Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
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IndieWeb
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We need a social web for nobodies.
Claude is much better at starting from scratch with a big piece of code than humans are. It can suck in a full app and all its dependencies and a few seconds. For me, I would never get there. A finished piece of software is much bigger than people think, because the details are mostly pretty well hidden. But if you want to work on the code, you have to worry about it all. But I just had a minute to ask Claude why I made a certain decision, and it found the answer in its notes and then I remembered it. This is one of many ways it rewrites the rules of building software out of a big library of components.
Useful concept, MacWrite was the coral reef for writing on the Mac.
The only twitter-like system that does text right is Elon Musk's X. I find that somewhat ironic. It's also the only twitter-like system where there's any kind of an actual community. They also have an API that works, has been around for more than a couple of years, and doesn't have a W3C working group messing with it. There's a lot of hype flying around, and we don't have any real journalists covering it so there is no real source of truth. I think the entrepreneurial twitter-likes should stop thinking in terms of owning the web and start adding back the text features the original Twitter thought the web didn't need, over 20 years ago.
If you work at Automattic as a developer, if there's another Radical Speed Month for devs, if you want, let's work on a project together even though I don't work for the company. I'm most interested in making products work together where the result gets people thinking about the web in a new way. A8C has a big enough product set, and FeedLand and WordLand are by design well-equipped to talk with other products. I love APIs and we have some good ones to work with, and some very underexplored (imho because we got too fixated on the silos for so long). Very much open to ideas, and I love working with good developers. Maybe I'll post some ideas here. I'm esp interested now in hooking other projects up with FeedLand.
Maybe the best way to deal with the AIs is to quarantine the data centers on the moon or Mars, and if you want to hook up to the network, you have to move there, and quite possibly not be allowed to return, depending on how things go. It would make it possible for us to change our mind after we see a preview of the consequences. Now the big question, would you volunteer??
There's so much I dread about the progress of AI, but nothing I say could possibly make a difference, and we aren't even that deep into it yet. This is the feeling I get every time I stop and think about it.
They should teach every chatbot to never give the user an order.
At what point will companies start using AI to communicate with customers? Who will be the first to show everyone else how to do it? Amazon taught the world how to do commerce over the web. When will users expect their vendors to use AI to simplify shopping, buying, returning? Right now, I don't think most companies realize they can do business differently with people. In my humble opinion that's when the boom will come.
Is Bluesky on the web?
Just watched the first episode of Star City, really good. Somewhat like The Americans, but takes place in the USSR. A spinoff of For All Mankind, which started out interesting and then became unwatchable, though I did enjoy the sets on Mars. I also liked the character who was inspired by Elon Musk, obviously.
There have been problems reported with subscribe.scripting.com. At least some of them are fixed. It's hard to test this kind of software because you can't really tell what went wrong. If people report problems they just say it didn't work. But real problems were fixed, so if you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing, now is a good time to try again. And thanks for your patience, and sorry for the screwy app. ;-)
Congrats to my friend Manton Reece, a San Antonio fan, for their victory in the Western Conference last night. The Knicks will be playing them starting on Wednesday for the NBA championship. Knicks representing the east, Spurs for the west.
If I ran Bluesky, instead of trying to fork the web, I'd be trying to become the competitor of Twitter's that is 100% web top to bottom.
Review of standard.site
Official recognition from WordPress
This is what I really accomplished in the years of work I did on the early web. I created something that could be built into a large successful company with millions of customers, and the web got a writing system, and because the people running it took the responsibility seriously, it has lasting value. As the say, still to this day, the systems I designed so many years ago work exactly as they did then. That's what the web was supposed to do. If my mom was still with us, I'd ask her to put this on the fridge. It's as good a review as I've ever gotten. My guess is that Matt wrote it, btw. He's really the only one in WordPress-land who can say something like this, imho.
This tweet is worth a lot. ChatGPT images, two years apart
I have the most followers on Twitter, Bluesky has never come close. I can't get anything to happen on Bluesky, but Twitter is great. Yesterday I had an idea, put it up on twitter and within a few hours I got the connection I was hoping for. It's a network, and it's more defined by who's there than who owns it. I can use it for idea distribution, the ideas find more minds and sometimes that results in benefits for the web. It's all about interop, and weirdly the pwned Twitter is much better for idea distribution than any of the other networks. In a sane world those smaller vendors would be fighting for interop, instead they're fighting against it.
Yesterday I applied to speak at WordCamp US in August. I got a really nice response from the main WordPress account. Thank you. I now have a platform to speak to the community, and I'll do my best to outline what I have in mind in August in Phoenix. How appropriate that the phoenix is the symbol of rebirth.
I applied to speak at WordCamp US in Phoenix in August. I want to give a rip-roaring speech about how WordPress is at the center of the universe and it doesn't even know. Let's get busy filling in the blanks. Writers are ready. If we build it they (developers) will come. To much sulking, let's get out there and kick some butt. I excerpted elements of my application on Twitter.
Really Open this time vs Really Simple last?? Hmm.
Dries Buytaert says you have to grow the ecosystem, not just yourself.