Found and fixed an error in the implementation of FeedLand's new reading lists feature.
#
One of the fundamental laws of programming. A problem that seems insurmountable often succumbs to a good night's sleep.
#
Brilliant post about RSS from Colin Walker. I agree with all of it. When a protocol or format is much more complicated that it needs to be, there's usually a reason, the proponents want to say they're compatible and open without having actual
interop.
#
BTW, I read in a news article the other day that I developed iPodder, the first podcasting client in 2004. This is not true. The first podcasting client was
Radio UserLand in 2001. I did not write
iPodder, it was a community effort.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/19/gutenberg.png)
I admire
Jeff Jarvis for his
spunk, and on matters of journalism it's amazing how often I fully and enthusiastically agree with his point of view. But I have to just as strongly
disagree with him about OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. I don't go for hype in tech, I'm very much a
Show Me kind of guy. Every time I think of a new use for ChatGPT I'm blown away by what a
breakthrough it is. Not just impressive tech, which it certainly is, but how incredibly useful it is. And how it understands my questions. And its infinite patience and good manners. I'm not trying to change Jeff's mind, but just to say I think my friend got this one wrong.
#
Why worry about AI taking over from humans, we’ve led our species off a cliff, maybe it’s time to try another approach.
#
- Imagine a Silicon Valley board meeting with a young entrepreneur wearing shorts and a baseball cap, drinking beer, while the investors are wearing ski vests and their attention is focused on their laptop screens.#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/19/siliconValleyBoardMeeting.png)
Silicon Valley board meeting.
#
If the Dead concert won't come to Dave, then Dave must go to the Dead concert.
#
The first miracle of the web was that people could
write and share knowledge. This was thought to have been a failure as journalism focused on abusive social media systems. But that's where the second miracle, AI, got all its info from. I guess something worked.
💥#
Colin Walker
adapted his feed reader to support
artcasting feeds. Also it turns out a number of established feed readers already do the
right thing with image enclosures. So that nails it, this is the way to do it. Support in FeedLand will be added shortly.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2020/08/09/gary.png)
We're starting to work with people on
artcasting. The idea is we want to send visual art over RSS 2.0 feeds. Photographs. Paintings. News. The consensus seems to be that we should use the
enclosure element, as with podcasting. In this case, if the type begins with "image/" then an
artcast viewer should handle it, and others should ignore it. We were at this place with podcasting in 2001, and needed some examples, so we had a feed of
Grateful Dead music to start using the technology. Here's the artcasting
test feed. Try subscribing to it in a feed reader you like. Hopefully it either ignores the enclosure or it does the right thing with it, displays it. Here's a
thread for comments, questions and screen shots.
#
I think a basic hookup to a chatbot is going to become part of the
textcasting spec pretty quickly. So far the best one I've seen is Guy Kawasaki's. I want to be able to ask for a list of things I've written on a given topic, and to be able to ask the questions in the same straightforward way I ask ChatGPT.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/17/nycAutumnColors.png)
A photo I took on this day in 2015, in Central Park.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2022/10/24/rssCoffeeMug.png)
Here's a
demo app that scrolls through pictures recently posted by one of the
art feeds on Bluesky. Artshow is not itself a feed reader, it calls FeedLand,
via an API, to get the recent posts from feeds in the list. It's all very simple, small pieces loosely joined. An illustration that there’s more to feed “reading” than we might think (podcasting is a another form of feed reading that doesn’t look like a feed reader).
#
BTW, Bluesky has excellent RSS 2.0 support. Here's
my feed on Bluesky. You can hook that up to any feed reader, obviously. But think about it, this is something new.
#
We need something like Black Lives Matter for Jews. Our lives do matter. But our right to continue to live is always up for debate.
#
textcasting and ActivityPub are not mutually exclusive. It would be great if an ActivityPub instance would also support the features outlined in the Textcasting
doc. It's equally possible that a non-ActivityPub app could support Textcasting. It's like saying you can send an MP3 over email and over SMS. Textcasting is the MP3. As the Textcasting doc says I'm interested in supporting writers. Really if we work on it, we
can have a great writing and reading environment.
