Pondering Dave Winer's early Jan 2016 posts

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 - 2024-04-19T16:07:53Z

- 2024-04-19T16:07:53Z
More and more I'm getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for. It's been hard to get used to. Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you'd keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system would re-render the Markdown, turning it into HTML, but you'd still have the Markdown around for editing. And of course there are other kinds of editors that make sense, knowing that the output is going to the web, but you don't have to write in the language of the web. You might want something more suited to wordsmiths -- ie writers, if you are a writer. I've gone back to Radio UserLand and tried to extrapolate, where would we have gone with that product, 22 years later. And now I'm beginning to see in the pieces that are forming the new product I've been working on, something whole, something that works. I think of it as "WordPress For One" -- you might be writing as part of a larger site, but this is your writing space, a place you can mold to fit your style, where it gets more comfortable over the years, more you. That's what I've felt has been wrong with the direction the web has been going in, we're getting boxed into smaller and smaller spaces, but for some of my writing I want a nice stage with good lighting and full freedom to tell a story that I have to tell. I also want to be influenced by your story. I want Working Together. Of course I still very much develop for FeedLand, and in the back of my mind I want to loop back around to Drummer (it's my main writing environment), and then I have another product I call Belter I want to finish. And I wouldn't mind trying to make a CSS thing that makes more sense than the tragedy CSS is, and also would love to see a port of Frontier to Linux, though I don't see doing that myself, but I would like to guide it (so it runs all the old stuff first).

- 2024-04-19T14:19:46Z
It's totally ridiculous to equate protest with antisemitism, esp with Israel led by a MAGA ally. The two concepts are orthogonal. I do not support the Israeli government any more than I supported the government of my country, the United States, when the MAGAs were in charge. We lost over 1 million American citizens who did not have to die imho, because our government was not only immoral and hugely corrupt, but also made no attempt to govern. I am a child of Holocaust survivors and an American born in the USA, and am proud of and grateful to this country. Any American is free to protest the actions of our government or any other government, or really anything. If you don't believe in that then you aren't actually trying to make America great, you're saying something altogether different and incompatible. I am also deeply offended at Americans who propose to speak for me. That actually is antisemitic, btw.

- 2024-04-19T13:06:14Z
Quick video demo of meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it's new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so quickly. You really should watch it on YouTube so you can see how what I type relates to the image in real-time. It's like subtitles inverted, with a very knowledgeable, creative and high bandwidth computer network behind it. Living in the future.

- 2024-04-19T01:43:34Z
I did the blogroll stuff because I needed a minimal feed reader that could run from the right sidebar of any app.

- 2024-04-19T01:30:21Z
I just spent a few minutes with meta.ai, Facebook's answer to ChatGPT, and it's really good. The drawing functionality recalcs while you're entering the prompt, so if you type, "vary gender, age and race," and as you type each word, the image changes.

- 2024-04-18T13:47:22Z
Suppose you're working deep inside a complex project and have an unrelated idea. How long does it take to switch to writing mode, get the idea down, and return to what you were doing. The less time it takes the more fluidity. Twitter totally won there. And we, the bloggers, made a tradeoff. We accepted fewer features and writing in a silo because it was practical. It worked, where less fluid software didn't. So they got all the casual writing, and over time sucked the life out of blogging. I think it's time to put the fluidity back, without compromising on features and lock-in.

- 2024-04-19T01:16:51Z
In the past, when I have tried to make other people's products better, it often doesn't go very well. The archive of this blog is filled with great examples. Yet I, as they say, persist. 😄

- 2024-04-17T13:46:47Z
Video: Design issues in FeedLand blogrolls.

- 2024-04-17T14:35:26Z
I just tripped across this post from 2009 where Matt had sent me an email saying they were supporting the Twitter API in WordPress. I had forgotten this. That's how long it's been that he's wanted to hook WP up to the social web. It doesn't look like I posted that to Scripting News. I wonder what other nuggets of forgotten history I'll find there.

- 2024-04-16T19:42:30Z
If Tesla went out of business, would my Model Y stop working??

- 2024-04-16T13:58:22Z
I've never been to TED or SXSW.

- 2024-04-16T14:29:15Z
Good morning NBA fans. Today is the official beginning of the post-season, and this Knicks fan is one freaking happy camper. Just thought I'd get that outta the way before getting down to business.

