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 - 2024-05-16T00:45:48Z

- 2024-05-15T20:43:59Z
My AI bot is a library, a librarian, a programming partner, tutor and executive assistant. And we're just getting started working together.

- 2024-05-15T15:57:30Z
AI is not over-hyped, imho. I'm discovering new significance for it every day. An example. I had to go back to some very complex code I wrote a week ago. I wanted to give it new flexibility, that would be simple from the user's point of view, and in order for it to work technically it has to maintain that simplicity internally. It's a tall order to go back to something complex a week after writing it, and rip it apart and put it back together and have it retain the simplicity it had before. But I had an advantage this time that I had never had before, a programming partner with a perfect memory. I had written the original code with ChatGPT. So I went back and asked it to review my plan, and then worked with it step by step as I had before. It had perfect recall, right, of course where my recall is pretty sketchy. It took two sessions to get it done, but it works now, and I'm confident I've covered all the bases. How do you put that story in a press release? If you want to understand a new technology, don't talk to the CEO of the tech company that made the product, their lives are whirlwinds, they don't have time or the capacity to understand how big the idea is, they just know that it is big. If you want to understand you have to use it and you have to talk with other users.

- 2024-05-15T13:26:30Z
Martha My Dear is the essential Paul McCartney love song.

- 2024-05-15T13:18:28Z
This is a typical dialog you see when you visit a site with an ad blocker installed. They say that turning off the ad blocker will "support" them. No, I don't think it actually will do anything for them. It might expose me to malware or having my interests shared with businesses who will use that info for who-knows-what. Much better would be to let me click a button to give them $0.50 to read the freaking article that's behind that idiotic dialog, and btw, the payment would have to be anonymous or I'm clicking the Back button. I really did want to know what happens if Trump is found guilty and sentenced to prison. I still do. But I don't think I'm going to turn off my ad blocker. I'll think about it. In the meantime if they had let me pay them $0.50 to read the freaking article, I might have linkblogged it to people who follow me via RSS or email, or on Bluesky or Mastodon, thus giving them a chance to sell others on paying $0.50 to read the freaking article. Not promising I'd do that, but if they really answer the question, if I really learn something I certainly would pass it along. Come on USA Today, get conscious. We'll happily support you for giving us info we wanted, just let us actually help you in a meaningful way, not by penalizing us for having the audacity to use an ad blocker.

- 2024-05-16T00:45:48Z
I wonder if anyone named their dog Alexa, and if any hilarity ensued.

The Knicks won last night - 2024-05-15T16:06:38Z

They needed fresh blood, and they got it.

Knicks won in a blowout.

I had no idea that was coming.

Next game on Friday.

- 2024-05-14T13:10:39Z
Yesterday's OpenAI big press event was a nothing burger. I thought they already had all of that stuff, they certainly had been at least telegraphing it. Also there never will be another Steve Jobs, it's too bad everyone is using his template for product announcements. It only works if you're Steve Jobs.

- 2024-05-14T13:12:34Z
BTW, I've been to three Stevenotes, the first one, the rollout of the Mac in 1984, then the rollout of NeXT in 1988, and a random press event in 1997 announcing they were going with Unix server products instead of the homegrown much easier to use Mac server products. We could have had both of course, but Jobs never really wanted developers imho, truth be told. We were inside in 1984 because Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki were doing the evangelism.

- 2024-05-14T12:38:37Z
It's a crazy world, so crazy that RFK, Jr could be elected president via a third-party. He's a better speaker than either of the other candidates. If he didn't a speech impediment I'd say he was basically a sure thing. I don't know how crazy he actually is, but he cleans up nicely, having seen him interviewed on MSNBC a few days ago. He had good PR training somewhere, it's probably not just from the genes, he is a freaking Kennedy, his mother was a wife of a Kennedy, and clearly raised him well. I'm voting for Biden of course. I'm not that crazy. But people are tired of Biden, I understand why -- and they want a president they can look up to, not one that reminds them of their 80-something grandfather. And people are also understandably fed up with Trump. Before it's over we will come to think of him not as a spoiler but as a possible future president, where "future" is less than a year away.

- 2024-05-14T13:08:19Z
Someday I'll make a list of people who I wish would read this blog.

- 2024-05-14T12:34:04Z
If a baker may not be forced to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding on the basis of religious freedom, surely a woman can’t be forced to give birth to an unwanted child.

Brunson as bad man or decoy - 2024-05-14T12:59:08Z

In this picture he either looks dangerous or defeated, or both. I wouldn't want to have to play against him tonight.

