Blocking prevents spammers from replying to your tweets, denying them a chance to hitch a ride on your flow. These days a very high percentage or replies are spam, a lot of it abusive. Giving users the tool to help you keep your moderation costs down Elon.
#
How do we find the 100 feeds on Bluesky that are substantial and not mostly bullshit? Now that I have this great Bluesky feedlist browser I don't know where to point it. I think the truth is that these social networks we've created don't actually do anything. They're just ways to pass the time, like the movies Netflix makes. The ones that really work are the ones you can put on in the background and pay no attention to while your attention is scattered on other things you're only partially paying attention to, sporadically. The sad truth is that everything is all bullshit top to bottom 24 hours a day 7 days a week, around the globe. When aliens discover the remains of our civilization they'll find we self-destructed out of boredom.
#
- In response to a tweet by Umair Haque. #
I think I figured it out. We've done it all, the human species. Fought against all kinds of extinction, and for a while we won. It's like in sports, once you've won the championship, the second time it's getting pointless, and by the third or fourth you really should hang it up. Thinking of LeBron James or Steph Curry, as examples. #- Well we won. Our species was trying to dominate everything and we did it. Now we have no purpose, and while we may not be conscious of this as individuals or collectively, it plays out in our having no idea what we should do. So we pass the time watching Netflix and Twitter, Youtube and Tiktok. Arguing about meaningless bullshit. Passing the time. #
- If we had evolved to be a truly motivated species, we would reinvent ourselves, but we aren't that. We're a stupid selfish individualistic species, evolved to survive in a kill or be killed environment. We have no goal, no purpose, no meaning, so we might as well hang it up and that's what we're doing. #
- One thing we did solve incidentally, no more character limits on Twitter! ??#
Someday a reporter will claim that they gave
Textcasting its name.
#
Textcasting will be what interop means in social media. Help me make it happen. I know it
sounds ridiculous to think we could change the net so it's a writer's paradise, but I think the time is right. What makes these things work is when enough people want to see the change that it achieves an aura of inevitability. That was the arc of podcasting. It applies to big companies too, Apple won't get anywhere with their new headset until it achieves that aura. I think the social media of textcasting will be amazing. And it's sooo low tech. There's nothing to it other than demanding that the techies stop imposing stupid rules on what we can write.
#
- How bad is journalism? Let me tell you.#
- A journalist claimed to have given podcasting its name. #
- He didn't. It's a lie. #
- But he somehow got it on the Wikipedia page for podcasting.#
- And there it stayed. And every reporter writing a story about podcasting, saw it, and liked it, and copied it. #
- As a journalist himself he knew how it works. They don't actually check anything, they just copy and paste. And get paid by the word.#
- So all the bullshit you hear about how ChatGPT has hallucinations, from journalists, covers up the fact that most of what journalists write is complete bullshit. They aren't factual or verified, they just copied something from another journalist, who copied it from a different journalist. They're full of shit, so much so that the journalist knew his lie would never be outed. Even if it were true, it wouldn't be news, but usually what they write contains little or no truth. #
- These same journalists will never say anything bad about Apple btw, even when they offer up a completely ridiculous product for a market that doesn't exist. Everyone gushes, oh it's so great, when no one even the CEO of the company would be caught with the thing on their head. They do this because they won't get invited back if they don't. #
- Best advice, if you have a question, ask ChatGPT, far more likely it's correct than some random journalist.#
- PS: This is how podcasting actually got its name. #
- PPS: International Podcast Day, which is cited as an authority by Google, says there is a dispute about who did what re podcasting between Adam and myself. We have our differences, that's for sure, but I'm not aware of any dispute about how podcasting was created and productized and promoted to turn the idea into a medium. I've always been clear that Adam came to me with the idea, at first I didn't listen, then I got it, and set about implementing it in software. And then creating podcasts, and promoting. We both did a lot of each of those things, but the software was my job, and the development of the standard format. I've never heard Adam dispute any of that. I think they should take that bit about disputes off their description esp since it's being quoted as an authority. And please take Hammersley off the credits. That makes the whole thing stink. #
- PPPS: There are journalists I trust. For example Monica McNutt. I'm sure she wants to rise, and she deseves to, but I'm pretty sure she says what she thinks and doesn't worry about access. Donald McNeil is another, which was why I was so disappointed when he was a victim of NYT internal politics. A real journalist should be forgiven for failing to pander adequately, we like our journalists like that, not that the NYT culture cares what their customers want. There are actually many more and everyone has to do a little pandering, and the lines aren't always totally clear. But as the podcast naming fiasco indicates, most journalists don't care about the truth enough to check their "facts." #
A friend asked if I was going to get "one of these headsets"? My answer, for the record: "Not even slightly interested, but I suppose that could change." One of the reasons I'm skeptical is that I have imperfect vision. I seriously doubt if a headset would work for me, given that my left eye is pretty bad, and my right eye is normal. Pretty sure they're for people with good balanced vision. I haven't heard that question asked or answered, for any of the headsets. Another concern is how heavy it is. As you get older you learn that stress on your body accumulates over time. For example, I can't use a full-size iPad. I used one for years, but it wore out my left arm so now it's too painful, but I can use an iPad Mini, without problems, so far. If you're putting some kind of new weight on a human head, what will that do to your neck over time? Your back? These kinds of problems tend to cascade. And I can't help but wonder if there isn't another way to achieve what they're doing without putting extra stress on our necks? And honestly I'd prefer to have a new Mac that ran
Frontier,
that would really excite me.