#
WordPress signin is now the default for feedland.org. I'm looking forward to being able to do some interesting things in the future with the WordPress connection.
#
- I love that ChatGPT makes it possible to create visualizations for ideas that previously I could only present in words. #
- For example, I like to say that when I die my gravestone should say He's Done Digging or something like that, to stand in contrast to my long-lived motto -- Still diggin! I did some writing this morning about Future-Safe Archives, and thought to get that as a picture. The piece isn't ready to publish yet, but no reason not to share the illustration. So here it is.. #
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/15/headstone.png)
Uncle Davy, no longer diggin.
#
- PS: No need for an actual gravestone. Online is fine. Hopefully we'll figure out how to make such things persist before it's needed. 😄#
I did my 500th Peloton ride today.
#
I've often felt I should be able to stay in places I've lived sort of on an
emeritus basis. A certain number of days a year based on the number of years I've lived there and maybe the number of people who live there who'd like to go out for a walk or a meal.
#
We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of
textcasting, btw.
#
Someone must be working on a ChatGPT for SQL databases. I want to talk to my friend the chatbot, so it can write the queries for me. All the time. For example, instead of
asking ChatGPT how to ask for the number of rows in a table, it could just tell me how many rows there are.
#
- Another in the series of fantasy concerts, locations and fans. #
- "In Madison Square Garden in NYC. A tribute band for Steely Dan. The audience are New Yorkers. Very well educated and well behaved."#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/14/msgAndSteelyDan.png)
Madison Square and Steely Dan.
#
Bluesky has a hidden feature no one knows about yet.
😄#
Mastodon is like CP/M. Bluesky is like the Apple II. Threads is like the IBM PC (though not nearly as open). And Twitter is.. hmmm.
#
You know I don't always like the same soda. Sometimes it's
Diet Coke, and other times,
Diet Dr Pepper. But for the last year or so the drink of choice around these parts is
Fresca. But you know what's funny. No matter what my favored drink is, it's always the one you can't get at the local
supermarket. Always sold out. Very weird.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/13/dollar.png)
I just got a link to a
story on The Information about my longtime friend
Guy Kawasaki. We had a couple of great adventures together, early in our careers, and I'll never forget the moment when he gave me the idea that blasted my company out of poverty to success. I would have loved to read the article, but to do so I'd have to sign on, and I'm sure they would sell my address, and I wouldn't be surprised if I had to subscribe. So as much as it pained me, I hit the back button and wrote this post to say I would have been happy to
spend $1 to read the article, and authenticate myself with a service I control (ie no selling my identity thank you). We've been around this block so many times. The writing world of the web is full of disappointment like this. I've written this post 100,000 times by now.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/04/24/cheshireCat.png)
Some news. I've been working with
Automattic for most of this year on a new version of
FeedLand that runs in their cloud. The advantage is it will scale like the most popular websites, as
WordPress does. There have been lots of internal changes in the software, but at the same time, it still runs on a $10 a month
Digital Ocean server, and on desktops as well. The next FeedLand works at all these levels, for a person, a workgroup and the world. Obviously, lots more to say about all this.
😄#
If
Threads is serious about being open, what's preventing them from adding a simple
posting API and
outbound RSS. Very lightweight well-established technology. We could start building around it now.
#
Someday an author is going to construct a universe in a LLM and let users interact with it. That sounds boring, but here's the interesting idea that led to it. Yesterday I asked
ChatGPT to draw me a image of an ancient band performing in the desert with cacti as the audience. Then this morning I had the idea of moving the concert into the pond behind my house, except this time
the audience are frogs. I have a private Facebook group where I tell the story of the pond, including the animals who come to visit. Some of them I invent, they don't actually exist. And they have relationships with each other, at least in my mind. A natural thing to make part of this private group would be the LLM of all the animals, and their stories and relationships. And other people's models could incorporate mine. This was an idea I had for SimCity, and the
web of outlines, neither of which happened. Maybe it'll happen in LLM-land.
