Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

- 2025-06-30T12:05:40Z
I needed a tiny feed reader for an app I was working on.

- 2025-06-30T17:59:49Z
If the Dems were competitive they would run ads now with Senator Tillis talking about the damage the new Repub bill will do to Americans, emphasizing this is a Republican speaking, taking one for the country.

- 2025-06-30T11:31:52Z
Another criticism of the Bluesky API. They make each developer do the support for Open Graph metadata, when it would be much more efficient for them to support it on their end. I would be happy to give them the code. It's not that complicated. But translating the OG format, which for crying out loud is a huge standard, into their arcane format which is only supported by Bluesky, is going in the wrong direction, and frankly is ridiculously arrogant. Show a little humility. Facebook is huge, and the format isn't just used by Facebook, everyone uses it.

- 2025-06-30T11:28:12Z
When I was having trouble getting into my AWS account last week, I ordered a Yubikey, which everyone says is the best way to go. I thought I'd set it up first thing Monday morning (ie now) but it turns out it's a major undertaking? Why does this have to be so hard? I guess I'll find out, but not today. I want to make some progress on my development project first. Maybe later.

Do a backup now - 2025-06-30T14:40:19Z

Advice from a longtime developer.

• If you think "I should do a backup," do it. Now, don't wait.
• Make it really easy to do a backup. Choose a menu item that's always available when you're working.

The reason is karma. God hears all your thoughts. When that thought pops into your head and you don't do a backup, or don't do it soon enough, He crashes your data, and you think "I should have done a backup when I thought of doing it." Even this doesn't please Him. At that moment it's even more urgent that you do a backup.

My hippie uncle taught me this. God has a terrible sense of humor, and thinks it's really funny when you have a good thought and ignore it. When something didn't work he would say that's God goofing on me.

In this case, we're talking about is the Programmer God. There are all kinds of gods, a baseball god, a basketball god, and very specifically a Knicks god. That god has the absolutely worst sense of humor of them all and by worst I mean best.

- 2025-06-29T14:27:39Z
A case study in APIs. Creating a new post via Bluesky's API.

A tough place to govern - 2025-06-29T23:07:57Z

Benjamin Wittes: "It’s remarkable how many non-New Yorkers seem to care who the mayor of New York City is."

They do and they're right to, the same way we were concerned how the Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles would react to the invasion of the Marines and hijacking of the National Guard.

Right now the NYC mayor is a hostage of the US govt. Not in a position to help. An inexperienced first term NY mayor, have we seen that before? How does the NYPD respond to that?

Then there was the snowstorm that derailed John V Lindsay, a heroic and transformative mayor. NY is a tough place to govern even when the US government isn't aiming to regime change the place.

NY is a tough place to govern even when the US government isn't aiming to regime change the place.

Local government is our last line of defense.

"Think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine."

You all fell in love with a candidate, I do it too.

But think about the context the next mayor will govern in.

The thing about NY that people might not understand is that the politics are dirty and fucked up. Dems tend to elect handsome young heros who when they have to deal with NYPD and the sanitation workers, the teachers union, and the federal government, also the ancient infrastructure, melt.

The best job in the world - 2025-06-29T12:31:44Z

Now that we know the outcome of the 2024 election, not just in numbers but in what it's doing to our beloved country and the rest of the world, it's interesting to revisit the campaign that journalism ran last year to force President Biden to step aside. That's one of the functions of Facebook, they play back your posts from years ago, so you can see how things changed, or didn't.

Anyway, last year on this day I wrote this on Facebook: "Why don't journalists cover the Biden base? Do they even consider the possibility that there is one? Or do they think they are the base? I thought they weren't supposed to care who the nominees are? Why do they feel entitled to say one candidate should withdraw but not the other? Have any of them even thought this through?"

Nick Arnett, a former tech journalist, said in a comment: "Until I read this, the madness of the Times calling on Biden, but not Trump, to withdraw didn't dawn on me."

I had followed his metamorphosis over years from a journalist to a worker who goes where there are fires or other natural disasters, for the government, to support the effort to save people's homes and lives. I watched him via Facebook, in awe, as he went around the country, not being paid very much I imagine, but doing good.

