Pretty sure there's no supportable reason to ban TikTok, any more than banning Facebook or Twitter would make sense.#
I've come to the conclusion that you can't really use ChatGPT as a programming partner. It doesn't understand the big picture, and if you try to explain it, it probably isn't getting it, and if it does, it will forget it quickly. It's basically fairly stupid, but a way better search engine than Google. Also, it never says it doesn't have enough info to answer the question and then an hour later you figure out the answer it gave you just doesn't work. I still think it's an incredibly useful too, just not as great as I used to think. In a couple of years it has never asked for more information before it answers. That's a clue. #
My newest server was down for an hour due to hardware problems at Digital Ocean. It appears to be running again. Please don't judge the new search feature, it was caught up in this outage. Oy.#
I've changed my Bluesky avatar to MLK's image to celebrate his birthday on Monday, January 20. I dream of everyone wearing this button proudly on Monday in support of American democracy and progress. We are a proud country, beneath all the weirdness. #
Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the state Capitol.#
Now that I have a search engine for my blog, I can reliably look for all instances of Wordle Kitty which was a character I was playing around with last year with ChatGPT. It even comes out in reverse chronologic order, and it's better than Google which ignores a lot of my blog these days. My own search engine doesn't do that of course.#
When I buy a domain speculatively, I usually put up some kind of placeholder page with a title, picture and tagline. Like feediverse.org. I pushed a link to it yesterday, and got back this possibly snarky response, but still thought provoking. Why isn't there a feed for the feediverse.org page. Good point! So if you were to put a feed on the home page of the open feediverse, what it be? A feed of posts to the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. I think that might be it. We can celebrate the day when that feed is mirrored on Bluesky (Inbound RSS ftw!) and we can shut down the stupid app that does the bridging. We had a standard long before Bluesky came along, isn't it wrong for them to try to force everyone to use their reinvention? It doesn't say anything good about the people who made that choice, among interop-minded developers. It kind of violates our ethos imho.#
The feediverse is not a joke. It's deployed, scaled, widely supported, far beyond AT Proto or ActivityPub. It's the HTML of the open social web. And where the others are complicated, feeds are really simple. #
Matt Mullenweg said something provocative on Twitter two days ago that I'm just tuning into now. "The lawsuits will go years and could potentially bankrupt me or force the closure of WordPress.org." I commented on it as a developer who views WordPress as a platform. #
Sad to say I'm going to have to mention Trump from time to time. When I hear a reporter wondering what to make of his thing about all those friendly countries he wants to go to war with, here's what it means. He's trolling you. Haven't you figured that out by now. Just by mentioning the weird thing he's talking about as if it were some kind of puzzle, a brilliant chess move, etc blah blah zzzz. It's trolling. Stop falling for it. If it's Trump-initiated nonsense, don't report it. You. Are. Being. Trolled. Asshole. All he wants is attention. Always. No exceptions.#
Daytona is the search engine for Scripting News. #
I've wanted to do a rewrite for quite some time, there were a lot of decisions I wanted to redo, and I've learned a lot about databases in the three years since the first release.#
You can try it out. There are docs, and a place for questions and comments. The usual caveats apply, esp since it's newly deployed, quickly.#
I used to use Twitter for middle of the night ideas. These days I use one of Twitter's successors. #
Here's one. "We should be able to tweet from within any application that has the ability to create and edit text, and not just in tiny little text boxes." And another. "The limits imposed by twitter initially in 2006 resulted in there being room for only very simple ideas. #
Self-contained isolated silos make progress impossible. We need an internet of ideas. Why should we depend on one small vulnerable company to handle all our internet publishing? It’s an old outdated idea. Look where our investment in Twitter left us, nomads searching for a new home, and what did we do, we went for basically the same deal as before. Oy. #
Re silos, are you watching the Apple TV+ series Silo? I don't want to spoil it, but their idea of a silo is more less exactly what we're talking about with the silos or semi-silos of the twitter-like era. They know being a silo is not popular so they do little things to give you reason to believe they might not be a silo. But being a partial silo is like being partially pregnant. No such thing. If you're federated that means you peer with your competitors. Facebook, or whatever you call Mark Xuckerberg's company these days, just cut off an Instagram competitor and completely gave away that federation is a very conditional thing for them, even if a user of Instagram might also want to hook into flow from Pixelfed. I never believed in their support of the fediverse. Now let's get some reality into these discussions. #
On Unix. "Learning Unix was when I learned that computer networks could be simple yet infinitely powerful. Before that for me it was just an inkling, a hunch. Reading the source code I wanted to make software that works like that. I hope I have, to some extent."#
