The great thing about MLB as compared to the NBA is that the teams play a game pretty much every day. And the Mets, my team since 1962, are really exciting right now, after a month of being lost. They have great rookie pitchers who are full of youthful enthusiasm and they kick ass on the mound. They have veterans who understand their job is to lead and they take that responsibility seriously, and they get on base, steal bases, and hit home runs. And they have workaday athletes who get on base when the team needs a hit, and the most expensive player ever in any sport who's finally playing as part of the team and not someone who misses the old team he used to play on. And they still have the most ridiculously dorky mascot, a caricature of a human with a baseball for a head, and his wife who also has a baseball for a head. Where do they come up with these ideas? Doesn't matter it's the M-E-T-S of New York town who we will now step up and greet.

If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get this snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.

I asked ChatGPT for a list of 20 of the most famous and wealthy tech capitalists, past and present, who built huge fortunes from the network and often dominated or wiped out competitors:

1. Bill Gates — Microsoft, crushed Netscape and many others
2. Steve Jobs — Apple, reshaped multiple industries (PCs, music, phones)
3. Jeff Bezos — Amazon, drove Borders, Sears, and many retailers out
4. Elon Musk — Tesla, X (Twitter), SpaceX, leveraged hype and scale
5. Mark Zuckerberg — Meta (Facebook), eliminated MySpace and Friendster
6. Larry Page — Google, wiped out AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo search
7. Sergey Brin — Google, co-founder, same dominance
8. Eric Schmidt — Google CEO, guided ruthless expansion
9. Marc Andreessen — Netscape (first big IPO of web era), then VC power
10. Peter Thiel — PayPal, Palantir, early Facebook investor
11. Reed Hastings — Netflix, ended Blockbuster
12. Satya Nadella — Microsoft CEO, turned around the giant with cloud
13. Tim Cook — Apple CEO, expanded the wealth Jobs built
14. Michael Dell — Dell Computer, squeezed margins on rivals with direct sales
15. Larry Ellison — Oracle, famous for brutal competition in databases
16. Jack Ma — Alibaba, Chinese e-commerce dominance
17. Pony Ma — Tencent, crushed rivals in Chinese social and gaming
18. Jensen Huang — Nvidia, now central to AI hardware dominance
19. Sam Altman — OpenAI, at the center of current AI gold rush
20. Travis Kalanick — Uber, rewrote taxi industry worldwide before being ousted

Why you have to use the WordLand-generated feed for linkblogs.?

WordPress uses the link element in RSS to point to the same address as the guid.?

The WordLand feed points to the link you provided in the linkblog.?

So we'll have to detect duplicates here in another way so the checkboxes aren't duplicated.?

I knew this was going to be a bit tricky, but that's what we like, complexity in the software to make the user interface simple. Bury the details.

I wrote an important piece today, wrapped up all the bits of the strategy.?

I want WordPress to have broader use. Not planning on being shy about it.?

There's no motion in the twitter-like service world. We're still dealing with the limits Twitter established in 2006.?

Writing is too important to be so lazy about it. WordPress is sitting there ready to handle writing as defined by the web. Just have to connect the dots.

The web is like the Grand Canyon, a natural resource worth protecting. I heard a great recent podcast about how wolves were brought back from near extinction in the Rockies. The Hudson River once thought to be polluted forever is now clean. People swim in it.

Maybe the good people of Ye Olde Bloggo Sphere would like to form a Blog Raising to migrate as many typepad sites as possible before the announced Sept 30 drop dead date.

A static site generator for typepad sites?

Other ideas?

The I in AI is a lie.

Remember that, it’s easy because it rhymes.

It’s also the major problem with the product.

What it can do is fool humans into believing that it’s alive is thinking, that it had a mind.

But if you rely on its mind at best you’ll waste time, at worst..

Use it as you would a search engine, and verify everything it says that you depend on.

And if you find yourself believing that you’re using a sentient being, get up and go for a walk.

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some scenes where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing.

Trump is a comedian. He makes people laugh the way Joan Rivers or Don Rickles did. It's verbal slapstick, which is for some reason I don't understand immensely funny and entertaining.

Newsom is making us laugh by imitating Trump imitating Joan and Don. It's working. He must keep doing it, and he should evolve the schtick, he should make Trump match him. And where Trump is promoting depraved policies with his comedy, we can count on Newsom to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law and all the progress we've made.

