A list of ten random country names

• Brazil
• Japan
• Kenya
• Norway
• Peru
• Thailand
• Morocco
• Chile
• Ireland
• Bangladesh

Now a personal comment. What pisses me off most about Bluesky is the environment all this is happening in. We need an open social web. They've got a lot of people convinced they are it. They are not and they know it. And they keep leading people on. They should either deliver, now, or get out of the way.

Regular readers of my blog know that I've been calling out Bluesky and people associated with it for saying they're an open platform, and part of the web, when they are neither. Why don't people, esp journalists, call them out on this? We've been around this loop over and ove...

I've been enjoying the new David Frum podcast. He's very good at thinking and does a lot of it, and expresses himself very well. I read all his columns and have read two of his books, even though I don't share much of his pre-Trump politics, I find it interesting to hear how...

FediForum is a virtual conference that starts tomorrow. If they had asked me to keynote, this is roughly what I would say. Imho this stuff is pretty freaking simple, esp since there are well over 20 years of prior art to use, and not that many ways to do what we're trying to...

And btw one of these days I'm going to clear the time to write a useful and up to date RSS feed validator. The one the W3C uses is a total embarassment. I'm not even going to link to it it's so awful.

Why doesn't Walt Frazier have a freaking podcast. Come on. (Jon Stewart did a series of podcast-style interviews with him.)

If everything goes well, the RSS feed for Scripting News will now have a channel-level image element because it's part of a network that requires an avatar-like image. This required me to go through some very old code that my system still depends on. Fingers crossed.

I now have the special ChatGPT function I've been waiting for. Codex. Give it access to my entire GitHub collection and let it go. I stopped myself from authorizing, wanting to sleep on it. I know I'm going to do it, but.. Gulp. Do I really want to dump all my thinking for Sam Altman?

I had a neighbor and friend a long time ago named Ann Doerr. I used to joke with her how her name was a combination of two of the main types of logic gates in computers. I think that's what attracted me to the Star Wars Andor show.

I've heard that Andor is great stuff. I'm on episode 6 of season 1, and it's the usual Star Wars bullshit. It was fun in 1978. But now? It's so freaking boring. Tell me it's worth continuing to watch, that it gets an actual plot at some point.

On today's Bill Simmons podcast, their Knicks expert, Van Lathan said they shouldn't fire Thibs, but they probably would. I listened to that about an hour before the Knicks fired Thibs. I don't think it's good or bad, it could work out great. No one knows if this was The Season the Knicks were meant to go to the Finals, but if it was, maybe next year will be too? There's no right answer. Maybe this was Dolan's call. I hope not.

"Courtesy" calls from health insurance companies aren't courteous at all.

If you followed the Knicks through the playoffs as I did, I recommend the latest episode of the Bill Simmons podcast. It began with talk about the fan base and that got me thinking. We don't know what would happen if the Knicks were in the Finals. Honestly. It could be the antidote to the crazyness. Maybe the reason things are so fucked up is that it's been 52 freaking years since the Knicks won the title. Something happens every so often, the energy field around the Knicks shifts -- Patrick Ewing, Melo, Linsanity and now Brunson. It'd be interesting to map that out against events in the world at the corresponding times. We won't find out this year. In the same way I sensed that New Orleans was doomed when I went to school there, I have a strong feeling connecting the Knicks to something not sure what, but it feels big.

Jeremy Herve of Automattic responded to yesterday's suggestion about when to set the og:image metadata in a page. His response is persuasive, but there may be a way to work around it. And a hat-tip to Jeremy, he's helped us so many times getting WordLand ready to market. When you're fitting a product to another product as a platform, it's so important to get help from the vendor, and usually you don't get much of that. Much appreciated! 😄

From Facebook on this day in 2015. "There should be a required college course called Introduction to Assholes. The student would learn how not to be manipulated by jerks."

BTW, I asked ChatGPT if I moved to NYC in 2009 or 2010. It answered in an instant. "You moved to NYC in 2010." I asked how it knew. It used my blog as the source. We have arrived in the future. This is exactly the kind of query I've been begging Google to support for decades. They could have figured out where my blog is, or let me tell it where it is. Famously they once asked if I had misspelled my mother's last name in a query. How fucking clueless can you get.

In honor of the Knicks' very successful season, I temporarily put the paper bags fans at the top of the home page.

Jay Rosen gave a brilliant short talk in 2008 about the role of links in the web, and how journalism would have a hard time translating their self-contained worlds with the idea of the web, which is there is no container other than the whole world. Lots of important ideas in ...

Below is a screen shot of a post written by Doc Searls as viewed in Bluesky. It's jarring. The big picture of Doc gets in the way.

I realize no one designed this, but it also is reality, it's how a lot of people see Doc's writing.

Here's my suggestion. When the user specifies a featured image for a post, set the og:image element in the head section of the page. When they don't specify such an image, omit that element. That's how we did it in the Baseline theme, and I, as the writer, am happy with the result. I suggest doing the same for the theme used in Doc's site.

BTW, I asked ChatGPT if I moved to NYC in 2009 or 2010. It answered in an instant. "You moved to NYC in 2010." I asked how it knew. It used my blog as the source. We have arrived in the future.

Krugman is right, living in NYC is amazing. When I lived in Manhattan betw 2010 and 2019, I had it great but toward the end I yearned to live in the mountains, the year before Covid hit (that was a bad time to be in Manhattan, btw). Now I yearn to again live in the city. Fun...

Human beings spend far to much effort feeling better than some people or feeling inferior to others.

This is understandable, I guess, as far as evolution is concerned, up to a point, but I think we've been past that point for a long time now. Now, evolution brought us to a point where in order to survive as a species we have to get over this need to rank people and work together.

So if you feel other people are better than you, get over it. Same thing if you feel better than others. You aren't and they aren't.

Your shit still stinks and as the great Republican philosopher Joni Ernst so eloquently put it, she's going to be dead pretty darned soon and so will you.

It's already June 2! It seems like just yesterday it was June 1!

Good morning and welcome to June. Another month gone, and coincidentally the end of the NBA season. I woke up this morning with the worst hangover ever, and I haven't had a drink in months (never was my vice, I have others). The Knicks lost fair and square to the Indianas la...

RSS never had a big corporation acting as a benefactor, but to some extent Harvard did play that role, though it didn't have an ego when it came to this stuff, and it didn't behave like a tech corporation (good thing!), but it was at Harvard that the podcasting bootstrap cent...

Why does Apple invent their own proprietary plugs when everyone else does USB? Even if you don't like to speak ill of Apple, you know why they do it. They want to control who can make add-ons to their products in hardware, just as they do in software. I still buy their products, but I also buy products that use standards, so I can use them on lots of devices. Now, the same thing happens in software from other people and companies. They can choose to use what already exists, or invent their own. Example, I chose MP3 for podcasting, did not invent a new format. If I were to do a social web network, I would use RSS, I wouldn't invent a new format. I want interop. I want to create an open platform, I don't mind making money, but that's not why I do it.

Podcast: The Knicks won game 5.