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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

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Scripting News - 2024-11-17T15:22:12Z

- 2024-11-17T15:22:12Z
Joe Trippi posted a video to his new sez.us service where Pete Buttigieg explains what the Russians have done to the US. I see it that way too. When Brian Lehrer asked a few weeks ago how the US got so divided of his guest Bob Woodward (a fascinating time capsule, recorded before the election) they both missed it. We were divided by an enemy that is on the cusp of destroying the US without launching a single nuke. Putin didn't have to invade Ukraine. I guess even he didn't think his plan would succeed so spectacularly. BTW, I don't think Trippi's network is the answer, but maybe it is. I wish I had had a chance to create the system he was using, we would make a good team. Anyway we need to be further along than his offering is. The right system would allow me to control my presence with only RSS, in and out. Maybe not for everyone, to start, but it would allow us to start building. It's why I have been lobbying for inbound and outbound RSS as a back-end for all these networks. With the rise of Bluesky in the last couple of weeks (things are happening that fast now) we may have a new shot at it because Masto and Threads are certainly feeling it, and when people feel competed-with they are more open to new thinking.

- 2024-11-16T20:06:17Z
Excellent piece on how Bluesky leaves users with the impression that it's open and decentralized in ways it is not. If it's bought by someone who wants to use it the way Musk has, they can, without any recourse by the users. As they said in the old days, if you're getting something for free, you're the product, not the customer. We helped Musk build a way to excercise political power against our interests. You may think Bluesky is a way of fixing that, but it probably isn't. They're digging a deep hole, probably too deep to climb out of at this point. They did some innovative stuff, perhaps. But they ended up at the same place, it appears, as Twitter did.

- 2024-11-15T18:21:00Z
Today's song: Tea for two and two for tea.

- 2024-11-15T14:52:11Z
I added a screen shot to the WordLand placeholder page.

- 2024-11-15T17:01:36Z
I predict that people will come to appreciate features that Mastodon has that the other twitter-like social web services don't.

- 2024-11-15T18:09:39Z
Why Repubs won? They campaigned in a new way that the Dems apparently didn't notice (neither did I, not claiming to be better). Repubs were more creative and improvisational. They didn't worry what Jake Tapper or Ezra Klein would think, so came off as more genuine. It's a TV show, acting and suspension of disbelief are what count. It has nothing to do with anything else. Sorry it has to be that way but that's how it is. I don't think they hate women btw, they would have voted for Roseanne Barr or Melissa McCarthy. Maybe Chris Rock, they probably would have really liked Will Smith. Idiocracy was incredibly prescient. No joke.

- 2024-11-15T18:17:17Z
When I was a boy my mother would sometimes say if I didn't stop belching I wouldn't be able to stop.

- 2024-11-14T14:57:54Z
Today's song: Who's this kinky so and so.

- 2024-11-14T14:58:34Z
A few days ago I saw Donald Fagen at a local supermarket. I had heard he lives in the area. I didn't bother him, I imagine a star like that enjoys moments as an ordinary person, but he's anything but. I'm listening to Haitian Divorce this morning, grinning from ear to ear as I sing along.

- 2024-11-14T14:48:14Z
Last year on this day: We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a blog post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of Textcasting, btw.

- 2024-11-14T14:49:12Z
We're going to open testing for WordLand shortly. At first I only want developers who write great bug reports. My goal is to speed up development and reduce wear and tear on me. Once we're confident it really works as advertised, we'll open up the testing further. There will be a form you can fill out to get in the queue. The choice of the first testers will be highly subjective.

- 2024-11-14T15:12:03Z
BTW, start thinking of WordPress as a highly networked, deployed, debugged, widely supported network operating system. It meets all the criteria. It also has storage. And can publish. And unlike other social web systems, it is textcasting-ready since it comes from the world of blogging where we competed to give writers the features they needed. We can build lots of apps on this foundation.

- 2024-11-14T16:36:40Z
I've been having a one-sided discussion with Bluesky asking they make their product less vulnerable to takeover by tech bros, and I can't tell if they're doing anything about it. They must be conflicted, on the one hand, they clearly could sell there service now for a lot of money, but when they do that they must know they're selling us out.