Here's my two cents. If Brunson has heavy legs tonight, as he clearly did in the last two games, he should be used as a decoy, to draw a double team, to free up one of the Knicks' assassins. Or maybe he'll be more effective with just one Pacer guarding him, instead of two or three.

And for crying out loud, start one of the excellent bench players, McBride or Sims or Burks, or all of them, and make sure the heroes of games 1 and 2 get plenty of rest.

- 2024-05-13T20:41:38Z
I've been trying the new 4o version of ChatGPT. It's much faster. It certainly is a search engine. And it covers news. I asked it about Michael Cohen's testimony today in the Trump trial, and it gave me a summary. I asked for the weather forecast in Kingston NY. It wouldn't give me the lyrics to Martha My Dear by the Beatles. I asked it to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images.

- 2024-05-13T19:15:44Z
I can’t wait for the UIs of settings on systems like Mac or Android to go through the AIs. No more hunting through menus to not find the setting where you’re sure it should be.

- 2024-05-13T13:04:09Z
Here's where we're headed now that we have AI programming partners. Creating software will be possible the way popular music is created. Watch Get Back to get an idea. George Martin was the Beatles sherpa, the same way my AI partner is my guide through unknown programming lands. It now doesn't matter if I have less experience building MySQL apps than others. I have the collective experience of all of them here to help. My George Martin. What got me thinking about this is John Naughton's piece about AI and programming.

- 2024-05-13T13:06:51Z
The way MSNBC has contributors, I want contributors for my blog. One of the first people I'd invite is John Naughton. See next item.

- 2024-05-13T13:11:45Z
BTW, that's what my blogroll is turning into. My contributors. The people I keep an eye on through my work day. Where I get new ways of looking at the same world we're all looking at. We used to call this "watching them watch us watch them watching us etc."

- 2024-05-13T12:13:16Z
The canonical Knicks fan, a video.

- 2024-05-13T12:03:59Z
I feel like crap today, the Knicks were blown out by the Indiana team, the series is tied 2-2 but it feels much worse. The headline in the Daily News reads "Pacers blow depleted, dead-legged Knicks out of the water in Game 4, tie series 2-2." Yeah. I don't know how we recover from this loss. In a way I imagine the Knicks issuing a resignation. "It's been a great season, but we're tired. We're headed to the beach, we'll see you in October Knicks fans. Thanks for your support." I would nod my head and say "Yeah that makes sense." Whatever. I may spend today sleeping it off. Next game is tomorrow night. Yes, they will play, for sure, and yes, I will watch.

- 2024-05-13T12:09:49Z
I absolutely abhor news sites that make you turn off your ad blocker only to reveal their paywall.

- 2024-05-14T01:53:49Z
Imagine a social web without, by default, the right to drop turds where ever you like.

- 2024-05-14T01:57:47Z
FSD gets confused and does some incredibly stupid things. With ChatGPT it's amusing but with FSD it's your ass on the line.

Weather map - 2024-05-13T20:51:22Z

I asked ChatGPT to draw a weather map of the mid-Atlantic states, but it drew the usual garbage for technical images.

- 2024-05-12T15:11:49Z
Today's one sentence provocation: Imagine a social web without the default right to drop turds where ever you like.

- 2024-05-12T23:02:38Z
Every social web should offer the two same author-level moderation controls that Facebook does. 1. The author can delete comments. 2. The author can say who can respond. Here are screen shots of the menu and dialog. We assume each site already has the ability to block users. No more spammer trolls.

- 2024-05-12T14:31:42Z
ChatGPT is like a worldwide encyclopedia that comes with a free librarian, 24 hours a day, who never gets tired and thinks all your questions are super insightful. I suppose everyone projects their ideal best friend on this thing. You just learned something about me. Heh. But the cool thing is it's not a yes-person, if they think you're wrong they say so. Which I really like. One more thing I'm really glad I got to be alive when this stuff came online. I feel much smarter and better organized and it's harder for me to get lost in the weeds, as I do sometimes. I guess what want next is a librarian who also is a great executive assistant. Takes notes on what I'm doing and figures out what I need to be reminded of and roughly when.

- 2024-05-12T11:58:36Z
Sometimes I just put one idea on my blog for a day and leave it at that because I think the idea is important enough on its own, and that any explanation would dilute it. Yesterday's one sentence comment was based on decades of reading the NYT, and the story told by their executive editor in a recent interview, who has imho completely lost his way. Using polls, which have proven not reliable, and are subject to manipulation by the NYT and other opinion leaders, to determine what they cover, that's marketing, not journalism. Journalism would tell us what to expect if we elect one candidate over another, if the differences are obvious, as they are in 2024. The NYT is not doing that, by its own admission, and based on observation. I ask my readers, some of whom are influential people themselves, do we accept this, and keep trying to get the NYT to understand and deliver on their responsibility, or take the problem on ourselves. I believe we have the tools and resources to do so, all we need is determination.

