Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

- 2025-06-07T16:27:15Z
I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment.

- 2025-06-07T16:37:39Z
I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments.

- 2025-06-07T16:24:15Z
Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging.

- 2025-06-07T14:52:19Z
Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example to crib from.

- 2025-06-06T15:44:59Z
I'm totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there in the last few days. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two of them. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s with Frontier. Today I might have one of the largest public codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week?

- 2025-06-06T23:10:59Z
A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence.

When the web was new - 2025-06-06T22:58:08Z

I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity. We were so lucky. We developed all kind of stuff that was only possible when there was no platform vendor.

But then in the mid 00s things changed, and since then the users have flocked to closed systems. It would be similarly wonderful if we had an open social web, but we don’t. Mastodon is open but it’s not simple like the web is, and Bluesky is simple, but it is not open. And neither supports the most basic features of the web.

Today most active devs weren’t around when the web came along and knocked down the silos. It is imho possible to have an open social web, but the people who are trying to make one out of complex and closed systems will imho never get there.

They would be better off to look for different foundations to build on other than Mastodon and Bluesky. I have one in mind, btw. You will probably be surprised, but then we were all surprised by the web itself.

Fediforum report - 2025-06-06T16:03:31Z

This was an email I sent to one of the people I'm working with at Automattic, and realized I was actually writing a blog post.

I was watching on the FediForum session yesterday, and heard all this stuff about Bluesky and Mastodon, but these are products that are poorly prepared for the "open social web" -- and imho they won't get there. But WordPress is already there.

I think some of the products are good, btw -- I hadn't seen Surf, it's basically a feed aggregator that can get input from Bluesky and Mastodon. I don't think they're using their RSS support though. Not adequate. But WordPress RSS is fine. I made an improvement to the Scripting News RSS to add an <image> element that works like the one on a WordPress site. Now my posts can show up in the timeline via RSS.

That's the key to what we're doing. Reading and writing, with the UI of a twitter-like product, all built on RSS, with the content also appearing on the network WordPress has defined. I see this as huge.

Obviously this needs to be a blog post.

Test post - 2025-06-06T14:48:07Z

A list of ten random country names

1. Brazil
2. Bangladesh
3. Chile
4. Ireland
5. Guatemala
6. Kenya
7. Morocco
8. Peru
9. Portugal
10. Thailand

Note: I was testing a new reading app, wanted to be sure it understood bulleted and numbered lists from an outliner. I always add support for outliners to whatever I do. It's just a thing for me. 😄

- 2025-06-05T13:24:26Z
Regular readers of my blog know that I've been calling out Bluesky and people associated with it for saying they're an open platform, and part of the web, when they are neither. Why don't people, esp journalists, call them out on this? We've been around this loop over and over in tech. There's a virtual conference today, FediForum, that on their home page repeats the hype. Why do people do this? What's the point of pouring your time into technology you hope someday will be open? I bought a ticket to the conference so if there are any sessions that look like they might be productive I can participate. I even wrote a keynote, so you can see there is a way for this stuff to start working, quickly, if the vendors you're looking up to are sincere in their promises. I've posted it on Mastodon and Bluesky so if you have comments or questions, we can start the discussion now, or any time.

- 2025-06-05T13:47:12Z
Now a personal comment. What pisses me off most about Bluesky is the political environment all this is happening in. We need an open social web. They've got a lot of people convinced they are it. They are not and they know it. And they keep leading people on. They should either deliver, now, or get out of the way.

- 2025-06-04T15:50:28Z
Why doesn't Walt Frazier have a freaking podcast. Come on. (Jon Stewart did a series of podcast-style interviews with him.)

- 2025-06-04T15:32:12Z
If everything goes well, the RSS feed for Scripting News will now have a channel-level image element because it's part of a network that requires an avatar-like image. This required me to go through some very old code that my system still depends on. It's remarkable how much time this seemingly small feature took to implement. One of these days I have to move this code to one of my more modern servers. One reason it took so long is that a random package that does something that never changes, had a breaking change in it. The breakage culture of the Node.js world is just plain fucked up, no other word for it.