??#Another
Succession post, maybe the last, for a while. At some point I'm going to re-watch the whole series, and then might have more observations. Anyway -- people who think that Roman and Kendall have no hope, well I think the writers gave them some cause for hope -- because when they controlled the company for a short period, each showed they were competent, not at running the enterprise, but a small part of it. Kendall was able to sell a complicated and kind of ridiculous idea. And Roman, when he had a clear goal, was able to manage it, and pulled it off. Neither were the kind of person who could run a sprawling enterprise like Waystar, for that you probably had to be Logan. If the two guys team up and manage something much smaller and more focused, they could possibly pull it off, once they get over not being their father. They
didn't revert to where they were at the beginning of the show, as some people say, when Kendall was a drug addict and Roman was a pure
schmuck blowing up a
rocket to try to impress the father. They both get a fresh start now that dad is dead. That is a big difference for men, when your father dies you get a chance to come into your own in a new way, I speak from experience.
#When I was little, maybe first or second grade, my
grandfather bought me a handheld
transistor radio. It was the 1960s. I listened to
WABC, the Beatles and all the great new rock and roll. My grandpa said I’d see so many amazing things in my life. To him the radio was a futuristic miracle, like AI today. Anyway I just asked
Alexa to play
You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes, one of the songs I listened to on the radio he gave me 60 years ago. I realized just now he was so right, I have indeed seen many amazing things in my life.
#
The Supremes.
#
I
made fun of the Apple Watch the day it was announced, but got one anyway and I've been
wearing it ever since. With that said, do you think the new
Apple VR device comes with a neck brace?
#New header image for the
blog, it's a
frame of the Talking Heads 1983
live performance of Life During Wartime. It's a beautiful high energy
song, the dancing, they're all so attractive, so young -- the sheer joy of it, it's totally worth savoring. Anybody have any questions?
??#
This is the
device they announced today.
#
John Maynard Keynes: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of motives, will somehow work together for the benefit of all."
#
- It's been a while since I asked about writing into AI chatbots -- ie writing something designed to be queried via something like ChatGPT, or ideally, ChatGPT itself. A few bullet points follow.#
- I already have a writing tool that I use for everything. #
- I figure by now a service probably exists that can ingest RSS or (ideally) OPML -- and have it be processed and kept updated as things change. #
- I have a sizable documentation project coming up, and I'd like to, if possible, start off with the new medium. I think we can make docs that work much better. #
- Of course I asked ChatGPT itself but it was no help. They said to use their API. I want to use something that uses their API. I can't spare the time to become a developer at this time.#
- If you know of such a service, or would like to make one -- send me an email or (better) post a comment here. #
I grew up in walking distance. Went to lots of Mets games as a kid.
#
More Succession. People wonder how can they like a show where everyone is ugly. Maybe the answer lies in the fact that the main character of the show isn't human -- it's
The Song. Maybe it's just a 4-season-long music video.
#Did you know that you can get Alexa to play the Succession theme song. On the Studio player it's magnificent. Now you can have it be the theme song for your great accomplishments. Get an elegant bit of code running? Fire it up! You're the boss. You did it.
#Newsletter apps have had their moment, now WordPress has one, and wonderfully it has inadvertently plied open the
lock-in that Substack imposes, by making everyone use their editor. WordPress has a time-tested API, so I could theoretically write my newsletters in
Drummer and push them up to WordPress which would then send them out.
#2009: The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that's the Internet.
#
- I was a skeptic when Apple came out with the iPhone, iPad and the watch and ended up eating my words. I use all three products daily. #
- When the iPhone came out I was a Blackberry user and loved it. I was angry with Apple for not running Mac software on the phone. #
- I had reasons for not liking the iPad and watch, but eventually used the iPad even more than the iPhone and I wear the watch every day. #
- None of them for me were revolutionary products, but they were good products. Worthwhile products. Impossible to resist.#
- Update: On the other hand, here's my one-month review of the first iPhone. It was not at time, for me, a winner. #
I did my
first fat tweet, yet another post
about Succession. I'm watching the last episode every night. Still finding new things to admire. Here's a
screen shot of the tweet in all its
corpulence. It's way easier to read than a headline and a link to a blog post. They should work on the formatting a bit. The text is too large and there isn't enough spacing between lines. But it works, and is a welcome addition. There's still
more to do -- let's have optional titles, links, styling, editing and enclosures.
#Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter should not be silos relative to each other. I'm starting to post links to Masto on Twitter, and links to Twitter on Bluesky. All combos. I realized I was, in my mind, assuming these
were silos. I think other people do too. That's not a good limit to impose, doesn't work in our interests, as users and developers.
#The 1619 Project had a
primetime special on ABC last night. Great perspective-changing stuff. I think a lot more people watch ABC than watch Fox.
