my blogroll.
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The
archive for February 2024, in OPML.
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- In a new product I'm working on, I'm including links to the blogs of the social media apps I use. I notice that most of them have one. This is why:#
- You can put a title on a post on a blog.#
- You can include links (invariably announcements have links).#
- You can edit posts.#
- Simple text styling.#
- Blogs have feeds.#
- So I'm looking for the official blogs of the social apps I use -- Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, Threads. #
- If so, what's the feed URL? #
- Here's a place to comment.#
- PS: It seems dumb to have two places for writing.
Also I bet Bluesky wrote their own blogging software, which is why there's no feed for their blog, which is awkward because Bluesky itself has feeds. As a programmer, I don't think I could maintain both codebases, and i'm pretty sure the blog is the one that'll get abandoned. Update: they do have a feed for their blog. At some point there won't be a distinction between blogging and social media-ing. Remember the tiny little text boxes have to go. 😄#
- PPS: Twitter's blog has a really shitty title, it shows up in the list as English (UK). That should be fixed to something like Twitter Blog. I know how this happens, obviously they're maintaining more than one language, so the title is given from their point of view. As a reader, it has to make sense in a list of feeds from different publishers. Here's a screen shot to illustrate. #
- My friend Brad Pettit is playing with ChatGPT's image drawing capability, and had a brilliant idea, feed it the lyrics to a song and see what it comes back with. He tried Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys by Traffic, a great song, and the image was really cool. #
- This game me the idea to try it with a few of my favorite songs. #
If the state of journalism is so bad from a business side, and if it's not serving the people very well, I wonder if we could work out some kind of deal here?
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If we want even a modest reboot of blogging, as a community thing, we're going to have to start with something like blogrolls. I wrote a bit
yesterday about how blogrolls came about, then weblogs.com and how that led to RSS and feed readers. This time, we don't have to wait for feeds to show up, they're already here. It should happen more quickly.
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There are a lot of blogging communities out there in 2024, but we don't think of them that way. But they totally behave like a blogging community. I remember when I was starting
weblogs.com, I wanted to get an idea of when sites were updating, so I didn't have to go hunting through a blogroll, clicking on links to find out if there was anything new. So I wrote a script that worked off a list of blogs, read each one in turn, and compared it with the last version we read, and if there was a change, it would move it to the top of the list. I didn't just make it for myself, I shared it with everyone. There was a mail list where people were freaking out about this. The server that would read their blog every so often was called
subhonker. This was something new and they were scared. I couldn't show them the benefit until the script had been running for a while. Everyone got upset. I remember being confused and scared, but I guess from their point of view it looked scary. I don't know. In the end weblogs.com became really popular, it became the central place to find out what's new with blogs, and then
evolved to use
RSS so we could find changes in even more detail. I guess the thing is people should see the benefit before they see the price? And as an innovator, we have to be aware of this, people may not see the benefit until they can
use it.
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I'm waiting for someone to give me the tools to index my own content so ChatGPT knows about it. I want it to learn my codebase so I can ask it questions about places I've used a feature before. I want to write code in a very high level language I invent as I go and have it compile it to JavaScript. Come on, what's holding things up. This will be the ultimate productivity software. The first one who gets there owns the world or at least deserves a nice prize and our thanks.
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I use Safari on my iPad. The software just updated, and they widened the width of icons in the browser chrome. This knocked three of my links over into the menu, out of easy reach. Why did they feel they could change something so basic? After using the iPad for 14 freaking years, why shake up this tiny little corner of the system? What's the possible benefit. Or maybe this is just a bug and they'll fix it? This is the kind of thing that makes me put off updating. Yeah I know it sounds small, but I really use my freaking iPad. It isn't just for watching movies. I can't tell you how many iPads I've bought. It's ridiculous. Come on Apple, I'm a customer not a slave.
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Re the Michigan primary returns -- I think it's great that 15% of Democratic voters voted
uncommitted -- because that's democracy, and it does not hurt Biden at all to have the voters express themselves, esp when I'm pretty sure he agrees. Biden is a Democrat, and Netanyahu is a MAGA. Remember that. They are not friends, and Biden has dropped very explicit hints that he's thinking that way. So give him an excuse to kick Netanyahu in the ass, and he'll be happy to do it. But he can't openly threaten Israel now, not with Trump over there saying he'd cut NATO, and thanks to him we're ditching Ukraine, even though Trump isn't in office. All of our alliances are fragile now, and getting worse every time Trump says or does something awful. Biden has to take it steady. I listened to the interviews with advocates for uncommitted, and no one even remotely suggested they'll vote for Trump or a Republican. This is democracy. It's good. That's as American as it gets.
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Another way to think about it. What if, say in California or New York, 15% of the Democrats voted uncommitted to make sure Biden knows he's expected to stand up strong for reproductive rights. That helps clear the way with any Democrats who feel they should go slowly. Voters expressing their political strength. Again, that's pure democracy. It's the best.
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Think of it this way -- voting is governing. We have a lot of power but only if we use it.
