![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/scripting.com/images/2024/05/05/marchOnWashington.png)
You say you want Biden to step down. You've been heard. This is the President of the United States. If you don't respect the man at least respect the office.
#
Congrats to Threads on a good first year. Looks like I
signed in on opening day,
July 5, 2023. They have done a good job of slipping into the spot previously occupied exclusively by Twitter.
#
Threads gives you a virtual
ticket stub for when you join, nice touch.
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Threads: "The reason people are finally talking about Project 2025 is because an actress used her platform to bring attention to it when the media failed to."
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This year I'm thinking how we can boot up a source of news that has the balance we deserve. Now that the Supreme Court is no longer keeping up any pretense of respecting the Constitution, and journalism is either colluding, or preparing for their meeting with a military tribunal in March next year, followed by, if lucky, a re-education camp, we need help knowing what's real and what's
not.
#
I hear that cancelling a NYT subscription is wicked hard. That
alone makes me feel like cancelling. I cancelled their morning email of things I need to know about. It's one thing for them to exclusively report on Biden's age in their space, but my mailbox is mine. Get the F out of my mailbox.
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Gordon McLean asks: "If I was to move my blog away from WordPress, what platform is simplest?"
#
Truth be told one of the reasons I added it now was because I wanted a place to use the new
easter egg Nakedjen recorded for me (and you).
#
- My blog is also a podcast. I wonder if anyone else does that. #
- The title of this episode is "A peneer of legitimacy," but what I really meant is veneer. #
I describe a dream where the owner of the NY Times is, in March 2025, being tried by a military tribunal for not sufficiently helping Trump get re-elected as he was told to do. Sulzberger, in his own defense, points out that they covered Biden's Age, the official new version of Hillary's Emails, while ignoring other possible issues. #
- The tribunal returns with its verdict and hilarity ensues as the punishment, secret until revealed, is administered. #
- The crowd goes crazy! "Too late! Not enough! Go to hell!" #
- The host of the show is Bart Simpson. #
- It could happen.#
- 3 minutes.#
Olbermann calls on Biden to resign, making Harris the incumbent.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/07/03/smallerPatrioticKitty.png)
Somehow, even though I watched an hour of news on MSNBC last night, and was on all the social media all day, I didn't hear about Pelosi's comments, or the leaked poll data, until this morning. It wasn't until I looked at the synopsis of Olbermann's podcast that I learned that something had changed. For whatever reason, even though I have made a significant investment in time to stay informed, it isn't working. Fact.
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If something like this happens and you haven't seen it in my linkblog, or on my blog's home page, please post a link to my
Mastodon account.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/07/02/kitty.png)
Listen to
today's Countdown podcast. I was cheering out loud during the first segment. When you read this
post, you'll see why. I tried listening to the NYT Daily podcast today, but it made me hate them all over again, starting with saying how great a week it has been for Trump. You can say that, imho, but you have to say right after that, that it was a terrible week for the rest of us. Because any good news for Trump is awful news for everyone else. And I do mean everyone, including the people who plan to vote for him again.
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Chief Justice John Roberts: βI will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.β
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They edited the Constitution the way board members of tech companies design software products, with no idea how it works.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/07/02/spiced.png)
My favorite soft drink these days is
Coke Cherry Zero. It's got a really nice taste. Went to the store today, they only had one 12-pack, but they also had a 12-pack of
Coke Spiced Zero. I decided to give it a try. I had a can at lunch and it's weird but okay I guess, but the belches are strongly flavored and that's
realllly weird. It took me a while to figure out where this
belch-breath was coming from. It tastes like I took some very strong medicine. The weirdest soft drink I've ever had. But it kind of grows on you. I'll try another one and let you know how it goes.
#
I post stuff to
Facebook that could get inundated with hateful comments. I have a pretty good idea upfront which ones those are. I go ahead and post them. At the first sign of flameage I turn comments off, with a
simple explanation. "I turned off comments here. I didn't want to have a discussion about this, it's just an observation." I think this is totally legit and more people should do it. Really frees you up to say what you see.
#
BTW, this is what the new podcast feed
looks like viewed in feeder.
#
- This is the first of two podcasts for today. #
- It started out being one podcast, but I hit the wrong button after 14 minutes and ended up with two audio files instead of one.#
- I don't like editing, so you get two for the price of one. :-)#
- It's a rambler, starts out with me talking about Elie Mystal on abortion and slavery. #
- The second podcast explains how we're in a war, and it's about time we recognized it as such. #
- We need the Democrats to do what we elected them to do, save the freaking United States, which by the way after yesterday's decision by the Supreme Court, doesn't really exist any longer. We go into that in the second episode. #
- It's not enough to win the election. We have to get the Supreme Court back to a semblance of what it was. They're behaving in a way that's inconsistent with the continued existence of the country they're supposed to be part of the government of. #
- But we can have a laugh along the way. The world hasn't completely fallen apart, yet. π #
- 14 minutes.#
- This is the second of two podcasts for a two-podcast Tuesday, today.#
- Very likely there will be another tomorrow. #
- So much going on! π#
- 25 minutes.#
- This is a lightly edited version of a post on Threads. #
- I understand why the Dems don't want to be the first to use the new rule passed by the Supreme Court, but I think they should consider this plan:#
- Arrest the members of the Supreme Court who just voted for the new rule about presidential immunity.#
- Nominate six replacements, sorry no Repubs this time.#
- The Senate ratifies them.#
- Once they're installed, they hold an emergency session to restore Roe v Wade, and to undo all the other crazy BS they did and then revoke the new rule, and re-assert the rule of law that especially applies to the president.#
- And I don't know what they do with the ones they arrested but frankly I don't care. Leave them in jail until they figure it out.#
- And it's about time Trump was arrested and held without bail, so he can't do any more damage to the US while awaiting trial. #
- Patrick LaForge, a longtime friend who works at the NYT: "I think the distinction here is that the president can't be prosecuted for violations of law but they would still be acts unsupported by law that a court could block or an agency could refuse to carry out. But they sure have created a mess."#
- My response: Maybe starting to do it is enough to get the courts to undo the mess asap.#
Every day now feels like another January 6.
