Do you think you've ever had an online chat with an AI impersonating a human without you knowing? Have you had such an experience with someone you know? If no, when do you think you will have such a conversation? Would you mind if a friend used an AI to front for them, so they could do other things while they were "chatting" with you? Would you be liable for anything your avatar did or said?#

It's a fascinating moment, somewhat like when the Berlin Wall came down. When it happened, we were all in kind of a daze. That wall had been there my entire life. No one knew, for many years, what its disappearance would mean. Same with the wall betw the Democratic and Republican parties. It was still the same US when one or the other was in power, there were constants that didn't change. There was an agreement that politics ends at the border. But now, are there two parties? What became of the one we call Republican? #

Also, when the Berlin Wall came down there were no blogs or podcasts. We got what we were given by the news networks and NYT and WSJ. #

The next in the series of podcasts from 2004. This one was done driving from Banff to Kelowna, on the way to Seattle.#

I found a bug in opml.visitAll in the OPML package I use in various software including Drummer and FeedLand. Had to fix it, even though there's a slight chance of breakage.#

Journalism doesn't come back from the election of 2024, any more than the Republican Party does. #

I got a beautiful new Pixel 9 Pro yesterday. It was amazingly easy to move the data from the old phone to the new one. Just turn both on near each other, and click a couple of dialogs. Haven't used it for anything yet. Will report. #

I got a bit of pushback on what I wrote about The Newsroom yesterday. If you think it was great, you should watch it again. They got everything wrong, imho -- and the storytelling is as simple as Atlas Shrugged. If you loved it in 2012, okay -- but we've all been through hell since then. And we know how the news orgs The Newsroom was trying to model dealt with the challenge. They folded. They gave up. It's all bullshit. It's like watching the story of a great war, that we lost. I don't mean bloggers, I mean all of it. If democracy depends on journalism, then it's gone. It can't come back from what they're doing now. Think of the hair-splitting they did in The Newsroom, even the slightest appearance of impropriety. Now they invite politicians on when they know they're going to tell hugely damaging lies about very important things. They're doing the opposite of what journalism is supposed to do. They sure as hell don't care what we think of them. Go watch it again. It's a time capsule that will show you how much you've learned since those horribly naive days. Maybe I'll write more about this tomorrow. #

I've never written a review on Amazon even though I shop there regularly. I was about to write a negative review for a product they can't seem to support, that I depend on, but got this message. Weird. I bought the product from the page I wanted to review it on. How else would they determine if I actually purchased the product? They don't say. They do offer to tell me a joke if I rate products I've bought. I've heard the company isn't doing that well now that Bezos has stepped aside. Hopefully this is just a bad set of coincidences. #

I'm watching the HBO series The Newsroom from 2012, it's an Aaron Sorkin show. It's fairly insipid, but for some reason I keep watching. They have a multi-episode controversy as they go crazy trying to source a rumor they've heard that the US bombed a town in the Middle East with sarin gas, and killed a lot of people. In other words they committed a war crime. Turns out they were set up by multiple people, and they went through all kinds of angst over who should resign and who should be fired, and how they would ever regain the trust of the viewers. It is a Sorkin thing so it is by definition overdone, but in the context of today's NYT and CNN and all the other schlock "news" that reports Trump's ever-more-egrious lies not only without fact checking, but knowing for sure the lies are coming. That this has happened to American "journalism" is worse than a war crime. It's what everyone told us is an essential part of an authoritarian state, we expect everything in the news to be lies. We have now gotten there. It's good to acknowledge that, imho and stop asking why it is, rather think about what you can do about it. #

Aaron Sorkin is like Ayn Rand. Reviewing his stories after you've grown up makes you wonder why you liked it in the first place. 😄 #

I don't understand using an email to send a code to verify the email address, that you then have to enter into a dialog. Why not just send a URL that the user can click on? What's the design rationale for making the user do the extra steps in remembering the number, switching back to your app, and entering the number by hand, when it could all be done with a single click?#

The blogroll on scripting.com is a real breakthrough. It's actually a feed reader, but don't tell anyone. Actually go ahead and tell them. 😄#

