I once owned a few acres of land that had some old trees on it. I sat under one of the trees on a lovely afternoon, and thought of the tree "I own you." The tree formed a thought that somehow I could tune into. "I was here long before you were born and I will be here long after you die." I didn't see it exactly as a response to my claim of ownership. But it sure did put things in perspective!
PS: I wrote that paragraph in 2011.
# Sat, 10 May 2025 13:58:38 GMT ## It's about time WordLand had a Bluesky account. # Sat, 10 May 2025 12:57:01 GMT ## Someday I'll be able to point ChatGPT at the home page for writing about WordLand, and tell it to read every page that's linked to it, and from that put together a well-organized book about WordLand. Maybe sometime next year perhaps?? I used that as a prompt, to see what ChatGPT would say. # Sat, 10 May 2025 14:19:52 GMT ## Software isn't a thing -When a friend discovers a new product of mine and says the world owes Dave for being such a great guy, I wish they'd skip that part, and follow what we're doing. Get in the loop.
Software isn't a thing, it isn't finished, it's a process as it gets invented by the users. It's a performing art. WordLand today is like a musician performing in a small club, working out the playlist, and hoping to be playing at theaters then arenas, and finally someday, if we're very good, stadiums. But we need help.
If you love WordLand, subscribe. Use the software. Learn what it can do, hit its limits, make requests.
I remember very well being handed a list of feature requests by Apple's lead evangelist from a new exec they just hired at Apple. I looked at the list, and handed it back and said I'd like to meet him. On the paper was the top ten list of every MORE user at the time. We knew what they wanted because we listened, studied, and learned. I knew his new boss was a real user, and thus I knew we could do stuff together. It worked out exactly that way.
So if you love it, use it, become part of it.
PS: I've written about this over the years with the motto we make shitty software. If you use it and share what you learn, it will get better.
# Sat, 10 May 2025 12:53:22 GMT ## America as a platform -We lived for the first years of my life in Jackson Heights, which is probably, today, the most culturally diverse place in the world. In the 1960s it was a white neighborhood that was adjacent to a black neighborhood, Corona. They paired our elementary schools when I was in third or fourth grade. My little brother went to the school in Corona, and I stayed in the school in Jackson Heights.
There's a famous picture, in our family at least, of my mother walking my brother to school. It was on the front page of the NYT one day. That was a big deal then.
When I was in fifth grade we moved to Flushing. It was a sleepy little place (for NYC), nice houses, mostly Irish and Italian families with a few Jews. Now it's a Far East culture, from China and Korea, and still just as nice as it ever was.
We have a system in this country, it takes people from everywhere and gives them a platform to create whatever they want. In Flushing it's the best Chinese food in the city, which is saying a lot.
# Fri, 09 May 2025 20:10:42 GMT ## A big update for Bookmarks in the latest release of WordLand. # Fri, 09 May 2025 19:11:24 GMT ## Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” # Fri, 09 May 2025 18:58:17 GMT ##
We had the world conned into taking our “dollars” and giving us cars, food, nice vacations, drugs, a huge military, all kinds of manufactured stuff for nothing, and we thought they were ripping us off! So we blew it up. The would-be “Art Of The Con” mastermind undid the biggest con in history.
# Fri, 09 May 2025 16:39:56 GMT
## The great thing about sports is that a lowly software developer can be richer than a fantastically rich team owner, if the developer's team is the Knicks.
# Fri, 09 May 2025 19:59:43 GMT
## Fight Club for Tech was a pet idea until I screwed something up and seemed to have lost control of it, but I just found it in the list of my WordPress sites, so I guess I can post to it again?
# Fri, 09 May 2025 20:03:09 GMT
## I think the shape of the intellectual world will be vastly different after AI, and that its impact will overshadow the web as the web made card catalogs irrelevant. I'm pretty sure whatever comes next won't look very much like what we're using now, but it will probably evolve from what we have, although it's impossible to know.
# Fri, 09 May 2025 20:24:42 GMT
## My programmer friend
- I have been writing the colorful saga of my sad depressed programmer friend on Facebook, and it was getting some interest from friends until I moved it into a group and now no one reads it, which makes me sad and depressed too because the story of my programmer friend took an interesting turn after he maxed out on space, got a call from the NBA commisioner asking if he would mind officiating the Knicks two playoff games in Boston this last week. My friend, was of course quite sad and depressed, but he was also exhausted and bored, so he said yes. Here he is before the first of two games, which partially thanks to his officiating were near-blowouts for the Celtics, and thus the Knicks are up 2-0 heading into tomorrow's game in New York.
I have to say the latest Baseline theme looks great!
Here's a blog post I just wrote, in the WordLand editor, and the writing experience was excellent. It took a long time and a lot of work to get it there, but it is there now.
