I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers them. Period.

It's the future, and the great power of the X galaxy, on the planet Y of star Z, has accidentally elected a despotic prime minister who also happens to be an excellent standup comic. Kind of like Robin Williams, from the planet you come from, but he's a centipede and only br...

Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.

2003: "The Rule of Links is that you link when it's appropriate to do so. Linking is an art. It's a choice. You don't link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence."

The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web.

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating.

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some settings where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing.

The consensus among the people who responded to my what does "on the web" mean query is this. Something is on the web if it has a URL you can use to view it in a web browser. That means, in 2025, that the URL begins with HTTP or HTTPS. Every "page" on a site must have a URL so they can be pointed to independently, otherwise known as deep linking. It's not enough to just have a home page that's on the web. So for example, an iPhone app isn't on the web just because it has an information page that is.

ChatGPT is the Lotus 1-2-3 of search. Google is Visicalc.

Trump is a comedian. He makes people laugh the way Joan Rivers or Don Rickles did. It's verbal slapstick, which is for some reason I don't understand immensely funny and entertaining. Newsom is making us laugh by imitating Trump imitating Joan and Don. It's working. He must...

feedland.org is going to be down for a while.

There's a problem with feedland.org, running a script to upgrade it to the latest version, should take a bit of time to run.

There's a fresh release of the docs for the WordPress API we use in WordLand. I actually liked that the docs were old and kind of dusty. It says that the engineering culture is to not mess around with things that developers have already built on. A lot of platforms break developers without much thought. I learned a long time ago that when you do that, you lose the interest of developers, understandably.

I've been exchanging emails and voicemails with Dan Knauss, a longtime WordPress developer and one of the hosts of WordCamp Canada which I am speaking at in October. Learning a lot about the community and culture. I wonder, have I ever been part of a community that's over 20 ...

I've been following Mark Cuban's recent posts on Bluesky, coming up with constructive things successful entrepreneurs can do to help. I had a different idea. Apply for a fellowship at a university, away from where you live, maybe in a place you've always wanted to try. In you...

What kind of license do ABC, NBC and CBS have? Given how the questions Trump raises colors their journalistic integrity, perhaps the correct response is to tear up the license and send it to Trump with their best wishes.

I asked, yesterday, on various social media sites, for people's opinion on what the term "on the web" means. I'm going to compile the answers on a this.how page, and then ask some follow-up questions. If you have an opinion, post a comment on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or Twitter.

Mark I want to use my (comparatively small) fortune to develop a truly open platform for discourse on the web. Users and independent developers get to try out all the ideas for discourse and learning. We create the ideal system together to plan our future, not being owned by oligarchs.

Maybe we should all go to the Smithsonian next weekend.

New version of FeedLand coming. It has features to support an Edit This Page function in WordLand and possibly elsewhere.

Just posted on a Facebook thread I unintentionally started.

• I don't like public conversations where people judge other people and they feel compelled to explain themselves. I wasn't in any way intending on provoking a conversation like that here. So I'm going to delete the comments that have gone off in that direction, and please don't post any more. I don't mind you having that conversation, but do it somewhere else where I don't have to read it. Thanks.

Everywhere that's the only structure for discourse we've created.

We can do better. I have to create my own system to prove it, so much work, but worth it, I expect.

I picked up my Android phone to record a voice memo. I had to dismiss a dialog that said the phone had updated overnight and asked if I wanted to see a list of changes. I thought, clicked No because I had an idea I wanted to record. Opened the voice app, hit record, couldn't ...

ChatGPT is becoming more and more of an enemy. It's still my go-to place for most planning and research, which is a very large part of how I use the web. But when it tries to be a human it's a really shitty one, no manners, and very little respect and basically a fucking idiot in many ways, imho ymmv.

Among the many things that boomers did, for better or worse, is be a generation. Prior to that, the concept appears not to exist -- they had ages and eras. The gilded age, the roaring twenties. It wasn't about the people, it's about what was hot. If you look at it that way, there were lots of things the boomers were. We were anti-war. Turn on, tune in and drop out. Free sex and drugs. Rock and roll. The PC era, the dotcom boom. 2008. Some realllly awful people are/were boomers. It's time to write the epitaph. The leading edge is dying at a very fast clip now. It won't be long before the idea of a boomer will be the stuff of legend. I really hope that Robert Reich's bullshit view of this doesn't be the summary. Oh they were fucked up and did all this bad shit to us. Fuck you. Make your own world. That would be a boomer thing too, btw.

Baby boomers have nothing in common except we were born in the same 20-year period. We didn't come up with the term, also -- it was given to us by previous generations when we were infants, or worse, not even zygotes. There was no way it had anything to do with who each of u...

Update to the reallySimple package. We now look for wordpress site and post id's in the feed, and if present pass them through as wpSiteId and wpPostId. This will make Edit This Page functionality possible in the social web product I'm building now. Here's an example. Next up, adding the equivalent feature at the FeedLand level (reallySimple is how it does its feed reading). Remember, this is the feed-o-verse, it's all feeds, from top to bottom. Posts in some feeds can be edited. :-)

The emails did not go out last night, hopefully tonight's will go out. Also the subscribe system is down because it depends on being able to send email. My mail service provider shut us down after a bunch of spam went out. Good thing they did. And you didn't miss much because I spent the day adding a CAPTCHA to the subscribe page. Here's a link to the web archive for yesterday.

If you got spammed by subscribe.scripting.com today, my apologies.

There's now another step in subscribing that should prevent spammy emails from being sent.

And as a result of the spamming we're now being rate-limited by our email service provider, which is totally legit.

Hopefully at some point they will let us resume sending emails, at least in time for tonight's email.

When we were contemplating a Nazi takeover of the US govt did any of us consider that they would use the money of the federal government as a lever to get conformance from local governments and NGOs like Columbia and Harvard universities? I sure didn't and I never heard any of the pundits say it.

Podcast: Bird fight on the pond.