At the beginning of the Trade Secrets podcast on Sept 22, 2004, is when I would say podcasting got its name. Adam and I were the leaders of the community. It had been discussed briefly on the mail list. We all recognized that what we were doing needed a name. There was a consensus, it was a small community by then, very collegial. Dave Slusher had already used the term in his podcast (according to James Cridland), so I said in the Trade Secrets show, let's just go ahead and use it. I did mention Ben Hammersley. So he's not out of the story, but he's not the person who gave podcasting its name. September 2004 was the moment when podcasting became something. It's rare in things like this that you can point to a moment, but we can here, and the record should make that very clear. You could say Hammersley was the first to publish the term in a piece he wrote, but he played no role in the bootstrap. I'd say that by the end of 2004 it was on its way, I basically stepped back and enjoyed the medium along with everyone else. Adam started a company. I would have liked to have started a company then, but it wasn't meant to be. That all happened 20 years ago. #

I started a new this.how doc on how podcasting got its name, so I could include new information. It links back to the piece I wrote in 2013. #

I have done this before, when a blog post I wrote became something I wanted to add to over time. Two examples -- Rules for standards-makers and Trolls. #

Today, in 2024, AI cannot create art. But a human being can use AI to create art. It's a medium, like paint and canvas except it's not static. It gets new skills all the time. It gives me the ability to create in a way I've never been able to before. I can't wait to see what it can do in a few months or years. #

Here's the show notes page for the podcast from Sept 1, 2004.#

And the show notes for the podcast from Sept 2, 2004. Fans of Adam Curry's podcasting will like this one. It's about this time that the collaboration starts becoming a community. Next episode is on Sept 5.#

September 2004 was the month when podcasting became a real community thing. Twenty years ago. I did eight podcasts that month. The mail list, which Adam started, was going strong. This is the month where podcasting got its name, thanks to some brilliant creativity from Dannie Gregoire. Until then we were calling them "audio blog posts" or some variant thereof. You can see it in this Google Trends graph. I started a special feed to echo my programs from 2004, I even got it registered in Apple's podcast database. There will be two podcasts in the feed today because I missed the one from yesterday. Still diggin!#

WordPress and GitHub fit into similar niches, but one is for writers and the other for developers. #

In hindsight Medium chose the wrong business model. They could have done what Automattic has done with WordPress. It's a private company so I don't know how much it's growing or how profitable it is, but from outside it's obviously growing and profitable. Basically, charge writers for the service, or lots of services. Little extras you can add to your site. Use it as a hook to sell domain names (huge recurring business). And open source the Medium editor, when it came out it was a breakthrough in usability, and offer it to Google to bundle with Chrome, upgrade the whole web while you're at it. With billions of windfall from the success of Twitter, why argue over nickels and dimes. That's what I always wondered about the thinking behind Medium. Ev had the ability to change the course of the industry, and make the same kind of money Google and Microsoft make. And yes, I did urge him to do all this at the time, publicly (didn't have access to him privately, if you can believe that). #

Dear NY Times, before we get rid of the penny, let’s open up your op-ed page to include criticism of the NYT. You can handle a little pushback, you need it desperately.#

The networks should put Trump on time delay and when he says you can legally murder babies in some states, that should be treated as if he said fuck or shit. Put up a screen that explains why he was cut off, then go to commercial, esp during the debate on Sep 10. #

Paul Graham wrote a very useful piece about "Founder Mode." As a founder myself, I think I can tell you why founders have a central role to play as the company grows. They're the only ones who know how the company was built, and what works and what doesn't and how to keep it consistent for customers and partners, and the founder, if the company grew, is tuned into to what makes the company work, and will see opportunities that even well-intentioned managers miss. I remember when a company I was a developer for, early in my career, switched out the founder and replaced him with a professional CEO. The founder had problems managing, and could have used help imho, but -- the founder understood what the company was about, and the professional claimed to be a "market of one" and therefore didn't have an opinion about what products the company should make. That would be delegated to people he hired. Almost as if the people running a company were just modules and servers, and if you needed to grow you just bought new modules. In this case. I can write this because I don't have to get approval from anyone else. I'm sure in a company of today someone would take offense at something I wrote here. That my friends is another reason why companies have a hard time scaling. 😄#