- 2024-11-13T15:00:24Z
A 27-minute post-election ramble podcast.

- 2024-11-13T16:27:40Z
I am working on a text editor for WordPress using MediumEditor, but I save the text in Markdown and when I reload the Markdown text I regenerate the HTML. I think the social web should exchange Markdown as the canonical form of web text. It has the right set of features, it's Just Enough HTML.

- 2024-11-13T21:55:56Z
There isn’t a single social web network that I like pouring my creativity into. I feel like I’m being used not appreciated. There’s nothing in it for me. I had a similar feeling for Twitter, but they were the only one. Now there are a bunch, and I honestly don't care about any of them, esp now that the election is over. I think this whole idea of feeding the greed of a bunch of tech people is over. If there's a good place to gather, with a small number of people I relate to as people, then I'm up for that, but none of these services meet that need.

- 2024-11-13T15:38:55Z
ChatGPT can't remember my coding conventions. It always falls back to using features of JavaScript I told it not to use. I indent my code according to the way it works in an outliner, so I can't use their code without having to manually modify it. I haven't forgotten that I'm the human and it's the computer. Its memory is supposed to be perfect. And I am a paying customer, btw.

Are you the nerd of the year?? - 2024-11-13T17:23:37Z

Whenever you ask for something with Bluesky they tell you about how a user account is like a website, you just have to make it work a certain way, that some devs have mastered, and I guess I could too, but right now all my attention is focused on WordPress and getting it to work well with ActivityPub so my editor can get directly into the Mastodon network and possibly with Threads too.

But what about Bluesky which is growing like a weed now??

It might be easy for the right person.

1. Come up with an interface that makes it so that a WordPress blog is just a user on the Bluesky network.
2. They have a nice API, I've just spent a year implementing on top of it. I imagine for someone who knows both WordPress and Bluesky this might be a weekend project?
3. Do it, and blow our minds! There's a lot of content out there in WordPress and a lot of people publish on it.
4. And the best part of it is that it totally drives adoption of textcasting which is my not so hidden agenda. 😄
5. And for the people who are starting to think it's only an ActivityPub thing, think again.

If you do this you might not win the Nobel Peace Prize but you will be Nerd of the Year in my book!

2024 is different from 2016 - 2024-11-13T14:41:32Z

It's good to have a record of the things you posted and when you posted it. On August 12 of this year, I tweeted this: "When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day." I included a screen shot of the front page of the NYT on Jan 7, 2021. One in three Trump voters still watch mainstream news, which follows the lead of the NYT, and if they had been straight with us, perhaps enough people who like Trump's style would have realized the danger, and voted in a conservative way, ie to conserve the Constitution. Because of how they covered it, we now get to re-run the 2016 experiment all over again.

But, as Heather Cox Richardson points out in Jon Stewart's weekly podcast (a must-listen) -- we have more experience too, and perhaps will know better how to deal with Trump and know that his bark is often worse than his bite. I have to say as the new reality sinks in, I'm not as scared as I was on Election Night last week or even Election Night in 2016. A lot of people will sell out this time who didn't before. But the problems of climate change have gotten worse in the intervening years, and people feel it in their bones, pocketbooks and fears. You think inflation was bad? This will be far worse and it's happening now, and nothing we can do at a human scale will make it go away.

We're dealing with a very unusual drought in the eastern US now. Fires are breaking out where we never used to have them. Yeah this shit is real, and even people who don't believe in science are feeling it.

As someone once said, you should never waste a good crisis. A lot of other people feel compelled to move. Unfortunately some are moving to the wrong place, as they always do. Making change isn't easy, but is possible, if you understand how people move. As they try to figure out what the Dem's failed at, that's it.

Skate to where the puck will be, not where it was, as another famous philosopher once said. And people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors (which I said, sadly, but then put that fact to use to get various standards to fly by without debate). There is a method to human madness, in other words, imho.

