I'm really excited about maybe finally getting my archive of Scripting News and DaveNet stuff, dating back to 1994, into ChatGPT before too long. Some people will be surprised to find that they're in the archive. If this works it'll be like the index in the back of a large book. I know I've tried this before, but this time I think I'll be able to do it myself and fuss over it and learn from it the way I do software development. Converting a very large work of writing into a reference, I hope.
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1995: "There was nothing rehearsed about Jerry Garcia."
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Lawrence is the new Rachel.
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What we call journalism in the US isn’t.
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Any news org with cash to invest could do to the NYT what ChatGPT is doing to Google.
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- 4-minute podcast about my first venture into ChatGPT via its API. #
- There's an accompanying GitHub repo, with an example app in JavaScript that runs in the browser.#
- Includes instructions for setting up and funding a developer account, which was the biggest hurdle. #
- Functionality: It tells you who Bull Mancuso is. #
- Much excitement as I think about integrations I can now do. #
- Don't know why I waited so long. 😄#
What's the best piece of
advice you ever got?
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Another practical use for ChatGPT. A super techy service you use decides to require 2FA but reading their instructions you realize the docs were written by someone who hates people like you. Idea! Ask ChatGPT to translate. Out come nice instructions easy to read for people like me. Turns a dismal exercise in frustration to happiness at finding another huge stress- and time-saving application for ChatGPT.
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- My version of the NY Times has campaign news too, featuring the cutest kitty on the trail, headed to North Carolina today to support the cute and adorable running mates, Kamala and Tim!#
Kitten hits the trail with Kamala and Tim!
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A real-life photo of Air Force 2, in Detroit.
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Timothy Snyder: "If JD Vance really were a normal midwestern guy he’d be very respectful of someone like Tim Walz."
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When I see a reference to an evil NYT piece, I RT it with a simple message: Ignore the NY Times. It's relaxing. You don't have to do something about it, in fact it says the opposite. Do nothing. It works on all social nets, and for any news org that's promoting lies, ignoring relevant facts, against the interest of the US. Find new ways to get informed. And if you can't find them, start one. And we can find each other.
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The
Bruce Springsteen mention at last night's rally was no accident. Boomers are now of the age where we vote in great numbers. So our feeling like there's something here for us might make the difference in one or more of the swing states.
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Last night's Democratic rally was wonderful. I was laughing and sobbing all the way through it. What an emotional release. We needed and deserved this. Beyond hope, we're finally going to fight. I hope President Kamala is really up to it, because we have a pretty substantial cleanup job to do
here.
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- I have great respect for Hillary Clinton and supported her over Sanders in 2016. I also supported Biden because we needed to win in 2020.#
- But we could have had a campaign team like the one we saw yesterday and today, with some very impressive presenters who've yet to take the stage, we could have had it in 2016. We didn't have to go through the tragedy of Trump.#
- The Democrats are stage managing perfectly now. I never really thought we'd see this day, but here it is.#
Our favorite kitten is on the road with the Democrats.
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Walz is Harris' choice. Picking Shapiro would have been leading with her chin because of Netanyahu. Walz looks older than her but they're actually the same age. And he figured out the right word to get under Trump's skin, so there's that. He just has to say
weird in campaign speeches to bring down the house.
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- A roadmap for the campaign is coming into view.#
- Harris has her knee on Trump's neck, and she won't let up. #
- There won't be time for anyone to get tired of her. #
- Their rallies are going to be the best in a very long time. They're executing perfectly. #
- Trump is a comedian, a cross between Don Rickles and Joan Rivers with a bit of Sam Kinison. He had a good schtick for a long run if you find fascist slapstick entertaining, as millions of Americans do or did. #
- Last night Maddow tried to get us excited about how the Repubs have planted people on voting boards in swing states with the purpose of stopping the counts, and thus preventing a vote in the Electoral College. But they're doing it too late. The administrators will feel the tide turning too. #
- This campaign will take place in the popular culture of 2024, which thankfully is not centered on cable news or the NYT. But Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are in control. In my 2017 piece I thought Zuck would run for president, given his new style makeover I wouldn't discount that, but these two will certainly have influence over how the election goes. Both Facebook and Twitter have algorithms that are opaque and controlled by them. Same deal as with the owners of cable media. #
- Trump stoked resentment with voters for being left behind, even if individually they were doing fine. But that was eight years ago and a lot has happened. Harris saying basically "there you go again" is an echo of Reagan, btw. It worked for Reagan, you just have to get the derision right. And Harris can do that, she laughs and we laugh. Trump loses his mind.#
- The Harris candidacy happened almost as if it was staged. The campaign hit the ground running, it feels like there was a lot of advance work. Or they picked bloggers who were up and running, gave them the keys and said go. Either approach is fine, breaking through where previous Demo campaigns didn't have the nerve. Whatever it is, there's a sign of competence and urgency in the Democrats that is grounded in the challenge not in some almost religious sense that she's The One, which was understandable with Obama, but won't do now. We have no illusions about what's ahead. I think for that Biden must have been a great teacher. #
- Now we're grounded. We've seen the outline of our future. Our eyes were fully opened on Jan 6. A few weeks ago the lead Republican thinker behind Project 2025 said, like an idiot, in an interview, it was up to liberals to avoid a bloodbath, as they took over. You don't hear that anymore. Those people must now be thinking more seriously about jail for what they're doing. And the Supreme Court will go to jail too if they try to support what Maddow was talking about. We must not let them overthrow the government. And that's why Maddow's concern is okay but overstated, imho.#
- I had my doubts whether Biden would stop the dissolution of the Supreme Court, and I don't know if Harris will, but given how purposefully the campaign in running, I suspect (hope, pray) she will. Our job is to give her the support she needs to feel that we've got her back. #
- PS: FDR threatened to pack the court in 1937. #
- PPS: If you haven't listened to Sunday's podcast, please do. It's just 12 minutes. #
When reporting massacres, imho we should cite the number of people who were shot. It measures of how much violence there was, and how excessive the gun tech used. Many who were injured but not killed have their lives ruined. Their suffering can go for decades.
