Podcast: Bird fight on the pond.

You couldn't have had podcasting without a lot of things coming together. Networks of writers who shared links. Blogging. A protocol for moving links around a network. HTTP. Something to attach links and recordings to. RSS. A standard format for recording. MP3. Inexpensive...

My mother would have been 93 years old today. She died in 2018, seven years ago. As time goes by, I feel her importance in my life more and more. I find I didn't have a realistic perspective in the living years. But more than any other person in my life, she shaped me -- for better or worse, but mostly better.

I had an idea that Global Voices, at least in concept, could help us prepare in the US for what's coming. I wrote: I'd love to have is an idea-sharing network where i could drop this idea in a box named "helping the US stay free" and have it find it's way to the right people in Ukraine who are saying "if only I could talk to people in the US trying to figure this out, we know so much about this!" That's the thing. How to connect know-how with the place that needs to know. To make our resistance more effective use the lessons learned in Ukraine over the last decades.

The purpose of the National Guard occupation of American cities is to control who votes. It doesn’t take much disruption to turn a blue district red. They just allocated $170 billion to fund ICE. They don't need all that money for border enforcement. It's meant to fund the transformation of the US into a Russian-style oligarchy. That's fear-inducing, but Ukraine has been fighting against becoming a Russian-style oligarchy for decades, with ups and downs, but so far, considerable success.

I've been building around WordPress to create a social network based on RSS. I want to get out of being controlled by billionaire-owned sites. I have a feeling we may need a good backup given where we are now.

I want to switch cell providers, so I used ChatGPT to figure out that Consumer Cellular is the best choice for me. I finally get around to filling in the form, and it complains about my zip code. "No service." Yes I know, there's no cell coverage where I live. I still need a freaking cell phone. Called them, the sales person says maybe it's a problem with your computer. Geez Louise. It's a problem with your computer. How many years have they had to fix this stupid bug. I could see if I was buying a landline. But this is a mobile device. That means it moves. To places with cell coverage.

What if you made a social network out of RSS? Then your blogroll would be the list of people you follow. Their updates would show up in a reverse chronologic list of posts that would look like something from Bluesky or Twitter. You could view a list of the people you follow, and expand each person to see their most recent five posts, summarized, with a link to each to read the whole thing. Since there are no limits to the length of a post in RSS there would be no limit to the length of one of these posts.

I've been watching The Dropout on Hulu. It's hard to watch at times, because the main character of the show, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is such a horrible person. She lies to everyone about everything, but she's cute and the VCs like her, so they pump hundreds of million...

I would like to get on the record.

1. The only billionaire-proof social network will be based on RSS.
2. The shortest path to being billionaire-proof for Bluesky is well thought-out inbound and outbound RSS.

We're going to have some interop based on RSS not too far down the road. A network that will only require an RSS feed for entry. It's what we should've built in 2006 and didn't.

The new header graphic is gift from Stan Krute at Fresh Art Daily.

We're in the doldrums of summer. It's hot and muggy, but I am where you want to be this time of year, in the Catskill Mountains, where there's lots to do outdoors, the peaches are fantastic right now, apples coming soon. I'm working a few hours a day on the integration of writing and timelines built around feeds. Instead of using Bluesky or Mastodon, with their limits, we use WordPress for storing posts. It has none of their limits, has a high performance open source server back-end, not without problems, but far ahead of where the competition is in terms are reliablity and ease of implementation. To be part of this network, all you need to do is a way of producing an RSS feed. Seems pretty openly billionaire-proof wouldn't you say.

I want a new ChatGPT mode where I drive the work, not the bot. I don't want it giving me answers to questions I didn't ask, because it's trying to navigate in my mind, and it has no information about that, so it's basically always wrong. I keep looking back on problems that took hours to solve because it drove the process and I went along with it. I want to tell it in advance to not make suggestions, to just answer questions. I call this "behave like a computer, not a human." Because it's a fanstastic computer, but not a good partner.

The big corner-turn is working. Here's a screen shot.

I like documentaries about climbing Mt Everest, but I absolutely hate watching people climb El Capitan. Then I realized that sometimes in software I'm climbing a cliff that's too tall to climb in one session, so I have to carry a tent and backpack with food and water. I hate this kind of programming more than anything, because it comes from not having a high-level enough runtime to support me in big corner turns. Or not having invested enough time in creating a layer I can build on. Anyway I'm in the middle of one of those corner-turns now. Hell has not broken loose although at times it looks like it might have. I'm being sure not to create another mess that needs to be cleaned up in the future. Not stressful, but I'd rather be doing anything but this. :-)

There should be a connection between DC residents and Kiev residents. They could teach us how to do this. They have decades of experience.

If you're trying to read any of my code via GitHub, make sure to open source.opml in Drummer, there are a lot of notes that don't make it through to the .js and .css files. I don't think I've ever said that on the blog before. I write my code in an outliner, and take advanta...

The future very much includes WordPress. It'll be as central a service as Mastodon or Bluesky.

You're going to think this is crazy, but maybe we should do what the hippie kids did in the 60s and 70s, giving flowers to the new cops in DC. Start off saying we don't blame you, we'll give you the benefit of the doubt, let's all be Americans and remember what that means.

Paul Boutin who I know from early Wired days offers some hope that it can be gotten to work, with a bit more guesswork, trial and error and head scratching. I probably will keep coming back to this until I break through. Or maybe hook up with another developer who can back into the websocket hose coming out of FeedLand. It's a natural thing to hook up to AI systems.

I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.

I want to work on the open web with other developers who make interesting products that we can hook up together to make new products. Or if users get an idea for linking two products, they can do it with scripting. It was a dream we had for the Mac, but it fell apart because...

Fixed a bit of breakage on the Links page over the weekend.

Theory about why we don’t fight to save the US.

Many of us haven’t personally felt much impact.

No hyperinflation yet.

The police still respond as they always have, wearing badges, faces uncovered.

The shelves are full at the supermarket.

The electricity is on, as is the internet. Buses and subways are running. The airports are open.

The Obamas and Clintons are still free, living in the US.

We read the news about universities and news orgs giving in. Corruption at the FBI and in Congress and the Supreme Court.

No major hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, tornados so cuts at FEMA not felt yet.

And we’ve been living in a normal way for hundreds of years. We’ve had no time to get used to the new normal. It doesn’t feel like anything yet.

I fear by the time we feel it it will be far too late, by design.

One more bingeable, Blue Lights from BBC on HBO Max. I love police dramas, esp British ones. I watched Peaky Blinders earlier this year and The Fall, another British crime drama, and, amazingly they all take place in Belfast, believe it or not, and don't count the number of times people say "wee" in the darndest places in BBC Belfast crime dramas. Do Brits really say wee all the time? How did I not see that coming.

Internet was out at the house all day. Luckily it was one of the most perfect days to spend outside. In the meantime, I highly recommend the Floodlines serial podcast from the Atlantic. It's bingeable in an afternoon, tells an interesting story of Katrina and New Orleans. The interview with Brownie is cringe-worthy not binge-worthy, I skipped over it.

I had an RSS-specific blog starting in May 2004. I had forgotten about it. Lots of stuff here, I just read through a few months.

There's a difference between reading a site in a web browser and it being part of the web. As it turns out what became Web 2.0, all built as silos, could more accurately be called Anti-web 2.0. Underneath all the silos, the heart of the web is still beating. Ready for us to build on it again.