Braintrust query: I've been encouraged to switch to the
mysql2 package for Node, saying that it would improve performance and compatibility. I'm interested in knowing if people had problems, and is the new package much better than the original?
#
Working on a big software project is like hiking the Appalachian Trail. You keep a diary so people who come through there next year and the year after will know what you tried and why it didn't work. Like using a GET when the RESTful thing is a POST. I once got excoriated by a famous security expert in public for doing this (XML-RPC only uses POST) but I had and have the best intentions. Back then in 1998, when I made the choice, I was juggling a billion flaming bowling pins. Back then there was no ChatGPT to ask about prior art. I had to move on. Well here we are again in 2024. I hope the next person traveling through the area in question sees what I didn't see. People who have worked on my code know that if you read it in an outliner, you'll see lots of blog posts like this. Some functions have comments going back to the early 90s and not just from me. Outliners are great for writing code, because a long comment takes up exactly one line until you expand it. So you can go on and on and not stop until you're finished. Thank you and have a nice day.
😄#
An algorithm for content moderation for reducing the human contact trolls have. If you notice an account that gets blocked by a lot of people who don't follow them after they reply to one of their posts, then slow them down or throw out their replies. Eventually if it keeps up, you pretty much know it's software, and you can delete the account. I guess. Just thinking out loud. ;-)
#
My gods the Knicks are
masters of the universe this year.
#
I wish I could send ChatGPT a pointer to a page I'm working on and ask it questions about my CSS. Or imagine ChatGPT running in Node, supervising my server app, looking for problems, odd usage patterns, and later looking for optimizations. And that's just the beginning.
#
I saw these
Sony buds advertised and I had to try them. They're now my favorite way to listen to music and podcasts. Most ear buds in my experience don't do very well with bass, and I love music with a strong beat. Sony makes great inexpensive headphones.
#
I'm looking for evidence of
useful federation with an open mind ready to become a believer.
#
I think
micro.blog is going to get very interesting once the APIs for all these random social networks fill out.
#
Issues with
feedland.com earlier in the day appear to be resolved. :-)
#
I dream of a day when I can subscribe to a podcast on my desktop and have my mobile podcast app know about it automatically. (To be clear, using open formats and protocols, so that this convenience does not lock me into using one podcast client, obviously.)
#
Experiments. I pasted the URL of a Mastodon post into a
Threads post. I was kind of expecting it would use the power of federation to just get the post and put it in Threads. I asked a similar question on Mastodon, pasting the URL of a Threads post into a Mastodon
post. As in the other direction it did nothing with it.
#
YouTube TV lets you
watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and BBC on one screen.
#
On Threads: My goal for the next few years is to get the feed world and the social web world to merge, and I'm pretty sure the style of reading of the social web will prevail because it is the rational most news-like way to read news.
#
- I don't usually watch Maddow on Monday nights. I lost my faith in her when she went after Facebook a few years ago, not that Facebook didn't deserve her attention, but her arguments while condemning them were exaggerated. I knew the facts, she left out important details. #
- She steered viewers into believing things that weren't true. Didn't exactly lie, but pretty close. I figured if she does that for stories I know, then she's probably doing it other times when I wasn't so well informed. #
- But the Knicks were blowing out the Pistons on the next channel over, and I had tuned in Jen Psaki, who as luck would have it, at the exact moment I switched, was explaining how the fact that she served in the Biden Administration before joining MSNBC was very different from the controversy over Ronna McDaniel, who Maddow went on to explain was basically a terrorist and traitor and Trump co-conspirator (not just an enabler), and not in a war that was over, but one that was still being fought, and not insignificant because this fascist movement has control of one of the two major parties in the US and McDaniel was instrumental in that. There are good arguments that she should be in a prisoner of war camp, not employed by one of America's major news networks.#
- That NBC hired McDaniel as a contributor says something awful about Maddow's employer. And Maddow, if she has any details on that, isn't saying what they are. #
- I've had this problem with other reporters in the past whose owners were caught up in some controversy that made them newsworthy. The reporters refused to cover it, or even be a source for others who were. This is where journalism goes wrong imho. Maddow should know the details, and if she does, she is obligated to share them, because they are significant, and go to how much trust any of us should give to any news coming to us from NBC. Maybe she has to quit to do that, and if so, go ahead and quit. Because the shadow it casts over everything touched by NBC, which includes MSNBC and Maddow is just too freaking long. It's similar to the "news" she reported on Facebook, except now instead of steering us to believe lies, she's holding it back, and instead of it being about one very powerful social media company, it's about the future of the government of the US. And maybe she doesn't know, as Upton Sinclair once said: “It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends on [them] not understanding it.” #
- I don't blame Maddow for liking her job. But as a reporter, there are more and more reasons not to trust her and esp to not trust the company that employs her. When it was obvious she wasn't going to tell us the story behind McDaniel's hiring, or even name the people responsible for it, I switched back to the Knicks, where at least I think I understand who they are and what they're trying to do. #
- Update: MSNBC backed down on hiring McDaniel. #
This is a
screen shot of my blogroll. I can have posts from Mastodon or Bluesky here. But not Threads. It's really easy. Just support outbound RSS and we can add you to the club.
