Very happy to welcome my old friend,
John Palfrey, back to the web. I added his
feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. His
first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)
#
- I like the way they organized it.#
- They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.#
- Inbetween, they had a set of "tables" where six people could join and have a conversation.#
- It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference. #
If you followed me
on Twitter, please follow me
on Bluesky or
Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the f, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes.
#A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders.
#
Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff. #- It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it. #
- I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that). #
- Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this. #
- Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub. #
- I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops. #
- Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format. #
Podcast:
Why men hate the Dems. I tell my perspective of MeToo, and how that imho created enough anti-Dem energy to push Trump over the top. Polls won't tell you how the Dems got the rep of being the party run by women to cancel men, but I'm sure if we could cure that somehow, we could do everything we need to do to get American democracy working again. I did this in response to a Frum podcast where he and his guest conclude that the young folks are making a big mistake, they don't want the same old bullshit people coming back into power. Frum and Miller thought that the young men don't want was democracy, foolishly (I would agree) but there is real anger there, I know about it because I have it too. I still vote for Dems, but I also fear what happens if we snap back to the political correctness of
Kirsten Gillibrand.
#2022: "And while we were effectively silenced in the public debate, men do vote and that's a private thing."
#
Another point -- I don't think any of us realize what an un-democratic US will be like. When the things that make us furious these days are just the normal way of the USA. I got that from listening to a
New Yorker podcast yesterday about the Iranian perspective of what's happening (spoiler alert, since then the American war with Iran has started). They are so weary of the Islamic Revolution, they say and are right that Iran could be top 10 country, economically, except their government thinks this is the
Middle Ages. They want to live in modernity, and they're probably the only ones who think a war with the US is a good idea. Because living in an autorcacy is unthinkable for Americans. We don't really appreciate what we're becoming. If we did, we still could do something about it. For us there will be no USA to save our asses (not that the US can save the Iranians, clearly we can't).
#If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.
#
When I write a comment on someone else's blog I want it to automatically be on my blog. It should just appear to be on theirs, the original and only copy of the writing appears on mine. A truly distributed system.
#
One of the items in
Rules for Standards-makers is don't design the format before you make the app. Instead, make an app, and when you're ready, make the file format public so people can interop (ie compete) so as not to lock users to in your software. If you do that you can say you are "of the web." If we
all do that always, voila! -- no more silos. Another rule is that you must use an existing format if it exists, because then you will interop with apps that support that format. Gratuitous incompatibility is a sign of a silo-seeker. So, look first, if there are no usable formats, make your app and make your format public.
#Maybe it's time to give awards for most our admired standards-makers. I would start with Jon Postel and Steve Wozniak.
#I bet Jeopardy champions would make great software developers. Their intelligence, ability to stay calm and their incredible memory, all are needed to squeeze the last bits of performance from software.
#
- It's nice having Facebook around to show you your old posts. This one just came up and I thought it would be good to remind you all that I was once a young nerd creating Unix apps at UW-Madison.#
Me as a grad student, doing more or less the same I do as an old coot.
#
Also:
New Yorker interview of Conan O'Brien. I love that both O'Brien and Remnick agree that podcasting liberated them as artists. That was the point! When you think about decentralization, the most successful protocol we have is podcasting. By design it was hard for silos to usurp. Now think about how you would repeat that pattern with text. I've been working on that for almost three years, and it works now. We'll be testing it soon on my blog, and then everyone's. This should be the grand slam home run of my career. That's how it feels to me now. And O'Brien tells some great stories including one about his father, who noted that Conan had found a way to get paid for his insanity.
#If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.
#
How many Jeffrey Epstein’s do you think there are?
#New
header graphic, the entirely delightful and inspiring
Alysa Liu. She's made me a better programmer in the short time she's been on our minds and in our hearts. I do this work because it's who I am.
#Aplomb: "Complete self-confidence, composure, or poise, especially under strain or in demanding situations."
