There’s no reason
RSS and social media have to be separate worlds. RSS is the easiest and fastest way to connect systems. When I see people endorse RSS over social sites I think we took a wrong turn somewhere because all these systems should be connected on the open web and RSS is the perfect way to do that.
#Rachel Maddow's show these days often begins with a hard-to-watch over-the-top endorsement of Bluesky. She shouldn't be doing that. It's a private company and someday she may criticize them as strongly as she did Facebook. I'd love to hear her explain exactly what's the difference between Bluesky and Facebook. A lot less than you might think.
#Hillary Clinton makes a very important point. "Republicans in Congress can put a stop to this at any time." By this, she means the crashing US economy. And even if you believe they'll "never do it" -- it's still the right thing to repeat this over and over -- people should know they could. This should be repeated until enough people get it, this is being done
on purpose by the Repubs. This isn't about winning elections, it's about understanding who's doing this to you and how deliberate it is.
#
A
question on GitHub: Is OPML the native file format for Drummer? It's better to first
use the product or
read the docs or
search on web or use an
AI chatbot before getting humans involved. Anyway, the answer is yes, OPML is the native file format of
Drummer. It's the reason we chose
OPML as the format for RSS reading lists, so we could edit them in a distant
ancestor of Drummer's whose native file format was also OPML. I tend not to change file formats gratuitously -- it's how you can use different tools to edit your own data. That's a big part of the plan with
WordLand, because the internal file format for drafts is Markdown, you could put any editor alongside that can edit and save text in Markdown, without a glitch. The idea is to create a new platform, editors for WordPress, and have them all interop with each other perfectly from the start. Because WordLand is the first product in this niche, and Markdown is a very safe choice these days (understood to discourage lock-in), I think it's going to be a perfect basis for interop. Learning from past experience and doing it better each time.
#
A search for
WordPress on this blog tells an interesting story.
#I wonder when ChatGPT or Claude.ai will compete with Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is great but it has always had a weakness in that it can be manipulated to tell a story from a very limited point of view. For example the RSS page has a long section explaining the benefits of Atom. What I like about the AI versions of the basic history of things is that it isn't so easily manipulated. I talked about this with Claude, and asked it to write up a
proposal for ClaudeWiki, a Wikipedia workalike, not too expensive to run, make it part of a user's $20 per month subscription. I think it would be useful, if only as a demo how Wikipedia itself might improve its service.
#If I were designing a social network, I would implement replies differently. When you reply to a post, only the person who wrote the post sees it. If they want they can RT it. The way it works now on all twitter-like systems means most of the replies are basically spam, people using your post as a way to reach people who follow you.
#BTW, when you post something on Bluesky it's just a tweet. These things don't need different names on each platform.
#I like people who stand up and speak the truth. This is one of the silver linings of this crisis. There's no real advantage at this point in trying to play it safe, to not be noticed. So I like what Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut has been saying.
#I used to tell friends you can't go wrong buying the S&P 500. The president is rated by now the stock market does, and so over the long haul you can expect steady growth from the S&P 500, and it keeps things really simple. Well, have to say -- that's no longer good advice. Maybe real estate? Outside the United States? I don't know. It depends on what the people of this country do, and if our representatives are listening.
#MAGA's goal, it turns out, was the Great Depression.
#
I finally looked at my
nest egg and was shocked to see the new number. Even worse that the dollars in the account will buy even less as the US dollar loses its value as the
flight to safety currency. It's not a big surprise as the US behaves like a drunk
Dunning-Kruger deluded schoolyard bully. What is amazing, if you think about it, is that we aren't having an emergency impeachment and trial to get him out of there. That could actually restore a bit of confidence of the outside world, showing that the power in the US is more with the people than it has been for a long time. Maybe our
would-be overlords are scared too at what their idea has unleashed. Even if Trump weren't so inept, eventually whoever you choose as the monarch, they're going to behave like this. Inevitable. We could have a revolution right now, fix this, and set the country on the right course. We could do it. I believe we could.
#I now have a Canadian partner on the
radiofreeameri.ca project, a founder of
Tucows, who I've known for
decades, Ross Rader. We've done work together in the past, it's great to be doing it again.
#On the path we're on, no doubt
Bluesky will come under the same kind of regulation law firms and universities are. And the shame of it is we could be using this time to spread out, distribute.
#
- I asked ChatGPT to draw a portrait of the current US president in the style of Diego Rivera.#
US president in style of Diego Rivera.
#
Diego Rivera style clown.
