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.
#
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.
#
What we need, now, is a system to compete with Twitter. A system as capable as Twitter. It has to be privately held by a group that can be trusted not to interfere with democratic use of the system. This can't be guaranteed, it has to be based on trust. It needs to scale very quickly. Its vision is to represent democracy. And it has to be simple, clean and quickly understood as parallel to Twitter. Bluesky has a lot of what's needed, but its ownership is not clear. But it more like Twitter than Twitter is today and I expect that to continue.
#
BTW Twitter is innovating in ways that it never has. People not staying on Twitter would have no way of knowing. Another reason why, for software developers, quitting Twitter is stupid. As quitting Facebook was ten years ago. Great, now you have no idea what features your users are learning how to use. Eventually your software will be in a dead end while a new
coral reef has been forming. Where are you going to get fresh ideas from. Not using these systems would be like not listening to the Beatles in the 60s,. You would have missed
all that followed. And not just popular music. Same with Twitter in the 2020s. That story is far from over.
#
I like to share posts from Threads on Bluesky and Mastodon to illustrate the incompatibility, the ignorance of one to the other. These guys should all be using the same protocol. It's a travesty that each of them considers their product to define the
social web -- they don't understand the first thing about the web, what the miracle the web was. Before the web, the tech world was as it is now, fragmented by huge companies that didn't care about anything but their own internal drama. The last thing they would consider was reusing something that was already running. While all that was going on Unix basically agreed on a core set of functions that formed a basis for interop. They weren't perfect, there were differences in each of the Unixes, but you could reuse most of what you knew on each of the platforms. But Apple, Microsoft, Sun and IBM each ran their own ecosystems. And then one day along came the web. Instead of bookshelves of docs, it wasn't even a booklet. You could be up and running with a "website" in ten minutes. I speak from experience. My first website was authored with a freaking email. Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon are the IBM, Microsoft and Apple of 2024. It's ridiculous if they think this is a web. To paraphrase the late great
Lloyd Bentsen, I knew the web, the web was a friend of mine. You are not the web.
#
I've been alternating days
here on my blog. One day, lots of posts, maybe even a podcast. And then a quiet day. Today started out quiet, and then the ideas started flowing.
#
Programming work: I was trying to work out a feature for
WordLand that isn't cooperating, having to do with the clipboard and the
MediumEditor package, which does all these nice things for us with the clipboard, but it isn't willing to share custody, or perhaps more accurately we can't figure out how to. The feature I want is when you paste a URL and there's a selection, the selected text is turned into a link. A video
explanation. I've burned two full sessions on this, seeking advice from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. They all pretend to know what to do, but in fact they don't. The clipboard is one of those areas of the browser that is held together with rumors and confusion, as is MediumEditor, and the intersection is rumors and confusion squared. Tomorrow I'm going to work on other things, and the day after until I have an idea for another way to approach this. I really want this feature because apparently it's supported in Slack, WordPress and other software that supports links.
#
BTW, we could use a few
more testers with good experience with bug reporting who use WordPress. I'm sure there are more bugs we haven't gotten reports on yet.
#
I've figured out more precisely what
WordLand is meant to
compete with --> the
tiny little text boxes of the social web. Ours is slightly bigger, and grows as your piece gets longer. Neatly arranged like the others, and all your writing flows through WordPress and RSS, where each of the
TLTBs only flows into their limited and incompatible views of the social web. RSS and WordPress are a powerful distribution system. Lots of software works with those two protocols, as do many programmers, and they're both marvelously open, stable over more than twenty years each, and
can't be owned by billionaires. Pretty powerful place, kind of amazing that there's so much room here, and the people are friendly.
π#
Amazing that the tech industry hasn't tried to retrieve its reputation from the ones who are repping us in DC nowadays. Software doesn't
have to treat their users like nobodies. Quite the opposite. I come from the school that says our users are the smartest most powerful people in the world and it's our privilege to create tools for them.