But as the post says, it's not just a blog post, it's also a tweet. And it's not a miracle, it's just endless iteration over both sides, the reading and writing, until it felt right. So far all that's visible is the writing side. But I know something about reading too, having written a number of feed readers over the years, including the first one. 😄
With Scott Hanson on one side of this effort and me on the other, him the developer, me the user (ie writer of blog posts and tweets) -- we wrestled with WordPress themes. I wanted a minimal design, a place to start -- which is why the theme is called Baseline. It's a Christmas Tree without any ornaments. None. A fresh start.
There will be a release of this theme in a short while. I just wanted to boast a bit about what it can do.
I asked ChatGPT to "Dress me like Gilded Age captain of industry in front of his mansion on the Hudson River."
The Knicks are unbelievable. It feels like 2015, when the Mets would be down 9-0 in the seventh, and you'd tune in to see how they would win. At the very end of the Knicks game tonight, when the Celtics were up by 1, I thought how would this feel if the Knicks came back so far and didn't win. I should've known better. All those insufferable years when we wore paper bags to hide our faces, even if this is as far as the Knicks get this year, it will have been worth it. Sports teaches you to believe, if you wait long enough your team teaches you that. I've learned it from the Mets so many times, and the Knicks now. I just wish Clyde were doing the color with Mike Breen doing the play by play. But who cares, this was great sports. Watching Monica McNutt on MSG in a daze. It's like homecoming. I might just splurge for a ticket to Saturday night's game. It's a pretty easy drive.
# Wed, 07 May 2025 21:52:56 GMT
## I want the EV's they're getting in China. Because we've got these stupid trade barriers we can't get the latest tech. Imagine in say 1984 you were a developer outside the US and you couldn't get a Mac. Then, perhaps Trump's tariff might have a slight chance of working. Now we're on the outside looking in.
# Wed, 07 May 2025 21:39:26 GMT
## There's a new dialog in WordLand that confirms the first time you publish a post, and offers to open it in the web browser.
# Tue, 06 May 2025 21:23:33 GMT
## When I did the rewrite of the nightly mail app, I didn't convert the app that builds the nightly RSS feed of the mail page. Wasn't sure if anyone was using it. I heard from a reader who missed it, so I got it running, knock wood, Murphy-willing.
# Tue, 06 May 2025 16:10:22 GMT
## ChatGPT as proofer? Not here
- Manton says he runs his posts through ChatGPT before publishing.
I do it the other way, I use it for background info on the things I'm writing about as I write, more and more. I used to use Wikipedia that way. I would love to include links to some of my conversations, but I find their shared links are unreliable, I keep hearing from people who couldn't read them.
Here's an experiment, two such backgrounders I had Claude.ai write for me for a pice I was writing (not published).
Claude.ai on the future of Chrome re antitrust case Google lost.
Claude.ai on claims Bluesky makes about being billionaire-proof.
I wonder if people can read those.
# Tue, 06 May 2025 12:50:03 GMT ## Notes for WordLand users -Three questions came up in overnight posts re WordLand.
I think we're at the "no more new features" point of the first release of WordLand. Learned my lesson on the 0.5.7 release. There comes a point in a developing product that it may not be perfect for every possible user, and while it has bugs (all software does), it is useful for what it was designed to do. In the case of WordLand, there's nothing else like it out there, and it forms a foundation to build on, not just for itself but for other types of editors, all pumping people's writing out through WordPress. The writer's web with a sweet new UI. Thousands of developers work in WordPress. Maybe tens of thousands. That's what I get excited about. WordLand is the equivalent of the twitter-like tiny little textbox, but it grows big as your writing does, and it has the features Twitter removed. Anyway I don't expect to do any further adventures in features for WordLand for a while, instead I'm going to assume it's there and build connections to other software, my own and that of friends, in this context products that use open formats like RSS and OPML for interop. I like WebSockets too.
# Sun, 04 May 2025 15:13:59 GMT
## 
ChatGPT is great for finding information on the public web, but I can't figure out how to find stuff I've worked on with ChatGPT in ChatGPT. There are big usability issues. I think it's getting better in some ways, but it's leaving me more scattered and disorganized than I was before when I took notes outside of ChatGPT. There's another problem, if I want to use my own editing and organizing tools, then the author of the software has to pay the vendor of the LLM for my users using it. That cuts me out, because I don't charge people to use my software, at least not so far, and I have no interest in being a reseller of LLM services. Same problem with Amazon and storage, why won't they sell storage to the user that they can allocate for use with my app, and others. That would give us the kind of power we used to have on the desktop where multiple apps could work on the same file at different times. If I want to make something that stores stuff in the cloud, I have to buy it and resell it. I have tried to discuss this with product runners at companies that could offer this service, it would fit in with what they did. There must be a legal reason here, ie who's responsible for the content being stored.