#
Bluesky is centralized, version 2. I wasn't satisfied with the blog post I wrote in March. I felt it was poorly organized and hard to understand, so I edited it, to get it down to its essential elements, and at the end explain why it's so important to get this right. Basically, by trying to be the universe, Bluesky is cutting off easy connections that can be made with other networks, make the system work better for communication, and at least deliver
some of the freedom we all want. They've been very successful, and deserve to profit from that, but recognize it plays a larger role today than just as a business, so let's spread it out so it's harder to shut it down. This is a real concern, not just a nice-to-have thing.
#Just tried an
experiment, I asked ChatGPT to review
ActivityPub re
Rules for Standards-makers. I totally concurred with its conclusions. In any case, it illustrates how ChatGPT can be helpful in designing new formats and protocols, making them more supportable and more useful for interop, which according to Rule 1, is the only reason we make standards.
#One thing led to another, we discussed lots of facets to the RFSM document. At some point it started rewriting what I had, and used two terms that don't belong in standards-making: dogfood and deprecate. Nothing ever is deprecated. That's arrogance on the part of developers. Imagine if someone in charge of NYC decided to deprecate the arrangement of the streets. Also, if your protocol achieved any adoption at all, there are far more developers than there are originators of the format. If I decided, for example, that the "webmaster" element in RSS was deprecated, do you think anyone would care? Of course not, nor should they. It's a powerless thing. I feel you should introduce features carefully because you will have to live with them forever. Also I thought there was a section in RFSM about breakage. That was Rule #1 at UserLand. We didn't always live up to it. About dogfood: I don't eat dog food, I'm a human. 2. It says we think of our users as pets, that's not rational or productive. However I do very strongly believe you have to use what you create, because you won't understand what users say unless you are one yourself.
#
We're doing some research into the origins of my family in Germany, learning a lot.
#
- They're still sanewashing Trump.#
- Example. Just listened to Brian Lehrer, a news interview and call-in show on WNYC, which I revere, for many reasons. Lehrer is smart, and doesn't dumb things down for his audience. He usually asks the question I'm dying to hear the answer to, which most reporters don't think of or won't ask.#
- On the March 27 they had a discussion about Trump's assault on Columbia University, which has now been extended to Harvard and Princeton. In all of them, the main issue is antisemitism at these universities.#
- Never in the discussion did they raise this question --#
- Do we believe that Trump cares about antisemitism?#
- And if he did, there are much bigger antisemites who are much more powerful and much closer to Trump (who is an obvious antisemite himself).#
- I'll mention just one -- Elon Musk, who actually did the Nazi salute, twice, from the podium with the Presidential Seal on it, at the freaking inauguration.#
- Musk has also backed the German Nazi party (they have a different name but to use that name would be NaziWashing, which I won't do).#
- The Occam's truth is that he's tying antisemitism to things because it's fun for him, and because later -- they will blame Jews for everything that's wrong in the US, as they always do.#
- The whole thing of Trump being a champion for Jewish people made me really uneasy, until I read a piece in Timothy Snyder's newsletter, which I recommend to everyone. #
- Anyway, I trust Brian Lehrer, I don't think he'd shirk a tough question, I just think as a journalist he still isn't thinking realistically about the world as it is now, instead behaving as he did before it got so rotten.#
Cory Booker asked the right question. "Where does the Constitution live? On paper or in our hearts?" Every living American was raised under the Bill of Rights. That's different from other countries which have long traditions of autocracies. Fascism on a mass scale will have a harder time taking root in this country.
Joe Rogan said what Trump is doing is wrong. He knows he has the right to say that. Setting a fine example. It will be hard to suppress that.
#Gambling and sports don’t mix for me. I want a version of games without the gambling. I don’t know how parents can let their kids watch games with all the gambling ads.
#
How did the music industry get through
hip-hop sampling in the 80s without blowing itself up? I was paying attention to copyright issues in software at the time, we used copy protection, but we knew it didn't work. It was just how things were done.
#The
beautiful art that came with the season finale of Severance could have been drawn by ChatGPT, it's that good, in the way that machine art is good. There's a point of view reflected in its creations, looking into a soul that in no way exists. We're learning about it, but it's a moving target, evolving before our eyes, in huge steps.
#My server has been coughing up hairballs tonight. It coughed up a link to
this piece from two years ago, when Twitter pulled the plug on their API. It knocked everything I had built on the Twitter API off the air. Every thing. Just like that. That's what tonight was like here. It was just some of my apps, suddenly, not working. Whew.
