What does "web" mean, part 2 http://scripting.com/2026/01/30/140150.html?title=whatDoesWebMeanPart2

Yesterday I wrote the idea "small pieces loosely joined" was central to what we mean by the web.

Now I'd like to add another criteria. "All parts are replaceable." I think it's self-evident what it means. And of course there is no such thing, but the internet itself comes very close to this ideal.

Somewhere there has to be a naming authority that can turn a string of characters like "scripting.com" into a physical address that a machine can understand, like: "16.15.217.109." In all likelihood, the machine your browser gets the answer from is replaceable, and maybe even the machine it gets the information from, but at the end of the chain of machines that cache the result, is the authority for the .com TLD. That authority should do as little as it possibly can. For .com, the authority is Verisign, and actually that server doesn't return the address of scripting.com, it returns the address of the authority for that domain and for scripting.com that is hover.com, where I have registered the domain.

The point -- the internet was designed to be very decentralized, and it does as perfect a job at that as is technically possible, but even the internet isn't totally decentralized. And some of the systems that claim they are part of the web are far from minimally centralized. If you were to knock out x.com for example, that would also knock out every every account on x.com. But that's okay because they don't claim to be decentralized. But Bluesky does make that claim, and they have some ability to serve other functions for other apps, but for using Bluesky itself, it is no less centralized than x.com is. So we really do have to tighten up the discourse on these systems and stop repeating the claims that companies make about their systems.

This is something that imho should be discussed at the next fediverse conference. Do we really want decentralized, and if so we should be clear on what systems are and aren't decentralized.

Notes for FediForum meetup http://scripting.com/2026/01/30/150403.html?title=notesForFediforumMeetup

The FediForum home page says "the Open Social Web still has only a tiny fraction of the users of the closed social media platforms, and growing that number significantly has turned out harder than expected." This is the premise of their next conference, on March 2, a little over a month from now.

Why don't people switch to Mastodon?

  • It's hard to use.
  • Twitter beat RSS because it was so damned hard to subscribe to a feed in RSS, and with Twitter it was a single click. Mastodon has the same problem. You might want to think of coming up with a Mastodon Lite that trades off some of the decentralization for ease of use. Not sure how that would work. But I promise you -- you all are having the same problems we had with RSS. People wouldn't work together, Twitter blew right through that.
  • If you want to get an idea why adoption is slow for Mastodon, take a typical task, responding to a post, and write down the actual steps you have to go through. It'll be a long list, and every one of those steps is a reason someone will give up and go back to Bluesky or Twitter.

Does it matter if people use Bluesky?

  • What are you actually accomplishing by using Bluesky?
  • It's not decentralized. Bluesky could shut down any developer or all developers any time they want.
  • It's not replaceable. Pretty sure it never will be.
  • People get confused because they have an API. Twitter has had an API since inception. It broke when Musk took over, but it works again. Bluesky breaks developers too, and if they want to be part of the "open web" why didn't they just use the existing standards of the web.
  • Bluesky at some point decided to clone Twitter, which is fine -- it's actually a better twitter than Twitter is. But once they did that, it becaume impossible for it to be federated, because Twitter has features that can't be federated, that depend on it being centralized. Again the realities of software kick in, you can't do what's impossible.

Start over

  • The only way imho to achieve your goal is to start over.
  • Start with a simple to install server and make it peer-to-peer at the server level from the beginning.
  • No features go in that don't work in that mode. Now see what you can make that's social.

Who owns Bluesky?

  • You have to start thinking about who is behind these companies.
  • Mastodon I believe is what it appears to be. I don't think you have to worry about anyone breaking developers there.
  • But Bluesky appears to be a pretty normal tech startup, except we know much less about its backers than we usually do.
  • They disclosed a $15 million investment two years ago. Have they raised more money? No idea. Do we know who their original backers are? We know who the founders of the Blockchain Capital fund are, but that's all that's publicly known, as far as I can tell.

Open social web

  • You should leave out the "open" part -- because it's implied by "web."
  • And imho neither of the products is connected to the web.
  • There's more to being on the web than being able to use the product in a web browser.

Why do I keep saying this stuff?

