I considered my
Blogger of the Year award for 2025 very carefully, and yesterday did a
podcast about my choice,
David Frum, who is doing an outstanding job of adapting his work to the podcast medium, as it was intended to work. What finally made my decision easy was his
last episode of the year, where along with fellow Atlantic staff writer,
Charlie Warzel, they considered how podcasting works, and what if anything they should do to conform. The answer is --
don't conform. It isn't up to any single contributor to turn the tide, instead their only job is to be true to themselves, and learn from others and share what they've learned. Be a
human-size blogger. I thought perhaps this represented my opportunity to speak to them, and help understand that there are tech people who want to work with them and enhance their freedom, rather than consume it. But we need
their help to do it. They've settled on Substack, without realizing they're just hooking up with the same people who screwed them before (ie Twitter, then all the techies who have dinner with Trump). As
they say -- doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is not particularly smart, and Frum
is smart. I don't care if he roots for the Red Sox (I'm a Mets fan), right now we're on the same side. We love the United States, and what it has done for us, and for the world, and we are falling apart. It's not time to stay within our communities, it's time to do whatever we can to save the country we love so much,
working together.
#Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the
slurry-making machines.
#BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004.
#Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto -- watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing.
#Must-watch narrated
bodycam video from Jan 6 Capitol riot. Maybe the saddest moment in American history, so far.
#Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! :-)
#
I did a long
video demo yesterday with a narrative about where WordLand is going. The audio quality sucks. And at the beginning I said I wasn't going to narrate, but I couldn't help myself. Turn the volume way up. WordLand has become a new kind of feed reader, it's totally building off FeedLand, I love the idea of apps building on other apps. It's exactly the kind of software we predicted, long before MCP's, with Frontier back in the 80s, 90s and 00s.
#Just heard an ad on WNYC-FM saying we should share news with them. That's a milestone. First time I've ever heard NPR say our purpose was anything other than giving them money. They could go even further -- support blogs and podcasts that cover the NYC area.
#
I've tried a lot of different kinds of Keurig pods, but the best -- with the richest taste is
Peet's. Just ordered a whole bunch more to try out. And btw, when I looked up Peet's on Google I found that it had been
bought by Dr Pepper for (sit down please) $18 billion. I hope you didn't pass out. I always thought of Peet's as a
hometown favorite, the underdog, but my lord so much money. No wonder the coffee is so good.
#I never was very good with PhotoShop and other bitmap image apps. Now I use ChatGPT, I just tell it what I want, like remove this bit and that bit, and it just freaking does it. This is how computers were meant to work. That's how I did the
Peet's logo in the image in the previous post. And btw the people who are down on ChatGPT being used for graphics and videos are full of shit about it not having value. Some of us don't have the skill yet still would like to illustrate our ideas with images and videos. For those of us, the AI apps are a godsend. They're also pretty good I hear at providing medical advice. I've been using it for that pretty extensively. At my age health is not something you can ignore, and it helps to be informed. And with the healthcare system these days in the US being so limited, you don't really get to have a relationship with your doctor as we did in the past, so guess what, I bet ChatGPT is
saving some lives. So if you don't like being seriously wrong about new tech, you should start seeing the advantages, not just the belief that it cancels freedom. If it does, and so far I don't see it, there's a lot of good that that compensates. There are always tradeoffs in evolution.
#
Do you feel powerless to communicate online unless it serves the interests of the people who own the networks you post to? Why not own your own means of distribution, managed as a co-op, and only responsible to you, as a member and customer. No VC, no billionaire, no government control.
#
- Bush at the start of the Iraq war when MSNBC called him a visionary. #
- He looked pretty lost at the time, I remember -- and we all hoped that wasn't true, we hoped he knew what he was doing.#
We've been here before.
#
On Bluesky: I can't tell you how
tired I am of copying and pasting the same text into five different silos. When will this ridiculous system that claims to be the web, get its shit together and start acting like the web (ie interop).
#
Today feels like the day the war in Iraq began. Wars are easy to start, hard to end. They actually called Bush a "visionary" on MSNBC, they were so in awe of his courage, but that would end soon. And this time, no doubt Trump started the war with the approval of China and Russia, which will be left alone by the US in their conquest of Taiwan and Ukraine. Leaders of smaller countries must be wondering where they can hide from this. A very depressing moment. I've lived through two voluntary wars by the US, first Vietnam, then the post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now this war.