#
But first I need to be able to interact ChatGPT-style with the archive I've already created. Yesterday I saw
Guy Kawasaki's chatbot, trained with transcripts of his podcast, and I have total LLM-envy. Guy
says it was created for him by a company named
Sentiyen.
#
The great thing about the private Facebook group is I have invited friends from all stages of my life. People I knew in from high school, New Orleans, Madison, Palo Alto, Cambridge and Berkeley, NYC and Woodstock. Even people I knew as a child. People I only or mostly know virtually. Imho, people who won't use Facebook miss out. Its greatest feature are the people who use it. It's the kind of village we yearn for, at a DNA level. People you will never stop loving. I don't think I've ever mentioned this group on the blog, but maybe I should do that more, because it's a uniquely civilized, friendly and soul-nourishing online place, at least for me.
#
Nobody thinks of social media apps like Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, etc as part of a content management system. But if they are somewhat
textcasting oriented, and have feeds that are properly configured, then yes -- you can have people write for publication using such a well-equipped social network.
#
Have you noticed that news articles take forever to get to the point. I very often give up after a dozen paragraphs of this and that. Whatever happened to
don't bury the lede?
#
- I asked for an ancient rock band performing on stage in the middle of the Arizona desert, and the audience members are all cacti, and they’re partying and grooving on the tunes.#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/11/rockconcertinarizonadesert.png)
Ancient band in Arizona desert with cacti audience.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/10/chicken.png)
The NYT, which I subscribe to, sent me an email today that linked to a
page of easy soup recipes. I thought this is nice, I thought their cooking site was extra money, which I refuse to pay because I think I already give them far too much money for the value I get. But when I clicked on one of the pictures I was
told this is a "subscriber-only recipe." This is incredibly disrespectful and probably unethical, because I was being conned by an ad, thinking it was journalistic content that I actually paid for. I used to love the NYT. I grew up reading them along with everyone else in my family. Now they betray that every chance they get. Whoever is running the NYT now is running it into the ground as far as I'm concerned.
#
I applied for a Bluesky invite a long time ago, got the
notification today. Maybe Bluesky is going to try to grow. Feeling the heat from Threads perhaps.
#
Feed Hunter is a new NPM package that looks for a feed, starting with the address of an HTML file. We first look for feeds that are
linked into the HTML source code. If we don't find a working feed there, we
look in 27 common locations where feeds are often found. And btw, there's a new version of
FeedLand that uses this package, so we do better at finding feeds. Thanks to the
Indieblog site which keeps a great
list of blogs with feeds. We used that info to come up with our list of default locations. We also used the list of feeds people have subscribed to in FeedLand.
#
For FeedLand users and others, how did you feel about the
starter feeds you were offered when you first signed on?
#
The thing people don't like about AI isn't that the machines are trying to be human, rather it's that you could be a machine.
#
I wonder if
Stack Overflow tried to do a deal with ChatGPT to flow human knowledge through their database. Or were they caught as flat-footed as
Encyclopædia Britannica was by Wikipedia, or how
digital cameras were obsoleted by smart phones. Was there anything any of them could do, or was there no possible corner-turn? Also newspaper
classified ads and Craigslist.
#
I asked DALL-E to help create an icon for
Feed Hunter. I can't imagine an art director at an agency not using AI to play around with ideas for logos, symbols, ads, whatever. What I arrived at was a
tennis racket trying to hit a cheeseburger. I didn't end up using it, but the exploration was useful. I think this process still has quite a ways to go, I find it difficult to control the bot, I give it explicit instructions sometimes that it apparently doesn't understand. But it's still a miracle of technology. And a miracle for this human, because I've found an artist that is infinitely patient with me, and works for $20 a month.
#
Still not in writing mode. Lots of interesting stuff going on. I need to find a more comfortable chair.
#
Took care of life details today, sold a car, voted, and realized I've been pushing it really hard programming for most of the year. Learned a lot, made new friends. Looking forward to working with users and developers this winter, and of course fixing bugs. A big new product release coming soon.