  • Because I think a social web wouldn't just be nice to have, I think we need it, last year, not next year. (Actually we needed it twenty years ago.)
  • You guys have been wandering.
  • And the biggest flaw in your culture is that you don't listen.
  • If you want to bootstrap something of significance, you should always be looking for clues of things that will work.
  • Just coming out with something that's a labor of love basically what you have now does not help you find the magic spot where it grows virally on its own.
  • I speak from decades of experience trying to do products that do what you say you want, sometimes with success. Sometimes with huge success. I know what it's like to find the sweet spot at the right time.
  • But I say things you don't want to hear. Like this -- you have not found the answer from a product standpoint.
  • When we look back at this I want to be sure people know I tried.
  • And ultimately I think we will succeed and I think some of you folk could help. :-)

A pair of good rules

  • Things that can be decentralized should be.
  • Things that should be centralized should be.

Want to comment?

http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a185913 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a185913
Yesterday I reported that I had remapped pagepark.scripting.com to the github repo for pagepark. But then later in the day it stopped doing that. Why? I have no clue. I moved it to another server and now it works.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a184427 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a184427
The best description for the web I've ever heard is small pieces loosely joined. That really gets to the essence of it. The pieces stand on their own, up to a point, when they are joined to other pieces. And you can un-join and re-join them. I see a lot of things that say they're part of the web that can't do the arbitrary joining that's central to what the web is.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a183725 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a183725
The great thing about the OG Web was that you could have an idea one day, have it deployed two days later, with a really ugly table-based UI, and everyone would know about it within a few hours. Then the reviews would come out, and a few hours later we'd know if it stuck or didn't.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a172008 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a172008
As all our former allies pay homage to Xi in Beijing, I was thinking well at the least the whole world speaks our language, and that'll take a few generations to change, but then I realized I bet the Chinese have been preparing for this, and of course they have.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a163941 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a163941
You're on the right track when all the questions have answers.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a163353 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a163353
More important than code is the right place for the code.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a152310 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a152310
I've learned a new self-management strategy. At the beginning of a day's programming work I set a specific goal that I feel I should be able to accomplish very quickly, in an hour, perhaps -- but probably less. If I get it done by the end of the day I will feel like I really got something done. The feeling it can be done quickly has to do with a lot of factors that you don't take into account so that in your mind it's simple but as you implement it you hit deal-stoppers. It makes you feel bad, if you're into being productive and brilliant as I am. But I know from experience that solving any problem in a day, at the end of the day, is a good feeling. There have been a lot of days when I don't move the needle even the smallest distance, and a fair number of days when I reject what I've been building, and basically move backward by days. We're always grappling with the mythical man-month approach to programming, when reality is very different.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a141530 http://scripting.com/2026/01/29.html#a141530
Zeldman found the Google and HTTP post I wrote many years ago. Thankfully they haven't completely broken HTTP yet. I like to think they can't because so much of the web would break if they did. People might not notice the Not Secure message they post in Chrome for sites that use HTTP (like my blog for example) -- but they would notice sites disappearing. There are so many reasons not to deprecate HTTP but the most important, no one owns it -- which is why the web is such a safe place to build. Google does not have the right to break the web. But they figure no one will object because users don't care about the web. But they do, they just don't understand that their online freedom comes from the web, like our freedom in America comes from the Constitution. Once it's gone (something we're finding out about now) we'll know why we should have cared. I've been appealing to historians to care about the history of technology, but they don't listen. Somehow they must think that tech will always remain exactly as useful as it is now. That it has never been free of platforms (it has) and the platform vendors will never cross the lines they imagine but don't actually exist? Well they can and they do, but since the historians don't study the history of tech, they don't know about it, and they don't listen to those who do. We have to build our own systems, our own news flows because the ones we depend on are owned by people who are not our friends, are not trustworthy.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/28.html#a212945 http://scripting.com/2026/01/28.html#a212945
"There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky." I put that at the end of a post the other day and as they say in journalism, he buried the lede. "Only works in" means silo. And it always results in stagnation because big organizations suck at shipping new ideas. For that you need a lot of people with laptops and a net connection and lot sof spare time to be able to replace small pieces, and join them up to the network, try out new ideas. When you're in a silo the owners place severe limits on what you can do. If you think you found a benevolent one, the exception -- there is no such thing. You're waiting for a "some day" that will never come.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/28.html#a150041 http://scripting.com/2026/01/28.html#a150041
An idea I read in this blog post is one I hadn't considered, is super important. AI is going to be part of programming forever. There's no way to go back. This has made StackExchange obsolete, because it basically aggregates everything that was there, and it was worth it because you can find things you never could find before, and it takes no time to search because it isn't really searching, it's gathered the knowledge and gives it back to you exactly as you asked for it. And when I write a piece of software using ChatGPT it presumably learns everything I learned, so it gets better and better, just like StackExchange used to, but (and here's the punchline) the knowledge is owned by a few companies, with no obligation to share what they learned. Very different from the old method, though I'm sure StackExchange wasn't obligated to share everything, the users would have found out immediately and they would have quick competition that were so obligated. (So StackExchange would change.) We get so mired in the question of should we do this -- well we're doing it, time to start looking at the next set of questions.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/28.html#a142437 http://scripting.com/2026/01/28.html#a142437
DNS fix: pagepark.scripting.com now redirects to the GitHub repo for PagePark. Somehow I lost the pagepark.io domain, but I don't really want it, so it's kind of ok. But there are some broken links. I recall there was a nice site with menus and stuff that was built from the GitHub repo but archive.org isn't able to find it for some reason. Moral of the story, don't buy so many domain names thinking you're really clever. But of course I still do. Someday they'll all be gone, of course. Will they have a ceremony for the last domain to be turned off, kind of like the last Blockbuster was. Does anyone remember Blockbuster.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a190812 http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a190812
Toby Ziegler: "They'll like us when we win."
http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a183533 http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a183533
I was looking at some of the first posts in in 1998 in discuss.userland.com and came across this post that talked about my decision to stop doing the Mail Pages, now that we had the discussion group.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a171025 http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a171025
A lot of online discourse is us vs them. If you find yourself doing that, that's a sure sign that you're not working on the web.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a132144 http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a132144
Jim Ray responded to my Saturday post about AT Proto. First, I've done more than kick around with ATP for the few years, I have written apps, some of which are still deployed. But I would rather continue to develop on RSS because it's not a silo, it's part of the web and imho that's where we should all be meeting. Planting seeds inside a big company's silo is not safe. If they want to shut you down, you will be shut down. They have all the power. And as long as they don't support the data format you use because of its severe limitations, you won't be able to publish on Bluesky. Imho you have no advantage using it over the web, which already does everything you need to do your own Bluesky, with none of the missing features. As long as Leaflet docs can only be read on the web, you might as well just use the standards of the web instead of betting on Bluesky's reinventions and good intentions. My opinion. And thanks for engaging in discourse, please encourage others in your community to do it too. I get my best ideas from listening to others. That's why I watch what's going on there.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a020714 http://scripting.com/2026/01/27.html#a020714
Interesting thread between Jake and Ted Howard about Frontier.
Where is our Churchill? http://scripting.com/2026/01/26/172058.html?title=whereIsOurChurchill

