Maybe it's time to give awards for most our admired standards-makers. I would start with Jon Postel and Steve Wozniak.

One of the items in Rules for Standards-makers is don't design the format before you make the app. Instead, make an app, and when you're ready, make the file format public so people can interop (ie compete) so as not to lock users to in your software. If you do that you can say you are "of the web." If we all do that always, voila! -- no more silos. Another rule is that you must use an existing format if it exists, because then you will interop with apps that support that format. Gratuitous incompatibility is a sign of a silo-seeker. So, look first, if there are no usable formats, make your app and make your format public.

If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.

Recommended: When ICE buys a warehouse in your town.

Also: New Yorker interview of Conan O'Brien. I love that both O'Brien and Remnick agree that podcasting liberated them as artists. That was the point! When you think about decentralization, the most successful protocol we have is podcasting. By design it was hard for silos to usurp. Now think about how you would repeat that pattern with text. I've been working on that for almost three years, and it works now. We'll be testing it soon on my blog, and then everyone's. This should be the grand slam home run of my career. That's how it feels to me now. And O'Brien tells some great stories including one about his father, who noted that Conan had found a way to get paid for his insanity.

How many Jeffrey Epstein’s do you think there are?

I was looking for an adjective for the astounding wpcom api. aplomb seemed right. "Complete self-confidence, composure, or poise, especially under strain or in demanding situations." Yes that's the word I was looking for. BTW according to Daytona, this is the first time I've used that word in 31+ years of blogging.

New header graphic, the entirely delightful and inspiring Alysa Liu. She's made me a better programmer in the short time she's been on our minds and in our hearts. I do this work because it's who I am.

We're going to try to reboot the web.

Doing what the social networks do, but only using the web.

Every part replaceable.

We store your writing in your WordPress blog (to begin, then with any other blog). As if we never let Twitter take over the news from the people.

WordPress is of the web, I checked it out in great detail, no lock-in, and the community has the principles of the web at the core. They're almost all too young to remember when the web itself was young, so they've always had the idea that it was spoiled by Silicon Valley.

I didn't watch the SOTU. Sounds like I didn't miss much.

I asked ChatGPT: "When movies were new there was probably a bit of rage from stage performers — why would people pay for live shows when for a fraction of the cost they can see the same show performed by artificial actors?" There was a lot to say about this, it turns out. Th...

Poll: Do you think less of a person if they show an interest in what you're doing? Results.

It took me a while to realize..

1. Agentics are server software.
2. The things you used to write in Node.js and before that PHP and Perl, and in my case Frontier.
3. I had been trying to get ChatGPT to do exactly that for months.

We're going to spend a while reimplementing all our server software.

It would be super helpful if the whole thing could be packaged up so we can write our servers in English or whatever our preferred Really Simple Language is, and have it compiled to whatever internal language it likes, and not have to learn too much new jargon.

Big snow day in the east. I thought it was going to be heavy snow but it's actually really light. The shoveling is easy. I'm getting good at it. Right now I think this storm was a lot less than they said it would be, but I also think to some extent, dealing with big snow is getting somewhat routine?

If you want to read something good, go with yesterday's piece about the web and evolution. A lot of things came together for me there.

And if you want to listen to something good, pick up the latest podcast. It has two purposes. 1. To tell the story of how I lost my Twitter/X account, hoping it makes its way to someone at the company who can turn my account back on. 2. To illustrate how we could use AI to make customer service work much better than it does. It's a real killer app. As if you thought of Craig's List when Craig did. This is not anything I can do, but I would love to use it. Right now the tech industry reputation is getting worse all the time. Do something that visibly makes people's lives better now. People are pretty nervous about AI. And so far you have to be a scientist of some kind to really appreciate it. But the internet as a place of business, education and health care is a big global mess.

The killer app of AI is customer service. A podcast about just that.

When I designed podcasting, I could have invented a better way to record and play radio shows, but MP3 already existed, as did recording and playback hardware and software, so it was the no-brainer choice. No one ever asked why we are using MP3. TBL did it when he designed ...

New podcast episode where I explain how I lost my Twitter account and how this is exactly the kind of thing that AI can do economically, esp for people who pay actual money for your service. I can't buy anything from you if I can't use my account.

Poll: Do you have a blog?

Query: I have not done any vibe coding and have a question for those who have. Suppose you request a change in an app you've been working on with the AI for a while, adding features, changing things around based on learning and testing, which is generally what happens after you've been working on something new. Here's the question. What happens when you ask for a change that requires the codebase to be reorganized. How did that go? Do the AIs even know that's possible or do they just pile on special cases?

What happened to polling? I had a poll app for a while, then Twitter came out with one and I switched to that. I don't know if Twitter still has it, but it would be bad form to require something at Twitter to engage with me here. How do you do polling, or do you?

I just remembered why I love the United States of America.

I am going to try again to open up the editing side of OPML. It's gotten pretty famous in RSS-land, but people don't know there are editors for OPML, and some which work pretty well with subscription lists, and could be made to work even better. Drummer can run scripts in JavaScript, so users can customize. I'm going to make an effort myself to start using Drummer to edit subscription lists and see what comes up.

I'd like to have an OPML subscription list with feeds with news about specific feed-based products. I started a thread on the reallysimple repo for people to post links to such feeds. Once I have enough feeds, I'll publish the URL of the subscription list. We should, in this community, of all communities, a good way to communicate about developments. Too many good ideas get lost without this.

I've taught ChatGPT and Claude.ai how to properly indent code so I can paste it into my outliner, and it will represent the structure correctly. I just got it to do the same thing with HTML code I copied from the Chrome debugger. Pasted it into the outline. Have a look.

If you're using OPML for your blogroll, here's an unofficial place to let us know what you're doing.

I think the really big money in AI will be helping all the commerce sites get competitive again, their sites are breaking, and are anemic compared to what you can do with AI. I think the WordPress community is in great position to get a huge amount of business here because many of these people are your customers. If you're a WordPress developer I'd love to hear what you think.