Working together - 2024-04-16T14:08:10Z

Each form of online discussion has a grain to it. Doc and I used to talk about how something "follows the grain of the web." Twitter has its own grain, formed by its character limit, what information is shared (ie number of followers in both directions).

I made a list of some of the social networks I've been on starting in the mid-70s. The list is very long. And each of them had their own limits, rules and features, and each led to a certain kinds of relationships between the participants. Mail lists that gain traction always flame out. It's hard to get people to read your blog. If you make it easier it changes into something else. Instagram, Youtube, TikTok form hierarchies of influencers. I think of those as the networks Taylor Lorenz covers.

But there isn't a structure that I'm aware of that leads to people working together. It's a puzzle I keep trying to figure out.

We need working together to survive climate change and fascism. It would be good to crack this nut.

One of the nicest things about ChatGPT is that it's always up for working with you. The critics of AI don't begin to understand this. As an example, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to draw a picture of people working together. Here it is. I didn't have to wait. It didn't look at my follower count, or my bank statement to decide if it was willing to work with me. I pay the $20 a month, and I've got a persistent always-on collaborator.

What got me thinking this way this morning is a bit of collaboration I did with palafo (a human) on Threads. It's remarkable. We actually did some work together. No sarcasm. It may be hard to read the thread but if you're curious about collaborative systems, here's a real example. Serendipitous, unplanned, but we figured something out by combining our experiences. Fantastic.

Later, Ben Werdmuller, a person who I've gotten to know recently, is intelligent and asks good questions. He asked one today, how do they get the live audience on SNL to laugh when they want them to laugh. I had an idea and shared it. (This was discussed on Reddit. I also checked with ChatGPT.)

If you take away one thing from this post it's that we can collaborate with the machines, and maybe that will unlock collaboration between humans. In fact, in a way they are facilitating the collaboration. If you want to be part of the collective human intelligence, you may be thinking about the machines the wrong way. Maybe they're the most human thing we have, because AI is made up of humans, somewhat like Soylent Green. 😄

PS: I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of humans working together to clean up a mess.

PPS: Yesterday I gave John O'Nolan what I think is a good idea for getting his Ghost blogs federating with Threads, Mastodon et al. I didn't expect thanks or even a response, but I wonder if he even heard it. Most of the time, trying to help other people results in not even an acknowledgment that they saw it. If I were him I'd look for a painless, quick way to get maximum interop. Something like ghost.social. I'd give the same advice to Matt at Automattic (in fact I think I did).

PPPS: I think acknowledgment is a key part of working together on the web. Nothing more than "I wanted you to know I saw it" is often all that's needed to grease the skids of discourse. I've had a friendly disagreement with Manton at micro.blog about this.

- 2024-04-15T20:43:52Z
Anton Zuiker is the first Drummer user with a FeedLand blogroll.

- 2024-04-15T21:19:57Z
Followed by Frank McPherson and Gary Thompson.

A blogroll on a Drummer blog - 2024-04-15T14:53:15Z

How to add a FeedLand blogroll to a Drummer blog.

• You must have a Drummer blog and a FeedLand account.
• You can specify that all the feeds you're subscribed to are in your blogroll or use a category and only feeds in that category will be in the blogroll.
• The blogroll updates automatically, when one of the feeds has a new post, it goes to the top of the list.
• You can expand a feed to see the five most recent items. Click on the pubdate to go to the full item on the web.
• It supports keyboard navigation. Up and down arrows move through the list, Return to expand/collapse.
• We're working on WordPress plugin.

Four head-level attributes in your blog.opml file. Only one required.

• blogrollUsername -- required
• blogrollServer -- optional, if not specified it's feedland.com
• blogrollCategory -- optional
• blogrollTitle -- optional, but you really should provide a title, otherwise we invent a silly one for you. 😄

Screen shot of how the head-level attributes are set on Bull Mancuso's blog.

Screen shot of the blog itself with the blogroll.

A link to Bull's blogroll category on feedland.com.

A place to ask questions offer kudos, etc. 😄

PS: I'm not trying to sell you on using Drummer to run a blog. Rather I needed a place to figure out how this works, so we know how to set up and document the WordPress plugin.