#WordLand and
Scripting News and a bunch of other sites/apps were off the air starting about 1AM Eastern, but mostly things seem to be working now, shortly after 6AM. It was a big scramble, I had to provision a new server on Digital Ocean.
#
- The prompt: Here's a drawing and a profile picture. I'd like you to insert the person in the profile into the drawing, and adapt it as you see fit, but the face of the person in the profile should be in the same style as the ones around it. #
- I gave it a snapshot of the art from the season finale of Severance, and my profile picture from Facebook. #
I laughed out loud as this was revealed by ChatGPT.
#
I changed the
domain for Radio Free America and the
Bluesky channel. It's not a Canadian site. Maybe at some time we can have a version of the news flow from Canada. We may need it!
#Bluesky is today brimming with irreverance.
#When
Apple bought NeXT, it wasn't long before we understood that it was the other way around.
#Great artists, before they die, should share their secrets, so the next generation can be even greater.
#
There's now a
home page for
Radio Free America. Once we have more feeds, the home page will be a timeline of news that can be acessed outside of
Bluesky. Please subscribe now, and help spread the word. Via the
dynamic OPML file that's publicly available there can be many such pages on the open web.
#
- Yesterday I uploaded an image of a pizza pie, in a New York pizzeria, with a couple dressed in evening clothes with a NYC cop and off-duty sanitation worker lurking in the background. #
- Paolo Valdemarin writes from London, "Have you tried adding more images to a prompt? From my experiments it can easily keep 'in mind' five different images and mix them. You can get a bunch of people sitting in the same room, with a very detailed version of the room." He sent two examples which are somewhat embarrassing, but you'll probably enjoy them. :-)#
- First, he uploaded my profile picture from Facebook. And asked ChatGPT to add me to the picture and then to "sit him next to the couple, with both of them kissing him on the cheek, and as you can see ChatGPT complied!#
Facebook profile picture.
#
Original pizzeria.
#
Dave inserted.
#
Awwww.
#
A new Bluesky news feed,
Radio Free America. It will also be on a web page as a river of news, and of course in
dynamic OPML so it can be reproduced in lots of places. It will be hard to shut down, if it catches on. The idea: deliver news stories, blog posts and podcasts from sources with ideas and facts an informed person would want. We hope we are helping the United States respond to threats to our freedom, well-being, the rule of law, and our country's friendships around the world. As the depth of what's happening is understood across the country, I believe we may need more flexible sources of news. We use mature tech that's widely deployed, well-understood. And it is completely and utterly one hundred percent billionaire-proof. We start out today with two feeds,
FactPost which is the official rapid response page of the Democratic Party, and
my linkblog feed, so I can easily test the system. The part that hooks up to Bluesky is relatively new, so we'll need to look at problems. As they say --
still diggin!#The US is being run like a TV show, with predictable results.
#
This is very important. If you're on Bluesky,
follow this account. "This is the official rapid response page of the Democratic Party." I've been
begging the Dems to do this since 2009, a permanent heartbeat for the Dems on social media. Staffed by the team that ran the Harris campaign social media center during the campaign. They were snarky, fun, irreverent, and never apologized for representing the people, and they did it well. This is a moment. I no longer have to beg for this. It exists. So the first step has already been taken, thank goodness!!! Now it's up to
us to spread the news that there is a place to find the heartbeat of the Dems. I'm going to study it, RT it, and keep the flame lit the best I can.
#
When your AI bot gave you code that worked do you go back and thank it and say it worked? I do. I don't feel complete until I do.
#When you put a hack into a piece of software you have to say out loud "It's a hack." That makes it okay.
#
- When we flatten out the differences between the different social networks, we'll start with their RSS feeds, if it works, ultimately there will be no need for different social networks. And again, if it works, we'll bring back the features of the open web that Twitter left out.#
- This is a much better approach to federation, delivers the benefits long before hashing out the diffs betw ATP and ActivityPub will take. And we really have the choice that Bluesky says they will deliver, and yes, it will also be billionaire-proof.#
- Yesterday I posted four new ChatGPT-created drawings, created with the latest upgrade of ChatGPT's drawing functions which are better than previous versions. The usual controversy is rekindled on the networks. The concern as always is that it learned how from human artists, puts artists out of business, and human artists create art, machines can't, and since this is created by software, it isn't art. #
- This gives me a chance to write a piece I've been wanting to write for a while. The meaning of art imho comes from what it says to and about the person observing it, what it does to them, how it changes them, what they experience. For most people, most of the time, they don't have any idea who created the art beyond their name, nationality and when they lived. If you see enough of their work, you learn about the work, not the person. What you learn from art is always going to be about yourself. #
- My father once told me, in all seriousness, the cliche about an abstract work of art -- it isn't art, my father said. I said to him, Dad that you feel so strongly about it means to you it most definitely is art. I believe if he were more truthful about his response, he would say what's behind the feeling, he's experiencing dishonesty, stolen valor, the artist is a profiteer, the person who made it a con artist not a real artist. Pretty similar to what people say in 2025 about art-making machines. #
- I gave ChatGPT a picture of a man and woman, reading the screen of a computer, then asked for various renditions. #
In the style of Leonardo da Vinci.
