Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
Rights: © copyright 1994-2024 Dave Winer.
Generator: oldSchool v0.8.12
I tried to get ChatGPT to draw an Amazon ad for the cap. This was the best we came up with, and it's not great. I'd like a model who is more everyday American, but this might help move the idea forward a bit.
One America Together ad. Video of Mike Myers doing Elon Musk in last night's SNL cold open.
Myers does Musk almost as well as Musk does Musk.
If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.
What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021.
My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?
AOC asked for ideas of what to do for the SOTU.
I suggested we come up with a new slogan. Like this.
“One America Together”
Make hats, purple — enough for everyone, including the Repubs.
During applause, Dems rise and chant “One America Together.”
What do you think?
Wordle Kitty throwing out the first pitch of the baseball season. The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there.
These days I read Timothy Snyder's essays as soon as they come in.
New month. Last month's source code archived. Onward! 😄
Nice to see Doc Searls using WordLand. He's been an early user of every writing tool I've written for the web going back to the mid-late 90s.
Like many other people I love Severance, esp this season, and esp the most recent episode. And my favorite scene in the last episode took place at a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Severance podcast, about this episode, which you should definitely listen to if you like me love the show. They have an interview with Christopher Walken who plays Burt. Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that I learned in the podcast that the restaurant mentioned earlier is actually a famous Kingston restaurant that just re-opened after a long hiatus, so I've not yet had a chance to eat there, but I want to, Eng's. This, after learning that the diner that's in two scenes, one in each season, is the Phoenicia Diner, one of my favorite local eating places.
Me as a grad student at UW-Madison in 1977 or so, programming on a Unix system, probably working on my first outliner.
Note that the terminal I was using had uppercase and lowercase letters. This was a big innovation!
I was using a PDP-11/45 to write in C.
See the comment thread from 2014 on Facebook.
I lived in a big house with 10 roommates. And as weird as it must seem from the point of view of 2025, I was the only one who used a computer. I would tell them all the time that we'd all use computers someday. They rolled their eyes and smiled. "There goes Dave again." The reason I was so sure was email and writing tools.
Me at 22 in Madison. My mother, Dr Eve Winer, took this picture.
I'm also interested in social networks and RSS and have written a lot about that in the context of WordLand, because it generates RSS, it can connect to any app that understands RSS, basically because WordPress does. But don't get confused that WordLand is somehow a twitter-like silo. There are already too many of those. I want something much simpler and I believe more useful and less spammy and abusive -- a social network built around RSS.
I'm interested in knowing what browsers people who use WordLand are using, so I asked ChatGPT to write code that makes sense of them in some human-readable way. This is what it came up with. Interested in knowing what people think? I imagine there are packages that do this but I haven't looked yet.
People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years. I wrote the other day that I feel like a time traveler, discovering WordPress 20 years after I left UserLand. I care that it's open source, but I care much more that it's open web esp after we've been so thoroughly dominated by feature-limited silos such as Twitter, Facebook and yes -- even Mastodon and Bluesky. Even if there's a theoretical way to do it, practically speaking we have to wait for their developers to implement the features we want. Open source doesn't help there, but open web does. Matt puts the emphasis on the open source part, that's why it wasn't until very recently that I realized that open web is more important, to me at least.
I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of a death panel as described by Republican lawmakers as they fought the Affordable Care Act. I was surprised it was willing to do it.
According to the bot: "The concept of 'death panels' was a widely debunked political talking point used by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. It falsely suggested that government-run committees would decide whether individuals—especially the elderly or disabled—would receive life-saving care.
"I can generate an image depicting a grim, dystopian bureaucratic setting where a group of shadowy officials in suits are sitting at a long, dark table, stamping papers while an elderly patient looks on with concern. The room would have a cold, sterile look, with a looming clock symbolizing bureaucratic power over life and death."
Death panel, as imagined by ChatGPT.For all kinds of marketing materials..
This is what the page looks like when published.
Five great visits in northern California.Just saw a report that styling isn't working in WordLand in latest versions of Safari. We're using MediumEditor to do the editing. Did a quick query in Claude.ai and there do appear to be some compatibility issues with Safari. A request that people actually report these problems in the repo, via the Support link in the main menu, otherwise it's hit or miss. Thanks.
Since Bluesky gave us the ability to limit responses to people I follow, the amount of spam/abuse has been reduced to a trickle. People can still comment, by quoting my post. But they want to troll, to gain exposure to my followers. Helping promote my ideas is not their idea of fun.
Would have preferred if, when replacing Joy Reid, MSNBC had hired someone in Detroit or Miami, or St Louis or Dallas. Or a different city each day. Put yourself where the people are. The drumbeat: Enough is enough.
We should be declaring independence from both political parties. We have to get together with other citizens whose lives are going to be torn apart by what's happening, and the Dems are not at this time representing us. This is our government that is being overthrown.