- 2024-04-15T01:25:17Z
Next up, let's connect Drummer blogging to FeedLand blogrolls. 😄

- 2024-04-15T01:18:48Z
I want to work with the best developers, I don't care where they work. It occurred to me watching a Martin Scorcese documentary about the life of George Harrison, how much people in music seek out opportunities to create with other musicians. In technology, it doesn't happen, we don't even look at each others software. After waiting a whole lifetime for a culture of collaboration, we have had it for short periods, but it's most of the time it's been people trying to deconstruct and reinvent other people's work, not build on it. I'm still open to this changing. I hope to be a catalyst for it, one more time.

- 2024-04-14T20:23:17Z
Final Eastern Division standings. Knicks finish second. Best Knicks team in a long time. Ended the season with a five-game winning streak.

- 2024-04-15T01:18:08Z
I don’t like how betting has invaded sports broadcasting. I don't like that it breaks the bond among people who root for one team their whole lives, as I have with the Knicks and the Mets. I think of people who love the same teams as I do as family. I like that there are Knicks fans who also like the Yankees even though I totally despise the Yankees and everything they (don't) stand for, but we all love the freaking Knicks (and ignore the Nets, btw). Before long there won't be any of us left, everyone will see sports as a business, an obsession, or their downfall, because you can't win at gambling, we all know that. The whole tribal thing about sports is broken by integrated gambling, it suggests many of us, maybe eventually most of us, are here not for love of team, rather they're feeding an addiction.

It's bigger than a tiny little textbox - 2024-04-13T21:47:55Z

Question: What's between a tiny little text box and a full-blown content management system?

Answer: A full-featured text editor with a social media feel to it without the limits of twitter-like systems.

That's what textcasting is for, to identity the essential features. This editor supports them.

100% built on WordPress. Why reinvent all the good stuff that's been debugged and scaled and has all that support in the world. As I like to say, one way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is.

PS: A seven-minute podcast that explains. 😄

PPS: And don't forget about the blogroll. It's part of the puzzle too.

PPPS: The house was really cold when I did this recording so I walked around to try to stay warm. By the end I was pretty close to shivering out loud. I turned the heat up after I finished.

- 2024-04-12T16:51:19Z
My wpidentity package now has storage.

- 2024-04-12T13:56:29Z
I just finished Ripley on Netflix, an 8-part miniseries remake of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I remember, probably incorrectly, as a light-hearted story. There was very little to laugh about in this new version, but omg it is such a beautifully presented story. Even if you hated the plot you'd have to watch it just to see the art. And if you're Italian or love Italy, you have to watch it. Anyway now that I know all the twists and how it ends, I'm going to have to watch it again, but I might wait to recover from the experience. It is, at times, hard to watch. But oh so goooood.

- 2024-04-12T14:03:38Z
In some ways the look of Ripley resembles Poor Things, another eclectic and lovely to look at presentation.

- 2024-04-12T14:08:15Z
I really want to see Civil War. Gets an amazing review in NYT.

- 2024-04-11T14:48:42Z
In an email to Doc this morning: "The web is such a huge total mess. CSS is a junk pile of reinventing that learned nothing from the ideas it was reinventing. The only reason we put up with this is the freedom we got from it. But that’s been gone for a long time. I have a feeling we’re wasting our golden years overlooking that we’re trying to get creative work done in a corporate crime scene. We won, only to have our victory enshrined by a bunch of corpy wiseasses and nazis." Doc is a very literate and quote-worthy writer, and we bring out the best from each other. So next time you see Doc thank him for me, for the creativity. We're making the best of a bad situation. It's even worse than it appears and I'm old enough to know better.

- 2024-04-11T15:03:14Z
A piece I wrote about Doc in 2022 entitled Doc Quixote.

- 2024-04-11T14:48:05Z
So this ticking time bomb was sitting there all the time the journalists were talking about how Biden is too old to win the election with Trump. Biden was never the issue, the issue was the freaking Supreme freaking Court.

- 2024-04-11T18:17:08Z
The Arizona court decision won’t just have an effect on the politics of Arizona. It will have effect on the politics of the entire freaking United freaking states of freaking America.

- 2024-04-11T14:38:24Z
I was closing tabs this morning and came across this sweet little test app I did when I was working on tabs. I wish there were a practical use for something like this.

Freakout Day on the internet - 2024-04-11T18:20:25Z

I have a suggestion for an internet holiday.