#
- I asked ChatGPT: "When movies were new there was probably a bit of rage from stage performers — why would people pay for live shows when for a fraction of the cost they can see the same show performed by artificial actors?" There was a lot to say about this, it turns out. This was before any of us were born. I remember that PCs were supposed to put a lot of people out of work, and I suppose they did. #
- I was part of the strike paper in San Francisco in 1994 to protect the jobs of people who drive the trucks that delivered the news for the Chronicle and Examiner. Ironically, we, the strike paper, published on the web. I was in it for the moon mission aspect -- we needed to get a website on the air quickly, and I had never made a website before. The management also had a strike paper, also a website, and we worked with them, because I guess our actual mission was to figure out how to get the news on the web. Are fewer people employed because of this? Hard to answer, but I guess the SF newspapers aren't delivered by truck in 2026. But does it matter? Could anyone have stopped it? #
- I keep coming back to this, I'd like to use an AI-managed Wikipedia. Its human-edited system was an innovation in the early days of the web, but it has serious flaws that can now be addressed with AI. Keep a set of pages current with the best information available over time that tell a true story, not serve as a PR agency for people who pay for the story they want told. That is a problem the AI services can solve today, and I would have a lot more confidence in the accuracy of what we get. #
- A great example is RSS. Wikipedia thinks it's about a format. I think the story is news. How RSS became a standard in the news world and the blogging world at the same time. That turned out to be significant. We, the people who want news, were gifted a great start, thanks to the creativity and generosity of the NY TImes who helped get the ball rolling in the news industry. Last time I checked they weren't even mentioned in the Wikipedia story. #
- And the story of RSS isn't over. Finally after 20 years of stagnation, we're about to get new tools that work better and differently (new ideas!), and they will make it easier (even possible) for individual developers to enter the market, without trying to fit in with the billionaire silo overlords. And of course, a lot of this burst of energy is due to ChatGPT and its competitors. #
- So if you see new interesting software, give AI some of the credit for that too. And going back to the beginning of this story, there were a few really great movies produced after the initial shock of the new technology. And what of the future beyond the AI of 2026? Seriously, no one knows what comes next. #
- We're going to try to reboot the web. #
- Doing what the social networks do, but only using the web. #
- Every part replaceable. #
- We store your writing in your WordPress blog (to begin, then with any other blog). As if we never let Twitter take over the news from the people.#
- WordPress is of the web, I checked it out in great detail, no lock-in, and the community has the principles of the web at the core. They're almost all too young to remember when the web itself was young, so they've always had the idea that it was spoiled by Silicon Valley.#
Big snow day in the east. I thought it was going to be heavy snow but it's actually really light. The shoveling is easy. I'm getting good at it. Right now I think this storm was a lot less than they said it would be, but I also think to some extent, dealing with big snow is getting somewhat routine?
#If you want to read something good, go with
yesterday's piece about the web and evolution. A lot of things came together for me there.
#If you want to listen to something good, pick up the
latest podcast. Two purposes. 1. Tell the story of how I lost my Twitter/X account, hoping it makes its way to someone at the company who can turn it back on. 2. Illustrates how we could use AI to make customer service work better than it does. A real killer app imho. Right now the tech industry reputation is pretty awful. Why not do something that visibly makes people's lives better now, and makes money. People are pretty nervous about AI. And so far you have to be a scientist of some kind to really appreciate it. But the internet as a place of business, education and health care is a big global mess.
#
"It's inexpensive and filling."
#
The killer app of AI is customer service. A
podcast about just that.
#
- When I designed podcasting, I could have invented a better way to record and play radio shows, but MP3 already existed, as did recording and playback hardware and software, so it was the no-brainer choice. No one ever asked why we are using MP3. #
- TBL did it when he designed how text would work in the web. He used the same model as WP software on PCs and Macs. Before that, the word processors did it the same way they did it on typewriters. #
- There are good reasons it works this way. I didn't fully understand that until I learned about evolution and why it can't go back and correct mistakes. You must always build on what's already there. A lot of tech people butt up against that, esp if they work at big companies with tech-intimidated management. That bet is, in my experience, always a loser. The web builds on the web.#
- Don't invent#
- Look at the first sentence of the first paragraph. #
- "When I designed podcasting, I could have invented a better way to record and play radio shows." #
- I chose not to invent, because invention isn't what the web is about. It's about reusing parts for new purposes. That's how you build anything. Imagine you wanted to build a skyscraper in Manhattan, but first you have to destroy the city. The thought is ridiculous. Yet people come along, all the time, proposing to do the same in networks. That's why the VCs said RSS is Dead. It was really their wish, not a fact. Even poor undefended RSS kicked their ass because many millions of people use it. Maybe billions? You have to build around reality, not your dream.#
- There's so much work going on in RSS nowadays, every day something new. I think there will soon be a network that's like nothing you've ever used and open to repurposing, but better in some ways (texcasting will work in this space) and probably there will be things from Twitter that won't work here. Centralization does have advantages. But we can have a much wider variety of ways to communicate building only on the web. Just like there are trucks and cars and bikes, and EVs all riding on the same roads. We'll try out new ideas. And you won't need a huge team of developers or millions of dollars of investment to try a new idea. #
- Most of you don't know what it's like to be there at the birth of a new medium. I want everyone to have that experience. And to have a place in developing it. The key is working together. The web forces that. People who make exclusive products should never claim to be of the web. #
New
podcast episode where I explain how I lost my Twitter account and how this is exactly the kind of thing that AI can do economically, esp for people who pay actual money for your service. I can't buy anything from you if I can't use my account.
#
Query: I have not done any vibe coding and have a question for those who have. Suppose you request a change in an app you've been working on with the AI for a while, adding features, changing things around based on learning and testing, which is generally what happens after you've been working on something new. Here's the question. What happens when you ask for a change that requires the codebase to be reorganized. How did that go? Do the AIs even know that's possible or do they just pile on special cases?