#
I was glad to have
3 Body Problem to binge over the weekend. Created by the showrunners for Game of Thrones based on a much-loved series of science fiction
novels, which btw I have not read. This was emphatically not Game of Thrones, though some of the actors played roles in both series, and in each case that was awkward. Not the best actors, they didn't get much screentime in GoT, but here, they get the big lines and omg it was embarrassing, they don't pull it off. Creepy. I loved the first four episodes, incredible story, and the special effects, awesome. Then it really started to stink in episodes in 6 and 7, endless stupid dialog with music that made every stupid thing like a climax of a sort. But I was still watching, and then it came back roaring in the final episode. On the other hand it's like so much of today's TV, superheros, epic conflicts, resolution, good guys win. A cross between
Lost and
Ender's Game. A space adventure and the supernatural. Net-net -- it
was worth it. A good distraction, I will probably watch Season 2.
#
I still love reading
my own stuff in the blogroll. Learning how to make stuff look good in a tiny little format like that. I don't mind having a small space to deploy in, but I like to have lots of room where I write. Linkblogs and blogrolls go together really well. Blogrolls work best for smaller groups of people and projects, not the huge number of followers people have on the twitter-like social web. But I think even a few hundred items in a blogroll work, as long as it's dynamic, and it's reverse chronologic.
#
Never thought I'd be so glad to see the
xml-rpc site back up and running. I found out about it being off by someone sending an email asking if they could buy the domain from me. Otherwise I'm not sure I would have noticed. The whole idea is to put these static sites in a safe place and forget about it. But clearly there are no safe places and someday you might get dragged back to try to debug some work you did a bunch of years ago.
#
Braintrust query: I have not been able to reliably get to a bunch of my sites that use HTTP this morning. For example,
feeder.scripting.com, a site that I use to test feeds. Also
xmlrpc.com. It's possible that something broke overnight in my server. Or Digital Ocean is having a problem? Doesn't seem like it's something Google is doing to punish me for using HTTP, though that is always the first thing that comes to mind. I tried moving the XML-RPC site to a different server, but the problem follows it. No changes have been made to the site in years. Not exactly what I had planned to be digging into on a nice (but cold) Sunday morning in the mountains. I started a
thread, if you have any insights. At least scripting.com is still working, but it's not served through my software or Digital Ocean.
#
So I went ahead and moved
xmlrpc.com to a HTTPS server. The
other day I forgot to mention that style sheets might not be readable when you move from HTTP to HTTPS, leading to
this striking breakage I saw when I first got to look at the site in its new location. And now thanks to Google and the EFF, I get to spend time debugging something that worked just fine in 1998 and every year since then. Should I send them the bill for my time? Fuckers.
#
I've had my
blogroll for a couple of weeks now, and I've got it on-screen a lot, as I'm developing another user interface that has the blogroll in it. This blogroll is much like the one I had in the 00s, but it's in motion, and it's a source of news and ideas. It's also doing the thing that Twitter used to do, it lets me have a way to see what specific people are interested in. I expect more of that as new people get this kind of blogroll. Right now I'm pretty much the only one. The next step is getting the blogroll running in WordPress. And then getting it running on
Om's blog and
Doc's blog, both of whom have real experience with the art of blogrolling. From that, I expect to have a better idea of what the editorial UI should look like for people creating and managing these blogrolls. We'll iterate until it's pretty easy to set up and manage one. Also to be clear, I want it to run in other platforms, this is not exclusive to WordPress. It's just the place where the people are right now, the ones I really want to work with. But I wouldn't mind it running in
Substack for example, if there are any writers there who find this compelling. That would require cooperation from the company though, their platform as far as I know, does not support other-party plugins.
#
I saw someone get upset that ChatGPT can beat humans at debate, but we humans, esp here in the US for the last few decades, haven't been taking good care of ourselves intellectually. It would be one thing if we placed a high value on being informed and thoughtful, but we're going the other way. However, if we
were aiming to be as smart and knowledgable as possible, we'd be losing to them anyway. The machines have infinitely expandable memory, and we don't and we lose stuff, and we hallucinate a lot more than they do. But why is it a problem if a machine does something better than we do, even something we (foolishly) think we're the best at. That's why we make machines. I have a great car, and live in a house that's heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. If I want to travel to the other side of the world, no problem. These are all things that machines do for me. One thing a machine might not be good at is inspiration. I asked ChatGPT to give me a good idea for something to write today. The idea it
came up with: "The Day the World Forgot How to Yawn." I rest my case.
#
Back in the 80s before many of you were born, you could buy a word processing program, which was basically a text editor, and you could use it to write and then when it came time to send that writing to other people, you would print it. And get this the printer could take its input from any of those writing tools. There were no
tiny little text boxes. The printers didn’t come with their own editors, you had choice and therefore there was lots of competition. Amazing, right?
#
What if climate change comes to where you live in the form of tornadoes that last 30 days.