#
In the style of the cover of a John Steinbeck novel.
#
As if it were an illustration inside Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
#
As if it were Mr Caputo and Chapman from Orange is the New Black.
#
From Succession with Logan and Sioban Roy.
#
From Severance, with Mark S and Helly R.
#- If you step through the pictures after giving each a bit of your time, by the time you get here, if you were asked if it's art, I hope you'd say Who cares. If it helps you see something new about anything (probably yourself) whether or not it's art is not the most interesting thing.#
- I believe it is. When people say my software thinks like they do, what's really happening is the software has gotten out of their way, they've incorporated the way it works into the base of their spine, so they can remain in the world they're writing about, and forget that they're using a piece of software. They perceive that as the software thinking like they do, which is fine -- it's the goal. But it's quite possible they have a totally different experience that takes them out of their suspension of disbelief by not working the way they expect, the same way it did the last 100 times, or it failes to open a file, or whatever might cause them to leave their own world and have to deal with the one I, and generations of software developers, have created, which can (as I know) be excruciating, humiliating, and whatever else you may feel. #
What a world we live in.
#A thought for everyone struggling to see a good future in all the michegas. My advice -- please -- do your protesting, resisting, DEIing, organizing, learning, and look for silver linings (they are there) and most important keep doing things that feed your soul. Treat yourself with love even if the world isn't. So in that spirit for those of us who love cats -- a
story.
#
You know how they have
walkability scores for different places? I live in a place now with a score of zero, you can't do anything without a car. I moved from a place with a
score of 99. I'd like to have social networks get a score like that, for how much they feed energy into the open web, vs how much they take out. Something that attracts you from the open web, uses it to build its network, but doesn't reciprocate, gets a low score. Like Twitter or Facebook, they'd have a lot of nerve saying they were of the web, and thankfully they don't. But Bluesky? They would like you to believe they are of the web, that they are feeding the web, when they are not. They would get Twitter's score, divided by two for the dishonesty. Substack? They don't make the claim so they're bad for the web but not the worst. Mastodon? They're trying. But they could make a concerted effort to check the boxes on
textcasting, and implement support across their entire network. Give writers a chance to really work on the platform. Give Bluesky some competition which they desperately need (by my estimation, probably not theirs).
#
This may seem controversial, but the Repubs do have a point re
DEI. We really do have a problem honoring the achievements of white men. I know because I get the bullshit when people have tried to honor me for my achievements. When I was offered a keynote spot a the
ISOJ conference in 2019, to honor my (then) 25 years of blogging, I told the show runner,
Rosental Alves, that his audience wouldn't like me. He is gentle generous person, so I believe he was genuinely puzzled. I decided to go, because a future of journalism conference that thinks the advent of blogs was something for journalists and journalism students to acknowledge was something I wanted to see. But in the Q&A period, it all came out. Bluntly and rudely. My contributions mean nothing because I am a white man and in their minds I couldn't have failed. Do they really believe that? Swimming upstream isn't easy for anyone. The experience at that conference was pretty good proof of that. Behind my back in Silicon Valley, while I was writing about the failures along with the victories, when professional journalists and magazine publishers almost unconditionally worshipped the tech gods, I assume because they respect money more than anything, I wrote about the great victories of tech, but a lot of them didn't come from billionaires and VCs. I don't study the creativity of bankers, I care about tools for creative
people. I tried to write the truth, didn't always succeed and sometimes I had to retract. But I did pretty much what journalism preaches. Stayed true to what I believe. The "white men bad" thing was an excuse for people to say I was weak or stupid, or whatever they think. So we get the backlash now. Some of the energy that MAGA gets is honest frustration of people who are victims of DEI, despite the hype from "the woke" which is a term I despise, what's wrong with being awake, what's the alternative, being asleep? dead? -- these righteous assholes, on both sides of this thing, really do treat people as objects, and that hurts, and that kind of pain is hard to forget.