I'm interested in the movie Darkest Hour. Specifically the scene where Churchill is surprised by a visit from the king, who we learned earlier is pissed off, while Churchill is morose and undecided on what to do. The King wants Churchill to know that he wants to fight, and that the people will be with him if he tells them what's really going on. I asked ChatGPT to summarize this scene in one good-size paragraph.

  • The king tells Churchill plainly that he does not want appeasement, that he believes Britain must fight, and -- crucially -- that the people will stand with Churchill if he is honest with them about the danger they face. The King’s visit reframes Churchill’s dilemma: leadership is not about finding a clever compromise but about trusting the public with the truth and giving them something worth enduring hardship for. The moment restores Churchill’s resolve, confirming that he is not alone and that moral clarity, not political maneuvering, is what the country needs from him.

That's the leader we need now. Someone who can give a speech like the one Churchill gave on June 4, 1940 to the House of Commons, the We Shall Fight on the Beaches speech.

  • "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

We need to make big changes in how things work based on having our limits tested and the guardrails broken, bringing us to the brink. We should be talking about that before the journalists turn this into a debate about what the next election should be about. It must be about everything. Nothing clever. This is what happened and this is what we have to do. For example -- Increase the number of Supreme Court judges, and give them terms of five or ten years, and have an age limit. The Justices must have a personal stake in the decisions they make. They should feel like servants, not gods. And really mean it about the 14th Amendment that says insurrectionists can't run for office. Come on, we were warned amply, and now we're having to deal with a Jan 6 every day in every state.

