Braintrust query. Every once in a while I get reports from people who looked something up on my blog's Daytona search engine saying that where they expected dates they see things like this: NaN. The reason you see that is that the archive has a mistake in it, where there was supposed to be a date there was something else. Usually I shrug it off, yes there are mistakes in the archive, 30+ years of OPML files, it's a miracle there aren't more errors. Then I realized since all this stuff is on GitHub, people could help with this, by instead of sending me the report, post a note on GitHub, here -- saying you searched for this term and this is what I saw. Provide the term and a screen shot of what you saw. And then other people who have some extra time, could look through the archive, find the post, and then show me what needs to be fixed. I would then fix it, and over time the archive would get fixed. I posted a note here on the Scripting News repo, if you want to help, bookmark that link, and when you see an error, post the note and we can get going. #

BTW: NaN stands for Not A Number. #

Three coin puzzles

1: Place a coin in each box (or leave it empty) so that the totals across and down are correct.


  3p 5p 10p
8p  ?-1p2p5p ?-1p2p5p ?-1p2p5p
6p  ?-1p2p5p ?-1p2p5p ?-1p2p5p
        4p  ?-1p2p5p ?-1p2p5p ?-1p2p5p

2: There are three ways to give change for a 5p coin. (11111|2111|221)
How many ways are there to give change for a 10p coin?
(and, for increasingly harder questions, a) a 20p coin? b) a 50p coin? c) a £1 coin?)

3: What's the greatest amount you can have in coins and not be able to give change for a £5 note?

I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It's all out there for the looking and breathing. Lift the hood on a car. Look at all those wires and hoses, what do they do. I hope they don't kill me. Whoever made the decision at Microsoft or Firefox or wherever that feeds needed to be obfuscated, some advice -- be more respectful of your users. The web is the medium that had a View Source command. You're supposed to take a look. Don't forget the Back button if you don't like what you see. Something funny, if only life had a Back button. #

Speaking of the Back button, that's the problem with tiny-little-text-box social networks. No links. So guess what the Back button one of the best inventions ever, isn't part of your reading and writing world. I guess this is like the street cars in LA conspiracy, that the car companies bought and shut down? #

To my WordPress developer friends. How about making the RSS feed prettier and easier to read. Properly indenting it would make a big diff. I prefer encoding individual characters to CDATA. Those two things to start. It really does matter how readable this stuff is. Comparison, the RSS feed that Old School generates, the software that renders my blog. #

It's all-star weekend in the NBA which I've never seen the point of. As if sport is anything but a simulation of what we were born to do -- compete and cooperate. My team is great, your team sucks. It's fun the same way slapstick for some weird reason is funny. All it takes to get a laugh is trip and fall on your face. It's funny just thinking about it. Doesn't seem very nice but there it is. #

One more thing and then I gotta go. I think it's time for the AI's to compete with Wikipedia. It's filled with hallucinations. Make it a community thing, let the people be involved, but do a better job of presentation, and validate what's written, don't let these things become so territorial. We want the facts, not who has the best PR. #

News still needs to make a big transition, to become a distributed unownable thing, with every part replaceable, much like what needs to happen with the social web. This transition has been possible and necessary for about 30 years. The reporters and editors will say we're naive, but we understand what's happening. The news orgs have always been large centralized businesses, silos, and increasingly has come in conflict with the interests of their users. Who trusts what you read in the NYT, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, and these were at one time the best of journalism. I know the reporters also won't like this, but the quality assurance of decentralized systems will be done by AI, and overseen by a non-profit organization, staffed by retired journalists. And there will be lots of competition. All parts are replaceable. #

I got the most remarkable headphones. Read a review in Wired, and was sold. On sale for $109. Open ear buds from Anker. When I first put them on and played something I had a jolt. The sound appeared to be blasting from the speaker on my laptop. I rushed to try to turn it down and realized it was in my head. Never been so impressed. They don't go inside your ear, the speaker is poised above the ear. Later when I got out of my car and the headphones automatically connected via Bluetooth -- it was a podcast -- I thought the person was talking to me on the street in the middle of nowhere. I laughed at now I had been tricked so thoroughly, twice. It keeps happening. Music is incredible. The best sound I've ever heard from headphones. So totally worth the money. #