#
I was just thinking about themes for WordPress, and thought to look up Manila themes, and found we have a
whole website that's still
running (thanks Jake!) where you can see the catalog of themes we had for Manila and Radio (thanks Bryan Bell!). I want something like this for WordPress themes that work beautifully with WordLand-authored blogs.
#
The ruling class in America is more out in the open now. Pretty much the same people who brought us the
Lehman Brothers too-big-to-fail meltdown in 2008 and the
Brooks Brothers Riot in Y2K. Not sure if
oligarch is the right word. Peter O'Toole starred in
The Ruling Class, a favorite when I was younger. The
last song in the movie is pretty freaking great.
#I want natural language text macros in ChatGPT. I would devise a macro that turned random text I wrote online into a properly formatted blog post. for example when i write fast i almost never stop to capitalize things that should be capitalized. or i might abbreviate the name of a product so i expect it to fill it in, as a professional copy editor would. I hope we're heading there. And if they have this, put it behind a simple api so i can wire it into my favorite writing tool. We could even work on a set of standards, a higher level Markdown if you will, that goes deeper than formatting. That would be something for an experienced copy editor to do imho.
#We're getting into WordPress in a new way, the need for a
featured image came from users. I didn't know they had this feature in WordPress. If you asked me if it did, I would have said yes, I'm sure it does, but where and what is it called? i could've gotten that too via chatgpt, but i would have had to think of it. that's where having sharp users makes a world of difference. When people thank me for my generosity, they don't get it. I want something out of it, your experience and your mind. It's one of my main raw materials.
#With all the good stuff happening with
WordLand I haven't found time to wind down feedland.com and feedland.org. The servers are still working, though not performing as I'd like them to, but it doesn't seem I'm going to get the time to do a graceful transition before my self-imposed March 31 deadline. So I'll come up with a new plan, and if you're using either of these services, enjoy! and keep
backing up your subscription list.
#
I've been putting Markdown support in my feeds -- everywhere -- on both sides, yielding
serendipity like this. This is how "it just works" comes about. With a good
design and a lot of love.
#
Thanks to
Ben Werdmuller and
Om Malik for their nice writeups of WordLand on their blogs. They're right. It is a small piece that can be hooked into lots of places, as is WordPress a big place that can host lots of apps many of which haven't been written yet. Products that look outward that can be hooked up in a million ways to everything, and leave the door open for those who follow. Such products are rare in our world. People always try to own their users by locking out competitors. I found a perfect spot for me to put some software, and I am having fun watching people use it, and coming up with new features that build on what we have. I think the writing tools market for WordPress will be huge, and I firmly believe that will turn into what I call
the writer's web, which you could also think of as just the web. Ben thinks of it as the "indie web," and that's fine. It's all just the web. Anyway, I should have put something here a long time ago, but I didn't look inside WordPress until a couple of years ago and I really liked what I found.
#Mini-spoilers follow. I'm a Severance lover, it's definitely one of the best shows ever, and I feel even more so after the season 2 finale which I watched last night on AppleTV+. I think there are two types of Severance users. One whose focus is on the evil and the other whose focus is on the love. If you think nothing happened in the finale then you're the first type, if you are the second type, this episode was incredible rich. And we learned what the goats were about and that's not nothing.
#
Here's
something that could be useful. A ChatGPT with instructions on how to help a user with
WordLand. Try clicking the
link and see what happens, esp if you're a regular WordLand user. I discovered the feature first by asking if the bot knew what WordLand was, and it said it did, and got it mostly right. I've been using ChatGPT to develop the product, so it's possible it has retained some of the info. And the
docs are on the web. This is one of those times when you really want the AI bot to ingest everything it can find. Worried about hallucinations. But with a product like WordLand, which could show up problems in the browser or a WordPress theme, a lot of the help requests are not problems with WordLand itself. Here's a
thread where you can report on your experience. Remember the
guidelines. Thanks!
#
Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people, if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."
#
I like
Jeff Nichols' piece, but I don't agree that
the writer's web is blogging. I think it's bigger. Blogging is
part of the writer's web. Today's writing network is much more powerful, the software tools are stronger, and new UI standards have evolved. Things like Digital Ocean, Markdown, Font-Awesome and Node.js didn't exist last time we took a serious look at writing on the web. The web with all its features is still here. WordPress has created a strong foundation to build on, at least as good as the social media platforms, but better because it's of the web, with
no limits. We've got the beginning of a new platform, one where developers compete to create great writing and reading environments, and we don't need federation because the web takes care of that.
