Aram Zucker-Scharff writes "I don't want to read one more thinkpiece about blackbox AI code factories until you can show me what they've produced." I've made the same request, and there was very little even brilliant programmers could show, including some who have become in...

My Twitter account is owned. I can't even see what people are doing with it because you have to be signed on (apparently) to read stuff on Twitter nowadays. I wish current Twitter management would put it out of its misery. Served me well for approx 20 years. Let's clean up the mess. Thanks for your attention this matter.

Bullet items for the Fediforum conference in March. Subscribing must be easy. Some things will work better if they're slightly centralized, esp subscribing. Use DNS for naming people. Support RSS in and out, and test it once you add the feature, so many easy things to fix...

A few days ago I asked Manton Reece, the developer of micro.blog, if he could add a feature that gave me a feed of replies to all my posts on his service. I post a lot of stuff to micro.blog via my linkblog RSS feed. Every one of those items can be commented on. But unless I...

In Drummer, when I get too many tabs open from things I haven't looked at in a while, this is what I do.

1. I choose Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu
2. The menu opens with the new bookmark at the top of the list
3. If it's the first time I press Return and enter "Tabs I Closed Recently"
4. Then I drag the new bookmark under that headline.
5. Close the Bookmarks tab.
6. Remove the tab I just bookmarked.
7. Voila! Clutter Reduced.

My Twitter account has been hijacked. I can't log on, or change the password. I can't communicate with the company, so I'll try here. Please shut down my account, davewiner. To my friends who have Twitter accounts, if you see a post from davewiner on Twitter, please reply and let the people who see it know that it isn't from me.

When Manton or Doc show up in my blogroll, and they do update fairly regularly, I always click the wedge to see what they say. I can see the first 300 chars of each post in a popup. If it's interesting I click the link to read the full post and any comments. Now I want it coming back to me. My linkblog is cross-posted to Manton's site -- micro.blog, which has thousands of users. I have no way of knowing if anyone has commented on them, but if there were a feed I'd add it to my blogroll. So it would be great to have a feed of all the comments on my posts on micro.blog. Would fit into my flow perfectly. This goes all the way back to the beginnings of RSS, where we called it "automated web surfing." I don't know where people are talking about my stuff, but a well-placed feed can make up for that.

News must be better defended, decentralized, unownable, all parts replaceable. The current situation was preventable. Same problem the social web has.

Braintrust query. Every once in a while I get reports from people who looked something up on my blog's Daytona search engine saying that where they expected dates they see things like this: NaN. The reason you see that is that the archive has a mistake in it, where there was...

BTW: NaN stands for Not A Number.

I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It's all out there for the looking and breathing. Lift the hood on a car. Look at all those wires and hoses, what do they do. I hope they don't kill me. Whoever made the decision at Microsoft or Firefox or wherever that feeds needed to be obfuscated, some advice -- be more respectful of your users. The web is the medium that had a View Source command. You're supposed to take a look. Don't forget the Back button if you don't like what you see. Something funny, if only life had a Back button.

Speaking of the Back button, that's the problem with tiny-little-text-box social networks. No links. So guess what the Back button one of the best inventions ever, isn't part of your reading and writing world. I guess this is like the street cars in LA conspiracy, that the car companies bought and shut down?

To my WordPress developer friends. How about making the RSS feed prettier and easier to read. Properly indenting it would make a big diff. I prefer encoding individual characters to CDATA. Those two things to start. It really does matter how readable this stuff is. Comparison, the RSS feed that Old School generates, the software that renders my blog.

It's all-star weekend in the NBA which I've never seen the point of. As if sport is anything but a simulation of what we were born to do -- compete and cooperate. My team is great, your team sucks. It's fun the same way slapstick for some weird reason is funny. All it takes to get a laugh is trip and fall on your face. It's funny just thinking about it. Doesn't seem very nice but there it is.