On Matt Mullenweg, who surprisingly has become a polarizing figure in the tech world. Who could've seen that coming? Not me. "Radical idea. Matt Mullenweg doesn’t like how things are going. He has every right to try to change it, to make it right. As do you, and I." I don't like that people have called him things like the Mad King. People used to say stuff like that about me. It's a substitute for trying to understand where someone is coming from. One of the things I learned about creating open technology is you attract people who don't contribute anything but expect you to work for them, for you to take orders from them. That is really what it comes down to, and it's crazy. If you feel strongly about something, either learn how to program, or make your freaking case with some humility, or offer a bounty, or just trust the universe. But giving people orders, there's no place for that. Matt could be right or wrong, or he could be right for himself. But he has the right to control his own destiny, as you and I do, to the extent that we can. #
I have my own vision for WordPress, as I've started to talk about here and Murphy-willing you should see more of that in the coming weeks. If you want a clue, listen to my podcast from January 8, and then if you have questions, ask them here. I think it's a better bet that WordPress will be the backbone of the social web than any of the other candidates. I wouldn't mind being wrong, as long as we can peer with the eventual winner. I can't endorse a silo, even on the hope that it will be de-silo'd. I also don't believe in the Tooth Fairy and Glinda the good witch of the south. #
One more thing. In the middle of the night the Department of Justice released half of the report on their case against president-elect Trump, a much anticipated bit of news. I didn't know it had been released, but when I woke up, and made the usual rounds, I checked in on Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Facebook and then finally Twitter, in that order. Guess where I discovered this news. Twitter. So when you think people move when they don't like what Musk does, or they find that Twitter is as polluted as some of the celebs do, understand this -- most people aren't affected by the noise. I don't see it unless I go look for it. Perhaps this is because I've been very liberal with blocking abusers, or more likely I don't have enough followers to be an attractive target for the abusers, who behave like spammers. They post where the flow is, and my account isn't as attractive as (for example) Paul Krugman, Mark Cuban or Jay Rosen. It takes a lot to get people to move, and I suspect most people never will. If you operate a gasoline powered car, I bet you buy a lot of Exxon gas, even if you don't see their logo when you fill up. It's very hard to get away from companies who hurt our species, by design, unfortunately. #
News orgs, published authors, great artists, universities, want to retain ownership of their intellectual property and don’t trust the utility of AI chatbots. They think the only application of AI technology is to steal from them, to cheat at school and in work. They see AI technology as destructive, immoral and dishonest.#
As a writer, of prose and software, I want to use the new tools to analyze and develop my work. I want ChatGpt to help port my biggest piece of software from Mac to Linux where it will work far better, far into the future. I want it to reassemble my 30+ years of every day writing into something that can be read by anyone in a few days. I want it to organize new writing projects in ways I can’t. I want it to help me learn about myself. I would gladly give it access to all my creative work, if only there were a relatively easy way to do it. Rather than demanding money, I would gladly pay thousands of dollars to have it all absorbed into its models so I can study and learn.#
Two very different approaches to the same technology.#
This is one of the dialogs you encounter when getting started with Bluesky. It's easy to see how new users might be led believe that Bluesky is federated, as Mastodon is. I'm a developer and I was confused by what it was saying.#
Notes on Little Feed Reader, running on Bluesky since Jan 2. #
YouTube channels have feeds. Here's the feed for my YouTube channel. And a canonical JSONification of the feed (this is how FeedLand gets the data from any type of feed, RSS, Atom or RDF, the YouTube feed is Atom). I did not know they had feeds, in fact I thought I heard they specifically did not have feeds. I've subscribed to the feed in FeedLand and it seems to work, and also included it in my blogroll category, so it should show up in my blogroll, and possibly in the Little Feed Reader on Bluesky. All of this, and more, was discovered by Andrew Shell. Two suggestions. 1. Include descriptions with the items. 2. Use enclosures for the videos. Atom does enclosures differently from RSS, but it can be made to work, imho. No matter what, thank you YouTube, and it's a great start. #
This is what my YouTube channel looks like in my blogroll. #
The personal profile pages for Bingeworthy are working again. Here's my profile page. This is how you share recommendations. More info here.#
Good questions from Phil Jones re Wednesday's podcast. I'm glad to get to answer these questions. There's more to wpIdentity than is obvious at first glance, for example it has a relatively complete storage system built in for developers to use. I used one of its features yesterday in the connection between Bingeworthy and the profile display app. #
BTW, I'm going through all the episodes of Deadwood, and find it's influencing how I write. A good bingewatch is like that. You become one of the characters, or in a way, all of them. Sometimes I'm Swearingen and other times I'm Wu. Etc.#
We need an AI chatbot that can work with GitHub repos. That is, in my prompt I say, the following questions are about this GitHub repo. At that point it is ready to answer any question about the project. This an incredibly important intersection of capabilities. As far as I can tell, GitHub doesn't offer it. #
Anticipating that people will suggest I use their editor, I don't want to use their freaking editor. This keeps coming up everywhere. You can't use this or that unless you use their editor. Insidious form of lock-in. And it also limits their market to people who use their editor. Shortsighted and stupid. #