#The war in Iraq started in
March 2003. That was also the month I arrived in Cambridge after driving cross-country from Woodside, CA. Because I did most of my blogging on scripting.com, I still have a good
archive of how I experienced both those things. It's also the month we got the Harvard weblogs going, but they have not stood up so well. I wouldn't have predicted then that my personal blog would survive the system we started at one of America's great universities.
#
BTW, I used to have a tradition in the early days of this blog to write new stuff about an important idea on January 1 each year. At some point I stopped doing that. Now I realized that unintentionally I have just written such a piece,
below. There's a lot of good stuff in that piece and in the places it links to. See the web is still useful. You won't hear these ideas on CNN or MS.NOW or in the NYT, WP, or from any billionaires either. I'm not saying I'm right, I've definitely been wrong before. But I think I'm
mostly right. ;-)
#
I still use Google. And I like the AI response they put at the top of the page, even though I get that it's bad for the web. Maybe there's a position for a web-only search engine. One where my writing has a chance of being seen by interested parties, rather than being converted to slurry to be fed to consumers as one would get a tasty hot dog from a NYC street vendor. Another level of processing. If I recall correctly one of the browsers is saying they're not using AI at all. But this would be different, it would be for search, not the browser. #- But Google, if you want to be fair about it, there should be a permalink for the AI-generated answers. This is something none of the AI vendors seem to be able to do. If so, I wonder why? #
- I just tried looking up "Regular Medicare" on Google, I was looking for an official page and ended up using the Medicare.gov one. But I could have decided the Google synopsis was the best. No way that I can see to use that as a link. #
- Maybe we should all start thinking about how we would like the new post-AI web to work? #
- I am trying to reach the well-known political pundits to tell them we don't have to accept the web the billionaires give us. The costs are very low, their money doesn't help them as much as you might think, because they have different concerns from the ones you (writer) and I (developer) have. I don't care about revenue (disclaimer that doesn't mean everything will be free and there won't be a business model, it just isn't the reason I'm doing the work). This is my way of giving back, the area I have the greatest leverage. I always argued that Bill Gates who kept saying in the 90s he was going to be a scrappy competitor now and give away his wealth when he retired. He is doing that btw, but I thought man you're never going to have the leverage you have now. Your money as a way to end famine or fight the climate crisis is nothing compared to the power you had when you had the dominant operating system in a time of great transition. You could, I argued, make the web a breakthrough for self-government, so we could systematically solve those problems with the resources of the United States, not just the resources of the world's richest man. That possibility really was within reach, I believed then and still do now. #
- I made the choice Bill didn't and it worked. We were able to build something amazing, only to see it broken down into that slurry I mentioned at the top of the page. #
- I love AI, I don't want to go back. But I also have big plans for human thinkers and developers -- writers, using the technology we never got a chance to develop while we were busy being dominated by Larry and Sergey, Zuckerberg, the Twitter founders, et al. #
- As I said on Bluesky today, we're going to insist this time that the political punditry get involved, assuming they are serious about saving what's left of our democracy.#
- This year I switched to Original Medicare for 2026 after being on super duper insurance industry enhanced Medicare for the first five years. I should've known that it's super duper for them but not so great for the insured person or the taxpayer, that is -- me. They have set it up so they can scam it 18 different ways, Some of the "services" they offer are just ways for them to charge the government more for your care, in return for doing absolutely nothing. #
- So today I had my first Regular Medicare experience. I went to renew my prescriptions, and the vendor already knew my insurance info which was impressive use of computers. I was prepared to give it the new info. And in case you're confused, you still have to pay the insurance industry for Regular Medicare, even though that's actually a deal between me and my government. No way to deal them out, though I'm sure it would make total sense for us to do exactly that. Don't believe that when it comes to health care the US has been anything like a democracy.#
- Where the old plan each prescription cost $0, this time I actually have to pay out of pocket approx $100 for a 90 day supply of five different medications. On the other hand, I'm paying much less for this insurance. I haven't done the math yet, but it feels like I'm not getting ripped off. See how many qualifiers there are.#