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If you want to keep up on political news, esp at a time when so much is happening so quickly, the best resource I have at this time is the
politics tab on news.scripting.com. Here's a
screen shot.
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For some reason I don't like writing
user-
level docs for my own software, but I don't mind narrating a draft with voice. Now that I have a
voice recorder that creates transcripts exactly where I need them, I can feed the narration to ChatGPT and ask it to write docs based on features I describe that are part of the current software, and leave out notes about possible changes or additions. It took me 13 minutes to do the narration, because I talk more slowly than it writes, and I ramble and get distracted. It took the bot less than a second to produce a near-perfect outline. It left out a bit that I wanted included, it was added in a second. Then I asked for an
OPML version of the docs so I could edit it, and pass back the edited version. It got a bit confused and gave me a JSON version of the outline, and Node.js code to convert it to the XML, but when I pointed out a simpler way to do it, I got what I needed in less than a second. And
here it is, in my outliner, ready for me to add notes, and edit and reorganize. ChatGPT is a team member, not a surrogate. Another amazing experience, absolutely no going back.
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Saw a video where Elon Musk talks about climate change, no snark, didn't call it a hoax, was intelligent and serious. Also heard that he's backing Trump for president, who says it's a hoax and one of his major campaign promises is to "drill baby drill." Maybe they could discuss this because there seems to be a disagreement here.
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- Wordle Kitty is rumored to be the VP choice for the Dems. She is at the Carnegie Deli in NYC to meet the Republican VP candidate, to talk about a debate, but the Repub is a no-show! Weird. Meanwhile the press is having fun asking her embarrassing questions about a cat in the White House. They want to know if the WH has a litter box. What if she gets pregnant? Stuff like that.#
Such a big sandwich for such a cute kitty!
😄#
Blogrolls, in the 90s, were the beginning of the social web. In the 20s, they can bring today’s social web into blogs.
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I was trying to find Tony Kahn on the web for a friend doing a documentary on the origins of podcasting, and came up empty. I just stumbled across him on Facebook and that led to
this autobiographical site where he tells his story of podcasting. Tony was the person who brought NPR into podcasting in 2004. A major contributor who isn't often credited. He was at WGBH at the time.
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There isn't a whole lot of love in this
39-year-old man. I worry for his kids, esp if either of them don't have kids.
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Where is the AI-based meme maker for Kamala. I'd like to have her flying in the sky with a cape, like SuperPresidentLady, going from town to town, finding out what they need, and churning it out for them in an efficiently run government meme factory in the nation's capital. Like we were doing with the
kittens earlier this summer.
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Welcome to August.
OPML archive for July's posts on Scripting News.
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People who get a sense of self-esteem from having procreated place a heavy burden on their children. What if the child doesn't live up to their expectations? Creating a new human is not an accomplishment. Treating that new life as a full person starting at birth, and through their whole life,
that's an accomplishment. For a man to father a child just means they have a functioning reproductive system. It's not anything to be proud or to expect to be rewarded or respected for.
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Heather Cox Richardson: "When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. He passed it to us."
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A note to anyone making a twitter-like system. If you supported outbound RSS, I could use your system as a note-taking tool. I know Bluesky does, and I should use it that way, but these days I'm more drawn to Threads, even though I know it's really Facebook under the covers.
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- Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States. #
- In the context of who we are as a country, and what the Repubs do and say about the country, "weird" is pretty mild. What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist columnist of the NYT, writing that column. (Safire was a Republican btw.)#
- And to the Democrats, no matter what the NYT says, keep using the term. This is where you get to speak out about what they're doing over there, and how it's not journalism. One of the rare things we agree with Trump on. #
- Podcast: 3 minutes.#
- PS: Safire went to Bronx Science! I did not know that. (So did I.) I love the idea of writers who aren't scared of tech stuff. #
- PPS: Even Richard Nixon would think today's so-called Republicans were weird. #
I said on
Thursday that Biden's speech last Wednesday had the potential to be a
Gettysburg address, if it the United States turns back toward democracy and government of the people, by the people and for the people. Biden has the potential of being as great a president as Lincoln. Let that settle in for a moment. I get goosebumps when I think about it. If he hadn't taken that stand, he could have become known as the US equivalent of
Kaiser Wilhelm.
