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...

I wrote this on Bluesky this morning. Most of what passes for discourse on platforms like Bluesky amounts to spam and abuse. Makes expensive moderation necessary and who’s going to pay for that on an open system. It’s why this approach can’t lead anywhere but to yet another...

I wrote this early this morning as a test post for my WordLand site. Happy to report that my linkblog routine is back to normal. I really shook things up there, and it probably wasn't a great time investment. I had been using a custom front-end to FeedLand, which has a buil...

A longish thread that probably isn't going anywhere. My final thoughts, cc'd here to get on the record. anyway it's feeling like a lost cause. to be really blunt, i don't think AP or ATP are the answer. and i also don't care so much about this style of conversation. and i ...

I've been playing a little game, trying to answer the question -- if I had a modern implementation of Frontier that ran on Linux and new Macs, just as it was in 1992 when we released it for the pre-OS/X Mac, what apps would I want to hook up to it right away? What would the ...

Kos is moving to WordPress. This is very cool. It means people who write for Kos probably will be able to use my writing tools. I am sold on the idea of WordPress being the OS for the social web. That's the point of having a platform, we used to call it "users and developers party together." Hopefully without too much interference from the platform vendor, even better if there is no platform vendor. 😄

I asked ChatGPT for two sentences on the Innovator's Dilemma -- "[It] describes how successful companies can fail by focusing too heavily on sustaining innovations—improvements to existing products for current customers—while ignoring disruptive innovations that initially serve smaller markets but eventually overtake the mainstream. These disruptions often seem inferior at first, so established companies dismiss them, leaving space for new entrants to rise and dominate."

I saw that Matt backed off from porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress, basically turning WP into an OS. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but probably overwhelming in complexity. But it was the right idea. We need fewer runtimes. If you can merge two runtimes, go for it. Anyway, this is all related to the "open social web" -- in fact it's central to it. We've got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything. We would go back to the potential the web had before Twitter and Google Reader split the blogging world in two. I swear the answer is make it so that all these networks can do inbound and outbound RSS and build on the reality of the open social web, not just the hype.

tinyFeedReader is a hit. But the docs aren't clear enough. It has no user interface, it's a package you can include in a Node app that calls back to you when a new item comes in from one of the feeds you've told it to watch. It's a totally teeny little framework for a feed reader, you get all the standard stuff tucked away out of site, you write the functionality you want to implement. It would be a good thing to turn over to your AI programming partner. It's for people who want to add a feed reader to something else.

An improvement in WordLand on the server, we now post metadata to WordPress, along with the HTML rendering so that code that runs on the server can now access and possibly in the future even talk back to WordLand. You never know where this stuff can go if the developers take advantage of opportunities to interop.

WordLand v0.5.19 -- Lots of little fixes.

I'd love to see a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. I've asked people at various companies if they'd do this. I'm happy to help with the software but operating the service is something for a trusted company to do. I think this would go all the way to putting the "open" in open...

How odd on Independence Day a law goes into effect that funds a secret police for the US. The goal is to flow people from inside the United States into concentration camps, and ostensibly deport them to other countries. It may turn out to be easier and less expensive to just gas them and burn the bodies right here in the USA. I listened to this morning's Daily podcast to hear how they summed up the bill, and they focused on taxes and health care as most of the other news orgs have been doing. They were puzzled why the Repubs didn't seem to care if it hurt their electorate, but they didn't state the obvious answer. They don't care. Remember Occam's News. I guess they didn't want to say it out loud so they just telegraphed the question. It worked, message received.

Today is Independence Day in the US, so how about an Independence Day for the web. One simple way would be to turn Bluesky into a big feed reader. It could easily be done in software, it would just take money to keep it running. Not something I could attempt personally. But I would totally help with the software and design.

WordLand v0.5.17 -- Two changes with linkblog support.

Looking forward to putting linkblogs in WordLand to bed, I don't think too many people other than myself will use the feature, but I wanted to get it right and then move on.

BTW, this is where we're going with WordLand. I think we can have a simpler social web that builds on simple open formats. That's the plan. I will make an instance of this to show it can be done, both sides, reading and writing. They will work wonderfully with each other. You can write a nice reader and/or writer and it will work with this simple network. Think of the MacWrite and MacPaint of the open social web. Enough to get the ball rolling.

WordLand 0.5.16 -- Rounding out the linkblogging features.

Software internally is mostly pipes connected to other pipes, each adding a specific quality to whatever passes through it. If you have nice standards for what you send through the pipes, you can do more of what you imagine. This is called orthogonality. Factoring is when you notice a repeating pattern, and give it a name, and a set of things you can do to it, those would be names of pipes. I have to ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this, but I am also asking my human friends. BTW I expect this seems so natural because our minds probably work that way too, internally, below our conscious awareness.

More feedback on the design of Bluesky's API.

Bullshit. Lisa Murkowski goes on a press tour and sounds like she could be the one that breaks away from Trump in the Republican Senate. As with all of them, always, it was an act. She has a role to play, she's one of an agonizer. We have to stop believing these people. They've all been vetted thoroughly, they play their parts. They are amazing in terms of how organized and orchestrated their campaign is and how cold and heartless they are.