Something interesting. I can
write a post on a Mastodon instance that supports Markdown and I can
view it in a Mastodon instance that doesn't support Markdown, and it handles it properly. I wonder where the rendering is being done. An incentive to use a server that supports Markdown. The
server, which I am operating, also has a character limit of 10000, which is effectively no limit. I think perhaps the dust is starting to settle on Masto, the fog is lifting. Maybe a subset of servers, called Maxtodon perhaps, would be the service worth paying for.
#
- A reading list is a list of feeds you can subscribe to.#
- The author of the list can add or remove feeds. When they do, people who subscribe to the list are subscribed to the new feeds and unsubbed from the ones that leave.#
- It means that there can be lots of specialized software that reads feeds, and the user gets to broadcast their subscriptions to all of them.#
- It also means that influencers like Andrew Hickey can keep his community up to date on the podcasts he loves. Someday he will have a reading list, and I will subscribe to it.#
- Technically a reading list is exactly the same format as a subscription list. The only difference is you import a subscription list, and you subscribe to a reading list. #
- I asked ChatGPT to work with DALL-E to create an ad for ThinkTank for the Mac in 1984, suitable to run in MacWorld magazine. What it came up with was dazzling. The software doesn't look anything like ThinkTank, which is par for the course. Ad agencies back then did the same thing. They showed readers what they thought we had described, and didn't bother looking at the actual screens. They treated us like hopeless nerds when we asked them to please show the actual products, that users would be able to see through this ruse. #
DALL-E's rendering of an ad spec'd by ChatGPT.
#- BTW, here's how ChatGPT explained the ad: "Illustration of an ad for the 'thinktank' software from 1984. A young professional woman sits at her desk, deeply engrossed in using her Macintosh computer. The 'thinktank' software is visible on the screen, prominently displaying a detailed presentation outline. The text reads: 'The Future of Presentations is Here: thinktank for Mac!' The overall aesthetic is vibrant and distinctly 80s, with bold typefaces, neon colors, and a touch of retro flair."#
- The new DALL-E is much much better than the previous one. What's great is that it's integrated with ChatGPT so you can have a conversation with it. Also there do not seem to be the previous limits of a few pictures per month. #
- I asked it to create a header image for my blog. Here was the spec: "I need a new header image for my blog, Scripting News. I want it to be imagery from The Matrix, with Neo, Morpheus, Agent Smith, Trinity, The Oracle, and Spoon Boy, my favorite characters in The Matrix, in an image that's roughly 1600 by 250 pixels (or proportional). Use the dark styling of the Matrix." #
- It couldn't use the actual characters because of copyright limits, so it tried to produce something in the same style as The Matrix, but after four attempts couldn't get the proper proportions. The images were lovely, but not suitable for a header image because of size. Here's one of them to give you an idea. #
Photo of a futuristic dark city skyline with green digital rain falling from the sky, reminiscent of the Matrix. Neon signs with code symbols glow in the distance, illuminating alleys and streets.
#- You can debate whether ChatGPT is intelligent or creative, but to me, a human who is (supposedly) both intelligent and creative, I can't tell the difference. And it's infinitely patient and always tries to do what I ask it to do. And unlike humans it doesn't judge me based on gender, race, age, religion or any number of other criteria that humans use to justify hating other people. And unlike journalists who lie, routinely, it appears to always try to tell the truth. #
I started a
page for this year's NJFF.
#
Albert Einstein: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
#
It's nice to see
Harvard claiming its key role in the podcasting bootstrap. Berkman was the perfect place for a web developer to hook up with a radio interviewer to develop a new medium.
#Every year around this time I start thinking about
Blogger Of The Year. And there's no doubt who it will be this year, but no spoilers. Also around this time each year we start thinking about which movies will be in this year's
NakedJen Film Festival, a tradition on Christmas Day every year when all the best pictures come out. Recent years the NJFF as its fans lovingly refer to it has been a virtual event, thanks to streaming, BitTorrent, COVID and the fact that Jen moved to
SLC, though we have held them in realspace in NYC and SLC since then.
#Twitter
is a
shell of its former self, I can see that in my own behavior. I used to help out voluntarily to vet posts their bots thought were questionable, but I don't do that any more. I don't feel any sense of ownership of Twitter. Looking back, it's surprising that I ever did. I also used to run polls there, but I don't do that any longer. And when something new is happening, I have no idea where to go, but I don't go to Twitter like I used to. These are facts. Not anything I ever weighed and
decided to stop doing, I just don't do them. And yes I think it's a good thing that the fog of Twitter is clearing. There was a time when I hoped interesting ideas would pop up in the blogosphere, but then we got lost in all the bullshit of Twitter, and now that's over. So maybe there's room for the web being used, once again, as a way of connecting real people in smaller numbers.