Call it Freakout Day.

Works like this.

When you think of a pronouncement you'd like to make, write it in your favorite tiny little text box, but before you send it, add the word "freaking" between every word in the punchline.

Like so --

The Arizona court decision won’t just have an effect on the politics of Arizona. It will have effect on the politics of the entire freaking United freaking States of freaking America.

Really impresses people. 😀

My 1988 driver's license - 2024-04-11T22:32:01Z

Found this in my desk drawer today. Amazing the things you carry with you over the ages. I lived in an apartment building on top of a hill in the middle of a golf course, smack in the heart of Silicon Valley, if it actually had a heart, and that's debatable. All the Sand Hill Road VCs were on the other side of the hill. And one exit south on 280 was Xerox PARC, and where NeXT had its startup offices.

This was the place where I started development of what became Frontier. I always wanted to do a great system level scripting thing, based on what I learned from Unix and what I loved about the graphic user interface.

It became a lot bigger than I anticipated. In the beginning it was meant to be a replacement for the Macintosh Finder, with an outliner for a file system browser, and of course a fantastic scripting ability, of the OS and of scriptable apps. I wish Apple had supported this effort but I didn't understand at the time that they couldn't. They weren't set up to let anyone but Bill and Andy make great products, even if their products weren't all that great, imho of course. You have to live with the mythology you create.

A lot of people got their first programming experience with Hypercard. I would have loved if more of them get their first experience with Frontier. Even better would have been if our products worked together, but that wasn't in the cards either.

- 2024-04-10T18:08:09Z
I've been trying to pay my NY State income tax and estimated tax for hours. I finally managed to log in, but that doesn't help. They have all kinds of links that say click here to pay the thing you want to pay, and that just takes me to a login page where it says someone with that email address already has an account, which I knew because I'm already logged in using that account. The IRS site was a comparative breeze, even though it had its own mysteries to solve and a certain amount of luck was required to be allowed to pay my freaking taxes. I think when Reagan said the government was the problem this is one of the times he was right about that.

Me and FSD - 2024-04-10T23:03:03Z

Check out my political preamble on Tesla, X and Musk.

One more disclaimer: I love my Tesla Model Y. Best car ever. I've been driving a Tesla since late 2021, and I still feel privileged to drive the car every time I do. It's the Macintosh of cars.

I don't generally use FSD, even though I paid for it and have had it available all the time I've driven a Tesla.

They say you should always be fully attentive when using FSD. I am always soooo ready to take over for it. I don't trust it. And I also don't feel that when I'm in white-knuckle mode when it's driving, that my reflexes are anywhere near as good as the reflexes I have when I'm driving, with fifty years of experience, and maybe a few hours of experience supervising a FSD car. I don't have a sense of how to work with it. So I err on the side of turning it off whenever I feel like even slightly scared.

I also don't like roller coasters, but if I did, I'd recognize that this is different. A roller coaster is designed to give the exact same experience to every user every time. It's designed to give the impression that your life is about to end, using gravity and eyesight and all that evolution trained you to be scared of. It fools you into being scared, when you're actually safe. Every so often you read about someone dying on a rollercoaster. That probably improves the fun for thrill-seekers, and gives people like me justification for staying away. People also bungee jump knowing there's a chance the chord could break, but they know it's not going to.

None of that is true for the Tesla. It's making it up as it goes along. And it definitely encounters situations it can't handle, or it misinterprets a set of obvious facts, or even worse it hallucinates just like ChatGPT.

Yesterday, I was driving from Lake Katrine to Woodstock with FSD, and it was doing really well, up to a point. First I was on Route 28, a four-lane road, for about five miles, it turned onto 375 which is a curvy two-lane road. I was starting to feel slightly comfortable. Then we come up to 212, where 375 ends. A busy intersection. Traffic coming from the left and right, and many are turning onto the road I'm on. I watched in awe as FSD tried to find a way to make a left turn in this complicated situation, starting, stopping, it tried, found itself out in traffic, and got stuck there. I had enough and took over. Luckily the car waiting behind us had left a little room. I've dealt with this intersection probably a few hundred times in the last few years. I know the crazy things the other drivers do here, and I know to watch out for them. The Tesla didn't know.