We all know where this is headed. We need a leader with the courage to name the problem before we're overwhelmed by it.

Snow and dreaded politics http://scripting.com/2026/01/26/151424.html?title=snowAndDreadedPolitics

Good morning. I am wiped out from the storm that just went through. Did a bunch of shoveling this morning, still have more to do. About two feet of snow, some drifts much higher. The snow is light, but it packs down from the weight of snow that falls on top, so shoveling is hard work. I have, as a kid, shoveled out more snow. I remember how tired I'd get as a kid. These days, as an older person, the exhaustion comes in bit sooner. Not being able to get out to the world quickly was a bit claustrophobia-inducing, and the politics haven't helped my overall feeling of dread.

Part of the general feeling of dread this time of year with the crisis we're in in the US, wondering if I should be working so constantly on a project that doesn't seem too appreciated. Wondering if I'm not doing the same thing I've been doing for the last X years, working for our online freedom, only to learn people don't really want it. I think about this a lot. It's one of those things if you prepare for it, could be fine, but if you just glide along from crisis to crisis as we are doing with online stuff, you never get to do the fun stuff without paying too high a price, with too many limits on what we can do.

Later, while it was still snowing, I was able to drive to the post office, so civilization is still here, thankfully. We seem to have survived this mess, for a while at least.

I still believe in what I'm doing, but I'm not going to give it much more time before turning it over to the people.

Like now, the people do understand beyone what's said in public discourse, but no one stepping up in a leadership role has been willing to spell it out. I saw Ruben Gallego who is a fantastic speaker and clear thinker, be driven into a defensive argument with MSNOW interviewers, who had reverted to their usual low road, trying to corner him into saying something that would only be interested if quoted out of context. He refused, but also was reduced to talking bullshit, when they should have just let him speak for crying out loud. They don't get that they aren't the news, our need for real leadership is most important.

We need to make some big changes in how things work based on having our limits tested and the guardrails defeated. And part of what needs to be redone is the power of journalists to make us all net-net far more stupid than we actually are.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/25.html#a190148 http://scripting.com/2026/01/25.html#a190148
They should host games on ChatGPT.
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They couldn't have chosen a more ideal liberal state to own. I don't think any of this is an accident. Next time they will kill two, American citizens of course. And we'll protest. And then 25. It's starting to sink in that this is not just a bad dream and it's not going to end. (I was wrong, according to ChatGPT, Minnesota is only the 17th most liberal state.) We're always looking backward, that's a mistake. Accept where we are right now, and be able to visualize what comes next if we give up.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/25.html#a165057 http://scripting.com/2026/01/25.html#a165057
Michelle Obama was wrong when she said "when they go low we go high." Sometimes the truth is pretty damn low.
Best Picture nominees http://scripting.com/2026/01/25/163204.html?title=bestPictureNominees

Nominated for best picture of 2025, ranked by Metacritic rating.

BigCo companies and countries http://scripting.com/2026/01/25/163331.html?title=bigcoCompaniesAndCountries

Random ramblings with past experience dealing with tech power.

As I think about next steps for building out from WordPress to create a network of users and their writing, I wanted to review how XML-RPC came to be, when I did a podcast, I found real gaps in my memory.

Then just a minute ago as I was browsing around the discuss.userland.com archive I came across this post entitled How XML-RPC will Evolve. This was in November 1998, five months after XML-RPC for Newbies and the Frontier implementation were released.

It was a few years before the W3C came out with their equivalent of XML-RPC, and as promised, Frontier supported it.

In fact, what a coincidence -- I worked on that project with Jake Savin, and we're once again working together on a project that's related to what we were doing then. It's also interesting that there are people to play the role that the three Microsoft people played, inside the WordPress community. And there is no one that can make them wait, as the Microsoft team in 1998 was stopped by their huge organization. But they were lucky to have me, someone completely outside their management structure, to decide to go ahead and release it.

