Took care of life details today, sold a car, voted, and realized I've been pushing it really hard programming for most of the year. Learned a lot, made new friends. Looking forward to working with users and developers this winter, and of course fixing bugs. A big new product release coming soon.
😄#
I have an itch to make a simple chat program for a workgroup whose
only output is a simple RSS 2.0 feed. Uses Markdown and supports full textcasting. Open source of course. Something people can test their apps against. A model for the kind of feed I'd like to see every social network generate for each user. Think of it as a lifeboat or an insurance policy that whatever you write in this place can be forever, even if the service goes away. Imagine if
T2 had a vision like this, instead of just re-creating Twitter. It's 2023, Twitter was new in
2007. There's a whole generation of developers who have never seen any real innovation on the web.
#
- When professionals look at ChatGPT they see someone stealing their ideas. When I look at it, as an amateur in everything but what I specialize in, I see new ways to express myself. This is what technology has been doing since our species started thinking and sharing ideas, thus creating our civilization. So which should I value more, the new ideas I'll be able to send and receive, or protecting the cash flow of others. I get it, I used to depend on the cash generated from my software. But it's funny almost none of that money came from individual sales of software. And value is manifested in many other ways than dollars. #
- The last month for me has been a revelation, as I can talk with ChatGPT and get it to express my wishes to DALL-E in a language it understands better than I do, and the net result is I can show you visually how I think about things I write about here. For example, I've been trying to come up with a way to visualize RSS. Not as some dead thing as Google and others tried to make you see it as. Rather as a bunch of balloons on a perfect day in the high desert of New Mexico. I asked that every balloon say RSS, but it could only manage one. Still the point gets through. #
RSS as balloons in the New Mexico high desert.
#
- You should feel proud of RSS because it was something created by you, not by the tech industry. We can do a lot more stuff like that if we choose to work together. It's one of those weird things like making a balloon lighter than air so you, a flightless animal, can fly around in the wind on a gorgeous day with other humans. #
- With the ChatGPT and DALL-E connection we're finally somewhere I honestly never thought we'd get, at least not in my lifetime -- you will be able to write your own software by telling a computer what you want. And it will be infinitely better at listening to you, with its full attention, its mind engaged 100 percent, able to talk with you at whatever level you are able to. With that, you can certainly create software, and through trial and error that used to take decades of experience, you can get results -- in weeks and months. I don't want to scare you, my programmer colleagues, but our craft is being reformed by this too. #
- I tried an experiment a few days ago. I got a random question that made no sense, about RSS and local files and seemed to depend on magic. I get these all the time and I don't have the intellectual ability or patience to understand what they're saying. So I pasted the email verbatim into ChatGPT and it answered the question. I sent the person a link to the answer, and he responded, cryptically as before, but apparently ChatGPT understood what he was asking for, where I did not. Now we're getting a glympse at the future. #
- There's this Silicon Valley expression -- A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. Here we are presented with that conundrum, but we're the B and we could hire an A. I guess that's the question. #
- BTW, Andrew Hickey, who has opened my mind to music over the last year, has made a mistake in saying that the same people who promoted NFTs and Bitcoin are the ones promoting AI. I saw Web 3 as a cheap exploitation of something open and wonderful, the Web, purely for greed. Like Exxon laying waste to the Arctic for more oil profits. Or if I started a band and called it Beatles II, and journalists went along with the con. #
- AI is more challenging, not as clear-cut, and at the same time incredibly useful even seductive, and we need minds like Hickey's to look at this carefully and think, and use it as a tool, so he can help us understand what's going on. I've seen this many times, people I admire who have dismissed AI, but when I tell them not to, and they try to use it, they immediately get it. Hickey will be one of those people, I'm sure of it. #
- PS: BTW, the future never ends up looking like you thought it would. #
Yesterday a user asked why
WordPress signon and not Google, Facebook or Apple. I know there are services that take care of all the logins. But I don't know who they are, the people, investors, and what they do with the data that flows through their systems. But there's another reason, I've known
Automattic since it was founded, I knew
Matt when he arrived in San Francisco in the early 00s, and have worked on a few projects with him and people at the company, and I respect him and the company he's built. I've written a lot about the
kind of
identity systems we
need to foster development. Right now the economics are such that in order to ship a simple product you have to raise VC money. But technologically, if users could buy storage, instead having individual developers buy it and resell it to them, we could get back to a time when an individual could make a hit product. You don't know how important that is. Products made by companies never take the creative risks that individuals can. That's why innovation in social media was stuck for 17 years with Twitter's idea of a post. Anyway -- I know that Google, Facebook and Apple would never listen to me, but Automattic does. So I'm willing to meet them in the middle. Okay let's see what we can do with this login thing. It's in
FeedLand now.
