Dave Winer posts in early January 2016

My current bookmarks page of sites that I visit or feeds that I consume includes a link to DW's feed near the top of the list. I access his feed multiple times per day to see what new insights he has posted. I'm mainly interested in his thoughts and projects regarding web publishing.

I agree and disagree with his tech posts. I don't care about the other topics. I don't access his Facebook or Twitter pages, except in extremely rare occasions. I read the RSS feed from his blog.

Here is how I read Dave Winer's writings: feed page.

I use my custom "feed" command that is included within my Junco code that powers this site. The feed command also exists in the Parula code that powers my message board at ToledoTalk.com.

Here's how it works. The feed= is surrounded by two curly braces at each end. The line must begin at the start of a new line in order for it to work.

Scripting News - 2025-03-07T01:29:06Z

- 2025-03-07T01:29:06Z
So proud -- Doc Searls wrote this beautiful blog post with WordLand. If I have my way blogging is going to come all the way back and then zooooom out from there. Still diggin!

- 2025-03-06T16:15:48Z
Web isn't just a brand, it's also a noun and a verb. "I web you."

Tech and democracy - 2025-03-06T14:24:46Z

I found the TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick about being a democracy blog disturbing because imho it should have been about democracy at least since 2017, when it was clear that Twitter had just elected a president of the United States. That was a clear strong signal that tech and democracy were tightly connected.

At the time I tried to raise the alarm, in tech and in finance, that a Republican could buy Twitter for $12B, and that was a cheap price considering the value of the presidency in a tech entrepreneur's hands.

My experience in Silicon Valley goes back to the late 70s, so I have a pretty good understanding of the personality of tech entrepreneurs.

My blog, Scripting News, has been about democracy since inception, in 1994, though it has primarily been about technology. I got the same complaints that I should stick to tech, but I didn't see a line of separation. The stakes were large then, but now they're much larger and as Masnick notes, impossible to ignore.

In the mid-90s there was not much of a debate whether the First Amendment applied to the web, the consensus was that it did not! The NYT didn't defend the 1st A on the web, and Congress passed a law saying the 1st A didn't apply and a Democratic president, Clinton, signed the law. That was a pretty clear signal. (We were saved by a Federal appeals court, otherwise who knows what we'd be doing now.)

In tech, every generation thinks they're seeing a problem for the first time. This is almost never true. It's like anything else, we're iterative, going over the same issues again and again, and we have a chance to wake up at any point and learn from our mistakes and not repeat the previous cycle, but it seems we never do.

Most important is that we work together and share what we learned. But first you have to be aware that there is history. You know the famous line about people who "cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

We have great historians working here, and TechDirt is more famous than Scripting News is now. It would be a shame if the historians overlooked the historic connection between tech and democracy because they weren't aware it was documented much earlier than 2025. And btw -- don't miss that Google et al would like to deprecate the archive of the early web. No one is paying attention to that problem, and it's another way history is lost. The wisdom of the Google people forcing this on the rest of us is very much like the DOGE bros in DC today.

- 2025-03-05T15:19:13Z
We need a new kind of social network designed to run an effective response to fascism. So far all we have are profit centers for billionaires and would-be billionaires.

- 2025-03-05T22:14:51Z
When I ask a personal question on one of the AI bots, all of a sudden on Facebook I'm getting ads about what I asked about. It could be a coincidence, but it's happened a few times, on more than one system. And I'm a paying customer on all of them.

- 2025-03-05T15:19:36Z
People who criticize Dems for weak opposition at the SOTU are not hypocrites only if they said before the event what they would do. I was glad not to have to choose. I think in the end they did what made sense to each one individually. The range of response by the Dems was much broader than the Repubs. We should be thankful they haven't capitulated, as so many have, esp in what we used to think of as journalism.

- 2025-03-05T14:31:02Z
One thing to be grateful for, Trump didn’t invite any of the Jan 6 rioters back to the Capitol for his speech.

- 2025-03-05T14:31:49Z
Watch out for people who celebrate your freedom while profiting from your enslavement.

- 2025-03-04T16:02:42Z
I'm trying to get ChatGPT to not assume I have the same abilities as it has. You can't dump a huge amount of code at me and expect me to quickly see what changed, that's not how human intellect works, but this is something computers are extremely good at. I told my bot that it would work a lot better if they just told me what to change. I said this: "I have a lot of experience being a human being and working with other humans, and all your clients as far as I know are human." In other words, be concise and direct. This is what it said in response. "That’s a sharp observation, and I appreciate the insight. I'll keep focusing on clarity, directness, and being actually helpful rather than just dumping information. If I ever seem to be leading you down a non-optimal path, feel free to call it out!" Note how concise the response was. More advice for the bot. Help your human understand. I think maybe eventually we may be their pets. Try scratching behind the ears. On the other hand, to my human friends, do not depend on the strategies they choose. They will never on their own question the path they took. It may not be the optimal one, but they'll keep going down it. It's up to you to say nah this isn't the way I want to go, and they will always respect that. It's not like HAL in 2001. I've sometimes wasted whole programming session going in the wrong direction assuming my bot was good at this. None of them are, as far as I can tell.