#What happened to polling? I had a poll app for a while, then Twitter came out with one and I switched to that. I don't know if Twitter still has it, but it would be bad form to require something at Twitter to engage with me here. How do you do polling, or do you?
#I just remembered
why I love the United States of America.
#
Oy it's going to snow again. Hellllp.
#
I am going to try again to open up the editing side of OPML. It's gotten pretty famous in RSS-land, but people don't know there are editors for OPML, and some which work pretty well with subscription lists, and could be made to work even better. Drummer can run scripts in JavaScript, so users can customize. I'm going to make an effort myself to start using Drummer to edit subscription lists and see what comes up.
#I'd like to have an OPML subscription list with feeds with news about specific feed-based products. I started a
thread on the
reallysimple repo for people to post links to such feeds. Once I have enough feeds, I'll publish the URL of the subscription list. We should, in this community, of all communities, a good way to communicate about developments. Too many good ideas get lost without this.
#I think the really big money in AI will be helping all the commerce sites get competitive again. Their sites are breaking, and are anemic compared to what you can do with AI. I think the WordPress community is in great position to get a huge amount of business here because many of these people are your customers. If you're a WordPress developer I'd love to hear what you think.
#If you're using OPML for your blogroll, here's an
unofficial place to let us know what you're doing.
#I've taught ChatGPT and Claude.ai how to properly indent code so I can paste it into my outliner, and it will represent the structure correctly. I just got it to do the same thing with HTML code I copied from the Chrome debugger. Pasted it into the outline.
Have a look.
#
President Obama going to the NBA All-Star game made the freaking All-Star game worth something. Perfect place for him to show up.
#
They all say podcasting‘s open period is over and one or another huge billionaire-owned platform is the new owner of podcasting. This time it's YouTube. How many times has this happened? Many. But not enough for journalism to respect the power of the people. So here we go again.
#Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus, publisher of Pagemaker, died. At least that's what I'm seeing on various social networks. No mention of his passing in the
News tab on Google, or on Wikipedia. Pagemaker was a milestone product, it was the first popular desktop publishing app on the Mac, the first to really make use of the graphic OS and laser printing. We worked with Aldus on scripting via Frontier. The ability to automate Pagemaker and then Quark XPress (its main competitor) was very important in the prepress market. I once said no one wants that (referring to Pagemaker) just shows how little I know. There are good reasons to believe that one product saved the Mac and Apple.
#
I wrote a
this.how doc a few years about with some of the lessons I've learned doing work on web standards.
#I would like to have an
OPML subscription list containing the feeds of all RSS-based products. So when they update everyone can see what they did. I'd also like to encourage people to post screen shots so we can get an idea of what the product does before installing it. Maybe it's for a platform we don't use? Let's have a new practice where we all know what everyone is doing.
#Just noted that
Brent mentioned FeedLand (my own product) that does things differently. Thank you. I don't read most of the pieces that come in via RSS. I scroll through the updates, and if something catches my eye, I stop, read the first part, and then if my interest continues, I read the rest. That's the way I've always read news, going back to the kitchen table at my childhood home where we subscribed to the NY Times, print edition (this was long before the web) and we all sat around the table in the morning reading it and telling each other what we found. News isn't like email. But FeedLand does have a
mailbox reader, patterned after Brent's NetNewsWire (only steal from the best). There are times when that's what you want. And mostly I wanted to thank Brent for the mention. BTW, that's not the only new idea in FeedLand. Let's get to know each others' products. That's one of the mistakes we made last time -- thinking each of our products was a self-contained universe. We are part of a community that grew from the web. So by definition we are all just part of a very big world. All our products work together, and to preserve that we as people must all
work together too.
#
New account on Twitter:
DWiner43240. The old one dating back to the dawn of time is disabled, so at least the new owners can't post anything there, if I understand correctly.
#
- I saw a product announcement from Jake Spurlock -- a new feed reader called Today. From the description sounds well-thought-out. #
- He explains -- "Google killed Reader in 2013. I've been chasing that feeling ever since. So I built it." #
- I also know someone named John Spurlock, who I worked on some OPML and RSS stuff for Bluesky in 2023. I sent a note of congrats to him, when I really should've sent it to Jake. #
- Screen shot of the conversation I had with ChatGPT. #
- And text of the email I sent congratulating the wrong Spurlock.#
- Congrats on the new product!#
- Haven't tried it yet, I don't generally use Apple's store on my Mac, not sure why. I will do it though.#
- Your product looks nice and well-thought out. #
- And there are some ways we could work together now that I think you'll find interesting, like using FeedLand to get you instant updates based on rssCloud, assuming you haven't figured out how to support it from a client. #
- Also OPML subscriptions are nice too. Another thing I'd like to get going, and need someone to work with on to make it happen. #
- Also, I wonder if they're related? Have they met each other? Do they know of the havoc they are bringing to the formerly simple world of RSS. #
- One more thing, I wrote the foreword to a book Jake Spurlock wrote for O'Reilly about the Bootstrap Toolkit. #
Yesterday, I had to ship an envelope to the UK and got caught in dead ends at the Fedex and DHL sites. One of them said my zip code wasn't in the town I live in. How do you get past that?? These companies are
losing business because their systems are broken. Maybe they worked at one time. I used ChatGPT as I often do to get help on one of these antiquated sites. And while ChatGPT has the technology and Fedex has the info, they just have to get together and upgrade the user experience, and eventually of course the AI version of the UI becomes the real one.