#
Our challenge is to make sure the really interesting stuff happens on the open web, outside the silos. If that happens we can go on. Otherwise we go right back to where we were when Twitter and Facebook dominated. Not a good place. 17 years of stagnation
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/03/13/corectblogroil.png)
A new version of
Blogroll Browser. You can now go directly to the OPML version of a blogroll, and to the HTML page we discovered it in. I know all this must seem strange, hard to figure out what's going on. That's how I feel about it too. But I know there's interesting data here, how people are connected to people. I'm still trying to figure out how to make a browser that engages the mind in that. It can take a long time to figure these things out. I had the basic idea for a blog in 1994, but it wasn't until 1999 that we really had it figured out and implemented for non-techies. This may be like that, or the browser might be just around the corner.
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The buggy images of ChatGPT perfectly fit the blogger
come as you are ethos. We called this
Dogma 2000, the site is gone now, and it's even gone in archive.org. Sad to realize some of the simplest most worthwhile ideas are gone now.
#
When talking to ChatGPT think of it as
Commander Data on Star Trek, who, in an interesting turnabout is a robot played by a human. Oh the humanity.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/07/01/everyDay.png)
Thanks to NakedJen for this beautiful illustration.
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- I just did an approx 40 minute podcast interview and discussion with Jeff Jarvis. I know Jeff from the early days of blogging. He was one of the best discussion leaders at BloggerCon. And he's an accomplished author and educator. #
- We talk about how to organize news for people who are information starved by whatever it is that our news sources are doing, which is really hard to figure out, but in the end (I argue) who cares why, we have a problem to solve, so let's get on with it.#
- I talk about the blogging at the Dean campaign in 2004, that's how they got around journalism. I'm sure that's where we have to go, put together what we think would be the Biden blog if the campaign was being run by Joe and Nicco, and I'd be on board, so would Jeff, and we'd help Heather Cox Richardson, and amplify anyone who is making sense and supports democracy. #
- It could be funded by the People's PAC, or something like it. It wouldn't take very much money, it's just a blog. But it would have powerful ideas that cut through the bullshit, and great videos, and we'd organize marches where people show up to help people.#
- And the campaign would never stop, we'd always be organizing.#
- This is the discussion I wanted to start. #
- Hope you enjoy! :-)#
- PS: Jeff's mike is much better than mine. Gotta work on that. #
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/30/podcastLogo.png)
Today's
podcast, what we need from Biden, and how we need journalism to get out of the way. Biden has a base. He should communicate directly with us. Joe, tell us you saw what we saw. A snake oil salesman. A con man. A loser. A criminal. We heard the tape of him blackmailing the Secretary of State of Georgia. He wanted the military to shoot Black Lives Matter protestors. Did he sell our secrets to Putin and others? He did all kinds of horrible stuff that the press has forgotten to talk about. The biggest problem here isn't Biden's age, though it is a problem, it's the controlling nature of our journalism, and the lack of any oversight. They can't be criticized because all we have are our individual voices, with no organization. We keep paying the price. This podcast is in the form of a voicemail to an old friend,
Jeff Jarvis, who I introduce at the beginning of the podcast. We share the same frustrations, I can see it in his posts on various social media networks. I'd like to elevate our discourse. And in the meantime, imho, it's a pretty good story.
10 minutes. π#
Not sure if it ever came out why
Trump stole the secret docs. Did he sell copies? If so, for how much and to whom. This would make an excellent news story. I imagine President Biden knows all about this, btw.
#
- The list (in alphabetic order)#
- Black lives matter #
- Climate change response#
- Democrats respect our democracy#
- Fair taxes for the 1 percent#
- Immigrants built America#
- Restore balance to the Supreme Court#
- Restore Roe v Wade#
- So Trump is prosecuted for his crimes#
- There could be another pandemic#
- Trump wants to be a Putin oligarch#
- Trump wants to be an autocrat#
- Trump will bring us Holocaust 2.0#
- Trump will surrender to Russia#
- This is a snapshot of the FAQ page. #
- ChatGPT provides better support for other people's products than they do. For example, I signed up for a trial subscription to BritBox on Amazon Prime, and a few days later decided I didn't want to continue. Amazon is famous for having terrible docs, in every part of the system. They made it basically impossible for me to quickly find the place where you unsubscribe. Okay so I asked ChatGPT and it knew how to do it, and I was unsubscribed in a few seconds. This feature pays for the whole $20 this month, everything else is a bonus. #
Another example. Something seemed screwed up in Caddy, a wonderful product, makes it super easy to support HTTPS. But the docs were written by programmers, and thus lack a user's perspective. Pretty common thing, and hard to avoid. So I asked ChatGPT questions to help me dig into the problem. It's annoyingly overly verbose, it answers questions I didn't ask, and thus wastes time, but -- in about ten minutes it put something on a checklist which turned out to be the problem. It's hard to debug a system problem you weren't expecting to have. The robot doesn't need to have its memory refreshed, unlike my 69-year-old human brain. #
- When I write these little stories I hope to counter the fear hype out there, because ChatGPT is an amazingly useful breakthrough product. I'm always finding new incredible uses for it. Products like this come along at most every twenty years or so. I've created some good software in my life, but nothing like this. This is like the Beatles or the web. It's that difference-making. #
Challenging questions: Why don't journalists cover the Biden base? Do they even consider the possibility that there is one? Or do they think they are the base? I thought they weren't supposed to care who the nominees are? Why do they feel entitled to say one candidate should withdraw but not the other? Have any of them even thought this through?