He can invite famous comedians on his podcast to play opposite him, sometimes the straight man, playing their SNL roles. So much potential. He's got the attention, don't throw it away.

Politics was boring, it's not boring anymore. But there's no reason excitement and entertainment can't be good for us too!?

Trump's secret is comedy and Newsom is stealing his thunder. Loving it. ??

There's a fresh release of the docs for the WordPress API we use in WordLand. I actually liked that the docs were old and kind of dusty. It says that the engineering culture is to not mess around with things that developers have already built on. A lot of platforms break developers without much thought. I learned a long time ago that when you do that, you lose the interest of developers, understandably.

Innovation belongs in new functionality, esp interop.

I am now testing another thing. will let you know how it goes…

now i will update it. once more. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

it looks like every item is changing, but we know that's not true.

comparing json objects is tricky. different serializers format differently.

now i have some nice debugging code that shows me the metadata if an item has it. while i was typing this some of that nice metadata came in, presumably from someone else's site. ?

Every time I see Trump using his power as president to punish people I think of the time Obama humiliated him at the White House Correspondents Dinner. When I saw it the first time I knew it was trouble. When you're on top you simply don't do what he did. It always comes back to bite you.?

Obama had every right to be pissed about the birther stuff. But when you're number one, you can't do it.

The reallySimple package now gets the site and post id's from wordpress feeds. This will make an EditThisPage function work in the reading side of WordLand.?

But before that can work, I have to open a place in the FeedLand database for this info, because WordLand gets its feed flow from FeedLand. No need to reinvent the wheel.?

And having this as an interface means that if other feed reader servers want to plug into this network it'll be as easy as possible.

A JSON format that arrives in your app via a simple websocket interface.

It reads all kinds of feeds, sorts out the differences. You get a simple uniform set of data no matter what the original format is.?

Many formats come in, one format comes out.?

The world of Really Simple Syndication gets even simpler.

Clear example code in JavaScript, for browser and Node.js.

Any feed reader can be a websocket server.

The content you get is simple.

Ridiculously simple syndication. ?

Focus all your attention on creating a ridiculously fantastic app.

Tried reading a Wired magazine explanation of vibe coding and it was the most disrespectful piece I've ever heard written about software development and it's just a pity that we can't communicate on a respectful basis. Programming is hard work and making software that works the way people want it to work is like creating a movie and editing it. The the large language models are aren't even remotely in the ballpark of doing that. They can do gee-wiz stuff. Maybe in the same way I feel about being able to do art with chatgpt it's about the same level of software that you're going to get except programs have to work they have to do something. A painting, all you have to do is be able to look at it. So the big point is how about a little bit of respect for programmers? And how about we all start trying to work with each other so that we don't all end up getting owned by billionaires again and again and again. It's much more complicated than you think.

It's always nice to have two posts that you can switch between, to make sure you aren't depending on some global variable being set correctly. This is one of those posts.

I'm just rambling like a rambler and a mofo. Don't explain this bullshit to me. I've heard it all!!!

It's time to enjoy a new test post. Don't worry about it working. I wouldn't be. I'm quite accustomed to things not working. Because it always seems to work that way. Or not.?

But at this point I'm kind of convinced that this mofo works properly! ?

This is the new configuration of WordLand.

It's got a collection of stuff you've written on any number of sites.

They can include WordPress sites, or really anything with an RSS feed. (Or Atom or RDF.)

But, for WordPress sites, you can edit them here in WordLand.

It's for both reading and writing. I plan to open up my list of posts for public perusal, probably the first way this will be released. Then we will add a way for you to reply to one of my posts, but it will work differently from any previous comment system.?More on that later.

I'm playing around with different ways of organizing writing and reading. This is about the 18th way I've tried doing it. Is this the right one? I thought so, urgently, when I set out to do it this way. I cleared the whole week to "work" on it. But I'm moving very slowly, because I have gotten really conservative about the WordLand codebase. And these changes scare me for some unknown reason.

I've tried out so many different ways, but it's really clean now, and stable. In the last set of big changes, to get the Markdown editing mode working, I did a lot of cleaning out of hacked-together bits to get the kind of interaction I wanted. Now it not only works exactly as I want, more or less, but the code is super clean. Much more so than Drummer or FeedLand, both of which are working basically flawlessly. So I know I'm at a very strong level of stability here, but I don't have it well enough modularized so that I can just drop a WordLand into another app as seamlessly as if it were actually one app. So I'm pulling the much-developed timeline code into the WordLand codebase. But not letting it change the WL codebase. Tiny very well documented hacks are allowed.

