If you've had trouble unsubscribing from the nightly email, I fixed a big problem there this morning, so please try again. If the problem persists, here's a place to report.

Manton Reece explains why Micro.blog uses Markdown. I use Markdown because Manton does. It's for interop.

If I had billions of dollars I'd divest. And if my country did a good job of investing in education, health, voting rights, stuff like that, I'd just give most of it back to the country. Thanks for the education, and saving my life with medicine not just once but twice. Thanks for being such a cool country. If only we lived up to the promise, but now we'd certainly need to come up with another way of distributing the benefits to the country and its people.

2016: Your human-size life.

No one got any sleep in these parts last night, was like a non-stop tornado, but I did watch a couple of artsy movies that were really good. And this morning power was out and internet, and I thought for sure some trees had to be down, but only one was, a huge one, and I had to walk to the post office to use their phone to call a friend with a big saw and truck, and I wondered how he'd get rid of the tree, and this is how. First he chopped it up into bits with a saw, and then used the same plow he uses to get rid of the snow to push the tree parts off to the side of the road. And when I got home the internet was back on and I'm going to spend most of the rest of the day sleeping, maybe or drinking a load of coffee and trying to stay on a normal schedule.,

I'm doing some really excellent work on WordLand II, which is almost starting to get useful. We should be doing a lot more than writing posts next year. It's helping that a few of us are using Instant Outlines in Drummer to coordinate work. I work so much better this way, but it's not something you can do on your own.

"I don't have time for this." That might be the name of a podcast. I just ended one with that exact phrase, and it totally fits the way I feel about these rambling diatribes by the time I'm about to sign off.

When you're buying a house, the most important thing to check is the roof. Get two inspections. Get three. A house with a good roof will keep you dry. A house with a shitty roof isn't really a house is it?

This came up on Kottke. I'm going to try commenting on other old school blogs more. Want to see if we can reboot the original sphere as a way of priming a new one.

We love Pluribus because it has all the features that we find irresistible.

1. AppleTV.
2. The makers of two previous huge hits.
3. An unsung and much loved star in the last hit.
4. An intriguing sci-fi plot.
5. It’s pretty good adventure type thriller in the first episodes that settles into a slower sexy love story.
6. A clever final scene in the final episode.
7. A typical long wait for the next season.

But all this is incidental, what really matters is that we’re all involved, have opinions, and thank goodness it doesn’t actually matter like the other stuff we debate.

I rated Common Side Effects as Loved, the second highest rating on Bingeworthy.

The biggest contribution ChatGPT et al could make to software development, beyond what it has already done, which is enormous -- is help us come up with a new general purpose programming language which is a lot easier for human programmers to work with, esp over time. I work in one of the most complex environments imaginable -- browser apps talking to server apps in JavaScript. We could do so much better. And now we have a partner that knows all about all our languages, unlike any human being on the planet. Instead of having a lot of disconnected bubbles, it would be great if programmers could come together on a new language that make it easier for us to manage lots of software projects.

Sarah Kendzior is a political writer who I greatly admire. Her frustration sounds a lot like mine. I wrote in 2017 that the bankers in tech should watch out because Twitter had just elected a president, and its market capitalization was so low that it was bound to get bought...

Just realized I'm like a Black Lab. I always have to have a ball to chase, and really like it if someone says I'm a good boy. I think it really is that simple. Maybe it's different for other men, but I think a lot of us are just that simple.

It is Christmas Day, and last night the emails did not go out. I think I know what the problem is and if it's correct the emails should go out very shortly. Lucky that it's Christmas themed! Ho ho ho.

I asked ChatGPT to put together a subscription list of student newspapers at American universities. Added it to lists.opml.org.

Joni Mitchell wrote a sad and lovely Christmas song.

I got a Kuerig single cup coffee maker and it's perfect. Exactly what I needed. The coffee is great and hot, and one cup is what I usually want. So now I can have a cup of hot coffee when I'm up late and want to stay up for a while longer. Or if I have to be extra sharp for some development project I've been putting off.

This time of year every day feels like Saturday. I love it. Why can't we always live like this?