😄#
- Last Tuesday I did a podcast specifically for Tim Carmody. But you can listen to, and I hope you do. #
- I do this from time to time, when I want to work with someone, I often will speak directly to them in public. Because working together is the only way to bootstrap open systems. I did it because I saw Tim, who I know as a smart tech writer, a creative person and thinker, as someone who could appreciate how little it takes to start a bootstrap. #
- It worked. Yesterday he wrote a piece on kottke.org that got a lot of coverage. It got a lot of people thinking about Textcasting and RSS. #
- The coolest thing he said are the first four words in the headline. The Future of RSS -- you know I've never seen anyone write those four words because RSS got so thoroughly maligned by the bigco's of tech, they really did a number on RSS, probably because it was so freaking good and so freaking simple. Who needs big tech companies to make it usable for you if it's basically usable all on its own. 💥#
- Tim made the point I couldn't make on my own. People must think I have a conflict with RSS, but I've never made any money from RSS, I advocate on its behalf because I think it's the right thing to do. And I wanted to show Tim that if he did it, people would listen. And they did! Oh my. I heard about it from so many people. Did you see this piece on Kottke!? I was told/asked yesterday over and over. #
- And maybe people are now beginning to see that RSS would make the perfect connective protocol in addition to the more complex ActivityPub for the next generation of social networks. He also got me excited, now knowing that I am not the only person trying to push this boulder up a hill. #
- Feeds are still there to help tie everything together. RSS only exists because people want it to exist. The more you want it to exist, the more it will. #
- So Tim, let's keep beating the drum. The goal as far as I'm concerned is to craft the perfect environment for writers on the web. We still have not tried to do that, because the BigCo's have convinced us that we need to be locked-in to get anything out of the tech. Well I'm here to tell you that's not true. And in the coming weeks and months I hope to prove it to you. #
- It's time to do stuff. Let's all work together on this. You'd be amazed how few people it takes to get something like Textcasting going. #
- PS: I don't agree with everything Tim said in his list of four needs. I don't need metrics or moderation. Believe me, I know about abuse, I knew about it before all of you did, because in the beginning I was the target of most of the abuse in the blogosphere. I learned some fundamental things about abuse, don't offer people a way to abuse you and you won't be abused. It means don't think of this as a conversational medium, and don't count on everyone hearing you. Use it for thinking out loud, and be happy when people hear you, but don't expect it.#
- PPS: At the end Tim asks what his role is. He's a writer and damned good one and one who thinks about how his writing gets to readers. I haven't found many writers who are thinking about that, but imho they all should be, esp right now when the dominance of tech companies is so iffy, when the possibilities are so open. I write software for writers, so I exist to make Tim happy. I want to be sure he can use the writing tools he loves (btw, maybe more than one, for different kinds of writing). #
- I don't believe a product like FeedLand should do its own identity. #
- Identity is one of those things you totally want centralized, because that's the benefit of identity -- you can be the same person in a lot of different places. And if we work that out well, the apps that you connect with that way can work with each other in interesting ways to provide new integrations. #
- I've always been preaching this, let developers and users do the integration, let software developers create basic capability that we can wire together any way we like. That was what we were doing on the Mac platform in the 1988-92. And also what we've been doing on the web since 1994 . It's an idea as old as Unix pipes. But it requires cooperation among developers, which we have seen sometimes happens. 😄#
- Using WordPress for identity is a step in that direction. The hope is it could form a backbone for an internet of applications. I'm willing to step up and say okay let's give this a try and see what happens. #
- I have been trying to visualize FeedLand to work toward a great logo for it, and had the idea of playing with ChatGPT and DALL-E to see what would come of that. #
- I painted a verbal picture of a yacht in a port on the Adriatic, the water is choppy but the yacht is doing well. On the main sail would be the words FEED and LAND. #
- This is what it came up with and it's better than anything I imagined. Really. The art is all over this. #
FeedLand as a yacht.
#
- I wrote a story ten years ago, posted only on Facebook. #
- A plot for a science fiction horror movie.#
- Takes place in the near future.#
- A young Zuck-like hacker not only understands how to write scalable server apps, and has no principles about people's privacy (or really anything, for that matter), he's also a lawyer. #
- He starts a Facebook-like service, but it's better in some way (still need to come up with this element), but there's a twist. The end user agreement is customized for each user. Not for everyone, just a few. They know where you live, and whether you own the house or not. #
- Here's the nasty thing they do. #
- They plant seemingly innocuous language in the agreement (that no one reads anyway) that says you sign over all your property to them. #
- Not sure where it goes from there exactly. #
- Probably not all that great an idea.#
- Visualized...#
- I fed this story to ChatGPT and asked it to ask DALL-E to visualize it. Had to change Zuck to Buck to get past its filters. And here's what it came back with.#
BuckBook, by DALL-E, as directed by ChatGPT, screenplay by me.
#
- PS: Full-size visual, on Facebook -- seems appropriate.#
Tim Carmody is a smart guy and he
wrote a post on Threads that's a lot like what I've been saying. So I decided to do a
podcast for him, and invite him to respond not on Threads but on a blog, or in a podcast, and let's talk about how we work together on this. If we want a great writer's web, we can have it.
