Scripting News podcast

I'm in the homestretch on the next release of WordLand. This version has approximately twice as many features as the last one. Because, like Radio UserLand from long ago, it does both reading and writing. But the UI is different. It's patterned after all the twitter-like products. It answers the question -- could you do a nice social network with nothing more than RSS and WordPress. And the answer is an emphatic yes.

And of course there is no center to the RSS universe, it might have benefited from one (ask me about it) but it didn't...

When I started blogging, early on, I had a different system for discourse.

Here's how it worked:

First each post would go out via email to a group of eleven people. I was cc'd.

The group was randomly chosen each time, so you might not know anyone in your group, or you might know two or three. Each time it's a different group.

You could reply to my post by just replying to the email. You can do a reply-all so that everyone in the group sees your comment. I would...

I'm starting to roll up the user interface of the new product, and so it's time to start talking about the features that are coming, and also let's talk about the mistakes we made last time, almost always caused by people not working with each other, and let's not do it this time. If you care about this stuff and you're a developer, please have a listen. This is a good time for us to start really working together. All I can do is put out the invitation, it's up to others to show up.

I cover...

I wrote a blog post last week about WordPress and the open web, and what I want to do there. It's the first time I've laid out in one place my plan for rekindling the open web, with my new editor providing a really easy way to write for the open web that does not otherwise exist today. It came out on the opening day of a WordPress conference in Portland, OR, and it made an impression, which I'm grateful for, and led to some discussion. Now I'm going to do some podcast interviews and next month I'm going...

I recorded this podcast in New Orleans on December 16, 2005. I had just spent three days there, visiting New Orleans and the Gulf coast of Mississippi, post Katrina.

I've always been fascinated by the evolution of cities, here was a chance to see a city that I was familiar with, having gone to Tulane in the early 70s, with its structure (roads and large buildings) still mostly in place but most of the people and their homes gone. As you might imagine the things I learned were not the things I thought I would learn. That's what this...

My house has a view of a pond, which is endlessly interesting, year-round, through all seasons.

And we have all the seasons here in the Catskill Mountains.

Yesterday, I spied a large bird in the pond, so I grabbed my binoculars, and I'll tell the rest of the story in the podcast, don't want to spoil the surprise! :-)

Dave Winer explores his frustrations with ChatGPT's tendency to overcomplicate simple programming tasks. What should be a straightforward request for pagination code—a standard feature in virtually every application—becomes an exhausting back-and-forth where the AI insists on offering alternatives and asking unnecessary follow-up questions rather than directly answering what was asked.

This experience leads to a broader observation about modern digital services: they seem deliberately designed to waste time. Whether it's ChatGPT dragging out interactions, Google's labyrinthine customer support, or intentionally confusing billing statements, there's a pattern of artificial friction that benefits the service provider at the...

On Thursday I wrote: "It would be interesting if Pocket Casts had an API. I would love to be able to one-click subscribe to a podcast in my feed reader. I mention Pocket Casts because it's the podcast client I use on my phone, but I would obviously like to see them all support an API, ideally a common API."

Today I explain why that would open things up nicely.

Basically I do my feed discovery on my desktop. My phone is for listening to podcasts, either while driving, walking or riding. My eyes are...

I've been thinking a lot about Harvard lately, and a revealing podcast interview with the top editorial person at Wired.

Elon Musk wasn't over-exposed, he burned out. If he hadn't saluted like a Nazi, boasted about putting USAid in a wood chipper, pranced around on stage with a chainsaw, and done so much damage to the US government, we still don't know how much, he could have chilled out, sold a fleet of Teslas to Trump, and gone on to his next adventure. We would have all been glued to our sets.

Twitter elected a...

"Behave like a computer. That's where we start."

ChatGPT is not a programming partner, it's a very fantastic improvement over search engines. That's reality.

Having used ChatGPT and various other AI tools for over two years now, and using it in my programming work every day, I can now report a basic flaw in the design of the tool, which is what it is. It tries to be a programming partner. A control freak and fairly ignorant programming partner. An incredible search engine though.

Now, this approach works well for things I don't...

I listened to an Evan Osnos podcast interview with Katie Drummond. Osnos is a reporter at the New Yorker, Drummond is the top editor at Wired.

Summary: AI is not just hype — it’s a transformative breakthrough on the scale of past revolutions like the web and personal computing. But journalism risks missing the story by filtering it only through billionaires or old frameworks. What’s needed is realism, openness, and listening to a wider range of voices.

PS: Sorry for the abbreviated show notes. Technical difficulties prevented me from iterating over it last night.

WordCamp Canada is doing a great job of creating a little community around my keynote there in October.

I have some experience running blogging conferences, I did the first ones in the US starting in 2003 called BloggerCon.

In a lot of ways I want to see if we can reboot the blogosphere in the age of social media and get the web and twitter-like services to merge. Until then imho the idea of the "social web" remains a dream.

I also feel very strongly that WordPress is a key part of that ecosystem...