- 2024-11-12T17:32:55Z
If Bluesky is open source, which it appears to be, someone who has time and has experience packaging products, should create a Bluesky distribution for a few popular hosting services (Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud), so installing a new instance is as simple as it can possibly be. One click? That would be awesome. We need to have thousands of these running. If it really is like the web, as they say it is, then it should be like the web in every way. There are lots of websites. If you sell your website to a billionaire, that has no effect on my website. Right now we are totally vulnerable to the Bluesky folk selling their service to another country, or our country for that matter -- or a billionaire, or whoever. Whoever did this packaging job would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Anticipating the objection that Mastodon is already doing this -- it is not. Setting up and using a Mastodon instance is good for nerds. Not for poets.

- 2024-11-12T22:41:24Z
Update: My guess is that they haven't released enough code to run a Bluesky of your own, because all the answers from people who say they know say the same thing -- "It doesn't work that way." You could write your own, but if we were to do that, why use their one-off API, use a standard instead, and we might have a chance to interop with other systems in a meaningful way. I don't blame them for wanting to cash out, but I do blame them for conning people into believing it's some kind of escape. Until I hear otherwise Bluesky is a dead-end, not worth investing your hope in. If you're migrating from Twitter this is no better. Keep looking. But I promise to let you know if I get any info that changes my opinion, so if I've got it wrong, people from Bluesky, just answer the freaking question in the post at the top of this page. Thanks.

- 2024-11-12T02:31:10Z
Does anyone know who was doing the work at kamalahq on the various social networks? I wonder if they would like to keep posting. They stopped updating on Election Day. We could change the names of the accounts. I thought it was great that there was a steady source of political news that didn't equivocate like the NYT-inspired news orgs. I would love to help fund a continuation of that flow.

- 2024-11-11T15:31:40Z
It might be time to get our shit together.

- 2024-11-10T16:32:02Z
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what's missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network. It is not represented online 7-by-24-by-12 every year, not just presidential election years. Democrats, when you lose it's because you didn't show up. It's happened three times so far, at least. We could have led here because most of the innovators in this space vote Democratic, but the leadership doesn't listen. The voters could get to know all the stars of the parties. People were right when they said they didn't know Harris. It's time to let the leaders rise from the net, not just from the insiders. This is how you do it.

- 2024-11-10T04:22:14Z
ChatGPT's web search can search my blog, as I do on Google, but it's way more useful. Here's a screen shot. We're getting there. Really nice.

- 2024-11-09T17:44:19Z
I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question.

- 2024-11-09T14:56:37Z
It's worth listening to On The Media, interview with Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through social web and podcasts, if that's where we're all getting our news from, and btw MSNBC are already pretty well limited in what they'll tell us (this was our beef with NYT if you recall) -- the next step is to make it impossible for us to hear what each other are saying. Now is the time to plant seeds for a defense of our speech and communication later.

- 2024-11-09T15:03:08Z
I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere." Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic.

ChatGPT image of my life - 2024-11-09T17:49:37Z

I asked ChatGPT: "Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like."

- 2024-11-08T23:05:43Z
BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can create your own.

Democratic mistakes - 2024-11-08T12:30:49Z

I've actually written a lot, but haven't wanted to publish most of it. So many reasons why the Dems lost. Maybe I should just list them.

1. Biden shouldn't have run again. There would have been a primary. Given the result of the election this week, we should have found out what support each candidate had with voters. We didn't get to choose the candidate. That said Harris ran a fantastic campaign.
2. Biden should not have shut down his campaign website. Rather than using it to raise money to feed to the media industry, they should have organized and listened, to develop new channels of communication with voters that were not dependent on journalism. Every time the Dems run a campaign, win or lose, they shut down their connection to the electorate. The voters' only role in the party was when they needed our money and our vote. We were not part of governing. Huge mistake. And I'm not just saying that now, I've said that about every Democratic campaign since Obama. This is probably the biggest single mistake the Dems keep making.
3. We needed a prosecutor at the top of Justice. I don't know what Garland actually did, but I'm sure it will all be swept out by whoever is Trump's AG.
4. Men's votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which is why so many voted for Trump. We could have had a bunch of them this year, if we had only spoken to them with respect.

I don't know if we can reboot the Democrats as an opposition party given all these problems. Whatever comes next is going to perform very differently from the party that lost this election. If we try to do it again the same old way, it will fail even worse. I think everyone knows this by now.

- 2024-11-07T23:00:56Z
Not much time to write today and tomorrow.

