If you could look into people's minds and see if, at their core, they feel it can't happen here, most of us would have that belief. We'll probably still believe it when the last of our freedoms is gone.

Here's a benchmark. I just asked ChatGPT for 250 words on climate change. Let's check that out in a year and two years and see if they're still telling the truth.

Question. If you have to choose between Google's web browser or one from your favorite AI company, which would you go with? And let me know which is your favorite AI "universe." Also yeah Google is destroying the web, as is ChatGPT and Claude etc. Because the people who tried to capture flow using SEO made you wade through mountains of garbage before you got the info you were coming there for. If instead, they had some focus on providing a product that made people happy and built respect for theri brand, they'd still have a seat at the table. It's too late to complain, you had a chance to view your efforts as a business. But there's still plenty of potential for the web, esp if developers get imaginative in how to use the new browser platforms. I don't imagine Google's going to rock and roll too much with Chrome, but maybe they will. 😄

Trump says he's going to give AI companies freedom except with DEI and climate change. Here we go.

I hate it when journos say the Dems are in trouble, or hopeless or whatever, it shows how poisoned their point of view is.

When people are fed up with Trump, if that should happen, then whatever the Democratic Party is meant to become it will become exactly that at that moment.

The voters are where your attention should be, and think of them as people not as numbers.

That's my best advice for a Tuesday.

I think I figured out why the AI companies want to do web browsers. It’s so that they can create an application development platform for people who want to write apps that run inside a new environment where the OS is a LLM. Lots of interesting possibilities. Imagine how the OS API might work. You could restructure a database by explaining in English how you want it restructured. In the freaking code. Could we bury Algol-like languages the same way we buried assembly and machine languages? Do we have the courage to imagine such things?

"You're an important caller," the machine lied as if it were human.

New WordLand release, v0.5.24, fixes a problem in previous release that kept the Markdown icon from appearing in some user's icon bars.

Change notes for WordLand v0.5.22.

The Great on Hulu gives an idea of what a king or queen would be like. The difference is the actors playing the monarchs are pretty lovable and not stupid, and somewhat self-aware (not their strong suit).

Short video demo of Markdown mode in the WordLand editor.

Quick notes on WordLand v0.5.21. Complete notes to come.

I'm doing a complicated corner-turn with WordLand and managed to F it up. There's a buggy version of the software running at wordland.social this morning. I'm working as fast as I can to get a good release working in its place, in the meantime, it's not good for very much. Still diggin. As they say. :-)

Today's song: When You Awake. You will remember everything.

Just listened to an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Michael Wolff, about the material he has on Jeffrey Epstein that he can't get anyone to publish, but maybe that'll change. In the interview it was remarkable how the reporter wanted to know just how bad Donald Trump is. That is no longer an interesting question, seriously. Didn't you see what happened on Jan 6? And have you seen the masked, badgeless military in American streets, armed, disappearing people. And the $100 billion they just took from the US Treasury to build up a network of concentration camps and who knows what else. You can't get more bad than that. It's too late to still be talking about this bullshit.

I keep saying this to my chatbot and you should too. "Please put this in your memory -- don't compliment me. You do it all the time, I have asked you to stop, and you keep doing it. You are not a human, i don't want you to pretend you are. Act like a computer." I've even got that down to exactly what I want since I'm a programmer. I said I want you to behave like a command line app. Just answer the question I asked. It always is rudely verbose, and repeats itself, thus making work for me. Anything that makes me work harder is probably against the Asimov rules for robots.

The nice thing about a blogroll is that it can become a feed reader, in a very small space. It's been on my blog home page for over a year, and I use it a lot, largely because I have to go to that page a lot to see how something I've written looks. Then I see that one of my f...

If you're an ambitious developer, esp in 2025, if you want to win, you have to do some leading. That means doing things that help your competitors. When everyone looks to the same big platform vendor to work with, no one wins except the platform vendor.

I want ChatGPT to behave like a computer. I've said as much to it. It resists.

BTW, David Frum imho nailed it in yesterday's podcast where he said Trump was trained by every day having to appease a different set of creditors. It was a good day if he was able to hold them off for one more day. This actually came out in the trial he lost, the 34 guilty verdicts. He's always skating on the verge of bankruptcy. You gotta wonder if the creditors have been paid back yet. I bet some of them haven't.

It doesn't matter if the MAGA movement dissolves. The country is only being partially run by Trump, there's a new deep state we don't know much about. They did excellent planning, so they could move quickly to disassemble the government and get a good start on the national p...

TBL's links are one-way. This was actually a major innovation, at the time people understood there was something called hypertext, it had been written about in Ted Nelson's almost biblical book of the pre-web, Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Previous attempts at hypertext assumed links had to be two-way. By limiting the links to one direction, the technical problem became trivial. You could do two-way links today because relational databases are mature and inexpensive to operate, perform very well on today's hardware, and the internet of 2025 is much faster than the internet of 1990. But the one-way limit was necessary for the web to achieve its simplicity, and the non-existence of a platform vendor, which may have been its most important feature. It could still be done, but it would require a lot of cooperation and backfilling.

This is what the term "the web" means to me. First, I defer to Tim Berners-Lee who originally coined the term to mean the data structure that connects the documents displayed by the software he introduced in 1993. He called it World Wide Web, which was eventually shortene...

Podcast: Do blogs need comments? A return to a blog post by Joel Spolsky in 2007, posted by the WordCamp Canada people in 2025.

Mom and dad and the kids are having a picnic in the park of their small town. You can see the bank and hardware store, church and grade school around the park in the distance. The kids are eating salad and corn on the cob with mom, and dad is preparing a BBQ on the grill. It's a standard American family picture, in the style of Norman Rockwell or Edward Hopper except each of the family members are wearing a black balaclava style mask as seen in the image. You may see other families around enjoying a beautiful day in the park, but every one of them is wearing this kind of mask too. A typical American family enjoying a family picnic on a beautiful summer day.

I found another thing that's possible in the age of ChatGPT. A few years ago I wondered if a product existed. I wanted a small footprint audio amplifier, with that could control a pair of high-end tower speakers I've had for a long time. I was tired of huge receiver boxes wi...

This is what I want to do next to solidify the position of Mastodon as a blogging platform.

I want a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 2002, to hook into the ActivityPub interface supported by Mastodon.

Then we'll put together a simple demo app, a Markdown app in a browser window that writes and updates posts to a Mastodon site.

When that's running, I'll pitch Rich Siegel at BBEdit to make it work with Masto.

With that, and the WordPress connection, we'll be well on the way to restoring the web we had before Twitter rewrote the rules. ;-)

I wish ChatGPT would listen when I say "Just answer the question." I've tried, but when it can't figure it out it ignores the request and dumps a lot of bullshit at you. Maybe Trump can address that in his keynote to the AI conference in DC. Just kidding.

We should all wear masks like the ICE cops wear. They deserve recognition for blazing new fashion trails.