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If Google Reader had handled untitled posts more gracefully weβd be in a better place today. Their choice to require titles meant we have had a fracture, on one side β social web and on the other feed readers.
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Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do.
Residential street in Berkeley
The soundtrack of your life
I've developed new appreciation for two musicians from my generation: George Harrison and Bob Dylan, thanks to the encouragement of two friends, both of whom have links to my childhood believe it or not, but who are current friends in my dotage and they're both on Facebook.
So my first friend said she likes George Harrison the best of all the Beatles, and I thought that's weird because it really was down to Paul and John, I thought -- and then I heard this interview with George asking why he didn't explain in his memoir how he worshipped John as a kid, and George took exception, saying yeah in John's mind that's who I am, a kid who worshipped him, which I never did (says George). So now I have gone back through his music and see holy shit he really was as unique as either of the others, and he was more of a collaborator in his later life than either (of course we never got to find out how John would have evolved past 1980). And he was never going to be taken seriously by the others, so he had to get out of there to have the creative life he wanted.
About Dylan, the credit goes to my local friend and Andrew Hickey, who focused my attention on the music of Dylan's songs, when I had only been focusing on the lyrics. Silly of me. He only ever wanted to be seen as a musician, not a leader of anything, and that's where the difficulty came from, and why I wasn't really interested, even though I had listened to all the Dylan songs many times, and had a few of his albums growing up. So I just played Tangled Up in Blue and realized this has been rolling around in my mind for days, and I wasn't even aware of it.
Kind of like All Along the Watchtower (another Dylan song) in Battlestar Galactica, which I just heard is currently on Amazon. I think it's time for another binge of that. ;-)
Anyway, two doors open, and that's always good. You know this is why you pick your music when you're young and stay with it, because it's the soundtrack of your life, and it has new relevance at every step of your evolution. Sure I listen to other music, but -- it's the songs that were big when I was little that matter most.
Dylan and Harrison
I've developed new appreciation for two musicians from my generation: George Harrison and Bob Dylan, thanks to the encouragement of two friends, both of whom have links to my childhood believe it or not, but who are current friends in my dotage and they're both on Facebook. Go figure.
I will send them links to this post separately so as not to embarrass them. ;-)
So my first friend said she likes George Harrison the best of all the Beatles, and I thought that's weird because it really was down to Paul and John, I thought -- and then I heard this interview with George asking why he didn't explain in his memoir how he worshipped John as a kid, and George took exception, saying yeah in John's mind that's who I am, a kid who worshipped him, which I never did (says George). So now I have gone back through his music and see holy shit he really was as unique as either of the others, and he was more of a collaborator in his later life than either (of course we never got to find out how John would have evolved past 1980). And he was never going to be taken seriously by the others, so he had to get out of there to have the creative life he wanted.
About Dylan, the credit goes to my local friend and Andrew Hickey, who focused my attention on the music of Dylan's songs, when I had only been focusing on the lyrics. Silly of me. He only ever wanted to be seen as a musician, not a leader of anything, and that's where the difficulty came from, and why I wasn't really interested, even though I had listened to all the Dylan songs many times, and had a few of his albums growing up. So I just played Tangled Up in Blue and realized this has been rolling around in my mind for days, and I wasn't even aware of it.
Kind of like All Along the Watchtower (another Dylan song) in Battlestar Galactica, which I just heard is currently on Amazon. I think it's time for another binge of that. ;-)
Anyway, two doors open, and that's always good. You know this is why you pick your music when you're young and stay with it, because it's the soundtrack of your life, and it has new relevance at every step of your evolution. Sure I listen to other music, but -- it's the songs that were big when I was little that matter most.
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I think the Repubs learned something after one of their own boasted that she killed her own dog with a gun. They learned that Republican voters think the right to bear arms does not make them hate dogs and to their surprise they don't endorse shooting them. Maybe shooting Jews, immigrants, people of color and libruls and libtards of all flavors would probably be okay but for crying out loud not dogs!! They're so freaking cute.
Can we please have a nice slogan we can chant at rallies saying that we think that women owning their own bodies is at least as important as everyone being armed to the teeth so they can shoot their dogs.
I think the Repubs learned something after one of their own boasted that she killed her own dog with a gun. They learned that Republican voters think the right to bear arms does not make them hate dogs and to their surprise they don't endorse shooting them. Maybe shooting Jews, immigrants, people of color and libruls and libtards of all flavors would probably be okay but for crying out loud not dogs!! They're so freaking cute.