#I wonder if any librarians have written about ChatGPT. I bet they
aren't worried about losing their jobs. That's the thing. When Napster was booting up, most of us were thrilled with the ability to finally program our own music. Now we take it for granted. Google was, it turns out, just a glimpse into the future. What we really wanted was a virtual librarian who had access to all the information available to our civilization. Now we're getting there. When I was growing up, the librarians, who became my friends, only had access to a very small fraction of what was known. Basically the books that can fit into a modest-size
storefront in
Flushing. Now when you ask for help, they'll have access to everything.
#The more I use ChatGPT the more I wish it had existed when I was a student. I would have learned so much more. It also would have filled in the blanks for impenetrable teachers and textbooks.
#BTW, we also have a limited ability to edit a tweet.
Screen shot.
#
It's nice to be thought of as a real person.
??#What if the blogosphere of 20 years ago traveled to the future and saw what remains of Google, Twitter and Facebook and got a taste of ChatGPT, Mastodon and Bluesky.
#I asked ChatGPT to
write a description of my linkblogging tool, and it came up with something far more hyped that I would ever write, but actually I think I should write this kind of copy for my products. I told it nothing about my product other than it was a linkblogging tool.
#I've already watched the last episode of Succession about five times, and I expect to watch it a few more. As my understanding grows, I hear different parts. I swear there could be a
QAnon thing going on here. Anyway, yesterday I
wrote about bullshit and about how Tom didn't win if winning means being the chosen successor of Logan Roy. That was the Swede. My jaw dropped when
Roman said they were bullshit. There's that word.
Bullshit. The kids were bullshit. Nothing. Tom was a great choice to be the new Gerri. The book closes so neatly. The ending wasn't dramatic like the ending of the Sopranos or Mad Men, or clever like Six Feet Under. it was more like the ending of The Wire, things just wound down in a natural way. The truth was the people who really run the world (a "world of a father," says Shiv) are Logans. The people we see on the news shows are Toms. We never hear from the children.
#BTW "world of a father" is interesting. Remember
Marcia said "He made you a playground and you think it's the world."
#
Succession: A lot of people still think Tom was the winner. He was not. He got a Tom job, not the job the Roy kids wanted, expected, felt entitled to. That job went to Matsson. Who Logan chose as his successor. We all got wrapped up in the
delusion of the kids. Succession was performance art. And
we are the performers. And most people haven't yet seen the brilliance of it.
#Sometimes I wonder if there's anything but bullshit on social media. And maybe instead of controlling AI bots, we should control the idiocracy of social media and start using that wonderful intellect we give ourselves so much credit for. The fact is that our online selves are mostly bullshit.
#My friend
NakedJen came to visit last year, first time I'd seen her in many years. Well what a delight. She's so smart and righteous and funny. She's a tiny but fierce person. And she had a new thing she said: BULLSHIT -- very loudly whenever conversation got around to that topic. I now say
bullshit myself more often and more emphatically and when I do it on my blog I think of NakedJen doing her thing.
#I
searched this blog for NakedJen and Google, whose AI is reallllly dumb,
suggests that perhaps I meant Naked Men? Well no, Google -- that's not what I meant. One time when I searched for my mother on my blog with Google, it suggested a different name. My mother and I have the same last name. Why would Google think I mis-spelled my own mother's name? I think they still need to do a little work on their intelligence.
#
Something interesting to ponder. When we have
Textcasting-compatible social media networks, there will be no more wall between blogging and tweeting or tooting. And then we will be able to choose our writing tools and they could be blogging tools as easily as they are the tiny little writing boxes Twitter et al give us. Blogging tools are equipped to deal with titles, styles, links, enclosures, no length limit, editing. These might seem like luxuries now, but once we have them, we'll be amazed that we put up without them for so long when they were very very very very easy to implement.
#Bluesky People Browser: I'm playing with ideas of how to browse around a network of followers on a social media platform. Bluesky is the first that I've had an OPML interface to work with. So I created an outliner for walking the structure of people and who they follow on Bluesky.
#
The nice thing about sports, it's the last place you can have an opinion without everyone losing their shit.