#
- Something the HTTPS evangelists must not understand: there's substantial breakage when you convert an HTTP site to HTTPS. Every image in every page breaks. Broken images make a statement, they're like broken windows, they say no one gives a F about this site. Well I care about the archive of scripting.com, I hope people understand that. I have been creating a record here since 1994. It'll be 30 years in October.#
- Instead of trying to blackmail me into breaking my archive, Google should be helping to preserve it. And not just mine, the entire early web. We poured our hearts and hopes into this, and massive amounts of time, without which Google would not exist. #
- I know Google doesn't have a heart and it isn't a living thing, but it's bad PR to make that so freaking obvious. #
- I think that perhaps Google is already run by the machines. Maybe it was the first such company. #
- To remind you of what Google's idea of the ancient web is, I put a broken image next to this post. #
- Thanks for listening. #
To ski, because it's snowing bigtime.
#
For the total eclipse of the sun.
#
Manton Reece gives Facebook the
benefit of the doubt. I have at times been that optimistic. And there are good well-intentioned people at every bigco. The problem is, when you get to the top, they don't actually give a F about any of this. They like to keep their users where they are. Right now Facebook is hoovering up people who are looking for something new in the Twitter space. So it helps to encourage people to believe that there will be a way out if they want to try something else. But everyone knows for real that that
isn't what's going to happen. This is in the tech playbook. When you're growing, you want everything to be open. When there aren't any more users to get from other places, well, that was a
nice idea.
#
Paul Kedrosky is paying for feeds coming out of Twitter and subscribing to them in Feedly along with his other feeds. This is smart and futuristic. No reason to have two or more social webs, let's get them all working together.
#
I was looking around the old social web circa 2003 and found the blogroll on my Radio UserLand
blog home page. Screen shot to the right. It shows that the art was very much still being practiced then. It looks cared-for. All themes designed by Bryan Bell. I am going to set up a demo of the home page, because I want to look at it as "live" as I can get it, and see if there are ideas there I want to bring forward to 2024.
#
Developing great products is something like the NBA which they always say is a business, esp when a player you love is traded. Happened recently with a point guard, Immanuel Quickley, traded from Knicks to Raptors. He wasn't the only heart of the Knicks, but he was one of them. He has a competitive grace you don't see very often. Quickley was one of those guys you knew would be the starting point guard on some NBA team, he was that good. But he was unlikely to get there on the Knicks, so we can be happy for him because he is the starting point guard on the Raptors, but we lost something important there. But the business side, if done well, opens the door for bigger love. I love watching the Knicks win they way they are winning now. That's what I want from developing software. I want to create a global team of truly independent developers, filling the void left by the
predation of the silos. There won't even be a business model for much of what we do, but there will be lots of teamwork and lots of fun, because the best accomplishment is when we do it as a team. We're going to play a game we started to play in the mid-90s, and somewhere somehow forgot we could still play it. We can. I am old now, I feel it, I can't produce end-user software much longer, but I don't want to leave until we have this thing rebooted.
#
I got
politics.newsriver.org working again. Things got pretty shaky in news product land. I'm trying to figure out a general formula for getting things working again. And as I update them, I'm switching them over to HTTPS. Once again I have to put in a plug for
Caddy. A real time-saver.
#
When they report on Trump’s financial situation they don’t take into account that the property, golf courses, buildings, etc are all mortgaged beyond the max, that’s what the NY trial was about, him lying about values for the purpose of getting loans on the property. So his equity in these investments is probably 0 or even negative (because of the fraud). No one is going to loan him anything on the properties, because he has no equity, and the story they tell about New York state liquidating his assets, there almost certainly is nothing to liquidate. Anyone who owns a home and has a mortgage can understand this, it works the same way even if the property is much more valuable than a family home. I asked jokingly what his credit rating must be, but it's a good question to ask, would help regular people relate to the situation.
#
This is amazing. Some of my friends at Automattic quickly put together a toolkit for WordPress that allows it to host my blogroll. There are still some missing pieces and some CSS glitches. But this is exactly where I hoped we would be at this point.
#
Read this on Threads. The thing that's great about this moment is that people are just beginning to get the possibility of not being locked into silos. They don't know how to parse my posts and screen shots, because I can do something they never thought they'd be permitted to do. Well we've got some visionary and lovable techies at Masto and Blueski who want you and I to be able to do that. And we've been building on that. And will continue to do so, Murphy-willing.
#
Blogroll fix. The blogroll was grabbing the up and down-arrow and Return for keyboard navigation, one of my favorite blogroll features. Put the cursor where you want, and arrow through the list. Press Return to expand, and again to collapse. Then down-arrow and repeat. But sometimes you want to use these keys for other functions. So I changed it so you have to click the blogroll to set the focus. Its border turns blueish, and the keys work as described. Press the Tab key or click outside the blogroll to take the focus off the blogroll.
#
I'm working with developers again, thank goodness. I once thought I could make server products or toolkits for people I called "poets" -- motivated writers. I have given up on that, at least for the time-being. I think a properly motivated intelligent writer could get developer-like results, I've seen it happen (Brent Simmons, Dan MacTough). They make really good developers because they understand the user perspective so well, it still lives inside them. The problem seems to be motivation, and a poet knowing that they need to be super-motivated and have the time, to get
anything technical to work. If they knew what was required, my 2024 theory goes, and had studied for it, the way they studied for their degree, they could not only be successful, but they could contribute to the developer process. Analogously, we all have to learn a little cooking just to get through life, but only a few people are chefs.