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BTW, there are plenty of relatively low priced tickets available at the Pacers arena for the May 10 game when the playoff heads to Indiana
. This is one of the Knicks fans' favorite tactics. Since there are so many New Yorkers, spread out all over the country, and we're pretty much all Knicks fans, this can create a demoralizing effect for the opposition players who assume their hometown crowd will be rooting for them, not the other team. It had a pretty adverse effect on the Sixers a few days ago. I was chatting about this with fellow Knicks fan NakedJen during last night's harrowing game, and said this might be a good tactic somehow in the election, if every time the opposition had a rally they discovered that most of the attendees were actually in favor of democracy and abortion rights.
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Almost all playoff series that aren't sweeps are intense, but this one was especially so. So we're on to the next round, starting Monday, back in NYC, against the Indiana Pacers, an excellent team this year. And Doc Searls, who is also a Knicks fan, now lives in Indiana, so he is somewhat justified in believing the world revolves around him. I've always had that sense about Doc.
Since I write so much about the Knicks here, I need to tell you that the Knicks won their first round playoff series against the Philadelphia team last night.
Almost all playoff series that aren't sweeps are intense, but this one was especially so. So we're on to the next round, starting Monday, back in NYC, against the Indiana Pacers, an excellent team this year. And Doc Searls, who is also a Knicks fan, now lives in Indiana, so he is somewhat justified in believing the world revolves around him. I've always had that sense about Doc.If not now, when?
First browser-based blogging tool
In February 1999, playing with blog writing in the browser. This was a new idea at that point. Full-size screen shot.
Two podcast episodes
If you want a new perspective on the election, two recommendations.
- Greg Sargent interviewed political consultant Joe Trippi, who explains why third parties could make all the difference in the election.
- Chris Lydon interviewed Richard Slotkin about the four major stories of American politics.
Both very illuminating and immediately influenced my thinking.
What became of 1999.io
TL;DR: It's gone -- you can't get there. Because it uses Twitter for identity. It and bingeworthy.io are the two apps I miss the most.
1999 was a rewrite of blogging software from the point of view of both 1999 and 2016. Both timeframes. I had learned a lot inbetween, and the art of online interaction had moved forward a lot. I had become a user of Facebook, and was impressed with how their software worked. I was imploring them to turn it into a blogging system, it was achingly close. When I realized they weren't going to do it, I set out to do it myself, how I imagined Facebook would do a blogging system. Of course I didn't have their source code, so I built it from scratch.
Because 1999 used Twitter for identity, I couldn't use it. I also couldn't use Radio, because it ran on Windows and a now-obsolete version of the Mac OS. It's made me think that maybe in a few years or even months you might not be able to use FeedLand or Drummer. Then I thought about how I can better future-safe them for users. And that led me to adding a simple feature to FeedLand that will help if a FeedLand server you depend on should go off the air. See the next post, below.
Protecting your FeedLand subscription lists
First and foremost, you should keep a current backup copy of your subscription list. It's very easy to do.
- In FeedLand, choose My feed list in the first menu.
- Click on the white-on-orange XML icon, in the upper right corner of the page.
- That will open a standard OPML version of your subscription list. This is the format that all feed reading software understands.
- In your browser, choose the Save Page As command in the File menu (or something like that, there are lots of browsers) and save it along with your other backups.
- You can also automate it if you can run a script that gets stuff over the internet. Once a night would be fine, not a huge burden on the server.
I added another way to preserve your feed list, using localStorage.
- Every time you sign in FeedLand now saves a copy of your subscription list in localStorage.
- And if the FeedLand server you're using should happen to disappear, if you have not taken a backup in a while, if you have a tab open, you'll at least have a copy in localStorage.
- If you want to see it -- visit feedland.org or feedland.com, wherever you have an account, and do a hard reload. Then open the JavaScript console, and enter this line:
console.log (localStorage.savedUserSubs)- If you have questions, here's a thread.
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There's a FeedLand Blogroll Toolkit if you want to adapt it to work in your blogging environment. We already have a WordPress plugin.
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Murray Abraham, pictured to the right, played the part of the bad guy in a fantastic movie about the Inquisition. We're headed that way in the US. A man very much like Bernardo Gui will be advising women and their doctors on what is permitted in women's health care.
F.
Murray Abraham, pictured to the right, played the part of the bad guy in a fantastic movie about the Inquisition. We're headed that way in the US. A man very much like Bernardo Gui will be advising women and their doctors on what is permitted in women's health care.