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/11/nakedJenToday.png)
The debate got the presidential race to another level. It also caused the NYT et al to fully decloak. It was impossible to watch, but it was also honest. We all knew but pretended we didn't that Biden has the kind of trouble he has. We voted for him anyway in 2020, and we will again in 2024. And Trump, what he did was worse than lying, it's a con job, because as soon as he takes office he's going to surrender to Putin. And stop fighting climate change. And destroy what's left of our democracy. And open the concentration camps and make the Jews pay for it. Biden can be president, the news orgs have to decide to let him be and stop trying to control the rest of us. We can make this work. Not the Democrats or Republicans, the Americans.
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I just gave another $100 to
Biden/Harris. We love Joe, come what may.
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This is my ideal for the
size of a social network. I have actually had networks this size in the past. When it clicks, it's really great.
#
- Every day when I play Wordle, I present it as the work of fictitious character I created with the help of ChatGPT: Wordle Kitty. #
- Now there's a family of Wordlers. A monkey, a bunny even Raines Cohen, a friend from the 80s in Silicon Valley. #
- I'm using Facebook for this because my friends there are the people I want to share it with. #
- The latest character is the Angry Old Gray Lady. She's horrible, evil, standing in the way of us getting back to America, for real, not the fascist con job from Maga Lardo. #
Wordle Kitty, the original wordler, a pioneer of new kitten culture.
#
Wordle Bunny, loves fresh fruit and vegetables, speaks at the UN.
#
- PS: I almost forgot Standards Kitty, Patriotic Kitty.#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2020/11/07/newYorkerCover.png)
New Yorker cover in 2016.
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A
podcast about the debate. We needed one thing from Biden, to believe he's got this. It didn't happen. Okay what's next.
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Today's song: "Respect yourself, respect yourself, respect yourself."
#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/28/cherryCokeZero.png)
I don't want to write about last night's debate. But if I did, I'd say there's nothing to be done, we just have to let this play out. Even if Biden were to step aside, that would just open the convention and there are lots of Democrats who would see this as their opportunity to be the FDR or Lincoln of the 21st century. There would be no nominee until after the convention, maybe it wouldn't be so bad for the Democrats to have everyone's full attention for a few months. There will be lots of polls, that's for sure. In the meantime, I'm going to try to enjoy the summer, it's beautiful here in the mountains north of the city, and I have some software to finish. And of course I will vote for Democrats straight down the line in the coming election.
#
I've started a FAQ for
why we should vote for Biden in November. I would have liked to have been looking at this list last night at the debate, to remind myself that even if the President had trouble explaining it in words, there were still good reasons to vote for him.
#
- I wanted to see what was out there in blogrolls, so I wrote an app that started from my own blogroll, and looked for feeds I was subscribed to that also had blogrolls, following the conventions we outlined in March.#
- It then starts at each of the blogrolls I found in my list, and did the same thing with them, until I ran out of lists to look at.#
- And the whole thing runs again a few minutes later. #
- It found a bunch of them, so then I threw together a simple user interface that lets you click on the title of a blogroll in a list in the left panel, and view the actual blogroll in the right panel. Here's a screen shot.#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/28/blogrollbrowser.png)
Screen shot of the Blogroll Browser.
#
- You can see it at browser.blogroll.social.#
- A caveat -- what you see here is just an experiment. I don't expect this app to be up for any period of time. It's here just to learn from. Part of a bootstrap perhaps.#
- PS: Cross-posted on micro.blog.#
Podcast: The Fediverse is doomed unless subscription gets easy, fast. Twitter kicked butt when it came out in 2006 and the butt it kicked was the
feediverse. Why? Because it was too damned hard and unnecessarily complicated to subscribe to a feed. In Twitter there was a button on each feed page that said Subscribe. Click the button and you're subscribed. That's it. May sound like a small matter, but it's not. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I've been dying to say that. 12 minutes.
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Summary of yesterday's news: You should now be able to subscribe to my podcasts. Use the search function in your favorite podcast client and look for
Scripting News. This is what it
looks like in Apple Podcasts, for example.
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Wordle Kitty hunkers down in an epic battle with Wordle Monkey on stage at Carnegie Hall in NYC for the honor of kittens everywhere. She ultimately prevails, but not without a brush with disaster! The NY Times judges her performance as merely βgreat!β#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/26/kittenAbides.png)
The Kitten Abides!
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And the
FAQ for the feed, linked to in the feed.
#
- How the logo for the podcast-only feed was designed.#
- I turned to ChatGPT of course. It came breathtakingly close on the first attempt, but it repeated part of the story. Every time I asked it to fix a problem, it created another problem, and the image brightness was reduced, not just in terms of pixels but also the creativity of the image. Of course it isn't really creative. I know. Yadda yadda. #
- Finally I got something that I could live with that I liked but was imperfect. I decided that since the motto of my blog is "It's even worse than it appears" that an obvious imperfection is totally consistent with the philosophy, and we move onward. As they say, still diggin!#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/25/scriptingNewsInlineImageVersion.png)
It's even worse th*@#it appears.
#
- The prompt for the image: "I'm sure you're aware of my blog, Scripting News, scripting.com. I am doing a new podcast feed for the blog. This feed is designed to get through Apple's submission process so it can be listed in their podcast database. One of the requirements is a 3000 by 3000 image that serves as a logo for the podcast. I need something simple and bold that says 'Scripting News podcast' and then 'With Dave Winer and friends' and 'It's even worse than it appears.' On a background of corn fields in Iowa viewed from the air."#
I
want to be able to run Frontier on the new Macs, but was disappointed that VMware doesnβt work and had given up on the idea. But I just learned that UTM might work. Hereβs the
transcript of my inquiry. Wondering if
anyone has had good experience using UTM to run older Mac software on Apple CPUs.