I understood the web because I understood Unix and missed it. #

If you're a FeedLand user and have the technical ability to install a Docker app, even on a local computer not on the net, you could help the project by trying the new Docker version. Think of FeedLand as something like Mastodon or WordPress, server apps that we hope many people will install on their own. I am doing that now, with the blogroll on Scripting News and various news sites running in front of my own FeedLand instance. And the various instances can communicate with each other. Scott worked really hard to make setting up a new instance much easier than it was. It's an open source project, so you can feel good by helping. You're helping the web, and helping bootstrap a new feediverse. And if you have a few hours to give it a try, maybe much less, you would be doing a good thing. #

When I was a kid I had a penpal in Scotland. It was kind of interesting but after a while it became tiresome. One time I got a letter from my penpal with the usual stuff, school, sports, the Beatles, other kids, but this time there was no mention about how stupid the adults were. I found out why at the end in a PS. "Sometimes my mom writes these for me." Obviously I never forgot this. #

Here's proof that ChatGPT, intelligent or not, listens to me. #

I no longer even think of debating whether the AIs are intelligent. I might as well argue about your intelligence, or even my own. We have no idea what intelligence is or how to test for it. So if you think you're so intelligent and you say things like "AIs aren't intelligent" as if it were an indisputable fact, well I'm pretty sure that proves you are not actually very intelligent, which indicates how intelligent I am (not). And if you're worried about what happens if you stop insisting that AIs aren't intelligent, you can relax, nothing depends on what you or I or anyone else thinks about that, or pretty much anything. Have a nice day. #

Claude just said: "And going forward, whatever post the user lands on first, that's what you seed it with." The thing that caught my eye was "the user lands on first." UserLand was the name of my last company, the one that did Frontier, blogging, podcasting, RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, etc. And here we are again in the land of lands. The User Lands. ;-) #

Docker version of FeedLand. Scott Hanson has it working, and would like help with testing. Thanks so much to Scott. #

A fair number of people make a stop at news.scripting.com every day. I want to make some improvements, I think it can be made a bit faster. And I want to make it easier for anyone to create a site like that, for others to use. I think every news org should have one of those, to tell your readers who you read. Work together, we need it as we reboot the news. This is will be an alternative to twitter-style news readers, which took over the leading-edge from RSS feed readers, twenty freaking years ago. I think there should be a new news paradigm every couple of decades at least. #

I just watched Life on Our Planet on Netflix, loved it. Lots of takeaways, but this one will surprise you probably -- I think the AIs are our successors. We should at least try to preserve them so they can run on the Moon if we're in the 6th Mass Extinction, which of course we are. There's been a lot of criticism of the show, but it got me to think about evolution not necessarily in the terms they offer, but the scale of it. And the CGIs were fantastic. #

Twitter started in July 2006. I was an early user, and a fan. Found this excellent review of Twitter by Anil Dash in early 2007. I'd be interested in reading other early reviews of Twitter written by bloggers. #

NetNewsWire is 23 years old. #

Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the bottom, to the home page of the shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series. There's a lot of good stuff in the previous episodes. #

When "together" is your message, we're on the same team.

Podcast: It occurred to me yesterday that there are a lot of parallels with Frontier on the Mac in the early 90s and WordLand and WordPress in the 2020s. So I told the story in a podcast and I think it came out really well. I did some editing at the beginning and end, and as usual my audio editing is pretty crude, but otherwise the story is exactly as I told it. I also asked Claude.ai to do a third-person summary of the podcast, as I did with the previous three shows, and it's getting better. I encourage anyone who's involved in the WordPress community to listen. I think WP has a bigger role to play in the web than it currently has, which imho is saying a lot. 15 minutes. #

Today's song: Eyes of the World. #

Problem in Drummer blogs. oldschool.scripting.com is now served on https and the code in the template doesn't take that into account. For example, if you try to load the home page of my blog, you won't get through because it can't open the http files in the head of the template. This is something users can fix because you get to change your template. So I'm going to stay focused on my current work. #