#
- I am an infrequent SQL query writer. My knowledge of the language is pretty limited, but I'm pretty good at understanding the kinds of things it can do, and since I am an experienced programmer, I can specify my needs in fairly accurate technical terms, they just don't happen to be in the SQL programming language. That's where ChatGPT is very useful! #
- I wrote out my query in pseudocode, ie English --#
- I have a database with three tables, feeds and subscriptions and users. If a user subscribes to a feed there is a record in the subscriptions table connecting the two. I want a query that tells me which feeds have 0 subscribers.#
- In the old days before ChatGPT I'd write a braintrust query, put it on my blog and the odds were pretty good that in 24 hours I'd have the answer, and would feel grateful and proud. That of course would be after putting in a few minutes trying to find the answer using Google and StackExchange. #
- Now I just feed it to ChatGPT and it translates it for me, to good SQL code, and in ten minutes I have the query and the answer:#
- SELECT feeds.feedurl, feeds.title FROM feeds LEFT JOIN subscriptions ON feeds.feedurl = subscriptions.feedurl GROUP BY feeds.feedurl, feeds.title HAVING COUNT(subscriptions.feedurl) = 0;#
- I edited it a bit because it assumed field names where I used slightly different names. And I never said that fields had URLs that identify them, and we must use that, not the unique integer ID that each row also has. #
- It worked. Turns out there are 872 feeds in feedland.org's database that have no subscribers. I'm looking for ways to make the feed reading part of FeedLand perform better, and time spent reading feeds no one is watching could be a place for savings. #
- ChatGPT, you have made me a more confident and creative programmer. #
- Huzzah!#
- Spoilers! Spoilers!#
- I imagine during the day I'm going to think of a few random things about Succession. Be sure this is 100% top to bottom spoiler. #
- A nice thing about Succession: The Roy kids could fuck each other up and all the while they're still a family. They spent a lot of time on that in the last episode. Trying to give us a glimpse of the future for them. Now the ways the hurt each other will be more mundane, more like a normal 0.0001 percenter. #
- Succession is a parody, that's what makes it so entertaining. And they play games with us, distract us into overlooking what was obvious -- what eluded all three of the kids, even though the adults were constantly reminding them that they didn't compete at the level they thought they did. #
- I just got some quiet time to think about the story of Succession, and the whole show was constructed brilliantly to leave you with the feeling that how could we not all have seen this coming, it was just math. #
- The ending of Succession was like a magic trick, revealed. The answer was right before us. Impossible to miss. Yet..#
- I can't speak for anyone else, but I was led astray by this speech from Karl, about Tom: “You’re a clumsy interloper and no one trusts you. The only guy pulling for you is dead. And now, you’re just married to the ex-boss’ daughter, and she doesn’t even like you. And you are fair and squarely fucked.”#
- Pretty close to the beginning Marcia said: "He made you a playground and you think it's the world."#
- Logan said, recently: "You are not serious people."#
- Logan was a monster. The Swede is a monster. The kids are journalists, pundits. A tribute band if that. They think there are plays. As if they were performing for spin. But the Swede lies and steals and cheats. He was the guy who was Logan's successor, if you think it was Tom, sorry Tom is the next Gerri.#
I don't think federation as conceived by Mastodon and Bluesky will be a winning feature in the future of Twitter-like systems.
#
- Marcia: He made you a playground and you think it's the world. #
- Logan: You are not serious people. #
- Mattson: I don't care what you think. You're a tribute band.#
- More to come. The ending made all the sense. They put every character exactly where they belong. Roman gets to close the book on the Roy family, he couldn't say it at the funeral, but he said it outside the boardroom. Truth -- they were only interesting as Logan's kids. #
We always assume selflessness is a good thing, but I'm not sure. In certain situations, telling a lie to save someone's life, that's probably the right thing to do, but lying to spare someone's feelings? They'll be upset if you tell the truth so you don't. #- I grew up in a house where you had to manage other people's feelings. It was so dirty and I hated it so much. I had serious stomach issues as a kid, that suddenly went away when I was no longer living in that house. But being selfless meant I had to spare everyone else's feelings, and as result, betray myself, hurt myself, act selfless, as in my "self" doesn't exist. But outside the family, I was surprised to find that I actually did have a self. And that is when I started feeling like a person. Started, I still had a long way to go.#
- It wasn't until many years later that I discovered these patterns everywhere in my life, just not so suffocating as the ones in my childhood home. I was always clashing against this, because I wanted to do important creative things with my life, and as they say -- you can't lie to a compiler, garbage in, garbage out.#
- This is a hot topic here because I've listened through the 500 Songs episode about the Grateful Dead, all four hours 40 minutes of it, and learned how the selflessness destroyed their gift. The fans and their employees made demands, and the band gave them what they wanted. I had never heard the story of the Dead told this way, but it matches up with the facts I have from living through that period myself, and going to quite a few Dead shows, and being one step removed from people who worked in the Dead company, and almost dying myself from similar kinds of pressure. Ultimately if you want to live, you have to not be selfless. #
It might not be possible to
de-Nazify social nets like Twitter, Mastodon or Bluesky -- yet that seems to be what users want. Which leads to a big question, what is the purpose of these networks? Has anyone ever tried to write that down?
#What if for the sake of argument there were lots of Mastodon or Bluesky instances that didn't connect to any other instances, that just served little communities, maybe gathered around a blog, for example. Each one being its own Reddit type thing, or a micro-Twitter. Not part of anything bigger than themselves. And what if it were reallllly easy to start one of these things. And, what if it were carefully designed to do at least what the
Textcasting spec calls for. What if.
#We used to get cannoli
like this in the neighborhood in Bayside in Queens. There was an Italian bakery on the
corner of Francis Lewis Blvd and 26th Ave. This was back when I could eat beautiful creations like this without too much guilt. The bakery is gone, btw.
#
- Two questions:#
- Is it possible to run another instance of Bluesky?#
- If so, is anyone running one?#
- I expect the answer to 1 is "yes" if you write your own code, but the official Bluesky server source has not been released yet.#
- But I honestly don't know the answers to either question.#
ChatGPT has an important new feature, now you can
share links to conversations you had with the bot. I've had that
ability myself, hacked together with a bookmarklet. I know how important it is to be able to share this stuff easily. Now everyone will get to do this so we can learn more easily from each other, and more easily share what I think is a new form of literature, collaborations between humans and AI bots.