- 2024-04-09T21:35:49Z
The last tab on news.scripting.com now contains news from the blogroll on scripting.com. Same feeds, different view.

- 2024-04-09T20:23:39Z
Far more important than machine consciousness is: 1. Human consciousness. 2. Species-level consciousness.

- 2024-04-09T16:42:45Z
BTW, straight -- everything Kara Swisher claims to be, the insider with the best view of the industry, they got that wrong. The things that matter happen far away from her conferences and dinners. It's as if Silicon Valley were Hollywood. To some people it is. But the big changes are never recognized by those people until they're juggernauts. They don't make the changes. They soak them up and devour them. They best of the people she writes about are not creators, they're pirates.

On Tesla, Nazis, X and the Macintosh of cars - 2024-04-09T16:03:39Z

I'm not sure I'd buy a Tesla today because of Musk's politics which he puts in our face, thus influencing other people to inflict their nightmares on us. I bet in the end Musk will be responsible for a lot of people dying.

On the other hand, I love the car, and thus love the people who developed it, who I don't know. I hope they're not Nazis. I don't see how someone who could design such a thing as a Tesla Model Y, in 2021, the year I bought mine, could be anything like that.

This car is going to be copied. There will be a generation of cars that comes along, some that have not arrived yet, that will have to stand up to a comparison to a Tesla. This is the original.

To be alive when such a product comes out and not own one, that would be hard for me to do. I don't think my "support" of Tesla could mean that much. The money is already spent. It costs nothing to maintain the car (one of its innovations).

It's like the Macintosh of cars. I would have owned a Macintosh in 1984 even if I wasn't one of Apple's top developers. I also know that Steve Jobs didn't design the machine, he stole it from people at Xerox who did. Apple refined the idea, made it practical, like a Tesla, commercial. That's a huge accomplishment, commercializing and humanizing a concept like the Mac was harder than inventing, imho. I have a feeling that Tesla must stand on the shoulders of giants in a similar way.

Tesla is always sending me emails, which I usually read, but last week I got one urging me to join X. I thought what bullshit. I don't want these products connected. There was a time, not that long ago, that I would have thought a car hooked up to Twitter as a fantastic and futuristic idea, but now, I think it means no one of principle, certainly no one who is a target of Nazis could work at Tesla in the future. And those are some of the brightest people out there.

Meanwhile I'm looking at other company's EVs with lust. I might like a Kia or a BMW. If you're making a consumer product, Nazi branding is not a good look. And X is becoming a stinker too.

PS: I was inspired to write this piece by one written by Ben Wurdmuller posted yesterday. I've had much the same feeling about FSD. This piece started out to be about FSD, but the preamble, like the one in his piece, got so long I decided to post it first as its own piece.

Gritty monochrome photograph - 2024-04-10T03:00:33Z

Via ChatGPT, and a prompt written by Brad Pettit: "Gritty monochrome photograph, midwestern family, juxtapose common legal vices.”

- 2024-04-08T21:20:31Z
I don't think eclipsy is a word.

- 2024-04-08T18:46:14Z
Something disturbing about America in 2024. Over a million Americans died of Covid, but they aren’t on our minds. A million more have long Covid, perhaps. This suggests a million Americans could be killed by our government in the name of a conspiracy, and we’d shrug it off like good Germans. “We didn’t know,” a likely defense.

- 2024-04-08T03:51:19Z
Back in the day, many of the early writing tools were called Word-something. WordStar, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect.

- 2024-04-08T03:43:29Z
I wrote four posts on micro.blog just before midnight. Probably some of the ideas will appare on Scripting News before too long.

How my workday flows - 2024-04-07T14:52:50Z

On Bluesky, Andrew Hickey explains how hard it is for him to focus while construction is going on at his house. I recognize the problem. I had major work done on the roof of my house last summer, and lost focus for a good two months, even though I had rented office space and at times an AirBnb to get away from the chaos. It wasn't until the work was over that I was able to start to get back into my flow.

In my work, I start pretty much at the same time every day, and I get a good five or six hours before it's time to do the next thing. The first hour is warming up. Then I go to the notes I left the night before about where I'm going next. By hour two, I'm not quite at my highest rate but getting there, by hours 3-5 I get monster stuff done, if I'm in a good groove. Hour six is iffy. All the while I'm taking short breaks to check email, tweets, whatever. All of it asynchronous. Waiting for my attention to be available, for a short period.

