It’s totally ridiculous to equate protest with antisemitism, esp with Israel led by a MAGA ally. The two concepts are orthogonal. I do not support the Israeli government any more than I supported the government of my country, the United States, when the MAGAs were in charge. We lost over million...

   Quick video demo of meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it’s new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so...

   More and more I’m getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for. Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you’d keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system...

   A street in New Orleans that Meta.ai invented. I asked for Joseph St across from the cemetary. Even so an interesting image, makes me think of the city in a nostalgic way.

   I did the blogroll stuff because I needed a minimal feed reader that could run from the right sidebar of any app.

   I just spent a few minutes with meta.ai, Facebook’s answer to ChatGPT, and it’s really good. The drawing functionality recalcs while you’re entering the prompt, so if you type, vary gender, age and race, and as you type each word, the image changes.

   Suppose you’re working deep inside a complex project and have an unrelated idea. How long does it take to switch to writing mode, get the idea down, and return to what you were doing. The less time it takes the more fluidity. Twitter totally won there. And we, the bloggers, made a tradeoff. We...

   In the past, when I have tried to make other people’s products better, it often doesn’t go very well. The archive of this blog is filled with great examples. Yet I, as they say, persist.

   Video: Design issues in FeedLand blogrolls.

   I just tripped across this post from where Matt had sent me an email saying they were supporting the Twitter API in WordPress. I had forgotten this. That’s how long it’s been that he’s wanted to hook WP up to the social web. It doesn’t look like I posted that to Scripting News. I wonder what...

   If Tesla went out of business, would my Model Y stop working

   I’ve never been to TED or SXSW.

   Good morning NBA fans. Today is the official beginning of the post season, and this Knicks fan is one freaking happy camper. Just thought I’d get that outta the way before getting down to business.

   Each form of online discussion has a grain to it. Doc and I used to talk about how something follows the grain of the web. Twitter has its own grain, formed by its character limit, what information is shared ie number of followers in both directions . I made a list of some of the social...

   Anton Zuiker is the first Drummer user with a FeedLand blogroll.

   Followed by Frank McPherson and Gary Thompson.

   How to add a FeedLand blogroll to a Drummer blog. You must have a Drummer blog and a FeedLand account. You can specify that all the feeds you’re subscribed to are in your blogroll or use a category and only feeds in that category will be in the blogroll. The blogroll updates automatically, when...

   Next up, let’s connect Drummer blogging to FeedLand blogrolls.

   I want to work with the best developers, I don’t care where they work. It occurred to me watching a Martin Scorcese documentary about the life of George Harrison, how much people in music seek out opportunities to create with other musicians. In technology, it doesn’t happen, we don’t even look at...

   Final Eastern Division standings. Knicks finish second. Best Knicks team in a long time. Ended the season with a five game winning streak.

   I don’t like how betting has invaded sports broadcasting. I don’t like that it breaks the bond among people who root for one team their whole lives, as I have with the Knicks and the Mets. I think of people who love the same teams as I do as family. I like that there are Knicks fans who also like...

   Question: What’s between a tiny little text box and a full blown content management system Answer: A full featured text editor with a social media feel to it without the limits of twitter like systems. That’s what textcasting is for, to identity the essential features. This editor supports them. ...

   My wpidentity package now has storage.

   I just finished Ripley on Netflix, an part miniseries remake of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I remember, probably incorrectly, as a light hearted story. There was very little to laugh about in this new version, but omg it is such a beautifully presented story. Even if you hated the plot you’d...

   In some ways the look of Ripley resembles Poor Things, another eclectic and lovely to look at presentation.

   I really want to see Civil War. Gets an amazing review in NYT.

   In an email to Doc this morning: The web is such a huge total mess. CSS is a junk pile of reinventing that learned nothing from the ideas it was reinventing. The only reason we put up with this is the freedom we got from it. But that’s been gone for a long time. I have a feeling we’re wasting our...

   A piece I wrote about Doc in entitled Doc Quixote.