Julia Child, a hero of mine, believed she could teach anyone to be a good-enough cook. But I bet she was frustrated by human reality.
😄#
Now that I have ChatGPT around, my
Lorem Ipsum text for testing can be slightly more interesting.
#
- Linkblogs work differently in blogrolls. When I click a link it takes me to the site the blog linked to, not to the blog.#
- So.. When you click the link in the screen shot below it takes you to a Metacritic review of the program#
Screen shot.
#
It's so funny, the editor of Wordle on a
podcast on Friday, 1000th puzzle day, said there are some puzzles that you might not solve in six moves not because of skill rather because of luck. I was pretty sure when I took my second guess, but that's just when the cursing started. By the third guess I thought she's screwing with us! I should not have listened to the podcast.
#
On Mastodon: I've done this before, starting 25 years ago. Find some new connection I can make because someone was wise enough to add an RSS interface. I get to have an
aha! moment and a good laugh at how great this is and then write a freaking blog post about it, and people think man this web thing is pretty cool.
#
On this day
in 1999. Not much happened in RSS. But I'm going to keep checking for the next couple of weeks.
#
An upgrade idea for the web. I'd like to have a bit of JavaScript code ask to be notified when the user clicks on a link on my page that gets them a 404. I'd like a chance to do some looking around and seeing if I can find the thing they wanted. This comes up when you look at the archive of this blog for
March 1999. Back then my server was a Macintosh which had a case-insensitive operating system. A few years later I moved all the stuff to Amazon S3, much less hassle, and probably cheaper too. But over there the filesystem is case-sensitive. I must've been typing in URLs by hand and not caring about case, because why should I, my server didn't care. Except now it does care and when I click links to pages I know
are there, but
can't be found, I get depressed. I wanted to read the damn thing, that's why I clicked on it. Not to see some cute
404 page (although it is pretty nice). Even better would be a way to tell Amazon to serve this bucket without regard to case.
#
Saying the web
misses Google Reader is like saying the United States misses President Trump. Why do I think that? Think of the mess Google left behind when they dumped the web. Putting all our cards in one basket in software is a very very very very bad idea. As everyone who misses The Orange Feed Reader is evidence of. It's like someone rips you off bad and all you can think about is how much you miss them. You, sir or madam, need to get your head examined.
#
- As I complete a big project I like to re-center, to remind myself what I'm working for.#
- My goal is to create a social web that includes blogs and twitter-like systems. To set a new baseline where titles, simple styling, links, enclosures and the ability to edit are tools writers can use.#
- Somehow twitter pushed writing into a tiny little box. If we work together we can dig ourselves out of this box. #
- I love that I can read Mastodon posts in my freaking blogroll. #
Eugen is the founder of Mastodon.
#
Maybe the thing I'm most
proud of is that the
blogroll can host
Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, because they
support outbound
RSS. I can also follow
Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon, for the same reason. And of course
Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, whose WordPress supported RSS from inception. Bluesky, Mastodon and WordPress, in the same social web. One of those
Golden Spike moments.
#
The blogroll is a lot like weblogs.com combined with its successor my.userland.com. All this happened first in 1999. Today's blogroll is far in advance technically from the blogrolls of
25 years ago.
#
When I was growing up they taught us that humans were the only animals that were conscious. They wasn't any scientific evidence of this, we know now, because it obviously
isn't true. And to my own credit, I was sure it was bullshit when I was a kid.
#
Finally seeing a real blogroll bug. We're getting notified that feeds are updating that we aren't following, yet they're showing up in my blogroll anyway. Either have to add some code or look for a bug. Good thing I've got the only really deployed blogroll now.
#
This is a nit, but it bugs me anyway. I'd love to know why Threads, which in every way is a modern JavaScript app running in a web browser, uses
urls that begin with www. In 2024. There's no harm in it, it's just there was a consensus a long time ago that the
www part was not necessary.
#
- We've noted this before.#
- Established facts about Trump eventually lose their currency, reporters forget and report it as big news next time they see it happening. #
- Trump's fealty to Putin for example. How could a reporter forget that? Yet they seem to. #
- Two moments to bring you back. #
Picture 1.
#
Picture 2.
#
- There are so many of these pictures. #
- Remember we tried letting Trump play president, we shouldn't have survived it, and in a lot of ways we didn't.#
- Collectively we're like the main character in The Sixth Sense (no spoilers, but if you have seen it you know what I mean).#
- So please, dear reporters and editors, try to factor actual proven facts into the context of your reporting.#
- Four things.#
- We're selling ourselves out by letting Facebook own a new social network and not putting that energy into building something that preserves our choice.#
- I understand that Facebook's claims of supporting the Fedisphere won't amount to anything. They will end up controlling what interop means, which means we end up with yet another app store, with all the nonsense that comes with. Welcome to CyberDisneyland.#
- You know all this, as well as I do. But we have decided not to care.#
- This is exactly how we snookered ourselves into using Twitter for 17 years.#
Lots of cleaning up after yesterday's party. I love that people are open to new ideas with blogs in 2024. It's been a while.
#
BTW, this is the
feed list for my blogroll. Feel free to import or subscribe to it into your feed reader.
#
The Scripting News
RSS feed now has a <source:blogroll> element.