#
Here's a nightmare stemming from using AI for development. A team of AI programmers can adapt a huge codebase to new incompatible APIs in an instant, where a system maintained by humans develops inertia quickly. The thought of re-doing a huge base of code that took years to assemble is impossible to contemplate. Human brains resist huge changes. Computers, on the other hand, now that they've learned how to program themselves, could obsolete all human programmers in an instant. Imagine turning an open ecosystem into a closed corporate-owned silo in an afternoon. Imagine Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk wake up one morning in a bad mood. Or imagine the conversation between
HAL and Dave. It could be that every human-authored bit of code is already an artifact.
#I tried to teach ChatGPT 4.0 how to
screw with JavaScript, and it was able to do what I asked. At first I tried it with 3.5 and it failed miserably.
#
Podcasting -- textcasting, artcasting, codecasting -- why should we only have tight standards for content in audio. Why not everything. Interestingly we're really close with art. That was the point of my
comment yesterday.
#
One of the big themes of my life as a boomer is why did the Beatles have to break up? How much better our lives would have been if they had kept creating like the Rolling Stones have. Of course the Stones are the outliers, most of the great bands of the 60s and early 70s stopped creating a long time ago. Or at least that we're aware of. Anyway, I never really got it until I read
this piece about the Beatles songs John Lennon hated. In that piece Harrison is quoted talking about how McCartney made them work on
Maxwell's Silver Hammer for weeks. I mostly am with McCartney that there's nothing wrong with
silly love songs, but I find MSH is hard to listen to. On the other hand, I really like
Lady Madonna, as I
said the other day, even though his bandmates didn't seem to. And what a
great story about
Why Don't We Do It In The Road.
#
At lunch today we were joined by a few dozen
yellowjackets at an outdoor
noodle bar in
Woodstock. They don't sting, but they sure are annoying. A waitress put out a
little dish of honey to draw them away from us and our food. Recalls a
piece I wrote in the early blogging days (1996) about bees in my Woodside (California)
yard.
#Every account on Bluesky has an excellent
RSS feed. I just realized I can convert my
Artshow app that used to run on the Twitter API to run on Bluesky art feeds. This is going to be interesting.
#Note to people running their own FeedLand instances. There's a new version of the server that handles
reading lists. This will be an important feature going forward. Right now what it needs most is testing and feedback. The user interface is very provisional.
#
- Drummer's native file format is OPML and OPML is the format for reading lists. This has led to some very nice synergies. #
- Example: A script you can add to your Scripts menu that asks for the URL of a feed, and inserts a node into your outline. #
- var url = dialog.ask ("URL of feed")#
- var theFeed = rss.readFeed (url)#
- op.insert (theFeed.title)#
- op.attributes.addGroup ({type: 'rss', xmlUrl: url})#
- Here are the DocServer pages#
- Took five minutes to write and worked the first time. 😄#
In the four line example above you're seeing lots of factoring done over three decades. #- It's JavaScript with one change, the statements are synchronous. The Nth statement doesn't start until the one before it completes. This version of JavaScript is optimized for the 99% of times you want synchronous code, makes that the default, as all reasonable languages do. Otherwise it's plain old JavaScript, which is a fine Algol-like language. #
- The verbs, dialog.ask, rss.readFeed, op.insert, op.attributes.addGroup, are designed to reduce complicated things to their most simple core functionality.#
- rss.readFeed, for example, builds on a couple of decades of understanding feed reading, parses all common formats that fit under the RSS umbrella and makes it all flat. Factoring is the antidote to chaos. #
- And "op" stands for outline processor. Those verbs go back to the late 80s when they were the first verbs in my first language outliner I called Betty. Why change the name of verbs if they work, recalling that one way to do something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. #
A rare mostly off-line Saturday. All is well. Just relaxing a bit after a fairly grueling week developing new features for
FeedLand.
#
Just listened to an hour of McCartney on Apple Music, and I love his stuff, but the best songs he did were collaborations with the rest of the band. No one of them had the magic, it was all of them. Take a minute and listen to
Lady Madonna. Lennon says
he didn't like it, but I can hear him in it. It's got the edge that McCartney alone doesn't have. Compare it to
Maybe I'm Amazed, the first song that the bot picked. It's like listening to part of one channel of a Beatles song.
#Factoring is when you recognize a pattern in your programming that has meaning, so you make it possible to invoke the pattern more simply, making the intent of the code more obvious, reducing opportunities for error, make it possible to build more complex programs. It is not factoring if you replace a pattern with another equally complicated pattern. Factoring is why the software you make in 2023 should be more powerful than the software you did in 2013 and 2003. Factoring happens slowly, usually. Sometimes factoring happens in a moment, when you realize how to reduce something by making a small change somewhere else.
Edit This Page was one of those.
#A great example of factoring is the
forEach function in JavaScript. There was a pattern, a for loop that iterated over an array with an index. They took out the index and did the iterating for you. It's a small simplification, and I smile every time I use it because the got rid of a little drudge work for me when entering it and reading the code. In no way a big deal, but nice that they found a way to make things easier and faster. I
asked ChatGPT why forEach is so great, but they use other "advances" in JavaScript that I consider unnecessary, not useful, cryptic, and I don't use them.