I learned something important when my father was in the hospital many years ago, in a coma, after losing a lot of blood and being unconscious for hours before he was found. He was in a ward in Flushing Hospital, along with a lot of other comatose people. All were unconscious, unable to feed themselves. Hard to know if they had any awareness. From an outside perspective they, and my father included, were lost. Some had been there for years, probably weren't ever going to come out of it. We were lucky, my father survived, after a month, and had seven more years to live.

I visited him every day, and got to know the flow of the hospital. Workers came in and out of the room to attend to these comatose people. Imagine the kind of support they needed just to keep their bodies functioning and not wasting away for lack of movement. I thought these people must have the worst jobs imaginable, imagining myself in their shoes.

I got to know them, asked about what else they do, how they got here, where they live, etc. Somehow I got up the courage to ask one of them if they liked their job, imagining I'd get a New Yorker comment like "You know, it's a living." But what I heard was a complete surprise. "It's the best job in the world," he said, because I can see so clearly how my work helps real people. He was looking right at me. It hit me, this man is doing what I can't do, what my father's parents, who were long gone, couldn't do. Caring. Caring for my dad. Then I got it.

Back to Nick, who was and still is, and probably always will be doing things to help other people, no matter what he does.

He was canned in one of the DOGE purges this spring.

Now you tell me whether the "Trump base" deserved a chance you wouldn't let us have with Biden? Why journalism felt entitled to make this decision for all of us? When are you going to get the idea that you're supposed to help us. Do the right thing. I get so angry at journalism for getting in the way. Once informed of the facts, it was their job to get out of the way and let us, the voters, make the decision.

PS: In the very next post on FB, I wrote an HTML hack that makes the same point, more concisely.

- 2025-06-28T16:29:36Z
We live in interesting times. Never a dull moment! 😄

- 2025-06-28T15:42:23Z
The latest David Frum podcast is about crazy tech billionaires. Once again he talks about who he's willing to listen to. He's really smart, thinks about things, and speaks brilliantly, but cultivates his ignorance and seems somewhat proud of it. In contrast, I listened to Jon Stewart's weekly podcast yesterday and it was as usual outstanding. Like Frum he thinks and speaks brilliantly, with the addition of being hilarious at times. In this episode he talks to an Iranian friend, a new perspective we don't hear often, but fits in with what I had understood about Iran. It's a highly educated country, a good standard of living and are mired with a repressive government and no options for regime change. When you hear that talked about on other podcasts and cable news shows, remember -- it's impossible to change regimes unless the country has prepared for that. There is no regime-in-waiting in Iran, hasn't been one since the 1979 revolution. This is the next danger in the US. Will there be anything remaining of our political system? It's almost all gone now. Funny to listen to the people on TV about surviving the next 3.5 years -- what do they think will happen then? Nothing will happen, that's the most likely thing. Back to Frum, what a shame there's such a smart guy, so cloistered, and boastful about it. That's not a good way to proceed now imho.

- 2025-06-28T15:54:42Z
Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho, and probably very funny, and respectful.

- 2025-06-28T15:26:53Z
I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook.

- 2025-06-28T15:24:46Z
I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited.

- 2025-06-28T13:01:47Z
Fixed the images that broke on morningcoffeenotes.com, a site that dates back to 2003, when it transitioned to https in 2024.

- 2025-06-28T22:26:17Z
With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.

Fast & easy Open Social Web - 2025-06-28T21:13:01Z

You hear the term Open Social Web used in places where things that are social are neither open or web. They aren't that far, and here today I'm going to give you a fast and easy recipe for linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness open social web

1. Add inbound RSS feeds. The social site allows a user to specify an RSS feed that represents their posts. When a new one shows up, it appears in the timelines of people who are following the user. They can add items to that feed however they like. It can come from anywhere. That's 1/2 of "open."
2. Add outbound RSS feeds. This gives you the other half. When a new item shows up in a users feed, however it got there, it appears in their outbound feed, which can be tied into the input feed of one or more other sites.
3. Support links in users' posts. You really can't claim to be part of the web if you don't implement this core feature of the web.

That's all there is, except this: The feeds have to be good. Don't be cheap with the information they contain. Work with other developers to make sure all the information they need that you have is present in the outbound feeds you generate. Same with the inbound feeds, be reasonable, if you can accept certain information and match it up with your service, then you should do it. Think of the users first.

You could try to use ActivityPub or AT Proto to play the role of RSS. I think you'll find that's more work, and not that many people have mastered these formats. RSS is simple and lightweight and has had 20+ years of burn in. Lots of familiarity, lots of working code.