#
Ross Mayfield: "The reason Threads doesn’t have an API or the promised Fediverse coupling is organizational inertia for the fear of another Cambridge Analytica." I think that's very likely true. I was using Facebook's API when they quietly turned it off, and I didn't blame them for it, given the way journalism was treating them. Everyone knew they had an API, and what it could do was openly published, and promoted by the same journalists who were now blaming them. So while FB has few scruples to admire them for, as a company -- in this case I believe Ross's explanation of why they are treading very carefully here.
#
Twitter de los Muertos in the style of Frida Kahlo, by DALL-E, at my behest.
#
What does it mean when the
Disk I/O graph for one of your servers does this and you can't think of what changed that could have caused it.
#
Well,
Facebook is aiming to replace Twitter with
Threads, and while I haven't been using it, it has become more useful. There's now a web client, the lack of which was holding me back, but now it's there and it's good, well-designed, attractive, all the things that Twitter isn't now that Elon Musk as renamed it X and effectively turned off API access. Mastodon is still a maze of federation, which some users still seem to think is a positive thing, but honestly, Facebook (they call themselves Meta now) has a better product, all the
federation michegas on Masto makes it a mess. Facebook
will replace Twitter if all the web can muster as an alternative is Masto. Oh but the FB folk say don't worry, we're going to support ActivityPub. The way this works is they can hold off the fear by just saying they'll do something, without explaining how or when it'll work. And they could change their mind, or somehow never get around to shipping. I've been in tech since the 70s, and I've seen this movie a few times. It's like the
Godfather, which
always ends exactly the same way. If we want to have a social media web that is not dominated by Facebook, it's time to face reality now and get into motion on
working together. Otherwise there will be nothing to celebrate as we face the new boss, as they say,
same as the old boss.
#
This is prime sports time on TV. Last night I switched back and forth between the first Knicks game with Walt Frazier and Mike Breen and the first game of the World Series between Texas and Arizona, a match-up I didn't think I'd care about but to my surprise, it was really good baseball. Both events were like coming home. The
Friday Night Knicks theme is something I forget every year, and then remember right around this time, remember how
comfortable it is to watch the Knicks, even in years when the team sucks, as long as my friends Clyde and Mike are talking us through the game. Movin and groovin, dishin and swishin, so nice we showed it twice and all the other familiar slogans. But this year the Knicks don't suck. The games will be good. And this year the World Series is exciting. Last night's game was won with a
walk-off 11th inning home run by a formerly unknown
star who has already set the record for the most postseason RBIs, and the series is just getting started. They play 162 games in a baseball season so each game doesn't mean that much, until the end of the season when every game matters, at this point, every inning matters and sometimes every at-bat. I've never been much of a football fan except for the years when I lived in the Valley and the Niners were rising. Not my sport. But I've loved both baseball and basketball my whole life, there are real family roots here, and traditions old and new. And tonight there's another World Series game and the Knicks are in New Orleans playing the Pelicans. Good times!
😄#
I want to throw together a nice little utility for Bluesky users. I'm working in JavaScript in web browsers. There should be a service I can access via one include each for CSS and JS code that lets me build the utility without writing any code to deal with storage or identity. Also supports reading and posting of data to Bluesky, one easy call for each. And the same environment should work equally well with Mastodon. The same code. No changes. If my code takes two days to write and test, that's how long I should have to spend on it. And after it's published, it should be a static app, no server presence at all. I get to move on to the next thing. Also if I want to charge for using it, that should be built-in as well. The tech for doing this is well understood. If we want it we can have it.
#
I've been posting a lot of my stuff about visualizations
on Facebook too. Imagine if ChatGPT became Facebook. Or vice versa. Whoever gets there first wins.
#
- I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming about cats being the people of New York City. So I got out my iPad, launched ChatGPT and asked it to instruct DALL-E to visualize: "A city street in nyc where humans have been replaced by cats, who walk upright, wear typical human clothes, are cops, mothers, business executives, messengers, television reporters. They drive cars, buses and cabs." #
- The first two images were imho lifeless, cheap -- lazy. I narrowed the spec: "The street should be more busy, and dirtier like nyc streets, and the cats should have more expressive faces, some should be angry, flirty, happy, depressed, tired."#
DALL-E's rendering of CatNY as
visualized by ChatGPT and myself.
#
- What came out was a good first try -- looks a bit like 8th Ave looking north from 42nd St. And cats! Look at the image in full resolution, it's got a lot of interesting detail. Maybe a continuing story.#
- This is how ChatGPT described what I wanted to DALL-E. I guess it's like SQL, one program writes scripts for the other program. #
- "Illustration of a busy and gritty New York City street scene where cats have replaced humans. The street is filled with trash, and the cats walk upright, wearing human clothes. Their faces are highly expressive, capturing emotions like happiness, anger, flirtation, depression, and tiredness. The roads are jam-packed with cars, buses, and taxis, all operated by these emotive cats. Among them, a cop cat is directing traffic, a mother cat is tending to her kitten in a stroller, and a television reporter cat is conducting an interview."#
- Just for fun I asked it to change the cats to dogs. #
The cats become dogs.