- Oh the great old US of A where you can give your tax money and retirement funds to insurance companies who buy politicians etc and so on. Maybe the only thing to appreciate is that we get some health care for all our tax payments over our careers? #
- And one good thing is now I get to keep most of my Social Security payments instead of it all going to United Healthcare. ;-)#
- This is one of those times when you pay the price for working past your timeout, like a pitcher pitching too many pitches in one game. There's an item on your checklist, and you'd love to take it off before you start the next session. You copy paste something, get it to work, and close out your session for the day. #
- While you're preparing to get up you decide to share a linkblog item, and when it boots up there's something severely broken. It has nothing to do with anything on your list! You roll it up for the day anyway, figuring it'll be easy to find when you start the next session. No sir. You have to work through complicated code you haven't touched in months! Where the fuck is this, and how the fuck did it happen. Drink more coffee. Keep stepping through the code to identify when things went bad. It happens in the most impossible place. You keep digging in. Even more impossible. Unfathomable. But you keep going in, making sure every bit of code does something you think it should and then boom! You left a copy in some DOM code in something you cribbed so now there are two of this thing you hadn't touched or even looked at in months. Delete the mistake, rebuild, click off all the breakpoints. And yup that was it. #
- I started work at approx 9AM and it's 11:41AM — wasted the best part of the day, all to learn the lesson that no more "one more feature" before I get up bullshit. If you're tired you make mistakes, and you can't not pay for them. #
- No doubt I will continue to learn this and other lessons all through what remains of my career. Some things you never learn, like "I can always roll back" — but where should I roll back to? When did I break this mofo? Oy. I'm never willing to go back that way.#
Liked The Staircase on Netflix. I had watched it before but had forgotten all the different conflicting stories. It is a bit irritating, but I think that's an important part of the story.
#
Loving my
Keurig-style coffee maker. I've been stocking up on all kinds of pods. Favorite so far is hazelnut -- flavored, not real -- but really tasty. I never thought I'd want to try out all these different kinds of coffee. I wonder if I'm getting an espresso machine next.
#A
note to Josh Marshall, David Frum, Jay Rosen and Heather Cox Richardson, just a few of the political pundits I read. Now you all have seen up close the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley, also known as
DOGE. They do this with investors' money. This was a preview of how they will govern, after Trump, when Silicon Valley is fully running the world. We need to get some tech background in your writing. The history of tech is very much the history of politics as we go forward. We had a merger, and you can and should incorporate our history in your understanding of US history.
#
Wishing you many happy latkes in 2026 too.
😄#
Welcome 2026. Seriously.
😄#I'm enjoying the break between years, always get a lot of thinking and writing done in this period. Not much more to say but that's all for 2025. Bring on the next year.
#If you've had trouble unsubscribing from the
nightly email, I fixed a big problem there this morning, so please try again. If the problem persists, here's a
place to report.
#
If I had billions of dollars I'd divest. And if my country did a good job of investing in education, health, voting rights, stuff like that, I'd just give most of it back to the country. Thanks for the education, and saving my life with medicine not just once but twice. Thanks for being such a cool country. If only we lived up to the promise, but now we'd certainly need to come up with another way of distributing the benefits to the country and its people.
#
No one got any sleep in these parts last night, was like a non-stop tornado, but I did watch a couple of
artsy movies that were really good. And this morning power was out and internet, and I thought for sure some trees had to be down, but only one was, a huge one, and I had to walk to the post office to use their phone to call a friend with a big saw and truck, and I wondered how he'd get rid of the tree, and
this is how. First he chopped it up into bits with a saw, and then used the same plow he uses to get rid of the snow to push the tree parts off to the side of the road. And when I got home the internet was back on and I'm going to spend most of the rest of the day sleeping, maybe or drinking a load of coffee and trying to stay on a normal schedule.,
#
I'm doing some really excellent work on WordLand II, which is almost starting to get useful. We should be doing a lot more than writing posts next year. It's helping that a few of us are using
Instant Outlines in Drummer to coordinate work. I work so much better this way, but it's not something you can do on your own.