It's time to stop claiming you are the open social web when it's so easy to be the open and on the web.

Hallucinating myths into fact - 2025-06-28T11:51:46Z

I have a Google Alerts query for my own name, just to see if any journalism outlets mention me. When it happens, it's often to give me credit for co-creating an app called iPodder, which they say was where podcasting started. None of that is true. But that's what journalism says about me.

On the other hand if you ask ChatGPT what role I played in developing podcasting it gives a more accurate answer.

So tell me what the role of journalism is. Hallucinating myths into fact? That would be my estimate.

Here's the ChatGPT result. I actually did a bit more than that, but what they say is closer to the truth and gives an idea of how things like podcasting come into existence. A lot of work and struggle against people's disbelief, and most of the time it doesn't work -- podcasting is one of the successes.

BTW, the second item in ChatGPT's list is not true. Adam's Daily Source Code came after my own podcast Morning Coffee Notes. I was urging him to do a podast but he didn't get one going until after I went first, proving the old adage "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." So somewhere along the line it got confused and it hallucinated just like the journalists. The actual first podcast was a Grateful Dead song in 2001 which I used to test Radio UserLand which was the first software to implement podcasting. There's a documentary coming out soon and I believe they have a bit about that, so maybe that'll get on the record.

If this is how history is written btw, I wouldn't trust anything in the history books. ;-)

- 2025-06-27T18:12:08Z
Glossary: Tiny Little Textbox. (An idea I might try, coupled with Daytona, I should be able to build a glossary of terms I want in my official vocabulary. Ideas that have stood the test of time, that mean something now, but eventually will be set aside and no one will know what a TLTB was.)

- 2025-06-27T11:46:47Z
The longest continuously updated RSS feed in the known universe.

- 2025-06-27T18:13:11Z
I'm working my way through The Bear, and it's great because you remember that you love all these characters and you can immediately start living the ongoing drama of their lives. I feel like a cat perched on a window watching everyone doing their daily stuff. Looking forward to going back to the beginning and starting over.

- 2025-06-27T18:15:09Z
BTW, I think the right way to read Scripting News is getting the nightly email. That's the pulse. I jot stuff down during the day, mostly in the morning, and later add links and finish stuff up. The scripting.com feed is updated in realtime. So you may get many versions of an item over the day, which might be a problem with feed readers that don't watch for changes. I noticed that my changes to a recent podcast shownotes page don't flow back out to my podcast client app on Android. FeedLand btw, records changes, and they flow through to the timeline. Coupled with rssCloud, which is supported in every WordPress site, makes the whole thing realtime. People assume that feeds have to perform like a feed reader. But if you have a component running on the open internet, hooked up via websockets to the client, you get the flow they get in twitter-like systems. And we didn't have to invent anything that didn't already exist in 2009.

- 2025-06-26T14:09:20Z
WordLand v0.5.15 is out.

- 2025-06-26T14:57:27Z
Masked secret police is pure terrorism. We should ask NYPD what we have to do to protect ourselves from them, and then do it.

- 2025-06-26T20:27:14Z
I, like a lot of other people, assumed that Americans would be terrible at authoritarianism. Shows we have a lot to learn. Americans are pretty good at it it turns out.

- 2025-06-26T20:30:12Z
Krugman doesn’t understand what’s coming for NYC. And doesn’t understand the leadership Cuomo uniquely provided at the height of Covid. It’s pretty likely what’s starting in NYC will be worse than Covid or 9-11. Funny thing is Krugman did get it, a few weeks ago when the crisis in Los Angeles was peaking. He wrote a piece that was terrified, and realistic. The National Guard had been nationalized. Marines were invading California. But now that Calif hasn't been in the news, it's easy to swing back. I bet if the election had happened during the worst of it, Cuomo would've won.

- 2025-06-26T12:22:39Z
Bernie Sanders asks what the Democrats should learn from Mr. Z's victory in the NYC primary this week. Here's what I say. Forget about ever rising from the ashes of what remains of the party. Right now, the issue is how to defend the city from the coming war with the US government. They're already holding the current mayor hostage. This will be worse than 9-11 and Covid. We have no leadership. We're totally fucked, what the Democratic Party does or doesn't do, at this point, simply doesn't matter.

- 2025-06-25T14:04:01Z
Podcast: Holding your nose, the aftermath.