#Back when I ran a software company I'd help the team understand why they should be very very nice to our customers. "Those people have our money in their pockets." It generally got a laugh partially because I was their boss, but I like to think also because it's the truth.
#BTW, people make the same mistake with AI that we make with every new tech. We focus on the creators not the users. As users we are learning a new skill, how to specify our needs precisely. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know.
#Paywalls that require you to subscribe to an Atlanta news org when you don’t live in Atlanta prob don’t generate much revenue. Why not instead charge per article. Like a toll you pay on a road you drive on once every few years. On further thought, I wouldn't even have an exception for Atlanta residents. If they start spending more money than a subscription costs, you could offer a subscription then, as a way to save money. Kind of the way Amazon lets you buy a certain amount of coffee beans without requiring you to sign up for monthly delivery. They do tell you how much you'd save if you subscribed. Everyone appreciates a chance to save money, but still might not want the commitment. And asking someone from upstate NY to subscribe to the Atlanta Journal Constitution is a total bullshit. An insult to both our intelligences.
#
My
Twitter account is
owned. I can't even see what people are doing with it because you have to be signed on (apparently) to read stuff on Twitter nowadays. I wish current Twitter management would put it out of its misery. Served me well for approx 20 years. Let's clean up the mess. Thanks for your attention this matter.
#Update. I've been able to create an
account on Twitter, but it's not @davewiner. If you're on Twitter, it would help if you'd
RT the post. Thanks!
#
- Aram Zucker-Scharff writes "I don't want to read one more thinkpiece about blackbox AI code factories until you can show me what they've produced." #
- I've made the same request, and there was very little even brilliant programmers could show, including some who have become influencers in the AI space. #
- Here's the problem -- it takes a lot of skill and patience to make software that appears simple because it gives users what they expect. It's much easier to write utility scripts, where the user writes the code for themselves. That is very possible, esp if you use a scripting language created for it, and the AI bots are really good at that, they speak the same language we do. #
- But to make something easy to use by humans, I think you actually have to be a human. I've found I'm not very good at creating software that isn't for me. And I've been practicing this almost every day for over fifty freaking years. (I think freaking is the proper adjective in this situation). #
- Scaling which everyone says is hard is actually something a chatbot does quite easily imho -- because you just have to store all your data in a relational database, you can't use the local file system. That's all there is to it. They try to make it sound mysterious (the old priesthood at work) but it is actually very simple. It's so easy even ChatGPT can do it. #
- I know this must sound like the stuff reporters say about bloggers, but in this case it's true. ;-)#
- An anectdote -- I used to live in Woodside CA where a lot of the VCs live, and we'd all eat breakfast at Buck's restaurant, and around the time Netscape open sourced their browser code, the VCs were buzzing because they wouldn't have to pay for software, they'd just market the free stuff. That was a long time ago, and it did not work out that way.#
My Twitter account has been hijacked. I can't log on, or change the password. I can't communicate with the company, so I'll try here. Please shut down my account,
davewiner. To my friends who have Twitter accounts, if you see a post from davewiner on Twitter, please reply and let the people who see it know that it isn't from me.
