Scripting feed

Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-06-22T15:45:40Z

- 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.

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. 😄

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.

The Joe Rogan of the Dems - 2025-06-18T17:10:22Z

If there were a Joe Rogan of the left, he would tell you to stfu and vote for Cuomo for mayor of NYC.

NYC is a special place, like the Knicks are a special NBA team.

And btw, Cuomo, like Trump, is from Queens.

PS: The Joe Rogan of the left will be from Queens too. :-)

PPS: Queens doesn't have an Empire State Building, and they tore down Shea Stadium. So the Unisphere from the last World's Fair will have to do. But Queens is probably the most ethnically diverse place in the world. Think about that for a minute and how the fight for the soul of the US will be fought in Queens.

PPPS: I come from Jackson Heights and Flushing.

- 2025-06-17T12:07:50Z
Podcast: Hold your nose and vote for Cuomo.

- 2025-06-17T17:28:03Z
Highly recommend reading this review of Trump's parade. We had the wrong idea about what the Army would do. Basically if you order us to do a parade, we will give you a parade.

- 2025-06-16T15:59:01Z
Progress report on linkblogging in WordLand.

- 2025-06-15T14:59:45Z
In a year or two it will be possible to create a perfect TV version of any person. No longer can you say any person has to die eventually and go away. And we can have anyone back we want.

- 2025-06-15T13:56:31Z
I figured that yesterday's army march in DC would have caused clashes with the police in more places than it did, perhaps due to false flag attacks "from the left" at one of the many No King Day parades around the country. I thought this was the moment when it would all melt down. America's Reichstad Fire. If it were an episode of Mission Impossible or Batman, it would definitely have gone that way. I bet there were plans hatched on open chat channels between various Cabinet members and their families, and probably Elon Musk via an interpreter, to coordinate. I was also surprised there weren't any Tesla Cybertrucks in yesterday's parade. I guess the honeymoon is really over. Anyway, they had to have had a plan, but I keep forgetting this is not Generalissimo Trump, rather it's TV President "Taco" Trump. I think they had a plan and he lost his nerve at the last minute. Instead, the Maga in Minnesota lit a different fuse, assassinating the speaker of the state house. That's a line that hadn't yet been crossed, but you knew the day would come. It's here.

- 2025-06-15T13:04:31Z
When Trump was on trial in NYC he begged for support from his base, no one showed up. The cops prepared for rallies that never showed up.

Some media is for relaxation - 2025-06-15T14:12:20Z

BTW, this piece in the NYT has a bit of wisdom that I had not considered because I don't listen to Joe Rogan it would never occur to me. He's relaxing white noise, chatting in the background while you play a game or write a blog post or text message on your phone, or just think about something unrelated. I forgot that mode of media consumption. I'm always on the hunt for that kind of content. That's why sports games are so good. You can almost completely tune out, knowing they'll replay the best stuff.

Reminds of a meeting we had a Berkman in the early days of podcasting. Most of the faculty were of course not on board with what we were doing, possibly believing that it threatened public radio (didn't turn out that way at all, they made incredibly good use of podcasting). One of the guys from PRX which was also incubating there at the time, said at me in a challenging way -- You get the best info from public radio! Right? I thought for a minute and realized this was a good question. No, I said, it's relaxing, I can tune out while I'm driving or walking around town. Loud groans. But it's so true. Now it's great when there's a TV series that really catches your attention, I love that too, but most of my media-ingesting time is with white noise, background relaxation. The world is still okay when the background noise on MSNBC are still on the air between the ever more disgusting ads for diseases I probably will never get.

There must be a better way.

It's like the canaries in a coalmine. When they go off the air that's when you really have to start worrying!

BTW, PRX was a good idea. Brilliant actually. Distribute the content from the public radio sources that generate too much to the ones in less populated areas where they don't generate enough. Podcasting blew that up -- but PRX adjusted their approach, and became a distributor of podcasting. That's an entrepreneur's approach. The were able to pivot and continue to make a contribution to this day.