- 2025-06-04T15:39:38Z
And btw one of these days I'm going to clear the time to write a useful and up to date RSS feed validator. The one the W3C uses is a total embarassment. I'm not even going to link to it it's so awful.

- 2025-06-04T14:08:42Z
I've heard that Andor is great stuff. I'm on episode 6 of season 1, and it's the usual Star Wars bullshit. It was fun in 1978. But now? It's so freaking boring. Tell me it's worth continuing to watch, that it gets an actual plot at some point.

- 2025-06-04T14:09:08Z
I had a neighbor and friend a long time ago named Ann Doerr. I used to joke with her how her name was a combination of two of the main types of logic gates in computers. I think that's what attracted me to the Star Wars Andor show.

- 2025-06-04T13:58:41Z
I now have the special ChatGPT function I've been waiting for. Codex. Give it access to my entire GitHub collection and let it go. I stopped myself from authorizing, wanting to sleep on it. I know I'm going to do it, but.. Gulp. Do I really want to dump all my thinking for Sam Altman?

Can David Frum hear me? - 2025-06-04T22:01:20Z

I've been enjoying the new David Frum podcast. He's very good at thinking and does a lot of it, and expresses himself very well. I read all his columns and have read two of his books, even though I don't share much of his pre-Trump politics, I find it interesting to hear how he parses things. I also subscribe to The Atlantic. I listen to him. But in this week's episode it's clear that the listening is one-way.

In today's episode we heard from the elite journalist David Frum, interviewing elite editor in chief Marty Barrett, formerly of the Washington Post, and they both make what I believe are wildly inaccurate generalizations about the quality of the news reporting by professionals and the ugliness and inadequacy of bloggers and podcasters.

The problem is, they don't read widely enough to know that there are bloggers and podcasters with good intentions, ethics, deep knowledge and experience who are also well educated -- they don't know we exist and therefore can't hear about the huge mistakes they are making with their own self-perception of their role that we can see because we are not in their world. (BTW, I have been in their world, I was a contributing editor at Wired, a research fellow at Harvard and NYU, each for two years, and I have collided with Frum-like elites, the usual response is a hand-wave of dismissal, written off as not worth listening to, I guess.)

Frum, at the end of the episode talks about how the press covered Biden's incapacity, that led to the second Trump term. They should have stopped, once we were all informed of what happened, and let the electorate decide, it wasn't up to them, or the celebrities they gave space to in their op-eds. In the United States, the people decide. Instead they put up a roadblock and wouldn't let the issue drop. We all knew, we were all informed, probably long before we read a single article about his debate performance. They should have stopped. That was their malpractice.

Their responsibility was to give us the information, and it was also their responsibility to stop right there. Once informed, they were wrong in continuing to harp on it.

We saw them do it with Governor Cuomo of New York. And Senator Al Franken. And Donald McNeil at the NY Times. And on and on. There's so much reporting that's lazy and incompetent, but they'll never report on that, because of their conflicts. And they never listen to their critics. And as a result they play a role they are not entitled to play.

They need to wake up to the idea that while reporting from their bubble is still important and is heard, they misuse it regularly, and we are fed up with it. If they want to control the government, do the right thing, and run for office. Don't do it from your byline in the Washington Post or NY Times.

My keynote for FediForum - 2025-06-04T16:22:06Z

FediForum is a virtual conference that starts on June 5. If they had asked me to keynote, this is roughly what I would say.

Imho this stuff is pretty freaking simple, esp since there are well over 20 years of prior art to use, and not that many ways to do what we're trying to do. I'm impatient, so here's a quick set of observations with my opinion, take it for what it's worth, ymmv, etc.

