If I were a sassy Democratic Party leader I'd cop to being woke. "Why yes I am woke. Aren't you?" The Repubs have never explained why it's bad to be awake. Dems have to learn how to engage to win. Another one -- "read, fire, aim" is how Trump leads, just look at the tariffs, and it's been a huge disaster for hard-working American wage-earners of all generations. The "all generations" part opens an interesting conversation, how it isn't just old people or young people, it's also people who are working today whose earnings are being stolen, and those of us who have been working for 50 years who were paying into a fund so we could benefit when we retire. That money is coming out of your paycheck with no intention of ever paying it back. That's the Republican-run America. Not so great.

As long as the Chinese company BYD is making such interesting and inexpensive EVs, and Tesla is a shithole company, if I were in charge, I'd give BYD a negative tariff to encourage them to flood the US market with nice cheap EVs so we can get rid of the shitstain Tesla once and for all. I'd give them an even better price if they agreed to recycle Teslas as trade-ins so we don't have to feel ecologically irresponsible. And yes, dear MAGAs, I am woke. You all can go back to sleep now. Zzzz.

All Trump is doing is making the US the cootie zone. We won't make anything here and we won't buy anything. We'll have nice 2025 computers, phones, cars, medicine, lumber, energy, but all the shit we import will break and be used up and we won't be able to replace it. The re...

I believe that eventually WordPress will be the hub for writers the way the web itself became the the hub for apps. Initially, the web wasn’t the best place to host apps, the Mac had a much more developed set of meaningful features for app devs, and we already knew the Mac A...

Today's song: Come on Eileen.

Rachel Maddow's show these days often begins with a hard-to-watch over-the-top endorsement of Bluesky. She shouldn't be doing that. It's a private company and someday she may criticize them as strongly as she did Facebook. I'd love to hear her explain exactly what's the difference between Bluesky and Facebook. A lot less than you might think.

There’s no reason RSS and social media have to be separate worlds. RSS is the easiest and fastest way to connect systems. When I see people endorse RSS over social sites I think we took a wrong turn somewhere because all these systems should be connected on the open web.

Hillary Clinton makes a very important point. "Republicans in Congress can put a stop to this at any time." By this, she means the crashing US economy. And even if you believe they'll "never do it" -- it's still the right thing to repeat this over and over -- people should know they could. This should be repeated until enough people get it, this is being done on purpose by the Repubs. This isn't about winning elections, it's about understanding who's doing this to you and how deliberate it is.

A question on GitHub: Is OPML the native file format for Drummer? It's better to first use the product or read the docs or search on web or use an AI chatbot before getting humans involved. Anyway, the answer is yes, OPML is the native file format of Drummer. It's the reason...

I wonder when ChatGPT or Claude.ai will compete with Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is great but it has always had a weakness in that it can be manipulated to tell a story from a very limited point of view. For example the RSS page has a long section explaining the benefits of Atom. What I like about the AI versions of the basic history of things is that it isn't so easily manipulated. I talked about this with Claude, and asked it to write up a proposal for ClaudeWiki, a Wikipedia workalike, not too expensive to run, make it part of a user's $20 per month subscription. I think it would be useful, if only as a demo how Wikipedia itself might improve its service.

A search for WordPress on this blog tells an interesting story.

If I were designing a social network, I would implement replies differently. When you reply to a post, only the person who wrote the post sees it. If they want they can RT it. The way it works now on all twitter-like systems means most of the replies are basically spam, people using your post as a way to reach people who follow you.

BTW, when you post something on Bluesky it's just a tweet. These things don't need different names on each platform.

It's time for new thinking. A reply to a tweet on Bluesky about the real purpose of MAGA -- it's to make rich white men richer. She said that to me. All I'm all three of those things. And that's really close to what people say about Jews, btw. In a few months that's what they'll be saying. All the pain and suffering is to make Jews wealthier. They're setting that up. Anyway, I looked at my retirement account the other day and it sure didn't look like I'm getting richer. Just sayin.

I like people who stand up and speak the truth. This is one of the silver linings of this crisis. There's no real advantage at this point in trying to play it safe, to not be noticed. So I like what Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut has been saying.

I used to tell friends you can't go wrong buying the S&P 500. The president is rated by now the stock market does, and so over the long haul you can expect steady growth from the S&P 500, and it keeps things really simple. Well, have to say -- that's no longer good advice. Maybe real estate? Outside the United States? I don't know. It depends on what the people of this country do, and if our representatives are listening.

MAGA's goal, it turns out, was the Great Depression.

And btw the it could be worse. 💥

I have a Canadian partner on the radiofreeameri.ca project, a founder of Tucows, who I've known for decades, Ross Rader. We've done work together in the past, it's great to be doing it again.

On the path we're on, no doubt Bluesky will come under the same kind of regulation law firms and universities are. And the shame of it is we could be using this time to spread out, distribute.

I finally looked at my nest egg and was shocked to see the new number. Even worse that the dollars in the account will buy even less as US currency loses its value as the flight to safety currency. It's not a big surprise as the US behaves like a drunk Dunning-Kruger schooly...

I finally looked at my nest egg and was shocked to see the new number. Even worse that the dollars in the account will buy even less as the US currency loses its value as the "flight to safety" currency. It's not a big surprise as the US behaves like a drunk Dunning-Kruger sc...

I asked ChatGPT to draw a portrait of the current US president in the style of Diego Rivera. US president in style of Diego Rivera. Diego Rivera clown.

How Bluesky hooks up via RSS into a powerful news system.

Bluesky is not Billionaire-proof, version 2. I wasn't satisfied with the blog post I wrote in March. I felt it was poorly organized and hard to understand, so I edited it, to get it down to its essential elements, and at the end explain why it's so important to get this right. Basically, by trying to be the universe, Bluesky is cutting off easy connections that can be made with other networks, make the system work better for communication, and at least deliver some of the freedom we all want. They've been very successful, and deserve to profit from that, but recognize it plays a larger role today than just as a business, so let's spread it out so it's harder to shut it down. This is a real concern, not just a nice-to-have thing.

ChatGPT colorized the photo of my grandfather on his tribute site.

Also one could argue that in the interest of neatness, one could phase out webmaster -- but why? It's not as if it's taking up a lot of memory or makes our software run slower. The idea of a webmaster is obsolete, it was how we thought of the web in the late 90s. Also note that it hasn't been deprecated by DNS, for the same reason, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Same subject is coming up on the nets as people discuss Musk's idea of rewriting the Social Security server side from Cobol to something else. We probably don't want to do that. Anyway. Just sayin.

One thing led to another, we discussed lots of facets to the RFSM document. At some point it started rewriting what I had, and used two terms that don't belong in standards-making: dogfood and deprecate. Nothing every is deprecated. That's arrogance on the part of developers....

Just tried an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to review ActivityPub re Rules for Standards-makers. I don't know if it was blowing smoke up my you-know-what, it did know that I wrote RFSM. But as you might imagine, after reading it, I totally concurred with its conclusions. In any case, it illustrates how ChatGPT can be helpful in designing new formats and protocols, making them more supportable and more useful for interop, which according to Rule 1, is the only reason we make standards.

They're still sanewashing Trump. Example. Just listened to Brian Lehrer, a news interview and call-in show on WNYC, which I revere, for many reasons. Lehrer is smart, and doesn't dumb things down for his audience. He usually asks the question I'm dying to hear the answer to,...