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The
Podcast0 project is teaching me how to read the archive of my own blog. Until now I had not carefully read the story I tell on my blog more than a few days after it happened. Here's I'm learning to reconstruct the summer of 2004, one of the most creative periods of my life, at least that's viewable in such a public and preserved way. Am I the first to do this for any blog? If you know of an example of historic research done using the archive of a blog, please send me a note. I'd love to learn about what you learned! Also because of its longevity and continuity, I offer
this blog as some kind of record of what happened in the last 30 years or so. I see it as a complete work of writing, a kind of
fresco writing.
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Like 193K others I tuned into
White Dudes For Harris last night. Please, let that be the last time we do that. I felt like it might as well have been
Slave Owners for Harris or
Reformed Republicans for Harris. I don't have anything against people of my gender and approximate race, but I also am a child of Holocaust survivors, and I happen to be one of the elites the Repubs claim to hate, and also am one of at least two castes that Democrats tend to blame for all our problems (other than White Dudes). I think we've done enough segregation for one campaign, now please please I beg you, let's
work together, regardless of labels, to save the country we all love. I have a philosophy, I don't care how you got to the party, if you took a subway, walked, rode a bike, or came by Uber or a Cadillac limousine. We all got here, and have a common purpose, so lets all love each other and party our way to victory. Regardless of race, creed, color or whatever.
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- Notes accumulated during the day -- not in any particular order. 😄#
- I keep a solid line between my personal life and blogging, learned the hard way. When I started blogging in 1994, I didn't have such a solid line, and found that I couldn't have a personal life if I made it public. But now I want to reveal something. I am "childless" which is a term I find pretty insulting, as if being childful is the only normal state of being. #
- I find, in general childful people are not great friends or family members. They want special privileges and they often get them. If childful vs childless is going to be an issue in this campaign, I say -- bring it on. We should have this discussion. #
- I'm often tempted to offer advice to the parents, but I won't offer it unless asked, except this. If you have children, there's a good chance one or more of them will not have children, and you should love them the same, and provide models of acceptance while they're growing up, by bringing childless people into your home, so the kids know that this is one of the legitimate choices in life, offering proof that you won't love them any less if they go down that path. And here's the hard part, imho, for people with children -- keep that promise. #
- BTW, people say it's seflish to not have children, but I don't agree, in fact I think it's the opposite. There was a point in human evolution where the struggle to survive for our species was fed by procreation, but some time in the last hundred years we crossed a line, where increasing human population worked against species survival. Our understanding of the meaning of procreating, like so much else about our civilization, has not yet caught up with the current reality. #
Like
cholesterol, there's "good weird" and "bad weird." I
think we all know which kind of
weird the Repubs are.
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Here's a
perfect illustration how ChatGPT can improve customer relations. I bought an iPhone that I now don't need, and it's arriving today via FedEx. I wanted to know whether I should just refuse delivery, or accept it and then return it. Obviously it's easier for me to refuse. I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a detailed reply. Apple's chatbot saw it as a "technical" question and wasn't prepared to help. Sales support is one of those applications where cost is totally justified. A human helper would cost a lot more I imagine than a LLM chat system. I tried calling 1-800-CALL-APPLE and talked to a human who was very nice, but couldn't find anything in her manual about refusing delivery.
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Is there anyone here
within earshot who is involved in doing the web stuff for the Harris campaign?
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Before Twitter broke the API, it was a quick way for me to channel items from my blog to almost all the people who follow me on the social web. Now it isn't even one of the services I use that I can post to with my writing tool (those are Bluesky, Mastodon, WordPress). None of them are anything like the aggregator of people that Twitter was, and I can't even reach it from my writing tool. I really want to solve this problem, but I absolutely can't do this on my own. No time, patience, and it's not my job to do all that coding. As observed the other day, my time should be spent on writing tools for the web and directly related products. This is the kind of project that should be handled as an open source thing.
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- I don't when technology moves backwards.#
- I'm always trying to push it the other way.#
- It's like being a ball player wanting to win a game.#
- Or a musician wanting to record a hit.#
- A VC wanting a 10x return.#
- A diplomat achieving growth and peace.#
Patrick LaForge who just left the NYT after
27 years: "RSS news readers let me track breaking news and competition back in my blogging days and I still used them as a corrective to see beyond what social media algorithms were showing me. You see the stories long before home page play or tweets. Gave me an edge. To print-focused journalists who knew little about computers in a certain era it seemed like magic."
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I reluctantly signed up for
White Dudes for Harris. Would have enthusiastically joined Men for Harris group. Tech for Harris. New York for Harris. Voters for Harris. Americans for Harris. And why just Americans.
People for Harris dammit.
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On this day in 2004, I did podcast interviews with
Don Means of Meetup and
Patty Wetterling of Minnesota at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. For both, I did the interview with Natasha Celine of the
Pacific Views blog. The next 2004 podcast won't be until
August 15. Banter with Adam Curry and Steve Gillmor probably about the podcasting bootstrap which at this point appears to be underway. Not sure if anyone as ever gone down this path in the last 20 years because, when I do the searches to find links to sites and people, I don't see any mention of this stuff in the current day, although now there will be (here in my blog archive). Here's
the feed of ancient podcast review. You can find the reverse chronologic list of the whole series on
morningcoffeenotes.com.