- 2025-06-25T13:16:17Z
A preview of how a WordLand linkblog works, which is of course a WordPress site, viewed in my blogroll. When I clicked on the link, I was surprised that it goes to Poynter, and not to the linkblog. But then I remembered that's the point of a linkblog. And it flows through to the feed, and the blogroll software understands. So now I have an end-to-end linkblog.

- 2025-06-25T12:04:51Z
Another reason to love WordPress. Every freaking WordPress site had great RSS support. They did more to keep feeds alive than anyone else. Google tried to kill RSS in a particularly humiliating way. WordPress kept it going.

- 2025-06-25T19:52:05Z
A NYT article from last year about 34th Ave in Jackson Heights where "a stretch of 26 blocks, running east to west, has been closed to cars from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day since 2020." Before we moved to Flushing when I was in 5th grade, we lived on 92nd St and 34th Ave. What a difference that must make. I love it when cities take chances like this, and the people in the neighborhood seem to love it.

Finding Frontier - 2025-06-25T16:06:52Z

I tried an experiment, go back as far as I can in archive.org on scripting.com and see where it gets me. The first try got me to a classified ads site I was experimenting with in mid-November 1996. A few weeks later, on December 3, there was a colorful directory that took you to all the sub-sites on the server, DaveNet, Frontier, Classified ads, our Midas Website (Macintosh Internet Developers Association), DocServer, a BBS, and Guestbook.

I went digging around in the Frontier part. Lots of stuff there. By then we had been working on Frontier for eight years. It had been reborn once, from a Mac-focused single-user scripting environment to a networked one, all because the web had exploded and Apple didn't want us making system software for their platform. 😄

BTW, some of this stuff is still here.

There are lots of paths to try out.

This was where my blog home page was then.

Then to DaveNet, and in the left margin Nerd's guide to this website.

I love the screen shots that show what a good match the Frontier object database was to the way a website is organized.

user.websites.davenet

- 2025-06-24T11:55:24Z
Jeremy Herve is a developer at Automattic. Here's what he said about yesterday's podcast. He liked the idea of WordPress as the OS of the open social web. Glad that resonated. It has so much more than the other possible platforms. The others couldn't even realistically claim to be part of the web. They don't support writers very well. We're going to build slowly and deliberately around this idea, always staying open for competitors, because that's the most important thing about the web, beyond its simplicity, it never locks its users in. That's a deal-stopper. As I've learned how WordPress works internally, I immediately saw that they embraced the concepts of the web not just as words, but in their practice. I never hit a wall that kept me out of doing something they already did. And they also appear to never break users and developers. That's one of the basic rules of the web, it's an unchanging thing, no one can break it because everyone is a guest. Anyway, there is only one web. Keep that in mind. Nothing exclusive about it.

- 2025-06-23T13:47:37Z
Podcast: WordPress and me.

- 2025-06-23T12:11:03Z
Dan Knauss, one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada, wrote a post on their blog using WordLand. Here's a screen shot of what that post looked like when he was editing it. That's all you need to see to understand the role that WordLand plays. It's a pretty self-describing product.

- 2025-06-23T20:54:00Z
A great scene from The West Wing. Use your imagination, something similar is probably happening right now.

- 2025-06-22T14:31:40Z
Today's song: Peace in our time.

- 2025-06-22T15:45:40Z
People talk about "regime change" as if the only regime that could change is the one in Iran.

- 2025-06-22T21:26:23Z
Note to linkblog readers: I just flipped a switch and am now using WordLand to do the linkblog. Today's links are good, but the ones from prior days were mainly test posts. They will scroll off in a few days, and it'll be as it always has been. Still diggin.

- 2025-06-22T22:18:35Z
One more thing about the linkblog, it no longer cross-posts to social media sites. I want to see if I miss having the links there. It also won't have the limits. Maybe it'll be better if my accounts are a bit more quiet. Also the RSS feed is in a new location, I want to wait a bit to make sure it works before publicizing the URL.

WordCamp Canada in October - 2025-06-22T13:24:05Z

I'm keynoting the WordCamp Canada conference in October in Ottawa. It's the first conference I've attended since before the pandemic.

The timing is ideal, and the location is significant. As an American, I don't want to try to attract people from around the world to a meeting in my country. Right now, I wouldn't come here if I didn't live here.