#
A thread I wrote
on Bluesky about how the RSS world, an earlier instance of
the writer's web, was overtaken by Twitter and why, which boils down to this -- the reading platforms wouldn't work with each other. So Twitter made subscription one click. And RSS made sites include 25 buttons to give people one-click subscription in every popular feed reader. Twitter only needed one button. And it worked every time. Now, 18 years later, the twitter-like systems world, Mastodon, Threads, Substack, Ghost, Bluesky, etc mostly can't get together on a simple way to peer. They keep talking about it and while they do, we're losing everything that's important to us. In the open tech world we have the same problem as the Democratic Party and the same problem RSS had. We refuse to see how the world has changed, and our slow and steady approach leads nowhere fast. We can't all be masters of our own silo'd domain. We need a web for words that's simple and can be learned in an afternoon, but doesn't lose the essential features writers need. I don't know what we need to win, but I do know what we need to get started.
#
Product Protocol Support Matrix.
#- Notes#
- Terminology: I don't thnk we should use the term social web until there actually is such a thing, so I invented a new term for these twitter-like services.#
- Since Ghost is now supporting ActivityPub, I felt we needed to include Substack because the two products compete directly. #
- I consider AT Proto a proprietary protocol for now, as proprietary as Mastodon's API.#
- I included WordPress because it supports ActivityPub. #
- If you want to comment or ask questions I posted this table on Mastodon and Bluesky.#
- If you aren’t sure how to ask for help with software, try first asking ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to help figure out what’s going wrong. It has infinite time to help, and won’t mind if the problem turned out to be a random browser plug-in that was misbehaving.#
- It often suggests trying things you might not have thought of.#
- I use it myself esp as often is the case there’s no one who can or is willing to work for me for free. I’m already playing it $20 per month, and for that I get as much time as it takes.#
- Really good for organizing your approach to a problem.#
Obama once said to the bankers who had just crashed the economy, much like Trump/Musk are trying to do now -- that his administration is the "only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back from 2009 and this time they want
everything. They don't care what's left, they're machines. All they know how to do is to consume. Squeeze a cent of value from every dollar. This
clip from Goodfellas explains. I saw a quote from one of the Dogeheads saying that all universities should be shut down. Hey you can say whatever you like, but they want to actually do it.
#A piece that Paul Krugman should write. How what Musk is doing to the US is worse than the 2009 near-collapse of the world economy. People who think he's going to bring down just the US, should recall how close we all came to falling into the abyss. But this time there will be no one to save us.
#The basic thing about tech is that attracts people who take things that don't belong to them. There's no policing. The richest people are the ones who are best at grabbing control of other people's creations. That's the common theme. Now they're in DC, going for all of it. The whole thing. But they're like the
dog that catches the car. They don't have the slightest idea what to do with what they're taking. How could they? It's incomprehensibly vast.
#The
data behind a
WordLand blog post I wrote a few days ago. I'm publishing these so people get an idea of the structures we're working with. It's basically a WordPress post with added metadata. They have these kinds of structures in RSS, Atom, ActivityPub and AT Proto. Eventually some of these will die out, there are too many formats to support. At any moment in time it feels like each one is enormous and permanent. But show me where the new OS/2, Novell, UCSD Pascal or CP/M apps are. Go back far enough, Alogol, Smalltalk, Lisp, Simula. I am very much a less-is-more type protocol designer, don't try to plan for things you don't have a working model of, because the ideas you gain when you actually put the app together will work much better. And only add things you're willing to live with forever. Slow down to hurry up. Etc. Anyway,
this is the format we work with inside
WordLand, and more important, in the new APIs, that build on and simplify the
excellent API that Automattic had already produced.
#
Of course I'm getting ready to ditch
my Tesla Model Y, and thinking about what my options are. I saw someone comment on the
Rivian truck, and I've seen them around but didn't imagine they'd have the same muscle car profile as the Tesla, but apparently they do. That's the thing I'd miss the most about the Model Y. Its power and handling. It's a big car, but it drives in many ways like the
Miata I drove in the 90s.
#Techdirt has a well-deserved rep for exposing the false claims tech companies make. I’d love to see a Techdirt analysis of Bluesky’s claim that they’re billionaire-proof and they don’t lock users in. For background check out this
TechCrunch piece from SXSW.
#
This post is for idiots like
you me who
click on links to The Bulwark.