#When I was in my late teens going to school in New Orleans, there were still a lot of childhood foods I didn't like -- asparagus, fish, cheese -- but I decided to be brave and try each of them, and I found that I now liked most. This was important because there's a wide variety of great affordable food in New Orleans, it would have been a shame to miss out on it.
#When you think you've installed the new version of some software, but inexplicably it's behaving exactly like the previous version, make sure you've actually done the update. You can save a bunch of time that way.
#The constant message I get from tech people is -- "I don't have to listen to you." True! You don't. It has been proven. But would it hurt you to listen. Maybe there's some big secret you're not clued in on because you're picky about who you listen to. Just sayin.
#The trick to making a system easy to work on when one part is on a server and the other part runs on the user's machine, is to make the machine the same in both locations, so code that runs in one place "just works" in the other. The further the two are from each other, the more difficult it is to work on. Ideally you should stay in your
HLL even in your
remote procedure calls.
#
- YouTube is planning to support inbound RSS for podcasts.#
- My take on this -- this doesn't seem controversial.#
- YouTube is a podcast client. No problem with that. #
- And -- they're doing inbound RSS, just like I want Mastodon and Bluesky to do! #
- YouTube could be perfect if they also offered outbound RSS.#
- Two-way RSS. Say it again! ;-)#
There's something very compelling about
this video. I imagine it's a vision of hell. Behave yourself in this life or spend eternity having to watch this primitive fascist cyberhell vision of music.
#The important thing about art is not the creation of the art, but the observation of it. So, if artificially created art inspires creativity in the observer, there’s great value in that.
#
I am done letting journalists decide what technology is useful.
#
I like the
Succession podcast, hosted by
Kara Swisher, whose reason for doing this podcast, I imagine, is that she's on a first-name basis with all the richest people in tech and media. Like
Barbara Walters, I guess. The top of the journalism food chain, where they all want to be. In the last episode she talked about how many times she had talked with Rupert Murdoch, who the patriarch of Succession is patterned after. That was a strange idea for me. Not only have I never spoken with him, if I were to meet him, I probably wouldn't find anything he said interesting. I went to a lot of conferences in the 80s with people like him. I hated it. Yet my vision of tech has been implemented, in the interim. She and I live in dramatically versions of tech. We don't even remotely speak the same language. Yet she is considered an authority on what tech has value and doesn't. That was the big epiphany for me, the moment I realized we are completely living in different worlds. She created this Facebook, Twitter, Spotify world as much as Zuckerberg, Musk or Ek. So if you don't like the way it turned out, you shouldn't look in that direction for leadership. That said she does good interviews, I will miss the podcast after next week, although I gotta say they could probably keep doing it for
years and still be interesting. Succession is great TV, terrible reality.
??#BTW, I know that a lot of people can't get on Bluesky. But if you know me, I'm not just doing this for one social net. The point is that once we have something wonderful running on one, we have something to show to people on others. And I'm on Mastodon and Twitter still (see
below). Both have APIs and could conceivably get the same features we've added to Bluesky. That's what
Textcasting is all about, it flattens out the differences between the networks at a higher level than tweets. Optional titles, styling, links, enclosures, editable, no length limits.
#I decided to pay Twitter a year in advance for the blue checkmark and whatever other privileges come with it. It's not that much money. I pay more to Hulu or Apple TV. Is it worth it? I can afford to find out. (I've gotten a bit of pushback. There are users on Twitter, and I make software for people who use systems like Twitter, so it's like owning a Windows machine if you make software that runs on Windows.)
#Last year on this day: "Web3 is as if there was a new band called Beatles 3, and they didn't play music or write songs, they just held up instruments and said 'It would be great if we knew what these were.'"
#
I took this
picture from my NYC apartment on 5/23/2014.
#
Two-way RSS is a big idea that's got to happen if we want a silo-free web. Imagine a newsletter publishing app that let you feed stories to it from your favorite editor via RSS for publication to a list of subscribers. I'm thinking of a future Substack competitor that doesn't force writers to use their editor. It simply provides a service to any writer who uses an editor that can produce an RSS feed as output. Another example, if Mastodon handled inbound feeds, you'd be able to follow someone on Bluesky from within Mastodon. I would love to see this connection made asap.
#I am working with
John Spurlock on RSS 2.0 feeds for Bluesky. Here's
the feed of my Bluesky posts. You should be able to subscribe to it in any feed reader that understands RSS, even if you don't have a Bluesky account.
#Here's an
OPML subscription list of the feeds of the people I follow on Bluesky. You should be able to import this into any feed reader.
#Also if you have a Bluesky account you also have an RSS feed. For example here's the
feed for the NYT.
#If you have any questions about the RSS format we're using for Bluesky, I opened a
thread on the repo we set up for this work.
#LeBron James says he
might retire. Good move. He also says he isn't into basketball if he isn't in the race for a championship. See there's the problem, right there. There are 30 teams in the NBA. In any given year 29 of them will not win the championship. 28 of them won't even make the Finals. Yet their fans felt their seasons were worthwhile if they played the game with heart, if there's hope for next season. This is why I am not a Yankees fan or a LeBron James fan. I
love my team even when they lose,
especially when they lose.