I'm also not happy with the tech industry of the US. I'd like a fresh start, a return to our roots, with the assumption that the people control their destiny and the role of developers is to give them to the tools to try out new ideas.

With WordLand I've created a product for writers, filling a need that's been there since the beginning of the web, using the practices in writing tools we learned in the 80s. It doesn't have the artificial limits imposed by Twitter et al. I think they're senseless. So we're going to blow that door wide open. No character limits. Simple styling. Links. Editable.

And it's also a product for developers. There's no lock-in anywhere in this stack. So you can make a different style of editor. Or play with new ways to view timelines.

I wanted to take discourse in a different direction too. A good design for the social web shouldn't require intense moderation. The reward for spammers is practically nil. Also, it'll be good for small groups in a way that Twitter et al never have been.

So far I haven't invented any new formats. We're building on what works now. WordPress is a remarkably deep product, so deep it could be used as operating system. and that's exactly how I've chosen to view it and it works incredibly well. Some of what we're building on is based on work I did with Joseph Scott of Automattic in 2009, believe it or not.

And as a bonus we get a great bridge into ActivityPub, from the great work Automattic is doing in bridging WordPress to ActivityPub. Think about it and you'll see how connections in and out of WordPress can facilitate a lot of interop, not just via RSS, but any format that comes along that people want to use.

We'll have a lot to talk about in October!

RSS on a timeline - 2025-06-22T13:13:33Z

More on the vision for WordLand and RSS.

Imagine that WordLand is the editor of a twitter-like system built around RSS. It saves your writing to WordPress, where it is published on a website and via RSS. You don't have to use WordLand or WordPress, because RSS is an open format. Any editor that generates RSS is part of the network. Designed to be simple.

All that's missing is a timeline viewer, and that's what I'm working on now. It's coming together pretty nicely, imho. Not an easy project, though on the surface it looks like it should be. Also there's nothing proprietary about my timeline viewer. There could be a thousand of them. Anyone who has written an RSS feed reader will have all the low-level bits they need.

Hoping to have all the connections working by the end of the summer.

Once done, it will be the completion of the vision for RSS as the foundation of the open social web, the place that all the open formats agree on, so we can get on with interop and say goodbye to lock-in. It can be done, I'm almost 100 percent sure of that now. Still have a little ways to go. As they say -- still diggin!

No time for peaceniks - 2025-06-22T14:32:17Z

Trump may not want regime change in Iran, but he definitely wants regime change in California.

He's going to war with Iran to hide his war with the United States.

We need a war-ready Democratic Party.

Governor or mayor is not a job for peaceniks.

- 2025-06-21T14:40:23Z
Speak plainly. As Brent says, lessons not learnings. Keep it simple. This is one of the foundations of blogging, btw. "Try to write correctly."

- 2025-06-21T14:29:15Z
Just a guess, but the people doing the "ice" raids are not real police any more than the "doge" people are/were actually part of the US government. In this New Yorker podcast, they dug into what "doge" actually was/is. Some weren't actually Trump supporters, they just thought it would be interesting to be empowered to fix the government. They learned the government doesn't work the way they thought it did. Spending is way up over the years, but number of government employees has stayed flat. It has already been largely privatized. Tangentially they appear to have found some things actually worth fixing. Tech culture isn't just the billionaires, far from it. There's a lot of hippie ethics in there too, you just have to look past the money, which seems too much work for some/most journalists. But The New Yorker tends to do this well, btw, sometimes. 😄

- 2025-06-20T14:20:16Z
I read through the QuickDraw API summary from 1985. For me it was like someone who built applications of electricity, going back to see Edison's workbench before there was an industry. It was so seminal. It would never work in today's architectures, almost everything was global. There were five color constants, white, black, gray, ltGray, dkGray. You could see the whole archtecture in just a few pages. It wasn't bloated yet. And the best thing was there was the screen memory. Not hidden. If you didn't like the way QuickDraw worked, you could go around it. It was an idea I only ever used on the Apple II, it was imho Woz's big contribution, for me coming from Unix it was incredible to have so much power. On the Mac it showed up as a variable in a high level language, on the Apple II, you had to know the physical address, but in both cases, when you stored a bit in the memory it showed up on the screen. We never saw anything like that on the previous generation of machines, IBM mainframes and Digital minis. Someday someone will go through all this and see how it evolved. These pages are a tiny but hugely significant slice. Maybe with next year's ChatGPT.