#
A popup menu with all kinds of background info.
#
10-minute
podcast about today's Blogroll-out.
#
That's
a blogroll, over there.
#
Blogrolls were a common feature in early websites. A list of blogs you follow. A checklist of places to look at. Advertising our web friendships. Blogrolls were the beginning of today's social web.
#
It's time to take a fresh look at the humble blogroll.
#
Screen shot of home page, with blogroll, shortly after launch.
#
- Here's a screen shot of the new software that came out today, the blogroll feature on Scripting News. #
- It's a post on Manton's blog, viewed in the blogroll on my site, talking about stuff on my site. #
- As we used to say in the Old School Blogosphere: "Watching them watch us, watch them watching us, etc, etc."#
Manton's blog is expanded, revealing the five most recent posts. The cursor points at one, showing the full text in a tool tip. Click the link to visit the post on his blog.
#
Shortly after posting this item, Scripting News showed as the top item in the blogroll.
#
Then Doc Searls posted on his blog, and I had to snap a screen shot.
#
- Did you know that Doc coined the term blogroll? #
- Today was a very exciting day here, I think tomorrow will be too.#
- #
- This image was the result of a late night collaboration with ChatGPT. For some reason it can't spell anything right, and when I asked it to correct the spelling it mocked me. But I loved the design. It understood the hard part of what I was asking for. #
- The Knicks have been slumping since two of their top players have been out with injuries for over a month, after having an amazing January. One of the two star players came back last night, and what a difference! They went from being a team that could barely put a starting five on the court to having the deepest bench in the NBA. I was trying to do the math, but came up empty. They were absolutely unstoppable. Now that they have two superstars on the court at once, the opposing team can't just double or triple-team the one player, it's basically impossible to defend against their schtick. At the same time, the Knicks are great at defense. When the second injured player comes back, and it seems that will be soon, we might be back in the January mode that was so exciting. Even so, last night's game was a return to greatness. They blew out the 76ers, something that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. It's fun being a Knicks fan again! ❤️ #
Tim Berners-Lee's idea for user-owned and controlled storage is good. Can't tell you how many times, as a developer, I wanted this. To get it going it'll need at least a couple of compelling apps, to seed the bootstrap. Like
MacWrite and MacPaint for the Mac. Without that, it can't even begin. I could help with their bootstrap if I had some belief they had would not crush developers, which is harder to do than it sounds. The only times it has worked for me, for a little while, was when I created the platform and apps and content (you need all three). But the huge companies have no vision for the role of developers, so these things rarely even get off the ground, and who's going to sign up to believe in the goodness of a huge company. It's a very steep road TBL has chosen to travel. I have argued with my friends at Automattic that they are in a golden position to do this since they already have a large installed base product that's popular with users, and lots of developers who could make good use of storage attached to each account. I hope someone with deep pockets and longevity does it. Then we can really start building an app ecosystem on the net. We've been doing this for 35 years as TBL points out, and we still haven't created an economic developer ecosystem on the web. Storage, believe it or not, is the big missing piece.
#
We need a protocol for embedding a tweet in a web page. We used to have one with Twitter, but it now works only intermittently. Mastodon has one, and I have been able to use it. But really it would be nice to have a sort of jQuery of this stuff. If they're all going to create their own APIs we obviously need a container for that so developers don't have to worry about all of it.
#
BTW, has Twitter abandoned "tweet" as a trademark? Is it now public domain? Could someone ask?
#
I bet someone could develop and AI bot that takes a NYT article and removes the spin. It'd be interesting to see the befores and afters.
#
This
screen shot illustrates the core weakness of Mastodon. We need the ability to log on to Mastodon, not to an instance. A factoring of that functionality. It totally could work, some person, company, foundation or whatever could build software that acts as a simplifier. Have you ever used plex.tv? Somehow they manage to do it. You're connected to someone's server, but you log on through one site.
#
- Manton is doing great work.#
- His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.#
- We've been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.#
- That's imho the best part.#
- PS: Blogrolls is where the social web started.#
- PPS: I have to write a short "what is a blogroll" doc, re OPML and RSS. There's not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.#
- PPPS: I'm having flashbacks to Manila. We're using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software. #
- Zach Seward, a friend from my days at Harvard and NYU, got a kickass job, starting up the AI effort at the NYT. He's just the right guy for it. Young, curious, creative, and very ambitious. And he has a strong startup journalism background. I couldn't think of anyone I'd want more to be in this position. #
- Now that he's published notes for a talk he gave at SXSW, it's time to share some ideas I have for the NYT re AI.#
- Current events. This is something ChatGPT doesn't do. Not sure why. I'd like to be able to connect to ai.nytimes.com and ask it to give me a rundown on the lawyer who's testifying in Congress today about how our president is "elderly." I don't want pointers to stories, though they should be included in the response, I want a custom report, like the ones ChatGPT provides, that answers the questions I have about the MAGA lawyer. Maybe the AI will just give me the story without the spin. #
- More useful NYT archives. When I was a kid I spent so much time at the big library in Jamaica (Queens) going back through microfilm of the NYT from before I was born. So far all we've done is replicate the microfilm user experience (which is great and very useful) but the thing that ChatGPT does so well is prepare custom reports. All that source material, used to answer very specific questions. Answer questions like "has anything notorious happened in the neighborhood I grew up in, as far as the NYT knows?"#
- Sell a service to your readers where you manage the archive of their blogs, and in doing so you create a much broader archive for historians, journalists and others to study in the future, and, in the context of AI, feed it all kinds of perspective on the time we live in. Maybe in the future history won't be written by the winners (lotsa luck with that). Anyway, if at some point the NYT and other journalism outlets will harness the energy, knowledge and intelligence of the readers, why not start now? #
- I criticize the NYT a lot, I know. But that means I care. When I stop criticizing you'll know that I've given up. #
- Alan Kay said of the Mac, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. That's the spirit. #
Manton Reece:
Recommendations and Blogrolls. We have been working on this together for the last couple of weeks. Really exciting to see it come to fruition.