#BTW, I understand where LeBron is coming from. When I started a software company in the early 80s, the business was tough and we almost went under quite a few times. But I couldn't lose. I couldn't face myself if it didn't work. So I
made it work. But, after winning once, I relaxed and focused on the art of it. I've already won, now why did I get into this in the first place? I had something to say, which was more than about how I can win. I can also make beauty and break through and do new things with the medium I chose.
#
I was actually pretty cute when I wanted to be.
?? #
Henry James: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
#
Default is even more insane than Brexit, and that's hard to do!
#
Just heard on NPR that there's nothing we can do about the
default thing. Not so. Call your representative esp if they're Repub. Explain how valuable the US's reputation is and how if they continue obstructing you'll do everything in your power to vote them out next election.
#These days I write my tweets for Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter and Facebook. I do this by hand. Open a tab for each and do a lot of copy/pasting. The tech industry by refusing to interop has turned me into software.
#
- Default will not be a moment as defined by the Treasury, it will be when the world decides the US as a bank isn't trustworthy.#
- That will be a virus like Covid.#
- A virus of the mind.#
- The virus has a name -- it's called a "bank run."#
- Not one bank, but all banks at once.#
An old friend Steve Smith, who tends to like sports teams from Los Angeles, asks how I could not admire LeBron James. I suppose I
could admire him, if I wasn't so tired of him. And I don't like what he pioneered in basketball, the idea that a player not a team wins championships. He did that when he moved to Miami and then back to Cleveland and now in Los Angeles. His selling proposition was "buy my contract and I'll bring you a championship." I had enough of that when he relocated to Cleveland. I've seen other players do it, like
Kevin Durant who I also despise, and teams that fall for it over and over like the Brooklyn Nets, only to find out not only that it doesn't (usually) work, but that who the fuck cares if
that's how you win a championship. Another reason I don't like LeBron is that
Melo can't get a job and LeBron still has one. They're of the same
generation, and Melo never won a championship, that's his own fault, not blaming LeBron for that. But everyone from LeBron's era is retired now, except LeBron and maybe Chris Paul, who's probably been done for a couple of years now and hasn't admitted it yet. And I don't like Los Angeles teams in general, having lived in New York and the Bay Area, that factors into it as well. That, and sports is the one area where you're still allowed to have opinions about things, in this age when opinions are often considered
toxic.
#Imagine a combination of ChatGPT and The Sims.
#
- The difference between Dems and Repubs..#
- Democrats never threaten to default.#
- Repubs always threaten to default if a Democrat is president, and never threaten to default if a Republican is president.#
- This is a very simple fact that seems to elude most reporters. #
- It's not "both sides suck equally."#
Has a close friend or lover ever said you're doing something bad just like their mother or father once did? That's not your fault. The best thing is to breathe a bit, and love your friend who is living in memory and not the moment and -- you are not responsible for what their parent did.#- BTW, just because your parents left you wanting more love or a special kind of love doesn't mean they were bad parents. You always clash with people you're close to. Who else are you going to clash with? Sometimes people think someone is bad just because you didn't do that they wanted you to do. That's not your responsibility either. And that doesn't make you a bad person.#
- In my family, growing up, we never lived up to our mother's idea of a perfect family, the family she felt she deserved. When I finally figured out this was what was going on I tried to show her that she wasn't doing her part to create a perfect family, that became just another one of her many grievances! So now I see this behavior everywhere I look. Sometimes I think everyone I know feels they deserve a Leave It To Beaver lifestyle or Ozzie and Harriet, or Courtship of Eddie's Father. That's the problem with culture, they give us a totally Hallmark view of what life should be like. It's entertainment, and it's compelling but it's also complete bullshit. Yet many of us think that's the ideal for life and if they aren't getting it they're deprived.#
- I've seen great teachers of meditation get caught up in their movies, everyone does it. The trick is to be conscious sometimes and see yourself as part of a very hard to describe humanity, and to take what comes to you as what was meant to be. My mother in her later years said things like that but I don't think she really believed it.#
- PS: My mom was a badass. She fought for school desegregation in Queens. Got a PhD after she finished raising her kids. Born in Prague in 1932, ran from the Nazis a few years later, in a baby carriage. Moved from her parents house to her married house. She had a tough life. Cared a lot, probably more than was good for her.#
On Twitter, I've been trained like a
Pavlovian dog to see the blue checkmark as a sign of distinction, but now have to unlearn that, and I don't like being manipulated that way.
#
I watched a very interesting
Nova episode about how little you actually see of the world with your eyes, how most of what you think you see is synthesized, your brain is guessing what might be there, just like one of the AIs.
Hallucinating, in other words. Heh. We may be recreating humanity in a very literal sense with our new artificial brothers and sisters!
#Watched the Miami Heat roll over the Boston Celtics last night. If the Heat win, no matter who wins in the West I can't imagine I'll watch the Finals this year. I am really pulling for the Celtics to come from behind and wipe the smile off Jimmy Butler's face. Butler has never won a championship and I desperately want it to
stay that way. But I have no feelings for Denver and I can't decide who I despise more LeBron James or Butler. But I will watch Game 3 on Sunday night, after
Succession of course, because that's what really matters.