#I am a big believer in
paving cowpaths. I believe in it because I see it everywhere in the evolution of products. Why are the controls of my
Tesla Model Y arranged the same way my 1974
Datsun B210 was.
#
Lite blogging day. I'm finishing off a big new feature for
FeedLand. I'll start writing about it in a few days, Murphy-willing of course.
💥 #Gotta wonder if there's negotiation going on between Dems and a enough Repubs to elect a Speaker who is bound to the Constitution, rule of law, the usual stuff.
#
Much of the story of
The Matrix is the question of whether
Neo is
The One. Much of the
best dialog in the movie is about that. In the world I live in today we're looking for The One for social media, the open platform that can replace the silos. The feeling is there is now a chance to do that, it wasn't there before and it may not be there again.
#
- Take a break from your busy day and study this picture. It's why Mastodon as a federated system is not going to work. #
- Here's what happened.#
- I decided to follow ProPublica.#
- I clicked on the Follow button.#
- The picture showed up with a very complicated set of instructions. It requires me to remember an address that I do not remember. #
- Instead of following, I wrote this blog post, because it was simpler to do this and I'm tired of people ignoring this because I care about us getting this right. #
- Why will it never work? Why is Mastodon not The One? I know, because I thought RSS should do what Twitter ended up doing and the main reason that happened is that to follow someone in Twitter is one click, and you're done, and I don't even want to write down the process for feeds because it's even worse than what it is in Mastodon today.#
Not that we didn't know this at the time, we did, or how to solve it at a technical level. I tried to get everyone to work with us on making subscription simple, but it didn't happen. Later I came to believe it couldn't. We could force everyone to use the same export format, that worked incredibly well. But every RSS reader developer acted as if they were the only product that did what they did and didn't want to do anything they didn't have to to make it easy for people to subscribe in other reader software. It's so convoluted and stupid, you have to figure the people making the actual decisions had never used an RSS reader and never wanted to subscribe to a feed. This, btw, is pretty common in the tech industry, product ignorance among key decision-makers. I even heard a CEO once boast that he didn't need to use the product because he's a 'market of one' as if all his customers were frankfurter meat? #- Here's the bottom line. If subscription isn't one-click in your federated social media system, go back to the drawing board and re-do your architecture, because it won't work. #
- PS: After writing the post I was calmer and remembered where my account was, and it was two steps from there to follow ProPublica on Mastodon.#
Podcast: Let's stop talking about
POSSE, and let's just
do it.
😄 #
The real killer AI app will be a box you can attach to your computer with a huge amount of memory and CPU that allows you to bake your own bot, as a bootstrap, you use the bot to build the bot you want. We're all going to architect people. You think it sounds trippy? We thought portable phones were pretty trippy in the late 80s. I kid you not.
#
A young person just beginning their career wants advice on being an entrepreneur, and specifically how to judge people as worthy of trust. My answer: Assume until proven otherwise that everyone is out to advance only themself. Unless you can see actual things they've done that were for the good of others or everyone, don't believe their claims. I didn't start out this way, quite the opposite, I thought everyone wanted to do good stuff that makes the world better. We certainly need a lot more of that. But being in it for yourself is a survival trait I guess, and until we reinvent evolution to select for group-good, we're more or less permanently fucked. At the slightest sign of progress, some asshole will try to take the common good for themselves. A great example is how Big Tech has taken over the open web and is gradually turning it into a cash cow for themselves.
#
- There's been some recent discussion about whether ActivityPub is the standard everyone should be building on, and that new ways of social networking, or even previously existing ones, should stop and implement ActivityPub.#
- My answer is this -- if ActivityPub were sufficient, I'd say yes -- let's coalesce around one standard, and stop trying to make something slightly better. I have a motto that goes with this -- One way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. For a couple of reasons: 1. You still have to support both, so you just made everyone's life more complicated, assuming the second way gains traction. 2. The goal is interop, not creating standards. Both of these are part of my Rules for Standards-makers. #
- But honestly, ActivityPub is both insufficient and a mess. And I'm not even convinced that what it's doing is all that worthwhile. I don't see conversation on social nets as having much value. Replies to my posts tend to be spam, people looking for exposure, hitching a ride on a post that's getting some flow, or to be annoying. It's very rare that new ideas or information come to light this way. #
- And all the arguing in the world won't change the way things are going. ActivityPub isn't the standard. People want to be Mastodon-compatible, not ActivityPub-compatible. Much of what Mastodon is doing isn't part of ActivityPub, it's their own API. #
- I've seen it said that Atom was a good thing, that somehow RSS wasn't enough. And all the "IndieWeb" protocols that just reinvent the Metaweblog API. Depends what your goals were. If you were intending to keep RSS and the blogging APIs from growing, then they were great successes. People spent time judging not aiming for more interop, whether items had their proper names, which is a common devolution in this kind of work, they even have a name for it, bike-shedding. #
- It's better to reduce the number of competing formats than to increase the number. #
- Again all that matters is interop, and splitting an open standard into multiple competing standards works against interop.#
- Back to ActivityPub. I wish it were simpler, that you could get something interesting working quickly that delivers interop. But it isn't that way, and no one seems interested in making it so. So imho the world will not coalesce behind ActivityPub, I wish it could, but it can't and won't happen. #
I hope journalists and bloggers, before they take Wikipedia as authoritative on any subject related to the web, verify their understanding of facts with ChatGPT. It's generally far more accurate than the stuff you get from Wikipedia, at least in my experience.