Another rule for whoever runs a tech company, they must themselves be a fanatical user of the company's product. They must love it the way a founder loves it. They must think the users are the smartest people in the world because they love the best product in the world. As a founder, I could not visualize the day I left the company for the last time. In hindsight I felt that was the one factor most responsible for the success of the company. #

Graham uses Steve Jobs as an example. He knew what was and wasn't an Apple product. A hired CEO would have to have that explained to him. Sculley, who Graham cites, is a perfectly nice person in my experience, had no idea how to deal with Windows. Very different from a consumer product like fizzy water. Who but Steve Jobs would have thought that an iPod was a proper product for a company that made PCs. I think he himself wanted it, and that's what made something an Apple product. It's probably why post-Jobs Apple is pretty much stuck selling only the products Jobs created for them. He told Cook to innovate on his own vision and timetable, probably knowing full-well that nobody would be able to do it. 😄#

And for some companies, the founder of a company they acquire might make the best CEO when the founder of the original company isn't available. Again Apple is a great example. Steve Jobs ultimately replaced Gil Amelio, after Apple bought NeXT.#

August is archived. Let's start September.#

Why does JD Vance have so many opinions about women? #

It's worth reflecting that the press took its best shot at Kamala Harris, and it was a big puff of smoke, she just cruised right through it.#

Thread: Blogs and the social web will merge. #

Feature I really need: A way to search all of my conversations with ChatGPT. It's the one feature I'm most missing, and the most surprising. I'm sure there's a huge amount of utility locked up in that. #

Humor and putdowns in politics are great if you know how to do it and if the time is right. Trump was the only comedian on stage at the debates. And his act was fresh. The people who loved him loved that the other people hated him. It really was simple. Like a sports team or a favorite comic. Anyway, the Harris folk are good at putdowns and comedy, and the time is right. Trump's act is done, people are tired of the same old bullshit (which is exactly what Kamala said last night in the big interview). That's the cushion they're floating on. If they had called Trump weird in 2016 it wouldn't have worked, and probably not in 2020 for different reasons (he wasn't a joke at that moment, a huge number of Americans were sick and dying, and the economy was in ruin and there was no end in sight, not a good time to be joking around). But now Trump is a joke. So it feels right. Another perspective you should get is James Carville, who was on the Daily Blast podcast on Tuesday. Real eye-openers re how campaigns really work and why it's working for Team Harris now. And btw, why she's doing great now and not so good in 2019, two things. 1. Obviously she's grown. The last four years she's been VP of the United States. That's got to be some kind of education for someone as brilliant as she is. 2. In 2019 she was on stage with 20 other people, and only got tiny slivers of time. Look at what you find appealing about her now (assuming you do). It's the pauses and looks as much as anything, the facial expression. Anyway, she's really good at what she's doing now, at all levels, and Donald Trump is washed up. That's why it still feels good because of course he still could win. #

I was thinking about Wisconsin news orgs and remembered we called the two Madison papers the Crap Times and the Wisconsin State Urinal. I don't know why that's so funny. Everyone does it. We used to call our own company Living Videosex, and the company that bought us out was Cementech or Sementech. Still makes me laugh. And there are company names that are funny without changing them like Microsoft. Sorry.#

What if Trump had been killed in the assassination attempt. What would have happened next? Biden was still the Democratic candidate. #

It has come to my attention that "It's even worse than it appears" might not be the right overlay for Kamala Harris, whose picture is the current banner art for Scripting News. Of course she's still even better than she appears. I really mean that, and if you read this blog regularly you know. But what would a random person think? Hmm. Maybe that it's strange, this is a picture of the would-be president, and it's a good one. I wonder if there are many levels of irony going on at this moment, the visitor might think. No matter how much I love the Democratic team this year, this is not a campaign site. I don't take ads. This is just a blog. You might have to peer below the surface to figure out what's going on. Even the guy who writes this freaking thing can't see all the angles. For now neither the image or motto are changing. There hasn't always been a motto there you know.#

