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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Pet peeve: A podcast uses sound effects like sirens. It causes panic when driving, esp at high speed. The sound systems in cars these days are fairly realistic, and the ambulance or cop car sounds very close. This has happened a few times, this time I remembered to say something.
BTW, as a longtime speaker of English and programmer, I think the term refactoring is re-dundant. The term comes from mathematics where you simplify a statement without altering its truth. Factoring is a repetitive process. You factor, and then factor some more if you can.
We should be thinking about a new SQL that's much higher level. It's time for another layer. Get all the efficiencies of a 50+ year platform, with all the understanding gained at the top level in all the time. Most of the learning I did in the last five years can be hidden behind a much simpler programming interface, imho.
The problem with everyone who says you have to get off Twitter is that we're giving up the meeting place we had and spreading all the bits into the wind. Are you going to leave the United States now that Trump is going to be president again? Leaving Twitter is a lot like that. How do you know Musk isn't going to have to sell it? Might happen. How would you feel then about having quit Twitter in a huff as if it would always be the bastion of assholes. It's a mistake. He isn't making money with it. The more you use it the more it costs him, btw. By leaving you might actually be helping him survive. Nothing is so linear, first big point. Second big point, no one cares about your gestures.
If you think woke is the problem, try reading the US Constitution and amendments. Really read them. Pretend you didn't know it was the Constitution. One woke idea after another. Basically if you don't believe in woke, you're in the wrong freaking country.
Last night's email had a YouTube video in it. I had forgotten that they get lost somewhere in the email delivery supply chain, so the fire that I put in the email was not transmitted. It's even worse than it appears. Here's a link to the video of the fire, with any luck that will get through in tonight's email. Happy holidays everyone!
Happy holidays everyone. Here's a nice fire to keep you warm. ❤️
I have a fairly large and old C application that was written to run on the Mac and Windows. I still use it today on a relatively modern Macintosh. I wonder if it will soon be possible to turn this project over to an AI like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity or some other, to convert it to run on Linux, where it should be able to run in perpetuity, or at least a lot longer than on the Macintosh. I would be willing to pay a few thousand dollars to do this work.
How this stuff fits in? 1. RSS blew a big open hole in the distribution of news and ideas. 2. Now we want to blow the equivalent hole in the writer's web.
Another idea that we continued to push in 2024 is textcasting. It was what I needed to build WordLand, it defines its objective, to form an open social web with all the basic features writers need. Titles, links, simple styling, ability to edit, no character limit, these are basic features we will drive the adoption of. Defining a new network where if you want to play you'll need to start thinking about writers, their power, and interop. You can't be on the open web and be a silo. And some of the most insidious silo-like features seem innocuous, like character limits. Whatever forces you into copying and pasting into tiny little text boxes, that's how you know you're in a silo. If you can use any writing tool to post to a network, then it is on the web. Pretty simple. Right now -- none of the popular ones qualify. None.
Talking with a friend about the listening lists idea and realized if it takes off it will turn podcasting into its own loosely-coupled social network. Really low tech, like the web. And not possible for one company to control. All it will take is one popular podcast client to get the pump primed. The second and third apps should be much easier to convince. This is how it worked with podcasting. Steady mission broadcasting, keep beating the drum, and if it's the right idea and when it's the right time, eventually, it happens. It will be that way too for this layer of the network, but at this time I don't own a podcast client, and that's the most basic ingredient in this bootstrap, so we wait, and keep beating the drum.
Instead of having the Dems redefine the Dems, how about the people who vote for Dems redefining the Dems. Agree on what the Dems are, and just as important, are not. Ending arguments about whether the Dems are this color or that, this gender or that, this age or some other. Draw a circle of common interest and leave out everything else. Draw the biggest circle possible.
I wrote this piece in WordLand yesterday morning over breakfast. Started writing it as a Bluesky post, quickly ran out of space so I switched over to my own TLTB, and it's very conducive to writing flow, which is its purpose. Then I did the same thing this morning. Sorry to keep talking about the product without it being in general release yet. I want to get it right before opening it up. Still a bunch of things I want to add/fix.
BTW Twitter is innovating in ways that it never has. People not staying on Twitter would have no way of knowing. Another reason why, for software developers, quitting Twitter is stupid. As quitting Facebook was ten years ago. Great, now you have no idea what features your users are learning how to use. Eventually your software will be in a dead end while a new coral reef has been forming. Where are you going to get fresh ideas from. Not using these systems would be like not listening to the Beatles in the 60s,. You would have missed all that followed. And not just popular music. Same with Twitter in the 2020s. That story is far from over.
What we need, now, is a system to compete with Twitter. The only thing that can counteract the new direction we're going in, is a system as capable as Twitter. It has to be privately held by a group that can be trusted not to interfere with democratic use of the system. This can't be guaranteed, it has to be based on trust. It needs to scale very quickly. And it has to have a vision to represent democracy. And it has to be simple, clean and quickly understood as a replacement for Twitter. Bluesky has a lot of what's needed, but its ownership is not clear. But it more like Twitter than Twitter is today.
What WordLand looks like today. Video.BTW, we could use a few more testers with good experience with bug reporting who use WordPress. I'm sure there are more bugs we haven't gotten reports on yet.
One more thing. I love taking the time to craft a delicious piece of software. I have never really done that in the 50 years I've been doing this. This time I decided there's no rush. I'm going to wait until people want what I've created. We're not there yet. 😄
Amazing that the tech industry hasn't tried to retrieve its reputation from the ones who are repping us in DC nowadays. Software doesn't have to treat their users like nobodies. Quite the opposite. I come from the school that says our users are the smartest most powerful people in the world and it's our privilege to create tools for them.
I've figured out more precisely what WordLand is meant to compete with --> the tiny little text boxes of the social web. Ours is slightly bigger, and grows as your piece gets longer. Neatly arranged like the others, and all your writing flows through WordPress and RSS, where each of the TLTBs only flows into their limited and incompatible views of the social web. RSS and WordPress are a powerful distribution system. Lots of software works with those two protocols, as do many programmers, and they're both marvelously open, stable over more than twenty years each, and can't be owned by billionaires. Pretty powerful place, kind of amazing that there's so much room here, and the people are friendly. 😄
I've been alternating days here on my blog. One day, lots of posts, maybe even a podcast. And then a quiet day. Today started out quiet, and then the ideas started flowing.
I'm thinking maybe we'll do a Kickstarter for WordLand. It'll cost money to run the server and continue to develop the sofware. It fills a big enough need to ask the users to support it financially, at least to get it off the ground. The server is open source so theoretically anyone can run one. But in practice most people will probably just want to use the service. I just want to solve this problem so we can start building a developer ecosystem around WordPress that it's never had. Think of WordLand as a pump primer. 😄
As a programming partner, ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It's also really irritating that it rewrites your code to conform to its standards. And it has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises. People who say the bubble is fully inflated on this stuff are not paying attention. We're still dealing with very basic technical problems.
A tuneup for WordLand confirms when it's publishing.
Today's