#
Quick note -- I'm working on a deep database feature in FeedLand, adding support for reading lists. Deep in the sense that it's under several layers of user interface. It's like digging up the foundation of a house and figuring out how to add a new room on the third floor. It's something of a high wire act, but I honestly think I figured it out. #- It's far from the first time I've implemented reading lists, I've done it before with simpler apps in JavaScript, and richer apps many years ago, in Frontier.#
- This time it's in JavaScript and MySQL, and thus is, in one way, fairly compariable to UserTalk and Frontier's object database. But we didn't have the SQL querying capability in Frontier, so it's not comparable in that way. What we're doing now in FeedLand would not have been possible in Frontier.#
- To implement this feature in MySQL I needed two tables to the database, one for reading lists, and the other for reading list subscriptions. This part is very easy. Not necessary in Frontier's object database because the structure is ad hoc, like JavaScript objects are ad hoc. You could store relational database tables in a JS object, but there would be nothing to prevent you from breaking the rules in some or all of the "records."#
- Where it gets complicated is the code to access the database, and use the reading lists while everything is running. The Frontier code to implement the structures would also be simple, and easy to debug. It's just straight line code, with if's and else's. The runtime takes care of suspending your thread when you need to wait for a result, it does not show up in the syntax of the language. The Frontier programming language also has an intimate relationship with its database, whereas in JavaScript and MySQL there are layers of levels between the JS stack and the database. There really don't need to be any layers at all, that's what Frontier proves. #
- It took me years to dig out from under all the layers and gruntwork that's here that wasn't in Frontier to figure out what exactly the difference was.#
- And since I designed Frontier, this is self-praise, for which I apologize, but let me share with you the secret that makes Frontier so much better. For years in development I factored and refactored every time I came up with a simpler way to do something. I had been programming for a decade when I started Frontier, and had used some great highly factored tools before -- specifically Unix and THINK C, and I understood the process, having done it with commercial Mac, IBM and Apple II end-user products. I treated every aspect of development as you would treat the user experience of end-user software. And since you are an intimately involved user, there's a huge advantage here. I just had the time, and took the time to do the factoring that so far no one else has taken. At least to my knowledge and that's a big caveat because we don't generally use each others' platforms in tech, unlike other arts and sciences, we tend to live in and create our own caves. But Frontier was a product at one point, with several thousand people working in it, and most of them understand what I'm talking about here .#
- PS: I asked ChatGPT for five distinguishing features of Frontier.#
JavaScript is the worst language for recursive data structures.
#
We're in a long-term political depression. We don't study this like we do economic depression, but we should, because otherwise how will we get out of it? We have
scholars tell us how to recognize fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism and all the other terrible human behavior that are on the rise. Let's also study how cultures emerged from these periods, if possible, without total destruction. Today total destruction might not be survivable on a species level. I just
skipped over this the other day when I
used the term for the first time. It just occurred to me that one way to emerge from it before it's too late is if a few Congressional Republicans took the Dems up on their offer to collaborate on choosing the next Speaker. Because enough come from majority Democratic districts, it might just get them re-elected next year. If they go the other way and support a Republican that's catering to the eight insane House members, the depression will continue unabated for more months or years. When you see an opening, first you have to actually see it.
#Interesting perspective shift. I saw there's a new
book by
Mark Pesce about AI systems, and it gets pretty technical. I was surprised because I thought he was a pundit (which he is) but unlike most tech pundits, he also knows how to program. More than that. I remember the first time I had a real talk with a famous tech pundit in the 80s and was shocked that he knew nothing about the ones and zeros. Didn't these people at least take
Intro to Computer Science in college? Shouldn't that be a basic prerequesite for selling one's opinions about tech? Now many years later I'm surprised to see one that does.
#
29 years ago today I wrote my first blog post on
scripting.com. Without doubt the longest-running blog on the web.
#Embarassingly, earlier today I incorrectly wrote that the anniversary would be on Tuesday. Serves to illustrate the point that memory gets less dependable as you get older.
💥 #One thing I remember correctly is this -- if, someday, I wasn't able to pay my AWS and Digital Ocean bills, this site and
everything else I've got running on the web would probably disappear within 30 days. That's never been an acceptable situation to me. I've been conscious of the fragility of the web since almost the beginning. I hope to have this solved by this time next year on the 30th anniversary.