Heard an interview with Kamala Harris. She said they had 109 days to tell them who she is. Right there she highlighted the huge mistake the Dems make and continue to make. Ever since the advent of Twitter, campaigns have been every day of every year. The Dems have been AWOL. We never should have gotten to the summer of 2024 where people have no idea of who the freaking vice president is. When are they going to see how swept under the old ways of relating to voters are. The people are the government of the United States. Get behind us and let us work our magic. #

The tech press did their part in giving control of the public internet to the people who are selling us out. #

Most attempts of humor in replies to twitter-like posts are of the "you had to be there" variety, as in it might have made sense when you typed it, but I don't get it. And it's even worse, I am irony-deprived, I often don't get jokes, something about how my mind works. But today I actually got a reply on Bluesky that's worth passing on. I posted a picture of a dialog box with one of my snarky slogans. Dan Berlyoung thought the dialog was interesting. "I kinda love that this is in a dialog box. One has to wonder what action on a computer would elicit this response." Man that's a great question. And that btw is what art is about. You put something in a dialog because that's the way it was presented by the software. I could have selected the text and put that into the tweet. But nahh, this is more interesting. And to answer the question Dan asks, in this specific case, the action that elicited this response was that I chose a placeholder command from a context menu in a piece of software that's a construction site, in other words it could have been any of the dozens of snarky slogans. Kind of reminds me of a piece I wrote a long time ago where bees who were about to die reflect on the meaning of existence. Turns out it meant a lot less than one might think. #

Highly recommend the HBO two-part interview with and profile of Mel Brooks who was 99 years old when the interviews were done. Includes quotes from lots of famous comedians. And the philosophy of comedy as art. So many things to say. Why is physical humor the funniest? And the funniest of all the excerpts was the farting scene in Blazing Saddles. Humans are so damned simple. #

if i ran firefox, this is what i would say wrt AI in firefox in 2026.

• 1. ai is exciting!
• 2. it's also in its infancy.
• 3. we don't know yet how or if it connects to the web.
• 4. the web is 100% our #1 priority.
• 5. so we're going to wait.
• 6. for now firefox is a no-ai browser.
• 7. we won't include ai until we know why.
• 8. and then it will be opt-in.
• 9. and we will continue to make firefox the best web browser.

sincerely,

the developers of firefox

BTW, this is what Scripting News in WordPress looks like. I really like it. Just writing. And a modern 2020s blogroll. Room to add more features without too much clutter. The beginning of an upgraded web? #

My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it. #

Doc has a idea how to stop teams from tanking. Get rid of the lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the Dallas Mavericks, who were not a lottery team with only a 1.8% chance of getting the first pick. They got a player who looks to be a great star but you can't always tell if a #1 pick will turn out to be a star, sometimes they do, but often not. #

An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they're real. #

Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb -- you know -- the thing that looked so easy. #

Om Malik says the internet is the greatest invention of his life, and since we're roughly the same age, that would be my life's greatest invention too. I think it would be if it weren't such a tragic invention, one whose growth was cut off by the very thing he quotes John Doerr saying, it could be harnessed to make huge amounts of money.

• Back in 1999, Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr commented: "Believe it or not, the Internet is actually underhyped." He called it "the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet." He was so on the money. Twenty-five years later, 10 out of the world's 12 trillion-dollar companies are internet or internet-related companies.

Doerr would, of course, look at it in terms of money, because money is his business. But because of that, we ended up crashing our political system and haven't gotten past that yet.

If we had kept the one thing about the internet that made it different, we could be far ahead of where we are now, and perhaps would have arrived at a different form of network that didn't favor the kind of people it favors.

