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.

A fair number of people make a stop at news.scripting.com every day. I want to make some improvements, I think it can be made a bit faster. And I want to make it easier for anyone to create a site like that, for others to use. I think every news org should have one of those, to tell your readers who you read. Work together, we need it as we reboot the news industry. This is will be an alternative to twitter-style news readers, which took over the leading-edge from RSS feed readers, twenty freaking years ago. I think there should be a new paradigm every few decade, don't you? Long overdue.

Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the bottom, to the home page of the shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series. There's a lot of good stuff in the previous episodes.

Today's song: Eyes of the World.

Podcast: It occurred to me yesterday that there are a lot of parallels with Frontier on the Mac in the early 90s and WordLand and WordPress in the 2020s. So I told the story in a podcast and I think it came out really well. I did some editing at the beginning and end, and as usual my audio editing is pretty crude, but otherwise the story is exactly as I told it. I also asked Claude.ai to do a third-person summary of the podcast, as I did with the previous three shows, and it's getting better. I thought it's summary was great except it added it's opinion of how much I deserved a vacation, and it was right, I did, but how did it know I deserved it? Anyway, I encourage anyone who's involved in the WordPress community to listen. I think WP has a bigger role to play in the web than it currently has, which imho is saying a lot. 15 minutes.

Problem in Drummer blogs. oldschool.scripting.com is now served on https and the code in the template doesn't take that into account. For example, if you try to load the home page of my blog, you won't get through because it can't open the http files in the head of the template. This is something users can fix because you get to change your template. So I'm going to stay focused on my current work.

Heard an interview with Kamala Harris. She said they had 109 days to tell them who she is. Right there she highlighted the huge mistake the Dems make and continue to make. Ever since the advent of Twitter, campaigns have been every day of every year. The Dems have been AWOL. We never should have gotten to the summer of 2024 where people have no idea of who the freaking vice president is. When are they going to see how swept under the old ways of relating to voters are. We are the government of the United States. Get behind us and let us work our magic.

The tech press did their part in giving control of the public internet to the people who are selling us out.

if i ran firefox, this is what i would say wrt AI in firefox in 2026.

• 1. ai is exciting!
• 2. it's also in its infancy.
• 3. we don't know yet how or if it connects to the web.
• 4. the web is 100% our #1 priority.
• 5. so we're going to wait.
• 6. for now firefox is a no-ai browser.
• 7. we won't include ai until we know why.
• 8. and then it will be opt-in.
• 9. and we will continue to make firefox the best web browser.

sincerely,

the developers of firefox

Most of the attempts of humor in replies to twitter-like posts are of the "you had to be there" variety, as in it might have made sense when you typed it, but I don't get it. And it's even worse, I am irony-deprived, I often don't get jokes, something about how my mind works...

Highly recommend the HBO two-part interview with and profile of Mel Brooks who was 99 years old when the interviews were done. Includes quotes from lots of famous comedians. And the philosophy of comedy as art. So many things to say. Why is physical humor the funniest? And the funniest part of all the excerpts was the farting scene in Blazing Saddles. Humans are so damned simple.

My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it.