#
- This is like that moment, five years ago, when we realized that Covid was going to kill a lot of us but it hadn't happened yet. A lot of people weren't yet aware. My friend John Palfrey, who is a legal scholar, has been writing about this moment on LinkedIn and Facebook. Things are flashing by very quickly, so I'm going to publish his latest piece here, below, so it gets a chance to get to the places I'm hooked into.#
- Lawyer friends and non-lawyer friends: has it become hard to say out loud in public: "we believe in the rule of law in America"? That seems not remotely controversial as a concept. The relative quiet on this topic is what is striking me most at the moment.#
- It would be a good idea for our Republic to avoid sleepwalking through a Constitutional crisis. Of course there are extremely talented lawyers working overtime on many fronts. Those who are not directly involved in litigation have other tools, including voice and funding and organizing, to make plain the simple truth that we should not let the rule of law slip away in America bit by bit. That will continue to happen if the rulings of federal judges can simply be ignored or sidestepped with impunity.#
- If the legislature has abdicated its role in checking the power of the executive, and then the judicial branch is also out, well, that leaves just one. This is not "fancy law stuff". This is "4th grade civics stuff" -- separation of powers, checks and balances (I know, I know, we don't teach civics enough in America...).#
- It is actually *not* more complicated than that. It can't be that hard to say out loud: "we value the rule of law in America" -- no matter your politics or party.#
- The Dems highest priority should be to get the Kamala Harris campaign back on social media, 24 by 7, with the truth and snark, irreverance, disrespectful of the Repubs, as a matter of principle. They were great. Perfect. We need a voice for the Democrats on the social networks. #
- Would someone please send this to AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Bernie Sanders, Mark Cuban, James Carville, anyone else you can think of. #
- The Dems only problem is there is no voice, no pulse, no heartbeat. Even without this, they almost won the last election. #
- Everything you like about government came from the Democrats. #
- We miss you. Get back on the air! No time to lose.#
Palfrey's alarm yesterday was about the Americans who were whisked off to
El Salvador. Who they are and what they're accused of is unknown, as if there's any substance to the accusation. No indictment, trial, verdict, appeals, etc. El Salvador wants to be the US dumping ground for undesirables. This is where we have, as
Timothy Snyder says, regime change. I thought the elmination of Social Security would have been the moment the light went on for most Americans, but this should be it. Citizens like you and me being
disappeared. It's a pretty quick way to get most of the people to behave according to the rules of the government, or off you go.
#Poking around on old servers I found
this cute little app that jsonifies an RSS feed. Not sure why I did it. Postscript, it only works for one feed, mine. I replaced it with a template in the feeder app which was a useful version of the cute little app. Here's a
demo of it viewing the contents of a feed in JSON using a special template.
#
I'd love to get a list of old school bloggers who are still at it. How would you go about that? I decided to give it to Gemini, limiting it at first to 100 bloggers. Here's the
prompt I wrote. For a while I was wondering what "deep research" was for, but as it's starting the work, I'm thinking of resources that would fit in -- like blogtree.com -- a fascinating site, gives a clear picture how blogs emerge out of the community of an earlier blog. Anyway it's working on it while I write this post.
😄 #An application ChatGPT is great it. You're staring at some code, it's really straightforward, you've done this a thousand times, but it doesn't work. Stare at it some more. Try re-entering it. Change the names of things. Still doesn't work. Copy and paste the problem code into ChatGPT and in an instant it tells you without you even having to ask that your comment isn't properly terminated, so the runtime was never seeing the code, and nothing I did made the slightest difference. The information was there. I had been staring at it, but humans see what we expect to see. Machines don't have that problem, at least not in this way (thinking of hallucinations).
#
Why is scripting.com not https? I hope you can see that I have no trouble deploying https sites here. I use
Caddy on my Linux servers, and I don't see why anyone uses anything else. It's really easy and requires none of the work people complain about. Anyway the reason scripting.com is http and not https is that the site dates back to 1994, before there was such a thing as https. Google didn't start their push to get the web to convert to https until 2014, 20 years after I started blogging. Have a look at
any of
my archived blog posts and
docs, the're pretty much all there. This is something I'm proud of. I wanted to create a record from the start, it was very deliberate. I was already an experienced developer when the web started up, so I had an idea what I was doing. I also use images on my site, in the right margin of posts, and lately as "inline" images, in their own boxes with a caption. It's a way for me to play with the ideas, and adds color to pages that are almost all text. So if I were to move the site from S3 to one of my hosted servers, which would be a fairly major undertaking on its own and add a lot of overhead because Amazon takes care of a lot of the bullshit you have to deal with, there would be a small matter of what about the images? They would all break if scripting.com was hosted on https and they were served from http. Now you might say -- Dave all you have to do is move all those images to a place with https support and remap the domains, and take care of all the michegas that's going to pop up. Or suffer with broken images. I decided to instead tell Google to stop trying to own something that belongs to no one and everyone. If they want a more secure web, create it, and make a browser for it, and respect the original web alone. Hopefully this clears it up.