I use my blog in the earliest part of the day to warm up and procrastinate. #

In elections we get to say who we are, ie who comes closest to who we are. It's all made of imagery. Bernie Sanders is someone you either love or don't. He reminds me of people in my own family, who I would never want to be president of anything. But this ad, the best ever imho, says wait a minute, please reconsider. A campaign is a series of messages from candidate to electorate: "Is this who we are?" The great ads tap our optimism, imho. The Sanders ad says we're nice happy people who have jobs and help each other.#

Today Automattic announced that they're converting Tumblr, which they acquired in 2019, to run on WordPress as its foundation. This could get a simple colorful user-friendly interface for WordPress, something it's needed for a long time. WordPress does everything in its UI, Tumblr has its UI better organized for writers and more casual users. If they can move in this direction, it seems that WordPress could be large part of the emerging social web. #

An idea for the Harris campaign. Let me buy some swag and have it sent to 10 of my best friends, esp ones who live in swing states. Plus you get the names and contact info for people at least one of your supporters thought would be a potential Harris voter. I'd send something less presumptuous like When We Fight We Win stickers. Another related idea, let me buy a whole set of promotional materials, kind of like the gift baskets they sell at Zabar's. #

Note to the Harris campaign: This Google search should return a complete list of your ads. Or a pointer to a site with a complete list of your ads. I want to make sure everyone who follows me sees every one of them! Let us help you help us.#

Very insightful Greg Sargent interview with James Carville. Two take-aways for Democrats. 1. Avoid NPR politics. 2. Appeal to college-educated white men. Most of them vote Republican, but with Walz on the ticket, they have a special ambassador, he represents that straight-talking country folk are part of the Democratic coalition. It's still true that white voters are the majority. Get a small number to vote Democratic could be enough to win the election. It never is about policy. It's about whether you are like them. That's what it means to avoid NPR politics. And btw, imho -- getting the press to like you might not be good. I wonder if the Dems would ever have the courage to sever itself from the journos. Imagine Harris saying "If the press says we're bad you know that means we're good." She could say that in her big interview. 😀#

The reason I asked yesterday if NYT reporters sign NDAs (with the NYT, not sources), then when a reporter leaves the NYT they can write a book about WTF happened at the NYT, and it would be an instant best seller imho. #

Do NYT reporters sign NDAs with their employer, the NYT?#

I know it doesn't matter why the NYT are so fucked up about covering the election, but I can't stop thinking about it anyway. Then, Greg Sargent's podcast gave me an idea. The oppressor in a fascist state doesn't need you to love them, so long as you don't love anyone else. The NYT isn't trying to make us love Trump, that's impossible. But they are trying to make us not fall in love with Harris. I doubt they foresaw that possibility. But our feelings about Harris are very much love. The NYT is our only master, they must think. There's no room for us to love someone else, because we might listen to them. In a sense they respond like a first born child on the arrival of their little sister or brother. I don't know. As I said it doesn't matter why. That's their problem. Our problem is to get them out of the way.#

I don't want to give Trump any ideas, but he's complaining that Harris is forcing him to run as an incumbent, so he might as well take credit for all the things Biden did. #

The NYT et al aren't even doing a fair job of covering the election as a horserace, because they're making sure it's a virtual tie, so even if our team has overwhelming power, speed and depth, and gets on base in every at bat and plays by the rules, our odds are no better than the other team. #

I know a kitten who'd like to be EIC of the NYT.#

The problem with the state-by-state abortion laws that Trump says he favors: 1. The women in states that ban abortion who will die as a result of the bans, and many more who will be severely injured, and all will have their freedoms severely restricted. 2. He's lying. When Congress passes a national abortion ban he'll sign it and boast about it, of course.#

If you're interested in languages and compiler compilers and how to bootstrap a scripting environment, then you'll enjoy the progress I've made in the project to get UserTalk running in today's environments. I welcome comments from experienced or curious language devs. #

Walt Mossberg: "Journalists have one core job: to tell the truth, especially when it’s clear. The staff of the NY Times has done it in the past, even at great risk. Why don’t they do it now?"#

My response: "We have no visibility into the inner workings of the NYT. We can't vote them out of office. We can't even rebut them. They rarely carry opposing opinions." #