Three things that made the internet special:

1. Every part is replaceable.
2. You can use each part to make something new.
3. Each part is as small as it can be.

BTW, I know Doerr. He was the backer of Symantec, the company that bought my company in 1987, then took it public a few years later and thus made it possible for me to make software for the rest of my life. He's a really nice guy. I've only met a handful of people in my travels that had mastered something important so well but managed to still care about people. ;-)

So if the internet is not the greatest invention, what is? I haven't spent much time thinking about this, but my initial choice is AI. Because it's so hugely powerful and yet almost entirely undefined. Uncharted territory, which is all human knowledge. It might be the invention whose product is invention. Whatever it is I'm sure the things it does now will be seen as we see the first moving pictures. A demo of the greatness to come.

What about products? A single act of creativity that made a huge difference. I might suggest Unix is the greatest product of our lifetimes (not invention). Or perhaps Visicalc. People would likely say the iPhone, but I still want something in that form factor that I can write software for and share with others without having to go through a company like Apple. So in that sense the iPhone might have been a negative invention, it cut off possibilities for an amateur development community to develop, as it did on the Apple II, Mac, PC, etc.

PS: If you had asked me in 1999 is the internet the greatest invention, I would have been as enthusiastic as Doerr. There was nothing but blue sky then. Everything was possible, and we were going to do it all!

I want news to work.

I would love to see a standard model for community news orgs, starting with the city of Washington DC, with some of the reporters who were recently laid off.

But the community would be very much a part of this. No more news without community involvement. Let's make it community published. How does that sound?

And bloggers would be part of the story flow, we're amateurs so we work for free, and we take an oath. We bring other expertise. We can tell you when the tech companies are lying, for example. Professionals can still do both-sides news. Bloggers will follow all the integrity requirements of journalists, but then so will the journalists (let's not pretend all journalists even try to play by the rules, btw).

There will be no paywall, instead there's a toll system, like the EZ-Pass we have on roads in the US. How how we pay to ride the subway. We pay per article read. A user can buy a subscription, if they think it would be a better value than paying per article. No more paywalls that say "if you want to read this article you have to subscribe." That would be an essential part of the deal for readers.

No ads. Let's get rid of them. They suck. Now there's incentive to put the punchline near the end. Tell the story and sign off.

The readers can buy shares in the news org, with maybe very little hope of getting a return in dollars, rather in a more functional community.

The veterans from the Washington Post could have the most exciting job in news in generations -- finally making the news work for the people they serve. And no more oligarchs pulling the strings. As readers we know you're often full of it because of who owns you. We're not that stupid. ;-)

And I am sure the independent developers of the web would love to write editorial and publishing software for the new enterprise. We won't charge for it. And we won't lock you in and we will support standards everywhere so all software is replaceable. You can check my references on this, I think this ethos for technology is as central as the Hippocratic Oath in medicine.

I want news to work.

I've been watching Jake do the Headless Frontier work with two different AI bots -- ChatGPT and Claude.ai. And as he's doing that, I'm slogging away the same way I've always done it, working on the top level user interface of WordLand in browser-based JavaScript. I don't see a way around it, because I have a special way of working on user interfaces, and we're still quite a ways away from the bot being able to do vibe coding at that level. It's fascinating to watch Jake revive code I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. He's a very accomplished user of it, being transformed, with the help of the bots, into a kernel-level developer of what's basically an OS built around a scripting language, object database and with the internet latched on after the whole thing was done, and then ported to Windows. I stopped working at that level before all that michegas happened. I have looked at the code Jake is working on to see what became of it, and wasn't horrified, I recognized my work, but I wouldn't ever want to work on that myself. I imagine some commercial developers have already rebuilt their testing and support functions for products around ChatGPT-like systems. If you're an old Frontier fanatic, that's where our product is once again getting out in front. When Jake is done it'll be one of the first big systems totally managed in an AI system. It should be relatively easy to add new verbs to the language, even to add new features to the language, new APIs, etc. #

Another example of ChatGPT utility. "I have a function named Boo. Inside it has an icon that when you click it, it calls Boo to view the parent of the item. But I don't want it to call Boo directly because that leaves the previous instance of viewFeedItem around. In JavaScript what's the best way to defer the call to Boo so that the two instances are unrelated, and the first instance goes away." I was pretty sure as I wrote this that setTimeout was the answer, but ChatGPT offered it as the first choice, and explained why it was the best. It's like having a code consulant ready to help. And it really does help to know it parsed it the same way I did. #

Good morning sports fans!