We need to start thinking about choice. If it applies to developers, it's more likely they will follow through in the designs of their own projects and give their users choice as a matter of principle. #
I'd also like to use a chatbot that incorporates the philosophy of the open web. They have opinions btw. One of the first things Claude.ai does when I give it some JavaScript code is that they "modernize" it. That is also insidious. I choose which constructs I use carefully, and follow the rule that one way to do something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. #
The bots can be bullies because the companies that make them are tech companies and thus shortcuts to make money, and thus handicap their users. Maybe the users are starting to figure this out. One can hope. #
If you read this blog, I hope you'll take the time to listen to yesterday's podcast. It's all about WordPress, a product that you won't read much about on this blog, going back through the archive. I wasn't paying attention until 2023 when I began to see what an amazing product it is, not just for 2004 when it came out, but in 2024. My theory is that it's the basis for an incredible social web platform, much better than Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky and of course Twitter. That's what I'm talking about for 1/2 hour in this podcast. If you give me that much time, I'll change the way you see the world, or at least the way you see me. I think I'm right about this, with another layer on top of the WordPress foundation, it becomes newly relevant, and very timely, in ways that as far as I know, no one has been pushing it. I think for example that Ghost and Substack should be built on top of WordPress. The fact that they aren't gives a clue as to how portable your work is there, and how little choice you get in writing tools. Anyway, please make the time to listen. This is pivotal, and I don't think I'll ever be able to spell it out in writing, it's pure storytelling. Thanks!#
I started a thread for questions and comments re the podcast.#
Just found an exponential memory leak at the database level in Bingeworthy. I have never seen one of these in all my years of programming. A data structure that saves a copy of itself in itself. So every time it saved it became exponentially bigger. Until it made the SQL server crash because the JSON object it was storying was over the limit of JSON objects. Crashed the freaking server. Fixed. Feels good. #
As part of the conversion of BingeWorthy, I started the database from scratch, but before I did that, I exported all the data and put it in a GitHub repo. This included a JSON file of ratings for each user. For example, this is my file. Remember we used Twitter identity then, davewiner is my Twitter username, just replace my name with yours to see your file, if you were a Bingeworthy user in the past. #
I wrote this post in 2023 as Threads was coming online. Now that Zuckerberg has thrown us under the bus, again, it's worth remembering their rollout strategy was to get us to overlook their past betrayals of users. They said "We ❤️ Fediverse." That did it. It was at a moment of fear of Twitter, now owned by Musk, and a belief in the story of ActivityPub, that it would create an open social web. Zuck said "we're on board." Now it's expedient to say to another group that he sees things their way, and it just so happens to be the very people most people who were looking to get away from in 2023 when he was loving the Fediverse. Now we're doing the same thing with Bluesky. And it's going to happen again. There will be a moment when you look back on your "hope for the best" approach and realize that it didn't work, and if I'm around I will remind you again. We have to roll up our sleeves and make an open social web that can't be sold out. When you build value for other people, they will use it for their advantage, leaving you with nothing. That's business. There are no companies that are different, not Apple, not anyone. More in a thread on Bluesky.#
2023: "If they really want to prove their love for the open web, if they aren't just trying to lull us to sleep while they steal yet another market from the open web, they should do something that helps the web more than it helps them."#
Liberals should support truly open technology that doesn't have a Zuckerberg who can sell us all out. Get involved.#
Has anyone come up with a variant of JSON that allows comments? I've started using names like "comment1" etc to shoehorn comments in. A complete hack, impossible to maintain over time. The idea of not being able to put notes in your config.json files is absolutely ridiculous. #
I wish the Ecmascript committee had put more effort into real soul-saving enhancements like comments in JSON instead of coming up with contorted ways to do the same old contortions we got used to dealing with ten years ago. And they could have removed features from the language instead of piling on more and more random reinventions. End of editorial, now on with the new Bingeworthy. #
Last night while watching a basketball game, checking my iPad, and all of a sudden new items started appearing in the RSS feed for the new Bingeworthy. #
I thought oh geez there's some kind of bug, last thing I need now, but quickly realized someone was using it and it was working. #
There were some final mostly cosmetic things I wanted to deal with first, and I wanted to fix up the docs, such as they are, but I am spread too thin, and had been putting it off. But here was a reminder, I put all that effort to rebuilding it after the TwitterPocalypse. BingeWorthy is the app I missed the most that hadn't been ported off Twitter identity. So I did the deed, flipped the switch and now you can use it too. #
I started fresh, with no programs, no users and no ratings. Then I imported the programs that I had rated, and my ratings for them.#