   So this ticking time bomb was sitting there all the time the journalists were talking about how Biden is too old to win the election with Trump. Biden was never the issue, the issue was the freaking Supreme freaking Court.

   The Arizona court decision won’t just have an effect on the politics of Arizona. It will have effect on the politics of the entire freaking United freaking states of freaking America.

   I was closing tabs this morning and came across this sweet little test app I did when I was working on tabs. I wish there were a practical use for something like this.

   I have a suggestion for an internet holiday. Call it Freakout Day. Works like this. When you think of a pronouncement you’d like to make, write it in your favorite tiny little text box, but before you send it, add the word freaking between every word in the punchline. Like so The Arizona court...

   Found this in my desk drawer today. Amazing the things you carry with you over the ages. I lived in an apartment building on top of a hill in the middle of a golf course, smack in the heart of Silicon Valley, if it actually had a heart, and that’s debatable. All the Sand Hill Road VCs were on the...

   I’ve been trying to pay my NY State income tax and estimated tax for hours. I finally managed to log in, but that doesn’t help. They have all kinds of links that say click here to pay the thing you want to pay, and that just takes me to a login page where it says someone with that email address...

   Check out my political preamble on Tesla, X and Musk. One more disclaimer: I love my Tesla Model Y. Best car ever. I’ve been driving a Tesla since late , and I still feel privileged to drive the car every time I do. It’s the Macintosh of cars. I don’t generally use FSD, even though I paid for...

   The last tab on news.scripting.com now contains news from the blogroll on scripting.com. Same feeds, different view.

   Far more important than machine consciousness is: . Human consciousness. . Species level consciousness.

   BTW, straight everything Kara Swisher claims to be, the insider with the best view of the industry, they got that wrong. The things that matter happen far away from her conferences and dinners. It’s as if Silicon Valley were Hollywood. To some people it is. But the big changes are never...

   I’m not sure I’d buy a Tesla today because of Musk’s politics which he puts in our face, thus influencing other people to inflict their nightmares on us. I bet in the end Musk will be responsible for a lot of people dying. On the other hand, I love the car, and thus love the people who developed...

   Via ChatGPT, and a prompt written by Brad Pettit: Gritty monochrome photograph, midwestern family, juxtapose common legal vices. Gritty monochrome photograph.

   I don’t think eclipsy is a word.

   Something disturbing about America in . Over a million Americans died of Covid, but they aren’t on our minds. A million more have long Covid, perhaps. This suggests a million Americans could be killed by our government in the name of a conspiracy, and we’d shrug it off like good Germans. We...

   Back in the day, many of the early writing tools were called Word something. WordStar, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect.

   I wrote four posts on micro.blog just before midnight. Probably some of the ideas will appare on Scripting News before too long.

   On Bluesky, Andrew Hickey explains how hard it is for him to focus while construction is going on at his house. I recognize the problem. I had major work done on the roof of my house last summer, and lost focus for a good two months, even though I had rented office space and at times an AirBnb to...

   Somewhat related notes about different kinds of networks, ActivityPub and RSS, various twitter like systems, as the social web spreads out and tries out new ideas. With ActivityPub you know who’s following you and in RSS you don’t. This may sound like a negative until you think about it from the...

   Facebook, years ago: I want to use my own editor and have my writing emanate from there, without me having to copy and paste into various forms on different sites. I’m not a copypaste machine. Technically, it’s an easy problem to solve, and I don’t see how it hurts various tech companies to let...

   I think you can save time by starting over sometimes, and rebuild the complexity, carefully testing at every step. Going back and fixing a poorly tested corner turn, esp one you did a while ago, is a time consuming and frustrating process. You need to have a fully consistent model to evolve. When...

   No no we are not supposed to have earthquakes in NY.

   Yes we’re having an eclipse next week. Earthquakes often find other kinds of energy to feed on, like the one during Game of the Bay Bridge series between the As and Giants in . The Bay Area doesn’t really get baseball. You have to pick sides. You can’t root for both teams. So an earthquake...