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Heard an interview show on NPR where they went to laundromats and asked people about the upcoming election. Big surprise they say pretty much exactly what they say on the news about the candidates, all of it
bothsidesisms and no mention of the fascism coming our way if we go one direction. It's all everyone's fault, so why bother voting, is mostly what they say. SMH in disbelief.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/03/12/macpaint.png)
If you think you understand the significance of RSS, I bet you don't. Please listen to the
14-minute podcast I
posted yesterday for the real story. We should learn from this and not repeat the same mistake, and of course until the real story is out, we can't learn from it. Let's get it right on the Wikipedia page. It isn't about Guha or Libby, me, or whoever. It's really about the power of Netscape and the early web news publishing companies that supported RSS, and the blogging systems that jumped on board (including my own products) and then two years later, the NYT coming on board, followed by the entire news industry. A bunch of nerds arguing on a mail list is
not the story. With the benefit of well over twenty years hindsight this should, by now, be kind of obvious.
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Threads could make it a lot easier for us to cross-post to their system, esp since they say they will support ActivityPub. As it is there are too many hoops to jump through imho. I think basically they all want you to use their UI's which amounts to writing in
tiny little textboxes of course.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/24/wordleKittyImpressive.png)
Another impressive day for Wordle Kitty!
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/23/scriptingNewsAd.gif)
I'm going to start a new podcast-only feed, and
this will be first episode. 14 minutes. It tells the story of RSS as a remarkable coming-together of tech, news, publishing and blogging. The first burst came from Netscape and four leading web pubs, Salon, Red Herring Wired and Motley Fool. As a leading blogger and developer of blogging tools, I jumped on board as soon as I heard of it, as did the people at Blogger. RSS was an instant standard with a great installed base, and retained its simplicity. You have no idea how remarkable that is. It grew like a weed. An installed base developed. There was confusion for a couple of years, between 2000 and 2002, about what RSS was, but the market stayed with the format specified by Netscape in 1999. Then in 2002, at UserLand we did a deal with the NY Times to get their news flowing through RSS, and in the next year, the
entire news world supported RSS. That's the story. You can write all about who did what in a background story, but the big story, the miracle, mostly remains untold. What matters is an open format took root and retained its simplicity. And it pays to understand why it was not a strong enough foundation to be successful, first because the vendors didn't work with each other, and then because Twitter made subscription one click, where it was ridiculous how hard it was to subscribe to a feed in RSS. We should learn from this, and not repeat the same mistakes, and of course until the real story is out there, we can't learn from it. This is a 14-minute podcast. I cut off the last five minutes because I got lost in the weeds. All of this is documented in the archive of this blog and the sites it points to. And if there's interest I'll happily talk about it in a future podcast.
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I saw a
Tesla truck parked in Woodstock yesterday. I wasn't prepared for how big it was. It's an impressive looking machine.
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There's a new star in the kittyverse,
Wordle Kitty. I let her do my Wordle-play. Today, she was
feeling a little under the weather so Wordle Kitty checked into the town urgent care center where they gave her some medicine which gave her the strength for a βsplendidβ performance at the days Wordle puzzle. So while sheβs feeling a bit ill under it all is a feeling of splendor and the usual over the top cuteness! :-)
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/23/wordleKitty.png)
The splendor of Wordle Kitty.
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Manton Reece: "I really dislike the Mastodon setting to require HTTP signatures for everything. It makes basic features like just grabbing some JSON for an actor more difficult. The userβs profile is on the public web anyway! We need apps that work natively with the web on its own terms, not more protocol layers."
#
- Jon Stewart said something interesting β and imho correct, that news is about the past. #
- When they cover things that havenβt happened, thatβs not news.#
- He said news should be like jury duty. Rigorous and decisive.#
- That makes total sense, and gives a pretty good idea of how far off course we are.#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/21/wordleKittyHello.png)
The best software does one thing well, that a lot of people want to do, that there is no other way to do. I've never seen this, but it's the ideal.
#
There's a new kitten to keep track of --
Wordle Kitty. When I need to score a big win, I turn Wordle over to this kitten and she does a
kickass job while remaining as cute as can be.
#
Thanks for all the good advice via email and
Mastodon re best way to
record an interview podcast in 2024. I'm really getting into this. I'm definitely going to come up with a nice pure podcast feed for Scripting News. But first I have some new software to ship.
π#
- More and more I see comments, unless explicitly asked for, as spam that I'd disable if I could. #
- Most of the energy in social networks these days goes into keeping the garbage out of replies. If originators had stronger tools, there would be less work for the platform to do, and overall happier people. #
- On Facebook, I often limit comments to friends, who don't tend to spam, presumably because we like to stay on good terms, and spam is an imposition, at best, and often insulting.#
Why did the Podcast 2.0 people reinvent
rssCloud? That's the kind of bullshit Google does. We don't do that in the open formats and protocols world. What really pains me is they claim to follow
my Rules for Standards-makers. Imho they do not. Two rules apply.
Rule #1 says the only reason we do this is interop. It's called Rule #1 for a reason. And the
one way rule a little further down the page. I've seen this happen twice where people say they abide by the
RFSM but then do exactly the opposite of what it says to do. We have to do this better people. Come on. Also come up with something more humble than the name you've chosen. We've been down this path. The only way it ends is in
tears.
#
Now that I'm publishing a podcast feed designed to be read in commercial podcast clients, I'm learning for the first time how they work. For example, they seem to list shows not in the order they discovered them, as I do in my products, rather in order of pubDate. So when I set the dates on the shows from 2004 to their actual dates, that would have worked if I hadn't made a
mistake in GMT-encoding the dates. Stupid programmer (me). Now they will show up first in the lists forever unless I switch to that form of dates. This so totally sucks. I wish there were something in RSS to say "Hey readers dump your cache now, let's start over, because I fcuked up." It wouldn't have mattered anyway, I'm sure none of them would listen, right?