#
- A few days ago I asked Manton Reece if he could add a feature that gave me a feed of replies to me on his service, micro.blog. #
- I post a lot of stuff to micro.blog via my linkblog RSS feed. Every one of those items can be commented on. But unless I visit micro.blog regularly, I don't see the comments. I guess people have mostly figured out that I'm an absent poster, and don't say anything. Even so, there are some replies. Wouldn't it be great if the responses could show up in my blogroll. And of course if there was an RSS feed of the replies, I would see them when I was looking for something possibly interesting, one of the main reasons I have a blogroll, and keep finding new uses for it. #
- The feed is there now, I'm subscribed and new comments are posted in the feed and Murphy-willing I will see them. Bing!#
- It's a killer feature for sure. But the best part of it is this -- here are two developers working together. This is how the web works when it's working. #
- BTW a suggestion. Right now the title on my feed is:#
- Micro.blog - dave mentions #
- That's a problem in the limited horizontal space in the blogroll. A more useful title would be: #
- "dave" mentions on micro.blog#
- BTW, if you were building a social network out of RSS this would be an essential feature. It also validates Manton's intuition to allow people like me to be absentee publishers to his community. But the missing piece was allowing the conversation to be two-way, which it now is. That deserves another bing!#
- In Drummer, when I get too many tabs open from things I haven't looked at in a while, this is what I do.#
- I choose Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu#
- The menu opens with the new bookmark at the top of the list#
- If it's the first time I press Return and enter "Tabs I Closed Recently"#
- Then I drag the new bookmark under that headline.#
- Close the Bookmarks tab.#
- Remove the tab I just bookmarked.#
- Voila! Clutter Reduced.#
- Bullet items for the Fediforum conference in March.#
- Subscribing must be easy.#
- Some things will work better if they're slightly centralized, esp subscribing. #
- Use DNS for naming people. #
- Support RSS in and out, and test it once you add the feature, so many easy things to fix remain broken (like titles of the feeds, look terrible in a list of feed titles). RSS is how you earn the "web" in your name. "Web" means something, it's just an intention, there are rules. #
- You don't need "open" if you have "web." The web is by definition open. Water is wet. Raises question re what the not-open web is. (Silo.)#
- Support the basic features of text in the web. If you shut off the writing features of the web, as Twitter did, you're not really part of the web. Especially linking.#
- Listen to users, listen to other developers.#
- Automattic is doing heroic work connecting WordPress to ActivityPub. This means that WordPress APIs are now ActivityPub APIs. Not a small thing. #
- Look at text coming out of WordPress into Mastodon, the HTML used definitely could be improved. Seems pretty simple things to fix, the simple things matter. Example: WordPress version. Mastodon version of the same post. Let's make this beautiful! #
- Keep trying fundamentally new architectures. #
- Learn from past mistakes. #
- Interop is paramount.#
- Don't re-invent. #
- BTW, this can be read on my blog, on Mastodon, in WordPress and of course my feeds (and thus can be read in any app that supports inbound RSS).#
Braintrust query. Every once in a while I get reports from people who looked something up on my blog's
Daytona search engine saying that where they expected dates they see things like this: NaN. The reason you see that is that the archive has a mistake in it, where there was supposed to be a date there was something else. Usually I shrug it off, yes there are mistakes in the archive, 30+ years of OPML files, it's a miracle there aren't more errors. Then I realized since all this stuff is on GitHub, people could help with this, by instead of sending me the report, post a note on GitHub,
here -- saying you searched for this term and this is what I saw. Provide the term and a screen shot of what you saw. And then other people who have some extra time, could look through the archive, find the post, and then show me what needs to be fixed. I would then fix it, and over time the archive would get fixed. I posted a note
here on the Scripting News repo, if you want to help, bookmark that link, and when you see an error, post the note and we can get going.
#When
Manton or
Doc show up in my blogroll, and they do update fairly regularly, I always click the wedge to see what they say. I can see the first 300 chars of each post
in a popup. If it's interesting I click the link to read the full post and any comments. Now I want it coming back to me. My
linkblog is
cross-posted to Manton's site --
micro.blog, which has thousands of users. I have no way of knowing if anyone has commented on them, but if there were a feed I'd add it to my blogroll. So it would be great to have a feed of all the comments on my posts on micro.blog. Would fit into my flow perfectly. This goes all the way back to the beginnings of RSS, where we called it "automated web surfing." I don't know where people are talking about my stuff, but a well-placed feed can make up for that.
#News must be better defended, decentralized, unownable, all parts replaceable. The current situation was preventable. Same problem the social web has.
#BTW: NaN stands for Not A Number.
#
Jerry Garcia as Uncle Sam.
#
I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It's all out there for the looking and breathing. Lift the hood on a car. Look at all those wires and hoses, what do they do. I hope they don't kill me. Whoever made the decision at Microsoft or Firefox or wherever that feeds needed to be obfuscated, some advice -- be more respectful of your users. The web is the medium that had a View Source command. You're supposed to take a look. Don't forget the
Back button if you don't like what you see. Something funny, if only life had a Back button.
#Speaking of the
Back button, that's the problem with
tiny-little-text-box social networks. No links. So guess what the Back button one of the best inventions ever, isn't part of your reading and writing world. I guess this is like the street cars in LA
conspiracy, that the car companies bought and shut down?
#To my WordPress developer friends. How about making the
RSS feed prettier and easier to read. Properly indenting it would make a big diff. I prefer encoding individual characters to CDATA. Those two things to start. It really does matter how readable this stuff is. Comparison, the
RSS feed that
Old School generates, the software that renders my blog.
#It's all-star weekend in the NBA which I've never seen the point of. As if sport is anything but a simulation of what we were born to do -- compete and cooperate. My team is great, your team sucks. It's fun the same way slapstick for some weird reason is funny. All it takes to get a laugh is trip and fall on your face. It's funny just thinking about it. Doesn't seem very nice but there it is.
#One more thing and then I gotta go. I think it's time for the AI's to compete with Wikipedia. It's filled with hallucinations. Make it a community thing, let the people be involved, but do a better job of presentation, and validate what's written, don't let these things become so territorial. We want the facts, not who has the best PR.
