I keep thinking of this cartoon, which explains it so well.

Now that ActivityPub is claiming to be the Social Web, I feel like Lloyd Bentsen at the debate with Dan Quayle. ActivityPub is not the web any more than Dan Quayle was Jack Kennedy. The web is simple. That was hard to do. Very little since then lives up to that standard of simplicity, definitely not ActivityPub. The web is the web is the web is the web etc. Pick another more humble name. If it ever does achieve the utility of the web does we can take another look.

First, a couple of examples/case studies. 1. About ten years ago I was trying to figure out how to get started with Node.js. I knew a little JavaScript, but nothing I read about Node made it click. It's server software, so there must be a way to write a server? From there, I...

Imagine no doctor would treat you for a serious illness until it was on the verge of killing you. That's the situation women with troubled pregnancy, if she lives in the wrong state, is in, in the United States, now. Imagine the frustration of people in the medical system. I...

It would be great if we could make voting a party, a celebration, something to look forward to, not something you have to make time for. That would probably do more to improve the lives of all Americans than any other single thing. It's like the SuperBowl, the NBA Finals, Coachella or the Oscars, only better -- because we are the stars.

I wish my father had lived to use ChatGPT. He would have been so thrilled. My uncle would have lost his shit.

This is what it looks like when UPS loses a package. It's a case for the new Google Pixel 9 Pro. It was shipped on Sept 6, at this point that's 17 days go. It was hell to just tell Google that the case was lost. I expected at that point they'd apologize and refund the money....

BTW, to be clear, I have no interest in working on twitter-like systems.

It's been like a prison to writers, we're stuck with this huge divide, with crap on both sides.

These things exist, they have a jumble of APIs and ways to integrate.

And we've been playing by the rules laid down by Twitter (ev, biz and jack) for 18 freaking years. That's enough.

This will never get sorted out until people realize it needs sorting out.

Not expecting much more to happen there.

Instead of just fact-checking the candidates, and presenting "both sides," how about recording the number of times the candidate threatens specific races, genders, lifestyles, religions and of course individual people. Keep a page where you tally the groups he doesn't threaten with expulsion or worse. That would be very revealing, and in line with the true issue of this election. Time for you all to get in sync with the actual American history that's being made.

It's around this time of year that I start thinking about my BOTY. I should give out a plaque or a statue or something. Someday! Anyway almost immediately I had my answer. The announcement will wait till December of course, sometimes early January.

Social networks are criticized when they carry lies from race-haters and fascists, but the major news orgs do it all the time. It's ridiculous that there are two standards.

To my programmer friends, how long would it have taken to answer this question using Google and StackExchange. There was a bug in this one line of code, a call to new Date () in JavaScript, that was behaving as if months were not 0-based, which they are known to be. The problem: I was specifying the day as 0 and month, correctly, but the day had to be 1 in order for it to work and without thinking I had specified it as 0.

Since I'm about to turn 70 (next May), and because my body is getting old in ways it never has before (of course) -- I've become a more active participant in the health care system. One thing I've learned is it can be hard to get the attention of the doctors. And once you s...

Has anyone attempted to make a higher level language on top of SQL? It's taken me a few iterations over years to finally (I hope) figure out how to design a table to take advantage of the features that evolved into making SQL efficient for the applications people really deploy. If this were machine language, it would be time to start thinking about the HLL that it inspires. Actually long past time imho.

This is a test. For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of a new server app that combines the functionality of several apps I used to run as separate servers. The goal is to be able to integrate the functionality of all the components. It's time to invest...

Note to self: When the phone doesn't ring, go to Settings - Sound & vibration - Do Not Disturb. It was on for some reason. I'm sure I didn't set this. I'm pretty sure I've been here before. Here's the ChatGPT log and screen shot.

My Pixel 9 Pro keeps giving me tips on using it when I bring it up, as I'm trying to read an important message, or change something at a red light. I'm always distracted when I use the phone, and by adding more distractions to sell me on something, that's not their right. I paid $1300 for this new phone. And also I can't figure out how to get the phone to ring when I get a call. I keep missing important calls.

I keep discovering uses for ChatGPT. I think you could use it very effectively to learn a language, for example. I know how to say this in English, could you explain to me, in English, how to say it in French. I bet it's very good at that. I am using it to learn to write SQL code that takes advantage of all the arcane features they've added over the years to handle cases that come up in real database work. It's anything but a new language, and efficiency is everything -- so I think they pretty much have all the cases covered. I remember how frustrating it was to learn Algol when all I knew before that was Fortran and Basic. It would have been great to have ChatGPT to coach me on it.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders forced us to think of her as a mom. I don't think that works out very well in her favor, probably best not to go there.

I was driving on a mountain road yesterday to pick up a pizza in a nearby town. I drive it fairly regularly, and I have a car that handles well so I drive at the speed limit or a little above. Still, what often happens on this road is some asshole tailgates, getting so clos...

Interesting thread on a simple upgrade for any podcasting client that would create a network of tools people could use for subscribing and listening. I've tried to get people who make podcast clients to listen. Yes I am a user, but I also designed the technology, and did the first implementations, so I know what's possible. The medium could work so much better if they simply adopted the interests of their users. I never want to lock users into my products, I want them to choose them because they're the best.

Podcast: Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere.

I theorized why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky on Bluesky. I did the same on Threads and heard people say ugly personal things about Dorsey. This really pissed me off, because he's a human being who made a large contribution to the technology we use, and I think hi...

I look forward to the day when I can link to a topic I've written about on my blog without having to depend on Google. I don't think they know I have a blog or have any respect for it. Actually I know they don't have any respect for it. That's why depending on them for access to it seems too flimsy to build on.

I look forward to the day when I can ask a question on my blog and get an answer, on the blog, from a trusted member of my karass.

When will ChatGPT be able to do a transcript of an audio file?

I've been re-watching The Bear and am now totally thinking of my job as a chef. I started out that way 40+ years ago, and somewhere along the line I stopped thinking that way. If you can, watch S02 E07 to see what I mean. It's about service, the connection between the staff and the people who come to eat, and the medium is the food. It's the same idea. There's so much cynicism around tech, and I hate that. We've rarely seen it as a human thing both by the people who make the meals and the people who love great food. The world thinks of it as billionaires and influencers and lying fascist politicians. But it should be much more than that.

Has it ever been suggested that journalists take an oath, similar to the one the President takes to: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Could be voluntary. Sports reporters might take a different oath.

I have a linkblogging tool crossposts to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Twitter, WordPress and RSS.

Every time I publish a link it goes to all those places,

The RSS feed is doing a lot of the work.

• Links from the RSS feed show up on my Links page and in the nightly emails.
• The RSS feed is also used to connect to Threads, going through micro.blog. I am able to give it the URL of the linkblogging feed, and then click on Add Threads -- and that's it. When I post something to the feed it shows up on Threads.

This feature is tucked away in a corner of micro.blog and I suspect most people don't know it's there. It's sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems. If you're a micro.blog user, its Feeds page is where you set it up. Screen shot.