#
- Then I asked for more motive variety. "Some dogs are sad, depressed, flirty, horny, unloved, ugly, arrogant, satisfied. And they're all hungry."#
This my friends is artcasting. I put together a list of art feeds on Bluesky, this is something that actually exists, in feed form thanks to
John Spurlock. After Twitter collapsed, the art flow went to Bluesky, and they have feeds, and we picked it up in FeedLand. This is
interop, and it's working once again.
Bing! #
Note -- you may have to
hard-reload the link about artcasting in the previous post. That happened to me just now when I tried to load the page from my iPad. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to do a hard-reload on iOS as a user.
#
Meet your new Cats menu. In FeedLand, I wanted to be able to see the news for each category, no matter where I was. I could be looking at something totally random and I want to see the news for MLB. Or I want to see if I'm subscribed to a particular podcast.
#
On this day in 1986,
a legend in baseball
history started with Gary Carter and Kevin Mitchell and ended with Mookie Wilson and Bill Buckner.
#
I was talking with
Jeff Sandquist yesterday, a friend from long ago when he was in developer support at Microsoft. He now works at Automattic, makers of WordPress. We're both old enough to remember Filemaker and PFS:File which were user-oriented databases for the Mac and PC in the 1980s. It was a new idea then because there were no easy-to-use file management products on minicomputers, these were products for users of personal computers. I wondered it there wasn't a position for a lite version of WordPress, a user interface designed for one person, not a group. I created a
prototype of what I call
WordPress-for-One as part of a project to get support for the WordPress API into my codebase. It's just enough WordPress for one writer. That's the idea.
#
I am adding another degree of complexity to the implementation of reading lists. Already in a programming structure that works against you at every step. The thing you have to go for is actual code that reads as clearly as pseudo-code. In JavaScript you are so far from that. Every little loop requires you to do a dance that's a pain in the ass when you're writing the code, it's 100 times worse when you're trying to find the bug that's hiding in the freaking haystack. But -- you can do it.
#
- I have basically had it with JavaScript. It is a write-only language. More so than any other language I've used, including some pretty old and arcane systems. I asked ChatGPT to give DALL-E instructions based on this prompt.#
- Imagine a big safe with lots of safes within. All the safe doors are closed except on. Inside you can see a dark maze with cobwebs and doors and scary creatures -- it's JavaScript code! and it's a nighmare. There a human in there, a laborer in a devil's workshop and it's struggling to get the door on the safe closed so we don't have to look at any of the monstrosities it contains. #
- Here are the visions it came up with.#
Vision 1.
#
Vision 2.
#
Vision 3.
#
Vision 4.
#
People are really down on
paving cow paths. But of course we think about whether it's the best way to do something, but the fact that users chose a way is important. Because our software is meant to empower them. I don't like software developers who think of themselves as above the users. Not a constructive way to do our art, imho.
#
As
Tantek describes POSSE it sounds tedious. Imho, web writing is supposed to be a joy. When you push an idea into the world it should feel powerful not laborious. When the process of writing and revising is trouble, the writing is troubled. I find sometimes it
is tedious, like arranging the
delicious artwork that DALLE made for me (and you), but that always inspires me, as a software developer, to look for ways to smooth the process. We call that paving cow paths, and that's my process. So let's do it. Take Tantek's vision, which we share, and make it work, for real. In the case of blog-peering, we can learn from podcasting and make the
sharing process for writing as smooth.
#
- I asked DALLE to do some art in the style of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Rembrandt and Georgia O'Keefe. #
- I asked for artwork about Twitter from each artist. Just about Twitter. My instructions to ChatGPT were: "Imagine Diego Rivera painting about Twitter." #
- The designs were by ChatGPT and the execution by DALLE.#
- Before all this happened I had an idea of what art is. It isn't the creation of the artist, it's what the observer creates in their mind from participating in the work -- that's the art. I'm not trying to twist words, this is just what I think art is. To the extent that my software is art, it is all about the user. What do you create with my outliner and news manager? You and us. What do we create together? That's the art. The art continues long after I've stopped coding. It starts when you recall an idea you had last Tuesday and improve on it, and relate it to someone else's idea next week and in 2029. #
- It's why we're so puzzled by some art, we're wondering what the artist was trying to say. Not really important, what matters is what you saw. And there's a precise answer for that, and only you know the answer. Your exploration of yourself is why we make art. It's where the art is. #
- With that in mind, look at what the freaking computer created. These are just a few examples. #
Rembrandt on Twitter.
#
Kahlo on Twitter.
#
Rivera on Twitter.
#
The nice thing about ChatGPT is that when you want to know something like how to
hard-reload any popular browser for advice to a user, or know what
Writing-First workflow is -- you get a complete answer without any of the junk writing you get from a commercial journalism site. And it seems not to forget (or bury) the one piece of information you came there for.