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My father taught me how to organize my thinking when I was trying to figure out how something works. And that's basically what I've spent my life on, figuring out how things work. The most interesting and gratifying was understanding things that didn't exist until I pieced their story together.
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When I log on to meta.ai, these are the suggestions. None of them relate to things I'm thinking about. I haven't been a student or interviewed for a job in decades. But I've been on Facebook for many years, and I had to connect this to my Facebook account to use it, so presumably it knows all that Facebook knows about me, about me. How long before this is customized?
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I've been thinking of setting up a Kickstarter for the next project.
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If you're a blogger, here's something to think about. Whose writing influenced the way you write? Here's my list: Kurt Vonnegut, My uncle Ken (not his writing, rather his way of telling stories), my father, Russell Baker, Robert Hunter (lyricist for the Dead), Douglas Coupland (specifically MicroSerfs), the Suck.com guys, everyone who was writing at Hotwired in 1995.
I'll think of others, but those are the ones who come to mind. I have been a constant reader since I was a little kid, so there's a mix of writing styles from authors I don't immediately remember. I should also do one of these lists for who inspired my software.
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I'm looking for a quick and easy and ideally free way to upload an MP3 of a podcast and get back a transcript. I have a feeling that a podcast I recorded yesterday will work better as a written document, but I don't have the patience to transcribe it myself. I asked on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, ChatGPT, Meta.ai.
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It felt like the Knicks had won the game when Maxie single-handedly pulled the Sixers back into contention. Now the Knicks are up 3-2 with the next game in Philadelphia tomorrow night. But! I didn't flip out this time like I did for the last game, and I think it was because I was able to watch it on local TV with the familiar play by play guy, Mike Breen, and the best color guy for any sport, Walt Clyde Frazier. If he wasn't flipping out why should I. One of the things I love about his narration is that he uses words incorrectly, kind of like Archie Bunker. I keep wanting to say "I do not think it means what you think it means," but then I realized, last night, for the first time, it's freaking poetry! A lot of it even rhymes. And it's a poem that will go on as long as the Knicks do. Unfortunately I don't think the MSG crew is going to be doing the next game. And btw, they do a much better job of camera work than ESPN. Maybe it's because the TV people have been able to iterate the camera setup the same way I iterate the UI of a piece of software. The same company owns the TV network as owns the arena as owns the team. It's all totally horizontally integrated. At dinner the other night a friend asked, if the owner of the Knicks wasn't a putz. I said of course, he's the worst but, the Knicks now are being well managed. So maybe he's mellowed out a bit?
I have to admit I like Tyrese Maxey of the Sixers, who spoiled a Knicks victory last night that would have closed out the first round of the playoffs.
It felt like the Knicks had won the game when Maxie single-handedly pulled the Sixers back into contention. Now the Knicks are up 3-2 with the next game in Philadelphia tomorrow night. But! I didn't flip out this time like I did for the last game, and I think it was because I was able to watch it on local TV with the familiar play by play guy, Mike Breen, and the best color guy for any sport, Walt Clyde Frazier. If he wasn't flipping out why should I. One of the things I love about his narration is that he uses words incorrectly, kind of like Archie Bunker. I keep wanting to say "I do not think it means what you think it means," but then I realized, last night, for the first time, it's freaking poetry! A lot of it even rhymes. And it's a poem that will go on as long as the Knicks do. Unfortunately I don't think the MSG crew is going to be doing the next game. And btw, they do a much better job of camera work than ESPN. Maybe it's because the TV people have been able to iterate the camera setup the same way I iterate the UI of a piece of software. The same company owns the TV network as owns the arena as owns the team. It's all totally horizontally integrated. At dinner the other night a friend asked, if the owner of the Knicks wasn't a putz. I said of course, he's the worst but, the Knicks now are being well managed. So maybe he's mellowed out a bit?It's different after its gone
Note: This post is the summary of a podcast.
When my mother died in 2018, it didn't settle in that the context in which I lived, my whole life, was gone.
She lived in the house I was raised in. Very little had changed in that house. I hadn't lived there since I went away to college, but it still defined who I was, an adult who didn't live in his childhood home. When we sold the house, the last time I saw it, it was empty, and that was when it hit me. That part of my life is over. I no longer have a home I can return to.
The same is true with our understanding of who we are as adult American citizens. Until now we felt we had a vote. But that is over, unless we change our view of the country we live in. It's not that it's about to change, which is what you hear in the news, and on social web -- it has already changed.