- 2024-11-06T14:53:03Z
I prayed. I really did. But I got the wrong answer.

- 2024-11-06T14:53:57Z
In 2016, on the night of Election Day, when it was obvious Trump would win, before taking a Xanax and going to sleep, I wrote a piece, that my friend Chuck Shotton says I should run again. Rather than doing that, I'll quote the important part. "I don't think it's about economics, I think it's about change happening too fast. And the Trump voters had the power to bring it to a screeching halt, they saw the chance and took it."

- 2024-11-06T14:56:05Z
First thing -- Don't shut down the campaign. We must keep communicating with the electorate, independent of what they get from the news orgs. The Harris campaign did an exemplary job. Why shut it down. Keep setting the agenda. Help keep us organized. Preserve the perspective and expectation of democracy in the US. Change the message from raising money, to keeping us all in touch with the opposition (ie us). This is the mistake we made in every election since we had the web to organize. The Repubs, almost by accident, never stopped organizing. And now that Musk, who will be part of the new administration, owns Twitter, you can be sure they will stay and get more organized. We can do it too! We have to stop making this mistake of going back to zero after election, whether we win or lost.

- 2024-11-06T15:01:14Z
Blame is pointless. It may be emotionally satisfying at some level, but it is division, and that's why we keep losing elections. We don't see it but we create our own divisions. This must stop.

- 2024-11-06T15:01:24Z
Be generous with all classes of people, by gender, age, race, religion, whatever is used to divide us. Stop vilifying men. Carville was right. There's no reason to make one whole gender the scapegoat for all our problems. It's no accident that the Repubs own the men. We could probably have had ten percent or more of their voters if we stopped doing this. Key point, when you blame a whole gender, you hurt people who have no power to stop it.

- 2024-11-06T15:11:38Z
Speaking of Carville, yesterday's Trippi podcast with Carville as the only guest was the best podcast I've ever heard. I recommended it yesterday as inspirational. Now that we know the outcome of the election, it's a marker of where we were before the results were known. A world that no longer exists. But like stories written in 2016, the markers are useful to see where we once were and how we got here, and what we can learn from what happened between. I wish it had turned out the way these two great friends thought it should have. But it didn't. But there was a hint that they knew what wouldn't work this time. No spoilers.

- 2024-11-06T15:13:35Z
Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter: "What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!" I wrote in 2017, that some Repub would buy Twitter, and it would merge and thus transform politics and tech. This was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one who saw it. We could have headed this off, if people would just listen. I beg you to listen to people you don't usually listen to. The NYT will never hire someone like me to write on their op-ed page, so if you only accept your input from people with legit credentials, you'll miss insights like this. We're paying a heavy price for this now. When I begged people to listen they came back with the balance sheet valuation of Twitter, but they were leaving the most important asset off the balance sheet, the dollar value of being able to elect a president. Musk didn't miss this.

- 2024-11-06T15:55:39Z
"Richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world."

- 2024-11-06T15:25:08Z
Also to the Twitter founders, amassing that much power and centralizing it as Twitter did, had a cost that we're paying now. But it's very hard to stop when the juggernaut is rolling. I understand, but in the future we have to think about this more clearly. When a medium becomes too big and centralized, there's trouble ahead. It was accidental that Trump was the one to take advantage of this to route around journalism and go direct, but it was not accidential that Musk did.

- 2024-11-06T15:18:47Z
Speaking of Musk, maybe he will temper Trump's desire for retribution. It may be a vain hope, but I'll cling to it anyway. Doing business in a world of retribution might not be too conducive to the creativity needed to run innovative tech businesses. A climate of fear doesn't inspire great software. I know the quality of products Musk makes, I own and love my Tesla Model Y. Best car I've ever owned or driven.

- 2024-11-06T15:20:50Z
My longtime friend, Mike Arrington said next time have a primary. He has a point. Would Harris have been the nominee if the Dems had had a normal primary process? Who knows. Maybe the voters could have told us then that what happened yesterday was coming.