One thing you can be sure of is it'll take more time for them than it did for you. Also it'll be more complex, and take more work to support. And you never will be able to fully support what they come up with, by design. So you just say Yeah! Let's do it, and in the meantime go ahead and develop the market. When people ask about the threat, we're on board. I had learned this from the experience with Apple and AppleScript. Take it in stride, don't assume they win just because they're large. Just take the bullet. And know that even if you do everything as best as you can, there is a cloud over your future.

Matt once said to me it was political, referring to RSS. Yes it was, everything about cooperation is political. But important point -- politics can be constructive, it doesn't have to destroy things. Even if everything goes smoothly as it did with XML-RPC, it's all still political. Yes, I really liked working with the Microsoft people, and I would have worked with them no matter where they came from. But it really helped build my confidence to know it came from inside the biggest most dominant tech company at the time. What an odd combination. Just like going to Harvard was political. Same thing, I would have done all the same work if I were at a smaller school without such a strong rep, but we were able to get more done because we were based there.

And btw, Carney's story at Davos about dealing with the BigCo country follows the same pattern. We didn't give Apple or the W3C awards, but net-net they were about as impetuous as the country Carney was talking about. What he said there could have been a Davenet post from the 1990s.

PS: I think perhaps just for fun we should create an XML-RPC implementation of the wpcom API. I have just the thing to base it on.

PPS: At some point we're going to want to make it as easy to set up a WordPress site as it is to create a new Bluesky account, because the two things will be basically the same thing. Either one will get you access to a network of bloggers.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/24.html#a182555 http://scripting.com/2026/01/24.html#a182555
A new home page for the Scripting News podcast.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/24.html#a152917 http://scripting.com/2026/01/24.html#a152917
I've been following Bluesky since inception, even tried developing for it and found it was nothing new with its 300 character limit, no links, titles, etc. Basically you can build the same apps for Bluesky that we were able to develop for Twitter. I've also been following Leaflet, an attractive writing tool that works on AT Proto, the format that Bluesky is promoting, basically a reinvention of the web but inside a silo, which means -- perhaps confusingly, that Leaflet uses the same basic format that Bluesky uses, but Bluesky can't do anything with Leaflet posts, because of the limits that Leaflet doesn't have. So -- they formed an alliance with two other products that are writing tools for AT Proto, and came up with a format that they will all implement called standard.site (nice name and very attractive site). They probably hope that Bluesky itself will use that format, at least to let people read their documents in the same place they display the more limited Bluesky posts, in user timelines. If that happens it may be a good thing for the web, if services outside of Bluesky can post these documents from outside. But it would be imho more powerful if they created a format based on something like RSS, which is already well-known to developers, and would mean something outside of Bluesky and probably would be taken more seriously by the Bluesky people. There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/24.html#a161843 http://scripting.com/2026/01/24.html#a161843
My first rule of platforms: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." I thought that rule was pretty new, but it actually appears in a 1996 blog post.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/23.html#a211420 http://scripting.com/2026/01/23.html#a211420
Just watched Darkest Hour, a biopic of Winston Churchill, as he became prime minister and had to decide whether to surrender or fight Mr Hitler as they called him. I had seen it of course when it came out, but it's especially appropriate to our times. I'm glad the NATO's are resisting the US. We have to work together to keep democracy alive, not just in our own countries, but around the world. If ever there was a time when working together mattered more than it does today, I sure can't think of it. And that all of this revolves around the technology we played a part in creating, that makes it all feel so much more real.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/23.html#a171152 http://scripting.com/2026/01/23.html#a171152
AI assistants could if they wanted drive all of us crazy in different ways. Advertising squared.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a223702 http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a223702
Something ChatGPT is good at. Give it a photo of the Statue of Liberty and ask it to remove the cement platform and change the background to pure white, then make the background transparent, reduce it in size, and paste it into the right margin of a blog post.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a222923 http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a222923
Wouldn't it be something if the leaders of European democracies said if democracy and self-government around the world are to have any hope the American government has to stop attacking their own citizens. We see where this is headed, they might say, and there will be no coming back from this for the US, if they turn the country, which still is the leader of the free world, into a police state. What if the European leaders said out loud and in public the things the Republicans and most of the Democrats refuse to say. The inverse of what JD Lance says about their governments and their people.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a221615 http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a221615
I hear Canada will be importing EV's from China. Now I'm going to have EV-envy a few hours drive away from home. They make better cars in China, I hear -- than we do in the good old USA. Too bad, it didn't have to be that way. And isn't it tragic that China is less politically toxic than the American citizen who made the car I drive now.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a221010 http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a221010
Apple's 1984 ad, with the benefit of hindsight, said "a new generation is going to take over now so get ready." We live very much in those times again. Now every time I use ChatGPT to do something that I never would have been able to do before I realize wow we just did "that" again. The same feeling I got when I first saw the 128K Mac at the Apple office on Bandley Drive in 1983, about the same time as Apple people saw the ad at their sales meeting in Hawaii in October. The Mac had an exciting but rough start, but by the turn of the century it was obvious that something completely different had happened.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a141854 http://scripting.com/2026/01/22.html#a141854
Happy to say the Knicks won last night in convincing 2026 mode after I doubted them in Tuesday's post (perhaps they read my blog?). And after I asked if Greenland was the Sudetenland of our time, Trump did his famous TACO thing and said hey I was just kidding, so we don't have to ask if Canada will be this generation's Austria, or Poland? Now I have to say the Knicks beat the Nets, often referred to as the Knicks' "cross-town rivals" by sports announcers who know nothing about New York sports. The same team Kevin Durant said was the new cool NBA team from NYC (it wasn't and isn't and it turns out no one cared what KD said, certainly not basketball fans from the city).
http://scripting.com/2026/01/21.html#a174139 http://scripting.com/2026/01/21.html#a174139
Isn't Greenland the Sudetenland of our time?
ChatGpt TV ads are great http://scripting.com/2026/01/21/145007.html?title=chatgptTvAdsAreGreat