We now understand that Trump may be above the law but that masks a bigger truth, the Supreme Court is already above the law. They take bribes, openly. They cannot be prosecuted (just try it and see what happens). They openly side with the insurrection, yet don't recuse when deciding issues of what to do with the insurrectionists. They imagine the president is a monarch.
We're already living in the authoritarian state we're worried about. We haven't caught up with that reality yet.
Our government is more concerned about our right to own guns than it is with our right to own our own bodies. Stop for a moment and let that sink in. If I said you don't own your own body, what would you think I'm talking about? Answer: Slavery.
If we did catch up with that reality, we would start organizing now to undo that mistake. We would not only re-elect Biden in a landslide, but we'd insist that he expand the court to 100 members serving 10-year terms each, retroactive. And thus we would eliminate one of the huge problems in our system of government. Have they proved they need this kind of correction? Yes, the overturning of Roe, and the lack of prosecution of Trump for trying to overthrow the government are all the proof we need.
And from then-on, no politician in any branch of government would take us for granted.
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I keep harping on Kevin Durant, but the thing he didn't understand about New York is that we're a one-team town when it comes to basketball. We'll go to a Nets game if there's nothing else to do, but the Knicks are the story of New York in re basketball.
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They play the game exactly as it should be played. And they don't take the bait to make it about anything other than what happens on the court, and to trust in the league to take care of players who don't play by the rules. And of course the Philadelphia arena was full of Knicks fans. The tickets cost a lot less than NYC tickets, and it's only 2 hours away by car, and there's good train service. If the series goes back to Philadelphia, the same thing will happen. I feel sorry for fans of small town teams, because no matter where you go in the US, there are always lots of Knicks fans. Largest city in the country.
The Knicks keep winning my heart.
They play the game exactly as it should be played. And they don't take the bait to make it about anything other than what happens on the court, and to trust in the league to take care of players who don't play by the rules. And of course the Philadelphia arena was full of Knicks fans. The tickets cost a lot less than NYC tickets, and it's only 2 hours away by car, and there's good train service. If the series goes back to Philadelphia, the same thing will happen. I feel sorry for fans of small town teams, because no matter where you go in the US, there are always lots of Knicks fans. Largest city in the country.Rustic Swiss village
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If you're running a FeedLand server, look in the data/riverBuildLogs folder. A bunch of fairly unnecessary JSON files may be accumulating there. I made a mistake in the default value of a config setting. Details here. I noticed the problem as feedland.org was getting low on disk space. The default is set correctly in the latest release.
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I'm also blocking people who hype ActivityPub in comments to my posts about social web stuff that has nothing to do with AP. I've been down this road before. I just want to find people with active minds, whose business is interop, who want to try stuff out. AP is not a good foundation to build on, at least until they come up with a BDG for it. Basically it isn't a standard even though they say it is. If you want to help your cause: 1. Stop hyping. 2. Get busy with that BDG.
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If someone I don't know posts a negative comment on Facebook, in response to something I posted, I just delete it, because they have that feature (other systems don't, they should). Any lurker who happens by is free to enjoy what I write. But if I don't know you, I honestly don't care what you think, esp if it's negative and has less than ten syllables total. It's hit and run spam for sure. I'm widening my definition of spam all the time. If you add up all the responses that actually mean anything, it doesn't amount to much. Let's see what the social web looks like without hearing from all assholes.
These days I'm using the moderation tools on the social web more than I did in the past.
If someone I don't know posts a negative comment on Facebook, in response to something I posted, I just delete it, because they have that feature (other systems don't, they should). Any lurker who happens by is free to enjoy what I write. But if I don't know you, I honestly don't care what you think, esp if it's negative and has less than ten syllables total. It's hit and run spam for sure. I'm widening my definition of spam all the time. If you add up all the responses that actually mean anything, it doesn't amount to much. Let's see what the social web looks like without hearing from all assholes.
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A use-case for ChatGPT. You get a hard-to-understand error message from MySQL, so you send the code to ChatGPT and it gives you a perfect error message, and gives you the corrected code. It also can generate SQL from an actual English language description. Quite a loop-close, since SQL was sold as programming in English, just like COBOL or AppleScript, except in ChatGPT you really are using English. It's precise English, but not "marketing" English (ie non-technical managers can be fooled by what they see). An intelligent non-programmer could actually write code, not sure of that of course since I am a programmer myself.