#
ChatGPT is the Ozempic of online info-finding. Neither is a panacea, there are side-effects, but both make possible great feats that weren't possible before, and both have come about just in the last year or two.
#
Until recently I was always unsure of how to use CSS, been that way for many years. Then I started to use ChatGPT and could ask it how to do things, and Iβve gotten much closer to the designs I wanted, and Iβm getting better at it with every project I do.
#
I'd like to do a series of interview-style podcasts. I'm
wondering if there are any services set up to make this easy. Or should we just use Zoom, and record the audio somehow?
#
People of my generation (born 1955) are at the point in our lives when we would feel better if we got credit for our accomplishments, good intentions, the ways we made the world better, but itβs dawning on us that we didnβt make as much of a difference as we hoped to, and what little we did accomplish will largely go unrecognized. Even worse, none of it, even in the short term, made much of a difference. πThreads API reminds me wh
#
- I started to write the code to hook up my linkblogger to Threads, but it led me to the same website with all my broken Facebook apps, the ones that stopped working when they shut down the API after the 2016 election. A reminder that this is still Facebook. And while I don't blame them for shutting down the APIs, the whole experience left a really bad feeling. #
- So I backed out of the project to give it some more thought. Do I really want to go down this road?#
- And of course I had the cute little kitten illustrate.#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/20/kittenStartledByThreadsAPI.png)
The kitten is startled by the Facebook developer site.
#
- A cute little kitten is sitting at a desk with a laptop, preparing to write an app. The laptop screen shows code for the Threads API from Meta. The kitten has a surprised and concerned expression as she looks at the developer site on another screen, which shows a Facebook logo and reminds her of the events of 2016. In the background, a calendar shows the year 2024. The scene is set in a cozy room with soft lighting and a few toys scattered around, giving it a homely feel.#
- Here is the image of the cute yet sad "Standards Kitty." She feels the pain of someone reinventing something while claiming to support open standards. Despite her tears, she's still really adorable.#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/20/standardsKittyIsSad.png)
Standards Kitty is sad.
#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/11/nakedJenToday.png)
Today's
podcast-zero episode is up. It's from June 14, 2004. It's 1/2 of a panel in 1991 that I was on with Bill Gates. This is before the turn to the web. At this point I'm starting to look around for audio that might fit into this new audio blog channel that goes with my written blog.
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Technical note. I made a
mistake in converting local time to GMT in the code that builds the feed. My times were off by four hours. So I corrected them. And now instead of three items in the feed, according to my own feed software, there are now six. I bet all the
other systems will do the same thing because the guid is a function of the creation date of the item, and they changed. Oh well. At least the
RSS version only has three items. I think I should change how the guid works.
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Here's a game you can play. Every time you think "good" immediately say "gouda." For some reason it's funny.
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I asked ChatGPT to
write a Hello World app for Threads. Here's
the code. I haven't tried running it yet.
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- One of the cool things about the way I designed FeedLand internally is that there are various levels of feed stuff. If you want to start over at any level, you can, and today I'm doing exactly that. But first here's the stack:#
- At the lowest level is the reallysimple package, which reads any feed and returns a consistent JavaScript object, so the database code only ever sees one kind of feed. All the differences between RSS and Atom are flattened, and features from the source namespace are included, where they are present. #
- Above that level is the feedlanddatabase package, which has a Node API that does all the stuff with the SQL database that FeedLand runs off. So if all you want to do is add feeds, subscribe to them, add a user, subscribe to a reading list, build a river, all that stuff is at this level. This is the level at which I'm going to start building today.#
- Next level up is the feedland package, which implements the REST interface, and handles all the runtime stuff that the FeedLand client needs.#
- And the final level is the one the user interacts with, it runs in the browser, and makes the REST calls to the feedland server. All the rendering of the objects coming out of the database via the REST interface happens here. #
- In an application I'm working on, I found myself reimplementing features of FeedLand, and I stopped myself and said, nooooo use the API that's already there. The advantages are many, including I will be able to use FeedLand to manage the data structures. So that's what I'm doing. Wish me luck.#
- I loved being my own DJ with Napster, and none of the execs or journalists figured out that this was the appeal of getting all the music out from behind the incredibly obsolete and brutal paywall that the music industry had concocted. They didn't give a shit about the users except they wanted our money, there was no love in the connection between the creativity of the artists and the creativity of the users. We supposedly didn't have any. #
- I'm like Emmett Chapman, an accomplished musician who created a new kind of musicial instrument for himself and others to use. That's what I do with software. I play the tools I make. But what I really get off on is the music the users make. I was thinking about my father yesterday, it would have been his 95th birthday. He died at 80, so there's been plenty of time to process his life as I knew it. The best connection he and I had was silent. I inherited my love for outliners from him, yet that love was latent probably for hundreds of generations in our family. I had the skill and creativity to create such a tool, and finally the technology existed, and he let his son turn his mind upside down and inside out. For that he would say Every day is Father's Day. That may be my greatest accomplishment.#
- I was chatting with my brother yesterday, ChatGPT came up, and I thought (and said) I bet dad would have loved ChatGPT. Then I thought of our uncle Ken, on my mother's side, and said he would have shit his pants over ChatGPT. Ken spent literally hours every day with the meager reference tools he owned in his off the grid cottage near St Augustine. The way I love ChatGPT is the way he would have loved it. I'm absolutely sure of it. My paternal grandfather would have loved it, and I expect my great uncle Arno who was a pioneer of zettlekasten would have also lost his shit over ChatGPT.#
- Which leads me to the art of a user of ChatGPT (which really needs a shorter name). People's first reaction is that by creating art with ChatGPT I'm stealing. Bollocks. I'm creating. I'm not even going to validate that with a rebuttal. I am proving it with the Patriotic Kitten thread, the next of which I will now entertain you with. #
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/19/patrioticKitten2.png)
The second patriotic kitten.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/18/patrioticKitty.png)
My second Podcast0 episode is up. Here's the
RSS 2.0 feed. And the
page for the episode on Apple Podcasts.