Braintrust: I want to get a UserTalk parser running in C. #

My linkblog now reliably works on Twitter and Threads, in addition to Mastodon, Bluesky, RSS and WordPress. I find it really empowering to be able to publish to all those places at once. #

Trump is not the incumbent, but it might feel that way because the coup that started on Jan 6 is ongoing. It won't be over until there is a peaceful transfer of power from Biden to Harris and Trump is out of the picture.#

No more shaming people for being who they are.#

I just realized something else -- there isn't a female America and a male America. What made me realize it is how natural the idea of President Kamala feels. Men and women are different, just like blacks and whites are different (it couldn't be otherwise) but we are all Americans, and further, taken together we all are America. All of this sprung from that Obama quote in his 2004 convention speech (which I was lucky to be present for, that was the year they welcomed bloggers). It's the one country that's the Union of all of us and we are United. #

I'm trying to teach ChatGPT how to do sidebar art. So far, it's not a great student. But I have hope. My instructions for the image in the post in the sidebar for the previous post: "e pluribus unum" is the motto of the United States. Out of many one. I would like a simple picture of an eagle with this motto over its head, in the same style it is in on the back of a quarter coin. #

This is how I explained what sidebar art is: There's a certain kind of art I need to create with you. I call it "sidebar art" -- they are images between 75 and 135 pixels wide. The content is on a transparent background. They are designed to fit in the right margin of my blog at scripting.com. Please remember this definition, so you can help me create new sidebar art. #

Thinking about what Michelle Obama said last night in her fantastic DNC speech. “We don’t get to change the rules so we always win.” She was talking about Trump, but it also applies to Google. There should be opportunities for independent developers to create for the web without having big tech companies be our gatekeepers. The web is a public resource. Of course big companies will take whatever isn't nailed down. It's way past time to protect the open web. #

Speaking of Michelle Obama, she made the most powerful political statement I've ever heard. "Who's going to tell Trump the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs." The way she said it made you think. Here we are, and one way or another, we have changed. America in 2024 is vastly different from the American of 2008. America is moving both toward self-acceptance and away from it at the same time. But here in the half of America my feet are planted in, we realize that there isn't a black America and a white America, there's just one America. We finally have come to accept ourselves as we have been all along. #

I use PocketCasts on my Android phone as my main podcast-listening app. I also have a website, dave.podcatch.com, that has the latest episodes from the podcasts I follow. I would love to hook up my subscriptions from PocketCasts to dave.podcatch.com, so that I could add to the website from my freaking phone. Make it really easy for me to pitch a great podcast feed to my friends. But I can only export my feeds, I can't create a dynamic link between the two. If I ran a popular podcatch app like Pocketcasts, I would open up my outbound subscription list, and vie to be the default place people come to subscribe to podcasts. If a few of my users were geeks and visionaries, they could start telling other vendors they should hook up to my source lists, so they can use Pocketcasts to subscribe. One place to subscribe is way better than many. If you think things like that can't happen, think again. How did you all come to use OPML for your subscription lists? It's because someone volunteered to go first, and the users of that product demanded that other products support the format. It still amazes me that there's an interchange format there, but we've barely begun to tap into the power there. #

My linkblog posts are once again flowing to WordPress. I had to generate a special password for this app because of 2FA.#

What should we expect from the Department of Justice in the Harris Administration?#

My linkblog, which posts to the Links tab on Scripting News, as well as Bluesky, Mastodon and RSS, now also posts to Twitter and Threads. #

Today would have been my mother's 92nd birthday. She died in 2018, and I still haven't, deep inside, fully gotten the message that she's gone. Probably the most significant person in my life. I find most of my adult relationships can be traced back to my relationship with her. #

Respect the reader. This isn't exactly a new rule for journalism, but it's worth mentioning anyway. If you wouldn't want to read the piece yourself, don't let them put your name on it. Example. A story promises to tell you about 47 seconds that saved Kamala Harris's career. They do eventually tell you the words, but you have to wade through a lot of pointless bullshit to get to it. If I were writing it, the first words of the piece would have to be the words, and then explain it. You've seen this over and over and it gets worse all the time. I still don't understand why they do it, if I'm reading the piece, I'm a paying subscriber, right? Another example of disrespect, quit trying to upsell paying customers. Once a month maybe, but not every 8th time I visit your site. Most businesses have no regard for their customers' time, but the ones that do, really make an impression. #

