Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t do it because I don’t know."
#
An app I'd like someone to do. I want to underline the word
reason in a blog post I wrote, below. I want to point to a page with a
definition of the word, as a verb, not a noun. As far as I can see there is no page on the web for that. Your app will have a dialog at the top of the page where you type the query, and it generates a page with a static URL that I can point to where the definition will display if the user clicks my link. I would paste the URL where I want it. And that's just the start, the key thing is short replies to queries needed to support something you're writing. I'm surprised Google doesn't do this. And I'd much rather use someone other than Google, but it has to be someone who will be around for a while. You can put an ad on each of the pages, but don't overdo it, or you'll incentivize a competitor.
#
- I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app. #
- Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently. #
- I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be. #
- And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood. #
Let me tell you something about AIs. They are not in any way ready to develop the kinds of apps I make. I spent a full week trying to get it to do so. What happened here is that we all were blown away, correctly, with what ChatGPT could do, and loved that it kept getting better. I've used it and Claude to make apps, and that is also amazing, unprecedented, maybe the biggest innovation ever. But. It doesn't have the memory you need to keep a full app in memory at once. And the tools we have now, compilers, editors, runtimes,
do remember the whole thing, they are really good at that, but they don't
understand at the level a human can and does. And sessions are too limited. And it makes unbelievably huge mistakes. Maybe they will get there, but we also had high hopes for the last breakthrough, the web, in its early days, and it didn't achieve its promise. Turns out the web gets you Trump, and Trump just discovered he has nukes. Cory talks about
enshittification and that's right -- but it's even worse than that. The tech industry always oversells the innovation. I am one of them in that regard. In this one I'm so far just a user. Also I haven't given up.
Still diggin!#Carville is obviously right. No political party can afford to demonize a group of voters based on gender and race, esp when they make up approx 33% of the electorate.
#
Reporter at the Guardian: "We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie." It's true. I was covering tech realistically starting in 1994, was writing for Wired, people thought I was being too hard on them, but I was actually like you too easy. But people didn’t want to believe tech was evil, they believed that the young people that were running tech were idealists and maybe they were when they started, but by the time the billions started flowing and they stopped caring about people and started only caring about money. A
piece I wrote in 1996, after going to a tech industry conference."
#
If he were alive today he'd be busting silos.
#
Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users.
#I was
looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but
found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters angry and arguing about nothing, dramatic music mocks the awful writing and acting. Does it get better? Reviewers
loved it. I've seen this before. Previous seasons were great, so the next season automatically must be great too.
#
- I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom. #
- Development around RSS has never "lain dormant." That's a perception not reality. Let's stop handicapping what we agree is a very useful and freedom-building system like RSS. You're telling the story that makes people believe it's gone. It is not gone. #
- Without the NYT the rest of the news publishing world would probably have never adopted RSS. The NYT drove the liftoff of RSS. Google's product did come to dominate, but there were excellent feed readers long before that. #
- Happened to the Mac too#
- In the early days of the web, it was conventional wisdom that there was no new software for the Mac, all the developers were flocking to Windows. Maybe all the devs were, but the best web server and development software, writing software, was on the Mac. #
- A blogroll for 2026#
- BTW, since you mention Kottke's blogroll, I'd love for you to have a look at mine. You can see it on my blog at scripting.com, or on the WordPress version of my blog at daveverse.org. A screen shot.#
- It's a realtime blogroll, the blogs appear in the order in which they last updated. You can expand each item to see the titles of the last five pieces, with a 300-char excerpt, and a link to read the whole thing. It's the blogroll I wanted in the early 00s, a clear indication that there's nothing dormant going on here, Cory. #
- You can install it on your own system, it works as a WordPress plugin, so it's especially easy to use it on a WordPress site. #
- My old ass#
- I'm working my old ass off developing for the web and RSS every freaking day Cory. #
- I won't stop until we have a social web running with all replaceable parts, no lock-in, as decentralized as the web itself and of course RSS is part of the web.#
Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news?
#
Remember when, just weeks ago, the
Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congress. The
video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video.
#
I remember liking the first three seasons of
Industry on HBO, so I just watched them again. It's a
Succession clone, in a way, not exactly the same story, but the same type of story. I waited until the final episode of Season 4 had aired to start at the beginning. So now I'll be watching fresh stuff, which is kind of scary because I found that I had forgotten some of the big plot points, I wonder how much of the new season I'll understand. I also found it dragged toward the end of Season 3, where they do a trick with the audio, make it sound really portentious and dramatic with a promise of evil, for events, which without the music would seem mundane, tiresome, kind of pathetic actually, embarrassing and just plain stupid. But at least it was just part of one season, there are some series that are all about nothing, made to seem important. I try to imagine the writers' room at such shows. Do they know how ridiculous it is? Maybe they don't care. Next up is The Pitt, which everyone says is great, esp doctors, tried watching it but couldn't stand the gore.
