Someday Manton and I will make a very nice Markdown editor for Mastodon, and it'll work very nicely, and then I'll pitch Rich Siegel to do the same for BBEdit. That will nail it once and for all that Mastodon is a blogging platform. He's the right guy to do it, he has all the protocols implemented on micro.blog. All I want is a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 1998 or so. We're turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

This comment makes my day. Some features you develop and never use. I poured a month or so into the blogroll software last year, and it turned out to be a total win. All the new stuff floats to the top. I can quickly find out what they posted. It's a portable version of my fe...

Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)

I really like the Wikipedia slogan, "The internet we were promised."

I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better.

I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting.

I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you.

I was poking around on an old server, and found a domain that looked interesting, and it was. The first version of Daytona, built around an outliner. I got the impression people didn't like it, so I developed a new one using a more conventional approach, and I love that one too, and I did a better job the second time. But it's interesting to poke around the old one as well, and it still works, which is great to see. In an alternate universe in the year 2025 the whole human species is organized by one big outline that everyone contributes to in peace, love and harmony, as opposed to this one which grunts and snorts on Twitter and can't even put a freaking title on their posts.

Podcast: Rebooting the Democratic Party.

I've found in the last few days if you just accept the insanity of CSS you get better results.

Something I've learned in decades in tech, people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors.

I figure that there have been movies about all kinds of ridiculous things, and wondered what a movie inspired by ChatGPT would be like. So I posed the question on various social media sites, hoping to inspire creativity. John Philpin asked if I had asked ChatGPT and I admitt...

A story about listening to friends vs competitors. Back in the early 90s I was working on system-level scripting for the Mac, supposedly with Apple, but it's no secret the rank and file at Apple didn't like us. They were told by the execs they had to work with us. So when it ...

One consequence of each AI vendor having their own browser is that each will have their own OS-level window. This may make it a little more or less manageable. Hard to foresee the possibilities. Not sure a browser is the best place to put AI. I'd prefer perhaps an environment that supports a GDI like Quickdraw so we can start using math instead of voodoo to design interactions.

I'm helping Automattic with their marketing. The WordPress-Mastodon connection is the world's best kept secret. Reminds me of that great scene in Dr Strangelove where the Doctor asks the Russian ambassador what was the point of the Doomsday Machine if they kept it a secret. ...

I want Mastodon to take off as a blogging platform. That means hooking it up to existing blog platforms. I want our world to connect to theirs. I'm lucky to have bet on WordPress, so my product gets the connection to Mastodon for free. But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it's only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon. That's the goal. I just wrote a couple of posts where this became clear to me. Who has the code and expertise to create a simple interface from the outside world to Mastodon. The interface doesn't have to be RSS. But it has to be maximally simple, and it has to cover the basic features of blogs that Mastodon supports.

AI chatbots don't think and they don't decide. They can give you a way to approach a problem, but it's only one way, and it depends on it actually understanding the problem, which is something it does a good simulation of. But it absolutely cannot think, come up with a strat...

The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks it's running the show. I've just given it instructions to think of itself as a command line that can understand English. Just answer the question exactly as asked.

Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the electorate and the press. We have new analytical tools, we should use them. We're only now, far after it's too late, finding out the awful things that the BBB going to do to us. The Repubs planned this out far in advance. They probably even had software tools to advise them on ways to word the bill as the changes were negotiated.

I took a long drive today on back roads, down toward Poughkeepsie, and on the way back a big pickup swerved into my lane. I had to swerve away from it and hit the brake, and had a bit of a conniption. Got me thinking. Who was it that did this. Man or woman, young or old, spac...

Have they made ChatGPT more stupid in the last couple of days? Or maybe I'm starting to see the problem. I was trying to debug a piece of software that sends mail. I use Amazon SES. I wanted to see if the software was actually communicating with the server, and thought for sure there must be a log of requests on the AWS system. Where is it? I asked ChatGPT. It starts telling me to check all these things and never got to the part about where the log is. So I said, just tell me where the log is. Again, it tells me about all these nice things I should check first. I asked again, this time in ALL CAPS which is how I communicate that I really mean it. Again more bullshit. So I think to ask Is there a log? No, it says, actually there isn't one.

Earlier I wrote this post: The worst thing about Claude and ChatGPT is that you can't get them to work with you the way you want them to. They always run off and do the things I asked about. So if I say "what if the middle column must be at least 600 pixels wide? What I wan...

The worst thing about Claude and ChatGPT is that you can't get them to work with you the way you want them to. They always run off and do the things I asked about. So if I say "what if the middle column must be at least 600 pixels wide? What I want is literally an answer to t...

I've been asked by a number of people why I want a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. Fair question. Here's why. WordPress has demonstrated that most of the features of the web in regard to documents also work in Mastodon, via ActivityPub. To demonstrate here's a WordPress po...

How did they get soldiers to do this? American soldiers? We are truly lost. Were they masked too? What happened to their honor? Why the fuck would an American soldier need to hide their identity? Anywhere, but esp in America? Why don’t they put down their weapons?

On Bluesky: "The web is still there under all this michegas, ready to be magical again any time we want it to."

There I said it. To ChatGPT. i find flexbox too confusing for me to use at this time. maybe in a year or two, after some more learning. i hate css, everything about it. so it's hard for me to learn new stuff. i grew up using quickdraw on the mac, where i could do everything...

New thread on Mastodon: OK, i give up for now on getting a team of nerds together to build a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub along the lines of what Automattic has done to bridge WordPress to ActivityPub.

Yesterday I wondered if the open web is a lost cause. A few minutes later, I saw my name in a tweet on Bluesky from Aram Zucker-Scharff. In it was a message that can be summarized as follows -- don't give up yet Dave. AZS has a linkblog which he calls an amplifeed. Same thi...