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Referrer logs and webmentions may be about to become obsolete with the advent of SearchGPT, and presumably Google's AI and search facilities are also about to merge. Here's the deal. When I write a blog post and want to know if anyone has mentioned it, I will simply be able to ask ChatGPT, "Have any sites mentioned, with or without links, the story I wrote yesterday entitled "Unix-like things" and if so please provide a title, synopsis and link, if available, so I can read the full text." I'm sure that will be appropriately shortened, or perhaps turned into something like the referrer lists of today. Something the network can do for us automatically.
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John Batelle had an interesting observation about this yesterday, that SearchGPT is a clever way to get news orgs to think about ChatGPT in a different, less threatening way. They want to be in a search engine index (that's called SEO) where they want to be paid to be part of a chatbot. There really isn't a line there, in fact. That's what SearchGPT makes obvious. I for one, want all my stuff in their index so I can find out wtf I've been writing about here for almost 30 freaking years!
😄#
Somewhere in this timeframe Adam Curry began
Daily Source Code which is still running to this day, almost 20 years later.
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Has anyone ever seen Trump laugh?
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- Somehow it's up to the Harris campaign to get the Trumps to have a normal American presidential campaign, not a prelude to a second attempted coup, which is what the Trumps are doing. I can see the op-ed they run in September saying that it's Harris's fault that the Trumps are fascist. #
- I reinstated my subscription because I need to actually read their words, not because they cover news, but because they are news. The news is that the fourth estate in the US is gone. They have lost their minds. They aren't even trying. Their op-eds don't reflect facts, such as Trump will never be a serious candidate in the sense that the NYT thinks a candidate should be serious. The Democrats still will. But there's no need as far as I'm concerned, for a legitimate candidate to respond to their taunts. #
- They completely lost many of us in their extended campaign to force Biden to step aside. I knew they wouldn't stop there, because abusers never stop when you give in to them. They are the tragedy of America now, even more than Trump. We must replace them. The real question is who's going to step up to help restore journalism to our country. #
- Thanks for listening.#
- PS: I am not pointing to their piece out of respect for people who have cancelled their subscriptions. #
NYT editorial writers, this is what we’re running against.
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- I lost my iPhone a few days ago. I think all the data is safe. First time I ever lost a phone. I ordered a new iPhone 15 Pro with 256GB, it will arrive on Monday hopefully. #
- In the meantime I've needed to use my Android phone to record voice memos. Google's product is called Recorder. It's just what I wanted. #
- It has a website, so you don't have to export your recording to get it where you need it to be, and it automatically does a transcript. There's an editor on the website, which again is exactly where I want it. #
- A 2-minute voice memo/podcast I recorded with the app.#
- BTW, I think the files are smaller?#
- Here's a screen shot. #
- I sent a tweet to Eric Raymond today, lightly edited here, following up on a thread that started in 2001. #
- What Raymond said in 2001.#
- XML-RPC, in particular, is very much in the Unix spirit. It's deliberately minimalist but nevertheless quite powerful, offering a way for the vast majority of RPC applications that can get by on passing around boolean/integer/float/string datatypes to do their thing in a way that is lightweight and easy to to understand and monitor. This simple type ontology acts as a valuable check on interface complexity.#
- It's very true, my design goal for my whole 50+ year career has been to factor my code so well so it was as clean as Unix is, from top to bottom#
- The virtue of relentless factoring is you can build higher if each layer of the stack lets through the functionality that's needed, and no more. Ideally there should be one way of doing something. and it should work pretty well. #
- I realized that the web, RSS and podcasting are also a Unix-like things. #
- Because they can be made to do anything, but are simple, not a lot to understand.#
- But -- there's been this huge proliferation of languages and frameworks, and incredibly complex and underspecified formats. #
- Meanwhile core functions like storage combined with identity for end users, has not been implemented, because of course if the users had their own networked data independent of any platform vendor there would be no lockin. that's 2024 version of the cathedral, to follow your analogy.#
- Anyway, seeing you here made me think of this, I've wanted to say this to you for a long to you and now I have. ;-)#
- PS: The 2001 email from Eric Raymond.#
Biden's speech might turn out to be a
Gettysburg type speech. I hope it does.
#
We're at a huge fork in the road. One fork -- goodbye USA, the other way, we're stronger than ever. We're in a good spot imho because Trump's tank is empty. He's old, tired, fat, addled, fetid, rotten. You have to work really hard not to see that. If it works, Biden will have stabilized the country, and Harris will erect the guardrails that make sure no one follows in Trump's path, and the Supreme Court gets back into its proper place. They've been overthrowing our society, economy and political system. That all has to be reversed before it does too much damage, and prevented in the future. I want to know why the court can't be expanded, and if Harris will put that in her platform.
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It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of
childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent.
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Pretty remarkable how abusive the bots on Twitter have become. Makes discourse there seem pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.
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I want a Masto-clone that does not do replies. You can't insert anything under my idea, but you can if you like include my idea, as a link, in yours. This model works. I think by now we know the other way does not work. BTW I use the term Masto-clone interchangeably with Twitter-like. Let's spread the love around.