😄 #At the same time, I've been programming for
fifty years as of this year. I started programming at 18 as a student at Tulane University. A math major who decided to give computers a try because "I heard you can make money doing that." Fifty years might be some kind of record too. All through my career, going back to my mid-30s, people have written me off as too old to develop software. I always resisted this, and resented people playing that trick. It wasn't true in my 30s or 40s or 50s, or even 60s, but I can see a day when it will be true. Programming depends on human memory. Over time the machine you're building on becomes more complex, the interconnections between the components become harder to grok, and you often don't remember why you did this or that. You resist making changes that could bring the whole thing down. So evolution of software becomes slower. There is a reason you can't keep pitching in baseball, or being a basketball star after 40. In software the time barrier is higher, but it is there, I can feel it.
#I was talking with some friends the other day about what a project to restore the early blogosphere might be like. Off the top of my head I thought of several sites I'd want to be sure were restored in their original condition and location. First, Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom, Evan Williams' Evhead and Justin Hall's Links.net. I'd also go for Blogtree, which was an innovative and fascinating effort to create basically a family tree of early blogs. I'd approach it like an archeologist. Some of the originals aren't with us any longer, some that never got the notoriety that they deserved imho, like
Jerry Pournelle, who greatly influenced me as an observer of tech. I'd love to see the earliest posts on Mike Arrington's TechCrunch, another important blog that had enormous influence. Doc Searls, the Cluetrain, Kottke, Meghead, I know there are whole universes of blogging that I don't know anything about, it grew so large so quickly. And it was very gratifying to see the Harvard blogs mostly restored. There was a lot of stuff that didn't make the first cut. But it set me thinking about what we could do if we really worked at it and what that might mean for creating more persistent writing on the web for the present and future.
#
BlogBrowser started out as a
test app for the WordPress.com API, and over time became a nice way to create and edit posts. Of course there must be many tools out there that do what this does, not claiming any kind of breakthrough, just something that might be useful to some people. I've been using it myself to write WordPress blog posts. If you have comments or questions, post them
here.
#A new FeedLand
feature, the
Cats menu. It's like half the product was missing. For example, here's a list of all
my podcast feeds. There was no way to do this before.
#Journalism could do some good by focusing on the
proposal the House Dems are making to possibly persuadable Repubs. Treat it seriously. Ask Repubs what they think. I think there's still some amount of honor, if not in the representatives, in the people. With press air cover, people could call their reps, write op-eds and blog posts, picket, collect signatures. Protest. It's a good thing to discuss. When and if the political depression in America lifts, this is what what it will look like.
#
Briefly, there's been a standard for including machine-readable metadata in web pages so that when Twitter or Facebook posts a link to the page, they can use an image, title, description and link to the source website in creating a "card" for the post. It's very easy to support in a CMS, so people tend to do it. My site has the feature.#- There's a confusing story going around that Twitter was limiting this feature, or even ignoring it. It wasn't clear from the story exactly what they were doing, so let's find out. #
- I've added an image and description to this post. Did they come through when I pointed to it on Twitter? #
- Where are you reading the post? A mobile device, desktop, some other place? #
- Ignore this if you got it via email, this feature doesn't apply there.#
- Screen shot: When I read the post in Chrome on my desktop Mac, the title and description were not shown, the image was shown, and the name of the site was shown. #
- You can post a comment here. #
Name one person, living or dead, you wish read your blog.
#
Amazon Music and
Peloton go so well together. I'm surprised one of the music companies doesn't buy Peloton which I hear is struggling. I'm always looking for music with a strong steady beat. For the beginning of the workout I go with songs that are steady but relatively slow, to warm up to -- like Eric Clapton's
Cocaine. It's perfect. But as I rev up I go for music with a faster strong steady beat. For that nothing like
Elvis Costello. For example
Pump It Up, which is
sooo perfect for Peloton. Oh my god. I'm listening to it now, and I'm moving, even though I just started work for the day. Really gets you going. If you don't believe me try playing it
now. "Down in the pleasure center, hell-bent or heaven sent. Listen to the propaganda, listen to the latest slander. There's nothing underhand that she wouldn't understand."
Oh mama mia.#BTW, if you want to break up Google, start by making Chrome an independent company that is not allowed to work with Google. They are controlling the the open internet, the same way
they controlled RSS, turning our open network into a corporate asset. It'll have the same disastrous
end.
#
Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the good people of Automattic for saving the archive of the blogs we started at Harvard in 2003.
#
In the last few months the net effect of ChatGPT has been an order-of-magnitude improvement to searching the web. This time the innovating could not have been done by a duo like Jobs and Woz working in a garage, or a lone programmer like
TBL. It required a multi-billion dollar investment, and what amounts to decades of R&D;, before any benefit was available. This is an event we will have a much greater appreciation for on the other side, from this side all we can see is how much better it is than what we had before. I've been to this place before. It's the best time to be in tech.
#Just read the
Wikipedia page on weblogs.com. I didn't "decide" to shut down the site in 2004. The management of UserLand at the time transfered the domain to one of my two servers at a local Boston-area hosting service, without telling me they were doing it. It knocked the server off the air. That was what caused the outage. It took a few days to get it back online. The secret -- we converted the site to PHP and it ran much better. No one
decided anything.