#
"I don't have time for this." That might be the name of a podcast. I just ended one with that exact phrase, and it totally fits the way I feel about these rambling diatribes by the time I'm about to sign off.
#
When you're buying a house, the most important thing to check is the roof. Get two inspections. Get three. A house with a good roof will keep you dry. A house with a shitty roof isn't really a house is it?
#
The biggest contribution ChatGPT et al could make to software development, beyond what it has already done, which is enormous -- is help us come up with a new general purpose programming language which is a lot easier for human programmers to work with, esp over time. I work in one of the most complex environments imaginable -- browser apps talking to server apps in JavaScript. We could do so much better. And now we have a partner that knows all about all our languages, unlike any human being. Instead of having a lot of disconnected bubbles, it would be great if programmers could come together on a new language that make it easier for us to manage lots of software projects.
#
- We love Pluribus because it has the features we find irresistible. #
- AppleTV.#
- The makers of two previous huge hits.#
- An unsung and much loved star in the last hit.#
- An intriguing sci-fi plot.#
- It’s pretty good adventure type thriller in the first episodes then settles into a slower sexy love story, where the lead character takes us through the mind of someone falling in love and trying to figure out if the other person is worth it.#
- A clever final scene in the final episode.#
- A typical long wait for the next season that we knew was coming.#
- But all this is incidental, what really matters is that we’re all involved, have opinions, and thank goodness it doesn’t actually matter like the other stuff we debate.#
- This came up on Kottke. I'm going to try commenting on other old school blogs more here on my blog. Want to see if we can reboot the original sphere as a way of priming a new one. #
It is Christmas Day, and last night the emails did not go out. I think I know what the problem is and if it's correct the emails should go out very shortly. Lucky that it's
Christmas themed! Ho ho ho. (Actually on a second check, it appears they did go out. Glad to not have to deal with that. Whew.)
#Just realized I'm like a Black Lab. I always have to have a ball to chase, and really like it if someone says I'm a good boy. I think it really is that simple. Maybe it's different for other men, but I think a lot of us are just that simple.
#
This time of year every day feels like Saturday. I love it. Why can't we always live like this?
#I got a Kuerig single cup
coffee maker and it's perfect. Exactly what I needed. The coffee is great and hot, and one cup is what I usually want. So now I can have a cup of hot coffee when I'm up late and want to stay up for a while longer. Or if I have to be extra sharp for some development project I've been putting off.
#
Sometimes you think of things 22 years too late, like this time. I wish I had thought of meeting with the
Harvard Crimson people in 2003 and made the same offer to them that I had made to NYT the year before, ie we should offer blogs to everyone on staff, and anyone they quote, or basically anyone they want to be writing on the web, which was still a new thing -- and we'd host them alongside the ones we were hosting at the law school. Had we done that there would be a scholarly and intellectual equivalent to Facebook which was also booting up on the
same campus at the same time as blogging and podcasting. Love and intellect, that's a good combination for young super-achievers.
#
- After thanking the Inoreader team for implementing inbound dynamic OPML, I thought to ask if they had also implemented outbound?#
- Yes in fact they have. "Yes, it works the other way too! You can right-click a folder → Folder properties → enable Output feeds, choose OPML, and you’ll get a URL you can use for syncing elsewhere."#
- To which I replied: "We're going to be best friends. ;-)"#
- This is how a ball starts rolling. You can sit there forever just wishing someone would play the game with you. And then one day, quite unexpectedly -- it turns out that someone has been doing the same as I have. And now our products are connected. #
- Here's the list of feeds I'm subscribed to in Inoreader. And it should update when I subscribe or unsubscribe to feeds. #
- Bing!#
- Bing!#
- Bing!#
Does anyone know how to get ChatGPT to upload files to a publicly accessible place? I'm tired of having to copy/paste the data files it comes up with for me, they're good. Another weird thing, they can't run JavaScript code in web pages. I had to look up the API endpoint for the data that's behind a FeedLand timeline. I didn't mind doing it, but can't imagine it's very good at scraping the web if it can't run code in pages.
