What if we all wore ICE-style masks as we went around doing our business.

If a baseball player's uniform didn't have a number or name.

Let's all be anonymous. It's very practical, we don't want to get doxxed either!

A podcast about a podcast users' API.

It's always a good idea to get a second opinion with AI stuff. ChatGPT may give you a convoluted answer where Claude.ai gives you a concise one.

I've been working on the top level of WordLand, and finally got to a place where navigation feels good, like this is the right track. So I took a snapshot so I can come back and look at this later, and I don't mind sharing with my blog readers with the look and feel of what might be coming.

A basic question I had about the ChatGPT agents that I can answer now that I have the feature, is whether or not the code you create that way can run on a server, where you can give it a URL and make it an endpoint other networked software can call. Or if it could run periodically, say once every five minutes for a function that was creating an RSS feed anyone could subscribe to. The answer is no -- it can't do either of these things. I'm sure they could do it at a technical level, but they don't want to host applications. But now I may understand better why they want to make a web browser, I bet you will be able to call these agents from apps that run in the browser. And in their case, they might not even have to support JavaScript? Heh. A wholly different programming model? Maybe I'm overestimating how much they're biting off?

One of the more depressing things in having so much code that I can easily search, is the number of times I've rewritten the same code without remembering I had written it before. Yesterday I did it knowingly, I wanted a function that could tell me if one of a set of categori...

As you get older your memory gets less reliable. It makes programming more of a challenge because as your software gets more features, there's more to remember and at the same time your codebase is getting bigger you are getting older. I wonder if there isn't some way to use ...

I think I'm going to put in my will that ChatGPT should run the Dave Winer persona on all social networks, and my blog, as long as the money lasts. It would tell stories that I would likely tell, take political stands that I would take, draw meta-pictures of my sad and depressed programmer friend and a cute and adorable kitty getting into all kinds of trouble. The seasons would come and go, and there would be Dave, still diggin. And of course he would continue to develop software, using some of the greatest tried and true tools, reminding everyone of how great Frontier -- but -- if only it ran on Linux. The long-lived fearless and fully paid-up version of Uncle D.

I got hoisted with my own Picard.

A change would do us good too.

I have a lot of code written before ChatGPT. Sometimes, as I read my old code, I wonder how the heck I ever figured that out without it.

Podcast. It's time for things to change. Two examples, Wired and Harvard. Change was always coming, but now you can't turn away from it very long before it re-appears.

Source OPML for July 2025 blog posts.

Welcome to August. More than half the summer is behind us. We're still here. The shelves in the supermarket are full of good stuff to eat. We've had about the normal amount of hot weather, and a good amount of rain but not too much. The Mets are doing OK, all things considered. They opened a Pho restaurant in Bearsville and it's good. Health, not too bad, all things considered. Still diggin!

Podcast: AI should behave like a computer.

It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all support an API, ideally a common API.

I abhor body shaming even if it's of someone whose ideas I find unacceptable.

Disclaimer: I own zero stock in AI companies, except for mutual funds and some Apple stock I've held for decades for sentimental and tax reasons.

This is the rendering of my linkblog in WordPress. This is a major milestone. We have in WordPress, what you see on the Links page on scripting.com, implemented entirely in WordPress.

BTW, I say ChatGPT instead of "AI" because I'm not comfortable characterizing it as intelligence. Deeper you get into it you learn that these beings whatever they are have serious character flaws that are counter-intelligent.

Another benefit of ChatGPT. It forces you to think and express yourself in tight logical language. Garbage in garbage out. All of a sudden rigorous thinking is required to get a result. This is very different from social media, where garbage is rewarded.

Last night's podcast about how AI is a revolution. I had just listened to a New Yorker podcast interview with the EIC at Wired, saying the hype was bullshit. You hear this from journalists a lot. The only way you can conclude this, imho, is if you aren't actually paying attention. It's as if you were a journalist in the 60s and said the story of the Beatles is that their hair must be fake, no one actually wears their hair like that. OK, whatever you say, but have you listened to the freaking music??

Kevin Kelly writes: "When a customer of yours complains, always apologize first and ask, 'What can we do to resolve this?' even if it is not your fault. Acting as if the customer is right is a small tax to pay to grow a business." Amen. Google sent an email saying my Google ...

Last year: "There could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea!"

But what about Substack and Ghost? A lot of people do their writing there too? What about those people. Here's the cool part for all people who write on the web. The API we use in WordLand to hook up to WordPress is open and documented. They don't break their APIs in WordPressLand. At least so far. You could say that API is a standard. And I bet it would be a lot easier for Ghost, for example, to support a limited subset of that API than it has been to get ActivityPub support implemented. Because the WordPress API is what I would call "really simple," and that's the thing I value most about a good API.

Now here's the real reason I need WordLand and if you write for WordPress sites, I think you'll want it too. It's because WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of web writing. If you ask someone how they do their site, in 2025, it's probably going to be WordPress. So if someone invites you to write a guest post on their blog, chances are pretty good I can write it in WordLand, and it'll be archived in my collection of writing, and easy for me to find, because that's what WordLand does for writers. So I was able to create the new post on the WordCamp site in less than a minute, and it was completely painless. And that's the point. Here's the screen shot:

I needed a "featured image" for my WordCamp post, so I gave ChatGPT a simple assignment. "Imagine a place called WordLand." Last year this was a miracle, now it's so-what, but I still think it's a freaking miracle.

Lots of embarrassing typos in a post yesterday on why I need WordLand. I did something unusual, I fixed the post this morning, and cleared up some of the ideas. It was an important post and equally important to get it right. I also cross-posted it on the WordCamp Canada site.

Listened to a segment on today's Brian Lehrer podcast about how to keep the good feelings from a vacation when you get back home. Here's my idea. Before you leave make a list of the things you like about being on vacation. Take it home, put it somewhere you can find it when you're feeling down and want that feeling back. Pick one of the things on the list and do it. Your subconscious will tune into it as an act of self-love and give you some of the body chemistry that you felt when you were hanging out at the beach or hiking the Applachian Trail. A similar idea in a Bruce Sterling talk in 2009.