Fleshing out an idea I presented on Scripting News on July 11.

Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the electorate and the press. We have new analytical tools, we should use them. We're only now, far after it's too late, finding out the awful things that the BBB going to do to us. The Repubs planned this out far in advance. They probably even...

This is a followup to the podcast of June 17 where I advised NYC voters to hold their noses and vote for Cuomo.

Well, they didn't. They voted their hearts, and I believe forgot the context.

What they're doing to LA is coming to every city in the US.

Who will stand up for NYC?

Not Mayor Adams, he's a Trump hostage.

And now, the voters of NYC have spoken.

Everyone's very happy because they forgot about ICE.

This is AOC's first big flub, imho, and...

I wanted to do a brief podcast to explain how WordLand came to be, and what I learned on my exploration of WordPress.

This, for me, was like time travel. They had picked up on a lot of what we were doing in the 90s and early 00s, and even though I was alive while this was happening, my attention was focused elsewhere. So when I found the wpcom package in Node.js, I was astounded. I thought you worked on WordPress in PHP, which I've never developed in (long story). And further, I found that the...

Today is a good day to talk about where the Democrats should go.

The Democratic Party tolerates no dissent. If you don't toe the line, you're next in line for destruction. I'm not kidding.

This episode of my at-least-monthly podcast explains why Cuomo is the right choice for a Trump-opposed mayor of New York, and why we have to revolt against the Democratic Party as much as we need to revolt against the attempt to overthrow the Constitution by the Republican Party. Both are sadistic autocracies, only one gets called out for it, and it's...

I've been tuned in for the NBA playoffs this year, as I am every year, but especially this time because my team the NY Knicks have made it to the Eastern Conference Finals. The series is now 3-2 in favor of the Indiana Pacers. Last night's game was a must-win for the Knicks, if they lost they would not move on to the NBA Finals which starts next Thursday, June 5, in Oklahoma City.

As often is the case, NakedJen and I are managing the team's space for this playoff season. Emotionally, each of the three series has...

This started out as an open podcast to my friend Jeff Jarvis.

But it soon became a story about how in a few months we're going to be writing about how we gave up control of our last social network to the government. We could have made it decentralized, so users couldn't be shut down at the government's request, but we didn't make it an issue.

Instead, we were building the next network for a billionaire to own

We could have fixed it, but we didn't.

We need to get tougher...

I'd love to read an article or listen to a mainstream news podcast that explained how people are using ChatGPT-like apps, and why they think it's such a big deal, as opposed to debunking it for not being intelligent, or making stuff up, or stealing intellectual property. This has all been adequately reported.

It also is the most revolutionary use of computer technology ever, in terms of the augmentation of human intelligence. And yes, dear news person, this matters.

It's a tool for our minds, it makes up for our relatively slow processes, how long...

Another permanent rant -- about how universities can be reorganized to do more for us, and we need places where lots of people come face to face to learn and build things, but let's go back to school every ten years.

I went to Harvard in 2003 wanting to bring the minds of Harvard onto the open web, instead they brought my mind into the university, and we brought the open web into Harvard. And long after I got my last degree, with new maturity and experience I found much bigger ways the university could be used as...

This is my permanent political rant, podcast-style.

The Repubs figured it out via Trump in 2016, use Twitter to campaign every day of every year.

The Dems campaign intensely for a few months every four years.

The rest of the time it's as if the Dems don't even take the field.

They don't know what to say when they get interviewed, they mumble they don't make eye contact. It's creepy. There are a few who can do it. AOC gets a big shout out here. They should have a conference where she's...

On Bluesky, I wrote a post to Oliver Willis, who writes at Daily Kos:

This podcast elaborates on that simple idea. We still have media, we don't have to wait for the leaders of the Democratic Party to tell Americans what the Repubs are doing in terms that mean something to them as people.

Saying we're losing rights, or government workers are losing their jobs, or immigrants are being deported -- these aren't as clear as a simple message that you depend on things they are terminating.

And they hired crazy...

I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.

I see people betting on the idea of federation in Bluesky.

At the same time, we should bet on simplifying Mastodon at scale.

Approach the problem from both directions.

We may need and not have federation in Bluesky at some point.

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat.

This podcast goes into more depth of this idea.

There is a transcript.

I had my first confrontation about what's stirring in the WordPress world.

I've tried to record this podcast a few times before, but today it became clear that I could get embroiled in the emotions flowing around WordPress now. There's a strong community there, and the angst is familiar, I've had it myself, because the people and companies we depend on rarely live up to our expectations of them.

Since most of the people who lead my industry are either my age or younger, I never idolized them. I certainly respect people like Bill Gates...

It's been a while since I released a podcast so here goes..

As a programming partner, ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It's also really irritating that it rewrites your code to conform to its standards. And it has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises. People who say the bubble is fully inflated on this stuff are not paying attention. We're still dealing with very basic technical problems.

"What we needed was an encyclopedic...