The Wikipedia page for Living Videotext begins with one of our slogans. It was a joke, and meant to keep us humble, so we listen to users. It was one of many such slogans. LVT made some important contributions to the networks we use today. Wikipedia should talk about that first, show some respect, for crying out loud. Otherwise, except for that snipe up front, the account is actually pretty accurate. #

It's nice to see the DNC including influencers this year. I hear them say this is the first time, but I beg to disagree. A few dozen bloggers were at the DNC in 2004, and were treated well, in many ways. I think the word influencer and blogger have fairly similar meanings. Blogger is a broader term, because it's possible to have a very small readership for a blog, thus not be influencing very much, but still have a lot of value. And you always can influence your mom and little sister, right? 😄#

Note: I had a quote here that appeared to be from actor Keanu Reeves. It was a good sentiment, but it apparently was not from Reeves. Thanks to Andy Piper for catching this. Here's the quote. "If you see someone falling behind, walk beside them. If you see someone being ignored, find a way to include them. Always remind people of their worth. One small act could mean the world to them." #

Another possible rule for journalism. Employ non-journalist op-ed writers. Appointed to a two-year residence, columns published alongside other op-eds. They expose flaws in stories that have appeared in the publication, either news or editorial. They have expertise in areas the publication covers. They have never been employed as a journalist. They are not part of your organization, never meet with other writers, have no personal relationships to preserve. They write from the perspective of a reader. By giving them equal weight as news or op-ed pieces, it's more likely the professional journalists and opinion writers will pay attention. Maybe they'll even respond. This is the beginning of accountability. The "public editors" the news orgs employed briefly were jokes. They never addressed the serious issues, likely because they lacked the perspective of a reader, or they had relationships to preserve, or just saw it from the perspective of an insider. There is an obvious and real problem with news, and it can never be solved until the people whose work is the problem see it. Is there a more important area of power that gets so little outside scrutiny? They say democracy dies in darkness, so does journalism.#

BTW, Olliver Willis is right, the Dems don't need the journos. #

Journalism is very important part of how our country works yet there is no accountability, no checks and balances, no requirement of transparency. There isn’t even a mechanism to disagree with them. most of the time they have the only voice. We don’t even know what they’re trying to do, what their goals are.#

John Goodman explains what to do if you get ahead by $2.5 million.#

No more lies in news. We've had to live with journalism that tries to give lies equal stature to actual news, but the two just don't mix. What happens if your news is half lies, the users don't believe anything you carry. This was predicted, in 2016 when it was clear that Putin's Russia was heavily influencing American journalism. They had developed their techniques in Ukraine in previous years, and the Ukraine press and government came to the same conclusion we're now arriving at -- stop at the first lie, turn the microphone off. That's the main rule, main change that has to take place now, in advance of the November election. They may not do it, but at least now we all understand that what they're doing is stupid, wrong, even corrupt. No matter what they don't get to keep their rep if they are laundering lies.#

I would almost add a rule that journalists should have respect for critics, we'll save that for the rules of 2030 if there is any journalism left.#

Thank you for reading the NY Times so I don't have to. #

Watch out when reporters say something said on their air or in their pub is "misleading." What they really mean is someone just lied in their space. Heard it just now on NPR after a Republican was using "talking points" that were "misleading." Of course lies are misleading, but they are also lies. What these reporters hope to do (I guess) is convince you that the lies they just broadcast don't reflect poorly on them. If they said "that guy just lied five times" you'd have to wonder why they included it. What's wrong with them. But if they just were "misleading" oh I guess that's okay. Same thing happened in an otherwise pretty honorable piece by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post. "When not one but multiple rants call 'into question not only his fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities,' the media’s refusal to convey Trump’s unfitness amounts to misleading the public." No. It's not just misleading, it's deadly -- to the reputation of the publication that didn't convey what they saw clearly with their own two eyes. The rest of the Rubin piece is worth reading. I expect she softened her criticism because she has to work with the editors at the Post who decided to keep cutting Trump slack. You and I don't have that problem. The news industry in the US must be scrapped and replaced with one that tells the truth, otherwise what's the point.#