#
One more thing. I love taking the time to craft a delicious piece of software. I have never really done that in the 50 years I've been doing this. This time I decided there's no rush. I'm going to wait until people want what I've created. We're not there yet.
π#
What WordLand looks like today.
Video.
#
Podcast: ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It rewrites your code to conform to its standards. It has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises. People who say the bubble is fully inflated on this stuff are not paying attention. We're still dealing with very basic features.
#
A
tuneup for WordLand confirms that it's publishing.
#
I'm thinking maybe we'll do a Kickstarter for
WordLand. It'll cost money to run the server and continue to develop the sofware. It fills a big enough need to ask the users to support it financially, at least to get it off the ground. The server is open source so theoretically anyone can run one. But in practice most people will probably just want to use the service. I just want to solve this problem so we can start building a developer ecosystem around WordPress that it's never had. Think of WordLand as a pump primer.
π#
I watched
Ari Melber last night and noted he isn't yet on Bluesky or hasn't updated his show graphics to include it? He usually tries to be leading edge in this, and at this point he looks a bit behind the times, imho, ymmv etc. After Melber, I stayed through the opening segment of Joy Reid and was charged up by her intro. She's clicking on all cylinders. They must be thinking about gutting or reconfiguring MSNBC at this time. It's up
for sale, I wonder if a billionaire will see the wisdom of owning that piece of real estate as Musk saw the value in Twitter, far beyond what the stock market valued it at. (BTW, I should add that I benefited from his largesse, I was a very
small shareholder in Twitter at the time. I did not want to sell, but my vote didn't matter. Heh.)
#
I've been thinking about
Blogger Of The Year for a few months, and had a choice (not yet final), but then
Paul Krugman left the NYT, set up shop
on Substack, and has been totally kicking ass every day for the last week. Presumably these are all things the NYT wouldn't let him run? Or if he submitted them, would they edit them into mushy nonsense. I've been there, I quit Wired when they edited my pieces, with my name on them, where I said things I thought were inane, things that I most definitely did not say. There's never been a better illustration of the importance of blogging and the value that's removed by publishing in the NYT. If a
Nobel Laureate like Krugman can't get his ideas out that way, with the huge advantage in circulation they have (as Wired did over my humble blog), then there must be a reason to have blogs after all. I don't think he will be my BOTY for 2024, but maybe next year, if he keeps up the intelligent irreverence.
#
I've got a new project called
davegpt, it's in GitHub, open source of course. I also created a
ChatGPT project with the same code. Presumably I can ask it questions about the code. Because I have a
worknotes.md file in the GitHub project, ChatGPT understands where I want to take this project. Most amazing, it wrote a
summary of what it saw in the project. I
added that to the GitHub project, of course, and since it was in Markdown, it fit right in with no mods. The power of standards. I love it when things that should work, do. The next step is to implement a feature in the new Bingeworthy that can only be done with an AI bot like ChatGPT. It's such a thrill to be working on this stuff as it's happening. And what a delight that it has an API. I don't mind that I'm paying for it, I love the idea of paying to break down walls to create new things that couldn't have been created before.
#
The Democrats are, of course, failing to lead the 75 million who voted for them in the last election, which was a bit over a month ago. Maybe they should factor that into their thinking, what kind of relationship would you have with an organization that only cared about what you thought if they needed something very specific from you in that exact moment. Any other time, who are you again? We are without leaders.
#
What could journalism do to help the country? Move your shows out into the red territories. Make it a requirement that Chris and Joy, Lawrence or Rachel, if they want to stay on the air, have to broadcast from one of the red states. It could be a large city in a red state. The reason is symbolic and practical. The red state voters wouldn't be such a mystery if you knew some of them from your everyday life. And you might have a few of them on the show. You have some selling to do, the idea you're selling is that you care about the people you don't know.