- 2024-05-11T22:57:51Z
The NYT is no more about news than the Repubs are about governing.

- 2024-05-11T01:57:54Z
Pretty sure I understand why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky. The mistake they made at Twitter was taking responsibility for enforcing decorum, which is completely diseconomic. A fully decentralized system is very different. That was why he funded Bluesky, to make a social web that wouldn't have at its center a company responsible for content.

- 2024-05-10T15:30:45Z
This year's Knicks are as memorable as the 1970 team. Brunson, DiVincenzo, Hart, Anunoby and Hartenstein. They have totally distinct superpowers. Tonight's game will be played without Brunson and Anunoby, both injured. That means McBride and Atchiuwa start, probably. I kept wanting to tell friends about these guys, they're just as exciting as the starters. And don't forget there's another center and forward still on the bench who have done real starting minutes this year and two years ago. They are Knicks too.

- 2024-05-10T12:27:41Z
A useful thread, where people share answers to a request for "an extremely minimal, clean blogging site with practically no bells or whistles where I can just share things on my mind."

The NYT runs on freedom and apparently they don't know that - 2024-05-10T15:24:11Z

This is a hard idea to get across, but there's nothing wrong with a news organization favoring things they depend on to exist.

For example, a news org that covers San Jose, CA is entitled to favor San Jose. It's okay for them to do things that help San Jose in competition with other cities. They could sponsor a food drive for the neediest in their community. It wouldn't be a conflict of interest, because it's understood that they have an interest in the success of San Jose.

A columnist that covers the NY Mets can be happy when the Mets win the World Series, and sad when they don't. This is not an integrity issue, or something they need to disclose, unless it's not obvious that they cover the Mets.

In that sense, every news org in the United States depends on the First Amendment, so it can be assumed they're in favor of democracy, because without it they couldn't exist.

This is why the editor of the NYT's statement about not favoring democracy is so ridiculous. He can't be objective about that, because the existence of his organization depends on the continuation of democracy in the US.

Whether he knows it or not, he's against Trump and in favor of the Democrats in the upcoming election.

Sometimes it's hard to see what's totally obvious. Ask a fish about water and they'll say there is no such thing. Same with free speech and the NYT. They are a product of free speech, without it, it makes no sense, doesn't work. But that's been true forever, so it feels like a given, but it isn't.

- 2024-05-09T15:18:59Z
It's pretty easy to create a FeedLand news service for your friends or co-workers, and it'll plug into a lot of the stuff we're working on now for presenting news without requiring people to learn a feed reader. That's a bridge too far for many people. In other words, your understanding of feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) can be of service to others. And by collecting useful sources of news, maybe even insightful ones, we can help upgrade the quality of news we all get. The first step is to learn how to use FeedLand, and it's pretty easy, esp if you already understand feeds. And with categories and OPML subscription lists, you can organize your feed reading everywhere, not just in FeedLand.

- 2024-05-09T14:06:44Z
StackExchange and OpenAI have made a deal. I used to use StackExchange all the time, now I never do, ChatGPT is much better. There's a lot of anxiety out there, it seems but this is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. There was a time when StackExchange was a godsend for programmers. But that time has passed. Here's a demo. I was trying to figure out why some ancient code wasn't working. I never understood how it worked, and now I had to figure out what was going wrong. So I debugged it, carefully, step by step, with ChatGPT. It's as if I was working with another programmer who had read and fully understood every StackExchange message, and was willing to work with me for no pay to get to the bottom of the problem. This is what we call disruption. It's a whole new level of programming. Here's the transcript.

- 2024-05-09T15:24:44Z
I'm tired of people using the term "podcast" when I can't find it at the place where I get my podcasts.

- 2024-05-08T14:36:05Z
A free idea for Apple that might boost their stock price. I use the Voice Memo app to take notes while I'm programming. Sometimes I talk for as much as fifteen minutes, because I ramble a lot, but I figure stuff out this way. I'm sure at some point the Voice Memo app will do automatic transcripts, I wish it did now. When I finish a memo, a few minutes or seconds later, there's an email waiting for me with the text of the memo. Now here's how they boost the stock price. They also provide an edited version of the memo, without repetition and rambling, and sidebars (they can be treated as sidebars, and appear at the end). I understand that $AAPL is depressed because the lack of an AI story. Here's a use that every stock trader will understand immediately. Huge value. I'm sure others are doing it. But Apple has the high ground. All kinds of services could be attached. I could, in the middle of my ramble, order a product from Amazon. Or send an email to my doctor to schedule a new appointment. (Disclaimer: I've owned a bunch of Apple stock since the mid-90s, so I stand to profit if they do it and I'm right.)

