Archive for Scripting News in February 2026, in OPML, as always.

Podcast: Why men hate the Dems. I tell my perspective of MeToo, and how that imho created enough anti-Dem energy to push Trump over the top. Polls won't tell you how the Dems got the rep of being the party run by women to cancel men, but I'm sure if we could cure that somehow, we could do everything we need to do to get American democracy working again. I did this in response to a Frum podcast where he and his guest conclude that the young folks are making a big mistake, they don't want the same old bullshit people coming back into power. Frum and Miller thought that the young men don't want was democracy, foolishly (I would agree) but there is real anger there, I know about it because I have it too. I still vote for Dems, but I also fear what happens if we snap back to the political correctness of Kirsten Gillibrand.

2022: "And while we were effectively silenced in the public debate, men do vote and that's a private thing."

Another point -- I don't think any of us realize what an un-democratic US will be like. When the things that make us furious these days are just the normal way of the USA. I got that from listening to a New Yorker podcast yesterday about the Iranian perspective of what's happ...

If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.

BTW, I know Al Franken is an idiot. We're all idiots.

When I write a comment on someone else's blog I want it to automatically be on my blog. It should just appear to be on theirs, the original and only copy of the writing appears on mine. A truly distributed system.

I bet Jeopardy champions would make great software developers. Their intelligence, ability to stay calm and their incredible memory, all are needed to squeeze the last bits of performance from software.

It's nice having Facebook around to show you your old posts. This one just came up and I thought it would be good to remind you all that I was once a young nerd creating Unix apps at UW-Madison.

Maybe it's time to give awards for most our admired standards-makers. I would start with Jon Postel and Steve Wozniak.

One of the items in Rules for Standards-makers is don't design the format before you make the app. Instead, make an app, and when you're ready, make the file format public so people can interop (ie compete) so as not to lock users to in your software. If you do that you can say you are "of the web." If we all do that always, voila! -- no more silos. Another rule is that you must use an existing format if it exists, because then you will interop with apps that support that format. Gratuitous incompatibility is a sign of a silo-seeker. So, look first, if there are no usable formats, make your app and make your format public.

If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.

Recommended: When ICE buys a warehouse in your town.

Also: New Yorker interview of Conan O'Brien. I love that both O'Brien and Remnick agree that podcasting liberated them as artists. That was the point! When you think about decentralization, the most successful protocol we have is podcasting. By design it was hard for silos to usurp. Now think about how you would repeat that pattern with text. I've been working on that for almost three years, and it works now. We'll be testing it soon on my blog, and then everyone's. This should be the grand slam home run of my career. That's how it feels to me now. And O'Brien tells some great stories including one about his father, who noted that Conan had found a way to get paid for his insanity.

How many Jeffrey Epstein’s do you think there are?

I was looking for an adjective for the astounding wpcom api. aplomb seemed right. "Complete self-confidence, composure, or poise, especially under strain or in demanding situations." Yes that's the word I was looking for. BTW according to Daytona, this is the first time I've used that word in 31+ years of blogging.

New header graphic, the entirely delightful and inspiring Alysa Liu. She's made me a better programmer in the short time she's been on our minds and in our hearts. I do this work because it's who I am.

We're going to try to reboot the web.

Doing what the social networks do, but only using the web.

Every part replaceable.

We store your writing in your WordPress blog (to begin, then with any other blog). As if we never let Twitter take over the news from the people.

WordPress is of the web, I checked it out in great detail, no lock-in, and the community has the principles of the web at the core. They're almost all too young to remember when the web itself was young, so they've always had the idea that it was spoiled by Silicon Valley.

I didn't watch the SOTU. Sounds like I didn't miss much.

I asked ChatGPT: "When movies were new there was probably a bit of rage from stage performers — why would people pay for live shows when for a fraction of the cost they can see the same show performed by artificial actors?" There was a lot to say about this, it turns out. Th...

Poll: Do you think less of a person if they show an interest in what you're doing? Results.

It took me a while to realize..

1. Agentics are server software.
2. The things you used to write in Node.js and before that PHP and Perl, and in my case Frontier.
3. I had been trying to get ChatGPT to do exactly that for months.

We're going to spend a while reimplementing all our server software.

It would be super helpful if the whole thing could be packaged up so we can write our servers in English or whatever our preferred Really Simple Language is, and have it compiled to whatever internal language it likes, and not have to learn too much new jargon.

Big snow day in the east. I thought it was going to be heavy snow but it's actually really light. The shoveling is easy. I'm getting good at it. Right now I think this storm was a lot less than they said it would be, but I also think to some extent, dealing with big snow is getting somewhat routine?

If you want to read something good, go with yesterday's piece about the web and evolution. A lot of things came together for me there.

And if you want to listen to something good, pick up the latest podcast. It has two purposes. 1. To tell the story of how I lost my Twitter/X account, hoping it makes its way to someone at the company who can turn my account back on. 2. To illustrate how we could use AI to make customer service work much better than it does. It's a real killer app. As if you thought of Craig's List when Craig did. This is not anything I can do, but I would love to use it. Right now the tech industry reputation is getting worse all the time. Do something that visibly makes people's lives better now. People are pretty nervous about AI. And so far you have to be a scientist of some kind to really appreciate it. But the internet as a place of business, education and health care is a big global mess.

The killer app of AI is customer service. A podcast about just that.

When I designed podcasting, I could have invented a better way to record and play radio shows, but MP3 already existed, as did recording and playback hardware and software, so it was the no-brainer choice. No one ever asked why we are using MP3. TBL did it when he designed ...

New podcast episode where I explain how I lost my Twitter account and how this is exactly the kind of thing that AI can do economically, esp for people who pay actual money for your service. I can't buy anything from you if I can't use my account.