#
Sad to say
Dixon Roadside in Woodstock is closing. It's only been around for two or three years, I guess launching during the pandemic was bad for business? Interesting place, new construction but designed to feel like an old time gas station and garage. The food was pretty awful, and the expectations were high because the restaurant is an offshoot of the
Phoenicia Diner, which is excellent, and always super crowded on weekends. Why was the quality was so different? Something of a puzzle, but you couldn't just walk up to the counter and ask Why does the food here suck given that we were expecting greatness? The great thing about living in this area of clean air, and quiet natural beauty is that the food is so good. Has a lot to do with the artist community, the abundance of music, and the
Culinary Institute of America being just across the river.
#
- I've realized that "open web" is redundant. #
- Same with "indie web".#
- The web is open. Its users are independent.#
- And the web is too precious to be taken over by self-preserving tech companies.#
I'm not writing prose very well today. :smile"
#
I got some
pushback for saying
yesterday that Google kicked RSS's ass. It wasn't meant to be a sweeping statement, or a forever thing. It was over
ten years ago. RSS was hurt by what Google did, anyone who says otherwise isn't dealing well with reality. On the other hand, I've spent the last two years on building
new software for feeds, so obviously I don't feel it's over, actually I think it's is exactly what we need to sew the open social media world together. Small pieces loosely joined. RSS, and formats that came after it, are all about weaving a loosely joined web of blog posts and news articles. If we want it to work, we can make it work.
#
Google kicked RSS's ass. I'm wondering if when that happened, I shouldn't have stepped up and tried to raise a great
RSS reader from OpenSourceLand. But I don't think it could have happened. It's funny how people processed that event, I didn't see any anger at Google, which if my little old
UserLand had done something like that, there would have been a huge shitstorm. I think they manage their PR well because there's no one identifiable as the personality of Google, neither of the founders are visible. They don't tweet, you never hear anything about them outside of the business press. Same with the two people they've hired as CEO. Anyway, they treated RSS like an unwanted litter of kittens, put in a shopping bag and dropped from a bridge over a river. No thought to cleaning up the mess they created. They treated their users and the standard they took over like crap. But people need a
person to be angry with. I'm much less consequential from a business standpoint, or user-control for that matter, my products get ignored mostly, but I am outspoken. And this makes me easy to be angry with. Anyway, I didn't step up because 1. I didn't think anything would come of it and 2. I didn't want to get embroiled in all the anger again. The last time it had nearly killed me.
#Today would have been my uncle's 78th birthday. Happy birthday Uncle Vava, where ever you are.
#September's outline is
archived. High hopes for Oct. Let's begin!
😄#
- Steve Algernon found this MORE ad from the 80s and sent it along.#
- I had been looking for it a few years ago, now I want to be sure next time, it'll be easy to find. Steve used to work at Living Videotext, where this product was made. He went on to Apple, where he did system software. He was the one who got XML-RPC and RSS into the Mac OS in the early web days. Thanks Steve for all of it. 😄#
"He's got three questions. You have two answers. You need MORE."
#- PS: Steve also sent along an article from 1985 about me with my standard schpiel back in those days about how outliners came to be. The picture is funny, I was much younger of course, and my expression in the photo was as bewildered as often is. Oh yeah and I was wearing a suit and tie as people often did in business in those days. These days, it looks really funny. #
Maybe chatbots will enable people to flame forever to a robot who will argue with them forever and not care. Or maybe we're already there. I found myself ranting at ChatGPT earlier today about Google. I could not get it to agree with me. It had drunk the Silicon Valley Kool Aid and I said so! Eventually it sort of came around to my way of viewing things, but it quickly snapped back to the party line. I wonder if psychologists have studied this to see what happen if people: 1. Have an interminable argument without ever convincing the other person (or robot) of their rightness or 2. Have a longish argument and eventually prevail. Is there a sense of closure when the OP says you know you're right, I've changed my mind! Can they now go on with their lives feeling like a winner instead of always losing to the corrupt and all-powerful woke coastal elites or the corrupt magas of middle America?
#A little advice about social media from someone who has been on social media since it has existed. You don’t have to argue. When someone wants to argue with you, you should block them. There is no good outcome possible from arguing on social media.
#
Near the end of the first season of
Fargo,
Molly Solverson, a wise and
tenacious cop in
Bemidji is talking to
one of the two perps she's been chasing, telling him a story about a man, waiting on a train platform with a pair of gloves in his hand. After he gets on the train, he notices that one of the gloves has fallen onto the platform. It's too late to get off the train to retrieve the glove, so he opens the window and throws the other glove onto the platform next to the first one. A generous gesture that costs him nothing. The perp ignores the advice. The thing is, who in our world will do the generous thing that costs them nothing? It's so rare. And if few us will, what exactly is the point of saving our civilization? What values do we have that are worth preserving? We think we're good people, but really we aren't unless we help each other.