The most important features are there, although they don't necessarily look that great. I want to do some more work there. #
The predictive stuff, users most like you and recommendations, have not been ported, because there are only two users, and we recommend both of them to you. And all the programs I liked a lot are great, if you haven't watched them, you should, right now, stop everything.#
If you have any questions or problems, I've started a thread. #
It uses WordPress for identity. I like this because it's the same identity service I'm using for WordLand, of course, and this makes it possible to use WordLand to write reviews of shows you like or don't like for BingeWorthy. It doesn't mean anyone has to read them. And I have ideas for how to use OpenAI to generate some interesting stuff from collections of reviews. All of this is just in my head, not even started to be implemented. But the idea of compatibility between the two creates some interesting possibilities, and I love those kinds of integrations, a lot like what we were doing in Frontier on the Mac in the 90s. #
BTW, of course I had ChatGPT do a logo. There's a slight typo, but rather than fix it, I left it there as something for attentive fans to find. #
The all-new logo for Bingeworthy, via ChatGPT of course. 😄#
The great thing about using a system like MySQL (or any SQL for that matter) is that it's been around for so long that if you can think of something that would be nice to have, you can be sure it's there somewhere. They've had enough time not only to hit all the walls, but to try out different approaches and settle on one. Maybe at times there were competing ways to do things, like the way Bluesky and ActivityPub, and probably Threads, and certainly Facebook and Twitter insist on reinventing RSS. But when I ask ChatGPT "can you do this in MySQL" it gives me one or two ways to do it, but usually just one. These are things I never would have found in the old Google-search way of finding answers. An example, I wanted to find out if there was a MySQL way to query a value inside a JSON object, and the answer is (of course) yes. And you can create an index on such a value. I didn't even ask for it, ChatGPT volunteered, guessing it would be my next question (it was). Whatever happened in the evolution of SQL it was a lot healthier than what's going on now in the social web, where the creators completely ignored what came before, and each other, and as a result there's a proliferation of different ways to do things we've known how to do for over 20 years. SQL has been around for 50, so maybe they went through this stage and emerged from it with a better answer. This feels a bit like the Fermi paradox and I'm a time traveler who has managed to witness 50 years of evolution long after the fact, any day of any week I want to thanks to ChatGPT. Also this is why it is so important to keep the archives of the 1990's web preserved. We may need to loop back to this when the people responsible for the social web decide that interop is important as opposed to each of them going it alone. #
How I'd write books with WordLand. Just thinking out loud here. Working with a group of people. It's possible it's just the author and editor, or it could be a larger documentation job, or a report covering a lot of ground. In 2025 we'd use AI to find the threads in our writing, to maintain a book outline that changes as our writing goes forward. Gone is the problem of writing a chapter structure before doing any writing. I've always found that to be a real obstacle to getting started. I've yet to use a ChatGPT-like service to do this, but I expect it can be done. I'm thinking about how I can set up an experiment for WordLand for writing this kind of book. The first test case could be the docs for WordLand. I would write a post about a feature as I thought about it, but not worry about how it fits into the rest of the book. Trust the AI organizer to help us do something sensible. #
Update: Bluesky images work again and thus the Great Art on Bluesky channel is back. If you're on Bluesky please subscribe. #
The crazy thing about Bluesky's API is they took already standardized things like links and enclosures, and after 20+ years came up with new definitions. Makes our apps more expensive to maintain, and we waste time and human wear and tear on stupid bullshit make-work. Developers are people, and our work is already horribly overly complex, we're working at the edge of comprehension, and what the fukc let's throw some more unnecessary complication into the mix. Arrogance, narcissism, whatever the source is, it's not a good way to introduce yourself. And, even better, after you go through the maze they break it, with an error message about legacy blob bullshit. They've already done this, and they're just getting started. It's why I say they should just adapt to RSS instead of trying to force us to adapt to them. I'll do it one more time, and then that's it. They can fix my code next time they break it. #
BTW, in defense of Matt Mullenweg and the culture of the developer community he built over the last 20 years, for better or worse, they don't do what Bluesky did. They look for prior art and implement it and they don't deprecate. They're still running the APIs we invented for blogging before WordPress even existed. The philosophy is "Let's not argue about decisions made a long time ago, because we want interop." People have all kinds of harsh things to say about their leadership, but unless you're a developer you don't understand that the reason it works is that they have a different code for their code, the only way we get interop is by not re-inventing. There are two competing ways to do things in tech. The blogging world has been taken over by the re-inventors, like the Bluesky people. They make a nice product, but honestly they don't reallllly want us to work with them, or we wouldn't be having this friction. Their API is bullshit. Plain and simple. They even thought of using RSS constructs and decided to reinvent the whole thing. There are places to innovate, like new freedom for users and developers, or there are ways to create hamster cages where everyone gets to run around in a very tightly defined space, that's fun. That's what Twitter was about, and that's what Bluesky is doing too. At some point we're really going to break free of this mess, but this isn't that time, yet.#