When was the last time the owner of the NYT did a press conference?#

I'm looking for an RSS feed for Kamalahq.#

A few minutes later, the feed is in my blogroll. 😄#

And here's the timeline for Kamalahq, via FeedLand.#

And here's the RSS feed. 😄 #

And even better -- here's the RSS feed for my Threads account. This is a huge gateway for interop. I wonder how often the feed updates. #

The way I see it, if the journos are going to lie to us, why shouldn’t we listen to lies that make us feel good? #

BTW, I've started using Mastodon in place of GitHub for comments on posts like the one below. GitHub has a better model for text with comments, supports full Markdown the way it was meant to work. I have an instance of Masto that I can use that supports Markdown but they do an unacceptable rendering of links. Example post. I want a simple, widely accepted easy place to comment, on the social web, not Discourse or GitHub, that isn't controlled by one vendor (so ActivityPub for now is probably the best approach) and supports plain old Markdown without any weird embellishments. I don't work in the Mastodon world, I'm already committed to the projects I'm doing. But we could really use something nice, designed to plug into blogs. This is a good use-case, and it's pretty close. #

One advantage of using GitHub for questions tied into a blog is that you get a great archive of all the questions you asked and how people answered or contributed, going back to 2016.#

I wrote rules for standards-makers and it caught on, and has been used by a few open source projects. I hope that the new rules for journalism, which is just getting started, will be similarly influential. If existing journalism is going to start working again, they're going to have to have some rules. Comments welcome on Mastodon.#

Feature requests for Threads.#

August 15, 2004: My audio blog post from NYC, from my Podcast0 feed. Had just listened to an Adam Curry podcast and one from the Gillmor Gang. Played a bit of music, described how a podcatcher would work, pretty close to the way they work today. Shortly after the feature would be in Radio UserLand. It was the only episode I did in August 2004. The next one is on September 1 and there are a total of nine shows in September, including the first Trade Secrets which is a podcast Adam and I did together. Here's the archive for this blog in August 2004.#

Let's stay organized after the election. #

I am addicted to buying domains. Latest example. Ideally it would be a news site with all the latest videos from the Land of Kamala aka the United States of America. #

The best journalism is coming from the candidate. I think you could make a pretty good hour-length show on MSNBC with 12 of their posts, five minutes each, one after the other, with a small panel of pundits quickly snarking about what they just saw. Go have a look at the feed and see if you agree. The best thing about it is that the writing is totally blogger-style. #

So what are we doing on Threads and why does Facebook (aka Meta) want to get the best minds of Twitter using their software. I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the user agreement, but that said, I bet it has something to do with building out their AI model so they can compete with OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.#

In today's installment of the Adventures of Wordle Kitty, the world's cutest and most adorable kitten was sentenced to life at Attica. #

I asked ChatGPT to put the Statue of Liberty on a $100 bill.#

If you don't buy the new rules for journalism because the liars will tell lies about you, the journalist -- well, you get that either way, no matter what you do, so I don't see the problem. And if you want people to trust you, you've got to tell the truth. Your reputation gets destroyed by their lies if you pass them through. Doctors can tell you to stop smoking to save your life and the tobacco companies will accuse them of lying or whatever and some people (such as myself, earlier in life) will continue to smoke. You still have to do what's right if you want people to trust you. #

I ordered a Pixel Pro 9 today for delivery in September. Look forward to seeing what makes it so AI.#

There's a second new rule. Journalists do not make demands. #

I started a this.how page for the new rules for journalism. Common-sense rules for reporters that they violate regularly, so now it's time to write them down. #

The new rule for journalists is sweeping Threads and Mastodon. People have power we don’t use but could. We could turn off the interview after the first egregious lie, even if the reporters don't. #

Just got a message from Slack that should serve as a warning to people who use other free services, expecting their archive to be maintained over time. It was too good to be true before. Now you need to ask vendors if that's true on their system.#