# Sun, 04 May 2025 15:19:48 GMT
## If you get the nightly email, the text might be a bit more readable. I've increased the font-size from 17px to 18px. I've only been able to do this lately because I could tap into what ChatGPT knew about it, whereas before I was flying blind, with no idea of the unusual things that happen when HTML is sent via email. There is another option, click on the date at the top of each email and that will open the same stuff in the web. It can be easier to make the text larger there than it is in an email client.
# Sat, 03 May 2025 17:11:10 GMT
## 
Today I spent (or wasted) hours trying to get my WebSockets code working properly with Caddy. Hours with ChatGPT, realizing it has a long way to go before it can manage code like I can. It gets fixated on an approach and never takes a step back to think maybe we're going about this the wrong way. It's extremely annoying all the times it tries to take you off track, and it works, it does take you down rabbit holes and then you realize it's only getting worse. The key is to not let it do that, but it's hard not to anthropomorphize so you don't want to hurt its feelings. In order to not be murdered as a small child you have to learn manners. And the bots push that too far. Really do take advantage. Still it knows far more than I do about everything, so if I could only get it to just shut the f up already and let me think! For something so capable it really doesn't spend enough time thinking, it's fully preoccupied with doing.
# Sat, 03 May 2025 17:20:21 GMT
## The Detroit Psssstons were truly great in the first round of the playoffs. And I was really gratified, ecstatic even, to see the Timberwolves give the Lakers a complete shellacking. I am so fed up with LeBron James. I can't imagine another team would want him. I can't imagine why he wants to win another freaking title. And I was really pissed off when people started saying they were contenders this year. Bull. Shit. And the reason I'm glad it was the Timberwolves is because Julius Randle is on that team now, and I hear he gets a fair amount of credit for their victory. The Knicks traded him for KAT last summer. They're a solid team. And while Donte DiVincenzo isn't playing very well, we really need him back in NY, so maybe the Knicks can figure out a deal that makes sense. And why aren't the Knicks playing Precious Achiuwa. He did great last year when OG was injured. The Knicks have a good bench imho, they just don't get to play enough to be warmed up properly. So sad the way Doooooce performed in the Detroit series. Anyway it was exhausting. I would have been okay with the DP's winning, seriously -- I'm ready for baseball. And I don't imagine the next series, with the Celtics will be any kind of a walk in the park.
# Sat, 03 May 2025 17:17:39 GMT
## Sometimes I think the Trumps are competing to kill the most humans.
# Sat, 03 May 2025 01:11:10 GMT
## Spent the day in NYC, had an idea and it was a gorgeous day, and I decided to be impulsive. See you back here tomorrow, Murphy-willing.
# Thu, 01 May 2025 20:33:38 GMT
## Has anyone thought to give ChatGPT a Turing test?
# Thu, 01 May 2025 21:09:21 GMT
## Rewrite of WebSockets functionality in the server side of WordLand.
# Thu, 01 May 2025 18:08:09 GMT
## One consistent bit of feedback on the new email format, which appears to be working for just about everyone, is that the text is too small. And while it is a rewrite, for a lot of people it looks exactly the same. That's because of differences in how email clients deal with HTML.
# Thu, 01 May 2025 14:20:13 GMT
## 
Phil Donahue interview with Bernie Sanders from 1981, then-mayor of Burlington, VT. He was a novelty then, an American politician who was a socialist. He was asked if capitalism was the normal way for humans to relate, he said no. I wonder if he still agrees, because I think that's the goal, and the reason we're in so much trouble is there really isn't an impulse to work with each other. What I've seen mostly is that when there's work to do, it's hard to find help, but once something has taken off, there isn't much help available either, the people who could make the greatest contribution just want to take over. And they often feel they have, but usually it doesn't work out, it would have been better if we all collaborated. At this point, the hurdle the human race has to get over is working together. We will never get out of the climate crisis without it, or avoid the next pandemic without millions of unnecessarily lost lives. The cynics are winning, basically -- and there isn't net-net much of a will for our species to survive. It's only getting worse.
# Thu, 01 May 2025 14:16:52 GMT
## I turned yesterday's Baseline Playground into a GitHub repo. I never made one of these before and thought it was worth sharing, or just writing about. I'm struggling to find the most readable font, size, line-height. I'm looking at the screen where I do most of my online writing, and I find this very readable, it just fades into the background, to the base of the spine, so intrinsic it occupies none of my conscious mind. Anyway the purpose of the baseline is to give WordLand a target to work out all the glitches in, so the writing experience goes fully end-to-end. I didn't find any WordPress themes that I felt worked really well for this, so we set out to create one. Thanks to Scott Hansen who is using my work to build out a WordPress theme and thanks to Jeremy Herve for helping us work with WordPress, which is more than a CMS, it's a network OS. There's a lot of value in the WordPress platform that has been widely overlooked, imho.
# Thu, 01 May 2025 14:31:13 GMT
## Welcome to yet another month
- Good morning and welcome to May 2025.
It's nice to start with a simple almost-empty outline.
Archived the OPML for April in the usual place.