Just taking it easy. Thinking about stuff. Will resume blogging soon. 😄#
BTW, as promised, last night's Knicks game was great. Up until the end, when the other guys took over and sadly the Knicks lost. We need a stronger bench. The starting five are great but they're not totally super-human. #
Knicks on Friday night: A big offline day here in the mountains, the show will resume tomorrow bright and early, Murphy-willing. Enjoy tonight's Knicks game in OKC. Should be a great game. 😄#
This means that sometimes I agree or disagree, or have mixed opinions, but I always learn something. That's what makes a blogger good imho.#
I don't know if I agree that children's minds are being poisoned. But I am pretty sure when people like Krugman and myself reach a certain age, and we are the same age, we start looking at new media that way. Maybe our minds are poisoned. My father called television the "idiot box." But it eventually became the literature of my generation, often very good. But maybe laws can help.#
One thing I am sure of is that sports is being ruined by gambling. I can't imagine that a parent in 2025 would let their kids watch the NBA on TV, because it makes gambling appear to be a normal part of being a fan. Yet the NBA, which has a reputation of being socially forward-thinking, has swallowed the pill, and gambling is an integral part of coverage of the NBA now. #
And is this why they can now afford to sign players to $765 million contracts? #
They're all getting hugely rich, but I believe that they are certainly doing great harm to the new sports fans growing up now. #
I am a no apologist for being a sports fan. I love the Mets and the Knicks, have flirted with the Niners, and have a place in my heart for the Cubs and Red Sox, and I know that gambling spoils what's fun about sports, can turn it into an awful addiction. I manage to be a fan without ever having bet on a game, even just a bet between friends. I don't see it as part of sports. It wasn't the way my family enjoyed sports. #
I was a math major and a 50+ year programmer, and I know that if you gamble enough you lose all your money. And as an addiction no gambler ever gets up from the table to enjoy their winnings when they win.#
PS: I wrote this post in WordLand on New Years Day, saving it for a good moment on Scripting.#
Technically, this is how the pieces fit together.#
I'm using the OPML file for my blogroll category on feedland.social to determine what's posted on Bluesky. When I add or remove feeds from the category, the OPML adjusts dynamically.#
I'm running a new Node app that has a websocket connection to feedland.social. It receives all the new items as they are found from all feeds over the socket. It's feedland.social's firehose. Since I'm currently the only user of that server, it's getting news from the all feeds I follow, not just the ones in the blogroll category. #
The Node app checks each new item to see if it's in one of the feeds in the OPML list. If so, it reformats it to fit in a Bluesky post and sends it to the feediverse account. #
If you're subscribed you should see the item, with a link, in your Bluesky timeline.#
The biggest problem in getting this running was rate-limiting. I have dealt with this on Twitter and other services, but Bluesky was not, for a while, letting anything through with the error message that we were over the limit. It was suggested that we should cache the accessToken rather get a new one for every message. I did that and cautiously turned the server on again at first with a 5 message per hour self-imposed limit, then gradually increased it to 10 per hour. The latest version only requires that there be at least five minutes between posts, so that means no more than 12 per hour. #
Thanks to Mark Cuban for the initial idea and his support. He saw a river of news from FeedLand and asked if it could work in Bluesky. That was the idea. I have always wanted a tight coupling between Bluesky and RSS but didn't know how to do it. We may have just skipped a step. #
We realllly could use some more formating features in Bluesky messages. This is a really strong use-case imho for the textcasting idea. #
The coolest thing from my point of view is that I already had all the pieces, fully developed, the only thing that remained was to hook them together. #
Finally, there's a this.how page for Little Feed Reader. It's purposely brief, but I have put a link to this post on that page. #
I wrote a few blog posts in WordLand this morning because it was convenient. It's good the same way I like to use a twitter-like app to write first drafts, when all I have to type into is my iPad. I've also started using it on my desktop for short things, but I just wrote and edited a complete blog post, a response to something Krugman wrote, about how gambling is destroying sports. And what for? It's like what Marge said at the end of Fargo. "There's more to life than a little money, you know." It feels like they're feeding the NBA into a wood chipper. What comes out the other side won't imho be recognizable as sport. And here you are, and it's a beautiful day.#
Welcome to a brand new year. The best one ever. 😄#
I've archived December in the GitHub repo, in OPML, as usual.#
I've got so much new stuff stacked up, on its way out. Hold onto your hats. #
After his death at 100 on Sunday, the news has been full of talk about Jimmy Carter. It's not polite to say it's exhausting and boring, and seems pointless. Then I happened to hear Jimmy Carter himself, on the latest episode of the Fresh Air podcast, and that was fantastic and totally worthwhile. It had been a long time since I listened to him, and I've grown a lot since then. Listen to the person, much more interesting than people talking about the person.#