😄#
- My car had huge numbers of mice living in it. When I started the engine and drove it some of the mice who were living in the engine died. Later when I got in the car it smelled terrible. So I took a picture of the car with the mice in it, and I want DALL-E to draw that for me. Thanks.#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/07/miceInMyCar.png)
Mice were living in my car.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2021/06/14/strongman.png)
I have an itch to make a simple chat program for a workgroup whose
only output is a simple RSS 2.0 feed. Uses Markdown and supports full textcasting. Open source of course. Something people can test their apps against. A model for the kind of feed I'd like to see every social network generate for each user. Think of it as a lifeboat or an insurance policy that whatever you write in this place can be forever, even if the service goes away. Imagine if
T2 had a vision like this, instead of just re-creating Twitter. It's 2023, Twitter was new in
2007. There's a whole generation of developers who have never seen any real innovation on the web.
#
When professionals look at ChatGPT they see someone stealing their ideas. When I look at it, as an amateur in everything but what I specialize in, I see new ways to express myself. This is what technology has been doing since our species started thinking and sharing ideas, thus creating our civilization. So which should I value more, the new ideas I'll be able to send and receive, or protecting the cash flow of others. I get it, I used to depend on the cash generated from my software. But it's funny almost none of that money came from individual sales of software. And value is manifested in many other ways than dollars. #
- The last month for me has been a revelation, as I can talk with ChatGPT and get it to express my wishes to DALL-E in a language it understands better than I do, and the net result is I can show you visually how I think about things I write about here. For example, I've been trying to come up with a way to visualize RSS. Not as some dead thing as Google and others tried to make you see it as. Rather as a bunch of balloons on a perfect day in the high desert of New Mexico. I asked that every balloon say RSS, but it could only manage one. Still the point gets through. #
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/05/rssBalloons.png)
RSS as balloons in the New Mexico high desert.
#
- You should feel proud of RSS because it was something created by you, not by the tech industry. We can do a lot more stuff like that if we choose to work together. It's one of those weird things like making a balloon lighter than air so you, a flightless animal, can fly around in the wind on a gorgeous day with other humans. #
- With the ChatGPT and DALL-E connection we're finally somewhere I honestly never thought we'd get, at least not in my lifetime -- you will be able to write your own software by telling a computer what you want. And it will be infinitely better at listening to you, with its full attention, its mind engaged 100 percent, able to talk with you at whatever level you are able to. With that, you can certainly create software, and through trial and error that used to take decades of experience, you can get results -- in weeks and months. I don't want to scare you, my programmer colleagues, but our craft is being reformed by this too. #
- I tried an experiment a few days ago. I got a random question that made no sense, about RSS and local files and seemed to depend on magic. I get these all the time and I don't have the intellectual ability or patience to understand what they're saying. So I pasted the email verbatim into ChatGPT and it answered the question. I sent the person a link to the answer, and he responded, cryptically as before, but apparently ChatGPT understood what he was asking for, where I did not. Now we're getting a glympse at the future. #
- There's this Silicon Valley expression -- A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. Here we are presented with that conundrum, but we're the B and we could hire an A. I guess that's the question. #
- BTW, Andrew Hickey, who has opened my mind to music over the last year, has made a mistake in saying that the same people who promoted NFTs and Bitcoin are the ones promoting AI. I saw Web 3 as a cheap exploitation of something open and wonderful, the Web, purely for greed. Like Exxon laying waste to the Arctic for more oil profits. Or if I started a band and called it Beatles II, and journalists went along with the con. #
- AI is more challenging, not as clear-cut, and at the same time incredibly useful even seductive, and we need minds like Hickey's to look at this carefully and think, and use it as a tool, so he can help us understand what's going on. I've seen this many times, people I admire who have dismissed AI, but when I tell them not to, and they try to use it, they immediately get it. Hickey will be one of those people, I'm sure of it. #
- PS: BTW, the future never ends up looking like you thought it would. #
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/04/feedlandLogoPossible.png)
Yesterday a user asked why
WordPress signon and not Google, Facebook or Apple. I know there are services that take care of all the logins. But I don't know who they are, the people, investors, and what they do with the data that flows through their systems. But there's another reason, I've known
Automattic since it was founded, I knew
Matt when he arrived in San Francisco in the early 00s, and have worked on a few projects with him and people at the company, and I respect him and the company he's built. I've written a lot about the
kind of
identity systems we
need to foster development. Right now the economics are such that in order to ship a simple product you have to raise VC money. But technologically, if users could buy storage, instead having individual developers buy it and resell it to them, we could get back to a time when an individual could make a hit product. You don't know how important that is. Products made by companies never take the creative risks that individuals can. That's why innovation in social media was stuck for 17 years with Twitter's idea of a post. Anyway -- I know that Google, Facebook and Apple would never listen to me, but Automattic does. So I'm willing to meet them in the middle. Okay let's see what we can do with this login thing. It's in
FeedLand now.