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There's a new faster version of
news.scripting.com coming. I was originally thinking I'd do the switch today, but decided to hold it for a bit. I want to do more testing and development.
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Ocean warming is a bad thing. Ocean currents determine the weather all around the world, accounting for a relatively mild environment in Europe, for example, even though a city like London is on the same parallel as
Winnipeg. Once the current is disrupted, people will find their buildings are not prepared for the change, or the cost of heating homes, or growing food.
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In the 80s there was a tech press that reviewed software, and explained OSes and hardware, so you really had a good idea what was going on. They just don't do that anymore. Haven't for many years. But along comes ChatGPT and I can get a
comparitive review of hosting services that compete with Digital Ocean, just by asking for it. I wanted to get an idea of how easy it would be to create an open source app so it could be easily deployed, on any of them and what the pros and cons were. I asked for a comparison between Digital Ocean (where I host my servers now) and Amazon, Microsoft, Google and I threw in
Glitch, just to anchor the whole thing simplicity-wise. Even InfoWorld wouldn't have done such an in-depth review. This is a
productivity revolution, at least.
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My
Threads timeline is full of
Kara Swisher the last few days. She has a
book coming out. I think she's popular with other journalists. Her theme appears to be that it's the personalities that matter, not what the companies do. I don't think she has a whole lot of insight into the products and technology. For some reason tech, which mystifies a lot of history and english majors, is considered irrelevant or optional, or maybe kind of cute, by the typical reporter. So she expresses tech in terms the journalists understand, therefore they like her.
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Not much blogging here today. A lot of writing in other contexts.
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Went out to eat, nice pizza place in
Phoenicia. There was a guy wearing a brand new Trump hat. I've never seen that in a public place. Otherwise he looked perfectly normal. I wondered what kind of weirdo has that kind of hate in his heart. Is he listening to what Trump is saying these days? I didn't want to ask him. These are our Nazis. They've hated us their whole lives. Until now, I never knew they existed. And now they get to parade around in public with these obscene hats on. When will the swastikas start appearing on the hats. I wonder if this is the first of many. Like the
Germans partying at
Rick's place in
Casablanca. One more thing. Have you heard about the
Civil War movie coming out later this year. Watch the
trailer. Maybe wait till morning, because you might have trouble sleeping.
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BTW, apparently my
post yesterday where I said I was "doing some of my best writing in ChatGPT" was confusing. I meant literally what I said.
My writing. Not that I was using ChatGPT to do my writing for me. I can understand that some people do that, writing isn't one of their things. However writing is one of my things. I've been writing every day for almost
thirty years. My writing style has changed a lot over the years. I don't necessarily think it's gotten better, it's just different. I would never post writing publicly written by a anyone other than me without saying it was. Writing for me is very personal. On the other hand, I don't draw very well, never have. I used to be good at box diagrams with arrows, but I'm really out of practice. So if you see something colorful here, that
was drawn by a bot, unless it says otherwise. I think we all have to be very clear about that. Now, I do write a lot in ChatGPT because I'm trying to get it to help me solve problems, almost always technical. Basically you have to
sketch out the problem in English very specifically so it gives you back what you want. I never thought I'd be programming in English, but here I am doing it. I really want a copy of everything I write, because someday I might want to feed it into a bot other than ChatGPT. There's the lock-in.
They own part of me, and I don't even get a copy. Yes yes I know I can download individual conversations, but not if they include an image btw, did you think of that? And who has time to remember to download them. This is fucked up. One of my action items is to hook
Drummer up to their API so I'm not relying on their editor. Every time you find yourself typing into a
tiny little text box the alarms should go off.
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There's a
Beatles song, by John Lennon, that was written by cribbing promotional items from a 19th-century
circus poster. It's kind of like asking ChatGPT to give you some random phrases and presenting that as your creativity. I think I'm going to
try that now. I asked ChatGPT to write a poem using ideas from a random song written by John Lennon. It chose Imagine. I asked that it write a poem using the ideas in Day Tripper. And finally I asked it to write a song based on the story of The Matrix.
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When I see the word "blogrolls" on my screen, in big letters, my brain always sees "bagels" first. I guess we know what's on my mind.
💥#
It just occurred to me that I'm doing some of my best writing in ChatGPT, and I don't automatically get a copy of all that text somewhere I can access it if they go away. Also that writing is not going into any search engine. Normally I watch out for this, but they got me, and you, to write for them for free, and I pay them $20 a month for the privilege. However in balance it is worth it, at least in the short term.
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Unfortunately ChatGPT has been down just when I needed it for some SQL coding help, so I turned to Google's service, and then thought to paste the post above into it's
tiny little text box, and see what
it had to say. It suggests, among other things, that I reconsider whether ChatGPT is a good deal. Heh.