After 5-6 hours of this, I'm wiped out.

I can handle small interruptions, like a package delivery.

But if it involves the front of my brain for any real amount of time, if I have to shift my attention elsewhere, boom, it all drops out of my head. It doesn't take much of a shift in attention to lose the whole thing, and basically have to start over the next day.

Try to imagine a professional tennis player. Do they talk about anything other than tennis during the game. Not with any focus. I'm sure of it. Their attention is fully on the sport. Same deal with intellectual achievement. If you're doing something that few other people do well, you're not only doing the complex things, and require multiple steps and a lot of detail, and memory, but you're sometimes inventing things that no one has done before. All the levels interact and affect each other. And you're doing a shitload of learning the whole time. Until you're burned out for the day that is. Or your deck gets shuffled. ;-)

PS: People sending you emails saying how great your last thing was, they don't interfere at all. ;-)

PPS: I wrote this post during one of my breaks. I won't edit it until the evening, when I do lite work that doesn't require much focus for any duration.

Different kinds of networks - 2024-04-08T02:45:05Z

Somewhat-related notes about different kinds of networks, ActivityPub and RSS, various twitter-like systems, as the social web spreads out and tries out new ideas.

• With ActivityPub you know who's following you and in RSS you don't. This may sound like a negative until you think about it from the user's standpoint: no spam, spyware, etc. Which is probably why Google didn't like RSS btw.
• It has been pointed out that some level of spying happens based on IP address, and I can testify to that, I get podcasts with ads for a local supermarket, kind of spooky but I guess ok. I can't recall ever receiving spam as a result of subscribing to a feed, and I never get messages from them when I unsub begging me to come back. So it isn't a huge problem in a real way at least for me, yet.
• I block spammers. In twitter-like systems, like Mastodon, spam means you attached a post to my post that is in no way responsive to it. You're just trying to coast on the flow generated by other posts. I don't abide that. Have a nice day.

- 2024-04-06T21:18:32Z
Facebook, 3 years ago: "I want to use my own editor and have my writing emanate from there, without me having to copy and paste into various forms on different sites. I’m not a copypaste machine. Technically, it’s an easy problem to solve, and I don’t see how it hurts various tech companies to let users write in their favorite editor. This is severely limiting what we can do with networks, and there seems to be no reason for it. APIs let us build networks out of software. Devs, take a chance on other developers. Let the web expand. Let the web breathe."

Sometimes it pays to start over - 2024-04-06T15:26:55Z

I think you can save time by starting over sometimes, and rebuild the complexity, carefully testing at every step.

Going back and fixing a poorly tested corner-turn, esp one you did a while ago, is a time-consuming and frustrating process. You need to have a fully consistent model to evolve. When you try to reorganize a complicated bit of code, and you find yourself scratching your head about how this or that works, that's a sign that it doesn't work.

But it's much more fun to add new features to a broken foundation than it is to either fix the foundation or rip it out and put in a new one.

- 2024-04-05T14:56:04Z
No no we are not supposed to have earthquakes in NY.

- 2024-04-05T17:45:23Z
Yes we're having an eclipse next week. Earthquakes often find other kinds of energy to feed on, like the one during Game 2 of the Bay Bridge series between the As and Giants in 1989. The Bay Area doesn't really get baseball. You have to pick sides. You can't root for both teams. So an earthquake knocked out the Bay Bridge and screwed up the Bay Area for quite some time to come.

- 2024-04-05T17:40:11Z
I have lived on the San Andreas and Hayward faults, was in the Valley for the Loma Prieta quake -- and I have to say this was a real earthquake. It wasn't very long, but it had a real jolt. Scared the shit out of me. I'm still very sensitive to this kind of disaster.

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. In the summer of 2013, I discovered the #indieweb group via a poster mentioning the https://indiewebcamp.com in a comment to one of DW's posts. Maybe the word "silo" has been used for a long time to describe social media sites, but the term got popularized in my conscience by the Indieweb site.

I added #webmention support to my Junco code because of the Indieweb group. The Indieweb people "use" social media sites differently. They own their own domain names. They post articles and notes to their own blog sites. But rather than manually cross-posting their info their many social media presences, they use software that makes it appear that the Indieweb users are using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. just like everyone else, but that's not the true.