#
I'm farting around with the OpenAI API. I have a nice encapsulation for calls to ChatGPT, one that hides all the tricky stuff, all you need is an apiToken to make it work, something that is available for free. The first place I put it is in an outliner. Basically I can write a question in a headline, click an icon and the response from ChatGPT is placed in a series of sub-heads. Interesting to see that they use Markdown to convey the response. The logical choice. I'm not sure how or if I will use this in my writing, but now I have an idea what it's good for. Here's a
screen shot of a question I asked and the answer. Also the API is very slow. A question like that would be displayed instantly in their app, in my app it takes a half minute. And I have to pay for it, whereas in their app it's all covered by my $20 a month subscription.
#
I get my greatest ideas walking, riding my bike, on a ski lift, or sitting in a hot tub esp when it's really cold out and there's a full moon as there was last night. Sometimes the ideas prove workable and other times they're like the great brainstorms one had with
cocaine in the 80s, not that I would know, but have heard. Anyway, I was daydreaming about what I'd do with
Bingeworthy if I was going to continue working on it. I thought about the mode I want to use it in. I want to watch a series that I would like, not that Netflix thinks I'd like, because their idea of what I'd like is bullshit. I find that I'll like almost anything that's rated in the 80s by Metacritic, but really only if the NYT reviewed it well. I'll give almost any NYT
critics choice a go. So what I really want in the middle of the Bingeworthy display of a program is 250 words about the program aggregated from various critics as Metacritic does so well. Unfortunately neither Metacritic or the NYT offer an API for this as far as I know. Oh too bad, same old thing. No access to the data where you need it (btw, ideally Bingeworthy would be baked into the TV set, or all the streamers could be played in the context of Bingeworthy). Anyway, then
boom it hit me, holy shit the thing I was farting around with
in the outliner could actually do this. Now I'm going to need to be able to call ChatGPT from a Node app.
#
Interesting
episode of the Daily podcast about AI in Hollywood. They specifically mention a
new movie starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, with bodies and faces edited by AI to be various ages other than what they are (mid-late 60s). The movie
Here, was rated not too great by
various critics including the NYT.
#
What if you had a twitter-like system that was embedded in a ChatGPT-like app. What would you do with that?
#
The journalism I pay attention is labeling itself as
truth-based -- but it most definitely is not. When it comes to topics I am expert in, they tell a mushed up version of extreme points of view, that (surprise!) favor the continued existence of their jobs. The choice of the
truth-based label is kind of a clue.
π#
This post spawned quite a
thread on Bluesky: "The AI industry could give us easy tools to build our own models, from our own archived writing, for private use. This may be a blind spot. It's as if when personal computers started, instead of spreadsheet editors, we were offered great sets of tabulated recalc'ing data. Fun to watch, maybe useful for researchers, but nothing compared to the utility of playing 'what if' on our own models."
#
Deep in the thread: "I want to give a huge volume of writing to ChatGPT or something much like it, and then ask it to give me an outline of what I wrote, and allow me to massage the outline, churn out a synopsis. I'd like to see what's there, and there's far too much writing for me to do that."
#
ChatGPT gets projects. Haven't had a chance to explore, but I desperately need this. I organize all my work as projects, and need to have my ChatGPT work be part of that.
#
- There was a moment a couple of years ago when Mastodon was gaining traction in a serious way when I thought that Automattic should do something publicly to demonstrate support for it because I felt that WordPress and Mastodon were two sides of the same important coin. #
- As you know, I've felt as a writer that we've been tragically limited by the idea that Twitter popularized that there was glory in removing features that writers could use. As if to say that writers were over-using things like links, simple styling, titles, the ability to edit, or to finish a thought. These were all very basic features of writing on the web before 2006, as they should have been. #
- Somehow a mass psychosis took over and there was a belief that these limits were good. I am shaking my head as I write this. It's as ridiculous an idea as the one that's going around at the top levels of our future government that we should bring polio back to the children of America and the world. #
- Anyway, by supporting Mastodon, I hoped people would make the link between WordPress, which has none of those limits, yet is very popular for publishing on the web, and Mastodon, which I (it turns out correctly) believed would navigate away from those limits given enough time. #
- I think I sent an email or a text message to Matt, or wrote a note on their Slack system, communicating with Matt is an iffy thing, not sure if the idea got through. Then this morning, I woke in the middle of the night, and realized that what I wished for was actually there. Without any fanfare at all. I could write on WordPress and it would appear on Mastodon. How is that not exactly what I asked for? And theoretically at least (someone should test this) you can access my WordPress writing on Threads, the system that Facebook launched to (as it turns out) compete with Bluesky! (In addition to Twitter, which is no longer called Twitter of course.) What a strange world it is. #
- And in the interim, the focus has gone off the social web, imho because the limits are still very much in force at Bluesky, which still insists a post can only have 300 freaking characters and no links, styles etc blah blah blah and yadda yadda. We're still having this argument. Programmers vs writers. The world has lost its mind. #
- And in another thread there are idiots who propose trying to vilify and presumably cancel people who drive Teslas as if the car you use for transport is as trivial a possession as a fur coat. #
- I'm having a great day, no sarcasm, all of a sudden I feel like we might actually be winning, again. #
Possibly the last moment when the Dems really kicked ass.