#
Journalism talks about Trump's trials, but they are trials for the Constitution too. If Trump is guilty (spoiler:
he is) then if he isn't punished we no longer have the rule of law. So don't miss that we are on trial too. And -- when journalism frames the faceoff as Democrat vs Republican, they ignore us, the people of the United States. Whether people know it or not, they will lose if the Republicans win. We know that, it's provable. And anything that's true should be built into the stories journalism writes about.
#
Last night's
email was a repeat of Saturday's. The reason was the switch to
Daylight Savings Time. This happens every year. The fix is to edit stats.json in the mail sender app's folder, and change
whenLastUpdate
to the day before, save it, and restart the sender app. It immediately sends out the correct email. I put this note here so I might find it next time it happens and I forget how to fix it.
😄#
- The other day I wrote proudly that we had better more reliable server software in 2024 than we did the first time we bootstrapped blogging communities. #
- And then this happened...#
- We've been having serious problems on feedland.com since Friday when I made a software version mistake. At first it caused the server to crash when you tried to subscribe to a new feed, so you'd get an awful error message, either from the FeedLand website, or the browser, saying the server had gone away. I quickly fixed that problem and another, and restored the server to some basic functionality. But when I did some work on my account over the weekend, I saw that there were new errors. And then noticed that none of my feeds had updated since March 8, they still haven't. #
- We're going to fix it this morning, by reverting the server software to the version as it was before the update, and the server should return to its previous reliability, Murphy-willing. Then we're going to upgrade the database, and then install the new software, and try again. That won't happen today and probably not tomorrow. #
- Most people probably don't know that feedland.com is a project I'm doing with Automattic. It's running in their cloud. This system should be able to scale up in ways that a Digital Ocean droplet can't, where feedland.org and the new feedland.social are running. So when there are many thousands of users, we should be okay. That's why I did the work to convert FeedLand so everything is stored in the SQL database, and nothing in the file system, among other changes that had to be made last year, like getting off Twitter for identity. That was not much fun, but it had to be done. #
- Anyway I am very sorry and embarrassed for the unreliable performance on our main server in the last few days. I can't promise it won't happen again, but we learned a lot in this experience, and in some cases re-learned. #
- It's even worse than it appears and as they say -- still diggin! #
Journalism is missing the story of the century. Does the American experiment end here? That's the horse race worth covering.
#
I still haven't found whatever it is that is causing the tabs not to respond to clicks sometimes on mobile devices on news.scripting.com and scripting.com. I'm thinking about all the time that's going into this and how much value there is in the tabs. I could also cut through all the michegas and just redirect from news.scripting.com
into FeedLand. The same data. There
are advantages to doing it that way. For some people that is what news.scripting.com will turn into. It's an on ramp to the world of collaborative feed subscriptions. The open social web, in feeds. Which is why we call it Feed
Land. You know The Land of Feeds. I like "land" names for products and companies. I started a company called UserLand a long time ago. I was skiing in Utah in 1989 when I decided on two names: UserLand and Frontier. I like product names that begin with F, esp if you come from the Mac -- where the
Finder is the app you spend a lot of time in. So Frontier was a good name simply because it was two syllables and began with F. I know it's weird. It's also why FeedLand feels like a homey name to me. :-)
#
Good morning. Here's the
next tabs test. Yesterday's test showed that tabs that switching between images is fine. The tabs never get hung up. Today's test is the same except one of the tabs is a FeedLand timeline. I want to see if somehow click events are getting lost on their way to the tabs manager.
#
Here's the
fourth testbed. This one has all the tabs in news.scripting.com. This testing has been really helpful. Please stay with the process.
#
The CEOs of Mastodon, Bluesky, Automattic and Ghost are all in my (real soon now) blogroll because their systems all support feeds. There's something new afoot. An open social network that "just works" across platforms because of simple easy well-established standards.
#
The
next test for finding the conflict in my tabs code. I'm trying to isolate a problem with the tabs code I use in my blog, and in various pieces of software. Late last year, I decided to stop making new tabs systems, and to invest in a single great tabs manager. This app tests only that code. So I want to know if this works. I may add another test after a while, based on the results of this test.