Indieweb users may never log into their social media sites, but their content gets posted to those sites, and the comments, likes, shares, etc. at those other sites come back to their personal sites. It's interesting.

Since I don't "use" Twitter and Facebook, having my info posted automatically at those other sites is unnecessary. I use Instagram but mainly as a notetaking app and a place to store photos. But lately, I rely more on Flickr. Again. I've been using Flickr for many years. I don't use Flickr to network with others. I use it to store photos that I then embed into my own web publishing apps and sites.

This past summer, I created my Waxwing app to be a simple image uploader that speeds up the process of using images within my web publishing apps. But I still use Flickr too.

I'm not interested in networking with people beyond my own message board ToledoTalk.com that I started in January 2003.

I could be considered anti-social because I don't use the hot social media/social networking sites, and that's okay by me. I'm fine with being labeled and called names. I won't get offended.

I like message boards, wikis, and blogs. If that's old school or archaic, then that's okay too because I subscribe to the theory that every human being is unique. Why would zealot fans of social media sites assume that everyone should enjoy using those sites/apps? And why do these zealot fans get irritated that some people have the nerve not to use those sites?

I don't care if these social media sites exist. More amateur content gets created. That's a good thing. They all have pros and cons. But I'm simply not interested in them. And I'm not alone with this thinking.

I'm not going to get upset because people use Facebook, and I won't waste my time trying to convince people to stop using Facebook. I don't care if people use Facebook.

I enjoy building and using my own websites. That probably puts me into a minority of a minority. Many Indieweb users also build or install their own software to manage their personal sites. Different breed. What's wrong with diversity?

What's odd is when the zealot social media fans try to convince us that we need Facebook and we must post to Facebook, etc. I don't know why they seem to be upset when people decide to delete their Facebook accounts.

Again, what's wrong with diversity?

I have many interests. I post to my niche sites. I read the web in my own way. And I have been doing these activities for 15 years or more. I don't need help nor guidance from anyone in this area.

I wonder if the zealot fans of social media are creating a new form of acceptable intolerance that's directed at people who don't share their fandom of
the hot social media sites.

Excerpts from DW's post titled "Leave nothing but footprints":

The universe just laughs at your ambition. Hah! You're a mere speck of dust, says the universe, a speck that exists for an infinitesimally short period of time.

Don't try to change the world. Instead, try to work with other people.

Observe. Think. Share your experience, but strive to not change a thing.

That emphasized part seems like an odd thing for DW to suggest. I vehemently disagree with it.

My wife and I will continue to help change a small part of Toledo for the better by volunteering with an organization that helps parents to educate their children before they start school.

It's why I created the website http://babyutoledo.com/ for the non-profit. I'm better with technical functions, and my wife is better at interacting with people directly.

The goal of Baby U is to end generational poverty. That's a lofty goal, but if successful, it would be a positive change for the Old South End area of Toledo. How can that be bad?

DW ended that piece with:

It's better to just be kind to each other. Your name may not ring down through the ages, but at least you will have lived a good life that you can be proud of.

That's all good, but why can't changing something for the better and being kind to each other exist together?

It seems that DW contradicts himself a little with his next post titled "Why tech insiders must be on Facebook." Some excerpts:

I know a fair number of people who don't use Facebook or don't understand Facebook, and I think these people are hurting themselves, if they want to be part of tech as it goes forward, and in some sense they are hurting the web, by trying to be part of a network that does not involve Facebook.

My head hurts when I read his opening, authoritative statements.

Again, DW rails against silos, and he claims to support the open web, but in this post he believes that a tech person will miss out on future tech and hurt the open web if they don't use Facebook. That seems senseless to me.

And what about his previous post:

It's better to just be kind to each other. Your name may not ring down through the ages, but at least you will have lived a good life that you can be proud of.

Maybe people who want to live a good life are too busy to use the hot social media sites, or maybe they don't want to be a part of the vitriol that can exist with Facebook and Twitter.

Maybe I don't use Facebook and Twitter because I've been running a message board for 13 years. In the past, I enjoyed using my own playground for heated debates. I've toned down my rhetoric some over the years, which means the site's overall tone has softened too. I'm not interested in flame-throwing with other message board users, and really don't want that kind of activity to occur on a site that I fund.

At least with Facebook, users can control that activity better.