The ads I like on TV these days are the ChatGPT ads that show you how it makes your life better. In the first ad two college age people, brother and sister it turns out, are on a cross-country drive and have a great trip planned. You can tell they love each other, and have a casual familiarity and trust and laugh a lot, teasing, as the itinerary scrolls by too fast to read more than two or three lines, but you can see they're going to have a better trip than I've ever had and I've done a lot of cross-country trips with friends over the years.

The other ad, again with the young college-age people, this time a date, probably not the first date, at his apartment, and the guy is making dinner for his guest, and again, the plan scrolls by. He's making something nice, but not too much, and like the last ad, they're confident, young, full of life, and since they've used ChatGPT for just this purpose, they're probably going to have a great meal, and they'll go out again, for sure.

This is the perfect advertising for this stage of their business. They are the leading product, the Coca Cola of AI systems, so they don't need to compare themselves with anyone, they are the standard -- and now they take the opportunity to define it. It's about friendship, love, looking good, getting the girl, etc. But it's wholesome and American. I bet they run the same ad in Denmark, only the kids speak Danish and have blonde hair and they go to places in Denmark and eat simple but good Danish food.

I don't think Google or Facebook did these kinds of ads as they were rising to dominance. Apple did, Microsoft didn't. This will also change the press coverage they get. Journalists like to pretend that ads don't infulence what they think, but good ones like these do.

BTW, if Microsoft had done ads introducing themselves to the world as the future tech behemoth, they might have gone folksy -- like Smucker's jam. "With a name like Microsoft, it has to be good." You probably don't even think about it these days the name is so familiar, but MIcro + Soft is not the most inspiring name for a tech product. But then ChatGPT is a pretty awful name too. Four syllables, too many. Three is ideal. Imho ymmv. Doesn't matter now, everyone has learned to say it. And they need those ads to cement the bond with the people of the world.

Don't change me http://scripting.com/2026/01/20/215822.html?title=dontChangeMe

Nobody wants to be told how to think. I think the best thing is to be friends with everyone you can. And maybe don't make a big issue about who people voted for, and relate as people and Americans. That's something to put in the bank.

Also if you let people relax around you, you may find out that someone you trust and like is actually antisemitic or racist. That's also something to put in the bank, this is not someone I want to trust if and when things get worse.

Things are changing radically now. so you may not have to do anything to wake anyone up. And it's good to reflect on your own attitudes and whether or not some of the things they say about you are fair criticism. We all put up barriers, and those don't ever serve us imho, esp in a democracy -- but they are esp nasty now.