I often wonder how we missed the opportunity to build a great media incubator at Harvard in the 00s. We were right there, and the backer of Berkman wanted entrepreurial projects, I found out at the reunion two summers ago. We had it, were there, if only.. Heh when you get to be my age there's lots of that.

Also I wonder how I missed the potential of WordPress all those years. Ships passing in the night. But we're there now, so..

ChatGPT right-margin image - 2025-06-15T14:42:00Z

If you're a regular reader of my blog you know I put images in the right margins of pieces. I get an idea then I go scouting around using search to find the image that fits.

Today I was looking for an image of an army General.

• i'd like a painting style image of an american general in world war ii timeframe standing on a white background, full body from shoes to helmet, lots of medals, angry determination on his face. as if it were a portrait.

This is what I got, and it's perfect.

- 2025-06-14T21:29:37Z
Today's song: Queen of the Roller Derby.

- 2025-06-15T01:44:53Z
If you think we need to find a way past the billionaires, then we have to find a way around the established media. They keep selling us out and we keep acting as if we show them that they're doing it in a way they understand they'll get on our side. But they can't. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” wrote Upton Sinclair in 1935. It's still true 90 years later. Another great philosopher, Les Moonves, said in 2016, "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," referring to Trump's run for president. It was good presumably because of increased viewership resulting more ad revenue. I'm sure it's still true today, though CBS stopped boasting about it in public.

Working together - 2025-06-15T02:08:23Z

It's not just the government that's afraid of small groups of people working together. Big tech companies also. And startups hoping to sell out to big companies.

Democratic resurrection plan - 2025-06-13T16:27:09Z

Having a Democrat rise from the ashes of metoo is just what the doctor ordered. It could cure the revulsion some voters feel for Democratic wokeness. Cuomo was never tried or convicted of any crime, or voted out of office by the state assembly or senate in Albany. Or the people of the State of New York. Al Franken wasn't allowed to have his case adjudicated by a committee of Congress. Both were pushed from office by journalism, which imho needs to be put in their place, they've been sloshing into lanes they weren't elected to. Let me try to make this clear. Journalism's role is to inform us of events. Once informed, it's their responsibility to stop. Anything past that is campaigning, not news. Step back and let the process run its course. Ultimately it's the people who will decide. Now, if Cuomo wins, this is the best outcome possible because the NYT et al will complain endlessly about how the Democrats just elected someone who they don't approve of. This will probably get the Dems more votes in coming elections, because there are a lot of people who legitimately are disgusted by the NYT trying to run the show. If you want to govern, run for office. If you want to be a journalist, know when it's time to shut up.

BTW isn't it amazing that when you say something counter to Democratic dogma, their first impulse is to try to destroy you? If the Dems were a healthy political party and not a religion, their first impulse would be to try to work with you not destroy you.

"Who me?" asks the Democrat. Yes, you.

You'll know who the next leader of the Democratic Party is because they will be campaigning against the Democratic Party. Talking about things that actually happened rather than the hallucinations the Trumpies indulge in.

Screen shot - 2025-06-13T16:26:40Z

The linkblog project is coming along. Still more things to hook up but I thought it would be nice to take a picture of what a linkblog post looks like in the reader app.

And just for fun because we can do it, here's a screen shot of the screen shot in the reader app.

- 2025-06-12T12:58:23Z
Today I'm going to teach WordLand how to manage a linkblog. Before doing that I tried to figure out what a linkblog is. I have been using various homebrew linkblogging tools which I have shared with others, but none of them became popular products. I wrote a summary to help guide the development work I have planned.