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Software-wise I realized recently that everything that takes me away from creating really nice writing and publishing tools is a waste. I have to get off track because there are huge holes in the web as a runtime platform. And every year it gets worse as new incompatible languages are added, new incompatible stacks built. As a result we have to re-do everything all the time, and never get a chance to create new user experience. The market fragments, which is exactly what the tech companies want. It keeps their products from becoming commodities. And like it or not, the politicians and corporations don't want us writing too much, they just want us working, donating to their campaigns, paying taxes, buying their crap, and not getting all agitated about things they don't care about.
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- I am optimistic that Trump is headed for the graveyard of history, shortly. #
- First time I've felt like this in a long time. #
- When (if) that happens, we can use Cory Doctorow's excellent concept enshitification to describe what he did to the American political system.#
- He also stress tested it, and we would be the greatest fools imaginable if we didn't add some seriously enforceable guardrails to prevent this kind of attack happening in the future. #
- Might work out well to have a lawyer in the White House. #
- JD goes as a childless cat lady in the Cretins of Trumpland krewe.#
Hey Mister throw me a kitten!
#
Fantastic
speech by President Biden. It's good we'll have both a president and a campaign and that they'll be separate thing. I look forward to reading it slowly. And he put a cap on the awful communication of the last month, he took control of the story from the snobs and shit throwers in the press.
#
How
Harry McCracken discovered that ChatGPT is a deeply and broadly knowledgable, infinitely patient, always available, inexpensive, programming partner. I've been
using it that way for a year, and it has enabled me to take on much more ambitious and complete projects. It could evolve into something much more powerful, but where it is now is already amazing. The criticisms for ChatGPT have mostly missed the point of what it's useful for.
#
I was able to follow
kamalhq on twitter. This
report says that Musk is rate-limiting followers on that account. Of course we
warned what could happen if a Republican bought twitter, but I didn't honestly contemplate that a fascist would. These days our greatest fears aren't scary enough. People laugh that Musk paid too much for twitter, but if the US ends up as an autocracy, the oligarch that owns the entire news distribution system for the world will probably have the last laugh. BTW, if you want to know why we're so thrilled to have Harris as the candidate, even though we didn't want Joe to give in, it's because no informed and sane person wants to live in a new Trump term. We tried that if you recall. The hope you hear now is much greater than the hope we had when Obama was selling that (though hope was a good word for it). Today it's the hope that we won't be deported or worse.
#
All the reporters know the Repubs refused to fund border stuff so they could use it to tag the Dems in the election. So the first thing the Repubs do is tag VP Harris with the border. The reporter asks a Dem what they have to say about that. But the reporter
knows what the Repubs did. So why do they even ask the freaking question? They just play the script the Repubs wrote for them. They are so savvy, but we heard all that too, so we know how corrupt they are. They don't care if we know.
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I want future President Harris to stay happy no matter what the bastards do or say. We should have a crisis line for her to call to get some quick love. 1-800-LUV-KAMALA.
#
- A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wire over the social web.#
- Also talked about twitter-like systems, and idea borrowed from algol-like and lisp-like. #
- I talk about what made Unix so great. #
- Eric Raymond once told me that XML-RPC was very much like Unix, and I said oh yeah, and so is RSS and the rest. Huge compliment because the simplicity of Unix is what I strive for, put huge time into. #
- Journos once said Apple is dead, but that was ridiculous because they had built a product that was just starting to grow and they had planted the seeds of huge growth in the 80s when they focused on selling to education, which made sure that kids when they grew up would have good feelings about Apple, and it totally worked. When the reporters were calling them dead, they were actually just about to boom in a whole new way, on the web, which the Mac was perfect for, given the built in simple networking. And then boom again when Jobs came back. And again with the iPod and then again with the iPhone. See how reporters miss the big picture. We shouldn't give them so much power, they pretend they know, but they are usually pretty clueless. #
- This podcast is also a demo of how my mind works. I flit around all over the place but also have learned over the years that if I want to get anything done I have to focus on one thing for at least a few hours every day, and string those days together. #
- I want to document this stuff for the benefit of young programmers. I learned a lot from reading the code of Unix, I always want to pay that back, the message is to strive for simplicity, keep technical debt to a minimum, and factor, factor and factor again to reduce technical debt. Those are the hardest projects, I'm doing one of those right now, but in the end it's worth it, because with simplicity you get to build higher.#
For the DNC in 2004, we had a site called
Convention Bloggers. It was a river of news feed reader, clearly done with Frontier, of blogs run by people who were at the convention.
#
I'm doing something new. Trying to initiate topics on the social web. We almost totally respond to external stuff, I wonder how different it would be if we engaged on a more individual level. I've been doing this for a while, but only now am able to explain it.
#
Looking forward to the NYT deeply analyzing Trump‘s 78 year old mind and body and his Hannibal Lecter stories.