#
Of course the Russians and Repubs have a plan to blow up this election like they did in 2016. Probably something that uses AI. They'll be two steps ahead of the Dems who are famously tech-averse. And they'll get plenty of help from the press who are happy to repurpose Repub talking points as news. They never questioned Huh or
whatever his name is, they just carried his quote as if it were gospel. Of course Trump's legal bills will be paid by his fellow fascists around the world. His fines are small change so far, less than a billion dollars. Putin is the
richest man in the world. He could buy a 50% chance of owning the US government again for at most a couple of billion, only this time he'll really know how to loot it, and with his hacking he can improve the odds. Trump doesn't care as long as he gets to go on TV and preen. He loves
bending the knee for Putin.
#
I got a text message from an unidentified person saying they were coming to SF soon for some event so now we could go for a nice walk on the beach. At first I wondered who this could be. I have a 415 number, but I live far away from Calif. My first thought this was a friend who didn't know I moved (in 2009 btw, must not be someone very in touch). Of course it's just phishing. D'oh. It's clever. I guess. I guess it isn't really that smart to send a message to a random 415 number and assume the person might live in the Bay Area.
#
I just added a <link rel="blogroll"> to my blog. I don't think it's ever had such a thing before. Now where's the freaking blogroll?
😄#
Poor Things on Hulu is excellent. Didn't get a good
review from NYT. I usually like their reviews but this time I think the reviewer didn't understand. As I see it, it's hey check out what
Emma Stone is doing now. Really entertaining because she is such a thrill.
#
Here's a test you can help with if you have a minute and are using a tablet or phone. Go to
this page. Click on each of the tabs. Do the clicks always work? Or do you have to click several times to get anything to happen. There is no good or bad answer. It's just a test. Please report result
here. Say what kind of device you were using. Thanks! :-)
#
There's a problem on
news.scripting.com and the
scripting.com home page. On a mobile device, sometimes you have to click several times on a tab to get it to switch. It doesn't seem to happen in desktop browsers. Yesterday I finally got it to reproduce on my own machine, when emulating an iPad Mini in Chrome on my desktop. I added debugging code and set breakpoints, and had a theory that tooltips were interfering, which turned out not to be the case, but now that I can reproduce it here, I really want to get this solved. If you have development experience, or just like a good technical puzzle,
here's the thread. Help much appreciated.
#
Why hasn't anyone invented a substance that has the properties of snow but doesn't melt. It's probably a crazy question. Why hasn't anyone invented a substance that has the properties of snow but doesn't melt. It's probably a crazy question. Why does it have to be cold to ski??
#
When I was a kid we used card catalogs, microfilm, encyclopedia and almanacs. Much later there was the web with search, Wikipedia and archive.org. Now there's ChatGPT. Each level was a dramatic improvement of the previous one. Now everything we're all working on is cast in a new context. They don't mean what they used to. What problem with the AI solve next? Any one of us can discover one, any day.
#
Evan Prodromou
explains that he has access to a feature in Threads that we don't have, which allows him to follow his Threads account from a Mastodon account. This is the easy side of interop, the other direction is more difficult, not technically, but from a regulation and PR standpoint. Facebook (they call themselves Meta now) heavily regulates what people can see on their network, and it's hard to imagine them not having an App Store like the ones on iOS and Android that allows certain services to peer with them and disallows the rest. This should be factored into people's thinking about the benefits of federating. It probably will feel fairly one-way.
#
The State of the Union tonight was great. MSNBC hosts are totally turned on by Biden's speech. They're actually having an interesting discussion. Remarkable. More later.
#
ChatGPT is everything the
lazyweb was supposed to be.
#
If blogging does come back now, it'll have features it didn't have last time we were really working on it. The reason is cheap servers, we know how to use them, and the software is already written. You'll get a chance to see how that works in a matter of days now, Murphy-willing of course.
#
January 6, 2021, a date which will live in infamy.
#
Have you ever seen an investigative report on the
oft-quoted lawyer who
said the nasty shit about Biden's age? Where's the journalism there?? Tell us a bit about his flaws. Is he a Federalist Society guy? Who did he vote for. Any other conflicts of interest? What does he know about aging, btw? Is he an expert? Did he even take a college course on aging? Did he consult experts before forming his opinion? Also does he feel it's fair for a prosecutor to use his public platform to smear the reputation of an innocent person? And finally if there is no respect for the president as a person, what about the office, and the country the president serves? Does he have any respect for that? And did he expect to have the light shone on him for making such a bold and potentially damaging statement? And then let's find out why the journalists never shone the light on Mr Hur.
#
When a headline says
the presidential race is deadlocked, what actually happened, in terms of who, what, why, when and how. Could the people who write these stories pass a journalism course with this stuff?
#
This just in from Occam's News. The states of Colorado, Maine and Illinois have guts and the members of the so-called "Supreme Court" enjoy wearing robes to work and they have nice offices, and don't want to be shipped off to a gulag, or
worse, once Putin's lapdog is back in the White House.
#
Sidebar -- this also explains the behavior of the owners of the media companies, such as the
New York Times. He doesn't wear a robe, but otherwise,
Fear of Gulag probably has a lot to do with what he does.
#
From the Credit-Where-Credit-Is-Due department, links that are jokes was a practice I first saw in
HotWired in 1994. Here I am thirty years later and I'm still stealing the idea and every time I do, I think of Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman's
brilliance.