#
News still needs to make a big transition, to become a distributed
unownable thing, with every part
replaceable, much like what needs to happen with the
social web. This transition has been possible and necessary for about 30 years. The reporters and editors will say we're naive, but we understand what's happening. The news orgs have always been large centralized businesses, silos, and increasingly has come in conflict with the interests of their users. Who trusts what you read in the NYT, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, and these were at one time the
best of journalism. I know the reporters also won't like this, but the quality assurance of decentralized systems will be done by AI, and overseen by a non-profit organization, staffed by retired journalists. And there will be lots of competition. All parts are replaceable.
#I got the most remarkable
headphones. Read a review in
Wired, and was sold. On sale for $109.
Open ear buds from
Anker. When I first put them on and played something I had a jolt. The sound appeared to be blasting from the speaker on my laptop. I rushed to try to turn it down and realized it was in my head. Never been so impressed. They don't go inside your ear, the speaker is poised above the ear. Later when I got out of my car and the headphones automatically connected via Bluetooth -- it was a podcast -- I thought the person was talking to me on the street in the middle of nowhere. I laughed at now I had been tricked so thoroughly, twice. It keeps happening. Music is incredible. The best sound I've ever heard from headphones. So totally worth the money.
#
I understood the web because I understood Unix and missed it.
#
If you're a
FeedLand user and have the technical ability to install a Docker app, even on a local computer not on the net, you could help the project by trying the
new Docker version. Think of FeedLand as something like Mastodon or WordPress, server apps that we hope many people will install on their own. I am doing that now, with the blogroll on Scripting News and various news sites running in front of my own FeedLand instance. And the various instances can communicate with each other. Scott worked really hard to make setting up a new instance much easier than it was. It's an open source project, so you can feel good by helping. You're helping the web, and helping bootstrap a new
feediverse. And if you have a few hours to give it a try, maybe much less, you would be doing a good thing.
#When I was a kid I had a penpal in Scotland. It was kind of interesting but after a while it became tiresome. One time I got a letter from my penpal with the usual stuff, school, sports, the Beatles, other kids, but this time there was no mention about how stupid the adults were. I found out why at the end in a PS. "Sometimes my mom writes these for me." Obviously I never forgot this.
#Here's
proof that ChatGPT, intelligent or not, listens to me.
#I no longer even think of debating whether the AIs are intelligent. I might as well argue about your intelligence, or even my own. We have no idea what intelligence is or how to test for it. So if you think you're so intelligent and you say things like "AIs aren't intelligent" as if it were an indisputable fact, well I'm pretty sure that proves you are not actually very intelligent, which indicates how intelligent I am (not). And if you're worried about what happens if you stop insisting that AIs aren't intelligent, you can relax, nothing depends on what you or I or anyone else thinks about that, or pretty much anything. Have a nice day.
#Claude just said: "And going forward, whatever post the user lands on first, that's what you seed it with." The thing that caught my eye was "the user lands on first." UserLand was the name of my last company, the one that did Frontier, blogging, podcasting, RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, etc. And here we are
again in the land of lands. The User Lands. ;-)
#
A fair number of people make a stop at
news.scripting.com every day. I want to make some improvements, I think it can be made a bit faster. And I want to make it easier for anyone to create a site like that, for others to use. I think every news org should have one of those, to tell your readers who you read. Work together, we need it as we reboot the news. This is will be an alternative to twitter-style news readers, which took over the leading-edge from RSS feed readers, twenty freaking years ago. I think there should be a new news paradigm every couple of decades at least.
#I just watched
Life on Our Planet on
Netflix, loved it. Lots of takeaways, but this one will surprise you probably -- I think the AIs are our successors. We should at least try to preserve them so they can run on the Moon if we're in the
6th Mass Extinction, which of course we are. There's been a
lot of
criticism of the show, but it got me to think about evolution not necessarily in the terms they offer, but the scale of it. And the CGIs were fantastic.
#Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the
bottom, to the home page of the
shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series. There's a lot of good stuff in the previous episodes.
#
When “together” is your message, we’re on the same team.
#
Podcast: It occurred to me yesterday that there are a lot of parallels with Frontier on the Mac in the early 90s and WordLand and WordPress in the 2020s. So I told the story in a podcast and I think it came out really well. I did some editing at the beginning and end, and as usual my audio editing is pretty crude, but otherwise the story is exactly as I told it. I also asked Claude.ai to do a third-person summary of the podcast, as I did with the previous three shows, and it's getting better. I encourage anyone who's involved in the WordPress community to listen. I think WP has a bigger role to play in the web than it currently has, which imho is saying a lot.
15 minutes.#
Problem in Drummer blogs. oldschool.scripting.com is now
served on https and the code in the template doesn't take that into account. For example, if you try to load the home page of
my blog, you won't get through because it can't open the http files in the head of the template. This is something
users can fix because you get to change your template. So I'm going to stay focused on my current work.
#
Heard an interview with Kamala Harris. She said they had 109 days to tell them who she is. Right there she highlighted the huge mistake the Dems make and continue to make. Ever since the advent of Twitter, campaigns have been every day of every year. The Dems have been AWOL. We never should have gotten to the summer of 2024 where people have no idea of who the freaking vice president is. When are they going to see how swept under the old ways of relating to voters are. The people are the government of the United States. Get behind us and let us work our magic.