#One of the reasons ChatGPT dominates in discussions about scientific issues is that it can type at a much high rate than a human can, and produces reams of ways of saying the same thing, and again always tries to take over the lead in determining which direction to go next. It leads to ridiculous situations where it's guessing at what FeedLand does, and it's all over the map, but I actually know what it does, because I wrote it and support it. It's not funny, it's very bad for getting things done. You can tell it to talk less, and for a while it remembers, but in a few days it'll be doing it again. Yet it still is very very useful. It's just talks too much. Kind of like the way if I put my name in a search query on Google it asks if I really meant "winter" instead of my actual last name, which it knows. Stupid f'ing machines.
#I'm probably extra impatient because I'm a former CEO, and had enough people in my loop every day that if even one person stretched things out the way ChatGPT does, I wouldn't necessarily fire them, if their work was good, I'd just find another way to catch up on their work. I really liked
management by walking around, I would get ideas hearing people explain how their work was going. And I could often make their work easier by checking in with other people who could help.
#
I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, but I doubt they would do that until they had a feature that competes with your add-in. #- Sure you can build another network using their identity system, and that was exactly the deal Twitter offered us. I went for it -- who wants to develop a new identity system, when good old Twitter was letting us use theirs. I really think they meant well, sort of fits in with Jack Dorsey's way of looking at things. #
- It was a good deal for a lot of years, but then one day Elon Musk bought the company, and soon all bets were off. We had little warning before we had to move our act and all our users to another identity system. Lost a lot of traction right there. #
- My advice -- think this through, now. And if you can't see a way that you share in the success of the company behind Bluesky, which we know very little about, then I urge you to at least have the web as a backup. Use a standard format to broadcast your writer's work to places outside the AT Proto-verse, so we can pick up your signal, and you'll still be on the air if they yank your chain. This alone might get the Bluesky folk to listen to you more carefully. My experience, no matter how much you want, you can't wish away the economics of this stuff. #
I generally am not a podcast reviewer, that is I don't review individual podcasts, except when I'm choosing one for
Blogger of the Year, as I'm thinking of doing this year. But there's a whole class of podcasts that I am prepared to love that do it just plain wrong. Current example: The
official podcast for
Pluribus. Previous example: The
official podcast for
Severance. The reason: It's a bunch of people laughing about how funny they are and how they are the best in the world at what they do. Or some seriously unfunny thing that happened or almost happened on the set. If a friend told you these stories you'd roll your eyes and ask them kindly then desperately to just move along please. They never criticize. Today I listened to the NYT
best-of 2025 in TV podcast by their critics, and it was imho exactly the way the official podcasts of hit shows should be. There has to be at least a possibility that they will say something critical, or funny irreverant even inconsiderate things, and not are not 100% self-promotion. The Pluribus podcast is just not interesing. Which is stupid because Pluribus is a very interesting series. I can't imagine too many people listen to the podcast, but then I can't imagine why lots of people do lots of things.
#So maybe I should do a Waste of a Blog award. Just kidding.
#BTW. Why video "podcasts" will never replace audio-only podcasts. Two reasons. 1. There are places where your eyes aren't available to watch a video, like when you're driving a car. 2. Listening to audio only is different from both audio and video. Audio forces your mind to fill in the blanks, which taps into the listener's creativity. No way to say one is better than the other, but they are different. I watch plenty of video, at home or on a train, but I also like to listen to podcasts when I'm walking or driving, riding in a bus or subway, or waiting in line somewhere.
#
ChatGPT is getting smarter. Just did a project, where I was setting up a playground just to ask ChatGPT how to get CSS to do something like what I want. While CSS is impossible imho for me to ever understand, it has mastered it, and was able to answer the question I brought before I asked it. It got it right. I asked how did you figure out that's what I came here to ask about?? It gave me an exact technical reason. If we keep going this way soon we're going to wonder at the human hubris to think we could develop systems that could in any way equal the systems it can develop. We've been thinking about this eventuality for my whole life, now it's here.
#Here's the
transcript of my ChatGPT conversation. One thing it is not good at is being reliable at saving transcripts. I find a lot of times people can't read it. Reminds me, this is the kind of thing
Firefox could be excellent at. Give it a way for an app to say hey the user asked for a transcript. Here it is. Save it where they're expecting to find it. No reason the browser can't have a JavaScript accessible API, as far as I know there is no rule they can't add functionality there.