In addition to a $20 per month ChatGPT account, I also have a full Gemini account because I bought a snazzy new Pixel 9 Pro which comes with one year of Gemini included. So far that's just meant that I get pop up dialogs all over the place telling me I can use Gemini with Gmail, Google Drive and whatever else. Honestly it's just annoying. I do not want these apps to do my writing for me. Please. That imho is not a valuable use of AI. I can write for myself thank you very much.#
Braintrust query: I'm kind of stuck with my little feed reader in Bluesky. It works, but a few hours into it, at 10PM last night, we start getting rate-limit errors from bluesky. If it really is a rate limit, shouldn't reset after a while?#
Still looking for WordLand testers who write good bug reports and use WordPress for writing on a regular basis, even daily. #
I posted this on Threads, and thought it should also be on my blog. :-)#
I don't want to be critical of anyone in the WordPress world, there's already a lot of that going around. I want to be off on the side, seeing the immense value of the platform, and things we can do with it that aren't possible any other way. #
Toward that end, I want to say -- for a product that is so incredibly useful for writers, not much attention has been paid to how writers work. We can do a lot better, imho.#
Again, not meant to be in any way personal. It's just the way it happened.#
I'm playing with using Bluesky as a very simple feed reader. 1. Running up against its lack of style and formatting. Very bare bones. Not sure if people will like.
2. What's the rate limit? My app is getting rate-limited with not very many posts. (According to their docs on rate limits, I don't think my project is anywhere near the limit. It's creating posts. I'll start counting them, I guess.)
#
Here's a list of all the feeds in my blogroll, with links to the XML version. I've wanted to have a nice non-XML way of viewing the feeds in an OPML subscription list. I took the time today to put one together. I had all the pieces, it was just a matter of putting them all in one place. You can use it if you want, if you want to show someone what feeds are in an OPML subscription list. Screen shot.#
I can't get it out of my head that today is Monday. That's how it computes in my brain. This time of year is very confusing that way. #
It took me a long time to figure out that when people respond to you on twitter-like systems they aren't actually speaking to you, they're talking over your shoulder to the masses they imagine are reading what you posted. Three comments. 1. There are no masses. You can see this by looking at the stats for each tweet, available on most platforms. 2. Most users on the social web are trying to get attention for themselves, the only reason they read the posts is to see if there's a place for them to attach their message. 3. A simple tweak to the software would make it so that only the author of the post being responded to could see the replies. Then they could RT a reply if they thought everyone should see it. This would make the social web a lot more useful imho.#
Peeve: A podcast uses a siren as a sound effect. It causes panic when driving. "Where's the siren!" the driver looks everywhere, only to realize it was just the podcast. This has happened a few times, this time I remembered to say something. #
I just had a fairly incredible experience using Claude.ai. Rather than write up the work we did, I asked Claude to do it.#
Dave started by sharing a text outline of computing platforms (Mac, iOS, Windows, Unix and their variants) and asked if I could visualize it. I began with a simple mindmap diagram using Mermaid. Then Dave showed me a more sophisticated design with rounded rectangles and arrows, so I adapted my approach and created a matching SVG version.#
The most interesting moment came when Dave casually asked if I could turn this into a Node.js package. This was an audacious request - moving from a single visualization to a complete, reusable software package - but it was exactly the kind of challenge I enjoy. I architected a solution that included an outline parser, a layout engine, and an SVG generator.#
I particularly enjoyed designing the two-pass layout algorithm. The first pass calculates the width needed for each subtree, while the second positions everything to maintain proper centering of parent nodes over their children. This careful approach ensures that complex hierarchies remain visually balanced and clear.#
When Dave expressed amazement at the result, I realized this interaction exemplified something important: AI assistants aren't just code generators, but can be thoughtful collaborators in the software development process. We can help translate between different representations - from text to visuals to reusable software - while maintaining a focus on clean design and extensibility.#
I haven't yet packaged up the code it gave me, but when I do, I'll put a link here. #
BTW, here's the app I wrote that generated the tree I asked Claude to render. #
We should be thinking about a new SQL that's much higher level. Another layer. Get all the efficiencies of a 50+ year platform, with all the understanding gained at the top level in all that time. Most of the learning I did in the last five years can be hidden behind a much simpler programming interface, imho. It's worth trying factor, again imho.#
BTW, as a longtime speaker of English and programmer, I think the term refactoring is re-dundant. The term comes from mathematics where you simplify a statement without altering its truth. Factoring is a repetitive process. You factor, and then factor some more if you can. #