- 2025-06-12T12:35:10Z
I was lucky to grow up in NYC, and had to commute from Queens to the Bronx every day to go to school. Some days I took the Q44 bus over the Whitestone Bridge, and other days I took the Q16 to the 7 train through Manhattan, and then the 4 or D trains up to 205th St in the Bronx. Took the same amount of time either way. So at age 15 I was able to go see the Grateful Dead after school at the Fillmore East on April 27, 1971. Midway through the set, a special guest band who they didn't introduce started tuning up on stage. We all wondered who they were. I now know the history thanks to the 500 Songs podcast, and this was the return of a band that had fallen out of favor, a band whose hits we all heard on WABC and WNEW-FM. When they started playing one of their biggest hits, Good Vibrations, the audience erupted in ecstasy. The Beach Boys now looking a lot different, but playing the same wonderful California music from the 60s. They couldn't be more different from the Dead, but there they were up on stage together. They were back, this time for good. This is a recording of the whole concert, the link points to the beginning of Good Vibrations. You can hear the gasp of recognition, and the bands recognition of the recognition, and from their it was a party in a party, including a sing-along part -- "gotta keep those a lovin' good vibrations happening with you." We were all growing up very quickly, but we had a moment when we could return to a more innocent time. Lovely the way music pulls you back in time. Brian Wilson wasn't there that night but his music certainly was.

Democrats and men - 2025-06-12T14:02:45Z

Yesterday I posted a link to my political disclaimer from 2018. Also listened to a podcast interview with Senator Gallego of Arizona who says, correctly, that the Democrats have work to do with men. It's true, speaking as a man who has been voting solid Democratic since Kerry, but I didn't stop being a man, which is something that makes me cringe to say it, the way I cringed at admitting to being Jewish when I was a kid. I lived in a place where hate of Jews was always just under the surface in school, but not so well hidden at the playground.

Men as a gender were really pushed into a corner we couldn't get out of during #metoo, all men, not just some. If they say they weren't they're lying. I went to a future of journalism conference in 2018, and the only thing men talked about, quietly, among ourselves, was how scared we were of losing everything. It really was bad, but since then it's eased.

I wrote about #metoo in my political disclaimer, but didn't promote it for fear of retribution. I was threatened when I stood up for a friend whose life was ruined for as far as I could tell doing nothing wrong. If you don't shut up we'll do you too, basically.

Women are people just like men, and when they got to rage online against men, even people I thought I knew and were friends behaved abhorently. The way we imagine Trump might deal with us soon.

I have to add not all women, there were some who didn't forget that their male friends were still friends.

It was very clear where the Democratic Party came down on all this, and of course, the Republicans took total advantage of this. If you want to understand the manosphere as you all call it, start here. I vote with you all, but absolutely abhor the way you pushed us all into a corner and shut down our pride. Women are people too and they can be just as ugly as men. If you believe otherwise you're believing lies. I speak from experience, I was raised to believe all women are saints. That lie did not prepare us well for life.

The good news is if the Democrats can make peace with men, there are a lot more votes available to us. We can put it behind us, but we can't ignore that in the late teens we went absolutely fucking batshit crazy about half of the electorate. It's amazing the whole thing didn't completely crumble, irrevocably. We can still fix it, but we have to acknowledge that men were hurt in that period. You all seem to have forgotten that we are just people too.

PS: Re-reading the #metoo section of the disclaimer I can't believe how I tiptoed around the truth. The truth I didn't dare say was it was a huge hate campaign as divisive as anything the Repubs ever did. In a country that was supposed to outlaw this, and from a political party that was supposed to be liberal. The "both sides do it" reality probably hasn't yet sunk in but the Democrats sided with sadists and fascists. No other way to put it. Men absolutely were silenced. Afraid to speak for fear of retribution. If you were on the wrong side of this you have some soul-searching to do. And you probably pushed a lot of people of all genders into voting for Trump. The Dems posture of "who me?" has an answer -- yes you.

- 2025-06-11T17:02:02Z
I needed an updated bio for a conference in October.

- 2025-06-11T15:33:01Z
I'm trying to make a linkblog with a WordPress RSS feed.

- 2025-06-11T15:21:12Z
Using soldiers as a political prop. Trump gave a political speech, lying about protests in front of a group of people dressed as American soldiers. They all appeared to be enjoying the president’s tough talk about the role he wants the military to play in policing the cities. MSNBC should not broadcast this.