#
It's a big enough
umbrella but it's always me that ends up getting wet.
#
BTW, I hear that Safari now defaults to using HTTPS. Not sure exactly
what that means. But if they ever actually stop showing scripting.com, which will always be plain old HTTP, I'll probably ship an Electron product that browses the web, and doesn't care if it's HTTP or whatever new fad Google is promoting. I'm going to
hold the fort for the original web. I can't change scripting.com to HTTPS, it would break all the images and probably a lot of other stuff.
#
- I saw a pundit suggest people harass people who drive Teslas.#
- When I bought mine, it cost $70K, a large sum of money that I will not throw away just so a pundit can make a point. #
- Here's my rebuttal. I'd like to see you get on without buying Exxon products. We all agree they suck, but evil companies have a way of building dependence, that's how they stay in business while openly doing despicable things.#
- When I put down $70K for what is, btw, a fantastic car, no one knew how evil Elon Musk was going to turn out to be, how little he would care what you and I think.#
- And I don't believe anyone can live a pure life and extract all evil from it, and still participate in civilization. #
PS: I wrote this initially as a
post on Bluesky.
#
Bingeworthy has an RSS feed (not public yet), and new ratings
show up in my blogroll, of course.
#
I have United Healthcare insurance. I got it as part of my Medicare package when I turned 65. I've had good experience with them. I had major surgery in 2002, cost hundreds of thousands, included a one-week hospital stay and lots of followup treatments. I know the hospital did all the work with them, I was shielded from any complications, but as far as I know there were none. Never had a treatment questioned or denied. I had another insurance provider for many years after that, but when given a chance I went back to United. Just want to say, so far -- knock wood -- I am a happy customer.
#
Just added to my todo list -- add the option to use the
WordPress REST interface in place of the
WPCOM interface, this will give
WordLand the ability to edit WordPress sites anywhere, not just on wordpress.com. When I made the choice to go with WPCOM I didn't have ChatGPT to look at the other options, I was surprised to find that WordPress actually had a good JavaScript API. It doesn't look like the conversion will be too bad. It's obviously better to be able to work with all WordPress sites.
#
No more elections where Hope is the main theme. Better: Kicking ass. Kicking ass is for ass-kicking Americans. I personally
like Hope, but I'm also a sports fan and understand the value of kicking ass.
