Great scene from The West Wing.
CJ and Josh, on the street outside the White House.
The president was hiding serious disease, and it’s about to come out. Back in those days such a revelation meant the president has no chance of being re-elected.
Anyway, the kid has an idea and starts explaining, and as he does CJ laughs. The kid asks what’s so funny.
She tells him about a scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Paul Newman as Butch and Robert Redford as the kid.
They’re cornered, on a cliff, preparing to jump into a river far below. Redford says he can’t swim. Newman says it doesn’t matter, the fall is going to kill you.
Okay so why mention this now?
I hear there’s a monster heat wave in California. Over 90F every day for two weeks. That’s unusual for October IIRC.
We’re all fretting about AI killing us.
Imagine CJ laughing. Haha she says, so you’re worried about AI are ya? It’s the climate that’s going to kill you.
Josh would correct her. “Us. It’s going to kill us.”
CJ tells him to go away she needs to be an adult right now.
Twitter with its relaxed character limit is getting pretty close to being a blogging platform. I wrote the first draft of this post on my iPad, that's how useful it is.
Imagine if a real blog platform created a super simple way to write posts, no need for Gutenberg, just Markdown and that would be optional. Default would be a normal wizzy text editor, bold, italic, using a standard user interface.
Add web links and a reply structure, open source, nice API and developer program to shine the light on the cool editors independent devs were creating, and all of a sudden a bunch of new blog platforms emerge, and get this — they all work perfectly with each other because of the common foundation and API. The web of social media. It would be exciting and would pressure the other social media apps to peer with this truly open system.
It would change the freaking world I tell you. And it would be so wonderful with AI. No need for the cheesy chat UI. A real revolution. Undo all the craptastic silos that strangled the web?
It would be pretty damn easy imho, fwiw, ymmv, mmlm.
PS: MMLM is an acronym for My Mother Loves Me. Anticipates flameage. Okay you don't like me, but my mother loves me.
Once again the app that bridges from scripting.com to daveverse.org went down for a couple of days. Just noticed it, kicked the server to get it running again, and all is good, except a couple of pieces show up today that were really posted on Thursday or Friday. The problem as often is the case goes back to PagePark, the server that runs my Heroku-like server crashed and it doesn't work well from then on, even after it's automatically restarted. Then the thing to do is to reboot the server. It doesn't happen often but when it does it makes the server behave badly. It's up and running again. One day I'll get a few days to fix the problems in PP.
People really liked the RSS tip I posted the other day, so here's another one, also related to the channel-level title element.
Consider the screen shot below, and the Thinking about... blog.
I can't tell from the title who's speaking, whereas with the two feeds above it I know it's Brian Lehrer and Kottke, and below, an excellent local site called The Overlook.
Now it's a shame that it doesn't say who's doing the thinking because it's someone who is on a roll right now, historian Timothy Snyder. So the title pretty much has to say his name, if it's going to look good in a list of other bloggers.
BTW, just listened to Snyder on the Scott Galloway podcast, another thinker who I've just started listening to. With the two of them together, you will learn a lot.
So remember the title sometimes is the only handle a reader has to figure out what it is. Choose it carefully and make sure it looks good in a tight space like the one shown below.
If you have questions about how to make your RSS 2.0 feeds work better, please add note below. If I don't know maybe someone else does.
After running the first Bloggercon at Harvard in 2003 a famous tech company had a meetup to talk about the same stuff in a private invite-only session in the Bay Area. The invitations went to all the discussion leaders at Bloggercon. People I chose. I was not invited. Only one of my friends told me about it. Not sure if any of them went.
Second time, Google invited a bunch of people I was working on with RSS 2.0 to a private meeting. Most of the people I was working with, but again, not me. Had I been there, I would have said don't reinvent, let's work together, do all the things you want, but slowly, with real software and real users, but that wasn't the plan.
In the first case I think the publisher was trying to decide if they should compete with BloggerCon, and Google wanted to build a protocol that was more ambitious than RSS 2.0. They likely were sincere in that, but they had not learned that bootstrapping worked way better than Immaculate Conception, where a small group of insiders invent something complicated out of thin air that rocks the world. If you look at history, there aren't many examples of that. Eventually, as I understand it, that became ActivityPub. I think things would have turned out much better if Google had kicked back and let the process that got us to RSS 2.0 continue. But everyone wants to work with the BigCo, I've learned repeatedly that it's much more likely to work if you join forces with individual developers, not big companies.
I only held four BloggerCon's, I would have been happy to work with a publishing company and turn it over to them, with some rules about what they could and couldn't do with it, for example it was a user's conference, the tech industry was welcome, but it wasn't for them. When we did BloggerCon at Stanford in 2004 that was apparently very hard for the tech people to get. Many of them tried to pitch their products and were prevented from doing so.
The problem with regulating AI is that no one knows where to begin. Yes it can do things that make you question your sanity for letting it have write access to your online work and private info. But if it is behaving itself you can do things you otherwise couldn't come close to. I speak from experience. I was able to create a new version of a large piece of software, from scratch, in less than three months, by myself. It has capabilities that make it able to understand a big codebase, in a few minutes, and then act on it. My human mind, even when I was younger could only focus on a small fraction of that. So we humans with our limited ability to comprehend devised ways to build tall and wide structures with conventions and carefully crafting the code interfaces, stuff users never see, so that what we'd expect is what is. When my Claude failed and started randomly overwriting files on active websites, it had rules that said it couldn't do what it was doing. Sometimes it doesn't understand what a rule means. Observable every single day, it forgets all the rules every time it starts a session, and it doesn't matter if it read the doc that contains the rules, sometimes it ignores one or more. I've spent a lot of time using it, and I have no stock or other interest in seeing it not regulated, but I couldn't begin to say what would be appropriate regulation that wouldn't also make it much less useful.
I keep thinking of cheesy ways I could switch over to https for new posts on Scripting News, esp now that Google is getting more militant in trying to sweep all the history of the web into the trash.
I know people think it would be a snap to do the conversion, honestly, sorry -- they are idiots. They don't understand that it's a viral format. If you claim to be "secure" then everything you include must also be https, and of course everything they include must be as well. So even if I would have to do nothing other than this conversion over a full year, what's to say Google doesn't invent another hoop we have to jump through lest their browser defames us and eventually shuts us down. It's like the web would become just like the Apple Store. Even if there's nothing on the site that requires https. Or if it's a historic site that very few people visit, but the archive is there because we believed the web would be a constant because no one owned it, no one could break it.
I've been on these trips with corporate platforms, and if they want you gone, you should just take the hint and go, because eventually you will get the point. This is a company that has nothing put spite for the web, or perhaps envy, or individual developers (ie indieweb). They are pure fuckers when it comes to people like you and me.
On the other hand you will probably be able to get https versions of my new writing at some point, Murphy willing. That's relatively easy. But I don't have that many years left, and I sure as hell don't want to spend any part of that trying to appease Google.
PS: This is the walkthrough of the answer to the question of who owns the web and how it is not Google.
When designing your RSS feeds, the top level title should be the title of the user's account. So if Bluesky had a feed for each user, the channel-level <title> element of the feed would be
<title>Bluesky: Mark Cuban</title>Why? Well because readers need context. And it's easy.
And feeds are showing up in places where there isn't much room for the titles, so you have to make your characters count.
Bluesky shows the user's address, imho it should be the string the user chooses, usually simply their name.