😄#
- Last Tuesday I did a podcast specifically for Tim Carmody. But you can listen to, and I hope you do. #
- I do this from time to time, when I want to work with someone, I often will speak directly to them in public. Because working together is the only way to bootstrap open systems. I did it because I saw Tim, who I know as a smart tech writer, a creative person and thinker, as someone who could appreciate how little it takes to start a bootstrap. #
- It worked. Yesterday he wrote a piece on kottke.org that got a lot of coverage. It got a lot of people thinking about textcasting and RSS. #
- The coolest thing he said are the first four words in the headline. The Future of RSS -- you know I've never seen anyone write those four words because RSS got so thoroughly maligned by the bigco's of tech, they really did a number on RSS, probably because it was so freaking good and so freaking simple. Who needs big tech companies to make it usable for you if it's basically usable all on its own. 💥#
- Tim made the point I couldn't make on my own. People must think I have a conflict with RSS, but I've never made any money from RSS, I advocate on its behalf because I think it's the right thing to do. And I wanted to show Tim that if he did it, people would listen. And they did! Oh my. I heard about it from so many people. Did you see this piece on Kottke!? I was told/asked yesterday over and over. #
- And maybe people are now beginning to see that RSS would make the perfect connective protocol in addition to the more complex ActivityPub for the next generation of social networks. He also got me excited, now knowing that I am not the only person trying to push this boulder up a hill. #
- Feeds are still there to help tie everything together. RSS only exists because people want it to exist. The more you want it to exist, the more it will. #
- So Tim, let's keep beating the drum. The goal as far as I'm concerned is to craft the perfect environment for writers on the web. We still have not tried to do that, because the BigCo's have convinced us that we need to be locked-in to get anything out of the tech. Well I'm here to tell you that's not true. And in the coming weeks and months I hope to prove it to you. #
- It's time to do stuff. Let's all work together on this. You'd be amazed how few people it takes to get something like textcasting going. #
- PS: I don't agree with everything Tim said in his list of four needs. I don't need metrics or moderation. Believe me, I know about abuse, I knew about it before all of you did, because in the beginning I was the target of most of the abuse in the blogosphere. I learned some fundamental things about abuse, don't offer people a way to abuse you and you won't be abused. It means don't think of this as a conversational medium, and don't count on everyone hearing you. Use it for thinking out loud, and be happy when people hear you, but don't expect it.#
- PPS: At the end Tim asks what his role is. He's a writer and damned good one and one who thinks about how his writing gets to readers. I haven't found many writers who are thinking about that, but imho they all should be, esp right now when the dominance of tech companies is so iffy, when the possibilities are so open. I write software for writers, so I exist to make Tim happy. I want to be sure he can use the writing tools he loves (btw, maybe more than one, for different kinds of writing). #
- I don't believe a product like FeedLand should do its own identity. #
- Identity is one of those things you totally want centralized, because that's the benefit of identity -- you can be the same person in a lot of different places. And if we work that out well, the apps that you connect with that way can work with each other in interesting ways to provide new integrations. #
- I've always been preaching this, let developers and users do the integration, let software developers create basic capability that we can wire together any way we like. That was what we were doing on the Mac platform in the 1988-92. And also what we've been doing on the web since 1994 . It's an idea as old as Unix pipes. But it requires cooperation among developers, which we have seen sometimes happens. 😄#
- Using WordPress for identity is a step in that direction. The hope is it could form a backbone for an internet of applications. I'm willing to step up and say okay let's give this a try and see what happens. #
- I have been trying to visualize FeedLand to work toward a great logo for it, and had the idea of playing with ChatGPT and DALL-E to see what would come of that. #
- I painted a verbal picture of a yacht in a port on the Adriatic, the water is choppy but the yacht is doing well. On the main sail would be the words FEED and LAND. #
- This is what it came up with and it's better than anything I imagined. Really. The art is all over this. #
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/11/03/feedLandAsYacht.png)
FeedLand as a yacht.
