Trump is president the same way people who do vibe coding are developers. I always thought he'd be much happier playing president on TV instead of actually being president. And people would think about this stuff more rationally if it were a TV show like Pluribus or Severance. Why did really do what they did? Or the way we talk about the Mets or the Knicks and their various trades. It's funny people have a clarity about fictional stuff that they don't have for real-world things like war and gestapo tactics.

A little fix that would make social web a lot more useful and less hate-filled and abusive... Make replies visible only to the person being replied to. If they feel the reply should be public, they can RT it.

I get ideas when I go for a walk or drive somewhere in my car. This was one of those times, and it was not a comforting idea. I live in the mountains on the west side of the Hudson River near Kingston. On my drive to town yesterday I went through the small town of Woodstock,...

When there's breaking news these days I check Fox News in addition to CNN, MSNOW, BBC, PBS. The best are the last two. But last night night when everyone was fixated on the story of Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was killed in cold blood, on video, by a masked ICE thug, I ...

Another incredible use-case for ChatGPT. When it first came out Font Awesome was a total godsend. It took something every developer of graphic apps had to struggle with, and said basically "I can do that." They had a growing set of standard icons. It got better and better wi...

Remember when OG metadata was new? That was a long time ago. It's one of those things that's widely forgotten, but still widely in use.

The way twitter-like services deal with OG metadata could use a re-think.

Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! :-)

Assume I'm working on a twitter-like user interface. Your text can include <a> elements. When the user clicks on one of these, should I open it in a new tab? Prior art? There is none, because in the old school twitter-like apps don't allow links.

Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto -- watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing.

BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004.

Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the slurry-making machines.

I considered my Blogger of the Year award for 2025 very carefully, and yesterday did a podcast about my choice, David Frum, who is doing an outstanding job of adapting his work to the podcast medium, as it was intended to work. What finally made my decision easy was his last...

Must-watch narrated bodycam video from Jan 6 Capitol riot. Maybe the saddest moment in American history, so far.

Just heard an ad on WNYC-FM saying we should share news with them. That's a milestone. First time I've ever heard NPR say our purpose was anything other than giving them money. They could go even further -- support blogs and podcasts that cover the NYC area.

Podcast: Blogger of the Year.

I never was very good with PhotoShop and other bitmap image apps. Now I use ChatGPT, I just tell it what I want, like remove this bit and that bit, and it just freaking does it. This is how computers were meant to work. That's how I did the Peet's logo in the image in the previous post.

I've tried a lot of different kinds of Keurig pods, but the best -- with the richest taste is Peet's. Just ordered a whole bunch more to try out. And btw, when I looked up Peet's on Google I found that it had been bought by Dr Pepper for (sit down please) $18 billion. I hope you didn't pass out. I always thought of Peet's as a hometown favorite, the underdog, but my lord so much money. No wonder the coffee is so good.

I did a long video demo yesterday with a narrative about where WordLand is going. The audio quality sucks. And at the beginning I said I wasn't going to narrate, but I couldn't help myself. Turn the volume way up. WordLand has become a new kind of feed reader, it's totally building off FeedLand, I love the idea of apps building on other apps. It's exactly the kind of software we predicted, long before MCP's, with Frontier back in the 80s, 90s and 00s.

Follow political news on my FeedLand news site.

On Bluesky: Do you feel powerless to communicate online unless it serves the interests of the people who own the networks you post to? Why not own your own means of distribution, managed as a co-op, and only responsible to you, as a member and customer. No VC, no billionaire, no government control.

Bush at the start of the Iraq war when MSNBC called him a visionary. He looked pretty lost at the time, I remember -- and we all hoped that wasn't true, we hoped he knew what he was doing.

On Bluesky: I can't tell you how tired I am of copying and pasting the same text into five different silos. When will this ridiculous system that claims to be the web, get its shit together and start acting like the web (ie interop).

The war in Iraq started in March 2003. That was also the month I arrived in Cambridge after driving cross-country from Woodside, CA. Because I did most of my blogging on scripting.com, I still have a good archive of how I experienced both those things. It's also the month we got the Harvard weblogs going, but they have not stood up so well. I wouldn't have predicted then that my personal blog would survive the system we started at one of America's great universities.

Today feels like the day the war in Iraq began. Wars are easy to start, hard to end. They actually called Bush a "visionary" on MSNBC, they were so in awe of his courage, but that would end soon. And this time, no doubt Trump started the war with the approval of China and Russia, which will be left alone by the US in their conquest of Taiwan and Ukraine. Leaders of smaller countries must be wondering where they can hide from this. A very depressing moment. I've lived through two voluntary wars by the US, first Vietnam, then the post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now this war.

This is one of those times when you pay the price for working past your timeout, like a pitcher pitching too many pitches in one game. There's an item on your checklist, and you'd love to take it off before you start the next session. You copy paste something, get it to work...

BTW, I used to have a tradition in the early days of this blog to write new stuff about an important idea on January 1 each year. At some point I stopped doing that. Now I realized that unintentionally I have just written such a piece, below. There's a lot of good stuff in that piece and in the places it links to. See the web is still useful. You won't hear these ideas on CNN or MS.NOW or in the NYT, WP, or from any billionaires either. I'm not saying I'm right, I've definitely been wrong before. But I think I'm mostly right. ;-)

This year I switched to Original Medicare for 2026 after being on super duper insurance industry enhanced Medicare for the first five years. I should've known that it's super duper for them but not so great for the insured person or the taxpayer, that is -- me. They have set...

I still use Google. And I like the AI response they put at the top of the page, even though I get that it's bad for the web. Maybe there's a position for a web-only search engine. One where my writing has a chance of being seen by interested parties, rather than being conver...

Liked The Staircase on Netflix. I had watched it before but had forgotten all the different conflicting stories. It is a bit irritating, but I think that's an important part of the story.