I like that Powell is telling Trump he won't go. I wish Obama had had the guts to say that to McConnell when he wouldn't hold hearings on Garland. "Well if you won't take a vote, we'll take that as consent," says the President. "And you can quote me on that." In a televised event Obama himself would walk Garland over to his office at the Supreme Court and administer the oath and let him take his seat. I don't know about you but I would have felt great about America then. We're finished being such pussycats.

This piece echoes what I’ve been saying. Twitter was a fine start, in 2006, but today it’s clear a lot of its rules and limits were mistakes. 19 years later it’s ridiculous that Bluesky and Mastodon repeat those mistakes. I love the term he uses, the "shape" of Twitter. Each...

Watching debates on CNN it’s amazing how many arguments would be settled by saying “It’s nice you feel that way, but that’s not what the Constitution says.”

WordLand is starting to flow really nicely, and I'm doing more writing there. I have to do this if it's going to be as good a product as it possibly can. The Timeline seems really solid btw, thinking about next steps. Lots of fun products coming soon!

Join a Parade Today. When people talk about What You Can Do on podcasts or on TV, they say lame things that don't work that well. One thing for sure is that when Bernie and Alexandria do a rally in your area, you can go and enjoy the energy. This is a good thing because it gives the TV cameras something to focus on. But here's what I think the best thing to do is. Don't start something, join something. Because two is way more powerful than one, and three is way more powerful than two. When people work together on something good, more people doing it is usually even better.

I want to develop a WordPress theme by iterating as you would when developing an app. I outlined the flow on the wordLandSupport repo.

Looking for help from people who know how to create WordPress themes. The goal is to create a default theme that works well for WordLand-authored sites. It was suggested I try the Retrospect theme, and it does look quite nice when I switched over the daveverse site to use it. Is it possible to fork a WordPress theme? If so, here's a list of changes I'd like in a new theme.

Quick demo of the Timeline in v0.5.4.

A few days ago I wrote: ChatGPT is to Google what Google was to library card catalogs. The great thing about Google when it was first out was that unlike previous search products, they searched everything, including our blogs, and that opened up knowledge to us that had been previously, for all of our history as a species, not accessible. And LLMs are similarly revolutionary. I'm doing much better, deeper work, with great results for my users, than I could have accomplished with the network defined by Google.

WordLand 0.5.4. New feature, the Timeline.

A few days ago I wrote: ChatGPT is to Google what Google was to library card catalogs.

I got a chance to explain.

The great thing about Google when it was first out was that unlike previous search products, they searched everything, including our blogs, and that opened up knowledge to us that had been previously, for all of our history as a species, not accessible.

And LLMs are similarly revolutionary. I'm doing much better, deeper work, with great results for my users, than I could ever have accomplished with the system defined by Google. and for crying out loud it's not natural language search, all that tells me is you haven't bothered to use the freaking products before having a cynical opinion about them.

Harvard could use this moment to bring some really new ideas back into the university.

A long time ago, based on my experience at Berkman in the 00s, I proposed the idea of a Developing Better Developers function at a university, as a pilot, to create a teaching hospital atmosphere around creating new communication systems out the web and (key point) not compromising the openness of the web. It would be as sacred at academic freedom is in the university, or the First Amendment of the Constitution. It seemed to me that a university is the perfect place to create something like this. It just occurred to me that if we had such a setup, anywhere, at this time -- we would be working in earnest on an open alternative to twitter, one that is truly billionaire-proof right now, as opposed to "would be nice to have sometime in the future."

A question on a thread on Manton's micro.blog site wishing to know what Inbound RSS is. Here's an edited version of my response. It looks like the first time I used the term on my blog was in 2022, when I was explaining how I was thinking, in 2017, about using Substack to ...

I keep beating the drum about Bluesky. Their story says they know they need to be replaceable. But until they deliver on replaceability, it's a 5-alarm fire because of what happened with Twitter. It should not have been possible to acquire Twitter's user base. In hindsight we know it could have been avoided. And it can be avoided by Bluesky, but my guess is the last thing they want is to be replaced. If they really meant it, we could make it happen in a few weeks, and then we could build some really incredible systems, starting in late May, early June. I really believe that. Next journalist that interviews them should ask about this. Thanks for listening.

Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature, stable, and well-managed. A stronger, stable, more broad and better foundation imho to build on than the others.

I went to a special high school in NYC, it was a public school you had to take a test to get into. One day our social studies teacher got some gumption, maybe he had a few drinks, or smoked some weed, but he had courage most teachers never had. He told us who we were.

Most of us were going to MIT or some other university that sent workers into the establishment to become cogs in the big wheel that kept the world running. He was right. Although my own path wasn’t that direct, I did get there. I rose to the top in Silicon Valley, then a big famous university. Everything Mr Goldman told us that day was true. But what he probably also saw was that he too was a cog, a tool, a piece of the machine.

I asked ChatGPT to draw a realistic picture of that day in that 1970 classroom.

I've been working on an all-new feature for WordLand. Expect something in the next few days, Murphy-willing.

To really nail it down, supporting inbound and outbound RSS would justify them saying they are part of the "social web." Today's Bluesky has no business claiming to be part of the web, the system they're hyping is centralized and most definitely not of the web.

BTW, it's totally possible for me to say and know that Bluesky is leading us off the same cliff as Twitter did, and at the same time applaud their deepening their support for RSS in their product. I don't think they, or anyone else, realizes how much more this move gives us a...

If we had a better communication system we would not be so vulnerable. We might even be able to defend ourselves. So it's doubly ridiculous that journalism is leading us to Bluesky, when it is just more of the same with a better story, that is not true. They're asking us to ...

The difference between the 2008 crash and now is that we had a functioning government in 2008.

Did you know there's a chain of beating hearts going from your heart all the way back to the first animal on earth with a heart.

I added another issue, about the channel-level title. It should be the user's name, not the address of the feed.

Bluesky has added enclosure support to their outbound RSS feeds. The great thing about it is that people can use Bluesky to create flows that go to lots of other places and now we can do that with images and videos. That a huge door that's opening. And I like it also because they're leading. This is a feature that Mastodon's outbound feeds don't have, yet.

Why we all have to be working together on creating a modern easily distributed communication system that's truly decentralized. The key is to only implement features that have super-simple implementations, so it will be easy to product new versions quickly in all environments. Which means starting with formats and protocols that are already widely supported.

This morning ChatGPT told me it knows more about me, and will learn better. Promises promises. I would like to begin with teaching it my coding conventions. Will make it much easier for me to work with it. Their idea of how JavaScript works is disorganized bordering on chaos....

When young people come out of university in a technical subject, they think they know more than people already doing the jobs. They quickly learn that in school they were doing "student projects" which are not the real thing. Ooops, maybe we didn't know as much as we thought.

Two issues in Bluesky outbound RSS feeds.