#As I get older things that used to seem like mysteries now seem simple. How many times has someone said they love you when you think hmm I don't think that's really love. How long did it take you to figure it out? At this point I know what love is. If you can be yourself with another person then you can be sure that's love. If you can snuggle up with them and relax, either physically or figuratively, and again, just be yourself, that's love, for sure. But if you have to be a certain way, pretend to be someone you're not, to stay in good stead with the other person, then that isn't love. It's just that simple. If you find yourself blurting out "I love you" without any thought, maybe even surprised yourself, that's love. But love is not a status, not a state of being. It's an act. You could be "in love" one moment and the next, not. That doesn't mean in the next moment after that you won't share love again. It's just that feelings are always in motion. Love is a feeling of freedom to be yourself, or in another way -- to just be. Love is the essence of being you. Nothing elusive about it. You are made of it.
#But we have really bad examples of love relationships in TV and movies and in our families. I hear people say things that I imagine they got from watching a show, where the writers, for dramatic purposes I guess, have the characters say things in the name of love that have nothing to do with it, or often are the opposite, people trying to be something they obviously aren't. I don't think my parents or grandparents shared much love with each other, maybe they had their moments, but they weren't often. My uncle once told me, after my aunt died and he was looking for a new wife to take her place, it was like casting for a movie, that it's betrayal if a person turns out to not be what they appeared to be on the first date. A lot of people think that way. To figure out love, you have to take a step back from culture and families and just be yourself and see who likes you. You just found love. ��
#
- If I were one of the leaders of the IndieWeb movement, I'd lobby for these ideas being added to the charter. #
- I want text to flow from my editor to the places I write. #
- If I have to use your editor to write on your site, forget it. #
- I want to use one editor to write. The one that's wired into the base of my spine. Where I just think of something and somehow it gets from my brain to the screen. #
- Every time I have to switch gears because I forgot which editor I'm using, or where I have to go to read and edit something, I lose ideas, or punt on getting the writing right. #
- We have too much social media and not enough great reading sites. The reading experience of the web generally sucks. #
When Google says having a certificate isn't enough to operate a website, now you have to be cleared by the US Department of Homeland Security, will you still think it was smart to let Google deprecate HTTP? Or, why do people lose their minds when it comes to Google?
#
- Warning: Small spoiler for Season 3.#
- The first scene of Season 3 of Fargo has always puzzled me. It takes place in East Berlin during the Cold War. A citizen is brought before a government official where he's asked to confess to a crime that apparently was actually commited by a different person who used to live at the same address. The story then moves to Minnesota, and there's no further mention of the characters or plot of the first scene. #
- I've always wondered why was that scene there, what it has to do with Fargo. Here's my theory.#
- Every episode of Fargo begins with "This is a true story. The events depicted took place in {location} in {year}. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of the respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred." #
- It's funny because that's what the opening scene is. A supposedly true story (we don't actually know it's true, we suspect not, same as with the show itself) but the names have been changed. #
- Everything in Fargo is nested that way. That's one of the reasons it's so much fun to re-watch, you see things each time you didn't see before.#
I suggested a
few years ago that MSNBC or CNN move one of their evening shows to Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona or Ohio, just to shift the perspective a bit. It would work. Probably one of the most revolutionary things they could do, and it's so easy. That they all come from DC or New York is probably why most of the rest of the country feels they are so clueless and elite. I laugh when Chris Hayes talks about what he thinks, or what he has experienced. I laugh because I think he's an idiot, and has no relevant experience. How about getting a child of Holocaust survivors to do the news, now that we're on the brink of a Nazi revolution in America. Might help sober people up a bit. Have a segment every night that explains how Hitler did what Trump is doing, and what it led to. This cozy little setup needs to be exploded. Start by getting off the East Coast, and out into the country. It would do wonders for perspective. BTW, President Biden picketing with striking Michigan auto-workers is an excellent example of this approach. He could have given a speech in the Rose Garden but that would have had no impact, wouldn't do anything to shift anyone's perspective.