- 2025-03-04T14:05:59Z
The single most important thing about what Musk is doing is that it is Musk that is doing it. Not elected, not accountable to anyone, and the only way we know what he's doing is from the aftermath. We play no role in his choices. Plus, he would be our last choice if we were in the market for a crazy despot to ruin our country. He wasn't born or educated here, and thus has very little idea of who we are and thus what the people he's firing do.

- 2025-03-04T13:51:57Z
Remember when watching the speech tonight, if you are watching, what our Capitol was like on that infamous day. The guy speaking, the guy up there on the podium, he did that. That's who he is. And where is right now, that's where it happened. Takes a lot of nerve to return to the scene of his greatest crime, so far.

- 2025-03-04T14:12:55Z
Another question about tonight. Where will Elon be? In the seat usually occupied by the VP or the Speaker? Will he make faces at the camera or interrupt Trump?

- 2025-03-04T21:30:55Z
The news should always report whether a bit of news is a financial plus or minus for Trump as in does this thing make him richer or poorer. That way you can zero in on the "why" of everything.

- 2025-03-04T21:14:42Z
I'm thrilled the Knicks are playing tonight. That's what I'll be watching. Let me know if anything happens in DC.

- 2025-03-03T16:24:41Z
Idea for SNL. A special episode of Law and Order where the cops arrest someone for being disrespectful to Trump,. The prosecutors debate among themselves if they have to do this, no one quits, they don't feel good about it but they prosecute, being assured by the District Attorney it's the right thing to do. When there are objections judge rules in favor of the government most of the time, but wants to show balance so once or twice rules in favor of the defense, but it doesn't matter, when the judge gives instructions to the jury he says basically the only option is to convict, or so it seems that's what he's saying and dutifully, the jury convicts. There are sentencing standards, provided by the DOJ so the judge sentences the accused to life at hard labor. Back in the studio at 30 Rock the audience isn’t sure if they should laugh, slowly realizing it’s not meant to be funny, the skit fades out to a commercial break.

- 2025-03-02T14:24:20Z
If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.

The best revenge is none - 2025-03-02T19:44:16Z

Pamela Short: The best revenge is none. Heal yourself, forgive, move on and don't become like those who hurt you.

There's a pragmatic reason for this. I found, when I was young and didn't know better, that getting revenge didn't just hurt the target, it also left me with a deep pain. When I did something to another person I was also doing it to myself. I found that the dark cloud of my harmful behavior would stay with me for a long time, maybe never going away. I would find it hard to forgive myself for what I did. So it's better to not try to get revenge, and let the pain of being hurt dissipate on its own.

I have a story to go with that. In the beginning of RSS, I had a partner and customer ask me at lunch if there were any circumstances when I would take the server we ran for them off the air. I said that's a weird question, but of course not. The very next day, his team announced they were taking over RSS, completely changing it, and the first I heard of it was in the public announcement. Later that same day, my brain boiling over in anger at being treated so poorly, I did eventually land on the idea of just taking his server offline. And then I laughed that he knew I'd get to that, and wanted to plant a little marker there for whatever reason, I don't know. But no I didn't take his server off the air. He may be a bastard, but he did pay for the service so his server stays up. And two years later, his project a failure, I came out with RSS 2.0 and that was the end of that. It wasn't revenge, it was just picking up the ball in the playground and restarting the game that they had caused to stop. We went on and RSS did a lot of good work.

Mike Myers as Elon Musk - 2025-03-02T15:32:27Z

Video of Mike Myers doing Elon Musk in last night's SNL cold open.

- 2025-03-01T18:25:54Z
The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there.

- 2025-03-01T18:23:51Z
These days I read Timothy Snyder's essays as soon as they come in.

- 2025-03-02T01:30:31Z
My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?

- 2025-03-02T01:41:45Z
What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021.

- 2025-03-01T18:21:22Z
New month. Last month's source code archived. Onward! 😄

One America Together - 2025-03-01T18:56:54Z

AOC asked for ideas of what to do for the SOTU.

I suggested we come up with a new slogan. Like this.

• One America Together.

Make hats, purple — enough for everyone, including the Repubs.

During applause, Dems rise and chant “One America Together.”

What do you think?

I'd like to excerpt from and comment about three DW posts that he made over the past couple days.

• Jan 4, 2016 - Leave nothing but footprints
• Jan 4, 2016 - Why tech insiders must be on Facebook
• Jan 5, 2016 - Re Twitter easing the 140-char limit

Dave claims that he likes the open web, and he often rails against silos, such as Twitter and Facebook. A couple years ago when I discoveredI heard the #indieweb use the word silo to describe social media sites