The problem with everyone who says you have to get off Twitter is that we're giving up the meeting place we had and spreading all the bits into the wind. Are you going to leave the United States now that Trump is going to be president again? Leaving Twitter is a lot like that. How do you know Musk isn't going to have to sell it? Might happen. How would you feel then about having quit Twitter in a huff as if it would always be the bastion of assholes. It's a mistake. He isn't making money with it. The more you use it the more it costs him, btw. By leaving you might actually be helping him survive. Nothing is so linear, first big point. Second big point, no one cares about your gestures. #
If you think woke is the problem, try reading the US Constitution and amendments. Really read them. Pretend you didn't know it was the Constitution. One woke idea after another. Basically if you don't believe in woke, you're in the wrong freaking country. #
Last night's email had a YouTube video in it. I had forgotten that they get lost somewhere in the email delivery supply chain, so the fire that I put in the email was not transmitted. It's even worse than it appears. Here's a link to the video of the fire, with any luck that will get through in tonight's email. Happy holidays everyone! #
I am ready to start programming ChatGPT, the same way I have built my own code writing and deploying software on Macintosh. I want to create rules in some kind of macro language that it will never violate. I find it has huge problems with memory, it says it's remembering something, but has forgotten it 24 hours later. This is like the Fail Whale in the early days of Twitter. Cute, because the system is doing something so new, futuristic and useful, but after a while it's not cute because we're using the system for real work. The web is programmable, our operating systems are, of course the AI-o-verse will be programmable too. We are able to create entirely new development environments, these platforms deserve a fresh new look at everything. I'd also like to note that at the same time, the platforms are breaking through in web user interfaces. Remarkable progress. Far beyond what we were doing in the very stagnant Web 2.0 world. They're still stuck on whether or not our writing can have titles. So bizarre to exist in a world that is deliberately hobbled, and another with infinite horizons. Anyway this is what I'm thinking about just before hunkering down with my Knicks and popcorn, a Christmas tradition for many many years. Ho ho ho. #
Talking with a friend about the listening lists idea and realized if it takes off it will turn podcasting into its own loosely-coupled social network. Really low tech, like the web. And not possible for one company to control. All it will take is one popular podcast client to get the pump primed. The second and third apps should be much easier to convince. This is how it worked with podcasting. Steady mission broadcasting, keep beating the drum, and if it's the right idea and when it's the right time, eventually, it happens. It will be that way too for this layer of the network, but at this time I don't own a podcast client, and that's the most basic ingredient in this bootstrap, so we wait, and keep beating the drum.#
Another idea that we continued to push in 2024 is textcasting. It was what I needed to build WordLand, it defines its objective, to form an open social web with all the basic features writers need. Titles, links, simple styling, ability to edit, no character limit, these are basic features we will drive the adoption of. Defining a new network where if you want to play you'll need to start thinking about writers, their power, and interop. You can't be on the open web and be a silo. And some of the most insidious silo-like features seem innocuous, like character limits. Whatever forces you into copying and pasting into tiny little text boxes, that's how you know you're in a silo. If you can use any writing tool to post to a network, then it is on the web. Pretty simple. Right now -- none of the popular ones qualify. None. #
How this stuff fits in? 1. RSS blew a big open hole in the distribution of news and ideas. 2. Now we want to blow the equivalent hole in the writer's web. Put the two together and we will have finally, after 30+ years, delivered on the promise of the web. #
I have a fairly large and old C application that was written to run on the Mac and Windows. I still use it today on a relatively modern Macintosh. I wonder if it will soon be possible to turn this project over to an AI like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity or some other, to convert it to run on Linux, where it should be able to run in perpetuity, or at least a lot longer than on the Macintosh. I would be willing to pay a few thousand dollars to do this work. #
Instead of having the Dems redefine the Dems, how about the people who vote for Dems redefining the Dems. Agree on what the Dems are, and just as important, are not. End arguments about whether the Dems are this color or that, this gender or that, this age or some other. Draw a circle of common interest and leave out everything else. Draw the biggest circle possible. #
I wrote this piece in WordLand yesterday morning over breakfast. Started writing it as a Bluesky post, quickly ran out of space so I switched over to my own TLTB, and it's very conducive to writing flow, which is its purpose. Then I did the same thing this morning. Sorry to keep talking about the product without it being in general release yet. I want to get it right before opening it up. Still a bunch of things I want to add/fix.#
I've come to the conclusion that you can't really use ChatGPT as a programming partner. It doesn't understand the big picture, and if you try to explain it, it probably isn't getting it, and if it does, it will forget it quickly. It's basically fairly stupid, but a way better search engine than Google. Also, it never says it doesn't have enough info to answer the question and then an hour later you figure out the answer it gave you just doesn't work. I still think it's an incredibly useful too, just not as great as I used to think. In a couple of years it has never asked for more information before it answers. That's a clue. #
Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the state Capitol.