#
- I grew up in the same part of Queens as Trump, about ten years after he did. His family was in Jamaica, mine in Flushing. Here's a map that shows you where the two houses are. 4.0 miles apart if you take Utopia Parkway. A great name for a street, but it's not a parkway and it's nice but definitely not a utopia.#
- People who aren't from huge cities like New York don't know that Trump what our losers look like. They probably have their own loser types. I think that's where 99% of the confusion is. They really don't believe he's so bad. Don't hold that against them, that's nowhere near as bad as knowing what he is and being okay with that. #
- He's a mean bully type. The name-calling is a big clue. Distracts from his weaknesses, which are very obvious. I don't believe in body shaming, because I care about other people's feelings. If I criticize his appearance it might reflect poorly on nice people who have his body type who may not be mean bully losers like Trump. #
- He's also a really good comedian if you don't think he wants to have the power to kill millions of people and control many more people. Last time he was our president just through incompetence, without trying, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Covid disaster. He also wanted the army shoot protestors, that's the mean part of our former president. Luckily the people who worked for him told him to fuck off. They saved us from going into a very deep hole that would have been hard to escape from.#
- I watched the coverage of the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and listened to the Americans they interviewed, not the actors they put behind him on stage, to make him look like a badass I guess, these were just normal people who mostly like Trump, but seem pretty likeable themselves. The one thing you heard over and over was how If you don't like a candidate vote against them don't shoot them. That's American and it's not fascist at all. I don't think they know that he wants to make big changes in how our politics work. People think if he's bad they can just vote him out next time. He tells them this will be the last election if he wins, he actually says that, but somehow it doesn't seem to register. #
Do Trump supporters understand what they support?
#
- Of course the journalists are distorting who Trump supporters are. Trump is deplorable if you take him at his word. Some of Trump's followers are deplorable too, like the ones who rioted at our Capitol and January 6 and the people who are lined up to work in his next administration if he wins. They are awful people who want to control all of us. They're already doing it via the Supreme Court. It's going to get a lot worse if we go the wrong way. We shouldn't accept that we're horribly divided. The powerful media people want us to be divided, I don't know why and I don't care, I just know they do, based on their actions. #
- Anyway I know we're at a high moment, we're excited, and I'm going to enjoy the feeling. We all seem to be pulling the same way, at least on "our side" but I hold out hope that being an American still means something, that we can be friends, and fellow countrymen, and work together. I think that's still our greatest challange and our greatest opportunity. Yeah I am woke, that means I care about all of us. I think most of us do no matter who you vote for.#
Or, less politely..
#
The earth shook today. I'm watching the news like everyone else after President Biden withdrew. There really is a lot happening very quickly, and the Dems all sound like they got their story straight, for once the Dems sound like a party. How did that happen. NakedJen says we need a miracle. I said that's her department.
❤️#
- BTW, there is a totally legit and legal way to deal with the issue people are grappling with, w/o any fancy new extra-legal ways of nominating a president that resolves it in a minute, if the Cabinet goes along with the idea that the current president isn't able to do the job, and if being re-elected is a legitimate part of doing the job. #
- Pretty sure most people don't get that being president is a job, not a role someone plays in a TV sitcom. #
- Great wealth is poison, that's what's playing out in the NYT-orchestrated overthrow of the American government. They're driving us into the arms of the Nazis. Who knows why, or even if there is a reason, other than their drive to find meaning in their great wealth. Their problem, and ours, is that it has no meaning, no human can use the money they've accumulated. These are not human-size fortunes, playing a game of make-believe, what if we really were as smart as we think our money says we are. Well you ain't that smart.#
- A two-minute podcast where I dictate an op-ed the NYT should run in its own name, apologizing for trying to take over the US government, and promising to return to being a news organization. #
- I am so fed up with it. Today they ran an op-ed written by Aaron Sorkin giving advice to Democrats based on his experience writing scripts for a fictional White House television show in the late 90s and early 00s. #
- Yeah the NYT has lost its way. I hope some people down there think they're way out on a limb and it's time to get back to what they do. They are not qualified or entitled to do what they are doing.#
I trust that President Biden will do what's best for the country.
#
Pete Buttigieg should be the Democrats' official blogger. Every day a new insight into what makes people do what they do and why the Dems have all the right ideas. He's a perfect spokesperson in that role. A daily Pete. He should do it.
#
Isn't it surprising, with
old age such an important topic, that we aren't learning more about it? I'm there now, myself -- immersed in it, can't escape it. I guess I didn't want to know about it until I had to. It's a real perspective-shift.