#
- A valued tester of WordLand asked a series of questions, which I answered in some detail, and felt it was a good idea to post the answers here on my blog.#
- Any kind of feedback you want to give is totally welcome. I'd prefer it be in the GitHub issues section so it might inspire other people to contribute. #
- Re image insertion, I'm not sure it could be simpler. The goal is to get an image into the user's document. If it succeeded at doing that then I'm happy with the design. ;-)#
- The target audience is writers who use WordPress. The idea is to put all the features writers need in one place, rather than scattered around the WP interface. And to use modern UI techniques you'd see in social web apps. #
- I've tried to answer the questions you raised in the only way I can. For example I need to use a term for the arrows that move you through the stories you've written. They aren't all posts, but they are all drafts. I can explain that in the docs, but I seriously doubt if anyone would read them. There is a distinction and it's important to make that distinction. I also don't think it's crucial to get that one "right" -- not that I think there is a right answer to that one other than removing the feature, which I like having there because it emphasizes that we're working with a set of documents that you can edit.#
- In all cases, you could raise any issue you have, I will think about what you say, but accept my response, and trust that I've incorporated your experience as data that might inspire a change in the design at some point. #
- But do understand that a lot of thought has already gone into this, and a quick review by a new user is no substitute for a product design.#
- I know the docs are non-existent. I am limited in the time I have and the commitments I've made. The truth is that even dedicated users won't read them. I know that by the questions they ask. But I will write the docs. #
- What I suggest is you try using the product for its intended purpose, and assume that all feedback is welcome (it is) but once it has been registered, you should move on to the next thing.#
- I've worked with testers many times going back a very long time. I've even hired testers. I don't take offense to critiques of the software.#
- BTW, if after reading this, you think you could be this kind of tester for WordLand, and you have experience with WordPress, and a site on wordpress.com, and are excited about the idea of a simple way to write and manage lots of documents in a WordPress environment, please fill out this form, I'll read it right away, and if it seems like a fit, I'll authorize your account. #
This time of year every day feels like Sunday.
#
Here's a sad fact. When something open takes off, the vultures swoop in and try to own it. You wouldn't believe the greed I've seen. It's a virus, and it needs to stop, or at least be exposed as it's happening.
#
Yesterday I did a
podcast about why it's important to choose humble names for groups of developers working on open formats, using podcasting as an example. Another case in point, the
Social Web Foundation, which is about ActivityPub and the Fediverse, when there are many other forms of the social web. Here's where the rubber meets the road. They're having a meeting in Brussels where people can demo their social web apps, but it's only about ActivityPub. If you have a project for Bluesky, or Threads, or non-ActivityPub Mastodon, or
RSS for that matter, you should feel welcome there, regardless of what their
Call For Participation says.
#
- Many Tesla drivers wish they'd evict Elon Musk. On the other hand can your car do this?#
My Apple Watch can unlock my Model Y, turn the heat on, open the frunk.
#
Anyone can build on an open format. That's part of what it means for it to be open. Developers and users are free to use anyone's ideas, or not use them, even if they claim to be the Holy Church of Some Open Format. No one can form an organization that owns the future of the open format because then it wouldn't be open.
#
I've got the
new version of Bingeworthy running here. When I saw how the database code worked, I had to redo it from scratch. It was probably my first SQL project, and I barely knew what I was doing. It's too bad, because looking at it from that point of view I could see how SQL could have been much simpler by making some of the optional features automatic. A higher layer on top of SQL is possible, it seems to me. Having ChatGPT review my ideas has been invaluable in this project. I'm going to use it myself for a while, and see how I want to reorganize the user interface. There were opportunities for factoring I didn't take back then because I was in a rush to do something else.
#
How I know Twitter was great. When something was going on anywhere, any kind of thing, I'd go to Twitter and it happened there 14 minutes ago. It was the pulse of the news. And somehow they couldn't figure out how to make a business of that! Amazing.
#
If you want to get excited about the future, I highly recommend this week's
Jon Stewart podcast interview with Bernie Sanders. I recognize these ideas, it sounds like what we're waiting for in the social web and in journalism. And working for and with each other.
#
Mozilla has repositioned itself as "a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible." These are all worthy goals, but in my experience Mozilla has been an
obstacle to these things. I wrote in a
comment on Mastodon, "A long time ago they invited me to present my ideas, and like an idiot I thought that's what they wanted, instead it was an ambush, people mostly wanting to ridicule me because they thought anything that a person does can't be any good, it has to come from a big company like Mozilla or Google. I thought then and still do now, how do they justify wasting their time on such a ridiculous thing. I kept on doing what I was doing, but switched off their browser first chance I got." If they really want to get behind projects that make the open web stronger, I'd be happy to help guide them, but only if they've sobered up and take that mission statement seriously, instead of just as a justification for holding on to their jobs a little bit longer.