I'm also thinking about whether I will want to use Drummer to write Scripting News, because I now have all my other feeds in this app too. Scripting News isn't that special now. It used to be everything. But now I'm getting my different writing spaces integrated. That includes multiple WordPress sites, btw. I'm not planning on bringing any Masto or Bluesky feeds in, they are too freaking ugly and with character limits — ugh.

I'm going to release a new reader app, reader.scripting.com. It's a place you can go instead of scripting.com, which I guess will now become the legacy home page?

This post is not on my test site. It's on the daveverse site, so it is one of the sites I'm subscribed to in the New WordLand. When I publish this, it should show up in the list, "underneath" the editor. Assuming everything works as we hope it will.?

It did not show up unfortunately. Hold on. It took much longer than I thought it should but holy guacamole it sure as heck did show up! How bout that.

The first update came through quickly, but the second one hasn't come through. Hmm.

I'm going to have to integrate my blogging on scripting.com and the blogging here.?

I'm starting to like writing here more than there.?

I guess when pour so much time into an editor, you start liking it??

I'll let you know when I figure it out.

First review of ChatGPT 5.?It's even more stupid and asshole-like than the previous version. It is remarkable how it pretends it knows what it's doing, and then you do something it said would work with what they can now do, but then after you take about 15 minutes to set up your end it turns out nothing changed, it still can't do it.

I am being more careful about what problems I give to ChatGPT and taking my own advice to use it as a fantastic search engine, but don't rely on its advice on how to approach problems unless you're sure that's what you want, and don't believe anything it says that isn't straight factual and sometimes, it not only gets it wrong, but it lies and gaslights.

The big lie is that they want you to believe this is human. This is a carnival stand imitation of a human. It may be that it's getting worse, or it's always been this way and I'm seeing more clearly. It was and is still a miracle, but nothing like what was in the science fiction books.

It's time for another test post to make sure everything is good.

I took some time today to revise the feedlandSocket app, it went from being a demo app to a Node package and a demo app, and a video that shows you what it does for 11 minutes running, with me commenting about what you're seeing and as usual digressing wildly. ?

Updated the docs for feedlandInstall, I had incorrectly documented a feature that got Chuck as he was setting up his FeedLand. Have I mentioned how great it is to have him working on one of my APIs? He's using the websockets stuff to feed into a research system he has running that needs lots of news. We can supply that.?

I put up a new lists.opml.org yesterday and made it a lot simpler. I rediscovered a feature of PagePark that makes it easy to mask the source of a URL, it's a nice kind of link shortener, and very easy. I had a much more involved way of updating the lists, that didn't work.

Next up, I'm going to edit the FeedCorps list, so that there are three solid things you can subscribe to that are legit reading lists, the three lists on lists.opml.org.

And then I will return to work on WordLand. I needed a little break there to regain perspective.

A spec from the ActivityPub universe, the intro begins:

ActivityPoll is a proper subset of ActivityPub that excludes activity delivery, making it easier to implement for static Web sites or content management systems. It meets an equivalent need to RSS or Atom feeds.

That's where I stopped reading.

Isn't this a pretty good clue that the support should be the other way around.

That full-featured ActivityPub servers should understand and emit RSS and/or Atom?

Why do we need another format?

If you want easy adoption, use formats that the sites already support. If you need new features, define a namespace, and add them there.?

Imho, that's exactly how ActivityPub itself should have been developed. Would've saved us a lot of time, driven more interop sooner, and would have provided a stronger more broadly supported alternative to the big corporate silos.

I've been working on the top level of WordLand, and finally got to a place where navigation feels good, like this is the right track. Here's a quick video snapshot, not really a demo.

I think I'm going to put in my will that ChatGPT should run the Dave Winer persona on all social networks, and my blog, as long as the money lasts. It would tell stories that I would likely tell, take political stands that I would take, draw meta-pictures of my sad and depressed programmer friend and a cute and adorable kitty getting into all kinds of trouble. The seasons would come and go, and there would be Dave, still diggin. And of course he would continue to develop software, using some of the greatest tried and true tools, reminding everyone of how great "Frontier" — but — if only it ran on Linux. The long-lived fearless and fully paid-up version of Uncle D.