#
- One great use for ChatGPT, simple recipes.#
- If you try looking for a recipe on Google they take forever to get to the point, and pop up all kinds of offers when all you wanted was a checklist of ingredients and steps. #
- For example, how to make hard-boiled eggs.#
- Try doing the same thing on Google to see what I mean.#
- Some coffee notes for a Saturday morning.#
- This election is a total mess.#
- Trump is extremely beatable.#
- Biden is extremely beatable too. #
- We've all had a chance to live in an America with Trump as president, and Biden. I know which one was better for all of us. (Evidence: our response to Covid, S&P 500 price.)#
- Biden's health is not good and it of course will get worse in the coming four years.#
- Trump's health isn't good either and it also will get worse. He doesn't care for himself. He's 77. He's near the end of the decade most people die.#
- The Dems can run the show without Biden.#
- The Repubs plan to run the show without Trump, he's just a figurehead, I hope you know that. An actor they put on stage to distract you from the nasty shit they are already doing (evidence, the Supreme Court). When he says Project 2025 isn't his, he's telling the truth. He has no idea what's in it and doesn't care. All he wants is to stand up at rallies and vent, and have his own Rick's Cafe in Casablanca and be Rick. It's the quieter, less showy folk that use him that you should be scared of. #
- Even if Biden wanted to step aside, and he clearly doesn't, the mess that would follow can't be unraveled before the election, so if you push Biden out we lose, pretty sure of that. This is why I think Nate Silver lost his way, he's a sports fan, as am I. What's your next move after taking out the pitcher. You better have a good reliever warmed up in the bullpen, right? We don't even have a freaking bullpen Nate (hope he reads this). #
- But it's fun to dream of the super-Democrat, the candidate who would totally clean Trump's clock, win in a landslide, and when they take office would clear out the junk on the Supreme Court, bring back Roe v Wade, slam the brakes on climate change, and then kick Putin's ass and restore America to greatness for real, and also prepare us to survive the next pandemic. But it's just a dream. It can't happen. Any good candidate will stay out of the mess that will follow a Biden step-aside. No one would want their future tied up in the mess-to-come. #
- Remember, your vote is a chess move not a love letter. #
Rick Blaine owns a nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca.
#
- A 25-minute ramble with the themes of the Dreaming piece I wrote earlier today. #
- Spoiler alert: I reveal the ending of the movie Casablanca. #
- Respecting yourself means sticking to problems we can and need to solve, and work together. #
- We can't make anything to happen until we start listening to and working with each other. #
- There is no perfect super-Democrat. Our candidate is Joe Biden. Any real candidate is going to suck.#
- It's like We Make Shitty Software, all candidates suck. But we do a great job. #
- The Democratic song this year, and always, should be With a little help from my friends. #
- Read George Lakoff, a great linguist who figured out how American politics work. #
- Check out Elizabeth Spiers piece about how it's time to get over the West Wing ideal. Martin Sheen never was and never will be president. #
- And remember your vote is a chess move, not a love letter. #
An eye-opening
segment on Brian Lehrer's
show today. The first half is an interview with
Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all ages, they're incredibly passionate, well thought-out, coherent. This is way better than the punditry you hear on news. The real crime here is that the insiders of the Democratic Party are taking control, after they were manipulated by the press. A total insider's route-around of the democratic process, it's just as bad imho as what the Repubs are planning around Election Day. The press did the same thing to NY governor Andrew Cuomo, who was elected by the people, and forced out without any legal process, and certainly not a vote. That experience argues in favor of when you're in doubt, do the thing the voters said to do. Anything else is very very questionable. Why are you taking control? Where are you authorized to do that? I think perhaps some of the Dems forget how huge an issue this was in the 2016 process.
#
Historically it's unjustifiable. The NYT et al are grievously wrong, and that should be reflected on their op-ed pages. We've been here before, this is as much a hack as Hillary's Emails. Maybe you can't see it now, but win or lose, people are going to look at this period when we all lost our minds.
#
I posted the above piece around the social web, I like the way it looks
on Threads the best.
#
Matt says some interesting new stuff is coming from Automattic now that
WordPress 6.6 is out. Something for writers? Perhaps something that moves WordPress into a space adjacent to twitter-like systems? They just added support for
Threads to WordPress, so now you can
crosspost from a blog to a thread. Haven't tried it yet. They also have a new
identity system built around Gravatar, announced in early June. It'll be interesting to see what they come out with. I wonder if there is a developer ecosystem building on this, and if they have an evangelism program. I have my own vision of how these things should work.
#
Now that
Elon Musk is giving so generously, dollars and
flow, to the fascists, he's encouraging more of us to use Zuckerberg's twitter-like system, aka
Threads. But Zuck isn't making it go down easy. There's a piece in
Bloomberg (paywall) that says Trump is
badass but isn't supporting either candidate. What could possibly go wrong?
#
She had to sleep it off. Still very cute!
#
Nancy Wicklund Gonzalez: "I’ve had to switch to watching the BBC. American news is unwatchable. Between the lionization of a sociopath and the denigration of a decent man, I just can’t even."
#
I'm avoiding the actual RNC, the speakers are just actors. Trump looks like the Queens kid he is. People from Queens don't feel like we really belong, except with other Queens people. We expect to be thought of as the kid from Queens. I know this so well. So the "boss" slumps around not sure what to do or say. He's not gregarious. Not in charge of anything.
#
If the world doesn't know you did something you might as well not have done it. This is what
Doug Engelbart learned, and what we learned in his aftermath. He is known for inventing the mouse, because that's the one thing he invented everyone knows about. He also developed software that pioneered using a computer to
organize your ideas. For the most part people don't know about that because (I guess) most people don't organize their work?
#
The Repubs can win by throwing the election into the House. They can probably get it by the courts in enough places, just a couple of swing states, and they win even if they lose by normal vote-counting methods. The whole bit about Biden's age is meant to distract us from the fact it probably doesn't matter how old the Democratic candidate is.
#
- A podcast about listening to the podcasts from 2004. #
- This is a short episode about what I learned, and what's coming up.#
- Humbling experience. #
Wordle Kitty's great grandma plays with the Dead at Shoreline in the 80s.
