# Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:41:39 GMT ## Isn't Greenland the Sudetenland of our time? # Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:50:07 GMT ## ChatGpt TV ads are great -

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.

# Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:58:22 GMT ## Don't change me -

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.

# Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:04:15 GMT ## OK Knicks -

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.

# Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:28:12 GMT ## 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? # Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:35:44 GMT ## I'm always happy to see NakedJen in my blogroll. Screen shot. # Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:33:14 GMT ## I got a text from Matt recommending Claude Code, saying it's as new as ChatGPT was when it came out. # Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:50:45 GMT ## 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. # Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:11:10 GMT ## 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. # Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:03:28 GMT ## 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. # Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:14:11 GMT ## 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. # Sun, 18 Jan 2026 15:41:52 GMT ## XML-RPC links from 2019 -

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.

# Sat, 17 Jan 2026 16:27:46 GMT ## A brief podcast with the fascinating story of how XML-RPC came together in 1998. # Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:10:34 GMT ## 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! # Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:12:08 GMT ## 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. # Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:29:52 GMT ## If you don't have one of these Keurig things, you're really missing out. # Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:00:09 GMT ## Think different about WordPress, cont'd -

This is a continuation of a piece I wrote in August 2025.

Yesterday I wrote a this.how doc about getting WordLand to run on sites that don't run on WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed. What this means is that their sites are accessible through the fantastic wpcom API, and with that API I have been able to build a very nice writers' workspace for WordPress sites. I call the ones that are left out the WordPress.org sites, though I know that's not an entirely accurate way of describing it, but neither is "self-hosted sites" because you could have a hosting service that doesn't install Jetpack. WordPress could be used for things that are quite different from the way it's used today. Important point.

I sent links to that post to two people, and encouraged them to pass it along, as a way of starting a discussion -- how are we going to get WordLand running on those "other" sites. And we need names for lots of things, but first we have to get the software working the way we want it to, then the naming will be more obvious.

Jeremy Herve has already written a response (as I asked him to). As always, very helpful. But I want to push back on the way he frames the project -- as if it's up to me to do this work, and that I dispute. It think it's up to us. WordLand isn't just a product, it's a challenge.

I'm going to outline here how we start, so it's documented so more people will see it too.

That's where I'm going to leave it for now. I suggest if you have a response or comment, please put it on your blog and send me a link. We're going to create new ways to link blog posts together, but for now we'll do it by hand.

PS: Hat-tip to Matt Mullenweg for building WordPress, and for having the idea that Tumblr could be rebuilt on top of WordPress. When he announced they were going to do that I knew I was on the right track. We were thinking about WordPress the same way.

PPS: If people have a hard time understanding how I could do this -- remember: 1. I've had a lot of time. 2. I understand WordPress at a deep level. 3. I'm good at building and selling APIs, I've been fairly successful at it. And even better, the WordPress community has been a very good caretaker of this work. They support a remarkable amount of it, and it all still works, and they often wonder why the rest of the world doesn't love it like they do. I feel the same damn way. ;-)

PPPS: And thanks to Steve Jobs for thinking differently.

PPPPS: And to VW for thinking small.

# Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:55:43 GMT ## I've been watching Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS. Jake worked at UserLand, but never at the kernel level, which is exactly where he and his (virtual) AI buddies are working. He knew Frontier well, he was a developer at MacWorld, where they used it as the CMS to manage their website. Then he came to work at UserLand where he worked on the CMS itself, and over time became a full contributor to the work we were doing in RSS, XML-RPC, feed reading and podcasting. He's a musician too and the nicest guy to work with. He just got the REPL for Frontier running. I'm so proud of his accomplishments, and totally looking forward using the new Frontier for server programming, which is all Linux for me these days. And I also look forward to having Manila and Radio UserLand running on modern hardware, esp so I can demo these apps for my friends in the WordPress community. There's a lot of stuff happening here these days, glad to say I'm working with some incredible people and totally excited about what comes next. # Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:46:16 GMT ## Demo: rssCloud makes feeds as fast as the internet. # Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:28:09 GMT ## It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well -- it doesn't have one. The web was like the Declaration of Independence, but like a democracy it takes care and a bit of sacrifice to keep it going. It's always been possible to rebuild the web, to take back our freedom to create new webs out of the web that TBL discovered. It just takes determination and dedication to working together, a higher cause than piling up billions of dollars that the billionaires have absolutely no idea what to do with. I think the world order based on democracy depends on us digging out of the hole we're in, in the technology. Think about it. # Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:56:18 GMT ## BTW, I haven't posted a screen shot of where I write Scripting News in quite some time. Nothing has changed, but a whole other writing enviroment, targeted at WordPress instead of Old School, and it has a different feature set, look and feel. # Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:40:42 GMT ## I had a fantastic meeting today with Jonathan Desrosiers. I gave him a tour of all the software that makes up WordLand and FeedLand. It was the first time I had done that with anyone from the WordPress community. It started off with a simple story about how I knew I was on the right track when Matt announced they were porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress as an OS. Which is exactly what I'm doing with my collection of software. Every bit of writing should be a WordPress post, and they should be linked together in arbitrary graphs. It was nice to review that with a serious developer, Jonathan is one of the core committers of the open source WordPress. It helped me see all the different things we can do, and now hope we will do. I feel I understand this community, as a time-traveler from the past I think I understand what we should do next. # Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:56:55 GMT ## Nothing's gonna bring them back -

Today's song: He's Gone.

We've barely had a chance to process the passing of Bob Weir, but now I realize that for the core of the Grateful Dead are now gone too.

So I chose a song of the day that, to me, says goodbye to Ron McKernen, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Robert Hunter and now Bob Weir. The heart of the heart of gold band.

They were more than great live performers, culture hackers, they also represented a philosophy that's remarkably versatile. It applies to software and the web as well as the Dead lifestyle. Look for ways that entertain yourself and share it freely with everyone, see what happens. Kick back and let nature take it's course. We'll write and perform songs, and sooner than later, we'll be gone. But they told us not to mourn them, as they chose the name of their band.

There may be more to write, there certainly was in the days after Jerry's passing. But for now we'll just keep on truckin.

# Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:16:06 GMT ## Only steal from the best -

I'm working on a feature for WordLand II where you can flip a switch to see the OG Metadata for a post you're reading, by clicking on an icon that looks like the flag on the side of an old fashioned mailbox. I remembered there was a desk accessory on the original Mac that used this approach, and I've wanted that icon for a long time, and today I thought to ask ChatGPT to look into it for me, I had previously been relying on Google search, and it found what I was looking for and a lot of great history sites with details. I'm going to document the thread including some descriptions written by ChatGPT which I will label. Everything not labled like that is from me. ;-)

This was the first question I asked.

ChatGPT's response

Screen shot

Links (via ChatGPT)

Then we had a conversation about the history, which I asked ChatGPT for a two-paragraph summary, below.

PS: I inititally wrote this up as a thread on Facebook where a lot of us oldtime Mac people still congregate.

# Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:40:44 GMT ## Textcasting: Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text. # Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:37:04 GMT ## If I were making a Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other. Comment here. # Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:41:46 GMT ## BTW, look at all the links in my writing. Shouldn't every platform that says they're part of the web let users add links to their writing? Of course they should. # Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:43:23 GMT ## If you run a FeedLand instance, we have a new recommended index for your database. It's also part of all new installs. The code will still work without the index, but it might make it a lot faster. # Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:57:05 GMT ## I just posted something new on Scripting News, and thought -- that should appear on the new WordLand I'm working on, even though it's not a WordPress site. It did appear. Screen shot. The beauty of RSS. It's supported everywhere, so we might as well depend on that. # Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:11:17 GMT ## I had to do some work with Concord today, the open source JavaScript outliner Kyle Shank wrote for me in 2013. I used ChatGPT to help. It knew all about Concord. Amazing. If only through ChatGPT etc, my work will survive. That means a lot to me. I take the opposite view that some artists take. I like that it's learning about what we did with our lives. Bob Weir died yesterday. That didn't go unnoticed here. # Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:48:17 GMT ## I wonder sometimes if we’re the last generation of humanoids on this planet for a variety of reasons. The future imagined by The Matrix is looking more likely than ever. # Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:46:10 GMT ## Bob Weir is gone. # Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:50:00 GMT ## Today's song: Playing in the Band. # Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:45:23 GMT ## What’s happening with ICE is like January 6 four years later with billions of dollars behind it and many months of planning and studying history for prior art. # Sun, 11 Jan 2026 01:00:06 GMT ## As I listened to the mayor of Minneapolis speak I thought he was going say "get the fuck out of Minneapolis" but of course he couldn't say that and then he said it. # Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:03:00 GMT ## I'm doing little demos of stuff I'm working on in WordLand, here's a narrated demo that shows how instant updates are going. As often the recording level is too low, so turn up the volume if you want to hear the comments. A productive Saturday session. # Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:44:55 GMT ## John Johnston, a longtime friend of UserLand and my newer products, asks how WordLand connects with FeedLand. Two ways. 1. FeedLand has an API, still working on it, but it will be public. 2. FeedLand has an outbound websockets interface, which is already public, so any can use it as their feed reader, and get notice of new items and updates to existing items as soon as FeedLand has the info. And if the site uses rssCloud, as WordPress does and has since 2009, the notices are instantaneous. So to the extent people thought RSS is a slow protocol, it's not. It runs at the speed of the internet. And FeedLand is all about RSS, as you know. # Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:16:26 GMT ## I get ideas when I go for a walk or drive somewhere in my car. This was one of those times, but it was not a comforting idea. I live in the mountains on the west side of the Hudson River near Kingston. On my drive to town yesterday I went through the small town of Woodstock, and I was thinking about how ICE is occupying Minneapolis, and wondered why wasn't I more concerned about it personally. The answer -- it's far away from here, and Woodstock, while it is a famous place, is on absolutely no one's radar. But then I remembered the astounding amount of money we allocated for ICE, far more than could be used for border enforcement, so obviously this all is a prelude for an American secret police and here's where the disquieting idea came up. Of course ICE will operate in every city and town in the US no matter how remote or small. But first they have to perfect their act, this is a form of training to teach the skinheads of America how to be part of an SS. Experiment first in a few cities before deploying, gradually, everywhere. We're all going to have to submit to loyalty oaths, and we will all be forced to denounce our neighbors as illustrated in Lives of Others, which if you haven't watched it yet, now is the time when you have to, to get an idea what it was like in East Germany before the wall came down, and where we're headed. It still may not be too late yet, but it's getting close. # Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:30:09 GMT ## Trump is president the same way people who do vibe coding are developers. I always thought he'd be much happier playing president on TV instead of actually being president. And people would think about this stuff more rationally if it were a TV show like Pluribus or Severance. Why did they really do what they did? Or the way we talk about the Mets or the Knicks and their various foibles. It's funny people have a clarity about fictional stuff that they don't have for real-world things like war, health insurance, the cost of eggs and gestapo tactics. # Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:02:06 GMT ## A little fix that would make social web a lot more useful and less hate-filled and abusive... Make replies visible only to the person being replied to. If they feel the reply should be public, they can RT it. # Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:52:52 GMT ## Was the ICE murder pre-calculated? -

When there's breaking news these days I check Fox News in addition to CNN, MSNOW, BBC, PBS. The best are the last two. But last night night when everyone was fixated on the story of Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was killed in cold blood, on video, by a masked ICE thug, I wondered what Fox was saying. They were showing the actual video over and over like the other networks. Their words were what Trump was saying, but they didn't hide what actually happened, at least as long as it's news.

Then I wondered how much this was pre-calculated. It clearly doesn't hurt ICE to signal that they're killing US citizens in the US with impunity. Next time will be soon, and it will be more than one dead, and maybe they'll be kids. What makes me think this was not planned by the higher-ups is that they killed a middle-aged white woman, mother of 3,, who writes poetry. Not a very likely cartel leader or narco-terrorist. There were dolls in the glove compartment of the car.

Every indication is that she was just afraid and trying to get out of there as quickly as possible.