#
Screaming into the void, which is what the media we have now is really good at, gets us nowhere.
#
- A blogroll is a piece of an open, super low-tech, small pieces loosely joined, social network. And will help us bootstrap textcasting. #
OPML still has a lot to give.
#
The new version of
news.scripting.com is up. It's been a long time coming. It looks a lot like the previous version. But it's faster. And if you poke around you'll find some new stuff. There's an
About page, linked into the info icon at the top of the page. Basically the dust is settling on the big work we did last year, and now things are starting to feel more like products. I don't doubt there will be problems, as they say, still diggin! 😄
#
BTW, in case you're wondering where "still diggin!" came from -- here's the deal. I have a feeling that when I develop software it's a lot like digging a hole and then starting another, and another and using the dirt from a new hole to fill in the old holes. At any time there's more or less a constant amount of dirt and holes. It seems futile at first look, and second looks and third looks, but we do eventually get somewhere, or so we hope, maybe. It's like "even worse than it appears." Still diggin is meant to say we know it's really futile, you don't have to point that out, we never actually go anywhere or do anything, but we feel somehow that next time it really will work. It's a Vonnegut-like or Deadhead-like philosophy, which is also very Postel-like. In other words, realistic.
#
Emily Nunn: "I don’t understand how all the outcry about their bizarre and defensive political coverage and the scary effect it can have on the election is not a major investigative story being written by other journalists. Not some fancy media critic opinion or an editorial. A real report, taking defensiveness out of it and applying accountability." A regular reader of this blog will know how totally I agree with this. But oddly when I agreed with her, perhaps a little to strongly for her liking, she accused me of being a MAGA. It's so totally not true, and typical of reporters, to use an ad hominem to not have to listen to a non-journalist opinion about journalism.
#
I have been a reader of the NYT since I was a small child. I wanted to be a writer like
Russell Baker. I was quoted by
William Safire in an op-ed. I have done some of the
most successful work of my career with the NYT. I love journalism
like I love the Mets. I don't expect them to do great things every season, but I do hope for a
1969 or
1986 every once in a while. These days I don't have much hope for the NYT returning to its former glory. I also wonder if they ever really were that great, that maybe I was just a naive young hero-seeker, growing up in Queens in the 1960s. We
all have to work together to dig out of the hole we're in. And that means reporters have to start looking at themselves, and they have to listen to us, the people who care about the job that we need journalism to do, that it isn't doing.
#
- All these different networks, but it's all the same kind of writing. #
- I just pasted a link to a Substack post into a Threads document. #
- It would make so much sense if the document itself was readable right there, wouldn't it?#
- Is the concept of a "web page" all that valuable?#
- Imagine if each note was a node. #
- People learn to make art by studying previous artists. Would we want it any other way? #
- Imagine if everyone had to reinvent everything that anyone had ever invented just to make something new. #
- There is a lot of that in software, people won't put in an API so you have to rebuild the whole house just to get a window. #
- We can make progress when people don't try to lock up their ideas. #
- Individuals live just a short time, we can't do that much in a lifetime, but we are an amazing species, because we leave behind what we learn and we build. #
We learn by studying ourselves.
#
- So why shouldn't our machines be able to learn too? They already can do things vastly more complex than we can. We've invented a huge lever. #
- Science fiction tells us that we will lose control and be enslaved by our machines. I love those stories, like the Matrix and Battlestar Galactica. But those are stories, they didn't happen. The future is rarely so predictable. Things interact in unforseeable ways. #
- We're at dead-ends in climate and government. We need to make radical changes, and a fresh invention as radically progressive as any that has come before is now in our hands. #
We're going to use it.
#
- PS: I wrote the words, ChatGPT did the images. #
- A new version of news.scripting.com went up today.#
I like to save a screen shot when a new version of something goes up.
#
There's been a slowdown in
feedland.org, I believe it's related to a limit reached on the database server. But for now you may see it take a long time to load pages. I have a ticket open with Digital Ocean. Update: Problem fixed.
#
There are advantages to being older.
#
If the Democrats had a sense of the moment they'd run the campaign on a plan to regain control of the House and keep the Senate and White House so we can pass a law that legalizes abortion in the whole country. Give people a positive reason to elect a governing majority. Think powerfully.
#
- I found myself responding at length to my longtime friend and proto-blogger Jeff Jarvis, so instead of posting a thread of chained messages, I just made it a blog post. #
- The thing about Gaza is that there's the rest of the world, and they're watching to see how we deal with Israel, given that Netanyahu has been such an asshole to the US. He's a freaking MAGA. #
- So the president has to gradually increase the pressure on Israel, but he has to be mindful that there already is a shitload of pressure all around, more pressure is the last thing we need. A lot more people will die if it spirals out of control. But Biden is increasing the pressure. The images of the air food drops into Gaza from US planes is exactly the right way to proceed for the US. It shows that there's another path, compassion and help. #
- Being president of the United States is a complicated thing IOW. But they're doing it the only way we can, given who we are. #
- Jeff, I know you know this. This would be the adult discussion, which we never have. Journos seem to think Americans can't understand the basics of world politics, but somehow we understand the rules and history of the NBA, NFL and MLB. The functioning of politics isn't really any more complicated. #