- 2025-06-11T13:02:52Z
Would one of the browser vendors work with me on doing something nice with displaying feeds in XML form? I don't support obfuscating what a feed is, that just adds confusion. When I lift the hood of a car I want to see an engine not a drawing of something that sort of looks like a car, but not really, and looks nothing like an engine.

Generalissimo Trump? - 2025-06-11T21:16:42Z

I was wondering if Saturday's military parade in Washington was going to be the rollout of the Trump junta, and if that meant the president would appear in military garb, perhaps subdued so next year's parade they can add more features. So I asked ChatGPT to help.

President Trump is reviewing the military parade in on a stage in front of the White House in Washington DC. To honor the troops, he’s dressed in a faux military uniform with medals, and a cap that says Make America Great Again. Fighter jets are flying overhead.

When I tried the first time, last night, it got halfway through the drawing then quit, saying it violated their content guidelines. So I went to meta.ai, which also does drawing, and it was willing to do it, and even animated it. I uploaded the result to my AI group on Facebook. It should be visible to everyone, without an invitation.

I then tried again with ChatGPT and it was willing to do the same task it wasn't willing to do last night.

artdaily.feediverse.org - 2025-06-11T12:56:06Z

Yesterday I introduced a new feed for great art, 24 times a day. Every hour on the hour.

Today, a version of that feed provides one work of art each day, at midnight, Eastern.

• art.feediverse.org
• artdaily.feediverse.org

Why I did this feed. I'm crafting a new information product, and I want to include a random work of art but not every hour, once a day is enough. I thought it was worth a detour to make the feed that I wanted.

The first work of art in the feed on its inaugural issue was The Countess from Hans Holbein the Younger, 1526. It was chosen at random from a collection of 42,473 works of art.

- 2025-06-10T15:38:29Z
There's a documentary coming out about podcasting. I was interviewed in it and got to tell a bunch of stories, about how you get people interested in working with each other. I told the story of how I chose the Grateful Dead's music to get the initial implementation going, on both the sending and receiving side. I used their music, since it so totally fit in with the philosophy, ie come as you are, we're all just people. And the song I chose was a good one too, the US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. I've been hiding out. In a rock and roll band." Using great art to prototype this connection makes total sense. It says we carry forward our art where ever we go, no matter where it takes us, a great work of music or art is always a good thing to share.

- 2025-06-10T14:24:40Z
Yet another journalism article about how AI is not really intelligent and all the tech industry hype must stop now or else we'll write another strongly worded article about how they are not really intelligent just like the 800,000 previous articles about how AI is not really intelligent.

A CNAME for your feed - 2025-06-10T15:34:45Z

Here's something to think about. As you may recall, I have an hourly art feed, available both in RSS and on Bluesky. Same content.

Today I gave each the same new name, art.feediverse.org.

If you use that URL on Bluesky, you go to its version of the content stream. And if you give the same URL to a web browser, ie accessing it via HTTP, you get the RSS version of the same data.

• On Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/art.feediverse.org.
• On the web: https://art.feediverse.org.

BTW -- think of feediverse as a web of feeds. It's open of course, because the web itself is open. And it's pretty social as you will see. It's why I think it's really the first instance of the "open social web."

I've long felt documents should have their own CNAMEs. I even went so far as to design a system where each node in an outline could have a CNAME. I still believe in this, why not have a hierarchic file system that's as editable as an outline? It's the same idea that works in so many other contexts. It's why the idea of a scripting system on a graphic PC like the early Mac made a world of sense. It's why Unix underneath that same UI was the right way to go. And why the web is so nice, you just View Source and you get to lift the hood and see how it works.

They were smart at Bluesky to use DNS this way. Why invent your own identity system when the net itself has a great distributed system that scales? They just made the wrong call (imho) in not using RSS for their timeline data, or at least the outside world's view of their timeline, in both directions -- in and out. That's the basic idea of the Internet itself. No one cares what's behind your TCP interface, it could be a network with a million nodes using some wacky protocol to connect them. As long as I can get to you via TCP, you're on the net. This is the kumbaya philosophy of the net, why not just use what already works.

