It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well -- no platform vendor. But I wonder if ChatGPT et al aren't destined to be the ultimate platform vendor. Are we the last generation of software developers, teaching it all of our thought processes?

BTW, I haven't posted a screen shot of where I write Scripting News in quite some time. Nothing has changed, but a whole other writing enviroment, targeted at WordPress instead of Old School, and it has a different feature set, look and feel.

I had a fantastic meeting today with Jonathan Desrosiers. I gave him a tour of all the software that makes up WordLand and FeedLand. It was the first time I had done that with anyone from the WordPress community. It started off with a simple story about how I knew I was on the right track when Matt announced they were porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress as an OS. Which is exactly what I'm doing with my collection of software. Every bit of writing should be a WordPress post, and they should be linked together in arbitrary graphs. It was nice to do that with a serious developer, Jonathan is one of the lead developers of the open source WordPress. It helped me see all the different things we can do, and now hope we will do. I feel I understand this community, as a time-traveler from the past I think I understand what we should do next (and I have done it heh).

I'm working on a feature for WordLand II where you can flip a switch to see the OG Metadata for a post you're reading, by clicking on an icon that looks like the flag on the side of an old fashioned mailbox. I remembered there was a desk accessory on the original Mac that us...

Today's song: He's Gone. We've barely had a chance to process the passing of Bob Weir, but now I realize that for the core of the Grateful Dead are now gone too. So I wanted to choose a song of the day that says a proper goodbye to Ron McKernen, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Ro...

I had to do some work with Concord today, the open source JavaScript outliner Kyle Shank wrote for me in 2013. I used ChatGPT to help. It knew all about Concord. Amazing. If only through ChatGPT etc, my work will survive. That means a lot to me. I take the opposite view that some artists take. I like that it's learning about what we did with our lives. Bob Weir died yesterday. That didn't go unnoticed here.

I just posted something new on Scripting News, and thought -- that should appear on the new WordLand I'm working on, even though it's not a WordPress site. It did appear. Screen shot. The beauty of RSS. It's supported everywhere, so we might as well depend on that.

I wonder sometimes if we’re the last generation of humanoids for a variety of reasons.

BTW, look at all the links in my writing. Shouldn't every platform that says they're part of the web let users add links to their writing? Of course they should.

If I were making a Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other. Comment here.

Textcasting: Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text.

We're recommending that people running their own instances of FeedLand create another index for the items table, on the whenCreated column.

As I listened to the mayor of Minneapolis speak I thought he was going say "get the fuck out of Minneapolis" but of course he couldn't say that and then he said it.

Today's song: Playing in the Band.

What’s happening with ICE is like January 6 four years later with billions of dollars behind it and many months of planning and studying history for prior art.

Bob Weir is gone.

John Johnston, a longtime friend of UserLand and my newer products, asks how WordLand connects with FeedLand. Two ways. 1. FeedLand has an API, still working on it, but it will be public. 2. FeedLand has an outbound websockets interface, which is already public, so any can use it as their feed reader, and get notice of new items and updates to existing items as soon as FeedLand has the info. And if the site uses rssCloud, as WordPress does and has since 2009, the notices are instantaneous. So to the extent people thought RSS is a slow protocol, it's not. It runs at the speed of the internet. And FeedLand is all about RSS, as you know.

I'm doing little demos of stuff I'm working on in WordLand, here's a narrated demo that shows how instant updates are going. As often the recording level is too low, so turn up the volume if you want to hear the comments. A productive Saturday session.

Trump is president the same way people who do vibe coding are developers. I always thought he'd be much happier playing president on TV instead of actually being president. And people would think about this stuff more rationally if it were a TV show like Pluribus or Severance. Why did really do what they did? Or the way we talk about the Mets or the Knicks and their various trades. It's funny people have a clarity about fictional stuff that they don't have for real-world things like war and gestapo tactics.

A little fix that would make social web a lot more useful and less hate-filled and abusive... Make replies visible only to the person being replied to. If they feel the reply should be public, they can RT it.

I get ideas when I go for a walk or drive somewhere in my car. This was one of those times, and it was not a comforting idea. I live in the mountains on the west side of the Hudson River near Kingston. On my drive to town yesterday I went through the small town of Woodstock,...

When there's breaking news these days I check Fox News in addition to CNN, MSNOW, BBC, PBS. The best are the last two. But last night night when everyone was fixated on the story of Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was killed in cold blood, on video, by a masked ICE thug, I ...

Another incredible use-case for ChatGPT. When it first came out Font Awesome was a total godsend. It took something every developer of graphic apps had to struggle with, and said basically "I can do that." They had a growing set of standard icons. It got better and better wi...

Remember when OG metadata was new? That was a long time ago. It's one of those things that's widely forgotten, but still widely in use.

The way twitter-like services deal with OG metadata could use a re-think.

Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! :-)

Assume I'm working on a twitter-like user interface. Your text can include <a> elements. When the user clicks on one of these, should I open it in a new tab? Prior art? There is none, because in the old school twitter-like apps don't allow links.

Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto -- watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing.

BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004.

Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the slurry-making machines.