#I asked
ChatGPT when Google started making HTTPS a requirement. Then I asked when was HTTPS first deployed, and was surprised it was in 1994 in Netscape Navigator. But apparently it was really buggy and wasn't codified until much later. Then I asked when HTTPS became the norm? 2017. So there's a lot of web out there that isn't being maintained by anyone, it just works, that predates HTTPS being widely adopted, if you believe the timelines ChatGPT produced.
#BTW, these days the images are served via HTTPS so they don't show up in broken links in RSS readers, including my own
FeedLand which is served over HTTPS.
#Another BTW, I'm still thinking about how I want to transition from the public and open-to-anyone FeedLand servers. So if you're still using .org or .com, they're still on the air doing the same thing they've been doing all along.
#
My suggestion re
Schumer et al. It's over -- remember the lessons, let's look forward, tonight's vote is already history. Let the Dems in the Senate take care of themselves. It's we, the people, who created this country, and we the people are the only ones who can make it work again.
#I heard an idea that really resonated in a Brian Lehrer
interview with
Anand Giridharadas, who says among many other things, that we should aim our ire at the
leaders of the MAGA movement, and stop bringing our angst to the people who voted for them. Every time I see a condescending TikTok story about them, I think about how that takes us further from getting where we must go. We have to reconcile, we share a country, and our interests are totally aligned. We need each other, that will become completely obvious, and the sooner it does the better.
#Question for WordLand users. When you published your first post, were you surprised that the window didn't clear? Did you understand that you can make changes and update the public post? I was just talking with a friend who didn't expect it to behave the way it did.
#
I was looking over my
blog archive for August 2006, which was when I started using Twitter, and came across this
video of Jason Calacanis, at a Wikipedia conference in Cambridge. This is what videos were like back then. I probably took it with a fairly expensive Nikon camera.
#Saw an
interview with Mark Cuban where they asked why would Elon Musk do something that would cause Tesla stock to tank. He's got the power to play with the biggest financial thing that has ever existed, and quite possibly that ever will exist. In comparison Tesla is just one car company, with a lot of competition, a market-leading product for sure, but the competition is catching up. They're constantly lowering prices to keep the volume up, so eventually the stock will have to come down anyway. He certainly knows stuff about the company that no one else can see, maybe their new product pipeline is empty? He also has had to deal with short-sellers who have the incentive to drive the price down, and he can't bet alongside them (how would that look, a CEO betting against his own company). No matter what, there is nothing bigger than the USA, and he's got it, and plans to keep it. But he's human, and thus has frailties, and he loses as often as he wins and knows it. Unfortunately for us we're all in his boat now, unless somehow we can wrench it back.
#
Please, today -- write a blog post that explains why you believe in
The Writer's Web. That's the best way to express our ideas on the web is with all the
tools that writers have invented. And while we may enjoy using social media like Bluesky or Mastodon, we understand that they are not for writing and are not the web. Please
send me a link to your post and I will read what you've written with thanks for believing in writers and the web! You can use any blogging software you like. My email address is dave.winer@gmail.com. And thank you. (And btw, your post can be about whatever you like, by just writing a blog post you're expressing your support for the writing on the web!)
#
- I keep hearing pundits and incumbent Democrats missing the point, that the people are the ones whose opinion matters about the Republicans dismantling our democracy in the United States. #
- I want to celebrate those leaders who totally get that the power is with the people, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. They are an inspiration! I live in New York and while AOC doesn't represent me in Congress (Pat Ryan is my rep), in a political and spiritual way she most definitely represents me. She should be the next president, as far as I'm concerned. She has all the leadership abilities we could ever want. #
- My contribution for today is the slogan that's the title of this piece. It's derived from James Carville's slogan when Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, updated for 2025. #
- "It's the people, dummy!" was always the right slogan. It's we, the people, who created this country, and we the people are the only ones who can make it work again.#
A funny thing. A few months back someone told me that I had been gone from the podcast world for too long for anyone to listen to me. I thought how weird, I didn't go anywhere at all, I stayed exactly 