- 2024-05-08T13:56:12Z
Now that I have my blogroll as a regular feature in my blog, I am able to keep current with more bloggers. It's actually much more than a blogroll, it's a feed reader. When a feed that I'm following updates, it moves to the top of the list. And if I want to see what's new, I just click on the wedge next to its name to reveal the most recent five posts. From there, I can get to the full post by clicking on the permalink. If you want to get a feel for it without taking the plunge yourself, you can leave my blog open in a browser tab. You'll get exactly what I get.

- 2024-05-07T11:51:59Z
I said this to a friend recently, in an email: “I noticed a change with the doctors, where earlier they would dismiss my fears of having this or that fatal disease, now they're always looking for the thing that's going to kill me.“ The friend, a retired English professor, said the sentence was very effective. Part of me would like to send the sentence and the review to my freshman English professor, I think she would be proud. Instead I decided to blog it.

- 2024-05-07T11:53:33Z
BTW, I was struck that famous editor and writer Ben Smith said he was ashamed at starting out as a blogger, on an MSNBC show hosted by a true hack. The quote was from Jeff Jarvis, who like me, cross-posts to a variety of social webs, presumably manually. Where did I put my comment? Hell if I know. Heh I found it. My comment: "I didn’t know he had been a blogger. So my respect for him went up dramatically in an instant, and in another instant, plummeted. What’s wrong with people?" Bad news for Ben, he's still is a blogger, btw, in his heart. I can tell. And true journalists and true bloggers share an ethos that the fakers like Morning Joe will never understand. So I guess when you're on with Joe you have to pander. Just remember Ben, we know who you are. Even if you have forgotten. 😄

Rustic Co-op City - 2024-05-07T18:15:31Z

I fooled it. Co-op City is in a part of the Bronx that is not old. There's nothing rustic about it. Or even possible.

Before Co-op City became a massive housing project it was an amusement park called FreedomLand.

- 2024-05-06T13:40:32Z
An unsung miracle of ChatGPT. I usually write my prompts very carefully, esp when using it to build software, but I just tried not really caring, and asking a question the way I thought of it, so it rambled a lot, was repetetive and had an error I didn't bother to correct, to see what would happen. It didn't even criticize me. It figured out what I was trying to ask/say, and gave me the answer I was looking for. Yes I am aware that all my fellow programmers taught it how to do this, though I have no idea how it does that, but it is freaking amazing. I keep finding miracles in this tech.

Cross-posting in 2024 - 2024-05-06T13:58:47Z

Some pragmatic notes how cross-posting works these days.

I use regularly: Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky.

Two that have APIs I can use: Mastodon and Bluesky.

I can't send images to Bluesky via their API, they broke the interface. My way of doing it is now called "legacy." The app that uses that feature doesn't work. But I don't even remotely have the time to go back and fix it.

The items in my linkblog come from this flow. If it appears in my linkblog, it also appears on Masto and Bluesky.

When I want broader distribution, I do this:

1. Open a new browser window.
2. Open a tab to Twitter usually. I don't know why.
3. I write some text into the Twitter tab.
4. Paste an image if there is one.
5. I open another tab for Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky.
6. I make one pass to paste the text, another to paste the image.
7. I click Send in each of the tabs, and get back to what I was doing.

I'm sure a lot of people are doing something very much like this. I can actually witness Jeff Jarvis doing it. I think Jay Rosen probably is too.

One thing that Bluesky may not be aware of is that their character limit is signficantly lower than the others, so sometimes I can't include them in this rotation.

I'd love to see one of these support the features of textcasting. I would give them 100 good netizen points for that, because it wouldn't be long before the others did it, and we'd have a much more complete network writing environment.

- 2024-05-05T14:55:27Z
We should all be working together as opposed to trying to find bullshit excuses not to.

I support the students - 2024-05-05T14:01:47Z

As a boomer who marched on Washington as a high school student, who started an underground newspaper, and organized student strikes, I support today's students making their political opinions heard. I also see journalists doing what they did in the 60s and 70s, reporting on violence as if it were caused by the protestors, which wasn't true then and I'm pretty sure it isn't true now.