- 2024-11-06T16:54:46Z
Final note (I think). The pain you feel at first may abate. It did for me. I had pushed down memories of 2020 and 2021. It was a horror show, and Trump was the main character. So the first thing I had to deal with is that I don't want to remember that. Too painful. But once I realized that's not where we are right now, it's a totally different situation, that's when the creative impulse rose as the pain receded. We have one short term thing to do -- keep the campaign running, and long term we have to recognize division we add, and counteract it. We are the party that welcomes everyone regardless or race, religion, country of origin, age or gender. All of them. No exceptions. The election result represents big change. And it's a good time to make more changes.

- 2024-11-06T17:31:06Z
PS: I bet Bezos wishes he had bought Twitter.

- 2024-11-05T13:01:39Z

- 2024-11-04T14:32:53Z
lists.opml.org: The other day I asked a famous blogger who uses RSS if he would be willing to share his list of feeds, so others could subscribe to them. He declined, for good reason, there was private stuff in the list he couldn't share. I certainly understand that. Then I realized, as often is the case, that I could do myself what I had been asking others to do. And in fact I already was sharing my OPML subscription lists, but people who didn't use FeedLand wouldn't know how to find them. So I decided to make it easier. On lists.opml.org I've got a link to the lists of podcasts I'm subscribed to. That list should update every hour for any additions or removals from this list. I don't update the list very often, fwiw. And I make no warranties about the quality of the podcasts, or when the feeds in the list update. And maybe this will give other people an idea that they might want to do this as well. Let me know if you do, I'd love to see what you do.

- 2024-11-04T13:40:17Z
Tomorrow if you are an American, and haven't voted yet and are thinking of sitting it out -- get off your butt and get out there and do your civic duty. We need great turnout this year, record-setting turnout, as a show of love for our country and our Constitution. Vote now, because later you might not have any power to change direction. Tomorrow, you do have power. And remember that voting is not you expressing yourself, it's not free speech, it's you and I governing. This is our moment of greatest power. Use it or lose it.

Rebooting the news - 2024-11-04T13:28:17Z

My opinion: At this point it doesn’t matter what the NYT says. Either way they jumped the shark for the last time in this election.

After the election if we still have freedom of speech, we should reboot news around the simple idea of news written by experts. They must know the basic rules of journalism, imho that's much easier than the know-nothing journalist posing as everyman with a view from nowhere, trying to understand what they're writing about. They don't have any basis to judge, we give them far too much power. That system is rooted in a time when publishing was expensive but that hasn't been true for thirty years. the old system has run its course. This election, either way, is a lesson in how that system, if it ever worked, doesn't work today. The next news system will be sources going direct to interested readers.

Jay Rosen and I did a series of podcasts in the early teens called Rebooting the News. This was the basic premise. I believe more than ever that this is the best path for news going forward.

They did this at Wired for a while. I was invited to be a columnist when my main qualification was that I was an accomplished software developer. I think that's the way to go. Experts sharing their perspectives on current events.

Before Twitter existed, in 2002, I proposed to the NYT that they offer a blog to anyone who is quoted in a NYT article. If they had done this, the NYT would be what Twitter became, and it wouldn't now be owned by Elon Musk, for the benefit of humanity. I wish they had done it. It would have been a real moneymaker. And good for the flow of knowledge.

- 2024-11-03T15:18:47Z
About polls, I learned how they work and how much they are a Ouija board, where the reports are tuned up based on the pollsters assumptions about who are the real voters, and account for the limited people who can be polled. They're trying to estimate what millions of people will do by talking with a few hundred. So they read each others' work, and try not to be too far off the consensus. It's at best an art, at worst they're just press releases designed to get the ad money to flow in certain directions. Don't overlook that the money is flowing to the same businesses that are choosing which polls to report on. Most of what the news orgs report on, it makes it into a sport like the NBA or MLB, but there at least there's objective news to report on, you know -- the score of each game, how many runs were scored, who got injured, fired, traded. In politics, there is no objective news, and if there were, the journalists we have don't report it. There's a lot of inputs that are connected to the outputs, conflicts of interest everywhere. Even so, the top item on Memeorandum is about a poll in Iowa that says Harris is ahead. Iowa was never thought to be in play. Yes, I too am addicted. Endlessly fascinated. Maybe we'll survive next week after all? Hope.

#rss