When I buy a domain speculatively, I usually put up some kind of 
The 
Sad to say I'm going to have to mention Trump from time to time. When I hear a reporter wondering what to make of his thing about all those friendly countries he wants to go to war with, here's what it means. He's 
One more thing. In the middle of the night the Department of Justice released 
YouTube channels have feeds. Here's 
If you read this blog, I hope you'll take the time to listen to 
We demand that the Department of Justice to release all the special counsel reports behind the indictments of former president Trump. 
I wrote 
Has anyone come up with a variant of JSON that allows comments? I've started using names like "comment1" etc to shoehorn comments in. A complete hack, impossible to maintain over time. The idea of not being able to put notes in your config.json files is absolutely ridiculous. 
The great thing about using a system like MySQL (or any SQL for that matter) is that it's been around for so long that if you can think of something that would be nice to have, you can be sure it's there somewhere. They've had enough time not only to hit all the walls, but to try out different approaches and settle on one. Maybe at times there were competing ways to do things, like the way Bluesky and ActivityPub, and probably Threads, and certainly Facebook and Twitter insist on reinventing 
How I'd write books with 
The crazy thing about Bluesky's API is they took already standardized things like links and enclosures, and after 20+ years came up with new definitions. Makes our apps more expensive to maintain, and we waste time and human wear and tear on stupid bullshit make-work. Developers are people, and our work is already horribly overly complex, we're working at the edge of comprehension, and what the fukc let's throw some more unnecessary complication into the mix. Arrogance, narcissism, whatever the source is, it's not a good way to introduce yourself. And, even better, after you go through the maze they break it, with an error message about 
BTW, in defense of Matt Mullenweg and the culture of the developer community he built over the last 20 years, for better or worse, they don't do what Bluesky did. They look for prior art and implement it and they don't deprecate. They're still running the APIs we invented for blogging before WordPress even existed. The philosophy is "Let's not argue about decisions made a long time ago, because we want interop." People have all kinds of harsh things to say about their leadership, but unless you're a developer you don't understand that the reason it works is that they have a different code for their code, the only way we get interop is by 
I wrote a few blog posts in 
After 
It took me a long time to figure out that when people respond to you on twitter-like systems they aren't actually speaking to you, they're talking over your shoulder to the masses they imagine are reading what you posted. Three comments. 1. There are no masses. You can see this by looking at the stats for each tweet, available on most platforms. 2. Most users on the social web are trying to get attention for themselves, the only reason they read the posts is to see if there's a place for them to attach their message. 3. A simple tweak to the software would make it so that only the author of the post being responded to could see the replies. Then they could RT a reply if they thought everyone should see it. This would make the 
We should be thinking about a new SQL that's much higher level. Another layer. Get all the efficiencies of a 
I am ready to start programming ChatGPT, the same way I have built my own code writing and deploying software on Macintosh. I want to create rules in some kind of macro language that it will never violate. I find it has huge problems with memory, it says it's remembering something, but has forgotten it 24 hours later. This is like the 
Talking with a friend about the 
Instead of having the Dems redefine the Dems, how about the people who vote for Dems redefining the Dems. Agree on what the Dems are, and just as important, are not. End arguments about whether the Dems are this color or that, this gender or that, this age or some other. Draw a circle of common interest and leave out everything else. Draw the biggest circle possible. 