#
I wish, instead of dropping all the way down to JavaScript after working in
Frontier for two decades, I could have done the next version of
Frontier, backward-compatible of course, factoring in what we learned from developing network writing tools, blogs, feed readers and podcasting in Frontier in the 90s and 00s. Then things like the relatively huge corner-turn I'm doing with
reading lists would be less of a mind fuck. I'll get there, but I don't like the stack I'm working in, the browser and its ridiculousness, then JavaScript and its idea of program synchrozation and structure, then HTTP which is simple enough, but of course Google couldn't leave that alone, and then
JavaScript again, and then
SQL where, instead of calling into another stack, you write scripts, send them over the wire. At least what you get back is a JavaScript object, imagine if everyone had to parse the text result that I'm sure SQL must send back. None of this history has been factored or smoothed out, yet we can get something as clever as
FeedLand running. Imagine if the runtime environment were
designed for the kind of work we're doing.
#
Been watching a lot of baseball lately, and let me tell you programmers slump just like athletes. I look at stuff I wrote a week ago and marvel at its complexity. I just don't have it in me to write something like that today. I hope I get it back soon. ;-)
#
- Nice article about the ideal of POSSE, an acronym coming out of the indieweb group, but.. It's like the great scene near the end of As Good As It Gets, where Melvin (played by Jack Nicholson) is professing his love for Carol (Helen Hunt), acting as nuts as ever, and she blurts out: Why can't I just have a normal boyfriend who doesn't go nuts on me! This is the big moment, because we know he's crazy, and she knows it, and of course she's crazy too and maybe just starting to catch on, when her mother pops out from behind the door and delivers the big line in the movie: #
- "Everybody wants that dear. It doesn't exist."#
- Same with POSSE. #
- Everybody wants it, but it doesn't exist. #
- When Twitter took off in 2006 it was the first thought every blogger had, can I cross-post from my blog to Twitter, but Twitter had nothing that our blogs had. Posts couldn't have titles, no links, styling, and it was limited to 140 characters. It's as if they put a big sign out front saying "No POSSE here."#
- Facebook said the same thing, no titles, no styling, but it didn't have a character limit, and while Twitter's API didn't allow updating, Facebook's did. Here's the catch -- if you wanted to cross-post to Facebook, you had to write text that would make sense even if the links didn't come through, and that really screws with the art of web writing. I tried it and hated it as much as I loved the open web. I tried to make it work for years, but eventually gave up, and went back to blogging the way of the web, and I was a much happier writer, even if I didn't have the reach that Facebook offered. I still to this day have a lot of friends on Facebook, and if they want to read what I write, they have to go outside of Facebook, because my writing can't get in there.#
- Even Medium, which was created by the founder of Blogger couldn't fit into the POSSE model because posts couldn't be updated. Otherwise it came pretty close to the ideal.#
- The idea of posting on your blog and cross-posting to lots of place is the right idea, no argument there, the problem is that the places you can actually cross-post to are few and far-between. The two places mentioned in the article that can peer with most other blogging software are micro.blog and WordPress. Everything else as far as I know, if you want to peer with them in a POSSE-like way, requires you to remove features from your writing, and you have to decide if it's worth it. #
- But now I want to try again -- because the time is right -- with Twitter falling into the background, pretty quickly, there are new platforms that are pretty close to being able to peer with blogging software, Mastodon and other ActivityPub systems, BlueSky and a few others. If we're going to organize, we should get together on the features we want in our blogs to be mirrored elsewhere and help the developers of those systems achieve it. And we should emphasize that it can be done, because we have examples that do it. #
- I put up a proposal for what that feature set would be. It's pretty simple, but in order for it to work, we have to work together. #
- The features are:#
- Optional titles#
- Links#
- Simple styling#
- Enclosures#
- Unlimited length#
- Editable#
- That's it. I could peer my posts with any system that supported those features. You can even support just a subset as long as you pass along all the data you get in your outbound feeds. I think with that simple system we could rebuild the social media world so that no one dominates, and we can always try out new ideas, and you can use the editing tools you like, and I can use the ones I like. It would finally be a writer's web, something that, after 30 years we still haven't begun to build. Let's do it! We have a chance now, all we have to do is work with each other. #
I've always meant to ask developers of
podcast clients to accept podcasts from feeds that contain normal blog posts. When I do a podcast on
scripting.com I just create another item in
my feed, alongside all the others. I don't see any reason people should have to have a special feed for podcasts, when it's so easy for clients to ignore items that don't have enclosures. So I've been trying to hold the door open for that (also I'm lazy). There's a 1-minute
podcast attached to this item as a demo.
