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Quick video demo of meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it's new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so quickly. You really should watch it on YouTube so you can see how what I type relates to the image in real-time. It's like subtitles inverted, with a very knowledgeable, creative and high bandwidth computer network behind it. Living in the future. #

WordPress For One#

• More and more I'm getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for. #
• Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you'd keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system would re-render the Markdown, turning it into HTML, but you'd still have the Markdown around for editing. And of course there are other kinds of editors that make sense, knowing that the output is going to the web, but you don't have to write in the technical language of the web. You might want something more suited to wordsmiths -- ie writers, if you are a writer. I have that working here, and have been building on it.#
• I've gone back to Radio UserLand and tried to extrapolate, where would we have gone with that product, 22 years later. And now I'm beginning to see in the pieces that are forming the new product I've been working on, something whole, something that works. #
• I think of it as "WordPress For One" -- you might be writing as part of a larger site, but this is your writing space, a place you can mold to fit your style, where it gets more comfortable over the years, more you. That's what I've felt has been wrong with the direction the web has been going in, we're getting boxed into smaller and smaller spaces, but for some of my writing I want a nice stage with good lighting and full freedom to tell a story that I have to tell, not necessarily all at once, but possibly in a series, over time. #
• I also want to be influenced by your story. I want Working Together. #
• Of course I still very much develop for FeedLand, and in the back of my mind I want to loop back around to Drummer (it's my main writing environment), and then I have another product I call Belter I want to finish. And I wouldn't mind trying to make a CSS thing that makes more sense than the tragedy CSS is, and also would love to see a port of Frontier to Linux, though I don't see doing that myself, but I would like to guide it (so it runs all the old stuff first). #

An imaginary New Orleans street#

• A street in New Orleans that Meta.ai invented. I asked for Joseph St across from the cemetary. Even so an interesting image, makes me think of the city in a nostalgic way.#

I just spent a few minutes with meta.ai, Facebook's answer to ChatGPT, and it's really good. The drawing functionality recalcs while you're entering the prompt, so if you type, "vary gender, age and race," and as you type each word, the image changes. #

Suppose you're working deep inside a complex project and have an unrelated idea. How long does it take to switch to writing mode, get the idea down, and return to what you were doing. The less time it takes the more fluidity. Twitter totally won there. And we, the bloggers, made a tradeoff. We accepted fewer features and writing in a silo because it was practical. It worked, where less fluid software didn't. So they got all the casual writing, and over time sucked the life out of blogging. I think it's time to put the fluidity back, without compromising on features and lock-in. #

In the past, when I have tried to make other people's products better, it often doesn't go very well. The archive of this blog is filled with great examples. Yet I, as they say, persist. 😄#

I just tripped across this post from 2009 where Matt had sent me an email saying they were supporting the Twitter API in WordPress. I had forgotten this. That's how long it's been that he's wanted to hook WP up to the social web. It doesn't look like I posted that to Scripting News. I wonder what other nuggets of forgotten history I'll find there. #

I've never been to TED or SXSW.#

Good morning NBA fans. Today is the official beginning of the post-season, and this Knicks fan is one freaking happy camper. Just thought I'd get that outta the way before getting down to business. #

Working together#

• Each form of online discussion has a grain to it. Doc and I used to talk about how something "follows the grain of the web." Twitter has its own grain, formed by its character limit, what information is shared (ie number of followers in both directions). #
• I made a list of some of the social networks I've been on starting in the mid-70s. The list is very long. And each of them had their own limits, rules and features, and each led to a certain kinds of relationships between the participants. Mail lists that gain traction always flame out. It's hard to get people to read your blog. If you make it easier it changes into something else. Instagram, Youtube, TikTok form hierarchies of influencers. I think of those as the networks Taylor Lorenz covers. #
• But there isn't a structure that I'm aware of that leads to people working together. It's a puzzle I keep trying to figure out. #
• We need working together to survive climate change and fascism. It would be good to crack this nut. #
• One of the nicest things about ChatGPT is that it's always up for working with you. The critics of AI don't begin to understand this. As an example, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to draw a picture of people working together. Here it is. I didn't have to wait. It didn't look at my follower count, or my bank statement to decide if it was willing to work with me. I pay the $20 a month, and I've got a persistent always-on collaborator. #
• What got me thinking this way this morning is a bit of collaboration I did with palafo (a human) on Threads. It's remarkable. We actually did some work together. No sarcasm. It may be hard to read the thread but if you're curious about collaborative systems, here's a real example. Serendipitous, unplanned, but we figured something out by combining our experiences. Fantastic.#
• Later, Ben Werdmuller, a person who I've gotten to know recently, is intelligent and asks good questions. He asked one today, how do they get the live audience on SNL to laugh when they want them to laugh. I had an idea and shared it. (This was discussed on Reddit. I also checked with ChatGPT.) #
• If you take away one thing from this post it's that we can collaborate with the machines, and maybe that will unlock collaboration between humans. In fact, in a way they are facilitating the collaboration. If you want to be part of the collective human intelligence, you may be thinking about the machines the wrong way. Maybe they're the most human thing we have, because AI is made up of humans, somewhat like Soylent Green. 😄#
• PS: I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of humans working together to clean up a mess. #
• PPS: Yesterday I gave John O'Nolan what I think is a good idea for getting his Ghost blogs federating with Threads, Mastodon et al. I didn't expect thanks or even a response, but I wonder if he even heard it. Most of the time, trying to help other people results in not even an acknowledgment that they saw it. If I were him I'd look for a painless, quick way to get maximum interop. Something like ghost.social. I'd give the same advice to Matt at Automattic (in fact I think I did). #
• PPPS: I think acknowledgment is a key part of working together on the web. Nothing more than "I wanted you to know I saw it" is often all that's needed to grease the skids of discourse. I've had a friendly disagreement with Manton at micro.blog about this. #