#
- I wrote a story ten years ago, posted only on Facebook. #
- A plot for a science fiction horror movie.#
- Takes place in the near future.#
- A young Zuck-like hacker not only understands how to write scalable server apps, and has no principles about people's privacy (or really anything, for that matter), he's also a lawyer. #
- He starts a Facebook-like service, but it's better in some way (still need to come up with this element), but there's a twist. The end user agreement is customized for each user. Not for everyone, just a few. They know where you live, and whether you own the house or not. #
- Here's the nasty thing they do. #
- They plant seemingly innocuous language in the agreement (that no one reads anyway) that says you sign over all your property to them. #
- Not sure where it goes from there exactly. #
- Probably not all that great an idea.#
- Visualized...#
- I fed this story to ChatGPT and asked it to ask DALL-E to visualize it. Had to change Zuck to Buck to get past its filters. And here's what it came back with.#
BuckBook, by DALL-E, as directed by ChatGPT, screenplay by me.
#
- PS: Full-size visual, on Facebook -- seems appropriate.#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2022/10/31/camel.png)
Tim Carmody is a smart guy and he
wrote a post on Threads that's a lot like what I've been saying. So I decided to do a
podcast for him, and invite him to respond not on Threads but on a blog, or in a podcast, and let's talk about how we work together on this. If we want a great writer's web, we can have it.
#
Ross Mayfield: "The reason Threads doesn’t have an API or the promised Fediverse coupling is organizational inertia for the fear of another Cambridge Analytica." I think that's very likely true. I was using Facebook's API when they quietly turned it off, and I didn't blame them for it, given the way journalism was treating them. Everyone knew they had an API, and what it could do was openly published, and promoted by the same journalists who were now blaming them. So while FB has few scruples to admire them for, as a company -- in this case I believe Ross's explanation of why they are treading very carefully here.
#
Twitter de los Muertos in the style of Frida Kahlo, by DALL-E, at my behest.
#
What does it mean when the
Disk I/O graph for one of your servers does this and you can't think of what changed that could have caused it.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/10/28/wontGetFooledAgain.png)
Well,
Facebook is aiming to replace Twitter with
Threads, and while I haven't been using it, it has become more useful. There's now a web client, the lack of which was holding me back, but now it's there and it's good, well-designed, attractive, all the things that Twitter isn't now that Elon Musk as renamed it X and effectively turned off API access. Mastodon is still a maze of federation, which some users still seem to think is a positive thing, but honestly, Facebook (they call themselves Meta now) has a better product, all the
federation michegas on Masto makes it a mess. Facebook
will replace Twitter if all the web can muster as an alternative is Masto. Oh but the FB folk say don't worry, we're going to support ActivityPub. The way this works is they can hold off the fear by just saying they'll do something, without explaining how or when it'll work. And they could change their mind, or somehow never get around to shipping. I've been in tech since the 70s, and I've seen this movie a few times. It's like the
Godfather, which
always ends exactly the same way. If we want to have a social media web that is not dominated by Facebook, it's time to face reality now and get into motion on
working together. Otherwise there will be nothing to celebrate as we face the new boss, as they say,
same as the old boss.