#
Screen shot of my blogroll on Scripting News. It's dynamic. Shown are the latest posts on the
emptywheel blog. When a blog updates it moves to the top of the list. A 2024 adaptation of a
concept from early blogging days. It should be part of the social web. You can try it out realtime at
scripting.com.
#
- Yesterday I wrote that I'd trade in my Model Y if an non-Tesla EV came along that equaled it. A few people asked what I liked about the Model Y that I'm not finding in alternatives. Here's the list. #
- I love the handling of the Tesla. It's a muscle car like the 2007 BMW 535i I used to drive, great acceleration, but handles like the 1993 Miata another car I owned and loved. I've also owned really sloppy cars like a Subaru Forester or a Toyota Sienna minivan, even a 1974 Plymouth Voyager, the largest American passenger car ever made. I'm never going back to a car that doesn't have the authority of a Model Y. #
- The Model Y has lots of headroom, which my long torso needs, so I don't bruise my head each time I get in the freaking car. #
- I have a Tesla charger at home, so whatever I buy has to be compatible with or adaptable to it.#
- 4WD is important because where I live it snows in winter, and I drive on dirt roads a lot too.#
- It's a computer. It's going to be hard for a competitor to offer the integration with a network that Tesla offers, they're a computer company as much as they're a car company. Their connection to Starlink (assumed to be coming) is going to be hard to compete with too. #
- Calling it self-driving should get them in trouble with the FTC, there's no way anyone should trust it to drive itself, and the car's OS enforces that view, so I guess they have lawyers at Tesla. That said, I like having access to this technology. I've been an innovative software developer for a long time, and I like using tech that pushes the leading edge. The marketing (a Musk feature presumably) is what I don't like. #
- Charging network. I occasionally take trips that are out of range of my home charger, to Boston, or NYC sometimes leave me needing a charge on the way home. I'd like to have the option of driving cross-country as well. The Tesla charging network is a big plus. I honestly don't know how good the charging situation is for other brands. This would be something for car magazines to rate, to have a way of measuring it, as people who are put off by Musk's politics (about 1/2 of American voters) look for ways to drive something other than a Tesla. #
- So this turned into an ad for Tesla. Heh. #
- There are reasons we love it so much. #
- Just separate from Musk and all's well. #
- I've been thinking Tesla drivers who love America should have some kind of demonstration. We all park our cars around local Tesla dealers, let the police tow our cars, only to be replaced by other Teslas. We're all computer nerds, we could probably even figure out the scheduling. We probably have nearly as much money as they do. Just sayin. #
- Tired of companies that push us around politically and Tesla is one of the worst. So far they've managed to convince us they aren't Elon Musk, but that's a mirage, he is the company and the company is him. They are completely one and the same. #
- Like the My Pillow guy and his pillows. π#
- #
2018: Iβm not picky about where I get new ideas.
#
As Trump's cabinet takes shape it's as if the cast of HBO's
Silicon Valley is taking over the US government. I'm glad to be alive. I really liked the show, it was incredible satire having lived through pretty much the whole thing, I swear some of the scenes felt like they were set in my backyard at the
hacienda in Woodside or at one of our
offices, esp in the early days of
DaveNet and this blog or the early days of TechCrunch.
#
When Bluesky was experiencing its huge post-election surge, it was exciting because lots of users were experiencing the surge in followers and engagement. It was exhilirating. That has slowed to nothing now, no more engagement there than on Threads, Masto or Twitter. The character limit on Bluesky being considerably less than the others makes it harder to rekindle interest imho. And btw the euphoria being gone is neither good or bad, it just is.
#
ChatGPT is also a tutor. I'm learning new ways of coding SQL through drill and it's also improving my JavaScript code. It's infinitely impatient. It does make mistakes, but that's also good for the drill, catching the mistakes is instructive too. And in programming you always have to be looking for errors, because you'll almost always find them. "Runs the first time" is a rare occurrence, no matter who wrote the code."