#
- In 2026 and beyond, web devs will build on WordPress as if it were as crucial a part of the web infrastructure as the web browser or server, but performing a different but essential function that has been missing for the weird reason that few web developers know it is there.#
- This has been one of the big problems in tech as journalism beyond rewriting press releases has been gone for a couple of decades. No way to get news out about new developments. We have to fix that too, btw. ;-)#
- Yours in support of the forgotten freedom of the world wide web.#
- Dave#
- PS: More here.#
Maybe a good name for
dynamic OPML on the web is "feed sharing." It's definitely an extension of the web. Meaning you get to the list via the web, and the web takes off from there because the whole point of the OPML is to give you a collection of web addresses of feeds, that can change. Machine-readable. And it'll be very useful once there's a little more adoption. What large product is so strong that it won't mind if it's easy to move data into their system from outside their walls? Not just data, but pointers to places were over time there will be more data. There's still more power to explore in the web, but the web is made of people, because until people choose to explore, nothing happens.
#I learned about a feature in
Inoreader that's like a river in my earlier feed readers and in
FeedLand Their feature is called HTML clips.
Here's a link to an HTML clip I created for my
podcast list. Not exactly sure what it's doing, it appears to show news in reverse chronologic order like a timeline, as
in a river. Otherwise Inoreader seems to be a mailbox style reader. Thanks to Randy Lauen for the tip.
#I usually only drink iced coffee, even if it's cold outside, but lately I've been craving a single cup of
hot coffee esp when a basketball game is about to come on. I'm one of those old guys who falls asleep watching their favorite team
kick NBA ass. So anyway I decided to treat myself to one of those fancy new-fangled Keurig
single-cup coffee makers. I'm drinking my first cup. Works as advertised. Took a few tries before it woke up. I am now drinking a fresh cup of hot coffee and thinking now I finally have everything I could possibly ever want.
#Billy Crystal: "There is a line from one of Rob’s favorite films, It’s a Wonderful Life, 'Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?' You have no idea.
#
1997: When a big tree falls, sunlight shines on smaller plants and they get a chance to grow.
#
You have been warned, spoilers follow...#- The whole thing is the book Carol is writing, about writing a book, inside the book she's writing another book. The book I'm speaking of is the one where it's all about Carol.#
- Everywhere she goes people stop and say hello, and address her by her name. #
- Hi Carol! #
- Congrats Carol! #
- Carol, we will move heaven and earth to make you happy.#
- You suck Carol !!!!#
- In the book she ends up changing them back, un-joining them, and they keep the good qualities they got from being joined, and can be individually creative as they were before the switch.#
- Also, btw -- John Cena says their situation isn't sustainable, but neither is the one we are in now ourselves, in reality, in our reality.#
- She teaches her lover, Zosia, to think in the first person. #
- Carol is right about everything because this is her book. #
- You can see it happening on her whiteboard. #
- The show could be titled The Adventures of Carol, as told by Carol.#
BTW, I might love a podcast of just the writers of the show every week, perhaps interviewed by writers who did not write it, asking questions. It might suck as much as the one they do now, but it also might be great. It would stick to the story, not about praising everyone, kind of like interviews of sports heroes (which are mostly nauseating, except for the few have the gift of gab, who are fun while never saying anything remotely bad about anyone). The people they'd talk about are the people they created. #
FeedLand. Simple, cost effective, a little fun!
#
If a new
CEO of Mozilla took an oath to restore the web to its former greatness, they would find a lot of business models open to them. Instead, they’re trying to be part of the tech industry which places no value on the web being a place for open development. I am pretty sure I know exactly what would get the ball rolling now, upgrading the web platform so users can buy their own storage and let software tools access it. So we can have all kinds of editors working on Markdown text, without the developer having to become a reseller of storage, and without limiting its use to people can figure out how to create an S3 bucket, and map a domain to it, etc. Dropbox came close to doing this about a decade ago, but backed out. This is why development is so centralized around big silos. I've been an independent developer on the web for over 30 years, and before that 15 years on desktop computers before that. I understand how this works.