#
- Because Drummer and FeedLand now do their own identity via email, I had to switch them to HTTPS last year. And I've pretty much been converting anything that builds on those apps to HTTPS as well. As a side-effect I had to convert the image URLs in Scripting News, which is served by HTTP, to HTTPS so they wouldn't show up as broken images in FeedLand. They almost certainly have been showing up broken in other feed reading software, for years. #
- Anyway, even though it would be relatively easy to convert scripting.com to HTTPS, it would break every single image that appeared before 2023. #
- I will also never do it for the simple reason that this site goes back to 1994, and if I switched to HTTPS now, well what about all the other sites of its era that are breaking due to this really ill-conceived corner-turn. And who there are so many subdomains of scripting.com started over 30 years and left standing, and all the HTTP urls hanging off them, I'll retire long before I consider that much crazy work. #
- You don't accumulate 30 years of archives thinking someday you're going to convert every page and thus break all the images. I can't imagine a change that could more totally break the web. And yet somehow we've let that happen. #
- Scripting News is one of the foundation sites of the open web, it goes back further than probably anything that's still updating. Scripting News is angry that Google is deliberately breaking the open web, even though Dave the system developer would rather just go ahead and switch. Google is playing mass psychology on us, getting us all to believe that giving them full control to evolve the web is somehow a reasonable thing. It won't happen here. #
- Scripting News may be the last continuously updating site that runs in black and white, but it will always do so. #
- It's weird that people have the idea that thinking out loud is a new idea for blogging. That's because when journalists first heard about blogging they decided that it's what they do. People who write publicly for money, mostly without any principle other than getting paid for writing, or perhaps "building a brand." That imho was not what was going on. It was people asking questions, often in the form of statements they weren't sure of. Put it out there, see what comes back. At its best it was what I called sources go direct -- where people with expertise shared what they knew so we could learn from them. So the idea of a public "garden" is just a response to journalists getting the story totally wrong about blogging in the early days. Amazing how these things cycle round and round often because of basic misunderstandings like this. #
- I love to cite this cartoon from the 2004 Democratic Convention which first opened its doors to bloggers. I was one of them. They saw us as gatecrashers. We were just people who have the need to blog. A small number of people were born to write about what they see, and the web opened that up to all of us, for the first time it took almost no money to get your ideas out there, and clearly they were scared of us. What a crime that actual people would be reporting on the events of our democracy. They're so stuck in their calcified thought patterns that it never occurred to them that this is great, people who actually give a shit, wanting to tell other people what they saw and heard. Unfortunately they got their way, that's how powerful they are and how easily manipulated we all are. #
- Next query: Draw a profile of a citizen of the Asteroid Belt in the year 2532 against a black background without stars. Make her a human woman, about 58 years old, no facial surgery, no makeup, a warrior and survivor of much hardship. Born in zero gravity so her body is skinny and long, and bones very lightweight. #
1. Belter citizen #1.
#
- Drawing of a woman from the Asteroid Belt, aged 58, positioned in profile against a solid black background. Her appearance is rugged and battle-worn, a testament to her warrior spirit. Her face is natural, untouched by surgeries or cosmetics. Her physique is distinctive due to being birthed in zero gravity, making her appear tall and thin with fragile bones.#
2. Belter citizen #2.
#
- Render of a 58-year-old Asteroid Belt female warrior in profile view. The background is deep black. Her visage reflects hardships endured, and her natural face is devoid of any surgical enhancements or makeup. Due to her zero-gravity birth, she has an extended, skinny body with lightweight bones.#
- My next DALL-E adventure: "100 years from now in 2123, New York Harbor will be a space port, with spaceships arriving from all over the solar system and around the Milky Way galaxy. People will visit to see New York's museums, see sports games, attend NYU, Columbia and the Bronx High School of Science, all galactically renowned educational institutions. Most alien beings will not be humanoid. "#
- I was presented with four illustrations.#
- 1. Photo of the futuristic New York Harbor as a bustling space port. Numerous advanced spaceships are seen descending from the sky, some with designs native to the Milky Way galaxy. The skyline of New York is still recognizable but has been augmented with futuristic architectures. Aboard the ships, a diverse array of alien beings disembark. Some float, some have multiple limbs, and they come in various colors and sizes. They interact with humans and each other, many holding digital guides highlighting New York's museums and educational institutions.#
A bustling New York Harbor transformed into a space port.
#
- 2. Illustration of the entrance to NYU in 2123. The iconic Washington Square Arch stands tall, but now with holographic enhancements. Students of various species walk, float, or glide into the campus. Some aliens are seen engaging in animated discussions with human professors. Banners in the background promote intergalactic exchange programs.#
Entrance to NYU in 2123 with the iconic Washington Square Arch and holographic enhancements.
#
- 3. Photo of an intergalactic sports game taking place in a futuristic stadium in New York. The game is a mix of soccer and a sport from another galaxy, played by teams comprising both humans and aliens. The audience is a melting pot of species from different planets, cheering passionately for their favorite teams.#
An intergalactic sports game taking place in a futuristic stadium in New York.
#
- 4. Watercolor painting of the Bronx High School of Science's main entrance. This prestigious school now has a massive holographic globe above it, displaying various constellations. Students, both human and alien, rush in, some levitating their books and some using advanced tech wearables for learning. A group of alien parents is seen taking a campus tour, marvelling at the institution's history.#
Bronx High School of Science's main entrance with a massive holographic globe.
#
Something interesting. I can
write a post on a Mastodon instance that supports Markdown and I can
view it in a Mastodon instance that doesn't support Markdown, and it handles it properly. I wonder where the rendering is being done. An incentive to use a server that supports Markdown. The
server, which I am operating, also has a character limit of 10000, which is effectively no limit. I think perhaps the dust is starting to settle on Masto, the fog is lifting. Maybe a subset of servers, called Maxtodon perhaps, would be the service worth paying for.