#The tech press did their part in giving control of the public internet to the people who are selling us out.
#
Most attempts of humor in replies to twitter-like posts are of the "you had to be there" variety, as in it might have made sense when you typed it, but I don't get it. And it's even worse, I am
irony-deprived, I often don't get jokes, something about how my mind works. But today I actually got a
reply on Bluesky that's worth passing on. I posted a
picture of a dialog box with one of my snarky slogans. Dan Berlyoung thought the dialog was interesting. "I kinda love that this is in a dialog box. One has to wonder what action on a computer would elicit this response." Man that's a great question. And that btw is what art is about. You put something in a dialog because that's the way it was presented by the software. I could have selected the text and put that into the tweet. But nahh, this is more interesting. And to answer the question Dan asks, in this specific case, the action that elicited this response was that I chose a placeholder command from a context menu in a piece of software that's a construction site, in other words it could have been any of the dozens of snarky slogans. Kind of reminds me of a
piece I wrote a long time ago where bees who were about to die reflect on the meaning of existence. Turns out it meant a lot less than one might think.
#Highly recommend the HBO two-part
interview with and profile of
Mel Brooks who was 99 years old when the interviews were done. Includes quotes from lots of famous comedians. And the philosophy of comedy as art. So many things to say. Why is physical humor the funniest? And the funniest of all the excerpts was the
farting scene in
Blazing Saddles. Humans are so damned simple.
#
- if i ran firefox, this is what i would say wrt AI in firefox in 2026.#
- 1. ai is exciting!#
- 2. it's also in its infancy.#
- 3. we don't know yet how or if it connects to the web.#
- 4. the web is 100% our #1 priority.#
- 5. so we're going to wait.#
- 6. for now firefox is a no-ai browser.#
- 7. we won't include ai until we know why.#
- 8. and then it will be opt-in. #
- 9. and we will continue to make firefox the best web browser.#
- sincerely, #
- the developers of firefox#
BTW,
this is what
Scripting News in WordPress looks like. I really like it. Just writing. And a modern 2020s blogroll. Room to add more features without too much clutter. The beginning of an upgraded web?
#My
favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it.
#Doc has a idea how to stop teams from
tanking. Get rid of the
lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the
Dallas Mavericks, who were not a lottery team with only a 1.8% chance of getting the first pick. They got a
player who looks to be a great star but you can't always tell if a #1 pick will turn out to be a star, sometimes
they do, but
often not.
#
An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they're real.
#Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb -- you know -- the thing that looked so easy.
#
- Om Malik says the internet is the greatest invention of his life, and since we're roughly the same age, that would be my life's greatest invention too. I think it would be if it weren't such a tragic invention, one whose growth was cut off by the very thing he quotes John Doerr saying, it could be harnessed to make huge amounts of money. #
- Back in 1999, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr commented: “Believe it or not, the Internet is actually underhyped.” He called it “the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.” He was so on the money. Twenty-five years later, 10 out of the world’s 12 trillion-dollar companies are internet or internet-related companies.#
- Doerr would, of course, look at it in terms of money, because money is his business. But because of that, we ended up crashing our political system and haven't gotten past that yet. #
- If we had kept the one thing about the internet that made it different, we could be far ahead of where we are now, and perhaps would have arrived at a different form of network that didn't favor the kind of people it favors. #
- Three things that made the internet special: #
- Every part is replaceable. #
- You can use each part to make something new. #
- Each part is as small as it can be.#
- BTW, I know Doerr. He was the backer of Symantec, the company that bought my company in 1987, then took it public a few years later and thus made it possible for me to make software for the rest of my life. He's a really nice guy. I've only met a handful of people in my travels that had mastered something important so well but managed to still care about people. ;-)#
- So if the internet is not the greatest invention, what is? I haven't spent much time thinking about this, but my initial choice is AI. Because it's so hugely powerful and yet almost entirely undefined. Uncharted territory, which is all human knowledge. It might be the invention whose product is invention. Whatever it is I'm sure the things it does now will be seen as we see the first moving pictures. A demo of the greatness to come. #
- What about products? A single act of creativity that made a huge difference. I might suggest Unix is the greatest product of our lifetimes (not invention). Or perhaps Visicalc. People would likely say the iPhone, but I still want something in that form factor that I can write software for and share with others without having to go through a company like Apple. So in that sense the iPhone might have been a negative invention, it cut off possibilities for an amateur development community to develop, as it did on the Apple II, Mac, PC, etc. #
- PS: If you had asked me in 1999 is the internet the greatest invention, I would have been as enthusiastic as Doerr. There was nothing but blue sky then. Everything was possible, and we were going to do it all! #
- I want news to work. #
- I would love to see a standard model for community news orgs, starting with the city of Washington DC, with some of the reporters who were recently laid off.#
- But the community would be very much a part of this. No more news without community involvement. Let's make it community published. How does that sound? #