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I'm highly motivated to support the newly released Threads API, but a quick look indicates that it's a fairly large project. All I want to do is cross-post, along with Masto and Bluesky. I did both those a loooong time ago. But I really want my links to go to threads, and also create a thread-writer for it like the one I did for Twitter and Bluesky. There's no shortage of really interesting projects now, so I think I'm going to have to wait to do this for a while. If anyone makes a really simple Hello World for Threads for Node.js that would make my day.
π#
For people who use
Electric Drummer. If you accidentally close a file that's open and want it to re-appear in its previous position, you can edit your prefs.json file. You can find it by choosing
Open Data Folder from the File menu. You'll see prefs.json. Open it in a text editor, and make the changes you want -- carefully. Probably a good idea to make a copy of the file before editing. But I just did it and laughed out loud, why didn't I think of this before? Heh.
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I can also set up a separate feed for Scripting News podcasts, and I'm definitely going to do that too. If this idea catches on I'd like to
collect and share interesting podcast0's.
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Here's a
screen shot of the post from 2004 in Pocketcasts. The arrow points at the date. It's cool that a podcast from 20 years ago appears to work. I wonder how it'll sort in the Most Recent lists?
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- I was talking with a friend over the weekend about the origins of podcasting, and how, in June of 2004, I finally decided to do an audio post, to get my feet wet, and to prove all you needed was a laptop and a little software and you could be doing radio almost as easily as writing a blog post. #
- That was June 11, 2004. #
- Then it hit me, it's June 2024 now, it's been twenty freaking years. #
- In hindsight, that podcast was the start of the bootstrap that saw a dozen shows by September and then hundreds and thousands, and now here we are, podcasting has been through quite a few bursts of growth and it's still as open as it was back in June 2004. #
- Anyone with a laptop can do a podcast. That was the goal. You don't need anyone's permission. That was a breakthrough in radio. Prior to that, you had to get a lot of approval, and every step made it less real and less interesting, imho. #
- My partner in this at the time was Adam Curry. Sometime in that period he started The Daily Source Code, and then we did a podcast together for a few months called Trade Secrets. My own podcast was called Morning Coffee Notes. #
- So I thought, why not do a Serial-like podcast over the next few months, with the actual programs from 2004, along with the Trade Secrets shows. I think I have them all archived. And it would be great if Adam did the same with his shows, starting when they started. And Dawn & Drew, Dave Slusher. This can go on forever if you like. (I promise mine won't.)#
- So here's the URL for the podcast.#
- http://scripting.com/podcast0/rss.xml#
- I'm sure there will be a lot of cringeworthy moments, but what the heck. I'll hopefully have the feed up before the end of the day, and I'll register it with Apple so will hopefully be transcripts. #
- I hope I can count on you to spread the word, this is how the podcasting bootstrap happened. If you want to learn how two weird geek hippie types like Adam and myself, can have an idea, and then by constantly trying out new approaches, eventually it sticks and becomes a new medium that's still thriving twenty years later. #
- It should be quite a story! :-)#
- Here's a picture of myself and Adam at Gnomedex in the summer of 2004. And that's the laptop I used to make all these podcasts. I was living in Seattle at the time. #
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/17/gnomedexDaveAdam.png)
Dave and Adam at Gnomedex in 2004.
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- PS: Here's the Apple Podcasts page. #
- I love the creativity of ChatGPT, some call it hallucinations, but maybe all the rest of this stuff is hallucinating, maybe only ChatGPT sees what's real? Could be. #
- This was the prompt: "PODCAST0 from Dave Winer with occasional appearances by Adam Curry, all original 2004 podcasts, the very first podcasts in the galaxy, and possibly the universe."#
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/17/allthepodcasts.png)
All the original 2004 podcasts.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/16/rssCover.png)
I've written a crawler for the network of blogrolls via
connective links in HTML and/or RSS feeds. When I started the project, I had no idea what I'd find. How many blogrolls of what quality. I still don't know the extent of it, but there's a non-trivial number of blogrolls out there. I'm thinking about ways to get a handle on all the feeds in all the blogrolls, and see what we get from that. And I'm beginning to see the utility of
FeedLand as a feed operating system, which is what I wanted it to be. It's not just a feed reader. It's able to do things most feed readers don't do, maybe none do. We don't have a good grasp of the depth of the feed products either. I will of course share the results when they are shareable.
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Three movies I've watched in the last few days: 1. Fight Club. 2. The Matrix. 3. The Devil's Advocate. I had seen all of them before. But they go together. And they're all about the same thing, about choosing to live in a dream, or to live the life you're actually living. All three are excellent movies that I watched straight through from beginning to end, which is really unusual for me these days.
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This would make a great campaign ad. Remember how lost we were. Understand what you're voting for when you go MAGA and what you could get if you sit this one out or cast a protest vote of some kind.
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- RSS has never been on the cover of a magazine, so you can't say ChatGPT is stealing this from anyone. In fact I'm offended on behalf of ChatGPT that the press has chosen to focus on the idea that it's plagiarizing journalists. The ideas journalists write about do not belong to them. If they're doing their jobs, they're reporting facts that exist whether or not they wrote a story about it. A simple example. I may have read in a local paper that the Mets swept the Dodgers in the NLCS. I don't owe a news org anything if I wrote that the Mets won, because I read the news on their site. The news doesn't belong to them. #
- The idea that RSS could be on the cover of a magazine isn't so far-fetched, but no one ran a press release and there were no billionaires involved, so they didn't consider it newsworthy I guess. Some day we're going to have to accept that we have to make our own news, in the sense of Scoop Nisker's famous line -- "If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own." So here we go. I asked ChatGPT to imagine a magazine with RSS as the cover story. #
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/16/imagineTheyPutRSSOnACover.png)
Imagine RSS as the cover story.
