Something ChatGPT is good at. Give it a photo of the Statue of Liberty and ask it to remove the cement platform and change the background to pure white, then make the background transparent, reduce it in size, and paste it into the right margin of a blog post.

Wouldn't it be something if the leaders of European democracies said if democracy and self-government around the world is to have any hope the American government has to stop attacking their own citizens. We see where this is headed, they might say, and there will be no coming back from this for the US, if they turn the country, which still is the leader of the free world, into a police state. What if the European leaders said out loud and in public the things the Republicans and most of the Democrats refuse to say. The inverse of what JD Lance says about their governments and their people.

I hear Canada will be importing EV's from China. Now I'm going to have EV-envy a few hours drive away from home. They make better cars in China, I hear -- than we do in the good old USA. Too bad, it didn't have to be that way. And isn't it tragic that China is less politically toxic than the American citizen who made the car I drive now.

Apple's 1984 ad, with the benefit of hindsight, said "a new generation is going to take over now so get ready." We live very much in those times again. Now every time I use ChatGPT to do something that I never would have been able to do before I realize wow we just did "that" again. The same feeling I got when I first saw the 128K Mac at the Apple office on Bandley Drive in 1983, about the same time as Apple people saw the ad at their sales meeting in Hawaii in October. The Mac had an exciting but rough start, but by the turn of the century it was obvious that something completely different had happened.

Happy to say the Knicks won last night in convincing 2026 mode after I doubted them in Tuesday's post (perhaps they read my blog?). And after I asked if Greenland was the Sudetenland of our time, Trump did his famous TACO thing and said hey I was just kidding, so we don't have to ask if Canada will be this generation's Austria, or Poland? Now I have to say the Knicks beat the Nets, often referred to as the Knicks' "cross-town rivals" by sports announcers who know nothing about New York sports. The same team Kevin Durant said was the new cool NBA team from NYC (it wasn't and isn't and it turns out no one cared what KD said, certainly not basketball fans from the city).

Isn't Greenland the Sudetenland of our time?

The ads I like on TV these days are the ChatGPT ads that show you how it makes your life better. In the first ad two college age people, brother and sister it turns out, are on a cross-country drive and have a great trip planned. You can tell they love each other, and have a...

Nobody wants to be told how to think. I think the best thing is to be friends with everyone you can. And maybe don't make a big issue about who people voted for, and relate as people and Americans. That's something to put in the bank.

Also if you let people relax around you, you may find out that someone you trust and like is actually antisemitic or racist. That's also something to put in the bank, this is not someone I want to trust if and when things get worse.

Things are changing radically now. so you may not have to do anything to wake anyone up. And it's good to reflect on your own attitudes and whether or not some of the things they say about you are fair criticism. We all put up barriers, and those don't ever serve us imho, esp in a democracy -- but they are esp nasty now.

The Knicks are on an epic losing streak. This feels very normal. Let the trades begin. Maybe if we ask nice, Thibs will return? And isn't it funny these days KAT makes Randle look pretty good. Sort of a bonus for the Minneapolis team, which is playing NBA in a war zone.

The guy in the lower right of that picture has the canonical look of a Knicks fan wondering when it will all end.

I'm always happy to see NakedJen in my blogroll. Screen shot.

I got a text from Matt recommending Claude Code, saying it's as new as ChatGPT was when it came out.

Screen shot: Twitter did what I have been begging all the others to do. Get rid of the character limit and allow for simple styling, links, optional titles, the ability to edit, basically the writing functions of the world wide web. You can also put a nice Medium-like picture at the top. Twitter was started in 2006 which according to my records is approximately twenty freaking years ago! I mean geez how long does it take?

I took a couple of falls on ice the other day, during one of the many snowstorms we've had, and both times my watch, after a polite pause, shook my wrist, asking if I just took a fall and should it call in an emergency? if you don't do anything it makes the call. In that sense, Your watch could beep when someone is gaslighting the other person. If it was you gaslighting them you'd see your avatar on the screen. Of it's them, you can show it to them.

I'd like to see a social network that had an AI filter that only showed comments that were responsive to the question raised by the post they're responding to. BTW we need some technical terminology for socializing online. When I reply to a post, what do we call the post I'm replying to? Remember there's a human quality to this too, you're not just talking about something on a computer, but an actual person.

First, glad I wrote the political blog post yesterday. Enough is enough. I love Minnesota. I want to wear a Minnesota baseball cap today. I want to fly a Minnesota flag on my front lawn. And I want Congress to do their job and put a stop to this bullshit before Trump sends t...

I've been trying to stay out of politics here lately (did you notice), but I don't get how Americans, no matter who they voted for, can watch what's happening in Minneapolis and not feel like we have to protect the people there from the thugs who are attacking them. And of c...

Why now? Because there are probably still enough in the military who believe in the rule of law who will obey an act of Congress. I don't imagine that will last much longer the way things are going.

In 2019, I did an overhaul of XML-RPC, and created a reference implementation in JavaScript, both client and server (Node.js).

The missing links from yesterday's podcast.

• XML-RPC website.
• XML-RPC GitHub repo.
• JavaScript reference implementation.
• New JSON encoding.
• The original website was preserved.

A brief podcast with the fascinating story of how XML-RPC came together in 1998.

Last night's email didn't go out at the appointed hour, and I didn't get a chance to look until early evening. So last night's mail went out at about 6PM Eastern. Hopefully today's email will go out at roughly midnight tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. Still diggin!

Is there any circumstance where "Sorry for the inconvenience" isn't the wrong thing to say? Maybe I didn't even notice, or if I did, maybe I didn't care. And what if the results were more than inconvenient? What if someone died! Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll say. I like still diggin the best. It says yes we suck, and we know it, but we're trying to suck less. With emphasis on trying.

If you don't have one of these Keurig things, you're really missing out.

This is a continuation of a piece I wrote in August 2025. Yesterday I wrote a this.how doc about getting WordLand to run on sites that don't run on WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed. What this means is that their sites are accessible through the fantastic wpcom API, an...

I've been watching Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS. Jake worked at UserLand, but never at the kernel level, which is exactly where he and his AI...

Demo: rssCloud makes feeds as fast as the internet.

It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well -- no platform vendor. But I wonder if ChatGPT et al aren't destined to be the ultimate platform vendor. Are we the last generation of software developers, teaching it all of our thought processes?

BTW, I haven't posted a screen shot of where I write Scripting News in quite some time. Nothing has changed, but a whole other writing enviroment, targeted at WordPress instead of Old School, and it has a different feature set, look and feel.

I had a fantastic meeting today with Jonathan Desrosiers. I gave him a tour of all the software that makes up WordLand and FeedLand. It was the first time I had done that with anyone from the WordPress community. It started off with a simple story about how I knew I was on the right track when Matt announced they were porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress as an OS. Which is exactly what I'm doing with my collection of software. Every bit of writing should be a WordPress post, and they should be linked together in arbitrary graphs. It was nice to do that with a serious developer, Jonathan is one of the lead developers of the open source WordPress. It helped me see all the different things we can do, and now hope we will do. I feel I understand this community, as a time-traveler from the past I think I understand what we should do next (and I have done it heh).

I'm working on a feature for WordLand II where you can flip a switch to see the OG Metadata for a post you're reading, by clicking on an icon that looks like the flag on the side of an old fashioned mailbox. I remembered there was a desk accessory on the original Mac that us...

Today's song: He's Gone. We've barely had a chance to process the passing of Bob Weir, but now I realize that for the core of the Grateful Dead are now gone too. So I wanted to choose a song of the day that says a proper goodbye to Ron McKernen, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Ro...