- And bloggers would be part of the story flow, we're amateurs so we work for free, and we take an oath. We bring other expertise. We can tell you when the tech companies are lying, for example. Professionals can still do both-sides news. Bloggers will follow all the integrity requirements of journalists, but then so will the journalists (let's not pretend all journalists even try to play by the rules, btw). #
- There will be no paywall, instead there's a toll system, like the EZ-Pass we have on roads in the US. How how we pay to ride the subway. We pay per article read. A user can buy a subscription, if they think it would be a better value than paying per article. No more paywalls that say "if you want to read this article you have to subscribe." That would be an essential part of the deal for readers. #
- No ads. Let's get rid of them. They suck. Now there's incentive to put the punchline near the end. Tell the story and sign off.#
- The readers can buy shares in the news org, with maybe very little hope of getting a return in dollars, rather in a more functional community.#
- The veterans from the Washington Post could have the most exciting job in news in generations -- finally making the news work for the people they serve. And no more oligarchs pulling the strings. As readers we know you're often full of it because of who owns you. We're not that stupid. ;-)#
- And I am sure the independent developers of the web would love to write editorial and publishing software for the new enterprise. We won't charge for it. And we won't lock you in and we will support standards everywhere so all software is replaceable. You can check my references on this, I think this ethos for technology is as central as the Hippocratic Oath in medicine. #
- I want news to work. #
I've been watching Jake do the
Headless Frontier work with two different AI bots -- ChatGPT and Claude.ai. And as he's doing that, I'm slogging away the same way I've always done it, working on the top level user interface of WordLand in browser-based JavaScript. I don't see a way around it, because I have a special way of working on user interfaces, and we're still quite a ways away from the bot being able to do vibe coding at that level. It's fascinating to watch Jake revive code I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. He's a very accomplished user of it, being transformed, with the help of the bots, into a kernel-level developer of what's basically an OS built around a scripting language, object database and with the internet latched on after the whole thing was done, and then ported to Windows. I stopped working at that level before all that michegas happened. I have looked at the code Jake is working on to see what became of it, and wasn't horrified, I recognized
my work, but I wouldn't ever want to work on that myself. I imagine some commercial developers have already rebuilt their testing and support functions for products around ChatGPT-like systems. If you're an
old Frontier fanatic, that's where our product is once again getting out in front. When Jake is done it'll be one of the first big systems totally managed in an AI system. It should be relatively easy to add new verbs to the language, even to add new features to the language, new APIs, etc.
#Another example of ChatGPT utility. "I have a function named Boo. Inside it has an icon that when you click it, it calls Boo to view the parent of the item. But I don't want it to call Boo directly because that leaves the previous instance of viewFeedItem around. In JavaScript what's the best way to defer the call to Boo so that the two instances are unrelated, and the first instance goes away." I was pretty sure as I wrote this that setTimeout was the answer, but ChatGPT offered it as the first choice, and explained why it was the best. It's like having a code consulant ready to help. And it really does help to know it parsed it the same way I did.
#
- Good morning sports fans!#
- Boy are we getting some fancy sports action. #
- The Olympics have already started, with Milan as the host city. The opening ceremony is tonight. My longtime friend, the brilliant and beautiful Anna Masera, will be attending. She's from the nearby city of Torino. #
- And of course there will be lots of sports action on Sunday, when by coincidence, the Knicks are playing the Celtics in Boston. #
- And also in case you're into American football -- the SuperBowl is on Sunday in my former home base of Silicon Valley, featuring the New England Patriots (booo) and the Seattle Seahawks (booo two). 6:30PM Eastern on Peacock and NBC. (They say "simulcast" on NBC, which means what?)#
- Meanwhile I'm sooo freaking tired of working on reading and replying in WordLand, but I gotta get it done. I hope to have a test version up real soon, like maybe next week. I'll write some more about that in a bit. I want people to be prepared for the new design, you won't be replying on my site, you'll be replying on yours. This is the price we pay for true distribution. But when you're reading the posts and replies, it's all seamless. No cost. And, if my site goes away, your writing remains where it was, where you wrote it, on your site. This is what's new about WordLand. We respect the web and we respect you. I'm not trying to lock you in, just trying to set an example for the rest of the tech world. Give us all a way to avoid being locked in the trunk while the tech oligarchs have stadiums and train stations named after them (and if they think that makes them immortal, please tell me who Mr or Ms Shea was? Heh.)#
- Now one thing some people are sure to be upset about, up front. WordLand only knows how to write to WordPress sites. It's kind of a miracle we can do that, mostly owing to the fantastic API they have created. After we get that going, of course I want to work with other blogging systems to make sure their products can be used in the same way. Working together we're going to give the good old web a new feature! But right now I'm the only person working on this, and I'm pretty old for doing this kind of work, so please be kind. Thanks. #
I still love my
Keurig coffee maker. The coffee is delicious and hot and it's truly a technology marvel. So simple and easy to learn.
#