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- PS: Does the concept of a cover story even exist now that we rarely read printed magazines?#
"If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him." --
Beatles.
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This function is included in every bit of software I write. Never know when you might need a random snarky slogan. I added two today. 1. There's no time like now, and 2. Mirrors lie.
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I have a server that's returning
OPML files. It's not the first time I've done this, but now there seem to be enough other people interested in this that it's worth raising this question. What content type should I use. Generally I've been using text/xml. But I see other people using text/opml. Here's a
thread.
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One place I could use ChatGPT-like functionality, in debugging CSS. I'd like to put my cursor on an object in Elements view and ask why does this object have a width of 1054.09px. When I look it up in the Computed panel it's greyed out, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to get the debugger to explain this. But there is an answer to this question.
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Is there a Kickstarter for political ads? I'd like to put up a page with
yesterday's ad, and let people put up money to run it. The more money we raise the more the ad runs.
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Getting a new case for an old cellphone is a huge cost savings, because you're getting most of the benefits of having a new phone for approx 1/86th of the cost, by my calculations.
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- Warning if you haven't watched the second season of The Jinx you should not read this, because it's a total spoiler. #
- When Durst is cross-examined in the trial, the prosecutor asks a series of questions that got him to admit that if he had actually killed his first wife, he would have lied in his testimony. He asked a whole bunch of things but stopped short of asking the question that would have nailed him.#
- Mr Durst, would you kill someone to avoid being convicted of killing your wife?#
- From what we know of Durst he would have had a hard time saying no. When he's caught he generally admits he's caught. #
- They got the conviction anyway. #
- PS: I don't recommend either season but having watched the first, I was kind of committed to watching the second. He's a truly despicable character. #
Thanks Mr President.
This needed to be said.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/14/julieAndrews.png)
I'd like YouTube TV to let me block Fox News. It shows up on their home screen as the default channel and it starts playing automatically. For some reason they've decided need to watch Fox News. Please stop doing that. Not just for me, for everyone. If there has to be a default make it something easy like Seinfeld perhaps. Or Law & Order. I haven't switched from Spectrum, I'm trying YouTube TV while I think about switching. This is a small thing, but might be a deal-stopper. I don't want my nose rubbed in how evil they are. I know. I want to turn on TV to escape. A Julie Andrews movie perhaps.
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I hate sticky keyboards. Very low tolerance.
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Matt Terenzio, who has been a friend for many years,
threw a fat pitch about people like me who think the NY Times has a lot of explaining to do. I don't think anyone is listening, but my issue with the Times is when they embrace and promote conspiracy theories that damage our political system. Matt says we have many truths, and I think that's where we differ, there has to be one truth when it comes to accusations of the kind that the Repubs throw at Democratic candidates and minorities. When they take a side against the people, that's when I have a problem.
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- Okay it's not the best political ad ever but it's pretty freaking good.#
- We love America and the flag stands for the good in us, in all of us. And our president not only gets that, he is doing what presidents are supposed to do, unite us. To the extent that we can at this time be united. But even a MAGA, viewing this ad, is going to have to swell up with pride for what this country means. #
But I have a question for my campaign friend and politics rabbi -- Joe Trippi. Joe, why don't they ask for a contribution at the end? I'd pay money specifically to have that ad run everywhere, even in states we have no chance of winning. Because there are people in every state that deserve encouragement, and if we want to really win we need them to feel part of our great country as much as anyone in a swing state. And there's always value in forcing the opposition to campaign in states they otherwise feel are safe. #
- So let me -- a regular citizen -- earmark a contribution for this message. It gives me another way to vote, a sense I'm participating. #
"Too much of everything is just enough." --
The Dead.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/11/nakedJenToday.png)
I'm working on a server app to read blogroll source in OPML, and build a database of other blogrolls that are linked to feeds in the original blogroll, accessed via the
feed or html source. It was a lucky thing when I designed the format for
subscription lists back in the 00s that it included the
htmlUrl attribute, it makes the HTML easier to find (though the channel-level link element in the feed could play the same role). Anyway, of course I'm using a SQL database for all this, and when I was thinking about it initially I thought "no big deal" it's a variant of a SQL table I've now done a dozen times. But it was a big deal, because I've yet to come up with a way to factor this so that I have a library that knows how to make the kind of table that keeps coming up all the time, to bury the complexity and make creating a new one much simpler. Same thing with CSS and JavaScript. I know the justification for CSS is that it makes scaling from phones to desktops possible, but that would be equally possible if you provided a good object with properties that can be configured at runtime. That's how we do it on servers with a config.json file. Then you could do a much better job of factoring browser-based apps. Imagine how much smoother everything would be if these structures could be factored. This probably doesn't make sense to too many people, maybe it won't even make sense to me in a couple of years, when hopefully I've moved on to a better way of doing these things. I would love to have the time to take a crack at doing the factoring anyway, I'm sure it's possible, just not obvious how to do it. In the meantime I think there are now enough blogrolls out there to build something interesting out of them, which is why I'm taking my break from
The Next Product to do this.
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It's not much of a secret that my next product is the minimal writing tool I always felt
WordPress should have. I have not been doing this in conjunction with Automattic, I'm not sure we're on the same planet re what WordPress is for. Ultimately it'll be their decision if this idea gains traction. But I keep hearing people ask for this product, and I think it's the reason Substack and Ghost have become popular. I'm going to put it out there, and see what comes back.
π #
Also, I'm using their
Calypso API to talk to WordPress. I like it. Well-designed and documented. I've built another layer that makes it even easier for a browser-based JavaScript apps, and also added storage, which you can't do a web app without.