#
Highly recommend this
Netflix series -- esp the last three episodes. I found it enlightening, even though I lived through most of this history, I never saw it all put together in a series of events over decades. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective of where we are in the Cold War. It never was over. "The end of history" was too good to be true. Also glad I read so much about slavery a few years ago. If you put both these together, you get the USA, and the deep and lasting wounds we keep re-opening.
#
The problem with
JD Vance is that he's empty inside, he'll be whatever he needs to be to get more power, and he's young. He's as empty as Trump, and much younger, so we can't hope to outwait him. Now we have a real problem, because Trump has a successor. I imagine Trump's sons probably aren't happy about this. Had he picked
Little Marco, no one would mistake him as an heir, or
Doug Burgum who is a bit too old to be an heir (same age as I am). We
do have a problem with Biden, he hasn't prepared for this moment. Old or not, they had 3.5 years to get ready, and they didn't. As I wrote
yesterday, the biggest most important thing is that we
organize ourselves. That's the best defense all around. Every attempt to
corral the insurrection has been either non-existent or overwhelmingly inadequate. Trump should be out of the picture, and for a while it seemed as if he was getting there, but now he's back, and probably a bigger threat than ever. I don't think replacing Biden is anywhere near enough. We need leadership. Not wait to be led. We've waited too long. People who appear ready to step up -- AOC, Bernie Sanders. Who else? I wouldn't put Obama on that list, he tried to welcome Trump, even let him have his Supreme Court pick, just to be a nice guy. We are not going to prevail by being nice, unfortunately. We're also not going to prevail by each of us taking care of Number One. We have to work together. Organize and work together. Those ought to be our mantras until we achieve them.
#
And btw, don't panic. You can't accomplish anything that way.
#
Today's adventure: "The great and cute Wordle Kitty was surprisingly chosen to be the running mate of the most popular presidential candidate in the history of the United States, who happens to also be very very old so that’s why they nominated the cute little cat to be the vice president because she is so young and so incredibly cute."
#
Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not
George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like
Up In The Air or
Michael Clayton, but we don't know
anything about his political judgement. He hasn't done anything to tell us who he is in that dimension. To the extent that we do know anything about him: 1. He's a
prankster. 2. He has a brilliant and beautiful
wife. 3. He has a huge
mansion in Italy which he keeps very private. 4. He's
rich. We have nothing in common. He should run for office and get in the mix. The fact that the NYT chose him, that says something about them, they don't care what people think, or they think we're really shallow and will fall for bullshit like George Clooney. He loves Biden. We didn't even know he knew Joe Biden! Why should Clooney have more of a say in this than I do? Tell me what
Nancy Pelosi thinks, or Al Sharpton. Or give
Michael Moore a shot. He has a lot more skin in the game than Clooney. I'd love to read an op-ed by
David Frum.
Liz Cheney.
Elie Mystal.
#
We. Need. To. Organize. Democrats should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as
Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of
John Gruber. Focus our attention on each product (ie climate change, social security, Ukraine, etc), so the ideas don't get missed, and we can network in support of the initiative. This is all part of the idea of having a
democratic.party website that we call call home for our political organizing. None of this pissing in the wind we do on twitter-like systems. Form buddy groups of people we organize with, based on locality or common interests. Organize the people as well as the billionaires are organized. This is what political parties should be in 2024 for crying out loud. We're missing the point of the mess in our politics. It's all a mess because it needs to be organized and it's not. Maybe I should take everything else off my blog now so I can use what little attention I have been able to gather here to focus on this idea.
#
NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.
#
On this blog 20 years ago: "Our mission when covering the DNC is to figure out what goes on at a DNC. On the other hand, some portion of the 15,000 reporters at the DNC will be trying to figure out what we, the bloggers, are doing at the DNC. I suspect most of them will conclude that we don't belong there, in the same way most of the early articles about weblogs concluded we are not going to kill professional journalism." This turned out to be true.
#
TWiT studio in
Petaluma is shutting down. A lot of great stuff came out of this place. Please take a video of the studio before it closes down for good. I've learned this over and over, having shut down a few offices where great stuff was created and forgetting to do this.
#
In today's Kitty Komix
episode: "The very cute but also very courageous Wordle Kitty is learning how to be a surgeon. They brought a mysterious leader into the operating room and asked the Kitty to please operate on the leader and save his life so Wordle Kitty got out the
textbook and read up on brain surgery, even though the patient only had a nick on his ear, which was admittedly very bloody, she operated on the patient’s brain and unfortunately the patient died. So we are looking at the scene where the dead body of the patient is on the operating table and Wordle Kitty is smoking a cigarette, relaxing and reflecting on what she learned. She’s still very cute of course."
#
- We should hire an intern at some J-school to keep track of all of my tweets, write them down, then translate each into a rule for what a news organization should do instead of not do. Flip the sense of the rule in other words.#
- Then we feed those rules to an AI.#
- Then we flow in the news stories of the day from various sites through the same AI for translation. Yes I know they'd complain vociferously, but which ones you use don't matter because the AI algorithm will translate whatever they are to Dave Winer tense.#
- Then of course publish them to another site called The News That Helps Us All Stay Sane. #