• You shouldn't be reinventing so much. Always look around for prior art. That will make it possible for you to interop more quickly at both a software level and at a human level.
• Don't invent stuff you think you may need later. Save that for later. You have no intuition for what's needed and more important nothing to test against. You will get it wrong 100 percent of the time.
• Don't invent stuff you think you may need later that makes what you're doing now more complicated. I see a lot of that in ActivityPub.
• The only reason you're doing all this work is for interop. If you've been doing it for years and you don't have much meaningful interop you're doing it wrong.
• Write the software first. Use formats that exist, or if you must invent new stuff, make sure it's simple. Work on its simplicity as you would any other feature. Factor! If there are going to be 100 interoperable products and you make it a little more difficult to implement, that work will be multiplied 100 times. And it be a barrier to entry, so you may not get the most powerful interop possible with the most interesting products.
• Read and follow the Rules for Standards-makers. There aren't that many. But if you're breaking them, you're not going to end up with a standard. If your goal is to appear to be making standards, you should also read RFSM, and don't do anything in it. I've seen people do that btw.
• Have you looked at the world outside the tech stuff to see how important this all has become? All the time we're wasting is very costly in everything that depends on the social web actually existing as opposed to just being talked about.

Now, what would I request if I could influence you??

• Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more (see the next item).
• They'd support the basic features of the textcasting spec, including Markdown because it's a great standard, very much of the same school as RSS. If it had existed when we did RSS 2.0 it would have been part of it.

That's it. Really not much work.

From there we'd have 25 years of interop to explore.

And we could really call this the open social web.

I'm ready to do it any time you all are.

Yours in not wasting time.

Dave

PS: I asked ChatGPT to visualize me giving this talk.

PPS: Comments or questions on Masto or Bluesky.

- 2025-06-03T21:12:55Z
On today's Bill Simmons podcast, their Knicks expert, Van Lathan said "I would under-react but they're going to over-react." I heard that about an hour before the Knicks fired their coach. I don't think it's good or bad, it could work out great. No one knows if this was The Season the Knicks were meant to go to the Finals, but if it was, maybe next year will be too? There's no right answer. Maybe this was Dolan's call. I hope not.

- 2025-06-03T20:48:36Z
"Courtesy" calls from insurance companies aren't.

- 2025-06-03T16:41:31Z
If you followed the Knicks through the playoffs as I did, I recommend the latest episode of the Bill Simmons podcast. It began with talk about the fan base and that got me thinking. We don't know what would happen if the Knicks were in the Finals. Honestly. It could be the antidote to the crazyness. Maybe the reason things are so fucked up is that it's been 52 freaking years since the Knicks won the title. Something happens every so often, the energy field around the Knicks shifts -- Patrick Ewing, Melo, Linsanity and now Brunson. It'd be interesting to map that out against events in the world at the corresponding times. We won't find out this year. In the same way I sensed that New Orleans was doomed when I went to school there, I have a strong feeling connecting the Knicks to something not sure what, but it feels big.

- 2025-06-03T12:54:51Z
Jeremy Herve of Automattic responded to yesterday's suggestion about when to set the og:image metadata in a page. His response is persuasive, but there may be a way to work around it. And a hat-tip to Jeremy, he's helped us so many times getting WordLand ready to market. When you're fitting a product to another product as a platform, it's so important to get help from the vendor, and usually you don't get much of that. Thanks! 😄

- 2025-06-02T14:40:43Z
Jay Rosen gave a brilliant short talk in 2008 about the role of links in the web, and how journalism would have a hard time translating their self-contained worlds with the idea of the web, which is there is no container other than the whole world. Lots of important ideas in Jay's talk. For example, the idea of developing something from one direction or the other. The problem with Bluesky and Mastodon is that they're coming from Twitter, and think they're aiming toward the web, apparently -- but they must not understand the web, because they're going to have to break with Twitter's model in so many ways to reach the web, they'll never get there if they go slowly. If you tried to develop the social web by starting with the web, you arrive at a different place, w/o all the problems of twitter-like systems. Different problems, but not the ones the twitter model has. How do I know? Because I know. 😄

- 2025-06-02T15:15:36Z
I asked ChatGPT if I moved to NYC in 2009 or 2010. It answered in an instant. "You moved to NYC in 2010." I asked how it knew. It used my blog as the source. We have arrived in the future. This is exactly the kind of query I've been begging Google to support for decades. They could have figured out where my blog is, or let me tell it where it is. Famously they once asked if I had misspelled my mother's last name in a query. How freaking clueless can you get.