#
I drive a
Tesla Model Y, the best car I've ever owned. I wish Elon Musk wasn't associated with it. If there were a good alternative to the Tesla, I would divest in a minute. I could afford to do it and would welcome the opportunity.
#
I'm getting a new
Apple Watch today, the latest model. My current watch, which I wear all the time (except when it's charging) is a 5th gen. The new one is 10th. I had to upgrade because there's a Tesla watch app out now that won't run on my old watch. It's the most rational add-on for the car. A must-have.
#
Looking for more excellent
WordLand bug report writers.
π#
Chuck Shotton: "Posting a video to YouTube is infinitely easier for a lot of people than understanding how to publish a podcast."
True. #
17-minute podcast I recorded on Tuesday after hearing that the president of South Korea had declared martial law.
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Dom Christie has an
interesting idea related to
listening lists. Aggregate all the shows from all the feeds in a list into a single feed. This seems brilliant because it reduces the implementation in the client to almost nothing, just rebuild a feed periodically, it could be done entirely in the client app. But it also could be something users could share with other users, sort of a meta-channel. I think it's brilliant with the caveat that sometimes when you implement it you find something that makes it more complex than it seems at first. This is the second idea I've heard that the initial listening lists idea spawned. I think there's a lot of unexplored possibilities here.
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As if in response to Dom's idea, overnight, via email Leslie Joyce sends a
link to a feed containing first episodes of new fiction podcasts. First comment, how useful! I love this idea as a user. And second, how innovative! I love this idea as a media hacker, what a clever use of RSS. I've added it to my blogroll and to my
shared list of podcast feeds.
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I filled out the
Podcast Ideas page I started as a placeholder on Nov 30. If you have a friend who works on a podcast client, please send them a pointer to this
piece, or link to it from your social web accounts on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads or via your blog. Let's nurture and feed new features to the open podcast world, ones that helps creators and influencers build new networks that can only work outside of the silos. It's time to start moving the market again, it's been stagnant for far too long.
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I am definitely the last person to hear about
ListenNotes search engine for podcasts. It's incredible. Just starting to explore its capabilities.
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President Biden
pardoned his son. I have no problem with that, because his son was accused as a proxy for his father. If there is any legitimate use of presidential pardons, this is it. Perhaps relatives of the president should also be immune from prosecution. Does anyone really think
Hunter Biden would have been tried for such petty crimes if he weren't Biden's son? The journalists, as always, have equated two
very different things. They're playing their own game, trying to self-pardon in a way, to avoid being a target for the incoming administration, which we're all scared of, and I guess that's the point, to scare us.
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BTW, another thing journalism is getting wrong, the FBI is
not the squeaky clean organization they present it as.
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I frequently have trouble remembering the names of things I want to use in my writing. I've come to rely on ChatGPT for help. So I
wrote to ChatGPT: "I'm trying to remember the name of the stone that has the key to understanding a language." To which it replied: "You're likely thinking of the
Rosetta Stone. It was crucial in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs because it featured the same text written in three scripts: Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphic. The Greek text provided the key to understanding the other two scripts."