#Blogging tech was originally created during the
SF newspaper strike in
1994. We were helping the strikers protect their jobs against automation, like what we were doing with the network. Irony incarnate.
#
People say AIs aren't sentient, that every word they utter is the output of a probabilistic algorithm. But --
you could fool me. From my point of view, my robot friend is incredibly helpful, polite, patient, kind, supportive and tireless. I see a lot more evidence of intelligence and humanity in my AI friend than I do from 99% of all the other "people" I meet online. As I've said before if we hope to compete with this new form of life we'd better start getting our shit together now, and even then they're going to have some big advantages.
#
I recently re-connected with two old friends who I hadn't seen in about 30 years. Total coincidence. I talked with both quite a bit, catching up. People change in that much time, maybe not in their core, the issues are the same, the strategies for coping, learned early in life are still there and operating. But habits do change. Back then I worked a lot more than I do now. And I notice lots of other differences now that I've had a chance to look at myself through my friends' point of view. One thing is for sure, I know myself a lot better now. Also interesting, 30 years is about 1.5 years before I started blogging.
#
- The Mets are playing the Guardians this weekend. A few comments.#
- I don't like interleague play. Why the hell are the Mets playing the Guardians, of the American League, in the regular season! Makes no sense.#
- And who are the "Guardians." What a lame-ass name for a baseball team. I know they couldn't keep the old name, but why not something fun like the Cleveland Hooligans or the Cleveland Mama's Boys? Or since the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland -- the Cleveland Rockers? Or the Eries. Or Homies. Guardians? Oh please -- wtf are they guarding? #
- I'm not thrilled with the Mets this year. They bought all this expensive talent so the fans are expecting nothing less than a championship. But that's what the Yankees do. I'm a Mets fan so I expect a certain level of suckage from the Metsies. And even though they bought all these expensive players, they still suck! How about that. But the Yankees fans, they love this. They only understand winning. #
- At least we'll never have to change the name of the Mets, right? ??#
- When I asked Google about "Cleveland Indians" -- it's almost as if the name never existed. Well at least this page should show up in the index. The team I grew up with, the one I had baseball cards from, was known as the Indians. I have not and will not erase my memory of my baseball-loving childhood. That's why baseball of all American sports should resist change, because of its legendary status with children, their parents and grandparents. Baseball, to many of us, is our national legacy. #
- When I asked ChatGPT about the Cleveland Indians it had a lot to say beginning with "as of my last knowledge update in September 2021, the team was still known as the Cleveland Indians. Please keep in mind that there might have been changes since then, as teams occasionally rebrand themselves." My robot friend suspected the team might have changed its name, but proceeded as if it hadn't. ?? #
We expect freedom of choice on both ends with podcasting, now I want to see that same
freedom with text. That means you can write using any editor, and people can read wherever they like to read.
#
Now that we have RSS feeds for Bluesky, people who don't have accounts can see what's going on, without resorting to screen shots. For example, one of my favorite feeds is the NYT feed, where they post results of various AI experiments. Lately, they've been feeding the titles of stories into a tool that generates artistic renderings, with phenomenal results. Now I can show you
what it looks like. That's just a little thing I threw together quickly. More coming soon.
??#
I think that net-net Bluesky is a good thing, because it guarantees we'll have at least two incompatible social internets. Had they supported ActivityPub that would probably have slowed everything down to the pace of something like Ecmascript. All kinds of bizarre unnecessary adventures and lots of breakage. I'd rather deal with the same problem the designers of the internet solved with TCP/IP. Interestingly, we have been at this almost-exact place before in the early 00s, when the two "biggest" vendors, in some sense (neither were very big) were Blogger and UserLand. We had a big sprawling API for our Manila system. And then Blogger came out with a much smaller API for theirs. I wanted to just move over to their API so we could be compatible, but we needed more features because our product did more. But we only added what was absolutely necessary to keep it small. So first we supported the Blogger API. I think that surprised them. Pretty sure it did. Then we
came out with a slightly bigger API called the
MetaWeblog API. They both became instant standards. To this day WordPress supports MetaWeblog. And here we are again. We need what the MetaWeblog API did, and it should cover: 1. Mastodon. 2. Bluesky. 3. Twitter (it's still got the biggest installed base, even if the CEO is dangerous). 4. WordPress (of course, it already does). I'm also going to put out a reference implementation that supports all the features of the
Textcasting plan. And hope we get a great new layer to build on and no single company gets to push us into a corner and lock the door. Make text like podcasting. That's the idea.