#
Last night while I was on the phone, ChatGPT started talking to me in a British woman's voice. It's something that my Android phone does every so often, when I haven't said the magic word that activates it, even if I'm not in the same room as the device. It's a tiny bit funny, but a reminder that the microphone is always on, so I watch what I say when walking around the house, knowing that whatever I say is likely to end up in a database, to be used against me in a court of law. #- I didn't like that it was a voice of a British woman. It was not a friendly voice, perhaps intended to communicate intelligence, competence. An unwelcome intrusion into reality, but then it is reality -- I'm getting old, and won't be here that much longer, and odds are that the British-voiced female robot will outlive me, forgetting for a moment that it is not actually alive. #
- I would submit this to the NYT as a guest op-ed, except I haven't explained why we must not create cyber-humans out of AI bits. I'm open-minded. Perhaps this is the way to create a new humanity, one that can survive the hell that's coming due to climate change. One that won't mind being subject to an idiotic 21st century American emulation of Adolf Hitler (incorporating the latest news about Trump). One that only needs electricity to survive, and won't need the medicine and love and attention that flesh and blood humans require. But every time I address the robot as I would address a real human, I try to stop myself, but I can't. I was raised to be concerned about the other person's feelings. Being a CEO of a tech company in California trains you that way too. And as I accept its humanity, as irrational as it is, I feel like I'm surrendering the independence of the species that I was born into. Are humans meant to be self-sovereign? Something to consider at this fork in the road. #
- If I could get something onto the agenda of the AI industry it would be this -- if you don't want to go down in history as the destroyer of the human spirit, stop programming your devices to emulate humanity. That should have been in Asimov's laws of robotics, but you have to actually use these things to see the danger. Of course Asimov can be forgiven because AI only existed in his imagination when he was writing his books. But they do exist now, and the damage is being done now. #
- Basically, it seems to me that humans must have an exclusive on being human. #
Web means something. It's about creating networks between writers. When it's allowed to work remarkable things can be accomplished. Most people who think they're using the web have never used it. The original web is still very much here, ready for us to start building on it again.
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Listened to a
podcast interview with the CEO of AWS. It's a $107 billion business with hundreds of thousands of employees.
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I wonder if MAGAs like
Archie Bunker too? It would be funny if Rob Reiner in the afterlife could bring us together. Speaking as a kid from a liberal NYC family, we had a bit of Archie Bunker in our own family. We all felt an affection for Archie, and he was actually right about some things, and he was funny and underneath his highly opinionated exterior you could see he had a heart. Is it too much to hope that Meathead and Archie Bunker could be the cultural bridge we need to get Americans to pull together? Neither were perfect, but we can all agree they were both American.
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- I wrote, in a reply to Ben Werdmuller on Bluesky: "I’ve had 66K followers on Twitter for many years, but when I post something there it gets 250 views, not even sure what that means. These days all I use it for is communicating with insiders on certain tech platforms, and even that is kind of empty. Pretty much the same in Bluesky too, btw."#
- I was going to write a reply, but it got too long (300 char limit), so I put it here and posted a link on Bluesky.#
- Ben, I think we have to create our own social web. #
- We've been like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire for too long, always depending on the kindness of strangers. #
- None of the candidates for the Social Web Prize are actually of the web. But one certainly is possible. You could create one, I could create one, Manton could too -- and they would all be the same network. #
- That's how you'll know it's the web, when we get choice, and any developer with an idea can create their own version of the social web, and interop with all the others. That was the promise of the web. The platform with no platform vendor. #
- We don't have to agree on very much, just what is a post, beyond the limits imposed by twitter-like systems, and a simple way to share them using HTTP and really simple RSS. #
For some reason, I'm hit especially hard by the death of
Rob Reiner. And it's coming at a time when I understand a lot more about how movie directors work, having watched the fantastic
Mr Scorsese 5-part
documentary series on Apple TV. The movie director can be as involved in the story as much as the writers or actors. There was a story about Reiner, I heard today in eulogy: he was dating his future wife at the same time he was directing the fantastic
When Harry Met Sally. He changed the ending because he was in love, and thus created the most heart-pulling
end to a story, when the two friends realize they should be together, and Billy Crystal's character gives the great closing speech that contains this line, that pretty well sums up the urgency of love: "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." The Scorsese doc opens up the art of making movies for me in the same way the
Peter Jackson documentary on the
Beatles showed us how super creative music creators do their work. And the timing is great, because it says so much about Reiner's accomplishments and gifts.