Followed by Frank McPherson and Gary Thompson.#

A blogroll on a Drummer blog#

• How to add a FeedLand blogroll to a Drummer blog. #
• You must have a Drummer blog and a FeedLand account.#
• You can specify that all the feeds you're subscribed to are in your blogroll or use a category and only feeds in that category will be in the blogroll. #
• The blogroll updates automatically, when one of the feeds has a new post, it goes to the top of the list.#
• You can expand a feed to see the five most recent items. Click on the pubdate to go to the full item on the web. #
• It supports keyboard navigation. Up and down arrows move through the list, Return to expand/collapse. #
• We're working on WordPress plugin. #
• Four head-level attributes in your blog.opml file. Only one required. #
• blogrollUsername -- required#
• blogrollServer -- optional, if not specified it's feedland.com#
• blogrollCategory -- optional#
• blogrollTitle -- optional, but you really should provide a title, otherwise we invent a silly one for you. 😄#
• Screen shot of how the head-level attributes are set on Bull Mancuso's blog. #
• Screen shot of the blog itself with the blogroll.#
• A link to Bull's blogroll category on feedland.com.#
• A place to ask questions offer kudos, etc. 😄#
• PS: I'm not trying to sell you on using Drummer to run a blog. Rather I needed a place to figure out how this works, so we know how to set up and document the WordPress plugin. #

I want to work with the best developers, I don't care where they work. It occurred to me watching a Martin Scorcese documentary about the life of George Harrison, how much people in music seek out opportunities to create with other musicians. In technology, it doesn't happen, we don't even look at each others software. After waiting a whole lifetime for a culture of collaboration, we have had it for short periods, but it's most of the time it's been people trying to deconstruct and reinvent other people's work, not build on it. I'm still open to this changing. I hope to be a catalyst for it, one more time. #

Final Eastern Division standings. Knicks finish second. Best Knicks team in a long time. Ended the season with a five-game winning streak.#

I don’t like how betting has invaded sports broadcasting. I don't like that it breaks the bond among people who root for one team their whole lives, as I have with the Knicks and the Mets. I think of people who love the same teams as I do as family. I like that there are Knicks fans who also like the Yankees even though I totally despise the Yankees and everything they (don't) stand for, but we all love the freaking Knicks (and ignore the Nets, btw). Before long there won't be any of us left, everyone will see sports as a business, an obsession, or their downfall, because you can't win at gambling, we all know that. The whole tribal thing about sports is broken by integrated gambling, it suggests many of us, maybe eventually most of us, are here not for love of team, rather they're feeding an addiction.#

• First, here's the freaking podcast if you're in a hurry 😄 #
• Now, the question: What's between a tiny little text box and a full-blown content management system?#
• Answer: A full-featured text editor with a social media feel to it without the limits of twitter-like systems. #

• The question we intend to answer. #

• That's what textcasting is for, to identity the essential features. This editor supports them. #
• And 100% built on WordPress. Why reinvent all the good stuff that's been debugged and scaled and has all that support in the world. As I like to say, one way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is. #
• PS: And don't forget about the blogroll. It's part of the puzzle too.#
• PPS: The house was really cold when I did this recording so I walked around to try to stay warm. By the end I was pretty close to shivering out loud. I turned the heat up after I finished. #