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.
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My feed readers on Bluesky now use the metadata in the pages we link to to show a title, picture and description for each post that offers the metadata.
Like this page, the one you're reading right now at this moment.
And here's a screen shot of what it looks like over in Bluesky.
A fork in the road. 
I still haven't decided what to do about my Tesla Model Y, which still is a wonderful car, and I still love driving it after 2.5 years, which is amazing. But the other day it updated, and gave me a pause, if they let Musk hack their computers the way he's hacking ours, should I trust what it installs on the vehicle I drive every day that theoretically has the ability to take control of my car and drive it off the road? I wonder if the people at Tesla would like to reassure people who drive their cars that the updates are safe from hacking by one of his associates? How is security on the Tesla network?
I had three questions this morning for Elie Mystal.
When we get back control of the government, ie they're following the Constitution, the Democratic leader in the Senate should be as ruthless as this bastard. Chuck Schumer is a nice guy and that sucks.
I have to say, a judge ruling that Musk has to stop, and delete all the info he has stolen, has made me feel much better. I don't know why, but I'm actually laughing out loud. The tight knot in my stomach has relaxed.
Behind the scenes in the US government I imagine it's like a Vonnegut novel, or an episode of Pinky and the Brain.
I wish Bluesky had just used the Twitter API. That's how I would've done it. Continuity matters a lot. And think of all time wasted at re-doing something we had working a long time ago.
I've cracked the code for adding OpenGraph data to Bluesky posts. The key was I learned how to do the equivalent of a View Source on a Bluesky post so I could see how others did it. I tried Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, none of them even understood the question of how to get Bluesky to add the data. I was amazed to learn that each developer has to do it for themselves, that this isn't something they built into their server. Anyway, I'm halfway there.
Another thing to watch while you still can, The Lives of Others, about life in East Germany during the Cold War.
The AI world would have done much better with a president like Biden than we will with Trump. AI is a very potent tool for surveillance. Completely changes the game. And if it were just Trump and not Musk we'd have a chance, but Musk and Thiel fully understand the power, and probably already have all the code written, they just need the database records to scan and now they have all of them. Eventually we'll be talking about the "peaceful uses of AI" as we do about nuclear tech. But just saying that will get you punished.
I saw a bit on CNN that was like the Dean Scream, an extended clip of how awkward Chuck Schumer is at a rally. It was used to shame a Democrat who was doing a great job of explaining the danger, Sen Murphy of Connecticut. I switched to basketball in disgust, thinking these people, CNN, are not serious. This problem isn't on the Dems, it's on all of us, and it always was. To pin it on the Dems is to say it's hopeless because right now they're just our representatives in Congress and some of our state governments. We have a big problem and we probably can't dig out of it, but if we have any hope at all, orgs like CNN have to stop being such idiots. Every so often I see a spark of brilliance over there, and then one of these things happens. What's more depressing, Trump or CNN? CNN by a lot. And the NYT and all the rest of the broken media. We are all in the same boat.
In January I started an online diary where I list each of the apps I manage, as I work on them. When I work on one, I move it to the top. The notes are brief and to anyone but me might seem cryptic. But at least you can follow what I'm doing. No I don't plan to do an RSS feed for it. It's just a place to keep track of all the things I work on, for people who I work with, and most important, me.
if you're feeling stressed, hum a few bars of alice's restaurant.
i find it very calming and satisfying.
it's a nice place we can always go home to!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM
just remember --
you can get anything you want
at alice's restaurant!
BTW, I found that video using ChatGPT. I had tried explaining it to Google and it didn't understand. ChatGPT found it in an instant.
A great scene in Goodfellas where they explain what it's like to have Paulie the mob boss as a partner. In this scene Paulie is Musk. The restaurant owner is Trump. The United States is the restaurant.
People might be curious to see the list of feeds that make up the Little Feed Reader account on Bluesky. It's dynamic, I can add or remove feeds through a very simple user interface designed for managing systems like this. It's like the user inteface of a product like WordPress, for designers and developers, producing results that are for users. There are now apps for the NBA, Devs and all my feeds.
Big picture, the US is being turned into Russia.
California Senator Adam Schiff said, I think it was yesterday, that Trump and Musk are removing honest FBI investigators and DOJ attorneys so they can raid the treasury of the United States. It's obvious, but you don't hear it said very often. It's the money they want. All of it.
One of my next projects, Murphy-willing, will be JavaScriptScript.
And btw to Mitch McConnell, fuck you. You had a chance, with one freaking vote, to avoid this. You are among a small number of people who could have stopped this. This should be the first line in your obituary. "He could have saved the United States, but chose not to do it."
I updated the Developers account on Bluesky to follow Tim Bray, Simon Willison, Techdirt, Manton Reece and Cory Doctorow. I took my feeds off the list, and added other developer accounts I regularly read. I'm trying to bootstrap something here, to see what can be done, and feel it's important to take myself out of the list for now.
Freaky warning. As easily as Musk can turn off government websites, he can turn off our sites. He could turn off all .com or .org sites. He'll probably do it just that way. Only one domain will work in the future, x.com. Goodbye Google, Amazon, your drug store. Bubye. Not sure if moving your DNS to Europe or Asia will make a difference. He's taking advantage of centralization, and will try to make it more centralized. Totally centralized. A journalist couldn't report this, because what proof do I have? It's because there's a pattern here. And it's pretty obvious the tools he's using.
I would love to manage individual DNS domains using GitHub. I already have great tools for updating stuff over there. And everything on my current DNS system is manual and laborious.