- 2025-06-20T14:13:22Z
I had an experience like the one Paul Simon described on Colbert last night. I was at the Apple Store on 14th St in NYC to pick up a new phone I had pre-ordered, lined up with some much younger folks who asked if I knew what was new on the phone. I said I wasn’t sure, so I asked if they knew. They all agreed the coolest thing was called “pod casting.” They said it slowly to be sure I could understand. They said it was great, it was like radio, but you could get it from the web, and there was always lots of new stuff. "What will they think of next," said the old man, impressed, nodding with respect.

- 2025-06-20T14:29:56Z
As you get older and see your friends of 30, 40, even 50 years -- you realize how silly this all is. I see them and I see an old person, but I know who they are inside. The old "don't judge a book by its cover" adage probably wasn't coined by a younger person. 😄

- 2025-06-19T19:29:10Z
Until further notice dissent is an act of patriotism, support of and belief in our country.

Bill Atkinson and QuickDraw - 2025-06-19T15:28:02Z

Bill Atkinson died two weeks ago today.

I was explaining to a friend why he was so important. Most people who know of him know about MacPaint and Hypercard, both were fantastic contributions to the evolution of personal computers. But underneath all that he created a layer of the Macintosh OS called QuickDraw, which was a core innovation of the Mac, its graphic system. Every piece of software that ran on the Macintosh ran on top of QuickDraw.

Here's what QuickDraw is. Software could do things at the pixel level, a dot so small it's barely visible to the eye. What you're seeing on the screen is made up of collections of those dots, forming lines, boxes, ovals and text, and later page layouts, beautiful photography, and the text you're reading right now. The software that does all that, on the earliest Macs, is called QuickDraw. (Later a successor called QuickTime made the dots move and added sound, and now we have streaming.)

QuickDraw is great.

That's the thing. You could tell from the API that the designers really understood the tech. It wasn't the first time this had been done. And either Atkinson did it himself, working on it for years, or he "stole from the best" -- probably a lot of both. The prior art came from Xerox in Palo Alto, and the experience came from being a hard-working dedicated hacker who didn't give up until it was done. That's like saying if he were a basketball hero, he was like Bill Russell or Steph Curry. We don't talk about our accomplishments that much in tech, on a personal level, we have an idea that Steve Jobs made the Mac, but it was really created by developers, designers, graphic artists, writers and application developers. Like Bill Atkinson.

I spent many years building on his work, and many more years wishing I still was. He made a contribution, and that's, imho, pretty much the best you can say for any person's life.

Thanks Bill. 😄

Bill Atkinson, on his creation, MacPaint on QuickDraw on Mac.

PS: For programmers, here's a summary of the QuickDraw API.

Passkeys and ChatGPT - 2025-06-18T16:15:51Z

I had a conversation on Bluesky with a writer saying she didn't have much use for ChatGPT, though she had tried it.

I wanted to see if I could open a door, suggesting that next time there was an problem using a computer, that she bring the question to ChatGPT.

I think that's good advice for anyone who hasn't seen how useful these are as tools. You can use it like a search engine. What comes back answers your question. With Google you'd have to read through docs that are meant to cover every angle, but the AI bot zeroes in on the issue you're dealing with. And the writing on ChatGPT is better than what you would get on a random web page explaining a technical concept.

Passkeys

Previously I had tried to approach passkeys to get an idea of how I should use them, but never grasped the big picture. I just didn't understand what they were doing, but I understood it was about authentication. A hardware approach to identity, that much I got. How it worked and how I would use it did not click.

And then earlier this week, an essential site that I use infrequently, required using a passkey. When I had set it up a few months ago, as part of a bigger develolpment task, I had no idea what I was doing, and eventually bailed out, and left it unable to get back into the system, which happened on Sunday. By default the browser, Chrome, had previously connected it to my Pixel 9 Pro. There was a record of the connection being used for a variety of other services, but the one I needed was not there. This was after a full day of trying to debug it from the other side. I now have a lot more info about how passkeys work, I won't be able to say I know enough until I've re-established the connection.

I know a lot of readers of this site understood passkeys without anyone having to piece it together for them. I have never been one of those people. Just the way my mind works, it's why I'm a good person to test software, I get lost easily.

All this is to say -- think of ChatGPT as a technical assistant with broad knowledge and patience. That's where the real power is imho.