😄#
The other day I
asked if an op-ed columnist at the NYT or WP would ever criticize their employer for showing poor judgment on what to report on, esp re the election. I was thinking of the
story about the
special prosecutor who did something highly unethical in writing a public, official, condemnation of someone he investigated yet decided not to prosecute. We have judges and juries for that. Only in a police state can a prosecutor pass judgment on an accused person. The news orgs took the bait, I didn't read one report on who
Robert K. Hur is, and the ethics of what he did. Is it appropriate to quote a person who was behaving so openly unethically, esp if you don't disclaim that up front. It's not that democracy is on the ballot this year, we're already over the line. Our journalism is acting as if it were already controlled by the authoritarians. Our lack of trust in journalism is our biggest problem. How can we force journalism to start to be a
little accountable. Right now they're the only part of our ruling class that can't have their choices reviewed.
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- I came up with a motto for Joe Biden's presidential campaign -- Old Enough to Know Better.#
- I asked ChatGPT to draw a campaign rally with a banner that said that, but it wouldn't do it for Joe Biden, so I changed the name to Bull Mancuso, and had him run for governor of Calif instead of president of the US. #
- It still couldn't spell the banner correctly but it is pretty inspiring.#
The banner should read "Old Enough to Know Better."
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I have the motto for the Biden campaign:
Old enough to know better. Uncle Joe, sit down with a reporter you can relate to, and explain what aging is about. How there's good and bad that come with getting on, and Repubs (of course) have been focusing on the bad but the journalists aren't getting the other side. One thing is for sure, it's hard to put one over on someone who's been in politics at the highest level for as long as President Joe has been. That's what the "know better" part is about. Whatever you can say about him, he knows a lot about being president. I've been using this motto as my own tagline for a while. But in the interest of protecting our democracy, I think the president should use it for his re-election campaign. No charge.
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- Even though they are, for me, the biggest band ever, I've never been able to see the connection to the John Lennon of the early Beatles, and the long-haired bespectacled wild John Lennon that came later. I don't see them as the same person. Not the other Beatles, they all make sense to me. Sometimes they have longer hair or a beard or whatever, but it's still the same face as before. Also I have trouble figuring out which Beatle is singing sometimes. On some songs it's perfectly obvious, others I have no clue. For example Norwegian Wood, Come Together, Strawberry Fields and Lucy in the Sky, that's John of course. Right? Hey Jude, that's clearly Paul, as is Let it Be, Yesterday. But for years I didn't know who sang Lady Madonna. Martha My Dear? Paul could sing so many different kinds of music. John, not so much. I guess. I'm still pretty unsure. #
- What I asked for: Imagine a version of The Sims or SimCity that had ChatGPT integrated,. You could create whole civilizations and then explore them, and if there was something you didn't like, you could have your way. No rule of law for you! You are the law. I wonder if you could draw me a Sims-like community as ChatGPT would design it.#
"Here's a visual representation of a vibrant, utopian community as imagined with the integration of ChatGPT's design principles. This community blends futuristic architecture harmoniously with nature, featuring energy-efficient homes, community centers, and public spaces all connected by pedestrian pathways and lush gardens. Solar panels and wind turbines integrate seamlessly into the buildings, and the central plaza acts as a hub for gatherings, surrounded by parks, sports fields, and a lake for water activities. This illustration embodies an ideal balance between technology and nature, promoting health, well-being, and environmental stewardship."
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- I don't care if you work at a big company or are an individual developer. #
- I care if you can make a contribution toward interop on the open web. #
- I've found over the years that sometimes devs at bigco's can help enormously (eg microsoft, netscape, automattic) but more often they are harmful (apple, ibm, sun, google stand out as the worst). Sometimes companies play both roles (apple).#
- But i also know that bigco's because they are big, have lots of different ideas how the world should work. And that can help.#
- I wrote this on Twitter this morning. Re-posted here with minimal editing. The fact that I could write it on Twitter was the point.#
- Twitter has one advantage over all the other social webs. no character limit. #
- I started typing a post on Threads which has a large character limit compared to the others, but ran out of space and decided to write it over here in twitter instead. #
- yes they charge me $8 a month for it, but it's worth it. #
- we have to get used to the idea of paying for value, it's how we avoid the messes of the last 20 years. esp if we can make sure we retain copies of everything we write (guaranteed by using our own writing tools, btw) which is another requirement for the new blogosphere. #
- btw, i'm having a blast these days. it's like tinkerbell in peter pan. all the open web needed was people to believe it exists for it to come (back) into existence.#
- still diggin. #
- ps: i also like they have simple styling, but where are the freaking links, twitter. do I have to pay another $8 to get those??#
- pps: the worst character limit is bluesky, i can't write anything there. too bad, it's a really nice system otherwise.#
- ppps: it would be nice to give something like this a title so you don't have to read pgf after pgf to try to figure out where i'm going and if you're interested. so i gave it a title, using markdown syntax. maybe they could just support markdown. hmmm.#
- pppps: i asked chatgpt to draw an illustration. that light in the middle of the room is the open social web. it's a vision of self-reliance, empowerment and cooperation. I asked for the light to be tinkerbell, but i guess they were concerned the image might belong to someone. creeping shitification. #
This is not a picture of Tinkerbell.
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