#If you have an X account, esp if you have a lot of followers, please
RT this post. I'd like to get my real account back. Thanks for your help.
#
On the other hand, it's hard to get Claude.ai to really apply itself to my own software. It likes to drive. Same with ChatGPT.
#
The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was going to evolve. I asked if it remembered how Rules worked in MORE. Yes, it explained it correctly. Then I said I'd like "faceless" rules, where we could edit the source so the outlines looked the way we wanted them to look, using Rules. In the time it took me to write a sentence here, it finished the job. I added a
home page for the AI outliner folder with links to the other docs in the folder. Then I did a bunch more changes, I could go on like this forever. It was like working with a team on a product, only the team turns around new versions in seconds, and eventually runs out of space (gets tired?) and I have to start another thread. I just did a transition and it seemed to pick up pretty close to where we left off. I have a lot of ideas here. Expect an explosion of new versions of popular software writing by individual people. We'd better make sure the standards of the web are really well documented.
#What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good girl?" Rub behind the ears. When they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing.
#We had a problem today with one of the servers, it meant a bunch of services weren't working. Never found the actual problem, but something changed and the misbehaving server started working. Learned a lot about managed databases on Digital Ocean.
#
I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser."
Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other cells using point and click. If you go down this path, ask it to keep a user's guide current, and then ask it to put in features, and just describe them in standard spreadsheet terminology. The trouble starts when you want to make something that doesn't have a standard terminology yet because it's new.
#Then I had to ask Claude.ai to write me a
nice little outliner that runs in the browser. And it did. With a flourish. It was designed to make me the guy who designed outliners for most of a lifetime, and I have to say it was very nicely done, for a two-minute project. Even for a two-week project it's pretty nice. Then I asked it to do a
priorArt outline, and it looks really good in the this.how template. The power of standards. And I had a full day of work even while Claude.ai was doing these
mind bombs for me.
#I asked for a feature of the outliner from Drummer that it automatically opens a file in read-only mode if there's a URL parameter with the address of an OPML file.
Like this.
#
"It really tastes like a pizza!!"
#
Very happy to welcome my old friend,
John Palfrey, back to the web. His
first new piece is about his experience at the
AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my
blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s, now heads up the MacArthur Foundations. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)
#
- I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)#
- They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.#
- Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.#
- It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference. #
- Some of my takeaways from the meetup.#
- Getting more people to use Bluesky and AT Proto was the topic. I don't know how to do that, and I don't think there's anything developers can do to make it happen. I think both products are what they will continue to be. #
- What's needed is to get all the various systems to interop. There must be a definition of what a text message is. Since we're trying to make the social web, I recommend looking to the web for the definition of what a text object is. I would go with a subset of the web. I outlined the features in the textcasting doc I wrote a few years ago. I am using Markdown in my software, and it seems like a lot of other people feel this is a good subset to use.#
- Bluesky will never be a distributed system because it has features that depend on being centralized. That's okay, perfection isn't needed. #
- Even better would be to have all systems support both inbound and outbound RSS, then they can do whatever they want internally, and users can participate using any blog and any feed reader. And independent developers can go crazy trying out all kinds of variants. That's how it works in WordLand 2 coming real soon now. 😄#
- More people will use a system when it's fun and/or interesting and they can't wait to see what else happened there. Like watching Alysa Liu videos now. People don't think about what they want, they just want it. That's what Twitter was like when it started. Unfortunately you can't start it again, if you want people to want it, you have do something new. #
- I talk too much. That's the downside of having an interesting conference. At a boring one where people give PowerPoint type talks, I can listen, form my opinions, write a blog post that no one reads and get back to work on my projects. #
- One day I'd love to go to one of these meetings and find people I can work with. You can be sure I'll let you know when that happens. Last conference I went to where that happened was at WordCamp Canada last October, but that wasn't about the social web, it was about WordPress. #
- I got to talk with Mike Masnick. I don't understand why he has a board seat at Bluesky and promotes it as a decentralized system. He's a highly credible reporter at TechDirt, but you can't be part of a company you cover and report on it with credibility. And it is not now and imho never will be a distributed system. I talked with him about this, at one of the virtual groups-of-six tables, but he didn't respond. I don't like it when Bluesky misleads users and they buy it, but as bad as that is, it is predictable. A credible journalist doing it, I can't comprehend that. I am open to being convinced, but I'm kind of an expert on this stuff, so it's really going to blow my mind if I'm wrong. #
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. ;-)
#