We also remember that in the aftermath of Jan 6, private texts from the top people at Fox indicated they were scared and appalled like most other relatively sane Americans. What had happened then was unthinkable. Well, what happened yesterday was just as unthinkable. Shocking. Makes you wonder what's next. Get ready, we're going to see a lot of ugliness now, hard to comprehend, hard to accept. We still have a skeletal democracy, and ICE isn't fully staffed yet (they have new billions of dollars to spend).

On Facebook, Dan Conover said: "This is what the collapse of the rules-based order looks like."

I responded: "Or it's a test of it. The guy wasn't very well disguised, I think he will be identified if he hasn't already been identified. Will he be arrested and tried? If yes, then we just validated the rule-based order. If no, we're fucked.

"Or even better the state of Minnesota could go to court and sue ICE to get their officers to wear identifying information, and no masks. For just this reason. And then here's an arrest warrant for the guy who fired his gun 3 times at the head of a 37-year old mom who writes poetry and drives an SUV with teddy bears in the glove compartment. In other words I'm not sure this was intentional (on behalf of ICE), and I think they may have to turn this guy over, otherwise someone is getting impeached. The video is too compelling."

# Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:59:27 GMT ## Another incredible use-case for ChatGPT. When it first came out Font Awesome was a total godsend. It took something every developer of graphic apps had to struggle with, and said basically "I can do that." They had a growing set of standard icons, it got better with every version. But some special icons haven't appeared in Font Awesome. There was a great icon on the original Mac, for a desk accessory, I don't remember which one. It was a flag, like the flag on a mailbox. If you put a piece of mail in the box you raise the flag, that way the postman knows to stop. When they pick up the mail they flip the flag down. On the early Mac it took an app that was wide and short, and made it wide and tall, revealing the ideas and data it kept for you. You can still have the icon, using ChatGPT. Have it generate your own icon using SVG. You get something every bit as good as a Font Awesome icon. So you can be creative in a new way. Whether this is art or not (of course it is) is beside the point. It's progress, evolution -- a way for users to make perfectly specified feature requests. # Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:52:43 GMT ## Remember when OG metadata was new? 16 years ago. It's one of those things that's widely forgotten, but still widely in use. I just wrote a post on Bluesky that demonstrates. That could be a new feature in WordPress, or the decision whether or not to display it could be up to the reader app (in this case Bluesky). If it were up to the reader we might need a way to signal that to the reader from the CMS. In the new WordLand, we use the image as an icon. It's completely wrong to use it as an OG Metadata image in Bluesky -- realllly embarrassing (screen shot). # Tue, 06 Jan 2026 14:38:37 GMT ## I considered my Blogger of the Year award for 2025 very carefully, and yesterday did a podcast about my choice, David Frum, who is doing an outstanding job of adapting his work to the podcast medium, as it was intended to work. What finally made my decision easy was his last episode of the year, where along with fellow Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Warzel, they considered how podcasting works, and what if anything they should do to conform. The answer is -- don't conform. It isn't up to any single contributor to turn the tide, instead their only job is to be true to themselves, and learn from others and share what they've learned. Be a human-size blogger. I thought perhaps this represented my opportunity to speak to them, and help understand that there are tech people who want to work with them and enhance their freedom, rather than consume it. But we need their help to do it. They've settled on Substack, without realizing they're just hooking up with the same people who screwed them before (ie Twitter, then all the techies who have dinner with Trump). As they say -- doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is not particularly smart, and Frum is smart. I don't care if he roots for the Red Sox (I'm a Mets fan), right now we're on the same side. We love the United States, and what it has done for us, and for the world, and we are falling apart. It's not time to stay within our communities, it's time to do whatever we can to save the country we love so much, working together. # Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:27:42 GMT ## Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the slurry-making machines. # Tue, 06 Jan 2026 14:49:30 GMT ## BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004. # Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:18:02 GMT ## Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto -- watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing. # Tue, 06 Jan 2026 14:37:09 GMT ## Must-watch narrated bodycam video from Jan 6 Capitol riot. Maybe the saddest moment in American history, so far. # Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:53:01 GMT ## Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! :-) # Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:19:53 GMT ## Podcast: Blogger of the Year.