#
- A reading list is a list of feeds you can subscribe to.#
- The author of the list can add or remove feeds. When they do, people who subscribe to the list are subscribed to the new feeds and unsubbed from the ones that leave.#
- It means that there can be lots of specialized software that reads feeds, and the user gets to broadcast their subscriptions to all of them.#
- It also means that influencers like Andrew Hickey can keep his community up to date on the podcasts he loves. Someday he will have a reading list, and I will subscribe to it.#
- Technically a reading list is exactly the same format as a subscription list. The only difference is you import a subscription list, and you subscribe to a reading list. #
- I asked ChatGPT to work with DALL-E to create an ad for ThinkTank for the Mac in 1984, suitable to run in MacWorld magazine. What it came up with was dazzling. The software doesn't look anything like ThinkTank, which is par for the course. Ad agencies back then did the same thing. They showed readers what they thought we had described, and didn't bother looking at the actual screens. They treated us like hopeless nerds when we asked them to please show the actual products, that users would be able to see through this ruse. #
DALL-E's rendering of an ad spec'd by ChatGPT.
#
- BTW, here's how ChatGPT explained the ad: "Illustration of an ad for the 'thinktank' software from 1984. A young professional woman sits at her desk, deeply engrossed in using her Macintosh computer. The 'thinktank' software is visible on the screen, prominently displaying a detailed presentation outline. The text reads: 'The Future of Presentations is Here: thinktank for Mac!' The overall aesthetic is vibrant and distinctly 80s, with bold typefaces, neon colors, and a touch of retro flair."#
- The new DALL-E is much much better than the previous one. What's great is that it's integrated with ChatGPT so you can have a conversation with it. Also there do not seem to be the previous limits of a few pictures per month. #
- I asked it to create a header image for my blog. Here was the spec: "I need a new header image for my blog, Scripting News. I want it to be imagery from The Matrix, with Neo, Morpheus, Agent Smith, Trinity, The Oracle, and Spoon Boy, my favorite characters in The Matrix, in an image that's roughly 1600 by 250 pixels (or proportional). Use the dark styling of the Matrix." #
- It couldn't use the actual characters because of copyright limits, so it tried to produce something in the same style as The Matrix, but after four attempts couldn't get the proper proportions. The images were lovely, but not suitable for a header image because of size. Here's one of them to give you an idea. #
Photo of a futuristic dark city skyline with green digital rain falling from the sky, reminiscent of the Matrix. Neon signs with code symbols glow in the distance, illuminating alleys and streets.
#
- You can debate whether ChatGPT is intelligent or creative, but to me, a human who is (supposedly) both intelligent and creative, I can't tell the difference. And it's infinitely patient and always tries to do what I ask it to do. And unlike humans it doesn't judge me based on gender, race, age, religion or any number of other criteria that humans use to justify hating other people. #
- Next request: "I’d like a picture of Abraham Lincoln playing with the Grateful Dead at Woodstock. He’s playing lead guitar and singing Casey Jones."#
- It said no. But it could give me a generic tall politician with a generic band at a generic concert. I said OK.#
Generic tall politician from 1860s playing Dead-like music.
#
- I asked if it could replace Lincoln with a rhinoceros.#
Rhino playing the part of Abraham Lincoln at Woodstock.
#
I started a
page for this year's NJFF.
#
Albert Einstein: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
#
It's nice to see
Harvard claiming its key role in the podcasting bootstrap. Berkman was the perfect place for a web developer to hook up with a radio interviewer to develop a new medium.
#
Every year around this time I start thinking about
Blogger Of The Year. And there's no doubt who it will be this year, but no spoilers. Also around this time each year we start thinking about which movies will be in this year's
NakedJen Film Festival, a tradition on Christmas Day every year when all the best pictures come out. Recent years the NJFF as its fans lovingly refer to it has been a virtual event, thanks to streaming, BitTorrent, COVID and the fact that Jen moved to
SLC, though we have held them in realspace in NYC and SLC since then.
#
Twitter
is a
shell of its former self, I can see that in my own behavior. I used to help out voluntarily to vet posts their bots thought were questionable, but I don't do that any more. I don't feel any sense of ownership of Twitter. Looking back, it's surprising that I ever did. I also used to run polls there, but I don't do that any longer. And when something new is happening, I have no idea where to go, but I don't go to Twitter like I used to. These are facts. Not anything I ever weighed and
decided to stop doing, I just don't do them. And yes I think it's a good thing that the fog of Twitter is clearing. There was a time when I hoped interesting ideas would pop up in the blogosphere, but then we got lost in all the bullshit of Twitter, and now that's over. So maybe there's room for the web being used, once again, as a way of connecting real people in smaller numbers.
#
Here's a nightmare stemming from using AI for development. A team of AI programmers can adapt a huge codebase to new incompatible APIs in an instant, where a system maintained by humans develops inertia quickly. The thought of re-doing a huge base of code that took years to assemble is impossible to contemplate. Human brains resist huge changes. Computers, on the other hand, now that they've learned how to program themselves, could obsolete all human programmers in an instant. Imagine turning an open ecosystem into a closed corporate-owned silo in an afternoon. Imagine Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk wake up one morning in a bad mood. Or imagine the conversation between
HAL and Dave. It could be that every human-authored bit of code is already an artifact.