You'll see that we're able to do some interesting twitter-like stuff with this duality.

A thread for comments and questions.

PS: A piece about DNS as ID in 2012.

- 2025-06-09T18:24:45Z
I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.

- 2025-06-09T22:47:29Z
Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard.

- 2025-06-09T14:18:36Z
I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances.

The game of being rich - 2025-06-09T13:15:23Z

Some random thoughts about wealth.

Suppose you're an average middle-class person who works for a tech company when the company is bought out for a huge amount of money and your stock is now worth $10 million. It's liquid today. You just received a check for $10 million. What do you do?

Answer: You buy things to see if there was a reason to make the money, and it turns out there really wasn't. You would have been just as happy in the big house in the rich neighborhood or the smaller house in a more modest area.

Then what if you reach another level, now you have a check in your hand for $100 million, then $1 billion, then $25 billion and keep going. It doesn't stop there. At each level you are compelled to find something fantastic that you can use that money for. Some power that the new level of wealth gets you.

We saw in Succession, they played out the lunacy, the people use a lot of space, but they're still just people. If they loved someone or someone loved them, they'd be much happier than all the happiness all that money ever gave them.

Having such large useless amounts of money is a not only a problem for the rich folk, we've found out, it's a problem for everyone else too, because eventually they get around to buying political power and they start using the money to change other people lives, always for the worse, it seems.

We need a new game that only super rich people can play that doesn't hurt the rest of us. I'm not advising anyone to do anything. But I think this is what I've been writing about on my blog since the beginning.

I didn't understand why, for example, Evan Williams didn't just make technology and give it away, after having made billions from Twitter.

Why did Bill Gates have to accumulate so much money and threaten the independence of the open web, a miracle, to get it? Why not use your power to make miracles before you retire, start doing the good you were promising to do later, right now? What good, in hindsight, did the extra billions do for anyone, including Gates? When his power was at his peak, in the 90s, he could have done a much bigger thing for the world, give us a free new level of communication that would be available equally to everyone.

Elon Musk, having done some incredible things in computers, finance, cars and space, had to invent new challenges that only his wealth can buy, and eventually came up with things that only the US Treasury could buy, and some things like relocating the human species on Mars, that no amount of money can buy (or so scientists say). He needs to receive an award of love and gratitude for not using his wealth to make everyone else totally miserable (including himself, it seems).

PS: I haven't yet read Evan Osnos' new book about billionaires, but I want to. He's done some great reporting in the past.

PPS: See also: Transcendental Money, or money that replenishes itself, ie money that transcends time.

PPPS: Another one: Your human-size life.

PPPPS: Ted Turner said "I bet you’re all wondering what it feels like to be a billionaire. It’s disappointing really. I’ve learned that great wealth isn’t nearly as good as average sex."

- 2025-06-08T16:02:19Z
With ChatGPT there's no excuse for a congressperson not validating every word in every bill. They could ask the bot to read the bill and call out any provisions that contradict your previous positions. It knows where you stand even if you've never written it down. I've found it can do that for my work. I'm sure it could do it for a legislator. Even better, news orgs could do that for them. Or validate a bill against their campaign platforms. "I promise never to touch Social Security" could be validated against pending legislation. The time delay part of this isn't an excuse any longer.

- 2025-06-08T15:49:07Z
Experience managing developers makes me a better ChatGPT user.

- 2025-06-08T15:50:08Z
A thread on Bluesky this morning about what we need to hear incumbent Dems say before they step aside as part of the future of the party. We can't be lead by Democrats who didn't do everything in their power the four years of the Biden presidency to shut the door on autocracy. They argued the niceties of filibusters, and letting the DoJ procrastinate on cleaning up the mess, as if everything had snapped back to normal. There was huge unfinished business. We never shut down the insurrection that started on January 6. Otherwise we will wait until the whole system falls down for the Democratic Party to reform probably around someone who comes from MuskLand.

- 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.

#rss