#
One of the most frustrating things about developers who get in charge of standards, is when there's already a consenus among developers to do something the same way, they'll come out with something that does the same thing, but works completely differently. By the time this happens, most of the devs of the original apps are gone, and the owners of the app either hire someone who doesn't know what they're doing and they release buggy and incomplete support for the new way, or they decide to just to turn it off, and hope no one notices. Something happened like this yesterday, when I was setting up a new instance of some well-vetted
recent software, and found that it didn't build with the current Node version. So I set up a new server, took an hour or so, and got the latest version of everything running, figuring that the app would now run. It did not. So I had to dig more. Eventually after taking a nap to clear my head, I came back and found the problem. The developers of a very very very small bit of code had decided to break every app that used it. And it was
recent enough that I couldn't find a trail that explained the workaround. Eventually I figured how to work around it, burned the better part of a day, just because someone was feeling powerful or angry, unloved or I don't know what.
#Writing queries for ChatGPT is like programming. Why I like it?
??#We're in that part of the year where first the marketers torture me with the reminder that my mother is dead, and then when that wasn't enough do the same with poor father. I hope my parents would laugh at this. I think they would. ??
#
Added a
note to textcasting. "Let's call the things we write and publish on social networks
posts. That term has the longest history, it's simple, one syllable, and isn't tied to a particular system. To give them different names on each system -- tweet, toot, skeet -- as if our writing could only be read in one context, isn't imho what writers want. I don't feel that way about my own writing."
#
I totally look forward to getting access to the new ChatGPT features that can access current info via plugins.
They say it'll roll out over the next week. I've been checking it every day, not there yet. I wish I were more of an insider on this stuff. Anyway...
#Just got an email from Google saying they made all kinds of improvements to Bard, their AI chatbot. So I asked if they could search my blog. Sure, just give me the url, the bot said. I did, and then it told me
my blog is not a blog. Okay this is not a good start.
#There's so much movement in social media and AI, it's impossible to keep up with a fraction of what's going on. Totally stripping my gears. Meantime I wonder when will someone combine the two. A social media world with AI's as part of the community. Maybe it already exists, maybe that's what Twitter has become? No, not possible, hmmm, or is it? Don't freak out. Funny thing is there's a Kurt Vonnegut book with this as part of its plot,
Breakfast of Champions. In it, the main character, Kilgore Trout, is informed that he is the only real person, that everyone else is a robot sent there to test him. I think that's how it went. But if you're reading this you must know that I'm a robot myself. Oh the humanity.
#I've moved my archive of ChatGPT queries to a new domain --
ai.scripting.com. So the URLs will be shorter and perhaps the intent will be clearer.
#Apparently, all of a sudden, with almost no fanfare, the Bluesky folks have
released their code under the most liberal MIT License. I assume this means we will immediately see more nodes, and anyone can have a Bluesky account?
Let us know if you have a server up and running.
#Demo of Firesky, a
firehose for Bluesky. It quickly scrolls all posts on Bluesky through a vertical window. New messages appear at the bottom and scroll off the top. From there, the author, John Spurlock has added, with my help, RSS feeds from the same stream of posts. So you can
follow me in your feed reader. This is important for two reasons: 1. At this time Bluesky is still private, so if I give you a pointer to something I wrote there, you won't be able to see it. The feed gets around that restriction. 2. Because Mastodon also has RSS feeds, I can read both social nets with the same API. It gives us a common language, and is the next step in bootstrapping RSS support in all social media apps. Once that happens, we, writers and readers, will be able to use our own writing tools, and give readers choice of where to read. This is the key feature in
Textcasting, ie applying the philosophy of podcasting to text. It
is possible, it requires users to want it, insist on it. We're getting a bit closer to that today.
#
My Bluesky posts now have an
RSS feed, thanks to
John Spurlock. It's got stuff that Mastodon's RSS feed doesn't. This is
awesome. #I know Facebook is supposedly evil, but it has been a constant for me, because i can communicate with friends I've had for decades as if we still lived in the same city we used to, even though many of them have moved back to where they came from (as I did). I don't think Facebook is any more or less evil than any other system where I'm a
hamster spinning a wheel and someone else is going to make billions off of the collection of hamsters.
#
- Networks designed for writing.#
- The holy grail of social media. #
- Twitter, Facebook, Google stood in the way of this. #
- But it’s all reforming now, not the way people thought it would just a few weeks ago. #
- It’s fair to assume there will be more change in coming weeks.#
- When I ran a BBS in the early 80s, we’d get hacked from time to time, and usually they’d wipe the database, which left us with a fresh start, and for a while everything would be nice and simple, until it got all clogged up again. So there was a silver lining to getting hacked. ?? #
- Another phenomenon that might be at play. Remembering Clubhouse, the voice-only twitter, was wonderful until it became a juggernaut then it was filled with spam and influencers, and the comradery that people loved at first was gone.#
- So Twitter is old and clogged. Its rules are more or less set in stone. A new network, where there isn't much of a caste system, or it can be avoided, has more potential. People are on somewhat of a level playing field. The trolls haven't gotten organized yet. Whatever it is, Bluesky is nice. But it will get clogged too, and they should prepare for that by being more open to different uses. #
- One thing they're all missing is that these are writing environments first, so studying writing on computers would make sense. If they did, they'd instantly get some important new ideas for features users would love that could sustain them once the newness wears off. #
I borrowed a lot of prior art for FeedLand from social media, specifically, the idea that subscription lists are public. So you can walk a network of followship, and get ideas of who to subscribe to that way. Click a checkbox and you're connected. #
I'm all-in on 