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BTW, I love the new
margin image of NakedJen. Talking with her the other day we decided this would be the opening scene of The NakedJen Movie. The
meaning of the image is well-known to people who travel with the Dead, as Jen did. I've never been to a Dead concert with her, but I understand it's like going to a Comdex or MacWorld in the 80s or
Esther's or
Stewart's conferences for me in the 90s. Sure you go for the music, but
mainly you go to
schmooze in the hallways. I love talking with her on the phone the most. We have thought about doing a podcast, and even tried recording one, but our one-to-one conversations are much more interesting, and funny. We're take turns being
Pinky or the Brain.
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- I did a search on my site for NakedJen. #
- Google thinks I meant "Naked Men."#
- This is why Google should know I have a blog and it has it indexed, and if it just looks it would know that question shows how dumb it is. #
- When I type my mother's name in, searching on my own blog (again) it tries to correct the spelling of her name. My own mother's name.#
- Google started out so smart then they must have lost all the smart people. Or they got stupid? I don't know. But there's so much they could do to improve their product, it would be sensible to, while they're shooting for the fences, do the small things that would give users an idea that there's some humanity to the product. #
![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/13/nakedJenOrNakedMen.png)
NakedJen or "Naked Men."
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- PS: ChatGPT should also know where my blog is, and it should be constantly loading the updates. This is the freaking breakthrough. Do it. #
Is this the
user experience writers want from WordPress? If I were designing it, I would start from scratch, build an easy writing tool for writers to focus on writing, make the design process accessible if they want to work in that mode, but keep it out of their way because most writing has nothing to do with design.
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A simple
example where ChatGPT saves programmer time. MySQL has awful error messages. Rather than try to figure out what they mean, I paste the message into ChatGPT and say nothing. It tells me what the error was and even fixes it for me. I copy the result, paste it into MySQL and I'm back on the road. One can imagine where they build that into the MySQL app and I converse with it instead of the app with the awful error messages.
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I'm happy to host
sidebar images on Scripting News that showcase the creative possibilities of ChatGPT-developed art.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2024/06/11/nakedJenToday.png)
Meanwhile the Repubs are getting ahead of themselves. Bannon said
something that he should be arrested for. I'm sure it's horribly illegal to threaten people the way he did, and he did it in public.
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I caught a bit of the last
Wheel of Fortune. The three players were celebs: Vanna White, Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik. What was remarkable was how super-human Jennings is. He could solve the puzzle with almost no information. I have no clue how he saw the patterns. He has freakish intelligence.
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Someone should tell the kids the Repubs will come for their weed. Just sayin. There probably are a number of voting age youngsters who have never lived in a time and place when cannabis was illegal.
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By popular demand -- my blogroll now makes it more clear that the permalink to each item is the date of the item.
Screen shot. This is a convention in blogs and social media apps that the timestamp doubles as a permalink. And I think this is more distracting, and cluttered, but let's give it a try. It's possible that people missed that they could go to the website from the blogroll. Now it should be more obvious.
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![](https://cdn.statically.io/img/imgs.scripting.com/2021/05/13/knicksFan.png)
The Repubs are coming uncloaked. Their slogan might as well be Revenge. It's the one thing everyone who votes for Trump wants more than anything. They hate their lives, and are looking for someone to release their rage on. They don't know how else to do it. It doesn't have much to do with inflation or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no one is happy with this arrangement. Ask a billionaire if you don't believe me. They have huge grievances which you would have thought all that wealth would have cured them of. The new Nazis have a selling proposition that works every few generations, after the memory of the previous societal explosion are gone. My parents, the last people I knew who lived through the Nazis are gone. I just have the memory of the aftermath, and it wasn't pretty. βAll of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.β We're at the beginning of the "happen again" moment. My grandfather told me what to do, but I won't do it, pretty sure of that.
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It's been driving me crazy watching Stan Krute doing all these weird and often beautifully bizarre ChatGPT images, and realizing they are only being seen by people on Facebook when there's this huge world of creative people that don't or won't use FB.#
- Then it occurred to me, I have the perfect place for these images, outside the facebookiverse, that would showcase them, and be easy to produce (I don't want to take on responsibility for big production overhead myself).#
- I have images I put in the right margin of blog posts on Scripting News. Small little bits of creative color, that may or may not be connected to the story they are next to. And sometimes connected in non-obvious ways, intended to make you think.#
- Then NakedJen sent me a recent picture of herself that's perfect for the right margin. Seen in the right margin of this post.#
- Here's a page where you can scroll through the collection of images I can choose from. I'd love to add more creative stuff here. And I'd love to get some of Stan Krute's genius or Brad Pettit or whoever else might be so inspired. #
- No promises about when or if they'd be used. You can post them here, as comments on this message if you like. #
- I may have to restrict this to people I follow, just letting you know, based on past experience. #
Greetings from the Catskills where it's a bright early summer day.
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Podcast: Why the mechanism behind ChatGPT doesn't matter. As usual I ramble all over the place, but hopefully this illuminates and perhaps entertains. 15 minutes.
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The real story of RSS is that in a moment when the NYT had a spirit of adventure, they backed RSS and as a result news adopted a technology that was pioneered by bloggers, not the tech industry. If that partnership had flourished and developed we might now have a good alternative to the tech billionaires.
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And before that a few oddly empowered crazy-ass people at Netscape had an idea that bloggers had the answer, not Google. I don't really know who they were, they communicated through their actions, not via email or the phone. Same kind of thing happened with XML-RPC, except there I knew the people at Microsoft who momentarily bent the corporate rules to make something happen quickly and simply in the market.
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Spoiler: The tech industry eventually had their way. As a friend from Microsoft who is now gone liked to say: too bad so sad.
π#