- 2025-06-02T12:55:36Z
Krugman is right, living in NYC is amazing. When I lived in Manhattan betw 2010 and 2019, I had it great but toward the end I yearned to live in the mountains, the year before Covid hit (that was a bad time to be in Manhattan, btw). Now I yearn to again live in the city. Funny how that works. Even in the 70s I felt safe in NYC, and I commuted to school from Queens to the Bronx. It was safe enough to let a 14 year old kid ride the subway into Manhattan and up to the Bronx and back, every freaking day. I never got mugged. And I did all kinds of dangerous stuff that independent-minded teen agers do. If you can afford it, I recommend you spend some time in NYC before you believe the bullshit the Repubs say about it. They have reasons not to like the cities that have nothing to do with how nice it is. In NYC we don't trust our politicians to tell the truth. You shouldn't trust yours so much either, dear Republicans. 😄

- 2025-06-02T14:50:40Z
In honor of the Knicks' very successful season, I temporarily put the paper bags fans at the top of my home page as a reminder to anyone who wants to blame someone on the Knicks for how the season turned out. I think we should all wear the paper bags on our heads as a reminder of how we felt about being Knicks fans not all that long ago. They are always a horrible team to love, whether they're playing for the title, or just trying desperately not to be the worst team in the NBA this season. Love hurts as some wise person once sang.

- 2025-06-02T12:41:35Z
It's already June 2! It seems like just yesterday it was June 1!

- 2025-06-02T16:47:23Z
From Facebook on this day in 2015. "There should be a required college course called Introduction to Assholes. The student would learn how not to be manipulated by jerks."

Suggestion to WordPress devs - 2025-06-02T13:14:44Z

Below is a screen shot of a post written by Doc Searls as viewed in Bluesky. It's jarring. The big picture of Doc gets in the way.

Doc's post as viewed in Bluesky. His picture dominates. Imho it shouldn't.

I realize no one designed this, but it also is reality, it's how a lot of people see Doc's writing.

Here's my suggestion. When the user specifies a featured image for a post, set the og:image element in the head section of the page. When they don't specify such an image, omit that element.

That's how we did it in the Baseline theme, and I, as the writer, am happy with the result.

Your butt still stinks - 2025-06-02T12:41:45Z

Human beings spend far to much effort feeling better than some people or feeling inferior to others.

This is understandable, I guess, as far as evolution is concerned, up to a point, but I think we've been past that point for a long time now. Now, evolution brought us to a point where in order to survive as a species we have to get over this need to rank people and work together.

So if you feel other people are better than you, get over it. Same thing if you feel better than others. You aren't and they aren't.

Your shit still stinks and as the great Republican philosopher Joni Ernst so eloquently put it, she's going to be dead pretty darned soon and so will you.

I have to remind myself of this when I see a picture of someone who is really ugly but acts like they're not. And when I say ugly, I mean ugly inside. I say to myself "Davey, they are reflecting off something inside yourself that you don't like. On a different day they might seem very beautiful to you!" So I can relax and stop worrying so much about what I think about them in the moment. It matters not one bit.

- 2025-06-01T14:29:01Z
Good morning and welcome to June. Another month gone, and coincidentally the end of the NBA season. I woke up this morning with the worst hangover ever, and I haven't had a drink in months (never was my vice, I have others). The Knicks lost fair and square to the Indianas last night. My first message came from NakedJen who isn't as far as I know a Mets fan, saying simply "Let's go Mets!" I like that, though it will of course take me some time to get re-adjusted. I think the Knicks were jinxed because Brunson said in his podcast that New York has two teams, the Knicks (I agree) and the Yankees. What! No. I think we may have to consider trading him to a team without philosophy. I'm not sure anyone will have him though, considering this possibly fatal flaw, philosophy-wise. And no doubt the Knicks are going to change some things over the summer, and I've heard that they might try to get Kevin Durant. I sure hope not. I think the Knicks are benefiting from the jinx he put on himself when he tried in vain to stir up a "rivalry" between the Knicks and the Brooklyns. No, that isn't likely to happen, unless they try to become a contender without kicking the Knicks in the butt like KD did. Maybe the Portland Trail Blazers will want him. That's about as far from New York as you can get in the NBA. And with that I now officially shut the door on the 2024-25 NBA season. We had a great run. See you all in October! 😄