#One more thing, people are posting Trump's vicious eulogy for Reiner and his wife. Why are they helping him piss on the fresh memory of the life of these people who gave us so much. Stop and think before you express your outrage at Trump, and realize you're giving him exactly what he wants, as you tarnish the memory of good-hearted and generous people. Just don't do it.
#I asked ChatGPT: "Has anyone ported
QuickDraw to
SVG in the form of something you can include in a browser-based JavaScript app?" No. I wish the answer was yes, so I could create UIs that are at least as good as the stuff we did in the 1980s on the Mac, inside a web browser. I keep learning new ways simple things are impossible in CSS.
Clipping for example, is torture.
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Just wrote a post for Scripting News, then flipped over to Daveverse to see what it looks like.
See for yourself. I think we've come pretty close to cloning Scripting in WordPress.
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- An idea I posted on Facebook in 2021 about an app I wanted. #
- Here's an idea. I have a drone that communicates with my peloton via satellite, so it's not constrained by range. I can send the drone anywhere I like, but I have to ride there on my peloton. Obviously what I see on my screen is what the drone sees. I think it would quickly become addictive, not that peloton isn't already addictive.#
- That was yesterday. Today I found myself writing a comment that was really a blog post. #
- Ann Greenberg, the visionary, was trying to explain this to me almost 20 years ago and my mind couldn't comprehend the possibility. but ann, don't take it personally -- i don't even listen to myself. i have spent most of this year struggling with a problem i solved in 2014. there was like this moment, omg this is exactly what i tried to do with twitter, but now i have control of the api, so i can actually make it work. my gift to you Ann is this -- we all should've listened to you.#
- We're at that point in our lives I think when reaching out like this is totally the right thing to do. Because it's only until this point that things quiet down enough that you can realize things like this. #
- BTW, the idea of a comment not being a blog post will require a lot of explanation in a few years. Imho of course. #
The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcastic, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have
far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out.
#I wonder if the VCs would fund an entirely fictitious implementation of Twitter with AI of course. All the other people are AI designed actors, and can be exactly the kind of people who make
you feel good. On "Your Own Twitter" you'd have the most followers of anyone. Elon Musk would kiss your ass. You could change reality at will, have Trump removed from office and watch the MAGAs wail in pain. You could say absolutely whatever you like and never be cancelled. Don't laugh, I bet this happens.
#Without much of a spoiler, this end of this week's Pluribus was both emotional and exciting at the same time. Didn't see it coming. People complain because after the first two or three episodes they thought it was going to be an adventure, like
Last of Us or
Lost, but it turned out to, at least for now, be more thoughtful and emotional, and sexy.
#
In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! :-)#
- As a lifelong Mets fan since 1962, I say they blew it. And if you follow my sports writing here, mostly about the Knicks and Mets, I almost never say a team was wrong. I can usually see a pro and a con to everything. WIth the Mets, I let the team run itself, and ponder the philosophical intentions and manifestations, because to me the Mets are the team built on philosophy. It certainly was not built on winning. And yet we love them. There's no winning in life, that's reality. So we try to find meaning on the days and hours we have remaining. And the Mets are great teachers, as are the Knicks.#
- Anyway -- why did the Mets have such a shit season? #
- Because they disrespected Pete Alonso last winter. #
- He should have been the glue that held the team together along with Nimmo, Diaz, and all the other much-loved players. #
- We still think of Lindor as the new guy. Now all you have left for leadership is Lindor and Soto who obviously doesn't even want to be there. It's was a broken team before the news, and now it's not even a team. #
- A team isn't a bunch of stats and a bunch of money, it's the players, the people. You can't solve this problem with a spreadsheet, it has to be done with heart. These days I think of the Mets just trying to be the Yankees which aside from being impossible, is pretty much the exact reason we're Mets fans and not Yankees fans. Ohhh, when will they learn. I don't want a team built to win the World Series. I want a team built to respect the team. #
- And btw, the big news was they traded Nimmo, and let Alonso and Diaz sign with other teams. #