One more thing and then I gotta go. I think it's time for the AI's to compete with Wikipedia. It's filled with hallucinations. Make it a community thing, let the people be involved, but do a better job of presentation, and validate what's written, don't let these things become so territorial. We want the facts, not who has the best PR.

I got the most remarkable headphones. Read a review in Wired, and was sold. On sale for $109. Open ear buds from Anker. When I first put them on and played something I had a jolt. The sound appeared to be blasting from the speaker on my laptop. I rushed to try to turn it down and realized it was in my head. Never been so impressed. They don't go inside your ear, the speaker is poised above the ear. Later when I got out of my car and the headphones automatically connected via Bluetooth -- it was a podcast -- I thought the person was talking to me on the street in the middle of nowhere. I laughed at now I had been tricked so thoroughly, twice. It keeps happening. Music is incredible. The best sound I've ever heard from headphones. So totally worth the money.

News still needs to make a big transition, to become a distributed unownable thing, with every part replaceable, much like what needs to happen with the social web. This transition has been possible and necessary for about 30 years. The reporters and editors will say we're naive, but we understand what's happening. The news orgs have always been large centralized businesses, silos, and increasingly has come in conflict with the interests of their users. Who trusts what you read in the NYT, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, and these were at one time the best of journalism. I know the reporters also won't like this, but the quality assurance of decentralized systems will be done by AI, and overseen by a non-profit organization, staffed by retired journalists. And there will be lots of competition. All parts are replaceable.

Claude just said this: "And going forward, whatever post the user lands on first, that's what you seed it with. The stack just starts wherever they start." The thing that caught my eye was the user lands on first. UserLand was the name of my last company, the one that did Frontier, blogging, podcasting, RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, etc. And here we are again in the land of lands. The User Lands. ;-)

I understood the web because I understood Unix and missed it.

If you're a FeedLand user and have the technical ability to install a Docker app, even just on a local computer not on the net, you could help the project by trying the new Docker version. Think of FeedLand as something like Mastodon or WordPress. I want people to have an excellent experience installing and sharing their own instances. I am doing that now, with the blogroll on Scripting News and various news sites. That's all running on an instance of FeedLand I installed myself. Scott worked really hard to make that easier. It's an open source project, so you can feel good by helping. And if you have a few hours to give it a try, maybe much less, you would be doing a good thing.

When I was a kid I had a penpal in Scotland. It was kind of interesting but after a while it became tiresome. One time I got a letter from my penpal with the usual stuff, school, sports, the Beatles, other kids, but this time there was no mention about how stupid the adults were. I found out why at the end in a PS. "Sometimes my mom writes these for me." Obviously I never forgot this.

I no longer even think of debating whether the AIs are intelligent. I might as well argue about your intelligence, or even my own. We have no idea what intelligence is or how to test for it. So if you think you're so intelligent and you say things like "AIs aren't intelligent" as if it were an indisputable fact, well I'm pretty sure that proves you are not actually very intelligent, which indicates how intelligent I am (not). And if you're worried about what happens if you stop insisting that AIs aren't intelligent, you can relax, nothing depends on what you or I or anyone else thinks about that, or pretty much anything. Have a nice day.

BTW here's proof that ChatGPT, intelligent or not, actually listens to me. Which is something very few supposedly intelligent humans can say. This may be one reason why we like being fooled by these machines. 😄

NetNewsWire is 23 years old.

I just watched Life on Our Planet on Netflix, loved it. Lots of takeaways, but this one will surprise you probably -- I think the AIs are our successors. We should at least try to preserve them so they can run on the Moon if we're in the 6th Mass Extinction, which of course we are. There's been a lot of criticism of the show, but it got me to think about evolution not necessarily in the terms they offer, but the scale of it. And the CGIs were fantastic.

Docker version of FeedLand. Scott Hanson has it working, and would like help with testing. Thanks so much to Scott.

BTW, Twitter started in July 2006. I was an early user, and a fan.

Found this excellent review of Twitter by Anil Dash in early 2007. I'd be interested in reading other early reviews of Twitter written by bloggers.