And they describe them as Palestinians, when that also is certainly not what's really going on. My guess is that 99% of them are American students, who, growing up were taught that America had great values, only to discover that America often has taken the wrong side in a war, as we are now in the war between Hamas and Israel.

We shouldn't have taken a side in that war, as long as Israel insists on killing massive numbers of civilians in Gaza. Yes, what Hamas did was unsupportable, and provocative, and just plain wrong, but Israel is killing far more people than Hamas did, and further, it's exactly what Israel, which pretends to represent Holocaust survivors, should not be doing, perpetrating a new Holocaust.

As Americans we have a responsibility to think for ourselves, and that's why I support the students. They aren't right or wrong, but they are continuing the legacy of free speech in the US, and our government and journalists are lining up against them, which to me is as tragic in the 2020s as it was in the 1970s.

Random RSS & ActivityPub notes - 2024-05-06T00:27:26Z

Back when I did my first XML-based serialization format, I did it because the XML people were asking developers to do that. "Now you can create your own formats!" The theory was they had finished their work, XML was ready to go, and developers should start building on it. So I did, thinking in the back of my mind, "they don't really mean it." This was based on experience with commercial platform vendors who heavily evangelized their products when they were new, but took umbrage at the chutzpah of the developer who thought they could do anything really useful or important, don't they know that's what BigCo's do. Anyway a few years later, that's exactly what happened. Predictably, the big companies, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Sun etc thought they should define the syndication format of the future, so they set about to do it as a "standard" and thus was born Atom. My opinion, one way is better than two, and they should have jumped on the RSS bandwagon. But that's not what they do. They're still trying to make RSS unnecessary, you think they would have figured out that there's no point in trying to do that. It isn't going away. 😄

I wonder if anyone has thought of working with ChatGPT or Meta.ai to create a Busy Developer's Guide to ActivityPub? Here's the prompt. "I want to write a simple bridge between my writing app and any app that runs in the Fediverse, using only ActivityPub. The operations are basically those of the MetaWeblog API, create a post, update a post. Just to start. How should it handle identity? I work in Node.js." I asked both AI tools, and the Meta.ai answer was pretty useless, but ChatGPT gave what seems to be a reasonable outline for the project.

ActivityPub is a product of Architecture Astronauts. Start with a simple idea but generalize it too far, so it can do everything, so much so that no one understands how to do the simple stuff. You have to understand the theory before you do can anything pragmatic. It's why I said last week that they need a BDG asap, with implementations in all major runtime environments. I would help them design it, I'm a fairly typical "busy developer." I would support it if it were easier to understand, thus more likely not to be revised with breakage to apps. I've also seen this happen before, in fact it happens more often than not. If you don't understand a format, you can't actually support it. This is part of the you can't lie to a compiler axiom.

- 2024-05-04T15:20:59Z
Braintrust query: If my wordpress.com username is scripting, where is my public profile page?

- 2024-05-04T14:27:38Z
ChatGPT is letting us customize the context in which our queries run. So I can say I use JavaScript so if I ask a programming question, it should answer in that language. I was happy to have this feature, and gave it a thumbs up. The idea is that we build up a highly detailed profile over time, so ChatGPT gets better at answering my questions. And it also locks us in. It didn't come up for me until Meta.ai came along and sometimes it's good to get a second opinion. But I want to share that profile info.

Knicks win, fans stunned - 2024-05-04T13:40:04Z

Two first round questions

• Why didn't Sixers coach Nick Nurse continue to play Buddy Hield who had the hot hand in the second and third quarters, and got the Sixers back in the game after the Knicks early dominance? He sat out most of the fourth quarter, was put back in at the very end and took the last Sixers desperation shot.
• In the other big Eastern Division game on Thursday, why did Doc Rivers, the Milwaukee Bucks' coach go into garbage time when the Bucks were down by only 10 with 2.5 minutes remaining? What the frack was he thinking? Deficits like that are often made up, esp in elimination games? Being a good sport is one thing, but quitting the season early when you're only down by 10? What the what? I tuned in the game at the point when his stars were coming out, before the Knicks game started, and couldn't figure out why he was giving up so soon?

It couldn't actually happen

• In the pause between the first and second rounds of the NBA playoffs, I am having the very very very strange thought that maybe possibly maybe the Knicks will could possibly maybe perhaps nah never hmm -- go all the way?

- 2024-05-04T00:19:55Z
Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do.

- 2024-05-04T00:25:40Z
If Google Reader had handled untitled posts more gracefully we’d be in a better place today. Their choice to require titles meant we have had a fracture, on one side — social web and on the other feed readers.

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