Om Malik says the internet is the greatest invention of his life, and since we're roughly the same age, that would be my life's greatest invention too. I think it would be if it weren't such a tragic invention, one whose growth was cut off by the very thing he quotes John Do...

Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb -- you know -- the thing that looked so easy.

I've been watching Jake do the Headless Frontier work with two different AI bots -- ChatGPT and Claude.ai. And as he's doing that, I'm slogging away the same way I've always done it, working on the top level user interface of WordLand. I don't see a way around it, because I h...

Another example of ChatGPT utility. Asked this question: "I have a function named viewFeedItem. Inside it has an icon that when you click it, it calls viewFeedItem to view the parent of the item. But I don't want it to call viewFeedItem directly because that leaves the previous instance of viewFeedItem around. In javascript what's the best way to defer the call to divFeedItem so that the two instances are unrelated, and the first instance goes away." I was pretty sure as I wrote this that setTimeout was the answer, but ChatGPT offered it as the first choice, and explained why it was the best. It's like having a code consulant, you're the surgeon and it's ready to help. And it really does help to know it parsed it the same way I did.

Good morning sports fans! Boy are we getting some fancy sports action. The Olympics have already started, with Milan as the host city. The opening ceremony is tonight. My longtime friend the brilliant and beautiful Anna Masera will be attending. I don't know if I can boast ...

I still love my Keurig coffee maker. The coffee is delicious and hot and it's truly a technology marvel. So simple and easy to learn.

News from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. Writeup is here.

Here's a news page with stories from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. A brilliant idea. All I did was give each item a category, and shortened the URL. The brief writeup is here.

I'm going to WordCamp Europe in June in Poland. Can't wait.

No one else can see this message. You are the only real person. The rest of us are alien robots sent here to test you.

I wrote an app that implements Inbound RSS for WordPress sites. Three months ago, a few little glitches but remarkably reliable. Open source. That's how I have scripting.com output hooked up to daveverse.org input. It stopped working this morning, not sure why. This is actually a test to see if this works. (Postscript: It did work. But I have two earlier posts today that did not get through.)

Automattic shipped a WordPress plugin that adds a source:markdown element to a WordPress feed. This is very cool. We're going to add this to the feed for daveverse site.

We need a short name for ChatGPT-like product. If I want to make a general statement about products in the category, there is, as far as I know, no word to use. Same with Twitter and tweet, so I call them twitter-like products and use tweet for posts to any twitter-like product. The whole idea of a different name (like toot, skeet) for each service is linguistic travesty. Anyway, ChatGPT-like is also an unacceptable term. If it had a fun name like OurMind -- then OurMind-like would work. If only William Safire were here.

for developers who don't use ai -- here's the kind of question i ask chatgpt. "i have a div that contains icons that are either svg's or font-awesome i's. if it were text, i'd use font-size to control the size of the icons, which won't work here. what's the right way to do it?"

apple is a company, very good at selling itself as a lifestyle. but there's only one person, who's been gone for 15 years, who could keep that reality distortion field inflated.

1996: Nerd's Guide to Frontier.

Interesting post on Twitter by an OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, about the value of RSS. I've it said elsewhere, that RSS and ChatGPT are particularly well-suited for each other. I don't understand the connection, other than RSS is always useful, as a way of formalizing...

Screen shot of system.verbs.apps as it appeared in my frontier.root frozen sometime in the early 00s.

I have an array built into every app I do, on server or in the browser, called snarkySlogans. When I need a bit of text to test with I just choose a random snarky slogan. They are little truths that have occurred to me over the years. You're free to steal this code, they do come in handy at times. There's a snarky slogan to cover that -- "Only steal from the best." Another one I really like: "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."

Why did we need all those programming languages?

Imagine building blocks to assemble your own social web app. A toolkit you could plug into your bot.

I was surprised to find that nirvana.userland.com, a site that was new in 1998, is still running.

January is archived, as is 2025. On to the future! :-)

Next year I have to go to FOSDEM. This year's conference going on right now, in Brussels. If you're there and reading this -- say a hello for me. I realize the piece I wrote yesterday about the future of the social web is equally relevant now for FOSDEM. My prescription: car...

Added a note to the storage docs page for wpIdentity, explaining that while most files we serve are private, there are examples of files we manage that are public. It had been a while since I reviewed this page. I also see now that we have to have a way to identify the app that created an object, and for that we'll need a way to identify apps. I knew that was coming sooner or later.

February 4 is the midpoint of winter. So we're almost half-way there.

The FediForum home page says "the Open Social Web still has only a tiny fraction of the users of the closed social media platforms, and growing that number significantly has turned out harder than expected." This is the premise of their next conference, on March 2, a little ...

Yesterday I wrote the idea "small pieces loosely joined" was central to what we mean by the web. Now I'd like to add another criteria. "All parts are replaceable." I think it's self-evident what it means. And of course there is no such thing, but the internet itself comes v...

Yesterday I reported that I had remapped pagepark.scripting.com to the github repo for pagepark. But then later in the day it stopped doing that. Why? I have no clue. I moved it to another server and now it works.

The best description for the web I've ever heard is small pieces loosely joined. That really gets to the essence of it. The pieces stand on their own, up to a point, when they are joined to other pieces. And you can un-join and re-join them. I see a lot of things that say they're part of the web than can't do the arbitrary joining that's central to what the web is.