If you're a regular reader of my blog you know I put images in the right margins of pieces. I get an idea then I go scouting around using search to find the image that fits.

Today I was looking for an image of an army General.

• i'd like a painting style image of an american general in world war ii timeframe standing on a white background, full body from shoes to helmet, lots of medals, angry determination on his face. as if it were a portrait.

This is what I got, and it's perfect.

BTW, this piece in the NYT has a bit of wisdom that I had not considered because I don't listen to Joe Rogan it would never occur to me. He's relaxing white noise, chatting in the background while you play a game or write a blog post or text message on your phone, or just th...

I figured that yesterday's army march in DC would have caused clashes with the police in more places than it did, perhaps due to false flag attacks "from the left" at one of the many No King Day parades around the country. I thought this was the moment when it would all melt...

When Trump was on trial in NYC he begged for support from his base, no one showed up. The cops prepared for rallies that never showed up.

It's not just the government that's afraid of small groups of people working together. Big tech companies also. And startups hoping to sell out to big companies.

If you think we need to find a way past the billionaires, then we have to find a way around the established media. They keep selling us out and we keep acting as if we show them that they're doing it in a way they understand they'll get on our side. But they can't. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair in 1935. It's still true 90 years later. Another great philosopher, Les Moonves, said in 2016, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," referring to Trump's run for president. He was referring to increased viewership and resulting ad revenue. I'm sure it's still true today, though CBS stopped boasting about it in public.

Today's song: Queen of the Roller Derby.

The linkblog project is coming along. Still more things to hook up but I thought it would be nice to take a picture of what a linkblog post looks like in the reader app. What a linkblog post looks like in my reader. And just for fun because we can do it, here's a screen shot of the screen shot in the reader app. It's RSS items all the way down. This could obviously go on forever.

Having a Democrat rise from the ashes of metoo is just what the doctor ordered. It could cure the revulsion some voters feel for Democratic wokeness. Cuomo was never tried or convicted of any crime, or voted out of office by the state assembly or senate in Albany. Or the peo...

"Who me?" asks the Democrat. Yes, you.

BTW isn't it amazing that when you say something counter to Democratic dogma, their first impulse is to try to destroy you personally? "Who me?" asks the Democrat. Yes, you.

Having a Democrat rise from the ashes of metoo is just the right thing to say to voters who were rebelling against wokeness. Cuomo was never tried or convicted of any crime, or voted out of office by the state assembly or senate in Albany, or the people of the state of New Y...

You'll know who the next leader of the Democratic Party is because they will be campaigning against the Democratic Party but talking about things that actually happened rather than the hallucinations the Trumpites indulge in.

Yesterday I posted a link to my political disclaimer from 2018. Also listened to a podcast interview with Senator Gallego of Arizona who says, correctly that the Democrats have work to do with men. It's true, speaking as a man who has been voting solid Democratic since Kerry...

Today I'm going to teach WordLand how to be a linkblog. Before doing that I tried to figure out what a linkblog is. I have been using various homebrew linkblogging tools which I have shared with others, but none of them became popular products. I wrote a summary to help guide the development work I have planned.

I was lucky to grow up in NYC, and had to commute from Queens to the Bronx every day to go to school. Some days I took the Q44 bus over the Whitestone Bridge, and other days I took the Q17 to the 7 train through Manhattan, and then the 4 or D trains up to 205th St in the Bron...

I was wondering if Saturday's military parade in Washington was going to be the rollout of the Trump junta, and if that meant the president would appear in military garb, perhaps subdued so next year's parade they can add more features. So I asked ChatGPT to help. President...

I needed an updated bio for a conference in October.

Using soldiers as a political prop. Trump gave a political speech, lying about protests in front of a group of people dressed as American soldiers. They all appeared to be enjoying the president’s tough talk about the role he wants the military to play in policing the cities. MSNBC should not broadcast this.

I'm trying to make a linkblog with a WordPress RSS feed.

Yesterday I introduced a new feed for great art, 24 times a day. Every hour on the hour.

Today, a version of that feed provides one work of art each day, at midnight, Eastern.

• art.feediverse.org
• artdaily.feediverse.org

Why I did this feed. I'm crafting a new information product, and I want to include a random work of art but not every hour, once a day is enough. I thought it was worth a detour to make the feed that I wanted.

The first work of art in the feed on its inaugural issue was The Countess from Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526. It was chosen at random from a collection of 42,473 works of art.

Would one of the browser vendors work with me on doing something nice with displaying feeds in XML form? I don't support obfuscating what a feed is, that just adds confusion. When I lift the hood of a car I want to see an engine not a drawing of something that sort of looks like a car, but not really, and looks nothing like an engine.

Here's something to think about. As you may recall, I have an hourly art feed, available both in RSS and on Bluesky. Same content. Today I gave each the same new name, art.feediverse.org. If you use that URL on Bluesky, you go to its version of the content stream. And if yo...

There's a documentary coming out about podcasting. I was interviewed in it and got to tell a bunch of stories, about how you get people interested in working with each other. I told the story of how I chose the Grateful Dead's music to get the initial implementation going, on both the sending and receiving side. I used their music, since it so totally fit in with the philosophy, ie come as you are, we're all just people. And the song I chose was a good one too, the US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. I've been hiding out. In a rock and roll band." Using great art to prototype this connection makes total sense. It says we carry forward our art where ever we go, no matter where it takes us, a great work of music or art is always a good thing to share.

Yet another journalism article about how AI is not really intelligent and all the tech industry hype must stop now or else we'll write another strongly worded article about how they are not really intelligent just like the 800,000 previous articles about how AI is not really intelligent.

Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard.

I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.

I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. I see the same sort of thing happening in LA now.

Some random thoughts about wealth. Suppose you're an average middle-class person who works for a tech company when the company is bought out for a huge amount of money and your stock is now worth $10 million. It's liquid today. You just received a check for $10 million. What...

A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.