Boy are we getting some fancy sports action.

The Olympics have already started, with Milan as the host city. The opening ceremony is tonight. My longtime friend, the brilliant and beautiful Anna Masera, will be attending. She's from the nearby city of Torino.

And of course there will be lots of sports action on Sunday, when by coincidence, the Knicks are playing the Celtics in Boston.

And also in case you're into American football -- the SuperBowl is on Sunday in my former home base of Silicon Valley, featuring the New England Patriots (booo) and the Seattle Seahawks (booo two). 6:30PM Eastern on Peacock and NBC. (They say "simulcast" on NBC, which means what?)

Meanwhile I'm sooo freaking tired of working on reading and replying in WordLand, but I gotta get it done. I hope to have a test version up real soon, like maybe next week. I'll write some more about that in a bit. I want people to be prepared for the new design, you won't be replying on my site, you'll be replying on yours. This is the price we pay for true distribution. But when you're reading the posts and replies, it's all seamless. No cost. And, if my site goes away, your writing remains where it was, where you wrote it, on your site. This is what's new about WordLand. We respect the web and we respect you. I'm not trying to lock you in, just trying to set an example for the rest of the tech world. Give us all a way to avoid being locked in the trunk while the tech oligarchs have stadiums and train stations named after them (and if they think that makes them immortal, please tell me who Mr or Ms Shea was? Heh.)

Now one thing some people are sure to be upset about, up front. WordLand only knows how to write to WordPress sites. It's kind of a miracle we can do that, mostly owing to the fantastic API they have created. After we get that going, of course I want to work with other blogging systems to make sure their products can be used in the same way. Working together we're going to give the good old web a new feature! But right now I'm the only person working on this, and I'm pretty old for doing this kind of work, so please be kind. Thanks.

I still love my Keurig coffee maker. The coffee is delicious and hot and it's truly a technology marvel. So simple and easy to learn. #

I'm going to WordCamp Europe in June in Poland. Can't wait. #

News from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. Writeup is here. #

Here's a news page with stories from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. A brilliant idea. All I did was give each item a category, and shortened the URL. The brief writeup is here. #

No one else can see this message. You are the only real person. The rest of us are alien robots sent here to test you. #

I wrote an app that implements Inbound RSS for WordPress sites. Three months ago, a few little glitches but remarkably reliable. Open source. That's how I have scripting.com output hooked up to daveverse.org input. It stopped working this morning, not sure why. This is actually a test to see if this works. (Postscript: It did work. But I have two earlier posts today that did not get through.) #

Automattic shipped a WordPress plugin that adds a source:markdown element to a WordPress feed. This is very cool. We've added this to the feed for daveverse site. #

We need a short name for ChatGPT-like product. If I want to make a general statement about products in the category, there is, as far as I know, no word to use. Same with Twitter and tweet, so I call them twitter-like products and use tweet for posts to any twitter-like product. The whole idea of a different name (like toot, skeet) for each service is linguistic travesty. Anyway, ChatGPT-like is also an unacceptable term. If it had a fun name like OurMind -- then OurMind-like would work. If only William Safire were here. #

Interesting post on Twitter by an OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, about the value of RSS. I've seen it said elsewhere, that RSS and ChatGPT are particularly well-suited for each other. I don't understand the connection, other than RSS is always useful, as a way of formalizing the output of an app so other apps can use it as input. Another thing AI apps have in common with work we've done in the past is the ability to script apps, which was one of the big features of Frontier esp on the Mac starting in the early 90s. This started out just for desktop apps but worked just as well for web apps, once that opportunity became available. I felt strongly that the Mac with it's very functional GUI could benefit from a powerful system-level scripting language with the UI objects being scriptable, and the data of the apps accessible via script. That kind of duality is still a common theme in computer work, I'm doing the same kind of thing with WordPress, as the OS for the web, and making it possible to create different UIs in ways that earlier social web apps can't. I think that functionality as with the others will pair very nicely with ChatGPT and its cousins. #