#
I tried to teach ChatGPT 4.0 how to
screw with JavaScript, and it was able to do what I asked. At first I tried it with 3.5 and it failed miserably.
#
Podcasting -- textcasting, artcasting, codecasting -- why should we only have tight standards for content in audio. Why not everything. Interestingly we're really close with art. That was the point of my
comment yesterday.
#
One of the big themes of my life as a boomer is why did the Beatles have to break up? How much better our lives would have been if they had kept creating like the Rolling Stones have. Of course the Stones are the outliers, most of the great bands of the 60s and early 70s stopped creating a long time ago. Or at least that we're aware of. Anyway, I never really got it until I read
this piece about the Beatles songs John Lennon hated. In that piece Harrison is quoted talking about how McCartney made them work on
Maxwell's Silver Hammer for weeks. I mostly am with McCartney that there's nothing wrong with
silly love songs, but I find MSH is hard to listen to. On the other hand, I really like
Lady Madonna, as I
said the other day, even though his bandmates didn't seem to. And what a
great story about
Why Don't We Do It In The Road.
#
At lunch today we were joined by a few dozen
yellowjackets at an outdoor
noodle bar in
Woodstock. They don't sting, but they sure are annoying. A waitress put out a
little dish of honey to draw them away from us and our food. Recalls a
piece I wrote in the early blogging days (1996) about bees in my Woodside (California)
yard.
#
Every account on Bluesky has an excellent
RSS feed. I just realized I can convert my
Artshow app that used to run on the Twitter API to run on Bluesky art feeds. This is going to be interesting.
#
Note to people running their own FeedLand instances. There's a new version of the server that handles
reading lists. This will be an important feature going forward. Right now what it needs most is testing and feedback. The user interface is very provisional.
#
- Drummer's native file format is OPML and OPML is the format for reading lists. This has led to some very nice synergies. #
- Example: A script you can add to your Scripts menu that asks for the URL of a feed, and inserts a node into your outline. #
- var url = dialog.ask ("URL of feed")#
- var theFeed = rss.readFeed (url)#
- op.insert (theFeed.title)#
- op.attributes.addGroup ({type: 'rss', xmlUrl: url})#
- Here are the DocServer pages#
- Took five minutes to write and worked the first time. 😄#
- In the four line example above you're seeing lots of factoring done over three decades. #
- It's JavaScript with one change, the statements are synchronous. The Nth statement doesn't start until the one before it completes. This version of JavaScript is optimized for the 99% of times you want synchronous code, makes that the default, as all reasonable languages do. Otherwise it's plain old JavaScript, which is a fine Algol-like language. #
- The verbs, dialog.ask, rss.readFeed, op.insert, op.attributes.addGroup, are designed to reduce complicated things to their most simple core functionality.#
- rss.readFeed, for example, builds on a couple of decades of understanding feed reading, parses all common formats that fit under the RSS umbrella and makes it all flat. Factoring is the antidote to chaos. #
- And "op" stands for outline processor. Those verbs go back to the late 80s when they were the first verbs in my first language outliner I called Betty. Why change the name of verbs if they work, recalling that one way to do something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. #
A rare mostly off-line Saturday. All is well. Just relaxing a bit after a fairly grueling week developing new features for
FeedLand.
#
Just listened to an hour of McCartney on Apple Music, and I love his stuff, but the best songs he did were collaborations with the rest of the band. No one of them had the magic, it was all of them. Take a minute and listen to
Lady Madonna. Lennon says
he didn't like it, but I can hear him in it. It's got the edge that McCartney alone doesn't have. Compare it to
Maybe I'm Amazed, the first song that the bot picked. It's like listening to part of one channel of a Beatles song.
#
Factoring is when you recognize a pattern in your programming that has meaning, so you make it possible to invoke the pattern more simply, making the intent of the code more obvious, reducing opportunities for error, make it possible to build more complex programs. It is not factoring if you replace a pattern with another equally complicated pattern. Factoring is why the software you make in 2023 should be more powerful than the software you did in 2013 and 2003. Factoring happens slowly, usually. Sometimes factoring happens in a moment, when you realize how to reduce something by making a small change somewhere else.
Edit This Page was one of those.
#
A great example of factoring is the
forEach function in JavaScript. There was a pattern, a for loop that iterated over an array with an index. They took out the index and did the iterating for you. It's a small simplification, and I smile every time I use it because the got rid of a little drudge work for me when entering it and reading the code. In no way a big deal, but nice that they found a way to make things easier and faster. I
asked ChatGPT why forEach is so great, but they use other "advances" in JavaScript that I consider unnecessary, not useful, cryptic, and I don't use them.
#
I am a big believer in
paving cowpaths. I believe in it because I see it everywhere in the evolution of products. Why are the controls of my
Tesla Model Y arranged the same way my 1974
Datsun B210 was.
#