#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/10/28/garcia.png)
This is prime sports time on TV. Last night I switched back and forth between the first Knicks game with Walt Frazier and Mike Breen and the first game of the World Series between Texas and Arizona, a match-up I didn't think I'd care about but to my surprise, it was really good baseball. Both events were like coming home. The
Friday Night Knicks theme is something I forget every year, and then remember right around this time, remember how
comfortable it is to watch the Knicks, even in years when the team sucks, as long as my friends Clyde and Mike are talking us through the game. Movin and groovin, dishin and swishin, so nice we showed it twice and all the other familiar slogans. But this year the Knicks don't suck. The games will be good. And this year the World Series is exciting. Last night's game was won with a
walk-off 11th inning home run by a formerly unknown
star who has already set the record for the most postseason RBIs, and the series is just getting started. They play 162 games in a baseball season so each game doesn't mean that much, until the end of the season when every game matters, at this point, every inning matters and sometimes every at-bat. I've never been much of a football fan except for the years when I lived in the Valley and the Niners were rising. Not my sport. But I've loved both baseball and basketball my whole life, there are real family roots here, and traditions old and new. And tonight there's another World Series game and the Knicks are in New Orleans playing the Pelicans. Good times!
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![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/http://scripting.com/images/2023/04/24/cheshireCat.png)
I want to throw together a nice little utility for Bluesky users. I'm working in JavaScript in web browsers. There should be a service I can access via one include each for CSS and JS code that lets me build the utility without writing any code to deal with storage or identity. Also supports reading and posting of data to Bluesky, one easy call for each. And the same environment should work equally well with Mastodon. The same code. No changes. If my code takes two days to write and test, that's how long I should have to spend on it. And after it's published, it should be a static app, no server presence at all. I get to move on to the next thing. Also if I want to charge for using it, that should be built-in as well. The tech for doing this is well understood. If we want it we can have it.
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I've been posting a lot of my stuff about visualizations
on Facebook too. Imagine if ChatGPT became Facebook. Or vice versa. Whoever gets there first wins.
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- I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming about cats being the people of New York City. So I got out my iPad, launched ChatGPT and asked it to instruct DALL-E to visualize: "A city street in nyc where humans have been replaced by cats, who walk upright, wear typical human clothes, are cops, mothers, business executives, messengers, television reporters. They drive cars, buses and cabs." #
- The first two images were imho lifeless, cheap -- lazy. I narrowed the spec: "The street should be more busy, and dirtier like nyc streets, and the cats should have more expressive faces, some should be angry, flirty, happy, depressed, tired."#
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/10/27/catNycInline.png)
DALL-E's rendering of CatNY as
visualized by ChatGPT and myself.
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- What came out was a good first try -- looks a bit like 8th Ave looking north from 42nd St. And cats! Look at the image in full resolution, it's got a lot of interesting detail. Maybe a continuing story.#
- This is how ChatGPT described what I wanted to DALL-E. I guess it's like SQL, one program writes scripts for the other program. #
- "Illustration of a busy and gritty New York City street scene where cats have replaced humans. The street is filled with trash, and the cats walk upright, wearing human clothes. Their faces are highly expressive, capturing emotions like happiness, anger, flirtation, depression, and tiredness. The roads are jam-packed with cars, buses, and taxis, all operated by these emotive cats. Among them, a cop cat is directing traffic, a mother cat is tending to her kitten in a stroller, and a television reporter cat is conducting an interview."#
- Just for fun I asked it to change the cats to dogs. #
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20231121081355im_/https://imgs.scripting.com/2023/10/27/catstodogsinlineimage.png)
The cats become dogs.
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- Then I asked for more motive variety. "Some dogs are sad, depressed, flirty, horny, unloved, ugly, arrogant, satisfied. And they're all hungry."#
This my friends is artcasting. I put together a list of art feeds on Bluesky, this is something that actually exists, in feed form thanks to
John Spurlock. After Twitter collapsed, the art flow went to Bluesky, and they have feeds, and we picked it up in FeedLand. This is
interop, and it's working once again.
Bing! #
Note -- you may have to
hard-reload the link about artcasting in the previous post. That happened to me just now when I tried to load the page from my iPad. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to do a hard-reload on iOS as a user.
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Meet your new Cats menu. In FeedLand, I wanted to be able to see the news for each category, no matter where I was. I could be looking at something totally random and I want to see the news for MLB. Or I want to see if I'm subscribed to a particular podcast.
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