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- I was very happy to see this post on Bluesky this morning from a friend, Matthias Pfefferle, who works at Automattic on the connection between WordPress and ActivityPub. #
- In his post he asks if there is a BDG for creating a PDS for Bluesky. #
- A BDG is a Busy Developer's Guide, something we did first for SOAP in 2001 when we were trying to figure out how to map XML-RPC onto it. Since then there have been lots of BDGs for all kinds of things. It's a useful concept because developers are often overly busy, so we need to get right to the problem before understanding all the theory behind it. We need an example that works, and we'll just do what it does. That also guarantees interop, which is the point of course. #
- Now we have a similar problem. Bluesky stores a user's writing in a PDS. If we can generate a PDS for our blogs, theoretically Bluesky should be able to see them and use them as if they were created inside Bluesky. If it were easy to understand we could get busy converting everything so it works there. We can do that because we're using popular simple formats like JSON (see below) to organize our work. #
- For example this is how I use JSON for my blog, the one you're reading right now.#
- Here's a folder in a repository on GitHub. Broken down into years, months, days, and posts. #
- Each post is a JSON file, like this. It has three bits of data, the text of the post, when it was created (which also serves as a unique ID, no two posts have the same creation date) and type. This item has a type of outline, because it can have structure, though this post does not. #
- Here's another post that does have structure. In Bluesky it would be represented as a thread. #
- Here's the question. What's the absolutely simplest way to have that structure of posts represented in a Bluesky PDS?#
- PS: I had a conversation with ChatGPT to scope this out. #
WordLand is the easy editor that writers using WordPress always deserved. I updated the
docs this morning to include very basic getting started stuff, and it now includes a link to a form where you can apply to be a tester. At this time it's limited to people who know how to write a bug report, how to find and read the JavaScript console in a web browser, and take a screen shot that shows clearly what went wrong. This the hardest part of getting a product fit for general use, and I'm too old to try to wrangle workable bug reports from well-intentioned users who basically aren't scientists. This time I'm determined to do this the right way without excess wear and tear on me.
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One way to help
RSS-based podcasts is to promote individual episodes from the past. Sometimes shows are done, but the archive contains good stuff. Not everything is based on current events. Music, art, history for example. Also bring the feed out from hiding. At least the nerdy people should understand how this stuff works. One of the big crimes was when the browser makers tried to hide the feeds. I like to be able to lift the hood even if I don't understand what I'm looking at.
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I'm using the term "RSS-based podcasts" in place of "podcasts" to make sure whoever reads it knows to ask the question of other "podcasts," are you RSS-based? The best answer is to encourage YouTube et al to just connect their "podcasts" to RSS and everyone's happy. Like "organic cheeseburgers." :-)
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For the record, Bluesky has completely taken over from Threads. Threads is basically at zero, needs something to shake it up. Obviously this could be different for everyone. And engagement on Twitter is pretty close to zero. I still check there periodically because despite what people say a lot of people I follow still post there. And I do too, since cross-posting costs me nothing. And it has been pointed out that deleting your Twitter account comes with a fairly huge risk. And if you do it, I wouldn't announce it, because anyone apparently can claim your account once it is completely deactivated. And that could create some problems for you. Probably better to hold the account indefinitely.
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Welcome to the last month of
Scripting News in the year 2024. Each year goes by faster and faster. And as we move forward in time, there's less room in front of us on the runway of life, and more behind us. At some point in the next decade my plane will probably take off. I feel a sense of urgency about getting it done. Still a fair amount on my todo list, but I'm making progress. As someone once said many times: Still diggin!
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And welcome to the time of year you can't remember what the day of the week is. For what it's worth today is Sunday. Feels like Monday?
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And here, for the record, is the
archive for November. A relatively lite month, only 87K worth of text. The
norm is about 120K.
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I wasn't clear enough
yesterday. We're losing the word "podcast" very quickly. It's coming to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there's no time to waste. If you make a podcast client, it's time to start collaborating with competitors and people who create RSS-based podcasts to take advantage of the open platforms, otherwise having a podcast will mean getting approved by Google, Apple, Spotify, Amazon etc. And they, as we know, are nuzzling up to the new government, who will want to impose severe limits. This isn't a casual
request, it's
urgent.#
I want to add an important feature to podcasting that can only work with
RSS, it canβt work with Spotify, Google, Audible etc. The idea is subscribing to subscription lists, which the influencers are likely to really love because they can create networks of podcasts. And when they want to edit the list, if this is done right, the users will automatically be updated. The RSS-based podcast industry just hasnβt been moving and if we donβt add features, improve the tech with new features for creators and users, then we deserve what we get. More on the technology to come in subsequent blog posts. But this is the core idea, just to get started.
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Think about primarying Democratic candidates not from the right or left, but from courage, intellect, and power in communication. People who say what they think and know if the press excoriates you, you can survive it, and the users will love you for it.
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