OK Knicks http://scripting.com/2026/01/20/170415.html?title=okKnicks

The Knicks are on an epic losing streak. This feels very normal. Let the trades begin. Maybe if we ask nice, Thibs will return? And isn't it funny these days KAT makes Randle look pretty good. Sort of a bonus for the Minneapolis team, which is playing NBA in a war zone.

Time for Knicks fans to get out the paper bags.

Above is a picture from the 2015 Knicks, a team that was actually even suckier than the 2026 Knicks (at this moment). The guy in the lower right of that picture has the canonical look of a Knicks fan wondering how did this happen and when it will all end. The only revenge I get from the Knicks suckage is that most Yankees fans are also Knicks fans and they have sooo much more trouble coping with this than Mets fans. Heh. It's actually almost worth it when you meet one. ;-)

A possible theory is that the Knicks won that in-season championship that no one really understands. It could be that winning turns out to be a curse, in which case having the Knicks suck now is worth it. Then every NBA team every year will try to lose that series, for fear of what happened to the Knicks happening to them. Sports fans in case you didn't know tend to be mystics, we suffer through the mysteries of existence to explain things.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/19.html#a212812 http://scripting.com/2026/01/19.html#a212812
Screen shot: Twitter did what I have been begging all the others to do. Get rid of the character limit and allow for simple styling, links, optional titles, the ability to edit, basically the writing functions of the world wide web. You can also put a nice Medium-like picture at the top. Twitter was started in 2006 which according to my records is approximately twenty freaking years ago! I mean geez how long does it take?
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I'm always happy to see NakedJen in my blogroll. Screen shot.
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I got a text from Matt recommending Claude Code, saying it's as new as ChatGPT was when it came out.
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I'd like to see a social network that had an AI filter that only showed comments that were responsive to the question raised by the post they're responding to. BTW we need some technical terminology for socializing online. When I reply to a post, what do we call the post I'm replying to? Remember there's a human quality to this too, you're not just talking about something on a computer, but an actual person.
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I took a couple of falls on ice the other day, during one of the many snowstorms we've had, and both times my watch, after a polite pause, shook my wrist, asking if I just took a fall and should it call in an emergency? if you don't do anything it makes the call. In that sense, your watch could beep when someone is gaslighting the other person. If it was you gaslighting them you'd see your avatar on the screen. Of it's them, you can show it to them.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/18.html#a180328 http://scripting.com/2026/01/18.html#a180328
I've been trying to stay out of politics here lately (did you notice), but I don't get how Americans, no matter who they voted for, can watch what's happening in Minneapolis and not feel like we have to protect the people there from the thugs who are attacking them. And of course that's exactly how we're supposed to feel. I watched a video of a woman, a disabled army veteran, being dragged from her car by the ICEs, and hearing cop car sirens in the background, imagining, hoping -- they were coming to stop the attack. We never did find out. How can you stand for this if you're an American. Forget about Democrats or Republicans, what about you? Where did you learn to ignore the feelings you must have when you see people, fellow human beings, attacked with such cruelty? Snap out of it, if you have any empathy left, or any love for our country. Tell your representatives to step in and stop this, and no excuses, Democrat or Republican, I don't care.
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Why now? Because there are probably still enough in the military who believe in the rule of law and will obey an act of Congress.
XML-RPC links from 2019 http://scripting.com/2026/01/18/154152.html?title=xmlrpcLinksFrom2019

In 2019, I did an overhaul of XML-RPC, and created a reference implementation in JavaScript, both client and server (Node.js).

The missing links from yesterday's podcast.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/17.html#a162746 http://scripting.com/2026/01/17.html#a162746
A brief podcast with the fascinating story of how XML-RPC came together in 1998.
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Last night's email didn't go out at the appointed hour, and I didn't get a chance to look until early evening. So last night's mail went out at about 6PM Eastern. Hopefully today's email will go out at roughly midnight tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. Still diggin!
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Is there any circumstance where "Sorry for the inconvenience" isn't the wrong thing to say? Maybe I didn't even notice, or if I did, maybe I didn't care. And what if the results were more than inconvenient? What if someone died! Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll say. I like still diggin the best. It says yes we suck, and we know it, but we're trying to suck less.