Sometimes you think of things 22 years too late, like this time. I wish I had thought of meeting with the Harvard Crimson people in 2003 and made the same offer to them that I had made to NYT the year before, ie we should offer blogs to everyone on staff, and anyone they quote, or basically anyone they want to be writing on the web, which was still a new thing -- and we'd host them alongside the ones we were hosting at the law school. Had we done that there would be a scholarly and intellectual equivalent to Facebook which was also booting up on the same campus at the same time as blogging and podcasting. Love and intellect, that's a good combination for young super-achievers.

After thanking the Inoreader team for implementing inbound dynamic OPML, I thought to ask if they had also implemented outbound?

Yes in fact they have. "Yes, it works the other way too! You can right-click a folder → Folder properties → enable Output feeds, choose OPML, and you’ll get a URL you can use for syncing elsewhere."

To which I replied: "We're going to be best friends. ;-)"

This is how a ball starts rolling. You can sit there forever just wishing someone would play the game with you. And then one day, quite unexpectedly -- it turns out that someone has been doing the same as I have. And now our products are connected.

Here's the list of feeds I'm subscribed to in Inoreader. And it should update when I subscribe or unsubscribe to feeds.

Bing!

Bing!

Bing!

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, b...

I'm probably extra impatient because I'm a former CEO, and had enough people in my loop every day that if even one person stretched things out the way ChatGPT does, I wouldn't necessarily fire them, if their work was good, I'd just find another way to catch up on their work. I really liked management by walking around, I would get ideas hearing people explain how their work was going. And I could often make their work easier by checking in with other people who could help.

Does anyone know how to get ChatGPT to upload files to a publicly accessible place? I'm tired of having to copy/paste the data files it comes up with for me, they're good. Another weird thing, they can't run JavaScript code in web pages. I had to look up the API endpoint for the data that's behind a FeedLand timeline. I didn't mind doing it, but can't imagine it's very good at scraping the web if it can't run code in pages.

One of the reasons ChatGPT dominates in discussions about scientific issues is that it can type at a much high rate than a human can, and produces reams of ways of saying the same thing, and again always tries to take over the lead in determining which direction to go next. It leads to ridiculous situations where it's guessing at what FeedLand does, and it's all over the map, but I actually know what it does, because I wrote it and support it. It's not funny, it's very bad for getting things done. You can tell it to talk less, and for a while it remembers, but in a few days it'll be doing it again. Yet it still is very very useful. It's just talks too much. Kind of like the way if I put my name in a search query on Google it asks if I really meant "winter" instead of my actual last name, which it knows. Stupid f'ing machines.

In 2026 and beyond, web devs will build on WordPress as if it were as crucial a part of the web infrastructure as the web browser or server, but performing a different but essential function that has been missing for the weird reason that few web developers know it is there.

This has been one of the big problems in tech as journalism beyond rewriting press releases has been gone for a couple of decades. No way to get news out about new developments. We have to fix that too, btw. ;-)

Yours in support of the largely forgotten freedom of the world wide web.

Dave

BTW. Why video "podcasts" will never replace audio-only podcasts. Two reasons. 1. There are places where your eyes aren't available to watch a video, like when you're driving a car. 2. Listening to audio only is different from both audio and video. Audio forces your mind to fill in the blanks, which taps into the listener's creativity. No way to say one is better than the other, but they are different. I watch plenty of video, at home or on a train, but I also like to listen to podcasts when I'm walking or driving, riding in a bus or subway, or waiting in line somewhere.

So maybe I should do a Waste of a Blog award. Just kidding.

I generally am not a podcast reviewer, that is I don't review individual podcasts, except when I'm choosing one for Blogger of the Year, as I'm thinking of doing this year. But there's a whole class of podcasts that I am prepared to love that do it just plain wrong. Current ...

Here's the transcript of the conversation. One thing it is not good at is being reliable at saving transcripts. I find a lot of times people can't read it. Reminds me, this is the kind of thing Firefox could be excellent at. Give it a way for an app to say hey the user asked for a transcript. Here it is. Save it where they're expecting to find it. No reason the browser can't have a JavaScript accessible API, or is there some rule they can't add functionality to their APIs?