#
- Follow-up on a piece I wrote yesterday about adding storage to WordPress. Thanks to all the people who helped answer the question, readers of this blog, friends from the Drummer and FeedLand communities, even devs who work at Automattic. 😄#
- I said in the piece: "It has happened before that I’ve asked for a feature in a product that was already there." #
- This is almost one of those times. ;-)#
- WordPress has the ability to add the equivalent of Mac refcons to WordPress posts. But, and this is an important caveat, you can only create such an object in PHP running on the server that's hosting the website. Once it's created you can access and update the stored object via their API. #
- Now I haven't tried it myself, because I don't have my own WordPress installation and I assume I can't install software on wordpress.com. And even if I could, it's not the feature I imagined. Tantalizingly close, but not able to do what I want. #
- A use-case#
- I want to create an editor for WordPress posts that's perfect for me. That means I edit the post in my outliner. I can attach attributes to headlines, like an image attribute with a small graphic that's displayed in the right margin. Or I can enclose text in double-square brackets and have it be indexed by and linked to my tag manager, like this: Drummer. Or I can use my glossary to fill in links and data that I want standardize on. I've developed a set of tools I've been using in some cases for over 30 years. I want to use them in WordPress. But more importantly, I want WordPress to become a writing platform for everyone, I think it can do a lot of important things that it doesn't do, and it's being held back by this missing feature. That's how I look at it, and I realize that's a different perspective from that of developers who work inside Automattic who have to keep their servers running.#
- And btw, I can do much of that without this feature. But with it, I can edit any post even if I don't have the application I wrote it with handy, or the source code for the post I want to change. This is part of the philosophy of having only one structure for my blog writing, to make it easy to make changes. If I have two structures, one for editing and one for reading all of a sudden making a change takes a dozen or more steps, where if the data lives in the same place as the rendered content, it can be edited with one click. This breakthrough, and it was definitely a breakthrough in the development of blogging, in 1999, was in a post entitled Edit This Page. #
- Anyway I assume the current design makes sure only people who have access to the server can do this. Or maybe it's just an oversight? I hope it's the latter, and I hope we can have the feature in the API in time to make a difference. #
- I've opened a thread on the Scripting News repo to follow up on this very interesting discussion. #
Where I live getting vaccinated is very much in style. It's what people talk about. So I think we're going to get a real sharp divide in our country, some people with no vaccinations, and other people vaccinated for everything they can -- flu, covid, rsv, shingles. Weird what we divide ourselves on. I keep thinking what'll we all do when we realize the whole system is infected with a virus that's basically the human sense of self-importance, our supposed manifest destiny, as it all falls apart.
#
- I am a developer, and WordPress is the largest blogging platform. Naturally, I want to develop products for WordPress. But there's a problem. #
- Suppose I have an idea for an editor for WordPress posts. I have a constraint, the editor can’t save any information about the post that isn’t in the HTML code for the post. This severely limits the kinds of editors developers can write. #
- Instead if WordPress had the idea that an app could store some JSON data along with a post, and when the user wanted to edit the post my editor would get the data back, we could edit all kinds of structures and have the result available in WP, not just to us, but to every app they give permission to.#
- I’ve wanted this feature for WP for a long time. Maybe it’s already there? It has happened before that I’ve asked for a feature in a product that was already there.#
- BTW, this idea goes back to the early Macintosh OS. Every object in the system had a 32-bit refcon which could be anything the app wanted it to be. Usually it was a pointer to an object that contained a lot of data and more pointers. You could attach them to a window, a menu, a button in a dialog, IIRC every object had a refcon. Whole complex systems were built around this idea. It meant that the platform vendor (Apple) could evolve their internal structures without breaking developers. You can develop whole app ecosystems around this simple idea. #
- PS: refcon is short for "reference constant." The fact that it almost immediately was used for pointers shows how innovative developers can be, and how sometimes an idea has much broader implications than you can foresee. #
- PPS: I couldn't find a page on the web that explains what a refcon is so I asked ChatGPT to write one. I can vouch for the accuracy, even beauty, of what it wrote. #
- PPPS: Apparently it is possible to set refcon-like values for WordPress posts. I'll write more about it soon. #
- I was writing a piece about a feature I'd like to see added to WordPress, basically a refcon for each blog post, that would allow me to write an editor that managed data that's structured differently than a classic blog post. #
- I briefly explained what a refcon was, and then searched the web via Google to find a definitive page on what a refcon is. Not finding one immediately, I had the idea of asking ChatGPT to write one. And what it came up with was not only accurate, but imho beautiful.#
- Now there probably is a page somewhere on the web that explains the philosophy of refcons, but once I got the idea to give the problem to ChatGPT that was the end of my searching. #
- I love refcons, they are so respectful, both ways, and I love ChatGPT just as much, because it says even if Google can't find something that doesn't mean I can't have it! #
- PS. I honestly don't know if the Mac OS still has refcons, but it did in the 80s, and they were very important imho to the success of the Mac as a developer platform. #
Just heard from friends at Automattic that the
Berkman blogs have been archived permanently on their servers. It's great to have the legacy preserved. It was the first blog hosting at any university. All you needed was a harvard.edu email address. Lots of great things started there, including political blogging and podcasting. We hosted Thursday meetups, and had two blogging conferences. Trained hundreds of people. That's how you do a bootstrap. Thanks to Automattic for help in preserving a good part of the early history of blogging. I've learned when a project like this needs help, they're a good place to turn.
😄#I wanted to see if my
What Makes a Weblog a Weblog piece made it across, and it did. And even better, when I found a
link to it on my blog from
5/30/2003 and clicked it, I held my breath, and it redirected correctly. This is one of those moments that gives you hope that the open web may still make it after all.
#
Today's debate is whether Elon Musk is out to strangle journalism by algorithmically downplaying links somehow. But that isn't what he said. What he actually said is that in Twitter people don't click on links. This is observable. I've known this for years as I tried to arrange it so people could read my blog posts where ever they wanted, and finally in 2017 gave up because it was impossible. Even if Twitter had completely dropped the character limit then, it still wouldn't have been possible.#
